Thereupon occurred a scene so wild that my father never forgot it. He told me the story at least twice. He was still upset about it forty years later. The scene ended, in one version, ‘and she fainted dead away’ – which seemed to me a lame end to a story he’d told with such obvious distress. But the other version ended, ‘and she tried to throw herself out of the train’.
My father was terrified by this incident. It revealed to him an unpredictable area of her soul, and he had no idea how deep it reached. His mother had died when he was a boy and he always felt guilty about it, and as a result there was something about unhappiness in a woman that sent him into such a panic he was unable to think clearly. Or so I believe.
But, if it comes to that, my mother’s emotions in this incident are also hard to understand. She may have been furious because he’d disobeyed her. Control was important to her. Or perhaps the incident derived from her chronic anxiety about money. But it came so soon after having fainted in Paris at the thought that Stephen still had lovers, I think some obscure form of self-punishment must have come into it.
Back in London, without telling his wife, Stephen discussed the problem with Anna Freud. Although my mother had taken lessons on childcare at Anna Freud’s school until she’d become pregnant with me, she had not been analysed by her. Anna Freud gave my father her private impression. Natasha would probably benefit from analysis, but she was held together by such an immense effort of will, it might be dangerous to probe too deeply. There was a risk of damaging whatever made her function without discovering anything that could take its place.
It’s unusual for psychiatrists to give off-the-cuff diagnoses of this kind – and here we are talking about the daughter of Sigmund Freud! Her message may have been: Natasha’s predicament is certainly grave, but the best person to deal with it is you, Stephen. But my father interpreted it differently. He decided that his wife was held together in such a state of tension that an attempt to deal with any part of it would make the whole pack of cards collapse.
My parents, taken by a street photographer in Verona close to the time when my mother threatened to throw herself out of a train.
Whenever my father talked to me about my mother’s character, it was entirely about her predicament as seen in this light. He never thought about how she saw him, nor did he consider that her moments of wildness might be a reaction to something he’d done. He had difficulty in understanding her feelings. They were hers, and she was responsible for them. This was true not just of his relationship with his wife, it has to be said. His entire effort was dedicated to understanding his own emotions, and those of other people were always mysterious to him.
As soon as I was old enough to form opinions on their relationship, he’d try to convince me that sometimes Mum had fallen victim to her emotions, and he and I should form an alliance to provide her with support. I resisted this desire to join a conspiracy. I thought we were missing two things: my mother’s point of view, and an explanation why her outbursts made him panic.
My mother’s feelings were revealed only after her death, hidden away in a diary written during a particularly stressful moment in her life, when my father fell in love with a young American ornithologist called Bryan Obst. Bitterly, she wondered why she’d accepted this predicament all her married life. Her harshest entries were written late at night, but in the morning she found her angry emotions had vanished. Her waking self was devoted to the image that their marriage was strong. Natasha at three in the morning was an entirely different person from Natasha at breakfast. She asked herself: Are the late-night entries the faithful ones, or those I write during the day?
I never questioned her daylight self, as it were, nor would she have accepted any form of criticism from me. Keeping up appearances in front of her children was a vital part of her sense of duty. She could complain to others now and again, especially to other women, but never to me. And, because appearances and therefore courage were involved, I knew that if I’d ever tried to find out what she really felt about my father’s continued relationships with men, it would have been a far more destructive act coming from me than if she’d been challenged by a stranger.
For more about this tense period of their lives, we have to fall back on a short story my father started at that time.
In ‘The Fool and the Princess’, a man who wants to become a writer comes back from a tour of duty in Germany where he’s fallen in love with a Displaced Person. There’s no love affair, and he returns home to his wife. She of course guesses that something has happened. She’s frightened. ‘I suppose you’ve never been really happy with me,’ she says miserably. I hear my mother’s voice very clearly in this phrase. Such was her investment in her marriage, and such was her deep-seated lack of confidence, that she was prepared to blame herself for the fact that he’d fallen for somebody else.
He protests that he loves her. She suffers. They try to return to normality, but it’s hard. ‘The very existence of the deeper level where everything was forgiven, mind and body fused, made them more impatient on the level where everything was wearisome, mechanical and unforgivable. Yet they could not live always on the deeper level, of dreams, tears, acceptance and finality.’ I read this as meaning: since deep down we are in agreement with each other, why can’t we avoid these time-consuming confrontations? ‘We’ being Stephen and Natasha, not the characters in the story.
The narrator knows he’s in the wrong, but he feels that his unconsummated relationship with the offstage ‘Princess’ has been good for him. ‘He made an effort to shake off once more this self-satisfaction which parodied a change which he felt really an improvement in himself, parodied even his love.’ He is guiltily aware that he can only understand how this situation is affecting him, and that although he loves his wife, her emotions are to him incomprehensible.
Left alone in the empty bedroom after one of these fights, he groans. ‘Yet although it seemed to him that he was suffering, his suffering lacked purity. It proved to him that he was sensitive. All the purity was hers, hers moving downstairs, hers moving out into the darkness, hers if perhaps, she drowned herself in some river.’
The idea that the heroine of the story might throw herself into the Thames is, to me, a memory of the occasion when my mother had tried to throw herself out of the train.
Over the early summer of 1947, Stephen met the head of Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York, who invited him to come and teach there for a semester. Thus he made his first visit to the United States.
My mother was preparing for a Promenade Concert at the Albert Hall, so Stephen travelled first. The day before he left, there was a major row. My father was still anxious about it next morning. From his cabin on the Queen Mary, he wrote his wife a long, self-reproving letter.
‘What makes separation so bad is anxiety, regrets, feeling that one has not made enough of the time together, fears about what the other is up to, and so on. So let’s both make up our minds that we are completely and utterly together, and then these few weeks can be spent in thinking about each other and feeling each other’s presence.’ This was one of my father’s strangest fixations: that love thrived on absence, during which it could reach a more immediate level by the power of thought; and this imagined reality was more powerful than the physical reality of an actual person’s presence. ‘My anxiety about you is that you don’t feel sure of me. But now there is no reason whatever for you not to be sure of me. You have your prom and your BBC concerts, I have my work, but you will soon be with me.’ What does the word ‘now’ in this passage signify? That the row involved his recent Parisian lover, and that Stephen had promised ‘now’ to put this part of his life behind him?
‘The root trouble with me is that I am self-willed, I am a rebel,