by Francis King
‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai …’
He completed the first two stanzas, the pitch impeccable. I had never before heard him sing. I had never known him to show any interest in music, as Ma did with her frequent visits to Bayreuth, Glyndebourne and Covent Garden. There was a beauty in the soft-grained tenor voice; and all at once he himself looked beautiful, his face serene, even happy, instead of tense with anxiety or haggard with despair.
When he had finished, I cried out: ‘Oh, do sing something else, Dad! Please!’
He shook his head.
‘Please!’
‘How about this then?’ He began not so much to sing as to croon ‘Schöne Fremdé’:
‘Es rauschen die Wipfel und schauern …’
When he had finished, he said: ‘I love those last two lines. Did you understand them?’
I laughed. ‘No, Dad. I don’t know any German. You know that.’
‘Well, how can I translate them for you? The title is, yes, ‘‘A Beautiful Foreign Land’’, and in those last two lines Eichendorff looks forward to some great happiness – ‘‘the distance speaks with ecstasy of some great happiness to come.’’ Yes, that’s more or less it.’ He turned to me. ‘ But what is that great happiness to come? Does he mean love? Does he? Freddy Noakes thought he did. But I think that he really means death. Death is the great happiness to come. Death is the beautiful foreign land.’
I heard voices approaching, and then there was a tap on the window beside me. It was Ma tapping with her long, painted nails. Behind her were the admiral and two other, younger men. ‘ Sorry to be so late, darlings,’ she trilled. ‘But the estuary turned out to be much farther than we’d imagined.’
Dad clambered out of the driver’s seat to make way for her.
After they had gone, I walked round the cricket field, alone. I could still hear Dad singing ‘ Schone Fremde’ in that beautiful light tenor of his. I had felt very close to him, I still felt very close to him. It was the first time that I realised that I loved him more than I loved Ma.
In the dormitory, Bob sat on my bed. Since he often could not be bothered to wash, his feet were grubby and smelly, and there was still that ink-stain on his chin. He swung the feet back and forth, grinning with happiness.
‘She’s terrific. Super. I wish I had a mother like that.
Why does mine have to be so old? Ancient. And she wears such ghastly clothes. And she never has anything interesting or amusing to say.’
As he went on, I felt increasingly shocked. I had never before heard anyone talk about his mother in that way – as though she were no closer to him than Mrs Philby or Marie or one of the maids.
‘You are lucky! You really are! And the sad thing is that you just don’t realise your luck.’
Chapter Fourteen
I was eight.
Dad was, as so often, absent from the flat in Prince of Wales Drive, taking a water cure in Italy. Ma was paying for it – perhaps, I now realise, not so much because she had hopes of a cure for him but because she wanted him far away.
‘What s the matter with Dad?’ I asked her in the taxi, after we had seen him off at Victoria Station.
She pondered, no doubt trying to decide what it was best to tell a child of my age. ‘Well, he had a dreadful time in the War,’ she said. ‘A lot of his pals were killed and he was almost killed a number of times. They call it neurasthenia. That’s what they call it. Neurasthenia.’
‘Neurasthenia,’ I repeated the strange word with difficulty. I had never heard it before. It is not a word one hears often now.
Soon after that, while Dad was still away, Ma told me that she had to go into a nursing home for ‘a little op’. It was left to Aunt Bertha, then still alive, to take charge of me for four days, in the house, overcrowded with vast pieces of Victorian furniture and no less vast portraits of her dead husband’s ancestors, in Campden Hill Square. Having never had any of her own, she had no idea how to deal with children. In consequence, I spent most of the time either in the kitchen, with the staff, or in the sombre library, its curtains always closed for fear that the sun would bleach the books, leafing through bound copies of the Studio. Could it have been then that I first became interested in antiques?
‘What exactly is the matter with Ma?’ I asked Aunt Bertha, as I previously had asked Ma about Dad, during my first luncheon at the long, narrow mahogany table, each of us seated at either end, as Aunt Bertha and Uncle Jack used once to be seated.
Aunt Bertha pursed her lips and, raising the jewelled, heart-shaped watch pinned to her blouse, examined it, her chin drawn in. Then, after another pursing of the lips followed by a sigh, she eventually said: ‘Oh, it’s one of those women’s things. Don’t worry about it. Nothing of importance.’
Years later I decided that, under the pretence of a D & C, Ma had probably gone into the nursing home for an abortion.
It was during this operation that she met a young Irish doctor always known to me merely as Fergus. With reddish hair, cropped close and sticking up around his wide, freckled face, muscular shoulders and thighs (he was a strenuous but not particularly skilled Rugby football player) and hands which seemed over-large even for someone of his height, he could not have been described as handsome. Having only just qualified, he was at least ten years younger than Ma.
Ma described him to me as ‘ a rough diamond’ after the three of us had been on an excursion to Hampton Court. He had sat for much of the boat trip with his arm around her, both of them paying me so little attention that by the time we arrived I was sulky and close to tears. But then, all at once, he became interested in me. We must try the maze, he said; and leaving Ma at the entrance – ‘No,’ she said irritably, ‘ I’ve no interest at all in going round it, I’ll just sit here and wait for you’ – he grabbed my hand and pulled me in. We then jogged, rather than walked, up and down the narrow paths in so short a time that he must, I realise now, have been there before and solved the mystery of the layout. Later, he showed me the real-tennis court and the vine. When we had luncheon in the hotel, he insisted that I should follow a vast Pêche Melba with an even vaster Poire Hélène, thus ensuring that I felt sick for most of the rest of the day.
How could Ma have fallen in love with someone so plain, so inelegant, so penurious, and (as she herself described him, using a word nowadays taboo) common, mystifies me. But perhaps what attracted her was precisely these things. All her previous lovers had had no such disadvantages.
During this ‘ friendship’ (to me she always referred to her lovers as friends) with Fergus, Ma also continued to see Noel Bartholomew, who was a junior minister, who was married, and who had extensive estates on the Borders. At that time I always thought of him, with his grey, carefully groomed hair and grey moustache, his aquiline nose covered with a frayed network of red and purple veins, and his wheezing laugh, as old; but I realise now that he could not have been much more than fifty, since he survived, eventually a peer, into the era of Macmillan, In those days a minister had to be even more discreet than today; but Ma and Uncle Noel (as she insisted that I call him) were assisted in their liaison by the fact that his wife, having absolutely no taste for metropolitan life, spent almost all her time in the country with her horses and her ‘Staffies’ (as Uncle Noel called them).
Ma was soon faced with a quandary. Uncle Noel was to leave for New York on the Queen Mary, to take part in an economic conference. Since his wife had no intention of accompanying him, he had put it to Ma that she should come instead. I presume that he was willing to pay all her expenses; but, even if he had not been, she could, at that period, have afforded herself to pay for them. Unfortunately, at the same time, Fergus was planning to take some leave, and had suggested to Ma that they should go together to Spain.
‘Oh, dear, I just don’t know what to do,’ she complained to me more than once, until I said: ‘ Why don’t you do neither? Then just the two of us could go away for a holiday.’ Her response was a sharp: ‘Oh, don’t be such a nitwit!’
/>
Coming to say goodnight to me before going to the theatre with Uncle Noel, she yet again reverted to the subject. ‘He’ll want to know what I’ve decided. And I’ve still decided nothing. It would be lovely to see New York again and I’ve always wanted to travel on the Queen Mary. And I might get to meet the President – Uncle Noel is related in some distant way to him. On the other hand, Fergus would be more fun. Don’t you think he’d be more fun?’
‘Yes, I think you should go with Fergus, Ma.’ I much preferred the younger man to the older.
She hugged me to her with extraordinary enthusiasm. ‘Oh, darling, I think you’re right, I think you’re absolutely right. I should always ask you for your advice, when I’m torn between two boyfriends.’
‘If you do go with Fergus, what … what will become of me?’
Clearly she had never given this problem a moment’s thought. ‘Well, I suppose you could come with us. Though I’m afraid it might all be terribly boring for you. Or you could go to stay with Aunt Bertha. Since Uncle Fred died, she’s been terribly lonely, in that big house with only the servants to keep her company.’
‘Oh, Ma, do let me come with you! Do! Please! Please!’ Suddenly I was frantic.
‘Well, I must think about it. And discuss it with Fergus. Whether he would want you along, I just don’t know.’
Night after night in Barcelona, Ma and Fergus would go out and leave me alone in the Ritz Hotel bedroom. (Ma, I realise now, must have been paying for everything, or almost eveiything.) Sometimes a jolly, large-bosomed maid, with a rudimentary knowledge of English, would whisk in on her round of duties and chat to me. On one occasion she brought me a toy: a hen, carved out of wood, which went through the motions of pecking for invisible grain, bobbing up and down, if I tugged on a string. On another occasion, she and I guzzled a huge bar of Toblerone chocolate given to me by Fergus.
I always used to wake when, through the locked communicating door between my bedroom and theirs, I heard Ma and Fergus return, with a lot of chatter and laughter. Once or twice I called out for Ma. But either she did not hear me or she decided to ignore me. Once, after that, when I had continued to stay awake, I heard gaspings and moans. What were they doing? I was simultaneously bewildered, frightened and excited by these sounds. I somehow knew that I must never ask either of them, or anyone else, about them.
On the day before our return, I awoke at dawn with an overwhelming feeling of desolation and dread. I have no idea what caused it. I had been perfectly happy when I had gone to bed the previous night. I clambered out of bed and went over to the window. The street lamps were still alight, even though there were smears of orange and red across the bottom of the sky. The square was empty but for a single man with a cumbersome suitcase, trudging diagonally across it. A truck rattled past on the road below. That feeling of desolation and dread intensified. It became an unendurable pain.
I crossed to the communicating door and knocked, first softly, then, gathering courage, as loudly as I could. There was no response. I tried the handle but, as usual, the door was locked. I sat on the edge of my bed, chin in hands, and wondered what to do. I had no notion of the time but I knew that it would be ages before Ma or Fergus stirred. Then I reached a decision. I jumped up from the bed and hurried out into the corridor. I knocked on the door of their room. Again there was no answer. But when I pushed down the handle, to my amazement I was able to enter. The previous night they must have forgotten to turn the key.
I saw what I thought at first was only one person under the bedclothes. Then I realised that it was the two of them, sleeping, limbs inextricably entangled, their bodies glued together. I ventured nearer and. nearer.
‘Ma! … Ma!’
Suddenly she started up, a hand to her forehead. The sheet fell away and I saw her naked shoulder and the naked curve of her breast. I let out a wail and threw myself on her, sobbing: ‘Oh, Ma, Ma, Ma!’
‘What on earth is the matter? What are you doing here at this hour?’
I wanted her to hug me but, so far from doing so, she was trying to push me off her.
‘I was frightened. I was frightened, Ma. I awoke feeling …’
‘What is all this nonsense? What were you frightened about?’
Now Fergus awoke. He, too, sat up. His chest, with the red pelt on it, was bare. ‘What on earth’s going on?’
‘This wretched brat barged in a moment ago. He says he’s frightened.’
Unlike Ma, Fergus was always kind to me. He put an arm round me. Then he asked me, gently, not in Ma’s furious voice, what had frightened me. I replied that I did not know.
‘Do you want to get into bed with us?’
‘Oh, Fergus, please!’ Ma protested. ‘He’s got to go back to his room.’
‘No, let me stay, let me stay!’
Fergus laughed. ‘Let him stay.’ He lifted the bedclothes. ‘Hop in!’
I snuggled up between them, feeling the warmth of their bare bodies on either side of me. Soon both were once more asleep. But I lay there, eyes open.
I was full of happiness, of a kind that I had never known before.
Chapter Fifteen
I had recently celebrated that seventeenth birthday. Bob had celebrated his three months before.
‘Haven’t you got any relatives at all?’
Bob shook his head. ‘My father’s father is potty. He’s in a bin for old people somewhere in Yorkshire. Well, not exactly a bin, a home, run by some churchy organisation or other. The other grandparents all died years ago. That’s one of the disadvantages – one of the many disadvantages – of having ancient parents. My mother had a brother but he went off to Australia ages before I was born and nobody seems to know what happened to him.’
I felt sorry for Bob. Although we were the same age, I also now felt protective of him. This was strange, since it was usually he, so much more dominant, who was protective of me.
For the Christmas holidays, he had been at a ‘holiday home’ in Bexhill, run by a retired Indian Army major and his wife. ‘I learned from them,’ Bob said, ‘that to be kind and to be generous are not the same thing.’ They were, he went on to explain, extremely kind people; but they were also extremely stingy ones. There was seldom enough to eat for the eleven boys and girls in their care; and such was the inadequacy of the heating of the rambling house during an exceptionally harsh winter that Bob returned to Gladbury with chilblains so severe that they were constantly bleeding. ‘They should have made you wear mittens,’ Marie said, providing him with a pair. It is now years since I saw chilblains on anyone; but in those days, when only the rich had central heating, they were all too common.
Bob began to tell me of one of the girls at the home. Although only eleven, she was ‘terribly sexy – with breasts, real breasts.’ She was ‘ready for anything’; he and she used to hide in a garden shed and ‘play’ with each other. Prudishly, I wanted to hear no more. ‘Oh, shut up! Shut up! It’s disgusting. You’ll get yourself into awful trouble if you go on like that.’
The next holidays, the Easter ones, Bob’s parents arranged for him to spend with one of the masters, Mr Graham, his pregnant wife and five children on a farm in Staffordshire. When I told Ma about Mr Graham’s many children – having seen him once at a Parents’ Day, she had said to me that he was ‘ really rather handsome in a Heathcliffe sort of way’ (I then had no idea who Heathcliffe was) – she remarked that ‘ someone should tell him about birth control.’ I passed this on to Bob, who replied: ‘No good. He’s a Roman Catholic.’
The farm, which was owned by one of Mrs Graham’s cousins, was swept by icy winds, and so isolated that for Bob to go into Stoke-on-Trent involved a long ride by bus. The Grahams, thoroughly uxorious, tended to neglect even their own children, who ranged in age from two to eight. In Bob and his doings they had absolutely no interest at all. ‘The only time they ever paid any attention to me was when they wanted me to take charge of one of their kids.’ He stared out of the study window, his face dark with anger. T
hen he sighed: ‘I was glad to get back to this place, I can tell you! And I never expected to say that.’
It was then that the idea came to me. ‘ I must ask Ma if you can spend the next holidays with us.’
‘Are you daft?’
‘Not at all. Why not? She’s been talking of renting a house on Lake Como. It would be super! She usually has a boyfriend with her and I spend most of my time on my own. If you were there …’
Bob still looked dubious. Perhaps he did not really believe me. ‘To be with your mother for the whole holidays … And with you,’ he added as an afterthought. All at once his face blazed with pleasure. ‘Oh, that really would be terrific!’
Chapter Sixteen
Ivor Wilkinson, who lives in the large, square red-brick house, built by himself, at the top of the street, telephoned this morning. It was typical that he would not tell Noreen what he wanted, but should ask for me, even though I was then in the bathroom. Although he would indignantly deny it, his is a world in which men are the chiefs and women are the coolies.
‘Oh, Maurice … Is this an inconvenient moment? I always forget that most people don’t get up as early as we do.’ He wanted, he said, to discuss ‘something rather delicate with you – with Noreen and you,’ he hastily corrected himself.
‘What’s it all about?’
‘Well, shall we postpone my telling you until our meeting?’
Eventually, we agreed that he and his wife, Claudine, should come round for a drink after dinner.
