The Apple (11 page)

When I recall him to mind, I rarely see him in a suit, although he was capable of putting on a suit when he left the house. But he rarely left the house. There was almost nothing he wanted to do out there, beyond visiting a few art galleries or popping into the tobacconist’s. Even his art materials he selected by post from suppliers he trusted, without the bother of traipsing across town. He preferred to wander from room to room in our little house in Calthorpe Street, his eyes perpetually focused at a height which, had there been a person standing before him, would have been crotch-level. He liked to wear crude workman’s trousers and a loose shirt with paint-spattered sleeves. His paintings depicted men dressed similarly informally, reclining against trees in a forest, or on the banks of a river, accompanied by naked women. He never tired of this theme. There must have been dozens of canvases stacked against each other in a corner of the studio, perhaps a hundred or more naked women and clothed men rubbing against each other, some long-dry, others still slightly wet. None of these paintings was ever sold.

My father’s portraits were a different matter. In these, he combined (as a contemporary critic admiringly put it) ‘innovation with exercise of skill, as though a modern master like John Singer Sargent had been touched by Fauvism and was none the worse for it’. I am still not sure what this means, but I do remember my father’s portraits very well. He was careful with the faces, had a flair for skin, and liked to take liberties with the sitters’ clothing. Dresses would blur into impressionistic designs, shoes would be dark smudges. Sometimes, if he was obliged to paint a whole family of daughters, the hands of those he considered less interesting would have ambiguous numbers of fingers. Legs and arms were often longer than anatomically feasible. Most customers were satisfied, though, feeling that they had immortalised themselves in a nobler medium than photography, and that they had patronised a rising star of the avant-garde to boot. But as it turned out, my father’s star rose straight through the smoky sky above Bloomsbury, into oblivion.

We weren’t to know that, then. My father was the head of our household. He had a job. My mother and Aunt Primrose didn’t have jobs, unless working for suffragette organisations was a job. I suppose it was. You know, I grew up awfully confused about work and what it was and who was supposed to do it and who wasn’t. Some of the children at Torrington Infants were of the opinion that gentlemen and ladies didn’t work: not working was what
made
them gentlemen and ladies. The more prevalent view, by 1908, as far as I could determine, was that men ought to be gainfully employed, but that ladies should not be paid for anything they did, or at least shouldn’t
need
paying. The legions of women who laboured in factories and shops were seen as unfortunates; their only claim to dignity was that they hadn’t descended into beggary or prostitution. As for domestic servants, I just couldn’t figure out what they were about at all. Our family employed a maid-of-all-work, even though Mama and Aunt Primrose thought servants were an offence to socialism. Rachel, her name was, I think. She rarely spoke.

But, getting back to my father … Mama and Aunt Primrose always treated him with affectionate condescension, as if he were a dog. An occasionally infuriating, improperly house-trained, but always amusing dog. He played up to them, as a dog might. He had a way of adjusting his big brown eyes that made them glisten imploringly when he was hungry. He slept wherever he chose. Indeed, he slept in so many locations throughout the house that I never developed any conception of ‘the bed’ as a shrine of marital intimacy. That’s why I’m wary of telling people that Mama and Aunt Primrose shared a bed, and that my mother and father slept together only occasionally. Sex: that’s all people think about nowadays, and the more deviant, the better. It wasn’t like that in our household. At a certain time of night, when Mama and Auntie Poss had grown tired of talking about female suffrage and the evils of the government, they would shuffle off to bed, and perhaps find my father snoring there like a Great Dane. In which case, they would simply make the best of things. There is no need to see hanky-panky everywhere. It’s true that my mother and Aunt Primrose often kissed and hugged, but not as often as Mama cuddled me, and you would be surprised how many women in that era were all over each other. It was quite normal. And as for the state of my parents’ marriage, well, I exist, don’t I? It took two to make me.

Oh, and I may have misrepresented my father by comparing him to a dog. I don’t mean to imply that he was without authority. He was a male, after all, and in that era it was a man’s world. There were almost daily circumstances in which females were reminded that they did not, and would never, hold the reins of power. Official letters concerning our family, our house, our expenditures, my schooling, new opening hours for Camden Public Library, and every other imaginable thing, were invariably addressed to my father. Bureaucrats, tradesmen, doctors, postmen, parsons, waiters, porters, the whole pack of them: they ignored my mother and Aunt Primrose, and directed their remarks to my father.

Oddly, my mother and Aunt Primrose didn’t seem to mind. ‘Time to unsheathe your mighty sabre, Gilbert,’ they would say, if there was an irritating man at the door who obstinately refused to speak to them. Or they would set Papa against the vile minions of bureaucracy. I have a vivid memory of my mother sitting on the parlour floor, using Aunt Primrose’s legs as a support for her back, while the two of them perused the day’s post. ‘Here’s one from that horrid little gargoyle at the public library,’ my mother said, resting her head in the lap of Aunt Primrose’s skirt, the better to display the important-looking letter she held above her face. She recited the words with mocking pomposity, in the same voice she used for Humpty Dumpty when reading me
Through The Looking Glass
. ‘“It pains me to have to point out what I assure you I should never make so bold as to allege, had I not confirmed the truth of it beyond doubt, for each book borrowed from this library is checked rigorously upon its return, and any damage immediately noted. Thus, with great regret and no small embarrassment, I am obliged to alert you to the fact that your wife has defaced the book she borrowed from us on the 21st, viz,
Female Education and the Health of the Nation
, by Dr Lucius Hogg, inscribing all manner of disparaging and, frankly, indecent glosses in the margins.”’ Here the two women dissolved in fits of giggles. ‘Well, there’s another job for Gilbert,’ said my mother, tossing the letter into the air. The following week, a written apology arrived from the library, and the women squirmed and squealed in delight.

People ask me nowadays how I felt, being the son of a bluestocking. I never gave it a thought. My mother’s vigorous advocacy of the rights of women seemed natural, a part of her personality, like a dislike of tapioca pudding or a fondness for snow. And, because I was always known as a
child
or a
boy
or a
poppet
or Snookums or Angel or simply Henry, I did not perceive myself to be under attack when Mama or Aunt Primrose railed against those appalling creatures,
men
.

I must make clear, too, that Mama was not a spiteful person, and her quarrel with the masculine world was based on indignation rather than hatred. She liked to collide violently with males who annoyed her, push them over if she could, and move on. She and Aunt Primrose worked as a kind of music hall duo, Mama getting by on charm and disarming honesty, while Aunt Primrose supplied the sardonic touch. My father was – if you’ll excuse what’s definitely not meant as a pun – the straight man. When we lived abroad, I never had the sense of our family being troublemakers. In Australia, everybody seemed to be arguing all the time, and enjoying it. Only when we re-settled in England did I get the impression that disagreement could be a scandal. And this took a while for me to learn. At first, I relished the fact that all sorts of funny new people were wont to make an appearance at our home, blustering in surprise and mortification at the things my parents said and did. But, in the months leading up to June 21st, 1908, the mood of these visits became increasingly sour, and I began, little by little, to sense that my family was caught up in a long and bitter war, and that there might be casualties.

I remember one such occasion unusually clearly. Aunt Primrose had invited a wealthy woman called Felicity to dinner, and Felicity had brought her husband Mr Brown along. Aunt Primrose was involved with a number of charitable organisations and was always on the lookout for patrons; she probably had her eye on Felicity as a potential opening into the fortune Mr Brown had made with his shoe factories.

The after-dinner phase of the evening got off to a convivial start. Mr Brown and my father smoked cigars and discussed Art, a subject on which Mr Brown, a self-made Mancunian, was earnestly attempting to broaden his horizons. The two men drifted in and out of the parlour, exchanging the occasional pleasantry with the three women, who were talking of the future of the world, the reformation of society, and ladies’ shoes. I had half-hidden myself behind the dining-room table, and pretended to read storybooks, revelling in the late hour. Eventually, with the aid of good red wine, my mother began to reminisce about the childhood experiences that had made her what she was today.

‘When I was a little girl,’ she said, ‘my father took me on an outing with him, to Lambeth. We had our own carriage, and I was very excited to be seeing the big wide world.’

‘The fabled towers of Lambeth,’ murmured Aunt Primrose, with a smirk.

‘I’d never been across the Thames,’ my mother continued. ‘It seemed as exotic as America. My father had some business to attend to there. I saw his …’ And then she smiled and shook her head, as she always did when she brushed up against something in her past that must remain a secret.

‘His what, I’m sorry?’ said Felicity Brown.

‘There was a lot of traffic,’ said my mother, ignoring the question, ‘and our coachman took detours through the poorer streets. The houses were all jumbled together and falling apart, with people’s underclothes and bedsheets hung in plain view. I could scarcely believe it. I’d seen poor people before – hawkers and knife-sharpeners and so on – and I knew they wore shabby clothes and smelt sour. But I thought they went home to picturesque little cottages.’

‘Like gingerbread houses,’ suggested Felicity Brown.

‘Exactly. The truth filled me with awe. I had my face poking out of the window of the coach, staring like a puppy. We passed through a horrible street, the worst. There was a little girl playing with a bucket. She was barefoot, almost naked, dressed in a ragged, filthy shirt.’

My mother tipped back her head and squinted, as though peering through a telescope into a long-ago that still existed.

‘I thought she looked exactly like me: a mirror image. Perhaps I was wrong; I hadn’t seen many children my own age. But I was gripped by a powerful sense that this grubby urchin was someone I might have been, had I been born in that street. Then she picked up a piece of … of dog foul, and flung it at me. Her aim was very good, I must say. She hit me right between the eyes.’

Aunt Primrose snorted with laughter, and Felicity Brown, confused, allowed herself a muted chuckle.

‘I think I was destined to be a socialist from that moment on,’ concluded my mother.

‘Nonsense,’ said Aunt Primrose. ‘Someone else might have experienced exactly the same thing, and decided forever afterwards to grind the poor under her heel. As revenge.’

‘Revenge is ugly,’ my mother declared. ‘It makes me think of military men with small eyes and epaulettes.’

Aunt Primrose, who was not averse to a bit of revenge when it was carried off with aplomb, didn’t let Mama get away with this pious stance. ‘You once told me you eat spicy food as revenge for the blandness of what you were fed as a child.’

My mother stuck her tongue out at Aunt Primrose, an action that had never seemed particularly rude in Australia, but to which Felicity Brown reacted with a small, startled jerk of her head, as though someone had just vomited.

‘All right then,’ said my mother, ‘let’s all get revenge for boiled mutton, mashed potatoes and milk pudding. They deserve it. They caused me much more misery than a turd in the face.’

I knew that the word
turd
was forbidden in polite company, and that the fact that my mother had just tossed it into the conversation meant that things were perhaps getting out of hand. This impression was confirmed when Mr Brown joined us, just at the point when Mama was railing against heartless politicians and exploitative factory owners. Mrs Brown struggled manfully – womanfully? – to smooth the waters my mother was stirring up. Then Mr Brown – who, by this time, had drunk quite a lot of wine – became irritable, defending the right of factory owners to operate competitively in a competitive market. To which my mother retorted that competition was a typically male obsession, which we would all be better off without, in the better world to come. Mr Brown challenged her to explain how this better world would be created, and my mother, egged on by Primrose (who had evidently given up on her daydreams of seducing the Browns into sponsorship) held forth on politics. The Labour Party, she said, had fielded only two successful candidates in its debut election, but only six years later, they got twenty-nine MPs in, which they were sure to increase to a hundred next time round. This made Mr Brown lose his temper.

‘Wake up, woman!’ he exclaimed. ‘The Labour Party will never get anywhere! It’s a simple principle of Evolution! A half-educated ape climbs one rung of the ladder and joins the Labour Party; then he climbs a few rungs higher and sees the broader picture …’

‘You mean, sees how many poor folk are being whipped and starved to produce his bananas?’

‘Bananas grow on trees, I believe. And your “poor folk” are rendered less poor when we pay them good money to pick the bananas off.’

‘Sounds like paradise, Mr Brown, with a threepenny bonus,’ hissed my mother, her face flushed with excitement. ‘Oh, the bounty of Mother Nature! Everything falling off the trees! Your watch-chain from the watch-chain tree, your waistcoat from the waistcoat tree, your carriage from the carriage-patch. Tell me when the next shoe crop is ripe, Mr Brown, and we’ll go shoe-gathering together!’