The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (24 page)

But their friendship went much further than Cyril’s romantic admiration. Both wanted the shifting excitements of nightclubs and parties and the indulgent giggling and gossiping of intimate friendship combined with periods of retreat into reading and solitary introspection. They loved luxury and beautiful things while abhorring snobbery, and had as strong a depressive streak as a sense of fun. ‘If Jennifer had been an actress,’ said Cyril’s daughter, Cressida Connolly, ‘she’d have been a light comedienne – with the intelligence to carry it. A funny person with a tragic side; melancholy but loving life.’267

Cyril had been at Oxford with the group of men who already formed a distinguished generation of writers, and who mythologised their student years: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Henry Yorke (who wrote as ‘Henry Green’) and Robert Byron. He was confident enough to produce the highly influential and original Enemies of Promise, but he claimed he couldn’t fit into ‘smart Bohemia’ and that he hated ‘the metallic voguey London’, even though many of his friends belonged to these milieux.268 Like Jennifer, Cyril was at ease with homosexuals; both he and Jennifer were often spotted at the Gargoyle Club or the Café Royal, drinking cocktails with Brian Howard, Cyril’s notorious Oxford contemporary. The ‘Brightest of the Bright Young Things’ in the 1920s, Howard was later thought by some to be de trop, and overly drunk. His early literary promise was never fulfilled and W. H. Auden called him ‘the most desperately unhappy person I have ever known’. But Howard was marvellously witty and clever, if mannered, and Waugh scarcely disguised him as the outré Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. He dressed impeccably and wafted about in a cloud of delicious perfume, applied from a small bottle he kept in his pocket, given by the celebrated perfumer Mary Chess – his American aunt.

Cyril was already friends with Gerald; their circles overlapped extensively and their shared interests were not only in the arts. Cyril had a similar predilection for unusual pets, favouring lemurs (which he’d allow in his bed and take around in his jacket), a ferret, and once (bought with wedding-present money), a racoon. Like Gerald, Cyril saw himself with a critical eye: each felt he had not used his artistic talents to the full extent, being too fond of the art of living – particularly the high life. Each admitted to being overly concerned with his food to the detriment of his figure, and each could veer swiftly between gloom and gaiety. Like Gerald, Cyril loved travel and spoke several European languages, but he was not an intellectual snob.

Cyril also became friends with Robert, doubtless admiring him for the attributes that he himself lacked, such as physical daring and impressive looks. On one of Cyril’s lists for ‘A sexy party’, he included Robert alongside Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford. It appears that Jennifer shared his opinion. In her photograph album from this period, there are several photographs of Robert. Smooth-skinned and shirtless on a daisy-sprinkled lawn, he looks moody and sexy, his luxuriant dark hair slightly wet from a swim, a stray lock naughtily curled in the middle of his forehead. Next to him in the album is Jennifer in a summer frock, sprawled on what looks like the same grass. She is peeping out mysteriously from behind her hair that tumbles over her face. They both look relaxed and very attractive – as if they have secrets. Jennifer took him to the Wyndhams’ at Parliament Piece, and there are pictures of him with Prim, who accompanied Jennifer on her first visit to Faringdon.

JENNIFER’S RECORD OF HER STAY AT FARINGDON IN 1938. ROBERT MANAGES TO TAKE ALL THE INNOCENCE OUT OF EATING GRAPES

One page in the album is titled ‘Faringdon House, Berks. June 27th 1938’ – the first time Jennifer stayed there unaccompanied. There are a couple of photographs of the house, and one of the Mad Boy in a greenhouse. He is straining his body upwards so he can eat grapes straight off the vine without using his hands – a wickedly provocative, Dionysian pose for Jennifer, who was presumably the photographer and who remembered the exact date of that weekend. Did they have some kind of fling? Probably – though there is no hard evidence apart from the expressions on their faces and the fact that both were sexual buccaneers whose bodies were their boats.

A PAGE FROM JENNIFER’S ALBUM, SHOWING ROBERT AND HER IN SULTRY MOOD

Robert would surely have taken Jennifer to the stables to meet his adored horse Passing Fancy, which he had ridden in the Grand National. The racer was a beautiful animal, and so swift that Robert tended to find himself alone and ahead with the hounds when out hunting with the Old Berks. Robert’s tall, thin groom, Fred Shury, lived over the stables with his short, plump wife. Shury claimed the animal was so intelligent that it ‘nearly talks to you’, coming up to him and trying to say, ‘Where’s the apples?’269

Of course, life was about to change irrevocably. The following year was 1939, and much of what was taken for granted would soon look like elements of a lost, distant civilisation.

* John Heygate, BBC News editor and later novelist, 1903-76.

HE SUMMER OF 1939 SHONE with a halcyon light,’ recalled Daphne Fielding. People were giving more parties than ever, fearing they might be the last. ‘The atmosphere was tense and feverish, no one dared to pause and the music went round and around.’270 You could get dizzy, wrote another young party-goer, watching them ‘all swivelling round, powder, rouge, & tulle, & crepe – the black cloth, the red carnations, the pearl & onyx studs, the smell of expensive hair oil & Chanel numéro cinq’.271 Hitler’s tanks had entered Prague in March, Neville Chamberlain was making desperate attempts to avert war, and in July Mosley held a huge rally at Earls Court, trying to whip up anger: ‘A million Britons shall not die in your Jews’ quarrel.’ Mosley’s wild-eyed ranting was making his fanaticism clearer than ever.

At Faringdon, all the old friends were still turning up for the indulgent, piquant weekends they had come to expect. Doubtless they ‘howled with laughter’ (as the Mitfords often put it) over reports of Cecil Beaton’s latest project, My Royal Past – a spoof memoir of a Baroness von Bülop that parodied the reminiscences of European royals. The book would be published at the end of the year and contained photographs of numerous old friends who had gathered for elaborate photographic sessions, dressing up in belle époque costumes as the Baroness and her ghastly titled relations. Gerald appeared as King Boris, with fake beard and pompously swathed in ermine, Michael Duff as a ramrod-straight military man with a sash, epaulettes and medals, and Frederick Ashton posed in convincingly aristocratic dowager drag.

FREDERICK ASHTON, ROBERT, MAIMIE, CONSTANT LAMBERT, GERALD, VSEVOLODE, ‘PRINCE OF RUSSIA’, AT FARINGDON, EASTER 1939

In April, Gerald’s ballet Cupid and Psyche was premiered at Sadler’s Wells, with musical direction by an increasingly drunken and unwell Constant Lambert, and choreography by Ashton. The original myth was turned into a frivolous, sometimes farcical performance that divided audiences: Juno was a pantomime dame, Venus ‘a rather shop-soiled floozy’, and Jupiter gave Fascist salutes and strutted with goose-steps – more chilling than amusing given the political climate in Europe.272 The production was generally judged a failure – the audience booed and the whole thing felt more like a private joke than a fully fledged creation. In these worrying times, ‘the cult of frivolity had backfired’; Cupid and Psyche folded after only three performances.273

Not long after this theatrical flop, Maimie Lygon got married to Prince Vsevolode, a nephew of the last Tsar who had fled Russia after the revolution and ended up in England, where he attended Eton and Oxford. Although ‘Vsev’ was penniless and could not compete with Maimie on looks, his background added to his glamour and Maimie was happy to become Princess Romanovsky-Pavlovsky, though some thought it sounded like a stage name.274 Maimie’s old friend Evelyn Waugh disliked the ‘intolerable Russian’, but he was generally welcomed into her social circle, though he drank as much as she did and didn’t make her happy. The couple stayed at Faringdon several times during 1939, including a couple of weeks after their wedding, where they posed for photographs and signed the visitors’ book as ‘Vsevolode, Prince of Russia’ and ‘Mary Pavlovsky’.

One August weekend, the sole guest was Gerald de Gaury, a forty-two-year-old explorer, orientalist and diplomat. Suave and scholarly, he had fought at Gallipoli, been wounded several times, and awarded the Military Cross. During his extensive travels in Arabia, he not only learned fluent Arabic, but came to deeply love the people and the region, which he photographed, painted and later wrote about in several books. The British government sent him to Kuwait as political agent in the 1930s, and he was a special emissary to King Ibn Sa’ud, who liked him and allowed him to stay in the royal household. With conflict looming, the War Office had just appointed de Gaury to manage intelligence and counter-intelligence in Arabia. Petroleum had been discovered there the previous year and the British were keen to keep things sweet with the King.

It seems likely it was over this August weekend that de Gaury decided to take the Mad Boy with him to the Arabian peninsula. The former soldier knew what was coming and Robert would surely have feared that his call-up papers might arrive at any time, as they would for nearly all the male staff at Faringdon. De Gaury must have told Gerald and Robert about the romance of the desert: fine horses, hunting gazelles with falcons, and the legendary, warm-hearted generosity of the King, who had forty-five sons. ‘He gives away motor-cars as European royalties used to give tie-pins and Negro servants as they gave boxes of cigars. Gold daggers and watches are frequently sent to visitors at their departure. The kiswa, a camel-hair cloak, head-kerchief, and gown, or set of clothes, is sent to every guest leaving the Court.’275 Robert was probably intrigued by the prospect of an exotic journey; if he had already experienced the gift of a motor-car from Peter Watson, he certainly had not been given a Negro servant or ventured into the wilderness. De Gaury’s motive in taking such a notoriously unpredictable companion on a delicate intelligence mission is less obvious. Still, the experienced traveller knew how much the Arabs valued good looks (‘they are more readily affected by human beauty of face and form than are Europeans, who add other qualities to the list when making up the sum of appeal in fellow beings’), and de Gaury was far from immune to the charms of male youth and beauty himself.276 Add to this the Arabian appreciation of good breeding, courage and manliness, and the Mad Boy began to look like a useful weapon in the spy’s armoury.

F ROBERT WAS PREPARING for a Boy’s Own adventure, Gerald felt himself on the brink of an abyss that would end everything worthwhile and beautiful about his life. He had been planning a trip to Rome, but that was obviously now impossible. Faringdon would have to be closed up; without staff to run the place and without his Mad Boy, it would not be feasible to stay there. The warnings of what this conflict could bring were horrifying. Bombs would soon be raining down on England and a generation of young men who had been too late for the First World War would now be annihilated. Although Gerald had lived a protected and privileged life far from trenches, bloodshed and grieving, he knew enough about the devastation wrought by one world war to be appalled by the prospect of another.

When Robert left in September, Gerald was almost beside himself with anxiety. But he had to take some decisions: London was too risky and his Halkin Street house was shut up (to be sold by the end of the war); travel abroad was almost impossible; and he tried to rent out Faringdon, though a tenant was never found. Deciding to go to Oxford, he moved in with his old friend Maurice Bowra at the Warden’s Lodgings of Wadham College.

A classicist with a devotion to Greece, Bowra was well known in Oxford for his waspish wit, his love of young men, and his exhilarating, audacious conversation that could leave the listener shocked, horrified and thrilled all at once. Anthony Powell described him as ‘Noticeably small, this lack of stature emphasized by a massive head and tiny feet’, resulting in a Humpty-Dumpty appearance (something that was also said of Gerald). Bowra’s humour easily slid over into cruelty; his ‘passionate praise and unbridled denunciation of enemies produced an intoxicating effect’, and ‘he dared say things which others thought or felt, but were prevented from uttering by rules or convention or personal inhibitions’.277 He wrote outrageously scatological poems about his friends.278

A generation of young men in the 1920s and ’30s had gathered around Bowra, including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Harold Acton and Kenneth Clark. John Betjeman claimed to have ‘met my friends for life’ within Bowra’s rooms. Cyril Connolly called him ‘Mr Bowra the boarer’, though it was clear that the older man ‘had developed a mocking, cynical way of treating events because it prevented them from being too painful’.279 Seen by some as a ‘dandified sodomite’,280 Bowra actually appears to have had much less experience in seduction than some supposed. Fearful of blackmail, he claimed that for him, sex was ‘inescapably in the head’, and that his lust was stirred by fetishism – the white shorts, grey flannel trousers and plimsolls he admired in the student population.281

Gerald and Bowra had many things in common, from their stocky physique and love of fine living to their remarkable intellect and razor-sharp humour. Both men were also dogged by insecurity and had troubled sex lives, while revelling in handsome, talented youth. They should have made perfect bachelor companions as the Phoney War dragged on through the autumn of 1939. But Gerald was descending into deep despondency. Everything that provided the foundations for his life appeared to be vanishing, swallowed up by the miserable mix of bureaucratic restrictions and fear that would now dominate everyone’s lives. Rationing and petty rules would replace the colourful, luxurious life before the war.

In a notebook of this time, Gerald identified himself with the character of the hedonistic grasshopper, which finds itself dying of hunger when winter arrives in Aesop’s fable The Grasshopper and the Ant. ‘The ant never stops doing its duty. I am not saying anything against doing one’s duty as a principle, but one can have too much of it. People who never stop doing their duty are seldom very agreeable people and generally end by doing more harm than good.’ Unlike the people who threw themselves into war work, Gerald saw only the quagmire that was enveloping him. Characteristically, though, even at a time of such gloom, his fear of war was evaluated in terms of amusement: ‘I can face the idea of annihilation with a certain amount of complacency but there is no doubt that it is an awfully dull idea.’282