Dead and Gone, but Forever Remembered

Eleven years ago today, my mother died. Sixty-six years ago, her fiancé was murdered. Ten years ago, the first ideas for my book were forged. Today, memories can live on via the pages of my semi-autobiographical novel, Infinite Stranger.

My mother – the real character of Molly Williams in my book – was a charmer. So much so, at times in my adolescence and youth I was downright envious of her. Envious of her confidence and charisma; envious of her Marilyn Monroe figure, of her pert Scarlett O’Hara smile, of the way she could break the ice at any stilted gathering; the way she could turn eyes, melt hearts. Molly would step into a room and people would instantly smile. ‘Ah, Molly’s here!’ they’d say in genuine delight. Everyone loved Molly, male and female, young and old, myself obviously included. I mean, I was her daughter, right?

But it wasn’t an easy love.

Peter Fox, my mother’s ill-fated fiancé, was murdered at the premature age of thirty. They were crazy about each other. They met in their youth and fell head over heels. Within a few weeks, Peter had proposed to Molly, and she accepted without hesitation. And yet by the time of Peter’s death, seven years down the road, they still hadn’t tied the knot.

‘Why?’’ I used to ask my mother in exasperation when she told me yet another tale of Peter Fox from her youth. ‘Why did you never get married, if you were so crazy about each other?’ And she’d raise her left eyebrow, just like Vivien Leigh did in Gone With the Wind, and sadly shake her head, and say, ‘Oh darling, if only life were that easy to explain!’

Peter and Molly broke up and got back together again several times during their long, stormy courtship. At one idiotic point, my mother even got engaged to a young, adoring architect who helped comfort her over Peter’s infidelities, but who she didn’t love. And another time, when on a cruise to the former Yugoslavia (we’re talking about the nineteen-fifties here), Molly hooked up with a drop-dead-gorgeous, hairy-armed, twinkly-eyed Moslem youth who did an even better job at helping her forget about her fiance’s infidelities. But neither of those crazy, interim romances lasted long, and very soon Molly and Peter were back together again. They couldn’t survive without each other, and yet their mutual neediness drove each other mad.

When I left home to study music and started to pull away from the proverbial apron strings, I began to see another side to my mother. A side which at times, quite frankly, also drove me round the twist. I sympathised with Peter. Molly was an exceedingly headstrong lady.

One of the most bizarre things to fathom about my mother is the way she reacted when I fell in love with a Benedictine monk. Enter Brother Matthew: another tall, dark and handsome guy, just like the aforementioned sexy Yugoslav, though my monk’s arms weren’t hairy. It was the kind of infatuation-love that any normal, sensible mother would have warned her daughter to run a mile from. But Molly was not normal and sensible; she was an incurable romantic and a dreamer, and she actually encouraged my forbidden relationship with said unattainable monk. Did he remind her of Peter, I used to wonder. Was she reliving her lost love through me?

I don’t know if Peter Fox’s arms were hairy. There are a lot of things I don’t know about Peter, despite my having been an avid listener to all the stories Molly related to me throughout my upbringing. Peter did this and Peter did that … Peter with the Svengali gaze and the high, intellectual forehead. Peter who yearned to be a foreign correspondent one day, to leave behind the grime of Lancashire in Northern England and travel the world. Peter who knew the Declaration of Human Rights by heart and often quoted it to my love-smitten mother on their early dates, until she got fed up of hearing it and would say something like, ‘Oh, do dry up, Peter!’ and then roll her eyes with true Scarlett O’Hara disdain.

Ah, Mother! Dead and gone, but still remembered, still loved, despite causing my world to fall apart. Just like your world did, back in December 1956, when that terrorist’s bullet pierced Peter’s heart. After that, nothing in your life was ever the same again.

I remember you once telling me, ‘The day that Peter died, something died in me as well.’

So who can blame you for marrying on the rebound barely a year later, and being unhappy in that marriage, eventually separating, and then pouring your heart and soul into your only daughter? Who can blame you? I certainly don’t, despite almost hating you at the worst of times. For instance when you wore black to my wedding. I can understand why they say that love and hate are closely linked.

Come to think of it, perhaps I should say no more! Perhaps, instead, I should encourage you, fellow-blogger, to dive into the world of Infinite Stranger, where the cross-generational love stories of Molly and Peter, and Leah and Brother Matthew, are resurrected via the wave of my storyteller’s life-breathing wand.

I invite you into that world with open arms.

“A beautiful, complex, tender story about a mother and a daughter, about love, living and the choices we have to make when it comes to matters of the heart.” – Louise Douglas, author of The Lost Notebook