I Am No Longer Myself Without You: How Men Love Women

Several days later the husband is going through his wife’s belongings. He is packing to move and trying to decide which possessions of hers to take and which to discard. He knows now that she will never come back and that he may never see her again. He is still bewildered. He knows there is something ‘far more’ to this affair than his wife’s simple departure:

You could say that my history has left me. Or that I’m having to go on without history. Or that history will now have to do without me – unless my wife writes more letters, or tells a friend who keeps a diary, say. Then years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record, its scraps and tirades, its silences and innuendoes. That’s when it dawns on me that autobiography is the poor man’s history. And that I am saying goodbye to history. Goodbye my darling.

The husband in Blackbird Pie is sedentary, appearing unmindful of his wife. His life is governed by fear and selfishness. He feels that he cannot be himself in his relationship with her. He wants her to remain just beyond him, neither to move away from him, nor to come too close: to sit with her knitting, a comforting presence he can control. Like Gabriel in The Dead, the husband in Carver’s story cannot tell his wife what he feels about himself and about her. Instead he tries to manage her. When she leaves he is lost for anything to say and his world begins to collapse. The hint of misanthropy which surrounds both men is echoed in Proust’s lament for Albertine in Remembrance of Things Past: ‘I knew now that I was in love with Albertine, but alas! I didn’t trouble to let her know it … the declaration of my passion to the one I loved no longer seemed to be one of the vital and necessary stages of love. And love itself seemed no longer an external reality, but only a subjective pleasure.’ Men’s love is a pursuit through others of all they feel they have lost and cannot speak of. It is why they speak of it as a bereavement. That is the nature of love – the desire to achieve a sense of completeness through unity with another. Only when men fall in love with women, they fall in love with that part of themselves that is missing. Men want love because we long to be offered a semblance of ourselves. In love a man is held captive not by a woman, but by his need to be loved by her. He longs for her, he needs her to embrace him and fill him with her love, but when she desires something for herself, or when she withdraws from him emotionally, she exposes the absence in himself. He feels numbed and lifeless, and only she can revive him. He cannot find the words to speak of the emptiness and fear her absence induces in him. He is no longer himself without her. Love tyrannizes him.

Men have colluded in a masquerade of silence around their emotional dependency on women, their loud self-assurance, nothing more than a brittle patina. In truth, men are unsure what to do about themselves and what to do about women. Or rather they are unsure what to do about their need of women. Men have celebrated being alone in order to imagine themselves free of women, free from their vulnerability. In the past we have taken pleasure in our ‘male only’ cultures: the army, public schools, trade unions, political parties, banking and commerce, working men’s clubs, gentlemen’s clubs and pubs. The history of the British and their class system is a history of sexual apartheid in which men and women existed in separate spheres. Society has sustained and been sustained by a language of opposites which privileges the masculine term over the feminine: active and passive, rational and emotional, hard and soft, culture and nature, the sun and the moon, the mind and the body. It is a language whose descriptive vocabulary has given men prominence: the history of mankind, fellow countrymen, forefathers, masterful, God the Father, yours fraternally, man, amen. A plethora of words, a confident, assured language in service to men’s authority which has been guaranteed by their monopoly of the public world of work and politics. In contrast their confused and tentative understanding of love and intimacy has been concealed in the privacy of the home. Today these old boundaries between the public and the private are breaking up and the culture of silence that has surrounded men’s feelings – once portrayed as a sign of sexual magnetism and authority – has lost its allure. In spite of our command over language, when it comes to speaking about love, words fail us.

II

Next-door to our bedsit was a room not much larger than a cupboard. For a while Michael lived there; his groans of anguish used to wake us in the night. His room was filthy and littered with old food and empty beer cans. His clothes smelt, and his eyes were half-hidden by a face swollen from drink. A self-educated, literary man in his late thirties, he would catch me on the stairs and subject me to intense monologues. He used to look at me fiercely, his breath stinking of alcohol, and tell me his stories in a bitter monotone. I could never get away once he started talking. He told me he had once been in love. He had lived with a woman in a semi-detached house somewhere in the suburbs, and had a good job. He had given it all up because he could not cope with love. He had left her. He scoffed when he told me this, and I didn’t know whether to believe him. He always ended his stories with the question ‘What do you want?’ For him this was the key to life, and he believed it would always elude him. ‘You see,’ he’d say, ‘that’s my problem. I don’t know.’

Michael disappeared that winter. The garden was covered with snow. No one went into it, even in the summer, but that morning there were footprints leading from the house to the garden fence. Not shoe prints but bare feet. Outside our door the hallway was full of police. The man in the cupboard was on the run and had jumped out of his open window, half naked and shoeless. They caught him making his escape down the road.

At the time I wondered where Michael had intended to go. He had spent years wandering from one sleazy bedsit to another and had few friends. Though his mother lived only a few miles away, I doubted he was heading in her direction. He had simply run for his life and I don’t think he gave a thought to where he was going. He was compelled to keep moving. That is what men do, he once told me. They pursue life. In both a metaphorical and a literal sense, men take to the road in search of their identities. They are uneasy about home, with its intimations of femininity and its constricting relationships. Generally young men do not daydream about a settled, domestic existence; instead they choose stories of travel, action and adventure. In their youth they leave behind their mothers and embark on voyages of discovery in search of themselves. The boy leaving home to seek his fortune is one of the oldest of all stories. He changes. He finds wisdom, kills his enemy, finds a wife, becomes rich and gains status and authority. When he returns, he has become a man.

When I was a boy, adventure stories mapped the geography of my desire: the sands tramped by the foreign legion, the seas sailed by plucky young English midshipmen, the veld of southern Africa, the islands, shipwrecks and pirates of England’s maritime history. I escaped and travelled to every distant corner of the globe without leaving the confines of my bedroom. I had no fear of being lost or abandoned. I lived periodically in deserts, and as a castaway on tropical islands, my desire transmogrified into heroic feats of survival. I had created a dream world entirely my own, full of angels and demons and mythical beings. In later years I was captivated by the frontier spirit of the Beat generation – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neil Cassidy, who headed across America demonstrating their rejection of the Cold War and 1950s white suburbia. The road was their metaphor for masculine freedom and self-expression, exemplified by Robert Frank’s photograph US 285, New Mexico, an infinite road heading off into a limitless future. Kerouac, with his compulsion to travel without stopping, was the personification of mobility: ‘somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed me.’ It never was. Kerouac ended his life in his mother’s house, where he died a drunk, defeated by the impossibility of his longing.

Kerouac wanted the simple things in life – marriage, possibly children. He was old fashioned at heart. He craved love but never knew how to ask for it. He believed he’d find it over the next hill, in the next town, on the next journey. In my own youth I could see none of this hopelessness because I was seduced by his poetry and the romanticism of his adventurous life. I dreamed of pursuing my life in the way that Kerouac had his. It never occurred to me that if I did so, I might end up running away from it. Kerouac pursued life because he felt he did not have it. The stories men write and tell each other – in literature, poetry, films, television programmes – provide us with the words and images of masculinity, giving us the means to define ourselves. Like the adventure stories of my boyhood, Kerouac’s narrative offered me an opportunity to escape from the confinement of my upbringing. If I now return to the imaginary islands and deserts and roads of my boyhood and youth, it is to excavate these stories and undo them from the inside. I want to unpick the seam of their narratives and discover Kerouac’s pearl – the silence I think I may find at their heart.

In recent years a new narrative of masculinity has emerged, which contradicts the conventional stories of ambition and worldly success. It is about men’s feelings. Demand has increased for popular psychology books which focus on men’s problems in communicating their feelings to others. Claude Steiner confesses in Emotional Literacy: ‘I would say that many of the things I did were insensitive and hurtful to the people in my life … Looking back I see myself as someone who had infatuations but no real attachments, who had little respect, regret or guilt when it came to the way I treated others.’ Some scientists are claiming that men’s difficulties in empathizing with others is caused by their genetic makeup. Explanations are reduced to a crude form of Darwinism: men have spent thousands of years hunting and fighting in wars and gain some advantage by lacking the qualities of empathy and concern. It is an argument which assumes masculinity is a fixed and unchanging identity. I don’t believe that our biology is our destiny. For me the distinctive problems men have in their relationships and in expressing their feelings are the consequences of our history and culture. There is no better illustration of this than Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It was one of the first books I was given as a child. The writing was difficult and reading it lacked pleasure – yet it is memorable because its narrative defined all the subsequent adventure stories I read in my boyhood. It is a story about the making of modern masculinity. It provides an explanation for men’s struggle with their feelings. It shows us what has made us into the men we are today.

Shipwrecked on a slaving expedition to Africa, Robinson Crusoe transforms the uninhabited island into his ‘little kingdom’. He orders time and space, builds his fortress home, domesticates animals, produces candles, clay pots and plates, and after three years cultivates his field of barley and rice and earthen vessels for baking bread. It is an idyll without the complicating presence of women. He suppresses his emotional response to events in favour of rational explanation. His scientific observations and careful dissection and classification of experience distance him from the compromising enigma of his feelings.

He decides to write a journal, but delays starting it. When he does begin, he chooses to describe events retrospectively. He explains that if he had begun his journal immediately on being shipwrecked, ‘I must have said thus: Sept. 30th. After I had escaped drowning … I ran about the shore, wringing my hands and beating my head and face, exclaiming at my misery, and crying out, I was undone, undone.’ With the trauma behind him, he can exert a greater control over his feelings and master his words. His command of his emotions is projected onto his command of the island’s resources. He is lord of the whole manor. There are no rivals, no competition, nobody to dispute his omnipotence. He is utterly alone, but he reflects on the benefits of his isolation. He has nothing to covet and nobody to lust after. Everything he enjoys he has made himself, for himself alone. It is a moment of personal triumph. But it also marks his downfall.

‘One day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand.’ After fifteen years his self-made world is shattered. He cannot conceive of the existence of someone other than himself. He is haunted. He begins to imagine – hope against hope – that the footprint is a ‘mere chimera of my own’. To no avail. Crusoe, the king of all that he knows, is almost driven mad by his terror of this unknowable print in the sand. He sleeps fitfully, dreams of the pleasures of murder and suffers lurid nightmares. The only significant emotion in the book is Crusoe’s dread of being swallowed up by the unknown. War must be declared, both on himself for mastery of his emotions and against this nameless other who threatens his existence; either he devours or he will be devoured.

After twenty-four years alone on his island and nine years under the threatening shadow of this footprint, Crusoe finally confronts the source of his dread and saves Friday from being killed in a sacrificial ritual. His solitude is over. But he is incapable of forming a relationship with Friday. He fashions Friday into a simulacrum of himself – not a threatening unknown nor an independent-minded individual, but a mimicry. He teaches him English – ‘I … taught him to say Master’. And like Crusoe’s parrot, Friday’s language is a copy of Crusoe’s own imperial identity – ‘Yes, master’ to Crusoe’s ‘No, Friday.’ After all the threat and the terror, there is nobody to fear. Robinson Crusoe inaugurates the story of the man who lives in the world as if it is uninhabited.

Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is arguably the first novel of modern England. Crusoe represents the exemplary man of an increasingly confident middle-class society whose principle of freedom lies in the unfettered pursuit of profit. In such a culture the ideal man is the man who is alone, unconstrained by his emotional need of women, or by concern for the lives of others. For Robinson Crusoe reason is the font of truth and freedom. Defoe turns Crusoe’s island into an allegorical setting where his hero must confront his irrational fears about his body, his feelings, his sexuality, women and ‘savages’. Crusoe imposes his rational order and language on the island and turns it into a solipsistic world in which other people are reduced to things, and relationships become instrumental. But he is left with the anxiety that the fear he has repressed lies beneath the surface of things, ready to erupt into life and consume him. To keep order, he must cultivate a manliness and master himself through strenuous activity.

The story of Robinson Crusoe became an ideal vehicle for the imperial spirit of late Victorian England. Its story of manly self-sufficiency and survival provided a model for countless boys’ adventure stories, eulogizing the exploits of Britain’s empire-builders. Their boy heroes treated the empire like a vast playground, glorying in violence, and championing the team spirit and chauvinism of the public schools. ‘The Englishman’s idea is that the world is ruled by character, by will,’ wrote the Hungarian anglophile Emil Reich in Success Among Nations in 1904. ‘From the very earliest childhood,’ he continued, ‘the English boy is subjected to methodical will-culture; he is soon trained to suppress to the uttermost all external signs of emotion.’ Out of this culture of asceticism emerged a form of imperial manliness which gained renown for its stiff upper lip, its masterly control over world affairs and its incomprehension of women and personal feeling. This is the manliness that we have inherited – a product not simply of our genetic makeup but of our history of empire, our relationships to women, and our functions within the newly emerging economic order of capitalism. This is the history of masculinity I inherited and it was a vital ingredient in shaping my language and identity. It determined the words I would use to describe who I was, and it gave form to the idiom of my life and relationships.

At the age of eight I was returning home from school one afternoon when, walking past the newsagents, I saw the Victor comic for boys slotted into a rack next to the door. On the cover was a wounded, bedraggled British Tommy, heroically struggling to fire his field gun at a group of advancing German Panzers. Around him were sprawled his dead companions. I recall being intensely attracted to this image and at that moment Victor became a part of my boyhood. The stories were pared down to the essentials of manly action. Characters like Captain Hurricane were cardboard cut-outs whose function was to carry the action and violence to its inevitable conclusion – a bloody pasting for ‘Jerry’. Exclamations, grunts and inexplicable noises indicated the brute appeal of the male body. Victor depicted a manliness besotted with self-sacrifice and athleticism. But the enduring images in action and adventure stories of the wounded male body, shot up, filled with arrows, starved, beaten and tortured, gives another, contradictory account of the troubled relationship men have with their bodies. The renowned understatement and personal reserve of the hero as he is faced with danger – chin up, don’t let the side down – cultivates an imperviousness to fear. His self-denial of his feelings transforms his wounds. He is a spectacle of righteous suffering, a martyr to his own pain. His emotional need is sublimated into his willingness to sacrifice his life for his country. Meaningless, catastrophic death is transformed into an eternal heroism, his short life into immortality. This celebration of death and suffering, the refusal to contemplate or be still, suggest that these stories of manliness involve a compulsion in men to elude their feelings and escape their own bodies.

Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1911 was one of the last great examples of this kind of English adventure. Pitched against the unendurable, Scott played the part of the imperial hero in the vast white solitude of ice. Eleven miles from One Ton camp Scott and his four companions were caught in a storm which lasted for four days. Knowing they were about to die he composed a series of final letters. In one, addressed to his friend, the playwright Sir James Barrie, he wrote: ‘we are in a desperate state, feet frozen, etc. No fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our cheery songs.’ In another letter, addressed to the British public, he apologized for his failure. ‘Had we lived,’ he wrote, ‘I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of Englishmen. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.’ This was how an Englishman should die, a willing accomplice to the rules of the game: his death should be free from the rictus and terror of personal annihilation, or the desperate pleading for a mother. And yet there is a frisson of anxiety. For Scott, the approach of death in the Antarctic brought with it a contemplation of his manliness. He wrote to his wife about his concern for his son: ‘Above all, he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know – had always an inclination to be idle.’ He ends his letter: ‘What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better has it been than lounging in too great a comfort at home.’ The loneliness of his frozen, emaciated death thousands of miles away from home confirmed him in his manhood. Yet the icy wastes of the Antarctic proved easier to confront than a deeper fear, closer to home – a life of domesticity with his wife and son. What the hero fears more than his enemy and the hostile terrain he must journey across are those close to him who want his love.

The stories of my boyhood transported me into an imaginary world of manly solitude. They taught me a language of self-possession which, I imagined, would galvanize me into independence. As a man I would step out into the world, alone, with nothing to fear or be mindful of. I had grown up in a middle-class society where emotions were coded in order that they could be denied, or taken back at a later date. The untempered expression of feelings – tantamount to making a scene – was not good manners. Neatly trimmed privet hedges and angled flower borders were like totems warding off the outside world and sanctifying the proper order within. Any emotional outburst – antagonism, conflict, despair – was to be contained behind closed doors. Nothing was to pass the obstinately patrolled border between feelings and words. They were kept apart, and in the silence which existed between people emotions remained nebulous, confined to the kitchens and the bedrooms of children. In my youth I turned away from my family. I had wanted my parents on their knees. I sought release from the grip of their own fear of the world. For their part they could make no reply to my intransigence. I wanted to put my family behind me and make my own way in life. My adventures would not take place in Africa, or the Antarctic. The boundaries I wanted to cross were not national or geographical but class and cultural. It was the mid 1970s and there was still a strong and vibrant counter culture. When I was nineteen, I spent the summer working on a small community newspaper in north Lambeth, London, before going to university. It was run by a group squatting in an old shop in Blackfriars, where local communities were hard pressed by property speculation and commercial redevelopment. I wanted to live what appeared to be a carefree existence. In the squat’s messy kitchen, which looked out onto a high brick wall, they would hold collective meetings at eleven o’clock in the morning, smoking and drinking tea. Involuntarily, I was always discomfited by the casual, nonchalant way in which they eased themselves into daily activity.

I began university in the autumn. The clear delineation of its red-brick buildings and the neat squares of campus life echoed the suburban geography of my childhood from which I had longed to escape. In the summer of my first year I left. I had met a women called C who lived on a large estate on the edge of the city. She, along with a group of other tenants, was building an adventure playground on a piece of waste ground. Local firms were cajoled into making donations and the post office persuaded to part with a dozen telegraph poles. The local industrial estate was scoured for old timber, and materials were salvaged from skips. A complex structure of wooden poles and beams grew from the ground, a matrix of walkways, swings and tunnels. Adults and children hammered and roped the warren, arguing about the course of its development and the merit of one design over another. I lived close by and began working there.

C had three children. The first time I walked through her back door I was taken aback by the poverty. In the small kitchen was a dirty stove, upon which stood a large chip pan. A vague smell of old chip fat and unwashed clothes lingered. Outside, the garden was a turmoil of broken toys, old bikes and junk. An apple tree stood in its centre, still alive, blossoming.

‘Want some apples?’ said her younger son to me.

‘There aren’t any,’ I replied.

‘Smart mush!’

In the dining room stood a couple of chairs and a solid table strewn with old copies of the local newspaper. An ash tray was pushed to the edge, brimming with cigarette butts and ash. It was perilously close to falling off. The wallpaper was peeling and torn; threadbare rugs partially covered the grey linoleum floor. When C came into the room I smiled and said hello and she said, ‘Ah! Hello.’

I had spoken to C once or twice before. She was in her late forties. Her hair was greying and messy. She had a snub nose and wore glasses. She dressed in whatever clothes came her way, which gave her an unconventional appearance. She was outspoken. I wasn’t sure what to make of her at first. She was old enough to be my mother, and in a way, as we became close friends, she became a mother in my new life, a mentor. We would spend hours in conversation. We went out together. People wondered, but there was nothing sexual between us. She was a link between my two lives, a transition out of my past, and she helped me to secure the emotional roots of my independence.

I moved away five years later and didn’t see C again until I had a phone call from her elder son, who told me she had cancer. It was 1990, and I hadn’t been back for ten years. I arranged to travel down two days later. The house was much as I remembered it, but the poverty had gone. There were carpets on all the floors, lamp shades and new curtains and the walls had been repainted. A new three-piece suite surrounded one of those gas fires with fake coal in the grate. C was sitting in an armchair with a blanket over her knees. Her face was drawn and she had lost a lot of weight. There was a faint bluish tinge around the edges of her lips and dark rings around her eyes. She looked very tired.

Her elder son had collected me from the station and then left us to go and shop. I sat on the sofa. C looked at me with some of the old familiarity. She seemed almost like a stranger to me. She told me about her children: her younger son was a labourer; her daughter was married; her elder son was thinking of leaving for London – there was no work in the area. Then she said to me, ‘The first time I saw you I knew why you had come here. You were so serious.’ I didn’t say anything. My seriousness had been frequently remarked on by my mother and I resented it. C told me,

My father was an accountant in Manchester. We were quite a well-off family. But I married beneath myself, as they say. My husband was a seaman. I fell for his charm and his sense of adventure. I longed to escape from home and who better than a sailor to do it with. We made plans to go to Canada. I got a passport. He was going to get me aboard his ship. We would sail into the sunset. I was only nineteen and very romantic, very naive. I thought I would never see my family again, but I didn’t care; it seemed worth it.

He got his papers and we travelled down here. It was our first port of call, he said, on the long voyage to a new life. He could sound romantic too. We married and a week later he embarked and left me here. I had to keep at least one part of the dream alive so I never went back home. I don’t think he ever had any intention of taking me to Canada. I became pregnant and we eventually got this house. A couple of years later he lost his job and began to drink. He became violent. I had three kids and I was at my wits’ end. I got an injunction and he left. I heard he was working the boats. I never saw him again.

I saw C one last time, when she was in hospital. She had been haemorrhaging and the doctors believed she had only days to live. She told me about her plans to find a small flat. She wanted to be on her own and lead her own life. I nodded my agreement. She repeated that she had always wanted a place of her own. Her elder son had contacted the council and thought they might have found somewhere for her. When I left I held her hand briefly, but she didn’t want to say goodbye, to acknowledge that we might not see each other again. On the train home I watched the countryside pass in a swirl of green. We entered a tunnel and the lights in the train flickered and cut out. For an instant it was dark and there was nothing to do except touch the cold, dark glass of the window. And then the daylight came, and then a hedgerow and, beyond it, fields. There is never a new beginning, only the muddle of the past and the never quite graspable present. C died a month later. She was found by her daughter. She had collapsed in the kitchen of her new flat, and died alone.

I understood what C had meant about my arrival at her home all those years ago. Like her I had wanted to disown my past. My seriousness had reflected an anxiety that my need for my family would threaten my autonomy. My face would become fixed in earnest concentration as I sought to banish the threatening feelings of dependency. In boyhood, being alone had been something to fear; in adulthood it became a virtue. I bolstered my defences with absolutes, intolerance of compromises and ambiguities. As I grew older I had imagined that at some time in my future, when my own desire was no longer compromised by my need for my mother and my family, I would become myself, and be completely present in my own mind and desire. The illusion of male adolescence is that we can become our idealized fathers, escape our mothers and our need. I now know this is impossible. To imagine that one has escaped from dependency on others is illusory. It is to become enclosed in a self-made emptiness. What was Kerouac’s pearl in the end but the terror of his own aloneness, which he could never alleviate because he dreaded his own need of women? His answer was to keep moving. At the end of the road there was nowhere for him to go but back to his childhood home, and no one to be with but his mother. All that journeying, and he ended up where he had begun.

This morning I was alone in my house and I decided to go out for a walk. As I stepped out of the front door the rain began and stopped me. I retreated inside my doorway. The rain became heavier, large drops darkening the dried pavement, gliding down the dusty windows. It began to drum on the ground, pummelling the fragile plants in the window boxes. The woman and her two children from across the road hurried in through their front door. The shopping she carried caught between the children and for a moment they were brought to a halt until she yanked the bags free. The door closed. A car passed. In this unexpected instant activity came to a standstill, and people were cocooned inside their own lives. A second car passed, but more slowly, its tyres swooshing in the water. The rain began to slant into the doorway. For a little while longer I stood watching it. Then I turned back into my house and closed the door. It was a moment in time when there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.

2 MOTHER (#ulink_900d9520-2d82-55e9-af62-15e41ed6cdf2)

The stretched-out hands are alight

in the darkness like an old town.

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

I

When I walked into the darkened room in the Tate Gallery in London, three video images were being projected across one wall. In the left-hand frame a woman is giving birth. She is crouching, leaning back into somebody’s arms, her muscles straining and contorting with each contraction. In the right-hand frame a video camera had recorded the face of an older woman. She is dying. She lies perfectly still and silent, her mouth dragged downward by a stroke, her cheek bones and her skull pressing through her papery skin, her breath a whisper. Birth and death. And between the two is the figure of a man floundering under water, and the sound of a muffled echoing.

Video artist Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych is a technological version of a medieval altarpiece. It runs for approximately fifteen minutes: the woman struggles to give birth, the man rises and sinks, turning aimlessly in the water, and the older woman lies quite still: the giving, the having and the losing. In life it is women who give and lose. Men want from them. They want the pulse of life first from their mothers, and later in adulthood from the women they love. The man, his features indistinguishable through the blur of the water and the flare of air bubbles which rise to the surface with each immersion, flails blindly between the two: between birth and death, between mother and lover. In the final minutes of the video the woman – Viola’s wife – gives birth. The baby emerges from between her legs, and into the arms of the midwife. In the same instant a flicker of life crosses the impassive face of the older woman – Viola’s mother – and she dies. Men use art to return to this moment, constantly attempting to understand their journey between these two states, between these two women.

The original story of men’s love – in his youth a man escapes from his mother; monogamy brings him back to her. She is always present in the mind’s eye of her son, yet she is also always lost. A man remembers the body of his mother; her feel, smell, touch. It gave him life, but its familiarity is also frightening. It reminds him of his childish dependency on her and impels him to try to escape his need of her. The paradox at the heart of men’s heterosexuality: desire and need, escape and no escape. Heterosexual love eventually leads back to a man’s childhood home, to the loss of his mother as the original object of his love.

The day following my mother’s death I went into her bedroom. There were pictures of her mother and father laid beneath a glass top on her bedside table. Cluttered across its surface was a portable radio, a bottle of hand cream, an alarm clock face down, the empty foil of two Disprin tablets and a couple of books. One lay open at the last page she had been reading. There were photographs of our family around the room: my sisters together; my brother; my sister and her new baby; me; me and my son. I switched on the radio to hear what station she had listened to. It was the local radio station and the tinny, slightly earnest sound of the news. Her clothes – jeans and a dark blue sweater – lay folded on the chair as she had left them. The thread that had held all these various objects together, the life which had given meaning to their side-by-sidedness, had gone. The slippers on the floor no longer had any connection to the book on the table. The family photographs, with their insinuations of unity, were broken apart into their different lives. Each item in her wardrobe had its own special memory: a wedding, a party for this dress, a holiday for that. The telephone filled the house with an incessant ringing. Each caller was no longer held to the next by a living presence, but only by a memory which belonged separately to each. Something was finished. She was dead and all that she had held together was now apart.

There was a bloodstain on the carpet, evidence of the paramedics’ attempt to revive her. I bent down to touch it. It was still damp from someone’s vain effort to wipe it away. Her bed had been stripped, the sheet bundled and the blanket folded. I lifted one of the sheets. It was stained with blood and urine. This sheet seemed to be emblematic of our relationship, its function as a source of childhood comfort subverted by these abject signs of her body. The dearest and the most difficult contained in one place. This is the paradox of my love for my mother: the longing for her to love me in the way I wanted her to, and the desire to be free of my dependency on her.

I kept the sheet my mother had died on for several years, in a plastic carrier bag at the back of one of my drawers. I imagined it, infused with the smell of her, spread out on the floor. As a child I had revolved around my mother’s body like a moon, held to her by my need. But I sensed she was always just beyond me, an absence I could find no words to fill. I could never name this void between us; nor could I leave her for long enough to live for myself. Now, after her death, maybe I could put to one side the distance I had established in adulthood, and circle this empty and crestfallen place, and discover the connection between us.

I was unsure what to do with the sheet. I could destroy it. I could burn it or throw it in the dustbin or consign it to a skip (there were always skips around where I lived). In doing so I could release myself from the entrapment of my childhood. I wanted both to keep it and to be rid of it. And so it remained in its plastic bag in my drawer, until one day I stopped my circumambulations and stepped, so to speak, in the middle of the sheet and, remaining there, I finally decided to take it out and burn it. I cleared a space in the back yard and draped it across a large stick. I had no matches, so I lit a piece of screwed-up newspaper from the gas stove and placed it beneath the sheet. The synthetic material mixed with the cotton erupted. The yard is very small and for a moment the heat in the confined space was intense. I was reminded of a Guy Fawkes night when my son was small. I had lit a number of cheap Roman candles and fountains. I had imagined they would be innocuous, but their magnesium brightness and roaring smoke overwhelmed the narrow space between the wall and the side of the house, and I brought them to a premature end with a bucket of water. The flames of my mother’s sheet roared. I watched it burn, and felt on my face the fierce energy of the fire. Oily plastic residue dripped onto the concrete.

When I was a child, separation from my mother brought on pangs of inexplicable fear for her safety. I recall one autumn evening when I was ten, looking out of a window at my boarding school, watching the rain fall. I had heard a flood warning on the news and now, as I pressed my face against the glass and watched the headlights of the cars glisten through the rain on the main road beyond the school’s walls, I imagined my mother drowning, swept away in a flood tide, her hair spread out and floating like seaweed on the surface of the water. In earlier years, as I lay in bed in the evening, I would call for her to say ‘good night’ to me. She would arrive in my room, sit on my bedside and kiss me and I would ask her to open my cupboard to make sure there was no demons hiding inside. As soon as she had thrown open the doors to reveal nothing more sinister than my father’s old suits and dinner jacket and a few toys, and she had pronounced the words ‘goodnight’, I was comforted. I took an image of her with me to sleep.

When I grew past this childish phase, I lost the reassurance of her presence, and the image of her would sometimes fade as I hovered over sleep and felt myself slipping into another world. At this moment on the cusp of sleep, when sleepers let go of their waking self, I experienced a terror that I would never find myself again. As I sank into sleep I would encounter an emptiness, its nameless, globular form rising up in concentric waves to smother my breathing. I felt myself suffocating and would spring into wakefulness, gasping for air, my eyes snapping open in the dark and my heart thudding. I tried to put off this moment and would stay awake, filling my mind with pleasurable thoughts, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. I would try and slip past its sentinels, and sleep without warning, unknown to myself. I never said any of this to my mother. I don’t know why.

At the end of each holiday, before I was due to return to boarding school, she would take me on an outing. The two of us would go out for the day to watch a film, or to eat at a restaurant. One end of summer I had a project on wild flowers to complete. We walked through the woods at the back of our house to a field. We called it the wild flower field. It lay through a railway bridge where, as children, we would yell beneath the Victorian arch and wait for the sound to rebound. It smelt dank and was always muddy. And out on the other side was the wild flower field, a long strip of meadow, bordered by the railway below and woodland above. That summer afternoon my mother and I sat in the field making a perfunctory search for wild flowers. I think we both felt the imminence of my departure for school. My fingers scrabbled through the coarse grass, coming upon a cowslip, or the flower of a wild strawberry, which I picked and placed between sheets of blotting paper, and I would glance across at my mother, on her knees searching, and she would look at me and smile, and in that moment there would be nothing between us but my own sense of emptiness.

We repeated this tableau vivant: an evening performance of the film Tobruk. We sat together, hearing guns blasting, heroic figures shouting, and then the lull of the desert after the battle. And in this momentary quiet and dark of the cinema I felt numbed. And my mother? She would have loathed the film. A day out to see Steve McQueen in Grand Prix. We sat on a seat in a small square, somewhere in central London, my mother voicing her exasperation, the meal ruined by my feeling unwell, the anticipation of the film squandered. Such brief moments laid our relationship bare: the time and the energy which went into maintaining propriety, and the evasions of a nameless dread which neither of us could cope with. And as everything began to unravel, I would abandon myself in compliance with her need to shore up my unhappiness behind the frontispiece of normality. I became my own worst enemy. I remember that film. I lost myself in the speed and excitement. But nothing we did together ever changed the silent fatalism that bound us together.