The Times Magazine 41and marvellous separately.” It becomes clear,
as Tremain relaxes, that this is true. She has a
fantastic ear for mimicry and an ability to put
on an array of voices, often to defuse sadness
or disappointment with wit and humour.
For example, her surgeon, she says, is a
wonderful South Korean man with small soft
hands. She puts on an absurd Los Angeles
accent, and of the fact that he had to cut away
half of her insides to save her life, says: “These
hands made me feel safe. I can imagine them
in my bawdeeee” – and then she bursts into
laughter. “Oh, what a terrible thought!”
On Harvey Weinstein – “slightly gross with
a bad knee tremble” – she imitates how he
said to her, sitting next to her at the premiere
after his film company, Miramax, butchered
Restoration: “Ya’know, this doesn’t really work.
It’s Jane Austen’s year! It’s Jane Austen’s year!”
“Of course, he was right about that,”
she says dryly, alluding to the rip-roaring
successful adaptation of Austen’s Sense and
Sensibility, written by and starring Emma
Thompson, which came out in 1995, the same
year as Restoration.
Even on the very sad subject of how her
prognosis might affect her life now, Tremain
answers by imitating the late Iris Murdoch.
Interviewer: “How long do you need
between novels, Iris?”
“Hmm, let me think,” Rose/Iris replies.
Comic pause. “About half an hour?”
Tremain bursts into peals of laughter. “It’s
very witty and it suggests that’s where she
feels alive, when she’s working,” she says.
“That’s the only thing that has probably
changed,” she says of her own post-cancer life.
“The sense of needing to speed up. I don’t
know how long I’ve got left so instead of
thinking...” she tails off. “I just keep going with
things. I’m turning into Iris Murdoch.”
It is what she calls the “tits to the valley”
approach to life, yet another comic phrase
and, she says, “a not unhelpful example of the
way humour can defuse fear”.
The phrase comes from way back in her
teenage years, when she was packed off to
Switzerland by her mother to become a nice
“gel” who could type. The school’s tanned
Swiss ski instructor, Monsieur Borloz, would
yell, “Tits to the valley!” to instruct the girls to
face outwards, towards the void.
“Can you believe he said that?” Tremain
says, laughing again, rejoicing in how off-
colour it sounds today.
“Actually, it was tits to the WALLEY,
because of his Swiss accent. TITS TO THE
WALLEY,” she repeats in a thick accent,
smiling to herself.
“Tits to the walley” is now a family
catchphrase, “a hilarious exhortation to
persevere, to confront things head on when
times are bad”, along with the “boots-on”
approach, a phrase coined by Holmes. Bothincorporate a getting-on-with-it backbone,
an appreciation of life shaped by the act of
writing, researching and, in her case, going on
the journey of the imagination, and by the
love of family. “I think Richard feels the same
[about life],” Tremain says. “I dare say if he’d
been the one who had been struck down, he’d
have done pretty much the same as what I’m
doing, just carried on. I’m sure he would. He’s
a very courageous man.”Tremain’s last proper memory of her father
before he left the family for another woman
was in 1952, in the same red-and-gold room in
Buckingham Palace where in March she was
made a dame. Keith Thomson was dressed in
a tailcoat, smiling at the young Elizabeth II,
who became Queen only that year. He was
appointed an OBE for his work as artistic
director of the York Festival, while Rose,
known then as Rosie, and her elder sister,
Jo, looked on. She doesn’t connect the two
experiences in any way, not symbolically, in
that she followed him in being honoured for a
life in the arts, or even in terms of the smallest
element of “I told you so”, a sentiment to
which she would be perfectly entitled given
her brilliance in the face of his lifelong
disregard of her. All she says is, “The decor
hasn’t changed in almost 70 years!” Tremain
doesn’t go in for self-pity.
Her father looms large as a terrible figure
in her life, endlessly letting her down. After
he left, her life in Chelsea, west London, was
brought abruptly to a close. She was removed
from Frances Holland School and sent instead
to a boarding school in Hertfordshire so that
her mother could live a dinner-party life in a
big house with a new husband. Her father
once thrillingly turned up at a big school
concert in London – because her mother
couldn’t be bothered – only to disappear,
leaving Rosie standing quite alone after the
performance while her friends were scooped
up by their proud parents. One of Tremain’s
childhood friends told me that Rose covered
up her unhappiness well, busying herself with
writing, painting, playing the piano, acting,
directing, imagining. But the concert incident,
she remembers, was crushing, even from the
sidelines. There were other cruelties. In 1993,
he returned Sacred Country to her unread.
The closest connection she felt to her
mother was during a game they played
pretending to be one another. Tremain wouldsit with her legs crossed, pretending to smoke
a cigarette and talk on the telephone – “Hello,
darling? Yes, darling!” – while her mother would
do handstands, pretending to be her, so that
her dress fell to her waist: “She always wore
very posh knickers.” It’s such a tragic portrait,
that her mother possessed the kernel of fun
but could never go the distance required
beyond the roleplay. When Tremain appeared
on Sue Lawley’s Desert Island Discs in 1997, she
talked about how she didn’t love her father but
said that she had a wonderful relationship
with her mother. Why? “I had to say that,”
she says. “I knew she’d be listening.” She was
terrified of her. Years earlier, her cousin had
christened Tremain’s mother “the Godmother”.
Both her parents are long dead. She loved
neither of them, she says.
There have been two marriages in
Tremain’s life, the first to Jon Tremain, the
father of Eleanor, and the second to Jonathan
Dudley, a theatre director.
“When you get to where I am in my life
I think it’s quite important to have, if not a
reconciliation with former partners, then to
reconcile in your mind what happened,” she
says. “Divorce makes everybody very angry
and upset and it takes a while to get over
it, but then you do come to some kind of
reconciliation. I think people go through their
entire life bearing grudges, but it’s not my
case. Things just didn’t work out. They are
probably far better off without me.”
Holmes is the true love of her life. They
began living together in 1993.
“Richard and I are so compatible,” she says.
“We understand what the creative life is and
we respect it. I think it was difficult for my
other husbands to understand that. They tried
to. I don’t feel any hostility to them whatsoever.”
“It is another triumph of Rose’s to have
made such a marvellous life with Richard,”
Ian McEwan says.
When I finally leave, Holmes drives me to
Norwich station. As I get out of the car, he
calls after me: “Don’t forget the short stories!
Read Extra Geography.”
It’s about two members of a school lacrosse
team who fixate on a female geography
teacher as a love object, a childlike game, little
more than an amusement to quell boredom.
But it becomes deeply tragic when it awakens
the young teacher’s sexuality, horribly
misjudged when the teenagers visit for tea.
I pass it first to one of my teenagers, then
another, then another, all of them transfixed
by the cruel game of the heart the young
lacrosse stars play on their geography teacher
without even knowing it. They are a new
generation of fans. Tremain would be pleased.
Tits to the walley – it’s the only way to be. nIslands of Mercy by Rose Tremain is published
on September 10 (£18.99, Chatto & Windus)‘I feel well at the moment.
I keep working. I keep
loving. There is nothing
else to be done’
STYLING: HANNAH SKELLEY. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: SALLY KVALHEIM AT TERRI MANDUCA USING CLARINS. ROSE TREMAIN WEARS DRESS, MEANDEM.COM