Madame K was entirely my father’s creation. My mother never mentioned her name or bought into this gothic Dickensian scenario. Later, when I learned the story of her own childhood, it dawned on me that having endured removal from her home, she understood that this was not a punishment to deploy lightly.
When I was particularly rude or naughty I was punished with a beating administered with a finely stitched calf’s leather slipper from a pair my father kept for travelling. At the appointed time, I had to present myself to my father’s bedroom and lie face-down, bare-bottomed, to receive five blows. My mother maintains that this only happened once, but I think it took place several times. What hurt more than being struck was my father asking me to kiss him when it was over, as a sign that all was forgiven and forgotten. It was not. It never occurred to me that all children were not treated this way. Not until much later did I understand that this behaviour could be described as abuse, perhaps because my father affected an almost exaggerated calm throughout, giving the occasion a formal solemnity and legitimacy. My mother stayed downstairs, well out of earshot as I bellowed with indignation into the pillows that smothered my cries.
I don’t want to excuse my parents’ strict discipline but corporal punishment was rife in those days. Caning was not part of the French method, but as a chatterbox in primary school I regularly had my mouth taped over. In secondary school a sadistic Latin teacher slammed the tops of our hinged wooden desks on to the hands of those who could not master their declensions. Serial offenders had their ears twisted till their eyes watered while being dragged to the blackboard for further humiliation. No one ever reported him.
In childhood, I never questioned choices made on my behalf. I had no idea that others my age made decisions for themselves. I had a black sausage-dog stuffed toy with a bell for a nose that I slept with. My father called him Mr Krushchev, after the Soviet leader of the day. I had no idea why and never gave him an alternative name of my choosing. Similarly, when we went to pick my puppy at the breeder’s, my mother named him Sasha to satisfy her Slavophile taste and I did not argue.
When I entered puberty and began to assert myself and attempt to make my own choices, I was put sharply in my place. Nothing belonged to me, including myself. If I was in a bad mood and took it out on the furniture with a stroppy kick at a chair leg, my father would turn apoplectic, reminding me in a sudden fury that I had not paid for it and it was not mine to abuse. ‘That is MY PROPERTY!’ he yelled, livid and spitting. ‘YOU are MY property! Everything here belongs to ME! Is that UNDERSTOOD?’
In the calmer aftermath of these episodes I was called in to my father’s study for a lecture about my attitude. I was always required to apologise for my deficiencies and promise that I would do better. Thus chastened, I drew up elaborately formal contracts between myself and my parents. In one such officious proposal I typed out when I was thirteen, I guaranteed to keep my room tidy ‘but not dust or hoover’, polish my shoes at weekends ‘but not during the week’, make breakfast once a month on Sunday, and set and clear the table for breakfast and dinner on weekdays. I thought that if I drew up these agreements we might secure a truce, but there was no chart to predict the emotional tides that ebbed and flowed in our little hermetically sealed biosphere.
Our triangle was elastic. When stretched it distorted this way and that, pulled by opposing forces. Most of the time I sided with my mother, cuddling on her lap well into my teens and giggling at her capacity for childish silliness: she was a champion face-puller, only too ready to distort those gorgeous symmetries into grotesque grimaces. At dinner if she was bored by my father’s lengthy ruminations, she would suddenly interrupt with a demonstration of how easily she could touch the end of her nose with the tip of her tongue while simultaneously wiggling her ears, to deflate my father’s self-important assertions. She had no respect for his pompous sermonising.
But if I was out of sorts or just feeling contrary, I ganged up with my father and patronised my mother insufferably, insulting her for being just a housewife, mocking her litanies of complaint and domestic woes when a plumber or some other repair man had failed to turn up. I belittled her hobbies, yawned at her accounts of the gardener’s visits, and mocked her early adoption of yoga, her mastery of ikebana flower arranging and her attempt to learn pottery with scornful ridicule, aping my father’s condescension and teasing.
If he was in a good mood and on a roll at dinner, we would ignore her and discuss history or the news as if she were a servant we tolerated sitting at the table but never invited to share her views. She could, if given the chance, more than match my father, who regularly sprinkled literary references throughout endless pronouncements on the events of the day. Quotes flew thick and fast as we ate. Hers were from Ancient Greek and Latin philosophers, Molière, Racine and Corneille—texts she studied at school, despite failing her Baccalauréat not once but twice, out of a bloody-minded stubborn refusal to work. No one noticed her rebellion. Too late, she realised the self-sabotage, making up for it in adult life with furious intensity as a reader in several languages.
When dinner was over, I left my mother to do the dishes without a second thought while my father disappeared to his study or to watch television. With a daily housekeeper and a steady string of Swiss au pairs to look after me and take care of cleaning and chores, my mother was free to fill the house with her exquisite flower arrangements, sculptural branches, tendrils of moss, single blooms and buds expressing nature’s cycles according to the rigorous discipline of the Japanese aesthetic. Like her cooking, they were her declarations of creativity and love, but I don’t remember ever complimenting her on a single one of them. I was an unappreciative, ungrateful, obnoxious snob. Now I wince with shame at the memory of this horrible behaviour, for which I wrote her a letter of apology some years ago.
The strain of taking sides took its toll. By the time I was twelve, something in me had been broken. It was as if an internal string had fallen out of tune and could not be tightened back to harmony. I was in a permanently discordant state.
An intense melancholy took hold of me and I did not know what to do with it. When my parents were out, I drifted from room to room in our house, opening cupboards, inhaling the rich aroma of Calèche in the pile of my mother’s neatly folded Hermès silk scarves, examining the racks of polished and neatly shelved shoes held in shape by springy metal trees. Sometimes I went into my father’s study and took the very sharp scissors from their tooled maroon leather holder and wondered about stabbing myself with them, poking myself experimentally in the stomach, feeling their dagger point through my clothes.
Self-absorbed and solitary, I was frightened by my own sadness. In an attempt to be scientific, I decided to monitor it, drawing up a chart that I annotated daily, marking dots on a grid to map my moods: was there a pattern that I could predict or anticipate? Could I be less vulnerable to the gusts that seemed to buffet my spirit? The lines on the graph pointed downwards with few spikes.
One day I emptied the sadness into a poem. It poured out in one draft, as smoothly as milk from a jug:
Sitting by a lonely stream
Looking at my reflection
I see my years of sadness
And feel a great depression
Thinking that ten years are wasted
Never to come back
But if I look a little closer
I remember a merrier thing
Like dancing through the daffodils
Every single spring
But that too long ago has gone
And now there is but water
Where I saw my years of sadness
And the happy ones just after
A gust of confidence impelled me to send it to the Brownie magazine, which informed me a week later via a printed card that it would be published in the next month’s issue. The string inside me twanged with an unfamiliar sensation. Joy.
When the poem was published I stared with complete fascination at my name printed beneath it. I coul
d not tear my eyes away from those letters and their connection to my self. Here at last was something that belonged to me and only me. That had not been bought for me and could not be taken away.
Mine. All mine.
CHAPTER 5
Second-hand fame
‘Your mother,’ my father would frequently announce like a king issuing a decree, ‘is the most beautiful woman in the world.’ In a good mood, he was prone to making hyperbolic pronouncements. Indifferent to compliments from a man capable of spitting insults at her, my mother responded with exaggerated eye rolls, dismissive shrugs or a grimacing grin that mocked his flattery.
I was too young to understand how her handsome looks eclipsed more conventional notions of beauty. There was too much of the eagle in her face. And besides, I liked to argue for argument’s sake: my father encouraged verbal jousting and the banter of rhetoric. ‘What about Audrey Hepburn? Sophia Loren? Elizabeth Taylor?’ I challenged with irritating gnat-like persistence. My father shook his head at the mention of each screen goddess. ‘Too made up’, ‘Vulgar’, ‘Cheap’, he replied with unwavering devotion, consistently dismissing all the obvious contenders I could name.
Beauty was a valued attribute in our home. We critiqued people’s appearances anywhere we went, from theatre foyers to airport lounges. ‘Nice pair of legs,’ my father would say appreciatively and our heads would swivel to where his nodded. ‘Regarde comme elle est moche, celle-là,’ (‘Look at how crummy she is’) my mother would say with uncharitable spite of someone with plain features or ‘Dis donc, ce qu’elle est mal fichue!’ (‘Goodness, she looks lousy’) of someone poorly groomed or dressed frumpily as if such a thing were a crime. Her judgement was merciless.
My appearance was subject to constant comment and scrutiny. My mother documented every haircut and new outfit with her cumbersome Leica and later, an even more professional Nikon. The portraits continued even when I became too sulky to smile as first puberty, then adolescence, hit like long grumbling storms. There are hundreds of photographs of me brooding soulfully in velvet capes and romantically ruffled dresses, my gaze often clouded with resentment or averted as a sign of non-cooperation. She might, by then, have called herself a war photographer, so hostile was her subject.
In early childhood I was a severe thumb-sucker who then graduated to chronic nail-biting like my father. He marred his carefully groomed appearance by chewing his nails to the quick till they bled, turning his sausage fingers into mutilated stumps. I felt ashamed of how his hands must look in meetings and when he signed documents, but he never seemed embarrassed enough to hide them or to attempt to stop. The double standard that allowed him to tell me off for our shared habit while doing nothing to correct it in himself infuriated me.
On Sunday mornings, he would call me into his dressing room for an elaborate, weekly, humiliating and slightly creepy ritual inspection and manicure. I was instructed to soak my hands in warm soapy water, and then he would tidy my hangnails with a pair of shaped cuticle scissors before slathering my fingers with cream, shaking his head in disapproval at the damage I’d done. My objections that his self-mutilation was far worse were ignored. He painted my fingers with a disgusting clear liquid to act as a deterrent, offering me a pocket money reward as an incentive to grow my nails. It failed.
When my skin erupted in aggressive acne due to the inevitable pubescent hormonal surge, there was nowhere to hide my embarrassment and no one thought it might be tactful to ignore my condition. On the contrary, it was discussed in detail over dinner, making my already agonising self-consciousness worse. My father knew a world-famous dermatologist I should see. He brought me skincare products from America that might help. He meant well, but still commented on every new pustule.
While the acne raged, my teeth became a second focus of unwanted attention. Crowded and irregular, they required orthodontics. I hated the feeling of the ugly clamps when I ran my tongue over them. My mouth felt like a prison. The stainless steel braces and wires made me lisp, food got caught in them and they inhibited my willingness to smile, making me seem even more sullen than usual. At night, I had to wear an additional external brace resembling a scold’s bridle, that medieval torture muzzle specifically designed for women. The metal boomerang on an elasticised headpiece made lying on my side uncomfortable and the thought of sleepovers with such a contraption inconceivable. I withdrew further into myself, my schoolwork and my books.
My chompers had already given me plenty of grief. When a milk tooth canine fell out but nothing dropped into its place, an X-ray revealed that the tooth was hiding in my cheekbone, impacted somewhere near the edge of my eye socket. I lived with the gap for a couple of years until I turned thirteen, when our Harley Street dentist, Dr Preston, suggested that rather than scar my face to extract the tooth, he would attempt a world first: he would make an incision in my palate and drill through the bone, attaching a wire around the rogue tooth, gradually winching it down into place with a winding mechanism much like the key on a sardine tin. The surgery would be performed under local anaesthetic.
On the appointed day, I woke up with a gnawing pain low in my belly and the bedsheets stained with rusty red smears. My period had decided to start that day of all days. A brisk explanation from my mother was all there was time for, together with a bulky sanitary pad. The surgery took much longer than expected and was extremely painful because the anaesthetic wore off. When Dr Preston attempted to top it up with booster shots, his bifocals magnified the needle to grotesque proportions, prompting me to slide away from him down the dentist’s chair in whimpering terror. My mother sat in the room with me through the whole ordeal, clenching her fists and her jaw to remain composed, not daring to come near me and see the carnage for herself. But I could hear everything and see too much. Most traumatic was noticing tiny flecks of bone fly up from the drill and stick to Dr Preston’s glasses. I was bleeding from both ends. For years after, when I lay in the bath, I would suddenly see the water turn red, as my brain replayed the trauma. Towards the end of the surgery, tears ran down Dr Preston’s crevassed cheeks as he repeated, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ for causing me so much pain.
The ordeal did not end there. The winching mechanism required tightening every few months, causing a temporary sensation of pressure and pulling. But, miracle of miracles, the procedure worked: two years later, a perfect canine appeared, its ivory tip heralded as it broke through the gum with all the jubilation of the moon landing. My father sent Dr Preston a case of champagne.
But I was not out of the woods yet. By the age of fifteen I was anxious to distract attention from the angry skin and heavy metal jaw that had shrivelled my self-confidence. To make matters worse, two of my closest friends at school were exceptional, head-turning beauties with ocean-coloured eyes, flawless complexions and California Girl manes of lustrous hair. Seeking to compensate for the features that so mortified me, I decided to treat myself to a new style at the hairdresser to boost my morale. Asking my most worldly and sophisticated girlfriend (her mother was a glamorous society fixture) where she had her hair done, I gamely booked myself in to Leonard’s, then the poshest coiffeur in London. I made an appointment for a Wednesday afternoon after school, taking along a photograph I had cut out of a magazine of the kind of curls I wanted.
I was assigned a seat, the only schoolgirl in a sea of Sloanes and model types, and showed my photograph to a stylist. The look, she explained, would require a perm. She set about mixing and applying a solution to rollers curled tightly on to my scalp and left to set. I settled in to reading a glossy magazine. After a time, the rollers were removed, my hair was shampooed and a second stylist took over from the first one, reapplying solution and a second set of curlers. Absorbed in my magazine I paid little attention. When I looked up, I recognised faces I had seen in the glossies being offered tea which no one offered me. The atmosphere was hushed, the air pleasantly scented with hairspray and perfume. I glimpsed Leonard himself—his hair dyed as black as a crow’s wing and s
tiffly coiffed in a gravity-defying upward bouffant style, his skin unnaturally tanned—skinnily swanning between clients in a black turtleneck and tight black flares, kissing cheeks and waving his scissors like a cigarette holder.
When the stylist came back to remove the curlers, I looked up expectantly. Something was wrong. My hair was coming out in tufts. Very soon all that was left on my head was a singed orange pubic fuzz. The stylist disappeared. Another one came, swept the hair at my feet away, removed my protective gown and ushered me to the front desk where I was presented with a bill—yes, a bill for more than a hundred pounds. Mortified but proud, I wrote out a cheque without argument, in a stupor of shock and humiliation. ‘You are welcome to come back for a free scalp treatment,’ the receptionist said in a rushed whisper, eager to get me off the premises.
I rode home on the underground and saw my reflection in the windows whenever we entered a tunnel. This is not happening, I told myself. It will all be alright tomorrow. People stared at me with open sympathy across the aisle. I rang the bell when I got to our front door. My mother took one look at me, gasped ‘Mon dieu!’ and recoiled in horror. ‘Don’t move!’ she ordered, before I could cross the threshold. She returned with camera in hand, instructing me to turn around slowly so that she could document my condition from every angle. Too numb to cry, I revolved in slow motion, barely able to speak or eat my dinner. Fortunately, my father was not due home until late, sparing me his comments.
In the morning, my mother stopped the cheque and I applied myself to attempting to disguise my condition for the school day ahead. I chose a pale blue silk scarf and knotted it peasant-style at the nape of my neck. It stayed on for about a minute before a bratty boy behind me yanked it off and the class breathed a collective gasp of disbelief. That was when the tears fell hot on my cheeks and it sank in that this was not all some ghastly nightmare.
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