Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  Though I was an excessively timid child, the boredom that timidity induced would sometimes get the better of me, and I became for a few moments vicariously bold. One day I found some nice fat cartridges inside a desk in the morning-room. Remembering the walking stick that was a gun I took these cartridges to the garage and found that they fitted. I then went off to find my grandmother who happened to be in her bathroom, not having a bath. I showed her the walking stick, put it in her hands, pointed to the trigger and asked her to pull it. She was reluctant to do so, but I begged her and begged her until eventually she did pull it. There was an enormous bang and a hole appeared in the floor through which our feet dangled, emerging, I daresay, like strange stalactites in the garage below.

  I got into grave trouble for this exploit and my father arrived back from France to punish me. But really everyone blamed my grandmother. She had become a figure of blame round whom all the irritation in the house seethed and beat itself. The sight of her struggling downstairs, or patting the cushions, or rearranging the chairs, or humming as she sauntered indecisively between rooms, or simply eating, provoked surges of uncontrollable indignation from us all.

  In his novel The Directors, my father has a breakfast scene in which John Maitland, a distinguished character with ‘a Victorian conscience about anyone who is dependent on him’, sits reading The Times while his wife chatters uninterruptedly without ever gaining his attention. She is an empty person, without occupation or interests, a child in a woman’s body, who has become completely dependent on her husband and so made him her prisoner. This is a picture of Fraser and Adeline at Brocket while my father was young. ‘John had bought the old Georgian house shortly after their marriage and she had fallen in love with it at first sight. She still loved it when she wasn’t feeling bored – which was all too often. Time hung heavy on her hands...’

  After almost half a century of time, Adeline (whom Fraser now called ‘Di’, rapping it out like a terminal injunction) makes her appearance in my novel as I saw her when I was young at Norhurst. She is now a ‘bent and fragile old woman, bravely pessimistic’, with a parchment face, and lips coloured crimson so inaccurately as to make her mouth leer across her cheek like a Hogarthian trull. I pursued her in A Dog’s Life as she advances to her breakfast.

  Her sparse metallic grey hair lay chaotic and unkempt, crushed by a dilapidated hairnet. From her left ear hung an earring; on her right foot a sober black gumshoe. Around her neck was suspended a fantastic chain of imitation pearls that stretched, as though elastic, far below her waist, and, when she got down from her stool, almost to the floor itself… Before her on the table was piled an assortment of articles, reminiscent of a junk shop. There was a ballpoint pen and a bottle of ink, one ball of string, a bottle of aspirin, some soap, a book, two flashlights and a small tin of boot polish. She was prepared for almost anything.

  My father did not object to this passage, or to my other descriptions of his mother. ‘Strangely enough, you seem to have dealt more gently with your grandmother,’ he wrote to me. ‘This I suppose is only to be expected considering she caused most of the misery. It was greatly due to her spendthrift habits that father got into trouble with the banks. Anyone who was dependent to any degree on her paid pretty dearly for the pleasure.’

  At various times in the course of her life we had all been dependent on her. Adeline had spent the family money, my father believed, and given the family no love in exchange for that money. Fraser and Basil were consequently ‘embarrassed’, both in the financial sense and in their vulnerability to attractive women like Agnes May and Sue who, they calculated, did give love for money. My father, who lacked self-esteem, talked women into marriage with glowing descriptions of financial happiness to come. He could not credit that anyone would accept him ‘for poorer’.

  I cannot believe that readers would find the hunchbacked, haphazard figure of my grandmother, as she appears in A Dog’s Life, with her meaningless patter and mad apprehension, more sympathetic than the other characters. Her days, I wrote,

  succeeded one another in a dull, identical pattern, each one finding her a little older than the last, a little more tormented by monotony, a little more fearful of the approaching end to her monotony… she waited for several seconds listening, but not knowing what it was she expected or even wished to hear. For Anne seemed convinced that there existed some secret in life which she had never discovered, but which was always being discussed behind her back. She hurried from place to place, from one shut door to another, in the hope of a sudden revelation…

  My father was convinced that his mother never loved him because, being her son, he genuinely was unlovable. And he could do nothing about it except make a million. Then he would be worth something. Money would transform him. Though it was worse for him because she had not even wanted him born, he knew that Adeline had not really loved his brother either, or even his sister, or her own husband, or anyone else so far as he could see. Until now. For she loved me. If Basil ‘put a foot out of line just once he heard about it till kingdom come’, I wrote in A Dog’s Life. But I ‘could get away with sheer bloody murder’, as I almost had done with the gun in the bathroom.

  Now that her bridge partners were ‘dead and gone’ and her wicked pack of playing cards put away, Adeline had nothing to distract her until I came to live at Norhurst. She at once offered me everything she had – everything she had somehow been unable to give her own children. I became another version of herself. ‘There’s nothing much to occupy a child in this rotten place,’ she would say. ‘It’s all gone to rack and ruin.’ She continually gave me things, often really absurd things like extra carrots for the night. She saved up her rations for me, saw I got second helpings of spinach and dried eggs, stood over me as I tried to eat them urging me on, plucking at my sleeve, trying to pull out of me some loving words. ‘See anyone you liked better than yourself while you were out this morning?’ she would ask. But this was not a promising gambit for a heart-to-heart talk because she never wanted me to go out of the house at all. ‘You’ll catch your death,’ she would say, before warning me to keep clear of strangers. She was terrified when my father arrived with a bicycle, and would endanger her own life leaning far out of her bedroom window looking up and down the road until I wobbled safely back. If I was taken to the Plaza or Rialto cinemas – expeditions that would send me almost ill with excitement – my grandmother would raise up her arms to heaven at the sheer folly of it and then force quantities of formamint tablets on to me in case I ‘caught something’. She, who had apparently been so carefree over my father’s illness, fretted all the time over mine. ‘Your eyes look like two burnt holes in a blanket,’ she would greet me in the mornings. She waited vainly for gratitude. ‘Now do buck up and be a comfort,’ she pleaded. But what could I do? Too often I felt irritation, impatience and the need to escape as she hovered near me, watching, worrying, plucking at my sleeve. ‘I declare unto goodness the boy never tells me anything,’ she would complain. But I had nothing to tell her. The important things for me were my book and music adventures and they could not be told to anyone. ‘Don’t waste your time speaking to your poor old grandmother. All right! All right! I’m not going to hurt you. But you’ll miss me when I’m dead and gone. “I wonder where she went,” you’ll say. “She was good to me when she was alive, poor old soul.”’ And so she was good to me. But it was too late and there was too much distance between us to make something of that goodness.

  11

  Yolande’s Story

  Whatever was to be done with ‘the boy’, it was usually left to my aunt to do it. Apart from reading to me in the kitchen and playing cricket on the lawn, she would take me to films in Maidenhead. She herself loved musicals and romances which I didn’t like; and I loved comedies and thrillers which she didn’t like. But in those days there were two films in a programme so we usually came out reasonably pleased. She also took me occasionally to matinées at the Theatre Royal in Windsor. We would get on the bus and
rattle through the fields and villages to the theatre that stood under the shadow of the castle, round a corner from the river. These were journeys of painful excitement for me. But I was dreadfully disillusioned by the Windsor pantomime, sitting through the first part with unutterable expectation, and then with awful impatience through the long interval during which trays of tea and cake were passed along the rows of seats in the stalls. I watched the final act with dismay, hating the silly jokes and longing for the entrance of the pandas – for I had got it into my head that I was at a pandamime. I have never since enjoyed pantomimes.

  My aunt was aged forty in 1943, the year I returned from Wilmslow to Maidenhead. To assist with what was called ‘the war effort’ she had taken a night job at the telephone exchange. She never told us what she did there, but I liked to imagine her in the dark decoding secret messages. Most of her days were passed ‘walking the dogs’. No extremity of weather kept her indoors – she could not abide frowsting with the rest of us. She would start out at a terrific pace, almost running, as if to catch up for lost time, over the Bath Road, up All Saints Avenue, along the playground and across the fields. Then she would strike for home through Maidenhead Thicket. The dogs were exhausted when they arrived back. But my aunt seemed driven by a frantic energy. She never had meals with the rest of the family. She could not bear the sight and sound of us eating, the uproar, the spectacle: my grandfather’s loose dentures, my grandmother’s regular farting, my own obstinate mess, even Old Nan’s insistent chomping. However late we were, she would burst into the house halfway through lunch and was always welcomed by Adeline with: ‘We were beginning to wonder where you’d got to.’ By way of reply, she would cry out: ‘This place is like an oven!’ Then she banged open all the windows and, as we cowered at the table clutching our white napkins like flags of surrender, she would turn on us and snatch away our half-full plates of food for the first round of washing-up. Adeline sometimes tried to hold on to her plate, not because she wanted to eat what was on it but because she wanted the privilege of washing it up. ‘Now do be sensible, Yolande,’ she would cry. ‘Do leave everything! You’re in no fit state. I’ll see to it all later.’

  ‘I’d save yourself the trouble if I were you,’ Yolande would spit back. ‘I’d only have to do it again afterwards.’

  ‘Leave the whole bally thing alone!’ Adeline would scream, as they struggled for the plate.

  Old Nan, who sat in her usual curiously tilted position, the top portion of her body bent acutely forward so that it seemed, despite being anchored to the chair by her substantial lower self, that she simply must crash forward, would aim her disapproving cough at Adeline and reach for her sewing or knitting like Madame Defarge beside the guillotine.

  Every move in the choreography of this family quarrel was achingly familiar to us. There were of course minor variations. Sometimes my grandmother, taking advantage of my aunt’s absence as she ran out to feed the birds, would put some knife or fork under the tap, and my aunt would snatch it from her as she raced back in and put it under the tap again. It was all done with extraordinary anguish and venom.

  The only meal my aunt liked was tea which she ate alone at about six o’clock as the bells from All Saints Church began sounding through the garden. She loved sweet things, drinking her cups of Rajmai with plenty of sugar, and eating biscuits and cake. Then she would disappear off to the telephone exchange or into her bedroom with its columns of magazines which, besides the few films we saw together, were the only spot of glamour she allowed herself.

  Writing A Dog’s Life in the mid-to late nineteen-fifties I gave a picture of my Aunt Yolande as she appeared to me in her fifties.

  The last ten years had brought her to her knees and made her irretrievably old before her time. Like the fine strands of a spider’s web, a thousand tiny lines had spread across her face, making her appear, even in her sleep, incredibly harassed. She did not flinch from this truth; she did not even regret the past – but… whatever happened she must not make an exhibition of herself. Life went on regardless of misfortunes… in an angry voice she began to lecture herself

  ‘Mathilda Farquhar!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This will never do!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pull yourself together!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stop all this nonsense, this instant!’

  ‘I will!’

  I can remember my aunt fiercely lecturing herself under her breath in this manner at Norhurst. In my novel the event that brings on this self-tutorial is the death of her dog Smith. But behind this loss rises the memory of another loss years back, that of an Italian boyfriend or lover whom she thinks of in her bedroom that night.

  It was difficult to believe that she was the same person as she was now, difficult to believe that any of it had ever happened at all… he had been a terrible rogue of course, everyone knew that. Still… whatever anyone cared to say about him… she often wondered whether she had really had such a lucky break as the family liked to make out. Anyway, he had given her what real happiness she had ever experienced, for however short a time, and no one had been able to take his place afterwards – no, not with all his faults!

  It was this page that particularly alarmed my father, I now see, and made him insist that I ‘alter the story as far as Yolande is concerned’. I must have picked up some rumour of my aunt’s early life, otherwise I would not have chosen an Italian for ‘Mathilda’. But only now can I begin to assemble some of the pieces in my aunt’s story.

  At the end of 1926, when Yolande was aged twenty-four, her father had sent her some money from the Royal Automobile Club ‘for your wedding clothes’. But there was no wedding and the following year he is writing of ‘the sorrow you have suffered’. If something went wrong it may have been due to ‘the slur cast on the family name’ by Fraser’s notorious escapade with Agnes May. This episode made all his children ask the question, as Basil put it: ‘could we ever hold up our heads again?’ But in his novel The Directors, he put forward another reason why his sister did not marry.

  Thelma grew into an unbelievably lovely girl and her Mother was determined to salvage the family fortunes by getting her daughter a rich husband. Thelma was paraded round all the smart places but she was never allowed out with anyone on her own. Wherever she went her Mother went too… A great many men wanted her, but those whom her Mother considered ineligible were turned away whilst the few who were permitted to pay their addresses soon decided the old lady to be too great an obstacle.

  I have no doubt that this is my father’s summary of the relationship between Adeline and Yolande. It was far easier for the sons to escape into their other lives. The little hammers of duty boarded Yolande up first at Brocket and finally in Norhurst. ‘You – as much as any of us – must know what hell has been made of your aunt’s life,’ my father wrote to me after reading A Dog’s Life. ‘Your grandmother ruined what chance she had of marrying when she was a young girl.’ Certainly it would have been all the more difficult for Yolande to leave her mother after Fraser himself had left. And when he returned early in the nineteen-thirties her wedding clothes had not been bought. ‘I have been wronged for years,’ Fraser declared from the Royal Automobile Club. But as the years unrolled it was Yolande who seemed most grievously wronged.

  The pictures of her in the South of France between 1928 and 1932 show a sunlit smiling face. She looks happy. She is usually with other women also in their late twenties. There are few men.

  But there was a man.

  When my mother began visiting Brocket in 1934, she saw Adeline playing bridge indoors and Yolande playing tennis in the garden. They would meet on the veranda for some light bickering before the tea ceremony. Yolande had her little Ford, the very one that, later stabled in the garage at Norhurst, I was to use for my private concerts of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. But at Brocket in the nineteen-thirties Yolande was chiefly buzzing about, my mother noticed, taking Adeline to and from her bridge parties. Yola
nde was disappointed that Ulla (she pronounced it ‘Oh-la’) did not play tennis. She was running out of partners. But unlike Norhurst, Brocket did open its doors to visitors, and people ‘popped in’. Mostly they were Yolande’s friends – Cathie, Cynthia, Freda, Nina and a few others who lived near by. And my mother also met Captain Hazlehurst whom everyone called ‘Hazel’. There is a snap of a yacht among my mother’s miscellaneous photographs which apparently belonged to Hazlehurst on which my parents and my aunt spent a weekend in the mid-nineteen-thirties. Among Yolande’s albums there is no photograph of Hazel himself. But this man, my mother wrote, was the love of Yolande’s life.

  My father assumed I knew about Hazlehurst, but I never met him and can recall no more than the hushed whisper of his name. Among the cheque stubs, vets’ receipts, bank statements, odds and ends my aunt preserved at the end, lay a few small bundles of correspondence. They are mostly letters of condolence on her parents’ deaths, letters from building societies and banks, and one or two letters with foreign stamps including a couple from myself posted in the United States. There are also about a dozen letters dating from the nineteen-thirties. These are signed ‘H’.

  *

  And now arises the question of whether I am entitled to read these letters written sixty or more years ago, and use them in this book. For as I write, though in her advanced nineties she can hardly speak or hear, has no memories and does not really know where she is, Yolande is alive.

  It is a question with which biographers are naturally familiar, but never in my own writing life has it arisen so acutely. For if I read them am I not trespassing? And if I quote them do I not commit the sin of which my father so angrily accused me? Or is this my chance of atonement?

  To other people I know that I appear reticent. This surprises me, since I do not always feel reticent or keep my opinions to myself. Have I not been in tears while writing parts of this book – tears of laughter sometimes? Doubtless I have a self-protective manner, the reasons for which are scattered through this narrative. Nevertheless, despite my appearance of reticence, I have gained something of a reputation as the biographer of Lytton Strachey and Augustus John for beating back the frontiers of reticence in other people’s lives. So what can I do in this near-autobiographical story? To some extent I am obliged to reflect the silence and repression within my family – a code of privacy shared by most ordinary people of those times – because they do not hand me the codebreaking clues of any correspondence. So what I can reveal emerges more between the lines of my writing.