This marked the point at which Robbie began his new role at the House. A routine was quickly established. Each night, after a homely supper cooked by my mother, the two men would repair upstairs to my father’s dressing room to change into their bikers’ uniforms. My mother remained below to wash up the dishes. By nine, the House was entirely hers. She rarely saw the two of them before breakfast the following morning.
My mother said nothing and did what was asked of her; Della was not so willing to comply. She wanted her husband back with her, and earning money.
My father jotted down a terse reminder to himself, during the late summer of 1984: ‘Talk with Della.’ He could, when he wanted, make himself hard to resist; I’m sure Della was surprised, when he left, to find that Robbie was going to be spending just as much time at the House as before, and with her agreement. The compromise she had been offered was that the invitation now embraced them both. Robbie would continue to accompany my father on his biking expeditions. Della, meanwhile, would enjoy the pleasure of providing my mother with a companion.
Separated from my first husband and keeping myself at a distance from the House and its altered ménage, I was baffled by the insistently serene tone of my mother’s letters. Having met Della once, I couldn’t imagine that the two wives had anything to say to each other; on paper, my mother praised her as a helpful young woman who didn’t mind helping to polish furniture and was always easy company, no trouble at all. Today, however, my mother has become less guarded. She remembers how Della enjoyed watching television game shows, with the volume turned up at full blast. The furniture-polishing was, she says, undertaken only when the television broke down, and at my mother’s insistence.
‘Well, she didn’t do anything else!’ she says. ‘And all that cooking! I had to give her lunch, and him dinner. I might as well have been running a hotel.’
‘Why did you pretend everything was fine in the letters?’ I ask. ‘You ought to have said you were having a rotten time; you know we would have backed you.’
Stubbornly, she shakes her head. ‘I didn’t want you causing trouble,’ she says. ‘It wouldn’t have done any good.’
Even though I’ve seen her watch that film so many times, I still can’t bear to hear the note of resignation in her voice. Gelsomina was a poor little waif, staying loyal to promiscuous Zampano, in part, because she had nowhere else to go; my mother is a proud woman, from a proud family. How could she allow herself to be so beaten down?
‘You said you could have left him. Why didn’t you?’
She looks bewildered. ‘And leave all this . . .?’
Of course. It isn’t only the story of Gelsomina, standing by her impossible man. Having lost that romantic family home of her own, the castle on the hill she’d always supposed was their own until her parents left it, my mother had allowed the house of her marriage to fill the void. She would have put up with anything rather than be separated from a home the contours of which had grown as reassuringly familiar as a beloved body. Here it always stands, at the heart of every family story, pulling us back, holding us fast: The House.
At about this time, bruised by the end of a marriage and a long, unhappy love affair, I turned again to the House myself, seeking comfort in its safe harbour. I hadn’t been seeing much of either of my parents after that one emotional scene with my father, when he thought that Robbie had left him. I knew of Robbie’s existence, and that he and Della spent time at the House. It had not occurred to me, until I began to feel the desire to spend more time there myself, that I would find myself an outsider. Robbie was now securely fixed in position. My brother and I had been displaced.
I hope that Robbie never understood how much I hated him for supplanting me. He didn’t glimpse me above him, standing on the roof, looking down to where he lounged at my father’s side on the bank of the lake, where he lay listening, like a perfect child, to a storybook read aloud to him by his ageing friend. He didn’t read the diary in which I wrote: ‘Is he never not here?’ He didn’t know how desperately I prayed for him to disappear.
Towards me, Robbie always acted cheerful and kind. He taught my son how to fish in the Thrumpton lake; when my London flat was burgled, he rode round on his new bike – my father’s birthday gift to him – to offer me a brass candlestick he claimed to have picked up at a car boot sale. (Or had my father given it to him to offer me as a sop?) He was always keen to come up with a word to help me out at Scrabble, a game that our father, dispensing urgent winks and nods to signal his scheme, ensured that Robbie always won, however bizarre his spelling.
‘You do like Robbie, don’t you?’ my father would say, hungry for appreciation of his friend.
‘He’s all right,’ I’d say, the most that I could manage without being accused of viciousness or snobbery. (And here was another difficulty: it was impossible to express hostility to Robbie without sounding condescending. If Robbie had been rich, or well-read, or from a grand family, I would have felt no such delicacy about expressing my resentment.)
‘He’s very fond of you.’ A yearning pause, while I savour the moment of power and contemplate the dangers of candour, the risk to my mother, who has begged me, almost crying, to make no more trouble than already exists in the House.
‘He was saying how much he admires you for writing all those books.’
I’d like to tell him that I’d value Robbie’s admiration of my works more if he had managed to do more than glance at their jackets. Instead, I thank my father for passing the tribute on; seeing Robbie himself loitering attentively in the background, awaiting his excuse to join in, I find a reason to move away, to leave the two of them alone. I hate to see them together. I hate the softness in my father’s eyes when he looks at Robbie. I hate the glances that plead with me to be understanding, to be kind.
My rage, expressed as calculated reticence, was fuelled by a sense of the injustice done to our family as a whole. Why was it acceptable to my father for Robbie to boast fingernails that looked as though he’d gone grave-digging without a shovel, while my mother’s honest gardening hands were criticised as unkempt? Why was my young son rebuked if he failed to post my father a weekly letter from school, while Robbie never wrote at all? Why must I drive across London – I was often working against tight deadlines – to return to Robbie a cheap plastic cigarette lighter he had left behind at the House? Why must I obtain the autograph of a singer I had once met, requesting him to write ‘With Love to Robbie’? Why must Robbie always take precedence, always be without fault?
The answer, as I well knew, was love. My father was enraptured, besotted, head over heels. He treasured my mother. He was, if only behind our backs, proud of his son and daughter’s achievements.
But Robbie was the passion of my father’s later life. Robbie’s only rival was the House.
The presiding spirit of this stage of their increasingly exclusive relationship was A. A. Milne. Teaching Robbie to read had not been an easy business, since he was quickly bored and disliked being corrected. These little foibles, as my father fondly observed, demonstrated that he had much in common with a special character in one of the few books that Robbie sincerely enjoyed: the bouncy and uncrushable ‘Tigger’.
Delighted by this identification, Robbie pointed out that Tigger was referred to by Pooh as a great friend of Christopher Robin’s: not just any friend, but a great one. If he was Tigger, then my father must surely be Christopher Robin (rapidly shortened to ‘CR’). Her affection for owls made the selection of name an easy pick for my mother. Della, although her visits had become infrequent, was offered Piglet. Behind her broad back, however, my father spoke of her to Robbie as Heffalump. They both enjoyed this little joke at the expense of Della’s shape, although Robbie occasionally remonstrated that it wasn’t in the best of taste. (He remained quite fond of Della, and liked to point out that she had a good sense of humour. She surely needed one.)
The names were chosen in 1984. From then on, these were the characters and personalities that
my parents and Robbie adopted for use in their private life.
I’ve managed to find my father’s tattered copy of The House at Pooh Corner, the volume in which Tigger first appears. It’s a third impression from the 1928 edition, published when George Seymour was five years old and just beginning to look upon Thrumpton as his rightful home. Ernest Shepard’s delicate drawing, spread across the flyleaf, depicts a small boy, with his faithful band of followers skipping at his heels, dancing through an idealised landscape. Easily visible on the far side of the rolling fields is the outline of a tall, well-gabled house. The similarity to his own House and its pretty estate is striking enough to have caught my father’s fancy when, almost sixty years later, he began reading the book aloud to Robbie.
To me, it’s clear that my father was once again revisiting his childhood, burying the bad memories of abandonment, loneliness and fear in a re-enacted version over which he had gained control. In his kindness to Robbie, he was also compensating himself for the years when he had slept up on the dusty top floor, and cried, unheard, for the mother who had left him when she travelled to La Paz.
My mother argues that the connection is simpler still.
‘He liked being Christopher Robin because it meant he didn’t have to be responsible,’ she states. ‘And Tigger: well, Robbie was rather greedy, and clumsy, and always making out he knew much more than he did.’
‘And were you Owl, because you were so wise?’
My mother glances again at the illustration by Shepard. ‘The owl isn’t following Christopher Robin,’ she observes.
And she’s right: the owl is off on its own, floating overhead, hovering above the frolicking troupe. Suddenly, I find myself thinking about the grand house parties with which my grandmother liked to fill her Welsh castle, and of my reclusive grandfather trotting quietly away from them, absconding up the stone stairs, fleeing to his turret and his books.
‘Could you have got through it all without that ability to detach yourself?’ I ask her.
My mother thinks about it, then she shakes her head.
‘I doubt it,’ she says. ‘No. Not that last ten years . . .’
8
THE HOUSE DIVIDED
Saturday, 24 April 1993
Received by George Seymour, very friendly, extremely correct, snobbish . . . In the library we were joined for drinks by . . . nice rugged lady resembling Violet Powell . . . and a strange yob-like bruiser who sat mute and gazing into space. Myles [Myles Hildyard, a neighbour] disclosed that he is the ‘friend’ with whom G.S. rides pillion all over the country on an enormous motorbike – very strange.
JAMES LEES-MILNE, THE MILK OF PARADISE:
DIARIES, 1993–1997
Lacking any interest in motorbikes, I had no sense in 1985 of the significance in my father’s exchange of a Ducati for a Harley Davidson. Today, I’ve become better informed.
The Ducati, affectionately known to its admirers (not just my father) as the Duke, is the Bugatti of the bike world. A young man’s machine, it was designed for speed, for fast corners on the Italian racetracks; later, it was adapted to suit the twists and turns of European roads. The Ducati is swift, dangerous and elegant. The Harley is a style of life, the icon of the seasoned biker, the tough guy.
Image, here, is what counts. Nobody cares that Marlon Brando actually rode a British Triumph in the film, The Wild Ones (or that the author of On the Road, for a similar example, could not even drive). In fact, and this explains my father’s change of machines, the Harley Davidson (rudely known to its critics as the Hardly Ableson) is a bike ideally suited to an ageing man. Built for long-haul riding on the straight roads of America, it is more comfortable than the Ducati, and more reliable. For a man of sixty-one who was anticipating a long future of leisurely bike tours around Britain, accompanied by Robbie, the Harley was the consummate choice.
This was not, at the time, how it seemed to us. To my brother and me, our father appeared to have taken one more step into a macho world of big machines, black leather, tough talk and loud boasts, a world into which we were unable to follow him. I myself, after my father once kidnapped my six-year-old son, sweeping him off to ‘do the ton’ on a busy local road, had resolved to have nothing further to do with bikes; my brother, having nearly lost his life in a biking accident, had better reason still for staying away from all such machines.
Love made my father protective of his friend: suspecting that his grander cousins and acquaintances would take a dim view of Robbie’s role in the House, he took care to keep them at a distance. The Visitors’ Book at the House had once been thick with names; by 1987, with rare exceptions, it displayed only one, awkwardly traced, over and over, week in, week out. On the infrequent occasions when country neighbours came to meals, Robbie stayed at the back of the House. Occasionally, for a laugh, and because he liked to have his friend close to him, my father coaxed him to come through to the dining room where, while pouring wine or gathering up the plates, Robbie took stock of the visitors. Later, he’d comment on their appearance and entertain my father with his candid views, fondly passed on in due course to my brother and myself. (No opportunity was ever missed for showing off Robbie’s remarkable powers of perception.)
Robbie, while we kept our distance, was feeling increasingly at home in the House. To him, as to us all, it offered an enchanted haven. The villagers, taking their cue from my mother’s smiling face, kept any doubts to themselves and offered Robbie a warm welcome when he and my parents joined in the local galas, fetes and feast days. In the gardens, on hot summer days, the two men hacked down laurels and scythed away undergrowth before settling down to a beer and sandwich lunch on the grass. Riding the bike around the county, they scoured antique markets and charity shops for bargains; irreproachably elegant in London, my father now competed with his friend for scruffiness in his country clothing, boasting of the excellent cut and comfort of a tattered and ill-fitting pair of moleskin trousers that Robbie had spotted on a secondhand stall. For supper, my mother remembers, the two of them liked nothing better than beans on toast before they went upstairs to my father’s dressing room in the oldest and most remote corner of the House, to prepare for a long night ahead, on the road.
Enthusiasm for fast bikes, late night fry-ups at motorway diners, and a bit of slang had not reduced my father’s acute sense of his place in the world. Visiting London, he continued to dine at his club, to visit his barber, to purchase hair lotion in Jermyn Street, and to study, at leisure, the Daily Telegraph, for confirmation that the civilised world was in decline. (At Thrumpton, he preferred to read, with Robbie, the jaunty and more downmarket Sun.) It gave him continuing joy that an earl’s elderly daughter consented to chat to him twice a week on the telephone. He flinched as if pierced when a stranger failed to rhyme his surname with the capital of Peru. He cringed when I mentioned that I had forgotten, while posting off a letter, that a duchess’s name should properly be preceded on the envelope by the words: ‘Her Grace’.
By 1988, however, Robbie’s ascendancy was almost complete, and the worlds that my father had striven to keep separate were beginning to collide. To us, his children, it seemed as though Robbie’s transformation into Tigger, the stripy little tiger who thinks he can do everything better than anybody else, had encouraged a new and irritating confidence. The bike rides now often included visits to castles, cathedrals and stately homes; seeing them in the company of a man who sounded eminently authoritative, Robbie picked up fragments and then produced them, garbled, as his own opinions.
‘Tigger’s got very good instincts,’ my father wrote to me, after proudly reporting Robbie’s reaction to the gargoyles of Notre Dame. All I could think was that my mother, rather than Robbie, ought to be holidaying with her husband in Paris. Burning with self-righteousness, I urged her to stand up for her rights. When had she last been taken on a holiday? Did she know – I’d been shocked by this information – that there were plans afoot for a visit with Robbie to Venice? Didn’t she care?
/> For a moment, I seemed to detect a slight chink in the armour. I didn’t know, then, that my mother had been suggesting that she and my father should take a holiday in Venice, their first European jaunt, as a couple, in twenty years. Neither did she feel the need to tell me. Instead, shaking her head, she told me to stop making trouble. Everything was all right. She had no complaints, none at all. In fact, the kindest thing her children could do, she said in a voice taut with repressed emotion, was to keep their mouths shut and their opinions to themselves. All she had ever asked of us was our discretion.
‘Be quiet,’ she said fiercely, when I returned to the attack. ‘Please. Just – be quiet.’
Silence was beyond me. I found it easier to stay away from Thrumpton, and to put all the contending forces and inhabitants of the House entirely out of my mind.
It was, as I realised later, easier for me to do this than it was for my brother. I, although I loved the House, had accustomed myself to the knowledge that it would never be mine. As my father’s daughter, I had escaped the weight of future obligation. I had no need to fret about my father’s determination to hold on to the House until his death (as one of an unusually long-lived family, he expected to survive into his nineties). I sympathised with my brother’s fears that his inheritance, when it came, would be swallowed up by death duties; but these were not my concerns.
In 1989, I married a man whose relative youth – he was several years my junior – and friendly manner won my father’s heart. Looking with hungry eyes for anybody in the family who would treat Robbie with more than frozen courtesy, he saw two potential allies, my husband and my affectionate, easygoing son, a boy of sixteen. This consoled him a little, I imagine, for the fact that my brother and I, while outwardly civil, remained hostile to Robbie, an intruder for whom our mother appeared to be meekly sacrificing her rights as a wife.
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