In My Father's House

by Miranda Seymour

  Shock numbed my father’s mind. When he tried to describe his feelings in his diary, his hand trembled. ‘It has been my life,’ he wrote; it had represented all that he loved most. Nothing could fill such a gap. ‘I am completely and utterly heartbroken.’ A day later, his mind was made up: ‘This shall not be.’

  Time, my father wrote three days later, was his greatest enemy. He knew now that his uncle and aunt’s plans were well-advanced. They had already made a journey to Essex and taken stock of Langford Grove, the tall, hard-featured house in which Charlie Byron had spent his early life and which was still owned by him. It was not easy to see how they could move back there in the short term, since army troops were still occupying the main rooms and the gardens had been destroyed, but the Byrons were resolute and optimistic. Upkeep costs would be far lower, they believed, and it would be delightful for Charlie to return to the landscape of his early years. Besides, the eighty-five-year-old rector of Thrumpton piously informed his distraught nephew, it hardly mattered where you lived if you had the kingdom of heaven in your heart. This was not my father’s view of the landowner’s position and obligations; infuriated, he struck back with a list of all the houses he had seen which were tumbling down after being abandoned. Did they not care if Thrumpton was ruined? Lord Byron’s answer was to let his nephew know that Earl Spencer of Althorp had already requested particulars and was arranging a visit of inspection. This information caused his nephew a fresh stab of pain: to picture a stranger prowling around the rooms, handling familiar treasures before negotiating a satisfactory sale price, was as painful as the thought of its becoming an untenanted wreck.

  Action had to be taken, and swiftly. Hearing that his uncle and aunt were paying a September visit to the Lake District, George took a fortnight’s holiday from the bank and dashed north to offer them his latest idea. Might they, he asked, consider installing him at Thrumpton as their tenant if he allowed them to remain with him as honoured guests? And where, his uncle demanded, was the money to come from? Did George intend to become a borrower? This was just what my father had been planning – he had already been in touch with a mortgage company to arrange the sum. His uncle’s tone and stare were so dismaying, however, that he lost his nerve and claimed not to have thought matters through. Crushed, he retreated to his room.

  Two weeks of determined argument and skilfully deployed charm produced the compromise my father had fought to achieve; worn down by such persistence, Charlie Byron agreed to defer the sale for a year. If George could find a solution before the following summer, Thrumpton might yet be saved. In the meanwhile, the advertisements were withdrawn and Earl Spencer was informed that the House was not, at present, on the market.

  Luck, now, was all my father needed.

  9

  FALSE TRAILS

  The occasion is one my father would have relished, a reception in the Lord Chancellor’s opulently refurbished River Room, held in 2005. This is a gathering of Nottinghamshire gentry for the posthumous publication of a book by one of their own. Conversation is more animated than I’d remembered; we’ve all, with varying degrees of competence, become businessfolk, reshaping our homes as conference centres and wedding venues. Rivalry wears a friendly face; we swap notes on websites, civil licences, the merits of in-house catering, marketing strategies.

  I’m struck by the change of attitude, the sense of renewed energy and goodwill. Ten years ago, attending an official dinner for the future generation of stately home owners, I heard nothing but resentment. The old couples were clinging to their heritage; the middle-aged heirs didn’t hide their frustration. Looking down the table and studying the faces, hawkish even by candlelight, it wasn’t hard to pick up the subtext beneath the well-bred chatter. My neighbour, a portly, pink-faced Yorkshireman, leant across me to refuel his glass of claret while he explained how unjust it was that his father was still ensconced in comfort at the Hall while he, his wife and their three children made do with a house that had once belonged to the estate manager. The old man was a fool, he said, hopelessly impractical, caring for nothing beyond his right to enjoy expensive holidays abroad and to dine at White’s Club or the Savoy when he came down to London. The estate was going to the dogs, all because he refused to transfer control.

  My father was anxious to publicise his generation’s concerns about the future of the country house.

  Lear was the ghost at that particular feast, a tough old king who hadn’t yet relinquished the reins. He’d pay for having kept his children waiting; that much was clear. My father had sketched out just this scenario in one of his unfinished stories, rationalising his plan to keep control of the estate until he died. I winced when I first read it and saw the depth of his mistrust. That evening, sitting down to dine with the impatient and resentful heirs, I understood his fears.

  Times have changed. Stringent regulations for the transfer of property and soaring maintenance costs have forced the stately home owners to change their attitude. House tours and farming tenancies don’t bring in enough income to cover maintenance expenses; it’s fair to guess that, ten years from now, even the wealthiest private owners will be running their homes as businesses, converting courtyards, derelict barns and estate cottages into craft centres, farm shops and office space.

  I’m glad. These houses were never intended for sole occupation. They suit large occasions; they need to be alive with warmth, light and people. The weddings and conferences help to pay for their costs; they also give energy back to rooms designed for crowds and show. Better still, since little divides a family so savagely as a withheld legacy, the owners have begun to look with kinder eyes on heirs who can offer professional skills for free. From viewing them as a threat to their own security, the older generation of owners have come to see their hardworking sons and daughters as allies and even, when they prove their worth, as friends.

  Commerce is the thing that marks the change. A heritage home is divisive; a business forms a bond. Mutual interests, shared expertise and a perception, at last, that trust can be a wise investment, have reaped rewards. Warmth has replaced hostility, a cordiality born of a determination to see these splendid, history-drenched estates through, and help them to survive. There are cases, I’m sure, where Goneril and Regan will still have roles to play, where my father’s terror of the old folks’ home and oblivion will be fulfilled; tonight, standing in the crowded River Room with its windows looking across a darkly glimmering Thames, I see no sign of this. Goodwill abounds, fathered by recovered confidence.

  I have an ulterior motive for coming to this occasion. I’m looking for the face of another of the acquaintances so carefully indexed in my father’s wartime diaries. Since then, he has become a celebrated right-wing journalist and editor. He enters the room late, a dapper, white-haired man. He’s smiling as I approach him, but with a wariness that suggests that he can’t quite place me. I introduce myself, with care, as my father’s daughter. I explain that I’m writing a book about him.

  ‘You used to meet my father in London towards the end of the war,’ I say, prompting his memory. ‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me what he was like then. He was quite a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’

  His smile, while still in place, is straining at the corners of his plump lips. I’m causing embarrassment.

  ‘I think you’ve got the wrong person, my dear,’ he says. ‘I don’t remember him at all.’

  ‘At the Orchid Room,’ I say, insistent, knowing I’m right. ‘The Bagatelle?’

  ‘Ah, the Orchid Room.’ Something’s stirring, but not, it seems, the memory that I seek to revive. ‘So sorry I can’t help,’ he says. And, while not quite turning his back, a shuttered glance indicates that further questions will be pointless.

  I’m beginning to wonder how much trust I can place in my father’s wartime diary. The first old friend remembered my father only as a skinny young man who always had a camera in his hand. He may have been delivering one of those coded messages at which the English aristocracy
excel (taking snaps of your chums wasn’t socially elegant in the days when photographers were always assumed to be working for the press). Were those carefully indexed names only of people near to whom George Seymour hungrily loitered, using his camera as an excuse for his presence? Why is it that he’s been so completely effaced from their memories, if not because he never enjoyed the friendship that his diary seeks to record?

  I find, to my surprise, that I’m angry with these smiling, smooth-cheeked old men. I’ve plenty of reason to hate my father, but his achievement matches theirs. They’ve no cause to be disdainful. They fought for their country; he gave his life to save a house.

  After leaving the River Room party, I go to dine with my younger brother. We sit in the corner of a small restaurant in Soho and talk, as we always end up doing when we’re alone, about our father. Sharing the memory of what we endured is, as we both know, dangerously addictive. We’d like to break the habit, cut ourselves free from the past; we haven’t as yet managed to do so. We don’t meet often, alone; when we do, we can be sure there’ll be a third presence at the table.

  ‘It’s an odd thing to say, I know’, my brother says, as though reading my thoughts, ‘but do you ever have the feeling that he’s still there?’

  ‘A ghost?’

  ‘I’m talking about dreams,’ he says. ‘Dreams when he comes back, as though he’d never gone.’

  I stare at him across the table. ‘Comes back where?

  He looks exasperated by my stupidity. ‘To the House. Where else do you think he’d be?’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Always. Why?’

  ‘Because I have dreams, too. Bad ones. Is yours like this?’ Almost whispering, we swap images and discover that our dream, our terror, is the same. No death has taken place, only a journey to some distant place. Now, our father is back for good, restoring everything, making sure that his home is just as it was twelve years ago, when he appeared to die. But there’s no possibility of his dying in this dream. There’s no way out, no end. Past middle age, his son and daughter are back behind the bars of childhood.

  Dismayed, we look into each other’s eyes, searching them for reassurance and finding none.

  ‘Who knows, perhaps you’re going to exorcise him for us,’ my brother says, kindly, as we say goodbye on the crowded midnight pavement, trapped in a jostle of bare arms and edgy hips outside a new dance-club. ‘I hope so.’ And, although he is not often physically demonstrative, he adds a brief hug. ‘We’ll get clear of it all one day.’

  Later, sitting at my desk in the bleak hour before dawn, I rest my chin on my hands and stare into the laptop’s grey screen. A photograph of my father stands propped on the windowsill beyond my desk. He’s posed at the garden entrance to his House; he’s wearing, to entertain the unseen holder of the camera, a mangy fur-lined coat that once belonged to Dick Seymour. He’s laughing at the lens and holding the coat wide, like a stripper in a burlesque show. Encased within, he’s immaculate in a three-piece suit, the country gentleman at leisure, down to his well-polished shoes. Sunlight has faded his features out, made a ghost of him in the twelve years that he’s stood at my window. I don’t see him clearly any more.

  My father shows off a dapper suit under Dick Seymour’s furlined coat, a relic from diplomatic days.

  If you wish to know me, look around you. That’s what the proud epitaph stolen from Sir Christopher Wren proclaims in Latin on the stone that marks my father’s burial place in the garden of his House. Look, then: what’s on show? A noble old building weathering its prime; a garden filled with trees chosen for the future, not the present; a park of sunny outspread fields, well-proportioned hills, restful inclinations, springing woods. All my creation, he liked to say, mocking his own hubris. The claim was not absurd: he gave his life over to ensuring that this beauty should outlive him and remain secure. A heroic endeavour, surely? Passion or obsession, the result is there for all to see. It outweighs the price that we, all of us, paid. It must. It has to show its value.

  My brother writes to tell me of a new dream, bred like a bad child from our last meeting. In the first scene, he saw our father striding across the hill above the House, a dog trotting at his side. The season was high summer. My brother watched as the walker stopped and turned, shading his eyes as he stared down. Below him, the land lay under a spell, sunlit fields dotted with sheep, the cricket pitch, the silver line of the river snaking away behind a row of feather-leaved willows, the sturdy tower of the village church, all in place, as it had always been. It’s an image, we agree, of the precarious serenity he fought to safeguard.

  The second part of the dream comes near to my own night terrors. There’s no sign of our father here, only a view of the western stretch of the lake, lit orange by a neon sky. Mud swirls thickly under the water’s surface; black bubbles force their way up. They burst, exposing, just for a moment, a glimpse of slippery substances twitching and quivering below, as if in pain. These are things that must not be seen.

  I know where this dream comes from. Like my brother, I remember the time towards the end of our father’s life when he decided to deal with his estate’s last unclaimed area of land. Bonfires smouldered through the nights, devouring the remains of a jungle of twisted creepers and stunted trees that had smothered the western end of the lake, obscuring it from view. They burned through the length of a windless summer, while long-armed machines scooped out the gathered filth of a century and the stink of dredged mud seeped through the cracks in closed doors, contaminating everything we touched.

  My brother offers an analysis. At a time of life when any other man might have felt it wise to undertake a little self-examination, George Seymour preferred to exorcise his land, to decontaminate his property. Better to cleanse a muddy lake than to risk taking a look into his own murky depths.

  10

  WELSH CONNECTIONS

  ‘No!’ My mother’s hands grip and twist the plastic handles of her floral shopping bag as we turn into the melancholy retail park where, two hundred years ago, George Gordon Byron and his cronies came sauntering down into scrubby meadowland to watch a display of cockfighting. Above us, the square bulk of Nottingham Castle looms from the rain clouds; around us, dark figures scatter across the glistening tarmac, fleeing towards the large lit doorways of the stores. I turn off the engine. We sit in silence, waiting for the rain to stop.

  ‘We mustn’t forget to buy coffee,’ I say. I’m feeling wretched at the distress my questions about her marriage have caused her. ‘And camomile tea. Oh Ma, I am sorry.’

  ‘If you were sorry, you’d stop writing,’ she says. Unexpectedly, she reaches out to touch my arm. ‘You’re so tense!’

  ‘Of course I am. I hate upsetting you.’

  ‘I know.’ She stares ahead at a row of shopping trolleys, snugly huddled under a plastic canopy. ‘Can’t you understand how strange it feels for me? Your father and I worked so hard to get the House back to rights. And we did love each other, you know. In spite of everything.’ She sighs. ‘I keep trying to remember the good times and then I start seeing him. He always looks so cross.’

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t like us to be managing so well without him.’

  ‘He certainly was bossy. Just like you. You’d have thought I was brought up in a pigsty to hear him lecturing me on how to behave.’

  ‘And to look. Do you remember how you had to have your hair set every week, in that style like a Greek helmet?’

  As I say it, I remember being taken into a hot many-mirrored room with my mother and watching active but unfriendly fingers force a miniature version of the helmet to sprout in lacquered curls around my glowering face. Worse even than the strain of meeting the hairdresser’s interrogative stare with a satisfied smile, was the lack of speech. All around me, well-tended ladies twittered bright floods of repartee; thirteen and wordless, I sat shuttered in self-consciousness.

  She flushes. ‘I liked it done that way. And some of the clothes he chose for me were lovely. What a
bout the apricot silk dress from Worth? You must have liked that?’

  I can’t remember it. All I see, thinking back, are the tweed suits of sensible cut, adding twenty years to her age. ‘Was he always like that, so controlling?’

  ‘There you go again, always against him.’ But she says it without rancour. ‘Not when we first met. Everything I did and said was perfect. I must say,’ she adds wistfully, ‘I did enjoy it. Being adored.’

  Packing our laden shopping bags into the back of the car twenty minutes later, I return to the subject. First, I press a bar of chocolate into her willing hand. ‘I can’t write the book without saying anything about your marriage, you know. It wouldn’t work.’

  Peeling off the wrapping, she breaks the bar into squares and pops one in her mouth. ‘Nice nice,’ she says, with a child’s pleased smile. ‘Not like those awful violet creams your father was always eating after we went to bed. He kept them in a locked drawer, greedy old thing. He thought I didn’t know.’

  I ask if he ever told her about reading the cherry stones at Thrumpton. ‘It was just before he met you. And the stones told him he was going to make a marriage and grow rich within the year.’

  ‘Just like him to be so superstitious. Remember when we went to the circus at Olympia and he wouldn’t come out of the fortune teller’s tent?’

  I remember it as a night scene by Edward Hopper, lights fading from the carousels and slides, music grinding to an end, my mother, brother and I clustered glumly in a doorway staring at the drawn blind behind which my father, then in his mid-forties, sat transfixed by an old woman’s warnings of grasping hands and indifferent hearts. She was, he had no doubt, speaking of the future of his home, warning him to keep fast hold of it.

  ‘As for being rich,’ my mother says. ‘I suppose money might have helped. But he wasn’t so badly off, you know.’ Always vague about finance, it’s possible that she never understood how little his four hundred pounds a year amounted to in 1945. ‘He did keep wanting to know how much income I had,’ she adds. ‘Too boring.’