In My Father's House Read online

  Watching life on the canal, I imagined it winding away to flamingo-bordered, cobalt blue lakes, and to undulant turquoise seas that might spread their lapping waters to the earth’s far continents. (Fed with Fifties-style colour postcards from the travels of our parents, my brother and I pictured the larger world in bilious enamel tints.) Digging a hole, after the flood had receded, in the gravelled laundry yard at the back of the House, I was hoping, quite soon, to reach Australia.

  I sit on my father’s knee for a family snap with Dick and Vita, who is trying to hold my brother still.

  Familiarity with the power of floods, increased by our adventure in the farmer’s field, bred a respect for water that bordered on terror. I didn’t mind paddling when our parents took us on summer visits to the seaside; I screamed if anybody tried to coax me further than the water’s edge, out to the point where the sand sheered away and nothing lay below but the sucking depths, cold as the clasp of mermaid’s hands.

  My introduction to swimming as a pleasure came with the arrival at the House of Slav, who was both fond of children and good at swimming.

  Slav was an Ethiopian. He had been castrated and sold, so he told us, as a slave in the market of Addis Ababa. Bought by an Englishman for unspecified use and taken to Southport, he escaped at the earliest opportunity. We never heard what happened next. Slav did not like questions about his past. What he did like, he made abundantly clear from the very start, was the personal freedom of physical nudity.

  Slav arrived on a bicycle, one summer afternoon, clad only in a khaki shirt and, in a temporary concession to propriety, a thin pair of shorts. He knocked at the back door, introducing himself by his first name – we would know him by no other – and asked for work. He took pains to emphasise that he expected in return little more than his bed and board. My mother was doubtful; my father, keen for cheap workers, was enthusiastic. Slav was hired, on the condition – this was laid down by Nanny Rose – that he would always wear, at a bare minimum, a loincloth, while working in the House. My mother, after some thought, produced the remnants of a silk dressing-gown that dated back to her family’s visit to King Farouk. Egypt, surely, wasn’t too far from Ethiopia? Slav wore his loincloth dutifully, but without any show of pleasure.

  The presence of our new employee caused talk in the neighbourhood. My father had, until this point, been regarded as faultlessly conventional. The arrival in the household of such an outlandish figure brought his reputation into question. Did gentlemen employ such people for normal reasons? What, precisely, was Slav’s function?

  This, so far as I am aware, was the first taste the neighbours were to receive of my father’s waspish humour. A Baron de Charlus might have appreciated it, but this was the Midlands in the late Fifties and such sense of humour as the majority of my parents’ country neighbours possessed was uncomplicated by wit.

  On a fine July day, a lunch was held. The dining room blinds were drawn; my father, masked by dark glasses at the head of the table, proclaimed a headache. Plunged into a yellow gloom, the guests exchanged desultory chat and did their best not to stare too eagerly every time the door from the kitchen swung open.

  Time ticked away; nothing out of the ordinary had transpired. Glances were exchanged, followed by knowing nods, indicating that the guests believed they had, perhaps, been led up a garden path. Conversation grew louder and less deferential.

  Then, as coffee was announced, my father walked idly towards the window and snapped up the blinds. The gasp from behind must have given him as much pleasure as had the planning of the scene now unveiled. For there, stalking across the lawn, in all his (possibly unselfconscious) glory, strode our tall, beautiful, coffee-brown Slav, a tiny watering-can dangling from his fingers, a shred of yellow and scarlet silk knotted about his naked hips. The pretence of his engagement at a task was quite perfunctory.

  In retrospect, and in the light of my father’s obsession with physical appearance, Slav must have provided him with an aesthetic pleasure that compensated for the fact that, as time went on, he showed increasing reluctance to actually do anything. Observing him from one of my many hideouts – a clump of bamboos; a laurel thicket; the lower boughs of a densely covered ilex, or holm oak – I watched Slav strolling to and fro across the lawns, doing nothing except, with no personal effort, to look magnificent. Sometimes, looking past him to the House, I would see a shadow etched on one of the library blinds. Behind it, my father sat at his desk, writing a letter or, perhaps, simply gazing at the figure on the lawn.

  Too young to understand what castration meant, I asked Slav to explain it. He did so, at length and without embarrassment. Castration could affect you in two ways, he told me. For most men, the result was a high-pitched voice, like a lady’s. For him, the operation had produced only extreme sensitivity to temperature. This was his reason for not liking to wear many clothes. But what about the winter, I asked? If he grew very hot in summer, didn’t it follow that he would grow very cold in the winter? Why, then, did he wear just as few clothes in December? But Slav, who had a proud, capricious streak, grew suddenly bored with the conversation. Closing his eyes slowly and looking, to my admiring eyes, more than ever like a beautiful marching soldier from Darius I’s army in my history picture-book, he walked away.

  Slav was as sensual in his pleasures as a cat. In winter, he liked to roll naked in snow; in summer, he waded, without a stitch on, into the lake and swam sleekly up and down, his head held high above the water, like a ship’s prow. Watching him one day, I admitted that I was scared of water. Slav smiled sleepily and suggested that I get my bathing suit.

  Being lifted on to Slav’s shoulders and carried down the grass bank, out into the dark water, was the most delicious sensation I had yet known. Even so, I panicked as he pushed my legs away from his chest and out into the treacle-dark lake. Still clasped by strong hands, I flailed and choked and floundered – and found, to my surprise, that I had reached the rushes. Clutching them and kicking while I cried with fear, I raised up my legs to level with the frantic paddling feet of a startled coot.

  ‘You’re there!’ said Slav, and pulled me back to try again.

  One afternoon, two years after his arrival, my parents, my brother and I walked up the village street to watch the home team play cricket on the field they called Twentylands. The pitch lay close to the road, enabling us all to see, as the batsmen paused to change ends, that Slav, wearing his shirt and khaki shorts, topped off, on this occasion, by one of my father’s panama hats, was bicycling gracefully past. This was surprising – Slav had left his bicycle, untouched, in one of the old disused stables at the back of the House, since his arrival. Comfortably, my mother suggested that he must be trying to get his weight down. (Slav, although still elegant, was no longer so lithe as he had been on his arrival, possibly because Nanny Rose had taken to baking him a weekly batch of scones.)

  Perhaps Slav heard my mother’s words and took offence. The House, when we returned from the match, was empty. Slav had left a bundle of possessions behind, but he never came for them. He had gone, without warning, as suddenly as he came. We hadn’t, until then, realised how much he had become a part of our lives. Nanny Rose remarked that the House seemed quite empty without Slav about the place. Peeping out across the lawns from my hideout in the bamboos, I closed my eyes to slits, willing one of the long straight shadows to turn into the silhouette of my hero.

  My father was quite irritable after Slav’s departure.

  The hat that Slav had taken away, he explained, was one to which he had been particularly attached.

  To my eyes, one panama hat was much the same as another. But there was only one Slav.

  I am sorry, both for the reader and myself, that no photograph of Slav has survived. My mother says that he did not care to be photographed.

  Everything in the House leads back to the lake.

  Up above the top floor, a steep staircase leads to the roof, and a walkway hidden behind the gables. Above it, accessible by scramblin
g up a gutter, a square platform of lead, bleached pale as birch-bark by a century of sunlight, overlooks the landscape.

  The Turn of the Screw is a story I always connect to the House. It does, however, have a flaw. Henry James, bringing the governess back from one of her first strolls outside Bly, the country house to which she has been despatched, makes her look up. She has to do so, in order to see the ghost of the dead butler, Peter Quint, defying her from the rooftop. As a dramatic scheme, it works; in real life, it’s implausible. People, unless called to do so, look ahead, not up. A roof is the place to go, not to exhibit oneself, but for concealment.

  From the high platform, my refuge through all the years of my father’s life, the view stretches out to the distant railway line, where it spans the river, beyond a hill massed thick with beeches. Come back. Follow the slow snake of the river to its bowstring tributary, the lake. Perched up here on the leads, you can watch a world of activity below: herons staking out their watchpoints in the rushes, cormorants balancing on treetops, swans skimming low enough to ruffle their own reflections. From here on the roof, all is visible.

  Looking down now, I might see myself being carried out into the water on Slav’s shoulders. I might, but I don’t. What I see is always the same. I see my father.

  He’s sitting on the bank, the boy from London at his side. The long plumes of the willows overhang them and keep the bright sun away. My father is reading aloud, from one of the old-fashioned humorous novelists that his own father relied on to keep sadness at bay. The boy is leaning forward, laughing and enjoying himself. My father’s arm isn’t quite touching his.

  Here’s happiness and ease. Here’s what he never found with us.

  I’d be frightened now to look at my own face, or to hear my own voice, when I hid up on the roof, spying on the usurper, hating them both. My screams sounded so ugly that I’d put my hands over my ears to keep them out. It shocks me, today, even to acknowledge that the screams of an angry, jealous child were still coming out of my mouth when childhood had long been left behind.

  3

  A QUESTION OF APPEARANCE

  My father had hoped for so much from the House. It was his Camelot, his grail, his lost land redeemed, from which all good would flow. But the House couldn’t give more than it was. It couldn’t confer friendship, or success. This was a source of bewilderment, sadness and disappointment.

  Increasingly conscious that the House alone was not doing all for him that he had expected, my father looked harder at possible areas of improvement. Standards must be raised higher. The family, above all, must make more effort to live up to the beauty of their surroundings.

  My brother, by virtue of being male, escaped the onus that fell on the shoulders of my mother and myself to be fitting inmates of the House. Intelligence was neither required nor desired; my father himself could be relied on to provide conversational vivacity and wit. Our role was to contribute an appearance of beauty, or, failing that, a show of good old-fashioned elegance.

  My mother, in her eighties, wears whatever she pleases. Throughout her married life, she wore what pleased her husband. He, as we were all made aware, had impeccable taste. No matter that it was a taste formed by living in the company of elderly female relations who would have thought it daring to go for a summer walk without parasol, a veiled hat and gloves; he, who had lived, however tangentially, among duchesses and countesses, must surely be deferred to, conceded to know what was right?

  ‘And hadn’t you known a few people like that, in your family?’ I ask my mother. ‘Why didn’t you ever stand up for yourself?’

  She shrugs. ‘You knew him. We did have that one time when you took over. Do you remember what a success that was?’

  I’m unlikely to forget. This was the occasion that I think of as the mermaid dress disaster.

  I was fourteen, and the BBC were to film a Hunt Ball at the House. It was the kind of moment for which my father had lived, a homage to his home and his achievement. Cleaning and dusting reached an unprecedented level that week; a temporary butler was recruited on the strength of his impressive appearance when dressed ready for the cameras in my father’s second-best evening suit, and his skill at polishing silver. A big houseparty was invited; I was given special permission to come home from school.

  During the last week of the preceding holidays, I persuaded my mother that she should take my advice, not my father’s, about the dress in which she should appear at the Ball. Never having been allowed to buy anything more revolutionary than a khaki belt, I was wild with excitement at the prospect. This was to be the night on which, invisible for too long, she was at last going to shine. And so, reflected in her glory, would I, her daughter.

  Walking through the hushed rooms of a London department store, we crossed acres of pale beige carpet to reach a section marked Evening Wear. An assistant appeared and was waved away: this was to be our own joint stab at independence.

  It was hanging on a rail that smelled expensive. Silver sequins trailed lines over turquoise silk net as prettily as patterns on the surface of the sea; the neck and back plunged boldly down; the arms were bare. This was a dress for a goddess or a mermaid, and who better to be a mermaid than my mother with her red-gold hair and creamy skin? It fitted closely on her generous breasts and hips; this was good. The saleswoman clasped her hands in admiration; I was ready to skip with joy, until the price was whispered.

  ‘Fifteen?’ my mother said pleadingly.

  Fifty-four pounds was what the mermaid’s dress was going to cost; and this was 1962. My mother wasn’t used to independence. She never had more than, at most, a twenty-pound note in her purse for a London visit. In 1962, the only way she knew of obtaining more without consulting her husband or going to Drummonds, the grandest London branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, in Trafalgar Square, was to make a visit to Bond Street. Here, two old brothers ran a silversmith’s shop that had benefited from the shrewd tips given out by my mother’s grandfather. In return, the brothers gladly cashed cheques for my mother and her sisters on their expeditions to London. Unfortunately, the shop we were visiting was on the opposite side of Hyde Park, and my mother had an afternoon appointment to keep with her hairdresser.

  ‘Oh dear,’ my mother sighed, as she began to search for a way to unhook herself from the glorious dress. ‘What a shame.’

  Assistants who worked on the clothes floor of big department stores still received part of their pay in commissions at that time. Sweetly and swiftly, as she saw her percentage receding from view, the saleslady produced the solution: Mrs Seymour should take the dress home, let her husband see how beautiful she looked, and then see how glad he would be to pay the bill!

  Of course! We brightened. Once he had seen it, how could he not applaud our choice?

  The weekend came. Mr Alan Whicker arrived with his crew. It was decided, for the benefit of the cameras, that the houseparty would assemble for drinks upstairs, in the graceful upper drawing-room where old Lucy Byron had presided over her first Thrumpton ball at the age of sixteen. This was perfect: my mother would be able to make a dramatic entrance by the side door leading from her bedroom (I hadn’t yet read Rebecca).

  The film of the Hunt Ball, when it was finally seen by us, proved disappointing. Nothing registered but the sound of drawled vowels, the angled thrust of heads, the tap and shuffle of dancing feet, the yelps of laughter. Mr Whicker hadn’t travelled all the way to the Midlands to celebrate my father’s rescue of a handsome old house, but to show blue-blooded bumpkins at play.

  We weren’t to know this at the time. The room was aglow with bare skin and soft light and the buttery chat of those who are bred to sound bored. Glasses chinked. My father, alight with pride at the celebration of his home, sped from group to group, a dragonfly of joy. Too excited to care, for once, that my forehead was sprouting pimples and that my long feet looked large as boat-paddles in new and uncompromisingly flat gold sandals, I watched the door in the corner, willing it to open before the cameras
were switched off.

  ‘I helped choose my mother’s dress!’ I boasted. ‘It’s got sequins on! It’s beautiful!’

  A tall, cold-faced lady bent to waft scent into my face. ‘How very brave of your mother,’ she said. ‘And your father? What does he think of it?’

  ‘He hasn’t – oh, look! Look!’

  The door swung open. And there she stood, my creation, a white-skinned, wide-hipped mermaid in a dress that clung to her soft body like the flowering tendrils of some tropical aquatic tree. My father, across the room, with his back to the door, was pouring a glass of champagne. Framed by the door, she stood still in a way that was at odds with her usual reticence. She knew that she looked lovely. She was happy to wait for his admiration.

  Her husband turned, at last, and stared. ‘Oh my God,’ he said and then his voice shifted up from disbelief, to shrill rage. ‘It’s dreadful!’ my father cried. ‘Absolutely dreadful. For God’s sake, go and put something on that suits you. Anything! Anything but that!’

  The guests must have been her friends, too, but nobody said a word. My mother turned and closed the door quietly behind her. When she returned, perhaps ten minutes later, she was wearing a pale brown dress in which she looked quite unnoticeable. My father complimented her warmly on her recovery of good taste.

  The cameras left her out.

  The dress was not, contrary to my expectations, sent back to the store. Instead, it languished at the back of my mother’s cupboard, like a turquoise teardrop, unworn and unloved until, in the late Eighties, it left the House for sale in a charity shop, after being ignominiously bundled into a black trash bag.