Country Girl: A Memoir (24 page)

That night, after I got a babysitter, my friend Beth drove me to the address where we believed the girl lived. It was a long drive: pubs were closed in high streets, gates and shutters were down, then out into the country where lorries were parked in lay-bys, their drivers fast asleep, and there was one eating house with a crazy, gaudy light and a sign that said,
OPEN EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR
. Parts of the journey were countryside with trees or saplings, and other parts bare ground full of litter, with here and there a lonely telephone kiosk. Long, long after that we arrived in that landscape where the low land stretched out to meet the sea, land and sea as one, empty and whitish and with a forlornness that was telling me my journey was in vain. We arrived in the small town that was fast asleep. The houses were
all of a piece, dotted in between with a coffee shop, a bookshop, a cake shop with a huge wedding cake in the window, and a shop that sold secondhand clothes. At the end of that street I saw Ernest’s gray vintage Railton car. It stood out, so stately, so incongruous, parked there, with a small rime of mist on it too. This was the evidence I required to get custody, it was within a whisker of me, except suddenly I did not know what to do. I became very agitated. Beth had brought a small amount of gin in a tonic-water bottle and we each had a slug while we debated the next course of action. She said that she could pose as a detective and storm in there, but then decided it was too dangerous and too dumb. How impulsive and unthinking the whole episode had been. I went to the phone booth at the end of the street and looked up the woman’s number. Surprised to find it, I dialed, and after a few minutes a voice answered and she simply said, “Fuck off.”

“I crave leave to refer to my petition therein…” Pomp and circumstance. I am entering one of the great legal institutions of England, which I know of only through reading Charles Dickens. A large notice reads
PROBATE: DIVORCE: ADMIRALTY
, and I go through a courtyard to Court No. 23, Case No. 10706. I had come to get custody of my children. It sometimes recurs in a dream, that solemn room, a handful of people, the judge in a suit and white shirt, sitting on the bench, his clerk sitting directly beneath him, and in the dream the judge is looking at me, trying to decide whether I am or am not a suitable parent.

After three years of a precarious arrangement, with the children spending some nights in my house and some in their father’s, things worsened, his thesaurus of rules and stipulations ever increasing and impossible to abide by.
They must not be driven in any private motorcar, they must not be bathed by either adult or minor, they must not be allowed into the room where I wrote, since my writing now reeked of the perverts and lunacy of Krafft-Ebing.
I was repeatedly warned that if I rocked the boat by even one fathom, he would emigrate with them to New Zealand, where his sister lived.

Then, in the post, a dossier of over six thousand words arrived. An obituary, charting our relationship from the day he had lifted me from behind the shop counter, thinking he had procured a decent, honorable companion but instead had found a “vainglorious monster, divested of all human traits,” who had destroyed everyone and everything she touched, including her
own bartered children. It ended by saying, “If you run to lawyers and courts, I will fight you. I am absolutely determined about that and I will fight you in my own way. Foul deeds beget foul deeds. A hundred thousand Arab children need a cup of milk a day to save their lives. The address of Oxfam is in the telephone book, you might still have time to save yourself.”

My solicitor, Bernard Main, was of the old school, courteous, slightly absentminded, his desk a jungle of papers and folders, scummed in dust, reminiscent of
Bleak House
and its forlorn petitioners. He wore a worn, oatmeal-colored tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, and for street wear he donned one exactly the same, but he seemed not to notice the similarity. We had been on a bit of a mission, hoping to find a few friendly people who would swear to the fact that I was not a monster, a nutcase, a nymphomaniac, or insane. My husband had compiled a dossier from evidence he accrued from the local doctor, the headmaster at Hill Cross School, and the Irish girl who had worked for us.

Bernard and I were in a cold tiled hallway in a house in south London. A woman I knew from home had agreed to be a character witness. We were escorted into a small sitting room full of toys, where half a train set snaked around the curb of a fireplace and there was a hatch door to the kitchen, where the wails of one child were being drowned out by the yells of other children.

“Are they boiling a horse?” Bernard kept saying, as the smell of the stew from the kitchen became more pronounced; he doubted the wisdom of our quest. Maura, who knew my family and who was normally garrulous, came in flustered, then sat on a pouf, wringing her apron as if it were a dishcloth. She had never talked to a solicitor before. She looked from one of us to the other, wondered aloud what her husband would say if he knew, and then in nostalgic vein recalled Drewsboro, the lovely kitchen garden with different kinds of apples and pears and
boys stealing them. One kind of apple in particular she remembered, with reddish flesh, as if there were dye in it, and she dilated uselessly on this. Finally he took a short statement, which she signed, hoping it wouldn’t land her in jail.

It was a bitter cold night as we walked down a hill toward the luring lights of a pub. We were sitting in a corner and drinking mulled red wine when Bernard, dropping his guard as a solicitor and referring to the sheaf of threatening correspondence, asked why I had married such a madman. It was something I could not answer, not even remotely, and all I thought was that if anatomy is fate, as Freud has said, answering the pay telephone in the hall of 58 North Circular Road on the night that I was first invited to meet him was also fate. Indeed, as I would later learn, Bunny had a list of desirable girls whom they could ring, so finding me was merely part of a lottery. Sitting there with Bernard, who could not give me any guarantee of the outcome of the case, I was beginning to crack. I asked him who decided on the custody, and he said it was down to one person, one judge only.

The night before the case was to be heard, the children were in their father’s house and were subjected to an inquisition that I would learn about only in time. I was in my house in Putney with the phone off the hook, a black phone coiled along the kitchen table, like a python ready to spring. Going up to bed, I was astonished to find a letter on the mat inside the door, an envelope with my husband’s handwriting. It said, “I am not fighting it any longer, your methods are too dirty and too devious. I will not be in court tomorrow morning, so the children are yours to destroy.”

Very early in the morning, I rang the barrister John Mortimer to impart the good news, and very relieved, he said that he would send his junior. I wore nothing stylish, though stupidly I put on long, giddy earrings with feather pendants that had the dip of catkins.

August Is a Wicked Month,
published 1965.

The first person I saw as I crossed over the path, along the grass toward the courtyard that led to the court proper, was my husband in a dark suit, curiously animated, talking with a great excess of energy to two men, presumably his barristers.

An usher in a black gown showed me to my seat, and across from me I saw my husband arrange a series of plain white postcards on which he had written the incriminating evidence that was to come.

My junior was kind, but somewhat at sea, staring down at his notes. My husband’s barrister then called him as witness, and with alacrity he climbed to the witness box and swore on the Bible. He was fired up, like an actor given the great part that he had always dreamed of. He told the judge that he had assembled his evidence in three categories: my character, my attitude to men, and my writing. The thought came to me that Moll Flanders, were she sitting in that court, stood a better chance of getting custody.

My most recent book,
August Is a Wicked Month,
he said made Krafft-Ebing’s portrayals of perverts and lunatics pale by comparison. It had been banned in South Africa on the grounds of its being “obnoxious, indecent, and obscene.” When I saw him hand a copy to the clerk, with two fetching photographs on front and back which had been taken by Lord Snowdon, I quaked. My attitude to marriage could indeed be gleaned from it, as indeed it could from a magazine (which he now waved) with the incendiary heading “O’Brien Tosses a Molotov Cocktail Through the Stained-Glass Window of Marriage.” In the article I had said that the marriage vows should be rewritten in favor of the wife; this in a room full of males did not bode well. The pith of his argument, however, was that I did not really want the children at all, they were merely “decor” for my life. Faced with the responsibility of having them seven days a week, I would back away and disappear for months, as I had done before, having fled to America soon after I abandoned them. My junior’s face reddened at each disclosure. Fighting this custody case was another example of my revenge toward men, part of the schizophrenic side of me that felt it must fight the entire
male element in the world. From being a nymphomaniac, I was suddenly a man-hater. The children, if they were to be left to me, would, he assured the judge, become mother-smothered, emotionally sick homosexuals, my favorite group of people. The judge was then invited to read a particular passage from
August Is a Wicked Month,
which, somewhat irked, he did; he then turned a few pages onward, closed the book, and, looking around, said, “It seems to me that boys of nine and eleven would not be interested in this kind of literature.”

My barrister was then asked if he wished to call me as a witness, and hearing him decline, I found that I was already standing, the words tumbling out. Without going to the witness box, I said that if I did not love them and if I did not want them, I would not have fought as desperately as I had done for three years. He asked if there was anything else I wished to say, at which I merely shook my head, powerless to refute the various charges that had been hurled at me. When I sat down, not only my ears but even the gold sleepers on which the catkins dangled were also burning like mad. There was a pause as the judge consulted the numerous notes from both sets of barristers, peering into them, then brooding at times, allowing his glasses, which were on a black cord, to slip off. I believed that I was doomed. The short wait seemed interminable.

“Pray, silence for the judge.”

I was hearing the words, but they were like something coming from a great distance, and only by the junior squeezing my arm could I fully believe their impact. He had decided to give me custody, with due consideration for the petitioner’s rights regarding visits and holiday arrangements. The years of agony had come to an end. I looked in my husband’s direction and saw that he had stiffened with outrage and disbelief, and then he looked toward me, and I felt a terrible judgment descend on me, as with Lot’s wife when she was turned into a pillar of salt.

I collected the children from their separate schools and told them the good news, which they barely responded to, and that evening in Putney at the supper table they were quiet and bewildered. Then suddenly Carlo, being the elder and feeling guilty for the father they had left, turned on me, saying, “Dad says you’re a snob and you’ll send us to a snob school and not a decent socialist school, where we would have grown up to be responsible citizens.” According to their father, choosing to send them to school in Wimbledon, where the traffic was greater and where they risked being run over, was part of my death wish for them. Carlo was crying as he said it, crying and befuddled. Sasha placed our three hands together in reconciliation, and all that evening we were grasping for nice things to say to one another.

It was much later that I learned of their last ordeal in Cannon Hill Lane. They had been put in separate rooms with an affidavit sheet before them. They were given pen and ink, and their father, holding a long stick of red sealing wax, asked them to write a letter which he would bring to the judge the following day. They were to say that they wished to remain with their father and not under the unstable influence of a sick mother. They were left alone for this.