25
The grandfather I did not share with Guy and Lorna was from Vienna: he came to London to look for his missing sister Lois in 1928, or that is the reason he gave. He may have been what is now called an economic refugee: his name was Anton Wasserman. He is not by all accounts a person anyone would much want to have in their bloodline. You can tell I do not like the Wassermans. My loyalty is to Felicity and to Felicity’s birth mother, poor Sylvia.
Lois Wasserman, Anton’s younger sister, was a child prodigy who came to London in 1913 when she was twelve to study the piano at the Royal College of Music. She boarded with a family in Gower Street, within walking distance of the Royal College in Marylebone Road. Within months of her arrival in London the young Serb loyalist Princip had taken it into his head to shoot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo: within months of that event World War I had begun. Princip was a lad of seventeen, who, fired with nationalistic fervour, took a pot shot at the Duke’s carriage as it proceeded down the main drag of the city and missed. He put his gun in his pocket and went round the corner to have a cup of coffee. As one does. The ducal coachman, dashing for safety, lost his way and ended up asking directions at the very same cafe where Princip sat. If you don’t at first succeed, try, try, try again. Princip went outside and shot dead the Archduke and the Archduchess too for good measure. Had he not done so Felicity would no doubt still be living in London and Lucy and Guy and Lorna and Alison would not exist. But you can drive yourself mad thinking this way. What ifs can only be endured if they belong to the very recent past; before lunch is about as far as you can go.
With the outbreak of war anyone with a German name still living in England was harried, hounded and taken to be a spy. Little Miss Wasserman found her studies discontinued, her host family no longer prepared to board her and with no means of travelling home. Her parents in Vienna were unable to help, or not willing to. Thus Lois was left at the age of twelve to fend for herself. My great-grandmother Sylvia, herself a pianist, in her kindness took the child into her home. Here, in the Moore household, Lois grew up. (Pd been to see where the family house once stood on the lower slopes of Hampstead Hill. It was demolished in the sixties. Public housing tower blocks now stand where once these dramas took place. So all our personal histories are swept away: the bricks which once sopped up the passions of the past are ground to dust, and perhaps as well.) Lois was already part of the household when Arthur was sent off to war as correspondent for The Times. She was there on his return, and when Felicity was born to Sylvia: she was there when poor Sylvia died of the flu. Within six months Lois, cuckoo in the kindly nest, had married Arthur: Lucy was born two months later.
‘Died from the flu!5 Perhaps Lois was like Margaret Lockwood, the mistress in The Man in Grey (1943) who murders the wife as she lies ill with a fever, by throwing open the windows to let the storm blow in and giving her pneumonia. Perhaps, having got the husband from the wife, Lois then conspired with the lover to get rid of the husband? Barbara Stanwyck was forever doing it in all those fifties films, bumping off husbands to get hold of the insurance money. All that melodrama would not have been confined to film. Film mirrors reality, and vice versa. It could have happened.
Employees of the Aardvark agency sit in Somerset House, or wherever the national archive is currently kept, and by finding addresses and studying dates detect such dramas. Whatever changes? I don’t suppose poor Sylvia much cared to stay alive. You don’t not notice that a twenty-year-old girl is pregnant; Lois did not seem the kind to protect her benefactor from the news. I'm pregnant and your husband is the father. It’s each for themselves, isn’t it, then as now. I never knew a girl to actually mean: Oh I don't go with married men, though it trips off the tongue well enough - and these days: Oh, he's not actually married, just living with her makes a good excuse. In Lois and Sylvia’s day there was even more at stake: not just sex and a relationship, but marriage and all that went with it: home, comfort, children and money - survival itself. It was worth the mistresses’ gamble. Get pregnant by a man, enchant him with sexual services, make the wife upset and angry enough, and chances are he’ll end up marrying you.
According to Lucy once Lois had got rid of Sylvia and trapped Arthur, she lost interest in him. She had memories of Arthur trying to hug and kiss Lois and Lois shaking him off. He was always gloomy and staring into space and she was always in a bad temper. (But then children tend to see the worst side of the parents’ relationship. They don’t get into the bedroom to see how the day relates to the night.) There was trouble over Felicity. Lois had wanted her sent off to boarding school. Arthur was against it.
Poor Felicity, now with an archetypal wicked stepmother, set on cleansing the dead woman’s brood to make room for her own. (cf. Babes in the Wood, Snow White. Mirror, mirror, on the wall et al.) Get lost! Off to the forest with you! Into the gingerbread house there to be eaten up; Daddy can't save you now. Indeed, Daddy can hardly remember who you are, according to the social Darwinists. The new wife is younger and stronger and does better by his genes than the one who died. In other words a doting new husband would prefer not to notice what was going on in his own household.
‘It might have been better for Felicity,’ said Lucy, ‘if she had been sent away. There was always something. She hadn’t made her bed properly or left a tap dripping, and she’d be shut in her room, sometimes with her hands tied to stop her getting into more mischief. Or locked in the cupboard. She never cried. I remember trying to stuff bread and jam under her bedroom door, and getting caught and being made to lick up the jam from the floor. My mother was a horrid woman. Why did my father never notice?’ ‘That’s men for you,’ I said.
After Arthur’s death things got even worse for Felicity. She’d be sent downstairs to live with the servants when punishment was required, which pretty soon was more or less permanently. She’d sleep in the attic and eat in the kitchen, while Lois and Lucy ate in the dining room. (Shirley Temple in Poor Little Rich Girl came to mind.) Lucy was told to call her May, not Felicity, the latter being too fancy a name for an orphaned girl with no family, who would have to make her own way in the world. (Some overtones of Jane Eyre crept in at this point, the one with James Mason as Rochester.)
‘I think Felicity quite liked the drama,’ said Lucy. ‘She was always such a little actress. She said there were worse things than peeling potatoes and it was more fun with the servants anyway. One day she thumbed her nose at Mama and then she really did get sent off to boarding school.’
‘Like the one in Jane Eyre,’ I said. ‘Or was it Dickens’s Dotheboys Hall?’
She looked at me blankly. I was beginning to feel uncertain as to how reliable a witness Lucy was turning out to be. She recounted Felicity’s early life in a narrative in which myth and archetype mingled and mixed. I did the same, of course, only I use film as my reference. Lucy used the Arthur Mee’s Fairy Books on which she had been reared. Each to their own. Lucy saw her mother as her enemy and because her mother hated Felicity, allowed her enemy’s enemy to become her friend, and so let the narrative follow where it led, without shame.
‘How did your father die?’ I asked, allowing her time to calm down. Her father, my great-grandfather, Arthur, who had had the misfortune or the weakness to fall for the wrong woman in his middle age and so destroy the happiness of generations. Married to Sylvia, he had impregnated Lois. In these practical and unmelodramatic days the word ‘husband’ has become unfashionable. Even women with marriage certificates sometimes prefer to call the men they sleep with ‘partners’ so as not to be out of tune with the times. Alas, partner has no in-built drama, contains no sense of coercion, no in-built Thanatos, no tragedy. It is not the stuff of major film. Okay for a subplot but you can’t hang a film on it, let alone risk a generation of real human beings, as once you could. Something lost, and something gained, as we industriously smooth away our capacity for personal pain, by taking good care not to run into it. Lucy was one of the early aficionados.
‘I
don’t know how he died,’ Lucy said. ‘We were told he was ill, and he’d been in bed for a month, with the doctor coming and going. No-one told children much in those days. My mother came out of the front bedroom one morning and told us he was dead, that’s all.’
Lucy could not or would not be more informative, though I pressed her. But I could envisage the scene. Lois coming out on to the landing, in one of those straight long flat-chested dresses with pleats, looking down at the upturned faces of the two girls, Felicity at ten, Lucy at three. Victorious. Your father is dead. And nothing being the same afterwards: that sudden extraordinary line drawn between the past and the present. It was said to me too. Your father is dead.
‘We were neither of us allowed to grieve, I do remember that,’ said Lucy. ‘She couldn’t bear us crying at the best of times. We got slapped if we did. We were told it was for the best. Felicity wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. She dressed up for it and then Lois told her she couldn’t go, it wasn’t appropriate, Arthur wasn’t her real father. There was a terrible scene. Felicity hit and scratched and Lois just laughed and said she was the coalman’s daughter. Sylvia had been a slut. But we’d seen the coalman, he was hideous so we knew it wasn’t true. One way or another I got to the funeral but Felicity stayed locked in her room.’
‘You don’t think Lois was unbalanced enough to have poisoned your father?’ I asked, half as a joke, but Lucy was serious enough when she said that it wouldn’t surprise her. Lois wasn’t in the least unbalanced, reported her daughter, just cruel and evil. And Arthur had made a will just before he died leaving everything away from Felicity, to Lois.
‘What used to worry me most of all, even back then,’ said Lucy, ‘is that after father died he fell into a pool of silence. No-one talked about him: it was as if he’d been some kind of nuisance wasp they’d batted out of the way. Mama kept a photograph of him in the living room, I suppose in case visitors came and she had to play the grieving widow, not the merry one, but there were hardly any visitors anyway. I don’t know why she bothered. I thought there must be something wrong with Felicity, something bad, to get her treated the way she was. When Felicity told me she’d had a mother who’d once slept in my father and mother’s bed I didn’t believe her. Surely this woman would have left some trace behind, but there was nothing, nothing. Not a hairnet, not a cup or saucer, not a book. Then when my father died it was the same thing. All his personal things went, vanished. She missed his slippers for a whole year, but only because I hid them. I’d sleep with one of them under my pillow, and I once caught Felicity doing the same.’
I said it was all long ago and over, and she had the grace to say, ‘But nothing’s ever over.’
Snapshots: metaphorical: a scene in which Sylvia is dying of flu in the bedroom, and Lois is allegedly nursing her, but doing as bad a job of it as she can without anyone noticing, and Arthur coming home from his day at The Times, and being waylaid by Lois who says Sylvia is sleeping soundly (she’s not: she’s too weak to move but she overhears) and takes him to her bedroom as she has a dozen times before and gets herself pregnant. If Arthur has done it once he’s almost obliged to do it again. Once a man is compromised in this kind of domestic situation he has to go on. He has to keep the other woman happy otherwise she’ll tell his wife. Because once the wife knows, that’s the end, so you might as well have a good time while you can, while it lasts. Round and round.
Lucy was not inclined to put any blame on Arthur: no, he was Lois’s victim and that was that, and she herself was the product of the union so how could she disapprove of both parents without wishing herself out of existence? How much easier for all of us if humans hatched out of eggs, anonymously, so our problems began when we cracked the shell with our infant beak, and not before. No such luck. Lucy only lived in comfort because Sylvia had once died. All our cheerful todays depend upon someone else’s fairly terrible yesterdays. I’m glad they pulled down my ancestral home: there’s so much misery embedded in the walls.
But we have no information about that: it’s all speculation, what went into the good-night Ovaltine and what didn’t. Did the dying Sylvia shiver for little Felicity, wondering how she’d survive without her mother, left to Lois’s mercies? No doubt she did. And still there was nothing she could do. The waters washed over her.
Real life is unsatisfactory, there is no resolving anything properly: you can go on for ever simply not knowing: murder doesn’t always out: the only ‘end’ is death. Films at least offer resolutions, and answers, and solutions, the boring bits edited out. We who have lived through the cinema age have been blessed. It is not surprising we take to mind-altering substances: they being the next best thing. Like being at the cinema in our own body, looking inwards.
Within a month of Arthur dying, in 1925, Lois’s brother Anton had moved into the house. Back to the Barbara Stanwyck wife/ lover scenario, plus incest. If it was Hollywood, the lover couldn’t be the brother too. You’d have to go to a French film for that, or a German, or indeed one of the few out of Austria, shadowy, dark and dramatic.
‘Life got better when he moved in,’ said Lucy. ‘Mother cheered up. We were glad he was there. He’d make jokes and we’d sing round the piano. The food got better.’ Felicity was allowed home for the holidays, and soon was taken out of school altogether and permitted to join the others in the dining room. Anton organized ballet lessons for both girls, for which only Felicity had the talent. ‘I was always Miss Clumsy,’ Lucy said. ‘Anton didn’t take any more notice of me than Father did. It was always Felicity this and Felicity that.’
‘But Lois let her go to classes?’
‘My mother always did what Anton told her,’ said Lucy. ‘I wonder now what went on between them. At the time it didn’t occur to me. You think I’m exaggerating about my mother, don’t you,’ she added, eyeing me suddenly quite sharply, and my silence told her she was right.
‘You’re so protected, you young things,’ she said. ‘You’ve no idea what the world can be like, what people get away with if they think no-one’s watching. In the days before social workers all kinds of things went on, and nobody thought the worse of you. Nowadays it’s gone the other way. You can’t do a thing without being spied on.’
She would not be patronized: she would take the initiative and come to me before I went to her. She would see me off. She was still Lois’s daughter, for all she would rather not be. It’s dangerous to hate your mother: you are obliged to hate yourself as well, and that can make you vicious. I was glad not to be a motherless, fatherless child in Lois’s care. I would have fared as badly as did Felicity, I daresay, under the incestuous Lois Wasserman, onetime child prodigy, presently stepmother and maybe murderess. Lucy took out a scrapbook from her smart Italian leather shoulder bag. Photographs. We looked at them together.
Snapshots: literally, from Lucy’s scrapbook. A yellowed newspaper cutting dated 1913: a photo of Lois at twelve, the caption - Arrival of the child prodigy from Vienna. On thin paper, much folded and refolded, and now cracking along the creases, an article about the nature of the child prodigy. Poor Lois, harking back no doubt to what might have been, had Princip not taken the opportunity offered a second time by fate, and World War I not started. What a sour offering by the Gods of Chance, which was to end so many million young male lives, and embitter so many women. The child Lois stared out of the faded picture, sullen, sensuous and plain, slightly pop-eyed, the family jaw stuck out in defiance. Poor Lois, as well as everyone else? What had she ever seen of family love?
Come to think of it, what did I know about it either? At least I tried not to go round doing other people damage. But if Holly linked up with Harry in any definite kind of way and then she died and I moved in with him how would I behave to his child? Any better than Lois? Would I too deal in humiliations and emotional torture? I’d have to be more subtle about it, of course, because these days, Lucy is right, people notice. I’d probably just do what was socially acceptable and send it off to summer camp while I got
on with my work, and I don’t suppose Harry would notice what was going on any more than Arthur had. Already I refer to this mythical child as ‘it’. Already I am hating and resenting it. Easier to take the position Lucy had arrived at, with the wisdom of the decades, which I was prepared to acknowledge, that her mother Lois was born evil and stayed evil and forget it.
A studio portrait of the family: Arthur and Sylvia, loving husband and wife with little Felicity clinging on to her mother’s hand, aged about three, and Lois leaning just a little into Arthur, managing to command the group. It was she whom the eye went to first. She had a nice figure, one could see that, shapely legs and pretty ankles below a knee-length, sporty, pleated skirt, and glowing with youth, and with her hair short and marcelled into rigorous waves, her jaw could easily be overlooked. Sylvia looked strained and pretty and faded and brave, and older than Arthur, who smiled happily and innocently at the camera, his head inclined ever so slightly away from his wife and towards Lois.
A snapshot of a family picnic: Lois and Arthur leaning into each other on the grass, little plain Lucy sitting with her legs stuck out in front of her: Felicity a little way away from the group, making a daisy chain. Angel had taught me how to do that; pick the daisy with as long a stem as you can, make a slit towards the bottom of the stem with the thumbnail, thread the next daisy through, make another slit, and so on. I supposed Felicity had shown Angel. No doubt Sylvia had found time to teach Felicity before she died. Daisy chains didn’t seem Lois’s cup of tea, somehow.
Another press cutting. Felicity at perhaps thirteen, little girl in a ballet dancer’s tutu, thin graceful arms stretched high: a shy yet confident smile. Caption: Local girl wins scholarship to Royal Ballet Company.
‘She never took it up,’ says Lucy. ‘She wasn’t allowed. Mama said dancing was bad for the back and gave you big leg muscles. But I had to go on with lessons: my legs weren’t worth bothering about.’
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 16