One morning when the bell clanged outside and we all got out of our beds, I noticed across the lower sheet a large cherry-coloured stain. Nurse Minima noticed it too and I was closely questioned. I answered that I did not know what it was and felt quite as baffled as she did. That evening I was summoned to Denis Owen’s study and after waiting nervously in the passage, that same passage in which my father had sometimes waited thirty years earlier, was severely questioned again about the red area on my sheet. At first I had thought it must be blood, but I had no wound or nose-bleed. It was inexplicable. My ignorance must have been transparent, and perhaps Denis Owen suspected that I had been the victim of a practical joke by the other boys in the dormitory. In any event I was not beaten that night. Instead I was told that, whatever the stain had been, it must never reappear. I thoroughly agreed and returned upstairs. But a week or two later it did reappear, bright cherry-red across the sheet – and this time I knew what it was. In the early hours of the morning I had half-woken, found that I had wet my bed and, still half-asleep, put my red dressing-gown underneath me before going back to sleep.
Nurse Minima sent me back that evening to the headmaster’s study and Denis Owen, who was busy, told me that I must come to him next day with a convincing explanation. This was more difficult than it sounded, not only because I felt the explanation to be unspeakably humiliating, but also because Denis Owen was so awfully unapproachable. Between the formal lessons, the organ-playing and sermons, he appeared to inhabit Olympus. I saw him once that day striding across a distant field with that grim expression on his face, and I ran some way after him but did not get near. The thought of interrupting his progress with my dreadful story was simply impossible.
That evening I was again summoned down to wait in the passage outside his study. Then he called me in, told me it was too late now for explanations, bent me over a chair in my pyjamas and began beating me. However, I was by this time in an extreme state of nerves and, at the first stroke, releasing all my pent-up emotion, let out a vast cry. It was as much a shout as a cry, mingling protest and pain in a great emotional eruption. The sound, I was later told, travelled upstairs and into rooms throughout the school. No one knew what it was, but everything came to a stop. Nothing so loud and unexpected had happened since the famous night when a public house nearby called The Bells of Ousley had been blown up by German bombers. Even Denis Owen appeared shaken. He told me to go back up to the dormitory, and at the end of term wrote a devastating report to my father, questioning him as to whether I was really fit for the rough-and-tumble of a boarding school. It was, I now think, an opportunity for my father to tell me about his own ‘absolute hell’ at Scaitcliffe, but I do not recall that he did so. He was worried by the practical difficulties of having to remove me, as he had been removed for different reasons. So I went back all the more determined to develop my skills of avoiding attention.
My last year at Scaitcliffe was the best. I did not actually like going there after the holidays, but then I did not like going back to Norhurst at the end of term. I did not know what I liked or where I was going: whether to Maidenhead with my aunt and grandparents; or to various places in France with my father; or to London with my mother, and then across the North Sea to meet my other grandmother in Stockholm and roomfuls of my incomprehensible Swedish cousins in Borås and Göteborg.
I needed everything to be simple. But by the end of the war my parents’ lives were growing more complicated, and these complexities began infiltrating my own life.
13
Three Weddings and a Funeral
My mother wrote that she was ‘without a penny’ at her boarding house in Cresswell Gardens, and that there were ‘days when I only had a glass of milk’. She lived largely on what Kaja was able to send her from Stockholm via the Swedish Consulate. Occasionally she would come down by train to Scaitcliffe, and sometimes also to Maidenhead ‘where you were left for me to see for a few hours. We always had tearful partings – you wanted to come back with me. I was desperate & believe that you were too.’
Everything began to change after my father left the Royal Air Force. In the first week of April 1946 he attended a medical board which found that he was still suffering from rheumatoid polyarthritis. His disability was rated at forty per cent and, ‘with regret’, he was declared unfit for further service. He had been billeted in Paris for eighteen months ‘chez Madame Dimier’ in the rue Sergent Hoff, a small street near the Arc de Triomphe, and after his discharge he continued living there. It was a solid, spacious apartment block built in 1912 and decorated on its balconies by sandstone flambeaux containing quivers and arrows, also pineapples and lions and swags of dependant fruit and flowers. Above the large portal with its art nouveau decorations was fixed the head of Silenus framed with grapes and vine-leaves. Inside were marble floors, and a slow and stately lift up the five floors. I remember visiting my father there during my holidays and being astonished by Madame Dimier’s ability to pour forth rapid continuous loud incomprehensible French without ever taking breath. It was an artillery of sound that killed off all other speech and covered everything we did, or thought, or saw, or imagined. I wondered how my father, no mean speaker under ordinary circumstances himself, could endure such a perpetual battering of noise. And then I suddenly realised that he had fallen in love with Maman’s voluptuous daughter, Marie-Louise, or Marlou as everyone called her.
Marlou was the most glamorous woman I had met. She was always elegantly dressed, had gorgeous raven hair that was swept back but kept falling forwards, rather pouting lips, and large expressive eyes with hooded lids that fascinated me. Her sultry looks made the climate around her seem warm and relaxing. I thought her the height of sophistication. I liked her too, but felt shy after my father took me to one side and asked me to give her a kiss each night because she was unable to have children of her own. This revelation led to a brief man-to-man talk about the ‘facts of life’ which left me rather unconvinced by the unlikeliness of it all, and wondering whether I had misunderstood. I doubt if, in my nervousness, I was as affectionate to Marlou when she came to say goodnight as I should have been. She took me to various fashion shows and praised my taste; and she gave me a camera with which I took a spectacular shot of the Eiffel Tower, making it appear like the leaning tower of Pisa.
Marlou’s full name was Marie-Louise Deschamps-Eymé. She was in publishing, her business partner being Marcel Brandin, ‘a cool, slim, bitterly disillusioned ex-Resistance fighter’, as the novelist Winston Graham described him, ‘who saw France returning to its old corrupt ways.’ It was in their publishing company, Editions Begh, that my father bought a directorship, using the invalidity money he had been granted by the RAF. He also brought with him an idea, which was to corner the market in translations of books that were being, or stood a good chance of being, made into films. Winston Graham, whose Poldark novels were later to be such a success on television, was one of his early authors; another was the well-respected, now-forgotten novelist Claude Houghton (whose ‘novelisation’ of Jerome K. Jerome’s play The Passing of the Third Floor Back was also filmed). Love and money were to be the ingredients of their success, but it was love and money that undid them.
Marlou was known to be the mistress of a millionaire newspaper owner on whose financial support Editions Begh largely depended. Nevertheless, my father proposed to marry her – once he had divorced my mother. In the summer of 1946 he hired a London detective who soon came up with the evidence he needed. The decree nisi cites Rowland Hill as co-respondent. It is not a name that appears in either of my parents’ accounts or that I ever heard them mention. In the London telephone directory of 1946 there is one Rowland Hill. He is living in the Marylebone Road, but disappears at the time of the divorce.
This divorce legally freed both my parents for fresh chapters in their lives. Or so they believed. In fact, probably because my father was in Paris, they forgot to take the formal step required to make their decree absolute. The result was that, though the
y never knew this, they actually remained married to each other, and all their later marriages were invalid. Fortunately perhaps they did not have children by these four subsequent marriages, though from time to time I was presented with a new stepbrother or stepsister for the holidays.
Late in 1946 my mother, still aged only thirty, moved into a nice small flat on the eighth floor of Sloane Avenue Mansions, near the King’s Road in Chelsea. I often stayed with her there before and after our journeys to Sweden. How I hated those awful bucketing voyages across the North Sea! We would start out from Tilbury in one of the regular Swedish boats, the Suecia, Saga or Patricia, creaking and groaning, swaying and heaving – and I was soon down in the cabin groaning and heaving with sympathetic sea-sickness. But my mother was not ill. She was popular on board, never missing the smörgåsbord, or the music playing and the sun shining, and the company of strangers. Occasionally I would crawl up on deck and see her talking to some admirer and exchanging addresses. I remember only one of these gentlemen, a Mr Smith, who wore his watch with its face on the inside of his wrist. I was so struck with the novelty of this that I turned my own watch round, and have worn it so ever since. Later, ‘Mr Smith on the boat’ became a generic term, and I would tease my mother about this ever-recurring gallant on her travels round the world.
It was unusual during those years immediately following the Second World War for people to go abroad, and for a time I became a person of exotic interest to other boys. I would return to school like a mariner disembarking from some exciting piratical expedition, with strange glowing booty: a Lapland knife in its multicoloured leather-and-fur sheath; a brilliantly exciting board game of ice-hockey; a vast marzipan pig with chocolate features; a magically tilting wooden maze over which, like a minefield, you could steer a silver ball. Such treasures made me appear like a magician in those drab years and granted me an illusory popularity. ‘Can we borrow your ice-hockey, Holroyd?’ I can hear their voices still. I always said yes and was proud when my best friend ‘Cuffy’ Capron made an astonishing score on the tilting maze in the school sanatorium.
This was the best feature of my travels overseas: the popular return. For though I loved my mother and could imagine no worse calamity than her death, I never found a way of life that fitted her style and rhythm of living. The fact is she was always lying down when I wanted to be bounding around. Dawn, it seemed to me, was the right time for leaping up. But left to herself my mother would not get out of bed till nine or ten o’clock. It was an agony lying in bed and waiting for her to wake. And when she did get up she almost immediately lay down again to sunbathe. The least glimmer of the sun and she would lie down. Is there anything more tedious than sunbathing? In my view there was not. But my mother loved nothing better unless it was, after the sun had gone down, to dance.
My mother’s dancing was not boring: it was excruciatingly embarrassing. She knew no shame. She would sing the tunes, kick up her heels, smile stupidly, drink all sorts of coloured drinks, make jokes in five or six languages. And she would dance. She could not be stopped. It was not beyond her to grab a waiter and propel him laughing round a restaurant. I saw her dance on tables too. I would close my eyes and long to disappear. It was then that I first determined to master the secret art of disappearing. But the penalty you pay for this vanishing trick is that your past vanishes with you. Now, as I bring those scenes back, I curse the terrible self-consciousness I felt that hardened into an inhibition preventing me from speaking the languages my mother spoke, and a paralysis that all my life has stopped me dancing, though I love to watch other people dance – indeed it is one of my vicarious passions. I rejoice now in the memory of my mother whirling about those floors and tables, but I could not possibly join in. All is in retrospect for me.
When she was surrounded by her family in Sweden, my mother was obliged to behave more formally. I was reminded of our large family gatherings at Easter or Christmas or on St Lucia’s Day when I saw Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander in the mid-nineteen-eighties. We preserved something of the same strict protocol of hospitality, the correct toasts and then the growing merriment and finally a soaring into surreal entertainment. It was all fantastical to me, for though everyone addressed me in English, they spoke fast incomprehensible Swedish among themselves. And then, though they were all introduced to me, my mind had somehow wandered and I did not know who most of them were anymore.
It was a relief to get back to London, even back to school sometimes. Coming up from Scaitcliffe to my mother’s flat at Sloane Avenue Mansions, I would crowd my uncle’s bat and pads into the hall, and eat up huge plates of bangers, beans and mash, followed by trifle and tinned cream – my mother knew what schoolboys liked. I did not realise that her ‘cabin in the sky’, as we called it, was rented for her by a man named Edouard Fainstain, nor that my mother was his mistress. She took me to meet ‘Edy’ and, what was most important, she borrowed his car, a sparkling blue Packard with an open ‘dicky’ or jump seat at the back in which I travelled dramatically in the sun and the wind. With this wonderful machine she would whizz down to Scaitcliffe, a blonde bombshell in a blue racing car, astonishing the other boys whose own mothers appeared so much older and dowdier. ‘You were notorious, pitied and envied, because your parents were divorced,’ my friend Christopher Capron remembered. I was the only boy at Scaitcliffe with divorced parents and after my mother began driving down on Sundays, I gained a certain status – Christopher Capron spoke of the ‘rather daring wickedness’ surrounding me. Once or twice I invited Christopher Capron or John Mein out to lunch with my mother at a rather grand hotel on Englefield Green. But she found it difficult to say anything that interested us, and we wandered around the gardens rather bored. Her notoriety was more potent from a distance. My great fear was that she might bring down Kaja on one of her visits to England. Occasionally she did this, causing me anguish over lunch when my grandmother examined the menu through an exquisite pair of eye-glasses held prominently by a single handle – ‘my lorgnette’ she called them. Another time, which was almost worse, she glared through an imposing monocle, looking like an aristocratic pirate. The embarrassment in case another boy, Bowman or Drummond, Palumbo or Stirling, should see this exhibition of adult eccentricity was agonising.
In 1948 Edy Fainstain was divorced from his wife Ida and on 25 February 1949, at the Kensington Register Office, he married my mother. ‘Then things were O.K.,’ she briefly noted in her account. She moved into a splendid maisonette on the top two floors of 24 Wetherby Gardens, a house once occupied by Viscount Allenby and round the corner from Drayton Gardens where I had spent my first couple of years. I was given a bedroom of my own and introduced to the first of my stepsisters.
Edy Fainstain was a Hungarian Jew whose father had been a farmer. For their honeymoon he took Ulla to Stockholm and, with his strong sense of family, was shocked to discover that she scarcely knew her father. He insisted that Kaja invite Karl to her apartment, and she absolutely refused. But nevertheless he still insisted, and so it went on over the honeymoon, this rally of obstinate insistence and absolute refusal until, to her own surprise, Kaja found herself conceding. She knew that, at some level of respectability, Edy was behaving correctly. And it would look so bad if, in however dignified a fashion, she went on refusing. Her own family liked Karl, or Kalle as they still called him. They thought him ‘charming and colourful’, a man of ‘humour and humanity’. Did they blame her for his lack of promotion in the army? Everyone had expected him to be made a general, but his inability to impose harsh discipline was said to have been held against him. He had behaved better to his men, Kaja sometimes thought, than to her. He had not grown aggressively drunk with them. She knew that some of her family still believed that the marriage had been broken up by her own persistent flirting with men of higher rank. Of course it was absurd – was he not a flirt also? – but that is what they thought. It must have been difficult for her to telephone this man who, she had told Ulla, had made her life so awful durin
g the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties with his demands for money, his venereal disease, his threats of violence. But perhaps she exaggerated his vices. Neither she nor my mother had seen him for over fifteen years, though he was living not far away with his second wife Marianne. But Kaja spoke to him, and he accepted an invitation to a cup of coffee at her apartment in Artillerigatan. Edy then went back to his hotel so that Karl could spend some time alone with his daughter. ‘Pappa Kalle arrived – pale – drawn – nervous – with a bunch of red carnations,’ my mother wrote. ‘A very awkward hour – Kaja made it so. I felt sorry, but also quite a stranger after so many years. Kaja never sat still & kept looking at the clock & bringing up awkward moments in the past. I did my best & I knew he knew that. That was the last time I saw my father.’ He was to die less than three years later aged sixty-five, at Växjö, on 14 December 1952. ‘This chilly December day when Karl Hall’s life ended seems very far from the idyllic warrior’s life in the happy 1920s,’ wrote the obituary writer in one of the Swedish newspapers.
Now when we are all middle-aged, the officers and men and the young ladies of the ball, we treasure the memory of this chivalrous heartbreaker, Captain Hall… Yet in this moment of farewell one doesn’t chiefly remember the carefree Kalle Hall from the balls and evenings of song, but the silhouette of Major Karl Knutsson Hall in the saddle after the company’s hard day-long marches or night manoeuvres… The tall horseman has passed the last post on his journey.
His brothers and sisters and his widow went to the funeral at Växjö, and so did Ulla. But Kaja did not go. There was no mention of her among the mourners, or in the obituaries. From this time onwards she reinstated her own family name, calling herself Kaja Jagenburg Hall. Her husband had already been as good as dead for many years, and such was the annihilating force of her feeling that my mother sometimes echoed it. That was probably why, in her account, she had written that her father had died in 1945. It surprises me now that he was alive while I went on my trips to Sweden, and that I never met him. But I was not interested then in the past.
Basil Street Blues Page 16