Читать книгу What it Means to be Human - Robert Rowland Smith - Страница 27

That summer of 1986, when Simone and I met, turned into autumn. She left to take up her teaching position in Perpignan. I, having checked out of Oxford at the end of my second year, stayed behind in Croydon, in the box room at my parents’ house. What was I thinking? I was horrified, revulsed and scared by my father’s condition. I had lingered in Oxford during the previous vacation specifically to avoid it. Yet here I was, moving back home. As against the default option, the path of least resistance, which was to complete my final year and claim my degree, I was actively putting the momentum of my life into reverse.

Part of the reason was the fear of sinking further into debt. That fear came with the shame I felt at the prospect of confessing to my financial woes. At home I could live for free, earn some money and covertly get back into the black. And yet the debt really wasn’t so large, maybe a grand. Besides, I had a place at Oxford. Imagining a better station in life was difficult. Yet here I was, throwing it away. What was pushing me towards this act of self-sabotage?

I think I felt guilty about driving ahead with my own life when my father had so conspicuously broken down. It would have been like ignoring the fire on the side of the motorway. The point being that it’s not how much success you want, it’s how much your conscience can tolerate. I didn’t formulate it in such terms at the time because I was still saturated with my disappointment in him. All too often that disappointment would come out as hostility. The first time I ever directed the F-word at him was during this period. I remember trembling afterwards, with a mixture of triumph and horror at my crime.

But outer hostility had an inner kernel of love. Or at least a filial concern to tie my fortunes to his, for better or for worse. Even if I longed for him to be different, I was his son, and he my only father. My sabotaging my own prospects was a simple case of a boy wanting to emulate his dad. What made the case unusual was that what was being emulated was catastrophe. When I saw that his car had crashed, I crashed my own.

None of this was conscious. Often, what motivates us at a given point in time is a mystery that becomes clear only with hindsight. I could conceivably come up with a yet truer interpretation of that summer of ’86 another thirty years hence, if I’m still around. Big events in life are like dreams in this respect. They spill their secrets slowly, and only after we have forgotten about them for a spell do their meanings achieve transparency. It’s not in thinking things through but in leaving them be that the pattern can form which we later discern. Thinking can be a block to understanding. For where thinking wants to make meaning, understanding is about receiving it.

And so, with the quotient of hindsight available to me today, I’d argue that, in a way that was obscure to me then, I was seeking to match my fate to my father’s. Needless to say, the tragedy points that I scored by dropping out of uni were far lower than those accrued by him. He was suffering from MS, had been ejected from the family business and, still in his forties, had been put out to pasture. Any ‘matching’ on my part fell far short. In their naïvety, my actions were probably closer to comedy than to tragedy. Nevertheless, I believe the unconscious intention to imitate his story was real.

The conundrum is why I bore that intention at all. What good would it do? The best answer I can give is that I was curbing my own success so as to make Colin’s having been deprived of it seem less egregious. Part of me couldn’t bear to succeed in case it exposed how far he had been left behind. I suspect such hidden motives might explain many cases where people fail to realise their potential. A secret loyalty is holding them back. I, at least, was nipping in the bud my own prospects for success. It was an intervention designed to exact some parity for Colin, after he had been so outplayed by life and was so many goals down. By breaking my own, I was showing him that a broken life like his was normal. I could thus spare him any sense that he had been singled out for misfortune. I could comfort him that he wasn’t alone, and serve as his partner in failure.

Insofar as that intervention involved a sacrifice on my part, however, it was pointless. Maybe copying his downfall helped to absorb the shock it had caused me. Trauma is trauma by virtue of the fact that we repeat it, rather than get over it. But my thriving less could never make him thrive more. Two wrongs don’t make a right. If anything, my dropping out would have added to his woes. Indeed, when I first announced that I wasn’t going back to sit my finals, he reacted with pure consternation. So pleased was he to have a son at Oxford that he would tell anyone who’d listen. Our local newsagent once reported to me that my father had been in again, buying his paper and talking about his clever charge. ‘So proud!’ said the newsagent. By quitting Oxford, I was actually taking away one of the few reasons Colin had to be cheerful about the future. His son, so full of promise, was putting his life chances in jeopardy.

I was also allowing my fate to become mixed up with his, like one swimmer helping another swimmer in distress, and causing both to drown. It can be hard for us to accept that fate separates people from each other, especially within a family. Fate undoes the knots that we so readily create as we become entangled with one another. In French, the word for fate is le sort, which alludes precisely to this notion of disentanglement, of sorting people onto different tracks. And so, despite my best efforts to subvert myself, to bring my onwards journey to a halt and wait with my father on the hard shoulder, fate had other ideas. A different engine had fired up.