My House Is Falling Down Read online

  ‘Hey there,’ says Mark. ‘Good day?’

  Once more, the phone pings. Mark is oblivious to the sound itself but not my reaction to it.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ I swipe the screen. ‘Sorry, just a sec.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Angus. Making sure I got back safely.’

  ‘How solicitous of him.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  I read the message.

  ‘You would? Lovely, Lucy! Or do I mean “Lovely Lucy . . .”? I think I might mean both. A. XX’

  My name is not Lucy, not really. I’m glad about this because the name Lucy is quintessentially English, and as I have no English blood I feel no kinship with it: it suggests to me an aspect of the English character that I do not feel I possess, a kind of uptight restraint masked by good manners. It’s difficult to pin down but the kind of person called Lucy represents, to me, someone whose feelings are stifled and internalized, a person with a resistance to joy – and I know that’s utterly ridiculous and there must be plenty of joyful Lucys out there but I haven’t met one. The ones I know are careful and impassive and I cannot imagine error in their lives. I can’t envisage them muddy, or distrait, or in the sack, and for those reasons alone I don’t identify with them. That could be because the three Lucys I know are all friends of my mother’s and each of them makes me feel inadequate. They’re hard to fault and I really don’t like that in a person. I prefer people with their flaws on the outside, like mine.

  I ran this entire ‘Lucy’ theory past Mark once but all he said was, ‘Babe, you seriously need to get out more.’

  My real name is Lucia, after my father’s mother, who was Italian, but early on my French mother called me Lucy, and it stuck. It was so simple and yet so transforming an amendment, the switch in infancy from a touch of Mediterranean exotica to upright Englishness via a few vowels – an Englishness that even my mother’s tendency to pronounce my name with a Gallic swing upwards on the second syllable would fail to mitigate. Attempts during my teens to persuade my family to stick to the original appellation failed. Whenever I asked them to call me Lucia they didn’t, I guess because they were used to Lucy by then and they’re anyway not the most amenable bunch of people.

  My father’s father was Welsh, and while it’s a pretty combustible mix, Welsh and Italian, it always struck me as oddly symmetrical, given that the Welsh – being every bit as impassioned as the Italians – are basically Italians turned inside out. Their emotions, instead of burning flamboyantly bright on the surface, smoulder beneath it, and their unyielding Celtic disposition perfectly mirrors its opposite – the famous Latin appetite for volcanic bust-ups and reconciliations.

  In keeping with his contrary genetic inheritance, my father has a predisposition for both sudden outbursts and morose silences, and though he has calmed down a bit since I was small, his liking for a colourful scrap far exceeds the enthusiasm most people have for disagreements. Spirited discourse is meat and drink to him; at mealtimes especially, arguing the toss with friends and colleagues, his appetite is for blood. Yet when depression settles upon him he is possessed instead by an austere brooding, which perhaps appropriately he takes himself to Wales to indulge in – sometimes for weeks on end – staying in a cousin’s cottage on the Ceredigion coast where in contrast to his sociable life at home with my mother he sees and speaks to no one. Sometimes there is a television series, the writing of which he must complete, to provide some broad explanation to others for his long absences but in the family, for as long as I can remember, the cousin’s seaboard cottage in Wales has been referred to with casual irreverence as ‘the sulking house’.

  During my teens, all my school friends wanted to meet my dad. He was the high point of their first visits to our house. He knew it, too, and had perfected the blend of implied intimacy and remoteness that so mesmerizes people, particularly susceptible females: ‘Oh, how lovely to meet you at last, I’ve heard so much about you from Lucy.’ And as my friends fidgeted with thrilled self-consciousness, he would retreat to his study and close the door firmly behind him with a flourish. That way, his absence might be felt immediately and his magic – now just out of reach – seem all the more beguiling.

  Dazzled, they would chime, ‘Wow, your dad is so nice! So down to earth!’

  Down to earth: such a meaningless phrase. It’s not one I would ever use, particularly with reference to my dad. But I gave up contesting it – and all the straightforwardness it implies – because when your father’s a popular TV historian, his easy captivation of others with the ornament of BBC fame means there’s simply no point.

  ‘Yeah,’ I’d concede. ‘He’s okay.’

  If it was a demanding business growing up with John Parry-Jones for a father, my mother, Hélène, compensated for it with a more relaxed attitude. Put bluntly, she combined full-time scientific research with ice-cool rationale and near-indifference to family life or discord. What this meant in practical terms is that she was seldom on our case, or not overtly so. I don’t doubt that she cared about my brother Ed and me but she loved my father above all else and although her feelings for her children were steadfast they showed themselves in a manner that could at best be described as hands-off and at worst neglectful. The fact that she was rarely at home, never cooked and barely noticed what time we went to bed (and from our mid-teens onwards, with whom), was altogether in keeping with her particular brand of maternal care – which was to care much less than most mothers about everything, leaving us to figure things out for ourselves and run our lives in parallel with hers, alongside but not overlapping.

  Since becoming a mother myself I’ve tried to convince myself that at least my own mother knew her strengths (epidemiology) and her weaknesses (family life). I’ve told myself it was just as well she had the good sense to concentrate on the former and delegate the latter to a woman called Margie who came in on weekdays to neaten up the edges of our lives and make sure that Ed and I had something hot to eat for supper whilst our parents were eating out with other, more interesting people than us. ‘What delights did Margie produce for you today?’ my mother would ask, long after our supper had been cleared, and ‘Margie’s delights’ soon became a family shorthand for golden-topped nursery food like shepherd’s pie, toad-in-the-hole and apple crumble. Actually, I say Margie neatened up the edges of our lives but really the opposite was true: she was central to everything. Family life without her would have fallen apart like the walls of a building collapsing outwards, leaving us all exposed, not just to the chill outside but to one another, gathered together, bewildered.

  My friends, however, thought my mother was incredibly cool. They envied me her tight black jeans, laissez-faire attitude and general abstraction. They didn’t know about the slight shiver that went down my spine when she came home. They wouldn’t have guessed that I wondered what I meant to her, and that my relationship with her was subject to persistent insecurity. It’s such a trivial example when I could produce a hundred others but when she walked through the door at the end of her day, the simple greeting, ‘Hello, Lucy,’ really riled me because it was not simple at all. It was in fact, ‘Hello? Lucy?’ – and given that she was already in the room with me it’s not as if I could have been Dad or Ed. And it may not sound like much, and I know the French like to sing-song their way to the end of a sentence, but that bloody question mark over my presence got right under my skin. It made me feel like an unexpected visitor to the household instead of my mother’s resident daughter, the one who was there when she left at breakfast-time dressed all in black, her lipstick pale pink, her coffee-coloured hair swept up into a coil and detained with a tortoiseshell pin; immaculate despite herself.

  ‘Hello? Lucy?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Productive day?’

  ‘It was okay. Jed’s coming around later.’

  ‘Bien. Which one’s Jed, again?’

  ‘Mum, you know who Jed is.’

  Standing in the kitchen, rifling thr
ough the papers in her briefcase, she muttered through a thick strand of hair that had escaped the tortoiseshell pin and was now falling in a perfect curve across her face, ‘He’s the blonde one?’

  ‘Yes,’ I sighed.

  She looked relieved, like a child who has taken a wild stab at an answer in class and got it right.

  ‘Ah yes, of course. He is with Amanda, non?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘She has finesse, Amanda. Delicatesse.’

  And then, nodding in the direction of my father’s study, towards which she was already heading, she said, ‘Now, where is my husband skulking? That’s the really important question.’

  Until I was nearly eleven, the village school nearby provided respite from family life. We planted watercress, tended hamsters and dug up earthworms. The atmosphere was festive and the headmistress a person so given to spontaneity that on hot summer afternoons she would sometimes cancel lessons in favour of trips to the river, where we would have water fights in its pebbly shallows. ‘Try that now,’ she said drily, years later when we ran into one another in the street, ‘and you’d be strung up.’

  The fun was not to last. Shortly before my eleventh birthday, my father got the bit between his teeth about the co-educational boarding school where my brother was excelling and I found myself on a taster weekend there. My experience of the first morning, subgrouped together with seven potential fellow pupils, was enough for me to know what I couldn’t take. The girls tossed their hair and eyed one another suspiciously; the boys used phrases like, ‘I beg to differ,’ and, ‘In my humble opinion.’ One girl had a mother who was involved in the Middle East peace talks, another a thirteen-year-old sister who was writing a musical (allegedly). I did the only logical thing. I sprinted to the railway station just under half a mile away and with some pocket money I had stowed in the bottom of my bag for emergencies, bought myself a single fare. Bound for home I cowered in my seat, glaring out of the window. When the train arrived, I phoned my parents from a telephone box on the platform, my hands shaking so much I could hardly push the coins into the slot.

  ‘Please can you come and get me?’ I quavered. ‘I’m at the station.’

  ‘You are where?!’

  Around the kitchen table that evening my father groaned irritably and demanded, ‘So what do you expect us to do?’

  I asked what was wrong with the local secondary school: all my friends from primary school were going there. My father shuddered like a man contemplating a treacherous pass across a deep ravine and said, ‘Oxbridge! Chances from there are slim.’ I said that even if I got into Oxford or Cambridge – and that was unlikely – I wouldn’t want to go anyway. I told him wild horses wouldn’t drag me. I said, ‘I don’t want to be like all the people who come to our house.’

  ‘What did you say?!’

  ‘I don’t want to be that kind of person!’ I spluttered. ‘They think they know everything! They think being clever makes them better than everyone else. It’s horrible.’

  My father’s mouth fell open. Mine was dry with fear.

  ‘How dare you!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re ten years old, damn it!’

  ‘Nearly eleven!’

  ‘You’re a juvenile! You have some of the best thinkers in this country in and out of your home on a weekly basis and you have the audacity to say—’

  ‘I hate them! And I hate you! I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere!’

  My father’s eyes blazed. I felt a familiar panic rise in my gut.

  I wondered then whether he might actually slap me: he never had before but I feared it nonetheless, the physical expulsion of my father’s rage. I had witnessed it often enough. He thumped the living daylights out of tables, kicked doors, slammed his clenched fist against walls, raving and ungovernable, breathing hard, spitting, ‘Fuuuuuuck!’ through gritted teeth and a mist of saliva. Instead, this time, he snarled, ‘Then you’re even more of a damn fool than I thought you were this morning!’ and stormed out of the room, casting his chair aside so violently that it cracked against the dresser and fell over.

  My mother and I stared at one another across the kitchen table for a bit before she sat up straight, put her hands on her thighs, and in a moment of exceptional ordinariness said, ‘Voilà. I’ll make us some scrambled eggs.’

  This uncommon treat augured well. A couple of days later she announced over breakfast that there was nothing wrong with the local school and I could go there if I wanted to. My father said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Hélène, they don’t even do Latin!’ to which my mother responded, ‘We can always pay for extra tuition.’

  ‘Latin?!’ I wailed. ‘Please, no.’

  ‘What’s the point,’ my father growled, ‘of sending her locally when a first-rate school would deliver the whole bang shoot?’

  ‘John.’ My mother’s tone was imperturbable, reasonable: she rarely resorts to out-and-out condescension although one always feels it lurking within close range. ‘You argue in public for state education and yet when it comes to your own children you lose your nerve. Hypocrite! Faux-jeton!’

  But my father was in no mood for dialogue. Black Dog was not far away. We had become adept at sensing this familiar interloper, knowing intuitively when he was prowling around the suburbs of my father’s mind, ready any minute to break in and take possession of the centre for days, weeks. Black Dog dulled my sparky dad: he claimed a clever, imposing person and drained his thinking dry, stripped it of colour and surprise, muffled his speech, killed his artful humour, reduced him to something rudimentary, brutish.

  Sweeping aside the newspaper and a plate of unfinished toast, my father declared the discussion a waste of time and immaterial to the purpose, which was to get me into a good school. He leaned across the table and got right up close to my mother’s face when he said this; too close, I thought.

  ‘Dad!’ I cried out. ‘Don’t!’

  ‘John!’ my mother intervened, sharply. ‘Ça suffit! Enough!’

  My mother proved victorious. She waited another day or two until the heat in him had diminished, registered me for the local school and left it at that. My father said the whole thing would be an unmitigated disaster.

  It wasn’t. I did what I had to do and at the end of it all I was offered a place at Swansea to read English. I’d chosen Swansea not for its tenuous family connection but because it was coastal, and I love the sea: it seemed a pretty sound basis for a decision about where to spend my first three years away from the suppression of home. My father choked on his coffee when I told him my plans. He had little affinity with his Welsh background, even though it had its political advantages for a left-wing historian. He barely spoke to me during my first term at university except occasionally to demand on the phone, ‘My dear girl, if you had to go west, why the hell not Bristol, at least?’

  In Swansea, I learned to surf, withstood a year of Chaucer and twentieth-century semiotics and by then, by God, I was fed up. So were the tutors and not just with me. Decades of unventilated debate had left most of them near-suffocated. Gasping for air myself, I left and got a job serving meals in a pub on the bay where by chance I ran into an old school friend who had spent the previous winter working a ski season in the Dolomites while I was contending with the spectacular insularity of Roland Barthes and the tedious specifics of Middle English.

  I wasted no more time, though my father would argue that that is precisely what I did. Waitressing, cleaning, childminding, teaching English, fruit-picking: it didn’t matter to me what it was, as long as I could raise the air fare behind a bar in the UK to travel repeatedly as far away as possible. Cairo, Bombay, Tel Aviv, Harare: my mother says she lost a lifetime of sleep over my choice of world capitals – an admission of maternal concern so uncharacteristic that it made those places even more exciting in retrospect. The toughest and most demoralizing job of all (apart from harvesting peanuts on a farm near the Gaza Strip – the leaves of the plants brought me out in a vivid, prickly rash) was hosing down the stinking, bl
ackened walls of a rubber factory outside Tel Aviv, for eight hours a day. The work was physically relentless, and so noisy and solitary that conversation of any kind was impossible. After just six days I walked out and never went back. The only other job that came close to the rubber factory for isolation was a short stint in Ireland as a live-in au pair for a couple who ran an IT company from a bleak farmhouse in County Westmeath – surely the one bit of Irish landscape its venerated God had overlooked. The place was flat and dreary and the nearest town miles away; plus, the children were too small to commune with and their parents constantly off in Dublin.

  In contrast, by far the easiest gig – the only peril was to oversleep – was raking the sand at sunrise on a quiet beach that fronted a scruffy B&B in Grand Bahama, before serving breakfast to affable, retired couples from Florida, and the odd honeymooning pair. The place was managed by a large, shifty American guy whom I was certain ran drugs from Miami, and his curiously buttoned-up English wife. They were the strangest couple. He scarcely spoke and was not often about. When he was, he ambled around the terrace in a baseball cap and large baggy shorts with Palm Beach Cardinals printed down the side of one leg. She wore Laura Ashley dresses that bore comparison with Edwardian smocks, and her hair in a pinned-up style that I guessed had not altered in years. They had no children. It pretty much concluded my wanderings, that job, and whilst it was a relief from the smog, poverty and precarious political situations of the East and Middle East, I was bored out of my mind after a fortnight. I stayed a couple of months. I had no other plans and the diving was pretty good.