Romany and Tom (37 page)

The next few months went all too quickly. I looked at everything with a new eye. The store cupboard was stacked with tins of soup and spaghetti, the local dairy coaxed into thinking my husband needed lots of eggs and sympathy, the best blue taffeta counterpane folded in tissue paper and a cotton one put in its place. Every garment was dry-cleaned, every sock darned and every button sewn on as if he were to suffer a great siege.

Rehearsals started in the cold early months of 1950. She confessed ‘the leave-taking that bleak February afternoon was awful’ and she was bitterly homesick for the first three weeks, but she soon grew to love the work and the routines; and the view out over the foggy river and the fields from the big white Georgian house where she lived among other actors, two miles from the theatre, fired her with a galvanising romantic enthusiasm. In June, midway through the season, Ken had ‘tired of his tinned diet and solitary life’ and travelled up to join her. He stayed for three months, even though she was still often rehearsing all day and acting all night. When work called him back to London in September, she stayed on to finish the season alone. And then, on 28 October, shattered but elated, she finally headed back to London herself. She wrote:

Oh, the excitement of seeing my little black-and-white mews cottage again, with its red window boxes and little tub trees! The delight of not having to go out in the evening, of just sitting by the fire, of looking in all my cupboards and finding things I’d forgotten! And above all, the companionship of my sorely tried husband, who had never once complained, but who never wants to eat stewing steak or kippers again!

I don’t doubt that she was happy to get home to the quiet comforts of her husband and the fireside after such a tumultuous and exhausting year, but it’s also clear the whole adventure had been deeply fulfilling on a profound and potentially life-changing level. ‘The most marvellous experience I ever hope to have’ is how she reflects on it in her written memories; it was also how she spoke of it in later years to me, when we’d talk about it sometimes if my dad was not around, and she could relax and not feel judged. It’s not hard to see how she thrived on the unrivalled attention it brought and the heart-stopping thrill of it all; it was what she had perhaps always dreamed of ever since that first day recording a broadcast with her father. Certainly the life of a housewife in a little mews cottage in west London could not have been more different. And then, ten months later, their first child, Simon – my eldest half-brother – was born, and everything changed.

‘Were you and Ken both keen for kids?’ I asked, as we carried on walking by the river that same evening in Oxford.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Although at the time I think Ken was more concerned about getting called up for the Korean War.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He was carrying a
gas mask
wherever he went. He was quite convinced war was around the corner. So he said we
ought
to have one. Just in case.’ She gave a gloomy laugh. ‘Not sure if you can call that romantic or not.’

Two swans cruised up to the bank, their necks poised, droplets of water resting on their furled wings.

‘Why do you laugh?’

She stopped to look at the river. ‘Did I ever tell you about our honeymoon?’

‘No.’

‘We went to Florence, Ken and I. Took a plane. We had to fly via Switzerland; it was very different back then. We stayed in a small hotel near the river. Very pretty, it was. Windows that opened right out on to the city, and that
view
. All very E. M. Forster.’ She let out a little laugh through her nose. ‘But to be brutal about it, that was about as romantic as it got.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sex, darling,’ she said crisply. ‘Or lack of.’

The swans had lost interest and had pedalled back into the middle of the stream. The shadows from the buildings loomed on to the surface of the water.

‘But that’s what honeymoons are for!’

‘You would have thought so, wouldn’t you. But no. I think we must have seen the inside and outside of every single church and duomo in the whole place. My feet ached. And the little guide book and everything. Renaissance this, Renaissance that. Beautiful, of course, but, well . . .’ She trailed off.

A man passed us wheeling his bike, cycle clips pegging his trousers to his ankles.

‘Ken was in heaven, of course,’ she said. We walked a little further and up on to the footbridge. ‘And I made such a fool of myself at Stratford.’

‘How?’

‘I didn’t get half the jokes. I’d been married for twelve months but had no idea why the audience all laughed at Paul Hardwick’s line “Hard all night”. I actually asked what it meant in front of a number of people.’

‘You didn’t!’

‘I did.’

We stood laughing. It wasn’t often that she was like this – forthcoming and confiding, and I felt close to her, like she was letting her guard down for a moment. Mingling. Gossipy.

‘What about before Ken? There must have been others,’ I asked, as we headed back.

‘Oh, yes. A whole string of them during the war. Pilot officers on leave or suffering fatigue – that sort of thing. I was a Wren of course. I nearly followed one back to New Zealand! Mother had to talk me down. She was always telling me I had a tendency to go
off at the deep end
about everything. And before that, when I was eighteen, I went to an old girls’ school reunion at the Craiglands Hotel and fell for a thirty-four-year-old married man called Reggie. He was very good about it. But it was all very chaste. All of it. All of them. Kisses and cuddles. That was as far as it went in 1942. Not like it is today.’

I’ve tried to picture her arriving at Brian and Elspet’s New Year’s Day party in 1957, aged thirty-two, and what she was thinking as she pushed through the hallway of people with a drink in one hand. I talked to Elspet, who became my godmother, over lunch not long after my dad died, and she painted it in simple strokes. Close friends with my mum since meeting at RADA in 1945, she said, ‘Romany hadn’t been happy. Life wasn’t very exciting. She loved the children to bits – the triplets were
adorable
– and Richard [the name she gave to Ken – as many did – after his pen name Richard Findlater] was such a
nice
man, very bright, but she wanted – how should I say it – more
pizzazz
. It had all got rather sterile. Perhaps she wasn’t even aware of it.’

‘But then Tommy wasn’t very happy either,’ Brian had interjected. (Elspet had always been my mum’s advocate, and Brian my dad’s. It was odd to think they’d each known one of my parents separately since the mid-forties, and then circumstance had brought the four of them together in the mid-fifties.)

‘How so?’ I asked, half knowing the story already, but wanting to hear Brian say it.

‘He was married as well. June, her name was; we never saw her. He’d married her right after the war. They had a flat in Blackheath. She had a condition. Awful business.’

I pressed him. ‘What sort of thing?’

‘Nephritis, by all accounts. To do with the kidneys. Couldn’t have children, or so we were led to believe. Often bedridden.’

I pictured my parents both there at the party, each already in their early thirties, almost six years before I was born. On the one hand there was so much going for each of them: my mum with the family, a celebrated husband and a new career as a journalist; my dad as a bandleader at Quaglino’s on the cusp of glittering success. But on the other, they must have felt as if there was so little: each adrift in awkward, idling, passionless relationships, fettered and unfulfilled.

Were they really on a collision course?

Chapter 37

As the weeks and months went by at the care home, my mum’s hallucinations got worse. She was convinced there was a rifleman on the roof outside her room, and would sit back from the window or lie on her bed to keep out of the way. One morning a carer found her with her shoes off in front of her small pink basin trying to splash little cupped handfuls of water on to her bare feet. When asked what she was doing, she said, ‘Can’t you see them? My feet are covered in wasps.’ And before long, Tom had changed from the smart lover appearing through the curtains to a skeleton, sometimes under the bed or sometimes in the chair as she woke.

She lost sense of day and night. Often she dozed and got herself into bed during the afternoons only to fall heavily asleep, and then found herself wide awake in the middle of the night. The night staff would find her wandering the corridors, using the handrails as a guide, as a mountaineer uses ropes, but then often she’d try to break into a determined run, which was all the stranger as during the day she could only shuffle unsteadily from chair to bed. One night it was said she burst into another resident’s room – up on the first floor – and was all set to wrestle her from the mattress, convinced Tom was under the sheets beside her. How she got upstairs no one was sure. They didn’t like to give her sedatives unless it was completely necessary, but sometimes it was the only way to keep her under control, and she’d zone out in her room for twenty-four hours, and then be calmer.

Yet in the midst of it all she had brief periods of great tranquillity and lucidity where random parts of her memory were sharp and her sense of humour undimmed, and I hoped as I pushed the door open on a visit that I’d catch her on a good day.

Leafing through some old photographs one morning I asked her for her strongest memory of my dad. The skin on her face was furrowed as though a fork had been pressed into clay or plasticine, her eyes grey-blue and gauzy. She opened her mouth to speak and moved her hands together under the blanket over her knees. Her face lit up. ‘He was very
loving
,’ she said, half girlish and fond, half cheeky. ‘So
alive
. And
very imaginitive
.’

She twinkled, as if she’d said something naughty.

Something must have detonated inside her during those opening few months of 1957. ‘It’s a deep pool,’ my dad had said on the eve of their first tryst in March at his flat in Blackheath over tea and gin. She had instigated it, phoning to suggest an ‘interview’ for the
Evening Standard
with ‘one of London’s top young bandleaders’, but the subtext was abundantly clear.

I have no memories of being told much about the affair while I was growing up. In fact, when I discovered, only recently, that it had started as early as 1957, my first thought was one of shock that it had gone on so long; they weren’t married until late October 1962, six weeks before I was born; that’s an affair lasting five and a half years. How was it sustained? Who knew? Why so long?

When my dad died, Roly handed me some souvenirs that had been kept in his loft since my parents’ move from the London flat to the Bristol care home. He hadn’t chosen to look at them himself. There was a banana crate of Tilly’s Romany china wrapped in newspaper, archived folders and cuttings, and the old grey cardboard fifties Harrods gift box with its Festival of Britain design, in which I knew my mum kept her special keepsakes and mementoes. I filled the boot and drove them back to London on a rainswept afternoon.

In the gift box I found a sealed envelope marked
Memories – Very Private – For Tom Only
. The handwriting was my mum’s. I looked at it unopened for a few days, my mind full of unanswered questions. Was it right to read it while my mum was still alive? Did her cognitive collapse make it OK? Was I allowed to open it, as my dad was now dead and I was his son? Should some time elapse first? If so, how long? On a long walk one afternoon I decided if I were to have any final appreciation and understanding of my mum before she died too, I needed to know the full story. What was the point in saving it? To only regret opening it when it was too late?

I remember how the old sealed envelope sat lightly in my hands, the paper softened by years of storage among other papers. The dried-out gummed edge was puckered. Sitting at my desk at the top of the house where we lived at the time, in the lavender twilight, I slid a small brown kitchen knife under the envelope’s edge and carefully cut a clean straight line. Why I was being so careful, I wasn’t sure. It felt as if I were picking a lock. I was aware I might be leaving fingerprints. Tiny flecks of white paper clung to the knife with static and a few tumbled on to my desk like feathery frost or the first flutters of snow. The folded paper sat neatly and tightly in the envelope; three or four sheets, I guessed. As I pulled them out I wondered how long they had rested in there private and undisturbed. It felt like an exhumation.

Putting the envelope down I pushed back my chair and unfolded the sheets of paper. The creases were as resistant as stiff old unoiled hinges. I could hear children playing on the neighbour’s trampoline in the next-door garden below and a helicopter passing in the distance. The paper cracked like a knuckle.

The words were typed on a proper old-fashioned typewriter, the font retaining all its quirks of misaligned spacing and over-blotting from the imperfect action of real machinery striking on real ribbon, hammered with the real feeling of real hands. The opening words jumped off the page in all their startling candidness like a tight heart unbuttoned. They read: