1901
A restlessness nipped at the ankles of the newly married Mr and Mrs Gross. They slept fitfully, ate sporadically and, as with any couple thrown together, each feared upsetting the other. Perhaps it is a condition common among immigrants who imagine the ground shifting under their feet before any roots have taken. Maybe the pair were colluding in their own healthy appetites for everything unattainable, or maybe they had touched on their incompatibility.
Fuelled by an almost inhuman energy, they worked eighteen-hour days without a honeymoon and without holidays in a rat-infested oil-lamp shop, that Sandor had spent his savings on, in Brixton, South London. Never missing a trick, Sandor even sold pornographic postcards from his back door – until he was cautioned by the police.
Within a year, the rush amongst the middle classes for electricity was on. This, Sandor sensed, was his future, and the oil-lamp business began to flicker and fade as he stretched their profits to purchase stores in Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow.
The couple’s reward was their first home – a new, redbrick terraced house in Court Lane Gardens, Dulwich, which Sandor named ‘Budapest’. I am King of all I survey, he must have thought, as he viewed the fine Wilton carpets, the pretty maidservant and rose trees in the front garden. In later years, though, constantly moving house would become another outward symptom of their unhappiness.
When seventeen-year-old Bella fell pregnant with their first child, the very next year, it was Sandor’s triumph. ‘I did it, I did it!’ Phyllis records as her father’s words after the baby, a boy, was born.
For Bella, the birth wrenched and wrung out most of the life from her. Weakened to the point of death, the chances of recovery were believed by the physician in attendance to be slim. A priest was summoned and her limp body was made comfortable. Sandor wailed as he caressed and plaited her hair to make her ready for the casket, as if, thought the physician, he was a mourner from one of those foreign countries.
It was partly Sandor’s sobbing and fussing which finally coaxed back Bella’s spirit which, if truth be known, was wallowing in his uncompromised attention. The physician advised Sandor to treat Bella to a boat trip, ‘to revive,’ he whispered, ‘the little soul’.
The frailty of women, Sandor mused, as he finally managed to bundle his ailing wife aboard a boat at Tower Bridge, which took them on a ten-day trip along the eastern coastline up to Berwick-on-Tweed. Whether Bella reluctantly left her baby under Sandor’s instructions, or whether she happily gave him over to a wet-nurse is unclear. But the couple were not to see their firstborn again.
The seas were rough and the spray revitalising. Storms delayed their return by one day. It was dead of night when the boat docked and there, on the quay, an elderly couple huddled under an umbrella, their forms swinging in and out of vision as a storm lamp flashed across them.
An ominous presence, sensed Bella, who instinctively recognised her estranged parents. Without ceremony, Maria Crowley greeted them with the news that their baby son had died that morning of an infection.
A single wail from Bella, stranger than any noise they had ever heard, rose out from the depths of her crumpled body.
‘I did not even name him. What punishment is this? I did not even name him. My baby will go to hell.’
With some difficulty her parents propped up their daughter and together they embraced her grief. Somehow no one noticed that Sandor remained outside the huddle, apparently unmoved.
Bella was to take to her bed until she could no longer fight the lingering, invasive depression that hinted at the mental illness she would fall prey to until her death.
I cannot abide this weakness. How am I to cope? thought her husband. Observing his wife convulsing with tears repulsed him. He marched out of whichever room she happened to be in – their bedroom, the empty nursery, or the front parlour – perhaps to take a turn in the garden, perhaps to retire to his study. But what about compassion? Did that ever stir in the pit of his belly? Guilt occasionally, but compassion – no.
Despite his impoverished upbringing, Sandor’s invincible health only served to emphasise Bella’s frailty; her valiant efforts to plump up her own milky-skinned fragility with sheer will-power were futile.
‘Anything that interrupts business is a nuisance,’ Sandor once told his daughter. ‘Illness, weddings, death. I may seem selfish but that is how it is. When I see somebody crippled or hear someone has died, I’m glad it isn’t me.’
The frustration of his wife, according to Phyllis, culminated in the first of many angry outbursts.
‘Pull yourself together!’ he yelled again at the little figure, bandaged in shawls, motionless on their bed. ‘Pull yourself together!’
The Crowley family rallied round at afternoon tea, their favourite gathering, giving free rein to disgusted whispers of how their son-in-law was treating their poor, dear Bella. ‘And perhaps his only child too,’ tutted Mrs Crowley.
Whenever he could manage it, Sandor sneaked out of their company. In the hall he pulled out a handkerchief from his top pocket and rubbed his eyes until onion raw. He stepped back into the parlour as Maria Crowley was pouring tea, his head bowed.
‘Perhaps I was too harsh. I misjudged poor Sandor,’ she remarked to her husband on their way home.
Sick is how Sandor felt when the couple were left alone again. All this business is making me sick, he thought. Homesick, he diagnosed. I long to see my poor dear mother.
‘Come, we shall take a trip,’ he whispered to Bella. ‘To Csurog. A belated honeymoon, my love.’
Another chance, Bella believed. She would try to be strong again for Sandor. But it was too late; the damage was done. Perhaps it was his desire to find in Bella the peasant strength with which his mother bore her troubles, but Sandor did nothing to encourage or reassure his wife.
For now, the fresh breeze of being on the move again, criss-crossing Europe on a two-month trip, and the absence of daily domesticity preserved their relationship, although the young woman’s body would take two years to recover from the loss.
On 19 March 1905, Imre, a gentle soul who would later be known as Anthony or Tony, was born in Dulwich. As if by genetic rebellion, his talents when an adult would be artistic and could not have been less important to his father.
The following year, on 25 September 1906, Phyllis Isobella Gross was born. A small baby, she grew into a tiny child, with her father’s cornflower-coloured eyes set in a heart-shaped face framed by masses of dark, wavy ringlets. Shortly before his death in 1957, her father revealed to Phyllis that neither he nor her mother had ever considered her a beauty. ‘A spiritless suet pudding she called you.’
Self-absorbed she might have shown herself to be, but as a mother Bella truly believed her children were her priority. It is unlikely, therefore, that she would ever have remarked that her daughter resembled a pudding or lacked spirit. Yet the phrase, which would have been instantly dismissed by anyone who had met Phyllis, carried all the provocative characteristics typically used by Sandor to stir, to insult and to goad into action. If he thought his authority or supremacy as head of his family and of his business, were at risk (which he obviously assumed in this case – despite nearing death), he would try to reassert his position. One of his favourite aggressive tactics was to undermine Phyllis, just as he could not resist undermining the confidence and capabilities of his wife.
Admittedly, when standing side by side with her conventionally beautiful mother, Phyllis was happy to be eclipsed, so she never felt the need to compete with her. Phyllis’s colourful artistic dress sense and short chaotic hair haloed a sensitive rather than a pretty face. But if there was one thing that struck every one of her friends and colleagues, it was her spirit – always present in her inquisitive blue eyes and keen energy.
Unlike her formally trained sibling, Phyllis preferred spontaneous painting, and sketching and writing. From the moment she first picked up a whiskery sable brush, she trained her eye to be accurate, and when she prepared her palette, she felt like a true artist.
‘Where, oh my goodness where,’ Sandor shouted in exasperation to Bella, years later, at their home in Claygate, ‘do these children get this feminine art obsession from?’ His eyes punched those of his wife in search of the answer, and their dinner of duck and port wine sauce congealed on the plate. Bella looked up at the chandelier to stop her tears from brimming over. ‘Who will make the money?’ Sandor shouted over and over again.