by D. J. Taylor
Back in London there was more modelling for Fortnum and Mason, Stiebel and Hartnell, and – courtesy of the art critic Michael Sevier, then married to her friend Louise – an introduction to the bohemian nightlife of the West End. There was also a purchase that came to have a vital bearing on her future life. Sometime in the late 1930s, flush with modelling cash, she laid out £400 on a tiny cottage near Hastingleigh in Kent. Known as the ‘Cot’, and supervised in her absence by the friendly local policeman, PC Boot, this became important to Barbara in a way that none of her other habitations could ever match. Quennell noticed that while her London addresses were merely ‘temporary resting-places’, in which she took no interest in decoration or tidiness, in Kent she became an energetic housekeeper, who loved the Cot ‘a good deal more than she loved or liked most human beings’. She was twenty-three, and had already got through more experience than half-a-dozen women twice her age.
The war seemed to make little difference to Barbara’s lifestyle. Perhaps in the end it was only that the men with whom she associated became more polyglot – refugees from continental Europe, Free French officers plotting restitution. By late 1939 she was living with her friend Luba Bergery in a tiny top-floor flat in Kinnerton Street. But this bolthole soon gave way to an apartment on Curzon Street whose rent was paid by a French banker named Georges Boris, who was ‘desperate for a woman and I seemed to fit the bill’. The Blitz came and the bombs fell but the social round continued: pre-lunch drinks in the Curzon Street Sherry Bar; lunch at the Ritz, the Coquille, the Ecu de France or the Coq d’Or in Mayfair. Then, after the void of the West End afternoon, there might be a trip to the Conga nightclub off Berkeley Square, the Suivi, the Jamboree or to watch the rising young actor Peter Ustinov at the Players’ Theatre Club. There were ‘scenes’ when Georges’s wife discovered her husband’s infidelity and the idyll – if that was what it was – promptly shattered.
It would take a private detective, here in the war-torn London of early 1941, to trace Barbara’s precise movements over the next few months, but they were accompanied by a paralysing lowness of spirits. ‘Wept and wept’, runs a diary entry from early in January; three weeks later she is ‘desperately depressed’ and ‘so low’. For a time she lived on the top floor of a house in Hertford Street lent her by the dress designer Jo Mattli, escaping its destruction in an air-raid by a providential trip to the country. There were brief periods working at unspecified jobs (‘Sacked’, the diary reports in mid-February, ‘jolly annoying’), stays at Cranmer Court in Chelsea, where the senior Skeltons had now fetched up, with a friend in Ebury Street, and days and nights spent at the artist Feliks Topolski’s studio off Warwick Avenue.
Topolski, it has to be said, was fairly typical of the many men whose instinct for beauty, capriciousness and trouble drew them towards Barbara in the early 1940s: at once passionate, sensitive yet not above resorting to physical violence if rivals pressed their suit, and also resourceful, tough and well-connected, quite able to rise to the challenges of living hand-to-mouth in a country that was not his own. Born in Poland in 1907, Topolski had set up home in London in 1935. Here he immediately became a part of the artistic circle of the Café Royal, where such luminaries as Augustus John, Jacob Epstein and Matthew Smith held court. There were valuable connections with D. B. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Timothy Shy’ of the News Chronicle, whose column he illustrated, and George Bernard Shaw, who thought him ‘an astonishing draughtsman’ and encouraged him to supply drawings for Geneva and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days. By the time he met Barbara he had graduated to the position of war artist, alternating as a war correspondent and a Polish second-lieutenant of infantry. (‘Topolski,’ General Sikorski, leader of the Free Polish, is once supposed to have twitted him, ‘how is it that yesterday you were a middle-aged civilian and today you’re a young lieutenant?’)
And if the Polish war artist was fairly representative of the kind of man to whom Barbara attached herself in Blitz-era London, then the circumstances of their courtship were more typical still. According to Topolski he first set eyes on her being entertained by a Free French officer in the French Pub in Soho. When, shortly afterwards, they met face to face, she consented to be taken back to the room he was currently renting in Albemarle Street. Here, according to an account written nearly half-a-century later, ‘she pressed mutely (her sole/toes signalling through my thigh) for spinning out the deed, to conclude with apologetic whisper “I only need it twice – first thing, and in the morning.”’ A photograph from around this time shows her lying face down on Topolski’s bed, stark naked, eyes raised coyly at the camera. If Topolski assumed that he was to be allowed exclusive access to this new conquest he was badly mistaken. According to Barbara’s recollection she was simultaneously involved with a journalist named Anthony Cotterill, an officer called Captain Brien (referred to in her diaries as ‘Cold Veal’) and a Yugoslav doctor known as ‘the Horse Thief’.
Onto this comparatively crowded scene, in the spring of 1941, arrived the figure of Peter Quennell, at this point still married to his third wife Glur, who would bear him a child in the early part of 1942, but to all intents and purposes living the life of a carefree bachelor. Not that any of Quennell’s musings on Barbara, who was to alarm, demoralise and obsess him for the best part of two years, could ever be described as carefree. For all his attempts to document their relationship and for all the evidence of his anguished letters, the life they intermittently shared between 1941 and 1943 is almost impossible to reconstitute, largely because of the altogether chaotic conditions in which it was lived: a world of snatched evenings in briefly tenanted bedsitting rooms, missed appointments and long periods of estrangement, where almost everything – from basic chronology to situational detail – is in doubt. According to Barbara they first met at her friend Gerda Treat’s house in Culross Street. Quennell, on the other hand, preserved a recollection of being taken by a girl with whom he was having an affair to call on her ‘rather dotty little friend’, then living with a Free French colonel. Quennell remembered her ‘sitting all alone, on the end of the bed but fully dressed, as though she were a good little school-girl waiting to be taken out’. That their relationship proceeded rapidly enough for them to think about living together seems to be confirmed by an undated letter from around this time inviting her to stay with him in Ian Lubbock’s old premises (‘an otherwise empty rather squalid flat in Holland Park . . . which has few amenities except a constant supply of boiling hot water’).
Forty years later, Quennell was still in raptures about Barbara’s beauty. He thought she might have had eastern blood. At any rate, ‘there was something about her slightly slanted eyes, her prominent cheekbones and smooth olive skin that suggested the youthful concubine of a legendary Mongol chieftain’. For her own part, Barbara reckoned that ‘with his Byronic attitudes, wit and blond quiff Peter struck me as being a romantic figure’. On the other hand, this impression ‘was soon dispelled when I knew him intimately’. There followed a complex game of hide-and-seek, involving Barbara, Quennell, Topolski and several other men besides, played out among the bedsitting rooms and furnished flats of Mayfair and Chelsea, characterised by suspicion, jealousy and resentment, and rendered yet more complicated by the demands of war work. Quennell at this point had given up his job in advertising for a post at the Ministry of Information. Topolski left the country in August 1941 to accompany the first British convoy to Russia. Barbara, after finally appearing before the call-up board, spent time driving trucks for the Mechanised Transport Corps, was employed as a wages clerk in the factory owned by the millionaire who had first seduced her and then, like Melinda, came to ground as secretary to the Yugoslav government in exile (‘a gang of Balkan horse-thieves’, Quennell sniffed) at their office in Exhibition Road. Even in ordinary circumstances, pursuing any kind of relationship in the febrile atmosphere of Blitz-era London would have been difficult. But for the men spiralling helplessly in Barbara’s orbit, it was practically impossible.
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p; What Barbara felt about it all – a curious mixture of fatalism, self-reproach and a case-hardened determination to enjoy herself while the going was good – may be divined from her fragmentary diary entries: watching Quennell stationed in the telephone booth opposite their flat ‘fixing himself up with free meals’ before sneaking off to the cinema with Topolski, or candidly acknowledging the extraordinary turmoil of her life: ‘What a messy existence! What chaos! What indecision! I feel depressed and unsettled.’ Trying to establish what she thought of her two principal suitors, she decided that she liked Quennell for the feeling of ‘security’ he brought with him and Topolski ‘for his company’. Equally, there were occasions when their joint absence alarmed her (‘Gloomy gloomy as can be. No Feliks. No Peter’) or when both of them managed thoroughly to exasperate her. Thus, buying them presents at Christmas 1941, she exploded: ‘Goodness knows why I bother, they will certainly not give me anything. Anyway I am sick to death of both of them.’ Quennell and Topolski, meanwhile, were sick to death of each other, conscious that they were being manipulated by a force they could not hope to subdue, both desperate to rise to the top in the struggle for Barbara’s favours. Matters came to a head one night at the Gargoyle Club when Quennell, furious at finding ‘the ambitious and adventurous young foreign artist’ in his girlfriend’s company, cornered them by the lifts, swung a punch at his rival and in the ensuing mêlée ended up with two cracked ribs.
An undated letter from Quennell, probably written in the early part of 1942, may be taken as representative:
Skeltie darling,
After the ridiculous events of last night, I think I had better leave the initiative to you. Telephone when & if you feel inclined. For some time now you’ve been becoming more and more difficult & undependable: so perhaps it would be a good thing if you saw less of me or didn’t see me at all. You know that I’m just as attracted as I was last autumn indeed much more attracted . . .
Looking at the situation through the prism of Barbara’s diaries, one sees immediately just how exasperated she is by her suitors’ sulks and insinuations. ‘What an insufferably suspicious nature!’ she wrote on the occasion when Quennell appeared in her room one morning, shortly after the Horse Thief’s departure, and began searching the premises for clues. On the other hand, Quennell clearly had cause for concern: as Barbara acknowledged, ‘I must say the bed was in rather a pickle with the bedclothes in disorder and dirty towels strewn about the floor.’ But Barbara herself was not above the occasional twinge of jealousy, or rather a faint wistfulness at the thought of a world that she was not yet privileged to enter. A diary entry from around this time notes that Topolski has been seen dining at the Café Royal ‘with a very lovely girl’. The suspicion that this was Janetta is reinforced by Barbara’s rather rueful gloss: ‘It’s glamorous to be left-wing these days.’ At the heart of the problem, one might suspect, lay a realisation that she could not bear to be with anyone for any length of time. Quennell remembered that, when weekending at the Cot, the atmosphere had usually turned shaky by Monday morning. One early morning start for London with Topolski began with Barbara abusing the taxi-driver, only to apologise with the words, ‘I’m sorry, I confused you with my friend.’ At the same time, the Kentish weekend offered the chance of many a romantic frisson: four decades later Quennell could still recall a walk in dense August heat when they descended a steep path between fields of barley and wheat that rippled in the breeze. The Greek word for ‘Corn-Goddess’ is Chalkokrotos, Quennell noted: Barbara, stripping off her shirt to wade bare-breasted through the corn, ‘made an admirable young Demeter’.
If these mythological visions were always doomed to failure, it was because Barbara could rarely be got to share them, or indeed to tolerate conditions of prolonged intimacy. Not only did close proximity make her anxious and keen to find fault, it also encouraged her talent for homing in on the other half’s temperamental weaknesses and frailties. Quennell believed that ‘she had acquired a knack, perhaps half-unconscious, of distinguishing her lovers’ weakest points, just as certain wasps, accustomed to paralyse their prey, know where to sink their stings’. All this could lead to profoundly embarrassing situations, such as the occasion when the cottage, in which Barbara was staying with yet another boyfriend, ‘a gallant young soldier’, was visited by the local curate bearing one of Quennell’s books for signature.
And so, through the spring and early summer of 1942, the dance went on, an intricate pattern of break-ups and make-ups, spectacular fallings-out and ardent reconciliations in which occasional moments of euphoria (‘Barbara darling, thank you so much. I’ve seldom been so happy – certainly I haven’t enjoyed myself so much for a long time’) alternated with murmurings of disquiet (‘Don’t forget me sooner or more thoroughly than you can help’) and admissions of the most abject misery.
What did Quennell want, here amid the complications of a life that included the virtual cessation of his literary career, the crack-up of his marriage to Glur and the birth of his daughter Sarah? Despite the serial abandonments and the unignorable evidence of rival suitors, he seems to have believed that, with a fair wind behind them, he and Barbara could plan some kind of future for themselves. The promise of secure accommodation in the rooms above Connolly and Lys’s Bedford Square flat in May prompted him to compose a long, reflective letter apologising for yet another recent tiff, revealing, inter alia, why in the midst of his affection for her, he found her so infuriating, and proposing a fresh start:
My darling Skeltie,
I was miserable when I’d rung off in a temper – one always is: but you’ve worried and disappointed me so much & made me so wretched that a certain degree of acerbity was perhaps not altogether inexcusable. I can’t bear all this muddling for muddling’s sake – particularly when you’re so fond of telling me I’m weak-minded & an opportunist. Give me credit for being extremely fond of you: & then decide whether your behaviour later (after the initial shock of the Easter business) hasn’t, to say the least of it, been a little inconsiderate. You want people to be fond of you – not to treat you in a casual promiscuous way – but certainly you don’t give them a great deal of encouragement. I could be much fonder of you than I am if I were given a chance . . .
Let’s leave it at this: think things over & if you make up your mind you want to go on seeing me on the same terms and want to make Bedford Square a more or less permanent place of residence, telephone me here on Monday morning. If I don’t hear from you I shall assume that the whole thing is finished: which I may add will make me exceedingly unhappy but which I shall regard as just another illustration of the beautiful old couplet:
La plus belle fille du monde
Ne peut donner que ce qu’elle a . . .
Darling Skeltie, I hope you ring up but am resigned to the worst . . .
Goodbye, darling & bless you.
This is a revealing letter, not merely for its exposure of the paralysing depths of Quennell’s unhappiness, but for the light it sheds on Barbara’s temperament: wanting people to like her in a serious, non-promiscuous way, but simultaneously never giving an inch in her relations with them; behaving badly and then compounding her indiscretions by accusing her lovers of shortcomings most of them believed her to be guilty of herself. The phone call was eventually made, and Barbara moved into Bedford Square, not wholly to her landlord’s satisfaction. Janetta remembered Connolly complaining about her using up the supply of hot water – ‘That girl he’s got up there’s always having a bath.’ There were also occasional depredations on Connolly’s quarters. Barbara’s diary records ‘several grumpy meetings with Cyril on the stairs . . . I suspect it’s due to the pouffe being removed from his sitting room.’
Meanwhile, as Quennell had reluctantly to acknowledge, her affair with Topolski was far from over. Most of his letters to her over the second half of 1942 strike the same anxious, end-of-tether and frequently paranoiac note, and if at the end of July he was anxious to tell her that ‘I love you very much and loo
k forward to seeing you again’, then by November Barbara found herself stigmatised as ‘impossible – at least as far as I am concerned’. If only, Quennell assured her, she was a little more normal, ‘or understood yourself just a little better’.
Undoubtedly Quennell’s agitation was stoked by distance. He was transferred to Belfast at one point, writing nervously home to instruct Barbara – now apparently gone from Bedford Square – to communicate with him ‘when you can. I think of you a great deal and wonder – resignedly – what you are up to. How is that Topples?’ Back in London, he continued to see her on an almost daily basis, ‘though, if a storm blew up – and she was fond of raising storms – she might temporarily disappear’. The wider patterns of Barbara’s life, meanwhile, exhibit an almost Thackerayan ability to mingle luxury and squalor from one hour to the next. Coming back one night from dining with Connolly and Lys at a fashionable restaurant to the house in which she was squatting she discovered that the kitchen was infested with vermin: ‘Found half a Hovis gnawed away with nothing left but the outside crust.’ A storm of particular intensity blew up in December 1942 when she simply disappeared. All Quennell’s attempts to contact her over the festive period failed and he was reduced to angry letters. A particularly anguished example survives from three days after Christmas in which Quennell notes sourly that ‘Here’s another item to add to your file of unanswered correspondence. Will you please get in touch with me as soon as possible?’