Separate Beds (49 page)

The loss of a loved job must be one. It is well known that unemployment can often have devastating effects on the psyche and on physical health. Not only that, it has an enormous impact on those who live with someone who is literally in a state of bereavement, mourning the loss of their job. Another theme explores the relationships between parents and their now adult children and, yet another, the deep pleasures and tendernesses of love reborn and renegotiated.

3) In
Separate Beds,
four generations of the nicholson family come together to live in the same house, a situation which is becoming increasingly common as people have children later and the elderly live longer. How does this new set-up affect the bonds between the family in the book?

Historically, families have often had to exist hugger-mugger. For our generation, it is a new idea – a real shift which involves re-thinking notions of independence and, on an emotional level, tackling the claustrophobia and irritations of close-knit living. In
Separate Beds
, the baby is always waking somebody up at night. Tom’s mother levies a series of demands on the already hard-pressed Annie. Tom has nowhere to hide his humiliation and despair. Emily longs to get out. Yet, despite all these individual anguishes, something begins to happen. The family is a crucible, and new and unexpected chemistry between its members is triggered.

4) Tom is devastated when he loses his job, and struggles with redundancy, whilst Jake is desperately looking for ways to revive his ailing business. Did you make a conscious decision for this to affect the men rather than the women in the family? What impact does it have on them as individuals and the family as a whole?

I didn’t start out to make it a male–female division but, after thinking about it, I felt that making Annie (already quite senior at her workplace) the main breadwinner would put her on a new trajectory, and in Emily’s case having to face the work treadmill was also important. (I also couldn’t resist poking a little fun at the writer, which was really poking a little fun at myself!) But, actually, I was not making any comments about work patterns with regard to the sexes – I think as a society we have established that women work too – but I was interested to explore how a proud man like Tom would deal with his situation and how a gentle dreamer like Jake would face up to the new reality.

5) The loss or disappearance of a child is every parent’s worst nightmare. In
Separate Beds,
annie and tom’s daughter mia makes a conscious decision to walk out of her family’s life. Why did you decide to have her leave in this way and what impact does it have on the family?

In one sense, families are extremely complex. In another, they are quite primitive and tribal. There has been some fascinating work on the ways families can hide, and tolerate, bad behaviour and of how they (unconsciously) assign roles to members. What they are less successful at doing is accommodating members of the family who turn out to be quite different – and I don’t mean learning to flamenco dance while the others stick to a soft-shoe shuffle. Mia decides to be different both politically and in the manner of how she chooses to live. In doing so, she not only clashes bitterly with her father in particular but also exposes his double-thinking. Fictionally speaking, this is a gold mine.

6) As the title suggests, when the novel begins annie and tom are sleeping in separate bedrooms. Some couples claim they have a happier, healthier relationship if they sleep or even live separately. Do you think this can ever be true?

I suppose it must be! Personally, I would hate to be in a separate room or bed from my partner. Think of never being able to say, ‘I think I heard a noise’ to the other half and expecting them to deal with it.

7) Reviewers often comment that you write very perceptively about marriage and relationships. What draws you to revisit this subject?

Simple. All human life is there and that is the novelist’s business.

8) You used to be a copywriter and an editor – what prompted you to make the switch to the other side of the fence and become an author?

It was a cunning plan. One of the tricks in life is to decide whether you are an early flowerer or a late bloomer. I was emphatically the latter so I knew I had to wait before I put pen to paper. While I was waiting I decided to sit at the feet of the throne, so to speak, and what better than to work in publishing where I would learn the business of producing a book? Anyway, there is enormous fun and pleasure to be derived from being both a poacher and a gamekeeper. (I would say that, I suppose, because I’m a Gemini.) I have never regretted my years in publishing. I look on them as the antechamber.