* * *
Back at school I stood in the fusty little cupboard beneath the main staircase where there was a pay telephone that accepted incoming calls; the receiver, black Bakelite, was sweaty on my ear from the girl who had used it before. My mother was asking me to come to her wedding to a man I barely knew though knew I did not like. She was turning me against my will into a stepdaughter, an awkward link in the conventional family chain. I refused the invitation. She wept. I hung up. I was losing her all over again.
Was it unkind not to be more tolerant of her choice of a husband, need for a husband? Was I behaving selfishly by protecting my new-found contentment at receiving her attention without competing with other adults? Her friends questioned her decision, begged her not to go through with the marriage. She shared her doubts with them and cried the night before in the arms of one of them, but the next day her anxieties had apparently dissipated, her resolve hardened. There was a legal ceremony at Caxton Hall, the same registry office where in 1952 Elizabeth Taylor had married husband number two, Michael Wilding, and where in 1965 Ringo Starr had married Maureen Cox. Philippa’s legal formalities were followed by a church service at St George’s, Hanover Square, during which a scratchy recording of the vows was made, the only audible words being Philippa’s confirmation that she would remain married ‘for richer’. The flowers at the wedding lunch at the Dorchester were regal purple, her favourite colour. None of her children were there for any of it. She returned all Nigel’s love letters, handing him back what had become redundant and meaningless documents.
Philippa’s second husband delivered the promised material comforts that took her beyond her wildest dreams. The reward for marriage included houses and live-in staff, holidays to exotic places, designer clothes to wear to the private box at Epsom racecourse, enough champagne to fill every en suite bath in the Dorchester Hotel and a private London taxi with its own peak-capped chauffeur. She once came to my school open day in a helicopter, her means of transport matched by the mother of only one other pupil, Princess Anne. There was an attempt on both sides to keep our relationship buoyant. But there was also a reluctance. I wanted to do the right thing and show that, despite not going to the wedding, I was pleased for her, but I wasn’t. She seemed anxious to keep me involved in her new life and yet I annoyed her. A friend of hers meant well when he took me aside and said how it could not be easy for me, being neither one thing nor another. Although I had embarked on the bumpy trip through the no-man’s-land of adolescent instability, tilting at times towards childhood and at others cautiously in the other direction, I did not want my limbo state pointed out. My mother’s irritation with her teenage daughter, pustular with hormones, or what Philippa termed ‘bolshiness’, was compounded for her by having to contend with a stepchild and a stepparent who had found themselves connected in a way that neither had chosen.
Weekends at Robin’s Hampshire house were a trial. The single thin chime of the clock in the hall would coincide precisely with the arrival of the Spanish butler bringing a tray of sherry glasses and a plate of mackerel pâté smoothed into perfect cones on top of Ritz crackers. Returning ten minutes later he would announce with a token bow that lunch was ready, repeating the ritual in the evening for dinner, when, even though there were rarely any outside guests, women of all ages were required to change into long dresses before entering the dining room.
Dining rooms have run through my family as uncomfortable environments in which to be trapped. In Albolote, Catalina read aloud her absent daughter’s letters to her embarrassed guests. At Knole, Victoria had tried to talk through difficult silences in the Poets’ Parlour, and at the same table Vita had attempted to calm her arguing parents. In the dining room at Sissinghurst, I had watched the painful decline of my grandfather’s health and my own parents’ unmistakable incompatibility. In Hampshire, my stepfather sat at one end of the highly polished table in the centre of the overheated dining room, Philippa at the other waiting for the butler to bring in the grouse. Conversation centred on the weather and the state of the turf for the next race meeting at Epsom. Both my stepfather and Philippa were mad about racing. All forms of culture, especially books, were considered dangerous, subversive and narrowing of the mind. There was to be no mention of politicians except Winston Churchill, and any hint of interest in the left wing was like suggesting Chairman Mao should be invited for a game of croquet. Adam remembers an explosion at his mention of the Red Star parcel force. There was to be no Commy talk in that house. Desperate to find a topic and to interrupt the silence, which felt like an expression of disapproval at our presence in Robin’s house, I would stare at my plate considering and rejecting everything that came into my head. All possibilities were derailed as I watched my stepfather tap Tabasco onto the new season’s oysters. He was a large man, not as tall as Seery but almost as bulky. But he had none of Seery’s sweetness. He felt soft and dangerous. He reminded us of Goldfinger. Filling the wall behind Philippa was a half-length 1950s portrait of Robin’s first wife, who had died some years earlier. She looked like Grace Kelly in a pale pink, sleeveless, diaphanous evening gown, and her beautiful, formidable, cold, painted eyes stared down at the back of my mother’s neck.
Even as my parents’ marriage was disintegrating, and especially after Philippa’s failed attempt to get me to lie for her, my relationship with Nigel had deepened further. Just as in those few flickery black-and-white moments of film when, as a five-year-old bridesmaid, I had reached for my father’s hand, I continued to reach for him after my mother left. After my parents’ divorce I spent as much time with Nigel as I could, gradually assuming a new responsibility. A (wifeless and indeed parentless) man often finds himself in need of a wife, but when a wife is not available, a daughter, even a teenage daughter, has to do. Almost a hundred years earlier, and only a few years older than I was in the late sixties, my great-grandmother had arrived in America to act as her father’s hostess at the embassy in Washington. Following her pattern, I stepped into a vacancy created by a mother’s absence. And as it had for Lionel and Victoria, the arrangement proved equally beneficial to father and daughter.
My second boarding school was only a few miles from Sissinghurst and after Saturday-morning lessons I would look out the small window on the upper staircase and down onto the school driveway, where Nigel’s orange Vanden Plas would be neatly parked waiting to take me home. Unaware of the extent to which he had been deprived of female affection, by not only his wife but also his mother, I wonder now if a nascent maternal instinct, a role reversal at such a young age, was already in place in me. During Nigel’s early days of singlehood, when he required a woman to assume responsibilities suited to someone far older, I think he saw an opportunity to ‘mould’ me in the same way he had tried to mould my mother all those years ago. He made clear his determination that I should not be submerged into incurious conventionality by the ultra-conservative, unacademic boarding school that Philippa had insisted on. He would test me, push me, and often criticise and despair of me whenever he saw a reflection of my mother in my behaviour. I was shy, unconfident and prone to giving up. ‘Little Miss Can’t’ was a favourite retort whenever I failed a challenge. I was frequently reminded of what was touted as ‘the family motto’. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again,’ he would chant whenever I raised an obstacle to what he was suggesting. Much later he admitted that he had first heard the phrase from The Children of the New Forest by Frederick Marryat, a book that had been given to him by one of his constituents in Hampshire when I was born. He wanted to toughen me up. He was not satisfied with a weakling daughter and his confidence in my potential ebbed and flowed. A chance remark could finish me off, especially a comparison with one of my school friends, who were universally assessed as prettier, funnier and cleverer than me. Perhaps Nigel was unaware of his daughter’s acute sensitivity. I recently read that the Sun newspaper editor David Yelland sometimes regretted publishing an unkind story, feeling ‘like a boy who kills a songbir
d with an airgun and only afterwards realises the power of his weapon’.
What I wanted more than anything was Nigel’s approval. His endorsement counted. His conventionality, indeed hypocrisy, given his insistence that he was the most liberal-minded and emancipated of men, was demonstrated in the demands he imposed on his pliable teenage daughter, expecting her to serve as his wife’s replacement cook and hostess for summer lunch parties. Having sent him a shopping list by post from school earlier in the week, I would change out of my uniform into jeans and knock up cauliflower cheese, macaroni cheese, cheese on toast, cheese and biscuits, and an oddly infallibly delicious chocolate mousse while, accompanied by his own sibilant whistle, he picked purple clematis to float in the two silver bowls on the dining-room table. But at the time, I was not in the least resentful, did not feel exploited. I enjoyed the part I played in his life, enjoyed being needed, enjoyed acting the grown-up, enjoyed the praise, enjoyed being with him, grateful for the sense of importance I felt when I accompanied him anywhere. And I loved him, so was happy to make my own patriarchal bargain.
‘Unseen hands will clear up,’ my father would promise guests at the end of lunch, implying the presence of several willing staff in the kitchen as we took his visitors round the garden before waving them goodbye and returning together to the twin sinks. The washing-up became a favourite place for difficult conversations, all inhibiting eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation removed as we stood side by side staring down into the soap-filled chrome tubs, me washing, him rinsing. He continued to take his parental duties as seriously as he always had, not sure if he could rely on his ex-wife to carry them out properly, and perhaps mindful of his mother’s inability to communicate with her children. Given his queasiness over all matters sexual, he handled a hormonal and dislocated daughter with laudable skill. ‘Do you know the facts of life?’ he asked one day, clearing his throat and turning on the cold tap more forcefully. ‘Yes, of course,’ I lied. ‘That’s good. Then we don’t need to talk about any difficult details. I have just one thing to say on the subject. Love affairs must reflect the pattern of your professional life. You must have three good stabs at your career and the same number at love. Change your professional as well as your romantic direction three times. The jobs and the men [he assumed it would be men] should all be rather different, none should become permanent or even necessarily husbands, but each of the three in both categories should be serious commitments and grand, all-consuming passions. The only thing I ask is that you neither fall for nor become a dentist. Mouths are horrible orifices into which to peer.’ (He had a recurring aversion for orifices of all varieties.) He was a romantic. Like his grandfather Lionel, but at odds with my mother, he did not want dukes for me, although on Valentine’s Day an unsigned postcard of a Bavarian castle would arrive with ‘This is where your prince is waiting for you’ written on the reverse in his neat handwriting.
I was learning little at a boarding school where every girl was sent on a celebratory school picnic when the head girl won a scholarship place at university. Each morning we made our beds with sharp hospital corners that were inspected by Matron for precision. Our physical deportment was refined by walking up and down the classroom with books piled on top of our heads. We had embroidery, cooking and knitting lessons. White-collared velvet dresses in dark colours designed with the housekeeper of an Edwardian vicarage in mind were worn on Sundays, with a panel that flipped up at the back so the nap of the velvet did not get crushed by the schoolgirl bottom. We learned that the correct direction in which to shave a leg was from ankle to knee, to do the Scottish reels and the waltz. We had euphemisms when we had our period (a word that itself was deemed vulgar) like ‘the Curse’ or ‘I am off games’. ‘Charlie’s dead’ was code for ‘your petticoat is showing’, and everyone including Princess Anne had a photograph of her mother on her dressing table next to the pink Mum Rollette sold by the ton at the village shop. We were all confirmed by the local bishop, the Archbishop of Canterbury, not because we were believers but because the preparatory lessons were taken by a shy visiting nun who we interrogated in voices of touching sincerity about what the Bible meant by ‘knowing’ a man. After lights out, conversational topics progressed from breasts to buggery and soon I was far out of my depth. There was talk about ‘positions’, and although I could not work out how the five basic ballet points, with the variations of a foot in front or behind, could enhance or decrease sexual pleasure, I kept quiet. We were all astonishingly naive. At the beginning of one term, word went round that during the holidays a very beautiful sixth-former called Isabella had ‘gone all the way’ with her boyfriend. A little bunch of us would assemble on the side of the Lime Avenue waiting for a glimpse of Isabella as she passed by, astonished to discover that she could still ride a bicycle.
There were attempts to prepare the student body for adult society. Sixth-formers were required on a rotating basis to eat a week’s worth of lunches at the headmistress’s table and practise the art of conversation. For seven days we were forbidden to mention the weather or sport while the stewed cabbage was handed round in an exaggeratedly polite manner, as if we were seated at a Lord Mayor’s banquet. Filling conversational spaces once again became a thing to dread, just as it was in my stepfather’s house, and we would try anything rather than be reduced to the ultimate crime of discussing the nature of the food on our plate. I was useless at needlework, cheated during the practical for my cooking O level, hated sleeping in a dormitory, and made few friends. The only part of school life that I really enjoyed were the English lessons and the marvellously bosomy Mrs Innes Crump, who rippled with emotion whenever she called upon herself to recite ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Poetry and fiction remained my escape route, my psychic refuge.
When Philippa suggested she might be able to persuade Nigel to let me do my A levels at a crammer in London, I jumped at the chance. She had found a college with a knack of getting non-academic girls through their exams with impressive speed. London and blue jeans felt a lot more exciting than velvet dresses and the village shop. I would have a room and my own bathroom in one of Robin’s two houses in Mayfair. Nigel agreed to the move, my academic success mattering to him more than my nearby availability as loving, compliant daughter and hostess.
Westminster Tutors was based in a series of Victorian rooms in Artillery Row, just down the road from Westminster Abbey, and presided over by its formidable founder, Miss Freeston, and her rabid terrier, Topsy. I discovered to my surprise and pleasure that my old teacher Mrs Fitzgerald was on the staff, the wisps of red hair that still escaped from her bun now highlighted with grey streaks as she ran into the fuggy little teaching rooms balancing a pile of books and a paper cup of soup. Perching the lunchtime mulligatawny on the bench next to the hazardous gas fire, her infectious love of literature, now transferred from Dickens’s knitters to Tess and her illegitimate child, remained undimmed. I began to feel adult, emancipated. I started to smoke, secretly at first, practising by lying full-length on the floor of the bathroom before adjusting to the dizzying nausea as I stood up. I rehearsed my inhale-exhale technique during long Tube rides. I discovered T. S. Eliot. I had never read anything like it. At home I thought about Prufrock and listened to Don McLean singing ‘Everybody Loves Me Baby’ and wondered if anyone would ever love me.
* * *
Philippa’s ambitions for me did not include the intoxication of reading poetry and smoking on the Underground on my way to Artillery Row, but more the landing of a rich, preferably titled proposal of marriage, including a chauffeur and a country seat. In preparation for a life of Bentleys and baronetcy, she wished me to come out as a debutante. On the day I left my boarding school, she somehow pulled a string and arranged for both of us to have our photographs taken by Cecil Beaton. I had been given a special candyfloss blow-dry by my mother’s hairdresser and felt and looked like a shop-window mannequin as the dapper, bow-tied Beaton stood me in front of his camera. Forbidding all mention of ‘cheese’, a word guaranteed,
he said, to produce a most unattractive elongation of the lips, he required me instead to repeat ‘lesbian’ very slowly after him, which produced a much more natural smile in the finished portrait.
Debutantes were still under the patronage of mothers who met one another at lunch parties before the beginning of the social season, ostensibly to organise the dates for their daughters’ dances and to discuss the potential of that year’s selection of ‘Debs’ Delights’, but covertly to weigh up the competition in terms of wealth and looks. Philippa cultivated several new friendships with smart mothers but considered herself slightly ahead of the game with the Beaton photographs under her belt and, through the connections of Patrick Plunket, an invitation to a party at Kensington Palace hosted by Princess Margaret. One of the other guests was at Westminster Tutors with me and her handsome brother Harry asked me to dance, as Lord Snowdon spun the discs in the large palace drawing room. Princess Margaret cruised among us, her eyes like mobile telescopes zeroing in on any misdemeanour, her own cigarette firmly in its holder while tearing a strip off my dashing dance partner, who had dared to drop his stub onto the floor and grind it into the polished surface with his shoe.
A House Full of Daughters Page 21