I’m going to tackle my father. Not literally, physical was not his language, and also he’s dead, so that’s not going to work. But I mean here. In these pages. Because everybody hates the rich, right? So now I have to talk about it.
Here goes.
He was very wealthy. Money was a language he did understand. Also he was charming, good company, a laugh when he was in the mood. Not ha-ha jokes funny, but outrageous funny. He’d say I fucked a girl in that telephone box as we drove past it and make me gasp at the outlandishness and be tingled by the intimacy. Any information he gave, even inappropriate morsels of his private life, were grabbed up and treasured. He sailed his own boat, he rarely let anyone aboard and when he did, could throw them off at a moment’s notice without explanation or apology. He was reserved and enticing, a captain I stared at.
His great grandfather was a Duke. His mother grew up in a castle. His great uncle married a Princess. People jumped to attention when he was in the room. Everybody wanted a piece of him. He was handsome and clever and mercurial. He kept to himself and winning his love was an essential childhood mission.
He was sold by his mother to his aunt for £500, a fact he shared casually. I wrote about it in A Perfect Explanation. So yes, I get it. His was a world of wealth and neglect, monetary riches and emotional poverty. A privileged man in twentieth century Britain, a child of empire. I became rich because of him, and to a child in a tall, cold house in London, he was king.
But he didn’t live with us.
Early on in their strange un-togetherness my parents settled on a system where he mostly lived on his large West Sussex estate, while we lived mostly on his London one. At weekends we gathered in the country, an explosion of children into a chocolate box cottage on a Friday night that had him disappearing to his studio. He was a writer, he published biographies of eccentric Victorians. He could have lived in a castle, too but chose a low-beamed cottage on the side of a road, so picturesque and pretty that tourists stopped to photograph us while we were having lunch.
Weekends were the big opportunity to win his love which I did by cutting his tomatoes just right for his salad, presenting his margarine decanted and perfectly smoothed in a tiny white dish, trying not to get in the way, or be five or six or whatever age I was that was annoying and loud and messy. You knew you were in the good books when he invited you up to his studio to see the gallery, a private museum of treasures accessed through a secret door that held wonders like a pair of Queen Victoria’s gloves. Even there, there was a test. Could you slide the keys down the banister rail so that they dropped into the Wellington boot at the bottom? Only sometimes. He was a man of games and trinkets, he wore slippers with bells on, you could set your watch by his ordered life.
Occasionally he came to London.
The housekeeper would whip into a frenzy, my mother’s waifs and strays shooed out of the kitchen with a dishcloth, the kettle boiled. There’d be a different air in the house as he crouched unhappily at the end of the table, bow tie and three-piece suit, cradling his tea or sipping his Cinzano. One of disappointment and annoyance. He carried a lemon in his pocket in case my mother didn’t have any. He required ice to be ready for his drink. He kept his hands smooth with E45.
Have I given impression enough of someone unassailable? He held the power and here’s the point I’m trying to get to. In all the years of therapeutic work, the untangling of what happened, I’ve only ever held my mother to account. But mothers are easy to blame, aren’t they? They are there and they fall short. I used to say he wasn’t, so how could he know. But here’s the truth. Even now, fifteen years after his death, if I say one word like, failed all hell breaks loose in my mind, the sky crashes in, disaster reigns and rains. I let him off the hook because I loved him. Because he was a man. Because he loved me and he made me rich and in case from beyond the grave he takes that last vestige of protection away.
Wow! What a post this is. You dig deep. You break the heart. You build character. You reveal. Your honesty thrills. May I tell you again how glad I am to have found you? I must. And this post is a must-read--for those of you out there who haven't yet discovered the amazing Eleanor ...
You know, I do see that it's easy to blame mother's. However, as I see it, in my old fashioned little brain, a mother is meant to protect you. It's one thing to do the harmkng, it's another to look away.