Dolly (10 page)

The next day was spent in Adèle Rougier’s car, or rather in the back of it, crushed between Dolly and the woman who was now apparently her hostess, and suffocated by that same woman’s asphyxiating scent. Any scenery she managed to see was glimpsed through misted windows, for the car was heated, even uncomfortably so. Nevertheless Adèle Rougier wore her mink coat. Toni wore her travelling coat of grey lamb, which she thought much more suitable.

‘Poor me,’ said Dolly, ‘in my old cloth coat.’

It was to Adèle Rougier’s meagre credit that she took no notice of this remark.

On the evening of the second day Adèle Rougier came for bridge. She was an inveterate gambler and a bad player; nevertheless
Hugo continued to lose to her. She gathered up her winnings in a dry red-nailed hand and put them in a small purse of gold mesh. She then turned jerkily to Toni and proffered the same hand.

‘So nice to have met you,’ she said, in the English her governess had taught her. After which Toni had felt herself dismissed.

She loved and mourned her son, who had seemed to her to be as good-humoured and as distracted as he had always been but simultaneously spoilt and diminished. He had accepted her presence as inevitable, but had not seemed particularly pleased to see her. In this she was mistaken. Hugo loved his mother, but was under the influence of his wife. Used to being dominated by a woman, he accepted, perhaps ruefully, that he had made a choice (or that it had been made for him) and that he now took his lead from Dolly, whom he sometimes took to be his parent, a replacement for that original parent who was now so far away. Whatever frustration this state of affairs occasioned Dolly was only visible in her quick bright angry smiles, her fidgeting impatience, and her increased social ambition. The beseeching look of anticipation—‘Love me! Save me!’—was no longer to be seen.

It was consciousness of this last fact that sent Toni off once again to Brussels, two years after her original visit. She was not entirely heartless, and she thought her son might need advice. But once again she was subjected to the company of Adèle Rougier, and a day in the back of the car, this time filled with three fur coats. It was understood that an excursion of this nature was something of a privilege: another was decreed for the following day. This she could hardly
bear to contemplate, but the alternative was to be left in the flat with Annie, who this time struck her as laconic to the point of insolence and somewhat dirty in the mornings. She longed for the peace of Maresfield Gardens, for the discreet company of her daughter, now a quiet and agreeable young woman, whose wedding she must organise. (My parents relieved her of this duty by walking to the Registry Office one sunny Friday morning.) When she got home, after that second disappointing visit, she sank gratefully back onto her own feather pillows and vowed never to travel again. And I know she never did. That was the beginning of Toni’s reclusion; her mind remained active but she aged in body. Perhaps she mourned her son prematurely; perhaps she always had. At any event when he died she was dry-eyed and stoical. She realised, after that disastrous visit to Brussels—belated in every sense—that Dolly had removed Hugo from her, but that Dolly was not perhaps as pleased as she might have been with the exchange. Yet the marriage had lasted; it had even lasted for a respectable number of years, a fact more to Dolly’s credit than to Hugo’s. When he died there was nothing more for Toni to feel. She endured, she continued, but she had become silent, strict; she did not welcome interruptions. She was not pleased when Dolly turned up after the funeral, accompanied by Annie, her fur coat, and several pieces of luggage. It seemed that she was prepared to stay, but where? The top flat which she had once occupied with her mother was no longer empty.

‘There is very little room,’ said Toni moderately, although she was appalled.

‘Annie can sleep in Etty’s room,’ replied Dolly, in a manner that was almost cheerful.

Indeed Dolly was cheerful, a fact which finally antagonised her mother-in-law. From time to time she gave way to explosions of grief which nevertheless had something enthusiastic about them. She was older, of course, more stolid, harsher: she had had to come to terms with change as well as with age. The pallid sister-in-law, of whom she had taken no notice, was now a married woman and a mother. Her mother-in-law was now a grim but not enfeebled old lady, whose censoriousness could be taken for granted. When she died—and that day could not be far distant—Dolly would make over the flat, she decided, brighten it up, maybe sell it and move nearer to town.

But Toni had her own views on the matter. She felt no animus against Dolly: she simply wanted her to disappear. What animus she felt was for Adèle Rougier and the fiasco of the Catholic funeral which she had so insistently arranged and for which she had no doubt paid. Dolly referred to this several times, hoping either to impart comfort or to impress, possibly both. Toni’s response was not what she expected.

‘Let us come to an understanding, Dolly,’ she said. ‘There is no room for you here. In any case I am used to being alone. You had better find somewhere else.’

‘But
Maman chérie
, my resources won’t stretch to it. You know how extravagant Hugo was.’

Toni had not known this, had seen no signs of it when Hugo had lived at home.

‘You can rent a small flat,’ she said. ‘I will help you out
initially. In fact I will make you a small allowance. But it will be small, Dolly. You will have to get rid of your maid.’

‘Annie stays with me,’ said Dolly flatly.

She found a flat off the Edgware Road, in one of those streets which lead into St John’s Wood. Toni never saw it, which was just as well, as the flat was rather spacious, with separate servants’ quarters and a drawing-room large enough to accommodate four tables of bridge. She settled in quite well, but never forgave Toni for what she considered her insolence. She had not been snubbed in so decisive a fashion since she was a girl at school, jeered at because her mother consorted with prostitutes. Ancient social resentments were stirred in her, just as ancient snobberies had been revived in Toni, on whom she was now dependent for her allowance. By mutual agreement they never met, but chose to communicate through my mother, whom Dolly took to visiting quite frequently.

‘Chere Mère,’
said Dolly, screwing up her mouth into a humorous grimace. ‘I’m afraid she’s getting old and intolerant.
Very
difficult. I don’t envy you, Etty.’

Old and intolerant Toni was, but she was still capable of settling her own affairs. Shortly before her death she sold the house in Maresfield Gardens and moved into a small suite in a private hotel. She died quietly in her sleep one night, without giving any trouble. She left her money to my mother, with a sum in trust for myself. Dolly’s allowance was to be paid by the bank on the first Monday of every month.

‘Dear Etty, you deserve every penny of it,’ said Dolly, with a caressing glance at my mother. ‘So devoted. And Jane too.’
This surprised me: my mother had been dutiful but not devoted, whereas I had hardly known my grandmother.

‘As for me,’ said Dolly, ‘I shall just have to be brave, shan’t I?’ She gave a brave laugh. ‘It won’t be easy, but I’ve never been one for indulging in self-pity. Remember what I told you, Jane?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what was that?’

‘Something about singing and dancing.’

‘That’s right. You won’t see me with a frown on my face, despite my difficulties. And I must go to Nice soon, to visit Mother. So many expenses.’ She sighed. ‘Well, this won’t do. Such an out of the way place you live in, Etty. I wonder you don’t move. Jane, are you clever enough to ring for a taxi?’

I considered myself grown-up at the time—I must have been nine or ten—and was therefore discomposed at the suggestion that I might not be up to the task of making a telephone call, I who talked to my friend Marigold Chance for hours.

When I returned to the drawing-room I saw Dolly clasp my mother in a lavish embrace.

‘Dear Etty,’ she said, holding her at arm’s length and contemplating her, head on one side. ‘Funny girl,’ she added. She then took and held her hands for a long and musing moment. There was the merest whisper of paper, so faint as to be barely noticeable, as the cheque was handed over.

I
grew up English and unafraid. My parents’ world was my world: I inherited the long walks, the afternoons of reading, the almost silent company of Miss Lawlor, without surprise, without rebellion, peaceably and comfortably, with a sense of order which I have never recovered. I was happy with my lot, with our modest existence, which I now realise was far from modest by contemporary standards: my father’s work at the bank was secure, while my mother had her own income. Modesty, to me, signified a certain unostentatious prosperity, never indulged, never advertised, and never, ever, mentioned in conversation. I was not aware of money, or of the need to make money. As far as I was concerned I would go to Cambridge, as my father had done, and then something interesting would come along, some job in publishing, which would surely be suitable for someone with my love of books: I thought I had only to advertise this love for the publishers to come running towards me from all sides, with offers of appreciable salaries and agreeable conditions
of work. It will be seen that I had confidence in a world of full employment, one which no longer existed. We were on the threshold of the 1980s and although we knew nothing of what was in store for us, the best years of our lives were over. But at the time we could detect no change; our world, or rather my world, was fixed, ineluctable, of the same order as the rising and the setting of the sun.

Some of this confidence came from the sun itself. We had had two radiant and prolonged summers, so extravagant, so unexpected, so altogether exceptional that they had done something to alter our perceptions of ourselves, as if we had been granted a more favourable situation on the planet. Suddenly people had sought shade, coolness; expeditions to shops were undertaken in the very early morning, while the afternoons were given over to drawn curtains and an uncharacteristic siesta. In Battersea Park, where I walked in the blissful glory of the sun, bodies lay under trees in violent out-flung attitudes, like the peasants in Brueghel’s
Land of Cockaigne
. ‘Don’t go too far,’ my mother would warn me, as I set off on one of my walks. ‘Keep in the shade.’ But I loved that efflorescence and thought the effort of walking negligeable. Sometimes I walked into town, which was not a great distance. I wanted to look at pictures, either in the National Gallery or in the Wallace Collection. This last was a haven of coolness, even of gloom, yet it was deserted, except for discreet knots of American ladies looking at snuff boxes in glass cases. To this day I can retrieve the sensation of walking over the hot gravel of the courtyard, my head hammering from the unforgiving glare, and the sensation of dignity which descended on me as I made my way up the stairs.
Ahead of me were the great Bouchers, masterpieces neglected by most visitors but to me of the same order as the astonishing weather, which, if I turned my head, I could see through the dusty windows. In comparison with the pictures the sun suddenly looked tawdry, exhausted. I remembered the bodies of the young men lying under the trees, dreaming like children in their brief half-hour of liberty, and I turned back to the pictures, to the effortless immaculate soaring of the figures in their spectacular universe. The throbbing in my head died away, as did all bodily sensations, as I stood at the top of the stairs, drowning in blueness.

That is my memory of those summers: the glory of the weather and the refreshment of art. It seemed to me that most of life was mirrored in art, or perhaps that it was the great distinction of art to hold a mirror up to nature, to be an interpreter of phenomena, of situations. It will be seen that my understanding was fairly primitive. But it has remained a resource for me, to search for an analogue in painting for some emotion which I could either not conquer or bear to examine. Later on, of course, I was to find these analogues in music. I never, or rarely, appropriated them from literature, which I was able to study more objectively. Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. Like my parents I read a great deal, sinking into my bed at night with one of the books my father chose for me, but too often distracted by the flushed sky or the solemnity of the advancing night. The nights were short; the mornings dawned brilliant and very early. And then there was another marvellous day to fill.

Like everyone I remember only the summers. I know that
in 1976 the autumn was abrupt and wet, but was somehow of lesser importance than the summer it had succeeded. This propensity to remember the summers of our youth has begun to interest me. I think it is inspired by regret for something which has been lost along the way, since it seems to be a universal feeling. Elderly people remember golden days long past with identical expressions of joy and tenderness, or, more properly speaking, longing. As life proceeds, and the long journey is recognised for what it is, the look that is cast back unconsciously falsifies. That there were winters is a fact which is discarded, seemingly forgotten. And the longing for more summer, more life, intensifies as the dark days wear on, as if light and life have become interchangeable, as perhaps they are.