Not Speaking: A Compelling Tale of Love, Anger, Infidelity and Fame, by Norma Clarke
Frances Wilson
Not Speaking: A Compelling Tale of Love, Anger, Infidelity and Fame
Norma Clarke is a professor of 18thcentury literature who has written superbly on Dr Johnson and his circle.
She is also the sister of Nicky Clarke, celebrity hairdresser, whose own circle includes Elton John and Naomi Campbell. Nicky Clarke, who helped devise the Purdey cut for Joanna Lumley, has also styled the tresses of Fergie and Di, Liz Hurley and Liz Taylor.
Most importantly, however, Nicky and Norma Clarke are two of the six children of Rena, Matriarch with a capital M, who is now 95 and lives in a granny flat above the Marylebone salon of her second hairdressing son, Michael van Clarke. Rena is Greek (she pronounces Waitrose ‘Whatross’) and doesn’t leave the house without holy water, religious icons and pamphlets about the lives of the saints. She is also the star of Not Speaking, but then Rena – a narcissist of the old school – has always been the star of her own story.
The book’s title refers to a number of issues concerning Clarke family communications. When Rena married Bill in 1945, neither spoke the other’s language: Bill Clarke was a sergeant major in the British army and Rena was an Athenian beauty. They moved to a council flat on the Old Kent Road with no bathroom and an outside loo. Bill worked as a turbine operator at Bankside Power Station – which later became Tate Modern – and Rena learnt her rudimentary English while comporting herself like royalty (Prince Philip, she liked to remind her children, was also Greek). Rena’s 13-year affair with the Greek Cypriot minicab driver who sired her youngest child, Tina, was never spoken about and Rena still can’t understand why Tina is upset that the father she adored was not her father at all. This is because for Rena, as Norma explains, ‘The notion that you might see something from the other person’s point of view was not only “stupid” but somehow suspect.’
During the writing of Not Speaking, Nicky and Michael were not speaking because of a fight about where Rena, now widowed, should live. Before moving to Michael’s specially-built flat, Rena spent ten years in a swanky pad belonging to Nicky. Both brothers want to claim Rena as their prize: this is her effect on men. On the morning of her 90th-birthday party Nicky had five different dresses, worth £400 each, delivered to her flat.
The Clarkes are a close-knit clan and so the stand-off between Michael and Nicky has been unusual and upsetting. Norma, speaking in her own tongue, compares it to Greek tragedy. More specifically, she compares Nicky to the great Achilles sulking in his tent, and Michael to Agamemnon. Rena herself, the face who launched a thousand angry emails, is of course Helen. It’s a witty and apt analogy, not least because Alexander Pope’s satire on the abduction of Helen, The Rape of the Lock – a favourite poem of Norma’s – is about the theft of a lock of hair: ‘What mighty contests rise from trivial things,’ Pope writes.
Centring on the stand-off between her brothers, Norma Clarke’s exploration of the family tensions uses literature to help unravel the knots. Her framework is Greek tragedy, but the Clarke culture clashes are often pure comedy. For example, while on holiday in Majorca, the siblings visit Deia, which for Nicky is where Princess Di retreated to Richard Branson’s luxury hotel after her marriage broke down, and for Norma is the place where Robert Graves once lived.
When his mother turned 90, Michael arranged for her to have a Lifebook autobiography, in which her children compiled their memories and a ghost-writer impersonated Rena herself. I Was a Greek War Bride, as the book was called, was not exactly ‘lies’, as Rena confided to Norma, ‘but it’s not the whole truth. If I told the truth, everybody would run away.’ Books can be dangerous weapons, as Norma and Rena know.
‘I understood her fear,’ Norma writes. ‘I felt it myself. The devil was in the room.’ Truthful, fearless and loving, Not Speaking will certainly give the Clarkes something to speak about.