Slipstream (55 page)

The evening with Iris and John was extremely enjoyable. They’d invited others to dine with us, of whom I only remember Tony Quinton, the philosopher – an old acquaintance of
Kingsley, whom he was very glad to see again. The house was fascinating. The short drive descended to the front door. It was winter, and each time the door opened, dead leaves wafted inside.
They’d reached half-way up the stairs where they lolled amongst small piles of books that were, like the leaves, presumably in transit from one floor to another. The ground-floor rooms, of
which there were several, all contained trays with table legs, upon which teapots, shells of boiled eggs, intractably old pieces of toast or open copies of Dickens were propped against milk jugs.
‘We don’t wash up until we’ve used everything,’ John remarked.

He took me into the garden to show me his birthday present for Iris. We entered a largish greenhouse. If you sneezed, it felt as though a piece of glass would fall discreetly to the ground. At
one end there was a circular tub, about twelve feet in diameter. It was full of black, silent water. ‘Iris loves swimming,’ John explained, ‘so I had this pool built for
her.’ Apart from the black, uninviting water, I worked out that if the gallant Iris got into it, she’d be able to swim precisely two strokes before she reached the other side.
‘What do you think of it?’ His complaisance was such that I had to admire it.

We left the following morning, installed ourselves in the hotel, and went for a beautiful winter walk in Blenheim Park.

This was my last most truly happy time with Kingsley. He was relaxed, affectionate, funny, communicative, said how much he was enjoying being alone with me, and that we should do this sort of
thing regularly. It was like old times – not the breathless beginning but something that held the promise of endurance, of an honest and companionable future. I went to bed feeling lighter
than I had for years.

The next morning we had breakfast in the dining room.
Kingsley had bought
The Times
, and after a few moments’ reading, he handed me a page, and I read that
Victor had died the night before. ‘I’m so sorry, Min.’

The shock was so violent, so horribly unexpected that for a moment I felt stunned. I read the piece again, remembered I was in a public place with people all around me eating breakfast and said
I’d go to our room to ring Victor’s housekeeper.

I don’t know why, but my first thoughts were of her. She must have gone into his room and found him.

‘Oh, Miss Howard! The shock! I’d given Mr Stiebel his dinner and when I put him to bed and was going he called me back and said,“Miss Brandt, I want to thank you for all you
have done for me. You have been wonderful. Wonderful,” Miss Howard, and I never guessed that they would be the last words he would ever say to me. And he was so fond of you!’

When I’d reassured myself that she had people with her, and said how good she’d been, we said goodbye, and I collapsed on the floor by the bed. My dear friend! I remembered going
with him to Covent Garden when they’d carried him to his seat – the last time, I think, that he was able to go – and the time before that, when he’d gone to the theatre and
sat in a box with Dick to see
Hello Dolly
! and the star had sung, ‘Hello, Victor, we’re so glad to see you back . . .’ and how it had pleased him. The extraordinary
unobtrusive courage with which he’d dealt with the awful restrictions multiple sclerosis imposed so that visiting him was a gift to the visitor; his interest in people, in music and books
never waned. I remembered his saying lightly, apropos of nothing that had gone before, ‘One day I shall stop.’ Then I realized that he’d wanted to say goodbye to me and I’d
not responded.

Kingsley was kind about Victor because he knew I’d been fond of him, but I also knew that he’d no idea how much of a loss his death was to me, and I felt that our rapport was too
fragile for me to express it. We went to Oxford to see Catherine and Anthony Storr, the psychiatrist and author, and nothing more was said between us about Victor.

The following week, Mrs Hopkinson opened the session by asking me how the weekend had gone. I started to tell her about the walk in Blenheim, and about Victor dying, and then
without any warning, I was sobbing uncontrollably. It felt like a dam bursting – a great weight of grief pouring from the fathoms out of my heart. Present grief for Victor, past grief either
unacknowledged, or only partly acknowledged until now. I cried for Liz, for my mother, for Cecil, for my father, for Sam, for Charles, for Derek, for Julian, all friends killed in the war, for my
grandfather, for Margaret Jennings, the little girl who’d fallen out of the window when I was nine years old. And I cried again for my mother, for the loss of her love and mine. I must have
cried for the best part of the hour, and during it Mrs Hopkinson sat quietly. She didn’t try to comfort me, or make any attempt to stop me, but gradually, through this swamp of grief, I
recognized her attention and was grateful to the point of love for it.

After that, smoking was no longer the main issue, although it wasn’t dropped. I developed a heavy transference, turning Mrs Hopkinson into my mother or, rather, into the mother I should
have liked to have. For those not cognizant of therapy, transference is a kind of primary cliché;some therapists work with it, some don’t. It’s a condition that people who have
not suffered it tend to dismiss with a more or less kindly patronage, bordering on contempt – rather like gout or piles or hot flushes are often the subject of jokes. In fact, it is one of
the most painful experiences, not least because the subject doesn’t, for some time, understand what is going on. I was a slow learner in this as in almost everything else.

Transference is like being in love – hopelessly so, because it can’t be reciprocated. If the therapist is of the opposite sex, sexual desire may be added to the anguish. Fortunately
I was spared that. It took me weeks to recognize what was going on, and recognition didn’t make it immediately easier. My self-esteem was non-existent. I realized this when Mrs Hopkinson
asked me what was good about me. After a frantic mental search I said I thought I was
reliable. Going home after the session I thought that even this wasn’t true.
I’d not written any fiction since
Mr Wrong
and had instead compiled an anthology,
A Companion for Lovers
, which didn’t count as real writing to me.

Kingsley was bored by his sex therapy and became more sceptical about mine. He resented the status quo, but wasn’t further prepared to make any change. This was when I recognized I
did
want to change. I wanted to understand how I’d become this abject, unfruitful creature.

While all this was going on other things were happening.

Nicola’s first marriage broke up during this time. I’d realized from when I went to Condicote, her home in Gloucestershire, that all was far from well, but those were days when she
didn’t confide in me and I was afraid to ask her outright. But I particularly remember a time when I stayed there and she was in a state of defiant excitement. She wore the same pair of
dilapidated trousers day after day, and when I said something about this she replied, ‘I haven’t got anything else to wear.’ She was painting the kitchen with some help from all
three children. There was a lot of tension in the house – and I noticed that she and Kip spoke to each other as careful strangers.

Shortly after this, Phil rang me up and said Nicola wasn’t well, and that she and Pete were taking her on one of the nature cruises at which Pete used to lecture.

When she returned, having very much enjoyed the cruise, she left Kip. Eventually, he bought her a cottage very near Condicote. There was a divorce and Daniel opted to go with her, and the girls
to stay with their father. But, again, it was clear that she didn’t want me to be closely involved in any of this, and I reflected sadly that, after her childhood, how could I expect that she
would?

One Sunday morning, after we’d seen the Fussells off to America, Kingsley shut the front door and said, ‘I don’t want to live here any more. It’s too bloody cut off. I
want to go back to London.’

I suppose it wasn’t the great shock to me that it immediately
seemed. I’d known that Lemmons would come to an end and that London would be the alternative. I
didn’t in the least want to leave the house or, even more, the garden, but I thought it wasn’t fair for two people to live where one of them didn’t want to. I thought also that if
we
did
move, Kingsley would be happier and therefore so should I. I took the precaution of asking where precisely in London did he want to be? The answer was uncharacteristically clear. He
wanted to be within five minutes’ walk of Hampstead tube station – otherwise he didn’t care what the place was like.

We put Lemmons on the market and Monkey came househunting with me in Hampstead. We had been told by estate agents that Lemmons should fetch about £125,000 and therefore must look at houses
that were under £100,000. There weren’t many houses within the five-minute radius of the tube, and we’d soon seen them all. They were either too expensive, or horrible. Meanwhile,
many people came to view Lemmons, largely out of curiosity to see where Kingsley lived. Eventually, after some false starts, somebody made the right offer. We agreed to drop the price by
£15,000.

Monkey and I found what we thought would be the perfect house in Flask Walk built in the eighteenth century by a man called Gardnor, who’d managed the springs in Well Walk –
Hampstead had once had the same reputation as Cheltenham and Harrogate for its health-giving waters. Because of its age, I employed a well-thought-of surveyor, who said the architraves round the
window on the back of the house required rebuilding but that otherwise there wasn’t much that needed to be done.

So then we moved. Martin’s story in his admirable book
Experience
isn’t quite accurate about this, for he thought I was trying to be a martyr by not using professional movers.
Actually my daughter Nicola, who knew how much I minded leaving, rallied round with the wife of a friend of Sargy’s, Jane Raybould. Jane said, ‘We’ve had a lot of pleasure staying
with you, and we want to do something back.’ I agreed largely because, apart from being
touched by their offer, I really didn’t care as I was so upset to be leaving.
They took it all over – all I had to do was help pack tea chests with books and kitchen equipment. Dan Day-Lewis came to help Monkey move out of his workshop and the barn, where he’d
stored quantities of strange objects he’d bought cheaply to restore one day. We hired skip after skip, and sewing machines, clocks, television sets and old speakers were hurled into it by Dan
and Monkey, while Terry, Jane Raybould’s husband, and Nicola filled her horsebox, which she’d driven down, with furniture. During all this, Kingsley sat in his study, surrounded by
half-empty bottles that he’d been drinking up for weeks, typing his novel, only moving when we had to take his desk away.

The evening before we left I went round the garden by myself. I had little hope that the new owners would do much to look after it. The wife had twice come round the house, and while we were all
in cotton and sandals, she resolutely wore her mink coat and leather boots that reached to her ritzy little knees.

It was a beautiful evening in July, the start of high summer, hot hazy dusk. The grass was tall in the meadow. The small white flowers on the blackberry bushes, where I’d picked the fruit
with Liz, growing softly on their writhing briars, reminded me of medieval embroidery, and I wondered if anybody would pick them. I went round all the trees I’d planted; the cut leaf beech
had died, but all the others were growing well. One more look at everything – the rose garden, the old mulberry whose main branch had rooted itself afresh in the ground where Lucy Snowe, our
little white cat, had had been buried. The path led to the medlar – twisted and malevolent like an Arthur Rackham drawing – then to the ancient useless greenhouse with a gravestone
marking Bonzo, some distant Edwardian pet, outside it, and finally through a door to the courtyard with its overfull skip and the sunflower-coloured lights from the kitchen windows. That was done.
The next day I’d go through the empty rooms, and then that would be done too.

Monkey was moving in with us, but the others would be gone.
Sargy had married earlier that year, a beautiful girl called Frances Carey, who’d been a student of his at
Camberwell. Terry, Dan and Monkey had carted everything and filled the horsebox and a van we’d hired, and early next morning we’d start the move. Mrs Uniacke, Jane, Nicola and I had
packed some eighty tea chests that were filling the hall waiting to be taken in the second load. It seemed amazing that we’d got so far.

The move was over by midday, in time for a picnic lunch in the new house. It was 1978.

Gardnor House was pretty, in fact, and must once have been a charming country residence with gardens and orchards reaching up from what is now Gayton Road to the High Street.
Now it stood marooned on a small triangular piece of land that was overlooked by subsequent building.

It was reputed to be haunted by Lady Gardnor, who, I’d been told, was supposed to have disliked women, so on the first evening I stood in the drawing room and assured her I’d do my
best to look after her house. Its top floor made a nice flat for Mrs Uniacke, who kept a large white rabbit there with the slightly misleading name of Bunny, since he had a ferocious personality.
The house possessed, among others, three particularly large, beautiful rooms, a dining room looking on to the back garden, the drawing room above it and our bedroom above that. I had a study on
that floor and Monkey had a large room on the first floor over the front garden, which ended with a garage whose gates were reputed to have come from Newgate Prison.

The rebuilding of the architraves began that summer – a noisy and dust-encrusted affair. We also rebuilt the kitchen, to make it large enough to eat in and and give it a glass roof for
better light. Kingsley had a study on this floor, which he seemed pleased with. The first week that we were there he announced that he was never going to use the tube as he’d decided that he
hated going in any underground train. He also refused to have any kind of holiday, so I went to stay for a week in France with the Welches and then for
a week in Tuscany with
Woodrow and Verushka Wyatt. This wasn’t a popular move. Kingsley was resentful when I got back, even though I’d arranged for friends to stay while I was away so that he shouldn’t
be alone, which I was beginning to realize frightened him.