Life Worth Living (16 page)

‘There’s no rush, Colin. We barely know each other. We have a lifetime to get to know one another. I’m happy to wait,’ I said, the momentary relief evaporating fast.

There were two king-sized beds in the suite, and although Colin and I started out sharing one bed (exchanging a kiss so chaste he might have been my son), within minutes he had got up, muttered something about jet lag and gone to the other bed. I’ve never heard anyone make such a production about jet lag before, I thought, noting that he had been in America for nearly a week now. Given the previous day’s palaver over the uppers and downers, I wondered if I had married the male version of a drama queen.

Hopeful that this was not the case, and eager to begin married life, I drove us back to New York the following afternoon. Roger Samet had lent us his apartment, which became the scene for the second bombshell. That night, as we were about to go to bed, Colin said, ‘I wasn’t totally honest with you yesterday. I have a hang-up about physical contact. So-and-so’ – he named a male relation some years older than himself – ‘used to force himself upon me when I was a little boy.’

He went into such graphic detail that good taste alone prevents me from recounting the instances of fellatio and intercourse which he described, but, suffice it to say, I was staggered. And, of course, sympathetic.

‘How terrible for you,’ I said, my heart going out to him as it would to anyone who had been so abused. ‘Why didn’t your parents stop it?’

‘They didn’t know. Pa was always off somewhere with Margaret or Mathilda [his two step-mothers] and Ma wouldn’t’ve believed me. God, that woman was a bitch. I cannot tell you how much I hated her.’

‘Oh, Colin,’ I said, rising from where I was sitting and cradling his head in my lap. He winced as I uttered words of compassion.

When I had finished playing Mummy to the wounded little boy Colin was now presenting himself as, I said, ‘What I don’t understand is how you could have seemed so desperate to get me into bed when we first met.’

‘That was just to let you know I liked you. I knew you wouldn’t say yes.’

‘But Jeanie said you used to be quite a ladies’ man, losing respect for them once they obliged.’

‘That may be what she thinks, but it ain’t like that. Not one bit.’

Sorry as I was for my new husband, I knew that I could not tolerate a marriage without sex or affection. Gently but firmly, I made this clear, but assured him that I was prepared to be patient. In return, he would have to make an effort to overcome his antipathy to what was, after all, no source of pain, but one of life’s fundamental joys.

I must confess that I did wonder whether I had made a terrible mistake. It chilled my blood that Colin hated his mother. I was a firm believer in the psychological principle of transference, whereby the feelings an adult male has for his wife are coloured by those he has for his mother, both during and beyond childhood. But I realised it was too late to back out of the marriage now. Unless I wanted to look an utter fool, I would have to hang in there and try to turn the situation round. Despite my positive attitude, I was annoyed that Colin hadn’t told me about his ‘hang-ups’ before our wedding. I appreciated that he was probably aware that I wouldn’t have gone through with it, but thought it best not to labour the point now. Any comment I made about my rights would seem like a recrimination, and that would have been unproductive in the long term. If I wanted this marriage to work, I had to accept the unpalatable facts, take them in my stride and overcome them. I had successfully dealt with one monumental problem before, and I was confident that I had the strength of character to face this one.

Whatever his shortcomings, Colin was a dedicated hedonist, and the four days we stayed in New York on our so-called honeymoon were great fun. He was highly sociable, and we had one long party with friends of Colin’s such as the interior designer Harrison Cultra and his boyfriend, Richard Barker. They had been friends and tenants of Colin’s mother at her house in Rhinebeck. They were also close to my good friend Mary Michele Rutherfurd, and I grew to like them both tremendously.

Colin, meanwhile, was smoking so much pot that even I, who smoked none, was getting high by simply being in the same apartment as him. But in 1974, so many people smoked pot recreationally that I thought nothing of his indulgence. One evening, we were sitting in Roger’s living room talking to a friend of Jeanie’s named Joe. Without warning, Colin informed me:

‘You’re too sophisticated to live in Fiji. We’ll stay in New York. I’ll get a job in PR.’

I was none too thrilled that he had made the decision without consulting me, but because New York was preferable to Fiji, I said nothing. Later, I tried to convince him that we should move to London, but having spent so much of his childhood in New York with his American mother, he wanted to stay there. ‘The English are too uptight,’ he reasoned, ‘and anyway, a title goes further in New York.’

Of course, my family were eager to meet my new husband, so we made plans to fly out to Jamaica. My parents’ reaction had been typical of their contrasting characters. Strongly sentimental, Mummy was caught up in the romance of it all and was perfectly prepared to give Colin a chance. My father, however, was another story. Upon hearing that I had married, his first question had been, ‘What does he do?’ When I told him deep-sea diving, Daddy asked what Colin’s annual income was. The grunt in response to the $12,000 per annum I quoted put me on my guard.

On the morning of our departure, I decided I had better warn Colin about my father. Daddy and I still had a highly volatile relationship. We might go for days or weeks in complete harmony; equally, there could be an unforeseen eruption within an hour of my arrival. I explained that Daddy was known to have a fiery temper, that he often regretted his explosions, and that Colin was not to take it to heart if there was one. Colin seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say, so I also told him, in considerable detail, about the impact the medical mismanagement of my condition had had upon my relationship with my father. When I had finished, Colin, who was sitting on the floor in front of the matching sofas, said, ‘This is just uncanny. We have so much in common. Your father, my mother. Ain’t this great?’ This was hardly the response the situation warranted or I expected. I wondered whether he had actually absorbed much of what I had said. At least his reaction was positive, I told myself.

That first afternoon in Jamaica when Daddy met Colin, he ominously refused to tell me what he thought of my husband after interviewing (no other word is appropriate) him for twenty minutes. Only when our marriage had hit its first major rock did my brother Mickey reveal Daddy’s prescient comment after that encounter: ‘George’s picked up a drunken bum. I only hope he doesn’t think I’m going to support him.’

Regrettably, Colin expected precisely that. Indeed his principal reason for marrying me was that I was Michael Ziadie’s daughter. When a man marries a woman for her money, he then has to work out how best to get his hands on it. For Colin this tricky problem was compounded by the fact that the money wasn’t mine anyway. In truth I had none. The only thing of value I had was my jewellery collection, which, while not excessive, was certainly considerable. Within forty-eight hours of returning to New York after our wedding Colin started trying to persuade me to take my jewellery, most of which had come from my parents and my Aunt Marjorie, to the jeweller’s near Roger’s apartment for an appraisal with a view to selling some of it.

‘We’ll need the money to furnish an apartment,’ he said.

He had reckoned without my feminine wiles. I was certainly not about to part with any of my jewels. Although appearing to acquiesce, I got the jewellers to provide the lowest possible quotation, the breakdown value, for a Fabergé bracelet and tiara, both of which were made from gold-plated silver. I then informed Colin of the appraisal, which was hundreds of times less than the pieces were worth.

‘It wouldn’t suit us to sell at all,’ I said.

Colin then began what turned out to be an intermittent but continuous campaign to gain access to Daddy’s money. ‘Get your father to settle an annual income on you.’

‘Daddy’s not like that,’ I’d explained when he first brought up the subject in New York. Undeterred, he mentioned the matter again, the morning after our arrival in Jamaica as he, Mummy and I were having breakfast. Kicking him under the table, I quickly invented some excuse to get him alone in our bedroom.

‘Please don’t embarrass me in front of Mummy. Daddy will never agree to something like that,’ I said. ‘He thinks that men have a duty to support their wives. Approaching him won’t only be fruitless, it will mean he’ll never have any respect for you. I cannot tell you how humiliating that would be for me. I’d sooner starve than put myself in that position.’

But as I was to learn, Colin was nothing if not determined and resourceful. By midday my new husband was making the first of a series of unaccountably frequent telephone calls to his brother Ian in Scotland. I had no idea what they were talking about – I was too well brought up to eavesdrop – but even Mummy said, ‘What on earth can be so important that he has to phone his brother every two minutes?’ In those days, long distance calls were expensive, especially in Jamaica, where not only were the charges substantially higher than in most places but also attracted a tax of nearly 100 per cent per call.

The same afternoon Daddy took a telephone call from the
Daily Telegraph
in London. ‘We have been informed that your daughter changed sex. Is that true?’

‘No, it is not,’ my father said. ‘Where did you get that from?’

‘I’m not at liberty to tell you, but it was an impeccable source.’

A wave of panic swept over me when Daddy recounted the conversation to me. I could hardly believe that after four years my worst nightmare might be about to become a reality. ‘Keep calm,’ Mummy counselled. ‘They can’t print something that isn’t true.’

‘They wouldn’t dare,’ Daddy boomed. ‘I’d sue them for every penny they have.’

Reassured, I calmed down. Within ten minutes, though, my father’s niece, Doreen Forbes, rang from the
Gleaner
, where she worked. The British tabloid the
Sunday People
, Doreen said, had sent through a request for a stringer to check me out
following a tip-off from a ‘well-placed source’. The
Gleaner
had asked their social columnist, Violetta de Barovier-Riel, to deal with the matter, but Violetta, who was a family friend, had refused to do so. Doreen said they were looking for a replacement as she was speaking, and warned us to expect another call within a few minutes. ‘Don’t talk to them, Uncle Mike. I’m going to Theodore Seely right now to ask him to put a stop to this.’

This time I absolutely freaked out. I became completely hysterical.

‘You must get a hold of yourself,’ Mummy kept saying as I bayed like a caged animal about to be immersed in boiling water. Colin said something I took at the time to be an attempt to console me.

‘The publicity doesn’t matter to me. You can sell your story for a small fortune and the controversy will help you get your book published.’ Thinking how sweet but misguided he was, I didn’t bother to respond.

Not that I could talk, for I was in such a state I could only howl and cry uncontrollably until Mummy forced two Valium tablets down my throat. Just as the tranquillisers were taking effect, Doreen phoned through to tell us that Theodore Seely had no intention of publishing, or helping anyone else to publish, a scandalous story about me. Once more he had mentioned Mummy’s charity work, and asked if we would grant one of his journalists an interview on the specific and non-controversial subject of the marriage. Needless to say, we agreed with grateful hearts.

‘Go and lie down until they get here,’ Mummy advised.

‘I’ll come and keep you company,’ Colin said.

As soon as we were lying down, he reached over to my side of the twin beds which were pushed together as one. ‘Come here,’ he said, taking my hand in his. He pulled me on top of him, brought my head down to his, and initiated the first kiss of our marriage. ‘I’ll have to teach him how to kiss,’ I thought, delighted that the second nightmare of the past few days was coming to an end with the first. Talk about wishful thinking.

Without further preamble, Colin inserted himself into me. Any man with any experience or sensitivity would have known that a woman isn’t a light switch. Obviously I’ll have to teach him how to make love as well, I thought as the encounter reached a quick conclusion. Even though he was no good in bed, at least the marriage had been consummated, which gave me hope for the future. In that, as in so much else, my optimism was to prove misplaced. Thereafter, carnal relations (for that is all they can be called) took place on a sporadic basis. In total there were no more than five or six encounters, and each was as sensually sterile as the first. Kissing was out, and Colin didn’t want his body touched, nor was he inclined to touch mine. He was always totally passive, lying back with eyes tightly shut and expecting me to do all the work until he had achieved his quick climax, at which point he pulled himself away unceremoniously.
Talk about inadequate: he was every bit as unsensual and asexual as I had sensed when we were first introduced, and I ended up feeling like a necrophiliac.

In the first days of our marriage, though, I happily flung myself into the preparations for the first of our four wedding receptions, the Jamaican reception, was to be followed by similar events in London, Scotland and New York. The last of these never took place. By that time the marriage had so degenerated that I told Patricia Fleischmann, our hostess, not to bother. Despite the wrinkles in the background, Colin made a real attempt to fit into the family and get along with all my friends. If he was demanding and needy, he was nevertheless powerfully charming and good fun, and I really thought he was a great guy, if a little screwed up. Certainly, he smoked too much grass, drank too much booze and took too many uppers and downers, which he had purchased in quantity as soon as we arrived in Jamaica, where you could still buy just about any drug over the counter without a prescription. It was as a result of this preoccupation with drugs that I learned that Colin had lived in Jamaica, and about Middleton and his ganja crop.