When we had finally fixed all the financial details, Alan announced that he refused to go without my signed agreement that sixty-two-year-old Jack Fox would be given the shooting rights for life on the estate. He would be able to take shoots (presumably with Alan or his friends, if required) all over the estate to gun down wild birds and the pheasants he raised in Grove Wood and Bennet’s Pen, a copse near the lake. My initial reaction was indignation. I didn’t like the idea of shooting anyway, and I was being forced to give away something against my will. Although Alan was always scrupulously polite with me and I admired his sang-froid in the face of what must have been a nasty disappointment, I realised I was an uncomfortable thorn in his side. His hand-in-glove relationship with Rosa, whom he continued to visit bearing his muddy riding boots, was awkward enough, but now he wanted to take away my control of something at Faringdon, probably for decades to come.
Adding to my unhappiness at Alan’s arm-twisting was an unfortunate phobia. Like Gerald, who ‘found a dead bird’ inside him during his wartime psychoanalysis, I had been horrified by this symbol of death since earliest childhood. While I never minded another animal’s corpse, the claws and feathers of a lifeless bird provoked a cold-sweat panic. I looked the other way or even avoided passing Jack Fox’s garden so I wouldn’t see the splayed wings of pigeons or, worst of all, greasy black crows hung up by their legs and waving in the breeze. One of the first things I had done after inheriting Faringdon was to get rid of the numerous stuffed birds from Gerald’s collection. Alan had offered to remove from the dining room some glass domes sheltering long-tailed birds-of-paradise, loading them into his car after one of our early meetings. The most gruesome item of all was a sinister screen made up of two glass panels, between which were placed the boneless bodies of numerous coloured birds. One of Cecil Beaton’s photographs of my mother as a baby shows her posed in Jennifer’s arms in front of it, Robert’s reflection in the glass only adding to the creepiness.
Alan was just as stubborn as I was and a far more experienced negotiator. I was trapped. In the end he won and, miserably, I capitulated.
There were other times when I learned how to get the upper hand over the grey men in suits. When my solicitor announced that the only way forward in Faringdon’s management was through a trust, he offered himself and a colleague as trustees. ‘Could one have someone else?’ I asked, inspired on a whim. ‘Does it have to be a lawyer, or could I have, for example, two friends?’ Within a short space of time, I was back in the panelled conference room off the Strand with Sarah Horrocks and Tessa Charlton, my two oldest friends, who had supported me through the peculiarities of the early months at Faringdon. They had even less experience of these things than I did, and the atmosphere was one of suppressed hilarity and high tension as we tried to concentrate on unfamiliar terms like ‘the statutory and equitable rules of apportionment’ or ‘deeds of Indemnity’. Tessa took drops of her Bach Flower Rescue Remedy to combat her terror of ‘suits’, and we all eyed one another conspiratorially across the heavy table. Unreasonably, it felt like a coup of the young and female over the old and male. Afterwards, the newly appointed Trustees of the Robert Heber-Percy Will Trust took me to a pub where we collapsed in fits of nervous laughter, downing vodka to put us back on track.
It was not all financial meetings and dealing with the burdens of tradition. The second summer after Robert’s death, Mario Testino asked whether he could do a photographic shoot at Faringdon. He was a friend of my younger brother Kolinka, who had once taken Mario to see Robert. They had been fed smoked salmon and champagne – ‘That’s all he ate, no?’ said Mario, who had been impressed by the place and the man. The previous year, Mario had taken atmospheric black and white wedding photographs for Leo and Annabelle. Ever since his arrival from Peru a decade earlier, he had noticed how many from his social and professional circle in England were fascinated by the era that Beaton had captured so memorably in his photographs. ‘They were very deferential to that group of people – Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, Elsa Schiaparelli,’ he said. ‘My editor at Harpers & Queen, Hamish Bowles, was obsessed with Beaton. We were inspired by the importance of decor and environment and his pioneering use of androgyny.’483 Mario’s own interest in the influential photographer had increased. People would later compare the Peruvian photographer to Beaton – both for his ability to create a story and an unusual mise en scène for a picture, but also for his ground-breaking portraits of royalty.
Mario and Hamish showed up with an impressive collection of models, stylists and make-up artists, and created what was essentially a 1980s fantasy of the 1930s using the idea of an Agatha Christie-style murder story. The dining room was turned over to make-up and hairdressing, while the study was filled with racks of slinky evening dresses and piles of red satin slingbacks, co-respondent brogues and sparkly gold heels. Actors as well as models became aristocrats manqués, a butler, a poetess – inevitably called Sappho – and an exotic femme fatale. Most of them stayed in pubs in the town, while those who could be fitted stayed in the house; with only five bedrooms, the hosts at Faringdon had always needed to limit their guests. Hamish, as willowy and gimlet-eyed as Cecil Beaton, wafted down the stairs for dinner dressed in the sort of Edwardian evening gown that his muse had donned in more frivolous moods.
THE AUTHOR AND MARIO TESTINO (IN ONE OF GERALD’S ROBES) AT FARINGDON, DRESSED FOR EASTER DAY, 1988
Mario had already visited Faringdon several times since Robert’s death and believed ‘You could really feel the energy, the madness that inhabited the place . . . The lake, the folly . . . England has so much history, you can relive it. Everything you do is related to the past.’ Once when he was staying, and as if to prove my links to the Mad Boy and Gerald who had fantasised about coloured sheep and cows, I dyed my mother’s grey whippet mauve. She had left Nifty with me when she went on two weeks’ holiday and I persuaded Don to help me colour him, applying the shade used on the doves for Robert’s funeral. In the old days, Gerald and Robert had done the dyeing outside the house, in ‘great basins of magenta, copper green, and ultramarine dye, and with the help of men-servants ceremoniously dipping, one after another, his white pigeons and once . . . some swans, a duck, and a white poodle’.484 With echoes of the past becoming almost deafening, the multi-coloured doves fluttered obligingly for the beautiful visitors, and a purple streak was to be seen racing across the expanses of green lawn between the house and the churchyard wall.
VICTORIA’S WHIPPET NIFTY, DYED MAUVE
My future at Faringdon continued to seem very unclear and I became increasingly convinced that I could not live there and be true to myself. I wrote at the time to an anthropologist friend that my relationship with Faringdon might be a bit like an arranged marriage. I don’t have a passionate love for it, as I do for Greece, nor do I have the deep, family sort of love that I do for Raasay. Faringdon is like a very handsome, rich, eligible husband, but one who was chosen by someone else. In some arranged marriages the love and even passion develops, but in others I suppose this can never be. The best I can do, as the privileged bride, is to give it a chance and see what develops. And at least, using the metaphor of marriage, I am able to be polygamous!
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Blood Ties
ESS THAN FIVE YEARS after I inherited Faringdon, I returned from abroad to stay there in very different circumstances. Rosa’s words that I could do worse than find a husband and take up flower-arranging returned to haunt me. Although I was not married, I arrived with a man and I was six months pregnant. As I walked about the gardens with my expanding abdomen, I picked flowers and placed them around the house in Gerald and Robert’s old vases. The place felt utterly different – transformed by love.
I had met Vassilis two years earlier in Moscow. Having finished my PhD, in 1990 I had gone on a trip to what was still the USSR, partly on a quest for my Russian roots and partly to write a couple of articles as a freelance journalist. One of the pieces I was investigating was about the G
reeks of the Soviet Union and I had arranged an interview with the Greek Consul in Moscow. The Consul stood me up, but Vassilis spotted me out of the Embassy window and took over. He was the press attaché, he said, so ideally placed to help. Some weeks after, Vassilis appeared in London, and not many months after that I returned to Moscow to live with him.
It took Vassilis over twenty years to admit that when I drove him to Faringdon from London for the first time and we spent the weekend alone there together, he was troubled. From my point of view he had seemed appealingly blasé, and I later appreciated that Vassilis was not weighed down by the historical burdens and class awareness of the British. But in reality, he had been perplexed. What sort of person will she be, if this is her house? he had wondered. Vassilis had by now been transferred to the Greek Embassy in London and was leaving Faringdon in the dewy mornings to catch a train up to work and arriving back by early evening. We had quiet weekday suppers in the kitchen, spotting deer picking their way daintily across the lawn towards the walled garden, or watching in dismay as a hawk dive-bombed a coloured dove, leaving a pile of candy-coloured feathers on the grass as it carried its meal away.
We made plans for improving the house, pondering how it might pay for itself as increasingly worrying accounts appeared. A few old friends like Sarah and Tessa came down for weekends, and Leo and Annabelle would come over with their two young sons. Rosa’s menacing presence as housekeeper had finally been expunged by a dark-haired young Scottish woman, Patricia Howie. An art-school graduate with a passion for cooking, she brought a new warmth and informality to the place, while rising happily to the challenge of creating imaginative feasts when we had people to stay. We also threw the occasional party. Friends gathered from Russia, Greece and around the country for the ‘Green Party’, at which everyone dressed in green. Even Coote showed up in a floor-length pastel chiffon number. Sarah wore a green wig and rode a monocycle along the terrace, and Tessa was overwhelmed by admirers from Moscow. (Later, developing her photographs, she discovered that someone had used her camera to take a close-up of his penis, something one imagines the Mad Boy might have done in his day.) The carpets were taken up for dancing, with music provided by DJ K, a Greek disc jockey called Kostas, who crossed Europe by bus for the gig. Some friends camped in the garden, others took rooms in local pubs, and in the morning we gathered at the orangery for breakfast, where two musicians played Indian music and people climbed the stairs to nowhere and took dips in the pool.
Faringdon was changing, emotionally and practically. All over the house were additions from Russia, where Vassilis had spent the last four years collecting art, furniture and curiosities; anyone paid in foreign currency was rich in Soviet terms, and he was a regular at the auctions and street markets. In the green part of the drawing room near Gerald’s piano there was now an ornate old harp, a double bass and a belle époque wind-up gramophone, all of which looked as though they’d been there since the 1930s. In the study, where Gerald’s red wax models of horses stood on a shelf, we placed a garland of trumpets, saxophones and trombones. As we began to reclaim the attic floor, in the hope of letting out the whole house for holiday rentals, we furnished some of the rooms with Russian wardrobes and desks and hung paintings Vassilis had bought in Moscow’s Arbat. Teasing was a tradition we easily adopted; we put a giant plaster bust of Lenin in the corner of the attic room under the pediment, now gazing not towards a glorious revolutionary future, but at the coloured pigeons that perched, cooing, on the window ledge.
Our daughter Anna was born in Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital in August 1992 and we returned home the same day. After half a century, Faringdon once more had a pram in the hall. This time, though, there were no nurses, nannies or green baize doors. The house seemed airy and light, reinvented by a new life. We walked the baby around the walled garden to pick mulberries and wheeled her through the park and down to the lake, shooing away the curious heifers that gathered to inspect the unfamiliar contraption. We lay, the three of us, in a capacious string hammock, bought the previous year in Mexico and slung beneath the Scots pines at the top of the lawn. Rooks cawed from their nests above, the church carillon chimed out Bishop Heber’s hymns through the warm afternoons, and somewhere in the distance, beyond the buzz of insects in the mock-orange flowers, was the rhythmic hum of Don mowing the grass at the back of the house.
My mother’s half-brother Jonathan came to take some photographs of our new family. Only too aware of the history, he arranged us in the drawing room, as Robert and Jennifer had been by Cecil Beaton in 1943. My brother Leo filled the place of Gerald, nonchalantly reading a book on the day-bed. To imitate Robert, Vassilis donned his gumboots, holding Anna in the place where her grandmother had been before her.
IMITATING THE CECIL BEATON PHOTOGRAPH OF 1943, IN 1992 MY UNCLE JONATHAN PHOTOGRAPHED MY BROTHER LEO (ON THE DAY-BED), VASSILIS HOLDING THE NEWBORN ANNA, AND ME TAKING UP MY GRANDMOTHER’S POSITION
Three summers later, Lara was born, and it was around this time that my mother learned something bizarre.
Jennifer had fallen down the stairs some years earlier and due to brain injury or possibly a stroke, she had changed profoundly. She was not always aware of what was going on and her speech was affected and often unintelligible. Even stranger was her outspokenness on subjects that she had been discreet about in the past. Alan had not been a good husband – he was a ‘bad man’, she declared. She also exhibited an occasional uncharacteristic prudishness: she disapproved of her young Australian nurse having a boyfriend. One day, Victoria took her mother for a walk in the nearby London park and Jennifer remarked, ‘You don’t look at all like Robert.’ ‘Is he my father?’ asked Victoria, who had heard a few whispers that there might be some doubt, but nothing more substantial. ‘Oh no,’ replied an ingenuous Jennifer, in a devastatingly casual, almost sing-song voice. ‘Well, who is?’ asked Victoria. ‘I can’t remember,’ came the disturbing reply. Then, ‘Ask Billa. She knows.’
Victoria didn’t approach Billa directly but asked for help from another old friend of Jennifer’s, the writer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, who lived near Billa in Norfolk. Almost a month later a postcard arrived from Jonny, who had invited Billa to dinner. He quoted her as saying, ‘The person that springs to mind is Ned Fitzmaurice.’ It was an unusual way to learn about a possible father.
Lord Edward Norman Petty-Fitzmaurice was the youngest son of the 6th Marquess of Lansdowne. He had been killed fighting in Normandy in August 1944 at the age of twenty-two. Billa sent a photograph of a sweet-faced boy, with fair colouring and a slightly snub nose. He was sitting with two friends and a dog, and when Victoria showed the picture to Jennifer she pointed to Ned and said he was the one. She added that she and Robert had slept together, but suggested that it had not been often.
Understandably, Victoria was thrown into turmoil. She was not helped by the fact that everyone she spoke to seemed to have their own opinion, never previously divulged to her. Some said they’d always known that Robert had rescued Jennifer when her lover was killed in the war. Others said it was Lord Berners’s arrangement, or Billa’s bossy scheme. When my mother approached Billa herself, the ageing Lady Harrod was furious. She now regretted saying anything, given the rumpus. Nothing was certain, anyway, she added. Equally incensed was Coote, whose famed kindness deserted her when Victoria consulted her. ‘Coote snapped my head off,’ remembered Victoria. ‘She said, “It’s really snobbish of you,” as if I’d preferred Lord Lansdowne instead of Robert Heber-Percy Esq.’485 Such apparent disloyalty to her oldest (if not necessarily most loyal) friend was anathema to Lady Dorothy Heber-Percy.
Victoria managed to arrange a meeting with the Duchess of Devonshire (née Mitford), the youngest sister of Gerald and Robert’s old friends Diana and Nancy. Debo had been very close to Ned and his older brother, Charlie, the Marquess of Lansdowne from 1936. Charlie had been killed in Italy, blown up in his tank, only nine days after Ned went down in a blaze of machine-gun bullets while leading his platoon.
According to a lance corporal in his regiment, Ned was ‘the gamest little lad I have ever seen . . . No one could ever imagine him to possess the guts he had.’486 Debo had often visited the brothers at Bowood House, their dazzling and gigantic Wiltshire home. The Bowood Ball was renowned as one of the most splendid events in the social calendar. Although large sections of the house were knocked down after the war, Ned’s bedroom and dressing room were in a part of the house that is still known as Ned’s Tower. When the Duchess met my mother for tea in Curzon Street (fresh from trying on hats for Ascot), she looked her up and down – ‘as if she was examining a horse’ – and said, ‘You have the ankles of the Lansdownes!’487
The Lansdowne family had been devastated by the deaths of Ned and Charlie, and their two sisters, Elizabeth and Kitty, were still haunted by the double tragedy. The title and inheritance of Bowood House had gone to a cousin. Kitty (who had inherited the family’s Scottish title, Baroness Nairne) was now in her early eighties. She was such a close friend of the Mitford sisters that her nickname was ‘Wife’; Debo described her as quiet, discreet, intelligent and witty.488 Kitty agreed to meet my mother and the two women immediately felt a bond and discovered much in common. Ned had been ‘sensitive if not over-sensitive’ and the whole family had suffered from depression, something that continued to plague my mother and that she now saw as a family trait; Kitty’s eldest brother had ‘fallen under a train’ aged twenty. If Kitty felt she was meeting the child of her beloved brother who had died fifty years earlier, Victoria believed she was meeting the sister of a young man who was rapidly becoming her idealised father. ‘I liked the idea of Ned,’ she said. ‘He was so much more sympathetic and cultured than Robert. I was keen on the idea of anybody other than Robert being my father. We just couldn’t get on – we were like a cat and a dog. He admitted to me that when I was born he had felt no more interest than if there had been a newborn animal in the house.’489
The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Page 38