Reviewing him now, having not seen him for a while, I feel more sympathy for him than I did. That is to say that I feel some sympathy, when before I felt none at all. At that time, when we were staying with him, he must have been worried that his whole self-ennobling adventure would implode, but it was part of his personality not to admit or ever discuss his fears. He would have seen that as weakness and loss of control. In fact, his main problem was his total inability to relax control under any circumstances. I would go as far as to say that his nature was the most controlling I have ever encountered. This made him not only impossible to entertain, or to be entertained by, but also lonely and desolate, for he could not admit to anyone, least of all his wife, that events were slipping out of his grasp. I had known him as a difficult and rather ill-tempered man, who always found any conversation not centred on him, hard to follow and harder still to contribute to. But I had not fully understood the extent of his mania before we arrived at his house, tired from the long drive, at tea time on that summer Friday. We were normal people. All we wanted was to be shown our room, to have a hot bath and generally to recover in order, like the model guests we were, to come downstairs refreshed, changed and ready to eat, or talk about, whatever our hosts might throw at us.
It was not to be. First, apparently, we had to sit and listen to a history of the house and when Jennifer suggested that we might be more in the mood for this lesson after we had rested, Tarquin replied that he did not judge us yet as ‘ready’ to see the rooms he had prepared. Naturally, my almost overpowering instinct was to tell him to piss off and drive straight back to London. But looking at Jennifer’s tired and harassed face, I suspected this was an option taken by more than one guest before now, so in pity and to Bridget’s relief, I allowed myself to be led into the library, to listen to the lecture like a good boy.
‘The thing is,’ said Tarquin, getting into his interminable stride, ‘you have to understand that when Sir Richard decided to rebuild in eighteen twenty-four, he wanted both to be in the height of fashion, but at the same time not to lose the sense of historicity that his ancient blood demanded.’ He took a deep breath and looked at us as if waiting for a response though what this might be I could not fathom.
‘So that’s why he chose Gothic?’ I volunteered eventually, wondering if we were ever going to be offered sustenance. I had arrived wanting a cup of tea, but after twenty minutes of this I was ready for whisky, neat and in a pint pot.
Tarquin shook his head. ‘No. Not exactly.’ The smugness of his tone was enough to make one seize a chair and smash it over his head, like a cowboy in a Mack Sennett comedy. ‘That was why he chose Sir Charles Barry as his architect. Barry was still young then. This was before the old Houses of Parliament burned down. He was known as a designer of churches and a restorer of ancient monuments, not a maker of country houses. To have a servant of God as the master of the works gave the whole project a gravitas that ensured respect from his neighbours.’
‘Because he built it in Gothic,’ I suggested. I wasn’t going to give up easily and my boredom was making me angry. But I felt this was as challenging as I could be while still pretending to listen to Tarquin with respect. In other words I was a living lie.
‘No!’ he spoke, this time, with a harsh edge to the word. ‘The style of the building is not the issue! The style is not important! I am talking of the spiritual background with which he approached the design.’
‘In Gothic,’ I murmured.
‘Can I go to the loo? I’m bursting,’ said Bridget and, as so often in the company of women, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that myself.
‘Of course,’ said Jennifer. ‘I’ll show you your room.’ With a sharp glance at her husband she led the way out, stopping to allow us to take up our cases in the hall. During all of this Tarquin was so annoyed at having his dissertation interrupted that he remained, still and sulking, in the library, watching us in glowering silence as we made our way up the imperial, double staircase.
‘God Almighty.’ I fell backwards on to the bed, with a loud sigh, which I rather hoped the retreating Jennifer had caught as she crossed the landing. If she did, it cannot have been a novel experience. ‘I don’t think I can manage a weekend of this.’ The bed itself was a large four-poster, at first sight grand and imposing, but in fact Edwardian export, cheap and clumsily carved, and clearly purchased by the Montagus for the overall effect, not for any intrinsic quality, presumably because they couldn’t afford the real McCoy. I had already noticed that the whole house was like this, impressive at a glance but disappointing to any further study, like a lovely stage set to be admired from the stalls but not explored too closely. In fact, the whole thing was a stage set, on which Tarquin could play out his personal fantasies of high-born and literate grace. Oi vey.
That night, matters did not improve as we gathered to eat in the gloomy and under-furnished dining room, Bridget shivering beneath her gauzy shawl. A huge Jacobethan table dominated the centre of the room and as we came in I heard Tarquin remonstrate that the places had all been laid at one end, instead of the four of us being ranged around the vast board like the characters in an Addams Family film. That, or a BBC period drama where a combination of modern prejudice and complete ignorance frequently obliges their fictionalised upper classes to adopt inexplicable customs. ‘If you’re going to give us a sermon, I’d prefer to listen and not just watch your lips move,’ said Jennifer, which brought the exchange to an end. We sat, Tarquin, needless to say, as our master at the head. He glanced at us, toying with a bottle of white wine on a coaster in front of him, a slight smile tweaking at the corners of his mouth. ‘Give them some of that wine,’ Jennifer murmured as she brought round plates of ethnic-looking broth.
‘I’m not sure they deserve it,’ said Tarquin, continuing to favour us with his twinkling, quirky gaze. ‘For better or worse, I’ve chosen this. It’s a fairly unusual Sauvignon, crisp but zingy at the same time, which I tend only to use on very special occasions. Is this one? I can’t decide.’
‘Oh, just give them some fucking wine,’ said Jennifer, voicing accurately my own unspoken response. She sat down heavily on her husband’s left, opposite Bridget, with me on her other side, and started to drink her soup. Tarquin did not answer her. Clearly, these rumblings of revolution had been getting more frequent of late. Like an unimaginative king, he was bewildered by the challenge to his authority and could not quite gauge the appropriate response. For a moment he sat in still and sober silence. Then he stood and poured the hallowed liquid into our glasses.
As he did so, I caught Jennifer’s eye for a moment but she looked away, not quite ready to acknowledge, as one does in just such a glance, that she was trapped in a ghastly marriage to a crashing bore. I sympathised with her decision, not least because I didn’t, for a moment, believe that I knew all the facts. There are many factors in a marriage or in any cohabiting arrangement, and just because someone gets too cross at dinner parties, or hates your best friend, or cannot tell an anecdote to save their life, these are not necessarily faults that outweigh the benefits of the union. That said, Marriage to a Controller is one of the hardest kinds of relationship for the outside witness to understand.
Genuine controllers are anti-life, killers of energy, living fire blankets that smother all endeavour. For a start, they are always unhappy on anyone’s territory but their own. They cannot enjoy any party they are not giving. They cannot relax as guests in a public place, because that would involve gratitude and gratitude is, to them, a sign of weakness. But they are intolerable as hosts, especially in restaurants, where their manner to waiters and fellow diners alike poisons the atmosphere. They cannot admire anyone who is more successful than they are. They cannot enjoy the friends of their partner because these strangers may not agree to accept them for the superior being they are. But since they have no friends themselves, it means they must regard any human gathering with suspicion. They cannot praise, because praise affirms the worth of the person to whom it is given and the process of controlling is built on the suppression of any self-worth in whomever they are with. They cannot learn, because learning first demands an acknowledgement that the teacher knows more than they, which they cannot give on any subject. Above all, they are boring. Boring beyond imagining. Boring to the point of madness. Yet I have known women to espouse and move in with such men, clever, interesting women, good-looking, witty women, hard-working and successful women, who have allowed themselves to be taken in and dominated by these tedious, mediocre bullies. Why? Is it sexy to be controlled? Is it safe? What?