WE SPENT THE summer of 1967 on Patmos, where Mougouch had rented a small house on the unfashionable side of the bay: Maro and me, her sister Natasha, Mougouch and her two other daughters, plus various guests who appeared expectantly on the veranda at mealtimes.
Mougouch was unhappy because a man she loved had refused to marry her. It was the first time in her life that she had ever been rejected and she took it very badly. She’d left England for a year delegating the mothering role to Maro – which was tough, as Antonia was rebelling against her boarding school and Chapel Street had been leased to a madwoman. ‘I can always count on you, dear,’ said Mougouch cheerfully when Maro asked for help. ‘You are my Little Meg. Maro Efficiency Gorky.’ This as an alternative to coming back from Athens and taking charge.
That summer on Patmos, Mougouch was dazzling in her unhappiness, but all of us were a bit mixed up. I was making horrible paintings that I threw away at the end of the summer. Susannah was an adolescent, and beautiful, and yet she didn’t want to say goodbye to her childhood. Maro was broody for babies, though it wasn’t yet apparent.
She found a half-drowned kitten on the beach and nursed it back to life. In the early hours of the morning she’d latch it on to my breast, because she said that although she fed it well with an eye-drop pipette, it needed to suckle, otherwise it would be psychologically deprived. My tit was more like a cat’s than hers, she said. So I lay there patiently every morning as this wild thing kneaded my breast with adamantine claws and chewed my nipple with needle-sharp teeth. After a week, I began to lactate. Everyone thought this was very funny, but later, on the laborious trip back to London, my breast became infected. In the end I had to have a mastectomy. Our domestic solidarity was thus confirmed by losing my right breast to a kitten.
Barbara Hutchinson joined us. She and Mougouch decided that if Maro and I got married, Mougouch would be able to come back to London with a flourish. Her feeling of rejection would be forgotten and social life in Chapel Street could start up again. I distinctly remember the two of them watching the Patmos boat drift across the bay and pick up steam before chugging off towards Athens. There was only one boat every three days. I couldn’t escape! Then they turned to me smiling and started work.
Maro and I thought of ourselves as being married already. What was this bourgeois convention they were insisting on? Why make promises of permanence when permanence was already there? And hadn’t Barbara been married three times?
‘Yes,’ she said passionately, ‘and every time I’ve always believed it was absolutely the right thing for me to do, and even when a marriage failed, I still believed it to be right. Every time! Absolutely right! It’s a gesture, you see – a protest against time. Time always wins, but in the meantime you’ve said, I defy you! Here I am! Here we are! We are facing the challenge of the future, side by side, through thick and thin.’
I thought this was terrific; so I said Fine, we’ll do it. I sank to my knees and proposed. Maro, who always refuses any gift, didn’t say yes and didn’t say no, but over the next few days it was obvious that the answer was yes; and that deep down, she’d been longing for this moment.
Mougouch on Patmos, wearing a broken umbrella as a sun hat.
I set off by the next boat two days later to join my parents in the South of France and tell them the news. Piraeus to Brindisi through the Corinth Canal, deck class on a sleeping bag, the rhythm of the boat aggravating my swollen breast. Train up Italy, the council houses around Bologna glowing in the afternoon sun. In Milan, I sat in the station offering mugs of wine to anyone who’d come near, and thus I missed the connection to Marseilles. I was scared. I didn’t want to get there.
No news was received more despondently by any parents. ‘We thought you must have something up your sleeve,’ said my mother wearily.
I sneaked down to the post office and sent Maro an enthusiastic telegram in their names. It hadn’t occurred to either of them to send a message welcoming her into the family.
I think we met David Plante that autumn. Dad brought him to tea with us at Percy Street. David sat on the edge of his chair and was very polite.
In the car travelling down Gower Street a few days later, Dad asked Maro and me what we thought of him. I said, making a joke, ‘I think he must be one of those creeping plants.’ The result was scary. Dad slammed on the brakes – luckily there was no one behind us – and said tragically, ‘How CAN you treat ANY human being with such contempt?’
I thought about this for a long time. Was he overreacting? Yes! To make a joke about Plante’s name was corny, perhaps even in bad taste, but surely no more than that? However, thinking it over, I decided that Dad’s anger was justified. My casual remark was a form of rejection, not so much of David Plante himself as of this whole arcane world that my father valued, which I felt I couldn’t enter.
He always spoke about David and Nikos in intense, hushed tones. Perhaps he just wanted to introduce us to them as one young couple to another, but at the time I misread his signals as being connected with a certain kind of glamour. When it came to glamour, I could see what Dad desired. When glamour struck, being alive bound him to the way the whole world moved. His hair rose in a halo, his face turned pink. His sense of self suddenly fused with the greed of the planet. Success is hyper-awareness of time, a prickling of the skin. Fun – as I’ve learned for myself in the few spasms when it’s come up in my life. But at the time I rejected it as a form of madness, for pleasure so intense could only mean something to the person it touches. And glamour spurns everyone outside its magic circle.
Dad enveloped Nikos and David in a part of London life where creativity and glamour overlapped and, by doing so, he gave them something they wouldn’t otherwise have had. It made me uneasy then, and I’m awkward as I write about it now, for I can’t quite pin down the problem. After reading an early draft of this book, a friend told me, ‘You’re making it too complicated. You were just jealous of your father’s lovers!’ It’s almost true. I was wary of Nikos, whose purity combined with intelligence often seemed poised to produce razorblades out of thin air.
But there was something else. Two men living together seemed alien to me, not because I took some moral position about homosexual relationships, but because of the atmosphere. The choice of objects to look at, the special meals to cook, the tidiness of the mantelpiece, the absence of children, the social striving, all seemed to me set to a different rhythm from anything I thought was domestic. It made me feel claustrophobic.
I told myself that I was suffering from a rejection of the homosexual world, a resurgence of my ancient prejudice regarding homosexuality and power, only this time with pining infants shimmering offstage. I told myself I was wrong; and I was certainly confused. To simplify things, I reverted to a decision that I’d made years previously when I’d decided that the tensions between my parents were not my business. I vowed that I’d never again comment on my father’s sexuality.
Over time, however, I discovered that keeping this vow was in itself a form of rejection. My silence was accusatory. The Creeping Plante episode, slight though it was, became a key moment when I began to cut myself off from my father.
Years later, Dad tried to talk to me about his love for Bryan Obst. The words he used to introduce this offstage young man, whom I never met, were these: ‘I have a friend, and he is kind and intelligent and – well, everything, really. And he tells me that he can’t listen to the music of Mozart because it reminds him of a toothpaste advertisement.’
I greeted this with absolute silence. I didn’t laugh, though I thought the remark was ridiculous. The pathos of ‘well, everything, really’. I’d like to give myself credit for not laughing, but it’s not good enough. I should have said politely, ‘How awful,’ as if Mozart really could be devalued by a toothpaste jingle. I could even have said, ‘When did you meet him?’ And quietly listened to the rest of the story. Instead, I said nothing at all. But I knew my silence signified rejection. And so did he.
We did not broach this subject again.
Years later, after Bryan had died, my father told me bitterly that AIDS was the worst thing that had ever happened in his lifetime. I said, ‘Worse than the concentration camps? Worse than the Second World War?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Because AIDS stops people from doing what they like with their bodies, and that freedom is the first of all freedoms.’
There was another point in cutting myself off from this aspect of my father’s life: loyalty to my mother.
It was tiresome that Mum didn’t see the attraction of the woman with whom, at the time of the Creeping Plante episode, I’d been living for the past six years, and was now about to marry. But I was damned if then or later I was going to join my father in a conspiracy of men against women. Whatever the difficulties I had with my mother – and there were plenty – I could see that my father’s frequent infatuations with young men were painful to her. Why should I become a part of them?
My mother at that point had finished her exams and had started a course in Psychology at London University. She was planning a dissertation on Aural Perception, to find out if musicians could hear a barely perceptible bleep, if it occurred in time to an imaginary beat in a bar. She tested Maro and me by wiring us up to headphones and pressing a button on a recording machine. I scored halfway between the musicians and the non-musicians. Natasha was thrilled to discover that Maro failed to score anything at all.
Stephen took no interest in this new life of Natasha’s, either then or later. Thus she’d sacrificed a musical career in which he felt little interest in favour of a new quest in which he felt none at all. It hurt. She wrote in her 1985 diary, ‘it makes no difference to S whether I read psychology or trash – I don’t talk about either’.
Though she subsequently made a new career for herself and was able to teach Visual Perception at the Royal College of Art for several years, it never raised a flicker of interest in her husband. She felt that, as far as he was concerned, her only role was that of wife. ‘The feeling is strong upon me that I have wasted my life – The policy of the last 20 years, progressively giving in from the point of view of asserting or even respecting my talents, culminating now in their complete surrender (in the hope of some felicity yet to be discovered to help S) seems to have led to barrenness, though a moderate atmosphere of affection is a little reward.’ But moderate affection could be ascribed to Stephen’s immaculate manners, with nothing behind it.
I have resigned all ambitions which have annoyed Stephen – I have blotted all commitment to anything but wifemanship from my life. S likes my helpfulness, and it is a surprise to me that he’s more often appreciative & less scolding, so it is rewarding. Perhaps if I had always been only a wife he would have been happier – but no – there would always have been long absences, and I would have been totally without resources.
The absences were justified by work, for Loudoun Road needed money just like any other household. However, when the house was empty, there was always the suspicion that Stephen, even if he said he missed home, was also seeing his friends in that ‘animated queer scene’ that did not include her.
She bravely put forward the ‘work’ argument, quelling her secret doubts. ‘S always thinks in terms of himself & justifies putting his work before his personal relationships (at least his central personal relationships)’ – but this brought on worse thoughts so she immediately adds – ‘although of course he hasn’t really devoted himself to his work which has always taken second place to going to conferences or social life.’
A day later, this thought becomes harsher: ‘S would always put everything else before his closest personal relationship – work before wife but also conferences & social life before work and intense romantic friendships before all.’
The role of wife had to be rewarded with something more than mere politeness. How to win more? All she had to offer was her wifely skill. ‘The truth is, if one is not loved, it avails nothing to offer devotion.’ This is what Raymond Chandler had told her so often and so relentlessly: without desire, there can be no love.
Her diary is the only remaining evidence about what she really felt; for her usual rule was that, to the outside world, appearances must take precedence over feelings. I think she would have burned this document in her final years if she’d remembered its existence. I found it after her death in the bottom of a cupboard as I rummaged around in the empty house and waited for my sister to come back from Australia so we could bury her.
Of her case against my father – if I can put it like that – I knew nothing from her personally; and I resent it. If in this book I’ve sounded hard on her, there’s a reason. I could not stand her sense of privacy. Her reticence grew from pride, and it had a certain dignity, a desire to keep her children out of it. Her own childhood was dreadful; I knew that. She wanted to limit the range of suffering. It wasn’t hard to understand. But it was also a form of rejection. It left me with two options: either to accept the edifice she presented of a family that functioned, with firm walls and solid furniture, or move out and try for an alternative myself.
In 1967, in the background of what must have been a difficult period of my mother’s life, the laws against homosexuality were at last repealed. The celebrations, if any, were muted. David and Nikos just laughed. Criminals? That’s what the newspapers said they’d been, one morning when they’d woken up in bed together side by side. They’d been criminals all this time and hadn’t even noticed? Well, they’d never felt criminal.
The repeal of those laws produced a subtle change in my mother. It was as if a great weight had been lifted from her mind. It made me realize that, up until then, the idea of a public accusation aimed at my father, or still worse a court case brought by the police, had always lurked in the back of her mind. I did not notice this anxiety until it had disappeared, but then I thought: Social shame would destroy her. It would not have had the same effect on my father, or even on myself; but my childhood had been secure, hers had been filled with stress.
I don’t believe my father had ever worried about being arrested. When he was young, he may even have nursed a fantasy of himself in the dock behaving magnificently during the trial for obscenity of The Temple. After the war, with a wife and two children, the risk of his arrest was almost non-existent, provided he did not provoke the police by importuning in public.
If as an adolescent I’d raised with Mum the question of my father’s sexual orientation, she would have denied it. His homosexuality was in the past and all evidence to the contrary was brushed aside. With the homosexual law reform bill, she began to move cautiously away from her position that this part of Stephen’s life was over, because public embarrassment was no longer a threat.
Patiently and skilfully she began to make friends with Nikos and David, moving from a state of polite hostility to one of wise understanding. This did not mean that she’d accepted her role as ‘peripheral’ to Stephen’s inner life. It was more of a question of gaining confidence in public. Other women could look at her at parties and guess how much it cost her. Occasionally I could see someone thinking: Natasha’s doing a fantastic job of keeping up appearances.
My father’s strength was his weakness. My mother’s weakness was that she always had to appear strong.
As Nikos and David slowly became integrated into the lives of both Spenders, there were times when they felt they were becoming part of an elaborate game. David, on the phone to Dad, would hear heavy breathing on the upstairs line as Mum listened in. And if the conversation between the two men became facetious, there’d be an audible click as Mum rang off. That click was as effective as a slamming door. The game was simple. Stephen was saying to Natasha as she eavesdropped: ‘I can always run away and join the boys.’ The ominous click was Mum saying, ‘No you can’t.’
Over time, David became her friend, and when thirty years later Nikos became terminally ill with cancer, she was extremely supportive to them both. Even before that she was always civil, but she’d never allowed either of these young men to occupy the role in Stephen’s life that he himself wanted. Verlaine was not allowed to run away with Rimbaud. After Dad died, David told Natasha that he thought Stephen had loved him. ‘No,’ said my mother with assurance, ‘but he was very fond of you.’ This meant: Even though Stephen is dead, I am still in control.
Back in London after Patmos, before we got married, I arranged for all Gorky’s work in Chapel Street to be photographed. It was the first step towards a catalogue raisonné – which incidentally is still unfinished. It took a long time and it wasn’t done particularly well, but it was a beginning. Those portfolios of drawings under the bed in the basement, the massive safe that had been installed in the house by Charlie Chaplin when he came to England, which used to contain all his films and now was stuffed with Gorkys – it was time they were documented.
Once the photos had been numbered I started going through them with Mougouch.
‘He had to begin somewhere,’ she said as we looked at a straight copy of a work painted by Picasso in 1923. ‘Everybody does. Sometimes he was still adding the final coat when I was around. He never seemed in a hurry to let go of anything.’
‘But even the railings are French! Those are not New York railings. I’ve seen them near the Place Ravignan where Picasso used to live.’
‘He didn’t care about that,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I didn’t know it.’
Gorky’s devotion to the old masters fascinated me. Quotations from Ingres and Bruegel were tucked away in strange corners of his own work, like ghosts from other paintings.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t interested in breaking with the past and doing something new. Gorky thought he could carry the past along with him. I suppose he’d lost so much, he didn’t feel like “killing the father” or whatever it is a man is supposed to do. He’d tell me: you just have to give it a personal twist. It doesn’t have to be much, he’d say, but it has to be yours.’
She’d translated for André Breton when he came to the studio. And Breton was marvellous. ‘He understood everything immediately, whereas those New York critics always thought Gorky was just a follower. All that business of doing something first, which is so typically American. It’s just as well I spoke French!’
After the paintings we started on the drawings.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That’s a walnut tree in the valley. He did a whole stack of drawings from that tree when we were in Virginia, then back in New York he did more, to unravel them.’
‘I just see the unravelling. Where’s the tree?’
‘You’ll get used to them. I cannot not see the landscape. And this one’, she pulled out a drawing, ‘goes with that one.’
I looked at the two side by side. ‘I’m sorry, Mougouch, I just don’t see it.’
‘Oh. Well, maybe the wind’s coming from the other direction.’
The work was fascinating. It involved history, chronology, sorting, New York gossip, her views on the Surrealists. Her life with Gorky had been wonderful, frightening, funny, serious, ridiculous, and some days all of the above.
I told her she should write everything down. ‘No,’ she said.
My parents saw this as a distraction, and they were right. ‘You’re becoming the bailiff of the Gorky Estate,’ my mother said. I wasn’t a historian or even a trained curator, she added. True enough. ‘Maybe you should join the Courtauld and take a course in curating? If you are serious, that is.’ My attention wasn’t professional. But – this was deeply buried but I felt it was there – my mother also thought that the attention I gave to Gorky was a distraction from the attention I ought to be giving to my father. It was another manifestation of the competition between Chapel Street and Loudoun Road.
Mindful of my mother’s warning, even though it contained an element of bile, I tried to remain detached from the Gorky story and merely act, as it were, as a long stop near the boundary. Every five years or so, for the next twenty-five years, I encouraged Mougouch to write her own version of her life before someone else produced a hostile biography. She always said no.
Twenty years later when she married the writer Xan Fielding, far away in a new house in a new country, I asked her one last time. If she didn’t want me to help her, surely she could tell Xan the story and he’d write it down? She said, ‘You’ve asked me before and I’ll tell you one last time: I am through with Gorky! I am happy now! May Gorky rot in his grave!’
Mougouch would never have said something so harsh to a stranger, but by that time I knew her extremely well. She felt that she had every reason to be defiant, because Gorky had lied to her. He’d never told her he was Armenian, he’d adopted a pseudonym that had already been used, his love letters had been copied from Gaudier-Brzeska. His relatives – including his father – had been kept secret from her. How was it possible that she’d shared her life with such a secretive personality? She’d been open with him. She’d given him everything she could. What level of intimacy had she received in return?
I’d been there when the article on the copied love letters was published. Mougouch’s shame was painful to see. Something as intimate as the letters that had seduced her had been copied from a book. I took her side. It was awful. Yet Maro, who in all other things told the truth (whatever the price), defended her father’s lies. He was an artist, she said. Artists’ lives are themselves works of art.
Gorky was a man who’d reinvented himself in the wake of a genocide, and that was understandable; and yes, life as a work of art was surely an admirable thing. But at this point he’d been dead for decades, and here Maro and her mother were fighting over differing loyalties to – what?
The ‘rot in his grave’ moment occurred in Mougouch’s new garden outside Ronda, in Spain. Xan was watering the roses. I looked up at Maro standing on the veranda. She wasn’t upset, thank heavens. ‘Mummy,’ she said, ‘if you find a bucket filled with muddy water, you wait until the mud settles, then you pour off the water into a glass and drink it and you make a tile out of the mud at the bottom. But instead you just keep stirring that bucket and it’s always cloudy!’
When we were alone I told Maro: This is all very well, but you and your mother can’t go on fighting for the rest of your lives over your father’s life. We know too little about it. One day we must set the record straight. If Mougouch won’t do it, we’ll have to.
One day, my mother appeared at Chapel Street to tell Mougouch that she wanted me to take a job. This in itself this was straightforward, but as she spoke she became distracted. Here, in Chapel Street, it seemed to her as if she’d come instead to reclaim the soul of her son from the coven of witches that had appropriated it.
She told Mougouch that when I was sixteen I’d ‘accused’ Stephen of not writing poems. ‘But poor Stephen couldn’t just write poems. Doesn’t Matthew realize the sacrifices he’s had to make for him?’
This was a complex subject. In this precarious moment after he’d resigned from Encounter, my father’s only source of income consisted of lecture tours or visiting professorships, so the prospect of prolonged absences was in the air. Money, plus me, plus absence, often confused my mother’s train of thought. In adolescence, these sessions with my mother about money always ended in a spasm of guilt on her part, in which I felt obliged to join her. But as tears rolled down my cheeks, I’d wonder: Is this money being earned for me, for her, for us? Whose anxiety is it?
What should have been a practical conversation between two experienced women ended with my mother weeping and Mougouch completely at a loss. As much as she’d understood of Natasha’s diatribe, it seemed an accusation aimed at herself. My mother didn’t approve of me spending time with those portfolios is how she’d interpreted it. And beyond those portfolios, my mother didn’t approve of Mougouch.
‘It just seems to me that somehow she’s reached – we’ve reached – a dead end,’ Mougouch told me afterwards. ‘She tries too hard – and I don’t see why. She doesn’t have to emulate and she doesn’t have to compete.’ My mother must have tried to enlist Mougouch’s support for her values. ‘I’m not going to be converted – and anyway, there’s nothing to be converted to. There’s no one good way of doing life. Doesn’t she realize that when it comes to the direction of your life, it’s only the things you throw away that hit the mark?’
This last observation made a big impression on me. I loved the idea that my entire existence could be won or lost like rolling dice.
To her own parents, Mougouch had ‘thrown herself away’ when she’d married Gorky. Her father had never ceased to believe this, in spite of liking Gorky himself and acknowledging that over the years he’d won a great reputation. He’d wanted something simpler and more wholesome for his beloved daughter – as fathers often do. When he lay dying a few years later he told her, ‘Aggie, you’ve always been a rotten picker in the garden of love.’ She was in tears when she came back from his bedside and told us this. She couldn’t see that the remark wasn’t a reproof, but an expression of love.
I don’t remember having ‘accused’ my father of not writing poems, but probably some adolescent confrontation of this kind had indeed occurred. Looking back on it, however, I wonder if the real target of my forgotten reproach wasn’t her, not him. I wanted to challenge her idea of what Dad’s ‘work’ entailed, because I thought her interpretation was wrong.
My mother’s idea was that Dad would sit quietly in his study writing magnificent poems, which she herself would be the first to admire. She would be practising, and he’d come stumbling into the piano room holding a piece of paper and he’d say, excitedly, ‘Read this.’ It was a good fantasy, and I am sure that in certain moods my father shared it; or maybe once or twice it even happened. But my father’s sense of what a poem should be included the spark of an original event that had to be captured, and this was always built around an adventure. I never discussed this with Mum, because it was forbidden territory. But she couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t have Dad quietly in the study doing his ‘real’ work, as she often defined it, without accepting the existence of Reynolds, and Nikos, and later on Bryan, because they were essential to the one activity about which she was entirely supportive.
My father always knew that, to him, creativity was linked to sex. When he was very old and at last impotent, he felt his perception of the world had been destroyed by a form of blindness. A month or two before he died, the realization that his sexuality no longer existed sent him into a kind of panic. ‘I do not believe that writing or any other activity I am capable of can exist without sex.’
For my mother, once the poem was finished and published, it was transformed into the bricks and mortar of the author’s reputation. This was another paradox. Mum may have believed that creativity was an interior process similar to prayer – the quiet hush of St Jérôme in his study – but everything to do with cultivating a reputation went in the other direction. Publicity. Fame. The world. And she enjoyed being famous. When the time came, she enjoyed being Lady Spender. Yet I could never tell her, all this involves ambition. It would have meant attacking her conviction that a poet is innocent.
My mother’s ‘innocence’ was not the same as my father’s. To him, the fact that he was unschuldig meant he could do anything without feeling guilty. It was part of his concept of freedom. Perhaps I should say, without being guilty. Such was the strength of his conviction that he was free from guile, deceit, ambition etc., that the mere fact he’d done something automatically conferred on it the virtue of his innocence.
My mother avoided thinking about her husband’s ambition by convincing herself that his reputation had been awarded to him incidentally. The creative act was solitary – the monastic moment – and its worldly recompense was unsolicited. Success was not evidence that he’d ever sought it. The world had rewarded this unworldly man because what he wrote was good, not because he was ambitious.
Strangely enough, Mougouch believed in a similar fantasy. To her, Gorky had rejected the temptations of the art world and the machinations of the New York critics, like Harold Rosenberg or Clement Greenberg and ‘all those other Bergs’, as she once put it, with a smidge of snobbery. His paintings, however much they acquired the spirit of New York, always projected the feeling of that intense bucolic mountainside hidden away in – where was it? She couldn’t quite remember. He’d never explained where.
I didn’t believe Mum on the subject of Stephen’s innocence, and Maro didn’t believe Mougouch on the subject of Gorky’s. I felt that my father was an ambitious man, whose life had been complicated by the distraction of politics, and these had slowed down his capacity to write poems. Nevertheless, I’d subscribed to his theory that sex and freedom and poems went together and I’d always, since I was twelve, thought he had a right to pursue all three. If self-deception came into it – fine, we are all guilty of that vice. Just as long as he didn’t try to involve me in the process.
The fact that my mother insisted on Dad’s ‘unworldliness’ meant it was yet another subject I could not broach with her. Indeed, I accepted the theory for far too long. The only clue I’d received so far that art isn’t pure was Auden’s unexpected joy at having been given a pat on the back by the Evening Standard. For shame! And the silly old Evening Standard! My obsession with that moment merely underlined how subservient I’d become to the theory that talent is rewarded in proportion to its innocence.
The pain, for me, of the Encounter business was that I absolutely had to decide how much my father had known about it. If he’d known even a teeny-weeny bit, wouldn’t that destroy Natasha’s theory that poets are innocent?
I could even reverse this thought. My mother’s hatred of Lasky and the CIA was necessary to her, to allow her to continue to believe in my father’s innocence.
Maro’s view of Gorky’s failure in New York was simpler. She thought, in a rough-and-ready way, that he’d done his best. It was just that he hadn’t had much luck. New York was tough, that was all. But he’d been successful in the end. Gorky had won his gamble posthumously.
Maro and I were both children of artists of talent, and we shared an intuitive idea of what was involved. There was the talent, and there was the world, and the two were connected in a mysterious way. If an artist says, I shall pitch my fantasy of the world against the reality of that world and see if I can win, it’s a magnificent spectacle. But if the challenge is rewarded, if for a while the taste of the world and the idea thrown at it combine, then the person of talent finds himself caught within his idea and the world into which it now fits. Nothing can penetrate the hard shell where these two elements intertwine. This is why the lives of successful artists are often so sparse. In time the taste of the world inevitably ebbs away, leaving the carapace of this drama as the only thing still visible.
One last time I went up to Loudoun Road to go through my fervent marital ambitions and rejection of all worldly ones. ‘Mougouch didn’t understand what you were getting at, last week,’ I said. ‘Can we keep it simple? What kind of job do you imagine would suit me?’
The answer was unexpected. It wasn’t too late for me to sit the Foreign Office exam, was it? I’d studied history, hadn’t I? The exam wasn’t that hard, and we could probably find someone to ‘recommend’ me. I’d enjoy working in the Foreign Office. ‘It might be rather fun to end up as an ambassador, don’t you think?’
I just laughed. Maro was hardly cut out to be an ambassador’s wife. I pointed out that she had no sense of tact, and her habit of treating a secret as if it were a delicious substance to be spread over a large area, like anchovy paste on toast, would hardly go down well in the Foreign Office.
Mum couldn’t resist saying: ‘Well, quite!’
There was something odd about this comment. I asked her what she meant. My mother, with a careless air as if she might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, said that Maro’s lack of tact might be a very good reason for me to choose someone else to marry.
I thought this was very funny, and so did Maro, but all the same it somehow represented the end of the line. We were getting married in about a fortnight, and here was Mum making a last-ditch defence of what was right by saying we shouldn’t.
It was frustrating. Mougouch was a much tougher personality than my mother, and at this point my prospective mother-in-law was revealing occasional rough edges by showing pleasure in having defeated Mum. But why, for heaven’s sake, had it always been such a battle? Mum was a vulnerable woman held together by rules. Mougouch was a buccaneer. Mum’s rules had never stood a chance. She shouldn’t have stuck to them.
My father, sent by my mother a fortnight later to try to achieve some understanding with Mougouch, took her out for a drink. We joined them and kept quietly in the background. Stephen explained that he and Natasha wanted to contribute to the expenses of the wedding; not perhaps all of it, because their finances were in such a bad state. Mougouch told him firmly that it was the duty of the bride’s parents to pay for the wedding, so he needn’t worry.
‘I want at least to pay something,’ said Stephen. He laughed. ‘Maybe we could take on the cube root of whatever it’ll cost?’
After he left, Maro asked her mother why she hadn’t even let him pay for the drinks. ‘Oh well, you’ve heard of something called pride, haven’t you? Pride! Sometimes when you get up, you can see it still stuck to the chair.’
I had the impression I’d heard this gag before. Never mind. It suited her.
At St Pancras Town Hall, the man behind the desk said something discouraging along the lines of, British law recognizes one wife per one husband at a time. We were asked to say yes, so we said yes. Afterwards Maro said loudly, before we’d even left the room, ‘I didn’t believe a word of it.’ She was right. It was the meanest of marital vows. We’d wanted ‘with this body I thee worship’. Something transcendental, but it was beyond anyone’s appetite in those days.
The party was chaotic. Mougouch had to make conversation with Sir George Schuster, my father’s great-uncle, who talked about Stephen’s wedding to Inez in 1936. Cyril Connolly talked to Moura Budberg, in whose arms the other Gorky, Maxim, was supposed to have expired. There were lots of children who, encouraged by Maro, danced all over the room like imps. My father, who’d looked gloomy throughout, sought a telephone towards the end and rang Nikos and David to say how pleased he was that they were together – those two, not us two. ‘Stephen, sentimental about how Nikos and I love each other, sounded drunk, and Nikos and I were embarrassed for him.’
For our honeymoon we went to Amsterdam. I wanted to compare and contrast Rembrandt with Frans Hals. The bath in our hotel was as small and square as a Japanese coffin, and I got stuck in it with my knees under my chin. Maro had to pull me out. There was a sullen squelch and we ended up on top of each other with water everywhere. She said, ‘This is the last time I get married to you.’
After walking through the museums, Maro wanted to see some movies as light relief. We saw five different episodes of Angélique, about an uptight Frenchwoman who survives every indignity in order to end up with the deeply unattractive Robert Hossein. She was raped constantly, though the camera always shied away at the last minute to concentrate on the floorboards. Then we’d drink young gin and eat rollmops.
One bar near the hotel had an aquarium with some very sick fish. My diary of the time has Maro saying: ‘I wouldn’t eat that scrawny old fish if they paid me, with his eyes going round in their saucers. Do you see him, Matt? He’s on his last legs. But it’s nice how they rest on the sand. One feels immediately protective towards the little darlings.’
It was December and the weather was foul. She said, ‘Can’t we go away? I’m not a fir tree. I’m a lemon tree or an orange tree. My leaves fall off if it gets too cold. Every time I want to laugh, shivers run up my legs. I’m an ice bucket with the cubes tinkling in my belly.’
I wondered, and not for the first time, if we couldn’t just leave England. Perhaps we could keep on going, beyond Amsterdam and down towards the sun, and never come back?