Running to Paradise (18 page)

In
the New Year we can decide what’s best to do. As I told you last night, I consider the only answer is to get rid of the lease on 3 Cheyne Square and move to the country. You’ve always liked gardening and country life, and you would manage to get much more hunting in: such a move would, incidentally, benefit your health.

Let
me have your view on the above as soon as possible.

Meanwhile,
I will confirm with Father that I am taking the girls there for Christmas.

Yours,

Algy

*

3 Cheyne Square, Chelsea — 19th December 1933

This
afternoon I saw Barny. We met by chance in Royal Avenue in the pouring rain. I’d just come out of the dress-maker’s and was looking for a cab; he was standing under the lampost holding an umbrella and looking lost.

‘
Hullo,’ I said.

‘
Hullo,’ he said and then we were walking together through the rain. It was only three o’clock but it was so dark the lights were on in all the houses.

‘
I was thinking,’ he said, ‘of going to Battersea Dogs Home; would you like to come too?’

‘
Alright,’ I said, and so we went.

Inside
the Home it was warm and rather smelly and the noise was terrific. We hardly spoke, just wandered about looking in the cages. Then we stopped in front of one in which crouched a small, black collie. His head rested miserably on his paws, each one tipped with a minute dash of white as though they’d been dipped in a jug of cream; his eyes were the saddest I’ve ever seen. Above his door a notice read, ‘Raffles, found on the canal bank with a stone tied round his neck’. We stood there for a minute or two just looking. Then Barny said, ‘Shall I give him you for Christmas?’ I thought of all the complications: of Algy sulking at his club; of the children; the servants; the mess I was in.

‘
Yes,’ I said.

‘
He’s about four months old by his teeth, and not house-trained of course,’ the lady at the desk said, ‘but a fine little fellow all the same.’

Outside
on the pavement we stood together, jostled by people clutching their dripping umbrellas, Raffles jerking at the end of a piece of string, ecstatic at his sudden release.

‘
D’you want to come back to tea?’ I asked.

‘
Yes, please,’ he said, so we hailed a cab. Inside Raffles jumped on the seat between us, his soggy paws slithering on the upholstery. He lifted his face for a kiss, then jumped down and peed against Barny’s leg.

‘
It’s what I deserve,’ Barny said. ‘The animal shows discrimination.’

Vera
opened the front door. ‘Oh, Madam, what ever have you got there?’ she said as Raffles dashed across the hall and into the library, leaving a trail of muddy footprints.

‘
Is she referring to me or the canine?’ Barny whispered in my ear.

Later,
Raffles ensconced in the servants’ hall, a bone between his paws, surrounded by a sycophantic group which included Nanny and the girls, Barny said, ‘Can I see her just this once: my daughter?’

‘
But why should you want to?’ I said, ‘Why?’

‘
I just do,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’ So we went upstairs to the night nursery, where Sophia lay on her back in her cot, blowing bubbles, her green-brown eyes squinting at the light, her long, thin, pink fingers clutching the enveloping blanket.

‘
What did the matador say?’ Barny asked. Was he very, very angry?’

‘
He behaved like a gentleman,’ I said, ‘but I nearly died.’ He reached into the cot and took Sophia’s hand. She turned her head and gave him a long, unwinking stare.

‘Will you tell her one day,’ he said, ‘who her father was?’

‘
No,’ I said, ‘why should I?’ He didn’t reply, but bent down and kissed Sophia on the forehead.

‘
We shan’t know one another, then,’ he said to her as though she were already adult. ‘What a pity, we might have got on.’

She
stared at him a little longer, then her lids began to droop and she slept. We crept out of the room and downstairs.

‘
I must go now,’ he said. ‘I’m dining with the Big White Chief and I leave for Mexico on Thursday. Thank you for letting me see her; may I send her a present?’

‘
If you like,’ I said. ‘If you really want to.’

Then
he put his arms round me and kissed me long and hard. ‘Goodbye then, little thing, look after Sophia and the dog, won’t you? Don’t fret too much for the matador, there are plenty more like him in the sea, and remember to keep the Red Flag flying.’

Then
he ran downstairs and I heard him calling goodnight to Vera. The front door slammed; I heard Vera’s footsteps going down the back stairs to the basement and after that — silence.

3
Cheyne Square, Chelsea — 21st December 1933

Another
pompous, idiotic letter from Algy. Has Daphne finally driven him round the bend? The accusations pour from his pen daily now; it’s not me who needs the doctor. He’s found out about Raffles and says the animal must be instantly returned to Battersea Dogs Home; if not, he will be shot. Who, one wonders, will do the shooting? He doesn’t specify — Daphne perhaps? Meanwhile, Raffles sleeps on my bed and has become the idol of the nursery.

This
afternoon I and a tall, earnest, bespectacled youth, newly down from Cambridge, distributed Labour pamphlets in the World’s End. During tea in a Lyons Tea Shop, he told me how he hoped one day to become Prime Minister! When we parted, he squeezed me on the shoulder and said, ‘I can’t tell you how much I admire your pluck Mrs C.’ Silly, I suppose, but nice all the same.

To
Amberley on Friday for Christmas; Sophia, Nanny and me plus Raffles. Pa says: ‘The house is full of Ruskies, darling, but you won’t mind that, will you?’

Ann
and Evie don’t want to go to Father’s at Redhill. ‘It’s horrid there,’ Ann says, ‘and there’s nothing to do except play boring word games with Aunt Anthea and listen to Grandpa Charterhouse snoring.’

Algy
has been complaining about me to Ma. Dr S prescribes bromide; if that don’t slow me down, nothing will, he says.

*

From the
Daily
Echo
, Saturday, 23rd December 1933.

Journalist and man-about-town, Barny Elliott, son of the poet, H. A. Elliott, is pictured here boarding the SS
California
at Tilbury yesterday en route for Mexico. Mr Elliott told our reporter he wished to study this fascinating country at first hand and hopes to gather enough material for a book on the subject.

*

Amberley — Boxing Day 1933

It
’s quiet by the library fire. Only the ticking of the grandfather clock nags at the silence. Natasha ‘rests’ upstairs, everyone else shooting, and here I sit with my bottle of bromide, ‘poor little Char’, who’s fucked up her marriage. I can’t go back to Algy now, it’s too late and he doesn’t want me anyway. Will he marry Daphne? Shall I run away to Mexico, or just go down to the river and jump in?

B
’s promised present to Sophia arrived. A box from Hamleys, inside a lettuce and inside that a white, furry rabbit with pink eyes. ‘What an extraordinary present,’ says Pa, snorting into his champagne, but Sophia likes it: she laughs when the lettuce opens and pokes her long finger into the rabbit’s eye.

The
Russians wept on Christmas Day and all got very tight; I got tight too; but didn’t weep. Natasha says I need to be fulfilled. ‘Does Pa fulfil you?’ I asked.

‘
Of course not,’ she said, ‘but I love him just the same.’ I don’t think I’ll write this diary any more. In fact, on New Year’s Eve I’ll put it on Pa’s bonfire. I wish I could do the same to the year 1933...

11

Again, she didn’t. The 1933 diary was not consigned to Pa’s bonfire, but survived all the many moves of Char’s later years. The story it had to tell was entirely new to me and to be truthful came as a considerable shock. It also begged a great many questions, not the least of which was did Sophia know Algy had not been her father? Had Char kept her promise never to tell her, and was Barny Elliott the love of her life or merely a catalyst?

I
decided to ask Sophia to dinner, feeling oddly annoyed that after all these years it was me, of all people, who should be the one to tell her about her parentage. I never doubted, by the way, that I should. I prepared the meal with great care: beef bourguignon, followed by lemon sorbet, her favourites, I knew. When everything was ready, too tense to sit and wait for her arrival, I watched from the kitchen window for her blue Metro to appear in the car park below, my hands absurdly sticky with perspiration. In the event, she arrived twenty minutes late, on foot and in a temper, having had to wait half an hour for a bus at Hyde Park Corner. ‘The bloody car’s in dock,’ she said as I followed her into the kitchen. ‘Why do you have to live such miles from anywhere?’

During
the meal, which she ate with relish, I found myself every now and again trying to trace those others, the poet and his son, in her features. She had their eyes, certainly: large, green, cat’s eyes, flecked with brown. The white skin too, perhaps, and her hair, now streaked with grey, in youth had been black as a crow’s feather. I remembered how years ago, when I first knew her, she’d frightened me a little: she’d seemed so powerful, forthright and uncompromising; one knew without a doubt she would never tell you what you’d like to hear, but only what she believed was the truth.

‘
Guy, poppet, aren’t we a bit
distrait
this evening? For the last five minutes you haven’t listened to a word I’ve said, and you’ve got that vacant look in the eye. What’s up — Mum’s past beginning to give you the gyp?’

I
cut myself a small piece of Brie and placed it carefully on a Bath Oliver biscuit. ‘There is something, actually, but let’s wait till we’ve finished the meal, then we can go into the other room and have some of your brandy.’ (She’d brought me back a bottle of Courvoisier from Brussels.) ‘And I’ll tell you.’

‘
I knew there was.’ She sounded triumphant. ‘From the moment I saw your face peering down at me from the kitchen window; you looked like an anxious school girl.’

Huffily
I began to stack the plates and put out coffee cups; she could be damned annoying at times. She came up behind me and stuck her tongue in my ear; it was warm, wet and it tickled, it also excited me in a way that, at that moment, I had no wish to be excited. ‘Come on, dish the dirt. What have you discovered about my Mum?’ I turned to find the cat’s eyes alight with laughter, and seemed to hear that other voice from long ago: ‘That’s a rather childish game, isn’t it, can anyone join in?’

In
silence we carried our coffee and the brandy into the sitting room. It was a warm evening, the big window open on to the slow-moving river, the scent of cherry blossom mixed with petrol and a dash of tar wafted up from the tidily ‘landscaped’ garden that surrounded the concrete garage boxes belonging to the flats. I poured two liberal brandies and we sat down side by side on the sofa. With hands that shook a little, I picked up Char’s diary for 1933. ‘Have you ever seen this before? It was in your mother’s trunk.’

‘
I don’t think so,’ she said, snatching it from me and riffling through the pages. ‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t know Mum ever kept a proper diary after she’d grown up. What fun! It’s the year of my birth too.’ Brandy glass in her hand, she began to read avidly; a child immersed in its comic.

‘
Sophia,’ I said desperately, ‘have you ever considered the possibility that Algy might not be your father?’ Her eyes were still travelling down the page, open, I noticed, for some time in January.

‘
I know he wasn’t,’ she said, and I was at once relieved and overcome with a ridiculous sense of anticlimax: I was not, after all, it seemed, to be the bearer of earth-shaking news.

‘
Do you,’ I asked, ‘know who he was?’

‘
Barny Elliott,’ she said. ‘I still have the white rabbit he gave me: it’s lost its eyes and its lettuce is a bit moth-eaten, but otherwise—’

‘
Never mind all that,’ I said crossly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before, you must have known how important it was.’

‘
I don’t see why it was important to you, you never—’

‘
Of course it was.’

‘
Anyway, if Mum had wanted you to know she’d have told you. You see, she was one of those women who seem to be rather like the female spider: they view all men as potential fathers to their children—’

‘
Oh, don’t be silly.’

‘
It’s perfectly true. It happened over and over again. Mum would fancy herself madly in love with some guy; would be, I suppose, until that is, she produced their child; after that she had no further use for them. I realise I’m being much too simplistic, but that’s roughly how it was.’

‘
Why d’ you always have to be so damned cynical about your mother? Apart from all else, doesn’t it mean anything to you that you’re the granddaughter of one of the great English poets—’

‘
Oh, don’t be so pompous.’

We
were silent for a minute, then, ‘How did you find out about your father?’ I asked.

Sophia
lit another cigarette and took a sip of brandy. ‘By mistake, if you really want to know,’ she said. ‘I was fifteen at the time. It was when Mum and George were still living in Camberley and I was staying with them for part of my school holidays. I had a great friend then called Nina Barrington. Nina and I used to go out together, and one Saturday afternoon two guys picked us up in the local cinema. After the programme was over they asked us for a drink. We agreed, of course, and off we all went to the local hotel. However, after a couple of gin and oranges in the posh cocktail bar, Nina and I came to the conclusion that our escorts were a bit of a bore and no way did we want to spend the evening with them. We therefore put our normal escape plan into action — we were old hands at this lark, you see — which consisted of nipping off to the Ladies and simply not coming back.

‘
Unfortunately, just as we were on our way out of the bar, rather on the giggly side, both of us being unused to gin, who should we bump slap into, but bloody George; at that period very much into his role of heavy step-father. He immediately seized me by the arm and to my acute embarrassment more or less frogmarched me out to the car, shouting that I was behaving like a drunken tart and if he had his way he’d put me over his knee and beat the living daylights out of me. Not unnaturally, by this time I too was in a blazing temper. When we got back to the house we found Mum stirring the soup, a cigarette in her mouth and a glass of gin and French conveniently placed on a table beside her. George pushed me through the door. “This child will go the way of her wretched father if something’s not done about her pronto,” he roared. “She’s drunk.”

‘
“Don’t bring Daddy into it,” I shrieked. “And if you’re talking about bad examples, if anyone’s to blame it’s you and Mum.”

‘
In the ensuing scuffle, in which Mum hit me in the face, I seized her by the hair and George had to separate us. I forgot what he’d said about my father until much later. By the time I did, Mum and I had made it up, and I asked her what George had meant. At first she refused to come clean, but in the end she told me, insisting I promise never to let on that I knew.’

‘
What a perfectly awful way to find out,’ I said, genuinely shocked. ‘It must have been fearfully traumatic.’

‘
It was, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I seem to remember I even cried.’ She ran her long fingers through her hair and squinted at me through a cloud of smoke. ‘But later I began to get interested. Then we did H. A. Elliott’s poems for A-level Eng Lit. Wasn’t that funny?’

‘
I suppose so,’ I said, not thinking so at all. ‘But why, if it was such a secret, did Char tell George? He’d be bound to blab it all over the place.’

‘
He did,’ she said, ‘when I was younger. He used to shout when goaded beyond endurance by Mum, that I had what he referred to as “tainted blood”.’

‘
The bastard,’ I said, gripping my brandy glass, ‘the old bastard.’

‘
I’m the bastard, ducky, not poor old George,’ she said. ‘But I think in a way Mum was rather proud of her affair with Barny Elliott; somehow it became romanticised in her mind and ceased to be the rather squalid going-off-the-rails of a bored society bitch which in reality it must have been.’

‘
Sophia!’ This time I really was shocked. ‘How can you say such a thing? It wasn’t like that at all.’

‘
Mum used to tell me I was conceived in a warehouse in Wapping; does it say that in there?’ And she tapped the diary. ‘A nice twist to an old theme, don’t you agree? So amusing to fuck in a warehouse, darling—’

‘
IT WAS NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL,’ I shouted, then realised suddenly she was on the verge of tears. ‘Sophia, love, just read the diary, that’s all, just read it.’

Later,
when we’d made love and she lay beside me, her head resting on my shoulder, I asked her about Barny Elliott.

‘
I believe he saw me once when I was a baby. He was killed in a plane crash a couple of years after I was born. He worked for a news agency and was on his way to cover the war in Abyssinia. I’ve got his obituary from the
Times
somewhere: it says he was a “fine journalist and a fearless seeker after truth”. Funny, I don’t even know what he looked like.’

‘
Let’s go to sleep,’ I said. ‘We have to be up early in the morning.’

*

A week or so later I paid another visit to Aunty Phyll; she greeted me with enthusiasm. ‘Where ever have you been dear? I thought you’d deserted me. The home help gave me a pot of Gentleman’s Relish last Christmas and I’ve made a few sandwiches. I do hope you like it.’

‘
My favourite,’ I said. Actually I had never tasted the stuff before: there are, I’m afraid, an awful lot of gaps in my education, or so Char used to tell me. Something was different about the place. At first, I couldn’t think what it was, then realised, no reggae music. Instead a frenzied commentator shouted above the roar of racing motor cars.

‘
New lodgers,’ said Aunty Phyll, as she struggled up the stairs. ‘They work at night and watch the box all day; I preferred the reggae.’

The
Gentleman’s Relish turned out to be delicious and so was the tea. I decided to broach the delicate subject of Sophia’s birth. ‘Barny Elliott,’ said Aunty Phyll surprisingly, ‘was a rather remarkable young man. Ronnie always said he was the right person for Char. He captured all of her, d’you see; her mind and her body. But he had a fatal weakness,’ and she raised an imaginary tankard to her lips.

‘
You surprise me,’ I said. ‘Not about the fatal weakness, that I knew, but I thought he would have been looked on with disapproval by Char’s family.’

‘
He was mostly. He came from a different world d’you see, and of course Algy loathed him.’

‘
You knew him, then. From Char’s diary I thought—’

‘
He stayed with us at Angmering. He was desperately unhappy and very much in love with Char. I never told her I’d met him. He made me promise I wouldn’t.’

‘B
ut I don’t see—’

‘
Char convalesced with us in the May of the year Sophia was born — ‘33 it was, I think. I don’t know if you’re aware of the circumstances?’

‘
I can guess, but her diary’s not specific.’

‘
I’m not surprised,’ and Aunty Phyll’ s voice took on a slightly acid quality. ‘Well, the truth was that when she discovered herself to be expecting Barny’s child — she realised Algy would know at once it wasn’t his, she’d refused to sleep with him since the birth of Evelyn — she completely lost her head. Her only idea seems to have been to get rid of the baby. Instead, however, of telling someone like that frightful friend of hers, Perdita Grant, who would have been able to produce some expensive Harley Street abortionist, she dosed herself with every quack remedy from quinine to neat gin, and when that didn’t work, got herself filthy drunk, climbed into a hot bath and started poking about with a knitting needle.’

‘
Oh my God,’ I said.

‘
Oh God, it was. Luckily for her and Sophia, she left the bathroom door unlocked: that marvellous Nanny of theirs happened to be passing, heard rather odd noises, dashed in and saved the day. But of course Char was frightfully ill afterwards.’

‘
Do you think,’ I said slowly, ‘she didn’t really want to get rid of the baby, but merely gain sympathy?’

‘
I think so,’ said Aunty Phyll briskly, ‘and of course she did.’