Those Wild Wyndhams (44 page)

When Pamela did entertain, she did it on her own terms. The rest of the family had long turned away from Bosie Douglas, on account not of scandal but of his character: ‘the kind … I most despise’, Mary told Arthur privately – weak, vitriolic, aimless, a conspiracy theorist quick to exercise his vitriol against the world.
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Bosie had ‘converted’ to heterosexuality and married Olive Custance in 1902. Pamela persuaded Eddy to give the Douglases a
cottage on the Wilsford estate; and to offer Bosie, in 1907, the editorship of
the
Academy
, a literary monthly recently bought by Eddy. Bosie used it as a vehicle to attack the Asquiths until his attacks became so extreme – he described Margot as ‘bound with lesbian fillets’ (the intent of which statement to offend being undiminished by its being unintelligible) – that Eddy, unable to fire him for fear of Pamela’s fury,
cut all ties with the publication, giving the entire enterprise to Bosie as a gift.
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In 1912, Bosie prompted another scandal when he came face to face with Robbie Ross, the executor of Wilde’s literary estate, at a reception held by the Tennants at Queen Anne’s Gate, and launched himself at him, shouting abuse. Ross hid behind a large table, and Bosie, sliding across the polished oak in pursuit, was hauled back by other guests, allowing Ross to dodge into the drawing room and bar the door. Roaring impotently with rage, Bosie remained glowering and huffing in the gallery’s corner until Sibyl Queensberry persuaded him out by requesting he escort her to her carriage. Meanwhile, Eddy Tennant moved quietly among his female guests, apologizing in his understated manner for the unseemly disturbance to which they had been subjected.
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Pamela’s regal indifference to convention provoked a certain cattiness – ‘an Olympian character, she floated to and fro between Wilsford and the Glen, appreciating their different beauties, and so well buttressed by wealth that she never had to catch a bus or think about the price of fish’, said Elizabeth Buchan, wife of the writer John
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– and provided ample anecdotage beloved of the press. She stopped her carriage in the middle of a state procession through Edinburgh, to buy up all the birds caged in a pet shop, ordering them to be delivered to Holyrood, then setting them free in King’s Park.
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Mary recalled a visit by the sisters to London Zoo to visit a cockatoo of Pamela’s from which she had ‘parted … because its language was too shocking for words!’ At the Zoo she ‘outraged the authorities by taking her dog Roly into the gardens, she hitched the dog under her arm and disregarded the complaints and threats of the officials, who followed her protesting, and at last withdrew in despair!’
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When they found the disreputable bird, it recognized Pamela.
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‘What would you think if I told you that I knew of a family of which the eldest son walks up to his waist in water when going out to dinner, & of which the mother, when she dines out, burns her pocket handkerchief in the dining room fire?’ teased Edward Grey.
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Each New Year’s Eve – Pamela told Sibell – she trysted with the memory of her doomed love for Harry Cust, sobbing as she reread all his letters stored in her keepsake box.
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There are hints in Bain’s letters that he and Pamela had some form of physical relationship – ‘when I die, Stonehenge will be found printed on my heart’, he said – and Pamela always made clear to Bain that her invitations to Wilsford did not include his wife.
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But Grey was the constant, providing Pamela with the attention and reassurance that she needed, meeting her mind in the truest fashion. At Queen Anne’s Gate, they shared firelight ‘knitting suppers’, at which Grey read aloud to Pamela as she knitted, needles clacking furiously beneath her serene face.
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‘Are you not more than Mary-Queen-of-Scots beautiful?’ he asked her, and Pamela, mollified, receded from her hysteria.
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‘Emma, You are very perverse in supposing that when I tell you of having refused bridge I do so with the object of conveying to you that I make sacrifices when I spend an evening with you. I tell you of these refusals to convince you how very much I prefer a K.S. [knitting supper] evening to other attractions,’ he wrote, addressing her as Emma Woodhouse, and signing off as her fictional lover Mr Knightley, after a stormy one-sided row in which Pamela had accused him of being motivated to see her by duty rather than desire.
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On an early-summer Sunday in 1912, Grey wrote to Eddy from Wilsford, a beautiful day, with missel thrushes out in force, and the river flowing strongly and full. He recounted his anxious journey from London, transporting in a slopping can of water six giant orfes ordered by Pamela for Dingley Cut, the pond at the bottom of the garden; the sight, at breakfast, of a stoat proceeding at stately pace across the lawn, its mouth full of prey; and a long afternoon’s walk with Pamela across the Downs featuring ‘the usual adventures; finding & negotiating precarious planks in unfamiliar water meadows’. All the children were well, he continued, Clare reluctant to return to school in Salisbury the next day, six-year-old Stephen satisfied with his new gardening method: digging up the crocuses flowering in the other children’s gardens and replanting them in his own plot. ‘“Rousing up the bulbs” he called it.’
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One would think that this letter came from the father of this family, such is Edward Grey’s familiarity with the Tennants’ quiet domesticity. Eddy, kept in Scotland by business and a mistress – a sweet-natured local woman about whom no one ever spoke – was an increasingly shadowy presence in that family’s life,
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even to the extent that Bim was sent to Winchester, Grey’s alma mater, rather than Eddy’s Eton, with Grey making the necessary introductions to the suggested housemaster. It must be this which provoked Stephen’s acidic claim in adulthood that he could scarcely remember what his dull father looked like.
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The Glenconners’ houses provided Grey with respite from his tussles at the Foreign Office. The Great Powers were aligning themselves on opposing sides in a tangle of ententes and alliances: in 1911, France’s designs on Fez in Morocco brought England within a whisper of war against Germany; in 1912, the frighteningly fast disintegration of the Balkans brought together the Great Powers in London at a conference of eight interminable months of petty disagreements and squabbles. Domestically, the bloody revolution that George had predicted, perhaps hoped for, had not come to pass, but the seeds of social unrest seemed everywhere. Bills proposing Home Rule for Ireland and the disestablishment of the Welsh Church were progressing through Parliament, their eventual legislative force apparently now only a matter of time. Suffragettes poured acid on to golf courses in green suburbia or chained themselves to the railings of Buckingham Palace; and, in front of dumbstruck crowds at the Epsom Derby, Emily Davison, with a return train ticket in her pocket, stepped out in front of the King’s horse, and died four days later from the injuries sustained. The sympathy of many was for the horse. At Wilsford, Nanny Trussler read out to her charges at breakfast the
Daily Mail
’s dire warnings about the consequences of the coal strikes breaking out across the North Country;
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in East London, the dockers continued their protests.

The discordant strains of Stravinsky’s music filled the air; Chekhov’s languid characters appeared on West End stages; Society dressed in exotic costumes inspired by Sergei Diaghilev’s astonishing Ballets Russes. Time seemed to be slipping ever faster past. Roger Fry’s exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ opened to public outrage at the Grafton Gallery in the winter of 1910. Two years later, a second exhibition of Post-Impressionism (now containing contributions from English artists inspired by the first) barely raised an eyebrow. Everything seemed fragile. The
Titanic
’s sinking in April 1912 blindsided a society that thought itself technologically invincible, and the disaster, remembered Cincie Asquith, ‘loomed … large in one’s life for months’.
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Invasion fears blossomed: Lord Roberts began campaigning for a Home Defence Army to protect England against the Germans. Summering at Baden-Baden in 1912 with Cincie, Mary noted with unease the effect of such speeches when reported in the German press. Only that morning, her German doctor had asked her in a truculent tone ‘if there was going to be a war in the spring … they are persistently, and absolutely convincing themselves that we want to fight them’, she reported to Arthur.
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In Baden-Baden, Cincie showed Mary a passage in the memoirs of Charles Greville, the celebrated diarist of the Regency and early Victorian years, concerning their ancestor the ‘Third Earl’. Mary was thrilled to recognize in Egremont’s patronage and open-handed hospitality qualities that ‘are me!’, surprised that they stemmed ‘from my paternal English (stiff shy English) and not from my Franco-Irish (Celtic! Red rag to Balf) side!’
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Mary was fifty, with married children, and now with grandchildren (Cincie’s son John was born in 1911 and Ego and Letty’s son David in 1912). In 1913 Guy Charteris became engaged to Eddy’s niece, Frances Tennant, another example, commented Mary, of the way in which ‘we Wyndhams … have dipped into the Tennant family as our marriage Lucky Bag’.
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Over the years, Mary and Stanway had melded into one another: the house was ‘a kind of material envelope – a shell – exactly fitted to your personality’, declared Arthur;
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‘a golden beehive of mellow stone and yellow grass with beautiful children and grandchildren swarming in and out’, said Detmar Blow.
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‘I am simply absorbed in happiness over my family!’ Mary told Arthur on a September’s afternoon in 1912, writing from the warmth of her ‘boudoir’ as rain beat against the windowpanes. The fire was crackling in the hall, where Mary had arranged chairs for the ‘young females’ to work and read; the boys were playing stump cricket in the barn; her mother was writing letters in her bedroom. As the house hummed with quiet activity, Stanway seemed to Mary ‘a wonderful centre of Love and Vitality (Life) Radiance and Harmony, and I begin to see dimly that I have done something, or that to speak more humbly and truly … something has been done thro’ me, for to have built up this home life is something and to have the radiating centre from which people can draw something and pass it on, is like having founded a watering place!’
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The house was short on creature comforts, even cleanliness: ‘every horizontal object wears a coat of dust, like a chinchilla. It’s a wonder the inmates look as clean as they do,’ commented Letty’s sister Lady Diana Manners in 1909,
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and Mary was constantly battling to find enough space for all her guests. ‘When a man’s tired he rests, when Mary Elcho[’s] tired she moves furniture,’ Mary told Arthur.
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In 1913, Lord Wemyss (under some pressure from Connor, Gosford’s agent, whom Mary called ‘my Scotch champion’)
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agreed to install electricity at Stanway and increase the Elchos’ annual income to £1,000. When Connor telephoned to tell her the good news, Mary, at first so relieved she could only weep, then poured all her energies into cajoling, bludgeoning and wheedling her husband, father-in-law and agent into agreeing to build Stanway a new wing, frantic not to let this dreamlike opportunity slip out of her grasp.
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The resulting extension, built by Detmar Blow, was torn down by Mary’s prescient grandson shortly after the Second World War, realizing it to be the only way the house might survive as a private residence.

Looking down over the assorted scrum of people at breakfast at these weekends, Mary was fond of saying that Stanway was like a lunatic asylum, although ‘sometimes … and this is probably true, I think it’s I who am a mad woman keeping house for the sane …’ she wrote.
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Certainly she anticipated this reaction from her ‘worldly’ friends (Ettie Desborough and the like) when, in the spring of 1913, she hosted Hugo’s latest mistress, Lady Angela Forbes,
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and her two young daughters at Stanway for several weeks, even going so far as to help Angela enrol the elder, Marigold, in the same Malvern girls’ boarding school attended by her own daughters Mary Charteris and Bibs.
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Angela was a chain-smoking, brash, hard-living divorcée. Mary could not resist the challenge – ‘this is a very hard nut ahead’, she said, with an ill-concealed glimmer of excitement.
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Even so, she recognized the difficulties her instinct could lead her into. ‘It’s very awkward living with a leg in each world. Some day I shall split and shriek like a mandrake!’ she admitted to Arthur.
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In the same letter, Mary reported the ‘great excitement’ of the engagement of George and Sibell’s son Percy ‘Perf’ Wyndham to Diana Lister, daughter of Tommy and Charty Ribblesdale, just two weeks after they met. The wedding six weeks later was remarkable as a grand convention of ‘the Wyndham clan – all so beautiful and so well pleased with each other’, commented an onlooker.
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The great hope was that Perf’s marriage would restore life to Clouds. Percy’s death had left Clouds ‘
awful –
haunted by vivid memories, presences you may almost say of Papa and Mama, myself! You! My children, Madeline, Pamela, Guy and
all
’, Mary told Arthur.
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Madeline Wyndham, having handed over the reins to Sibell, ‘naturally won’t’ play the chatelaine ‘and Sibell apparently can’t!’ said Mary. ‘Let the young people in I say and give them their heads.’
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Six weeks after Perf’s wedding George took a trip to Paris, accompanied by his mistress Gay Plymouth and her daughter, and planning to meet up with Hilaire Belloc while he was there. George’s time in Paris was nigh perfect: he hunted through antiquarian bookshops for books for his library (which needed only the inscriptions on the walls to be complete); and enjoyed the late-spring sunshine on walks with Gay and Phyllis in the gardens of Fontainebleau.