Those Wild Wyndhams (55 page)

Mananai would never forget the ghastly shock of the telephone call the next morning. In the days after their sister’s death the three remaining Wyndham children, the survivors of Percy’s ‘remarkable quintette’, cleaved together for ‘heavenly days of
healing
and
comfort
’ at Babraham.
⁸⁷
The Bishop of Salisbury conducted a bleak funeral at Wilsford, and a grim memorial service was held at St Margaret’s Church in London, at which those attending had to fight their way through pouring rain and packs of pressmen eager to catch sight of the Bright Young Things in mourning, and the widowed Elder Statesman.
⁸⁸

Pamela did not cease to demand attention even in death. At Glen that Christmas, Stephen said that his mother had ‘rained messages on me!’
⁸⁹
Shortly after she died, headlines were splashed across the popular press. Hermione had told friends of a ghostly experience the night Pamela died, and they had leaked it to the press. The press tenor is exemplified by Utah’s
Ogden Standard-Examiner
which asked, referencing David’s rakish lifestyle, ‘Did the Ghost of Viscountess Grey Return to Rebuke Her “Naughty Boy”?’ with a mock-up of Hermione with hair standing on end.
⁹⁰
Yet the incident, recounted in Hermione’s memoirs, is curiously touching. She described being woken in the night by the sound of her bedroom door opening, and someone walking over to David’s side of the bed:

‘Is that you, Stephen?’ I whispered. No one answered. There was complete quietness in the room. I sat up terrified … ‘David,’ I said hoarsely, ‘someone’s been in here.’ My heart was thumping. ‘There’s someone in the room … whoever it was bent over you.’ David lay back. ‘Don’t worry darling,’ he said sleepily. ‘It must have been Mummy coming to wish us goodnight.’
⁹¹

The force of Pamela’s personality made it difficult for her sisters to believe that she was really gone. ‘[I]t seems … so bewildering & less easy to realize somehow to me now than when the blow first fell,’ Mananai wrote to Mary, three weeks after Pamela’s death.
¹
For years, her instinct was to write to ‘Darling Pamela’ with every piece of family news: ‘[she] still seems here to share as I know she would our family happenings’.
²

The lives of the Adeane children – albeit without the column inches – reflected how dramatically the war had changed their class’s ways. Mananai rejoiced when Sibell Adeane and her second husband Charles Lyttelton (brother of Pamela Adeane’s husband George) moved out of Hawarden, ‘the huge cold gaunt house with miles of basement!’, into the recently deceased Helen Gladstone’s ‘lovely sunny central heated – lit – modern house The Rectory’.
³
She mourned when Sibell, four and a half months pregnant, was obliged to undergo an induced miscarriage in ‘a little absolutely new & up to date Maternity Home’ after the doctor said that she would never carry the child to full term.
⁴
In 1929, Robert Adeane married Joyce Burnett. That November, Mananai was overwhelmed, even tearful when she found out that they were to have a baby: ‘isn’t it
wonderful
? it seems so somehow to me I don’t know why –
Robert’s
child’, she wrote to Mary.
⁵

As that Christmas approached, Mananai was wrestling with the implications of the impending Local Government Act for her county council business. It was to come into force on April Fools’ Day 1930, and had given her ‘much extra … work … but
most
interesting’. She was also carrying on her Red Cross work, trying to launch an ‘Orthopoedic [sic] scheme’ to add to that of massage already existing.
⁶
Mananai’s letters were, as always, enthusiastically loving and short on reflection. She had escaped, by disposition, the fragility and nerviness of her sisters: she had also been helped by a happy marriage, and finding work that she loved.

From the late 1920s, Mary frequently asserted that she had not long to live.
⁷
Crippling arthritis in both hips required her to walk with the aid of sticks, and left her in near-constant pain. She had been crushed by the sudden, early death, in 1925, of Frances Charteris, Guy’s wife. ‘With Frances there … I felt “safe” about them ALL and could have died tomorrow without a tremor,’ she told Arthur.
⁸
Now, ‘I feel I must – – more broken-winged than ever – trudge on like a snarling wrinkled charwoman, old and harsh with years! A crippled witch groping about with the Fairy Princess gone who ruled us with her gentle gracious sway.’
⁹
Others dis-agreed. An anonymous correspondent, paying tribute to Mary in
The Times
after her death, wrote:

Many who remember with admiration and love the brilliant, vivid woman portrayed in Sargent’s ‘Three Graces’ may think that the last phase was the loveliest of all: the frail, shrunken, halting figure, dependent on the two sticks which were always losing themselves, and the monkey-headed hot-water bottle Pongo: the laces and muslin, fastened with little glimmering brooches, framing the finely modelled, deep-lined, ivory face in which the eyes of a young girl shone with inexhaustible fun.
¹⁰

Throughout the decade, the publication of memoirs sporadically flung the Souls back into the public eye. The first occasion was early on in the decade, when Margot released the first volume of her autobiography. Gossipy, indiscreet and ludicrously self-important, it provoked a ‘controversial maelstrom’, in Balfour’s words.
¹¹
‘All the things that people quote to me from it as containing observations of mine seem to be quite untrue but not intentionally malevolent,’ he said to Mary, declining to even read it.
¹²
There was another flurry in January 1929, when
The Times
serialized extracts from Richard Haldane’s forthcoming memoirs which criticized the Souls for taking themselves on occasion ‘much too seriously … on the whole it is doubtful whether their influence was on balance good’.
¹³
A number, including Ettie Desborough, wrote anonymously to the Editor to protest. ‘When Lord Haldane says that … he is taking himself too seriously. [The Souls] were not concerned with chaperoning the conscience of anybody. They shared different ideas, different ambitions and different politics,’ said ‘Q’ in a forthright riposte.
¹⁴
All these letters emphasized the cross-party nature of the group, their lifelong devotion and loyalty to one another. The Souls continued to deny that they were a ‘set’, maintaining, in a distinction perhaps only they could see, that they were simply a group of good friends. It left them in the somewhat awkward position of defending the character of a clique they claimed had never existed.
¹⁵

The previous spring had been the longest period Mary and Balfour ever spent under one roof, when Balfour came to Stanway for five weeks to recover from a mild stroke. Ettie was also there: a trinity of Souls, as of old.
¹⁶
That year, Mary wrote to Arthur imagining what people might say about them: ‘How pathetic to see Arthur and Mary Wemyss. How sad is the end of life – the necessary onslaught of illness and old age. How sad to outlive Romance. I believe they were lovers once, tho’ nobody knows the truth about these things!’
¹⁷

Arthur died at Whittingehame in 1930. Mary was at Hyères. Two days before that, she had woken feeling out of sorts, edgy, nervous and tearful. From Hyères she sent a bunch of rosemary and thyme, the only flowers, besides family flowers, thrown into his grave.
¹⁸
‘I cannot yet realize how great the blank will be,’
¹⁹
she wrote, upon the loss of her ‘unfailing friend’.
²⁰
Her lifelong confidant had gone. With the publication of
Family Record
in 1932, she began work on her Souls memoir in earnest.
²¹
Ettie and Evelyn de Vesci, friends spanning fifty years, continued to marvel at Mary’s energy. She was as ‘Napoleon-like’ as ever, said Ettie, as Mary planned a day that involved leaving Stanway after breakfast, lunching in London and dining at Taplow Court, after stopping off in Surrey for tea.
²²
Yet Mary was also prone to fits of depression and gloom, and mental demons could drive her into fits of anxiety. She reached such a crisis in 1936.

In 1932 Dick had put Clouds – estate and contents – up for sale. Only the most precious objects – the Orpens of Madeline and Percy, the Watts of Madeline, George Wyndham’s bust by Rodin – were kept in the family. Everything else – from eighteenth-century Italian cabinets to a pair of ice-skates – was auctioned off over the following months. ‘The prices weren’t too good – but not
too
bad,’ Dick Wyndham told his father.
²³
It took four years for Knight, Frank & Rutley, the estate agents, to find a buyer for the ‘dignified mansion’ and its 3,000 acres. In 1936 it was sold for a little over £39,000 to a property developer, who parcelled it up. The eventual buyer of Clouds – now marooned on just 26 acres – demolished a third of the house before the Second World War, just to make it manageable.
²⁴

Mary, adrift without Balfour, the
Family Record
that had accompanied her for fifteen years complete, Clouds sold, and agitated by Margot’s prolific publications, began to try to pin down her past. Her progress on her memoir of the Souls had been faltering. Now she reattempted it, as an article which she intended for publication under the title ‘Friendship’s Garland’.
²⁵
Becoming frantic at her inability to capture it properly, she sought the help of Evelyn and her brother-in-law Evan Charteris. The manuscript horrified them. The article was meant to be ‘character sketches’ of ‘ball throwers’ that Mary had admired,
²⁶
but in reality it was full of titles, names and ‘unsubstantiated assertions’, said Evan.
²⁷
‘I think it is an
impossible
document for the
public
to play about with,’ said Evelyn. She thought it could attract only ‘unkind derision & criticism … a
saddening
document’.
²⁸
Yet their attempts to dissuade Mary – now ‘verging on a nervous breakdown’ in their view – failed. Evan agreed to go to Gosford to help her edit the work. Mary had told him that she would ‘go mad’ if he did not help her, ‘& she looks a wraith – & agonized & distracted’, he explained to Evelyn.
²⁹

On arriving at East Lothian, Evan was dismayed by what he saw. Gosford had reached its nadir with Angela and Hugo’s decision to turn it into a hotel of sorts, taking in paying guests. Evan’s description is redolent of Fawlty Towers: ‘the little dining room (marble hall end) – now a gaudy cocktail bar – with a rather pretty barmaid – cheap little tables – & cheaper chairs – disposed in the true bar manner’, Hugo ‘sulky as a bear’ striding the corridors, barking at a man in plus-fours turning into the saloon to ask him what he was doing there. Angela was ‘always in the house – usually in the Bar – following guests about, spying what she can & giving them fits with a monster Alsatian which barks & bays along the corridors’; while Connor, ‘in great distress about the situation financial & social … weeps for the good name of the Brigadier & Mumsey [the tenth Earl and Countess of Wemyss]’. There was only one guest when Evan arrived, ‘& it has now got so bad a name locally & I believe universally that it is commonly regarded as doomed’.
³⁰
No one escaped Evan’s furious eye: ‘Guy [Charteris] with no more manners than a fish hook … wraps – papers – cards – bridge scores strewn about – dogs fighting and being screamed at – never a moments serenity or peace – everyone snapping & scrapping. I have paid my last visit there.’
³¹

Evan’s attempts to help with editing had been futile. ‘M is incorrigible … she concedes an exclusion of a name or the alteration of a sentence or paragraph & the next day it is returned – she is a naughty child up to every sort of subterfuge & dodge secretly determined to get her own way.’
³²
He was more concerned about Mary’s mental state:

[she] has been undone by coming here … the Souls & Moby Dick [Wyndham] have played havoc – & her state of mental agitation is worse than I can recall it to have ever been … I wonder if she ought not to try psycho-analysis …? I know nothing about it beyond its claim to reduce complexes – & here at any rate are the complexes allright [sic] – complexes which are biting into her reason – dominating her outlook & blotting out all other considerations.
³³

The article was never finished. The following February, Mary’s children and grandchildren held a ‘Family Banquet’ for her at her club, the Albemarle, on Dover Street as her seventy-fifth birthday approached. The Adeanes did not attend, Mananai was recovering from the flu and Charlie had duties as Lord Lieutenant which he could not miss. ‘We don’t want to complicate things (which leaving things open does) so I feel we ought to say no,’ said Mananai.
³⁴
Two months later, Mary had a small house party at Stanway: five or six of her oldest friends, and a new young writer and his artist sister whom ‘she had newly taken to her heart’. To her guests she seemed as vibrant as ever – although she confided to one of them that she did not think she had long to live. This time she was right. She died a week later on 29 April 1937, at the age of seventy-four. She had been taken ill at Stanway in the afternoon, and died that night with ‘a swiftness merciful to her’, wrote the anonymous correspondent in
The Times
: ‘a rare spirit has passed away’.
³⁵
Hugo lived another two months, rivalrous to the end, and died in his sleep at Gosford, in his eightieth year.