Mad World (38 page)

Wincey, Baby Jungman’s dog, was a Blenheim spaniel given to her by the Duke of Marlborough. Evelyn had never been fond of the dog and the feeling was mutual. Grainger had also been very hostile to Evelyn in the early days of Evelyn’s friendship with Maimie. ‘On Guard’, the story in question, finally went to
Harper’s Bazaar
. The heroine is a fusion of Baby Jungman and Maimie Lygon. This is a good example of Evelyn’s art of composite character creation. His old Oxford friend Terence Greenidge considered that his characteristic literary device was to roll together two real life characters into one fictional one, ‘very often adding some lurid vice’. This was certainly true of Anthony Blanche in
Brideshead
, whom Evelyn admitted was a composite of Harold Acton and Brian
Howard. His rake, Basil Seal, in
Black Mischief
and
Put Out More Flags
, was a combination of an Oxford charmer called Basil Murray and Nancy Mitford’s husband, Peter Rodd. When one of Evelyn’s friends asked him how he got away with using real life models for fictional characters, his reply was that you can draw any character as near to life as you want and no offence will be taken provided you say that he is attractive to women. In the case of ‘On Guard’, neither Maimie nor Baby took offence because the heroine of the story was supremely attractive to men.

It tells the tale of a suitor who leaves for Africa and buys his girl a dog that is tasked to keep away other suitors in his absence. The dog, called Hector after the suitor who purchases it, obliges by spoiling all romances for his owner, peeing on all-comers and barking at them. Grainger and Wincey both had this characteristic, but so as to offend neither of them Hector is made a poodle rather than a Pekingese or a spaniel. Evelyn’s father always had black poodles.

The heroine, Milly Blade, like Baby and Maimie, is a beautiful blonde: ‘she had a docile and affectionate disposition, and an expression of face which changed with lightning rapidity from amiability to laughter and from laughter to respectful interest’. As with Maimie in real life, her best feature is a beautiful button nose that ‘more than any other, endeared her to sentimental Anglo-Saxon manhood’. Small and snub, it was ‘a nose which made it impossible for its wearer to be haughty or imposing … it was a nose that pierced the thin surface crest of the English heart to its warm and pulpy core; a nose to take the thoughts of English manhood back to its schooldays, to the doughy-faced urchins on whom it had squandered its first affection, to memories of changing room and chapel and battered straw boaters’.

Men fall hopelessly in love with her and she, beautiful, careless and vague, usually returns their affection for a few months. Four is her normal track record. Mike Boswell (Evelyn) is a platonic friend who has enjoyed a wholly unromantic friendship with Milly since she first came out. ‘He had seen her fair hair in all kinds of light, in and out of doors, crowned in hats of succeeding fashions, bound with ribbon, decorated with combs, jauntily stuck with flowers; he had seen her nose uplifted in all kinds of weather, had even, on occasions, playfully tweaked it with his finger and thumb, and had never for one moment felt remotely attracted to her.’

All of this changes when he is having tea with Milly, Hector growling
quietly. Mike (a tall and personable man of marriageable age) makes the mistake of patting Milly on the knee. Hector attacks and bites him, causing Milly to rush for the iodine bottle: ‘Now no Englishman, however phlegmatic, can have his hand dabbed with iodine without, momentarily at any rate, falling in love.’ Seeing the nose in such close proximity as she dabs his hand, he becomes her ‘besotted suitor’. Meanwhile, Hector continues to ruin her chances, defeating suitor after suitor with his bad behaviour. Milly is more in love with her dog than the erstwhile Hector in Africa. He performs doggy tricks to amuse and delight her, but also disrupts the tender moments by peeing or being noisily sick.

Finally a suitor manages to get the better of the dog, and in response to his usurpation Hector bites off Milly’s nose, leaving her with a ‘fine, aristocratic beak – worthy of the spinster she is about to become’. Like all spinsters, she is doomed to spend her life alone with an ageing lapdog. In his bitterness towards Baby, Evelyn half-hoped that would be her fate. He would never have wished or dreamed that Maimie might be the one to end her life as a lonely old drunk sitting silently with only a Pekingese for company.

At the end of December, Evelyn returned to Pixton, the Georgian house on a wooded hillside near Dulverton that belonged to the Herbert family. He was becoming more and more taken with Laura Herbert. Then on to Mells, the home of Diana Cooper’s friend Katharine Asquith, from where he opened his heart on paper to Maimie, who had been so close to him throughout his disastrous courtship of Baby Jungman.

First Evelyn told her how he felt sad and guilty that his former lover, Hazel Lavery had died aged only fifty-four: ‘I feel a shit.’ He was having a Mass said for her, which would require him to drive six miles in the cold and dark. He then turned to Laura, the ‘white mouse’, whom he had barely noticed at Portofino:

I have taken a
great
fancy to a young lady named Laura. What is she like? Well fair, very pretty, plays peggoty beautifully. We met on a house party in Somerset. She has rather a long thin nose and skin as thin as bromo as she is very thin and might be dying of consumption to look at her and she has her hair in a little bun at the back of her neck but it is not very tidy and she is only eighteen years old,
virgin, Catholic, quiet and astute. So it is difficult. I have not made much progress except to pinch her twice in a charade and lean against her thigh in pretending to help her at peggoty.

Evelyn was falling in love with another large chaotic family. Pixton was solid and shabby genteel, rather than aristocratic and beautiful, homely and hospitable rather than grand and elegant. The dogs ruled as they ran about jumping out of windows and sitting proprietorially on chairs, leaving guests like Evelyn to stand. Laura’s mother, Mary Herbert, was another of the fierce, formidable and (unintentionally) funny matriarchs that Evelyn loved. She disliked him at first but came to be devoted to him. Evelyn Gardner was a close cousin of Laura’s on her father’s side. One of Laura’s relations was heard to remark: ‘I thought we had heard the last of that young man.’ The family and guests were noisy – drinking, smoking and talking, mainly about arrangements for horses and hunting, and of course Catholic matters.

There was a converted chapel outside the house. It had been a laundry room. Father Knox and Father D’Arcy were frequent visitors. A nanny lived upstairs, often to be found quietly playing patience. This kind of country house living was very different to the lifestyle at Mad. But it was comfortable and it was here that Evelyn became drawn to the eighteen-year-old Laura. She may have looked like his favoured type – blonde, fragile-looking, shy, in need of protection – but she was not afraid to stand up to him. Unlike the glamorous flapper girls that had previously attracted him, she was stable, with a very strong sense of self. She also had the all-important sense of humour, and shared Evelyn’s love of nicknames.

At her young age she was taking on a lot with Evelyn, who was himself such a strong character, and had not lived by half in his thirty-one years. But, bolstered by her strong sense of family pride, she was more than up to the task. Though not as musical as the rest of her family, she liked amateur dramatics and after finishing school in Neuilly she enrolled at RADA.

Evelyn wrote to her in London: ‘Darling Laura, I am sad and bored and need your company. If you have a spare evening between now and when you leave London, please come out with me. Any time will suit me as I have no engagements that I cannot gladly break. Ask your mother first and tell her I wanted you to ask.’

In February 1935 an event loaded with heavy symbolism occurred. Evelyn wrote to Maimie with plans for her birthday: ‘for your birthday we will have a stately orgy’ (orgy meant party in Mad parlance). He joked that Jessel (he of the foie gras episode) had arranged a party on the eve of his wedding to Lady Helen Vane-Tempest-Stewart so that they could reciprocate for his Christmas faux pas at Mad by stealing all his presents. He told her that he had seen Laura in London but that the meeting had not been a success because he had an appalling hangover and after eating three oysters was ‘sick a good deal on the table so perhaps that romance is shattered’. At the very end of the letter he wrote: ‘I set my booms house on fire last Monday.’ It may have sounded casual but Evelyn was very upset about the incident.

His father’s diary records the events of the night: ‘woke at 4 am to a smell of burning. On opening the bookroom door found the room ablaze. Called K [his wife], and Evelyn called the firemen … many books were burned, the armchair, Rossetti chair, carpet, curtains all scorched … Evelyn went to bed again.’ Not only the precious chair that had once belonged to Rossetti, but also many of the books were irreplaceable. An account by Evelyn, written a couple of years later, says remorsefully: ‘My father is a literary critic and publisher. I think he can claim to have more books dedicated to him than any living man. They used to stand together on his shelves, among hundreds of inscribed copies from almost every English writer of eminence, until on one of my rather rare, recent visits to my home, I inadvertently set the house on fire, destroying the carefully garnered fruits of a lifetime of literary friendships.’ Evelyn, a book-collector himself, knew what this meant to his father. This incident – beside his sense of humour – explains why when he was later in the Army he infamously asked for his wife to save his books before his children, since books can never be replaced, whereas children can.

Whilst writing about Campion, who spent much of his time travelling between the grand homes of the aristocracy, Evelyn did the same – albeit without the inconvenience Campion faced of having the Elizabethan secret service on his tail. At Newton Ferrers he shocked the aristocratic company by talking crudely about love, which upset Sir Robert Abdy. If he was in the habit of sucking up to aristocrats, the accusation that has dogged his reputation, then this was a curious way of doing so. In Mad
World, the private code for boring was ‘Hugh D. Mackintosh’, or rather ‘Makingtosh’, an allusion to an Australian businessman friend of Lord Beauchamp’s whom the Lygon girls found unutterably tedious. Evelyn’s letters to his favourite aristocrat, Lady Maimie Lygon, include several references to Makingtosh of the following kind: ‘I missed that train so I have to wait wait wait wait god it is sad Hugh D. Makingtosh H.D.M Hugh D Hugh D I think I am about to die I missed the train What will Laura say? say? Hugh D. Mackingtosh Grainger is impuissant as the frogs … GRAINGER CAN’T FUCK.’ This is not the customary language of sucking up.

His life at this time was all ‘wait wait wait wait’. He wanted to propose to Laura but could do nothing until he heard from Rome.

Evelyn and Maimie both suffered from depression and insomnia. They shared tips on pills and draughts to combat their problems: ‘This is better than what I meant to send. Dissolve both in boiling water (½ tumbler) and drink. Very delicious and you will have 8 hours. Can’t bear to think of you unhappy.’ In April 1935 he wrote to Maimie from Bridgwater to thank her for reciprocating by sending him the ‘beautiful pills. I think I will take to my bed and sleep for a few weeks.’

Maimie was full of news that her eldest brother had met a Danish widow to whom he had taken a great fancy. Evelyn mentions the relationship between Elmley, who he mocks as ‘the Viscount’, and his lady, ‘the melancholy Dane’. He had formed a clear impression of the latter on the basis of Maimie’s account of her origin: ‘I suppose she will be like Ophelia and walk about with garlands of wild flowers and drown herself.’

The melancholy Dane was Fru Else Dornonville de la Cour, daughter of an actor and widow of a property developer. Known as Mona, she was very beautiful. Elegant and well travelled, she spoke a number of languages. She had been brought up in Copenhagen by her mother, after her father had left when she was just a young child. He was a well-known character called Viggo Schiwe, who played the part of Jean, the footman who has sex with the aristocratic young woman of the house in the original production of August Strindberg’s scandalous play
Miss Julie
. Else tended to keep quiet about her theatrical connections, preferring to emphasise that her grandfather had been an admiral in the Danish navy. She was eight years older than Elmley and had a nineteen-year-old
daughter from her first marriage. She had been educated at a good school in Copenhagen, which she thought gave her an advantage over the Lygon sisters: ‘I’m sure I got a better education than my sisters-in-law brought up by governesses.’

She first met Elmley getting off the train at Worcester railway station. She was actually on her way to Madresfield. She had been invited to the house in her capacity as a friend of Lady Carlisle, who knew the Lygons well. Elmley had been travelling on the same train and was mesmerised by the beautiful Danish widow with the beguiling accent. He introduced himself as Lord Elmley, though she had no idea that he was connected to the Lygon family. ‘I was going to stay with people called Lygon,’ she recalled years later, ‘and I knew their father was Earl Beauchamp, but I didn’t know of someone called Elmley.’ Mona was disappointed when the young man left her. She thought that she would never see him again. On arriving at Mad, she was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the house, with its bachelor wing, visiting maids’ rooms and nursery wing. There she saw the dining table which seated several dozen, the well-stocked library, long gallery, the crystal balustrade, ebony furniture, the Bronzinos on the walls, the cases full of Sèvres china and ornate snuff boxes, the Buhl furniture from Versailles, the carpets and tapestries. Then at dinner that evening she was amazed to see the young man she had met on the train taking his place at the head of the table.

All four sisters were at Mad that weekend and they welcomed Mona warmly. But it was Elmley who particularly singled her out. She had just learned to play backgammon and so he sat her on the sofa and they played all weekend. They agreed to meet up in London and that was the start of their relationship. The Lygon sisters grew to dislike Mona and had very little sympathy with their brother for marrying her. They were sure that, given her age, he would never have children and the longed-for heir. Hugh was not likely to marry and have children, which left only Dickie who was estranged from Madresfield and living with his mother. Mona, for her part, disliked the sisters. She remembered that they were pretty and glamorous and spoilt, ‘financed by their father in a big way’.