Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read Free Page B

actress full of stories, about Guyana, where one of her Melvilleancestors had met Evelyn Waugh and shown him around and was probably, she thought, the model for Mr. Todd, the crazy old coot who captured Tony Last in the rain forest and forced him to read Dickens aloud forever in
A Handful of Dust;
and about rescuing her husband, Angus, from the Foreign Legion by standing at the gates of the fort and yelling until they let him out; and about playing Adrian Edmondson’s mum in the hit TV comedy series
The Young Ones
. She did stand-up comedy and had invented a male character who “became so dangerous and frightening that I had to stop playing him,” she said. She wrote down several of her Guyana stories and showed them to him. They were very, very good, and when they were published in her first book,
Shape-Shifter
, were widely praised. She was tough, shrewd and loyal, and he trusted her completely. She came over at once without any discussion even though it was her birthday, and in spite of her reservations about Marianne. He felt relieved to be leaving Marianne behind in the Lonsdale Square basement and driving by himself to Burma Road. The beautiful sunny day, whose astonishing wintry radiance had been like a rebuke to the unbeautiful news, was over. London in February was dark as the children made their way home. When he got to Clarissa and Zafar’s house the police were already there. “There you are,” said a police officer. “We’ve been wondering where you’d gone.”
    “What’s going on, Dad?” His son had a look on his face that should never visit the face of a nine-year-old boy. “I’ve been telling him,” Clarissa brightly said, “that you’ll be properly looked after until this blows over, and it’s going to be just fine.” Then she hugged him as she had not hugged him in five years, since their marriage ended. She was the first woman he had ever loved. He met her on December 26, 1969, five days before the end of the sixties, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty-one. Clarissa Mary Luard. She had long legs and green eyes and that day she wore a hippie sheepskin coat and a headband around her tightly curled russet hair, and there flowed from her a radiance that lightened every heart. She had friends in the world of pop music who called her
Happily
(though, also happily, that name perished with the fey decade that spawned it) and had a mother who drank too much, and a father who came home shell-shocked from the war, in which he had been a Pathfinder pilot, and who leaped off thetop of a building when she was fifteen years old. She had a beagle called Bauble who pissed on her bed.
    There was much about her that was locked away beneath the brightness; she didn’t like people to see the shadows in her and when melancholy struck she would go into her room and shut the door. Maybe she felt her father’s sadness in her then and feared it might propel her off a building as it had him, so she sealed herself off until it passed. She bore the name of Samuel Richardson’s tragic heroine and had been educated, in part, at Harlow Tech. Clarissa from Harlow, strange echo of Clarissa Harlowe, another suicide in her ambit, this one fictional; another echo to be feared and blotted out by the dazzle of her smile. Her mother, Lavinia Luard, also bore an embarrassing nickname,
Lavvy-Loo
, and stirred family tragedy into a glass of gin and dissolved it there so that she could play the merry widow with men who took advantage of her. At first there had been a married ex-Guards officer called Colonel Ken Sweeting, who came down from the Isle of Man to romance her, but he never left his wife, never intended to. Later, when she emigrated to the village of Mijas in Andalusia, there was a string of European wastrels ready to live off her and spend too much of her money. Lavinia had been strongly opposed to her daughter’s determination first to live with and then marry a strange longhaired Indian writer of whose family