Semi-Detached (38 page)

I don’t
have the ring any more. I once gave it to a dresser on a set for safe keeping
while I tottered off to do a sketch. He lost it. If I had reported it he would
have got the sack, so I had to let it go, unremarked.

I had
little to give my uncle in return except my attention, and I wasn’t very
generous with that. When Aunty Joan died and left him alone, my mother in her own
widowhood gave way to mild implied triumphalism. ‘I am so lucky to have my
children all about me. Poor Ieaun,’ although poor Ieaun, older than my father
by ten years, survived into his late eighties.

Still a
student, I went to call on his glamorous split-level residence in Cardiff. What
had seemed unbearably stuffy to a six-year-old became exotically seductive, if
utterly bonkers, as I grew older. Every square inch of wall was covered with
dazzling pink and yellow flower power wallpaper and hung with sickly-coloured
paintings. Joan and Ieaun had imported the Nice Corniche to a suburb of Cardiff
and sat amongst their glittering bibelots looking down on Radyr Golf Club. He
would show me round his treasures before, inevitably, launching into his
lengthy war saga.

I was
an attentive listener. He had left Cardiff when called up, gone by ship to
South Africa. The garden railroad had taken him to Durban for training and
Aden, where he had been a Wing Commander in charge of a hospital. (I had his
tin trunk inscribed with his rank in my set alongside his old Imperial portable
typewriter in my room in college.) With all its details, of cocktails and
verandas, of encounters with girls in flowered frocks, with his post-war
difficulties building a practice and accounts of pre—war anaesthetical
inadequacies, the story usually lasted most of an afternoon.

It was
like sitting opposite a distorted mirror vision of my father. Ieaun was tall,
elegant and spare, with delicate gestures and a nervous, half-stuttering manner
— donnish, you might have thought, if he had read anything other than that week’s
Country Life
— but rather remote from the picture of a short-tempered
tyrant that my mother always painted. Elwyn was short and tubby, but with the
same translucent skin and the same round features and the thin but not receding
hair, and inescapably the brighter. It was as if there had been a division,
though. Daddy had taken the ordinary share. He wanted to be an unpretentious
person, with a family and children. Ieaun had taken the rest. It was impossible
to imagine Ieaun allowing his wife to choose his clothes: his alpaca monogrammed
dressing gowns, his Turnbull and Asser shirts and his hand-made plus fours. My
father looked at style and fashion and parties and dancing and declined them
all, mooching around in his Morris Oxford and his Gannex mac. Or perhaps my
uncle had already taken the lot, and there was no possible point in competing.
All the same, it explained something about my father. It explained his origins
in pomposity. It explained the trappings and his almost disguised dignity.

Later
in life, I rather proudly brought my uncle out to show him around a bit, to
demonstrate that I had trappings too, so that others might appreciate that I
had stylish antecedents beyond my dumpy old dad — not that they had ever met my
dumpy old dad, but Ieaun was an agreeable substitute though he habitually
embarrassed me far more than my father would ever have done.

When
Bookworm
went to Cardiff I sold Ieaun to Daisy, my producer. ‘Oh, he’s terribly
stylish,’ I promised and brought the wizened old stick to join us in our hotel,
dressed in a purple shirt and a yellow suit far too big for him, with a tartan
tie and correspondent shoes. He looked bemused by the new Holiday Inn, peering
about as if the lobby and its flaming torchères had descended on Cardiff from
outer space, but he rattled out most of his war stories before getting up to
dance a little too intimately with the girls one by one. (He was then
seventy-nine.)

A few
years later I invited him up to London to a Royal Variety Show, where he did
the same at the party afterwards, taking straight to the dance floor and
smooching with a startled agent. I didn’t know her. She just happened to be
sitting at the table where the rest of us were gradually falling asleep. He was
dragged away at two in the morning begging for one last dance. He was a ladies’
man, then. He must have taken all of that side of the sibling share too.

When
Ieaun died he left all his wealth to his accountant. It was his accountant who
had decided that Ieaun was too ill to look after his own house and arranged for
him to be moved into a nursing home near Newport. I visited and discovered him
alone in a little room looking out over a bleak garden. He may have detested us
as children but he had lost none of the good manners he had shown us as adults.
He was wearing a rather fine cashmere lemon-yellow cardigan with the buttons
done up wrong. The nurse brought us both tea and presented him with a chocolate
bar. ‘Oh, you like the Twix, don’t you, Ieaun?’ And he nodded and reached for
it. He munched with the concentrated attention of a toddler. He started talking
earnestly about my Fellowship. ‘That’s quite a thing you know, your Fellowship …’

I
demurred.

‘No,
no, to be a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, it’s recognition.’

He wasn’t
talking about any honorarium of mine, but my father’s. It had been the subject
of a row with my mother on the night of my father’s funeral, and now with tears
in his eyes Ieaun was somehow trying to acknowledge his younger brother’s
qualifications.

I didn’t
stop him. It was a fragile and telling genetic connection. I was content to
play the part of my father, to acknowledge that he was a better man than me and
deserved the praise. I took it on his behalf. Confusingly, in this befuddled
sibling, there were all my father’s mannerisms again, the little feminine
reassurances, the same grey look in the eyes, the slight earnest urgency What
was this? My father mistaking me for my father? But Ieaun knew as he talked
that he wasn’t right in some way and faded. A look of panic overwhelmed him,
and I tried to encourage him to talk on.

‘Yes,
because you went to South Africa in the war, didn’t you?’ I finally said
helplessly.

For a
moment he calmed. He nodded and smiled. ‘I went on the Castle Line … all the
way down because …’ And he stopped. He faltered and sat quietly, and I felt
bad for what I had done. Tears rolled down his face. I had only succeeded in
prompting an awareness of his current condition. He was happier with his
chocolate bars. He was suddenly conscious of the complete absence of memory. He
was reduced to the present, to a drab room, a candlewick bedspread and a
regular, rationed Twix.

His
will pre-dated his Alzheimer’s, but I got his clothes. They arrived in five or
six large cardboard boxes: dainty Lobb shoes with trees, monogrammed shirts, a
Sulka dressing gown, dress collars and studs in little leather boxes. I keep
them for sentimental reasons.

There
weren’t many intimations of mortality in Cambridge. After wallowing in relative
luxury, designing posters and directing plays and dressing up in borrowed
clothes, I now faced my final year and had to go in search of somewhere to
live.

Three
days before term began in October 1974, I went back a whole day early to study
the small ads in the
Cambridge Evening News.
A room was advertised in
Eden Street in the Kite, with a viewing at six o’clock.

I left
that late too. When I arrived at five past, a considerable party of students
from the tech, several men in cheap suits hugging carrier bags of clothes and a
clutch of desperate-looking pregnant girls were already waiting in the queue.
An estate agent came and unlocked the front door. He turned to the crowd. ‘I
have only two rooms in here,’ he announced. I could have left then, I suppose,
but speculated that the thirty desperate people in front of me might just
possibly be very, very fussy, so I waited at the utter end of the line. Both
rooms were taken immediately. The estate agent marched briskly out and along
the queue. ‘There’s another round the back,’ he said. We turned on our heel as
one. Nobody protested, though they should have done, because the last to arrive
(me) was now miraculously at the front. He unlocked a lean-to outhouse. I glimpsed
a folding table and a bed. ‘I’ll take it,’ I said. Twenty-eight people behind
me groaned softly.

It cost
me five pounds a week. To open the door I had to fold the table away. There was
a shiny oval electric bar heater high on the wall. If I switched the fire on,
the room instantly became sweltering. This seemed promising. The space was
little more than the length of the bed. As the winter progressed, though, the
cold out-performed the bar. The wall was only one brick thick and the heater
struggled to warm up north Cambridge. So I spread my Russian flag over the bed
and went to sleep at Newnham (easily done as long as I got in before ten),
padding down ‘the longest corridor in England’, squeezing into Charlotte’s
single bed. I was just one of a large number of illegal male friends sneaking
about the nunnery.

Life
wasn’t exactly formless. I spent almost five years at Cambridge. That’s only a
little less than the time I spent at secondary school. At school I had grown.
At school I had progressed. My balls dropped, my voice broke, hairs sprouted on
my chin. But university is a blur of repeated impressions, as if nothing really
changed, while everything was changing. But though I feel no different now —
somehow damned to remain forever eighteen, with an increasingly bad back — I
started a journey at Cambridge which I suppose was to become the rest of my
life and I never stepped off. I never pushed the boat out. I never started the
engine. I don’t recall exercising choice.

But one
day I looked up from my crud-covered trousers and realized the end was
approaching. I stayed in Cambridge for another vacation to try to catch up.

‘I
remember being furious because you got a dispensation for an extra day on your
long essay,’ Charlotte told me in 2005.

‘Did I?’
This was marvellous. I had no recollection of that at all. It was enjoyable to
reconstruct. my forgotten life, to live it again, vicariously ‘Why were you
furious?’

‘Because
I had finished mine on time and, instead of being able to relax and celebrate,
I had to go around and proofread yours.

‘Incoherent.’

‘Yes,
but clever; on Ibsen and Nietzsche.’

How
sweet: Charlotte was flattering me after all these years. I remembered it as
being a colossal error. I had to read the whole of Ibsen, the whole of Shaw and
quite a lot of Nietzsche in one vacation, only in order to point out that they
had nothing in common at all.

Six
Hamilton Place was a house of postgraduates: Rose and Charles and Ian (who was
in fact still an undergraduate, but a bearded one) would emerge from their
studies, blinking and tottering, and make tea in the back kitchen. I moved
there after a German count playing a small part in a play I was directing
borrowed the room in Eden Street to change for the squash courts and lost the
only set of keys. Finals were coming. The women’s college was getting tense. I
knew I had to give myself over to monkish cramming in order to get by myself,
and, 10, it was good. I can remember the warm spring nights, getting back up
the hill under horse chestnut trees hanging over a wall, heavy with waxen
candles.

Was it
then that I was trying to earn extra money by working in the ADC bar? Was it
then, unable to get through the month, that I sold all my books in a shop
opposite Magdalene? (I watched as the owner picked through the box and came to
a leather-bound seventeenth-century tract I had inherited from the wreck of
frizzy Aunty Betty’s house, assuming that it would be worth a fortune, only to
have him sniff at it and add an extra pound to the total.)

‘I
remember the carp you bought and cooked,’ Charlotte said.

I
remembered that too. ‘In red wine and sultanas.’

‘It was
disgusting.’

I had
taken up experimental cookery too. How did we fit it all in? Why did we fit it
all in?

I was
directing a musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac composed by Peter Fincham,
but I finished a busy rehearsal one afternoon in 1975 and I decided that I
ought to try to reread my essays. There weren’t that many of them, but I had
Finals the following day I especially needed the one I had written on James
Joyce. I spent the evening I had allocated for revision trying to track down
my supervisor. He still had it somewhere on. his desk. I had never finished his
sequence of supervisions before my exams intervened.

So I
finished my education and drew breath to look around me. There was no sense of
panic. I had been crawling along the baby-boomer pipeline since 1953, doing
pretty much everything that was expected of me and enjoying myself; possibly a
bit too much recently, but as far as I .was concerned, I was top of my class in
shouting at other undergraduates in university plays. Something would come of
that, surely. If it didn’t, I wasn’t sure that I minded unduly Frankly, I was
exhausted by the last four years. I needed a bit of a rest.

I would
become ‘a director’, of some sort. I had never invited anybody up from London
to look at ‘my work’. I did write a letter to a man at the Royal Court, who
promised that he would try and kindly pointed out that he had retired ten
years before. (The library copy of the
The Theatre Yearbook
was a little
out of date.) I vaguely assumed that I should work as some sort of assistant to
begin with, but for whom? I decided I had better start writing letters in
earnest.