Jennifer never spoke to me about the visit to Faringdon one hot summer weekend, or about her feelings towards Robert, but she left a description.
I woke early, apprehensive but soon felt better and at 11 a handsome man with a Range Rover arrived to fetch me. I didn’t know him but he turned out to be the son of Gerald’s chauffeur – Webb. Strange is hardly the way to describe my arrival as I was talking to him and didn’t notice we were in Faringdon until we were at the Door. The pigeons were a brighter colour but otherwise at first glance all was the same as ever – including Robert. I was glad to have a drink – 12.30 by then, and I was shaken, and to find I was in the same room no – the same bed, as the rooms have been changed round.
. . . My heart was so full of memories and my own thoughts and gossip and old times – so different to the times of now. I must try and remember more. I cried now and then but no one knew.
Robert said that’s your bag. I said ‘where?’ and saw it on a chair. He said no, it was a straw fish-shaped bag with a cane handle, under a picture of me. How long had it been there? My voice must have trembled a little.473
Among the guests staying that weekend was the publisher Jonathan Burnham, then an undergraduate at Oxford. He had recently become such a favoured friend of Robert’s that Rosa detested him. Jonathan recalled that Robert had been in a state of anxiety to get everything perfect in preparation for his ex-wife’s stay. Jennifer, on the other hand, evidently felt very emotional and her large, dark eyes frequently brimmed with tears. After lunch, when others went home or disappeared for siestas, Jennifer suggested a walk and the student and the slightly tipsy woman in her mid-sixties strolled down to the lake in the afternoon heat. They sat on a bench by the summer house and talked: Jennifer confessed how much she had loved Robert. Then she asked the young man whether he would like to join her for a swim. When Jonathan protested that he had no trunks, Jennifer retorted, ‘Don’t be so silly, darling,’ stripped naked, lowered herself into the green-tinged water and swam off with a ladylike breaststroke. Jonathan followed suit and later commented that although nothing else happened between them, Jennifer’s behaviour appeared to be ‘a kind of seduction’, as well as an expression of freedom from stuffy conventions.474 Like Robert, Jennifer refused to let her age get in the way of the sort of flirtation or unexpected behaviour that had always been a part of her character. Other friends who came for Sunday lunch that weekend recalled that Robert and Jennifer got on well, making something of a comic double act out of their shared memories. Afterwards, when his ex-wife was leaving, Robert said, ‘Do come back soon, darling,’ and Jennifer quipped, ‘Perhaps I will. This time for good.’475
Y THE TIME ROBERT WAS seventy-four his health was failing. He had had a stroke followed by some smaller ones and had nearly drowned on holiday in Majorca. Frail, unable to walk far without a stick and later, humiliatingly, a Zimmer frame, he took to driving almost everywhere, even within the estate. There was a Range Rover and a Mini and although he had always tended to crash, there were now brushes with death on a regular basis. It was customary to see new cement work patching up the front steps of the house after yet another collision. There had been several stays in hospital in Oxford, from where there were also escapes. Being shut up and restrained was unbearable for him. Once Robert persuaded Don Pargeter, the groundsman at Faringdon, to come and get him from the John Radcliffe. When he got home, it emerged that he had ripped out the tubes and discharged himself; the drip was still inserted in his hand.
Robert was desperate to be at Faringdon, but even there life was no longer easy. He had bouts of increasing gloom, while being cheered up by visits to and from friends. His relationship with Rosa became progressively more fractious. Once, he peed in his trousers in front of her, stepping out of them and leaving her to clear up the mess as if he was a naughty toddler challenging his mother. His fingernails grew long and yellow and sometimes he refused to wash. Rosa threatened to hand in her notice several times, but their lives were so entwined that such a prospect probably seemed impossible to them both.
Friends were worried about Robert, but they were flabbergasted when, in 1985, they heard that he was engaged. The shock was not just that he planned a second wedding, but that the bride was to be Coote. For a man who was known to be fundamentally gay and who had always prioritised beauty, Lady Dorothy Lygon was among the most unlikely choices. True, the pair had been friends all their adult life. Coote’s stalwart devotion to Gerald and Robert had been limitless, and it had long been rumoured that Coote was always secretly in love with the Mad Boy. But marriage was surely beyond her most outrageous dreams. The Daily Express wrote, ‘A Darby and Joan engagement just announced in The Times has led to much chuckling on the grouse moors this week . . . Both are in their early 70s and were not expected by friends to marry.’
Some thought it one of Robert’s cruel jokes – a nod to the sort of thing he and Gerald had concocted when they placed advertisements for elephants or when the papers announced that Lord Berners was marrying the sapphically inclined Violet Trefusis. However, all doubt about the seriousness of the case was dispelled when anyone spoke to Coote. Known for her sharp mind and placid manner, she now appeared like a giddy girl, confessing, ‘I know I’m seventy-four, but I’m starry-eyed.’476 Robert’s fiancée went to a health farm to lose weight, bought a smart handbag and showed off an impressive sapphire engagement ring. Evelyn Waugh had been dead almost twenty years, but she would surely have loved to tell him that his humiliating tease of ‘marrying off Coote’ – with the implication of its unlikeliness – was now obsolete. Notwithstanding the general consternation, Coote viewed her first marriage with genuine delight and to mark the day she had a cushion embroidered:
To celebrate the marriage between
Lady Dorothy Lygon
And Mr Robert Heber-Percy
on
10th September 1985
Astonishment led to perplexity. Why? Couldn’t they just go on being close friends and neighbours? After all, Coote was so often at Robert’s social events that she was seen as ‘a cross between an ADC and co-host’.477 Was it something to do with inheritance or tax? Maybe Robert wanted to ‘look after’ his old friend, who was far from well off. Or was it that the old Mad Boy still enjoyed shocking people and being unpredictable? Some recalled an equally unlikely marriage over thirty years earlier between Tom Driberg and his middle-aged Labour Party friend, Ena Binfield. Driberg was well known for his rampant appetite for casual sex with young working-class men, and his friends (including many of the Faringdon set) were astonished and, in some cases, appalled at what appeared to be either a big joke or a horrible mistake.
People noticed an expression of annoyance cross Robert’s face when confronted with Coote’s romantic interpretation of his proposal; whatever his motives, he hadn’t expected to see her as his blushing bride. Rosa was beside herself, fulminating as if she were a jilted wife. The plans went ahead anyway. Dozens of loyal friends turned up for the party at Faringdon which preceded the civil ceremony. I was unable to go, having just driven out to Greece to start two years of research for an anthropology PhD, but I heard a number of reports. Most guests were staggered that Rosa, whom they considered among the finest cooks in the country, provided a very disappointing meal. ‘She was in a proper bolsh,’ said Algy, Robert’s nephew, who drove over from Hodnet Hall. ‘We’d expected a splendid lunch for an important family event, but it was very modest with two or three plates of ham sandwiches. So the coronation chicken and the lovely salads were nowhere to be seen.’ ‘It was so, so sad,’ said Susanna Johnston. ‘Rosa was in a filthy temper and made a filthy meal, slamming down plates of sandwiches.’
Twenty-five years after being turned down by Buckingham Palace as Tony Snowdon’s best man, Jeremy Fry was appointed as Robert’s. Who better to comprehend the complexities of being gay, married, divorced? The nuptial pair made their way to the car with the help of sticks, and Martin Webb drove them to Wantage Register Office. On the way,
Jeremy Fry asked Coote who would represent her and she said, ‘Martin.’ So Lady Dorothy Lygon was ‘given away’ by the son of the man who had driven her from Faringdon station up to Faringdon House over half a century before. Martin then chauffeured Robert and Coote to Heathrow, from where they set off to Venice with Andrew Crowden, the doctor Robert had often stayed with in Dar-es-Salaam. Robert had failed to book early enough and the only hotel they could find was something very unsatisfactory in the industrial town of Mestre, on the edge of the lagoon. By all accounts, the two-week honeymoon was not a success.
Fuelled by ferocious jealousy, Rosa refused to stay even one day in the same house as the woman she accused of marrying Robert for his money. By the time Robert and Coote returned, Rosa had finally implemented her threat to leave. She was helped by Alan Heber-Percy, Robert’s nephew, who provided her with accommodation and work in Gloucestershire. However, Rosa wanted to witness the full impact of her vengeful departure and concocted a plan. She booked Martin Webb to drive her away immediately after he had brought the returning honeymooners back from Heathrow. Robert was so angry when he discovered what was going on that he tried to block the driveway with his car to prevent them leaving; poor Martin was caught between two people who were masters of creating a drama. Eventually, Rosa won and she was driven off, leaving Robert and Coote alone in a house full of unwashed plates and debris from the wedding party. Lady Dorothy Heber-Percy’s first night in her marital home consisted of scraping mouldy food from platters and washing champagne glasses, with Robert in a rage.
Robert’s uxoriousness had not increased during the intervening forty-two years and his second marriage was even less successful than his first. From the day they began cohabiting, he was unkind and spiteful to Coote. ‘I’ve gone from being his best friend to being his worst enemy,’ Coote confessed, her expectations of sharing a room quickly dashed. ‘He treated me like an unwanted guest as soon as we were married.’478 Just as Robert had adored Jennifer and was then unable to have anything to do with her after the wedding, now he was foul-tempered with the woman who considered herself his closest companion. Worse, he expected Coote to take over Rosa’s duties and cook, clean and shop – there was no persuading Rosa to return, however much anyone begged or bribed. For an elderly woman who had always lived alone during a peripatetic life and had never focused on domestic skills, these were almost impossible challenges. To compound the problems, Robert didn’t provide any money for household expenses and Coote was forced to use her meagre savings to provide for them both. The newly-weds were utterly incapable of looking after themselves, and though sporadic help came from Garth’s widow and estate workers, the situation quickly became unbearable. ‘Poor Coote didn’t stand a chance,’ said one friend.479 ‘But she behaved like a gentleman,’ recalled another; ‘she left so that Rosa could come back.’480 And sure enough, no sooner was Coote back in Lime Tree Cottage than Rosa returned.
URING THE TWO YEARS that I carried out the research for my PhD in the Peloponnese, I made the odd trip back to England, but I had become so attached to my adopted country that even after I finished my research and was writing up my thesis, I spent at least half the year in my apartment above a grocer’s shop in Nafplio. I had changed during the time it took to learn Greek and make myself at home. Jeremy and I separated in Greece and it seemed to me as though I’d left my English life behind. Living out of a couple of suitcases, with furniture picked up from the street, made me feel light and happy – there was a sense of relief at abandoning my past. I liked the Greeks’ lack of class obsession that I realised was so prevalent in my home country, where someone’s accent, their school or their parents all counted for so much. It was also good to be away from the chaos of my parents’ lives; my father’s drinking had taken a deep plunge for the worse, he had left his second wife and their three young daughters and, shortly after the divorce, had married an eighteen-year-old within a week of meeting her. I was pleased I had no telephone (it took years or significant clout to acquire a line in the Greece of the 1980s), and although my landlord allowed important incoming calls to his neighbouring apartment, I usually queued up for the crackly connections of the telephone exchange in the centre of town. Slow letters still formed the most normal method of communication to England.
In 1987, on one of my visits home from Greece, Robert got in touch and asked if I would go to see him. I drove to Faringdon from London on a cold grey day. It was early springtime and there was a jazzy carpet of crocuses and aconites along the drive as I approached the house. Robert seemed frail but lucid. We had drinks and then ate lunch prepared by Rosa, who was back in charge as though nothing had ever happened. Ben, the boxer dog, wandered around between master and mistress. Afterwards, we sat by the fire in the drawing room. Robert said, ‘Would you go into the study and look in the top drawer of the desk. There should be a will there. Bring it here.’ I did as he requested and returned with the legal document. ‘Does it say that I leave everything to you?’ he asked. I flicked through the pages and, apart from a few small legacies, what caught my eye was the name Alan Heber-Percy, repeated over and over in different clauses. I had never met Alan, but I knew that he was the son of Robert’s brother Cyril. I had also heard that he was (at least until the marriage to Coote) Robert’s intended heir. Alan was a businessman in his early fifties and married for the second time to someone with a large house in Gloucestershire. He was already caught up with Faringdon as a shareholder, he managed the farm and he owned a company in the town.
‘I think it says you leave everything to Alan,’ I said. ‘Well, I want to leave it to you,’ replied Robert. I can’t remember how I reacted, but I suppose it was an expression of shock. I was so stunned I felt almost sick. It was an extraordinary gift and yet it seemed inappropriate to my character, age and situation. I was deeply flattered but also afraid. I realised that Robert was eccentric and wilful, but this was extreme. ‘Do you know a solicitor?’ asked Robert before I left. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Can you bring him here?’
I drove back to London in bewilderment. I couldn’t imagine myself living like Robert. And how else might one live at Faringdon? Perhaps it would be different when I was older. My mother was astonished and far from happy when she heard the news. She had systematically tried to get as far away as possible from the way of life represented by Faringdon, and had made it clear to anyone who asked that she was not interested in inheriting her father’s house. Nevertheless, Robert never consulted her about this ‘and it would have been nice to be asked’. Victoria told me that her consternation was not that she felt disinherited – far from it – but she feared what would happen to me. For her, Faringdon represented a snobbish, mannered, loveless environment. Now, her daughter was being pulled right back into the epicentre. She worried that I would change into a different sort of person – that I would become like them.
I soon went back to Greece, carrying the bizarre piece of news like heavy extra baggage. I hoped that Robert would live a long time and provide me with many years in which to process this bizarre, almost terrifying development.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Purple Dye
BOUT SIX MONTHS after Robert made me his heir, he died. It was a sunny October day and I was in my apartment in Nafplio typing up notes. Mr Mimis, my landlord, called me downstairs to his shop; there was a call for me. I could speak on the telephone by the cash register. My mother sounded shocked. I should arrange to come back as soon as I could. ‘Don’t be sad,’ comforted Mr Mimis when he saw my tears and I explained that my grandfather was dead. ‘He was an old man.’ I didn’t explain why the situation was more complicated.
Leo, my younger brother, collected me from Heathrow the next day and drove me to Faringdon. The sky was colourless and the air was cold. As we parked in front of the house, several people came out onto the porch: my mother, Rosa and a man who introduced himself as Alan Heber-Percy. We went into the study, where a fire was lit. Rosa, red-eyed and hand-wringing, brought tea. Alan sat on the lea
ther fender-seat, welcoming and apparently in control. Urbane and handsomely silvering, he gave no sign that I had ruined his prospects, and was full of affable, practical advice. I went up to Robert’s room to see his body. He looked slight and unfamiliar, laid out on a narrow four-poster. The room was very cold – the windows open – and I stood, chilled and fearful, in front of the man who, by dying, had made such a huge impact on my life.
My mother and I stayed at Faringdon for a few days. I slept in the room next to Robert’s, where I was haunted by the image of him lying on the other side of the wall. During the day, we went for walks in the cold mist, sometimes accompanied by Ben, the boxer, who lolloped about cheerily. The house was still and quiet, dominated by the corpse that was soon transferred into a coffin on trestles. I don’t remember that I organised much for the funeral or did anything practical, though my mother had been to Russell Spinage and chosen the plainest coffin available before I arrived. I now suppose that it must have been Alan and Coote who organised the service. It was Jack Fox who laid out the body of the man he’d known since the 1930s, and about whom he said, ‘One minute he was as good as gold, and he’d give you anything. And then he’d bury you in the earth.’ Now it was Jack’s turn to bury him in the earth, or as good as.
Rosa cooked for us and continued to care for the house, outwardly confident that I was Robert’s chosen replacement and that I would learn to step into his shoes. She made sure that I sat in his place at the table and that I learned how to use the electric bell to summon her. There was a system and Rosa was not about to change it. There was no question of our making ourselves something to eat in the kitchen – that was Rosa’s domain. Even a cup of tea was brought on a tray, with the large white teacups and saucers edged with a gilt key pattern. During those first days, I got to know the three men who worked outside, taking a special liking to Des Ball, the gardener, and Don Pargeter, the groundsman, who I later learned had been asked to ‘look after’ me by Robert. One of Don’s jobs was to dye the fantail doves and it was his suggestion that we colour them purple as a sign of mourning for their master.
The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Page 35