Romany and Tom (28 page)

It’s OK for dear Ben to leave a note saying ‘Look after yourselves’, meaning, don’t go dramatically off and leave him to fend for himself (even for 24 hours) because it does no good. And he’s right. But it’s this holding back my real self all the time that is so exhausting. We are always talking on the bloody ‘Dear Katie’ page about self-respect. Where has his gone? He has so much to be proud of. Why does he make every effort to destroy himself ? Is it just a male menopause crisis? This obsession with the world situation is desperately hard to cope with. I feel guilty that I cannot feel as he does – and yet, isn’t there something rather perverse about his intolerance. We can no longer watch
Agatha Christie, Reilly
, the news, medical programmes or political diatribe of any kind. How can I broaden my own interests so that my life is not exclusively devoted to him (apart from my work)?

O, the unanswered questions. The defeatist feel to the whole of my life is wearing me out.

It must have been dark outside when my mum sat down in her study and wrote those words. The sun doesn’t rise until after seven in October. The flat would have been quiet. Not even the clicking of the cold copper pipes of the central heating as they slowly expanded with the first rush of hot water would have broken the silence; not before six. I picture my dad asleep in the other room, her in a nightie and overcoat at her desk, and the sound of her fountain pen scratching out the pale blue ink on to the large plain pad of ruled paper.

There is no date in the blue ink. Just the day and the time. First thing on a Monday morning. Something pressing on her mind. But it has been added above –
October 1983
– in pencil, and the same pencil has been used on the envelope to write
Personal
–
Come On, Romany
. There is something about the two pencil inscriptions of the afterthought, as if written a little time later, at the moment the urge to write the rest of it all down had partly subsided, at the point the envelope was sealed and put into a drawer – another sad document for family posterity carefully dated.

But oddly it made its way into my mum’s silver-grey Harrods gift box of souvenirs. I found it in there along with other important things like her baby notebooks and the telegrams of congratulations, a tiny red pair of shoes, the letter from Liz Taylor, her Diploma in Dramatic Art, bundled love letters, a postcard of snowdrops bought on the day of her mother’s death, and a graphologist’s analysis of her handwriting that opens with the helpfully flattering words,
This is the handwriting of a highly intelligent, keenly perceptive woman
.

There is an engaging indefatigable tone to the phrase
Come On, Romany
which seems at odds with the hopelessness of the final line of the letter itself. Together they seem to say so much about her. Soft on the inside. Flinty on the outside. She must have considered the letter important to have kept it among all those other important things, and – as with much of her carefully preserved archive – when I read it I couldn’t help but hear a voice that said,
Make me heard
. I should point out that much of her archive is interleaved with additional notes and arrows and codicils that say things like: ‘
Read these, then throw way’
; ‘
Hadn’t the heart to get rid of this’
; ‘
Jennie might like these’
; ‘
Aborted autobiography notes – for family only’
. They are signposts that tease and hint and cajole, and ultimately lead to the conclusion that one day she wanted it all known and understood.

I can also be assured the contents of the gift box represent the very heart of how she saw herself, as she was a furious editor as well as an archivist, often weeding out irrelevance and dead wood, throwing away second-rate features she had written, or inconsequential letters, as though she were aware she would be judged soon and was clearing a path to the essential stuff. She made a few wrong calls in my view; ninety per cent of her journalism was purged in the late nineties. She threw away many scrapbooks, keeping only her favourites and interviews with the most famous. I also went in search of one of her much-loved treasures – a first edition of Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
that I knew had been given to her by Richard Burton in Mexico complete with a dedication to her from him on the title page – but it was nowhere to be found; not among her souvenirs, nor on the bookshelf of any family member. I’d all but given up finding it when a random web search for the words ‘Richard Burton’ and ‘Romany Bain’ threw up a link to a second-hand bookshop in Southport, Lancashire. Sure enough, it had the very copy. She must have sold it or given it away to charity in the late nineties along with everything else. I bought it back. For a hundred pounds.

As for the letter, if I felt a prickle of guilt as I opened it, since reading it something
has
been understood, something that I once only sensed has been substantiated: the sheer punishing weight of living with a man with chronic depression. Now, in our age of therapy, and footballers who unburden themselves, it seems so clear that what she endured was beyond what anyone should have had to put up with, and yet no one talked openly about depression back then – especially the depression of a proud Scottish working-class jazz musician. In the year it was written my mum was editing an agony aunt and advice page with Katie Boyle – ‘All black dogs, love rats and adult virgins,’ she once said to me, ‘and tips on how to keep your china sparkling’ – but no one was around to give
her
advice when she got home. I’m glad I opened the letter. It made it real. I hugged her when I next saw her; although I didn’t mention what I’d read.

I met my aunt – my uncle Glyn’s second wife, and yet another ‘Jean’ in this story – in the spring of 2012. She was eighty-two when I turned up at her tiny terraced cottage in Kentish Town. She had lived less than two miles from me for the past twenty-seven years – Glyn having died suddenly in 1977 and she then remarrying and relocating to London in the eighties – and I couldn’t think of a good reason why we hadn’t met more regularly, other than our family are experts at keeping their distance. We reminisced about a lot of things, but one thing that stayed with me was when she said she had always thought of my dad as ‘quite a sad man underneath’.

‘It was in his eyes,’ she said. ‘I felt he drank to come out of himself, to make himself braver.’

After she’d said it, it suddenly seemed so obvious: underneath the jokes and the charm and the rambunctious exterior was a small melancholy man from Glasgow, who just wanted everyone to love him and his music. I wondered why it hadn’t struck me sooner or as clearly. And then I remembered that in 1982 a local London jazz ensemble, the Willie Garnett Big Band, had unexpectedly played a couple of his old arrangements – twenty years after he’d written them – and he’d been invited down and allowed to conduct them himself and bring them to life in front of a small back-room audience in the suburbs. He was home late that night. My mum had gone to bed and left out a note on the kitchen table, asking him how it had gone. He slept in the spare room so as not to disturb her, but not before writing on the bottom of the note: ‘
I was
lionised
!’ Can we ever be loved enough?

Included with the letter my mum wrote to herself that early October morning, in the same white envelope, was another note on the same paper written in the same pale blue ink, most likely around the same time. She must have written it for my dad to see, although it’s not clear whether she left it out for him, or decided against it at the last minute and sealed it up with the other one. Not that it matters. It reads:

I don’t like myself very much, you know. I didn’t
want
to be matron – with all that word implies. I would have loved to have someone in charge of me – to make fun of my idiosyncrasies and look after me. But you are teaching me that people are so insignificant, so doomed, so manipulated, so corrupt, that there is no point in anything any more except jazz and Ben. Is our personal life of so little value that it doesn’t matter if we both become strangers? I suppose not.

I don’t
want
to talk to you about the ‘Dear Katie’ page.

If you had a
job
– an equally boring 9–5 job – neither of us would talk about our own work to each other.

That is another of my dilemmas. I work here – basically to keep you company – but I know it’s all a charade, you being interested in what I do. It’s not natural or normal. But what else can I talk about? We never go anywhere – we have no friends – we never go out for a meal or visit anyone. I can’t help boring you. We don’t go to a play, and now, rarely watch TV.

I am as unhappy and frustrated as you are in many ways.

Sorry about it.

R

When I read both of them now they make me sad. And they bring to mind the questions my mum put to Liz Taylor in her two major interviews with her published in 1970 and 1971, questions I now realise she must have asked herself a thousand times. As they sat overlooking the ocean in San Felipe in 1970, she entreats, among a scant selection:
Whose fault is it if a marriage goes stale?
;
Should a woman try to change her husband?
;
How is Richard as a stepfather?
;
Do you have many close friends?
And then, when they met in Rome in 1971, she went on to ask:
Have you thought what you would do if Richard wanted to leave you? Would you try to stop him?
;
Have you ever tried to change him?
In context they pass by in a glamorous whirl of opulence and fame, but extracted on their own they strike me as the saddest of questions.

The summer before the letters – the summer of 1983 – I had come back down to London from Hull with Tracey to finish writing and recording our debut album as Everything But The Girl. We were twenty. The atmosphere between my mum and dad was like an electrical storm. My half-brother Toby said we could house-sit for a few days at his tiny place in Kingston if we needed to. It was right on the Robin Hood Roundabout on the edge of the main A3 in and out of town. Behind us were the vast open spaces of Richmond Park but in front the traffic thundered past day and night. We recorded the final primitive demos for
Eden
there on a tiny four-track cassette deck, waiting until late at night to record the vocals when the roads were quieter. We then stayed uneasily with my mum and dad in early September while we recorded the album in Willesden at Robin Millar’s Power Plant studios. We gave my mum some money towards the phone and washed up our breakfast things before we left each day, but we barely saw each other. We’d walk half a mile across the common and catch the train from Barnes to Richmond, then change on to the Broad Street Line and travel up to Brondesbury Park. From there we’d walk the final mile to the studio. It could take an hour and a half each morning. In the evening Robin treated us to a minicab back. The day after we finished, we caught the train back up to Hull, even though term didn’t start for a couple of weeks.

Not long after we were back on Humberside, my mum called me with the news that my dad had drunk his last drink at the Bull’s Head. In a confused garbled story it seemed he’d had a public altercation with the new manager and walked out, vowing never to return. ‘He said the new manager tried to
humiliate
him in
front of everyone
,’ my mum said. ‘He’ll barely talk about it.’ It seemed impossible at the time; the Bull’s Head was his home from home. As more came to light, there was a rumour that he was accused of ‘being caught with his hand in the till’, which, I suppose, while possible, seemed so far-fetched. Others suggested he had become too disruptive and vociferous on a regular basis, and the new manager simply wanted him out, and used the accusation as a ploy to make him leave. I have never got to the bottom of the story; suffice to say it marked a fork in the road, as my dad never
did
return, nor would he drink in
any
of the other pubs in Barnes from that day on. ‘Barnes is over for me,’ he said casually but firmly a few weeks later. It seemed oddly preposterous.

Instead he took to quietly drinking at home. ‘At least I can keep an eye on him,’ my mum wrote. ‘He gets mildly squiffy here . . . which is so much safer.’ With Barnes cast adrift, I was suddenly conscious of a new future looming, and amid all the usual stories of a week away on a farm or a boat, or the annual visit of my dad’s mother, or birdlife at the kitchen window, an elegiac tone started to appear in her letters:

The road is emptying. The Kentishes advertised in the
Sunday Times
and the
Observer
last Sunday and the Warhursts are also putting their house on the market . . . Even Anthony and George have sold their house. They are splitting up, I believe. The Paynes’ house had a SOLD notice. A young family move in there ‘after Easter’ . . . We got the tree surgeons to vet the poplar and they say it is
rotten
three-quarters of the way down, so by the end of spring, I think ours and the one [next door] will be felled.

By 1988 our house had been sold too.