Those Wild Wyndhams (34 page)

Sargent’s portrait had caught the sisters like flies in amber, frozen for ever in trinity. In reality, their worlds were moving ever further apart. Of all the siblings, Mary and Pamela saw each other the least. They were ‘widely unlike’, and while Cincie Charteris diplomatically tried to attribute their prolonged absences from each other to ‘their very different ways of life’ – Mary ‘was at everyone’s beck and call’ while Pamela ‘exercised a certain thrift in the spending of her time’
¹
– the fact was that Mary often found Pamela difficult and remote. Mary was ‘devoted’ to Mananai (‘as well she might be’ said Cincie
²
) but with the perspective given by an age difference of a decade, she recognized her youngest sister’s flaws better than the rest of her family, and was capable, on occasion, of a ‘heated … skirmish!’ with her, something that faithful Mananai would never do.
³
Publicly, Mary maintained her support of her difficult sister: ‘I know you’ll forget any little hardnesses of speech about your Pamela. I could not bear you to think me stupid enough not to see her extra out-of-the-way cleverness,’ Margot wrote to Mary in 1900 – a rare enough apology from Margot, suggesting that Mary must have defended Pamela quite forcefully.
⁴
‘It is the fashion to abuse Pamela,’ Mary remarked almost twenty years later to Lady Desborough (as Ettie Grenfell became after Willie’s elevation to the peerage), thanking her for understanding her sister as she did.
⁵

In 1902, however, Mary and Pamela were united by the common bond of pregnancy, giving birth just weeks apart in May. The children were born into a new era of peace – the Treaty of Vereeniging that marked the end to the Boer War was signed on 31 May, the day that Mary’s third daughter was born. They were Edwardians, not Victorians: Bertie, the Prince of Wales, who succeeded his mother upon her death on 22 January 1901, was crowned Edward VII in August 1902, after appendicitis had forced cancellation of the original ceremony in June.

Bertie’s designation inspired a host of nicknames – ‘“Edward the Caresser” & (only I think this is too prophane [sic]) “King of the Jews” … Mrs K[eppel, Bertie’s mistress] has been called “Mistress without Robes” … very wrong only rather funny,’ reported a shocked but amused Mananai to Percy.
⁶
Mananai had been in London for the Queen’s death, when a ‘pall of unknown sadness’ fell over ‘a mourning City’. As bells tolled and paperboys’ sandwich boards shrieked of war, Mananai had mourned ‘poor England’, a country beset by misfortune and change.
⁷
The coronation and the peace promised the fresh and new. Pamela longed to call her son, born on 22 May, ‘David Pax! It sounds so short and manly,’ she told Mary. At Pamela’s suggestion, Mary named her own child Irene Corona after the peace and the coronation, although she was known always as ‘Bibs’. Pamela and Mary were both delighted with their new arrivals. ‘David Pax is such a squawler … you never heard such a voice – peppery & imperative,’ said Pamela.
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Mary thought Bibs was like spun wire, with a combination of fragility and toughness ‘that makes me
ache
for the little creature … her eyes shine like stars’.
⁹

Both sisters knew how anxiously Mananai awaited the birth of her own child due that autumn. After the terrible loss of 1899, Mananai began to visit Schwalbach, a German spa providing the ‘iron cures’ recommended for ‘women’s problems’.
¹⁰
She also subscribed to the popular theory that a baby’s sex might depend on the month in which it was ‘started’: ‘I had a feeling I
must
begin the
same
day of the
same
month as last time (May) … I don’t feel to trust any other month,’ she told Madeline Wyndham, herself enthusiastic about the scheme.
¹¹
Her sisters felt a twinge of guilt at having so effortlessly succeeded where Mananai had failed. ‘You, at least, can feel you have not mopped up a possible son from darling Madeline!’ Pamela told Mary when Bibs was born.
¹²
To quiet disappointment, in October 1902, Mananai gave birth to a fifth girl, named Helena.

Helena Adeane was the only one of the newborn cousins whose paternity was not questioned. The Adeanes were devoted to one another, moving together between London and Babraham, where at the turn of the century Charlie built a large hall in the grounds, named the Madeline Hall after his wife.
¹³
In January 1901, Charlie went to Egypt, while Mananai, run down after the election’s excitement and her exertions during the ‘benevolent season’, made a longed-for trip to Ireland to see George and Sibell, followed by several weeks’ convalescence in the gentle sunshine of Hyères. ‘It will be so strange being a “grass widow”,’ she said of this rare separation.
¹⁴

It is unlikely that the angelically blonde Bibs was, as some rumoured, actually Arthur Balfour’s child. Bibs looked like her undoubtedly legitimate brother Yvo, and Hugo doted upon her – in marked contrast to his coldness towards Mary Charteris. More plausible is the suggestion that David Tennant was the son of Edward Grey,
¹⁵
a close friend of the Tennants’, godfather to their second son Christopher, a reluctantly prominent Liberal Imperialist and an obsessive birdwatcher and fly-fisherman, pursuits of which he wrote lyrically in a series of essays published under the title
Recreation
.
¹⁶

Fishing was the foundation of the two Edwards’ friendship, forged in the mid-1890s. Their decades-long, quietly affectionate correspondence is mostly blow-by-blow accounts of days thigh-deep in a rushing river, with only occasional intrusions of finance or politics
.
¹⁷
Both quiet, unostentatious and honourable men,
¹⁸
they were politically as well as temperamentally aligned. Both became senior members (Grey was a Vice-President, Eddy a member of the Executive Committee) of Lord Rosebery’s Liberal League, a vehicle for imperialist views founded in 1902 when Rosebery, who had supported the Boer War and advocated ‘cleaning the slate’ of ‘obsolete policies’ like Home Rule, moved to the cross-benches.
¹⁹

The reluctant politician: a beaky Edward Grey at the despatch box.

Pamela’s instinctive jealousy of Grey as a rival to her husband’s attentions was quickly mollified by admiration of his character. By the turn of the century, she numbered Grey and his wife Dorothy among her closest friends: ‘two of the elect’, she said, ‘each of them nearly the nicest person in the world’.
²⁰
The Greys divided their time between Fallodon, Grey’s Northumberland family seat, and a small tin-roofed cottage in Itchen Abbas, a village in the New Forest within cycling distance of the Tennants in Wiltshire. Beneath the reclusive Dorothy’s forbiddingly reserved façade, she was, in Pamela’s estimation, ‘a woman in a thousand … gracious, sympathetic, eagerly appreciative of all distinction in thought, action and character … No one who ever knew her well was not the better for her influence …’
²¹
The connection between Pamela and Grey was particularly intense. They had ‘nearly every taste and interest in common’. The ‘peculiar sympathy’ between their minds ‘eludes words, because it is so intimate!’ said Grey.
²²

It was common knowledge within political circles that the Greys’ marriage was, at Dorothy’s request,
un mariage blanc
– a sexless marriage. Most thought the courteous Grey was celibate. But
Lloyd George, the unabashedly philandering ‘Welsh Goat’, maintained that Grey was a man of ‘sham honesty’ in both public and private life.
²³
Certainly Grey’s reputation as the most reluctant of politicians sits oddly with his part in the ‘Relugas Compact’ of 1905 in which he, Asquith and Haldane tried to weaken their leader, Campbell-Bannerman, in the Commons by forcing him upstairs to the House of Lords. As for his private dishonesty, Marie Belloc Lowndes – Pamela’s close but indiscreet friend – recalled in her memoirs that after many years of marriage Dorothy Grey had suggested to her husband that they resume a physical relationship, but Grey refused. The implication was that Pamela had forbidden it, but the anecdote is inconclusive. Pamela would most likely have issued this edict even if she was not having sex with Grey.
²⁴
Pamela was very demanding with those she loved.

This approach extended to her children. Charlie Adeane spoke to Mary with ‘the greatest admiration’ of the way in which Mananai ‘has obtained
complete
control over all her children by
love & influence
. Punishment & Reward can never obtain this. I think you all inherit this wonderful power – a very rare one – from your mother.’
²⁵
This was certainly true of the docile, loving and obedient Adeane girls. But Pamela’s was a hothouse love. She loved her children ‘in a French and not an English way’ said Osbert Sitwell, commenting on Pamela’s wish to be constantly with her children – ‘the last thing, as a rule, that an English parent of her kind would desire’ – and to ‘regulate absolutely’ their lives.
²⁶

‘O, I almost wish I didn’t love the children so dreadfully,’ Pamela said, recounting her anxiety when Stephen suffered scarlet fever.
²⁷
She immortalized her children in two of her most successful books:
The Children and the Pictures
, in which the subjects of the Bart’s Old Masters came alive and joined the Tennant children in midnight adventures; and
The Sayings of the Children
, which recorded their childish wisdom. She kept them close to her, yearning for the days when they went no further from her than Glen’s village school each morning on their ponies,
²⁸
sobbing when delivering seven-year-old Bim to the train that was to take him to boarding school for the first time,
²⁹
and making every excuse to keep her younger sons at home. Only Clare, whom she thought ‘spiritually short-sighted’,
³⁰
did she willingly send to school. She was fiercely jealous of the children’s nanny, Rebecca Trussler, a stout, middle-aged Cockney who joined the family in 1906.
³¹
When Stephen – whom she dressed, long after his infancy had passed, as the girl she wished he had been – was eight years old, she appeared on stage with him in a charity tableau at the Royal Albert Hall, cradling him in her arms as though he were an infant.
³²
Her children were her acolytes. ‘What a child we could have,’ she once told her son David with reference to their striking good looks.
³³
Such looks were on constant display. Visitors arriving at Glen were startled to find the family seated in greeting, in the hall, ‘in a sort of photographic pose’: a tableau of perfection, with Clare pouting gently, Stephen perched on her knee, and Pamela, the beautiful, youthful mother, at the centre of it all.
³⁴
As a young man, Stephen wrote a scrap of thinly veiled autobiography in which Pamela appears as the remote Lady Brandon, ‘whose charm and beauty had greeted her in the glass every morning for more years than she cared to remember [and] was greedily exacting as to the admiring allegiance of her family and immediate circle’.
³⁵

Pamela’s approach to childrearing was considered strange. ‘I never care for a woman draped in her children – let them go,’ said Margot.
³⁶
‘I do NOT cart my children about like Pamela,’ Mary retorted hotly to Hugo when he charged her with having taken Bibs to Clouds to amuse herself, rather than leaving her at Stanway with her nanny, Cliffe: implicitly the latter was better parenting as providing stability and routine.
³⁷
Cliffe herself complained, as politely as she could, of the Liberty Hall atmosphere among the Tennants when visiting with Mary Charteris and Bibs in 1906, shocked that nine-year-old Clare, attending school in Salisbury each day, ‘as a rule dines with her mother, at 8, I feel that is much too late for
Mary
… they do not rest at all in the
day
.’
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