Annette Byford is a longstanding Welldoing therapist and author of two non-fiction books relating to family relationships. For these she spoke to a range of individuals about their family dynamics, and the ties and fractures that can occur over the years. But nothing in either Once a Mother Always a Mother or A Wedding in the Family prepared me for Byford’s first novel A Dance of Mirrors.
Byford is originally from Germany but has lived in Southern England for decades. In recent years her mother has died, and she has written here about how she had started first to write about her mother’s life, not thinking that anyone other than close relatives might be interested. But, inspired by the times in which her mother had lived, and her mother’s romantic entanglements, she found she was writing a book, which was published first in Germany, and now in the UK.
At the centre of the novel, which she describes as auto fiction, is Byford’s imagining of her young mother’s quotidian life and fantasies in the years following the Second World War. As she writes “No German person can be at ease with themselves at this time.” Bomb blasted cities, displaced people of all ages, dreary work in grey offices, there was little respite for a young woman whose cinema-fed dreams were of passionate love rather than following the safe, prescribed road to marriage and children.
Byford’s mother is long-engaged to a doctor who never joined the Nazi party, worked as a medic in the war, but is then forced to practice in a hospital far from her. Lonely, sad, but aware of her sexual capital, the fetching young woman in her 20s starts an illicit affair with her much older boss, who is married with four children.
Sitting alongside the 1950s affair and its dramatic but long-secret outcome, is the modern-day, British-based psychotherapist’s daily routines and imaginings. Widowed with grown children and grandchildren, she is happy and proud of her professional life. But, like her mother, she finds herself drawn to someone unsuitable, a young woman who plays in an orchestra, one of her therapy clients. The struggle with these feelings is only ended when the therapy is complete and “like a drinker emptying bottles into the drain, I put her file away funder “past patients”. I block her Instagram account. I delete her number and email address on my phone.”
This fictional attraction contrasts with the real coupling of Byford’s mother and her boss. Her decision to keep the affair secret from the doctor whom she married mirrored, writes Byford, “what was going on around them after the way. There was a whole nation unable to talk about something that had happened at their hands… They settled for a version which had a few monsters and millions of relatively innocent followers.”
As she concludes, “My mother kept this secret and enforced the silence about it. She did not want to see it, and she did not want to hear it. Maybe she could not.
“Germany, my pale mother, with your secret and your shame and your long-lasting inability to talk about it. I look at you in those years, across the sea from the shores of a different country, after a long life, and I feel like weeping for us both.”
We have not chosen a book like this as a Welldoing recommendation before, but its psychological depth convinced us. The balance of the historical and modern stories is so well achieved, and for anyone interested in therapy, getting inside a therapist’s head is intriguing.
