The Woman of Substance. Piers Dudgeon

he died as a baby, as a little boy. Then my parents had a son before me, who is Alfie in Act of Will, which is why I had Alfie also die of meningitis. Our Vivian Taylor was six or eight months old when he died, not even a year. It certainly affected my mother’s relationship to me, because she focused every bit of love and attention on me. If there was a purpose in my mother’s life it was me. That’s rather sad actually.’

      But there was more to it than Vivian. ‘My mother didn’t want any more children because she wasn’t going to let anything stop her from giving me a better life than she had had,’ Barbara told me. In Act of Will, Audra is fired by her need to redeem her own lost opportunity. No sacrifice is too great to enable her daughter, Christina, to realise the opportunities that were denied her in childhood. There is an obsessive quality about it from the moment Christina is born and her mother announces, ‘I am going to give her the world.’

      Barbara remembers well how this was expressed for real in her relationship with Freda: ‘We were very close. I was very close to Mummy. She totally and completely believed in me. There wasn’t a day of her life that if she spoke to me, even after I’d gone to live in London and then America, when she didn’t say, “I love you.” There wasn’t a time when she didn’t tell me that I was the most beautiful and the cleverest and the most talented and the most charming and the most wonderful person and of course that’s not true, we all know that we have faults. But what it did . . . it gave me tremendous self-confidence and a self-assurance that I had even when I was fifteen and sixteen. And she instilled in me a desire to excel. Her message was: “There’s nothing you can’t have if you try hard enough, work hard enough and strive towards a goal. And never, never limit yourself.”’

      Barbara took away from their relationship an absolute conviction that she was capable of anything to which she set her mind. Inadequacy was not a concept ever entertained. Her friend Billie Figg noted this as her defining characteristic in her early twenties: ‘What she had was enormously high expectations of herself and a lot of assurance.’

      In Act of Will, Vincent fears that Audra’s motivation to do the same for Christina is tinged with obsession. He notes a possessiveness about his wife’s relationship with their daughter, which seems to exclude him, and comes to frighten him. ‘There was a cold implacability in the set of the mouth and the thrust of the jaw, a terrible relentlessness in those extraordinary cornflower-blue eyes . . .’ And Vincent fears, ‘She’s going to make it a crusade.’

      Audra announces her intention to give her daughter the world in the hospital, shortly after she is born. Both Audra’s husband, Vincent, and his doctor friend, Mike Lesley, bridle at her naked aggression, not seen before.

      When it is all over in the novel, and Audra’s daughter, Christina, is the success she has made her, the girl says: ‘I’ll never be able to thank you enough, or repay you for everything you’ve done for me, Mummy. You’ve been the best, the most wonderful mother in the world.’ But, as Emma’s brother Winston says of his sister towards the end of A Woman of Substance, her success is attributable to ‘Abnormal ambition. Abnormal drive.’

      In Act of Will, Vincent, convinced that his wife is victim to irrational forces, shows his mettle in his response to her. He is tender and loving. He masterminds a surprise birthday party for her. There is no hint of violence towards his wife, even when she brings him to his wits’ end with her obsession. Moreover, he gives his wife one hundred per cent support over her sense of loss of status. He could have gained the whip hand in the class turmoil of their relationship – that she always believed she came from a better class than he – but nowhere does he use it as a weapon against her.

      Knowing now what happened to Freda in her childhood, and the loss she suffered, knowing what it was that made her so determined that Barbara should have the opportunities that were denied herself, it is safe to say that Winston’s response to Freda (if it is reflected in Vincent’s) was the very best that could have been made. There was in Freda something running deeper even than the loss of her first child, something which possibly no project of success – not even Barbara – could ever quite resolve. Maybe Freda’s mother-in-law, Esther, sensed it was never going to be resolved by her son Winston either – however good he was to her. Reason enough for her unsettled relationship with Freda.

      The novels first tipped my research in Freda’s direction, and it was the novels that gave me a sense of the deepest roots of dysfunction I would find. Turning again to Everything to Gain, Mal searches for the reason for her mother’s unhappiness: ‘Perhaps [she] had experienced humiliation and despair and more heartache than I ever realised. But I would never get the real truth from her. She never talked about the past, never confided in me. It was as if she wanted to bury those years, forget them, perhaps even pretend they never happened.’

      In Act of Will, Audra’s in-laws are all around her. She loves Vincent, but there is something getting in the way, a feeling of apartness certainly. Is it class, as in the novel? Is the belligerent ‘outsider’ in her really being outed by her better birth? Or is it, as in Everything to Gain, something in her childhood, some loss she suffered?

      We never get to the heart of the matter in the fiction (because Barbara didn’t know), but, like Mallory Keswick, we cannot but suspect there is something we are not being told; indeed we only accept Audra’s strangely aggressive love for her daughter in Act of Will because we entertain such a suspicion.

      In reality, I was to discover, there was every reason for Freda to behave so. Her story provides the crucial dysfunctional and motivational forces that led to her unique relationship with her daughter and Barbara’s extraordinary will to succeed. Much of it remained hidden during Freda’s lifetime, for Barbara’s childhood ‘was constructed on secrets layered one on top of the other,’ as she wrote in Everything to Gain.

      These secrets provided Barbara with many of the narrative possibilities of her best novels, and one reason why they have been so successful is that Barbara is not simply writing good ideas, but ideas that are her inheritance. The novels are the means by which she shares in the experience of her past, her mother’s past, and that of her mother’s own mother. More strangely still, she does so without knowing anything about Freda’s history or that of her maternal grandmother, the extraordinary and beguiling Edith Walker.