Those Wild Wyndhams (19 page)

Two weeks later, back at Stanway, Mary was hosting Doll Liddell, Gladys de Grey, Emmie and Eddy Bourke, the Pembrokes, Harry and Daisy White, George Curzon, Alan Charteris and D. D. Balfour. D.D., who later married Alfred Lyttelton, was no relation to Arthur Balfour. A London businessman’s daughter, she was drawn into the Souls by merit of her brilliant talk and engaging intellect. Curzon, meeting her for the first time, was drawn by her considerable personal charms and tried to grope her when they were momentarily alone in the dining room at breakfast.
¹¹
The Whites, the only non-British Souls, were Americans who had been in England since 1884 by reason of diplomat Harry White’s position as First Secretary to the US Legation. Daisy White, a close friend of Edith Wharton’s since childhood, was well admired, pretty, ambitious, and a key player among the rivalrous female Souls.
¹²
That evening, the party dressed as Cavaliers and Puritans, and sat on the stairs, moonlight streaming over them as D.D. and Emmie sang. ‘Most of us looked quite picturesque and we all felt very sentimental. I wish you had been there and then it might have been perfect for me; or as perfect as anything can be,’ Mary told Arthur.
¹³

In fact, and unusually for Mary, she had counted the days until the party ended.
¹⁴
The fire had left her ‘physically abattu … as if everything had been wiped out of my brain with a clean sponge or
burnt
away’.
¹⁵
Each morning was devoted to writing ‘Fire letters’, replying to the scores of condolences she received – many asking if it was true that Clouds really had been razed to the ground. ‘I’ve done 25 today & yest & spent whole mornings in bed, writing and blotting self & sheets,’ she recounted to Arthur some two weeks after the fire itself.
¹⁶

In the fire’s aftermath, the family ‘knew nothing except how much we all loved each other & how close together we were drawn’.
¹⁷
‘[H]ow tightly we are bound … how we all stand and fall together,’ George Wyndham said to his mother.
¹⁸
Volatile Pamela was ‘very brave and behaved splendidly’ despite the loss of everything she owned, but she had nightmares about the fire for years.
¹⁹
To doubtless intense relief Madeline Wyndham’s nerves held up under the strain: perhaps the destruction of her jewel-like house confirmed her belief that the forces of light and darkness walked hand in hand. At least, she often said, death had never entered into the house.
²⁰
Yet the utter destruction of Clouds – what Georgie Burne-Jones called ‘that beautiful monument of loving and successful labour’
²¹
– was, said Betty Balfour, a ‘heart-breaking event’.
²²
Philip Burne-Jones cited the calamity to Gerald Balfour as philosophical proof of the existence of evil.
²³
The most romantic of the Wyndhams’ children echoed this view. ‘Who the gods love die young,’ said Pamela, describing Clouds as ‘too ideal to live’.
²⁴
From Ireland, George vowed to ‘begin at once defeating evil Fortune and making it lovely again’.
²⁵
Both he and Pamela regarded the fire, the first calamity they had faced, as an indication that the world must have been corrupted. Their self-conscious bravery is a reminder of how distinct Disraeli’s ‘two nations’ of rich and poor remained: it displayed the arrogance of the Wyndhams’ ‘Plantagenet’ strain. Of all the Wyndhams’ children only Mary put the loss in perspective, not railing against fate, only pitying her parents. ‘I’ve aches and aches for them and I have not suffered half enough it’s too hard; all their love and labour lost, when one
did
so want them to enjoy the well-earned fruits of all their pains,’ she wrote to Arthur.
²⁶

The conflagration in
Poynton
destroys, for ever, the work of a lifetime. The Wyndhams defied this. Webb’s estimate for rebuilding was £26,741 17s. To Percy’s relief, the insurers of the house and its contents paid in full, £28,345 12s from the Sun Insurance Company and £27,000 from the Royal Insurance Company, enabling him to rebuild Clouds identically – except with fire-proof flooring, additional tin-lined water pipes to avoid further troublesome plumbing and a new boot cupboard for Percy in his dressing room – and to refurnish it, replacing treasures lost in the fire. Percy calculated that he was only £3,000 out of pocket.
²⁷
The Wyndhams moved into the offices for the duration of the rebuilding, operating a reduced staff and having only close friends to stay. ‘It is a good thing that our architect was a socialist because we find ourselves just as comfortable in the servants’ quarters as we were in our own,’ commented Madeline Wyndham cheerfully.
²⁸
They re-entered the ‘Beautiful Phoenix’, as they termed it, two and a half years later on 29 August 1891.
²⁹

In Society’s collective memory, the 1889 Season was a good one, enlivened by the Shah of Persia’s visit, and the bursting into the public consciousness of the Souls after a dinner held by George Curzon for his thirty or so closest friends at the Bachelors’ Club in Piccadilly. It was also the Season in which George Wyndham entered Parliament as the Conservative Member for Dover after a by-election in July 1889 (‘Isn’t it
delightful
George being an M.P.? & for Dover too such a nice place,’ said Mananai);
¹
and the eighteen-year-old Pamela Wyndham finally made her debut.

‘The Babe’, as Pamela was known to her family and their friends, appeared to have been granted all the blessings that accrue, fairytale-like, to the youngest child. With her delicate features and refined air,
²
she was considered the most beautiful of the sisters, second only to George in terms of Wyndham looks and, like him, ‘literary and clever’, as Mary remarked admiringly.
³
Pamela’s contemporary, Edith Olivier, whose father was canon of nearby Wilton, said that Pamela ‘seemed to pour ideas into one’s mind like an empty glass’.
⁴
Like George, galloping across the Downs at sunrise and quoting Ronsard, Pamela rejected crude reality in favour of an idealized past. From a young age she collected folk ballads, and noted picturesque examples of village dialect. She read avidly, and kept a tally: seventy books for 1889. She adored the Brontës’ tales of wild moors and love against the odds (‘I can always read anything by them,’ she told Mary),
⁵
the romances of Scott and the diaries of her FitzGerald ancestors. George addressed Pamela as ‘Pamela III’ in homage to Lady Edward (their grandmother, Lady Campbell, being ‘Pamela II’); and there was certainly something regal in the way she comported herself. She disparaged ‘the tyranny of the red blotting pad’ over Mary, which meant that her sister spent her time writing letters rather than reading books: Mary’s never diminishing ‘nest egg’ of unanswered letters ‘is too much of a time-sucker with you!’ said Pamela.
⁶

Pamela in her late teens, by Violet Manners.

On seeing Pamela at this age Wilfrid Blunt was struck by her similarity to Mary, but Mary disclaimed the resemblance: ‘Imagination I may have but wit
never
! & I was so silent.’
⁷
In fact they were very little alike. Pamela was born demanding attention: she was passionately jealous of those she loved. From little more than toddlerhood she sobbed if a sibling received a letter or present from their parents and she did not. At Clouds, she was queen. Villagers and guests alike were well accustomed to recitals from Pamela, singing folk ballads while accompanying herself on her ribbon-bedecked guitar, a Lacôte – the Stradivarius of guitar makers – which she received for her eighteenth birthday.
⁸

Pamela had a constant sense of expectation, of greatness imminent; a sharp tongue; a facility for damning with faint praise; and her mother’s love of birds: ‘they would fly to her finger when she called, which she thought was marvellous’, remembered Sir Stephen Runciman, a neighbour and contemporary of Pamela’s children.
⁹
The comment might be a metaphor for Pamela’s relationship with people, and when she entered Society, people flocked to her, attracted, no doubt, by her air of lofty unconcern. She did ‘not allow her partners much time for talking or nonsense but kept them going’, said Percy approvingly of her tendency to whisk young men efficiently around the dance floor.
¹⁰

At almost a decade younger than most of the Souls, Pamela was still too newly arrived in Society to be a guest at Curzon’s farewell dinner on 10 July 1889. Curzon had been diagnosed with lung trouble. He intended to summer in the healthful Alps, then travel across Central Asia to Persia, the buffer between India and Russia and fulcrum of Anglo-Russian rivalry. Renowned even at twenty-eight for his imperious manner and a self-confidence so fervent that people thought it must be hubristic, he was doggedly pursuing his long-held ambition to be India’s Viceroy.

Persia’s Shah was in fact being honoured that very same night at a dinner given by Lord Rothschild at Waddesdon Manor – meaning that some of those Curzon had invited could not attend the Bachelors’ Club. The guests arrived to find a long, well-dressed table lit by candles, covered in blue glass and silver, and decorated with crystal bowls of flowers. Behind each chair, instead of footmen, stood club servants. On each chair was a lengthy piece of doggerel by Curzon listing and eulogizing each member of the Gang, both present and absent. Margot Tennant, always mindful of posterity, swiped her copy and recorded the work fifty years later in her memoirs. The verse on Mary and Hugo, with its sly reference to Hugo’s infidelity, exemplified Curzon’s tone:

Curzon’s recital of his poem raised his already ebullient guests to exuberant spirits. Raucous singing and dancing followed. Even the normally reserved Balfour was capering as if possessed amid fun ‘so loud it was impossible to hear anyone speak’. Eventually the party adjourned to the Tennants’ house in Grosvenor Square where they danced until the early hours. The survivors, including Lady Brownlow, made their way home via the old flower market in Covent Garden, weaving through sleepy streets hazy with the morning sun, their arms full of flowers.

By lunchtime reports of the Souls’ wild evening were already being exchanged third hand. Frances Balfour had bumped into a fresh-faced Lady Brownlow before eleven o’clock in the morning and been brought back to the Brownlows’ for breakfast. The house was ‘cool as an icebox’ and ‘a bower of roses’ as usual, Frances told Betty Balfour that afternoon, passing on the gossip as soon as she received it. As Lady Brownlow furnished Frances with the details of the night before, her nephew Harry Cust stumbled in, still bleary-eyed, startled to see visitors already present. Lady Brownlow repaired to her bedroom with Frances in tow. She settled Frances into a comfortable chair, and grilled her guest on her views concerning the immortality of the soul.
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It is understandable that Arthur, fond of her though he was, described Adelaide Brownlow as ‘occasionally quite terrible’.
¹²

The dinner made the Souls famous. By 1890 the
World
was devoting articles to ‘this highest and most aristocratic cult … as liberal in its views as it is exclusive in its composition … Certain intellectual qualities are prominent among the Souls and a limited acquaintance with Greek philosophy is a
sine qua non
.’
¹³
Three years later Henry Labouchere’s radical
Truth
got its hands on an ‘Expression Exam paper’: a quiz set by female Souls to while away a rainy afternoon and printed it in full:

1. Explain the following: The dull box. A greenhouse. A gorge riser. Gilletmongering. Atrophasia. Stinche. A Lou-good. Jephson. Whippingham. A felbrig. A float-face. Barloon.