Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

Previously published in Great Britain by 4th Estate as AutoBioPhilosophy in 2018

This 4th Estate eBook edition 2019

Copyright © Robert Rowland Smith Ltd 2018

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Cover images © plainpicture/our labor of love

The right of Robert Rowland Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

This book is based on the author’s experiences. Some names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed, reconstructed or fictionalised.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008218522

Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008218485

Version: 2019-04-18

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Author’s Note

1 Blood and Water

2 The Dream of Three Daughters

3 The Keys to the Tower

4 A Love Quadrangle

5 Going to California: a case of aller-retour

6 Office Politics

7 Near Death

8 The Forms of Things Unknown

9 Portraits of Love

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Epitaph

Illustration Credits

Footnotes

By the same author

About the Publisher

Foreword

When such a spacious mirror’s set before him

He needs must see himself.

William Shakespeare

What is it to be human? That is the question. This book offers nine answers, each mapping on to one of the nine chapters. Being human means:

1 Dealing with our fate

2 Standing in the flow of time

3 Needing a purpose

4 Living amongst others

5 Making mistakes

6 Belonging to groups

7 Facing mortality

8 Not knowing it all

9 Looking for love

Needless to say, there are far more potential answers than those on the above list. The nine offered here correspond broadly to the nine phases of my own life, from my origins to the present day. For I have used my own experience as the source material for answering the question of what it is to be human. To arrive at the general, I go via the specific.

What results is an autobiographical narrative that serves up philosophical insights along the way. But I should stress that the narrative has many gaps. It is not supposed to be a complete life story. My criterion for selecting content was how fertile it appeared to be from a philosophic point of view. If people or periods are represented unevenly, that is why. For example, because of circumstances unique to him, my father Colin plays a more leading role in the text than does my mother. In real life, she is no less important. This book is dedicated to them both.

Author’s Note

In the vast majority of cases, I have changed people’s names for the sake of anonymity. When talking about individuals, disguised or otherwise, I have been as even-handed as I can be. I recognise that judgements are hard to keep out of one’s descriptions of other people, but the agenda here is philosophical rather than personal. Besides, it is the flaws in my own character that will be the most conspicuous by far.

The specific weight of the soul is equal to the weight of what has been dared.

Bert Hellinger

1
Blood and Water

My formula for greatness in a human being is ‘amor fati’: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

At the brow of a hill in Norwood, south London, stands an imposing red-brick building. It is called The British Home and Hospital for Incurables. The word ‘incurable’ sounds strikingly Victorian, and indeed it was during Victoria’s reign, in 1894, that the building was officially opened. Just as striking is the word’s directness. Incurable. The people who come here aren’t going to get better, it says. We might mock the Victorians for their stiff upper lips and prudery, but in their choice of this word, they showed a frankness that we would balk at today.

Among the seventy-odd residents of this Victorian terminus is my father, Colin Rowland Smith. His particular incurability is multiple sclerosis. It is his story that will provide the framework for this first chapter.

The reasons for choosing my father are threefold. First, he represents the origin, along with my mother, of my own life. He is therefore the starting point of my story, which unfolds in the chapters ahead.

The second reason is that, by bringing a real person into the picture, we can gain some initial purchase on what a human being might actually be. For a human being is always a particular human being, not some vague notion of a human being. I often think of an article by the British novelist Zadie Smith, reflecting on the process of writing. She talks about how you always start out with the ambition of penning the perfect book. From the moment you write the first word, however, it becomes this book and no other.

Behind the idea lies, I suppose, a simple logic. That first word limits the range of options for the second word, the second for the third, and so on, until you have a paragraph which determines the next paragraph which determines the next, until you have a chapter. Then each chapter conditions the chapter after it, until the whole thing is done. A book has to follow an internal sequence to reveal its own identity. By definition, this identity will differ from the identity of other books, and so become unique.

As the book, so the human being. None of us has an ideal, perfect or general self. We have the self that we have, with its irreducible specificity, its one-of-a-kind combination of history, biology and character. What’s more, our choices narrow as we grow older, making us even less likely to deviate from who we are. The golden thread that leads from the beginning to the end of our lives only becomes finer along the way. So that is why in this chapter I’m looking at a human being in all his book-like individuality.

The third and most important reason for choosing my father is that his story gives us a first answer to the question that will serve as a prompt to all the chapters ahead. The question is: ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’ Each chapter will offer a different response. In the case of my father, that response goes something like this: ‘Being human means dealing with our fate.’

My father’s fate was a heavy one. It wasn’t just the MS with which he had to contend. Yet how he contended is what matters. It matters for us all. Whether our fate is lucky or unlucky, we are dealt a hand. We might be born into poverty or affluence, good or bad health, peace or war – but the playing of that hand is up to us. And so it is that tension between being determined by our circumstances and determining ourselves which is an essential part of being human.

Mutiny in the body

The ‘sclerosis’ in multiple sclerosis or MS refers to lesions resulting from damage done to the sheaths encasing the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. This damage affects physical coordination, speech, ability to concentrate, memory and more. Maybe all diseases are strange, travelling as covertly as spies and silently infiltrating our systems. What makes MS especially mysterious is that it seems to result from a mutiny in the autoimmune system. Rather than do its job of protecting the body, the autoimmune system revolts and attacks. But not only that:

 women get it more than men;

 you’re more susceptible to it the further your origins lie from the Equator;

 there is no available cure; and

 its causes are unknown.

Unknown but not unguessed at. The medical literature points to both genetic and environmental factors, though the evidence for either remains inconclusive. It is not a lifestyle disease. Nor is it considered heritable, even though there’s some debate about your increased likelihood of getting it if you’re related to a sufferer. As Colin’s son, I am acutely aware of this possibility, though I’ve never shown any symptoms and have reached an age at which they’re less likely to appear. That does, however, raise the question of just how closely related he and I are.

Institutionalised

Colin’s parents, Rowland and Beatrice, divorced early in his life. At the tender age of eight, Colin, an only child, was packed off to an English boarding school in leafy Sussex, called Hurstpierpoint College. This was in 1945, just as the war was ending. I picture the school as a rural haven from the disarray in cities to the north. It was set, as if to a metronome, to the consoling tempo of public-school life – cricket matches, prayers, tea, weekly baths. But rationing was still in force, those baths were cold, and the school will have had its share of bullies. Female presence was limited, and academic study came a long way ahead of emotional development.

Beatrice, his mother, went to live a hundred and fifty miles away in Birmingham. Rowland took a new wife and had four more children. To begin with, they set up in Hove, adjoining Brighton, and a mere ten miles from Hurstpierpoint. Later, they moved to handsome surroundings in Bungay, Suffolk, which was scarcely any nearer than Birmingham, and required of my grandfather a lengthy commute into Liverpool Street station.

Hurstpierpoint College

So, from the age of eight to eighteen, the Neo-Gothic flint castle of Hurstpierpoint College would have been my father’s entire world, a colony unto itself. Apart from school holidays, that is. These he spent with his mother in Birmingham. There, as a fifteen-year-old, Colin met his wife-to-be, Patricia. A year younger than Colin, Patricia had already left school, and was doing a clerical job in the Midland Bank not far from the Bull Ring. As a girl in the 1940s and 50s, her education wasn’t deemed important, though that didn’t suppress her aspirations to improve her working-class lot. She dreamed about one day having a son and sending him to Dulwich College, the famous public school of which she had once heard as in a legend. With his Queen’s English, shiny bicycle and public-school credentials of his own, Colin appeared in Patricia’s life like the key to a door. For his part, he found a first meaningful female connection. The relationship flourished.

Trouble in paradise

Thanks to the class divide, however, neither family approved. By the time the couple reached their late teens, and Colin too had left school, Rowland, his father, was ready to take action.fn1 With a view to splitting them up, he packed Colin off again, only this time much farther afield. Colin was dispatched to an outpost of the family food business in Canada.

The plan backfired. From his exile Colin wrote to Patricia, imploring her to join him. He enclosed a ticket for the Atlantic sea crossing. The letter landed on the doormat of a terraced house in Bell Hill, Northfield, one of Birmingham’s less well-to-do districts. Patricia opened it, made up her mind and set sail. Some months later, at a United Reformed church in Hamilton, Ontario, in a ceremony attended by no more than a handful of well-wishers, they married.

Colin and Patricia might have settled in Canada for life, but a combination of factors drew them back to England. Here my mother was grudgingly accepted and subsequently patronised by her in-laws. The newlyweds set up home in south Croydon, then a still desirable suburb of London. Colin began commuting to the family business’ head office on Tooley Street, opposite London Bridge station. Patricia gave birth to three children, two girls and one boy. She sent me to Dulwich College.

My two sisters were privately educated also. The combined fees can’t have been cheap, but the business was doing well and paying Colin a tidy salary. In 1970 the family moved to a much-extended house with a large garden on a private road further into the suburbs. I had a pine tree outside my bedroom window. Colin bought himself Jaguars, Daimler Double Sixes and BMW 7 Series. For Patricia there was a gold Ford Escort, then a cherry red Opel Manta. The pinnacle was a white two-seater Triumph Spitfire with detachable roof. I would beg her to collect me from school in it. My parents shopped for clothes on Bond Street. One year we went on holiday to Chewton Glen in the New Forest, then the UK’s fanciest hotel.

Yet by the end of that decade a serpent had slithered in. The economy was tanking. The family business was running out of the steam that had powered it since its heyday in the late 1960s. A major factor had been the death of ‘Uncle Bob’. He had been the company’s driving force. Robert Rowland Smith – after whom I was named – was my grandfather Rowland’s brother, and my father’s uncle. Tall, talented and magnetic, Uncle Bob was a legend. With no children of his own, he invested his energies not only in the firm but also in his extended family. So whilst he was happy to splurge on himself – a mansion in St John’s Wood, a Rolls Royce – it was he who had bought Colin and Patricia that first house in south Croydon. What with his passing and the weather in the market turning squally, the business began to founder.

From Colin’s perspective, the squeeze on company revenues wasn’t the only challenge. Without Uncle Bob’s mediating influence, Colin found himself working directly to a father whose modus operandi with his son was criticism. ‘Useless’ was his put-down of choice. Colin was conscious that his father had gone on to have a second family. The youngest of four among that second batch of children was another son, also named Rowland. This new Rowland was about fifteen years my father’s junior and an incipient rival. My father was jealous not just in the way that any brother might be jealous of a half-brother, but also because Rowland – known as Rowley – was taking his own first steps in the family business.

The axe falls

There was a third man for Colin to worry about. This was David Cooke. As is obvious from his surname, Mr Cooke wasn’t part of the family. He was an outsider. Like the owners of many family businesses, I suppose, the proprietors of Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. were aware that family ties could be a liability as well as an asset. They saw the value in an external perspective. Besides, David Cooke came with a reputation as a marketing genius. Before long, Colin perceived his father to be favouring the interloper over him, just as he had suspected his father of transferring his favour to young Rowley. Colin might have been made a director of the company, but psychologically he found himself twice displaced.

Meanwhile, in his thirties, Colin had been diagnosed with MS. He would complain of pins and needles, and of a recurrent ache down the left side of his body, starting in his shoulder. He acquired a slight limp. Mercifully, the disease stabilised at a low level, barely impinging on his capacity to function. Until, that is, the storm clouds that had been gathering over the business finally broke. The money began running out and desperate measures had to be taken. As the big boss, my grandfather decided on cuts. Having tallied up the golden salaries paid to the directors, particularly to my father and David Cooke, he chose to delete one. He sacked his son.

That was in 1979, when Colin was forty-three. He made some half-hearted efforts to set up a marketing enterprise. But, having been given a house and a job and a salary just by virtue of belonging to the Rowland Smith clan, he couldn’t muster the initiative to make anything happen. Perhaps he had also internalised his father’s verdict on his uselessness. He never properly worked again. He sold the big house and gave himself up to his disease.

His eyes were one of the first things to go. He developed a squint and had to wear an eye patch. He had trouble forming sentences. One day he lost control of the accelerator pedal on the Citroën to which he had downgraded. He rammed the vehicle in front, causing a minor accident. With great reluctance, he agreed not to drive again. The limp that had been with him since his thirties became unignorable. The staircase at home had become an abyss into which he risked tumbling from the top. Before long, the walking stick was traded for a wheelchair. Colin would trundle this contraption around the downstairs of the gingerbread cottage he now lived in with Patricia, smashing against the door jambs until they were splintery and raw. By the late 1990s he would fall down regularly getting in and out of it, and my small-framed mother was losing the strength to haul him up again. It was then that she approached the British Home and Hospital for Incurables.

Man’s character is his fate

Colin’s story shows just how singular was his fate. In its details it belongs to nobody else. That is what makes him different – different even from me, his son. The truth is that, having witnessed the onset of his MS, which terrifies me, I’m glad of it. For all the compassion I feel towards him, that his fate differs from mine is something for which I can only be thankful.

Maybe it would be nobler if I felt the urge to take on his disease in order to spare him. That would be a grand filial sacrifice. It is what sacrifice is, at heart – the loving instinct to take over somebody else’s fate, to bear their cross. But that is a fantasy, and in any case doing so is impossible. We can never really stand in for anybody else. Even in the extreme case of offering up our own life to save another’s, it is still our own death that we will die, not theirs. We can’t actually spare them, we can merely buy them some time. What’s more, sacrifice seems to flow more appropriately in the other direction. If anything, parents sacrifice themselves for their children, not the other way round, at least in the West. They cede to the flow of time, giving priority to newer life over older. Incurable is incurable, as the Victorians said.

Wrapped up inside fate is another element that makes family members other to us. It was identified by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. In a precious fragment of text from the ancient world, Heraclitus is quoted as saying that ‘man’s character is his fate’. Who we are, as much as the action of any external influence, determines what will happen to us. To change our fate, therefore, requires changing who we are. But changing who we are is never easy. The drive to carry on being ourselves counts among the most powerful forces in the universe, rivalling gravity. After all, our character is what stops us from becoming other people. As if it were a repelling magnet, our character keeps others at arm’s length, insisting on its own space.

I saw first hand just how much my father’s character shaped his fate. Despite his education, his money, his family, and his luck in being given both a job and a house, he experienced life as a series of calamities. The slightest thing would vex him. If the traffic was bad, if he couldn’t open a jar, if a utility bill arrived in the post, if the sink got blocked, if the lawnmower ran out of petrol, if the television picture went fuzzy – in all cases, an almost existential despair would wash over him. It was as if every red light on the road was a monstrous unfairness trained deliberately on him. In little things he saw large tragedies. Fate had seen that Colin’s character was tragic, and decided to follow suit.

What overwhelmed him, I believe, was the sense of confronting his own resourcelessness. It wasn’t just that he had been given a lot, but that both boarding school and the family business were institutions that ran life for him. True, he had shown initiative in bringing Patricia to Canada. But she was expected to be a stereotypical 1950s wife, managing his domestic infrastructure. In other words, he’d had precious few opportunities to develop agency of his own. So whenever something less than advantageous occurred, he looked into his cupboard of personal supplies for dealing with it, and saw that it was empty.

In such tiny moments, Colin exhibited a brief but bottomless despair. He would let out what the English Gothic writer Thomas de Quincey called a ‘suspiria de profundis’, a sigh from the depths. I remember this sigh filling the house like the exhalation of a wounded animal. So when something truly terrible finally did happen – his own father ousting him from what was purportedly a family business – one can only imagine the hollowness into which he stared. If it was hard enough for Colin to roll with the mishaps of everyday existence, how frightening it would have been to behold this once-in-a-lifetime tsunami.

In the jargon, Colin lacked the necessary ‘coping mechanisms’. The want of resilience that he had shown in allowing minor inconveniences to flummox him became, when he was fired, his condition of being. Cruelly, it also provided the ideal environment for the MS to thrust upwards from beneath the ground, where it was only half buried, into the light. For whatever else multiple sclerosis might be, it is a disease that deprives its victims of the ability to cope. To someone whose coping mechanisms are already feeble, an incurable disease such as MS, mixed with unemployment, produces a fatal concoction. Paralysis was the result.

Other people might have responded differently. Stories abound of those who conquer or at least subdue their MS through a combination of attitude, diet and exercise. But my father responded in the way that only he could. He met the emptiness that faced him with an emptiness of his own. That was his character, and it became his fate.

Our parents are foreigners in time

Both character and fate set Colin apart. They even set him apart from me, his biological offspring. The straight genetic pipe from him to me contained leaks, so not everything got transmitted. Besides, there was another pipe coming in from the maternal side, although with leaks of its own, to be sure. It is by these twin leaky conduits that we’re connected to our biological inheritance.

What that means in terms of our parents is that we’re both the same and different. Such is the mystery of generation. When the human organism divides, it issues a copy of itself that’s not quite perfect. The uncanny thing is to look into the face of anyone we know and see three people. Both parents flutter in the movements of that face, along with the unique combination of them that produces the third person, the person whom we erroneously think of as a discrete self.

That leakiness is not just biological. It also applies to what gets transmitted by way of narrative about our parents’ lives. We hear a few details and they take on a magical quality, like photographs found in an attic. But so much of their lives leaks away, and we have to rely on their memories, which are leaky themselves. These memories can feel strange because they are both near and far. They are highly intimate and yet unavailable. They have a warm otherness to them, like a soil.

That soil is where we come to be planted. It is because they concern our own origin that our parents’ stories, about their lives before us, take on the quality of fable. Origins are always mysterious. We hear this mystery in Colin’s narrative. We get a picture of the 1950s, for example. It contains a post-war mixture of bereavement and hope; the recognition of a modernity finally burying the Victorian past; and a sense that the triple-towered edifice of class, gender and religion is cracking. But that is a historical view. Through it, the 1950s seem to be part of an objective account that people can write books or make documentaries about. This account is available to anyone who’s interested. The other is the view of a child – me – learning about the time in which my parents lived, before the child was born. This view is far more private, and the time period it gazes at has a different feel. Different and more enigmatic.

The stories about our parents aren’t quite history, therefore, even where there is plenty of historical data, because they produce in us a state of wonder. This wonder makes those parents all the stranger to us. Indeed, as much as those stories draw us in to the lives of father and mother, we can’t help feeling a trace of repugnance. For all our natural, biological proximity to them, they are foreigners in time. Children come after their parents, by necessity, and we all live in a flow of time that none of us can interrupt. Time is like a motor beneath an hermetically sealed bonnet, always running.

So if our parents are strangely ‘other’ to us, their children – if their fate separates them from us, their closest kin – it’s not just because the stories are exclusively theirs. It is also because those stories hail from a time that is not ours. Our parents are not of our generation, and so a quantum of alienation runs beneath every experience that we have of them. Even these twin origins of our becoming, our parents, remain other to us. In this respect, they are no more special than every other person on the earth – even the remotest, the never thought-of, those who come and go without us even having been aware of their existence.

Perhaps this semi-disconnect from the past of our parents is why our own lives can at times feel so random. In Existentialist philosophy, which examines the big questions of life and death, insisting on the arbitrariness of our birth is a commonplace. Martin Heidegger, for example, writing in the hush of the Black Forest in the 1920s, talks about how we are ‘thrown’ into the world. It is as if we were literally cast into a pine forest, fenced in by the tall, dark shapes of the trees and the silhouettes of strangers threading between them. There’s nothing apparently necessary about how we got there. Whenever we get an intimation that, thanks to the separating effects of time and fate, some distancing even from our own parents is inevitable, it’s little surprise that this sense of randomness can seize us so strongly.

Performance versus belonging

Colin himself would hardly have been unaware of all the factors that created distance between him and the members of his family. First, there was the divorce of his parents. Though divorce wasn’t unheard of at the time, it was scarcely the norm. Another half-century would have to pass before its stigma faded.

Second, there was being sent to boarding school. Again, this wasn’t uncommon. It was even considered a reputable form of education for a boy – ‘character-building’ was the term used to endorse and/or excuse it. Wartime had in any case necessitated all sorts of makeshift arrangements for children, who were often dispatched to live with distant relatives or friends. Colin himself had been evacuated to sleepy Gloucestershire during the war proper. But emotionally, boarding school was a wrench. Just as other families whose fathers had come back from the war were reuniting, he, an only child, was torn away from parents who had torn away from each other.

Third, there was Rowland generating a second family to which Colin both did and didn’t belong. Or rather, he continued to belong to his father as a son – that was his right – but belonging to the second family as a whole was something that would have to be done by invitation, as it was never quite a right in the same way.

Finally, there was the family business, where Colin’s experience of separation would have been the most complex. The very phrase ‘family business’ holds a tension, even a contradiction. A family has no purpose beyond the affirmation of blood ties and the circulation of love. It can simply be and nobody has to justify its existence. Most importantly, everybody in a family has a right to belong. The sole entry requirement is being of the same blood. With a business, it’s different. There is a test involved in joining a business: belonging is never automatic. As a commercial enterprise, the right to belong to it must be earned by supporting that commercial aim.

So when you merge ‘family’ and ‘business’ into the entity known as a ‘family business’, a circle has to be squared. Do you have a right to belong to the family business just because you’re a part of the family? Or do you have to prove yourself first, as anyone joining a conventional business would have to do?

Colin was tipped straight into the mesh of that ambiguity. He had been brought into the business as a young man by virtue of belonging to the family, even though his ‘belonging’ had already been rattled after his father remarried. But that was when the economic weather was still fair. When it turned foul, Colin was judged on his merits and found wanting. Now his card was set next to that of the non-family member, David Cooke, and his scores looked poor. No longer was being part of the family enough; performance was the new measure, and Colin’s fell below par. When the chips were down, water was thicker than blood.

Put another way, businesses have an easier time excluding people than families do. It doesn’t test their conscience in the same way. Unlike the right to belong to a family, which is granted once and for ever through the definitive act of birth, in a business you have to keep demonstrating how valuable you are. It never lets up. Belonging is secured by the collateral of performance; and explicitly or implicitly, performance is continuously monitored. Take the performance away, and the belonging falls apart too.

Of course, there are those individuals in certain businesses who become so much part of the furniture that, long after they have ceased to hold their own commercially, they’re kept on like pets. But that is an indulgence. The only legitimate exception to the rule of belonging-conditional-upon-performance would be if the business were one that you founded. As the originating spirit, you are central. And you will be largely exempt from the scrutiny applied to the performance of those who come after. You created the enterprise, which makes you its ‘father’ or ‘mother’ in a more than metaphorical way. You gave it life. Where there had been nothing, you made something.

As acts of creation, these inaugurating gestures of the founding father share a life instinct with the making of a family. Which is why, in those rare cases when a company does turn on its founder and relieve him of his duties, everybody feels its moral portent. There is an unspoken question as to how natural it can be, like watching an eclipse. Nobody is totally sure that it’s a legitimate move, even if the business reasons for the removal are sound. Taking such a dramatic step leaves a mark on the conscience of those who unseated the founder, as if they had committed parricide. (In the later chapter about organisations called ‘Office Politics’, I will say more about this uncanny power of the founder.)

No wonder the concept of a family business holds so much tension. Most of the time that tension remains obligingly latent, but when, as in the case of Rowland Smith & Son Ltd., market forces enjoin on the company the taking of drastic action, it appears like an unspeakable black animal on stage. It has to be addressed. Do you get rid of Colin or David? Between family and business, which comes first?

We know which way my grandfather, Rowland, called it. He chose in that moment to see my father less as his son than as an employee to be judged on a level playing field with his rival. No more was Colin an alternative but sympathetic expression of the same genetic wave, a variant of Rowland’s own subjectivity. Rather, Colin had become an objective human asset to be evaluated against other human assets. To say that Rowland ‘disowned’ Colin would be a clear distortion, despite the feelings of abandonment that Colin must have suffered. Nevertheless, Rowland shook the family tree with sufficient vigour to make Colin fear that, like a rotten fruit, he would fall.

The diagram above describes the situation in graphic form. ‘Colin 1’ and ‘David 1’ refer to the starting positions, the point at which David was brought into the business. ‘Colin 2’ and ‘David 2’ refer to the later point at which Rowland, my grandfather, chose between them. This choice was made against two criteria: performance and belonging. In position one, David’s performance was seen as strong, but as someone with the surname Cooke rather than Smith, his belonging could only be weak. In contrast, what was perceived as weak about Colin was his performance.

The fundamental problem was that even at the start Colin’s belonging was less secure than it could have been. We know that Rowland’s ‘ownership’ of his son had always been circumscribed. He was barely involved in Colin’s childhood, and not for purely psychological reasons. For six of the eight years before Colin was sent to boarding school, 1939–1945, Rowland was at war, stationed in India and Burma. Not long after his return, he divorced, remarried and began his new family. In other words, Colin’s belonging never was assured. It wasn’t as if he had a full tank that got emptied: the tank peaked at around 70 per cent. Colin’s aggregate score, even in position one, fell short.

What’s most striking, however, is that despite his different blood, David actually increases his level of belonging. This is, first, because he replaces Colin: doing so makes David a stand-in son, a family member. The second reason is that David doesn’t carry the same baggage as Colin did from Rowland’s previous marriage. That makes David a less problematic proposition when it comes to slotting him in. These two reasons facilitated the miracle that Rowland performed of turning water into blood.

That miracle doesn’t have to happen under such special circumstances. There is a perfectly ordinary example of it. In the early 1930s, Rowland and Beatrice are a couple, and Colin is not even a glimmer in the eye. In order to marry, they must by law come from separate families. Marriage represents what anthropologists call ‘exogamy’. Exogamy means that matrimony occurs with a spouse chosen from outside the family. Nothing unusual about that. And yet on the day of the wedding, husband and wife become each other’s family. When Rowland and Beatrice tie the knot, they transmogrify into each other’s next of kin. That happens despite and because of the absence of blood ties. It is an act of social alchemy. In marriage, water not only becomes blood: it can become blood only if it is water. To extend the metaphor, one could say that Colin’s issue was that his blood and water were mixed. The result was a dilute mid-liquid that embarrassed all concerned.

The irony is that Rowland’s own belonging might have been the tiniest bit in doubt too. I say this because stories about my grandfather suggest he was never quite the man that legendary Uncle Bob – Robert, his brother – had been. Bob always seemed the more able. There is a suspicion, then, of what Freud called ‘projection’. This is the idea that we transfer onto other people those aspects of ourselves we find least congenial, thereby restoring a sense of our own flawlessness. In couples psychotherapy, for example, a wife might say of her husband, ‘I don’t trust him.’ But unconsciously what she is indicating is, ‘I am not to be trusted.’ So if, as second fiddle to Robert, Rowland felt inadequate, it’s possible that he saw in the pairing of David and Colin an echo, psychologically speaking, of his own situation. Thus David was the superior and Colin the inferior partner. Expelling Colin represented the purging of an inferiority that was Rowland’s own.

If that hypothesis is credible, then berating my father for his ‘uselessness’ was for Rowland an unconscious way of railing at a deficiency of his own, relative to his brother. It was a personal deficiency that he dealt with by contaminating his son with it. He then cited his son’s deficiency as a justification for banishing that son like a leper. Unluckily, however, you do not get rid of a disease by passing it on to someone else. It sticks. In any case, Colin had already been invaded by a disease of his own that would derange him more completely.

The madness of decision

On the other hand, we could say that Rowland took the tough decision. From this perspective, he was acting like a true leader. After all, when decisions require little discretion, we are not really deciding at all. We are pushing at an open door. Say I’m checking into the Grand Hotel in Brighton and am offered a choice between two rooms at the same tariff. One is at the front with a sea view; the other is at the back, overlooking the car park. It is obvious which one I should take.

But when I quiz the receptionist further, I discover that the sea-view room is poky. Between it and the sea runs a noisy road. The back room, by contrast, is spacious and quiet. Now I have a genuine dilemma, which calls for a true decision. Choosing between family and business is a genuine dilemma too, because the arguments on both sides can never be exhausted. The decision can always be deferred. What’s more, families and businesses are not two hotel rooms but apples and oranges. We are not comparing like with like, so how on earth are we to weigh them up?

So tricky are such genuine dilemmas that reason can take us only so far towards resolving them. That is why the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida, for example, writes about the ‘madness of decision’.fn2 Whatever the logical steps involved in the run-up to it, the decision itself marks a leap into the dark. That leap is the point at which reason can no longer help, because now it’s a matter of acting. You close your eyes and jump.

That’s what Rowland did. He acted with the unavoidable madness of all action. By not ducking the decision, he was, for good or for ill, accepting accountability. Was this something that he had learned in wartime? He had won an OBE for his actions. If Colin was the poorer performer, keeping him on might have put the business at risk. That would have impacted everyone. We can choose to see Rowland’s decision not as the cold-hearted rejection of his firstborn, but as a judicious move for the greater good. After all, the gravity of the decision can’t not have affected him.

The contribution sextant

An organisation perishes if it doesn’t work, so ultimately it has to put its own prosperity above the individuals in it. There is no autonomic system operating in a business such as there is in a human body. A business has no respiratory function that carries on regardless of the will of its owner. It must remember to breathe.

This need on the part of a business to keep its purpose at the front of its mind has an impact on the relationships among the individuals in it. We’ve seen how the roles played by Colin and David were reversed. Where the semi-son became the outsider, the outsider became the semi-son. That reversal took place because David’s input was perceived as more vital to the company’s commercial aims. A valuation took place. But such valuations take place in any situation where we bind together with others in a joint endeavour. The endeavour could be trivial, such as assembling a flat-pack wardrobe with a friend, or hold national significance, like starting a political party. No sooner do we find ourselves in such partnerships than a third element comes and stands over the relationship between us, like a master with its back to the sun. This third element is the goal that we’re trying to attain. It’s this goal that has convened us, and both of us have a duty to fulfil it. No matter how close the bond between the individuals involved, it takes second place to the goal that has brought them together.

As soon as the work begins, however, we become highly sensitive to the level of contribution that we are separately making. In particular, we are attuned to whether our partners are doing their share. We carry a secret measure, like a microscopic, translucent gauge within us, from which we’re always taking readings, working out who’s showing the greater commitment to the joint goal. I call it the ‘contribution sextant’. If, at any moment, we judge that our partner is more distant in his or her heart from that goal, we rate them as less valuable than we are. A draught of estrangement passes between us. To begin with, we ignore it. Generally, we’d rather get on with people than point out their failings, especially if we’re supposed equals before the same goal. Over time, however, the tolerance dries up, becomes brittle. Sooner or later it snaps and, with an aggression that’s more or less passive, we’ll call out the difference between their contribution and ours.

Compare the two triangles below. The first is equilateral, so we see a perfect balance. The distance between my partner and me is the same as the distance between each of us and our shared goal. The shared goal stands above us. We both have a duty to fulfil this goal. Like ladders, our separate efforts lean up towards and converge upon it. Meanwhile, a horizontal line runs between me and my partner, representing the equality that we experience as we labour at our joint task. Neither of us is supposed to give more or less than the other. The horizontal line helps us to feel we are in it together. These two factors, a shared goal and a sense of equality before it, create a bond. It feels right, and because it feels right, it feels good.

In the second triangle, by contrast, we see a less perfect configuration. Immediately, we sense relative disorder. My line to the shared goal is shorter, and my partner’s correspondingly longer. That indicates a greater commitment on my part to the shared goal. The shorter line has the inevitable consequence of lifting me higher up the picture than my partner. This elevated position is in effect the moral high ground. From here I can look down on my partner.

My partner’s perspective is altered in proportion. Now he is in a position of inferiority relative both to me and to the shared goal. How will the new configuration affect our relationship? We no longer have the line of equality keeping us in balance. What’s more, the distance has grown, and the new angle means we can’t see as much of each other. Our relationship suffers from the asymmetry, and we both know it. The disjointing of the triangle leads to an inner knowledge, shared by us both, of damage done.

That second triangle throws light on intimate relationships too. If you replace ‘our shared goal’ with ‘our relationship’, and interpret the lines as representing how much each partner is committed to that relationship, you have a triangle where the same dynamics apply as in the work scenario. The question is who feels worse. Is it me because I’m giving more and observing my partner giving less? After all, I’m the one being ripped off, picking up the slack. The diagram suggests that it’s actually worse for my partner. Not because she’s giving less per se, but because she’s located in the inferior position. She is looked down on both by me and by ‘the relationship’ as a concept. That makes matters less tolerable for her than they are for me. It also means that she’s more likely to leave than am I.

Soul knowledge

I believe we all carry such images within us. They might not assume the form of triangles, but we’ll have our way of figuring the balance or imbalance in any mutual enterprise. We know when things are off kilter. I call it ‘soul knowledge’.

Soul knowledge is deeper but simpler than psychological understanding. In tracking the complexities of human interaction, psychology sometimes loses touch with the underlying realities. Such realities aren’t always as complex as we imagine. Sometimes they are so simple that they can indeed be represented by a form as basic as a triangle. The danger, in other words, is that psychology can’t see the forest for the trees. Where psychology aims to quantify all sorts of data – tendency to agree or disagree, response to reward, frequency of relapse – soul knowledge measures the essentials. In this case, it takes a reading of the give-and-take in a relationship. Where the give-and-take is skewed, the result is a warping of the system as a whole, like a picture frame ruined by damp. It feels wrong. And because it feels wrong, it feels bad.

In other words, soul knowledge is a form of systemic awareness. It maps the tacit geometry of our connections with other people. We live in systems all the time, be they family systems, work systems or intimate relationship systems – and even fleeting systems like the audience we’re part of at a concert, or the queue we stand in at the post office. In all cases, we are switched on to our place in it and the place of others. When the system is in order, it feels right. The soul has an eye for the system as a whole, and unlike the self, which wants to stand out, is always ready to slot into its place.

What’s so very challenging about a family business is that two systems have to be reconciled. A family system has to be reconciled with a business system. At Rowland Smith & Son Ltd., the partners in the triangle, Colin and David, were not partners in the way that most colleagues might be, for the simple reason that one belonged to the family and the other did not. Strictly speaking, the former half-belonged to the family and the latter did not belong. I’m not sure it would be possible to chart this system, because Colin stood at once closer to, and further from, the shared goal understood as the family’s commercial interests, while also standing above, below and on the same level as David.

Systemically, it was a mess, and I think it had an impact on Colin’s soul. All his soul could have known was confusion. It might be pushing it to say that his MS was the direct result of this scrambling of his soul knowledge – being deprived of the chance to see a clear whole – but I find it hard not to draw at least a metaphoric parallel between the neurological misconnections in his body and the eccentric wiring in the system of the family business. In both cases, there’s a tragic failure of coherence.

Frenemies

Although David Cooke turned into, or was turned into, Colin’s nemesis, I do recall a period when one or two faltering attempts at a friendship were made by my father. It must have been a big deal for Colin, because although he came across as gregarious, handsome and jocular, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he had no friends. Life consisted of his office, our home and the commute between the two termini. I have more fingers on one hand than the number of times I remember my parents going out for the evening, and I have no recollection at all of any friend making a visit. The double bed in the commodious spare bedroom remained cold from 1970 when we moved in, right the way through to 1983 when we moved out.

I say the attempts were faltering, as if they could have been otherwise. But how could they, given that clash of the two systems, family and business? Even without such entanglements as those affecting Rowland Smith & Son Ltd., work friendships are rarely without complications. You don’t become friends with somebody through work unless the work was there in the first place to bring you together. The work provided the environment in which you met, and both of you will have gained entry to the organisation on the understanding that you would contribute to the shared goal. Work is the context of your friendship. So when you meet outside work as friends, the most you can do is to put that context in brackets. You can’t erase it altogether. Even if you never talk shop, your awareness of each other as co-workers remains in the back of your mind.

Why is that a problem? The presence of a shared goal acts like an alloy, thinning out the friendship’s integrity. Obviously, friends often do come together to perform a shared task, like putting up a tent or cooking a meal. The point is that the friendship doesn’t depend on such tasks in order to survive. That’s how friendships differ from relationships in the workplace, where the lack of a goal leaves people at a loss as to what to do. It is also how friendships resemble family relationships: both are an end in themselves. Friendships should consist in no more than that horizontal line between two people, with no tip of the triangle representing a goal. That horizontal line is also the line of equality. No friendship will be authentic if there’s any inkling of one friend feeling superior or inferior to the other. Both positions are bad for the soul.

The test comes when one of the friends quits the organisation. The deeper the friendship, the longer it can survive without the binding of work. We know we were never really friends if we lose touch soon after one of us has moved on. Needless to say, Colin and David did not remain friends in the wake of Colin’s sacking. Even when working together, the friendship never got off the ground. Ulterior motive was too much in play. For Colin, befriending David would have been, at least subconsciously, a way of neutralising a potential threat. For David, currying favour with another Rowland Smith could only bolster his position. The most they could have ever been to one another was ‘frenemies’.

What’s in a name?

The biggest stumbling block, therefore, was the name. Like a bell, my father’s surname had a resonance in Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. that David’s did not. Until Colin was removed, that is. Then the roles reversed. David became an honorary Rowland Smith, while Colin – sidelined from business and family alike – effectively forfeited his name. An acquired namelessness, like a reverse baptism, was one of the many facets of his plight.

But we shouldn’t let the peculiarities of the Colin/David scenario lead us into thinking that having different names is always a problem in friendships. Quite the reverse. Like marriage, friendship is exogamous. It involves making a bond with somebody outside the family. That requires you to choose a friend with a different surname. I mean by different surname ‘coming from a different lineage’, even if the actual word – Jones or Patel or Blanc or Diaz or Khan – is the same. If it were really the same family name – the same patronymic or matronymic, to give it its technical title – then you would be making friends with somebody from your family, which is unnecessary. Unnecessary because the bond already exists. If we think of friendship as the reducing of the otherness of other people, or as making the strange familiar, then in a family this labour of familiarisation has been done in advance. It’s implicit in the word ‘family’. Regardless of how much you like the person, befriending a family member is ever so slightly ingratiating. Ingratiating because superfluous.

It cuts the other way too. The superfluousness of befriending a family member gives us an excuse not to make an effort. With friends there’s always a subtle pressure for that effort to be made. I am not saying that one shouldn’t bother to be friendly with family. But ‘friendly’ is different from ‘friends’. Family is a blood system, friendship water. Although the two can be mixed, they are intrinsically different. Mixing them evokes a subtle sense of aberration.

So Colin and David did not remain friends after the former left the company. Whether Colin’s departure in 1979 really helped the business to recover is debatable. In 1983 Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. was sold to a Dutch enterprise. The following year Colin’s father, my grandfather, died.

Incurable souls

Over time, Colin’s metaphorical namelessness has become all too real. Now when I visit him, he’s not sure what his own name is, let alone mine. Addressing him in his fleece top, sweat pants and Velcro slippers – he hasn’t worn shoes for fifteen years – I ask, ‘Am I Robert?’ Sometimes he shakes his head. Other times he says yes. Or rather he whispers yes, because that’s the best his un-exercised larynx can do. His mouth hangs open most of the day, revealing the few teeth that are stuck like plugs of dark sap onto his gums. It’s an effort for him to close his mouth in the way that enunciating syllables requires, so the ‘y’ and the ‘s’ at the beginning and end of the word ‘yes’ barely have any definition. The lack of consistency in his replies suggests that he just doesn’t know who I am. He’s guessing. It seems that I, his only son, have become a stranger.

Often he won’t reply at all. But then, language consists of more than words. Whenever I appear, his face lights up. After this initial burst, he will zone out, adrift in some time outside time. But during it, he is stirred. He may not be recognising me as Robert; he may not even be recognising me as his son. But that he is recognising somebody is beyond dispute. Only recognition could trigger such elation. I smile back and, for those first few seconds, we are communicating.

We are communicating, but as to what underpins the communication, I cannot say. It’s not just he who is unsure about me. To be frank, even though I know rationally that he is my father, being with him is so strange that I feel it like a vertigo. That’s partly because I’m in a state of protracted shock, both about his disease and about being related to him as its victim. But it is also because that disease has refashioned him to such an extent that I’m not sure who he is either.

If we can communicate despite having no normal basis for it, it’s possible that something else is going on. Not only is the mutual strangeness no bar to communication, it might even be what allows a more immediate form of communication to take place. When two people know each other well, or are each sure of who the other person is, the quality of the communication can actually decrease. How so? The familiarity causes us to rely on our inner picture of that other person, rather than seeing them as they truly are. We become too habituated to properly notice. But, as when a wave recedes and leaves the pebbles on the beach gleaming, when the familiarity recedes and we become strangers once more, we see the other person afresh.

It is more like an encounter between two souls than two selves. Souls don’t need to know in the way that selves do, because in the realm of the soul everything essential gets communicated in advance. When two souls come together they ‘always already’ know each other. That is why, for example, the process of falling in love is instantaneous, and why a new couple will often attest to the uncanny feeling of having known each other before. Their souls arrived at the love-place ahead of their selves.

The key condition for this soul knowledge to occur, therefore, is the dislodging of the mask of the self. In Colin’s case, it was knocked from his face for him. He certainly didn’t ask for it. Like most of us, his preference would surely have been for a life of presence, identity, connection and value, for the embroidery of the self to weave its threads until it had assumed the form and colour that most people are able to enjoy. And yet it’s precisely because his self grew so threadbare that his soul was able to shine through in large smooth patches. Perhaps that’s what’s so jolting about visiting Colin and seeing the other incurables drooling in their food, or hearing the unidentifiable sounds they make echoing down the long, wide parquet corridors. It’s the absence of selves and, in their place, the presence of their naked souls.

Happiness

Given his aphasic state, Colin’s medical file lists ‘Dementia’ next to ‘Multiple Sclerosis’. Whilst those categories might work on paper, in the flesh they can’t be told apart. The dementia is merely extending the process of effacing Colin’s identity begun long ago by the MS, just as the MS itself picked up the work of erasure that had commenced in his psyche at an early age. It is as if the gift of presence, which is what makes life life, was fumbled at his birth. It broke as a glass sphere brimming with light would break. I remember that in the wheelchair period, he would simply sit at home, with the lights and the heating turned off to save money, as if he needed no more sustenance than the objects around him. As if he saw himself as something other than alive.

In this doleful example, we come across perhaps the deepest sense of what it means to be a human. Having a fate, as we all do, means being vulnerable. It calls us away from others and into a future that we can never completely predict. In extreme cases, like that of Colin, it can even separate us from who we are. I say this because Colin’s self has come so close to being scrubbed away that there’s nothing for him to reflect on. It’s as if there is not even an interchange between a conscious and an unconscious self. There’s nothing for an unconscious to split off from and no ocean for the shipwreck of his self to sink into.

Is that a good or a bad fate in the end? Perhaps that is the wrong question. It is more a matter of how we play the hand we are dealt. Where others might have reinvented themselves after losing their job, or, as I suggested earlier, summoned their inner resources to keep the MS at bay through diet, exercise and will, my father appeared to let fate take its course. But then, all that he had known from a young age was his life being directed by others. His real tragedy was that he never developed a sense of his own agency. The capacity for self-determinism was always going to be weaker than the forces acting upon him. The final irony, if that is the right word, is that he appears to be happy at last.

Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.

Niklas Luhmann

2
The Dream of Three Daughters

But who are these three sisters and why must the choice fall on the third?

Sigmund Freud

In the small hours, the bedside phone is ringing. I am a light sleeper, but on this night of all nights I’m beyond reach. As the calls rain in, I sleep through. Maybe my unconscious is detaining me because it knows that this will be the start of a new life.

What wakes me in the end is not the phone, though it is crouching just inches from my ear. There is a thumping at the door. As my unconscious releases me, I find myself on the edge of a bed in an unlit flat in Oxford, the phone ringing, the door booming, not knowing which to answer first.

Based on some dim argument about presence trumping absence, I opt for the door, for responding to the person who is actually there rather than the remote entity at the other end of the telephone wire. Besides, I know what the phone call is about. As for who’s behind the door, I have no idea.

It is a policeman. He is tall and burly, and has a ginger beard. My guilty conscience tells me that he has come to arrest me. But no. He starts saying something about people trying to reach me on the phone. Members of my family have been trying to get hold of me, he repeats, ringing the receiver off the hook. As a last resort they have phoned the police station in Oxford, to send a policeman round to wake me up. Is he annoyed or amused? The phone continues to ring. I am still naked.

I head back into the bedroom to pick it up. It is Simone’s aunt, Lydia. Simone has gone into labour. It is bang on the due date. We decided it was best to have the baby in London, as there was family near by, while I set up our new flat in Oxford. So Simone is staying with another aunt, Jo, in Primrose Hill. Yesterday evening, when Simone and I spoke on the phone – she in London, I in Oxford – she assured me that no birth-giving was in the offing. Hence perhaps the depth of my sleep. Now Lydia is forcing information at me down the line, and I am trying to drink from the fire hose. Simone is in the obstetrics department at University College Hospital, on Huntley Street, in Bloomsbury, London. Lydia gives detailed instructions on which entrance to use. I can’t picture the place or take it in. To me, a suburban boy, central London is a black box.

How to get from Oxford to London at three in the morning? There will be no trains to Paddington station at that hour. I don’t have a car. The only alternative is a taxi, but I’m unemployed and have literally no money. The idea of taking a taxi to London is preposterous. I wouldn’t take a taxi into town, let alone from city to city. The cost defies calculation.

After due dithering, I decide to call Simone’s parents’ house. I explain that I can’t get to the hospital, and ask to borrow the money. But I call with trepidation. I am the student dropout whom they have met only twice. At the first meeting, almost a year ago, I was just the summer fling. The second meeting was at Waterloo station, where the parents greeted us off the train. Simone was heavily pregnant with my child, and I was looking everywhere except into their eyes. I’m convinced that, to them, I’m the layabout who sponged off their oldest daughter in Perpignan and got her pregnant. My credit rating isn’t high. But in this hour of need, as ever, they are gracious. They are active members of their Catholic church and do good in the community. The money is pledged. I look for my cheque book. I know the cheque will bounce, but that won’t come to light for a few days. I fumble through the Yellow Pages, hands now shaking, and call a minicab firm.

As soon as I inform the driver of my mission, he steps on it. He drives like the wind. I have never been driven so fast in a car. He says that if the police stop us, they’ll understand. They’ll probably put you in the squad car and drive you themselves, he joshes: blue lights flashing, sirens blaring.

With the M40 behind us and the Marylebone flyover bearing us aloft through west London like a toy car on a toy bridge, and now passing Euston station, the driver asks me for directions. I know the name of the hospital. I know the street. But no more. He is from Oxford: London’s not his manor either. The well in the driver’s-side door has no A to Z. Smartphones are yet to be invented. And so, having reached London in about forty minutes, we get mired in the squares and one-ways of Bloomsbury for as long again. It is like being in a maze. He’s looking out the driver’s side, I’m looking out the passenger window; both of us are scrutinising the buildings for signs.

At length, we locate the red-brick hospital, gloomy as a castle in the 5 a.m. light. I write out the cheque for forty-three pounds only, slam the door shut, and bound up the stone stairs. Simone is on the bed, pushing hard. The baby comes, a purple and white larva, slippery and warm and as charged with life as a battery. This is the creature we have been referring to as ‘Sweet Pea’ for all the time that she has been furled up like a fern in the womb. Her very first act in the world is to sneeze, to blow away the prehistoric goo and enter human time.

What does it mean to bring new life into the world? How is the act of birth connected to the act of sex that preceded it? Obviously there is a biochemical chain of cause and effect, but the two events can feel so unrelated that they might as well have occurred on different continents. How can we make sense of taking up a new place in the schema of generations? For at that moment, when Sweet Pea came out of the tunnel and in the light became Anna, Simone was no longer just a daughter but also a mother. I was no longer just a son but also a father. Although Simone and I were both young – just twenty-two – we found ourselves instantly elevated one branch up the family tree, as if on a genealogical ski lift. I felt the sense of being caught in the onward rush of life. That is part of what it means to be a human being, and it is the answer that this chapter will develop.

There is a supplementary question, concerning our relationship to the unknown. I touch on this question because in that room in UCH as the dawn was coming up on an early autumn day in London, with the baby arriving in all its hotness and strangeness as if down a chute from Venus, I felt as if I knew nothing at all. Or rather, the experience was so enveloping that any understanding was blocked.

Down and out in Oxford and Croydon

I had met Simone at a summer job in July 1986, the year before Anna’s birth. We were both working at a call centre for British tourists who run into difficulties abroad. We the staff, most of us language students, would liaise with the local services overseas. We would speak French, Spanish or Italian on the tourists’ behalf whenever their rental car had a prang or someone broke a leg. Simone had finished her degree and was about to take up a one-year teaching position at the University of Perpignan, in the south of France. I had completed two of the three years of my English degree at Oxford, and was disaffected. I couldn’t engage. My plan – my non-plan – was to throw in the towel.

There was another reason for my lowness. Some months earlier, I had broken up with my girlfriend of three years, Astrid. Actually, she had broken up with me, and I was still smarting. In an old Mini, Astrid drove down from Birmingham to Oxford with her identical twin sister to deliver the news. We faced off like actors on set in my high-ceilinged ground-floor room, with me trying to persuade her to stay. While the sister waited in the car, we had the best sex that we had ever had. The sex didn’t change her mind. It was a closing ceremony.

I wanted a girlfriend to fill the gap. To redeem myself, in fact. When Astrid left me it felt like I had failed. By finding somebody else, I would prove that I wasn’t a failure. I would show Astrid that I was a worthy boyfriend and that she had made a terrible mistake. And so I dated a physiotherapist who had done an ultrasound on my knee after I’d dislocated it, not for the first time, playing cricket. It was the reactivation of a longstanding injury – no pun intended – which, later in life, would make it impossible for me to walk down stairs without pain. I sat in my underwear at the John Radcliffe Infirmary as she smeared the paste around my patella. She pressed the cold metal head against my skin. We caught each other’s eye. But when I cooked her dinner, she claimed to have had a big lunch and left most of it. That seemed to stand for something. We didn’t see each other again.

Earlier that term there had been a party in the house, in my friend Simon’s room next door to mine. I had been dancing with Elizabeth, Simon’s supposed girlfriend. After the party had wound down and I had gone back to my room, she knocked on my door and got into my bed. I told her that I couldn’t betray Simon. Once I had denied her three times, she walked out and wouldn’t speak to me again. She left her sweater in my room, an oversized magenta V-neck by Oscar de la Renta that I kept for years.

That bed was a red futon given to me by Uncle Rowley, my father’s half-brother and my godfather. Though he was now living on a farm in remotest Suffolk, we were still close. The futon was a twenty-first birthday present. But it must have been jinxed because every time a girl got in, the prospect of sex got out. There was a chaste American, Sylvia, with whom I’d been flirting. Though she was keen to lose her virginity, I didn’t want the responsibility of taking it. There was Poppy, the girl from the library, who spent much of term away from Oxford mucking out horses on her parents’ farm. She just wanted to cuddle. There was Bronwen, the dark Welsh beauty, who lived in the house itself, on the top floor, and came downstairs to spend an entire evening on my accursed futon, smiling and twisting her hair, before going back up to bed. And there was Kate, one of my best friends. After going drinking one night, we ended up sleeping in my room, she on the futon, me on the floor. In the dark we started talking about sex. I let my hand brush against her thigh. Our heartbeats quickened briefly before we agreed to remain just friends. Aided by the alcohol, we fell asleep. Once again, the red of the futon had said stop.

So the girl situation was getting me down. But mainly it was Oxford University itself that was sapping me. The freedom it offered opened up like an abyss. Apart from checking in for a one-hour tutorial once a week, we were left to our own devices. Today it would be called ‘self-guided learning’ but I lacked the maturity to guide myself. I skidded off like a dud missile.

This second year was especially hollow. It was the first time I had experienced anything close to depression. My thoughts became bleak, my mood saturnine. I lived out of college in a huge and forbidding Victorian mansion on the Woodstock Road, the house where Astrid and I had our valediction. It always seemed empty, even when all twelve study bedrooms were occupied. That house still appears in my dreams, with extra passageways leading into derelict rooms and a basement like a crypt divided into cells, damp and cold.

I spent my days wandering the waterways of Oxford. The evenings found me alone in my room with a treasured Aiwa tape deck, dancing to Marvin Gaye and Talking Heads. I went to bed later and later. I did less and less work. Occasionally I would give in to my weakness for buying clothes, but I was on a student grant which always ran dry before the end of term. For everything else, there was MasterCard.

The lack of money was a background drone and a drain. The previous summer, at the end of my first year in 1985, I had decided to stay on in Oxford for the long vacation or ‘vac’. In that era, it was still possible for students to sign on out of term time. The phrase was ‘going on the dole’. But my application was refused. I remonstrated with a benefits officer behind a glass screen in the prefab Department of Social Security building on the outskirts of town. To no avail. This was where the government employees received us privileged ‘gownies’ – as opposed to ‘townies’ – with the contempt that we probably deserved. It matched perfectly what Kafka describes in his fiction, The Trial: faceless administration, baffling paperwork, impenetrable processes. I felt like the Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth.

So for the ten weeks of that long summer, in the year before I met Simone, while I was still with Astrid, I lived on a food budget of a pound a day. I made a few extra quid offering guided tours of Oxford, but not enough to make a difference. One pound equated to a single portion of boiled rice from a Chinese takeaway called Dear Friends – known to us student wits as ‘Dead Friends’ – and a couple of Snickers bars. That was it. I lost weight. Meanwhile, the credit card bills came through with inexorable regularity, and with interest charged on top like some monstrous dehiscence.

Why didn’t I just go home that first Oxford summer and live off my parents, like a normal student, getting my laundry done and having my meals cooked? This was the period after my father had lost his job, when his father, my grandfather, had scraped him like a barnacle off the hull of the ship of the family business, leaving him to bob hopelessly in the waves. To shore up their losses, my parents had moved from the rambling detached house where I had done most of my growing up, into a semi-detached cottage back in south Croydon. The flash cars were sold. My bedroom was a box partitioned out of the master bedroom where my parents slept, with a wall so thin that I could hear them breathe at night. It wasn’t home for any of us. On the day we moved in, my mother sat down on the stairs and wept.

Haunting

That wasn’t the main reason why I stayed up in Oxford that first summer. Though I too struggled with the comedown in our family fortunes. The loss of social status became all the more acute on going up to Oxford. I could see up close the real-life toffs at Christ Church and Worcester and Magdalen. These were the gilded youth who hailed from old money, had houses in the country, and all knew each other – my peers included David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Before going up, I had assumed that Oxford would be about the scaling of intellectual summits. I soon realised that social altitude mattered more. Being middle class and intellectual was somewhat suspect. Better to be a bit less bright and a bit more posh. I’d been a keen actor at school and a member of the National Youth Theatre, and Oxford would be a chance for me to take some interesting new roles … but the roles were always taken by these chums with skiing holiday tans, liberal allowances and bow ties that needed to be tied.

A short note on cars

The Chrysler in the photo was one of several owned by my grandfather with an ‘Oak’ licence plate. The registration number refers to ‘Ye Olde Oak’, the brand name of the tinned ham produced by Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. In the mid 1970s, this vehicle was sold to none other than David Bowie, who was then in his ‘plastic soul’ phase, and wanted an American car to drive in England. A Chrysler features in his 1975 song ‘Young Americans’. Perhaps it was this one. When my father had to give up driving, it represented another break with the Oak dynasty, and a loss of male energy. My own dreams often feature cars. The kind of car I’m driving and the journey I’m on seem to indicate my state of mind at the time.

Admittedly, I had been to a private school myself – the same Dulwich College that my mother aspired to on her son’s behalf. But Dulwich was a school for new-money boys from Beckenham or Bromley or, like me, Croydon. By contrast, those bright young things had carved out an elite within the elite, an inner sanctum of privilege cordoned off with a red rope and guarded by a PR team with a list of names from which mine was absent. I wasn’t sure if I hated them or wished I was one of them. Probably both.

Ultimately, staying away that summer was a means of avoiding living under the same roof as my father in his castrated state. A state like that of King Lear turfed out of his castle, confined to the outbuildings with the animals. It would have meant seeing his reality first hand. I use the word ‘castrated’ deliberately. Though the MS would sure enough disable his sexual functioning along with everything else, it was more that the symbolic male energy that should have flowed from father to son, from him to me, had been interrupted. The oil pipeline, the artery of resources, had been blown up by terrorists. Just as I was making my transition from adolescence to the big wide world, and needing male fuel to boost me on, the engine cut out.

More usually the reverse applies: paternal potency induces filial feebleness. There are billionaire fathers with wastrel sons, and celebrity fathers whose male progeny live in their shadow. In those cases, it is an excess rather than an insufficiency of fatherly strength that causes the son to weaken. For me, it was the other way round. And it was as much about timing as anything else. At the point of leaving home I needed a full tank. I had expected my father to fill it up as a parting gift. I got only a few miles down the road before the engine sputtered and died. Why had my father stopped earning money to support me? Why couldn’t he have an influential job for me to boast about? Why did he have to crumple into his own despair rather than steer me with gubernatorial ease towards a sure destiny? I felt angry with him, disappointed, cheated.

To tell the awkward truth, I felt it would have been better if he had died. To me he was like a bloodied bull staggering around the bullring, dazed and confused, the picos sticking out from his neck to make a grotesque ruff. A part of me was praying for the matador to put him out of his misery. At least then I would have the opportunity to mourn. In the terms of Sigmund Freud, I would have been able to ‘incorporate’ him properly. Instead, he was cast into a limbo between life and death. That made it impossible for me as his son to abstract the remaining heat from his corpse, like an electricity thief, and plug it into my own circuit of veins. For Freud, this is one of the chief causes of depression, or what he calls ‘melancholia’. Instead of being able to grieve fully for somebody by incorporating them into our memories, we are impeded. They remain only half taken in, and that induces a terrible sadness.

But Freud is talking about people who actually die. He is describing a failure of mourning on the part of those who survive them. My dad did not actually die. Rather, he lived a half life, as if he’d been exposed to radiation. He would stir only to do sums on blotting paper, working out how to eke out his savings, now that no more income was coming in. This half life, half death on his part was the cause of my half mourning. I’ve effectively remained in this state of half mourning ever since that rupturing of the masculine tract. I think it lies behind the dejection I experienced at Oxford. Freud refers to primitive societies in which the dead king is literally eaten, ingested, as a way of tapping his energy. Not eating leaves you weak. We grow in strength when we consume dead meat. We need the body of the past to sustain us for the future.fn1

The implication is that when you fully incorporate the dead, you won’t be haunted by them. They will be satisfactorily swallowed, and you can get on with your business, just as if you’d had a restorative meal. Haunting is less a spectral visitation, in other words, than a failure of mourning. It’s not that the dead return, but that the living haven’t digested them properly. The living thus keep burping up the dead like a gas which takes human shape, its hologram shimmering before their eyes. And because, with the onset of his two irreversible conditions, MS and unemployment, my father entered a zone that was also neither dead nor alive, it turned him into a kind of ghost that haunted me. It was his ghostly half-presence that spooked me, and I couldn’t face living in the little house with it for a whole summer.

But nor could I fight with him. Young adult sons need not only to draw from the male strength of the father, but also to do battle with it. There has to be some alpha wrangle that lets the son believe he has thrown the father over. It’s an Oedipal crisis that tightens the relationship between father and son like a screw until the wood splits, and the parts can become individual again. With a damaged father, one mother, two sisters and no brother, I lacked a male adversary to define myself against. My father had become a ghostly gas (the two words are related), and I could punch right through it.

The word ‘Oedipal’, of course, refers to the Oedipus complex as elaborated by Freud. The original version by Sophocles sees Oedipus unwittingly kill his father and marry his mother. Freud recasts the Greek original in psychological terms in order to reveal a general tendency among boys to attack their fathers while idealising their mothers. He says that it is an important phase for a boy to go through. As in, go through and come out the other side. In my attempt here at a Freudian self-analysis, I’m saying that I never quite went through it, or that I might still be stuck in an unresolved version thereof. I couldn’t attack my father because he couldn’t fight back.

And if I couldn’t elbow my way beyond that aggressive phase with my father, does it imply that I remained in a state whereby I idealised my mother in Oedipal fashion? As I pointed out in the Foreword, this book contains disproportionately more material about my father than about my mother. I would answer that writing less about my mother does indeed contain a residual motive to idealise, but in the following sense. Just as my teenage self was squaring up to fight him, I saw that my father was already on the canvas, knocked out by life. With one parent down, and still down to this day – as I write Colin lies in his hospital bed ten miles away – how could I possibly risk damaging the other parent too? Would analysing my mother in the way that I have analysed my father undermine the consolation that I derive from having at least one parent not sitting on death row? Even if any illusions that I hold about my mother serve merely to compensate for the disillusion with my father, that is fine by me. My silence about my mother keeps those illusions about her alive. Those illusions, if they exist, serve a purpose.

Whether or not my self-analysis is valid, it was because of that father–son dynamic that I didn’t go home that first Oxford summer. The following year, 1986, I took up the summer job at the call centre and met Simone. Having dropped out of college, I started wondering what I would do with my life.

Sex: more recreation than reproduction

When Freud writes about incorporating those who have passed away, it fits, perhaps surprisingly, with his earlier theory of sexuality. Whether mourning the dead or reaching out to the living, we are bringing the other towards us, overcoming distance, making relationship. Underlying both is an instinct in us to bond with others and get close to them. It is this instinct which for Freud is ‘erotic’, though in the very broadest sense. He’s not talking about sex narrowly defined, but about the wider need in us to discharge our energy. Given that the energy has to go somewhere, our erotic instincts provide a positive channel.

Not that sex is absent from the picture. Our erotic instincts do also take the form of wanting sex with others, that is bringing them into physical intimacy with us. These erotic instincts have an interest not just in the short-term pleasure of the moment, however, but also in the long-term furthering of the species. Sex goes together with life.

Maybe that is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet the obvious is recalled more seldom than it might be. Thanks both to the availability of contraception and to a growing acceptance of homosexuality, we make the connection between sex and life less automatically than once we did. Whatever the morals of it, there just is an awful lot of sex that doesn’t result in babies being born. That makes sex overall more about recreation than reproduction, as shown in the following diagram. (In the diagram, the size of the circles is a crude indicator of the amount of different kinds of sex that we have.) And whilst the dominance of recreational sex can dull our appreciation of the link between sex and life, our appreciating it less doesn’t stop that link from holding.

So how much of the life force is present when we hold erotic feelings for another person? How far is our sexual desire controlled by an unconscious instinct to reproduce? Of course, the question doesn’t seem to apply to same sex relationships, where reproduction isn’t an option. But does that make the question a bad one? After all, you can still want what’s not available. To put it philosophically, impossibility is no constraint on desire. So, oddly enough, we can’t be 100 per cent certain that the instinct to reproduce plays no part in homosexual desire, especially if instincts are unconscious, which in Freud they are. That isn’t supposed to be an underhand way of averring that gay people are closet heterosexuals. It is just that an unconscious instinct for life might conceivably roam in the background of all erotic feelings.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to prove. What we can say is that without reproduction humans would die out, meaning that as a species we need to have sex for our own survival. So although, when we want sex, we might never get any felt sense of the larger imperative, such an imperative could well be there. Maybe that implies that we are rewarded with sexual pleasure by the species as a sop, to ensure its own continuity. But so what? The species isn’t different from us, its members. If we are being manipulated, it’s we who are doing the manipulating. We win both ways.

Self-sabotage

That summer of 1986, when Simone and I met, turned into autumn. She left to take up her teaching position in Perpignan. I, having checked out of Oxford at the end of my second year, stayed behind in Croydon, in the box room at my parents’ house. What was I thinking? I was horrified, revulsed and scared by my father’s condition. I had lingered in Oxford during the previous vacation specifically to avoid it. Yet here I was, moving back home. As against the default option, the path of least resistance, which was to complete my final year and claim my degree, I was actively putting the momentum of my life into reverse.

Part of the reason was the fear of sinking further into debt. That fear came with the shame I felt at the prospect of confessing to my financial woes. At home I could live for free, earn some money and covertly get back into the black. And yet the debt really wasn’t so large, maybe a grand. Besides, I had a place at Oxford. Imagining a better station in life was difficult. Yet here I was, throwing it away. What was pushing me towards this act of self-sabotage?

I think I felt guilty about driving ahead with my own life when my father had so conspicuously broken down. It would have been like ignoring the fire on the side of the motorway. The point being that it’s not how much success you want, it’s how much your conscience can tolerate. I didn’t formulate it in such terms at the time because I was still saturated with my disappointment in him. All too often that disappointment would come out as hostility. The first time I ever directed the F-word at him was during this period. I remember trembling afterwards, with a mixture of triumph and horror at my crime.

But outer hostility had an inner kernel of love. Or at least a filial concern to tie my fortunes to his, for better or for worse. Even if I longed for him to be different, I was his son, and he my only father. My sabotaging my own prospects was a simple case of a boy wanting to emulate his dad. What made the case unusual was that what was being emulated was catastrophe. When I saw that his car had crashed, I crashed my own.

None of this was conscious. Often, what motivates us at a given point in time is a mystery that becomes clear only with hindsight. I could conceivably come up with a yet truer interpretation of that summer of ’86 another thirty years hence, if I’m still around. Big events in life are like dreams in this respect. They spill their secrets slowly, and only after we have forgotten about them for a spell do their meanings achieve transparency. It’s not in thinking things through but in leaving them be that the pattern can form which we later discern. Thinking can be a block to understanding. For where thinking wants to make meaning, understanding is about receiving it.

And so, with the quotient of hindsight available to me today, I’d argue that, in a way that was obscure to me then, I was seeking to match my fate to my father’s. Needless to say, the tragedy points that I scored by dropping out of uni were far lower than those accrued by him. He was suffering from MS, had been ejected from the family business and, still in his forties, had been put out to pasture. Any ‘matching’ on my part fell far short. In their naïvety, my actions were probably closer to comedy than to tragedy. Nevertheless, I believe the unconscious intention to imitate his story was real.

The conundrum is why I bore that intention at all. What good would it do? The best answer I can give is that I was curbing my own success so as to make Colin’s having been deprived of it seem less egregious. Part of me couldn’t bear to succeed in case it exposed how far he had been left behind. I suspect such hidden motives might explain many cases where people fail to realise their potential. A secret loyalty is holding them back. I, at least, was nipping in the bud my own prospects for success. It was an intervention designed to exact some parity for Colin, after he had been so outplayed by life and was so many goals down. By breaking my own, I was showing him that a broken life like his was normal. I could thus spare him any sense that he had been singled out for misfortune. I could comfort him that he wasn’t alone, and serve as his partner in failure.

Insofar as that intervention involved a sacrifice on my part, however, it was pointless. Maybe copying his downfall helped to absorb the shock it had caused me. Trauma is trauma by virtue of the fact that we repeat it, rather than get over it. But my thriving less could never make him thrive more. Two wrongs don’t make a right. If anything, my dropping out would have added to his woes. Indeed, when I first announced that I wasn’t going back to sit my finals, he reacted with pure consternation. So pleased was he to have a son at Oxford that he would tell anyone who’d listen. Our local newsagent once reported to me that my father had been in again, buying his paper and talking about his clever charge. ‘So proud!’ said the newsagent. By quitting Oxford, I was actually taking away one of the few reasons Colin had to be cheerful about the future. His son, so full of promise, was putting his life chances in jeopardy.

I was also allowing my fate to become mixed up with his, like one swimmer helping another swimmer in distress, and causing both to drown. It can be hard for us to accept that fate separates people from each other, especially within a family. Fate undoes the knots that we so readily create as we become entangled with one another. In French, the word for fate is le sort, which alludes precisely to this notion of disentanglement, of sorting people onto different tracks. And so, despite my best efforts to subvert myself, to bring my onwards journey to a halt and wait with my father on the hard shoulder, fate had other ideas. A different engine had fired up.

Pomegranate in a shoebox

By the end of that year, 1986, I had tried two further temping jobs. The first was in the accounts department of a computer company located next to the old Croydon Airport. I might have got into Oxford and been a dab hand at English literature, but when it came to numeracy, I was at sixes and sevens. God knows what the auditors made of the books for the period that I was there. The second involved stacking shelves in the food hall at Marks and Spencer, organising the items according to sell-by date. If I was underqualified for the accounting job, I was overqualified for this. With no plan B, I quit on day two.

Meanwhile, Simone in Perpignan and I in Croydon had been writing regularly. We would send each other gifts. In return for a pair of ski pants that I bought her, Simone dispatched a fresh pomegranate. On account of its many seeds, the pomegranate is an ancient symbol of fertility.fn2 The fruit would demonstrate its prophetic power in due course, though as a gift it was already suggestive. Simone had wrapped the burnished gourd in newspaper and packed it into a shoebox. With it she had enclosed Baudelaire’s poem, ‘L’invitation au voyage’, which she had written out long-hand in French:

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,

Luxe, calme et volupté.

‘There is nothing here that is not order and beauty, / Luxurious, calm and voluptuary’. I lingered over this refrain. Given my context – living with my parents, temping in Croydon – it was beguilingly exotic. Like a siren singing to a sailor all at sea, Simone was calling me to join her.

Again, I would realise it only later, but that wasn’t the first time in my family history that such an invitation had been issued. It echoed my father inviting my mother on the transatlantic voyage from England to Canada in 1959 which resulted in their wedding. Perhaps that was another reason why I was so amenable to Simone’s unwitting reinterpretation of it. My parents’ elopement having entered the family folklore, it must have formed a template in my psyche for how romantic events were meant to unfold. The template ran as follows:

Out of love, one follows the other across the sea.

We often play out our lives according to these semi-mythical frameworks implanted in childhood. They work like a foreshadowing, or the unwitting tracking of ley lines. In both cases, however, accepting the invitation was as foolish as it was romantic. By eloping, my parents had been playing fast and loose with their family ties. I was damaging my career prospects still further, for in those days, before the opening up of the European labour market, I had no right to work on the continent. Perhaps it was romantic because it was foolish.

A staircase without stairs

Fortunately, Simone had a steady income from her job as lectrice at Perpignan’s university, which eased the immediate pressure on me to earn money. Perpignan sits in south-west France near the Spanish border. One had only to make the short drive through the slopes of the eastern Pyrenees to see in silhouette against the hills the effigies of bulls that were so talismanic of Spain. The border country also maps onto Catalonia. On Perpignan’s labyrinthine streets one would hear Catalan spoken both by old ladies wearing black and old men in flat caps.

A true melting pot of cultures, Perpignan was north African too. Simone had rented digs on the Rue Dugommier in the city’s shabby Arab quarter. Our downstairs neighbours were Moroccans. On the one day that it snowed, they congregated in woollen beanies, looking out from the hallway in bemusement. The apartment was on the first floor, above a horse butcher’s straightforwardly called A Cheval, with sawdust on the floor to soak up the blood. A few doors down was a bistro, Chez Nicole et Marcel, where they served mussels in piles as high as a wedding cake.

Having a place of our own at that age was wonderful. We had terracotta tiles and red shutters. Not that it was perfect. One day we came back to find that several of the stairs between the first and second floors had crumbled away, leaving a ravine spanned only by the iron of the banister. Whenever the people on the two storeys above us wanted to get into their flat, they had to approach the ascent like mountaineers.

I was to give English lessons. Without a work visa or leave to remain in the country for more than ninety days, however, I’d have to do so on the sly and for cash only. That meant I was nervous of getting caught. It wasn’t just paranoia. One night, towards dawn, we were woken by a commotion in the hallway. Doors were banging, people were shouting. ‘Ouvrez! Ouvrez! Police des étrangers! Ouvrez!’ The immigration police were conducting a raid. Our Moroccan neighbours in the ground-floor flat were wrenched from their beds. More of them than we ever imagined could live in it were bundled out of the door in their nightwear.

Being on the first floor, Simone and I were next. She was legit, but my number was up. I saw myself thrust into a police cell, questioned and roundly deported. ‘Vos papiers!’ barked the gendarme at our door. I fetched my passport from the drawer and proffered it to him as if I were a lamb to the slaughter. No sooner did the officer see the British insignia than he bowed, apologised and moved on. I was as illegal as any of the Moroccans, but the good old racism of the French South had come to my rescue.

In addition to the grande dame who hired me to occupy her daughter with English verbs while she had adulterous sex with her lover, one student stood out. For our first lesson, he insisted that we meet at a public venue. I arrived at the Café de la Paix at the appointed hour to be greeted by a Sicilian man called Andrea. He was in his late thirties, stocky, with a broken nose, yellow-tinted sunglasses, a gold chain and greased-back black hair. He said that he was looking for an English-speaking partner in his shoe business. Why he thought a student dropout would fit the bill wasn’t clear, but the Oxford connection seemed endorsement enough. I explained that he’d got the wrong end of the stick. I wasn’t looking for a business venture, just to earn some francs teaching English.

Andrea and I compromised on a meal at his house, to which he also invited Simone. In a marble dining room, we feasted on lobster and other fruits de mer, accompanied by champagne. The meal was served by his wife, who was coiffed to perfection, dressed to the nines and sparkling with jewellery. Andrea pointed at her as if she were a poodle at Crufts, giving an inventory of each jewel she wore and how much he had laid out for it. Simone and I felt obliged to return the favour, so we had them round to our bijou flatlet. They walked up in their finery, through the hallway that smelled of cat pee. We served trout followed by apple tart. They looked down their noses.

Too much freedom

The disparity in our lifestyles didn’t stop Andrea from continuing to court me for my friendship. He would invite me out for couscous royale or fillet steak at his expense. He even proposed that I join him on a business trip to Italy. My dual role would be to share the driving and keep him company.

I was far from sure about accepting. That friendship never was quite mutual. I had had my doubts about him from the start. Why did he want to meet in public? What was this notion, exactly, about me being his partner? All I had done was to advertise English lessons in the local classifieds. Out of nowhere loomed this swarthy Sicilian who seemed less interested in learning English than in coercing me into a business scheme. His approach was at best misjudged. At worst, it was sinister. What was his agenda? I wasn’t just doubtful; I was also scared. He exuded a dark Mediterranean roughness like that of a Minotaur. With my half-a-degree in English literature, I had only the flimsiest defence. He was unambiguously a man, while at twenty-one I was essentially a boy. It was like the meeting of Innocence and Experience.

In the end, I agreed to go to Italy with Andrea for the feeble reason that I had nothing better to do. When Simone went off to work, I was left to potter around the apartment or mooch about the farmers’ market. Apart from a smattering of translation work, there were just my ‘little English lessons’, as Andrea would disparagingly call them – and not so many of those, frankly. So I was free.

Too free, perhaps, like I had been at Oxford, when I had only to show my face once a week. Because freedom implies the absence of responsibility, it’s a close cousin of rootlessness. Pure freedom is bad freedom, in other words. Good freedom comes about when we securely belong. Think of children playing in the garden while their parents make Sunday lunch. The children are all the more free because they are invisibly tethered to the kitchen. It’s the feeling of being safely held which, paradoxically, releases them to play.

In my case, there was barely a tether at all. My parents never tried to talk me out of leaving Oxford. After my departure for France, I heard not a peep from them until I dropped the bombshell of Simone’s pregnancy. Up to that point, they were content to keep paying out the rope that might have kept me connected, and I was content to keep pulling away. It was all slack. That gave me a strong sense of the arbitrariness of life, of how easy it is to turn onto new paths when there’s no firm set of expectations. It lay behind my later decision to make what was, to many people, the bizarre switch from academia to management consultancy. There was never enough glue sticking me to my own track, whatever that was, never any chance of getting stuck in a rut.fn3 The surface over which I moved was as smooth as marble. Freedom and arbitrariness went together. I could slide in any direction.

Red voice, green voice

That trip to Italy in the spring of 1987 began innocuously enough. Andrea and I would take turns at the wheel of his white Audi as we cruised along the Côte d’Azur, while he talked with gusto about sex. He described the positions he favoured for fucking his wife, pausing every now and then to enquire unsuccessfully as to my own proclivities. ‘Tu es bien,’ he remarked with sorrow.

Andrea’s concupiscence extended to food. He recommended consuming not just the flesh but also the eyes of grilled fish, and sucked the whitened discs from a sea bream. At another restaurant, he returned to his seat having already settled the bill for our five courses – antipasti, pasta, primi, secondi, dolce – so that he could enjoy a second dessert from the trolley, an oozing millefeuille which he had failed to spot the first time round. He also taught me his method for eating pizza: cut into triangles, roll a triangle up starting with the tip, stab with a fork, then eat from one end, like a wrap.

So far, so good. My doubts on agreeing to the road trip had climbed out of the front seat of my mind and into the back. But they were still in the car. I would describe these doubts as the ‘red voice’ in my head. If doubt is proactive uncertainty, that is what the red voice was. It said, ‘Danger! You are out of your depth!’ However, the red voice had competition in the form of a green voice. The green voice was saying, ‘It will be fine. Don’t be a wimp. It could be an adventure. You’ve never been to Italy before. What’s the worst that could happen?’

Whenever we strike a deal or make an agreement with somebody, we hear these competing red and green voices. The problem arises when we allow the red voice to become stifled. Nearly all difficulties in human affairs stem from poor contracting, that is, when expectations are not surfaced at the outset of whatever the joint effort might be. To take an everyday example that would later happen to me:

Two couples go out for dinner together for the first time. Couple A declare that they are not drinking alcohol that night, and order tap water. During the course of the evening Couple B consume two bottles of wine. The bill arrives and Couple B pay half the total amount. Couple A pay their half, but they resent doing so. Couple A thought that in announcing that they wouldn’t have wine, they had implicitly entered into a verbal contract with Couple B over the division of the bill. But in the social nervousness at the beginning of the meal, that contract wasn’t made explicit. The two couples do not go out for dinner again.

In other words, the red voice warns us that the contract has residual ambiguities in it, like undissolved stones that sink to the bottom of a liquid. To mix my metaphors, these stones become the eggs from which poor decisions hatch.

What made me turn the volume down on my red voice was that lack of meaningful work, and a corresponding need to fill it. The mental picture of life in Perpignan that I had painted before leaving Croydon did not feature me as a house husband. A sojourn in the aftershave-drenched company of Andrea’s machismo would help to chase away any perceived effeminacy on my part.

In other words, my self-esteem had dropped to a point at which I was more likely to agree to things that I might otherwise have rejected. That’s the real danger with low self-esteem: it can draw us into making bad decisions. That sense of my life’s arbitrariness, of my being able to slide in any direction, wasn’t just about autonomy. It indicated that my life wasn’t worth securing.

It was when Andrea and I reached Parma that the atmosphere soured. There had been an intimation of trouble when we crossed the border. Before waving us on, the Italian police had taken a long look at our Palermo licence plates. On our way to the Bologna shoe fair, Andrea and I had checked into a hotel for the night; we shared a room with two single beds. Barely a minute later, the bedroom door was busted open by the cops. They must have been following us all the way from Ventimiglia. It was my second raid in a month. The Armani-wearing carabinieri went through our suitcases. They frogmarched us down to the Audi where Andrea was forced to display his wares. There were just the shoes, as he had protested. That didn’t satisfy the police. They lifted the carpets, unscrewed the radio and removed the door panels, questioning Andrea all the while.

They had questions for me too. I was an English student dropout working without a visa in France on a business trip to Italy with a person of interest from Sicily. If those weren’t quite grounds for arrest, they were certainly cause for suspicion. My Italian wasn’t up to following him, but somehow Andrea managed to blarney his way out of it. The police grudgingly withdrew.

The next day, it all came out. Andrea didn’t fess up as such, but he did let me ask questions to which he would supply yes or no answers. Was he laundering money through shoe sales? He nodded. Was it for the Mob? Another nod. The Bologna shoe fair would enable him to close a number of deals, after which he was to report back to his bosses in Milan. Personally, he wanted out. His own brother had been shot down in a helicopter by his mafiosi friends, and Andrea had lost his stomach for it.

A part of Andrea’s befriending me, it seemed, was a genuine desire to live a more reputable life. Perhaps that is what he had associated with the Oxford brand. Where I was innocent enough to believe that all experience was good, he, the figure of experience, was hankering after some innocence. He would use this innocence like a cleaning product for wiping his slate: Innocence™. Like the good Catholic that he was, he had an overdeveloped faculty of guilt along with an exaggerated longing for atonement.

We stopped in Milan on the way back, as ordered. Andrea went for his meeting in an anonymous office block, leaving me in the car. Knowing what I by then knew, my wait was tense. What if one of them saw me? Andrea came back half an hour later with new instructions. He was to move his family back to Sicily. After the return drive to Perpignan, I never saw him again.

I arrived home to find Simone in a state. We had been burgled. They took everything, even jeans. My beloved cassette player was gone. In order to unlock the front door from the inside, the bastard had punched a hole through the glass panel next to it, cutting his hand. There was blood everywhere. We were now in 1987, at the high tide of the hysteria around HIV. Would we get infected?

The robbery had a further disquieting aspect. Our apartment was locked and on the first floor. Accessing it required the main door of the building to be breached, as well as that of the apartment itself. Simone herself had been away while I was with Andrea, visiting friends in Provence. We couldn’t help wondering whether our Moroccan neighbours were the culprits. Maybe we were being as racist as the immigration police, but who else would have known that we were both away? Apart from Andrea, that is.

The dream

I had arrived in Perpignan with Simone on New Year’s Eve, 1986. Simone had been back home for Christmas to visit her parents, and had scooped me up for the return leg. The coach journey from Victoria station took a gruelling twenty-four hours. We pulled into Perpignan’s central square just as the restaurants were closing and the floors being swept.

That first night, I had a dream in which I was the father of three daughters. There was little narrative, more a single tableau for me to behold: the three girls and me, as if I were being shown a photograph.

It was rare for me to dream, or at least to remember a dream. Maybe what provoked it was the combination of the travelling, the unfamiliar bed, the first night spent with Simone, and the apprehension induced by having taken this leap into the unknown of another country. More unusual, however, was the fact that the dream featured a family. Of all the fantasies regarding my future that I nurtured at the age of twenty-one, none included children. The very word ‘family’ freaked me out. It brought up visions of The Waltons and other cheesy Americana. The concept of the nuclear family rankled, as it diminished alternative ways of life. Family was so mammalian: whither had our human faculties disappeared in this guileless mimicry of the animal world? With a young man’s single-mindedness, I also thought that having a family would attenuate my heroic purpose in life. Not that I had one.

What was stoking all this aversion? That lack of tethering to my birth family, no doubt. It was as if, growing up, a centrifugal force had whirred in the house, like the drum in a washing machine, spinning my parents and sisters into different corners. Not to mention the central fact of my father’s decline. For me, belonging to a family meant living in a micro-culture that had failed to coalesce around anything much, save for that heart of darkness.

In short, dreaming about having a family should have made me anxious. In fact, it felt benign. By the time I dreamt the dream, on the first morning of 1987, Simone was pregnant.

C’est une fille

It was another three months before we knew. Since we were using birth control, it was a while before it crossed our minds, but eventually Simone went to the doctor. When she came home with the news, I sat on the bed and buried my face in my hands. Here is some of what I thought and felt:

A few weeks later, Simone went back to the doctor for a scan. This time I accompanied her. Given we were in France, where eating rare red meat was the norm, he warned us about toxoplasmosis, a blood disease carried by undercooked food, and the dangers it held for pregnant women. Simone and I later laughed at how typically French the whole thing was. Other than that, all was routine. The doctor performed the scan. To me, the fuzzy black and white image was as indecipherable as a galaxy. The foetus lay inches beneath the skin yet seemed as remote as an astronaut blurred by cosmic sleet. When we asked about the gender, the doctor suavely replied, ‘À mon avis, c’est une fille.’ ‘In my opinion, it’s a girl.’ Sweet Pea was frolicking like a seahorse in her amniotic bath.

Secret motives

The pregnancy came out of the blue. We hadn’t planned it, we were using contraception and, for the purposes of bringing up baby, our circumstances were far from ideal. Simone was on a fixed-term contract; I was on no contract at all. Neither of us had a home or a job in the UK to go back to. We’d been together a few short months, and were a long way from committing to each other as life partners. My desire to start a family was zero. To the extent that I had plans, they were as self-oriented as any twenty-one-year-old’s plans would be. What’s more, the model of fatherhood that I held in my mind was shaped by my own father, Colin. If that was what fatherhood looked like, then thanks but no thanks.

So there were more than a few enemies that the pregnancy needed to defeat. On paper, it shouldn’t have won. But despite all those forces lined up in opposition, maybe a part of me wanted what shouldn’t have happened to happen – to say nothing of Simone’s own unconscious motives. Was I surreptitiously on the lookout for a chance to become the father whom I wished I had had? It was more than not wanting to be his son. That agenda I was already enacting. On my eighteenth birthday I had declared that I would no longer address my father as ‘Daddy’ (so babyish!), but by his first name, ‘Colin’. It felt awkward but I was militant – in the way that a young boy is militant when he runs away from home with a knapsack and a bag of crisps.

Was I now going one step further, by wresting the role of father from Daddy? I did take the first opportunity available: conception occurred within hours of being dropped off from the coach. It was as if I had seen a way to reinstate the figure of thrusting fatherhood which, with Colin’s demise, had been swiped away. I was young and healthy, with all my life ahead. If he couldn’t do it, then I would. Rather than observing his position as if through binoculars, I would commandeer it. I would lift from Colin the burden of being a father himself, freeing him to slay his own demons and return to vigour.

Who knows. Beneath our stated intentions, the layers ladder down like strata on a cliff face. I would group these layers into four, as in the triangle below:

1 We all have a top layer of selfish interests. I was concerned that my own life should go well, without having a baby to worry about.

2 At the next layer down, I was heeding an unconscious call to repair the damage in my family system (hence the ‘systemic’ label). This I would do by pumping life back into the punctured figure of the father, substituting myself for Colin.

3 Beneath layer two sits that level of motivation which keeps us in line with our society’s expectations. Largely without thinking, we will adopt prevailing norms, seeking not to stand out. It takes effort to be different: fitting in is so much easier. Hence the dominance of that nuclear family. On our arrival in France, the government was just launching an initiative to drive up the birth rate. Billboards displayed pictures of cherubic babies, accompanied by cheeky captions inviting the population to go forth and multiply.

4 At the deepest level, our motivations are bestowed on us by the species as a whole. The species is fixated on its own survival. We need life to go on, even if not all of us will serve as its agents.

The further down the triangle we go, the less conscious our motivations become. That doesn’t mean they lose power. On the contrary, we find ourselves subject to increasingly puissant forces. By the time we touch the ground floor that marks the species level, we are unlikely to be aware of any ‘motivation’ at all. Few of us will have children for the sake of preserving the species. But the fact that our minds won’t register the needs of the species – except in an abstract way – doesn’t mean that our bodies aren’t teeming with those needs. That’s the life force at work. Whatever else we might be, we are vehicles of life and its indefatigable drive to keep driving. Some of us create children; none of us created life. Although we can suppress life through contraception, abortion, and even acts of killing, we are only holding back a force that is stronger than we are.

Up to a point, this force fits with what the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer refers to as ‘will’. For Schopenhauer, ‘will’ is a striving in all things – animal, plant and mineral – to continue being themselves. It has an invisible but surging energy. Schopenhauer doesn’t focus on the transferring of this presence from one generation to the next, yet the quality of ‘will’ that he describes seems close to what I mean by ‘life force’. It is that which compels all things to be what they are. It also stops them, for as long as they exist, from becoming nothing. Human beings are no less subject to this law than are the animal and plant kingdoms, and even the realm of the inanimate. If my guiding question for this book is ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’, then one answer is that human beings, like everything else, are saturated with will.

The future of the past

Each one of us represents a bet placed by the species in the interests of multiplying itself. Not all the bets will come off: that’s what makes them bets. And yet every one of us is living proof of a bet that did. We leave behind a cloud of countless lives that never came to be, like a trillion soap bubbles popping in the air. We, the few, got life. They, the many, did not. For as long as we are alive, we keep life itself alive. That is perhaps the deepest vocation that we can follow. Without our lives to bear it like a flame, human life itself would expire. Say we achieve little success personally; or fail to love our family as much as we could; or make a negligible contribution to society. Nevertheless we will have kept life alive, and that is not nothing.

As far as furthering the human race is concerned, the brute fact is that those of us without children represent an end-stop. But we can look down the telescope the other way. To be here implies having come from somewhere. The life force has flowed into everyone, regardless of whether it flows out into the next generation. We are ancestral creatures one and all. Typically, we will look back as far as our grandparents or great-grandparents; we will hold three or four generations in mind. Our ancestors are active in us from roughly a hundred years back. They animate our memories even if they no longer move in the world. They enjoy an afterlife during which their name, whenever it is recalled, will swivel like a weathervane in the minds of those who survive them. In this sense, our ancestors don’t finally die until the fourth or fifth generation after them has arrived.

That sounds like a stretch, although in ancestral terms it’s nary a dot on the timeline. Our ancestors extend back for hundreds if not thousands of generations. There isn’t one of us who is not descended from real people who lived in the eighteenth century, the eleventh, the fifth. We have hind-parents from the time of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, the Pharaohs, the builders of Stonehenge and before. Hind-parents are people who lived at the same time as those iconic figures, and who placed their children on a serpentine line that eventually found its way to us. Before they were people, they were apes; before they were apes, they were birds; before they were birds, they were fish; and so on, back to the flickering origin of life itself. Thanks to the DNA that was passed down, we hold that line in our bodies. We are the past from which we have come.

The majority that do have children are prolonging the being of their remotest ancestors. It works like an ancient yeast, this thing called ‘being’, a germ with the miraculous power of regeneration. Not that this wonder-culture is any vaccine against death. Even as our children keep a trace of us going, we die. Their arrival signals our departure, no matter how drawn out. Obviously, people without children are mortal too. It’s just that, with an extra generational layer beneath them, parents may find their mortality more clearly framed. The clock doesn’t tick any faster for parents than for non-parents, but perhaps it ticks louder.

In my case, there was a twist. Let us run with the hypothesis that, by becoming a father, I was replacing my own father. In doing so, I was also giving life to my own future replacement, in other words the baby. I made myself both vital and redundant at a stroke. Hardly the action of a genius. Really, all I needed to do was to love my father for who he was, rather than wishing he were someone else. Trying to change their parents is one of the most futile pastimes in which children can indulge. If only I had learned that lesson earlier. I might have spared myself those psychological contortions.

But had I done so, there might never have been any Anna, the daughter who began life in the womb as Sweet Pea. Not to mention my second daughter, Ruby, and my third daughter, Greta. They arrived in 1991 and 2006 respectively, as if fulfilling a prophecy.

The dream revealed nothing, however, about that fifteen-year gap, nor the fact that the daughters would have different mothers. In this respect, the dream was a riddle, not unlike the witches’ prophecy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.fn4 In Act One, the witches tell Macbeth that he will never be killed by a man ‘of woman born’. From this information, Macbeth quite reasonably infers that he is invulnerable to murder. In Act Five, Macbeth is stabbed by Macduff. It turns out that as a baby Macduff was delivered by Caesarian section. He was never ‘born’ in the technical sense. The prophecy was playing with Macbeth’s assumptions, just as my dream had tricked me into assuming that all three daughters would share the same mother.

The importance of doing nothing

Trying to stand in for my father spoke to an urge on my part that was immature. Or premature, rather. Because I couldn’t bear to spectate on his life, I was trying to hasten his death. Doing so would turn me prematurely into a father in my own right. As a precocious essay at adulthood, that fitted with acts of far lesser import, such as the calling of my parents by their first names, which was supposed to prove how grown-up I was. It fitted with starting to shave before I really needed to, as I had done at fifteen. It fitted with lying about my age to my first girlfriend, Emma. I told her I was doing my A levels like an eighteen-year-old, when at sixteen I was only doing my Os. In all cases, I was jumping the gun. Maybe it was a response to having an older sister, showing that I wasn’t lagging behind. Whatever the cause, the natural – and unhurried – process of maturation caused me stress. I was forever trying to catalyse it.

Knowing when to act is at least as important as knowing what to do. Ripeness is all. And sometimes the best course is to do nothing. Broadly speaking, that is the Taoist approach. It’s not about inertia, however. The advantage of minimising our own activity is that it maximises the effect of powers larger than we are. We get out of our own way. That allows us to be carried instead by a knowing tide. We recognise that there are wider forces ready to disport themselves, forces such as that species imperative. If being human means standing in the flow of life, then perhaps we should allow that flow to happen, and accept that life is stronger than any of us. Let us stop trying too hard.

Because we in the West live in a culture that believes in making rather than letting things happen, that approach might be unpalatable.fn5 We favour action, looking down on inaction with disdain. Yet it was exactly at the point where I was no longer calling the shots that I was rewarded with a daughter.

When I decided to drop out of Oxford, I believed I was taking my life into my own hands. I was exhibiting, even flaunting, my agency. As I’ve said, there was a powerful enough default option, in the form of carrying on with my degree. Interrupting that momentum took effort. But as the thunderbolt of Simone’s pregnancy proves, I could direct events only so much. My interruption was interrupted. The result, however, was a daughter whom I love. That raises the question of what other powers were at large, powers operating a level deeper even than the species. Might there be a fifth layer to our triangle, a wider base?

That I was prematurely made a father might have been chance. Except that ‘chance’ is such a non-answer. Given that Anna’s appearance in the world was so positive, was there a benign will that made it happen? In pop terms, was this ‘the universe’ doing me a favour? The practical benefit of Simone’s pregnancy was that it made me realise I should go back to Oxford and finish my degree. It forced me to sober up. If I was to be a father, I should give us as a family the best foundation. An Oxford degree, which luckily enough I was two-thirds of the way to completing, was exactly that. At the very least, I would be pulled out of the hole I had dug. Whether it was chance or the machinations of a spirit, some goodness was abroad, some benefit being dispensed like overnight dew.

Again, it’s hard to know. Powers such as chance or ‘the universe’ are inscrutable. That is partly what it means to be human. We never know for sure the balance of our own agency versus all the other forces operating upon us. The lesson that I draw from Simone falling pregnant is that sometimes it is better to take one’s own hands off the steering wheel. Trust that you’ll be delivered safely to the right destination, even though that destination might not be the one that you punched into the SatNav.

A pint of Guinness

Put another way, knowing can be the enemy of being. Although it is human to want to know, the fact that our knowledge has limits is what keeps us open to experiences we can’t fully understand. That is possibly the moral of the Garden of Eden. In warning Adam and Eve against eating from the tree, God is imparting general advice to us all: keep your knowledge in check, so that you can enjoy the benefit of forces beyond your ken, forces working for your good. Yes, that sounds paternalistic; but then we are talking about God.

The experience of Anna’s birth was one I will never fully know or understand, no matter how many the hindsight miles by which I overtake it. Too many thoughts, feelings and prior events had converged at that point for me to make sense of them. But that is exactly what allowed it to make such an impression. My reasoning couldn’t block out the experience. Some fragments: the grey light filtering in from the courtyard; Simone squeezing my hand to the point of crushing it; the crowning of the baby’s head as slick as an otter’s; the rapidity with which the body slithered out once the shoulders were through; the whole scrunched-up baby held aloft by the midwife, with the umbilicus attached, as though she were lifting an oversized telephone with its cable; the placing of this rubbery alien on Simone’s breast.

Later that day, my oldest friend from school, Charlie, came to visit. He was at the same stage as me, about to start his third year at university. He insisted that we wet the baby’s head. We went for a swift pint of Guinness at a nearby pub. It was there that he told me his girlfriend had fallen pregnant by accident, and that they were going to keep it.

Now the family is rejoined. In a

gold circlet they weep of old fears.

It is warm here, the sycamore

pales at last. His to keep. Amass.

J. H. Prynne

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