Those Wild Wyndhams (22 page)

Mary’s letters to Hugo, which had once mixed admonitions with caresses in ‘Spression’, were now primarily couched in plain English: asking her husband where he was, when he was coming back, and why he did not reply. Any compliment seemed more an attempt to provoke him into good behaviour than a response to it. Hugo’s incessant infidelity was so poorly concealed that at one point Ettie Grenfell (herself the recipient of his attentions) intervened to urge him, at the very least, to exercise a little discretion.
⁴
At the turn of the decade Hugo began a relationship with the renowned beauty Hermione, Duchess of Leinster, a distant kinswoman by marriage of Mary’s.
⁵
By the early 1890s he was more frequently at Carton, Hermione’s house in Ireland, than at Stanway. If, as he sat at dinner underneath Lord and Lady Edward FitzGerald’s portraits, joking with Hermione’s friends, he felt any pangs of guilt he did not show it.
⁶
Mary reproached him for his inconsiderate behaviour, challenged him on his gambling, asked him questions about children and arrangements: in short, engaged him in the minutiae of married life. Hermione told Hugo that his love for her was ‘the one happiness of her unhappy life’. In her eyes, the errant son and disappointing husband was the perfect lover.
⁷

Mary was widely regarded as a saint for putting up with Hugo, and her perceived forbearance regarding Arthur Balfour was considered, even by the most morally exacting of her contemporaries, to be ‘wonderful’. In 1891, Arthur had returned from Ireland to take up the post of Leader of the House of Commons, and First Lord of the Treasury. The 1892 election delivered Gladstone to power for a fourth time, and put Arthur in opposition. The greater free time this afforded him meant that he and Mary were ever more in proximity. Yet, remarked Ettie Grenfell, ‘I
cannot
make it out – ‘she [Mary] seems never to see him [Arthur] alone, positively to avoid it.’ Ettie put this down to Mary’s ‘prudence … I do admire her courage intensely.’
⁸
‘Lady Elcho is an angel: of all the women I know, an angel,’ said Lady Lyttelton, wife of the soldier Sir Neville.
⁹

Privately there remained, in Mary’s phrase, an ‘unstable equilibrium!’
¹⁰
As she drily pointed out to Arthur, on the increasingly rare occasions when Hugo was with only his family ‘he has more time for observation’. On a summer’s evening in 1890 when all three were visiting the Adeanes at Babraham. Hugo materialized in Mary’s room before dinner and tormented her with questions. Had Arthur ever openly expressed his fondness for her? What exactly had he said? Such questions ‘screw up my entrails! And make me feel quite quivering,’ Mary told Arthur the next day, apologizing for her silence all evening. ‘[C]hilld to the bone’ and feeling ‘particularly helpless and nervous’, she had been unable to talk to him normally. Sitting after dinner in the Italian Colonnade, she had only been able to hope, impotently, that Arthur would ask her to watch the moon rise on the other side of the house, allowing her to escape Hugo’s sardonic gaze. Arthur didn’t.
¹¹
Mary was anguished. She perpetually feared that Arthur would abandon her for a younger, prettier woman who could offer him more by way of sex than she.
¹²
Arthur, capable of cattishness, did not always dispel those fears. In a particularly low blow he even once eulogized Hermione and her artistic skill.
¹³
‘No woman, wife or mother is ever quite her own master,’ said Mary.
¹⁴
Hugo’s and Arthur’s behaviour often forcibly reminded her of that.

By the time Mary arrived at Clouds on 21 December 1892, she had not seen her children for over a month. Her primary concern was for Ego, still overly nervy after a bout of scarlet fever he had contracted in the autumn, but she put it down to Christmas excitement. A shoot planned for 28 December had kept the Adeanes and their girls at Babraham; George and Sibell were at Eaton in Cheshire with the Westminsters; Guy and Minnie were in India. It being a high day and holiday, Hugo was present too.

On Christmas morning the children’s stockings were crammed with toys. As the family walked to East Knoyle church, three-year-old Colin delighted every passer-by with a prattling ‘Merry Christmas’. Just a few hours later he was struck by scarlet fever; Hugo and the other children fell sick the next day. Five-year-old Cynthia remembered ‘a timeless blur of bewildered suffering. Burning heat, raging thirst, tossing and turning in sheets that seemed on fire’.
¹⁵
In a journal that recorded her children’s infancies and early youths, Mary recalled that she had been ordered by the doctor not to go to her children in case she caught the fever herself. But she had already had scarlet fever in her late teens, and would have been immune. In fact, as Mary recorded to George in a letter just a few days later, Mary had stayed by Colin’s side until Hugo ‘begged me to go with tears in his eyes’ for ‘the others’ [children’s] sake’. Half an hour after Mary left him, Colin died. Heartbreakingly, Mary was told that Colin had been conscious and had asked for her.
¹⁶

‘I think there must be
no
heartache like that of losing a child,’ said Pamela as she watched over Mary, lying ‘very still’ in her quiet darkened room.
¹⁷
‘I am sure she is brave &
wonderful
,’ wrote Mananai impotently to her mother as the news reached the Adeanes at Babraham; ‘kiss her from me.’
¹⁸
Colin was buried on a sunny bank under a laburnum tree in the East Knoyle churchyard. By convention Mary did not attend to see the small white coffin decked with flowers go into the earth. A notice in the
Evening Times
alerted the world. Letters of condolence flooded in, offering varying degrees of comfort. Almost all spoke of how close Mary had been to her son, how much she had loved him, how happy his life had been.

Around 14 per cent of infants born in England and Wales between 1860 and 1900 never reached their first birthday. Disease was the most common cause of death, and scarlet fever, gastro-enteritis, dysentery, measles, smallpox and tuberculosis among the most prevalent diseases. Upper-class children had a better rate of survival: approximately 8 per cent of infants died in their first year, and 5 per cent between the ages of one and five. The old assumption that parents of this era were somehow immune to infant death has been discredited. Parents cared deeply, particularly when, like Mary, they had no strong religious faith to console them.
¹⁹

Outwardly and for the sake of her children she put on a ‘resolute, almost jaunty brightness’. Cincie, who tiptoed out of the nursery to find her mother sitting on the stairs ‘weeping as if her heart must break’, knew differently.
²⁰
Mary was plagued by the fear that Colin had died in pain, alone, thinking his mother had abandoned him. She asked Arthur whether life could be checked without great suffering. Arthur employed all his philosophical detachment to help her, but his reductionist argument – ‘It was right that you should be absent … it would have been most wrong because most useless that you should be present’ – can have helped little. But he had a stronger argument: it was ‘not the last farewell, the last look, the last word that
ever
matters’, but the life preceding it, ‘the endless trifles of which everything really important consists’. Between Mary and Colin ‘there never was anything in your relations … which now you need desire to be unsaid or undone. How rarely can a mother say this of any child?’
²¹

Mary and her children, accompanied by a nurse and Cincie’s governess Miss Jourdain, did not leave Clouds until March: Guy Charteris had developed complications from the fever and was too ill to be moved until then. They were to convalesce in Hyères, joining Madeline and Percy who had developed the habit of wintering there. Hugo was to make sporadic visits from London.

The departure was bleak. Guy was sewn up in an eiderdown to protect him from the cold; Cincie wept all the way. Mary had been set on cramming her entire family into one sleeping car, and only with great difficulty was dissuaded from sleeping top-to-toe in a bunk with Cincie, an instinct that seems driven by vulnerability rather than frugality. A party of friends and relatives saw them on to the boat train in London; another met them at Hyères where they settled into a tiny doll’s-house of a place called the Villa Marguerite.

Anyone who has grieved will be drearily familiar with the path that Mary trod that ‘long and un-ending’ spring, as the exaltation of grief gives way to the dull realization that what seems an experiment in loss is actually a new reality. Without a strong faith – throughout her life, her letters spoke little of God – or her mother’s spiritualist beliefs, Mary found little to console her. ‘I do
not
feel as if he were near! … but then I should hate & could not bear to feel that he was hanging about, missing the spring and wanting to live,’ she said to her mother. Not knowing what to think, she had only unanswerable questions and a deep sense of guilt. Watching her children grow stronger and play among the same olive groves she had run through as a child, she felt some relief, but ‘Spring intensifies everything.’ She was ‘horrid’, she told her mother, and nothing could help her.
²²

Mary and her children left Hyères in mid-May and went straight to Felixstowe. In deep mourning, Mary eschewed the Season entirely, only stopping briefly in London to see Madeline Adeane, who had given birth to a third girl, called Madeline after herself. She then left to summer in Sweden where a Dr Widegren had promised to restore her to health. With a distracted mother, the Charteris children ran wild and unruly. They did not return to Stanway until October 1893, almost a year since they had first left it.
²³
Colin’s death drove his parents still further apart. Hugo’s absence is notable in the records of this period. Reading Mary’s bald account of her son’s death in
Family Record
it is hard not to escape the conclusion that she blamed Hugo for her absence from Colin at his death – even, perhaps, for his death. That, even as Mary mourned, in Hermione Leinster’s nurseries was a six-month-old son, a child that was undoubtedly Hugo’s, cannot have failed to intensify Mary’s deep-seated grief and rage.
²⁴

In mid-August Arthur attended a Saturday-to-Monday at Ashridge. Harry Cust, the Brownlows’ heir, Violet Granby and their mutual young cousin Nina Welby were among the party. A drawing of Nina by Violet shows a dark, slim, pretty girl with a distinctly doleful air. Nina was utterly in Violet’s thrall, and well known to be besotted with Harry. Arthur described to Mary an uneventful weekend. He had unsuccessfully tried to evade the clutches of Adelaide Brownlow and been ‘carried off’ by her for a long walk before dinner: ‘she nearly makes me cry with boredom’. He had written a little more of
Foundations of Belief
, which he had begun in 1892 (it was his second book following on from
A Defence of Philosophic Doubt
published in 1879),
²⁵
played some lawn tennis and had a nice talk on art with a young female guest. ‘H.C. seemed to me rather to neglect his harem – those who were there – but was pleasant enough to the outside world.’
²⁶

Shortly afterwards, Harry went to Clouds. His behaviour seemed promising. ‘He does not flirt in the coarse way he did but is deferential & attentive & vy. pleasant to evry [sic] one. He & George have endless arguments on Poetry,’ Madeline Wyndham told Mary.
²⁷
Percy thought Pamela looked prettier, happier and more hopeful every day, though he maintained some misgivings. ‘I
hope
it may all turn out well,’ he told Mary. ‘I wish I had better grounds for
thinking
it would.’
²⁸
It seems likely that at this point Harry and Pamela became secretly engaged. George Wyndham subsequently told Wilfrid Blunt that only the thought that Lucy Graham Smith might ‘make trouble in the matter’ had prevented an announcement before Lucy had been duly mollified.
²⁹

As Harry left Clouds, the state of affairs was ‘like an extremely delicate weather glass’, said Pamela.
³⁰
She knew the dangers of marriage to Harry, but it offered the chance to do more than ‘just live and be passive’. ‘I feel I could without any hesitation jump into a chasm for someone … or cut off a finger – or anything
real
,’ she told Mary. Her letters were filled with rhetorical flourishes: she was a lone warrior going out to meet an army; a sailor refusing to turn back at the sight of stormy seas. She discussed the conflict between her ‘hill self’ – the self of thoughts, ideas and inspiration, found in church and at Bayreuth – and her ‘earth self’ – ‘the one who talks, sleeps and comes down to breakfast’
³¹
– in a convoluted discourse that would have done justice to George pirouetting in the House of Commons. She explained to Mary:

One thing I have learnt in my life & I am glad I have learnt it so young, is that to look for peace & happiness in perfect
entirety
is a wild goose chase in this world … in the end the
chances
of happiness are more equally balanced than one thinks, what may seem ‘wreckage’ viewed in one way – may not be more ‘wreckage’ than lives outwardly perfectly matched.
³²

It was doubtful logic.

In September, Madeline Wyndham took to her bed. Her guests were told she was suffering from rheumatism and a bad cold. It is likely that her nerves were succumbing under the strain. Pamela and Mananai, who was visiting, were left to hold the fort. Pamela took pleasure in the ill-concealed surprise of their eminent guests – mostly male Souls – at finding her and Mananai hosting with not one of the Souls hostesses, like Mary, Ettie or Margot, in attendance. She took equal pleasure in defeating their attempts to make her change her mind about Harry. On a sunset walk Richard Haldane, a Scottish Liberal Imperialist barrister who was gradually being drawn within the Souls’ ambit (and whom Walburga, Lady Paget, a fellow guest that week, thought conversed ‘in epigrams and aphorisms’),
³³
told Pamela that Harry was a man she could better help as friend than as wife, and that he ‘should not regret it’ if she ‘postponed a decision’. The following week Asquith, now Home Secretary, and courting Margot Tennant, talked urgently of silk purses and sows’ ears. Later that day it was Arthur’s turn. From Sweden Mary had begged him to make Pamela see sense, but Arthur was ‘on a pedestal of perfection as always’ and could not bring himself to come down off his plinth to talk about Cust, ‘so we reached home again having discussed civilization!’
³⁴
said Pamela mischievously, particularly delighted to have outwitted Arthur, whose understated intelligence always made her own pretensions seem florid,
and whose loyalty to Mary made her feel scorned. Pamela liked having primacy in people’s affections.