Mad World (40 page)

On 7 July, Evelyn finally got the news from Rome for which he had waited for so long. He received a telegram from the archbishop handling the case: ‘Decision favourable. Godfrey.’ He phoned Bruton Street, Laura’s London residence, to tell her the news. She was at church so he hurried to find her. In the church porch he told her that they were finally free to marry. He wrote to Maimie to tell her the good news: ‘Darling … You will be greatly surprised to hear that I have got engaged to be married to Miss L. Herbert … She is lazy with a long nose but otherwise jolly decent … don’t tell Capt. Hance or he will take Miss H. away from me on account of his superior sex appeal.’

Evelyn’s diary for 9 and 10 July shows him dining with Maimie and
Hubert Duggan and lunching the next day with Hugh and Maimie. He was very happy and full of news and plans about Laura and his wedding. He dined with Coote on 13 July; the next day he had drinks with Hubert and Maimie, who were probably still conducting their affair. He was happy, sleeping well, visiting friends and spending most of his time with Laura. He went to a cocktail party with Maimie on 21 July. A letter written to Laura expresses his deep happiness: ‘I shall think about you for about 17 hours in the 24 and dream of you for the other five. Darling Laura. I love you. Thank you for loving me.’

While this was a happy time for Evelyn, for the Lygons it was the worst since the events of summer 1931. They experienced two tragedies, one after another. First came the unexpected death of the countess from a heart attack.

Evelyn had made plans to return to Abyssinia to finish the novel that was published as
Scoop
. On 28 July 1936, the day before he left England, he wrote in his diary: ‘Had arranged to meet Hubert at Halkyn House but Lady Beauchamp had just dropped dead so my arrival, tipsy and with Brownlows, was not opportune.’

That night he met and got drunk with his old love Olivia Plunket Greene, now in her thirties and an alcoholic: ‘she very drunk. Put her to bed.’ He was saddened to see the state of her but relieved that the relationship hadn’t worked out, now that he had Laura. The meeting signalled the close of a long chapter but also his determination never to desert his old friends.

Lady Beauchamp’s death set off a chain of events that was, in Waugh’s words, ‘Shakespearian in its elaborate impossibility’. The death of the countess propelled Lord Beauchamp into action. The moment he heard the news, he contacted his lawyer, Richard Elwes, who happened to be on holiday in Venice, and told him that he was determined to return to England as soon as possible to attend his wife’s funeral. Coote was in Venice with her father and they set off for England by train.

Elwes hurried back to London and saw Norman Birkett, who held a senior position in the office of the Attorney General. The Attorney General’s office was sympathetic to Lord Beauchamp’s plight and the proposition, put forward by Elwes, that the warrant for his arrest should be regarded as non-operative during his attendance at the funeral. However the ultimate decision lay with Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary,
who was very upright. The Duke of Westminster wasted no time in speaking to Sir John and appealing against any provision that Beauchamp should be allowed to ‘desecrate by his odious presence the interment of his beloved sister’. Sir John was in an awkward predicament but finally decided that the law must run its course.

Father and daughter arrived at Dover on a cross-Channel steamer. At the point of embarkation they saw a man frantically waving his arms. It was unclear whether he was waving them on or not. He was dressed in striped trousers and a short black lawyer’s jacket. They realised that it was Richard Elwes.

Lord Beauchamp, after five years of exile, was about to set foot on English soil when at the last minute Elwes went aboard and urged him to stay on board or else risk arrest and public humiliation. With his sister still warm in her coffin, the Duke of Westminster was on the point of exacting his revenge for the lack of a public trial and the refusal of the Lygon children to testify against their father. Elwes told Lord Beauchamp the news: ‘He said, No.’ There was no choice but for him to return to his palazzo in Venice. His daughter remembered that, stoical and tough as ever, Boom did not make a fuss. They waited for the steamer to turn around and sailed back to France.

Coote returned with her father and did not attend her mother’s funeral. Nor did Maimie, who was said to be ill.

Lady Beauchamp’s funeral took place in Chester. The countess, said the newspapers, had been ‘a great political hostess’ noted for two things: her devotion to her mother and her ‘staunch churchmanship’. There was, of course, no mention of the scandal and the separation – though a friend subsequently wrote to
The Times
quoting a poem that once had been written for her by Laurence Binyon, including the lines: ‘What wrongs are borne, what deeds are done/ In thee’, and adding the pointed comment that ‘in her mature years these lines were equally applicable in the sense that she possessed a great simplicity of character. Experience of life had brought very great moral courage and devotion to duty.’ Another correspondent recalled her hospitality at Madresfield in happier days:

I can only see her now with her fair head thrown back and her hand outstretched in welcome … ‘I have put you in the same room, as I know you loved it so’ were her words to me once; and at dinner the
same night she whispered to me that there was to be ice pudding as she remembered my love for this, too … Thus one thinks of those fragrant memories which recall her as we knew her then. Her nursery, her garden, her stables with the pair of white Austrian horses, the long gallery where she wrote her letters, and the chapel with the white pigeons circling round it.

Hugh was distraught by his mother’s death and also by the death five days later of his cousin, Lady Alington. A healthy girl with a fistful of swimming medals, she was struck down by acute appendicitis at the age of just thirty-three. Hugh was in a bad way. Coote recalled that he had been feeling unwell for some months. His failures had multiplied. His desperate attempts to get back on the wagon had come to nothing and, as Evelyn’s friend Christopher Sykes put it, ‘the violent physical exertions by which he thought he could restore his health failed utterly; he still refused to consult a reliable doctor’.

He had been injured falling from his horse and his face had been damaged by a stray pellet on a shooting trip. Photographs taken at the time show him looking much older than his years. He was no longer the gilded youth of photographs taken in the twenties and the lovely portrait of him executed by William Ranken. Hugh was persuaded to recuperate abroad, but his devotion to his dogs, Dan and Luke, made him reluctant to leave. The dogs were inconsolable, he said, if he left them for even an hour, so how would they cope being left for three weeks?

He decided on a motoring tour of Bavaria and left on 14 August. This was the month when the Olympic Games were held in Hitler’s Berlin and the whole of Germany was in the grip of Nazi fever. Hugh travelled with an artist friend, Henry Winch, described by Coote as a ‘dull dog’. On Sunday, the 16th, the day of the Olympic riding finals in Berlin, they spent many hot hours driving hatless in an open car. Hugh was afflicted with sunstroke. Or he might have been drinking. Near the end of the day, he got out of the car to ask passers-by for directions, fell on the kerb and in so doing fractured his skull. He was taken to Rothenburg ob der Tauber hospital.

Henry Winch sent a telegram to Coote in Venice. Her father chartered a plane and they rushed to Hugh’s bedside. Lady Sibell also made her way there. Maimie was recovering from an appendix operation and couldn’t travel. Despite the attention of the very best German doctors,
Hugh never regained consciousness. He died on 19 August in the early hours of the morning. He was thirty-one.

This time nothing was going to stop Boom from returning to England. He insisted on bringing the body of his son home to be buried. He simply didn’t care if he were arrested. The
Daily Express
reported that he ‘felt he had to bring the boy home … it had broken him up’. Lady Sibell claimed, late in life, that Lord Beaverbrook prevailed upon Sir John Simon to lift the warrant. She recalled that on her arrival at Ostend with her father and sister, she received a telegram saying: ‘Safe for your father to land.’ But she was probably exaggerating her own part in the affair. The truth was that Lord Beauchamp had once again instructed Richard Elwes, telling him that regardless of the risk of arrest he was returning to Madresfield for his son’s funeral. Elwes put the case to Birkett and they renewed their case to the Home Secretary. This time Sir John felt moved to mercy. It was felt that Lord Beauchamp had suffered enough, and to the great indignation of the Duke of Westminster and his entourage, the warrant was suspended for the period of the funeral.

On 24 August the Honourable Hugh Lygon was buried at Madresfield. Lord Beauchamp had longed to return home, but never in such a circumstance as this. A Tiger Moth aircraft was kept on standby in case he had to make a hurried exit.

The church and churchyard were so packed with friends that the funeral was delayed: those who remembered Hugh’s habit of always being late smiled at how he was late for his own funeral. Lord Beauchamp’s emotions can only be imagined. It was the first time he had seen Dickie, his youngest son, in five years. He had a lot of people to face, including a smattering of aristocrats (the Dowager Lady Ampthill, the Countess of Coventry, Viscountess Deerhurst) and even his former lover, Ernest Thesiger. Hugh’s pallbearers were his devoted friends: Wally Weston, Jack Hood, Walter Hanson, Robert Bartleet and Henry Winch. Captain Hance attended with Jackie and Reggie. Evelyn was still away in Abyssinia and did not hear the news until he returned home. Among the friends who did make it to the funeral were Patrick Balfour, John Sutro, Christopher Sykes and Hugh’s old acting coach, Willie Armstrong.

Appreciations and obituaries were written for Hugh, with his friends remembering his gentleness, ‘quiet charm’ and his capacity for laughter. ‘Only to hear his irresistible laugh was a tonic,’ wrote Armstrong in
The Times
. His alcoholism and homosexuality were tactfully ignored. His devotion to friends was emphasised, along with his kindness to his servants and employees, who considered him, it was said, their friend more than their master.

‘He could not do enough for his friends and in their happiness he knew what it was to be happy.’ The ‘close friendship’ with Evelyn Waugh was particularly remarked upon, with due mention of their intimacy at Oxford (Mr Waugh and Mr Acton being described as leaders of ‘Aesthetic Oxford’). There was mention too of their adventure in Spitsbergen, where Hugh, despite injuries, had shown remarkable fortitude. His friends and family would long mourn him, Armstrong concluded, ‘for it was quite impossible to know ‘‘Hughie’’ Lygon and not love that smile and that indefinable charm which were his very own’.

After the funeral, Lord Beauchamp returned to Venice. Coote remained convinced that her beloved Hughie’s death had been brought on by the vicissitudes of his wasted life, his needless bankruptcy and his unhappiness in those last few weeks after the death of their mother:

He may well have been poorly before he went off and no doubt was shaken by my mother dying so suddenly from a heart attack without any preliminary illness. Also I think he had a long term malaise from Lady Sibell and Elmley letting him go bankrupt for a very paltry sum a couple of years or so before; although he was reinstated and farming a living in a pretty house not far from Mad called Clevelode, all his plans for training and so on had come crashing about his ears, and I think this had a shattering effect on him.

At this terrible time Coote was a rock to her father and he could not have coped without her. She put aside her own despair to comfort and support him. She later described Hugh as a man of ‘tremendous energy’: ‘he was such fun to be with, it came as a great blow to me when he died’. Boom wrote to her on 30 August from his palazzo on the Grand Canal: ‘Darling Dorothy, I want to write a special line of thanks for all your loving sympathy these last dreadful days. You had more courage than I and I can never forget your help. How bad it has been I now begin to realise and have collapsed – not ill but just unhappy … your loving Daddy. What a lucky man your husband will be.’

For those who loved Hugh, it was the waste of a young life. He was a young man who had seemed to have everything – wealth, connections, a first-class education, let alone his formidable personal charm. It was the thwarted promise that was so upsetting for his family. For those who knew him best, the added tragedy was that Hugh had seemed to overcome his demons. His farming at Clevelode was going well: he had returned to the embrace of the Malvern Hills and the support of the loyal locals.

When Evelyn returned to England he was shocked and deeply upset to hear the news, especially as he had thought that Hugh was finally turning his life around. It was on 10 September that he arrived back from Abyssinia and learnt the news. He immediately wrote to Maimie:

Darling Blondy,

I have just got back and have learned for the first time the tragic news of Hughie’s death. At least I have heard as much [as] my parents remember from the newspaper report. Do write and tell me what happened.

It is the saddest news I ever heard. I shall miss him bitterly. It is so particularly tragic that he should have died just when he was setting up home and seemed happier than he had been for so many years. I know what a loss it will be to all of you and to Boom. Please accept my deepest sympathy. I am having Mass said for him at Farm Street … I long to see you again in October.

My dearest love to you, Bo.

CHAPTER 19
Three Weddings and a Funeral

Laura was now foremost in Evelyn’s thoughts. He had stopped at Assisi on the way to Abyssinia and from there he wrote her one of his most tender letters: