Life Worth Living (37 page)

Hard as it was for my sisters and myself, for our parents the death of their only son was a catastrophe. Mummy has still not got over it, and Daddy, who was positive thing to come out of all that pain was that each of us started to appreciate the others even more than we had before. We now understood how finite one’s time on earth is, and by the time Daddy died on 7 December, no one had left anything unsaid or undone that needed saying or doing.

This was especially poignant where Daddy and I were concerned. He had been making an effort for years to show that he was as satisfied with me as he was with his other three children, but now he was intent on leaving no room for doubt. He explained that any mistakes that had been made had been honest ones, intended to spare me pain, not to inflict it, and
started telling me that he loved me. It was such a comfort, not only to know before he died, that my father really had loved me, but to hear him say it.

The last time I saw my father was when I was leaving Jamaica after Mickey’s funeral. ‘I’ll bring the children to see you in February,’ I said.

‘Please,’ he said.

‘What did you say?’ I asked. It was difficult to understand him as the Parkinson’s made his speech slurred.

‘Please,’ he repeated clearly, a smile lighting up his face.

Had I been asked to choose the last words in a relationship that had been so troubled for so many years, I could not have come up with anything better.

M
y faith in God was restored through unhurried reflection followed by a bizarre incident that could have come straight out of a bad novel or a movie, but which was nevertheless instrumental in reinforcing many of my basic beliefs about good and evil. I have always been a great exponent of the ‘Lord helps those who help themselves’, and that God gives us the means to fight evil with good, destruction with construction. What I was about to face would show me how very right I was.

Contrary as that view was to my brother’s brand of Christianity, once I began practising in earnest its usefulness cleared up many of the doubts Mickey’s death had triggered off. The first inkling I had that something was afoot came when I returned to England in August 1994, looking forward to picking up the pieces of my daily life. The nanny had been quite happy when I left, and I had asked Rosebud, a black West Indian who had befriended me a few years before, to look out for her and the children while I was away. Jesús Mora, Kari Lai and my cousin Enrique Ziadie, who had recently returned from the United States to live in London, were also keeping an eye on things.

Now the nanny was in a state of surly rebellion. No matter what I asked her to do, she had some smart-alecy riposte. I ignored her behaviour for a few weeks, thinking that she needed a period of adjustment now that the boss had returned, in both spirit and body. I was only too aware that she had been ‘manning the fort’ while Mickey had been so ill, and doubtless this had suited her better than playing second fiddle to me, for she was a dominant personality. I certainly wasn’t about to engage in a power struggle with any employee.

Soon I noticed that the nanny had taken to speaking to the children in an unnecessarily harsh manner, and that she was constantly on their backs, controlling the life out of them. ‘They need to explore,’ I said to her. ‘They’re only a year and a half. This whole world is a fascinating new adventure for them. Let them touch and feel, as long as they’re not breaking things or endangering themselves.’

‘You mus’ wan’ me to spoil them,’ she snapped, her lower lip jutting out.

‘Just do as I ask.’

‘Who you think you is?’

‘I know who I am. I also know who you are. They are my children, and they will be brought up according to my precepts, not yours.’

‘If you don’t like the way I take care of them, I can leave.’

‘That’s fine by me. I’d sooner you went than stayed and ruined them.’

For a while things improved. Then, early in October, my mother telephoned to say, ‘Your father’s been taken to Medical Associates. He’s in intensive care. The doctors don’t expect him to live, but he’s not dying just yet.’

There had been previous false alarms over the years.

‘Please keep me posted and give me enough notice so I can come and say goodbye to him,’ I told Mummy.

That same day, Eugenie and I spoke about formalising Misha’s adoption. I made no attempt to keep my voice down – I had nothing to hide, so it never entered my head that the nanny might overhear anything I was saying, let alone that it would matter if she did. Within days of those two telephone conversations, the nanny was back to her defiant self. Finally, I said to her, ‘This is ludicrous. I’m not paying you to be rude to me. You will either do as you’re asked, without further lip, or I’ll be putting you back on a plane to the West Indies as soon as the crisis with my father is over. I’ve had quite enough of your nonsense.’

That initiated a round of abuse the like of which I had not heard since I’d lived in Jamaica. ‘I hate you. You white people are all the same. Black is beautiful and white is corrupting,’ she said. She repeated this like a mantra, day in, day out, for the next month.

Rosebud’s behaviour also seemed odd, but I did not connect that with what was happening to the nanny – only a paranoiac could have suspected what was really going on behind the scenes. Rosebud had stoked up the nanny’s latent prejudice against ‘white oppressors’. This was easy enough to do, for Rosebud was a highly intelligent woman, while the nanny was an uneducated country woman. All Rosebud needed to do was to play upon the nanny’s prejudices and hopes, attitudes with which Rosebud was only too familiar, since her own background was only one cut above the nanny’s.

Rosebud promised the nanny a job in America when she, Rosebud, moved there, which she has never done. This was a masterly touch, for every West Indian of no education or sophistication knows with the certainty of scientific fact that the streets of America are paved with gold, and that a lot of it will rub off on the soles of their feet as soon as they land at JFK Airport.

Blissfully ignorant of the intrigue taking place behind my back, I turned my attention to doing up the house in the country. The nanny’s behaviour became so intolerable that I contacted the Spanish Convent in Kensington and got them to send me an au pair, whom I hired from Sunday 27 November.

‘You will be going back to the West Indies on Sunday 27 November,’ I informed the nanny, taking care not to tell her that I had replaced her. ‘I have never been so disappointed in any employee in my life. I have always managed to have good relations with anyone who worked for me.’

Her response was to walk out on Friday 18 November. I would subsequently learn that she went straight to Rosebud’s studio flat, where she remained until Rosebud made the mistake of taking the nanny to the cinema with friends she had met through me. Of course, they spilled the beans as soon as they discovered the full extent of her double dealing. All this, however, lay in the future, and I was completely in the dark about Rosebud’s relationship with the nanny. Stunned by the nanny’s behaviour, I expressed my outrage to Rosebud, who made a point of inviting herself to dinner even as she was harbouring the nanny.

‘If you’re worried about who’ll take care of the boys if you have to go to Jamaica, I will,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ I replied, so annoyed with the situation that I did not tell her that I had already employed someone else. ‘That’s very thoughtful of you.’

As I would subsequently learn from Rosebud, her plan was to seize my children once I was out of the country, and, by orchestrating a campaign to have the children taken away from me, to keep Dima, with whom she had fallen in love as soon as she saw him, for herself, and to give Misha to her childless sister. This seems extraordinary but bizarre things do tend to happen to me.

The first warning I had that whatever was going on was serious, came on Tuesday 6 December when I received a letter from Westminster Social Services stating that they had received a complaint relating to the children, and that they were therefore coming to see me the next day. I contacted my solicitor immediately.

‘This is preposterous,’ I told him. ‘Someone is again using the children to pressurise me, doubtless into dropping one of my lawsuits. The question is, which case is it?’

It was not the first time something like this had happened. The year before, someone connected with the
Sunday
Express
lawsuit had asked a neighbour who was a local councillor on Westminster City Council to express doubts to the social services about my ability to parent children on the dubious grounds that I had no qualifications in parenting skills. Westminster Social Services had not taken the complaint seriously, accepting the word of the health visitor that the children were well cared for and that I was a good and loving mother.

Four times that day I telephoned to speak to the social services. Important people seldom fail to return calls, but minor bureaucrats, it seems, lack either the will or the courtesy to do so.

The following morning, my mother phoned to say that Daddy had died. This was unexpected, as he had been making such a good recovery that he had been out of intensive care for over a week, and there had even been talk of sending him home. Alas, he had suddenly taken a turn for the worse two days before. I
telephoned to cancel the council’s visit. ‘My father died this morning.’

‘How unfortunate,’ the girl said. ‘We can reschedule for next week. I’ll write and give you a date.’

‘That will not be possible. I shall be away.’

‘We have a statutory right to see you to discuss the children,’ she said.

‘There’s no way that anyone has a valid complaint about my children and I’ll be at my father’s funeral in Jamaica. I don’t suppose you have a statutory right to follow me there, do you?’

‘No. That we don’t,’ she said.

‘Good, because it is my and my solicitor’s belief that you are being used as an instrument of harassment in the same way as you were last year.’

‘That is not so. That I can confirm,’ she said.

‘I don’t see how you can confirm that, unless you know all the facts, which, obviously, you can’t.’

‘But I know the informant,’ she said. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that she’s a sensible, fair-minded person and that she’s speaking the truth.’

‘Your ability to arrive at just decisions strikes me as severely impaired,’ I said. ‘You have just told someone you do not know, and have not had a conversation with for more than ninety seconds, that you had made up your mind about her before you had met or even spoken to her. My understanding of arriving at fair decisions is that one keeps an open mind until all the evidence is in. If you’re as biased as you’ve just indicated, you can bet your bottom dollar I won’t be letting you within a hundred yards of any child of mine.’

‘We can force you to see us. I’ll be in touch again after I’ve spoken to our lawyers,’ she said.

‘I have said all I intend to say to you, now or ever. If you wish to get in touch with me again, you may do so through my lawyers.’ I gave her the details.

I took off for Jamaica a few days later to attend Daddy’s funeral. So peeved was I with the way Rosebud had been behaving that I did not let her know Daddy had died or that I was leaving. My every instinct told me to distance myself from her, and I can only say I am deeply grateful that I listened to my inner voice. But for that, I would have found myself in an even bigger mess than I did, and one which was not so retrievable.

I returned from Jamaica the week before Christmas to discover that letters were passing back and forth between my lawyer and Westminster City Council’s legal department. They refused to tell my lawyer what the complaints were or who had made
them, showing a shocking disregard for my human rights and the very principles of the law they were seeking to hide behind.

My lawyer asked them, ‘How can anyone defend herself if she is not told what she is defending herself against?’

The Social Services continued to write to me directly despite having been requested not to by my lawyer and myself, and trying to make appointments in London when they knew I was in the country. My lawyer and I were surprised by the Council’s tactics and attitude, which were unprofessional, discourteous, recalcitrant and intimidatory, to say the least. I cannot say I was worried, for they didn’t have one thing to pin on me. I was therefore rather surprised in January when my lawyer rang me in the country to say, ‘They’ve applied to the family court for an assessment order. They are also disputing the adoptions. The informant claims you didn’t adopt the children in Russia, but smuggled them out illegally after buying them. I told them I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous, but they’re adamant.’

I was flabbergasted. Everything was above board, and by this time, Misha’s adoption had been processed. The children were not even British, so the British courts had no jurisdiction over the adoptions, which were matters purely for the Russian and Jamaican authorities, both of which recognised them.

‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ my lawyer said. ‘As long as you don’t allow Westminster Social Services across your threshold you’ll be fine. We’ll have to oppose the assessment order, for that grants them access, and if their behaviour so far is anything to go by, they’ll twist, turn and fabricate nothing into something once they have you and the children in their clutches. I don’t know what’s going on, Georgie, but I can tell you, I don’t like it one bit. Something is seriously amiss here, and my advice to you is to speak to no one about this, no one at all. I wouldn’t believe the people I’ve been dealing with if they told me the time of day, but one thing I am sure of, and that is that they’re telling the truth when they say that a friend of yours is behind this.’

But which ‘friend’?

‘Did you ever see
Gaslight
, that movie with Ingrid Bergman, where her husband tries to send her mad by psychological warfare?’ he asked. ‘This reminds me of it. Someone who knows you well is playing the most monstrous game. They’re not only trying to destroy you in the eyes of Westminster Social Services, they’re also trying to destroy you psychologically.’

I battened down the hatches. The only friends who then knew anything at all about what was going on were Jesús Mora, Anna, Lady Brocklebank, Patricia Harris and Geraldine de Sancha. Jesús provided moral support, while the three ladies supported me not only morally but practically, by swearing affidavits. Anna and Patricia provided a comprehensive picture of me as a mother and of how happy and well cared for the children were. Geraldine also attested to how one of the parties to one of my lawsuits had once before asked her to lie about me to the social services before we had even met.

My lawyer is not a specialist in child law, so he turned the case over to Charles Buss, a capable, intelligent, charming and decent lawyer in his firm. From the word go Charles handled the matter, and me, with expertise. By this time I was frantic with anxiety lest anyone make a mistake and aid the opposition’s case. Shortly before Christmas, Rosebud rang to arrange an exchange of presents. Isabel, the au pair, answered the telephone.

‘You have a new nanny,’ Rosebud said to me accusingly.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I hope she has good references and you aren’t jeopardising the boys’ safety.’

‘Thanks for your concern.’ Her desire to control really had been overstepping the boundaries of acceptable behaviour lately. ‘I will remind you I’m not some little airhead and you are not my husband.’