Beginning again: Chris Womersley, ‘The Diplomat’

Chris Womersley’s latest novel, The Diplomat (Picador, 2022) is a superbly written but gut-wrenching tale. As the cover blurb says, ‘Shot through with grief and dark comedy, The Diplomat is a powerful story of love and recovery—and a stark evocation of the fine line between self-destruction and redemption.’
It is a story of grief, remorse and guilt, amidst a profound search for simple meaning within relationships that ought to mean something…

Edward Desgraves returns to Melbourne after years of living in London, a recovering drug addict, artist who has never quite made it, and with him the ashes of his beloved wife Gertrude. He returns to begin again, but pays one last visit to the hotel The Diplomat, scene of many a drug deal, as a final step towards a new life, though he hasn’t any idea what that new life will be. All his previous connections are lost, and in any case his advisors warned against returning to them.
The narrative covers just a couple of days in Edward’s new situation, though returns several times to his life with Gertrude, with whom he had engaged in various kinds of art fraud. Now, he leaves all that behind.

At one critical point, he visits his father and brother. This visit is poignant with the yearning for relationship, love, across a chasm of unknowing. Gertrude had written often to Edward’s dad, who had kept all the letters, filled with false accounts of their successful life and careers in Britain. In this first visit, Edward is unable even to tell his Dad that Gertrude has died. Yet there are some wonderful moments of understanding, or recognition. Edward does some tidying of the flat and washing up, both to assist his dad but also as a powerful acting out of his deep need to make things better. I found this chapter especially poignant, at several critical moments.

‘I always liked that one.’
It was my dad, who’d shuffled into the kitchen in his slippers without my noticing and was behind me, admiring my old painting (which was on the wall).
‘Thanks, Dad.’
He stood there at my shoulder, obviously fishing about for something suitable to say. My dad wasn’t into art and certainly didn’t have much of a clue about the language people used to discuss it. He liked the races, Richmond Footy Club, Wheel of Fortune. He could talk about the ins and outs of those things until the cows came home. But art was a mystery to him—as it was supposed to be.

‘You did the dishes?’ he said, in a tone better suited to my having completed a space mission.
‘Yeah. Thought the place needed a bit of a clean.’
‘You’re a good lad.’
We stood there in awkward silence.

A little later they returned to the subject of that one painting of Edward’s in the home, and with it the father’s memory of him as a boy, always drawing something. A sudden realisation of affection occurs, as it comes to Edward that his dad had thought deeply about that painting. ‘I was filled, quite suddenly, with fondness for my old man. He was not a wise man, but he was kind—which is perhaps a natural sort of wisdom. He had tried, at least, and although he had never given me any advice, he’d always been around, always been dependable in his quiet way.’

They then speak of how the older man is coping without Edward’s mother, who had died almost a decade earlier. The subject is almost brushed off, but then another sudden insight occurs.

‘How are you going here, Dad? Without Mum, I mean.’
‘Oh, that. Well. Yes. Goodness. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?’
He looked down at his frayed tartan slippers. My dad was sixty-three years old, almost totally bald on top of his head. It made him seem frail and babyish. As far as I knew, he’d never had another woman in the years since Mum died.
‘I still miss her sometimes, you know,’ he said. ‘It was hard for a while, but life goes on for the rest of us, doesn’t it? Either the pain gets less or you get used to it. …
It’s hard to think of a person being gone, isn’t it. They say that people die twice. There’s the death, of course, when they leave the world of the living—and then there’s the time when nobody talks about them anymore, no one speaks their name. And then they’re gone for good. Forever, you know? So we have a chat now and then. Or I chat, Thinking out loud, you know. Neighbours probably think I’m barmy, but I don’t care. Say her name. Lilly, this, Lilly that. I ask her things. Advice. Which horse to punt on, what to have for dinner, this kind of thing. She always had strong opinions, didn’t she, eh? Kind of brings her back to life…’

Edward then reflected on his estimation of his father. He knew it had cost his father a lot to be so open with him. He’d never really admired or wanted to be like his father; if anything, the opposite. His vision of the good society was to be found in other places and activities: art, politics, literature. Except now he wondered if any of that had actually given him life. And with that thought came the recognition that he ‘had not clue about my dad’s inner emotional landscape’. He did not know his father. We only know the life of a person we see and talk about, but there is another existence, the life that goes on inside that person’s head and maybe the two lives don’t resemble each other much at all. As they continue, Edward’s father offered one more pearl of real wisdom:

‘You think your suffering is special because it happens to you,’ my dad went on, ‘but it’s not. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s just life and death and everything in-between. People die. No point arguing about it forever, is there? You got to carry on. Be thankful you had them with you for a while. Anyway, I know you don’t believe it, but I reckon I’ll see your mother on the other side. And then we’ll be together again forever.’

As usual, I was mildly taken aback by my dad’s profession of faith. It seemed at odds, with his love of punting and beer, but there it was. And although he was right about my scepticism of organised religion, he was wrong about my belief in an afterlife. There had always been a part of me that maintained a childish awe of death; like him, I imagined my mother bustling about in some ill-defined afterlife with a tea towel scrunched up in one hand. The people we loved lived on somewhere. How on earth could we cope with their deaths otherwise?
I patted him on the shoulder. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around in the past few years, but I’m back now.’
‘That’s great. Good.’

It has been worth offering so much quotation, as the story and the insights are so compactly presented in this novel. There is so much more to it, but this part of it struck me profoundly. How many generations of us have grown to adulthood, imagining that our parents had little or no knowledge of us and our world? It is true, many of us have been educated out of our homes, our families and communities of origin. We have so little to talk about, with those who stayed in the old home town or suburb. I remember the profound alienation and sadness of trying to go ‘home’ and realising that it was essentially the daily routines and activities that created the relationships of school and town life. What else was there to it, when these were gone? In my case, my parents had no idea at all what my life was like at University, though they were somehow pleased that I went there. And as for going overseas …

Yet, two things remain with me as I reflect on this novel. First, that there are relationships that remain, through the differences of time and changes in life and circumstance. My experience is that these relationships have this feature in contrast to those that do not remain: for each person there is the freedom to change and grow. When returning from years overseas, we found there were those who expected us now to slot back in to where we used to be. That didn’t last. But there were those who knew we had changed, grown, travelled, experienced things, as they too had changed, grown and experienced things—and all that was stuff to talk about, together.
Just a hint of that freedom to be someone different from what we might have imagined is evident to Edward, in this story. He discovers his father as he has never known him, never allowed him to be, perhaps—a man of reflection and insight into human suffering. And I just love the comment on kindness: ‘He was not a wise man, but he was kind.’

Then, too, there is wisdom in that comment about suffering. Many people do in fact think their suffering is ‘special’. They want it to be. Somehow it makes things easier to bear. But as Edward’s father says, we all have to live with whatever is our situation: living and dying, and we all have to find a way to live with it, not avoiding it, not pretending that we alone are the ones who struggle. For it is in this acceptance, that we are all human, all mortal, all frail and yet also all touched with capacity, different talents and possibilities, and also all feeling less than we might hope to be—the acceptance of all this brings us together, and allows us indeed to be a little bit kind, to others, and to ourselves.

What Edward does with his pain and grief, and his chance at a new beginning, is beyond The Diplomat hotel. The novel invites us all into this compassion and this life, together.