After Chinese food, there was a lull; maybe it was in this lull that he produced my yellow retriever pup Guisachan, dropping her on to my bed as I slept after giving birth to Clementine. The next phase was altogether more esoteric and demanding; Nol became an apprentice chocolatier. He joined the University of the South Bank and learned a tremendous amount about the temperatures at which chocolate is shiny, less shiny, not shiny at all, completely screwed up and so on. He purchased a white overall and he worked in beautiful white gloves. There was nothing he could not do and boxes of chocolates so complex and so pretty that it was impossible to imagine eating them started to appear at family occasions. Nol was the most patient enrober, glosser, crystalliser, ganache-maker and praline-crackist. At this stage in his life he had not yet separated from his third wife. They lived in a house of airy elegance with a parrot named Albert, who had plucked off all the feathers save those on his head, so that Quentin would say he looked oven-ready, and three wire-haired dachshunds named Charlotte, Anne and Emily. The minute precision required by chocolate technology was a challenge to domestic and marital life and it was perhaps a manifestation of their internal schisms when forty-five gallons of enzyme for making soft centres turned up in a drum on the doorstep. Each chocolate requires but one drop.
Nol would have made a good teacher and, in happier times, he could have been an intimate and loving parent and grandparent, had his heart spared him.
The night before our wedding day, I lay in Aunt Mickey’s elder daughter Angela’s maiden bed in St James’s Palace and prayed. I do not remember sleeping though I must have. I remember quantities of indecisive, pleasant February rain falling and the wide view from my window over the sentry box and up St James’s Street. In a box in the cupboard were my white suede shoes, size six, in which I was to walk into my future.
Quentin and I moved to London, renting a house in the Portobello Road, because his bachelor house in London had been set fire to by an arsonist–an episode terrifyingly and more extensively described in Janet Hobhouse’s novel The Furies.
I am incapable of thinking about this with any precision. It occurred around the time of Oliver’s birth. I hardly know about it save through fiction. Quentin had lent his house off Westbourne Grove to Janet when she casually mentioned that she had nowhere to live on a visit to us that snowy winter of Olly’s birth. Janet was living there and lost the manuscript of a book that she was writing on Braque in that fire. Thank God she did not lose her life, though that too was early extinguished by the cancer that drives The Furies into being the stupendous novel it is.
The arsonist had seen Quentin’s car and formed an idea of us for which he evidently did not care. He made a pyre of everything moveable in the house, which was not a great deal, poured petrol over and lit it. Both Quentin and I have, with increasing reason, a deep horror of fire.
During our time in the Portobello Road, Oliver learned to turn somersaults and his sister was conceived. I would not mention this did she not like the idea; it has remained ‘her’ part of London.
While I was expecting Oliver, Quentin himself had been at sea for a good deal of the time, completing his own private circumnavigation on his ketch Ocean Mermaid. Quentin is one of the few people in the world who is entitled to wear the tie of the Association Internationale Amicale des Captains de Longs Cours Cap-Horniers. That is, he has been around Cape Horn, more than once, under sail. To attend the meetings of this society even as an appendage is a privilege. On one occasion, I was lucky enough to see a film made on a full-rigged tea clipper when one of the nonagenarians present had been just a boy holding on for dear life to a spar as the great ship rounded the Horn. No soundtrack, but you read the sails.
Quentin can name the stars and navigate by them. He can find land using dead reckoning. He stopped hunting after his mother’s death and took it up again the day it was made illegal. He has a passion for justice, a tenderness for the underdog, and a mind that works patiently and logically through to the bone of the problem. There is something of Plantagenet Palliser to him. He is quiet, but when he speaks, he has a beautiful voice.
When Clementine was born, Aunt Mickey presided once more like a more worldly angel of maternal lore, and Nanny Ramsay came too. We had a new house to move into, an estate house just beyond the gates of Farleigh House where the school still festered. Clementine had expressively conversational hands and was a very slow eater. She decided not to breastfeed and very early conquered her larger brother, who referred to her as ‘Birdy’ until her birth and was her subject in love as soon as he saw her. He would stand with his feet tucked into the bars of her cot and loom over her, shedding a shadow that was bright orange at the top where the sun fell upon it. They were, and are, each other’s stalwart best defender.
After the birth of Clem, the health visitor suggested that I might like to get out of the house a bit and do some A levels with a view to gaining some qualifications–and perhaps some other ‘interest’. I was reading avidly, though that is not invariably deleterious to the raising of happy and balanced children, and both children seemed to be flourishing. I was one of the first people to read Midnight’s Children. As well as the seethe of the book, I liked the look of the thin, modest, exhausted author. Shrewd of me, if not precisely prophetic.
Things between Quentin and me had shifted and held us apart at an undeclared pitch of difficulty. We could not find the words with which to row our way to safety, then found the wrong ones. Not for the first time I lit upon escape as a solution. My father wrote me a, for him, unusually direct letter of concern. It suggested that although powerfully drawn by temperament to Italy, he had come to place a higher value on the aesthetics of the Dutch School. He loved Quentin.
I left Farleigh. I went to stay with my friend Rosa Beddington in her tiny house in Oxford. The telephone rang. It was Lucinda Wallop, Quentin’s sister. She said, ‘Daddy’s dead.’ I said, ‘No, he can’t be.’ He was only sixty-one and Quentin had just found a home for him close to us on an island on the River Test. He was a loveable, unrealised man.
I visited estate agents. I am not at all sure how lucid I was. One estate agent assured me that very few rental houses accepted children, most particularly not one house I liked the sound of that lay deep in rural Buckinghamshire. ‘No Children’, I read. There were no pictures of the property.
Very uncharacteristically, I found myself driving down a half-hidden road signed to Wotton Underwood. I could park my little car because there was a large gravelly yard to the side of what seemed to be an architectural hallucination, a golden pink central house flanked by lantern-shaped pavilions, behind delicate wrought-iron, golden-berried gates. It was a sleeping beauty. I looked to my right and saw that there was a gate leading to a wishing well on a wide lawn that ended in a ha-ha and beyond that at least one lake. I rang a doorbell at the side of the house. A funny bracket, as though for a pub sign the size of an equestrian portrait, stuck out of the side that faced where the cars were parked. It was high summer. I realised that this bracket must be for swinging in enormous paintings, pianos, furniture through the great windows of the house. The door was answered by a woman with my maternal grandmother’s very voice. She took one look at me. I was not a pretty sight, fat, wretched, scared, uprooted, unaware that alcohol would never make anything better. The witch who opened the door, for a white witch she was, said, ‘My child, you will live here. And you will bring your children.’
This phenomenon was Mrs Elaine Brunner, who, going one day to a garden clearance sale in the 1950s had seen the house to which that garden was attached. The house was due for demolition, having in its last usage been a school for delinquent boys. She had on that day a powerful instinct that underneath the Edwardian modernisations by Sir Reginald Blomfield there still lurked a Soane house. It had been built for the dukes of Buckingham and Chandos as a companion house to Stowe.
She saved it, buying it for a sum, I think, close to £5,000. She was, right up till her death, one of the most compelling, se
xy yet maternal and grand-maternal women I’ve ever known. She was one of the beloved monsters of my life and she worked untiringly for that extraordinary palace she saved.
My first night at Wotton, I slept in a slightly-adapted-for-lodgers ducal apartment. The telephone went and it was Quentin. It seemed to be ridiculous to be separated from someone whom one so wished to console. I asked him whether he wanted me to attend his father’s funeral and he said, ‘It depends on whether you cared for him or not.’ Of course I went.
And so we parted, as though our lives were happening to other people. We held hands in court and there seemed no question but that the children, on account of their situation, must stay at Farleigh. It was more unusual then, and my sense that this was the right decision was not one that I could ever make clear to any but the most intimate of my friends.
People have tackled me about this, thinking it unnatural or weak, but it laid between the children’s father and myself a small island of trust amid the perilous currents of divorce. It was the children who mattered. Whether or not it was right for the children can only be gauged by them. I wanted Quentin to trust me and knew that the next thing we had to build was a safe place for our children.
Mrs Brunner it was who insisted that we all, including Quentin, have Christmas together at Wotton. On the years when the children were with me at Christmas after that, Quentin went and worked for the homeless at Crisis at Christmas. I received a letter from Aunt Mickey that told me among many other things I had lost ‘a place in the world’.
LENS II: Chapter 7
Wotton became my place in the world, by which I mean my place quite far away from the world. Perhaps it was here, in its tall rooms and in its perfect self-contained hiddenness, that I relapsed into my inborn habit of reclusion. Wotton never did feel lonely, because I discovered that Mrs Brunner shared my affection for in-house mail, so that we left one another letters almost daily if we had not met in the rose garden or taking a walk under the chestnuts by the first lake. The park had been laid out by Capability Brown and there was, to the small landscape in which the house lies, an adaptation to mortal scale and vision that made walking along those lakes past their half-resurrected bridges and temples a humanising experience. Before the first lake there were two Doric-pillared Grecian temples. Oliver and Clementine and I would take bread to the swans who lived here. On the farther lake lived Canada geese with their two faithful watchmen-geese standing apart from the flock. Returning from walks to the house with the children was each time almost impossible to believe. We would pass a herbaceous border, leave the rose garden to our left, go and sit in the long grass on a bench by the wishing well and be paid visits by Solomon and Sheba, Mrs Brunner’s peacocks, who, she said, had probably flown over from Waddesdon, which looked down at Wotton from the east. If it was a sunny day, Mrs Brunner would call us up on to the back steps of the house that led in to her own quite breathtakingly sparkly apartments. She always had a treat for the children, though her appearance was in itself the greatest treat, for she was brightly manicured and preferred to wear the colours of the rainbow. She smelt good too. Inside the house the tall windows had shutters that were barred at night across the dizzy original glass. Each shutter had its hole, an oval about eight inches tall, through which to look out for the moon in its transit.
There were secret rooms and rooms filled only with ebony knickknacks. One room contained only objects made of mother-of-pearl. Clementine’s and my favourite had a high curved ceiling edged with shining pearls, each the size of a tennis ball, in freehand plasterwork; below this lay disposed Mrs Brunner’s own extraordinary wedding dress and that of her daughter, so that the whole room had a silvery-fragile bridal air, as though from the story of Beauty and the Beast. It was like the dream of a princely wedding that the poor Beast might have prepared.
If Mrs Brunner was attached to fairytale stage sets, she was also a brilliant chiseller at all possible architectural or state-related organisations that might help her to protect, conserve and reveal her exigent treasure trove. Even when I lived at Wotton House, she discovered an eighteenth-century ha-ha behind the nineteenth-century one, an indoor fish pond laid with tiles and braced with elegant bronze pillars, and several further follies in the woods beyond the second lake. I do not know how old Mrs Brunner was, though I imagine it would be easy enough to find out. Her role in our lives was so supernatural that I prefer my ignorance. I never called her by her first name.
The house within has a trembling stone staircase with wrought-iron work by Tijou that quivers as one mounts the stairs. The vistas within the front hall suggest the receding background of a Renaissance painting, exemplifying and playing with perspective. The hall is full of light, very high, and paved with black-and-white marble in squares on the grand scale. In winter, an open fire was set in the fireplace in that front hall, where the children and I left carrots and biscuits and, at Mrs Brunner’s insistence, a tot of brandy for Father Christmas.
It was at that first Christmas after the sadness of our parting that I saw how a pure flirt like Mrs Brunner made things easier between me and Quentin. The great lack in our lives, probably thanks to the premature death of his parents and my mother, was grown-ups to teach us how to pull the splinters out instead of driving them further in.
We developed a pattern, familiar to many families, whereby the children spent half the holidays with me and half with their father, and alternated, insofar as it was possible, at weekends. Thank God there were the two of them to sustain one another and grumble about this together, since it was to go on for a long time. I remember standing on the nursery floor at Wotton having tidied all their toys away and looking at the departing car, thinking, ‘What is in their heads?’ At around this time I wrote a children’s book and illustrated it. It was really about Oliver and Clementine, of course, and it was always going to be destined for Quentin, who has the paintings now, which are portraits of his children.
There was no sense of unsafety at Wotton although we were an old lady and a younger woman and two small children alone. The whole place was barred up so snugly that its only burglar, during my time, was a ferocious wind that punched holes in three fragile windows, whose panes simply couldn’t take the brunt in spite of their delicate ductility, like that of sails.
I had the notion that I would write some short stories to make a bit of money. I sent five to Auberon Waugh at the Literary Review. He sent them back with a kind note saying that he and his wife had enjoyed reading them in bed. I imagine this was a tease. I then tried applying to The Archers to see if they would like a new scriptwriter, but they wouldn’t.
There’s nothing for it, I thought, but writing a novel. I had bought my father an electric typewriter that he had seen the Observer newspaper was offering at a reasonable price. He passed me his old typewriter, whose keys you really had to think about pinging down like those of an old till.
I wrote my first novel, A Case of Knives, in my bedroom at Wotton House, a room whose mirrored cupboards chopped up the images thrown by the circular mirror the size of the shield of Achilles on the opposite wall.
In the South Pavilion lived Sir John Gielgud. In the morning, you could see his partner Martin taking their shih-tzu for a walk. Opposite Sir John lived an elegant German lawyer who worked between Washington and London and kept this celestial pavilion as his country hideout. He often entertained my children and me to Sunday lunch. His line in girlfriends was terrifying to one who has never seriously in her life thought of wearing leather. On the whole they turned out to be very nice and, moreover, to do things like run Lufthansa’s legal department or own a chain of supermarkets in the old Austro-Hungarian countries.
Behind this exquisite pavilion was a courtyard containing a long house that had at one point been where beer had been brewed for all the servants employed in the main house. In this house lived Graham C. Greene and his family, including at one point his mother Helga, with whom Raymond Chandler had been in love. Quite briefly, Clarissa Dickson-Wrig
ht was his housekeeper, and once she babysat for me. At this point she and I were both what is called ‘practising alcoholics’. I had no idea.
Every day when I woke up at Wotton, I was glad to do so. I suppose that means that one has found a place in the world. Once I saw fox cubs playing leapfrog on the back lawn. I so loved being there and when the children were with me it felt as though beauty in itself might feed them the things that disunity was taking from them. It was a hopelessly over-aestheticised view, I can see. But to this day, I like it when I know that they are in the places where there is beauty.
Mrs Brunner met and charmed my father; they were exactly each other’s sort of thing. Daddy, possessed by architecture, crazy about Soane and handsome; and Mrs Brunner, obsessed by her great charge, her house, and very fond of flirting. Mrs Brunner welcomed other friends as well, though she was a great one for taking what the Scots call scunners. She was absolutely beastly to the boyfriend of one of my best friends whom she regarded, quite correctly, as treating my friend unkindly. If not a witch, she was an advanced telepath. She could also dismiss people simply on the unfair grounds of their want of physical attractiveness, and she was extremely fussy about fairness between the children so that if someone bought a present for just one of them, there would be a note requesting the presence of the giftless child in Mrs Brunner’s drawing room where would be laid out a fairy feast and some compensatory present.
It is quite a feat for a mother of an only child to think in this way. She had at some level remained not childish but fierce as children are, and we were all her cubs and felt it. I hope that it is no shadow to Mrs Brunner’s own daughter to say that Mrs Brunner made me feel, if not mothered, protected.
What to Look for in Winter Page 22
