In february 1968 I was getting ready to fly to Hue when the elderly messenger from the Saigon PTT brought the telegram with news of my mother's death. I heard his bicycle wheels on the dusty concrete of the alley and the scrape as he rested the machine against the wall. When I opened the door he was standing on the step in his pith helmet, his face impassive but not unkindly, a suitable mask for the bearer of news in time of war. It was the second week of the Tet Offensive and there was a big battle in Hue, where the Americans and south Vietnamese were struggling to drive the communists out of the city. I could have flown back to Britain, but when journalists are caught up in great events they easily believe they are a necessary part of them. It is not true, of course, but the illusion makes it easier to be a passive witness to the suffering of others. In my case it worked so powerfully that I knew at once I would not go home for the funeral.
There was another reason for my decision, although I scarcely admitted it then. In my mind my mother was already dead. I do not know when she died. It was not sudden, but a slipping away from life that may have begun when she was very young; certainly there was no escape from it once she fell in love with my father. I think she knew quite soon what was happening to her. She might have been aware of it for more than half of what others called her life.
I have a photograph of her taken by the society photographer Lenare just after my elder brother was born. He made my mother ravishing. She sits almost in profile, her head tilted back so she seems to be looking at her baby from under lowered eyelids. Portraits such as these suggested women too conscious of their own glamour to bother much with the children they seemed to worship, but in my mother's case the clich? was wrong. She was never a beautiful woman; she was pretty. Beauty may be dangerous and calculating; prettiness as sweet as my mother's is vulnerable and rarely wise. She had curly fair hair and her nose turned up slightly at the tip. She giggled a lot and my father's friends thought her "great fun," innocent and something of a dumb blonde.
Neither family liked the marriage, and there are no photographs of the wedding, which was attended only by a mutual friend of the bride and groom and my father's sister, on whose help he had relied to escape earlier entanglements but who would not let him get out of this one. There had already been several engagements, for women liked him as much as he liked them-even though, his family's titles notwithstanding, he was not a brilliant catch. At Cambridge he drank too heavily to get the cricket blue he deserved, and spent so much time partying with richer friends that he only just scraped a pass degree. As a younger son he could expect little money from his family, and he seemed unlikely to make a fortune in the City, where my grandfather had found him a job.
My mother's parents knew this, but her stubbornness defeated them. She was their eldest, and made her own way around social London. Her father, a broker on the Baltic Exchange, was a philanderer with an uneasy laugh. My grandmother, from whom my mother took her prettiness, dealt with his infidelity by claiming a weak heart and spending hours on her chaise-longue. My mother's name was Elizabeth, but her parents called her Betty, a little girl's name she swapped for Eve when she went into society. The re-naming marked her separation from a family for whom she seems never to have felt much warmth.
She must have known what other people said about my father, and she had plenty of other boyfriends who were more desirable from almost every point of view, but he was the one she picked and stuck to. Of course she saw in him what others saw, a tall young man with smooth dark hair and aquiline profile, and so naturally elegant that when he was at Cambridge tailors made him suits for nothing because he was such a good advertisement for their clothes. There was something else that only she saw, for no other woman loved him as she did. She decided that her life depended on having him and that was the trouble; she was a drowning woman relying for salvation on a man who could scarcely swim himself.
They set up house at 7 Cathcart Road, on the western edge of Chelsea. Today it is a millionaire's white stucco palazzetto, but in 1930, it was rather bohemian. I doubt if my mother had more than a brief spell of happiness in Cathcart Road. My father was soon making breakouts from the marriage. He would set off one night in evening dress and come back two or three mornings later in the same clothes, to find a wife in tears and his mother-in-law lying on a sofa in the drawing-room as though she was the centre of crisis.
My parents soon moved to Wellington Square, a more fashionable part of Chelsea. My brother and I lived on the top floor under the care, as was the custom for children like us, of a nanny and a nursemaid. We were not supposed to see much of our parents, although we might be taken down to the drawing-room at our bedtime when they were having drinks before dinner. My mother did not object to this, nor did she feel the need to compensate for her unsatisfactory husband by getting closer to her children.
The other photographs of her that survive from before the war were taken at the seaside. One dates from 1939. My parents are sitting side by side on a lawn. My brother and I are between my father's legs, while my mother holds a black Scottie dog. They are both tanned, and screw up their eyes against the light to look at the camera. Is that the only reason they seem so far from smiling? My mother's left hand, which could easily have been on my father's shoulder or arm, lies empty on her lap as though paralysed.
Nanny did not smile much either. Nannies were often known by the name of the family they worked for, but Nanny Moreland kept her own and deserved to. She was an independent source of constancy in the house. She was Liverpool Irish, dark-haired, a little sallow, and too serious to be pretty. For many years it was a mystery to me why she vanished each Sunday morning: it was thought improper for us to know that she was catholic and went to mass. I cannot remember loving her in an obvious way for she was not a woman who invited hugging, but I seem to have understood that I needed her. It must have been a lonely life for Nanny, observing the frantic unhappiness of the adults who lived below and yet always behaving as though nothing was wrong. I suspect that she was too proud to gossip about such things to other nannies, and she never let slip what she knew or thought about my father and mother. She connived in just one act of clandestine nursery resistance. For reasons of class prejudice my parents forbade us to eat Heinz's tomato ketchup. Nanny ignored them, and smuggled ketchup into the nursery, where we ate it with bacon and fried bread for breakfast.
I was five when the war came and I cried, but only because my father got his call-up papers when we were at the seaside, and, trying to please me when he said goodbye, sat me on top of his car. The sun had been shining all day and the bonnet was hot and burned my bare legs, and I burst into tears.
Tears were the appropriate overture to a war that destroyed what hopes my mother still had for her marriage. My father was in the air force and we followed him as he moved from airfield to airfield, but he escaped us for good when he was posted to Malta. My mother moved us six times in four years. I do not know how she coped. She was a tidy person for whom everything had to be in its place. I dreaded the times she took me to buy school clothes and made me stand for what seemed hours while she pulled and tweaked at a jacket or a pair of trousers. Her habits had been early causes of quarrels with my father. She kept him awake by checking the laundry in their bedroom late into the night, folding and re-folding the dirty shirts and towels until they lay in the box as neat as new.
Perhaps she was able to cope with the disorder of moving because she believed that one day she would win him back for good. She had nothing else to believe in. They did have meetings, mysterious occasions such as the time my mother took us to spend the night at a hotel in London. When my brother and I went to her room in the morning my father was there and she seemed happy and he embarrassed. Sometimes my brother and I saw him on our own and once he took us to lunch at Quaglino's, where I was enchanted by an omelette made from egg powder. Mostly, though, my father was not there. He did turn up one evening while we were staying with my grandmother. When he came to see me in bed, I cried and told him to go away. I cannot remember my mother crying. Perhaps Nanny took care that I did not.
What haunts me is the thought of my mother's loneliness. She only had Nanny, but Nanny was dour and perhaps unwilling to bear the secrets of others. My brother went away to boarding school and, although I enjoyed a younger son's unearned privilege of being the favourite, I did not feel particularly close to my mother. At nine I was sent to boarding school, but I cannot remember crying for my mother, or even missing her.
She stood no chance of getting my father back. He was a ground controller in fighter command, where many of the pilots were friends he had known in his amateur flying days before the war, and for the first time in his life had work that absorbed him. I was twelve when Miss Pike called me out of class and told me about the divorce. It was characteristic of my parents to have someone else tell their children that their marriage was over. They were not callous, but it saved them embarrassment. My father felt guilty and my mother helpless. They believed they were doing the best for their sons by sending them off to boarding schools from which we would emerge after nine years like cakes baked according to a tested recipe, and resembling our ancestors as much as possible.
after the war my father married a woman whom he loved a great deal more than she loved him and at last had order brought to his life. It was different for my mother. When the war ended everyone's life was meant to start afresh, but how could that be for her when she had lost my father? For her children's sake, perhaps, and because she was lonely, she remarried, too. A friend saw her just before this second wedding and said that she hoped she would be happy. "I shall never be happy again," my mother replied, as though it was a fact so obvious everyone should be able to see it.
She married a good man, but the wrong one. Olof Wijk, brought up as an English gentleman by an anglophile Swedish father, was a captain in the 4th Hussars when the war broke out. Captured in Greece in 1940, he spent the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where he got a letter from his first wife saying she was leaving him. When he came back to London his body was covered with eczema and he spent months in hospital before it cleared up. He was highly strung, and in spite of British schooling and years of cavalry life, still inclined to bouts of Nordic gloom. He needed a strong and cheerful woman, and he got my mother, a winged bird trying to disguise that it would never fly again.
Both were still only in their thirties, and they made a fine-looking couple. But apart from having known each other before the war, and finding themselves lonely after it, they had little in common. He left the Army and joined an old-fashioned wine merchant's in Jermyn Street. They lived in Medmenham, a village on the Thames, and he took up gardening. He liked to cook, and bought French Country Cooking, Elizabeth David's second book, as soon as it came out. He was child-like in the kitchen, always demanding applause for the sole in white wine and the water ice made from young blackcurrant leaves that were his most successful dishes. He had read a lot in prisoner-of-war camp and also developed a taste for music. He played me my first Mozart piano concerto on the radiogram at Medmenham.
I came to hate that house. It is humid in the Thames valley and I felt imprisoned during the long summer holidays. The house's mood was set by my mother as she tried in the only way she knew to keep control of her life. The meticulousness with which she dressed herself and her children, and managed the ordinary business of life, turned into obsessions and made living with her torture for a careless adolescent. When she washed dishes they had to be rinsed first, then washed in soapy water, rinsed again and at the end polished, not just dried. She was always late because her rituals needed frequent repetition. When we went out together we waited, for what seemed hours, while she did and then re-did her hair, or brushed and brushed again her skirt to get rid of lint and hairs that only she could see.
She had once played golf and tennis well, but I cannot remember her playing after the war. Olof took her canoeing in France when they married, but she never wanted to repeat it. She was not interested in the garden. Scarcely educated, as was the custom for her sort of girl, she had no taste for reading and seldom came to the cinema in Marlow, where Nanny took me once a month and amazed me by crying when Garbo-Karenina threw herself under a train. Christmas and Easter were the only times she went to the village church. God hid himself from her as she was hiding herself from her family and everyone she knew. She had no passions; my father in his carelessness had seen to that. All she had were her obsessive rituals, and they only deepened her loneliness.
I do not know when she became a compulsive drinker. Some friends said she drank too much before the war. Certainly my father gave her reason. Others disagreed: of course she lived among people who drank a lot, but at most she got tipsy in a mild and giggling way. I discovered she was drinking heavily when I came home on leave from national service in the navy and she was lying on the kitchen floor among the ruins of a bacon and lentil pie. She must have dropped the dish as she was putting it in the oven for our lunch, and collapsed on top of it.
Soon after that they sold the house in Medmenham and moved to London, where Olof hoped to find someone to treat her, although she still did not accept that anything was wrong. There was little public discussion of alcoholism 40 years ago and "alcoholic" was more often a term of abuse than a clinical diagnosis. Trapped between the polite, intolerant world she believed she ought to inhabit and the nothingness into which she felt herself vanishing, how could my mother say she was alcoholic? After many battles Olof did persuade her to see a specialist in addiction. My mother withstood the attacks of this forceful woman until one afternoon she brought together Olof, myself, my brother and my mother's sister to plead with her to start treatment. The specialist chain-smoked while we shouted at my mother and even cried, and she stared at us like an animal which knows it is trapped but will still not let itself be broken.
She agreed in the end, but no amount of explaining convinced her that her alcoholism was no fault of hers, just an illness triggered by a faulty metabolism. She was too obstinately conventional to let anyone absolve her from the shame of drinking, and I wonder now if she clung to her shame because it was a last piece of the identity she knew she was losing. She could not stop drinking, but at least she could hate herself for it. And what was left to her if she did stop? Olof could do nothing for her. Her sons were grown up. And my father was by then just the ghost of a memory, less a continuing cause of pain than part of the void into which she was being drawn. She was treated with drugs and electric shock therapy, started drinking again and had more treatment. She came to like her specialist and even to depend on her, but it was not enough to stop her drinking. Aversion therapy put her off gin and she turned to whisky. Olof could take no more, and they were divorced. I was angry with him, but it was chiefly because I did not know what to do, and I was scared.
She moved into a block of flats off the Earls Court Road, where she could be an anonymous middle-aged woman who smiled charmingly at anyone who met her in the corridor. She still had furniture and pictures from her marriage with my father and the sofa and chairs with jazz age patterns I remembered from visits to the drawing-room in Wellington Square, but in spite of them the flat was as dead as a demonstration room in a furniture store. In her sober months the bed looked so smooth and the kitchen so clean that no one seemed to live there; when she was drinking the rooms appeared abandoned, the ashtrays full and the kitchen covered by dirty pots and plates. She bought her drink in half-bottles, partly because money was scarce but also, I guess, because she was ashamed to ask the off-licences for larger amounts. Perhaps at first they did not notice anything unusual about her: she was thin from not eating enough, but she always had the pretty smile and her clothes though old-fashioned were still neat. That is the most painful thing to imagine, the middle-aged woman who dressed so carefully even when she was unsteady on her feet, checking and re-checking in the mirror the hood of the plastic mac she wore when it rained, and if on her way out she met a neighbour, smiling as she once smiled at acquaintances at a pre-war party, and all the time determined to buy her drink even if everyone saw through her pretence.
When she got the bottles home she hid them under the sofa, among her clothes in drawers and at the back of cupboards. They were never hard to find, but she was hiding evidence from herself as much as others. We cleared the bottles out each time she became so ill that she agreed to go for treatment, but when it was over she went back to an empty flat and there was still nothing to fill her life. She had no close women friends; it was Olof's friends who had come to Medmenham. Very occasionally she saw one of the men she knew before she married my father. She scarcely saw her brother or sister, and she hated the Sundays when I took her to have lunch with her mother. The old woman, a widow now, would be waiting at a window and smiled like a child at Christmas when she saw us coming. The smile was chiefly for me, whom she spoilt. She treated her daughter like a schoolgirl she could not understand. She did not know how to comfort her; and my mother did not expect it from her.
I was working in Moscow when my brother married and was so wrapped up in my new life that, foolishly, I did not go back to London for the wedding. He sent me the photographs. The one that caught my eye showed the bride and groom with my mother and father, taut as soldiers on parade. I thought how strange to see them together-they had not met for almost 15 years-and put the photograph away. I shudder when I look at it now. My father, elegant as ever in a tailcoat, is almost scowling. My mother manages a smile, although it takes only a little imagination to see it as a wince of pain. She has aged less than my father, and is still slim and pretty, but her clothes give her away. Someone was sent to make sure she got to the church, but there was no one to go home with her after the reception, and when my aunt went to see her the next day she did not want to let her in because she was already drunk.
Olof was not rich and her alimony was small. My brother and I helped a little, but she had barely enough money to live on and needed more whenever she was drinking. She moved to a cheaper flat, sold what pictures and furniture she could to antique dealers, and looked for a job. She worked in a tobacconist's shop and then in Harrods' telephone order department. I cannot remember ever eating with her in her flat. I took her out to restaurants, where she drank tonic water and asked me the sorts of questions mothers ask their children about their newly independent lives, and to which the children give canny answers. They were painfully formal, those meals we ate together; if she did talk about her past it was with the gaiety of a bad actress. She never talked to me about my father, nor criticised Olof for leaving her. We had our rows in her flat, pointless battles about her drinking. I felt sorry for her, sometimes hated her; and never knew what to do for her.
One day she told me she had a boyfriend. She had met him in a pub near Knightsbridge Barracks, where he was stationed with the household cavalry. She said she wanted me to meet him. Perhaps it was a last attempt to break out of the loneliness. What else can have given her the determination to go into a pub and talk to a younger man? But I did not meet him and she never mentioned him again.
At the end of a long spell of drinking she was sent to a convent just outside London, where the nuns specialised in the treatment of addiction. The Mother Superior was a powerful a woman. She called my mother Elizabeth and in her presence my mother became a schoolgirl eager to please a teacher she held in awe. For a while she seemed to find something like happiness in the convent, but when she left she could not hold on to it for long. She had to return there, and this time found herself with a new sort of patient, drug addicts, many of them rough young women of a kind she had not met before, and she hated the idea that people might think she was like them.
My brother took her back to the nuns in 1968. The night she arrived she fell into a coma, and died the next day. At the cremation what was left of her family sang the 23rd psalm and For All The Saints. The hymn suited better than the psalm. No shepherd had come to bring her comfort but there was something worthy of the saints in her solitary suffering, an innocent victim of her times. Her former husbands sent flowers and so did one of the friends she knew before the war. My brother and his eldest son attended a mass for her in the convent, the only place in her last years where she had known peace, and her nine-year-old grandson carried her ashes to be buried among the rose bushes of the nuns' Garden of Calvary.
A few years ago my brother and I went back to look at the place, but the nuns were gone and the corridors and grounds were busy with the healthy, American-looking students of an international school. We found no trace of the Garden of Calvary nor of the ashes of my mother and the other women buried there. Her name is engraved, though, on the side of her father and mother's tomb in Putney cemetery. She is remembered there as Elizabeth Wijk. Eve Frankland had vanished many years before.
