The Face That Must Die (2 page)

I’m reminded by her letters, heartbreaking though I find them, how skilfully she could tell an anecdote. She had published short stories in a Yorkshire journal before the Second World War, and during the war she wrote her first, largely autobiographical, novel. It was encouraged by my father, whom I gather she met through an advertisement she’d placed under a false name (possibly in a writers’ journal) for pen friends.

As their marriage deteriorated and divorce proved unavailable, she set her hopes on writing novels, mainly thrillers, to make enough money to bring me up on her own. My impression is that they were technically skilful but already dated. She used numerology to work out which titles ought to bring her good luck. In my early teens she listened to “The Archers”, a nightly radio soap opera, and grew convinced that the names and actions of the characters represented messages of hope for her. When her manuscripts were rejected yet again she concluded that the messages had been deliberate lies, meant to break her down. I think it was then I became fully aware that all was not well with my mother.

I don’t think my grandmother was living with us then, but I believe I was only a few years old when she gave up her flat in Southport and divided her time between her two daughters. I don’t know why I remember her only in glimpses — her singing “Just a Song at Twilight” to me in a high sweet voice, her groaning loudly on the toilet, her praying (“Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”) and beating her breast so loudly that I could hear it in my room. I say my room, but during my adolescence I shared it and its single bed with my mother. It may be that the reason why she didn’t share her mother’s room was that she refused to accept there could be anything wrong with her sleeping with me: it must have been about then she began to fulminate Freud and his dirty mind.

My grandmother died of gangrene when I was fifteen. Later my mother told me that she’d found one of her mother’s toes in the bed. I was in my room when I heard the doctor pronounce her dead, and I began sobbing uncontrollably. Yet that night, as I lay on the ramshackle couch downstairs because I didn’t want to sleep upstairs where the corpse was, I read nearly the whole of a John Dickson Carr novel. Sometime after midnight my mother woke in the chair in which she’d dozed off and told me angrily to go to sleep. Once we returned from the funeral I had my own room at last, and lay in the dark praying hysterically that some undefined terror would stay away from me, now that I no longer had the night light my mother had always kept burning, whether in case she had to go to her mother in the night or for fear that my father might come into the room. Some months later she saw her mother at the top of the stairs, wearing a nightgown which, she claimed, crumpled emptily to the stair and was still there when she went up. Now and then she would feel the ghost of her father tap her meaningfully on the shoulder.

(One more thing I’ve only now remembered about my grandmother: during her final illness I once had to help lift her onto the bedpan, and this was my first glimpse of a female pubis. It appalled me, and made me think for some reason of a spider.)

It must have been soon after the funeral that we began to have our differences. I was the only one left there in whom she had invested her affection, and I suppose it seemed a betrayal when I turned into a drinking cursing adolescent who read dirty books (Henry Miller and William Burroughs whose banned books I had sent to me from abroad, Nabokov, Lawrence Durrell). I took a wicked delight in quoting her some of the naughty bits and, I admit, in being generally disagreeable. (My correspondents of the time will confirm this: sorry, Alan Dodd, David Johnstone, John Derry. . .) I became involved in science fiction and fantasy fandom, which she viewed with deep suspicion: half the writers were probably homosexual and lying in wait for me. Later I discovered she’d been opening my letters and had written to one correspondent telling him to moderate his language. With very few exceptions she refused to let me invite friends home, since she was ashamed of where she was living. Soon we no longer laughed together, perhaps because I’d grown too pompous to.

All the same, I needed to build my self-confidence somehow. On top of all I’ve recounted, I spent my adolescence at a Catholic school, much of the time in terror of being beaten for getting answers wrong. In my experience this is not conducive to learning, and I did rather badly until my last year there, when I was taught by several excellent teachers. (Corporal punishment is a British institution, of course, especially in our pornography, where the use of school settings points up to the Sadean isolation of schools from outside intervention; clearly it appeals to something in the British.) I went into the Civil Service when I was sixteen, and floundered about for several years, trying to relate to people. Several characters in my stories show how I was: Vic and Kirk (both ironically named) in “The Cellars” and “Concussion”, Lindsay Rice in “The Scar”, Peter in “Napier Court”— Peter being how I became as I put myself together to my own satisfaction, if to nobody else’s. You can see what a loudmouth I was from my pontification in the fanzines.

I was twenty when my mother decided I could be left alone while she went into hospital for the operation she should have had twenty years earlier, on her prolapsed womb. A neighbour of about her age, Miss Holme, took in my laundry, much to my embarrassment and resentment. Resentment and impatience and indifference were all I felt at the sight of my mother in a hospital bed, a well-nigh psychotic reaction I have never understood. I remember leaving one Sunday before visiting was over so as not to miss the pre-credit sequence of
Modesty Blaise
; I remember telling my mother that I’d allowed a friend who was giving me a lift to come into the house while I put on my coat. She never forgave me or him for that, and took me to task for it for years.

Her operation led to complications, and she was moved to a different hospital for further treatment. She believed she’d been misled about the operation and its aftermath, and refused to undergo a further operation to repair the damage. She left hospital as soon as she could, and tried to sue the surgeon, but couldn’t find a lawyer to take the case.

When I suggested that the lawyers weren’t necessarily in league with the surgeon, she felt I had turned against her — that someone had got to me. I don’t know if that was the first time I tried to persuade her that things weren’t always as they seemed to her: that Liverpool wasn’t full of people conspiring against her, that radio programmes weren’t about her under an imperfectly disguised name. My denials seemed like betrayals to her, and she tried to find reasons why I was changing: I’d turned gay, I was taking drugs (which I wasn’t and hadn’t been), my friends were turning me against her. Sometimes I tried to argue her out of her paranoia, but it was fruitless: she would accuse me of trying to drive her into a hospital or a home, and make me swear never to have her put away. Increasingly, perhaps defensively, I accepted that this was simply the way she was and that I could do nothing.

The house seemed much smaller. I went to the cinema a great deal by myself. Just as my mother avoided many local shops because she disliked the people there, so she ceased going to church on Sundays, but insisted I continue attending. I strolled to a church a couple of miles away, then turned round and came back, reading a book all the while.

My fiction was becoming steadily more autobiographical. My invented town of Brichester, originally intended as the Severn Valley equivalent of Lovecraft’s Arkham, was Liverpool by now in all but name. I believe I was still avoiding using Liverpool itself because my mother had half-convinced me that offended Liverpudlians would hinder publication of anything they thought detrimental to the town. Writing “The Cellars” cured me of that nonsense — it was too good a setting to waste.

I met Jenny Chandler at Eastercon in Oxford in 1969, after we’d met briefly at the previous year’s Eastercon in Buxton. In 1970 we bought a flat in Liverpool, and I moved away from home at last. That year my mother’s dog Wag, her pet for most of two decades, died. Soon Miss Holme brought her a dog which both women insisted was the same dog, having escaped the vet who’d pretended to put it down only to take it away for vivisection. I tried to point out that it didn’t even look much like Wag, but soon gave up.

Jenny and I had a belated honeymoon in the Lake District in the summer of the following year. I think it was actually on the first day we were away that my father fell (or, according to my mother, was pushed) downstairs at the fireplace manufacturers where he now worked as a clerk, having retired from the police. My mother called me long distance to demand I go back to see him in hospital, but I told her she had to be kidding. Even when we returned to Liverpool a week later, I let a couple of days pass before I made myself go, and then I couldn’t find the hospital; my mother had told me it was behind a department store when in fact it was several streets away from the front of the store. I wandered about until visiting time was over. I wasn’t trying very hard to find the hospital.

I did find it the next day, and my father. He looked old and feeble and unfamiliar; he wore bandages on his skull and a tube up his penis. Only his blurred murmur, which he must have been unable to control, seemed familiar from all those overheard arguments. I couldn’t touch him or understand what he was saying, only feel repelled by my mother’s belated concern for him. I left as soon as I could, and a few days later he died.

I attended his funeral in the pouring rain. His sister peered into the open grave and cried “Where’s mother?” Subsequently my mother claimed that policemen at the inquest had told her they weren’t satisfied that my father had died of natural causes, but I heard no more of this.

The sense of relief I’d felt on leaving home didn’t last long, for my wife and my mother disliked each other profoundly. The spectacle of their mutual politeness made me increasingly tense, not least because I felt as if I were somehow in the middle of all this. Besides, her front room seemed unbearably small to me with both of them in it. On the other hand, my mother disliked visiting us when she would have to take a taxi home, for she suspected the drivers of wanting to rape her. Soon I was finding excuses to visit my mother by myself, but this only made her even more suspicious of my wife. She frequently accused me of discussing her with Jenny, though I wasn’t; over the years she’d managed to inhibit me against discussing her with anyone.

Perhaps all this had something to do with how I was developing. I’d grown very much like Peter in the present novel. I deleted chapter XX from the first edition but now, for the sake of autobiographical honesty, I’ve put it back in. That was how I was when I wrote “I Am It And It Is I” (a title which Lovecraftians may recognise). It was to be one of a collection of tales called
Marihuana Marvels
, a project which, thank heaven, got no further. All the same, I find I quite like the story, one of my funnier pieces, and I’m glad to see it into print at last as a complement to the novel.

Eventually I roused myself from my apathy. Jenny and I bought a house and I went back into production. I was in libraries now, but growing frustrated. In 1973 I went after jobs in journalism and in the Civil Service but, luckily, was unsuccessful. Instead I went full-time as a writer and began to live on the edge of my nerves. I’d had a couple of curious mental experiences when I was younger — I’d spent most of my eighteenth year unable to perform the mechanical task of reading, spending so long on each phrase that I lost the sense of the context (though I had this trouble only with fiction), and I think it was earlier in my teens when I was intrigued to notice that the pattern on the seat opposite me in a railway carriage had turned into lines of print in an unknown language — but being compelled to write, even if by the pressure of untold stories rather than the need to make a living, feels much crazier. My story “The Change” pretty well conveys how I often felt until I learned to relax, largely by being aware that one can always rewrite.

Of course the situation with my mother could only get worse, though gradually enough to let me believe she was just the way she had always been. She became convinced that the neighbours were circulating a petition to have her put out of her house because she was only a tenant whereas they owned their homes, but a few of her neighbours were on her side and refused to sign. Miss Holme began to accuse people of stealing items from her house, which was infested with demons, and my mother called in Miss Holme’s nephew to help, but after Miss Holme’s death some years later she denied that she had ever said anything was wrong with her friend. By then, however, my mother was on the same path.

I suppose I realised this soon after my wife and daughter and I moved house to the far side of the river from Liverpool. We invited my mother for dinner on her birthday that October, and I arranged to meet her at our local station. She never arrived. I waited several hours, phoning her home between trains, and eventually went home to a phone call accusing me of having played a trick on her. She’d been waiting for me at the station in Liverpool, where, she insisted, people had taken her for a prostitute.

After that things quickly grew worse. Aeroplanes were being used to spy on her, though perhaps one of the pilots was protecting her. When we gave her a photograph of herself holding our daughter, she refused to believe she was the woman in the photograph. Her next-door neighbours had bought her house from her landlord and were trying to take over one of the rooms for their daughter’s use. Her neighbours on the other side were social workers who wanted her to take care of a mad old woman during the day. She would phone me in a panic, saying that the room was full of people who were staring at her, or that she was in the house that looked like hers but was miles away from hers. Sometimes she felt she was being drugged to cause her to hallucinate. When I tried to persuade her these things weren’t happening she would accuse me of conspiring against her, trying to drive her mad.