The Face That Must Die Read Free

radio soap opera, and grew convinced that the names and actions of the characters represented messages of hope for her. When her manuscripts were rejected yet again she concluded that the messages had been deliberate lies, meant to break her down. I think it was then I became fully aware that all was not well with my mother.
    I don’t think my grandmother was living with us then, but I believe I was only a few years old when she gave up her flat in Southport and divided her time between her two daughters. I don’t know why I remember her only in glimpses — her singing “Just a Song at Twilight” to me in a high sweet voice, her groaning loudly on the toilet, her praying (“Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”) and beating her breast so loudly that I could hear it in my room. I say my room, but during my adolescence I shared it and its single bed with my mother. It may be that the reason why she didn’t share her mother’s room was that she refused to accept there could be anything wrong with her sleeping with me: it must have been about then she began to fulminate Freud and his dirty mind.
    My grandmother died of gangrene when I was fifteen. Later my mother told me that she’d found one of her mother’s toes in the bed. I was in my room when I heard the doctor pronounce her dead, and I began sobbing uncontrollably. Yet that night, as I lay on the ramshackle couch downstairs because I didn’t want to sleep upstairs where the corpse was, I read nearly the whole of a John Dickson Carr novel. Sometime after midnight my mother woke in the chair in which she’d dozed off and told me angrily to go to sleep. Once we returned from the funeral I had my own room at last, and lay in the dark praying hysterically that some undefined terror would stay away from me, now that I no longer had the night light my mother had always kept burning, whether in case she had to go to her mother in the night or for fear that my father might come into the room. Some months later she saw her mother at the top of the stairs, wearing a nightgown which, she claimed, crumpled emptily to the stair and was still there when she went up. Now and then she would feel the ghost of her father tap her meaningfully on the shoulder.
    (One more thing I’ve only now remembered about my grandmother: during her final illness I once had to help lift her onto the bedpan, and this was my first glimpse of a female pubis. It appalled me, and made me think for some reason of a spider.)
    It must have been soon after the funeral that we began to have our differences. I was the only one left there in whom she had invested her affection, and I suppose it seemed a betrayal when I turned into a drinking cursing adolescent who read dirty books (Henry Miller and William Burroughs whose banned books I had sent to me from abroad, Nabokov, Lawrence Durrell). I took a wicked delight in quoting her some of the naughty bits and, I admit, in being generally disagreeable. (My correspondents of the time will confirm this: sorry, Alan Dodd, David Johnstone, John Derry. . .) I became involved in science fiction and fantasy fandom, which she viewed with deep suspicion: half the writers were probably homosexual and lying in wait for me. Later I discovered she’d been opening my letters and had written to one correspondent telling him to moderate his language. With very few exceptions she refused to let me invite friends home, since she was ashamed of where she was living. Soon we no longer laughed together, perhaps because I’d grown too pompous to.
    All the same, I needed to build my self-confidence somehow. On top of all I’ve recounted, I spent my adolescence at a Catholic school, much of the time in terror of being beaten for getting answers wrong. In my experience this is not conducive to learning, and I did rather badly until my last year there, when I was taught by several excellent teachers. (Corporal punishment is a British institution, of