Five days later we left the children for the day with a babysitter and of course a list of telephone numbers. We drove to Heathrow and entered the aeroplane in our dark funeral clothes. At the then friendly and rather cosy part of Heathrow where one used to embark for Scotland were further mourners including my cousin Frances and Jamie Fergusson. Frances had been evacuated as a child to the house where we now lived in Oxford. She had known it as the house of one family. We knew it divided up by a developer; our kitchen was the old butler’s pantry. Frances had particularly disliked my first novel and wrote me a long letter explaining why, resting her case on the reasonable enough complaint that there are sufficiently many nasty people in the world without writing about more. She also very much disliked the business of my drawing attention to myself by being published. Nonetheless, she made a gay-hearted and kind companion during the long cold exhausting farce that was to be the day of my father’s funeral. In the morning I had rung a florist and asked for a big bunch of mixed anemones to be placed on his grave, with a note saying, ‘To Daddy, with all my love from Candy’. Once in the air, we felt all set for this impossible event, Daddy’s last ever slipping out of the room. Considering that he was only just sixty-one, what a lot he did with his life. He’d meant to die. He hated falling to bits.
We sat with our thoughts. Jamie is perfect at these occasions and knows to tease me but not to make me cry. He had written a personal obituary of my father for the Independent in addition to the official art-historical one.
Over the border, something started not to go quite right. Our captain came on to the public address system. Lovely, reassuring doctor’s voice. We were in the middle of a blizzard that had suddenly burst over Scotland and we would have to divert to Glasgow.
The funeral was in Edinburgh.
It was a bumpy flight with much flashing in the air and sudden darkness at the windows. I wondered if Daddy had anything to do with it. When at last we got out at Glasgow, we were faced with really only one practical possibility, to hire a cab and screech along the M8 motorway. We got out of Glasgow’s tentacular ring-road system, with its tall noticeboards reminding you in twinkly lights not to take a drink or smoke dope at the wheel. The motorway was completely blocked and the visibility was, exactly as my father would have liked it, minimal. There was a good smoky fog. Obviously he was going to slip away while the going was good. We had already overshot the time for the commencement of the funeral service, which was to be led by the Bishop of Edinburgh, the Father Holloway of my childhood. We drove cautiously — no screeching possible — over what was nothing less than thick black ice. No one was crying and I knew that if I started to, everyone might.
On the radio, Radio Scotland reiterated news of the sudden descent of a blizzard across the central belt. I was trying to think when exactly Daddy would be put into the earth. Frances was in the front seat, Jamie, Fram and I in the back. Blizzard lights over the road kept us aware that we were in ferocious rather than merely dim conditions.
As I had so often done as a child, I leaned my head against the window and listened to its hum. I cleaned the window with my cold fingers. There, to the left, reversed out as though in a print or a linocut, was a black horse galloping across a white field, with above it, on a hill, the thorny crown of Falkland Palace. Somehow, we had got lost. I felt that the horse was white, the field was black; the message was that my father was free. His contrary soul, his dear soul was free.
We arrived in time for polite drinks at Edinburgh College of Art and I was cornered by a girl who told me, at length, how dreadful it was for her that my father was dead. I agreed but couldn’t do much more to comfort her. She had clearly enjoyed a unique relationship with my father. That’s the charm problem. The last mourners left. Edinburgh College of Art’s staff annexe seemed, once empty, a cheerless place to have travelled so far not to see the last of one’s remaining parent. Jamie and Fram suggested that despite the thick snow, we go and find the grave at the Highland Kirk of the Greyfriars where Daddy is buried close by Robert Adam. He is memorialised in the Flodden Wall of Scottish Heroes. We set off almost skiing downhill in our thin wet shoes.
Lightly clad for a southern funeral as we were, we slithered and slopped and froze. But at last we did find the fresh earth, snow-blanketed now. And we found my cheerful anemones with their card, ‘To Dad, from Mandi’. The ‘i’ had a special dot on it like a Polo mint.
Most things about this vexing day would have been to Daddy’s taste.
In Edinburgh, which, to me, has always been an hospitable city, we could not find even a cup of tea. We returned to the airport, flew back to Heathrow, said our goodbyes and Fram and I returned home to Oxford where my older children had for the first and last time comprehensively destroyed their bedroom, very possibly egged on by their grandfather who was making such a spree of it.
When I undressed the baby he had a horrible welt, open and sore, on his left-hand side, the size and shape of an adult man’s thumb. I enquired of the babysitter what it might be. ‘It’s impetigo,’ she said. ‘I have it all the time.’
Apart from — and it is a very considerable ‘apart from’—those weekends when Fram was with his parents and I therefore corroborating to myself the unlikeability my mother-in-law sensed in me, we were often very happy. I have been close in the mind to no one unrelated to me by blood as I have been to Fram and in all other parts of our lives that remains true also. Every day when he dropped me at the market to choose our dinner while he drove off to work, I thought, ‘This is how it is and this is how I wish it to be.’ I worked hard and loved it.
Our joy was later increased by the presence of Clementine, who had come to the Dragon School in Oxford as she had outgrown her school in Hampshire. This thrilled me for all the obvious reasons, and also because it had been Fram’s idea and indicated trust between our two households, Quentin and Annabel’s and ours. Clementine proved to be a fire-breathing dragon. Soon she was in the scholarship class and schoolmates with exotic names were sending her Valentine messages. Her literary tastes grew. She loved A House for Mr Biswas, finding the episode where no brown stockings are available very poignant, and reading A Suitable Boy round and round.
Fram was working too hard and on too many fronts and I knew that he was often exhausted beyond endurance. I also knew — how could I not? — that there was something abnormal about my relationship with alcohol. When we entertained, I did not drink, but often disgraced myself when making the coffee. When we went out, I hardly ever drank. If I did do so, there would be a terrible script waiting just inside my larynx to tell itself. Fram would write down the awful things I said and read them to me the next day. It was like listening to another person. I had a bad person within me whom I mistakenly identified with my dead mother. What neither of us realised was the toll this was taking on Fram, not by nature immune to his mother’s melancholy.
The years rolled round and I produced my books. I lived by reviewing, which was congenial and constructive. I loved the chewiness of the process, miss it greatly in blindness. The children were flourishing. Fram had discovered a passion for being a patron of interesting architecture. Clementine disliked the boarding school she had moved on to, but, when offered the opportunity to leave it, decided entirely characteristically to stick with the devil she knew. Oliver was growing taller and taller. He played athletics and rugby for his school, in spite of his slenderness. We did not yet have a word for the clumsiness that ailed Minoo, but Minoo had a word for almost everything else.