Back to the lacrosse game amidst the March winds. Phyllis’s mantra had proved useless – and here were the happy couple, two bright figures tacking their way down the moleskin curves of the South Downs.
‘Why must she ride a horse?’ Phyllis muttered, yet she already knew the answer.
This defiant symbol of her mother’s rehabilitation was intended to be relayed to her former husband. What other reason could there be, when the pain crunching her back would ordinarily have been enough for Bella to take to her bed? Yet the injection of happiness that Alfred had given her enabled Bella to grind her teeth through the crippling seizures and pray that Sandor would hear of her well-being and be plagued by jealous thoughts.
The pair were still too far away for Phyllis to have been able to catch an American voice stabbing the air with curses. Curses on her mother.
‘God dammit, Vernie, wait up, I said. Pull up your damn horse now, ma’am. I can’t keep up!’
Gone was Phyllis’s surge of light-headedness after the three goals for which she had fought so hard; in its stead, a hot rush of pain swelled her bruised thumb and twisted ankle as the other girls stopped playing to stare across the field. A flotilla of navy-blue games skirts and lacrosse sticks bobbed together. Like banshees, Cicely Shackleton and the other prefects wailed, ‘Just look at that lady – she’s riding astride. Oh, and look at what she is wearing!’
‘Pig? I thought your people were in Argentina . . .’ Cicely screeched back to Phyllis, then she, too, fell silent as the spectacle drew near. The girls gave a collective gasp, half in admiration and half in relief that no matter how provoking their own parents were, they would never subject them to humiliation on a grand scale such as this. For there, on a Western-style saddle astride an apocalyptic black horse rode Bella, in white Brazilian riding breeches and an exotically fringed white flamenco jacket, her feet encased in an exquisitely embroidered pair of black and scarlet patent leather boots.
‘I say, look at that white sombrero,’ the girls whispered.
This was the first time that Phyllis had set eyes on her mother’s new husband and, she supposed, her stepfather. Here was one Alfred Everett Orr, a New Yorker, who could have had no idea at that time that his new wife would guide him up the English social ladder from commercial artist into a highly respected portrait painter, whose sitters would include the Prince of Wales and members of European royalty.
His connections may have sounded grand, but Phyllis was about to be exposed to yet another emotionally deprived adult whose artistic temperament was as fickle as his finances. The trouble with Alfred, Phyllis said as a grown woman, was that if sitters paid in advance he saw no reason to paint them, and if they didn’t he was so upset he could not bring himself to do so.
She noted the slightly flaccid body, kitted out in a Savile Row suit of royal blue corduroy and a yellow silk cravat that underlined his angry red beard. ‘Although this is the man Mama has married,’ Phyllis later declared to the girls in the dorm, ‘he is not to be mistaken for my father.’ Phyllis said this even though at a young age, she sensed she would never actually like the man who was her father. Yet her love, loyalty and unconditional adoration for Sandor could not be swayed.
Whether Sandor conducted his relationship with his daughter with such brusque formality because snobbery deceived him into believing that is how an English patriarch ought to conduct himself, or whether it was simply how he treated everyone, apart from himself, is hard to discern. As it was, Phyllis would not hear of confronting or questioning her father’s cruelty, nor in later years his lack of trust in her business skills. She never sought to fight against the injustice meted out by him. She took great pains to shine, to smile and to appeal to his gentle side that she prayed was dormant and not dead. Unlike her mother, Phyllis never resorted to ultimatums, to tears or to shouting. Even so, perhaps Phyllis was cleverer than that. Phyllis got her revenge in a subtler way. After all, who will question a man’s true character when it is his own dear daughter who is writing about his life long after he is dead and buried?
‘We had no principles in our family,’ Phyllis once said in an interview. ‘I was never told about right or wrong. Morals were never mentioned. I was told “meet your problems head on”. But the main thing was to make money.’
Would Alfred fare any better as a strong, paternal figure? For one thing, Orr liked to drink – an unfortunate vice that within a couple of years had destroyed any order that Roedean had painstakingly instilled in Phyllis’s life. So foul were the words that oozed from his drunken lips then, and so capricious were his needs that he, too, goaded Bella to the precipice of insanity many times.
In time, Phyllis recognised that Alfred’s flame-coloured hair served as an indication of his irrational temper. Even then his skin, thickened by eczema and brandy, gave him the appearance of a stuffed pig, while his nose, thought Phyllis, resembled a large crimson plum. Anyone decent, she decided, would take one glance at Alfred’s shoes – flimsy, black patent ones – and mark him down as a fake, a trickster, as gaudy and cheap as his brightly painted cufflinks.
Just when I was doing so well, Phyllis thought, her tiny feet squelching to a halt in the mud in front of Bella’s horse. The wind scurried around her knees and her head dropped to examine her boots, as if in search of the adoration she kept especially for her dearest Mama but which had suddenly gone into hiding.
‘We do not want any more Ghastly Scenes,’ Miss Waldron had scolded Phyllis the last time Roedean had hosted a Gross gathering.
‘What an unexpected pleasure,’ the headmistress Miss Lawrence had announced, when first Bella and then Sandor had burst into the front hall within minutes of each other, one Tuesday evening after dinner.
‘Do not let that philanderer speak to my daughter!’ Bella had wept. ‘I want to see Phyllis, I want to see my daughter . . .’
‘Under no circumstances will you allow that whore to see Phyllis. It cannot be permitted. Look – just look at her behaviour!’ Sandor had shouted.
‘May I make it perfectly clear that such displays of hysteria will alarm the girls. Kindly refrain from this deplorable behaviour.’
Miss Lawrence’s words had hung over the scene as Phyllis ran first to embrace her mother and then her father. An observer would have felt disquieted by the fact that the child’s distressed reaction to her parents and her tears meant nothing to the man and woman whose play for power had driven them all the way from Surrey without any of their hateful energy dissipating.
You are so lucky Tony, stressed Phyllis, her nib pressed hard on the paper in a letter sent to her brother the following morning, to be so far away at Repton. Mama and Papa are here all the time and you can imagine . . .
And maybe to imagine was as much as Tony could do. For although Phyllis witnessed first-hand the disintegration of their parents’ marriage, her brother’s diary, typed in later life, recorded a more dispassionate view:
My father and mother were quarrelling and finally parted. This meant them both coming down separately to our schools to tell Phyllis, my sister, who was at Roedean, what a terrible person the other was. (This was particularly odious for Phyllis, as Brighton was so near Surrey.) They went there practically every week but luckily only came once to Repton, one after the other. These skirmishes went on, they sold our lovely house and garden at Claygate and set themselves up in a dark and dingy service flat in Westminster. They were dance mad like the rest of the world at that time. My father after the final separation went completely berserk on dancing with complete disregard for his business.
‘Hold our horses, little girl,’ Bella commanded Cicely, and with that she whoa-ed her horse and in a flourishing dismount, flung her reins at the mute prefect. A waft of familiar perfume caught up with saddle oil and steaming blankets drifted over the gathered crowd. Not one fleck of dirt sullied Bella’s virgin outfit but no matter, she avoided the chance of spoiling her appearance by merely inclining forward to cup her daughter’s face in her hands.
> As her pearl earrings wriggled in the light, Phyllis gauged her mother’s state. No pin-sized morphine pupils, no pinched cheekbones, no tremulous nerves. Glorious, is the word Phyllis decided on. Mama is gloriously happy. And she was right, for despite the agony of her back, Bella’s cheeks were infused with fresh-air pink and her eyes were charcoaled not with shadowed lines of grief but from careful artistry.
‘Phyllis, darling, are you permitted to offer us a little tea?’ Bella cooed, her eyes expanding in the gaze of all these girls. This was precisely the sort of entrance Bella excelled in – for a fine performance. ‘It seems as if only yesterday we were in Argentina,’ Bella let out to no one in particular, ‘and now we are resting in Brighton. How lucky you are, my darling, to see us.’
Selfless as she always was when it came to appeasing her parents, Phyllis probably did not give the future of her sub-prefect badge a second thought. Of course, forfeited it was later as she flouted the rules to lead the sauntering pair into the deserted refectory where afternoon tea was set out.
Wasting no time, Alfred flickered his fingers as his hands first plunged into a plateful of the regulation thick wads of white bread and then smeared them generously with gloopy red jam.
‘Not quite like Nanny would have made it,’ giggled Bella, who shooed away the unrefined platters proffered by Phyllis and swivelled her eyes around the room. Phyllis wobbled the weedy tea from the chipped pot and into a china beaker. ‘Our first family tea,’ smiled Bella as she pulled out one of the small splintery chairs at the end of the refectory table and sat down.
I can tell, thought Phyllis, there is a stranger among us. Sure enough, she detected Cicely sidling up to the table. Look how she smiles at Mama. Fancy trying to endear herself to my Mama!
Indeed, Cicely was entranced by Bella, whose every fairy gesture caused the tassels on her jacket to shiver. And Bella, who never missed a trick, sensed the opportunity for another commission for her new husband. She rapped Cicely on the arm with her dainty white kid gloves and said sweetly, ‘Why, my dear, you must pay a little visit to our studio soon.’
Cicely flushed. And Phyllis was never tormented by her again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Homing Instinct
‘Who do you love better – your mother or me?’
It was a wicked question – the sort of question that only a parent desperately torn apart by a custody battle might ask of their child. Yet Sandor began asking that question long before he and Bella did divorce. It wasn’t that there was a custody battle, as both parents were loath to give up their newfound freedom since Phyllis and Tony had been sent to boarding school. The children, it was decided, could please themselves.
What answer did Sandor expect his daughter to give when he tried to catch her out, time after time, with this same question, ever since she was eight years old?
Did he have some conscience or doubts, perhaps, about the quality of the affection (but never the presents) he gave to his children on the rare occasions he actually managed to see them before their bedtime? Had his daughter sweetly replied, ‘Mama,’ would that have weakened what love Sandor had for Phyllis, or simply fed his jealousy of Bella?
Phyllis always refused to answer him. Even then she matched her father’s cunning and had acquired the cutely coy manner of her mother as a girl. She would not be drawn. Her eyes would flit and twirl but her lips remained clamped shut.
When Phyllis first realised just what fierce rivals her parents were, she never let on. But in later life she noted that her father’s insecurity always seemed to raise its ugly head and lead to screaming rows after social occasions such as a dinner party hosted at The Firs. On a night sparkling with guests and silver, Bella had perhaps led the conversation and concocted the wittiest stories and the prettiest of summer puddings. Sandor still trailed behind the Home Counties aristocracy, since his accent even after twenty years in England still impeded the flow of his speech, like a crippled child trying to walk in callipers. His wife’s success left him fuming with jealousy.
He also hated to be left at home while Bella went off to spend a day or two with her parents. Then, perhaps she might leave him in charge of his young offspring – with the assistance of a governess – and after a quickly blown kiss and a monstrous slam of the front door, it seemed that all at once there was no one there to adore him, to tell him how wonderful he truly was. It is the most useful thing a wife can do for her husband, Sandor believed.
‘Sandor, how I worship and adore you,’ Bella would tell him every morning, and each time she said it with as much sincerity as the first time. His mother had sighed, as she too told her son how much he was loved. And so, Sandor hoped, so too will my daughter.
But exclusivity was essential to Sandor.
And then the question would arise as Phyllis fetched his copy of the Daily Telegraph to put at his place for breakfast. He would stop eating his egg soldier, wipe his moustache of any yellow spots and then ask the question as if he was indeed enquiring about the prospects of a fine day without rain. ‘Phyllis, who do you love better – your mother or me?’
The reaction Phyllis allowed herself to give was one of vague disinterest. Quite how she managed to feign such an emotion, so young, was in itself an achievement. Scoff as much as you like at my runaway hair, she had thought to herself. Ridicule my knees that are bruised and scabbed from climbing the apple trees. Don’t even trouble yourself to glance at my sketches of the garden that have taken days to draw as carefully as I can. But, no matter your faults, Papa, my love for both you and Mama is equal, no matter how you hurt me or how much you try to barter with me.
What if she had said these words aloud? It is doubtful that she would have, not through cowardice but because Phyllis knew intuitively that if she had only one role in the family, it was to act as a pacifier to the other members.
‘The impudence of my wife. My wife who dares to question my facts!’ Sandor had screamed at Bella after one garden party. The sun had not yet gone down on the fluttering white tablecloths, and glasses stood cloudy with unfinished champagne. Tony had moved in on the strawberries huddled in a silver bowl and had sought solitude down by the pond.
The raised voices rattled the house as Sandor continued pacing to and fro in his study. Bella reclined on the chaise longue in the conservatory, fanning away the flies, her neck mottled red with angry blotches. Then she suddenly got to her feet and screamed up to no one in particular, a hoarse, wild sound that brought Sandor flying out of his room: ‘I AM LEAVING THIS MARRIAGE!’
Phyllis, who had been stroking the cat and teasing it with leftover anchovy toasts, had at once sensed the seriousness of this statement. Quietly she crept into the conservatory where her mother was leaning against a wall, her mouth covered by a handkerchief; her father had crumpled weeping onto the chaise longue. She had taken the trembling hand of her mother and placed it gently into the trembling hand of her father. And she had left them there, consoling each other, but inconsolable in their marriage.
Cigar smoke seeping out from the study – that was one of Phyllis’s early memories of her father at home. On long winter nights when the rest of the family were curled over books in the drawing room, he removed himself, with friends, to expound over elaborate and absurd business schemes. Games, reading, quizzes – to Sandor they were all a waste of his time. Only Bella understood how much her children would remember the hours of fun they had had, long after they had grown up. To listen to their laughter twisting around the house kept her head light and soothed her loneliness.
‘Why not hop on the open-top bus to Clapham Common?’ she’d say. Or she would insist they pull on their galoshes to go splashing about in the rain, or shoo them out of the nursery just before four o’clock and race them to the front door to meet the muffin man. It was Bella who saved Phyllis when the cook chased her around the kitchen table with a large carving knife, after she had politely enquired whether tea would be ever so much longer. By no means a petite lady, the cook made up for
her lack of speed with her ferocious-sounding flat feet. Shrieks rang out and Bella ran to the kitchen to see her only daughter sprinting and crying and laughing with fear, unaware that she really might have been carved into little chunks for a casserole.
Calmly, Bella guided Phyllis out into the hallway and whispered down to her: ‘I had no idea you could run so fast. We will have to do an egg and spoon race tomorrow.’
And promptly sent for the police.
But it might as well have been a different mother entirely who half-opened the front door of her house to a thirteen-year-old Phyllis, one July afternoon in 1920. The times when her daughter would have rushed into her mother’s arms and let out a huge sigh of comfort had been locked away.
Dressed in trousers, Bella was whisking a bowl of eggs. The smell of spirits escaped from the hallway. She scowled, or maybe it was squinted, and then smiled at her daughter as if she didn’t quite recognise her.
‘Yes?’ The door remained only half-opened.
‘I don’t suppose you might lend me a few pounds for the taxi fare from Victoria? I know it’s a lot, I’m terribly sorry.’
‘Is it the end of term?’
‘No.’
‘Why have you come to see me then?’
‘I’ve been sent home. I thought Papa might have told you.’
But Sandor had not confided in his ex-wife, since he believed she would have sniggered at his current misfortune; instead, Bella had felt rather queasy at the news of her only real tie to money being as poor as she. The sly bankrupt, she discovered from Phyllis, had given strict instructions in a telegram to her at Roedean from his shabby Hotel Cecil on Tottenham Court Road, before he had left for America: I’VE BEEN ROBBED OF MY FORTUNE. YOU WILL HAVE TO LEAVE ROEDEAN FOR GOOD. TELL NO ONE. GET YOUR SHOES MENDED AND GET A WINTER COAT ON TICK.
For Phyllis, the trauma and humiliation of the past twenty-four hours had left her in a state of shock. The memory would smoulder on for the rest of her life.
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