Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  She lost sense of day and night. Often she dozed and got herself into bed during the afternoons only to fall heavily asleep, and then found herself wide awake in the middle of the night. The night staff would find her wandering the corridors, using the handrails as a guide, as a mountaineer uses ropes, but then often she’d try to break into a determined run, which was all the stranger as during the day she could only shuffle unsteadily from chair to bed. One night it was said she burst into another resident’s room – up on the first floor – and was all set to wrestle her from the mattress, convinced Tom was under the sheets beside her. How she got upstairs no one was sure. They didn’t like to give her sedatives unless it was completely necessary, but sometimes it was the only way to keep her under control, and she’d zone out in her room for twenty-four hours, and then be calmer.

  Yet in the midst of it all she had brief periods of great tranquillity and lucidity where random parts of her memory were sharp and her sense of humour undimmed, and I hoped as I pushed the door open on a visit that I’d catch her on a good day.

  Leafing through some old photographs one morning I asked her for her strongest memory of my dad. The skin on her face was furrowed as though a fork had been pressed into clay or plasticine, her eyes grey-blue and gauzy. She opened her mouth to speak and moved her hands together under the blanket over her knees. Her face lit up. ‘He was very loving,’ she said, half girlish and fond, half cheeky. ‘So alive. And very imaginitive.’

  She twinkled, as if she’d said something naughty.

  Something must have detonated inside her during those opening few months of 1957. ‘It’s a deep pool,’ my dad had said on the eve of their first tryst in March at his flat in Blackheath over tea and gin. She had instigated it, phoning to suggest an ‘interview’ for the Evening Standard with ‘one of London’s top young bandleaders’, but the subtext was abundantly clear.

  I have no memories of being told much about the affair while I was growing up. In fact, when I discovered, only recently, that it had started as early as 1957, my first thought was one of shock that it had gone on so long; they weren’t married until late October 1962, six weeks before I was born; that’s an affair lasting five and a half years. How was it sustained? Who knew? Why so long?

  When my dad died, Roly handed me some souvenirs that had been kept in his loft since my parents’ move from the London flat to the Bristol care home. He hadn’t chosen to look at them himself. There was a banana crate of Tilly’s Romany china wrapped in newspaper, archived folders and cuttings, and the old grey cardboard fifties Harrods gift box with its Festival of Britain design, in which I knew my mum kept her special keepsakes and mementoes. I filled the boot and drove them back to London on a rainswept afternoon.

  In the gift box I found a sealed envelope marked Memories – Very Private – For Tom Only. The handwriting was my mum’s. I looked at it unopened for a few days, my mind full of unanswered questions. Was it right to read it while my mum was still alive? Did her cognitive collapse make it OK? Was I allowed to open it, as my dad was now dead and I was his son? Should some time elapse first? If so, how long? On a long walk one afternoon I decided if I were to have any final appreciation and understanding of my mum before she died too, I needed to know the full story. What was the point in saving it? To only regret opening it when it was too late?

  I remember how the old sealed envelope sat lightly in my hands, the paper softened by years of storage among other papers. The dried-out gummed edge was puckered. Sitting at my desk at the top of the house where we lived at the time, in the lavender twilight, I slid a small brown kitchen knife under the envelope’s edge and carefully cut a clean straight line. Why I was being so careful, I wasn’t sure. It felt as if I were picking a lock. I was aware I might be leaving fingerprints. Tiny flecks of white paper clung to the knife with static and a few tumbled on to my desk like feathery frost or the first flutters of snow. The folded paper sat neatly and tightly in the envelope; three or four sheets, I guessed. As I pulled them out I wondered how long they had rested in there private and undisturbed. It felt like an exhumation.

  Putting the envelope down I pushed back my chair and unfolded the sheets of paper. The creases were as resistant as stiff old unoiled hinges. I could hear children playing on the neighbour’s trampoline in the next-door garden below and a helicopter passing in the distance. The paper cracked like a knuckle.

  The words were typed on a proper old-fashioned typewriter, the font retaining all its quirks of misaligned spacing and over-blotting from the imperfect action of real machinery striking on real ribbon, hammered with the real feeling of real hands. The opening words jumped off the page in all their startling candidness like a tight heart unbuttoned. They read:

  I kissed you for the first time on January 1st 1957 because you looked lonely. I kissed you again on January 28th because I couldn’t help myself.

  The paper drooped in my hands. I looked away. I felt as if I had prised open a locket.

  The three pages of captured memories are vivid and impressionistic, by turns wistful and defiant, written it would seem in the middle of 1959, some two years after the affair had begun. ‘I have no diary for 1956 or 1957,’ she begins, and there is a sense, by the end, that by writing the memories down she is trying to trap and preserve something she fears she might lose, or worse, forget. Of the early days she eye-catchingly reminisces:

  March 3. Prelims. Scones for tea on the trolley, with honey . . . Unromantic humorous musical medley on out-of-tune piano. Offer of gin. Offer of another gin. Shoes off. The rest is history.

  And then:

  Opening Phases. Spring ’57. Sitting on the piano stool . . . the sun shining into your flat in the late afternoon. The sun at the Yacht [in Greenwich]. Sitting pressed close together against the wall at the Yacht and you saying you thought you loved me for the first time . . . Driving from the tea shack on the heath to the Plume. Following you down the hill . . . My black cotton dress. Your grey suit. My gold bangle . . . Driving round St James’s Square. Journeys to Blackheath at night when the world was ours. Tea in Hampstead. Tea in the Chinese Restaurant in Brompton Road. The visits to your tailor. Buying my coat in Harvey N. And collecting June’s from Fenwick.

  They met illicitly for four months – riverside pubs and stolen afternoons, a little hotel (the Paragon) and sometimes bolt-holes engineered with the help of friends – but beyond the surface clandestine excitement, it’s clear from the beginning that it was a door opening on to a new and profound secret world for her: a world that was carnal, adrenalised and consuming; unlike anything – at the age of thirty-three, with four children and nearly nine years into a marriage – she had ever known before. A few letters preserved from the period are unblushingly frank and unposed, as if this time she really had – as her mother used to say – ‘gone off at the deep end’. It wasn’t long before she was describing it in a letter to my dad as ‘the most overwhelming, beautiful, tender, savage thing that ever happened to me’.

  Looking back now, and bearing in mind the changes and loosening in the divorce laws that have taken place since 1969, it is hard to imagine what entangled years lay in store for couples who met as ardently and dramatically as my parents did in 1957. The rights of the married individual have long since displaced antiquated notions of moral fibre and dangers to the fabric of society, but back then the divorce laws of the day permitted annulment only on the grounds of adultery or cruelty or desertion lasting at least three years. Even when the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce 1956 was set up to review increasing pressures in the post-war years to see marriage merely as a companionate alliance between two people in an increasingly individualised world, as opposed to a legal binding duty that involved the state as well, no changes were made. A relationship that ‘broke down’ was not enough. In fact, clinging steadfastly and conservatively to the past, the report stated:

  We are convinced that the real remedy for the present situation lies in other directions [i.e. not easier div
orce]: in fostering in the individual the will to do his duty in the community; in strengthening his resolution to make marriage a union for life; in inculcating a proper sense of responsibility towards his children.

  It was against this background on 2 July 1957 – four months after the affair had begun – that my dad’s first wife, June, found out.

  My dad broke the news to my mum in the tiny Grenadier pub on Wilton Row near Hyde Park Corner. He vowed it would make no difference, and they talked themselves into renting a flat for six weeks in Sussex Gardens in Bayswater to continue their secret assignations. Quite how soon afterwards Ken found out is unclear, but the affair was fully exposed by the end of August, and my mum and dad seemed unable to sustain the duplicity. In early September, they were preparing to reconcile with their respective partners. On the final night before the lease ran out on the Bayswater flat, my mum stayed up late alone while my dad was out performing at Quaglino’s, and wrote an open letter to herself:

  Written to the strains of Jack Payne on Eve’s lousy wireless. On this night of Sep 4 at 11.30 sitting in this strange girl’s flat in which I have been since Monday, I feel, for the sake of the future and the past, I must write a couple of things down. Tomorrow I give in the keys. The oddest thing almost, is that I should be so besotted in the business that we have a flat – us – he and I actually have a flat of our own and have had for six weeks. ‘I am so steeped in’ now, that I can entirely neglect my children – my lovely lovely triplets and my awkward heart-rending nervy Simon – can entirely and utterly banish them from my thoughts. That Ken – my dear husband of almost nine years is a stranger to me as a piece of furniture – a thing – not a person any more. And I realise I am doing all this – for what? For my lover – for this boyish, randy, sensitive, needful man . . . What is it I see in him? I know what he sees in me, but there is a terrific core of gentleness, thoughtfulness, passion, vanity and need there, that I find irresistible – plus humour (often violently simple), gaiety and, I suppose, though I hate to admit now that it has any bearing on the subject, glamour. I love him because he has a creative life of his own – he is above me and brilliant in his own field, and he loves me, I think, because sexually he finds me stimulating and I am a ‘whole’ person, he says – developed, he thinks! But emotionally I am pretty unstable. He talked to me about music again tonight – the things he’s playing in the first programme – ‘Sally’, ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’ and ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ – which when he said it last time, on this very bed – with tears choking – it seemed the saddest thing I’d ever heard. They’re playing ‘Jennie In Love’. Poor little girl – will she go through all this after the years of apparent stability, security and happiness? I feel I must be such a worthless person to be so wrapped up in this – so unaware of anything else – so vital, so important, yet, unless I can be adult enough to remain his mistress and also a good wife and mother . . . But I can’t believe I am strong enough or without conscience – and yet I love him absolutely still, and tonight I am happy – but tomorrow I must take up the threads and responsibilities again – and the house fills me with foreboding – please may everything work out – and yet why should He bother when I am so wicked.

  If it is a portrait of my mum in crisis – crazily in love for perhaps the first time in her life – it is also a portrait of the time: a post-war moral maze where her love for her children, duty to her husband, respect for the institution of marriage, and fear of Christian judgement run parallel with unstoppable feelings of awakened passion and free will. Reading it now, I find it difficult not to hear its continuous background soundtrack of late-night London jazz and sentimental show songs, spilling through the radio, running through her head, articulating every surge of feeling, all interlacing with the many versions of the same songs she must have heard performed for her in restaurants and clubs and studios by her own lover. If it weren’t my own parents’ story, I’d say it reads like the overwrought synopsis of a bestselling fifties potboiler.

  I sometimes drove my mum to Paddington Station when she came up to London to visit me after they’d moved to Oxford in the late eighties. We’d turn off the Marylebone Road before the flyover and cross the Edgware Road, and she’d go quiet on Sussex Gardens.

  ‘Is it all hotels now?’ she once asked.

  ‘Looks like it,’ I said, as we passed the strung-out illuminated porticos of the two- and three-star conversions set back from the road.

  ‘Funny to think I rented a place up there with your father.’

  ‘Yes, Dad mentioned it once,’ I said, keeping the tone in my voice unembellished, wondering what she might say next.

  ‘I bet he did. He probably said something rude.’

  I laughed. ‘He probably did.’

  We turned up Norfolk Place towards the station.

  She was still looking out of the window at the passing buildings. ‘It was all just so desperate,’ she said quietly. ‘You never mean to hurt people, do you?’

  At first, after they left the secret Bayswater flat in early September 1957, there was an immediate breaking-off. My mum returned to Ken and the children, and my dad to June. Yet within a fortnight it was clearly an insufferable state of affairs. In an attempt to exert some control my mum wrote to my dad; her letter was headed, a little comically, RB’s 2nd Sensible Manifesto (Rules for Anguished Lovers, Part II). Nevertheless, she writes earnestly and clearly:

  Statement: This last two weeks has been intolerable, unproductive, desolate, blank and quite untenable. No work, no love, no nothing. Tears, rows and dead hopelessness.

  Cause: A complete cessation of a six-month love affair (which on Saturday included ‘for ever’) is too drastic and cruel for ordinary mortals of which we are two.

  Reasons For Abrupt Cancellation: Of the highest conscientious principles – love, duty, honour and [the] pain we were causing our legal partners and the intolerable strain of running a double life.

  BUT in actual fact, our utter misery is making us much crueller and bitterer than we need be and we are taking it out on ‘them’, the very people we have done this thing for.

  Suggestions: (1) We continue this enforced separation until such time as we are all more settled in mind – till then, the body must want. (2) You must get on with your work and rebuild your musical life and concentration. You’re on the threshold of success. (3) I must make my family happy and be kind to Richard [Ken] and take an interest in ordinary things again.

  It must have been such a tense and volatile stalemate. June had responded with implacable anger and entrenchment. Ken, on the other hand, soon understood that nothing of value would come from such enforced deprivation, and – much as it must have pained him – reluctantly advocated ‘something less drastic’, in the hope it would all come to nothing if left to run its course. If required, he was also ready to meet Tom and write to June to edge things forward. In a letter from the time, my mum calls him ‘the strongest and best of the four of us’, the one prepared to ‘wait and see’ and ‘face what comes’. Was it just his measured pragmatism that impressed her? Or the fact that he was quietly clearing the way for my parents to meet again?

  It was six months into the first year of their affair and the slow walk towards an uncertain resolution had begun.

  Chapter 38

  ‘We went driving, Tom and I.’

  Pale autumnal light was at the window. A hoover could be heard in the corridor. I leaned in and smelled the fading red cut freesias in the vase on the chest of drawers. Soap. Strawberries.

  ‘Did you, Mum? When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  I turned and pushed the uneaten bowl of apple crumble to the side of the invalid table, and slid the coffee towards her. I’d learned to stop correcting her; if it was true in her mind, it might as well be true. ‘Really? Where?’ I sat beside her on the footstool.

  ‘Oh, here and there, you know. The countryside. It was dark. Very romantic. We were late back. No one saw us come in.’
<
br />   The lake and willow trees in the green ghost light at Sonning. The dovecote, swans, my too high heels, the red buttons on the sofa, the journey back under the stars of peculiar brightness.

  (From my mum’s letter of private memories with Tom)

  ‘He was unsure about coming here,’ she said, slowly slipping her lightly trembling finger into the handle of the cup and raising it to her mouth. She took a sip of the tepid coffee. ‘I thought he wouldn’t arrive. But I saw the lights from his car.’ She put the cup down and gestured to the car park of the care home beyond the window. ‘Out there.’

  Henley. Waiting, watching the bridge for your car. Rowing up the river. Dinner when my nerves overwhelmed me. Lying smoking cigarettes in bed at one in the morning and me crying. Darts at the Turville pub, and me in a blouse like June’s, and even at that stage the knowledge that I must make you drive up the avenue of meeting trees and just belong under it for always although you were already in an agony of doubt and conscience.

  (From my mum’s letter of private memories with Tom)

  ‘And where is he now?’

  She hesitated for a moment. ‘Around.’

  She looked out again towards the car park and as she did so, it suddenly hit me why in part they’d chosen to move to Oxford in the late eighties: it wasn’t just for the little modern house on the river, or the recommendation of an old friend; it was because it was the hub for so many places where much of their early elopement had taken place – the towns and villages along the Thames Valley, in the Chilterns, beside the Ridgeway; before all the years of compromises and mistakes; in those days when it was all about them; in the green ghost light; up the avenue of meeting trees; when it was all intoxicating and alive; under the stars of peculiar brightness. Oxford was to be remade as something of their own again.