In My Father's House Read online

  I still don’t understand why my father reacted with such hostility to the dress. Was it because he considered sequins to be vulgar, or the colour too loud? Or did he dislike the fact that it exposed so much of my mother’s luscious, creamy skin? The clothes he bought her, I noticed, never exposed her shoulders or her back. It seemed strange that while he had been amused and even delighted by the spectacle of a near-naked employee wandering around his House and gardens for two years, his wife was encouraged to cover herself as thoroughly, almost, as a woman in purdah.

  In the same year as the episode of what I came to think of as ‘the unfortunate dress’, my father sold a small piece of land. Avarice was not one of his vices: when he had paid for the recarpeting of the two main staircases of the House, a surprise was announced. He was going to take his wife, his mother – Dick Seymour had died three years earlier – and his son and daughter on an Italian holiday. No expense was to be spared: we were booked to stay at the Cipriani hotel in Venice, before visiting Rome, Amalfi and Positano. We would eat lobsters and see St Peter’s. I had never, until now, travelled further than Scotland and the West Country. The prospect of a European adventure was quite thrilling.

  Up in the nursery (I still slept in a child’s bedroom on the top floor, although I had now been at boarding school for two years) I practised my phrases – per piacere; vorrei andare a; bella vista! – and stitched together a continental two-piece of my own design. The result, when I posed sideways, the thinner view, was pleasing: a hot pink linen crop-top and low-slung bellbottoms. Che bella! I could hardly wait to show my new look off to the world.

  The Cipriani was grand, isolated and not, I thought, the kind of place in which to show off my costume. Rome was a blur of humiliation, caused by the sudden loss on Capitol Hill, in a wind, of one of my new and uncomfortable contact lenses. (My father, who had worn spectacles all his life, couldn’t bear the ugliness of a woman or girl in glasses.) My grandmother was convinced that the wearing of one lens without the other would ruin my sight for life; spectacle-less and almost blind without artificial aids, I was forced to try out a small and mean-looking patch which had come free in a first-aid pack. James Joyce might have got away with it, or Samuel Beckett. Perched askew on the pink and moonlike face of a chubby fourteen-year-old, the patch looked sinister and ridiculous. I wept and said I had rather go about blind. My father agreed: the patch, he said, did nothing to improve my looks. My grandmother, annoyed at the ingratitude being shown for her (freely provided) remedy, instructed him not to upset me. My father said that it was a pity nobody ever thought about his feelings. He, after all, would have to be seen with me. And I looked, if he had to be frank, a perfect sight.

  ‘Gracious!’ says my mother. ‘I mean, what a lot of fuss! About a patch! As though it mattered! You didn’t look that bad!’

  My mother had suffered from the opposite extreme. She could, as she says, have sat beside her own notoriously vague father with a cardboard box on her head, and have been judged to look in no way strange. Being noticed, in her view, remains preferable to being invisible. I’m not so sure.

  We sped down to the Amalfi coast in a sky-blue Zephyr. My father, tieless, in dark shades, tipped panama and striped blue shirt, spun expertly around the dizzy coils of the coast road, whistling ‘Volare!’ while Vita, bolt upright between my brother and me in the back seat, entwined the fingers of her beige suede gloves, determined not to show her fear.

  Luxury, by this stage of the holiday, was becoming an agreeable habit. My father had booked us into the best hotel; after we had admired our balconies overlooking the sea, and lunched on lobsters and cold white wine, Vita announced that she was ready for an afternoon nap in her room, while my mother wanted to write postcards. All smiles, my father proposed to take my brother and me out for a trip across the sparkling bay in a speedboat. At last! The perfect opportunity to show off my new costume! Removing the patch, and with it, my remaining contact lens, I passed the afternoon in a haze, confident that my pink top and smart hipsters had been admired. Clear vision was not required for me to know that I was being observed, discussed and praised. Che bella! What a lovely young girl!

  Flushed by triumph and the sun, I glowed all the way back to the hotel. Here, over a candlelit supper table, my father told the family what he had heard whispered under someone’s breath as I scrambled out of the boat. Nice girl. Pity she’s so big.

  It could have been worse. They could have said I looked like a pig; there’s no doubt that I was overweight. What hurt, and sent me crying all the way to my elegant bedroom with a sea view, was the scorn and anger in his voice. So little was expected from me, and still I had let him down. Was it so much to ask that his daughter should appear . . . thin?

  Che bella! Shades and a large hat help hide the eye patch, and divert attention from the plump form of which I had just become aware.

  Minding so much himself, he tried to hide disappointment behind a joking manner. The story of ‘Pity So Big’ was produced, over and again when we returned home: in front of me, he told it to visitors, guests, relations.

  ‘Can’t you shut up about the girl?’ an outspoken old cousin once said to him, coming to my rescue. ‘It’s not her fault she’s got a big bottom.’

  This, although well-meant, was not altogether comforting. My father paid no attention at all. But it was, he said when I challenged him, just a funny story; had I no sense of humour? Didn’t I understand how affectionate he was being when he referred to me in public as Melon-Face or, when I streaked my make-up, as Tiger Tim?

  A more confident girl – but what adolescent female has the confidence to doubt a father’s view of her looks? – would have ignored or ridiculed him for this obsession with her appearance. Instead, I grew increasingly eager to win his praise. I managed to gain it, in my late teens, but at a price.

  My hair had always disappointed him. Instead of being luxuriant, it was fine, straggle-ended and fiercely resistant to my attempts to make it curl. The colour ranged from dark blonde (winter) to light mouse (summer). Always keen on self-improvement, I decided to have it cut in a bob. This, the hairdresser explained as tufts of hair scattered around the chair, would create an illusion of thickness.

  I had forgotten, when I presented myself for inspection, that short hair was one of my father’s pet hates. After covering his face with his hands and declaring that it was painful even to look at me, he produced five pounds and told me to buy myself a wig. (My mother had already delighted him by agreeing to wear a full wig for all formal occasions.) Bearing his fondness for long hair in mind, I bought a cap of captivating blonde nylon tresses that spilled over my shoulders. My father was thrilled.

  ‘You look really pretty,’ he said, with delight. ‘Don’t ever take it off.’

  I didn’t. Having found the way to please him, I didn’t dare. For three years, I wore my wig night and day.

  This was not an easy task. Swimming in the Caribbean sounds like a fate that anybody would be glad to endure (my father, after one of the palmy moments when his investment hunches were successful, had bought a house in Jamaica); swimming in hot water in a shoulder-length wig is surprisingly uncomfortable. An additional problem is the fact that wig-hair doesn’t dry in a natural way. I envied the girls who sat chatting to each other on the beach, styling damp hair with their fingers, while I slunk away behind a bush where, unseen, I could safely remove my waterlogged false locks and tweak them into shape. On another occasion, when I was dancing, the wig suddenly flew off, leaving me with a rats’ nest of hairpins exposed to view and nothing for it but to crawl through a jigging forest of trouser-legs and silky calves until I correctly identified a small, pale, dead Pekinese dog as my lost head of hair, spread out across a corner of the dance floor.

  I was consoled for these trying experiences by the fact that my father, for so long as I wore the wig, was unfailingly complimentary, kind and good-humoured. The downside was that my own hair fell out: the trichologist I consulted when I was twenty was su
ccinct.

  ‘Screw him,’ he said when I explained about my father. ‘You don’t ever put that thing back on your head again. Not ever!’

  But my confidence had already been undermined. The week before my wedding, four years later, I bought myself a long blonde wig. Pleasing my husband was the last thing on my mind.

  My mother’s looking guilty.

  ‘I should have said something. I hadn’t realised he hurt your feelings so much.’

  I pat her hand. ‘You couldn’t have made any difference. He had us beat.’

  The technique by which this in many ways unremarkable man kept two strong-willed women under his control was simple and invisible; he made us feel worthless. Without value, you have no power. No physical force was employed, no threat, except of his displeasure.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ my mother says, when I ask her about the charm game.

  Memory is being kind.

  The charm game, devised by my father on our Italian holiday in 1962, revealed the depths of his own insecurity more profoundly than I realised at the time. Then, the game excited me. The game was my chance to be as cruel as he, and to feel that I was not, after all, the most disappointing member of the family.

  The rules were simple, as simple as the way in which the game was introduced among us, and must be allowed to develop, if my brother and I were to benefit. Our father controlled the family budget: if we wanted to enjoy a good dinner, and go to bed feeling loved, then the game’s originator must score well. To give him bad marks was unwise.

  But somebody had also to be the loser, and our father made it clear who that somebody should be. High marks for him; low marks for her; it never failed to give him joy. (Possibly, he was taking revenge for the first humiliating months of their courtship, when he had been at her mercy.)

  We played it first in Amalfi, after my grandmother Vita – she would never have tolerated such a vicious game – had gone early to bed. He laid out the rules; my brother and I didn’t even need to glance at one another. We knew what we were meant to do.

  ‘I thought,’ my father said, lounging back in his chair, crossing his legs and smiling at us with unusual graciousness, ‘that we might start with – charm? Now, how do you think I might score – truthfully?’

  We hesitated, debated, looked solemn, and had to tell him the absolute truth: on a scale of ten, he scored nine. (The mark was not outrageous; our father could, when he chose, squirt charm more efficiently than a tom-cat sprays musk.)

  We’d done well. He looked delighted, even though he tried to smother the smirk in a handkerchief.

  ‘And now: your mother. Rosemary? Well, darling, I wonder what we should give you.’ Pause. ‘Do you know’ – pause – ‘I don’t know that I would say charm, not exactly charm, is one of your strongest points. What do you think, yourself? Honestly now.’

  Let her damn her chances, out of her own mouth. He knew she’d do it. And she did. Smiling, but not happy, she said that he was probably right and that she was feeling tired. She wasn’t allowed to escape so easily.

  ‘And you, Miranda darling? What do you think about Mummy and charm? Do you think she’s charming? Truthfully?’

  She hadn’t spoken up when he mocked my size, and laughed at my spectacles, and sighed regret at my skimpy hair. She’d let me carry the blame for the mermaid dress, said that it wasn’t her choice, but mine.

  ‘I’ll give her four,’ I said, and watched her wince.

  Divided, we fell.

  4

  BETRAYAL

  My mother has been asking about my memory of earlier years. She thinks it odd that I’ve written nothing about my relationship with my father before the age of fourteen.

  ‘You can’t’, she says reproachfully, ‘have forgotten everything.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Fluently, she rattles off a list of scenes. the after-tea visits from the nursery to the library downstairs to listen to a chapter from The Pickwick Papers, our father’s favourite of Dickens’ novels; the Christmas party for all the children from the village, with old-fashioned games being played around a candlelit tree; our annual winter visits to the pantomime and the circus; playing croquet in the garden; eating impromptu picnics up on the hill above the House; walking through fields thick with buttercups, down to the foaming weir . . . ‘You had a wonderful childhood. I can’t imagine anybody being better looked after.’ She’s plucking at the pockets of her purple velour suit. ‘And now, all you remember are the bad things . . .’

  I don’t know what to say. I remember all the scenes she cites, but in black and white, like old photographs. There’s no emotional freight.

  It startles me to discover that I have hardly any memory of her at these occasions, but I think I know why. Married to a volatile man with high expectations and a short fuse, my mother had already embarked on the path she kept to throughout her marriage: to comply or keep quiet. When hurt, unnerved or in doubt, she smiled. I do remember her smiling more than seemed reasonable. I can’t remember her voice.

  I can see him far more easily. The first image to surface is the fluttering, languid movement of the long white hands on which he prided himself; this is followed by the deceptive impression of weakness delivered by a soft and loose-fleshed chin below the narrow, unpredictable knifeline of his mouth. His grey-brown curls are slicked flat to the sides of his head; his pale blue eyes are hidden behind dark glasses. That’s how he liked it; he could look out, but we couldn’t see in and guess at his thoughts.

  ‘It isn’t that I remember only the bad things,’ I say. ‘It’s just that they’re more personal. I know they happened, the scenes you’re talking about, but they don’t seem quite real. It’s as though they were part of a stage play.’

  My mother flinches as if I’d struck her; nevertheless, I believe I’m telling the truth. The upbringing that had been devised for my brother and myself replicated, as closely as possible, our father’s idealised memories of his own first years in the House. Revisiting the past through the expeditions, games and pastimes he arranged for our enjoyment, he left no room for us to receive new impressions. Everything, as we were aware, was a repeated process. These secondhand experiences have left only the faintest of traces behind. I remember them less well than pictures in the books from the nursery bookcase: Cuchulain’s head being kicked around some Irish field; a sharp-faced villain being hurled down a precipice, long hair flying up behind him like parachute strings . . .

  ‘So it didn’t mean anything to you that we did all those lovely things?’ My mother rarely shows emotion. ‘Anything at all?’

  I must try harder, but none of the images I recover will serve to satisfy her need for reassurance that they, our parents, did well by us. I can see his fingers making a pile of pale shells from the tiny shrimps we caught for his tea on summer seaside holidays. I can remember the erectness of his carriage and the smartness of his shoes treading back towards our family pew after he had read a lesson; the scent of the handkerchief with which he once dried my eyes; the hot sense of shock and shame when he first mocked me for being overweight, for not incarnating that ideal of what he had imagined for his daughter.

  I remember the back of his neatly rounded head, as I sat in the car behind the driver’s seat, willing him into extinction . . .

  ‘I remember when I moved into my first grown-up bedroom,’ I tell her.

  Sighing, my mother walks away. I know I should have offered more. There’s nothing there to give.

  Connected memories of my father begin in the year that I moved down a storey in the House, to a large – and chilly – white bedroom, overlooking the lake, a room which, to this day, is still my own. I was fourteen, young and fearful enough to sleep with my knees tucked up hard against my stomach, away from any nasty surprises. (This was the room in which, in his nineties, old Charlie Byron had died; I’d heard it whispered that he returned to lie there on the bed, from midnight until dawn, in his coffin.) Placed within easy reach of my parents’ room, and witho
ut a key to lock my door, I found I had acquired a new role. I was to be my father’s confidante, a receptacle for the sufferings of a sensitive heart.

  Our bonding had not, until this point, moved beyond the occasional and unwanted invitation to enter the intimacy of his dressing room. Here, awkwardly, I stood with my back turned towards the bathroom, anxious to catch no embarrassing glimpse of his pale, unclothed body. The rules were now reversed. Friendship of a new kind was being offered. It included, to my considerable dismay, a father’s right to walk into his teenage daughter’s room, at any time he chose, before or after bedtime. The given reason, on most occasions, was that he had received a letter that it would interest me to hear (this was seldom so) and on which my opinion would be welcome. (The notion that personal correspondence should be treated with discretion was as alien to my father as the idea that I had any rights to privacy; all handwritten letters were read aloud, analysed and – if they contained gossip or material that had the potential to cause damage – passed along to whoever might help to stir the brew. This, I realise now, was a trick he had picked up from old Ismay FitzRoy, herself an arch intriguer. Letters, in the view of herself and her grandson, were to be shared, not spared.)

  I did not especially mind being asked for my opinion. I did not at all like to know that, during any stage of undress, the door might suddenly open to reveal him. He never apologised; my discomfort was ignored even when I crouched on all fours behind the bed with a blanket tugged down over my naked back. He spared my blushes by appearing oblivious to my state. Walking past the rumpled bed to the window, he looked down at the lake, out to the young woods beyond it, and launched into the matter in hand.

  ‘Perfect morning! I couldn’t resist letting you know what X wrote. Quite incredible!’