Swan River (12 page)

Decorum and their former agreement dictated that Young George must stay with Sis and Tom, but after a rubber of bridge – in which Tom partnered Sis, and George beat them playing with the dummy – to Sis's irritation he excused himself and left the room.

Sis and Tom faced each other across the baize-covered card table in front of the sideboard. There was a silence before Sis remarked on the beauty of the flowers he had brought. She stood up and smelled them.

He told her how good it was to see her again and how he had enjoyed the evening at the Johnsons'.

She said that she had enjoyed it too.

Then, with the correct amount of deference, he asked if he could visit her again.

‘Of course.' The response somehow slipped out, without her thinking about it.

Tom smiled as George returned. They cut for partners for another rubber; Sis drew the dummy.

She thought later how she could have politely discouraged him; women knew how to do that and did it often; she had done it on occasion; there was an etiquette for these situations. For some reason – she didn't know why – she had just said it, ‘Of course.' Was it that she was tired of nuance, didn't care about all that any more, and had simply answered his question literally? ‘Of course', he could come again. He was a nice man. She liked him. Why not? But, if that was her attitude, wasn't she being terribly modern! She didn't think of herself as modern. She was an ordinary woman with ordinary morals – she had thought about her ordinariness, her cleaving to convention, over and over, and had convinced Kate of it, with sincerity. Anyway, he would come again and she would see whether she wanted to be modern.

Sis lost the rubber, and they crossed the hall to see Old George.

‘The holy of holies,' Sis heard her brother mutter to Tom as they entered.

Tom hesitated by the door, seemingly transfixed by the flickering light of a dozen candles. Old George invited him to sit down. He took a padded, armless chair at the end of the bed, and – as he said later – felt as though he had arrived in the premises of an arcane religious sect.

Old George smiled and acknowledged that gaslight was Tom's living, and told him that he valued it and used plenty of it, but that he liked to celebrate flame, the first source of light.

Sis wondered why her father was being so pompous, but Tom simply looked startled and said, ‘My hat! You certainly have a lot of candles in here sir.' Sis and Young George suppressed their giggles.

There was a noise at the front door and the sounds of a man and a woman talking. A moment later Ernest walked in, greeted everyone loudly and introduced himself to Tom.

Ernest knew Tom's brother Bill, and was soon telling Tom that he must come and see his wife Rose's new act. It was still being rehearsed, but would be a scorcher; one impresario wanted them both – he had become her manager and played a small part in the act – to perform in St Petersburg, and another wanted them in New York. Tom should come to the first public performance at the Britannia. He would get him good seats.

As he spoke, a thudding noise came from the stairs, followed by the screeching of a violin.

Tom stood and looked through the open door to the hall. Old George stayed in bed smiling, and the others remained in their chairs. The sound grew louder and closer, and Tom could hear an approximation of the tune of ‘Daisy'. Then, into his line of vision, came a woman walking on her hands; her legs were encased in silver sequinned tights and her short black skirt fell around her torso. She stepped off the bottom stair and proceeded across the carpeted floor of the hall. She was playing the violin with her feet.

‘My hat!'

‘My wife, Rose. Stage name, La Frascetti.'

10

The Large-eyed Beauty

In the spring of 1963 my parents sold our home in Marlow, put the furniture in store and went to live in a caravan among other caravans in a flat, sparsely grassed field near Taunton. The seed company had promoted my father again and posted him to Somerset, where their business was flagging. The caravan was to be a temporary arrangement while they looked for a permanent home.

During my Easter holiday I slept on what served as a seat in the daytime, with my father snoring two feet away on the facing seat. My mother had a fold-down bed over which we had to climb if we wanted to go out at night for a pee on the grass or, worse, to walk fifty yards for a shit in a breeze-block cubicle. My mother, whose Edwardian childhood had been spent in a large house in South Kensington with plentiful servants, looked unhappy for much of this school holiday but, when I asked her how she could put up with it, smiled and said that it was fun for a short time and that it wouldn't be for long.

I had no friends there and my days were spent either with the Ordnance Survey map on my lap directing my father to farms, or travelling to Taunton by bus with my mother where we shopped and played golf on a municipal nine-hole course near the centre of the town. We were poor golfers – I had never played golf before and, as far as I know, nor had my mother – but there was nothing else to do, and we found that we enjoyed walking about among trees and bunkers while hitting a little ball and chatting.

Marlow was more than one hundred miles away. I hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to Richard, Deborah or any friends. I wrote instead and Deborah wrote back. She said she missed me. I missed her too and when I went back to school we went on exchanging letters.

When I next came home, for the summer holidays, my parents had moved into a furnished first-floor flat in a tree-lined street near the middle of Taunton. This was still to be temporary, my mother told me; they just hadn't been able to find a suitable house.

It was a hot dry summer. At the beginning of August my father took some days off and the three of us made excursions to Minehead, picnicking and swimming from the beach. The swimming costumes that they had worn every summer for as long as I could remember were on show once again: my father's navy blue and woolly; my mother's a turquoise one-piece with ribs and seams in the bosom region and narrow shoulder straps. They seemed unusually happy and surprised me by holding hands in the waves and splashing each other. I sat on the sand watching them from a distance; they seemed strong and much younger than they were. Yet they were old – seventy-one and fifty-seven.

On a hot afternoon later in the month, I returned to the house after a trip to the record shop in Corporation Street. As I let myself in, I could hear my father's voice. He was shouting. I stood downstairs in the hall listening. There was a silence. Then, my mother screamed, ‘Don't! Don't! Put it down!' I ran up the stairs and found them in the kitchen. He was standing over her. His arm was raised; there was a heavy frying pan in his hand. His face was red and damp with sweat, and his whole body was shaking. My mother's back was towards me. One hand was in front of her face, the other was on the floor. She was trying to get underneath a small formica table.

My father turned and glared at me. Still crouching, my mother ran from the room, pulling me after her by the arm. She half ran, half fell down the stairs and along the narrow hall to the front door. I followed, brushing past the old woman who lived underneath us. Out in the street my mother seized my hand and ran to the end of the road. She stopped at the corner and looked back. My father wasn't following us. Her face was white and she shuddered rhythmically as she drew in deep draughts of air. She was still gripping my hand. I put my free arm around her shoulder. She glanced briefly up at me. She looked sad, almost heartbroken, rather than frightened.

She kept hold of my hand and we hurried across the main road, past a parade of shops and into a side street. There she stopped and sat down on a low wall. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, wiped her forehead and blew her nose. I stood beside her and kicked the wall with both feet as though dribbling a football, gently at first and then with increasing ferocity. I stopped when the pain shot from the big toe of my right foot up into my calf. I put my arms round her and hugged her tightly. She didn't move. I held her like that for a few moments with my chin resting on the top of her head. Then I let go and sat down beside her.

I was holding a paper bag and pulled out the record I had bought fifteen minutes earlier. I looked at it: the Beatles' ‘From Me To You'. My mother took it from me. ‘Oh good… I like that. We must go home and play it… soon.' The corners of her mouth flickered as she tried to smile. She looked very tired. Strands of hair were hanging loose on either side of her face.

I leaned my head against her cheek. ‘We shouldn't go home yet.'

‘No. I'd like a cup of tea with sugar in it.' She was still a little breathless. She didn't usually take sugar. ‘You can have a Coke.' She felt in the pockets of her thin cotton skirt. ‘Damn!' She shrugged and looked sad again. ‘I've no money. We'll just have…'

‘I've got money.' I showed her three shillings and eightpence, and pointed at the record. ‘The change from buying that.'

* * * * *

It was a proper tea shop, with table mats and doilies and willow-pattern china. When the waitress brought the tea we both ordered a scone with cream and strawberry jam.

My hand trembled as I spread the cream. I put the knife down and swallowed hard. I was sweating and felt nauseous. I didn't want her to notice.

‘David! What's the matter? You look very pale.' She came around the table and held her palm on my forehead for a moment. ‘Put your head between your knees… and you must have some tea with lots of sugar too. Go on! No one will notice.'

There weren't many people in the tea shop, and none of them was near us. I turned sideways in my seat and bent forward, and stayed like that while my mother went to order more tea. I heard the waitress bring it and my mother tell her that I was feeling a little faint. The waitress remarked on the closeness of the weather and opened another window.

The nausea began to pass. I sat back upright, drank the sweet tea fast, poured another cup and dropped a handful of sugar lumps into it. I began to feel more normal.

My mother picked up a napkin, leaned across the table and wiped my forehead and nose and cheeks. ‘Do you feel better? You look a bit better.'

‘I think so.' I gulped more tea.

‘I think you've suffered mild shock.' I looked at her, unsure what she meant. ‘A shock, or a fright, can affect you physically.' She looked down at her plate. ‘I think your father gave you a fright… He certainly gave me one, but I feel better now.'

‘He could have killed you.' Suddenly I felt furious.

‘No… I don't think he would have actually hit me, even if you hadn't come in… though I am so glad you did.' She smiled and looked away. ‘He's never hit me with anything except his hand, and he hasn't done that for a long time. When he picks something up, he always puts it down at the last second… sometimes it seems like the very last second. Then I walk away… and he does, too, in the opposite direction.'

‘I think you should leave him.' I blurted it out. I had had the thought a few times over the last year or two, and I had voiced it once before. I didn't know anyone whose parents were separated, but I had read about it in the papers.

She looked at me without smiling, and bit into her scone. ‘You'd miss him, wouldn't you?'

‘I wouldn't stop seeing him.'

‘Yes… but you'd see him less, if we… lived separately.' She was staring into my eyes, as though trying to understand my deepest thoughts. ‘You wouldn't like that…would you?'

‘I wouldn't mind… I feel as though I wouldn't mind if I never saw him again ever, because of the way he treats you… but I suppose I would want to after a while.' She was still gazing hard at me. It seemed that she was actually contemplating leaving him – and I felt pleased.

She looked away. ‘Can we afford another pot of tea?'

We could, just.

* * * * *

The next afternoon I helped her to hang out washing in the garden we shared with the old lady from downstairs. My father was out selling seeds.

I had asked her before why she had married my father all those years ago, and she had seemed to answer as completely as she could: she had seen him as glamorous and clever, and intriguing because he was so unlike her parents, unlike anyone she had known before. They had first seen each other at a meeting of something called the Federation of Progressive Societies in London – my father was leader of the Federation's Economics Group. The year was 1933. She was twenty-six and he was forty-one.

Both of my mother's grandfathers had been millionaires – one an English banker, the other an American wholesale chemist called George Washington van Duzer who lived, during my mother's childhood, at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane. Both these men had several children, most of whom, including my mother's parents, lived off their inheritances. As my mother grew older, though she was fond of her family, she became increasingly desperate to escape from the complacent and comfortable enclosure in which she was expected to do nothing beyond marry a wealthy man of the same class. She had been brought up at home by nursery nurses and governesses until, when she was fourteen, she was sent to a smart girls' boarding school. She enjoyed that, but was taken away at the age of sixteen because she was a girl and in her parents' world girls didn't need education.

In her twenties she became determined to educate herself. The quest led her from her parents' home in South Kensington to the draughty hall in Clerkenwell that housed the Federation of Progressive Societies; at the same time, and to the dismay of her parents, she bought some independence by getting herself a job – in the film industry as a continuity girl.

In a book written fourteen years after he met my mother and two years before I was born, my father described how in the spring of 1933 he had sat in the audience at a meeting of the Progressive Societies at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, where ‘my eyes wandered about the hall, idly seeking the best-looking girl they could find'. He saw my mother sitting above him in the gallery and remarked to a male friend sitting next to him, ‘That one up there…about the best looker I have seen in this set-up.'

The friend knew her slightly and told him that she was rather shy, but ‘“a cut above the average here. Been very well brought up: a perfect lady and all that.”' And he told my father her name, Mary Miller.

They didn't meet that evening; but she noticed him eyeing her up, and took a good look at him when she was sure that he was looking the other way. She knew who he was – the leader of the Economics Group and the author of a book on economics – and had been struck by his passion and humour when he had spoken from the platform at a previous meeting.

Later in the year, the Federation of Progressive Societies held a summer school in the Quaker village of Jordans in Buckinghamshire; the venue had been suggested by my father because he lived there with his four-year-old daughter, my half-sister Ann. My mother stayed with other members in an old timbered hostel run by Quakers, and most of the Federation's lectures and discussion groups were held in a meeting house nearby. But one group met regularly at my father's cottage and among its members was ‘the stately, simple, large-eyed beauty, Mary Miller'.

My father invited my mother ‘to volunteer for the unpaid, thankless task' of secretary for his Economics Group. Another member, concerned on his behalf, told him to be careful because my mother might already be engaged, to a tall handsome man in the Education Group. My father retorted, ‘I want someone to send out the messages to my blessed group. I'm not looking for a wife.'

But then, ‘On Midsummer night we went for a drive in my car. It was a still, breathless evening. The world was filled with the scent of blossom riding the heady air of the year's zenith. You could feel its effect upon your senses.' During the drive he stopped the car because a rabbit was sitting in the middle of the road. They sat talking long after the rabbit had gone. He told her about his daughter Ann and how, two years before, his world had been destroyed when his wife and baby, Ann's sister, had died within ten days of each other. He saw ‘the glitter of tears in her lovely eyes. She was very gentle. She let me kiss her. I did it in a spirit of awe and reverence. We were engaged.'

My father called at the hostel early the next morning. ‘I had had a sleepless night wondering about my sudden and unexpected decision. “Were you really serious?” I asked her. She was. She came to me with the same quiet understanding smile, speaking in a low soft whisper. “Did
you
really mean it?” She too had lain awake.'

As I stood in the garden with her, thirty years later, handing her clothes pegs so that she could clip my father's shirts and underpants to the washing line, I asked her whether the attraction she had felt for him was completely gone. She stared at me through a gap in the damp washing. She seemed to be wondering how truthful she could be. ‘You can tell me the truth. I want to know it.'

She looked down at the ground and then up at me from beneath her eyebrows. Her eyes seemed large and her face small. ‘Almost… Almost gone.'

She pulled some clothes pegs from my shirt pocket, moved to an empty space on the washing line and reached up to fasten some socks.

I followed her. ‘I hate him for the way he treats you… but I love him as well I suppose.'

‘That's good. You should love him… I want you to love him.'