Life Worth Living (19 page)

‘How do I know the
Sunday Express
is telling the truth? Ian was awfully credible.’

‘OK, OK,’ replied Colin irritably. ‘So I might have made a mistake. Maybe they did set us up. Maybe your stupid boyfriend wasn’t lying. Is it my fault the newspapers are hassling me because of
your background
? Why are you so angry with
me
? I was only trying to protect you and make the bastard pay for hurting you.’

It did not yet strike me that the whole story could have been Colin’s own creation, but that is what I now believe. However, I did feel in my heart of hearts that he had shown scant concern for my wishes and feelings and that he was trying to exploit the situation financially and me emotionally. This proved to be another huge nail in the coffin of our marriage.

At the time I was searching for an agent in London to represent my book on philosophy, so on several occasions I used that as an excuse to bring up the subject of how inextricably linked happiness is with sound values, attitudes and behaviour. Colin seemed incapable of making the connection between actions and consequences. Unable to grasp the notion that no one is above life’s rules, he always seemed to think that he was a special case, that he was the one person who was entitled to enjoy the benefits of happiness while being poisonous, of sobriety while drunk, of thoughtfulness while being thoughtless, of being treated lovingly while behaving hatefully, of being loved while caring about no one but himself. Frustrating as it was to have acquired the role of Sunday-school teacher on top of all the others, I persevered, not because I seemed to be getting through, but because I did not know what else to do.

Help came from an unexpected quarter. Alan Ramsay’s ex-wife, Frances Beveridge, who had known Colin all his life, and was
only too aware of his problems with drink and drugs, saw me floundering and she came to my aid.

‘The first thing he needs to do is give up drinking. I’ll arrange an appointment with a doctor who can convince him to do so,’ she said, ‘then both of you can come and stay with us for the last few weeks of your time in England. That will relieve you of the burden that I know Colin can be.’

That Sunday, Colin and a relieved and hopeful Georgie drove down to Surrey to see this doctor. He clearly spelled out the options: drink and you destroy your life and marriage; give up booze and you give your life and your marriage a chance. Colin then tried a new tack: he tried to lay the blame at my door. He was just warming to his theme, that Frances and I were exaggerating his drinking, when I stopped him with a raised finger and one word.

‘Cheekbone,’ I said. He took the hint. Not wishing the Beveridges, the doctor, or anyone else to know about that incident, he hastily agreed to go ‘on the wagon’.

But if I thought that this leopard was going to change his spots simply because he had changed his watering hole, I was in for a big disappointment. It was now July, and we had had no marital relations since Inveraray. Nor was sex the only dead issue, either. He still had his ‘hang-up about physical contact’, which ruled out affection as well. Moreover, he had no interest in me personally. He couldn’t have cared less how I felt about anything, unless he stood to gain something from it. This became painfully evident when, a few weeks after the Ian Hamilton episode, he came up with another get-richquick-and-keep-the-wife-grateful-that-I’m-standing-byher scheme.

I went into Frances’ drawing room to find Colin in full flow. ‘The
Sunday Express
are a danger which must be eliminated,’ he was saying to Frances.

‘Why are you stirring up a hornet’s nest?’ I asked. ‘Can’t you let things be?’

‘What happens if the
Sunday Express
print that story? It isn’t only you and your family at stake. My family’s reputation is on the line, too.’

Using the nag’s version of Chinese water torture to break down my resistance, Colin went on and on about it for weeks. ‘You have no objection to people knowing you’ve always been female even though you were brought up as a boy. Nor do I. But we both object to people thinking you are a man. The press will jump at the chance to report your story. If you don’t give it to a sympathetic paper like the
Express
, sooner or later a hostile one will print it. I know how the press works, you don’t. You’ve got to do it, and do it now. And if you’re going to give it to them, you may as well sell it.’

Finally, worn down by all this, I took the first tentative step towards agreeing.

‘Everyone does it,’ said Colin. ‘Pa did it all the time. How do you think he bankrolled his divorce?’

‘Colin, I’m sure any journalist would respect one more if one didn’t sell a story of that nature. If you truly believe there is a threat, surely the sensible thing is for us to choose the newspaper ourselves? They’d be doing us the favour of printing what we want.’

That amused Colin no end. ‘Newspapers don’t do people favours, Georgie,’ he sneered. ‘It’s use and be used.’

‘But we don’t need the money.’

‘We will. Sooner or later, we will.’

Although I dreaded the possibility of any personal publicity, Colin had now got me to the stage where I saw the wisdom of making a pre-emptive strike to preclude any misrepresentation of the facts.

‘Phone Olga Maitland. Go to lunch with her. Fly the idea past her,’ Colin said. ‘She’s one of us. She’ll keep her trap shut if it doesn’t suit us to go through with it.’

Reluctantly, I got in touch with Olga, the Scottish aristocrat who had interviewed us for the
Sunday Express
. We met for lunch at Walton’s. She told me the story wasn’t worth anything like the tens of thousands Colin hoped for – at any rate, not in the decorous form I was insisting upon. I heaved a sigh of relief, especially when she advised me that any worries we had about it appearing in an inaccurate form were groundless.

‘No newspaper would dare print something like that without proof,’ she said.

Returning to the Beveridges’ flat, I walked in on a discussion of the subject between Frances, her first husband Alan Ramsay, Colin and my brother. Mickey had returned that very day from Jamaica. He was saying to Colin, ‘One doesn’t deny rumours, Colin. Have you lost possession of your senses? No, no, a thousand nos. I will not allow you to bring my sister and our family into disrepute. Georgie will not be making any statement on her personal life, and that’s all there is to that.’

I have never been more grateful for Mickey’s domineering character than I was at that moment.

In August we returned to New York, to real life. Since our apartment was still empty, immediately after dropping off our luggage we had to go shopping for beds. Colin opted for twin beds pushed together: a statement of separation, and a harbinger of ills to come if ever there was one. My spirits spiralled ever more downwards.

Two and a half weeks after our arrival, real trouble loomed. Colin received a letter from the attorney who handled his late mother’s estate. The bottom line was that the kitty was empty. This was the only extra source of income for Colin or Ian, beyond the $12,000 per annum each brother received from
their $225,000 stake in their maternal great-grandfather’s trust. Colin, of course, freaked out.

The estate already owed Colin about $20,000. His mother had guaranteed a bank loan so that Ian could purchase his Park Walk house in London, but Ian had never made any repayments on the loan. It was hardly surprising, when he had no job of work and such a paltry income. The bank were demanding repayment of the outstanding amount, $21,011.23, and the executors of the guarantor’s estate were obliged to satisfy the debt. It had cleaned out the account, and there was no money to settle the estate’s debt to Colin. Worse, the Priory, where Colin had been treated for his drink and drug problems before he met me, was threatening to sue him for over £2,000 in unpaid fees. Unless the estate could come up with the money, Colin would suffer while Ian benefited from funds he owed his brother.

Colin was beside himself with worry that people would discover not only that he had drink and drug problems, but financial ones, too, if the Priory sued him. He placed the blame for the fix he was in squarely on his brother. They fired telephone calls and letters back and forth across the Atlantic, Colin demanding that Ian make good his debt; Ian refusing to acknowledge responsibility for his failure to do so. The only way Ian could settle the matter was to sell his Park Walk house, and this he was adamant he would not do.

Colin then turned his attention to me. Couldn’t I get Daddy to help? I most certainly could not. My father would have said to Colin, ‘Get your brother to fulfil his responsibilities and discharge his debt to you.’ Colin then suggested using a portion of the money I had received from my family to furnish our marital home. We had already spent a lot of it on antiques since returning to New York. I reminded him of that, and of the fact that he had also dipped into it at a rate of knots in England, frittering it away on daily visits to the trichologist Philip Kingsley, even though he had a full head of healthy hair; standing round after round for a multitude of strangers in bars, indulging in extravagances such as chauffeur-driven limousines to take him two or three blocks, when a taxi, or his feet, would have done the job just as well. We needed what was left to finish the apartment.

The problem wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t about to become involved with it. He and Ian must sort it out among themselves. Moreover, the money Daddy, Mummy, Auntie, and Grandma had given us was specifically intended for our marital home. What would I say when they came to visit us and discovered that I had never completed the job? By now I knew Colin well enough to anticipate that he would wait until I least expected it and then clear out the account. Not for nothing did he admire his father, who had been resourceful enough to steal his first wife Janet Aitken’s diamond tiara on their honeymoon to settle his gambling debts. To prevent this I spent my own money before he had a chance to get his hands on it, ploughing every last cent into items we needed for the apartment. It left us very little to live on, but that, I reasoned, was no bad thing. It would force Colin to curtail his spending, and focus both our minds on
generating income through something he seemed to find very distasteful: work.

As I saw it, my greatest opportunity to make some money was the book I had written, which I hadn’t yet placed. I set about finding a literary agent with renewed vigour. At the time, Barbara Taylor Bradford lived on the same block as us. She very kindly put me in touch with her literary agent, Stephanie Bennett, who agreed to represent me. It would take Stephanie nearly four months to find the right publisher, but when she did so, it was one of the literary world’s brightest stars: Howard Kaminsky, then head of Warner’s book division. In the meantime, I started looking for a job in the only sensible way I could think of: I wrote to people I knew, such as Bill Paley, who was the head of CBS. While I awaited their replies, I worked on the apartment while Colin pursued his primary activity: drinking.

‘I thought you were giving up drinking and finding a job in public relations?’ I finally said.

‘PR isn’t my thing,’ he replied, quick as a flash. ‘I’ll try my hand at writing instead.’

‘And what will you write?’ I inquired with curiosity.

‘A travelogue.’

‘A
travelogue
?’

‘Yeah,’ he said edgily. ‘You have said yourself how interesting my travels have been. Just you wait and see. It will sell like hot cakes. The public will be intrigued to see how the other half lives. It might even outsell your philosophy book.’

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. ‘Colin, a book is a major project. It takes time and dedication to write. We agreed that we’d both earn a living.’

‘I’m not having you strong-arm me into taking a job I don’t want,’ he said. ‘You get a job. I’ve got my income. That will be my contribution.’

‘It’s not enough.’

‘Then get your cheapskate father to support us.’ He stormed off to the bar, slamming the door.

Obviously Colin’s tactic was an attempt to force me to appeal to Daddy for help, but I would sooner have chopped off my right arm than have humiliated myself like that. So I battened down the hatches and waited for my husband to come to his senses.

Colin’s response was to taunt me about why he’d married me. ‘Are you stupid enough to think it’s because I loved you? I don’t love you. I only married you because of your reputation as a great beauty and your father’s money. Doesn’t he know that’s how things are done when money marries a name? My father didn’t work a day in his life. His wives supported him. That’s what wives are for. That’s what
you
are for, you stupid bitch.’

Like any other woman, I wanted to be desired for myself, not for my merits as a trophy or for my father’s worldly goods. His words had an unsettling ring of truth, but I was not going to play the victim. When he persisted in rubbing salt in that particular wound, I finally hit back.

‘If that’s the case, you really must be dumb. Whoever heard of a man marrying a girl without money on the off-chance that her father will part with some of his?’

Predictably, now that Colin was back on the booze, things went from bad to worse. Every morning he’d leave the apartment, hit the bar and lurch back in mid-afternoon, ostensibly for lunch, which I had eaten an hour or two before and which he was usually too drunk to consume in any case. Then he’d collapse in a sodden, stinking heap on the sofa or bed. He’d crank himself up at about six, demand food, which he’d guzzle down like a hog, grunting and burping and grimacing. ‘My stomach,’ became his constant refrain, but I no longer had any sympathy for him. I pointed out that he was bound to develop alcoholic gastritis if he continued to abuse himself. His response was to guzzle more alcohol to dull the pain it had caused in the first place.

I don’t know how much more of this I can stand, I often thought. By this time, I dearly wanted to leave him, but two things held me back. The first was my marriage vows, which I did not in all conscience feel I could break before enduring as much as was humanly possible, and I had not yet reached the end of my tether. There is no doubt that my medical history had a bearing upon my attitude as well. In those days, all divorce was construed as a failure on the part of one or both parties to the marriage. I was desperate not to fail, for I did not want anything to reflect adversely on my performance as an individual, or worse, a woman.