‘Hester was a fascinating woman. I first discovered her at Cambridge. I was immediately drawn to the fact that she was only four foot eleven! For nearly twenty years she was Dr Johnson’s hostess, confidante and, in all probability, his mistress. In one of his letters he asks her to keep him “in that form of slavery which you know so well how to make blissful”.
‘The Mrs Grundys of the literary world would have us believe that the slavery was symbolic,’ she says dryly. ‘But it’s plain that theirs was a deeply erotic relationship. Though don’t worry, I only talk about it in the play. I’m not sure that Francombe is ready for the sight of me in a PVC catsuit cracking a whip!’
Mrs Thrale fell from grace when, as a forty-three-yearold widow, she married her daughter’s Italian music teacher. Lyndon herself is no stranger to scandal after the Daily Mail revealed that she lived in a ménage à trois with the writer, Jasper Gurney, and the architect, Brian da Silva. ‘First they tried to make out that I was a scarlet woman and then that Brian and Jasper were gay, and I was their beard. Just think of us as Mormons but in reverse,’ she says with a smile.
Such candour failed to disarm those critics who held that her lifestyle made her inappropriate casting for the role of the nation’s favourite vicar. ‘They claimed to be offended by me but they were really offended by Penny. These were people who loathe the mere idea of women priests but they don’t want to admit it. So they went for the soft target.’ Her sunny features cloud over. ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the letters we received. Scratch the surface of this green and pleasant land and you find yourself knee deep in filth!’
That moralistic minority may be relieved, but her vast army of fans will be dismayed to learn that there are no plans for a seventh series of The Vicar’s Husband. ‘If the Church of England Synod ever votes to allow women bishops, we might do The Bishop’s Husband,’ Lyndon says, smiling.
She has much else to keep her busy. After Mrs Noah, she returns to Stratford to play Juliet’s Nurse and Mistress Quickly. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says, daring me to object, ‘it should be Juliet! Perhaps you could start a campaign to persuade the director to recast?’ There are also several TV projects in the pipeline.
Meanwhile, the actress has one burning ambition. ‘I want to do a rom-com,’ she says. ‘I want to be snogged by a Hollywood hunk before I hit menopause. Why should leggy blondes have all the fun? Surely it’s the turn of a forty-something roly-poly dwarf?’
From everything Ellen had told him, Duncan expected to see a woman in a tie-dye shirt, silk bandana and patchwork pantaloons but, as he strained to glimpse her through the windscreen, he saw a statuesque sexagenarian soberly dressed in a grey-and-white Fair Isle sweater and black ankle-length skirt, her one concession to hippiedom the tangle of chains round her neck. Ellen had asked him to remain in the car to avoid awkward introductions, but her mother, who seemed to be as intrigued by him as he was by her, had followed her to the front door.
Prior to her arrival earlier in the week, Ellen had given him a detailed account of Barbara, whose insistence that she call her by her first (never Christian) name had distressed her as a girl but was now a blessing, since it freed her from any undue filial sentiment. She was born in Dorking, the only child of a chartered surveyor and a school secretary, and one of the many grievances that Ellen bore her mother was that she had cut her off from her grandparents. With no sense of inconsistency, she heaped scorn on their conformism while expecting Ellen to respect her own less orthodox but equally predictable lifestyle. From an early age she possessed a talent for painting, which her parents encouraged until, at the age of eighteen, she announced that she wanted to go to art school rather than university. Her father proposed a compromise whereby he would support her to study commercial art at St Martin’s. Her disenchantment at having to design beer mats, cereal packets and railway posters, while her contemporaries on the fine art course were taught painting by Gillian Ayres and sculpture by Anthony Caro, vanished after graduation when the training that her father had viewed as the passport to a job at J. Walter Thompson thrust her into the heart of late-1960s counter-culture.
At a happening in the basement of Better Books, a radical bookshop a few steps from St Martin’s, she met two young Americans who were setting up Black Eagle, an underground magazine whose objectives of cultural subversion, anti-capitalism and social and sexual liberation were not then seen as incompatible. Discovering her grasp of Letraset and lithography, they asked her to join them and she quickly became an integral member of the team. Although she later admitted to Ellen that she never understood why her design expertise was a better foundation for washing dishes and making tea than the literary background of her male colleagues, she flourished at the magazine. Black Eagle ran for seventeen issues before being shut down by the police in 1971 after it published the names and addresses of twenty-five Tory MPs whom it deemed to be justified targets for the Angry Brigade’s bombing campaign. Meanwhile, she had moved into a squat in Hyde Park Mansions among an ever-shifting population of musicians, actors, buskers, anarchists and impoverished aristocrats.
While roundly scorning the bourgeois notion of coupledom, she fell in love with Richard Houseman, an Old Etonian performance poet who was given a six-month jail sentence for burning a copy of Burke’s Peerage in the House of Lords public gallery during a debate on the Misuse of Drugs Act. On his release, she persuaded him to move with her to Wiltshire where Olivia Meridew, the bubble-wrap heiress, had set up a commune in a derelict stately home. Although she subsequently told her daughter that her sole aim had been to rescue Richard from the hard drugs scene to which he was increasingly drawn, Ellen suspected that a secondary one had been to distance him from the hordes of female admirers for whom his good looks and poetic flair were now enhanced by public notoriety. They stayed in the commune for seven years, although they never moved into the house but lived in one of the caravans dotted around the lake, largely because Olivia’s belief that the restoration should be carried out by the residents themselves in order to maximise the flow of chi meant that it was left unfinished. Ellen was born during their first year and while, with a few exceptions, Barbara kept Richard away from other women, she failed to keep him off the drugs. Whereas the rest of the commune smoked pot, took LSD and ate home-grown magic mushrooms, Richard, convinced that it was the way to revive his waning creativity, consumed ever greater quantities of amphetamines, barbiturates and cocaine. He suffered a massive stroke, and one of Ellen’s earliest memories – certainly her most vivid – was of returning to the caravan to find him slumped on the floor, his right cheek collapsed into his chin.
Richard never recovered. After several months in hospital, he was moved to his family home in Berkshire. Barbara took Ellen to visit him every week, thereby acquainting her with her paternal grandparents who had disowned their son after his parliamentary protest. Then, without warning, their visits ceased. While assuring Ellen that her father was not dead, Barbara offered no explanation for the change and it was many years before the truth emerged. Blaming Barbara for Richard’s drug use (which, as they knew full well, had long pre-dated their meeting), his parents claimed that she was an unfit mother and applied to the court for custody of Ellen. Aided by Olivia’s barrister brother and a precipitate move from the caravan to an estate cottage, Barbara won the case. The Housemans retaliated by saying that, if she wanted them to provide the round-the-clock care for Richard that was way beyond her means, she must break off all contact with him. To Ellen’s lasting resentment, Barbara agreed.
Over time, Richard regained sufficient movement in his right arm to reach for the ancient scimitar that hung above his bed and slit his throat. Barbara knew nothing of his death until after the funeral when his sister, defying her parents’ wishes, sent her a small parcel of his personal effects including a silver pentacle necklace that Ellen still treasured. Her father’s most significant legacy, however, was to have ignited her interest in speech therapy. While keen not to overstat
e the connection, she was convinced that the sight of someone she loved struggling to communicate had inspired her choice of career.
Soon after Richard’s death Barbara left the commune, taking the six-year-old Ellen to Lyme Regis, where they moved in with Rupert Thring, a middle-aged violin maker, whom Ellen credited with sparking her love of music but who otherwise remained a shadowy presence in her life. After five years Barbara, whose confidence had been restored by the success of her glass paintings, left Rupert to live with a series of unsuitable men, one of whom, Roman, a Polish puppeteer, took an excessive interest in the now pubescent Ellen, although she was quick to point out that this was manifest in nothing more than suggestive remarks, protracted hugs and unwanted mugs of late-night cocoa. Dismissing her daughter’s protests about her affairs, Barbara insisted that every woman had the right to a fulfilling sex life. Eager for Ellen to enjoy that right, which she presented as almost a duty, she took her to have a coil fitted at the age of fifteen. To her chagrin it wasn’t needed for another four years, by which time Ellen had left home to study speech and language therapy in Sheffield.
It was there that she met Matthew while on placement at the Northern General Hospital, working with adults who had feeding problems after surgery. Once a week the consultant led a ward round that he attended. He was intelligent, good-looking, self-possessed and serious, and one of the few junior doctors not to add a U, either mentally or manually, to the SLT notices in the common room. They fell in love, or at least she did (she could no longer be sure of anything about Matthew), and married two years later, after her graduation and his appointment as a senior registrar.
If, as Ellen came to suspect, part of Matthew’s attraction for her was his distance from her mother’s world, then Barbara’s response was unsurprising. With her New Age contempt for allopathic medicine, she failed to share Ellen’s conviction of his brilliance. Moreover, long before the revelation of his crimes, she detected a ruthlessness behind his reserve. To her credit she stuck to her promise not to interfere in her daughter’s marriage, her antipathy to Matthew, along with the demands of an ever-expanding business (she now employed four painters to execute her designs), restricting her visits to a couple of weekends a year. Her only prolonged stay came in the summer of 2006 when, having failed to cure herself of cancer with a regime of juices, Chinese herbs and chanting, she was recovering from the removal of her left breast. She refused any reconstructive surgery, which, true to form, she turned to her advantage when, on her return to Dorset, she met a retired archaeologist whose predilections had been shaped by his late wife’s mastectomy.
She was as candid with her grandchildren as she had been with her daughter. Matthew had been outraged to come across her showing nine-year-old Sue and six-year-old Neil her postoperative scars. Although she rarely gave them presents, preferring to plant trees in their names for birthdays and Christmas, they both loved her. Sue, who never voiced approval of anyone over thirty who lacked a media profile, even pronounced her ‘cool’. So it was with mixed feelings that Ellen greeted her newfound interest in her family. In the eighteen months since Matthew’s arrest she had visited them as often as in the previous six years. Ever mistrustful of her motives, Ellen suspected that she was driven less by affection than the belief that her daughter would be lost without her help.
‘Why do grandparents and grandchildren get on so well?’ she had asked Duncan when, after profuse – and redundant – apologies for boring him, she concluded the story.
‘Is this a riddle?’
‘No, it’s a joke. At least it’s supposed to be. I was told it by one of our paediatricians.’
‘I don’t know. Why do grandparents and grandchildren get on so well?’
‘They share a common enemy.’
To be fair, Barbara did not look hostile as she waved expansively to him from the front door, although Duncan was unsure how much this was a genuine greeting and how much an attempt to disconcert Ellen. He considered waving back but feared that Ellen might view it as a betrayal. So he contented himself with flashing a broad smile in her direction, even though it was too far away for her to see.
Ellen stepped into the car, filling it with a gentle fragrance.
‘You smell delicious,’ Duncan said after kissing her.
‘Thank you. It’s a new perfume my mother brought me, made by one of her friends.’
‘She should market it.’
‘Though as always with my mother there’s a catch. It’s not just a perfume; it’s a floral remedy, made from jasmine and roses and ylang ylang and heaven knows what else, designed to boost confidence, diffuse anger and promote well-being. I thought I’d put it to the test by wearing it when I met Matthew.’
‘In which case, shall we make a start?’
‘Please.’
Try as he might, Duncan could think of no less romantic date than driving a recent divorcee to visit her ex-husband in prison. Yet no sooner had Ellen mentioned her trip to Bedford than he offered to take her. If their relationship were to grow, he needed to share in all aspects of her life, both the good and the bad. Matthew’s trial had been national news and while Nugent was an unremarkable name and Martin Casey, the only person in Francombe to know of the connection, was sworn to silence, she lived in permanent fear of exposure. Duncan had at least been able to assure her that there would be no mention in the local press, even though it was a matter of legitimate interest, given that one of the hospital trusts Matthew had defrauded was East Sussex.
Duncan remembered the case well. After fifteen years as a consultant neurologist, Matthew had left the NHS to set up a locum agency with a chain of bogus offices across the South. Capitalising on the chronic understaffing of hospital accounts departments, he submitted duplicate and inflated invoices, which over a four-year period resulted in a demonstrable loss to the NHS of £400,000, although the true figure was reckoned to be ten times higher. In court, Matthew blamed the discrepancies on errors by the locums, hospital billing clerks and his own staff, but the jury was not convinced and found him guilty on three charges of false accounting and two of fraudulent trading. He was sentenced to five years in prison, ordered to pay £200,000 in costs and disqualified from acting as a company director for ten years. Two months later at a disciplinary hearing of the GMC, he was struck off the medical register.
Although both the trial judge and the district judge who subsequently granted her divorce accepted that Ellen knew nothing of Matthew’s malpractice, public opinion was less generous. Friends who had enjoyed their hospitality were especially quick to condemn her. She saw no way to defend herself without relating a history of subservience that she feared would make them despise her all the more. Duncan was, therefore, doubly grateful for her readiness to confide in him. On a windswept cliff with the herring gulls screaming in sympathy, she described how within months of their marriage Matthew had taken control of every detail of her life. Having ordered her to give up work when she was pregnant with Sue, he refused to let her return once Neil started school, accusing her of seeking to humiliate him. Charm itself so long as his wishes were obeyed, he sank into baleful silence the moment they were defied. Her spirit was so crushed that she sometimes even longed for him to hit her. At least a bruise might embolden her to fight back.
Today’s visit, the first since her move to Francombe, was at Ellen’s request. Although his elderly parents, who continued to assert their son’s innocence, saw him regularly and wrote her lengthy reports in the hope that, the divorce notwithstanding, she would take him back on his release, she wanted to verify that he was both well and well-treated. More importantly, she needed to be sure that he was no longer a threat. It was four years since a chance discovery by the audit manager at Basildon Hospital led the police to launch their investigation into Safe Cover: four years during which she felt that she would never be able to trust anyone again, including herself. Now she had been given another chance with Duncan. For that to succeed she had to confront her past, in the person of
her former husband, one last time.
‘Would you like some music on?’ Duncan asked, when fifty minutes into the journey the companionable silence grew strained.
‘I’m sorry; I didn’t think I’d feel this nervous. I’m very glad you’re here.’
‘So am I … that is I’m glad to be with you.’
‘I couldn’t have done it on my own. Barbara offered, but her show of sympathy would have been worse than blame.’
‘What about the kids? Doesn’t Matthew want to see them?’
‘He didn’t ask. Then again, he would never set himself up for rejection. I sounded them out. Sue refused point-blank. But that has nothing to do with her anger towards her father and everything to do with her passion for Craig. The latest is that she wants his name tattooed on her thigh.’
‘Surely she’s too young?’
‘She’s too young to have one without my consent. I know I’m not best placed to talk about self-respect – and I’m terrified that she may have learnt from my example – but you don’t have to be a card-carrying feminist to object to a girl having her boyfriend’s name branded on her body.’
‘She’s clearly besotted,’ Duncan said, wondering whether they had slept together and worrying in an undefined way about Jamie.
‘She wants to make a deal. If I allow her to have the tattoo, then she won’t have sex with him,’ Ellen said, as if reading his mind.
‘Some deal! Either you let me mutilate my body or I’ll let him break my hymen. Sorry,’ Duncan said, catching her grimace.
‘No, you’re right. She’s desperate to show her commitment. I explained that he was her first boyfriend and that she wouldn’t be with him for ever – which drew the predictable response.’
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