Just a few weeks ago, she had said in a television interview: ‘How could I live anywhere else in the world except Ireland.’
Anita apologized to Jane for asking Tarka for money so soon after his daughter’s birth: ‘I really am ready to give T every penny I have but can’t extend an overdraft!’ And to Tarka: ‘It is only the fact that half my income goes to you that has made it difficult for me to pay for the balconies.’ And then the never-ending worry:
I fuss about Glaslough – it seems so far away and such an effort for you to farm and Desmond so difficult and I can well see that Monaghan is a hopeless background for you and Jane – especially not owning the big house which alone made it worth while striving – one will have to see.
This is a new development. Anita, a woman who was often in two minds, now seemed to be wishing for two scenarios; the first was for Tarka to be rid of the Glaslough farmlands, which Anita had bought for him over the years, the second to regain ownership of Castle Leslie. She had never mentioned taking back the castle from Desmond before but she may have felt that the time was now ripe to do so. In 1983 Desmond sold the equestrian centre to Geraldine Bellew, who had been in charge of the stables. The equestrian centre was profitable and looked as though it would become even more successful, so its sale seemed baffling. Desmond’s sympathetic biographer, Robert O’Byrne, suggests that Desmond was simply too worn out to continue to run the business. Helen’s mother had left her a house in the south of France and Desmond spent an increasing amount of time there. When he returned to Castle Leslie, it was to find that dry rot had begun to ruin the main reception rooms, so that he and his family had to live in a small section of the house. Chronically short of money, he sold paintings, land and outbuildings, reducing the value of the estate. This frustrated and saddened his sister. Anita to Tarka: ‘I only wish that I’d either kept the whole show … or moved away. As it is I seem to have tied you and Jane into inexplicable knots for nothing.’ The knots became even more tangled over the next few years as Tarka and the Bellews argued over access rights to various parts of the estate.
The Cleveland Square flat had become a money pit and there was confusion about who should pay the bills for crumbling masonry and faulty appliances. Anita to Tarka on 7 March 1985:
I have paid 3 installments of £1,500 for the balconies. You paid one only (I paid £4,500 and you £1,500). Now who has been paying the electric light and telephone? I have never received any bills – And I don’t want to arrive and find the phone CUT off like last year! And the RATES which are at least £300 are due this month.
She was dismayed that Tarka had employed an expensive builder to make new kitchen cupboards and had installed new telephones, and even more dismayed that he planned to cover the cost of these enterprises by letting the flat. Anita to Tarka: ‘My one extravagance is to pay service charges of £3,200 a year to have somewhere I can leave everything.’ She had planned a long stay in the flat to coincide with the publication of Cousin Randolph at the end of April but, faced with another slew of bills, she had had enough:
I can see that the flat has become too expensive for us to keep without letting and so I will move out FOREVER next winter and leave it to you to do what you like with … I really could not bear to have to keep moving my books and papers to Pentridge – much less all our clothes … The whole point of the place was to have a base in London where one could leave things however grubby it was.
She was at a low ebb that March, unable to shake off a cold that had plagued her for weeks and which looked like stopping her from attending Olivia’s christening. Her dream of the quiet room in which to write seemed to be over, due, like so many other mishaps, to her inability to keep to one plan. She had put the flat in Tarka’s name because, had she herself had a London address, she might have been liable to uk taxation. At the time, it appeared that the flat would still be hers in all but name but before long she assured Tarka and Jane that the flat was theirs, although she never seemed clear about who was supposed to pay the bills. In any case, it seemed that the flat was not an attractive proposition to the rich Americans whom Tarka hoped to attract as tenants. When Bill stayed there during the winter, he noticed the inconvenient kitchen, the malfunctioning radiator, the broken handbasin and filthy lavatory and the bags of builders’ rubble outside the door. He had made things worse one night when he forgot his key: climbing up the scaffolding, which had been erected while repairs to the balconies were carried out, he had broken a window, which had to be boarded up. He suggested to Tarka that it might be better to get the place ‘in first class nick’ before offering it to ‘luxury’ clients.
In April, for the third time that year, Anita wrote a pained letter to her son:
Let me know how much longer I have to send you half my income – or is it for ever? … After Randolph book has come out we’ll see about leaving the flat forever to be let. I don’t want to go to London to see friends if I cannot keep my books and papers there in the same drawers.
And then, in the same letter, as though regretting her snappishness, she said that Jane could borrow the Fitzherbert tiara whenever she wanted to and she wished that she, Anita, could afford to pay for extra help for the new baby. Still at Oranmore at Easter, she wrote sadly to Tarka:
I had half intended to reside permanently in Cleveland Square and change my residence once the battle about my books being tax exempt is over but now I feel maybe that this castle is the best place for me to settle down in … I feel more inclined than ever to leave London for ever and the flat to you to let or not let as you choose.
There was something to be said for remaining at Oranmore. Leonie and Alec’s children, Heather and Cian, often stayed at the castle to be doted on by their grandparents and Margaret Glynn. Leonie and Alec, unlike Tarka, were not a source of financial anxiety. Leonie had her teaching job and had a knack for buying property, including a pub in Galway, which she profitably rented out, and six acres of sheltered woodland, a valuable holding on that wind-battered Atlantic shore. De Danann was now so famous, striking record deals and touring the world, that Anita now referred to it by name. To have continued to call it ‘Alec’s music group’ would have been like calling Mikhail Baryshnikov ‘a dancer’. When Anita had supper with this successful couple there was champagne and smoked salmon from McDonaghs, Galway’s renowned fish shop. The castle was now well heated and, if there were problems with the plumbing or the roof, it was easier to get them fixed than it was at Cleveland Square, where frustrating negotiations with managing agents caused delays.
Bill, who had only a £400 monthly pension, was no help financially. Over the years, he had let Anita take charge of their lives, which left him free to go skiing as often as he could. His boyish charm was irresistible; his boyish irresponsibility less so. Once at Oranmore, he tried to repair a blunted chainsaw without wearing goggles and nearly lost an eye. During the transport strike in Ireland, it was Anita who arranged his passage home by telephoning Dublin Yacht Club and organizing a lift. When Anita came to London to promote her new book, Bill, once again, went skiing. Anita arrived at Cleveland Square in April to discover that some very unlikely items had gone missing. She wrote to Tarka: ‘I got very ill in first night here and looked for the cold compresses left in bathroom – but they’d vanished.’ So had the towel rail, the rubbish bin and, most oddly, the legs from her bed and the frill for it, which she had made herself. Although she had assured Jane that the latter could decorate the flat in any way she liked, Anita criticized the result: ‘Kitchen – I hate it … I can’t bear the cream walls and will paint the colour I most like and always intended … The sofa now looks straight into the mirror – Do take it away. And bring back the small tables.’ It was only a month ago that she had written that, after the summer, she would leave the flat for ever. Her plan to repaint the kitchen walls gives the impression that she may have changed her mind again.
Anita had worked on her biography of Randolph Churchill for two years. It had been such a difficult assi
gnment that she urged Anita Burgh to stick to novels, which the younger writer successfully did. The older Anita swore that her latest book, for which she received an advance of £4000, would be the last biography she wrote. It was but, sadly, not in the way she intended. By the time Anita’s book Cousin Randolph. The Life of Randolph Churchill was published, Brian Roberts’ Randolph. A Study of Churchill’s Son, had already appeared. Randolph’s son Winston, his official biographer, was working on His Father’s Son, which was published in 1997, and wrote stuffily to Anita when she asked if she might quote from Randolph’s letters. Winston had been under the impression that she was writing a personal memoir and was annoyed to learn that she was interviewing the same people as he was. He did give her permission to quote from Randolph’s love letters to Laura Marlborough and Natalie Bevan. But Anita realized that Winston wouldn’t welcome her book and even worse, as she wrote to Roy Miles on the eve of publication: ‘Mary [Soames] wrote me rather sourly about not contacting the family – but honestly Roy I couldn’t – I had to write my own account of Randolph who was very dear to me.’ Roy had wanted to give a launch party at Trevor Square but Anita told him: ‘Much as I love your house and perfect as it is to give a party in – this particular volume is too tricky.’
Randolph Churchill, of whom Noel Coward remarked, ‘Dear Randolph, entirely unspoilt by failure,’ was just Anita’s cup of tea. Like her father, the author of Studies in Sublime Failure and, according to his biographer, somewhat of a sublime failure himself, Anita was fascinated by men who, starting off fabulously, wandered on to an inescapable downward path. Leonard Jerome, Mortal Ruin and now her beloved Randolph with his mingled charm and boorishness and what Elizabeth Paget called his ‘ghastly good looks’. This lovable/detestable man inspired a gripping biography. It also provided a chance to recycle material previously published in her memoirs. So, once again, we have the incident at Blenheim Palace, when Randolph asks the teenage Anita to ‘Clear off. Here’s ten bob’, to leave his path clear for seduction. The footmen in damp white gloves also give a repeat performance, as does Randolph’s championship of the manic depressive Orde Wingate in wartime Egypt.
Anita’s biography was a heaven-sent assignment for Fleet Street’s book reviewers, many of whom had known Randolph, a towering figure among journalists, and were happy to recall their own encounters with him. To M.R.D Foot, writing in Books & Bookmen, Anita had done exactly what she had set out to do: ‘She manages to prove that boaster and failure though he may have been, he was a personality of tremendous force of character and a most loveable man.’ Martin Gilbert, who had worked for Randolph on the official life of his father, wrote in The Sunday Times that the biography ‘has many insights into Randolph’s life’. Gordon Rhodes in the Yorkshire Post: ‘We are won over to her belief that the man had charm – not the practised art of one who knows how to turn it on like a tap, but the childlike appeal of someone whom we have to laugh about even when he is being infuriating.’ Peter Quennell, a friend of Randolph whom Anita had interviewed, wrote in The Sunday Telegraph, which ran two extracts from the book: ‘Altogether Miss Leslie has produced a candid, able, popularly written account.’
Only Alan Watkins in The Listener struck a sour note, pointing out Anita’s lapses of style, with which Harold Harris had long been familiar:
If a name may contain a hyphen but does not, she puts it in and vice versa. She is partial to italicisation and to exclamation marks in a style often described as ‘women’s magazine’, though it refers to a way of writing which went out of these publications about 30 years ago and itself derives from the society remarks, the recollections of a lady of fashion, of the period before 1939.
He criticized Anita’s book for being unreliable, inaccurate and eccentric in her judgements of politics. But he conceded: ‘It may be full of mistakes but it is also full of life … The imaginative sympathy which Miss Leslie shows with Randolph and his work is admirable.’ Anita’s own verdict, given to Harold Harris: ‘That book is full of things i don’t say!’
Following the book’s publication, Anita got pneumonia again and had to cancel an appearance at a Yorkshire Post literary luncheon. Bill came back from his skiing holiday and put an end to too many friends visiting his wife at the same time, which tired her. Seeing how thin she had become prompted her friends to bring food to Cleveland Square: homemade soup and fish from Joe Corvo’s wife, Victoria, a smoked chicken from Jane’s mother. ‘I am still gaga,’ Anita wrote to her daughter-in-law on 19 May but ‘woolly brained’ as she was, she still insisted: ‘The fact that he [Tarka] takes half my income stymies me.’ She was being unfair; she had chosen Tarka’s career path for him, ignoring his reluctance to be part of the ‘Leslie half-world’ and his complaints of feeling as though his feet were set in concrete. Although, in recent years, she had expressed regret at buying him farmland at Glaslough without considering the financial implications, as well as putting his life in danger, she doesn’t seem to have considered pulling out of the estate, freeing her son from the responsibility of farming nine hundred acres in a danger zone and from the frustrating skirmishes with Desmond.
By the beginning of June Anita was on the mend. She attended the private view of an exhibition of portraits at the Mall Galleries, which included a small portrait of her by the Spanish artist Theodore Ramos. It depicts a wispy-haired Anita looking old and ill, but she liked it and planned to commission another portrait by Ramos, in which she would wear a khaki shirt and flashes. She never talked about her war experiences but now, uncharacteristically, she told Jane: ‘I was the only woman in the world to get the Desert Star and the Croix de Guerre.’ Later that summer, Roy Miles visited her at Cleveland Square. Anita sat, exhausted, on a sofa and Bill told Roy that she wasn’t eating. Since their first meeting in 1961, Anita had captivated Roy. She had predicted his future, using a rare old set of Tarot cards, and insisted that he sell his gallery, as she had seen the death card. This persuaded him to sell his Bruton Street premises and operate as an art dealer in a less flamboyant and less stressful way. She had invited him to dinner parties where he had been entertained by three duchesses. She had advised him about his health in letters crammed with oddly placed capital letters and exclamation marks. Now, at what was to be their last meeting, she treated him coldly. She had heard some scurrilous gossip about him and, although he told her it wasn’t true, merely the price of fame, she failed to sympathize. He left Cleveland Square sick at heart.
In September she was back at Oranmore and back at work. She was planning a third memoir, spanning the last thirty-five years and, after that, a novel. She wrote to Tony Whittome: ‘I thought of beginning in 1847 before the Famine and then I can roll on indefinitely incorporating my own family history in modern times.’ The Famine actually began in 1845. She was also trying to help her uncle Lionel write his memoirs. Lionel was a favourite of hers; when she was in Paris as a young girl, he had introduced her to his artistic world and this had led to her writing a biography of Rodin. Anita felt guilty towards her uncle because, when the Sir John Leslie company had been dissolved and Lionel had sold his shares, unlike his older brother Seymour, he had not been rewarded with an apartment at Glaslough. ‘Such an interesting life – but he cannot write and one has to remake every chapter,’ Anita wrote to Tarka, although Lionel was the published author of One Man’s World: A Story of Strange Places and Strange People (1961) and Wilderness Trails in Three Continents (1931).
However hard she worked, her financial worries worsened. In 1985 tax on her American income rose from 500 punts to 700, insurance of 400 punts was due on the Land Rover and refilling the oil tank required 300 punts. She claimed that she would have nothing to spend on Christmas presents, particularly since her income for the year was £18,000 pounds, down on the previous year’s £21,000. ‘I must discuss why?’, she wrote to Tarka, but the labyrinthine complexities of her finances – the American bequest from her late aunt Anne Bourke Cockran, book royalties and horse sales, profits of which were set agains
t the vagaries of the Irish tax system – would flummox the canniest accountant. She had not had a final decision from the Revenue Commissioners regarding the possible tax-exempt status of her books, so she sent a copy of Edwardians in Love to Charles Haughey, now leader of the opposition, with a letter asking him if that was what he meant when he passed the [artists’ exemption] Bill. But, as she explained to Tony Whittome, her timing was off: ‘His yacht struck a rock and sank and after 3 hours on a raft he has not answered me.’ Haughey had had to be rescued off Mizen Head by the Baltimore lifeboat and perhaps was too distracted to read Edwardians in Love, although he would have identified with the luxury-loving adulterers who were its heroes. A frustrated Anita wrote crossly to her son: ‘I want you to understand the situation I am in … When are you likely to be able to pay my tax? Don’t come here – just write the facts.’
Tarka had just returned home to Pentridge from Glaslough, where the price of cattle had gone down and the barley crop had failed. Pentridge was not cheerful either. He wrote to Anita on 30 October: ‘Life here seems to be a state of continuous semi-bedlam.’ The mail had piled up, the house and horses needed attention and the rocking-horse business he had started had Christmas orders that needed to be dealt with. At least the Cleveland Square flat had been rented out for six weeks and he told his mother that ‘the money should help towards something’. No mention of paying her tax bill but an account of a disturbing incident at Glaslough:
I was got out of bed at midnight by the Provos as one had a sick child that had to be got to Dr. Gillespie. We reached his door at 1.15 am. On the way home I was told ‘You are the only man who can drive safely round both sides of the border at this time of night!’ I don’t know whether to be flattered or worried.
Anita could not be distracted from her financial problems. On 2 November she wrote separately to Tarka and Jane. To Jane, she sent receipts of the service charges she had paid and, although she had recently insisted that she would not be returning to the London flat, she scolded:
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