But dandyism evidently enthralled him. Later in life Father began to buy waistcoats copied from those exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Mother was not sure about these. One was a variation on a short tunic Edward II allegedly gave to Piers Gaveston, coloured in red gold and studded with glass jacinths. Another resembled, at least when Father put it on, the huge valerium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum in Rome, an expanse of purple on which was represented, by silver embroideries, the starry sky.
Most of Father’s suits had been purchased from Christian Dior in the 1960s. Over the years, however, he lost nearly three stone. By the time I was seventeen Father had lost so much weight his trousers seemed always in danger of falling down.
We pleaded with him to buy new pairs but he merely said that it would be cheaper to purchase more braces. There was a problem with this. In the summer he abandoned wearing braces because of the irritation they caused his skin in the heat. After we had moved the scene of our summer holidays to Porto Ercole on the Italian Mediterranean sea, he dispensed with them altogether.
One August, we were invited to an annual cocktail party given by a neighbour, Marchese Cino Corsini. Ex-Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was another refugee in this demi-paradise. This upright representative of the House of Orange lived the life of a virtual recluse nearby, but enjoyed attending the Marchese’s party, where she was de facto the guest of honour.
Before her arrival, Father and I took a stroll in the arboretum with its layer upon layer of lush plants. Father was shuffling. Obviously his trousers were loose again.
‘They’ll fall down if you don’t pull them up.’
‘Rubbish.’
We walked a few more yards. They duly slid down to his ankles like a flag running down a pole. Father didn’t seem to mind. He considered it fortunate as he felt in any case like having a pee.
‘Don’t do that,’ I called out anxiously. ‘I think Queen Juliana’s coming around the corner.’
‘Trying to tease your old dad.’ He stuck out his tongue. ‘I don’t fall for that.’
He crouched down in the middle of the path.
The situation was becoming increasingly desperate. Indeed the Queen’s legs could be seen magisterially making their way towards us. Still Father refused to believe me. He was having one of his rip-roaring pees, when his instrument behaved like a garden hose. Then he looked around. He began to yell in horror.
‘Oh my God, why didn’t you tell me the old bat was coming?’
There was no answer to this disgraceful inquiry. To the old bat’s credit she didn’t bat an eyelid. But Father kept a better eye on his trousers after that.
Despite Father’s passion for bow ties and waistcoats, he treated his clothes very badly. His idea of what to do with them when they were not on his body was to drop them in a heap on the floor. When Father undressed for bed he did so in every room of the house. First, in the drawing room, he kicked off his shoes, the left one behind an urn, the right obscuring the beam from the burglar alarm, so it was impossible to turn it on until we had found his shoe. Next came the socks. These were usually pulled off in the hall. Father would sit on the bottom of the stairs and swear at them until he had managed to prise them away from his toes. His shirt would come off on the stairs. Then he would march to the bathroom, and while brushing his teeth, shrug off his trousers. His underpants were stepped out of outside his bedroom door.
When I was a child I could always find Father by following these fantastic rivulets of colour. One knew where he was in the house by how many articles of clothing were on the floor. Poor Mother. Mother always went to bed half an hour later than the rest of us because it took her that long to retrieve all Father’s clothes and put them away.
For railway stations or airports, Father would resort to what he called ‘my informal travelling attire’. I doubt that anyone ever possessed such unprepossessing ‘travelling attire’, informal or otherwise. It consisted, almost without variation, of a pair of checked green-and-yellow golfing trousers held up with a piece of string, a claret-coloured shirt with large holes, a pair of old Moroccan slippers and a baseball cap.
As if this were not picturesque enough, Father added extraneous details. He sometimes put a boiled egg under the baseball cap in case he later got hungry. Often he forgot it was there, however. He would arrive at the airport and go to the check-in counter and suddenly, in front of serried fellow travellers, the egg would roll down his back and onto the floor just as if Father were a gargantuan human chicken.
The effect this had on the general public was a radical one. The first impulse of many observers was to assume Father was a tramp and offer him a few coins. This always amused him greatly. To my shame he sometimes took them.
‘Most generous, old fellow, thank you so much.’
Other passers-by, on being struck by this outlandish vision, backed away in consternation, anxiously gathering their children around them.
To lessen my embarrassment I used to walk five or more paces behind him in airport lounges, railway stations and outdoor cafes. I had, you might say, a prime view of all that was going on. I remember when I was thirteen creeping through the departure lounge at Heathrow airport as Father proceeded, like some extraordinary pasha, through the throng. In front of him was a young family with children in pushchairs. The wife gazed at Father in amazement and cried out to her husband for all to hear, ‘Oh darling, look at that funny man! His poor family must have a dreadful time.’
22
The pleasure of your company
AS A HOST, Father aspired to a combination of Trimalchio, Petronius’s resplendent Roman character, and that sultana of the eighteenth-century salonnières, Madame de Staël.
Father suspected the veracity of most aphorisms – unless he had thought of them himself – and especially disliked the Victorian proverb, ‘Enough is as good as a feast.’ ‘Balderdash,’ said Father. ‘Enough is as good as a fast.’
Alas, this enthusiasm for quantity was seldom counterpoised by an appreciation of aesthetics. A large plate, spilling over with some tasteless grey substance, or a quaking mauve-coloured mound of peas and paprika (a dish Father often asked for), pleased him as much as any airy-light invention of the finest French chef.
Mother used to complain that Father was capable of ruining the best cook in the world. In the early period of my parents’ courtship, when Father lived at Tower House in Regent’s Park, he employed a chef who lived in a fog of frustrated virtuosity. One might say that he yearned his living. Menus of divine dexterity were disregarded for such nonagenarian nonentities as cabbage soup and waterlogged chicken, which Father floated on his plate like a forlorn schooner.
After my parents married, Mother decided to appropriate to herself all aspects of entertaining. On the morning of a dinner party, Father was sent out of the house, while Mother supervised the menu. For years in the Seventies we had the good fortune to employ a truly first-rate Portuguese cook. Luisa provided all the pastries and viands that could be wanted for a feast, while Mother’s exquisite taste was displayed in the decoration of the table. The bright arrangement of flowers and embroidered cloths, under chased candelabras of silver and gold, was almost symphonic.
As far as Father was concerned, the apotheosis of each dinner was the wine. Father’s cellar was something over which he fussed and doted. Most of the wine was bought at auction; by 1974 the cellar contained four thousand bottles of champagne, claret, burgundy, chablis and Hungarian Tokaji. The decanting of the wine was an arcane mystery. It was rather like the Schleswig-Holstein question, about which Bismarck said that only three people knew the answer and two of them were dead. Father claimed to have learnt the secret from no less a person than the grandmaster of the vinous arts and the author of Notes on a Cellar Book, Michael Broadbent.
Many accoutrements were needed for these rites. No one was allowed to handle them but Father. The most precious object of all resembled a silver horn into which had been fitted a filigree sieve
for catching sediment. Prior to one dinner party in 1978 all Father’s pomp and pride came to the fore. Among the guests was to be Hugh Johnson, and Father had chosen to put before this exalted connoisseur of the grape a Lafite-Rothschild of particularly fine vintage.
At a quarter to five, there was an unearthly howl from the bowels of the house. It sounded like a blackened soul being scourged by demons. Father’s silver wine decanter had gone missing. Up and down we searched for the wretched thing, but it was no use. Father sat with his head in his hands, a broken man. ‘Never mind Voodrow,’ said Mother briskly, ‘I’m sure you can use something else.’
It must have been seven o’clock when Mother, now a perfected presence, ventured down to the kitchen to make sure the preparations were running smoothly. I recall to this day the sound she made. It was like a car skidding on a bumpy surface after the driver had failed to oil the brakes. When I reached the kitchen I found her fixed to the spot, her face quite grey with horror, her arm outstretched in a reproach. Father was standing by the table, one hand clasped around the neck of the magnum, the other holding a piece of material dripping red. Attached to it was what remained of a bunch of white silk roses, now sadly clinging together for comfort.
It was Mother’s Ascot hat.
‘Oh Buttercup,’ entreated Father in a tiny, plaintive voice. ‘Don’t look at me like that. It was the only thing I could find to decant the claret through.’
That error cost Father in abundant measure. Mother requited the disfavour in spades. A few weeks later she held a ladies’ dinner while Father went to his club. Lips were curled at Mother’s ladies’ dinners. Whenever Father heard of one he made a sound like a balloon slowly releasing its air. With ill grace he offered to put out a few bottles of mediocre Chilean wine.
‘Your mother’s friends,’ he whispered to me, ‘think a wine’s bouquet is a free bunch of flowers you get with a bulk purchase.’
Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher. When Father returned home at 11.30 he found Mother and three other women still lingering over the table. In front of them, lined up like railway carriages, were empty bottles of his best claret, including a Mouton-Rothschild of unique provenance that had come from the cellar of the late Selwyn Lloyd. Force majeure prevented a nasty accident from which Father could only have been extricated by a defence lawyer. But he rarely spoke again of Mother’s ladies’ symposia and he never again used her hats to decant wine.
Usually dinner guests numbered from eight to fourteen and were chosen on no evident principle save their conversation. Thus into a stock of aristocrats and rakes of the race course – of whom, as Byron remarked of Beau Brummell, ‘you might almost say the body thought’ – were thrown statesmen, business magnificoes and the occasional prelate. During dinner the men talked to the women on either side of them. Or that was the convention. At Tower House, an occasional guest had been George Brown, the bumblingly bibulous Foreign Secretary. Brown abided by his own social rules. After speaking to his middle-aged neighbour for three minutes he made an announcement that was not intended to express commendation:
‘I don’t want to speak to you any more, you old hag. You’re boring and ugly.’
After coffee the women were sent out of the room – into a sort of purgatory of the trivialities – leaving the men alone. This archaic practice infuriated some of the more feminist-minded wives. I remember one dinner to which Father had asked that conscientious Conservative politician John Biffen and his fiery, foxy wife Sarah. Father was a relentless talker, a back-seat driver of the dining table. Mrs Biffen became so enraged by the men remaining in the dining room for one hour that she could control herself no longer. She made a precipitous exit home on a bicycle. Father claimed women were incapable of abstract thought, but then showed himself lacking in this facility himself by adding, ‘They always reduce everything to the personal. At least in my experience.’
I was always surprised by the range of Father’s conviviality. It absorbed everything before it like the expanding ripples on a lake. During the late Eighties he took a sudden shine to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. As Father was an atheist it seemed an unlikely crush, but Runcie’s piquancy of character brooked no opposition. Bertrand Russell once wrote that of the eminent men he had met the most unforgettable were not necessarily those who had made the greatest mark on history. Lord Runcie was the truth of this incarnate. His measured agreeability marred his zeal for reform but invested his personality with a wonderfully benign aura.
Father’s and my first meeting with him had more than an element of slapstick. We had gone to a cocktail party at Winfield House, the American ambassador’s sumptuous residence in Regent’s Park. Father’s bold eyes immediately appraised the scene.
‘No one much here,’ he said dolefully, thereby dismissing two cabinet ministers, a Field Marshal and a well-known film actress.
‘Oh but look,’ I protested, ‘there’s the Archbishop of Canterbury.’
Father was unimpressed. His eyes glazed.
‘Haven’t been any good since Wolsey. Well let’s see what the fellow has to say for himself.’
The Archbishop’s opening gambit was a startlingly secular one. He stared fixedly at my chest. With surety I can say he was not admiring my theology.
‘What do you do besides looking beautiful?’ he smirked.
His laughter was like a brandy glass shining in the firelight.
‘I’m doing my A-levels.’
The course included the study of a well-known seventeenth century theological sect called the Arminians. One of their followers, the Revd. William Laud, became Charles I’s Archbishop of Canterbury and was executed by the Roundheads. This seemed an ideal topic on which to engage his successor.
‘What do you think of the Arminians, Archbishop?’
Runcie did not distinguish himself by his answer. He leaned forwards, raking in another few inches of cleavage.
‘Very nice people the Armenians. I was in their country recently. Quite a pleasant place surprisingly enough.’
To be fair to the Archbishop – and may Our Father bear this in mind on the Day of Judgement – he may have been a little hard of hearing. Notwithstanding, Father and he hit it off to the extent that the Archbishop became a frequent recipient of invitations to the racecourse, though disappointingly he could never be persuaded to commit the worldly sin of gambling.
Mother’s salon did encompass the worldly. They shone there like glittering lizards in the sun – sometimes, a day or so later they were indeed in the Sun. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother; Angus Ogilvy and Princess Alexandra; the Duke of Beaufort; Peter Ustinov, Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge; Laurence Olivier’s black-eyed son Tarquin, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher.
During the unfolding of the years Father became the cynosure of lion-hunting foreigners who hoped through his varied and impressive circle of acquaintances to bag genuinely big beasts. At first Father was touched when someone from a foreign embassy would telephone with the news that such and such a senator, contessa or madame was arriving to London for a few weeks but knew few people there. Could Father not produce some bright stars of the social firmament?
By the Eighties however he had begun to feel himself the victim of his generosity. When the female acquaintance of an American cousin was dispatched to our home for a dinner en famille, Father was not gruntled.
A few years before he had placed a placard in the front hall, which said, in a paraphrase of Sir George Sitwell,
‘I must ask anyone entering the house never to disagree with me in any way as it disrupts the functions of my intestines and prevents me from sleeping at night.’
When the American lady arrived she found this quaint but egregious.
‘How sweet,’ she trilled like an ill-tuned flute.
Aside from a self-congratulatory air, her characteristics were a face that medical science, not nature, had rendered as smooth as cake batter, and blonde bouffant hair. Her appearance was completed by a yellow outfit from wh
ich her pungent scent was wafted abroad. She looked like an animated macaroon.
For Father it was hate at first sight. The macaroon had an exaggerated air of innocence which she seemed to be daring us to challenge. She was a moron. Or close to one. Father would fix her with a hostile look and declare at periods,
‘I like Americans – as a rule,’ or ‘Never met a Yankee I didn’t like – until very recently.’
To these taunts she remained as impervious as stone. With the macaroon all were banalities. They poured forth unchecked.
‘The Queen’s so Queenly, Sir Woodruff, don’t you think?’ (She seemed unable to get her tongue around Father’s name.) ‘More wine? What a naughty girl you must think I am!’ followed by ‘My Heaven, such adorable drapes in the little girls’ room.’
Mother and I braced ourselves for calamity when the macaroon piped up in that grotesquely grating voice of hers,
‘Oh Sir Woodruff, you know what would be divine? Could you possibly help me out? I’m dying to give a soirée in my hotel suite for some of your English celebrities and fashionable society people. I’d just love it if you could help me out with the guest list.’
Our trepidation turned to astonishment when not only did Father smile agreeably at this request but positively burdened her with help.
‘Of course, dear. Of course I’ll help. We’ll make it a night to remember, don’t you worry.’
Glances of concern were exchanged between the female Wyatts. When the macaroon had been bade goodnight, pecked on the cheek and hustled out of the door, Mother set in motion a confrontation.
‘Voodrow, I don’t understand you at all. You are horrible to that poor woman all evening and then you promise to help with her party.’
Father responded with cunning,
‘Buttercup, she made me feel guilty.’
Father Dear Father Page 17