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tainly could not have entered into a debate with Isaiah Berlin, but
she would have said, like most Englishwomen of her generation,
that she considered herself free. Now she saw that true freedom
lay in the surrender of self, that fulfilment lay in sacrifice, that hap-
piness lay in service, the only certain Triumph of the Will: Mumsy
had found her Fiihrer.
Actually, I did not witness much of their fife together. I sup-
pose I must have resented somewhat Cyril's usurpation of my
place at the centre of Mumsy s focus. That would be natural,
even in an adolescent who at the same time sought his inde-
pendence. But I was no Prince Hamlet, and the pair resembled
Gertrude and Claudius only in their gross sexual appetite for
one another. I rather liked Cyril in those years, as I think I've
said. If ever in my mind's eye I saw the bloat king paddling with
his fingers in her neck, I have forgotten, and even at the time
would probably have suppressed such an image. Whether mine
is the reflection in the mirror above my naked mother in the
once-scandalous double-portrait hanging in the National Portrait
Gallery, I am no longer as certain as once I was. Still, I can easily
see that Stan, if he were writing my biography, could, as I've
hinted more than once, lay his Freudian template over my life
without any trouble. The truth is much simpler. I went away to
university, and after university to London, the umbilical cord
already hygienically severed. In Dibblethwaite I was, in Mumsy s
years and after, a visitor; I never thought of it as home.
The letters provide some sort of insight into a troubled rela-
tionship. (Yes, of course I have the letters.) Once Mumsy was
settled in Dibblethwaite, she had relatively easy access by bus via
Ripon to Harrogate. Her parents, the grandparents whom I
hardly knew, were getting on, were in fact retired from the fish-
and-chippery that had sustained them and were living out their
lives in a small terraced house behind the station. Cyril evidently
160
thought it good that she visit them on and off. Perhaps her
absences afforded him the opportunity to plug into variations
on the Eternal Feminine that were on offer in other convenient
vessels.When they were apart, they exchanged letters. Only Cyril
knows whether Mumsy's letters to him are still extant.
The early letters offer firm declarations of love: 'You are the
greatest joy of my life,' for example.'This morning, Master Willie
in a fearful rage, I took your smalls from the laundry basket and
sniffed them, longing for you.' ' Now that I know what true lone-
liness is, perhaps I'll paint it.'Apart from his schooldays at Cronyn
Hall, his brief stay in Cambridge and his army years abroad,
Cyril had seldom been away from the moors. He was what the
Americans call a hick or a rube. Mumsy's urbane elegance, the
title she had earned through marriage to a knighted barrister,
her acquired 'posh' accent, these evidently excited him: 'Your
high heels, your silk blouses, and the red fox you drape around
your shoulders, with its beady little eyes, its sharp snout and full
tail, give me a sexual itch. You have only to pronounce "Cyril"
and Master Willie stands and salutes.'
He could also be cruel, lashing out for no other reason, per-
haps, than his momentary mood: 'I don't think you could ever
arouse me physically were it not for the spiritual dimension. For
a start, your breasts are too big for my taste. A German whore
in Hamburg once taught me the ideal dimensions: "Eine Handvoll
und nicht mehr; was ubrig ist ist ordinar!' Go ask one of your lin-
guist friends what it means.' 'I make a better shepherd's pie than
you. Yours makes me sick.'
Once my grandfather died and Mumsy's visits to Harrogate
were prompted by her desolate mother's needs, and no longer
by Cyril's convenience, he became vicious. 'What I want is some
healthy girl, healthy in body and spirit, who can be a comfort
to me & give me all the things that you in your selfish absence
seem unwilling to give. Your dad is dead, for Christ's sake. Your
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mum should be told to make the best of it.' But he had by then
already met Lady Cynthia, youngest daughter of a baronetcy that
traced its ancestry to the gratitude of Henry IV. In one of the
letters to Mumsy, he quotes a letter of Lady Cynthia to him: 'I
am tremendously anxious for you to have what you need and
want. I am so much more anxious for that than that I should
have any of my personal wants.' Then Cyril tells Mumsy that
she has obviously made her choice: her mother rather than Cyril.
He wishes her well. The letter is enough to prompt my mother's
immediate return to Dibblethwaite, ignoring her own mother's
ostentatious misery. But in Dibblethwaite, of course, Lady Cynthia
was already in residence. All Mumsy could do was flee in tearful [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]