A week later, as my mother, Hilly, dropped me off at school, she said that she and Kingsley were embarking on ‘a trial separation’ (‘we’re just not getting on any more’). What I remember feeling at the time was numbness, pierced only by a weak hope. I was not yet aware, of course, that trial separations were nearly always a resounding success. But I never doubted that my father still loved my mother. (And it was true.) At the same time the fear awakened by Eva now filled the sky like a mushroom cloud: was this the end of everything? Yet it seems that even a pre-adolescent gets hormonal support (adrenaline? testosterone?), allowing him to contemplate the disaster with an imitation of pragmatic calm.
That night I lay there in the dark pining for the return of my brother Nicolas from boarding school, which I knew would strengthen me. I also made one adjustment to my internal plot summary. The fancy woman was removed from the cast.
During the summer break Hilly took her three children – Nicolas, Martin, and Myfanwy, now fifteen, fourteen, and ten – to a rented house near Sóller, Mallorca, for an indefinite stay. My brother and I were enrolled at the International School in Palma; Myfanwy attended classes, in Spanish, at a local nunnery (and very soon became fluent). By November the boys were feeling the loss of their father so sharply that they spent at least an hour every morning waiting for the postman to stop by on his motorbike; and once in a while there was a brief, jaunty, and uninformative paternal letter, or more usually a paternal postcard.
So sharply (I repeat) that when half term came Hilly immediately put Nicolas and me on a plane to Heathrow, equipped with the address of Kingsley’s ‘bachelor flat’ in Knightsbridge. I think both the brothers at this point believed in the first word of the quoted phrase. I for one certainly had daydreams about Dad having his tea and toast alone in a modest kitchen, and perhaps making the bed or even doing a bit of dusting…
The flight was delayed, and it was well past midnight when we rang the bell in Basil Mansions, London SW3. My father, wearing striped pyjamas, opened the door and rocked back in astonishment (Hilly’s telegram had not arrived). These were his first words: ‘You know I’m not alone here.’ We shrugged coolly, but we were now as astonished as he was. Silently the three of us filed into the kitchen. Kingsley disappeared and then reappeared. Then Jane appeared…
A modern youth would have thought, simply, Wow. But this was 1963, and what I thought was more like Cor (with the slightly reluctant rider, Say what you like about him, but Dad can’t half pull). Tall, erect, calm, fine-boned, and with the queenly bearing of the fashion model she once was, in a spotless white bathrobe and with a yard of rich blonde hair extending to her waist, Jane straightforwardly introduced herself and set about making us bacon and eggs.
Our five-day visit was a saturnalia of treats and sprees – Harrods fruit-juice bar every morning, restaurants, record shops, West End cinemas (55 Days at Peking, with Kingsley lying down on the floor at our feet every single time Ava Gardner appeared on screen), punctuated by several agonising and tearful heart-to-hearts between father and sons (during one of which Nicolas – very impressively, I’ve always thought – called Kingsley a cunt). But there it was: he had made up his mind and he wasn’t coming back.
On the last night, in the middle of a small dinner party, the telephone rang and my father answered; he listened for a moment, and shouted out, ‘No!’ Then he looked out at us and said four words. Jane quietly began to weep. And one of the guests, George Gale (or, as Private Eye called him, George G. Ale), grimly fetched his overcoat and headed off to Fleet Street and the Daily Express. It was November 22. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Over the next three or four years my lovelorn mother’s homestead in the Fulham Road – so bohemian that it was never locked – steadily disintegrated; and by the time the two boys went to live with Kingsley and Jane I was a semiliterate truant and waster whose main interest was hanging around in betting shops (where, tellingly, I specialised in reversible forecasts on the dogs). The move was Jane’s idea.
She always had a pronounced philanthropic bent, and was strongly drawn to strugglers and lost souls – to those who, as she put it, ‘had such terrible lives’. She wanted goals, tasks, projects; unlike either of my parents, she was proactive and she was organised. Nicolas, far bolder and more rebellious than I was, didn’t last very long in the elegant and mannerly house in Maida Vale (and by his own efforts he went on to the Camberwell College of Arts). But I liked it there. So I swallowed the guilt of disloyalty (to my mother) and I responded to my stepmother’s interest and advice.
When Jane took me on I was averaging an O level a year, and I read nothing but comics, plus the occasional Harold Robbins and – for example – the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley; I had recently sat an A level in English (the only subject in which I’d ever shown any promise) and was awarded an F: I failed. After just over a year under Jane’s direction (much of it spent in a last-ditch boarding crammer in Brighton), I had another half-dozen O levels (including Latin from scratch), three A levels, and a second-tier scholarship to Oxford. None of this would have
