Did Ben’s marriage have to be unhappy to justify our affair? And anyway, was it? And if it was, would it not be the worst of reasons? These were not questions for Patrick, not then, not ever.
‘Was it like that for you?’ I asked. ‘The sense of compromise?’
He didn’t answer, but I could see it in him.
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘How is it for you?’
‘Sometimes it’s been hard and I’ve felt closed out. But other times it suits me well,’ I said, and finally, for the first time, I talked to my father about the love and independence conundrum, the pull two ways, rather like the tug between England and Australia, here and there, one part of myself against another. And I talked to him about feminism – had I ever used the word in his presence? – and what a relationship between a man and a woman might look like if the woman was, truly, independent.
‘You should write about it,’ he said.
‘What!’ I said. ‘You’d have me write all that in public?’
‘No, no,’ my father said. ‘It could be a novel. I’ve often wondered why you don’t write novels. You told such good stories when you were little.’
‘And got into trouble for them, for exaggerating …’
‘You always insisted they were real.’
‘They were,’ I said. ‘To me, they were real. Stories only work if you believe them.’
‘I can see that now,’ he said, ‘but at the time, you know, when the school would complain that you’d told a story about a helicopter taking you up so high you could see all of England all at once …’
‘I don’t remember that,’ I said.
‘There was quite a fuss. You were very little, six or seven. The trouble was that other children wanted to go up too. You said the helicopter lived behind a hedge, and only you knew where it was.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, the shame of childhood sweeping over me, but my father was smiling. ‘Poppy was almost a novel,’ he said.
‘Would you have preferred it if it was?’
‘Well, it makes it easier,’ he said, ‘to know it’s all fiction, than to be left wondering.’
‘Were you? Left wondering, I mean.’
‘You called me Richard. It made me wonder what kind of man I’d be if I’d been called Richard.’
He took my hand. ‘You can write,’ he said. ‘You always could, it was there in your letters, even from school.’
That evening with my father, I pondered whether I’d have written if I’d stayed in England, and if I had, what would I have written? Did it take the split to let me write as I did? What would there have been in its absence? If I’d stayed, would I have married a solicitor and lived in the suburbs that stretched along the railway lines out from London, a portly husband and a brace of daughters in tartan dresses? And if I had, would I have written? Would I even have had the idea? Or, without writing, would I have followed in Poppy’s footsteps, straight into the psychiatric hospital? That evening it was with my father that I wept, as I hadn’t, with him, since childhood. I heard the night nurse come in downstairs. And still I wept. I dropped my head onto the bed beside him, I could feel the warm pulse of his chest against the crown of my head, I could feel the scratchy caress of his fingers in my hair. I could hear his voice exactly as it had been all those years ago when it was I who lay in bed and leaned into the gentle pressure of him as he sat on the edge of my mattress to read the stories of Dr Doolittle, and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.
The next morning there was an air of relief in the house. Rather than this unaccustomed display of emotion wearing him down – as the night nurse who’d come clucking into the room had predicted – Patrick was better than he’d been for days. When I pulled my chair up to his bed the next morning he told me he’d been thinking about his mother, Gertie, my grandmother – not that he’d been thinking anything in particular, more that she’d come to him in a sweep of images: kissing him goodnight when he was a boy, smelling of freesias; waving him off on the school train, holding down her hat in the rush of air along the platform; hurrying along the corridor from the kitchen as he opened the door to visit her; sitting at her desk all afternoon writing in a small notebook.
‘What do you suppose she wrote?’ he said. ‘I haven’t really thought about it until now. It must have been a diary. I wonder if anyone kept it.’
‘Would the aunts know?’ I asked.
‘Have you ever had the feeling,’ he said, ‘of knowing someone without really knowing them at all?’
‘Often,’ I said.
‘What a race we are,’ he said, and I didn’t have the wit to ask him what he meant by race. Us humans? Us English?
In a small box in the bottom drawer of Patrick’s desk – which is now mine, here in the house near a park on the edge of Sydney’s inner harbour where I am living twenty years after the events leading up to his death in October 1995 – are his letters to Gertie. She kept them all, tied into bundles with old-fashioned black ribbon. Jane and I found them after he died. The first are from prep school where he was sent to board at the age of seven. In a jerky hand he wrote: ‘Darling Mummy, Last week I had a poisoned hand. I am real very homesick. Please come and get me at once.’ ‘Darling Mummy, I’ve still got a pain. I am 4 st 8 and 4 ft 9ins high. PS Send a long letter soon.’ The tearful letters didn’t last long; by the following summer: ‘Cricket was spiffing, we’re doing awfully well and Jones made a jolly good showing.’ His only complaints were about the custard. It was ‘a lark’ even when his glasses were flushed down the lavatory. There aren’t many letters from his next school, Uppingham, where he went at twelve – the school, incidentally, from which Edward Brittain and his fellow musketeers enlisted for the First World War. Preserved in the box were odd pieces of memorabilia: concert programmes, a hand-drawn map from a cadet’s exercise, a note in Patrick’s hand instructing that ‘In future people who do prep in hall will, on the conclusion of prep, leave hall immediately. They will not, as sometimes previously, loiter in hall much to Raeburn’s and the senior clear-ups inconvenience.’ This matches the photo of him as a prefect, arms crossed, face stern, the boy performing the man. Did he not write his mother more than the few letters that remain? Is this what it takes, the making of the Englishman away from his mother from the age of seven? Writing of mothers and politics in 2014, Jacqueline Rose comments – in the context of a British Cabinet dominated by those from public schools: ‘The one who most proudly proclaims the idea of iron-clad self-sufficiency must surely have the echo of the baby in the nursery hovering in the back of his or her – mostly his – head.’27
Patrick’s letters from the war still address Gertie as ‘Darling Mummy’, but gone was any trace of vulnerability. ‘There’s absolutely no reason to worry at all,’ he wrote from Burma. ‘Our command knows what it’s doing, and we’re seeing some splendid countryside.’ The letters are here with me in Sydney, still in Gertie’s box that once held octavo-sized ‘Alabaster note paper, triple thick’, because when we found them I thought I’d write about the making of an Englishman. ‘I wake up every morning and give thanks I was born an Englishman,’ he once said. But as it is, I have barely looked at them. While Martha was living here we got them out, but it was too ghostly to read more than a random few. We put them back in the box and closed the drawer.
‘I wish I’d been with Gertie when she died,’ Patrick said that morning after the night of my tears, when his mother had come to him.
‘Where were you?’ I asked.
‘In court. My clerk sent in a message.’ And then, as if there was only a certain distance he could go, as if he was afraid of burdening me, he said, ‘Quite enough of that.’ He looked at the clock. ‘Betsy will be back soon. Are you really going to London?’
‘The cottage will be free next week,’ I said. ‘I’ll come down then and spend each day with you.’
‘You won’t stay here?’
I shook my head. No more.
7
From the damp air over the river to the noise of Lo
ndon streets, from the desolation of an approaching death to life rushing on – a drive that didn’t take much more than an hour – my life consisted of splits and divisions. Back and forth; up and down; past and present; here and there. Where? During the eighteen months of Patrick’s illness, I returned to England three times; for the third I arrived in summer, hot blazing days with pale Londoners stretched out in the parks, and stayed until the trees lost their leaves and he died in the middle of October. In London I stayed in Stoke Newington with Virginia, an Australian friend who worked for a Shadow Minister in the soon-to-be-elected Blair government. In the aftermath of Thatcher there was a sense of possibility and renewal, and arguments that went to and fro between the hopes that New Labour – which would be swept into power in May 1997 – would restore the welfare state, and with it the idea of a common good, and the fear that the break with the collectivist past of old Labour signalled a further triumph to the market, and greater inequality. The answer might be clear now, but it wasn’t then, or not entirely. At night at the houses of friends, there’d be noisy meals and talk that, too, would bat back and forth; which way were we going? What could be achieved by working with the government-in-waiting? Could the welfare state and the market be harmonised? What would be lost by trying? What should be given up, and in what name? I’d take it all in, split upon split, and it’d seem at once urgent and oddly distant – not because it didn’t matter, or even because part of me was still in that house by the river. It was as if I was in someone else’s memories, the person I might have been, but wasn’t. While I’d got to know a lot of people in London after twenty years of travelling between, it wasn’t the world in which I had a voice. In Australia, after Poppy and The Orchard, I did have a voice, of sorts; I knew the way into, and around, the talk that went to and fro in Sydney, or Melbourne. In London there was a part of me that felt out of place, and I’d look around at these people I liked and considered friends, many of them through Lynne – with whom friendship had been restored – and wondered if I’d have found my way to them if I hadn’t gone to Australia. And if I had, would I have had a voice then? I didn’t know. There wasn’t an easy answer to any of it, the big and the small, here in London or there in the house by the river where only The Times and the Daily Mail were delivered.
One evening at a pub in Hackney I was almost tempted into forgetting by the attentions of a man in the group in which I stood with a glass in my hand. He’d been arguing with an old communist (in both senses of the word, a man of the 1950s in his sixties) who wasn’t budging in his distrust of Blair, and eventually the younger man gave up and moved over to me. I’d met him a few times and during the argument he’d raised his glass to me, and smiled a smile that broke through my sombre mood. Ah yes, he was attentive, that man, and his attentions snapped me into the present. He was good-looking in a lanky, leftist kind of way; I knew the type well. I also knew the danger signs; he might not be so keen on a free market, but free love, well that was another matter. I’d been vaguely tempted by him before, and that night I wavered; what better way of resolving the splits, the divisions, what better form of forgetting than the forgetting of the body? But I’d learned enough to know that form of escape is rarely an escape – or perhaps it was just that I was old enough to know that a night of forgetting could magnify every split come the morning. So I got in the car with Virginia and drove home with her, to the house in Stoke Newington and my small room at the back overlooking the cemetery. In the morning, when she left for another long day at Westminster, I read the Guardian at the kitchen table and listened to Radio 4, gathering strength for the drive back to the house on the river. The cottage I’d been lent in a nearby village, five miles away, was comfortable, warm as the chill of autumn began, and I was grateful. I was lonely there, as I was not in London, but lonely, I discovered, was a small price to be away from the barely concealed enmity that filled the house.
In September, a month before the end, Betsy wanted Patrick put in a home. One of her sons came over to ‘talk sense’ to Jane and me. We were in the kitchen, the door open to the hall and the stairs.
‘No,’ my sister said, her voice resolute. ‘After all he’s done for you, no. He stays here.’
‘It’s not fair on Mum,’ the son said.
‘Not fair? There are nurses.’
‘They’re expensive.’
‘For goodness sake. So’s a home.’
‘Not necessarily,’ the son said.
‘It’s not as if it’s for long,’ I said. ‘He’s dying.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ Betsy said.
‘Why? He knows it, we all know it, and he wants to die at home.’
‘The doctors say we should look on the bright side.’
Really! Hadn’t she watched Monty Python? What is it with the English?
‘You move him,’ Jane said, ‘and you’ll have to move us first.’
‘You’re so extreme,’ the son said.
Compared with the bad thoughts that kept me awake at night, and the sound of the night nurse helping him to the lavatory and the groans I could hear from my bed, the loneliness of the cottage was insignificant. The friend whose cottage it was would ring from London. I’d talk to her, and prowl among the books on the shelves, a comforting mix of England and Australia. In the morning while the nurses were washing Patrick and changing his sheets, I’d go for long walks through the village and into the countryside. Beech trees. There’s something about beech trees. Childhood, I suppose. Then I’d drive over to the house by the river, and take his lunch up while Betsy went to have her hair done, or shut herself into the sitting room with the midday movie.
‘Thank you,’ he’d say, and I’d sit beside him, reading while he dozed. Death was close, drawing him into a dream zone that was not quite sleep, but not awake either.
‘Where are Tom and the little Indian boy?’ he asked one afternoon as he emerged from this zone. By Tom he meant his grandson, of course, who was eleven by then. As to the little Indian boy, I have no idea, but there he was, as much a part of the dream as Tom.
‘When were they here?’ I asked.
‘They’re loading the car for my journey,’ he said, and then he looked at me with a small, slight laugh. ‘I think I must have been dreaming,’ he said.
Another afternoon he woke from a dream about Poppy. He was looking for her in a cathedral but she had gone. ‘Maybe there was another door,’ he said, ‘and I missed her.’
He put out his hand to me, bony knuckles, veins standing out from the loose, empty skin.
‘You’re wearing her pearls,’ he said.
Yes, I was, even with jeans. I wore them every day.
‘Take care of them,’ he said. ‘They’re seed pearls.’
‘I know,’ I said, and told him about the time the string had broken while I was waiting to cross a busy street in downtown Sydney. I’d been wearing them since Poppy had given them to me not long before she died; I hadn’t thought to take them to a jeweller and until that moment hadn’t understood the value of a necklace strung on silk with a tiny knot between each pearl. There the necklace lay on the edge of the pavement, a frayed break but otherwise intact, with one end dipping into the gutter as the lights changed and people pushed past to cross. I picked it up and saw how threadbare the silk had become, and as I tested it, it broke again. A single pearl dropped. I stooped down and couldn’t find it. When I took the necklace to the jeweller, he could tell me exactly how many pearls I’d lost. Five, all from the back where the silk rots first – all that Sydney sweat, I suppose – and where the pearls are the tiniest.
‘She was wearing them when I met her,’ Patrick said, his hand still stretched towards me.
I took the necklace off and handed it to him. He held it up close, lifted his glasses, his myopic eyes acting as a magnifying glass to the small pearls.
‘What was she like?’ I asked, though I knew the answer he’d give.
‘She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She had o
n the loveliest dress.’
‘I know, you’ve always said so.’
It was a story, smoothed down into the shape of stone. It was early in the war, January 1940, when they met at a dance in Shropshire on the borderlands of Wales. Her father, my grandfather, whose temperament was over-imaginative and somewhat paranoid, had evacuated his wife and daughters from London before the Germans (whom he was certain were about to invade) had a chance to get them. Poppy was fifteen, taken out of a school to which she wouldn’t return. Patrick was twenty, had enlisted and was at an officers’ training camp nearby. They met at a dance in a hotel called the Craven Arms. Her mother, my grandmother Toto, watched as they danced that first night in the shortest of courtships before he was sent on service, first to East Africa and then to Burma; theirs was a romance of letters and poems, with one leave back in the middle. We all knew the story of the dance, and Patrick in his uniform, a soldier ready for war, having to muster all his courage to ask her to dance. And did she? we asked as children, holding our breath as if she might still say no, and we’d never be born. But she did, and they danced one dance, and then another, until late in the evening they were dancing only with each other. That was the story: Poppy and her dress and her pearls.
It wasn’t until much later that I understood that the war, for her, wasn’t only the prelude to us children; it also meant that while Patrick was in the line of the guns, she, as a woman in an unoccupied Allied country, had a whiff of freedom and felt herself, briefly, part of a larger polity. As soon as she turned sixteen in November 1940, she enlisted in the FANYs (the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), a branch of the British army; to her father’s annoyance she could only be contacted via an address in Whitehall. She was stationed in an undisclosed house in the country where Polish servicemen were being prepared to be dropped back into their occupied homeland with radio transmitters and forged papers. Nothing the men wore or carried could show any sign of coming from England – except, of course, the heavy radio transmitters, which seemed rather a major exception when we heard the story as children. But that was the point, Poppy would say, they were spies – though at sixteen the work of decoding the messages transmitted at night to a quiet room in the house terrified her. Knowing that the smallest mistake could result in a man’s death, she asked to be taken off the decoding. Instead she sewed clothes with Polish thread and went for long walks through the English countryside with the men who were in the uniform of their vanquished air force until it was time to don their disguise. There were photos of her in her uniform, and the Polish men in theirs, on a lawn with trees spreading into the distance. It wasn’t until I asked her at the end of her life that she talked about hearing the men’s stories of families and friends and sweethearts, whose fate they had no way of knowing. The peace of the fields and woods where they walked, and the war the men were to return to, became very vivid for Poppy, a contrast that seemed cruel and arbitrary. It was from these Polish servicemen – not her parents, nor her school, nor the man she’d marry – that Poppy learned her first political lessons; arbitrary, yes, the accident of birth, but nothing, no fate, no destiny, was just one thing. Our most personal lives are also formed by the contingencies of history and power and politics. I don’t think I realised the significance of this until now, not even when I was writing Poppy; I was more interested then in the nervous breakdown that had taken her away from us and begun my exile in a school a long train-ride away. Me, me, me; the perils of memoir.
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