Stirring the pot again
Simon Blow
STRANGERS by Emma Tennant Cape, £12.99, pp. 183 Why do families quarrel? Why is there invariably so little of that disinterest- ed love which we are brought up to believe a family should possess? Some of these answers can be found in my cousin Emma Tennant's book, Strangers. She subtitles it `A Family Romance' but it is romance of a very twisted sort.
However, the ground she treads is mostly known to me, since I wrote the story of my mother's family, the Tennants, ten years ago. At the time my book received the cold shoulder from the family. 'How could you write of your grandmother in that way?' one society-frenzied cousin, Laura Marl- borough, said to me. Even my mother's first cousin, the author of this present account, announced to the family that my book must be denounced. I became the victim of furious telephone calls. 'I don't know about books, but Emma does,' a relation yelled at me.
At issue was my suggestion that my great-grandmother, Pamela Wyndham, a beauty painted by Sargent, had had lovers while married to my great-grandfather, Eddy, the first Baron Glenconner. This brought the legitimacy of some of the children into question. I am delighted that Emma does not shy away from Pamela's dalliances, which makes me all the more surprised that exception should have been taken to my own assessment. I can only put it down to that lurking monster, family rivalry. On the subject of my grandmother, Clare Tennant, the only daughter of beau- tiful Pamela, cousin Emma is perfectly frank, portraying a spoilt tigress with an unusually advanced sexual ego.
The mercantile Glasgow past, where the Tennants made their money, is but briefly touched on. My cousin is more interested in the psychological effect of Pamela's van- ity and blue blood on her Eddy-born chil- dren, whom she cosseted as her 'jewels'. And rightly so: as my book Broken Blood pointed out, this was the family's turning- point. Glasgow was banished by Pamela when she brought her ancient Wyndham and royal Orleans blood to the plain-speak- ing Tennants. Thus, her daughter, my grandmother Clare, was a far more familiar sight on the byways of Mayfair than on her own Clare Street — a street which I was amused to find on a turn-of-the-century map showing the roads neighbouring the vast Tennant chemical works at St Rollox.
Of Pamela's children, Emma's father, Christopher Glenconner, was the 'normal' one. The book has a true-to-life portrait of his solidity and detachment. I remember from my childhood his strolling round Glen, the Tennant mock-baronial seat in the Borders, built by the Bart to house his family and his treasures. I learnt to fish in the loch where Emma recalls Uncle Stephen pining for truite au bleu. Clare, David and Stephen — Christopher's siblings and Pamela's surviving 'jewels' came badly unstuck due to Pamela's stranglehold that, under the guise of all- giving love, was threatening and destruc- tive. And yet, unaware, she saw her closeness as a challenge to the fashion for parental distance.
Because of Christopher, Emma had a secure childhood; because of Clare, my mother and I did not. But, like Emma, I was curious and wanted to know everything about Clare, who had dismissed my moth- er, her first child. I wanted to know if I could forgive my grandmother. She was 18 when she married, the first world war was on and my grandfather was in the trenches, and she took a lover which led to a scan- dalous divorce. Clare's aunt, Margot, had her husband Asquith intercede. The lover, the Hon Lionel Tennyson, replied in writ- ing, 'You are an interfering old buger [sic].' On her divorce, Clare lost access to her two-year-old daughter, but she made no effort to have the decision reversed. And whenever I asked about my grandmother I would be frustrated by the reserve I too often encountered. 'You mean my sister Clare,' Uncle Christopher would reply when I pressed him.
It struck me as unfair that in the family Uncle Stephen was treated as the dotty one — the round of jokes about his make-up and scents. For me, his eccentricity was touching, not mad. It was my grandmother who bordered on the dangerously mad. To cut off a daughter for no greater reason than that the marriage had been a failure is to create untold damage ahead. My mother suffered to the end of her short life from Clare's silence. Other wounds were to come to Clare's daughter, most as a result of this initial hurt, but when a friend of my mother's said to me after her death, 'Diana died of despair,' I knew what he meant.
It is essential that the difficulties of upper-class childhoods are brought out. I was born into what is on paper a comfort- able background, but in reality was a loony- bin of unbalanced emotions. Fortunately my cousin Emma was more protected. She not only had a balanced father but a thor- oughly dependable mother. Her parents could keep the threat of the flawed rela- tions at a distance, whereas Clare's instabil- ity, coupled with my father's chronic drinking, were far too close. My mother wept about her lost mother. We went to Glen in the regime of Emma's father to get a glimpse of what a childhood could be. My memories of Glen are of good food and a very stable family, where days were spent rough shooting, fishing on the loch, and in the evenings playing Racing Demon.
Unlike Emma, I struck a chord with Uncle Stephen. This was rare in the family. I saw, through Stephen, what had gone wrong, but more importantly he closed up the gap made by Clare. An analyst might say that Stephen was the grandmother I never had, and it would be true. I could stay at Wilsford whenever I wanted, and I never encroached on his reclusiveness: 'I love to hear your footfalls in the house, Simon, like a leopard roaming.' Yes, Emma is right; love was a word he used a lot. He used it because although he had known love, he had no idea how to handle it. His mother, Pamela, he told me, had given no advice in that area. The first time an outsider kissed him he burst into floods of tears.
To me Stephen was no recluse, and I must have spent hundreds of hours sitting by his bed or in the garden with him. Once he was off there was no stopping him talk- ing. Sometimes it was I who craved to escape back to my bedroom, but I felt he'd been so hurt that I could not add to it. I knew that Clare had been hurt too, but her heart had frozen. Stephen's heart was not dead, but his development was incomplete, and he knew that. It's all good material for the modern therapist, but these Tennant spirits are not so easily quietened. Are Pamela's famous seances still happening and we do not know it? These spirits don't want to leave us alone. Emma claims that her late nephew, Colin's son Charlie, was possessed by demons. Some years ago Clare, long dead, came to me in her much publicised beauty and kissed the on the lips. Was it guilt or atonement? I don't know. With the pot stirred again, I'm already beginning to shudder that any night now she will return.
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