In My Father’s House

The king of the gods once loved a Trojan boy

Named Ganymede . . . and carried off the youngster

Who now, though much against the will of Juno,

Tends to the cups of Jove and serves his nectar.

OVID, METAMORPHOSES,
TRANSLATED BY ROLFE HUMPHRIES

It was in 1980, shortly after my father had given up hunting for his lost treasures, that he found Robbie, the young man who became what J. R. Ackerley called ‘The Ideal Friend’.

Ackerley, having tried love and found it disappointing, settled for a dog. My father, looking to fill the gap left by dead pets and absent children, found a substitute for both in a sweet-natured boy who was willing to offer the uncritical devotion he needed and had never, as yet, found.

Robbie was not, at first sight, an obvious candidate for my father’s love. Heavily built, with bad posture and nicotine-stained teeth and fingers, he appeared older than his age. Shaving and hair-care were low on his priorities; he looked rough as a straw mattress. His eyes were small and flickered shyly when you tried to meet them; his smile was unexpectedly sweet. He was quite muscular. He was also, as my mother reminds me, proud. Nick hadn’t objected to dressing up as a footman to hand around our Christmas dinner; Robbie would have served us with a better grace, but in his own clothes. Probably, he would have wished to contribute something to the feast; always short of money, he had a generous heart.

So far as I know, my father never read Ackerley’s writings: if he had, these candid discussions of homosexuality might have struck some familiar chords. To the reader, who has already heard of his sharing a bedroom with Nick, and who is now being introduced to a relationship with another young man that lasted, in growing stages of intensity, for fourteen years, the situation will seem transparent. It will seem more so when I state that my father eventually gave Robbie the bedroom in the House that lay closest to his own private dressing room, that they took holidays together, went biking through the nights and often only returned for breakfast.

This points, does it not, to an obvious conclusion? Even my mother, when we last discussed this delicate subject a few weeks ago, reminded me that my father had allowed Robbie to share with him my parents’ twin-bedded room in their London house. She added that she had never cared for the fact that Robbie slept in her bed, and that it was often still unmade when she paid her own next visit.

‘So what do you think?’ I asked her, and she shrugged. ‘I don’t see what else could have been happening,’ she said. ‘Do you?’

The strange truth is, that I’m finding it difficult to set the words down. As soon as I write them, doubts crowd eagerly in. Really, I know that part of the trouble is that I just don’t want to imagine my father in bed with Robbie, any more than I wanted to imagine my father in bed with Nick. I wonder, never having been to an analyst, what I should make of this reluctance. Am I too prudish to tolerate the thought that my father slept with boys? Can I honestly believe that this attachment, so close in all other ways, was sexless? Why can’t I acknowledge it with the simplicity that my mother seems at last to have achieved? I don’t know. Is it the biographer’s mind at work, warning me to abhor speculation unless proof can be given? I simply do not know. But I may be the last person who clings, absurdly, to the faint possibility that my father was, until the end, a heterosexual.

I’m clearer on the fact that it was, once more, the pain of displacement that troubled me most. Being ousted, reduced to a lesser place in my father’s affections than his friend: this was what hurt, like a bad headache, all the time.

Whatever my father’s private life may have been, he wanted the world to know him as a straight man. Robbie was introduced to the small circle of people who encountered him as a friend, never as a lover. We, as I knew even then, were valuable camouflage. If my mother, my brother and I played our parts obligingly, Robbie could be presented as a friend to all of us, an approved addition to a close-knit family. My brother and I were not happy about this plan. How could we be, when Robbie had usurped us?

And my mother? The other question that needs answering at this point is that of my mother’s extraordinary restraint. My father kept company with Robbie for fourteen years: why did she put up with it?

‘I was weak,’ she says now. I don’t see it as weakness, but as evidence of how well she understood her husband, a man whose need for love was as profound as his insecurity. They write of people who will walk through fire for the sake of a loved one: she’s one of those. This is why, when I see my mother watching her favourite actress, Giulietta Masina, in her favourite film, La Strada, I understand the look of enchanted recognition that transfigures her face.

La Strada tells the story of Gelsomina, who leaves home to travel the road with a circus strong man, Anthony Quinn playing the character of Zampano. A taciturn but handsome brute with a terror of solitude, Zampano bullies Gelsomina and humiliates her by his casual affairs; she, loving him and with no other place to go, stands by her man and accepts humiliation as her fate. When, finally, she leaves him, Zampano goes to pieces; in the last scene, he is seen trying to bury himself in the shore where Gelsomina’s abandoned body lies.

Time and again I have watched my mother, her dinner forgotten as she stares at the screen. I’ve seen her hands caress the side of the chair as Gelsomina turns to show us, by her bright little smile, her determination to endure. ‘I can’t bear it!’ my mother cries. But she always wants to watch the film once more.

My mother, throughout this last epoch of her marriage, played Gelsomina’s role. Like Gelsomina, she understood that however much my father hurt her, she would damage him far more if she failed to play her part. He needed Robbie, but he also needed her.

They met, so my father explained to me later, in Leicester Square in London, in a cinema queue. My father talked about his bike. Robbie, just turned eighteen, was awed by his descriptions of the Ducati: shyly, he admitted that he had never seen one of these glamorous machines. The cinema tickets were sold out. With nothing further to do that evening and a sulky young wife waiting for him in a Vauxhall basement, Robbie was happy to be offered supper and taken to a London house where, with a fond pat on its ebony side, he was introduced to ‘the Duke’. He felt honoured by the friendly manner of a man who seemed both kind and lonely. They agreed to meet again.

Confidences were soon exchanged. My father, anxious not to frighten Robbie away, played down his own circumstances. The House was never mentioned, only an unsympathetic family and a need for freedom. Robbie revealed that his father, four years earlier, had killed himself, and that he had since lost contact with his mother. A girlfriend had pressured him into marriage, a step that he now regretted. He didn’t have a job and didn’t relish the idea of full-time employment. (His options were restricted by the fact that he could only with difficulty write his name.)

It was my father who suggested that Robbie should train to be a despatch rider. Self-interest played the predominant part. My father liked to instruct; despatch riding wasn’t a full-time job; the boy, when once qualified, could replace Nick as his co-rider upon the Duke.

It didn’t take long for my father to realise that he was underestimating to himself the role he desired Robbie to play in his life, and that his feelings were reciprocated. Robbie, a confused and gentle young man who had been deeply affected by his father’s death, was as lonely as he was himself. Grateful for my father’s solicitous friendship, Robbie came, in time, to worship him, as a substitute for his own lost parent, as a tutor, and, at the least, as a beloved companion.

For the first two years, the friendship flourished in secret. Their mutual pleasures were simple. They walked along the tow-paths of the London canals, ate breakfasts at greasy spoon cafes and went to bike shows. My father picked out a few films of a popular kind, at which they both could laugh. Years had passed since my father had felt so merry. Robbie was an easy laugher; he chuckled at everything, even when no cause for mirth was apparent.

Here was the kind of easy companionship that my father had hankered after during his miserable years of employment at the bank. Here, surely, was what his children should have continued to provide? The closer he became to Robbie, the more resentful my father grew of what he perceived as the cold indifference of his son and daughter. We had never been so readily available, so willing to fall in with his whims, so happy to place our lives at his disposal.

My mother, during this early period of the relationship with Robbie, was kept in the dark. While surprised by the amount of time that her husband now apparently devoted to his voluntary work in London as chairman of the Juvenile Magistrates’ Court, she was not much grieved by his absences; ill-health, hypochondria, and low spirits had made of my father a querulous and demanding companion. As the daughter of a near recluse, my mother was equipped to make the best of solitude. Unlike her husband, she enjoyed her own company.

My father had now reached his late fifties. He was overdue for a mid-life crisis, ripe for the rebellion that had never taken place in his early life. The timing of Robbie’s appearance was perfect; all of the older generation for whom my father retained a ghostly vestige of awe were dead. Nobody was left to gainsay him, or to tell him how best to treat his wife.

My mother, if she happened to hear about Robbie’s existence, could be relied upon to defend her husband, and fight off any suggestion that there was anything odd about this unusual partnership. Friends presented a trickier situation.

George FitzRoy Seymour and Robbie.

My father had lost none of his snobbery. He cared, as much as ever, about where he was invited and by whom, about annual invitations to stalk in the Highlands, and the fact that he frequented the same London barber as the Duke of Muttonchops. It amused him to flout convention by inviting a young female pop star to his club, just as it had once given him delight to shock his country neighbours by showing off Slav in his loincloth, as part of the household. Robbie was another matter. He did not wish it to be thought that he was paying a young man for sexual services; he was acutely conscious that rumours would spread if Robbie and he appeared, outside my mother’s company, in public. He was, for this reason, unnerved when Robbie casually proposed that the two of them should take a walk together, sometime, around Piccadilly and St James’s. When my father began to offer alternatives – a visit to the Tower of London was held out as an enticement – Robbie displayed his most annoying characteristic: extreme stubbornness. Nothing would satisfy him now but the promise of a long and leisurely day during which my father would show him a glimpse of his other, more old-fashioned world, and share with him – Robbie loved picnics – a sandwich in Green Park.

Green Park was the least of my father’s worries. ‘Avoid Boodle’s’ he wrote despairingly in his diary. The reference was to the club from the ladies’ annexe of which he had defiantly stormed when warned that his young companion must hide her skimpy clothes under a coat and put away her camera. Like all the old-fashioned gentleman’s clubs, Boodle’s invited its members to be treated like schoolboys: to eat nursery food, to dress ever so nicely, and to behave as Nanny would wish. Robbie had heard my father mention the club as a place for which he felt a particular affection. As a favoured friend, he was keen to pay a visit. Untruthfully told that strangers were forbidden to enter, he requested to be allowed to admire it from the doorway.

His prodigal daughter wasn’t there to relish the spectacle of her father’s anguish; today, I find no difficulty in imagining it. Sauntering down St James’s Street with his friend ‘Georgie’ (he disliked the name George, finding it far too formal), Robbie kept his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans. Hurriedly informed that they were passing the sacred door, he climbed the step, stared in, let his stomach take the air and gave it a prolonged and cheerful scratch before announcing that he was ready to move on. This would not have been a protest against the splendour of his surroundings, or an indication of the fact that he had intuited my father’s anxious state of mind, but a modest declaration of his lingering independence.

The diary reveals that the mission was successfully accomplished. They had met nobody my father knew. Robbie remained unconscious of having caused even a moment of anxiety – and thoroughly enjoyed his day out.

The year 1982 saw two strands of my father’s elaborate life become entwined. It’s possible that Robbie was starting to feel hurt at being kept apart from his friend’s family; it’s as likely that my father could no longer face daily life at Thrumpton without him. He invited Robbie to stay, for a week of biking. He didn’t tell him what to expect, what sort of a House. He did, imperiously summoning me to come and visit at the same time, try to ensure that his friend received a warm welcome. I was told that I would be meeting a somewhat illiterate young man with a sensitive nature that would respond quickly to slights. I heard the tenderness with which my father anxiously offered this brief description. Just as with Nick, I felt my body shake with jealous rage. I knew what to expect now. Another cuckoo: another usurper.

Robbie, as I later learned, had arrived a day earlier than myself, riding the bike that my father had given him when he passed his test. My mother’s recollection is that she offered the unwelcome visitor a friendly welcome, a good lunch and an invitation to carry her basket of stems and cuttings while she pruned the garden roses. It’s possible that Robbie felt basket-carrying was a bit demeaning. It’s more likely that he was unnerved by the size of the House and angry that my father had hidden all this splendour from him. All I know is that I turned up the following day to find the library blinds drawn, the bees humming merrily outside them among the wallflowers, and my father stretched, prostrate, upon a sofa. His eyes, when he removed his dark glasses to bestow a sorrowing kiss on my cheek, were milky with tears.

‘Where’s your friend?’ I asked. My father shook his head. He could hardly speak for sobs.

‘Gone,’ he said at last. ‘Gone back to London. And he never wants to see me again. Oh, bloody, bloody house!’

‘He’s cockney,’ my father said, as though this explained everything. ‘And I love him. Is that a terrible thing to say? I love him!’

I studied my fingernails and concentrated on wondering whether they might be improved by a clear coat of varnish. By concentrating, I could block out the unwelcome sound of a renewed burst of weeping, followed by further diatribes against the House. This, clearly, was love of a new kind.

‘I suppose you think I’m horribly selfish,’ he said petulantly, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to respond. ‘But if you knew how happy Robbie and I have been—’

Outraged, my father glared. ‘My God, but you’re cold-hearted! You’ve never cared. It’s all about you, isn’t it? It never occurs to you that anyone else might deserve a few pathetic little moments of joy, when their entire life has been one long, wretched grind of duty and sacrifice . . .’

More followed: long, quaveringly familiar lamentations about the cruelty of a family who begrudged him any moment of freedom, any morsel of common happiness. I was too furious to speak. I couldn’t believe that he was looking for my sympathy.

‘Now, don’t be so sharp,’ reproves my mother. ‘I’m sure he never said all that. No need to get carried away.’

‘I think’, my mother says nicely, ‘you had less to complain about than me. And I put up with it.’

‘Only because you had to,’ I say brutally. ‘Only because you weren’t ever going to leave him.’

‘I might have done,’ she says, looking forlorn. ‘You don’t know everything.’

Guilty at causing pain, I squeeze her hand. ‘You’d never have abandoned him. You were a good wife.’

But she still wears a sad look, and I’ve put it there. ‘I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t always kind.’

The row was quickly patched up, and Robbie was persuaded to return to the House for a second visit. After a third, he began to feel more at his ease. He was staying there in October 1982, when my father, aware that mature women dislike to be reminded of their age, adopted the charitable course of leaving my mother to celebrate her sixtieth birthday alone, while he took young Robbie off on an overnight bike trip to Scotland. Shortly after this jaunt, with my father’s benevolent encouragement, Robbie decided to leave his wife. The separation and divorce were uncontested; Robbie now had even more time to place at the disposal of his mentor.

Either Robbie disliked the bachelor state or else he was an easy prey; we were never quite sure. In 1983, less than a year later, he announced that he planned once again to marry. His choice had fallen upon Della, a stolid, matronly young woman, a few years older than himself. My father, although displeased, paid for the cake and the hire of the registry office; he even offered to act, and performed as, the best man. Three weeks later, he suggested to Robbie that the Duke needed to get out for a run. They took a two-day trip on the bike to Cornwall: this expedition, as my father noted in his pocket diary, had proved ‘great fun!’ Part of the fun, I’d guess, was in knowing that he’d won Robbie away from a newly-wed wife.

The homosexual friends to whom I’ve told the story interpret Robbie’s married state as a plus for my father. He’d never shown any interest in effeminate men; they see him as the type to enjoy the challenge of a female rival. If this was the case, he must have relished the scent of victory. Robbie was either exceptionally weak or entirely under my father’s spell; by the spring of 1984, less than a year after he married Della, he was travelling to Thrumpton every week, while his wife remained in London.

This marked the point at which Robbie began his new role at the House. A routine was quickly established. Each night, after a homely supper cooked by my mother, the two men would repair upstairs to my father’s dressing room to change into their bikers’ uniforms. My mother remained below to wash up the dishes. By nine, the House was entirely hers. She rarely saw the two of them before breakfast the following morning.

My mother said nothing and did what was asked of her; Della was not so willing to comply. She wanted her husband back with her, and earning money.

My father jotted down a terse reminder to himself, during the late summer of 1984: ‘Talk with Della.’ He could, when he wanted, make himself hard to resist; I’m sure Della was surprised, when he left, to find that Robbie was going to be spending just as much time at the House as before, and with her agreement. The compromise she had been offered was that the invitation now embraced them both. Robbie would continue to accompany my father on his biking expeditions. Della, meanwhile, would enjoy the pleasure of providing my mother with a companion.

Separated from my first husband and keeping myself at a distance from the House and its altered ménage, I was baffled by the insistently serene tone of my mother’s letters. Having met Della once, I couldn’t imagine that the two wives had anything to say to each other; on paper, my mother praised her as a helpful young woman who didn’t mind helping to polish furniture and was always easy company, no trouble at all. Today, however, my mother has become less guarded. She remembers how Della enjoyed watching television game shows, with the volume turned up at full blast. The furniture-polishing was, she says, undertaken only when the television broke down, and at my mother’s insistence.

‘Well, she didn’t do anything else!’ she says. ‘And all that cooking! I had to give her lunch, and him dinner. I might as well have been running a hotel.’

‘Why did you pretend everything was fine in the letters?’ I ask. ‘You ought to have said you were having a rotten time; you know we would have backed you.’

Stubbornly, she shakes her head. ‘I didn’t want you causing trouble,’ she says. ‘It wouldn’t have done any good.’

Even though I’ve seen her watch that film so many times, I still can’t bear to hear the note of resignation in her voice. Gelsomina was a poor little waif, staying loyal to promiscuous Zampano, in part, because she had nowhere else to go; my mother is a proud woman, from a proud family. How could she allow herself to be so beaten down?

Of course. It isn’t only the story of Gelsomina, standing by her impossible man. Having lost that romantic family home of her own, the castle on the hill she’d always supposed was their own until her parents left it, my mother had allowed the house of her marriage to fill the void. She would have put up with anything rather than be separated from a home the contours of which had grown as reassuringly familiar as a beloved body. Here it always stands, at the heart of every family story, pulling us back, holding us fast: The House.

At about this time, bruised by the end of a marriage and a long, unhappy love affair, I turned again to the House myself, seeking comfort in its safe harbour. I hadn’t been seeing much of either of my parents after that one emotional scene with my father, when he thought that Robbie had left him. I knew of Robbie’s existence, and that he and Della spent time at the House. It had not occurred to me, until I began to feel the desire to spend more time there myself, that I would find myself an outsider. Robbie was now securely fixed in position. My brother and I had been displaced.

I hope that Robbie never understood how much I hated him for supplanting me. He didn’t glimpse me above him, standing on the roof, looking down to where he lounged at my father’s side on the bank of the lake, where he lay listening, like a perfect child, to a storybook read aloud to him by his ageing friend. He didn’t read the diary in which I wrote: ‘Is he never not here?’ He didn’t know how desperately I prayed for him to disappear.

Towards me, Robbie always acted cheerful and kind. He taught my son how to fish in the Thrumpton lake; when my London flat was burgled, he rode round on his new bike – my father’s birthday gift to him – to offer me a brass candlestick he claimed to have picked up at a car boot sale. (Or had my father given it to him to offer me as a sop?) He was always keen to come up with a word to help me out at Scrabble, a game that our father, dispensing urgent winks and nods to signal his scheme, ensured that Robbie always won, however bizarre his spelling.

‘You do like Robbie, don’t you?’ my father would say, hungry for appreciation of his friend.

‘He’s all right,’ I’d say, the most that I could manage without being accused of viciousness or snobbery. (And here was another difficulty: it was impossible to express hostility to Robbie without sounding condescending. If Robbie had been rich, or well-read, or from a grand family, I would have felt no such delicacy about expressing my resentment.)

‘He’s very fond of you.’ A yearning pause, while I savour the moment of power and contemplate the dangers of candour, the risk to my mother, who has begged me, almost crying, to make no more trouble than already exists in the House.

I’d like to tell him that I’d value Robbie’s admiration of my works more if he had managed to do more than glance at their jackets. Instead, I thank my father for passing the tribute on; seeing Robbie himself loitering attentively in the background, awaiting his excuse to join in, I find a reason to move away, to leave the two of them alone. I hate to see them together. I hate the softness in my father’s eyes when he looks at Robbie. I hate the glances that plead with me to be understanding, to be kind.

My rage, expressed as calculated reticence, was fuelled by a sense of the injustice done to our family as a whole. Why was it acceptable to my father for Robbie to boast fingernails that looked as though he’d gone grave-digging without a shovel, while my mother’s honest gardening hands were criticised as unkempt? Why was my young son rebuked if he failed to post my father a weekly letter from school, while Robbie never wrote at all? Why must I drive across London – I was often working against tight deadlines – to return to Robbie a cheap plastic cigarette lighter he had left behind at the House? Why must I obtain the autograph of a singer I had once met, requesting him to write ‘With Love to Robbie’? Why must Robbie always take precedence, always be without fault?

The answer, as I well knew, was love. My father was enraptured, besotted, head over heels. He treasured my mother. He was, if only behind our backs, proud of his son and daughter’s achievements.

But Robbie was the passion of my father’s later life. Robbie’s only rival was the House.

The presiding spirit of this stage of their increasingly exclusive relationship was A. A. Milne. Teaching Robbie to read had not been an easy business, since he was quickly bored and disliked being corrected. These little foibles, as my father fondly observed, demonstrated that he had much in common with a special character in one of the few books that Robbie sincerely enjoyed: the bouncy and uncrushable ‘Tigger’.

Delighted by this identification, Robbie pointed out that Tigger was referred to by Pooh as a great friend of Christopher Robin’s: not just any friend, but a great one. If he was Tigger, then my father must surely be Christopher Robin (rapidly shortened to ‘CR’). Her affection for owls made the selection of name an easy pick for my mother. Della, although her visits had become infrequent, was offered Piglet. Behind her broad back, however, my father spoke of her to Robbie as Heffalump. They both enjoyed this little joke at the expense of Della’s shape, although Robbie occasionally remonstrated that it wasn’t in the best of taste. (He remained quite fond of Della, and liked to point out that she had a good sense of humour. She surely needed one.)

The names were chosen in 1984. From then on, these were the characters and personalities that my parents and Robbie adopted for use in their private life.

I’ve managed to find my father’s tattered copy of The House at Pooh Corner, the volume in which Tigger first appears. It’s a third impression from the 1928 edition, published when George Seymour was five years old and just beginning to look upon Thrumpton as his rightful home. Ernest Shepard’s delicate drawing, spread across the flyleaf, depicts a small boy, with his faithful band of followers skipping at his heels, dancing through an idealised landscape. Easily visible on the far side of the rolling fields is the outline of a tall, well-gabled house. The similarity to his own House and its pretty estate is striking enough to have caught my father’s fancy when, almost sixty years later, he began reading the book aloud to Robbie.

To me, it’s clear that my father was once again revisiting his childhood, burying the bad memories of abandonment, loneliness and fear in a re-enacted version over which he had gained control. In his kindness to Robbie, he was also compensating himself for the years when he had slept up on the dusty top floor, and cried, unheard, for the mother who had left him when she travelled to La Paz.

‘He liked being Christopher Robin because it meant he didn’t have to be responsible,’ she states. ‘And Tigger: well, Robbie was rather greedy, and clumsy, and always making out he knew much more than he did.’

My mother glances again at the illustration by Shepard. ‘The owl isn’t following Christopher Robin,’ she observes.

And she’s right: the owl is off on its own, floating overhead, hovering above the frolicking troupe. Suddenly, I find myself thinking about the grand house parties with which my grandmother liked to fill her Welsh castle, and of my reclusive grandfather trotting quietly away from them, absconding up the stone stairs, fleeing to his turret and his books.

‘Could you have got through it all without that ability to detach yourself?’ I ask her.

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