Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Read online

  In Bath, we drove to a car park: a dreary, randomly aligned expanse of asphalt and concrete. A tall woman with white hair walked to meet us.

  “This is Mollie,” said John Julius.

  “Hello,” I said politely. He didn’t explain who she was, beyond that. It was obvious she wasn’t his wife. She was beautiful and elegant in a rangy, tweed-trousered way.

  There was something furtive, I thought, about meeting in a car park. I wasn’t sure whether I was the one being discreetly kept away, or Mollie was. Perhaps because we were both peripheral, we didn’t have to be hidden from each other. I wondered, suddenly, if I was just an excuse that allowed John Julius to meet up with Mollie. If he’d really wanted to spend the day with me, why was he bringing her into it? I took it as a slight. He must love her very much, I decided, to drive such a long way just to see her for lunch.

  They took me to the Roman baths. I didn’t know the Romans had been in Britain, and John Julius didn’t think to explain it to me. So I didn’t quite understand why the baths were ruined, or why we were looking at them at all. I felt muffled, as if nothing I was seeing was quite in focus, and whatever sounds I heard seemed to come from far away. The information coming into my brain was fuzzy and jumbled. I couldn’t bring it together to mean anything.

  I thought he was relieved when he finally dropped me back at the house on Cheyne Walk. I was a duty he’d performed nobly, and it was a good thing I was a semi-secret. I had been an embarrassment to him just by being born; and I was an embarrassment in myself, now. I felt stupid, nonfunctioning, American. My clothes, which I’d liked till that day, were all wrong. I’d worn my best outfit, which Anjel had bought me during the Ryan time: a gray wool skirt, cream shirt and jacket, and Maud Frizon boots—but they were two-tone cowboy boots in cream and magenta, and the cream part, which was canvas, was stained blue from the day I’d been caught in the rain wearing jeans.

  When I got up to my birdcage room and took off my jacket, I saw that it was smeared with red all down one side. So was my handbag—a canvas Sportsac with short handles that tucked into my armpit. A red pen had leaked, right through the canvas. The jacket was ruined; the ink would never wash out. I cut a strip of cotton—the cream-colored shirt had come with a matching piece of fabric to tie around the neck—and glued it to the handbag over the red stains.

  I could have bought a new bag. Sportsacs weren’t expensive, and Anjel wouldn’t have minded. I didn’t. The bandage kept the red ink off my clothes, and no one would see it if I kept that side next to my body. I was more or less able to hide it when I unshouldered the bag and set it down. I felt defensive about my bandaged bag—which Anjel must have sensed, as she never questioned it. She would look at it doubtfully, and I would pretend not to see and brazen it out. The bandage got messier as the edges, which I never sewed down, pulled away from the glue. Still, I kept it. It was damaged, but that didn’t make it worthless. I had fixed it, and even though I hadn’t done a great job, it was good enough.

  “How can you be spending so much money?”

  Anjel was furious, standing over me where I sat on the purple-carpeted floor eating my dinner and watching Top of the Pops on the tiny TV, with punk bands like X-Ray Spex and British singers like David Essex that nobody in California had ever heard of. It was September. The decision had been made that I would stay with her and Jack in London through the autumn.

  I knew I’d been spending too much, but I couldn’t help it. The tutors who were teaching me my American schoolwork were scattered all over London, and I was taking five or six taxis a day. I was trying to be frugal, not buying things for myself beyond what was necessary, but in less than a week the envelopes of ten twenty-pound notes that Tim, Jack’s cook, gave me were gone.

  “Do you think you’re some kind of princess? You can’t go on a bus or tube like everybody else?”

  Joan had told me what bus to take to her flat, and where to find it, but I’d never been on a tube train. I didn’t know how to read the maps.

  “I always had to go everywhere on public transport,” she said, and stormed out.

  I felt a rush of panic. What if Jack said I couldn’t stay because I was too expensive? I knew he had lots of money, but that didn’t mean he had to spend it on me. And if he did say that, what would that mean for Anjelica’s relationship with him? I didn’t want to be the cause of another breakup between them. She belonged with him, it was obvious, and I was virtually holding my breath that this time it would last. He was being very generous in letting me live with them—with her. And could I be spending so much that it was a lot even for him? The last thing I wanted to do was make him think I was a burden. I was doing my best to be sweet or, best of all, invisible.

  Jack was working long days on The Shining, and at the same time he was editing a movie he’d directed, Goin’ South. He went back and forth over a horse farting: taking out the sound effect and putting it back in, obsessively. Anjel was walking on eggshells around him. I remember only two flashes of the Jack who used to cannonball into the pool with Jen and me, the Jack who joked and played: his delight when he got a special suitcase just for his shoes, and a day when he slid into the chauffeur-driven Daimler, where Anjel and I were waiting for him, with the words, “Here I am, girls—a symphony of autumnal browns.”

  When Jack was given a week off from filming, he decided he wanted to see Ireland. The three of us flew to Dublin, got into another Daimler limousine, and headed west. We stopped for lunch in pubs, we walked on the quay at Dingle and along the cliffs of Moher, but mostly we just drove. And near the end of the week, we reached St. Cleran’s.

  We went up the back drive, where the lampposts still stood, and up to the Big House. The lions that had flanked the door were gone. Firewood was stacked high around the columns. It seemed deserted. We peered through the dining-room window. The Japanese wallpaper was still there, the birds swallowed up by the shadows.

  “Stop!” called Anjel to the driver as we passed the Little House courtyard on the way out. The black iron gates were closed.

  She got out of the car and stood in front of them, gazing into the courtyard. I followed her. Jack stayed in the car.

  Inside, all was the same as I remembered it. The courtyard didn’t look mistreated, as the Big House did. The gray stone was warm, the grass in the center circle had been mowed, the white statue of Punch was still there. But I’d never seen the gates closed before.

  I hadn’t wanted to stop, hadn’t wanted to get out of the car. I did, because I felt I ought to do what Anjel had done. She wasn’t the only one who had lived there. I wanted to lay claim to St. Cleran’s. I was entitled to feel as anguished, as exiled, as she did. Suddenly I felt that even when I had lived in the Little House, I’d been her ghost.

  Anjel put her hands on the iron bars and curled her fingers through them. So I did too. I wished she would just let go. I wanted to get back in the car, wanted to get away from this horrible feeling of being shut out. But I couldn’t, not as long as she stayed standing there, holding on to the gate.

  A figure appeared from a side doorway, wearing a ragged green jumper. His shaggy, steel-gray curls looked familiar. It was Paddy Coyne. He stared—and started running toward us.

  “Anjelica! Oh Jaysus. And Allegra, is it? Ye’re back. Ye’ve come back. How are ye?”

  He was crying. He’d never spoken so many words together in all the time I’d known him. He told us he was the only one there; the people who owned the Little House were away, and nobody lived in the Lynches’ house on the other side of the courtyard. All the while, he was hauling the gate open.

  Anjel was in tears, like Paddy. I should be also, I knew, if I had any heart, but I had felt my tears dry up, like a blast of dry hot air into the space just below my eyes, right at the moment Paddy reached us. When I walked through the gate onto the crunching gravel, I felt a spell break. The past was gone, lost. The unraveling yarn of Paddy’s sweater pinned me to the present like a captured moth. I felt like myself again: n
ot caring much about anything, but so aware of how I was supposed to be that it stung.

  In Dublin, we went to see Nurse in the little terraced house that Dad had bought for her. She was nervous as she welcomed us in—because Anjel and I had come into her world, or because of Jack’s fame, I didn’t know. She sat us in the living room and disappeared to make tea. The sofa and chairs had plastic covers on them, as if they were still in the shop. I felt a disapproving snobbishness rise up, like a succubus taking me over, and I loathed myself for it. This was Nurse, who had looked after me so devotedly, who had gone anywhere I’d been sent without protest: to New York, to Cuernavaca, to Gloom Castle. Her stalwart, unchanging presence had made everything normal for me. How dare I judge her for something so trivial as a lapse of taste in how she kept her house?

  But there it was. I couldn’t unthink the thought. I felt awkward hugging her. I had nothing to say. Anjel was talking, laughing, crying, appreciating the details of Nurse’s new life as she winkled them out of her. I had nothing to give: no interest, no appreciation. I could feel that Nurse was hurt that I was so cold, though of course she did her best to disguise it. Why couldn’t the part of me that was loyal and grateful get back inside that standoffish body and make it do what I wished it would: smile, make a fuss of her, show her that I knew how much I owed her and that I loved her still?

  I remembered how cavalier I’d been when, at Cici’s house, I didn’t even realize she’d been sent away. Since then I’d lived in places that Nurse, I thought, would barely be able to imagine. I wasn’t, anymore, the little motherless girl whom she had looked after and loved. I could look after myself now; I didn’t need anybody. But how could she know that? I was recognizably me: bigger and spottier, but my long blond hair was the same, my blue eyes, my stolid body.

  I felt like a pretense, a walking shell: the shape and shadow of me, the brain of me, but a blank space where the heart should be. I wondered, suddenly, if I’d ever really had one. Who would I cry never to see again? No one. I could outlast any loss now. It scared me—mildly, as much as I could be scared by anything less than a raging beast or a plane crash—that I was so empty.

  I saw Nurse one more time, two months later, when she came to England for Tony’s wedding to Lady Margot Cholmondeley.

  I remembered Margot—Nurse always called her Lady Margot—from the times she’d come to stay at St. Cleran’s. I was rather in awe of her, with her soft voice and her cloud of coppery hair, like a woman in a Vermeer painting. She was beautiful in a way totally unlike any of the women I knew. She didn’t wear makeup or fashionable clothes; she wore flat boots instead of high heels. She seemed not to care what people thought of her, and she was never at a loss for something to do. I envied her ability to interest herself as much as I admired her talent for creating beautiful things. Her pencil drawings were delicate, perfect likenesses; and at St. Cleran’s she had made a group of puppets. I had watched her as she worked on them for days in the Little House: building skeletons of wire, forming the papier-mâché into perfectly pointed noses and curvy mouths, painting them with vivid expressions. When the trunk from Ireland arrived at Gloom Castle, I had hoped to find them as much as I hoped for my treasure chest. But they weren’t there.

  The wedding took place in the chapel at Margot’s family home, Cholmondeley Castle. Anjel and I went, without Jack; Zoë came from Rome, and Danny from his boarding school somewhere in the English countryside; Dad flew in from Mexico, without Maricela. Tony arranged it so that Danny and I stayed at Cholmondeley with Dad, while Anjel and Zoë were billeted at a neighboring house. Dad was given the bedroom the Queen used when she came to stay.

  I played backgammon with Dad on a clattery Turkish board, sat in while he and Buckminster Fuller discussed philosophy, and listened to Margot’s brother, David—who had the absurdly glamorous title of the Earl of Rocksavage—play the piano, very well. My piano lessons had finished when I left Cici’s house, and I knew that I would never, never have been as good as David. This was the standard, I thought, by which John Julius must have judged me: an aristocratic English standard. I had been even more of a disappointment than I thought.

  Nurse stayed on the top floor—the servants’ floor—along with Margot’s old nanny. For the two days that we were both at Cholmondeley, I didn’t go in search of her, didn’t sit and talk with her. It was as if she were someone I’d met once or twice, no more. That selfishness and ingratitude that I’d blamed myself for when she was sent back to Ireland—blamed myself a little unfairly, I had decided—I showed it all, truly, that weekend. I barely gave her a thought. As if I owed her nothing.

  Except for the wedding itself, she stayed upstairs. She never came to find me; I’m sure she felt it wasn’t her place. She was as substantial as a ghost: less, maybe. I couldn’t comprehend, anymore, what she’d once meant to me.

  After the ceremony, we sat for a photograph: Dad and his four children. It was the first time the five of us had ever all been in the same place at the same time. This is my family, I thought: the Hustons. Zoë wasn’t in the photograph, which meant, to me, that John Julius mattered as much as she did, or as little. Despite our odd histories, Danny and I were part of the core. The Irish band De Dannan played, and Tony had chosen songs in honor of each of us: “The Kerry Dance,” for Anjel and me, and “Danny Boy” for Danny. We were brothers and sisters, and Dad was our father. I never felt I was second best to him. I was as much his child as any of us.

  16

  “Allegra doesn’t want to go back to L.A.,” Anjelica said to Helena on the phone—at least, as Helena remembers it. “She won’t come out of the room. Her hairbrush is full of hair. And Jack’s gone crazy. You’ve got to come.”

  My hairbrush probably was full of hair; and my bed wasn’t made; and some days I didn’t even open the curtains. For Anjelica—as it would have been for Mum—it was evidence of an unhealthy mind.

  Going back to L.A. meant going back to Gloom Castle. I had been giving my address as 1315 Angelo Drive when I filled out immigration forms, but it had been a kind of holding zone for those times when Anjel’s life was too unsettled, or she was out of town. Now I realized that that was where I would come to rest.

  I had loved running through the house with Collin, taking the three steps at each end of the minstrels’ gallery in one leap down and then up again, chasing him down the spiral staircase in the back, doing cannonballs off the high retaining wall into the pool. Without him, it was entirely different: a cavernous, echoing house, dark and tired from not having enough people in it. I felt trapped. The road down the mountain was miles long, and steep, and most of the neighbors were over seventy.

  I no longer slept in the room next to Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Myron’s room, the room that had been Cici’s. I had my own room, at the farthest end of the house. I think it used to be Stephan’s. Mostly I sat on my bed watching TV or reading.

  The previous spring, in the interlude between Ryan and Jack, I had decided to get thin, so I’d read books while pedaling furiously on Aunt Dorothy’s abandoned exercise bike in the back attic. I used to play canasta with Uncle Myron, but his Parkinson’s disease was getting so bad that cards were hard for him (though he still drove himself to his rental-car office every day). When Aunt Dorothy had friends from the Beverly Hills Women’s Club over to play bridge I sat at her elbow at a folding table in the cavernous living room, the ceiling twenty feet above, the vast picture window half a basketball court’s length away. The ladies all had perfect lipstick and motionless hair, and they didn’t talk much except to bid and score. Their painted nails clicked on the cards; the ice clicked in their glasses; the glasses clicked on the laminated coasters. Occasionally the silver end of one of Aunt Dorothy’s special bridge pencils clicked against the engraved silver binding of the score pad. “It’s one of the great games,” Dad had once said about bridge. “Every intelligent woman should know it.” I couldn’t imagine myself ever being one of those women.

  I hated my room, with its hairy g
rass wallpaper and furniture inset with mud-green leather. I hated our dinners at six-thirty, with stringy meat and soggy vegetables, and Aunt Dorothy squirming minutely as she tried to get her toe on the buzzer under the carpet to summon the maid to clear the plates, and Uncle Myron turtlelike opposite her, silent except when he suddenly came out with incomprehensible strings of letters, which were the initials of some phrase that I was supposed to be able to figure out.

  I’d become sullen. I was tired of being nice and acting the perfect granddaughter. I almost resented Aunt Dorothy for having opened her house to me; I didn’t like having to feel grateful to be living in someone’s house. I hated the way she was rich but behaved like she was poor: buying cheap cuts of meat, Scotch-taping a rip in a Japanese screen, jamming a fake jewel into her antique Chinese necklace and twisting the filigree around it with a screwdriver. And hating it made me feel mean-spirited and ungrateful.

  One morning, she came into my room. I was still in bed, reading.

  “I had a terrible dream last night, Allegra,” she said. “I dreamed you’d stolen my diamond ring.”

  This was a gigantic marquise-cut diamond set in platinum, which she kept in a hollowed-out shoe tree in her shoe closet.

  “I didn’t,” I said. I couldn’t take this seriously.

  Aunt Dorothy clicked her tongue against the back of her top teeth. It was one of her habits that drove me crazy, just like her way of answering the phone with “Hay-lo-oh”; and saying “ah-hah-uh” deep in her throat as if she were gargling and practicing opera singing at the same time; and never asking a direct question but always saying “I wonder if…”