by D. J. Taylor
As for the daily round of Cairo life, newcomers from London were always amazed by the availability of fresh food. ‘The war is non-existent in Egypt,’ the actress Vivien Leigh wrote home to her mother in early September, ‘and to see huge tables spread with every sort of deliciousness, and bowls of ice-cream was extraordinary.’ With military operations transferred to the farther side of the Mediterranean, Barbara’s arrival coincided with an upping of the social tempo. Spring Party, a revue produced by John Gielgud and starring such imported talent as Leigh, Beatrice Lillie and Dorothy Dickson had been playing at the Opera House during the summer. Noël Coward was much in evidence. A luxury nightclub, the Auberge des Pyramides, newly opened on the Mena Road, featuring an open-air courtyard with a dancefloor in the centre, had soon acquired the reputation of the city’s best nightspot, and the patronage of the King.
Barbara seems to have taken up all these opportunities with gusto. At any rate there is scarcely any mention, either in memoir or novel, of time spent at work on her official duties decoding telegrams about incoming ships and their cargo. Escorted to lunch at the Gezira Sporting Club on her very first day, she began a whirlwind romance with a ‘bumptious major’ that came to an abrupt end in the back of a taxi several weeks later. Meanwhile the diplomatic bag had begun to disgorge letters from home. PC Boot wrote with news of the Cot (‘I despatched two old razors to Mr Quennell but have not heard if he received them. Is Mr Topolski still in London? Give him my respects when you write . . . I was pleased to see Mr Topolski in this week’s Picture Post with our prominent friend Mr Bernard Shaw.’) For his part, Mr Topolski sent reams of gossip, while Mr Quennell, though delighted by a letter Barbara had sent him en route, was alarmed by the thought that she might have been misbehaving in his absence:
Your letter – posted at Sierra Leone – has arrived – almost exactly a month after your departure. So all is forgotten and forgiven . . . A nice letter it was too, tho’ I couldn’t help wondering just what had happened on that boat and being a little disturbed – quite unreasonably – by the background you rather vaguely filled in of sultry nights, and scandal, and fisticuffs etc etc.
Quennell had also been pondering the question of Barbara’s launch into local society, for a second letter, written a fortnight later, contains an introduction to Patrick Balfour, who had arrived in Cairo late in 1942 as press attaché to the RAF. ‘Use it or not as you’re inclined,’ he instructed. ‘At the worst you could meet him for a drink & give him some gossip about Cyril’. Remembering that Balfour was in the throes of his divorce, he advised that ‘whether Angela is still a tender object I’m not quite sure: it would probably be wise to allow him to take the initiative.’ There remained the question of how Barbara, several thousand miles away and prey to all kinds of male temptation, might feel about him and vice versa. ‘Tomorrow I hope to be at Tick & will moon around looking at old photographs & examining your signature in the visitors’ book.’ There had clearly been a second letter, sent from Nigeria, offering details of her romantic exploits, as Quennell goes on to add, somewhat ruefully, that ‘I’ve accepted the black lamb at Lagos with resignation: tho’ your gun-turret activities stick in my gullet a little even now.’
Not that Barbara, now transferred from the Continental to new quarters at the Villa Moskatelli at Zamalek, seems to have needed very much help in insinuating herself into the Cairo beau monde. Fresh admirers gathered on all sides: Oxford-educated ‘Freddie’, a Bentley-owning Copt who introduced her to the local nightlife; ‘Victor’, an international polo player who claimed that his idea of bliss was to make love to a woman on a bed of tuber roses. In the midst of these diversions, the letters home dried to a trickle and then stopped altogether, so that Quennell could complain, early in December, that it was ‘a very long time since I heard from you – & I fear a very long time since you heard from me’. Topolski, meanwhile, was fretting at the news that Quennell was still in the game, sending his very best love and, in his capacity as a war artist, planning a descent on the Middle East. That Topolski now had a confederate seems clear from an enclosure from PC Boot. (‘Just a line from Mr Topolski’s studio. I am on my way home from Blackpool & have just looked him up. Wish you were here too. I do hope you are enjoying the life in Cairo.’) To add to the confusion, ‘Grub’, the military boyfriend, was also thought to be on his way to Egypt. Either Freddie or Victor is presumably the subject of a letter from Quennell written at the end of January 1944:
My darling Skeltie,
I was much struck by your news, & gather that you are perhaps a little more flustered by the whole affair than you’re prepared to let on. Don’t go marrying him for God’s sake! Grub arriving too! He met little Lys in a pub & told her that he expected to see you soon; & little Lys had, of course, great pleasure in telling me – adding ‘Poor Topples, I’m afraid he may find Skeltie rather surrounded, mayn’t he?’ She seems to have been righter than she knew. But seriously . . . I hope you are not too unhappy & bothered – or too much enamoured. What is he like? Spherical – solid – black – or slow & moon faced? Thank you for saying that, were we to meet tomorrow, the situation, so far as you are concerned, would not have changed greatly. Who can tell . . . I had a twinge – yes, a distinct twinge – when I read of your latest adventure . . .
Quennell’s letter is revealing in several ways. On the one hand, Barbara’s account of her latest passade had clearly gone into considerable detail (‘Your last letter was both the nicest & most informative you have yet sent me’). On the other, it seems to have betrayed a certain amount of disquiet at the prospect before her. There were good reasons for this, the most obvious being that Barbara was an employee of the British government and that the men she was now associating with operated at the upper level of what, if not a fully fledged imperial possession, was a British Protectorate whose internal power-brokers were jockeying for position in what they knew would very shortly be a post-war world. At the very least, Barbara’s association with Freddie and Victor was woefully indiscreet. At worst, it was a security risk. All the evidence suggests that Barbara, for all her customary self-possession, was slightly out of her depth.
As to what actually happened when, where and with whom, all this is more or less impossible to reconstitute. Topolski headed east early in 1944 – there was a minor confrontation with Quennell in London when news of the trip went public – and a single room was eventually procured at Shepheard’s Hotel for their reunion. Here, too, there was trouble. The fact that the pair were unmarried outraged public morality: coming back to the hotel one night, Barbara used the back stairs in an attempt to evade the hotel authorities, only to find that they had got wind of her presence. Their efforts to evict her turned into what Topolski remembered as a ‘slapstick chase – the horde of long-gallabiahed and tarbooshed safragis and Nubian porters racing up after her, and, finally, gathering outside the room with bangs and shouts’. Professional duties then took Topolski to China and India, and his second visit to Cairo was less successful. Although he took care to book a double room, by this time it was too late: Barbara’s affections were engaged elsewhere.
At some point in the summer of 1944, somebody – presumably the faithful Freddie or the tuber-rose loving Victor – took Barbara to dine at the Auberge des Pyramides. The royal party sat at an adjoining table, where the King, in one of his playful moods, was amusing himself by scattering coloured pom-poms. (In A Young Girl’s Touch, Melinda dines at the fictitious ‘Hotel Flamboyant’ and watches King Yoyo decant a cauldron of roast peanuts onto his plate, which he then begins to flick at the guests.) An introduction was effected, with Barbara professing to find ‘his infantile side rather endearing, even this kind of thing’. A few days later an equerry arrived at the embassy bearing an invitation to join a royal house party in the desert. Picked up at the Villa Moskatelli by a royal aide, she was taken to a private train that ‘ran like a centipede through the desert’ to a station where a convoy of cars waited to transport the twenty or so guests to Farou
k’s summer palace. Of the night that followed, Barbara remembered that:
We were told we all had to sleep on the Palace rooftop where mattresses had been laid. Farouk never stopped chatting in Arabic and laughing with his underlings at his guests’ discomfort, as we all trooped onto the roof in our respective nightwear. When I appeared in a green dressing gown he said I reminded him of a cabbage. At sunrise, we were awoken by the inevitable bugle call. I had a pair of earrings in the shape of curly fish that I had bought in Moosky. Farouk took them, saying he was going to give me a surprise. One night I was getting into bed when I found a jewel box tucked under the pillow: the curly fish had been copied in gold with emerald eyes, and a clip to go with them . . .
A Young Girl’s Touch adds a few corroborating details, in which the King gives Melinda a tour of the palace, shows her his stamp collection, his apostle spoons and the contents of the royal armoury (‘We’re nearly out of Brasso’) and beats her with a rolled-up newspaper (‘Tensely she awaited each thud with a forlorn feeling that was not unpleasant’). There is also a rather wistful exchange in which he invites her to take up residence.
‘You could live here if you wished.’
‘Wouldn’t I get lonely?’
‘You’d soon get used to it . . . I should very much appreciate finding you here whenever I came with some guests.’
‘A permanent member of the harem?’
Over the next few weeks, Barbara was constantly, if covertly, in the King’s company – dining and watching films at the Abdin Palace in Cairo, being driven back to the Villa Moskatelli by him in the small hours and ducking out of view as the car passed the night-watchmen at the palace gates. Set against popular caricatures of Farouk as a sybaritic debauchee, her memories of him are unusually downbeat. She thought he had simple tastes in food, while ‘in spite of the rather dull sycophantic people surrounding the King, I must confess I was never bored’. Quennell, previously reduced to fragments of Bedford Square gossip (‘Did I tell you that little Lys now has a pink & grey Australian parrot, which makes the hours of daylight hideous . . . loves only Cyril (of course) but as soon as it is out of its cage, descends like a dive-bomber yelling with fury on the heads of those (including myself) who it does not care for’), had been told about the jaunt to the summer palace.
I was delighted to get your very funny letter about King F’s weekend party. It is just how Eastern Monarchs are supposed to behave & I thought your description particularly – tho’ not unexpectedly – brilliant. Whether King F. eventually got his beady (?) way you leave a little doubtful. Perhaps he did – or has done – since you wrote. However, it is a little late in the day to appear possessive: & I suppose that to have been a royal mistress at least once in her life is an attractive woman’s privilege.
This, too, is a revealing letter, for it hints at a change in the way that Quennell regarded Barbara. His letters from the early stages of their relationship are ardent, but also faintly superior, full of rather sickly pet-names (‘Baby’, ‘Skeltie’, ‘Wombat’) and prone to patronage. Three years later there is a sense that Barbara has gained an extra dimension, turned into a royal mistress with a literary style to match. You suspect that Quennell, though clearly admiring of the new Barbara, is nonplussed by her, not quite sure how the transformation has been effected, and at the same time anxious about its implications for the small matter of himself, wondering if his own recent successes – the reviewing job for the Daily Mail, the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine – might not be considered inferior to the accomplishments of a woman who was being wined and dined by the King of Egypt.
But the wining and dining, the swimming sessions in the palace pool and the late-night lifts to the Villa Moskatelli were about to come to an end. Before very long she found a polite note on her desk at the embassy suggesting that, in view of her professional duties, she might be associating too much with non-Britishers. (‘Did it mean Farouk, myself or others unknown to me?’ Topolski wondered.) In much the same way, Melinda in A Young Girl’s Touch is
aware of a hostile atmosphere; everyone made a note of the time she came and went; how often she left the room and the amount of tea she consumed and, whenever the telephone pealed, the girls would exchange grave looks. They reserved the longest telegrams for her, with lists of ships and cargo to be unloaded at some port, or the dreariest, that were unravelled with the aid of an enormous tome, which could be found in the post office of any provincial town. She was considered a security risk.
One of the last passage migrants to set eyes on Barbara in Cairo was Sinclair-Loutit. Meeting her for a drink in mid-August 1944, he found her ‘either thro’ dumbness or niceness . . . unaffected by the intolerable Cairo female vanity’. That Barbara had by this point become a focus of expatriate gossip is confirmed by Sinclair-Loutit’s account of a conversation with an old Cambridge friend, who ‘thinks the amount of attention she gets is a tribute to her real qualities rather than to her biological scarcity. When treated without avid supplication at her real value she exhibits a petulant boredom.’ Coming across her again a week or so later, Sinclair-Loutit was less impressed. ‘Skelton is unbelievably dumb + I think knows it’, he informed Janetta, ‘is, I think, genuinely gone on Topolski . . . + they say she is being sent home for having an affair with Farouk . . .’
In this regard, the gossips were right. Shortly afterwards she was summoned by the first secretary at the embassy, Bernard Burrows, and informed that if she went on seeing Farouk she would have to leave Egypt. Burrows was by no means a martinet. And, as one of Farouk’s own British friends, he would probably have appreciated the irony of having to forbid another British subject his company. To Barbara this reaction was understandable, if misguided. After all, as she later put it, ‘I was in a sensitive position, and they were convinced Farouk was setting me up just to get information from me.’ Her own view was that, on the contrary, the King had no interest in politics. ‘What they never could understand was that Farouk couldn’t have cared less. The only communications to England that mattered to him were his telexes ordering silk neckties from Hawes and Curtis.’ In the end, Burrows decided to give his wayward cipherine a fortnight’s leave. Nothing loath, Barbara opted to spend her two weeks hitch-hiking round the Middle East. A day later she could be found eating her supper at a cheap hotel in Ismailia (‘A strange contrast to my dinner of last night with the Monarch!’), sousing her food with ketchup to disguise its nastiness. It was amusing being alone, she reflected, as people were encouraged to come up and talk ‘as though I were an old friend’. Later she would retire to a room that overlooked the railway terminus, where trains rumbled past the window, children’s voices screeched and there was a clatter of plates from the hotel kitchen.
If anything irked her, it was the physical consequences of her last meeting with Farouk. She was deadly tired, she wrote in her diary, and ached all over ‘from a flogging last night on the steps of the Royal Palace’. Barbara would have preferred a splayed cane, ‘but instead had to suffer a dressing-gown cord which created a gentle thudding sound over an interminable period’. A day or two later she was in Jerusalem, drinking with a ‘small lecherous Frenchman’ who had picked her up in a taxi outside Gaza. There was a tussle in the cab on the way home after dinner, but Barbara, fresh from her experiences with a royal flagellant, could handle a lecherous Frenchman. After hitting him twice on the head with a volume of Virginia Woolf she happened to be carrying with her, she made her escape.
Interlude: Joan
On first inspection, no one could look less like a Lost Girl than Joan Eyres-Monsell. Lys was an orphaned teenager forced to carve out a career by way of the typing school and the mannequin parade. Sonia’s mother kept a South Kensington boarding house. Joan’s father, on the other hand, was a one-time Conservative Party Chief Whip who by the early 1930s had risen to the dizzying political heights of First Lord of the Admiralty. The Honourable Miss Eyres-Monsell – after papa was raised to the peerage in 1935 – was brought up on the fam
ily’s estate at Dumbleton, Gloucestershire, where hunting, shooting and other rural pursuits were enthusiastically pursued. Joan enjoyed a thoroughly conventional upbringing, in which genteel poverty and bohemian shadings were conspicuous by their absence. From an early stage, though, there were hints of a personality that pined to escape from the world of debutante dances and enforced leisure and set up camp in less orthodox climes. When she married in the summer of 1939, it was not to a landowner or a Tory MP of the kind of whom her parents might have approved but to a recently divorced journalist named John Rayner, one of Lord Beaverbrook’s bright young men, who had just become day assistant editor of the Daily Express.