Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  ‘Through the curtains?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It sounds strange when you say it, but he just slips in.’

  ‘What’s he wearing?’

  ‘One of his suits, I think. Very smart. Always.’

  ‘Does he speak?’

  ‘Oh yes. He could always do that. A gift.’

  ‘And what do you say to him?’

  ‘I usually just lie there in the bed listening.’

  ‘And what does he say?’

  ‘Oh, this and that. He’s getting married again, you know. To another woman. I hope he’s told her about the drinking.’ She was now speaking the way she had always spoken, head turned away, as if addressing the middle distance. Her tone was slightly detached, as though she had tumbled the ideas for hours around her own head, rinsing them of any detectable feeling until they could be voiced like simple yet vaguely baffling facts to get used to.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, she ought to know beforehand, don’t you think? I mean, it’s not right, is it? It’s just so unfair to spoil someone else’s life like that.’

  I heard muffled voices out in the car park. A greenfinch was at the bird-feeder outside the window, then it was gone.

  She turned her face to me. ‘I would have liked some looking after myself, you know. Someone who took me for who I was.’

  There was a knock at the door, which was half held open with a rope attached to the radiator. I looked up. It was one of the carers.

  ‘Just brought you your laundry, Romany,’ she said loudly, already half into the room, the corners of the words curled and whorled by the West Country accent. ‘Shall I pop them in your drawer for you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said my mum, half over her shoulder, stretching the word a little patronisingly to make it sound like as usual.

  The woman zipped into the room and slipped a couple of things in the chest of drawers. ‘Nice of Ben to pop in and see you, isn’t it?’ she said, still loudly.

  ‘Don’t. Shout,’ said my mum, clipping each word short, putting a full stop between them.

  The woman shot her a smile, then winked at me. ‘Lunch’ll be along in a moment,’ she said, already almost out of the door.

  ‘How thrilling,’ my mum said, pulling a face just for me.

  I waited for the footsteps to disappear, then said, ‘You were saying about Dad . . .’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tom.’

  She rummaged around in her head. ‘Was I?’

  ‘About his visits.’

  She sat still for a moment. ‘A handsome man.’

  I watched her face. I could picture a carousel of images in her head, coming and going, in and out of focus, faces on a fairground waltzer, random in time and space, and every now and then she was able to slow the movement down and bring something into focus and freeze the frame before it floated away again like a paper fire lantern.

  ‘Can you remember when you first met?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It was at Brian and Elspet’s party. New Year’s Day 1957. Only a few nights after Tom had started at Quaglino’s. Ring a bell?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘I think you’re right.’

  It had been a sketchy fact I’d known growing up, one my dad had bragged about. ‘Why did you kiss her?’ I would ask him. ‘I couldn’t stop her,’ was his stock reply.

  ‘Can you bring it to mind, Mum?’

  She closed her eyes and wrinkled her brow as though I’d asked her the name of a South American capital city. ‘He was at the end of the room,’ she said after a moment. ‘And I thought, Who is that man making everyone laugh with the lonely face?’

  ‘And you kissed him that night?’

  ‘I must have.’

  ‘Although Ken was there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you kiss him?’

  She shrugged. ‘People do.’

  She and Ken had married a little over eight years earlier in 1948. He was on the staff at the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune as their theatre critic, and had spotted her acting in London not long after she left the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

  ‘He took such a shine to me,’ she said to me one evening as we walked by the river in Oxford. ‘He began following me everywhere. He even travelled down to Devon to see me in a tiny church hall. I was in rep. It must have taken hours. He had to walk across the front of the stage to get to his seat after the curtain went up. Clump, clump, clump. I was so embarrassed.’

  The ceremony took place at 11 a.m. at the Hinde Street Methodist Church in central London on 2 October with the reception at the Mandeville Hotel. Her brother Glyn gave her away, her father having died five years earlier. She wore a white satin Victoria gown with a bustle and short train, the Swedish lace veil was bound round the brow with a gold circlet studded with pearls, and she carried a posy of crimson roses; the bridesmaids wore Wedgwood-blue gowns and coronets of fresh white flowers, and carried bouquets of white carnations and gladioli.

  Eunice, her mother, kept a meticulous list of attendees and no-shows, and their respective wedding presents. The list is a brilliantly comprehensive vision of forties domesticity:

  dinner wagon and kitchen scales

  coffee percolator

  toast rack and napkin rings

  canteen of cutlery

  cheque for £5

  bread fork

  biscuit box

  book of poems

  tea knives

  cheque for £2

  recipe book and doily

  Victorian bon-bon dish

  Daleware mixer

  fireside companion set

  Shetland rug

  Staybrite tray

  wool tea cosy

  fish knives and forks

  biscuit barrel

  cheque for £3.30

  waste-paper basket

  whisky decanter

  Pyrex set

  two soup ladles

  pair of double sheets

  The list went on. And yet if my mum was to be left in no doubt that she was preparing for domestic life, it was clear she was also unwilling to sacrifice everything.

  In April 1951 she was asked to write a talk for one of the clutch of new afternoon programmes on the BBC aimed at women in the immediate post-war years. Wartime broadcasting for women may have been typified by programmes such as The Kitchen in Wartime and The Factory Front, but 1946 had seen a new emphasis on the home with the advent of Housewives’ Choice and Woman’s Hour. Writing for the newly launched Mainly for Women, she defended the right to seek work and look after the home at the same time. In an essay entitled ‘Housewife at Stratford’ she wrote about the months immediately following her wedding:

  When I got married, just over two years ago, most of my friends thought I should give up the stage. My relatives and in-laws took it for granted; my actress friends sighed, rather smugly I thought . . . But my husband and I had other plans. He is a theatre critic, so he understood my love of the stage. We decided when we were engaged that it would be foolish to waste my two-year training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and my two years’ experience in repertory, and that if any jobs turned up I was certainly to take them.

  At first, overwhelmed by setting up home with Ken in a small mews cottage in west London, she found it hard to do both, only acting in ‘one or two Sunday night shows’ and ‘a few odd weeks of repertory in the suburbs’, but in the spring of 1949, after six months of nest-building, she began looking in earnest. She ‘pestered all the agents and wrote an average of ten letters a week’. Every management company she could think of was contacted, but it was tough going; work was scarce. After three months of dispiriting rejections, and more in hope than expectation, she aimed high and travelled to the Globe Theatre in London on a summer morning in August to audition for the director Anthony Quayle, who was preparing for the following summer’s season of Shakespeare plays at the Memorial Theatre in
Stratford-upon-Avon. She nervously delivered speeches by Hermia and Cleopatra, was thanked, eagerly agreed to accept walk-ons or understudies or small parts if required, but left disheartened. The following week, much to her astonishment, a nine-month contract to act with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company alongside John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft arrived in the post. When she’d first started looking for work she’d imagined small repertory tours in the provinces lasting two or three weeks; leaving home for nine months had never crossed her mind. Newly married, she was torn, but she also knew it was a huge chance. It took several days to make up her mind, but with encouragement from everyone, she accepted. She went on to write excitedly:

  The next few months went all too quickly. I looked at everything with a new eye. The store cupboard was stacked with tins of soup and spaghetti, the local dairy coaxed into thinking my husband needed lots of eggs and sympathy, the best blue taffeta counterpane folded in tissue paper and a cotton one put in its place. Every garment was dry-cleaned, every sock darned and every button sewn on as if he were to suffer a great siege.

  Rehearsals started in the cold early months of 1950. She confessed ‘the leave-taking that bleak February afternoon was awful’ and she was bitterly homesick for the first three weeks, but she soon grew to love the work and the routines; and the view out over the foggy river and the fields from the big white Georgian house where she lived among other actors, two miles from the theatre, fired her with a galvanising romantic enthusiasm. In June, midway through the season, Ken had ‘tired of his tinned diet and solitary life’ and travelled up to join her. He stayed for three months, even though she was still often rehearsing all day and acting all night. When work called him back to London in September, she stayed on to finish the season alone. And then, on 28 October, shattered but elated, she finally headed back to London herself. She wrote:

  Oh, the excitement of seeing my little black-and-white mews cottage again, with its red window boxes and little tub trees! The delight of not having to go out in the evening, of just sitting by the fire, of looking in all my cupboards and finding things I’d forgotten! And above all, the companionship of my sorely tried husband, who had never once complained, but who never wants to eat stewing steak or kippers again!

  I don’t doubt that she was happy to get home to the quiet comforts of her husband and the fireside after such a tumultuous and exhausting year, but it’s also clear the whole adventure had been deeply fulfilling on a profound and potentially life-changing level. ‘The most marvellous experience I ever hope to have’ is how she reflects on it in her written memories; it was also how she spoke of it in later years to me, when we’d talk about it sometimes if my dad was not around, and she could relax and not feel judged. It’s not hard to see how she thrived on the unrivalled attention it brought and the heart-stopping thrill of it all; it was what she had perhaps always dreamed of ever since that first day recording a broadcast with her father. Certainly the life of a housewife in a little mews cottage in west London could not have been more different. And then, ten months later, their first child, Simon – my eldest half-brother – was born, and everything changed.

  ‘Were you and Ken both keen for kids?’ I asked, as we carried on walking by the river that same evening in Oxford.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Although at the time I think Ken was more concerned about getting called up for the Korean War.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was carrying a gas mask wherever he went. He was quite convinced war was around the corner. So he said we ought to have one. Just in case.’ She gave a gloomy laugh. ‘Not sure if you can call that romantic or not.’

  Two swans cruised up to the bank, their necks poised, droplets of water resting on their furled wings.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’

  She stopped to look at the river. ‘Did I ever tell you about our honeymoon?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We went to Florence, Ken and I. Took a plane. We had to fly via Switzerland; it was very different back then. We stayed in a small hotel near the river. Very pretty, it was. Windows that opened right out on to the city, and that view. All very E. M. Forster.’ She let out a little laugh through her nose. ‘But to be brutal about it, that was about as romantic as it got.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sex, darling,’ she said crisply. ‘Or lack of.’

  The swans had lost interest and had pedalled back into the middle of the stream. The shadows from the buildings loomed on to the surface of the water.

  ‘But that’s what honeymoons are for!’

  ‘You would have thought so, wouldn’t you. But no. I think we must have seen the inside and outside of every single church and duomo in the whole place. My feet ached. And the little guide book and everything. Renaissance this, Renaissance that. Beautiful, of course, but, well . . .’ She trailed off.

  A man passed us wheeling his bike, cycle clips pegging his trousers to his ankles.

  ‘Ken was in heaven, of course,’ she said. We walked a little further and up on to the footbridge. ‘And I made such a fool of myself at Stratford.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I didn’t get half the jokes. I’d been married for twelve months but had no idea why the audience all laughed at Paul Hardwick’s line “Hard all night”. I actually asked what it meant in front of a number of people.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘I did.’

  We stood laughing. It wasn’t often that she was like this – forthcoming and confiding, and I felt close to her, like she was letting her guard down for a moment. Mingling. Gossipy.

  ‘What about before Ken? There must have been others,’ I asked, as we headed back.

  ‘Oh, yes. A whole string of them during the war. Pilot officers on leave or suffering fatigue – that sort of thing. I was a Wren of course. I nearly followed one back to New Zealand! Mother had to talk me down. She was always telling me I had a tendency to go off at the deep end about everything. And before that, when I was eighteen, I went to an old girls’ school reunion at the Craiglands Hotel and fell for a thirty-four-year-old married man called Reggie. He was very good about it. But it was all very chaste. All of it. All of them. Kisses and cuddles. That was as far as it went in 1942. Not like it is today.’

  I’ve tried to picture her arriving at Brian and Elspet’s New Year’s Day party in 1957, aged thirty-two, and what she was thinking as she pushed through the hallway of people with a drink in one hand. I talked to Elspet, who became my godmother, over lunch not long after my dad died, and she painted it in simple strokes. Close friends with my mum since meeting at RADA in 1945, she said, ‘Romany hadn’t been happy. Life wasn’t very exciting. She loved the children to bits – the triplets were adorable – and Richard [the name she gave to Ken – as many did – after his pen name Richard Findlater] was such a nice man, very bright, but she wanted – how should I say it – more pizzazz. It had all got rather sterile. Perhaps she wasn’t even aware of it.’

  ‘But then Tommy wasn’t very happy either,’ Brian had interjected. (Elspet had always been my mum’s advocate, and Brian my dad’s. It was odd to think they’d each known one of my parents separately since the mid-forties, and then circumstance had brought the four of them together in the mid-fifties.)

  ‘How so?’ I asked, half knowing the story already, but wanting to hear Brian say it.

  ‘He was married as well. June, her name was; we never saw her. He’d married her right after the war. They had a flat in Blackheath. She had a condition. Awful business.’

  I pressed him. ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘Nephritis, by all accounts. To do with the kidneys. Couldn’t have children, or so we were led to believe. Often bedridden.’

  I pictured my parents both there at the party, each already in their early thirties, almost six years before I was born. On the one hand there was so much going for each of them: my mum with the family, a celebrated husband and a new career as a journalist; my dad as a bandl
eader at Quaglino’s on the cusp of glittering success. But on the other, they must have felt as if there was so little: each adrift in awkward, idling, passionless relationships, fettered and unfulfilled.

  Were they really on a collision course?

  Chapter 37

  As the weeks and months went by at the care home, my mum’s hallucinations got worse. She was convinced there was a rifleman on the roof outside her room, and would sit back from the window or lie on her bed to keep out of the way. One morning a carer found her with her shoes off in front of her small pink basin trying to splash little cupped handfuls of water on to her bare feet. When asked what she was doing, she said, ‘Can’t you see them? My feet are covered in wasps.’ And before long, Tom had changed from the smart lover appearing through the curtains to a skeleton, sometimes under the bed or sometimes in the chair as she woke.