The words you are about to read have not come easily to me. Indeed, at the last count I have attempted to begin this chapter four times and on each attempt I have failed. Perhaps this is appropriate, however, as my own failures are at the crux of the story you are about to read.
I claimed much earlier in the book that when my first wife Jacqueline and I began to drift apart, our daughter Juliet became my priority. This remained the case for all too short a period, as over time I began to drift apart from her too. Jacqueline had suffered her first major breakdown when Juliet was about two years old, and after time, it had made both of us realize that we were very different people. There had been no vehement demonstrations of this, and I dare say that, had we been inclined to, we might have rubbed along OK together. It wasn’t to be, however, and with me working away from home most of the time, a separation became inevitable. What happened next, you already know.
Over the next four or five years I saw Juliet perhaps four or five times a year. I am completely to blame for this and having thought about it a great deal over the years I have concluded that I must have put up some kind of barrier between us in order to draw a line under everything. A similar thing had happened with the divorce, of course, whereby I offered to act as the guilty party as a means to everyone being able to move on. I did keep in touch with Juliet, but I only ever saw her at birthday parties and such like. I was not being a father to her.
The catalyst for change was certainly Pru. She had always been anxious about my daughter and the barrier I had put in place did not sit well with her. ‘You should really try to see more of Juliet,’ she used to say to me. ‘Why not invite her for tea?’ Juliet was living in Putney at the time with her mother and grandmother and so gradually, after taking Pru’s advice, we began purposely to see more of each other. ‘Are you my new mummy?’ she used to ask Pru at the very beginning. ‘No darling, I’m your new step-mummy,’ Pru would tell her.
For a not inconsiderable amount of time, Juliet’s relationship with Pru was far stronger than her relationship with me. In Pru’s opinion, this was partly down to them both being female and so having certain related things in common. A degree of shame on my part, however, was also undoubtedly to blame. I simply did not know what to say or what to do about it.
Some small amount of progress was made in 1968 when Juliet confided in Pru that she was dreadfully unhappy at her new school, a huge comprehensive just down the road from us in Wandsworth.
‘Can’t she go to Moira House?’ suggested Pru. ‘Both mum and I were blissfully happy there.’
‘But what would Jacqueline say?’ I countered. ‘It will seem like we are interfering.’
‘We can only ask her,’ said Pru. ‘Shall I speak to Juliet first?’
Fortunately, Jacqueline had also been made aware of Juliet’s problems at her current school and so after telling her and Juliet all about Moira House, Pru and I took Juliet down there for a look around. There had been well over two thousand pupils at the comprehensive she attended, and when Juliet asked how many were at Moira House, the answer went down rather well. ‘About a hundred and eighty in all,’ said Pru. The tour was a resounding success. Juliet adored the school and she and the headmistress seemed to get along famously.
‘So, darling, do you think you’d be happy here?’ Pru asked.
‘Yes, definitely,’ she said. ‘I really do.’
Jacqueline’s mother had already insisted on paying her granddaughter’s fees for Moira House, so it was all systems go.
Despite her initial enthusiasm, it took Juliet several months to get used to boarding away from home and she informed me recently that her early letters to her mother and to Pru featured ‘circled tears’, no less. Fortunately, her grief was only temporary and not only did she become extremely happy at Moira House but she has since admitted that from the age of about thirteen she would happily have stayed on during the holidays.
Rather ironically, during the years that Juliet attended Moira House she and I probably saw even less of each other, as during the holidays she felt obliged to spend time with her mother and grandmother. She was happy, though, and me having been a part of something positive in her life for once was undoubtedly a source of comfort.
In the early 1970s, Jacqueline and the man who had become her new husband decided to move to South Wales. Having been born and bred in London, Juliet was unhappy at the idea of having to go with them. She once again confided in Pru. ‘Then you must come and live with us,’ Pru suggested. And so, she did. The boys, who had always adored Juliet, were thrilled when we told them.
Far from using this as an opportunity to get to know my daughter, I’m afraid I cocooned myself in the comforting notion that Juliet, Pru and the boys were all happy. I was also incredibly busy, and was still at a loss as to how best forge any kind of meaningful relationship. The longer this went on, the easier it became for me to hide behind the realization that Juliet was turning into a happy, beautiful and well-adjusted young lady, which is where I remained into her adult life.
One great blessing is that Pru and the boys were never encumbered by my own emotional issues regarding Juliet, which meant they were free to treat her as one of our own, and they did. I asked Joe a little while ago if he remembered Juliet arriving at the house. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Jules has always been a part of my life. She’s always been there.’ Sam too has little recollection of life without his big sister being around. And as for Pru, well, in addition to her always having been a stepmother, strictly of the non-evil variety, as time went by her relationship with Juliet grew stronger still. Pru always claimed that she wouldn’t have liked a daughter of her own. ‘Too much competition,’ she once said. ‘With Juliet, I didn’t have to go through all that. It’s been marvellous and I think we’re good for each other.’
My own relationship with Juliet didn’t really begin until 2001. I’m afraid that isn’t a typing error. Two years previously I had written a volume of autobiography called A Moment Towards the End of the Play and in that featured a statement of regret that I had never been able to say to Juliet in person before.
The passage reads:
I regret more than anything in the world the years of my daughter’s life that I lost; that essential time between the ages of five and ten, when a father and daughter should be companions and discover all manner of things together. Those years are irreplaceable, and I feel them as a great hole into which even now I stare blankly, every time we meet.
Unbeknownst to me, when the book was first published in 2001, Juliet went out and acquired a copy. She’d long since moved out by then and I never thought for a moment that she might be interested in reading it. And therein lies part of the problem. It breaks my heart to write this, but Juliet assumed that I did not care about her and on reading the passage she realized that I did. And I do, enormously. In her letter she said that she loved me and always had and that she was proud of me. By return, I told her that I felt exactly the same.
‘Isn’t it funny,’ I said, ‘that we both find it easier to write what we mean than say what we mean. Very British.’
Juliet was having problems with a boyfriend at the time, and I reminded her in the letter that she was an attractive, intelligent, loving and thoroughly worthwhile object of such affection as our lamentably useless male sex might summon up the effort to offer when they feel like it, or something like that. Hearts were poured out, that’s for sure.
A few weeks later Juliet came down from Winchester, where she was now living, to visit Pru and me, and when I answered the front door no words were spoken. There’d be time for that later. It had been forty-four years in the making but finally, thanks primarily to Juliet, we were able to embrace each other actually as father and daughter.
‘She never gave up, did she?’ Pru said to me later that evening when we were in bed. ‘Never gave up on you and her. I’m so glad for you both.’