Swan River (13 page)

11

Wise Old Men

On 1 December 1963, nine days before my father's seventy-second birthday and two weeks before the end of my term, my mother packed a suitcase, wrote a note to my father, took a train to London and went to live with her uncle in Chelsea. My father was out calling on farmers.

She had planned her flight. Uncle Godfrey had already moved into a larger flat, and a letter from a lawyer reached my father the following morning telling him that my mother was divorcing him on grounds of cruelty, and suggesting an informal arrangement whereby they would both see me during my school holidays. The lawyer asked my father not to visit me at school during the remaining days of term to avoid adding to my presumed distress.

My mother sounded cheerful, but concerned for me, as she told me all this on the telephone in Bird's office – while Bird and Mrs Bird hovered in their sitting room next door. The next morning I received a letter from my father, abusing both my mother who, he said, was mad and had always been seriously unstable – he hinted that there were many things I didn't know – and Uncle Godfrey, a wicked philanderer who, by turning on his own niece, was now guilty of incest. My father thought it better that I live with him and proposed to take me to America – even though, before my mother left, he had found a new place to live, which he described as part of a stately home in beautiful countryside. The letter began and ended with well-worded declarations of his love for me.

I read it standing up in the study I shared with my guitar-playing friend Pete Connolly and an obliging character called Paul Snape. I sat down feeling weak, helpless, thinking that I would have to fight my father to get my way – to stay in England and continue to see my mother. If Connolly and Snape hadn't been there, collecting their books together for the morning's classes, I might have cried – something I hadn't done for a few years.

I gazed across at Deborah's drawing of La Frascetti which Snape thoughtfully polished from time to time. My sense of fear came more from the thought of disappearing to America with my father, never to see my mother again, than from the insinuation that terrible proof of my mother's insanity had been hidden from me – although that disturbed me too. But the allegations about Uncle Godfrey were not believable, so perhaps my father, in his fury, was also imagining that my mother was mad.

I spent much of the day hanging about with Bird while he and I talked, and spoke on the telephone to my mother. By late afternoon my mother's solicitor had made me a ward of court. First my mother on the telephone, and then Bird in his sitting room, explained what this meant: the court -and not my parents – was now my legal guardian; I couldn't go abroad without its permission; it would decide when and where I would see my parents, and where and with whom I would spend my school holidays. I had a vision of my life being ruled by an empty panelled room filled with high-backed chairs and a picture of the Queen, until my mother explained that ‘the court' meant ‘a judge in chambers' and that that meant a wise old man sitting in an armchair by a fire.

The next day my mother arrived driving a rented white mini and I was given special leave to spend the afternoon with her. She had had her hair done in a looser wave and was wearing a close-fitting grey jacket that I hadn't seen before. Though she frowned a lot as we talked, she seemed happier – as well as smarter – than I could remember. She seemed to want my approval of what she had done and I tried to communicate that I was pleased, but worried about what my father might do.

As we drove north through Kennington and North Hinksey she said I shouldn't worry and that she would explain something important later. First she wanted to talk about Uncle Godfrey and what I thought about living with him – I would have my own room in his new flat. And he had made her a proposition: ‘He says that if I will drive him occasionally in his car – he can hardly drive any more because of his eyes – and help him with paperwork such as paying his bills, we can live with him for free.'

I really wanted to talk about my father and the important thing that she had said she would tell me later, but I forced myself to think about Uncle Godfrey. I liked him – he reminded me of Wilfrid Hyde White. A few years before, after eating a strawberry mousse provided by him, I had been sick all over his carpet – and
he
had apologised to
me
for giving me a bad mousse and had insisted on clearing up the mess himself. Afterwards, my father – who often said that he couldn't bear Uncle Godfrey because he was idle and rich – had declared that the way he had dealt with the strawberry vomit had been the behaviour of a perfect gentleman and that I should learn from it.

He was eighty-two years old, the younger brother of my mother's father and the lone survivor of six brothers and sisters. He had attended the school I was at, had been to Oxford and, like his two brothers, had been an artillery officer in World War I. He had acted in minor parts in British films in the 1920s and '30s – and that was all the work he had ever done. A long time ago he had been married and had had one child, a daughter close to my mother's age who had died when she was sixteen.

The idea of living with him appealed to me – he was always jovial but didn't pay too much attention to me – and he was very fond of my mother, and she of him. I also thought I would like his local shopping street, the King's Road, Chelsea; like the High Street in Marlow, it had a grocer, a greengrocer, a butcher, a fishmonger and a bakery, but it had three cafés with chairs and tables outside and some of the people who sat at them, I had been told, were artists. Uncle Godfrey's proposition seemed very fair to me, but my mother had a reservation. ‘It's very kind of him, but I'm not sure. I don't want to be dependent on him.'

‘You won't be dependent. You'll be helping him with the driving and other things.'

‘I know, but I could get a job and pay proper rent.' She frowned. ‘I want to be
in
dependent, you see.'

I did see. I had the same aim myself.

.

We had tea in a hotel, in an airy room with a view of fields and leafless trees, and sat beside each other on a chintz-covered sofa. A waitress put tea, scones and cakes on a low table in front of us. After she left, the only sound was of other people talking quietly several feet away. As my mother reached for the teapot, I said, ‘What did Dad mean about you being mad?'

She forgot the teapot and sat back in the corner of the sofa. I waited, and thought that perhaps I shouldn't have asked – but I badly wanted to know that she wasn't mad, and never had been.

‘I had a nervous breakdown during the war. It wasn't that serious. I was depressed and spent a few days in a hospital – a mental hospital – having treatment.' She looked at me from under her eyebrows. I noticed that she was wearing her pale blue eye shadow, something she wore very rarely – on formal occasions.

‘So that's all he's talking about?'

‘Yes… He often brings it up and calls me a madwoman when he's angry.'

‘I didn't think you were mad.'

She smiled. ‘Good.'

I asked what she had been depressed about, and she hinted that it might have been to do with her failure to have children for so many years. She smiled more broadly, and for a moment I felt smug – just by being born I had saved my mother from depression.

‘You'll have to see your father,' she said, ‘but maybe not for a bit, not till he calms down.'

‘Of course I'll see him. I
like
seeing him – '

‘Perhaps you can take friends with you. I'm worried about you being alone with him.'

I pushed a small cube of sponge coated in yellow icing into my mouth, and swallowed it quickly. ‘I
like
being alone with him. He's one of the best people to be alone with.'

I slid down on the sofa and rested my head against it. I was worried about the next time I saw him because he might try to take me to America – he was quite capable of ignoring what an old man in an armchair might say. And he would make vile remarks about my mother. But I had no fear of being alone with him.

I imagined sitting beside him in the A35 – and remembered guiding him miles down a narrow lane that turned into an almost impassable track, because the map showed there was a building at the end. If it was a farm I would receive two shillings – my father had increased my usual commission twice as the track grew rougher and his scepticism grew – and if the first person we saw was a man in a flat cap I would receive another sixpence. Instead of a farm and a farmer there was a bare-headed, tall, bearded man, a little younger than my father, living frugally in a tiny cottage with no electricity and thousands of books. He didn't want any seeds, but he gave us tea and cake he had made himself, and my father and he talked all afternoon about philosophy, politics and religion. After a while I took his border collie for a long walk. On the way home my father gave me five shillings ‘for finding the most interesting man in Somerset'.

Recently my father and I had talked more than ever. We sometimes argued, and occasionally – when I refused to agree with a view that he put forward with what he thought to be flawless logic – he lost his temper in the familiar red-faced, bulging-eyeballed way, repeated his argument more loudly than before and ended the conversation by bellowing his standard refrain: ‘If you can argue against that, God help you!' I had found this upsetting years ago, but nowadays I just shrugged and there was a short silence, and he would start talking in a normal voice about something else.

I looked at my mother. She was staring out at the trees, with her chin raised high; she seemed extraordinarily relaxed and confident. I felt proud of the stand she had taken, her seizing of independence. My anger had gone; I sat up and told her that the only thing that worried me was my father's idea of taking me to America.

She said that is was unlikely that he would mention that again. She pulled an envelope out of her bag and took out a small pink card. ‘But you have to have this… just in case. It's just a safeguard – nothing to worry about.' Printed on the card were the words ‘HOME OFFICE: CHILD WELFARE DEPARTMENT' and a telephone number. ‘If anything happens – if Dad did try to take you somewhere, I don't think he will – you ring this number from any telephone. You don't have to put money in if it's a telephone box. You say where you are… and someone will quickly arrive to help.'

‘Blimey! Who?'

She took my hand. ‘Look, I don't think this will happen, but he just might try to take you to an airport… or to somewhere like Dover, to take you abroad. I really don't think he will; he knows that he'd be breaking the law if he did. But that's what this is for. If you ring the number, a policeman or woman will arrive very quickly… or, if you see a policeman, you can show him the card and he'll look after you.'

My hands tingled. I felt like smoking a cigarette, but I didn't do that in front of my mother. I put the card down on the table and took a large bite out of a scone. ‘I could always just run away. I can run faster than him.'

‘Yes, but you might not know where to go then…or you might not have any money. You can go into a police station and show this card.' She took my hand again, and frowned as she looked into my eyes. ‘I really don't think it'll happen. Just keep it with you when you're with Dad. Hide it in your wallet.'

‘O.K.' I looked at her and shrugged, feigning a bravado I didn't feel. ‘Quite exciting, really.' I put the card in my wallet, wrapping it inside a letter from Deborah.

Later my mother gave me two five-pound notes, to be spent only if my father created an emergency.

* * * * *

That evening, I showed the pink card to Connolly and Snape, and told them I might have to sprint through London airport, find a telephone and then hide until the police arrived.

‘
Very
James Bond.' Connolly looked at the card, turned it over and passed it to Snape. ‘You be careful, my son.' He took my hand and held it against La Frascetti's chest – Connolly, Snape and others had turned that part of my great aunt into a talisman.

Biting his lower lip, Snape handed the card back. ‘Not much fun, Dave, really.'

I left them and went outside through a door at the bottom of the stairs. It was dark, with a little light coming from the moon behind clouds. I had been wanting a cigarette since tea time. I crossed a quadrangle and a stretch of mown grass, walked between some buildings and tapped on a mullioned window. Pat Chandler's face appeared inside the glass; he was shading his eyes with his hand. A minute later we were inside the hollow tree, blowing smoke upwards, away from our clothes towards the sky, and whispering to each other for fear of being caught. I told him about the tea with my mother and the pink card. He asked to see the card and studied it in the light of a match.

‘Chroist!' – he had begun to adopt what he thought was a Cockney accent – ‘but probably nothing'll happen. Your old man can't be as mad as that.'

I pulled on my cigarette and flicked the ash on to the ground. ‘He can be pretty mad sometimes.'

Pat usually spent time in London during the holidays – his father had a flat there, though his main home was in Dorset. I told him about my new home with Uncle Godfrey and we made plans to meet. Apart from my mother's elderly relations, he would be the only person I knew.

‘What do you do in London?' I had a vision of endless streets filled with red buses and people I didn't know.

‘Go to the pictures… coffee bars… shop in the King's Road. Portobello market is…'

I had a sudden memory of walking beside the river in Marlow with Deborah and, without meaning to, I stopped listening to Pat. There was a swan near the further bank and we were talking about Uncle George and my grandfather who went to Canada.