Only

by Caroline Baum

  Her older brother Lucien fell in love with Jacqueline and they became engaged when she was nineteen. Having secured a place at l’Ecole Polytechnique, one of France’s elite higher education institutions, Lucien stunned my mother by volunteering for active duty in Indochina, staying away for eighteen months. During his absence she bumped into Thérond, who asked her out.

  As the wedding date drew closer, my mother felt increasingly uneasy. ‘I liked the whole family very much and wanted to belong, but at the same time I could not handle their kindness, and thought they would swallow me up. I mistook Madame Varda’s care for interference. I could not cope with anyone taking an interest in me,’ she said, looking guilty, but without further elaboration.

  Two weeks before the wedding, Jacqueline broke it off with Lucien. She gave no reason. Sensitivity was not her strong point in that moment. Like a cornered animal, she only knew she had to escape. She was deeply apprehensive about marrying someone who had fought in a war and who might have killed. ‘When his mother showed me the trousseau of bed linen that had already been embroidered with our initials I knew I could not go through with it,’ she told me.

  Her instinct was sound. Years later in Paris I went to visit Agnès, still hard at work in her cutting room at the age of eighty-seven. She revealed that Lucien, to whom she was never close, had for a time become a violent man.

  There may have been another unconscious reason for my mother’s reticence. When I was in my twenties, my mother told me a secret she had shared with no one. Not with her best friend Arlette, not with Thérond, of whom she started to see more after her break with Lucien, and more revealingly, not even my father once they were married.

  Nineteen and still a virgin, my mother went for her first proper job interview for a secretarial position, pretending in her application to be twenty-one. Her prospective employer, a ship’s chandler, had asked her to come for an interview at the end of the day. A woman admitted her to the offices above the famed Lido nightclub on the Champs-Elysées, and then left. The man locked the door, raped and assaulted her, only stopping when my mother told him she was under-age. Although her face was swollen as a result of being hit, no one asked for an explanation and she told nobody the reason. When she trusted me with this confidence, abruptly and out of the blue, I felt like I had been violated. We were not in the habit of exchanging these kinds of secrets.

  By the time she was twenty-eight, Jacqueline was desperate for a family of her own. She had left it quite late, and when she made her choice of partner, from the way she told me, I felt her motive was driven by a cool pragmatic urgency more than genuine passion.

  What did my mother see in the young Harry Baum? Black- and-white photographs from the 1950s show evidence of a certain debonair confidence in his assured bearing: he held himself well. His straight-backed, military posture increased his stature and made him look like a leader, someone in charge. Never a dance-floor lothario, he must have made his conquests thanks to the force of his personality and a certain vitality that colleagues described as charisma.

  Daughters are hardwired not to find their fathers attractive, but Harry Baum was not handsome by anyone’s standards. Of average height with sloping shoulders, by the time I came along, his luxuriant light chestnut hair had thinned, emphasising his high forehead and moon face. Spectacles framed his small pale grey-green almost lashless eyes. His nose was broad, his mouth thin. When he was angry, his lips seemed to retract as they twisted into a grimace that suggested he’d just bitten down on a lemon. His teeth were stained with tannin from copious tea-drinking.

  In his thirties Papa had a sense of fun that I only heard about second-hand: at work-related parties he surprised staff and clients with elaborate dressing-up disguises. His repertoire included a goggled winter sports tourist overburdened with luggage, skis and skates; a bewigged judge; a cardinal; and in a particularly spectacular homage, he once transformed himself into Shakespeare’s Richard III by hiring Laurence Olivier’s original costume and adding a fake plastic nose and a wig.

  Hardly interested in sport, and a moderate drinker, he was a polished raconteur and joke-teller, urbane, worldly, sophisticated and generous with compliments and cigarettes. He could recite Shakespeare, quote Churchill, speak several languages fluently. American women fell for his cultured European manners and smooth eloquence. The female colleagues and clients who became close associates were not self-effacing, quiet, pretty women; he preferred those who were strong and independent. He referred to any women he liked as girlfriends, as if they had all been conquests at some stage. Unapologetically, defiantly sexist, he also used the term ‘broad’ like a character out of Guys and Dolls, in the same way as some men today might refer to a babe. All of this makes him sound rather brash, and a little vulgar, which he was, although he was never coarse or crude.

  When my parents met, my father was not yet the workaholic he was to become. He had quit a job as a well-paid bureaucrat for UNESCO to start his own travel business, and hired my mother as his secretary on the strength of her bi-lingual skills. Their first date was a Berlin Philharmonic concert, which set the tone for their courtship: grand, formal and serious. On their second date they watched the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth on television, which would have suited my father’s taste for pomp and ceremony more than my mother’s republican sentiments. Decades later, attending a royal function, she refused to curtsy as protocol required when the monarch filed past.

  Jacqueline and Harry got to know each other better over intimate dinners at favourite bistros and cabaret at chic nightclubs. Including, I now realise with a sickening chill, the Lido, where my father loved the magic acts and spangled and feathered showgirls, little suspecting that his future wife had been violated upstairs. I remember how whenever my father spoke fondly of those champagne soirées, my mother would murmur that she preferred to go to the Crazy Horse, the Lido’s rival.

  Jacqueline was seduced by his vigour and appetite for life, his enthusiasm for food, music and travel, and his grasp of world affairs and his erudition. She felt he was safe, reliable and worldly. He must have enjoyed making her feel that he could look after her, and felt proud to have such a glamorous woman on his arm, little realising how fragile she was beneath that soignée surface. These were superficial reasons, masking what probably drew them together at a far deeper, subconscious level, but that they did not, could not, would not, express to each other in those early days of attraction, or subsequently, when disillusionment and bitterness set in: a deep-seated need for stability, a shared wound of robbed childhood, loss, immeasurable sorrow and helpless anger. A magnet of tragedy that drew two fathomlessly incompatible elements together. What does it mean that Jacqueline never told Harry she had been raped? An incomplete intimacy? Shame? Or a desire to put it behind her? These are questions that, as a daughter, I never had the courage to ask.

  Leaving France was never an issue, as my father seemed utterly at home there and as besotted with the place as with my mother. So it came as a total surprise when he decided to relocate to Britain to start a new company. He had originally come to Paris to wait out his divorce, following an impetuous marriage that had lasted just ten months. It took two years for the decree nisi to come through, during which time he met and courted my mother. They married in 1956 at Marylebone Registry Office and honeymooned in Majorca, where their low-rise hotel was the only one on the beach.

  Back in London, my father threw himself into his work with endless stamina, travelling frequently. My mother did secretarial work for him. Sometimes they took ephedrine when they had to pull an all-nighter to meet a deadline on scripting a proposal for prospective American clients.

  Jacqueline admitted to having no particular professional ambition, having failed to find work that could accommodate her anxious disposition. Before my father hired her, she worked as a ground hostess for high-status airline Pan Am at Orly airport. Being employed by an American company was considered the epitome of post-war glamour, and the company’s smart s
ky-blue uniform was individually made to measure by a tailor. There were travel perks and parties in planes parked in their hangars. But although my mother enjoyed the camaraderie of her colleagues, she found the paperwork stressful, forever getting the indigo ink from the Gestetner and Roneo copying machines all over her hands. Worst of all was keeping the passenger manifest up to date and running to the plane with it at the last minute. Naturally disorganised and with virtually no training, she was often in a panic so that it was inevitable she would get things wrong, which meant that she sometimes sent passengers to one destination and their luggage to another.

  She could not wait to give up work to become a full-time housewife and mother. But away from the first-floor office in Marylebone High Street, my mother must have been lonely. She knew no one, did not find Brits especially friendly and was having difficulty getting pregnant, which was her ultimate aim. The privations of rationing still existed in Britain. Jacqueline missed butter, cheese and market produce, and was shocked that Britons ate swedes, which the French normally only fed to pigs. The drab austerity of the post-war years was seemingly endless.

  Through no fault of his own, my father was away on business when I was born two weeks prematurely (and I have been arriving early ever since). When we finally met, still in hospital, where my mother had developed complications, he was too afraid to hold me. In formal studio portraits taken a few months later, I look as startled as an owlet fallen from the nest. He is nowhere to be seen and rarely appears in any of the red leather-bound photo albums that document every moment of my evolution.

  But he must have been delighted because he did something truly out of character: he wrote a poem, his first and last as far as I know, to mark the occasion.

  Poem on the birth of a daughter

  Caroline Françoise Leonore, c’est moi:

  To be a good petite pumpkin, I’ve promised mama

  And with a bit of luck, je crois

  I plan to charm even papa

  I suffer from the disability

  Of developing his facsimile

  But mama says it doesn’t matter,

  His rocking influence she’ll shatter

  With a view to my becoming

  A young lady smart and stunning

  Here we have a happy home

  Where my mama does set the tone

  Both my parents me adore

  So we’ll have lots of fun galore

  Having given her much trouble

  I shall always harder struggle

  To endeavour to beguile

  My mama’s Mona Lisa Smile

  This collection of words is as awkwardly sincere as a hastily assembled bouquet of mismatched flowers. A connoisseur of language who prided himself on his vocabulary and syntax and could recite Shakespeare by the yard, my father would have known that this was pure doggerel. It does not scan properly. Its clumsy construction, as wonky as a makeshift table cobbled together by an amateur carpenter, is at odds with his customary elegant turn of phrase and sweeping, if pompous, cadence in letters and speeches. Its sentiment is sickly sweet, its naïvety gauche and simple in its optimism. And yet—something moves me about his pride, his hopes. The higgledy-piggledy verses suggest joy, the smattering of French words a sure sign of euphoria. I wonder about him choosing to write in the voice of the baby, who speaks as if she already knows she has her parents wound tightly around her little finger.

  Once I was brought home, Maman devoted herself to her role as full-time wife and mother with unqualified pleasure. She applied herself to homemaking and expressed her creativity through her talent for la cuisine, using her skills to lure my father home. My father salivated with anticipation for her boeuf en gelée. He would beg her to make his favourite Viennese zwetschgenknödel, plum dumplings rolled in breadcrumbs, cinnamon sugar and melted butter; sigh for her Yorkshire pudding; devour her mousse au chocolat; and ask for second helpings of every dish. Maman became an unrivalled kitchen goddess. Keen to show off his wife’s matchless beauty and talent, my father boasted to his colleagues, bringing them home for meals and equipping her with all the latest gadgets and accessories: a hostess trolley and hot plate, a fondue set, state-of-the-art mixers and a rotisserie oven.

  My mother, however, hated playing the corporate wife for my father’s business associates. Though she shone in the kitchen, she was bored and ill at ease at the dining table. Partly because my father, though he worshipped her cooking, was a tyrant about preparations for dinner parties.

  If the kitchen was my mother’s domain, my father invaded it with the brutality of a tank commander when it came to table setting. He planned as if preparing for full-scale battle. Out came his arsenal of weaponry: squadrons of glassware and crystal, which he insisted on washing in scalding water and then polishing till they sparkled. Inspecting cutlery as if it were troops, he ran a dishcloth between the tines of every fork before he was satisfied. By the time he had fussed over whether individual crystal salt cellars had been refilled, the number of serving utensils and the starched crispness of the napkins, my mother was usually in tears. When guests arrived, she was such a nervous wreck she could hardly speak or she would sulk through the meal, glaring stonily at my father as guests praised the food through a cloud of cigarette smoke, lighting up between courses. They talked only of business, never including my mother in the conversation. She dismissed them all as philistines. It was a torment.

  My role on these occasions was to curtsy at the door when introduced, take people’s coats like a maid, and hand around the nibbles and cigarette boxes I had been previously instructed to top up while guests enjoyed their pre-dinner drinks. I hated the falsely jovial bonhomie my father displayed to these suited strangers who stayed too long. Why was he so agreeable and pleasant to them and so vile to us? I despised his gracious hospitality, knowing how much he had bullied my mother in the lead-up to his performance. She often went to bed before guests left or retreated to the kitchen, where she had set up a portable television to keep her company.

  Once she left work to become a full-time housewife, my mother rarely visited my father at his office. I never enjoyed going there either. His manner was always imperious and peremptory, his tone either preoccupied or irritated. Staff acknowledged us with barely a smile. We always seemed to have arrived at an inconvenient moment or when a crisis was erupting. As a boss, Papa had the reputation of an ogre. His turnover in secretaries was so rapid that he could not remember their names and referred to them generically as ‘cows’. Sometimes he would bellow ‘COW!’ through the glass window that separated his office from his staff. At home I often heard him shouting down the phone, ‘I don’t pay you to THINK, I pay you to FOLLOW ORDERS!’ at some hapless employee who was just learning the ropes and was presumably stranded at an airport or hotel facing an unexpected disaster.

  The permanent pall of cigarette smoke in his brown timber veneer office stung my eyes. Like a captain on the bridge issuing updates on a change of course over a tannoy, he shouted commands into the pyramid-shaped intercom on his desk, as if catastrophe were imminent and there was a large iceberg ahead, interrupting himself to speak a memo into his dictaphone. Everyone seemed to be on high alert. We never stayed long. The only perk was being able to raid the stationery cupboard, taking home boxes of staples and paper clips.

  A military-style stickler for punctuality and order, my father expected his home to run on fixed routines. Dinner was always at 7.30. If he was late, stuck in traffic, we waited like staff for the master, without the benefit of a mobile-phone update. Everything was timed to be ready for his arrival. If he’d had a bad day, he would say, ‘Fix me an aquavit,’ before even crossing the threshold. I had the routine down pat: running to the hall cupboard lined with shelves of glasses and bottles to select a shallow eggcup of smoky Danish design, quickly pouring out just a thimbleful of the liquor. Having barely removed his overcoat, Papa would down it in one shot. The colourless fiery water took effect almost immediately, taking the edge off whatever tension
threatened, causing his shoulders to drop slightly. Sometimes nothing could quell the storm: if his mouth was twisted in a distorted downward grimace when he rang the doorbell (despite my mother’s repeated requests, he never used his keys, preferring to be formally welcomed like a visiting dignitary), it was wise to say nothing at the table and let my mother’s culinary prowess work its magic.

  If I was already in bed and heard his heavy footfall up the stairs, I prayed that he would not come and kiss me goodnight, as he tended to smother me in a crushing embrace that felt violent rather than loving.

  With my father often away on extended business trips, my mother might as well have been a single parent, although she did not have to worry about money. If she missed him, she never said so. Instead, we became so girlish in our cosy complicity that I imagined we were sisters. (In pre-adolescence I developed a habit of introducing my mother as my daughter to shopkeepers. Although she found it amusing, I now wonder if I had already intuited that she lacked a mother of her own.)