In My Father's House Page 13

  ‘Shall I open some wine? We could have a glass before supper.’

  ‘I don’t want any,’ she says in a low voice, then glances up at me. ‘I haven’t objected to your writing this book. I haven’t tried to stop you, have I?’

  ‘Not yet!’

  She doesn’t smile. ‘You don’t have to put in everything. I’ve read your biographies. You didn’t say what Henry James did in bed, or Mary Shelley.’

  ‘They weren’t around to tell me, but you . . .’ Eagerly, I rattle off a quote from one of her own letters, forgetting that this is a sure way to antagonise an interviewee, let alone a mother. ‘You called him “my clever, mathematical, neat, precise and altogether perfect person”, and that was just two weeks before the honeymoon! It’s not passionate. You must admit that.’

  ‘Letters don’t tell you everything.’ Her voice is still so low that I have to bend to hear her. ‘All that side of things was lovely. It always was. Can’t you just leave it at that?’

  No, I can’t, I want to shout. I need to know. Lovely, in what way? Lovely, because of what? But she’s slipped away from me, back behind the door she keeps closed on anything unpleasant. I’m my father’s daughter in my volatility and imperiousness; each time we talk, I see more clearly that she is hers in the way that she protects herself from intruders and their judgments.

  Staring down in thwarted silence at her bent head, I remember the time I first made love and how, full of glee and complacency on a summer day, I tracked my mother through the garden shrubberies to boast about it. Nothing much had happened – the affair was over in less than a month – but I glowed with foolish pride that afternoon. My body was hot with remembered pleasure; my mind shimmered with the memory of tangled limbs, smothering kisses. Kept down for so long in a state of lowered confidence, I had my parents beat at last. I’d discovered things they could never have dreamed about. I told it all in triumph as she stood there, looking smaller than myself, trowel in hand. The words came rushing from my mouth as I searched my mother’s face for – what? Wonder, I suppose, wonder and envy.

  What I did not anticipate was the outstretched hand, the gleam of sudden secret pleasure in her eyes. And wasn’t it marvellous, she said, when—

  Horrified, I cut her off and backed away. I wanted her to be abashed by my revelations. I wanted none from her, a middle-aged woman, an untouchable in the hard eyes of youth. I didn’t see, as I do now, the generosity and warmth of her response.

  And now, when I want so badly to uncover her sexual feelings, there’s no way to get at them. The door has been tight shut. It was lovely. It was always lovely.

  I’ll have to continue my interrogation another day.

  They were married at St Margaret’s Westminster in June 1946 (‘509 guests!’ my father noted, rejoicing at the lavish number of wedding cheques he had received). Since foreign travel was still prohibited, their prolonged honeymoon was taken in Britain. In Wales, they spent a fortnight at one of Tommy Howard de Walden’s properties, a seventeenth-century house called Plas Llannina. The summer was a scorching one, too hot for excursions until the end of the day, when they strolled along the beach towards New Quay, past the spot where my mother remembered having seen Augustus John stretched out on the stony shore like a beached whale after emptying a decanter of whisky with her father, his host. Coming back, they peered into the semi-derelict applestore where Dylan Thomas lived while he began to dream up the story of Milk Wood. With the oil lamps lit, they sat reading each other chapters from old-fashioned novels about foxhunting—

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Why? Any objections? You haven’t become one of those activists, have you?’ my mother inquires with sudden suspicion.

  ‘It sounds so unlikely.’

  ‘Not at all.’ My mother is her jaunty self again this morning. ‘It just goes to show how little you really know about your parents.’

  Snugly tucked up in a big double bed, with the oak door shut against the creaks and whispers of a house more haunted than any other my mother can remember, they opened the window to gaze at a full moon above the sea and to listen for the bells that, so the stories went, rang up from Llannina’s submerged church to warn of coming storms.

  ‘And don’t forget Valentia.’ She sighs. ‘Such views: I’ve always meant to go back there.’

  My father’s diary tells me less about the little rainswept island lying to the west of County Kerry than can be gleaned from a couple of internet sites; one entry does record that my parents spent time ‘very pleasantly’ in their hotel room. Does ‘pleasantly’ hint at unmentioned pleasures? I can’t tell and my mother can’t – or won’t – remember. It’s easier to pick up the note of outrage in his account of a visit to the skeletal ruins of a Kerry mansion, burnt out by a careless smoker on a wild weekend in the twenties. My father was too upset to eat his supper that night. Emotion, as he unfailingly reminded us in later years, went straight to his stomach, proof of his exceptional sensitivity.

  Hints of troubles to come surfaced in August, when my parents were in Norfolk with George’s parents, enjoying the last sleepy days of a glorious summer. (‘They seem so entirely happy,’ his mother noted, adding that she was glad Rosemary seemed to be a fit and energetic young woman. George’s health must be carefully watched, Vita warned her daughter-in-law. This project of farming was all very well, but poor George was too delicate to undertake more than the lightest tasks. Advising and overseeing were his real strengths.)

  My parents needed identity cards for their honeymoon off the coast of Ireland in 1946.

  A letter from Charlie Byron cast a sudden chill upon the pleasant experience of admiring a last magnificent clutch of wedding presents. (My father had been shameless in advertising his need for furniture and paintings of a kind appropriate to his future home.) Capricious until the end of his days, Charlie was reviewing his plans once again and wondering if he had been too generous to his nephew, too hard on his Byron cousins. Perhaps, he wrote now, George imagined that the Home Farm and the Lodge were being given to him for nothing? He had better take note, now and for the future: no special privileges were being offered. He would be expected to come to financial terms with the land agents – ‘and ME!’ the old man wrote in shaking capital letters, forgetting that the proposal for George to run the estate farm had come from himself.

  Vita was alarmed by the letter – perhaps Charlie was planning to leave his home to those Byron cousins, after all? My father was irritated, but not unduly worried. Charlie had changed his mind before and would doubtless do so again; at the end of the day, the only surviving Byron claimant was a Catholic and Charlie Byron would not even let a Catholic through his door. True, my father would have preferred to hear he was going to inherit the House outright, but a life tenancy still secured his future. Charlie, he told his mother, was just playing games.

  Overall, as my father settled into his new life as a young farmer with a pretty little manor house in the village he adored, his situation was enviable. Rosemary’s relaxed attitude to money was due to her possession of a substantial amount of it, to be shared with him; her parents were both fond and lavish. They had helped to find a young Scot who was willing to oversee the Home Farm; three girls from Chirk village were persuaded to come and form a domestic household at Thrumpton Lodge. Anna scurried around to find them a chauffeur, a dairyman and a day-labourer. The final feather in my father’s cap was the news that Margot Howard de Walden’s personal maid wanted to return to her Nottinghamshire roots. Word arrived that she had settled in a nearby village, on hand to sew, press clothes and pack cases. The level of elegance at Thrumpton Lodge was now, as George joyously noted, almost ducal.

  At twenty-three, then, my parents were fitted out for a life of unusual comfort. When my mother, misty-eyed, talks of her farming years, I want to know how many farmers’ wives had a chauffeur-driven Daimler in 1947; unkindly, I comment that she reminds me of Marie Antoinette tending vegetables behind the Petit Trianon.

  They
kept no diaries during the four years they lived at The Lodge; my mother remembers these as the happiest of her married life, marred only by a requirement to dine with the old Byrons at least twice a week. This, as George’s uncle began to slip into senility and Anna grew correspondingly fretful, was not a cheerful experience.

  My mother believes her memories. She remembers creating a pretty garden at the Lodge (‘I put in those borders!’) and a cheerful home. (‘All the family loved coming there. The Lodge was such a cosy place.’) The meagre documentation that has survived shows this to have been a period of dismay, confusion and enforced economy. Can both be true?

  The main agent of change was the unexpected death of Tommy Howard de Walden within months of his youngest daughter’s marriage. That June, Rosemary noted how ebullient her father seemed, as if he had already managed to put the memory of Chirk behind him. In September, she worried that he was looking tired. In October, he was taken into the London Clinic for an operation. On 5 November, a date she has ever since associated with misfortune, her father died. He was sixty-six. The given cause was jaundice.

  George Seymour had married a young woman whose income greatly exceeded his own. In the late autumn of 1946, at the beginning of the coldest winter in living memory, when snow buried the hedges from view and the roads around Thrumpton were blocked off as impassable, bad news came in. Tommy Howard de Walden had never liked lawyers; convinced that they were out to rob him, he had put off the unpleasant business of dealing with them. As a result, scant provision had been made for his five daughters. My mother and her older sisters were no longer heiresses; instead, to his dismay, my father found himself married to a young woman whose means were almost as modest as his own.

  ‘I will take care of you forever,’ George had promised Rosemary at the beginning of the year. He had not imagined that this would involve economic support. Eleven months later, preparing to celebrate a family Christmas at Thrumpton Lodge to which he had proudly invited his parents, his married siblings and their children, my father had to beg for a delay in paying the fuel bills. His plans to buy three young pigs for the Home Farm were cancelled.

  I have said that I would not want to be in a wartime trench with my father; I’m proud to see how well he performed in less dangerous circumstances. The Christmas plans went smoothly forward; Vita praised her son’s generosity as a host and scolded him for buying such lavish presents: a pair of crystal vases for herself and a really beautiful cocktail frock, off the peg, that might have been made just for Rosemary. Vita had no idea that her son had paid for these Christmas gifts, and the traditional turkey, by cancelling his order for a new suit – his own was threadbare – and recalling the deposit.

  ‘I’m a fool about money,’ my mother had blithely announced in one of her early letters; my father now began to discover that she was, indeed, an innocent. Arithmetic had never been her strength; she understood only that her bank statements must always show her account to be in credit. Asked by her husband to perform some simple feat of addition, Rosemary gladly offered a prompt answer. Unfortunately, she had halved the sum instead of doubling it.

  George could not, it was plain, rely on his wife for the keeping of ledgers and cash books, by which he hoped to control their rapidly shrinking funds. All accounts, bank details and household reckonings would, from this time on, lie in his province.

  I was scornful when I first encountered the Telephone Ledger. Begun a month after my grandfather’s death, the ledger-book was maintained, with only one break, until a few years short of my father’s death. I looked at it, initially, as a potential hiding place for awkward secrets. ‘Black Boy’ sounded promising; so did three entries for ‘artificial insemination’.

  Closer inspection showed that the ledger had no shocks to offer. The Black Boy was the name of a pleasantly old-fashioned hotel in the centre of Nottingham; the entries on artificial insemination referred, not to procreational difficulties between my parents, but to the herd of Ayrshire cows they had purchased, at £70 a head, during the first ambitious weeks of taking on the farm.

  The entries told me little that I did not expect; there was no surprise in finding that each call to a person of illustrious birth was fully recorded, with titles, while those of less genealogical interest were briskly noted by their surnames. The unexpected aspect was that the entries had been maintained, with a note of the length of time spent and subsequent cost of every call, over a period of fifty years. The ledger brought into question the haste with which I had dismissed my father’s service to Barclays Bank (such meticulousness, such dedication, could not have gone unremarked). The ledger showed me that, despite the capriciousness with which my mother had once held him in thrall, my father now controlled the marriage.

  My father’s entire life had been driven by his passion for Charlie Byron’s home. I wonder what was in his mind in 1948, when he made a visit to another Byron landmark in the neighbourhood. Newstead Abbey was where his uncle’s celebrated ancestor had spent his youth; since then, it had become a desolate ruin. Was my father thinking about Thrumpton as he peered through the Abbey’s grimy windows at dusty wooden floors, peeling wallpaper, sheeted furniture? Was he wondering, for the first time in a lifetime of obsessive love, if a neglected, inconvenient old house, in which his children would never have the right to live, was worth the wait?

  My father’s feelings were about to be severely tested. The following year, in a glorious June, Charlie Byron died. It was not, at this point, apparent just how little he had done to safeguard his family property.

  13

  THE FULFILMENT OF A DREAM

  My father had been anticipating only a lifetime’s tenancy of the House he worshipped; outright possession was the unlooked-for gift magnificently extended by a devoted aunt. Anna took frank delight in the naïve expectation that she was free to dispose of her late husband’s home as she wished – and to exclude his surviving relatives from any part of the House’s future.

  In the autumn of 1949, Anna went to a meeting with the family lawyer and two trustees appointed by her husband to act for the interests of the estate. Gently invited to explain how Lord Byron had dealt with his correspondence, she grew flustered. Charlie was always prompt in answering handwritten letters; it was the other kind he didn’t like. And how, the principal lawyer asked, did Lord Byron respond to this other kind? Had he answered these letters later? Anna shook her head. Had he answered them at all?

  The answer was reluctantly given. She had noticed that all official-looking letters lay on his desk for a certain time, unopened, after which they disappeared. Did she know where to? Anna was growing impatient: after all, there were so many places! Good heavens: drawers, boxes, the backs of cupboards. When space ran short, she added helpfully, Charlie often stored tiresome-looking letters behind the House’s heavy cast-iron radiators. Should she start a search?

  The lawyer shot a discreet glance at the trustees and shook his head. This was when Anna learned that Charlie had unwittingly thrown away eight years’ worth of dividends. A search would be a waste of time; their present value was nil.

  Worse was to come. Charlie Byron, an inveterate procrastinator, had failed to act in the best interest of the House’s future. The tax bills raised by his death were enormous; they could only be met by a sale of the Estate, the House, and its contents. Anna must not be too alarmed, the lawyer reassured her. She would not be homeless. Lord Byron’s principal home in Essex had recently been demolished after a fire, but a smaller house on the same estate was available for her use – if she remained a widow. Dazed, Anna listened to the one condition over which Charlie had taken real care: all of her future benefits were to be cancelled if she remarried.

  George’s affection for his aunt was sincere; his first instinct was to comfort her. But what reassurance could he offer?

  Little correspondence survives from the period following Anna’s dismaying interview. All I know is that the University of Nottingham put forward an offer to buy the House as an i
nvestment, and that my father persuaded the trustees to reject it.

  ‘And then?’

  My mother shoots a wistful glance at a pile of creased cloths stacked on the ironing board. ‘It’s almost eleven,’ she says. ‘I wanted to go shopping this afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll take you. What happened after the University backed out? I’ve nothing to do until lunchtime but listen.’

  She sighs. ‘But you know all this. George must have talked about it. The trustees knew how much your father adored the House, and that he’d been told he was going to have it. They made us an offer: fifty thousand pounds and a year to find the money. If not, the House and the estate went up for auction with the contents.’

  ‘But you didn’t have anything like that sum of money.’

  ‘Of course we didn’t. We had to borrow.’

  I’m trying to picture it. Fifty thousand pounds, in 1949? Fifty thousand pounds, for an underheated, underlit, decrepit mansion which, following the auction of contents to pay the Inland Revenue, would be empty of all but a small clutch of Byron heirlooms preserved for his relatives by the old man’s will? Why not sit tight at Thrumpton Lodge and wait for a friendly and more prosperous buyer for the Hall who would be delighted, surely, to have them as tenants and neighbours?

  ‘Weren’t you terrified? How did you think you were going to pay such a sum back?’

  ‘Oh, I know!’ she says. ‘But think of owning the House, of its really being ours, not just somebody else’s home!’ (She’s thinking, transparently, of the Welsh castle her family had loved, not owned.) ‘It was something we were going to enjoy doing together,’ she explains. ‘A real adventure!’