The extreme romanticism of my parents left an impression on me as indelible as a birth-mark, the significance of love, and it being the thing that ultimately mattered, was a constant thread. ‘Everything needs love; nothing survives without it,’ my mother had said. In the week she died, she said how lucky she’d been, how the pain was inconsequential in comparison to the love she had received all her life. ‘How lucky I’ve been with my darling husband, my darling children,’ she said. I disagreed. I told her she hadn’t been lucky. She was loved by me because she knew how to love, how to leave me alone to be myself, how to step back and allow me to make my own mistakes without interference, how to love me tenderly and uncritically, and without any of the strings so often fastened on.
After she died, my brothers and I spent every Sunday going through our parents’ lives in Drayton Gardens. Sorting through Maeve’s dressing table, among the lipsticks, eyebrow pencils, scents and hankies, I found letters from the butcher, touching little notes scrawled on the backs of order forms that cleared up the mystery of why it was always me who had to queue for the lamb chops and not her. ‘I simply never get served, darling,’ was her curious response. ‘Dear Mrs Peake, you are a beautiful woman. I think I have fallen in love with you,’ said one note, and others repeated the same sort of thing. To go through someone’s drawers is such an invasion of privacy; the ordinary belongings of a loved one suddenly become so important. The button to some unknown shirt, the half-used lipstick, the crinkled rose from some unknown occasion, all take on an out-of-proportion significance, and these private little notes from the butcher that she would never have been so disrespectful as to disclose to anyone made me weep.
Sebastian and Fabian were in Mervyn’s studio sorting through the thousands of loose drawings when Fabian called up. ‘Clare, there’s a letter for you in Dad’s drawer.’ I raced downstairs. Written ten months before she went into hospital for the last time, it was unfinished.
Charing Cross Hospital
October 5th 1982
My dearest darling Clarey, You have been the most darling daughter that anyone could wish to have, and as you have grown your touch and understanding have grown immeasurably sensitive, and I think of you as my friend.
I want your life to be fulfilled. Think of me as I was in my best days. I love you all so much. The world is changing so rapidly, that it will be very unlike the one you grew up in, but I know you will have the wisdom to guide your own children.
I am leaving so much of Daddy’s work unresolved, and it will be almost too much for you three to know what to do about …
There was so much of our father’s work to go through. We began the arduous and emotionally draining task of dividing everything into three. It was done simply and with no fuss. Three similar-sized paintings would be leant against a wall, then three more, and we took it in turns to be the first to choose until all the paintings were done. Then we moved on to the drawings, then sketch pads, pipes, the piano, the wooden table, the easel, until the whole of Drayton Gardens was dismantled. The order we were met with made the task so much easier, but still the volume of work meant that it took every Sunday for months. Any painting or drawing by Mervyn or Maeve of one of us would automatically belong to that person, but aside from that, it was a very democratic affair. Then there were the books to divide, hundreds of wonderful books, signed affectionately, signed admiringly, to Mervyn from many of the literary giants of the twentieth century.
Having been left for so long while Maeve was in hospital, the house had become a lonely place. The smells of stews and roasts, the strains of Billie Holiday calling from the basement to the next four floors, the preparations for her thrilling parties, our kitchen dances to ‘La Vie en Rose’, the warmth of her greeting, the kisses she planted on the inside of the frosted glass that you kissed back, all escaped into the atmosphere. The backward kick my father did as he left the house, the echoing laughter of the two of them, just memories now. We thought about trying to keep the house, but couldn’t, and shouldn’t, and didn’t want to try to recreate a time that had gone, a time that was simply what it was – a memory, our parents’ lives and the lives that they created for us being from a world unrecognisable now. In any case, without Maeve and Mervyn it just became any old house, and none of us wanted to live with ghosts. The house was sold, the murals whitewashed as it became a home worthy of a lifestyle magazine, and as far removed from the unreconstructed house that the five of us had lived in as was possible to imagine.
So we packed the boots of our cars, drove to our separate houses, hung the pictures on our walls, put the books on our shelves, and got on with our lives, with a sense that it all hadn’t lasted very long, that the ending had been premature. But my sorrow, and that is what it was, had a sweetness to it. I knew that what Mervyn and Maeve had given me I would carry with me always. They would forever be close, not so close as to give me claustrophobia, but just close enough that I could still breathe.