Clare was not so lucky.
After school, Hugh decided to study medicine. A year later, Clare chose to do the same, although her nature, which was often sardonic and intolerant of human frailty, seemed ill-suited to such a profession. In her first year at Newnham College, Cambridge, she met a fellow medical student, Katherine Priestman—always known as K—who would become her lifelong friend.
K introduced her to my father.
Half-French, half-English, K was, and remains, a lively, highly intelligent woman. As capable as my mother of unleashing the biting bon mot, she did so less frequently, perhaps because she was happier. (Though I have watched them together, ‘stitching’ as the Brazilians say, discussing their friends, and sat mesmerised and laughing, while at the same time praying the bright beam of their wit would not pan in my direction.) One of those women who seem to grow old without losing any of their beauty, K is small and slender and has a laugh so natural and affectionate it seems like a reward. When I asked her what my mother was like when she was a student, and if she displayed any signs of the despair and alcoholism which would plague her later life, K thought for a while and then said: ‘No, she was a very happy, scathing woman.’ And laughed, remembering her.
She was bold, advanced, and witty. She smoked and drank, but neither to excess, and was considered somewhat ‘rakish.’ Her confidence, so notable then, so absent later, came, K believes, from having a large, interesting family in which all the members took pleasure in each other’s company even as adults. When Frances threw tea parties at Conduit Head for academics and fellow poets, the children were always invited.
When they were finished with their studies, Clare took K out with Hugh and Jean to go pub-crawling. Because of the war, it was often hard to find a pub which had beer and they would wander around the city in search of one, and, having found it, drink and talk until closing time. During this period, Clare and her mother started to attend a small church in Cambridge, Little St. Mary’s. It was K’s impression that this began because of a monk Frances had met who was both charismatic and intellectual. Clare enjoyed the ritual, the songs and the incense.
Throughout the war, K received occasional letters from an officer in the Navy, a childhood friend named Cecil who wrote from Australia and the Far East. Clare, who had no such glamorous friends, pretended not to believe in his existence and insisted on meeting him when he came back on leave. By the time he did, the war was almost over and Clare was studying at St. George’s Hospital in London. The three of them had lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Soho. My mother, already in her twenties, arrived with a yo-yo which she played with constantly. My father was handsome and intelligent and had a girlfriend in Australia, which made him all the more desirable.
A short while later, with France liberated, K decided to go and visit relatives in Paris. When Clare heard Cecil would also be there, she insisted on going too.
As a Naval officer, my father had access to the Officers’ Club, which was in the former Rothschild mansion, not far from the British Embassy. The cook at the club was French and the food was not only excellent but plentiful. Coming from rationed England, this was the greatest of treats, and the three of them ate and drank there constantly. By the end of the week my mother and father were in love. Not long afterwards, they were engaged.
Cecil was the son of a professor at Oxford, Sidney Chapman, a theoretical physicist who discovered a magnetic layer around the earth, now known as ‘The Chapman Layer.’ Cecil already had a degree in physics from London University and after the war would pick up a second, in history, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his father and grandfather had been Fellows. When I was a child his mind seemed as different from mine as an athlete’s body is from a paraplegic’s. He could do calculations with numbers that were absolutely baffling in their complexity, feats of mental agility for which I was simply not equipped. He also had an extraordinary memory and allowed no factual question to go unanswered, rushing always to the nearest encyclopedia to extract the truth. He was kind, decent, honest, ethical, rational, objective, and fair.
He was the wrong man for my mother.
Perhaps there could never have been a right man. As a teenager my mother climbed into the attic at Conduit Head and found boxes and boxes of love letters her parents had written to each other, hundreds of them, mostly from her father to her mother, most written after they were married. K, who was taken up into the attic a few years later to be shown some of them, says the letters expressed a love of such depth and power it was almost shocking. It was as if Francis and Frances were as close to each other in spirit as they were in name, as if each had found in the other the absolute ideal.
This rare state of romantic and intellectual passion is, I think, what Clare expected in her own marriage. Maybe it was the war—kamikaze pilots crashing into the decks of the ships on which my father served, the scent of foreign ports, or simply his good looks—which convinced her Cecil could provide the grand romance which her father had provided for her mother. If she was thinking at all, perhaps she also concluded that whatever their differences, the similarity of their academic backgrounds would sustain them.
They got married in 1947. By now she was in her final two years of training. Soon she was pregnant with my older sister. And if you are looking for a determining moment, a moment where life could have provided her with sufficient pride or structure to overcome her instinct toward self-destruction—or not— this is where you might find it. Taking the final exams that would qualify her as a doctor, she failed one paper. As I remember the story, it had something to do with the anatomy of a cat, although why someone who was almost a doctor would be studying that I do not know. In any event, she abandoned medicine for motherhood and, compounding the sense of failure that descendants of great men tend to have, she never went back. From then on, it often seemed that if she could not immediately do something perfectly, she had no interest in it and gave up.
Though I believe they were genuinely fond of each other, right through to the end, in spite of her alcoholism, theirs was not a happy marriage. At least for the last thirty to forty years it was not a happy marriage. In the beginning, for about nine years, my father thought they were happy, and probably they were by normal standards. And then one day, my father found out she was having an affair and had been for at least a year.
Cecil’s partner, Peter, was a graceful man, slender and quick. Educated at Stowe and Cambridge, his mother was a German aristocrat, his father a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Berlin until the First World War. His paternal grandfather, however, had been the ticket clerk at Rugby railway station. A long-distance runner for Britain in the 1936 Olympics, Peter had been expected to win in 1940, but the games were not held because of the war. His bearing was upright and athletic but diffident rather than haughty. He spoke with an upper-class accent and voted Conservative, but was a man who didn’t seem to quite fit in anywhere and to me this was his charm, a kind of awkwardness, a shyness handled with rueful dignity.
After the war, he started making mechanical wooden toys and musical boxes in London, but one night the place burned down and he lost everything. He was married to a woman who had money and he liked solitude. They bought the Vicarage in Grantchester and he decided to apply his engineer’s mind to scientific instruments, which he began to do in a folly at the end of the garden. As a hobby he continued to restore and collect musical boxes and mechanical singing birds, these latter being clockwork devices of great complexity and delicacy, birds the size of your fingernail with plumage of real feathers. They would spring out of the silver surface of the box and chirp and turn from side to side and move their beaks and wings. I still remember visiting him, sitting at his workbench in the folly, surrounded by tiny cogs and gears and brightly coloured feathers.
When my mother introduced him to my father, he had just started the scientific instrument business. The two couples had dinner in the Vicarage. Afterwards, Peter showed my father a device which at that time w
as still novel, a dishwasher. The two men opened it up and studied it and my father commented on a way in which the design could be improved. Although my father had no qualifications as an engineer, Peter saw how intelligent the comment was and offered him a partnership, thereby doubling the size of the company. Because of my father’s inexperience, the terms were not particularly favourable to him. Peter’s instincts, both human and financial, were correct. My father quickly became an excellent engineer and more than doubled production within a year. The first devices they made were temperature control units, small baths in which test tubes could be stood and retained at an exact and constant heat. Later on they would make refrigeration units for the same purpose, then shaker baths to keep fluids agitated for long periods, and finally computerised temperature measurement devices, one of which was used to monitor the heat of the skin of American space rockets.
Peter and my mother had met in 1936 when she was only thirteen years old and he in his late teens or very early twenties. Their families knew each other and he had been invited to a party at Conduit Head. He was at his most glamorous, having just run in the ominous, Hitler-dominated Olympics. Innocently or not, he kissed her and she never forgot it.
Eighteen years after that first kiss, they started an affair.
A day or two after the birth of my younger brother, Francis, my father noticed a letter in Clare’s handwriting addressed to Peter. As he saw both of them every day and could easily have passed on whatever my mother might have wanted to say, he was at first puzzled and then suspicious.
He opened the letter.
It said she was glad to be having Peter’s baby even if they could not be together. ‘He took to the breast very quickly,’ she wrote, ‘just like his dad.’
My father was furious, confused, and then depressed. Everything was so entangled. The business, which had expanded out of the folly, was now in the mill and literally attached to our house. He already had two children and, in spite of everything, he still loved Clare. When he sought an explanation, Clare told him of that first kiss and how, even now, whenever Peter came into the room, her stomach ‘turned over.’ Peter was married and had a child and could not, or would not, leave his wife. Cecil decided that as far as he could, he would forgive Clare, and accept the situation without further recrimination. Francis was an exceptionally likeable child, gentle and funny, with a sweet smile. His paternity was kept secret and he was brought up as one of us, loved by all. He was one of us and remains so to this day, no less a brother than my other brother.
Not long after Francis was born, Peter’s au pair came to see my mother. ‘I’m sleeping with Peter,’ she wept, ‘and I just don’t know what to do.’ My mother did. She went around to his house and threw a brick through his window. In her early thirties, she now became wilfully promiscuous. Whether this was her way of exacting revenge on Peter for this humiliation, or whether it was simply an attempt to drown her depression in sensation, who can know? She began to drink more heavily.
This was the period when my sister and I began to discuss divorce.
Until Francis was about four years old, Peter came to lunch at the house every day and would feed him and play with him. After that—after my father and he split the business because Peter did not want to run a company which had grown so large— he would come only once a week. Eventually, he sold all his shares in the company to my father. They remain friends.
What can you know of anyone’s marriage, even the marriage of your parents, but I suspect that in my father’s decency in forgiving my mother lay the death of this one. There is an element of unintended cruelty in such forgiveness. It gives you a possession no one should have. As she slid into alcoholism, perhaps he felt, albeit unconsciously, that like a character in Greek tragedy, her self-destruction was inevitable and deserved.
My father was an attractive and capable man. He could have left the family and had a better life, but didn’t largely for the sake of us, his children. A friend of mine once said, ‘If only my parents had divorced I’m sure I’d be happily married by now.’ But how was Cecil to know in 1956 that the wound Clare had hacked into the marriage would never heal, that after Peter would come others, and that she would not stop drinking until she entered hospital to die in 1992? Four years after Francis they had one more child, my youngest brother, Ludovic, and so by the time I was ten, we were a family of six.
For the first fifteen years or so, we did not acknowledge she was an alcoholic, though to any modern family it would have been as obvious as a confession. Living with her was to live with two women, the woman of the morning, bright and funny and loving, and the woman of the evening, cruel and despairing. So different were these two that to speak to the woman of the morning about the woman of the night before seemed somehow indecent and unfair. And so we didn’t.
When she started to fall down stairs, however; when the ambulance had to come in the night, when she lied to the doctors at the hospital and told them my father had hit her, then we began to discuss it and tried to get her to do something; but to her AA was shameful, for toothless boozers in the gutter. When we suggested it, she wouldn’t take part in the discussion. She was an intellectual, albeit one who often mocked intellectualism, and she was the great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. AA was not for women like her. Whatever the complicated causes—genetic depression, shame, or the weight of history—the solution she chose was brutally simple. She wanted oblivion, and alcohol would do the job.
Had she been from a family with less money, she would have hit a wall. Instead she hit stoicism and denial, and so, with every year, her drinking got worse. Sometimes she would drink wine, sometimes whisky, sometimes gin, and in the summer, cider. She would drink out of a mug instead of a glass and hide bottles all over the larder. Once or twice it seemed as if she tried to stop. My father tried drinking with her, refusing to drink with her, speaking to her about it, and ignoring the whole thing. Nothing worked. Sometimes there would be a period of days where she would not drink, or an even longer period where she seemed to drink in moderation. When she was not drinking, her eyes often wandered away, their expression so intensely melancholy it almost resembled fear. And then she’d have a drink, and in those first moments I would see a look of relief pass across her face which reminded me of how I felt when I scalded my hands to quell the itch; release from endless tension, the voluptuous rewards of failure.
Ludovic, who remained stranded in the worst of her decline after the rest of the children had departed, swears that when he opened the front door—long before he saw her—he could tell if she was drunk or not. I left home as soon as I could, but when I came to visit at weekends from London, I had the same sensation as I drove down the lane and hit the gravel yard. Her unhappiness seemed to cause even the bricks and mortar to exude despair. And when one’s worst fears were confirmed, such a weight of sorrow, such a feeling of being let down: the beautiful house, the wind and the trees, the sound and smell of the river, all extinguished by this pervasive gloom.
The children scattered away from her. Sarah took to the road, off to India and Nepal. I went to live in London and then Los Angeles. Francis moved to London a few years later. Ludovic, unable to stand any more of her corrosive tongue and overwhelming misery, was sent to school in America. Eventually, Sarah and Ludovic returned to live not far away in Cambridge, but none of us ever went to the house without our guard raised, and none of us could help her escape her misery. Her incisive comments, her scathing wit, were seen less and less often. Now she would sit at the table, eyes frequently closing, and simply groan with despair at any comment she did not agree with. Sarah, who got on least well with her as a child, came to be closest to her in the last years of her life.
In her late fifties, ill health and overweight brought on by decades of drinking and smoking slowly began to take from her the few things she did enjoy. The vast Norfolk beach, the one where she had shown me shrubby sea-blite (for which I rewarded her by giving it to her as a nickname), was now too far awa
y for her to reach. Walks in search of elusive flowers and birds became rarer. Before long, she could only stand at the kitchen window, staring through the bottom of her glass at the river flowing toward her. One day she lost all interest in making the meals around which the family had united in praise. Cooking, she now claimed, had never given her pleasure and she had simply decided to stop. The kitchen garden was abandoned. Perhaps she knew already what my father was doing and felt too fundamentally betrayed to continue these last fundamental acts of nourishment.
Cecil, who for thirty years lived under the suspense of what each evening would bring, fell in love with someone else, an old family friend. One night he was speaking to her on the phone when he felt Clare’s presence behind him and turned.
Now the final agony began.
I must have gone to sleep at some point, because I wake up and find myself exhausted and hung over. Gloria cooks me breakfast, a slab of ham, fried tomatoes with herbs, and biscuit with gravy. How anyone stays under 300 pounds. in this place is a miracle that can only be attributed to heavy smoking. Eventually, I will go to almost every eating establishment along the highway and in none of them find anything that would remotely fit the Surgeon General’s definition of a healthy meal.
Trials of the Monkey Page 11