The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (36 page)

Henry was also married. ‘Dig’ (née the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph), his wife since 1929, was universally recognised as ‘sweet’ and ‘nice’ and ‘almost as inscrutable as Henry’.406 When they were first married, they were known as ‘the Bright Young Yorkes’, and Dig’s friends included the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth), who stood as godmother to their son, Sebastian. Dig was so nice that she seems not only to have turned a benevolently blind eye to her husband’s many girlfriends (who included Rosamund Lehmann and Mary Keene), but to have kept them close as friends. Later, when Jennifer remarried, Henry and Dig saw her regularly.

Evelyn Waugh mockingly called his old friend (and literary rival) ‘Mr H. Yorke the lavatory king’ on account of his parallel career with Pontifex, his family’s factory in the Midlands, which made, among other things, plumbing parts. Henry always tried to keep his writing life as Green quite separate from his business and personal life as Yorke. His Who’s Who entry listed his favourite pastime as ‘romancing over the bottle, to a good band’ – an interest he shared with Jennifer. In 1948, Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford about Henry’s liaison with Jennifer, and she replied, ‘I should think Miss Fry and Henry very well suited both so sexy.’407 When asked about the inspiration for Loving, Henry replied with provocative English dryness mixed with eroticism. He had got the idea, he said, from ‘a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash.’408

Henry was already drinking too much and starting to neglect his appearance; by 1952 he had written his last novel and was becoming a somewhat pitifully lugubrious figure. Nevertheless, in the late 1940s, he was attractive enough to appeal to Jennifer, not to mention other young women – his subsequent relationship was with Kitty Freud, whose marriage to Lucian Freud was breaking up. Above all, Henry was interesting and intelligent and, after the childish antics of Mickey, it was refreshing for Jennifer to be with somebody older and probably wiser.

Henry’s 1950 novel, Nothing, features John Pomfret, a middle-aged widower whose younger lover is supposedly based at least partially on Jennifer, though there are also elements of her in other characters. The opening scene depicts an event which actually occurred at Jennifer’s house. John visits his former mistress, Jane, and enacts a mock marriage ceremony with her young daughter, Penelope. The game is taken one step too far and the young child ends up crying in her mother’s arms. Victoria had in fact dressed up as a bride when aged about five, to play this somewhat inappropriate game with Henry, though she has no memory of the tears.

Jennifer adored her daughter, but despite her struggles at Oare with only sporadic help she had little idea of the physical reality of motherhood; women in her milieu did not generally spend much time with their children and it was assumed that you hired people for the practicalities. Once, Jennifer took the four-year-old Victoria shopping at Harrods and then went home, totally forgetting her. Racing back, she found the child quite unperturbed in the fabrics department, entertaining herself by removing and replacing price tags on bolts of material.

It was a painful irony that Jennifer should have made some of the same mistakes as Alathea had in her time. Most crucially, she employed a nanny for Victoria who was bad-tempered and aggressive. Wrapped up in her own struggle to establish a new life after the Faringdon debacle, Jennifer relied on Mardie, a forceful, middle-aged, chain-smoking Scot, to take on much of the day-to-day childcare. Jennifer knew that Mardie shouted and railed, but she failed to grasp the extent to which the nanny was bullying her daughter. Victoria travelled up to Scotland with Mardie for long holidays over the summer where she would not see her mother at all (when Jennifer asked whether she might join them for a visit, she was told it would be better if she didn’t). Just as her own nannies had conspired to make Alathea an almost obsolete figure who could be idealised from a distance, so Jennifer allowed Mardie to keep the nursery a world apart.

Although Jennifer did not return to Faringdon for many years, she and Robert collaborated so that their daughter could spend time with her father. Victoria would be sent over with a nanny for a few days at a time and later for longer periods during the school holidays. There are photographs of Victoria, aged about three, sitting on Gerald’s lap, and he continued to feel huge affection for the child, and showed her kindness despite his worsening health. Robert arranged pony rides and visits from other children and generally tried to do what was expected of a father. He still cared enough about Jennifer to show signs of jealousy and on one visit tried to teach the young Victoria a rhyme involving a parrot and the line ‘Mickey’s gone to visit Pixie’s sister’, evidently hoping that she would recite it back home. A surviving letter from Robert to Sir Geoffrey indicates that Victoria was sometimes sent across from Faringdon to Oare; bizarrely, these two bisexual, self-centred men found themselves discussing the practicalities of childcare in the post-war years when bread, butter, sugar and meat were still rationed. Written on Berners Estates Company paper (‘Directors: RT. HON. LORD BERNERS, R. V. HEBER-PERCY, Farm Manager – Capt. H. H. Cruddas M.C’), it probably dates from about 1948, when Victoria was five, and when Jennifer was in London making secret dates with Henry Yorke.

Dear Geoffrey

I hope Victoria arrived safely.

Jennifer has got her ration book. I don’t know if you will be any more successful than I was at getting it.

We find that eggs or cream have a disastrous effect on both stomach and temper, otherwise she has been very sweet and good.

Yours,

Robert

Only a year later, the affair with Henry was over, and Jennifer was getting married for the second time. Alan Ross was exceptionally attractive – dark-eyed, black-haired, slim and athletic – a poet and a keen cricketer, and combined a sophisticated love of glamour with sensitivity and a tendency to depression. Six years younger than Jennifer, he had been born in Calcutta and had undergone the conventional miseries of children sent to boarding school in England, where he desperately missed the Indian servants and his ayah, who had spoken to him in Hindustani and given him the security he now lacked. He had gone up to Oxford in 1940, studying modern languages at St John’s and becoming a cricket and squash Blue, so he might have passed Jennifer unknowingly in the streets or at the Playhouse bar. His contemporaries included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. After five terms he joined the Navy, participating in the Arctic convoys and suffering the terror of being bombed and torpedoed by the Germans. As his flame-filled destroyer had flooded with icy water and he struggled to fight the fires, he found himself treading on the bodies of his comrades and friends floating in the darkness. These were experiences that would haunt him and his poems for life.

Beneath the ice-floes sleeping,

Embalmed in salt

The sewn-up bodies slipping

Into silent vaults.409

VICTORIA SITTING ON GERALD’S LAP DURING ONE OF HER VISITS

After a spell in Germany in 1945, Alan was finally demobbed, but rather than return to Oxford to complete his degree, he wrote, travelled and became a keen frequenter of Soho’s artistic watering holes. When he married the thirty-three-year-old Jennifer, he was twenty-seven, but he had already entered London’s literary life. John Lehmann published his first poems and he became friends with Cyril Connolly, who was keen to act as master of ceremonies, if not matchmaker, for the relationship with Jennifer. The couple combined the perfect mix for Cyril – intelligence with beauty, worldliness with feeling – and he was happy to keep them close. According to their friend Francis Wyndham, Cyril repeated this pattern of encouraging and ‘masterminding’ couples where he was somewhat in love with the woman and ‘a tiny bit of the man’; another was Caroline Blackwood and Lucian Freud. Mickey described Cyril as ‘Old Miss Matchmaker, that rival to Swan Vestas’.410 But Cyril also had his vulnerable side, and his own love life was often a mess; he warned a friend who said he would like to edit his letters, ‘You’d find letters to two women threatening suicide, written within half an hour of each other, and then one to a third, written quarter of an hour later, asking her to lunch at the Ritz.’411 Cyril’s vulnerability was something Gerald recognised; once, when the ever-pugnacious Evelyn Waugh had been making spiteful comments (as he frequently did about Cyril, whom he enjoyed tormenting), Gerald memorably remarked, ‘To attack Cyril Connolly is like shooting a sitting robin.’412

The photographs from the October wedding show Alan boyishly anxious yet happy in a dark suit, and Jennifer smiling confidently, dressed in a pale autumnal dress, cinched in at the waist. Wedding guests included the two painters who had shared a house with Alan, Keith Vaughan and John Minton, and the as-yet-undiscovered Soviet spy Donald MacLean. A letter congratulating Jennifer on her unexpected wedding was sent by a friend who had evidently followed Jennifer’s complex romantic life, though the second page and signature is missing: ‘Poor Robert will feel it I think and I wonder how Cyril feels. And Henry! To say nothing of Micky [sic]!’

JENNIFER AND ALAN ROSS ON THEIR WEDDING DAY, 1949

ALAN ROWING

The six-year-old Victoria adored her new stepfather and he enjoyed this role. The following year, they all travelled to the Italian Riviera and stayed at La Mortola, a beautiful villa near Ventimiglia, built on steep, verdant slopes above the sea – an enchanted high point in Victoria’s childhood. At last Jennifer appeared to have found love and stability with someone who was also handsome, intelligent and sexy. Alan added to the family’s new-found happiness when he announced that he could not stand to have Mardie living in the house with them and the dreaded nanny was sent away. Jennifer wrote to her mother in 1950, thanking her for sending butter from Oare – ‘such a treat … after National Butter!’ – then adding, apparently ingenuously, that Victoria looks very well and seems very happy. ‘You won’t believe it but she is quite different since Mardie left. She is full of ideas for games and so on which she never was before as she was never given time to think or turn round with Mardie barking at her day and night.’ There is no mention of why Jennifer had allowed a nanny to ‘bark’ and terrorise her daughter for so long.

Y 1949, GERALD’S health was rapidly deteriorating. He had heart problems, high blood pressure and it appears he had suffered some sort of thrombosis, though he still had the spirit to write letters to friends: ‘Do you find that everything disappears. “Panta rei” (I can’t write Greek letters any more) as Heraclitus says. The moment I put a paper down on a table it disappears into space. It is also largely Robert I suspect.’413

Those close to Gerald were increasingly worried but nobody seemed to be clear quite what he was suffering from. Some suggested a brain tumour, others that it might have all been somewhat psychosomatic. Nancy Mitford wrote to her sister Diana after visiting him: ‘He is quite well I think but furious if one says so!’ When Diana went to see him, she found him lying ‘like a log with two nurses and all the paraphernalia of terrific illness and I believe he dreads getting better for fear of his depression coming back (he is not awfully depressed now). We talk of his coming to Crowood [the Mosleys’ home] and he says he longs to, but you know he won’t even open his eyes!’414 Diana continued to visit and sometimes managed to drive him in his dressing gown to the farm, where he enjoyed seeing the cats in the cowshed.415 Writing later to Robert, Diana noted ‘how gentle and thoughtful’ he was with Gerald during this difficult time.

Gerald’s decline can only have been worsened by the news coming in of old friends dying: Gertrude Stein in 1946, Emerald Cunard in 1948. When writing to Cecil Beaton, he thanked him for news about Salvador Dalí and requested that his love be sent to him and Gala. ‘All my old life seems to be vanishing,’ he wrote; ‘I feel like a ghost. Perhaps I am really dead and just earth-bound. It is a curious and not wholly pleasant sensation, anyhow I can’t write more than a few lines to living friends and must end now. Also it’s lunch time.’

In spite of his vulnerability, many people Gerald cared about continued to arrive for weekends. Elizabeth Bowen described ‘sitting on the terrace tangled with loops of honeysuckle, drinking champagne, with this enormous smoke-blue Berkshire distance reaching away below … Robert Heber-Percy’s exquisite 5-year-old child Victoria is here; all the Betjemans’ children arrived over, and we spent a very nice demented midgy afternoon boating on the lake.’416 Clarissa was still a regular visitor, but there were also people from the theatre like Freddie Ashton and Constant Lambert, and others, like Edward James, from the heyday of the 1930s, and Gerald de Gaury, who had snapped up the Mad Boy for their Boy’s Own Arabian adventure. Cyril Connolly’s signature crops up many times in the visitors’ book, revealing his own domestic changes as Lys’s name disappears and Barbara Skelton (soon to be Connolly) appears. Robert kept the whole place running, even when Gerald wasn’t up to much; inevitably he was now less like the young Mad Boy running riot in Gerald’s shadow. And it was a reflection of this that Cyril wrote him a jokey thank-you letter on Horizon notepaper.

Dearest Robert,

I don’t suppose you get many bread and butter letters so I am sending you one. You looked after me as well as I am accustomed to, even at Faringdon. One or two small points – you should serve champagne in the bath on a salver, with a small hand-towel. And one CAN’T be expected to use the same bath-salts two baths running. But one must not carp …

Was up all night twice last week, most enjoyable, the rising sun over the lake in Regent’s Park was everything you … used to crack it up to be.

Lots of love from Cyril

Cecil Beaton pronounced that Gerald was fading fast, reporting a conversation in his diary (later published in The Happy Years): ‘Gerald comes blinking into my room. “It’s really quite serious: it’s the sort of thing that people die of. Oh well, it’s not worth getting upset about … but I might as well take a month off, for after all, health is everything, isn’t it. And it’s never quiet at Faringdon with Robert about.’ Cecil visited Gerald on one of his sojourns at the Richmond nursing home, where the patient was sad to be missing Faringdon at a lovely time of year: ‘The bore is I’m missing the spring there. Now, let me see – when I come out of the home it will be 1 June. The syringa will be coming out and the greenhouse peaches will be ripe.’417 Cecil included accusations in the same book that Robert had not cared well for Gerald during his illness, adding to his suffering and loneliness rather than assuaging it. When these diaries were published, many years later, friends who knew the situation at Faringdon rallied in defence of the Mad Boy. Billa said she was quite certain that Robert did not neglect Gerald, and Daphne Fielding pronounced that both Robert and Hughie were ‘Pure Gold’ as far as tending to Gerald was concerned. Diana Mosley was angered that Cecil spread what she saw as unfair and untrue details about Gerald that would give entirely the wrong impression of the situation at Faringdon.418