Mad World (56 page)

After many years of travel, Coote settled down near Faringdon House in Oxfordshire, the home of Lord Berners, who had left the house to his long-term lover and companion, the notorious ‘Mad Boy’ Robert Heber Percy. Coote knew both men, as they were friends of her father’s and had often visited Mad.

Robert Vernon Heber Percy was born in 1911, the youngest son of Algernon Heber Percy of Hodnet Hall in Shropshire. He was nicknamed ‘the Mad Boy’ on account of his outlandish behaviour. He was handsome, elegant, high-spirited and a notorious homosexual – although that did not stop him marrying a girl called Jennifer Fry in 1942. They had one daughter, with whom Jennifer left home two years later. A divorce followed in 1947.

Mad Boy had met Lord Berners in 1932, when he was twenty-one. They were lovers for eighteen years, inseparable save during the war and the brief period of Heber Percy’s marriage. When Berners died in 1950, he left Faringdon to Robert.

Faringdon was Mad World all over again, what with its flock of doves dyed in pinks and blues, and pewter tankards full of champagne. Mad Boy crashed cars and smoked furiously, burning holes in his stylish and expensive suits. There was a dog cemetery with one of the tombstones inscribed ‘Towser: A short life but a gay one.’

Coote was fond of Mad Boy, on account of their shared passion for horses and entertaining. They had in common many friends and a taste for outrageous stories. They had been to many of the same places – Venice, for instance, where Heber Percy had lived with Berners, and where Coote had visited Boom. Berners worked for a time at the consulate there and was once asked to respond to a report in an Australian newspaper saying that Venice used to be a luxurious place but now it was full of nothing but beggars. He said that the only possible explanation was a misprint – ‘for beggers, read buggers’.

By 1984, Mad Boy’s health was failing and Coote nursed him through a bad fall. Paddy Leigh Fermor, the great travel writer who had often crossed paths with both the Lygons and Evelyn (he was a major player in the battle for Crete), visited Coote at Faringdon and noticed that they were close. However, neither he nor any of their friends could hide their shock when Coote announced that she was marrying Mad Boy. They married the following year, both aged seventy-three.

But Mad Boy had a loyal and ferocious Austrian cook/housekeeper, Rosa Proll. Her food was legendary, notably her summer puddings and her Pudding Louise, a confection of hot
marrons glacés,
boiling raspberry jam, and ice cream on top. Rosa was devoted to Heber Percy and left the house in high dudgeon when Coote became mistress of Faringdon. The fact that Coote was an excellent cook added insult to injury.

Rosa has been blamed for the failure of the marriage, but her influence cannot have been the only reason. For all the shared love of the hunt, Mad Boy and Coote were not exactly a natural couple. After all the years that Maimie and Evelyn had joked about possible suitors for their beloved Coote, not even they would have guessed in their wildest dreams the bizarre finale to her romantic life.

What possessed her? Some said it was a marriage of convenience to avoid death duties, but those who knew her best simply said that she was flattered and wanted to be married. Yes, Robert was homosexual, but so was her own father. Boom’s problem, she thought, was not his sexual orientation, but his choice of a wife who didn’t understand homosexuality. She would be different. The decision was, however, a disaster. Coote spent her honeymoon alone after Heber Percy turned against her, outraged at the thought that he might actually be expected to sleep with her.

After the marriage failed she retreated to her nearby bungalow, where she was happier. It seems that they never divorced, for she signed herself Dorothy Heber Percy in her will. In 2000 she helped a small press to republish a book by Lord Berners called
The Girls of Radcliff Hall,
a mischievous, racy, fictional evocation of life at Faringdon, in which all the boys (including Heber Percy) become girls at a boarding school, with Berners as the headmistress.

Coote died in 2001, at the age of eighty-nine. She had been busy planning her ninetieth birthday party. Despite all the trials and tribulations
of her life, she had an admirable stoicism and resilience. Whereas the bigamy of Sibell’s husband and Maimie’s marriage to a penniless philandering Russian prince caused enduring distress, Coote’s union with a notorious homosexual was a brief aberration. She had the happiest life of all the Lygons, filled with laughter and the love of friends. Even in her seventies she would think nothing of driving from Oxfordshire to the south of France for a party.

There is a wonderful glimpse of her in August 1990, at the twenty-first birthday celebrations of Debo Mitford’s grandson. Debo, of course, had made the best match of all the Mitford girls – to the Duke of Devonshire. The party took place at Chatsworth and, like a throwback to Elmley’s twenty-first at Mad, it lasted for three days. The celebrations began with an evening garden party for over two thousand people. The third day was for charity. Sandwiched between, was the main event, the ball. The grandchildren insisted on the formal dress code, much to Debo’s amazement (though a few wore skimpy dresses, ‘the sort that JUST covers the telling bits of body and show vast thighs, as if anyone wants to see them’). Debo herself wore ‘a big crown of a tiara and felt like Mrs Toad of Toad Hall’. The young people were ferried from London in buses, with dinner served en route. There was only one gatecrasher, a ‘beautiful, goat-like, tall creature’ called Jerry Hall, some sort of model. Coote was there. She spent much of the night talking to old friends such as Paddy Leigh Fermor, though she could not have helped thinking of the old days at Mad.

In 1997, the BBC made a documentary about the changing fortunes of the British aristocracy. They interviewed Coote and Sibell, who were still following the Ledbury Hunt (though by car, not on horseback). Lady Sibell is tall and elegant, Coote large with spectacles. They talk about Evelyn and remember that he came out to hunt a couple of times, though it wasn’t a great success. They also talk about how they were ‘relentless about disturbing’ him when he was trying to work in the old nursery at Mad. Coote wonders how he ever managed to finish his books.

Then she reads aloud the description of the chapel at Brideshead as the camera pans around Boom’s chapel at Mad. They show family scrapbooks, beautiful photos of the ‘Beauchamp Belles’. And they talk of Boom’s exile for being a homosexual, Coote saying wistfully but stoically that it was ‘quite, quite, quite an upset’. In the chapel they comment how
the flowers in the stained glass have faded a little and recall how they were required to hold artificial doves when they were being painted for their frescoes. They talk about the wild weekend parties and then about how the war ended the world they knew. For Coote, it was an enormous watershed in everyone’s life, while Sibell just says ‘Never the same again.’

Evelyn

Ann Fleming killed Evelyn Waugh. She broke his spirit by passing on a piece of gossip. In November 1961 he went abroad with his favourite daughter, Meg. She was his last great love. In Trinidad they had stayed with Lord Hailes, Governor-General of the West Indies. In a move of unprecedented and uncharacteristic spite, Ian Fleming’s wife Ann let Evelyn know that the Haileses had found him a great bore. This was a shock from which he never fully recovered.

It came on the heels of a similar incident that Evelyn himself recounted to that other noted wit, Nancy Mitford. Evelyn had been accosted by a man in White’s (his gentleman’s club in Piccadilly) who told him that nobody wanted to speak to him because ‘you sit there on your arse looking like a stuck pig’. Evelyn, always slightly on the edge of persecution mania, became convinced that he had become boring. Nancy was furious about the Fleming incident: ‘what makes Ann
tell
you that some friend of an expatriate … finds you a bore? The very last thing anyone could reproach you with.’ But he was still upset a month later and tried to explain to Nancy precisely what this meant to him. The fine distinction that he stressed was that he had lost the ability to recognise his own dullness:

I must explain about boring the Haileses because it has been what young people call ‘traumatic’ … The crucial point is that I was confident they both enjoyed my visit … I talked loud and long and they laughed like anything. Now I find I bored them. Well of course everyone is a bore to someone. One recognises that. But it is a ghastly thing if one loses the consciousness of being a bore. You do see that it means that I can never go out again.

He was quite serious about this. Nancy tried to comfort him: ‘Do try and get it into your head that whatever else you may be you are
not a bore
.’ But, never one to forget a criticism, Evelyn brought it up again with Nancy two years later, referring to himself as ‘the man who bored the Haileses out of Trinidad’. Then yet again, in 1965, four years after it happened, he wrote to Diana Cooper: ‘I first realised I had become a bore when the Haileses remarked on it to Clarissa. I had thought I was particularly bright with the Haileses. Traumatic.’

Evelyn’s wit was legendary – often cruel but always hilarious – and he had made his career on being funny. He could be nasty, snobbish, cutting, acerbic, as his letters attest. But he could never have been accused of being dull. Not only did he have a life-long fear of boredom itself, but, in common with many of his generation, he had a pathological fear of becoming that most dreaded of things – a bore. Two other events added to his unhappiness towards the end of his life. His favourite daughter married and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council ‘knocked the guts out of him’.

Ann Fleming, despite this aberration, was a loyal friend and she would have been upset to know how deeply Evelyn was hurt by the Hailes incident. Her friendship with Evelyn ‘was a relationship giving nothing but joy’. She sketched one of the best descriptions of Evelyn in later life. For her, he was a great comedian like Charlie Chaplin – the little man, the figure of fun. She thought that like all great clowns ‘he affected a grave demeanour of manner, he seldom laughed aloud, and a smile was very rewarding’.

Despite his great love for his wife and children he was beset by mood swings and fits of melancholy. When he was rude to his friends, his wife Laura made him apologise. On two occasions his rudeness provoked Ann Fleming to physical violence. She understood that his ill temper was partially due to his long-term insomnia, but that his bad moods were much improved by misadventures. Rafting on the Rio Grande he was delighted when the raft sunk and they had to swim to shore: ‘Evelyn doing a slow breast stroke, blue eyes blazing and mood much improved, for he liked things to go wrong.’

Evelyn’s problem after the war was that his life went right, so his fiction went wrong. His comedy depended on the misadventures and the sense of being an outsider. Settling down as a country squire with a happy
brood of children was no recipe for the creation of another
Decline and Fall
or
Handful of Dust
.

Testimonies from his friends all emphasise his funniness, his incomparable companionship, his loyalty, his courage, his schoolboy sense of humour, his fierce intelligence and his humility about his own genius. He was a flirt (like his father) and adored fair, beautiful aristocratic women. All of his friends recall his blue eyes with their intense, piercing gaze. But no one gives a more accurate portrayal of the middle-aged Waugh than Evelyn himself. His autobiographical novel
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
, published in 1957, recounts a nervous breakdown that he suffered aboard a ship. It was brought on by an overdose of sleeping draught. In a chapter entitled ‘Portrait of the Artist in Middle-age’ he observes that ‘the part for which he had cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, before his children … and his cronies in London, until it came to dominate his outward personality’. This is late Waugh in a nutshell: a man who cast himself in a role that was really rather boring, with the result that he became a parody of himself, all too easily misunderstood as a curmudgeon, a snob and a testy misanthropist.

Gilbert Pinfold’s crisis was his own. He went mad, began hearing voices in his head. One of them kept telling him that he was a homosexual. He wasn’t – he loved women too much for that – but there is no question that the creator of Sebastian Flyte and admirer of Lord Beauchamp had one of the great bisexual imaginations of the English literary tradition.

His health was ruined prematurely by heavy drinking, smoking and addiction to the sleeping drugs that had blighted his life. But despite the ever more crusty persona, his late letters to his children reveal a tender, loving side that was rarely seen in public. To Bron, his eldest, he repeated his mantra: ‘Most of the interest and amusement in life comes from one’s friends.’

He died on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966, of a heart attack. His friend Father Caraman said the Mass in Latin. He was deeply mourned by his friends. ‘Probably the greatest friend I ever had,’ said Nancy Mitford in a television interview just after his death: ‘what nobody ever remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything. That’s what none of the people who wrote about him seem to have taken into account at all.’ His son Bron echoed this in the
Spectator
that May:

The main point about my father, which might be of interest … is not that he was interested in pedigree – it was the tiniest part of his interests. It is not that he was a conservative – politics bored him … it is simply that he was the funniest man of his generation. He scarcely opened his mouth but to say something extremely funny. His house and life revolved around jokes. It was his wit – coupled, of course, with supreme accuracy of expression, kindness, loyalty, bravery and intelligence – which endeared him to everybody who knew him or read his books.

Late in life Evelyn Waugh completed
A Little Learning
, his memoir of his early years, in which Oxford plays such a vital part. When he heard that ‘Frisky’ Baldwin had had to buy a copy, he wrote a letter of apology, which Frisky inserted in his private proof copy of
Brideshead Revisited
. Evelyn said that the only reason he had not sent a complimentary copy was that Frisky had not really featured in the early years. ‘In the second volume,’ he explained, ‘you will be a prominent character and I shall send you proofs for your permission to disclose the pleasures of the early ’30s.’