Читать книгу Conspiracy of Secrets - Bobbie Neate - Страница 7

I was miserable. My mother had died. Her funeral had been on Friday, and now, on this cloudy Monday in July 2002, was her interment. For a brief moment I allowed childhood memories to come flooding back as I approached Sutton Coldfield’s Cemetery Road. I saw myself huddled in the back seat of the Morris Oxford estate car, with its distinctive yellow slats of wood dividing the doors and windows from the pale-green chassis. It was a large vehicle for the 1950s but it soon became too small for four children and a poodle, dachshund and terrier as our growing legs took up more of the available space under the back seat of the car.

Mum would, of course, be driving. Stepfather never drove. In my recollections, my three older siblings had left for boarding school and I, as the only child left at home, was alone on the back seat. Beside me sat the handsome wreath that Mum had organised. On each anniversary of the death of her mother, father and younger brother I accompanied her on her pilgrimage to the family grave. It was my job at the age of seven or eight to stop the wreath falling to the floor if she braked hard. Woe betide me if my stepfather spotted I had failed in my duties and it had slipped from its position!

The previous day she had been on the phone, sitting in her usual position: leaning on her left elbow, the phone pressed to her ear while she allowed the pen in her right hand to doodle on the notepad. She knew all about the florist’s home life, just as she knew all the triumphs and disappointments of her favourite shopkeepers. As with everything else to do with her family, she gave the floral arrangement a great deal of care and attention. The end result was always an unusual but fitting tribute.

As we approached the cemetery Stepfather put on his supportive-husband act: deferential, courteous and speaking in quiet tones. Mum would reply with subdued remarks about her dearly departed family. She would recall vivid memories of her graceful mother and her talented dad. He was an engineer who built a thriving company that supplied car parts to the motor industry and died when my mother was only 17. He passed away so young that he achieved hero status within family folklore. Whatever time of year, the churchyard custodian stood waiting to greet us beside the lychgate, brush or fork in hand, ready to sweep leaves or to pull out any brave weed that dared to encroach on one of his paths.

But on this disturbing day, over fifty years later, I was the adult and I was the griever. I knew that the burial service would be harrowing, not just because we were burying my darling mother, but because of how we were to deal with our manipulative stepfather. I had been pulled through an emotional mangle and I longed for some peace. But the biggest shock of all was still to come.

It was on a cold Sunday in December 2000, 18 months before my mother’s burial, that my life fell apart. I was in my early fifties and a divorcee myself, in sole charge of three teenage children. Tom, my elder son, had been visiting home for the first time since starting university. We had spent the weekend doing all the old things that we used to do when he lived at home. While we were out, Stepfather had left an unclear message in his low resonant voice.

‘Mum has had a mild stroke,’ he relayed in his haughty voice. ‘It’s nothing to worry about.’

What? Mum’s suffered a stroke? Mum was nearly ninety but she was invincible. I was in deep shock. I tried to ring him back but the phone was engaged. The dull bleeps reminded me of all those years ago, when the phone at my family home, the Old Mill House, was constantly in use. Thoughts flooded into my brain. Did I have to admit to myself that I hardly knew this man? Was the pretence over? He was the secretive man who had married my mother when I was young, and in those early days he did not go out to work but lingered at home writing in his upstairs study. The same puzzling man later became famed in the world of motor racing when I was entering my teens.

It was Tom hollering from his bedroom that evening that jerked me from my anguished thinking: deep concern for my mother tempered with fear of having to deal with Louis Stanley without her steadying influence. While my elder son crammed his tatty clothes into a holdall I shouted housekeeping instructions to Rupert, who was studying for his A-levels, and the lively Hannah, who was 14. I called to Tom to jump in the car and we left so quickly I didn’t have time to wave goodbye. Little did I know as we set off that this would be the first of many stressful drives to Cambridge.

My mother had been inspired to look for a larger house in Cambridge when I, her youngest, arrived. She immediately fell in love with the old miller’s house that stood on the corner of a main road leading into the city. She would sit at the kitchen table, staring at the heavily netted kitchen window, searching for a glimpse of her delightful courtyard, and recall buying the place.

A small part of the house dated back to the sixteenth century, but Victorian additions made the building an attractive if chaotic structure. However, this did not stop my mother’s love for the old miller’s abode. It was she who arranged for the gate to be painted blue. Later she bought a brass bell with an arched clanger and had it fixed so that, when the blue gate opened and exposed the enclosed courtyard, it merrily jangled.

‘Do you know, I paid ten thousand pounds for the house?’ she would say.

We did. It was one of those oft-repeated family stories, one of the few she was allowed to retell that predated the arrival of Stepfather.

The kitchen was the hub of the household, welcomingly warm with steamy windows, the air filled with scrumptious smells. The aromas permeated through the thick heavy door and out into the cold passage beyond. Even on the coldest windswept Cambridgeshire days, the coke-burning boiler generated a cosy background heat. It sometimes produced pungent odours, overcoming the bouquets of roast dinner, apple pie and steamed greens, but, even if the acrid vapours hurt my lungs, it made the Mill House home.

In those early days, if I had fallen down the greenhouse grating, been hit on the head with a rounders bat, argued or just could not do my homework, I would expect to find her in the kitchen, with an attractive apron strategically placed over her fashionable clothes. She might have kicked her high heeled shoes to one side and be in stockinged feet, but she would be there. The radio would be tuned to the BBC Light Programme (the network that became Radio 2), Housewives’ Choice would be blaring out, and there would be remnants of flour on her hands.

Years of dedicated and loving culinary work had made the surface of the old oak table irregular. It was similar, in many ways, to a butcher’s slab with its ups and downs of wear and tear with the pitted wood revealing the many chops and gouges of various cutting implements over the years. But the kitchen table was not just the place to chop meat, peel endless potatoes, and roll out pie after pie. It was the place to do your painting by numbers, to play the latest board game and the floor was always the best surface for any car game.

Car toys were always popular with me. In the winter I set up a permanent Scalextric track in the playroom and I would play for hours putting oil on the back tyres of the model cars to make the steering harder.

Then on warmer days there was the garden to practise my cycling. I pretended I was driving a BRM and I had to get the fastest lap. The washing line had been moved to above the asparagus patch, and if I reached up from the saddle I could fix my stopwatch with a peg so that it dangled from a height. Grabbing it and clipping the button as I skidded in to beat my previous best lap time was all part of the fun. The garden had a maze of paths, so there were lots of corners to be taken at speed and many were lined with low box hedges or hidden flat bricks.

In those early days when I got home from school on summer days my mother would fling open the front door so that the flagstones of the veranda became an extension to the oddly shaped hall. The Victorian ironwork pillars that held the slanting glass roof made a superb backdrop to where Mum had organised a gigantic arrangement of tall blooms in one of her massive vases. The white tray tables would be in use again. We would carry them from the kitchen loaded with bread and cakes. Then, when we got into the right position, perhaps over Stepfather’s knees, we would press the handles carefully, so that our fingers would not be trapped in the mechanisms that lowered the legs. A teatime treat might be strawberries from Mrs Hacker’s farm, collected on the way home from school. Then we would sit in deck chairs eating and watching the birds peck at the flowerbeds.

As we ate, my mother might allow herself to recount how she loved sorting Baxter Prints with her adored father on Sunday afternoons. Then she might recall the stories of the punt her parents kept on their moat and how she paddled them around among the reeds. On happier days she did not hear Stepfather’s heavy huffing and puffing, which indicated that she had reminisced enough, for she might add the story of her teenage brother, Ernest, and how he grabbed the boat from under her nose and set off without her, then lay in the punt listening to his records on his wind-up gramophone, while eating quantities of the richest Sutton Coldfield chocolates. He deigned to give her an occasional wave from behind the horn of the gramophone, as she stood stranded on the lawn. But by now Louis was tapping his teaspoon on his cup and she drew to a halt. He had grudgingly agreed to these stories from her childhood but she appeared to be barred from reminiscing about her earlier adult life when we were very young.

It seemed so strange that Stepfather never recounted any incident from his early years. If I turned and asked about his childhood he never replied, so I soon learned that questions about his previous life were unwelcome. Even a mild ‘Where did you go to school?’ might provoke a thunderous look, but if I ventured to ask, ‘Where did you live?’ his mood would darken further. Yet his silences only increased my curiosity. Was childhood too demeaning for such a great man? As I grew older and perhaps a little braver, while my knees still knocked I would ask the two questions that utterly infuriated him: ‘What did your father do?’ and ‘What did you do in the war?’ These often made him strike out in rage.

On one occasion after I challenged him hard about his past he finally snapped angrily at me, ‘My father was a cotton broker.’ Those few words stopped me prying for some months. Then, years later, when we boldly pushed him about his lack of relatives, he lost his temper and swung his arms out in a mock, or perhaps real, attempt to hit us. ‘I had an Uncle Oliver. You must have heard of him.’

For all that, Stepfather could not resist occasionally tantalising us with a boast about his past years. If Question Time was on TV he might brag, ‘Of course, it’s not as good as when I appeared on it. The programme was called The Brains Trust and was on the Light Programme. In those days, just after the war, everybody listened.’ When I was older the question of why he had been selected was on the edge of my lips, but I resisted the temptation. I didn’t want to hear another torrent of bragging stories, which always appeared too fanciful to be true. However, years later he could not resist showing us a huge antiquated audiotape in a metal circular box with ‘BBC’ written on it. Stepfather also seemed to know many TV personalities. He rarely liked them. The journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge had once been his friend, but not any more; and when the politician Roy Jenkins or the historian A. J. P. Taylor appeared he always made some derogatory remark.

Stepfather’s name fascinated me. Why was he called Louis? It was such a strange-sounding name. None of my friends’ fathers had French names. Why did he? And why did nobody address him as Louis? Even my mother avoided using it. And pronunciation of his name caused all sorts of problems to others.

My stepfather was a romantic and always seemed fond of my mother, and she shyly returned his affections. He bought her endless bunches of flowers, showered her with expensive presents and never let her leave the house without a kiss. He always watched her walk through the painted blue gate from the landing window if she was nipping out with us children.

Of course that does not mean they did not have quarrels. There were lots, especially in the early years. When I was older, the rows were either about our behaviour or about a woman called Auntie Mamie.

When I was little my mother went shopping every day; of course, Stepfather came too. She rarely went out on her own. Our first stop was the baker – Mum would chat to the lady behind the counter as she passed me armfuls of bread to carry home. But there were other, more worrying, conversations that I overheard on the Cambridge pavements.

‘Yes, of course, I’m still going to do the baking for the Mission to Seamen. Some of my charity works will stop, but not the one most dear to my heart.’

Even when I was that young, all did not seem right. Why did she have to repeat this to so many people? I wondered if my mother was somehow disgraced. There were other whispered asides that I didn’t understand.

It was my mother who had to deal with the running of the house. She paid all the bills. There were times when Louis wanted more control. This always proved disastrous and he ended up exploding with anger with one of the poor individuals who were trying their best to help. My mother would then be called upon to use her charm to encourage the tradesman back to his job. But Louis’s behaviour lost us the services of many local businesses for ever. Builders, plumbers, florists, stationery and book stores all experienced his wrath, but the biggest loss of all was the large department store Eaden Lilly. They banned him. It proved a great inconvenience to us all and slowly my mother began to do more and more of her shopping in London. But he even managed to destroy some of her fun there. There had been some sort of argument with the Harrods management about money owing. As a result, Louis refused to shop there any more. Little did I know that he had been refused their credit.

In the afternoons when I was very small Louis used to cycle into Cambridge. He first topped up the air in the tyres of his extra-sturdy bike, fixed with dynamo lights and three thumb-click gears, then he would wrap the bottom section of his russet corduroy trousers into tight tidy folds and clip each ankle with a black sprung clip. If it was colder he would wear his fawn duffle coat and Emmanuel scarf. As he opened the blue gate he would turn and wave at my mother who stood at the landing window. When he came back, I remember, he reported to my mother he had collected his post from his old college, kept in a strange box in the porter’s lodge. He would also tell of visiting his mother and strange sister in Newnham, where they lived before they permanently moved in with us.

For, unlike like my friends’ fathers, Stepfather did not leave for work in the mornings and return tired in the evenings. Instead, he lurked at home writing about golf. Then, as he became more interested in his wife’s passion for motor racing, he developed his already well-honed photographic skills to publish a yearly account of the season’s Grand Prix races. Each year he became more adventurous with his pictures and text and the racing circus began to fear each new edition, in case an individual was featured in an unflattering or derogatory manner.

Mum had been a proud housekeeper and Stepfather greatly increased her work. She always had a freshly ironed tablecloth at every mealtime. In those early days she must have washed and ironed a mountain of linen every week. She had needed a survival strategy. It evolved over the years. She subtly looked and waited for the opportune moment when Louis might be in a good mood – it would eventually come and then she would pounce.

One Thursday, after she had come home from her weekly shopping trip to London, she produced a big parcel, which she had bought at one of the smart stores she visited. She allowed us to unwrap the packet and, as we opened it, the unaccustomed waft of an oily product hit our noses. It was a plastic tablecloth. Stepfather looked thunderous. ‘I’m not eating with that sleazy object on the table,’ he said.

‘We’re trying it out while I iron the embroidered tablecloth. There isn’t a clean one at the moment.’

I can remember mum’s sheer joy at only having to wipe away drops of gravy, the odd piece of roast potato after it had shot off our plates, or spills from the water jug. Slowly the plastic cloth replaced the embroidered ones. She had won a small battle. Her victories were subtle, but they began to work for her. I watched her manoeuvre him to her advantage and I believed that, when I needed help, she would always do her best to win a small contest against him, for me. He was manipulative, so she became crafty.

Now I can write quite confidently that Louis Stanley was my stepfather, but as a child I was perplexed. And there was nobody I could ask. He insisted on telling everybody else that we were his children and, as nobody ever mentioned a father other than this stranger, who had once given me a huggable teddy to replace my stiff-jointed monkey, I was confused. I don’t remember asking questions when I was told that this massive, balding, thick-set man was suddenly to be known as Papa and not Uncle Louis. Nobody liked the name ‘Papa’, so Mum tried to use Poppy. But nobody liked this version of his name either.

I was always too frightened to ever ask questions about a real father. But I remember querying with myself whether I really had a proper father or not. I wondered where I had got the notion he might have been a vicar. There were times when I overheard gossip about a father having a possible fling with a maternity nurse. Was this my father? I asked. Then there were the whispering shopkeepers talking in lowered tones after we left their stores. Even then I felt everybody else knew more about the truth than I did. It was not until I started my investigations that I was to find out more.

When I was five or six, I started school. Byron House was based in a rambling Edwardian house with extensive grounds. Every morning we filed into the hall so that Miss Gimmingham, the headteacher, could take the register. Later on, if ever I was in doubt about having a ‘real’ father, I recalled my previous position in the register. Surely my surname had started with a ‘B’. The voice of my teacher was an auditory reminder that I had once been at the top of the school register and now I had plummeted to the nether reaches of those children whose surnames began with ‘S’. I kept the recollection to myself. There was nobody in whom I could confide. Stepfather controlled us with the divide-and-rule principle, so I felt unable to talk with my brothers and sister.

Stepfather was frightening. He was so severe I never even dreamed of disobeying him, even in the smallest way. The perplexing problem was that sometimes he tried to be nice. Looking back, I guess this was only when my mother was around. He could be brutal in his comments. He soon put a stop to my noisier games and banned me from my favourite sport of Grand Prix circuit antics on my small bike in the garden. He certainly did not want to hear any of us and if we hid ourselves away he was more than content. My brother was turned out of his large bedroom and put into a box-sized room so that Stepfather could have an upstairs study. There he hid away for most of the day, appearing only for meal times. Sometimes I could hear the tip-tap of his Olivetti typewriter but more often than not I heard popular music of the time blaring out, ‘Moon River’ being one of his favourites. Years later he shut himself away in his room with the telephone.

Stepfather’s study was his sanctuary but he also used this private space to entrap the few visitors he had. There was something disturbing about that one step into his room. I had to pluck up courage to cross that imaginary boundary and sometimes I was asked to lurk. Guests were always deferential. Stepfather did not have friends. As they entered his study they were instructed to view the series of golf books he had written, then they were guided to admire the garish colours of the dust jackets of his motor-racing titles. Next, the visitors were asked to turn their backs on the shelves and marvel at his gallery of black-and-white snaps that were placed on the wall facing the door. They were his celebrity close-ups. Most of them also featured Stepfather. I remember the close-up of W. H. Auden, whose face was grooved by deep facial lines, and his pride when he added Elizabeth Taylor to his wall. Then there were Cecil Beaton, Orson Welles, Harold Macmillan and Gilbert Murray. I knew nothing about the people, and his interest in photography sent shivers down my spine, so most of the images remain grainy in my mind.

But I have a clearer memory of his haughty voice repeating the names of the people he was meant to know: Lord Birkenhead, Jo Grimond, Eric Lubbock, the Aga Khan, the Du Maurier family, T. E. Lawrence, Duncan Sandys, Douglas Fairbanks, a man whose surname was Masterman, Oswald Mosley and the Mitfords, Lord Beveridge, Malcolm Muggeridge, Gilbert Murray and somebody strangely called Trevelyan. (We will meet some of these characters later.) He had repeated these names so often, how could I ever forget them? I wasn’t interested in the fame of the people. I was fascinated by their nomenclature. Augustus John: fancy having the surname ‘John’! I thought. The other name that amused me was Bertrand Russell. I was interested in its rhythm, but it stands out in my memory because Stepfather liked to call each male acquaintance by just his surname. So for years I thought Bertrand Russell was a double-barrelled name. Surnames such as Pitt Rivers and Goodenough amused me. Then there was the fascinating name that Stepfather always mentioned when he came home from London, which conjured up all sorts of geographical images: Beaverbrook.

Friends were something our family did not do easily. My mother was a social individual, but when she married Louis nobody dropped round. The blue gate outside our house became a kind of barrier to deter guests. If a neighbour was brave enough to open the gate and walk through the courtyard, more often than not Stepfather would get to the door before my mother and the poor visitor would leave crestfallen having had a thorough grilling. My friends suffered the same experience. Even when invited they were sent away from the front door without explanation. Often I never knew anything about their humiliation until years later.

My earliest experience of friends being banned from our house was around the time of my birthday. My mother enjoyed planning my party. She was adept at organising games. But as each birthday approached I became increasingly worried about whom I would be allowed to invite because in previous years I had cringed with embarrassment. Stepfather rudely forbade the same particular names. There was something strange about it. Even in those days I asked myself if it was something to do with his secret previous life.

My party always came to a nervous end, when the doorbell started to ring and other parents came to collect their children, my mother began to change character. I picked up vibes that she was embarrassed in some way. She stood uncomfortably on the threshold with the women who had once been her friends before Louis came into her life. To me as a little girl it all seemed so contrived. As I grew older things did not change. Stepfather’s attitude to my friends was frankly rude. I lost precious pals and potential boyfriends. It was too scary to challenge him.

Thursday had always been a special day in my mother’s life – it was the day she spent in London. As a treat I would be allowed to go too. It was always the same routine but the success of each trip depended on Stepfather’s mood. As we drove down Park Lane I used to get butterflies in my stomach: what would happen when we reached the Dorchester’s forecourt? Often there was a fuss, as Louis demanded to take one of the bays right outside the hotel entrance. We sat in the car as Stepfather spoke with the smart commissionaires with their pristine white gloves. They would shake hands and then, smiling broadly, one of them would direct my mother into one of the six prime spots. As time went on Louis did not even pretend to use the hotel, for, after leaving the car, he immediately called upon the same commissionaire to call a cab and we went off to lunch at Bendicks coffee bar in Wigmore Street. After the meal two taxis would be called and we went our separate ways, Louis to meet his publisher and my mother to the salon in Knightsbridge created by Mr Teasy Weasy.

As a treat Mum might arrange to meet Stepfather at five outside Fortnum’s Quick Bar, but things would often go wrong. He would be late. We would wait for so long that my mother would suffer the indignity of the shop closing behind our backs as the assistants pushed us further away from their steps. Even then I suspected he liked to play ‘waiting games’ with those he could.

As I grew older the Dorchester Hotel featured more and more in Louis’s life. He could not resist repeating every so often that in his previous life he had lived permanently there and that he had driven around in a Bentley. Again, to me as a child, this seemed an odd boast, as he never drove anywhere. Occasionally he went to London on the train and took lunch in the Dorchester’s Grillroom, usually with a publisher he called ‘Collins’. In later years there was no doubt in my mind that Louis had a passion verging on obsession about the Dorchester Hotel. He insisted Mum’s car use one of its six precious parking bays for the whole of Thursdays. He also tried to use the hotel lobby as his own personal space – and often succeeded – and was constantly trying to convince us that the new chef, the head waiter or the manager was a personal friend.

Then, when I was much older and he was allowed to take more and more control of the motor-racing team of BRM, he held his meetings in the hotel’s long elegant lounge. Then he progressed to hiring one of the hotel suites. My mother was very against this squandering of money and she persuaded him to lean on the hotel management to bend their strict rules. He did indeed exert his power over the manager and he allowed him to hire the suite by the day. But this did not stop his continuous boasting to the racing circuit that he had a permanent suite in the Dorchester Hotel.

It’s difficult to work out how old I was when I think about some events in my early life, but I do remember Coronation Day in 1953. It was the first time I can recall having Louis Stanley around. I was five. The royal day proved for our family, as for many in the nation, to be the incentive to buy a television set. My mother bought everything for the house. He never paid for anything.

I clearly remember the excitement of watching the engineer set up the strange-looking contraption. There were wires everywhere and deep narrow holes to be made in the walls.

Later in the day, on the spur of the moment, Mum and my new stepfather decided to take us up to the Royal Mall. Mum loaded up the back of the red-and-white Hillman Minx with pillows and bedding and made a bed for my brother and me. As we left Cambridge it was great fun pretending to go to sleep in the back of the vehicle.

It seemed no time at all before I was surrounded and squashed by tall excited adults. The crowd on that warm summer’s evening was in a jolly mood. Clinging to Mum’s hand, I was washed along with the happy throng, seeing only trousered buttocks, buxom hips in floral dresses and clasped hands.

As the royal couple emerged onto the balcony of the palace, everybody cheered at the same time. The noise was electrifying. The masses pushed forward and Stepfather picked me up and put me on his shoulders, but his hand moved up my legs. I waved my Union Flag with its balsawood stick, but the excitement was gone. The bed in the car was not so cosy on the way home. Stepfather frightened me.