The funeral was on 10 June, remarkably speedy, given the momentous times we were living through, and was in Claverleigh’s parish church, St James the Less. It was a short service, one hymn, one reading — I read one of Xan’s poems from his collection, called ‘A Monk, Watching’ — and an address given by Eric Maude, the playwright who had adapted my father’s story ‘The Belladonna Benefaction’ — the one bona fide success in his life. Maude was an elderly, flushed man with a dandelion mane of white filmy hair and whose memory was not sure. He kept referring to my father as ‘Brotherton’, for some reason, not Beverley. ‘Brotherton was the most generous of collaborators.’ I could see my mother growing increasingly irritated.
Other mourners included some colleagues from Strand magazine and the publishing houses that my father read for. His own publisher was not present. Dido was there, of course, and she played a loud and complex toccata by Buxtehude as we all filed out into the graveyard, our ears ringing. Xan was flying combat missions over northern France in his Typhoon and Greville was away in Italy with the 2nd US Army Corps.
As the coffin was lowered into the ground the air was loud for a few minutes with the passage of dozens of high-flying bombers heading across the Channel and we all looked up. As the final blessing was spoken the noise of the planes diminished and I glanced round the small churchyard, dry-eyed, glad that my father’s death had been so sudden and just sorry that the two and a half decades since his awful experience in the First World War had been so devastating and undermining. I was pleased that his last years had been calmer and that his troubles were now over. ‘Rest in peace,’ the vicar said, barely disguising his boredom — he might have been saying ‘Pass the salt’ — but I had to agree.
The day was cool but sunny here in East Sussex, at least, and as the drone of the planes vanished it was replaced by the sound of a wood pigeon calling in the beech trees that lined the graveyard behind its waist-high ashlar wall. Every time I hear wood pigeons I will think of my father, I said to myself, and found the mnemonic consoling.
We decided to walk back to Beckburrow where sherry and biscuits were waiting to be served as a modest wake. Dido and I accompanied Eric Maude, who wielded a stick, but strode briskly, all the same, saying he was more than happy to stroll back, remembering — entirely falsely — the many walks he and Brotherton had taken around Claverleigh. We soon caught up with my mother who was at the head of the party, keen to be first at the house. She was in something of a state, frowning and upset.
‘Don’t worry, Mother,’ I said, taking her arm. ‘It was a lovely service.’
‘There’s been no obituary. It’s a disgrace!’
Her mood didn’t improve and she took to her bed in the afternoon when the guests had departed.
Dido and I went down to the gazebo with a bottle of sherry and a box of cigarettes. My father’s chessboard was still set up with six pieces laid out on it: a rook, a pawn, two knights and two kings. The last two-move composition he had been working on.
‘Make any sense to you, these problems he posed?’ Dido asked, pointing at the chessboard.
‘No, not a clue. Mate in two moves. Baffling.’
‘He couldn’t remember the time of day but he could solve fiendish chess problems. . Funny old thing, the human brain. You were Papa’s favourite,’ she said, suddenly, topping up our sherry glasses. ‘Strange fellow, our father. He only tolerated me and Xan.’
‘He tried to kill me, Dido.’
‘Oh yes, of course. Forgot about that.’ She lit a cigarette.
I thought about what Dido had said and wondered if that were true. Had I been my father’s favourite? If I had, then that made his descent into madness all the more poignant, and the inevitable rift that occurred between us all the more sad and remorseful. Everything had changed after that day at the lake and as I sat here looking at his impossible chess problem the regrets began to accumulate within me almost unbearably. Just what had I lost, in fact? What had that war done to my father — and what part of him had been taken away from me forever?
Dido was saying something — I was glad of the distraction.
‘Sorry. I was just thinking of Papa,’ I said.
‘I’ve got something to tell you. I’m leaving Peregrine.’
I thought for a moment. Yes, this was significant: leaving Peregrine Moxon, the composer, the mentor, the man who had created Dido Clay from humble Peggy, the child prodigy.
‘Are you just leaving him? Or leaving him for someone else?’
‘For someone else.’
‘Do I know him?’
‘Reggie Southover.’
Blank. ‘Should I have heard of him?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Amory! Reginald Southover, the playwright.’
‘At least it’s not Eric Maude.’
‘That’s not in the least bit funny. You must have heard of him. He had two shows running in the West End in the summer before the war.’
‘I was in New York.’
‘Well, we’re madly in love.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Fifty-five. No, fifty-seven.’
‘Dido, you’re twenty-nine.’
‘I’m old for my age.’
‘That’s true. Is he rich?’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’ Pause. ‘He’s well off, I admit.’
‘What about Peregrine?’
‘He says he’ll kill himself.’
‘Poor thing.’
‘Good luck to him, I say.’
I closed my eyes as Dido rambled on about Peregrine’s failings — his enormous selfishness, his profound weakness as a man, his persistent jealous attempts to control her career — and tried to conjure up an image of my father before he was ill and I saw him, in my mind’s eye, standing on his hands, mocking and pitying us poor deluded inhabitants of our topsy-turvy world.
Peggy (Dido), my father and me around 1918.
I remember the month of June 1944. I stayed on at Beckburrow to keep my mother company, commuting to London by train, but it wasn’t really necessary as she seemed to pick up her old life without fuss. I suppose my father’s inconspicuous presence these past years had barely registered as she went about her business. He kept himself to himself, working on his chess problems; there was a cook and a housemaid to provide for and supervise him and they both met only at the evening meal — or sometimes not. Now he was gone so were the small traces he left at Beckburrow.
The sky above East Sussex in those weeks of June was full of aircraft flying to France and back again. Then in mid-June came the flying bombs — the doodlebugs — announced by the annoying sputtering roar of their engines. ‘Bugs’ was the wrong name — they were big, like small single-seater aeroplanes. I remember standing on the roof of the Holborn offices and seeing three of them at once and then the motor cut out on one of them and it arced down, like a thrown stone, somewhere in the region of St Paul’s. There was a percussive boom and a cloud of smoke and brick dust blossomed up prettily from the impact. In Chelsea I would lie in bed and hear them coming over — like a small motorcycle in the sky or an aerial lawnmower. There was something almost comic about the noise. But I lay there rigid — the noise was what you wanted; when it suddenly stopped, the fear kicked in as you imagined it hurtling down out of the night sky.
I remember I saw Cleve just once, briefly, after my night with Charbonneau. He seemed to suspect nothing; all was well and he said he’d be back in August. But I told Charbonneau he couldn’t stay on in my flat — to his sulky irritation. I found it impossible being the meat in a Charbonneau — Finzi sandwich. I didn’t like them both being in the city, paradoxically — I found it different from the situation in New York. How can I explain this? Perhaps because Cleve was back to his old self and I felt guilty betraying him. Life is complicated enough and I think I felt that, now my father had died, I didn’t need any more complications.