This, then, returning to my father, was one of the young minds to which he addressed himself in the billiard-room of Grafton House in 1912. He admitted, I remember, his own early participation in the practice in which he thought it advisable to counsel moderation, then took occasion to add—getting it all off his chest in one and providing for the future as well as the present—that in the matter of sex there was nothing he had not done, no experience he had not tasted, no scrape he had not got into and out of, so that if we should ever be in want of help or advice we need never be ashamed to come to him and could always count on his understanding and sympathy. That this was an excellent and friendly speech I realized when I was older; that I never took advantage of it is the whole point of this book; even at the time, my brother thought that the “old man” (my father was then forty-eight) had behaved “very decently”; but I myself was embarrassed and shocked. I had never associated my father with sex, indeed it was hardly more than a couple of years ago that I had innocently failed to associate him with the production of myself. Deprived of my stork, I was brought to understand, without ever pondering it, that many years ago my parents had come together to create a family; that was all. It was what people married for and they had achieved it. Since then, of course, there had been nothing more for them to do but raise and protect us and work for our good.
To hear my father now complacently admitting to, even boasting of, extensive sexual misconduct was disconcerting and distasteful. Indeed it had absolutely no reality and I put it aside. My brother and I never discussed it, and for a great many years I did not think of it again or wonder what exactly my father had meant or what he had done. Whatever it was it lay in a remote past, and there it remained. It made no difference whatever to my present view of him, and of my mother, as staid, elderly people who, all passion spent, had fulfilled their lives in the creation of ourselves. Physical love belonged to the young. It did not enter my head even that my father might still be having congress with my mother, let alone with anyone else; all that belonged to the past; they slept now in separate bedrooms; their sexual day was done.
9
IF SUCH INNOCENCE looks odd in a schoolboy of sixteen (and I don’t know if it does), I shall seem odder still when I say that these somewhat inhuman views I took of my father in his middle age as a sexually abdicated man persisted almost to the day of his death, more than fifteen years later. It must be remembered, however, that our lives together were interrupted by the war, which kept me from home almost continuously for four years; when I returned after the Armistice, adult and enlightened, there were reasons for consigning him, without much thought, to the sexual shelf. One of these was health. But first of all I must describe him as I recall him best, during the ’twenties.
He was a very large man, tall and heavily built, the heaviness of his frame increasing with age. As a trooper he had been almost perfectly proportioned, I believe, according to Army standards, able to hold sixpences between his thighs, knees, calves and ankles when he stood upright with his legs close together, but the broad shoulders sagged forward more and more in late middle age until he acquired a top-heavy, unwieldy look. Upon these shoulders was set a large head, which may be called grand, with a wide, intelligent forehead, a prominent supraciliary ridge, and the strong features of an elder English statesman. My mother called him “Punch,” but that suggests an exaggeration of feature he did not possess; his nose and chin were both strong but there was nothing nut-crackery about them. His face was fleshy and venous, becoming rather jowly; his complexion ruddy. Thin on top, his greying hair was full at the sides and back; a thick mustache adorned a pleasant mouth in which, most of the time, a Jamaican cigar was tucked. I don’t remember him as a smiling man, though he was a cheerful one; he would laugh and chuckle, but his mien generally was serious and attentive; the smile, if he were pleased or amused, was conveyed more by voice, manner, and small facial movements than by any display of teeth. In one of his eyes, which were wide and blue and greatly magnified by his horn-rimmed spectacles, he had a pronounced cast.
Strangely enough, considering the condition of his own, my father held decided views, often stated, of where eyes should be placed and what they ought to do. He was liable, in the early ’twenties, to come out with a number of maxims, old adages common to his generation, perfectly absurd for the most part and out of which we managed to joke him, a process to which he was easily amenable. Among them were two “chaps” who came in for very severe strictures: there was the “chap who doesn’t look you straight in the eyes” and there was the “chap whose eyes are too close together”: neither could be trusted. These quaint fancies, which I reported among my friends, had upon us all a somewhat self-conscious effect: should we pass muster? I have said elsewhere that I did not find it altogether comfortable to look my father in the eye; this was partly due to his maxim, partly to the fact that I myself don’t much like looking people straight in the eyes, and partly to his cast or squint which made it difficult, in his case, to do so. The consequent tests were sometimes unnerving. His own gaze, which perhaps he supposed straight, was ever full, thoughtful and prolonged, and it was his habit, according to the distance from him one happened to be sitting, sometimes to lower his head and regard one over the rims of his spectacles, a cross-examining look, sometimes to tilt back his head for a better focus. Thus with his magnified blue eyes swimming behind the lenses, he fixed one, yet not, as it were, quite in one’s place, his cast causing the beams of his lamps to intersect too soon and pull one in, so that one sometimes felt not merely scrutinized but trapped at an uncomfortable distance, at too close quarters. My own eyes, I remember, when I was younger, often felt as though they were starting from their sockets under the strain of bravely meeting his; if my self-conscious gaze so much as wavered, I thought, the game would be up, my guilt established.
His general physical effect, then, may be described by such words as “impressive,” “authoritative,” “commanding,” but in fact, at any rate in domestic life, he exerted little authority and did not command. To what extent he directed his business I do not know; he certainly did not direct his home. Even in family quarrels, the only ones we ever had, the jealous disputes that broke out between my sister and mother, he seldom intervened, he did not take sides and put people in their places, though there were many times when he should have done so. Whatever he thought, and it was easily guessed, for the faults were easily seen, he kept to himself until, later, he might give it private expression to me in some rueful comment. I think myself that this massive and commanding appearance really sheltered a timid, unassertive, tolerant spirit, rather child-like and secretive, often obstinate, but diffident rather than self-confident, one who preferred to stand outside of life and observe it, not (as he would have phrased it) to “put one’s oar in.”
A short dialogue from one of my notebooks sets the prevailing domestic tone. My father and I are drinking an aperitif with some guests before dinner, awaiting the appearance, always late, of my mother and sister who are dressing upstairs. The butler brings in the first course, and my father says:
“What is it, Avery?”
“Fish, sir.”
“Hot or cold?”
“Hot, sir.”
“Ah well, it will be cold by the time the ladies arrive.”
It might be thought to follow from all this—and, when one remembers the end of the de Gallatin affair, it seems to me revealing—that he deeply disliked and carefully avoided being emotionally upset. It was perhaps to protect himself that he interfered so little in my sister’s stormy affairs; he did not know how to cope with tempers and tears. He would not read the books or see the plays I sometimes recommended if he knew them to be at all tragic and harrowing. Once I trapped him into seeing Masefield’s Nan, telling him it was a comedy, and he was wary of me afterwards. He went to the first night of the 300 Club’s presentation of my own play The Prisoners of War, harrowing enough in all conscience, but would not join my party. He took a ticket al
l by himself at the back of the dress circle so that he could get out quickly and unseen. He had already read the play and knew what he was in for. The Palladium and the Tivoli, where he could have a good laugh and an eyeful of chorus girls, were his mark, Sexton Blake his favorite reading. To finish him up, his manners were always courteous, he was kind. He had very beautiful large hands, and the only lack of refinement I remember in him was an unconscious habit he had, while reading his newspaper in his armchair, of picking his nose abstractedly and rolling the little bit of snot between his thumb and forefinger.
The cast in my father’s eye was caused by pain.1 He was in pain so frequently during the ’twenties that it has become, in my recollection of him, almost a part of his personality. We knew it as neuritis; he usually referred to it as his “jumps,” “twinges,” or “twitches.” It was not a continuous pain, I think, unless it was always with him in, so to speak, a lurking way. At any rate there were periods, days at a time, when he seemed free from it. But in the course of years it became more frequent. It might arrive at any moment and he knew when it was coming. Sometimes it was mild, sometimes it was agony. It attacked him everywhere, but its favorite seat, oddly enough considering its effect upon him when it was bad, was in the basic joints of his little fingers. It was the commonest thing to see him, every ten minutes or so when his “jumps” were on him, suddenly grip this finger with his unaffected hand and, hanging on to it, shake all over for a moment until the spasm passed—so common indeed that in course of time we scarcely noticed it unless it was particularly bad. Then he could not hide it or stifle exclamations of pain. He might be presiding over the dinner-table in his usual genial, debonair manner when, with a “Damn” or “Drat the thing,” he would drop his carving knife or fork and vigorously chafe the offending digit, while a profuse perspiration would break out on the brow of this huge man momentarily mastered by a pain in his little finger. I asked him once what the pain was like; he said it was as though a red-hot needle had been jabbed deep into the very bone. Yet he never complained, never spoke of his “jumps” unless asked, and never, except for the occasional curses involuntarily wrung from him, allowed the agony he was plainly enduring to interrupt for more than a moment whatever he was saying. My notebooks give me the following conversation:
Myself (to my father who has come down to breakfast a little late): How are you?
My father: Rotten night.
Myself: Your jumps again?
My father: Yes. All night.
Myself: Where?
My father (indicating the region of the heart): Here. But it’s nothing much. Only a nerve. Damned annoying though. (He moves unsteadily over to the barometer to study the day’s weather.) Did I tell you that story Bilson told me the other day? There was a fellow walking down the street when he saw a pretty girl—Ah! damn you! Why can’t you let up?—in a very short dress bending down to adjust her garter. So as he passed he put his hand up under her skirt between her legs. She was furious at this. “How dare you!” she said, but he passed on with a—Crikey! — a smile. So she called a policeman. “Constable!” she said. “Arrest that man! He’s insulted me!” “What’s he done?” asked the policeman. She told him. “Well,” said the policeman, “I’m afraid the evidence isn’t sufficient. You’ll—Oh, drat the thing!—You’ll have to come back with me to the station so that I can photograph the finger-prints.” Te-he-he....
Sometimes as though ashamed of the fleshly weakness that had forced him to acknowledge pain by so much as a curse, he would pass it all off as a jest, wagging his carving knife perhaps at the offending finger in an admonitory way, as though it were a refractory child, apostrophizing it with: “Why can’t you lie down, you blighter?”
It was a long time before he could be persuaded to take medical advice; it was the worsening of his condition that drove him to it. Professing a low view of doctors, whom he hurried in fast enough if anything went wrong with us, and the best specialists obtainable, he would have had to be practically in extremis before he would have summoned one to himself. However, since our own doctor, Harry Wadd, who was a personal friend, often in for a meal or a game of bridge, lived next door, he was readily available, and when my mother was worried, as the sweet, anxious lady constantly was, she would surreptitiously phone her fears to him, and soon he would come, humming and bounding up the steps in his light-footed way, ostensibly to impart to father the latest racing tip or dirty story, really to take a professional squint at him. My mother would then leave them together over the decanters and cigars. My father was sometimes vexed and grumpy with her over these subterfuges which, if he did not twig them at once, he received evidence of later when the bills came in, for Dr. Wadd (despite the cigars and fine old brandy) was far too astute a businessman not to lay them on and with considerable generosity to himself. But I am sure my father was grateful to her on the whole, and her prompt action once saved his life, as I shall describe later. Eventually his jumps got so bad that he was obliged to take the alleviating drugs he had hitherto resisted (“Beastly things drugs! Can’t do without them when you’ve once started”); these were large pink or white capsules which he floated like boats in his whisky-and-soda before or after dinner, prodding them with his forefinger until they became softened, when he gulped them down before their contents could spoil the taste of his drink. He took these in his last years whenever his jumps started, or if he felt them to be on the way, and obtained considerable relief. The capsules, I suppose, contained potassium iodide or some similar preparation, and I expect he knew that and what was really wrong with him. His jumps were “neuritis” only by courtesy; he was suffering from a syphilis contracted in Egypt in his guardsman’s days,2 incompletely eradicated then and now in its tertiary stage. I myself learnt this from the doctors only after he died of it. But whatever he understood about his condition, the gravity of it must have been kept from him, for at the time when the doctors knew that he would shortly be dead he had tickets for another sort of journey in his pocket.
1. This is conjecture. If it was not caused, it seemed often to be intensified, by pain.
2. I am uncertain of this. It is in my head, but I don’t recall how it got there. Perhaps Dr. Wadd inserted it, but I can’t substantiate it. The disease may have been contracted later.
10
BESIDES HIS STATE of health, there was another strong reason for supposing my father’s life to be as complete as it was seen: the steady regularity of its domestic rhythm—at any rate as observed by me when I was at home in the ’twenties. At the beginning of the decade he left Blenheim House, our third Richmond residence, at eight o’clock every morning for breakfast at his office. Any nosy Parker keeping a watch upon our house would have seen the front door opened punctually at that hour by the butler, and my father descend the steps in his grey Edward VII hat, his light fawn or heavy overcoat, his umbrella on his arm, a cigar in his mouth, drawing on his wash-leather gloves. He would halt for a moment in the front rose garden to exchange a word with Scott the gardener (if that bibulous old man had arrived) about the roses, the racing, or the weather, he would make some little joke (perhaps about the Epsom Salts he had just taken and would he reach his office or even the station in time?), old Scott would dissolve into wheezy laughter, the butler would stand with the gate ready open, my father would pass through and walk down Richmond Hill to the station. Punctually at six-thirty p.m. he would return for dinner, often bringing with him a present for my mother, flowers or some delicacy for the table. After dinner he liked a game of bridge and neighbors would be summoned in for it if necessary. These regular habits were, of course, interrupted from time to time; trips might have to be made to his business branches in the Midlands— Liverpool (including a visit to his old sisters), Manchester, Sheffield; if we were going to a dance or theatre he might dine us at Romano’s; occasionally he would be kept late at his office and dine out alone at his club. But he seemed to prefer his home and home comforts. He was generally there for weekends and, in the early p
art of the decade when he was more active, might stroll on Richmond Terrace in the afternoon or take the dogs for a walk. Unless our nosy Parker had assiduously trailed him upon these walks he would soon have started to yawn.
My notebooks remind me of a special situation when, at any rate for a few years, he always dined in town; this was when my mother invited her sister, Aunt Bunny, with her second husband, Dr. Hodgson Chappell Fowler, the “Doc” as he was called, down from Pimlico to spend the evening, as she often felt obliged to do. This man, the “Doc,” was so detested by my father, who seldom displayed strong personal feelings, that he could not bear to be in the same room with him. There was nothing surprising in this; it was indeed inconceivable that anyone who met the “Doc” could possibly desire to meet him again, the repulsiveness of his appearance and the sour, prickly aggressiveness of a personality which, since no one could praise it, was forever praising itself, were too daunting; yet share though we all did my father’s distaste we managed, for my aunt’s sake, to endure what we could not always avoid, and I wondered afterwards whether part of my father’s quite frantic dislike of this eminently dislikable man was due to the fact that as witness to his secret marriage the “Doc” had added to his other enormities the impudence of having a confederate claim to confidence. At any rate, the very sight of him acted upon my father like an emetic and, despite his affection for Aunt Bunny, he exacted from my mother a solemn promise that he should be forewarned whenever the “Doc” was to appear so that he could make arrangements to dine elsewhere. This naturally created great difficulties for my poor mother, for the constant excuse “I’m afraid Punch has been kept at his office” soon wore thin; the “Doc,” who easily bristled with suspicions of slight since it was his lifelong experience to be dodged wherever he went, smelt the customary rat, and the feelings of my aunt, who adored her disagreeable, bombastic soak of a husband and wished others to adore him too, became wounded and militant. At her wits’ end (I take it from my notebook) and hoping to bring about a reconciliation, my mother “forgot” one evening to keep her promise to my father and assured my aunt instead that he would be at home. He was peacefully smoking in his armchair in the sitting-room when he heard the “Doc’s” loud alcoholic voice hectoring my aunt as they ascended the frontdoor steps. With a single bound he sprang from his chair as though he had been stung, seized his hat in the hall, told Avery to inform my mother at once that he was dining out, left the house by the back door and returned to London.
My Father and Myself Page 8
