The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (14 page)

Robert had been unhurt in the Grand National fall, but his equally daredevil older brother Alan was less fortunate. In 1934, he rode in a National Hunt steeplechase at Cheltenham, where he was thrown to the ground and killed after his horse hit a fence.* It was particularly hard for the Heber-Percy parents, as Gladys had recently forbidden him from returning to Hodnet Hall after a scandal involving a married woman. Robert was devastated. He never forgot that before the race he had driven under a railway bridge while a train was crossing – something he considered bad luck – and he connected it with witnessing his brother’s death. He retained a lifelong superstition and would stop the car rather than pass below a bridge if a train was coming.

* Alan’s neck was broken. The coroner’s verdict was accidental death.

T WAS NATURAL that a more youthful group of friends should accumulate after Gerald and Robert started living together, but this was not just because of Robert. Many entered the Faringdon orbit as friends of Gerald; their reactions to Robert varied from delight to antipathy. Among the most frequent visitors to Faringdon in the early 1930s were the dazzling Lady Mary Lygon (‘Maimie’) and her sister Lady Dorothy, known as ‘Coote’. Two years younger than the Mad Boy, Coote was the youngest daughter of Earl Beauchamp. She was plumper and plainer than her three beautiful sisters, her pudding face hidden behind thick glasses, but they were all known as ‘the Beauchamp Belles’. Coote was intelligent, kind and discreet and quickly became a close and lifelong friend to Robert and Gerald. Nobody would have been more surprised than the participants if destiny had been revealed – that many decades later, the elderly Coote and the Mad Boy would do something that might have been the young woman’s wildest dream. But we are jumping ahead of the story.

Coote and her six siblings had been brought up at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, which had been home to Lygons for almost a thousand years. Gerald and Robert became familiar with the remarkable house that boasted a moat, twelfth-century oak doors and a Tudor great hall combined with Georgian fireplaces and Arts and Crafts murals. The Lygons also had a house in Belgrave Square and a castle in Kent to which they travelled by private train. The Lygon children’s existence had been one of extreme luxury combined with an extraordinary set of problems. Their father, known as ‘Boom’ for his voice, took snobbery and etiquette to their limits: guests would go into the dining room for meals in order of precedence (royals, then dukes, then earls and so on); he referred to his children by their titles (‘Lady Lettice’ or ‘Lady Dorothy’); champagne was decanted into jugs so as not to be ‘middle class’; and the numerous servants were dressed in gleaming livery of black tailcoats with silver buttons.149 Nevertheless, Lord Beauchamp was a member of the Liberal Party and was informal enough to invite his children to visit him during his bath time for chats (and sometimes a cocktail), and to take them swimming in the freezing Kentish seas. His wife was less popular. Her children found her strict, cold and mean – she dressed her daughters in embarrassingly shabby clothes – and she was ultimately behind the disaster that befell the family.

COOTE (LADY DOROTHY LYGON), ROBERT, PENELOPE BETJEMAN AND GERALD, READY TO RIDE

Though the Lygon family was actively Catholic, with household prayers held twice a day in the family chapel, the morals at ‘Mad’, as the house was known, were notorious. Robert must have been amused if he was ever among the young male guests that Coote and her sisters advised to lock their bedroom doors at night in case their father had taken a fancy to them. And while Gerald was never known to act inappropriately with his employees, he probably enjoyed the evident fact that Lord Beauchamp took on his male servants according to their looks – footmen were dressed in the Beauchamp colours of maroon and cream and were observed to sport an impressive array of rings and bracelets.150 Harold Nicolson was once at dinner at Madresfield when a fellow guest asked him, ‘Did I hear Beauchamp whisper to the butler, “Je t’adore”? ‘Nonsense,’ replied Nicolson. ‘He said, “Shut the door.”’ Nicolson (the bisexual husband of the bisexual Vita Sackville-West) knew that the other guest had heard quite well and observed that the butler was most handsome.151 It was hardly a secret that Lord Beauchamp took his footmen and grooms as lovers, but when he went on a tour of Australia in 1930 and lived openly with his nineteen-year-old valet as his ‘joy-boy’, it became something of a scandal. Lady Beauchamp’s brother, the Duke of Westminster, hired private detectives to collect evidence, reported it to the King, and organised an attack.

One summer day in 1931, as Lord Beauchamp sat doing his embroidery in the Moat Garden, several cars drew up and a number of severe and important-looking men, including the Liberal Chief Whip Lord Stanmore, got out. They had been sent by ‘the highest authority in the land’ and announced that there was evidence of ‘criminal acts of indecency’ between Beauchamp and a number of men. He was told he must leave the country and never return, or expect to be arrested. Coote was only nineteen, at home with her twenty-three-year-old sister, Sibell, and a friend. Their mother had already moved out and their other siblings were either married, living in London or at school. Boom’s first reaction was that his only option was suicide, but after his rapid departure to a German spa, his children took it in turns to stay with him and make sure that he didn’t manage this.152 Only the oldest son and heir, William, Viscount Elmley, took his mother’s side; all the other children stayed loyal to their father, travelling with him and helping him bear the humiliation and isolation.

With their father ‘gone to have mud baths’ (as the euphemism had been for Wilde and others in their exile), the young Lygons had the run of Madresfield, inviting their own friends for weekends, and continuing to hunt and serve champagne in jugs. They now had to cope with the fact that they were simultaneously highly attractive, privileged people, and almost like orphans. To some extent, they became social outcasts because of their father – unwelcome in certain circles and tainted as prospective wives, even if Sibell had persuaded her lover, Lord Beaverbrook, not to let the story get into the press. Nevertheless, there were enough open-minded people and the Lygons’ Madresfield friends overlapped to a large extent with the Faringdon set. Gerald and Robert went to stay there, as did Michael Duff, the Mitfords, Cecil Beaton and many more. The Lygons were always welcome at Faringdon. Coote remembered this phase as being rather fun: ‘We were young and foolish and just enjoyed ourselves very much.’153

Gerald was loyal to the entire Lygon family, inviting the nomadic, exiled Lord Beauchamp to stay with him and Robert on his travels. Beauchamp tended to move between cities that were more tolerant to homosexuals – Sydney, San Francisco, Paris and Venice – often accompanied by one or more of his children. Supporting friends in trouble was a high priority for Gerald, who was fearless of public opinion. Evelyn Waugh joined them in the Holy City and Boom organised intensive sightseeing, including visits to St Peter’s, while Tito, Gerald’s factotum, cooked and kept house.

Evelyn Waugh had become a fixture at Madresfield after his first stay in 1932. Recently separated from his first wife, he had been at Oxford with Coote’s brother Hugh, who would later become the model for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited: handsome, boyish, drunken and homosexual. It is believed that Waugh had a fling with him during their student days. Though Coote loyally denied that the book had been modelled on her family, there were enough parallels for most people to draw a different conclusion. Coote certainly had overlapping qualities with Cordelia, the youngest daughter of Lord Marchmain (not to mention King Lear), and the dazzling Maimie, whom Waugh adored, was not unlike the unavailable and compelling Julia Flyte, with whom she shared a wild, uncontrolled streak and a tendency to depression. The Lygons represented all the romance of youth, grandeur and indulgence that Waugh had not experienced at home.

Waugh took on the role of naughty, flirtatious older brother to the sisters. He defaced young Coote’s diary of humdrum routines and spiced them up with orgies and incest. And he liked to play the game of ‘marrying off Coote’, so that every man they encountered would be inspected to see if he was suitable: ‘Would he do?’154 His letters to Coote (‘Pollen’ or ‘Poll’) and Maimie (‘Blondy’) are intimately bawdy, insulting Coote jokily as a ‘Filthy Bitch’, and using the fashionable expressions of the day to express how much his stays at Madresfield meant to him: ‘It would just be too lovely for any words to join in your Christmas cheer. Deevy [divine], in fact hot stuff. Oh, but you can’t really mean it …’155 He dedicated Black Mischief to Coote and Maimie in 1932. Waugh was also intrigued by ‘the wicked Lord Berners’s and later, when house-hunting, he wrote, ‘I wouldn’t mind the Berners Betjeman country.’

Faringdon became an ever more significant refuge for Coote and Maimie as disaster continued to dog their family. After the death of Lady Beauchamp, Hugh, who had become increasingly dissolute, went on a driving trip to Bavaria, fell on a pavement and fractured his skull. He died in 1936, aged thirty-one. Within two years, Boom would also die, attended in New York by Coote – now more of an orphan than ever. At the age of twenty-five, there were increasing indications that she might remain a lifelong spinster; Waugh’s old teasing about prospective grooms must have worn very thin. To make matters worse, she and Maimie felt unwelcome at their beloved Madresfield, now dominated by the new Earl, their formal older brother, and his frosty Danish wife. They didn’t return for fifty years.

MAIMIE AND ROBERT IN ITALY

The old album at Faringdon shows photographs of Maimie and the Mad Boy sprawled in skimpy bathing costumes on the beach at Ostia. They look like something out of an unsuitable Hollywood movie; in one, someone has taken a lipstick and written SHIT in large letters across Robert’s muscular back. It would be hard to believe that they were not physically involved, even if it was under Gerald’s watchful eye. Like his friend Derek Jackson, Robert liked to ‘ride under both rules’.156

Though it was Maimie whose sex appeal was tangible, it was Coote who stayed more often at Faringdon. Maimie was a beauty, but she drank too much, suffered from melancholy and insomnia and had a succession of Pekingese (including Grainger, whom Evelyn Waugh called ‘the lascivious beast’) that piddled on the Aubusson rugs, rather as Gerald’s fictional dog, Mr Pidger, would do in the eponymous story. No doubt Maimie and Gerald discussed diets and sleeping pills and fashionable cures. Coote, on the other hand, rode an elegant side-saddle out with Robert, was interested and informed about books and travel, and her independent mind made her a valued friend. She was there at the party given for the opening of the Faringdon Cinema, where Gerald made what might have been the only public speech in his life – and even that was only three sentences long.157 There was also an element of the ‘Jagger’ about her – an expression that Waugh and the Lygons used to describe a helpful, dependable, good-hearted friend who doesn’t make too many demands.158 Certainly Coote was tactful and steadfast; even her nickname emerged from her secretive ways that reminded her siblings of the hymn ‘God Moves in a Mysterious Way’, which they thought was by a Mrs Coote but in fact turned out to be by William Cowper. It was nothing to do with the feathered variety, and she could never have been said to be ‘queer as a coot’. However, as a daughter who had doted on her disgraced father, she was always unobtrusively sympathetic to the ways of men who preferred men.

MAIMIE WITH HER PEKINGESE GRAINGER AND ROBERT AT FARINGDON

HEN CECIL BEATON had first met Gerald in the mid-1920s, he didn’t take to him. ‘A ridiculous-looking man – like a silly tailor’s dummy’, he wrote.159 But he soon longed to be part of Gerald’s inner coterie. A contemporary and enemy since school days of Evelyn Waugh, he shared the novelist’s intelligence, ambition and sense of being an outsider. Both men began as middle-class boys who longed to be part of the smart set and Waugh later claimed Cecil’s diaries revealed him as a man ‘unashamedly on the make’.160 The latter never denied this – in fact he admitted to being a ‘scheming snob’ – and there were others who levelled remarkably similar accusations at Waugh. Cecil was close to Michael Duff and even without the manifest talents that endeared him to Gerald, the willowy, mannered young man was soon a member of the privileged set of creative types and party-goers who surrounded Gerald and Robert.

Cecil was seven years older than Robert but their loathing was mutual. Robert didn’t like Cecil’s spiky calculating ambition, and Cecil despised Robert as a waster. There was an obvious incompatibility between the effete, artistic photographer and the chaotic, sometimes aggressive country boy, but there was also jealousy over the Mad Boy’s honoured position in Lord Berners’s life. In Cecil’s private photograph albums there are two pictures of Robert from the mid-1930s, dressed in scruffy corduroys and adorably handsome and boyish, a flop of hair curling over his forehead. In one, he is carrying a billycan beside what looks like a campfire. The caption, in Cecil’s hand, reads ‘Horrid Madboy’.

Robert spread a story that Cecil initially thought him ‘divine’. Once, when they and Gerald were at a country-house party together (possibly at Madresfield), the Mad Boy led Cecil on and explained exactly where his bedroom was situated. That night, Cecil tiptoed along the corridor and crept quietly into Robert’s room, at which point the light went on. Gerald, rotund in pyjamas, a grin on his face, was sitting up in bed. ‘Cecil, I never knew you cared!’161 Although Cecil stood for this teasing because he appreciated Gerald, he also considered him quite cruel in his humour. This was a running theme in their relationship. Gerald, for instance, took great delight in defacing Cecil’s 1930 The Book of Beauty. While Cecil was known to doctor his pictures to make people slimmer or prettier, in this case milky-skinned debs with pearls were transformed into moustachioed hunchbacks, and satin-clad hostesses underwent skilful metamorphoses into hags and harridans, their teeth blackened.