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careerist, another star-chaser.
    One answer is simple and perhaps all-sufficient. He was a good catch. He rescued her; she bagged him. In 1935, when the marriage took place, he was forty-five years old, to her twenty-four. He came of what might have been called then “good Berkshire stock”; had “distinguished himself,” with no unfortunate Rattyesque blots, in the Dardanelles and Palestine; had served in India, where—this was about all I learnt from his own lips—he “shot tigers,” and where he was married, briefly, the first time around: one of those pathetic, semi-arranged marriages involving a shipped-out bride and ending in tropical fever. My mother told me her name was Vanessa. I see a creature compounded of white tulle and pale, sacrificial skin.…
    When he returned to England in ’33, he was a seasoned officer in his middle years, conditioned by matrimonial disappointment to a life of service and duty, young enoughstill to nurse ambitions, possessed of a patrimony he had not yet had the chance to squander—and a perfect target for my mother’s charm. I don’t blame her for fortune-hunting. Now that her father, the hapless surgeon, was dead, how long was she to go on waiting for Uncle Rupert either to die too or to make some provision for her and her younger brother? Yet Ratty, with all his dread of the Great Leveller, lived on, steadily growing more crankish and steadily exhausting what was left of the Rawlinson riches.
    It was just possible that the motive of which I know so much—revenge—entered my mother’s calculations. An army officer. With a clean and honourable record. And enjoying, at that time, just that rank of major to which Ratty had
fallen
. The mockery of it. The gall of it. Uncle Rupert could not prevent the marriage, but if he ever swore it should take place only over his dead body, he almost proved himself correct, for within a year of the wedding he at last gave up the ghost. Whether he had achieved by then, to his own satisfaction, the ultimate and redeeming goal of his life—certain proof of his kinship with Sir Walter Ralegh—no one can say.
    My mother being excluded, or in any case now provided for by marriage, Uncle Ratty’s dwindled estate passed to her brother. Who did not have long to enjoy it. For, in reaction, perhaps, to the family tinge of khaki, he joined the Navy in 1939 and was killed in the earliest months of the war, not in action but in some miserable and obscure collision at sea—another instance, I suppose, of Rawlinson ignominy.
    I was three years old at the time, so my Uncle Jim, perhaps in his naval togs, must once have dandled me in his arms, but I don’t remember him. Nor do I recall my mother’s being plunged into sisterly mourning. But aframed photograph of Jim was one of the few personal remnants of her past which she allowed herself to keep. It disappeared when she married Sam. I could see why Sam would never have liked it. It was only after her death—the photo is mine now—that I discovered that she hadn’t disposed of it but had simply hidden it from view.
    He looks appallingly young and appallingly ignorant. Life has a thousand avenues, but he is fixed for ever—a perpetually grinning midshipman. He has my mother’s sparkle, none of her cunning. And, of course—this was Sam’s difficulty—I cannot look at that photo without seeing also the photo of Sam’s brother, which Sam first showed me, slipping it confidentially out of his wallet and giving me the facts, in those very early days in Paris. A shrewd but ill-fated piece of emotional trading. Sam’s brother (tropical whites; a lady-killer’s smile), Sam’s younger brother, Ed, who for these last forty years and more, just as Uncle Jim has been lying somewhere under the North Sea, has been lying under the South Pacific.
    And what did my father—elevated now into some safer, more Olympian zone of warfare, touring the military purlieus of Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey and