The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (48 page)

It took Vassilis over twenty years to admit that when I drove him to Faringdon from London for the first time and we spent the weekend alone there together, he was troubled. From my point of view he had seemed appealingly blasé, and I later appreciated that Vassilis was not weighed down by the historical burdens and class awareness of the British. But in reality, he had been perplexed. What sort of person will she be, if this is her house? he had wondered. Vassilis had by now been transferred to the Greek Embassy in London and was leaving Faringdon in the dewy mornings to catch a train up to work and arriving back by early evening. We had quiet weekday suppers in the kitchen, spotting deer picking their way daintily across the lawn towards the walled garden, or watching in dismay as a hawk dive-bombed a coloured dove, leaving a pile of candy-coloured feathers on the grass as it carried its meal away.

We made plans for improving the house, pondering how it might pay for itself as increasingly worrying accounts appeared. A few old friends like Sarah and Tessa came down for weekends, and Leo and Annabelle would come over with their two young sons. Rosa’s menacing presence as housekeeper had finally been expunged by a dark-haired young Scottish woman, Patricia Howie. An art-school graduate with a passion for cooking, she brought a new warmth and informality to the place, while rising happily to the challenge of creating imaginative feasts when we had people to stay. We also threw the occasional party. Friends gathered from Russia, Greece and around the country for the ‘Green Party’, at which everyone dressed in green. Even Coote showed up in a floor-length pastel chiffon number. Sarah wore a green wig and rode a monocycle along the terrace, and Tessa was overwhelmed by admirers from Moscow. (Later, developing her photographs, she discovered that someone had used her camera to take a close-up of his penis, something one imagines the Mad Boy might have done in his day.) The carpets were taken up for dancing, with music provided by DJ K, a Greek disc jockey called Kostas, who crossed Europe by bus for the gig. Some friends camped in the garden, others took rooms in local pubs, and in the morning we gathered at the orangery for breakfast, where two musicians played Indian music and people climbed the stairs to nowhere and took dips in the pool.

Faringdon was changing, emotionally and practically. All over the house were additions from Russia, where Vassilis had spent the last four years collecting art, furniture and curiosities; anyone paid in foreign currency was rich in Soviet terms, and he was a regular at the auctions and street markets. In the green part of the drawing room near Gerald’s piano there was now an ornate old harp, a double bass and a belle époque wind-up gramophone, all of which looked as though they’d been there since the 1930s. In the study, where Gerald’s red wax models of horses stood on a shelf, we placed a garland of trumpets, saxophones and trombones. As we began to reclaim the attic floor, in the hope of letting out the whole house for holiday rentals, we furnished some of the rooms with Russian wardrobes and desks and hung paintings Vassilis had bought in Moscow’s Arbat. Teasing was a tradition we easily adopted; we put a giant plaster bust of Lenin in the corner of the attic room under the pediment, now gazing not towards a glorious revolutionary future, but at the coloured pigeons that perched, cooing, on the window ledge.

Our daughter Anna was born in Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital in August 1992 and we returned home the same day. After half a century, Faringdon once more had a pram in the hall. This time, though, there were no nurses, nannies or green baize doors. The house seemed airy and light, reinvented by a new life. We walked the baby around the walled garden to pick mulberries and wheeled her through the park and down to the lake, shooing away the curious heifers that gathered to inspect the unfamiliar contraption. We lay, the three of us, in a capacious string hammock, bought the previous year in Mexico and slung beneath the Scots pines at the top of the lawn. Rooks cawed from their nests above, the church carillon chimed out Bishop Heber’s hymns through the warm afternoons, and somewhere in the distance, beyond the buzz of insects in the mock-orange flowers, was the rhythmic hum of Don mowing the grass at the back of the house.

My mother’s half-brother Jonathan came to take some photographs of our new family. Only too aware of the history, he arranged us in the drawing room, as Robert and Jennifer had been by Cecil Beaton in 1943. My brother Leo filled the place of Gerald, nonchalantly reading a book on the day-bed. To imitate Robert, Vassilis donned his gumboots, holding Anna in the place where her grandmother had been before her.

IMITATING THE CECIL BEATON PHOTOGRAPH OF 1943, IN 1992 MY UNCLE JONATHAN PHOTOGRAPHED MY BROTHER LEO (ON THE DAY-BED), VASSILIS HOLDING THE NEWBORN ANNA, AND ME TAKING UP MY GRANDMOTHER’S POSITION

Three summers later, Lara was born, and it was around this time that my mother learned something bizarre.

Jennifer had fallen down the stairs some years earlier and due to brain injury or possibly a stroke, she had changed profoundly. She was not always aware of what was going on and her speech was affected and often unintelligible. Even stranger was her outspokenness on subjects that she had been discreet about in the past. Alan had not been a good husband – he was a ‘bad man’, she declared. She also exhibited an occasional uncharacteristic prudishness: she disapproved of her young Australian nurse having a boyfriend. One day, Victoria took her mother for a walk in the nearby London park and Jennifer remarked, ‘You don’t look at all like Robert.’ ‘Is he my father?’ asked Victoria, who had heard a few whispers that there might be some doubt, but nothing more substantial. ‘Oh no,’ replied an ingenuous Jennifer, in a devastatingly casual, almost sing-song voice. ‘Well, who is?’ asked Victoria. ‘I can’t remember,’ came the disturbing reply. Then, ‘Ask Billa. She knows.’

Victoria didn’t approach Billa directly but asked for help from another old friend of Jennifer’s, the writer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, who lived near Billa in Norfolk. Almost a month later a postcard arrived from Jonny, who had invited Billa to dinner. He quoted her as saying, ‘The person that springs to mind is Ned Fitzmaurice.’ It was an unusual way to learn about a possible father.

Lord Edward Norman Petty-Fitzmaurice was the youngest son of the 6th Marquess of Lansdowne. He had been killed fighting in Normandy in August 1944 at the age of twenty-two. Billa sent a photograph of a sweet-faced boy, with fair colouring and a slightly snub nose. He was sitting with two friends and a dog, and when Victoria showed the picture to Jennifer she pointed to Ned and said he was the one. She added that she and Robert had slept together, but suggested that it had not been often.

Understandably, Victoria was thrown into turmoil. She was not helped by the fact that everyone she spoke to seemed to have their own opinion, never previously divulged to her. Some said they’d always known that Robert had rescued Jennifer when her lover was killed in the war. Others said it was Lord Berners’s arrangement, or Billa’s bossy scheme. When my mother approached Billa herself, the ageing Lady Harrod was furious. She now regretted saying anything, given the rumpus. Nothing was certain, anyway, she added. Equally incensed was Coote, whose famed kindness deserted her when Victoria consulted her. ‘Coote snapped my head off,’ remembered Victoria. ‘She said, “It’s really snobbish of you,” as if I’d preferred Lord Lansdowne instead of Robert Heber-Percy Esq.’485 Such apparent disloyalty to her oldest (if not necessarily most loyal) friend was anathema to Lady Dorothy Heber-Percy.

Victoria managed to arrange a meeting with the Duchess of Devonshire (née Mitford), the youngest sister of Gerald and Robert’s old friends Diana and Nancy. Debo had been very close to Ned and his older brother, Charlie, the Marquess of Lansdowne from 1936. Charlie had been killed in Italy, blown up in his tank, only nine days after Ned went down in a blaze of machine-gun bullets while leading his platoon. According to a lance corporal in his regiment, Ned was ‘the gamest little lad I have ever seen … No one could ever imagine him to possess the guts he had.’486 Debo had often visited the brothers at Bowood House, their dazzling and gigantic Wiltshire home. The Bowood Ball was renowned as one of the most splendid events in the social calendar. Although large sections of the house were knocked down after the war, Ned’s bedroom and dressing room were in a part of the house that is still known as Ned’s Tower. When the Duchess met my mother for tea in Curzon Street (fresh from trying on hats for Ascot), she looked her up and down – ‘as if she was examining a horse’ – and said, ‘You have the ankles of the Lansdownes!’487

The Lansdowne family had been devastated by the deaths of Ned and Charlie, and their two sisters, Elizabeth and Kitty, were still haunted by the double tragedy. The title and inheritance of Bowood House had gone to a cousin. Kitty (who had inherited the family’s Scottish title, Baroness Nairne) was now in her early eighties. She was such a close friend of the Mitford sisters that her nickname was ‘Wife’; Debo described her as quiet, discreet, intelligent and witty.488 Kitty agreed to meet my mother and the two women immediately felt a bond and discovered much in common. Ned had been ‘sensitive if not over-sensitive’ and the whole family had suffered from depression, something that continued to plague my mother and that she now saw as a family trait; Kitty’s eldest brother had ‘fallen under a train’ aged twenty. If Kitty felt she was meeting the child of her beloved brother who had died fifty years earlier, Victoria believed she was meeting the sister of a young man who was rapidly becoming her idealised father. ‘I liked the idea of Ned,’ she said. ‘He was so much more sympathetic and cultured than Robert. I was keen on the idea of anybody other than Robert being my father. We just couldn’t get on – we were like a cat and a dog. He admitted to me that when I was born he had felt no more interest than if there had been a newborn animal in the house.’489

It was a cataclysmic experience for my mother to have to revise her own life in the light of this possible new narrative. To discover that your unloved legal and social father might have had nothing to do with your biological make-up can be bewildering but also exhilarating. Victoria had undergone enough years of psychoanalysis to know about the ‘inner father’ and the large, framed, black-and-white photograph of a freckle-faced boy that now took pride of place in her bedroom became a ‘guardian angel’. For me, the episode was a very different sort of experience. ‘Maybe Faringdon doesn’t really belong to you now, if Robert is not your “real” grandfather,’ suggested some. This seemed an inversion of the reluctance some of the Lansdownes initially showed my mother, fearing she might be a bounty-seeker. While I didn’t fear the legal or practical implications, there was no doubt that this changed the story. My conversations with people who knew the characters involved didn’t lead me to any firm conclusions about who my ‘real grandfather’ was, and while I sympathised with my mother’s anguish and hopes, I realised that when it comes to the biology of one’s grandparents, it all seems more remote and less urgent. One sperm didn’t seem to make a fundamental difference by the third generation.

It wasn’t until I came to write this book that I tried to weigh up the evidence more systematically and to ponder on the implications of my own descent and inheritance. First, I tried to find out more about Ned. There was no evidence that he and Jennifer had been seriously involved; the most likely scenario was a brief fling, like the many adrenaline-fuelled passions that lasted a night or two during the war, when nobody knew whether they’d survive the next day. My mother had discovered a few things about Ned. He had been an undergraduate at Oxford before he joined the Army and he was artistic, drawing and painting for pleasure. Apparently, he had hoped to be a writer. Victoria had managed to look through Ned’s old letters to his family, but the only reference she found about her mother was that he reported meeting up with Jennifer and Billa and finding them both ‘middle class’. Hardly a reflection of intimacy or romantic intent. Worse, it seemed an indication of a snobbish superficiality that may have been prevalent then among the titled class, but now sounds bad. When I asked Ned’s descendants whether I could take a look at the papers myself, they refused. Kitty died only four months after getting to know Victoria and had left strict instructions in her will that nobody should see the letters until after the death of her younger sister, Elizabeth. According to one of the relations, the dates of Ned’s whereabouts made it virtually impossible that he was Victoria’s father, but without access to the papers I was unable to verify this.490

Gerald’s old friend Clarissa had been close to Ned’s older brother, Charlie, but she was surprised to hear that Ned was a possible candidate. ‘I didn’t know he was old enough,’ she said, recalling a ‘little boy’, though she then remembered that he had been ‘charming and gentle with a little bit of malice – a kick at the back’. As Lady Avon dug back into her memories, she recalled that Ned had become a great friend of Gerald’s when he had been an undergraduate at Oxford. ‘Ned was amusing – he had a half-smile on his face as if he was about to say something. And Gerald liked being amused. I presume that Gerald picked him up in Oxford and Ned began going to Faringdon. I saw him there.’ I scoured the visitors’ book and, sure enough, found Edward Fitzmaurice staying for the weekend of 27 June 1942, a couple of weeks before Jennifer and Robert’s wedding. Other guests included Winnie de Polignac, Constant Lambert and Margot Fonteyn. There is no sign of Jennifer’s name.

At this point, I began to look at dates. My mother had been born on 28 February 1943, so when did Jennifer become pregnant? An online service calculated conception on or around 7 June 1942. Assuming that Jennifer’s next period was due a couple of weeks later (say, 21 June), that she waited at least a week before getting a pregnancy test (29 June), and that the test took at least a week to produce results, she would not have confirmed the situation before at least 6 July, five days before she and Robert got married (11 July). Even given the propensity for last-minute weddings during the war, the pace of developments is uncannily rapid. It would have taken some doing to gather parents, relations and friends from around the country for the London nuptials, especially during a time of chaotic communications when there were plenty of more urgent problems. Was twenty-year-old Ned invited? He didn’t die until August 1944, around the time when Victoria was eighteen months old and she and Jennifer had left Faringdon for Oare. A letter from Billa to Roy at that time reveals that Nancy Mitford ‘wrote to Jennifer about a book and asked her to tell me how sorry she was for me about … Ned. I thought that so very sweet of her.’ Was this Nancy’s tactful way of sending condolences to Jennifer?