A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  The Ovaltine and Bovril drinks of his schooldays were still considered a bedtime treat. When we had guests, the menus reflected a lifelong wartime nostalgia as my schoolgirl repertoire of macaroni cheese and chocolate mousse was expanded at his request to incorporate steak and kidney pudding and kedgeree. But when we were alone, we would eat curries from a box, the desiccated ingredients packed in little paper envelopes, which you added to boiling water. After the girls had gone to bed, I would sit with him for hours, trays on our knees, in the room where I had learned the facts of life and where my mother had smoked her golden packets of cigarettes. And we would talk. We talked a lot about love and marriage, and he confided in me his sense of failure and once, with considerable pride, that during his marriage he had slept with a prostitute. He listened to my stories. He was the best listener.

  But although he was often sympathetic, he could also be unkind. My persistent lack of self-belief and fear of trying anything new infuriated him, and he continued to hurl the childhood accusation that I was a Little Miss Can’t. If he thought my current affairs knowledge was hazy, or if I contradicted him about a political issue, he would quote an appropriate line of Shakespeare or Shelley at me that I invariably failed to recognise. Occasionally he would lose his temper when I objected to the many prejudices he had inherited from his parents. There were bursts of anti-Semitism even though his business partner was Jewish. He found any mention of homosexuality between men or women distasteful. He never forgave the Germans. He worshipped John Major. ‘Do you not understand that John Major is the greatest prime minister since Churchill?’ he said before the 1997 election as I argued the case for Tony Blair. For all of Nigel’s bohemian upbringing and his falling-out with Bournemouth East, he remained a Tory throughout his life. Doors were slammed and mutual sulks followed, and I cancelled a non-refundable prepaid joint trip abroad. He undermined me where I felt weakest and most vulnerable, indulging in the old critical misogynistic habits to which he had subjected my mother.

  But he never criticised the girls. They could do no wrong. They adored him and he them; the whistle and hum of his favourite songs that had been familiar to me from childhood were now part of their own hummable repetoire too. We all knew that the sound of Nigel singing about a bright golden haze on the meadow between mouthfuls of breakfast cornflakes indicated his contentment. Clemmie and Flora began to know and love the house and the garden, and they became as familiar with the paths through the woods, the swing tree, the bronze leaf-dense floor beneath the ancient beeches, and the tiny cemetery devoted to Vita’s dogs as I was. They absorbed the historical romance of the Kentish Weald around us, transitory, unselfconscious Orlando figures, wearing flat caps, carrying walking sticks. They, too, became the beneficiaries of Nigel’s particular sort of history-telling. ‘Can we go on an expedition?’ they would ask, and off we would go in his white Mercedes, the successor to the Vanden Plas, bought second-hand in immaculate condition with a windfall, an acquisition instantly regretted, soon dented and scraped, the seats sticky with barley-sugar wrappers. ‘Expeditions’ to the nearby fourteenth-century moated castle at Bodiam included shooting arrows through the slits in its four rickety towers. An ‘expedition’ to the side nave at Canterbury Cathedral involved peering at the ancient stone floor for evidence of the bloodstains of ‘poor murdered’ Thomas à Becket, searching for the place where in his play T. S. Eliot said that ‘good and evil in the end become confounded’. On other days we stood in a Sussex field among munching cows who were quite oblivious, he said, to the fact that the rich grass beneath their feet, freckled with cowslips, owed its deliciousness to the rotting bodies of a thousand soldiers who had lain there since 1066. He encouraged his granddaughters to wince as an imaginary arrow destined for King Harold flew instead straight towards their own eyes, and to shake their heads in sympathy and say ‘Poor King Hadji’, just as I had once done.

  * * *

  Nigel would come up to visit us in London once we’d settled there, his briefcase with its missing handle carried under his arm like a woman’s evening clutch bag. I would watch him from the window walking along the street towards our front door and hear that tuneless whistle, ever-nervous before a social encounter of any kind, even one with a daughter and her children. The girls went to a day school round the corner from our new home, a little terraced house in Chelsea, and we all began to settle into this new city life. The spirit of our own house depended on this new small unit that had emerged intact after several years of upheaval. The house became the refuge for a dislocated, tightly bonded, even formidable threesome, a house full of daughters. The walls were not pink, but some felt they might as well have been. It was a cross-generation household that felt empowered. We had all begun to grow up. I began a new career in journalism and embarked on writing my first book, with the encouragement of Adam. The girls were happy in their schools. The smell of tobacco seeped out from beneath the closed bathroom door. Music filled the stairwell from the basement to the attic. Bedroom walls were covered in phone numbers and doodles and half-remembered quotes for exams. Boys arrived in our lives. The experience was new and enjoyable, partly because I did not know how to or, more important, wish to judge them. Boys were different. They were less critical. They were less focused on the details. They ate more. They laughed at my jokes. They were all adorable. And then my daughters went away to university and the dishwasher at home would still be only half full at the end of the week. Once I baked a cake and forgot about it, finding it charred and abandoned in the redundant oven two months later only when they returned for the holidays. And then we sold our daughter-house as I moved away to live in the country and they went to share flats in London with girlfriends. I left my daughters that day, the day our home became someone else’s home, watching as they disappeared into the Underground. I stood above on the street trying and failing not to show that I knew this was another moment, a parting, and a loosening of the structure of our lives.

  After a while I met Charlie, a man who was prepared to put his trust in me, and I discovered how it is possible to learn from the mistakes of the past, blessed to find such a deep and enduring happiness. As my daughters formed adult relationships of their own I hoped we would be able to preserve our mother-daughter closeness while allowing the boundaries necessary for independence to be recognised and respected. I wanted to achieve that balanced state described so perceptively by Susie Orbach as ‘a world without the loss of their intimacy and without the burden of the daughter carrying the mother’s unmet desires’.

  * * *

  Ten years after we returned to live in England, my active relationship with alcohol hopefully in the past forever and that with my children and Charlie embedded in certainty, I faced the inevitable change that I had dreaded all my adult life. Waking up at Sissinghurst in my attic bedroom, beneath the protection of Vita’s golden angel on its plinth above my bed, where it had sat since Hadji had given it to me after Vita’s death, I would always listen for the sound of my father’s radio downstairs, sinking back reassured onto my pillow when I heard the beeps signalling the top of the hour and the news being read. Silence was an aberration I was not yet prepared for. The leukaemia came upon him gradually, a weakness in the knee, a slowness in his walk, a faltering when climbing aboard a boat in Ireland that would previously have set him no challenge. He passed each incident off as arthritis. But this unprecedented fallibility did not yet deter him from continuing to work, to write reviews, to complete an index for a new edition of his father’s letters. Articles, bills and receipts were all filed neatly away in the grey cabinets outside his writing room. He was setting things in order. I tried not to think about what all this preparation was for.

  And then one February morning his physical strength gave way. After his illness was diagnosed, we knew he would not recover. During his last few months, his existence had narrowed to a distillation as well as a reflection of the way he had responded to life as various adjustments to his room were made. An abstract painting by
Flora, a red-and-blue block of colour, was propped beside his bed, as was a framed print of his favourite old portrait, Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews. The television set was brought from downstairs and took up its position on the chest of drawers. He loved watching television and would always mark up the Radio Times at the beginning of the week so he could plan his evening viewing. And this was 2004, the year of the Summer Olympics in Athens, and the combination of athletic beauty and a backdrop of his favourite city on earth was his televisual ecstasy.

  Although he struggled on for eight months, he never went downstairs again or out into the garden that lay just below his window. Possibly the physical weakness that prevented him from walking there on his own was too distressing to acknowledge. Maybe he chose to save himself from the pain of saying goodbye to a place he had known and loved almost all his life. Or perhaps he could not bear to remember that he was dying in a place so vitally alive. But even though we failed to persuade him to go outside, he welcomed the arrival in his room of a bunch of miniature narcissi, or two or three grape hyacinths in a sherry glass. Early on in those bedridden days the scent of these spring flowers brought for him the promise of new life, and for us, hope. Beside his bed sat a series of tiny vases, the sort that my grandmother used to keep on her writing desk when she wanted to study a single stem for its shape, its colour or its perfume. My father’s favourites were aquilegia, with their jester caps of every colour, and the creamy Madame Alfred Carrière, the first rose Vita had planted in the garden. As autumn approached, he clung to the fading fruits of the summer. Quinces and Kentish cobnuts, blackberries and mushrooms held no appeal for him, but three raspberries popped in the mouth seemed, at least for a day or two, to contain a life-giving elixir. As this almost imperceptible closing-down persisted, I began to believe it would never end. There were still so many signs of a future. Within dying there is still so much living. We talked for hours, the restrictions imposed by the need to meet a train, take a telephone call, catch the post, all lifted by a falsely luxuriant sense of endless time. With this concentration of pleasure came expressions of regret, experiences he would now never have, places he would never visit. And allied with the regrets came a new honesty.

  Sex, that most encompassing of all sensory experiences, when the hippocampus, the part of the brain that stores the senses, is provoked into such total response, remained for my father unsatisfyingly mysterious, even somehow shameful. The early embarrassing lessons learned from Olga, the one-off visit to the prostitute, the self-admonishment confided in his diary years later about his inadequate performance with my mother and the whole strange confusion that arose from his parents’ physically unorthodox relationship had their consequences. Confined to his single, starchy-sheeted bed, he confessed that he had loved too often but never too well. Even then he continued to be as self-conscious and inhibited as ever, flinching apologetically if someone crossed the line and stroked his hand, yet occasionally ruffling my hair when I bent to kiss him on the cheek, as he used to do when I was a child. At the end of his life, he admitted that he had been unable to follow his own advice to me about the three all-consuming passions. This failure took on huge importance for him during those final months; and as he spoke with a new openness, he wept for what might have been, for what should have been, lamenting that he had finally run out of chances to start all over again.

  I pitied him, recalling then the urgency of a meeting long ago with someone I loved at a railway station in a small town in the South of France, and a much more recent moonlit swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean, the start of my new romance. And now, as I remember those days at my father’s bedside, when he lamented his lost opportunities, I think how lucky I was not very long ago to walk with my new husband along a pathway of hollyhocks towards pillows of roses and peonies plumped on the window ledges in a country churchyard. I am blessed knowing that I will not share my father’s regrets.

  During those dying months, the days grew at first warmer and the daylight hours stretched far into the evening, before the autumn cool and shadows took their place. My daughters and I would gather in the corridor outside my father’s room, looking out of the window towards the garden, our arms around one another, forming a ring of silent weeping.

  Birth and death are the only human experiences that defy a first-hand account. But I knew what the absence of a person could do to those left behind. On my return to London from America I had made friends with a poet, a man formerly much given to reading aloud but who had recently been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx and was desolate about the loss of his voice. He died one evening during the winter, and the funeral was held on a peculiarly English day when an eiderdown of clouds hung above us like sodden silk. The waiting grave faced the gentle undulation of the South Downs, the bare line of hills interrupted only by three trees, beautiful in their silhouette against the heavy sky. Those of us who had gathered to show our love for this poet stood in silence, and at the moment the coffin was lowered into the earth, a sudden beam of light arrowed through the clouds. In the silence, and spotlit by the sun, three horses emerged from behind the trees and galloped across the horizon. As they disappeared, the long, wintry shadows disappeared too, and then the sun vanished behind the clouds. And then I understood the permanence of death.

  Julia Samuel, my friend and a woman who understands bereavement better than anyone I know, had suggested that grief, such a small word and yet an iceberg of a word, feels like fear, her perceptiveness helping me through those days. And then in my father’s final hours of consciousness, something miraculous happened to ease that fear. All of his physical reticence suddenly evaporated and he allowed the old easy fallback of words to be replaced by the enclosing of one hand within another, mine within his. As self-consciousness dissolved, trust and love were condensed and recognised in that simplest of human contact. The greatest eloquence of our relationship lay within that last moment of silence.

  Being an orderly man who never went to bed without doing the washing-up even if it was midnight, my father had made detailed arrangements for the time when I would no longer hear the sound of the radio from the floor beneath. A manila folder labelled ‘When the Day Comes’ lay on the top shelf in his writing room. He used to say the phrase out loud with a little rhythm to the words and accompanied by a rueful smile, his attempt to joke his way out of any difficult death talk.

  * * *

  The relief that follows the death of someone who has suffered a long illness is not just about the ending of suffering for them, but a silent exhilaration at the release from guilt that not enough is being done, not enough visits are being made, and from the longing to be let off the caring-for hook. At last the moment arrives when it is permissible to stop fulfilling the all-consuming duties of nurse, shopper, accountant, reader, letter writer, cook, postman, cherisher, brow-soother, grandchild, son, daughter. For a time this new feeling of independence is heady, before the long, slow tumble begins, the falling and twisting down through the tunnel where gravity cannot intervene. The loss of a parent can be one of the most foundation-dissolving of adult experiences. Just as Hamlet sees the sky as a caretaker, a ‘majestical roof fretted with golden fire’, so a parent provides the protecting ceiling above a child’s fragility. A parent’s death removes the shielding ‘overhanging firmament’, and in their absence we are left free-floating. For me, orphanhood prompted confusing feelings, the extremes of freedom and of loss, an adrenalin rush that comes from being at the very centre of a drama, followed by the deflation and a sense of ‘Is that it?’ Adam said that for him the experience was a form of dislocation, as if the limb of his own continued existence had ‘come out of its socket’. The comparison is one I recognised, for I was no longer sure how to position myself, to balance myself within my own life.

  The day after the Day Came, we took the buff folder down from the shelf, and among The Instructions was a veto on any sort of service to express thankfulness for his life. ‘No one will come and it will be embarr
assing. Embarrassing for you I mean. I won’t be there of course.’ When he first became ill, my father had begun keeping a list of names in his bedside drawer headed ‘People who might come to my funeral’ in black biro, underlined twice. When he was feeling buoyant, the list increased to as many as fifty, but initial optimism dwindled, and by the time the final calculation was made, the numbers had sunk to the low twenties – certainly not enough to fill any decent-sized church, let alone anything with grander pretensions. A man of conventions, if not a believer, or even a churchgoer, he helpfully suggested in his notes in the buff file that a small service in the village church would fit the bill. He had typed out his favourite hymns, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, a carefully chosen Bible reading for Rebecca, and a little Post-it note wondering if it would be too much trouble for Adam to make a short address from the pulpit. For me, there was a favourite poem by his mother. The service would be followed by a visit to the crematorium and then burial next to his father and brother in the village churchyard. And that would be that. We held the service in the village church, just as he had asked, managing somehow to complete the readings and the address as I steeled myself not to catch, the eye of either of my daughters. The poem my father had asked me to read is taken from Vita’s long pastoral song called ‘The Land’. It remains my favourite of all her poetry, encapsulating Sissinghurst and all she felt about it, the beauty of the garden, handed down to us, her lucky, lucky grandchildren and to our own equally fortunate children and grandchildren. And of course it also reminds me of my father and his own love for that place. He had chosen the same reading for Vita’s own funeral. The poem begins