Those Wild Wyndhams (28 page)

George further gave Bosie advice, although ‘when I call it advice I should call it an offer’. If Bosie agreed to leave the country George would see to it that he received an allowance, and that ‘we [meaning the Establishment] would all fight his battle’. The Wyndhams’ cousin Algy Bourke had even offered to ensure that Bosie was not expelled from their club, White’s. Sibyl’s hopeful suggestion that Bosie should join the party in Florence was nipped in the bud: ‘for Bosie’s own sake & ultimate chance of shaking off all this nonsensical view, he must break fresh ground’, said George, proposing Ceylon, or Australia ‘which would enable his friends to say that he was going to prove himself a man’.
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The unreliable Trelawney Backhouse claimed that Wilde’s prosecution was the tit for tat offered by the Establishment to prevent Queensberry going after Rosebery once more. These conspiracy theories seem likely to remain unproven.

Thanks to the Wilde affair, Percy and George were toing and froing from London. In late March Arthur passed on to Mary in Egypt gossip delivered to him by Margot at a London dinner party, ‘telling me that Eddy Tennant is going out to Florence with the Hon’ble P and that she and Charty want him to propose to Pamela!’ ‘He is an excellent fellow,’ added Arthur, wishing him ‘every luck’, but obviously amused, for placid, affable Eddy was no match for his inexorable sisters.
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The putative Florentine romance was a slow-moving affair. Eddy seemed ‘very much in earnest’, but the matter was ‘too long and important to go into in letters’, Percy insisted to Mananai when she asked for an update.
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In the end the Wyndhams’ friend Walburga, Lady Paget, brought matters to a head. Lady Paget (whose daughter Gay, artistic and a devoted vegetarian like her mother, would soon begin a long-running affair with George Wyndham) was an inveterate matchmaker. Thirty years before, she had helped bring about the engagement of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In early May she invited Pamela to stay for a few days at her villa in the hills above Florence. While Pamela was there, she asked Eddy to dinner, and after dinner suggested they both walk with her on the moonlit terrace looking out over the distant city lights. At this point, Lady Paget told her diary, she gave an elaborate shiver and withdrew, leaving the tentative lovers alone. On taking his leave that evening Eddy bowed low and kissed his hostess’s hand. ‘I knew then that the balance had dropped on his side,’ Lady Paget wrote.
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Legend has it that while they were in Florence Pamela told Eddy that she could never forget Harry Cust. The conversation probably took place that night.
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In any event, Eddy had proposed, but Pamela had not accepted. By agreement Eddy returned to Glen, leaving Pamela to mull things over with her family – including George, who arrived shortly afterwards, feeling that with Wilde now a fortnight into his prison sentence and Bosie safely abroad he had earned his holiday.

Despite his sisters’ conquering of Society, there remained residual suspicion of the Tennant men. ‘[L]ots of people love
Laura
and me and Lucy or Charty,’ Margot had explained to George Curzon in 1890, but Society looked down on ‘boys parents place hills’, as being ‘not common’:
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by which she meant ‘unusual’, but which might be read more straightforwardly as nouveau riche, more vulgar and less charming. As much is evident in E. F. Benson’s novel
Dodo – A Detail of the Day
, published in 1893. The eponymous heroine, child of an industrial tycoon who slays all before her as she becomes the hit of London Society, was widely rumoured to be based on Margot. Dodo’s family, the Vanes, have not the same success: ‘somehow none of Dodo’s glory got reflected onto them’.
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A decade later, St John Brodrick complained of a visit by the Tennant brothers to Gosford where they had been ‘distressingly familiar … you cannot make gentlemen’.
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Eddy’s looks, wealth and kindness could not dispel the feeling that something in him did not quite ‘fit’.

Were Pamela not twenty-four, had the Harry Cust debacle not occurred, it is quite possible that the Wyndhams – certainly Madeline Wyndham – would have resisted Pamela’s marriage into the Tennant clan. In the end, Eddy clinched it with a letter. He was an excellent letter writer, of quiet humour and with an air of comforting gravitas. Whatever he said, it worked. Pamela wrote an acceptance in reply and walked with George through the sun-baked streets of Florence to the post office, where she also telegraphed Mananai the news: ‘Engaged E.T. still private.’
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Eddy, who swiftly returned to Florence, was more fulsome when breaking the news to Charty: ‘A little letter to tell you great things, if my hand will not shake. The uncertainty is at an end and Pamela accompanies me through the world to the end …’
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‘You can imagine my surprise! I think they have all been in such a whirl … they have forgotten about everything! & kept us all in the dark!’ Mananai exclaimed to Mary. She swallowed her disappointment for Baker-Carr – ‘
poor
man … he has known now for some time it was practically impossible’ – and embraced this new prospect. ‘To think that such a nice person should … come forward – and at last no obstacles … one can only be deeply thankful.’
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‘Waiting and waiting would never have done for Darling Pamela,’ Mary agreed, now back at Stanway from Egypt, amused, if a little irritated, that she had to wait several more days before her ‘
extraordinary
sister’ sent her a telegram of her own.
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Eddy arrived in Florence to jubilation: ‘… I seem to be holding some one in my arms all day long in congratulations and even the old concierge woman looks disappointed that I have no embrace for her.’
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Yet none of Pamela’s family pretended that Eddy would be other than a ‘very nice husband’, and provide Pamela with the means to make a happy home. Wilfrid Blunt thought privately it was ‘no great marriage’ for Pamela, thinking of ‘the somewhat coarse fibre in [Eddy]’,
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but George spoke to outsiders with generous condescension of a ‘nice simple letter’ he had received from Eddy.
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Mary, reminding her parents of the ‘many “fan breaking” times & sick monkey faces we have passed thro’,
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thought the calm prospect offered by marriage to Eddy, ‘so sensible, so reposeful, so himself’, was enough. Pamela would appreciate ‘the change, the peace of mind, the … clearing … away of doubts & emptiness & vain regrets’.
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Implicit in all the family’s comments was that Pamela would have to provide any spark in the marriage with her ‘splendid natural spirits … & capacity for enjoyment’.
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As for the power balance in the match – that was evident even to six-year-old Cincie Charteris, for ‘When I announced Pam’s marriage to Cincie, she merely said “Did Auntie Pansie arx him to marry her, or did the man arx her?’ Mary reported to Arthur.
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The Wyndhams returned to England, but not before one final upheaval. On their last night in Florence Percy was in the palazzo’s drawing room when his peace was interrupted by a bone-shaking roar. His manservant Giovanni knew the sound’s significance. ‘Saying “il est mieux de s’asseoir” he sank into the largest armchair in the room,’ Percy told Guy. ‘Oh god god god,’ shrieked Madeline Wyndham, who was with Pamela, Eddy, Dorothy and Fräulein in the ballroom as the force of the earthquake cracked walls around them and tumbled bricks down the chimney. The earthquake destroyed treasures in Florence’s Duomo and caused a stampede at the Opera House in which several were killed. The palazzo’s inhabitants were thankfully unscathed. Dorothy displayed ‘her usual calm’ and slept like a top until morning; to Percy’s relief the more highly strung members of his party appeared no more unnerved.
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‘Pamela has a faculty for sensational catastrophes which is really out of place, unless in a novel,’ said George upon hearing the latest instalment of the ‘Florentine Drama’.
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Mary’s greatest concern about Pamela’s engagement was that the wedding and attendant festivities required her to see everyone she knew. All spring she had kept a low profile at Stanway. Even once in London, two days before Pamela’s wedding she reproved her mother for letting slip the news to Lucy Graham Smith: ‘telling a female Tennant is like telling the Town-Crier, why did you tell her? Wicked Mum!’ she wrote, despite admitting that Lucy would have guessed when seeing her at the wedding anyway.
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Mary had let herself ‘slide & glide’ and now had to face the consequences. Yet she is at her most cipher-like this summer. Her diary is missing, although this would probably not have revealed thoughts, only whereabouts and actions. To gauge her interior self we can only judge from that which she presented to others. Her letters to her family and friends that summer are masterfully normal. In August she even mentioned to Arthur ‘baddish nights’ caused by pregnancy-related pains, moments of being ‘frightened and miserable in the watches of the night’
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– for Mary must have been afraid that she might not survive the pregnancy that was against her doctor’s orders.

Mary had confessed to Hugo about her pregnancy on returning to Stanway that spring. Hugo’s reaction is reported second hand – Wilfrid’s report of a conversation he had with Mary later that summer. On that account, Hugo was silent for three days. Then he said, ‘If it had been Arthur I could have understood it, but I cannot understand it now … I shall forgive you, but I shall be nasty to you …’ Mary also told Wilfrid, rather irritably, that Hugo’s primary concern was that Hermione’s family would think the Elchos had reconciled sexually while Hermione was dying.
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The next occurrence, again recorded by Wilfrid, is his receipt of a furious letter from Hugo, blasting him for having ‘wrecked the life and destroyed the happiness of a woman whom a spark of chivalry would have made you protect’. In Hugo’s letter, Mary ‘was a happy woman when she went to Egypt, and her misery now would touch a heart of stone’. Then came a letter from Mary, breaking off all contact: ‘You did try and wreck my life and the only thing that prevents my being utterly angry with you is that I believe you
did
care for me in a way,’ she wrote.
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The letters’ linguistic similarity, dwelling on the word ‘wreck’, suggests that Hugo stood over Mary as she wrote it. This would seem to be the case, since shortly afterwards Mary wrote to Wilfrid again. Again it is a transcription, but recognizably Mary’s voice. She was sorry that he was upset – ‘I know you are suffering’ – but she was matter-of-fact. She discussed how she thought things could be managed. Wilfrid was to behave towards her mother and George – neither of whom knew anything yet – ‘just as usual’. In time, she thought things would blow over. ‘These things must be done gradually,’ she told Wilfrid:

I can only be deeply grateful to [Hugo] for not making my life unbearable … It is a cruel thing to destroy a person’s
ideal
, when they have a love & admiration for one person & make them feel one is something quite different from what they imagined – all one can do is to labour painfully to build up a new image & to deserve it, to earn it …
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Wilfrid told George the following month on his return from Italy. George, the ‘largest-minded’ of all men in such matters, seemed to understand: ‘[he] neither blames me nor finds it strange’, Wilfrid noted in his diary.
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From Mary’s reproof to Madeline Wyndham in July, it seems that she had still not told her mother the truth of the child’s paternity by then.

Wilfrid found Mary’s sangfroid baffling. In the days before the wedding he enlisted Judith, to whom he had intimated some and possibly all of the truth,
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as a makeshift spy and sent her to storm the fortress of Cadogan Square. She reported:

[T]he door opened cautiously and revealed the end of Mary’s nose and one eye through the crack … I was immediately let in and taken to the dining room where Miss Jourdain and Mrs Guy Wyndham still sat at lunch. Mary is looking well and was extremely cheerful. She asked where you were … when lunch was over Mary took me upstairs and we talked about things in general and nothing in particular …

After that, Judith and Anne Blunt went to view Pamela and Eddy’s wedding presents, laid out on display at George and Sibell’s house, 35 Park Lane, since Belgrave Square was still let. ‘Old Madeline was most affectionate to us both, Percy was amiable, Pamela kissed me if I remember right four times in the course of 30 seconds … Sibell was most caressing and sat in a corner holding mother’s hand when she was not holding someone else’s … There is evidently not a shadow of anything between us and the Wyndhams,’ concluded Judith.
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On 11 July 1895, Pamela and Eddy were married at Holy Trinity Church on Sloane Street, in London.
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Pamela’s hopes for a wedding at Salisbury Cathedral had been dashed by the Tennants citing logistical difficulties. But there were nods to her fondness for rustic life. Her ten bridesmaids (including Wommy, Dorothy and little Cincie Charteris) resembled shepherdesses in white chiffon and large white straw hats trimmed with white roses – albeit wearing diamond-and-pearl lockets that were the bridegroom’s gift. Pamela’s low-cut satin bodice and full court train were embroidered with silver thread, the skirt trimmed with handmade Brussels lace and her fashionably large sleeves chiffon like her veil. She wore sprays of orange blossom in her hair; a ‘circle of brilliants’ pinned her veil in place. As she and Eddy made their way back down the aisle Pamela, her veil thrown back, diamonds glinting in the light and a ‘seraphic’ expression on her face, seemed ‘like a thing inspired … I have never seen a bride so lovely,’ thought Lucy Graham Smith, erstwhile rival and now one of Pamela’s many new sisters-in-law.
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After much agonizing, Wilfrid, fearing that Hugo might cause a scene, decided not to attend the ceremony, or the reception, held by George and Sibell at Park Lane. He claimed he had missed his train. To his chagrin, he suspected that the Wyndhams did not much care about the veracity of his excuse. Nor did a dance held by George and Sibell the following week provide any further intrigue. George was on ‘fine form’, ebullient at hosting his first dance, and waxing large on epicurean delights. Wilfrid sat by Madeline Wyndham to watch the dancing. They talked of Mary and of Pamela ‘in a way of affection there has not been these twenty years’. Once again Wilfrid was confounded. It seemed ‘clear that Mary has not taken things at all as tragically as I have … Why should I repine?’
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