Life Worth Living (17 page)

Undoubtedly, the charmer I had married was full of surprises. Complexes, too, all of which I then thought he was admirably open about. What he was actually doing was parading them so that everyone would sympathise with his hard lot in life. It gave him the attention he craved and the excuse he needed to do nothing about helping himself. Day after day, Colin sat on the back verandah telling Mummy and me and whichever friends dropped in about how he had no faith in marriage, because his parents had seven marriages between them; how terribly he had been neglected by both of them (he saw his father only once between his parents’ divorce when he was five and when he went to school in Scotland at twelve); how his mother never loved him because he was a mere second son and would never be the Duke; how he had hated her while growing up, and spurned her when he was an adult and she wanted to have a relationship with him; how his brother made him feel unwelcome at Inveraray Castle, despite the fact that he did not own it, but was a mere tenant there. Sympathise I certainly did. This, after all, was 1974, and peace and love had given way to ‘Don’t be judgemental.’ And, more to the point, having suffered in my own life, I identified strongly with underdogs. And if I had had any doubt that Colin was deserving of pity, I needed only to look at the state of his wardrobe for living proof of the deprivation to which he laid claim.

His worldly goods were easily held by one medium sized and battered suitcase. He had one pair of shoes; a navy blue velvet smoking jacket that had seen better days; one ruffled dress shirt with a frayed collar; one bow tie; three pairs of cheap socks; three or four old shirts for day wear; one turtle-necked sweater and casual suit, which we had bought the day before our wedding between purchasing the rings and looking for his drugs. The day after our arrival in Jamaica, I rang my Aunt Hilda, who worked with my father, and asked her to send up an extensive list of clothes and shoes from my father’s shop. It would have been too mortifying to drag around a husband who looked like a tramp.

It was at this point that Colin started saying, ‘I hope you don’t think I married you for your father’s money.’

‘What money?’ I asked, the thought having never occurred to me. ‘How could you marry me for Daddy’s money when he isn’t a rich man? David Koch is rich, Ari Onassis is rich. Daddy is merely comfortable. I’d have to be paranoid to think anyone would want to marry me for Daddy’s crumbs when there are people with huge loaves out there.’

Talk about naïve. While I regarded my father as having no real money, in the eyes of others, especially someone with a paltry income of $12,000 per annum and no real prospects of earning much more than that, he was seriously rich.

Money seemed to be a subject dear to Colin’s heart. His major preoccupation now, the jewellery escapade having failed, was how we could generate the capital to furnish our apartment in New York.

‘The furniture has got to be antique. Nothing but,’ he stipulated. Anything else would be infra dig for Lord and Lady Colin Campbell.

‘Don’t worry,’ I would reassure him, thrilled that someone who had lived such a hippy lifestyle seemed to care so much about his surroundings. ‘Daddy and Mummy are giving us money, Mummy is going to sneak me another whack on her own and Auntie and Grandma have also promised large cheques. And Aunt Hilda’s phoning all the Ziadie and Azan relations to tell them not to weigh me down with the usual load of silver, china and crystal, but to bring cash. By the time they’re through throwing money at us, I’d be very surprised if we can’t furnish two apartments.’

I was right. With my wedding present money, we were able to buy superb antiques for the apartment I found on East Eighty-Third Street between Lexington and Third avenues. And that was after the apartment remained empty for four months while we headed for the United Kingdom, where Colin was able to enjoy the novel experience of being flush with cash for the first time in his life.

Those were heady days indeed. We stayed with my cousin Toni de Acevedo off the King’s Road (Colin did not want to stay with his brother, towards whom he had strong feelings of antipathy, as well as the occasional fraternal tug, though Ian did tender an invitation) until Charles Delevigne found us a sweet cottage on Coulson Street in Chelsea, which interconnected with Mary Michele Rutherfurd’s flat on Lincoln Street. I took Colin to Jermyn Street to augment his wardrobe. All my friends were so happy for me that just seeing their faces was pure pleasure. Even the press reports of our marriage were wholly flattering. Colin and I had become the Romeo and Juliet of 1974, my husband cast as the ruggedly individualistic aristocrat and me as the beauty with the brains and the bread. Colin’s brother, the Duke of Argyll, organised two wedding receptions for us, one in London at his little house in Park Walk, the other in Scotland at the ancestral home, Inveraray Castle.

Although we fared less well in the wedding-present department than we had in Jamaica, I did not mind, for many of the people I met were warm and charming, and all, without exception, were welcoming. Ian and his wife Iona could not have been more welcoming, either. In fact Ian seemed most excited by our marriage and the attendant hoopla. On our first afternoon in London, he insisted that Colin and I came over for tea. When we arrived, he proudly presented his brother with a folder filled with press cuttings. ‘You’re a star now,’ he said to Colin, before launching into a long explanation of how he had kept the kettle of press interest aboil with stories about Colin’s adventurousness, my beauty and exotic ancestry, the ‘hooley’ he planned to have for us and so on.

I was frankly surprised that he cared about what I regarded as trivia, and that he was so well informed about my antecedents. So that was how Colin had been spending Daddy’s money when he’d been chattering away non-stop to his brother from Jamaica.

Colin was thrilled with the press coverage. Up to this point in his life, he had been ignored by the papers. He was the only member of his notorious family deemed too insignificant to be written about. Lords, after all, were sufficiently commonplace in Britain to be of no interest unless they did something noteworthy or notorious. Cutting a drugged and drunken swathe through the Americas and the Antipodes might have qualified, but since that was hush-hush, it took marriage to me to catapult him into the limelight.

‘I don’t see how you can say your brother is jealous of you,’ I said to Colin once we were safely back at Toni’s flat. ‘He struck me as genuinely pleased for you.’

‘There’ll be a catch,’ Colin said. ‘Depend on it.’

Ian’s conduct the following evening belied any indication of sibling rivalry, and I wondered whether Colin was being paranoid.

Ian and Iona took us to Mr Chow’s, the fashionable Knightsbridge restaurant owned by Michael and Tina Chow, for dinner. Colin and I mentioned that the
Sunday Express
, a Beaverbrook newspaper, had given me a hard time about my past during an interview earlier that day. I was especially distraught about the source Colin said they had given him: an ex-boyfriend of mine who knew my family in Jamaica. Ian was sympathy itself. Iona, who seemed to have a limited attention span when the subject of conversation strayed too far from herself, either stared good naturedly around the celebrity-packed restaurant or repaired to the loo for extended periods. Moreover, Ian came across as genuinely interested in the circumstances of my wrongly assigned gender. Accustomed to an environment in which no one ever spoke about such an awkward matter to one’s face, I was delighted to have acquired a brother-in-law who was keen to know what life had been like for me. So I told him everything – not only about how the mistake had been made, and how it had been compounded, including my frustration at not being sent to Johns Hopkins in
Baltimore, but even about how the solution had resulted in me having two birth certificates.

As much as the brothers loved publicity, I was reluctant to be written about more than was absolutely necessary. As I was the linchpin, and my co-operation was essential if the bandwagon were to continue to roll, they both employed their considerable skills of persuasion to conquer my fear of the press. They were terribly plausible.

‘The papers can’t print lies about you. If they do, you can sue.’

‘Wives in this family are celebrated as great beauties. You have a duty to the family to co-operate in flattering publicity.’

‘The publicity we’re/you’re getting will do your book good. It will help you to get it published.’

‘Every report says how beautiful you are. A few more articles and you’ll knock Margaret off her perch.’

My vanity did not require confirmation of my supposed beauty, nor was I competitive. The fabled Margaret, Duchess of Argyll could sit upon the throne of great beauty forever for all I cared. I thought that cooperating with puff pieces when two newspapers now had brought up the explosive issue of my background was begging for trouble, and I did not see why any publisher would be influenced by the superficial celebrity of an author of a work on philosophy – the book either stood on its own merits or collapsed accordingly. But I was grateful for the warm and kindly way in which Colin and Ian had taken my past in their stride. I was mindful, thanks to Daddy’s warnings over the years, that there could have been a less enlightened response. For that reason, and that reason only, I stopped short of point-blank refusal to accommodate their quest for publicity.

While I was being querulous about the degree of media attention we had received to date, unbeknown to me, Ian was beavering away setting up an even greater barrage than had hit us so far. The result was that Colin, Ian, Iona and I flew into Glasgow to be greeted by a solid phalanx of photographers and reporters, who were not content with an interview at the airport, but had to follow us as far as the home of Iona’s father, Sir Ivar Colquhoun of Luss, on Loch Lomond. It now emerged that the press were not interested in Colin. All the questions were aimed at me. Our marriage was nothing but a peg – had they been able to mention it without referring to Colin Campbell, they would undoubtedly have done so.

I didn’t like this new development one bit. I dreaded the possibility of yet another journalist grilling me about my private life the way Lady Olga Maitland had done when she had interviewed us for the
Sunday Express.
I had found the experience deeply invasive, sullying in fact, as if someone were asking for an inspection of my body. I drew a metaphorical line underneath all this press nonsense and resolved to keep out of the media’s way from then on.

When the newspapers containing the stories were delivered, Ian and Colin pored over the reports in the library, devouring
each word and savouring each phrase as if they were consuming the most delicious meal.

‘This is great,’ Colin said.

‘Marvellous, old boy,’ agreed Ian, who had been born in Portugal and raised in France and America, and tended to overcompensate for his un-British background and mainly American heritage with an exaggerated English accent. ‘We must get the chaps from
Tatler
and William Hickey to come up for the reception.’

‘I hate to be a party-pooper,’ I said. ‘But I really couldn’t function with the press at something as private as my wedding reception.’

‘We wouldn’t want the latest addition to the family being uncomfortable, now would we, brother?’ Ian said in his stilted but charming way. ‘It was just a thought, Georgie.’

He looked up from the paper and smiled benignly at me. But I was going to be fried alive in the fat of publicity. The question wasn’t whether this would happen, but when.

I
nveraray Castle is every child’s idea of a fairy tale castle. Its four towers were castellated into neo-Gothic cones during the reign of Queen Victoria, whose daughter Louise was then the Duchess of Argyll. It nestles beside Loch Fyne, with the Highlands behind it, in as picturesque a setting as can be imagined. Compared to English stately homes such as Chatsworth or Longleat, Inveraray Castle is small. But that merely adds to its charm, making it cosy and homely rather than splendidly impressive. Despite the fine French furniture procured before the French Revolution by the then Duke and his wife, Elizabeth Gunning, it invites you to kick off your slippers and put up your feet.

When I first saw Inveraray Castle, this feeling of homeliness was enhanced by the modesty in which the current Duke and Duchess lived. They were tended only by a butler and his wife, helped, on a part-time basis, by a couple of cleaners, one of whom I was assured would loathe me because I was used to a full complement of servants and she was supposedly rabidly left wing. In the event, I found Mrs Lindsey a delight, and at first Inveraray even worked its magic upon my marriage.

For the first few days, the tensions in Colin’s and Ian’s relationship were relaxed, along with those in our marriage. Colin became warm and affectionate instead of distant and elusive. We even made love twice (lousy both times, but at least his heart seemed to be in it). I expected us to go onwards and upwards, building a nurturing relationship from this foundation. It was in this frame of mind that I set out with Colin and Ian for a tour of the Argyll estate and its surroundings. We passed Innischonnel Castle.

‘That’s the original Campbell stronghold,’ Ian said, pointing to the ruins. ‘I’ll let Colin have a life tenancy on it if you two agree to restore it.’

‘I don’t know where we’d get the money from,’ I remarked.

‘Maybe you should ask your father,’ Colin suggested.

‘It wouldn’t cost much to do up,’ said the impecunious Ian, expansively, as if large sums passed daily through his hands. ‘No more than £250,000.’

‘Daddy would never put his money into any enterprise he didn’t own,’ I said, ‘even if he had money like that to spare, which I’m sure he doesn’t.’

‘Sure he does,’ replied Ian, much to my surprise. ‘Colin told me about your mother’s jewels.’ Colin had been present when Mummy brought home a selection from the bank to choose from for our Jamaican wedding reception.

‘And Carolyn Nathan [a Jamaican socialite friend who had just been staying at Inveraray] said you Ziadies are rolling in it.’

Daddy will never hand a large sum over to anyone until he’s dead,’ I insisted, hoping to close the subject.

‘Why don’t you ask?’ Colin suggested.

‘Yes, good idea,’ Ian chipped in. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He can only say no.’

‘You know what Daddy’s like,’ I said to Colin.

By this time, Ian must have realised that this line of persuasion wasn’t going to work with me. I could tell from the look Ian gave me that he was not exactly thrilled that I was being so obstructive of his plans to have his brother and sister-in-law living nearby in Scottish splendour, and I could see, for the first time, what Colin had meant when he said that Little Ian wasn’t all sweetness and light. Ian then confirmed that observation with a catty comment directed at baby brother: ‘I see you picked yourself a wet one.’

It was easy, when looking at Ian’s precarious financial predicament, to see why aristocrats with large houses and heavy responsibilities now had to put practicality to the fore of their thinking. Inveraray had been built in the eighteenth century, when the Argyll family had been wealthier and more influential than they were now. It might have been smaller and more comfortable than other stately homes, but it was still a large house and very difficult to keep warm. It was not centrally heated, nor could Ian and Iona afford even to install, much less run, electric radiators and it was rather pathetic to see them rattling around in it trying to maintain what they called ‘standards’. These included hot-water bottles, which Iona herself scurried around popping underneath the guests’ pillows before they retired to their freezing beds at night. And this was at the height of a particularly warm spring.

Inveraray gave me another unwelcome insight into human nature. The British upper classes, I soon discovered, were nothing like the Americans, Continentals or Jamaicans. They would do anything – be nice to people they despised, tolerate scorn and abuse, most likely even silently bear witness to the stabbing of their own mother – just to receive an invitation to stay in a stately home. And if that invitation wasn’t forthcoming, they would resort to staying at a nearby bed-and-breakfast, from where they would launch an embarrassing series of phone calls to ensure that they were received for a quick drink or tea at the very least. This enabled them to return to London and drop the odd comment such as, ‘When I was at Inveraray, I said to Ian/Iona/Colin/Georgie …’ as if they had been in residence as house guests. To people like these, friendship had less to do with liking someone than with forming associations based on the right social and material connections. This chilled me spiritually, but I did not pass judgement; I simply gave thanks for having British friends like Mary Anne Innes-Ker and Diana Ballard, who liked me for myself.

Along with the bona-fide house guests that old sinking feeling reappeared: something I couldn’t put my finger on was wrong again with my marriage. I confided in both Mary Michele
Rutherfurd and my cousin Toni, who agreed with my mundane analysis that Colin was probably possessive and didn’t like sharing me with my friends. Confident that we would recapture our intimacy once they had departed from Inveraray, I was not worried. Nor was I tempted to push my friends and family aside to accommodate the jealousy of a man. So I threw myself into enjoying their company, and, to give Colin his due, he made every effort to be hospitable.

It wasn’t until we all went to visit Glencoe that I discovered the family into which I had married was still regarded in many parts of Scotland as the world’s original war criminals. Colin ill-advisedly dropped his name in an attempt to expedite lunch at a restaurant near Glencoe. The waitress refused to serve any of us.

‘I don’t soil my hands feeding Campbells,’ she said.

The name Campbell was synonymous with treachery and evil to many Scots because of the Massacre of Glencoe, which took place in 1692, at a time when the Highland clans’ tradition of hospitality compelled them to offer shelter even to their enemies. The Earl of Argyll ordered his men to seek refuge at Glencoe with his enemies, the MacDonalds, and then, when night had fallen and their hosts were asleep, to slay every last man, woman and child. Glencoe, it emerged, was the most ignoble act in a thousand-year history of Campbell savagery and treachery, but there were many other lesser crimes, some of which the present Countess of Airlie entertainingly recounted to a party of us when I visited Cortachy Castle later. Others I learned about from just about every Scot I met. There were so many instances of betrayal, deceit, rape, pillage, disembowelment – even the setting alight of children – that they soon blended into one in my memory. But the common theme was clear: the Campbells of Argyll had a just reputation for cruelty and treachery.

I took the view time distanced the current Campbells from their forebears. Nearly 300 years had elapsed since the Massacre of Glencoe, and the other incidents were part of the past, too. I regarded myself as being far too fair-minded to believe in ‘bad blood’, or to stain someone’s slate with the sins of his father, never mind a long line of vicious and treacherous ancestors. I was surprised by the fierce antipathy towards the family that persisted, but I did not feel any of it had anything to do with me.

We left Inveraray to stay with Jeanie’s Aitken cousin, Alan Ramsay, at Galashiels in the Borders. On the way there, Colin told me that I could never be buried in the Campbell burial site at Iona because I was a Catholic and the Campbells had been anti-Catholic traditionally, even though Jeanie and Margaret Argyll were also of my religion.

‘Pa would never have let me marry you if he’d been alive,’ he sneered. ‘A bloody Catholic and a bloody colonial.’

I was too shocked by this sudden unaccountable malice to reply. Colin quickly reverted to being pleasant after that first attack, but he remained as emotionally distant as he had been before our stay at Inveraray. I thought perhaps life would
improve once we had left Scotland and moved into a place of our own in London, so I was grateful when we said goodbye to Galashiels and drove down to our little cottage in Coulson Street. It was to be our first marital home, since we had not yet lived in the New York apartment, and I was as excited as any new bride. I was looking forward to seeing my many London friends; Colin had a few, too, so we both got on the ‘blower’, as he called the telephone, and organised our diaries.

On the May bank holiday Monday, I set off with him for a drink in the neighbourhood pub, the Queen’s Head on Tryon Street. Colin’s stepmother, Mathilda, for whom he had professed undying love, was due to visit us from Paris. Ian was rather less fond of Mathilda: they were involved in a protracted legal suit over chattels which he wanted and she claimed were hers by right. After his second pint of beer, Colin became moody and started to talk disparagingly about Mathilda. Obviously, at Inveraray he had allowed his brother to influence him against her.

‘But I thought you liked her,’ I said.

‘All women are bitches,’ he sneered, in the same ugly tone he’d used at Galashiels.

This was so patently ridiculous that I could not treat it as anything other than a joke.

‘Come on, Colin,’ I laughed, jollying him along, ‘you know that’s not true. You’ve always said you liked Mathilda. How could she be a bitch? And I’m no bitch.’

For a long and lingering moment time stood still.

Colin looked at me. I could tell from his expression that he understood what I was trying to do. For a while I thought he would scale the hurdle. For a split second it seemed he would break into a grin, but the hurdle was evidently too high. Instead his cheeks sank in and his mouth turned downwards. An expression of pure venom darkened his face.

‘All women are bitches. My mother was a bitch, Mathilda is a bitch, and you’re a bitch,’ he said, grabbing my wrist and spilling my Coca-Cola. With that, he stood up, still clutching my wrist, silently yanked me out of my seat and manhandled me into the car. He stood aside while I opened the door then pitched me in roughly.

I stretched across to his side and opened the passenger door for him. He climbed in, sucking deeply and moodily on a Dunhill cigarette. As I drove the short distance to our cottage, I tried to pour oil on troubled water with expressions of wifely concern.

‘Shut up, you stupid bitch,’ he spat as we pulled up.

No one had ever called me stupid before, and, whatever else I was, I was even less of a fool than a bitch. Partly through nerves, and partly because of the preposterousness of his insult, I started to laugh. Colin leaped out of the car, stalked to my side before I had a chance to open the door and hauled me
out. His fingers pressed into my right arm and he shoved me across the pavement, digging deeper into my flesh while I searched my handbag for the house keys.

‘You’re hurting me,’ I said.

‘Hurry up, you stupid cunt,’ he said in a voice so laden with malevolence that it chilled my blood. Instead of relaxing his grip, he tightened it.

As soon as I managed to get the key in the lock and turn it, he kicked open the door and threw me through it, kicking it shut with his foot. He shoved me across the sitting room to the sofa, and pushed me down on it by the shoulders. By this time, I was laughing hysterically.

‘Shut up, you bitch.’

He stood menacingly over me, glowering with such irrational poisonousness that I hovered between hysteria and amusement at the sheer ludicrousness of all this. I had no experience of violent men, and I could not quite grasp what was happening.

‘Let me go upstairs and compose myself,’ I said between giggles.

‘You ain’t going anywhere, you cunt. You’re gonna stay right here and shut that stupid trap of yours.’

‘I can’t,’ I said between giggles that were now most definitely hysterical.

‘You stupid bitch,’ he said again.

It was as if his body and soul had fused into one awful mass of irrationality. He clenched and unclenched his fists, swinging them ominously on either side of my face.

‘Let me go upstairs,’ I repeated in a panic as I tried to make my escape.

He pushed my shoulders down with his fists. ‘Sit down and shut up.’ With that, he clenched his fists again and smashed them into the right side of my face again and again. As the bones collapsed, I felt an explosion of pain.

With an atavistic surge of strength, I jumped up, knocking him over. I didn’t need to look in the mirror to know I was injured, but when I did, I was horrified. I saw the face of a monster, one half sunken in and misshapen.

‘Look at what you’ve done to my face!’ I shrieked, lunging at the beast on the floor and pounding him with my own fists until he captured both wrists and restrained me. ‘You monster, you beast!’ I kept repeating. ‘You’ve destroyed my face!’

As soon as I could get up, I headed for the telephone and called Dr Michael Yates, the house doctor for the Connaught Hotel, who my cousin Toni had used as a general practitioner since
the days when she lived there. It was not the first time I had had to call him: before we went to Inveraray, Colin had overdone the amphetamines and needed an antidote to dewire him. I told Michael what had happened now, and he instructed me to meet him at the casualty department of St George’s Hospital on Hyde Park Corner.

When I hung up, a contrite Colin was waiting for me, having marshalled the full battery of his considerable powers of persuasion. The insane scene of destruction was at an end as suddenly as it had begun. Swearing that he had not intended to maim me, he begged my forgiveness and pleaded with me not to tell anyone else what he had done.