Dolly (6 page)

This harmonious state of affairs was not to continue for very long. I am sure that Toni hoped to draft her future son-in-law into residence in Maresfield Gardens, but my mother and my father were to be adamant on this point. ‘Very well,’
she said finally, when this matter was settled. ‘But don’t expect me to visit you. Where did you say? Prince of Wales Drive? Somewhere in south London, isn’t it? Too far for me. But if you have decided …’ She heaved a pathetic sigh. I imagine that at this point she had begun to feel her age. My mother was thirty when she married, which makes Toni seventy-three at the time. She was in good health but moved around very little. My father’s attitude was simple. He saw that no real affection bound Toni to her daughter, and therefore he felt only a very slight affection for Toni. He recognised her for what she was, a selfish and resilient woman. He had disliked the atmosphere at Maresfield Gardens, the hawklike profiles raised enquiringly from the coffee cups. He thought the ambience perfervid, haunted by the ghost of Freud and other Viennese associations. Even the conjunction of the Berggasse and Maresfield Gardens was, he thought, too apt, too prompt, too symbolic to be a mere accident: no good could come of it. He regarded my mother’s innocence as all but miraculous. By comparison Prince of Wales Drive seemed sane, rational, uneventful. They could walk in Battersea Park, which they could see from their windows. And so it was to be. Toni kept her word: she rarely visited them. They, for their part, were enjoined to visit her in Maresfield Gardens. This arrangement continued, at increasingly lengthy intervals, until her death, by which time her legendary indifference to her daughter had reasserted itself.

One visit to us I do remember. I must have been small, watching from a window. I was drawn to the window by the ticking of the cab, a sound which still draws me to the window today. My grandmother stepped heavily from the taxi,
planting one foot in front of her and slowly disengaging the other. She was wearing a bright blue suit which fitted her rather too closely: she had put on weight and was very conscious of it, although she remained an impressive looking woman. She was carrying a cake from some Swiss Cottage bakery, the reason, no doubt, for her increasing girth: she was never to lose her sweet tooth. She raised her head and saw me at the window. Her brief wintry smile hardly disturbed her morose features which were tremendously bedizened with make-up: lipstick, blusher, eye-shadow, all chosen to bring out the blue of her still startling eyes. Her hair was dyed a defiant apricot. She looked as if she owed her appearance to an entire morning spent in front of her dressing-table mirror, and all to see my mother, of whom she was not particularly fond, and the grandchild whom she watched carefully but did not fondle. Whether she had hopes for me or not I never knew, but I think she pitied my mother for her tepid existence, for never having known the hothouse love she had known as a girl in Vienna. At that stage, in her old age, she had come to realise that that love had held an element of parody, even of tragedy; her failure to captivate her father stayed with her, as did the image of Frau Zimmermann, watchful in the background. In the recesses of her infant mind she had always known of their liaison, known it imperfectly, but known nevertheless. Her ultimate lack of fulfilment she attributed rightly to this period in her life.

We visited her, in Maresfield Gardens, after Hugo’s death. She sat in a chair, apparently turned to stone. Her face was thickly powdered, but her lips and eyes were pale: tears,
which we were not to witness, had obliterated all the colours. There was something reproachful in her attitude which I only later came to understand. Hugo’s death had made her not only sad but bitter, as if it were inevitable that the men in her life should let her down. In her heart I think she knew that my mother was the better of her two children, but by then her disappointment was so comprehensive that she expected nothing further in the way of joy or gratification, knowing that in her life she had received only the barest minimum, and regretting the days of her youth and the ways in which she had spent them, or misspent them, hanging hysterically on to her father’s arm, while he made plans to dispose of her. She was a widow who had never enjoyed being a wife, a mother whose favourite child had predeceased her. Slowly her expression changed to one of outrage as she contemplated her fate. I remember that adamantine face, menacing and pale. Although I had very little to do with her, and indeed hardly knew her, although it was not possible to feel for her the glimmerings of something so intimate as affection, I retained a sort of admiration for that hieratic face, that four-square position in the wing chair, that formal, distant, almost cold insistence that we taste the various cakes she had provided for our teatime coffee. I find the idea of her making her lonely way to Swiss Cottage, on what must have been one of the worst days of her life, immensely impressive. And I have no doubt that she dressed carefully for that short journey, and bid acquaintances good morning, and returned their condolences in as steady a voice as usual. The follies of her youth were long gone, its excesses banished for ever. Of her solitude I can hardly bear to think,
although I understand it very well. My own ability to tolerate a solitary life is, I am sure, an hereditary factor: it is the way my grandmother, whose influence on my mother was notable for its absence, lives on in me.

My other grandmother I knew even less, a fact which I did not regret since she seemed, from what I heard of her, to be slightly mad, and may even have been so, for all I know. She was a widow living in South Kensington with two small wire-haired terriers to whom she devoted all her leisure hours. She really should have been a dog breeder rather than a mother, for she felt for her son a mild affection only one degree warmer than indifference, whereas she would actually play games with the dogs, for whom she also bought expensive rubber toys. The dogs were taken out morning and afternoon for an extensive run in Hyde Park, where my tireless grandmother, dressed winter and summer in trousers, a short-sleeved blouse, and an old tweed jacket belonging to her dead husband, threw balls and sticks, shouted instructions and encouragements, and scarcely noticed the seasons changing all around her. The only thing my father seemed to have inherited from her was her love of exercise: he too was impatient unless he had the prospect of a long walk before him.

My Manning grandmother wore an eager religious expression which it was possible to mistake for friendliness. In fact she was meditating on the universal Oneness of things and attended some institution devoted to psychic research and spiritual growth conveniently near her in Queensberry Place. Her religious exercises, which she was fortunately able to pursue while romping with the dogs, consisted of exerting
the power of love, a gospel which she never ceased to proclaim. To love everyone is a noble enterprise; unfortunately it denies one a certain faculty of discrimination. My grandmother loved everyone, whether they liked it or not. In fact very few people were aware of this love since she had very little time for friendship, and in due course knew only the people at the psychic research place, all of them as eager as herself on the occasions on which they were gathered together, and all of them putting in claims for the distinction of total transforming conviction. Very few people visited her, although she was invited out to tea by the more sociable of the believers. On such afternoons she dressed in an archaic navy blue suit, with hard shoulders and box-pleated skirt, which transformed her appearance but did not flatter it. This was a pity for she was quite an attractive woman, with a fluff of gingery hair above a small sharp-featured face. She was the natural version of which my grandmother Toni was the work of art: the same reddish hair, the same blue eyes, the same fine skin which she had allowed to fall into a dozen tiny cracks, like an apple which has been stored too long. The daunting fervour of her expression, allied to her almost total absentmindedness, made her a somewhat enigmatic parent, and indeed she seems to have expected my father to fend for himself from a very young age. There was no other parent in the house; my father liked to say that his father had died in childbirth. In fact Richard Manning had been run over by a car outside South Kensington tube station. My father suffered no damage from this dereliction, and was philosophical about his mother’s shortcomings. Her indifference may even have served him rather well. She provided
him with a satchel when he went to school, with a briefcase when he went to university, and with several items of unwanted furniture when he left home. These pieces of furniture, of uncanny size, were a feature of our life in Prince of Wales Drive, since there was no prospect of anyone paying good money to take them away. One could see why she had found them to be superfluous.

When my mother went to meet her for the first time she was nervous and suffering from a cold. To Eileen Manning, who never suffered from anything, this was a sinister affliction. She surveyed my mother with narrowed eyes.

‘You don’t look very strong,’ she said. ‘You look chesty. Are you chesty?’

‘I’m very fit,’ said my mother, coughing slightly. She had taken a mouthful of scalding tea in her eagerness to please and had swallowed it too quickly.

Eileen Manning’s suspicious look was replaced by her habitual expression of enthusiasm as she tried to expound her psychic gospel. My mother, I am sure, listened politely, her eyes occasionally straying to the man she was to marry as if to reassure herself as to his sanity. Later, when he had taken my mother home, he returned to South Kensington and announced his intention to become engaged.

‘Oh, I don’t think that’s wise, Paul. Not if there’s lung trouble in the family.’

‘Henrietta is perfectly well, Mother.’

‘I doubt that, dear. But you must please yourself, of course.’

She was in absent-minded attendance at the small reception Toni gave after the wedding, no doubt in her box-pleated
suit, but after that was content to receive a weekly telephone call, in the course of which she would enquire, ‘And how’s that poor girl of yours?’

Once a month my father would undertake to visit his mother, combining the visit with one of the long walks he so loved. He would go round Battersea Park, along Cheyne Walk to Pimlico Road, across to Sloane Square, along Sloane Street and into Hyde Park, where he might linger to watch the dogs, and, in winter, the red globe of the setting sun. Then he would leave the park, perhaps regretfully, and present himself at his mother’s flat in Ennismore Gardens for a cup of tea. He doubted whether his mother got much pleasure from these visits, but she received him placidly and reached up to kiss him when he left. I think she was an entirely contented woman, but I have to admit that I never consciously knew her. I think she broke the habit of a lifetime and visited us when I was a baby, but if I registered her presence at all it was only as another face bending over to examine me. These, with an infant’s privilege, I ignored.

By mutual consent she and my mother rarely met; had they done so my mother would have been interrogated on what Eileen Manning was convinced was her progressive deterioration. When Violet Lawlor—part old acquaintance, part domestic relic of her early married life—sent her usual Christmas card in the winter of my parents’ marriage, Eileen Manning, as usual, sent back a card with a postal order tucked inside it. She then performed the one good deed for which my mother knew her, and despatched Violet to Prince of Wales Drive ‘to look after poor Henrietta’. Having thus disposed of nearly everyone she knew she then took the
dogs out for a run. Yet at a mere sixty-five, after a lifetime of healthy exercise, she suffered a fatal heart attack, appropriately enough in the park. It was the barking of the dogs which alerted passers-by, rare at that hour, for it was getting dark. My father was very subdued for a while, yet when my mother pointed out how fitting this death was, how painless the manner of her leaving this life, he cheered up. Death is arbitrary, after all. No one is safe.

Against these fairly unusual backgrounds my parents stand out emblematically, like pale creatures newly liberated from engulfing darkness, slender pillars of English virtue advancing, hand in hand, towards the light of common day. Having effectively divorced themselves from home and family, they felt free to invent their lives, as if they were characters in Dickens. This meant doing the opposite of what they had been brought up to do, living lives of the utmost orderliness and decorum. I felt a painful love for these mild and conscientious parents, whose moderate voices unfitted me for the realities of the world I was to inhabit.

‘The snail’s on the thorn,’ my father would announce, his signal that he was about to go for a walk. And then, politely, ‘Would Jane like to come, do you think?’

I was too young or too small to accompany him, but the formalities had to be observed.

‘I’m afraid I shall need Jane to help me make pastry,’ my mother would inevitably reply.

‘Very well. Then I shall look forward to eating it.’

I never felt excluded from their lives, never witnessed any primal scene, was not encouraged to formulate any family romance, although I was to do this later in the books I wrote
for children and for which I became quite well known. As far as I was concerned my parents were two grown-up children, rather like myself. I longed to preserve their innocence, while my own innocence was as yet unformulated. I resented on their behalf any gross intrusion, any shadow of
louche
adult concerns. Into this category I put both debt and sexuality. I reckoned myself the ideal company for my mother, with the possible addition of my friend Marigold Chance: anything more worldly, I suspected, might damage her. In this conviction I was remarkably prescient. As I say, and try to explain in my stories, children are alive to adult feelings. I mounted guard on my mother, keen to protect her, for no one knew her vulnerability better than I did. My grandmother Ferber I could just allow, for she seemed to keep a respectful, even a mournful, distance. My first misgivings about the impermeability of our world came during that first visit of Dolly and Hugo to our flat. Since Hugo was to die shortly afterwards my feelings of caution, of anxiety, of guardedness, became focused upon Dolly. Yet at that stage Dolly too was innocent, or as innocent as she ever managed to be. I rather think that innocence was not in her nature, yet that this was not entirely her fault. Or maybe it was. I had reason, in later life, to be impressed by the simplicity of her motives, and at the end, of course, she was as disarmed as the rest of us.