The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (49 page)

Then when I spoke to Francis Wyndham, Jennifer’s old friend who had been at Oxford for part of the war, he threw a spanner in the works. According to him, Jennifer’s regular boyfriend in 1941–2 had been Ian Lubbock, the dark-haired actor who had played in Gerald’s The Furies. ‘My mother [Violet] always thought that he was Victoria’s father. Ian was struggling to make a career in rep, he was married (and separated) and he drank too much. Violet didn’t think there was any future in the relationship. She assumed that when Jennifer found out she was pregnant, the last thing she’d want was for it to be Ian’s.’491

Armed with a new bundle of suspicions, my mother set off to Norfolk to speak to some Lubbock relations – Ian had died in 1977. They hadn’t felt right, she reported afterwards. It was a question of instinct, but also physical looks. Ian’s mother had been Jewish and her children inherited her dark colouring, whereas Victoria was fair. Seeing as both Robert and Jennifer also had dark hair, this was setting her firmly back on course for Ned, whose light hair and freckled skin matched hers, as did his darker disposition.

It only made things worse when someone mentioned a Canadian airman as a candidate. Another friend from later days said, ‘Well, I know Harry Cust was often mentioned. “The Sergeant.” I think he was a US Air Force sergeant. He was also involved with Robert.’492 Increasingly, my mother wondered whether Jennifer had simply not known who the father of her child was.

Almost everyone I spoke to on the subject said something different or contradicted the evidence. One theory was that the Mad Boy had stepped gallantly into the breach to help an old friend out of a tricky situation. In this scenario, Jennifer found herself alone and pregnant at a time when the only feasible alternative to an abortion was marriage. Given that neither a young student headed for the Army, nor a boozing, still-married actor were appealing prospects, she favoured Robert. But then, as someone who was fundamentally gay and had cohabited with another man for the last decade, the Mad Boy was hardly the ideal husband either. And if it was all a charade to avoid scandal, why was Jennifer so bitterly disappointed when Robert failed to take on the part of a real husband and locked her out of his bedroom?

‘Robert might have been pleased to be married and give the impression of having a daughter,’ said one old friend of Jennifer’s who knew those involved at the time. ‘It helped cover up bugger life. The bloody-mindedness of the police towards any kind of buggery, even during the war, was awful.’493 At a time when homosexuality was illegal and the penalties were daunting, there is little doubt that a wife and child provided a useful alibi. But why would Robert have grasped at this opportunity all of a sudden in the middle of wartime, when nothing else in his life ever showed that he was fearful of having relationships with men and being seen to do so? Gerald had always given him the freedom to have flings with women and men; why would he introduce such a volatile element to their fundamentally stable set-up?

‘Did Robert want a son and heir, perhaps?’ asked Sarah Gibb, daughter of Peter and Glur Quennell and friend of Victoria’s who had often stayed at Faringdon when they were growing up and knew the rumours. Robert had always seemed pleased to have a daughter and was very keen to have her at Faringdon, where she went during most school holidays. ‘He did lots to entertain us, asking other young people over, organising picnics, boat trips on the lake, Christmas parties for teenagers. I don’t remember him not being nice to Victoria, but maybe they didn’t have one-on-one time – they were always surrounded by people.’494 ‘Robert had no doubts that you were his granddaughter,’ said Richard Brain, a close friend and neighbour to the Mad Boy since the 1950s. ‘He talked to me about whom he should leave the estate to and he never really considered Coote as someone who should inherit Faringdon.’ Several people added to this theory by saying that if Robert believed that he was not Victoria’s father it would have emerged at some point. He often drank too much and said outrageous things; surely if it was all a big secret, he would not have managed to keep it undisclosed over a lifetime of blurting things out. Logically, then, Robert must have thought that there was at least a possibility that Jennifer was pregnant by him. ‘And anyway, you look like him,’ remarked Charley Duff, who had just quoted his father’s description of Robert as an ‘attractive ape’.

My mother had initially agreed that it might be worth carrying out DNA tests and I began to investigate. I uncovered a website that offered clients ‘peace of mind’ and a ‘quick, confidential and compassionate’ service. The details proved trickier. If the putative father were no longer alive, samples could be taken from the remains – a bone fragment from the shaft of the femur or two teeth would do. Robert had been cremated, so that was out of the question. I wasn’t sure what had happened to Ned or Ian’s bodies, but I couldn’t imagine we’d get to the stage of digging them up. It was suddenly becoming slightly creepy. Couldn’t you take samples from relations?

Just when I was wondering how I could start the process, I received a warm email from Robert’s nephew and current owner of Hodnet Hall, Algernon Heber-Percy. Although I had never met Algy or his family, I had asked whether I could visit to see the place where Robert had been brought up. Algy invited me to stay at Hodnet and I was welcomed as family. I was given the largest bedroom I’ve ever stayed in, which turned out to be the old sitting room and study of Gladys, my great-grandmother. Or was she? The windows gave on to the water gardens and beyond, a bucolic scene of cattle grazing on velvet swells of green field. As I made myself comfortable amidst drapes and swathes of rosy chintz and wallowed in a bluebell-scented bath, I idly wondered whether I’d be able to sneak some hairs from a Heber-Percy hairbrush. It didn’t seem the right way of approaching the enigma.

When I asked Algy whether he knew of the rumours that Robert was not Victoria’s father, he said he had always heard that Jennifer was pregnant by the son of an Irish peer and that when her lover was killed during the war, Robert offered himself as a solution. The story went that the lover’s family was only too happy to find their problem solved. When I explained that Ned had been killed two years after the wedding, Algy pondered a while. ‘Was Jennifer what they called a “popular girl”?’ I agreed she had been. Algy suggested that it seemed likely that if his crazy, unreliable uncle Robert had known he was definitely not Victoria’s father, it would have emerged over the years. ‘He could get cross and nasty … which meant that either your mum meant an enormous amount to him – and he was very proud of her, after all, she was stunning and it would raise your stud fee to be her dad – or he didn’t believe there was anything to think about. In that case, maybe he was the father.’ Later, when I rejoined the family after some time in Gladys’s room, Algy said, ‘Well, we all think that you look like a Heber-Percy. You’ve got the fine hair.’ Somewhere between my mother’s Fitzmaurice ankles and my Heber-Percy hair lay the truth.

By the time I discussed the matter of DNA testing again with my mother, she had decided that she didn’t want to go ahead. She preferred to stay with her image of lost innocence – Ned, the golden boy who could stand in as an idealised father-figure. It would be too disappointing to find out that it had been Robert all along. She didn’t want him as her father, even if he was. As Francis Wyndham said, it was like a Henry James story with these three varied possibilities: Ian Lubbock, the actor-son of a Jewish pianist and a Quaker teacher who ended up an alcoholic; Ned Fitzmaurice, the scion of an old English house who was killed in the war; and Robert Heber-Percy, the Mad Boy who created havoc all over again at the end by choosing an unlikely heir to his estate. Even after all the investigation I had done, I didn’t believe that a conclusion was clear from the evidence. Perhaps Jennifer herself didn’t know. And while it was a twist in the tale of my relationship with Robert, it hadn’t made a difference to how I thought of him and I wondered whether it would have changed anything for him either. Whatever the case, the scientific route would evidently not be taken and the solution would have to remain inconclusive – a mystery that each person could guess or solve as they preferred. As they say, ‘It is a wise child who knows his own father.’

NE WEEKEND when Lara was not yet one, we had a robbery at Faringdon. It was a warm, still summer night and the baby had been unsettled. I had been up with her for what felt like hours at a time, and at 7 a.m. Vassilis finally gave up hope of more sleep and went downstairs to make coffee. He returned quickly, looking shocked. Something awful had happened. The drawing room looked completely different. Rushing down to look, I felt the chill morning air blowing in through the door to the terrace, which had evidently been forced open. The room had been half-emptied. After the initial feeling of being punched in the stomach, I had to admit that it had been a surgically precise job. No paintings or easily identifiable objects had been taken, nor large, unwieldy pieces of furniture, but anything that could be lifted quietly by a couple of thieves in rubber-soled shoes and taken out onto the terrace, down the steps and over to where a van had evidently been waiting. There were now gaps where there had been gilded mirrors, aged globes, painted blackamoors, portable chairs, tables and bookcases, and all the Victorian beaded needlework cushions from Gerald’s day-bed. I couldn’t believe we hadn’t heard a thing. Worse, I knew we were partly to blame for not having closed the large wooden shutters on the drawing room windows. It had always been the rule – Rosa’s task in the old days – but the five minutes spent unfolding and barring the three pairs of shutters on each of the five tall windows was always a bother last thing at night. Surely, I had reasoned, burglars would not be able to smash their way unnoticed into a house full of family and friends?

Since the silver heist in Rosa’s day, we had suffered other burglaries, but not inside the house. Each time we opened the gardens to the public, there was a subsequent swoop on urns or statues in the grounds. One gang had even removed the bronze fountain of a lissom young Dionysus that I had commissioned as a memorial for Robert from the sculptor Nicholas Dimbleby. They had sawn him off at his shapely ankles, leaving his feet behind. He was later found by a policewoman at an antiques fair, wrapped in a blanket like a stowaway in the back of a van. He was duly repositioned in the circular pond at the back of the house. An unpleasant phase followed of putting up electric gates at the end of the drive, upgrading the burglar alarm and positioning security cameras. We stopped opening the gardens. It was a distressing process that went against all my instincts of leaving the doors open and welcoming people in. Yet there seemed little alternative other than asking Rosa to come back with a vicious dog.

Within days of the burglary, Vassilis was offered a tempting posting in the Greek Embassy in Rome and given twenty-four hours to decide. In the four years we had been together in England, Faringdon had become like home. Not only had we repaired, renewed and decorated, we had tried to get the finances back on track by renting it out for holiday lets. We had also, in spite of the burglaries, become relaxed there in a way that I hadn’t managed in the first years. The presence of two young children had confirmed the metamorphosis so that while I could still marvel at the absurd serendipity of owning the place, I could also feel that I belonged there. Now all this could be thrown up in favour of the unknown. It was a daunting prospect to set off again, and although Vassilis had spent his student years in Venice and spoke Italian like a native, I knew that I would have to start from scratch once more with a new country and language. But perhaps I could return to the freelance journalism I had enjoyed during my time in Moscow, I thought. We wrote a list of pros and cons, as Darwin had before he married his cousin, and came up with a ‘yes’, in favour of embracing the new. After all, we could always come back, we reasoned. And wasn’t that how Gerald lived his life, with long stays in Rome?

Over the next years we returned to Faringdon periodically, but it was proving difficult to keep the place afloat financially. The short-term lets were erratic and the tenants themselves were unpredictable – some didn’t respect the fragility of the house, whilst others were absurdly demanding. We decided to let Faringdon out for a longer period as a way of balancing the books. We were very fortunate in having a housekeeper, Patricia Hornbuckle, whose vast energy and capacity to cope under any conditions provided the foundation for trusting that we could leave the house. We stored away more of our personal belongings and prepared for a long wait before our next stay.

VASSILIS WITH ANNA AND LARA, SPRING 1996

A variety of tenants ensued, some delightful and appreciative of the unusual spirit of the place, others less so. One tenant tried to commune with the ghost of Lord Berners while wandering the grounds at nightfall. Another had a wedding there at which the bride demanded that the doves be dyed ‘gold’. Yellow was the best that could be managed by Andrew Smith, the man who replaced Don after his retirement and became just as dedicated a gardener, groundsman and dove-dyer, not to mention inspired restorer of the disintegrating lake house, orangery and Victorian greenhouse. A few who rented the house were dismayed by the scruffy side that often exists in English country homes, where power showers are unheard of, historic carpets are frayed and the wiring hasn’t been replaced in a lifetime. However, many of our tenants were friendly and welcoming and Vassilis and I became accustomed to the initially unsettling experience of being invited as guests for drinks or meals in our own house.

ON THE BACK LAWN DURING A VISIT TO FARINGDON, EASTER 2009: THE AUTHOR’S DAUGHTERS, ANNA (PLAYING GUITAR) AND LARA (DANCING), THEIR COUSINS (LEO’S SONS) ALYOSHA, RIGHT, AND TOM, DANCING, AND LYDIA, A FRIEND FROM GREECE

After five years in Rome, we made the decision to move to Athens. Vassilis had been offered a job there and we were happy to move on and settle in a place we both loved but had never lived in together. Anna and Lara would grow up as bilingual, bicultural children, something we could only view as positive. We still managed the occasional stay at Faringdon, while using it to generate enough income to pay its bills.