Basil Street Blues (21 page)

Marlou was known to be the mistress of a millionaire newspaper owner on whose financial support Editions Begh largely depended. Nevertheless, my father proposed to marry her – once he had divorced my mother. In the summer of 1946 he hired a London detective who soon came up with the evidence he needed. The decree nisi cites Rowland Hill as co-respondent. It is not a name that appears in either of my parents’ accounts or that I ever heard them mention. In the London telephone directory of 1946 there is one Rowland Hill. He is living in the Marylebone Road, but disappears at the time of the divorce.

This divorce legally freed both my parents for fresh chapters in their lives. Or so they believed. In fact, probably because my father was in Paris, they forgot to take the formal step required to make their decree absolute. The result was that, though they never knew this, they actually remained married to each other, and all their later marriages were invalid. Fortunately perhaps they did not have children by these four subsequent marriages, though from time to time I was presented with a new stepbrother or stepsister for the holidays.

Late in 1946 my mother, still aged only thirty, moved into a nice small flat on the eighth floor of Sloane Avenue Mansions, near the King’s Road in Chelsea. I often stayed with her there before and after our journeys to Sweden. How I hated those awful bucketing voyages across the North Sea! We would start out from Tilbury in one of the regular Swedish boats, the
Suecia
,
Saga
or
Patricia
, creaking and groaning, swaying and heaving – and I was soon down in the cabin groaning and heaving with sympathetic sea-sickness. But my mother was not ill. She was popular on board, never missing the
smörgåsbord
, or the music playing and the sun shining, and the company of strangers. Occasionally I would crawl up on deck and see her talking to some admirer and exchanging addresses. I remember only one of these gentlemen, a Mr Smith, who wore his watch with its face on the inside of his wrist. I was so struck with the novelty of this that I turned my own watch round, and have worn it so ever since. Later, ‘Mr Smith on the boat’ became a generic term, and I would tease my mother about this ever-recurring gallant on her travels round the world.

It was unusual during those years immediately following the Second World War for people to go abroad, and for a time I became a person of exotic interest to other boys. I would return to school like a mariner disembarking from some exciting piratical expedition, with strange glowing booty: a Lapland knife in its multicoloured leather-and-fur sheath; a brilliantly exciting board game of ice-hockey; a vast marzipan pig with chocolate features; a magically tilting wooden maze over which, like a minefield, you could steer a silver ball. Such treasures made me appear like a magician in those drab years and granted me an illusory popularity. ‘Can we borrow your ice-hockey, Holroyd?’ I can hear their voices still. I always said yes and was proud when my best friend ‘Cuffy’ Capron made an astonishing score on the tilting maze in the school sanatorium.

This was the best feature of my travels overseas: the popular return. For though I loved my mother and could imagine no worse calamity than her death, I never found a way of life that fitted her style and rhythm of living. The fact is
she was always lying down
when I wanted to be bounding around. Dawn, it seemed to me, was the right time for leaping up. But left to herself my mother would not get out of bed till nine or ten o’clock. It was an agony lying in bed and waiting for her to wake. And when she did get up she almost immediately
lay down again
to sunbathe. The least glimmer of the sun and she would
lie down
. Is there anything more tedious than sunbathing? In my view there was not. But my mother loved nothing better unless it was, after the sun had gone down, to dance.

My mother’s dancing was not boring: it was excruciatingly embarrassing. She knew no shame. She would sing the tunes, kick up her heels, smile stupidly, drink all sorts of coloured drinks, make jokes in five or six languages. And she would dance. She could not be stopped. It was not beyond her to grab a waiter and propel him laughing round a restaurant. I saw her dance on tables too. I would close my eyes and long to disappear. It was then that I first determined to master the secret art of disappearing. But the penalty you pay for this vanishing trick is that your past vanishes with you. Now, as I bring those scenes back, I curse the terrible self-consciousness I felt that hardened into an inhibition preventing me from speaking the languages my mother spoke, and a paralysis that all my life has stopped me dancing, though I love to watch other people dance – indeed it is one of my vicarious passions. I rejoice now in the memory of my mother whirling about those floors and tables, but I could not possibly join in. All is in retrospect for me.

When she was surrounded by her family in Sweden, my mother was obliged to behave more formally. I was reminded of our large family gatherings at Easter or Christmas or on St Lucia’s Day when I saw Ingmar Bergman’s film
Fanny and Alexander
in the mid-nineteen-eighties. We preserved something of the same strict protocol of hospitality, the correct toasts and then the growing merriment and finally a soaring into surreal entertainment. It was all fantastical to me, for though everyone addressed me in English, they spoke fast incomprehensible Swedish among themselves. And then, though they were all introduced to me, my mind had somehow wandered and I did not know who most of them were anymore.

It was a relief to get back to London, even back to school sometimes. Coming up from Scaitcliffe to my mother’s flat at Sloane Avenue Mansions, I would crowd my uncle’s bat and pads into the hall, and eat up huge plates of bangers, beans and mash, followed by trifle and tinned cream – my mother knew what schoolboys liked. I did not realise that her ‘cabin in the sky’, as we called it, was rented for her by a man named Edouard Fainstain, nor that my mother was his mistress. She took me to meet ‘Edy’ and, what was most important, she borrowed his car, a sparkling blue Packard with an open ‘dicky’ or jump seat at the back in which I travelled dramatically in the sun and the wind. With this wonderful machine she would whizz down to Scaitcliffe, a blonde bombshell in a blue racing car, astonishing the other boys whose own mothers appeared so much older and dowdier. ‘You were notorious, pitied and envied, because your parents were divorced,’ my friend Christopher Capron remembered. I was the only boy at Scaitcliffe with divorced parents and after my mother began driving down on Sundays, I gained a certain status – Christopher Capron spoke of the ‘rather daring wickedness’ surrounding me. Once or twice I invited Christopher Capron or John Mein out to lunch with my mother at a rather grand hotel on Englefield Green. But she found it difficult to say anything that interested us, and we wandered around the gardens rather bored. Her notoriety was more potent from a distance. My great fear was that she might bring down Kaja on one of her visits to England. Occasionally she did this, causing me anguish over lunch when my grandmother examined the menu through an exquisite pair of eye-glasses held prominently by a single handle – ‘my
lorgnette
’ she called them. Another time, which was almost worse, she glared through an imposing monocle, looking like an aristocratic pirate. The embarrassment in case another boy, Bowman or Drummond, Palumbo or Stirling, should see this exhibition of adult eccentricity was agonising.

In 1948 Edy Fainstain was divorced from his wife Ida and on 25 February 1949, at the Kensington Register Office, he married my mother. ‘Then things were O.K.,’ she briefly noted in her account. She moved into a splendid maisonette on the top two floors of 24 Wetherby Gardens, a house once occupied by Viscount Allenby and round the corner from Drayton Gardens where I had spent my first couple of years. I was given a bedroom of my own and introduced to the first of my stepsisters.

Edy Fainstain was a Hungarian Jew whose father had been a farmer. For their honeymoon he took Ulla to Stockholm and, with his strong sense of family, was shocked to discover that she scarcely knew her father. He insisted that Kaja invite Karl to her apartment, and she absolutely refused. But nevertheless he still insisted, and so it went on over the honeymoon, this rally of obstinate insistence and absolute refusal until, to her own surprise, Kaja found herself conceding. She knew that, at some level of respectability, Edy was behaving correctly. And it would look so bad if, in however dignified a fashion, she went on refusing. Her own family liked Karl, or Kalle as they still called him. They thought him ‘charming and colourful’, a man of ‘humour and humanity’. Did they blame her for his lack of promotion in the army? Everyone had expected him to be made a general, but his inability to impose harsh discipline was said to have been held against him. He had behaved better to his men, Kaja sometimes thought, than to her. He had not grown aggressively drunk with them. She knew that some of her family still believed that the marriage had been broken up by her own persistent flirting with men of higher rank. Of course it was absurd – was he not a flirt also? – but that is what they thought. It must have been difficult for her to telephone this man who, she had told Ulla, had made her life so awful during the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties with his demands for money, his venereal disease, his threats of violence. But perhaps she exaggerated his vices. Neither she nor my mother had seen him for over fifteen years, though he was living not far away with his second wife Marianne. But Kaja spoke to him, and he accepted an invitation to a cup of coffee at her apartment in Artillerigatan. Edy then went back to his hotel so that Karl could spend some time alone with his daughter. ‘Pappa Kalle arrived – pale – drawn – nervous – with a bunch of red carnations,’ my mother wrote. ‘A very awkward hour – Kaja made it so. I felt sorry, but also quite a stranger after so many years. Kaja never sat still & kept looking at the clock & bringing up awkward moments in the past. I did my best & I knew he knew that. That was the last time I saw my father.’ He was to die less than three years later aged sixty-five, at Växjö, on 14 December 1952. ‘This chilly December day when Karl Hall’s life ended seems very far from the idyllic warrior’s life in the happy 1920s,’ wrote the obituary writer in one of the Swedish newspapers.

Now when we are all middle-aged, the officers and men and the young ladies of the ball, we treasure the memory of this chivalrous heartbreaker, Captain Hall… Yet in this moment of farewell one doesn’t chiefly remember the carefree Kalle Hall from the balls and evenings of song, but the silhouette of Major Karl Knutsson Hall in the saddle after the company’s hard day-long marches or night manoeuvres… The tall horseman has passed the last post on his journey.

His brothers and sisters and his widow went to the funeral at Växjö, and so did Ulla. But Kaja did not go. There was no mention of her among the mourners, or in the obituaries. From this time onwards she reinstated her own family name, calling herself Kaja Jagenburg Hall. Her husband had already been as good as dead for many years, and such was the annihilating force of her feeling that my mother sometimes echoed it. That was probably why, in her account, she had written that her father had died in 1945. It surprises me now that he was alive while I went on my trips to Sweden, and that I never met him. But I was not interested then in the past.

My new stepfather must have been a relief to my mother after her sequence of inadequate Englishmen. Edy was forty-five at the time of their marriage, some thirteen years older than his wife. He was the sort of person men instinctively distrust and women like. But I liked him, as all young people did. He gave the impression of having lived a generous life, not all of it respectable. On the marriage certificate, as his ‘rank or profession’ he put ‘Company Director’, the profession that had by then supplanted the rank of ‘Gentleman’ on such documents. He was a director, I understood, of several property companies; the owner, or one of the owners, of ‘The Brief Encounter’, a smart café-restaurant opposite Harrods, and an expensive furniture shop round the corner in Beauchamp Place. It was here my mother met ‘a charming man’ to whom she sold a
chaise-longue
. He was a Mr Haigh, soon to become notorious for a series of acid-bath murders. But that, as Kipling would say, is another story. Or might have been.

Edy had entertaining cosmopolitan friends: a white Russian; a much-photographed model; a radio scriptwriter; an actor. Jon Pertwee, a future Dr Who, came and sang to a small guitar, greatly irritating me. Was this the sort of performance you had to put on to get adults’ attention? Was this what my mother admired? I despised his pattering jokes, his insistent strumming, and refused to smile or even listen, knowing I could never do such tricks myself. Edy belonged to a far more glittering world than any she had known in Beckenham, Maidenhead or Wilmslow. It was a world she thought she had been entering when she married my father – and very near his Basil Street showrooms and the hotel where they had spent their honeymoon. Among Edy’s scattered properties was a villa called ‘L’Oiseau Bleu’ near the village of La Turbie, just above the Grande Corniche overlooking Monte Carlo. The world was opening up for my mother.

But it was beginning to close in for my father. He had married Marlou in 1948, having talked her and everyone else into believing that his ideas would liven up their publishing house in Paris. The ideas were good enough, but they needed money to implement them. ‘Editions Begh went down the drain when the millionaire withdrew his financial help,’ Winston Graham later wrote. ‘If Marlou deserted him for your father, perhaps this is the reason.’ Probably it was. By the beginning of the nineteen-fifties my father returned to England; Marlou eventually got a job with another publishers, Les Editions Mondiales, in the rue des Italiens; and their partner, the cool slim Marcel Brandin, accepted an offer from André Malraux to become his
chef de cabinet
.

There was one more family marriage in these years. My Uncle Kenneth, having escaped from his prisoner-of-war camp in Romania, had been captured once more and ended the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp. We saw him at Maidenhead again in 1945, terribly thin and ghostlike. But he had plenty of stories for us – stories of hiding in the Dolomites with Italian peasants; stories of living on a diet of turnips in appalling conditions; stories of death and friendship; stories of humane or inhumane commandants and guards – and the awful retribution afterwards; stories also of the ingenious methods he had picked up for passing time (he had even learnt, my grandmother was delighted to hear, how to play bridge). We listened to these stories with fascination at first and then, despite our valiant intentions, with overwhelming boredom. He was so nice, so quiet, so achingly dull. We were all experts in tedium and recognised a master. He took an infinitude of time to tell his stories and he told them in an unwavering monotone. Perhaps it didn’t matter. We were all pleased to see him. But we felt that, after all he had endured, we really should keep our eyes intent, our heads set at intelligent angles, our smiles and frowns coming and going. Doing all this I almost fell off my chair, so overcome was I with drowsiness. The others were no better. My grandfather could hear so little, my grandmother never listened, my aunt could not keep still, Old Nan gave no sign of anything as these ghastly tales of war slowly unfolded before her, and my father, seething with impatience on his visits to us, tried unsuccessfully to insert some RAF anecdotes. As for myself I was mainly anxious to hold on to my uncle’s bat and pads for my last cricket season at Scaitcliffe. Poor Kenneth!