He really did have excellent taste for a man, I thought to myself. The drawing room had lacquered red walls and a polished near-white parquet floor with silk rugs scattered here and there. A painting of a naked Negro boy dancer hung above the mantel and the occasional tables were clustered with silver- and tortoiseshell-framed photographs of his biggest social prizes. I stood at the window with my cigarette looking over the roofscape toward the palace. Life was indeed good. You’re only nineteen, I said to myself, look how well you’re doing, a year out of boarding school. Laura and Millicent would sell their souls to the Devil to be where I was now. And who would have thought? I was meant to be at Somerville College, Oxford, reading history. Non, merci. Let life come to you, my father always said, don’t rush about looking for it. Then I heard Greville coming in the front door and I felt myself tense with warm anticipation.
‘You still up, you naughty girl?’
‘Well. .?’ I said, queryingly, as he came in. ‘You have to tell me.’
‘He didn’t say yes — and he didn’t say no. I think he’s genuinely interested — he wants to see how I’ve taken some of his set. Have we got those portraits of Lady Furness? That’ll swing it. We’ll look them out in the morning.’ He undid his tie and headed for the drinks table where he poured himself a whisky.
‘A perfectly acceptable evening was marred by a rather unpleasant row with Lady Foster-Porter.’ He drained his glass and topped himself up. ‘There’s no other word for it but I’m afraid Lady Foster-Porter is a ghastly old cunt.’
I wasn’t shocked. Greville swore all the time in private, arguing that we owed it to the English language to exploit the full range of forceful expressions it offered. He went on to explain why the disagreement had arisen with Lady Foster-Porter — her refusal to honour the fee he’d demanded for her son’s wedding.
‘Very tiresome woman,’ he said. ‘She actually said her chauffeur could have done a better job.’
‘Sourpuss bitch!’ I threw in, loyally. ‘How dare she?’
‘Well, I was fuming by then, you can imagine. Boiling. I said her son’s wedding merited exactly the treatment I’d given it. And reminded her I’d done the Earl of Wargrave’s wedding the very next day. And he’d been delighted.’
‘Did she shut up?’
‘She called me a snob. Fucking old trout. She—’ He stopped. ‘Why’re you staring at me like that?’
‘You look very handsome, all of a sudden, cursing away. Swearing like a trooper.’
He came over, took my hand and gave me a kiss.
‘Greville and Amory versus the world,’ he said.
‘Easy winners.’
‘Lockwood sort everything out?’
‘Yes, I’ll give him a hand developing and printing in the morning — send everything off to the magazine.’
‘Sit down, darling. There’s something I have to discuss with you.’
He led me over to a chair in front of the fireplace and sat me down then knelt in front of me and took both my hands. This is it, I thought — it’s going to happen, now.
‘Your father,’ he said. ‘You have to go and see him.’
I hadn’t seen my father since that day at Hookland Castle Lake when he was taken away by the police. I said to Greville — keeping my voice steady — that I couldn’t bear to be in a room with my father, that it made me ill, unstable.
‘I can’t, Greville. He tried to kill me.’
‘He wasn’t well — he was deranged. He’s much better now and he asks for you every time he wakes up, it seems, so your mother tells me. The doctors say it might help if you went down and saw him. Each week, each month that you don’t see him, you know, sort of agitates him more.’
I closed my eyes. Why was I being so foolish?
‘I’ll come with you,’ Greville said. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of. He’s making good progress. And it might help you, as well. Catharsis and all that.’
He was right. But some tears flowed and I gave a little sob. As I hoped, Greville took me in his arms and rocked me gently to and fro. I breathed in, content in the moment, my head filled with the scent of custard and jasmine.
4. CLOUDSLEY HALL
CLOUDSLEY HALL, near Rochester in Kent, was the asylum where my father had been taken after the Hookland Castle Lake incident. It was an ugly early neo-Gothic Victorian manor house built on the site of a grand eighteenth-century farm and consequently flattered by its ancient landscaped park dating back to that era. Cloudsley Hall had battlements, corner towers and an unlikely belvedere and there were two lodges at the gate leading to a gently winding drive through sheep-cropped, hillocked and wooded meadows to the hall itself. One might have been visiting a hotel or a private school.
Greville drove me there in his Alvis. My mother, Peggy and Xan had decided not to join me as they had seen Papa on numerous occasions and it was felt it would be more effective if I went to meet him alone. We were taken to the office of the medical director, a Dr Fabien Lustenburger, who was Swiss, Greville told me, an expert on the latest treatments for ‘mania’.
Dr Lustenburger was a huge, portly young man, well over six feet, already quite bald but with a wide dense moustache that acted as a counterbalance to his almost indecently burnished pate. He was welcoming and warm, very pleased that I had come, and eagerly took me upstairs to my father’s ward. Greville said he would wait in the library.
‘Your father will seem completely well to you,’ Dr Lustenburger said as we reached the landing of the first floor. ‘I warn you. You will be surprised. You will say, why is he in this institution?’ He had a barely noticeable accent. ‘Maybe he will be a bit sleepy. When we rouse the patients they find the state of “waking” a little strange and hard to cope with. They spend so much time sleeping, you see.’
He led me through a ward of a dozen beds, most of them occupied by sleepers, in fact, men and boys, as far as I could tell from a quick glance to either side. The atmosphere was suitably hushed. Dr Lustenburger showed me in to a glassed-in balcony area that looked over the wide rear lawn of Cloudsley Hall — and the thin oblong of its ornamental lake, I was rather alarmed to see. The place was full of lush potted plants — palms and aspidistras — and overstuffed armchairs with leg rests. My father was sitting on one of them, wearing pyjamas and a quilted scarlet dressing gown. He looked very well, fresh-faced, his hair longer than usual, untrimmed, almost boyish, it seemed to me. He kissed and hugged me enthusiastically — entirely naturally, also, as if nothing had happened between us.
‘Amory, Baymory, Taymory! Look at you, sweetheart. Isn’t she the height of modern fashion, Dr Lustenburger?’
Dr Lustenburger, smiling, backed away without comment.
I launched into a somewhat hysterical prattle about my life in London, working with Greville, the parties I went to and the people I’d met. I felt very uneasy being alone with him. It seemed at once wholly normal and quaveringly tense. My father appeared to be listening, a vague smile on his face, and from time to time nodded and said, ‘Wonderful,’ and ‘What larks, Amory,’ and ‘Goodness me.’ Then he lay back in his armchair and closed his eyes.
I sat there for a few seconds watching him.
‘What happened, Papa?’
He woke up at once and swung his legs off the chair.
‘I can’t remember,’ he said abruptly. ‘It’s all gone, that’s the problem. The medicines they give you in here, you know. .’ He took my hand and studied it. ‘I know something awful happened — and I can remember you and me standing on the top of a car in a lake of some sort. .’ He gestured out at the vista through the glass, indicating Cloudsley Hall’s lake. ‘Bigger than that. And then I remember police, a police station, then doctors coming and then. . here.’ He paused, then leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘You know, when I first came here and I woke up the next morning I said, “My, I slept well last night!” And the nurse said, “You’ve been asleep for two weeks, Mr Clay.”’ He frowned. ‘They put you to sleep here, Amory, for days and days at a time. Weeks. I’ve no idea how long I’ve slept. Months. I’m hardly ever awake, it seems to me.’