by Philip Eade
Throughout that autumn and winter, Shevelyn was plagued by ill-health. According to her written account of their marriage, she suffered severe period pains for which she underwent an operation – without which, her surgeon then discovered, she would never have been able to have children, although she recalled that she and Evelyn had no immediate plans in that regard, having ‘decided to wait until we were better off’.27 Sometime after that, in early October, Evelyn came home one day to find her feverish – ‘a touch of influenza’, he noted nonchalantly in his diary;28 however the next day she became delirious as her temperature soared to 104. A few days later her mottled face led their doctor (‘a cross between a butcher and vet in appearance’, Evelyn recorded)29 to diagnose German measles. Her sister Alathea and brother-in-law Geoffrey Fry suggested she go and convalesce at their house at Oare in Wiltshire; however it was two weeks before she was strong enough to travel down there.
They stayed at Oare for the best part of a fortnight while she recuperated and Evelyn got on with the various newspaper assignments organised by A.D. Peters, the then up-and-coming literary agent Alec had introduced him to in order to capitalise on the success of Decline and Fall. ‘Please fix up anything that will earn me anything,’ Evelyn wrote to Peters after he was taken on, ‘even cricket criticism or mothers’ welfare notes.’30 Several were written from the standpoint of the nation’s youth but providing he was well paid, he was happy to write about anything, so when the Evening Standard misunderstood his proposal to write about ‘The Manners of the Younger Generation’ and asked for a piece on ‘The Mothers of the Younger Generation’, he promptly dashed off 1,000 words on mothers instead. In June the next year he was similarly unhesitant when asked for a piece by The Birth Control Review of New York.
A handsome country house spectacularly situated beneath the Downs, Oare is nonetheless described by Pevsner as ‘townish’ and Evelyn found there ‘an epicene preciosity or nicety about everything that goes better with cigarettes and London clothes than my tweeds and pipe’.31 Originally Georgian and more or less square, the house had recently been enlarged and modernised by Clough Williams-Ellis, whose scheme had been written up in Country Life in March 1928 while Evelyn was still working on Decline and Fall. As Duncan McLaren suggests, the featured revamp may conceivably have prompted Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s request to her architect Professor Silenus to replace her Tudor country house King’s Thursday with ‘something clean and square’. Equally, Alathea Fry, who struck Evelyn as ‘extraordinarily ingenuous with a fluttery eagerness’, may have contributed something to the creation of Margot herself, who arrives at the Llanabba sports ‘like the first breath of spring in the Champs Élysées’. Like Margot and Paul Pennyfeather, Alathea was ten years older than Evelyn, and she had been photographed by Curtis Moffat in mannered poses not entirely dissimilar to the photographs taken by David Lennox of the back of Margot’s head and the reflection of her hands in a bowl of ink.32
Alathea was arguably the most beautiful of all the Gardner sisters, however her looks were apparently wasted on her husband Geoffrey, who was far more interested in the various young men he had to stay at Oare, one of whom Evelyn described on the first weekend of their stay: ‘Young Mr. Wayman [an accountant] appeared first in riding clothes and rode, then in white flannels and played tennis, then in tweeds and went out shooting – “having a smack at the longtails” as someone described it to Geoffrey – then in evening clothes and talked about architecture.’33 Oblivious of Geoffrey’s previous deviousness over the BBC job, Evelyn seemed equally unaware that he and Shevelyn were still under the scrutiny of this outwardly graceful and witty yet essentially rather cruel and calculating man. At the end of November, when Shevelyn was well enough, the Evelyns threw a house-warming cocktail party at Canonbury Square, cramming their flat full of guests cheerfully celebrating what most assumed to be the start of a long and happy marriage. However Mary Pakenham later recalled that as she left with Geoffrey, who gave her a lift home, he remarked: ‘And when they buried her the little town had never seen a merrier funeral’34 – presumably an intimation of his forebodings about Shevelyn’s health and/or their marriage, neither of which was set to prosper over the course of the next year.
After spending Christmas in Wiltshire with Henry and Pansy Lamb, whose wedding they had gone to shortly after their own, in February 1929 the Evelyns set off for a cruise around the Mediterranean, a trip conceived as a kind of belated honeymoon and an opportunity for Shevelyn to recuperate properly while Evelyn earnt some money by writing articles and a book. The Daily Express marvelled that Decline and Fall had been so successful that the young author was able to afford this luxurious expedition out of his royalties,35 whereas in fact Evelyn’s enterprising new agent had managed to obtain free passages in return for favourable publicity. Evelyn’s eventual travel book, published in 1930 as Labels, accordingly devoted several pages to extolling the Stella Polaris’s ‘quite remarkable’ comfort, ‘almost glacial cleanliness’ and ‘Jeeves-like standard of courtesy and efficiency’.36
But what had looked set to be a delightful adventure quickly became a nightmare for Shevelyn, who began to feel feverish as soon as they reached Paris. A dose of crème de menthe (unhelpfully suggested by a friend of Evelyn’s) did no good at all and by the time they were in the train heading south she was ‘beginning to feel very ill indeed’, she later recalled.37 In Labels, Evelyn disguised himself and his wife as ‘Geoffrey and Juliet’, the author’s intermittent travelling companions, ‘a rather sweet-looking young English couple – presumably, from the endearments of their conversation, and marked solicitude for each other’s comfort, on their honeymoon, or at any rate recently married. The young man was small and pleasantly dressed and wore a slight, curly moustache [Evelyn had recently grown one in line with his original idea to call his travel book ‘Quest of a Moustache’];38 he was reading a particularly good detective story with apparent intelligence. His wife was huddled in a fur coat in the corner, clearly far from well … Every quarter of an hour or so they said to each other, “Are you quite sure you’re alright darling?” And replied, “Perfectly, really I am. Are you my precious?” But Juliet was far from being all right.’39
As Shevelyn’s condition worsened they eventually moved to a more comfortable carriage – though Evelyn fretted about the expense – and on arrival at Monte Carlo she ‘trudged miserably beside Evelyn through falling snow from hotel to hotel until we found one that would take us in’. Two days later, an English doctor consented to her going aboard the Stella Polaris providing she remained in her bunk, however as soon as the ship slipped out of port she began to cough up blood. By now suffering from double pneumonia and pleurisy (as it was later diagnosed) and unable to sleep because of her cough, it was ‘a horrible voyage’, she recalled, ‘imprisoned in that little cabin with its closed port-hole and dark walls at which I looked for so long’. At Haifa they hired a nurse, ‘a pallid, skinny Israeli who cannot have had much training for all she did was to insist on scraping my tongue with a spoon’. When they reached Port Said she was taken ashore by stretcher ‘looking distressingly like a corpse’,40 and rushed to the British Hospital.
At first it was feared that she might not survive and Evelyn sent a postcard to Pansy Lamb saying that by the time she got it, Shevelyn would probably be dead.41 She did eventually pull through, however, and after ten days she was ‘sitting up in bed knitting and reading and falling deeply in love with her doctor’, Evelyn reported.42
Evelyn visited the hospital every day to read aloud from P. G. Wodehouse but otherwise wrote articles to help defray their escalating expenses, pondered a new novel and disconsolately loitered about the ‘intolerably dull’43 Port Said: ‘This is not the town I should have chosen for a month’s visit,’ he wrote to Henry Yorke. ‘There is one expensive hotel with a jazz band and bugs, innumerable bars where the P & O stewards may be seen getting mildly drunk on Guinness at 2/6 bottle, two brothels, one European one Arab … and this [Union] club whe
re the shipping office clerks attempt to create an Ethel M. Dell garrison life.’44 Occasionally he was entertained by the consul and his ‘harlot’ wife, who led the women guests away after dinner saying, ‘Goodbye darling men. Keep your naughtiest stories for us.’ On another evening at a dance, Evelyn reported, ‘she opened her mouth and invited me to throw sugar into it’.45
Alastair Graham briefly visited from Athens and took Evelyn to Cairo for some ‘varied and vigorous nightlife’; he also gave them £50 so they could ‘struggle along for another week or two’.46 Of the Cairo trip Shevelyn recalled that she ‘didn’t grudge Evelyn the invitation or its acceptance’ but also remarked: ‘I don’t think he would have done that if he’d really loved me, would he?’47*
At the end of March they travelled south to the Pyramids and a two-week stay at the Mena House Hotel, ‘very enormous & hideously expensive but sunny & I think a good place for Evelyn’s recuperation’, Evelyn told Harold Acton. It was a chance too to see the Tutankhamen discoveries, ‘real works of art – of exquisite grace,’ Evelyn reported, ‘just as fine as anything which has survived of Athenian Art’.48
From there they headed to Malta to rejoin the Stella Polaris, Shevelyn by now well enough to organise the ship’s fancy-dress ball, while Evelyn, unlikely as it sounds, joined the onboard Sports Committee, ‘which is very serious indeed’.49 At Athens they saw Alastair Graham and Mark Ogilvie-Grant, and at Constantinople they joined the Sitwells for ‘a brief & rather uneasy luncheon party at the Embassy’.50
Approaching Venice in early May, Evelyn told Harold Acton that it was at last turning into a delightful voyage. ‘Evelyn is growing stronger every day. There is plenty of sun and a calm sea and a very good background of ludicrous fellow travellers to amuse us in between ports. In the Bosporus a Greek tried to seduce first Evelyn & then me & then the bar-steward. Evelyn & I were flattered & delighted but the bar steward furious & the Greek had to leave the ship.’51 As they headed for home (via Barcelona – where Evelyn was dazzled by the buildings of Gaudí – and Lisbon), he reported that they were thinking of ‘taking a minute house & settling somewhere in the country for the summer’, partly on account of being so ‘hideously’ broke but also so that he could get on with writing his new novel, Vile Bodies.52
Although she sequestered herself in the country in later life, Shevelyn cared little for rural seclusion at that time and so was perhaps never especially keen on that idea. The voyage had evidently also gone on too long as far as she was concerned, and towards the end she told a friend that ‘we are getting a little fed-up and shall be glad to get home’.53 In Labels, written after the devastating events of the coming summer, Evelyn described being woken several times in the night by the ship’s foghorn as they neared Harwich, ‘a very dismal sound, premonitory, perhaps, of coming trouble, for Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be happy for very long’.54
When they reached London at the end of May Evelyn’s publisher at Duckworth’s, Tom Balston, confided to Anthony Powell that he thought the Waughs’ marriage seemed strained, although Shevelyn declared herself ‘frightfully well – really much better than before I caught that beastly pneumonia’.55 Having already missed so many parties in the three months they were away, she was loath to go and sequester herself in the country just as the most vibrant London season since the war was reaching its peak.
Thus, as Evelyn soon reported to Henry Yorke, they came to a fateful arrangement whereby she went to live at Canonbury Square, accompanied by her old friend Nancy Mitford, while he went off to write his book in a pub.56 In the meantime they stayed a few days at Underhill and on 5 June Kate Waugh noted innocently in her diary: ‘Evelyns lunched with J Heygate.’
John Heygate had been a friend of both Evelyns since the previous autumn, introduced coincidentally by the same Bobbie Roberts who had brought the Evelyns together at the Ranee’s party. For a time they made ‘such a happy trio’, Heygate later recalled. The slightly louche son of an uncompromisingly conventional Eton housemaster, and heir via his equally strait-laced uncle to an Irish baronetcy and some 5,000 acres in County Londonderry, Heygate also descended through his mother from the diarist John Evelyn, and had very nearly been named Evelyn himself after his distinguished ancestor, which, as his friend Anthony Powell drily remarked would have added an extra layer of confusion to future events.57
Tall, reasonably good-looking, with ‘an easy rather lounging carriage’, as Powell described it, he was reputed to be ‘agreeably successful with women’, albeit ‘well short of being anything like a professional womanizer’.58 He used to say that his chief misfortune was that stupid people thought him intelligent and intelligent people thought him stupid. After Oxford he had gone to Heidelberg to learn German and formed a lasting romantic attachment to that country, but after failing to get into the Diplomatic Service he had suffered a breakdown, possibly exacerbated by his heavy drinking, and began hallucinating that everyone around him in a London club was talking German. By the time he met the Evelyns his troubles were reasonably well hidden – although they would re-emerge later – and he was working as an assistant news editor at the BBC. Evelyn would later describe Heygate as ‘radically contemptible’, however according to Powell he ‘was very much taken’ with him when he first got to know him.59 Shevelyn maintained that she had initially thought Heygate ‘a nice young man but nothing more’.60
While Evelyn took himself off to the Abingdon Arms to write, Heygate was among those entrusted with chaperoning Shevelyn and Nancy Mitford, who recalled a succession of costume balls so endless that ‘we hardly ever saw the light of day, except at dawn’.61 The summer of 1929 was a particularly hectic one for the well-connected partygoers known as the Bright Young People who were about to be definitively satirised in Evelyn’s new novel:
‘Oh Nina, what a lot of parties (… Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies …)
For a time Evelyn’s writing regime worked well, and on 12 June ‘Dragoman’ (his friend Tom Driberg) reported in the Daily Express that he had telegrammed his wife: ‘Novel started splendidly. All characters horribly seasick.’62 By 20 June Evelyn reckoned he had written 25,000 words in ten days. ‘It is rather like P. G. Wodehouse all about bright young people,’ he told Henry Yorke. With Evelyn ‘chained hand and foot’ to his novel, Shevelyn and Heygate came to Beckley to see him and they all went for lunch at the Trout Inn just north of Oxford with Heygate’s girlfriend Eleanor Watts, a twenty-year-old undergraduate at the university. Shortly afterwards Heygate proposed to Eleanor but she was unsure, and when they subsequently went to a party in London – she later recalled that it had been held by Bobbie Roberts, a curiously catalytic figure in the whole Shevelyn story – Heygate got so drunk that Eleanor left without him. Shevelyn was also there and ended up going home with Heygate; they were found together at his basement flat in Cornwall Gardens the next morning by a manservant.63 Shevelyn later recalled that the realisation that she was ‘very seriously in love’ with Heygate came as an ‘emotional thunderbolt’.64
Oblivious of all this and happy with the progress of his novel, Evelyn told Henry Yorke that he was toying with the idea of coming up to London for Bryan and Diana Guinness’s 1860s party on 25 June ‘if I thought there would be anyone who wouldn’t be too much like the characters in my new book’.65 He did not go in the end, but afterwards the indubitably safe Harold Acton thoughtfully reassured him that he had �
�danced blissfully’ with Shevelyn. Later that evening, however, Heygate had taken Shevelyn and Nancy Mitford on to another party aboard the schooner Friendship, moored off Charing Cross pier, where The Tatler inadvertently photographed them lounging on deck in ‘a very amiable position’, as Heygate later described it.66 There was another couple in the foreground yet Heygate was clearly recognisable and Shevelyn, with her back to the camera, could also be identified from the costume in which she had been photographed by Sketch at the Guinnesses’ party.67
The next evening, Thursday, 26 June, Shevelyn and Heygate were both among the guests at a small dinner party held by Tom Balston when Heygate, having been up till dawn the previous night, fell asleep between courses. The day after that they went to Anthony Powell and Constant Lambert’s cocktail party at Tavistock Square. On that occasion Evelyn did travel up from Beckley, however Powell remembered that he and his wife arrived separately, neither of them seemed to enjoy themselves and they left early, together, after what appeared to be a brief altercation between Shevelyn and Heygate. ‘This was the first public occasion when there was a sense of something being wrong between the Waughs,’ wrote Powell. ‘Quite how wrong I did not even then take in.’