As he made his way to bed, he motioned me into the library. ‘Don’t tell your old mum but I’ve thought of a splendid wheeze.’ Father’s wheezes were often the opposite of splendid. I showed true British phlegm.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘That silly cow wants grand people. I intend to oblige her.’
‘But none of your friends will want to come, will they?’
‘I shan’t ask them.’
This was anything but reassuring. I recalled that Father had recently drawn my attention to a Damon Runyon short story, the plot of which involved a New York hustler rustling up some phoney bigshots for the benefit of a visiting Spanish nobleman. When the evening of the party came around, dread had me by the groin and was shaking hard.
The macaroon’s suite was at the Connaught Hotel, that London staging-post favoured by Americans. She was attired like a maharani on tour. Seldom can so much gold have covered so small a space. Equal care had been taken over the food. The tables sweated bottles of Dom Pérignon; while hors d’oeuvres had been arranged like Union Jacks with salmon roe, caviare and chopped egg white denoting the colours. A white-suited doorman waited to announce the guests.
The macaroon writhed in an ecstasy of anticipation. Goodness knows what Father had said, but had he promised her the whole of Debrett, some minor royals and a world-famous film star or two, she could not have looked more hopeful. I was astounded therefore when the first arrival turned out to be our local newsagent, Mr Singh.
‘May I present,’ Father said portentously, ‘Mr Kapor Jamaal, the grandson of the Maharajah of Nonapoor and our leading Asian man of letters. His novel won the Hovis prize last year.’
Even from Father I had never heard such a whopper. So far from being a prominent man of letters, Mr Singh had never written a book in his life.
Presently a waiter announced the French cultural attaché, Monsieur Le Vicomte Defarges. I recognised him as the manager of a North London bistro called Pepe le Moko. The next three arrivals, according to Father, were the most eligible trio of debutantes in London, the Ladies Amelia, Cordelia and Lavinia.
They turned out to be three Tote employees. One had a ring through her navel – these were the days of punk fashion – and spiked chrysanthemum hair. Even the macaroon was surprised by their appearance. If her credulity remained undented her sense of aesthetics suffered a blow.
‘Are they really considered great beauties?’ she whispered. ‘You must understand,’ said Father, ‘that upper-class standards of beauty are different from those deployed by the west coast Americans. They are considered very chic here.’ This explanation seemed to satisfy her.
I thought Father had gone too far, however, when he produced Eddie the pharmacist as ‘our well-known fashion photographer David Bailey’. Father only remarked, ‘If she doesn’t know it is Eddie the pharmacist, how will she know it isn’t David Bailey?’
It seemed to me he was positively pushing when the doorman announced ‘Ronnie Biggs’ and in walked an academic acquaintance of ours who lectured on law. The macaroon was stunned.
‘But how did he get out of Brazil?’ she asked, amazed at this piece of dexterity.
‘Oh, he got a day pass from the Home Office,’ lied Father. ‘The Home Secretary was going to come tonight but unfortunately he has to have dinner with the Queen.’
Goodness knows how Father had persuaded all these people to agree to the shocking masquerade, but that he soon ran out of individual volunteers became clear when a group of people arrived and were declared to be ‘sundry upper-class personages’.
This was dangerously vague. I prayed there would be no leakage of the truth. Half the guests had had their tongues loosened by the unaccustomed amounts of gratis champagne. Mr Singh, our leading Asian man of letters and the grandson of the Maharajah of Nonapoor, was attempting with small success to inveigle Lady Lavinia into sexual congress. Her accent had slipped as she beat the man back with cries of ‘Get orf you ruddy oik.’ Fortunately the macaroon was too engrossed with ‘the French cultural attaché’ to notice.
Astonishingly the evening drew to its conclusion without her penetrating any of the impostures. It seemed that everyone was happy. The faux celebrities because they had fed on honeydew and drunk the milk of Mayfair and Father because of the success of his little joke. Even the macaroon was content. Although she did remark to Mother, ‘As one non-English girl to another, the British really are a remarkably ugly race.’
23
Norman Lamont wins the Tour de France
IT MUST HAVE been the summer of 1987 when Father and Mother decided to move the scene of our family holidays from Tuscany to a small peninsula north of Rome, called the Monte Argentario. Father was by now approaching his seventies and the attractions of a dry inland climate had faded when compared with the gentler ones offered by the azure waters of the Mediterranean.
We rented a villa above a small fishing village called Porto Ercole. The house, which overlooked two medieval fortresses of Spanish provenance, belonged to a member of the Bucci-Casari family, descendants of Napoleon’s sister, the livelily lubricious Pauline Borghese.
It was an inspired construction. One entered a garden where bougainvillaea blossomed in bright sunlight and, later, the mesmeric scent of hibiscus filled the night air. Lawns leapt past sculpted urns of ochre on their way to the sea. Down below in the port, white fisherman’s cottages were set back against the yellow hills and broad-bottomed boats bobbed in the bright marina.
Porto Ercole was one of those towns that had been settled intermittently by a variety of nationalities so that its genealogical lines met and moved away from each other like the veins on a Stilton cheese. By the time we arrived there it was the summer haven for, among others, ex-Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. At the very centre of the village, however, was an Italian family whose members had over the centuries provided that nation with some of its greatest sons.
The Corsini forebears, as Father was fond of repeating, included three popes and one saint. When the Tory MP Hugh Fraser, throughout his life an enthusiastic Roman Catholic, was introduced to a Corsini princess, he fell on the floor in an act of the humblest homage. The Porto Ercole Corsinis lived with a wild and weird austerity that would have pleased all those noble ancestors. They lived, in short, in a vast botanical garden.
This arboretum, which stretched all the way down the hillside to the sea, had been conceived by a nineteenth-century ancestor called Baron Ricasoli. This Ricasoli had led the Italian troops in the Crimean War. His remuneration had been in human souls. Ricasoli was permitted to take back with him to Porto Ercole one hundred Russian prisoners of war. These men, their Slavic features an exotic contrast to the gentle olive mien of the natives, were set to work planting what the Baron intended to be the most ambitious private garden in Europe.
Fable had it that so content were the Russians with their new lives that when the Peace of Paris was declared, they declined to return to their homeland, preferring to settle down with local wives and become fishermen. An alternative story, quite probably true given the Baron’s renowned wiles, is that he deliberately omitted to tell them that peace had broken out.
The fruits of the Russians’ labours meanwhile flowered into a garden of almost mythical enchantment. Lofty palms from the Indies; upright cypresses, gothic shrubs and plantains, all rare examples of their kind, bordered an intricate design of picturesque lakes and fountains which, when the summer Sirocco blew, shimmered like oases in their deserts of golden grass.
Sometimes the call of history is irresistible and the mysterious voice of blood, which is quiet for generations, speaks in a more intelligible language. Then race claims its own and forgotten ancestors assert their rights. The present occupant of the garden, Marchese Cino Corsini, could only be understood through such spiritual atavism. Of middle height, his profile resembled the pale, precise lines of a painting by Bellini and his eyes, which had seen some sixty odd years, retained their fierce brightness. He w
as respected by everyone – so much so that those who believed in aristocratic government would point to the Marchese in justification. It was often felt that if there had been more people like him, Italy would not have fallen into the unfortunate state that it did earlier this century. He was a man, then, who never did anything small or mean. His whole existence seemed to tend toward the common good. Cino befriended everyone. His strays included an insalubrious but travel-hungry local fisherman whom he took with him to a society wedding in Gloucestershire, introducing the man, somewhat optimistically, as ‘the Count of Orbetello’. Little did the English know that Orbetello was a stinking pissoir of a harbour north of Porto Ercole and the only counts it had ever seen had been quite out for it.
Each August, Cino and his wife Aimée, an American lady of the utmost probity and charm, held a cocktail party in the botanical garden. Those invited included ex-Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard, as well as the English, Americans and Germans who had holiday houses in the vicinity and would arrive with their guests trailing colourfully behind them like members of an Eastern caravan. This mixture of nationalities had from time to time caused confusion. On one occasion, the late Marquis of Bristol, then Viscount German, had introduced himself to a couple thus: ‘How do you do. I’m German.’ The pair had responded delightedly. ‘Ja, gut. So are we.’
One regular house guest of ours at this time was Norman Lamont. Norman’s unlucky public image never did justice to the warmth of his charm and the bright intelligence and humour of his conversation. When Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, his visits were characterised by a peripatetic hide-and-seek with members of the British paparazzi.
One year, two journalists from the London Daily Mirror attempted all sorts of wheezes to inveigle our address from the locals, including the unlikely subterfuge of claiming to be members of ‘Lord Wyatt’s pop group’. The vague presence of the journalists proved inhibiting even to Father, who contracted what might be described as severe page fright. He decided to make the ultimate sacrifice to prudence and curtail his early morning naked bathing until they had departed for England.
Eventually the journalists gave up the chase and holiday life returned to something approximating normal. The week of the Corsinis’ cocktail party came round once more and we looked forward to an indulgent evening among the botanical delights of Cino’s garden and the restorative ones of his wine cellar.
The two representatives of the House of Orange were always excellent entertainment for the reactions their presence provoke in the European bon ton. There was, for instance, a Swiss couple who loved anything royal – this emotion was genuinely disinterested, as they loved them quite as much in exile as when they were in power. The wife’s curtsies, however, never resembled an aspen swaying gracefully in the breeze. She scrambled down like a dromedary searching for water and quite often had to be hauled to her feet by her husband, whose presumed discomfort was belied by the most beatific of fixed grins.
The party fell on one of those sublime summer evenings. The white stars, cleansed by the sea winds, were large and clear. We glanced up among the trees, half expecting to see some awful vision there.
The arrival of the House of Orange dispelled our contemplations. A ritual was to be enacted. Like a mongoose distracting a cobra, our host would feed Prince Bernhard and his queen with human titbits so that conversation continued uninterrupted. Cino was delighted by our arrival with Norman, who counted as a very big catch indeed, one that would doubtless satisfy the appetite of the royal pair for much of the evening. He enquired of Father at once: ‘May I take him off?’
Presently, though, our host returned with a worried expression on his usually sanguine features.
‘What did you say your friend did?’ he demanded. Father replied, somewhat surprised, ‘He’s the British Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ The Marchese looked crestfallen; he clapped his hand to his forehead in a gesture of great distress. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘I told Prince Bernhard he’d won the Tour de France.’
Father and I burst into laughter. We rocked back and forth. The more we roared the more melancholy Cino became. It transpired that the Marchese had confused Lamont with a famous American cyclist called Lemond, who had indeed won the Tour de France a few months before. Delighted to have found such a prize to put before the Prince, who was something of a sports aficionado, Cino had introduced him as such.
It later transpired that Prince Bernhard had been puzzled by Norman’s appearance. ‘My dear fellow, I imagined you would be somewhat leaner!’, he had said, and ‘What a thing to have achieved given your figure! Miraculous!’
Norman, to his credit, took the episode in great part and merrily related the story to everyone he met for the remainder of the holiday. But when Cino returned to the Prince and reported that Norman had not won the Tour de France at all but was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer he lost interest completely. A chancellor evidently was of scant importance compared with the victor of Gaul.
24
A Peer of the Realm
FATHER’S RACING YEARS were a period of his life on which he looked back with affection and regret. His interest in the turf was first pricked in the 1960s. It was not that Father had ever mounted a horse himself. In India twenty years before, the most the Viceroy had done was to persuade him to sit on a pony.
Father, his face and hands scarlet with a five-cocktail flush, had omitted to secure the girth. The dénouement was inevitable, perhaps. When the animal began to amble off, both saddle and rider slid to the ground.
From then on, Father determined that if any riding were to be done, it would be by other people. I suppose that friends must have suspected that horseflesh was something with which he was not familiar, because when he was invited to his first race meeting at Newmarket, he is alleged to have asked, ‘At which point do they bring on the dancing girls?’
He denied strenuously, however, asking the host at which intervals during the day to cry out, ‘match point’, ‘foul’ or ‘sticky wicket’.
The Newmarket grandstand, where the guests enjoyed an elegant repast, was grand enough even for Father’s exacting tastes. Encouraged by good food and wine, he was persuaded to place some money on a horse called Diamond Girl, which was running in the second race. He won. In the fifth race he won again. The effect of this run of luck was dramatic. Father decided to buy a race horse, thus beginning an association with the turf that was to last nearly forty years.
As a rule, Father’s horses had a funereal halo of failure hovering over them. They did not distinguish themselves on the racetrack and were therefore entered in small, inconsequential meetings. These invariably took place in the foulest of weather. Father always felt he was sloshing around in some strange puddle, the whole ambience of the courses so slippery that neither he nor the horses could get a grip.
Then he struck lucky. Some wiry, weather-beaten racing hunk pointed Father in the direction of a certain two-year-old. Its mother was called Lady Godiva and its sire, Pink Flower. It was a beauty, with ample yet lean lines and legs as strong as metal bars. Father knew he had a winner on his hands. What is more, he managed to purchase the horse for under four hundred pounds.
There was one small snag. The horse had as yet no name. It was 1959 and Father was a Labour MP. The Tories were still in power but the election might change that. Thus when the Jockey Club asked Father what he intended to call his horse, he replied, ‘Vote Labour’.
Vote Labour? Quelle horreur. The serried ranks of the Jockey Club took an unsurprisingly dim view. That aspicated body said it disapproved of political propaganda on the racecourse. In the end Father called his horse Godiva’s Pink Flower.
After it had won a small but not insignificant race in Nottingham, Father asked the trainer to enter it in the New Stakes at Royal Ascot.
The man was horrified. ‘You can’t run a four-hundred-pound horse at Ascot. All the other horses will have cost five to ten thousand pounds.’
It was the only occasion on which he
disregarded his trainer’s judgement. Father intended to go to Royal Ascot for the first and perhaps the last time in his life, and races were infinitely more amusing if one had a horse running. Besides he was confident of his little horse and asked a bookmaker for a price on his being placed fourth – which, after a demur at such an unusual request, he received.
In the paddock Father told the jockey of his bet, and after doubtfully looking around the smart horses being saddled for the race, he promised to do his best. The Duke of Norfolk, a great figure in racing, had an outstanding runner called Sound Track. It jumped into the lead and there was silence about Father’s tiny quadruped.
Then he heard the commentator saying, ‘Godiva’s Pink Flower coming up fast behind Sound Track.’
From then on the man repeated over and over, ‘Sound Track followed by Godiva’s Pink Flower.’
What a pity, Father mused, as they approached the Royal Enclosure, that the commentator’s voice could not be echoing into the stands and the boxes, ‘Sound Track . . . and Vote Labour,’ to the astonishment and perhaps petrification of the spectators.
Godiva’s Pink Flower had no hope of overtaking Sound Track but it did its brave best. Father’s horse had become worth far more than he had paid for it.
After that, though, Father had no more winners. Racing was draining his finances and the odd small victory proved no counterpoint to his dwindling pride. He sold his remaining horses. This might have been the end of things in one way or another, but then Fate stepped in, in the amiable manner she usually employed where Father was concerned.
By this time his close friend Roy Jenkins had become Home Secretary in the Labour government. One day he spoke to Father on the telephone, seeking advice. He had a problem. The Chairmanship of the Horserace Totalisator Board was vacant. The company had been losing money and was generally believed to operate in an archaic, short-sighted style. Who could fill the post? Father could not come up with any names, so Roy asked archly, ‘But Woodrow, you like racing. Why don’t you do the job?’
Father Dear Father Page 18