My Father and Myself (18 page)

Even now I don't see what else I could have done in the face of this ultimatum but acquiesce. I had only just joined the BBC, on a salary, so far as I remember, of £350 and could hardly help my mother much on that; my sister and her infant child were now on our backs (she had been with us for a year or more, declining to rejoin her husband in Panama because of my father's health, until the husband, losing patience with her prolonged absence, instituted proceedings for divorce and the long legal struggle for alimony, which it fell upon me to conduct, was soon to begin); my mother, who was sixty-five, was used to a standard of living in which worry about money played no part; even on what she now stood to get she would have to be cautioned to be careful, and a new bogey would be added to her considerable collection of bogeys, as indeed it was (“I'm not overdrawn, am I? I do try so hard to be careful and keep within my means”); my duty, I had no doubt of it, was to her; I regretfully dishonored my father's posthumous wishes. This dilemma in which I had been put I communicated to my father's mistress in her Castelnau house; of that interview I now recall nothing whatever, but my notebook tells me that I undertook to pay her youngest daughter's school bill.

She had been shrewd in her prognosis in my father's death-chamber: I never saw her again and had no further part in the life of her family, my three half-sisters, until many years had passed. Indeed it would be true to say that I gave them all scarcely another thought. Reasons, good or bad, can easily be marshalled: excepting for the youngest girl, whom I had met only once and quite recently, they were strangers to me; they were a secret, my father's secret, kept from me for over twenty years, and a secret which I had already decided to hide from my mother; they did not yet know of my relationship with them; I felt no interest or curiosity about them; I was leading a homosexual life, totally indifferent to girls, my own sister was worry enough with her disastrous affairs and her frequent jealous warfare with my mother, I had certainly no welcome in my heart for any more sisters; they were of an age to fend for themselves, as I would now have to fend for myself and my family; the house in Castelnau belonged to them, a considerable asset, while our own house in Richmond was rented.

During these transactions with Stockley he said to me, “By the way, your father's desk is now your property. If you take my advice, you will let me have it burnt with all its contents.” I said, “All right.” This was a decision I was to regret in later life more than anything else, more, perhaps, than my failure to keep in touch with my half-sisters, with whom I had in the end a close and happy relationship; indeed I regard it now with such astonishment and horror that I can scarcely believe I ever agreed to such an act. Why did I agree? My then state of mind is so hard to recall that I can only suppose that no problem was in fact posed. I can't even remember what I thought Stockley to mean. He must have meant either that the desk might be contaminated with my father's diseases, or that it contained private papers and letters unfit for filial eyes to see. If the latter, my high-minded state of desiring to honor his posthumous wishes may have included a sense of scruple in invading further the secrets of a life he had not thought fit to share with me. But perhaps the most likely formula for my feelings would be: I was then quite incurious about my father's history; I didn't want his gigantic roll-top desk, what on earth could I do with it?; I was grateful to Stockley for propping my mother up—and I was frightened of him. I have said elsewhere that I was subservient to personalities stronger than my own, and of all my father's “men pals” Arthur Stockley alarmed me most. A cold, ruthless, self-righteous figure, his unsmiling critical gaze seemed always trying to solve me as though I were a riddle, an unpleasant riddle, for I never felt he liked me. He was, to me, an unnerving man, and if he had said to me instead, “The desk is yours, take it away,” I would have taken it away. The mind which he managed always to enfeeble would have agreed with whatever he said. What the desk contained I have no idea; my father kept no papers at home; if he kept any at all they must have been in it, and it might well have yielded that information about his past life which this memoir so sadly lacks.

TO HOW MANY other people besides his office cronies was this double life of my father's known? I believe that Dr. Wadd was in the secret, and if the discreet Mr. Morland, the chauffeur, who waited so often with his car outside the house in Castelnau had not been actually taken into my father's confidence, he had put two and two together from his observations. Only we, his family, remained in the dark, and my mother died seventeen years later, in 1946, in ignorance of his deception. It was therefore, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of life's little ironies that her sister, my Aunt Bunny, who lived with and on her after the “Doc” had followed my father to the grave, and sometimes tried to gain prestige and credit for her diplomatic success in 1919 which rang my mother's marriage bells, was morally precluded from using the sensational and clinching proof of her case which had come to her knowledge ten years later. For prior to 1919, of course, my father was simply a bachelor keeping two mistresses, my mother and Muriel, each with a family of three; had he continued thus and died intestate a complex situation would have arisen.

This second family of my father's, about whose lives I learnt long after his death when I met them, was laid down with twin girls in 1910 when I was a preparatory schoolboy of fourteen. A stillborn boy was said to have preceded them. The third girl was born two years later, round about the time when my father delivered his man-to-man homily to my brother and me in the billiard-room of Grafton House. They were accidents like ourselves. The birth of the twins was registered by him under an assumed name, he borrowed the name of his mistress; the youngest girl was never registered at all. They were all stowed away in a house near Barnes Common in care of the Miss Coutts he mentioned in one of his posthumous letters to me, a doctor's sister and an old confidante of his. Through dietary ignorance or a desire to save his pocket, she fed them so frugally and injudiciously that they all developed rickets. They had no parental care, no family life, no friends. Their mother, whom they did not love or even like, for she had less feeling for them than for her career and reputation, seldom appeared; the youngest girl does not remember to have seen her at all until she was some ten years old. This period contained the war years and the aftermath of war, when the mother was engaged in her active service ambulance work and was therefore much abroad. But three or four times a year a relative of theirs, whom they knew as Uncle Bodger and who jokingly called himself William Whiteley, the Universal Provider, would arrive laden with presents. This gentleman, almost their only visitor, they adored. He would come in a taxi with his load of gifts (sometimes with a dog named Ginger, who had perhaps provided him with a pretext for the visit: “I'm taking the dog for a walk,” and who, since he was
our
dog, was also therefore another conspirator in my father's affairs, had he but known it), and this was the most exciting event in the lonely and unhappy monotony of these young lives. Before he left they would decorate his gray felt hat with wild flowers, sticking them all round its black band, then see him off into his train or bus, from which, as it departed for Richmond, he would wave them goodbye with his garlanded hat. What did he do with the flowers then, I wonder? He could not return to my mother in this festive state. Did he pull them out and throw them away, or make a little posy of them for his dressing table? Visited rather more by their mother and Uncle Bodger in the 'twenties, the girls remained in this house, getting their schooling in Putney and Wimbledon, until my father set them all up in the Castelnau house. Here he was able to see them frequently, for the house lay on the main route between Richmond and his Bow Street office and, travelling now always by Mr. Morland's car, he could drop in on them daily during the last two years of his life. They lived therefore, this secret family of his, for nineteen years within easy walking distance of ourselves in Richmond. How often he managed to meet their mother, or where, during this long period I don't know; she may have been at the end of some of those business trips to the Midlands before and after the war; perhaps she was in Paris when I sat with him in the Bois de Boulogne; she certainly went with him on his annual cures to Bad Gastein, which accounts for his startled and cool reception of my compassionate offer to accompany him on the last of these “lonely” holidays. The prolonged concealment of his paternity of the children seems to have been insisted on by him rather than by her; a time came when they began to get curious and she wanted them told, but he would not allow it, even when he was cracking up. Indeed as they grew into adolescence the anomaly of their situation, their strange, lonely upbringing in care of their old woman guardian, the occasional
prima donna
visits of their unloving and unlovable mother, their lack of a father and their true relationship with the charming and mysterious Uncle Bodger, became a matter, between the twins at least, for discussion, speculation and suspicion. One of them finally, in an emotional state and determined upon the truth, paid him a surprise visit at his office and said to him earnestly, “Please tell me, are you our father?” His reply, since it was not a denial, seems almost an admission: “I can't answer such questions. You must ask your mother.” A sad response to a daughter's heartfelt appeal. They were told the truth only after his death.

The discovery of my father's duplicity gave me, I suppose, something of a jolt, not severe to a mind as self-centered as mine, but a jolt which gradually intrigued and then engaged my thought more and more as the years passed. It was the kind of shock that people must receive when some old friend, who has just spent with them an apparently normal evening, goes home and puts his head in the gas oven. The shock, after the shock of death, is the shock to complacency, to self-confidence: the old friend was a stranger after all, and where lay the fault in communication? My relationship with my father was in ruins; I had known nothing about him at all. The “grown man with every sign of a great intelligence” who, in his posthumous letter, had stood before him on the morning of October 21, 1920, the year after his belated secret marriage to my mother, had had, it seemed, insufficient intelligence, then and thereafter, to take him in, to make him out, and to the “kindly nature towards human frailties” that he had believed me to possess, his own frailties were not entrusted. All his “men pals,” who deserted him at the end like the proverbial rats on the sinking ship, had been let into his “secret orchard.” I was to join this group “only in case of my death.”

Why? The question vaguely teased and discomfited my thought, whenever it turned to him, as time went on, and became at last the
raison d'être
, of this examining and self-examining book; not the only
raison d'être
, it must be admitted, for, being a writer, I perceived that I had a good story to tell, a story which, as it ramified, grew better and better. If it is true, as I think Arthur Stockley told me, that my father originally met his second mistress at the Tavistock Hotel, the pub in Covent Garden to which they all used to repair in the early decades of the business, and where she worked, I believe he said, behind the bar, his “men pals” may have got into his “secret orchard” only because they could not be kept out of it. After all, he had managed to exclude them for many years from that first secret orchard, in Cheshire, in which my mother and ourselves dwelt, until it was accidentally discovered. Nevertheless, since so many trespassers had already got into his second orchard, why was I kept out? Why did he, a businessman, with cherished monetary dispositions on his mind, prefer to leave them to the uncertainty of posthumous letters instead of enlisting my cooperation face to face? It may of course be that, having got so far undetected by us, he hoped to scrape through. As I have already said, I don't know how aware he was of the gravity of his condition; with tickets for Bad Gastein in his pocket he clearly did not expect to die so soon, and his mistress, who did not know the nature of his complaint, certainly hoped that if she could only get him to his spa she might recover him. Some such optimism may have buoyed them up and, after all, more perhaps by good luck than good management, they had almost brought the thing off, the “secret orchard” had preserved its secret from us for nearly twenty years, my sister was well married and off his hands (or so he thought; her divorce proceedings were instituted after his death), I had my job in the BBC, his three other girls had practically reached marriageable or working age, success was almost within his grasp; given a little more luck, a little more life, he may have thought, and he would be rid of the expense of five children, all launched upon the world, and be able to destroy his letters to me, leaving his secret forever undisclosed. Yet of course this only begs the question of why he preferred to exclude me from his confidence—and why, for that matter, he preferred to exclude his three daughters also. Did he enjoy secretiveness for its own sake? His history abounds in instances of it. Or was he ashamed? Could he have conceived that, so far as I was concerned and in spite of my “kindly nature towards human frailties,” I would have been morally shocked, embarrassed, even censorious? Did he think I would reproach him? Indeed I
would
have reproached him—for failing, in the chance he had, to provide me with some more brothers instead of all those extra sisters. What a thrilling present that would have seemed to me then, some brand-new, teen-age brothers! They might even have yielded the Ideal Friend! How
could
he have viewed me, this ex-guardsman with his “secret orchards” and way of life as shady as my own? My half-sisters believed that he and their mother, who also met my sailor in Southsea, realized that I was “queer,” but they could not have known that I was a practicing homosexual, and I wonder whether, with my “highbrow” intellectuality, my lack of interest in girls, my obvious preference for the company of working-class “lads,” I could so have fogged him, so have presented myself to him, that he supposed me to be a sort of social worker, an idealist, a selfless, high-minded fellow remote from and superior to himself. I have reason to believe that I often wear a frown. Our public faces can be known to us only by hearsay and I have been given several clues to my own. A preoccupied anxious look seems to be my most settled guise, tinged by sadness. A charming smile: “sunshine through tears,” someone once described it to me. My fine blue eyes can emit a piercing stare, I am told, though what on earth they pierce I have no notion, they certainly did not manage to pierce my father. And, as I say, a frown may darken my face. My mother would sometimes make it worse by trying to smooth it away with her fingers. “It will spoil your beautiful brows,” she said. I was told later, to my sorrow, that love me though she did she was rather scared of me (“Do you lov your little mother?” she would say, as though the full word were too much to ask for), and I expect I gave her cause; with her ceaseless chatter she invited defense, the raised barricading newspaper, the yawn, the frown, the off-hand manner, the bored, inattentive face. A friend once remarked to me, “It's wonderful how rude one can be to your mother without her even noticing it.” It may be, therefore, that if I contrived to scare her off with my frowning, preoccupied look, I scared my father too. Perhaps he found my “piercing” eyes as disconcerting as I found his squinty ones. I set it down for what it may be worth.