A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  My father organised everything and gave me away, or at least gave half of me away, at the altar. My mother showed her disapproval, disturbed not only by the lack of title but also by the life of poverty that she was convinced lay ahead of us. She showed little interest in the wedding plans beyond commissioning and paying for the dress, which was designed and made by her own smart haute couturiers. At the fittings I became a child again, unassertive, miserable at her joylessness over my approaching marriage. Unlike Victoria at Vita’s wedding, Philippa did at least appear, without Robin, at mine, arriving by helicopter, remaining downstairs as I put on my wedding dress upstairs in her old bedroom, alone with her hairdresser. Five minutes before we left for the church, I appeared at the top of the stairs in my expensive, diaphanous bridal gown. My father was waiting at the bottom. His face fell. The fashionable 1970s absence of a defined waist was not to his conventional taste. ‘You aren’t going to wear that, are you?’ he asked as I descended the stairs and tried to feel bridally beautiful.

  * * *

  With marriage I felt I had arrived at the point of irreversible and invincible grown-upness, the exhilaration of exclusive intimacy in which no one, especially not a parent, could interfere. I would never be treated as a child again. James loved Sissinghurst and my father loved us being there for the weekends. The ballast of becoming a couple even led to an unexpected but welcome easing of my tense relationship with my mother. We had little money but saved for a down payment on a small terraced house in Battersea, managing the mortgage between us. I was working in publishing and James left the discotheque and started an interior decorating company with a friend. He made our house lovely. We invited our friends for tea in our red sitting room, cooked shepherd’s pie in the yellow kitchen, ate off a table made out of an old door in the green dining room, bathed in an old Victorian bath in the blue felt-lined bathroom and slept in a creamy bedroom. Our life was as straightforward as the colours that surrounded us and we were happy.

  I understood why in her memoir Vita said the first four and a half years of marriage to Harold made her feel ‘rescued from everything that was vicious and violent’. My husband and I were embarking on our marriage in a spirit of contented equality. For me, the excitement wasn’t owning the toaster, or the novelty of entertaining in my own home, but more the concentration of affection I received from my husband and the bonus of realising that the partnership of marriage can be like no other relationship. I loved working out problems together, discussing obstacles as well as opportunities. I discovered the fun of planning weekends, holidays, birthdays, Christmases, all of life together: the heady feeling of infinite possibility. I felt as if I had returned to the sanctuary of the baker’s cart, which had been my refuge as a child, complete with a door James and I could close against a difficult world.

  10

  Juliet

  Guilt

  My mother’s second marriage was not working out. She had become frightened of her new husband. He was a busy man with little time for her. She was home alone, bored. The hot air balloon of luxury that might have lifted her up to a carefree heaven had instead lost its appeal and she was drifting slowly earthwards, in houses that were sweltering in temperature and freezing in atmosphere. Her existence became devoid of laughter or even much conversation. And she had begun to drink.

  Sarah, her best friend from the old schooldays in Norfolk, would telephone and realise immediately that Philippa was drunk. ‘Oh, Pippa,’ she would say sadly. ‘Don’t Pippa me’ came the go-away reply. So friends stopped visiting, uncomfortable at the deterioration of a woman who had once been so pretty and so gay. Like Pepita’s more-than-familiar relationships with the local stationmaster Monsieur Béon and the builder Monsieur Desombre, my mother befriended people whom she paid to ask no questions and who would not challenge her. The manicurist and dressmaker would gather for lunch at the house, where the air was scented with huge vases of expensive, out-of-season mimosa. Champagne and smoked-salmon sandwiches were served by the butler while the dressmaker convinced her client that she would look lovely in lilac, in navy, in stripes, in spots, in linen, in velvet, while imitating my mother’s drunken grimaces behind her back. When the beautiful clothes eventually arrived months later, just in time for the five-day Ascot Race Meeting, protected by sleek grey dust covers imprinted with the ‘By Royal Appointment’ logo, they hung in her cupboard unworn, as she had become unwilling and unable to leave the house.

  But in the face of undeniable evidence she denied there was a problem. And we, her children, also became distrustful, avoiding her on the telephone and in person as we all got on with our own lives. We would visit reluctantly, briefly determined to confront her, to save her, but realising as soon as we saw her that there was nothing we could do. She would attribute our hesitant suggestions that we could smell vodka on her breath to the Swiss herbal sweets that she claimed had been relieving her sore throat. In the library, where she sometimes sat all day watching interminable horse racing on television, there was a cupboard containing boxes of expensive mint chocolates, board games and, on the top shelf, one upended, unwashed glass tumbler. Even though the bottle of vodka had been more imaginatively hidden, the purpose of the solitary glass, tucked high above the snakes and ladders box, was impossible to disguise. The indignity of my mother’s appearance, old before her time, youth-drained, sometimes injured at ankle or knee from a fall, was shocking. She became bloated and reddened, angry and amnesiac, unloving and unreachable. We would leave her slumped on the sofa, disheartened all over again. She would absent-mindedly fondle the underbellies of her husband’s basenjis, sinister dogs deprived of a bark that squirmed with Trappist pleasure under her touch. I would quickly look away.

  In moments of lucidity she would call and berate me for being unkind and neglectful. She would regularly announce she had deleted me from her will, only to call the following week to say I had been reinstated. Her frustration at my refusal to allow the will to become a bargaining chip between us did not stop her from echoing previous generations who had used money to bribe their independently minded daughters. Victoria, who had loved her baby daughter with such intensity, who had ‘hugged her till she screamed’, reached a point when she could no longer manipulate Vita with money or jewellery and was driven through exasperated jealousy to accuse her of selfishness and ingratitude. My mother’s threats that she would cut me off held no power. I had heard them too often. I felt that the umbilical link between us had disintegrated beyond the point of repair. For years I had felt her indifference towards me but I did little to address the problem. I did not know then how to look for the reasons that she drank. Only now do I realise that when a daughter floats outside the perimeters of her mother’s experience, even a proud mother can feel a mixture of loss, envy and even anger. Only now do I understand the sense of rivalry that I awoke in her, the fear of her own inadequacy, the fear of acknowledging that her daughter loved her other parent more. Only now do I regret with a pain that twists my heart the irritation and cold impatience with which I treated her insecurity and her emotional fragility.

  There had been one unsuccessful medical intervention by her GP into her murky, chaotic existence. Philippa agreed without telling anyone in her family to check into a specialist addiction clinic on the King’s Road not far from where we had once lived. All street clothes were removed from those who might try to do a runner and exchanged for hospital gowns, but the clinic had no insurance against the theft of fur coats and my mother had arrived swathed in mink. The coat hung on the hook behind her door until the pub opposite opened its doors and she walked in fur-clad and ordered a double vodka. The following day, having been returned to the clinic by the pub and denied any further access to alcohol, she telephoned Adam, said she was in a prison and asked him to come in a taxi at once to rescue her. He had no idea what had been going on and, worried about her, came at once. The responsibility that, as an adult child, I, too, felt for her was often difficult to handle; it was similar to how Victo
ria had become a burden to her daughter, Vita, who felt both irritation and affection for her mother.

  Late one cold December evening in London, James and I heard the muted chuckle-throttle of a taxi engine pausing outside our new home in Fulham. My mother stood on the doorstep in the rain in a tightly belted mackintosh, an expression of apology and fear on her face. She was cold and she was sober. Over the next hour she described the depth of her unhappiness. Alcohol was barely mentioned, but she confirmed that underneath the need to numb herself was the sense that she was wasting her life. She felt trapped and useless. She could see where hope lay. On one side were her children, ready to help the moment she asked, and on the other was her husband, stuck in his ways, irascible, intolerant and uninterested. She had become caught between generations, holding on hard to increasingly invalid claims of youthfulness, dyeing her hair, shortening and lengthening her skirts with the changing fashions, and terrified at the ever steeper tilt into old age. All those past decades, a lifetime of being undervalued, had suddenly become too much. In four years’ time she would be sixty years old and she wanted to make some changes before it was too late.

  I looked at her face, the deflated skin, drooping like an empty pillowcase on a washing line. She seemed old. And exhausted. And lovable in her courageous desperation. For the second time in my life, I thought I glimpsed the vulnerable young woman who my father had met so long ago, a figure unknowable by her daughter but who had once been as real as this older, sadder version. We drank coffee. We listened to her. And as she sat in the safety of our house, she began to breathe more easily. It was as if by taking off her coat and expecting to brave the chill she had instead found warmth. She had come looking for yet another place of refuge and had at last found one that carried with it no penalties, no conditions. We offered to help. We promised we would do anything we could. We meant it. We were quietly hopeful. The taxi driver had switched off his engine and waited. Two hours later I hugged her goodbye and she returned the embrace with a strength that surprised us both. It was, I realised, a strength gained from her courageous admission of vulnerability, and its consequent, fleeting liberation from fear.

  Very early the following morning she telephoned. Anything she had said the night before, she instructed me in a flat voice, was to be forgotten and never mentioned again.

  * * *

  In 1984, James and I moved to New York. He had always been ambitious and had recently landed an impressive new job with Savory Milln stockbrokers. The opportunity to cross the Atlantic was too good to ignore and the prospect of a few years in Manhattan was thrilling to us both. Soon after our arrival, Philippa flew over on the Concorde to visit us. She had stopped drinking and there had been an advance call from London from my stepfather, perhaps at Philippa’s request, to ensure that there would no sobriety-splintering drinks in the minibar of her suite at the hotel. We filled our own fridge with orange juice. But abstinence for an alcoholic is a struggle without some sort of support, and willpower is an unreliable chaperone. Since her late-night visit to us in London, Philippa had not asked for any help, or ever acknowledged her problems. But it was clear from her shaky hand and nervous conversation that she was teetering. She had lost the confidence that she believed alcohol gave her. There was none of her usual mimicry of people she had met at the airport, on the plane, in the hotel. She was drained of the energy to camouflage her real feelings. I wanted to talk to her but she was terrified of being left alone with me. She made sure there was always someone in the room with us. I could not reach her.

  Shortly after Philippa’s return to London, she began to drink again. She was powerless to stop. All other attempts to find the elusive magic that would put an end to her unhappiness had failed. And she had tried an array of potential spells. There had been husbands, children, clothes, houses and travel. She had tried food, pills, sex, money, status and a restless, unsustained series of short-lived interests. There had been the tapestry-cushion-making phase, the carriage-driving interlude, the fascination for the iguanas indigenous to the Galápagos Islands, the study of fantail pigeons, the training of two Bernese Oberlanders – giant dogs from Switzerland, which were a gift from an admirer – the obsession with llamas, the photography fad, the craze for Lipizzaner horses, racing horses and racing demon, as well as the cooking, gardening and shopping habits that came and went throughout her life. Just as Victoria had brought her total commercial inexperience to the impossible venture of her stationery shop, my mother was ready to try anything once, just in case it solved her unhappiness. But none of these interests lasted, except the fuzzing, nurturing, numbing enemy in disguise, the utterly reliable escape-affording power of alcohol.

  Separated from her by the Atlantic, I would think about her every day. I dreaded her calls, and I dreaded her silence. I worried about her. I was infuriated by her. Each week I wondered if I should go over to London to try to help her. I knew I was abandoning her, and guilt urged me to forgive her everything and run to her. I had tried before, but maybe not often enough. Any outright confrontation had been met with denial, the Swiss throat sweets taking the rap yet again. I was split between the adult impulse to look after her and the childlike desire for a mother who would love me like other mothers loved their children, a mother who would once have been waiting for me when I returned home from school. I longed for consistency. It was the unpredictability of her behaviour that I found so difficult.

  In May 1987 we fought on the telephone. She hung up on me. A week later she went on a cruise, taking with her a friend who watched horrified as my mother threw lavish nightly parties for the crew, supplying them with unlimited champagne and behaving, according to her lovely, conventional friend, ‘in a manner inappropriate to her position’. She returned home having done irreversible damage to her liver. Within days her skin turned yellow and within a week she was in the intensive care unit of King Edward VII. Her GP rang me in New York. My mother was aware Mrs Thatcher had won the election the day before, and had smiled when she heard the result, but her mind was becoming hazy. If I wished to see her conscious, the doctor said, I should get on the next aeroplane. I went straight to the airport, the copy of Anna Karenina that I had been reading when the GP called in my bag. But I had been too late. She was already in a coma. As she lay in the hospital bed, she was oblivious to my presence.

  I went home to Sissinghurst. That day, as my mother lay dying, was a day of drifting disbelief. My father was uneasy, not trusting himself to be alone with me, all the things he wanted to say unsayable in case they reduced us both to a rubble of regrets. Outside he paced the garden, his nervous affectation, the hiss of his idiosyncratic whistle audible through the open window while I stood defrosting a chicken in the kitchen. Tiny flakes of ice burned my fingertips as I put the cold lump of white flesh on a plate by the window through which a dark pink, deep-smelling rose was curling its new shoots. My mother died early the next morning. She was fifty-eight years old, exactly the same age as her mother was when she died.

  * * *

  My stepfather regarded funerals as a man’s business. Women were not invited to attend such events in his own family. He had asked my brother to make arrangements for our mother’s service to take place the following day, giving Adam a budget for the flowers that Robin wanted sent in his name. I stood with Adam and Rebecca in the front pew at an occasion that should have been filled with choirs of angels, but the congregation was sparse. James joined me there, having flown over from New York. My father came from Sissinghurst, his sense of duty, guilt and real sadness all prompting his appearance at this final moment. The chauffeurs from London and Hampshire were there with the cook and butler from London and three of my mother’s oldest friends. The coffin sat on the conveyor belt in front of me, like a piece of decorated luggage at an airport, almost invisible beneath an eiderdown of mimosa, the flower that grows with such freedom and abandon in the South of France. The sweet, powerful scent hovered at the edge of childhood memories and hit the back of my throat. What a w
aste, I thought. She won’t see it, she won’t smell it. Years earlier Philippa had made a note of a favourite hymn she wanted sung at her funeral. The thin small chords of the 1930s organ at the Golders Green Crematorium accompanied words that celebrated the beauty of ‘hill and vale and tree and flower’. I tried to sing, twisting her eternity ring on my finger, the ring she had been wearing when she died, three interlocking circles of gold. But when I came to the lines about the joy of human love for ‘brother, sister, parent, child’, I could not sing. And I could not weep. I wish I had been able to. She had chosen those lines for us, her three children.

  After the service, my father went back to Sissinghurst on the train, and we children lunched with my stepfather on roast chicken and lemon mousse in his Mayfair dining room. His usual magnum of Perrier-Jouët was sitting in front of him. It was half empty. He had not been at the funeral and asked us no questions about what had taken place. As we sat down, he announced that he did not wish our mother’s name to be mentioned nor did he want any talk about the suddenness of her death or any speculation over its cause. Although he did not say so, I knew that she had disrupted his comfortable life, caused him embarrassment and much inconvenience and the less said about the whole thing the better. For him, her death was shameful but a relief and a release.