My Phantoms, by Gwendoline Riley
JOANNA KAVENNA My Phantoms
Larkin wrote that we all live in days – and that’s quite true.
Also true are the words of the great but almost forgotten poet Charlotte Mew: ‘I remember rooms that have had their part/in the steady slowing-down of the heart.’ We live in rooms as well as days, and these days we live also in strange little cyber-rooms.
Gwendoline Riley is an excellent writer who often writes about rooms and the daily agonies that occur within them.
Her first novel, Cold Water, won a 2002 Betty Trask award. It was about a bar and the poor drunks who go there to self-medicate. More recently, First Love was about how love ‘makes one little room an everywhere’ – but also how if your love affair is going badly, then this ‘everywhere’ is hell.
In Riley’s latest novel, My Phantoms, some of the most affecting scenes take place in a restaurant. The narrator, Bridget, describes a middle-class if grim childhood. Her father, Lee, is a merciless bully; her mother, Helen/hen, is a fragile narcissist. Eventually Bridget leaves home; her father dies. Hen moves to a flat she hates in Manchester. Bridget moves to London, to a flat she loves, with a boyfriend she loves as well.
Things are better, and Bridget tries to avoid her mother. However, once a year Hen comes to London for her birthday, and invites Bridget to join her for dinner.
And who can refuse their mother on her birthday, even if she is a fragile narcissist? So Bridget goes along each year, ‘full of apprehension or antagonism’.
The weather is always abysmal, in the manner of the pathetic fallacy but also in the manner of London in January.
Her mother insists on going to the same restaurant each year, the Troubadour. This is an ‘old haunt’ from her student days. This adds a further layer of emotional peril, as Hen tries to recapture her vanished youth. Bridget is ‘angry and guilty’ but she is also a dutiful daughter, so she spends the evenings urgently ‘shovelling in the bright friendliness; the treats. Things that had happened and things that had not.’
One year, Bridget persuades her mother to try a new restaurant, but this ends badly. They are served ‘two large, colourful haystacks of grated vegetables.’
Hen eats in miserable silence, occasionally ‘stopping to wipe her forehead’; Bridget counters with ‘really tremendous good humour and warmth’.
In general, she wonders, ‘What was my justification for this charade? That we were playing pretend together, maybe?’ Whatever she does, Hen is ‘very hurt’. They meet every year, and every year is just as terrible. Helen is mortal, ruined and penitent; a victim and a persecutor.
Bridget is desperate to escape the past but the past keeps coming to dinner, and refusing to eat grated vegetables. It’s all so sad and accurate.
Later, Hen becomes ill, and Bridget goes to look after her. She finds her mother ‘living in a student block in a student area, behind sooty railway arches, with throbbing music from the club over the way’. Bridget sleeps in the spare room, among ‘magazines, from the nineties, and … old black tights’. More rooms. The weather, once more, is abysmal: ‘Grey skies. Raindrops chasing down the window.’
Who’d have thought a novel about a mother and daughter eating dinner could be so richly absorbing? But these are often the best novels.
In our lives (especially recently) nothing happens over and over again, and the most significant events are often the most apparently generic: love and the deaths of those we love, and sitting at dinner smiling nicely even though we want to scream.
Why read novels that are about nothing when we have to endure this in our real lives anyway? Well, novels about parallel realities and space travel are great too, but they often end up being about love and death and excruciating dinners as well.
In answer to the valid question ‘Why bother?’, Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, ‘Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about … You are not alone.” ’
And what do we care about more than our families, our loving ambivalence and moments of precarious hope? For all these reasons, My Phantoms is completely devastating.