I could not understand the attraction. Jasmine was sweet-natured, gentle, generous and half-Chinese. Her waist-length hair was black and lustrous, her skin golden, her features childlike and enchanting. Teddy was middle-aged, had mean little eyes, scant hair, an undersized chin, an oversized stomach and a self-conceit that seemed entirely unfounded. To see him treating Jasmine with a careless assurance that seemed to take her devotion for granted made us furious. We did everything we could think of to release her from the spell that made her blind to his ass’s head – lecturing her as mentioned above, telling her that Teddy was a boring and pompous bastard, introducing her to nicer, more attractive men – but she remained enamoured.
Sarah, who owned the house in Paradise Row, and to whom Jasmine and I paid rent, had her own theory about this.
‘Jazzy sees her father twice a year. He kisses her politely, gives her an inscrutable smile and a cheque and asks her to call him a cab. Ergo, she’s looking for a father substitute.’
On the sole occasion Jasmine’s father and I had met, he had shaken my hand and told me that Communism had been the end of civilization as far as China was concerned. Then he had whipped a book from his pocket and removed himself to the far end of the room to read. He held some diplomatic post at the embassy in Paris. It did not seem to me a position for which he was particularly well suited.
‘But would you say that Teddy was exactly an ideal father figure? Having an affair with a girl half his age would seem to me to disqualify him from the start.’
‘Don’t be so literal, you fathead!’ Sarah was a forthright girl, a barrister-in-training. She enjoyed polemic. ‘Jazzy doesn’t want a bloke smelling of pipe tobacco with slippers and a woolly waistcoat. She’s looking for an authority figure to lead her through the maze of life and instruct her in every instance, including sex. Surely you know that all little girls have powerful sexual feelings about their fathers?’
I looked at Sarah’s round brown eyes in her round face, framed by straight brown hair.
‘I can say with absolute certainty that I never did.’
‘You’re afraid to admit it to yourself, that’s all.’
‘Afraid would be the word, all right.’
‘Anyway,’ Sarah continued with energy, ‘Jazzy’s still in many ways a child. She doesn’t understand cause and effect. She refuses to take responsibility for her actions. Like a baby, she simply responds to the most pressing physical need.’
‘I still don’t see why that makes the repulsive, chinless, paunchy Teddy—’
‘What a dunce you are! There’s nothing special about Teddy except his age and his unavailability. She has to struggle to engage his attention. That feels familiar, therefore comforting. Those of us who’ve had reasonable relationships with our fathers can move on from there to seek men who satisfy our grown-up emotional and intellectual needs as equals.’
‘So far we don’t seem to have had much success.’
It was true that there were men of all kinds turning up on the front doorstep of Number 22 to take us severally out to lunch, dinner, the theatre, the cinema, exhibitions, home to meet their mothers, and sometimes to bed. But neither of us had so far met anyone who met all our requirements for more than a few months. Sarah had had a string of lawyer boyfriends who were unsatisfactory because they much preferred sex to arguing. My boyfriends tended to be artistic and unsatisfactory because they were self-absorbed, neurotic, unreliable, and always borrowing money. Once I had got as far as announcing an engagement in The Times before I came to my senses and called it off. The unpleasantness this engendered and my own deep regret for causing pain had put me off such conventional behaviour for good. After the tremors had ebbed I decided that if I met someone I wanted to marry I would do it at once and without more ceremony than the register office provided. No one had so far tempted me to put this plan into action.
None the less, it would be true to say that my life was continuing satisfactorily until one morning not long after the above conversation – 22 April 1978, to be precise – a telephone call from my father had come as a rude blast shattering the idyll.
TWO
‘It’s your mother. Broken her hip. You’d better come at once.’
‘Poor thing! Is she in pain? How did it happen?’
‘Fell down the library steps. Her own fault for frittering her life away with those damned stupid fairy tales.’
There was triumph in my father’s voice. His reading matter was confined to the Trout and Salmon Monthly and the Shooting Times. He considered a taste for fiction evidence of bohemian depravity.
‘I suppose it could have happened anywhere.’
‘Stop arguing, Roberta! Your mother needs you. I’ll tell Brough to meet the twelve-fifteen.’
Brough was valet, butler, gardener, handyman and driver. Due to a childhood illness that had resulted in a humped back, he was a tiny man, much shorter even than my father. Though he sat on several cushions, his view from behind the wheel of our Austin Princess was largely sky. My father regularly deducted the repair of wings, bumpers and headlamps from his wages, then lent him a subsistence to prevent him from starving. After twenty years of service, Brough was several thousand pounds in debt to my father. Because of this he seemed to feel he had no choice but to do my father’s bidding, however unreasonable the task and the hour, and to put up with any amount of calumny in the process. Understandably Brough was a morose man, given to violent outbursts of temper when out of earshot of my father.
‘I’ll get a taxi from the station.’
‘This is not the time to start throwing money about when I’ve the fruits of your mother’s confounded carelessness to pay for. That damned clinic charges the earth.’ Nor were reports of the general standards of hygiene of the Cutham Down Nursing Home encouraging. But my father presumably thought it was worth paying for a superior sort of dirt.
‘I’ll come tomorrow on the ten-fifteen.’
‘You’ll come today, my girl, or I’ll know the reason why!’
There followed an unpleasant exchange which bordered on a row. A compromise was reached and I went down to Sussex late that afternoon.
‘How are you, Mummy?’
A temporary bedroom had been made of the morning room, ill chosen as such for it faced due north and was perpetually in shade.
My mother opened her eyes and sighed. ‘Terrible. Can’t sleep.’
‘Were they kind to you in the nursing home?’
‘They were harridans.’ Her voice was alarmingly weak but she managed to get a little emphasis on the last word. ‘Ill mannered. Coarse and stupid. Like being nursed by a gang of Irish road-menders.’
‘What a good thing you were able to come home early.’
‘They said I ought to stay in at least until the stitches were taken out. But your father insisted on my being discharged. It’s ninety pounds a day.’
Her skin was lined and greyish. Her gooseberry-green eyes were reproachful and her mouth quivered with resentment.
‘Poor Mummy.’ I bent to kiss her and stroke her once pretty, fair hair from her forehead. ‘Does it hurt very much?’
‘Don’t pull me about.’ She jerked her head away. ‘You know how I hate it. It’s perfect agony, if you want to know.’
I looked around the sickroom, noticing that the grey and white-striped paper was beginning to peel at the cornice, that the Turkey carpet had a hole in it and the bed on which my mother lay was propped up at one corner by a stack of books.
‘This is such a dismal room.’ I put an extra brightness into my voice to compensate. ‘We must see what we can do to cheer it up. I’ve brought you some flowers.’
She looked at the bunch of exquisite pink and green-striped parrot tulips I held out, then turned her eyes away. ‘I prefer to see flowers growing out of doors where Nature intended them.’
My eye travelled through the window to where Brough was hacking with uncontrolled fury at some spotted laurels, growing in a landscape of dank shrubbery an
d sour grass.
‘I’ve brought you some chocolate. Walnut whips. Your favourite.’
My mother closed her eyes and screwed up her face. ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been ill. In the state I’m in, rich food is simply poison.’
‘I’ve also brought the latest Jeanette Dickinson-Scott.’
‘I expect I’ve already read it.’ Her eyes opened. ‘What’s it called?’
I looked at the cover on which was a painting of a Regency belle in a low-cut purple dress, with powdered hair and a loo mask. ‘Amazon in Lace.’
‘Who’s in it?’
I flicked through the pages. ‘Someone called Lady Araminta. And her guardian Lord Willoughby Savage. He’s got sardonic eyebrows, long sensitive fingers and a jagged cicatrice from cheekbone to—’
‘You may as well give it to me.’ My mother’s hand appeared from beneath the bed cover. When I looked in, half an hour later, she was reading hard and sucking the top of a walnut whip.
After that the days had crawled by at an invalid pace. There was plenty to do but only things of a most unrewarding kind. Cutham Down, once a village, now a small town, was in a part of Sussex that had a micro-climate of bitter east winds and exceptionally high rainfall. After my maternal great-grandfather had amassed a fortune bottling things in vinegar – ‘Pickford’s Pickles Perfectly Preserved’ was the slogan – he had sold the factory and applied himself to the serious business of becoming a country squire. In the 1880s Cutham Hall had been a pleasing two-storey Georgian house with a separate stable block set in the middle of forty acres. This had not been grand enough to suit my great-grandfather’s newly acquired notions of self-consequence so he had added a top storey and thrown out two wings, at once destroying the elegant façade and making the house unmanageably large.
Cutham Hall had ten bedrooms, most of which had not been slept in for decades, and a number of badly furnished rooms downstairs in which no one ever sat. My father lived in what he called his ‘library’, a room of mean proportions which housed the remains of the various hobbies that he had run through. There were drawers of butterflies and beetles pinned on to boards. There was a sad red squirrel with a crooked tail, his first and only attempt at taxidermy. In a cupboard were his guns and fishing rods. On the walls were photographs of meets at Cutham Hall from the period when he had been enthusiastic about hunting. No books, of course. He was really only interested in amusements that involved killing things.
Oliver and I spent most of our time in the kitchen where there was an ancient lumpy sofa by the Aga and a television, ostensibly ‘for the servants’. We had no indoor servants unless Mrs Treadgold, our daily, counted as one. She had a twenty-eight-inch colour television in her tidy, warm, watertight bungalow and would have scorned to watch anything on our tiny flickering black-and-white set with its bent coat-hanger aerial.
For about three days after my return home, Mrs Treadgold and I diligently dusted and vacuumed the ancestral acres of mahogany and carpet. I could tell by the quantities of cobwebs and dead flies that they were unaccustomed to so much attention. Then, by tacit agreement, exhausted by labour that was as dreary as it was pointless, we closed the doors on the unused rooms and allowed them to sleep peacefully on beneath a fresh film of dust. I took over the cooking and shopping while Mrs Treadgold cleaned the few rooms we lived in. Between us we looked after my mother.
My chief duty was to keep her supplied with books and, as she read all day and half the night, I was constantly on the road between our house and the four libraries in the county to which she was a subscriber. Her taste was for romantic fiction. I had my name down for every novel that had the words ‘love’, ‘heart’, ‘kiss’, ‘bride’, ‘sweet’ or ‘surrender’ in the title.
‘I’ve read this,’ my mother said during the second week of my servitude, casting my latest offering aside. ‘Don’t you remember? You got it out last week.’
‘Can’t you read it again?’
‘I know what happens in the end.’
‘Of course you do. The handsome titled hero subdues the heroine’s pride and spirit until she loves him so much she’s prepared to let him do unutterably filthy things to her despite her natural disinclination. That’s always going to be the ending. She’s never going to go off with the good-natured wall-eyed coachman or decide she’d rather run a dress shop.’
But my mother affected not to be listening. ‘You can ask Treadgold to bring my tea now. And tell her not to slop it in the saucer. That woman’s so clumsy, she could get a job at the nursing home easily. You’d better go and see what Brough is doing. Now I’m lying here helpless I suppose the place is falling to rack and ruin.’
‘It looks fine,’ I lied. ‘You mustn’t worry about it. Just concentrate on getting better.’
My mother threw me a sidelong glance of annoyance. It occurred to me then that she much preferred lying in bed and being waited on to the unremitting slog of trying to run a large decaying house with severely limited funds. I could sympathize with this. I went to see Brough as instructed.
The forty acres my great-grandfather had begun with had shrunk to four as parcels of land had been sold piecemeal during the last hundred years to prop up a pretentious style lived on an insufficient income. Most of the remaining acreage had been given over to shrubbery which required little attention. Brough had a comfortable arrangement in the greenhouse with a chair, a radio and a kettle by the stove where he sat for hours on end, no doubt brooding over his thralldom. On this occasion I found him actually out of doors, spraying something evil-smelling over hybrid tea roses of a hideous flaunting red.
‘Wouldn’t they look rather better if they had something growing between them?’ I suggested, hoping to strike a note of fellowship with this remote, furious being. ‘Perhaps some hardy geraniums or violas—’
‘This is a rose-bed.’ Brough’s angry little eyes were contemptuous.
‘Yes, but it needn’t be just roses …’
‘The Major wouldn’t like it.’
The Major was my father.
‘How do you know he wouldn’t?’
‘Because he told me. He said, “Brough, whatever you do, don’t go planting anything between them roses. Over my dead body.”’
One cannot call someone a liar without disagreeable consequences. I walked angrily away and set myself the task of weeding the stone urns on the terrace. A harvest of bittercress shot seeds into the cracks between the stones as I worked, there to take ineradicable root and, just as I finished, the handle of one of the urns dropped off and smashed, leaving two large holes through which the sandy earth trickled on to my shoes in a steady stream. I went indoors.
My brother Oliver, the fourth inmate of this unhappy house, threatened daily to shake the plentiful dust of home from his feet. He was twenty, nearly six years younger than me, and could certainly have done so without anyone objecting. I think my father might even have been willing to drive him to the station himself, had he been convinced that Oliver would board the train. Oliver was currently an aspiring novelist. He was working on something satirical about a Swiftian character who, like the fortunate Dean, was adored by two equally desirable women. Despite having completed a mere ten pages Oliver was convinced that this was to be his passport to success and a new life. I loved my brother dearly and to see him struggling to maintain a fragile self-confidence was painful. I already knew the plot of Sunbeams from Cucumbers backwards and it seemed promising.
‘It’s all in the writing, you see,’ he explained, lying full-length on the sofa after a lonely afternoon of creation, while I peeled potatoes for supper.
It was three weeks after my return and my mother had not yet managed to totter further than to the commode set up for her in the corner of the morning room. I was sinking into a lethargic despondency at the prospective length of my term of servitude.
‘You know the saying “kill your darlings”?’ Oliver went on. ‘I think it was Hemingway who said it. Well, as soon as I write anything tha
t seems any good, I have to destroy it immediately. So, naturally, it takes a while to get a page done.’
‘You’re sure you aren’t taking it too literally?’ I put the saucepan on to boil. ‘I mean, if you only keep the bits that aren’t any good, isn’t that defeating the object?’
‘It means you must cut out the showy, self-conscious passages.’ Oliver licked out the bowl in which I had made a batter for apple fritters. School and the army had bred in my father a taste for nursery food which meant that solid English puddings, of the kind that require custard, were obligatory at lunch and supper. ‘My problem is that to lose self-consciousness I have to be drunk. But not so drunk that I can’t hold the pen. It’s a delicate balance. You’ve no idea what a serious writer has to suffer.’ As he said this at least twice a day I felt I was beginning to get a pretty good idea.
It was unfortunate that alcohol did not agree with Oliver. He had tried beer, whisky, wine, sherry, even crème de menthe, but they all made him wretchedly ill. He was a handsome boy with dark, almost black hair, a large, slightly bulging forehead, which gave him the appearance of a solemn child, a sensitive, girlish mouth and my mother’s green eyes which, because of the drinking, were matched by his complexion. On bad days his skin was the colour of a leaf.
‘I think this place is part of the trouble,’ he went on to say as I cut corned beef into cubes for a hash. ‘How can one be inspired when living in an atmosphere of intellectual aridity and Pecksniffian hypocrisy? That tosh Mother reads is atrophying her brain. She’s so miserable with Father that she can’t bear to live in the real world. I sometimes wonder where Father’s getting his spiritual nourishment. I can’t believe being beastly to his children and kicking Brough around is quite enough even for a man with the mental acuity of a wood louse.’
‘I can answer that as it happens. I drove into Worping this morning to see if Bowser’s had any new romances and afterwards I stopped at the Kardomah for a cup of coffee. While I was there Father came in. That was strange enough but what made it even odder was that he was with a woman.’
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