Romany and Tom (38 page)

I kissed you for the first time on January 1st 1957 because you looked lonely. I kissed you again on January 28th because I couldn’t help myself.

The paper drooped in my hands. I looked away. I felt as if I had prised open a locket.

The three pages of captured memories are vivid and impressionistic, by turns wistful and defiant, written it would seem in the middle of 1959, some two years after the affair had begun. ‘I have no diary for 1956 or 1957,’ she begins, and there is a sense, by the end, that by writing the memories down she is trying to trap and preserve something she fears she might lose, or worse, forget. Of the early days she eye-catchingly reminisces:

March 3. Prelims. Scones for tea on the trolley, with honey . . . Unromantic humorous musical medley on out-of-tune piano. Offer of gin. Offer of another gin. Shoes off. The rest is history.

And then:

Opening Phases. Spring ’57. Sitting on the piano stool . . . the sun shining into your flat in the late afternoon. The sun at the Yacht [in Greenwich]. Sitting pressed close together against the wall at the Yacht and you saying you thought you loved me for the first time . . . Driving from the tea shack on the heath to the Plume. Following you down the hill . . . My black cotton dress. Your grey suit. My gold bangle . . . Driving round St James’s Square. Journeys to Blackheath at night when the world was ours. Tea in Hampstead. Tea in the Chinese Restaurant in Brompton Road. The visits to your tailor. Buying my coat in Harvey N. And collecting June’s from Fenwick.

They met illicitly for four months – riverside pubs and stolen afternoons, a little hotel (the Paragon) and sometimes bolt-holes engineered with the help of friends – but beyond the surface clandestine excitement, it’s clear from the beginning that it was a door opening on to a new and profound secret world for her: a world that was carnal, adrenalised and consuming; unlike anything – at the age of thirty-three, with four children and nearly nine years into a marriage – she had ever known before. A few letters preserved from the period are unblushingly frank and unposed, as if this time she really had – as her mother used to say – ‘gone off at the deep end’. It wasn’t long before she was describing it in a letter to my dad as ‘the most overwhelming, beautiful, tender, savage thing that ever happened to me’.

Looking back now, and bearing in mind the changes and loosening in the divorce laws that have taken place since 1969, it is hard to imagine what entangled years lay in store for couples who met as ardently and dramatically as my parents did in 1957. The rights of the married individual have long since displaced antiquated notions of moral fibre and dangers to the fabric of society, but back then the divorce laws of the day permitted annulment only on the grounds of adultery or cruelty or desertion lasting at least three years. Even when the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce 1956 was set up to review increasing pressures in the post-war years to see marriage merely as a companionate alliance between two people in an increasingly individualised world, as opposed to a legal binding duty that involved the state as well, no changes were made. A relationship that ‘broke down’ was not enough. In fact, clinging steadfastly and conservatively to the past, the report stated:

We are convinced that the real remedy for the present situation lies in other directions [i.e. not easier divorce]: in fostering in the individual the will to do his duty in the community; in strengthening his resolution to make marriage a union for life; in inculcating a proper sense of responsibility towards his children.

It was against this background on 2 July 1957 – four months after the affair had begun – that my dad’s first wife, June, found out.

My dad broke the news to my mum in the tiny Grenadier pub on Wilton Row near Hyde Park Corner. He vowed it would make no difference, and they talked themselves into renting a flat for six weeks in Sussex Gardens in Bayswater to continue their secret assignations. Quite how soon afterwards Ken found out is unclear, but the affair was fully exposed by the end of August, and my mum and dad seemed unable to sustain the duplicity. In early September, they were preparing to reconcile with their respective partners. On the final night before the lease ran out on the Bayswater flat, my mum stayed up late alone while my dad was out performing at Quaglino’s, and wrote an open letter to herself:

Written to the strains of Jack Payne on Eve’s lousy wireless.
On this night of Sep 4 at 11.30 sitting in this strange girl’s flat in which I have been since Monday, I feel, for the sake of the future and the past, I must write a couple of things down. Tomorrow I give in the keys. The oddest thing almost, is that I should be so besotted in the business that
we
have a flat – us – he and I actually have a flat of our own and have had for six weeks. ‘I am so steeped in’ now, that I can entirely neglect my children – my lovely lovely triplets and my awkward heart-rending nervy Simon – can entirely and utterly banish them from my thoughts. That Ken – my dear husband of almost nine years is a stranger to me as a piece of furniture – a thing – not a person any more. And I realise I am doing all this – for what? For my lover – for this boyish, randy, sensitive, needful man . . . What is it I see in him? I know what he sees in me, but there is a terrific core of gentleness, thoughtfulness, passion, vanity and need there, that I find irresistible – plus humour (often violently simple), gaiety and, I suppose, though I hate to admit now that it has any bearing on the subject, glamour. I love him because he has a creative life of his own – he is above me and brilliant in his own field, and he loves me, I think, because sexually he finds me stimulating and I am a ‘whole’ person, he says – developed, he thinks! But emotionally I am pretty unstable. He talked to me about music again tonight – the things he’s playing in the first programme – ‘Sally’, ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’ and ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ – which when he said it last time, on this very bed – with tears choking – it seemed the saddest thing I’d ever heard. They’re playing ‘Jennie In Love’. Poor little girl – will she go through all this after the years of apparent stability, security and happiness? I feel I must be such a worthless person to be so wrapped up in this – so unaware of anything else – so vital, so important, yet, unless I can be adult enough to remain his mistress and also a good wife and mother . . . But I can’t believe I am strong enough or without conscience – and yet I love him
absolutely
still, and tonight I am happy – but tomorrow I must take up the threads and responsibilities again – and the house fills me with foreboding – please may everything work out – and yet why should He bother when I am so wicked.

If it is a portrait of my mum in crisis – crazily in love for perhaps the first time in her life – it is also a portrait of the time: a post-war moral maze where her love for her children, duty to her husband, respect for the institution of marriage, and fear of Christian judgement run parallel with unstoppable feelings of awakened passion and free will. Reading it now, I find it difficult not to hear its continuous background soundtrack of late-night London jazz and sentimental show songs, spilling through the radio, running through her head, articulating every surge of feeling, all interlacing with the many versions of the same songs she must have heard performed for her in restaurants and clubs and studios by her own lover. If it weren’t my own parents’ story, I’d say it reads like the overwrought synopsis of a bestselling fifties potboiler.

I sometimes drove my mum to Paddington Station when she came up to London to visit me after they’d moved to Oxford in the late eighties. We’d turn off the Marylebone Road before the flyover and cross the Edgware Road, and she’d go quiet on Sussex Gardens.

‘Is it
all
hotels now?’ she once asked.

‘Looks like it,’ I said, as we passed the strung-out illuminated porticos of the two- and three-star conversions set back from the road.

‘Funny to think I rented a place up there with your father.’

‘Yes, Dad mentioned it once,’ I said, keeping the tone in my voice unembellished, wondering what she might say next.

‘I
bet
he did. He probably said something
rude
.’

I laughed. ‘He probably did.’

We turned up Norfolk Place towards the station.

She was still looking out of the window at the passing buildings. ‘It was all just so desperate,’ she said quietly. ‘You never mean to hurt people, do you?’

At first, after they left the secret Bayswater flat in early September 1957, there was an immediate breaking-off. My mum returned to Ken and the children, and my dad to June. Yet within a fortnight it was clearly an insufferable state of affairs. In an attempt to exert some control my mum wrote to my dad; her letter was headed, a little comically,
RB’s 2nd Sensible Manifesto (Rules for Anguished Lovers, Part II)
. Nevertheless, she writes earnestly and clearly:

Statement: This last two weeks has been intolerable, unproductive, desolate, blank and quite untenable. No work, no love, no nothing. Tears, rows and dead hopelessness.

Cause: A complete cessation of a six-month love affair (which on Saturday included ‘for ever’) is too drastic and cruel for ordinary mortals of which we are two.

Reasons For Abrupt Cancellation: Of the highest conscientious principles – love, duty, honour and [the] pain we were causing our legal partners and the intolerable strain of running a double life.

BUT in actual fact, our utter misery is making us much crueller and bitterer than we need be and we are taking it out on ‘them’, the very people we have done this thing for.

Suggestions: (1) We continue this enforced separation until such time as we are all more settled in mind – till then, the body must want. (2) You
must
get on with your work and rebuild your musical life and concentration. You’re on the threshold of success. (3) I
must
make my family happy and be kind to Richard [Ken] and take an interest in ordinary things again.

It must have been such a tense and volatile stalemate. June had responded with implacable anger and entrenchment. Ken, on the other hand, soon understood that nothing of value would come from such enforced deprivation, and – much as it must have pained him – reluctantly advocated ‘something less drastic’, in the hope it would all come to nothing if left to run its course. If required, he was also ready to meet Tom and write to June to edge things forward. In a letter from the time, my mum calls him ‘the strongest and best of the four of us’, the one prepared to ‘wait and see’ and ‘face what comes’. Was it just his measured pragmatism that impressed her? Or the fact that he was quietly clearing the way for my parents to meet again?

It was six months into the first year of their affair and the slow walk towards an uncertain resolution had begun.

Chapter 38

‘We went driving, Tom and I.’

Pale autumnal light was at the window. A hoover could be heard in the corridor. I leaned in and smelled the fading red cut freesias in the vase on the chest of drawers. Soap. Strawberries.

‘Did you, Mum? When?’

‘Yesterday.’

I turned and pushed the uneaten bowl of apple crumble to the side of the invalid table, and slid the coffee towards her. I’d learned to stop correcting her; if it was true in her mind, it might as well be true. ‘Really? Where?’ I sat beside her on the footstool.

‘Oh, here and there, you know. The countryside. It was dark. Very romantic. We were late back. No one saw us come in.’

The lake and willow trees in the green ghost light at Sonning. The dovecote, swans, my too high heels, the red buttons on the sofa, the journey back under the stars of peculiar brightness.

(From my mum’s letter of private memories with Tom)

‘He was unsure about coming here,’ she said, slowly slipping her lightly trembling finger into the handle of the cup and raising it to her mouth. She took a sip of the tepid coffee. ‘I thought he wouldn’t arrive. But I saw the lights from his car.’ She put the cup down and gestured to the car park of the care home beyond the window. ‘Out there.’

Henley. Waiting, watching the bridge for your car. Rowing up the river. Dinner when my nerves overwhelmed me. Lying smoking cigarettes in bed at one in the morning and me crying. Darts at the Turville pub, and me in a blouse like June’s, and even at that stage the knowledge that I must make you drive up the avenue of meeting trees and just belong under it for always although you were already in an agony of doubt and conscience.

(From my mum’s letter of private memories with Tom)

‘And where is he now?’

She hesitated for a moment. ‘Around.’

She looked out again towards the car park and as she did so, it suddenly hit me why in part they’d chosen to move to Oxford in the late eighties: it wasn’t just for the little modern house on the river, or the recommendation of an old friend; it was because it was the hub for so many places where much of their early elopement had taken place – the towns and villages along the Thames Valley, in the Chilterns, beside the Ridgeway; before all the years of compromises and mistakes; in those days when it was all about them; in the green ghost light; up the avenue of meeting trees; when it was all intoxicating and alive; under the stars of peculiar brightness. Oxford was to be remade as something of their own again.