Heathrow Airport is one of the few places in England you can be sure of seeing a gun.  These guns are carried by policemen in short-sleeved shirts and black flak-jackets, alert for terrorists about to blow up Tie-Rack.  They are unlikely to confront me directly, but [...]]]>  Published in Prospect Magazine and New Writing 15

Heathrow Airport is one of the few places in England you can be sure of seeing a gun.  These guns are carried by policemen in short-sleeved shirts and black flak-jackets, alert for terrorists about to blow up Tie-Rack.  They are unlikely to confront me directly, but if they do I shall tell them the truth.  I shall state my business. I’m planning to stop at Heathrow Airport until I see someone I know. 

In the busiest airport in the world this shouldn’t take long, and I expect to be home before Ally leaves for work.  It is 6.43 a.m.  My gaze slides between so many faces that I instantly forget everyone I don’t recognise, except for a young girl, 11 or 12, looking Lebanese and wearing a wedding dress.  She has red cotton flowers dotting her black hair-band, a tight curve over her wild, swept-back hair.  She is someone I do not know.

Go to the busiest place and stay there.  I’m always telling Victor and Clemmy that we have to do what makes sense, and I’m now leaning expectantly against the barrier at Terminal 1 Arrivals.

Astonishingly, I wait for thirty-nine minutes and don’t see one person I know.  Not one, and no-one knows me.  I’m as anonymous as the drivers with their universal name-cards (some surnames I know), except the drivers are better dressed.  Since the kids, whatever I wear looks like pyjamas.  Coats, shirts, T-shirts, jeans, suits; like slept-in pyjamas. 

The first call comes at about seven fifteen.  Feeling detached and powerful, I let the phone vibrate jauntily in my pocket.  There’s a second call ten minutes later.  I check it’s Ally, as if expecting someone else, and then turn off the phone.

Most of the passengers arriving from Glasgow (BA1473 0700), Manchester (AA6614 0710)  and Aberdeen (BD671 0720) are men, including Celtic football fans in green-and-white hooped jerseys, and tartan hats with a fluorescent shock of hair at the back.  The orange hair is attached to the hat.  I would normally explain this to Victor, who is five, to see him marvel at the kind of serious stuff I know.  Also, he shouldn’t assume every Scot has orange hair.  Not all Scottish people are the same, just like not all Daddies are the same. 

Early morning arrivals can look like new-born babies, pinched, querulous.  Their first instinct is to look for someone they know, even when they’re not being met.  There is a man with a feather in his cap, and a man telephoning threats of violence.  There is a small boy with his mother, hyped up on sugar-drinks and true-life air travel, who shouts ‘Telephone!’ every time he hears a ring-tone.  He is very busy.  He is very noisy.

As I say to the children, think it through.  I’m standing at Terminal 1 Arrivals when I live less than 8 miles away.  Few of the people I know will be arriving at this time of the morning.  Of course not.  They’ll be leaving, and from one of the other terminals.

Terminal 1 is not a serious terminal.  It has mostly domestic flights, and therefore lacks emotional distinction.  Between Leeds/Bradford and London there isn’t the difference for long-distance passion.  Back from Newcastle, couples climb in the car and go where they’re going.

‘Good trip?’

‘Rainy.  You?’

‘Yup.’

Along the white and yellow walkways, air-conditioned, temperature-controlled, my eye catches on pale blue turbans, and fat people.  Without shading, in this bright permanent daylight, all fat faces look similar, and therefore like the fat people I know.  The features are diminished, hard to make out, scrunched up by unmeant flesh. I stare hard, because I wouldn’t want to miss anybody. 

At a corner table of Costa Coffee, at the entrance to Terminal 2, a posh lady in a dark skirt and sky-blue cardigan is wiping off a table with the heel of her leather glove.  I knew this would happen.  I finally see someone I know, and it’s not someone I want to see. 

It’s Ally’s mother. 

I stop dead, about 20 feet away, hoping she doesn’t notice me.  I should be at home in the house she helped us buy inside Heathrow’s 63 decibel noise contour.  In return for not being able to hear ourselves think, we get a discounted semi-detached and a small garden from which we can play name-that-airline.  Garuda, Iberia, JAL.  We put on a brave face.

The lady looks up sharply, and reaches for her bag.  She adjusts to focus on me, neutral at first, then frowning.  She is not Ally’s mother, though they do look alike.

I hurry on to Terminal 2 Departures, where men my age are leaving the country in confident cutting-edge trousers.  I check the screens and the first city I see is Zagreb, making me think of Serbia and therefore Iana, and that is not good.

08.10 OK653 PRAGUE GATE CLOSED

08.20 LH4791 HAMBURG BOARDING

08.30 AF2671 PARIS CDG GATE OPEN

And so on.  Here in Terminal 2 Departures I can expect to see, if not anyone I know now, some go-ahead contemporary from my college days.  Mine was a serious University, and if I hadn’t caught glandular fever I’d have left from this very gate for the 3rd year of my Modern Languages degree.  I had a job as a classroom assistant in Zaragoza, but it wasn’t to be. I stayed in bed in my childhood bedroom for two and half months, then went back to College where I met Ally, who was studying Zoology. 

            Five or six years ago, more like seven, eight in fact, we used to know a lot of people.  They won’t have changed much, as we haven’t.  An outer shell of success, perhaps, fluent in several languages and fashionably bored with travel.  Here in Heathrow Terminal 2 at 8.20 on a Tuesday morning, we can both be proud of turning out more or less as we’d hoped. 

            ‘Where to?’

            ‘Zagreb.’

‘Wonderful city, Zagreb.’

            We’ll compare jobs and children, look at our watches and promise to keep in touch.  Finally, as my like-minded friend turns towards passport control, I’ll touch his sleeve (or her sleeve, it could be a her, though I’m thinking it’s a him) I’ll touch the sleeve of his suit-jacket and ask whether I should sleep with Iana the Serbian teenager.  Whatever the answer, I’ll then go back to the car, be home in 20 minutes no-one the wiser, and Ally will still make it to the office by 10.  If she hurries.

            The only flaw in this plan is that I still haven’t seen anyone I know. 

            It turns out that the people I falsely think I recognise are very like acquaintances I rarely see.  The anxious, calculating face of Mrs Roberts, but with her it’s not so much the face I recognise as the large square glasses. There’s a jolt of indecision about a pony-tailed cousin, and then Mr Browning who marks out the soccer pitches though it can’t be him because he’s in hospital.  The team had a whip-round.  They call me Mum, and when I tackle more fiercely than strictly necessary, Psycho-Mum.

I linger at Terminal 2 Departures like someone saying goodbye, having said goodbye to someone I love.  This is where Iana would wave off her fat and physically unfit husband, if she loved him.  When they moved in, we spied on them from an upstairs window.  He was so much fatter and older than her that we made them a married man with his recent au pair.  Which is in fact exactly what they are.   

Perhaps I’m more likely to recognise women. I more often look twice, because women at airports are an ideal type.  They have no fear of leaving, or being left.  I look closely for a woman I might know among the Pontypridd Ladies Hockey Club, European Tour 2005.  This is both absurd and not impossible.

Hours pass by.  I’m tired out by thinking, and when I should be looking at faces I’m looking at legs.  The way her baggy cargo pants grab and release her buttocks, a recent arrival from Milan but also Iana, when singing to her walkman she swings along our street to the shops.

I turn on my phone and don’t open any of Ally’s text messages.  It rings immediately, and forgetting I’m powerful I answer. 

‘Where are you?’

‘Heathrow.’

‘Where?’

She isn’t shocked, or challenging me to say something more credible.  There’s a plane going over our house, and she can’t hear what I’m saying.  I wait for it to pass, and in the foreground of the background, Victor and Clemmy playing, or fighting.

‘I’m at the airport.’

‘You’re supposed to be here.’

Nag nag nag.

I disconnect and worry about the car in the Terminal 1 car-park at £2 for half-an-hour.  Now that I can hear myself think, I’m thinking that the short stay car-park is not a serious car-park, not if you want to hide a body in the boot.  Long Stay would be a better bet.  In Long Stay, you’d get a month before anyone took an interest.

Short-stay is rubbish for dead bodies, but better for sex.  At every hour of the day there are people having sex in the Short-Stay car-parks at Heathrow Airport.  With so many couples re-united, and true love as urgent as it is, it must be happening all the time.  Though not to me, even when I met Ally off the plane from Jakarta.  I was trying to fit the trolley between a concrete pillar and the side of the car when she confessed to sleeping with a guy called Tim.  Tim was not Indonesian.  He was from Aldershot.

I’ve never knowingly seen Tim, so Tim from five years ago isn’t one of the people I’m likely to bump into beneath the bright lights at Terminal 2 Departures.  Besides, he’d be at Terminal 3, a serious international traveller like Tim.  Terminal 2 is Europe only.  It is not a serious terminal. 

Inside Heathrow Airport I can’t hear the planes.  It is the only place in the Heathrow corridor where this is true, as if everyone has arrived or will leave soundlessly, like angels.  I hear myself thinking about all the people I know who have let me down by not leaving early on a Tuesday morning for glamorous European destinations.  My former colleagues from the insurance office must still be stuck at their desks, like I always said they would be, when I was stuck there too, wasting my time and unable to settle while Ally moved steadily onward, getting her PhD and her first research fellowship at Reading University, her first promotion.

Our more recent grown-up friends, who have serious jobs and who therefore I half expect to be seeing any moment now, tell me that home-making is a perfectly decent occupation for a man, courageous even, yes, manly to stay at home with the kids.  These friends of ours are primarily Ally’s friends.  I don’t seem to know anyone anymore, and away from the children and the overhead planes, hearing myself think, I hear the thoughts of a whinger.  This is not what I had been hoping to hear.

I start crying, not grimacing or sobbing, just big silent tears rolling down my cheeks.  I don’t want anyone I know to see me crying, because I’m not the kind of person who cracks up at Heathrow airport some nothing Tuesday morning.  I manage our house impeccably, like a business.  It’s a serious job.  I have spreadsheets to monitor the hoover-bag situation and colour-coded print-outs about the ethical consequences of nappies.  I am not myself this morning.  I don’t know who I am.

The phone rings.  I connect and push it to my ear. 

‘When can we expect you back?’

I won’t sob for her.  I’d rather not speak.

‘I have to be somewhere.  You know that.’

I press the button and put her back in my pocket.  We haven’t been getting on well, Ally and I, though usually we try to talk about it.  I say I sometimes feel tired and listless, and she says join the club.  We make appointments with the doctor and blame the flight-path, with heavy aviation fuel dropping down upon us in a constant invisible drizzle, blighting our little garden, poisoning what’s left of our brains.

So then.  If we’d been seen, it was jettisoned aviation fuel that made me sit next to Iana on Iana’s rented sofa and place my hand on her thigh, on the cotton of her khaki cargo pants, midway above the knee.

Deep breath.  After a brisk walk, I have found the one place in Heathrow where no-one I know will see me crying, or feeling sorry for myself.  Churches are traditionally useful for this kind of thing, and the church in the middle of Heathrow is called St George’s Chapel.  I sit in a chair at the back, my hands flat between my knees, rocking backwards and forwards.  This would be a good place to hide.  It would also be a good place to come if you believed in a God who was able to help. 

Mrs Roberts is about 60 years old and lives two doors along from us with her disabled husband.  She rents out her self-contained basement to Iana and Iana’s absent, negligent, fat, middle-aged lover.  One day, Iana went upstairs to tell Mrs Roberts that the washing-machine had stopped working, except her English wasn’t so good.  Mrs Roberts then called me because everyone knows I have nothing better to do. 

I left the kids with Mrs Roberts and went downstairs with Iana, just about making sense in a German she partly understood.  I proudly showed her how to use the trip-switches in the fuse-box.  She offered me a cup of tea.  She was young and lonely and I, I sometimes think I’m not where I’m supposed to be.  I went round more than once, always during the day while Ally was at work.  I pretended to help, and then we sat side-by-side listening to the planes, not daring to hear ourselves think.

Ach.  I stand up sharply and double-handed slap my own forehead.

Telephone.

‘Ally.’

‘Look, I’m not angry.’  She has to pause while a plane comes in.  ‘I  just have to know when you’ll be back.’

‘I can’t say.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s taking longer than I expected.’

‘I thought we’d agreed about everything.  You said you were happy to do it.’

‘I won’t be long.  Promise.’

I’d set myself a target.  I will get married and have children and live happily ever after.  I will be a sensitive human being who supports his successful wife.  I understand and can visualise this story, its beginning and middle, and this is the story I want other people to see me living, the man I want them to know.  Then one Tuesday morning I seem to have mislaid the ending. 

Could have been braver, I suddenly realise.  Could have aimed higher.  In fact, I should have gone straight to Terminal 3. 

I get moving, stumbling, almost running, because if you start something you have to finish it.  I say this to the kids.  It’s one of my lines, part of my play-acting as a Dad that gets us through the days until Mummy comes home.

Terminal 3 is a serious terminal.  In the same hall you get incoming from Washington and Jeddah mingling with frequent flyers on Iran Air.  My daytime television knowledge of Islam is enough to warn me I’m in the presence of desperate fanatics who count their own life cheap, and within a 10-mile radius of Slough, Heathrow Terminal 3 is where history is most likely to happen. 

I stand there, waiting. 

When she finished her PhD, but before starting her first job, Ally went travelling for three months in Indonesia, where she met Tim from Aldershot.  It was here at Terminal 3 that I saw her off, and met her when she flew back home in a sarong. Did not have sex with her, as I’d been hoping to do, in the back of the car in the Short Stay car-park.

At Terminal 3, single men who are not limousine drivers or terrorists in disguise are sex tourists.  In shorts and faded polo-shirts they’re on their way to Manila and Bangkok, where dark, humid bars heave with numbered girls.  If I was doing it, it would be different.  It wouldn’t be so bad.  I’d pick one girl and stick with her. If she was value for money, I would.

What am I thinking?  I would, but I don’t. I’m not a sex tourist, I haven’t even had sex in a Heathrow car-park.  There is not a body in the boot of my car.  I didn’t even make it to my gap-year job in Spain.  I have a wife and two children and live eight miles from Heathrow airport and I’m failing to see anyone I know.

I should wait at the entrance, or near the shops.  At the bus rank, or the exit from the Piccadilly Line.  So many choices, and by making the wrong one I end up stuck forever in this simple unflinching daylight.  There are people I know in the airport.  There must be.  We just haven’t been in the right place at the same time.

Staying where I am, I think that when I graduated, I imagined a few years of exotic travel before returning rich and famous and beyond reproach.  I applied to teach English in Tokyo.  Ally didn’t want me to go, so Dad drove me to the airport, but at the last minute, clutching my ticket, I found I couldn’t leave. I wanted Ally.  I’d cried and Dad hadn’t understood, and we’d got back in the car and driven home.

No-one seems to notice that I’m not right.  63 decibels 16 hours a day, the invisible pestilence of drifting fuel, can’t hear myself think. I have the motivation to blow this airport to kingdom come, and after five hours of wandering aimlessly, thinking, going nowhere, in this of all places I should have been arrested.  To make the arrest more serious, by a policeman with a big black gun.  And then when I’m cleared, everyone will know I’m innocent.

It gets harder to see individual faces.  The most I see now of Heathrow’s daylight people are obvious external markers.  A goatee, dark glasses, a rolling walk, a short skirt, a sombrero hat.  A purple shirt and tie set.  Flip-flops and cracked yellow toe-nails.  A waist-coat, a hair-piece.  I will be stuck here forever, living on coffee dregs and apple cores, and when I do eventually see someone I know, they don’t at first realise it’s me.  I see someone I recognise, her long nose casting a shadow over her lips.  As an unexpected stranger, making eye-contact, she is surprisingly attractive.

My wife Ally is pale-haired, pale-skinned, moon-faced, her hair tied back.  She is 7 months pregnant and she has a small child clutching each hand, tugging her arms straight like heavy luggage.  These two children are my children.  My wife has her head on one side.  She lets go of the kids and they run towards me, as if I’d recently arrived from a great distance.  Ally holds out her arms.  I recognise that gesture, her glistening eyes, her attempted grin which she bites off before it disintegrates.  She is livid, but with my children clutching my legs I have at last seen someone I know. 

I can therefore go home.

A moment of expectation [...]]]> Monday morning and another long journey to the site, the unspoken anger from last week just below the surface, John and Bob on opposite benches of a swaying and jolting pre-dawn tube train, hard-hats on the floor between their feet, when suddenly

- Bob.
- John.
- Fuck.
- What?

A moment of expectation though with traces, possibly, of the familiar resignation, an acceptance of other Mondays not so dissimilar: always different, always the same.

- Lunchbox.
- Again?
- Fucking lunchbox.
- You stupid, absent-minded pillock.

Seemingly mad at his own forgetfulness, furious teeth over the top of his stubbled lower lip, and only the one remorseless word (apparently) in John’s emptied and unreliable mind.

- Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
- Christ alive, John.  Public place and all that.  Less of the fuck, mate.
- Every fucking Monday.  Always the bloody same.
- You and your vanishing lunchbox.
- Amazing. Unfuckingbelievable.
- Sure. One of the last unsolved mysteries.

Like last Monday morning, at about the same time on the same train, just short of the long platform at Shoreditch. The confessed forgetting of John’s lunchbox, a miserable thing in any case, nothing special any other day from Tuesday to Friday, usually no more than a bag of unbranded crisps and a limp, plasticked pasty.  Pathetic.

Bob, on the other hand, Bob’s legendary Monday snap. A regular miracle, a very special bag of sandwiches famous on every London site from here to High Barnet.

- Bob, me old mate, me old mucker.
- What?
- Any spare sarnies by any chance?

On a Monday. What a strange coincidence. And yesterday, like every other Sunday, Bob’s weekly visit with the family to Chelmsford. Nice ride in the car, two pints in the Lamb and Flag with Dad, and then his Mum’s unmatchable Sunday roast.  Perfect.  And always the weekly improvement on perfect: her routine parting gift of leftover chicken sandwiches for the Monday. Chicken, more often than not.  Or sometimes pork and pickle. Occasionally, beef and mustard. 

- Earth to Bob.  Mum still on good form?
- Never better.
- A Mum among Mums, genius.  The bread, the meat, the butter, bit of pepper, spot of mayo.  Lovely.
- Not today, John.
- But Bob, last Monday . . .
- Not today.

Above the seats opposite, up above Bob’s bemused but hopeful face, his pleading detestable face, a saving selection of suddenly fascinating adverts, for Heatbusters and Windsor Castle and cheaper car insurance for single ladies over the age of 25.  My Mum, my sandwiches, my lunch.  Nothing more to it.

- Just this one last time, Bob.  God’s honour.
- No, John.  Not after last week, never again.
 

From now on, it depends. If this particular Monday is destined to be no ordinary Monday, which after all is the premise of most stories, Bob and John will have to act, and therefore change; events will move forward, things will happen. Many of those things are likely to be regrettable, and nothing will ever be the same again. Such is the tyranny of verbs.

Alternatively this story, like a thousand million unwritten stories lived day by day in most lives, can continue without verbs, stop before it starts, come to an end before any real harm is done.  If Bob and John are lucky.

- Please, Bob. Pal to pal.  One sandwich. One half of one sandwich.  Pretty please?
- Oh alright then.
- Thanks, Bob. Nice one.  Solid.
- But not next Monday, or the Monday after that!.
- Sure, Bob. No problem.  Mmm, beef and mustard, my favourite.  What a gent.

(The end, until next Monday.)

This is one of those stories about she and you. She is the mother-in-law. You are the man who duped her daughter, or the woman who ensnared her son. Or stole or deceived or sidetracked, or diminished or corrupted or hardened, depending on how stereotyped either you [...]]]>
from Granta 88 Winter 2005

This is one of those stories about she and you. She is the mother-in-law. You are the man who duped her daughter, or the woman who ensnared her son. Or stole or deceived or sidetracked, or diminished or corrupted or hardened, depending on how stereotyped either you or she find the relationship to be.

Two women appeared before King Solomon, dragging between them a reluctant young man. ‘This good-for-nothing promised to marry my daughter,’ said one.
‘No! He promised to marry my daughter,’ said the other.
‘Bring me an axe,’ the king said. ‘I shall chop the youngster into two pieces, and you shall each receive a half.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ said the first lady.
‘Oh, your highness,’ protested the second. ‘Don’t spill innocent blood. Let the other woman’s daughter marry him.’
The wise king had heard enough. ‘This man must marry the first lady’s daughter,’ he proclaimed.
‘But she was willing to have him hewn in two!’
‘Indeed,’ said wise King Solomon. ‘She is therefore the true mother-in-law.’

The she is a woman, and always more than a woman: a mother. In this case, the you is a son-in-law, but you can also be a woman, a daughter-in-law. It’s no easier either way, because the problem of the mother-in-law is universal, and universally thought to be funny.

Abu El Abed’s mother-in-law died. Abu Staeif went to offer his condolences and ask him how it had happened.
Abu El Abed: She was leaning on the balcony when she flipped over and—
Abu Staeif: She hit the ground and died?
Abu El Abed: No, she hit the electricity cable and—
Abu Staeif: She got electrocuted?
Abu El Abed: No, she got deflected to our neighbour’s swimming pool and—
Abu Staeif: She drowned?
Abu El Abed: No, she hit the diving board and bounced all the way back to the balcony intact—
Abu Staief (confused): How did your mother-in-law die then?
Abu El Abed: I grabbed my rifle and shot her.

Why was El Abed so determined to see her off? What made her so intolerable? For me, it was her intrusive anxiety. My mother-in-law had no doubt that anxiety was the correct response to life. Her timidity was therefore very assured, almost aggressive. She seldom liked the gist of the weather, or an undated yoghurt, or the Albanian look of a waiter (they spit in the soup, you know). She insisted on locked top-floor windows and boiled meat and toilets buffed with Windowlene.

Doctor: I’m sorry to say that your mother-in-law has had a heart attack.
You: That’s impossible!
Doctor: What do you mean that’s impossible?
You: She doesn’t have a heart!

Often fluttering with terror because the world in which her only daughter was making her way was full of haste and recklessness and danger. At first, this militant vulnerability could seem amusing, an ongoing joke. I used to tease her by arriving in T-shirt and shorts on my motorcycle, or preparing conspicuously for a swim in the local fast-flowing river. She’d plead with me not to risk my life, and I’d laugh and go anyway. Back safe and sound, I’d apologise. Then spend the rest of the day intercepting her unquestioning motherly love as it flooded across rooms at her child. Her only child. I’d attach to that certain love my own less conclusive emotions, and feel them nourished.

Even so, we never managed a lasting compromise. Taking her daughter on the bike became the most solemn secret of the engagement. The roads were lethal. People get killed. Of course, I nodded, I’d never dream of riding us over the Alps to Lake Como where the water is cold and blue.

‘You hear terrible stories.’

‘You do.’

‘Quite dreadful.’

She simply couldn’t help her anxiety on our behalf, while I preferred to believe that nothing could touch us because we were young and special. And I was doing the driving.

Later, and I can’t say exactly when (perhaps when I sold the bike), it stopped being funny.

Mother-in-law: If you don’t like me, why do you take me on holidays?
Son-in-law: So I don’t have to kiss you goodbye.

After several years of marriage, you go on holiday with your husband or wife’s parents. In this case, counting the children, that makes four against two. Or four against one, because my father-in-law remained a figure in shadow. In his favour, I hoped it was reassuring and even inspiriting nearly always to be in the right. To live for years and travel for miles with someone whose next idea or instinct was always more ridiculous than his own. Must make a man feel needed, I’d reasoned, and useful. So then, four against one, though my wife couldn’t be expected to take sides against her own mother (three against one), and the children loved their grandparents. Which made it one against one, single combat, in July 2003 on the Atlantic coast of France.

We were arriving from different directions by road, because she distrusted air travel. She also avoided motorways, for reasons of speed, and it once took us two days to drive safely from Paris to Strasbourg. She was a very attentive driver. Leaning forward over the wheel, she rarely even blinked.

Three friends were discussing the possibility of sudden death. Everyone dies someday, but if only we knew when, we could make a better job of preparing ourselves. The friends nodded in agreement, and considered what they’d do with two weeks left to live.
‘Go out and have as much sex as possible,’ said one, and the others murmured in agreement.
‘Give all my possessions to worthy causes,’ said another.
The last of the friends then spoke up. ‘For those two weeks, I’d stay on the Atlantic coast of France with my mother-in-law.’
The others were puzzled by this answer. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because,’ you say, ‘It would be the longest two weeks of my life.’

More than once, as we moved fast down the bright straight roads of northern France, I flirted with disaster by driving on the wrong side of the road. I was remembering childhood holidays with my own parents, strictly no in-laws, when these routes nationales were shaded by glorious avenues of plane trees, providing shade and a dappled vanishing point. Most of the trees are gone now, in the interests of safety. ‘Make an effort,’ the daughter of my mother-in-law said. ‘The two of you may even get on.’

We’d never physically fought, though I feel she sometimes wanted to hit me. Mostly, we avoided looking at each other, and failed to communicate directly for days on end, especially around Christmas. I’d occasionally flounced out of a room, apparently to stop myself doing something I’d regret. Of course we didn’t get on well. If we had, it wouldn’t have been funny.

Murphy’s mother-in-law was walking round the farm, when a mule attacked her and she died. Five hundred married men turned up at the funeral, and Father O’Toole said to Murphy, ‘I never realised your mother-in-law was so popular.’ Murphy said, ‘Father, they’re not here for the funeral. They’ve come to buy the mule.’

We were involved in a universal conflict. The earliest recorded mother-in-law jibe is Juvenal’s from the first century AD, showing that along with hair-dressing and a liking for fresh flowers, the tension between you and her is a feature of every culture at all times. It’s inevitable, biological. It’s human nature.

Abu El Abed and Murphy (and Aaron and Piotr and Li Po Chu) fantasise the early death of their mother-in-law to put an end to the otherwise endless contention over who’s right, what’s best, and, ultimately, the correct way to live. The universal complaint is that she thinks you’re not good enough for her child. If you have any self-knowledge, and you adore the person you married, you’ll know she’s right. This makes the situation worse. On this one vital point you can agree, but that doesn’t mean you need to be reminded. You therefore disagree about how to roast a chicken, the definition of smart-casual, and the itinerary for a visit to historic La Rochelle (which you didn’t want to make in the first place and, lest anyone forget, you’re actually paying for).

She and you squabble, fall out, and we were no different. Before long, disagreeing in itself became a habit: the date of the wedding, where to live, the children’s names. She didn’t like the covers of the books I read, or the boots I wore around the house. I didn’t like the way she ate with her mouth open, usually while speaking, as if there was never time for considerate chewing. She might choke before she’d get the words out, when what she had to say, invariably, was death and disaster. In reply, I could indulge my instinct that nothing I said or did would matter very much. I could therefore say what I thought. She would always be my mother-in-law and she would always visit. Later, I’d gripe in private to my wife, I’d whine and roll my eyes, but not too much, because that’s not a good idea in any relationship.

You’re trying to be adult, having babies, working hard, moving into the attempted universe of marriage. It’s important not to be childish, and instead to behave as if you know and are more than you once were. Back in the days when you were still a child, say, and visibly needed a mother. Then this woman arrives, she eats with her mouth open, is present, and she is all mother, even more so than a natural mother, your own mother. She is related to you entirely by her motherness, because how else would you have met? What other reason do you have for keeping in touch? You’ve shared no experiences, nor seen her in any other context save as the mother of the mother of your children. In a charmed future, she may one day become the mother of the mother of the mother of your grandchildren. My own mum can’t do that, however hard she tries, however many cakes she bakes.

‘I don’t dislike all mothers-in-law,’ you say. ‘I like yours much better than I like mine.’

You have loads of excuses, and some of them may even be reasonable. You love her daughter or her son, who is good and strong. They must be, because you love them. So how can the mother be so difficult? And if she is impossible (and tremulous too), maybe your wife or husband isn’t good and strong, except by some miracle which defies genetic inheritance. In the absence of miracles, you’re therefore living with an impostor who is in fact aggressively timid, and who will one day speak while eating.

Try another possibility: no-one is loveable all the time, especially not the person you married. You may not want this to be true, but bring her into it, bring in your mother-in-law, and it’s a safe way of deflecting the temporary dislike you feel for your wife, your husband. Transfer the annoying characteristics to your mother-in-law, and if this positive displacement works for you, then thank God she’s still there. This could be what mothers-in-law are for.

The village where we’d rented a house was supposed to be neutral territory, safe and slow, the only possible irritation the buzz of fourteen-year-olds on their mopeds lapping the church and the boulanger via the nearest route departmentale. In the corner of the village cafe the pendulum of a tall clock tocked slowly, perhaps too slowly, because we soon lapsed into familiar stand-offs and disputes, and a running breakfast-time bicker about whether to finish the old bread before starting on the fresh. We ate many meals without once looking each other in the eye, while my wife remained good and strong by a miracle that defied genetic inheritance.

There were some problems with the house: it faced onto a main road (without pavement), and it was just conceivably feasible to walk out of the door into traffic. There was a small garden in the back with an iron table-and-chair set, and a rusted metal spike protruding from the grass of the lawn. I spent an evening trying to dig it out. It wouldn’t budge. I spent the next morning covering it over, burying it beneath a mound of earth and sand.

The more obvious danger that summer was the sea, because our two children were young and submersible. The ocean, on the other hand, was ancient and merciless. ‘Don’t worry about the sea,’ my wife said, giving her Mum a hug. ‘Enjoy the beach.’

I bought a flimsy plastic dinghy, of the kind often swept out on the tide, because it scared the living daylights out of her. Then I took the kids for rides while she looked on, inches from the last wave-break in her billowing flower-pattern sundress. She was agitated, terrified, a non-swimmer poised to save us all, and she grimaced every time the inflatable buckled on an incoming wave. It felt too late to be angry. What once used to astound me—the fear, the ineffectiveness, the kind heart—suddenly looked like old age. I started feeling sorry for her, not only at the beach but in the supermarket at L’Aiguillon, where she hunted packets and jams like a predator, shoulders hunched, nerves trembling to the underrated menace of faulty trollies and over-priced dairy products.

The secret was to watch her when she didn’t know she was being watched. I’d distanced her from her only child, just by one step, but from the centre. No wonder we should tussle, bicker, fight. It was for love, jealous love.

On her last night at the house, we celebrated our defeat of life’s many dangers by cooking a special meal. We then stayed up late disagreeing about Muslims. She insisted we promise never to live in Paris, where Muslim Arabs would rob and mug us, or worse. Adhering to the principle of disagreement, keeping her up much later than was usual, I couldn’t help but goad and provoke her. What, all Muslims? All of them?

It was easy to forget that earlier in the day I’d been pushing the flimsy dinghy with the two kids in it, up to my chin in the Atlantic, deeper than I’d wanted to be. Standing in her sundress on the shore, she was waving or beckoning, pleading with us to come back in, come back safely, and I’d suddenly tired of this unwinnable squabble. I’d wanted to escape its predictability, and spying on her from behind the dinghy, I’d thought the trick – no, the achievement – would be to look at our parents like we look at our children.  With the same love, the same gratitude, and the same precious attention to detail.

At the table later that evening she was tired, flagging, but stubborn about Paris. It took so long and came out so garbled because she couldn’t care less about Muslims. She was saying, in her ardent but indirect way: Be careful. Be very careful. Not just here and now, but wherever you go and always. I love you.

The tendons in her neck stood out, and she was so anxious for us that she suffered agonies, all the time. Her complexion was green with worry, and her eyes darted constantly left and right. She loved us, she loved us so much, and I wished just once I’d shown some understanding. From now on, I vowed to myself, from now on. Let her live, exist as more than a mother-in-law. Let the poor woman surface and breathe.

Q.How do you stop your mother-in-law from drowning?
A. Take your foot off her head.

*

If not in her own bed, or peacefully in the conservatory of a cool green nursing home, then your moether-in-law might go something like this: in a burgundy Peugeot 305, on a straight stretch of French road, somewhere near the ugly provincial town of Niort. 

We went to bed late and on bad terms, and woke up irritable. At our last breakfast, she chewed yesterday’s bread, because it was there (and with her mouth open). I ate the fresh bread, because it was there (mouth closed, eyes averted). I can now see both sides of this argument.

We kissed goodbye, unlike in the joke. Then I stood in the doorway for a long time waving away her car, which proceeded slowly to the nearest junction, where it stopped. My father-in-law looked back and waved. My mother-in-law kept her eyes on the road. I went back indoors before they moved off again. 

The next morning we were on the same road, in shock, worn out, with everything happening slowly and the day taking forever.  About 70 kilometres inland, at the Mercure Hotel in Niort, we found her husband, my father-in-law, in grief on the terrace under trees.

I wanted to help, because the last thing you want to do is look in the mirror and see your own dishonesty. You therefore do the driving to the gendarmerie, the mairie, the pompes funebres. The policemen said there was little point visiting the crash-site, especially with two small children, and in the heat. They said the sequence of events was clear from the markings and scars on the road.

We went anyway, and stared inexpertly at the metallic gouges and black smudges of rubber. It was so hot in the middle of the empty straight road that the tarmac stuck to our shoes.

There was a bang, my father-in-law said, white-faced, not always making much sense. I was reading from the Michelin, he said, telling her about the church at Poitiers, so I had my head down and there was a bang and my first reaction was to shout out what have you done now?

She’d fallen asleep at the wheel, drifted across the road. The chances against it were phenomenal, like any punchline, but a lorry was at that moment coming in the other direction. She must have woken up before impact, an instant before the bonnet shuddered against the leading edge of the lorry’s wagon. The Peugeot careened back onto its own side of the road, skidding round on itself, sliding backwards, ending up sizzling and crackling on the smooth grass next to tree-stumps which had once edged an avenue.

The driver of the lorry was called M. Clochard. The first medic to reach the car was Dr Camus, who examined her as she slumped behind the wheel. Her fingers were no longer closing, even faintly, as a sign that she was hearing, that something was understood. Already at the roadside, while she was still in the car, the doctor admitted or announced it was hopeless.

When the news reached us the night before, my wife had fallen instantly to the floor, crouching on her knees, head clenched tightly between her elbows. She cried out for her mother, with so much love, and love lost, which is grief. There was the past, and all its detail, but also the love lost from the future, the years of mothering and grand-mothering unmothered, the hand-holding unheld. The loss, too, of a chance to repay some of that unpriced, unconditional mother’s love: hot meals during the last days in her own home, a room at the front of the house, daily care and life-saving interventions.

And through my wife, crying out, rocking in despair on the floor, I felt the opposite of the immense rolling mother’s love I had once intercepted. Grief can suck love away and out of the world, and it’s all you can do to try and haul it back.

We went to the recovery garage to look at the car. The mechanics in their oil-company overalls stopped whatever they were doing and stared. They knew who we were, and which of their wrecks my father-in-law had survived unscathed. It was a spectacular wreck, dropped in a corner of the yard with the driver’s side detached and dumped on the roof. My wife’s father put his head inside and picked up a navy-blue cardigan with gold buttons. It was heavy with blood. He dropped it back on the floor.

All that day I drove carefully, obsessively, like she’d always wanted. From the back seat, my son asked his mother how you spell dead. He wanted to know, quite insistently, what happens when you die. As if this was what mothers were for, to answer questions such as these.

M. Terrasson of the pompes funebres directed us to a six-room mortuary at the road end of a small industrial estate. Shamed by death, caught out by it before I could make amends, I stumbled into the familiar formulas, like obstacles.

Q. Why did you go to see your mother-in-law’s body?
A. To check that she was dead.

She was unlike herself, expressionless. The left side of her face had been rebuilt and heavily made-up with brown foundation. I’d never seen her with her head still, or her eyes closed. Nor with her mouth shut, top lip stretched tight over her teeth. This was not how she was. This was some kind of joke.

Q. Why didn’t you recognise your mother-in-law when she was laid out at the mortuary?
A. She had her mouth shut.

She was dressed and had her shoes on. The kids couldn’t understand that. If she’s resting in peace, why is she lying down and seemingly asleep but still wearing her shoes?

It took more than a week to organise and route and pay for the body to leave France, by which time letters of condolence were backing up on the mat. My father-in-law said that some of them left him cold. Others, unexpectedly, moved or consoled him. I read some of the cards, full of her beauty and warmth and serenity, and I asked my father-in-law which ones left him colder, the formulaic messages or the exaggerated ones.

‘None of them exaggerate,’ he said.

There was a funeral, in a beautiful cemetery overlooking a lake. A speech was made in German, Sie war eine gute Mensch. Her clothes, her coats, her shoes were picked up by a grey-haired lady from one of the Protestant charities. The clothes have since been distributed in Africa, so she lives on under cloudless skies, her cardigans and sundresses parading through the bustle of African markets.

She lives on in memory, and in the photos we keep of her around the house, and in certain physical mannerisms of the children, who are sometimes reckless. I watch anxiously from a distance, thinking that it’s vitally important to be careful. Be very careful. Not just here and now, but wherever you go and always. More than that. Recognise the outright need to value every moment of being of the people you love. It seems an unbearable duty, an oppressive charge, and I try to keep it from the children. I don’t want to make them anxious, as she was, knowing that however much you value each moment it’s not enough, never enough, when the shock comes, the astonishing end.

In Memory of Christiane Nagy (1940-2003)

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