Those Wild Wyndhams (26 page)

In 1892, Wilde had suggested Mary take a walk-on part in
Lady Windermere’s Fan
. Mary asked Wilfrid Blunt’s advice, but he dismissed the idea out of hand.
³
By 1894, Mary was fair placed to play the wronged wife in any of those dramas. That summer, the Elchos’ marriage had reached a critical point. Hermione Leinster, suffering from incurable tuberculosis, had gone to France to live out her final months in a more temperate climate.
⁴
She packed off her sons to relations and left with her mother and sister for the south of France. Over the course of the summer the Elchos came to an agreement. Hugo would go to Hermione until the end came. When it did, Hugo and Mary would reconcile and have another child to seal their marriage. In the intervening period Hugo’s sister Evelyn de Vesci was to act as go-between for the Elchos. It seems that even the long-suffering Mary baulked at maintaining anything more than cursory contact with her husband during this time.

In August 1894 Wilfrid Blunt and Bosie Douglas made a pilgrimage to Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, stopping at Stanway en route. They arrived unannounced to find the Adeanes, George Wyndham, Arthur Balfour and Mary playing cricket while a band of brightly dressed Neapolitan musicians serenaded them from the sidelines. Hugo was in the Engadine in Switzerland on a cure, Mary about to depart for her own spa treatment at Ems. The following days were filled with Stanway’s standard amusements: croquet in the rain, a golfing trip to Cleve Hill, evening games of battledore (an early form of badminton) played across a string rigged up in the hall. Normally Hugo’s absence gave Mary a chance to spend time with Arthur without challenge. But this time, while Arthur played golf, Mary was not on the links but sitting with Wilfrid in an inn garden nearby while he read poetry to her.

In the years since Blunt had first discovered his fascination for Mary a friendly, cousinly relationship had sprung up. In 1887, he had been allowed back into Egypt, and his small family were now accustomed to spend half their year at Sheykh Obeyd. Over a decade after the British occupation had started, Egypt was the fashionable holiday location of choice for upper-class Englishmen and women. Large elegant hotels sprang up in Cairo and Alexandria catering for linen-clad panama-hatted tourists eager to visit the Pyramids and cruise down the Nile. ‘Someday I must take my children there!’ Mary had told Blunt on receipt of his latest tales of desert life in 1893.
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Blunt insisted to himself that he had built El Kheysheh, the little pink guest house in Sheykh Obeyd’s grounds, expressly with Mary in mind.
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On Blunt’s last night at Stanway he found himself momentarily alone with Mary and ‘by a sudden inspiration kissed her’. ‘She turned pale, said nothing, and went away to Arthur,’ Blunt told his diary, but the seed had been planted.
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The next morning Blunt and Bosie left to continue their journey. Mary got up early to say goodbye and went for a short walk with Blunt in the churchyard that lay adjacent to the house. In the churchyard, in the rain, Mary agreed to go to Sheykh Obeyd that winter.
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A few weeks later, lest Mary should waver, Wilfrid sent the keen horsewoman one of his finest Arab horses from the Crabbet stud – ‘the most delicious hack I have ever been on – it’s like riding a swallow’, said Mary blissfully.
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In October 1894, Hugo left for France and Hermione. Mary was quite alone at Gosford. The news of Drummy’s death had just broken, and her family had hastened back to Clouds. The Wemysses were spending October in the spa town of Maldon, oblivious to any developments in the south of France since, fearing their reaction, Hugo had decided not to tell his parents anything at all.

When, through a helpful busybody, Annie Wemyss discovered the whereabouts of her son she was, she told Mary in the reproachful letter that followed, too upset for several days even to put pen to paper. Having found her tongue she did not spare her daughter-in-law: ‘I do not lose sight of your goodness … you must have reached heights of charity and self-effacement of which I should have been incapable of even dreaming.’ But the fact that Mary had given her ‘sanction’ to Hugo was in Annie Wemyss’s mind the most terrible thing of all.
¹⁰
‘Many seemingly crooked things get straight,’ Mary said evasively. She did not reveal the pact’s full details, knowing that it would send her mother-in-law into an even greater frenzy of righteous indignation.
¹¹

Mary’s own family were incapable of bringing up the subject. Pamela made glancing allusions to Mary’s ‘trials’, but there were no more encouragements from Madeline Wyndham to ‘cleave together’. Matters between the Elchos had now reached such a pass that the Wyndhams could only remain silent, and hope that in time things would improve.

Hugo’s departure was the provocation for Mary’s own trip to Egypt and the bargaining tool that enabled her to go. Ignoring the warnings of her friends, she booked her passage on the
Bengal
at exactly the time that Hugo left. In late December, in the middle of the worst winter that anyone could remember Mary, ten-year-old Ego, eight-year-old Guy and seven-year-old Cincie, Cincie’s governess Miss Jourdain and Mary’s latest maid crossed to Cairo in terrible seas (Mary, teased Arthur, seemed always to attract the stormiest of crossings). They arrived at Sheykh Obeyd, dusty and footsore, in the freezing early hours of 5 January 1895.
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Mary woke later that morning to sparkling blue skies and ‘paradise’. She embraced everything about her new surroundings, the Bedouin clothes that Wilfrid had left out for her, the heat, the silence and flickering shade in the garden as the leaves of the gemeyseh tree rustled in the wind and sunlight sharpened off the white stone dome of Sheykh Obeyd’s tomb. The children were terribly happy ‘grubbing in a little Bedouin tent a few yards from this house’, she reported to Evelyn in the first of many anodyne letters;
¹³
their party had made a trip into the desert, with Mary, Wilfrid and Anne Blunt on Arab horses and the children and Miss J on donkeys. Photographs of this excursion show Mary still in a western riding coat and top boots, white blanket draped over her head to protect her from the dust, a green and white umbrella in her hand. Behind her a black-clad Miss J looks hot and uneasy on her donkey; the children are so small one can scarcely make out their faces.

All Mary’s friends had warned her before she left that Wilfrid would try to seduce her. They reiterated these warnings in every letter they sent. She kept her letters home cheerful and bland, proffering sanitized tales of picnics of dates and fresh camel milk in Bedouin tents. ‘The little bits we get of
real
Eastern life are very interesting,’ she told Evelyn in a letter headed ‘Desert, Cairo’. ‘We might be living in the time of Joseph (this is just about where Potiphar’s garden might have been).’ Staying with the Blunts was delightful: ‘so
much
nicer than being in an hotel’.
¹⁴
The true story of what happened lies in Wilfrid’s own account, and in Mary’s later correspondence with him: for of all her diaries that remain, the volume for
1895
is missing. The inference that it was destroyed, possibly by a diligent descendant, is inescapable.

Four days after Mary arrived she appeared at the main house alone, dressed in Bedouin clothes and asking Wilfrid to show her Sheykh Obeyd’s tomb. When they were by the tomb Wilfrid kissed her once again and in the flickering shade of the gemeyseh tree the cousins sat and talked. Mary confessed her childhood crush on Blunt, and on gentle pressing revealed something of her relationship with Arthur on which others had speculated for so long. ‘To him she is pledged far more than to Hugo,’ Wilfrid duly noted in his diary. ‘She loves and honours and respects him, and he is constant to her, and she has always been constant to him, and she is bound to him by a thousand promises never to give herself to another. On this understanding he has been content that their love should be within certain limits – a little more than friendship a little less than love.’
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Mary’s explanation to Wilfrid is the clearest indication we have that her relationship with Balfour had not been consummated. That night she wrote to Arthur confessing that Wilfrid had ‘made a little love’: confessing and needling simultaneously. Arthur replied almost immediately from a fog-ridden London where he was battling ‘the important trifling of politics’ and influenza: ‘All the things I really want to say are unsayable so that if you wish to know them you must imagine them for yourself. Think of what you would like best to hear and have faith that that is what I should like to speak. I do not think you will be far wrong.’
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It is as close as Arthur would ever come to a declaration, but hardly a satisfactory one. It was also too late. A few days before that letter arrived, Mary had sent the children and Miss J into Cairo, to see the museum, while she stayed in bed, recovering from a bad cold. In the late morning, as she dozed in her cool darkened room, she was woken by a soft knock on the door. It was Wilfrid who found, as he had hoped, Mary alone. One thing led to another. ‘My extremest hopes were achieved,’ Wilfrid wrote in his diary that evening, jubilant at having seduced the cousin he had been pursuing for so long.
¹⁷
It was almost certainly the first time that Mary had had sex with anyone other than Hugo. Wilfrid did not think that she had ‘intended quite all that happened’,
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and Mary later agreed. ‘We might have been lifelong friends but
you
excluded it with yr eyes open,’ she said, explaining that she before ‘had only had to do with
different
men’ – the men of the Souls who flirted, cajoled and kissed, but never (at least not in Mary’s experience) crossed over into ‘the conjugal act’. Later still, when nostalgia had cast a rosy glow upon everything to do with her time in Egypt she would tease the ‘unscrupulous’ Wilfrid for having taken advantage of her.
¹⁹

In early February, the party set out on what Blunt called their ‘desert honeymoon’. As intended, Anne and Judith accompanied them only on their first day, after which they turned back, leaving Blunt and Mary, albeit ‘chaperoned’ by the children and Miss Jourdain and numerous servants, on their own. Each night, in the wadis where they pitched their camp, Mary secretly left the tents set up for the women and children and went to Blunt, under the canopy of his travelling carpet a little way away. The clandestine visits did not go unnoticed by all the members of the party. ‘I think the Arabs with us knew that we were lovers,’ confided Wilfrid to his diary: ‘indeed they must have known it, for there were Mary’s naked tell-tale footsteps each morning in the sand … Mary is now my true Bedouin wife.’
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Far from being intimidated by the desolate, unforgiving landscape, Mary felt free for the first time since her Cumberland childhood. ‘I was made for the desert,’ she told Wilfrid proudly. ‘I
knew
how to live in a tent (have “blackened cooking pots!”) & to rise high on a camel with streamers flying in the … wind! It all came to me by instinct.’
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Years later, even a kettle’s singing in an Edinburgh convalescent home recalled to her the sound of Wilfrid’s servant, Mubarak, playing to the company on his flute, as they reclined under tents made of rugs set among the sandhills, and conjured up the memory of ‘lying in a tent in the hot clean sand & making foot prints in it’: the telltale signs left of the lovers’ nighttime wanderings.
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On their return from the desert, the affair continued. Judith, who was in her early twenties, dropped by El Kheysheh one evening, to find ‘H.F. [‘Head of the Family’, Judith’s nickname for her father] sitting on Mary’s bed … They looked horribly confused but I suppose it means nothing,’ she recorded in her diary.
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Cynthia’s biographer believes that both the little girl and her governess had some idea of what was going on.
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It would seem impossible that Anne Blunt had not noticed as well. But Mary buried thoughts of Anne, of Arthur, of the fact that she had taken her mother’s lover as her own. ‘I am &
always
shall be sorry for wounding the feelings of anyone I care for but otherwise its difficult to wholly regret days of beauty & romance,’ she assured Wilfrid later.
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‘I am quite happy living in the present,’ she told Evelyn innocently in early February, just after her return to Sheykh Obeyd.
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The ramifications of the past and thoughts of the future could not be held at bay for ever. The next day – Valentine’s Day – Mary broke the news to Blunt that ‘it being the 36th day … she is certainly with child’. Blunt received the news with sheer delight – ‘For me it is a pure gift from heaven.’
²⁷
Throughout the affair, Mary had alluded with concern to possible ‘consequences’. Her period came like clockwork, and a rough and ready calculation with the dates suggests she fell pregnant almost the first time she slept with Wilfrid. Perhaps this knowledge informed her recklessness: since she was damned she might as well embrace it. Yet from Blunt’s bald report now that Mary was ‘a little troubled and anxious’ one can sense a world of apprehension and confusion for her. ‘She will not, if she can help it, give up her husband, or her children, or her friend,’ he told his diary.
²⁸
Nor can Mary have forgotten that six years before her doctor had warned her that another pregnancy would risk her life – the reason why she and Hugo had not had sex in all that time, and why she could not now hope to pass off the child as Hugo’s, even if she wanted to. Almost magically, a solution to the latter problem appeared to present itself: the next day, they received a letter from Hugo announcing his imminent arrival – and, hot on its heels, the author himself appeared, bowler hat plonked firmly on his head and Cymru, Hermione’s fluffy chow, on a chain.