Basil Street Blues (29 page)

That was how matters usually stood when, at the end of the evening, my stepfather would bang the table with his fist and shout out the word ‘Bed!’ He would do this even when there were guests; or go off to his bedroom and then come back in his pyjamas and dressing-gown to show those who still had their wits about them that it was time to leave. My mother did soon leave.

It was, I think, sometime in 1957 that she telephoned to ask again for my advice. She had recently been on holiday with Kaja to Baden – or was it Baden-Baden? Anyway, they had been abroad for the sake of the air or water, and my mother had encountered a very polite Viennese gentleman who apparently manufactured everything from ballpoint pens to motorbicycles somewhere in South America. She had often dreamed of travelling to South America and she wanted my advice as to whether she should set off there now. She had a handbag full of Swedish kronor after leaving Kaja which would take care of the fare (her husband, she reminded me, never gave her anything). Egon, her new admirer, had promised to meet her off the plane. He was wealthy, she added, and passed all his summers in Europe, so she would be able to see me each year. Perhaps, when all else failed, I could come over and manufacture motorbicycles myself…

I replied with one of my profound pauses, made a few gravelly noises in my throat and uttered a perfectly-balanced sentence with a ‘nevertheless’ at its centre. Then we got down to planning her journey. Before she went off to the airport, my mother asked me to draft an explanatory note for ‘your stepfather’. This she copied down, leaving it for him on his return from the office.

That evening my stepfather telephoned me to say that ‘your mother’ had gone abroad. His voice sounded wobbly, and I went over to see him. This was a different conversation from the ones we usually struck up, and all gentlemanly airs and pretences were shed. My stepfather was somewhat bald but had a good growth of hair at the sides of his head which he kept tugging until these tufts stood out fantastically over his ears. We drank several tumblers of whisky, man to man, but for once he did not grow aggressive and I was not sick. Eventually he asked me to help him draft a letter to my mother who had left a forwarding address. ‘You’re a writer,’ he said. ‘You can put it on paper.’ This was the first time he had acknowledged my wish to be a writer. Much gratified, I took out my pen, the very pen with which I had recently drafted my mother’s farewell note, and hoping the whisky would inspire me, began writing.

Some three weeks later I heard from my mother in Acapulco. She had received, she wrote, a very curious letter from ‘your stepfather’ and was wondering how she should reply. Would I help her? I did try to help her. I drafted an answer. So began what, for eighteen months or so, was to be an elaborate international correspondence with myself. I was not really aware of what I was doing, of the irony of what I was doing, as I bent over these letters, acting barrister for, almost being the biographer of both husband and wife. But I did notice that I was beginning to pay myself extravagant compliments – ‘your excellent letter’ and so on.

While this correspondence was slowly trundling back and forwards (my stepfather did not like wasting money on airmail), and I was still trundling between London and Maidenhead, writing a paragraph or two in one place, crossing them out in the other, I spent two long summer holidays with my mother’s new entourage, moving through Denmark, France, Austria, Germany and Italy. These were extraordinary summers of affluence. A shimmer of sun and beach, the glitter of casino and nightclub, buoyed me up, blinded me, as I floated agreeably off the known map. I hardly knew where I was sometimes. I remember arriving in Vienna and being astonished by how amazingly wet the streets were – before realising I was in Venice. Egon Hessel and his ebullient brother Walter would spend their days in luxuriously carpeted hotels and gorgeous restaurants, their nights at gambling tables and bars – and I went along too.

While we were in Austria, Griffy arrived for a couple of weeks and he was able to explain to me that we were at a lakeside resort called Velden which had once been frequented by socialites from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was now haunted by émigrés returning from the New World. At the further end of the Wörthersee, in which we were presently bathing, was Klagenfurt, once a prisoner-of-war camp. Griffy told me that he had been shocked to see one lady who had a death camp number tattooed on her arm. Velden, he thought, was one of those places where a large Jewish community lived before the war, many of whom, like the Hessel brothers, now returned each year. Despite this Germanic piece of scholarship, I noticed that whenever Griffy and I went out to lunch beside the lake, the two of us would land up with three portions of food due to Griffy’s habit of confusing
zwei
with
drei
.

Egon Hessel was a leathery sort of man, of medium height, with a crumpled figure and creased features – a smiling, paper bag of a face he had. He could easily have disappeared in a crowd. But the crowd around us was very aware of him because of his wealth. He was a generous, level-headed man, a rock in this fermenting sea of social life and a contrasting figure to his brother Walter with his wicked air of scandal and fountain of gossip. My mother, I think, saw Egon as representing an appealing form of security; and he was attracted to her because she brought a transparently innocent sparkle to his life. They seemed to trust each other. That, at any rate, was what Griffy and I decided as we ate our way through our curiously large lunches.

Griffy had taken to calling my mother ‘Madam’. At various stages of our holiday, often quite late at night and from the edge of the dance floor, he would cry out in an anguished voice: ‘Steady, Madam! Steady!’ But my mother had little grasp of steadiness, and perhaps it was we who needed more unsteadiness. It was as if she were younger than we were, as if she were providing us with an education that we lacked. ‘This is where Madam excelled,’ Griffy writes to me.

She was always on the lookout for some fun. She was game to try anything and if it involved a party she would do her best to see that things went with a swing. This ability to enjoy herself was infectious and a wonderful tonic for others. I think she had an uncomplicated and almost childlike approach to life and was not much given to great thoughts about herself or her future. Although she had left Sweden long ago, it never left her. I have learnt never to be surprised at anything which a Swede may suddenly do.

Griffy surprised himself later by marrying a Swedish girl (a friend of one of my cousins) and becoming something of an expert, he believes, in Swedish ways. But at the various stopping-places used by the Hessels as they moved like a travelling circus through Europe, Sweden was represented in its purest form by my grandmother Kaja. She had always dressed up and gone out to my mother’s parties, and continued doing so. Though she was not quite at ease in these exotic caravanserai, she wanted to see Ulla safely settled at last. She often looked, I thought, like redoubling Griffy’s cries for caution, and made something of a confidant of the remarkable head waiter at the hotel restaurant at Velden. He was a man of terrible dignity and momentous tact with the appearance of an archduke and the spirit of Bernard Shaw’s wise waiter in
You Never Can Tell
. I think he impressed my grandmother as the one obvious aristocrat among this miscellaneous throng of middle Europeans.

The following summer, when Egon and Ulla reached Munich, my mother summoned me urgently. She had gone into hospital for an operation to remove one of her ovaries and her womb. Though the operation, for which Egon was paying, was successful, it had a lowering effect on her. It was as if she were at last heeding Griffy’s appeals to steady herself. She told me that she did not want to go on with this life of perpetual travelling. She wanted to return home. Home was now London rather than Stockholm. Home was Chelsea. She missed the King’s Road. Over the last eighteen months or more, she reminded me, she had been receiving a number of nice letters from David Nares. He had promised to be more friendly to her in future and not call her ‘Mrs Nares’ when summoning the salt and pepper. He also promised to be more generous and let Kaja come to stay. He had written repeatedly that he wanted her back at Chelsea Embankment, and she had decided that she wanted to go back. But how could she tell Egon? He had been so kind to her. Lying in her hospital bed, rather tearful, she told me that she was not up to telling him. Would I do it for her before I left Munich? Why didn’t I explain everything to him that evening over dinner? It would be an immense relief to her.

I was then twenty-two, but an inexperienced twenty-two. This was one of the penalties I was paying for all my mannerisms of maturity and that patina of sophistication I had acquired as a protective carapace. I dreaded the prospect of speaking to Egon, but I did so that evening in a half-empty restaurant, explaining away my mother’s decision as a post-operative condition, but one that would persist. I could see he was surprised and I believe he was hurt. As a rich man, he could never be certain that people really liked him and not his money. Though my mother enjoyed much of the brightness that money switched on, she was never commercially-minded, and Egon liked that. He hardly said anything that evening.

Before the end of the year, and after a short spell in Stockholm, my mother was back in London with David Nares. Then, early in 1959, she left him again and, employing me as her travel agent, returned to Egon Hessel in Mexico. Both return flights were disastrous. At Turners Reach House, everything soon reverted to pomposity and drink. Despite what I had drafted in my letters trying to negotiate some common ground, they remained completely incompatible. I had achieved, in a more devastating form, what I had accidentally done while Mr Owen was absent from the divorce court: prolonged an irretrievably unhappy marriage.

What did I feel about this? The answer is that I did not fully recognise at the time the part I had played in it all. Being then in my twenties and quite familiar with the rapid changes in my parents’ lives, I was not so worried on my mother’s behalf as I later became. I had no moral objections to anything she did. Life, it seemed to me, was a matter of trial and error, and error had legitimacy. I thought of facts and the factual lure of fantasy more than of faults. My own anxieties arose from inaction and experience delayed. Like my grandfather. If I did not really understand my mother’s life, it never occurred to me to condemn it.

But what went wrong the second time round with Egon Hessel? For some time I wondered whether he had deliberately lured my mother back so as to seize the initiative and end the relationship on his own terms. I do not believe he wanted revenge, though his shock and disappointment in Munich could have damaged his feelings. I asked my mother afterwards what happened and she said Egon found out that she had altered the date of her birth in her passport. Looking through so many birth, marriage and death certificates for this book, I am amazed how regularly men raise their status and women lower their age. I have my mother’s passport from that time in front of me and can see that she has changed the year of her birth from 1916 to 1918. It seems a harmless vanity, though maybe some customs official noticed it and caused them embarrassment as they crossed from one country to another. But if Egon saw my mother as luminously innocent, perhaps this deception was significant to him, symbolically changing who she was. In any event, his feeling for her altered ‘when it alteration found’.

After another short spell in Stockholm with Kaja, my mother returned to London and by the end of 1961 was living in Ebury Street, not far from Sloane Square and the King’s Road where she felt at home. In February 1962, David Nares presented a petition for divorce on the grounds of desertion. It was uncontested, and David found himself free to marry for a fourth time on his fiftieth birthday. Two or three years later, when working on my biography of Lytton Strachey, I came across a letter from his father Owen Nares to Strachey and sent him a photocopy of it. ‘I’m in good heart,’ he replied, ‘and now that I’ve risen to dizzy heights at Crawfords am reasonably affluent, though heaven knows what will happen to us all when Wilson’s recent measures begin to bite. Why not come and have a drink before they do?’ We met at Turners Reach House and discussed, man to man, Harold Wilson’s six months’ freeze on wages and dividends. David had already fired off a couple of explosive letters to newspapers and had another, he told me, in the barrel – mercifully they were not the sort of letters he needed any help in writing. This was the last time I saw him. We did not mention my mother and there was no sign of his wife.

Though still only forty-five at the time of her divorce, my mother never remarried. Apparently she had no need to do so – no financial need. Egon had promised to pay her a quarterly allowance. I cannot remember how much this was – something between four and five thousand pounds a year. But unlike my grandfather’s arrangement with Agnes May Babb, this was an unwritten agreement and no one knew how long it would last.

My father (unlike my mother) was very commercially-minded, but unfortunately he had no money. He found the post-war world difficult to understand. Everything appeared topsy-turvy, and he could not manoeuvre round it. After the failure of Editions Begh, he retrenched at Norhurst, still married to Marlou. Then he went west to work as sales manager for a company called Concrete Construction (Wales) Ltd, with its headquarters in Pontlliw. Though it had been my uncle who read architecture at university, it was really my father’s interest and, guided by this enthusiasm, he now attempted to make a career in the building trade. Pending success, he lived modestly at a boarding house in Swansea, working at our history of the world at nights so as to save money he might otherwise have spent in pubs or at the cinema. How we actually began this grand enterprise I cannot now remember – perhaps it was after one of the occasions when my father was teaching me the correct way to drink wine. I visited him two or three times and remember reading Joyce’s
Ulysses
in the back bedroom there (I was reading Proust in my bedroom at Maidenhead). Then I would go further west to stay with Griffy Philipps at his father’s house near Carmarthen. Sir Grismond Philipps, Lord Lieutenant of Carmarthenshire, looked like a Grenadier Guards’ version of the Italian film actor Vittorio de Sica whom we had all seen in
Bread, Love and Dreams
. Griffy sometimes referred to his father as ‘the Commanding Officer’ and, on returning to Swansea, I tried out this formula on my own father as a means of circumventing the difficulties of ‘Daddy’ or ‘Basil’. He took it pretty well and was soon signing his letters to me ‘C.O.’, while my mother became ‘Madam’.