A Tiger's Wedding

by Isla Blair

  It was a scary thing falling in love with Julian. For as well as delight, he would bring me quite a lot of unsettling anxiety. We started living together in secret. I stayed every night in his studio flat at the top of a Victorian house in Fulham and beetled back to my flat in Kensington to change, shower and be there in case the phone rang and it was my parents. The uncertainty Julian brought me was my own insecurity. He was experienced and bright and he was married, for God’s sake, when I was still at primary school. I did unforgivable things – I steamed open Eileen’s letters to him that she had written from New York and I remember once jumping off a bus to follow her into Mary Quant’s shop – Bazaar – in Knightsbridge. Just to see her – her skin and hair, watch her blink and breathe – here was Eileen, Julian’s still-married-to-wife and I had turned into her stalker for five minutes. She was unaware of me, but I was in anguish, my insecurity not allowing me in any way to measure up to her. How could he want to be with me? I was quite pretty (a word I was beginning to despise, it felt so insipid somehow), but I was young and I was afraid of her. It didn’t occur to me that she could be alarmed by me. She has since become a friend; I admire her work hugely. She is very funny and she has shown generosity to my son and therefore to me.

  After two years of tears and fears, sun-wrapped days in France and in Deya, Majorca and drizzle-damp days in London, Julian asked me to marry him. He didn’t need to ask twice.

  Julian is impulsive, enthusiastic and passionate, he is funny and warm with a sense of honour that some could consider quaint. He is also without envy, he is genuinely pleased when friends, even rivals, do well – if someone gets a part he has been up for and he thinks they are better for the role, he will admit, and mean it, that they deserve it. He even lacks schadenfreude, which can be quite annoying when I’m having a good old bitch about someone. He is loyal and kind, but he can be fantastically tactless. This springs from a curious innocence – he sometimes doesn’t think before he blurts out a remark he occasionally lives to regret. But because his heart is warm, people forgive him and laugh with him. Julian is well known for playing villains, but he is soft really, open and honest. Tough, he might appear, but his vulnerability is childlike and it tugs at my heart.

  I remember in the first years we were together, I used to feel suffocated when we had to be apart; I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, and that hasn’t gone away. It was different from the choking feeling of the gundamulley bead in my throat that I experienced as a little girl. This was as if I couldn’t get enough air in; no amount of air was enough to fill the empty space in my chest. Yes, love makes you vulnerable and open to pain. Separations have become trying and frightening for both of us and we both dread, with silent, unspoken foreboding, the longest separation of all.

  Julian and I married in September 1968 and we were to honeymoon in Bermuda. Well, that was the plan but it didn’t turn out quite like that. The Friday before our wedding, on 27th September, the Registrar from Chelsea Register Office rang us and said, “So, you have changed your mind about marrying on Saturday.”

  “What do you mean we’ve changed our minds? No, we are flying to Bermuda on Sunday.”

  “I’m afraid not. There must be, by law, one clear day between your divorce and your remarriage. To marry on Saturday, your divorce should have been registered on Thursday.” On registering his divorce from Eileen, Julian thought one clear day meant 24 hours. However, the Registrar was persuaded by my father’s soft Scottish voice and, I think, a small handful of notes, to marry us on the Sunday. So we had a wedding lunch on the Saturday at San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place with close family and friends and then we went to our friends Miranda and Edward de Souza’s house in Barnes for a wedding reception. I wore my wedding ring, we cut the cake, toasts were made in champagne, Julian made a speech that made everyone cry – and we weren’t married at all. We had a secret private moment when we put the rings on each other’s fingers and vowed to love each other always. And we have. The reception was happy and sunny, the rain came out at the end of the day and caused rainbows – a tiger’s wedding on our wedding day. It seemed auspicious.

  Julian and Isla’s wedding

  We were officially married at Chelsea Register Office at 10.00 the following morning, Sunday, September 29th – my birthday. Very hung over. There was a very large sign with a pointing arrow to the “VD Clinic”. Not quite so auspicious. Our little wedding group is photographed looking remarkably cheerful, if a tad rough, bags under the eyes and hats askew. My beloved Mum and Dad are standing right behind me.

  Only Fiona was missing, but we were soon to join her in the sunshine as we honeymooned in Bermuda, where she and her husband Chris were living. Riding our mopeds, sailing, swimming, fighting our way through the red land crabs as we made our way to the beach each morning for our swim. At night we would listen to the tree frogs and felt distressed when we saw a lot of them squashed on the roads in the morning. I liked the tree frogs and their night music. One evening there was a plop in Julian’s wine glass and a tiny frog appeared, really tiny, the size of my thumbnail, but with huge eyes and suckers on his feet. We fished him out and deposited him at the foot of a tree. I don’t know if he was too pissed to clamber up it. The other frogs kept on singing.

  We saw a lot of Fiona and Chris and we had barbecues and beach parties and drank a lot of champagne and did quite a lot of the things you are expected to do on honeymoon. I found myself swimming through the turquoise ocean looking at my wedding ring through the water and marvelling that I was now Mrs Glover. I was married to Julian; I was no longer Isla Blair-Hill but Isla Glover. Suddenly I was part of a unit, I belonged, I was now more important to one other person than anyone else in his life. I was safe. I was home and I would never be lonely again.

  We returned to London, Julian to do a television play; I was to start rehearsals for Nora in “A Doll’s House”. I was feeling a bit odd. Not ill, just odd. I knew I couldn’t be pregnant. Julian had told me when we met that he was unable to have children. When he and Eileen had failed to have any, they were both tested for fertility to find out that Julian was unlikely to father a child. It must have been a blow to him. But when we married I felt I’d rather be with Julian and not have children than have a child with anyone else. I was young and had no yearning as yet for children. We had never used any contraception. I decided secretly that I should have a pregnancy test. I met Julian at the front door when he arrived back from rehearsal with, “Hello, Daddy.” I shall never forget the look on his face.

  I spent nine happy, utterly contented months before falling in love for the second time.

  TWENTY

  Oh, It’s You

  It was in the hot summer of 1969 at 12.50 pm on July 10th that I met him. This time I knew at once that my life would never be the same again, I would never be the same again, for in that moment, that hour, that day, I was reduced to a state of awe and panic, joy, fear and elation. Hot protectiveness flooded through me and love so intense, its fierceness frightened me. I knew that in its power I was capable of anything, of opening bolted doors, running through fire, I knew that it was even capable of killing me. I looked at the sleeping baby with skin like a white fleshed peach, smooth, with tiny white dots the size of pin pricks on his nose, a faint fuzz of blond hair on his round head – not misshapen by the drama and traumas of birth.

  He opened his eyes and I swear he peered steadily into my heart. I felt a stab of recognition and said, “Oh, it’s you.” For this was precisely the person I had been expecting. I had somehow known he was going to be a boy (no scans in those days) and I had called him Jamie for at least six months. And now, here he was, my Jamie. My source of anxiety that would last my life, this boy, my boy was here. I had the not uncommon primal urge that most mothers feel – that I would give up my life for his. I knew in that moment that I would passionately try to protect him from all harm if I could. I think I knew too that I would have to watch as he made his own mistakes, suffered hurts and slights and rejection. I knew
that part of my love for him was to give him the confidence and strength to be his own man, carve his own path, walk away. I thought of C. Day Lewis again: “Love is proved in the letting go.” Of course, I didn’t really think that at all. Well, not then. Those thoughts only came with convenient hindsight. In that very moment I was too overwhelmed with love to even face the possibility of being parted from him for an instant.

  Isla and Jamie

  Photograph by Frazer Wood

  I think I did know then, though, somewhere deep and far away, that just as I held him close he wasn’t really “mine” at all. He was his own person and part of my journey as his mother was to watch the struggles and challenges his journey had mapped out for him. As I gazed at him, it seemed impossible that one day he would go to school, that I would hand my precious boy into the hands of strangers. Of course, he could always come home and tell me of his triumphs and failures, his fears and forebodings and he knew I would take his part when the school bully lay in wait for him, when he wasn’t picked for the school cricket team… I would be utterly partial and partisan. And that thought took me right back to my parents and a surge of compassion for them, for I knew then how very much they had to give up, give away – when they let me go.

  My parents had been concerned when I first told them about Julian, ten years older, married but separated and unable to have children. When I declared, aged twenty-one, that I would rather be with Julian and without children, they must have wondered if I would regret my decision when I was forty-one. I daresay they were sad that I would never give them grandchildren and they must have talked and argued and comforted each other privately, but – after a long discussion one Sunday afternoon – they saw that I was serious and never questioned me on the subject again. They swallowed their doubts and disappointment and, much later, came to love and respect Julian. They were surprised and almost overwhelmed with delight when I told them they were to be grandparents. No-one prepares you for the falling in love that you have with your grandchild and I saw tears in my mother’s eyes as Jamie folded his tiny fingers round hers; I know he held a special place in their hearts always.

  Jamie’s primary school was round the corner from us and when the time came for him to go to secondary school, we faced a problem. The one in our catchment area had a terrible reputation and so we sent him to King’s College, Wimbledon, a very good school indeed, but not right for Jamie and he was wretched there. Of course, we took him away. We visited various schools and the one Jamie liked best – and we were equally impressed, mostly by the headmaster – was a coeducational, so–called “progressive” school near Farnham called Frensham Heights. But it would be impossible to do a daily commute to it and the thought of Jamie boarding was unthinkable to me. Admittedly it was only weekly boarding and weekends would be spent at home. Even so, the thought of being parted from him and him possibly being homesick or lonely was unbearable as, unlike me, he wouldn’t even have a Fiona to be his companion and protector.

  Jamie, however, longed to go there and Julian and I chatted it out over several days that ran into weeks. Eventually Julian said, “Who is this decision for, Isla? For Jamie or for you?”

  I felt as if I had been slapped. I was being utterly selfish. What was important was to find a school where Jamie would not only follow the curriculum but would grow in confidence, would find other interests, sport and music, and would learn to respect himself and his colleagues and also learn about self-discipline and understand how to work for exams, where he would gain friends and have some fun. Frensham Heights was perfect.

  Jamie aged 3

  He started in the autumn when he was eleven and I felt sick with grief as I waved him goodbye, handing my beloved boy into the hands of people I didn’t know, just as my parents had done all those years ago.

  As chance would have it, I was touring in a terrible production of a Keith Waterhouse play when Jamie was delivered to his new school. Julian was in Corfu, being the villain in a James Bond film, “For Your Eyes Only”. It was my parents who took Jamie there and saw him into his dormitory shared with five other boys. It must have been a painful déjà vu for them, unpacking the trunks with the name-taped towels and sheets and his school clothes all neatly folded, and waving him goodbye as their car sped away down the rhododendron-ed drive (rhododendrons again, as there had been at Kilbryde Castle), the blue Surrey hills in the distance the backdrop for his small blonde figure, standing erect, not letting his apprehension show. But, of course, they had seen his wide, round, dark-pupiled eyes, his slightly wobbly chin, as my mother kissed him and my father shook his hand and patted him gently on the shoulder. Jamie, at that age had a marked resemblance to me. Perhaps their little stab of pain was as much for their conker-haired daughter as it was for their vulnerable, strong but sensitive grandson.

  I made sure that I was at his school early on each Saturday morning to pick him up and to take him back on Sunday evenings. Weekends became sacrosanct, a time when it was just the three of us, with visits occasionally from Jamie’s friends, but a time when we would be together. He was never left at school and there was no play or concert, no cricket or football match that Julian or I did not attend. Being able to support and encourage Jamie became a matter of huge importance and there were jobs I turned down because it meant being away during the holidays or not being able to get back for his weekends. Not different from many working actors really. But I wonder if my need of Julian and Jamie, my need of our family unit, was not coloured by the absence of one when I was a child. I was aware that a protective love of Jamie could be stifling, so when he was accepted for drama school, aged only just eighteen, I remembered my parents allowing me to share a room in London aged only seventeen. They let me go and that was what I would have to do with Jamie. It felt right, it was time, it was his turn to “walk away” and discover the world for himself.

  * * * * *

  Fiona and I spent our early adulthood apart. I had been used to phoning her with a triumph, with a disappointment, with a rejection, with news of a new boyfriend or a new role. I enjoyed her tales of the hospital ward – pranks and jokes as well as the inevitable sadness that being a nurse brings, however hard they try to stay objective. It seemed strange at first phoning my parents with life’s daily occurrences. For so long they had not been party to joys or woes, but it took me less time than I could have imagined for it to become a daily routine and this persisted until each of their deaths 24 years apart.

  Fiona married a dark haired “man-of-the-sea” (so I called him), Chris, who had piercing blue eyes and a remarkable resemblance to Paul Newman. The first years of their marriage were spent in Bermuda, where she nursed and he was an officer in the marine police.

  When their first daughter, Joanna, was six weeks old, they travelled to Virgin Gorda, part of the British Virgin Islands which, in 1970, was a “virgin island” – no electricity, no running water and certainly no shops and no doctor. Chris went to fill the post of Harbour Master in the newly opened Little Dix Bay marina. Fiona spent much of her time alone with her new daughter, sometimes literally isolated when the rain washed away the road. She occasionally had misgivings about her pioneer spirit, in the same way our grandmother Sara had trepidations as she stepped out of the dhooli onto the jungle floor that was soon to make way for tea.

  I went to visit Fiona when Jamie was six and marvelled at her resilience as she batted away sand crabs and spiders the size of tea cups and steered her daughters (her second, Sara, was a small baby) away from poison apples and sea urchins. One day I had the misfortune to stand on one and the pain that shot up my leg took my breath away. Fiona came to find me and a distressed Jamie on the shore and bundled us into her little beach buggy and drove us to her house where she inquired if I needed a pee. She produced a bowl and urged me to try and I was in too much pain to argue. She placed my foot in the urine in the bowl – her nurse’s nous had told her that the acid in the urine would remove the urchin’s spines. It did. The strange things you learned as a
nurse on an almost desert island. As her children grew, she and Chris decided it was time to return to England for their education. There was never any question of boarding school, sending the girls “home”, or any separation. She was central to their lives as their friend, confidante and very much their mother.

  When the girls were on the point of leaving school, she returned to nursing. She had various exams to take to bring her up to speed with all the new techniques and approaches and worked in a hospital in Maldon near her home and spent several years on the geriatric wing. She became a ward sister and I know enriched the lives of those she helped and the nurses she encouraged. But as a ward sister she wasn’t doing much nursing – just long hours filling in forms or on the computer, responsible for her team, her patients and the ward. She loved her work, was fond of her colleagues and felt more than a little sad when she retired at 60. She now works as a volunteer in a hospice and derives as much pleasure from her grandchildren as I do from mine. She has remained my friend, my heroine really; what older sisters cannot know is that, in their younger sister, they have a fan for life. So it is with us.

  Fiona

  TWENTY-ONE

  Letting Go

  It was poignant for me that I should be playing Kate and singing “I Hate Men” at the Bristol Old Vic when my father became ill. The diagnosis did not take long – lung cancer. All those years of cigarette and pipe smoking in the Men’s Bar had finally caught up with him. He had given up the cigarettes years before in India, but he kept up the pipe on his return to England; he enjoyed the ritual of the cleaning, tobacco pouches, endless matches and finally the long, “cool” puff. I am sure it was far from cool and my mother complained that the smoke clung to the curtains in the drawing room. He was taken into hospital to have an operation to remove the offending cancer and one of his lungs. Once he was opened up, however, it was found that the tumour had spread and the removal of the lung was pointless. It was decided he should come home once he had recovered from the operation, have a short course of radiotherapy, but really to pray for a remission and to spend the summer months with us – my mother, Fiona and me.