Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  In the Easter holidays of 1951, Poppy came to Royaumont. She stood in the doorway of my room and held on to me, to say that she had had a miscarriage. I would have had a brother. In her papers is a page with the heading “A Letter to a miscarried child.”

  My little one, why have you left me? Where is your soul? Oh! The years of longing and strange solitude before you came! Sometimes, as now, I feel like breaking, my body is useless, my mind weak, my courage nil, my heart torn to shreds. I would like to protect you always, that my heart and soul are also with you and that all that is in me (alas so little) of good is yours to surround and shield you for ever. Darling, if perfect love can be given, or could be measured by the degree of sorrow that is now mine, then you have all which I am able to give.

  Another page runs:

  How can I escape? Why do I hate? Why can I not think of anything except myself, my feelings and my sorrow. Please take away this hate which is insupportable. Why is it that because I am in pain I need to inflict it on others? I fear the present and I dread the future and the immediate past haunts me like an unending nightmare, visions pass in my mind at a terrific speed, and all alas the same. What is it that I am seeking which I have not learnt to understand? No experience seems to improve me, I am worthless and long to disappear.

  The final word of this cry from the heart is in French, “Pitié.”

  Afterwards Camille Dreyfus and other of Poppy’s doctors were to tell me that her cancer was the result of the miscarriage; others say this is medically unsound. At any rate in that same year she found and arranged the house we were to move into, 27 Cavendish Close, the end one of five freestanding in a secluded cul-de-sac in St John’s Wood. Three houses away was Dame Myra Hess whose piano-playing we could sometimes overhear. Monty Woodhouse, once the youngest colonel in the army and then a Conservative M.P., was four houses away. Poppy had the large house with lots of servants that had once been her fantasy. The chef came from Lord Mountbatten. Doris Gibbins had risen from housemaid to housekeeper for Lord and Lady Carnarvon at Highclere; her divorced husband had been King George’s chauffeur in the war. Arthur Briggs, the butler, also came from Highclere. A quiet humorous man, he could be persuaded to do a turn imitating Lord Galloway putting on his overcoat. Arriving from Eton to the new house for the first time, I found we had a servants’ hall. “The servants seem excellent, really excellent. Hard-working, nice, competent and out to economise,” Alan wrote to Mitzi on Christmas Eve 1951. He is also soothing, “I find Thérèse as well as could be hoped – not tired or shaken or gloomy – and all her doctors are pleased. I shall try to see Mayer later in the week. Of course she has her moments of Angst, but nothing to what they are when she is quite well!” A month later, about to leave Castle Hill finally, he tells Mitzi that Poppy is showing “an unwillingness to come back into ordinary life. I think she feels, as she felt in 1936, that to be ill is a kind of haven, and that to be well demands too much of one … it is perfectly normal to be rather low after a ray treatment – but there it is, she feels that everything is pointless and impossible.” After which he gave a spirited account of the lying-in-state of King George VI at Windsor, complete with gossip about the Dukes of Kent, Norfolk and Marlborough on this occasion. And he lets drop that he had seen me at Eton and found me busy and cheerful. “Van Oss was delighted with him and the day passed off very well indeed.”

  Jessie had been let into the secret that Poppy had cancer and was feeling sick from the radiation she had to undergo in the American Hospital in Paris. Jessie wrote to her from Castle Hill on 7 January 1952, “I’m hoping and praying that every day and in every way you are better, and am pleased to know you have spent a happy Christmas in your family. Here it was awfully dull, I put a little holly in the vases for luck but everything seemed to say ‘Where is she?’ Yes! Where is she and how is she?” Jessie goes on, “You must feel fed up with all this treatment.” Next week they are taking up the carpets: “I’m getting on with it, Hickmott helping, a little every day. In a way I’m glad you are not here for you would insist on doing it all yourself.” In a subsequent letter she writes, “it worries me to know when you are ‘down and out’ and I’m not there to look after your small wants, although I suppose you are better off without me bossing round with hot water bottles and powder.” Then leaving Castle Hill for the last time, “The strife is o’er, the battle won, as they sang at the King’s funeral, which means we have cleared out of the farm. It was not so terrible. Alan’s attitude seems to say ‘Hands off Cavendish Close,’ so I did not even suggest it.” But she finishes, “All these changes make my old heart cry.” Quite right in her perception of Alan, she could not have imagined that he was writing to Mitzi at the moment of moving house, “Please God Jess will move too, and in the direction of Royaumont. That noble woman has become as high a test of my character as I could conceive and it is only my love of you all that has kept me from murder and suicide every day.”

  Back at Royaumont, Jessie tells Poppy “I had a very nice letter from David, said he was well and was writing a story for a book, so I hope as it is his first he will be successful but if not, then he must try again. I often wonder what he will do in life.” And then this – surely evidence of greatness of soul after a lifetime of sacrifice on our behalf was being brought to an end with such little consideration: “Please don’t send me any more thank yous. I know I’ve done my best for you, and my biggest worry now is that you find someone sympathetic who will take an interest in their work and look after your small wants which are so much more necessary to you than the big ones. I’m also grateful to you and Alan for putting up with an old frump for so long. So we’re even, shake hands and say no more about it – either way.”

  No expense was spared in doing up Cavendish Close. Poppy employed Ernst Freud, father of the painter Lucian, as her architect. When Edmund Wilson dined there, he recorded in his diary The Fifties that “the large house and the splendour” puzzled him until he heard that Poppy was “some sort of Rothschild” – which was wrong. He went on to note that Alan obviously “loves living in this way” – and this was right. It wasn’t long before Alan was writing to tell Mitzi that he was at the top of the social scale. Princess Margaret and the Edens were coming to dinner, “Rather a bore, because of police and extras,” adding a telling throwaway, “it is so expensive living at no. 27.”

  In the few months that Poppy lived in Cavendish Close, she was too unwell to enjoy it. Suffering constant pain, she spent much of the time in bed. A ball was due to be held at Hever, the home of Lord Astor, owner of The Times and therefore ultimately Alan’s employer and also a relation through Violet Astor. George Dix, an art dealer from New York with feline if not feminine manners, had invited himself to stay. That evening, Poppy had still not got up, and I was sitting on the edge of her bed when these two men came into the room to say that they were off to Hever. It was a white-tie occasion and they had dressed up for it. Poppy implored Alan to stay with her but the two waved themselves away and hurried down the staircase. Then she sobbed her heart out. Later that same evening she told Doris Gibbins (who repeated it ever afterwards) that she had not long to live, and made her promise to look after Alan and me.

  Around that time, she put down on paper for Alan the position she found herself in.

  I am deeply grateful for your great kindness, your patience and especially your wish to try and make things right again but it just does not work, I fear. I am better when away from you and quite alone. This trying to pretend is hopeless and a strain and impossible and it is just wearing you down and does me no good at all. I know I am unreasonable, that I am ill etc, but this crisis has not been brought on by the recent events but as you know has been brewing for some time. All this comes from me. You have nothing to reproach yourself with, I have always interpreted life the wrong way and when events have been against me thought it was a personal offence. David’s unwished for birth was the first terrible crisis and my love for him has been never what I had hoped to feel for m
y children because of it (I know that my nervous breakdown was due to that.) The only moment when you did misunderstand me was during the war when I wanted another child, that might have brought my complete balance back and fulfilled what now never will be. I am bored by my life. I pretended at “playing houses,” I pretended that my home my garden etc filled my life but they did not and my loneliness grew and grew until it was unbearable. Your life, your friends, your interests don’t (it is my fault) give me that steady feeling which I search for – and now I realise that I had hoped that the baby would give all this to me and of course it was not so. I was selfish and was not thinking of it but of me and now that I have lost it I realise that it would not help and that something somewhere is broken and wrong. I can’t start life again with you. I am deeply unhappy and don’t wish to ruin your life and make you miserable too … for the time being everything you say is wrong and jars on my nerves. My trust and confidence in you is now different, perhaps that is the reason why your help means so little to me. I can’t remain trapped and pinned down nor even to start again. I just want to be alone.

  That evening in her room, I had wondered whether she was making a scene, crying because she was feeling left out of the ball at Hever. I had no idea what she was really going through. No idea either that she was about to leave for Paris to be with her family and might never return. No idea that she was weighing her despair in these letters to Alan: “You seem like a dummy. Your life is filled by your work, David is independent. I feel intensely lonely, exiled here or in England, bored by your friends.” No idea that she would be dreading seeing Dreyfus because there was no escaping what he would say. No idea that in the American Hospital at half past seven in the morning on 1 October 1952 she was writing to her mother, “I have passed my crisis and greatly regret that you were not only the witness but to some extent a victim. Sometimes things seem too much for one but I suppose that resignation comes in the end. In any case I have no fear of operations which is a great blessing.” No idea that in spite of her clarity about Alan and his friends she had one last plea for him on the eve of the operation, “Please be there when I open an eye, I shall then feel life is still worth trying to keep a while longer though alas I have no more hope for the future.” And she tacks completely, to make her peace. “But we must never mind as our existence has not only been wonderful but so exceptional in every way that we can’t feel too bitter or reproachful of our fate.” She signs, “thank you for your immense kindness, your sad old Pigling.”

  SIXTEEN

  One’s Rothschild Cousins

  Who knows what goes on in the head of a Rothschild in Paris?

  SHOLEM ALEICHEM

  COAL WAS RATIONED in September 1948 when I went to Eton and each boy could light the fire in his room only once a week. Ice formed on the water in the hand basin and I had chilblains on my hands and feet. Soon after arriving, I came shivering into my room to find a note on my desk: “Your mother is a dirty Jewess.” The boy in the room next door came from a well-known banking family, I recognised his handwriting and went to find the housemaster. Reading the note, Oliver Van Oss gave one of his deep chuckles, then sent for the culprit and said, quite possibly improvising, that there were now three people of Jewish origins in the room.

  Known by his initials as OVO, Oliver was an exceptional schoolmaster, genuinely interested in bringing out the potential of the boys in his care. Open-minded and generous, widely read and an artist at heart, he was ready to break the rules in a good cause. In the Easter holidays of 1949 Alan had received a proof copy of George Orwell’s 1984 for the Times Literary Supplement to review. The excitement in the house prompted me to start reading it but I had time only for the astonishing opening pages. Returning to Eton, I went to the school library to ask Mr Cattley, the librarian, for the book. He was a bald stooping crotchety old man straight out of Dotheboys Hall. “I shall report you for asking for filth,” was his response. That evening, OVO came to find me in my room to say, “You must forgive Mr Cattley, he is a very simple soul.”

  I was familiar with the old Eton Calendar that printed the list of Alan’s prizes and I thought the right thing was to earn a longer list. At the end of every term, my parents would ask how I had done and their faces would fall when I told them about winning this, that and the other prize, not just for English or French but for neglected subjects like divinity. As an antidote, they arranged social occasions for me until after a teenage dance for no discernable reason I was sick all over the floor in Lennox Berkeley’s house and Poppy in her nightdress had to clean up. OVO told them that in time I would put this mark-grubbing to adult purposes and make a fortune as a banker. He nicknamed me Monsieur le Maire. One term, I wrote a short story in French for him, and his comment in red ink, “This is the real thing,” encouraged me to see myself as a writer. Others in the school at the time who were to become writers included the prolific Andrew Sinclair, Bamber Gascoigne, the mastermind of a television game that popularised a repeated phrase “Your Starter for Ten,” sociologists Garry Runciman and Benedict Anderson, the underrated novelist and travel writer Philip Glazebrook, Duff Hart-Davis, John Hemming explorer and historian of Latin America, Michael Holroyd, who by himself banged a little black rubber ball up and down in the squash courts and has brought out massive biographies researched and written with the same solitary engagement – industrious but hardly a match for the Orwell and Connolly generation. At the moment when I must have bettered Alan’s list of prizes, the Calendar decided to save money by no longer printing the footnotes that recorded this voluntary competition.

  The Eton Society, colloquially known as Pop, gave boys at the top of the school the freedom to select themselves as what in effect were prefects. It was a sort of club in embryo, with a room of its own. The twenty or so members had the power to fine and even cane boys for minor offences, and they were allowed the privilege of wearing clothes that distinguished their status, most visibly a fancy waistcoat when everybody else had to make do with a black one. Since then, authority everywhere has been busy centralising power in all manifestations for fear that it might fall into uncontrollable hands, and even Pop has long since been reformed to exclude anyone who might get in just because he was popular. Election in my day meant the approval of my peers, and suddenly, badly, I wanted it. Everyone at Royaumont became anxious on my behalf. If I got in, Elie de Rothschild promised to give me a waistcoat the like of which nobody else would have. I got in, and a waistcoat with show-off patterns of gold, green and purple duly arrived, chosen and made by Dior. Uncle Elie had entered my life.

  In spite of the breach in the generation of their fathers, Rothschild and Fould-Springer children had been at the same dancing classes in Paris. In a perfect metaphor for the disruption he was to cause, the young Elie rolled marbles across the floor there. It was said in his favour that he never had the chance to come to terms as an adult with the way of life he could expect. His early twenties were spent as a prisoner of war either in a camp in Lübeck or in Colditz and then he returned to an essentially dynastic marriage that had been celebrated in absentia. He and Liliane had hardly had time for any courtship.

  “Elie came to see me,” in November 1945 Mitzi recorded the first of innumerable mutual testings of their intentions, “and for one hour we talked business, the [illegible word] account, the factory, Czechoslovakia, Export and Import came to be spoken about, each question one after another. He said, ‘I see that your adoring children are afraid of you with reason, you are the only one with whom one can talk business. The others never have the time for it.’ How true! He is the first member of my family with whom it is a rest and a comfort to talk business. What a help! Elie, the son of Robert, has very quickly got into my and my angel’s hearts. He is sweet and capable and too adorable with Lily.” From beginning to end, he played her with a rather perfect pitch of humour and intimacy. For instance he addresses a letter of 26 April 1946 concerning some equipment for the factory to “My very dear, very worthy and very respected Mo
ther-in-law.” The opening sentence is, “Your least desires are orders for me,” and he closes using the second person singular, “Ton gendre préféré” your favourite son-in-law. All her children stuck to the more impersonal form of the second person plural.

  A year or so after the end of the war Elie invited Alan and Poppy for a cruise on a yacht in Danish waters. Separated for so long, Poppy and Lily had to renew what had been their close relationship, with their husbands to be taken into account. Alan’s personality was so different that he and Elie were never likely to be close. Realistic though Alan was, at the same time he took snobbish pleasure in the association with that family and the material that it provided for gossip, so much so that years later Brian Urquhart, a friend who was the deputy of Dag Hammarskjöld at the United Nations, proposed that Alan ought to give his memoirs the title One’s Rothschild Cousins.

  Few people were in a position to speak to Elie as an equal, but Poppy was one of them. To her, he was the naughty boy she had known in childhood. Liliane was the little sister whom she had in tow. At school, I used to receive letters from her in Paris full of detail about the doings of Liliane and Elie, the state of their marriage and the birth of their children Natty and Nelly. When she fell ill, she suspected she had cancer but the doctors, her mother and her sisters thought it kinder not to spell it out to her. The one person she asked to tell her if her illness was fatal was Elie. On the advice of the doctors and the family, he too concealed the truth. It was to his house that she went to die. Had she lived, he used to say, everything would have been different. What he meant was that he had very mixed feelings towards the Fould-Springer family into which he had married, and Poppy might have been the ideal go-between.