The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (38 page)

Whatever the attraction, the liaison with Garth was formalised with proper terms of employment. For Robert, as for both Gerald and Jennifer, the affection for employees was sometimes among the most lasting and significant sort. Gerald’s fondness for William, his driver, or Jennifer’s love for Pixie, her governess, were other examples of the intimacy that could occur in these unequal relationships. Though Robert was kind to Garth and his family in many ways, he still paid his lover a pitiful agricultural wage.431 While it was probably their fiery characters that frequently led the two men to have noisy and sometimes violent quarrels, the unequal power balance must surely have played a part.

Notwithstanding the periodic separations and the complications with Garth, Hughie adopted an increasingly ‘wifely’ role at Faringdon, taking great pride in the place, its beauty and history. Unlike Robert, Hughie added a more effeminate atmosphere to the household. His favourite party trick was impersonating the Queen Mother, and having stuffed a cushion down his front and a toque on his head, was said ‘to actually become her’ as he waved his hand in the royal manner. Hughie’s flower-arranging was also noted, becoming increasingly extravagant, so that ‘huge, voluptuous cornucopias with every sort of flower’ were placed around the house.432 Gin was distributed liberally, even to underage visitors, and guests were made to feel at ease. When Candida Betjeman came over to play with Victoria, and later to stay on her own and ride, it was Hughie who became her confidant and, ‘like a slightly illegal uncle’, gave her advice about boys. ‘He was a lady-in-waiting’ to Robert, suggested one friend.433 ‘He was a kind of buffer,’ said another.434 When Robert lost his temper, was rude to people or drank too much and got out of control, it was Hughie who smoothed things over. With Hughie by his side, Robert was able to continue as a Mad Boy, even if he was now Lord of the Manor, running an estate and watching a daughter grow up.

ENNIFER AND ALAN’S SON Jonathan was born four years after their wedding, in 1953. Aged ten when her half-brother was born, Victoria was overjoyed: ‘It was the best thing in my childhood.’ Jonathan completed the family with her mother and beloved stepfather. The family divided their time between South Terrace and, from 1955, Clayton Manor, a Georgian house beneath the Sussex Downs. Alan was writing poetry and became the Observer’s cricket correspondent; Jennifer and Victoria joined him in Australia where he covered the Ashes series in 1954–5. He also contributed to John Lehmann’s London Magazine, a monthly literary publication that he was eventually to take over as editor. His stewardship was largely subsidised by Jennifer, who supported his interest in young, undiscovered talent, and helped turn the publication into a far more daring international one than it had been. Many writers and poets remain grateful to Alan for giving them an opportunity when they were still unknown; he spotted and published a young Caribbean poet, Derek Walcott. Jennifer often read manuscripts for Alan and had a strong sense for when something worked or not. ‘She had perfect pitch about writing,’ said Francis Wyndham. ‘I am often credited with having discovered Jean Rhys, but it was Jennifer who found out about her and recommended her to me.’435

The Rosses’ ménage looked marvellous from the outside. Jennifer and Alan were good-looking, intelligent and sociable. They continued their London life during the week but took pleasure in creating a more substantial country home. Clayton Manor was charming and comfortable, with many books, and furniture picked up in antique shops in Brighton. There were paintings by contemporary artists, including Alan’s old friends John Minton and Keith Vaughan, and Jennifer’s friend Adrian Daintrey (a regular at Faringdon), plus pictures by Augustus John and Eric Ravilious that had come from Oare. The lovely gardens contained an ancient ginkgo tree (whose leaf was used as the London Magazine’s logo), a swimming pool and a tree house, and there was enough room for a few friends, often writers and artists, to stay. An Italian couple lived in and guests were provided with delicious food, including many Italian recipes, which were still unusual in those post-war days of dull English fare. Cecil Beaton described visiting ‘the Alan Rosses’ in Sussex in the 1960s, when, among others, Violet Wyndham was there (she was still an important confidante of Jennifer’s, and Jonathan’s godmother). Cecil described a ‘most friendly, highly civilised evening of quiet talk, discussing the quality of charm and why it is not enjoyed by the younger generation’. But all was not well between Jennifer and Alan, and even Cecil noticed on another occasion that Alan was ‘tense and rather hard on nice clever Jennifer’.436

Jennifer and Alan’s marriage had begun to unravel from early on. Alan started having affairs and then Jennifer began seeing Mickey again. After Jonathan’s birth, the couple stopped sharing a room. At Clayton, Alan took over a small, austere bedroom with a single bed, while Jennifer’s was a large, bay-windowed feminine place, where she was brought breakfast in bed (grapefruit, Ryvita and honey, tea with lemon). Shades of Geoffrey and Alathea were haunting the marriage. Alan had a masculine, book-lined study, where he took interesting male guests for cigars and literary conversations, or to watch the racing on television – he owned racehorses and chose for his colours Schiaparelli shocking pink and chocolate brown. He kept a sporty convertible in the garage and organised cricket matches, bringing in people to play against the village team.

When Jennifer wrote notes, years afterwards, about the failure of her second marriage, she used the third person: ‘Sexual failure early on – as he marries her for wrong reasons and suffers from what is called Don Juan Syndrome – seducing all her friends – voyeurism, prostitutes
etc.
She meets her lover again. Affair starts again.’ It wasn’t long before she yearned for the days in London and hated the endless train journeys and the ‘deathly weekends in the country’. Eventually, Mickey married and had children, and as Alan’s star rose, Jennifer’s declined. Coming from a family where health was a favourite preoccupation, she became increasingly concerned with what Virginia Woolf called the ‘daily drama of the body’. Her liver reacted badly to cream, the east wind brought headaches, and tranquillisers and drink offered blurred relief from anxiety and sadness. However, her anguish was tempered by her forgiving nature and years afterwards she wrote some loving lines for Alan.

I lie awake at night and think of you.

Cradled at Clayton

The beeches guarding you like an army, the Gingko [sic] a sentinel.

Creating the childhood house you never had.

No dog, no scrapbook.

No person.

Now you have a stream, a pond with birds.

All your own doing.

Cranking up the pain, Alan had a fling with Cyril’s ex-wife Barbara, who was now unhappily married to George Weidenfeld. Not entirely justifiably, Cyril was outraged. Worse, he tried to involve Jennifer in preventing it, accusing Alan of ‘plotting alibis with her [Barbara], all the James Bond stuff’. The two men fell out, not for the last time, over a woman (‘The moral of all this is Fuck Women!’ wrote Alan in reply).437 Another of Alan’s dalliances was with Deirdre Craven, a beautiful, blonde, married, much younger woman, who would go on to marry Cyril in 1959 and bear him two children, Cressida and Matthew. The cross-cutting stresses might have prevented friendship for others, but Cyril and Deirdre lived in Sussex and were among the most regular visitors to Clayton, the legacies of the past forgotten or swallowed along with stiff drinks before Sunday lunch. Jennifer was asked to be godmother to Matthew (along with John Betjeman and Diana Cooper), and became lifelong friends with Cressida, who exhibited her father’s intelligent wit and charm from a precocious age. But the shifting sands of her marriage had an effect on Jennifer. Indeed it was Deirdre who noted a transformation, particularly after Jennifer dyed her hair in the early 1960s, when she went from an energetic, dark-haired person to a blonde who sat, Alathea-like, on the sofa in the drawing room she had filled with pretty Victorian knick-knacks.438

The merry-go-round of love had not been stopped by the war and the intricate patterns of marriage, betrayal, compromise, reconciliation and separation continued within a remarkably tight-knit social group. Many of Jennifer’s friends, like Cyril or Cecil, also knew Robert and had known Gerald. And if it had seemed that Alan was from a different milieu to Faringdon society, life with him was equally complex. Later, Jennifer tried to analyse the similarities between herself and her second husband in terms of their sexuality: ‘Alan said he was a hustler once. So was I – he did it for money probably. I did it for fun and revenge. His father and grandfather were Evangelist preachers. Mine were Quakers. And we both had to break away. Differently – but the same.’439 It appeared that part of what brought them together also drove them apart. Jennifer would describe Mickey as ‘the love of my life’, and while their relationship was always fitted into the interstices, she found solace with him when Alan’s rejections became too painful.

Although Alan had more worldly success than Jennifer, he had had several severe bouts of depression that he linked directly to his horrifying experiences during the war. Jennifer thought their source, at least in part, might be the guilt he felt about how he had been so blatant with his extra-marital relationships. Alan was hospitalised and received electric-shock treatment, while Jennifer remained loyally by his side – an experience she again made notes on, writing in the third person: ‘Winter of snow and loneliness and journeys to nursing home through snow. Utterly alone, pitied by friends. Husband recovers and leads active work travel life – including more flaunting affairs. Never tells but friends do. Unable to make much of her life. Living in two places with man she has no mutual life with is nearly killing her.’

Some observers believed that Alan used Jennifer’s wealth and that he would have left her long before he eventually did if it hadn’t been for that factor. She never mentioned this aspect of their relationship, but later, she did write a passage that was probably never given to Alan, but shows she was far from naive about the issues:

Tonight when you talked about being anti Arts Council Grants, you didn’t seem to realise that I am now your Grant, enabling you to live in comfort in two houses, with no responsibilities, telling me perpetually that I do nothing, when I could give you a very long list of what I do to make your life comfortable, whereas you do next to nothing for me.

You don’t understand my emotional needs – for affection, talk of subjects that I am interested in. Of course I know your flawed childhood, your war life – but who in a way hasn’t suffered? I think you are selfish, inconsiderate and would have gone some years ago if it hadn’t been for many things better not put in writing. I also have great admiration for you – and affection as well as the opposite.

Quoting Maria Callas (whom she loved), Jennifer finishes the unsent letter: ‘Communication is the most important thing in life – it is what makes the human predicament bearable.’

N 1950, WHEN VICTORIA was five, Jennifer sent her to Lady Eden’s School for Girls, an exclusive institution in South Kensington which prioritised dance and the arts and mixed old-fashioned formality with a cosy homeliness. It was run by the sister-in-law of the Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, and pupils were dressed in checked pinafores with frills and tweed coats with velvet collars, and curtsied to their teachers. Victoria loved ballet, acting and poetry and was generally good at lessons; she skipped a year to be in an older class. However, she often had minor illnesses and Jennifer indulged her daughter by allowing her to miss school if she claimed to feel unwell.

During the school holidays Victoria always visited Faringdon. At a young age she was accompanied by Mardie, but later, when she was a bit older, she went alone or with her best friend, and was cared for by Mrs Shury, the affable wife of Robert’s groom. ‘Robert tried terribly hard,’ remembered Victoria, regretting that his efforts didn’t help make a connection between them. ‘He organised parties and invited friends.’ But none of this made them close. She came to agree with a doctor friend of Robert’s who, many years later, told her that her father was ‘emotionally autistic’. Both Garth and Hughie were very friendly with their lover’s daughter. Garth built a three-storey wooden house for her hamster, Jenny, and Hughie was the most approachable person at Faringdon. He chatted to Victoria and sat with her at Gerald’s piano, teaching her the beginning of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

Gladys, Robert’s mother, came to live near Faringdon to be close to her adored youngest son and occasionally saw Victoria. ‘Granny Heber-Percy’ had very high cheekbones and a somewhat severe mien. She had remained a formidable rider, insisting on galloping side-saddle, and claimed to have broken every bone in her body; not much had changed since she laughed when she heard her young sons had tumbled from their pony’s panniers while out with their nurse. Gladys bought her granddaughter a young Arab pony that Victoria named Pegasus and which thrilled its young rider. But although Victoria liked horses, she was not a daredevil rider like her father and grandmother. ‘I used to think that Candida Betjeman would have been the ideal daughter for Robert instead of me, because she loved him, she was a very good rider and she was confident and worldly.’

Victoria passed her Common Entrance exam a year early, aged eleven, and went to Cranborne Chase in 1956, only ten years after the small boarding school for girls had been founded in Crichel House in Dorset. Robert came every term to take her out, but despite his attempts to do the right thing and to establish a bond with his growing daughter, she felt that he didn’t actually like her. ‘I couldn’t think of what to say to him, and later he said that as a child, nothing had been quite right for me. We were the wrong kind of animal for each other – we didn’t “get” one another.’ When Victoria was about thirteen, a friend told her that Robert was ‘queer’ and this only increased her sense of distance and difference from her father. While she felt rejected by him, she also played a part in the lack of rapport. Once, when Robert visited his daughter at school, he had given her £5 and she refused to take the money, handing it back to him. He had been hurt, he later confessed. For her part, Victoria later said, ‘I think that without thinking it out, I rejected Faringdon before it rejected me.’ Victoria also enjoyed shocking people when she was young by saying, ‘My father has never given me a Christmas present and has never written me a letter.’