This house was to be home for a while. The woman who owned it wore black satin. She and Nurse Knott drank tea and talked of their dislike of Marguerite’s mother. Marguerite persisted in enquiring why and was ushered to bed. On the first-floor landing was more stained glass: a dragon and St George with a knife. The nurse explained that the saint was killing the dragon and if Marguerite did not behave he would come down and kill her too.
Mother was usually absent or suffering a headache or a rage. She wore exotic clothes, smelled of perfume, laughed a lot, but cried more. She played the piano and sang in a high soprano voice. Her moods were unsettling, her temper short. Household problems enraged her. She screeched at the servants, withheld their wages and summarily turned them and their possessions out of the house.
Grandmother Diehl came to stay. To her, Marguerite said she owed her moments of childhood happiness. ‘Without her I think I must have died of sheer starvation of heart and spirit.’ She had long, coiled-up hair, blue eyes, spoke in a soft drawl and was used to a house without men. Her father had died when she was a child. At seventeen she had married Edwin Otley Diehl, a stockbroker. She had her daughter and two sons, but when widowed at twenty-three took her children to live with her mother.
She called Marguerite sugar plum, which somehow turned into Tuggie. ‘To her I was Tuggie til the day of her death.’ She took her to matinées, read Dickens aloud, took her shopping at William Whiteleys department store where the green stair carpet was woven with yellow globes of the world. She did not scold and was never unkind. Through her Marguerite said she discovered ‘an altogether new sensation … a sensation that made you discontented unless you were with the person you wanted to be near. A sensation that made you want to look at them and admire them and be praised by them and kissed by them. It was no less a factor than love.’
Her grandmother wrote down her efforts at poems and praised her ‘inordinately’. When Marguerite asked why her mother cried and was disliked by Nurse Knott and why her father had gone, Grandmother Diehl, however circumspectly, always tried to reply.
‘If she and I could have lived alone I feel that we two would have been content.’ Here was the fantasy mother who talked of heaven, God and love, was soft-spoken and attentive and who made her feel worthwhile. But she kept disappearing to America. And between them was Mary Jane Hall. ‘The influence of my mother was so potent that it held my grandmother perpetually in chains.’
Mary Jane’s tyranny ruled, her ungovernable tempers and ever-changing moods. In the Notting Hill sitting-room she and Grandmother Diehl talked of money, the Case and Radclyffe, a man whom Marguerite associated with all that was worst in the world. It was Radclyffe who prompted her mother’s invective. Grandmother Diehl would say, Do be careful, the child is in the room. Mary Jane, in subdued rage, would then spell words out, not speak them. Which exasperated Marguerite, for she was dyslexic – a disability associated with birth trauma – and though she could memorize stories, poems and songs, spelling eluded her and she had difficulty learning to read or write.
Mother’s attention was unwelcome. Sometimes she clasped and kissed her, called her her poor, poor little girl, cried into her neck and made the front of her dress wet. Marguerite recoiled, so her mother wept the more and said that even her own daughter did not love her. Then abruptly she would stop and tell Mrs Diehl to get ready to go to the theatre. ‘Why Mary Jane,’ Mrs Diehl would say, ‘you’re up and down like a thermometer.’ And Marguerite, alone in her room, learned to hate her.
Revenge and venality sustained Mary Jane. The Case went on for years with legal wrangling over custody and money. In an initial decree for separation, granted on 25 February 1882, Rat was ordered to pay £1,250 a year. Mary Jane then took her case to the Chancery division of the court to claim on Marguerite’s behalf against the grandfather’s will. She delayed divorce fearing Radclyffe might remarry and his father’s money pass to other legitimate children. In a second hearing one third of his inheritance was awarded to Marguerite to be administered in trust. Against this settlement Mary Jane’s allowance was reduced to £750 a year. This allocation of funds was to cause inordinate bitterness from mother to daughter in later years.
The marriage had been a disaster, its disintegration was cruel. Marguerite was its victim. Mary Jane denigrated her husband and all his relatives and denied her daughter contact with any of them. Marguerite saw her father no more than a dozen times. Another of her abiding fantasies was that life would have been better had she been brought up by the Halls at Derwent.
There were few visitors to her mother’s house. Social graces were not demanded of Marguerite nor learned by her. No one troubled much what she did. She had lessons with her nurse in the mornings and a walk in Kensington Gardens. She needed special tuition which she did not receive. She liked to hear stories read aloud, she learned rudimentary arithmetic and to sing and play the piano. But she could
