Futh and his mother

Futh’s relationship with his mother is shaped by an intense attachment that survives her departure as sensory memory, unanswered questions, and a small silver perfume case. Her leaving is not presented as a clean break: before it, he watches signs of her preparation without understanding them; after it, he longs for her to be spoken of even as those conversations hurt. The bond persists in the scents of violets, oranges, leather, and camphor, which return her to him more forcefully than any explanation does.

Attachment and the signs of departure

As a child, Futh sought refuge in his mother’s wardrobe, making a nest among shoes and sitting in its dark interior beneath her woollen skirts. Its smells—leather, secret cigarette smoke, and the camphor of summer mothballs—formed an intimate, bodily idea of her presence. He imagined that this combination might be bottled as “Essence of Mother”; the actual perfume associated with her offered violets and oranges instead.

From inside that hiding place, Futh overheard his parents arguing. He later saw his mother standing beside an open suitcase on the bed. After she zipped it and put it away beneath the bed, he pulled it out and found it brightly coloured and packed with clothes, shoes, and toiletries. The creases in the clothes suggested that they had been taken from the wardrobe rather than packed for the first time. To Futh, the suitcase looked ready for a quick escape, though he could not yet know what it meant.

The perfume and a brief intimacy

The silver lighthouse case connects Futh’s mother to a family object that had been entrusted to Futh’s father for return to Ernst. Outside Ernst’s house, however, Futh’s father handed it to her. She admired the case and vial, approved of the scent, and put the perfume on her wrists and throat. The car filled with violets. For Futh, the object thus becomes more than a keepsake: it holds a specific moment when his mother wore the scent and the family was still together.

That closeness exists alongside emotional distance. During the Cornwall holiday, Futh wandered back to his parents carrying the lighthouse and its stoppered vial. His mother lay with her eyes closed in the sun while his father looked out to sea. After his father remarked on the foghorn, she told Futh how much he bored her. The episode sets the tenderness of the perfume memory against a direct dismissal from the person whose attention he longs for.

Departure and its aftermath

On the journey home from Cornwall, Futh recognized that his mother was leaving the family. He wished the train would slow or never stop, and hoped she would keep sleeping while his father remained away in the buffet car. At the same time, the details of the journey fixed the coming separation in his senses: the perfume case with its broken vial was in his pocket, his hands and boots smelled of violets, and his mother, asleep against the dirty window, smelled of the orange she had eaten. Years later, when he worked in the manufacture of artificial odours, octyl acetate made him feel sad.

Her departure left no address. She had said she was going home, meaning New York, thousands of miles away; only afterward did Futh realize that he had no way to contact her. In the kitchen he found only the beginning of a shopping list, written in her nearly flat handwriting and impossible to decipher. The absence of an address made the separation more than a journey away: it left him with no route by which to follow or reach her.

Futh’s mother had already been gone for almost a year when he and his father took a holiday together. He longed for someone to mention her, hoping the words would lift his heart, but when she was discussed she was invariably spoiled in some way, and he wished the subject had been left alone. Her absence therefore governs both what he wants to hear and what he cannot bear to hear. During the night she left, he woke to see her round face above him, moonlit through a gap in the curtains. After she went downstairs, he was alone with the smell of violets and the sound of her footsteps. By breakfast she was gone, and his father was already drunk.

Erasure, memory, and recurrence

After she left, Futh’s father burned what she had not taken: books, framed photographs, pictures, folders from her Open University work, her pin board and lists, furniture, clothes, curtain material, and even her and Futh’s walking boots. He pulled up the plants she had put in the garden, then cleaned the house until disinfectant replaced the traces of her presence. The effort at erasure was not complete. Futh kept books hidden beneath his mattress and continued to carry the silver lighthouse with him.

The mother he carries forward is therefore both a person who left and a collection of material traces that others could destroy, conceal, or preserve. On the ferry, the memory of her departure returns as a raw, bleeding feeling. Later, while hiding in Ester’s bathroom, Futh smells camphor from a bottle and is carried back to the wardrobe’s darkness. The sensation is described as wrenching him through time: the earlier smell of his mother’s private space briefly overwhelms the present. In this recurrence, the relationship’s defining pattern becomes clear. Futh cannot recover his mother or obtain an explanation from her, but objects and odors repeatedly restore the physical force of her absence.