son and heir #3: dead mother
My newest short story, 'Barbarism', is available to read now on the Granta site.
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The Henriad is about fathers dying. Henry Bolingbroke is in exile when John of Gaunt dies; only Richard is there, the true king and the false son, stealing Henry’s inheritance. Prince Hal is luckier, he gets to be there when his father dies. But the only reference to Hal’s mother is a single line in Henry IV Pt 1: a nobleman comes to the Boar’s Head, sent by King Henry, and Hal tells the hostess, ‘Give him as much as will make him a royal man, and send him back again to my mother.’
It is unclear whether Hal means ‘literally, send him to my mother, who is alive and lives in the castle, offscreen’ or ‘tell him to get dead like my dead mother.’ Henry V’s mother, Mary de Bohun, died when Henry was about seven. Mary was about 26 and had had six children; she died after giving birth to Philippa, who herself would die following a stillbirth. So the Lancasters are a perfect medieval family: the men are kings and fight battles, and the women give birth and die. Dying is actually so feminine that when men die they turn into women. Henry V died aged 35, after some kind of gastrointestinal illness, leaving behind an infant son. Didn’t he turn out just like his mother?
I could have resurrected Mary in the novel, but I made her die again. Many ghosts are thought to be repeating their deaths. My Hal does think and talk about her, to the point where he becomes a bit of a 'my dead mother' bore, as Shakespeare's Hal was a 'my dying father' bore in Henry IV Pt 2. Sympathy peters out more quickly than most would admit. Hal keeps begging for it, pathetically, with bad jokes and solemn promises of self-reform. Love me Falstaff, love me Poins, love me hostess, love me Francis, love me father. 'No, if rightly taken, halter.' Anyone so fixated on wordplay has some kind of horror at the center of their psyche.
I imagine the real Philippa, Queen of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, who had come to Scandinavia with ships full of English swag — hampers from Harrods, Paddington bears, Heathrow gift shop Barbours — lying in bed, dying, with a dead child, thinking, 'Now I will be just like my mother.' Henry V, dying, must have been pleased he'd at least managed to produce a son and heir. Richard couldn't manage it! And here Henry, son of the usurper, has conquered France, and exercised the rights of the husband upon his French princess. It must have been something, having Henry V's scarred face heaving stupidly above you. His eyes are open, but he's looking straight through you and thinking about military supply lines. Remembering debts he owes the magnates who had recently helped his father usurp the throne.
'Barbarism' is the thing I swore I would never write, a story from the perspective of Henry-the-father, Henry-IV-but-not. It takes place in the year 2000, a year after Mary's death. Henry is bitter that Mary died and Richard hasn't yet. Henry IV must have been bitter, too, after having Richard killed, that he had sent Richard to join Mary and now he was left to rule alone. In the year 2000, Richard is not yet dead. Henry rules over two high-value residential properties and 1,000 acres of land in southeast Wales. Landlord of England art thou now, not king. Not that Richard is king either: he has an unimpressive house in town, a more impressive house in the country, a 400 acre deer park, money-sinks without anything to feed them but six-digit overdrafts at Coutts. His lover consoles himself that, even if he has no legal right as next of kin, he is at least able to dine out at Richard’s expense without worrying about inheriting the debt.
Richard II’s father also died young, when Richard was ten. Edward the Black Prince died aged 45, after some kind of gastrointestinal illness, having once been a great soldier. This is not in Shakespeare. Nigel Saul writes: ‘In his final bedridden years he had only the memory of his past achievements to sustain him.’ Richard would have remembered his father’s decline and death quite clearly. Mary died unexpectedly, and Hal will forget more of his mother with each year that passes. He’ll remember Richard better.
Suffice it to say I have not, with this story, been able to solve grief. Henry is alive, occupying the narrative, and Mary’s soul has left the earth. He lies awake the whole night through: as soon as he starts to drift off, one of the children cry. Though there is a nanny to comfort the child, Henry is awake again, remembering his mistakes, fearing the future, imagining his cousin Richard lying in bed with his lover, Edward (different from his father Edward, different again from his grandfather and great-grandfather Edward). Of course Henry wasn’t there in 1995 when Richard nearly died of meningitis: the lover was the one to take him to A&E, to watch jealously as a 20-gauge needle penetrated two inches deep into a spot between his lower vertebrae that the lover could only kiss the surface of. The lover wishes he could be like Henry, capable of starting a process in the beloved that changes their body to the extent that it produces new life. He feels that if only Richard could fuck him without a condom they could merge completely, and he would no longer have to be himself. Henry senses this sentiment in Edward and believes that he hates Edward for it. What he really hates is that Edward gets to kiss Richard’s lower back.
In the novel, Hal never tells a lover ‘I love you.’ Falstaff says Hal used to say it to him, but Falstaff is known to lie. If Hal were to have said it to Falstaff, he would have meant it as if he were saying it to his mother: I accept your unconditional love, I recognize that I deserve it from you. Shakespeare’s Hal can only reject Falstaff because he has just become an orphan. He accepts his lot, then. He is a single, sad creature trapped inside his kingship like a corpse in a box beneath an effigy. Pleasure belongs to the past; redemption will come through the suffering. Redemption will come for his father the usurper, too. Hal will pray for his father's soul. He will imagine his mother in purgatory, certain of heaven so long as she endures.