Those Wild Wyndhams (54 page)

Grey’s sight had continued to deteriorate to the point that he was practically blind, and neither operation (which he tried) nor love (which he had) was going to fix it. But the marriage was very happy. The Greys moved, in London, to Mulberry House, an elegant Lutyens house on gas-lit Smith Square in Westminster,
⁵³
but on the whole
they
divided their time between Wilsford and Fallodon. Pamela was spotted shopping in Newcastle with a green parrot on her shoulder (the same parrot was walking on her bed at Mulberry House the last time that Mary saw her sister).
⁵⁴
‘He was sometimes a long-suffering husband,’ recalled David Tennant’s wife, Hermione – but the example she gave was simply of Pamela, ‘not renowned for her punctuality’, keeping a resigned Grey waiting by the car,
⁵⁵
a far cry from the tales of Pamela terrorizing Eddy. A ‘very perfect friendship’ had become still better a marriage.
⁵⁶
‘I feel I can write to you … telling you that I am happy, I was going to say
– at last
,’ Pamela told Wilfrid, remembering distant Stockton days when her cousin had asked her if she was happy, and she had been unable to reply.
⁵⁷

Pamela and Grey undoubtedly had a sexual relationship. Marie Belloc Lowndes, who never left a confidence unrevealed, said in her memoirs that Pamela had a miscarriage shortly after her marriage, which she attributed to an overlong drive to a political meeting.
⁵⁸
This was in the early spring of 1923. At fifty-two, older than what is now the average age for menopause, Pamela’s chances of miscarriage were extremely high. Her doctor prescribed three weeks of bed-rest, and no exertion for a further three months: ‘a holiday for 3 months! A lovely prescription! … I believe Dr Aarons is going to combine a douching or ichth[y]ol treatment during the 3 weeks to increase the slender hope for the future,’ Pamela explained to Marie Stopes from Wilsford in March.
⁵⁹

Pamela had not forgotten her debt of gratitude to Stopes. She agreed with pleasure (when most other grandees who were approached regretfully declined) to become a patron of Stopes’s first birth-control clinic, the Mothers’ Clinic, in Holloway, North London, on its opening in 1921. She even hoped to connect that ‘fine work’ with her Home for Working Mothers in Westminster, where ‘I have the Infant Welfare scheme … The mothers who attend there, & they are continually increasing, would benefit by your work being made known to them.’
⁶⁰
Throughout the 1920s, Pamela arranged for contraceptive devices to be provided to Wilsford’s villagers. In some instances, this was to help women who already had large families. ‘I want to help [her] to feel secure … can I get one of the little rubber fitments you invented? If so where –’ she said of one early case.
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Yet Pamela, like Stopes (and many more, including John Maynard Keynes, Havelock Ellis and Balfour),
⁶²
was an advocate of eugenic theory, then part of a progressive ideology. Eugenics applied in this context meant the use of birth control to prevent breeding among, in Stopes’s words, the ‘inferior, the depraved, and the feeble-minded’.
⁶³
In an undated letter to the Stopes Society, Pamela asked for ‘some appliances’ that she could ‘take down … & explain … the use of’ to a woman in Wilsford village: ‘She is not of very high intelligence, & it is really of importance that she should not bear a child. She has just married … I should be glad to be of use to her.’
⁶⁴

Despite her belief in Stopes’s work, Pamela always gracefully resisted appearing on platforms at Stopes’s meetings. Possibly this was her old fear of public speaking. She was probably also reluctant to become the controversial movement’s figurehead that Stopes clearly wished her to be. On her remarriage, she gave up public support entirely. ‘I have been a breaking reed, I fear: not in conviction, but in supporting you in public,’ she told Stopes, explaining that ‘Lord Grey is averse to my taking up public work, though he knows & admires your work …’
⁶⁵
It is most likely that Grey could not countenance Pamela having public involvement in this work.

Pamela was not to have another child. In 1925, she wrote to Mananai recounting another prolonged period of bed-rest, with troublesome heart and raised blood pressure. She explained that the underlying cause was ‘the change’ – the menopause. ‘[S]he has had to give up doing everything & live the life of an invalid,’ Mananai told Mary.
⁶⁶
The Greys and Stephen spent the winter in Madeira and the spring in Vernet-les-Bains.

Grey’s
Twenty-Five Years
had just been published, to remarkable commercial success (six impressions in six months) and critical acclaim. It was widely considered to vindicate Britain’s entry into the war. Grey’s dedication to Pamela explained that she had read over what he had written each day, offering suggestions and improvements. It seems that this amounted, in some cases, to rewriting.
Twenty-Five Years
contains an anecdote of Grey, as a child, seeing the Northern Lights and thinking them Paris burning in the 1870 Siege. It replicates almost exactly a supposed childhood memory of the Wyndhams, published in George’s
Life and Letters
that same year.
⁶⁷
In one biography of Grey Pamela has been presented as a society dalliance who had no impact on his life and work.
⁶⁸
This is emphatically not so.

An added frisson of interest for the popular press was that this elder statesman breakfasted with stepchildren who were leading lights of the Bright Young Things. Immense wealth, good looks (‘Of course, we have the fatal gift of beauty, darling,’ Stephen commented)
⁶⁹
and utter disdain for convention made Clare, David and Stephen irresistible to the press. David founded the notorious Gargoyle Club, a louche Soho nightspot that drew into its mirrored rooms everyone from the Prince of Wales to Tallulah Bankhead and the Bloomsbury Group. He married, in 1927, the pint-size revue star Hermione Baddeley, famous for her rendition of Noël Coward’s ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’, written especially for her.
⁷⁰
Stephen was the androgynous beauty immortalized by Cecil Beaton, whose ‘Silver Room’ in Mulberry House, wallpapered in silver foil, with a polar-bearskin rug on the floor, was the subject of a
Vogue
spread (Pamela said it looked like an iceberg).
⁷¹
Several of Beaton’s most famous photographs of the Bright Young Things were taken at Wilsford, including that, in Pamela’s drawing room, of Beaton, Stephen, Baby and Zita Jungman, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Rex Whistler, Elinor Wylie and Rosamond Lehmann lying on a rug underneath a tigerskin. In another, on the bridge over the Avon, men and women alike are dressed as Regency dandies in breeches with powdered faces, the river still as glass below them. Clare was an icy Society beauty, regularly featured in the press.

In
Broken Blood
, a family biography, Pamela’s descendant Simon Blow alleged the corruption of an industrious, Presbyterian line by Pamela’s blue blood. Certainly her extraordinary self-possession infected her children, but the way that David and Stephen Tennant, in particular, fascinated, titillated and outraged the press is redolent of the impact Eddy’s sisters had had when launching themselves upon Society forty years before. Perhaps Wyndham blood melded with generation-skipping Tennant insouciance.

Moving in and out of their circle was Dick Wyndham, who had lived at Clouds for only a couple of years, during a disastrous early marriage. After his divorce in 1924, Dick, a playboy with artistic pretensions, moved to the French Riviera and let Clouds, first to Sibell’s son Bend’Or, then to a wealthy Dutch couple, Adriaan and Nancy Mosselman. Despite a substantial income, Dick had developed a habit of selling off a painting a year to keep his funds buoyant. In 1927 it was
The Wyndham Sisters
.

Dick justified the sale as providing an annuity for Guy Wyndham, who had remarried in 1923 and had two small sons with his wife Violet (née Leverson). Sargent was rapidly falling out of fashion, but Dick thought he could get £20,000 for the painting – ‘an entirely artificial value over and above what Grandpapa payed [sic] for it’ – which, invested, would provide an income of £1,200 a year. He explained to Mary:

I look upon this painting as really belonging to you and Aunt Madeline & Pamela, so would do nothing without your consent. Personally I feel very strongly that it ought to be sold … The alternative is keeping a picture in a house, where neither I nor any heirs will ever be able to live. I feel sure that Grandpapa would have been the first to chuckle at his good buy – the painting is ‘sentiment’ and I feel that Father’s income is a more practical sentiment, particularly as none of the family get any advantage from the picture.
⁷²

The Wyndham Sisters
was sold to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1927 for £20,000. There is no evidence that any of the money did go towards supporting Guy.
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Pamela later heard from the Mosselmans that Dick had not even bothered to tell his tenants that he was intending to remove the painting. ‘The first they knew of the matter was the men trampling in to unhook it! What a lack of
touch
,’ she commented to Mary.
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Pamela in later life was as ripe for anecdote as ever. She appears in Hermione Baddeley’s memoirs as an imperious grande dame, whisking David off on Alpine tours with more suitable young women, and recruiting the press baron Lord Beaverbrook to have a quiet word with Hermione over lunch. ‘Marriage is not for a clever young actress like you …’ he advised. ‘You keep your mind right there on your career. Don’t get married. D’you hear me?’
⁷⁵
In Hermione’s account, on discovering that David and Hermione had had an illegitimate daughter, Pauline, Pamela swoops in: ‘“By the way”, said David, “you know how fond she is of babies. She asks if you’d like Pauline and her nanny to live at Wilsford?” I couldn’t believe my ears. Not only was she trying to marry David off to some suitable girl, but she wanted my baby too …’
⁷⁶
The story has a happy ending. After pitching up at David and Hermione’s low-key wedding at Chelsea Registry Office in April 1928, draped in fox, with a feathered toque and Christopher and Stephen in morning suits, Pamela softened. She approached Hermione at the reception held at the Gargoyle ‘and pressed the most beautiful pearl, emerald and diamond ring into my hand. “This is something very precious from me to you” she said. “The first man I ever loved gave it to me.”’
⁷⁷

Hermione and David threw a party to celebrate their marriage, requiring their guests to dress in nightwear. The press went to town.
⁷⁸
‘Hasn’t all this racket about poor Hermione’s “Bottle & Pyjama Party” been silly?’ Pamela said to Mary, ‘the occasion really being nothing different to an ordinary Fancy Dress Party – & “bringing a bottle” being one of the rather good “short-cuts” I think of modern days, that facillitates [sic] impromptu entertaining! But the Press
must
have copy – so they invent long interviews.’
⁷⁹
A month later, the long interviews were about Stephen, one of the protagonists in the ‘Great Mayfair War’ in which he brought uninvited guests to a ball given by Lady Ellesmere, who then threw the ‘gate-crashers’ out. The Old Guard were fighting a rearguard action. Society had changed irrevocably since the pre-war years. But Pamela’s concern was for Stephen. Shortly afterwards, Edith Olivier found her at Wilsford ‘in a panic, quite broken … She and Lord Grey have been warned that it’s the beginning of a “Round-Up” of Stephen and his foppish friends,’ and Pamela was afraid that Stephen ‘would be suspected of real immorality if he continues to be written of in the papers in this company’.
⁸⁰

Pamela’s concerns for Stephen were amplified by those about Clare, who was in the throes of a second divorce
and lining up James Beck, her co-respondent, to be her third husband:
⁸¹
‘they quarrel as if they had been already married for ten years (!) cynical this – but you know what I mean … poor little Clare she looks so worn and cross and miserable that I am anguished for her,’ Pamela told Mary. For some time Pamela’s doctor had told her that she had a ‘hard patch in my Aorta … [which] gets affected by any emotional strain’.
⁸²
In May 1928 she suffered a bout of illness after a ‘gruelling week’ in London in which she presented two young cousins at court (the Queensberrys’ girls), gave a paper on spiritualism at the Forum Club and chaired a Sunlight League meeting in a stiflingly hot room at Sunderland House: ‘I really did too much and my heart cried out against me.’
⁸³
The following month, further anxiety about Clare ‘threw’ her ‘back again [with] rather heightened B.P. and a sense of troubled circulation in my breast’. She assured Mary that she was at Wilsford, ‘happily,
wisely resting
– & holding as well as I can a quiet Centre of my own – in the midst of these troubles’. She had adopted a raw diet, and was enjoying the latest biography of Emily Brontë, written with a fashionably new psychoanalytical slant.
⁸⁴

Some five months later, on a Sunday afternoon in November, Pamela was alone in her garden at Wilsford when she suffered a stroke. She died a few hours later without regaining consciousness. She was fifty-seven. David and Christopher reached Wilsford in time. Stephen, who was summoned back from France where he had been holidaying with Siegfried Sassoon, and Clare, now married to Beck (she had sobbed, ‘it’s the end of my childhood’ when told the news),
⁸⁵
were both too late. So was Edward Grey. He had been at Fallodon when he was telephoned on Sunday evening. Just before 10 p.m. that night the Edinburgh–London express train was stopped at the little private railway station on the estate and Edward Grey boarded. He reached King’s Cross at 5.15 a.m., ashen-faced, to be met by Christopher with the news that Pamela was dead.
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