Walking in the Shade (22 page)

T
HE FLAT WAS IN
W
ARWICK
R
OAD, A SINGULARLY UGLY STREET
, where lorries thundered all day and most of the night. It consisted of a large kitchen, a very large living room, and upstairs two decent bedrooms and two small ones. A ‘maisonette'. This was the first place I could call mine, of all the many rooms, flats, houses I had lived in. It was all brown wood and cream paint, twenty years later to be the last word in chic, but then the very essence of dowdy provincialism. I could not have lived with it. I painted it white, all of it, and that took two and a half months. I balanced on ladders, and windowsills, on contraptions of ladders and chairs and planks, even over stairwells: I now shudder to think of what I did. A painter dropping in from downstairs, hearing that this female was usurping his place in the economy, looked at the paint rollers, just invented, and said no decent workman would use such rubbish. ‘No one can do a good job with rollers.'
Experts
.

The furniture that came with the flat was quite awful. I painted some of it. I put up cheap but pretty curtains. I dyed the ancient carpet green. A friend told me the other day that when she came into the flat and saw I had a black cover on the bed she was shocked. But it was red, surely? I remember dyeing a ‘brocade' bedcover dark red. At first I took one of the tiny rooms as a bedroom, but then when Jack ditched me I moved downstairs, and the big living room was where I slept, worked,
lived
.

When I went into this flat or ‘maisonette', which was really like a little house, was my approach much different from someone conquering a bit of wilderness? This flat was
mine
. I was not renting a corner in someone else's home. We put our mark on new houses, flats, with curtains, colours, furniture, but I did not have the money for all that. What I hung at the windows was not what I would have chosen. It was the dazzling skin of white over every inch of the walls that was my mark. I had thought my kitchen was mine—blue linoleum floor, white woodwork, a red wallpaper—but Jack stood in it, smiling, and said, ‘What a colour box! You share more than you know with my wife. She's got the same wallpaper in her kitchen.' In those days there wasn't so much choice as now, not hundreds of possible kitchen wallpapers, so this was not really so surprising. But deflating, yes.

I could not have afforded this flat without letting a room, at least when I began. The rent was very low, but no one could let such rooms these days, even in the provinces. There were merely adequate beds, dressing tables, and wardrobes; painted board floors, everything bright and cheap. The bathroom and lavatory were shared. Peter had one of the big rooms. There was a succession of tenants: I had entered that world of the lost, the lonely, the misfits, the waifs and strays that drift from one let room to another in big cities. It was a nasty experience. It didn't help that I was a youngish woman, by myself. My highest social point as a landlady was when a couple of minor diplomats from the French Embassy took a big room and a small one. They were charming, affectionate in the caressing French man-to-woman way, and that was certainly good for my morale. They brought me flowers, offered to do all kinds of little jobs I found difficult, like moving heavy furniture. They were good to Peter. They were fascists—I mean, real ones. This was when the French were fighting the rearguard action in Vietnam, and they called the Vietnamese little brown scared bunnies. The two handsome young men staged a rabbit hunt through the four rooms upstairs, frightening Peter because they were violent and vicious, though they were making a joke of it. They were anti-Semitic, in a conventional way. They complained about the black people in the streets: ‘They should go back where they came from.' So depressing was this experience of letting rooms that after a few months I decided I would chance it and live on what came in, hoping it would be enough. It was, more or less.

Peter was not happy. He had done well at his first school, had enjoyed it, or seemed to, and when it came to choosing the next school, I thought, Well, why not stay with what has worked well up till now? Most of the children from the junior school moved up to its senior school, which was next door, near Notting Hill Gate. Peter at once became sullen and miserable and was at the bottom of the class. Then he said the headmaster had beaten him. No one had ever so much as smacked him before. I went to see the headmaster, who was an unpleasant little bully. He said, Spare the rod, spoil the child, and called Peter ‘Lessing the Blessing'. I knew that Peter was earning—far from the last time in his life—punishments for being my son. The children of the successful can have a hard time of it. The worst thing about this man was his cold, sarcastic, cutting voice, the voice which, when I was a child, shrivelled me up. He made drawling envious remarks about my books. There followed two unsuccessful schools. I thought that this most gregarious child was suffering from being so much of the time alone with me; he still did not sleep until nine or ten, still woke at five or six. He went to a school as a weekly boarder, coming home at weekends, but he hated it. He hated Warwick Road, as much as I did. During the time I had lodgers he was resentful and suspicious of them. He was used to a household with a lively family atmosphere—Joan's—and now he had to be quiet for fear of disturbing these strangers who were in his home. I made a mistake and refused to buy a television, though he begged for one. Bad enough, I thought, the ‘comics' which he read for hours every day. So he used to go after school to friends' houses to watch their television. We became engaged in a battle of wills on this and it seems on every other issue. I knew that what he needed was a father. When Gottfried dropped him, just like that, and he was so unhappy, I made a point of creating a picture of Gottfried as a brave, heroic figure fighting for the poor and dispossessed. This was hardly the truth, but I believed it would be bad for the child to know too much about the failures of communism. I made up stories about how he—Peter—and Gottfried tackled all kinds of difficult and dangerous situations, from solving housing problems in slum areas to fighting landlords (this was the time of the landlord Rachman whose name is still synonymous with the wicked exploitation of tenants) or routing whole divisions of Nazi soldiers. Later, in his teens, when Peter went to visit Gottfried, he found that his father was vilifying me in every way he could and that he had been doing so for years. This is not at all uncommon, where one partner in a failed marriage, usually the woman but not always, builds up a ‘positive' and flattering portrait of the absent one, only to discover that he, or she, is being made to look a villain to the children.

How to make better this bad situation? Meanwhile what saved us both was the Eichners, there in East Grinstead, in their old farmhouse among the rocks, and the other children there, a real ordinary family, mother, father, and the children, and it did something to balance me, who lived without a husband—much rarer than today—this unconventional mother, this writing mother, and he was at the age when children are most in love with respectability and the commonplace. The Eichners took their own children and visiting children on all kinds of trips, over Britain and abroad, to France, Spain, and Peter went too.

At the Eichners', Peter was part of an instructive effort. Fred Eichner was a bit of a genius. He had invented something he called plastic foam, in two forms: one, blocks of substance full of minute bubbles, like sponges; the other, globules in various sizes. He had a small factory. He thought the stuff could be used in packing and by florists. As this caravan of adults and children travelled around and about Britain, Fred Eichner was trying to get some business or bank or forward-looking financier to back him, but when I knew him he constantly failed. Perhaps in the end he succeeded.

The oldest son, Michael Eichner, was Peter's friend, and he came to London and they went about together. I took Peter on holidays, once to Spain for a month in the summer, and he loved it, but I didn't, much.

There was a child in the flat downstairs for a while, a boy Peter's age. The parents hoped the children would be friends, as parents so often do, but they did not like each other. One day this happened: I had started Peter off on a stamp album; we bought stamps, sent for stamps, he swapped stamps. The little boy downstairs took the album and stole half the stamps. Peter was miserable, in that frantic resentful way of children who feel themselves trapped by circumstances. I asked the mother to get the stamps back for Peter, but all she said was: ‘Poor little boy'—meaning her son. Peter was hurt by the injustice of it, and I felt an only too familiar cold discouragement—that so often things went wrong for him and I could not put them right.

I will leave this theme here. Women who have brought up a son without a father will know how difficult it is, and those without the experience will have no idea of it. One may easily describe a single dramatic event—like a traveller arriving at the door with a present for Peter from his father, a plastic whale, for instance, but there was no word from his father, no letter, nothing. One may describe the pain of that for the child, his bewilderment and the mother's anger, but not the day-in, day-out slog of it all, trying to be what is impossible, a father as well as a mother.

When Jack finally left me, we were in Paris. He was going to some hospital abroad somewhere. I knew he had arranged it to break with me. We both knew this was the end but were saying things like: ‘Well, it's only six months.' He was off to the airport, but he went with me to the ticket office at the station, where I would buy my ticket back to London. We embraced. He left. I stood immobilised, tears flooding. The young man at the ticket window made sympathetic noises. No queue. Seeing I had a packet of Gitanes in my hand, he nipped out from his little office, put a cigarette in my mouth, lit it, clicked his tongue, Tsk-tsk, patted me, said ‘
Pauvre petite
' several times, and nipped back to serve a customer. When I finally was able to ask for a ticket, he said love was a very serious matter, but cheer up, I'd find another lover soon.

It was very bad. The ‘affair,' which had lasted four years, was in fact a marriage, more of one than either of my two legal marriages. I had been uncooked, raw, not involved with more than a small part of myself. But with this man, it had been all or nothing. How absurd that was: he had never ever said he would marry me, made any promises. And yet I had been committed to him. This was the most serious love in my life. So little did he understand how it was for me that he turned up later, three times in all, the last being in the seventies, to say that since we had done so well, we should start again. And with a look at the bed. That was where we understood each other….But surely in a good many other ways too? In
Under My Skin
, I describe leaving two small children, and I earned criticism for not going into what I felt about it. It seemed to me obvious that I was bound to be unhappy and any intelligent reader would understand that without ritual beatings of the breast. Now I feel the same. There is no one who hasn't suffered over love at some time, and so it should be enough to say that being thrown over by this man was bad for me. It was the worst. I was unhappy for a long time. Men fell in love with me, but it was no good, I could not care for them. And then I did something foolish, after misguided reflection. My two marriages I did not think of as having been chosen by me: the first was because of the approach of war, always as good as a marriage broker, the second was a political marriage. My great love, with Jack, had ended badly. Why did I not do as people have been doing for centuries—choose a man for compatibility, similarity of tastes and ideas (at that time these had to include politics)? Among the men interested in me was one who could not have fitted the bill better, as well as being amiable with Peter, who liked him. We embarked on an affair. This was a bad experience for him. He was in love with me, but seriously, and I had to bring the thing to an end. I felt suffocated by him. There was no rational reason, and I have never understood it. We'd meet, with pleasure, talk, walk, go for a meal, I found him delightful—and then it would begin, an irritable need to escape, get away; and in bed it was the same, though on the face of it there was nothing wrong. I couldn't breathe. It had never happened to me before, and it hasn't happened since. I was shocked at myself for letting him in for such pain, because he was badly hurt by it.

 

And now my mother: the cruel story continues. She had been four years in London, that Elysium about which she had been dreaming for all the years of her exile, and she had spent them in a dreary little house, looking after yet another old man, who was not even her relative but my father's. She had more than once come to Joan's house to be with Peter while I was away. All this time she was saying, ‘All I want is to be of use to my children.' When I left Joan's to get my own place, she suggested—without much confidence—that she should come and live in it with me. ‘You need help with Peter.' I did, most desperately, but not from her. She went to see Mrs. Sussman, to get her to make me see reason. Mrs. Sussman said, in a variety of conventional phrases, that young people need to live their own lives. Afterwards my mother complained that Mrs. Sussman was a Roman Catholic. I did not know what to say. She could have said that Mrs. Sussman was Jewish, that she was not English, was the very essence of European culture, was subjecting me to exotic un-British influences like Jung and Freud. But that she was a Roman Catholic? I knew there was nothing I could say that my mother would respond to, or even hear.

By now Peter was finding the Eichners', that paradise for children, more attractive than my mother's outings. I tried to suggest that a very energetic nine-year-old boy was bound to find a place full of children of various ages more interesting than the company of adults.