In My Father's House Read online

  ‘I won’t have you saying your father was a coward,’ my mother says with the fierce loyalty that can still take me by surprise, given all that she has endured. ‘He probably got on the wrong side of his drill sergeant. And you know he hadn’t been well.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he take a desk job? He had a good brain. Couldn’t he have worked for the Ministry of Information, or at Bletchley?’

  But I’ve lost my mother’s sympathy. Crossly, she reminds me how poorly I always did at team sports. ‘Just like him, you see. I keep telling you so.’

  ‘I had bad eyesight.’ My voice is sharp and defensive; I hate being reminded of my unhappy schooldays. ‘And it was a completely different situation. There wasn’t a war going on.’

  This opens the way for my mother to remind me, not for the first time, that I haven’t the slightest idea of how it felt to be at war, or to experience training drill. ‘You’re determined to show him in a bad light,’ she says. ‘And he can’t answer back.’

  This is the first of our discussions that has ended in disagreement. My mother, who carried on as a hard-working member of the ATS, even after suffering a nervous breakdown, doesn’t want to accept that she married somebody less courageous than herself. Pneumonia had seemed a respectable reason for a discharge; the idea that George suffered from this absurdly named ‘effort syndrome’ is an embarrassment.

  I look at the surviving evidence once more. If he had failed to make a complete recovery, how was he able to go on those cycling trips? If he felt as mortified as his letter to his parents suggests, why was he ready to spend the first weekend after his discharge in a jolly Yorkshire houseparty, eating like a horse and going on long walks? And what about the letter congratulating him on a lucky escape, ‘knowing you loathe the army as much as I do’?

  Looking at that letter once again, I wonder if it is open to a different interpretation. Was Philip Parr doing his best to make my father feel better about a situation they both understood to be profoundly humiliating? I may do better to stop being censorious, and consider the effect that his discharge might have had on my father. A combination of bad nerves and ill-health bought him a ticket to safety, but the price, in terms of guilt, must have been immense. How can it feel to know that your contemporaries are risking their lives while yours has been spared? How can it feel to read of their deaths?

  Who am I, searching for an explanation of the wound in his heart, to say that my father didn’t suffer when he was told to go home?

  7

  LITERARY CONNECTIONS: 2006

  The book club that I belong to is meeting tonight to discuss Henry James’s disturbing tale of corrupted innocence, The Turn of the Screw. (‘And I don’t suppose you’ll bother to mention the family connection,’ my father hisses. ‘I know everything to do with my family is dreadfully boring, but don’t you think your readers might be – just faintly – interested?’ On this occasion, I’m ready to agree. To hell with those fragile links by which my father claimed kinship to the royal Tudors and Stuarts: it’s more exciting, for a writer, to think that Henry James used to spend weeks at a time with May Portsea and her brother, Howard Sturgis. I relish the possibility that their parents’ home inspired descriptions of the Touchetts’ English country house in The Portrait of a Lady, and that May’s father was the original for old Mr Touchett, a transplanted Boston banker. ‘And so’, my father slyly whispers, ‘do tell me, darling, just what is the difference between your snobbery and mine?’)

  The meeting ends with a frisson as we drain our glasses and ponder the atmosphere that Henry James breathed into the fabric of Bly, identified by him simply as an ugly old house in Essex. ‘Make him think the evil,’ he wrote later of his projected reader. ‘Make him see it.’ Suggestion was all that was required.

  Later, as the tube train moves away from the station at Lancaster Gate, I watch the bright posters slide past the windows, urging me to visit Spain, to read the Guardian, to invest in a new online account. I see the words, but my inner eyes are focused far from here. Remembering the scene in James’s novel in which the intense, imaginative governess confronts the ghost of her drowned predecessor, I, too, am staring across a muddy lake. No tormented Victorian female stands there; instead, I’m watching a burly young man. He stands at ease, his feet hidden by the rushes. Fiercely, I wish him out of view; smiling, hands on hips, he holds his ground. He takes up a fishing rod and flicks the line out carelessly, far enough to catch my clothes with the baited hook if I don’t move back into the shadows, out of sight. Behind him, under the tree, I glimpse another male figure, thin and languid-limbed. He walks forward, stretches out a proprietor’s hand, drops it on the fisherman’s shoulder. The fisherman leans back slightly, and his mouth opens in a grin.

  I know who these ghosts are. Like James’s governess, I lack the power to will them away. They, not I, are the masters here. Shuddering as I come back into the rattling carriage, I catch the nervous glance of a fellow passenger and manage a tight smile.

  All is in order. All is bright and bland. Who ever saw ghosts on a London tube?

  A few days later, I’m lying in the bedroom where I’ve slept since the age of fourteen. A four-poster bed hung with heavy white curtains holds us close as we whisper into the tender skin of each other’s unsunned flesh, driving the past and its bad faces away from troubled eyes. This is a newfound and late-come love, still strange to me, and wonderful. But I’m not yet used to the fact that the House can show one face to me, another to him, the newcomer. He looks from the window and sees a heron keeping supercilious watch from the top of a tree, a file of long-necked cygnets paddling through the lake’s summer coat of emerald weed. I see the shadows of late afternoon and twist them into the shapes of the dead. They’re waiting for me behind every concealing bend in the landscape, the two male figures, heads bent close together. Each time I walk through the narrow passages into the back of the House, I hear their laughter in rooms that I know hold nothing but sunlight.

  ‘They’re gone,’ he says. ‘You know it. They’re twelve years gone.’

  I pull away from his embrace to stare across the pillows. ‘They never leave. They just move out of sight.’

  Later in the night, filled with joy, I reach out my arms and say what we both know to be true, that I love him more than any man I’ve ever known. In this room, that’s unwise. My eyes are scarcely shut before the window brightens like an angry moon. I look through the diamond panes. My father’s pale blue eyes are there, looking in at me. Far away, I hear a startled nightbird screeching in the fields.

  ‘What?’ He’s trying to hold me still. ‘There’s nothing there. It’s only a bird.’

  I’m out of control. Words won’t come. Wailing, I shrink under the soft pink quilt and pull it down over my head. Knees to chin, I huddle in the dark body-scented hollow at the centre of the mattress. It’s wet with tears.

  His hand reaches down to stroke the top of my head, conveying a calmness he surely can’t feel as he asks what it is that has scared me so. I have no words. I can’t tell him I conjured up that ghost myself, to witness the moment of my betrayal, to warn me not to give my love elsewhere. Here, in this House, only one man counts. And he isn’t, while I’m so quick with fear and guilt, dead at all. Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad. Betray me and I’ll come to you, my daughter. He never left. He hasn’t died at all.

  The first novels that I wrote in my twenties featured beautiful houses, tyrannical fathers and stories of obsessive passion. It didn’t surprise me, when I began to assemble a file of my father’s writings, to discover that these, too, had a common theme. At school, he had written about a beautiful old house destroyed by fire. Convalescing at Middleton Park and fretting about the dangerous politics of his fellow invalids, he used his favourite house as the setting for a story about the importance of tradition. (‘“Changes are evil things,’” the house-owner says, sounding like Charlie Byron delivering one of his sermons against progress.) Another story, ‘The Fountain’, rec
ords the sorrowful feelings of a young man who visits a derelict house (the owners have been unable to maintain its upkeep); yet another describes how an impoverished squire dies of a broken heart when the demolition team arrive to raze his ancestral home.

  My father was writing these tales of neglect and destruction at a time when the future of the English country house looked bleak. James Lees-Milne, acting on behalf of the National Trust’s recently formed Country House Scheme, was doing his best to persuade embattled owners to hand over their increasingly decrepit homes to the Trust, together with an endowment for their maintenance. Many, requisitioned for use as hospitals, schools, or by the military, were past the stage of preservation. It’s a curious fact that only three historically important houses were damaged by enemy action during the war; most of the wreckage was inflicted by indifferent occupants. At Alton Towers, bored gunners took pot shots at the glazed conservatories; at Blickling, airmen pillaged the mausoleum; at Castle Howard, a homesick schoolgirl started a fire and gutted the central block of Vanbrugh’s haughty masterpiece. Evelyn Waugh’s image of the decline and loss of a great house, in Brideshead Revisited, spoke to my father’s darkest imaginings. In his own writings, over and again, he played out the story of his worst fear, the loss of the House he loved. Thrumpton had not been selected for functional use during the war; on the other hand, it was operating with a skeleton staff, and the Byrons were getting old. Without care, a large house can descend into a state of irretrievable ruin in the space of a few years.

  Reading the slender sheaf of my father’s typescripts for the first time (hidden away in a drawer, they had never been mentioned), I wanted to scoff, but found it impossible. The style was old-fashioned and ponderous; the intensity of feeling was remarkable. I knew the emotion, and the style, from my own first writings. It was a shock to discover that, quite unconsciously, I’d used the same outmoded voice, expressed the same concerns.

  It doesn’t strike you, darling, that you’re too like him to be objective?

  I wish I could get those words of my mother’s out of my mind.

  My own writing career began almost by chance. In 1971, I was engaged as an under-secretary in the syndication department of the Evening Standard. Reluctant to admit to my family that most of my working hours were spent visiting the postroom or making cups of tea, I presented myself to them as a celebrity interviewer. Lists of stars who were staying that week at Claridge’s or the Savoy were sent to the office every week: convincingly, I described Gregory Peck’s interest in ranching, Eartha Kitt’s taste in jewelled slippers. Asked where my interviews were to be seen, I mentioned the Tanzanian Times, the Wellington Gazette, anywhere, in fact, where my parents were unlikely to have friendly correspondents.

  The senior secretary – she was three years younger than I – cheerfully shouldered the work of us both and covered up my mistakes (I had already been sacked several times for gross inefficiency). Left to lounge at my desk with a heavy electric typewriter, the first I’d ever used, I put it to work. ‘Shadows under the Cedars’ was the result.

  The book was to be unguardedly autobiographical, a poignant account of the vanishing life of a privileged minority. I wrote rapidly and with no trace of irony, about summer picnics on newly mown lawns, about crooling pigeons, sunlit gables and starlit skies. By the end of the first chapter, I knew that I was producing a masterpiece. Proud and confident, I left the pages exposed to view and sauntered out to munch a ham sandwich on the Embankment while contemplating a glorious literary future.

  Returning, I found that the three young male journalists who inhabited a smoke-shrouded room next to the secretaries’ office had spent a productive lunch hour. ‘Shadows under the Cedars’ had acquired a new title: ‘The Recollections of Aunt Matilda’. Reading my way slowly through their account of Aunt Matilda’s birthday party and her distress at discovering a dead mouse in the tea urn, I felt sick with dismay. I struggled on with ‘Shadows’ for a week, but without conviction. On a Friday evening, at six o’clock, I walked down to Blackfriars Bridge and dropped the typescript in the river.

  A year or two later, while chastened by the usual experience of rejection slips, revisions and, following the thrill of first publication, a mortifying absence of sales, I knew that I wanted, for better or worse, to write books for the rest of my life. There were some low moments (my first and distinctly unappreciative review was produced and slowly read aloud to a table of twenty acquaintances, including myself, by our tittering hostess, a former schoolmate of mine): nothing dispirited me more than my father’s withheld praise. My mother, doing her best to make up for this, gallantly declared each new book I produced to be a masterpiece.

  Having seen my father’s stories, I can understand more easily how he felt. Of course, it pained him to see his daughter’s novels being published while his own writings lay in a drawer, unseen and unknown. Privately, he took out his old stories, typed them up, with small amendments, and marked them as ‘revised versions’ before putting them back in the drawer. Publicly, he punished me by silence. When I gave him my second book, a gothic romance featuring a Lord Ruthven as an aristocratic vampire, he returned it unread after hearing me mispronounce the name. (‘Riven, my poor darling, not Ruth-ven. But why should it matter? I must be terribly boring to want to get things right.’)

  Carrying On, an old-fashioned modern novel, was the first book that I was certain would please him. The story was of a man in thrall to a beautiful house. Confident of a warm response, I presented the book to him in his own library, when it was filled with weekend guests. I was aware that I had not yet given him much cause for pride. This was to be my public compensation.

  My mistake had been to describe the house as shabby. The page at which he opened the book mentioned a sofa of threadbare chintz. My father read the phrase aloud, gave me one long look of bewildered rage, and snapped the book shut. Holding it away from him, as if the pages smelt of vinegar, he strode out of the library doors into the garden where, in full view of the startled guests, he tossed my novel into a flowerbed. Returning, he asked my mother how much longer we were going to have to wait for lunch. I never heard him mention the book again. A friend of my parents, keen that I should sign her copy, imported it in a brown paper bag, afraid that the contents might be discovered.

  ‘You said this book was going to be about your father, not you,’ my mother says sharply, when I remind her of this occasion. ‘And I don’t remember him saying anything against your writing. He was always praising you.’

  ‘Not to my face, he wasn’t.’

  Evincing discomfort, she begins to tidy the objects on her desk, laying out pencils in a row, making a neat pile of her unanswered post. ‘What about the Henry James book? Even you can’t fault him about that.’

  I was amazed, at the time, by the enthusiasm with which my father greeted my first attempt at scholarship. I hadn’t, despite the family connection, imagined that Henry James’s elaborate style would appeal to a man whose favourite authors were Noël Coward and Lord Lytton.

  It didn’t.

  The book looked at a circle of writers, of whom the youngest, the most affecting and the most beautiful, was Stephen Crane. The place where my father marked his own copy of the book was the page that showed Crane as the newly celebrated author of The Red Badge of Courage. Lightly moustached and large-eyed, his face was appealing, even in a faded black-and-white reproduction.

  Crane came to England in 1897 with Cora, his common-law wife, who had previously managed a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida. Cora fancied the life of an English lady; she persuaded her lover to rent Brede Place, a manor house not far from Henry James’s new Sussex home, in Rye. Brede Place was tumbling down; Crane’s lease required him to put it into order. This was the time when his commissions began to dry up and his health to give out. It’s no great exaggeration to say that Brede Place killed Stephen Crane; its demands wore him out. He died of TB, aged twenty-eight.

  ‘Of course your father loved reading about C
rane.’ My mother frowns, impatient with my slowness. ‘Think how rundown this place was when we first moved in. Think of them planting daffodils all along the drive at Brede. It was one of the first things we did here; such a job!’ And she tells me something I never knew, that Crane’s story had so entranced my father that he drove off to Sussex and talked his way into being given a private tour of Brede Place. Back home, he bought every book by Crane that he could find: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, took an honoured place on the shelf of favourites, right between Earls of Creation (James Lees-Milne) and Noël Coward’s Collected Short Stories. Privately, I muse on other aspects of Stephen Crane, the vulnerability and eagerness for which Joseph Conrad loved him like a son, the large, beautiful eyes and light moustache drooping over full lips. But my mother may be right: what attracted my father even more than Crane’s looks was the idea of a man who committed his energy to the salvation of a house.

  She may have missed the point. Reflecting on other aspects of my father’s life in 1988, the year when my book about Henry James and his colleagues was published, I think he was most intrigued by Crane’s situation: his pride, his lack of money, his dependence on the kindness of benefactors. These things would have spoken to him. My thoughts turn back to the image of two figures by the lake, my father’s hand resting on the shoulder of the burly fisher boy, his proud dependent. But making connections doesn’t always bring mysteries to light; here, they threaten to add confusion.

  8

  SHADOWS UNDER THE CEDARS

  The search for my father’s life after his discharge from the army takes me to Lamas in Norfolk. Keen to live near Alex, their married daughter, Dick and Vita bought a house here in 1941, after selling their London home; at the beginning of 1943, my father joined them as he started clerical work at the Aylsham branch of Barclays Bank. (A member of the cousinship had pulled strings to secure him this lowly position from which, it was hoped, George would swiftly be promoted.)