Dolly Page 4

  ‘Mrs Fischer,’ he said later, stirring his coffee in the drawing-room, his eyes watering more than usual. ‘Can you do something for my daughter?’

  Mrs Fischer enlivened an entirely respectable existence with a little matchmaking, a fact of which Dr Meyer was unaware. He simply considered it a duty for mature women, who would of course be married, to look after young girls. Mrs Fischer’s outlook was slightly different. She considered that young girls had a right to be looked after by mature men. The ideal match, according to Mrs Fischer, was between a very young girl and a man considerably older than herself, whose money could then be spent in any way deemed appropriate by the virgin bride. Marriages, as far as she was concerned, were largely financial contracts: compensation was to be made by the husband for removing his wife’s inexperience and inducting her into matronhood, a process also supervised by Mrs Fischer.

  ‘I will give a dinner party,’ she said.

  She already had someone in mind, Arthur Ferber, an Englishman with a German name. This, she thought, could be brought into use as a conversational ploy if they were in want of something to say to each other. He was thirty-eight, and reasonably wealthy. He had inherited a wholesale stationery business and went off to a suburb every morning, Hayes, she thought, or Keston, where he sat in an office and directed operations in the warehouse, which was substantial. This Mrs Fischer considered entirely appropriate: she did not approve of men who stayed around the house all day. She thought Ferber a dry stick, unemotional, but doubted whether Toni Meyer could be trusted with more combustible material. She saw tears there, hysteria certainly a possibility.

  ‘There is someone I want you to meet,’ she said.

  Arthur Ferber, whom I never knew, seems to me far more foreign than my grandmother ever did, for after twenty-five years of marriage he left her, and they were divorced while my mother was still very young. This event gave Toni a certain tragic grandeur, although the fault was all her own. She had taken quite kindly to Ferber and to his house in Maresfield Gardens, although she was never to love him. Nor did he seem to love her beyond the initial pleasures, which he appreciated more than she ever did. His nature was resigned, and he put up with her increasingly bad temper for the sake of a well-run household. She accused him of being secretive, which he was: he preferred to keep all his thoughts and feelings to himself. Perhaps he might have been encouraged to be more expansive had Toni not turned all her attention away from him and focused it adoringly on her son, Hugo. Here was a golden child made in her own image. With the same astonishing lack of understanding which had led her to perch on her father’s knee and lay her head on his shoulder she trained the boy to be her consort, which effectively removed him from any care or guidance which might have been provided by Arthur Ferber. Ferber, an engima by all accounts, or rather by Toni’s account, augmented in due course by Hugo’s, was if anything grateful for this additional show of indifference. His plans, it may be assumed, were already laid.

  At fourteen Hugo was his mother’s dancing partner at the largely Jewish weddings she attended, or at the lavish seaside hotels which she liked to frequent. Her husband never accompanied her on these occasions, which he thought of with contempt. Marriage to Toni had bred in him a mild strain of anti-Semitism, but the more he disapproved of her the more perversely attractive he found her to be. She had been a ravishing girl when he married her; she had become an impressively handsome woman. Had it not been for the uncertainty of her temper he thought they might have got along quite well. But he could not stand the sight of his son being fondled, could not stand his son’s attentive response, could not stand the symbiosis between the two of them. Basically, I think, he could not stand his son, whom he thought of as spoilt and unmanly, Viennese, in fact. Hugo was certainly unmanly, or perhaps he was simply un-English. His father was too disgusted by the son’s charming and insinuating manners to supply any manliness that might have been lacking.

  Hugo, whom I knew so briefly, grew up into a passive and agreeable youth, although by the age of twenty he appeared curiously inert, as if worn out by his attentions to his mother. He was always to remain gratified by a show of feminine interest in his welfare, of concern for his wellbeing. It was a sign of Dolly’s acumen that she recognised this at once, for her experience of men was far greater than Hugo’s experience of women. But Hugo had no thought of marriage, although his mother’s tireless companionship was beginning to irk him. Perhaps for this reason he quite enjoyed being in the army, where he was a singularly inept soldier. Sent to camp at Catterick, he was endlessly referred for further training. A mild degree of popularity was ensured by the lavish parcels sent to him by his mother. He never enquired where the chocolate and the biscuits came from; it was entirely natural to him that his mother continued to spoil him, as she always had. He did not enquire how so many sweet things came his way: he assumed that his mother had sources of nourishment denied to the rest of the population, as indeed she had. When he was demobbed he wore the same amiable smile as he had worn when first introduced to what was in fact a relatively harsh life: he had, after all, been used to having his bed turned down, his curtains drawn, his fire turned on, his meals delicately, anxiously prepared. He returned home to his mother, who clasped him in her arms, her heart throbbing with emotion.

  ‘You have been so brave,’ she murmured.

  He had done nothing more arduous than sign requisition forms, at which he was rather good, but he accepted the tribute with a modest smile. He too was glad to be home.

  He returned to university, but not to Cambridge: his mother could not bear another absence. He went to King’s College, in the Strand, and took his law exams, after which he joined the Westminster Bank. He continued to live at home with his mother, for his father, who had been a far more important serving officer, was still overseas, and had volunteered to remain there after the war. Thus Arthur Ferber spent many agreeable and instructive months in Vienna, where his wife had been a girl. It served to reunite them for a spell: nevertheless, after spending his leave in London, he signed on for a further term of duty. This suited them all very well. There was in any case an acute shortage of paper, so he was not needed either at the office or in the warehouse, to which he appointed a manager and a supervisor. Hugo and his mother spent evenings at home, where she taught him to play bridge. Occasionally, bravely, she urged him to go out and enjoy himself. Occasionally he did. But he found he cut a poor figure among the returning officers, and the girls were not as nice to him as his mother was.

  The epochal moment of his marriage must be left until later in this narrative. What concerns me now is the birth of my mother. It has been necessary to dwell on Toni’s history and comportment in order to explain my mother’s apologetic personality. My mother was born when Toni was forty-three: her stupefaction at finding herself pregnant again had turned her against her daughter for life. Incredible though this may sound, my mother was kept in another part of the house under the supervision of a nanny who stayed until my mother was twenty years old. Thus two ménages coexisted under one roof: different meals were eaten in different rooms. While Hugo was in the drawing-room playing bridge with Toni, my mother and Nanny Sweetman were keeping each other company in what had been designated as a servant’s quarters. Occasionally she joined them in the evenings. Hugo was very kind to her. In return she adored him almost as much as his mother did.

  Toni’s attitude to her daughter was also dictated by her daughter’s looks. My mother was thin, pale, shy, self-effacing, not by any stretch of the imagination a beauty, towards whom Toni might have relented. Toni’s response to my mother’s timid overtures was one of annoyance, almost of contempt. This was compounded by the fact that Arthur Ferber had by this stage asked for a divorce. He disliked his son, might have loved his daughter, if distance had not worked its enchantment on him. On his final return from Vienna he sold the business, and settled money on his daughter, enough to provide her with an income for life. This final injustice did nothing to soften Toni�
��s feelings towards my mother. Her son, she thought, had been slighted, although she herself had done very well out of the divorce settlement. Arthur Ferber retired to Collioure, where he painted landscapes, badly, in the manner of the Fauves, and eventually married a Frenchwoman, Clothilde Lemaire. For a time he sent postcards to his daughter: then the postcards became more widely spaced and finally stopped.

  ‘Do you think he is dead?’ Henrietta asked her mother.

  ‘Never,’ was the reply. ‘He is too careful for that. And too devious.’

  In any event, as far as Toni and her daughter were concerned, he had ceased to exist. He survived in my mother’s memory only as a tall vague figure, glimpsed only occasionally, and regretted only in so far as it became a daughter to regret a lost father. Even this regret was limited, since he was presented to her as something of a wastrel (Collioure, the landscapes). If she ever pictured him in later life it was with a puzzled but by no means frustrated curiosity. She imagined him to be like Gauguin, a renouncer of families. This latter trait she respected. The last communication she had had from him was a photograph of one of his landscapes. Even she could see that this was extremely poor. After a while she accepted her mother’s verdict, and Arthur Ferber was effectively discarded.

  To say that Toni neglected my mother is not quite accurate: she also exacted a sort of revenge. When she went out my mother had to accompany her, as if she were a lady companion. If Toni were reconciled to Hugo’s eventual marriage—for she was not a complete fantasist and considered it her duty to guarantee his survival—she had no such plans for my mother. My mother was to assure Toni’s comfort as she grew older, until such time as she might require assistance. At those hotels where Toni liked to spend Christmas, my mother would sit resignedly on the edge of some ballroom while Hugo whirled his mother round the floor. No one was likely to ask her to dance: at fifteen she looked no older than eleven, and in any event her mother did not like her to talk to strange men. It was at one of these hotels that Hugo met Dolly, while my mother loitered palely on the sidelines. The brief courtship that followed was watched with agonised approval by Hugo’s mother. She consented to the marriage, half hoping that Dolly could be installed in the house in Maresfield Gardens. The one event for which she was not prepared was his request for a transfer to the Brussels branch of the bank. She suspected, rightly, that this was inspired by Dolly, who nevertheless addressed her as ‘Maman chérie’. In due course this was changed to ‘Chère Mère’, but by that stage Toni had found fault with Dolly as well.

  My mother grew up in her separate quarters in Maresfield Gardens, and grew up entirely without rancour, humbly accepting her indifferent status and the petty duties that were demanded of her. In time Toni’s dislike turned to indifference, although she never valued my mother as my mother deserved to be valued. She continued to regret her appearance, so that my mother grew up believing herself to be ugly. Her mirror told her that she was in fact far from ugly, but she believed her mother rather than the mirror. At the age of twenty she announced that she had decided to go to college. Nanny Sweetman had by this stage retired. My mother must have sensed that she must not settle for what had been devised for her, and put her case quite strongly.

  ‘Very well,’ said Toni, who by this time had various cronies in Maresfield Gardens, strong-willed women like herself with pliant sons or daughters. ‘But you must live at home. I can’t be left alone. You must see that.’

  She agreed, of course. But she had learned that escape was easier than she had suspected. She took to going out by herself in the evenings, when Toni was entertaining her iron-jawed friends. That was how she found herself in the Wigmore Hall, where she met my father.

  He was, I think, the first person to love my mother, for Arthur Ferber hardly counted, and he loved her to the end of his life, as she loved him. By contemporary standards their courtship was slow, archaic: for five years they went to concerts, took their walks. I think well of this, although my generation is more cynical, less hopeful of a good outcome, and tends to be derisive of such obvious chastity. Toni’s attitude was cautious. She knew that something was afoot, but chose not to know. For that reason my mother introduced Paul Manning to Maresfield Gardens on an evening when Toni was giving one of her weekly bridge parties. At these affairs lavish refreshments were served. As they entered the room seven heads were lifted from their coffee cups. Toni, in the face of such public witness, was gracious. ‘So nice to meet you,’ she said. ‘You will have coffee, won’t you? Etta, find Paul a chair. Next to me, dear. That’s right.’ When she found out that he worked in a bank she became more gracious. ‘My son is in our Brussels branch,’ she said. The Westminster Bank had become ‘our’ bank. And in the presence of her friends it suddenly became her to have a marriageable daughter. At the end of the evening she clasped Paul’s hand and said that he must come again soon. Her friends exchanged significant glances. For a brief moment Toni enjoyed her status as mother of the bride.

  This harmonious state of affairs was not to continue for very long. I am sure that Toni hoped to draft her future son-in-law into residence in Maresfield Gardens, but my mother and my father were to be adamant on this point. ‘Very well,’ she said finally, when this matter was settled. ‘But don’t expect me to visit you. Where did you say? Prince of Wales Drive? Somewhere in south London, isn’t it? Too far for me. But if you have decided …’ She heaved a pathetic sigh. I imagine that at this point she had begun to feel her age. My mother was thirty when she married, which makes Toni seventy-three at the time. She was in good health but moved around very little. My father’s attitude was simple. He saw that no real affection bound Toni to her daughter, and therefore he felt only a very slight affection for Toni. He recognised her for what she was, a selfish and resilient woman. He had disliked the atmosphere at Maresfield Gardens, the hawklike profiles raised enquiringly from the coffee cups. He thought the ambience perfervid, haunted by the ghost of Freud and other Viennese associations. Even the conjunction of the Berggasse and Maresfield Gardens was, he thought, too apt, too prompt, too symbolic to be a mere accident: no good could come of it. He regarded my mother’s innocence as all but miraculous. By comparison Prince of Wales Drive seemed sane, rational, uneventful. They could walk in Battersea Park, which they could see from their windows. And so it was to be. Toni kept her word: she rarely visited them. They, for their part, were enjoined to visit her in Maresfield Gardens. This arrangement continued, at increasingly lengthy intervals, until her death, by which time her legendary indifference to her daughter had reasserted itself.

  One visit to us I do remember. I must have been small, watching from a window. I was drawn to the window by the ticking of the cab, a sound which still draws me to the window today. My grandmother stepped heavily from the taxi, planting one foot in front of her and slowly disengaging the other. She was wearing a bright blue suit which fitted her rather too closely: she had put on weight and was very conscious of it, although she remained an impressive looking woman. She was carrying a cake from some Swiss Cottage bakery, the reason, no doubt, for her increasing girth: she was never to lose her sweet tooth. She raised her head and saw me at the window. Her brief wintry smile hardly disturbed her morose features which were tremendously bedizened with make-up: lipstick, blusher, eye-shadow, all chosen to bring out the blue of her still startling eyes. Her hair was dyed a defiant apricot. She looked as if she owed her appearance to an entire morning spent in front of her dressing-table mirror, and all to see my mother, of whom she was not particularly fond, and the grandchild whom she watched carefully but did not fondle. Whether she had hopes for me or not I never knew, but I think she pitied my mother for her tepid existence, for never having known the hothouse love she had known as a girl in Vienna. At that stage, in her old age, she had come to realise that that love had held an element of parody, even of tragedy; her failure to captivate her father stayed with her, as did the image of Frau Zimmermann, watchful in the background. In the recesses of her infant mind s
he had always known of their liaison, known it imperfectly, but known nevertheless. Her ultimate lack of fulfilment she attributed rightly to this period in her life.

  We visited her, in Maresfield Gardens, after Hugo’s death. She sat in a chair, apparently turned to stone. Her face was thickly powdered, but her lips and eyes were pale: tears, which we were not to witness, had obliterated all the colours. There was something reproachful in her attitude which I only later came to understand. Hugo’s death had made her not only sad but bitter, as if it were inevitable that the men in her life should let her down. In her heart I think she knew that my mother was the better of her two children, but by then her disappointment was so comprehensive that she expected nothing further in the way of joy or gratification, knowing that in her life she had received only the barest minimum, and regretting the days of her youth and the ways in which she had spent them, or misspent them, hanging hysterically on to her father’s arm, while he made plans to dispose of her. She was a widow who had never enjoyed being a wife, a mother whose favourite child had predeceased her. Slowly her expression changed to one of outrage as she contemplated her fate. I remember that adamantine face, menacing and pale. Although I had very little to do with her, and indeed hardly knew her, although it was not possible to feel for her the glimmerings of something so intimate as affection, I retained a sort of admiration for that hieratic face, that four-square position in the wing chair, that formal, distant, almost cold insistence that we taste the various cakes she had provided for our teatime coffee. I find the idea of her making her lonely way to Swiss Cottage, on what must have been one of the worst days of her life, immensely impressive. And I have no doubt that she dressed carefully for that short journey, and bid acquaintances good morning, and returned their condolences in as steady a voice as usual. The follies of her youth were long gone, its excesses banished for ever. Of her solitude I can hardly bear to think, although I understand it very well. My own ability to tolerate a solitary life is, I am sure, an hereditary factor: it is the way my grandmother, whose influence on my mother was notable for its absence, lives on in me.