Departure and abandonment

Departure and abandonment are recurring conditions of intimacy in the novel: people leave, others are left to interpret the silence, and the remaining connection often survives as an object, a smell, or an unfinished act. Futh’s mother’s departure gives this pattern its formative shape. Later separations, including his own marriage and his expulsion from the Hellhaus Hotel, echo its unequal balance of agency: one person goes, while another waits, hesitates, or discovers the meaning only after the moment has passed.

The First Disappearance

Futh’s earliest experience of abandonment begins with an intimate presence that vanishes before morning. He wakes to find his mother beside him, her face lit by moonlight; after she leaves the room, he is alone with the smell of violets and the sound of her footsteps descending the stairs. By breakfast she is gone. The sequence makes departure both physical and sensory: the footsteps recede, but the scent remains as evidence of the person who has left.

The absence changes the conditions of Futh’s childhood. Before his mother leaves, his father has never hit him; afterwards, the blows arrive without warning, like birds striking windows. Futh tries to stay out of his father’s way and sometimes sits on the climbing frame until the dark obscures the ground. He feels safe outside, yet can still see the bright kitchen window. The image holds together distance and attachment: he removes himself from danger without ceasing to orient himself toward the house.

Futh’s later memories make clear how much attention he gives to signs that his mother might leave. Hidden in her wardrobe, among unworn shoes and the hems of wool skirts, he finds shelter in leather, cigarette smoke, and summer camphor. He hears his parents arguing, then watches his mother close a suitcase and push it beneath the bed. Its bright, garish appearance and packed clothes, shoes, and toiletries tell him it is ready for a quick departure. The child’s refuge is thus also a place from which he observes the possibility of being abandoned.

Cornwall: The Departure Becomes Visible

The holiday in Cornwall turns the possibility into a scene Futh can neither prevent nor forget. His mother wears perfume from the silver lighthouse case, and the car fills with violets after she puts the scent on her wrists and throat. On the cliffs, amid his father’s talk of the foghorn, she tells Futh’s father that he bores her. Later she says she is going home. Futh notices redness on her cheek, while his own palm is cut and the broken vial leaves perfume in the wound. The scene binds family conflict to a damaged object and to bodily pain, without making the child able to intervene.

On the walk back, Futh hears his father ask what will happen to him and sees his mother shrug. They take the train home that afternoon. She offers Futh an orange, then falls asleep against the window; he understands that she will leave when the journey ends and wants the train to keep moving, delaying the return rather than stopping it. The perfume case, still in his pocket, contains the broken vial. His unwashed hands and boots smell of violets, while his mother carries the scent of the orange she has eaten. Years later, the artificial fragrance octyl acetate will make him sad, extending the memory beyond the original journey.

The next morning, the departure becomes unmistakable. Futh recognizes his mother’s pink dress from his parents’ honeymoon photographs as her going-away dress, and sees the packed suitcase beside the back door. His father is still upstairs. His mother kisses him, takes the suitcase, and leaves so quickly that the coffee she has left in the kitchen is still warm when Futh picks up the cup. The warmth does not soften the absence; it makes the ordinary room register the suddenness of her exit.

The Afterlife of Leaving

The mother’s departure persists in Futh not only as recollection but as a sensory pattern. The wardrobe’s leather, secret cigarette smoke, and camphor form an imagined “Essence of Mother,” distinct from the violets and oranges he actually associates with her. Much later, while hidden in Ester’s bathroom, he opens a bottle and smells camphor; the scent carries him back to that wardrobe. A smell can therefore bring the absent mother close without restoring the relationship or changing what happened.

Cigarette smoke also links this childhood memory to Futh’s adult marriage. When Angela comes to bed smelling of smoke, he thinks of his mother but knows better than to say so. He understands that Angela associates the smell with Kenny. The same sensory cue belongs to different intimate histories, exposing a connection Futh keeps unspoken rather than resolving it. In this way, departure recurs as more than the act of going away: it shapes what can be said between people who remain together, or who have already begun to separate.

Separation, Return, and Exclusion

Angela is the one who proposes that she and Futh separate, after Kenny’s visit and as Christmas approaches. Futh is astonished, but later recalls her eye-rolling and sighs and recognizes signs he had missed. The separation is agreed upon, yet he does not move out for months. Angela finds him a flat, packs his belongings, and arranges the removal firm. Unlike his mother’s abrupt exit, this departure is prolonged and practically organized by the person who is leaving the shared home; Futh’s delay does not reverse the decision, and Angela completes the arrangements for him.

The loss of their baby complicates Futh’s account of the marriage’s end. When his father and Gloria ask about the baby, he says they lost it, then reflects that the phrasing seems to imply culpability, like a ship lost because it failed to withstand a disaster. The thought gives abandonment and separation a wider vocabulary of loss, while leaving responsibility unsettled. Futh’s hesitation over the word does not make the separation less real; it shows how difficult he finds it to describe what has been lost without assigning blame.

Departure also shapes the divided space of the Hellhaus Hotel. Futh arrives late, carrying a wheeled suitcase, while Ester has waited for him; she brings his supper upstairs, and the hotel’s private door separates guest rooms from the rooms she shares with Bernard. Bernard sees Ester hurrying out of Futh’s room and then sees Futh in the doorway. The next morning, after noticing Ester’s bruise, Futh asks about breakfast, but Bernard tells him to go. Futh does not understand the German and cannot make sense of the order; after trying again, he gives up and packs. The sequence turns the hotel’s boundary into an abrupt exclusion: a paying guest is told to leave without receiving an explanation he can understand.

Ester’s memory of her own mother offers a contrasting direction of departure. During a visit, the two walk to the ferry point and have coffee and cake near the train station. Ester tells funny stories, and her mother urges her to come home. The request makes return imaginable even as it marks Ester’s distance from home. Across these episodes, leaving is never a single, stable meaning: it can be a child’s sudden abandonment, a spouse’s drawn-out separation, a hotel’s unexplained expulsion, or an invitation to return. What endures is the unevenness between the person who departs and the person left to read the signs.