The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (39 page)

Although father and daughter were not close and Victoria felt that Alan played a more significant role in her life than Robert, there were times when she appreciated Robert’s generosity and style. In 1959, when Victoria had her sixteenth birthday at Cranborne Chase, she rang her father to tell him she wanted to throw a party and Robert sent Hughie over with a van filled with marvellous food. ‘There were maybe twenty roast poussins,’ she remembered, and although it was February, the weather was warm and the whole class had a picnic. ‘It was a typically grand gesture.’

VICTORIA, AGED FIFTEEN, WITH HER ADORED HALF-BROTHER, JONATHAN, AGED FIVE

Soon after this birthday party, Victoria left school, saying she felt homesick, and joined her mother and stepfather in London, where she took a few independent lessons and planned her future. It was at this point that Cecil Beaton asked to take a photograph of the beautiful teenager. He got her to stand by a gauzy-curtained window and then, without asking her permission, published it in Harper’s Bazaar with the caption ‘Victoria Heber-Percy: the reluctant debutante’ – though she was not a deb and never would be. Victoria was already attracted to a different approach to life from that of her parents. Her belief in simplicity and the idea of being ‘natural’ became an instinctive principle and one that increasingly marked her apart from her glamorous, well-dressed mother and particularly from her father, with his obsession with his grand house and his lack of emotional involvement.

In September 1959, Victoria went to St Clare’s, a crammer in Oxford, to do A-levels. Early the next year, just before her seventeenth birthday, her recently ex-boyfriend Michael Brett took her to a party. It was there that she met Peter Zinovieff, a twenty-six-year-old geologist who was known in Oxford as a ‘mad Russian’. His parents had left St Petersburg as child-refugees of the 1917 revolution, and he was known for wild behaviour and the sort of alcohol-fuelled pranks that recalled the heyday of Brideshead Oxford – running round the quadrangle in a woman’s corset, stripping naked, setting fire to his hair or making bets as to who could be the first to drive to London and return with a policeman’s helmet.440 In order to call off his engagement to a second-generation Russian in Paris, Peter had concocted a crazy scheme that involved accompanying his fiancée to the opera, where he pretended to have a fit and jumped out of the box into the stalls below. After working in Cyprus, he was now at Oxford doing post-doctoral research.

Peter’s first encounter with Victoria was not by chance. He had come across Cecil Beaton’s photograph of the teenager and, enchanted by her looks, had cut it out of the magazine and carried it around in his wallet. When he serendipitously discovered that Michael Brett knew this beautiful girl, Peter insisted that he engineer a meeting.

They were ostensibly an unlikely pair. Victoria was depressed following her break-up with Michael, and was particularly immature for her age (she had only reached puberty the previous year). Peter, despite his reputation for wildness, was still a virgin and his family background equalled Victoria’s for complications. His parents had separated when he was a child and his remarried father had been killed in a train crash when Peter was eighteen. His mother had been born Princess Dolgoruky, but created havoc in the exiled White Russian community not only for becoming a dedicated communist but for her many love affairs. She worked with the French Resistance during her internment in a Nazi camp in France and was now being monitored by MI5. This ‘Red Princess’ worked for the Communist travel agent Progressive Tours, taking groups of socialist tourists to visit the Eastern Bloc; she delighted in showing off her parents’ palaces in St Petersburg, adding what a good thing it was that they were now state-owned.441

VICTORIA AGED SIXTEEN, PHOTOGRAPHED BY CECIL BEATON. IT WAS PUBLISHED IN HARPER’S BAZAAR AND INSPIRED PETER TO SEEK HER OUT

By the summer, Victoria and Peter were enough of a couple for the forty-four-year-old Jennifer to take them on a holiday to Greece. They rented a house on Aegina, where Peter and Jennifer drank lots of wine and got on so well that she was delighted when her schoolgirl daughter announced that she and Peter were getting married. Peter fainted from over-excitement most nights at dinner, to the extent that they took to positioning a mattress behind him as a precaution. The only person to suggest that seventeen seemed rather young for matrimony was Alan, who came out to Greece with Jonathan towards the end of the holiday. But the event went ahead anyway.

In November 1960, Victoria and Peter were married at the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile in Emperor’s Gate, Kensington. Robert, now almost fifty and starting to go grey, was dashing in a morning suit. He had been scheduled to give the young bride away, but there was a muddle and in the end it was Alan who did – symbolic of how Victoria had adopted him as more of a father-figure. Jennifer wore a fur hat with a fitted silk suit and winkle-pickers and seven-year-old Jonathan carried the icon, as is the way in Russian church weddings. It probably looked quite exotic to the English crowd; there were crown-bearers and large candles and the front section of the bride’s voluminous veil burst into flames and had to be torn off and beaten out. This all added drama to an event Victoria recalled as ‘like having the main part in the school play’. The headmistress of Cranborne Chase attended, in addition to many of Victoria’s old school-mates, one of whom was the maid of honour. Hundreds of guests went on to a reception at the Ritz, where formal photographs were taken – the Russian émigrés on one side of the couple and Robert, Jennifer and Alan on the other. After the party, the bride and groom took the night train to Scotland for the first part of a honeymoon. The second part was in Iceland.

Early the next year, the couple took a driving holiday to Italy in a newly invented and highly fashionable Mini. Victoria was struck with a mystery illness in Rome, where she felt very sick and, worried it might be appendicitis, Peter raced her back to London. When the British GP asked whether there was a chance Victoria could be pregnant, they both had to admit that the thought hadn’t occurred to them.

Before the baby was born, Victoria took Peter to stay at Faringdon for the first time. There was a splendid dinner the night they arrived and the following morning Peter let himself into the darkened, shuttered drawing room. Inspired by the stories of Lord Berners, Stravinsky, Constant Lambert and others, he sat down at the Bechstein and began to play. An accomplished amateur pianist, he improvised something he thought might fit the place and its extraordinary history, but before he got very far, Robert rushed into the room. ‘What the hell are you doing, buggering around in here?’ he shouted. ‘Get out!’ Peter stopped, mortified. ‘I’d only been trying to do something positive,’ he recalled. ‘I was so shocked that I cried!’ The couple stayed on miserably for the rest of the day, and left early the next morning. Why Robert was so furious remains unexplained. Although Gerald’s piano was precious, it was not an untouchable relic – Hughie often tinkled on it after dinner – and it is hard to imagine that this was the reason. Perhaps the ageing Mad Boy was unable to stomach the young mad Russian. Peter knew just as much about breaking conventions and behaving badly as Robert; was there too much reckless male energy in one house? Maybe Peter was not playing by Robert’s rules, about which he was increasingly particular. Whatever the cause of Robert’s outburst, Peter never went again during his father-in-law’s lifetime and it was years before Victoria did.

VICTORIA AND PETER’S WEDDING RECEPTION AT THE RITZ, 1960. L TO R: PETER’S UNCLE, KYRIL ZINOVIEFF; HIS MOTHER, SOFKA SKIPWITH; THE BRIDE AND GROOM; JONATHAN ROSS; ROBERT HEBER-PERCY; JENNIFER ROSS; ALAN ROSS

In 1961, Alathea offered Victoria and her new husband the opportunity to take over Oare. Geoffrey had died just before the wedding and his widow didn’t want to keep the place on. But neither of the newly-weds wanted to establish a life with the constraints that a large country house would bring and it was eventually sold.

N NOVEMBER OF THAT YEAR, I was born at the Royal Northern Hospital in Holloway. Peter fainted and the obstetrician had a heart attack, but the teenage mother (already an early advocate of natural birth) did very well. They named me Sofka after my paternal grandmother and I lived with my parents and two grey whippets in Ebury Street, Belgravia. This was a road whose previous inhabitants included Mozart and Tennyson, and from where Vita Sackville-West set off from her marital home dressed as a man for evenings out with Violet Keppel. I was christened in the Russian Orthodox Church, though I barely returned there during my childhood. Peter was becoming interested in computers and experimental music, leaving behind the geology and a job at the Air Ministry that had formed his career until then. Victoria was now receiving an income from a trust fund set up by her maternal grandfather, Geoffrey Fry, to provide for Jennifer and her descendants. The new parents gave dinner parties where the guests wore evening dress, and they often went to Clayton for weekends and took trips abroad. Their house was decorated by designers sent in by Jennifer, with beautifully made curtains and silk cushions.

L TO R: JENNIFER (AGED FORTY-FIVE), VICTORIA (NINETEEN), HOLDING THE AUTHOR AS A BABY, AND ALATHEA (SIXTY-NINE) AT OARE, 1962

Fifteen months after me, my brother Leo was born, and by the time my mother was twenty-three she had a third child, Nicolas, later known by the Russian diminutive ‘Kolinka’. But the marriage was not going well. Peter had started having affairs within weeks of the wedding and Victoria had soon followed suit. She felt dominated by Peter’s large personality and was periodically depressed. Husband and wife were following in the tradition of their parents in terms of their chaotic infidelity, and Robert took the opportunity when he could to come between the young couple. On one occasion he invited Victoria to a party at the Clermont Club – a grand gambling outfit in Berkeley Square – to which only one half of every couple was allowed. Peter sat at home, believing he had been cut out of a party thrown especially for his wife, and became so angry and miserable that he started smashing the windows at 4.30 in the morning. Victoria returned home to the sound of breaking glass.

A few years later, Victoria and Peter transformed their milieu, embracing the fashionably bohemian ethos of the time and moving from Belgravia to Putney. Gone were my mother’s fitted dresses and shiny shoes from the early period of her marriage; now she wore long Indian skirts, went to pottery classes and smoked the odd joint while listening to Leonard Cohen. Trips to St Tropez had been replaced by holidays in the Hebrides, in a remote croft house they renovated. My father built a computer-music studio in our Putney garden, which ran almost underneath a railway bridge and down to the Thames. The place was filled with a mass of winking lights and electronic wires and innards – ‘probably the most advanced studio in the world’, Peter told a reporter for the Evening Standard.442 In 1968 there was a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with his Partita for Unattended Computer and it was not long before experimental composers and musicians of all sorts were flocking to Putney. Meanwhile, the children went about barefoot, didn’t have many haircuts and weren’t taught manners on principle.

The same year, Victoria decided to leave Peter and it was Robert who suggested she join him and a friend, Lady Primrose Cadogan, on a cruise to South Africa. That Robert was keen to facilitate a distance between his daughter and her husband is comprehensible. It is more unexpected, given the lack of warmth she felt for her father, that Victoria agreed. At least it provided an escape from a situation that was increasingly unhappy. It was both brave and reckless when the twenty-five-year-old Victoria gathered up her offspring, aged six, four and nearly two, flew to Venice and boarded an Italian ship bound for Cape Town. Perhaps she was encouraged by the example of Alathea, who had taken up travelling the world on cruises since Sir Geoffrey’s death. Rumour had it that Alathea perked up no end as a widow, taking quite a shine to the sailors, though she was to die on one of these voyages, aged seventy-four, this same year. She was buried at sea.

I remember nothing of Robert from that journey down the west coast of Africa and he was apparently not impressed by his three unruly grandchildren, preferring the bar and the gaming tables. If he was trying to facilitate a divorce between my parents, it didn’t work. After the cruise, my mother, gripped by the depression that continued to dog her, returned to my father and they struggled on with their marriage for another five years.

THE AUTHOR, AGED ABOUT TWELVE, AT HOME IN PUTNEY

OSA PROLL WENT TO WORK at Faringdon in the late 1950s and it was she, more than Robert’s indoor boyfriend or the outdoor one, who was to mark his tenure. Fiercely industrious and loyal, Rosa got rid of the other house staff, only tolerating old Mrs Shury till her retirement and allowing a daily cleaner to come in from the town for some years until she too was banned. It was not long before Rosa controlled every aspect of the domestic environment. Already a phenomenal cook, she took on the weighty mantle of producing food that matched the standards Robert had learned at Gerald’s side. Eventually, Rosa also cleaned the house, polished the silver and the brass, washed the walls, mended the linen and, in her spare time, embroidered tapestry chair covers for the dining room. It was she who barred the shutters after everyone had gone to bed and who opened them in the morning before laying the fires. She had the trays ready for the ladies’ breakfast in bed, observed a military strategy for preparing a three-course lunch and kept a close eye on what was going on in the gardens. ‘She was a bloody terror,’ remembered Des Ball, the gardener at the time. ‘You couldn’t move without her coming to check.’ Trespassers on the estate became a thing of the past as Rosa patrolled the grounds with a large dog; even children who played by the stream in the woodland a good mile away from the house were chased off with shouts and threats.