SOMETIME THAT AUTUMN, my mother announced that she and I were going to a party at a friend’s house in a town nearby. On the way there, in the car, she said, “Julie, I want you to do me a favor. If I ask you to sing, will you do it?” I remember being miffed, because my singing was always something my mother used, in a way. I reluctantly agreed.
The party was at a pleasant house, set on a hill in an upper-middle-class residential area. I sang one song, with Mum at the piano, and was relieved when it was over. Afterward, the owner of the house approached me. He was tall and fleshily handsome. I recognized him as a man who had come round to visit at The Meuse once or twice, in earlier years.
This evening he came and sat on the couch beside me and seemed genuinely interested, asking questions almost piercingly. In retrospect, I remember feeling an electricity between us that I couldn’t explain.
As the party continued, my mother proceeded to get extremely drunk. When it came time to leave, she was clearly unable to drive. Though I was not yet licensed to operate a vehicle, I had been practicing with my dad in preparation for the test I would be eligible for the following year. After some confusion, my mother said, “You drive. I’ll show you the way.”
It was dark and foggy. We said good-bye to our hosts and I drove off, carefully concentrating with every fiber of my being on the road in front of me. I prayed that we wouldn’t be stopped by the police.
“Did you like that family?” Mum asked after a while.
“Yes,” I replied. “They seemed very nice.”
“Did you wonder why I wanted you to sing?”
“No, it didn’t cross my mind.”
There was a pause. Then she said, “What did you think of the husband?”
“He…seemed pleasant,” I answered, trying not to lose focus on the task at hand.
“Did you wonder why I took you there tonight?”
Suddenly I had the impression that something akin to a freight train was about to come at me. I had no idea what it was, but I had the distinct feeling that it was going to be unpleasant.
“Would you like me to tell you?” Mum’s eyes were a little moist.
“It doesn’t really matter, Mum, it’s fine.”
“Well, I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Because that man is your father.”
My brain slammed into defense mode. My very first thought was of the man I had supposed was my father all these years. Words rushed to my mind’s eye: “IT DOESN’T MATTER. IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE.” Whether the man this evening was my actual father did not alter the fact that the man who had raised me was the man I loved. I would always consider him my father.
I tried to react carefully. Keeping my eyes on the road, I said something banal like “Oh, that’s interesting. How do you know?”
“I know,” she replied. “Can you imagine how long I’ve been waiting to tell you? Fourteen years…”
She explained that she had a one-time liaison with the man by a beautiful lake not far from Walton. She went on to say that it had been very hard to keep this secret for so long, and that she had no wish to hurt me, but the affair had been the result of an overwhelming attraction that she couldn’t deny.
It seemed to matter very much that I stayed quiet and calm, because she had become tearful, overwhelmed perhaps at getting this out of her system.
As I pulled the car to a halt on the gravel in front of The Meuse, there was an empty silence between us. She seemed embarrassed now that she had told me, and went quickly up to her room, leaving me to think about it as I prepared for bed.
For the next couple of days, she kept her distance from me. She didn’t say anything about the incident, and neither did I. I think I was afraid to. Eventually, however, I simply had to gain some clarity or go crazy.
“Mum?” I stood tentatively beside her at the kitchen stove. “You mentioned something in the car the other evening about that man at the party…Is it true what you said?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“How do you know,” I pressed, “since you were married to Dad at the time?” The question had been burning in my brain.
“Because Daddy and I weren’t being romantic in those days,” she said, after a moment.
I didn’t know what to ask next. It may sound odd, but it was almost as if I had asked one question and that was enough—I didn’t know where to go from there. I didn’t think to ask her, “Does Daddy know?”
Finally I said, “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Very sure.”
And we left it at that.
SOMEHOW, I WAS able to push it away to a dark corner of my mind. Since I didn’t know whether or not Dad knew, I assumed she must have slept with him afterward in order to say “I’m pregnant.” I went into denial. I told myself that my mother had been drunk when she chose to tell the story. Maybe it wasn’t even true.
Nearly forty years later, some time after my mother’s death in the 1980s when I was making the film Victor/Victoria, I was chatting with Aunt Joan about the past, and suddenly the opportunity to broach the subject presented itself.
I asked if she remembered the certain gentleman who had come to visit once or twice in my youth.
“Why do you ask?” my aunt said, very sharply.
“Well…because Mum hinted a couple of times that perhaps he was my father.”
There was a long silence. Aunt seemed to be weighing something in her mind. Then she murmured, “Yes. He was.”
“But Auntie, how do you know?” I asked.
“Because I was around at the time,” she replied, “and Mum spoke to me about it.”
“What about Daddy?” I asked. “Did he know?”
“Yes. He did,” she said.
And that simply knocked me sideways.
ACCORDING TO AUNTIE, my father was so in love with my mother, he decided it shouldn’t make any difference. Two years later, Johnny was born—his legitimate son. Several years after that, my mother had the affair with Pop and became pregnant with Donald. The fact that Dad had offered to take me, and later Donald, under his wing to keep the marriage intact is extraordinary. If he knew about my heritage, he certainly never treated me any differently. I believe he loved me dearly. And because I did not know then that he knew, I didn’t have the heart to ask him about it before he died. I thought I was protecting him from some deep hurt.
I also never asked Win, my stepmother. And I never mentioned it to any of my siblings. Until the day I spoke with Auntie, I just wasn’t sure of my facts, so I thought I shouldn’t rock the boat. When I began to write this book, I felt they should hear the truth from me before my story was published. I was not happy being the bearer of such news, but it seemed right to set the record straight. It was a painful time for us all.
The important thing is that my love for the man I thought of as my father—Ted Wells—did not change in any way. I was fierce about it, and after that I wanted nothing to do with the other man. I wasn’t curious; I had no desire to start a relationship. I disliked the specter that he was. I didn’t see him again until some nine years later.
THINGS BETWEEN MUM and Pop further deteriorated. My mother seemed to fall deeper into depression, finances were growing increasingly difficult, and we were having trouble with house payments. The Meuse itself was becoming unkempt. There was a mouse in my bedroom, and at one point it ran over my hair, which scared the hell out of me. I began to hear voices in my head at night, a crazy chatter, and I worried that I might go mad, like Betty, my father’s sister.
A source of comfort for me was the late-night train that rattled through the nearby railway station. As it approached, coming up from the coast to London, I’d hear the wheels of the steam engine clattering over the railroad ties, the puffs of the chimney and shrieks of the whistle. Lying in the dark, the sounds were always reassuring. They implied that there was life out there…the world was going about its business, and that made me feel more sane.
Not long after the revelation from my mother, I was gazing out of my bedroom window one day, feeling a little sorry for myself. I stared at the garden, watching the birds swoop down and around the rosebushes.
Uncle Hadge had long since moved up to London with Auntie Kit, and the bitter truth was that all the magic he had made in that garden had fallen apart. It mattered deeply to me that it not sink back into disarray, but it had. The tennis court was overgrown, the roses had become wild, the gladioli were spindly, and everything was generally a mess. It seemed symbolic of the condition of our family.
It was a hot summer afternoon, still and perfect. It began to rain, lightly at first, but quickly becoming fat, heavy drops. I thought, “Someone send me a sign that there is something better in the world, something beautiful and worthwhile, something more to life than this.”
I was gazing at a particularly large, full-blown rose, when all of a sudden one extra raindrop was just too much for it. All its petals cascaded to the ground at once. It was startling, and oddly comforting.
A rose lay open in full bloom
and, looking from my garden room,
I watched the sun-baked flower fill with rain.
It seemed so fragile, resting there,
and such a silence filled the air,
the beauty of the moment caused me pain.
“What more?” I thought. “There must be more.”
As if in answer then, I saw
one weighty drop that caused my rose to fall.
It trembled, then cascaded down
to earth just staining gentle brown
and, since then, I’ve felt different.
That’s all.