The word “gift” troubles me. Is a gift something that belongs to us or not? If it is simply something we have rather than receive, why do we use the strange word “gift”? And if a gift is a true gift, then surely my mother was right — it comes unconditionally; you can take it or leave it, cherish or renounce it. But Ruth would not have held this view. Ruth would have said, I think, though she never said it in so many words, that we must serve our gifts.
I have always thought of myself as one of the great ungifted, so who am I to judge? My mother died, of throat cancer, because she neglected her gift. Ruth died of lung cancer, because she served her gift and was rewarded for it — and fate strikes quickest at the gifted and successful. There is no consistency or justice in superstition — but you have these thoughts. Easier to say that Ruth died of lung cancer because she smoked a lot. But then, we all know, some people smoke and live to be ninety. I like a cigarette myself. (Neither my wife’s death nor my own foiled one has cured me of the habit.) A gift is a gift: to treasure or disdain, to use or abuse, keep or reject. Including our bodies? Including our lives? Including our selves?
And, truly, my mother’s gift, as I remember it, was like something that didn’t belong to her. When she sang, it was as though some other creature was born inside her. A spasm of breast and throat, an upward parturition, a songbird hatching in her bosom — and out of this woman, so unscrupulous, so indolent, so heartless, my mother, would come a sound so sweet and miraculous, it was impossible not to yield.
“Who is Sil-via? What is she-e …?”
It must have softened even the rancorous heart of Uncle Ratty, disturbed in his dusty studies by those clear notes rinsing through the house. It must have bewitched the audience at concert halls and recital rooms in Reading and Maidenhead and Windsor. Among the debris that came into my possession after her death (along with Matthew Pearce’s testament) was a yellowed newspaper cutting recording my mother’s solo début (arias by Handel, Gluck and Purcell) at a concert in Reading in March 1929, in which the reviewer, Hugo Duval, saving his barbs for the orchestra, singles out “Miss Rawlinson” for her “exceptional promise” and “exquisite charm and purity.” Charm and purity! Charm, yes. How much was Hugo’s enthusiasm elicited by my mother’s vocal talents alone?
A career lay before her (she might have thrown away that cutting; she kept it). She might — who knows? — have trod the opera stage. And yet when she married my father, she abandoned the prospect and sang thenceforth — as if simply for the pleasure of it — only those intoxicating snatches I remember. And when my father died — it took time for me to realise, time for the truth of it to sink in — she gave up even that. Her throat never quivered, the songbird never took flight again.
And it is curious that in that catalogue of family failures, in that roll-call of doomed, obscurity-dreading, honour-hunting attention-seekers, she did not mention my father. She avoided my father altogether.
How were they ever joined together? Why, with her merciless view of masculine pretension — though perhaps it was unformed then, perhaps it only came with my father — did my mother marry my father? A man over twenty years her senior and, superficially at least, of precisely the same mould as Uncle Ratty: Colonel Unwin (a full and true colonel this time), formerly of the regular army, latterly of some ill-defined, semi-civilian sphere of duty between the military and the diplomatic services. Another careerist, another star-chaser.
One answer is simple and perhaps all-sufficient. He was a good catch. He rescued her; she bagged him. In 1935, when the marriage took place, he was forty-five years old, to her twenty-four. He came of what might have been called then “good Berkshire stock”; had “distinguished himself,” with no unfortunate Rattyesque blots, in the Dardanelles and Palestine; had served in India, where — this was about all I learnt from his own lips — he “shot tigers,” and where he was married, briefly, the first time around: one of those pathetic, semi-arranged marriages involving a shipped-out bride and ending in tropical fever. My mother told me her name was Vanessa. I see a creature compounded of white tulle and pale, sacrificial skin.…
When he returned to England in ’33, he was a seasoned officer in his middle years, conditioned by matrimonial disappointment to a life of service and duty, young enough still to nurse ambitions, possessed of a patrimony he had not yet had the chance to squander — and a perfect target for my mother’s charm. I don’t blame her for fortune-hunting. Now that her father, the hapless surgeon, was dead, how long was she to go on waiting for Uncle Rupert either to die too or to make some provision for her and her younger brother? Yet Ratty, with all his dread of the Great Leveller, lived on, steadily growing more crankish and steadily exhausting what was left of the Rawlinson riches.
It was just possible that the motive of which I know so much — revenge — entered my mother’s calculations. An army officer. With a clean and honourable record. And enjoying, at that time, just that rank of major to which Ratty had fallen. The mockery of it. The gall of it. Uncle Rupert could not prevent the marriage, but if he ever swore it should take place only over his dead body, he almost proved himself correct, for within a year of the wedding he at last gave up the ghost. Whether he had achieved by then, to his own satisfaction, the ultimate and redeeming goal of his life — certain proof of his kinship with Sir Walter Ralegh — no one can say.
My mother being excluded, or in any case now provided for by marriage, Uncle Ratty’s dwindled estate passed to her brother. Who did not have long to enjoy it. For, in reaction, perhaps, to the family tinge of khaki, he joined the Navy in 1939 and was killed in the earliest months of the war, not in action but in some miserable and obscure collision at sea — another instance, I suppose, of Rawlinson ignominy.
I was three years old at the time, so my Uncle Jim, perhaps in his naval togs, must once have dandled me in his arms, but I don’t remember him. Nor do I recall my mother’s being plunged into sisterly mourning. But a framed photograph of Jim was one of the few personal remnants of her past which she allowed herself to keep. It disappeared when she married Sam. I could see why Sam would never have liked it. It was only after her death — the photo is mine now — that I discovered that she hadn’t disposed of it but had simply hidden it from view.
He looks appallingly young and appallingly ignorant. Life has a thousand avenues, but he is fixed for ever — a perpetually grinning midshipman. He has my mother’s sparkle, none of her cunning. And, of course — this was Sam’s difficulty — I cannot look at that photo without seeing also the photo of Sam’s brother, which Sam first showed me, slipping it confidentially out of his wallet and giving me the facts, in those very early days in Paris. A shrewd but ill-fated piece of emotional trading. Sam’s brother (tropical whites; a lady-killer’s smile), Sam’s younger brother, Ed, who for these last forty years and more, just as Uncle Jim has been lying somewhere under the North Sea, has been lying under the South Pacific.
And what did my father — elevated now into some safer, more Olympian zone of warfare, touring the military purlieus of Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey and sometimes being called to Whitehall, even to Washington — think of his new young bride? At his age, and after the first attempt, his notions of marriage must have been all to do (poor fool) with seniority, authority and self-esteem. He saw my mother as a pretty adornment to his own advancement. Or perhaps — after all those years of rigour under the Indian sun — he melted in the mild air of the Home Counties and in a wave of sweet self-delusion took this rather showy flower to be the perfect, adorable English rose.