Life Worth Living (24 page)

‘If that’s your game plan, you’d better think about the consequences very carefully. I’m your wife, and will remain so until we are divorced.’

‘I’ll get the marriage annulled.’

‘No, you won’t. Nor will you get a divorce on those grounds. If you try, I will contest the divorce and defeat you. Then, when I’ve won and we’re still married, I won’t divorce you. I’ll have you committed to an asylum and
throw away the key
. Think about it. I’m your next of kin until we’re divorced.’

The following Tuesday I departed for Jamaica without telling Colin that I was going. My beloved Aunt Marjorie was there staying with my parents, who were overwrought about Colin’s betrayal. Daddy, especially, felt acutely the tarnishing of his good name. I was still as devastated as I had been at the Rutherfurds’. I spent a week lying on the chaise-longue on the back verandah or in the drawing room crying and being consoled by Mummy and Auntie.

Once I resurfaced, my sense of humour returned.

Colin had figured out where I was and was inundating the house with telephone calls. I took the first one about ten days after arriving in Jamaica.

‘I love you. I know you love me. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. It will never happen again. Please come back,’ he pleaded.

‘Ah, now that you realise you can’t make the money you hoped by betraying me, you want your old punch bag back, do you?’ I was enjoying putting the boot in.

‘It’s not that. I do love you. Wilde and Ian convinced me you’d made a fool of me.’

‘And just how did they accomplish that, dear Colin?’

‘When he came to New York, Ian said everyone in Scotland was laughing behind my back because I had married a man. He told me to get shot of you. He said if I did it right we’d solve our financial problems and be rid of you in one stroke. That’s how this all came about. I swear it wasn’t my idea.’

‘That I can believe.’ I didn’t think he had the brains for a venture of this scale.

‘And Wilde did misquote me,’ Colin said, lapsing into his lost and injured little-boy tone. ‘I didn’t say those terrible things about you.’

I still hadn’t seen the second story he’d sold, so I asked, ‘Why don’t you tell me precisely what you did and didn’t say?’

‘I said you were a passionate wife on our wedding night.’

‘If you must stoop to discussing your wife’s sexual performance in the gutter press, you could at least refrain from lying. We didn’t have sex on our wedding night.’

‘I didn’t want anyone to think there was anything wrong with you.’

‘No, Colin. You didn’t want anyone thinking there was anything wrong with
you
.’

‘Right, right,’ he said awkwardly, aware that he’d needed to throw me a concession if he wanted to get the conversation back on track. ‘I’m going to the travel agent. I’ll send you your ticket. Come back.’

‘You do that and we’ll see.’ I had to get back to New York somehow, and frankly, if Colin was going to pay, so much the better. I was unhappy about being such a drain on my parents’ resources.

For the next two and a half weeks, I played cat and mouse with the rat, and Mummy and I had quite a lot of fun at Colin’s expense. Sometimes he’d telephone six times in an hour. ‘Say I’m out, Rupert,’ I’d instruct the butler, who was also in on the joke and would give the game away just enough to drive Colin crazy. On other occasions, I’d take a call and say, ‘I’m coming back on Wednesday,’ and then not show up. It was childish and silly, but it was a laugh in the graveyard at the expense of the killer of my reputation and peace of mind, and we needed some light relief. I don’t regret doing it at all.

At last I received the article Colin had sold from my brother in London, and I knew I had to return to New York to defeat his lies with proof. That meant moving back in with Colin for long enough to invalidate his claims that my medical history was the true reason for the collapse of our marriage. I would also have to gather evidence against him to use in case he changed tack yet again and tried to orchestrate a sensational divorce. That called for getting hold of documents which would completely disprove his version of events, as well as the letters from his files which had been written to his father by his hosts in Australia and New Zealand and concerned his brushes with the law while stoned and violent or drunk and disorderly. These went back to the mid-1960s, and clearly showed that he had always been disturbed.

The next item on the agenda was to smoke Ian Argyll out of his lair. That was easy enough to accomplish. As a precondition of returning to New York, I had stipulated once again that Colin had to give up drinking and drug-taking. ‘I’ll need your help,’ he had replied, hoping to manipulate me as he had done before, but I am not the sort of person who makes the same mistake twice. I used his appeal to protect myself and ensnare his brother. I telephoned him in Scotland.

‘Ian, I need your help. Colin wants me to go back to him, but I told him I wouldn’t until he’s dried out. He can’t afford hospital prices in America and there’s no question of my family paying, especially after what Colin just did with the press.’

‘Why don’t you arrange for him to be hospitalised in Jamaica?’ Ian suggested shrewdly.

‘I couldn’t possibly do that. My father says he’ll kill Colin if he ever sets eyes on him again.’

‘But it would be so much cheaper in Jamaica,’ Ian persisted.

‘But not as cheap as Scotland, where it will be
free
,’ I said, my voice positively trilling with barely concealed relish. ‘What I need is your support. If I suggest to Colin that he returns to Scotland for treatment, will you back me up?’

‘Of course, Georgie, of course. I’m happy to do anything I can to help.’

‘I so hoped I could rely upon you.’

Later that afternoon, Colin was on the telephone, in an hysterical state. ‘Ian says you want to commit me. He said you were on the blower to him asking for his cooperation.’

‘Now why would I need his co-operation when I’m your next of kin?’ I recounted my conversation with Ian verbatim. ‘But you can thank him for showing me his true colours.’

I returned to New York to ‘sign divorce papers and steer the action safely through to a civilised conclusion’, as I put it to Colin. He was now off the sauce. He still took his Valium, but 
that was now a matter of complete indifference to me as I couldn’t have cared less whether he lived or died. Frankly, there were times when I hated him so much that I wished he’d just take the whole lot and put us both out of our misery. Colin, however, was not one to punish himself – all anger and blame had to be directed outwards. I was determined that this time I would not be the butt of his sadistic inclinations.

It was apparent to me from the moment of my arrival at 170 East Eighty-Third Street that Colin Campbell was hoping the marriage would pick up where it had left off. Whistle in the dark, I thought, making it clear that he had to provide me with a divorce. He instructed Cusack & Stiles to make the arrangements for the quickest and cheapest (he was paying) no-fault divorce available. This turned out to be divorcing in Santo Domingo.

Meanwhile, I was determined to get Colin to recant the lies he had sold. By this time the peculiar idea that we would remain together after the divorce had taken hold in his head. I said nothing to disabuse him of that notion, recognising as I did that I would be lucky indeed if I could achieve a scandal-free divorce and a scandal ridding proclamation as well.

While Colin was trying to keep me sweet, Ian was trying to break up what Colin must have told him was a reconciliation. He became increasingly strident in his accusations about my medical history, telling Colin he knew for a fact that I was a man who had been ‘hacked up’ by the ‘butchers’ at Johns Hopkins. I told him the next time he phoned the apartment never to ring my home again, then wrote him a letter which left him in no doubt that I knew what he had been up to.

I could not now wait to see the backs of both brothers. I had ceased using the name Campbell. Apart from putting distance between myself and a creep like Colin, it was a slap in the face to him, for he truly believed that his was one of the greatest aristocratic names in the British peerage. By dropping it, I was showing the contempt I felt for him and all he represented, and the contrasting pride I had in my own antecedents. It was like a red rag to a bull. Colin nagged me mercilessly to resume using my married name, but for once, I wasn’t tempted to give in. Now his persistence served only to stiffen my resolve: I loved seeing him frustrated and impotent. Now it wasn’t he who was tormenting me; by withholding what he wanted, I was tormenting him.

In March Colin started to drink again. I serenely continued with my own life. I was in New York for a purpose, and I was going to see the project through to a successful conclusion. I saw my friends and even went on one or two dates with men like Nick Simunek and to the odd amusing party. One was the vernissage of the artist Sarah Churchill (Sir Winston’s daughter, otherwise Lady Audley). Upon meeting me, David Frost archly said, ‘I’ve been reading all about you. Anyone married to your husband deserves all our sympathies.’ Appreciative though I was of the kindness behind the sentiment, I found it mortifying that Colin Campbell had managed to turn me into a figure of curiosity and pity.

Sometimes I went along to Al-Anon meetings. These I found no more satisfying than before, but at least the people there reduced the sense of isolation that Colin’s bizarre behaviour created. It was simply impossible to speak about it to normal people without feeling a deep sense of embarrassment that anyone associated with me could reduce himself – and, by association, me – to such a condition.

In Colin’s view, of course, he had good reason to resume drinking. Despite having been perspicacious enough to have had me sign a prenuptial agreement, he had discovered from his lawyers that it did not fulfil its intention of protecting his trust fund. He had overstepped the mark, and had got me to sign away all my rights to alimony, instead of just some of them.

‘I’ll be only too happy to sign a separation agreement,’ I said. ‘I don’t want maintenance.’

‘That ain’t possible,’ he said. ‘You have to have some maintenance. If you don’t, the agreement ain’t valid.’

I knew from Charles Dismukes that I was entitled to 50 per cent of everything Colin possessed in New York, which, incidentally, was where his trust fund originated.

Colin told me that Richard Steel, the senior partner at Cusack & Stiles, was suggesting 15 per cent – $26,000 – though I later overheard him telling someone else that the figure Steel had recommended was 25 per cent. Either way, it was hardly compensation for someone scarred by his violence and whose reputation he had destroyed, but I just wanted to be rid of Colin, so I agreed. Colin used the opportunity the drafting of the separation agreement afforded him to exploit me financially.

‘If you’re getting a slice of my trust fund, I should have the furniture,’ he pointed out.

‘You must be joking. I’m saving you 35 per cent of what you owe me under New York State law. Why should I give you the furniture? Your money didn’t buy it. It’s not yours. Regard my share of your trust fund as compensation for all the abuse you subjected me to. And remember, this marriage has failed because of you. You should feel enough guilt to carry the can without complaint.’

Money, however, brought out the beast in Colin that my refusal to use his name did not. Within days, he was employing his old standby: brute force. On each occasion I called the police. In those days, however, domestic violence was not treated with the seriousness it is now, so they always talked to Colin and calmed him down while I stood by imploring them to throw him into the slammer. Colin did once prevent me from calling the police by repeatedly chopping me on the back of the head with his hand, judo-style. Deciding that it was easier to pretend I had passed out cold than to struggle for the telephone, I lay down on the floor, eyes shut.

‘Fuck,’ he said, bending over to examine me. ‘I hope the bitch isn’t dead. Fuck. Stupid cunt.’

While I tried hard not to burst out laughing, despite the pain, he did something interesting and unexpected. He telephoned his brother and gave him an elaborate explanation. This gave him a new idea. Within a couple of weeks, Ian was in New York, and while he was there, my death became Colin’s latest obsession, a topic he persisted in returning to even after his brother had left the city.

‘It’s easy to get a contract out on you. I’ve been told how. I know who can arrange the hit. You’d better watch your step, or you might never make it crossing the road.’

I no longer dismissed the Campbell ravings out of hand – too much that I had never believed possible had already come true. So I telephoned my parents and told them about the threats to my life. If I did die, they would know what to do and who to go after.

‘Just sign the furniture over to him,’ my mother counselled.

‘It’s only money,’ Daddy said. ‘That’s what this is all about, money. Just sign the damned furniture away and let’s get rid of the drunken bum.’

‘If I do that, we won’t be rid of him. We’ll only encourage him.’

At first my parents allowed me to do as I saw fit, but when Colin bombarded them with five days of round the - clock telephone calls – all collect, naturally – Daddy snapped.

‘Sign the goddamned furniture over to him if you know what’s good for you!’ he screamed at me. ‘I’m fed up with the mess and the problems. It’s our money and I’m your father. I’m ordering you. Sign the furniture over to the leech.’

Against my better judgements, I agreed that Colin could have the furniture. No sooner had I done so than up he bobbed with a new demand.

‘It’s humiliating that you’re insisting the lawyers refer to you as Georgia Ziadie in the separation and divorce papers. Just for those, let them call you Campbell,’ he suggested.

‘Absolutely not. My name is Georgia Ziadie, and that’s the name they’re going to use.’

Colin nagged on and on until watching his discomfort was no longer satisfying. I was secretly relieved when he came up with a compromise that saved both our faces: using the name Georgia Ziadie Campbell.