All your own doing.
Cranking up the pain, Alan had a fling with Cyril’s ex-wife Barbara, who was now unhappily married to George Weidenfeld. Not entirely justifiably, Cyril was outraged. Worse, he tried to involve Jennifer in preventing it, accusing Alan of ‘plotting alibis with her [Barbara], all the James Bond stuff’. The two men fell out, not for the last time, over a woman (‘The moral of all this is Fuck Women!’ wrote Alan in reply).437 Another of Alan’s dalliances was with Deirdre Craven, a beautiful, blonde, married, much younger woman, who would go on to marry Cyril in 1959 and bear him two children, Cressida and Matthew. The cross-cutting stresses might have prevented friendship for others, but Cyril and Deirdre lived in Sussex and were among the most regular visitors to Clayton, the legacies of the past forgotten or swallowed along with stiff drinks before Sunday lunch. Jennifer was asked to be godmother to Matthew (along with John Betjeman and Diana Cooper), and became lifelong friends with Cressida, who exhibited her father’s intelligent wit and charm from a precocious age. But the shifting sands of her marriage had an effect on Jennifer. Indeed it was Deirdre who noted a transformation, particularly after Jennifer dyed her hair in the early 1960s, when she went from an energetic, dark-haired person to a blonde who sat, Alathea-like, on the sofa in the drawing room she had filled with pretty Victorian knick-knacks.438
The merry-go-round of love had not been stopped by the war and the intricate patterns of marriage, betrayal, compromise, reconciliation and separation continued within a remarkably tight-knit social group. Many of Jennifer’s friends, like Cyril or Cecil, also knew Robert and had known Gerald. And if it had seemed that Alan was from a different milieu to Faringdon society, life with him was equally complex. Later, Jennifer tried to analyse the similarities between herself and her second husband in terms of their sexuality: ‘Alan said he was a hustler once. So was I – he did it for money probably. I did it for fun and revenge. His father and grandfather were Evangelist preachers. Mine were Quakers. And we both had to break away. Differently – but the same.’439 It appeared that part of what brought them together also drove them apart. Jennifer would describe Mickey as ‘the love of my life’, and while their relationship was always fitted into the interstices, she found solace with him when Alan’s rejections became too painful.
Although Alan had more worldly success than Jennifer, he had had several severe bouts of depression that he linked directly to his horrifying experiences during the war. Jennifer thought their source, at least in part, might be the guilt he felt about how he had been so blatant with his extra-marital relationships. Alan was hospitalised and received electric-shock treatment, while Jennifer remained loyally by his side – an experience she again made notes on, writing in the third person: ‘Winter of snow and loneliness and journeys to nursing home through snow. Utterly alone, pitied by friends. Husband recovers and leads active work travel life – including more flaunting affairs. Never tells but friends do. Unable to make much of her life. Living in two places with man she has no mutual life with is nearly killing her.’
Some observers believed that Alan used Jennifer’s wealth and that he would have left her long before he eventually did if it hadn’t been for that factor. She never mentioned this aspect of their relationship, but later, she did write a passage that was probably never given to Alan, but shows she was far from naive about the issues:
Tonight when you talked about being anti Arts Council Grants, you didn’t seem to realise that I am now your Grant, enabling you to live in comfort in two houses, with no responsibilities, telling me perpetually that I do nothing, when I could give you a very long list of what I do to make your life comfortable, whereas you do next to nothing for me.
You don’t understand my emotional needs – for affection, talk of subjects that I am interested in. Of course I know your flawed childhood, your war life – but who in a way hasn’t suffered? I think you are selfish, inconsiderate and would have gone some years ago if it hadn’t been for many things better not put in writing. I also have great admiration for you – and affection as well as the opposite.
Quoting Maria Callas (whom she loved), Jennifer finishes the unsent letter: ‘Communication is the most important thing in life – it is what makes the human predicament bearable.’
N 1950, WHEN VICTORIA was five, Jennifer sent her to Lady Eden’s School for Girls, an exclusive institution in South Kensington which prioritised dance and the arts and mixed old-fashioned formality with a cosy homeliness. It was run by the sister-in-law of the Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, and pupils were dressed in checked pinafores with frills and tweed coats with velvet collars, and curtsied to their teachers. Victoria loved ballet, acting and poetry and was generally good at lessons; she skipped a year to be in an older class. However, she often had minor illnesses and Jennifer indulged her daughter by allowing her to miss school if she claimed to feel unwell.
During the school holidays Victoria always visited Faringdon. At a young age she was accompanied by Mardie, but later, when she was a bit older, she went alone or with her best friend, and was cared for by Mrs Shury, the affable wife of Robert’s groom. ‘Robert tried terribly hard,’ remembered Victoria, regretting that his efforts didn’t help make a connection between them. ‘He organised parties and invited friends.’ But none of this made them close. She came to agree with a doctor friend of Robert’s who, many years later, told her that her father was ‘emotionally autistic’. Both Garth and Hughie were very friendly with their lover’s daughter. Garth built a three-storey wooden house for her hamster, Jenny, and Hughie was the most approachable person at Faringdon. He chatted to Victoria and sat with her at Gerald’s piano, teaching her the beginning of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
Gladys, Robert’s mother, came to live near Faringdon to be close to her adored youngest son and occasionally saw Victoria. ‘Granny Heber-Percy’ had very high cheekbones and a somewhat severe mien. She had remained a formidable rider, insisting on galloping side-saddle, and claimed to have broken every bone in her body; not much had changed since she laughed when she heard her young sons had tumbled from their pony’s panniers while out with their nurse. Gladys bought her granddaughter a young Arab pony that Victoria named Pegasus and which thrilled its young rider. But although Victoria liked horses, she was not a daredevil rider like her father and grandmother. ‘I used to think that Candida Betjeman would have been the ideal daughter for Robert instead of me, because she loved him, she was a very good rider and she was confident and worldly.’
Victoria passed her Common Entrance exam a year early, aged eleven, and went to Cranborne Chase in 1956, only ten years after the small boarding school for girls had been founded in Crichel House in Dorset. Robert came every term to take her out, but despite his attempts to do the right thing and to establish a bond with his growing daughter, she felt that he didn’t actually like her. ‘I couldn’t think of what to say to him, and later he said that as a child, nothing had been quite right for me. We were the wrong kind of animal for each other – we didn’t “get” one another.’ When Victoria was about thirteen, a friend told her that Robert was ‘queer’ and this only increased her sense of distance and difference from her father. While she felt rejected by him, she also played a part in the lack of rapport. Once, when Robert visited his daughter at school, he had given her £5 and she refused to take the money, handing it back to him. He had been hurt, he later confessed. For her part, Victoria later said, ‘I think that without thinking it out, I rejected Faringdon before it rejected me.’ Victoria also enjoyed shocking people when she was young by saying, ‘My father has never given me a Christmas present and has never written me a letter.’
Although father and daughter were not close and Victoria felt that Alan played a more significant role in her life than Robert, there were times when she appreciated Robert’s generosity and style. In 1959, when Victoria had her sixteenth birthday at Cranborne Chase, she rang her father to tell him she wanted to throw a party and Robert sent Hughie over
with a van filled with marvellous food. ‘There were maybe twenty roast poussins,’ she remembered, and although it was February, the weather was warm and the whole class had a picnic. ‘It was a typically grand gesture.’
VICTORIA, AGED FIFTEEN, WITH HER ADORED HALF-BROTHER, JONATHAN, AGED FIVE
Soon after this birthday party, Victoria left school, saying she felt homesick, and joined her mother and stepfather in London, where she took a few independent lessons and planned her future. It was at this point that Cecil Beaton asked to take a photograph of the beautiful teenager. He got her to stand by a gauzy-curtained window and then, without asking her permission, published it in Harper’s Bazaar with the caption ‘Victoria Heber-Percy: the reluctant debutante’ – though she was not a deb and never would be. Victoria was already attracted to a different approach to life from that of her parents. Her belief in simplicity and the idea of being ‘natural’ became an instinctive principle and one that increasingly marked her apart from her glamorous, well-dressed mother and particularly from her father, with his obsession with his grand house and his lack of emotional involvement.
In September 1959, Victoria went to St Clare’s, a crammer in Oxford, to do A-levels. Early the next year, just before her seventeenth birthday, her recently ex-boyfriend Michael Brett took her to a party. It was there that she met Peter Zinovieff, a twenty-six-year-old geologist who was known in Oxford as a ‘mad Russian’. His parents had left St Petersburg as child-refugees of the 1917 revolution, and he was known for wild behaviour and the sort of alcohol-fuelled pranks that recalled the heyday of Brideshead Oxford – running round the quadrangle in a woman’s corset, stripping naked, setting fire to his hair or making bets as to who could be the first to drive to London and return with a policeman’s helmet.440 In order to call off his engagement to a second-generation Russian in Paris, Peter had concocted a crazy scheme that involved accompanying his fiancée to the opera, where he pretended to have a fit and jumped out of the box into the stalls below. After working in Cyprus, he was now at Oxford doing post-doctoral research.
Peter’s first encounter with Victoria was not by chance. He had come across Cecil Beaton’s photograph of the teenager and, enchanted by her looks, had cut it out of the magazine and carried it around in his wallet. When he serendipitously discovered that Michael Brett knew this beautiful girl, Peter insisted that he engineer a meeting.
They were ostensibly an unlikely pair. Victoria was depressed following her break-up with Michael, and was particularly immature for her age (she had only reached puberty the previous year). Peter, despite his reputation for wildness, was still a virgin and his family background equalled Victoria’s for complications. His parents had separated when he was a child and his remarried father had been killed in a train crash when Peter was eighteen. His mother had been born Princess Dolgoruky, but created havoc in the exiled White Russian community not only for becoming a dedicated communist but for her many love affairs. She worked with the French Resistance during her internment in a Nazi camp in France and was now being monitored by MI5. This ‘Red Princess’ worked for the Communist travel agent Progressive Tours, taking groups of socialist tourists to visit the Eastern Bloc; she delighted in showing off her parents’ palaces in St Petersburg, adding what a good thing it was that they were now state-owned.441
VICTORIA AGED SIXTEEN, PHOTOGRAPHED BY CECIL BEATON. IT WAS PUBLISHED IN HARPER’S BAZAAR AND INSPIRED PETER TO SEEK HER OUT
By the summer, Victoria and Peter were enough of a couple for the forty-four-year-old Jennifer to take them on a holiday to Greece. They rented a house on Aegina, where Peter and Jennifer drank lots of wine and got on so well that she was delighted when her schoolgirl daughter announced that she and Peter were getting married. Peter fainted from over-excitement most nights at dinner, to the extent that they took to positioning a mattress behind him as a precaution. The only person to suggest that seventeen seemed rather young for matrimony was Alan, who came out to Greece with Jonathan towards the end of the holiday. But the event went ahead anyway.
In November 1960, Victoria and Peter were married at the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile in Emperor’s Gate, Kensington. Robert, now almost fifty and starting to go grey, was dashing in a morning suit. He had been scheduled to give the young bride away, but there was a muddle and in the end it was Alan who did – symbolic of how Victoria had adopted him as more of a father-figure. Jennifer wore a fur hat with a fitted silk suit and winkle-pickers and seven-year-old Jonathan carried the icon, as is the way in Russian church weddings. It probably looked quite exotic to the English crowd; there were crown-bearers and large candles and the front section of the bride’s voluminous veil burst into flames and had to be torn off and beaten out. This all added drama to an event Victoria recalled as ‘like having the main part in the school play’. The headmistress of Cranborne Chase attended, in addition to many of Victoria’s old school-mates, one of whom was the maid of honour. Hundreds of guests went on to a reception at the Ritz, where formal photographs were taken – the Russian émigrés on one side of the couple and Robert, Jennifer and Alan on the other. After the party, the bride and groom took the night train to Scotland for the first part of a honeymoon. The second part was in Iceland.
Early the next year, the couple took a driving holiday to Italy in a newly invented and highly fashionable Mini. Victoria was struck with a mystery illness in Rome, where she felt very sick and, worried it might be appendicitis, Peter raced her back to London. When the British GP asked whether there was a chance Victoria could be pregnant, they both had to admit that the thought hadn’t occurred to them.
Before the baby was born, Victoria took Peter to stay at Faringdon for the first time. There was a splendid dinner the night they arrived and the following morning Peter let himself into the darkened, shuttered drawing room. Inspired by the stories of Lord Berners, Stravinsky, Constant Lambert and others, he sat down at the Bechstein and began to play. An accomplished amateur pianist, he improvised something he thought might fit the place and its extraordinary history, but before he got very far, Robert rushed into the room. ‘What the hell are you doing, buggering around in here?’ he shouted. ‘Get out!’ Peter stopped, mortified. ‘I’d only been trying to do something positive,’ he recalled. ‘I was so shocked that I cried!’ The couple stayed on miserably for the rest of the day, and left early the next morning. Why Robert was so furious remains unexplained. Although Gerald’s piano was precious, it was not an untouchable relic – Hughie often tinkled on it after dinner – and it is hard to imagine that this was the reason. Perhaps the ageing Mad Boy was unable to stomach the young mad Russian. Peter knew just as much about breaking conventions and behaving badly as Robert; was there too much reckless male energy in one house? Maybe Peter was not playing by Robert’s rules, about which he was increasingly particular. Whatever the cause of Robert’s outburst, Peter never went again during his father-in-law’s lifetime and it was years before Victoria did.
VICTORIA AND PETER’S WEDDING RECEPTION AT THE RITZ, 1960. L TO R: PETER’S UNCLE, KYRIL ZINOVIEFF; HIS MOTHER, SOFKA SKIPWITH; THE BRIDE AND GROOM; JONATHAN ROSS; ROBERT HEBER-PERCY; JENNIFER ROSS; ALAN ROSS
In 1961, Alathea offered Victoria and her new husband the opportunity to take over Oare. Geoffrey had died just before the wedding and his widow didn’t want to keep the place on. But neither of the newly-weds wanted to establish a life with the constraints that a large country house would bring and it was eventually sold.
N NOVEMBER OF THAT YEAR, I was born at the Royal Northern Hospital in Holloway. Peter fainted and the obstetrician had a heart attack, but the teenage mother (already an early advocate of natural birth) did very well. They named me Sofka after my paternal grandmother and I lived with my parents and two grey whippets in Ebury Street, Belgravia. This was a road whose previous inhabitants included Mozart and Tennyson, and from where Vita Sackville-West set off from her marital home dressed as a man for evenings out with Violet Keppel. I was christened in the Russian Ort
hodox Church, though I barely returned there during my childhood. Peter was becoming interested in computers and experimental music, leaving behind the geology and a job at the Air Ministry that had formed his career until then. Victoria was now receiving an income from a trust fund set up by her maternal grandfather, Geoffrey Fry, to provide for Jennifer and her descendants. The new parents gave dinner parties where the guests wore evening dress, and they often went to Clayton for weekends and took trips abroad. Their house was decorated by designers sent in by Jennifer, with beautifully made curtains and silk cushions.
L TO R: JENNIFER (AGED FORTY-FIVE), VICTORIA (NINETEEN), HOLDING THE AUTHOR AS A BABY, AND ALATHEA (SIXTY-NINE) AT OARE, 1962
Fifteen months after me, my brother Leo was born, and by the time my mother was twenty-three she had a third child, Nicolas, later known by the Russian diminutive ‘Kolinka’. But the marriage was not going well. Peter had started having affairs within weeks of the wedding and Victoria had soon followed suit. She felt dominated by Peter’s large personality and was periodically depressed. Husband and wife were following in the tradition of their parents in terms of their chaotic infidelity, and Robert took the opportunity when he could to come between the young couple. On one occasion he invited Victoria to a party at the Clermont Club – a grand gambling outfit in Berkeley Square – to which only one half of every couple was allowed. Peter sat at home, believing he had been cut out of a party thrown especially for his wife, and became so angry and miserable that he started smashing the windows at 4.30 in the morning. Victoria returned home to the sound of breaking glass.
A few years later, Victoria and Peter transformed their milieu, embracing the fashionably bohemian ethos of the time and moving from Belgravia to Putney. Gone were my mother’s fitted dresses and shiny shoes from the early period of her marriage; now she wore long Indian skirts, went to pottery classes and smoked the odd joint while listening to Leonard Cohen. Trips to St Tropez had been replaced by holidays in the Hebrides, in a remote croft house they renovated. My father built a computer-music studio in our Putney garden, which ran almost underneath a railway bridge and down to the Thames. The place was filled with a mass of winking lights and electronic wires and innards – ‘probably the most advanced studio in the world’, Peter told a reporter for the Evening Standard.442 In 1968 there was a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with his Partita for Unattended Computer and it was not long before experimental composers and musicians of all sorts were flocking to Putney. Meanwhile, the children went about barefoot, didn’t have many haircuts and weren’t taught manners on principle.
The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Page 31