In My Father's House
Page 25
All roles at the House were now reversed. The paternal tyrant had become a weeping and apologetic child. We sat in silence at meals where my father, pushing his plate away, leaned forward, rocking his head in his hands, attempting to shield from sight the tears that never stopped falling. My brother and I, grim-faced, read to each other the letters in which our father thanked us for the affection we had shown to Robbie, and apologised for his own lack of control. Even the sight of a despatch rider could make him cry, he admitted; the knowledge of the money he had held back was a source of relentless self-accusation.
‘I wish I could overcome this misery,’ he wrote to me, but it held him as if in a vice.
My father had always been superstitious. I found for him a clairvoyant, who provided him some comfort when she told him Robbie had spoken to her. It is an indication of the depth of his love that he was willing to undertake, while suffering such tormenting pain that it hurt him by then even to stand upright, a daily round trip of a hundred miles in order to sit with this kindly woman, and to receive her message of consolation. Robbie was happy, she assured him, repeatedly; he was at peace.
My father would not go near a doctor until the physical pain, indistinguishable by now from the trauma of his grief, had grown too strong to be withstood without management. He asked for, and got, morphine, enough to keep him biking, week after haunted week, up and down the motorway. The purpose, I imagine, was to receive further comforting messages about, or from, his lost friend. Drugs helped, but couldn’t sustain him. Too weak to fight the family’s pleas for a diagnosis and proper investigation, he allowed himself to surrender. After two desolate nights at the local city hospital, we were advised to take him home. Cancer, five months after Robbie’s death, had invaded and spread to my father’s pancreas. He hadn’t, the doctor said, more than a few days left.
We took him back to the House. He wouldn’t let us help him up the stairs until one last call had been put through to the clairvoyant. The last words I heard him speak, to be conveyed through her, were a message to Robbie. She wouldn’t take a penny in payment when I asked, later, what she was owed.
‘He was such a gentleman,’ she said. ‘And so sad.’
‘No,’ my mother rebukes me gently. ‘That’s wrong. You’ve forgotten the staircase.’
She’s right. I’ve somehow blotted out the memory of my father’s last words. Stoked up on morphine, he had fought to throw us off, as we led him to his bedroom. We saw before us a silent staircase, cushioned with soft red carpet. His eyes saw flames, a blazing fire rising above us to engulf what he had given his life to save: the House. The old terror, the one put into his mind as a child by the story of Nuthall Temple, became once more real enough to cause him to shriek out, like a soul in torment.
I’ve never been able to uncover precisely what my mother had endured in those five months after Robbie’s death. She tells me now that one of the hardest things to bear was her husband’s insistence that my brother and I had truly loved his friend, as she had not. It was this last piece of wilful self-deception that eventually proved intolerable. Once again, I started from sleep to hear a telephone ringing in the darkness; once again, I heard my father’s broken tones.
‘She’s saying terrible things,’ he said. ‘Tell me they’re not true. She says you hated Robbie, you and your brother. It’s not true, is it? Tell me it’s not true.’
‘And you lied,’ my mother says flatly and I look away.
‘What else could I do?’
‘You could have supported me,’ she says. ‘You could have told the truth. As if he hadn’t known it already.’
There was no contact between them at the end. My mother, during the last week of her husband’s life, closeted herself away in the small, undistinguished bedroom that had always been used – while in their single state – by the men of the House: my father, her son, and mine. She didn’t come to the room in which my father lay dying. He didn’t ask for her.
My brother and I sat by his bed throughout the slow, glittering May days that bleached the walls with light. We read to him, as he had read to us when we were children, the comic scenes from The Pickwick Papers. He gave no sign of hearing our voices. His hands lay open upon the sheets, palms upturned, as if waiting for something to be placed within them.
We discerned at last what it was that his hands so wanted to hold: a photograph of Robbie, at nineteen, standing beside the Duke and smiling cheerily. My father’s fingers closed around the frame, clasping it tight. We thought we saw him smile.
‘Somebody he was fond of?’ enquired the nurse who’d come out to help us. We nodded. Explanations, adequate ones, didn’t seem in order, not even possible.
Death came crawling. We could hear the tick of time slow down, to the point when every movement on the bed became frustrating. And then – suddenly – he’d gone, and all around us, the air grew light and easy. Running across the wet lawn with bare feet, scything down branches until I stood knee deep in blossom, I hurled shouts at the red-brick walls and arching gables until they echoed back at me: Free! Free!
I didn’t, at the time, understand that we’d simply passed from one phase of possession to another. My father had gone, but only from the daylight. Never from the House.
EPILOGUE
Twelve years on, my father’s spirit is present as ever, but the sense of anguish has receded. Walking through the fields, reading on the bank by the lake, playing the piano as he liked to hear me do, I’m conscious of the passion with which he cherished all this beauty and that, increasingly, I’ve taken on his cause as my own. I worry as he did, over the death of one of the grand old trees in the park, and the change its absence will create; I glow as he did, when friends, making their first visit, sigh with pleasure to find such an oasis. Like him, I’d sacrifice almost anything for the sake of keeping all this in place, as it was; and as, however precariously, it has remained. They’re putting up a vast marquee on the terrace above the lake this weekend; the bride is planning where to stand and greet her guests; the caterers are laying name cards on the tables; the florist has just put the final touches to a column of lilies and roses. Up in my room, above the marquee roof, I can look across the white canopy to where two swans are conducting their file of cygnets across the lake, orderly as the wedding processions to which, looking regal and faintly bored, they lend a conscious air of dignity. Beyond them, I can see the drooping branches of the old willow tree under which Robbie and my father used to sit, reading stories of Christopher Robin and watching the water for the slick of light on a carp’s back, out beyond their lines. I can see myself there, sitting on Slav’s shoulders as he waded out into the lake; I can see my brother, the oars of his boat sending ripples out towards where my mother stands on the bank, scattering bread for the ducks from the basket balanced between the swell of her hip and the crook of her arm.
It’s an image of impossible serenity. Making it, I realise the danger of becoming too close a replica of my father, whose unappeasable wish it was to control not only the House and its setting, but the lives of those who lived there.
Following in my father’s footsteps, I’ll try to walk with a lighter tread – and no longer, now, to look back.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Euston Hall, the Norfolk home of the Dukes of Grafton.
2. Dick and Vita Seymour pose, looking a little subdued, at the Legation in Bangkok. Leo and Alex are sitting on the small carpet at their parents’ feet.
3. An aerial view of Thrumpton Hall and its park, 1968, looking very much as it does today.
4. Home life with the Byrons at Thrumpton in 1928. The county boundary was in constant flux; here, they have been shifted into Derbyshire.
5. My father lines up for drill at Middleton Park, Lord Jersey’s Oxfordshire home, during his brief convalescence from a head injury. George FitzRoy Seymour, the author guesses from his stance and leg-shape, stands second from right in the line facing the brand-new (it was completed in 1938) Lutyens façade.
6. Chirk Castle, my mother’s romantic family home in North Wales until her marriage. By kind permission of Gillian, Lady Howard de Walden.
7. Sir John Lavery’s painting of Lord Howard de Walden and his family. My mother stands at the centre. By kind permission of Gillian, Lady Howard de Walden.
8. My parents at their marriage, June 1946. Just behind them is my mother’s bridesmaid and best friend, Judy Montagu.
9. The Seymour family at Thrumpton, painted by Julian Barrow in 1967. My mother, seated right, and I, left, at the piano, both wear wigs.
10. Palmy days: My parents with new friends, Mr and Mrs William Douglas Home, on a QE2 voyage in 1970.
11. My father’s daughter. George Seymour quite liked this photograph of me, wearing my false tresses and accompanied by a suitable escort, Lord Charles Hay.
12. My father lounges on the right, with Nick on the far left. Between them sits Griselda, a contemporary of mine who shared their enthusiasm for bikes.
13. Robbie shows off one of his best catches from the Thrumpton lake, a massive carp. My father was the photographer.
14. George FitzRoy Seymour takes his six-year-old grandson for a first – and last – tearaway ride on the Duke.
15. My father’s headstone, in the garden at Thrumpton.
1. Euston Hall, the Norfolk home of the Dukes of Grafton.
2. Dick and Vita Seymour pose, looking a little subdued, at the Legation in Bangkok. Leo and Alex are sitting on the small carpet at their parents’ feet.
3. An aerial view of Thrumpton Hall and its park, 1968, looking very much as it does today.
4. Home life with the Byrons at Thrumpton in 1928. The county boundary was in constant flux; here, they have been shifted into Derbyshire.
5. My father lines up for drill at Middleton Park, Lord Jersey’s Oxfordshire home, during his brief convalescence from a head injury. George FitzRoy Seymour, the author guesses from his stance and leg-shape, stands second from right in the line facing the brand-new (it was completed in 1938) Lutyens façade.
6. Chirk Castle, my mother’s romantic family home in North Wales until her marriage. By kind permission of Gillian, Lady Howard de Walden.
7. Sir John Lavery’s painting of Lord Howard de Walden and his family. My mother stands at the centre. By kind permission of Gillian, Lady Howard de Walden.
8. My parents at their marriage, June 1946. Just behind them is my mother’s bridesmaid and best friend, Judy Montagu.
9. The Seymour family at Thrumpton, painted by Julian Barrow in 1967. My mother, seated right, and I, left, at the piano, both wear wigs.
10. Palmy days: My parents with new friends, Mr and Mrs William Douglas Home, on a QE2 voyage in 1970.
11. My father’s daughter. George Seymour quite liked this photograph of me, wearing my false tresses and accompanied by a suitable escort, Lord Charles Hay.
12. My father lounges on the right, with Nick on the far left. Between them sits Griselda, a contemporary of mine who shared their enthusiasm for bikes.
13. Robbie shows off one of his best catches from the Thrumpton lake, a massive carp. My father was the photographer.
14. George FitzRoy Seymour takes his six-year-old grandson for a first – and last – tearaway ride on the Duke.
15. My father’s headstone, in the garden at Thrumpton.