A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  But I did not feel I was getting things right. My determination not to repeat the mistakes that had made parts of my own childhood difficult was not succeeding. I was always leaving my daughters. Just like my mother. When we lived in London, I had left the house each morning to go to work, earning enough to pay for Clemmie’s nanny, the substitute for my maternal presence. Chugging and swerving along the streets on my moped towards my desk in Covent Garden, I was exhilarated by my office life but always urged the bike to return faster on the homeward journey. The pattern was repeated in New York; work for the parents, nannies for the children. The nannies themselves were a mixed bunch, some wonderful, a few less so. The arrangement began well with the loving and steady Janet and Linda. After their lamented departures, the turnover became disturbingly rapid. Angela confessed after her short-lived presence in our family that her unexplained exhaustion and the curiously tousled state of my bed when I arrived home on Tuesdays was the result of her weekly lunchtime rendezvous with the dry-cleaning delivery boy. Harriet was no better, tyrannising us all with her icy beauty and superiority, her taste for champagne and banker boyfriends. Jake, an experimental male nanny, admitted within a week that he had a problem with his boyfriend and his haemorrhoids. He left after I informed him that the job did not come with either medical or therapeutic insurance. Finally we found Eglute, a joy of an eccentric eighteen-year-old and a favourite with us all, even though behind my back she taught the girls to swear effortlessly in her native Lithuanian. Old ladies in the park were charmed, unaware that these two little blonde Lithuanian angels were cooing fluent filth over their beloved terriers.

  There is little I would not exchange now for the chance to start again, abandon the job, abandon the nannies and immerse myself for a while in my daughters’ young lives. And yet I wanted to work. My sense of myself was that I functioned as a professional woman. I faced a conundrum. I wanted to stay at home and look after the children myself, unlike my mother. And I wanted to go out to work, unlike my mother. In order to try to have everything, I made a bargain with my conscience that I had established a balance that suited us all and that fitted in with the modern way of life. The payoff for heading downtown to the office was the reassurance that, unlike my own mother, I was giving my daughters a blueprint for financial independence, intellectual stimulation, society’s respect, an emancipated life, something that they might one day emulate. And yet by leaving my children in the paid care of another, I risked accusations and suffered the guilt of abandonment. And I missed being with them. The choice remained a hard one. I swung between the options with metronomic regularity, reaching one extremity and then being pulled inexorably back to the other. While I rejoiced that professional opportunities for which Catalina had fought so hard for her daughter had opened up so easily for me, I found the decision about how much time to give to work or home challenging.

  The children seemed fine. And they had each other when neither James nor I was around. They were a team, a sisterhood, finding in each other their own best and most secure confidante, sharing a private bond through which parenthood could not permeate. Anxiety was not their burden but mine. I felt that although I could hear my children, I was not listening to them: I was present but at the same time absent. Aunt Pun, the mother of my nanny Shirley, had demonstrated to us years ago how a mother’s love should be done. Shirley herself had demonstrated to us how it should be done. I indulged my children, but was indulgence the same as love? Being allowed to watch television for as long as they wished, to go to bed at a time of their own choosing, made them feel uneasy and insecure. The extravagant presents I brought back after a two-day work trip and the pizza delivered for supper every night of the week lost the thrill of rarity. Leniency and extravagance were not antidotes to negligence. The father of some friends spoke to his children in the tone of a sergeant major. Clemmie announced she would like to be spoken to in the same way. She craved such a display of discipline. She did not remember ever feeling so envious.

  * * *

  Gradually our marriage lost its footing. James and I had married young, and as we grew up and our own separate interests developed, we had drifted apart. I was hopeless at feigning interest in the financial world that became increasingly important and absorbing for him. And I allowed my own relationships with my work colleagues to become all-consuming and excluding. There was increasingly little overlap in James’s and my social lives. I would take the girls home to England for the holidays as often as I could, and I had begun to dread boarding the return plane to America. While the participants who remain in a failing marriage are responsible for sustaining the slow and painful collapse, their children can only watch, bracing themselves for another argument, another door slammed, another edgy meal. Feuding parents invite divided loyalty, often unintentionally, but while carrying an assumption that it is legitimate to ask a child to be their message bearer. Vita had known what that felt like. I had known what that felt like. And now my own children were being submitted to the same experience.

  And then I discovered a way to cheer myself up. Alcohol. Although the cause of my mother’s death remained raw and salutary, for some inexplicable or cruelly genetic reason I confused the identical poison with curative medicine. At first I succeeded well in cohabiting with my new habit, certain that I knew how to manage it, adamant that its powerful attraction would not become addictive. And for a while I controlled my intake well enough to hold down my job, but only just. The compulsion to drink became more and more difficult to disguise. There was a sign that I always seemed to end up facing as I strap-hung on the subway on my way to work each morning on the packed rush-hour trains. It had been put up by an alcohol-concern charity. ‘Alcohol will rob you of your job, your friends, your family, your life,’ it warned. I would silently tick off each category on my fingers, relieved that so far all four were intact. At least that is what I told myself.

  I have thought a great deal about the wisdom of writing about my struggle with alcoholism, and for many years had decided it was better to keep it private. My grandmother’s relationship with another woman was, during her lifetime, hushed up by many and verged on the non-mentionable. And when the decision to publish Vita’s confession in Portrait of a Marriage was criticised by reviewers, commentators and even friends, Nigel was deeply disturbed by the accusations of disloyalty to his parents. But he never failed to stress that Vita herself had hoped that her memoir might one day help others going through the same emotions as herself, over an issue that society in general found shameful and in some cases illegal. Vita had written that she believed that one day ‘such connections will to a very large extent cease to be regarded as merely unnatural and will be understood far better’, and that ‘the spirit of candour which one hopes will spread with the progress of the world’ would lead to recognition, if not quite full acceptance, of both female and male homosexuality. My father also received dozens of letters from people grateful to him for his decision and for having the courage to face up to the criticism. I resolved to write about my own secret only after consulting those whom I love most and who had been hurt most by my drinking. It is only with their support and agreement that I do so now. While there are few taboo subjects remaining, several are still misunderstood and fenced in by stigma. If my own experience with one of them offers hope, even to just one individual who might be in despair about this mental and physical dependency, then for me, the decision to write about it will have been justified.

  During the weekends at the brick house, my family found the intrusive, character-changing power of drink increasingly difficult to ignore. And within an alarmingly short time alcohol had become my first resort, my hereditary drug of choice, the default option so frequently chosen by women in my family who had struggled with life. At the brick house escape became the dominant activity. My daughters would escape together to their hideouts, my husband would escape to the garden, to isolation with a book, to visit neighbours, and I would escape to the dubious companionship and numbing
comfort of the vodka bottle. And then people at work began to notice that I was frequently late for meetings, that I forgot things, that I was an unreliable employee.

  Eventually our daughters, by then aged eleven and eight, with heartbreaking calmness, courage and wisdom, confronted us, their parents, and suggested it was time we stopped fighting. And eventually I, too, found the courage to ask James if I could take our daughters home to live with me in England. With a generosity of spirit for which I shall always be grateful, he agreed. But even after our return and when our marriage was officially ended in a soulless London courtroom, I continued to struggle. My obsession with drink and continued inability to control it obscured what I wanted to be my main focus: providing a happy home for Clemmie and Flora. It is the period of my life of which I am most ashamed. I felt inadequate, a large-toothed, huge-nosed divorcee. A long erosion of self-confidence, of never being quite up to the mark, a tendency to give up, of being a Little Miss Can’t, finally took its toll. I felt like a failure, just as I now realise my mother had felt. Maybe, especially during the lonely despair of the war, this was how Vita had felt, how Victoria felt as her own marriage ended and how, in the isolating claustrophobia of Arcachon, Pepita might have felt too. Once I went to a dinner party, determined that a social life of sorts must go on. But I could think of nothing to say to those strangers sitting on either side of me, and as they turned away in search of more lively companions, I resorted to counting the petals on the fresias in front of me, staring at dining-room tables all over again.

  Much of the time I could not bear to think. To think was to feel and to feel was painful, and so I obliterated conscious thought. There were incidents – forgotten dates, humiliating behaviour in front of my daughters’ school friends, indiscretions revealed, whispered asides by dismayed friends to restaurant waiters not to top up my glass. And there was an occasion of real embarrassment when, as my father’s guest, I interrupted the distinguished speaker at a swanky charity dinner by clinking my spoon on my empty glass, asking the speaker to shut up and let us get on with the party. And then I fell unconscious, awakening with a start as my nose grazed the surface of my soup. The humiliation was almost complete. But still I could not stop drinking.

  I used to work out how long I had left to live, conscious that women on my mother’s side of the family did not survive beyond the age of fifty-eight. I did not want to die before my father but I knew I would. I wondered which of my friends would be at my funeral. I began to avoid sleeping on my right-hand side. The pressure on my damaged liver was so painful that every twinge confirmed what I already knew. After a doctor’s appointment and a blood test for an unrelated complaint, I was told that only 10 percent of my liver was still functioning. I was tipping over the edge. I did not make any more doctors’ appointments. And I continued to drink. My mind and its mental addiction were indivisible from my body and its physical dependency. The whole thing was me. I was a mess. I wondered what the point of me was. I was exhausted by the singing, dancing act that had for so long concealed the truth. Just as my mother’s performance as a mimic gave way at the end of her life, so my ability to maintain a charade of normality collapsed. I was attracted by darkness, embarking on a long, slow leave-taking from life, creeping into my bed during daylight hours, closing down, retreating into the embryonic state in which I would be responsible for no one, least of all myself. The act of curling into a physical ball of smallness, once a position of comfort, became one of defence, diminishing my exposure to life.

  The guilt that I feel now about putting my children through what I myself had experienced remains sharp-edged whenever my memory rubs up against it. After three years of watching my mental and physical deterioration, and of trying to help in every way they could think of, my brother and sister-in-law had seen enough. Sympathy was not working. I remember the day when Adam told me that he and Sarah, who had been so supportive for so long, no longer cared what I did. The tone of his voice was stern. I could choose to do something about my drinking or I could choose not to. It was up to me. But if I continued to drink, he made it explicit that the authorities would consider my fitness as a mother and without any doubt the custody of my children would be removed from me. My own survival and my relationship with my children depended on making the right choice, and I alone could make it. Adam and Sarah hoped, I realise now, that claiming to be indifferent to my behaviour, coupled with the warning of the consequences of my addiction, might be the paradoxical solution. My brother still loved me but this was a new sort of love, the tough variety, as tough for him and Sarah as for me. Their courageous decision to concentrate their concern not on me but on my children was painful for them. Friends and relations strongly advised them not to interfere. But unlike Harold, who flunked any such confrontation with Vita when she began to drink excessively, my brother and sister-in-law were undeterred.

  Some mothers in my family had not chosen survival. My own mother had given up in middle age. Victoria, a little older, had also eventually retreated to self-pitying and angry isolation. Any urge to fight had left them both. I felt I was genetically woven into repetitive surrender and did not know if I had the courage or the strength to snap the thread and interrupt the pattern. I had arrived at a midway point in my life and was tempted to look reassuringly backwards to what I knew, instead of forward towards something different and possibly alarming. But Adam and Sarah had made me see things differently. The importance and fragility of my family had never been clearer, the lessons I had learned from my mother about what not to do were all of a sudden invaluable. At the heart of the whole thing were my daughters. At last I realised I did not want to die, not because of me but because of my love for them. How could I abandon them as I once had been abandoned? Adam and Sarah’s forever un-repayable act of salvation was in making me understand that there was a solution, that help was available but only to those who asked for it, and because of them I made the biggest decision of my life. I asked.

  * * *

  I went to a treatment centre in London, where I met Aly. She was a divorcee, like me. And the mother of two daughters, like me. She had become dependent on alcohol, like me. And she wanted to be immersed in the lives of her children, whom she loved very much, just like me. Giving each other the courage to try to change, Aly and I had joined a group of wise people who showed us by their own example how to live without alcohol, taking it a day at a time and leaning on each other for encouragement. Whenever I wobbled, daunted by the task ahead of me, Aly propped me up. And I did the same for her. We have continued that way ever since and I would be lost without her wisdom, friendship and love. With the additional and invaluable advice of Trish, a woman who taught me that, with courage, no personal challenge is insuperable, I discovered that the daily process of deciding not to drink was itself empowering. I knew I could always change my mind tomorrow but each day, as I faced the decision, I chose to stay sober, just for that day. And gradually I felt the stigma of shame at my past behaviour lift as it was replaced with an unfamiliar self-respect.

  Sobriety returned me to life. It also brought some other changes of perspective that I had not been prepared for. The first and best thing was seeing how happy it made Clemmie and Flora. They were now aged fifteen and twelve and at last, as my unnerving unpredictability was exchanged for reliability, I began to trust myself not to let them down. I also found that a whole range of experiences – hearing the sound of a cathedral organ, walking through fallen leaves in the autumnal woods at Sissinghurst – did not and probably never had needed the enhancement of a drink to improve them. An ache of sadness in the throat, the draining of saliva at moments of fear, the accelerated heart race of excitement, those times of elation, what Vita called the ‘flaring days’ of self-confidence, were not only intact but purer and deeper for the lack of any artificial boost. And the absence of shame, of the compulsion to lie, of guilt, of the fear of being caught, brought instead a sense of peace.

  I am grateful to be living at a time when much, thou
gh not all, of society considers the admission of vulnerability to be courageous. In so many ways I benefit from a kinder, more compassionate society than was available to my mother, to Vita, to Pepita. I did not tell my father that I had finally addressed my problem. I wanted to be sure that I could sustain my abstinence before I felt confident that my past behaviour was truly in the past. I wanted to make sure that I had allowed the stain of that old behaviour to fade. For five years the subject of drink and the incident at the charity dinner were not mentioned, but one morning when we were having breakfast at the kitchen table, he reached across and put his hand over mine just as he used to do when I was a child. And he left it there. ‘I am proud of you,’ he said quietly.

  Other relationships were readjusted too. Even though James’s and my marital storm had blown and gusted for a while, the years after our divorce and my recovery were accompanied by a new and enduring calm. It doesn’t prevent me from wishing the unhappiness that preceded it had never happened, but our separation and divorce had a paradoxical effect of reconciliation and of providing a united stability for our daughters. When James married again, he and his wife continued to live abroad. And when eventually they sent their two daughters to boarding school in England, they asked me to act as their daughters’ official guardian, an invitation that confirmed the restoration of trust, an invitation that I was honoured to accept.

  * * *

  My daughters would spend part of their holidays with James at the much-loved brick house in America. But when they were in England, Sissinghurst was the place of safety for us all. During these years I loved being my father’s daughter, happy that my own children were getting to know him so well. We lived a lot by old habits. ‘In the olden days,’ he would begin, prompting fake groans. The telephone was still ‘a modern miracle’ to him, even though his grannyma had discovered its benefits exactly a century earlier. He never went out without a jacket and tie, a blue-biro splodge staining the breast pocket, yesterday’s soup in evidence in the middle of his red-and-blue Guards tie. The central heating would be turned off as soon as the spring equinox turned, whatever the temperature outside. On chilly days a terrifying electric fire left over from the war, with grey wire filaments bursting from their springs like an untamed head of curly hair, would be switched on within inches of his already singed trouser cuffs. If his new book was not going well, his foot would jiggle beneath the desk, brushing against the deep wastepaper basket. The sound of chinking glass betrayed a half-finished bottle of sherry hidden among the discarded pages.