Those Wild Wyndhams (29 page)

Wilfrid and Mary finally met in late August, clandestinely on the London-to-Brighton slow train, at Mary’s direction. Wilfrid recorded their conversation almost verbatim in his diary. Heavily pregnant, dressed in a black dress with a white scarf and a pearl necklace, Mary was looking ‘well and strong and pretty’ and cheerful. She gave every appearance of being happy to see him. Wilfrid had brought her a basket of peaches to remind her of the apples she carried in the desert, and as she munched her way through them she recounted how she had dealt with Hugo’s interrogations and weathered the storm of the last few months. She had refused to be drawn on the ‘seduction’ beyond the bare fact of its occurrence. ‘He asked me “whether I intended to bring it up with his own children” and I said I supposed so and that was all … he will not take any notice of it [the baby], but nobody will remark that.’ Now, she said, the Elchos never talked of the matter: ‘perhaps he [Hugo] does not think of it’. She said that Arthur, though a little jealous of Wilfrid, suspected nothing either.

There is nothing to suggest, beyond Wilfrid’s tendency to embroider, that this is not an accurate account of the conversation. As discussed on that journey, George was indeed made a godfather of the child, and Wilfrid did provide through him. Nonetheless certain statements leap out oddly. It cannot be, for example, that Mary was genuinely considering calling the child ‘Zobeyde’ if it were a girl, as Wilfrid insists.
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And while it is probable that she was hoping the child would be a girl, so as to avoid ‘the dynastic question of the Wemyss inheritance’, she cannot truly have meant it when she said, ‘I know my own children will die as a punishment to me,’
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particularly since she had lost a beloved child only three years before. Hugo required Mary to play the victim in order to forgive her; Blunt could only accept Mary, pregnant with his child yet seamlessly maintaining her life as Lady Elcho, if she was racked with secret remorse. Wilfrid departed the train, as agreed, at Preston Park, leaving Mary, still eating peaches, to travel on to the final stop alone, where she was to be greeted by a Campbell cousin, Edward Stanford.

Mary Pamela Madeline Sibell Charteris was born on 24 October 1895 (‘a most delicious little baby girl, exactly what I wanted’, Mary told Blunt disingenuously of the ‘family baby’ who was named after one side of the family only).
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To the great relief of her family and friends Mary was unharmed by the birth, and recovered well.
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She was delighted with the child, from the first the most beautiful of all her children, and rapturous in the description she gave to Blunt: ‘She is absolutely round plump healthy and beautifully made, very dark with long soft brown hair – huge glittering eyes with long drooping lids and pencilled eyebrows,
lovely
hands bewitching mouth and
arched
feet … when she opens her eyes she looks you thro’ and thro’ – and she might be gazing fearlessly across the desert.’
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Wilfrid met the child for the first time in a rendezvous at an inn near Cheltenham the following year,
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an engagement that was deliberately planned in Hugo’s absence for Mary was acutely aware that ‘a meeting might be very terrible’.
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Four years later, Blunt still sent letters to Mary via Belgrave Square, lest Hugo catch sight of his handwriting. ‘There’s a letter to you from Wilfrid, Mary, extraordinary fellow that he is! Why doesn’t he write to you at your own house?’ Percy’s bemused response demonstrates just how successfully the secret was kept.
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In the years to come Mary would often be vexed by Wilfrid’s reproachful urgings to see her and their daughter. But when she felt like it she was quite willing to remind him of her time as ‘yr Bedouin wife’; to speak meaningfully of ‘footsteps in the sand!!’; even to revisit the romance. ‘I
am lost
– in a tent,’ she told him blissfully in 1901 after ‘stumbling’ across him and his blue and white carpet while on a solitary early-morning walk through the grounds of Clouds.
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Some five years after that she gloated over a nighttime visit to a convalescent Wilfrid in London when her ‘somewhat unorthodox treatment’ had managed ‘in a few seconds, [to] turn an invalide [sic] into a distinctly rampageous young man’.
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After each sexual encounter, Mary assured Wilfrid that it was the last, threatening with relish to become the model of ‘professional cousinly’ rectitude, ‘quiet and undisturbing’. ‘I shall have on a quaker or salvation Army bonnet … or a nun’s veil … or rather my soul will be draped in suchlike garments … I shall be as dull as anything,’ she announced after her nighttime visit in 1906.
⁴⁵
Perhaps one of the strangest twists of this tale was that by this point Dorothy Carleton was living with Wilfrid, ostensibly acting as his nurse but actually having an affair with him. When Wilfrid recovered, he ‘adopted’ Dorothy so that she could continue to live with him, as she did, until his death in 1922. It caused the final breach between Wilfrid and Anne, and occasioned much bitterness from Judith Blunt and Dorothy’s brother Guy. The Wyndhams accepted it without a bat of the eyelid, and continued to be as close to Dorothy as they had ever been.
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The real distress for Mary came when she revealed to Arthur the truth of her child’s paternity, and genuinely did have to destroy an ideal. A cryptic letter from her in the spring of 1896 speaks of an unhappy afternoon spent at Arthur’s house at 4 Carlton Gardens. ‘I hated having to distress you,’ she says.
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Mary was already five months pregnant with Yvo, the Elchos’ true ‘reconciliation baby’ born in 1896, who was the apple of Hugo’s eye, so the revelation cannot have been her pregnancy. But she did not lose Arthur. In fact, it reminded him – as it had Hugo – that Mary could be desirable to other men. And as one thinks of pregnant Mary, elegant in her black dress and pearls, dismounting at Brighton to be met by her cousin, with her hold on her husband, her ‘friend’, her children and her social life intact, it is very hard to resist giving her a silent, heartfelt cheer.

The Souls thought the marriage of the youngest Wyndham to the eldest Tennant would provide a new nexus of power. ‘I am so glad they have got anyone so delicious as Pamela to take over Glen!’ Frances Horner enthused to D. D. Lyttelton.
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It did not take Pamela long to rectify these misapprehensions nor much time before a civil war had developed between her and her redoubtable sisters-in-law.

After a brief honeymoon, Eddy and Pamela made their way to Glen, where the entire Tennant clan had decamped for the summer. Wilfrid Blunt, on seeing Pamela briefly in London just before, thought her looking ‘very slight, and rather pale, and perfectly lovely’, and also happy: ‘not rapturously … but perhaps sufficiently’.
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Pamela assured her family that she was indeed happy, and thankful, she declared to George, for the decision she had made in Florence.
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But Pamela’s tone was muted, and there are clues which indicate that her honeymoon, such as it was, had been a shock to her. In 1918, Marie Stopes’s bestselling
Married Love
confronted its fascin-ated readers with the necessity of the female orgasm, attributing many of the neuroses of modern women to unsatisfying marital relations. Pamela, when she was nearly fifty, told Marie Stopes that ‘meeting with your book has given me a sense of fellow-feeling & comfort’. She referred to a conversation in which ‘I have never spoken to anyone as I did to you’.
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It is hard to escape the conclusion: sexually, Pamela and Eddy were a mismatch.

For both Pamela’s sisters, the novel delight of sex had eased their transition into married life. Pamela was precipitated into a new world without that comfort. Glen compounded her loneliness. A mock-baronial monstrosity, windswept and cold, the house was ‘so
different
to what I have always lived among’, she complained to George, shrinking into herself and longing for the light and air of Clouds – ‘it is as if Morris were not – nor had been’.
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Meanwhile the fundamental differences between the Tennant and the Wyndham ways of life were daily becoming more apparent.

‘I find Sir Charles very difficult to get on with,’ said Pamela, ‘a curious grown-up child – with whims & tantrums’ and a line in selective deafness that drove her to distraction. She found the Bart overbearing, dictatorial and ridiculously sentimental: ‘Eddy says he can’t read Prayers without wobbling,’ she told George exasperatedly, and at dinner, she explained, ‘the conversation trails like a winged bird, lower and lower till it gradually settles down among stocks and shares, or the indifferent among the poems of Burns.’ ‘It’s true … there is an awful leg to the table corner which takes all my thoughts; – it’s the kind of leg to the table you can’t forget, but still I think it’s his fault rather’.
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Pamela had been dominant in her own social circle. By marriage to Eddy she was ‘grafted’ on to the Souls, ‘a world of friends already so formed & complete’ a good decade older than her.
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She had no inclination to assume a junior role, and was constantly enervated by her sisters-in-law’s reminders of how much better they knew ‘dear Eddy’ than she; and, in Margot’s case, how, until her own marriage to Asquith in 1894, she had been Glen’s chatelaine in all but name. Mary advised Pamela to remember that the Tennants were akin to the vultures in the Bible verse: wherever there was death and destruction, there they would be, teasing out pain and worrying away at weak spots.
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The Tennant women were caustic, unsentimental and matter-of-fact. Their frank approach pierced Pamela’s pretensions; their claims on Eddy provoked uncontrollable jealousy in her. She professed horror when, rhapsodizing about the Scottish hills on a carriage ride with Charty, she saw that her companion, head down, was knitting furiously, heedless of the beauty all around. She deplored their habit of facing conflicts head on. In retaliation, she became ever more vague and ethereal. ‘The more I see of them,’ she wrote to Mary of her sisters-in-law two years into her marriage, ‘the more I realize what
very
remarkable women they are [and] I don’t mean it in a wholly complimentary sense … they have so many qualities that
equip
them almost unfairly for the fray of Life compared to most other women.’
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Pamela seized upon the opportunity provided by her first pregnancy to escape. Eddy had promised to take a house in Wiltshire, and paid over the odds to secure the rental of Stockton House, just a few miles from Clouds. While waiting for it to be made ready, Pamela retreated to her childhood home. Barely six months after her marriage, she was back at Clouds, embroidering hats with Wommy and knitting the intricate patterns at which she excelled for the baby due in July 1896. She wrote Eddy long letters about the minutiae of her days, her quick pen sketching out a scene in its quintessence: the obsequious waiter who had served her and Wommy with tea at Mere; the children round the maypole at Clouds; Charlie Adeane lecturing the assembled company at Clouds with his views on matters ranging from educational reform to poultry breeding.
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Eddy visited Pamela when he could in between conducting family business in London and shooting and fishing at Glen. He diligently corresponded with her when he could not. Adoring and fearful of his beautiful wife, Eddy canvassed opinions among his sisters and sisters-in-law as to the best possible nursemaids and governesses; trailed around Glen’s nurseries with Pamela’s latest letter in hand checking that everything from skirting-board length to the new Morris wallpaper accorded with her instructions. He dealt with all Stockton’s furnishing and staffing – by convention, Pamela’s domain – even down to buying the glasses, linen and crockery for the servants’ hall, sourcing and interviewing staff.
¹¹
Notoriously parsimonious, Eddy had long been casting a critical eye over the extravagance of the Bart’s practices at Glen, but, to Margot’s rage, he encouraged his wife to buy whatever took her fancy for the new house. He gave each of Pamela’s points his full attention, whether considering ‘Wommy’s [newly trimmed] Hat’ (‘sounds fascinating’)
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or the news that Pamela had dreamt on three successive occasions of flowers (‘it is curious’).
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He scoured Glen from top to toe for a book of Scottish songs she was missing; he was enraptured when she wrote to him of a drawing she had done, and was ‘longing’ to have it framed and hung up.
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He was thrilled when she told him that she was beginning to read about politics in the newspapers.
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And as Pamela’s complaints about her first pregnancy steadily increased – a litany of aches and pains, neuralgia, indigestion, excessive ‘wriggling’ from the baby and haunting dreams – Eddy provided all the sympathy for which Pamela could have hoped. By the end he was swearing never to leave her again.
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