At the reception there were fifteen wedding cakes including one topped with a bride and bride, and, for the duration of that hot green garden afternoon with children playing in several languages around us, I sat under a tree with my son and Leander’s mum and dad and allowed a new thought to cross my mind: that all could be well.
It was late June of that same year. My older son Oliver and I met in, as the nonsensical phrase has it, a ‘residential’ part of London where, even with my photophobia and flinching face, I perceived that I would feel like a thistle in a plushy meadow if I pretended to live hereabouts. My son had taken time off work. He is half a foot taller than I am. I love to be in his shadow. He was in a suit. The day was unbreathably hot. I could see he was missing important phone calls.
We were nearing the end of our list of flats for rent. We had squeezed our frames into several highly accoutred provisional and meretricious spaces with nice keen girls. We had viewed eight leather sofas and three very thin tellies. How did I see this? By doing as I’m doing now, to read this through, by pulling up my eyelids’ raw skin, and by making mad faces.
I feel like Mrs Tiggy-winkle with the spikes growing inwards especially over my eyes. I move like Mrs Tiggy-winkle too, tentatively shuffling as though in slippers and very old. I climb upstairs like a child of two.
We had one flat left. We had heard about it only that morning. Over breakfast, Olly’s godfather had told Fram, who is his great friend, that he had just inherited somewhere off the King’s Road, its owner an American artist who had lived for many years in Italy before moving to London in the nineteen-seventies. He painted right up till almost the very end and the last two squiggles of pigment he chose are still sitting on his palette under an inverted toffee tin. Mauve and ochre, the colours of shadow in Rome.
We sat in Olly’s car. I could feel his thin skin not liking the heat of the day. He has hair the colour of the flame on a firelighter packet and slanting green eyes. I was melting like an old cake. We were only just not tearful, like hot children on a birthday.
We shook ourselves down, he clicked shut his car and we ambled to a house that I had not entered since having dinner there thirty years before in the company of my father’s old schoolfriend Simon Raven.
The street was a chasm of heatwave. We pressed one of four bells. Two heavy doors were opened and we stepped into what might as well, that afternoon, have been in its shaded refreshing dinginess, a segment of a palace in Venice.
Oliver, who is formal in his manner and composed of jokes and understatement, said, ‘It’s like your old life, Mummy. Look at all the books.’
I could smell home. Books, linoleum, dust, polish, oil paint, soot, laurel and the very faint note of drains. Edinburgh, Cortona, Karachi, the Hebrides. And now Tite Street.
LENS II: Chapter 1
If I’d stayed at home, would it all have happened? Or is this every runaway’s question when chased down by shame?
It’s certainly a question you might have wanted to ask of my uncle Clement, who, if he’d been able to stay at home at ‘Dunkeld’, my paternal grandparents’ home in Sydenham, or at his and my grandmother’s grace-and-favour house at Windsor Castle, where he was organist and choirmaster at St George’s Chapel, might not have married or become a father. Would his musicality, sheltered, have made him a more sung English composer of the twentieth century? Or would he have chosen, as he did, his own merry means of death as one of the seven Noble Gentlemen of Poverty at St Cross in Winchester? Fewer than a dozen of us went to his funeral at Basingstoke Crem.
Clement’s son, David, one of my only two first cousins, who looks lugubrious and is funny, very handsome in the darker Italian fashion, stepped forward and stuck on Clement’s coffin as it slipped through the curtains the label he had steamed off his daddy’s last bottle of Gordon’s Gin. ‘Mrs Gordon’, Clement called it. For him, not mother’s ruin at all, but quite possibly a mother’s boy’s compensation for that mother’s absence.
Winchester Cathedral rang with voice at his memorial. He paid for his gin by giving maths tuition to the children of takeaway proprietors and late-night shopkeepers, ambitious for their children’s rise up the slippery pole Clement had negotiated by ignoring or perhaps remaining innocent of it. He saw the sad and funny, not the worldly, in the world.
McWilliams do this thing of fading out. They die young and they stay in touch with the aid of telepathy, of not writing letters and certainly not making telephone calls. They tend to eat unhealthily, to be musical and scholarly to the point of dust in their habits, with strong genes for self-effacement, religious faith (C of E in the rest of the world and Episcopalian in Scotland, or converts to Roman Catholicism), medicine and spying. They have been explorers and teachers but mostly they have been naval surgeons, musicians and secret poets. Their habits are gentle and they have a sweet tooth. Almost sickly thin in youth, they may get tubby later. It could in only some few cases be something to do with drink. It is not hard to see why they were only briefly kings of Scotland. My daughter Clementine compares them favourably with that reproductively inefficient animal, the panda. ‘McWilliams are rubbish at dating,’ she says, ‘but pandas are really rubbish at it.’
Clement himself loved the detective stories of Edmund Crispin, King Penguins, of which he had collected almost the entire run, the music of Buxtehude, Wilkie Collins. He knew his Bradshaw intimately, which of course gave him heartbreak as the railways were privatised. He slept from time to time on park benches. He wrote operas for children, preferred tinned fruit, and hummed as though continually about to hatch.
My father was not a drinker. He was a Capstan Full Strength Navy Cut untipped man. He gave up after his stroke, simply smoked seventeen in a row in the hospital and never again. Not that there was long to go. His stroke had hit him while he was walking along reading a Posy Simmonds book in Charlotte Square. Perhaps it was an excess of pleasure that felled him.
Up ahead of Clement and me is my robust Cousin Audrey. A dead ringer for Christine Keeler, Cousin Audrey is a Champagne girl, and I hope she won’t mind if I say that she is now to the north of seventy, in her cloud of fragrance purchased at Jenners, the Queen of Edinburgh department stores, and surrounded by the ghosts of terriers and horses. Cousin Audrey is my mother’s first cousin and is a Young of Young’s Malt Loaf, delicious, healthful and profitable. Young’s Malt Loaf will be remembered by some for its acronym: YOUMA, long since, to Cousin Audrey’s righteous and splendid ire, munched up by United Biscuits, now a mere crumb in Nabisco, which may be just a corner of Nestlé. Cousin Audrey keeps tabs on us all; she is not a McWilliam. McWilliams are mainly socialists and Cousin Audrey, to whom I can’t not, as you will have seen, give her full title, does, energetically, use the telephone. She has graced stages from Pitlochry to London. One of her dearest friends, a Miss Balfour-Melville, she addresses as Miss Balfour-Melville. Miss Rosalind Balfour-Melville will this week be one hundred years old; we are in May 2008. For her birthday present she has requested a new white frock with a lot of wear in it. That’s Old Edinburgh for you.
When Cousin Audrey is puffed out, she declares, ‘Whew! I’m peched.’ When she’s feeling dotty, she says, ‘I know you think I’m up the lum.’ Cousin Audrey is an alumna of a now-defunct Edinburgh school called St Trinnean’s, which is, you understand, not remotely the same as being a girl from St Margaret’s, which is quite distinct from Lansdowne House, George Watson’s Ladies’ College, Heriot’s or St George’s, which as it happens is where I went. St George’s is to the naked eye intensely Scots but to the understanding of mockers of a tubby wearer of its uniform in the nineteen-sixties, almost up-itself English.