‘You know your father’s got a fancy woman in London,’ said Eva García, with her thick Welsh accent (‘Ewe gnaw ewe father’) and her thick Welsh Schadenfreude (the simple pleasure of relaying bad news). ‘Fancy man’, according to the dictionary, is ‘a woman’s lover’; ‘fancy woman’, far more specifically, is ‘a married man’s mistress’. I didn’t know that then. I was thirteen. But I took Eva’s meaning.
Celt-Iberian Eva García had served as our nanny-housekeeper during the family’s decade in Swansea, South Wales; and she was now summoned down to Cambridge to help keep things steady during an undefined domestic crisis (my father, Kingsley, was elsewhere, and no one had told me why). I found Eva’s words completely unabsorbable, and I cancelled them from my mind. Simultaneously I intuited that her intervention was spontaneous and unauthorised, and this damaged my trust in it. But it still awakened fear in me.
A week later, as my mother, Hilly, dropped me off at school, she said that she and Kingsley were embarking on ‘a trial separation’ (‘we’re just not getting on any more’). What I remember feeling at the time was numbness, pierced only by a weak hope. I was not yet aware, of course, that trial separations were nearly always a resounding success. But I never doubted that my father still loved my mother. (And it was true.) At the same time the fear awakened by Eva now filled the sky like a mushroom cloud: was this the end of everything? Yet it seems that even a pre-adolescent gets hormonal support (adrenaline? testosterone?), allowing him to contemplate the disaster with an imitation of pragmatic calm.
That night I lay there in the dark pining for the return of my brother Nicolas from boarding school, which I knew would strengthen me. I also made one adjustment to my internal plot summary. The fancy woman was removed from the cast.
During the summer break Hilly took her three children – Nicolas, Martin, and Myfanwy, now fifteen, fourteen, and ten – to a rented house near Sóller, Mallorca, for an indefinite stay. My brother and I were enrolled at the International School in Palma; Myfanwy attended classes, in Spanish, at a local nunnery (and very soon became fluent). By November the boys were feeling the loss of their father so sharply that they spent at least an hour every morning waiting for the postman to stop by on his motorbike; and once in a while there was a brief, jaunty, and uninformative paternal letter, or more usually a paternal postcard.
So sharply (I repeat) that when half term came Hilly immediately put Nicolas and me on a plane to Heathrow, equipped with the address of Kingsley’s ‘bachelor flat’ in Knightsbridge. I think both the brothers at this point believed in the first word of the quoted phrase. I for one certainly had daydreams about Dad having his tea and toast alone in a modest kitchen, and perhaps making the bed or even doing a bit of dusting…
The flight was delayed, and it was well past midnight when we rang the bell in Basil Mansions, London SW3. My father, wearing striped pyjamas, opened the door and rocked back in astonishment (Hilly’s telegram had not arrived). These were his first words: ‘You know I’m not alone here.’ We shrugged coolly, but we were now as astonished as he was. Silently the three of us filed into the kitchen. Kingsley disappeared and then reappeared. Then Jane appeared…
A modern youth would have thought, simply, Wow. But this was 1963, and what I thought was more like Cor (with the slightly reluctant rider, Say what you like about him, but Dad can’t half pull). Tall, erect, calm, fine-boned, and with the queenly bearing of the fashion model she once was, in a spotless white bathrobe and with a yard of rich blonde hair extending to her waist, Jane straightforwardly introduced herself and set about making us bacon and eggs.
Our five-day visit was a saturnalia of treats and sprees – Harrods fruit-juice bar every morning, restaurants, record shops, West End cinemas (55 Days at Peking, with Kingsley lying down on the floor at our feet every single time Ava Gardner appeared on screen), punctuated by several agonising and tearful heart-to-hearts between father and sons (during one of which Nicolas – very impressively, I’ve always thought – called Kingsley a cunt). But there it was: he had made up his mind and he wasn’t coming back.
On the last night, in the middle of a small dinner party, the telephone rang and my father answered; he listened for a moment, and shouted out, ‘No!’ Then he looked out at us and said four words. Jane quietly began to weep. And one of the guests, George Gale (or, as Private Eye called him, George G. Ale), grimly fetched his overcoat and headed off to Fleet Street and the Daily Express. It was November 22. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Over the next three or four years my lovelorn mother’s homestead in the Fulham Road – so bohemian that it was never locked – steadily disintegrated; and by the time the two boys went to live with Kingsley and Jane I was a semiliterate truant and waster whose main interest was hanging around in betting shops (where, tellingly, I specialised in reversible forecasts on the dogs). The move was Jane’s idea.
She always had a pronounced philanthropic bent, and was strongly drawn to strugglers and lost souls – to those who, as she put it, ‘had such terrible lives’. She wanted goals, tasks, projects; unlike either of my parents, she was proactive and she was organised. Nicolas, far bolder and more rebellious than I was, didn’t last very long in the elegant and mannerly house in Maida Vale (and by his own efforts he went on to the Camberwell College of Arts). But I liked it there. So I swallowed the guilt of disloyalty (to my mother) and I responded to my stepmother’s interest and advice.
When Jane took me on I was averaging an O level a year, and I read nothing but comics, plus the occasional Harold Robbins and – for example – the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley; I had recently sat an A level in English (the only subject in which I’d ever shown any promise) and was awarded an F: I failed. After just over a year under Jane’s direction (much of it spent in a last-ditch boarding crammer in Brighton), I had another half-dozen O levels (including Latin from scratch), three A levels, and a second-tier scholarship to Oxford. None of this would have happened without Jane’s energy and concentration.
The process also had its intimacies. One day, early on, she presented me with a reading list: Austen, Dickens, Scott Fitzgerald, Waugh, Greene, Murdoch, Golding, Spark. I began, leerily, with Pride and Prejudice. After an hour or so I went and knocked on Jane’s study door. ‘Ah Mart,’ she said, taking off her glasses and leaning back from her desk. I said, ‘Jane, I’ve got to know. Does Elizabeth marry Mr Darcy?’ Jane hesitated, looking stern, and I expected her to say, ‘Well you’ll have to finish it and find out.’ But she tenderly relented and said, ‘Yes’ (and in addition she put my troubled mind at rest about Jane Bennet and Mr Bingley). Long afterwards we agreed that this was the simple secret of Austen’s narrative force, and of the reader’s abnormally keen desire for the happy ending: she slowly unites heroes and heroines who are literally made for each other, and made with all her intelligence and insight and art.
In the early years at least, Kingsley and Jane seemed made for each other. It was an unusual and unusually stimulating ménage: two passionately dedicated novelists who were also passionately in love. Their approach to the daily business of writing formed a clear contrast, one from which I derived a tentative theory about the difference between male and female fiction. Kingsley was a grinder; no matter how he was feeling (sickly, clogged, loth – or plain hungover, if you prefer), he trudged off to his desk after breakfast; there was a half-hour lunchbreak, and that was that until it was time for evening drinks. Jane was far more spasmodic and compulsive. She would wander from room to room, she would do some cooking or some gardening, and plenty of smoking as she stared out of the sitting-room window with arms folded and an air of anxious preoccupation. Then she would suddenly hasten to her study, and you’d hear the clatter of her typewriter keys. Quite soon she would shyly emerge, having written more in an hour than my father would write in a day.
The great critic Northrop Frye, in a discussion of Milton’s elegy ‘Lycidas’, made the distinction between real sincerity and literary sincerity. When told of the death of a friend, poets can burst into tears; but they cannot burst into song. I would very cautiously suggest that there is more ‘song’ in women’s fiction – more real sincerity, and less tradition-haunted contrivance. This is certainly true of Elizabeth Jane Howard. She was an instinctivist, with a freakishly metaphorical eye and a sure ear for rhythmically fast-moving prose. Kingsley once ‘corrected’ one of Jane’s short stories, regularising her grammar. All his changes were technically sound; and all of them, in my view, were marked disimprovements (and later on I privately said so).
Later on, because by this time mutual hostility was clearly building; and an attentive reader of Kingsley’s novel, Girl, 20 (1971), could feel pretty sure that all hope was already lost. At the outset, one of the qualities that attracted my father to Jane was her well-travelled (and twice-married) worldliness, her confident social presence – her class, in a word. England in the sixties and seventies was stratified to an extent that now seems barely credible; and it is naive to expect artists or intellectuals to be immune, in the living of their lives, to the stock responses, the emotional clichés, of their time.
The daughter of a prosperous timber merchant, Jane was educated by governesses and grew up in a large house full of servants in Notting Hill. The son of a clerk at a mustard manufacturers, Kingsley was a South London scholarship boy and the first Amis to attend university (he was also a card-carrying Communist until the ridiculously advanced age of thirty-five). That gulf in status was part of the attraction, on both sides; there is bathos as well as pathos in the fact that in the end it proved unbridgeable.
Kingsley would later write that many marriages adhere to a familiar pattern: the wife regards the husband as slightly uncouth and ill-bred, and the husband regards the wife as slightly over-refined and stuck-up. And it was as if Kingsley set himself the task of broadening that divide.
To take a relatively trivial example (while remembering that marriages are measured by relative trivialities), among her other accomplishments Jane was a culinary expert who expended a lot of time and trouble in the kitchen; Kingsley did not go so far as to smother her soufflés with HP Sauce, but with increasing frequency he reached for the pickles, the chutneys, and the jams, muttering that he had to make this or that venison terrine or smoked-fish mousse ‘taste of something’. In a well-meaning marriage the principals soon identify each other’s irritabilities and seek to appease them. Jane and especially Kingsley did the opposite. As he got coarser, she could not but seem snootier. The antagonisms proliferated and ramified; it became a cold civil war.
Jane was a self-confessed ‘bolter’. Maybe, in her two earlier marriages. But no one was even mildly surprised when, in 1980, she did a medium-paced runner on Kingsley. Nicolas called me and said, ‘Mart. It’s happened’; and I knew in a heartbeat what he meant. Her disappearance seemed punitive, and certainly gave rise to great complication, due to my father’s lavish array of phobias (he couldn’t drive, he couldn’t fly, and he couldn’t be alone after dark). This necessitated a system of ‘Dadsitting’ by his three children – until we hit upon an unlikely arrangement involving my mother and her third husband, which to everyone’s consternation lasted till Kingsley’s death in 1995. A man who abandons his first wife and is then himself abandoned by her successor loses everything: he becomes an amatory zero. But as soon as Kingsley was reunited with Hilly (though only platonically and prudentially) he stopped ‘feeling cut-up about Jane’. And thereafter, it still pains me to report, he never had a good word to say for her.
During their early years together Kingsley and Jane practised a curious ritual. Before dinner they would in turn read out to each other the results of their day’s labour. I always found this incomprehensible: after all, the prose is unrevised, raw, contingent; and besides fiction is there to be read, not listened to. I once rather snidely asked my father if he had yet regaled Jane with the penultimate paragraph of Jake’s Thing (1978). He looked furtive, and this is why:
Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.
The blanket condemnation became outright misogyny in Stanley and the Women (1984). In that long sentence I can see glimmers of Jane; but I can see nothing of Hilly, whose presence in the house cured Kingsley of his aversion, and thereby rescued his artistic sense, which was in the end redoubtable. In 1986 he won the Booker Prize for his longest and most satisfying novel, The Old Devils.
After Jane separated herself from Kingsley, it never occurred to anyone that I should separate myself from Jane. But I naturally saw far less of her. She wanted more from me – more than I felt able to give. It was always that way. From the very start I sensed emanations of love from her. I was very grateful and very attached and very admiring. But your father’s ‘other woman’, I fear, is doomed to love her stepson without full requital. The blood tie to the blood mother is simply too potent and too deep.
With a secretive look Jane said to me in 1965, just after she and Kingsley got married, ‘I’m your wicked stepmother.’ And it was true: she was wicked in the sense of ‘exceptionally good’. In my last letter to her, written in December 2013, I saluted Jane for her artistic longevity (she had just published All Change, volume five of the Cazalet Chronicles, at the age of ninety); and I cited the example of the skilled historical yarner Herman Wouk, who had just published The Lawgiver at the age of ninety-seven. I hoped and more than half expected Jane to duplicate Wouk’s feat. But she died on January 2, 2014, barely a month after her younger brother Colin, an unsung hero of this saga (charming, witty, not very happily gay, universally adored, and one of the most sweet-natured people I have ever known), who lived with Jane before Kingsley and went on living with her through the lion’s share of the Kingsley years.
For reasons that no doubt go back to a dismal childhood (with a cold mother and an intrusively intimate father), Jane was always restless for affection; and at the same time she remained a calamitous chooser of men. Indeed, my father – by any standards a mixed blessing – was probably the pick of the bunch, standing out (there were other, briefer exceptions) from a ghastly galère of frauds, bullies, and rogues. One of Jane’s finest books was a collection of stories called Mr Wrong. So maybe in the end it is Colin – always known by everyone as Monkey – who will have to serve, and serve honourably, as the love of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s life.
I spent that Christmas and New Year with my wife and younger daughters in Florida, where I heard of Jane’s death and wrote the first version of this personal obituary. On the plane back to New York I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if Jane answered my letter.’ And she had; the envelope, eerily, with her slightly shrunken but unmistakable hand, was waiting on the mat in Brooklyn (postmarked December 16). Inside it were two single-spaced typed pages. She included a resilient account of Colin’s funeral, a stoical (and amusing) catalogue of the sort of disabilities you’d expect as you enter your tenth decade, some kind remarks about my last novel, and news about her work in progress (she was a third of the way through). There was not the slightest hint that she felt herself to be fading or ailing. Indeed, she approved my suggestion that we resume the quite diligent correspondence we kept up during my years as a student, half a century ago.
Jane’s authorised biographer, Artemis Cooper (and at that stage hers was another work in progress), told me that Jane had a full and active Christmas (she was always a generous and ingenious buyer of presents), and duly answered all the letters lamenting her younger brother. With that done, her appetite began to fail, and her body seemed to be ‘shutting down’. Medical science has only recently recognised the condition – but we have all seen it at work. The spouse, the companion, the close relative goes, and often with terrifying speed the soulmate follows. With good reason did Saul Bellow entitle one of his later novels More Die of Heartbreak. Jane’s final morning came on January 2; and she ‘serenely’ ceased to be in the early afternoon.
Telling a dream, we all know by now, impedes a novel or a story. But this is not fiction. In early February I dreamt I was very young again, and I and my brother and sister heard that Jane’s dog Rosie was in great distress (a ‘ruby’ Cavalier spaniel, Rosie was put to sleep with much sorrow in the mid-1970s); and we set off to find her, as if on a quest in an idealistic children’s book. Nicolas asked, ‘What shall we do when we find her?’ ‘Cuddle her,’ Myfanwy firmly answered. We found Rosie, who was the wrong colour but was certainly suffering, and we set about giving her comfort. Then I woke up. Later that day I realised why, in dream logic, Rosie was crying. She was crying because her mistress was dead.