One of the treats available to a Fergusson-fancier, when the two brothers were still alive, was to get them together and overhear their conversation. It was like waiting for the Mona Lisa to wink.
Annabel’s mother is something quite else. Spirited, croyante, a Catholic convert, she is one of those people very much one’s senior who combine wisdom with knowing exactly what’s hot at Top Shop. I loved her from our first meeting, which was long before anyone in our generation had married anyone.
Annabel herself I first met at a party where what was striking was the blueness of her eyes, the grooviness of her physique and the old-fashionedness of her garb. I think maybe at her christening there was a fairy who arranged for Annabel to dress in an especially old-fashioned way, otherwise her effect as she walked down the street would, like that of Zuleika Dobson, have left men even more stupefied than they already were. The other thing I knew about Annabel was that she was clever in the practical, realistic way that I am not. People would say of her, ‘She looks like a Botticelli angel but do you know she can do the Times crossword?’
No one could possibly accuse me of either of these attributes and I was happy that Quentin himself might be growing happier. I also knew, most importantly of all, that Annabel was kind and good. Later it was my pleasure to find that she is really, properly, funny. It’s like medicine.
For reasons to do with the house at Wotton’s beauty and Mrs Brunner’s scarcely perceived but very present hand on the tiller of the life that my children and I led, we never felt transient or uncared-for. She combined bossiness with affection and the sort of over-partiality you do, on the whole, only offer to your kin, so that we did feel we were living with, if not a fairy godmother, a fairy grandmother.
I hate competitive games, maybe for the base reason that I’m no good at them. At New Year, Mrs Brunner, who had an entire room called the Oak Room dedicated to stage costumes, held a charades party. How I dreaded it. I can’t act to order and I can’t act if I know I’m acting, but I loved her and would have to attend. I couldn’t pretend I had to stay with the children because they were with Quentin, and Fram was with his parents because New Year’s Day was his father’s birthday. (Parsis have two birthdays, one dependent on their mama and one dependent on the moon.) Mrs Brunner had arrayed herself that night as a mixture of Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, the Empress of Bohemia and all nine muses. Her golden hair was up, her face painted. It was possible to see the captivating young woman she had been. But in this incarnation she was authoritative.
The script was complicated, a good dinner had been had, much Champagne drunk, a charming set-designer named Carl Toms, who had worked with Visconti at Covent Garden, was on hand, while to direct us there was none other than Nicholas Hytner. I’m glad to say that he recognised my acting potential at once and that I played my part as a poisonous mushroom with the sort of grace and sporingness you might expect. New Year was also the birthday of Annabel and I believe that it was then that Quentin proposed marriage to her. I hope that I am right. Perhaps I am giving them a few more years of marriage than they have had, in which case, lucky them.
In the case of Fram and myself, things could not but have been more complicated. When I consider myself from my mother-in-law’s point of view, I can see that what her beautiful only son was bringing home was a gigantic, Angrez, previously married, too old, and completely untrained animal. My mother-in-law could not help feeling these things. In complex ways, the West that she had been raised to admire, whose literature had arrived by steamer-trunk throughout her children’s childhood, had become grotesque, appetitive, grasping, vulgar. The particularly bad part of it all was that I entirely saw her point of view and agreed with her, so replete was I with self-disgust, self-distaste and the willingness to believe that I smelt and took filth with me wherever I went. It was an unhappy concatenation.
My father-in-law Eddie, who I always thought liked me a bit more than did his wife, actually liked me a good deal less.
Nonetheless, all these feelings were, for some years, hidden by my parents-in-law. It might have been better to have released them by some means other than the slashes of the razor that my mother-in-law chose as her means of attack. It was mainly her son she punished. Yet they themselves had been to school in England, had sent him to prep and public school in England, so to punish him for being what she called a ‘brown Englishman’ was cruel. She never stopped loving her son, so the hurt she felt compelled by her anxieties to cause him harmed her much more.
My mother-in-law was a woman who could make a room a paradise or a slicing unit on account of her mood. Her family were used to it. My sister-in-law Avi, who stands at under five foot and has known severe long-term medical pain in her life, simply and beautifully neutralised all malice ever afloat in the room by her own blessedly even nature. She has a keel. I don’t know if it’s a faith or her natural acceptingness, or both.
I fear that I was all too keen to condemn myself. At the very beginning, when Fram first courted me, I think my mother-in-law and I wanted to love one another; I certainly wanted to love her. I think she genuinely tried to love me, but my own sense of my unloveability rushed to greet her instinctive condemnation and they wrought, over the years, a terrible mischief together. In order to be married in Italy, we had to fulfil residency requirements and stay in the house in Cortona for something like two months. Quentin was happy that we were being married out of England — it seemed more natural that way.
We did have one happy day, the day of our Parsi betrothal in Cortona. My mother-in-law had threaded jasmine and marigold ropes and set in shaken chalk auspicious designs all around the perimeter of the house. Fram’s aunt and uncle came from Rome, a coconut was broken and rice placed on our foreheads and sugar on our tongues to make sure that we would only speak sweet words to one another.
The wedding itself took place under the aegis of the Communist Party of Italy. The Mayor of Cortona made us freemen of that beautiful town. We were garlanded with long strings of carnations that my mother-in-law had sewn. We were young, thin, blazingly in love and tremendously close at every possible level. There was a feast at Vasari’s house outside Arezzo, with Italian and Indian food alternating. Fram’s kind and smiling Aunt Khorshed had provided Niazi, her old cook from the Pakistani Embassy in Rome. Yet in the photographs my mother-in-law is holding her sari over her face so that she cannot see what is being enacted before her. If only I could have taken that pain from her and told her that I would look after and love her son for ever, that I could love her, that I was I, not a foreign culture. But it didn’t happen.
Months later, after our honeymoon, the photographs of our wedding came back and Fram noted on a visit home the distaste with which they were regarded. The poison had started to run and could only get worse, most especially when I began to make some small name for myself in that thing, the world.