Country Girl: A Memoir (22 page)

With my parents in front of Drewsboro House, 1966.

“I can’t,” I said, forcing back the tears that combined rage and desperation.

“You little shite… always were from the first moment you were born… and always will be,” he said.

That was the last time we went there as a family.

It was in that frame of mind that I wrote the epitaph to my parents that would ever after dismay me, except that I wrote it when I did:

Shall I write and tell them that I hate them, these parents on the very verge of their extreme unctions, I hate him because he murdered me, in each and all of my tiniest inclinations, so that I walked with a stoop, thought with a shudder, and spoke the utmost untruthful, placating drivel, and she, she stitched me back on, she got a big packing needle that was her heart and a big bale of coarse twine that was her will, and whenever I walked abroad, she called me back, quick, quick, to the world of stirabout and bowel movements, to the cold dark rooms reeking of vomited drink, to the cold dark rooms waiting for their next hideous commission of sin.

It was about halfway on the journey when my husband stopped in order to have tea, which he had brought in a flask. We went into a cornfield where the harvest had already been taken and the ground was spiked in stubble. There were geese at the far end, and a gander with its neck craned, hissing and determined to drive us away. The story I was reading was Chekhov’s “The Steppe.” The parched plain, the sunburnt hills, the peasant women binding the sheaves of corn, and the terrible stagnancy in the story resembled the place I was in. To my astonishment, I fell asleep in that cornfield and dreamed that a group of people, including some of the characters in the story, my husband and my parents, were all crammed into some shelter, waiting. A girl, well known to be a thief, picked up a sack of potatoes and walked off with them. It might have been a religious service that we waited for, certainly it was deliverance of some kind, and then we heard that the actors who were due to come and entertain us had stopped along the way for a boozy lunch. My mother sat, utterly silent, with a hen in her lap. It was a Rhode Island Red hen, and she ran her fingers repeatedly through the folds of its feathers, searching for something she had lost. I went to her, to apologize, but found that I had lost my speech, and yet when I wakened, I let out some cry of dismay. My sons were shaking me, saying their father had started the car and it was time for us to go.

An envelope, addressed to me, containing a huge check. It was almost four thousand pounds and was for the film rights to
The Lonely Girl.
Enough to allow me to flee, with the children, to rent a flat, to engage a solicitor, and so on, but I was paralyzed by my own fears. My husband was asleep. I looked at the check again and again, held it up to the light, incredulous at the large sum, then reading the name of the bank and the two signatures, which were almost illegible. This time, I would not endorse it over to him, as I had done with all the previous checks from both novels. I simply put it back on the hall table, which was of black cherrywood with a latticed panel across the front. Every detail of those culminating hours has stayed with me.

In the early afternoon I took the children for a walk on the Common, knowing that sometimes their father would watch through binoculars, so that he could follow our movements. But he was still asleep. The children were playing a war game with two sticks—they liked war games—when, as ill luck would have it, Carlo hit another boy who was intrigued by the game and almost grazed his eye. A furious parent rushed to grab the two sticks, saying his son’s eye was destroyed for life and demanding compensation, there and then. I had only my latchkey in my pocket. He insisted on taking down my name, our address, and our phone number, which, quakingly, I gave him.

Ernest had materialized as though out of thin air, and I was surprised that he had got up before being brought his tea and toast in the bedroom. He met us just as we joined hands to cross the road, and I saw the dagger look and thought that he had witnessed, through his binoculars, the near-accident with the other boy, but it was not that. The children were told to look at television, several hours earlier than normal, and Carlo went “whoops,
whoops,” which was his favorite word at that time. He used to pick up certain words that appealed to him and savor them.

“You haven’t signed it,” he said, pointing to the check on the hall table. There was pen and ink bottle beside it.

“I haven’t,” I said.

He stopped, and for a moment he didn’t say anything at all. Endeavoring to be calm, though in a rushing burst, I said, “No… and I’m not going to.”

He stood motionless for a few seconds, realizing in that instant that I had never before openly defied him.

“Come upstairs,” he said. I went upstairs, knowing that for years I had anticipated this defining moment and somehow I must go through with it. He stood with his back to the door, a simulacrum of power, his eyes blazing, saying that yes, the marriage was over, that I had killed it with my schizoid personality and vaunting ambition, but I was being given a last chance. I was being allowed to live in that house and see those children, provided I played by the rules.

“I won’t sign it,” I said, and he rushed toward me, almost soundless, and sat me on the bed. His hand came around my throat, a clasp so sudden that I thought I was already dead, yet cravenly fighting for words, the words still stuck in my craw, but waiting to be said. The words “yes, yes.”

I came downstairs, endorsed the check on the back, and laid it facedown on the big sheet of blotting paper he had put there. Like a sleepwalker, I put on my coat and went out, surprised to notice that dark had fallen. It was late September 1962. It smelled of autumn, though I could not say exactly what the smell was, leaves and leaf mold and the remembered smell of bonfires from the back gardens. Smell attaches itself to a particular moment, and that autumn I knew that I was walking from the past, from the twin governance of parents and husband, but that my steps were as yet unsure.

I went first to a police station and then a hospital. The policeman who saw me was surly; hearing my wifely story, he simply kept asking, Did he or did he not molest you, and did I want the matter taken further? Limply, I said no.

From there, I went to the outpatients department of the Nelson Hospital at the end of the lane, where it seemed the dregs of the world had descended. People calling, people bleeding, people shouting, a drunk couple wrangling and then all of a sudden cuddling, a dog that seemed to belong to no one, bawling children, a taxi driver stumbling in, holding up his badge, searching for the bastard who had picked a row with him, and in a corner, all by himself, a dwarf with a look of utmost desolation. I was not sure why I was there. It was something to do with getting through a given number of minutes, and they would be followed by another given number of minutes, in which time passed, like walking along stepping-stones. The nurse who eventually saw me was motherly, but she said she could not prescribe sleeping tablets, and her advice was for me to go home, make up, have a gin-and-tonic, and mend the marital fences.

I went to Waterloo station, the place I had first seen when I arrived in London. I sat on a bench and curiously felt no fear. The men around me were mostly Irish. One, a talker, kept walking around, saying the same thing, “Oh, I’m tellin’ ya, wah… oh, I’m tellin’ ya,” but whatever it was had slipped his fogged memory. They had a bottle of drink which they passed around. Another man got out a coin for the weighing machine and had the others in stitches as the machine spoke his weight back to him, and his friend jumped on to avail himself of the penny’s worth. I was not afraid there that night, or rather, I was less afraid than in the house I had vacated. Many years later, in a taxi to Portobello Road, the driver swore that he had been one of the people on one of those benches that night and he
remembered me, cowering into the collar of my coat, remembered my accent.

Woodfall Films was based in Curzon Street, and it was they who had bought the rights to
The Lonely Girl,
later called
The Girl with Green Eyes.
A man in their office loaned me some money and then rang Penelope Gilliatt to ask if I could go with my sons for a couple of days to her house in Sussex, where she and John Osborne lived. I picked them up from school, having brought a supply of chocolate, a Dinky car each, and some plastic swords, all of which they thought exciting. The excitement mounted when, soon after we arrived, John enlisted them to smash the greenhouse, which was already falling down. It was an old greenhouse on a cast-iron frame, and the panes of glass were covered in thick, black-green splotches of moss. The sound of the breaking glass came through the open window as we sat having tea, and I poured my woes out to two people who were evidently besotted with one another. Not long after, they left for their flat in London, linked and jocular, and I had such a stab of envy, because I feared I would never be so at ease with a man, like that. Penelope gave me two sleeping capsules that were a bright turquoise, like the beads of a necklace, except that I was afraid to take them, in case I would never wake up again.

My husband and I had one mutual friend, the Canadian writer Ted Allan, who for me was the last word in sophistication, because he had a play that ran in Paris for over a year and starred Jacques Brel. To my astonishment, when I rang him, he began to shout and rant, asking how could I do it to their father, how could I allow a man to go to the school gate, only to learn that his children had been abducted, a man who had had the same nightmare experience from a previous wife. He said then that Ernest was asking to meet me, and he assured me that
everything would be all right, that there would be no recriminations, none. The meeting was in Ted’s flat in Deodar Road; it looked out on the river Thames. Ernest seemed a changed man. He had obviously not slept, his eyes hollow, and he wore the old green jersey that zipped up to his throat. He inquired about the children’s well-being, and then Ted offered to repair to his bedroom, hoping we would appreciate the trouble he had gone to with the tea, two pottery mugs and a brown teapot with a broken spout. Ernest spoke very gently, said he accepted the fact that the marriage was over, he realized that I was young and, as he put it, needed to sow my wild oats. He said we were both reasonable people and that we would share the children, but for the time being, I should bring them back to his house, until I got a place of my own. The matter of money was not mentioned.

I went back to the country to fetch them, and that night we stayed with Trix Craig in north London, a woman I had met at the parties given by Dr. Jerry Slattery, a Cork man who saw to it that all Irish people, but especially actors and writers, met one another under his roof. Trix made apple fritters for the tea, and we played ludo afterward, and the children and I slept on a blown-up rubber bed that she put in the sitting room. They had no idea as to what was going to happen. She gave me a fiver to replenish my funds, which were running low. In the taxi from Wimbledon station, they fretted about catching at least the second half of
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
They argued fiercely over the plot, so I could not reasonably work out who was the good agent or who was the bad agent, the Russian or the American, except I did glean that they had ganged together, were in some HQ in New York above a tailor’s shop, where they waited to confront the enemy who coveted their weapons. I told them that I would not be coming in, that their father and I had amicably agreed to separate, but this news was secondary to the
cliff-hanging moment of the two agents above the tailor’s shop in New York.