Amaurot was big and hundreds of years old, and it seemed to me while Bel and I were growing up that as long as we were there nothing bad could ever happen to us; the world outside could go up in flames and we would continue to play, safe in the shadow of the high stone walls. As far as we were concerned, Amaurot was the world — and it belonged to us, like the waves belonged to the sea, or certain shades of blue to the sky.
The house was set on a promontory, bordered on two sides, at the bottom of steep hills, by the sea. At every hour of the day you could hear it whispering or roaring, slipping from jade to amethyst to grey to deepest black; I loved it as the companion to my thoughts and the ear to which I disclosed my desires. A long avenue swept proudly over the lawns back to the road; ancient trees rubbed shoulders with saplings and wild flowers along the perimeter. To the rear of the house were the vegetable garden, which had gone to seed rather in recent years, the apple trees and cherry trees and a small rivulet that bore frogs down to the sea. This was where Bel and I had spent most of our childhood, in the long grass and pine needles.
Bel had been a recalcitrant playmate. She went through long periods of not talking to anyone; instead she’d read, for days on end, her bare legs dangling from the windowsill. But she had a gift for invention, and on days when she jumped down from the ledge to join me in my stick fort, all of the fabulous ideas that she nursed over her books came bubbling out as complex adventures which I had to struggle to keep up with.
She liked to read about Russia, and Amaurot often doubled as the Winter Palace. Sometimes we would be orphaned children of the Tsar, fleeing the clutches of the evil Revolution, crossing invisible wastes on phantom troikas; sometimes she would be the diffident, entrancing princess and I the dashing suitor trying, with difficulty, to win her over. I would be called Karl and Bel Tanya, after the heroine of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which she had fallen in love with at the age of eight. (In fact, even when the toys had been put away for ever and the games forgotten, she hung on to this name: to her friends at school, she was Tanya until well into her teens. ‘Christabel’ had been Father’s idea, after a Coleridge poem — a murky and rather depressing thing about nymphs and vampires, which breaks off abruptly at a point of confused identities and general malaise. She couldn’t stand it. ‘It’s not just the fact that nobody can spell it,’ she would fulminate periodically, ‘but he never even got around to writing the happy ending. I mean, couldn’t they have named me after a poem that someone had actually finished, would that have been too much?’ Eventually, ‘Bel’ was arrived at as a sort of compromise, and Father became the only person to call her by her full name.)
Mother thought she might be a genius; I overheard her talking to Father about it sometimes. ‘The way she reads!’ she’d say. ‘The library is looking positively bare, she’s smuggled off so many books.’
‘I was thinking perhaps we should get a billiard table for it,’ Father said.
‘And such an imagination!’ she went on. ‘The things she comes out with, really —’
‘Hmm… you don’t think she might be a bit over-imaginative, do you? She does seem to spend an awful lot of time in this dreamworld of hers.’
‘That’s a sign of intelligence, Ralph. That girl will go places, believe me.’
‘Hey, Your Highness,’ I’d say to Bel, listening in on the windowsill, ‘escaping from these sorfs is making me hungry, I think there are apples in yonder wood, yonder…’
‘You can’t say “Hey” to a princess, Charles,’ jumping down, ‘and it’s serfs, not sorfs…’ and we’d steal through the gap in the hedge to Old Man Thompson’s garden and throw sticks up into the branches, until apples began to thud around us and, inevitably, Olivier, his sinister German manservant, appeared on the verandah: ‘Herr Zompson! Zey are scrumpfing our apfeln!’
Old Man Thompson would come hobbling out waving his cane, yelling, ‘After ’em, Olivier! After ’em!’ and we’d shriek and run away as Olivier gave chase — a spindly black spider in his tight PVC suit — and burst back through the gap just in time, Old Man Thompson howling from the other side, ‘Bloody children, I’m going to call your father up, you bloody…’
I don’t know if he ever did call Father up; I don’t know that it would have done him much good anyway. Father could be a difficult man to get through to. He was full of unfulfilled romanticism and wilful, unspoken delusions; he spent long hours at the office or in his study, and only the husk of him was brought home to us at the end of the day. Through the evening he’d maintain a weary, benevolent silence, and only address us to deliver abstract lectures, or ask disinterested questions about school. But sometimes he would take walks out through the trees to the hillside, to look down at the flying vapour of the sea, and bring Bel and me along with him; we would fidget restlessly while he gazed into the darkness, and then, just as we were wondering what the point of all this was, and how long we would have to stand there doing nothing while valuable television-watching time was being eaten up, he would turn to us and without introduction launch into a poem from memory, spooky verses about lonely lovers and capricious fairies, tricking spectres and murmuring seas. And as our faces turned pale with not-understanding, and we tingled with the haunting, equivocal magic that crackled around the poems, he would chuckle out, ‘Yeats, children. Yeats would have liked to be up here with you and me, on a night like this.’ And before we could express our indifference as to the presence or otherwise of Yeats, he would be marching off again, back to the house.
Father had been a master cosmetician. In the skin of the human face he divined what a Renaissance master might have seen on a blank canvas: the possibility of a transcendent beauty. Though the Renaissance master painted to testify to God’s greatness, while my father, one of those agnostics who spends his life doing battle with the God he doesn’t believe in, worked more out of defiance, as if to say, Where you have failed, I succeed; I can lift people up out of your squalid Creation. He had worked with all the greats — Lancôme, Yves St Laurent, Givenchy, Chanel — inventing unguents, balms and lotions to retard the ravages of the sun, to preserve the black sparkle of mascara from rain and tears, to maintain the bloody red kiss of the mouth through a thousand bloody red kisses; to soothe, to rejuvenate, to enhance and restore, in short an act of such great love for the human race that, through his cosmetics, the years could be rolled back and the tale of anyone’s life — written always in lines, scars, desiccation, no matter what they say about the beauty of wisdom and life’s rich tapestry — could be untold.
His death was more than two years ago now: it followed a long, wasting illness which had caused him great suffering. In his last days he had faltered badly. His mind had slipped, and he misused his art. He tried to disguise the desecration the disease had left, and thus, by his thinking, counteract it. ‘There’s no escaping it,’ he’d been fond of telling us when he was well, ‘the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge you on your big nose or your weak chin. Six billion people could be wrong, but you’ll never get them to admit it.’ And so the make-up was caked on with trembling fingers, layer upon layer; he lay in the half-darkness like a sad, syphilitic Pierrot, his gaunt cheeks stained concavely with rouge. For a time the house teetered on the verge of becoming some kind of hospice Cage Aux Folles, everyone flapping about in hysterics and occasionally French accents. It was a mercy when he died and we could restore him in our memories to what he had been before all this mortal vaudeville. I can still hear his last words to me, with a crumbling, crooked finger beckoning me out of the shadows to kneel at his side: ‘Son… the world is cruel…’ he’d whispered. ‘Always… moisturize…’