The reason for Nick’s obliging behaviour became clear when, shortly after handing round the soup and with a nervous glance at his host, he announced that he had a piece of news to give us: he’d got himself engaged. The marriage was set for early summer.
‘Well! This is a surprise, Nick dear,’ my father said, through lips that had become thin as filleted anchovies; I watched white fingers tap, and then begin to drum, the edge of the table behind his glass. My husband, raising his eyebrows, glanced at me across the table. I shook my head. I had no idea what we were in for, but the look on my father’s face didn’t suggest that we’d be celebrating this engagement with much joy.
The storm broke an hour later, after Nick had taken off his uniform and retired to watch football on television. The details, for me, remain obscure. All I remember is my father’s low groan of self-pity as the door closed behind his friend. The familiar catalogue of complaints began. If only we could all stop being so selfish, realise how hard he laboured to keep the House going, how unappreciated he felt, how neglected, how despised by all these members of the family (furious looks at myself, my brother, and my husband) who regarded themselves as so much more intelligent than himself. Of course, Nick had the right to get married. But if we could only understand how much the bike trips meant to him, how terrible it was for a man who had known so little friendship in his life, to have such a boon companion so mercilessly snatched away . . .
In fact, as was abundantly clear, my father was jealous. Nick belonged to him. The idea that he might have led another life, in which he had been stolen away by some wretched girl who – Nick had cheerfully admitted as much – cared nothing for bikes and wanted him to give them up, was torture. We were invited to agree that Nick should be urged to reconsider and, perhaps, postpone such a hasty match; when we murmured disagreement, my father burst into tears.
I was already seething. I’d hated seeing the way my father praised Nick’s good looks in his military attire and stroked his arm with a covert hand while being served his soup; I was infuriated by his response to the engagement, and his eagerness to undermine it. But it was the tears that undid me. I’d seen my father shed them too often. I knew how easily they flowed. Seizing a handful of boiled potatoes, I flung them, hard, at his bent and weeping head. When this failed to shut him up, I dropped on my knees and, while my husband’s jaw dropped in dismay, sank my teeth into – what would some enlightened Freudian make of this delicious detail? – a leg of our family dining table.
‘Stop it at once!’ my mother whispered.
I heard her as if through a mist and didn’t care. I was high as a kite on rage that evening, intoxicated by the joy of letting emotion finally flood out and take whatever form it found. Easily my father’s match when it came to putting on a display of histrionics, I hadn’t the gift for precise timing that allowed him now to rise to his feet, deliver one long sorrowful glare, and then dramatically sweep from the room. Still crouched upon the floor by the table-leg, I smelled defeat. That I hadn’t quite shown to advantage was confirmed by the horrified stares of my mother, my brother and my husband.
‘You and George!’ my mother sighs. ‘I don’t know what it was about the two of you. You couldn’t let each other alone for a moment. Dreadful. He was never so bad when you weren’t there, you know. So long as he had his own way; that was all it was about.’
This mild attitude infuriates me so much that I have to walk away from her and stare out of a window while I steady my voice. Hadn’t letting him have his way been just the problem, in later years? Had letting him have his way, as she so submissively did, been a form of compliance and endorsement? Wouldn’t it have been better, when things got worse than this – and they did – if she had stood up to her husband and spoken out against the way he imposed his new life on us, obliging his family to conform to patterns of existence we could never have anticipated?
But this is unfair of me. I know that, while I relish storms and confrontations, my mother dreads them. There was a scene, just before my father’s death, in which she did at last speak to him frankly, but I have never caught more than a shadowed glimpse of what occurred that night. I know only that words were said in the small London house, their second home, where much of my father’s other life had been played out in his later years. I know that the scene traumatised her to the degree that she refused ever to enter that house again. ( We sold it immediately after my father’s death, at her request.) This was, I believe, the only occasion on which she nerved herself to speak to him, not as his subject, but as his wife and equal. To do so, she had needed to be pushed beyond the terror for her own future that conditioned all her earlier behaviour towards him.
Nick was not a lively character, but he possessed a kind heart, coupled with a warm affection for the man who had taken the trouble to teach him how to drive a car (and who had funded the purchase of his own first bike). He may even have felt some guilt about the distress his approaching marriage had caused.
Shortly after Christmas, my father mailed me a joyful letter (our quarrels were always as quickly extinguished as ignited), to explain that his youthful friend had devised a happy plan. My mother was scheduled to visit the Corfu house in May; Nick, never having left England before, had expressed the wish to ride out there in April, with my father and ‘The Duke’. The fact that my unpopular husband was to be away in America for the summer offered an added incentive and excuse. A young mother must, surely, be in need of company?
The expedition was, from my father’s point of view, a triumph. But I, from the moment that a villager shouted up at my window that two foreigners in black leather were awaiting me at the taverna, was stiff with self-consciousness and embarrassment. Instead of admiring their achievement – 550 miles in a day, my father boasted, beaming, in pouring rain, over the Alps and down through Italy to Calabria – I spiked their cheerfulness with snide remarks. I mentioned my mother’s name incessantly; my conversation was angled to slant just above Nick’s head, or to wound him with allusions to episodes of which he could have no possible knowledge. If I proved clever enough, subtle enough, even my father couldn’t catch me out in any overt discourtesy.
Looking back, across the years, at Nick’s hunched back, as he sat out on the terrace, staring at the hills and wishing, I’m sure, that he had never crossed the Channel, I’m ashamed of my viciousness. He had done all the riding, acted as the mechanic, humoured my father’s wishes, sacrificed the company of that fiancée whom he, presumably, missed; his reward was to be tarred with condescension until his cheeks must have burned. I could see that he didn’t like Greek food, that he felt lost and that he would have preferred to be anywhere other than where he presently found himself. Nevertheless, he was still my enemy.
The trouble, this time, stemmed from my father’s disconcerting announcement that Nick and he would like to share a bedroom. The room I had selected for his friend, as he pointed out with accuracy, was less agreeable than his own at the front of the house, with a view across the valley. And for Nick, far from home, it would be a comfort not to be alone. In fact, my father added with a smile, he couldn’t imagine for a minute that I would object.
He gave me no option to do so. Lying alone that first night in my own bed, after checking on the room in which my small son slept, I listened to the sounds of laughter and shifting bodies on the other side of the wall, and writhed. All those years, I’d followed the rules of his House; now, in mine, I was being forced to do so again, and to endorse a way of life that reeked of betrayal: to myself, to my mother, to our family.
Later, after his return to England, my father wrote me a long and warmly affectionate letter. He reported what fun it had been to take Nick for drinks at the Ritz in Paris; and, later again, of the misery of going into the cold empty bedroom of the little London house, after Nick had gone off to spend their first night back with his fiancée and her parents. My father had begged Nick not to leave him on his own, but of course, it couldn’t be done. ‘Did I feel flat
and alone and downcast to think all that super time was over? It was horrid.’ Still, the journey to Greece and back had been an experience that would never be forgotten. ‘It did,’ he added, ‘seem to bring us much closer together, didn’t it?’
Had it? I wasn’t so sure. It had touched me to see how care fell away from my father’s face when he was on holiday and out of reach of the House, with its relentless need to be cared for and paid for and kept up; it had filled me with confusing and distressing thoughts to know that he and Nick, when we went upstairs at night, walked into a shared room. I had hated the sounds of their laughter, their whispers, their stirring bodies.
Readers will think it odd that I did not immediately draw the obvious conclusion, that my father and Nick were lovers. I had no means of knowing whether this was true or not; oddly, I didn’t care. What troubled me was the sense that I myself had been supplanted, that somebody – Nick – had taken a place that was rightfully my own. Not my mother’s? Did that mean that I wanted to be sharing a room with my father? The idea shocked me so much that I promptly shut it out.
In truth, I didn’t know what I thought. All I understood was that I felt disturbed and uneasy, and that it was the sense of exclusion that caused me the most pain.
6
CHERRY ORCHARD BLUES
It’s rare for a son or daughter to possess sufficient understanding of a parent to be able to proffer a fair assessment of that parent’s behaviour.
‘It doesn’t seem to have stopped you,’ says my mother. ‘I never knew anybody so keen on judging everybody else’s behaviour as you are.’
‘What I mean’, I say, ‘is, what I’m trying to say is . . .’
Italics, here, admit to unease. I’m writing about my father with the benefit of hindsight, and with unlimited access to his diaries, letters and notebooks, writings that neither my mother nor I was privy to during his lifetime. The connections that these personal records are enabling me to draw, between my father’s early life and his later behaviour, now appear obvious; I’m being granted an overview that was from nowhere visible back then, at the time.
What we saw then, as my father entered his mid-fifties, was the emergence of what appeared a radically altered personality. The documentary evidence of his life, up until the time of his marriage, suggests to me today that this final phase, though a long time coming, may have been inevitable.
Sickly and spoiled, my father grew up as the cherished darling of an over-indulgent mother, encouraged to develop into a preening young snob by doting grandmothers. At Thrumpton, as a child, he’d assimilated the habits and attitudes of a reactionary octogenarian, so thoroughly, in fact, as to guarantee that he’d be seen as an outsider by his peers, and given a wretched time at school. Later, he’d failed to pass his military training, and his diary reveals that he felt both lonely and unpopular in his banking job at Barclays. Here was a man who had a lot of living to make up for in life. Is it surprising he fell so hard for the sensation of freedom and rebellion afforded by biking? Is it any wonder, as he saw his children slip away, eluding the patriarchal grasp, that he looked for compensatory companions who would prove, if perhaps less challenging, then more dependable?
‘And what about the clothes?’ I ask my mother. ‘All that business of the biking uniform? All that leather, the black? What did it all mean? Do you think wearing clothes like that was a redress of some kind, for his not having served in the Army . . .?’
My mother’s look conveys such utter lack of enthusiasm for the subject that I break off. For a moment, I feel the sense of obscure depths that she may still adamantly be concealing. Am I imagining it, or is she battling a secret urge to speak out – fully, finally – after all these years?
My mother says: ‘I wouldn’t know.’
My father, while he did not approve of psychoanalysis, never minded indulging in discussion of family failings, so long as the topic didn’t involve criticism of the head of the House. (It was acceptable to reproach him for being ‘sensitive’, or ‘vulnerable’, or ‘trusting’: these backhanded virtues were his authorised weaknesses.) But a quality such as my mother’s resilience – in the face of such acts of cruelty as the public humiliation by her husband over her sequinned dress, or his belittling of her in personality games, or his snide and constant comments upon her shape (neither his wife nor his daughter could ever match up to his willowy and near androgynous ideal of the female form): this was drawn from a profound inner security that was unfathomably alien to my father.
‘My religion, I suppose you mean?’
My mother’s faith is simple and unquestioning. There is an Afterlife. The good are rewarded. Evil, in the end, reaps its punishment. God may drag His feet, but, though dilatory, proves ultimately benevolent.
My father’s beliefs were less secure, and consequently more rigidly held, more sternly enforced. His response, when I dared as a child to question the existence of the Holy Spirit, was to order the local vicar to walk me up and down in our park, in full view from my father’s writing-desk behind the library window. This purgatory was to be perpetual, or until my belief was restored, after which we could return to the House for lunch. (The vicar, after an hour of our pacing on a hot morning, admitted that he himself wasn’t certain about the precise dogma of the Holy Spirit. We were both in need of refreshment; a collegial accord was reached. We did not forfeit lunch.)
‘It’s more to do with an inner confidence,’ I tell my mother today. ‘I can detect it already in that painting of you as a little girl at Chirk. You always knew just who you were. Maybe you had an understanding governesss; maybe it was a result of growing up as an accepted part of a large family? I don’t know. But that’s the quality he never achieved. And he couldn’t shake it in you, however unhappy you became. Do you think I’m right?’
‘Mmm – perhaps.’ (Unlike her husband, my mother has always disliked discussing other people’s traits of character.) ‘I hope we aren’t going to stand here talking about this all day?’
It’s hard, listening to her brisk tone, to credit how completely my mother hid all evidence of an independent mind during the twenty years leading up to my father’s death in 1994. It was as if she’d drained all colour from herself, leaving behind only the faintest of sepia tints. At meals, she sat in silence; when asked a question, she simply referred it to her husband for an answer. This was a form of loyalty that maddened my father. Enraged by her refusal to offer a point of view on any subject, however provocative, he flung at her the accusation that she acted like an ostrich. It seemed as if he wanted her to lift her head and hold it there high, while he took the opportunity to launch at it whatever he found at hand to hurl.
My mother kept her head down. Safe from sight, she could survive.
Bearing in mind the fact that she was now as much a slave of the House as he had ever been, that the worst thing she could imagine was not that her husband should humiliate her but that she should be separated from her familiar surroundings and her small, safe routines, I don’t see, now, what else she could have done. At the time, I longed for her to speak out, or even to let us, her children, speak out on her behalf. She wouldn’t allow it. Whatever George did was right was the attitude she decided to take, as a form of self-protection: a silence that spoke poignantly of grim endurance did nothing to diminish the sense of nervous unease that made visits to the House increasingly disagreeable.
It seemed, after Nick’s departure in 1975 into married life, fatherhood and a regular job that put an end to the joint biking expeditions, that our family sat as if watching a clock, all of us, anxiously, simply watching. And waiting.
In company (given a proper guest list, meticulously chosen), my father remained entertaining, malicious, witty, and always hospitable, allowing his darker side to emerge only as the final moment of departure threatened, and once again there gaped before him the dire prospect of solitude.
‘Where has civilisation vanished?’ I remember him wailing as the guests filtered away from a mi
d-week lunch party, one chosen to suit his calendar, not theirs, at my home in London. Informed that these people had jobs to go to, he was incredulous. He was free; why weren’t they?
Abandoned by his self-absorbed and heartless children, feeling inadequately attended to by a wife who appeared always to be in the kitchen or planting bulbs in the garden, my father would lapse into gloom, an ennui so profound that only his writing table could provide conceivable remedy. My brother, patient, good-humoured and deeply attached to the House, tried to make our father plan for the future: how did he hope to transfer his property without exposing his heir to the crippling maximum penalty imposed on unprepared estates? You would think, having experienced the effects of this at firsthand when Charlie Byron failed to make proper arrangements, that our father would have been eager to do better by his own son. Far from it; my brother was accused of a cold and calculating spirit for even daring to raise such questions. Better, my father droned in one of his favourite phrases, to let the tapestry unroll, by which he meant that he had no intention of doing anything to ease my brother’s mind, or lessen the financial burden he would have to bear. Retrospectively, it seems that he intended his heir to endure all the tests of devotion that the House could impose.
Not being the heir, I was freer to speak my mind, and frequently did.
‘Thank you, darling, for a shrewd appraisal of my faults, something which it can never be but salutary to hear,’ my father wrote in 1976; my reward was a counter-lecture upon my taste for heavy late-Renaissance-style chairs (‘the ghastliness of such furniture makes me want to cover my eyes’) and another on my style of dress (‘those awful monolithic rings and see-through skirts’).
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