[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]I booked a flight to London[.small-caps] in mid-December so I could see my mother on her ninety-third birthday. I flew over the day before and woke the next morning in the house in Chelsea where I’d arranged to stay, close to Carlyle Square, where I’d lived in my mother’s house during the 1970s. I saw the light around the edge of the window blind and heard the sound of the traffic on the King’s Road and footsteps on the old buckled paving stones in the street, and somebody sweeping dry, coarse leaves, using a brush with stiff bristles in a nearby garden. I recognized the light, and the sounds were identical to what I would have seen and heard on waking forty-odd years ago, and with that recognition the distance between my present and my past vanished and became one.[.article__paragraph--cap]

I took myself off for breakfast. In the dining room was a long table with people gathered singly or in pairs, reading their newspapers. There was a clack of cutlery on porcelain and the sound of the chef in the kitchen whistling listlessly. I was reminded of Patrick Hamilton’s accounts of boarding-house life and the optimism I’d woken up to was banished by the exhaustion and ennui I felt in that room, lying like a blanket over everything. It was Christmas, no doubt, I decided. Christmas was only ten days away and it was always a dampener. But it couldn’t just be the misery of the annual season of forced jollity. It was surely what was happening in the world and the gathering sense – and this was something I’d often heard my mother fulminate about because it had sickened her – that the old inclinations towards violence and tyranny were being embraced with unchecked enthusiasm by a new generation of reckless, shameless, strong men. It might have been ever thus, but the monsters had a new spring in their step and as they rose something sank, at least in me.

After breakfast I returned to my room to work. Towards 12:30 I put on my coat and set off, not as usual for her old house in Ovington Street but for her new flat in an apartment block in Belgravia. A new route but through a familiar terrain. I passed cottages done up to look like Cotswold village gems, new apartment blocks for oligarchs, with porters and neatly trimmed orange trees in painted boxes at the front, mansions encrusted in stucco, thick and white like new icing, and on every building, loud and shiny and pugnacious, cameras and alarms, the paraphernalia of security. Everywhere, women in housecoats with dogs on leads staring at their phones; housekeepers who toiled in the houses round about getting ten minutes with their Instagram feed as they walked their employers’ dogs. Purring by, huge cars driven by churlish men who insisted on making every pedestrian wait before crossing the road so they might take the turn and cruise on. I thought of Laius meeting Oedipus on the road to Delphi and ordering him to step off the road so his chariot could go forward. It didn’t seem much had changed.

I had gifts for my mother, but I stopped at a tiny, cupboard-sized parfumerie on the corner of Walton Street and Old Brompton Road on the way for one more. I bought a Verbena Vera reed diffuser (she’d had one before; she liked the scent) and as the assistant wrapped the purchase I started with the banal questions. Was Christmas a busy time? Yes. What were her clientele like? She had a few regulars whom she liked because they talked. She was on her own all day every day and liked to talk, but for the most part the customers didn’t want to talk. They just wanted to get in and get out with their purchases, quickly. And from this very modest rebuke to the people in the place to where she, an immigrant, had come to make a life, she slipped quickly but smoothly to full-scale revelation (with little opportunity to talk, she just couldn’t help herself, I assumed; it all just had to come out). Life in Britain, she said, for immigrants like herself was getting steadily worse. It was people’s unending, self-pity-fueled hatred of outsiders that was to blame. The white people didn’t like her because she wasn’t white. Nobody who wasn’t white was liked. People said immigrants like her were the cause of everything that was wrong with their lives. They said it to her face. On the Tube. On the street. In the pub. Oh, yes, this was what she was hearing more and more. She was to blame. She and her kind. For everything. And the sooner she went back to wherever she came from the better.

In the street moments later, prompted by what I’d just heard, the memory floated into my mind of Rainer Fassbinder’s film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), which tells the story of a lonely aging white German cleaning lady who marries a handsome, much younger black Moroccan immigrant worker; the couple, as the film charts, endure huge prejudice and antagonism because of their relationship. My mother had loved this film, as had I, and I have clear memories of our having long conversations in which she applauded the iconoclastic German director’s excavation of German antagonism and prejudice towards those of a different race and a different skin. She hadn’t changed in this respect since then. And were I to tell her about the conversation I’d just had in the perfume shop, I thought, I could predict her reaction. She would instinctively take the shop assistant’s side, and feel outraged on her behalf. Perhaps because she’d come from Ireland (and I say “perhaps” because I’m not sure that the argument that she felt solidarity with immigrants because she was once one herself was accurate) and even though she’d had an exceptionally privileged life, her gut always led her to align with the outsider who was under attack by the host because they looked different and didn’t fit. Always.

I returned to Walton Street and padded on, carrying my small, beautifully wrapped parcel. I passed many very thin women – armored coats, shield-sized handbags, sunglass worn as tiaras high on their beautiful coiffeurs – and workmen with dust in their eyebrows squatting on coils of cable and bags of cement outside houses under renovation, of which there were a surprising number, necking cans of Lucozade and Red Bull.

This was my first visit to where my mother had moved so everything was new. The street where she now lived in Belgravia held that special atmosphere of quiet and wealth. Her block wasn’t a nineteenth century icing-encrusted stucco mansion but something twentieth-century and possibly Art Deco-ish. It had unadorned walls and black, metal-framed windows. As I approached the entrance, a modest but heavy door, Bertie Wooster sprang to mind. In P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, Bertie lives in Half Moon Street, which was not so far away. He could have happily lived here, I thought, it being close to his West End haunts. Then I remembered that the writer J. R. Ackerley, author of My Father and Myself, a book which had influenced me hugely, had also lived in Half Moon Street in the 1920s,  when he was finding his way around London. These odd conjectures were followed by a fizz of bafflement. Why was I associating what I’d already come to think of as my mother’s last home with Bertie Wooster and J. R. Ackerley. What was my mind up to?

I passed through the front door and stepped into the hall. A table, a vase, flowers (artificial, I guessed), tasteful modern paintings, modern lamps, nice lampshades, a muted, soothing color scheme, carpet, marble, glass, brass; there was nothing Woosterish about the aesthetic at all. This was modern and monied. There was a desk, with a porter who smiled, said “O’Brien?” (he’d doubtless posed the question to many people who’d floated past wanting to find their way to my mother) and when I nodded, directed me to the basement.

I descended the narrow stairs, negotiated a corridor, and found myself at the flat’s front door. I rang the bell. The door was opened by a woman dressed in blue scrubs; she was short, spry, had an excellent smile and a smooth, unhurried, very even way of speaking. She told me her name was Beatrice and I immediately sensed two impulses were in play. On the one hand, there was propriety (she knew what needed to be said and she’d be sticking to her script; that’s what she signaled); and, on the other, there was her vast empathy, which she was bursting to express (this she also signaled). My apprehension of these contradictory impulses characterized every subsequent interaction I had with every carer.

I also knew at that moment that for the immediate present propriety would prevail until we got to know each other better. After all, wasn’t that the way of the world? Boundaries and protocols always trump the expression of feeling when money is in the mix and the client has the cash. In this matrix, the carer’s job is to care, not be human; that would seem to be the substance of the unwritten contract, though I didn’t pay much attention at the time to this revelation. Later, however, as I came to know how remarkable the carers were and how remarkable their practice was, I came to believe this cult of discretion and detachment was symptomatic of our social alienation. Why was it wrong for feelings to show, even if money was changing hands? I wondered if perhaps this rule has arisen because the clients – who are usually rich and prosperous – cannot face forming a human bond with the carers – who are usually not rich – because they fear that what they would discover, if they made friends, would discomfort them. The rich have never been very good, after all, at facing up to the difficult and unhappy truths regarding the lives of the less fortunate. Money does have such a terrible corrosive effect on empathy. This was something I think my mother understood. The alienation between human beings that wealth creates. She didn’t like it either.

I entered the flat. Shiny floors and newly painted doors. My mother was in a room off the kitchen. An untouched open sandwich on the slate table in front of her: white bread, green Gorgonzola Dolce, and slivers of pale smoked salmon with lemon juice and pepper. The smell of the lemon and the pepper and the fish, mild and comforting. Her tiny, creased hand when I shook it was like a piece of origami; a small, weightless, perfect representation of a small creature folded tight around itself. She said she hoped, it being her birthday, I hadn’t brought any presents.

[.smalltext]An extract from No One Tells You: The Last Years of Edna O’Brien by Carlo Gébler, New Island Books, September 2026.[.smalltext]