Cicely shoved a letter under her nose. ‘Listen, everyone. What do you have to say about this, Phyllis? Thought you wouldn’t get found out? Your people must have no morals whatsoever. “Dear Cicely, Why couldn’t you get up here for Speech Day? The sister of my stinking fag did – I trust you take it out on her.” So you cried wolf, eh? No one will ever believe anything you ever say again. Get out.’
Just as the meanness of Cicely was beginning to pall (being pinched in the corridor, mud smeared on her pillow and the family photograph pinned above her bed scribbled over), Sandor’s letter arrived.
The next day, as his car pulled up at Roedean, Phyllis could see that nights of lost sleep had dragged on his face.
‘Your mother has asked to see you.’
He shook hands with Miss Waldron before bundling his mute daughter into the car. They drove for two hours in silence to Guildford Cottage Hospital. Inside, the raw smells and noises of death and illness stuck themselves in her memory. Whispers. Uniforms. The white of the nurses. The black of the nuns. The distinctive chloroform odour, that made her nose run, would release memories of that day, over twelve years later, as she visited her mother in quite a different place – Bedlam. Tears, uninvited, began to trickle as Phyllis and her father were led up the stairs by a matron.
‘Please be aware that your mother’s pain will be aggravated by every movement and sound,’ the woman warned them.
But no one had thought to warn the thirteen-year-old girl of what she might expect to find.
In her mother’s darkened room, the body that lay in front of her was huge. As Phyllis drew nearer, she gave a little gasp. A slow rattle of breath shook in and out of her mother’s mouth. Her face, unrecognisable, was a purple landscape of pulped hills, her eye-sockets blackened, her eyes bulged shut. Distorted by shaving, her engorged head was tightly bandaged.
Phyllis’s tears stopped, as did her feet, unable to move closer towards the body. ‘Don’t worry, Mama,’ she blurted, ‘I can still see it is you.’
A cracked voice: ‘My wings are clipped.’
‘Time for your morphine, Mrs Gross.’
The head and spinal injuries that Bella sustained were almost identical to those that her daughter would receive in a plane crash over twenty-five years later. Both women would find their recovery impeded by returning to work too soon, and be witness to their lives changing beyond all recognition. In Bella’s case, she would literally never be the same person again.
Today, brain scans would have probably shown up a degree of brain damage that at most might have triggered what seems to have been a severe personality disorder and at least, left her with severe headaches for the rest of her life.
After two months in hospital, they moved Bella to a nursing home not far from Claygate. Her mother, Maria Crowley, who took the train daily from Peckham Rye, said bedside prayers for her daughter and for her son-in-law, whose temper, she believed, was the work of the devil.
In her memoirs, Phyllis described the excruciating cruelty that her father unleashed, without restraint, on her mother during his short visits, irrespective of whether it disturbed his daughter, other patients, or Bella herself:
Papa, provoked beyond endurance by her slow progress, her inability to talk rationally, shouted at her, ‘I cant bear illness. Why should this happen to me? Pull yourself together, Bella. There’s nothing wrong with you!’
‘I’m sorry, Sandor, for the mess,’ Bella slurred. ‘Everything spoilt for you and the children. My own fault.’
Sandor walked towards the door. The next words he spoke, which clawed their way into Bella’s disorientated mind, would be his most destructive.
‘It is terrible for a man like me to be tied to one woman for the rest of his life.’
The physical strength that Bella must have summoned up in the darkness, after her husband, mother and daughter had left, to pack, to tremble into her clothes, to steady her way down the corridor and then take a taxi to a hotel, was phenomenal. Yet it was her anger that so galvanised her damaged spine and fractured skull into working, long before they were ready to do so.
When the doctors informed Sandor of the disappearance of Mrs Gross, they enquired whether there was anything he might have said to upset his wife.
‘None of your business,’ he snapped. ‘I pay you, don’t I?’
The house felt like an empty butterfly cocoon without her mother. Despite her pleas to stay until Bella was found, Phyllis was packed off back to school. Her miserable window vigils had irritated Sandor beyond endurance. There, ludicrous nightmares tore up her sleep, so much so that the teachers instructed her to sleep a little extra at the weekends. Her imagination, that had come in so handy for creative essays, had turned against her; as she looked out across the sea, she wondered if she caught sight of a hand, a leg, a body, her mother, drowning before her eyes.
Two weeks later, a letter arrived at The Firs addressed to Alexander Gross.
Dear Sandor,
I know how often I have disappointed you. Now I have given you your freedom. The freedom you asked for.
Yours, Bella.
The following day, a Sunday, Else the housekeeper found Bella collapsed on the doorstep of The Firs and tucked her into bed, before the master came home from a pheasant shoot with his neighbour, General Livingstone.
By Tuesday, Sandor had coaxed his pale wife back into the office, where he believed she would be most useful to him, rather than allowing her to stay at home. When she shuddered at his orders and no longer gave clever retorts to questions as she used to, by all accounts he shouted. In a three-storey office filled with the quietest of workers – draughtsmen – he shouted.
Even as the stairs wobbled beneath her and the typewriter keys rattled her ears, she took slow steady breaths as she entered the drawing office. ‘I am so sorry. My husband is not himself today.’ Her eyes lowered, she smiled at the silence and made her way out on to the street.
Just after the death of her unnamed firstborn, it became clear that in order to continue as Mrs Gross, Bella had two options. To subjugate her desires and opinions and shape a life in subservient shadows, or to fight, and sustain many bruises along the way for what she believed was meet and right.
The only option, she believed then, was the one that would keep her imagination alive. She still believed it. As it was, this fight would beat her beyond recognition. Was she a battered wife? Sandor never so much as raised a hand to her, but physically, she would turn on herself. Mentally, her self-worth was knocked repeatedly until she could no longer judge her own merit. The only difference between Bella and her daughter was that Phyllis had the advantage of seeing her mother’s sorry example of a disastrous marriage, and Phyllis would not, unlike Bella, be in love with her husband.
‘She must go for six months to Dinard, a few miles west of St Malo,’ the family physician advised Bella when he called on her at The Firs. ‘For its restorative coastal air, and,’ he whispered, patting her damp hand, ‘to get away from your husband.’
‘Your dear wife is very highly strung,’ he told Sandor.
‘Highly strung! So am I highly strung,’ he quipped.
Perhaps it would have been for the best if, when the schools shut for summer, Phyllis and Tony had been palmed off on their grandparents for a modest British holiday. But to give him his due, unlike most fathers of that time, and some nowadays, Sandor was not in the slightest bit daunted at travelling with his two lively children.
For Phyllis, those weeks flashed by in her memory as a precarious, unpredictable adventure in Europe. Her father’s attention was constantly diverted and distracted by women as they caught trains from one country to another. On the Orient Express to Vienna, he became acquainted with what Phyllis recalled as ‘a compliant countess’, complete with a gold front tooth.
Most anxious that his children should not impinge on his sexual indulgences, their good behaviour (not running away, not fighting over the biggest bed and turning up dressed for dinner at 8 p.m. ev
ery night) was rewarded with gold crowns, which Sandor would press into their palms and tell them to spend freely each morning, so that he might entertain his new friend.
The giddy fun of running around fairgrounds, riding on big wheels, eating roasted hazelnuts and jam crepes and trying their luck on hoopla stalls (where Phyllis and Tony once won a bottle of champagne, drank the lot and fell asleep under a fortune-teller’s table), freed their minds from the deep anxiety surrounding their mother.
In those days, such scrapes and near-misses were deemed character-building for children. Run away to sea at fourteen? Travel alone by ship to Australia at ten? A wife and three children by twenty? The liberating childhood afforded to our grandparents could not be further from the twenty-first-century teenagers who are driven to and from school and where the average age for a man to leave home is twenty-five years old.
THE WRECK WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU AT LUCERNE.
So read the telegram from Bella that Sandor opened one morning, a month into their trip. He sent word back that they would indeed take the train the next afternoon to Lucerne. The sense that his wife was close at hand did not cut short his antics, however. In fact, he dusted down his thespian skills and became more daring in his act to attract women. To the treacle-hearted dowagers, he was a widower. To the young heiresses, he had been deserted. And to the extremely beautiful, the children were not his own but those of his poor dead sister. He reeled them in, the Viennese, the Swiss, the French, the Germans, and spat them out too, fleeing with Phyllis and Tony before any of them could attach themselves to his coat-tails.
The next encounter with Bella, whatever good intentions either may have had, would run away with itself, drawing them both on over two months to the end of their marriage.
Phyllis, who claimed never to have been shielded from any aspect of her parents’ relationship, devoted a good section of her memories to these events that would divide her family for ever.
The long French windows in the hotel dining room were open on to Lake Lucerne. Out in the dark night, mountain tops glowed as lightning flashed across them. As the orchestra played Hoffmann’s Barcarolle Sandor insisted that he, Phyllis and Tony were shown to a table for four.
‘Your mother is late. To humiliate me.’ He ordered juicy watermelon, but Phyllis felt sick and could not touch it and Tony said he would wait for Mama.
‘Eat, both of you!’
All three ate in silence, the noise of their cutlery grating on their ears. Then Phyllis heard a lull in the conversation, and remembered looking up:
There she stood; her face was chalk-white, framed in a black crepe-de-chine hat, black Pacquin frock – fringed and concertina-pleated. She remained immobile, except for haunted, darting, shadowed eyes, scanning the guests.
Sandor did not make a move. Nor, as she approached the table, did he stand up or kiss her. ‘Please kiss her. Please, Papa,’ Phyllis cried, as she left her chair to hold the thin, unresponsive body of her mother.
The fixed gazes of Sandor and Bella hardened. ‘Now we are all here,’ said Phyllis, braving the silence, ‘let’s agree on going up the Rigi tomorrow.’ Like statues coming alive, the husband and wife suddenly began to talk, to eat and, to their own surprise, all four survived until pudding.
What turned out to be not so surprising was that as the family took a turn about the lake the following morning, Bella fainted, and Sandor’s reaction, as passers-by started to stare, was less than kind.
‘Good God,’ he muttered. ‘Do I have to endure this?’
The little hands that lay beneath Bella’s head, while Tony flicked drops of lake-water on his mother’s face, belonged to Phyllis.
‘Don’t worry, Mama,’ she whispered, cradling her mother’s grey face. ‘Tony and I are here.’ As Bella came round, they led her to a bench, where all three squinted at the tiny figure of Sandor making his way back to the hotel.
‘Children, it’s impossible,’ she said, taking their hands in hers. ‘I’m leaving for Dinard.’
The next time Bella would see her husband was as he burst in on her as she lay on top of a bed, clad in nothing but a peach silk slip, in the house of Monsieur le Docteur Tillier.
The confusion surrounding Bella’s departure from the hotel gave Phyllis, a curious child, the opportunity to play detective. First, she had asked reception for a forwarding address for Madame Gross’s mail. ‘Chez Monsieur le Docteur Tillier,’ they said, as did the bellboys. Her work, she felt, was bound to be rewarded by her father, but unfortunately, the address was not that of the Dinard Convalescent Home.
Like a dog let loose amongst sheep, Sandor stormed into the dining room and out again, he tried to go for a walk to kill his anger, but ended up ordering his luggage to be brought down from his room. At once.
‘Children, we are off to catch your mother. She has gone to meet her lover. All three of us will catch her in flagrante delicto!’
As the train to Dinard pulled out of the station, both Phyllis and Tony cried, much to their father’s disgust. ‘The shame of it – you, Phyllis, thirteen and Tony, fourteen years old.’ But they continued to sob, afraid of what they might find and afraid of what they might hear.
It was well past midnight when the taxi driver stopped outside a well-lit Victorian corner house. Incensed by the beauty of the house, Sandor rang the bell, and kept his finger on the button.
‘You will wake the dead,’ grumbled the maid, as she unlocked the bolts and then flung open the door. ‘Sir, whatever is the matter?’
Sandor grabbed his children’s hands and ran up the stairs. ‘Where is she? Where is my wife?’
He burst in on Bella, who was apparently alone. From a side door, a calm Frenchwoman in her sixties breezed through in black taffeta, her white hair held in a black Alice band. ‘Explain yourself, Monsieur,’ she said sternly.
The woman, Sandor discovered, was the mother of Dinard’s most eminent doctor. It was she who, for companionship, had invited Bella to stay in her house. ‘There is no lover,’ she explained. ‘Your wife is here alone.’
Phyllis fainted.
‘Ma cherie, ma cherie,’ was the whisper Phyllis heard as she stirred in the arms of the doctor’s mother, who could not disguise the tail end of a vicious argument.
‘Sandor, you have murdered my love. You thrive on scenes like this.’
‘Apologise, or don’t come home.’
‘I’ll leave. I’ll go to Lisbon.’
True to Bella’s unpredictable nature, the bill Sandor received the following week was for a return passage to Rio de Janeiro.
The relative sanity of Roedean was quite a relief, Phyllis decided after she had returned for the Michaelmas term, although she found herself unable to relate to tales of lawn tennis, picnics, rowing up the River Cam, tea parties at the Ritz and samphire-gathering on the beaches of Norfolk.
Pinned above her head, postcards of the Corvocado Mountain would be joined by ones from Botafogo Bay and Urba. On 6 September, a birthday card was missing from her mother, but made up for by a telegram from her father: MOTHER SENT YOU & TONY HORSE EACH. WHITE.
Enclosed was a note she had sent with the horse box to The Firs, which read: For my darlings, Phyllis and Tony, with love from their Mama. I am now riding on a mule into the heartland of greenest Brazil, with a group of prospectors who I had many a dinner with on board ship. We are in search of radioactive minerals. Do not expect to hear from me until Christmas.
Of all the bizarre things to happen, Bella’s consortium would discover samarskite in the mines at Divinópolis. According to Phyllis, when they presented their find to Marie Curie for testing at her Institute of Radium in Paris, such was the richness of the mineral, they were each paid thousands of pounds.
The financial security brought about by Bella’s journey had also freed her proud spirit. On her return to London, she sent three telegrams, one to Sandor, one to Phyllis and one to Tony.
All three read: FILING FOR DIVORCE. NEW LIFE.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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The Kishlany Trailing Behind
The cruelty of children must never be underestimated. As well as the physical brutality they feast upon, unhindered by any sense of morality – whether it be concocting stews from pulped worms or deserting a younger sibling stuck in the branches of a tree until the day’s shadows have slunk away – their verbal taunts can splice confidence with the accuracy of a rapier sword.
Fortunately, the young ‘ladies’ at Roedean were also attracted to the superficial. Their hands would snatch at pink iced buns, satin dancing shoes and the shiniest of pennies while their curly heads fibbed about the father with the fastest car or the mother with the fattest string of pearls and the rubiest of lips.
Phyllis had no need to fib on that score, but she took no pride in her family’s wealth, dreading their impromptu visits. Even now, on hearing the sound of hooves and seeing a couple riding towards the lacrosse pitch, she was chanting under her breath: ‘Please do not. Please do not let. Please do not let it be. Please do not let it be them . . .’
But it was.
Phyllis was now aged fourteen, and as she staggered against the March gales tearing over the lacrosse pitch at the end of Saturday practice, another girl overheard her mumbled mantra. ‘Whatever is the matter with Pig?’ she asked disdainfully.
But no one replied, since no one actually cared.
Only a month before, Miss Waldron had monitored her pupil for signs of distress as she handed Phyllis a telegram to read before Prayers.
DARLING. MARRIED ALFRED LAST WEEK. GONE ON A PAINTING TOUR OF ARGENTINA. WISH US FINE WEATHER. MRS ALFRED E. ORR.
Scanning the words only once, Phyllis folded the white paper over and over again into a tiny square, tucked it up the sleeve of her sweater and, tilting her head sweetly, requested to be excused.
We will not, Miss Waldron reconsidered, need to worry about any tears from Phyllis.
What Miss Waldron does not understand, Phyllis had thought as she marched away, is that it doesn’t matter to me, because it is all happening so far away. Anyway, Alfred may be Mother’s chance for happiness.
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