My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (30 page)

I had had one of my happiest reunions. But when Haynes as was his wont fell asleep with his cigar half-smoked and I walked out into the Finchley Road, to pick up a bus at Swiss Cottage, I could not restrain misgivings on his account.

Three years later, in November 1948, I was returning to England from New York. My first act at London Airport was to buy a copy of the
Evening Standard
and as always I turned first to the ‘Londoner's Diary'. In the centre of the third column I read this paragraph:

Struck off

Lawyers are startled to learn that E. S. P. Haynes, well-known solicitor with offices in Lincoln's Inn, has been struck off the Roll by the solicitors' Disciplinary Committee.

There was a technical description of the complaint. It was a question of improperly kept books. The paragraph then continued:

Haynes is 71, an old Etonian, author of some 30 books, and a prolific writer of letters to newspapers. He is an authority on laws affecting divorce and marriage. His ‘Divorce and Its Problems', written in collaboration with Derek Walker-Smith (now MP) was published in 1935.

‘The war has done this,' said Haynes. ‘Up till the war I was well off and solvent. But I am a child in finance. Perhaps I gave too much time to
writing. When I no longer had people to look after my money affairs, this happened.'

Stooping, grey-haired Haynes recalled to-day a remark by his father (also a solicitor). ‘He told me, no matter how idle I was I could expect about £1500 a year.'

Says Haynes: ‘I have not been idle, and I have earned much more than that. But those days are ended now.'

Haynes plans to spend his time writing now, has a book due for publication soon.

I re-read it, trying to envisage all its complications. I had been away a month and on our last walk Haynes had told me that he would be appearing shortly before some board. ‘It was intolerable,' he had grumbled. All these forms. With his old managing clerk alive he had known exactly where he was. The accounts had been prepared for him. A man like himself should not have to bother about trivial details. He was concerned with the strategy not the tactics of a campaign. As I read the paragraph again, I recalled the misgivings that I had felt on his account on that first walk with him. Those misgivings had been justified. He had taken on too much.

I was going straight from the airport into the country. I was not planning to spend much time in London before Christmas. I should have no chance of finding out the facts from mutual friends, of discovering from a neutral source ‘how Ted was taking it'. I thought it was better to write than telephone. I dropped him a note, telling him that I was back, asking if he would suggest a day for lunch. Five days later having had no answer I rang up. He was always hard to hear over the telephone. He regarded the telephone as a commercial convenience, to be used by secretaries, not by principals. His voice gave me no indication of his state of mind.

We made a date for the following week. I went up to London with some trepidation. My last walk had been a painful one. It had been a chill, bleak day. Wuff had been
more than usually fractious. Haynes had been more than usually asthmatic. Every few hundred yards he had stopped and choked and coughed. We proceeded at a glacier's pace. My fur coat was in cold storage in New York. I was very cold. Haynes himself had been in a gloomy mood. He would never, he said, get through this winter. He had nearly died last February. This February would finish him. His face was pallid like stale plaster. He was very thin. This might well be, I had thought, the last time that I should see him.

That had been in late September. Now in early December, by a caprice of climate, the sky was blue and the air vivid with a sense of spring. The stucco-fronted house took on a golden tone in the mild amber sunlight.

Haynes was no longer living in St John's Wood Park. The proprietors had at last succeeded in obtaining his eviction. But his youngest daughter had a house half a mile away in Hamilton Road. It was a smaller house, but it had been built in the same period; early nineteenth century. It had the dignity of solid unpretentious things that are built to last. He had moved his furniture across—the John Wells portrait of his wife in the wide-spreading gold skirt, the eighteenth-century ancestor, the dresser with its Wedgwood dinner service. On my first visit it had all looked uncomfortably tidy, but within a few weeks the old litter of books and pipes had been restored, and the curious smell, a mixture of leather, garlic, cigar smoke, undusted magazines, a smell that was by no means unpleasant but that was peculiar to Haynes, pervaded again the rooms and passages.

As always my reception from Wuff was boisterous. He ran past me into the front garden and barked for a full three minutes. ‘Don't your neighbours object to that?' I asked. It had been one thing to bark in the wilderness of a bombed area; it was quite another to disturb a
respectable residential district. ‘Yes,' said Haynes. That laconic ‘yes' was as typical, as symptomatic as his first ‘Why not?' Nothing could have been more complete than his refusal to have his personal preferences disturbed.

As usual, though I had arrived a little late, it was to find him in his night-shirt. His dressing proceeded slowly. Although his litter of half-worn shoes matched his litter of half-smoked pipes, he had bought a new pair of shoes the week before. It was the first time I had seen him with any new article of attire. I fancy that he had only bought them because shoes were at that time rationed and he felt that by using his clothing coupons he was getting his own back on the Government. He had great difficulty in getting into these shoes, and could not find his shoe-horn. Finally with the leverage of a spoon I effected the introduction.

In September Haynes had looked pasty and exhausted. Now there was a buoyancy in his step that reminded me of the days when he had taken Fitzjohn's Avenue in his stride. He did not once stop for breath. Wuff was relatively docile. Instead of stopping at the foot of Primrose Hill we had time to mount its summit. We sat on a wooden seat looking over London.

‘I suppose you've heard about my being unfrocked,' he said.

To the ordinary person, being struck off the Roll of Solicitors would be a disgrace, comparable to the cashiering of an officer. But Haynes was not an ordinary person. He ordered his life by a different set of rules, and by his own standards he had done nothing of which he needed to be ashamed. Several solicitors have assured me that he had done nothing except be casual and muddled, that since his managing clerk's death he had not bothered to keep his accounts in order; a negligence that is in a solicitor reprehensible but implied no reflection on the
E. S. P. Haynes whom his friends knew and loved. It was in character.

He could not have taken his reverse more calmly. When an Englishman goes bankrupt, or fails to meet his obligations, he is expected to resign from his clubs, because he might put a club servant in the awkward position of having to refuse a member's cheque. But Haynes could clearly not be bothered with unnecessary correspondence, and he had been amused by the devices adopted by the various club committees to remedy this omission. A personal friend of long standing at the Achilles had written to say that as the subscription was being raised in January he would probably prefer not to continue his membership. A city company on the other hand gilded the pill by returning him not only his entrance fee but his subscription over thirty years. He could not have been more delighted with his cheque for three hundred pounds.

He was as full of plans now as ten weeks earlier he had been despondent. At last he would have the leisure to write the kinds of book he wanted.

I had never known him so self-confident. His confidence was not bravado; a need ‘to show people' that he still ‘had it in him'; to justify, to vindicate himself. He was genuinely relieved to be rid of the necessity for paying daily visits to his chambers; to have the whole day free for writing.

Confident though he was, however, I had never seen him feebler. He looked well, but he looked very old. As Christmas was near, I had brought him as a present a bottle of champagne. He insisted on our drinking it together there and then. It was pleasant to drink it with him; it was pleasant to watch his enjoyment of it; but he kept falling asleep at table, a thing I had never seen him do before, even when he was bending his head over the broad-brimmed goblet inhaling the aroma of the
wine. His talk grew vague and indeterminate. I did not believe that he would have the vitality to complete his reminiscences. At the same time he would be happy working on them intermittently. The next two years might be among his happiest; an Indian summer.

On several earlier occasions on grey cold days when I had taken those freezing walks with him, when he had stopped and choked and Wuff had disobeyed him, I had stifled my irritation with the thought, ‘This may be the last time you'll ever see him. You must make a happy occasion of it.' This time I had no such feeling. Many more lunches were awaiting me in these next few years. We went upstairs for coffee. He lit a cigar. I have no recollection of what we talked about. Before the cigar was a quarter finished, he fell asleep. As was my wont, I let myself out quietly. It was the last time I saw him.

A few days after Christmas as he was standing in his bedroom in front of the gas fire, the tails of his shirt caught fire. The burns were serious: pneumonia followed: he died in his sleep.

The funeral was at the crematorium at Golders Green. It was the first time that I had been to the funeral of anyone for whom I closely cared; in thirty years our contact with each other had been unbroken. There are those who say that the crematorium service is cold and clinical. I did not feel it was. On the contrary I felt my heartstrings pulled as they never had been at the scattering of earth, by the symbol of the coffin passing out of sight, towards the furnace, followed by the words ‘Go Christian soul'.

They were discussing Haynes at the Savile that day at lunch. ‘What a pity,' someone said, ‘that he didn't die four months earlier, before the trouble broke.'

I could see what that someone meant: and for his
family the trouble inevitably must have been a cause of grief. And he himself may have been saddened by the suspicion that no obituary might appear of him in
The Times
. At the same time that trouble gave a sense of classic completeness to his life; it rounded the thing off. His full stature became apparent in those last weeks when he displayed in adversity his full stoic calm, his capacity to carry on, to remain an individualist to the end. I would not have had Ted Haynes in himself one iota different: he was of a piece. I would not change the end.

VYVYAN HOLLAND

A traveller such as myself relies on clubs to give a cohesion to his scattered life. I belong to four clubs in London, and two in New York; in addition I have several dining clubs. In London none has mattered to me more than Ye Sette of Odde Volumes. Founded in the 1870s by the bookseller, Bernard Quaritch, who grew tired of paying for his friends' meals and decided that by forming them into a club he could ensure that his intimates became self-supporting, the Sette is, I believe, the oldest dining club in London. Bookish in its inception somewhat in the trade sense of the word, the rules and ritual suggest a Mason's handiwork. There are elaborate initiation and inauguration ceremonies. The members wear badges, and the officers assume chains of office. The master of ceremonies carries a seven-foot silver and ebony wand. Until very recently full evening dress was worn. In fact, almost the only times since the war when I have worn white tie and tails have been at the Odde Volumes. Each member has a special cognomen and is known and addressed as Brother Idler, Brother Spectator, or Corinthian. The president is called ‘His Oddship'.

The constitution was drawn up in terms of what the 1870s considered humorous; facetiousness is the prevailing note. Rule XVI provides a typical example: ‘There shall be no Rule XVI'. It is the habit for the brethren to introduce their guests, one by one, in a speech. It is traditional to insult one's guests. The more distinguished the guest, the less veiled the insult, Vyvyan Holland once remarking of a well-known publicist, ‘I joined the
Sette because I needed somewhere to entertain the kind of man I could not invite to my own house. Mr——is the kind of guest I had in mind.' The wittiest introduction was that of Eustace Hoare by Maurice Healy. ‘My guest is a member of the second oldest profession in the world. Mr Hoare is a banker.' Evelyn Waugh in
Brideshead Revisited
made an amusing and irreverent reference to the Sette—Bridey was a member—as ‘a curious association of men, distinguished in their professions, who met once a month for an evening of ceremonious buffoonery'.

The first half of the evening is conducted on that note. Then the Sette proceeds to justify its claim to be regarded if not as a learned society, at least as a gathering of specialists in different fields. A paper is read, and a relatively serious discussion follows. These papers are twenty to forty minutes long and very often they are printed in a standardized format at the expense of their author and presented to the members. They are listed as
opuscula
, and over a hundred have been issued. The early ones are considerably the longer, and as I have turned their pages I have wondered how the Odde Volumes of the 1890s, after consuming the many-coursed banquets that were then the fashion, managed to stay awake while they were being read. But most of the more recent
opuscula
have intrinsic merit; are something more than collectors' items.

I joined the Sette in 1920, am now its senior member, though as an Emeritus Odde Volume I take no longer an active part in its affairs, and have seen several changes in its atmosphere over fifty years. The members are now a much livelier lot, and the ritual is treated, as the plays of Wilde are acted, as a period piece. The papers are a good deal shorter. Probably the Sette was at its best in the 1930s, when its membership included doctors like
Moynihan and Arbuthnot-Lane, jurists like Norman Birkett, Roland Oliver, and Walter Monckton, wine experts such as André Simon, A. J. A. Symons, Maurice Healy, and Vyvyan Holland, while David Low designed its menus. Surprisingly enough, it did not number many authors, Ralph Straus and J. G. Lockhart being the only professional writers besides myself, but it was during this period that the best
opuscula
were issued. Perhaps some of the best writing is produced when a man of taste and scholarship writes on his own subject, out of direct personal experience.