by Peter Graham
The girls played all their favourite records, and while Juliet rested Pauline read her nearly completed novel The Beautiful Lady in Blue. It was very good indeed, she thought, and would make a superb picture if ever filmed. The pair then spent a happy afternoon strolling around the grounds talking about James Mason. “It is really extraordinary that two people could be so very much in love with the same person and yet never quarrel over him and obtain infinite pleasure from discussing the possibility of one of them’s future with him,” Pauline noted in her diary.
Next day, with the help of Mr and Mrs Purvis, she managed to catch Omar Khayyám and bring him on a leading rein from Bexley to their paddock. The Purvises gave her a bridle and said they knew someone who would lend her a saddle. Nora, Bert, Nana Parker and one of the boarders, Darren, came out to see the horse, and that evening the Rieper family drank a toast to him. Pauline was allowed to spend time with Juliet again. Her life was looking up wonderfully.
CHAPTER 15
The Temple in the Garden
No one is exactly sure when Walter Andrew Bowman Perry arrived in New Zealand, nor how Hilda Hulme came to meet him. A Canadian engineer, Bill Perry, as he was known to everyone, had had a good war. In the rearguard at Dunkirk and
one of the last of the fighting men evacuated from the beach, he
had been awarded the Military Cross and attained the rank of major. A close acquaintance recalled that he was “very handsome … a clever fellow, very tall… athletic looking … striking looking”. Mrs Grinlaubs, the Hulmes’ housekeeper, thought him “very good-looking, tall … charming”.
Perry was employed by Associated Industrial Consultants, aLondon consulting firm that had been retained to advise a Christchurch company, Booth and MacDonald, manufacturers of agricultural implements, on restructuring their business. The company being in urgent need of his services, he had flown out to New Zealand while his wife followed by ship. On the way she had fallen in love with the ship’s purser and disembarked in Australia, spelling the end of Perry’s marriage.
One account has him arriving in Christchurch on July 2, 1953, but it may have been earlier. Renée Stockwell believed he had known Hilda Hulme before he arrived in New Zealand, may even have had an affair with her in England, and traced her through the Marriage Guidance Council. Helen Garrett, whose husband Professor John Garrett was also a Canadian, remembered it differently. Perry, she thought, had come to see Hilda about his divorce when the Hulmes were living in the Port Hills. She claimed Hilda had interviewed Bill Perry in the matrimonial bedroom on the grounds that it was a “neutral place”. This would date their meeting—or reunion—before October 1950, which is unlikely.
The commonly accepted version is that Perry first met Hilda Hulme when he went to the Marriage Guidance Council for counselling, which made their subsequent relationship a grave embarrassment to the organisation, especially as Hilda was its vice chairman: sexual relations between counsellors and those they counselled were strictly forbidden. Hilda’s close friend Nancy Sutherland, who described Perry as “one of Hilda’s lovers”, thought they were both counsellors on the Marriage Guidance Council. That is another possibility. What is certain is that towards the end of 1953 Hilda was becoming increasingly involved with Perry. What had started as a fling was turning into a serious love affair.
Around Christmas, Hilda asked Mr and Mrs Grinlaubs and their two children to move out of Ilam: the flat was required for Mr Perry. Mrs Grinlaubs was not surprised: she had seen the relationship developing. Once, when cleaning an upstairs room and shaking her duster out the window, she had seen Perry and Mrs Hulme kissing in the garden below. “I drew back my duster and didn’t say anything,” she said.
Nancy Sutherland and friends of Perry tried to talk him out of moving into the flat. Sooner or later, they were sure, Juliet and Jonathan were bound to notice what was going on. Nancy thought it wrong of Hilda to flaunt her affair so recklessly, without regard for her children’s or Henry’s feelings. Jan Sutherland, Nancy’s daughter, remembers her mother talking to Hilda on the phone, tears streaming down her cheeks, saying she could not be her friend any longer.
In the Rieper household, the lull brought about by Omar Khayyám did not last. Relations between Pauline and her mother were again volatile. “This morning Mother gave me the most fearful lecture because I started to wash the kitchen floor in my housecoat,” Pauline wrote in her diary. “She nagged on and on bringing up all my past misdemeanours and of course I was insolent. (I can never manageto be contrite.) Anyway, she ended up saying I could not go to Ilam today as I had planned. I was very upset when I rang Deborah as Mother’s lectures always make me hysterical and the strain of pretending not to care is great. Deborah was very worried by some of Mother’s threats, and all the Hulmes were, which is pleasant. … I rang Nicholas but he was out and that caused me to fly into a rage. … This evening I fixed my old jodhs [jodphurs] for wearing tomorrow. I am reading a murder at the moment.”
Pauline phoned Nicholas whenever her mother was out of the house and met him at every possible opportunity. On Sunday, January 31, she saw him when she was on the way to Miss Rich’s for a riding lesson. He seemed rather depressed. The following Sunday she hoped to visit him on her way to church but Wendy was with her.
She was “annoyed desperately” on February 20 when she tried to phone him and he was out. He was still out when she phoned again that evening.
The affair limped on until February 25. That evening she rang Juliet and they talked about Him—James Mason—for a long time, after which she felt “much cheered” and wrote a letter to Nicholas saying she wished to discontinue their relationship. She took the letter, together with a parcel of books he had lent her, to the boarding house where he lived and left it there.
The teenage romance had ended. In her diary, Pauline had made no mention of having sex with Nicholas other than the night she lost her virginity, and presumably on December 12, a couple of nights after Diello’s coronation but, given Nicholas’s profession of love and her dogged persistence in contacting him and arranging to meet, it is likely they had taken whatever opportunities presented themselves. Later everyone would seek to make light of the relationship, including Pauline herself, who told Dr Bennett she gave Nicholas up because he was “weak-kneed and unpleasant” and “just a trophy”, and informed Dr Medlicott: “It wasn’t for me. I wasn’t interested.” But anyone charting the course of the relationship through Pauline’s diary would come to the conclusion that, while it lasted, it was at least as intense as any other schoolgirl’s first love.
After she came home from the sanatorium Juliet had lost interest in her horse, but Pauline remained passionately interested in Omar Khayyám. Throughout January and February in the scorching summer of 1954, she had ridden miles on her bicycle almost every day to visit and ride him. She even went to groom him on February 2, the hottest day in Canterbury for forty-three years. But by the time she severed relations with Nicholas her interest was petering out, and by March 11 she was trying to sell him.
Pauline’s dumping of Nicholas and her decision to part with Omar Khayyám coincided with renewed contact with Juliet—allowed by both sets of parents despite their being well aware Dr Francis Bennett considered the girls’ relationship to be essentially homosexual. Pauline and Juliet had moved on from the empires of Borovnia and Volumnia. Pauline was finishing her new novel The Donkey’s Serenade and Juliet putting the final touches to The Beautiful Lady in Blue. Sexual matters increasingly occupied their thoughts, and a certain luxurious physicality entered their friendship.
On January 26 Juliet telephoned Pauline to say that her Alsatian dog “Rommel” had arrived, a wonderful thrill as she had thought she would not be getting “a Rommel dog” until her birthday. It turned out to be a tease. Next day she admitted it was Bill Perry’s dog and was to be called Carlo. (In the end the dog was called Retzi.)
Pauline stayed two nights at Ilam. The dog, she noted, was a “lovely animal with the lo
veliest ears”. The girls played records and walked around the garden eating grapes filched from the hothouse. In the afternoon they lay on Hilda’s bed discussing what the charges would be for their services if they were prostitutes.
Next day they celebrated “He’s Day” in honour of Mario Lanza, eating birthday cake, drinking a toast, playing Lanza’s records, and building him a shrine. They decided “His”—Guy Rolfe—should be shifted to the Gods. Rolfe, a tall, lean, good-looking Hollywood actor, specialised in treacherous villains such as Prince John in Ivanhoe and a Parisian safecracker in The Spider and the Fly. An actress who worked with him called him “strange, very saturnine”: there was a whiff of sulphur about him. Later, the girls worked out how much prostitutes earned and decided they would definitely take up the profession.
School resumed on the second day of February. Pauline was now in her fifth form year. Preparing to visit Ilam on the weekend, she found a glittering black dress in which to celebrate “Him’s Day”. On the Saturday, Hilda and Henry Hulme went out and the girls had the house to themselves. They wore black, changed into Hilda’s most elaborate evening dresses, and made themselves “look really beautiful”. They talked about the Saints, mainly Him, and their books and laughed so much they ached.
The following Friday, Nora was in a dreadful temper. “Mother gave me a fearful lecture along the usual strain and declared I could not go out to Ilam tomorrow,” Pauline wrote. She immediately rang Juliet. “I had to tell someone sympathetic how I loathed Mother. The past tense is not necessary.”
Next day Nora was unrelenting. “Mother told me I could not go out to Ilam again until I was eight stone and more cheerful. … one cannot help recalling that she was the same over Nicholas. Shesaid I could not see him again until my behaviour improved and when I did she concluded it was not having his influence that caused it. She is most unreasonable. I also overheard her making insulting remarks about Mrs Hulme while I was ringing this afternoon. I was livid. I am very glad because the Hulmes sympathise with me and it is nice to feel that adults realise what Mother is. Dr Hulme is going to do something about it I think. Why could Mother not die? Dozens of people are dying all the time, thousands, so why not Mother, and Father too.”
The day after she so fervently wished her parents dead, Pauline’s behaviour was exemplary and her mood unusually sweet. The turbulence had passed, even if the cause was not forgotten. She went to church and with her parents visited Rosemary at Templeton Farm. Later she cycled to Omar Khayyám’s paddock and spent an hour or two giving rides to Mrs Purvis’s sister’s three young sons. “Omar was beautiful,” she wrote. “With the children he was positively marvellous. … I enjoyed myself more than I have for years.”
Although Nora had told Pauline she could not go to Ilam again until she weighed eight stone, by the following Thursday she had yielded: she could now go the weekend after next. Pauline was mystified by her mother’s change of heart. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she wrote in her diary. By way of further atonement, Nora bought her a nightgown and took her to see Julius Caesar, starring James Mason as Brutus and Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. Pauline recorded that “Him was almost too wonderful to be true. The picture did not depress me greatly as a good many Him ones do. Although I wept over it when I came to bed. However I was much pleased to see how young Him looks. That fact cheered me greatly and Him’s superb physique…” She finished The Donkey’s Serenade and began a new book called Leander or Léandre. There was a moment of delight when a girl asked her how long she had been out from England. “Five years,” she answered.
By the end of January 1954, the Hulmes, whatever their concern about the homosexual nature of the girls’ friendship, had again extended Pauline an open invitation to stay at Ilam. That Saturday, feeling they were making up for lost time, she and Juliet spent a “heavenly day” wandering around the garden, playing their records, reading each other’s books, and talking about the “Saints”, which gave them the giggles; they lay down on Bill Perry’s bed and “simply roared”.
The Saints were a private pantheon of film actors, opera singers and fictional characters they worshipped and adored—and about whom, to one degree or another, they harboured lustful thoughts. At first it was relatively simple. Strictly speaking, James Mason—Him—and Guy Rolfe—His—were Gods above the Saints.
In schematic form it looked like this:
GODS
James Mason = Him
Guy Rolfe = His
SAINTS
Mario Lanza = He, Mario or Poor Mario
Orson Welles = It or Harry Lime
Mel Ferrer = This or The Angry Man
Jussi Björling = That
Rupert of Hentzau = Who
(Charles) Boinard =?
*
Neither Juliet’s novel The Beautiful Lady in Blue, which she wrote in school exercise books, nor Pauline’s The Donkey’s Serenade have survived. Neither seems to have been as extravagantly violent as the Borovnia-Volumnia correspondence. The title of Pauline’s book came from a famous song by Hollywood singing star Allan Jones: more importantly, Mario Lanza had recorded a cover version. Bill Perry considered The Beautiful Lady in Blue “an innocent adventure … the sort of thing you would expect a teenager to write”. It reminded him of The Prisoner of Zenda. Pauline thought it “amazingly amusing and Himish”. Henry Hulme also thought it marvellous. One day he stopped Len Hensley, a university colleague, in Hereford Street, fished the exercise books out of his briefcase, and made Hensley skim through them so he could share the admiration he felt for his brilliant daughter. Hilda did not share his enthusiasm, pronouncing the work “ordinary”.
On Sunday, February 28, the girls made a momentous decision: they would “hurry up terrifically” the quest for Him. To go to Hollywood and introduce themselves they would need to get money and book passages. After school next day Pauline traipsed around shipping companies asking about fares and schedules. The news was not encouraging: “It looks as though we will have to make the journey in spasms. Probably going to Honolulu for some time at first.”
On Wednesday the pair had another long feverish talk “mainly of … boats and our plans for the future”. The following Saturday Pauline, in a frenzy of activity, got up at six in the morning, iced
a cake, peeled potatoes and shelled peas for lunch, took Wendy breakfast in bed, and then biked to Ilam. Once there she and Juliet spent hours in the garden, clearing a small grotto where they had established a graveyard of mice, birds and other small creatures. They were building a temple which they planned to sacrifice when they left on their travels, along with a record of the Donizetti aria “Una furtiva lagrima”.
The first time Pauline mentioned the temple in her diary it was to be dedicated to Minerva but it became the Temple of Rafael Pan. The Archangel Raphael, protector of pilgrims and other travellers, was Juliet’s favourite angel. Artists such as Verrocchio and Perugino had depicted him as a beautiful young man with elegant wings. If Raphael were an emissary from spiritual realms, Pan was the opposite, a lascivious, rutting nature-god with the horns and hairy legs of a goat, ravisher of goddesses, nymphs and maenads, the wildly uninhibited acolytes of Bacchus. The temple symbolised the duality of the wonderful new life they dreamt about.
That evening the girls worked on The Saints Book, a collection of photographs and articles from magazines about their objects of adoration. With Hilda and Henry out of the house, they had an “absolutely wonderful” time together, becoming “weak with laughter”.
On Tuesday night Pauline read Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and went with Wendy and two of the boarders to The Wicked Lady, starring Margaret Lockwood and James Mason. Juliet was also there and they ended up sitting together.
“Him,” Pauline noted approvingly, “was terrifically lustful and swore a lot” and “spent a lot of time in bed seducing and raping odd bods”. She would have to develop this side of Meredith Lanyon, her leading man in Léander or Léandre, who was based heavily on James Mason. That n
ight she found herself passionately making love to the side of her mattress.
To raise money for her passage to America, or at least Hawai’i, she put an advertisement in a newspaper offering Omar Khayyám for sale. On Saturday she and Juliet spent most of the day arranging the Temple of Rafael Pan, having “a positively wonderful time”. She would, she wrote, “quite willingly forego having heaven in [the] afterlife if I could always have such heaven in this one”.
Sunday was very different. At home with her family, Pauline polished the furniture in the lounge, then went to church. After dinner she provoked Wendy over some trifling incident. Nora flew into a rage. Pauline, she said, was not going back to school. “I don’t see why I should keep a horrid child like you,” she snapped. She had no wish to continue supporting her.
Pauline was delighted. School was of no interest without Juliet there; she had wanted to leave but hadn’t dared ask. She would do everything she could to keep annoying her mother in case she changed her mind. Next day, to her joy, she was still not allowed to go to school. At dinner her father said she could return if she wanted but Pauline declined. She had already proposed getting a job as a governess in the country and Nora had agreed. That evening Nora’s mood changed: she was, in Pauline’s words, “nicer than she has been for weeks”.
Two days later, on March 16, the girls went to see Scaramouche, a swashbuckler with Stewart Granger, Eleanor Parker, Janet Leigh and “This”—Mel Ferrer. “Absolutely superb… thoroughly divine,” Pauline thought. She stayed over at Ilam. “It is a heavenly night and I feel wonderfully happy,” she wrote in her diary. Next morning there was trouble at the Temple of Rafael Pan: “Some bloody son of a bachelor pulled up all our crosses. Curse the bastard.” Nevertheless the girls made good progress building a four-poster bed that was an adjunct to the temple. Thoroughly exhausted, they lay down on the rustic bed in the grotto and talked and talked.