Chapter 29: Clary and Archie - The Golden Hours

‘How’s the house coming?’ Polly asked, on the phone.

Clary, gilded and gleaming having swanned back from Los Angeles, had the receiver balanced between chin and shoulder, a glass of vermouth in one hand and her bare feet up on the coffee table. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Jemima’s taste is not my taste, but at least it’s anodyne. I’m just peeling things back and messing everything up a little, which comes absolutely naturally. And at least nothing is brand new any more.’

‘What are you going to do about all the long silk curtains?’

‘Keep them! The pink ones especially have faded beautifully. She put them in after she and Hugh married, didn’t she?’

‘And the unbearably tasteful wallpaper in the big bathroom?’

‘We’ve already stripped it,’ Clary said. ‘The naked plaster was rather attractive but anyway, now Bertie and Buttercup, guided by Archie, have painted a sort of Garden of Eden scene of palms and birds and distant vistas of the sea, with galleons.’ She could almost hear Polly’s eyebrows rising at the other end of the line.

‘And how about all that fitted carpet?’

‘Archie wouldn’t let me take it up. He said that we’re not students and we need a bit of padding in our old age.’ She didn’t want to tell Polly that to make up for his intransigence Archie had put rugs (cheap as chips on the market) over the beige carpets. Polly would be rather disgusted by the double layers. Clary herself had wailed ‘filthy insects will breed, and Georgie will want to adopt them’, but not in Archie’s hearing.

She was attempting a budget, and wondered how many screenplays she’d have to write before they could afford new carpets in beautiful jewel colours, what Polly called an enfilade . . . or did that only mean paint colours? In her study, of course, she could do what she wanted. A Room of My Own! Carpet up, wallpaper off – at least, a few strips off, until she saw the layers of generations of previous wallpapers, and loved them, the history they told, the humanity of it. ‘Somebody actually chose you,’ she murmured to a revolting display of flesh-coloured flowers; dark purple and green stripes; a lattice pattern of silvery lace on an undistinguished greige.

‘I’d better come down, hadn’t I?’ said Polly, and come she did, to join in: she could never keep away from a house which needed things doing to it. In theory she was going to offer her expertise. In practice she mostly stared sentimentally at things that reminded her of her younger days, tried not to be too rude about her stepmother’s choices, and dragged Clary down to the antiques end of Portobello Market, over and over again. Georgian candlesticks, Victorian tea sets, paste earrings, bevelled mirrors, twenties diamanté, forties tea-gowns. Polly was a disciplined purchaser; Clary not, but they were both distracted by a giant white wicker birdcage the shape (and almost the size) of Brighton Pavilion – ‘We could keep quails, for the eggs!’ – and a fairground horse in crimson and gold with its name painted in curly writing on a garland round its neck: Bertie! How could they resist? ‘Now we’ll just have to find ones called Harriet and Buttercup,’ said Clary, ‘so nobody feels left out.’

The idea now was that Hugh was leasing the house to Archie and Clary, and Rupert was buying out their share of Mortlake, but in practice nobody had much money and it was taking for ever, and everybody had taken out mortgages – except Clary, who as a woman couldn’t, by law, and who also, as it happened, was currently the richest, loaded with her Hollywood dollars. Hugh was astonished when she handed them over. He felt it quite wrong.

‘Poor Hugh feels that quite a lot of things are quite wrong,’ Clary said, sitting beside the gas fire in the first-floor sitting room, and wondering how hard it would be to take it back to an open fire, or was that mad? Who would lug the firewood around? Where could one even get firewood in London? She had a momentary fantasy of sending Bertie and Harriet out to Holland Park for kindling. Or surreptitiously nicking branches from the plane trees which even now tapped on the windows.

‘He’s probably right,’ said Archie. Clary had hung one of his early paintings above the fireplace and he was wondering how to ask her to take it down. Mrs Evans was coming for a drink – he hadn’t been able to get out of it – and he didn’t want her seeing it, in case she wanted to buy it, or put it in the exhibition. The opening was only a couple of weeks away and he was antsy.

Clary noticed him glancing.

‘Wrong spot?’ she asked, and he smiled his relief.

‘Like being young marrieds,’ he murmured as she climbed the stepladder, and perilously passed the painting down to him. He gave her his hand as she clambered down herself, and when she got to the bottom held her close.

They’d had the conversation, about Mrs Evans, and moving on from her. Clary had laughed and laughed, and then sobered up and said, ‘Poor Mrs Evans, poor old thing, doesn’t get the best man in the world after all.’ And then, as Harriet and Bertie were at school and Nanny had taken Buttercup to Camden Town on the 31 to have tea with her sister, they’d ended up in bed. During the day! Which was a bit delightful at this advanced stage of life.

Something about moving house realigned Clary. And something about America, too. She really was so grateful to Archie for letting her go, and so grateful to everybody for still being here, and sane, and English, when she came back. She didn’t quite want to let on how sort of wobbly she had felt out there in dreamland; how every time she had been asked where she was fraahm she’d felt put on the spot; every time she’d had to say wah-derr instead of water she felt dishonest and alienated. There were so many names for that feeling, and, she began to think, there must be lots of people who think and feel like that all the time. London must be full of alienated people, feeling as discomfited as she did in America. One even told her she spoke real good English for a foreigner! She hadn’t known where to look. Did they really not know where the language they spoke was from? But then although most of the people she met had been born in the US, their names and accents told her that their parents or grandparents hadn’t been: they were from Russia and Italy and Mexico and Puerto Rico and Korea and God knows where. And the African Americans – though she’d hardly ‘met’ any – were nothing like black people in London, who were mostly West Indian. Well, of course they wouldn’t be! They’d been in America for generations and had a different history. Of course slavery was quite a long time ago, but that was the background and there was no getting round it – it was people’s grandparents. One white man in a silk suit had told her there was no class system in the US. As a visitor she felt she couldn’t challenge him. But really! Civil rights issues were everywhere. She liked thinking about how different everybody’s story was, but wasn’t sure how to talk about it, either to people about their own background, or about the topic in general. In some ways the Americans all seemed to mix in together, Land of the Free and so forth, but in others racial background seemed to work much like class in the UK. She didn’t feel she could discuss it with anybody till she knew more about it. But she wasn’t there long enough.

These thoughts came home with her, and she found herself thinking about how they applied here. Ever since she’d seen A Taste of Honey at Stratford, she’d been aware of working-class writers erupting all over the place, and women, and young people, but she didn’t see any Caribbean writers, or Indians. Performers, yes. She’d seen Cleo Laine, who’d been phenomenal in Flesh to a Tiger at the Court, and others . . . But writers? In the US, yes – she’d come back with a suitcase full of James Baldwin, and was as a result feeling not only supremely untalented but also bereft of any experience of, or knowledge about, anything remotely worth writing about. Without that absolute fire, what was the point?

It bothered her. Quite apart from the uselessness of her own parochial little talent, what if there were English James Baldwins out there? How would they ever get their work into the world?

A trip to Foyles revealed Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, and – here we are! – Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners.

She talked about it with Archie.

‘There aren’t enough women writers in the world for you to give up,’ he said.

‘But what’s the point?’ she cried.

‘Of it all?’ he said.

‘Of creativity, when other people are so much better at it?’ she said.

‘It stops you going mad,’ he said. ‘It’s not just about what we produce, or whether or not people like it, or it does them good. It’s that some people are born creative and if they can’t create, they become monsters. Look at Hitler and his watercolours . . .’

Clary didn’t want to look at Hitler, or his watercolours.

‘And yes,’ Archie went on. ‘It’s greatly to the benefit of humanity that all kinds of people put their work into the world, and that does include restless upper-middle-class English ladies with three children and painter husbands. If you approve of writing, in general, then you have to approve of yourself doing it. The point of creativity is humanity.’

She ordered fifteen copies each of Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Lonely Londoners, to give to everybody for their birthdays.

The best thing was coming back knowing that the job was done, the contract fulfilled and she no longer had to think about any of that, at least until the film came out, but that could be ages. Her mind was free for the next thing, and the next thing had not yet appeared in her mind, so now would be an excellent time to think about the children. Harriet seemed fine. Self-contained, as always. She was doing so well at St Eleanor’s, her A levels next summer. Bertie was delightful, growing into the manly stage of boyhood, lissom, with dark silky hair and a bridge to his nose, and almost embarrassingly well mannered. He felt his school was appalling: ‘Mother! They make me do sport!’ But he worked. ‘We must keep our options open,’ he’d told Buttercup. ‘Strings to our bows!’ Buttercup, who was literal, remembered the Snow Centaur with his bow and arrow. She carefully stored up everything that Bertie had to say. Bertie is her darling, Clary thought. But then she has many darlings. Buttercup, oh Buttercup. My milk calf, my baby. (Where was that from? The Bible?) So angry when Clary first got home that she wouldn’t speak to her for twenty-four hours. So eager to please. Her fair colouring persisted – the blonde Cazalet strain which had passed Clary by was strongly evident in her, along with Clary’s round face and big grey eyes. She had none of Archie’s darkness, but something of his moral integrity resided in her look. Basically, when Buttercup stared at her Clary felt guilty.

And now of course there was also Laura, who hadn’t wasted a drop of this opportunity to manipulate her poor sweet parents into letting her go back to London and – finally – to St Eleanor’s. Clary had wondered how Jemima really felt about this, but a mist surrounded that branch of the family at the moment. Hugh wasn’t well (when had he ever been truly well?) and didn’t like talking about it, or anybody else talking about it. Jemima was preoccupied with him (as she always was) and respected his discretion. Clary thought Laura was probably being kept in a state of ignorance. After years of living with her dad and Zoë, Clary herself had no desire to get involved in that generation’s niceties, but she did hope Jemima was talking to Rachel – of course she will be, she thought. Otherwise, Clary found Laura hilarious. She was terribly annoying, queening it about the house, making sure everybody knew that it was hers really, claiming precedence and heredity and arcane knowledge of things like the boiler, about which she knew nothing at all, other than that years ago there had been constant disputes about who should ‘do’ it – i.e. fill it with coal, and riddle it, and take away the clinker and ash. Clary remembered the conversation from visits in the old days: Hugh had been too old and fragile (‘No, I’m not!’) and Jemima too pretty and female (‘Oh, Hugh, darling! Somebody has to’) and Marie-Christine too uncomprehending (‘Quoi? I am not this job!’). In the end, a crate large enough to hold a week’s worth of coal had been installed next to the pantry, which James the gardener filled up from the coal-hole under the front garden. Hugh, when well, was allowed to do the crate-to-boiler stage, the riddling, and the lifting out of the clinker and ashes – but only as far as the small bin.

None of this was an issue now. Archie did it, leg notwithstanding, and Clary knew better than to suggest he shouldn’t.

God, it was nice to feel solvent, though, to paint walls and make plans and have a gap in her mind like empty bookshelves, waiting and available for what would turn up next.

It was Nanny, obviously, who held it all together. I may not be the best mother, Clary thought, but I chose her. And that was a brilliant bit of mothering.

* * *

Even the hang had been traumatic for Archie. Mrs Evans had insisted on arraying the pictures rather differently to how he would have, and actually said to him, ‘Archie, please, let me do my job. You paint them; I sell them.’ Aesthetically he knew he was right; commercially undoubtedly she was. And that’s why she exists in our lives, he told himself. He still felt horribly awkward with her. The fact that she remained entirely smooth only unnerved him more.

The opening itself was, as he described it to himself later, lively. Far more people appeared than could possibly have been invited, drinking their white wine and yelling at each other from the very back of the room to the middle of Cork Street, where, he noted, they could hardly be admiring the art. But that was normal. Old, young, high art, new money, tweed jackets, miniskirts, gold watches, paint-stained linens, homegrown and foreign were there, plus, he was told by a blond American, Cork Street’s most notorious private-view gatecrasher, who was famous for blessing only the most successful artists with his presence. So that augured well. And Archie was touched that the entire family seemed to have come: Polly and Gerald had motored down with Rachel in GUN 97 and parked it up outside; Juliet and her rather fast-looking pals (including a slender young man in lilac velvet) were lounging on it, smoking and being eyed in combined fear and admiration by the older crowd. ‘I see Carnaby Street and Chelsea have turned out,’ said Mrs Evans with a nod, as she steamed efficiently from potential buyer to potential buyer. Everybody wanted to congratulate and compliment him, which was at once gratifying and excruciating – what the hell was one meant to say? Yes, aren’t I brilliant?

Thank God Clary, in the little black velvet dress which made her look like a Singer Sargent portrait, was at his side the entire evening. She took so naturally to laughing and chatting and batting off the facile comments which he could hardly bear to hear. He did his best, with a polite smile which even he could tell must look ghoulish, until she whispered to him, ‘Darling, you don’t have to be nice. You’ve done your bit; it’s up on the walls. If you want to be Mr Enigmatic, or Mr Surly Bastard, or Mr So High Art He’s Silent, you’re quite within your rights. Actually, come to think of it, they’d probably love it.’ And when a fusty-looking man in a pinstripe suit bellowed, ‘So where do you get your ideas?’ at him, Clary responded, ‘Oh, he knows a little place on Old Queen Street, but it’s hardly ever open and terribly difficult to get served.’ And so they started laughing, and decided to spend ten minutes in the broom cupboard, just the two of them and the mops and buckets and a bottle of champagne. But then Mrs Evans was banging discreetly on the door saying the man from the Londoner’s Diary wanted a word, and had Archie heard that apparently Mick Jagger was here, and for God’s sake, don’t tell the Standard that he’s not? The broom cupboard, it turned out, was a well-known favourite retreat for artists when overcome.