It is said that happiness writes white. The Three of Us is an extraordinary memoir written in the sootiest of blacks, yet with a light touch and a beauty of line that lift it out of the mire of its raw material onto a more elevated plane. It is a survivor’s tale, and a miraculous one at that. For it would require an unusually lurid imagination to dream up two characters less equipped to be parents than Thomas and Rosalie Blackburn, into whose doomed and dysfunctional marriage Julia had the misfortune to be born. The fact that she emerges in the end not just with her sanity intact but able to love and make her peace with both parents is remarkable. Each chapter is sealed by a fragment describing the dying Rosalie’s last weeks in Julia’s house, during which the icy rage and rivalry between mother and daughter is finally resolved, and real pleasure in one another’s company is palpable at last.

Julia’s father, Thomas Blackburn, was a poet of volatile temperament, irascible, twice divorced, an alcoholic who in 1943 also became addicted to a powerful barbiturate – sodium amytal – which only increased the violence of his drunken rages. Julia never felt threatened by him, however; somehow they rubbed along. Her mother was another matter: too selfish to have any maternal instinct, compassion or self-knowledge. “I was always afraid of her”, Blackburn writes.

Rosalie de Meric was by profession a painter, but her real interest was in sex – she lived for sex and through it, and her daughter was first an encumbrance in her single-minded pursuit of seduction, and later, as she matured, a deadly rival. While many parents are initially coy with their children about the facts of life, Rosalie tackled the subject with relish, adding graphic details about various refinements for good measure. Treating Julia not as a daughter but as a sister and (unwilling) confidante, she crowed about each new sexual conquest, elaborating on the unwelcome details. And there were many such conquests, because after the entirely predictable demise of her marriage, Rosalie set out to recruit an unbroken sequence of lovers from the lodgers she welcomed into her house.

But we are jumping ahead: despite the cataclysmic rows, the infidelities, the drunkenness and the violence, the Blackburns’ marriage had teetered on until Julia was thirteen, and she had to pick her way through its daily dramas, keeping her head low. Far from self-pitying, her account of it is often wry: on her father’s evening return from work “the two of them would start fighting almost immediately; there was a lot of groaning and wailing and crashing of crockery and furniture, and a lot of curiously choreographed movements, as if they were enacting an ancient dance”. It is debatable whether life improved for anyone on their parting. Thomas shacked up immediately with Peggy, who was kind and caring and lasted the long and stormy course, while Rosalie was now free to unleash her rampant sexual appetites on a series of men, who responded with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Julia was a pawn in the complicated games her mother played, the tension between mother and daughter growing as Rosalie swung between teasing out and denying Julia’s developing sexuality. She travelled around Europe in her mother’s slipstream, with perhaps the latest lover in tow, but otherwise – except on the occasions when her presence somehow furthered her parents’ varied and perverse agendas – she was largely neglected, and stumbled her way through adolescence in dazed confusion. It is little wonder that her account of these years, with their sordid seductions and casual liaisons, is curiously impersonal: Julia confesses to her therapist that she no longer knows who she is, and the devastating precision with which she writes of earlier years blurs on the page as her identity slowly falls apart.

Then comes the crunch: lodger number seven was an older and more sophisticated man called Geoffrey, and Rosalie pinned all hopes on him. Despite her frenzied efforts to keep him happy, their affair did not go as planned, however, and slowly he transferred his affections to Julia, thirty years his junior. When she began to suspect this, Rosalie became frantic with jealousy. And when, later, Julia and Geoffrey started an affair that eventually ended in tragedy, the die was cast: from that moment there was only bitterness and blame. As predicted, the daughter usurped her mother’s sexual supremacy, and neither forgiveness nor understanding was possible – until the very end of Rosalie’s life.

There is some comfort in this sorry tale, however: the eighth lodger, who arrived in the midst of all this brouhaha, was Herman, a man so kind and undemanding that Rosalie had no designs on him herself. His quietly sympathetic presence threaded through these turbulent years, and after a long absence he reappeared as Julia’s confidant while she became reconciled with her dying mother and broke free of her shadow. Reader, she married him.

Both Julia’s parents loathed their own fathers, and despite lengthy courses of psychotherapy, both were emotionally crippled by their relationship with their parents. There is no hatred or overt resentment in the author’s tone, however; instead, she adopts an almost forensic objectivity to detail the many humiliations – and worse – of her histrionic upbringing. Her story is an object lesson in how not to raise a child, yet from it all she somehow emerged a fine writer with a voice of sinewy intelligence. Unlike Blackburn’s other books, The Three of Us is too painful to read with unalloyed pleasure, but it is gripping, courageous and not easily forgotten.

Julia Blackburn
THE THREE OF US
A family story
313pp. Cape. £16.99.
978 0 224 08060 6
US: Pantheon. $26. 978 0 375 42474 8

Ariane Bankes is working on a book about Mamaine Koestler, and a new Aldeburgh Anthology to mark the opening of a music campus at Snape Maltings in 2009. She edits the Charleston Trust Friends’ magazine Canvas.

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