The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (43 page)

On Sunday, the whole thing started over again with the addition of Sunday papers, sometimes read sitting in the morning sun on the porch. Not long after, there’d be a giant jug of Bloody Mary with celery and lots of Worcestershire sauce, maybe taken out onto the terrace where one would find a place on the low, honeysuckle-covered wall. Someone might get out the croquet set and we’d thwack the coloured balls around on the turf. Or a child would wind up the music boxes in the hall, or pull the lead on the Victorian model pug, which would open its lower jaw to reveal a small-toothed pink mouth and let out a rasping bark. There might be an expedition to climb the Folly, take the punt out on the lake or have drinks somewhere else. Once, Robert took us to Oare and we slipped into the gardens through a side gate. I’d never seen the house where my grandmother had grown up and it had been sold when I was a young child. We wandered along to the swimming pool – a perfect turquoise rectangle surrounded by green – and looked around before leaving, unobserved, the way we had come. It came just as naturally to me as it did to Robert to sneak in the back way, to add a touch of the forbidden. Perhaps we bonded over that without needing to talk about it.

Once, Robert asked me to come to Faringdon alone, without Jeremy, though he knew that we were living together in Cambridge. We had bought a tiny two-up two-down with no bathroom and Jeremy was now extending it into the garden to where the privy had been. For a long time, there was a tarpaulin instead of a roof and lots of dust. Robert had been given an invitation to a ball held by the new Lord Faringdon, the nephew of Gerald and Robert’s old friend who had inherited the title and Buscot House in 1977. The party was intended as a celebration for his son’s twenty-first birthday and as I was about the same age, I was invited. My grandfather wanted me to go alone. I knew nothing of Robert’s attempted manipulation of my mother’s relationship with my father, but I sensed that he wanted some control over me – strange, perhaps, because he seemed to like Jeremy. I was sent a cheque for £100 to buy a frock and I found something in a secondhand shop that was very old and made of black silk chiffon. It looked like it was from the 1930s – bias-cut and delicate as spider’s web – and cost £25. I kept the change without telling Robert, slightly guilty but pleased to subsidise student costs.

THE AUTHOR WITH ROBERT, MID-1980S

When the night arrived, my grandfather drove me to the ball and, after a drink with the ‘grown-ups’, left me there. People were kind – some girls took me to an upstairs bedroom where they were fixing their hair – and there was a glittering marquee, dinner and then dancing to pop hits of the day. I felt terribly out of place and, predictably, my nearly disintegrating dress was unlike any of the brightly coloured, stiffly ballooning confections that were fashionable in the early 1980s. I also knew I had to wait until a respectably late hour before I asked for my arranged ride back to Faringdon. When I did, there was a tray in the hall with milk and biscuits, laid out as I imagined had always been done after countless hunt balls, where young people had drunk too much and, in the pre-dawn hours, were starving from all the dancing and flirting. It was like something out of Brideshead Revisited, which I was watching each week on television. All that was missing was a darling old nanny up in an attic bedroom whom I could visit the next morning for advice after a night of excess or an amorous disaster.

When I left at the end of a weekend, I’d sign myself into the visitors’ book, laid out on one of the wooden chests in the hall near the Dalí ink drawing of a horse and rider and the wartime Prieto portrait of Gerald holding a lobster and butterflies. Once, when I wrote my name under two of the regular guests I’d met as Deirdre and Johnny Grantley, I didn’t understand why she had written her full name and he had only put his surname; it was the first time I learned that lords make a habit of that.

I once made the mistake of asking to stay over on Sunday night as it fitted my plans better for travelling on somewhere the following day. I heard a mild reluctance in Robert’s acceptance, but only understood afterwards why that had been. On Monday morning, the place was completely different; the show over. The drawing room was shuttered up, the cleaning equipment was out and by the time I got up, Robert was dressed in a darned sweater, clutching a mug of Nescafé laced with brandy and back from consulting with the gardeners. It was like going back-stage after a play, where the actors were taking off their make-up and the scenery was being put away by technicians. After decades of observing how it was done and with Rosa’s extraordinary capabilities, Robert was now the creative director of what was often a weekly production. But the audience needed to play by the rules. By Monday, it was back to rehearsals and repairs.

DIDN’T KNOW IT THEN, but Jennifer went to visit Robert after one of my early trips to Faringdon. In their mid-to-late sixties by then, they had more in common than they might have admitted. Both used alcohol as a crutch and dreaded the degradations of old age. Both also retained the optimism required for sexual escapades despite the fragility of a body that betrayed. ‘Isn’t it horrible being old?’ Robert said to Jennifer around this time. Neither had a permanent partner; Hughie was long gone and the predictable if painful divorce from Alan had finally gone through. Clayton had been sold and Jennifer was now back in London. ‘I am waiting for the telephone to ring. I have a whisky, light a cigarette, put it out. Pour another drink. The room seems stifling. I open the window and look at the trees, trying to relax.’470 It was a sad time to be single, and Alan was now involved with a woman of Victoria’s age.

When Cressida Connolly, Cyril’s daughter, was finding her feet in London after leaving school, she lived with Jennifer for a while. Cyril had died when she was only thirteen and Jennifer had become something of an honorary godmother. ‘She was very brave in many ways,’ remembered Cressida. ‘She didn’t confide her problems, even though she sometimes complained a lot. And she was witty about her moaning. One autumn evening, at dusk, when she was shutting the curtains as usual, she said, “Darling, I can’t stand this time of day … or year … or life.”’ Or when Cressida asked what they would cook that evening for dinner, Jennifer would announce deadpan, in her tinkling, pre-war voice, ‘Petti di fucking pollo’.471

Younger people often loved Jennifer for her humorous sparkle and for being unshockable; she never judged anyone’s behaviour. Jonathan’s friends flocked to her for advice over a drink or two. She was still attractive enough to have what she called ‘the odd adventure’, often with a much younger man, but this was done discreetly. Even at this point, she was still Pixie’s darling; she continued to shelter her beloved governess from anything that might shock her, and she had the saintly old lady (now heading for a hundred) to live in her house before she moved into a care home. At one point, Jennifer decided to do some voluntary work and, taking a lead from her ancestor Elizabeth Fry, visited prisoners’ wives. Though Jennifer didn’t have the practical or financial problems of the women she tried to help, she identified with their unhappiness; she was lonely herself. It was often the small things that made her miserable, as though the underlying problems were too great to confront. One friend remembered going on holiday with her to Italy and on the first morning she appeared at breakfast ‘totally shattered’. When asked what the matter was, she said, ‘The leaves.’ It seemed that the geraniums outside her window had been ‘clattering together all night’.472

Jennifer never spoke to me about the visit to Faringdon one hot summer weekend, or about her feelings towards Robert, but she left a description.

I woke early, apprehensive but soon felt better and at 11 a handsome man with a Range Rover arrived to fetch me. I didn’t know him but he turned out to be the son of Gerald’s chauffeur – Webb. Strange is hardly the way to describe my arrival as I was talking to him and didn’t notice we were in Faringdon until we were at the Door. The pigeons were a brighter colour but otherwise at first glance all was the same as ever – including Robert. I was glad to have a drink – 12.30 by then, and I was shaken, and to find I was in the same room no – the same bed, as the rooms have been changed round.

… My heart was so full of memories and my own thoughts and gossip and old times – so different to the times of now. I must try and remember more. I cried now and then but no one knew.

Robert said that’s your bag. I said ‘where?’ and saw it on a chair. He said no, it was a straw fish-shaped bag with a cane handle, under a picture of me. How long had it been there? My voice must have trembled a little.473

Among the guests staying that weekend was the publisher Jonathan Burnham, then an undergraduate at Oxford. He had recently become such a favoured friend of Robert’s that Rosa detested him. Jonathan recalled that Robert had been in a state of anxiety to get everything perfect in preparation for his ex-wife’s stay. Jennifer, on the other hand, evidently felt very emotional and her large, dark eyes frequently brimmed with tears. After lunch, when others went home or disappeared for siestas, Jennifer suggested a walk and the student and the slightly tipsy woman in her mid-sixties strolled down to the lake in the afternoon heat. They sat on a bench by the summer house and talked: Jennifer confessed how much she had loved Robert. Then she asked the young man whether he would like to join her for a swim. When Jonathan protested that he had no trunks, Jennifer retorted, ‘Don’t be so silly, darling,’ stripped naked, lowered herself into the green-tinged water and swam off with a ladylike breaststroke. Jonathan followed suit and later commented that although nothing else happened between them, Jennifer’s behaviour appeared to be ‘a kind of seduction’, as well as an expression of freedom from stuffy conventions.474 Like Robert, Jennifer refused to let her age get in the way of the sort of flirtation or unexpected behaviour that had always been a part of her character. Other friends who came for Sunday lunch that weekend recalled that Robert and Jennifer got on well, making something of a comic double act out of their shared memories. Afterwards, when his ex-wife was leaving, Robert said, ‘Do come back soon, darling,’ and Jennifer quipped, ‘Perhaps I will. This time for good.’475

Y THE TIME ROBERT WAS seventy-four his health was failing. He had had a stroke followed by some smaller ones and had nearly drowned on holiday in Majorca. Frail, unable to walk far without a stick and later, humiliatingly, a Zimmer frame, he took to driving almost everywhere, even within the estate. There was a Range Rover and a Mini and although he had always tended to crash, there were now brushes with death on a regular basis. It was customary to see new cement work patching up the front steps of the house after yet another collision. There had been several stays in hospital in Oxford, from where there were also escapes. Being shut up and restrained was unbearable for him. Once Robert persuaded Don Pargeter, the groundsman at Faringdon, to come and get him from the John Radcliffe. When he got home, it emerged that he had ripped out the tubes and discharged himself; the drip was still inserted in his hand.

Robert was desperate to be at Faringdon, but even there life was no longer easy. He had bouts of increasing gloom, while being cheered up by visits to and from friends. His relationship with Rosa became progressively more fractious. Once, he peed in his trousers in front of her, stepping out of them and leaving her to clear up the mess as if he was a naughty toddler challenging his mother. His fingernails grew long and yellow and sometimes he refused to wash. Rosa threatened to hand in her notice several times, but their lives were so entwined that such a prospect probably seemed impossible to them both.

Friends were worried about Robert, but they were flabbergasted when, in 1985, they heard that he was engaged. The shock was not just that he planned a second wedding, but that the bride was to be Coote. For a man who was known to be fundamentally gay and who had always prioritised beauty, Lady Dorothy Lygon was among the most unlikely choices. True, the pair had been friends all their adult life. Coote’s stalwart devotion to Gerald and Robert had been limitless, and it had long been rumoured that Coote was always secretly in love with the Mad Boy. But marriage was surely beyond her most outrageous dreams. The Daily Express wrote, ‘A Darby and Joan engagement just announced in The Times has led to much chuckling on the grouse moors this week … Both are in their early 70s and were not expected by friends to marry.’

Some thought it one of Robert’s cruel jokes – a nod to the sort of thing he and Gerald had concocted when they placed advertisements for elephants or when the papers announced that Lord Berners was marrying the sapphically inclined Violet Trefusis. However, all doubt about the seriousness of the case was dispelled when anyone spoke to Coote. Known for her sharp mind and placid manner, she now appeared like a giddy girl, confessing, ‘I know I’m seventy-four, but I’m starry-eyed.’476 Robert’s fiancée went to a health farm to lose weight, bought a smart handbag and showed off an impressive sapphire engagement ring. Evelyn Waugh had been dead almost twenty years, but she would surely have loved to tell him that his humiliating tease of ‘marrying off Coote’ – with the implication of its unlikeliness – was now obsolete. Notwithstanding the general consternation, Coote viewed her first marriage with genuine delight and to mark the day she had a cushion embroidered:

To celebrate the marriage between

Lady Dorothy Lygon

And Mr Robert Heber-Percy

on

10th September 1985

Astonishment led to perplexity. Why? Couldn’t they just go on being close friends and neighbours? After all, Coote was so often at Robert’s social events that she was seen as ‘a cross between an ADC and co-host’.477 Was it something to do with inheritance or tax? Maybe Robert wanted to ‘look after’ his old friend, who was far from well off. Or was it that the old Mad Boy still enjoyed shocking people and being unpredictable? Some recalled an equally unlikely marriage over thirty years earlier between Tom Driberg and his middle-aged Labour Party friend, Ena Binfield. Driberg was well known for his rampant appetite for casual sex with young working-class men, and his friends (including many of the Faringdon set) were astonished and, in some cases, appalled at what appeared to be either a big joke or a horrible mistake.