The Safekeep, and the loneliness of inauthenticity

As it’s LGBT History month, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about The Safekeep, a novel set in post WW2 Holland that joins the noble enclave of extremely saucy WLW historic fiction (I’m looking at you, Sarah Waters). Alongside the aforementioned sauce, the novel touches on several much darker subjects, including grief, sexism, antisemitism and the impact of the War on the Jewish population, the unspoken secret of homosexuality, and midnight spoon-polishing (this is not a euphemism). Above all themes, this is a novel that goes deep into exploring loneliness, as lived by our spoon-polishing protagonist, Isabel.

As we join Isabel’s story, her loneliness is immediately palpable. She is physically isolated from others, the sole occupant of a house whose other inhabitants have now long departed (either through choice or death). In her day-to-day life, she has no regular company but her maid, Neelke. Her closest relationships are with her brothers, whom she sees infrequently, with varying degrees of emotional distance. She’s sort of dating a neighbour, Johan, but manages to avoid saying anything of her own life to him. While Isabel is undoubtedly epitomising the dictionary definition of loneliness, I’d argue that this isn’t solely about isolation: Isabel’s story also illustrates the particular sort of loneliness that inauthenticity brings. Her loneliness isn’t only being cut off from other people - she’s experiencing the additional loneliness of being cut off from herself.

Authenticity isn’t the easiest thing to come by, no matter our circumstances – we can all face barriers to being ourselves, not least in finding our own understanding of what that actually looks like to us. I find Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts helpful on this subject: she describes inhabiting authenticity as an ongoing process of self-creation, constructing a sense of self through the choices and actions we make. This definition takes the view that authenticity doesn’t lie in rediscovering some ‘essential’, factory-setting version of ourselves from the past, but rather that it’s something we actively build for ourselves in the present. So, authenticity isn’t just ‘who we are’, it’s what we do.

So, what does Isabel’s life look like on the authenticity front? When we first meet her, she is living in a house that she’s somewhat turned into a museum dedicated to her absent family, full of items that aren’t hers through either choice, inheritance, or gift. Even the clothes she wears and the way she styles her hair are taken from her mother’s instruction. The tight control she keeps on the house mirrors the tight control she keeps on herself, and she rages at anyone trying to draw her out just as much as she does anyone trying to take up space in the home. Holding this up against de Beauvoir’s checklist, Isabel isn’t doing too well: she’s stuck in a position of ‘choosing not to choose’, continuing to live the life her mother laid out for her instead of taking action to create her own.

Enter Eva. In Isabel’s eyes, Eva is openly herself, happy to express her wants and needs in a way that Isabel doesn’t dare. After only a few short months with Isabel’s brother Louis, Eva has re-decorated his flat, which Isabel hasn’t chosen to do in the house after years alone there. Upon arrival in the house, Eva takes the main bedroom, and puts her own things there – even fastening a photo of her own mother into the frame depicting Isabel’s. She invites Neelke to drink and chat with her, disrupting the dynamic despite Isabel’s insistence on maintaining a barrier of excruciatingly icy silence with the maid. Eva is making a very different choice to Isabel: she’s choosing not to accept only what’s given to her, but shaping space to fit her rather than moulding herself quietly into it.

Isabel is plainly infuriated by Eva, and deeply jealous of the way she moves through the world. From Isabel’s perspective, Eva differs from her because people find Eva likeable: ‘Isabel could imagine who Eva would have been in school: loud, happy, beloved […] the kind of person to have plenty of friends’ contrasts with Isabel’s experience of being isolated in childhood, enduring bullying and being labelled ‘weird and boring’ after the fallout with her short-lived friend Silke. In Isabel’s experience, being herself around others has meant rejection. Further to the rejection from her peers, Isabel witnessed their mother turning her back on her brother Hendrik after he came out, providing an even scarier example of what authenticity can lead to. Isabel seems to be avoiding acknowledging aspects of her she worries would attract disapproval, shutting down from herself and others. She resents Eva’s perceived ability to freely and fearlessly inhabit her own skin - the irony, of course, is that Eva is also concealing herself.

Through her relationship with Eva, and upon realising Eva’s secret, Isabel begins to shift her stance on authenticity. In accordance with the de Beauvoir model, she starts to make choices and actions that enable herself to emerge. She cuts her hair, decides what she wants to do with the items in the house, dumps Johan, pursues the inheritance of the house, and goes to find Eva (quite a lot of choosing and acting, tbf). She begins to ask for what she wants, acknowledging that she isn’t simply the ghost of her mother. Finally, she releases her hold – on the house, as well as on herself. Isabel has learned that her emotions, needs, and even her ‘weirdnesses’, can be accepted by others. She is no longer locked away, either from others or herself. 

The arc of Isabel’s relationship with authenticity isn’t an unfamiliar one, particularly in the context of queer experiences. Many of us can relate to the sense of self-policing, worrying about what would happen if people were to see what we were trying to hide. What’s interesting about this particular portrait is that we get an insight into how Isabel’s idea of the situation diverges from others’ reality. She feels Hendrik should never have acknowledged his sexuality and come out, but we see Hendrik’s happiness in his romantic relationship, and how he has built a fulfilling life for himself away from the stifling family home. Isabel sees Eva as free, unselfconscious, and fitting happily into the mould that Isabel could never assimilate into, but we see an Eva who is actually also contending with these same challenges. Like Isabel, we may strongly believe that hiding is the best option, or that other people don’t struggle with fears about being themselves, but maybe we’re not always correct. Yes, it can be very scary to open the door – but perhaps ultimately, it’s a lot less scary than staying stuck in the house.