White Mischief (18 page)

Morris shook hands with each member of the jury after his closing speech, then left for Johannesburg without hearing the verdict, which was delivered at 9:15 p.m. on July 1st.

As he returned from their deliberation, the foreman of the jury winked at Broughton, and gave him the “thumbs up” sigh. Broughton described the moment later in a letter to a friend in England:

It was really very sensational when the Verdict of the Jury was delivered after a discussion of 3 hours and 25 minutes. I had been walking up and down outside the court with various friends and was beginning for the first time to feel the “strain,” and although I never at any time visualised a “conviction” at the last moment one gets doubts and I feared the Jury might disagree, and there would be a fresh trial because all twelve of them have to be unanimous, and it is always possible that even one might think me guilty. Luckily they all were unanimous.

The Foreman, in a very clear voice said, “Not Guilty” and a loud sob of relief came from all over the court and a good deal of clapping. One could almost feel the Angel of Death, who had been hovering over me, flying out of that court disgruntled.

When I got outside there was a great rush of about 200 people, headed mostly by the police, to shake me by the hand. People have been extraordinarily kind and I have had 146 cables of congratulations and countless letters from all over the world, lots of them from people I’ve never heard of.

The letters Broughton wrote after the trial express elation and hope. He claims to have recovered at once;
never to have felt happier, and writes of Diana’s loyalty and affection. Within a few days they were on their way from Mombasa to Ceylon together, on the long-postponed trip to look over Broughton’s investments. There was time to spare before returning to Kenya, and they crossed to India to look up two old friends, the Nawab of Bhopal and the Maharajah of Jodhpur. Broughton was deeply grateful to be swathed in luxury once again (“we have six huge rooms and 4 servants to look after us”), and to find that nothing had changed since the 1920s. “This place,” he said, “might be a million miles away from any war.”

But there was a nagging worry in the back of his mind. How had his friends reacted to the case? His private life had been broadcast in detail for the scrutiny of all his fellow clubmen. Would he be able to resume his life in England as it was before the war? He began to fear that he was irretrievably disgraced.

PART TWO

THE QUEST

10

THE VOICE ON THE ESCARPMENT

In mid-1969, when I started work with Cyril Connolly on the Erroll story, I was twenty-four years old and employed as a feature writer on the
Sunday Times
Magazine in London. Before that I had served my apprenticeship on a provincial evening newspaper and for two years had travelled in Africa, as a reporter for various newspapers, including the
Daily Nation
in Nairobi, soon after Kenya’s independence.

Connolly was then sixty-five, and his elegant prose had adorned the literary pages of the
Sunday Times
for fifteen years or more. As the author of
Enemies of Promise
and
The Unquiet Grave
and wartime editor of
Horizon,
he was a revered luminary of the world of letters.

Connolly’s personality and the preoccupations which infused his writings were almost as renowned as the work he produced. There was his love of pleasure, for which the historian and writer Peter Quennell likened him to an eighteenth-century Man of Pleasure, later shortened to “Man of P”; his passion for beautiful objects; his sloth, which never dimmed his brilliance or his exacting standards, and his sense of regret at his own unrealised promise. Connolly traded in guilt and remorse, and he was beset with troublesome insecurities.

He was rarely seen by the reporters in the Gray’s Inn
Road, where the
Sunday Times
has its offices. He lived with his family in a large Victorian house in suburban Eastbourne, Sussex. There he looked after his library—now at the University of Tulsa—gloated over his first editions and his collection of china, and cultivated his rare plants. He travelled to London on Wednesdays to deliver his copy and correct proofs. If one caught sight of him, getting in or out of a taxi, his unathletic frame was usually clothed in the smartest Savile Row suit of charcoal grey and he would be wearing a black homburg on his head. The dandy of the early 1920s had turned into some merchant banker of the 1960s, although the disguise was not perfect. One imagined he was making his way to White’s in St. James’s Street—whose rituals he observed with great seriousness—or to a carefully chosen rendezvous where he could feast on some longed-for pleasure. “Above all, the Dublin Bay prawn” is a phrase I remember at the end of a Connolly paragraph. It was in a piece written, I think, from a West African hotel where he had been subjected both to loneliness and to what he called “the torture of the table d’hôte.” Later I imagined him repeating it, his soft voice reverential and quivering with ecstasy. His friend Peter Quennell has since told me of the elaborate stratagems, necessary or unnecessary, that accompanied these weekly visits to London, and of Connolly’s sense of excitement as his train approached Victoria Station.

I held Connolly in some awe, not only for his great reputation. I had also seen how fearsome he could be if he was bored or irritated. I knew him slightly from the Sussex coast, where my parents had bought a house in the village of Firle, near Lewes. Before moving to Eastbourne, Connolly had rented a house on the Firle estate of Viscount Gage. From time to time he would come to dinner with my parents; often, in the early days of their acquaintance, an uneasy occasion since Connolly’s reputation in the neighbourhood as an intellectual isolated among the gentry, who labelled him “distinguished and erudite,” was also that of a difficult and unreliable guest.

On a bad night Connolly could play his part with cruel certainty. His famous love of pleasure was catered for to the best of my parents’ ability, as it was by our other neighbours who befriended him. He would sometimes leave the carefully chosen vintage untouched, and the food as well, to sulk in so conspicuous a silence that the evening would begin to die around him. Neither was this behaviour always confined to his country neighbours. Quennell wrote in a tribute in 1952, when Connolly’s idiosyncrasies were already a matter of history,

… if his pleasure makes itself felt, so does the opposite and complementary mood. His strength of will is positively royal; and Queen Victoria’s “We are not amused,” was scarcely more to be dreaded than Cyril Connolly’s “I am not pleased,” or rather the subtle change of expression, the indefinable lengthening of the features with which this alarming message is swiftly, surely rammed home. The temperature drops; candles flicker; the wine begins to taste corked.

In our neighbourhood, after Connolly had been to dinner, friends would ask, “How did it go?”

Towards the end of his life, Connolly made close friends with a local stockbroker, Tim Jones—himself a great lover of wine and food. Late one evening, after they had shared a particularly poor dinner at a neighbour’s house, Connolly telephoned and said, “Tim, I just want to ask you one thing. What did you have to eat when you got home?”

Yet on a good night, depending on the company, and especially towards the end of the 1960s, the legendary wit and erudition would pour forth. There was almost nothing Connolly seemed unable to talk about in detail, and he had a lethal gift for verbal parody. I had always liked him; I had secretly relished the uncompromising silences and the awkward moments as much as the verbal brilliance, and he was invariably friendly and attentive to anyone under twenty-five.

In this period the
Sunday Times
Magazine, which operated separately from the body of the paper, had a certain literary distinction of its own. Much of this originated with the author and critic, Francis Wyndham, one of its senior editors, a tireless encourager and seeker-out of talent, who by his reputation could persuade almost anybody, it seemed, to write for us. Wyndham was a longstanding admirer of Connolly and had always wanted him to write for the Magazine. The problem seemed to be finding a subject that would entice him into action, to write at the greater length the Magazine required, although the reputation for inertia was exaggerated.

From time to time Connolly would be seized by obsessions—what he called his “dualogues” with a current craze. When these attacks came on they completely took him over: he blazed with mental energy, storing and retrieving detail with startling powers of recall, and closely interrogating any of his friends who had more than a scrap of knowledge of the subject. Burgess and Maclean was an example, but that had passed by 1969. More recently there had been “Who wrote Shakespeare?”, the unaccounted for years in the life of Christ, and always in the background his passion for genealogy, porcelain and silver, in which he seemed to be pursuing somewhat neurotically the vanished grandeur of his Irish ancestry.

In May 1969, Connolly and his wife, Deirdre, came again to visit my parents. I hadn’t seen him since before my African tour, and he had recently returned from one of his East African safaris, writing on travel and wildlife for the
Sunday Times
. He began asking me what I knew, from my time in Nairobi, about the Erroll murder. I thought I knew something about it. At one time it had been a hot topic in the newsroom of the
Daily Nation,
where I worked.

The paper had run a series on the story which had been stopped mid way. The editor, George Githii, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, was a protégé of Jomo Kenyatta. He thus had a measure of political autonomy as
editor, and could even publish the occasional piece attacking Kenyatta’s own ministers, but when it came to the Erroll story, the pressure, to his great surprise, was sudden and swift and unlike any he had known in the normal course of politics. This had intrigued me at the time, and I had read up all the cuttings on the case in the library. Connolly then declared that the story had been a longstanding obsession with him, and from the way he told it, with its twists and its ironies and its echoes of Somerset Maugham, one could see why. Indeed, Connolly said that Maugham had wanted to write the story as fiction, but had decided that he was too old to attempt it.

Connolly already seemed to know a great deal, to have narrowed down his list of suspects from a real knowledge of the affair. Whenever he had travelled to Kenya, he said, he had brought the subject up in conversation, always with good results, and had many notes in his diaries. I told him that Francis Wyndham had always been keen for him to write for the
Sunday Times
Magazine. Would he write about Erroll? Connolly was flattered and interested. The following week Wyndham, after some discussion with Connolly, arranged the commission and I was assigned to work alongside him.

We worked together on the story for the next six months, first when our other commitments allowed it, and then full time. We did an immense amount of investigation—Connolly himself interviewed more than fifty people, some of them jointly with me, and the article came out in the Christmas issue of that year. On the cover was an oval colour-tinted picture of Diana; some artwork had been applied to the original Lenare photograph, and a caption underneath read “Cyril Connolly traces an obsession.”

He contributed barely four thousand words towards the 6,000-word article—there was a limit on space—but they were distilled from a monumental store of notes and documents. His densely written, spiral-bound exercise books,
covered with blue-black ink in every corner of each page, are the real evidence of his obsession, and also of his methods of investigation. They continue to record fresh discoveries almost until his death. He wrote towards the deadline at great speed, in longhand, with hardly a correction on his one and only draft. He generously insisted that we divide up the final act of writing into our special areas of interest, with each succeeding section headed with our separate by-lines.

His copy began with a thread of memory that led back to 1938, and a chance meeting with one of the main characters in the story.

One morning, in the last summer of peace, I was lying in the sun at Eden Roc. I used to swim out to the rocks of the Villa Eilen, across the water and then recuperate on my mattress, hired for the season with its coffin sized slab of limestone. Round the corner, invisible, were other slabs and mattresses, each with their locataire, regulars from the villas or the Cap d’Antibes or the hotel.

A woman’s voice floated over the escarpment, one of those never-to-be-forgotten voices, husky, yet metallic, almost strident, a voice of the period, a touch of Tallulah, or, if anyone remembers her, of Brenda Dean Paul. “My God I hate men.” she was saying, “I’d trust my dog more than any man. I’d tell my dogs things I’d never tell a man.”

I was so impressed by this outburst, which came. I discovered, from a small and wiry dark-haired woman (since described as blonde, but there are blondes and blondes) that, as she left, I asked the beach captain her name. “That is Madame Carberry, but she is really Milady Carberry: they come from Nairobi.”—Was it every year? I thought of “Carberry’s hundred isles.” Swift’s poem, Somerville and Ross’s stories, that lovely corner of southern Ireland where Castle Freke, the old home of the family stands in its woods.

That was in 1938. I was not to hear the name again until 1941 when the English papers reported the trial of Sir Jock Delves Broughton for the murder of the Earl of Erroll. June Carberry was the principal witness. I put the case from my mind (Sir Jock
was acquitted) until 20 years later, I found in my bedroom in the house near Malaga where I was staying, Rupert Furneaux’s book.
The Murder of Lord Erroll
[Stevens, 1961], which carried me through the small hours. The obsession was now formed: the poisons of curiosity and speculation united to form a morbid mental growth. I was hooked.