He was very good indeed at his acting. He made you believe in him. After a bit you just forgot he was your naughty brother and thought he was – well, whoever. I remember once they did a little thing, a kind of history of America, and he was Lincoln, making the speech at Gettysburg. Well and there we were, all of us Yankees, dabbing our eyes with our handkerchiefs. We almost had to take our mother out of the hall, she was sobbing so loudly.
If he had a fault, it was that he was just a little bit conceited. He knew all about his looks and what he could do with them. The girls all fell in love with him, and he certainly knew how to keep a half-dozen of them going at a time. He could be a terrible liar when it suited him. I used to feel ashamed, listening to him at the door. ‘I’ve to help my mother this evening,’ he’d say to one of them, and then he’d be off for a walk with another one, as soon as the coast was clear. When he was only fifteen he had girls coming round all the time. He was really quite precocious.
Further notes for Two Childhoods chapter of The Tinsel Underneath.
Interview with Peter Gregson, psychiatrist. Head boy at Abbots Park Preparatory School during Piers Windsor’s first year there. Wishes to be anonymous.
Well, I liked Piers Windsor very much. He was a nice little chap. He seemed very young, even to me. I was thirteen, in my last year. Just moving on to Winchester. So he looked like a baby to me. He was very good-looking, pretty almost. Boys who looked like him were more at risk. Poor little buggers. Sorry, unfortunate choice of words. This is anonymous, isn’t it? I’d hate to upset anyone.
Anyway, he had a bad time at first, being bullied, but that seemed to get sorted out after a bit. Some big boy took it upon him to protect him. Or so we thought. It was in his second term, and there was an end-of-term concert. The youngest ones were doing a scene from Peter Rabbit. Windsor was going to be Mr McGregor. He was absolutely marvellous apparently. He seemed a bit happier and more confident.
Then the scandal broke. Poor little tyke was caught in bed with this bigger boy. I honestly don’t think they were doing anything much. It’s more comfort, when you’re that age, you know. It’s a bit of warmth and cuddling, feels like home. Nobody realizes how alone, how desperately abandoned you feel in that situation. I would no more send a child of mine away to school than shoot my right hand off. I heard about it in my position as head boy. Not officially of course; it was kept completely hushed up. But one had quite a lot of dealing with the staff on a day-to-day level. The parents were not to be told, because of the scandal. Piers and the other boy were beaten, and told if they were ever seen even speaking together again, they would both be expelled. Barbaric. I have my doubts about this beating business too. In my experience, sadistic masters got some kind of a thrill out of beating small boys.
Anyway, that was that. Or so they all thought. But then Piers was found in one of the lavatories, vomiting. He’d taken half a bottle of aspirin. God knows how he got them. He was rushed off to hospital and stomach-pumped, and again, it was agreed his parents should not be told. And as a punishment, he was stripped of his part in Peter Rabbit.
I tell you, it has haunted me to this day that I just let all this drift on under my nose and didn’t try to do anything about it. I’d find it a bit hard to face him now, to be honest with you. Talk about the Nazis. The English public school system is almost as evil in my view.
1945
Caroline and William were married at Easter in St Mary’s Church, Woodbridge. They had planned a small wedding, but in the end the church looked quite full, and at least saved the organist from the embarrassment, as she put it, of drowning out the voices. William had a large family: three sisters, all married, who came with their husbands and the ten children they had between them, and a brother, and two elderly aunts plus the large family of his best man, Jonathan Dunstan, with whom he had been at Eton. There was nobody on Caroline’s side of the church except Cook and Janey, who had come at Caroline’s express invitation, and Jack Bamforth and his wife and children. There was also the small problem of who should give her away, and she ran through her circle of acquaintances, even considering Jack and, in a moment of wild mischief, Giles Dudley-Leicester, whose constipated-looking wife Angela she had taken a great dislike to, but in the end it was agreed that William’s brother Robert should do it, and she gave in, thankful not to have to worry about it any more.
William wore his morning suit, and Caroline wore an extremely beautiful dress from Worth in ice-blue lace, quite long, almost to her ankles, cut low at the neck, with a tight, full waist, and a great taffeta bow, rather like a bustle, at the back; and a wide-brimmed straw hat, trimmed with blue and white flowers and a half veil which she said made her feel at least a bit like a bride.
The service was quite simple, but Caroline walked into the church in a stream of sunlight to the glorious waterfalls of Bach’s Fugue in B Minor and everyone agreed, however grudgingly, that she did look not only lovely, but happy, and they sang ‘Love Divine’ and ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ (which Betty Baxter-Browne, née Hunterton, hissed to her husband was a very strange choice of hymn for such an occasion) and the vicar gave a very nice address about love healing hurts both large and small, and the hope that any new marriage must give to everybody after the war. As they walked back down the aisle to the Wedding March, Caroline on William’s arm, she looked not at the congregation (most of whom she did not know) but up at him with an expression of such unmistakable affection that all three of William’s sisters suddenly found they could not meet each other’s eyes, in the light of all the deeply unpleasant things they had been saying about her and the marriage over the past few weeks.
The reception was held at the Moat House; Mrs Bamforth and Jack took some extremely good champagne round from Stanley’s apparently inexhaustible cellar and two girls from the village followed them with trays of canapés, and there was a very impressive cake which Cook had spent the last two months baking and icing. After they had cut the cake, Jonathan Dunstan got up and made a short and highly embarrassing speech about how long it had taken William to make up his mind to go to the altar, and that he had always had trouble getting himself together over anything, even at school, except for cricket, but now he had decided to bowl this maiden over (‘Some maiden,’ hissed Betty, dangerously audibly to her younger sister, Joyce) and they were clearly going to make a lot of runs together. He went on to say that if ever William was to retire, he would be there to pick up the bat, at which Barbara Dunstan had a coughing fit and had to be given an extra glass of champagne, which mercifully cut the speech short. Then Jack Bamforth quite unexpectedly stood up and said he would like to say a few words.
‘How extraordinary,’ whispered Betty to Barbara Dunstan who she had gone over to join, ‘he was serving the drinks a few minutes ago.’ There was an odd buzz in the room, a ripple of general unease, which Jack ignored, just stood there totally relaxed in the spring sunshine, with his handsome face politely patient, and his grey eyes fixed rather distantly on Caroline.
‘I thought that as Caroline had no one much to speak about her, I should,’ he said in his soft, rolling Suffolk voice. ‘She’s had a very sad time just lately, and I think we all greatly admire the way she’s managed to take care of everything since her father’s death and the subsequent one of her mother.’ A couple of the ladies looked meaningfully at one another at this point, but most of the room was standing listening to him carefully and courteously. He had always had that effect on everyone, Caroline thought, listening to him with something very closely akin to love.
‘All I wanted to say then,’ said Jack, smiling at her, ‘was that all of us who have known Caroline all her life, we all know what a very special person she is, and how lucky Sir William here is to be marrying her. She’s brave and kind and a fine horsewoman, what’s more important,’ he added, grinning at them all, ‘and those of us who have worked for her have never known anything but the greatest consideratio
n and care from her. I hope she won’t mind me telling you that all of us here at the Moat House held a little party of our own when we heard she and Sir William were going to stay here and keep it as their home. I hope she and Sir William will be very happy, and I ask you all to raise your glasses to wish them well.’
‘Hear, hear!’ cried Robert, and the room took up the toast, raising their glasses, smiling most benignly, and Caroline, flushed and with her eyes soft with pleasure and tears, went over to Jack and kissed him gently on the cheek.
‘I don’t think I ever liked anything more than that in my whole life,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said, ‘you deserved it, and it needed saying. Are you all right?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Caroline, with a sigh, knowing exactly what he meant. ‘You seem to be always asking me that, Jack. Yes, I’m quite all right, thank you.’
But she wasn’t.
They went to Edinburgh for their honeymoon; for no other reason than that it was totally removed from the experience of either of them, and seemed far enough away for them to relax into their new selves. The war was not quite over, but peace was sufficiently nearly there for people to be totally relaxed; they went up by train (petrol still being severely rationed), booked into the Royal Scottish Hotel, and hired a car when they got there so that they could explore the surrounding countryside as much as their petrol coupons would allow.
They had a big room with an even bigger bathroom on the first floor; William had said to Caroline rather bashfully that he did not feel able to ask for the bridal suite, but that the rooms they had were the very next best, and he hoped they would be all right for her. Caroline had kissed him tenderly and said she would have stayed with him in a boarding house in Clacton had he so wished. William’s rather pale blue eyes softened with pleasure as he looked at her.
‘I do realize how very fortunate I am,’ he said. ‘I hope I will not be a – well – a disappointment to you.’
‘Dear William,’ said Caroline, ‘you couldn’t possibly be a disappointment to me. I know you far too well for there to be any nasty surprises.’
‘That is not absolutely true,’ said William, carefully, ‘but perhaps we can work together through any difficulties.’
Oh, my heavens, thought Caroline, looking at his face flushed with the effort of confronting such a subject, he’s talking about sex. It had been something she had carefully not confronted herself; during her pregnancy her usual voracious appetite had been dulled, by misery and loneliness, and since the birth of her baby she had kept her entire consciousness carefully fixed on anything, anything at all that was not to do with her body, its functions and, most dreadful of all, its capacity to reproduce. Nevertheless, confronted it had to be; William was clearly not marrying her for her cooking, or even her company alone; and he had told her several times he hoped they would have children. Nevertheless, until such time as she was forced to consider it, she knew she couldn’t; when that time came, she presumed, her body would see her through.
‘William,’ she said, very gently, ‘I know what you mean, and I’m sure it will be quite all right.’
‘I hope so,’ he said, ‘the situation will be a little irregular, to put it mildly.’
They had arrived at the Royal at tea-time the day after the wedding (having spent their actual wedding night in chaste exhaustion on a series of trains); unpacked, went and looked at the castle and strolled round the town, and then came in for dinner. ‘Early, I think,’ said Caroline briskly. ‘We’re both tired.’
They ate well: smoked salmon and venison (‘They have obviously been ducking the war up here,’ said William), drank a bottle of excellent claret, took a further stroll round the hotel garden, and went up to bed.
‘Oh, William,’ said Caroline, turning to him as she walked into the room. ‘Champagne! How romantic. And how luxurious. How did you manage that?’
‘I’m afraid,’ he said, his pale face flushed, ‘I smuggled it in from your father’s cellar. I hope you don’t mind. I really felt we had to have one, and when I made enquiries, they told me of course that they had none. But at least they were able to provide the ice bucket.’
Caroline kissed him gently on the lips. ‘You’re a wonderful husband. I’m very lucky.’
Undressing in the bathroom (having left the bedroom to the ferociously embarrassed William) she reflected on the task ahead of her. Unless she was greatly mistaken, William was virtually inexperienced; he would need careful and infinitely tactful initiation. It was going to be very difficult; she shrank from it. Apart from anything else, fond of him as she was, she did not find him in the least physically attractive: not repellent, not even unattractive, but simply not attractive. However, it had to be done; it was her penance, the price she must pay for having someone to love and care for her, someone kind and gentle and good, and there was no way out. Caroline took a deep breath and walked out into the bedroom.
He had poured the champagne; they sat in bed side by side and drank it, slowly, relievedly relaxing. By the third glass William was blessedly giggly. ‘I shall have to be careful,’ he said to her, ‘I believe this can lead to disaster in this sort of situation.’
‘Darling William, you are obviously a man of great worldliness,’ said Caroline, leaning to kiss him and then turning out the light. ‘You’ve been deceiving me.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, rather sadly, taking her in his arms, ‘I have only – well – made love three times in my life, and in each case it was somewhat disastrous.’
‘Why?’ said Caroline, genuinely interested.
‘Oh, I suppose because I was not able to give the ladies in question any pleasure.’
‘How old were they, these ladies?’
‘Oh, I really couldn’t say. I suppose between thirty and forty.’
‘Who were they, William?’
‘Two of them were prostitutes, I’m afraid,’ he said, sadder than ever. ‘I was out in France, just after the First War, with some undergraduate friends and they – we – thought it would be fun. It wasn’t.’
‘And the third?’
‘Oh,’ he said, and she could hear the desperation combined with amusement in his voice, ‘she was a friend of my mother’s. She seduced me one afternoon, when my mother was out. I was only sixteen at the time. I was very shocked. It wasn’t a – well – a success. She told me that.’
‘And since then?’
‘Since then I’ve just – well, tried not to think about it, and – well, you know . . .’ His voice trailed away.
‘I know. And nobody else ever tempted you?’
‘Well of course I did think about marriage from time to time. But someone always asked the person in question first. And I’m very old fashioned, you see, I could never have – well, had a relationship with someone I respected and wasn’t married to.’
‘Poor William,’ said Caroline tenderly, stroking his face, ‘what a lonely life you’ve had.’
‘In some ways, yes.’
‘But you really can’t blame yourself for not giving pleasure, as you put it, to two prostitutes. They’re not too capable of it, I believe. As for some old bat, coming on at you when you were only sixteen, it’s enough to put anyone off for life. Or was she beautiful and sexy?’
‘No,’ he said, horrified. ‘Fat and plain, as I recall.’
‘Oh well. There you are then.’
There was a long silence; they lay holding one another. Caroline waited for some feeling to come into her body, some gesture from him, but there was nothing. She felt herself slipping dangerously, senselessly, into sleep and roused herself. It was no use putting it off.
‘Now look, my darling,’ she said, ‘the first thing we have to do is take our clothes off. We’re not going to get very far with your pyjamas and my nightdress between us.’
> ‘Oh, no, no of course not,’ said William. He got out of bed, removed his pyjamas and slithered hurriedly back in. Caroline, also naked by now, took him in her arms again. He was still stiff, awkward; she turned his head and began to kiss him, slowly and very deliberately. For a long time nothing happened; then slowly, nearly fearfully, he began to kiss her back, and she felt with a sense of almost awed relief his penis hardening against her, and sensations within her own body going out to meet it. Perhaps, she thought, blanking out her mind to everything except the immediate physical present, perhaps it would after all be all right.
It was, in some ways. William proved, after a short time, to be a competent lover: tender, careful, inevitably inhibited, but competent. He did not want sex very often, for a bridegroom; days would pass, sometimes a week or even two, between encounters. But when he did approach her, gently, almost apologetically, kissing and caressing her in a kind of formal ritual, entering her slowly and cautiously, his excitement and his climax rising suddenly and swiftly at the end, she managed to respond, to go out to him, to move with him, sometimes even to climax herself. And afterwards, as they lay together, William smiling with infinite happiness, stroking her hair, saying he loved her and thanking her over and over again, she would relax in his arms, and thank him too and somehow manage to keep her thoughts with him, in this bed, this room, this moment, and never, never for an instant to wander into a pair of stronger, rougher arms, a younger, hungrier body, and a voice that cried out with her own in exultation and joy. And she also managed, with even greater effort of will, to keep her mind away from a tiny tender body, a soft, floppy head, a set of frond-like fingers and a pair of dark blue eyes that looked into her own with squinting serenity and which filled her dreams night after night. It wasn’t easy, especially when she woke crying, sobbing aloud, finding the pillow wet, her face flushed, and William holding her, patting her shoulders awkwardly, asking her if there was anything he could do; but she did manage it.
AN Outrageous Affair Page 7