A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  As soon as I could I left his house and plunged into the lunchtime cacophony of Oxford Street in a state approaching exhilaration. Never again would I feel the guilt of not going to see her, not answering her telephone calls, wishing she would stop, stop, stop, leave me alone, absolve me from daughterhood. A friend was having a party the following week and, seeking a distraction from the whirl of my mind, I wandered into the crowded, summer sale-time evening-dress department in Selfridges to look for something suitable to wear for a celebration. But I could not find the energy for dresses. Instead, I looked at the other shoppers around me. I suddenly had a premonition of exactly what their faces would one day look like, as a procession of stretched, smooth-sculpted death masks passed by me. I walked out of the shop and back through the London streets on my way to take the train back down to Sissinghurst, trying to pin Mumma-memories down in my mind. They were not good ones. The recent weeks and months and years had been stained dark by her addictive illness. I wanted to think of her as loving, as lovable, but I could not.

  And yet I knew that once she had been those things to me, her daughter. I had not forgotten the brief time after she had left my father when she was free-floating, light as air, unweighted by disappointment, her eyes and smile infused with gaiety, lovely to look at, smelling of roses, fallible, lovely and lovable. There was evidence in that photograph of Adam and me holding her hands as we waited for the ship to dock so many years ago, and in the creased envelope now in my desk drawer, marked ‘Juliet aged one’, containing one white-blonde curl. I thought of how when I was little she would collect me from school wearing a skirt covered in circus animals because she knew the trumpeting elephants and their trunks made me laugh. Over the skirt she wore a coat with buttons the size of crumpets, the breadth of a child’s hand.

  If we had been closer, if she had allowed me to help her, if I had not felt so abandoned by her, if I had not been so ruthless in my impatience with her, if she had been proud of me, the infinite ifs, if she had not died, then maybe one day I would have been able to help her. I envied the writer Edna O’Brien her impossible, critical mother who eventually confided to her daughter that she prayed ‘we shall both be buried in the same grave’.

  In my father’s diary I found an admission of his guilt, his deficiency as a husband. ‘The prime cause of her leaving me was that I never really loved her,’ he wrote, perhaps the saddest thing a child can read about her parents, for it was without love that they lived together for so long and perhaps without love that they made their children. For over thirty years my mother’s presence, even during her geographical absences, had dominated my life. And for over thirty years I had wanted to be loved by her. Immediately after her death, the secret I feared uncovering most was the one I had suspected for so long: my poor unloved mother had herself never learned how to love. So I left her alone, not mourning her, and never wishing for her return.

  * * *

  In Vita’s biography Pepita, she works out her feelings for her mother with a clarity that I would covet. Through writing down her impressions so shortly after Victoria’s death, Vita fulfilled that impulse to work out her own position within the mother-daughter relationship. She describes how after Victoria’s death she managed to look back on her mother’s life and gain a new and, by implication, fairer perspective on her, with ‘all the silly little irritations fading and the real quality emerging’. I, too, felt the urgent need to write something down, to try to work out what I felt about my mother. But I could not manage it. I think anger got in the way and stifled me. I wanted to feel for my own mother something of the compassion that Vita had displayed for hers. I could not do it then. All these years later I am trying again.

  11

  Clemmie and Flora

  Forgiveness

  One winter’s day, three years after our wedding, I had returned to my office after an appointment with the doctor. Long ago, I had made a secret pact with James that I would quit smoking if I ever became pregnant. That afternoon I telephoned him to say that the moment for abandoning cigarettes had arrived. We did not tell anyone else our news for several months. It was the best secret I had ever known.

  The two days on which I gave birth to my daughters remain the most precious of my life. I became a mother for the first time in September 1981 in a south London maternity hospital run by nuns. The holy sisters had made an incongruous choice of profession it seemed to me, given their vow of chastity. But theirs was a wonderful decision for us, the beneficiaries of such professional gentleness. As the time for the birth approached in its predictably unpredictable manner, my bed faced a large window through which the light suddenly sharpened on the sycamore leaves in the way it sometimes does when the autumn sun begins its slow descent to the horizon. During the few weeks before my daughter’s arrival, I had felt apprehensive about giving her up to the world. The mysterious and intermittent butterfly flickers of the early months had grown into something more definite as I alone knew when my unborn child stirred or, in that wonderful biblical word, ‘quickened’ deep inside me. I longed for but also feared her emergence, her first breaths of independent existence, and my subsequent inability to keep her safe in the way I had for nine months. This visceral need to protect was shared by James, who, within moments of her birth, announced his role as her chief defender at all times, especially from all future unsuitable boyfriends. I knew he had met the first human being he would willingly die for.

  My own emotions were unprecedented. They were untethered, unpredictable, switch-backing from elation to the painful intensity of something I did not recognise, a feeling akin to deep grief and yet nothing to do with grief. I felt like a child who laughs so much that she suddenly weeps. I might in some fanciful, absurd way say that the moon shone more brightly, the birds sang more loudly or even that some hazy sense of spirituality moved into a sharper focus. But it is both simpler and more inexplicable than that. Scientifically or biologically, the relationship of a mother to her child is founded on the utilitarian requirement to preserve new life. But that prosaic definition will not really do. I have never known a purer feeling than motherhood. Or a profounder one. Or a more complex one. Perhaps I had experienced the same unarticulated feeling of astonishment only once before: at the moment of my own birth.

  We called our daughter Clementine, Clemmie for short. With her arrival the role that daughterhood had occupied in my life shifted its emphasis. Until then, other than marriage and, to an extent, my professional life, daughterhood had defined me and identified me. During my parents’ lifetimes, whether I was rebelling or seeking their approval, they had both, in their different ways, remained my first point of reference. But with motherhood I reached a point of clarity; my daughter joined my husband as the pivots of my emotional life.

  When Flora was born in New York in March 1985, three months after our arrival there, in a hospital two blocks from our apartment, James brought a case of twelve miniature bottles of champagne and a huge bunch of paper-white narcissi smelling of spring, of having come through a harsh winter, of arrival, of beginnings. Clemmie came to visit, the unexpected gift of having her own sister illuminating her three-year-old face. It is an expression that endures, matched by that of Flora herself, and one with which I remain profoundly familiar. At the hospital, the new mother in the bed next to me was married to a man who owned a pizza parlour. Breathing in the perfume of the delicate white flowers and the scent of my baby daughter’s skin, I shut out the spicy odour of margherita and pepperoni that suffused our little ward. When I arrived home the following day, I gazed at my baby asleep in her cot, the sight of her so perfectly beautiful, transforming the hard edges of sadness at being far from home. With Flora’s arrival, the completing, deepening, blessed sense that motherhood brings and never leaves was re-enforced once again.

  As children and adults all settled into the challenge of expatriate lives, New York became a tale of two cities. There was downtown for work and there was uptown for motherhood. James worked in his high-fly
ing stockbroking office on Wall Street in the shadow of the Twin Towers, I got a job in Union Square at a small, distinguished publishing house, Clemmie went to a school near the river on the Upper East Side and Flora stayed at home in the care of the nanny. Manhattan was in some ways a strange, unsettling, even unsuitable backdrop in which to bring up daughters in the 1980s. Adult society was in turmoil. Alarming articles appeared in the press about the new illness that was ripping through the drug-using and homosexual male communities, although New York’s gay bathhouses were still operating at full swing. A transvestite club in the meatpacking district carried the innocent symbol of a woman in a ball gown on the door to the ladies’ loo. But when the door swung open, a bank of urinals confronted you, complete with a line of bare male bottoms, their skirts bunched around their waists. Vietnam vets packed the bar, still twitching and shuddering with post-traumatic stress, chain-smoking and cradling their tumblers of neat Scotch. Listless, gum-chewing taxi drivers waited outside the club hoping for a fare, their engines ticking over. To alleviate the boredom, they sometimes became customers themselves, winding down their windows to allow a stilettoed blond, his five o’clock shadow showing through thick foundation, to bend down into the well of the driver’s seat, taking half a minute to effect a fleeting pleasure. But the fear and rumours about this rampaging ‘plague’ that was running through the gay community, and for which there was no known cure, gathered momentum as an increasing number of cases were diagnosed and the notorious bathhouses were closed a year after we arrived. HIV, that led to the fatal condition of Aids, was transmitted through an exchange of bodily fluids and through sharing drug syringes. Manhattan binmen refused to collect the rubbish for fear of picking up used heroin needles and becoming infected. Restaurants covered their loo seats with disposable cling-film covers. The shared cup containing communion wine was shunned at altar rails. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had died of the illness but few of the victims’ families, or public relations companies representing movie stars like Rock Hudson, would admit it. Homosexuality in heart-throbs was bad for the box office. The physical ravages of Aids were impossible to miss. Skeletal appearances due to the disease were sudden and dramatic. Talk at the altar rail concluded that mankind had somehow offended his Maker. If sex and heroin had been the infecting culprits, liver cancer and rheumatoid arthritis became the convenient substitutes for denial and shame. The atmosphere and the media coverage of the epidemic fluctuated between censorship and fear until 1986, when a British advertisement showing a granite tombstone engraved with the single word ‘Aids’ and the strapline ‘Don’t die of ignorance’ promoted awareness of how the virus could be avoided and made international headlines.

  High up in the glittering skyscrapers of Wall Street and behind the portered doorways to Park and Fifth and Madison Avenues’ elegant apartment buildings lay riches beyond most people’s wildest dreams. At a birthday dinner party on Black Monday in October 1987, a personal butler stood impassively behind each woman’s seat. A dozen black-suited bankers craned across their wives to analyse the news of the apocalypse. The world’s stock markets had crashed, and on that day $500 billion had been lost from the Dow Jones index. We wives, irrelevant and invisible, emptied our glasses; the butlers leaned forward and refilled them; we drained them yet again. Bread must have accompanied the wine at this last affluent supper, but none of these twelve disciples of the Wall Street ticker tapes nor their wives were conscious of eating. Several hours later, twelve inebriated women swayed precariously from the room as if they, too, were about to crash to the floor along with the markets.

  James and I had been fortunate to find an apartment for our family just a few yards from Central Park, the 843 acres of Midtown Manhattan given over to nature, for so long a source of such pride to the citizens of New York. But the park had begun to lose its green-grassed innocence and acquire sinister associations. In the early morning and late evening, in rain and in sun, the city’s population of committed joggers swept past with their fluid movement and toned limbs, running from the beds of their high-achieving, taut-muscle lovers to their office desks beside other high-achieving work-addicted colleagues. In late August 1986, one of these amateur athletes was strangled in the park just behind the huge bulk of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by a former choirboy, the young girl’s murder in this safe place shocking the city and putting a nervous acceleration into every runner’s step. During the daytime, the open spaces of the park became the resource of the very old and the very young. Old men sat on the benches in groups of two and three, clutching half-bottles of Scotch wrapped in brown paper and discussing unintelligible profundities, while private nurses in immaculate white trouser suits and matching plimsolls slid wheelchairs past them, the frail skull-like faces of the nonagenarian occupants grotesque in misapplied lipstick and blusher. Young children were pushed on the swings by parents and nannies who were warned not to go anywhere near the tame-looking squirrels that reeled their way round the trunks of the chestnut oaks, high on discarded heroin paraphernalia. Near the boating lake, the larger-than-life-size statue of Alice in Wonderland, onto whose bronze lap the children of many decades had climbed, continued to welcome members of a new generation, among them my daughters, into her comfortable embrace. Alice was a talisman of security in an uncertain world.

  But children are infinitely flexible, and if the imagery of my daughters’ childhood setting seemed to me at times to resemble a distorted and fantastic Boschian landscape, they took to it in a way I never quite could. My daughters were united in their tolerant familiarity with the eclectic bunch of individuals who populated our urban lives. The brownstone adjoining our apartment was owned by a man with a past. He had once been a respected art dealer and had made a great deal of money. But now he used his prime real estate to house pigeons. There were dozens of them. We could see them through the windows flying around the high-ceilinged rooms as if trapped in a grim fairy tale, and when the man emerged, we tried not to stare at the pale grey feathers that clung to his dark, shit-splattered coat. Around the corner, a smiley, bearded, homeless Jamaican with an incongruous, brand-new Mont Blanc pen jotted down poems on a notepad. Complimenting the coiffured, lacquered ladies who emerged from the shiny red door of the Elizabeth Arden salon, he invited rather than implored them to part with a hundred dollars, his charm often proving irresistible.

  * * *

  We had been living in New York far longer than the two years we had originally intended. James was now working for Deutsche Bank and I had been given new responsibilities at the publishing company. My daughters were growing up. They became androgynous New York children, living in jeans and off Chinese takeaway. They knew the names of baseball stars, collected the all-the-rage miniature felt animals that made up the Sylvanian families, learned about the Native American princess Pocahontas and about Martin Luther King and spoke with American accents. The avenues around us teemed with headline-making personalities. When Woody Allen brought his cameras to film at the bottom of our street, he invited a star-struck Clemmie and her friends into his trailer for orange juice and autographs. Flora reported that she had spotted the fugitive writer Salman Rushdie concealed from the fatwa in the shadows of the hotel two doors down. They were both intrigued by the tall, dark figure of Claus von Bülow. The notorious former lawyer, recently at liberty after successfully appealing against his conviction for the attempted murder of his heiress wife, Sunny, hurried in his modish, mobbish leather jacket past the little knot of journalists that waited outside his apartment. Every morning, we ate crispy bacon and glazed doughnuts for breakfast in the local diner, before the yellow bus took the girls across the park to their new co-ed school. John McEnroe and his movie-star wife, Tatum O’Neal, added a frisson of stardust to the morning by turning up to wave their children off at the bus stop. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities had lit up the best-seller lists while its author strode the streets around us in his man-for-all-seasons white suit. My daughters knew every slab of pavement betw
een our apartment and the park as well as I had known the London pavements between my own school and home in Chelsea. They considered themselves New Yorkers.

  In order to compensate for what felt like the over-sophistication of city living and to give our daughters something of the rural upbringing that James and I had both loved, we found an old brick house in upstate New York, not far from the border with Massachusetts. We made a lovely weekend life there for ourselves, with camps in the woods, makeshift bridges over streams, starry nights under canvas, newborn lambs in the meadows and grey-bearded beavers in their riverside burrows. We were surrounded by fields of high-growing sweetcorn through which a gentle wind swept, sounding like a church congregation rising to its feet. These were all elements that contributed to our idea of what we wanted for their childhood. And despite the paint-blistering heat of the summers and the windowpane-cracking cold of the winters and a cellar where dead bodies had once been laid when the earth was too hard to dig a grave, we sometimes felt as if we belonged. My daughters’ memories of eating wild blueberries picked from the hedgerows, playing cowboys and Indians, cycling across the cornfields to the nearby lake, exploring the dark and dusty outhouses where ‘the chair lady’ stacked her second-hand furniture, barbecuing freshly picked ears of corn and catching fireflies at dusk on the bank of the little stream, return them even today to what Flora calls ‘the absurd beauty of that place’. The brick house remains a capsule of an American childhood that they both now consider to have been idyllic.