Nigel’s idea for the anthology held no appeal for Philippa. In the summer of 1967, when he was abroad researching a book, she wrote him a letter, exasperated by her sense of her own inadequacy for the task and angry with him for making her feel that way. ‘I’m very panicky about the garden anthology,’ she wrote in scratchy green ink. ‘I’m certain I don’t have the knowledge, competence or concentrated dedication to complete this minor project on time … I’m frightened it will be terribly amateur … I try to remind myself how well praised were my prècis [sic] and paraphrases at school. But if my name is attached to this anthology I’ll feel my stomach switch-backing at my lack of push for nepotism.’ The letter continues chillingly. ‘You don’t think I’m now happy to die having given Juliet, Adam and Rebecca life but I am.’
This is a tough letter to read, her waning confidence barely concealed beneath her defiance. By giving birth, she suggests, she has achieved all she ever will. And yet she goes on to end the letter with a real understanding of the beauty of Sissinghurst, as if to demonstrate what she might be capable of. It is impossible not to be moved by her lyrical description of the garden that evening. She tells Nigel how ‘the light of the sun lowered in purple stripes across the sky, the tower threw its long shadows sideways over the orchard. It was marvellous, the light. The bricks were gentle pink, the balsam poplars puffed their pungent smell across the orchard … Sybille [a head gardener] marched briskly down the flagstones to lower the flag and I watched as the dogs growled and tumbled in that pink dusk.’ But the lack of confidence, the fear of failure and the seeking of approval where there was none were familiar. Every one of the women who preceded me in our family had felt like this at times. Pepita had felt judged and shamed in Arcachon, Victoria had felt marginalised and cast off by Lionel, Vita had not met her own rigorous standards, and now Philippa was trapped by Nigel’s harsh treatment of her and by her own lack of self-belief.
Nature’s wildness unnerved her. Despite her upbringing in the country and her enduring love of horses, the natural world seemed determined to catch her out when she least expected it. Once, when dusk was falling, she put her hand on a sleeping bat on the banister. The startled animal made straight for her curly hair. Another time a wasp flew into her ear and was floated out on a wave of olive oil, poured by the doctor into the insect’s hiding place. One day we put a dead rat on her car seat just for the fun of hearing her swear. But there was also a human wildness in the air at home. I recognised the undisguised contempt on my mother’s face as she watched my father from her end of the dining-room table. The silent glare was preferable to the stream of precious French dinner plates that had on one occasion flown in Frisbee-anger between my parents down the length of the kitchen table and from which we had fled upstairs to Shirley’s soothing presence. During their rows I would concentrate on the plastic yogurt container that sat next to a silver twin-tubbed mustard pot, an ‘A’ and an ‘F’ imprinted on the inside lids, an Edwardian joke denoting Anglais and Français. Had Vita sat looking at the same glinting pot as her own parents’ relationship unravelled during dinner? I did not want to catch anyone’s eye. If I looked down, perhaps things would be better when I looked up again.
9
Juliet
Escape
During the summer of 1969, the Rolling Stones were still lamenting how a lack of sexual satisfaction leads to a deeper sense of isolation. And Philippa, who had given up on Sissinghurst, Nigel, marriage, the beauty of the pink dusk and on us children, went off on one of her regular visits to stay in St Tropez. And there she fell in love, not only with a man but with another kind of life. The new existence was offered to her by a fellow Silberberg guest, an old schoolfriend of her father’s. Robin McAlpine was a widower, a much older man, the wealthy chairman of a family firm of world-renowned civil engineers, who had built Wembley Stadium, the M1 motorway and the Dorchester Hotel, where Gervaise had lived during the war. He flattered Philippa, he fancied her and he promised to look after her. The tug of the older man, a father figure, protector and provider attracted her. Just as Nigel had offered her an escape from a stultifying life with her parents in the New Forest, McAlpine represented an alternative to a critical, unloving husband. Robin’s escape route included unparalleled riches and even the possibility of a title – he had been knighted in 1969 in the same honours list as Nigel’s business partner George Weidenfeld. In return for financial affluence, she would bring him gaiety, sexiness, companionship and rejuvenation. She had made her first patriarchal bargain with Nigel. Now she was about to make her second.
On 1 May 1968 Hadji died at Sissinghurst of a heart attack while undressing for bed. He was eighty-one. The coffin was placed in the Sissinghurst library, known to us as the Big Room, and Nigel sat beside it for the entire night before the funeral, weeping, he told me years later, more than he had ever wept in his life. A joint memorial service for Harold and Vita was held in Christopher Wren’s beautiful church, St James’s, Piccadilly, and we children were given a day off school to attend. The light-flooded building, with its huge windows and pews in the high gallery above the nave, had been filled with flowers sent up from Sissinghurst. The art historian Kenneth Clark gave the address to a packed congregation, and afterwards Gervaise gave a lunch at the Ritz accompanied by champagne for the whole family. I found the outing thrillingly sad. But I was not aware of the secret pledge that my mother had made with my father. She had given Nigel her word that she would not upset Harold by revealing their mutual unhappiness. As long as Harold was alive she would stay. The pledge had now expired.
My childhood now became dominated by secrets. There were secrets kept from me, secrets I suspected and also some secrets that I knew but kept to myself. I spent a lot of time listening at doors, silently picking up the telephone receiver and holding my breath to make my presence inaudible. It was supposed to be a secret that my parents were not getting on, but we had been long aware that although they slept beneath the same roof, they lived separate lives. One day when Nigel was abroad on business, Philippa and we children were collected by a small plane in a nearby field and flown over the county boundary to lunch in a smart white house in Hampshire. Robin McAlpine greeted us from an upstairs gallery that ringed a large potted-palm-filled, centrally heated hallway. It was the first time we had met him and we were not sure of his precise relationship to our mother. He was wearing a black sling because of a recent fall, and we watched him walk cautiously down the stairs, steadying himself on the banister with his good arm. As he reached the bottom to greet us, his sling acted as a shield that prevented him from shaking our hands. Despite his considerable size he seemed frail and old. In the dining room, silver swans with movable silver wings that opened to reveal a bed of salt had been positioned at intervals along the table. The first course was already waiting at each place. I was still feeling sick from the bumpy plane ride as I stared at the plate in front of me. The white of an egg was just visible through a murky blanket of aspic, one lettuce leaf and a tiny flower of parsley alleviating the gloom of the brown jellied blob. I hated eggs. As I cut into the mud-coloured sphere, the yolk ran free, staining the plate yellow and swamping the lettuce garnish, the only part of the bilious presentation I had been bracing myself to eat.
For the next few months, Philippa would shut herself in her bedroom at home, and although I could not make out her words, if I put my ear to a crack in the beam in the corridor, I could hear her whispering, a new sort of glutinous half-voice that made me shudder. She would remain locked away for more than an hour, a red light on the other telephone extensions in the house showing that she was still talking. I used to put one finger over the light to cover it up but the beam shone through, turning my finger into scarlet X-ray flesh. I wondered what my father thought and if he had noticed the way the red light stayed lit for so long, or if he listened in through the space between the beams and heard that cloying voice. I wanted her to stop gush-whispering into the receiver, to stop talking, to hang up. I knew who was on th
e other end and I did not like it.
That Christmas holiday she took us to London to see Gone with the Wind in the huge cinema in Leicester Square. The film, at four hours long, ended too late to catch the last train home. We were to stay the night in the London house belonging to Robin McAlpine. He had become a very special friend. He was a very kind person. His house in Mayfair was thick-carpeted and very hot. A glass bottle of water labelled like wine sat on the bedside table next to a glass engraved with garlands of flowers and a flowery cotton pouch containing paper handkerchiefs. In the bathroom the towels on the chrome rail were unexpectedly warm. In the morning the live-in cook brought a tray laid with a plate of paper-thin slices of brown bread, porcelain cups so fine one feared taking an accidental bite out of them and a miniature pot full of weak, scented tea that went grey when you put the milk in. On the way home on the train my mother said quietly to me that it would be best to tell our father, but only if he asked, that we had stayed the night at her brother’s London club. My father was waiting for us in the kitchen. Had we had fun? Was the film good? Where had we stayed? I hesitated. I looked at my mother. She looked back at me steadily. She was counting on her daughter. Resistance thumped just under my ears. In silence I went upstairs to the bathroom at the top of the house and put the little piece of wood attached to a leather thong into the latch, locking myself inside. I sat on the linoleum floor and then got into the empty bath and stretched out full-length. For the next hour I remained there silent, my socked feet resting on the taps as my father and mother took turns trying to persuade me to come out. They pleaded, reasoned, bribed, wheedled, exasperated and raged, but the power had shifted from mother to daughter. I not only knew the honest answer about where we had stayed the night but also a more insidious truth: that my mother wanted me to lie for her. Victoria had imposed the go-between role on Vita when her marriage to Lionel was falling apart. But this was worse. My mother had asked me to join in on her betrayal, and that day in the bathroom was a point of departure. Philippa had not taken into account the strength of my developing alienation from her. Her long abandonment of me over many years was mirrored that day by mine of her.
* * *
I was not sure why I had been suddenly packed off to school on the Kent coast, a two-hour drive away. I didn’t want to go. My brother was sent at the same time and he was only eight years old. He didn’t want to go either, but somehow the banishment from home of little boys whose small knees shone red with cold in their new uniform short trousers was presented as a wholly acceptable practice for a certain kind of family. My father had been sent away. My mother’s brothers had been sent away. There was no reason to break the tradition. But I do not know how my parents justified their decision to put a sobbing daughter into such expensive exile. Perhaps it eased their guilt at arguing in front of us. My mother cooked roast chicken, my favourite food, for the last supper. I could not eat a mouthful. At the school the headmistress herself made a favourable impression on my father when she wept in admiration at the strength of my resistance to her establishment. I was homesick but not really for my own home. Hiding my face in a damp pillow, I would invent a place where there were no rows, an ever-present mother who always made my favourite suppers, and plenty of expeditions with a father who promised me I would never have to go back to boarding school. Dancing was the best lesson, as we were allowed to change out of the brown uniform and wear our home clothes and feel normal. I knew that my father missed me, because he wrote to me every day for the first week, three times a week for the next three weeks, and after that once a week whenever we were apart for the next forty years.
I was entirely innocent of the facts of life, although my father’s sixteen-year-old goddaughter, dressed in jeans and a black bra, had once let me watch her wash her hair while she listened to music on her own gramophone, in her own room. This glimpse into the unimaginable, sophisticated and seductive power of adult women alerted me to a deliciously mysterious life ahead. On the first night at boarding school two older girls in my dormitory told me about the imminence of the apocalyptic blood that no woman, whether a mother or a teenager, is able to avoid. It was a curse they said. I was eleven and had never heard of such a dreadful thing but I was terrified that it would soon strike me down. As I queued up with the other girls in the communal bathroom, with its row of rusty baths, early adolescence so uncompromisingly exposed, I tried to work out whether those in the tubs in front of me had yet been cursed. I wanted to keep my end up but a bluff at authoritative knowledge backfired when I compiled a list of rude words to read out loud after lights-out and accidentally left the list in my gym knickers when they went to the laundry.
‘What is this? Please read it aloud,’ Matron demanded, holding out the piece of crumpled paper to me as I faced her across her office desk.
‘Bra, bottom, fart, willy,’ I began.
‘Continue please.’
‘Bosom, bust, knickers,’ I went on.
‘I’m afraid I will have to write to your parents,’ Matron concluded as I slunk from her room. Although the inventory was never mentioned by either parent, it might have prompted a conversation with my mother on my twelfth birthday.
‘What I am going to tell you, this thing about what a man does to a woman to get a baby, sounds disgusting,’ she said, crossing her legs as she lit a Benson & Hedges and exhaled the smoke with force. ‘And it is.’
I never much enjoyed boarding school, and the experience of returning after the holidays was always traumatic. In the spring of 1969, almost a year after Hadji had died, there was a sense of finality at Sissinghurst and yet I was feeling more miserable than ever at the prospect of another ten weeks away from home. My mother drove me back to school for the first day of the spring term with my trunk in the boot of the car. Sitting outside the school gate in her green Rover with the cream leather seats whose smell made me feel sick, the ignition turned off and the warm air from the car heater extinguished, she told me that she and Nigel were getting divorced. She would be leaving forever, she explained. We were used to the ‘leaving’ but not the ‘forever’. Her words held the physical sting of a slap. In the late 1960s divorce was not a common state of parental affairs, at least not in my school, and it stigmatised me as one of several distinctive odd girls out, linked as a figure of whispered curiosity to the girl who was adopted, the foreign princess who shaved her lower arms, and the inconsolable one whose father had died. A day or two later a copy of the Daily Express had been placed on the low table in the house study. Several girls were sitting in front of the fire reading and chatting with each other and paying no attention to me as I picked up the paper and turned the pages. Part of the William Hickey gossip column had been neatly removed with scissors, the headline perhaps accidentally left intact. CHATELAINE OF SISSINGHURST PREFERS GARDEN IN HAMPSHIRE. I looked up. Every eye was on me. They said they had cut the passage out to save my feelings but I knew they had been waiting to see my reaction. Yet I was not the chief casualty of the breakdown of the marriage. Philippa’s decision punctuated a defining point both in the structure of our family life and in my mother’s loss of identity. Until that moment she had been a daughter, then a wife, then a mother. For the next part of her life, she hovered between those two last roles, never quite sure which of them she wished to occupy, stumbling and falling with increasing damage not only to herself but also to her relationship with us.
When we returned from a holiday in Ireland, Nigel left us at Philippa’s new home, a large rented flat in a Victorian block just off Kensington High Street, before driving back to Sissinghurst alone. At one end of her large sitting room was a colour television, the first I had ever seen, while at the other end red-painted chairs with string seats were ranged around a trendy white-painted table. There were strawberries for supper in April, bought from the laboratory-clean supermarket down the road. In this seductive, sharp-edged, brightly lit city environment, tapestries and hessian and Sissinghurst fustiness had been replaced with the whiff of new gloss
paint and beige carpets. Suddenly London had become a treat, no longer just the place for an occasional holiday visit to the cinema and the smart dentist who discussed his loathing of Harold Wilson’s government with our mother while drilling ever more venomously into her children’s mouths. Now, we ate ice creams in Kensington Gardens, regularly went to the cinema and learned to eat with chopsticks in Chinatown. We went shopping in Kensington Market and I bought long silky Indian scarves and a silver necklace with little bells that jangled as I moved. We inhaled incense, sophistication and freedom. My mother and a couple of her friends threw a party in our flat for their four teenage daughters. Carolyn and Bella Warrender were super-glamorous, and I was amazed to find myself suddenly part of a cool gang. The third daughter, Rachel Pritchard, with her long blonde hair, was mischievous, irresistible. She became my lifelong best friend. There was a discotheque in the sitting room, and I wore a mustard velvet trouser suit with a black wet-look shirt underneath. The next day one of the most popular boys at the party called by with a pair of silver hooped earrings as a thank-you present. I felt giddy glimpsing life’s potential.
Throughout that year I was aware for the first time of being the envy of my contemporaries. For one lovely, spoiling, possibly guilt-induced interlude I had a mother who shone with demonstrative love. Maybe she was acting the part but I think not. Her own happiness came from the liberation from years of insecurity and unhappiness and allowed her to turn her attention to her children in ways she had been unable to before. She made us laugh with her mimicry of the man reading the news on the new colour television. I glimpsed the schoolgirl who had been singled out for her friendship and sense of fun in Norfolk, the young woman who had played leapfrog in London when she fell in love with Patrick Plunket, even the shy but eager bride-to-be whose sweetness and vivacity had struck my father among all the other guests at a party nearly twenty years earlier. Maybe, after her schooldays, this was the time when she was most free, happiest. When she was out, her rosy scent continued to drift on the air. At last the criticism and the obligations had gone and she had money and rooms of her own, the communal entrance to the flat giving her a liberating anonymity. Despite my new membership in the group of school oddities, I began to feel pleased that my parents had separated. For that one year I felt I had cracked the knack of balancing life, seeing each parent whenever I wished. It was as if I had learned to run a bath to the perfect temperature with not one extra drop of hot or cold required, until one day the water ran tepid. Philippa’s independence had been illusory. Robin McAlpine had paid for the flat in the old-fashioned way, his mistress housed, no questions asked, in a service apartment. But the arrangement could not last indefinitely.
A House Full of Daughters Page 20