A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  One afternoon we walked down to see Masson. A maid opened the garden gate and we saw Masson on a deckchair in the sunlight, reading Le Figaro. He got up briskly and came over to greet us. He knew all about Gorky, had met him once, and he looked at Maro with curiosity. I knew nothing about Surrealism at that time. I only wanted to talk to him about Matisse. A shame. Masson was a key figure in Gorky’s life, and we hardly knew it.

  At Easter my parents appeared.

  If at first sight my mother was displeased to see Maro with me, she didn’t show it. However, a couple of days later, she said that they’d be driving over to see her old friend Anne Dunn at Saint-Estève. They wanted me to come, but Mum said there wouldn’t be room in the car for Maro as well. Maro said: ‘But I know Anne very well. We used to go to lesbian night-clubs together in Paris.’ Mum smiled as if someone had made a bad joke and ignored her.

  This left me with the choice of staying with Maro or going with my parents. Reluctantly, under pressure from my father, I went with them. When we got to Saint-Estève, the first thing Anne said was, ‘Where’s Maro?’ I mumbled that she’d been left behind, because Mum didn’t believe they knew each other. Anne said, ‘Is this true, Natasha?’ My mother just smiled and blinked.

  Maro went back to London in my absence. She was upset.

  After she’d gone, my parents drove to Maussane near Saint-Rémy, where someone had found a Provençal ruin for sale. They took me with them. Mum fell in love with the house and everything was fine, except I was in a foul mood because I felt she’d made me dump my girlfriend rudely and, for all I knew, definitively. My mother just wanted to talk about her plans for her ruin. She sketched on bits of paper while I tried to get her to admit that she’d behaved badly to Maro. A fight broke out. I remember saying, ‘I’ll help you build your house, but don’t expect me to ever live in it.’ Dad just sat there looking embarrassed.

  Next morning, Mum behaved as if nothing had happened. My father could afford the asking price of five hundred pounds, so that was that. He called it ‘Mum’s ruin’, as if it was entirely her responsibility. Thus Mum finally acquired the house she’d always wanted – not a honeysuckle-entwined cottage in Oxfordshire with Raymond Chandler in the attic, but an abandoned sheep farm that had once been used for target practice by the Germans.

  It was called Fengas, a Provençal word signifying mud. My mother didn’t like this, so she called it Mas Saint-Jérôme, and told the postman and the local tax office. She admired St Jérôme, who in paintings is always depicted as working quietly in his study, sometimes with a lion curled up at his feet.

  My mother stuck to that house for the rest of her life. In the autumn she’d drive out from London her oldest friends with whom she gathered her olives. Peggy Ashcroft was one. When the property burned down in a fire about ten years after Dad’s death, she rebuilt it. I kept telling her that she was too old, she couldn’t live alone there anyway, and therefore she should sell it. She paid no attention.

  The garden, about which she wrote a book that sold well, measured about seventy yards by thirty. She worked for more hours than I care to imagine on this garden, though the soil was barren and the water source feeble. Into this small space she lavished her love for the gardens of Sissinghurst and Chatsworth and all those other stately homes that she admired so much. She planned an elaborate pathway, and I can hear her voice saying ‘and then you turn the corner and you are in the White Walk’. This was five yards of white flowers. And when Dad said, ‘What will happen if a pink butterfly perches on a white blossom?’, she said without a smile, ‘Oh I don’t think that will matter, do you?’

  She called her shrubs by their Latin names, and they cowered. My father said that whenever shrubs in the local nursery heard they’d been chosen for Lady Spender’s garden, they’d start trembling, as if they knew they were destined for a concentration camp. He did not love that house, but he never told her. In summer it was so hot he couldn’t work, and it was bad for his heart, but he never refused to go and he pretended he was happy there. That house was his penance, his cure.

  When Lizzie and I sold it after her death, a strange thing emerged. The caretaker, a sweet Provençale woman, said that Mum had told her that she’d suffered very much as a child, because her mother had been a gambler who’d lost all her money at the Casino; thus they’d been miserably poor. This was exactly the story of the caretaker’s mother. It was a case of Mum trying to show sympathy by telling a lie. When I said, But our grandmother never gambled, the caretaker just gave a little nod. She hadn’t believed my mother, because the story was a mirror of her own. She did not hold it against Mum, for she knew she’d lied in order to be friendly. It was a moving example of Mum’s capacity to use those different voices that she’d learned in her childhood. Reality could be reassembled to fit the other reality of people’s feelings.

  After my parents had gone back to London, one evening as I rode my motorbike back up the hill from the bar at Le Tholonet, looking up at the full moon and thinking how beautiful life was, I ran slap-bang into a telephone pole. I was chipped and churned and the bike refused to go up hills after that.

  It was a seven-mile walk into Aix for the groceries and seven miles back. Once I was so hungry that when I got home I cooked and ate the entire week’s provisions.

  The market lay beyond the barracks. The French Foreign Legion had recently been recalled from Algiers. The war was over at last. Tough-looking soldiers stood outside in the street with their hands on their hips, glowering at the citizens of France who’d betrayed them.

  Missing Maro, I hitchhiked back to London.

  Chapel Street had remained the centre of Maro’s existence for some time after she’d moved into St Andrew’s Mansions. Then one day Mougouch had said, ‘Off you go, dear, back to your little world of Barons Court.’ This so annoyed Maro that, indeed, her psychological base switched from her mother’s kitchen to St Andrew’s Mansions, where a huge map of Europe was hung as a curtain over the window in the kitchen, with ‘Greater Armenia’ on it, taking over most of eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and western Iran.

  I was in London secretly, so I went to a theatrical store and bought myself a big moustache, larger than Hitler’s but smaller than Stalin’s. I thought it would provide anonymity. One evening we all went to a play. I knew my parents were in the audience, so I hid behind a pillar. Bimba’s father Louis MacNeice was also present. When she brought him over to show me in my splendiferous mustachios, he murmured, ‘It’s nice to see a Spender with a sense of humour.’

  For some reason this remark got to me. It was the first time I had an inkling that among my father’s generation, among his immediate peers, there were those who did not see him as an eminent figure.

  I went back to France a few days later. As I left, Maro took all my cash off me as rent. This was the result of the secret letter that Stephen had written to Mougouch saying we ought to be serious about money. I told Maro that I couldn’t exactly swim the English Channel, so she gave back just enough for the boat ticket.

  In France, I slept for the first night under the marquee of a wedding in Calais, which I found by mooching about aimlessly in the suburbs; and the second night in an orphanage in Clermont-Ferrand, which I found by asking a gendarme. I was very hungry by the time I got back to Aix.

  I went up to New College that autumn.

  There’s not much to be said about my Oxford career except that it was squalid. I was not depressed, in fact away from Oxford I was very happy, but I knew I wasn’t doing my best with the opportunities the university provided. I did not want them. On the other hand I could not do without them. Westminster had given me the appetite. I was in a bad way, because I felt that the opportunity to go to art school had come and gone and that every step I took towards Oxford took me away from art.

  From the rooms in the Old Quad that I shared with another student, we looked down on the Mound, an incongruous heap of vegetation surrounded by an immaculately razored lawn. I got into the habit of c
limbing out of college at dawn to paint a cypress tree in the local cemetery. Over time, the tree withered under my gaze. Back for a quick lunch of beer and a pork pie, a snooze, then at three in the afternoon my academic life would start. I knew how to write an essay. I should have been finding ways to feed this skill imaginatively, but I simply turned it into a vice. I gutted books and wrote my lines and that was that.

  I did not join any societies, I did not go to lectures and I did not eat in Hall. Instead, I joined the Ruskin School of Drawing and drew nudes. I read catalogues raisonnés in the library of the Ashmolean Museum, vast tomes with no colour reproductions, but the black and white photogravures had a solidity of their own. The Ashmolean owns the beautiful Piero di Cosimo of a fire in a wood, hung not far from The Hunt by Paolo Uccello, among whose dark trees the strident riders reminded me that in Italy nostalgia is not ornamental, it is an attribute of nature.

  I studied Japanese prints. I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum and arranged to guide tourists, but the Proctors heard about it and politely told me that I couldn’t study at Oxford and earn money in London at the same time. While in the V&A, the Keeper of the Print Room took me to one side and said that I should change from Modern History to Japanese at Oxford and come back to him in three years’ time. ‘You could carve out a nice little niche for yourself here at the V&A.’

  At the end of my first year, I earned an Honorary Exhibition. My essay on Bishop Anselm had apparently made an impression. No money, just a fluttering gown. My friends heard the word ‘exhibition’ and thought it was a show of my paintings, but these were getting smaller and tighter and more antique by the minute. Meanwhile the cypress tree tilted over on one side and was fenced in by ropes.

  In the interest of making us all get on better, I asked Maro to turn off her natural instinct for contradiction whenever we went to Loudoun Road. Couldn’t she just sit there and listen, for once? ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Conversation is supposed to be a ping-pong. But with your parents, it’s all ping and no pong.’

  One supper during my first year at Oxford, we went there for supper. The other guests were Auden and Freddie Ayer, who’d written a brilliant book on Logical Positivism that neither of us had read.

  Auden at table wasn’t the easiest of guests. His presence was benign, but he smoked between courses, wasn’t interested in the food, and when he spoke he was oracular rather than conversational.

  On this occasion, he announced that often one pretended to have read a book, even though in fact one hadn’t managed to get through it. The worst was to have written a review of a book before reaching the last page. That was ‘naughty’. He liked the idea of rules and morality, and this occupational hazard, which must face all book reviewers – and there were two others at the table – obviously broke an important rule.

  ‘For instance,’ he added, ‘I never got to the end of The Alexandria Quartet, even though I gave Durrell a good write-up.’

  Before Freddie or Stephen could say anything, Maro said that the great thing about Lawrence Durrell’s novels set in Egypt was the descriptions of the city and the feeling of being a European exile in Alexandria – though he wasn’t so good on the subject of the Egyptians themselves.

  Then it was Dad’s turn. He said he’d never seen the point of Rabelais. ‘But have you read him in French?’ said Maro quickly. ‘The way Rabelais describes food is marvellous, but it doesn’t come out so well in English. And anyway, the English aren’t interested in food.’

  No, said Dad heavily, he had not read Rabelais in French.

  Finally it was Freddie’s turn. Freddie said that he’d never managed to get to the end of Don Quixote. Maro started saying something about the emptiness of the Estremadura and Dad turned to her and said, ‘SHUT. UP.’ It was so emphatic, the full stop was audible between the two monosyllables.

  So Maro shut up. She didn’t seem discouraged, though. She’d read the books. The others hadn’t. Why shouldn’t she have chipped in?

  Not long after this, we were having supper at Loudoun Road when the subject of the origins of language came up. Before anyone else could say anything, Maro said that the origins of language were obviously onomatopoeic. ‘The Chinese word for strawberry will be like the noise of a Chinaman eating a strawberry.’

  Unfortunately, one of the guests at table was a professor of philology. He tried arguing. She persisted. He lost his temper. Nothing was more simplistic or inaccurate than what she’d said. The origin of language couldn’t be reduced to the imitation of natural sounds.

  Maro backed down, but she happened to be sitting next to my mother. In a kindly but persistent way, Natasha whispered to Maro that if one were sitting at table with a distinguished professor, one really had to pay respect to his superior knowledge. I saw Maro’s face begin to crumble. Next minute, she was going to start crying.

  Before this could happen, I rose from the table and said I really had to get back to Oxford. I had a train to catch. She and I got up. The professor started to apologize, but I said Never mind I really do have a train to catch, I’m sorry to break up the dinner party, please don’t mind us.

  In the street, I tried to take my mother’s side. Couldn’t Maro just keep quiet whenever we went to supper at Loudoun Road? She said, No. Well, couldn’t she at least think before she spoke, I said bitterly? ‘No,’ she said. ‘How can I tell what I think until I’ve said it?’

  If that was her attitude, why had she become so upset? If she’d ignored the social customs, she had to take her chances. She said, ‘But under the table your mother was pinching me!’

  There was no answer to this.

  ‘I can’t stand your mother’s respect for academics. That professor,’ said Maro. ‘He was just arguing with the argument. That’s what professors do. They squibble. But let’s not talk about it any more. I’m so tired, I can feel my eyelids creaking.’

  It was a long way back to Barons Court.

  ‘Oh, your mother,’ said Maro as we went to bed. ‘I refuse to be figged and I refuse to be tossed by her.’

  We stayed away from Loudoun Road. It was for the grown-ups to defuse the situation. No incoming calls came through, however. I brooded. Still the telephone kept silent. Was Maro right? Was there something remorseless about my parents?

  Many years later, on one of our ‘honeymoons’, when Dad and I went off together in order to bond in the absence of our wives, I mentioned the strawberry incident. Dad remembered it, and he added a detail which made me posthumously furious, as it were. He said that next day the remorseful professor had sent to Loudoun Road a big bunch of flowers with a letter of apology addressed to Maro.

  ‘Why didn’t Mum sent them on?’

  ‘Natasha thought that it would spoil Maro.’

  I looked at Dad, dumbfounded. If Mum had stuck to the rules, the flowers would have been received, Maro would have written a note to the professor, and the incident would have been closed. Why hadn’t he insisted that Mum send them on? He whose manners were so perfect?

  ‘Yes, I feel very badly about it,’ he said, trying to disengage.

  These incidents carried a weight out of all proportion to what had actually happened, because my mother always insisted that Maro had to learn from her mistakes. I’m sure that in the eyes of almost anyone, we were behaving badly. We were over-privileged and familiar and casual – I plead guilty to almost any reproof regarding my earlier self. But my mother took the view that we were all of these in relation to standards cast in bronze. It was this faith in her own rightness that made it so hard to talk to her.

  Dad came round to Maro in the end.

  It happened that one day he complained because someone had sent for publication in Encounter several poems written by an Eskimo. What could he possibly know about Eskimo poetry? Maro said, ‘But Stephen, surely you know that marvellous Eskimo poem that goes, “Granny, you are too old. It’s time we put you on to an ice floe and pushed you out to sea.”’ Dad almost broke a chair laughing. Maybe it’s what he�
�d always wanted to do with his mother-in-law, Ray.

  While I was in Oxford keeping my head down, Bimba took Maro up to Hampstead to meet Bill and Hetta Empson.

  My father probably met William Empson in the mid-Thirties through the Mass Observation project, where Stephen’s younger brother Humphrey worked – as did the second husband of Inez Pearn, Stephen’s divorced wife. Then Empson left England to teach in China, whence he returned shortly before the war. He went back to China to teach at Peking University after the war, and when he returned to London he gave the impression that he’d become a sympathiser of the Chinese Communist Party. Stephen admired and liked him, but there’d been an estrangement that had taken place soon after Encounter was founded.

  In 1954, at a party given by Louis MacNeice, Bill had cornered Stephen and accused him of having ‘taken sides’ in the conflict between America and the communist bloc. Stephen explained that he considered that Encounter was ‘a platform in which American points of view confronted and were confronted by opposite attitudes in other parts of the world’. Bill told him briskly that, if this was his intention, he’d failed. Others at the party tried to defuse the situation. Someone said that Empson was on such good terms with the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party that the wisps of his beard communicated with them directly by radio. The confrontation got worse, and in the end Stephen threw a glass of wine over Empson. Bill was good about it. He said there were so many stains on his suit, one more wouldn’t matter. Since then, however, the two distinguished authors had been on ‘non-speaks’, as the expression of the time had it.

  Bill Empson lived in a nimbus of his own, but he didn’t insist on deference if he threw out fragments of his thoughts. I remember one afternoon when he tried to convince his son Mogador that what the Chinese really needed was cheap timber for coffins, and he should buy lumber in Canada and set up a carpentry shop. Wearily, Mog waved his hand.