My Father's Fortune by Michael Frayn

Author:Michael Frayn [Michael Frayn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571270606
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

And that’s the end of my mother. My sister and I aren’t allowed to go to the funeral, I suppose for fear that it would upset us. What do we do instead, while our father and the rest of the family are at the graveyard in Ewell that November day, and my sister and I are staying behind at home, not being upset? Are we on our own? Am I looking after my sister?

One thing we’re certainly not doing is talking about our mother. So far as I can recall, she’s never mentioned in our house again. Not by any of us. Not by my father or grandmother. Not by me or my sister. She has been airbrushed out of the historical record, like one of Stalin’s victims. She has become an unperson. And when I’m grown up, and have to explain to people about my past, I find it difficult to be exact about even the date of her death. Was it 1945, or was it 1946? I tell some people that I was thirteen, others that I was eleven. Now, as I write this, sixty-five years later, and try to recapture the past as fully as I can, I’m able to fix the date from the death certificate. But of what actually happened on that date the scattered recollections above are the only ones I have left. I spent so many years not thinking about it too closely, or not thinking about it at all. My sister couldn’t remember anything about it, even though she was already eight at the time. Her son says that she told him our mother had died while she was cycling to the shops. This is a confabulation with something that one of our neighbours said much later. She had seen our mother struggling back with the shopping on her bicycle during the war, and believed that this was part of the strain that had overtaxed her heart. In my sister’s memory, evidently, not even the most general outline of the events on that November night remained.

One of the reasons that my sister and I never mentioned her is that we lacked the words. We had no name for her. We couldn’t call her Vi, as all the grown-ups did when she was alive, because we never had. ‘Our mother’? We’d never called her that, either, not to each other, and to start now would have been ridiculously formal. No, worse than formal – impersonal. It would have placed someone with whom each of us had a unique relationship, and for whom each of us had a unique personal name, in a general class. I did try it once, nearly sixty years later, when my sister was very ill, and I thought that she might want to talk about some of the things that we had once shared so intensely, and that we had never spoken about since. But it sounded wrong, and she didn’t respond.

We had had a name for her when she was alive, of course.

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