Father Dear Father Page 4

  Richard was a gateway. I discovered history. History may be many things to a child but above all it is a release from an irksome existence into a world to live in and savour. Father’s joy in the past was boundless and in me he had an enthusiastic acolyte. We sat up late into the night. We talked of General Gordon’s death at Khartoum, while Father thrashed his cane around in imitation of the General’s own.

  ‘Never go to the Sudan, Petronella,’ he warned. ‘It’s a very treacherous place.’

  Over glasses of port we spoke endlessly of Pitt the Younger. Pitt had said, ‘England has saved herself by her exertions and will I trust save Europe by her example.’ He was called the Pilot who Weathered the Storm, explained Father. Legend had it that his dying words were ‘My country, how I leave my country.’ Father refused to believe this. ‘No one would say that when he was dying. What he really said was, “I could do with one of Bellamy’s veal pies,” but silly historians found that too prosaic.’

  During school holidays we trailed around London looking at Dr Johnson’s pretty Georgian house near the Bank of England. Johnson was a distant family relation. His sister, a Miss Ford, had married one of the Wyatts. We paid visits to the church in South Audley Street which housed the resting place of John Wilkes, the eighteenth-century radical MP. Every Christmas Eve we went to Midnight Mass there, presided over by a pompous High Church prelate. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ asked Father, ‘if he knew why we were really here – to pay our respects to a deist, a lecher and a one-time convict?’ Wilkes had been an early member of the Hell Fire Club. Initially they had met to practise their arcane debaucheries at the ruins of Medmenham Abbey by the Thames. This location had been penetrated, however, so the club had rumouredly transferred to the caves of West Wycombe Park, the Buckinghamshire estate owned by the then Sir Francis Dashwood, dilettante, sybarite, and Lord Bute’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Mother was often bemused by our conversations. It was confusing for her, especially as a few of these long-dead figures had descendants of the same name whom she happened to have met. ‘Who is this John Wilkes?’ she would ask, exasperated.

  ‘Well,’ said Father, ‘he’s a friend of Charles Churchill and Francis Dashwood.’ This was perfectly true. Charles Churchill, the poet, and Sir Francis Dashwood, the first baronet, had been close chums of Wilkes. Charles Churchill (no relation to the poet, but the Duke of Marlborough’s younger brother) and the present Sir Francis Dashwood were friends of ours.

  Aside from the eighteenth century which we admired for its verve, its abundance of great wits and its lack of hypocrisy, Father and I leaned towards ancient Greece and Rome. When the I Claudius television series, featuring Derek Jacobi as the stuttering emperor, was broadcast, Father and I were hooked. We could not be prised away for anything. During one tense episode, the telephone rang. Father was eventually obliged to pick it up. ‘Can’t talk now,’ he roared. ‘State of emergency, Agrippa’s being murdered.’ The receiver was slammed down. Half an hour later the phone rang again. It was Mrs Thatcher. ‘Are you all right, Woodrow?’ she asked. ‘The Downing Street switchboard said they rang earlier and you were being attacked by an intruder.’

  So fond did Father become of this series that one Sunday afternoon he decided to venture into the local video rental shop in search of more Romans on celluloid.

  ‘I want an educative film for my daughter about a Roman emperor,’ said Father. The manager of the shop shook his head. ‘We don’t have anything like that.’ ‘Yes you have,’ said Father. He pointed to a section marked Adult. ‘Look, higher education.’ The man was dubious. ‘You misunderstand, sir.’ Nonsense. Father’s eyes skimmed a selection of salacious titles. Bondage Bitches, Sex Fiends from Hell, Slaves to Sado-masochism.

  ‘How odd, I’m not familiar with these. Are they anything to do with Tacitus?’

  But when his gaze fell on a film entitled Caligula there was jubilation. ‘That’s it. That’s what we want. Very educative for my daughter.’ ‘How old is she?’ ‘Fourteen.’ The man paled. I could see he was thinking of unimaginable perversions. But Father was oblivious. We took the video home and put it on. Sir John Gielgud’s appearance in the opening credits made Father feel vindicated. ‘Silly man in that shop. If John’s in it it must be very highbrow.’

  Gielgud was in it for a mere ten minutes – fully clothed. He was the only one who was. In a sub-Fellini pastiche, orgy followed execution followed incest in disgusting, crapulous monotony. Father was bored and baffled. When Malcolm McDowell’s Caligula had sex with his sister’s corpse Father said, ‘But that’s not in Suetonius.’ As the film ground to its repellent conclusion Mother chanced to put her head around the door. Horror disfigured her visage. ‘Really, Woodrow. What are you teaching Petronella?’

  Father replied equably, ‘History, Buttercup. But it’s changed since I last read it.’

  4

  Hungarian rhapsodies

  MOTHER’S FAMILY CAME from Budapest. They were eminent lawyers and landowners. My great-great-uncle Emil had been Admiral Horthy’s Minister of Justice before the Second World War. Emil, who looked like an apostle on a diet of yeast, began his career as a lawyer. He raked in the chips like a croupier. For acting for him in one case alone, Prince Esterhazy gave Emil 5000 hectares, on which he grew lavender for its valuable oil.

  As well as having a large law office similar to a New York practice, he was a turbulent, tumultuous political journalist. Of a precipitate nature, he once challenged the Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Bethlen, to a duel over some allegedly dubious share dealings in which the premier was engaged. The duel did not take place, though an associate of the Prime Minister took up the challenge, withdrawing at the last minute with the scabrous excuse that Emil fenced left-handed. In his disgust my great-great-uncle resigned his government post.

  A rich man in Central Europe could live like a sultan. Emil owned a magnificent house on a plateau overlooking the teeming spires of Buda. Swimming pools and tennis courts interrupted the rich swathes of emerald lawn.

  Part of this was paid for from the remuneration he received from being a friend and legal adviser to the Belgian Princess, Stephanie, who had married Franz Josef’s tragic heir, Crown Prince Rudolf. In 1889 Vienna was shaken by scandal when the bodies of Rudolf and his young mistress Maria Vetsera, an eager-eyed baroness, were found together at a hunting lodge in Mayerling. Mayerling was really the first royal scandal. It came at a time when an emerging mass Press had started to report the toings and froings of the mighty. Later it inspired a ballet and an over-sentimental film featuring Catherine Deneuve and Omar Sharif.

  It was a family legend that Princess Stephanie had told Emil the true story of Mayerling, and Emil told it in turn to his niece, my grandmother. Rudolf, apparently, was promiscuous, syphilitic and a drug taker. He tired of the seventeen-year-old Maria Vetsera, who may have been less demi-mondaine than mundane. Broken-hearted, she followed him to Mayerling, where he had gone to hunt, to beg for his love. She pleaded for one last night and Rudolf, satyr that he was, consented. The night was wild and scarlet. While the Crown Prince lay asleep, she took his cut-throat razor and slashed off his penis. Rudolf, at the age of thirty-one, became the first Bobbit. He could not contemplate life without a penis, and medical science had not yet pioneered the requisite reconstructive surgery. So Rudolf took a gun, shot Maria and then shot himself.

  Rumours flew. The most popular to this day is that the lovers made a romantic suicide pact because they were unable to marry. Another, now discredited, is that Rudolf was the victim of a political assassination. Franz Josef wanted the lurid nature of the deaths covered up. With his autocratic powers, he deterred the investigations of the journalists. When the Viennese Chief of Police died, his widow received a pension and went to live in Paris. Whenever she ran short of money she threatened Franz Josef with revelations. Her demands were always met. My grandmother swore by this story. She said Emil never lied. One supposed, though, that Princess Stephanie, jealous and vengeful,
might have done.

  My grandfather, whose name was Racz, had Austrian blood. He was thin and pale like a sickle moon. My grandmother, Livia, was a fabled beauty. She had many admirers, including the Mayor of Trieste who was later imprisoned by the Allies for having been somewhat overzealous during the war. She had met him at a railway station. Grandmother had disembarked from the train to pee and had locked herself in the lavatory by mistake. To her horror she heard the train moving off with all her luggage aboard. Suddenly the door was prised open and there stood a bejewelled Hector. Behind him was piled in a pyramid her suitcases.

  ‘Madam,’ he said. ‘I saw you get off the train and noted that you had not reboarded. So I took the liberty of removing your luggage.’ Then he fell at her feet and worshipped her beauty. They plighted eternal love.

  Mother and her sister, my aunt Lili, found the letters he sent her. Eventually my grandfather had enough and asked for a divorce. But neither of the children was informed of their parents’ legal separation, so they went on shuttling train-like between them as they had always done.

  For Mother, adolescence in pre-war Hungary passed like a dream of enchantment. Mother and Lili were beautiful sisters, one dark and lustrous, the other fair like Isolde. My grandfather was very strict. Although they had many suitors neither girl was allowed to go out with a man on her own. They were chaperoned everywhere. Sometimes the girls tried to make the chaperone, generally a maiden aunt, ill by putting strange concoctions in her drinks, but she only complained to grandfather.

  On Sunday afternoons all the young officers came to call. The previous day they had been with their married mistresses and on Sunday they visited suitable girls they hoped would one day be their wives. They came in scarlet uniforms, clanking swords, which were left in a shiny pile in the hall. Summers were spent in a country house on the shores of Lake Balaton. My second cousin Otto, like Thrasyllus, Tiberius’s gnarled old soothsayer, read auspices from chicken entrails. Otto cut off their heads and then watched the headless bodies run about. Grandmother was compelled to put a stop to it when she ran out of chickens for a lunch party. Those were days of diamonds as big as the Ritz, glittering like the pellucid water itself. Almost every night there was a ball. Sometimes the young men hired gypsies to play to their girls from the middle of the lake. They stood with water up to their fat bellies, fiddling until dawn.

  Then the war came. Grandfather’s family detested the Nazis. Jews were helped to hide in the dank and sloping attics of Budapest. During the fighting in the city, which began in December 1944, times were harrowing. The house was fought over and occupied alternately by the Russians and the Germans.

  The Russians were sometimes monsters and sometimes as gentle as children. Puzzled by modern plumbing, they washed their hands and faces in the lavatory bowls. One night they made Mother and Aunt Lili bury the German dead in the garden. When they were angry they locked the family in the drawing-room and defecated in the hall until streams of urine flowed under the doors. Then, on a sudden whim they would hand out food and brightly-coloured flowers. Sometimes they became maudlin and then amorous. My great-grandmother was in her eighties and – so it was alleged – had been untouched for forty years. She was one of those women who thought herself picturesque but succeeded in looking a fright. A young Russian conceived a sudden and unlikely passion for the old lady and wanted to ravish her. My great-grandmother could hardly believe her luck. The rest of the family took a dimmer view. The Russian could not be put off, however, until someone had the bright idea of telling him that great-grandmother had contracted syphilis.

  When the Communists took over the government the town house and the house at Lake Balaton were confiscated. Grandfather was allowed to make a small living translating Soviet-approved plays. Two of my great uncles high in the old government service were given long prison sentences. This was followed by deportation to work in the fields. Emil was put in prison and then sent to work as an agricultural labourer in his old constituency. The Communists believed their own propaganda and expected him to receive rough handling from the peasants he had once employed on his estates. Instead they could not tolerate the dignified old man working in the fields and fed him and hid him in the most comfortable quarters they could find. Emil’s house was of course stolen by the Communists. When I went to Hungary for the first time I saw it. It was being used as housing for dozens of families and had become a slum. The swimming pools no longer echoed with children’s laughter; the tennis courts were sad and overgrown. When Emil died in 1952 the Communists felt a twinge of remorse. He had been, during the war, a committed anti-Nazi who wanted Britain to win. The Communists paid for a grand funeral for the man they had tortured and humiliated, and published long tributes to him as a great son of Hungary, especially praising his brave efforts to save Jews from concentration camps.

  As it became clear to grandfather that the Communists were determined to punish his family, he decided to send his daughters to England. But the day before they were to leave, Aunt Lili fell in love with a man in a bread queue. So Mother went alone. In her suitcase she carried a few dresses and some pound notes. On her arrival in England the money was taken from her by stern officials. She was terrified, as well she might have been. The notes turned out to be counterfeit. With no money and speaking erratic English, she found dire lodgings with another Hungarian girl. Nothing in her former life had prepared her for this. Then one day someone suggested she go and see Alexander Korda, the Hungarian founder of London Films. Korda had a reputation for helping Hungarians, especially if they were pretty and obliging young women. He was married to Merle Oberon at the time, but the union was foundering.

  So Mother went to see him in his large, shiny office; a melange of horsehair and leather. The first thing Korda did was ask if she owned a winter coat. When Mother shook her head, he procured one for her. This act of interested generosity was misinterpreted as an elderly man’s simple kindness. Korda suggested she might do some work as a film extra. When it became clear that Mother could not act, he put her through art school. Still she regarded him as a saintly and benevolent mentor.

  The inevitable happened. Mother lost her lodgings in Earls Court. Korda offered her the use of his London apartment. She accepted. The following night the door bell rang thrice. It was the eager landlord.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ asked Mother, genuinely surprised.

  ‘This,’ Korda replied, and promptly dropped his trousers.

  Feeling that she could no longer remain Korda’s tenant on this dubious basis, Mother moved back to a small bedsit. But Fortune smiled on her. One evening a fellow Hungarian introduced her to a Baron Lazslo Banczsky von Ambroz, an immigrant asthma specialist living in London.

  The Baron was married to a former Miss Poland, but was nonetheless swept away by Mother’s curves, which some people likened to the hull of a racing yacht. He divorced Miss Poland and moved Mother into a large and airy house in Devonshire Street, which has since become an embassy. The marriage was an agreeable one for both parties, if hampered by the large differences in their ages, the Baron being twenty-six years older than his new bride.

  They soon had a son, my half-brother Nicholas. When Nicholas was ten, his father died suddenly. It happened at the dinner table. The Baron was in the process of putting his fork to his mouth. He gave a cry and keeled over onto the floor. Mother rushed to feel his pulse. He was dead. The doctors said it was a heart attack.

  After Mother married Father, grandmother decided to move to England. Father complained bitterly that he was the only Englishman he knew who was forced to live with his mother-in-law. Mother assured him it would only be a temporary measure. The temporary measure lasted thirty-one years.

  Let me describe this remarkable and formidable woman in greater detail. She was one of two sisters. The younger was called Edith. Poor Edith was not destined by the Almighty to be a beauty. She remained a virgin until her forties, and even then we were not sure if the affair was really consummated, because her
lover died shortly after the act was alleged to have taken place. For the next thirty-three years Edith was convinced that her dead lover would be reincarnated in someone else’s body. As a precaution, perhaps, she never changed her clothes, but wore the same iron-grey boiler suit. In the meantime she occupied herself by making dolls. She took to the ski slopes late in life. Holiday-makers and sportsmen at various Austrian resorts would be astonished by this upright and precise figure with a head of chrysanthemum-white hair manoeuvring black runs at extraordinary speed.

  Then one day it happened. Hoping to facilitate the meeting with the reincarnated lover, she took to inviting strangers off the streets to share her small repasts. She left her front door unlocked at all hours. On her seventy-fifth birthday she walked into a bar, picked up ten men and took them to her flat for champagne. Aunt Lili was convinced she would be murdered, but Edith was equally convinced that love would touch her with its scarlet wings.

  Love came in the form of a carpenter. But its wings were grey and it required a walking-stick. Edith was eighty-three, the carpenter was a relatively young seventy-one. Edith was in the first frenzy of a young bride. She changed her clothes for the first time in over thirty years. She invited my aunt to tea and badgered her with questions. Would Our Father deign to forgive her if they lived in sin before the marriage? Aunt Lili replied that at her age Our Father would have little to forgive. Edith pointed to a sofa that was missing numerous springs. She gestured dramatically and cried, ‘This is where I will give him my body.’ Aunt Lili said she felt ill. Whether Edith gave the carpenter her body or not is a moot point, but within a year they had fallen out. She suspected that the man was not her former lover after all but a charlatan who was after her money.