In My Father’s House

My father had hoped for so much from the House. It was his Camelot, his grail, his lost land redeemed, from which all good would flow. But the House couldn’t give more than it was. It couldn’t confer friendship, or success. This was a source of bewilderment, sadness and disappointment.

Increasingly conscious that the House alone was not doing all for him that he had expected, my father looked harder at possible areas of improvement. Standards must be raised higher. The family, above all, must make more effort to live up to the beauty of their surroundings.

My brother, by virtue of being male, escaped the onus that fell on the shoulders of my mother and myself to be fitting inmates of the House. Intelligence was neither required nor desired; my father himself could be relied on to provide conversational vivacity and wit. Our role was to contribute an appearance of beauty, or, failing that, a show of good old-fashioned elegance.

My mother, in her eighties, wears whatever she pleases. Throughout her married life, she wore what pleased her husband. He, as we were all made aware, had impeccable taste. No matter that it was a taste formed by living in the company of elderly female relations who would have thought it daring to go for a summer walk without parasol, a veiled hat and gloves; he, who had lived, however tangentially, among duchesses and countesses, must surely be deferred to, conceded to know what was right?

‘And hadn’t you known a few people like that, in your family?’ I ask my mother. ‘Why didn’t you ever stand up for yourself?’

She shrugs. ‘You knew him. We did have that one time when you took over. Do you remember what a success that was?’

I’m unlikely to forget. This was the occasion that I think of as the mermaid dress disaster.

I was fourteen, and the BBC were to film a Hunt Ball at the House. It was the kind of moment for which my father had lived, a homage to his home and his achievement. Cleaning and dusting reached an unprecedented level that week; a temporary butler was recruited on the strength of his impressive appearance when dressed ready for the cameras in my father’s second-best evening suit, and his skill at polishing silver. A big houseparty was invited; I was given special permission to come home from school.

During the last week of the preceding holidays, I persuaded my mother that she should take my advice, not my father’s, about the dress in which she should appear at the Ball. Never having been allowed to buy anything more revolutionary than a khaki belt, I was wild with excitement at the prospect. This was to be the night on which, invisible for too long, she was at last going to shine. And so, reflected in her glory, would I, her daughter.

Walking through the hushed rooms of a London department store, we crossed acres of pale beige carpet to reach a section marked Evening Wear. An assistant appeared and was waved away: this was to be our own joint stab at independence.

It was hanging on a rail that smelled expensive. Silver sequins trailed lines over turquoise silk net as prettily as patterns on the surface of the sea; the neck and back plunged boldly down; the arms were bare. This was a dress for a goddess or a mermaid, and who better to be a mermaid than my mother with her red-gold hair and creamy skin? It fitted closely on her generous breasts and hips; this was good. The saleswoman clasped her hands in admiration; I was ready to skip with joy, until the price was whispered.

Fifty-four pounds was what the mermaid’s dress was going to cost; and this was 1962. My mother wasn’t used to independence. She never had more than, at most, a twenty-pound note in her purse for a London visit. In 1962, the only way she knew of obtaining more without consulting her husband or going to Drummonds, the grandest London branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, in Trafalgar Square, was to make a visit to Bond Street. Here, two old brothers ran a silversmith’s shop that had benefited from the shrewd tips given out by my mother’s grandfather. In return, the brothers gladly cashed cheques for my mother and her sisters on their expeditions to London. Unfortunately, the shop we were visiting was on the opposite side of Hyde Park, and my mother had an afternoon appointment to keep with her hairdresser.

‘Oh dear,’ my mother sighed, as she began to search for a way to unhook herself from the glorious dress. ‘What a shame.’

Assistants who worked on the clothes floor of big department stores still received part of their pay in commissions at that time. Sweetly and swiftly, as she saw her percentage receding from view, the saleslady produced the solution: Mrs Seymour should take the dress home, let her husband see how beautiful she looked, and then see how glad he would be to pay the bill!

Of course! We brightened. Once he had seen it, how could he not applaud our choice?

The weekend came. Mr Alan Whicker arrived with his crew. It was decided, for the benefit of the cameras, that the houseparty would assemble for drinks upstairs, in the graceful upper drawing-room where old Lucy Byron had presided over her first Thrumpton ball at the age of sixteen. This was perfect: my mother would be able to make a dramatic entrance by the side door leading from her bedroom (I hadn’t yet read Rebecca).

The film of the Hunt Ball, when it was finally seen by us, proved disappointing. Nothing registered but the sound of drawled vowels, the angled thrust of heads, the tap and shuffle of dancing feet, the yelps of laughter. Mr Whicker hadn’t travelled all the way to the Midlands to celebrate my father’s rescue of a handsome old house, but to show blue-blooded bumpkins at play.

We weren’t to know this at the time. The room was aglow with bare skin and soft light and the buttery chat of those who are bred to sound bored. Glasses chinked. My father, alight with pride at the celebration of his home, sped from group to group, a dragonfly of joy. Too excited to care, for once, that my forehead was sprouting pimples and that my long feet looked large as boat-paddles in new and uncompromisingly flat gold sandals, I watched the door in the corner, willing it to open before the cameras were switched off.

‘I helped choose my mother’s dress!’ I boasted. ‘It’s got sequins on! It’s beautiful!’

A tall, cold-faced lady bent to waft scent into my face. ‘How very brave of your mother,’ she said. ‘And your father? What does he think of it?’

The door swung open. And there she stood, my creation, a white-skinned, wide-hipped mermaid in a dress that clung to her soft body like the flowering tendrils of some tropical aquatic tree. My father, across the room, with his back to the door, was pouring a glass of champagne. Framed by the door, she stood still in a way that was at odds with her usual reticence. She knew that she looked lovely. She was happy to wait for his admiration.

Her husband turned, at last, and stared. ‘Oh my God,’ he said and then his voice shifted up from disbelief, to shrill rage. ‘It’s dreadful!’ my father cried. ‘Absolutely dreadful. For God’s sake, go and put something on that suits you. Anything! Anything but that!’

The guests must have been her friends, too, but nobody said a word. My mother turned and closed the door quietly behind her. When she returned, perhaps ten minutes later, she was wearing a pale brown dress in which she looked quite unnoticeable. My father complimented her warmly on her recovery of good taste.

The dress was not, contrary to my expectations, sent back to the store. Instead, it languished at the back of my mother’s cupboard, like a turquoise teardrop, unworn and unloved until, in the late Eighties, it left the House for sale in a charity shop, after being ignominiously bundled into a black trash bag.

I still don’t understand why my father reacted with such hostility to the dress. Was it because he considered sequins to be vulgar, or the colour too loud? Or did he dislike the fact that it exposed so much of my mother’s luscious, creamy skin? The clothes he bought her, I noticed, never exposed her shoulders or her back. It seemed strange that while he had been amused and even delighted by the spectacle of a near-naked employee wandering around his House and gardens for two years, his wife was encouraged to cover herself as thoroughly, almost, as a woman in purdah.

In the same year as the episode of what I came to think of as ‘the unfortunate dress’, my father sold a small piece of land. Avarice was not one of his vices: when he had paid for the recarpeting of the two main staircases of the House, a surprise was announced. He was going to take his wife, his mother – Dick Seymour had died three years earlier – and his son and daughter on an Italian holiday. No expense was to be spared: we were booked to stay at the Cipriani hotel in Venice, before visiting Rome, Amalfi and Positano. We would eat lobsters and see St Peter’s. I had never, until now, travelled further than Scotland and the West Country. The prospect of a European adventure was quite thrilling.

Up in the nursery (I still slept in a child’s bedroom on the top floor, although I had now been at boarding school for two years) I practised my phrases – per piacere; vorrei andare a; bella vista! – and stitched together a continental two-piece of my own design. The result, when I posed sideways, the thinner view, was pleasing: a hot pink linen crop-top and low-slung bellbottoms. Che bella! I could hardly wait to show my new look off to the world.

The Cipriani was grand, isolated and not, I thought, the kind of place in which to show off my costume. Rome was a blur of humiliation, caused by the sudden loss on Capitol Hill, in a wind, of one of my new and uncomfortable contact lenses. (My father, who had worn spectacles all his life, couldn’t bear the ugliness of a woman or girl in glasses.) My grandmother was convinced that the wearing of one lens without the other would ruin my sight for life; spectacle-less and almost blind without artificial aids, I was forced to try out a small and mean-looking patch which had come free in a first-aid pack. James Joyce might have got away with it, or Samuel Beckett. Perched askew on the pink and moonlike face of a chubby fourteen-year-old, the patch looked sinister and ridiculous. I wept and said I had rather go about blind. My father agreed: the patch, he said, did nothing to improve my looks. My grandmother, annoyed at the ingratitude being shown for her (freely provided) remedy, instructed him not to upset me. My father said that it was a pity nobody ever thought about his feelings. He, after all, would have to be seen with me. And I looked, if he had to be frank, a perfect sight.

‘Gracious!’ says my mother. ‘I mean, what a lot of fuss! About a patch! As though it mattered! You didn’t look that bad!’

My mother had suffered from the opposite extreme. She could, as she says, have sat beside her own notoriously vague father with a cardboard box on her head, and have been judged to look in no way strange. Being noticed, in her view, remains preferable to being invisible. I’m not so sure.

We sped down to the Amalfi coast in a sky-blue Zephyr. My father, tieless, in dark shades, tipped panama and striped blue shirt, spun expertly around the dizzy coils of the coast road, whistling ‘Volare!’ while Vita, bolt upright between my brother and me in the back seat, entwined the fingers of her beige suede gloves, determined not to show her fear.

Luxury, by this stage of the holiday, was becoming an agreeable habit. My father had booked us into the best hotel; after we had admired our balconies overlooking the sea, and lunched on lobsters and cold white wine, Vita announced that she was ready for an afternoon nap in her room, while my mother wanted to write postcards. All smiles, my father proposed to take my brother and me out for a trip across the sparkling bay in a speedboat. At last! The perfect opportunity to show off my new costume! Removing the patch, and with it, my remaining contact lens, I passed the afternoon in a haze, confident that my pink top and smart hipsters had been admired. Clear vision was not required for me to know that I was being observed, discussed and praised. Che bella! What a lovely young girl!

Flushed by triumph and the sun, I glowed all the way back to the hotel. Here, over a candlelit supper table, my father told the family what he had heard whispered under someone’s breath as I scrambled out of the boat. Nice girl. Pity she’s so big.

It could have been worse. They could have said I looked like a pig; there’s no doubt that I was overweight. What hurt, and sent me crying all the way to my elegant bedroom with a sea view, was the scorn and anger in his voice. So little was expected from me, and still I had let him down. Was it so much to ask that his daughter should appear . . . thin?

Che bella! Shades and a large hat help hide the eye patch, and divert attention from the plump form of which I had just become aware.

Minding so much himself, he tried to hide disappointment behind a joking manner. The story of ‘Pity So Big’ was produced, over and again when we returned home: in front of me, he told it to visitors, guests, relations.

‘Can’t you shut up about the girl?’ an outspoken old cousin once said to him, coming to my rescue. ‘It’s not her fault she’s got a big bottom.’

This, although well-meant, was not altogether comforting. My father paid no attention at all. But it was, he said when I challenged him, just a funny story; had I no sense of humour? Didn’t I understand how affectionate he was being when he referred to me in public as Melon-Face or, when I streaked my make-up, as Tiger Tim?

A more confident girl – but what adolescent female has the confidence to doubt a father’s view of her looks? – would have ignored or ridiculed him for this obsession with her appearance. Instead, I grew increasingly eager to win his praise. I managed to gain it, in my late teens, but at a price.

My hair had always disappointed him. Instead of being luxuriant, it was fine, straggle-ended and fiercely resistant to my attempts to make it curl. The colour ranged from dark blonde (winter) to light mouse (summer). Always keen on self-improvement, I decided to have it cut in a bob. This, the hairdresser explained as tufts of hair scattered around the chair, would create an illusion of thickness.

I had forgotten, when I presented myself for inspection, that short hair was one of my father’s pet hates. After covering his face with his hands and declaring that it was painful even to look at me, he produced five pounds and told me to buy myself a wig. (My mother had already delighted him by agreeing to wear a full wig for all formal occasions.) Bearing his fondness for long hair in mind, I bought a cap of captivating blonde nylon tresses that spilled over my shoulders. My father was thrilled.

‘You look really pretty,’ he said, with delight. ‘Don’t ever take it off.’

I didn’t. Having found the way to please him, I didn’t dare. For three years, I wore my wig night and day.

This was not an easy task. Swimming in the Caribbean sounds like a fate that anybody would be glad to endure (my father, after one of the palmy moments when his investment hunches were successful, had bought a house in Jamaica); swimming in hot water in a shoulder-length wig is surprisingly uncomfortable. An additional problem is the fact that wig-hair doesn’t dry in a natural way. I envied the girls who sat chatting to each other on the beach, styling damp hair with their fingers, while I slunk away behind a bush where, unseen, I could safely remove my waterlogged false locks and tweak them into shape. On another occasion, when I was dancing, the wig suddenly flew off, leaving me with a rats’ nest of hairpins exposed to view and nothing for it but to crawl through a jigging forest of trouser-legs and silky calves until I correctly identified a small, pale, dead Pekinese dog as my lost head of hair, spread out across a corner of the dance floor.

I was consoled for these trying experiences by the fact that my father, for so long as I wore the wig, was unfailingly complimentary, kind and good-humoured. The downside was that my own hair fell out: the trichologist I consulted when I was twenty was succinct.

‘Screw him,’ he said when I explained about my father. ‘You don’t ever put that thing back on your head again. Not ever!’

But my confidence had already been undermined. The week before my wedding, four years later, I bought myself a long blonde wig. Pleasing my husband was the last thing on my mind.

‘I should have said something. I hadn’t realised he hurt your feelings so much.’

The technique by which this in many ways unremarkable man kept two strong-willed women under his control was simple and invisible; he made us feel worthless. Without value, you have no power. No physical force was employed, no threat, except of his displeasure.

The charm game, devised by my father on our Italian holiday in 1962, revealed the depths of his own insecurity more profoundly than I realised at the time. Then, the game excited me. The game was my chance to be as cruel as he, and to feel that I was not, after all, the most disappointing member of the family.

The rules were simple, as simple as the way in which the game was introduced among us, and must be allowed to develop, if my brother and I were to benefit. Our father controlled the family budget: if we wanted to enjoy a good dinner, and go to bed feeling loved, then the game’s originator must score well. To give him bad marks was unwise.

But somebody had also to be the loser, and our father made it clear who that somebody should be. High marks for him; low marks for her; it never failed to give him joy. (Possibly, he was taking revenge for the first humiliating months of their courtship, when he had been at her mercy.)

We played it first in Amalfi, after my grandmother Vita – she would never have tolerated such a vicious game – had gone early to bed. He laid out the rules; my brother and I didn’t even need to glance at one another. We knew what we were meant to do.

‘I thought,’ my father said, lounging back in his chair, crossing his legs and smiling at us with unusual graciousness, ‘that we might start with – charm? Now, how do you think I might score – truthfully?’

We hesitated, debated, looked solemn, and had to tell him the absolute truth: on a scale of ten, he scored nine. (The mark was not outrageous; our father could, when he chose, squirt charm more efficiently than a tom-cat sprays musk.)

We’d done well. He looked delighted, even though he tried to smother the smirk in a handkerchief.

‘And now: your mother. Rosemary? Well, darling, I wonder what we should give you.’ Pause. ‘Do you know’ – pause – ‘I don’t know that I would say charm, not exactly charm, is one of your strongest points. What do you think, yourself? Honestly now.’

Let her damn her chances, out of her own mouth. He knew she’d do it. And she did. Smiling, but not happy, she said that he was probably right and that she was feeling tired. She wasn’t allowed to escape so easily.

‘And you, Miranda darling? What do you think about Mummy and charm? Do you think she’s charming? Truthfully?’

She hadn’t spoken up when he mocked my size, and laughed at my spectacles, and sighed regret at my skimpy hair. She’d let me carry the blame for the mermaid dress, said that it wasn’t her choice, but mine.

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