He took over from Mother. Thereafter, he was her equal. He coped brilliantly with the recovering Emily, with her grief over losing the longed-for third baby, with her depression, with her apathy. Mother told him he did the hardest part, but he never believed her. And even a fool could have seen that the damage was done: in his own eyes, Mark had failed his wife. All the next weary six years, before they were divorced, the night Mother stood in for him left a residue of bitterness which soured his marriage. I always felt that, if only he could have said damn your fucking family Emily, he would have got over it, but such hate was never part of his make-up. At the time, they seemed to get over their little drama quite well, but I don’t think they did. Mother didn’t make any comment, but then, of course, I was to distract her soon from concentrating on what was going wrong with Emily and Mark. With my baby.
*
— seemed to fix upon her age to focus my anger. It was so dangerous, so very unwise both for herself and her baby. She assured me she had had the appropriate tests and that these had established that the baby was normal and also, by the way, that it was a boy. This seemed to please her hugely. ‘I didn’t want a girl,’ she told me, and that annoyed me, too. I would have thought a single woman on her own would prefer a girl but, no, girls apparently were ‘a nuisance’. She wanted a son. He was to be born at Christmas – ‘perhaps your birthday, Mother’ – and Rosemary told me in August. She was greatly pleased with herself and well aware of the element of shock, because, since floating the idea some years before, she had never again referred to it. I well remember, of course, her coming to tell me. She walked into my garden looking extremely tanned and well, she had just returned from a holiday in Greece. She was wearing some sort of loose white dress and did not look in the least pregnant. We sat in the sun and she talked about her holiday and about Colin, the man with whom she had been on holiday. He had been in her life, off and on, for several years, so I knew about him. He was a freelance film editor, and had been married a long time before when in his twenties. I liked him. He was quiet but determined, it had always seemed to me, quite capable of dealing with Rosemary’s headstrong nature. At any rate, I asked about Colin’s next job and she said he was going to America. Then it came out. ‘I’m quite glad, really,’ she said. ‘I don’t want him around the next few months.’ Then she smiled and actually took my hand and said, ‘Take a deep breath, Mother. I’m going to have a baby, at last, and I want you to be glad.’ The warmth of her hand resting in mine bothered me. I squeezed it and patted it and said inane things. I hope I sounded glad. She began to tell me that Colin was the father, of course, and that he was thrilled but that she had made it clear it was to be her baby. She’d made it clear right from the beginning of their attempt to have one, and Colin had understood and been agreeable. He did not want to get married again, ever, and she herself had never complicated things by wanting to either. She finished by saying, ‘So there you are. Mother, another member of your family on the way and a boy, so the family name won’t die out. In fact, I’m going to call him Oliver, not because of Dad, really, I just like the name, Oliver James Butler.
I felt incredibly distressed. It was hard to conceal. It was not for a minute any outmoded, outraged notions of propriety: that did not upset me, I did not care what people thought. What moved me was the pathos of it all. This baby, born to what? Not a family. And Rosemary, a mother on her own, when the road ahead was so hard. Did she realize how hard? Rosemary knew what I wanted for her, knew why I could not ‘be glad’ in the way she wanted. But then, with her hand still in mine, and her smiling, happy face so close to me, I could only hug her and try to hold back my fierce grief. After she had gone, I had held it back too long to let go. I remember how drained and exhausted I felt, how sad and helpless. Gradually, however, I overcame my depression and began to push myself into a more positive attitude. Rosemary would be a good mother. It was her choice to have this child. She was a mature woman and knew what she was doing. Her wild oats had been long since sown. She was economically secure, with no need of that inheritance she had so frivolously spent. She would manage on her own very well, and, as for her son, he would never know anything else. There was no reason for me to imagine that he would turn round and accuse his mother of wilfully cheating him out of a father, and, if he did, Rosemary would be well able to deal with it. I thought of Emily and her increasingly unhappy marriage and I could not truthfully say her regular, ordinary family was necessarily better than anything Rosemary had in mind.
Rosemary’s pregnancy was a happy time. She had been made a director of the design firm for which she worked and she drew a substantial income from it. Now she used that money to buy herself a house, which to my great pleasure was not far from me. It was part of a new development, town cottages they were called, built in a gap where a bomb had demolished the existing terrace. Rosemary intended to let half of it to somebody who would look after her son, when needed. She had it all very well thought out. I expressed astonishment that she should leave Fulham but she said firmly that her son would need a park to be walked in and that he might as well be near his only grandparent. Such idyllic days, we had, walking on Primrose Hill, Rosemary stately in a blue cloak, which suited her beautifully. We walked, even in the coldest weather, well wrapped up, and Rosemary would come home with me and put her feet up and I would make tea. She seemed serene and calm, and, though she grew enormously large, not at all discomforted. I felt somehow humble in her presence, in the presence of maternity, and shy. There was such power in her. I was so aware of the life she held inside her and there was a strange excitement in thinking about it. My own body, not then old but not young, seemed a poor, dried-up thing, tame and quiescent.
Colin came once. He was back, briefly, from America. He came to tea with her one bright December day. When I saw them together I felt a return of that emotion I had experienced, when I was told the news, and once more had to struggle to be sensible. They looked right together. I had not thought Rosemary on her own did not look right but suddenly, seeing Colin at her elbow, solicitous, even proud, I knew I had been deceiving myself as to the success with which I had accepted my daughter’s independence. I would have given anything to see Colin and Rosemary, if not married, then settled together. When he left I felt bereft and I could have sworn that Rosemary did, too. Over the next few weeks she was quiet and reflective, not quite so happy or at ease. She was irritated by my most general queries as to where Colin had gone, and told me she knew what I was thinking and I had better stop. It took a while for us to re-adjust. By the time her baby was due to be born, Rosemary was herself again but I noted that she talked less often of Colin who, up until that visit, had featured often in her conversation, as though she had been determined to show me she was fond of him but could do without him.
The baby was not born on my birthday. December came and went and still Rosemary had not been delivered of her child. We had a quiet Christmas. By the end of the first week in January. I was becoming concerned. Rosemary was not. She was against an induced birth and would put no pressure on the hospital, but on January 9th, when she was ten days overdue, they took her into UCH. Right up to the moment they took her into the delivery room she was relaxed and cheerful – nobody could have been a better patient, nobody. All the doctors and nurses said —
*
A lot of crap, that was what Mother’s revered doctors and nurses came out with, quite unbelievable shit. It could have happened to anyone, don’t think about it, try not to dwell on what’s over, you’ve all your life ahead of you, sssh, sssh, have a good cry, there, there, you’ll feel better soon, here’s something to make you sleep, these things happen, nothing anyone could have done, sssh, sssh, sleep, sleep . . . I was treated like an idiot. There wasn’t one single person who came near me, all that terrible week, who could even begin to cope with me. Except Mother, of course. Mother knew. She didn’t say a word for the first two days. I screamed and yelled at her, said awful things, hurled insults at her and she jus
t sat there, inscrutable. I called her smug and self-righteous, asked her why she didn’t say I told you so, why she didn’t say it was a judgement on me, even accused her of being glad, because unmarried mothers shouldn’t have babies, they don’t belong to proper families. I emptied all the evil bile in my own head out over hers. I hated her, too. I shrieked at her to get the fuck out, that I never wanted to see her again but, even when they wanted to, she wouldn’t let them sedate me against my wishes. As for saying the doctors and nurses thought nobody could have been a better patient . . . They thought I was a pig. The praise stopped when they saw how I treated Mother. Oh, they told me I was a good girl for being so brave during the birth, but they didn’t rate that for long. It was Mother who was the heroine, putting up with me and never complaining or turning on me. Though she did, eventually. The day before I was discharged she said to me, ‘If you’re going to love your own pain, then carry on as you have been doing and I’ll go home.’ I swore at her, and then that was the end.
God knows what happened. I didn’t want the details at the time and I don’t want them now, though I expect Mother is going to tell us. What bad luck we Butler girls had in childbirth, yet Mother sailed through her three deliveries. There’s Em with her miscarriages and stillbirths and ectopic pregnancies and there’s me with my pathetic whatever it was, some hideous-sounding complication that meant a late Caesarean, too late. One in a thousand, but naturally. Maybe it was even in a million, but why boast. All I remember is coming round from the anaesthetic, or maybe only half round, and seeing this character at the end of my bed saying, ‘My dear my dear my dear,’ like a stuck record and the face swirling and swirling in front of me. The words, ‘your baby is dead I’m so sorry’, were gentle and echoey and I think I smiled, it sounded like a lullaby. I think of it often, that moment, pleasantly. I clutch on to it sometimes and replay it, so soothing before the raw awakening that followed. I could have seen the dead baby, if I had wanted to, but I didn’t. Probably I should have done. There was nothing wrong with him, I know that. Mother saw him. She said he was beautiful, quite perfect. I hit her when she said that, slapped her, hard, right across the mouth, and screamed that of course he wasn’t fucking perfect when his fucking heart wouldn’t work.
Mother did say, timidly, some weeks later, ‘You could adopt a baby, Rosemary. I mean if . . .’ Lucky she left the rest unsaid. I wanted my own baby, I wanted to make it and have it and nothing else would have been any good. I didn’t need motherhood, like Mother and Em did, it wasn’t the mothering part that I’d wanted. An adopted child would have been no use, it would have been a graft that did not take. I could do without mothering, if I could not biologically be a mother. Which was just as well. At forty, I was in no position to try again and I don’t think I could have endured it. After all, at least I had been pregnant, I had had that first stage of being a mother, and I’d loved it. I wanted nothing to spoil the memory, no sickly second pregnancy to cloud the blissful reality of the first. I made my peace with all this, but an essential part of it was preserving those nine months intact. I thought about them quite often, quite gloatingly. I don’t think it was unhealthy, why should it have been? It helped me to stabilize myself. I sold the house, went back not to Fulham, but to Chelsea proper. It suited me better. Being near parks and grandmothers was too absurd. I thought about going abroad but I didn’t go. I thought, if I was going to be a childless middle-aged woman, I had better start adapting straight away. And I returned to hospital, six months after I had given birth, to be sterilized. I wanted any lingering romantic fantasies that might arise dealt with ruthlessly. It didn’t upset me. I remember coming out of that place and thinking, well done, that was wise, now let’s get on with life. I didn’t tell Mother of course. She would have approved in theory, but I think it would also have upset her. She didn’t need to know. I can’t say I found myself mooning over babies or anything like that, but then I never had done, and I didn’t feel any resentment towards Emily’s children. In fact, I loved them more, not less, which was just as well, because at that time they were in need of as much love as they could get. Daniel was very much like the boy I would have wanted Oliver to have been, and I found it hurt less to admit this than to pretend I did not feel it. So. It was away with one phase of my life. I put on my cork jacket and became buoyant again.
June 4th
SPENT A LONG time in Cole’s choosing wallpaper for the sitting room. Remembered how I used to think that when I had time I would love choosing wallpaper, love taking the trouble to get something exactly right for the room. But I don’t love it. It seems a worthless, trivial occupation. After an hour I felt ashamed, yet why should I? Chose a Victorian trellis pattern. Rosemary is sure to hate it. To redress the balance, walked from Mortimer Street to the National Gallery. Had seen somewhere that their new acquisition was called Mme André Wormser and her Children. It was in Room 46. The painting was done in 1926/7 in the Wormsers’ Paris home, 27 Rue Scheffer. It showed Mme Wormser standing in the middle of a rather grand sitting room, while one of her daughters played the piano. A boy watched and two other girls sat on a sofa. A family scene. The walls in the room were dark green, the chairs were covered in green brocade, the carpet was green patterned. Everything was stiff and formal. The mother looked quite removed from her children as she stood there, complacent, with a fussy little dog at her feet. She was called Olga. The children were Oliver, Diane, Sabine and Dominique. The dog was called Pouf des Landes. I stared and stared. They were not real to me, those people. If I had had my portrait painted, Mme Butler and Her Children, I would not have chosen to stand elegantly in the middle of the room. I would have wanted to sit on that sofa with my children close. What Olga wanted was to use her children as showpieces. I saw that the picture, by Edouard Vuillard, had been presented to the Gallery by an officer of de Gaulle’s Free French Army ‘as a grateful remembrance of the years 1940–45’. Was M. Wormser killed in the war? No, surely not. Room 45 is so much nicer. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Seurat’s Une Baignade. Much prefer them to what I am doubtless going to see in Florence. I worry about going there. It is kind of Rosemary to take me but will she regret it? Why is she taking me? Pity? Duty? She can’t be choosing me as her travelling companion. Why does she not go on her own? It isn’t as though I suggested myself, the idea would never have occurred to me. I know my place.
*
Knows her place? I could get side-tracked on that one with the greatest of ease. But I must get on, get through this. I’ve rung the Royal Free, Mother’s fine, tooth’s out and no problems. I could go to see her this evening, but I can’t stand hospitals and Celia will be quite enough for her. I want to make the most of this most perfect of opportunities. A drink, a fag, and I’ll be ready for Daniel. As yet it’s Emily. Emily, every time I turn a page.
*
— once read in a newspaper article written as one of the many that celebrated the Queen Mother’s eightieth birthday, that the greatest pain of her life had been the divorce of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones. If that is true, I know how she felt. Nothing hurt me quite so profoundly, apart from those family deaths I have described (which belong to another order entirely) as Emily’s and Mark’s divorce in 1976. Emily once said to me that, if it had not been for knowing how I would be hurt, she would have been divorced long before. She said this resentfully, as though thinking of it had been a nuisance, as though I had wilfully exerted an unpleasant power over her. I don’t believe I was the contributory factor she likes to allege. I think the only thing that held her back from divorce was the deep love of her children for their father and his for them.
The reasons for divorce were cited as ‘irretrievable breakdown’, the usual meaningless words that covered ignorance of the real reasons. Neither of them really knew what had gone wrong, it seemed to me. So far as Mark was concerned, there was no real desire to break with Emily. It was she, from the start, who pushed for divorce. She became obsessed with the need to be rid of him. I would not say she ha
ted him, but she no longer loved him and he annoyed her intensely. Everything he did annoyed her. She jeered at his respectability, his tastes, even his success, because Mark had more than fulfilled his promise and was by that time an established accountant whose services were in great demand. Boring, said Emily. They had moved, as Mark had planned that they would (everything in their lives had gone as Mark planned, except for his wife’s response to his achievement) nearer to town, to a house in Dulwich. It was most attractively situated, on a hillside, with tree-filled gardens all around, and the merest tantalizing glimpse of the river through them in the distance. Boring, said Emily, even worse than Surrey, which once she had found so delightful. It is true I had no sympathy for her and, yet, it is also true I grieved deeply for her. She was a lost soul, restless and angry but without direction: she was not really furious with anyone or anything, except herself. Her resentment was fierce but unfocused. She had none of Rosemary’s analytical powers. Emily could not stand outside herself and examine her own condition. I wasted countless hours stupidly trying to remember if she had always been like that. All I could see, in my mind’s eye, was her round, beaming, cheerful face as a child. I tortured myself with memories of her exceptional happiness when she was a child – there had never been any problems with Em. And now there she was, miserable and drawn, hardly ever smiling, working herself daily into a frenzy of regrets. She never said I should not have allowed her to marry, because she knew how strongly I had voiced my objections at the time, but there was, all the same, an unspoken impression that I had somehow contributed to her mistake. It seemed Emily had been ‘taken in’, as she put it, by the false picture I had painted of the glories of marriage and motherhood. I should have been realistic. I should not have enlarged upon my own privileged experience of matrimony, nor extolled the delights of children. It was all nonsense, of course, and Emily knew that it was, but in her unhappiness she was vicious and she lashed out in all kinds of ways at innocent targets. She desperately needed someone to blame and I was a handy and even willing target, willing because of the eternal guilt I, like most mothers, can feel at the slightest provocation. How Emily’s predicament could have been avoided by me, I do not know, but I searched continually for an answer. What had I done? What had I not done? How much was the failure of my youngest daughter’s marriage my fault?
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