Those Wild Wyndhams (56 page)

Mananai and Guy, the two quietest of Percy’s ‘remarkable quintette’, lived long enough to experience the sadness of seeing the world once more descend into war. Guy Wyndham died in the darkest days of the Blitz, on 17 April 1941, peacefully in his sleep in Wiltshire. Two months later, on 31 July, Madeline Adeane at the age of seventy-two suffered a fatal heart attack at Babraham, cheated of her hope to live long enough to see what became of Adolf Hitler. She had been engaged ‘literally’ to the very day of her death in her county council and charity work. ‘The gap she leaves there … cannot be filled,’ wrote a correspondent in anonymous tribute.
³⁶
Under the headline, ‘One of “The Three Graces”’,
The Times
noted the passing of a dynasty: ‘She was the last survivor of the gifted family of the Hon. Percy and Mrs. Wyndham, whose home at Clouds in Wiltshire, was, during the 30 years before the last War, a delightful social and intellectual centre.’
³⁷

And so it ends. But not, perhaps, if one takes Pamela’s word for it. In 1928 she had made a ‘pilgrimage’ back to Clouds, taking David, bearing wreaths for the graves of her parents and George. They had found the graveyard ‘profoundly beautiful & peaceful’. Except that the rosemary on Madeline Wyndham’s grave was overgrown, everything was as it should be. David had read aloud from Shelley’s
Adonais
for George; Pamela had recited lines for her parents: a ‘little Persian rhyme’ that Madeline Wyndham had loved, and for her father Proverbs 4:18 – ‘But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.’
³⁸

Pamela and David had gone into the house, to be greeted kindly by Mrs Mosselman, and wandered around the place. The house was warm and lived in, Pamela told Mary, and scattered with children’s toys. In the library, Pamela had stood by the Rodin bust of George and ‘received a fine, and convincing RAP (– one of my
raps
that are so astonishingly apposite!) … I laughed, & said “
All Right!
– Message received!”’ The atmosphere of the house was still overpowering ‘like a tangible, all encompassing actuality! Just like great mid-summer Lilies or Honeysuckle, come towards you … on the air in Summer evenings’.

Walking through the house, Pamela felt like Kay in
The Snow Queen
, a fairytale she had read with her sisters long ago, in which dreams and vapours passed the boy that only he could see.
³⁹
She relived the sight of Madeline Wyndham, making her way across the hall, arms piled high with shawls for music listeners, of Percy in his flapping slipper-heels slip-slopping his way across. She heard the sound of herself on her guitar. She saw themselves as children impatiently tapping the weather glass, longing for snow and ice to go tobogganing; saw the great teas where thirty or more sat and waited for toast, always cold and curling after the servants’ trek down miles of corridor. She saw Mary and Madeline Wyndham, desperately trying to battle up the narrow stone staircase through gathering smoke, thinking the children still above on that January night that Clouds was ablaze; she saw too in the empty, rebuilt hall herself and Harry Cust standing on the hearthstone in that final interview at the end of the summer – the end of their affair. Clouds’ atmosphere, like the scent of the wild flowers that once filled it, was still strong.

‘Just as there are long strands of Time, here, on the Earth Plane which we live through & then fold up & lay away, so I believe, in the next phase of Consciousness, there are long sweeps of Earth Life, to be lived over again, to be more fully realized perhaps,’ Pamela told Mary. The only difference she thought likely was that ‘sad facts’ might be hidden from ‘dead eyes’. ‘And so’, Pamela concluded, ‘it might be that Mamma may quite well be happily unconscious of any disturbing or chilling factors in the present history of Clouds, and be – possibly – safely and joyously tucked away again into a nest of lovely sisters, and visiting Mrs Curragh with Lord Odo Fitzgerald [sic] … or shining in an equipage of old Lord Carlisle’s, with outriders, driving through the gates of Dublin Castle …’
⁴⁰
– on her way to meet, perhaps, for the first time, the young, uncertain Percy Wyndham, and let the whole story unfurl once more.

‘A tall strong woman’: Madeline Wyndham, in her early thirties,
by G. F. Watts.

‘The Hon. P’: Percy Wyndham as a young man, by Frederic Leighton.

Playing at romance: Guy, Mary and George Wyndham at Cockermouth Castle, 1867.

Madeline Wyndham with the toddler Pamela on her lap at Hyères, 1873. On the reverse Madeline has scribbled a clandestine note to Wilfrid Blunt.

The adoring father: Percy Wyndham with George.

Mary, as a wide-eyed eight-year-old in Cumberland, by Valentine Prinsep.

Mary in her early twenties, by Sir Edward Poynter. Mary found the sittings a ‘bore’. Her children thought Poynter failed to capture her vitality.

A young Wilfrid Blunt, smouldering into the camera.

‘Pretty Fanny’: Arthur James Balfour in less obviously seductive mode.