The Viceroy's Daughters (11 page)

But enough balls and nagging. Honestly, and you must know it by now, I miss you terribly when you are away, and somehow I want to say I'm ever so grateful to you for being the marvellous friend to me you have been ever since we left India; I don't count so much
before
March, do you? as we saw so very little of each other as compared to now. Oh! I can't write what I want to say but I am oh!
so very
grateful to you for
everything
. Your marvellous friendship first and then all your help with the horses and ponies and the running of my stables. But I'm not going to write a soppy letter though I
insist
on your
driving
out of your silly old head any ideas or thoughts of returning to India when your year's leave is up. As a matter of fact there's been no mention of your name up here as yet but that don't make a scrap of difference. I'm just not going to let you go back to that Godforsaken country and life and insist on you staying with me (officially) to run my stables etc but actually, to . . . well, carry on being what you've always been to me and are now, my greatest man friend. I can't just explain why you hold that “position” and mean so much to me, right here on paper, it's just YOU!! But now I'm getting sloppy again and you'll hate me if I get like this and besides I must dress for dinner, for which it is a far greater crime to be late than at Badminton. But you know what I mean!!

I hope you will get this before you go west on Sunday and I enclose a letter for old Wilder. I can't bear not to be going to Easton Grey with you next week and mind you don't jump the horses over the schooling fences. You can do anything you like in the closed school and may jump out cubbing if Master lets hounds go. But no more as I want to be there for the dirty work even if I'm not capable of doing it mysel
f
!! I know you'll say I've been vocalising and put me in 1st or 2nd Div. But I only want to try and tell you how grateful I am to you for all you've been and are to me and how much I'm missing you and how I want you to chuck any ideas of leaving me unless you want to for your own private and personal reasons then of course you are free now as you've always been but I've gotten an idea that you don't want to leave me for either private or personal reasons. So “cut it all right out”
now and for all time. Must stop now.

Be good tho' I bet you aren't. Be careful of that little bitch from Peshawar but give my love to Mrs. Belleville. What a shame to rag you but the latter is the goods while the other isn't
your
affair at all. Please write to me.

Yrs ever EP

PS I miss all the fun and jokes we have together so terribly. I've written pages to the old Admiral!

Curzon had spent the late summer taking a cure at the French spa of Bagnolles. He was worried, as always, by his financial affairs. Grace, who had agreed to pay him £200 a month, seldom did so. Rent, rates, taxes, living expenses, repairs, wages and entertainment for the two principal houses, 1 Carlton House Terrace and Hackwood, came to £20,389 15s 3d a year; Montacute House cost £1,589 10s 10d; Naldera, the house in Broadstairs, £299 13s 7d; income tax and supertax £6,067 5s; Baba £1,025 7s 3d. “A total of £32,371 15s!”

He came back from France on September 5, 1923, when he reproached Gracie for not taking the slightest interest in him, his health or his doings. “You have never once asked me how was my leg. Not one word have you ever said about my office or Foreign Affairs—you who once rebuked me for not keeping you au fait with everything that passed. For five weeks I have lived in absolute solitude.”

Grace was now pursuing her own life with unblushing selfishness, spending as much time away from her husband as she could while simultaneously trying to offload on to him as much of the responsibility for her children as possible. It was Curzon who had to find a tutor for Hubert; Curzon who arranged a party as a treat for Marcella's sixteenth birthday on November 24, first lunching with her and then taking them all to the theater afterward; Curzon who wrote several times (fruitlessly) to Marcella's older brother Alfred to remind him of his sister's birthday; Curzon who mopped Marcella's tears afterward when Alfred made no responses, failing even to turn up for the luncheon.

It was Curzon, too, who had to deal with the boy's drunkenness at Balliol, who had to make arrangements to extricate him from his “decadent set” by sending him abroad. “Unless we save him now, Gracie, it will be too late,” wrote Curzon to his wife. As a first step, Alfred was sent to stay with Irene for a week, then returned to Carlton House Terrace, giving his word of honor that he would always be in by midnight. Instead, he stayed out all night, letting himself in by the area door when it was unlocked in the morning and, as Curzon put it, “drinking and cavorting with women, with whom he had on most occasions been home.” He still had gambling debts from Balliol and to keep afloat he had sold his car and pawned his jewelry. Curzon bought back the car, tried to find the jewelry and spent hours talking to Alfred. He begged Gracie not to go on giving Alfred money and above all to understand the seriousness of her son's behavior. Finally, in February 1924, Curzon decreed that no bill would be honored unless it was from a tradesman or a debt of honor. “The Randolph Hotel, the tarts and the night club will not be paid.”

Grace was not particularly grateful. After the desperate attempts of the previous years to conceive and carry an heir, she had virtually given up all pretense of married life. Curzon did not make it easy for her: she was a woman who needed attention and, apart from the life of the bedroom, she received little from her husband. By his own account, he had no time for recreation and had only dined out once that year; instead, he sat up until two or three in the morning working on papers. Lord D'Abernon, to whom he confided this, noted in his diary: “This regime almost compels him to relegate to the morning hours the lighter amenities of conjugal life.” Not surprisingly, Gracie described herself in one letter as “only your wife in name.”

She seldom saw her husband. Though always protesting her longing to be with him, she managed to arrive in London when he was in Kedleston, to be in Scotland when he was in London, and then to depart in October for Switzerland (“I long to return as I no longer care for this place but the children seem to love it”). Nor had she been at home when the Mary Curzon Hostel for Women was established as a charity on October 6, 1922, at 170 King's Cross Road, with Curzon's great friend Consuelo Balsan (the former duchess of Marlborough) as trustee.

Curzon, who devotedly sent Grace flowers, chickens, rabbits and fruits whenever she was in England, felt her indifference badly. He wrote sadly from Kedleston, where many of his plans were going awry: “. . . all these worries and never one to turn to or speak to. I think you must try, Girlie, to be a little more nice to me in the future. It is telling on me badly . . .”

His unhappiness was exacerbated by a frightful row with Baba, who wanted to go to America. No doubt she felt she would like a change of scene since she had turned down Prince George and Bobbie Shaw had made it plain that their future was not together. But she was only nineteen and, although Nancy Astor had issued a blanket invitation to the houses of her Langhorne relations in Virginia, she knew that her father
would not let her go without a carefully planned itinerary of visits to approved houses. One after another, these planned visits fell through, but not Baba's determination. Curzon anguished over her plans, asking Lady Salisbury to visit him—he had to come down in his dressing gown, so painful was his back—so that he could ask her advice.

Lady Salisbury consulted Nancy Astor, and both agreed that on no account should Baba be allowed to go unless every day and week of her time in America was mapped out with bona fide invitations in advance. “When Baba comes back from Irene on Tuesday I shall probably have a fierce encounter,” Curzon wrote to Gracie. Two days later, he did. “This morning I had it out with Baba and went through a rather terrible scene. I implored her not to live for pleasure and excitement only but to do or attempt something serious but I fear it is not in the child.” To make allowances for a nineteen-year-old's need for fun was not in Curzon's nature.

His sole source of love and affection was Marcella, who traveled with her nurse to whatever house he was staying in. He loved her sunny nature, her originality, her frankness and her trusting delight in his company, all of which seemed to compare so unfavorably with his own daughters. He gave her little presents like Georgian paste shoe buckles; he reported gleefully that he had done a very difficult crossword puzzle in the
Westminster Gazette
, sent it in in Marcella's name and won a prize. “Marcella is very pleased with the little terrier Chips Channon gave her, which capers about her school room,” he wrote to Grace in Saint Moritz at the end of November. “I see next to nothing of Sandra who is out all day. Where she goes I have no idea as she never leaves word with anybody.”

One of the places she went during that winter of 1923 was to her sister Irene, in Melton Mowbray, a small Leicestershire town at the heart of the best hunting country in England. Here Tom Mosley had successfully courted Cimmie, and here Irene was now well established, settled in Sandy Lodge, the hunting box that would become her home. From it, she hunted regularly with the Quorn, the Belvoir and the Cottesmore hunt clubs, with occasional days with the Pytchley and the Fernie. Here, too, was the Prince of Wales, hunting as often as he could manage with the Melton packs. With him, in charge of his horses, came Fruity Metcalfe.

10

Melton Mowbray: Life at the Gallop

When the Prince of Wales began to hunt with the Leicestershire packs during the season of 1923–24, the small market town of Melton Mowbray became as important socially as it had traditionally been for its closeness to three of the best hunts in England, the Quorn, the Belvoir and the Cottesmore.

Melton revolved around hunting. The wide grass fields of Leicestershire gave such good galloping that two horses a day were needed; for those who hunted five days a week this meant maintaining a dozen or so horses and their grooms from October to late March or early April each year. In Melton hunting boots were made, and polished to mirrorlike gloss with spit, polish and a deer bone; here hunting ale was brewed; here there were saddlers, breeches-makers, purveyors of straw, fodder and oats, horse dealers and grooms. Here too were numerous large or small hunting boxes, owned or rented by those who hunted regularly. From 1923 onward, the most famous was Craven Lodge, where the Prince of Wales stayed.

Craven Lodge, originally called Craven Cottage, was one of several noted hunting boxes at Melton which offered accommodation—others were Wicklow Lodge, Sysonby Lodge, Staveley Lodge, Hamilton Lodge and Warwick Lodge (where one American tycoon stabled fifty horses). On a small hill overlooking Melton, it had acquired its name when rebuilt the previous century by a nephew of the first earl of Craven. In 1922 it was bought by one of Tom Mosley's best friends, the twenty-eight-year-old Captain Michael Wardell of the 10th Hussars. A great sportsman and an enterprising businessman (he later became general manager of the
Evening Standard
), Wardell converted Craven Lodge, run by his mother and stepfather, General John Vaughan, into a kind of “hunting club” for those who did not want the trouble of their own establishment.

The house, with its twenty-four principal bedrooms, was divided up into several sizable apartments and the stabling extended to provide sixty-two loose boxes and six saddle rooms for the use of the occupants. The large main rooms of the former house, furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs, became the club drawing and dining rooms. There were seven acres of grounds; courts for squash, then becoming a favorite pastime on non-hunting days, were soon added. The prince enjoyed his first stay at Craven Lodge so much that he decided he wanted something more permanent, and the Urban District Council quickly approved plans for a private flat for him overlooking the Craven Lodge stabling. He took formal possession of this in the autumn of 1924.

All the prince's intimates poured down, from his brothers to the earls of Dudley, Kimberley, Rosebery, Derby, Sefton, Westmorland and Londesborough. Most came to hunt, the men immaculate in white buckskin breeches and glossy top hats, the women in beautifully tailored blue or black habits (women invariably rode sidesaddle with these shire packs), with white linen waistcoats or stocks and bowler hats.

Others, like Baba, came simply to enjoy the social life—during the winter months Melton became a microcosm of smart Mayfair society. There were balls, like the one given by Lady Ancaster just after Christmas 1923, to which Baba went, and innumerable dinner parties. Marquesses, counts, earls and rajas attended the annual performance of Gilbert and Sullivan by the operatic society or danced with the public at British Legion dances in the Corn Exchange. On several occasions there were three royal princes at dinners organized by the local branch of the National Farmers' Union. One was the Prince of Wales, who said in proposing a toast to the farmers: “I am trying to pay off a debt, or I should say a fraction of the debt, that I owe for many happy days of riding over your land.” As the prince said in one of his letters to Fruity, you could jump one of these Leicestershire cut-and-laid fences six abreast. There were social events every evening, including a weekly dance at Craven Lodge; after dinner, poker was a favorite amusement, with sums the equivalent of thousands today being won and lost nightly.

So chic did Melton Mowbray become when the Prince of Wales made it his winter headquarters that the prince's favorite Embassy Club opened a branch there above a shop in the Market Place—the prince's
passion for dancing was almost as great as for hunting. The first dance, held at the King's Theatre in November 1923, with the prince as guest of honor, was comparatively makeshift, with the footlights given colored shades, the sides of the stage banked with orchids and ferns, and curtains instead of the London Embassy's mirrored walls, but like the later, more sophisticated dances it was packed. The single Curzon sisters were both there, Irene in gold tissue, Baba—one of the prince's partners—in green and silver brocade.

That winter, Baba often visited Irene. When the bitter quarrel between Curzon and his two elder daughters over their inheritance had taken place, Baba, still at home, had heard the story from her father's point of view. At first she believed that it was her sisters who had behaved badly and there was a temporary coolness. But good relations soon resumed. Like everyone else, she adored Cimmie, and she was fascinated by Tom. His potently male aura and the immediate assumption of intimacy natural with a sister-in-law who was only a schoolgirl when they first met had flattered and bewitched her. She was still young enough to find Irene's semi-maternal attitude comforting and reassuring, and staying with this older sister, so well established at Melton, provided a welcome escape from the difficulties of life at home. Although she did not hunt, she loved the diversions of Melton. Everywhere the prince went, Fruity Metcalfe went too, so she and Fruity met constantly. It was during these visits that Fruity fell deeply in love with her.

Baba was used to male admiration. She was also conscious of her youth and inexperience, and well aware that this was not a match that would please her father. Fruity was seventeen years older than she was, only of her world by the freak of chance, and the violence of his emotions scared her. She wrote to him in December 1923 to tell him that she loved him—she thought—but on the other hand she might easily meet someone else. What she made absolutely clear was that she did not want any kind of commitment at that moment.

Fruity, a generous-spirited man, responded with impassioned declarations of love and a promise to give her all the time she needed. “Dearest Love, God is not kind to allow me who worship you to be the cause of hurting you. It is not right that my love for you, and your love for me, should be the cause of making your life, which is a far from happy one in some ways, even more difficult than it at present is. Forgive me, sweet woman that I love—forgive me.

“I want you, I need you, I want to see you, look at you, be near you. You say you want a year, or is it a day.
Yes, Yes
, my love, take what you want and all you want.”

 

In February 1924 the Prince of Wales had an accident that aggravated his family's worry about the dangers to which his passion for riding was exposing him. While riding one of his hunters around a jumping circuit he took a fall and broke his right collarbone. Fruity, who was with him, tied up his arm and took him to the nearest surgery. Later on that month the prince, his arm in a sling, went to Paris under his favorite incognito, Lord Chester, taking Fruity with him. They went stag hunting, to the Folies Bergère and to a dinner at the British embassy.

At the same time, Baba was recuperating from an operation for appendicitis and was whisked off by Irene for a long weekend in the bracing air of Brighton. Before she left she scribbled a short letter to the Prince of Wales apologizing for being such poor company at their last evening out in a party. He replied immediately with a charming note that shows the depth of their friendship: “Surely you know me well enough not even to say you've been rude and that night of all times when you weren't really fit to go out and dance so soon after the operation. I know you did it so as not to cart me which was sweet of you and much appreciated by me. You must take care of yourself. Yours, E. P.”

Only weeks later, in March 1924, Fruity was the one injured, while trying out a new horse for the prince at the Aldershot Command drag hunt near Long Sutton in Hampshire. The horse fell at the third jump, a high fence with a ditch, and Fruity was hit in the face by the hoof of the horse following. This time it was the prince who dashed to get help and, with his brother Henry, visited him in the Cambridge Military Hospital. Fruity's jaw was broken, his face needed twenty-seven stitches, his lips were torn and several teeth knocked out.

Treatment by the noted plastic surgeon Harold Gillies restored his looks, though his nose, said one columnist, was now more that of Caesar than Apollo. The prince, said Fruity, was kindness itself, especially given his attitude to illness. “When the P is well he doesn't want anyone near him who is not well too,” wrote Fruity to Baba. “He's a funny lad, but very lovable and has always been wonderful to me.”

The king and those around him had become worried by Fruity's influence on the heir to the throne. The two were inseparable, confiding everything to each other and sharing jokes and code words inexplicable to others. Both had an obsession with clothes and would spend hours discussing cuffs or the placing of buttons (Fruity almost invariably wore checked suits, the prince often favored gray).

Even before Fruity's advent the prince's love of horsy sports, in particular hunting, had made his family fearful. It was natural that Fruity, a brilliant horseman who had been employed by the prince to manage his horses, would encourage the prince in what was rapidly becoming an obsession. Like many Irishmen, Fruity had an excellent eye for a horse, and he was determined to see that his royal master was mounted on the sort of animal that would take him to the front of the hunt.

As the prince was a rider of almost desperate recklessness who did not care what risks he took, inevitably he often came to grief and it seemed quite possible that one day he would suffer serious injury, even death. At least one serious accident or fatality every season is recorded in Irene's hunting journal: “Mike Wardell larking about on the way home from hunting over a little fence got a thorn in his left eye and had to have it out.” “Lord Derby's only daughter Lady Victoria Bullock never regained consciousness after a bad fall. All the royal brothers out as usual this season.” “While the Prince of Wales was out, a former Master of the Pytchley was killed when his horse fell and rolled on him.”

The prince fought to keep Fruity, the king to have him sent away or at least no longer in his son's household. The question was shelved for a while when the prince decided he would visit his ranch in Pekisko, Canada, in the early autumn of 1924, stopping off en route for a few days in New York to watch the international polo. He managed to avoid being accompanied by Admiral Halsey, instead taking Fruity and Brigadier Gerald (“G”) Trotter.

G Trotter, who had lost his right arm in the Boer War and wore his uniform sleeve pinned across the front of his tunic, was a genial man whose main pursuit was pleasure. His official post was assistant comptroller of the prince's household. Although more than twenty years older than the prince, he was his constant companion, deplored almost as much as Fruity.

Fruity went on ahead, in August, with the prince's polo ponies. By now deeply in love with Baba, he could hardly bear to leave her. “It's only six hours since I left you, my dear Love, wet-eyed but
oh so
brave, for my sake I know. You were just grand my darling and I thank you for it and know how much of a strain it was for you to bear up, and smile. I realise well how you felt in that taxi, with the wee dog, returning to Carlton House Terrace (that strange house that has given me some such wonderful moments and yet I dislike it; mainly because I know you do, but also because it seems to stand solid and massive between me and you my beloved).”

Fruity's intuition was correct. The last thing Curzon would have wanted for his youngest and most beautiful daughter, who could have married literally anyone she chose, was a man with no money, no title, no land and no compensatory position in politics. Indeed, once, told by the butler that the hat and gloves in the hall belonged to “Major Metcalfe,” he had stormed upstairs to Baba's sitting room and almost thrown Fruity out—though this was in part due to his stringent belief that tea and cucumber sandwiches, brought in by a footman, were not an adequate chaperone for any unmarried daughter of his.

The lovesick Fruity wrote to Baba constantly. “I've not talked to you for such a long time but you've never left my thoughts—never. I've been comparing you with others (I am honest) and you've won, without a race. They just don't come up to you in any way. You have them beaten before the start. I've seen a few lovely women and girls but your beauty, Pansy darling, overwhelms them.”

He was leading his usual active life, playing tennis and golf on Long Island, swimming and dancing as well as getting the ponies fit for the prince's arrival from Canada. When the party did arrive, in mid-September, there was a jolting shock in store.

The prince seemed to have turned away from Fruity—his sudden abandonment of those he professed to love was to remain a feature of his character—in favor of G Trotter. Although Fruity did not know it, it was an eerie foretaste of what was to come; then, he was quite simply wretched. “It just cannot go on unless there is a big change very soon,” he wrote unhappily to Baba. “I feel it so terribly. I have
never
let him down,
never
. I have done every possible thing for him, and now this. No wonder I feel miserable. There is d——d little left for me.