Over the years I lived in Drayton Gardens, there had been many boyfriends, and the kitchen was the scene for many break-ups and make-ups. A lot of listening to ‘Otis Blue’ and weeping into glasses of gin went on there, but I loved that place, with the scrubbed wooden table that smelt of bleach. The wood had almost forgotten what tree it had come from after decades of manic scrubbing, with undiluted bleach poured on to it every day, until all you had to do was put a paper napkin on to its proud and pale surface and it left a mark. Everything worth happening happened there, and I have more nostalgia for that warm room in the basement than I have for anywhere else in the world.
The whole room was muralled. Dad had begun when we first moved in, painting strange little faces peering from holes in the wall where plaster had crumbled off and not been filled, then Mum took over and couldn’t stop. Our shutters, boiler, oven, dresser, walls, cupboards and fridge were all painted. The staircase to the kitchen had a wooden handrail and on the wall behind it Maeve had painted dancers, men and women dressed in leotards and tutus with their feet resting on the rail as if in a dance studio. There was a Welsh dresser with un-matching but lovely china, and an airing cupboard that smelt of newly laundered sheets, warmth and excitement. Our presents, bought months before Christmas and birthdays, would be hidden among the tablecloths, towels and sharply creased napkins, and I don’t think she ever knew I had discovered this hiding place years before. Baby Bunting, our white cat, coiled on top of the towels, purring contentedly, full from the prawns and occasional potted shrimps – or shrotted pimps, as Maeve called them – she ate with her paw, and double cream she lapped with her tongue. Slim, healthy and spoilt, she was confident in the knowledge that she was queen of the castle and would never be disturbed.
There was no washing machine, spin dryer or any modern convenience at all, except for a small wooden clothes-line that went up in the morning and came down in the evening. I remember the thud of the pastry as it hit the floured kitchen table, the rolling that went on until it was light enough to cover the apple pie or steak and kidney pie or the criss-cross of the treacle tart Maeve would be preparing for supper. She was very proud of the lightness of her pastry, saying that, like everything else in life, you either had it or you didn’t. I remember the beauty of the coalmen as they delivered the coal to our bunker, just outside the kitchen door. Why, Maeve pondered, were coalmen and firemen always handsome? Was it a necessity when applying for the job?
Before going out at night I would run the four floors to the basement, a quick blast of ‘Pet Sounds’ or ‘Tapestry’ on the record player, do my make-up in the minute mirror perched on a tiny ledge on the dresser, and leave the house to walk to the Royal Court to see all the new plays in the opening week. I miss those days. I miss those nights when I would come home to find Maeve in the kitchen, talking and drinking with her friends. It might be John Davenport, the literary critic who, when temporarily homeless, stayed with us and who, in the middle of the night, I once saw standing naked in the lavatory, waving cheerily as I passed him by and taking what looked like rather an unsteady aim. It might be John Braine, author of Room at the Top, with his sexy northern accent – ‘Ooh Maeve! Just what the doctor ordered,’ he’d say as he tucked into apple crumble – or Gordian Gill, Eric Gill’s adopted son, a sweet and touching man for whom nothing ever seemed to go right. There could be laughter with Michael Moorcock while they ate his favourite meal of roast lamb followed by chocolate mousse. Sometimes it would be a Scrabble contest with Brigid Brophy, a philosophical discussion with Lord Longford, or a melancholy talk with the gentle Arabella Boxer, or nostalgic reminiscences with Quentin Crisp or new ideas with Michael Horowitz, Heathcote Williams and other young poets who had become friends.
I might come home to find her sitting with Tony, our window-cleaner. On a few occasions she had found him looking at the books in the sitting room, and hastily putting them back on the shelves. One morning they got talking about their favourite authors and, from then on, once a month after cleaning the windows, he gave himself an extra hour to sit and have coffee with Maeve and talk about the book he was reading. He ‘wasn’t allowed’ to buy books (dust harbourers) or borrow books from the library, because his wife was intimidated by his ‘hobby’ and became incensed when he wanted to read in silence instead of watching television with her. So he secreted them under the cloths in his van, found a place to park and read in his lunch breaks. I was livid when I heard this story. I couldn’t believe he was being prevented from doing what he loved by his wife and, at the time, didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, the loneliness both he and his wife must have been feeling. This book group of two temporarily solved the problem.
It is impossible to listen to ‘La Vie en Rose’ without conjuring up the whole of my childhood. That gorgeous space in the basement, with Edith Piaf belting out the chirpier ‘Mon Manège à Moi’, my mother circling the room with the vegetable she was peeling gripped in her hand, the two of us passionately joining in every word, one of us understanding what they were singing, the other without a clue. Or stopping whatever we were doing – cooking, cleaning, washing up – and dancing together to Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Misty’ or Billie Holiday’s ‘Night and Day’ and ‘The Man I Love’, tears welling up in our eyes, hearts bursting with gorgeously indulgent emotion, loving every second of that most satisfying of small pleasures.
Maeve held a big party about twice a year. The kitchen would be waiting patiently in the basement, spruced and smart, smelling glorious and just hanging around until the guests made the exodus from the elegant sitting room two floors up. She never felt that parties were for serious conversation; you had the rest of your life for that. They were for letting your hair down, for dancing and disgracing yourself, for forgetting your troubles and having some fun. She would retrieve her cane and her collapsible top hat from the airing cupboard and dance as if her life depended on it, as of course it did. The party often ended with Maeve standing on the kitchen table, her top hat perched sideways, her magician’s cane elongated for her Marlene Dietrich impression. ‘Falling in love again, never wanted to, what am I to do, I can’t heeeelp it,’ she would imitate brilliantly with all the seduction of Lili Marlene, halfway there already with her enormous eyelids, and infuriatingly perfect show-girl legs.
I can see Maeve and Michael Moorcock now, he in an elegant Harris Tweed suit, she with a white feather boa casually slung around her neck, swaying, tango-ing, laughing. The parties, heaving with poets and publishers, translators and editors, writers and painters ended with the same song for years. ‘All You Need is Love’ would belt out from the ancient record player, and she would sing along, vehemently endorsing the message. I should have been embarrassed, but I never was. I was proud. I never wanted one of those comfortable mothers who didn’t take life by the throat and squeeze it. I liked her daring. I liked it that when her heart was breaking, she rose to the occasion. And I couldn’t stand some of the crusty academics who stood in a corner, observing and drinking, drinking and observing, the voyeurs who would have died rather than let themselves go, but never in a million years would have refused an invitation, because no one gave a party like Maeve.
Years after she died, I realised that she had never taught me anything practical at all, apart from a few little culinary tips. ‘A bit of ash in the stew makes all the difference, darling,’ she laughingly said as I watched her stirring the deliciously warming stew with ash precariously bent from her cigarette. She was a hopeless smoker. She didn’t inhale and always looked as if she was trying out her first cigarette, as she puffed awkwardly, if she puffed at all. She soon graduated to cigars, and they suited her much better. A really good cigar gave her as much pleasure, if not more, than a tipple of Gordon’s or a bottle of Arpège. But this lack of any education whatsoever in the field of house-proudness made the concept fraught with misunderstanding, and like another language to me. When I met Charlie, the man I was going to marry, I entered another world, with people who, it seemed, spoke in tongues. ‘When did you last wash your wainscotting, Clare?’ my mother-in-law once asked me in a voice laden with accusation. I was too scared to admit that I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about, but felt sure it must be a secret part of my anatomy. There were hundreds of these words, and when I asked Maeve what they meant, she didn’t know either.
But she knew what a party was for and I was very happy with a mother who laughed and danced and drank too much on occasions. Having said that, after I had meticulously learnt Zorba’s Dance at twilight on a beach in Athens a few years later, I unwisely taught it to Maeve. We happily practised on impromptu occasions when we were alone, but soon it became another regular finale to her parties when she gave me the eye that signalled a rather shameful pas de deux, outstretched arms and often unsynchronised foot movements stamping to the strains of Theodorakis’s mandolins.
Maeve was a complex woman, and there were many contradictions. Aside from being glamorous and vivacious, she was intensely private. She appeared cool and supremely confident, but underneath it all she was nervy and extremely shy. She was a serious person and the idea of discussing her personal life with anyone who wasn’t the greatest of friends would repulse her in the same way it repulses me. She would have got on badly in this world where nothing is private, and everyone kisses each other. Hating over-familiarity, her composure could be stiff with strangers, yet with close friends and family she was warmand earthy. She loved her two best friends, Barbara Norman and Sue French, deeply, but whether she talked to them about the inner workings of her soul I’ll never know. She claimed to loathe sentimentality, hated to be manipulated, was furious with herself for crying so uncontrollably at the death of Bambi’s mother, and found babies, even her own, a bit of a bore. Yet didn’t I catch her on a few occasions choking up when she saw big men holding tiny babies, or lovers unaware they were being observed? The truth is, while Sebastian and Fabian don’t have a trickle of sentimentality coursing through their veins, Mervyn, Maeve and I were emotional beings, who could sob at the breaking of a stalk and thoroughly enjoy every moment.