A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  Pam and Gervaise had recently made friends with Dorothy and Daniel Silberberg, an American couple who lived near Villa Arabe. Dan Silberberg was a successful self-made businessman from the Bronx – the exact source of his wealth Gatsby-mysterious. As an antidote to the precision of the business world, he supported up-and-coming artists, with whom he became friends. Philippa used to emphasise Dan’s commercial brilliance by telling the story of how he had made his contacts as a shoeshine boy in New York’s financial district, charming his way to a career as he buffed up Brooks Brothers’ loafers worn by Wall Street whizz-kids. Dan was the same age as Gervaise and they had met either over the barter of the trading floor or maybe simply as like-minded neighbours in the South of France. On one of Philippa’s frequent visits, Dan took a shine to Gervaise’s young, restless, unfulfilled and vulnerable daughter, and soon his own house at the newly fashionable fishing village of St Tropez, a few miles along the coast from the d’Eyncourts’ Villa Arabe at Cannes, became her latest refuge.

  In 1962 St Tropez was the most seductive place on earth. With its Gauguin-pink bougainvillea, lavender-scented air and cicadas chattering in the fig trees, this ancient and tiny fishing port had been attracting the rich, famous and glamorous ever since the film And God Created Woman, set in the town, hit the cinema screens in 1956. Its previously unknown star, Brigitte Bardot, the twenty-two-year-old wife of the director, Roger Vadim, played a sexually energised eighteen-year-old called Juliette. Bardot had bought a house on the edge of the town, positioned at right angles across the bay from the twin terraces of Dan’s own splendid house. Everyone knew when Bardot was in residence, buzzing around the tiny streets on her moped, blonde hair streaming out behind her, a bottle of wine and a stick of bread in the basket in front. Her well-known predilection for removing the top half of her bikini while sunbathing on the rocks outside her house was trumped by her habit of dancing shoeless, a never forgotten thrill for those lucky enough to find themselves touching toes with her on a nightclub floor. Everything about Bardot smouldered, even her alliterative initials.

  Dan was sun-leathered, square-faced, flat-faced, his darting lizard eyes predatory, alert, constantly assessing everything they lit on. His long-fingered hands were covered in liver spots. He spoke rarely and slowly, as if the effort of articulation exhausted him, and when he did say something, the volume was turned down so low that one had to lean in to hear him. He smelled of dust. He wore espadrilles with the backs down, the flap-flap of the sole on the red-tiled floors giving warning of his imminent arrival. During the day, he would take his house party out on his boat, the Darcey, rarely travelling more than a short distance from the shore before anchoring in the clear, warm Mediterranean water. A member of the crew would swim alongside the older English guests holding up high an umbrella in order to protect the sensitive English skin from an undesirable suntan. After the swim, lunch was served beneath a canopy on board while guests lounged and smoked on white cushions, drinking rosé and surveying the party scene on boats moored nearby. Sometimes Dorothy went out on the Darcey with the party, her particular skill for dressing the tomato salad praised with gusto by the guests. Sometimes she stayed behind, apparently unconcerned about her husband’s mesmeric power over younger women. With quiet dignity she closed herself away in the darkened, mosquito-screened dining room at the house, to be massaged by professional healing hands.

  A glamorous mixture of artists and businessmen, British aristocrats and beautiful girls assembled for the evening fun. There was a pub-like bar off the sitting room with a full range of exotic alcoholic drinks lined up on the shelves. Dressed in baggy lilac trousers and an oversize linen shirt, his eyes barely visible behind his thick-lensed tortoiseshell glasses, Dan would stand behind the counter mixing the pre-dinner cocktails. He would trickle a thin stream of scarlet framboise liqueur or deep purple cassis into cold white wine, easing out the cork as if pulling a ripened carrot from moist earth. Or he would squeeze lemon juice into a silver shaker, capped by a sieve to catch the pips, and add a splash of Bombay gin and a measure of Cinzano. Then he would give the concoction a good shake before pouring it into glasses with rims that had been dipped in sugar. He was an accomplished sugar daddy.

  My mother was enchanted by this sunshine world, so distant from her dull, domestic life in damp and rainy England. St Tropez became her favourite place to go, the scent of wild mimosa that grew so prolifically her favourite smell. She could not stay away. Any reproach by Nigel at Philippa’s absence was implicit. Perhaps he did not dare acknowledge that she was able to find greater contentment somewhere else, thus showing up his own inability to make her happy. Her mother, on the other hand, was not pleased, becoming increasingly disapproving back in the New Forest, writing to my father about her growing consternation that Philippa was spending so much time abroad with ‘aging Jews’. She began to suspect that her daughter was not only flirtatious, but lustful. It did not occur to her that Philippa was justified in longing to be desired, to be valued for herself, rather than considered inadequate for not matching the intellectual standards demanded by her husband. To Nigel’s continuing frustration and reproach, Philippa never listened to classical music and rarely read what he considered a ‘proper’ book. From the earliest days of their courtship, Nigel had made it cruelly clear in his letters to his parents that she was incapable of discussing philosophy, literature, architecture or politics. But his plans to ‘educate her’ had not worked out satisfactorily, and as illness, motherhood and then loneliness intervened, Nigel made his irritation with her all the more evident. So when Dan Silberberg, rather than judging her for her superficiality and frivolity, praised her for her pretty face, her lovely figure and her gaiety, she began to glow. Praise and an unprecedented awareness of her own attractiveness gave her a power that she had never enjoyed before, and it proved addictive.

  8

  Juliet

  Confusion

  My mother began her nine-day recovery from my birth at home in her pink quilted bed, surrounded by flowers and messages of congratulations. My father, entering with characteristic hyperbole into the drama, recorded that on the first day of my life, I was given a spoonful of water that I accepted ‘with the maturity of a marchioness sipping Cointreau’. I was not only a first child but a first grandchild. The Sackville flag was raised at the top of the tower at Sissinghurst in honour of my arrival. Harold wrote to Philippa to say the news had made him feel ‘thirty years younger’, and that night Vita wrote in her diary: ‘May God please be kind to Juliet all her life. And if she ever inherits Sissinghurst may she love it and care for it. Amen.’

  But when my mother fell ill with tuberculosis when I was eight months old, her incarceration at first in hospital and later in isolation in her bedroom at her parents’ house took her from me. Although ‘Mumma’ was my first word and the name by which I continued to address her all my life, the drugs that helped her get well ensured that ‘Strep-to-my-cin’ was my first sentence. Her long and tiring illness not only established a relationship that was undercut by her absence, but put the emphasis of parental presence on my father. Despite his total lack of experience with children, he rose at once to the challenge. He was supported by a series of nurses in starched and belted Carry On uniforms. When I was just a few weeks old, the first of these surrogate mothers came with us to spend the weekend with Vita and Harold at Sissinghurst, the long-since-forgotten site of a prisoner-of-war camp for French soldiers. After the nurse had put me to bed, she went for a walk in the garden and spotted a column of men beside the moat, talking in an incomprehensible language and wearing a strange version of military dress. On reporting the intruders to my father, she was immediately replaced by another nurse. My father did not go in for ghosts. They terrified him.

  I did not seek out ghosts but I spent a lot of time hiding away with the fairies. They lived in a clearing in the little wood beside the stream at the bottom of our garden in Hampshire, and from an early age I sat for hours alone in conversation with thi
s diminutive, alternative family in elemental secrecy, the damp earth underneath me, the strip of dancing water in front, the sunlight catching particles of dust in the air around me. When it was too dark or cold or rainy to see them, I knew they were sheltering inside the hollowed-out trunk of the oak. Once I misstepped in an attempt to join them and fell into the stream, my gumboots filling with water. Back at the house I was rebuked, stripped and plunged into a warm bath, where the autumn leaves sticking to my knees detached themselves and floated off towards the taps. After that I was forbidden to go down to the stream alone, and instead took refuge in the garden in the tiny caravan, an old painted baker’s cart that my grandfather Harold had given me for my fourth birthday.

  When Adam was born, in order to share the new responsibilities, allowing my mother time to recover and concentrate on the new baby, my father became voluntarily immersed in the care of his elder child. In his diary he wrote a detailed account of the morning routine established by a three-year-old daughter and her forty-year-old father, who at that time was sharing her room along the corridor:

  At 6.00 am Juliet batters me into wakefulness. I shout at her to go back to her cot and keep quiet. For the next hour there is a constant pattering to and fro to fetch various dolls and books. She carries on a conversation with her rag doll Fiona in hoarse whispers. I’m not asleep at all but I pretend to be. At 7.30 I tell her to dress. With mounting modesty she goes next door and puts on, usually back to front, her knickers and vest. She reappears at my bedside for inspection. With great care we then choose the frock or trousers to go over the vest. Hair is combed by me still from my bed. Shoes are buckled. And then after a cat-lick washing of hands and face she bounces off to P’s room … It is a very happy life.

  The physical weakness of his wife allowed Nigel a chance to participate in the earliest days of his daughter’s toilette in ways he otherwise would not have welcomed. The experience softened him. He loved being a father. We also had nannies and rabbits – Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, Peter and several dozen of their immediate descendants – a marmalade-coloured cat, Chunky; a budgerigar, Budgie; my male counterpart, the Border terrier Romeo; and each other. When my brother, Adam, was old enough, he joined me in the baker’s cart. He called me Duster because he couldn’t say ‘Juliet’. We were allies, dressed in clothes cut from the same cloth: blue, red or yellow Viyella dresses with collars for me, short trousers for him.

  In 1960, when I was five, Jenny, the daughter of Doccor Howard, asked me to be her bridesmaid. In a short sequence of movie footage from the wedding, my mother, immaculate in her black broad-brimmed hat and a sleek black-and-white linen costume, stands at the church porch waiting for the arrival of the bride. I am standing beside her in a white, ankle-length dress made of stiff organza, a pale blue velvet ribbon at the waist, and holding a small wicker basket filled with lily of the valley. One whiff of the sweet scent of those delicate bell-like flowers, the same flowers that had been given to Vita on her return home from the Sackville-West inheritance trial, takes me back to childhood in an instant. The memory mutates into the unusual sensation of the fabric of a new dress, a bridesmaid’s dress, brushing against bare calves, scratchy and thrilling at the same time. In the film Philippa bends down to speak to me, her hands encased in pristine white elbow-length gloves clasped tightly behind her back, well out of the way of sticky fingers. Later in the footage and after the service I am skipping about in Doccor H’s summery cottage garden. I look up to my father, and as I stretch up my hand, his answering hand reaches down to enclose mine. Hands mattered. Holding a parental hand was like being called ‘darling’: rare but special.

  At times Philippa had seemed happy enough. In my favourite photograph of those days, my mother is in the middle of the picture, wearing a creamy mid-calf dress. She is holding the hands of her two children – on her right is a six-year-old blonde girl in a striped summer frock, a cardigan and a hairband made of blue ribbon, while on her left her three-year-old son stares up at the hulk of an enormous white ship that is docking in front of them. We are in the London Docks, waiting for our new Finnish au pair Brita (the latest in a long line) to disembark from her ship, the Baltika. I had privately longed for the ship to sink before it arrived because it was a day when we had our mother all to ourselves and I did not want it to end, especially because she was holding our hands.

  Much of the time my mother felt quite unreal to me, never tethered, floating off, always busy, remote, disconnecting from me in mind and body. And yet for a while it was her remoteness, her elusiveness that made her so seductive, the night-time rustle of satin close to my ear as she bent down to kiss me goodnight before going out to a dinner, a passing mist of rose-tinted scent that lingered even after she had closed the door and gone downstairs. Years later at boarding school when I was a teenager, I would still mouth her name over and over again, wanting her to come to me, to be near, to stay with me. Perhaps she did not realise how much I wanted her to show me that she loved me. Perhaps her own mother had never shown her how.

  I did not want to leave Hampshire for London. I loved Shirley House and all the animals, and I did not want to leave Alison, my best friend from school, who had yellow hair like mine. Our new house in Chelsea was just off the unsmart end of the King’s Road. Council houses and blocks of flats had replaced the Victorian slums and stood among the Georgian terraces. Although it all felt very modern, and taxi drivers knew the area as the World’s End, we missed the country. The garden at the back of the house smelled musty and was filled in all seasons with dead sycamore leaves, the flaky surface of each leaf swollen at one end to house a tiny nut, like the aniseed that is left behind at the end of a sucked gobstopper. Adam and I would dig up the stale urban earth around the sycamore leaves with a spoon and fork, excavating a tunnel that would lead us down to Australia, or at least back to the Hampshire fields. But it was also exciting to be living in a city where the ice-cream van stopped right outside our front door and played the Popeye tune to announce its arrival. Every afternoon the rag-and-bone man clattered down the middle of the street, shouting for any old iron, his horse oblivious to any car traffic as if the pair of them were still working in the eighteenth century, while the oddly illicit, acrid smell of hops fermenting at the local brewery swirled in the air.

  Each morning four of us would leave the house in Limerston Street. In the beginning Adam walked to his kindergarten with Brita while my father bussed me to my school in South Kensington before getting on the Tube for the onward journey to his Oxford Street publishing office. Within a year it was considered safe enough for us go to school by ourselves and at the ages of seven and four we began to lead lives that were frequently unsupervised. I would catch the double-decker bus directly outside our door, getting to know the conductors, who kept an eye on unaccompanied schoolchildren. At the same time my little brother, wearing his red-and-green uniform, his cap covering his blond hair, was put onto the number 19 or 22 to Sloane Square, from where he had to walk by himself along the remaining stretch to the school door. We undertook the journeys in reverse each afternoon, and sometimes after school we were allowed to go round the corner to the local toy shop that sold Dinky Toys sports cars for boys and Sindy dolls for girls. Occasionally, the owner produced a gem from under the counter, a battery-operated telescope that ranged round the night skies with an especially powerful beam, or a miniature spade-and-fork kit that would have gotten us to Australia far faster than a spoon and fork. Once he showed us his own model of a 1911 San Francisco fire engine that set both our hearts racing.

  Farther along the road, the baker’s home-made doughnuts claimed our weekly pocket money. The sugar stuck to the upper lip, and the blood-red jam squirted out of a hole in the dough, no matter how carefully we tried to staunch it with the paper bag. The baker’s assistant (or was she his wife? his sister? his daughter?) had a huge goitre on her neck. We stared. Her slightest movement between the trays of currant buns, jam tarts and pastry horns filled with artificial cream caused t
he huge growth to wobble from side to side like a balloon filled with water. The streets around us were packed with various kinds of uniforms: small children in school uniforms accompanied by nannies in nanny uniforms, old Chelsea Pensioners in uniform red coats with gold buttons, and lots of pretty girls with uniform fringes that were so long you could hardly see their eyes and skirts so short you could see their knickers.