In My Father's House Read online

  ‘God send I never have to leave for ever.’ There’s no doubting Thrumpton’s charm, but what was it that could lead a boy of twenty-one to make such a declaration? How could bricks and mortar exert such power? What was ‘the wound in his heart’, so painful to see, so difficult to comprehend?

  To find the answer, time has to be turned back and confronted.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I simply don’t see the point.’

  My mother and I have been discussing my wish to write this book for ten years. Anger and self-pity have kept me on hold. Listening to myself as I talk to friends, telling them the stories, polishing the details, I hear sourness in the tone, feel rage twist a knife in my throat, and know the time hasn’t yet come. I’ve wondered if my mother’s way, the path of silence, is the wiser option. There are things it’s easier to disclose in private than expose to public view. There are things I’ve never understood, that I’m not sure I want to examine.

  ‘It’s not as if you’d be writing one of your biographies,’ she goes on. ‘He’s your father.’

  ‘Was,’ I say fiercely. ‘Was.’

  We’re sitting late over supper in the kitchen of the House, our faces lit, like uneasy conspirators, by a couple of candles.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says after a long pause. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Be my conscience. Tell me when I go wrong.’

  She gives me a sharp sideways look. ‘I can tell you. It doesn’t mean you’ll do anything.’

  ‘I’ll listen.’

  ‘It doesn’t strike you,’ she says after a pause, ‘that you’re too like him to be objective?’

  ‘Like him!’ I can feel the heat of blood rushing to my cheeks. ‘Like him?’

  She winces. ‘Is that so dreadful? Did you hate him so much? He did love you, you know.’

  ‘After his fashion.’ Don’t do this to me, I think. You know what he was like. You know what we went through. Don’t make me soft, not now.

  ‘Well,’ she says, standing up and brushing crumbs off her skirt, ‘you’re set on it and I can’t stop you. But you’ve gone wrong already.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Solemnly, she nods. ‘Cutting down lilacs? Darling, do you still not know the difference between lilacs and a buddleia, a butterfly tree? In our own garden? Good grief, George must be turning in his grave.’

  Even a phrase like that can summon him back. Later, brushing my hair before the dim glass in my bedroom, I catch the flicker of a shadow behind me, hear the sudden squeak of a pressed floorboard.

  ‘Goodnight!’ I call. I wait for my mother’s voice to answer me, but the House is asleep inside the tall closed shutters. Not a sound is to be heard now in the muffled quiet but the deep steady thud of my own heart and the busy rattle of a distant train.

  PART ONE

  The House: Obsession

  1

  DICK AND VITA

  ‘I expect you’ll be talking about Barbara Castle,’ my mother remarks. We’re having breakfast on a winter morning. When I glance up, it’s to see her feet stretched out towards the fire as she admires a new treasure, a pair of slippers fluffed out to resemble startled baby owls.

  ‘I will?’ Am I about to hear revelations of something too improbable for fiction, news that my true-blue father had a secret affair with an aristocrat-averse old politician who wouldn’t – or would she? I want to sound casual, but I’m dismayed. This won’t fit the story I want to tell. It’s out of character.

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ I say carefully. ‘Something I’ve missed?’

  The owls withdraw under the table. My mother raps the dome of her egg with a spoon and rallies herself from a moment of slipped moorings.

  ‘Castle-maine! Who did you think I meant? You know, Charles II’s mistress, the one he made Duchess of Cleveland. I can’t imagine anybody writing a book about George and leaving her out. Dreadful money-grubber. Nothing to boast about that I could ever see.’

  I’m relieved – and she’s right. It’s inconceivable that I should omit to mention the connection my father most treasured. Snobbery is, after all, a significant aspect of the man. I can’t, in describing a passion for houses and great estates, undervalue the Euston link, the precious ducal kinship.

  Extract from Frederic Shoberl’s The Beauties of England and Wales, 1813:

  EUSTON, a village, pleasantly situated on the Lesser Ouse, was formerly the lordship of a family of that name. It afterwards descended to the family of Pattishall, and from them to Sir Henry Bennet, who . . . built Euston Hall; and left an only daughter, Isabella, married to Henry Fitzroy, one of the natural children of King Charles II, by the Duchess of Cleveland, who was created by his father Earl of Euston and Duke of Grafton, and was the ancestor of the present noble proprietor of Euston.

  ‘I love your Euston,’ my father wrote to his mother in 1942. He was nineteen, and enjoying a rare overnight stay with his favourite FitzRoy cousin at the Hall. It was the Hall, the Duke of Grafton’s country seat, on which my father always dwelt when he spoke to us of Euston. I imagined that this was where his mother, the Duke’s granddaughter, had grown up.

  This was a misconception. Vita FitzRoy had not lived at the Hall. Her home, never alluded to by my father, was at the rectory across the road.

  Vita kept a diary from the age of eight. Her daily entries conjure up a cheerful picture of life at the turn of the century in East Anglia, a part of England that had not altered much since Frederic Shoberl made his entry on Euston in 1813. Water was heated on the rectory’s kitchen range; oil lamps and candles lit the rooms; Vita and her two sisters shared a bedroom, and a schoolroom governess, until their mid-teens. On summer days, they knotted up their long serge skirts and bicycled into Bury St Edmunds where, on one occasion, they saw a blue man, a giant and a midget, who were visiting the market town with Buffalo Bill’s travelling circus; in the evenings, they clustered round their mother, Ismay, while she read to them from the novels of Walter Scott. Sometimes, when their boisterous brothers came home from boarding school, the girls played silly family games: Puff Poilliard, Rumble Puppy, Teapot and Up Jenkins.

  Vita was a lively, hot-tempered child. ‘I fought with Fraulein at my music lesson,’ she noted during the summer she turned fourteen. ‘This morning [I had] another fearful row with Fraulein. Afternoon. Row continued with fearful heat.’ A day later, feeling penitent, she noted that Fraulein had kissed her and did not seem cross.

  ‘I love your Euston,’ my father had written. He never comprehended how little affection Vita felt for the large, handsome Hall and its owner, a grandfather who was rarely there. She responded with excitement, not dismay, in 1902, when a large portion of the Hall went up in a blaze. Five horsedrawn fire-engines lumbered up the village street, too late to save the grand staircase and the finest staterooms. Vita, thrilled and awed, watched the spectacle with her father, the rector, from the top of the church tower.

  A year later, Charles FitzRoy was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Less work, and plenty of rest in a warm climate: this was the doctor’s prescription. A handout from the rector’s father would have helped him to follow it. But the Duke of Grafton, glumly contemplating the devastation of Euston Hall, decided that restoration and enlargement of the family house came first. Charles FitzRoy was forced to settle for taking holidays at Eastbourne; at home, the dust of bricks, mortar and stone chippings blew across the road, whitening the rectory windows and caking his throat. Euston Hall, when the expensive work of renovation had been completed, was larger than ever. The Duke, who preferred Wakefield Place, his home in Northamptonshire, stayed away.

  George FitzRoy Seymour’s maternal grandfather, the Reverend Lord Charles FitzRoy. He died of tuberculosis in 1911, the year in which George’s parents married.

  The sense of straitened circumstances at the rectory comes through the diaries more poignantly because it is mentioned so seldom. Vita wore an old dress freshened up with new buttons and a frill of lace for her first grown-
up dance. When rich friends invited her to stay, she was ordered to decline. The servants of rich families expected lavish tips; the rector’s family couldn’t afford them. ‘Mother says it would be too extravagant,’ Vita told her diary; instead, she was sent on a cost-free visit to her grandfather’s house, in Northamptonshire.

  Her stay began agreeably. Two days after her arrival, Vita cautiously noted that the Duke had been quite good-tempered – ‘so far.’ On the third morning, a female guest sneezed at breakfast; pressed to explain herself, she admitted to a cold. Typhoid fever could not have caused more alarm. Rising from his chair at the head of the table, the host waved away a whimpered apology and stalked out of the dining room. He was not seen again. An order was despatched, via the butler, that the house must be vacated by nightfall; Vita was offered the consolation of a parting gift. Unwrapping it at the rectory that night, she found only a signed and plainly framed photograph of her grandfather.

  At the beginning of 1908, Charles FitzRoy and his family faced a domestic crisis. His youngest daughter, Violet, had fallen in love with a military man; aristocratic genes did not console Nigel Maitland-Wilson’s parents for Miss FitzRoy’s shortage of cash. They wanted evidence that her family could support her; when Violet shed tears, the rector decided to help raise money by selling his favourite horse, and set about it without consultation. When he returned from Bury market with a beaming smile on his face and thirteen pounds in his pocket, even Vita knew he had been duped: ‘Dad could never be a good horse-dealer or a bargainer in anything,’ she noted. Still, brightening, she thought that he was looking ‘awfully well – for him’. She was being optimistic. Tuberculosis had begun to strip the fat from Charles FitzRoy’s athletic frame. He had three years left to live.

  Dancing offered Vita a release from worry as her father’s illness became increasingly hard to ignore. At the age of eighteen, her favourite treat was to stay over for a dance at one of the local big houses. In the past, the three sisters had always gone together, often sharing a bed in some freezing room up in an attic. Anna, the oldest, announced that she was bored by dances; Violet (the Maitland-Wilsons had reluctantly consented to their son’s engagement), was a married woman. Vita, in the late spring of 1908, was obliged to look for a new companion.

  She found one in her cousin. Linda Nelson was smartly turned-out and boldly spoken. She smoked, drank cocktails, expressed doubt about the existence of God, and drove her own car. Linda shared Vita’s love of dancing, but she was not eager to go about with a girl who wore home-made dresses. When Vita admitted that she couldn’t afford to buy new ones, Linda urged her to write to the Duke. Surely, however stingy he was, the old wretch could afford to buy his granddaughter a dress?

  Fuelled by Linda’s untipped cigarettes (‘we smoked until we felt quite ill’), Vita concocted and despatched an elaborately affectionate letter. The response, to her amazement, was prompt: for her next dance, Vita wore silver kid slippers and a brand-new blue voile dress with a shimmering glace lining, paid for by a cheque from the Duke.

  ‘Hereward Wake and I had great fun dancing together,’ she reported to the diary the following day. ‘He is most awfully jolly and nice.’ She had taken a tumble on the floor, but Hereward had helped her to her feet, ‘and I wasn’t a bit hurt’. She wondered if Sir Hereward’s unusual name meant that he was descended from the Saxon hero, a thought she found most romantic. (She had just read Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe.) A week later, Hereward and she were in each other’s arms once more. A dinner service of pure gold had been laid out in the Marble Hall at Stowe, an architectural wonder-house in Buckinghamshire, soon to change use and become a boys’ school. Two bands had played in relays until the sun came up. ‘Danced in the ball room, the drawing room, the dining room and the Hall!’ Vita reported with glee. ‘We danced all night!’ Later, they walked beside a stream towards William Kent’s Temple of the Worthies, where she admired busts of Milton and Shakespeare. She doesn’t mention whether Hereward kissed her.

  Perhaps Sir Hereward failed to live up to his heroic name; perhaps Vita’s zest for dancing wore him out; all I know is that she never mentioned him again. A few months later, she was invited to a houseparty in Scotland. The guests included the raffishly named Tiger Howard, Lord and Lady Strathmore, Aubrey Herbert, Neva Trefusis, Richard Seymour and a Mr Gore. ‘All young,’ Vita noted, ‘and very jolly.’

  ‘Jolly’ is just the word for it. They started by going to a fancy-dress ball, at which Vita showed up as a Romney painting of ‘Flora’, after having her cheeks rouged by Tiger Howard; on the following night, they stayed home and had ‘great sport’ after dinner, romping in the drawing room to the music of a pianola. ‘Mr Gore dances too beautifully,’ Vita noted, and added he was said to be the best dancer in London. ‘He is awfully nice, too,’ she added, ‘most amusing – in fact, I like him far the best.’ They collaborated in a game of charades the following night; on the next, Mr Gore and she beat all the rest in a game of billiards.

  Hereward had been forgotten or surpassed; more surprisingly, my grandmother had not a word to say about Mr Gore’s friend and companion, the man she would later marry. Her only reference to Richard Seymour on this occasion was a brief mention of the date on which he, together with Mr Gore, returned to London.

  Am I missing the story of a love affair? Vita abandoned her diary the following year; she did not resume it until well after her marriage. Did Mr Gore – so graceful on the dance floor, so deft at croquet, so swift on the tennis court – capture my grandmother’s heart that summer, only to break it? Did my shy grandfather catch her on the rebound? The letters and diaries have nothing to say.

  Vita married Richard Sturgis Seymour (he was always known to his friends and family as Dick) in April 1911. Her father, who took the service himself, died that autumn; her mother told Dick that worries about the marriage had shortened the rector’s life.

  Ismay FitzRoy was a troublemaker who always showed a flair for the dramatic statement; nevertheless, there was cause for concern. Dick Seymour’s career was flourishing when he visited Scotland with his friend, Mr Gore. He had served both as First Secretary and as a hard-working head of Chancery in Paris, Vienna and Berlin; now, aged thirty-two, he counted on being summoned to head an embassy, a position for which he was well prepared. Instead, in the summer of 1911, just after his marriage to Vita, he was ordered to prepare for a transfer from Berlin to Copenhagen. This was a disagreeable shock. Copenhagen was a charming city, but for a diplomat of Dick Seymour’s age and experience it meant only one thing: demotion. In 1911, a well-educated, hard-working man’s career had abruptly been thrown into reverse.

  This was baffling to Dick, and distressing to his wife’s family. Seeking explanations, they found none. Dick’s chief, Sir Edward Goschen, pleaded for him in a private letter to Sir Edward Grey, the Secretary of State. Richard Seymour was a man of complete integrity, he pleaded; he was known for his conscientiousness, his industry and his intelligence. He did not deserve such treatment.

  Grey never answered. Dick, bearing his humiliation with grace, thought he knew why. Grey’s secretary at the time was William Tyrrell, a man referred to in all Dick’s personal notes as ‘the black knight’. For reasons that have never been clear, Tyrrell loathed Dick Seymour. The family think that Dick may have disparaged his colleague’s olive complexion (he had an Indian grandmother). All that can be said for certain is that Tyrrell treated Dick as an enemy and took steps to block his advancement. It was, my grandfather wrote fifty years later, ‘a dirty business’.

  Copenhagen marked the beginning of an end to Dick Seymour’s career. In 1917, he was offered another disappointing position, at The Hague; in 1920, he and Vita were despatched to the Legation at Bangkok. Although awarded the trappings of success (a fine house, plenty of servants, daily contact with Siam’s young ruler), Dick knew that his position carried no weight. He was coming into middle age and his chances of being offered a decent post were vanishing. Worryingly, for a father of two young
children, he still had no home of his own.

  ‘Surely we must some day get something if we only stick to it,’ Dick wrote to Vita from The Hague in 1917; five years later, back from Bangkok and with a third, most unexpected baby on the way, they at last found a house in Surrey that seemed affordable. Dick’s Bostonian mother, born Mary Sturgis and always known as May, had meanwhile sold her vast mansion on Piccadilly. Grumbling of fallen circumstances, she moved to a slightly smaller home, in Eaton Square. May promised to provide her son with some furniture; two weeks later, she packed up and sent off her contributions: two brass-handled penwipers and a set of old-fashioned kitchen scales.

  ‘Well, you know what that was about,’ my mother comments. ‘Beastly old woman: she was keeping the money to buy that wretched Bertie Falle’ – she rhymes it with Hall – ‘a title. When you think of the money she had! And the jewels!’

  The only remaining evidence of May’s wealth – she was coheiress to a banking fortune – is in a portrait that she gave to my father. (She liked young George for sharing her passionate interest in ancestry.) Stroking the surface of the paint, I can feel the sharp points of light with which the artist has dutifully picked out every one of the two hundred pearls in the spectacular necklace that May sold in 1930 to help buy her second husband a barony.

  May was fifty-three when Dick’s father died in 1904. Bertie Falle, a broad-shouldered and chestnut-haired young politician from Jersey – he was considerably younger than May – was already her lover. In 1906, she married him. From then on, May’s prime object in life was to obtain a barony for her adored Bertie. It took thirty years and the equivalent today of over half a million pounds; in 1936, Sir Bertrand Falle (Bertie had been more respectably honoured in 1916, for his services as MP for Portsmouth) finally became Lord Portsea.