Romany and Tom (5 page)

When the whole repertory of plays was running our costumes were exchanged daily according to the play that was being performed. The dressing room was thus constantly changing in mood and period. On Monday the racks were filled with dirty chrome and brown peasant costumes inspired by Bosch and Bruegel, which the producer would not allow to be cleaned because they looked more authentic when dirty. On Tuesday the rags and tatters of the Roman mob. By mid-week the barbaric splendour of Goneril’s crimson velvet hung in solitary state. By Thursday the subdued browns and greys of Catherine of Aragon’s sad Tudor ladies, and at the weekend the gorgeous-hued sapphire, primrose and cherry velvets of the Italian Renaissance.

I was struck by the eye for detail. I remembered looking up the season on the online British Theatre Archive Project and reading the ecstatic first-hand reviews of the audiences at the time. It was still ten years until Peter Hall would form the permanent year-round Royal Shakespeare Company, and the season in 1950 was seen by many back then as a milestone in British theatre history. I glanced down the cast list on one of the programmes. There were big names in the tiny roles – Robert Shaw and Robert Hardy as First and Second Gentleman – and the main parts were impressively star-studded – Alan Badel, Sir John Gielgud, and Harry Andrews. The director was Anthony Quayle. The production was by Peter Brook.

I thought of how little it had meant to me when I was growing up and the struggle parents often have to impress their children with their past glories: all those box files and photos and scrapbooks kept for years in the hope at least one member of the family might be captivated. My mum once told me excitedly that
Harry Andrews
had offered her a lift to Stratford from Leamington station on her first day. I didn’t know who Harry Andrews was. Much of what she said was a jumble of arcane words. ‘I
danced
with Sir John in
Much Ado
, you know’ was a favourite. It wasn’t until I was seventeen that I took an interest in the theatre and decided to read drama at university, but even then I thought I knew best, and much of my mum’s stuff was just old uninteresting history to me – even dancing with Gielgud. And then recently she had said to me, without any hint of sentimentality, ‘They were the best years of my life. I was
accepted
.’ And the word ‘accepted’ stayed with me.

I pictured her acting career slowed in its promising infancy by the Second World War, then stopped quickly in its tracks by family life. She’d had one child (Simon) with Ken – her first husband – in 1951, just after her debut season at Stratford, and was knitting booties for another one two years later and contemplating a gentle return to the stage, only to be told she ought to buy more wool as she was pregnant with triplets; it must have been such a shock. The hospital took an X-ray to confirm it. The spines showed up on the negative, as she used to say, like ‘three little fish bones on a plate’. When she informed Ken of the news that evening at home, she told me the first words that came out of his mouth were ‘How bizarre . . .’ and then he turned away into the bay window and looked out on to the street in silence. Within a few months – in January 1954 – Toby, David Roualeyn (‘Roly’) and Jennie were born and turned her life upside down. It was on the front page of the
London Evening Standard: Triplets for Author’s Wife
, ran the headline, with her picture above. Among all the excitement, she must have watched her dream of being an actress just melt away.

I put the papers back in the box and got up and walked into the hall. They’d be here soon. I looked around. It all seemed plausible: the front door with a little cupboard next to it for rubbish that could be collected by the porter from the outside without knocking; a place for coats and shoes and a big full-length wall-mirror for my mum in which to check herself before perhaps a matinée at the National Theatre; the easy-clean hardwood floors for soup spills; the compact fitted kitchen conveniently located next to the sitting room; the teak dining table that we almost left behind right there in its own perfect space in the sitting room; the books with the nicest spines I’d selected for the bookcase – some old Penguins, a biography of Jean Shrimpton, a hardback Brecht, an incomplete set of crumbling red-leather-bound Temple Shakespeares. But as I congratulated myself I noticed there were other things – chairs, a fruit bowl, those Portmeirion storage jars – that seemed to belong to other rooms I knew so well, the memories of which clung to me like smoke, and it was as if I’d stolen each item and repositioned it here in an unfamiliar place irresponsibly.

I leaned on the window ledge in the sitting room and watched a full number 13 double-decker bus, its lights glowing like a storm lantern in the gathering dusk, the windows misted, pull clear of the crossroads and disappear north towards Swiss Cottage, and I waited for them to arrive.

Shortly before five, the bell rang.

It was dark outside. As Roly brought them up in the lift, I ran round adjusting cushions, turning on table lamps, dimming the down-lights a little, muting the television and putting on some background jazz. It felt like a first date.

‘I thought we were back at the hotel in Oxford until Roly told us where we were,’ my mum said with a tight laugh, as we all greeted each other in the doorway.

They followed each other into the flat, my dad cautiously steadying himself on the door frame and watching where he put his feet, my mum overdoing the silent face of childish excitement at me, while pretending to tiptoe.

I showed them round.

‘Do you like it?’ I said, unable not to ask, as we finally settled in the sitting room after a brief tour, coats shed.

They looked tired and disorientated.

‘Tom?’ my mum said, as though she sensed I was expecting the final word on the matter, and it was his opinion that I was seeking.

My dad cleared his throat and looked round the room. He was out of breath. His face was chalky. He went to speak, then glanced at my mum, before dropping his head slightly and waving his hand in a limp surrender.

‘Not now, darling,’ my mum said, coming to his aid. ‘It’s been a long day. Ask us again in a day or two. I think we might as well be in Timbuktu.’

‘Now what?’ I said to Roly on the way down in the lift.

‘Give it time,’ he said.

I remembered us having a puppy once when I was young; that feeling when it was shut in the kitchen overnight for the first time, and I could sense it behind the door; and how I didn’t know what it would make of the night; or what would have happened when we opened the door again in the morning.

I had that feeling as I drove home.

Chapter 4

Three weeks after they moved in I invited my mum and dad up for Christmas lunch at our house; it was only five minutes away by car. Apart from a couple of scares with the unfamiliar waste-disposal unit and the immersion heater, things had gone uneventfully, if a little cautiously; or at least they hadn’t told me otherwise. I collected them around eleven, wheeling my dad down in his shiny new wheelchair that I’d bought especially for their new life in London. The tyre-treads were still clean and supple, the footplates gleaming. As the flat door closed their breath was caught in the draught. A flurry of brackish sweetness. Burnt sugar.

We stood waiting for the lift. In the blunt sodium light of the lobby my dad looked terrible. His cheeks were criss-crossed under the skin with tiny broken crimson threads. His nose was blotchy and purple, and the skin on his forehead was red and desiccated as if he’d just brutishly rubbed his face with a bone-dry flannel. Perhaps he had. I looked at his clothes. Nothing smart. It wasn’t like him. He’d pulled on a drab green fleece. I saw a smudge of mustard. My mum looked tired. Her dark grey hair was swept back off her forehead accentuating her sharp high cheekbones, her skin pale, but soft and sallow, her face fixed but watchful like a crow. She wore small turquoise studs in her ears, and was wrapped in a big brown woollen cardigan-coat that fell in folds like thick protective wings.

She roused herself. ‘So clever, the wheelchair, Tom,’ she said, enunciating each syllable so that he could hear her. I pictured her delivering it from a stage to the back of the upper circle. It was as though she wasn’t related to him, a local church volunteer doing a good deed on Christmas Day for one of the old people.

‘Yes. Clever,’ he said.

‘Fits easily in the lift, doesn’t it?’

‘Doesn’t it.’ He seemed to be used to this style of conversation. Efficient answers. Keep things moving. Did I sense a hint of embarrassment?

‘So useful the way the wheels come off for the car,’ she went on loudly.

‘What’s that?’

‘The wheels – the way they come off. Very useful.’

‘Very useful. Marvellous.’

We pushed open the glass doors and headed for the road.

‘Ooh, it’s quite brisk out, isn’t it?’

‘Brisk it is, Romany,’ he said, his voice masterfully both dry
and
cheerful.

They were quiet on the journey. An estate car laden with presents pulled up alongside us at the traffic lights. My indicator silently winked, amber reflections in the silver gift-wrap on the parcel shelf.

At the house they parked themselves on the sofa amidst the Christmas tears and tantrums and torn wrapping-paper – our twin girls, Jean and Alfie, were nearly four years old. Blake, their little brother, was only nine months. My dad blinked and smiled and cupped his hand behind his ear every time someone spoke to him. My mum took Blake cautiously on her knee for a few minutes as though it were all new to her, before handing him back, a look of quiet relief on her face. I wondered if they both had terrible hangovers.

At lunch someone generously filled my dad’s fat wine glass with a full-bodied red. St-Estèphe.
14%
. There was little I could do from the other end of the table. ‘Stop worrying,’ I said to myself. ‘It’s Christmas.’ People were laughing. Someone blew on a kazoo. My mum jumped. I saw my dad swallow a mouthful then reach out through the hubbub and, with maximum concentration, pour another slug to top it up. Here comes trouble, I thought. Half an hour later, he went to stand up. His legs buckled and I saw him make a grab for the edge of the table. I was picking up a small rubber band and reading an abandoned Christmas motto when it happened.
Why do the Christmas elves wear seat belts? For Elf and Safety.
And as I finished it I saw his knees as they crumpled like a detonated wall. I caught him just in time and got him back into his chair. How long can this go on? I thought. And what’s it like when I’m not there?

They lasted another half an hour in which time my mum managed a black coffee and my dad ate a handful of Quality Streets before I ushered them back to the car and drove them home.

Twenty minutes later as my mum said goodbye and went to close the door of their new flat I wanted to push it open again and remonstrate, or shout at them, or take a deep breath and sit down and talk calmly like someone from Social Services, but I did none of those things and just let her close it and stood silently in the cold corridor.

As a fifteen-year-old, alone in our old flat where I grew up, I would wait for them to come home from the pub on a school night, hearing the tyres approach on the road around ten, the car turning into the drive and stopping in the car-port, a stumble on the step, the key in the Yale lock, the heavy footsteps up the stairs to the flat, the overcompensation in their greeting, the fat-tongued words, their slight air of hostility as though they feared I would be censorious.

My mum wasn’t a natural drinker. In fact, in the years with Ken, pubs were not in her social orbit at all; parties, dinners with theatrical friends, intellectuals and writers were more her thing, but to my dad socialising meant the pub and it always had done. Once they were married, my dad’s choices dictated how they spent most of their leisure time, and pubs were top of the list.

Facing the village green and the graceful sweep of Barnes Pond with its curving white fence and green draping willows and swans, the Sun Inn was their favourite haunt as a drinking couple in the late sixties. I can remember being taken down on summer evenings – my earliest pub memory. I wasn’t allowed inside, of course. Instead I was escorted through the gravel car park and the gate in the wall to the small empty silent wooden pavilion of the crown bowls club that backed on to the pub. I was given a Coke with a straw and a bag of roast-chicken-flavoured crisps, and cajoled into playing darts with perhaps another boy who might have been left loitering in there too, or – if the place was empty, which it usually was – I’d talk my dad into a quick game before he exited to drink in the bar with my mum and their current loose circle of drinking friends. I liked the darts: the wire mesh that separated the numbers; the little doors that folded back on which you could write the score in chalk; ‘B’ for Ben, ‘D’ for Dad. And I liked the smell of the old trestle tables, the earwigs, the mildew and the woodworm, the folded-up deckchairs stacked in the corner and the canvas bowls bags. It felt lived-in and oddly homely. After I got bored – if I was on my own – I ignored the
Keep Off
signs and tiptoed out under the pale urban stars on to the sumptuous, supple, yielding grass of the brick-walled bowls lawn, as flat as a snooker table. It was like walking on gentle springs, the turf so pliable and plump with dewy, sap-filled life. I walked right out into the middle, my heart thumping, and lay down on my back and stared up at the sky, listening to the distant muffled laughter from the pub. And on a clear night, I breathed in the cool, spotless air, and watch the winking red and white lights of the planes flying over south-west London into Heathrow, the TV aerials on the tops of neighbouring houses, the glow from the windows, other families passing through rooms, and I was aware that I didn’t really like this part of my parents’ life.