by Ben Watt
I looked at her on the pavement. Her doctor had told her that protecting what was left of her eyesight was the best she could do. Which explained the special sunglasses. In fact, ‘sunglasses’ does not really describe them; they were big, blacked-out, wraparound eye protectors, with side and brow shields, the shape worn by lab technicians or wood choppers, so big that they fitted over her normal bi-focals. They seemed perfect for my mum – medically recommended but also with a touch of the attention-seeker. It was wrong not to sympathise, but standing next to her at the pelican crossing I was unable to shake the thought that she looked a bit like an elderly European rock star.
Diagonally opposite was another large purpose-built modern block of flats. Bullnose biscuity-brown engineered bricks rose functionally above the loose-limbed trees of the Wellington Road. I think I’d once thought they were offices. Wide steps led up to the glass front doors past well-stocked planters. My mum nodded aristocratically at the porter in the entrance lobby, but I could sense her already flagging as we got into the lift up to the second-floor flat for our next viewing. The lift doors opened again and we padded across a navy fitted carpet, past a solitary weeping fig, and through a communal fire door.
‘Cold corridor,’ she said.
I felt the radiator. It was off. I hoped the flat would be warmer.
It was. In fact it seemed cosy. Honey-blond hardwood flooring threw a glow on to the white walls. We were drawn to the big aluminium double-glazed windows in the sitting room overlooking the gentle bustle of the tube station.
‘Lovely big sky,’ she said, clearing her throat.
‘Isn’t it,’ I enthused.
‘We need a view. The days can be very long, dear. Especially when the snooker is on.’
The compact fitted kitchen was right next to the sitting room, separated by sliding doors.
‘Oh, praise be! Now that’s easier,’ she said mordantly. She opened the fridge, closed it, and then ran her fingers slowly along the worktop. She’d been ferrying food up and down the stairs in their Oxford house for too long. Meals used to be taken in the downstairs kitchen at the teak dining table, but recently my dad had been having everything in front of the TV on the first floor. I’d even been flirting with the idea of buying him a bean-bag lap-tray.
The estate agent showed her a large cupboard with a small window (‘or third bedroom’ as he put it, in that language of elastic dimensions that only estate agents use) where she tried to picture herself neatly set out with her electric typewriter and Romany pictures and scrapbooks. Down the hall was a double bedroom with a bathroom for her, and a separate bedroom and small bathroom for my dad.
‘Will Dad like it?’ I asked as we were leaving.
‘Who knows?’
When I dropped her off back at Paddington, and watched her blow one of her mannered hangdog kisses through the windscreen, and then turn and get her bearings before trudging away from the taxi rank towards the familiar Edwardian three-faced clock and the trains, I found it hard to imagine how they were still coping, what with her eyesight and fluctuating moods, and the drinking (once mainly him, now often both of them) and the infirmities and the long afternoons of darts and snooker. I imagined a kind of auto-pilot: days navigated by instinct and accustomed routines; furniture in familiar places; the quirks of the kitchen appliances memorised. And while I thought I understood my mum’s longing to escape, and have new support near by, I drove back over Bishops Bridge and worried about the change and what bewilderment it might bring.
Later that night I spoke to her on the phone.
‘First impressions?’
‘Very practical, if you need to hear something positive, dear,’ she said. ‘The last one, I mean. Seemed promising. Your father is in agreement with whatever I choose. I don’t know if that makes it easier or not.’
‘How did you describe it to him?’
‘I could barely remember it by the time I got home. The train was packed. Quite unpleasant. Oh, I don’t know. Bright, airy. A view of the sky. Everything handy. You’ll have to fill me in on the detail. You know I’m half blind, dear. It’s about the practicality. We’re not looking for St-Tropez.’
I asked her to sleep on it.
Two days later, with the weather still fine, I went back to the flat with a handheld camcorder and filmed a walkthrough for them both to watch, hoping it might help them make up their minds, and ease the burden I felt that I might be rushing them into it. The thought of my mum returning and choosing anything else seemed remote. I tried to show everything as it was, impartially, but I couldn’t help skimming across the condensation pockets trapped in one or two of the ageing double-glazed windows and instead made a point of hovering over things that I knew would matter to my dad, like the view, the electric razor power point, the master light switches, and the Sky TV coaxial socket.
I dubbed it on to a video cassette and posted it to them.
The next day my mum phoned.
‘You father’s calling it a masterstroke, darling,’ she said. ‘Very clever of you. Such a modern way of doing things. We’ve watched it three times. He wants you to know he thinks the place looks very metropolitan – that was the word he used – but friendly and practical. And we both agree there’s no point hanging around waiting for something perfect. We are beyond that. Put in an offer, dear, and let’s get it over with.’
Chapter 3
I’d hoped for a crisp December morning – blue skies, low sun – but it was mild and overcast, when, three and a half months later, I met a Pickfords removals van outside the block of flats with the biscuity-brown bullnose bricks. Everything was flattened in a neutral plain grey light.
The offer had gone in and had been accepted, and the deal completed over a leisurely twelve weeks. The Oxford house had been packed up; Roly had taken my mum and dad to a nearby hotel for a night (‘As much as anything else,’ he’d said, ‘to get them out of the way and make sure they don’t change their mind’); and I was planning to unpack everything and make the place recognisable and homely, while Roly collected them late morning, took his time and arrived late afternoon with it all done. ‘A pub lunch should slow them down,’ he’d said drily.
It was gone ten before the removals men had finally edged the lorry up against the pavement, swung the battered doors open, and begun glumly trundling boxes up the path to the front doors. For the next few hours I kept things moving, supervising furniture positions and unpacking possessions, and when the three workers had shuffled off midway through the day, I carried on on my own.
I wanted it to look perfect. I hung clean towels and quilted loo rolls in the bathrooms and filled the fitted wardrobes with their soft musty comfortable clothes, flattening all the boxes as I went, piling them like gym mats in the corridor outside. In the little kitchen I stocked the green glass-fronted cupboards with my mum’s handed-down mismatched Romany china: gold-rimmed orphaned teacups, lidless serving dishes, odd cream jugs and faded soup plates. As I spread it out on the counter it looked like the contents of a car-boot sale, not a vintage collection of rare antiques, which was how she’d always proudly painted it. ‘Gypsy heirlooms, darling. Makers’ marks. Very desirable.’
It was a motley assortment; I suppose its diversity hadn’t been helped by the night the kitchen cupboard fell off the wall. I must have been eleven years old. It was a Saturday night. We’d been happily watching TV in the other room; my dad was just back from the pub, and he was passing round the biscuits and we were all whistling the theme tune to Parkinson when we heard it; the crash was ear-splitting. Leaping from our chairs, we rushed into the darkened kitchen across the landing to find the crockery cupboard had dropped two feet on to the worktop below. My mum’s cherished collection had been crammed on to the top shelf. ‘You’ve been promising to fix those Rawlplugs for weeks,’ she had reprimanded, suppressing a slight hysteria, while salvaging one of my great-grandma Tilly’s saucers. ‘I wouldn’t have needed to if it weren’t for all that knackered old china,’ my dad had
answered saltily.
I opened another box. Saucepans and oven dishes came out smelling pungent and waxy. Some were still ringed with tidemarks of soup, and flecked with specks of food. Cutlery was smeared. A few of the tumblers and mugs had lip-marks, and the frosted rings brought on by dishwashers used without rinsing agent and salt. It caught me off guard. I thought of my dad in his armchair with his oxygen, unable to get downstairs, and my mum with her degenerative eyesight doing the evening dishes, and suddenly they seemed old and frail. Was I convincing myself otherwise? I found the manual for the dishwasher and put everything I could fit inside on an intensive cycle, before sliding open the window and looking out at the traffic on the Wellington Road, wondering if any of this was a good idea.
The light was thickening. I turned back and glanced at my watch; they’d be well on their way. I pressed on, making up the beds and putting ornaments and framed photographs of the family on the window ledges and shelves. The Sky installer arrived as planned and within twenty minutes he was done, and the TV was plugged in and fully tuned, and I was moving round the flat to the comforting sound of racing from Lingfield Park. I thought of my mum and dad’s Saturday-afternoon betting slips: each-way doubles and Yankees fixed to the green baize pin-board in our old kitchen; and the day I was told off at school for doing my geography test with a short stubby pencil taken from the bookie’s.
In my dad’s single bedroom, I neatly arranged his jazz tapes and CDs on the sideboard. I opened a suitcase expecting to find more clothes, only to find a dozen smart leather-bound manuscript folders, each with a black ribbon to tie it closed, and each embossed with the words Tommy Watt Orchestra. Underneath them was a stack of jumbled sheet music, some handwritten, some in a copyist’s smart ink script. An arrangement of Neal Hefti’s ‘Girl Talk’ slithered out on to the floor; above the intro was written ‘Flutes?’ in my dad’s firm handwriting. I shuffled them all up together. The ream of blank manuscript paper on the bottom felt lovely in my hand. A wedge of cream-coloured, heavy-grade soft bond paper. The edges almost fibrous. It must have been expensive. The best you could buy, probably. It seemed so like him. Or the him I pictured when I was young: pin-sharp; immoderate; sometimes formidable. I stacked them in the bottom of his wardrobe; it seemed the appropriate place; it was where he used to keep them – below the duty-free cigarettes and his laundered shirts.
I considered hanging up some pictures and paintings, but I knew that was one of my mum’s great pleasures – she was forever painstakingly reframing and rearranging things on the walls, particularly when they moved to Oxford – so instead I stacked them against the cupboard in her new tiny study. There were cut-out photo montages of the family she’d made herself, watercolours of Romany wagons and birdlife, cartoons and sketches by artists she knew from Fleet Street, black-and-white photographs of actors she’d interviewed and fancied over the years (Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck), and a poster for one of my dad’s jazz orchestra concerts – his name on it mischievously half burnt out by the tip of a teenage stepson’s cigarette.
I unpacked her framed theatre-costume designs collected since her season as an actress at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1950. There was Mariano Andreu’s painted sketch for a dress for Diana Wynyard in John Gielgud’s 1949 production of Much Ado About Nothing, the material dropping gracefully off the shoulders at the back like the wings of a great white dove, a pencil annotation (Beatrice 1er Acte) still clear on the canvas. Behind it was a later watercolour from 1955 of a male costume, in burgundy and indigo, with Titus . . . Sir Laurence Olivier written across the top, and Olivier’s own signature dashed off across the bottom. A third, from 1950, entitled Lady in Waiting to Queen Catherine in Henry VIII, had two small swatches of the costume’s material still pinned like butterflies to the canvas under the glass. On the back, held on by yellowing sticky-tape, was a photocopy of a photograph of my mum wearing the very same costume on stage in the production at Stratford. She must have been twenty-six. She looked raven-haired, dark-eyed, her face as pale as the moon, hawkishly beautiful, sitting on her haunches, stitching at the hem of the queen.
I sat at the desk and opened the scuffed cardboard Harrods gift box in which she kept her keepsakes and theatre souvenirs. The programmes inside were inexpensive – just folded sheets of pale yellow printed A4. One was headed Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. 1950 Festival. Underneath: Julius Caesar; Measure For Measure; King Henry VIII. I sifted among the sheaves of paper and found a typewritten page on the bordered foolscap she used to use with her old electric golfball typewriter:
I was one of only six women in a sixty-six strong company. The audiences were extraordinary. They queued all night, they queued all day. Fans lay is wait by the stage door, and they were just as delighted to get my autograph as Miss Ashcroft’s.
The dressing room: first-night telegrams, picture postcards and photographs bordered the mirrors; mascots, flowers, books and half-done crossword puzzles lay on the table, with pots of cold cream, cotton wool, powder and sticks of greasepaint. Square-toed Tudor shoes, green suede boots and patched ballet slippers jostled each other on the shoe-rack, and yellow woollen stockings, garters and white coifs hung on the towel rails. On the shelf above sat the wigs and hats of every shape and colour – demure gabled headdresses, golden fillets, blue felt waste-paper baskets, and white cambric cartwheels, and over the lamp-brackets were slung strange ropes of woollen pearls and exotic brass necklets made of bicycle-chain.
When the whole repertory of plays was running our costumes were exchanged daily according to the play that was being performed. The dressing room was thus constantly changing in mood and period. On Monday the racks were filled with dirty chrome and brown peasant costumes inspired by Bosch and Bruegel, which the producer would not allow to be cleaned because they looked more authentic when dirty. On Tuesday the rags and tatters of the Roman mob. By mid-week the barbaric splendour of Goneril’s crimson velvet hung in solitary state. By Thursday the subdued browns and greys of Catherine of Aragon’s sad Tudor ladies, and at the weekend the gorgeous-hued sapphire, primrose and cherry velvets of the Italian Renaissance.
I was struck by the eye for detail. I remembered looking up the season on the online British Theatre Archive Project and reading the ecstatic first-hand reviews of the audiences at the time. It was still ten years until Peter Hall would form the permanent year-round Royal Shakespeare Company, and the season in 1950 was seen by many back then as a milestone in British theatre history. I glanced down the cast list on one of the programmes. There were big names in the tiny roles – Robert Shaw and Robert Hardy as First and Second Gentleman – and the main parts were impressively star-studded – Alan Badel, Sir John Gielgud, and Harry Andrews. The director was Anthony Quayle. The production was by Peter Brook.
I thought of how little it had meant to me when I was growing up and the struggle parents often have to impress their children with their past glories: all those box files and photos and scrapbooks kept for years in the hope at least one member of the family might be captivated. My mum once told me excitedly that Harry Andrews had offered her a lift to Stratford from Leamington station on her first day. I didn’t know who Harry Andrews was. Much of what she said was a jumble of arcane words. ‘I danced with Sir John in Much Ado, you know’ was a favourite. It wasn’t until I was seventeen that I took an interest in the theatre and decided to read drama at university, but even then I thought I knew best, and much of my mum’s stuff was just old uninteresting history to me – even dancing with Gielgud. And then recently she had said to me, without any hint of sentimentality, ‘They were the best years of my life. I was accepted.’ And the word ‘accepted’ stayed with me.
I pictured her acting career slowed in its promising infancy by the Second World War, then stopped quickly in its tracks by family life. She’d had one child (Simon) with Ken – her first husband – in 1951, just after her debut season at Stratford, and was knitting booties for another
one two years later and contemplating a gentle return to the stage, only to be told she ought to buy more wool as she was pregnant with triplets; it must have been such a shock. The hospital took an X-ray to confirm it. The spines showed up on the negative, as she used to say, like ‘three little fish bones on a plate’. When she informed Ken of the news that evening at home, she told me the first words that came out of his mouth were ‘How bizarre . . .’ and then he turned away into the bay window and looked out on to the street in silence. Within a few months – in January 1954 – Toby, David Roualeyn (‘Roly’) and Jennie were born and turned her life upside down. It was on the front page of the London Evening Standard: Triplets for Author’s Wife, ran the headline, with her picture above. Among all the excitement, she must have watched her dream of being an actress just melt away.
I put the papers back in the box and got up and walked into the hall. They’d be here soon. I looked around. It all seemed plausible: the front door with a little cupboard next to it for rubbish that could be collected by the porter from the outside without knocking; a place for coats and shoes and a big full-length wall-mirror for my mum in which to check herself before perhaps a matinée at the National Theatre; the easy-clean hardwood floors for soup spills; the compact fitted kitchen conveniently located next to the sitting room; the teak dining table that we almost left behind right there in its own perfect space in the sitting room; the books with the nicest spines I’d selected for the bookcase – some old Penguins, a biography of Jean Shrimpton, a hardback Brecht, an incomplete set of crumbling red-leather-bound Temple Shakespeares. But as I congratulated myself I noticed there were other things – chairs, a fruit bowl, those Portmeirion storage jars – that seemed to belong to other rooms I knew so well, the memories of which clung to me like smoke, and it was as if I’d stolen each item and repositioned it here in an unfamiliar place irresponsibly.