Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  That was how life had treated those delicious Corbet girls who, in my grandfather’s eyes, appeared to possess the very secret of happiness.

  Fraser had attempted to shield Adeline from such disasters. Perhaps he had shielded her too much. Was there some extra apprehension that called forth his protection – a fear of the unknown, untreatable by her doctors? So much was unknown to Adeline. She had learnt little at school and little from her married life. No one had really bothered to teach her anything, and her imagination never came alive except when sensing danger. The world was teeming with danger: a shopping trip to London, a matinée in the theatre, lunch at a restaurant – all had their risks. Being uncertain of so much, she pretended and was perceived as being pretentious. She did not really love anyone, was loved neither by her husband nor her children, and never realised what was lacking or how she might attract it. All she knew, as she went on with her bridge parties each week and giving attention to her dogs, was that life had turned out a disappointment.

  Adeline and Fraser had been together for over a quarter-of-a-century, and perhaps theirs was no worse than many marriages. People did not get divorced so easily then. But the times were changing. They were to change for Fraser and Adeline after the General Strike of 1926.

  *

  After the war my grandfather used to be driven by Thatcher in his Lancia each day from Maidenhead up to Basil Street in Knightsbridge. Passing through Hammersmith in the second week of May 1926, he told his chauffeur to stop the car and give a lift to a woman who was standing on the pavement – many people were giving lifts during the General Strike. As a courteous gentleman Fraser must have thought it his duty to help this voluptuous-looking, well-dressed young woman in distress, with her fine eyes, full lips and welcoming smile. It was the very least he could do – indeed he desired to do more. In the car, they got talking and by the time they reached their destination in the West End they found that they had not exhausted all they had to say to each other. So they arranged to meet that evening and continue their conversation…

  The lady’s name was Agnes May Babb. She was thirty years old – that is twenty years younger than my grandfather – though she admitted to being only in her late twenties. And she was married – in fact had already been twice married, though it seems unlikely that my grandfather knew this. Agnes May’s first husband had been a young accountant called William Reynolds Lisle. He was made a Second Lieutenant in a London regiment shortly before she married him in 1916. Both of them gave their address as Rose Cottage, Barrow Green Lane, Oxted, in Surrey. He was the son of a solicitor (who had recently died leaving him a nice inheritance) and, on the marriage certificate, she agreed that her father too had been a solicitor, and was also dead.

  Rather curiously she gave her Christian names as ‘Maimie Archie’ – almost as if she had not been quite sober at the time. But that perhaps was understandable as her husband was off to fight in the war. Against the odds, Second Lieutenant Lisle survived the war. In his petition for a divorce, which came to court towards the end of 1919 and was made absolute on 19 July 1920, his wife’s name is correctly given and she is cited as respondent. But there is no co-respondent which suggests that she deserted him almost immediately after the marriage.

  Then she went up a couple of ranks. Eleven days after her divorce came through she married Thomas George Symonds Babb, a thirty-three-year-old, previously-unmarried Captain in the Royal Engineers. Both gave their address as 187 Ladbroke Grove, a large late-Victorian terraced house some three hundred yards from where I am writing this book.

  Thomas Babb was the son of a hotel proprietor in Minehead, and on the marriage certificate Agnes May agreed that her father too had been a hotel proprietor. As soon as they married they left London, but six years later she is separated from her husband and back in London, standing on the pavement in Hammersmith, waiting for a lift.

  How much of this past history my grandfather got to know I cannot tell. Certainly Agnes May’s two husbands were not meant to find out that she was the daughter of a humble glass-grinder, Joseph Bickerstaff, from St Helens in Lancashire – her sophisticated voice showed little trace of a north country accent. She was unlike any other woman my grandfather had known, a fast smart modern woman of the nineteen-twenties as thrilling to him as the Corbet sisters had been thirty years ago in Ireland. He quickly became infatuated with her. But what was he to do?

  What he did shocked everyone – it was so dramatically out of character. He left home and put himself up at the Royal Automobile Club’s palatial Edwardian hotel-and-headquarters in Pall Mall (sometimes called ‘the Chauffeurs’ Arms’ by members of senior clubs). And he bought a twenty-one-year lease on an apartment a few hundred yards away in Piccadilly into which Agnes May moved in the summer of 1927. From the second floor of Berkeley House, 81 Piccadilly, on the opposite side of the road from the Ritz Hotel and not far from Lord Palmerston’s old house, her rooms looked pleasantly across Green Park towards Buckingham Palace. The yearly rent of this love nest was £1,250 – equivalent to no more than £40,000 a year in the late nineteen-nineties.

  But this was not my grandfather’s only fresh expenditure. He had to make separate provisions for his wife and children. This he attempted to do by means of a legal arrangement, the trustees of which were his old friends ‘Nipper’ Anderson (who had of course been married to Adeline’s sister Alice) and his partner in the tea business, Richard Magor, whose father had befriended Fraser’s father in India.

  It was on his ‘Indian fortune’ that Fraser was relying to support his new way of life. From 1 July 1927 he covenants to pay his trustees, for the rest of his life, one-half of his income from the Rajmai Tea Company for the benefit of his wife and three children. Rajmai Tea shares are not the sort of happy-go-lucky shares that are bought and sold by anyone and everyone on the open market – the sort of shares from which Lowenfelt made his dubious profits for the Investment Registry. On the contrary, they were shares in a private company, reliable shares owned by one or two families and their loyal friends that had the same nominal value of £10 a share as they had when Major-General Charles Holroyd listed them among his assets in the previous century. Of course, if they somehow did make their way on to the Stock Exchange, there is every reason to feel that by now they would fetch considerably more than £10 apiece. But there is no need for them to be traded in that fashion: they are rock solid, part of Britain’s undented tradition. The nominal value of Fraser’s shares is a little under £30,000. But their true worth is incalculable. They are, in the Holroyd family’s legend, priceless, invaluable, beyond dreams.

  Apart from this income Fraser allows Adeline and their children the occupation of Brocket and the use of its contents. In the event of his death there are binding guarantees reaching into the next generation. But he retains the right to sell his Rajmai Tea shares if ‘he shall in his absolute discretion think fit’, then reinvest his fortune and divide the renewed income in the same proportions.

  My grandmother made it clear that she would never consent to a divorce. After all, she was an Irish Catholic and knew her rights and duties, knew what was proper, knew that the shock of it all would kill her and that her husband would forever have it on his conscience. But that Fraser, who for thirty years had given every appearance of being ruled by conscience, could so far have forgotten himself flabbergasted her. She had thought him such a safe pair of hands. She did not keep quiet about the catastrophe. She told everyone. She wrote letters to Ireland and Australia; and she made terrific and terrible scenes in Maidenhead. Everyone at Brocket was familiar with her ascending Hail Marys, her dramatic pleas for wingèd death to carry her off; but their repetition and the increase in their volume chaffed at the children’s embarrassment. They wished she would shut up, though reluctantly recognising that this time she had some justification.

  Yolande, Kenneth and Basil all preferred their father to their mother. His was the more sympathetic presence, and yet they were not really close to him. ‘He is not
of a nature to confide in others, & keeps his feelings to himself,’ his own father had written to Oscar Browning, and that was how he remained. The Archbishop of Canterbury was soon to announce his approval of free sexual discussion. But such a thing was absolutely impossible for my grandfather and his children. The only intimacy they really shared was one of English awkwardness. Yolande, Kenneth and Basil were in their early twenties, easily shocked, quick to judgement. ‘We were horrified by the slur cast on the family name,’ my father wrote in the fragment of his account. ‘How could we ever hold up our heads again? How could he have done it?’

  It seems that Fraser told them almost nothing, that he could not bring himself to speak of such things, could not even bear to see his children. They were left in a vacuum. ‘We cannot judge a man,’ one of Yolande’s friends wrote to her, ‘as their temperaments & everything are so different from ours & they do things hastily.’ Among the family at large there was general incredulity. ‘I’m absolutely lost for words to say about Uncle Joshie,’ wrote a cousin from Australia. ‘It all sounds to me like a dream as Uncle Josh was the one man in the world that I believed in… I think that temporally he must be unbalanced and that sooner or later he will realise the great mistake he is making… he was such a model I simply can’t convince myself that it is true. If my own father left, heavens I would be singing a hymn of thanksgiving...’ But none of Fraser’s children were thankful he had left. And none of them seemed capable of understanding what had happened.

  Except for the allusive couple of pages my father wrote fifty years later and a strange legal document, there was nothing to mark or record the break-up of the marriage. The few photograph albums among my Aunt Yolande’s possessions suggest an uninterrupted passage of smiling summer holidays. There are groups of the family with dogs and tennis rackets at Brocket; and snaps taken on trips to Greece, Turkey and Sicily – the Acropolis at Athens, the Sancta Sophia and Blue Mosque at Constantinople, the Chapel of the Royal Palace and the Monreale Monastery at Palermo, all visited in 1927. But mostly there are holiday shots of Yolande in the South of France: at Antibes in 1928; Juan-les-Pins and Cap Ferrat in 1929; Monte Carlo between 1930 and 1932. There she is sunbathing and picnicking on the beach. I am astonished to see her water-skiing behind speedy motor-boats. She still takes almost as good a photograph as she did when she was a precocious child, and she looks happy with her friends Cathie and Cynthia and Freda, though this is the period of her father’s decampment. Clearly these holidays, longer and more luxurious than at any other time, are designed as an escape from this distressful family break-up. In the background occasionally, and sometimes in a group posed on deckchairs, Adeline appears; but of course Fraser is never to be seen, nor are Kenneth and Basil often there. They have their own friends elsewhere, and besides they are now directors of the famous Lalique enterprise on which the family fortunes, including the continuation of these holidays abroad, will depend. Apparently it does not occur to them that their father’s change of business life may be part of his emotional and sexual change of life. They do not see the disposal of the Rajmai Tea shares as a letting-go of his family past, or the purchase of Lalique glass as his embracing of Agnes May’s contemporary glamour. But then they do not know that Agnes May’s father had been a glass-grinder.

  Kenneth and Basil themselves kept almost nothing from their past, and among Yolande’s three or four cardboard boxes there is little except the photograph albums of people and dogs – the people, if not the dogs, usually unidentified. There are a few papers, but they are mainly notes for the milkman, old cheques for tiny sums, reminders from the Eastbourne Mutual Building Society, a newspaper cutting on ‘the ABC of Purchase Tax’, a receipt for shoe repairs (3s 6d) and an advertisement recommending analgesic tablets. Some of these items are stuffed into a torn and ragged evening bag of soft red morocco. There are several old letters too, among which is the one already quoted, from a cousin in Australia, dated 20 December 1926, expressing amazement at Uncle Joshie’s temporary madness. Otherwise the creased and faded bits and pieces belong to later years. But in the lining of this dilapidated red bag I find three or four extra papers that cannot have seen the light for more than half-a-century. One is apparently in code. It is scribbled in pencil and difficult to make out even with a magnifying glass in sharp light. I call in a second opinion, my wife’s. As part of her biography of Angus Wilson, she has been doing research on the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and after a few minutes she solves the puzzle. We are reading a special recipe for de-worming dogs. The other pages come from three short letters written by Fraser and sent to Yolande from the Royal Automobile Club in October and November 1926.

  My grandfather’s handwriting has not altered greatly since he wrote the only other letter I have seen – to Oscar Browning in 1895 – which is in the library at King’s College, Cambridge. He has a clear, handsome, flowing hand with, nevertheless, the odd word regularly crossed out. The first letter is simply a note to be delivered by hand:

  I have been very seriously ill and am not yet in a condition to stand further worry.

  With all my love

  ever yr fond & devoted Dad.

  This serious illness, whatever its exact nature, recalls his breakdown at Cambridge. The other two notes his daughter kept are also written from the RAC apparently one month later, and both are incomplete. The shorter of them concerns some money for Yolande’s wedding. ‘I enclose a cheque value £20 to pay for your wedding clothes,’ he writes. ‘Early next month £175 [£150 has been crossed out] will be paid into your a/c making £275 since last June.’ This amount (equivalent over six months to £8,000 in the late nineteen-nineties, or presumably £16,000 a year) is an allowance the details of which, her father adds, can be better explained by a Peter Rawlins of 45 King William Street, London Bridge. The handsome Peter Rawlins had been an admirer of Yolande’s Aunt Lannie in the days before she went to Australia. So Fraser is keeping everything, as it were, in the family. Yolande has evidently been sending letters to her father at the RAC, and eventually he agrees to see her. He also agrees that, as a wedding gift, ‘you can certainly have a piece of Lalique’. The note ends at the foot of the page without a signature. ‘My love and affection for you have not changed & I am not the character some may wish you to believe.’

  Perhaps the separation between husband and wife had been too long postponed. In any event it seems to have been peculiarly bitter, and whereas the unpleasantness of it all paralysed Fraser, it released a hailstorm of recrimination from Adeline. Her husband is now a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The children cannot credit this. Certainly they do not want to, but they do not know what to believe. The worst that can be said of him, they think, is that he is weak. For years they have seen how weak he has been with their mother. Is he now being weak with another woman?

  Yolande’s pressing letters to her father are obviously not unsympathetic but they express her bewilderment. What were the facts? Surely it must be possible to put everything right by a family discussion about it all? Fraser’s last note is his reply to this suggestion.

  Discussions more especially on subjects where I am unable to make concessions are distressing, & when I know that your minds have been poisoned by misrepresentation & the withholding of important facts.

  I am grieved that you have felt the strain of the position – your letters were greatly appreciated – but because I am not for the moment able to confide in you please trust me & do not believe all you hear. Time will I am sure show that your belief in me is not misplaced & this will I hope repay you for the sorrow you have suffered.

  I have been wronged for years and it was only my love for you three children which enabled me to endure so long.

  You are & will always be in my thoughts – I have no wish to ostracise…

  And there the letter stops. There is no mention of the woman in the case. Perhaps, by staying at the Royal Automobile Club, Fraser was concealing her presence in his life for as long as possible. But by the early summer
of 1927, after he bought her the flat in Piccadilly and made his legal Settlement with Adeline and his family, the truth must have been known to them all. It was the old story. Adeline was aged fifty and Agnes May thirty. Adeline had given birth to four children; Agnes May apparently had no children. She was a glaringly attractive woman – an expensive tart, my father irritably thought when he eventually met her, whom Fraser insisted on treating as a great lady. But she was also sympathetic and understanding, sexy and loving to Fraser who believed that Adeline’s loveless complaints over the years had worn away all good feeling and were the real cause of their failed marriage. At any rate, he could stand no more. He had that special sensitivity to women that some men whose mothers die early retain all their lives. The fact that his mother had killed herself may have acted on him as an inhibition – though I do not know whether he was ever told that she had killed herself. In any event, his need had grown so acute through neglect that he was driven to actions which people who thought they knew him found incredible.