'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  The tragedy of the present was that the world was run by journalists who, being culturally ignorant about the past, failed to comprehend what was happening in the present. Even politics were governed by journalists; diplomats did not count any more. Just journalists and revolutionaries … Too many people wrote; and they wrote solely for the present; no one gave a thought for the future … If he had unlimited money he would leave a trust for writers not to write. He had no use for Eliot now. ‘A terrible humbug.’ Auden was no good either. ‘Is Sanskrit such a wonderful language as it is reputed to be?’ Cyril asked. ‘Some maintained it was more expressive and melodious than Greek.’ ‘Horrible language,’ said BB, ‘mathematical and spoken like a chant.’

  How he hated metaphysics! ‘Meterfussers,’ he called the metaphysicians. He thought the Flaubert cult a great exaggeration, that reading him was ‘like swimming in turtle soup’. He had read the Education Sentimentale many times and still had the impression it could have been reduced to a long short story, Il tire par les cheveux. But he liked Bouvard et Pécuchet most. We asked him if he liked Verrocchio’s David as much as we did. But he did not share our enthusiasm and described it as being ‘equivocal’. Cellini’s Cosimo was very much praised. Michelangelo’s David was a ‘hobbledehoy’. There had been more balderdash talked about painting in the last fifty years than ever before; if a hundred years elapsed without another word being said on the subject, it would be no loss to the world. How overpraised the late Renaissance had been! The absurd reverence for Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo – out of all proportion. The Douanier Rousseau was a complete fraud. But Van Gogh was a great painter.

  C went into his room to say goodbye for the last time and told him that when he had stayed at I Tatti in the twenties he had been anticulture. He had felt that I Tatti was the dead hand of the past on creative young people. He was more influenced by Huxley, Lawrence and Joyce than by Pearsall Smith and Berenson. But now he had come round to see that I Tatti was ‘infinitely more precious than anything avant garde which has such a short life’. BB said, ‘Culture is like a match burning in infinite darkness.’ C: ‘Why do people always want to blow it out?’ They don’t want to, they just have to blow.’ C asked, ‘What are your plans?’ ‘Trying to finish my catalogue of Italian paintings, though each night I go to bed wondering if I will be here the next day …’

  ‘The snow has melted. Look, BB. And the birds are singing. It’s spring today.’ Berenson: ‘This bed is where I do my singing. Peep peep.’

  * Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas.

  PART TWO

  WEEP NO MORE

  To Bernard and Claudine

  Contents

  Chapter I – Weidenfeld

  Chapter II – Obsessed

  Chapter III – In Hospital

  Chapter IV – In Spain

  Chapter V – Morocco

  Chapter VI – Renewals

  Chapter VII – De la Folie Totale

  Chapter VIII – Divorce Proceedings

  Chapter IX – Lyall Street

  Chapter X – ‘Whatever Are You Going To Do Now?’

  Chapter XI – Flight

  Chapter XII – New York

  Chapter XIII – Cuba

  Chapter XIV – Aftermath

  Chapter XV – Living at the Ritz

  Chapter XVI – Grimaud

  Chapter XVII – Life at the Mas

  Chapter XVIII – Guests

  Chapter XIX – In the Pink

  Chapter XX – Cyril’s Death

  Chapter XXI – Adieu, Poules

  Chapter I

  Weidenfeld

  The last time I saw Farouk was in 1953 after getting a letter which said:

  Dear Kiwi,

  Please keep in touch with me so that we can arrange a meeting some time … and don’t dare pass through Italy without dropping in to see me at the Villa Dusmet. Otto von Frank.

  PS Address your letters in my correct name as usual, please.

  Thus, when George Weidenfeld invited Cyril to join him on a European culture tour, I arranged to go to Rome and stay with the deposed King who, after the abdication, had taken the title of Prince Farouk Fuad. He was living with a Neapolitan girl in the Grottaferrata area and no longer had a retinue of servants. It was not a particularly gay interlude. By then, I must have been considered part of the family, so that when Farouk set off on his nightly rounds, I would be left behind in the kitchen to keep his mistress Irma company. She was a buxom, simple, friendly girl, but all she wanted to talk about were her dreams of becoming a filmstar. Late in the afternoon I would come upon Farouk eating grilled meat in a pitch-dark alcove. He was supposed to be on a régime and ate kosher butter with his bread. No more jolly jokes and laughter. He had become a lonely, sagging figure, ostracised by Roman society, not because of his lax morals, oddly enough – according to Princess Anne-Marie Aldobrandini, born Anne-Marie Lacloche, daughter of Countess Volpi, a Venetian lady who had married into Roman society – but because they found him boring. When she told me this, I expressed surprise. For, many years back, while in Rome with Rex Harrison’s first wife, Collette, I met some aristocratic families and, although they lived in enviably beautiful apartments, they were totally devoid of conversation. And ouf! were they boring. Like Irma, impoverished Roman gentlemen also had their dreams, not of becoming filmstars but of marrying American heiresses.

  In Rome, Farouk was just as quirky as he had ever been. On my departure, he did what I wish I had the courage to do when any bookworms depart; he checked on the contents of my suitcase and came upon a comb belonging to the apartment, which he quickly claimed back. I was about to descend to a taxi waiting to take me to the station, when he called me back and said, ‘You’ve forgotten something,’ and my last vision of him was standing in the doorway, with his familiar mocking smile, holding up my toothbrush.

  During my visit I received a letter from hubby in Bayreuth, saying,

  Darling Baby,

  I am sorry for not writing before, it has been so hot, a permanent heat wave in which one is always on the run or else at the opera which one has to attend in a dinner jacket at four pm every roasting afternoon, when one is craving a naked siesta after the morning’s sightseeing. My article has to be written between seven and nine am. I am very glad to have seen this but I shall not wish to see it again. An interminable wallow in German pre-Raphaelite folklore, with marvellous moments but vast tracts where, not knowing a word of German except for what the mailbag requires, one sits gazing at fat women berating each other while the mind wanders further and further away and the bottom itches on the hard seat. However, I have learnt The Ring and all its good and subtle moments, especially the marvellous orchestral preludes and the general-sense-of-doom themes. It is the last and perhaps the greatest explosion of Romanticism. It is now eight am and more sweltering than ever. I motor in a couple of hours to Munich with W. and Podbielski. Then W. and I take the train to Salzburg where we ‘do’ another festival. Everyone is beginning to get on my nerves though G. W. has been very charming and tactful and very useful as an interpreter. He chases women and gets more and more Central European, which suits him, a chuff-like, big businessman with wanton, bloodshot eyes and a bulbous bottom, always in a telephone booth, but there is the domed forehead and considerable intelligence and a soft spot for yours truly, whose fortune he proposes to make.

  I managed to get through the operas without being turned out for interruptions and confine ‘How’s about another million?’ and ‘Clever little darling baby’ (for that is what you are) to the streets, museums and other private places. I miss you very much except when I’m alone, when I feel with you. I long to hear if the handbag arrived and if all is well. My telepathic system tells me that you are sometimes bored and miss your Pop but that on the whole you are enjoying yourself. If we are to meet in Paris, we had better make it the Pont Royal. I don’t know if the French strikers will make my Vienna job impossible. I hope to find a word from you in Munich today. Will w
rite again and wire from time to time. All my love, Cyril.

  PS There is no happiness outside one’s prose. One must create in it the warmth and grace that one doesn’t find outside …

  At this stage Cyril had changed publishers. He had abandoned Hamish Hamilton and been taken on by Weidenfeld.

  *

  Of the two categories of individual, the ‘present-giver’ or ‘non-giver’, I am inclined to belong to the latter group. My sister Brenda and I were brought up simply to consider presents a waste of money. As a young girl, while modelling for the Mayfair couturier Victor Stiebel, I made friends with another model who, thinking I looked lost and lonely, arranged for me to spend my summer holiday as a paying lodger with her aunt in Eastbourne, where I knew no one. In an effort to fill my day, I answered an advertisement for tuition in ballroom dancing. The instructor turned out to be a white-haired pederast. The lessons consisted in our gliding around an empty room overlooking the seafront, to the accompaniment of a foxtrot or a tango on the gramophone. Soon after this dismal holiday, my friend announced her forthcoming marriage. At a loss to know what to present her with, I dug out of the cupboard a pair of trite blue Venetian candlesticks and I don’t think we saw each other again.

  Cyril loved giving presents. He would hand them over to you beaming. It might be an exquisite pair of apple-green, leaf-shaped Sèvres fruitbowls that I treasured for years, or Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal in a second-hand 1890 edition he had dug out of an Honfleur bookshop and inscribed ‘Barbara from Cyril – séduisants climats’, and although I then hardly understood a verse, the poems were taken to our favourite Normandy beach every day. He inscribed a revised edition of The Unquiet Grave:

  To beloved brilliant Barbara from Palinurus, Navigator of Silences.

  ‘Dry again?’ said the crab to the Rock Pool

  La Noche Buena 1949 London

  This was followed by Enemies of Promise and The Condemned Playground: Essays 1927–1944.

  And then, a re-edition of The Rock Pool:

  Barbara from Cyril

  who knows her

  Cagnes

  Finally, only two of Cyril’s books ever got published by Weidenfeld; the first Ideas and Places:

  Barbara from Cyril –

  ‘Let not th’ insulting foe my fame pursue

  But shade those laurels which descend on you’

  May 1953

  Second, the Golden Horizon of long short stories:

  Barbara from Cyril

  illam oportet crescere

  me autem

  minui at her cottage of Elmstead Nov 1953

  The following summer, we went to stay with Maurice Bowra in Oxford and while there were driven over to The Close, Bloxham, to lunch with the gourmet, André Simon, author of several cookbooks and set before each invite’s plate was the following menu:

  *

  At the end of that year, when we passed through London, we no longer indulged in a room at the Ritz. Cyril stayed at his club. I don’t remember whose proposal it had been, but I spent the night in the spare room of the new publisher’s house in Chester Square. This was after Weidenfeld’s wife had left him and his attic quarters had been rented to a Count. Then, one day, Cyril confessed he had become infatuated with Caroline Freud and had been for some time.

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I shall have to find somebody.’ Using the very words of my mother, Cyril replied.

  ‘So long as he is a gentleman, I won’t mind.’

  ‘Whom do you consider a gentleman? Weidenfeld?’

  ‘Too continental. But, so far as a continental Jew can be a gentleman, he fits. And …,’ Cyril added, ‘I would prefer him to most people.’

  It was about this time that I finished writing A Young Girl’s Touch. The title had been taken from a calypso, although Rose Macaulay later, perhaps rightly, suggested it should have been entitled From Kensington to Cairo. When the manuscript came back from the typist, Weidenfeld perked up interest. He read it and agreed to publish the book. A contract was drawn up and A Young Girl’s Touch was included in his spring catalogue. Some others on the list were The Bubblemakers, A Legacy by Sybille Bedford and Marcel Proust’s Jean Santeuil. The novel being off my hands, it left a gap in my life. I felt restless, became the avid London-goer and got taken to wallow in German pre-Raphaelite folklore. I don’t know whether it was the circumstances in which I first heard it (holding hands with this promising new publisher throughout the many performances of The Ring) but Wagner became one of my favourite composers and from then on, whenever I heard the Rhine maidens, I visualised a chorus of Sonia Orwells.

  When, with conflicting feelings of guilt, fret and shame, I admitted to being in love with his publisher, Cyril talked less of Caroline, saying, ‘I realised it was making you unhappy,’ and, no doubt knowing it would lead to further frustrations, he gave up seeing her and I, not wishing to disrupt our marriage, did everything I could to break the Weidenfeld stranglehold. But W. was very tenacious. Whenever I refused to see him, he elicited sympathy and support from Feliks Topolski or John Sutro, maintaining he was rescuing me from an unhappy marriage, until I eventually relented and agreed to a meeting.

  Chapter II

  Obsessed

  There was an old hag in a hovel.

  Who spent her days writing a novel.

  When one page was writ

  She looked for some shit

  And scooped it all up on a shovel.

  Diary

  Latest development is that Cyril is cross because I have become an avid London-goer. Says he doesn’t want to leave the country this week. Has never made such a statement before, not since I’ve been married to him. Is talking of taking a holiday abroad. Last night he said,

  ‘I know you think I’m mean.’

  ‘Well, you constantly remind me of the money you spend on me.’

  ‘You’re always so ungrateful. Now Caroline I smothered with presents.’

  ‘No wonder you’re so overdrawn at the bank.’

  Wake up this morning with a feeling almost of liberation. Could I really give up W.? How is it I can be in love with someone whose podgy hands and doughy pallor intrude like flaws or speckles in an otherwise perfect photograph? I have had this feeling before of being able to dispel him from my mind, usually after a visit to London, but it doesn’t last. Cyril has become angelic, never a grumpy word. Now professes to love it here, never wants to leave Oak Coffin, is disgusted and bored with London, Joan very dull to be with, nobody he wants to see, he would like to kill W. and it would break his heart if we separated. It would break mine too.

  *

  Winter has reared its ugly head. The beech tree has shed most of its leaves, the field opposite is sunny with shiny blades of grass rumpled by the wind. The kettle whistle has just sounded. As the char, Mrs Lea, is away I say to Cyril,

  ‘Is that for the washing up?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replies, as though to satisfy me, and adds with a giggle, referring to the tap of the typewriter, ‘We try to make an author’s life as comfortable as possible.’ He then goes into the kitchen and proceeds to wash the dishes. I have had a bad night, could not go to sleep for ages brooding in a fury. I wonder why, when I get down here, I think of W. with such resentment. All that came in the post, The Thurber Garland. We discuss the jokes. I say I don’t enjoy the wine joke much – ‘It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.’ Cyril says he prefers his own description – ‘A well-fendered little wine.’

  We had a day in Folkestone, a mouldy tea, scrambled eggs on margarine toast. A windy main street, potboilers already appearing on the bookstalls for Christmas. Books with large photographs of cats and small, boring prints.

  *

  Wake up this morning to hear a steady, gentle drizzle, little pinpricks of sound like something sizzling in the grate. A calm, darkish day, very still, an occasional cock crows, and just outside in the lane the old woman from the bungalow calls out to
her goat, ‘Billie’, and, again, the forlorn cry, ‘Billie’.

  *

  Last night I went to sleep very early without tablets. Was awoken by Cyril groaning in the next room. ‘Poor Cyril’, over and over, just loud enough for me to hear. Or ‘Poor Baby’, several times over. When I called out, ‘For goodness’ sake, Cyril, do shut up’, he did not reply, but merely went on muttering in a lower tone.

  *

  I have been to let the geese out of their patch, which is completely shorn of grass.

  ‘One or two eggs for breakfast?’ I ask.

  ‘There’s no such thing as one egg, it’s like one eye,’ said Cyril.