The Girl from Station X (45 page)

I can feel sorry for my mother now as I recall her trying to deal with her son. However, I do not think that she was a very good mother to him. Perhaps she did not know how. My grandmother,
after all, had let her five-year-old grandson wander off alone, knowing that he could climb over her swimming-pool wire. And my father had not helped Nicky in later life either.

I recall that image of my grandmother’s mother – Grandmoods – assisting the little girl, Anne, the only bridesmaid at her mother’s second wedding, with that huge bunch of
delphiniums, taller than she was. Yet, despite her difficult early childhood with its double bereavement, then her first son’s death, I also cannot help blaming my mother for what I perceive
as her weakness and self-indulgence, and for the way that she ultimately failed my brother Nicky. On Nicky’s first day at public school, instead of accompanying him, my mother had yet again
gone abroad, leaving my father and grandmother to take the petrified twelve-year-old and leave him there. My grandmother reported that he was ‘shaking like a leaf’. And I remember also
my mother’s peevish complaint to my grandmother when my brothers were in their early teens: ‘Why can’t Elisa look after the boys?’

The farm was sold and I never saw Nicky’s girlfriend or Mac again. My mother was very bitter about the way Mac had treated her son. He had written her a threatening letter and she was
afraid that he might come to her at night when she was alone in Sussex, demanding money. She even said that if he did come, she might try to kill him.

On Christmas Eve 1977, I flew back from America, where I had been since September. I went straight to Knowle, to spend Christmas with my grandmother. There, I was told that
Nicky had decided to stay alone in London for Christmas.

The telephone rang and Violet came in. I was saying how selfish it was of Nicky to stay in London for Christmas.

Violet burst into tears: ‘Poor Nicky’s dead, Elisa!’

My grandmother went behind the sofa to the big partners’ desk still full of Chow’s possessions since his death in 1953 and picked up the telephone.

‘Darling, I’m so sorry about what’s happened. How awful it must be for you . . .’

Later, my mother would remark on how strong her mother’s voice sounded, as though she was young again.

Nicky had died over an overdose of Valium, prescribed by a London doctor for his depression. I drove over to my mother’s, to be with her. Her old friend Cynthia was staying, and my other
brother. The whole thing was unreal to me and I didn’t want to talk about Nicky. My mother declared: ‘I admired him tremendously, more than anyone else I know!’

She was referring to Nicky’s moral courage, for demonstrating in Grosvenor Square against the war in Vietnam while only fourteen and for being a pacifist. Nicky, in some ways timid and
fragile – which infuriated my father – also had nobility and gentleness. He was buried in early January 1978 in the churchyard near Knowle. My brother Raymond and my mother’s
infant brother Raymond lay there; so did my father and Aunt K, and my mother’s paternal grandparents and great-grandparents.

Soon after Nicky’s death, three gypsy women called at my mother’s London house. I bought a strip of lace from one, who then warned me: ‘Your mother has a
terrible pain in her leg!’ I expressed surprise and decided that she must be referring to my mother’s rheumatism. She added: ‘Your mother will get a boyfriend you won’t
like!’

Perhaps the gypsy did have second sight, in which case the ‘terrible pain in her leg’ alluded to my mother’s breaking her hip – for the first time – the following
summer. The ‘boyfriend’ would turn out to be someone whom I certainly didn’t like.

M
ost of my life, I did not see many expressions of intimacy between my mother and grandmother – I never even heard my mother call her
‘Mum’ or ‘Mummy’– though I had the impression that before Raymond’s accident they were closer. My grandmother and mother, separately, told me of their holidays
at Loch Choire – they both loved fishing – of dressing-up parties at Knowle, of sports days in the Knowle garden, in which they and Aunt K and all the Knowle staff took part. There were
visits to America and Ireland, to see each of my grandmother’s surviving sisters, Dita and Lin, their string of dogs – Zost, Jerry, my mother’s Scottish collie Nicky and all the
many West Highland terriers owned in succession by my grandmother – those little white dogs that my brother Nicky had nicknamed, to me, ‘the Sugar Lumps’.

Nevertheless, I was aware that my mother and grandmother were very different. My grandmother, despite her own tragedies – in particular, the early death of my grandfather, with whom she
was deeply in love – was tougher and worldlier than my mother. And, unlike her daughter, she seemed at peace with herself.

When I was in my early twenties, my grandmother came to lunch with me and my father – my mother was away travelling again. On the hall table was a sealed letter to my grandmother from my
mother. My grandmother opened it and started reading out loud. My mother gave the date of her return, then suddenly the letter became personal – my mother was thanking my grandmother for all
she’d done for her and saying how much she loved her. My grandmother’s voice faltered when she came to this bit and she stopped reading out loud.

My mother would never have been able to say this directly, she had to write it. She found it difficult to communicate, except at one remove. And of course my grandmother must have been surprised
to suddenly find herself reading out something so personal.

In June 1978, when the Knowle garden was scented with golden and coral-coloured azaleas, my grandmother died. She was cremated – her wish – but there was also a
service at the church where our other relations were buried. I didn’t put on black, as my grandmother, who always wore bright colours, wouldn’t have liked it. I wore a pale yellow dress
with mauve patterns and an orange straw hat.

My mother and I waited in the hall at Knowle for the undertakers. My mother suddenly tried to dart into the garden, to avoid seeing her mother’s coffin being carried downstairs.

Katherine said: ‘Mrs Segrave’s wreath is the yellow roses!’ Then she added: ‘Mrs Segrave insisted that our wreaths [hers and Violet’s] should go on the
coffin.’

However, there was room for only three wreaths and one was mine. My mother kept saying: ‘I don’t mind if mine doesn’t go on the coffin.’

‘For God’s sake, have yours on the coffin!’ I cried out.

Why was my mother being so self-effacing? At other times she was self-centred. It was confusing. Anyway, it was
her
mother who was dead. My mother should definitely have had
her
wreath on the coffin. It was inconceivable that my mother would weep at a funeral. She didn’t approve of that sort of thing. She once praised a local widow for showing
‘great dignity’ at her husband’s grave.

Perhaps my mother did not want to see her mother’s coffin being carried downstairs because it reminded her of Nicky being taken to that churchyard only five months earlier. She
wasn’t going to tell me. Was she similarly cut off from
her
mother?’

Neither my mother nor I kept my grandmother’s ashes. Katherine put the urn on her mantelpiece in the cottage my grandmother had bought for her, a few minutes’ walk
from the churchyard.

She told me some weeks later: ‘The Rector asked me what he should do. I said Gran’d wanted her ashes scattered over the dogs’ graves at Knowle by the azaleas. He wouldn’t
do it himself, but one of the undertakers came down and did it. Your grandfather’s horse is buried there as well.’

Two months after my grandmother died, I went to America and was with Peggie in Long Island when my mother rang with the shocking news that Violet had drowned herself in the Knowle swimming pool.
Soon after that my mother fell, again, and broke her hip.

It was I, not my mother, who had to deal with the subsequent sorting out, then the sale, of her childhood home; Knowle and many of its contents were finally sold in 1980, two years after my
grandmother’s death. It would have been too expensive to keep on. One of many unpleasant tasks I had – I was staying with my mother that weekend – was to inform the son of an old
farm worker that he and his young wife would have to leave the flat above my grandmother’s garage. The wife had tears in her eyes, but at no time did it occur to
me
to cry over the
sale of Knowle. I hardly ever cried; I had not done so over the deaths of Raymond, of Nicky, of my father or even of my grandmother.

That afternoon, after leaving the garage flat, I lingered for a few moments alone by the garage. This was where Frank had taught me and Raymond the two times table. Frank’s future wife,
Elsie, had as a girl helped Nah look after Anne and Anne’s little brother, and Frank had fallen in love with Elsie then. The night he proposed, he had threatened to shoot himself if Elsie
turned him down. My mother had told me that.

As I turned my car out of the Knowle gates, to drive back to my mother’s, I suddenly saw Katherine, getting off the local bus. She confided that she had felt lonely in the cottage that my
grandmother had bought her in the village and had come to see the Knowle daffodils. Although I had known Katherine since I was a baby, I had never warmed to her, as I knew that she had been jealous
of my closeness to my grandmother. (The morning after my grandmother’s death, I had watched her rip off the wall a sheep stitched on to card with yellow wool that I had made for my
grandmother when I was four.) But now, both missing my grandmother, we walked round the garden together and I saw again how beautiful the place was.

When I returned to my mother’s at teatime, she said nothing about the impending sale of Knowle, her childhood home.

The gypsy who had predicted my mother’s pain in her leg – perhaps a reference to her fall and breakage after Violet’s drowning – had also said she would
get a boyfriend I wouldn’t like.

I was already accustomed to a procession of women through my mother’s life. One of my earliest memories is of her and a friend sitting close together on a step in a garden in Spain, both
showing their long, flesh-coloured undergarments. Since these were the same colour as skin, I half-believed that the two women were wearing nothing under their skirts and announced to my father:
‘Mum had no knickers on!’ With the instinct of a very small child, or small animal, who wants to be close to its mother, I must have sensed that there was something exclusive in the two
women’s friendship and felt left out.

My father’s way of dealing with these women who appeared throughout his married life was to belittle them, sometimes giving them nicknames. When I was seven, soon after Raymond’s
death, there was Audrey, who had given me Buzzy – a wonderful gift. Her only son had been killed falling from a train and she and my mother’s mutual bereavement must have made them
closer. Audrey was
soignée,
with red hair in a chignon, and bossy. My father, no doubt jealous of Audrey’s intimacy with his wife, called her ‘The Little Bitch’
– not very subtle of him. Then there was Olga, who, I now knew from the diaries, had been introduced to Anne as early as 1945. Olga often stayed with us in Sussex with her two little
daughters, and they came several summers with us to Hope Cove, which my father found boring, perhaps because he was tired of the sea, on which he had spent so much of his life. Olga had a deep
throaty voice and green eyes, like the eyes of Lady Ann Cole in 1930, I now realised. Olga seemed to love my mother and my mother, in her turn, expressed irritation to me when, on one holiday, Olga
rang her husband in London every evening.

Then, when I was an adolescent, my mother met an older married woman on a group trip to the Middle East. She, like my mother, I read in a very short travel diary I had found, had a
very masculine
husband. My father furiously made up a song which he would sing round our house, rhyming one line – ‘She never gets my ire!’ – with
this new lady’s surname. Another line was: ‘She is so calm, she’s full of balm.’

In January 1979, my mother and I were at a hotel in Tobago with four other women. One, Betty, was a divorced woman in her seventies, tall, with grey hair and greenish eyes with a fleck of brown
in them. She put her head on one side like a slim tall bird, a cormorant. My mother was immediately interested in Betty, whose former husband was a diplomat.

In our group also was Knotty – whom my mother met in the WAAF in 1944 – and Dodo, widow of Aunt Elisa’s son Michael; he married Dodo after his first wife died. Dodo, who lived
in Ireland, had brought Betty with her. My mother was in a wheelchair, due to a broken hip incurred from her fall the previous summer, soon after Violet drowned. Mary, our cousin who lived very
near Knowle, a little older than my mother, was also with us.

Time passed with endless meals and endless drinking of rum punches. Knotty and I swam in the sea and chatted to some English medical students. More than once, Knotty and I were deliberately left
out of rounds of drinks.

My mother and Betty became extremely rude to Knotty, frequently poking fun at her behind her back. They made it clear that they thought her inferior, and no doubt Betty was jealous of
Knotty’s thirty-five-year friendship with my mother. Betty kept flattering my mother, who seemed to love it, and Betty, I noted, brought out a complaining side of her, encouraging her to moan
about not being able to get a taxi after a West End play and so on. Actually my mother had never cared much about physical comfort. Now, however, she kept agreeing with Betty. Was this the same
woman who, each time she went to Russia, left the group and walked round the back streets on her own and, only a few years ago, tried out a canoe in rough waves at Hope Cove?

I was disgusted by my mother’s attitude to Knotty, who had been such a good friend, and who, unlike my mother and Betty, worked, as a secretary, in a nine-to-five job. My mother seemed to
have no loyalty, no understanding of friendship. She was capricious and often played her women friends off against each other, like a little girl at school. ‘Now you’re my best friend!
Now you’re not!’ She ditched people, seemingly without guilt, when she got tired of them.