Mad World (31 page)

As with Robert Byron all those years ago, Evelyn was a charming and interested companion, who pleased Boom because he was far more interested in churches and art than the Lygon children. Lady Sibell recalled that although her father liked Evelyn very much, he could be irritated by his lack of grace: ‘Father once told me ‘‘I wish Mr Waugh would not genuflect because he does it so clumsily’’.’ Evelyn, in Rome for his confirmation as well as the chance to meet Beauchamp, was as yet a novice – and perhaps a little over-enthusiastic – when it came to the external signs of his faith. Lady Dorothy, too, remembered that Evelyn and her father got on well and that for Evelyn it was tremendously exciting to be in Rome to have his new faith confirmed.

Evelyn would always remember this time with great affection. He wrote to Maimie on more than one occasion to recall the happy days that they had shared: ‘Wasn’t it extraordinary that we were all there in one room?’ Another letter from 1950 says that he was in Rome and went back to visit Berners’s home, ‘now in the hands of a soldier’. ‘I had quite forgotten there was only one bed-room. What fun you and I and B[oom] – and Byron must have had. Youth youth … there is a wonderful porphyry font in Verona. Did B[oom] know? Love BO.’ Boom was an admirer of porphyry, to the point of being a bore in his enthusiasm. This became a running joke between Evelyn and the Lygon children.

The reference to ‘Byron’ in this letter is intriguing. It is not an allusion to the Byronic quality of Lord Beauchamp. Nor does it refer to Robert Byron, the Hypocrite and travel writer, who accompanied Beauchamp on that earlier trip to Italy, but does not seem to have met him again. It would seem, therefore, to be a reference to a third Byron. Ocean liner passenger lists reveal that the Earl Beauchamp was accompanied on his wanderings by one Robert Harcourt Byron, an Australian in his mid-twenties. Born in Sydney, six feet tall with fair hair and blue eyes, he is sometimes described as Beauchamp’s ‘valet’ and sometimes as his ‘secretary’.

When Evelyn returned to Rome four years later for the final stages of the annulment of his marriage, he wrote to Coote Lygon: ‘So I am in the eternal city god it is cold and I have to wait to be cross-examined by beasts re my wife.’ He was clearly thinking of Lord Beauchamp and Maimie: ‘Then I will come to London to my boom at Highgate … I miss porphyry arse very much also Blondy.’

‘My boom at Highgate’ is a projection of the Lygons’ fond nickname for their father onto Arthur Waugh. Blondy is of course his name for Maimie. ‘Porphyry arse’ would appear to be Boom himself. This is the playful Evelyn, fuelled by alcohol, indulging in what he calls ‘filth’. Other letters, though, reveal a different side. In February 1960, he again reminisced to Maimie about Rome, this time in a serious and reflective mood that shows his deep and abiding love for her: ‘I was in Rome and thought much of our days in the Forum. I was in Venice and thought of Brandolin. I think of you always.’

‘Brandolin’ was the Palazzo Brandolini on the Grand Canal in Venice, where Richard Wagner had once stayed. It was there that Evelyn and Maimie went after saying goodbye to Boom. That summer of 1932, Venice was full of society people, among whom the most glamorous was Diana Cooper. Another Nordic blonde like Diana Mitford, she was witty, elegant, charming and unconventional. Brought up as the daughter of the Duke of Rutland (though almost certainly the result of the duchess’s liaison with a dashing writer called Harry Cust), she was regarded by many as the most beautiful woman in England. An actress as well as a society fixture, she married the diplomat Duff Cooper and entranced every man who met her. Evelyn too fell under her spell. His cup filled to overflowing as he found himself in the company of Diana as well as Maimie.

English society in Venice was orchestrated by an ambitious American called Laura Corrigan, a professional hostess who offered high-class accommodation and entertainment for wealthy visitors. The Guinnesses, Cecil Beaton, Lady Cunard, Randolph Churchill and many others from the ‘smart set’ were all to be seen at candlelit dinner parties in crumbling palazzi, the tables adorned with heavily scented tuberoses. By day the guests were ferried to the Lido on Mrs Corrigan’s outsize motor-launch. Liveried footmen arranged backgammon boards on the beach, poured drinks and served elaborate luncheons. It was a time of late nights and sleeping in till noon. At cocktail hour, people would gather at Harry’s Bar to drink Bellinis and plan the rest of the evening.

Evelyn wrote up his experience of this trip in a ‘letter’ entitled ‘Venetian Adventures’ for
Harper’s Bazaar
. The argument of the piece was that Venice was a superior destination to the French Riviera. He defended the delicious scampi that was unfairly given a bad name by the English: ‘It is
pure legend that they are caught in the canals. I spent a night last week trawling in the Adriatic with one of the boats of the Chioggia fishing fleet, and watched netfuls of scampi being drawn in from the deep water for the Venice markets. We cooked them on a charcoal brazier and ate them in their shells at dawn.’ But he then characteristically deflates his own lyricism, adding ‘with cups of hideous coffee compounded, it seemed, of chicory, garlic and earth’.

Evelyn, Maimie and a group of others visited the monastery island, San Lazzaro, once a leper colony but now home to Armenian monks. The island was made famous by Lord Byron, who would row out there to learn the language and help the monks to compose an English-Armenian dictionary. Evelyn enjoyed talking to the brothers in Latin. One of them complained about ‘
Mulieres stridentes et vestitae immodestissime
’ (‘noisy and immodestly dressed wives’). Evelyn gave a donation and tried to explain that there were six English Members of Parliament in the party (‘
Hic sunt sex senatores Britannici
’).

He painted a rosy picture of Venice, which he was to draw upon many years later when he wrote
Brideshead
. He loved the evenings, when the city ‘really becomes itself’ and ‘we can drift quite silently, except for the gondoliers’ cry at corners, on black water among the smells’. He stayed drinking until late in the Caffe Florian, where he admired the locals’ sense of the need for formality of demeanour. If foreigners wish to sit at Florian’s in the evening, he informed the readers of
Harper’s Bazaar
, ‘they must dress as the Venetians think suitable’. He despised tourists wearing informal sun wear: ‘Young Englishmen who attempt to appear like gross schoolboys in shorts and vests present a very vulgar spectacle indeed under Venetian eyes.’

He liked the compactness of the city, the fact that it could be walked in an hour. In contrast to the sprawl of the Riviera, with all its hotels, villas, beaches and casinos: ‘Here there are at the most about forty English or Americans, who know exactly what everyone is doing every minute of the day. They all meet every evening on the Piazza and discuss how they dined, and on the morning after a party I love to see the convergence of patinas, canoes and bathers, sometimes into a Sargasso Sea of gossip, sometimes into rival camps with rare swimmers travelling between and fanning the dissension.’

Even the Lido, with its noisy backgammon players and general
grubbiness, did not deter him. But the heat did not agree with him. A ‘confirmed heliophobe’, he left it to the others to sunbathe while he escaped ‘in the cool depths of the churches and palaces’. In
Brideshead
Lord Marchmain advises sticking to the cool of the churches rather than the beaches where endless games of backgammon were played.

Evelyn welcomed the cool of the evening when he could watch the locals: ‘I like the evening carnival, when all the poorer Venetians decorate their boats with lanterns and flow in procession down the Grand Canal, not to collect money or attract tourists, but simply because it is their idea of an agreeable evening.’ Italy, the home of Catholicism, released his long-repressed romanticism. He loved the Venetian architecture and painting. He liked the food and the wine. He could see no ills – even the traditional complaints about the smells of the sewage and the mosquitoes were not to spoil the mood. The mosquitoes, he noted, disappeared at dawn, ‘and as none goes to bed much before that they are very little nuisance’. Even the smell of sewage in ‘garlic-eating countries’ he found preferable to those of the north.

For
Brideshead
, the only one of his novels in which he fully unleashed his emotional and romantic side, he drew on his memories of 1932 in an evocative passage:

The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly – perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life kept pace with the gondola, as we nosed through the side-canals and the boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days, with the speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known, and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of Chioggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern swinging in the prow, and the net coming up full of weed and sand and floundering fishes; of melon and
prosciutto
on the balcony in the cool of the morning; of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at the English bar.

When Charles Ryder first arrives in Venice he experiences a heady, intoxicating response to the city’s beauty: ‘conifers changing to vine and olive … the sun mounted high, the air full of the smell of garlic’. The liveried gondoliers, the butler dressed in ‘rather raffish summer livery of striped linen’, the
piano nobile
in full sunshine, ‘ablaze with frescoes of the school of Tintoretto’: every detail is a loving recreation of the visit in the company of the Lygons.

Not even the bouts of diarrhoea – the habitual inconvenience of the English abroad – spoiled Venice for Evelyn. He was among friends, where they accepted him as a celebrated young novelist and an amusing companion. His wit was legendary, as long as he could control his equally famous sharp tongue. He was at his happiest in the company of beautiful women and there were plenty to be found on the Lido that summer. He listed them in his article for
Harper’s
: ‘Diana Cooper, Diana Abdy, Bridget Parsons, Mary Lygon, Mrs Bryan Guinness, Doris Castlerosse, Anne Armstrong-Jones and Tilly Losch’.

Passions ran high in the summer humidity. Michael Parsons (Earl of Rosse) ‘boxed the ears’ of Anne Armstrong-Jones in a jealous rage provoked by her stepping out on a balcony with another man. She sent back the tuberoses he sent in apology but married him three years later. Evelyn noted wryly that there were always apologetic tuberoses lining the tables of the Palazzo Brandolini.

Another legendary quarrel broke out on the island of Murano. It took place during ‘a placid, English birthday party when glassblowers and gondoliers joined in and danced with the guests’. This was a party to celebrate Diana Cooper’s fortieth birthday on 29 August, but it all ended in disaster – ‘placid’ is a joke. The trouble began when the ‘Lucky Strike’ cigarette heiress Doris Duke accused Sir Richard Sykes of making a pass at her in her car before the party. She was incensed and asked her chauffeur to throw him out of the car. Then, at the party, Sir Richard deliberately burnt the back of Miss Duke’s hand with a cigarette. Randolph Churchill sprang to her defence. Diana Cooper’s account was this:

Everyone had been drinking like fishes for an hour before. Now all the wives were clinging to their men to stop them joining in … Oliver Messel and Cecil Beaton were fighting like bears and, as I thought, doing
splendidly
! … The next day I was covered with tuberoses, which were sent when you’d behaved outrageously.

Evelyn wrote: ‘I shall never smell tuberoses again without envisaging queues of repentant young men apologising after parties.’

It became known in Evelyn’s circle as the ‘Murano incident’ and the word ‘Syksed’ was added to the pool of in-jokes and private language shared with his friends: it was applied to anyone who had been roughed up or to anything broken. Writing to Diana after returning to England, he mourned the end of ‘all the fun in Venice. How I loved it’. He also reported that in the version of the Murano incident that was circulating around London society the Earl of Rosse was purportedly thrown into the canal by twenty gondoliers. He added that Lord Donegall thought that ‘we were all hired by Miss Duke to bash Sykes’ – this suggests that Evelyn must have been at least a fringe participant in the famous brawl.

At the end of the summer Lord Beauchamp left Rome. He travelled through Provence, stopping off in Avignon, before joining Hugh in Marseille, where they boarded a ship for Australia.

It is not clear whether the unreliable Hugh made the Italian trip after all. This most elusive of the Lygons does, however, speak in his own voice in a letter to his little sister Coote written from on board ship during the voyage out with his father. ‘Darling Coote,’ he begins, ‘Thank you so much for coming to see me off. It was sweet of you and I did love it.’ He writes of the lovely swimming pool on the ship, which is mostly reserved for ‘all the horrible children on board’. He rather poignantly tells her that he is ‘on the wagon’ and therefore does not have to spend money and that he works out at the gym every morning, on the rowing machine and that he boxes, and swims before trying to ‘sink into a coma for the rest of the day. Proust is very helpful.’ He also mentions that High Choral Mass has started next door in the bar. He seems not to be fond of women: ‘There are lots of little women on board but the Captain is nice and is going to show me the engines.’ He also notes that: ‘There are 120 Malay stewards which is quite quaint.’ He says that he is going to Cairo for the day the next morning and that ‘Boom is hopping about everywhere with his embroidery.’ He says that the women on board also have their embroidery, ‘so soon we shall have a cosy little circle’. He asks ‘how are the poor animals?’ He adored his shooting dogs and missed them desperately when he was away.