In My Father's House Read online

  All squeaks of protest were ignored. Astonishingly, my father maintained this habit of casual intrusion during the whole of my first marriage, and through most of my second one. I was never able to convince him that the habit was a strange one, or that a grown daughter had some right to privacy. Neither were my husbands, when we visited Thrumpton for weekends and festivals. He came with the territory. His House. His Daughter. Theirs not to reason why, but to smile, share and endure. They did so with a grace that, while it speaks well of them, says more about the force of my father’s personality.

  It was during these earlier, pre-marital invasions that my father began to draw me into his confidence. Staring out of the window while I tried to dress, invisibly, beneath a bath-towel or quilt, he spoke casually of various young women who had caught his eye. Nothing serious, as he was always keen to explain; nothing for me to give him such looks for!

  ‘What a face! I must say, darling, it’s a pity you don’t try to make the best of yourself. And aren’t you going to get dressed for breakfast?’

  Enraged both by the invasion of my privacy and by the expectation that I would applaud his good taste in girls, I punished him in the only way I could. He wanted my approval; he couldn’t force me to grant it. Stubborn in my silence, I willed him to stop talking and go away.

  ‘Not that he ever did anything,’ my mother says with a sniff. ‘Talk, that’s all it was.’

  ‘What about Carole?’

  ‘Good grief! You’re not putting her in!’

  ‘Why not?’

  On the rare occasions when I had been invited into the nostalgia-drenched sanctum of my father’s dressing-room, I always noticed a large portrait quite out of keeping with the rest of his private hoard: the dreary prints of Tudor Seymours; the tiny framed photographs of venerable and plain-faced relatives. This picture could have been copied from a Fifties poster; it showed a deep-breasted young woman with dark hair, gleaming teeth, and parted red lips. The prints and photographs offered no competition; the room belonged to her.

  This was Carole, with whom, apparently, my father had engaged in some lively bouts during the early years of his marriage. Incapable of keeping a secret, he confided in his wife. This, he explained to her, was a different kind of love.

  ‘I should say so!’ my mother exclaims. ‘She was in here with him! On the library sofa! Anybody might have come in! Just as well I didn’t. I might have hit them both over the head with a frying-pan.’

  In fact, as we both know, my father always waited until his wife went to visit her mother in London for a night before making an arrangement with Carole.

  ‘And what did you do?’

  My mother sits up straight, looks demure.

  ‘You know! And you’re not to go putting his name in! I found that London art dealer. He’d always looked as if he’d like to get to know me better. We did what we shouldn’t. It was—’

  ‘Quite nice?’

  ‘Oh, quite! And then I went home from London on the train and told George. He was livid!’

  ‘And did you ever do anything like that again?’

  ‘What do you take me for? Certainly not. As for him, well, if he wanted to make a fool of himself after that, chasing girls young enough to be his daughter – let him! They only laughed at him. Silly old thing!’

  It isn’t the first time that I’ve been struck by the way my parents’ generation dealt with their moments of sexual weakness. I’m impressed by the fact that what really outraged my mother was the use of the family home. Had her husband gone, discreetly, to a hotel, she’d have let it go. Appearances – of our selves, of our conduct, of the House – were what mattered most.

  It wasn’t hard for my father to charm girls. At his best, he looked like a cross between wistful-eyed Leslie Howard and a posh playboy. He had charm enough – even when he’d mocked my shape, my hair, my spectacles and my choice of clothes – to make me ache for his admiration. I’d seen others bask in it, watched how he could, when he chose, work magic.

  I first felt its power when I was fifteen years old.

  Home for the holidays, I was thrilled when he suddenly asked if I’d like to be taken to dinner with him, alone, in the local city’s best hotel. (My mother was away for a night, visiting one of her sisters; I wasn’t yet old enough to comprehend the strength of my father’s loathing for solitude.) After all the talk about the pretty girls whom he took dancing at clubs in London, I was flattered. I’d never had a boyfriend, never been kissed, and never – yet – been asked out to dinner. This was a rite of passage.

  My hair was brushed neatly to my shoulders (this was in the pre-wig days). My stocking seams were pencil-straight, shirtwaister belt pulled in until my breath came in gasps. The mirror gave me hope. I didn’t look, that night, especially fat or plain. My father even used the word ‘elegant’ when I came downstairs. He swung open the door of his red sports car and helped me in. He sang along with Ella Fitzgerald on the radio as we glided through the darkness. Arranging my legs sideways, as I had seen film stars do, I felt sophisticated.

  ‘This is rather fun, isn’t it?’ my father ventured, kindly. ‘It’s nice having a grown-up daughter! We must do it again.’

  That evening, I was given a taste of the charm my father could deploy, when he was in the mood. He asked about my friends at school, made jokes about the headmistress and told me that having dinner with me was the greatest fun he’d had all month. The sense of having glamour draped around my shoulders, like a silk cloak, lasted all the way through the prawn cocktail and well into the main course of scampi with tartare sauce. My plate was almost clean when my father leaned forward.

  ‘It’s been wonderful, darling, but now – there’s something I want you to know.’

  A smudge of sauce on my chin? Anxiously, I dabbed.

  ‘Not you. Me. Don’t frown, darling. It spoils your looks.’

  I put down my knife and fork and, trembling, folded my hands on my lap.

  ‘What? Please tell me?’

  He was dying, I suddenly realised with a rush of love and guilt. I’d spent all those years praying for something dreadful to happen. Now it had, and I could only just hold back the tears.

  He told me. Of course, there had been girls before, nothing serious, just a little fun, nothing to worry about. But now, there was a woman. And then he named her.

  ‘She is wonderful, isn’t she?’ my father said, insisting on an answer. ‘And she’s tremendously fond of you. I know how much you admire her.’

  I felt sick. He was, of course, quite right. The woman he had mentioned was everything I most wanted to be. She had a tiny waist, large eyes, glossy, long brown hair and a low, slightly foreign accent. My parents were friends with both her and her large, quiet, kind-eyed husband. When she came to stay, the woman played tennis with my father and went on long walks around the garden with my mother. I liked the woman for giving them both an equal value, and for bringing a spirit of serenity into the House. It had never occurred to me that she could be my mother’s rival.

  ‘But she’s married,’ I whispered.

  Divorce was a word I didn’t even like to say. The only girl at my boarding school whose parents were divorced was treated as a tainted alien. I turned my head to one side when I spoke to her, as if divorce was something I could catch from her breath. My reaction to my father’s words was entirely selfish: I didn’t want to be treated like my unfortunate fellow-pupil. A tear plopped into the little puddle of tartare sauce at the side of my plate.

  My father was too absorbed in what he had to tell to notice my reaction. The story, I began thankfully to realise, wasn’t about to start: I was hearing about a finished event. Of course, nothing was going to happen, he said. It simply wouldn’t have been fair to us, his family, or to the House. That was what he wanted me to know. I mustn’t be upset. All thoughts of his own happiness had been renounced. The price had been high, but all would be well. The only real victim was himself, for this had been true love, and hard to sacrifice
.

  I watched him remove his glasses to blink and, with one of his immaculate handkerchiefs, dab moisture from the corners of his pale, blinking eyes. Stiff with anger now that I knew we were safe and that I myself had been frightened to the edge of tears for no good reason, I allowed his hand to clasp mine. I heard that I was a dear daughter, so sympathetic and loving, when I wanted to be. It meant so much to have shared his secret sorrow. Well, time to call for the bill.

  Lighthearted again, he sang along with the radio all the way back to the House.

  ‘It sounds,’ my mother comments, ‘almost as though you were jealous. Not of me. Of her.’

  ‘Oh not at all!’ I say. She doesn’t look convinced.

  ‘Really,’ I repeat, ‘not in the least!’ My voice sounds, this time, too emphatic.

  A few years later, travelling abroad by myself, I spent a couple of nights staying with the couple in question. They had lost touch with my parents since leaving England; nevertheless, they both spoke warmly of their visits to the House and of the careful attention with which my father, in particular, had always seen to their comforts. I listened attentively for some hint of a more nuanced relationship. I heard none. But this was to be expected: why would she want to give her secrets away? It was possible that her husband had never known of the romance.

  Towards the end of my visit, however, I found myself alone with her. She was still a graceful and beautiful woman. I could understand my father’s passion, and the pain that renunciation might have cost him.

  ‘I wanted to thank you,’ I said suddenly, and I told her about the dinner of revelations, and then I thanked her again, for allowing our family’s happiness to take precedence over what clearly had been a serious affair.

  She looked astonished, and, as I came to the end of my pompous little speech, faintly amused. Hurt, since this had not been easily done, I asked her to tell me what was so comical. Only, she said, that the mildest of flirtations, a couple of lunches, a postcard or two, a birthday present of some nicely bound book, could be so misrepresented by a charming, but rather silly man. She had been fond of my father; the idea that she would ever have dreamed of ending her own marriage, or expected him to leave my mother, was absurd. Quite absurd, she repeated, and shook her head over the version with which I had lived for all those years.

  While ready to suspect that she was playing down the impact of her own beauty and flirtatious manner on a susceptible man, I believed her. I do not think now that this was a passionate relationship or a profound one; my father may have enjoyed none of it so much as the moment when he could overwhelm his teenage daughter with the tale of a grand amour, heroically renounced for the family’s sake.

  The relationship described here was one of several that marked the passing of my father’s fortieth birthday. This was the decade during which he took advantage of the new motorway, the first to be built in England, cutting the journey between Nottinghamshire and London by an hour. The proud owner of a sporty little open-top car, he used the motorway like a private racetrack, roaring off to take some merry-faced bachelor girl to supper and to dance at his favourite, old-fashioned nightspot, the Four Hundred, before he returned to the more decorous life of a father, husband and country gentleman. Here, in his other life, we saw an opener of fetes, cutter of ceremonial ribbons and – a new role – a conscientious magistrate who took an entirely respectable interest in the welfare of juvenile criminals.

  ‘That’s innuendo,’ my mother says sharply.

  But it’s not. My father’s visits to approved schools for boys looks bad in the light of later events. I’m sure now that this work increased his sympathy for young men who had lacked his privileged upbringing, but I see nothing sinister in it. He worked hard. He tried to get their living conditions improved and to put in a kind word when he felt that a remedial sentence had been unjustly harsh. This was in keeping with his self-perceived role as a patron. No boundary lines were crossed.

  My mother’s singular absence of jealousy during the years when her husband was discovering the joys of flirtation was based on common sense. She was well aware that none of these pretty, cheerful young dinner partners threatened her position. Why would they want to take on a shabby stately home, and the care of a petulant country squire? And which of them, however delightful, could compete against George Seymour’s passion for his home? It was just conceivable that he might be prepared to abandon us; he would never desert the House. And the House, without her willing commitment to the role of its drudge and slave, would not survive. She was, so long as she kept smiling, entirely safe.

  The flirtations were, however, a form of betrayal, and their existence helped to drain my mother of authority and confidence. The smile, a bright gash of vermilion in those days, stayed in place. Her feelings were never publicly expressed. As a girl, she had watched her reticent father encase himself, for a pageant, in a suit of mail from his collection of medieval armour; now, hooking her girdle tight, she pulled wool sleeves down to her wrists and planted a bright tam-’o-shanter upon her spray-fixed waves, a reminder to herself of the jaunty girl who had once held at her mercy the insecure, obsessive man to whom she now was married.

  Flirtations and a taste for fast cars marked the onset of restlessness in my father, and a terror of approaching middle age. Depression accelerated the process. Some causes for this were trivial or imaginary; others were real. The news that one of the largest power stations in England was likely to be built on the doorstep of the House to which he had given all of his energy and love headed the second category.

  The Trent, running across the centre of England, has been rated highly by business interests since the days of the Industrial Revolution, when fast-running water was needed to fuel the mechanical enterprises of Arkwright and Wedgwood. In the postwar decades, as power stations and pylons reshaped the skyline of the Midlands, the Trent played a key role in determining their location. Today, watching the shadows of clouds scud across their pale exteriors, and steam puffing up from their stacks in soft white clouds, spectators can bewitch themselves into seeing such architecture as the twentieth century’s variation on the castles of crusaders and conquerors. This view was not shared by George Seymour.

  The first hint of a threat came in 1963. Two sites had been selected in the Nottinghamshire area, of which we were one. The new station, if it came into being, would be built just beyond the Thrumpton estate, within half a mile of the House.

  My father was incredulous. He had only just, after twelve years of ownership, succeeded in bringing his cherished House back to its former glory, from a state of semi-dereliction. The years ahead were the ones in which he planned to harvest the rewards of a lifetime’s dedication. The House, the landscape, and the part of the village he loved best, were his. Luck and skilful investments had procured him enough money to support a leisured life; a closely-knit family circle consoled him for a dearth of intimate friends. (Letters written to my father during this period draw attention to the four of us as a unit, tight-packed, like a Roman phalanx. Friends declared that they envied his good fortune in having such affectionate children, such a marvellously competent wife.) All of this, now, lay under threat for how, conceivably, could Thrumpton survive such a transformation? We would have to leave – and without his House, my father knew that he was a lost man.

  (‘I am under no illusions,’ he wrote to me several years after this, in a letter which tried to explain his enduring commitment to the House. ‘Who, if we did not have lovely Thrumpton to offer to our friends, would give a damn about a middle-aged couple who had achieved nothing, and who lived in some quite ordinary home?’ I had not, until then, understood that my own lack of confidence was as a drop to the ocean of my poor father’s insecurity.)

  From 1963 on, he waged a five-year battle. By 1967, the matter was settled. There was no way out. Fields would be flattened, lanes buried, trees uprooted, making way for an edifice as alien to this drowsy landscape of little hills and wooded bluffs as the outsized f
unnels of the cruise ships that often, in those less protected times, overtopped the palaces of Venice’s Grand Canal. The difference was only that the funnels could always be dismissed. This change could never be entirely undone.

  The slow stages of the station’s growth were the hardest for my father to bear. Each phase was like a death. The towers came first, sprouting above the hilltop like the decapitated stalks of gigantic concrete mushrooms. I, entranced by their hollow hearts, spent illicit weekends prowling over the internal scaffolding and listening to the booming echoes of their muffled vacancy; my father moved the garden benches to face away from the devastated hilltop, and discovered a new enthusiasm for fishing in the lake. (The lake was one of the few places from which the towers could not be glimpsed.) Leylandii, trees that he had always dismissed as suburban, were suddenly found to have a certain stately grace: no other trees would grow fast enough to preserve his favourite views.

  The towers could be managed; the chimney was beyond his reach. Even I, who had enjoyed annoying him by defending the station’s right to co-existence with a private family home, grew silent as the column of concrete reached that height for which we had fearfully prepared ourselves – and then doubled. Swiftly, our hill shrank to a hillock, overshadowed by a giant snout from which, we were reassured, an invisible plume of smoke would silently rise and pour its waste, not upon us, but Norway. This, too, proved an illusion.

  From left to right, with the towers behind: my brother, mother, father and a visiting friend, Cornelia. From the collection of Warner Dailey.

  My father was not stoical about his trials: old acquaintances, fed with too many station tales, fell away like dead flies. He had reason to be wretched. The noise, during the first years, was like living in the middle of some Victorian factory, complete with clanks, explosions of steam, and shrieks of suddenly-vented air, all of it calmly acknowledged by the authorities. The rose-coloured bricks of the House’s walls, unpitted through three centuries of rough weather, became newly pocked with black holes. Each year brought further assurances from the station authorities, boasts of a dramatic fall in the level of sulphur emission; each year, smarting eyes and cankered leaves argued how slight that fall must be.