I was more deeply affronted by his next swipe, a pointed reminder of the fact that my husband, after four years of marriage, was spending little time in my company. ‘My poor darling, you really are a grass widow now,’ my father wrote, oozing fake sympathy; ‘don’t you ever wonder what people must be thinking?’
Licking the wounds of the defeated, I withdrew from this round in our lifelong epistolary fray.
I hated him. I loved him.
Let’s look first at hate. Like most of us, my father was enthralled by the glamour of the stage. Few things gave him more pleasure, in the days when Nottingham’s new and daringly modern Playhouse Theatre was making a name for itself in the Midlands (this was during the late Sixties), than to ask the cast over to Thrumpton for a meal and a tour. This was fun, with the exception of an excruciating occasion on which he lured over a well-known actor who was playing Lord Byron by promising to lend him a household treasure, the poet’s very own signet ring, for future performances. The actor, delighted, visited, took the tour, and held out his finger for the precious loan. A sudden silence fell. The ring had belonged to Byron when he was a schoolboy; the actor, as we all now saw, had large hands. He struggled; twisted; sighed: patently, it wasn’t going to fit. ‘But look, it’s perfectly easy!’ my father shouted. Infuriated by the failure of his project, he seized the ring back and demonstrated, triumphantly, how elegantly it fitted his own narrow finger. ‘You see!’ We did. Flushing crimson, the actor apologised for having such workmanlike digits and regretted the trouble he had caused. My father, oblivious to the embarrassment he had caused, remarked on the contrast all over again, inviting his unhappy guest to admire the blue tracery of veins in the hands of a true aristocrat.
On this occasion, I would gladly have stabbed him through the heart.
And then, let’s look at love. In London, he made friends with the girl lead singer from a well-known pop group. Asking me to come and lunch at the ladies’ annexe to his club one day, he explained that Grace was to join us (she had expressed an eager wish to see such a place) and that my duty was to help steer her through the subtleties of club behaviour.
The club was old-fashioned and pompous, creaking with elderly men in pinstriped suits and chirping, neatly suited ladies from the shires. Grace, when she entered shyly down the stairs, made quite a stir. For this special occasion, she had chosen her clothes with care: high white heels, a fake leopard coat, a tiny skirt and an even tinier top. Descending the stairs, she began to remove her fur. Eyeing her bronzed thighs and popping breasts with a combination of admiration and alarm, my father hissed at me to give her a hint by putting my own coat back on, quick. I did as asked. Grace kept hers off.
Having reached us and smiled warmly around her, Grace showed that she was perfectly at ease. Sitting down, she adjusted a slipped shoestring shoulder strap, tucked one foot up under a bottom tightly draped in scarlet silk, and took out her camera for a snap. The ladies from the shires forgot their manners and gaped; this wasn’t what they were used to: even to produce a pencil and paper was a social crime in this hallowed spot. The head waiter hurried over and whispered furiously in my father’s ear, while grimacing at Grace’s upheld camera as if its mere presence had the power to blast the club to bits. My father, in turn, rose to his feet. With a sweet smile for us and a glare for the head waiter, he announced that the place was far too dull for such a glamorous creature as his guest. Swept up the stairs on the tide of his indignation, Grace and I were carried off to feast, at twice the price, at a restaurant in which grandly discreet cubicles protected us from comment, and honoured Grace’s reputation as a celebrity. Grace was overjoyed: ‘He’s a lovely chap, your dad,’ she said when he went off to hail her a cab home. ‘Such a gentleman.’ Later, my father told me that the waiter at his club had insisted ‘Madam’ must put away her camera and wear her coat throughout her stay, so as not to distress the other diners. ‘Pompous ass,’ he said furiously. ‘A sweet girl like that.’
I loved him that day, because he was so transparently concerned only that his guest should have a happy time. He could, when he chose, be kind.
I hated him. I loved him. I longed for the affection he bestowed so generously on Nick and Grace. He could make me laugh until my breath choked in gasps. He’s the man whose autocratic ways and vicious sense of humour, as surely as his unappeasable craving for love, have most formed my nature. The note of self-pity that lurks about my conditional clauses, and the inflections that escape from the corners of my whispered asides – ‘if you cared’ . . . ‘as though it mattered’ – are part of my father’s heritage. Like him, I hunger for praise of the House; like him, I quicken with rage in its defence.
‘I never knew a man make such a fuss about such an ordinary little English manor house,’ an old acquaintance of his remarked to me only the other day, in a conversation about my father.
Ordinary? Our House? At moments like that, my father’s spirit approaches as close as the hand that used to brush my shoulder whenever, playing the piano, I picked out some sentimental tune (‘I’m just a lamb that’s lost in the wood,’ he’d croon with mocking awareness of the self-pitying aspect of his nature, parodying his own besetting weakness).
I love and I hate; and his is the familiar voice, whenever I discover myself alone, that whispers to me from the dark.
In 1977, two years after Nick’s defection, my father deserves our sympathy. No substitute biking companion has yet appeared. His daughter, meanwhile, has gone off to spend six months with her errant husband and small son at a beach house in Malibu, writing a book about Greek island life, recollecting it in utter tranquillity, while watching the dawn roll in upon lilac waves.
‘Your life,’ her father writes with justifiable irritation, ‘is so beautifully glamorous . . .’
His son, goaded by him into riding about town on a motorbike, is hospitalised after an accident in a city street. The accident was life-threatening; now, there’s daily pain and grim talk of a possible amputation. But it’s not at all my father’s fault; not in the least. He’d never asked his son to get knocked down by a lorry (although he had forcefully pressed upon him a machine quite alien to the young man’s nature). What matters most to my father is the resulting emptiness that has descended upon the House; and that its appetite for care remains inexhaustible.
Taken at their London house, this photograph shows the real affection that continued to exist between my parents, and, in the placing of her hand, an indication of my mother’s wish to protect her husband.
Living in California, I scarcely gave my parents a thought. Now, looking through the old diaries and letters, I see that a little more concern might have been welcome. Money, by 1977, is in short supply. Often as not, now, when my parents have visitors, it’s my mother who does the cooking, lays the table, and washes up afterwards, while my father scurries off round the bedrooms, twitching curtains shut, running baths, refilling water-flasks, vainly attempting to replicate the leisured life of a perished century. Reading stories of ageing and decline by William Trevor and Molly Keane, my parents smile at one another and sigh in recognition. Sometimes, when all the guests have finally gone, their hosts are so exhausted that they fall asleep in their chairs, waking with a start only when their shoulders sense the chill of encroaching night. They worry about their son’s slow recovery; they comfort themselves by buying tickets to see The Roly Polys, a troupe of unusually plump dancers, or Hinge and Bracket, a transvestite revue that mocks gentility (my father’s favourite target for mockery). There’s a companionship here, and a good humour, that it will fortify my mother to remember in the difficult years ahead.
Times had been growing harder for the privileged owners of stately homes. In 1974, a dramatic exhibition was mounted in London to warn of the speed with which this unique portion of its heritage was being lost to Britain. Visitors to the show, put on by Roy Strong at the Victoria & Albert Museum, stared in disbelief: were there really so many fallen monuments and roofless halls, such a nu
mber of tree-flanked avenues leading up to unkempt fields and ravaged ruins?
Articles were written, appeals launched. Some of the larger and more famous buildings attracted public interest and elicited grants, but life for those who owned the smaller and less celebrated houses posed problems that lacked simple solutions. These once stately mansions were not, after all, crucial repositories of the Crown Jewels. What right had these smart-voiced couples to squander precious land, and then proceed to speak of themselves as noble custodians? Why shouldn’t their oversized homes be sold and put to more productive use, as training colleges, for example, or nursing homes?
My father resisted the temptation to apply for a grant, since he feared, far more than the lack of money, being placed under any form of supervision. (Much of his delight in the House stemmed from the sense that he could do as he pleased with it, and be beholden to none.) Instead, he and his wife did what they could to limit the costs of a way of life they could no longer properly afford, but which continued to seem demanded of them by the House. The family cars grew smaller, and secondhand; the heating was turned down, until damp patches upon the walls portended worse problems than high fuel bills. Plans were made to economise by hibernation, during winter months, at the rear of the House.
During this period of slow deterioration, my father’s diaries – my mother had no time to keep one – became increasingly laconic. Each week carried a brief notation of the days upon which smoke-clouds from the power station had been worst, and of the number of trees upon the estate that had had to be cut down, victims of a virulent plague of Dutch Elm disease.
Elms, and the sound of the wind sighing through their lush boughs, were one of the glories of Thrumpton’s park. Over a hundred of them had been affected by the virus, and now stood, drab-branched and skeletal, waiting to be felled. My mother, in a rare confessional moment, admitted in one of the letters she sent to California that she could no longer bear to walk out into the fields. All day long, the chainsaw whined; trunks sprawled on the land like the severed limbs of fallen giants.
Nineteen seventy-seven was a bad year. After losing in rapid succession two adored black labradors, loyal animals who seemed bred for love, not hunting, my parents managed to locate and purchase a third. They’d owned the dog just six months when burglars, casing the House for some future felony, abducted it. Drugged, and stabbed with a knife up the rectum, the poor, friendly hound was left on a local roadside, to bleed to death. The prospective theft, efficiently executed in the absence of any guard-dog, was carried out the following month.
This was a major burglary, on a scale that felt, to my parents, as if their home had been raped. For me, the devastation did not, at that time, carry great impact. Living far away, off on another continent, I had fallen out of love with my parents, with their way of life, and with the House. If asked for a view, I might have quipped that the House had always been too cluttered and that a few old clocks and antique miniatures weren’t worth crying over. Even I, however, regretted the loss of objects that reminded me of the now rapidly vanishing past: I was six when I first watched two tiny blacksmiths tap their anvils against a bell in my greatgrandfather’s gold repeater watch; I was not much older when I was shown a silver fish that concealed in its innards a secret cargo of toothpicks, a pretty trinket designed to adorn a Georgian lady’s dressing table.
The repeater watch was gone for ever; the fish turned up ten years later in a Nottingham silversmith’s shop. My father, driving at dawn to a deserted car-park on the edge of Doncaster, discovered, as his informant had promised, that the prettiest of the clocks had been left ready for him, deposited in a brown paper bag between the front wheels of an abandoned Ford Sierra. I never heard what exorbitant bribe had been paid for its recovery, or how the extortion had been effected. All that mattered, to my father, was that the clock had come home.
The burglary brought out both the best and the worst in his nature. The best was represented by the tenacity that had come to the fore back in 1950, when he borrowed beyond his means to rescue the House he loved. Now, when the police made it clear that their obligations did not extend beyond reasonable endeavour, my father undertook to tackle the job himself. He transformed himself into an amateur sleuth. Loitering in the narrow lanes of Brighton, where stolen goods often appeared prior to their journey across the Channel, he was at virtually no risk of being mugged; when he started going alone to the Mile End Road, and asking questions in places where, despite his flat cap and shabby jacket, he could never have passed unnoticed, he was pushing his luck.
My father’s determination paid off: goods were recovered; confessions, improbably, obtained. My impression was that, distressing though the burglary had been – my parents were in the House at the time, and were fortunate to have survived the pillage unhurt – the ordeal had soon after devolved, on the part of my father, into a titillatingly farcical treasure hunt.
The burglary also brought out the worst in my father, as I discovered on my return to England and, inevitably, to the House. My father’s insistence that all weekends were his pre-requisite, driving me into elaborate lies to cover each time I failed to show up, with or without my husband, had not weakened. He talked about the burglary all the time. The precise details were replayed until, as with the power station, guests and visitors had to be entreated, for all our sakes, to keep away from the topic. There was no power station. There had been no burglary.
We could forestall conversations. We could not inhibit the feverishly elaborate workings of my father’s mind.
A detailed inventory of the House and its contents had been drawn up shortly before the burglary. The suggestion for this had come from a homosexual couple with whom, a decade or so before, my parents had become close friends. (The couple’s sexuality had, in those years of necessary discretion, been well-hidden – so much so that I, as a schoolgirl, placed the more handsome partner’s name under my pillow, hoping that this might induce from him a proposal of marriage. My parents’ early endeavours to find suitable wives for this agreeable couple suggest that they lived in a state of similar ignorance.)
Two facts had aroused my father’s suspicion. One was that the older of their two friends, a sweet and softly-spoken man, worked for a well-known antique shop, from which insider information might conceivably be bartered. The second was that the couple, emerging at last from camouflage during the late and less inhibited Seventies, began to lead an overtly stylish life, in a house that was reported to be filled with splendid things.
To my father, all now became clear. Accounts of a fine house filled with antiques clinched his suspicions. Their two old friends had been the masterminds behind the burglary. This breakthrough in the case was announced to the family over lunch at the House, on a tranquil summer’s day when I was just daring to hope that the subject of the burglary was closed. Beaming, my father announced a plan of action; dumbstruck with dismay, we asked him first to produce any shred of evidence.
But it was so obvious, so excruciatingly obvious! (He thumped his fist on the table so hard that the knives and forks danced from their set positions.) What fools we were! How blind! The couple had never once, since the burglary, asked my father to their house, to stay! What could be clearer? Patently, they had everything to hide!
Hopelessly, we pointed out the flaws in his reasoning. How could the couple possibly expect to hide well-known pieces of furniture in a house visited by mutual friends? Why, when they had successful careers, would they stoop to burgling? Why would they still be issuing invitations to my parents to dine with them in London? Why? Only, surely, because they were innocent – and, at this stage, unaware that they had fallen into the camp of suspects.
We were wasting our time. No protests could dissuade my father from his chosen course of action. He took a hotel room in the town nearest to the house in which his friends lived. From there, he went, ineffectually disguised beneath a flat cap and dark glasses, to case the joint in which, he knew, his stolen goods were being conce
aled (if not flaunted!), all that missing booty plundered from his beloved home.
The denouement proved both melancholy and ludicrous. The gay couple, having gone out for the afternoon to visit some friends, returned to find a familiar figure, strangely disguised, with his nose pressed hard to the locked window of their library, a room which overlooked the private, garden side of their house. Trapped, my father muttered some improbable tale of how, having found himself in the vicinity and happening to pass by, he had idly wondered, seeing how lovely their roses looked . . .
The episode was one of complete discomfiture and farce. It did not stop my father from believing, for a single second, that his friends remained guilty. If the stolen goods were not on show, then it was because they had been secreted away, or spirited off to be fenced. The possibility that his conjectures might prove wrong was never entertained. His old friends, baffled by his visit and puzzled by his altered manner, were not afforded the chance to defend themselves or the opportunity to clear their names.
‘Of course they’d claim they were innocent,’ my father stormed. ‘Anybody who isn’t an idiot can see they’re just covering up. I don’t mean they did the burglary themselves, but they were behind it. Who else would it be?’
(Years later, I’m tempted to wonder whether this blameless couple, brave enough as middle-aged men to proclaim their love to a social group notorious for its narrow views, had not evoked within my father an anxious mirror to his own secret compunctions? At the time, his eagerness to condemn them as felons seemed both bizarre and inexplicable.)
The discovery, ultimately, that the burglars comprised a group of well-known criminals who specialised in country house robberies, came too late for the salvation of a congenial relationship. This was sad: that long-enduring friendship was one of the last true ones of my father’s to have survived.
In My Father's House Page 21
