A Family Matter

“She knew she should have mentioned them, the husband and child waiting inside, her real life. It wasn’t a lie, Dawn told herself, just a break, a few hours of being a different kind of young again.”

Dawn reflects on the fact that after she and Hazel part at her house following their first meeting, she omits to mention that she is married with a daughter. This is one example of many in the novel where people are careful about what they say for a variety of reasons, not lying but not telling the full truth either. It is clear from this the impression that Hazel has made on her at their first meeting. The youthfulness Dawn feels is implicitly a sense of romance and flirtation, but this is something she struggles to articulate, given how deeply she has repressed her identity.

“At fourteen, Tom can almost see it, a life that is bigger, or sharper, than his parents’. A life not lived around bean-to-cup coffee machines and mindful lunch breaks.”

Maggie and Conor’s son Tom is on the cusp of becoming a man, and he is feeling a call from within to live a different kind of life than he has experienced in the conventional, middle-class home in which he has grown up. He does not yet know what that might be, and it sometimes makes him rude and sarcastic toward his mother. Nonetheless, Maggie empathizes with him. While she appreciates her simple and largely uneventful life, she also grows bored at times, a sentiment she’s had to express to her husband.

“Heron thought it was a shame to see men with estate cars and pensions who couldn’t clean a toilet.”

Heron is an orderly, tidy man who always pays attention to domestic tasks, and he has never shared the traditional view that such things were a woman’s responsibility. An “estate car,” in Heron’s day, and a pension would be signs of wealth and success, and perhaps out of his own reach as a working man, but he eschews the idea that successful men shouldn’t be capable of caring for their own household. This more thoughtful approach to class and gender roles adds complexity to a character whose traditional beliefs regarding LGTBQ+ people guides much of the narrative.

“Later that same week, Dawn saw Hazel waiting for a bus into town, a string bag over her arm. There were hints of her when she cut through the park on her way home. Shadows and suggestions of Hazel everywhere Dawn went. There were glimpses of Hazel behind her eyelids when she blinked.”

The increasingly subtle expressions of connection between the two young women suggest the impact Hazel has already made on Dawn, even though they have not known each other long. Hazel’s allure has disrupted Dawn’s life so severely that her mental wellness is disrupted. Still, Dawn is not yet able to acknowledge the impact of this woman in her life. She dismisses her obsession with the explanation that she sees Hazel everywhere because she likes “her haircut,” a comedically false explanation for what is actually a growing attraction to another woman.

“It was in August that Dawn realized it wasn’t Hazel’s haircut, or the things she talked about, that she liked. It was the way she changed the air as she moved through it.”

This subtle and succinct metaphoric expression illustrates poetically how, when Dawn is around Hazel, the entire atmosphere changes. She is clearly in love with Hazel, even though she still uses the word “liked,” as if she has not yet fully come to grips with the new feelings and what they signify.

“Maggie watches herself like a character in a film. She looks at her reflection in the train window and she dreams. She likes the commute, and she hates it, the glamour and boredom of it.”

Maggie often has a sense of detachment, looking at her life and assessing it from a third-person perspective. Here, on the commuter train in the morning, she expresses a paradox—the coexistence of opposites in life, which is typically how she expresses the complexity of her experiences. Just a little earlier, she referred to her morning routine with her family as both “ridiculous and ordinary” (43), another paradoxical expression. She recognizes that, in some ways, her lifestyle is incredibly ordinary; however, she also acknowledges that her life would appear completely unfamiliar to others, making it potentially “cinematic.”

“How would she begin to explain that this wasn’t new at all but the opposite. Something she had always known, as deep and bright as bone.”

Dawn is trying to think of a way to tell her practical, straightforward husband how her life is different since she met Hazel, and she married him only because it was traditional rather than something they both passionately desired. She struggles to explain how her apparently new orientation in love and partnership is something she’s actually always known. In the simile that follows, she explains it as a basic part of her being, as intrinsic as her bones.

“Maggie, in the kitchen, puts down the plate she is drying and stops, caught in the beam of this story she hasn’t heard before. She listens to her son asking the questions she has never been able to ask and reminds herself to breathe.”

Maggie listens as her father tells his grandson Tom about how he met her mother Dawn. The author does not waste words conveying the effect on Maggie of hearing about an aspect of her family background that she has never been told. Instead of using adjectives to describe Maggie’s state of mind, the author simply points to something that is going on in Maggie’s body and her reaction to it; she must remind herself to breathe. This emphasizes how momentous this occasion is, and it makes clear that Maggie never accepted the mystery of her mother passively—it’s something she’s always wondered about but never felt comfortable asking about.

“There are topics not talked about for so long they become impossible to say out loud. Maggie thinks of her parents’ marriage in a lost language, in words she has not heard or used for years. She doesn’t have the vocabulary now to ask her father these questions, how they met, how they split up. She only has a tourist’s grasp of the language when she needs to be a poet.”

This refers to Maggie’s bewilderment and confusion as she overhears her father telling Tom about how he and Dawn met and married. The irony here is that Heron and Maggie remain so close to each other in many respects, yet there is a gaping hole between them regarding Maggie’s lack of knowledge of their family history. They are similar in their inability to address difficult topics, and Maggie’s metaphorically conveyed struggle to express herself to her father also implies that Heron feels the same. He may not have withheld the truth out of malice or apathy, but rather because he felt incapable of communicating about something so emotional.

“When the solicitor asks him questions, Heron takes the edge off his accent. He takes care to describe Maggie as ‘three,’ not ‘free.’”

At the solicitor’s office, Heron is intimidated. He has likely never talked to a solicitor before, and he is aware of the difference in social class between them. He therefore tries to speak in what he thinks will be a more educated way, rather than in his normal working-class accent, in which the “th” sound is pronounced like an “f.” Nowhere else in the novel does the narrator indicate Heron’s accent in the direct speech attributed to him, so this single occurrence is important in giving an idea of his social class. This dynamic helps explain why Heron will defer to the solicitor’s advice on the custody case—he feels self-conscious and diminished within a perceived social power imbalance.

“She cannot say, you cannot die, not now, because I will sometimes want to call you, to tell you a joke I read in the paper, or that I saw a famous person on the platform at London Bridge. You cannot die, because you will be missing from the photographs of all the days that haven’t happened yet—the children grown up, graduations, weddings, their babies.”

Maggie is having the same difficulty in talking to her father about his illness as she has in raising questions for him about her mother. When she cannot find the right way to talk about something of great importance, she ends up saying nothing at all. In this quotation, as Maggie thinks about her dying father, she is embarrassed by the thoughts she would express if she were to speak to him, and so she remains silent. She compares supposedly unremarkable events like newspaper jokes or seeing someone in the city with momentous occasions like weddings and great-grandchildren. This aligns with the consistent motif of comparing opposites, offering both equal emotional importance.

“Somehow she breathes. Somehow she swallows the scream, and then she says, ‘She had an affair. They got divorced. She moved away. Fine. But whoever he was, she chose him over my dad. She chose him over me.”

Maggie addresses her husband Conor, who has suggested that she try to trace her mother. Maggie is angry with Conor, justifying her reluctance to do what he says. She does not want to turn toward a “stranger,” as she puts it, when her father is so ill. Her words to Conor, with the masculine pronoun, show how little she knows about why her mother left her father and demonstrates how unfairly Dawn has been represented.

“Hazel tries to fall out of love with Dawn. She makes a list of all her bad habits, the way she leaves the lid off the butter dish, the way she sticks the old bits of soap together rather than starting a new bar. She thinks of all Dawn’s imperfections, the strange bit on her left ear that’s like an elf’s, or a small rash she had once on her elbow, and she tries to be disgusted instead of charmed by them. Hazel tells herself lies.”

Hazel has these thoughts when she is alone. Having first allowed herself to think that she and Dawn could make a life for themselves together, she dismisses the idea and tries unsuccessfully to talk herself out of her own feelings. More worldly and familiar with antigay bias than Dawn, she knows the difficulty that Dawn will now face if pursuing their relationship, and her desire to grow “disgusted” with Dawn is actually an attempt to spare her partner pain. Still, Hazel can’t bring herself to believe these lies because she loves Dawn.

“‘What harm are they doing to anyone?’ Sue had smiled at her, paused to find the word to break it to this young woman, the world, and what it was really like. ‘They are terrified,’ she said to Dawn, ‘that’s what it is. Think about how it looks to them. Mothers, housewives, shacking up together. We’d bring the whole system down.’”

Dawn asks the question of one of the women in the support group she is attending. Dawn is still naïve. Sue explains to her that the people who reinforce a patriarchal system are frightened of losing control over something that works so heavily to their advantage. This is why they encourage both social and institutional prejudice, which ensures that the LGBTQ+ community lacks the power to fight for their rights.

“She presses her face up against the window. Once, she screams through the letterbox like a madwoman. She begs […] It’s all to the good, Heron’s solicitor says. Evidence of instability. And he arranges a temporary order to be put in place, forbidding Dawn from seeing Maggie until after the hearing.”

Deprived of her house key, Dawn follows Heron and Maggie home and desperately calls out for admittance, saying that Maggie needs her. Heron reports this incident, and the solicitor’s actions demonstrate Dawn’s first direct experience with the ruthless system she is up against. Instead of acknowledging how painful it would be for a mother to be unfairly separated from her child, they mislead Heron and use these experiences to misrepresent Dawn in court.

“Maggie reads the first page in one glance, whole, like swallowing food, too hot and too fast. The lump of new knowledge sticks in her throat. Burns her from the inside.”

Maggie reads from the legal document she has discovered in a box of Heron’s old papers. It describes the custody case that she has never known about before, and it profoundly shocks her. The author’s use of an extended simile to describe Maggie’s reaction conveys how forcefully the revelation has impacted her.

“Conor knows that Christmas Day for Maggie is never about now and always about then.”

Maggie makes a big effort to ensure that Christmas Day is a happy one for her family. However, Christmas always brings back memories of her own childhood Christmases, when it was just her and her father. These were not always happy times, although Heron did his best. Conor, Maggie’s husband, knows her well enough to understand how she is trying to remedy memories of the past by creating a better experience for her children now.

“Heron leans his arms on the table and sees that things are expected of him here. A deep sort of confidence. The moral high ground. He has never thought of himself as a bold man, certainly not a vengeful one. He just likes rules, that’s all.”

Heron has never been in a courtroom before, and he is out of his depth. He allows himself to believe that the men in the courtroom are pursuing the best solution and know what they are doing. It is therefore not difficult for his lawyer to persuade him, against his more conciliatory instincts, to take a more aggressive stance in the case to ensure that he gets full custody of his daughter. This alludes to how many people in this era had little personal issue with the LGBTQ+ community, but they still allowed social and institutional prejudice because they didn’t want to challenge the system.

“The whole time he questions her, Heron’s barrister directs his gaze at Dawn’s left earring, a tasteful little knot of gold. It helps him, not to look into the eyes of the person he is questioning. He is not distracted this way, by her shock, or whatever else passes across her face.”

This is a technique the barrister has perfected over the years. Although it may seem innocent, allowing him to concentrate on his task, the fact that he refuses to look into the eyes of the person to whom he is addressing his intrusive, embarrassing questions suggests a lack of feeling and decency. He can only go through with it by ignoring the correct social etiquette of looking, at least for some of the time, directly at the person to whom one is talking. It takes effort to dehumanize her, which is what he’s doing.

“His Honor […] dismisses the challenge as if annoyed to have his concentration interrupted. This deviation from the natural way of things is much the same as that deviation, as far as he’s concerned. It is permissible. So the report is read; the steady, certain voice of James Paul explaining to the court what becomes of children with perverts for mothers.”

The judge has just heard a challenge from Dawn’s lawyer about the outlandish comparison of the dangers to a child of having a lesbian mother as the equivalent, in terms of moral risk, of a prostitute’s child being exposed to crime and drugs. The fact that the judge dismisses the challenge immediately shows the limitations of the male-dominated legal system as far as its attitude to lesbianism is concerned. He’s also more preoccupied with not interrupting the “natural” process than doing his job correctly and ethically.

“Maggie doesn’t know how to make him hear it, feel it, without him crumbling to dust on the doorstep.”

Maggie is angry at Heron and wants to confront him about why he told her so little about her mother and did not explain the circumstances of her departure. She rings his doorbell, but when he answers and stands in the doorway, he looks so weakened and vulnerable that Maggie is thrown into turmoil about the tone in which she should talk to him. The image of crumbling to dust suggests dissolution and death, which demonstrates how Maggie is ultimately most fearful about the imminent loss of Heron.

“I know it’s painful, Maggie. But they were different times.”

Conor tells Maggie that although it is difficult for her to cope with what she has learned about her past, she must bear in mind that it all happened 40 years ago, in a different era. This is also what Heron said to Maggie. It emphasizes the fact that attitudes to queer relationships were very different in 1982 from what they were in 2022. While this is well intentioned and truthful, to a degree, it is also a mindset that absolves Heron of his complicity in what happened to Dawn.

“‘I just don’t understand how you could have done it,’ Maggie says again. When what she means to say is, I have missed you. When what she means to say is, I have loved you all this time, even so.”

Maggie speaks to Dawn in their face-to-face meeting 40 years after Dawn left. In this novel, several characters struggle to express the full truth of what they are thinking because that would be too hard, especially if one is close to someone or has a long history with them. Difficult truths are therefore suppressed. Frustrated and facing the decades of Dawn’s absence, Maggie can only defer the blame to Dawn rather than being vulnerable and saying how much she wanted her mother.