Mad World (55 page)

‘How I dread Christmas,’ she wrote towards the end of 1946; ‘Do come
to London soon and cheer us up.’ Those joyous Christmases at Mad were now a very distant memory. Her letters revealed increasing signs of having been written when drunk. An obsession with homosexuality runs through many of them: an Isherwood novel that she ‘thought would be about a pederast’; repeated references to a story that eighty people had been arrested in Hampstead for sodomy. ‘How much my mind has sunk,’ she commented.

Every now and then she wrote with Madresfield gossip, such as the news that Miss Bryan, her old governess, was very ill and that the cook who blackmailed Boom was dead. She said that Dickie, her youngest brother, had phoned to say that he had sent a wreath and written a card from her (noblesse oblige, even to a blackmailer) and then Elmley rang to say he had done the same and so did Lady Sibell, ‘all after I had rung the gardeners at Mad and done the same so I expect many people will think I am heart-broken’. The one thing she never lost was her sense of humour. Her letters to Evelyn are peppered with references to her father (‘high time someone wrote a lovely life of Boom’) and with nostalgia for the good old days (‘just think 18 years ago we were all in Venice’).

By 1952 Evelyn informed Nancy Mitford that ‘poor Maimie is broke’. She and her husband were following ‘the old, almost abeyant custom, of residing together without speaking. Difficult without servants.’ The next year she moved to Hove on the Sussex coast, where she had a bad fall down the stairs, probably when drunk, and was left concussed and bruised. Evelyn thought that she was going a bit crazy. Her lawyers and bankers were refusing to allow her to cash cheques. She had begun to pawn her jewellery. This provided short-term relief: ‘I have £350 in notes and no bills,’ she wrote to Evelyn, ‘so come up and let’s make whoopee.’ She told him that she was in deep disgrace with her brother Lord Beauchamp and her sister Lady Lettice, who had asked her and Vsev to live ‘as jagger in turns with them to save money’. Maimie was desperate not to have to resort to this – ‘So darling,’ she asked, ‘suggest a way I can earn my living.’

Her Christmas was dreadful: ‘Not like the old days with the Capt. G. B. H.’ At this point Vsev was still living with her, but he was shortly to leave for good. Maimie had been reading her old letters to Boom: ‘My word! I was hypocritical. I expect they made good reading for Boom all the same … I never see a soul nowadays. However have got used to being
lonely.’ She had also been reading diaries from the early thirties (alas, now lost): ‘Plenty of you – all to your credit. Well deserved!’ But her brave front was not fooling her loved ones.

In 1954, Coote wrote to Evelyn: ‘I long to see you; we are all very concerned about Little Blondie. Being married to Vsev is bound to make anyone nuts.’ Coote told Evelyn that she had made an appointment to see Maimie’s doctor but had deemed it wise not to tell her sister of her plans. Coote was pretty much resigned: ‘I don’t think it will do any good. Why didn’t we kill him [Vsev] at Hove?’

Maimie’s mental condition worsened until she was admitted into a rest home for the mentally ill in central London in June 1954. Naturally, she faced it head on and wrote to Evelyn: ‘So here am I in the bin … I have been ill since before Whitsun.’ She longed to return to her little flat in Hove, but was persuaded to stay at the home in Weymouth Street. Evelyn was distressed to hear the news and wrote to comfort her and sympathise that he too had lost his reason in February and March. He made jokes about her being mad with the coming eclipse of the sun, asking ‘is it not very expensive in your bin?’ Like the rest of her friends and family, he was worried about her financial position. He wished he could come to see her with ‘grapes, and flowers, and filthy stories’.

A letter she wrote to him in August 1954 reveals her fragility: ‘Darling, What are the saddest words in the English language – If Only, Never Again, Kept Waiting, Too Late, No Answer, Just Because. I think If Only is the Saddest.’ By the end of the year, Evelyn was writing that ‘Poor Maimie is sunk in madness.’ There were rumours of suicide attempts and desperate drinking, though she made periodic attempts to give up for Lent or out of ‘vanity and parsimony’.

Maimie was divorced in 1956. Vsev had gone off with his Hungarian mistress and would soon remarry. She abandoned Hove, wrote off her car and reverted to her maiden name. Several collections of her jewellery appeared as star items in the sale rooms at Christies. She explained to Evelyn that Vsev’s old wine firm had sacked him and offered her a job: ‘There is quite a future for me in the Booze business.’ The willowy debutante was becoming an overweight middle-aged lady.

In December 1954, the year he found Maimie ‘sunk into madness’, Evelyn had visited the don, Richard Pares, who was dying of motor neurone disease. He wrote to Nancy Mitford: ‘I went to Oxford and
visited my first homosexual love, Richard Pares. At 50 he is quite paralysed except his mind and voice and awaiting deterioration and death … No Christian Faith to support him. A very harrowing visit.’ He could not bear the idea of his friends dying without faith. So when Maimie wrote to him some years later to tell him that she had lost her faith, he acted quickly. She had said she was: ‘Poor, Persecuted, cold, tired, hungry and I have lost my faith which I mind but what to do?’ The letter was signed: ‘Yours despairingly, Blondie’. Evelyn asked her to elaborate and she tried to explain:

When I say I have lost my faith I do not mean
belief
exactly as who am I to dare say that something is untrue which has been known to be true for centuries by ones of far greater learning and intelligence than I could ever have had a glimmer of. Perhaps I meant courage and the insight which I had. Perhaps it is that things have been too easy for me. Anyway perhaps I could see your Beast one day … I do value your friendship.

Apart from trying to set up a meeting with a priest, he asked his friends to visit her and sent his daughter Meg, whom she adored, to see her. Meg loved looking through Maimie’s scrapbooks of the 1930s and chatting. They often went to dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel. By this time Maimie had a new job working at Sloane Galleries Antiques on the King’s Road. When this fell through, she took a position at Ede Car Hire, writing to Evelyn to recommend the company. It was a far cry from driving down to Mad in her father’s sleek Packard. In 1963 Evelyn, in all seriousness, suggested that Maimie should take over the position of hostess at the Cavendish Hotel, following in the footsteps of Rosa Lewis, ‘The Duchess of Jermyn Street’.

Maimie was, in Evelyn’s words, ‘very poor, and pretty’. He often sent her cheques for her birthday and Christmas. In the early days of their friendship he used to write her cheques for thousands of pounds with a message: ‘Here is some money in case you are poor’, knowing that she would never cash them – this of course was a joke, the rich daughter of Lord Beauchamp needing money from a poor, aspiring writer. But in these last years, he gave her money in earnest. He always asked with great tact whether she would mind accepting cash rather than a present for Christmas.

When Maimie was seventy-one she was interviewed for
Harpers & Queen
in relation to the Granada television adaptation of
Brideshead
. She was living in an unprepossessing basement flat in juggernaut-begrimed Redcliffe Gardens in Earls Court – still in surroundings that eccentrically combined style and disarray. A once rather grand gilt table was strewn with clutter, indeed every surface was covered with junk – pieces of string, old magazines, pipes – as though the contents of drawers had been tipped out. Maimie was elegantly dressed and ‘remarkably pretty with hair the shape and colour of an overblown white rose’ as she sat poised on a ‘threadless urn-shaped sofa’ with Mister, her Pekingese, gnawing an old bone at her feet. She had, observed the interviewer, Julie Kavanagh, the ‘self-possession and nonchalant disregard of convention that seems natural in people of great beauty and privilege’. Although it was only four in the afternoon, Maimie offered her visitor vodka: ‘It’s so much nicer than tea, I always think.’ Kavanagh saw the vestiges of the anarchic streak and enormous sense of fun that had so appealed to Waugh and sustained their long friendship. Maimie said that the motto that summed up her relationship with Evelyn was that inscription on the sundial at Madresfield: ‘The day is wasted on which we have not laughed.’

Lady Mary Lygon died of cancer on 27 September 1982. Coote had nursed her throughout the illness. Her friendship with Evelyn Waugh endured for over thirty years, from his arrival at Mad to his death. Her Pekingese, Grainger, has his name perpetuated in
Black Mischief
,
Scoop
,
Incident in Azania
,
Put Out More Flags
and
Work Suspended
.

Elmley, Mona, Sibell, and Dickie

Elmley, the last Earl Beauchamp, lived out a dull life as a ‘backwoodsman’ in the House of Lords. The high point of his year was the Three Counties Agricultural Show. He died in 1979, leaving Mona as chatelaine of Madresfield. She lived on for another ten years, riding around the estate either on a tricycle or in a powder blue Rolls-Royce with a cocktail cabinet in the back.

In the early part of the Second World War, Lady Sibell’s husband, Mike Rowley, served as a fighter pilot with 601 Squadron. But in the course of 1940 he developed a brain tumour and Sibell took him home to care for
him. Meanwhile in Germany, the true Mrs Rowley found herself in the awkward position of being an enemy alien by virtue of her marriage to a man who was married to someone else. A letter to Rowley was smuggled out of Germany, but Sibell made sure her husband never saw it. She wrote to the address given by Eleonore – that of a friend in neutral Switzerland – with the news, entirely false, that Rowley had been killed in action.

Mrs Eleonore Rowley survived the war and in 1949 got a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s adultery with Lady Sibell. This meant that a decade after their bigamous marriage she and Mike could remarry legally. But the wartime deception still rankled, so in 1951, short of money, Eleonore sued Sibell in London, claiming that the letter stating that Rowley was dead had caused her, as his lawful wife, deep shock and had affected her heart. The jury found in her favour and awarded her damages of £814. There was also a story that Eleonore had blackmailed Sibell for £2,000 before the court case.

The following year her husband really did die. Sibell moved to Gloucestershire, less than an hour’s drive from Mad. She was subsequently cited in a divorce case brought by Mrs Anne Warman, of Salwarpe Court, Droitwich, against her husband, Francis Byrne Warman. Sibell also had romantic involvements with Lord Rosebery and Lady Mairi Bury.

She devoted the rest of her life to her one great passion: hunting. As Master of the Ledbury Hunt, she was for many years the only female Master of Foxhounds in the country. Whereas Coote always rode side-saddle, Sibell sailed astride over the big ditches and fences of the Gloucestershire and Herefordshire countryside. The secretary of the Ledbury Hunt, who worked closely with her, was Major Peter Phillips, whose son would become a renowned three-day eventer and the husband of Princess Anne. In 2005 Sibell was to be seen on the lawn of Madresfield, at a meeting of the Croome Hunt, the last before the imposition of the hunting ban. She died later that year, at the age of ninety-eight.

Youngest brother Dickie never spoke about his parents. He shunned the aristocracy, preferring the middle classes. He married a vicar’s daughter. They had two daughters, one of whom, Lady Rosalind Morrison, moved into Madresfield after a protracted legal wrangle following Mona’s death in 1989.

Coote

Lady Dorothy Lygon was on leave in Venice on VE Day, which was celebrated there with fireworks. At the end of the summer, she was shipped home from Naples. The following year she was demobilised. Hers had been a good war. Whereas Maimie’s life had been shaped by her good looks, Coote got by on her toughness and intelligence. Her work as a flight officer and then a photographic interpreter in the WAAF was well respected and the war had given her the opportunity to travel throughout Europe.

When peace returned, she followed a variety of paths. She farmed in Gloucestershire, but that seemed constricting after the horizons opened during the war. She accordingly went to work as a governess in Istanbul for six months and then moved to Athens to serve as social secretary to the British ambassador. She lived for a while on the Greek island of Hydra before returning to England to work as an archivist at Christies. She was loved by young and old alike.

She remained friends with Evelyn until the end of his life. They shared book talk as well as smutty jokes and frivolity, and he encouraged her to write about her life. She sent him a story, based on her Istanbul experiences, about the misadventures of a governess called Miss Coote. ‘I could try to write my autobiography as you suggest,’ she said in a letter, ‘but Elmley, Mona, Blondie and Lady Sibell would never speak to me again, let alone any other friends or relations, who might also fall by the wayside, and while I don’t really care about E and M, I feel some consideration otherwise.’ Nevertheless, she told him that she was trying to write about her ‘nursery days with a vague idea of following it up with adolescence and the summer I spent with Boom in Venice when Hughie died, as 3 more or less self-contained essays cum documentaries. Do you think this is feasible?’ He got her an advance of £300 from Chapman and Hall, but the book was never finished.

In one letter he noted that she did not appear to be greatly cast down by the death of her uncle, the Duke of Westminster, the architect of the family’s misery. Even gentle Coote was delighted by the death of Boom’s nemesis.

When she was a governess in Istanbul in 1956, she had looked after a little girl called Julia, daughter of a Mr Rochester. She very much liked her but thought she was hopelessly spoilt. The youngest child in the
family wet her knickers at the sight of Coote, who rather fancied the young Greek servant and felt that the Rochester family were like something out of an Ibsen play (‘problem children and even more problematic parents’). When Coote first left for Istanbul, Maimie wrote to Evelyn with a playful turn on the ‘Mr Rochester’ connection: ‘Poll came before catching the Night Ferry. I am sure that didn’t happen to Jane Eyre before leaving Lowood.’