Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  Once a month, I sat with Cici on her bed while she did her accounts. Every penny of expenditure was entered in columns, every check she’d written ticked off. She let me fill in the numbers and I started to write them like hers, the sevens with a dip in the roof and a crossbar. I felt privileged and helpful. And I could see that no matter how tight a hold she kept on her expenses, the income and the outgo didn’t add up.

  Dad’s studio was empty now, so Cici decided to rent it out. The tenant was Anjelica. I was impressed by how she was able to walk up the pebbly stepping-stones in spiky high heels, her feet balancing on them in a very deliberate way, like those toys that wobble and don’t fall down. She and Cici went out after dark in the pickup truck and stole flowers from people’s gardens, made fabulous arrangements back home, and called it the Palisades Florist. Cici learned that one from Aunt Dorothy, who used to go by chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce to get her tulips from Lucille Ball’s garden.

  I assumed that Anjel had moved out of Jack’s house because they’d broken up. I’d seen her in tears often, and somehow I had gotten the idea that she had her own room at Jack’s house so that she would have somewhere to cry.

  The room was at the top of the stairs, at the gateway to Jack’s private realm. The first time I went into it, my head swam. For an instant I didn’t know where I was. The room was filled with her things. How I knew they were all hers from years before, down to the tiniest glass and silver vial, I don’t know—I didn’t remember them from the house she’d shared with Jeremy. Where had they all come from? Paintings and drawings and photographs covered the walls, many of her, many by her friends or Mum’s friends. There were framed letters from Mum’s friends too. And there, in the crowd, I saw the oyster shells and pearls sunk in cotton wool, surrounded by a rectangle of mother-of-pearl, that had hung in my room in the Little House at St. Cleran’s.

  I had thought it was mine. I realized now that of course it was Anjel’s. Everything that I thought was mine had once been hers. It was mine only if she didn’t want it anymore, if she had forgotten it. If she claimed it, my right to it was lost.

  She saw the wonder on my face as I stared around at this trove, the visible accumulation of days and loves and houses and experiences, the proof that life had been lived. I traveled through life so lightly loaded—not much more than my clothes and my suitcase went with me from house to house, clothes which I grew out of within months—that I was sometimes waylaid by a sense that my own existence wasn’t quite real. In Anjelica’s room, each thing anchored her further to her place in the world; and each thing that I lost, by seeing that it was hers, unanchored me from mine.

  “That’s Mum’s bed, Legs.”

  She said it fondly. For her, I guessed, it brought only warmth. She had many memories of Mum, and in them Mum was alive.

  I was almost afraid to look at it, as if it would turn me to stone. It had faces on it, carved into the high finials at the head and foot. It was painted gray, the color of low cloud.

  Was that the bed I had sat on, between Anjelica and Tony, when Leslie told me my mother was dead? It gave no clues: no scratches in the paint that could have been made by my fingernails, no splotches that could have been the watermarks of my tears. Not that I expected to find them: I knew I hadn’t clawed and screamed, and Anjel had told me that I hadn’t cried. But how could it be so impassive, so cold, so gray? It was Mum’s bed; it had been heated by her body, it had held her as she slept and dreamed. Suddenly it was in the same room as me; she was in the same room as me. How could it show no marks at all?

  Anjel didn’t bring the bed with her to Cici’s. I figured it must still be at Jack’s house. To me, that meant she hadn’t really left him. And among the photographs she hung on the wall of her dressing area was one of a teenage boy with that same dazzling grin: Jack’s high-school-graduation photo.

  “He was cute, wasn’t he, Legs?”

  She loved him still. I could hear it in her voice, and it made me happy. I was sure she’d be back with him soon—where, I felt, she belonged.

  One day we went down to the basement, to get a bottle of wine maybe, or to store one of Anjel’s fur coats in the temperature-controlled room where Cici kept hers.

  “Oh, my suitcase!” cried Anjel. At first I wasn’t sure what she meant—if she had brought a suitcase and stored it down there, why would she be surprised to see it? Then I realized that she was looking at the square-cornered, dark blue canvas suitcase that had gone with me everywhere, from Maida Avenue to St. Cleran’s to Grampa’s house to Euclid Street and now, finally, to Cici’s house. My suitcase—the one with “A.H.” stenciled on it in white below the clasp.

  “You have it,” said Anjel, delight in her voice. “How wonderful!”

  No, I wanted to scream, that’s my suitcase! Those are my initials. I am A.H.! But I wasn’t that A.H., the A.H. She was.

  I’d been so proud that I had my own suitcase, with my initials on it, and that I still had it even after Nurse was gone. I knew I’d had it my whole life, which meant that Mum had put the initials there.

  She had—but for Anjelica. My whole self crashed away.

  The big gold A on my bedroom door in the house on Maida Avenue: that was for “Anjelica,” not “Allegra.” I already knew that everything that had been mine at St. Cleran’s was actually Anjel’s. Everything that had been Mum’s was now hers, it seemed. Had anything ever been mine—even Mum? I didn’t look like her, with my pale skin and blond hair, not the way Anjelica did, with her arched eyebrows and dark Italian beauty. I had almost no memories of Mum; and the ones I had weren’t about her, they were about me. Anjel had the ownership rights. All I had was an abstract fact.

  One day in February 1977, Cici sat me down on the rust-colored suede sofa in the living room. Water gurgled out of the stone fountains in what I still thought of as Dad’s pond. The narwhal tusks were gone.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said. She’d chosen a time when Collin wasn’t there. I didn’t know what was coming, but I dreaded moments like this. I felt like my world was about to split apart.

  “John isn’t really your father.”

  Once I heard the words, I knew I’d been expecting to hear them. Everyone I’d ever lived with was temporary, and Cici might well be the same. Losing them, I could deal with. Even though he was gone from the house, Dad was all I really had left to lose.

  I couldn’t stop myself crying. It all made sense: meeting Dad when I was too old to meet a father; the word “adopted” in the newspaper; the constant uncertainty about where I belonged.

  “Your real father is an English lord. I told him he should come and visit you. He’s coming tomorrow.”

  I saw dark spots on the suede where my tears had wet it. I hoped they wouldn’t leave a stain; then I realized I hoped they would.

  “Your mother went out and found love,” Cici went on. “John was furious, because she was supposed to be his slave and put up with the Zoë thing and Danny and so on. But she wouldn’t do it. She went out and got a life.”

  I could hear how Cici admired Mum for that, the kinship she felt with her. When I finally lifted my face and looked at her, she held my eyes. She smiled—not her usual square smile but something soft and almost invisible. Her voice asked me to believe her.

  “You were a child of love.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It seemed to be important to Cici. I heard—in her words, or maybe only in the pleading gentleness of her voice—that somehow it was better to be me, the child of this love that was suddenly being sprung on me, than Anjelica and Tony, the children of the right mother and father, whose love hadn’t lasted and maybe, if I believed Cici, had never been there at all.

  She wanted it to be important to me, but I was just tired. I wished my life was rounded off and simple, like the basketball hoops above the driveways of normal families. I felt bombarded. This new father wasn’t—couldn’t be—the last piece of the puzzle. He was just one more shudder in my precarious sense of self
.

  The next day, a biblical rain pelted from the low sky. Sheets of water tumbled down the steep driveway and turned the grass and trees beyond the big plate-glass windows into distorted swirls of green. I sat with Cici, silent, waiting for the knock on the door.

  When he came inside, he was dripping rain. Cici shook his hand.

  “I’m Celeste,” she said. And, with her hand on my shoulder, “This is Allegra.”

  I think he thanked her. His manners were elegant and easy, as if he met his secret children every day of his life. That threw me. Then I saw the unease underneath, and felt better. I didn’t see why this should be any more comfortable for him than it was for me.

  He came toward me, and dutifully I approached him. I let him embrace me.

  “I’m very happy to meet you, Allegra. I loved your mother very much.”

  Did he say that then, or later? Did he say, in so many words, that he was my father, that I was his daughter? I don’t know.

  I wasn’t happy to meet him. I wondered if that meant I was unhappy to meet him, but that wasn’t it either. I just felt blank. Somebody else would have to turn a key and rev up my emotions, if they wanted to.

  I wasn’t sure if this gray-haired man with glasses and a square face and his initials embroidered on his shirt did want to. He could hardly expect me to leap into his arms—could he? The alternative would be floods of tears and hysterics. I wondered if he’d been afraid that I would go that route. Maybe he was relieved that I was so flat. Or was I disappointing him by acting like the walking dead?

  I was disappointing Cici. I knew she felt that he was, in a way, her gift to me. Everyone had lied to me, my whole life; she was giving me the truth. She wanted the knowledge that I wasn’t really Dad’s daughter to make me happy.

  He and Cici did most of the talking, though they kept trying to pull me in. We sat on the other sofa, the one I thought of as more formal, farther from the swinging kitchen door, away from the fountain in the floor. The fractured light through the rain-smeared windows behind him dissolved the outlines of my father’s face.

  His voice and Cici’s seemed to come from some far distance, beyond the pounding of the rain. The wish jumped into my head that he and Cici would fall in love and get married. That would round things off beautifully. But that mayfly died when he said he had a wife, and I had a brother and sister in London.

  Words came easily to him. They didn’t come to me. He wanted to know who I was, but—even with Cici’s promptings—how could I tell him? This was a random hour flung like a boulder into the river of my days. He was leaving for London the next day, and I had no idea—or even any curiosity—if I would ever see him again.

  I felt them struggling. The visit had to last a certain length of time—the taxi was coming back in an hour. An hour—just one hour—seemed almost insultingly short for something as big as meeting one’s father. But that hour, on that sofa, was an impossibly long time.

  “Why don’t you play the piano for your father?” said Cici brightly, grabbing the thought like a passing trapeze.

  “Yes, please do,” said my father, clutching on. “I’d so love to hear you play.”

  I knew Cici hated the way I used to dance my double jig for Dad’s friends, and I didn’t like performing either. But playing the piano meant we wouldn’t have to talk.

  “Okay.”

  Cici had persuaded Collin’s father, the screenwriter Walon Green, to rent the piano for me. I never understood why he agreed to—or quite believed that he really was paying for it. In Dad’s absence, Cici had fostered a relationship between Wally and me; I went with Collin to stay with him for weekends, and on a camping trip to Washington state. And she wanted Dad to know that.

  I’d had piano lessons during my year in Long Island and my year on Euclid. The teacher Cici hired worked differently, writing out the chords like guitar music. It was easier than the conventional system, but the drawback was that I could only play pieces that he had transcribed.

  I started with “Danse Macabre,” my favorite. I was conscious of the fact that I wasn’t playing from proper music, that I had some kind of hippie L.A. way of playing that my new English father must look down on. Of course he was disappointed in me. Still, I had to play on. It was better than the alternative.

  When I started the next piece, my father sat beside me on the bench and improvised above my careful chords. Cici beamed. I plodded on, aware of how comfortable he was at the keys, aware that this couldn’t exactly be fun for him either. When I visited Dad at the Beverly Hills Hotel, we had a kind of script that we followed. I had no script for meeting a new father—and, evidently, neither did he for meeting a new daughter. I wondered if he was as keen as I was for this difficult hour to end.

  12

  On a spring day in 2007, I sat waiting on a tastefully upholstered sofa in a bank in Trafalgar Square. Huge chandeliers dropped flat sheets of light, brighter than the London day outside, unnaturally intense, like a stage. At intervals—as if propelled by an assistant director filling the scene—people walked past, heads down, the way people intent on business are supposed to walk.

  I heard the footfalls of the well-suited young man I was waiting for before I saw him reappear: walking a little slower than the others to underscore the importance of his task. He had the confident look of someone performing a duty well.

  He handed me two large, lumpy manila envelopes tied into a single parcel. The ends of the string that quartered them were fixed to the paper by a ragged circle of muddy red sealing wax.

  A smaller envelope was tucked into the cross of the string, marked, in small, elegant handwriting, “Disposal Instructions.” The letter inside was signed simply “Norwich.” No “John Julius” before it: with a title, a first name isn’t necessary. In the event of his death, it said, the letters were to be sent by the bank to his solicitors, who were to deliver them to me, his “natural” daughter.

  That event hadn’t happened. When I told him I was writing this book, he told me that he had kept the letters my mother had written to him, and arranged for me to collect them. Seeing two envelopes, my heart leaped: perhaps the second contained the letters he had written to her. Had she returned them to him when their affair ended?

  I had already sorted through every letter in the tin trunk, and none were from him. His handwriting is unmistakable. The letters I knew he had written weren’t there.

  I found myself reluctant to break the seal and open those manila envelopes. “You were a child of love,” Cici had told me. But, in reading the letters Mum had kept and her scraps of diary, I’d seen her in love with other men—and not Dad: the struggling young man, the Argentinian diplomat, the writer/adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor. I knew by now that she hadn’t left Dad because of Zoë, as Cici had suggested. She was already living in a rented flat in London. I was glad that she had found happiness in those romances, until they curdled. But I wanted my father to be different: to be the man she loved above all others. I thought he was—because of all those men that she fell in love with as an adult, he was the one whose child she had kept, had felt kicking her as she looked out her bedroom window to the house where he lived with his wife and children, across the canal.

  Reading her letters to him was the promise of pain. I dreaded it. I tried to put them into date order without opening them, according to the postmarks on the envelopes. Many were missing or too smudged to read. I could order them roughly by the address on the envelope: only one to his house, the others care of the Foreign Office, where he worked, or to his club, or to a hotel in Geneva: these last with her handwriting disguised so that it wouldn’t be obvious that a member of the British delegation to the nuclear disarmament conference was being deluged with love letters. But to reconstruct properly the shape of the love that created me, I would have to unfold each one.

  The first letter was dated October 1961, nearly three years before I was born. The last was written in January 1969, the month Mum died. I corralled my eyes within the top inch
of the top page of each letter, but always words leaped up from below, like fish rising: “dearest,” again and again. Most of the letters were six, eight, ten pages long. Some were written only a day apart. Some, only hours.

  Heartbreak lapped at me. The movements of my hands became detached, robotic, as I folded each letter again and put it back in its envelope, marked the date on the outside, and slotted it into place in the torrent. On my own sofa, surrounded by the physical manifestation of the love that brought me to life, I was surrounded also by Mum’s death. I would not be reading these letters, now, if she had lived to see me grow up and bounce her grandson on her knee. And I knew so much more than she did: I knew how this overwhelming, mind-consuming passion—with so much absence in it, that demanded letters—would end.

  All the letters were from Mum to John Julius; there were none from him to her. What happened to his letters? Was she so angry, so hurt, that she burned the record of a devotion that proved hollow? It seems unlikely. She kept everything: good-luck telegrams, cards from florists, paper coasters and straw mats from forgotten evenings. She was good at transforming a finished love affair into a tender friendship. More likely she kept them apart from those other letters, and when her belongings were disposed of, they weren’t found.

  But where would she have kept them? In the drawer of some piece of furniture that was sold? Surely everything was emptied. In some chilly, secret safekeeping where no accidental eyes would see them? These are the two possibilities: that my father’s letters to my mother came into the hands of someone who thought them trash and tossed them; or that they lie entombed in some vault in London, where they will outlast us all for decades, maybe centuries, until the vault itself ceases to exist.