Rosie

by Rose Tremain

  This was rape.

  Ivo had been away in York, where he still held some directorships that demanded a few days of his time. On the fatal afternoon, Jane had gone into her bedroom for a nap, with her curtains drawn. Her bedroom door was unlocked.

  Soon afterwards, Juan and Maria had come into the room. They went to the bed and held Jane down. Juan attempted to rape Jane, while Maria looked on. Jane began screaming, but Maria covered her mouth with her hand, so in fact Jim Butler didn’t hear those screams. The rape took place and it was only after Juan and Maria had gone out of the room that Jane was able to pick up the telephone and call Jim’s cottage.

  Jim and his wife came rushing to the house, whose front door was seldom locked at that time. They comforted Jane as best they could and called the police. The police arrested Juan and Maria. Ivo was contacted and immediately began the long drive back from York.

  What happened next? When Jane related all this to me, she said that both Ivo and the police encouraged her to bring a court case against Juan and Maria, but that she didn’t want to do it. Her fear of having this humiliating and traumatic event ‘spread all over the newspapers’ overwhelmed her desire for justice. She no doubt felt that terrifying mix of anger and shame that afflicts all rape victims, but she couldn’t see any way forward in her life at that point except to try to put it out of her mind and move on. She probably decided on this course of action as much for our sakes as for her own. Juan and Maria were released without charge, but what became of them after that I never found out.

  How much did this incident affect Jane’s state of mind?

  I think it’s a credit to Ivo and his gentle care of her that – to us, at least – she seemed just about the same: generous and thoughtful at times, very often impatient and severe, tormented by stomach ailments, quick to anger but also capable of being delighted and amused by her world of close friends, bridge parties and fishing holidays. In some obstinate core of herself, Jane was a survivor. She’d survived an unloved childhood, the death of her brothers and desertion by my father. Now she’d been raped by a trusted servant. No doubt this devastating afternoon returned to her frequently in her dreams. I think it probably put her off sex for ever: she and Ivo had separate rooms from this time onwards. But she didn’t give in to hatred or self-loathing; she just carried on.

  But why had this happened? Had Juan and Maria nurtured a secret hatred for Jane across months and months? Had she ever wounded them with an angry physical slap, the way that she’d wounded me in Liberty’s? There must have been something. But what? Because Maria was party to the repulsive crime, they must have planned it together. It must have been overwhelmingly exciting to them, sexually, with risk as part of the thrill. But how did they think they were going to get away with it? Had they relied on the possibility that Jane’s feelings of shame and disgust would prevent her from ever speaking about it, even to Ivo?

  When she was old, I once tried, very tentatively, asking Jane about it. She stared at me in bewilderment, as though she couldn’t imagine what on earth I was talking about. Then she sent me away. She said she was tired and needed to be left alone to sleep.

  I returned to Crofton Grange. The Milton mural was finished. Exams were upon us. We passed them, as we knew we would, all except Latin, which had been badly taught by a short-tempered woman aptly named Miss Gaul, and which none of us had taken seriously enough. I reassured Robbie I would resit the Latin exam the following year. But the following year never came.

  In the midst of the O-level weeks, I sometimes went into the English room and stared critically at the wall, now so crazy with flowers, showers, bowers and towers. I knew Robbie had, in the end, been pleased with it. I’d been rewarded with a few celebratory visits to her room, where we toasted marshmallows in front of her gas fire, and talked about Milton’s Lycidas, which was one of Robbie’s favourite poems.

  For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

  Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

  Who would not sing for Lycidas?

  Indeed, who would not? My early affection for this work became in my half-formed mind almost as great as that for Romeo and Juliet, not only for its lyric desolation, for the sweet memory of Robbie’s recitations, but also because the countryside evoked in it, the ‘high lawns’, the ‘self-same hill’, segued in my mind into Linkenholt, my paradise lost.

  Robbie had also recommended that my labours be rewarded by something called the Good Citizenship Cup – about which I was mercilessly but good-naturedly teased by my friends. But I wasn’t totally sure I’d earned the marshmallows, or the cup. I felt that the only bit of the mural that had value was the central figure, with its brooding face and well-drawn hands. The rest seemed amateurish and weak to me. Not for the first time, I thought how much better the whole thing would have been if it had been executed by Jo.

  Jo, in Paris, was now experiencing her first encounter with love, falling for Paul, the forty-year-old son of the Frenchwoman she lodged with on the Avenue Victor Hugo. She was nineteen. And she felt so torn between the passion that she felt for Paul and her fear of the sexual act and its consequences that she felt stranded, as though on some terrible ice floe, in a sea of confusion. All she could do was call for help. Jane and Ivo rushed over to Paris, extracted Jo from the Académie Julien (where she had been doing well, bringing home some beautiful watercolours of the great City of Light), and from the Avenue Victor Hugo – where the middle-aged Paul, still tied to his mother’s apron strings, nevertheless felt something more than paternal tenderness for Jo – and brought her back to the tranquil green fields of Berkshire.

  It’s interesting to reflect upon what happened to her next – to this star of my childhood, the girl my parents’ friends dubbed ‘the talented one’. After the Paris debacle and a period at home, where she painted in a lovely little studio Ivo had kitted out for her in one of the Frilsham outbuildings, she was accepted at the Central School of Art in London, where she was steered away from illustration towards design.

  Design was not where Jo’s talent lay. Her tutors at Central must have been slightly obtuse not to see this. In a sense, her art school years were wasted, in pursuit of something she couldn’t do well. But after this, she returned to her skill with small drawings, pastels and watercolours, working freelance for Gordon Fraser, designing greeting cards. Had she pushed a little harder, found an agent, planned the way ahead, she would surely have found work as an illustrator of children’s books.

  But after a few years, she stopped it all. Aged twenty-three, she married an advertising copywriter, John Pitt, converted to the Roman Catholic Church at his request, gave birth to six children and never revisited the skill that had defined her childhood and all our expectations. I have always had to respect Jo’s decision to set aside a blazing talent, but I have never been completely reconciled to this squandering of something precious.

  My own turn to be steered away from a planned pathway was approaching.

  Before my last term at school had ended, I was told by Jane that Oxford was an ‘inappropriate dream’, that she didn’t want a ‘bluestocking’ for a daughter. This would make her a laughing stock. Did I want her to be a laughing stock?

  ‘Fuck, Baitie!’ Mawkie said to me. ‘That’s so unfair. What’s this “laughing stock” shit? You’ve always been bloody brilliant and I was looking forward to coming and seducing your friends at Oxford.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Exactly, Mawkie. I was looking forward to that too.’

  My cousin Johnny was about to sit the Cambridge exams, and Rob would soon be destined for Oxford. But for me, ‘the bluestocking’, it was not to be. Resistance to what Jane had planned felt impossible. I was leaving Crofton Grange and being sent abroad to a ‘finishing school’ in Switzerland. That was the term for the place my mother wanted to consign me to: a ‘finishing school’.

  I wept tears with Robbie under my brooding incarnation of Melancholy. My vision of myself at Oxford was still unbearably vivid. Rob
bie offered to write a ‘strong letter’ to my mother. But I told her it was a waste of time. I told her I could do nothing else but submit. And this is one of the enduring mysteries of my childhood: why didn’t I stand up to Jane? Why didn’t I argue and shout? I had moments of hating her with a profound, deep-seated dislike, and yet I never seemed to have the courage to challenge her rulings – not even her ruling against Oxford. The nearest I can get to explaining this is that, in some way, I was terrified of her. Later in my life, Johnny and Robert admitted that they’d been afraid of her too. Retrospectively, Johnny christened her ‘the Godmother’. He’d watched appalled as everybody jumped to do her bidding.

  So then, I reason that, though years may pass, lovelessness can lay the seeds of tyranny. The tragic, rejected ‘Little Dudley’ was, in her middle years, a despotic woman: ‘Little Corleone’.

  During my last term at Crofton Grange, 1959, Joyce Hatto was giving her first orchestral concert with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Festival Hall and arranged tickets for a group of her pupils.

  Jane and Ivo never took us to concerts, so this was my first entry into the main auditorium at the Festival Hall, and I remember feeling so awed by it that I became breathless and wondered if the air inside was ‘different air’. The knowledge that Joyce was going to come walking onto the stage and sit down at the enormous shining piano was almost too overwhelming to contemplate.

  The piece she was going to play was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a marvellous, fast-paced show-off number for an adroit pianist, but as the orchestra assembled, our little group fell silent. We worried that, despite the genius she displayed to us at school, our darling Miss Hatto might be overcome by the occasion and suddenly stumble – or worse. Caroline Gee, head of music at Crofton during our time there, told us that she had attended a recital during which Joyce had suddenly fallen into a faint, with her head crashing down onto the keys. What if this terrible occurrence was going to happen again, this time in the huge auditorium of the Festival Hall?

  On she came.

  We recognised her footfall in her court shoes before we saw her. She wore a long blue taffeta gown. She was smiling her lipsticked smile.

  I think we held onto each other as Joyce settled at the piano and started adjusting the stool. Then the first slow laid-back, jazzy bars began. Here, the pianist has to wait and wait … wait and wait … then pounce. Timing and speed is all, and Joyce was right on it. We stopped worrying and just sat back to marvel. When the piece reached its end, we were tearful with pride. She was our Joyce Hatto, and rumours had reached us down the years that she was a star – but now we knew it for sure.

  In my recollection, she had a fine ovation from the Festival Hall audience, but of course I would remember it like that. This was my first encounter with what we might call fame. Later critics suggested that Joyce Hatto had never been ‘in the first rank’ of concert pianists. But for me, on this great occasion, the idea that one person (somebody you knew, somebody who otherwise went about her life doing ordinary things) might be good enough, bold enough at something to stir hundreds or thousands of people to strong emotion seemed suddenly quite extraordinary.

  Recently, from Caroline Gee, I heard a significant story of something that happened to Joyce during her time as our teacher.

  Joyce stayed one night a week at the school, giving lessons on two successive days. It was Caroline’s task to wake her up in the morning with a cup of tea well before school assembly, at which we always sang a hymn and Joyce would play the accompaniment.

  One morning, over the tea, Joyce suddenly told Caroline that her agent, William Barrington-Coupe, always known as ‘Barry’, had proposed to her. Joyce said that she hadn’t thought about marriage and didn’t particularly want to marry Barry, but he’d been sitting at his desk, nervously playing with a yellow toy duck, as he uttered the words of the proposal, and this sight of him anxiously fussing with the duck had seemed so ‘pathetic’ that Joyce agreed to become his wife, out of sheer pity and sorrow. She married him in 1956.

  Much later, long after she had renounced all her teaching in favour of concert performance, a massive musical scandal overtook Joyce Hatto and William Barrington-Coupe. As well as being Joyce’s agent, Barry was also a music producer, adept at studio recording and editing. When Joyce developed stomach cancer in the 1990s and became too ill to play to her former standard, Barry decided to embark on a ruinous fraud. During her last years, he issued more than one hundred recordings – including the complete Beethoven sonatas, concertos by Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and Brahms, and some Chopin preludes – passing them off as Joyce’s playing and earning widespread critical acclaim for her, with the music world beginning to ask, ‘Where has this brilliant pianist been all these years?’ But these recordings were not by Joyce. Barry had spliced in the work of other ‘lesser known’ concert artists and sold hundreds of CDs, all purporting to be recordings by Joyce, on his Concerts Artists record label. When the fraud was revealed, he swore that Joyce had never known about it, and had listened to the music believing she herself had played it. And right up to his death in 2014, he was strangely blithe about what he’d done, claiming that he’d ‘harmed no one’ and simply acted out of love for his wife.

  The strangeness of this story will no doubt fascinate musicologists for a long time to come, it was so singular, risky and odd. But as Joyce’s pupil and friend, I just feel very saddened by it. In the 1980s and 1990s, Joyce and I kept in touch from time to time, and I received some marvellous Chopin and Rachmaninov CDs from her. I loved them. The playing seemed flawless to me. To find out that they were not by her, but just part of Barry’s shameless deception, was a bitter shock. I wanted to turn back time, to have Joyce come clattering into the school assembly to play the morning hymn, find her sitting by me at the Crofton Bechstein, then see her walking onto the stage in her blue taffeta gown to play Gershwin – and let her stay there, on the great concert platforms of the world, a genius in her own right.

  After Gershwin, we returned to Crofton. Everything felt sad, wasted. I envied passionately the girls – like Heather Gray, the newly designated head girl – who were staying on in this place where, for a while, I’d felt so outcast and unhappy.

  On my last day, I went to Robbie’s room to say goodbye to her. The July day was cold and she’d lit her gas fire. She didn’t want to look at me. She picked up her small brass toasting fork and said: ‘Shall we cook one last marshmallow?’

  My final school report, an unusual survivor of the archive of my teenage years, gives out A or A− grades for everything except Latin and gymnastics, in which it’s suggested that ‘harder work is needed’. The report ends, in Mrs Baines’s familiar green ink, with the observation that ‘Rosemary is an exceptionally gifted girl’, and expresses her sorrow that the school was losing me ‘at such an early age’. I was not yet sixteen.

  The convention with school reports was that they were sent to the parents, who saw them before we did. Thus Jane had been able to read the report before she had to show it to me. When I got it, I was startled to find it slightly defaced. Ignoring the A grades and the praise from Elizabeth Baines, my mother had scrawled over the ‘harder work is needed’ gym report, writing, ‘Ha! Ha!’ and signing it with her formal initials, V.M.T.

  ‘Tits to the Valley’

  Jane had got rid of us all now.

  Carol was working in London, Jo was at the Central School of Art, Mawkie had joined the Fleet Air Arm (where he was destined to become the youngest jet fighter pilot the Fleet Air Arm had ever sent into the skies). And I was sent to Switzerland to my ‘finishing school’.

  As Jane saw me off on the boat train to Dover, surrounded by a posse of nicely dressed sixteen-year-old girls but nobody that I knew, I couldn’t help remembering the story Lois Crane had told me about my mother and Pam McKenzie linking arms as the train to Braughing pulled away and rejoicing that they could now ‘get on with life’. Now, I asked myself not what life Jane had to get on with
– I knew what her days consisted of; I asked myself what kind of life I was speeding towards.

  All lives have moments where, often without warning, the pathway you thought you were on suddenly veers away from its expected direction, or narrows and runs out, and you feel lost. This was what I experienced on my journey to Switzerland: a feeling of profound disorientation. And some anger. I hadn’t asked to be sent to Crofton Grange after my father left us, but thanks to my friends, thanks to the drama studio and the teaching of art, thanks to Robbie and Joyce Hatto, I’d managed to put in place the structures of a creative existence there. I’d begun to thrive and feel happy. Now, like poor, confused Alice, I’d been snatched away from all that and was being pushed and shoved through some other unfamiliar door, some stupid new rabbit hole.

  What waited for me was a collection of solid buildings in the town of Morges, on Lac Léman, gathered together as the school known as ‘Mon Fertile’.

  This – with its startlingly mockable name – had been founded by a dynamic English–French female couple, Miss Allen and Mademoiselle Clara. I think they – or the school, anyway – owned a massive amount of Swiss real estate. In winter, the whole thing transferred itself to the ski resort of Les Diablerets, where we lived in three large chalets. In both places, the houses were warm and well maintained. At Morges there was also a barn that had been converted into a theatre. How Clara and Allen had come by all this property, we never quite knew.

  The house I was allocated to was called Tournesol (Sunflower). It was early autumn and the weather was very beautiful, with the trees just beginning to yellow on the shores of the lake. I was to share a room with two South African girls, Carol Reunert and Jenny Lowe, and I remember being instantly glad about this. I liked the flatness of their accents; liked the fact that they’d come from a different kind of childhood from mine. There was something a bit exotic about them, living in this hot, troubled, black/white country, and this broke through the very English self-pity I was feeling. With them, it seemed possible to set aside my anger with my mother, and hear instead about life in the leafy suburbs of Johannesburg, where Carol and Jenny’s families lived, about braais (barbecues), bioscopes (drive-in movies) and the bundu, the great wilderness that still covered so much of South African soil.