The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (42 page)

OT LONG AFTER MY FIRST VISIT to Faringdon in 1979, Robert invited me back. I asked if I could bring the same boyfriend, Jeremy Newick, a designer and a keen sailor and boat-builder. Now eighteen, I had already left home by default as my father and stepmother had moved to the remote Scottish island where we had always holidayed. They had no telephone and the only means of contacting them was by letter. During term time, I was lodging in Oxford and attending my final year of school, but at weekends and holidays I stayed with Jeremy in his decrepit but elegant Georgian terraced house at the top of a hill in Bristol. I learned how to sand floors and paint banisters, I wrote my essays and played the piano with fingerless gloves against the cold, and I hardly noticed some of Jeremy’s friends’ quizzical looks at this rangy thirty-one-year-old taking up with a schoolgirl.

My mother, with whom I had not lived since the age of eleven, was now a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian mystic who had dozens of Rolls-Royces and was called the ‘Sex Guru’ by the tabloids. Her latest boyfriend was a sannyasin, and she had joined the many thousands who dressed in orange or shades of red and pink, wore a mandala with a picture of Bhagwan around their necks, and were given new names by their leader. She spent weeks or months away visiting ashrams in California and Oregon. Her comrades-in-orange all called her Gala, her middle name, which had appealed to Bhagwan when he bestowed her new identity. I sometimes went to stay with my mother in London, where both my brothers lived in a house that was often filled with ‘orange people’. There was lots of dancing, hugging and meditating, and rumours filtered back about the incredible orgies in Oregon, though Bhagwan ordered the use of rubber gloves in addition to condoms, predicting that AIDS was going to decimate the world. Victoria still claims she has never been happier than at this time.

Throughout the early 1980s, Robert kept inviting me to stay, and once or twice a year Jeremy and I went to Faringdon for a weekend. But there was no closeness in the relationship with my grandfather, no sense of complicity in the fact that we were related. I suspect he liked adding me into a weekend house party as a wild card: a surprise element that might entertain the other guests. There were regularly people who reacted with astonishment at meeting me. Some didn’t even know that Robert had a child, let alone a grandchild. Others assumed he was exclusively gay. I enjoyed playing along with his game. The place and the people I met were so different from the rest of my life and it was exhilarating to feel as though I was someone else for a couple of days.

The house was always perfectly set up on a Friday to receive guests. Gravel was raked, flowerbeds weeded and Des, the gardener, brought in whatever was agreed in the way of vegetables, cut flowers and hothouse plants. A collection of pots was placed beneath the double staircase so that the heady scent from stephanotis blossoms or the bell-like blooms of daturas wafted about as you passed through, just as they had in Gerald’s day. Rosa arranged flowers in tall vases for the drawing room and dining room and smaller ones for the bedrooms, and every piece of silver and brass glistened, newly cleaned.

Guests were usually instructed to arrive in time for pre-lunch drinks on Saturday, or sometimes for Friday evening. It was like walking into a production where you had to play a part, with nice clothes and funny stories ready. Often there were a few people invited just for drinks who were expected to know to leave before the music boxes in the hall chimed their tunes and the rest of the guests were summoned to the dining room by Rosa. Robert would have worked out a placement in advance, calculating who the most senior woman was and inviting her to sit on his right. He always occupied the same chair at the large round table, within reach of an electric bell underneath; it took me some time to work out how Rosa knew exactly when to reappear after one course and clear away the plates and bring in another. There were white linen napkins and tablecloths, supple from years of washing, and crystal glasses, quickly filled with a golden, nectar-like Mosel that was Robert’s habitual wine (neither he nor Gerald had ever been wine buffs who made a fuss about domains and vintages). The dining room contained furniture, pictures and ornaments that must have been from the old days – an articulated silver-gilt fish the size of a salmon and painted blackamoors on columns – but there were also some more modern touches like a flashing-light sculpture by the Greek artist Takis.

Once everyone was seated, Robert would direct the ladies to serve themselves from a range of dishes on the sideboard, starting with the most important guest and then letting the men get going. There might be a light salmon coulibiac, already sliced, with a frothy hollandaise sauce; the system was perfect if, like me, you wanted to discreetly avoid the pheasant or rack of lamb. It was like a highly orchestrated ceremony, with Robert as the master who was allowed to break all his own rules and Rosa as his handmaiden.

Returning to Faringdon, I got to know some of the regulars. Coote was among Robert’s closest friends, having moved first into a cottage in a nearby village and then into a somewhat dour modern house in Faringdon. I didn’t know that both had been bought by Robert, nor that Coote was paying a mortgage to him. Coote seemed almost part of the furniture at Faringdon – a calm, modest foil to Robert’s mercurial ways. Sometimes her sister Maimie was there too. You could tell that Maimie had been a beauty, though age and drink had extracted their toll since the 1930s when she and Robert had rolled almost naked on the sand at Ostia. She still had the air of a coquette and carried about a badly behaved, incontinent Pekingese that recalled the one-eyed predecessor that Evelyn Waugh had described half a century before: ‘the malignant Cyclopean-eye of Grainger winking across the Ritz lounge’.469 Neither sister had been back to their beloved Madresfield for decades as they detested their older brother’s wife, Else.

Other neighbours who frequently appeared were Susanna and Nicholas Johnston. Nicky had been the architect for what was probably Robert’s greatest addition to the gardens – the ‘stairs to nowhere’ by the orangery, and the pool at the top of them. The great flight of stone steps surrounded by yew hedges was the first idea, built up a bank opposite the orangery and ending mid-air. This surreal tease was such a success that Robert decided to go one further and build a swimming pool up there. Nicky devised a way of incorporating a tank, and – after being rung in the middle of the night by Robert shouting, ‘I want to go High Gothic’ – then designed a castellated pepper-pot changing room with a floor of old pennies. Robert located a pair of very expensive seventeenth-century stone wyverns (winged, serpent-like dragons), which he bought with money won through gambling, and they were incorporated into the structure. The result was a triumph – Robert’s own Folly, created forty years after Gerald made his tower.

After we had helped ourselves to the raspberry Pavlova or redcurrants frosted in icing sugar and served with buttery, bean-shaped shortbread, we would move back to the drawing room and drink coffee from gilt cups sculpted with scenes and figures like something Benvenuto Cellini might have made, encasing a tiny porcelain interior. Then we would often meander over to the pool. The size precluded laps but made it ideal for wallowing; like the interior of the house, it was heated to an indulgent degree. Robert would sit on an antique marble throne by the edge, but some of us would dive off the ledge by the wyverns or float in a dreamy haze.

Occasionally, I would play the piano at the green end of the drawing room. I would leaf through the piles of music I assumed had belonged to Lord Berners and find some Bach or Chopin that I knew. I hadn’t heard the story about my father’s disgrace and I never suspected that Robert might be eyeing me suspiciously as the progeny of the dreadful mad Russian; quite the reverse, as I could tell he liked me and I was pleased. When Jeremy and I made a jokey present for Robert, assembling a collection of false moustaches and framing them like a butterfly display, he hung it in the drawing room alongside formidable works of art by Corot and Gerald. It felt like an outrageous honour. I didn’t know then that long before, Robert and Gerald had decorated Berners ancestral portraits with moustaches, or that there is a Lord Berners piece called ‘L’Uomo dai baffi’ (‘The Man with the Moustache’). But moustaches were evidently in the ether. There were still plenty of other jokes: Gerald’s mechanical toys remained arrayed on a grand marble-topped table, added to over the years; fake pink pearls spilled from delicate porcelain shells; and small, snooty busts of a jowly Queen Victoria were reflected in sumptuous rococo mirrors.

Getting to know Robert was unlike any other family relationship or friendship I had encountered. We rarely had a personal conversation, and both circumstances and his character discouraged intimacy. He told stories that made his guests laugh, often recycling episodes from long ago with characters interchanged at will. Was it Sachie Sitwell, or Emerald Cunard, or perhaps the arrogant Lady Stanley (who wondered whether, when she arrived at the pearly gates, she would be addressed as ‘Portia’ or ‘Lady Stanley’) who arrived at Faringdon all in a fluster? ‘The policeman stopped us in the car and was preventing us from leaving, so I had to tell him who we were.’ (Or sometimes it was: ‘The head waiter at the restaurant did not know who we were.’) To which Gerald’s reply was always: ‘And who were you?’ This stinging retort had appealed to Gerald and Robert, as they shared a hatred of pomposity and a delight in deflating anyone too puffed up. Like Gerald, Robert wanted to be amused and to amuse others, and scorned anything too earnest. For my seventy-year-old grandfather, life was still for living dangerously, in the moment and with indulgence. And yet I had also seen his tender, hands-on care of the gardens, his planting of trees he would never see mature, the detailed curating of sculptures, ornaments and vistas around the estate. Whenever I came to some conclusion about the man, another angle came into view that contradicted it.

I never had the kind of discussion with my grandfather that gave me much insight into his life or his deeper emotions; everything had to be deduced or guessed. And later, when I came to write this book, Robert was the hardest character to get close to. The absence of written documents left a void that was not filled by the fond recollections of friends and admirers or the scathing remarks of enemies and critics. Sometimes he appeared to be a vulnerable figure, taking refuge in bad behaviour, but he could also seem to be selfish, rude and vain, without a thought for other people’s feelings. There were points where his mischievous rebelliousness was appealing and others where it was tiresome.

During one stay at Faringdon, Robert gave me a present – a compact, square bottle of scent with a gold label. He explained that Joy was his favourite: ‘We used to sprinkle it in our gumboots.’ The smell was intoxicating, like tuberose and jasmine mixed with the mysterious fragrance of the opulent magnolia grandiflora that Rosa would place on the breakfast tray she brought me in bed, nestling next to a set of the prettiest mottled green china I had ever seen. I didn’t know it, but Joy had been created in France in 1930, just before Robert met Gerald; it was famous for being ‘the world’s most expensive perfume’. When I wore it, I felt transported into the world of Faringdon’s heyday. I didn’t know much about it then and felt I had little in common with this unusual grandfather, but I could sense the seductive indulgence and mischief. I realise now that it was largely through the senses that I got closer to Robert – by putting on Joy, by sleeping in his house, walking in his gardens and eating his food. And now this seems appropriate, as he was a man for whom the physical aspects of life often took priority.

Sometimes, Robert’s love of controversy and tendency to shock became obvious. Several drinks in, a precariously unflicked inch of ash on the cigarette in his hand, he would make remarks that left the table speechless. The anti-Semitism that had been de rigueur in the Shropshire homes of his childhood and the London parties of his youth was like regurgitated bile. He chose to ignore that this had become an appalling faux pas in the post-Holocaust, increasingly politically correct era of the 1980s. There was never a theory or policy, just an inbuilt prejudice that was difficult to know how to tackle. ‘It wasn’t any more than many of his time and class,’ remarked several friends of his whom I questioned. But it wasn’t something I had encountered before.

By this time, I had left school and was studying social anthropology at Cambridge; it was unbearable to be in a situation where someone joked that a lampshade had been made from Jews’ skin. I was close to my Russian grandmother, who had brought me up on Holocaust literature, and who was later posthumously awarded a medal and recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Israel for her bravery in helping Jews during the war. I only witnessed Robert expressing anti-Semitic sentiments once and I tried to confront him. It became immediately clear, however, that there wasn’t a discussion; he wasn’t making these remarks to open a dialogue; it wasn’t a democracy at Faringdon. It could have been a point to break off relations. For someone of my generation, this sort of racism was unacceptable. To walk away might have been morally braver, though I knew it wouldn’t make any difference to him. I had the impression, though, that maybe it was all a trick or a test and that he didn’t mean it at all. To challenge him was like aiming at a moving target that kept changing shape. After all, Robert sometimes had Jewish friends to stay and he didn’t seem to have a problem with them. Other liberal-minded people kept coming. I let the matter hang uneasily – a canker in the bloom.

In the afternoons there was tea, and then everyone retired to bathe and change, emerging like new creatures of the evening – the women in long dresses or at least something smarter, the men in suits, their hair brushed. It was at this time that the elements in the house’s own scent were at their most potent: steamy bath essence and the spritz of newly applied perfumes dominated upstairs, while the tempting hint of a buttery sauce floated out from the kitchen, and the smell of beeswax furniture polish gave a low note to the ambient aroma. Added to this was the heartening tang of woodsmoke, as fires were lit, even in the summer. In cooler seasons there was no dread of the chill so familiar to English country houses; as in Nancy Mitford’s day, ‘Faringdonheit’ was kept heated to a luxurious degree, with radiators blasting and electric fires in the bedrooms. Lighting, on the other hand, was always kept low, with small lamps glowing like candle-light. Combined with the speckled old mirrors, one’s reflection became more romantic, unblemished by the strong lighting of a modern era. The steady flow of alcohol added a further dose of mystery. Evening drinks were served, possibly with a new set of people chosen from local or Oxford friends as temporary entertainment, and then there was dinner.