Mad World (46 page)

He also wrote mysteriously: ‘What are the documents concealed at Mad?’ Coote must have mentioned something in a letter to him that does not survive – perhaps something to do with the family scandal. Boom and Mad were much on his mind as he wrote.

He was recalled to London at the end of March. While they were still deciding what to do with him, he ensconced himself in the Hyde Park Hotel and corrected his typescript. ‘My Magnum Opus is turning into a jeroboam. I have written 62,000 words.’ He had come to a natural break in the story and was happy to spend a fortnight getting drunk in White’s while he awaited orders. On 1 May, he gave dinner to two old Oxford friends, Harold Acton and John Sutro. He filled Maimie in with the details: ‘a fine dinner – gulls eggs, consommé, partridge, haddock on toast, Perrier Jouet ’28, nearly a bottle a head, liqueur brandy, Partaga cigars – an unusual feast for these times … I found their company delightful … Harold’s descriptions of service life as seen by a bugger were a revelation. He combines his pleasures with keen patriotism’ (Acton had finally been accepted by the RAF).

Two days later he returned to Chagford, struggling with ‘a very difficult
chapter of love-making on a liner … I feel very much the futility of describing sexual emotions without describing the sexual act; I should like to give as much detail as I have of the meals, to the two coitions – with his wife and Julia. It would be no more obscene than to leave them to the reader’s imagination, which in this case cannot be as acute as mine.’ He wrote to Laura with a warning: ‘sexual repression is making mag. op. rather smutty’.

He made terrific headway through the month of May, during which Laura gave birth to his fifth child, Harriet Mary. At the end of the month he was assigned to No. 2 Special Air Service Regiment, though not given an active posting. On D-Day, Tuesday 6 June, he brought the book to its climax: ‘This morning at breakfast the waiter told me the Second Front had opened. I sat down early to work and wrote a fine passage of Lord Marchmain’s death agonies. Carolyn [Cobb] came to tell me the popular front was open. I sent for the priest to give Lord Marchmain the last sacraments. I worked through till 4 o’clock and finished the last chapter.’ That same week, appropriately enough, the Americans liberated Rome.

‘I think perhaps it is the first of my novels rather than the last,’ he wrote. He again described it as his ‘magnum opus’ and said to his agent that it ‘was very good’, explaining to him that ‘the whole thing is steeped in theology’. The epilogue and final tinkering were completed on 24 June, the Feast of Corpus Christi.

He was shaken by the advent of the new flying bombs (this was the time that he sent his books away from the Hyde Park Hotel back to the country and joked that his son should come to London – ‘a child is easily replaced while a book destroyed is utterly lost’). He was discomposed that, as one low-flying bomb came over, ‘for the first and I hope the last time in my life I was frightened’. He put this down to his being drunk and resolved to give up alcohol: ‘It is a cutting of one of the few remaining strands that held me to human society.’

A message arrived with the news that Randolph Churchill had personally requested Evelyn to join him on a mission to Croatia. Evelyn claimed jokingly that the commission came ‘in the belief that I should be able to heal the Great Schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches’. He was eager to accept, but worried that the posting wouldn’t come off, as he had had so many setbacks in the last three years.

Yugoslavia had been invaded by Germany and Italy, but had a number of resistance groups. It was thought that the presence of Churchill’s son would act as a visible symbol of Britain’s solidarity. The main resistance group was General Tito’s Partisans, now supported by the British, who had switched their allegiance from the Serbian Chetniks. Tito was presented to the British as a heroic figure who stood for religious tolerance. In fact, he was a shadowy figure with his own communist agenda.

Catholic newspapers in England had reported for some time the less palatable truth about Partisan activities, which included the murder of Slovenian priests and the desecration of churches. Evelyn had his own agenda for agreeing to Randolph’s offer, and he did not see Tito in quite the same way as he appeared to Churchill’s son. Evelyn initiated a fantasy that Tito was in fact a woman and a lesbian to boot. He called her ‘she’ or ‘auntie’, a joke that took advantage of Tito’s elusiveness and the fact that he was so little known outside Yugoslavia that there were doubts that he really existed.

In July, Evelyn and Randolph were posted to the Italian port of Bari and then to an island off the Dalmatian coast called Vis. From there they headed to the small spa town of Topusko, the Partisans’ headquarters. They flew in on 16 July but, just as they were about to land, the plane crashed. There were nineteen on board and ten were killed instantly. Before setting off on the flight, Evelyn had mentioned in a letter to his wife that he had abandoned a silver medal that she had given him because the silver chain had turned his neck green. He believed that whereas Baby Jungman’s St Christopher had saved him in the Amazon, this time the lack of Laura’s token had nearly cost him his life.

Badly burnt, he was sent to hospital in Bari. To his great good fortune, Coote Lygon was stationed near there with the WAAFs. For the last two years of the war, Coote had been posted abroad. Like many other women of her class, her life had been given new meaning and adventure by the opportunity to serve her country. Most of the time she was in Italy, in the small Apulian town of San Severo, below the mountains of the Gargano peninsula on the Adriatic. She remembered Evelyn and Randolph going in and out of Yugoslavia. Evelyn sent her a telegram to tell her of the plane crash and of his injuries. She immediately went to see him.

Coote was delighted to be of use to Evelyn, whose first concern was
that she should contact Laura. His hands were so burned that he could not hold a pen and so she wrote to Laura for him.

Coote remembered the hospital visit for more than one reason. Late in life, she recalled Evelyn’s burnt hands and the grumbling son of the Prime Minister, ‘complaining of water on the knee … creating a fine fuss’. But she also remembered a significant moment in the course of her conversations with Evelyn. He told her about the new book he had just finished: ‘It’s all about a family whose father lives abroad, as it might be Boom – but it’s not Boom – and a younger son: people will say he is like Hughie, but you’ll see he’s not really Hughie – and there’s a house as it might be Mad, but it isn’t really Mad.’

If Coote felt apprehensive, she didn’t reveal it. She remembered that he ‘talked on for some time in this vein, at pains to emphasise that, although he had chosen a situation which might be compared to ours at one time, he was going to treat it in a very different way – he had taken the bare bones, the skeleton, and intended covering it with muscles creating tensions, quite different from those which had influenced us’.

Evelyn was clearly anxious not to hurt Coote and the family that he loved. He told her that the Roman Catholic element was a key part of the novel and that the matrimonial problems of the fictional Flytes were very different from those that beset Lord and Lady Beauchamp. Nevertheless, it was bold of him to admit how close the parallels were. It shows the depths of Coote’s devotion that she chose to accept Evelyn’s excuse for using her family as copy. She loyally continued to claim that the resemblances between her own family and the fictional Marchmains were much exaggerated.

Evelyn was sent to Rome to convalesce before he and Randolph departed a second time for Yugoslavia. Coote went too to look after Evelyn, giving up her leave in order to nurse him, just as Maimie had taken him in after his parachuting accident. He stayed in a charming flat, 5 Via Gregoriana.

He was also treated for a carbuncle that had grown on his neck. It was a painful procedure: ‘Suffering was intense and continuous.’ Eventually they gave him antibiotics and it began to heal. He relished the fact that Coote was there to administer to him and soon he was enjoying Rome – ‘a week of easy living, getting strong and eating better’. Their days were spent visiting churches and dining quietly in the evening. He was in pain
and had lost most of his luggage in the crash, including his shoes, forcing him to walk in ‘creepers’ both made for the same foot. It must have been a difficult time for Coote, given the memories of Rome with Boom. She was short of money and Evelyn, always generous to his friends, insisted on loaning her 5,000 lire.

In September, Randolph and Evelyn returned to Topusko. Evelyn set about collecting information for an official report on church affairs. He was also awaiting the proofs of
Brideshead Revisited
.

Randolph proved to be an uncongenial comrade. Being together in close proximity was a great strain upon both men. ‘He is not a good companion for a long period,’ Evelyn wrote, ‘but the conclusion is always the same – that no one else would have chosen me, nor would anyone else have accepted him.’ The weather was dreadful, it rained night and day for a week, and he had run out of cigars. Nor did he have the comfort of hard drinking, since he despised the local spirit, Rakia. He thought that it had ‘an all-pervading stench part sewage part stickfast paste’.

Coote, with typical understatement, observed that the two men had got on each other’s nerves when they were together in hospital in Italy. In Yugoslavia, nerves frayed by lack of cigars and drink, Evelyn vented some of his most glorious invective upon his less intelligent companion. Randolph was a ‘flabby bully who rejoices in blustering and shouting down anyone weaker than himself and starts squealing as soon as he meets anyone as strong. In words he can understand he can give it but he can’t take it … He is a bore – with no intellectual invention or agility.’ All he and Lord Birkenhead, who had joined them, could do were repeat witticisms spoken by their fathers. ‘Of conversation as I love it – a fantasy growing in the telling, apt repartee, argument based on accepted postulates, spontaneous reminiscences and quotation – they know nothing.’ At the end of his tether with Churchill’s volubility, Evelyn laid a wager that he could not read the Bible in a fortnight. The wager backfired as Randolph had a wonderful time rediscovering the Bible. As Evelyn described it: ‘He sits bouncing about on his chair, chortling and saying ‘‘I say, did you know that this came in the Bible ‘bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave?’’’ Or simply, ‘‘God, isn’t God a shit.’’’

Evelyn wrote to Coote, complaining that he was short of reading materials, and she dutifully sent him packages of books. He thanked her
for repaying the Roman loan and told her that Freddy Birkenhead’s arrival was ‘most opportune as I was beginning to have qualms about a winter tête-à-tête with Randolph’. He also told her how grateful Laura was for Coote’s nursing of him while he recovered from the plane crash and that his wife had said, ‘I always thought her the nicest of all your friends.’ To which Evelyn added ‘Hear hear’.

Evelyn told her that he was hoping to see her again in Bari, where he had applied for a transfer. Coote was much on his mind, not least because the novel, in which her younger self figured as Cordelia Flyte, was also consuming him. On 20 November the proofs finally turned up and Evelyn spent every minute that Randolph was out of the room correcting them. He later gave them to a Jesuit institution in Baltimore, who had awarded him an honorary doctorate. He described their extraordinary trajectory in war-torn Europe: ‘This set of page proofs was sent in October 1944 from Henrietta Street to 10 Downing Street; from there it travelled to Italy in the Prime Minister’s post bag, was flown from Brindisi and dropped by parachute on Gajen in Croatia, then an isolated area of ‘‘resistance’’; was corrected at Topusko and taken by jeep, when the road was temporarily cleared of enemy, to Split; there by ship to Italy and so home, via Downing Street.’ Having Winston Churchill as his father was one compensation for Randolph’s awkward company.

The proof corrections made by Waugh in Yugoslavia between 20 and 26 November were, he told his agent, ‘extensive and very important’. He changed such crucial passages as the one in which he described the trajectory of Charles’s love from Sebastian to Julia to God; he introduced many alterations to the architectural history and layout of Brideshead Castle; he made Charles’s wife Celia even less sexually desirable than she was in the manuscript; he inserted a key passage into Sebastian’s letter and expanded upon the theme of Charles’s aesthetic conversion to the baroque. There were numerous other minor changes, some of them bearing upon the Lygon connection: in the manuscript, Beryl Muspratt is a year or two younger than Bridey, but in proof she becomes a year or two older, heightening the resemblance to Elmley’s wife, Mona the Dane. The question of explicit homosexual reference was a cause of some soul-searching. In the manuscript, when Bridey wonders whether Kurt’s relationship with Sebastian is ‘vicious’, Charles replies that it can’t be because, ‘For one thing, I happen to know the man has syphilis.’ In proof,
this becomes a gentler ‘I’m sure not. It’s simply a case of two waifs coming together.’

Once he had inserted the final proof corrections (undertaken while Randolph Churchill was out at the cinema), Evelyn dispatched his magnum opus and asked for a new posting to Bari. He remained there a fortnight, meeting up once again with Coote. She loved Bari, describing it as ‘Paris, London and New York rolled into one after San Severo’. He was still short of reading matter, so she lent him some Trollopes. She was so keen to spend time with him that she got herself to Bari whenever she could, even on some occasions hitchhiking in lorries. It was a long and tiring journey from San Severo, but his company was usually worth the effort. Not always though – once she came to see him looking ‘very thin and almost pretty’, arriving early, ‘rather importunately, at 3.30’. ‘I had a rather sticky time with her until 6,’ Evelyn complained, ‘failed to get a bath, took two Benzedrine tablets, found I had lost all appetite through fatigue and could eat little of the very fine feast we had arranged. For myself I found it a dull evening and wondered whether Coote found it worth the long hitch-hike.’