by D. J. Taylor
11.
The Destructive Element: Barbara, Connolly and Others 1944–51
Thirty today. Christ!
Barbara Skelton, diary, 26 June 1946
G. Orwell is dead and Mrs Orwell presumably a rich widow. Will Cyril marry her? He is said to be consorting with a dingy demi-mondaine called Miss Skelton.
Evelyn Waugh, diary, January 1950, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)
Most Lost Girl lives in the 1940s are to a greater or lesser degree trackable. Lys, after all, was by Connolly’s side, or at any rate a pace or two behind it, for the best part of a decade. If not reconstitutable on a day-to-day basis, the outlines of Sonia’s career are a matter of record, and should Janetta ever threaten to slip beneath the surface of Blitz-era London for a month or two there are always Frances Partridge’s diaries to drag her unresistingly back.
The exception to this rule is Barbara. There are whole stretches of the late 1940s where she simply vanishes, disappears from the face of the earth, tugs free of the diary entries and letter exchanges that kept other Lost Girls at the forefront of her friends’ imaginations and slips off into a kind of sub-world of out-of-the-way vacations and lying low, an obscurity so unmonitored that at times even her closest friends scarcely seem to know where she is. As to how this had come about, and why the one-time ornament of the Ritz Bar and the Ivy should be spending her time on furlough in the Alpes-Maritimes or roosting in some anonymous London hotel, the most obvious explanation lies in the changing shape of the post-war world. People were growing older, staider and more respectable. The patterns and the congeries of the early 1940s were breaking up. Not long before he died, Feliks Topolski reflected on the landscape through which he, Quennell and Barbara had wandered nearly half-a-century before:
She was this beauty, an odd beauty, because it was not real beauty, but tremendously desired by all men all round. And being utterly silent and not offering really anything and not going along with any situation but at the same time, in consequence, being the most desirable object in existence. In the early days she was mysterious with this lovely cat-like attitude of not settling anywhere but just carrying the basket of essentials and moving from one person to another. At that time she was mostly using as bases, Peter Quennell and me. And so, if she stayed with me and after a few days became unbearable – because she was unbearable, basically – she would simply without much explanation take her basket, slink off along the wall and go to Peter; and then reappear in a week or two to stay in my bed with no things said. And that’s how it went on for a while, for quite a while – for years, actually.
There was a suspicion that this kind of life was no longer sustainable in the age of Mr Attlee, Ernest Bevin and the National Health Service. Quennell had settled down into the routines of (reasonably) upmarket journalism, editing the Cornhill Magazine and reviewing books for the Daily Mail. Topolski, though still hungry for whatever crumbs Barbara let fall from her plate, had a career to pursue. The Free French officers had gone back to a newly freed France; and where did that leave Barbara? Her first task, naturally, was to see out the war. A letter survives from November 1944 in which Topolski, writing from London, imagines the two them together on an Egyptian beach some years hence, comparing notes on their past marriages. That old rivalries endured is confirmed by the information that he saw Quennell at the Dorchester cloakroom, and the theatrical manner in which he turned towards the lavatories annoyed Topolski so much that he abandoned his own visit and sat out the dinner he was attending with a full bladder.
By this time Barbara was long gone from Cairo. Coming back to base after her two-week tour of the Middle East, she discovered that the European situation was in flux. The German army was in retreat across the Greek border; the British Embassy in Athens was expected to reopen and, as the war moved on, there was a demand for cipherines. The route led north via Italy and the next four months offer tantalising glimpses of Barbara in action: the meet-ups with old friends (one of them was Janetta’s half-brother Mark, whom she visited in hospital in Salerno where he was recovering from TB); the legion of male admirers (these included an obliging USAF colonel who provided access to PX stores and spent Christmas with her in Naples); and the customary difficulties involved in calibrating the demands of her personal life to the call of duty. Brought back to England by the Foreign Office early in January 1945, she was booked for redeployment to Lisbon in the summer, but ‘for some inexplicable reason’ missed her flight and was promptly suspended from the service.
In the meantime there was the question of finding somewhere to live. It is a mark of her elusiveness that virtually the only clue to her whereabouts in the immediate post-war period comes in the letters sent to her by friends. In February 1945, newly returned from Athens, she was staying at the Eccleston Hotel in Eccleston Square, a stone’s throw from Victoria Station. There was a brief stint at the Park Village East house, which Quennell was sharing with the publisher George Weidenfeld. (‘Turned out. Move to Peter.’) One of the notes to Topolski from January 1946 is sent c/o the literary critic John Davenport at Rossetti House, Flood Street, Chelsea, but by the following month she seems to have moved on again, as a letter sent in late February by her friend Gerda Treat suggests that ‘Your Sydney St abode sounds like something in a play. Screamingly funny, but I suppose not so funny to live in.’
As for the existence being lived out in Pimlico, Chelsea or elsewhere, the early part of 1945 saw an instant resumption of her pre-Cairo routines. She lunched with Quennell on each of her first three days back in England, and Topolski’s name turns up in her diary in the first week of February. If there was any satisfaction to be gained from once again playing off Quennell against Topolski and vice versa, it seldom surfaces in her diaries. (‘Went to the cottage alone and desperately dejected . . . Saw Feliks. Very upsetting. Think of nothing else all day.’) What did Barbara make of the news from Europe, where the war was now reaching its endgame? The diaries are merely a succession of one-line entries: ‘Mussolini dead . . . Hitler dead . . . Germany surrenders’. Clearly, she had her own problems, in which the necessity to earn a living – she started work at the BBC in November 1945, capacity unspecified – contended with growing unhappiness: ‘Gloom gloom. Polished off the gin . . . Depths of despair . . . Loneliness and awfulness.’
The answer, if there was one, lay abroad. As early as September 1945, Topolski could be found writing to her at an address in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the Alpes-Maritimes, a picturesque Riviera town where she spent three winters in the immediate post-war period with her friend Poppet John; there was at least one summer holiday in a villa co-owned by François Villiers, whom she had met in Lagos. One obvious question that hangs over this peripatetic lifestyle with its intermittent and at times non-existent employment is: who was paying for it? The prime candidate would seem to be John Sutro, who certainly funded the top-floor flat in Queen Street, SW1, where she established herself towards the end of 1947 and whose correspondence hints at a fairly close relationship. A letter from Poppet John from this time sent to Cagnes records that she ‘has seen John S. twice, he never stops talking about “our little friend” – this is you – and seems to want to find some kind of a flat or room for the winter . . . He can’t wait to see you again.’ The Queen Street landlord’s own letters are full of polite expressions of sympathy (‘I am sorry that your sojourn at the Rock Pool [Cagnes-sur-Mer] is proving unsatisfactory; the milieu (or that horrid word “ambience”) sounds most disagreeable’), with little flashes of emotion breaking out from under the surface (‘I confess I miss you very much . . . I simply must see you for a few hours’).
Sutro was an odd character, an Oxford friend of Evelyn Waugh known for his elaborate impersonations who went on to make a career as a film producer: one of his letters to Barbara is addressed from the Venice Film Festival. If his activities on Barbara’s behalf seem to cast him in the old-fashioned role of gentlemanly ‘protector’, offering subsidy and accommodation in return for sexual favours, then h
e was understandably sensitive to another aspect of her life in the later 1940s: regular bouts of ill-health. ‘I am very sorry to hear you have been ill,’ runs a letter from the summer of 1949; ‘it’s the second time you have been ill on your arrival at Cagnes.’ A letter from the previous September strikes a similar note – ‘I hope you are well and not having any relapses’ – and presumably refers to the illness mentioned by Gerda a few weeks before. ‘You poor kid. A couple of incoherent letters from you. You never told me what’s wrong, just about operation. Where? + how did it all come about?’ There are no references to health problems in Barbara’s memoirs, but the trouble may well have been gynaecological: a brief diary entry from May 1945 notes that ‘the doctor professes sterility’.
Ill-health notwithstanding, Barbara’s emotional life was every inch as complicated as it had been in the days when Quennell and Topolski fought for her favours at the Gargoyle Club; Topolski, at least, was still on the scene, for the letter in which Gerda enquires about the operation notes, ‘So that Felix [sic] is still around. Is he divorced yet?’ Whatever her relationship with Sutro, she spent much of her time at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the company of an ex-Resistance leader named Pierre Savaigo, another one of those enticing hooligans in whose company she always delighted. Possessive and prone to violence, Savaigo once beat her up after seeing her in the company of a cheque-forger and afterwards took a knuckleduster to her bedroom walls. After he lost his temper at the sight of her engagement-strewn diary during a visit to Queen Street and produced a gun from his suitcase, Barbara decided that the relationship had probably run its course and notified the police. The following morning two plain-clothes men rang the doorbell ‘and how sad I felt when Pierre was politely extradited’.
And so the 1940s ran on. A little modelling for her old sponsor Mattli at his salon in Carlton Place. Late evenings at the Gargoyle in the shadow of David Tennant’s Matisse. Bohemian parties at Queen Street. Weekends at the Cot, where the ever-faithful PC Boot still acted as unpaid security guard when its owner was away. Riviera vacations, with the wind blowing through the pines and the blue of the Mediterranean stretching out into the distance . . . And a curious episode remembered by an Australian girl called Robin Dalton at large in post-war London, and dated to 1947, in which Miss Dalton, out on the town with the society photographer Baron Nahum, whose name recurs in Barbara’s engagement diaries, found herself in Feliks Topolski’s studio together with Barbara (‘very drunk’) and another girl of the same name: ‘The two Barbaras were enjoying themselves in what appeared to me a most curious fashion, indulgently watched over by Felix [sic] and Baron, before Barbara Skelton turned her attention to me. Baron took pity on my prim lips, murmured protestations and firmly crossed legs and took me home.’
A suspicion that some of the company Barbara kept here in the half-decade after the war was not of the choicest is confirmed by her diary account of a trip to North Africa in May 1949, undertaken with a pair of unidentifiable male friends called Vasco and Graham, jointly referred to as ‘the boys’. The excursion began on a whim: ‘Vasco turns up at luncheon & suggests going to Tangier. Pack bags and depart.’ After a night in Paris (‘Woke up in bed with both the boys’), the party left for Barcelona and then flew south across Spain to the Mediterranean. The next few days were devoted to sex, drugs and quarrelling: ‘I bicker with the boys. Vasco & I end up in the hole in the wall smoking hashish . . . Swim in the morning. 3 fucks from V.’ There were visits to Casablanca and Algiers; the final entry reads, ‘Graham & I pass out on the bed clutching a bottle of wine.’ Pierre and his knuckledusters. Waking up with the boys. Bickering in the Tangier cafés. Clearly, it was time to be moving on.
If the two centres of Lost Girl life in the later 1940s were the Horizon offices in Bedford Square and the house in Sussex Place, then Barbara at this point in her life was detached from both of them. What brought her back, shortly before the magazine published its final number, was a meeting with an old friend named Natalie Newhouse. Natalie, then living with her future husband, the actor Robert Newton, at Tickerage farm, confided to her that, as Barbara guilelessly put it, ‘Cyril was bored with Lys and was seeking someone new.’ That this someone might be Barbara was made abundantly clear when Connolly invited the pair of them to lunch at L’Etoile. The ex-editor was in low-ish water. Despite having pocketed substantial advances from publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, he had failed to write the masterpieces expected of him. The invitation to review books for the Sunday Times, which would set his post-Horizon life back on course, would not arrive for nearly another year. At the same time, he was darkly conscious that the world he had moved through so effortlessly for the past decade – a landscape of high-end entertaining in comfortable surroundings, with Lys always present to deal with his moods and raise his spirits – was coming to a close. Funds were low, his association with Peter Watson was coming to an end, and Lys – faithful, attentive and put-upon Lys – was searching for an escape route.
If Connolly was looking for a change of partner, as opposed to someone to trifle with whenever he grew weary of Lys, then why did he turn to Barbara? And why, if it comes to that, should she turn to him? They had known each other intermittently for eight or nine years, and neither had particularly enjoyed the other’s company; Connolly irritated by the thought of his lodger’s sullen girlfriend in the upstairs flat using up the hot water and stealing his furniture; Barbara unimpressed by Connolly’s stage management of the social occasions at which he appeared and amused by the details of his domestic routine sent out by Quennell to the Middle East. All of this, though, is to ignore both the highly individual way in which Connolly conducted his emotional life and Barbara’s positive relish of domestic unease. From Connolly’s point of view, Barbara was a superlatively good-looking woman who, while alluring in herself, might also serve as useful ammunition in his dealings with Lys or, for that matter, with anyone else who might stray into his orbit. From Barbara’s equally idiosyncratic viewpoint, here was a man who, while lacking in physical attraction – no great hardship to a woman who once confessed that ‘I never really appreciated conventional good looks’ – had wit, flair and a wide range of amusing friends: just the thing to ginger up her social life and keep boredom at bay.
At the end of February 1950 Topolski, then on a tour of the Far East, wrote to inform her that he would be back in the beginning of May and asking whether she would spend time with him. But by this stage Barbara was already pursuing a clandestine affair with Connolly. According to her diary he telephoned on 9 March ‘in a terrible self-pitying state’ to report that Lys had gone out to dinner leaving him on his own, that there was no money and that it was all her – that is, Lys’s – fault. Fearing the worst, Barbara packed a basket and hastened round to Sussex Place, only to find him ‘prancing about the bedroom barefoot . . . said he was pleased to see me, whipped off his dressing-gown, sprang into bed and was asleep in no time’.
Discovering that Barbara’s plans for the spring included a continental trip, Connolly decided to gate-crash the party. Their relationship, consequently, began as it would continue: in an atmosphere of subterfuge, sarcasm and divided loyalties. Accompanied by Quennell, Barbara set off for France in a red convertible Sunbeam-Talbot, possibly supplied by Sutro, and was met by Connolly in Paris. When she moved on to Geneva to stay with Sutro, Connolly booked himself into a hotel on the far side of the lake and amused himself by signalling to her from his room. If this hot pursuit was a sign of Connolly’s genuine interest in her, then their covert meetings also brought out a less attractive side. Barbara noted the first of his ‘deflating quips’ when, as she lit up in a restaurant as the cheese course came into view, he remarked: ‘I suppose you think the hollows in the gruyere are there for you to stub out your cigarette.’ Shortly after this he began to pine for Lys and went off to meet her in Marseilles.
Although there was a subsequent reunion at Sussex Place in the early summer of 1950, none of this boded well. Neither did the phone call in
which Connolly revealed that he had spent the greater part of the previous night allotting marks to all the women he knew according to their suitability as wives. Barbara got fewer than anybody for ‘spirituality’ but achieved top score for sex appeal, followed by Sonia. Lys and Joan Rayner were awarded top marks for loyalty and giving a sense of security. And yet, amid the point-scoring and the mutual antagonism, it seems clear that Connolly and Barbara had more to bring them together than to drive them apart and that from an early stage in their relationship they seem to have understood each other pretty well. Each, for example, was a natural melancholic. Both seemed to have pined for some ideal mode of existence without really knowing of what it might consist. And in the end, the net result of their inbred sulkiness and dissatisfaction was a curious affinity. It was as if each was drawn to the turbulence that the other created, basked in the winds that blew over their wounded dignity, disliked and resented the face on the other side of the breakfast table but would have lost an essential element of their life if it had been suddenly removed. To put it in a way that Barbara would instantly have comprehended, Connolly liked things to be difficult too.
He was also – a crucial factor in his relationship with anybody, whether male or female – at his most vulnerable. In July 1950 came the news that Jean had died, a few months short of her fortieth birthday. Lys, steadily detaching herself from his orbit, had taken a job in the London office of the New Yorker, found a new boyfriend and moved out of Sussex Place – a furious Connolly was at one stage discovered watching from the street as the couple talked in Lys’s office. Janetta was on the point of leaving Robert Kee for Derek Jackson. Joan was with Patrick Leigh Fermor. Everywhere around him, friends were moving on and old alliances splitting apart. There was a depressing trip to the Cot during the course of which Barbara told him that she was sick of life. They couldn’t possibly marry, Connolly told her, ‘as we don’t get on at all well when things go wrong and you couldn’t bear being poor. After all, it’s not as if anyone is likely to leave you any money we can count on.’ Back at Queen Street, Barbara’s low spirits continued, made yet more irksome by Connolly’s idleness. (‘Wake up with terrible gloom . . . Spend all morning cleaning while Cyril soaks in the bath.’) A second weekend in Kent was enlivened by Connolly’s unselfconscious memorialising of his romantic past: ‘He is always telling me of the number of women he nearly went to bed with and when I say “Why didn’t you?”, he says their scent put him off.’