Those Wild Wyndhams (53 page)

Now that she was Countess of Wemyss, and no longer had to kowtow to a difficult father-in-law, Mary refused to stay at Gosford. She rented instead Craigielaw, a small house a short way down the coast. She justified her ‘bungalow’ on financial grounds.
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It allowed one wing of Gosford to be let, and ‘even the most ill-natured cannot pretend that Hugo & I have quarrelled if we lunch or tea together every day!’
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Craigielaw made East Lothian just bearable, limiting her exposure to ‘Hugo (the biggest child of them all)’, the ‘Angel in the house!’ as she called Angela, ‘the dull neighbour and the clergy, the disgruntled farmer or the Beggar at the Gate’. Mary left Frances Charteris, Guy’s wife, to keep the peace. ‘She is the only woman I could count on to do everything in the home exactly as I would have it done only a great deal better!’ Mary told Arthur.
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In 1921, Stanway was redeemed. J. M. Barrie, to whom Cincie had been indispensable as a private secretary since 1918,
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would take it each August, with Cincie acting as his hostess,
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allowing Mary to live there for the rest of the year. The system continued for over a decade, and brought further artists and writers to Stanway. Mary returned to Stanway that autumn, at the time that the Anglo-Irish Treaty ending the bitter War of Independence was signed. She wrote to Arthur while unpacking her ‘household Gods’ of photographs and trinkets: ‘now our home will be here’, she said staunchly.
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She recounted her previous night’s drive in her ‘pony shay’ with Wilkie and Eliza Wedgwood from a musical party back to Stanway: ‘the stars shining brightly out of the velvety deep blue black & so far away sky & the Didbrook church bells ringing for Peace between England & Ireland … All the many different times the bells have pealed or tolled – I feel that I shall hear them when they peal I hope (not toll!) for me … I felt very near to all I loved both those who have gone – so many & the precious few that are left …’
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It is a love letter to Stanway and to her past.

By the 1920s Arthur, author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration promising a national home to Jews in Palestine, and negotiator of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, had been propelled to international statesman: ‘you are the World’s Chef making an apple pie of the universe’, Mary wrote proudly as he attended the World Disarmament Conference in Washington DC in 1921.
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She made light of the contract with herself, ‘all hoary and moss grown in Gloucestershire struggling with my Village Women’s Institutes and War Memorials and looking after my … grandchildren’.
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She remained mischievous and irreverent. At the birth of Mary Strickland’s first child in 1919, Mary, summoned from her bed at Cadogan Square at 3 a.m., was, to her delight, permitted by the doctor to administer the chloroform. ‘I had the time of my life,’ she said.
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At Stanway she composed melodramas for her grandchildren’s Christmas theatricals in which she appeared as a pirate in turban, ‘Moorish coat & riding boots’.
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She redoubtably sat down on the stairs at the formal reopening of Westminster Hall in 1923 when she was tired – the only one with common sense enough to do it, she told Arthur stoutly,
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and Mary Strickland recalled her kneeling on Paddington platform to finish writing a letter begun on the train while all about her streamed the disembarking hordes.
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Mary hustled to provide the funds she needed to keep up Stanway, importuning her friends to provide her with their old finery for a rummage sale to raise the £50 required for electric lighting in Stanway’s barn. ‘Ettie sent me 20 old Hats – & 16 prs of shoes!’ she triumphantly informed Arthur of the event where the servants manned the stalls and Hugo’s valet was auctioneer.
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In 1923, cautioned by Cincie’s experience, Mary echoed history and shepherded a reluctant Bibs into a match with Ivor Windsor-Clive, a shy, awkward man, thirteen years Bibs’s senior.
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Ivor was heir to the earldom of Plymouth, the eldest surviving son of George’s mistress Gay. ‘[I]t warms my heart to think how George would have rejoiced – and my mother …’ said Mary
.
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Madeline Wyndham had died at Babraham on 8 March 1920 at the age of eighty-four. Mary and Mananai were with her in her final weeks as she slipped in and out of consciousness, and her mind wandered through her past. ‘She has gone even further away into the borderland & only returns for short intervals, she still knows Madeline & me but no one else for long,’ Mary wrote to Dorothy Carleton. Dorothy had sent Madeline Wyndham a letter: ‘she held it in her hands all day together with some things I cut out for her … She has no anxiety now & says “I am quite well” & she has no pain just … grows steadily weaker.’ Dorothy had also sent a message from Wilfrid Blunt. Whatever it was, it pulled Madeline Wyndham momentarily back half a century to a handsome cousin’s flattery, for on receiving it ‘she said “he means it!” her smile has been too wonderful’, Mary reported to Dorothy.
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Madeline Wyndham’s body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, her ashes buried in the family plot at East Knoyle on 12 March. She was the last Wyndham to be buried there. Pamela was not among the large crowd of mourners. For several months the Glenconners had been touring America, visiting Grey, who had come out of near retirement to serve as Ambassador to the United States. Pamela decided not to cut short their trip. ‘I was absolutely convinced she was going to die before I returned so it was no extra grief to me,’ she explained to Mary from the Biltmore Hotel in New York, adding that she had taken the precautionary step of leaving an obituary she had written with Frederick Lowndes, who edited
The Times
obituary section, so that he could publish it if her mother died while she was away. Pamela’s spiritualism had rendered her strangely impervious to grief. She had sought out mediums in every place the Glenconners visited, from Chicago to California (Eddy had privately chartered a Pullman to make the journey).
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Her first act upon hearing the news of her mother’s death – in Boston – had been to go, anonymously, to a medium named Mrs Chenoweth. It was a ‘very beautiful’ sitting, she told Mary, ‘and the very first person who came was darling Mamma, it gave me such a great comfort … I can truly say I am thankful she is released – into the fuller Life, which I
know
is now hers! … I dwell in the thought of her joy.’
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America had given the spectacularly wealthy Glenconners a rapturous reception. ‘… I never knew I was so delightful! or could be so clever! – how overlooked I have been until now! What have the people in London been thinking about? – didn’t they know that when I was with them? … my room is a bower of roses, the table groans under cards …’ Pamela wrote in her diary as they arrived in New York.
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They were fulfilling a semi-ambassadorial role, helping promote relations between the nations (the subject of an address made by Eddy to New York’s Sulgrave Institution).
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Their every step was followed by pressmen, fascinated by the
‘Scottish Magnate’ and his eccentrically beautiful wife, who organized her thirteen-year-old son to give dance recitals at their hotels.
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In England the work of the press barons – both Lords Beaverbrook and Northcliffe were friends of Pamela’s – was coming to fruition. The public was avid for tales of upper-class eccentricity. Pamela and her family provided it to perfection. Less than six months after their return to England Eddy died, aged sixty-one, in a private nursing home after suffering complications from what was intended to be a routine operation.
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He left Wilsford and Queen Anne’s Gate in trust to Pamela. Christopher, now the second Baron Glenconner, inherited Glen. The remainder, valued at £814,479 gross (a sum of over £17 million in today’s money), was divided predominantly between David and Stephen, with a large lump sum to Clare, a bequest to Edward Grey and an annuity to Nanny Trussler.
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Pamela, a widow not yet fifty, proved her mettle. She let out Queen Anne’s Gate to a shipbuilding magnate and his wife on a rolling seven-year lease, so that Christopher could move back in when he married, and took 4 Buckingham Street, a ‘dear little house’ two doors down from Guy and Frances Charteris on a street ‘like Quality Street in its prettiness’. Pamela decorated the house with cream-coloured walls, ‘dark Columbine blue’ curtains and carpet, and chintz sofas and chairs; the ‘dark red roses & pink roses look so lovely against the … blue curtains’, she told Dorothy Carleton. The magnate and his wife had been happy to caretake the larger pictures in the Gallery, so Pamela had brought ‘
only
a picked few of the smaller canvassed pictures’ with her to the new house. She listed them for Dorothy and Wilfrid: two Turners, two Bonningtons, a Constable, three Nasmyths (‘great favourites’), two Lancrets, two Hogarths, one Floris, the Orpen of Madeline Wyndham, the Lawrence crayon of Charles Dickens,
The Leslie Boy
by Raeburn, Mignard’s portrait of Colbert, the Reynolds of ‘the dew bird’,
Miss Stephens
by Zoffany,
The Widow Wadham
and
The Uncle Toby
by Leslie, a woman’s head by Angelica Kauffmann, the Millais of Lady Millais as Marguerite, the Natier of the Duc de Guise, Morland’s
Industry
and
Idleness
‘and a Fragonard’.
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From the moment of Eddy’s death, Margot had scrutinized the Tennants, hawk-like, for sufficient distress. Mary described to Ettie Margot’s behaviour during a fraught visit to the Tennants at Glen, where they had repaired immediately after Eddy’s death; ‘no tears, no heart, the dry-eyed are relegated to an everlasting limbo of callousness & cruelty,’ she added wryly. As for Pamela, who refused to break down in front of Margot: ‘I think one may as well … be thought “to have done one’s husband to death”.’
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Shortly afterwards, Pamela began to hear reports from friends of a ‘story of falsehood’ and neglect reeled out by Margot at dinner parties
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– that Pamela and her children had shamefully abandoned Eddy to die alone in his nursing home.

Pamela confronted her sister-in-law: ‘Margot, I do not open my letter with the conventional term of endearment, as I cordially dislike you. Will you write me your apology for perverting the truth of my conduct towards Eddy on his death bed? I do not require a long letter; having neither time nor inclination for anything beyond the apology for which I ask. Yours, in utter sincerity …’
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Pamela subsequently explained that she had been with Eddy on the day of his death for almost fourteen hours straight, from ‘4 a.m. till about 6.30 (or 6 … I cannot recall accurately)’. She was only absent at the moment of death because she had ‘fainted through anguish and lack of food’ and been taken back to Queen Anne’s Gate by Eddy’s brother Jack to eat and change.
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Margot backtracked enough to give a semblance of apology, and Pamela graciously accepted it as though it were fulsome: ‘we will not quarrel for Eddy’s sake’, she told her sister-in-law.
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To Pamela’s mind this was still very much a present obligation, as she remained in close contact with her dead husband. ‘I have received two most excellent Messages in Book Tests from Bim & Eddy together … they are singularly
Good
and made me happy,’ she wrote to Mary three months after Eddy’s death.
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She spoke of her dead as though she had just put down the telephone to them, encouraged by Oliver Lodge, so nearby at Normanton House, where he had built a large room to serve as a laboratory for further psychical experiments.
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Her granddaughter Dinah Bethell remembered her sitting on her bed each morning, recounting the previous night’s conversations with Bim.
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More bitterly, Stephen recalled arriving back at Wilsford, having been taken by his friend (and lover) Siegfried Sassoon to meet the elderly Thomas Hardy. He burst into the house, eager to tell his mother about the encounter. Pamela, according to Stephen, barely looked up from her spiritualist tract.
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In February 1922,
The Times
reported that it was ‘authorised’ to announce that Pamela and Grey would marry in the early summer of that year.
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At half-past eight on the morning of Sunday 4 June, Pamela and Grey were married at St Michael’s Church in Wilsford. Christopher Tennant gave Pamela away; Edward’s sister Mrs Curtis was the only other witness. The ceremony was kept so secret that the villagers of Wilsford did not even know of it until it was over.
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Grey had in fact proposed on Whitsunday a full year before, cycling over to Wilsford after an ‘odious paragraph’ of speculation in the press. Then, Pamela had refused. At the time she told Lucy Graham Smith that it was because her sons still needed her, and expressly asked Lucy to tell ‘your immediate circle’ – meaning Margot – that Grey ‘would not have suggested a thing so early had he not thought that the paragraph in the Press had worried me’.
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A year later, Pamela had decided to bow to her sisters-in-law no longer. ‘[T]he great step was taken, at last, by me,’ she told Wilfrid.

I had no really valid reason for refusing any longer, and now that it is taken, I am quite certain it was right. Edward is so very fond of me, and I can be of use to him: and he is a wonderful LOVER and makes me very happy in a hundred ways … I feel – like Philip Sydney’s mother – who made her second marriage so late in life that, like her, I could inscribe inside my wedding ring ‘NO Spring till now’ …
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The press leapt on the news.
The Times
on 6 June reported ‘A “Marriage of the Minds”’, talking of the newlyweds’ many shared interests (the correspondent is anonymous, but the tone smacks of Marie Belloc Lowndes). A double-page spread in the American press, on ‘The Romantic Miracle of England’s Loneliest Man’, claimed that Grey’s sight had been cured by his nuptials: ‘Now all of England is saying that the healing touch of the woman he loved brought life to the stricken nerves that had been pronounced dead by surgery.’
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