In My Father's House Page 12

  Sitting in the Chirk Tandoori that night, while rain beats against the windows, we replay our favourite moments from the day. Mine was climbing an airy flight of stairs to the upper drawing-room, still lit by candles and the silvery reflections of the long glasses on its walls. I didn’t need to close my eyes to see the little girl squaring up to the artist in her lemon-yellow frock, centre stage. Nothing had changed.

  ‘And yours?’ I ask. I’m sure she’ll pick the garden where she walked beside Rudyard Kipling, listening to the stories he shaped to fit the setting. I’m forgetting that her last companion at the castle was a haughty tabby cat. The moment she chooses is the one in which, stalking out of the mist and along the gravel path, a grey tabby advanced to whisk a bushy tail around my mother’s calves, before vanishing behind a wall of clipped yew.

  Her eyes are shining at the memory. ‘He was welcoming me home, wasn’t he!’ And she reaches forward to pat my hand. ‘I’m glad we came!’

  I’ve asked my mother whether, back in 1945, she was told about the deferred sale of Thrumpton. Her memory is only of the fact that my father talked about the House with a tenderness that touched her heart. She had just become aware that her family were about to lose their own home. Chirk, which had never belonged to them, was about to be reclaimed, in its newly repaired and improved state, by its owners, the Myddleton family. This was to be her last Christmas at the Castle.

  Of course, as she is quick to point out, she had no expectation then that my father would inherit a splendid house of his own. All she can tell me is that the misery of leaving Chirk allowed her to understand, at once, the intensity of his feeling. This was a bond, and a strong one.

  The proposal was made, accepted, and announced to the family within hours of the young couple’s arrival at the castle. (The letters and diaries are annoyingly reticent, stating only that George made an offer and was accepted.) My grandfather, descending from his turret, gave a cautious nod. He could rely on Margot, who was arriving from London the following day, to establish how they should react.

  ‘She [Margot] seemed quite pleased,’ my father noted hopefully in his diary; in fact, Margot was not pleased at all. Aching from his introduction to riding, and sleepless from a night of embraces on the drawing room sofa (‘nothing more,’ my mother says sharply), George had been briskly ordered to account for himself, his income and his prospects. It was delightful to see him so aglow with love, Margot remarked acidly, but how, at the modest age of twenty-two, did he plan to support their daughter? My father had no immediate answer; prudently, he kept Thrumpton out of the picture at this stage. He described his bank work; Margot’s expression chilled. Rosemary was extremely delicate and sensitive, she informed him; a nervous breakdown had weakened her stamina; with no experience of handling her own finances, she needed a husband who would shoulder responsibilities, cherish and protect her. Was George Seymour, a mere bank clerk, that man?

  Margot’s scepticism acted as a spur to my father’s love. ‘Precious Rosebud, I will love you and take care of you as long as we live, forever,’ he wrote before he left. En route to join his parents for a quiet family Christmas in Norfolk, he found time to dispatch two telegrams and three long letters to his fiancée. They had been apart for just two days.

  An exchange of photographs: Rosemary to George . . .

  and George to Rosemary. My father was proud of his elegant hands, and liked them to be admired.

  My mother’s elusiveness had given her the lead in the relationship during the first two months; now, my father began to establish control. He did so by one of his most effective techniques: the letter. My mother had always enjoyed writing spontaneously: she was not used to writing to order, or to a required length. ‘There! I’ve written five pages!’ she told her fiancé with evident pride; the following day, she was reproached for such clear evidence of her indifference. Love, for my father, was judged by the volume of words in which it was expressed. Two pages of heartfelt passion were worth less than four of modest intensity. To let a day pass without writing was proof of a cold heart.

  Keeping pace with my father’s own almost relentless flow of letters was hard work; my mother remained saucy and unsubdued. ‘I still adore you,’ she wrote a week after their engagement, and added that her cat did not feel the same way. When George sent her, unsolicited, a large and solemn studio photograph of himself, she told him that she had given it to her maid, who thought he looked sweet. (‘There’s another conquest you’ve made, you Casanova!’) This could be dismissed as girlish teasing; my father was more seriously alarmed by a letter that announced the arrival of a new country neighbour (‘26, with a vast house, servants galore and lots of farms’). Her mother, Rosemary added, thought him quite perfect. She did not say for what purpose, but it wasn’t hard for an anxious lover to guess. George was already conscious of his fiancée’s passion for farming and her attachment to Wales.

  ‘Who was it?’ I ask, inquisitive. ‘You don’t mention his name.’

  ‘Can’t remember,’ she says, a touch too briskly. She couldn’t – could she – have made him up? I can’t guess. The more of this story I write, the more I realise how little I know about the sharp-witted, strong-willed old woman who has been my chief companion for the past two years.

  12

  NEARER, MY HOUSE, TO THEE

  Retrospectively, it seems as though fate was on my father’s side. At the time, however, he was disagreeably conscious of having come up against a character as forceful as his own. Rosemary could be managed; her mother was another matter.

  Margot had been frank with him at their first interview. She did not regard a junior bank clerk, however glorious his family connections, as a suitable consort for her daughter. Rosemary’s heart was set on farming; it followed that George, too, must look in that direction.

  Margot spoke with her husband; the result was the offer of a shared tenancy of one of his finest Welsh properties, Croes Newydd. Rosemary had already been encouraging George to think of himself as a man of the land (‘my great big, strong, tough farmer to be’). Now, she urged him to consider the charms of Croes Newydd and the pleasure they would have in running a farm together. Her mother, meanwhile, made it clear that if he did not apply himself to farming, their consent to the engagement might be withdrawn. (She had already insisted that it should remain secret for three months.)

  On 13 February 1946, five days after his twenty-third birthday, my father took the plunge. Resigning from his job at the Fakenham branch of Barclays, he ended, for good, his days as a paid employee. With no future prospects, he was terrified.

  ‘Promise you will never leave me,’ he wrote anxiously that night to Rosemary.

  ‘Woman is said to be fickle, but I am not!’ she reassured him. This was comforting, but he was disturbed to note, a little further on in her letter, that ‘darling Mummy’ had been demanding an answer about the offer of a Welsh farming partnership. Rosemary was unsure about spending her first married years in a house which was not her own. ‘I don’t fancy the idea of sharing,’ she admitted. Neither did George, but he was in no position to turn down the offer of a free home and a source of income. At that precise moment, he had neither.

  This was the week in which a promising letter arrived from Thrumpton: his uncle had formed a new plan that might, conceivably, be of interest to his nephew. If George could spare the time from gadding around nightclubs and meeting members of Rosemary’s illustrious family – Charlie’s Byron’s notes were always spiked with malice – perhaps he would care to pay a visit.

  He went at once, and was received with warmth. ‘We had a most excellent dinner,’ he noted (my father loved his food), ‘bonne femme soup, roast pheasant, vanilla ice bombe with hot chocolate sauce, and cherries in brandy!’ Champagne was produced, and toasts drunk to the happy couple, before the new offer was made. Smiling benignly, Charlie Byron announced that he had thought things through. While conscious of the claims of his own distant relations on the House, he felt that it was
only right that George, with his great love of the place, should enjoy it, in due course, as a life tenant. Later, George must understand, the House would have to revert to the Byrons. For the present, since George was unemployed, perhaps he and Rosemary would consider running the Home Farm at Thrumpton – and acting as companions to a fond old couple. He wanted, did he not, to be a farmer? He wanted to live at Thrumpton?

  Charlie, in other words, had finally recognised the convenience of having a dependable, affectionate nephew around to work for the estate and act, if necessary, as general supervisor. No Byron cousin was likely to show him the same devoted care. My father accepted the proposal at once. Nothing, he told his uncle, would please him more.

  Breakfast the following morning was taken after prayers. Charlie Byron, encased in what had once been a dashingly fashionable teddy-bear coat, retired to meditate on the Sunday sermon in the lavatory. Anna clasped her nephew’s hand and led him down the drive. Her pride was evident and glowing; halfway to the village, she stopped to boast that she had been the mastermind behind the scheme for George’s happiness. Proudly, she pointed between the trees to the home she had singled out for him.

  Her satisfaction was well-founded. I, like my parents, have only happy memories of the house where, a few years later, I was born. A friendly, unpretentious building with ample gables, an eighteenth-century barn and a spacious garden, Thrumpton Lodge was where I would have liked to grow up, had I been given the chance. For my father, it was ideal; only a low brick wall separated him from the House he now looked forward to inhabiting, when the time came; in the meantime, he could enjoy all the beauty of Thrumpton’s benevolent atmosphere, introduce Rosemary to his favourite walks through familiar scenery, and have the added pleasure of feeling that he was doing the old couple a favour in lifting some of the burdens of ownership from their shoulders.

  There was only one problem, and Anna was confident that he would solve it. The present tenants of Thrumpton Lodge were family friends who had no plans to leave; Charlie had already made it clear that he was not prepared to serve notice on them. What, then, was to be done? Aunt Anna tapped George’s arm with a gloved finger. He could be such a persuasive boy when he set his mind to it, she said archly; this was the time to show off his negotiating skills.

  I have no records to show what form of emotional blackmail was deployed on the tenants whom my father visited at the London flat before the day was out; I do know how impossible it was to resist his will, when he set his mind on an objective. Perhaps he simply wore them down; perhaps they were charmed at the prospect of helping a young and homeless couple. All I can discover is that his ends were obtained. They ended by agreeing to cut their tenancy short; their house would be his by late autumn.

  ‘A triumph!’ he wrote to Rosemary from London late that night. ‘A complete triumph!’

  It’s hard to disagree. Nevertheless, the shock to my mother when she paid her first visit to Thrumpton two weeks later was considerable. Nothing in George’s lyrical descriptions had led her to expect the House’s air of wan neglect (she still shudders at the memory of pea-green painted walls, dusty piles of prayerbooks, moss-grown drives, broken windowpanes, and rats). This was not what she had grown used to at Chirk, or what she had anticipated for her married future.

  ‘But you can’t just say that!’ my mother says anxiously. ‘Of course it was run down, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t beautiful. You ought to say how thrilled I was when your father took me for my first walk on the hill, and we could see the House below us. You must say something! Not just that I thought it was shabby.’

  This was the moment at which my mother’s fondness for the solemn, old-fashioned man she had chosen to marry deepened into love. Enthusiastically, she began to lay plans for a herd of Ayrshire cows, to ponder where they would keep horses, and what sort of hens would make the best breeders. The flirtatious tone of her earlier letters gave way to real tenderness. Together, she told George, they would make a splendid team. ‘It will be such fun! Such fun together, won’t it darling.’

  ‘I meant it, you know,’ my mother says, blinking her eyes and hunting for a tissue. ‘It was so touching. I’d never met anybody who loved a place so much. I never have. Well – you know how he was.’

  We both know how he was. I’m glad to look into his diary and find this insecure and unfulfilled young man – he was just twenty-three and looked less in his round schoolboy spectacles – declaring that he had found happiness at last, with the prospect of bringing together the two things he most adored. ‘I must be the luckiest man in the world,’ he wrote.

  Love, however overwhelming, placed no curb on my father’s snobbery. It gave him a sense of singular joy on 4 March 1946 (‘the very great day’) to see that the official announcement of their engagement took top place in The Times gazette, ‘at the head of the column!’ It tormented him that the announcement came too late for his name to be added to my mother’s invitation to a ball at Buckingham Palace. My father became as avid as Mr Pooter, one of his favourite fictional characters, for details of this elegant occasion. (It horrified him that my mother did not make a special visit to the hairdresser or even have a manicure.) To whom had she sat next at dinner, he wanted to know? What kind of china and glasses had been used? And what had the young princesses worn? But my mother, who took little interest in such details, could only remember that the food had been tepid. He was comforted a few weeks later when the two of them shared a dinner table with Princess Elizabeth – among twenty others – for a dance. George seized the opportunity to take a good look at his royal neighbour. She was pretty, he conceded, but not a patch on his Rosebud, ‘by far the loveliest woman in the room.’

  Love coloured everything. He had, until now, shown no taste for classical music; now, when he visited his parents for an occasional weekend, they were amazed to hear Liszt and Bartók crackling down the staircase from the portable player in their son’s room. The very mention of ballet, in later life, was enough to curl his lip; three weeks before his wedding, seated in the stalls of Covent Garden for a performance of Sleeping Beauty, George was in a state of entranced joy. ‘It was heaven: the music, the dancing, the decor all lovely – and my adored Rosebud sitting beside me looking like a dream.’ He wanted the world to share his awareness of her beauty; if not the world, his entire family. Thrilled by the chance to show his prize off to his grandest relations, he paid twenty pounds for tickets to a charity ball at Euston Hall and fancied they might be asked to stay the night. No invitation came, although my parents were the last to leave.

  The visit to Euston spurred him to enliven their long journey home with reminders of his royal connections. Rosemary’s family were fine, to be sure, but who could cap the glory of claiming Charles II for an ancestor? (A considerable number, if we are to be honest, after a span of seven generations; to my father, however, the cherished connection had grown close enough for him to thank goodness, for Rosemary’s sake, that he had not inherited the king’s lax morals.)

  My father was in ecstasy; his fiancée was in a state of nervous exhaustion. ‘Those endless visits to relations!’ she groans. ‘Aunt this and cousin that – it never stopped. I never knew a man with so many cousins. And all the worry about how I dressed: I’m sure the FitzRoys couldn’t have cared less which hat I wore to church.’

  ‘It was the way he showed his pride. Come on, Ma, you know he was wild about you. And your family: what did they make of him?’

  ‘They thought he was all right.’ She fidgets. ‘He hadn’t read much. At Chirk, we were always talking about books and music and things. George didn’t have a lot to say, except about family history.’ She pauses to think, anxious not to sound too harsh. ‘I mean, there was Thrumpton, and the wedding plans, and his new car – such a wretched thing. An Alvis.’

  I know about this. ‘You made him buy it. You certainly paid for it. It’s always described as yours.’

  She looks baffled. ‘But I didn’t drive.’

  ‘Then y
ou bought it for him. It’s not a crime to have been generous.’

  ‘Horrid car,’ she says with feeling. ‘It never stopped breaking down and you know how useless your father was at mechanical things. That’s why he found it so useful later to—’

  Breaking off, she gives me a sideways look. ‘You know. Have a friend.’

  The difficulty about holding these conversations with my mother is that I never know which way she’ll want them to go. It’s apparent that she’s in the mood today to discuss the years in which we lost him. I’m not.

  ‘I’m longing to know more about the honeymoon,’ I say.

  ‘I’m sure you are.’ Her tone is drily discouraging.

  ‘I didn’t expect to find you going off to a film on the first night of your marriage. Do you remember? You were staying at the Savoy as a present from your parents. That must have been fun: I’d love to stay there.’

  Babble babble. I’m prattling while I bait my trap, hoping she’ll fall into a web of compliments and tell me: why. Why did my parents go to a silly costume drama (the young Gene Tierney and Vincent Price in Dragonwyck) when they could have been behind doors and locked in each other’s arms, bruising their lips with newly legitimised kisses? Standing above her in the half-light of the curtained library, I stare down, willing her to read my thoughts. Her fingers are plaited together and she’s looking at them intently, circling her thumbs around each other. There’s earth under her nails and the cheerful red varnish has chipped away from the rims. Her hands have looked this way for as long as I can remember.