In My Father's House Page 11

  I watch the familiar gesture of a piece of silver foil being smoothed and refolded, occupying her hands while she considers. ‘We used to laugh about all sorts of silly things,’ she says after a long pause. ‘I hope you’re going to say something about that. We did have fun.’ An unexpected giggle spurts out of her, so girlish that I turn in my seat to catch a glimpse of her face. She’s pink, her eyes screwed up with merriment. ‘I was remembering the time when we were in Hyde Park late one night after dancing at the Orchid Room,’ she explains. ‘We were kissing in your father’s car and a policeman stuck his face up against the window. He told us he’d been standing there and shouting at us for half an hour. We never even noticed!’

  ‘Did he tell you about Thrumpton straightaway?’ I ask as we drive slowly home. ‘He must have been in such a state about it being sold.’ And that, I think to myself, is why he would have been so pleased to meet a pretty and rich young woman who, even if she didn’t return his love at once, seemed glad to be courted. I’ve checked out the dates. They fit.

  ‘Sold?’ My mother gives me a disgusted look. ‘The things you ask. Whoever said it was being sold?’

  I’m so flustered that I almost overshoot the turning into the courtyard at the back of the House. ‘It’s in the diary. Uncle Charles had decided to go back to Essex, to Langford, you know, after the troops moved out of the big house there. Thrumpton was put on the market for sixty thousand. George was frantic. It happened just before you met. He must have told you?’

  ‘Not a word.’ Halfway out of the car, she stops and gives me a glance that expresses more amusement than annoyance. ‘So that’s what you’ve been thinking all this time, that he married me for my money! A nice thing.’

  I don’t want to offend her, but I can’t dismiss the idea of a connection. The Byrons agreed to take Thrumpton off the market for a year in September, 1945. My father had a year in which to come up with a solution. ‘I’d do anything to save Thrumpton,’ he wrote that month. ‘I realise now that it means more to me than anything else in the world.’

  Did anything include persuading the daughter of one of England’s wealthiest men to marry him and provide the funds he lacked?

  I’m looking at a picture, painted in 1930. In the foreground, two skinny teenage girls kneel on the floor, playing chess. These are my mother’s sisters, Gaenor and Pip. Behind them, near to the fireplace, my grandmother sits at the piano, chin held high: Bronwen, her eldest daughter, known always as The Beauty, plays a viola; Elizabeth, the musical prodigy of the family, draws her bow across a cello’s waisted heart. Across the room, their brother turns his back; a tennis racket swings from his hand like a hunting crop, hinting at the impatience he surely felt at having to pose for a family portrait. Facing him, perched on a long window-seat, my grandfather is identifiable by the baldness of his head and the plumpness of his crossed thighs. ‘I suppose Pa’s fond of us, in his way,’ my mother wrote to my father at the time of their engagement, ‘but he’s a queer person.’

  The Irish artist John Lavery has painted this domestic scene in deep, glowing colours that pull the eye towards the centre where, in a short lemon-yellow frock, a child stands. Her feet are neatly pointed like a dancer’s. She’s watching the game of chess, but the artist has placed her apart, separate. She could have been curled up by one of the two dogs or sprawled beside her sisters in the foreground, but Lavery has made a focus point of her solitude.

  This is my mother. Eight years old, she stands firm as a young warrior in the drawing-room of Chirk Castle, a fourteenth-century fortress in the Marches, the borderlands that divide England from Wales. This, until the year she marries my father, will be her home. She will be the last to leave, helping Margot, her mother, to fold curtains, store books, check the inventories, say farewell to the house that always seemed to be their own. Her parents were only a couple in the most formal of senses by 1945, but Margot took care to return to Chirk that year. She knew her husband; left to himself, Lord Howard de Walden would have cared only for the preservation of his library, his writings, and his hawks.

  Writing her memoirs years later, my grandmother claimed that Tommy chose her as a bride because of her hands, which were large and capable. They needed to be.

  Erudite, absent-minded and notoriously dishevelled in person, Lord Howard de Walden made up for an unglamorous appearance by living like a Renaissance prince. Invited to join the Olympic Fencing team in 1906, he transported his colleagues to Athens on the Branwen, his private yacht; the Royal Welch Fusiliers’ regiment under his command in the First World War was equipped to fight with medieval daggers from his own collection. Lacking a country home of his own and learning of a family link to the property, he rented and repaired a beautiful, haunted house in Essex until the ghosts – a mighty hound that raced around the dining table and vanished into the wall; an old man who sat on visitors’ beds; an army of spectral knights who came clattering up the drive on moonlit nights – grew too obstreperous for the tenant of Audley End. In 1911, he undertook another romantic project: the restoration of a Welsh castle that the resident family could no longer afford to maintain. This was where my mother was born in 1922; by that time, the Howard de Walden family looked on Chirk as their home.

  Lord and Lady Howard de Walden enjoyed dressing up for pageants at their Welsh home.

  My mother has taught me to venerate my grandfather and the home he brought to life. I like her youthful memories of being led around the hilltop gardens by the hand of Rudyard Kipling, of being talked at (‘never with; you couldn’t!’) by Shaw. I love to think of her galloping bareback over the Welsh hills on her father’s Arab mares. (‘There you go again! Bareback! You know perfectly well that we always used saddles.’) And of my grandmother calling her tribe of daughters home by hooting Brünnhilde’s cry across the Ceiriog valley. (‘Well, that’s true.’) I relish the story of an intrepid aunt setting off to nurse in the Spanish Civil War (wrong side, unfortunately) before marrying a philandering aristocrat whose baby-smooth cheeks and confident smirk won him a few film appearances (famous titles, undemanding roles, always playing himself, the charismatic cad).

  Hearing how five-course banquets were borne across a courtyard from an underground kitchen, I’m amazed again by the ease with which my mother has adapted to a different life. Doesn’t she mind wearing velour tracksuits and secondhand shoes when she looks back on those years in a many-towered castle, set high on a wooded hill, with maids to unpack for her, to press her clothes and draw her bath?

  I should know better than to wonder; the key to my mother’s survival and good humour is that she never occupies her mind with what’s gone. It may be that the last memories of Chirk are so bleak that they blot out earlier pleasure. I can’t imagine how it felt, aged twenty, to escape a court martial (her misplaced chart pins had sent an American convoy, quite harmlessly, to Scotland instead of Devon). Broken and lost, she came back to Chirk, to recuperate from a nervous collapse in an abandoned house. This isn’t a time she talks about, but I’ve heard enough to know my mother suffered. I’ve heard her describe sitting alone at meals with her father, staring at the bald dome of his head as he bent forward, oblivious, diligently tracking a line of text in some obscure manuscript. Once, unable to bear the silence, she shouted at him. He flinched, as if a stranger had broken in on his dreams, but he didn’t speak. She says it was a mercy when Margot returned from Canada, a warfree zone to which she had agreed to take those grandchildren who could least be cared for by their busy parents.

  My mother as a small girl, posing in her tutu; and as a teenager (on the far left) at a fete in Chirk village, 1936.

  Back in Britain, Margot looked at her youngest daughter’s trembling hands and listened to her frightened laugh; furiously, she lambasted Tommy for selfish indifference before taking control of the situation. My poor mother: hustled off to a local agricultural college to learn the rudiments of farming, she found her métier just in time to be deprived of it. A girl must have a season; Margot ins
isted on it, even when the girl in question was in her twenties. Measured and fitted into a fluid sheath of flame-coloured silk, another of emerald green, my mother was launched, bright-eyed and apprehensive, to find a mate and make a life of the kind for which she had been bred.

  In later years, my mother developed a comfortable shape. By the time she had turned twenty-two in the summer of 1945, worry and a poor diet had stripped her of flesh. Large-eyed, and thin as a weasel, she was pale-skinned, her head crowned with a mass of copper-gold hair. (Think Moira Shearer; you’re not far off.) She read with voracious indiscrimination, spoke a little French and German, spelt atrociously and was financially innocent. (‘Unless I can see money or know it’s there, I feel insecure,’ she admitted in an early letter to my father.) Her nervousness was hidden by an insouciant manner. She didn’t, beyond a couple of tender flirtations, of which one had been with an unseen military pen-pal, have any sexual experience. This was a dove, I’m ready to conclude, who was ripe for being caught and plucked.

  My mother shakes her head. ‘You make me sound such a ninny. I wasn’t looking for a husband. My father may have rented Chirk, but he owned lots of farms in Wales. I’d talked to him. He was going to let me have one of them at half rent. I had everything planned out.’ She looks past me, her eyes bright with affection for the picture of something I have never seen. ‘I’d have kept a few goats. Hens. A donkey. Pigs. It was going to be just outside Wrexham, near Chirk.’

  Life on the land she’d loved. I remember reading the letters that Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon wrote to each other in the closing months of the Great War, two poets planning out a farming future. Unchanged landscape comes to symbolise a lost idyll in wartime. Old-fashioned paintings of pastoral scenes sold well throughout the 1940s; fields of corn helped mask the stench of war: of sulphur, and of death. Of course my mother wanted to farm: what could life offer that was more tranquil, more reassuring?

  ‘And your father,’ she says firmly. ‘He was just as keen, you know.’

  Remembering the wartime diary’s notes of visits to the manicurist, and of a certain flower-scented hand-lotion reserved there for George Seymour’s personal use, I can’t help smiling. ‘Just read his letters,’ she says, indignant. ‘He was just as keen as me. The letters will tell you how it was.’

  I tell her that I have been unable to find them. ‘But he kept yours in his desk, every single one. All tied up in ribbons and put safely away.’

  ‘So are his,’ she says swiftly.

  ‘Oh?’ I’m sceptical. I’ve searched through every cupboard and drawer in the House, but they’re gone, those voluminous screeds of adoration which demanded instant response, out on the ash heap or in the fire. She can’t remember a word from them now, or even from her own.

  ‘Listen!’ I quote one of my favourite lines, when she informed her husband-to-be that her mother thought him ‘“oh! A perfect pet! (Although she doesn’t say what sort.)”.’

  My mother looks delighted.

  ‘Did I say that? Did I really? I’d no idea I was so funny!’

  11

  READING ROMANCE

  In November 1945, my father went to a London dinner party and found that he had been placed next to a slender, hazel-eyed girl with pale freckled skin and red-gold hair. With the writer Ludovic Kennedy sitting on the other side of her, she had little time for an arrogant but shy young man with a small head, round spectacles and neatly slicked hair. Nevertheless, she smiled. My father, smitten, noted in his diary that he had fallen for Rosemary Scott Ellis, the youngest daughter of Lord Howard de Walden, and that she had agreed to dine with him at the Savoy. (This was not such an extravagant invitation as it sounds; London’s best hotels offered low-budget meals to keep their restaurants filled during the frugal war years.)

  I want to like my father at this crucial stage of his life. I want to see him through my mother’s (by slow degrees) admiring eyes. To do so, I must overlook a gloating note in his diary about a FitzRoy family wedding at which (‘ha! ha!’ he wrote) he sat in a grander pew than some of the envied ducal cousins. I need to forget that the future of the House lay so near to his heart, and that he must have known that he was in with a chance to save it, if he could but charm this millionaire’s daughter into backing his passion with substance.

  I know that there must have been an element of calculation, but the diary tells a different story. From that first meeting at a dinner party, my father lost all sense of decorum. He did not behave like a cunning opportunist. He behaved like a man under a spell, or overwhelmed by love.

  He could think of nothing but Rosemary. When they went dancing, he was tortured to see her smiling at another man. When she casually addressed him as ‘darling Georgey’ and suggested that he might care to visit her Welsh home, he accepted by return of mail and told his diary that he would treasure the endearment until the end of his life. When she cancelled a dinner date the following week, he announced that he was ready to kill himself with grief. When she consoled him with an invitation to a drinks party, he sent her a copy of Antony, his favourite book, together with a declaration of unconditional love.

  Her answer, to his dismay, was a rebuff. ‘I must admit I do think of other things than you,’ she told him, and warned him that her feelings were less passionate than his own. ‘But if because of this you must go into a monastery, I pray you, don’t consider it.’ The following week, however, she reminded him of his promise to visit her in Wales: ‘I am ordering and beseeching you to come here,’ she wrote, and added that he had best bring his riding things. (She rode every day; my father did not dare admit that he had never yet sat on a horse.)

  ‘I hope you’re not going to criticise me for sending him back that awful book about Antony Knebworth,’ my mother says. ‘I did try to read it, but really!’

  The reason for my mother’s air of indifference was simple: she was in love with another man. Shortly before Christmas, this other suitor told her that he was about to propose to someone else. If his first choice turned him down, he was willing to marry my mother. Passing the news on to my distraught father, she told him not to give up, as she was also fond of him. ‘I do like being truthful,’ she added.

  A week later, her lover’s engagement to his first choice was announced.

  ‘And what if he had chosen to propose to you? Would you have married him?’

  ‘Don’t be so difficult,’ my mother sighs. I’m answered.

  The fickle lover’s engagement was announced on 15 December. The following day, my mother lunched with my father at Claridge’s. She wore her favorite rust-coloured suit; a matching beret was pulled aslant on her red-gold curls. My father, enchanted, told her she looked ravishing. They went to the Tate gallery and discovered that they both hated the Pre-Raphaelites. Later, they had dinner at the Mirabelle.

  ‘We did live it up, didn’t we!’ My mother is beaming at these remembered pleasures.

  A night of dancing ended in a passionate embrace across the small front seats of my father’s Morris Minor (this was the occasion on which the policeman knocked vainly at the driver’s window). A week later, flushed with love, they drove out of London on the winding road to north Wales. There were storms along the way when my mother refused to wear a diamond brooch on which my father had spent most of his savings.

  ‘That was mean of you.’

  ‘Well!’ My mother sips her wine and gives me a little sideways look.

  ‘Not good enough?’

  ‘You’ve seen me wear it. Perfectly nice.’

  I’ll never be able to make the word ‘nice’ sound so lethally dismissive.

  It’s mid-October 2005. I’ve persuaded my mother to visit Chirk Castle, and to act as my guide. She hasn’t been there for over forty years; I’ve never seen it before. I need to imagine the impression it might have made on my father when he arrived here on a chilly night in December 1945.

  ‘Where’s the sweetshop gone?’ cries my mother, gazing with distracted eyes at a village restauran
t that announces itself as the Chirk Tandoori. I’m staring past it at the war memorial, and the clean-cut bas-relief of a soldier marching, head bent, into action. I can’t believe it.

  ‘Eric Gill? For a village memorial?’

  ‘Why not? He used to come and stay. Pa asked him to do it.’ Of course. What could be less remarkable than that Eric Gill should come to Chirk for a weekend and turn a small commission into one of the finest war memorials in the country?

  We drive on a winding road up a hill – ‘Mountain! Welsh mountains, Miranda!’ my mother admonishes me – so that I can admire the Roman aqueduct spanning the broad flanks of the Ceiriog valley. Returning, we pass between gates as proudly delicate as peacock tails, opening the way to a drive that twists like a strangling rope around the castle hill. Mist swirls in and wreathes back, to show a flock of black sheep cropping grass, a view of distant slopes and, rising above the trails of wispy cloud, a square, four-towered castle of grey stone. Sedate as a hearse, we cross the narrow drawbridge on which, during the war, my grandfather parked a horsebox to keep invaders out. Below, grass smooths the banks of the old defensive moat. (‘I remember it filling up with snow,’ my mother says with delight. ‘I jumped in and lay there for three hours, quite snug, with a little hole to breathe through. I cried when they came and pulled me out.’ She was five years old.)

  This wasn’t just a house. It was a world. As I register the splendour of its scale, my mother, smiling, walks back into the past. I climb the winding stair to my grandfather’s refuge, a stone room with six-foot embrasures and broad views across the Ceiriog valley. My mother talks eagerly to the curator about a keeper’s pet owl and the laundry room where she kept two angora rabbits. I peer down narrow slits through which oil was poured on to the heads of medieval intruders; my mother has found the walk above the castle chapel from which she dropped paper streamers upon the bald head of a visiting minister. I’m down in a dungeon, contemplating the life of Henry V’s twenty French prisoners, kept in windowless gloom fifty feet below the tower where my grandfather, centuries later, would hide from view. She’s walking along the Long Gallery, recalling the elaborate family pantomimes in which she, as the youngest child, invariably took the smallest part.