Life Worth Living (29 page)

Grandma loved her only grandson, my brother Mickey, more than her three granddaughters, but of the girls she liked me the best, and chose to leave me her house in Grand Cayman. Grandma’s death provided the spur for two important decisions. I gave up smoking on the evening of her burial and went into therapy when I returned to London. Ever since the débâcle of my marriage, I had been carrying around an unbearable load of pain. There was no healthy way of getting rid of it, save talking it out of my system. Friends and relations, however, really don’t wish to be burdened with too much anguish, nor did I wish to
burden them with it. ‘Laugh and the whole world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone,’ Mummy used to warn us when we were growing up, and, recognising the truth of that adage, I decided to pay a professional to listen while I relieved myself of this weight.

Basil Panzer turned out to be the ideal therapist, cosmopolitan and sophisticated, elegant and polished, and wise and sensible as only the spiritually enlightened can be. He and I clicked from the outset. Once a week, every week for the next four years, I went to see him, although by the last year he was recommending, ‘Don’t waste your money. You don’t need me any longer. We can have tea instead.’

Shortly after I began to see Basil, James Buchanan-Jardine returned to live in London after five years in Hong Kong. ‘Do give him my number and ask him to bring his wife around for dinner, if he’d like that,’ I said to Vanessa Hoare, a mutual friend, who relayed the message.

When James telephoned and asked me for dinner, I fully expected him to show up with his German wife. Instead, he was on his own. ‘She’s in the south of France with the children,’ he explained.

Over dinner, it became apparent that James had never got over me. He was too loyal a person to badmouth his wife, but I gathered, reading between the lines, that their marriage had seen better days. Although they had two little girls, the younger only a few months old, they were leading independent lives. Sitting there in L’Avenue de la Poissonerie, looking across the table at James, I was shocked to realise how fond of him I still was. He was no longer the beautiful young man I had met nearly six years before. His hair had thinned dramatically and he was well on the way to portly middle age. If anything, though, he was an even more attractive person than the Adonis I had known, for five years away from Britain had given his personality a breadth and scope it had previously lacked.

By the end of the evening, it was obvious to both of us, though neither of us said a word, that we had bitten off more than we could chew. Nevertheless, we both behaved with formal rectitude. I presented James with my cheek, and he pecked it gently, saying, ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow.’

When James rang, he asked if I could have dinner with him again that evening. ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he said. I knew what it was even before James walked in through my door, swept me up in his arms, and declared that he still loved me.

‘I do, too,’ I replied, as we engulfed one another in a passionate embrace.

Thereafter, and for the next eight years, James and I were very much an item. Each morning we went running together; each evening he came by after work to see me. Sometimes, we went to dinner; sometimes we saw friends or went to the movies; sometimes we did nothing. Sometimes, too, we went our separate ways, for we were not an official couple and had our
own lives to lead. Although the issue of marriage reared its head pretty early on, and I would definitely have married him if he had been free, James did not want to disrupt his family life with another divorce. He knew from bitter experience with the daughter of his first marriage what it was like to be a father to a child he seldom saw. He wanted to be a daily part of his two young daughters’ lives, to occupy the same house as them, to have breakfast with them, to do all the things fathers cannot do when they are divorced and custody falls to the ex-wife.

Although I was not exactly thrilled that we would not be living together, I not only respected James’s point of view but also supported it wholeheartedly. Like most Mediterraneans, I understood that children should come first, even if that priority complicates adults’ lives. Moreover, I already had a lot to be grateful for, and knew that I should count my blessings instead of demanding myself out of the happiness and fulfilment James brought into my life. If he had been a dream come true the first time around, this time he was everything a waking woman needs: a wonderful lover, a delightful companion, a warm, nurturing Daddy. He really cared whether I was happy or sad, well or sick, up or down. Gradually, I came to recognise that he was all I had ever wanted or needed.

So what if I didn’t have the sort of structure I wanted for the relationship? I had the relationship, and all its benefits. Marriage was not a necessity in the circles we moved in. Established liaisons were accepted as valid alternatives to matrimony, and were treated with equal respect. Friends of James’ as well as mine frequently asked us out together as a couple. Some of his friends would even ask me to one party and his wife to another. Occasionally she and I even entertained one another, though I tried to keep such events to an absolute minimum. The restraint they called for was simply not conducive to relaxation, and frankly, who needed the tension?

Perhaps my attitude towards having a protracted relationship with a married man might have been less serene had I not had the benefit of a superb therapist like Basil. Recognising how special James was, however and how good what we had between us was, he encouraged me to ‘go for it’ for as long as it made me happy.

After three years together, James presented me with a ‘love-child’, whose importance cannot be exaggerated. James and I were both dog-lovers, and Tum-Tum (named in honour of James’ tum-tum, which was then a very sexy and inviting cushion) was the nine-week-old daughter of James’ springer spaniel, Sooty. ‘Why do you want the responsibility of a dog? It will tie you down,’ my brother Mickey said, completely missing the point. I wanted to be tied down, I wanted responsibility, I wanted to be needed, I loved loving. Although I had come to terms with living alone, I had never regarded a solitary existence as being a desirable one, and Tum-Tum’s presence cheered up that empty flat at West Eaton Place in a wholly unexpected way.

Before her arrival, I had often been lonely; after it, I never was.
As my personal life went from one level of fulfilment to another, I decided to shift the focus of my writing to books. Paul Sidey, a close friend and successful editor (then at Century Hutchinson, now with Random House), suggested I capitalised upon my background and wrote a guide to being a modern lady. This idea had appeal, so I set about writing it before I even bothered to find an agent. In the end, I did not need one. In winter 1985 I attended a dinner party given by Anne Hodson-Pressinger, the only daughter of Pamela, Lady Torphichen and met Graham Lea, who published the autobiography of Sara Keays, the mother of former Tory cabinet minister Cecil Parkinson’s illegitimate baby, Flora. He asked me what I was working on, and said he’d like to see it. I sent him what I had written so far, he liked it, we signed a contract and I wrote like the furies to finish the book within the deadline. To my astonishment, Graham liked it so much that the only editing he did was to fuse the odd split infinitive.

In October 1986,
The Guide to Being a Modern Lady
was launched with a party at the Foreign Press Association. The photographers and gossip columnists were particularly excited to see my stepmother-in-law Margaret, Duchess of Argyll there. (Margaret and I had become great friends since meeting in 1975.) ‘Duchess, hold up the book. Lady Colin, move in closer,’ they instructed us as she gamely posed with me for picture after picture.

The rollcall of prominent names – my friends Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia, Prince Philip’s great-niece, Prince and Princess Lew Sapieha, Lord and Lady Pennock, Lady Delves Broughton, Sir James and Lady Mancham; my ex-boyfriend Larry Lamb; my cousins Peter Jonas (then managing director of the English National Opera) – had the journalists salivating. The launch party was a great success; it remained to be seen whether the book would be. To my surprise, it sold well and got even better press coverage – the glossies, of course covered the launch party in depth, and even the broadsheets dedicated valuable column inches to the book. Graham Lea was even more pleased than I by the favourable reaction. I went on a book tour of Britain and had a delightful if taxing time giving interviews and receiving a positive response wherever I travelled.

Where British journalists are concerned, however, adulation is never universal. The gossip columnist Nigel Dempster now decided to disparage the flavour of the month with the rancour which I, and other victims of his attention, have found so predominant. He not only sought to damage the book by dismissing it as ‘commonplace’, but he also dragged my relationship with James into his odious commentary. He also brought up my medical history in typically venomous fashion. I had reached the limits of my patience with that sub-species of journalist, and wanted to take action. Hadn’t it occurred to Dempster that people might wonder why he had never once been able to write about me without mentioning the circumstances of my birth in as spiteful a manner as possible? Did he not realise it raised more questions about him than it did about me? By attacking me for a birth defect he was making a public admission about himself. James, however, wanted the whole matter ignored. Out of respect for him, I let the innuendos
pass. My relationship with James was not affected; nor was the public reaction to my book.

James’ wife Irma did not like having her nose publicly rubbed in it, and I sympathised wholeheartedly with her reaction. It was indeed cruel to hurt her by publishing the story of our relationship, but then, I have never met anyone who would attribute kindness to Nigel Dempster.

Once the dust settled, life returned to normal and I mused on what my next professional project should be. The difficulty with being a writer is that you can go for long stretches without an idea for a book, then suddenly come up with ideas for two or three. In the meantime I did occasional journalistic assignments for publications such as
You
Magazine or the
Sunday Express
magazine. I was under no illusion about the reason I was hired. I had access to people and places that real journalists did not. For instance, I was able to get
You
magazine into the gala held by Prince Alfred of Liechtenstein at the Schwartzenburg Palace in Vienna, with the president of Austria and his wife in attendance. And I was able to pull in people like Prince Charles’ old confidante, Lady Tryon, or the Duchess of Norfolk for features on subjects as disparate as the Derby and charity work.

Working for newspapers took some adjustment. I had major misgivings about associating professionally with a class of people I did not always have respect for. I did enjoy the protection of a few honourable journalists, and sheltered behind them. Chief among these were Jonathan Dawson, a commissioning editor at
You
magazine, and Alan Frame, deputy editor of the
Daily Express,
who was introduced to me by my good friend Catherine Olsen, both of whom understood that I would only write about ‘feelgood’ subjects, and that I was not about to rubbish my friends in print or embarrass anyone who put their trust in me.

In 1988 my journalistic career took another turn when Baron Marc Burca, a friend of many years’ standing, asked me to become the social columnist for
Boardroom
magazine, the glossy he owned which could be found in the reception area of the office of every chairman and managing director in the city of London. He assured me that I would not be writing a gossip column – this would be strictly reports of social functions. It was up to me to set the tone of the page, to be as witty or catty or anodyne as I wished. Did I want to give it a whirl? Yes, I did.

It certainly turned out to be an edifying experience. The power it afforded one in the social world was akin to that otherwise enjoyed only by major movie stars and royals. I had never lacked invitations beforehand, but I was now inundated with them by all sorts of PR firms, socialites, companies and charities. Some chased publicity like heroin-addicts chasing the dragon, while others maintained their dignity and kept things in proportion.

I’ll start as I mean to go on was my motto, and from the beginning I wrote a column that I hope was witty and seldom bitchy. I never gossiped. If I knew that Mr This and Lady That were having an affair, I was always careful to separate their
names when listing guests. I also included loads of people, as Betty Kenward did in ‘Jennifer’s Diary’, for most people like to see their names mentioned. Society-addicts liked to figure out who was who in the pecking order, so I subtly indicated the different gradations of celebrity. Where I was less gentle was in the selection of events I covered. I attended only three sorts of functions: those organised by friends, actual or prospective worthy causes; and glamorous occasions such as the Queen’s Cup or the Cartier polo match at Windsor.

At first, I never wrote about any event I had not personally attended, nor did I mention anyone I hadn’t seen or spoken to, but after the fourth year, I changed my approach. ‘Send in a list of the people and some photographs, and I’ll write it up as if I’d been there,’ I often said to friends or PRs.

When I wasn’t partying or writing or with James and my friends, I dedicated myself to charity work. This I loved, not only because of the personal satisfaction it brought, but also because I was acknowledged as having a flair for fund-raising. I understood that no one wants to be taken for a ride and that everyone wants value for money, even when they’re giving to charity, and I accepted that charities had become big business. People are ultimately selfish, no matter what they say to the contrary, and this was as true of the fund-raisers as it was of the ticket-purchasers and donors. Most of us raise funds because it makes us feel good or reflects well upon us, while those who give usually do so to receive some hidden benefit in return, whether material or spiritual.