Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  In All Bull B.S. Johnson was to conclude that ‘the Army itself did very well out of National Service’. When the book was published in 1973 I sent a copy to Bernard Fergusson who, as Lord Ballantrae, had recently retired as Governor-General of New Zealand and been appointed Chairman of the British Council. He replied: ‘National Service may or may not have been a good thing for the nation; it was a bloody awful thing for the army… [it] dried up regular recruiting almost entirely: men didn’t want to join something voluntarily when it was compulsory for others.’ He also deplored the amalgamations of the English line regiments and the formation of ‘Big Regiments’ without territorial identity, in the initial stages of which Smout and I had been employed. Then he apologised for this ‘out-pouring’ and thanked me for his ‘honourable mention in dispatches’, adding: ‘You could have had much fun from making me look a real Charlie, instead of just a benevolent old blimp.’

  In 1980 I saw him at one of the Literary Society’s dinners at the Garrick Club. He was then in his seventieth year and his wife had recently died. He looked pale and fragile, a ghost of the terrific brigadier I had known. We laughed over our exploits as a British Don Quixote and Sancho Panza twenty years before on Salisbury Plain. Then he went out into the night, and I read his obituary not long afterwards. I remember him with gratitude as the first person after Peter Spanoghe at Eton to give me genuine encouragement.

  16

  The Third Mrs Nares

  Although the nineteen-fifties was an indecisive decade for me, my mother was making plenty of decisions. One morning while I was still working as an articled clerk in Windsor, she telephoned me to say that she had discovered her husband Edy had been having an affaire with Mrs Hanbury, a tenant on the first floor of Wetherby Gardens. I was surprised by this news and felt curiously disappointed. Frances Hanbury’s husband Ronnie was a writer of radio scripts for a famous comedy team, Ben and Bebe Lyon. I enjoyed these programmes but could never believe that Ronnie Hanbury, a peculiarly unfunny man, had written them. ‘His wife was a voluptuous blonde by daylight,’ Griffy Philipps reminds me. ‘With the benefit of hindsight and having read one or two books by Iris Murdoch, I suspect that Mrs Hanbury was much taken by you… As an Etonian of that era you were alarmed, and took great pains to enter the front door so quietly that Mrs Hanbury would not delay you.’

  It was suddenly clear to me that Griffy’s assiduous reading of contemporary novels, though alerting us to a real drama, had seriously misdirected us as to its plot. It was not for me that Frances Hanbury was waiting, her ears alert for the tell-tale click and muffled crash of the front door, but for my stepfather Edy Fainstain. I had been tiptoeing round the house quite pointlessly. And though I had felt a tremor of alarm at what Griffy insisted were Frances Hanbury’s advances, I now felt deprived by the knowledge that she had no romantic interest in me at all. I could have done with some of her delay.

  ‘What shall I do?’ my mother suddenly asked. She seldom took any action during the nineteen-fifties, however ruinous, without first asking my advice. But it was awkward giving advice over Mr Owen’s telephone in Windsor, with Mr Owen himself standing humbly by me, though his office was packed to the ceiling with valuable precedents. The quality of my advice, its timbre and sheer slowness of delivery, had gained me an odd reputation for maturity. I would pause a good deal and produce a series of noises in my throat that conveyed gravity and experience. My silences, hedged around with an air of pondering wisdom, sounded powerfully deep. When I did speak I used ‘whereas’ and ‘nevertheless’ and ‘on the other hand’ pretty freely. While I was putting on this performance, the other person would usually make it clear what he or she wanted to do – and I would then triumphantly chime in with that conclusion.

  What my mother wanted to do, rather to my surprise, was to divorce Edy and start another chapter in her life. Perhaps it was the presence in Wetherby Gardens of Mrs Lupu Fainstain, clothed in black, that had unsettled her, since Edy felt it right to give his mother priority over his wife in most things. But I suspect that Ulla already had her next chapter sketched in and was eager to get on with it. The decree nisi was granted on 25 January 1955 and made absolute in the second week of March. They had been married almost exactly six years. My mother was now aged thirty-eight.

  While these legal matters were proceeding she took off for Stockholm, arriving back with enough kronor in her handbag to pay for several weeks at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington. This became her habit: vanishing into Sweden during emergencies and then reappearing with these handbags of kronor – until eventually Kaja was to die a poor woman.

  A dozen years after the war people in Britain were just beginning to recover themselves financially in preparation for the good days to come in the nineteen-sixties. But we had gone down too far to recover. Even the richest of us, my Uncle Kenneth who had ‘married money’, left only £45,000 at the end of the nineteen-sixties. The rest of us had become a species of distressed, not-so-gentle folk, downwardly mobile, indeed charging downhill, led nobly by my grandfather. He was to leave £6,000 in the early nineteen-sixties, having been given more than this amount by Kenneth. My mother, it is true, left £40,000 in the mid-nineteen-eighties, but this included Kaja’s estate and the flat in Chelsea I had recently completed buying for her. When I sold the contents of my father’s rented flat in 1988, they fetched less than £50 altogether.

  My mother made two more telephone calls to me at Stuchbery’s that year. One was to tell me that Edy had suddenly died of a heart attack (Griffy wanted to know whether Mrs Hanbury had been with him). I could tell she was genuinely distressed, feeling perhaps a little guilty, at least regretful. Edy died in France. There is no mention of my mother in his Will, and I am surprised to see that he left only £28,000. Some years later, when passing through the South of France, I went to see his gleaming white grave in the cemetery at La Turbie. High in the Alpes Maritimes, overlooking the Mediterranean, such a glorious site I thought was appropriate for a good property owner. And if I could have said this to him, I think I might have heard his gurgling laughter again.

  My mother’s other telephone call was to tell me she was marrying once more. Her third marriage was celebrated at the Chelsea Registry Office on 12 May 1955. She wore ‘a Dior dress of pink and black silk organza and black velvet’ according to the evening newspapers. The marriage was widely covered by the national press and there were also reports of it in Sweden. This was partly because my mother had recently begun modelling clothes for the dress designer Charles Creed, having shown the spring fashions that year for the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers to Queen Soraya of Persia. The marriage was additionally newsworthy because she was marrying the son of a famous actor-manager.

  My new stepfather, David Nares, was a forty-one-year-old advertising executive who managed ‘the Martini contract’ for the Crawford Agency. He was the son of Owen Nares, a celebrated ‘matinée idol’ between the wars, and star of several silent films – melodramas and romances such as The Sorrows of Satan, Young Lochinvar and The Private Life of Don Juan. In his Who’s Who entry, he listed only one son, but there was another, David’s younger brother Geoffrey. He had been homosexual, and died in Cairo from a tumour on the brain during the war. Looking back, it seems clear that David was anxious to suppress a somewhat feminine strain in himself. He liked firing off reverberating letters to the Daily Mail and Sunday Times, calling for a stronger British ‘fighting force’ against the red menace of Soviet Russia, or cursing young people in modern society for expecting something for nothing. ‘Let us roll up our sleeves,’ one of his letters exhorts readers, ‘and get down to hard work.’ He himself was a hard drinker and would sometimes roll up his sleeves at dinner when explaining how alcohol was a necessary solvent in his line of business. This was his third marriage, as well as my mother’s. He had a very pretty daughter, Caroline, who had been distantly educated round Europe and was to be one of the last débutantes presented to the Queen. A picture of my new stepsister
at the front of the Tatler at the age of seventeen shows her already beginning to dress like the Queen Mother, as many young girls with their matching accessories dressed before the nineteen-sixties. Nevertheless, the few times I saw her she appeared so dazzling that I was simply unable to speak, and when she invited me to her coming-out dance, I did not turn up.

  For the first year of their marriage my mother and stepfather lived in Ennismore Gardens, near the Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge (it was the same street in which Edy Fainstain had kept a secret apartment for his meetings with Frances Hanbury). They then moved to Turners Reach House on the Chelsea Embankment. Their ground-floor flat, with its wonderfully theatrical split-level drawing-room looking out on the Thames, was directly below the apartment where George Weidenfeld gave his famous publishing parties, and was itself bought, my mother later told me, by the filmstar Sean Connery. She was entering, she believed, a world of glamour.

  ‘MODEL TO MARRY. SHE WILL BE THE THIRD MRS NARES’ ran a headline the day before my mother’s marriage.

  Ulla Hall is a statuesque blonde from Stockholm in her early thirties who was visiting England just before the war and stayed here. During the war she drove an ambulance. She took up modelling a few years ago and appears regularly in the collections of the Top Twelve.

  According to this Stockholm beauty, who divides her life between the two countries, it is easy for a Swedish girl to model English clothes ‘because we Swedes wear suits and tweedy things like the English women’.

  This girl with her cool Nordic look would be at home practically anywhere. She speaks French, German, Italian and Swedish, and is now learning Spanish.

  Ulla plans to continue modelling after her marriage.

  This article, about a woman who has never been quite ‘at home’ even in her homes, is a good reminder for biographers not to accept newspaper information naïvely, or to rely on sources where the code of ethics forbids the revealing of sources. My mother, who was actually in her thirty-ninth year when she married David Nares, enjoyed a career of three or four years modelling for Charles Creed who had a fashion house behind Harrods, at the opposite end of Basil Street to my grandfather’s Lalique showrooms. There are pictures of her showing clothes to the Royal Family in the nineteen-fifties, and as one of the ‘Twelve Smart Women’ selected to display British haute couture at Lancaster House. ‘The blonde Mrs Nares has a flair for enhancing elegant, classic clothes,’ declared a reporter on the Daily Telegraph, ‘which is why Creed chose her.’ Charles Creed himself claimed that his wife, the fashion editor of Vogue, knew more about the ‘mysterious business’ of women’s clothes than he did. He knew nothing. Though his family had been in tailoring for four generations, you could get more sense on the subject, he would boast, from Crinnie, his small corgi dog. He was buoyantly shallow; never read a book (not even his ghosted autobiography); had no interest in politics or the arts; and listed watching golf and snooker on television as his hobbies. He was very popular.

  After leaving the army, I would occasionally call at Creed’s couture house to collect my mother for lunch at La Vache à la Cave, a few houses along Basil Street, past the beauticians and hairdressers. Creed’s settled belief that fashion ‘always comes round to meet the couturier who refuses to follow it’ was leading him into an unfashionable hinterland from which he never escaped. The waistless, short-skirted line of the nineteen-twenties, which came round again in the nineteen-fifties with its beads and fringes, had little in common with his tailored suits; while the more abandoned styles of the nineteen-sixties were deeply unappealing to him. To my young and partial eye, one reason why my mother modelled so well for him was that she made women in their forties and fifties believe they could look flatteringly young.

  Despite the novelty of this modelling, my mother was not happy in the late nineteen-fifties, and nor was my stepfather. Seeing them together, I could not understand how they had ever wanted to marry one another. Each, I imagine, appeared to offer the other some social advantage. As she glided, glassy-eyed, around the cocktail parties, my mother presented from a distance an image of serene drawing-room credibility. My stepfather, who was anxious to burden himself with the equipage of an English gentleman, gave the impression of being considerably richer than he actually was. Both of them were quickly undeceived.

  I occasionally stayed a few days at Turners Reach House. ‘I don’t want you treating the place like a hotel,’ my stepfather welcomed me. But it was difficult not to do so if, simply by going in and out of the front door, you were judged to be downgrading the house in this way. On the other hand, my stepfather added, it would be a pleasant relief to ‘enjoy some good conversation for a change’. Women, he suspected, were incapable of conversation – certainly my mother was. The sort of newspaper talk that passed for conversation at Chelsea Embankment struck her as intolerably dull. My stepfather liked to ask me, man to man, what I thought of ‘the Cyprus situation’, or the CND march to Aldermaston protesting against the hydrogen bomb; and I was clearing my throat, tilting my head, when suddenly my mother would spring up, switch on the radio, and start whirling round the room clicking her fingers. My stepfather, abandoning Cyprus and the CND, unavailingly called her to heel. Both of them were already fairly drunk, my stepfather having tanked up at various clubs and bars on his way back from the office, and my mother having fortified herself against his homecoming with several secret whiskies. At this stage, my stepfather usually said something offensive about Swedish neutrality in the war, and then announced that he was going to ‘change for dinner’. He would make his way to the bathroom and we heard the splashing of bathwater. Twenty minutes later he would reappear in exactly the same clothes, except for a new white collar above his old striped shirt. Dinner was served by Giacomo, a young Sicilian who later enjoyed an erratic career in the black market. In the belief, apparently, that he was displaying aristocratic manners, my stepfather called my mother ‘Mrs Nares’ over dinner, though at no other time. This struck her as unfriendly and led to an increase in her drinking. When she was drunk, she became extraordinarily silly and fell down a lot before passing out altogether; when he was drunk, my stepfather became aggressive; when I was drunk, I was sick.

  That was how matters usually stood when, at the end of the evening, my stepfather would bang the table with his fist and shout out the word ‘Bed!’ He would do this even when there were guests; or go off to his bedroom and then come back in his pyjamas and dressing-gown to show those who still had their wits about them that it was time to leave. My mother did soon leave.

  It was, I think, sometime in 1957 that she telephoned to ask again for my advice. She had recently been on holiday with Kaja to Baden – or was it Baden-Baden? Anyway, they had been abroad for the sake of the air or water, and my mother had encountered a very polite Viennese gentleman who apparently manufactured everything from ballpoint pens to motorbicycles somewhere in South America. She had often dreamed of travelling to South America and she wanted my advice as to whether she should set off there now. She had a handbag full of Swedish kronor after leaving Kaja which would take care of the fare (her husband, she reminded me, never gave her anything). Egon, her new admirer, had promised to meet her off the plane. He was wealthy, she added, and passed all his summers in Europe, so she would be able to see me each year. Perhaps, when all else failed, I could come over and manufacture motorbicycles myself…

  I replied with one of my profound pauses, made a few gravelly noises in my throat and uttered a perfectly-balanced sentence with a ‘nevertheless’ at its centre. Then we got down to planning her journey. Before she went off to the airport, my mother asked me to draft an explanatory note for ‘your stepfather’. This she copied down, leaving it for him on his return from the office.

  That evening my stepfather telephoned me to say that ‘your mother’ had gone abroad. His voice sounded wobbly, and I went over to see him. This was a different conversation from the ones we usually struck up, and all gentlemanly airs and pretences were shed. My st
epfather was somewhat bald but had a good growth of hair at the sides of his head which he kept tugging until these tufts stood out fantastically over his ears. We drank several tumblers of whisky, man to man, but for once he did not grow aggressive and I was not sick. Eventually he asked me to help him draft a letter to my mother who had left a forwarding address. ‘You’re a writer,’ he said. ‘You can put it on paper.’ This was the first time he had acknowledged my wish to be a writer. Much gratified, I took out my pen, the very pen with which I had recently drafted my mother’s farewell note, and hoping the whisky would inspire me, began writing.

  Some three weeks later I heard from my mother in Acapulco. She had received, she wrote, a very curious letter from ‘your stepfather’ and was wondering how she should reply. Would I help her? I did try to help her. I drafted an answer. So began what, for eighteen months or so, was to be an elaborate international correspondence with myself. I was not really aware of what I was doing, of the irony of what I was doing, as I bent over these letters, acting barrister for, almost being the biographer of both husband and wife. But I did notice that I was beginning to pay myself extravagant compliments – ‘your excellent letter’ and so on.

  While this correspondence was slowly trundling back and forwards (my stepfather did not like wasting money on airmail), and I was still trundling between London and Maidenhead, writing a paragraph or two in one place, crossing them out in the other, I spent two long summer holidays with my mother’s new entourage, moving through Denmark, France, Austria, Germany and Italy. These were extraordinary summers of affluence. A shimmer of sun and beach, the glitter of casino and nightclub, buoyed me up, blinded me, as I floated agreeably off the known map. I hardly knew where I was sometimes. I remember arriving in Vienna and being astonished by how amazingly wet the streets were – before realising I was in Venice. Egon Hessel and his ebullient brother Walter would spend their days in luxuriously carpeted hotels and gorgeous restaurants, their nights at gambling tables and bars – and I went along too.