LENS II: Chapter 6
If my own is a story of uprooting and its effects, so is that of my first husband, about whom I shall take the course of writing as little as he would wish. We married in love and in good faith and are the parents of two beloved children. We come high in one another’s lives and have only kind thoughts for one another. We are both of a romantic temperament, both shy and both with an instinct to place trust in a metaphysical belief system that includes God. Quentin is a confirmed Christian. When I stand next to him in church, which I do quite frequently, I feel my own shaky faith strengthened by the directness of his.
I did not become confirmed when the opportunity to be so arrived at boarding school, taking the pi line that most of the other girls were doing it to please their parents and to get a nice string of pearls or a pretty diamond cross. I should have become confirmed then, because it would have so pleased my McWilliam grandmother. Quentin’s story of deracination and its redress is geographically (and in other ways) more dramatic than my own and I shall tell it sparely. Born in Spain, he was a young child in Australia. He loves the sea and ships. At a very tender age, he was sent to prep school at Farleigh House School. His grandfather, sensing after the war that big houses might be doomed, had leased his own to this institution, a primarily Roman Catholic prep school, and moved to Kenya. Thus Quentin was at school among boys of a different religious denomination; he had an Australian accent and was being schooled in a house that was, actually, his own. While he keeps many friends from those days, it was greatly to his satisfaction when the lease expired in 1983 to be able to restore and to re-enter his ancestors’ home. The school relocated to Red Rice in Andover. There is now no sense to the house that it ever was anything but a happy family home. People who were at the school are astonished by the difference.
One way of being evasive in a memoir or whatever it is that my mouth is making in an attempt to get my eyes to open, is to take refuge, as Anthony Powell so gruesomely enjoyably and teasingly does in his own memoirs, in genealogy. I shan’t do that. Histories of the Wallop family may be found elsewhere.
Perhaps the most humanly relevant fact about the Wallop family is that they are known as the Red Earls on account of the heir more often than not having ruby-red hair. Our son Oliver, who was named for Cromwell — one of the Wallops was a regicide — was born on 22 December 1981. His names are also Henry Rufus. I got to choose this third quite unrejectable name. As soon as a little bit of the baby’s head was visible, Quentin was convinced that he would be a boy, and a boy indeed he was, with a fiery head, at birth and ever since, of scarlet hair. It was a hard snowy winter and we spent Christmas at Basingstoke District Hospital, dizzy with joy and completely ignorant of how to feed our huge son. The NHS gave us a knitted Santa which is still in the day nursery at Farleigh. It was the middle of the shooting season, so Quentin would be busy in the day and then slide in his Land Rover back to me in the hospital with big dishes of salami that he had bought at I Camisa in Soho and sliced paper thin. Other mothers who gave birth in December 1981 may remember this handsome man handing around plates of cured Italian meats in his delight at being a father, and it was indeed to be a father that Quentin himself was born. His story of deracination makes for an absolute fix on steadiness as a parent.
Our honeymoon took place in Mexico. I had forgotten to get an American visa and even Mr Potts couldn’t swing it. This time, the crazy luck came from the fact that Papa was very briefly a Minister of State for Defence under Mrs Thatcher, who sacked him I think for being too left-wing; ‘wet’ was the word of the day. Phone calls were made and on our stopover in Los Angeles I was guarded, including on ‘comfort visits’, by armed police. Quentin is an experienced, hardy, courageous, adventurous and curious traveller. He was completely thrown to discover that he had married someone who turned to jelly at the thought of arranging a train trip from Basingstoke to London. He says that I offered to do the washing-up on our first long-haul flight together. In those days there was a sort of drawing room in the forehead of very fat aeroplanes, which I used to like. It felt solid. It was like being a citizen of Celesteville, Babar’s immaculately rational and so French city, all curves and absence of threat, while sitting up in the top of those fat jumbos.
We arrived in Mexico City in the middle of the night. I sent my sparkly pink and grey going-away outfit to the dry cleaner and, true to form, it returned doll-sized the next day. It made for a good grounding that I had read Under the Volcano so many times
But I was completely unprepared to conceive of the minds that could build the pyramids of unmortared stone that we climbed in the Yucatan. The solidity of such abstraction, the mathematical judgement and forethought required to cut each constituent stone just so and to cut it but with another stone, that obsidian axe, all this not only overwhelmed but terrified me. I found myself thinking about their thought and failing to conceive of how even to begin to think about it. It argued mental processes of such developed abstraction, whose result was transformed into something solid, and that felt deathly itself. There were no merciful flaws, was no tolerance of looseness.
It is common knowledge that the Mexicans go and picnic on the graves of their ancestors, taking food for the dear dead. Perhaps that was what I couldn’t supply imaginatively as I stood in the court where allegedly a game had been played with human heads, or when I looked into the stone face of the rain god Chac Mool at the summit of one of the pyramids. It was a relief to see that his uncomfortable pose and lugubrious features looked exactly like James Fergusson, who would have made an improbable Mayan.
In between visits in the dawn before the great heat rolled over these ancient sites, we drove with our guide Mr Cervantes, prodigiously belted around his generous tum, and visited churches whose inner gold was like being swallowed by the burning sun itself, though they were lit low and only brushed by little candles.
In Oaxaca, I was briefly kidnapped. Quentin found me in the police station. There had been a misunderstanding and a perfectly genial crowd of kidnappers had thought I was Jimmy Connors’s new wife, who was apparently a Playmate of the Year in Playboy magazine.
In the way of new couples in a new place, we found ‘our’ restaurant and ‘our’ waiter. We fell for an elderly waiter whose deep melancholic physiognomy was so paintable, so Spanish, that he seemed to have walked straight from the frame of a painting by Velázquez. Having been born in Spain, on the feast of Santiago, Quentin has an affinity with Spaniards, though a Mexican Spaniard is another kind of Spaniard. I feel a strong attraction to that Spanish Greek, El Greco, born in Candia.
It was at the metal table tended by this beautiful waiter, wrapped in his pure white apron, that I learned that of all spirituous liquors, tequila is to me the most dangerous and powerful. I saw black visions. The iguanas didn’t help, purposeful and with empty eyes. They look repulsively knowledgeable, hardenedly social.
Quentin had planned in detail a long honeymoon involving deeper penetration of the jungle — to see Mayan ruins — than we eventually made. We spent some time self-catering in Cancún, an outpost of one kind of American civilisation. When I say self-catering, I mean that we got shy of the communal dining room of the resort we found ourselves in. Somehow it was common knowledge that we were newlyweds and the combination of being serenaded and of not giggling at the menu (‘Pork Chops Deutsch’ got us every time) drove us to spend time in our little cabin on the beach. Since he had been to Mexico before, Quentin had developed a taste for Huevos Rancheros; since I was in love, I ate them too. The other thing we lived on was avocados. I never became quite used to the flat-footed arrival into our bedroom of a grumpy seven-foot-long iguana, who seemed to want to play. He did that thing that creatures in thumpingly hot countries do of staying very still indeed and then making a sudden movement that chills the blood. I think he was in love with Quentin too and wanted to drive us apart. He certainly saw it as his business to guard Quentin from any overtures from me. He was very dusty and I wondered whether he was polished at all underneath. His sides ticked. He stood, it seemed to me, for disappointment, aridity and a general sense of having missed the party. There was no reasoning with him.