My mother is the sculptor Celia Barry. She makes birds, the menacing, oversized variety, out of repurposed materials. Rake heads, appliance motors, things from the house. Once, at one of her shows, Patrick said, ‘I honestly think your mother has never met extant physical matter she couldn’t repurpose.’ He was not being unkind. Very little in my parents’ home functions according to its original remit.
Growing up, whenever my sister and I overheard her say to someone ‘I am a sculptor’， Ingrid would mouth the line from that Elton John song. I would start laughing and she would keep going with her eyes closed and her fists pressed against her chest until I had to leave the room. It has never stopped being funny.
According to The Times my mother is minorly important. Patrick and I were at the house helping my father rearrange his study the day the notice appeared. She read it aloud to the three of us, laughing unhappily at the minorly bit. Afterwards, my father said he’d take any degree of importance at this stage. ‘And they’ve given you a definite article. The sculptor Celia Barry. Spare a thought for we the indefinites.’ Later, he cut it out and taped it to the fridge. My father’s role in their marriage is relentless self-abnegation.
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Sometimes Ingrid gets one of her children to ring and talk to me on the phone because, she says, she wants them to have a very close relationship with me, and also it gets them off her balls for literally five seconds. Once, her eldest son called and told me there was a fat lady at the post office and his favourite cheese is the one that comes in the bag and is sort of whitish. Ingrid texted me later and said, ‘He means cheddar.’
I do not know when he will stop calling me Marfa. I hope, never.
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Our parents still live in the house we grew up in, on Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush. They bought it the year I turned ten with a deposit lent to them by my mother’s sister Winsome who married money instead of a male Sylvia Plath. As children, they lived in a flat above a key-cutting shop in, my mother tells people, ‘a depressed seaside town, with a depressed seaside mother’。 Winsome is older by seven years. When their mother died suddenly of an indeterminate kind of cancer and their father lost interest in things, in particular them, Winsome withdrew from the Royal College of Music to come back and look after my mother, who was thirteen then. She has never had a career. My mother is minorly important.
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It was Winsome who found the Goldhawk Road house and arranged for my parents to pay much less for it than it was worth, because it was a deceased estate and, my mother said, based on the whiff, the body was still somewhere under the carpet.
On the day we moved in, Winsome came over to help clean the kitchen. I went in to get something and saw my mother sitting at the table drinking a glass of wine and my aunt, in a tabard and rubber gloves, standing on the top rung of a stepladder wiping out the cupboards.
They stopped talking, then started again when I left the room. I stood outside the door and heard Winsome telling my mother that perhaps she ought to try and muster up a suggestion of gratitude since home ownership was generally beyond the reach of a sculptor and a poet who doesn’t produce any poetry. My mother did not speak to her for eight months.
Then, and now, she hates the house because it is narrow and dark; because the only bathroom opens off the kitchen via a slatted door, which requires Radio Four to be on at high volume whenever anyone is in there. She hates it because there is only one room on each floor and the staircase is very steep. She says she spends her life on those stairs and that one day she’ll die on them.
She hates it because Winsome lives in a townhouse in Belgravia. Enormous, on a Georgian square and, my aunt tells people, the better side of it because it keeps the light into the afternoon and has a nicer aspect onto the private garden. The house was a wedding present from my uncle Rowland’s parents, renovated for a year prior to their moving in and regularly ever since, at a cost my mother claims to find immoral.
Although Rowland is intensely frugal, it is only as a hobbyist – he has never needed to work – and only in the minutiae. He bonds the remaining sliver of soap to the new bar but Winsome is allowed to spend a quarter of a million pounds on Carrara marble in a single renovation and buy pieces of furniture that are described, in auction catalogues, as ‘significant’。
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In choosing a house for us solely on the basis of its bones – my mother said, not the ones we were guaranteed to find if we lifted the carpet – Winsome’s expectation was that we would improve it over time. But my mother’s interest in interiors never extended beyond complaining about them as they were. We had come from a rented flat in a suburb much further out and did not have enough furniture for rooms above the first floor. She made no effort to acquire any and they remained empty for a long time until my father borrowed a van and returned with flat-pack bookshelves, a small sofa with brown corduroy covers and a birch table that he knew my mother would not like but, he said, they were only a stopgap until he got the anthology out and the royalties started crashing in. Most of it is still in the house, including the table, which she calls our only genuine antique. It has been moved from room to room, serving various functions, and is presently my father’s desk. ‘But no doubt,’ my mother says, ‘when I’m on my deathbed, I’ll open my eyes for the last time and realise it is my deathbed.’