Two were barking
Cressida Connolly
THE THREE OF US by Julia Blackburn Cape, £16.99, pp. 313, ISBN 9780224080606 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Julia Blackburn has written about Goya, about the island of St Helena, about the naturalist Charles Waterton, about a talking pig; and she has turned her attention to other strange and various things besides, but she has never written a dull sentence. It is clear from the first few lines of this book that The Three of Us is going to be fascinating. Dark, too. This is a family memoir, from Blackburn’s early childhood with both her parents, progressing through their divorce to a series of ever more difficult triangles featuring herself, her mother and a series of male lodgers.
There was nothing conventional about Blackburn’s parents. Her father, the poet Thomas Blackburn, was: ‘an alcoholic who for many years was addicted to a powerful barbiturate. . . the cumulative effect of the drug combined with the alcohol made him increasingly violent and so mad he began to growl and bark like a dog’. Blackburn is very matter-of-fact about her father: ‘He was disastrous in many ways, yet I never felt threatened by him.’ He evidently loved his daughter, in a distracted sort of way: they got on. Not so with her mother, a painter called Rosalie de Meric who sounds like one of those cruel yet pleading characters played so well by Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. ‘I was always afraid of her’, writes her daughter. Rosalie was a nightmare. Self-centred to the point of lunacy, she nevertheless lacked any insight. Sex-crazed, self-deluding, desperate, she seems to have lacked not only any maternal feeling, but also any trace of kindness, empathy or compassion.
Some readers may feel that Blackburn is unduly harsh on Rosalie (is it necessary to tell us, for instance, that she farted in the bath?). The account certainly denies her any dignity, save that of dying bravely. Blackburn’s exploration of Rosalie’s own childhood — as an unloved, unwanted younger sister — sheds some light on her subsequent character, but it is almost impossible to feel any sympathy for such a woman.
Both Blackburn’s parents underwent lengthy psychoanalysis, as well as sending their only child to a shrink when she developed the habit of screaming at the top of her lungs. In a household where she effectively had no voice, it is hardly surprising that she took to shrieking. The amateur psychologist will conjecture that being nice to her, putting her first, listening, would have been a better course. Blackburn’s early childhood, witnessing her parents’ bloodcurdling physical fights, interposing herself as a human shield between them, is ghastly. Things get even worse once her father leaves and she enters her teens.
Rosalie shows her daughter old photographs of herself, naked: ‘Oh look, here’s Mummy with nothing on! That was taken by a boyfriend before I met your father. We did it on the floor, just after he made the picture!’. On holidays, she arranges for her daughter to stay in a separate pension, so that the presence of a teenager will not put off potential lovers. She offers to teach her daughter to masturbate. After making love, she informs her daughter: ‘ “It’s the first time in five months!” she said tearfully. “You must be pleased for me!” ’ Blackburn responds in her diary: ‘Why does Mummy have to tell me how many times she had made love to Geoffrey? Why does she have to say I want the same?’.
Rosalie’s obsessive fear that her daughter will usurp her becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Blackburn begins an affair with her mother’s former lover. Lives are ruined. ‘The battle we fought reached a crisis in 1966 when I was 18, and that crisis never really passed, the scent of rage and adrenaline hanging in the air as sharp as gunpowder.’ The young Blackburn seems to act like someone sleepwalking, without agency or will. The story has the terrible inevitability of a Greek myth or fairytale.
Mercifully, there is a happy ending, at least for the author. In the month before Rosalie’s death (at 82, from leukaemia), mother and daughter are reconciled. One of the single male lodgers who lived in the house during the Sixties reappears, with startling and joyful consequences. It is a relief to learn that the misery of earlier times has not entirely blighted Blackburn’s life: she has a son and a daughter, a house near the sea. Her intelligence and curiosity have saved her.
‘Now you will be able to write about me, won’t you!’, says Rosalie, on her deathbed. Yes I will, replies her daughter. I felt she was giving me her blessing, making it possible for me to tell a story that otherwise I could never have told. Later on, she telephones the hospital to ask after Rosalie and learns that ‘her breathing had changed and it wouldn’t be long now’. She does not rush to her mother’s side. Instead, she makes herself a hot-water bottle and a cup of tea and goes back to bed. No one who reads this painful and altogether remarkable book will blame her.
Previous page
