A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

Her Book, with its great empty spaces, its undergrowth of clichés, its photo parade of men and women on horses, of children and flowers, dogs, prime ministers, and then the dark floating passages of poetry, is truly her autobiography. I look through it one last time and enter her world again. Among the crowded signatures there are few revealing facts. But I sense that I am closer to Eve. She carried this great book so far, valued it so highly – and now it rests in my hands. While I slowly turn its stiff and crackling pages I feel I am about to come across something unexpected and significant. This is the excitement and mystery of research. I trawl through many famous names that have signed up to the statement that she ‘will never be forgotten by …’. Yet she makes no appearance in their biographies and autobiographies. She is a legendary character in a small world, all shadow by the end – the substance vanishing with time. It is as if her story is written here in invisible ink, which appears faintly when you breathe on it. In an interview she gave to the Star shortly before going into hospital, she was asked if she had any regrets and replied: ‘Yes, only one, and that is I never married. I was very popular in my time and had many offers. Maybe, if I had married, I would be better off today.’ Then, without being asked a further question, she adds that she knew various people in South Africa, and ‘had relatives there, including Sir George and Lady Milner, of Cape Town’. If I were a novelist I could arrange for her son Mordaunt to meet Ernest Beckett’s son Lancelot in South Africa and carry on their adventures there.

  Prising open two pages that had become stuck together, I suddenly come across Ernest Beckett, who, signing himself Grimthorpe and recording the date as 15 May 1915, two years before his death, copied down a devastating verse from Swinburne’s poem ‘Dolores’ written in reversed dactyls.

  For the Crown of our life as it closes

  Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust;

  No thorns go so deep as the roses

  And love is more cruel than lust –

  Time turns the old days to derision

  Our loves into corpses or wives,

  And marriage and death and division

  Makes barren our lives –

  4

  With Catherine at Cimbrone

  My researches into Eve and Ernest, as I had begun to call them, took very different courses. Early on I wrote to someone I had known at school. Rupert Lycett Green was married to John Betjeman’s daughter Candida – they had spent their honeymoon at the Villa Cimbrone (and both their families appeared in Eve’s Book). Rupert replied that the best person to help me was his sister Catherine.

  Catherine Till was the same age as me. She had her own reasons for research into the Grimthorpe family, I was to discover, which followed an adjacent course to mine. Our two lines of enquiry stretched ahead of us, never colliding, but appearing to meet at an ideal point on the horizon.

  Pond Farm, where she lived, was a stone farmhouse on the top edge of a sloping village green at Newton-upon-Rawcliffe, a windswept hamlet not far from Pickering in the North Riding of Yorkshire. She is not altogether alone when I arrive: Romney, a medium-sized dog (a lurcher) and Crackers, her multi-coloured cat, live very contentedly there. Next door is Basil, her horse. Catherine, who is a valiant motorist, drives me to see anyone in Yorkshire who might have useful information. I meet people who had known, or whose families had known, both Ernest and Eve. I visit houses where the Becketts and Fairfaxes lived, and cemeteries where they were buried. But nowhere on our journey could I find what I most wanted to see: Eve’s Book – though everyone knew of it and had elaborate theories as to where it might have come to rest. Then one day at a Yorkshire racecourse someone makes off with Ernest’s grandson Christopher Grimthorpe’s hat. In the hat left behind, he finds the name ‘Sparks’ and when he catches up with Mr Sparks (who is also searching for him) he discovers that Alexander Sparks is the husband of a great-niece of Eve’s. So he speaks of my interest in her famous book. My search is at an end. For Alexander and Serena Sparks have Her Book – and six weeks later I am turning its pages at their house in Wiltshire.

  When I first met Catherine she was completing a mass observation survey for a government department on psychiatric morbidity in a crime-stricken area of Middlesbrough. She is also in regular correspondence with a man on Death Row in Florida and twice visits him in jail for a charity before he is finally executed. By conventional standards this is a most irregular career, not harnessed at all to money-making (she is far from being well off). But to my mind her work is all the more admirable.

  Like Eve, Catherine spent her very early years at Bilbrough Manor which her father, David Lycett Green, bought after his marriage to Catherine’s mother Angela. As a child Catherine was unaware of her mother’s long and passionate love affair during the 1930s and into the 1940s with Ernest’s son, Ralph Grimthorpe, the boy Luie had died giving birth to. Ralph, who married Mary Archdale in 1914, turned out to be in some ways very like his father. When he spoke to you, whether you were a woman or a man, it seemed as if you were the only person in the world to whom he wished to speak.

  Hurtling round the Yorkshire moors in her brave car, Romney lurching around on the back seat, Crackers left guarding Pond Farm, Catherine informs me that she is not after all the daughter of Angela and David Lycett Green, but of Angela Green and her lover Ralph Grimthorpe. Catherine had got into the car at the beginning of our journey as my old school friend’s sister, but gets out of it an hour later as Ernest’s illegitimate granddaughter. This has been a hectic research trip and I need time to catch up.

  Over the next couple of days Catherine tells me about her early years. Owing to the war, she saw little of David, her legal father. ‘One vivid memory’, she tells me, ‘is walking in the snow with him trailing animal and bird prints.’ Her adult life was also to become a trail, following prints that might lead her to a secure identity.

  Before the end of the Second World War, Ralph’s wife petitioned for a divorce on the grounds of his adultery and Ralph married Angela after her divorce from David. Catherine and Rupert, then aged ten and eight, were unaware of the scandal that swirled round the county families of Yorkshire and was aggravated by David and Ralph being masters of foxhounds (members of one pack not speaking to members of the other for several years). Soon afterwards the children went to live half the time at Ralph’s home, Easthorpe Hall, a fine eighteenth-century house near the village of Amotherby. Ralph talked cricket to Rupert and horses with Catherine, and when David Lycett Green asked them what they thought of him ‘we said we very much liked him’, Catherine remembered. ‘I can still see the rather sad, wistful expression that crossed his face. Perhaps it was then, for the first time, that I felt the tug of divided loyalties.’

  This tug of loyalties was made more acute when in 1948 David married again. His new wife, ‘a very striking woman’, had two children of her own and turned out to be an awkward stepmother. Even her compliments undermined Catherine’s confidence. (‘She once told me I had a good complexion and must take care of it. I felt like Masha in The Seagull who, when complimented on her hair, remarks “everyone says that to a plain girl”.’) Shortly after their marriage, Catherine told me, David Lycett Green had a coronary and became more or less an invalid for the last twelve years of his life.

  In 1950, at the age of fifteen, Catherine went to the Villa Cimbrone for the first time. ‘I always loved the villa, particularly that jagged outline of mountains above Maori,’ she told me. ‘I loved wandering through the rooms, occasionally to evade my mother’s wrath, mainly to open drawers and make discoveries.’ On one of her early visits she discovered a diary Ernest had written at the beginning of the 1880s before he met Luie. ‘I thought he was insufferably pleased with himself,’ she recalled. The diary was full of trite generalisations such as ‘Fringes and flirtations go together. Where you don’t see the former you seldom find the latter.’ It was a wonder to the teenage Catherine that any woman could find a man with such a ridiculous moustache attractive. But the adult world was full of such my
steries. Ernest’s diary made it clear that an innkeeper’s beautiful daughter in Naples had fallen in love with him. This was the sort of episode that often overtook him on his travels abroad.

  It was not simply the fun of bathing and being with Ralph’s family and knowing that her mother loved the place, it was the haunting beauty of Cimbrone that cast a spell on them all. Catherine seemed inexplicably happy. Yet still she went from room to room, looking in cupboards, opening drawers, as if trying to find a solution to her divided loyalties.

  Back in England she went through ‘all the foolish fanfares’ of being a debutante. To the horror of her mother, the irritation of Ralph, she fell in love with an impossible Polish man called Jan. Ralph had a tremendous row with him and Angela’s vituperation was so extreme that it had the unintended consequence of preventing Catherine from ever again confiding in her. To get over this infatuation she was sent once more to the Villa Cimbrone. Though she would never have a romance at Cimbrone, it became a Promised Land where strong feelings about absent lovers were intensified. She resumed her search through drawers and cupboards. What was she searching for? I ask her. ‘I feel sure that for everyone much in childhood is known without being known,’ she answers. What she did discover was a bundle of love letters from her mother written to Ralph during the war. Her mother had sometimes opened and read the letters sent to her children, but now Catherine reversed this process as if taking over parental seniority herself. Soon she came across an early letter that confirmed her silent suspicions. She shows me a photocopy. In it Angela writes that she could never leave Catherine because she is in love with her father, Ralph. Catherine later realises that this letter, overflowing with love for Ralph, is not proof that Ralph was actually her father. It is a strategic document, drafted with the intent of strengthening Angela’s position before she leaves David. The letter makes no claim or protest – it repeats something she has obviously discussed with Ralph. She wants to make doubly certain that Ralph will take responsibility for Catherine, after she joins him – which he does.

  Carrying on her search, Catherine also found a letter from Ralph to Angela saying that Catherine is the most beautiful baby he has ever seen. She is filled with sudden happiness.

  Catherine could never raise the matter with her mother: they were not on such intimate and sympathetic terms. Closeted in their bedrooms, she and her brother Rupert discuss it (they are by now close companions). Examining pictures of both families for similarities, they take their pick. Rupert remains a Lycett Green and Catherine becomes a Beckett.

  Catherine’s parentage lies at the very centre of her worries. ‘I felt I belonged nowhere,’ she tells me, ‘and I judged both Angela and Ralph quite harshly.’ It seemed to her she was doomed to make a mess of her life. As if to delay this fate, she prolonged her adolescence. She wanted to marry and have children, but not until this problem was settled and she was acknowledged to be Ralph’s daughter, Ernest and Luie’s granddaughter, without any shadow of guilt or sense of betrayal. But how could she be certain? Her instinct pointed in one direction; reference books told another story. We sit in her drawing room at Pond Farm: Catherine needs official recognition of what she feels is the truth. The evidence may still lie hidden, she believes, at the Villa Cimbrone.

  When I got back to London, I began to wonder why the solution to Catherine’s paternity might be at Cimbrone. Apparently the Grimthorpe family had unintentionally left all sorts of papers there when, in the early 1960s, and shortly before his death, Ralph sold the place to an Italian family, the Vuilleumiers. There were still secrets to be found at the villa.

  We make a plan. She will write to the Vuilleumier family and arrange for us to stay at the Villa Cimbrone for a week as their guests, explaining that we wish to go through the Grimthorpe archive, which is in their care. I will pay for the air tickets and the hire of a car. Catherine will use her international skills as a motorist and also act as my Italian interpreter.

  The night before we set out I have a strange dream. I am in a hotel and when I go to unpack my suitcase I find a number of clothes that do not belong to me. Among them is a small black computer with a red button that says ‘Press me’ (rather like the ‘Eat me’ and ‘Drink me’ from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). I press it and hear a woman’s voice thanking me for finding her clothes. ‘Where are you?’ she asks. I tell her and she instructs me how to return the clothes to her (which apparently I am obliged to do having pressed the magic button). I must go to where she lives, travelling by exactly the same route as she used. I am dismayed by this, particularly since I don’t know the final destination of my journey. But I recognise that there is no appeal – I must go. I begin packing her clothes together with my own but do not think they will any longer fit in the suitcase. I wrestle with them until the hotel fire alarm suddenly sounds – and I wake up to the ringing of my alarm clock.

  We meet at Gatwick in the last week of April 2000. I am innocently dressed in grey flannels and a change coat on which, I suddenly notice, a great blob of ink has appeared from a leaking pen in an inner pocket. Is this an honourable mark for a writer or a sign that my vital strength is ebbing away? Should I flaunt it or wear a patch? I see Catherine ahead of me and join her. She is carefully dressed in a light green outfit useful, I judge, for climbing mountains or trekking through a desert. It is, I decide, a guerrilla outfit. She has advised me on the phone to leave my suitcase half-empty so that we can fill it with precious papers from Cimbrone. She is accompanied by an extraordinary piece of luggage, beige and formless, resembling at some angles a small bear. I offer to carry it and she very readily agrees. But how can it be half-empty? Is it half-full of lead? I grapple with it, unable to tell where its front is, where its ceiling, its back. It seems to have wheels but they are inside – one would have to gut it to reach them. We stagger along the queue creating waves of impatience behind us.

  Once we have taken off, Catherine produces some photocopies of letters that help to bring the story she has told me at Pond Farm up to date. She has an ingenious theory that having two fathers whom she loved in confusing ways and with pangs of disloyalty was like a man having a wife and a mistress – indeed it may have led, she suggests, to her emotionally untidy past. During her twenties there was almost always some intense involvement with a man, bringing her much pain and pleasure.

  At the beginning of 1966, when she was thirty, she travelled to India, Thailand and Cambodia, meeting at an Italian Embassy dinner in New Delhi Raja Ranbir Singh, ‘a Raja without a state’. Ranbir had spent much of his life outside India, being educated at Balliol and passing the war in Switzerland ‘seducing women and learning exquisite French’. He was sixteen years older than Catherine and she was greatly impressed by him. ‘He had absolutely no common sense,’ she says with a smile, ‘and a violent temper.’ He liked nothing better than parading his knowledge. It was like ‘listening to an encyclopaedia’.

  That autumn she joined some friends she had met in Kathmandu and drove up to Nepal. They were like pioneers along the hippy trail. It was an unforgettable journey: the splendour of Afghanistan and the wild beauty of the Bamian valley with its huge statues of the Buddha still standing there. She took voluntary work teaching English to Tibetan refugee children at a rat-infested hill station in the Indian Himalayas. ‘I loved it all,’ she says to me, ‘apart from the rats. I particularly loved the Tibetan children. It was, perhaps, the happiest time of my life.’

  Unlike many other English travellers, she never fell in love with India. But she saw Raja Ranbir again and fell in love with him. ‘I suppose I was flattered that, among a stream of women, he only wanted to marry me. He was striking to look at but vain, always glancing in the mirror. It took time for me to realise that he needed reassurance for his looks and for everything else.’ And perhaps Catherine needed reassurance too and maybe they could reassure each other. It occurred to me (though I did not say anything) that those Tibetan children she had taught and loved at the hill station had suddenly, urge
ntly, made her want to have children of her own. They decided to marry and were to have three remarkably good-looking daughters – she shows me their photographs. Ranbir, by a previous marriage, had two sons aged fifteen and twelve (both of whom went to school at Harrow). He had more or less driven their mother out of their lives while they were still very young and they did not to see her again until they had grown up. Catherine formed a bond with these sons which, to some extent, excluded their father. ‘His behaviour towards me grew more and more obsessive. It took me several years to admit the failure of our marriage and leave him.’

  She sought sanctuary, with her daughters, for a time at Porlock in West Somerset before Christopher Grimthorpe gave her a cottage in the remote village of Westow, a few miles north-east of York. The threats and endless telephone calls from Ranbir began to subside. ‘We were happy,’ she says. ‘I started work for a degree with the Open University, studying sociology and the humanities. My degree has been of little practical use at my age, but it is a source of satisfaction.’ It is a rare badge of conformity.

  She has covered these years of turmoil on our short flight to Naples and we are approaching the airport as she sketches in her second marriage. In 1974 she met Patrick Till, a country solicitor who, ‘with uncharacteristic spontaneity, immediately decided he wanted to marry me’. He was, like her, passionate about horses and fox-hunting, and like her lacked perhaps some degree of self-confidence. But that was all they had in common. He was good to her daughters and had three sons of approximately the same ages. ‘I should have refused to marry him or, having done so, I should have tried to make the marriage succeed,’ she says. She does not blame him for leaving her. ‘But I found the process painful. Once again I felt an outsider.’

  We land and, in the seething chaos of the airport, with what Catherine calls ‘a miracle of efficiency’ and I call simply ‘a miracle’, we find our car. It is a miracle, to my way of thinking, because, though we have bundles of papers mentioning it, there appears to be no car-hire company in Naples with the name we have been given. This is an opportunity for Catherine to try out her Italian as I look on with what I hope is a severe expression. She speaks with energy, breaking into incapacitating laughter every two or three sentences (in which everyone else joins – while I struggle to hold my fierce glare) at the sound of her downright English pronunciation. There is an atmosphere of bewilderment like a thick fog over everything: then suddenly, and without explanation, the sun shines through and, amid more laughter and congratulations, we are handed the keys. Our car is parked so close to other cars that I can see no likelihood of entering it except perhaps through the roof. But difficulties like this bring out Catherine’s strengths. With the skill of a contortionist, she fights her way in and begins experimenting loudly with the gears until the car, like a frightened animal, jumps backwards, almost knocking me to the ground. But we are on our way.