Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  An Apache war cry rang out as Bella wedged her black kid boot in the door, grabbed Phyllis’s wrist and then hurled them both at the solid oak obstacle. Simultaneously, Alfred had decided to retract his hasty decision.

  Like silver bullets, mother and daughter shot through into the entrance hall, upsetting two aspidistras and a coat-stand, which hit the hall carpet with a thud.

  ‘Now, let’s have a nice glass of champagne, shall we?’ Bella suggested as she straightened out her skirt and brushed herself down, briskly.

  Phyllis and Alfred exchanged glances.

  ‘Just the three of us. Like old times,’ said Bella, who smiled as she took first Alfred and then Phyllis each by the hand and swooped into the drawing room. Neither Phyllis nor Alfred dared to mention that old times did not exist. This was indeed the first of any such occasion.

  The maid then entered, tweaking at her apron strings. ‘Please, ma’am, may I have the evening off to go to the pictures? Orphans of the Storm is on, with Lillian Gish.’

  ‘You live in this house and you want to PAY for entertainment?’ shrieked Bella.

  The maid’s lip had wobbled.

  At that moment Bella, who had been wrestling with the cork on a vintage bottle of champagne, which was wedged between her knees and embillowed in her navy-blue skirt, had let the thing go with an OOOPPP!

  The maid sniffled and rushed from the room. Bella whooped with excitement as the smoking liquid trickled into three glasses. But after she had daintily distributed the drinks with a little curtsey, Bella fell mute. For all his self-indulged drunkenness, his dry lips and his beetroot cheeks, for all his rages and brawls, Alfred recognised that this was not a good sign.

  Not one bit of a good sign, he thought.

  Sure enough, later that same night, Bella ran out on to Cheyne Walk brandishing a large kitchen knife, and stabbed a man who happened to be walking alongside the River Thames. Luckily, he survived the vicious attack, but according to Phyllis it took six policemen to restrain Bella who had still struggled even when she was carted away by ambulance.

  The system, if that is what you could call the management of the mentally disturbed in the early part of this century, failed Bella. Her death warrant was effectively signed after what became commonly known in Bedlam as ‘the Matron and the Mirror Incident’. Bella’s presence was deemed untenable. Nothing had ever been done to answer Phyllis’s questions or anxieties.

  ‘We don’t keep incurables here’ was the official final word delivered to Phyllis before the hospital arranged for a transfer. As with many rambling state institutions, only after six months did the urgent deportation of Mrs Gross become a reality.

  On one June day, an underfed Bella was taken, shivery and drugged, by ambulance to Horton Hall Workhouse and Lunatic Asylum in Epsom, Surrey. Within a week she had contracted pneumonia and Phyllis was summoned.

  A dank and unlit train carried Phyllis from Waterloo to Epsom.

  Every noise had jarred, from the ticket inspector’s whistling to the rush of steam and wind. A cup of tea from the buffet car had poured itself like hot wax into her tightly drawn throat. Phyllis’s thoughts were set adrift in anguish.

  ‘I don’t want to be an orphan,’ she grieved. ‘I have a father, but is it so very bad to ask to keep my mother too?’

  It had become evident to Phyllis that an asylum was not a sanctuary or a place of healing, but one where the afflicted and the destitute were sent to rot away. Bleached tiles and death smells greeted her here at Horton Hall. The drone of the insane spiralled down the clicking hallways. The heavy keys, the iron gates and wailing all wrung at Phyllis’s guts.

  There can be no greater horror than this, she thought, as five senile women and one younger one capered into her sight. This was the Grand Guignol ward.

  ‘Here is your mother, Mrs Pearsall,’ the Matron piped up, stopping at a sunken body, covered in the regulation bedspread.

  Phyllis knelt at her mother’s bedside and placed the chilled wasted hand in her own. ‘Has she seen a priest?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet. But he is on his way.’

  ‘Please would you be so good as to fetch me some consecrated wine?’

  For all her lack of religious conviction, Phyllis felt compelled to ease her mother’s suffering with an ancient ritual.

  And with that, Bella rose up in her sheets, her arms outstretched and her every feature ravaged by the early stages of decomposition. ‘I’m frightened,’ came a hoarse whisper.

  She was only fifty years old. Her own mother had died in her eighties, sitting in her rocking chair at home, preaching the gospel to Tommy, the Crowley family canary. Had it been a happy life-story, then perhaps the priest would have arrived in time, to comfort Bella. She would have gazed into his kindly eyes and the photograph she had kept in her Bible, of her own father as a young man and a priest, would have slipped into her vision and then the soft, smiling face of her own mother would have called her name as she too appeared, standing behind her father, as they beckoned her out of this world and into the next with open arms.

  But the priest did not arrive in time. And even the consecrated wine that Phyllis pressed to her mother’s lips did not pass them.

  ‘Too late,’ the nurse mouthed to Phyllis, whose face was slippery wet with tears.

  Alfred proclaimed that he could not paint at all without ‘my Vernie’. And sittings with Prince Edward had been reduced to whisky-drinking sessions in which the two men commiserated over their beloved women.

  ‘I cannot live without my Wally,’ moaned Prince Edward, and according to Phyllis, Teddy poured out his heart to Alfred.

  Alfred never made contact again with his stepson Tony, whom he had encouraged as a student while attending the Slade and to whom he had passed on his painting secrets.

  But in spite of this help from Alfred, Tony would write in his memoirs: I used to quarrel dreadfully with him. He was a good man at heart and his principles in painting were sound. Unfortunately his destruction and my mother’s as well was due to the fact that he was a complete alcoholic. He has now long since been dead and my mother too and I hope they have both pardoned me, as I have long since pardoned them.

  ‘Wretched and bitter’ was how Alfred described himself to his friends after Bella’s death. He truly believed that to go on living would be an impossibility. Any gratitude he may have spared his late wife’s daughter after she had insisted that he keep Bella’s ashes had been washed away by his own complete self-absorption.

  But when later Alfred decided to scatter Bella’s ashes in their favourite place for walking and painting outdoors – Kensington Gardens – he was apprehended and told it was against the regulations of Royal Parks. And so Bella’s final resting-place remains unknown.

  Forlorn and bankrupt, Alfred’s painting of Edward Windsor was to remain unfinished. His ginger beard had grown straggly, his liver could not sustain his high living and within a year, Alfred too had died, far away from his family and homeland, alone in the infirmary at Paddington.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  My Old Man Said, ‘Follow the Van . . .’ (and don’t dilly dally on the way)

  Looking back over the past eight years, at her travels through France and Spain with Dick, Phyllis recalled how the bright flamenco colours and orange groves, the scent of wild herbs, blue seascapes and dry white walls had served, as they had done for Tony before her, as sensuous distractions from her past.

  The joy of each completed canvas, worked on under the shade of the olive trees in a village square, the easy routine of an afternoon siesta and a night dancing after paella and sangria, and the pleasure of every donkey-ride across the scrubby hills that tracked down to the sea, had led her memories away from The Firs, away from the contented family who had once lived there so long ago.

  Only when her marriage had ended did England beckon to Phyllis in her dreams. It was time to go home.

  From her scant knowledge of London, Phyllis knew that Chelsea was a pretty place. If she s
ettled there, she would be near to Bella and Alfred. She suddenly imagined herself entertaining them to a tapas lunch (without mishap), or Bella agreeing to sit with her elegantly pinned hair, perfectly still on a stool, as Phyllis sketched her eyes flitting over the busy street below.

  But within months of returning to London, and in nightmare circumstances, she had lost her beloved Mama. Phyllis shooed Bella’s dying face from her mind. Instead, she recalled the ludicrous, wonderful, beautiful, incompetent mother whose death she would never get over. Before her danced the letter Bella had once sent by mistake to her at Roedean, instead of to the laundry. It read: Two Milanese silk petticoats are missing. Much-loved characters sprang up from the children’s books Bella had written – Douglas the Daring Dispatch Rider, Mulberry and Merrylegs. Then, the lulling tone that could only come from the voice of a mother, as Phyllis heard her reading from Tess of the D’Urbervilles in the library, while she and Tony, no more than eight years old, curled next to the fire, stroking the tiger rug.

  Fortunately, the regret and sorrow at her loss never dragged Phyllis down into an inherited dependency on alcohol or other drugs, nor on the creatures that had let both of them down – men.

  Sandor, bewitched by his New York life, had begun to publish guides of the city that were selling ‘like hot potatahs’ as he told Phyllis with his American twang. New York was swiftly followed by The World.

  ‘Alexander Gross is back in town,’ he boasted to his daughter.

  Despite their often convivial correspondence, it is an amazing fact that Phyllis did not inform her father of Bella’s death for another twenty years. Sandor, of course, was unsurprised that his former wife chose not to keep in touch, nor was he concerned enough to mention it to his daughter.

  Phyllis’s ability to make and keep a decision like this hints at her formidable wilfulness, yet from her point of view it was based on sound reasoning. Firstly, she would not hear of bringing distress to her father, however necessary, and secondly, that same father, she believed, would only throw dirt and shadows on the memory of her mother.

  When she did eventually tell Sandor, it would be in 1955, two years before his death and on a rare visit from New York to London. After a dinner of Beluga caviar and fresh Dover sole, he led Phyllis upstairs to the balcony of his suite at The Savoy to take in the view of the Thames. As she began to speak, Phyllis leaned her head against her father’s pitiful face. For once, when his voice trembled, it was not with anger.

  ‘Bella was my life. I never married again, did I? She loved me. Don’t forget that, Phyllis. Did she ever tell you so?’

  Phyllis could not answer.

  Then, Sandor felt the moment shift too much for his liking towards sentimentality. ‘You know the reason I’m in Town?’ he said briskly. ‘I’m here to get backing for a new project. Not really my thing but I’m publishing the New Testament – Jesus, in fifty-two weekly parts, from Mary’s annunciation up to Christ’s death. And I am also about to start a pornographic comic – you would not believe the booming market in pornography! But I need a title for it, so get your head around that one.’

  With that he called room service and ordered himself a whisky. ‘You, little lady, must be tired,’ he said, holding open his door for Phyllis to leave. And that, apparently, was that.

  Sandor flew back to New York the following morning. On his arrival at his apartment he found a telegram:

  HOW ABOUT SEXTASY.

  He fired one right back: SPLENDID. YOU’VE INHERITED YOUR MOTHER’S TALENT FOR THE OUTRAGEOUS.

  Somehow, after Bella’s death, Phyllis carried on regardless. The voice in which she asked to be shown around a vacant bedsitter on the Horseferry Road and then the smile she gave as she handed over her rent deposit to the landlady was, for all anyone knew, perfectly normal.

  For such an acutely observant person, whose over-excitement at everyday things – the shape of a milk jug, flowers wilting in a window-box, a livid sunset that took away her breath – Phyllis had become strangely monastic about her surroundings. Of course, poverty played a part, exacerbated by Alfred’s inability to pay her mother’s debts, and his pathetic request that, as her darling daughter, wouldn’t it be right for Phyllis to contribute?

  But what did it matter, she thought, that her new bed was not wide enough to turn over in, that a chest of drawers had to become a makeshift wardrobe, that none of her wooden chairs matched, while the flimsy lemon curtains were so faded, she could not tell there had ever been a pattern. Money had made her dear parents wretched, yet frequently having none in her pockets in Paris had given her the sensation of total freedom.

  Over the months following her bereavement, the rope that tied Phyllis to the present was portrait-painting. Those sitters whom Alfred could not fit into his schedule he generously directed to Phyllis. Clients began to climb the stairs to her bedsitter; after offering them lemon tea, she would perch them on a rickety chair and begin to sketch. Hours skipped away as Phyllis squinted and smiled in turn at the subject, while continuing to paint and chatter away. She did not dither.

  ‘Hop off!’ she would eventually say to the stiff bodies longing to stretch. ‘All done for today!’

  So often artists notched up a reputation as unreliable and ornery miscreants who overcharged for their work, but Phyllis was different. Quite soon, her own schedule was full, too.

  At night, a beautiful nothing. Silence. A hot bath. A book – Joseph Conrad most likely, or Henry James. Smoked chicken on toast. Anything and everything, just as she pleased. I came back to England, Phyllis wrote, and oh, it was lovely, not having this perpetual anger.

  The years of selflessness dropped away from her. Make no mistake, her kindness and consideration towards others did not disappear, but the effort of constantly trying to please Dick had, she felt, robbed her life of too many years. Unbeknown to Phyllis, she was about to get involved in something new, something all-consuming that would wipe out her nightmares and her terrible sense of loss. That something would reveal itself one stormy night, a few days after her birthday in September 1935.

  It was one of those nights when everything seemed destined to go awry. Phyllis had accepted an invitation to dine with one of her more distinguished clients, Lady Veronica Knott, at home in Maida Vale.

  Time had already played crafty tricks on her and then, as she buffed her shoes, the light flashed off. Phyllis dashed to the window and could see the rest of the street in darkness. A power cut. After dressing as best she could in what she hoped was her red dress, and knotting a silk scarf around her head, she felt her way down the stairs and then back up again, for she had forgotten the flowers for her hostess. In the street, before she could fully unfold her umbrella it had blown inside out; the monsoon puddles that sloshed around her feet could not have been deeper. By the time she jumped on a bus at Victoria Street, her lilies resembled trodden on leeks and her shoes steamed.

  Oh dear.

  When the bus chose to choke and rattle and shudder to a stop, apparently too poorly to continue its journey and the conductor shouted, ‘Warwick Avenue!’ Phyllis hopped down, anxious not to be late. Unfortunately, it was the Harrow Road end, a further splattering walk until her final destination – Bristol Gardens.

  Perhaps her spirits were unusually low, remembering how much fuss and fun her mother had made out of rain, but Phyllis could not tweak out a smile. God’s wash, Bella had called it. ‘Here comes God’s wash, children – run!’ But now, after years in the arid Spanish climate Phyllis flinched at its all-permeating powers.

  Lady Veronica opened the door to receive her battered flowers and battered guest.

  ‘Mrs Pearsall, just you wait there on the doormat,’ she said, her voice slightly strained, as she summoned the butler to offer Phyllis towels while she continued to drip quite extensively on to the finely woven Indian carpet. The three couples already poised over their asparagus soup were intrigued by the fiery-eyed, brightly dressed, sodden young woman who breezed into the dining room.

 
‘I am so very, very sorry for being late. Do forgive me, please.’

  Then the conversations began, bombarding her with as many ideas as questions.

  ‘Do you drive, my dear?’ began one gentleman with a tight little moustache, whose name she thought was Gibson.

  ‘Good Lord, tell me you didn’t walk,’ interrupted a blonde woman in a shimmering turquoise dress to his left. Phyllis assumed this to be his wife, since ‘Gibson’ referred to her throughout dinner as ‘Silly’.

  ‘No, I’m afraid I just look as if I did.’

  ‘I told you no one walks these days, Silly.’

  ‘One does find it tremendously hard to negotiate London, especially if one is rarely in Town,’ chipped in Lady Veronica.

  ‘Yes, but do you not find that unless you are in a taxi, there is no clear way to know how to get to where one is going?’ queried Lord Knott.

  This conversation would nag at Phyllis all through the remaining duck and brandied-plum courses, and then through the night. The very next morning, she became determined to find a street map of London.

  First, she went to Foyles on Charing Cross Road, where she was told, ‘The last Ordnance Survey map of London was charted in 1919.’

  ‘I’ll take two copies, please.’

  As she walked back to Westminster, her mind was whirling with ideas. What should she do next? Back at home, she unravelled one of the maps and put a book on each corner. She hung over it like an eagle, her eyes picking at everything. When the light began to fail, she lit candles, her body casting a mean shadow over the Thames.

  ‘By the government for the government,’ she murmured, ‘but what about me? What if I want to go from here’ – she stuck her finger on Chiswick High Road – ‘to here’ – and she stuck another on Highgate. ‘There’s no index. No London Underground markings. No house numbers.’

  As her artist’s eye noted that new roads were nowhere to be seen, she tutted at the misuse of space and the lack of colour. What is more, the map was full of inaccuracies.