The library of lost conversation

My father died in May, seven years after my mother. We are slowly emptying the house the two of them lived in together since the autumn of 1966, a couple of months after I was born.

The house contains my childhood, of course, and those of my older brother and sisters – but mostly now it embodies my parents’ lives together, the choices they made, together or singly, the things they loved, the things they could afford, the things they could not afford but bought anyway, good furniture followed by worse once children required accounting for, my mother’s resilient DIY eventually supplanted by an old age of greater ease and comfort.

To break it up, this life, seems strangely disloyal. Should their choices and tastes mean so little to us? Do photographs, which we will keep, say more about them than the LPs they collected, the pictures and prints on the walls, the vases and lamps, the glasses and the linen?

People are fond of saying, in the social media age, that we are all curators of our own lives these days. But weren’t we always? Aren’t the undispersed houses of the dead always museums of a kind, suspended in time – because both finished and unfinished – in just the way Pompeii is? The ghosts that inhabit the homes of the lost are not merely those of the past – they are also the ghosts of the future, the lives unlived, the films unseen, the thoughts unarticulated, the food uneaten, the books unread.

Death ends our dialogues with the dead, but the conversations want to go on.

For me, that talk is almost always about the books.

The best books – the ones we carry with us always in our hearts – find the words for things that we feel within us already but cannot express – sometimes have not even known we wanted to express.

I look around at the packed shelves at my parents’ and think of all the emotions they contain. Perhaps I cannot capture how my mother felt on a given day one April or September, say. But I can know something of her in the words she read, in her radical’s surprise at the humanity of Queen Victoria’s letters to her children, or her profound identification with the Vera Brittan of Testament of Youth.

Every time I read the court martial scene in Catch-22, I can hear my father, wheezing and snorting with laughter as he read it out loud to us as children, tears of laughter – the only kind or tears I remember him shedding till the last years of life – slipping quickly down Saturday-stubbled cheeks, landing warm on my arm. He almost choked on it, too breathless with the absurd, savage logic of Heller’s humour to read at all.

But most of the books on my parents’ shelves resonate more quietly, words exchanged in distant rooms, things glimpsed behind us in a folding mirror. A good many I read myself as I grew up, often with my parents encouragement, occasionally their distaste; I don’t think Mum ever developed a liking for Ian Fleming, for example, although I find myself repeating even now her opinion that he wrote well, if not as well as his brother, Peter, despite the fact I have yet to read – or indeed see – even one of Peter’s books.

The galleries – museums, memory houses, what you will – those intimate spaces we curate in our own minds begin in our childhood reading as much as in our childhoods per se. For me the iconic Bond images aren’t Connery or Moore or Craig, but the covers of the 1960s Pan paperbacks that still sit on the shelves in the hall: the faux bullet holes in the cover of Thunderball; the scorpion clutching a pearl on You Only Live Twice; the blood-spattered snow of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

And so it is across every shelf. Many of the paperbacks’ brash colours have faded with sunlight and time. The hardbacks, stripped long ago of their jackets, have grown old too. They have not discoloured so much as acquired a patina of disuse; their bindings are stiff, their typesetting demodé. They smell tired, like baked dust.

Growing up, each book to me seemed to promise so much, each an unfamiliar world of its own wrapped inside the mystery of my parents’ hearts. Those I have never read still catch the eye, but this time with guilt: Eastern Approaches; Lust for Glory; Old Men Forget; The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists; Angel Pavement; The Man-Eater of Malgudi; and on and on. They are the among the earliest landscape of my life, I suppose; these enticingly unexamined vistas are somehow more evocative than the posters and prints that hung on the walls, like doors opened just a little onto shadowed gardens. The doors are still there; but to open them now would, I think, make my parents’ absence all the more painful.

These books stand for much of my parents’ emotional lives. For bookish people, that’s what books are. They aren’t mere stories or arguments or theses: they are aspirations. They are possibilities. They express the inquisitive longings of my parents: the kind of world they wanted to create for themselves and their children, of course. But it’s more than that. To buy a book is to express a desire. To want to think and feel something new; to see without seeing and know without knowing. Books fulfill us. To read a book is to open ourselves, to invite different lives into our own most private spaces. It follows that to leave a book unread behind us is its own kind of sadness: an opportunity stifled, a chance untaken.

I know there are many books here my parents never got round to reading. I can only guess at which. Each one seems to suggest a diminished life in a way, or poignant evidence of death’s broken continuities, the sense of lives not finished with, even though life itself has gone.

It is one of the strange qualities of books that the words they contain live for the reader as much as the writer – and they live for readers other than ourselves, too. We get a frisson – at least I do – when we hear someone speak about a book we know intimately ourselves – as if the depth and delicacy of our connection to the words it contains connects us to them also. The web of words vibrates a little and we feel it, the pressure of another person’s life, their thoughts and experiences humming through the threads and wires. So you heard it too, I think to myself. You understood the music that moved me so.

So much of my relationship with my parents was expressed through such connections. We lived through books. We exchanged them as gifts; we exchanged thoughts about them endlessly, books we had read, books we wanted to read, books we had read about. So to be in an empty house lined with shelves is to be in a library of lost conversations with them.

I look up at them, lined up beside each other, in no other order than that made by a random choice on a random day, subjects flitting erratically, seamlessly from one topic to another, book to book and shelf to shelf, the way intimate talk does when it seems to be endless.

I want to hold on to each one, but there are too many for my lifetime too.