Patrick wrote his first poem when he was nine. As a small boy he read precociously and widely. He spent his lunch money on poems and, inspired, wrote his own with great delight. When he was eighteen he sent a poem to David Archer, a publisher with a tiny bookshop in Parton Street. Archer invited him to tea. Nervously entering the chaotic, crammed shop, Patrick saw before him a pale young man swaying high upon a stepladder. ‘Be an angel, hand me that hammer,’ said Archer and Patrick did so. Archer brought out Patrick’s first volume of poetry and introduced him to T.S. Eliot. Eliot asked Patrick to send some poems to him at Faber, and a few days later a letter arrived confirming that Patrick was to be published by them. At twenty, Patrick had leapt over the straight blue line which in those days took young men from public school to Oxford and then into publishing and being published. He became famous.
Like Eleanor but twenty years earlier, Liza found Patrick’s poems in a bookshop, read them and fell in love. She wrote to him, offering money and an escape from Japan, where he was teaching at a university when war broke out. He accepted and sailed across the Pacific to California where Liza met him. They began a love affair which was to span almost two decades and produce Dominic, Helen and Theresa.
Patrick and Liza rarely lived together, and never married. During a lull in their relationship Patrick met an ingénue called Nancy with a fleece of blonde hair and round blue eyes like baubles on a Christmas tree. They got married and left London for a cottage in Sussex where the roses were overblown and the tap spewed sand as well as water. Nancy wanted to write, but she wanted to have babies more. Patrick forbade her to become pregnant. Nancy defied him. He drank a bottle of whisky to fortify himself, then forced her to sit in a scalding bath while he poured gin down her protesting throat. She was young and scared and she forgave him. He tortured her, a maniacal curiosity roused in him to see how much she would take.
One morning he called her into the garden. Sacrificial in her white nightdress, Nancy stood in the orchard against a bowed apple tree. Patrick picked up an apple from the grass and placed it on her head. He took a bow and arrow and, assuring her that he had been practising, shot the apple through the core. She could take no more. Days later Nancy ran away into the arms of Patrick’s best friend, and they disappeared. Raging and bereft, Patrick left the house in pursuit of her. He didn’t shut the front door or turn off the wireless. He went and never came back. He drove up and down England searching for Nancy but no one dared tell him where or with whom she had gone. In desperation he went to see her mother in Harlow. She tried to shut the door in his face, but he forced his way into her kitchen. Seeing his grief and his determination, Nancy’s mother relented a little and made him a cup of tea.
‘I cannot tell you. I will never tell you.’
Patrick glowered and lit a cigarette. He looked up at the glinting litter of china and silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece. Propped against a small mauve shepherdess was an envelope. Patrick was sitting at the far end of the room but he could make out the familiar shape of Nancy’s name. Her mother made tea and talked stiltedly of the route back to London and the weather. Patrick answered, his eyes fixed on the envelope, straining to read the address. Nancy’s mother saw the direction of his gaze and continued to talk. Patrick left. He never found Nancy.
Patrick returned to Liza, but the affair dwindled and by the time he met Eleanor it had been reduced to an uneasy friendship. Liza sustained cool hostilities during Eleanor’s pregnancy, but when Va Va was born, unbent a little.
In the years that followed, the tangled relationship between Liza, Eleanor and Patrick unravelled and the two women became close friends, excluding Patrick from their long late-night conversations. ‘I could never live with him, not even when the children were small. I don’t know how you can remain sane,’ Liza said to Eleanor time and time again. When Patrick dragged her from parties by her arm, her collar, her hair, and threw wine over men she spoke to, Eleanor vowed she would leave him for ever. But she stayed.