Authors: Paula Byrne
Mad World (42 page)
Evelyn finished
Scoop
at the start of 1938, and his first child, Maria Teresa, was born in March of that year. His last recorded visit to Madresfield took place towards the end of April, a couple of weeks before
Scoop
was published. Now Evelyn had a family and a substantial country house of his own, albeit on nothing like the scale of Mad. He had found a home but lost his freedom. He was happy and settled. His correspondence with Maimie and Coote would continue for the rest of his life, but he was no longer a true inhabitant of Mad World. His absence from Boom’s funeral that November – whatever the reason – is symptomatic of the change.
He was, however, still a traveller. Straight after
Scoop
was published, to high acclaim for its comic brilliance, Evelyn was on a train bound for a Catholic convention in Hungary, the Eucharistic Congress. He was upset that the Nazis had prevented thousands of Catholic Austrians from attending: ‘near neighbours abruptly and cruelly deprived of their primary
human right of association in worship’. After this he went to Mexico with Laura to write about the political situation there. His account was published in a book called
Robbery Under Law
, which was more a political treatise than a travel book, and for that reason his least funny and least successful work.
The immediate consequence of Boom’s death for the Lygon sisters was that they lost their family home. Elmley wasted no time in initiating the formalities to assume the title of the eighth Earl Beauchamp, take his seat in the House of Lords and move to Madresfield from the disused lighthouse where he had lived in his parliamentary constituency in Norfolk. Madresfield had a chatelaine again: middle-class Mona, now the Countess Beauchamp. It was Mad World no longer. By this time the sisters cordially loathed Elmley and Mona. Sibell only returned to Mad once during the reign of Mona, which lasted for fifty years.
The best hope for the sisters would be a sequence of good marriages, but there was little prospect of that. As his condolence letter suggests, Evelyn was concerned about them. Throughout his long friendship with Maimie, Sibell and Coote he made jokes about possible suitors, but not even his wild imagination could have predicted that they would make such disastrous matches. Apart from Lettice, who had married her country baronet before the scandal, none of the Lygons married into the aristocracy or even the gentry. Perhaps this more than anything shows the legacy of their father’s disgrace.
Of the three sisters, Sibell was the first to marry. She had had many affairs with prominent men such as Lord Beaverbrook. And she had some repute as a journalist. Though most of the pieces that appeared under her name in the
Daily Express
were actually by Beaverbrook, her column in
Harper’s Bazaar
was her own. She was very attractive, extremely tall, over six feet, and many were surprised that at the age of thirty-two she was still unmarried. It was said that like the big horses she rode, she was too headstrong to control. Ominously, she had a history of small confrontations with the wrong side of the law. On one occasion a policeman called at Madresfield, believing that she did not have a licence for her dogs. He was told that it was inconvenient for Lady Sibell to receive him. When he called again, he discovered that the new licence had been taken out just a few hours after his first call. The matter went to court and she was fined thirty shillings.
She found herself a handsome pilot eight years her junior, named Michael Rowley. His mother had married (and would later divorce) Bendor, Duke of Westminster, the architect of the Lygons’ misery. She had owned a hairdressing salon on Bond Street, and briefly employed Sibell there.
The wedding was announced at the beginning of 1939. It would be a quiet affair, ‘due to mourning’. The ceremony was then postponed three times. A date in early January at Caxton Hall was scratched when the groom’s father claimed never to have heard of Lady Sibell. The second date at the Oratory was cancelled. A third plan for a wedding at Marlow was also aborted. The ceremony finally took place at the Brompton Oratory in February 1939, in the presence of close family and friends.
Two weeks later, apparently thinking it a great joke, Rowley told his new wife that he had been married to someone else the previous July. Something to do with a German girl while on holiday in Mexico – ‘But he didn’t think it was legal,’ Sibell later recalled. Unfortunately, the first wife, living in Bavaria, found out. She told of the passionate letters that Michael had written to her professing his love: ‘It is almost unbearable to be away from you’; ‘I adore you and will never give you up for one day’; ‘Nothing shall separate us.’ Her name was Eleonore, and they had been secretly engaged, but initially had no intention of marrying. After a drunken lunch while on holiday in Mexico, they had spotted a sign outside an office saying ‘Get Married Here’. When they went in they saw a young American couple in the process of marrying. The couple agreed to act as witnesses, and so they got married too. It was on his return to England that Rowley met and fell in love with Lady Sibell. The couple went over to Germany to see the first Mrs Rowley, and she appeared to accept the situation. Things came to a head later.
Meanwhile, things had not been going well for Maimie. Some time before the war, Evelyn had written to her from Chagford commiserating with her for having contracted a sexual disease: ‘Decent to hear your voice on telephone. V. sorry about your ear and crabs. Odd we should both have crabs together. It is worse for me to have no bush than it is for you. But it will grow again I hope. Perhaps we should get wigs to wear.’ ‘I expect there will soon be a war,’ he added, to pile general misery onto local difficulty.
All her love affairs had ended in tears. Her beauty would not last for
ever. Maimie had no choice but to make the best match she could. She too married in 1939. The girl who had consorted with Prince George and been spoken of as a possible royal bride had to make do with a Romanov instead of a Windsor. She married an exiled Russian prince, called Vsevolode Ivanovitch. The nephew of the last Tsar and second in line to the dissolved imperial throne, he was three at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. His English governess smuggled him out of Russia and he went to Eton and Oxford. He partly survived by selling off such family silver as had been brought out of Russia, but he could not get by without working. At one time he set himself up in business selling lubricants in north London, where he became known as Mr Romanoff.
Maimie called him Vsev. Photographs show him as an earnest bespectacled man with black slicked-back hair. He does not look at all glamorous, unlike her other lovers such as Hubert Duggan and Prince George. Nevertheless, it gave a certain pleasure to place an announcement in
The Times
on 1 February 1939 to the effect that Lady Mary Lygon had become engaged to ‘Prince Vsevolode of Russia, son of the late Prince John Constantinovitch and of Princess Héléne of Serbia’.
Evelyn wrote to Maimie to congratulate her on her engagement and she told him that she had a ‘v. decent engagement ring’ and joked that she wanted the title Princess Grainger but that Vsevolode said ‘no, she is the Princess Pavlosk’. Maimie told Evelyn that she was receiving instruction in the Orthodox Church from a nice beast. As with Evelyn, love led her to religious conversion. She also told Bo that she was very popular with Vsev’s family as ‘Boom jiggered some Patriarchs some time ago so they think I’m wonderful.’ She asked: ‘Can we come and sponge one weekend?’ In the same letter she also asked with concern about the appendix operation that Laura had just undergone. This led her to remember her own operation at the time of her mother’s funeral: ‘I wonder if her scar is bigger than mine which is one and a half inches. There is a lot of snobbery over that.’ She told Evelyn that Coote had bought a house in Upton upon Severn, and that Grainger was ill. Apart from her concern for Grainger, she seemed happy and ebullient: ‘V and I are going to be quite rich and you must come often to our luxurious Highclere – I am longing to see you.’ The expectation of riches was either a joke or seriously over-optimistic. The reality was that Vsev lived from hand to mouth. He, not George, was the genuine ‘pauper prince’.
His tsarist origin and her popularity in society were enough to get them some good wedding presents: a silver cigarette case with lighter from the Queen (in the photographic portrait taken for the wedding Vsev has a matching cigarette holder), a stack of jewellery from the groom’s mother, Hepplewhite dining-room furniture from the Lygon siblings, a television radiogram set from some of Maimie’s girlfriends, and a silver casserole dish from her former lover, Prince George (and Princess Marina). Maimie gave Vsev a set of solid silver dinner plates inscribed with his crown and initial – the only crown left to him. He gave her an ostrich-skin dressing-case and a couple of antique cigarette cases. They married on 31 May in the Chelsea Register Office, with a religious ceremony the following day in the Russian Orthodox Church on Buckingham Palace Road. Maimie, perhaps casting a wistful eye towards the Palace up the road, thus became the Princess Romanovsky-Pavlovsky.
Young Dickie gave her away because Elmley was ‘ill’. Her dress was in oyster satin with flounces of old family Brussels lace. There was a good turnout of exiled Romanovs and society figures, along with some of the old set – Henry Yorke, Christopher Sykes and of course Evelyn and Laura. A
Tatler
photographer caught the moment during the Orthodox service when crowns were placed over the heads of bride and groom.
Evelyn disliked Maimie’s husband, calling him the ‘intolerable Russian’. He met him properly for the first time in July, when he drove to Malvern to meet Coote, Maimie and her new husband at the Hornyold Arms. He also lunched with Coote at her new house in Upton upon Severn: ‘commodious, nondescript, very cheap house’, he noted in his diary. It was very strange to be with the girls in Worcestershire, but excluded from Mad itself.
There was little sign of heavily built and thickly spectacled Coote getting married. Evelyn still joked with Maimie about possible suitors for her sister, but Coote herself was happy to remain single. The prospect of war overshadowed everything. Everyone’s lives were about to change.
What really hung over us then, like a great storm cloud, was the idea of Hitler.
But like all parties, it had to come to an end.
(Maimie Lygon)
In July 1939, Evelyn was busy at Piers Court. His journals are full of industry: he is hanging portraits, planting bulbs, digging paths and restoring panelling. He also began work on a new novel, whose heroine owed not a little to Diana Mitford. It is not a novel in any direct sense about the Lygon family – though in the manuscript there is an interesting excised episode in which a gentleman is blackmailed by his servants, a fate that had befallen Lord Beauchamp when he was blackmailed by the Madresfield cook, Mrs Harper, who threatened to expose his homosexuality. Evelyn had heard about this incident from Maimie. The novel also details a quasi-autobiographical father/son relationship that is distant and formal.
Both father and son despise the modern age and view life as a ‘huge, grim and solitary jest’. A major theme is the erection of blocks of jerry-built flats adjacent to the family home, Hill Crest Court. The destruction of ancient houses was always a deep concern of Evelyn’s. Barbarians were taking over the modern world. The arrival of Mona at Madresfield was
perhaps a symptom of the changing times. This novel also introduced a new character type, Atwater, who would assume a prominent place in Evelyn’s post-war novels. Vulgar and touchy but also a clown, he is the symbol of the new age of the common man – half-educated, blasé, an insensitive bore, he will be reincarnated as Hooper, Apthorpe and Trimmer. The type is everything that was diametrically opposed to Lord Beauchamp.
The book was unfinished, but eventually published as a fragment, called
Work Suspended,
in 1942. An exceptionally incisive account of it in the
Partisan Review
highlighted the key theme: ‘For fifteen years, Waugh has sung the house, and with it the precious furnishings he finds suited to it … And in this love of house, of continuous domicile and individual roof, Waugh appears for the defence in one of the most important struggles in English poetry and letters of the past twenty years.’ For this critic, Nigel Dennis, Waugh’s preoccupation with country houses was bound up with his hostility to the poets and intellectuals of the New Left:
These young mainly upper-class men, he argues, tried to purge themselves of their upper-class preferences, their acceptance of the old, rural order … The intellectual pledged his new fidelity to the city, to the waste land that must be recreated … Like these intellectuals, Waugh saw the ghosts in the old houses, the flies lovely in amber; unlike them, he totally rejected the plea to ‘advance to rebuild’. The ghosts must be materialised; or, if that were impossible, they must be preserved as the best available wraiths.
But as Evelyn worked on the novel through the long hot summer of 1939, it was becoming increasingly clear that the threat to England and its old ways was not the New Left at home, but the far right in Germany.
As soon as war was declared, Evelyn abandoned the novel in order to sign up for soldiering. But his age (thirty-six) put him at a disadvantage. He felt bitter that he appeared to be of the generation who were too young to fight in the first war and too old for the second. A desk job on government business was a possibility, but that would kill him as a writer. His inclination was to join the Army as a private – the ‘complete change of habit’ would be the best possible stimulus to his imagination.
Just over two weeks after the declaration of war, Sibell unexpectedly arrived for lunch, in company with her new husband in his shiny RAF uniform. She was ‘in a great state of nerves, full of laments about blackout and rationing’. Evelyn took her rather too literally and it was left to Laura to point out ‘that she was apprehensive for Michael’s safety’. Waugh, by contrast, had no immediate prospect of war action. After various knockbacks he came to the conclusion that someone at the War Office was blocking his chances. Worse, all of his friends seemed to have positions (apart from Harold Acton, who was turned down by everyone and, in a development that would have appalled the fictional Anthony Blanche, was reduced to teaching English to Polish airmen in Blackpool).
