LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS.7

After breakfast Lillian took the vaporetto all the way to Lido, thinking that a quiet day in the shade beside a beach would give her time to reflect on what she’d learned on Thursday, which simmered at the back of her mind like a pot on the stove. But Lido was not a quiet place in which to lift the lid and inspect the ‘stew’ that was her son’s duplicitous life. The avenue to the beach was jammed with buses and taxis, cars and motor-scooters and dawdling people with shopping baskets and picnic hampers and loud unruly children. Halfway to the beach her patience gave out; she turned and jostled her way back to the vaporetto. Venice didn’t seem to have any quiet corners. It might be better to go back to the hotel.

Then, as the boat approached the first of its stops on the return journey, she saw that it was about to dock beside a park at the far end of the promenade that led eventually to the Doge’s Palace and Piazza San Marco. Quickly disembarking she explored the park, which was far from tranquil but not as busy as Lido. After five minutes she found an isolated metal chair beneath a straggly pine. Had Andrew walked in this park, sat beneath this tree?

But it was not on the last three-and-a-half years of Andrew’s life that her mind immediately focussed, but on the years preceding them, the years when she had imagined that his life still belonged, at least partly, to her.

Day or weekend trips to see Andrew had been the high spots of Lillian’s life after he moved to London in 1959. Sylvia’s wedding and the birth of the twins were highlights that Lillian was able to share with George, who doted on his daughter, but a similar bond tied Lillian irrevocably to her son. On her own with Andrew she was able to ‘let her hair down’ in ways which her mother would have considered indecent and George a waste of money. Mornings spent shopping in Harrods and Liberty’s. Lunches in fashionable restaurants in Knightsbridge and Mayfair. Afternoons visiting art galleries where Andrew knew the exhibitors or inspecting displays he had designed. Dinners in cosy haunts of his in Soho or Chelsea. A slightly risqué comedy or revue. Some trashy film she wouldn’t dare suggest to George. A new soprano at Covent Garden; Eartha Kitt at the Talk of the Town; Marlene Dietrich in Golder’s Green. Sunday boat-trips on the Thames or a ride to a country inn in a chauffeur-driven hired car.

Being with Andrew was, to Lillian, the height of what in her own youth would have been called ‘fast living’.

And now, sitting under a salt-ravaged tree in the city he’d adopted, she forced herself to confront what Carlo had told her last night: this other life of her son’s which he had so carefully kept from her. Lillian’s strait-laced upbringing had not prepared her for such a confrontation. There were aspects to this which she could not, never would be able to, even contemplate - but then she’d never liked the series of what she presumed to be his girlfriends or mistresses. Perhaps no mother could ever come to terms with the notion that her precious son was a roué, still less that he was a pervert.

Exactly what role had these girls played in his life, she wondered: Fiona, Jocelyn, Sandra and Thelma, all of whom she’d been introduced to in theatre bars and restaurants. Had they connived with him to provide a smokescreen, or had he deceived them as he had deceived her?

When had it started? And with whom? At University, when he first broke free of the narrow confines of family life and provincial Sussex? During his National Service, where middle-class grammar-school boys were thrown into God knows what sort of low company?

It was hard to see Hastings as a breeding ground for homosexuals, but then she was clearly not skilled in recognizing them. The only one she could recall meeting was Andrew’s partner in the Mayfair agency, Algie, whose voice and mannerisms were obviously effeminate, although they’d never discussed it, it hadn’t seemed to matter – until now. Surely Algie, who was close to 60 and closer to being an alcoholic, wasn’t Andrew’s ‘partner’ in any other, more disgusting, sense?

Apart from Algie the only male friend of his she’d met between the schoolboy son of the family doctor when Andrew was in his teens and ‘Sharlz’/Carlo in 1962 was Laurence Dickinson, who’d provided Andrew with a home in Bexhill in the summer of 1956 when George made it impossible for him to live with them after he started work at Plummer Roddis. Laurence was a client of George’s, divorced from his much remarried wife and with a teenage daughter who later came to live with him and was now herself divorced. Surely Laurence could not have been Andrew’s whatever-the-word-was? Because if Laurence was, then what about Carlo or even Doctor Yates’s son, both of them married men and fathers?

Wondering what more might lie beneath this stone that Carlo had forced her to turn over, Lillian sighed. Opening her handbag, she took out the letter and cards which on an impulse she’d removed from her dressing-table drawer just as the Sadlers tooted their presence outside the house on Monday. Two postcards, one greetings card and a letter that together comprised all she had known – until last night - of her son’s life since November 1962; three years and eight months during which her daughter and grandchildren had moved to the edge of China and her husband had sickened and died. She knew their contents by heart, but now she would be able to place them in some sort of context to what Carlo had told her of Andrew’s life in Italy.

* * *

APRIL 1963

From Venice, a postcard: the head of a girlish-looking boy described as a ‘Detail from Titian’s Virgin of the Pesaro Family’ in the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

"This young man is an ‘island' of Pre-Raphaelite
purity in this city which is one enormous over-
stuffed monument to the Renaissance. Like him,
I seem to be out of time and out of place. But,
Venice is all things to all men. Here at least no
one can be a fish out of water!

Love,
A."

This must have been while they were still settling into Venice. Carlo would have been working in the bar of the Europa Hotel and Andrew was doing up their attic flat in a palace on the Cannelloni canal or whatever its name was.

* * *

‘What’s a “Pre-Raphaelite” when it’s at home?’ George had demanded, stumbling over the unfamiliar word but much more articulate than when Andrew had left in November.

‘They’re one of those groups of painters,’ Lillian told him. ‘You know, like the Impressionists.’ Luckily George didn’t ask her to name anyone from this School.

‘Artsy-fartsy nonsense,’ he jeered.

She’d been worrying herself sick for five months - for this? A cocktail-party observation about Venice and art, and - nothing else. No return address: nothing. He didn’t want them to be able to contact him. She would not know if he was ill or well, happy or miserable - would she even know if he was alive or dead?

George, stronger now in health and spirits, re-adopted a dismissive attitude towards the son who’d spurned his birthright, but Lillian remained in a morbid mood for weeks. She had experienced a period of the same black depression when she miscarried her first child as a result of a fall in the garden in the final month of her pregnancy: a boy it would have been, two years older than Andrew, perhaps the son George might have taken into the business.

* * *

JANUARY 1964

From Cortina, a greetings card reproducing a 19th-century lithograph of an alpine village; inside, ‘Happy New Year’ was printed in Italian, French, English and German. All but the English greeting had been lightly scored through with a fine red pen such as Lillian had seen him use on posters. Also in red he’d written:

"As ever,
Andrew"

This would have been when he was decorating the ski lodge for a film producer from Rome. Carlo was now helping him. They’d opened their office at 253 San Marco. And Andrew was busy social-climbing among contessas and dukes and princes and Peggy Guggenheim (who liked to solicit gondoliers from the terrace of her garden!).

* * *

‘Is this all we get?’ George had asked.

‘Apparently,’ she said.

‘Well, there’s your precious son for you,’ he scoffed.

‘Same old Andrew,’ Lillian said bitterly; ‘“As ever”.’ Her despair redoubled.

* * *

JULY 1965

Another postcard, from the island of Elba, a view of Napoleon’s villa and the Museum at San Martino.

"My 27th birthday, but at least I’m here from choice!
Like Napoleon’s, my exile is a mixture of reflecting on past glories and expectations of a glorious future which Time will no doubt frustrate!
Thinking of you both,
With love,
A."

It was the third year in which she had no address to send him a birthday card. He had not remembered any of her birthdays – or his father’s.
Eighteen months had gone by. They had modernized Carlo’s house in Burano and given up the attic in Venice. Andrew had been to that countess’s celebrity ball. There had been scandal at Lido, deportations and hasty departures, a suicide in Paris.

What was he doing in Elba? Carlo hadn’t mentioned any work in Elba.

Unlike the others, this card was addressed to George as well as to Lillian, and this at least had pleased her. She told him about it but was unable to gauge his reaction, for its arrival followed what proved to be his final stroke from which, in the two months that he outlived it, he never recovered the power of speech, no matter how frenziedly he tried, eyes blazing with frustration.

Lillian visited the hospital every afternoon, sitting by his bed, holding his hand and telling him the news of her day, the garden, their friends and neighbours, who had won this or that tournament at bridge or golf. His useless limbs twitched spasmodically as he applied the force of his will to them like a charge of electricity. Loathing the sickness which he had fought so manfully for so long, Lillian loved him more fiercely than at any time since their courtship.

At the end, the nurses told her, he died quietly, in his sleep. His heart gave out; perhaps, like hers only more so, it was simply broken. This was in the first week of September, five months after their thirtieth wedding anniversary and a few days before Lillian’s fiftieth birthday. George was sixty-one. Lillian dined with the Sadlers at Rye’s Mermaid Inn on her birthday; two days later she buried George.

* * *

7 NOVEMBER 1965

"Milan

Dearest Mother,

I’ve only just learned, from my bank, that you have lost Dad. It’s a penalty of cutting oneself off like this that you don’t hear about these things until it’s too late to do anything to help. Sylvia’s always strong on “rallying round” in a crisis; I hope she’s been a comfort to you over these past weeks. I wish I liked her more.

And I wish, too late, that Dad and I had made more allowances for each other. I remember holidays we had when Sylvia and I were kids – Cornwall, the Lakes, the Norfolk Broads, Scotland. I’m trying to concentrate on those times and forget what came after. I hope you are not missing Dad unduly and that your memories are only of the good things.

I seem to be getting restless again. Really it’s unreasonable, for my life here is full of variety and a fair amount of “glamour”, if you can call it that.

I may come home for Christmas. No promises, of course. I would come now, but I still have irons in the fire. There’s more magic here than anywhere else I know. If only I could find some way of binding myself to it.

(Sorry, that sounds very mystical and precious. I don’t change, do I!)

Love, always,
Andrew"

* * *

Milan. He and Carlo had now met Adriana who would shortly become pregnant. It occurred to Lillian that the reason Adriana had seemed vague about dates might be because she had married Carlo after he made her pregnant.

Presumably Andrew had by now gone to live at the other end of the lagoon so that Adriana and Carlo could have the Burano house to themselves. But why so far from his office in Venice? Or was this connected to the ‘purge’ of the city’s homosexuals? Had those that remained all retreated to towns and villages on the furthest edges of the lagoon?

This piecing together of his ‘restless’ history was even more difficult than she’d expected.

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