April 5 Grand National Day
I back ‘Overshadow’ and ‘Wot No Sun?’ – ten shillings each way. ‘Wot No Sun?’ comes in third, so I win three pounds ten shillings. Dirty mounds of snow still lie about the roads where the sun has not penetrated. There is a large mound slumped against the hedge opposite which is the first thing one sees on looking out of the window. A small bit all round thaws each day, symbolising the stagnation and boredom of country life. Have just had a pleasant weekend with the Campbells, who are friendly and hospitable, and every meal quite delicious on scanty ingredients that seemed to be portioned round to the last potato. I remained immersed in Paul Bowles’s new book Let It Come Down, reliving Tangiers, while snowflakes beat against the panes. On the way back we stopped a night in London, staying with the Hultons. We were given twin beds in the servants’ quarters. We are offered champagne by the butler. We accept and two quarter bottles of non-vintage instantly arrive.
Excellent service. Nika’s facial twitch now expresses itself through her hands and she never stops flapping them about like a penguin. It is usually accompanied by a boast, ‘How if they lived to be a hundred they wouldn’t know what to do with all Teddy’s wealth.’ She is trying to persuade Cyril to give his name to a prestige magazine (she suggested it should be called The Connolly Magazine) – The CONNOLLY MAG! I expect she would like Cyril to do all the dirty work while she remains the editoress. We go to see a Rattigan play, The Deep Blue Sea, which, apart from Peggy Ashcroft, is banal and boring. The dinner split up into Nika and her two stooges (Cyril and Robin Ironside) squeezed together on one side of the table and myself and John Russell who talked in awed whispers.
April 7
The snow has thawed opposite the gate. It is a grey, cold, bleak day with a violent south-west wind. We have a fire. Last night we motored over to St Margaret’s Bay to see the newly-weds who have just returned from Jamaica. Ian Fleming, tanned, fretful and thinner. Ann, greyer, older, happier and obviously pregnant. We drive there and back in a thick sea mist and drizzle, but they are both so vitalised and pleasant that it is a successful visit. They were more lovebirdy than ever and kept putting their heads together to inspect the holes in their carpet, and then nesting chirrupy noises would follow as to whether it should be sent to be repaired now or when they were next in Jamaica.
We ate roast chicken served by a new butler who handed the dishes round the wrong way. Ann had redecorated the house; the sitting room was immensely improved by the absence of the two Noël Coward pianos which used to squat in their respective corners like a pair of reproachful giants.
End of April
There is a blustery wind tearing off the blossoms; the grass is green and needs mowing. Kupy is sitting on my knee with icy cold paws and keeps trying to nuzzle under my pullover. We are very overdrawn, unable to cash any cheques. The two Chinese goslings are double the size of a week ago, the guinea fowl have not started laying yet, and today we heard the cuckoo. C is absolutely obsessed with house-hunting. Every time we go into a town, he puts the cottage into some agent’s hands and every house that comes onto the market he buys in his imagination. Stone Hall, the house behind a high wall opposite The George, was for sale a fortnight ago. It had always symbolised a prison to me and for the last ten years, every time I passed, I accelerated. I was eventually persuaded to go over it. The garden was well kept up, and they only wanted £4,750 but it lacks any magic or charm. The rooms are built in the Georgian style, symmetrical and dull. Now, every day, I am made to drive Cyril within walking radius of this prison and leave him to prowl round on his own, so that in the end the dog has got to know him and always runs out when he approaches. The last time we went up to the house in the car and stood gaping from the roadway, whereupon the dog ran out barking followed by its mistress, who was furious when she saw us and demanded to know what we wanted, as though we didn’t have any right to be wandering along a public highway. She then snapped that the house had been withdrawn from the market. Was I relieved.
The day after, Pop developed a passion for Knock Farm overlooking the marshes – very bleak and completely ramshackle with beams, sloping floors and no modern conveniences. Now, he never stops going on about Knock and what he wouldn’t do to the garden.
May 18
Today has been a most satisfactory day. Coombes the gardener came, although as soon as he arrived one could see he regretted it and was trying to sneak away. Having leapt out of bed the instant I heard his small Austin car pull up in the drive, I ran out in my ragged sky-blue dressing-gown and fluffy red slippers, and accosted him on his way to the vegetable patch, shouting, ‘Shall I tell you what we want done?’ and pointed; ‘the wiring must be moved to the side there to pen in the geese.’ ‘Ooow! I thought you just wanted it pulled down.’ ‘I wrote and told you I wanted it moved, Mr Coombes, so that you could bring the correct tools.’ ‘Ooow! I ’aven’t got the tools for that job. ‘Ow about Saturday?’ He was back-stepping into the car. ‘Never mind about doing it properly. Just do it temporarily,’ I said, tugging him toward the goose patch. In the end it was done. ‘Can you clip the hedge today? …’ ‘Saturday …’ ‘Will you spray the roses as I asked? …’ ‘Kill ’em to do it now. Too early …’ ‘But, the greenfly are already there. You mean it’s too cold? …’ ‘Burn ’em up …’ ‘Did you bring the grass seed? …’ ‘Nope.’ He looked dreamily in to the distance. ‘You want a thorough downpour for that job …’ ‘Well, we won’t get it now …’ ‘Nope.’ I could hear him banging away at the pegs in a fury.
My lucky day. It drizzles all the time. I expected him to down tools at any moment. ‘If only I can keep Coombes here until twelve I shall have achieved something,’ I say to Cyril. Coombes packs up at 11.30 without saying a word … But the soft broom has been mended. The raspberry jelly has set. The goose patch has been cleared. The old hen coop broken up, the pieces stacked in the garage. Then, C rings up Costa asking him to lunch on Sunday. Costa says he has no car; would we go there? I am reluctant to go, for some reason, and produce the excuse that our car is being repaired. But we accept. Then, on Sunday, we both wake up ill-tempered and when C catches me finishing off some dregs of soup in the kitchen he gets very cross. ‘Weren’t you going to offer me any?’ he says. We depart at midday in a taxi. Neither of us speaks all the way to Ashford. A cold, windy, rainy day. As we leave these hills, the countryside is much greener, fresher and less bleak; fruit trees everywhere in bloom. At Ashford garage we pick up the car. There is a long list on the windscreen of the things that need doing, like decarbonising, so I start driving at a snail’s pace as though the car were an ailing invalid. ‘You mean to say it won’t go any faster?’ Cyril says. ‘Come along, Baby. You can do better than that.’ ‘I am driving safely, for a change,’ I say, ‘and which way now?’ Cyril directs me wrongly so that we go seven miles out of our way. ‘Subconsciously, neither of us wants to go to this lunch,’ Cyril says. We stop right outside the Smarden cider works to ask the way. ‘Are you ever going to order some more cider?’ I say, thinking if I’d known we were coming this way I’d have brought the cider flask. We arrive on time. Me surprised, C knowing it. Costa talks all the time about India. How they have no culture any more. No art. No writing. Apathy. They miss the British. Would like to have them back. We both comment afterwards on his striking appearance. He was wearing a long-sleeved dove-blue angora pullover matching his bright blue eyes, his white hair almost entirely bald from the rear. ‘Look at his head,’ Cyril says to me, ‘tonsured like a monk.’ So circular is the bald patch that it might have been drawn. Over the dove-blue pullover he wore a jacket of small black and white check. His woollen socks were a letdown, rugger team type in large crude stripes. I noticed how capable his hands looked. He was very tanned, hawkish, birdlike and really stylish. ‘I am sure he studies all that,’ Cyril said. ‘He just wants to be admired and is quite content with his life. No sense of wasted talent, having none. His narcissism prevents any emotional entanglements.’ Costa is explicit and
informative about places, there being hardly any country that he has not visited. I felt we must have been very unresponsive. He gave me a little Afghanistan cap. Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi looking better and less like a boiled monkey after a severe operation. She nearly choked when Costa opened the bottle of Taittinger ’43. After all, a bottle of champagne for four is always a letdown. The last five days have been blissfully hot. A lot of work done in the garden. Everything looks promising until one catches a glimpse of the peach-curl on the nectarines; it is like realising one has produced a deformed child; after seeing those blotchy scalded leaves one gets a real understanding of the word ‘diseased’.
Raymond Mortimer is back from India, so Cyril has been told to resume only ‘fortnightly’ reviews. He complains of a pain in his right side and thinks he has a rotting appendix, is slightly sunburnt but on the surface of the brown skin scurfy scales have appeared, so I call him scale-face.
The hedge is full of birds’ nests, mainly mistlethrush. One contains four tiny speckled blue eggs.
* In fact, Lady Elizabeth von Hoffmansthal, daughter-in-law of the Austrian poet and dramatist, Hugo von Hoffmansthal.
† My predecessor in Cyril’s affections.
‡ Ann and Ian Fleming were married in 1952 in the Caribbean with Noël Coward as witness.
§ A winter evergreen flowering shrub.
Chapter XIV
Waugh’s Visit
Diary
June 8
Start having guilt about Kupy. She has been in the zoo for three weeks as we have just spent two weeks in Paris at the expense of a cultural congress financed by a Mr Fleichman, an American millionaire. Cyril enjoyed mooching about the bookstalls, his pockets stuffed with francs, privileged, with nothing to do but present himself at the conferences and listen to other people’s speeches. The most conspicuous pair at the Deux Magots, Sonia and Tony Bower. Two ‘memorable’ incidents. One, when Cyril took me sightseeing on the Left Bank. It was a very hot day. After tramping about for hours, me trailing several paces behind the great man, both of us quite silent, I expressed a desire to eat. ‘Stick it out a little longer, Baby,’ says Cyril, ‘I have a surprise for you.’ We walked on through narrow streets, the gutters strewn with spittle, passing many restaurants with check tablecloths, and my imagination got to work on the lovely lunch I was going to be given by that clever Popple who knew his way round Paris so well! Suddenly, he darted into a doorway, giving me a beckoning thumb gesture and led me up a steep stairway, into a pitch-dark room empty except for a gathering of waiters. I looked forlornly out at the street below bathed in sunlight. ‘Could we open the window? …’ ‘Don’t look so glum,’ says Cyril, ‘don’t you realise this is LAPÉROUSE?’ I ordered a tomato salad, grenouilles and coffee. The portions were minute. No one else came into the restaurant. Neither of us spoke while Cyril read Les Temps Modernes; all I said was, ‘I felt like eating Midi food.’
The second disappointment was a dinner with Pauline Potter,* whom we had run into during a performance of Billy Budd. ‘Wear a little frock,’ she said to me, as though she were addressing a midinette. So, in defiance, I wore my black suit. When we arrived at her house on the Isle St Louis, she was in semi-evening dress and looked me up and down with great disapproval. ‘Comme elle est borne,’ said Philippe de Rothschild and as a punishment I was made to sit on a chair much higher than the others, causing great discomfort. The other dinner guests were Glenway Wescott, as well as a lesbian gossip writer, and Tony Bower served up with the dessert.
*
Cyril is sitting in a deck chair in the garden. I am about to weed. ‘Have you seen my fucking gloves anywhere?’ ‘Your fucking gloves are about as common out here as loving fucks,’ he says.
His latest million pound lament.
‘A million pounds was made and spent, and then another million came and went, and then there came a million more, and then a million as before …
June 26 My birthday
No adequate fuss made. Left to stew with the geese all day while C has lunch with Jack Lambert.† I lunch with PQ. Hottest day of the year. Peter carries an umbrella. We go to Wimbledon as I have been given tickets. Never sheds his trilby, complains of the heat, prods the crowds with his brolly and begs to leave every fifteen minutes. I try to distract him by pointing out all the pretty girls; he pronounces them all as being ‘common’, but takes a great interest in the royal box, until he spots Mr Attlee in a deep sleep. Return to the country in the evening. Cyril and I not speaking.
September 5
This morning I go into Cyril’s room with a cup of tea and see a fresh packet of biscuits lying beside the bed. A secret eater! I say, ‘Where did you get them? Cookes?’ He nods, his mouth full. I say, ‘You’re like the greedy girl in the Stafford story who always kept a hoard of sweet food in her drawers.’ ‘I shall be having a charcoal grill up here next,’ he says, very pleased with himself. He has invented four categories of fart. The ‘dry goose’, ‘wet goose’, ‘chicken fart’ and ‘phosgene’; we remark on how frequently we both fart and put it down to boredom. ‘Do you think other people fart as much as us?’ I ask. C says no.
I was preparing some rhubarb the other day when C said, ‘Wouldn’t it be improved with some lemon peel?’ Me: ‘I dare say, but it’s not going to get it. It’s a question of lump it or leave it.’ Seeing some red wine all over his face, I say, ‘What have you got all over your face?’ ‘Hate,’ says Cyril. I hardly ever cook now, bored stiff with the whole practice. I say we are economising. We have not had to order any household goods for weeks. The Tide lasts longer and the Vim; the onions remain in the box for ages.
Cyril is lying in the bath brooding on Caligula who liked to pile all his gold coins into a heap and paddle in them with bare feet. We are on bad terms again. I hear him in his room murmuring at night, ‘A million … Two million’ or, simply, ‘Just a million.’ Yesterday my sister and her family came to tea. She was looking very young and pretty, but the whole effect spoilt by hideous black open sandals and fat legs. Everyone on their best behaviour. Cyril put in an appearance and made conversation. Vivien did his best to be responsive by making a series of obvious remarks. The two children rather dull. Angela looks as though she is going to be sulky. Jo plump and sweet-natured.
We are very worried about the quackers; they are suffering from diarrhoea and loss of appetite. I suddenly feel extremely sorry for them and wonder if I am starving them to death; they are not allowed bread as a rule, as their function is to keep down the grass. I decide to love them up a bit. The hen has lost all her tail feathers and looks absurd. Can’t wait to turn her into a good broth.
Have spent nearly the whole day retyping the Waugh portrait that Cyril is doing for Time magazine. He compares it to a Max Beerbohm drawing. It is terribly good. While I am typing, he prepares the lunch just when the rates man arrives, so the eggs are overcooked. The man said he had read all Cyril’s reviews, adding, ‘They’re a bit above me. Your husband seems quite happy with them, though.’ I can now make perfect oeufs en cocotte à la-crème and almost perfect pommes Anna. Tell Cyril I will soon beat all his circus at their own game, Joan with her cooking, Sonia for her know-allness. Mrs Lea has suddenly arrived with an enormous basket of freshly gathered mushrooms, the first of the season. Elle est bien gentille and a great plum, apple and blackberry provider.
*
Saturday was the gayest day of the week. We would get into the little bus and tear into Folkestone, with Cyril doing witty impersonations all the way, he was so pleased to have finished writing his weekly review, the idea being to get to Jacksons to stock up on Romary biscuits, pumpernickel bread and oat cakes before the shop closed. Then we would head for the Grand Hotel for our usual Saturday lunch. To avoid getting something disgusting, we always stuck to the same menu. Smoked salmon, plain grilled sole, strawberry ice cream and a kind of coupe Jacques of mixed fruit.
After lunch we usually had a row. ‘Am I getting any money for the shopping by any chance?�
� Then I shopped. Not for food but for some weed, slug or ant killer. Then we would go to the cinema. On our way home, we stopped off for dinner at The Rose and Crown in Elham. It was run by Mr and Mrs Millen. She did the cooking while her husband stood behind the bar polishing the glasses. There, too, we stuck to the same menu. Soup, roast chicken, sausage, bread sauce, roast potatoes, then tipsy cake. Another row. Then home.
One night while we were dining there, a man at the next table engaged us in conversation. Eric Wood lived at the White House, Alkham, and from then we often met. He became our neighbourhood friend. Cyril enjoyed going to his pretty house that you entered through a large conservatory with a climbing mimosa. Eric had rosy cheeks and was rather a toper. Although not an intellectual, he was interested in painting and china. He lived alone with a cat, had charming manners and a housekeeper who cooked. At weekends, he might have one of his old boyfriends to stay. Eric always seemed to be so pleased to see us, and we grew very fond of him.
'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More' Page 16