The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (47 page)

Y VISITS TO FARINGDON gave rise to a range of emotions. I appreciated its extraordinary beauty and originality and it was strange and wonderful to invite friends to stay. Don continued to teach me about the history and ways of the place, from explaining how to choose the right day to dye the doves, to helping me decide which trees to plant by the lake. He often told stories about Robert and pointed out the quirks and history of the house and grounds. I gradually got to know the people whose lives were entwined with the estate, and each one had their own complications. According to Robert’s will, Garth’s widow Betty had been left a lifelong tenancy at an annual rate of 10p, and when her house needed fixing, I was the one who had to decide what we could do. Many tenants took the opportunity of a new regime to request repairs that Robert had refused to carry out.

After Leo, Annabelle and their young son moved out to a house they had renovated in a neighbouring village, I occasionally stayed at Faringdon alone, mooching around, flicking through first editions that had belonged to Gerald, or uncovering stashes of photographs that revealed something new about the place. Sometimes, I tried to get on with writing up my thesis there, but it was extremely difficult to retreat from what seemed like a steady flow of people who needed me to be ‘captain of the ship’, as one person put it. I found myself being offered a variety of roles and relationships that apparently came with the inheritance and that were bewildering to someone in her mid-twenties from a very different background. I was asked to become president of the local horticultural association and to ceremonially switch on the town’s Christmas lights. People I didn’t know invited me to dine at nearby large houses. Fearful of being sucked into a way of life I hadn’t chosen, I refused. I worried that the line between real friends and the curious, the snobbish or the ambitious would become blurred. I was apprehensive about what effect this hugely beautiful yet weighty appendage would have on the way my life evolved.

I must have seemed stand-offish to some, but I also tried to do the right thing. All of Robert’s local obituaries mentioned his kindness in the community: there was a tea party each year for the Silver Threads social club, scouts came camping and charity events were allowed. I had seen the old photographs of fetes and Gerald crowning the May Queen. I tried to continue some of these activities, and when the gardens were opened twice a year under a national scheme, I often sold tickets or helped with preparations, half proud of how lovely the place looked, half awkward at being thrust into the role of chatelaine. When the town’s annual firework party was held in a field by the lake on Guy Fawkes Day – also Robert’s birthday – I agreed to give a welcome speech. There were hundreds of people and I was taken to a caravan to speak into the booming PA system. A Greek friend staying gave me brandy to quell my nerves. ‘My grandfather would have been very pleased …’ I heard myself say, in a voice that sounded squeaky, shaky and like a pitiful imitation of minor royalty without the elocution lessons.

Various issues cropped up that forced me to take a position. Would I allow the local hunt to continue to ride over the estate? My initial reaction was: absolutely not. As someone who barely knew one end of a horse from the other and who believed that hunting was outdated, snobbish, brutal and unnecessary, I said I’d prefer to keep the place as a fox sanctuary. It was only after the thoughtful and charming Master of the Hounds and his deputy showed up for a drink and I heard about the alternatives – farmers shooting, trapping and wounding foxes, the problems created by what was classed as vermin – that I took in some of the complexities. Who was I to turn up and stop them having their fun? Wasn’t I an anthropologist who tried to empathise with other cultures? We made a compromise: no blocking foxholes and sending the terriers in to kill the cubs and a ‘fox reserve’ to be respected around the house. From my bedroom window, I would often see a red glint slinking across the rough field above the lake, provocative on a frosty morning.

Harder to resolve was the situation when Alan was finally bought out. He had become a director and an investor in the Berners Estates Company after Robert had got into trouble with severe gambling debts and Alan had stepped up with the cash in return for shares. There was a selling spree to produce the money for him. Among other things, Gerald’s beloved paintings by Corot were auctioned and many more would follow in subsequent years, including the portrait of Henry VIII given by the king himself to the Lord Berners of his day. There were too many long meetings with people I described at the time as ‘be-suited, grey-faced, heavy-shoed, tax-scheming, middle-aged men’.

Along with the rumours that people passed on about my own inheritance, I was given several stories about why Robert ditched Alan at the last post: some said it was because his preferred nephew had separated from a first wife whom Robert adored, though that had been years before; others that Robert didn’t like the second wife. (At least she owned a place in Gloucestershire that was much larger than Faringdon, so I had no additional guilt that Alan’s lost expectations would affect his quality of life.) An estate worker claimed that Robert had said, ‘Sofka is the only one with any bloody sense.’ An old friend of Robert’s suggested that he liked the serendipity of this unlikely choice. Just as he had been a surprise for more conventional types when he acquired everything in 1950, so he liked the idea of creating a rumpus. ‘He said it had been so amazing for him when he inherited Faringdon from Gerald – like Kind Hearts and Coronets,’482 a film where an oblique inheritance is the subject of much scheming and merriment, not to mention Ealing Comedy murder.

When we had finally fixed all the financial details, Alan announced that he refused to go without my signed agreement that sixty-two-year-old Jack Fox would be given the shooting rights for life on the estate. He would be able to take shoots (presumably with Alan or his friends, if required) all over the estate to gun down wild birds and the pheasants he raised in Grove Wood and Bennet’s Pen, a copse near the lake. My initial reaction was indignation. I didn’t like the idea of shooting anyway, and I was being forced to give away something against my will. Although Alan was always scrupulously polite with me and I admired his sang-froid in the face of what must have been a nasty disappointment, I realised I was an uncomfortable thorn in his side. His hand-in-glove relationship with Rosa, whom he continued to visit bearing his muddy riding boots, was awkward enough, but now he wanted to take away my control of something at Faringdon, probably for decades to come.

Adding to my unhappiness at Alan’s arm-twisting was an unfortunate phobia. Like Gerald, who ‘found a dead bird’ inside him during his wartime psychoanalysis, I had been horrified by this symbol of death since earliest childhood. While I never minded another animal’s corpse, the claws and feathers of a lifeless bird provoked a cold-sweat panic. I looked the other way or even avoided passing Jack Fox’s garden so I wouldn’t see the splayed wings of pigeons or, worst of all, greasy black crows hung up by their legs and waving in the breeze. One of the first things I had done after inheriting Faringdon was to get rid of the numerous stuffed birds from Gerald’s collection. Alan had offered to remove from the dining room some glass domes sheltering long-tailed birds-of-paradise, loading them into his car after one of our early meetings. The most gruesome item of all was a sinister screen made up of two glass panels, between which were placed the boneless bodies of numerous coloured birds. One of Cecil Beaton’s photographs of my mother as a baby shows her posed in Jennifer’s arms in front of it, Robert’s reflection in the glass only adding to the creepiness.

Alan was just as stubborn as I was and a far more experienced negotiator. I was trapped. In the end he won and, miserably, I capitulated.

There were other times when I learned how to get the upper hand over the grey men in suits. When my solicitor announced that the only way forward in Faringdon’s management was through a trust, he offered himself and a colleague as trustees. ‘Could one have someone else?’ I asked, inspired on a whim. ‘Does it have to be a lawyer, or could I have, for example, two friends?’ Within a short space of time, I was back in the panelled conference room off the Strand with Sarah Horrocks and Tessa Charlton, my two oldest friends, who had supported me through the peculiarities of the early months at Faringdon. They had even less experience of these things than I did, and the atmosphere was one of suppressed hilarity and high tension as we tried to concentrate on unfamiliar terms like ‘the statutory and equitable rules of apportionment’ or ‘deeds of Indemnity’. Tessa took drops of her Bach Flower Rescue Remedy to combat her terror of ‘suits’, and we all eyed one another conspiratorially across the heavy table. Unreasonably, it felt like a coup of the young and female over the old and male. Afterwards, the newly appointed Trustees of the Robert Heber-Percy Will Trust took me to a pub where we collapsed in fits of nervous laughter, downing vodka to put us back on track.

It was not all financial meetings and dealing with the burdens of tradition. The second summer after Robert’s death, Mario Testino asked whether he could do a photographic shoot at Faringdon. He was a friend of my younger brother Kolinka, who had once taken Mario to see Robert. They had been fed smoked salmon and champagne – ‘That’s all he ate, no?’ said Mario, who had been impressed by the place and the man. The previous year, Mario had taken atmospheric black and white wedding photographs for Leo and Annabelle. Ever since his arrival from Peru a decade earlier, he had noticed how many from his social and professional circle in England were fascinated by the era that Beaton had captured so memorably in his photographs. ‘They were very deferential to that group of people – Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, Elsa Schiaparelli,’ he said. ‘My editor at Harpers & Queen, Hamish Bowles, was obsessed with Beaton. We were inspired by the importance of decor and environment and his pioneering use of androgyny.’483 Mario’s own interest in the influential photographer had increased. People would later compare the Peruvian photographer to Beaton – both for his ability to create a story and an unusual mise en scène for a picture, but also for his ground-breaking portraits of royalty.

Mario and Hamish showed up with an impressive collection of models, stylists and make-up artists, and created what was essentially a 1980s fantasy of the 1930s using the idea of an Agatha Christie-style murder story. The dining room was turned over to make-up and hairdressing, while the study was filled with racks of slinky evening dresses and piles of red satin slingbacks, co-respondent brogues and sparkly gold heels. Actors as well as models became aristocrats manqués, a butler, a poetess – inevitably called Sappho – and an exotic femme fatale. Most of them stayed in pubs in the town, while those who could be fitted stayed in the house; with only five bedrooms, the hosts at Faringdon had always needed to limit their guests. Hamish, as willowy and gimlet-eyed as Cecil Beaton, wafted down the stairs for dinner dressed in the sort of Edwardian evening gown that his muse had donned in more frivolous moods.

THE AUTHOR AND MARIO TESTINO (IN ONE OF GERALD’S ROBES) AT FARINGDON, DRESSED FOR EASTER DAY, 1988

Mario had already visited Faringdon several times since Robert’s death and believed ‘You could really feel the energy, the madness that inhabited the place … The lake, the folly … England has so much history, you can relive it. Everything you do is related to the past.’ Once when he was staying, and as if to prove my links to the Mad Boy and Gerald who had fantasised about coloured sheep and cows, I dyed my mother’s grey whippet mauve. She had left Nifty with me when she went on two weeks’ holiday and I persuaded Don to help me colour him, applying the shade used on the doves for Robert’s funeral. In the old days, Gerald and Robert had done the dyeing outside the house, in ‘great basins of magenta, copper green, and ultramarine dye, and with the help of men-servants ceremoniously dipping, one after another, his white pigeons and once … some swans, a duck, and a white poodle’.484 With echoes of the past becoming almost deafening, the multi-coloured doves fluttered obligingly for the beautiful visitors, and a purple streak was to be seen racing across the expanses of green lawn between the house and the churchyard wall.

VICTORIA’S WHIPPET NIFTY, DYED MAUVE

My future at Faringdon continued to seem very unclear and I became increasingly convinced that I could not live there and be true to myself. I wrote at the time to an anthropologist friend that my relationship with Faringdon might be a bit like an arranged marriage. I don’t have a passionate love for it, as I do for Greece, nor do I have the deep, family sort of love that I do for Raasay. Faringdon is like a very handsome, rich, eligible husband, but one who was chosen by someone else. In some arranged marriages the love and even passion develops, but in others I suppose this can never be. The best I can do, as the privileged bride, is to give it a chance and see what develops. And at least, using the metaphor of marriage, I am able to be polygamous!

ESS THAN FIVE YEARS after I inherited Faringdon, I returned from abroad to stay there in very different circumstances. Rosa’s words that I could do worse than find a husband and take up flower-arranging returned to haunt me. Although I was not married, I arrived with a man and I was six months pregnant. As I walked about the gardens with my expanding abdomen, I picked flowers and placed them around the house in Gerald and Robert’s old vases. The place felt utterly different – transformed by love.

I had met Vassilis two years earlier in Moscow. Having finished my PhD, in 1990 I had gone on a trip to what was still the USSR, partly on a quest for my Russian roots and partly to write a couple of articles as a freelance journalist. One of the pieces I was investigating was about the Greeks of the Soviet Union and I had arranged an interview with the Greek Consul in Moscow. The Consul stood me up, but Vassilis spotted me out of the Embassy window and took over. He was the press attaché, he said, so ideally placed to help. Some weeks after, Vassilis appeared in London, and not many months after that I returned to Moscow to live with him.