‘Isn't that rather ridiculous?’ she said.
‘I must be self-supporting. I must keep my self-respect,’ he replied.
For thirty years Alec used Edrington in the same way he had used Underhill: as a handy place to store his clobber. It was never ‘home’ in the fullest, most sentimental sense of the word.
A few months after Joan had acquired Edrington, Alec was back in New York, this time pursuing a ‘very pretty’ twenty-year-old American. Her name was Donita. He had first met her as a schoolgirl and, I think, had previously kissed her mother, Donna. Though bald, small and something of a roué, Alec always scored well with American women. He spoke in a beautiful pure English accent embellished with a gentlemanly stutter for emphasis. The cricket blazers and club ties that he wore – regarded in England as slightly suspect – were, in America, admired as the stamp of the English gentleman. I do not suggest that Uncle Alec was a fraud – he never wore his MCC blazer in England – but his driving ambition was to seduce women, and if that meant dressing and behaving differently in different parts of the world, then so be it. Anyway, Donita fell hook, line and sinker for whatever part he was playing and before anything had advanced beyond the flirtation stage she had agreed to fly with him to a luxury hotel in Miami. That evening Alec knocked priapic on her bedroom door and walked in to see her sitting up in bed wearing a pink-striped dressing-gown. ‘Sorry,’ she explained. ‘I'm having my period.’ Poor Alec had to wait three days before he could consummate the passion.
How do I know such things? Well, my ‘disgusting Uncle Alec’, as Evelyn used to refer to him, was a candid man.
While Alec was abroad, Arthur regularly took the train to visit Joan, often without K, who stayed in London to look after the poodle, which was not welcome at Edrington. Joan and Arthur were very close. ‘My darling old Poppa’, she called him. ‘All my life,’ he wrote to her, ‘I have always wished I had a daughter; but I am sure now that I could never have had a daughter of my body who would have been so kind, so understanding, so companionable as you have been.’ Joan was the ultimate joy among all his ‘surrogate’ daughters, and for that reason Alec was too afraid to admit to his father that what he really wanted was to escape from the marriage.
Back at Midsomer Norton the virgin aunts were either dying off or getting too old and batty to be any fun. Aunt Elsie offered Evelyn and Alec all the family portraits, which, since his mother's death, Arthur had keenly coveted. Now that he knew he would never possess them he wrote to Alec in an effort to swing their distribution favourably:
My dear Billy,
Yes, I believe Aunt Elsie means what she says. Aunt Connie made the same suggestion to me about a fortnight ago. The facts are as follows: –
My father, who had his full share in the Waugh relish in talking about his death and post-mortem arrangements, used to say at frequent intervals, ‘Arthur, you must have the family portraits and the cabinet.’ But, he said nothing about it in his will, and left everything in the house to my mother. She died 15 months later, leaving everything of which she died possessed to her three daughters. There was a slip of paper in her writing saying that I was to have certain things, but it was neither dated nor signed. So it had no legal authority whatever.
Immediately after the death of her parents, Aunt Elsie developed a vindictive and bloodthirsty clutch upon all of the family possessions. She was unpardonably rude to Mother about it; and, in fact, burst out into hysterical fits, whenever anything was said about plate, glass, pictures, furniture, or any property in the house or grounds. The situation was so revolting that I vowed that never under
any condition would I claim anything at Norton, or regard myself as having any stake in the place again. Believe me, it was the only possible thing to do.
Now that the portraits are peeling and some money has to be spent on them, Elsie changes front… But Elsie had better think carefully before making you the offer; for I feel sure that, when once the walls are bare, she will miss them very much. In fact I don't think she has counted the cost to her virulent possessiveness.
However, that is not your concern, or Evelyns or mine. They have made you the offer; and, if you and Joan care for the portraits (and if I were in your place, I should care for them very much), I should certainly accept it. But I hope you wont give Evelyn first pick. I should like you to have first pick of one picture, then Evelyn the next and so on…
Alec was the opposite of Aunt Elsie: possessions meant little to him. He liked travelling and he liked girls. His brother, however, liked things. In the end Evelyn got more than his fair share of the Norton booty.
As Alec travelled round the world he knew that in every port a letter would await him from Arthur – affectionate messages of goodwill, with family gossip, review cuttings, compliments on his last book, encouragement for his next. Contrary to popular opinion, Arthur believed that his elder son was as important a writer as Evelyn, and he never wavered from this opinion. Alec, however, was under no illusion. He was well aware, long before he married Joan, that he was never going to be the ‘great’ writer and he knew, from the moment Evelyn published Decline and Fall, that his younger brother was in a different class but, like all true Waughs, he never repined. ‘I have no illusions about the quality of my work,’ he once wrote. ‘I know myself to be a very minor writer.’ He took pride in the workmanship of some of his novels and was aware that others among them were painfully second-rate. After publication of Going Their Own Ways, one of his sloppiest literary efforts, he snapped at Arthur's friendly encouragement. Instantly he regretted it: his father was still his lodestone and his most valued critic. Evelyn was patronising, Joan was uninterested, K found his books ‘too sexual’. In the trough of professional despair, he started to believe that his novels were of interest to no one except his father. In writing to Arthur aboard the Canadian Steamship Lady Nelson as it sailed past Bermuda, Alec revealed the early stages of an unease that led him later to the brink of suicide:
My dear Father,
No sooner had I posted that last letter to you than I thought ‘How ungrateful that must sound for the nice things you said about Going Their Own Ways’ – and I hadn't meant to be: for I was so pleased by them and did appreciate them, and it means a great deal to me that you should still be able to take pleasure in the work that all those years ago you started upon its course. I hadn't meant to be casual. Your letter – and your having gone out on that Sunday morning to see if the Observer had reviewed it – touched me deeply. It's just that I'm despondent about it all – and I guess that will pass.
As always Billy
By January 1938 he and Joan had physically and emotionally drifted apart from one another, but she wanted another child. That month, she and Alec set off on holiday to Morocco with the specific intention of conceiving it and nine months later their second son, Peter, was born.
On 17 April 1937 Evelyn married my grandmother. She was upper-class, a niece of Lady Burghclere who had died three years earlier, and the daughter of a dashing soldier and Balkan explorer whose father was Lord Carnarvon. They lived at Pixton Park, a slightly dilapidated fifty-four-room mansion set on a hill in the wild Exmoor countryside above Dulverton in Somerset. Her name was Laura Herbert. She died when I was young but I tweely conceive that she and I had, in our brief knowledge of one another, a particular bond based upon our shared fondness for cows. At the end of her life Granny lived with us in ‘The Wing’ at Combe Florey, and every Saturday morning she and I went together to the cattle auction in Taunton. She held her trousers up with binder-twine, and I copied this. We were both at our happiest amid the mooing, bleating, pastoral whiffs and rustic tones of the Taunton cattle market. I once found a rubber milking teat lying in a field and put my penis into it in a bid to be funny. Alas, a red ant that lived inside it, resenting the intrusion, bit me. In tears I showed my rash to Granny. She looked at my swollen organ for a moment in silence. ‘Not very nice!’ she said at last, rolling her r in heavy gravitas. They were the most c
omforting words I think I had ever heard. I miss her very much. But I am jumping ahead…
Evelyn and Laura's courtship had started in 1935. He knew when he converted to the Catholic faith that he would probably never be allowed to marry again as long as She-Evelyn remained alive. In the meantime he had proposed in vain to one nice lady and nearly impregnated another. When he heard that the latter might have his child he wrote in his diary, ‘I don't care either way really, so long as it is a boy,’ and a few days later, when she had got the all-clear, ‘She says she is not going to have a baby, so all that is bogus.’
When Evelyn realised that the Catholics had left a loophole that provided, under certain strict conditions, for a previous marriage to be nullified,1 he presented the Church with the plea that he and Evelyn Gardner had entered into their marriage on the understanding that if anything went awry they would divorce. The Curia, or Papal Court, accepted their argument and granted them an annulment on 4 July 1936.2 For Evelyn it was the end of a sorry process that had dragged on for several years. Laura was prepared to wait, but at times the wait seemed interminable. Five months before the annulment was granted he had written Laura a frank and eccentric proposal of marriage. He was thirty-two at the time, a famous novelist and a man of the world; she was a modest, shy nineteen-year old virgin:
Tell you what you might do while you are alone at Pixton. You might think about me a bit & whether, if those wop priests ever come to a decent decision, you could bear the idea of marrying me. Of course you haven't got to decide, but think about it. I cant advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you, but think how nice it would be for me. I am restless & moody and misanthropic & lazy & have no money except what I earn and if I got ill you would starve. In fact it's a lousy proposition. On the other hand I think I could reform & become quite strict about not getting drunk and I am pretty sure I should be faithful. Also there is always a fair chance that there will be another bigger economic crash in which case if you had married a nobleman with a great house you might find yourself starving, while I am very clever and could probably earn a living of some sort somewhere. Also though you would be taking on an elderly buffer, I am one without fixed habits. You wouldn't find yourself confined to any particular place or group. Also I have practically no living relatives except one brother whom I scarcely know. You would not find yourself involved in a large family & all their rows & you would not be patronised & interfered with by odious sisters-in-law & aunts as often happens. All these are very small advantages compared with the awful-ness of my character. I have always tried to be nice to you and you may have got it into your head that I am nice really, but that is all rot. It is only to you & for you. I am jealous & impatient – but there is no point in going into a whole list of my vices. You are a critical girl and I've no doubt that you know them all and a great many I don't
know myself. But the point I wanted to make is that if you marry most people, you are marrying a great number of objects & other people as well, well if you marry me there is nothing else involved, and that is an advantage as well as a disadvantage. My only tie of any kind is my work. That means that for several months each year we shall have to separate or you would have to share some very lonely place with me. But apart from that we could do what we liked and go where we liked – and if you married a soldier or stockbroker or member of parliament or master of hounds you would be more tied. When I tell my friends that I am in love with a girl of 19 they look shocked and say ‘wretched child’ but I don't look on you as very young even in your beauty and I don't think there is any sense in the line that you cannot possibly commit yourself to a decision that affects your whole life for years yet. But anyway there is no point in your deciding or even answering. I may never get free of your cousin Evelyn. Above all things, darling, don't fret at all. But just turn the matter over in your dear head.
The courtship had been going for nearly two years, yet Laura had never been introduced to Arthur or K. She was extraordinarily incurious, and I doubt she had asked Evelyn if he had any parents let alone what they were like; in any case, Evelyn was in no hurry to draw them in. By the spring of 1936 the pair had agreed to be married in a pact between themselves. It was not, at that stage, an official engagement.
Laura's father had died when she was a child and her mother, Mary Herbert, now in sole charge, had virulent objections to the union, which were entirely snobbish. Many grand men had sought Laura's hand. Evelyn Waugh, though clever, famous and socially as well – if not better – connected than the Herberts, was not one of them. Mary Herbert thought her prospective son-in-law was a ‘common little man’, an arriviste who had already left a bad smell in the family with his failed marriage to her niece Evelyn Gardner. But Laura, in an uncharacteristic mood of rebellion, was flatly determined to marry him and nothing would sway her to the contrary. In the end Mary Herbert, like Lady Burghclere a few years earlier, had no choice but to concede.
On 23 September, K in Highgate telephoned Alec to discover that Joan had received a letter from Evelyn announcing his engagement. Arthur moaned into his diary: ‘But he has not written to us!’ A week later K received a letter from Evelyn announcing that the wedding would most likely take place in February. Still Arthur had not been personally apprised and, as head of the family, was starting to feel hurt. In a short letter of congratulation he hinted, in the martyrish tone Evelyn loathed, that he was upset to be the last person informed of the good news. By way of excuse, Evelyn claimed that he had only just received the nod from the Catholic Church – in fact it had come four months earlier – and his future mother-in-law's withholding of her approval had delayed everything. Perhaps he did not want to involve Arthur in another snobbish, humiliating wrangle with yet another redoubtable Herbert matriarch.
My dear Father,
I hope that you did not think it unfilial to delay telling you of my engagement until it was settled. I know that you easily become anxious, and for the last two or three years there have been many causes for anxiety about the decision of the Curia. The case was only finally sealed and signed about two days ago [sic]. For various reasons Mary Herbert does not want the engagement announced until the end of December. However, everyone is now so far in agreement that it can be known within the family & I wrote to Joan and my mother – meaning of course that a letter should reach you too. Thank you very much for your kind wishes. I have sent your letter on to Laura. I know she will join me in gratitude.
She is very young, very thin, rather poor, dead silent, long nosed, laudably devoid of literary, artistic or social ambition, lazy, affectionate, timid, ignorant. I will bring her to see you at the first opportunity. Probably to
dinner one evening next week, when I hope to be in London. She is the youngest daughter of Aubrey Herbert of whom you probably know more than I do. I gather he was a popular and prominent figure in his day. Her mother is a sporting Irishwoman with an interest in foreign politics. I can't hope that you will find much in common with her.
I shall never find a more suitable home than the one at Nunney (do you know it? The old Manor House was a farm, dilapidated but full of magic architectural features) but it is still doubtful – rather improbable – that I'll get it from the present owner, a homicidal squireen named Major Shore.
Yours affectionately Evelyn
The first meeting between Laura and the Waughs took place over dinner in Highgate on 6 October and went with a bang. In his diary Arthur wrote, ‘Great preparations for Evelyn and Laura. The evening was delightful. She behaved charmingly; he was at his best and the dinner was good.’ And on the next evening: ‘K and I had a pleasant talk over dinner about our happy evening with Evelyn and Laura. I was very glad to see K so happy. By last post a little note came to K from Laura, thanking us for being “so sweet” which sent us to bed happier still.’
Two months later the engagement was official. K had offered the happy couple as a wedding present a little mahogany bureau of great sentimental value to herself, but Ar
thur was still dithering over what to give. In the end he settled for five pieces of silver and a small cheque. Evelyn wrote to Laura:
My papa says will we come and choose a bit of silver from what he has left of his grandfather's wrapped up in a flannel under his bed. Also he will give us £25 to buy ‘something definite and lasting – to remind you of me’. I think that's decent considering his reduced circumstances and the fact that he forked out handsomely for my mock
marriage some years back. So what would you like?… Will you choose? Now I will write my Nash's article. All love E.
Two days after Arthur had sent the money to Evelyn he learned that Laura's grandmother had given them £4000 and that Evelyn had a £1000 cheque for a ‘film scenario’ in his pocket.
The wedding ceremony, which took place at a gloomy Catholic church in Warwick Street, London went off without a hitch. The congregation consisted of many grandees from Laura's side of the family and a handful of Waughs. The service was followed by a crowded reception that was all over by one o'clock. Arthur went home for brown bread and cheese having enjoyed a ‘capital morning’. He was particularly pleased when Alec rang to say that he had enjoyed the wedding too.
But Arthur's happiness was not destined to continue long beyond that day, for he soon came to realise that he did not especially like his new daughter-in law. He found her distant, impenetrable, enigmatic and disappointing. She, in turn, was unimpressed by his flamboyant performances. An interviewer who came to Highgate to write about Arthur for a series called Publishers in Person recorded in that ‘cosy abode of books, manuscripts, pleasant chintzes a modern incarnation of Mr Pickwick. He had twinkling eyes, rosy cheeks, silky white hair and a pleasantly rotund figure’, but none of it worked on Laura. Soon her mind would be focused on cows and only cows. As Evelyn's letter to Arthur had warned, she was not impressed by other people, no matter who they were. As a literary man Arthur was appalled by the vapidity of her letters. To Joan, he wrote: ‘Certainly my two daughter sin law write very differently, and have very different temperaments. I shall never be able to make anything of Laura. We live in other worlds and talk another language. But I miss nothing. I find everything I want in Joan, the daughter of my heart.’
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