White Mischief

by James Fox

  Alice made one try at suicide shortly before her final successful attempt, on September 23rd. When Patricia Bowles, her neighbour and friend, went to her rescue, she discovered that Alice had already marked each piece of her furniture for distribution to her friends. Patricia Bowles said:

  Our house was at Kipipiri with the mountain behind it. Nancy Wirewater, Joss Erroll’s old flame, was living at Clouds while Dina was away. And there was a joint birthday party of Alice, and someone else. All the guests were arriving. Flo Crofton was with Alice and sent a note over saying Alice wouldn’t be coming because this time she’d done it successfully. The party was starting. I went to Gilgil to get a South African medical unit and he and I both got to work on the stomach pump. I felt awful bringing her back. She wanted to go. I spent the night with her trying to keep her off the Nembutal, which she had obviously hidden. She had her gun in the bed and passed out before she could use it. The second time she used it. I didn’t go that time. I was terrified of having to do it again. It was absurd. We were always apologising to each other. Me for bringing her back to life and she for causing me inconvenience, and all the time almost asking me not to do anything.

  Alice wrote two letters after the first attempt. To Dickie Pembroke:

  My darling, I don’t suppose for a moment you can understand why I am doing this. We think so differently.

  Anyway please, please, believe that from my viewpoint at least I’m doing right.

  I’m writing this in my garden on a glorious morning—drinking in sun and colour and peace, by the middle pool.

  I love you very much as you know—too much to meet you as a different being later on.

  The reason it was so intolerable for me saying goodbye at Kampala, was that I knew then it was final.

  All my love Alice.

  Give my love to Lizzie. I simply can’t write again, and there is nothing more to say. A.

  To Patricia Bowles, she wrote,

  Me voilà encore! You wrote me a perfectly charming letter. It was sweet of you and gratefully received in the spirit of the moment.

  But you see what I did not make clear—life is no longer worth living when you no longer care whether you are wanted or not.

  I won’t say more, but I think you’ll understand, partly anyway.

  If you will not talk of this at all, no one will need know that it is not post-operative depression. It is kinder towards Dickie and my children and better for you and Flo and William [the doctor who operated on her].

  Love Alice

  Love to Derek too.

  When she finally succeeded, Alice tidied her bedroom and filled it with flowers, dressed up and put on her best bed linen. She left several notes. One was to the police—its contents were never released. The rest were to her children, to Dickie and one to Patricia Bowles: “By the time you get this,” it read, “I’ll have done it again. This time, I hope successfully.” She also asked that a cocktail party be held at the grave.

  * Alice is possibly referring to the fact that Lady Idina had been taken away from Happy Valley by her fourth husband.

  † Lezard. too. was on the point of being posted to Cairo.

  * Once married to Paula Long: became head of British Secret Service in Ankara.

  16

  THE GREATEST POUNCER OF ALL TIME

  Broughton did have one loyal friend in England who had followed the case with close attention. This was “Porchy” Carnarvon (the Earl of Carnarvon). When he heard that Broughton had been acquitted, Carnarvon sent him a cable which was framed and hung on the wall of White’s at the insistence of Jimmy de Rothschild. It read, “Hearty congratulations on winning a neck cleverly.” How Broughton must have treasured it as a sign that he was still accepted in the fold of his fellow officers and peers! Lord Carnarvon has written about his old racing friend in his memoirs. No Regrets. The two men had met in the army in 1914, and it is clear from the book that Carnarvon considered he knew Broughton better than anybody. In May 1980 I wrote to him, asking for an interview.

  There was a period in the early 1970s when Lord Carnarvon was a star of the television talk shows in Britain, playing the role of the unashamed feudalist and plutocrat. He was the size of a jockey, but looked more like a bookmaker who had been out in a lot of bad weather, and sometimes he spoke like one. He winked a lot and told dirty jokes, and talked about women’s legs and ankles. When he laughed it all came out in one loud syllable: “Hah!”

  Forty years after Carnarvon had sent his cable to Broughton, I drove down to his home. Highclere Castle, in Berkshire, with Tessa Reay, grand-daughter of Vera and Jock Delves Broughton. It was a warm morning late in May, with patches of coolness in the air and a bloom across the landscaped park. Golden pheasants stepped through the unfenced grass along the gravel drive. It seemed that nothing here had changed for centuries; certainly not since Broughton had come as a guest for the racing weekends in the 1920s.

  I rang the bell at the front door, but there was no answer, so we made our way into the great Victorian Gothic hall, lit from a skylight, with its soaring pillars and leather wall coverings. In search of Lord Carnarvon we wandered into a large room glimmering with perfect Empire furniture, the chairs and sofas otherwise upholstered in the dark green leather favoured by the St. James’s Street clubs.

  Great clocks ticked together, yet next to the armchair beside the fireplace was a cheap green alarm clock with a black face and luminous hands—the only hint of present-day occupancy. Possibly this was the room where Lord Carnarvon took his naps. We called out into a passage beyond the brown baize door, but our voices echoed back. We separated and searched the ground floor. In the cloakroom was a sauna bath and a record of the Earl’s daily steam temperatures. There were the usual racing caricatures and cartoons and a rhyme on the theme of declining sexual power.

  His sporting days are over

  His little light is out

  What used to be his sex appeal

  Is now his water-spout.

  Then Lord Carnarvon appeared and briefly mistook me for Cyril Connolly. Half an hour later a butler also appeared and apologised for the doorbell being broken.

  Carnarvon was neatly dressed in twill trousers, a greenish tweed jacket, and immaculately polished brown golfing shoes with studded soles. His speech delivery was part Willie Whitelaw (emphasis and bluster) and part Earl Mountbatten (rolling stentorian).

  “Vera’s grand-daughter,” he said. “I can’t get over it. Now. You’ll have anything you want. You just have to ask.” He faced the drinks tray. “Are you married and blissfully happy with lots of children?”

  “No, I’m divorced,” said Lady Reay.

  “All right, darling.”

  “Darling Vera,” he continued. “Now. Ask me anything you like. Most glamorous woman of her day. Quite, quite lovely. She was always being mistaken for Gladys Cooper, which I think gave her an enormous kick as she was very fond of people admiring her. I don’t know any woman in the world who doesn’t like being admired.”

  “Did you ever have an affair with her?”

  “No. No. Certainly not. Never laid a hand on her. I find it damned hard to credit, but darling Vera, I don’t think she willingly went to bed with anybody.

  “Her interests were shooting with a rifle (probably used a shotgun too, but certainly a rifle). And there you are. And if you said to Vera, I’d like you to come with me to the source of the Mekong Delta, one thing and another. Where’s that? Timbuktu or something. Will there be crocodiles? Yes, darling, guaranteed. Will we have to sleep under mosquito nets? And I’d say Oh, I haven’t asked. Oh, yes I’m sure we will. Is it civilised? No. Not civilised at all. I’d love to go. I’m just giving you a picture.”

  Tessa Reay said that her grandmother had travelled to places which were then very remote: Burma and the Philippines, and had eaten human flesh. “Oh, I’ve no doubt,” said Lord Carnarvon.

  “I wouldn’t have thought she was in love with Lord Moyne,” he said. “My guess is that Vera said to he
rself, ‘Here’s Walter. I must be as nice as possible.’ I cannot and do not believe that Vera was the sort of person who fell in love. I’ve never seen the slightest sign of her being unfaithful or anything else. I think she was one of those ladies who didn’t ever want to hurt anybody’s feelings; don’t think she would ever consciously do so. I think she said to herself, ‘I like the fleshpots, who doesn’t? Well, there it is. Walter’s mad about me and I’m not going to quarrel with him or anyone else.’ But I find it very hard to believe that she surrendered herself willingly to anybody. Darling Vera. I don’t think sex interested her.

  “Jock in my opinion was a weak man,” Lord Carnarvon continued. “He was not in any way a brave man.” He leaned forward to emphasise the point, clearly resisting the word “coward.” “I probably knew him better than anybody,” he continued. “He faked a sunstroke in 1914 as he feared going to France. He was basically a dishonest person and rather vain.

  “And when Vera wanted to go off with Lord Moyne, he would say, ‘I hope you have fun. God bless you. See you when you get back.’ That’s not to say his feelings weren’t hurt. He was too weak to say no—a mari complaisant.

  “Vera probably said to herself, ‘I’m no longer amused by Jock,’ who wasn’t a very amusing man—didn’t tell funny stories or anything else. Hardly ever spoke. He was a very ordinary chap, neatly dressed, trim moustache. Perfectly nice. (The best-dressed men of the time were me, number one, Broughton, Jock Buchanan Jardine, Hugo Londesborough and Burghie Westmorland.) Jock was perhaps a little vain and I think damn stupid, if you ask me.

  “Hate being horrible about anybody and never am, but I think he was. Not much grey matter.

  “Do you want to know what Jock was most interested in? Going to the loo every day in the morning. There. You’ve got it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  I suggested that Broughton had run out of money by the time he went to Kenya, or that at least he was hard up. “He was,” said Carnarvon. “Up at Doddington he’d lived high, wide and handsome. He’d betted and lost. And what’s more, what he did was very dishonest. He’d rather make £10 crookedly than £100 straight. He, unbeknownst to Vera and the children, sold property and pictures which did not belong to him, which he’d no right to sell. Yoh, yes. Yes. Only weak men succumb to temptations to do dishonest things. That is a fact. I mean a man, poor devil, he’s starving, he snatches a bun out of a stall. I can understand that. But Jock was never starving. I can imagine he would be very shy coming back to England, because he knew perfectly well that he’d done something which, if found out, he was liable to go to prison for. I’m certain he appreciated that.”

  Why, asked Tessa Reay, had her grandfather taken such risks to maintain such extravagance? “Because once you do something, my dear, you get accustomed to it,” he said. “It’s very difficult to give it up. Only strong men are able to do that. He was not a strong man and I’m certain that he was determined that what he’d got used to he was going to do for the rest of his days.”

  Our trio moved into lunch, across the great space of the dining room. Lord Carnarvon faced one of Van Dyck’s monumental portraits of Charles I mounted on a horse. “Erroll? Knew him,” said Lord Carnarvon. “Stoat.” Stoat? “One of the greatest stoats of his generation—one of the great pouncers of all time.

  “He was a coureur par excellence.” Coureur? “Runner after. He certainly was. Had been very attractive. Got rather bloated in Kenya.”

  We lunched on ravioli, Highclere lamb with new potatoes, and strawberries. “Gorellas,” said Lord Carnarvon. “G-O-R-E-L-L-A-S. Dutch. They come from Holland. They’re better than Cambridge. Not so juicy, but they’re good fruiters.

  “Erroll was double-crossing Diana with Alice de Trafford,” he continued. “That affair wasn’t over at all. I don’t think Jock Broughton had the guts to kill anybody. He could no more have shot Erroll with that hand than he could have shot an elephant. Damn bad shot. Incapable of lifting any weight. He couldn’t have held an army revolver.”

  But why did he take up with a woman so much younger than himself—one who was not particularly well accepted by his friends? Was he in love with Diana …?

  “He was a weak man, therefore I would have said he liked pretty women.

  “He was not a great performer. He’d take a girl a box of chocolates to her bedroom and claim the rest; whether or not Diana was pretty at the time, never appealed to me, but that’s neither here nor there. HA!

  “There’s no possible way of knowing,” Lord Carnarvon went on, “because what’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison. I mean, to me, hands are very important things, nails are very important things. After all, hands caress the man. Therefore to be touched by anybody who bites their nails—ooghaargh—puts me off. Oh no, darling, don’t look at your nails. They’re not bitten. Ridiculous.

  “It’s one of the first things I look at. I am a person who pays great attention to hands. Lot of people don’t. I’ve known endless men who pop it in, go to bed with a woman or anything else, who’ve got hideous hands. Think nothing of it. And so on. Everybody is different.

  “I myself pay great attention to hands, and I pay a great deal of attention to legs too. If people have got hideous legs, fat legs, I mean to say—poor devils—they can’t help it. They didn’t make themselves like that. There again, I, Carnarvon, have always been put off.”

  “What happens,” asked Tessa Reay. “to a woman when she loses her looks?”

  “ZERO,” replied Lord Carnarvon.

  We were now clearly straying away from our subject. But is this how Broughton and his contemporaries talked?

  “I have in my time known perfectly beautiful women, not a brain in their head, dumb as anything and I’ve said, ‘I’m going to give you a barrelling and I’m going to enjoy it.”

  “My first wife was quite, quite beautiful. Then Tilly [Losch, the actress—Lord Carnarvon’s second wife] was very beautiful. She had a very rare thing. She had green eyes with yellow, amber pupils. Now you only see that once in a lifetime. And she had naturally dark, I think it’s called ‘Titian,’ hair. Can’t say she had the greatest legs—she’s dead now—then she had been a dancer. Imperial Ballet in Vienna. Develops the calf and thigh muscles. Take lots, tuck in. Take lots of cream. Anything you want. Arrive sober and leave drunk. That’s what I always say to my guests.”

  After lunch he showed us into an enormous drawing room lined with leather-bound books, densely furnished with more magnificent objects. I asked about the origins of a piece of furniture. Was it French? Italian? “Can’t tell you how I got hold of it,” he said. “All here when I arrived.” He pointed out a chair and table on which he claimed Napoleon had signed his abdication at Elba. “See those scratches on the arm? Said to have been made by his finger-nails. In frustration. Soft wood at the time.” The room in which we stood had been badly damaged by fire some years earlier. The plaster rosettes on the ceiling—“macaroons” as Lord Carnarvon called them—needed replacing. He was abroad when the builder cabled him with the estimate: £150 per macaroon. “I cabled back,” snapped Lord Carnarvon, “NO MACAROONS.”

  Lord Carnarvon then sold a copy of No Regrets to Tessa Reay for £5.95, inscribed it and disappeared. He was gone a long time and I heard Tessa Reay calling out in some distant passage, “Lord Carnarvon? Lord Carnarvon? Where are you?” He returned to see us off on our journey back to London.

  17

  PALACES AND APPEARANCES

  The most rewarding part of our investigation into the mysterious temperament of Delves Broughton began with the moment of his acquittal. He had reacted slowly to the verdict. The judge was already thanking the jury, exonerating them from further duty, when Broughton was seen to blush, to light up with pleasure and excitement, and then, on his way out of the courtroom, to say to Harragin, according to one version of that ill-heard remark, “I’m afraid I’ve slipped through your fingers.” In anticipation of the verdict, Diana and Kaplan had arranged a party for Broughton in Kapla
n’s house. A guest remembers its end of term flavour and the roars of nostalgic laughter when June Carberry raised her brandy glass and said, “It doesn’t look too good for the old boy today.”

  Broughton described the acclamation and attention he received, and his own euphoria, in a circular that he mailed off to his friends in England a few days later, attaching a fulsome letter of congratulation from Morris. (On his return to Johannesburg, Morris was asked who he thought the murderer might be and had replied, “Good Heavens, I forgot to ask.”) Broughton made a hundred copies of each document. His purpose was clearly to diminish the air of scandal surrounding the case; to brush the whole episode aside as an annoying interruption in his life; to project it now as an amusing story for his friends:

  I only wish I could tell you the inner history, but it would be censored, so it is of no use.

  It was a ridiculous case and I was a victim of unfortunate circumstances … I was in Gaol from March 6 until July 1st, and was never worried or depressed and kept absolutely fit all the time. Being on remand I could have my food and drink sent in and as much to smoke or read as I liked, but no drink [sic], which did not affect me in the least. I had lots of visitors and always walked for two hours each day and I have never felt better than when in Gaol.

  I got a fellow prisoner to clean out my cell etc. and had no discomfort except the small, whitewashed cell 10 x 8. I had a very comfortable bed and never had one sleepless night.