The Pursuit of Laughter (9 page)

The Unquiet Grave
was no more than a commonplace book containing his nostalgic thoughts about Paris and the Mediterranean when war immobilized him in London; flawed by much that was rather absurd and irritating, it nevertheless echoed the feelings of his generation at that time.

All his life he was surrounded by adoring women, and never more so than when, financed by Peter Watson, he edited
Horizon
during the war. Lovely and devoted girls did the hard work of producing the magazine, ministering to him they fed him with
honeydew
.

He was capable of imaginative sympathy. Meeting a boy who had like him been a King’s Scholar at Eton and was doing his military service soon after the war, the
description
of his basic training so horrified Cyril that he told him to write it all down, and
published
it in
Horizon
. Balm for the unwilling soldier. Connolly was dogged by poverty. His first wife, Jean, had some money, but the other wives had none. He and Jean were perfectly suited, her income was enough for their bohemian way of life. Dining with them was
hazardous
because of their pets; ferrets cannot be house-trained. When she left him because he was ‘impossible’, he mourned her loss on and off for the rest of his life.

His wit and clever conversation made Connolly a welcome guest, but he was not always asked twice by fastidious people. One host complained that he marked his place in
borrowed
books with bacon rind. He wrote brilliant reviews for the
Observer
until he quarrelled with the priggish owner, and subsequently for many years the
Sunday Times
, an excellent paper in those days. He promised endless books to eager publishers, but rarely wrote them.

Towards the end of his life he was invited to Austin, Texas, for an exhibition based on his ‘100 Best Books’. Expenses paid and a large fee, it was a recognition by America of his eminence as man of letters. Austin has an unrivalled collection of modern English books and MSS. He was happy to accept and was enjoying every moment until the cataloguer of Evelyn Waugh’s library, a recent acquisition, asked him to solve some conundrums of place and identity. Connolly’s eye lit upon Waugh’s copy of
The Unquiet Grave
, and he could not resist looking inside to see what had been written in the margins. The brutal rudeness and dismissive jokes he found ruined his visit. ‘For the rest of my stay in Texas I remained obsessed with Evelyn’, he wrote. Waugh teased him even from the grave.

Connolly died, as he had lived, beyond his means. He left a huge overdraft at the bank; his rich friends generously paid up.

The photographs illustrating this delightful book are so badly reproduced that one succeeds in making the attractive Jean look uglier than Cyril himself, while Railway Club members seem to be hardly human.

Cyril Connolly: A Nostalgic Life
, Fisher, C.
Evening Standard
(1995)

In July 1928 I went accompanied by Nanny, to stay at Bailiffscourt. This was a piece of country by the sea in Sussex which the Guinnesses [future in-laws] had bought a couple of years before; they had saved it from speculators who had planned to ruin the entire coast.

Bailiffscourt itself was a small farm-house at Climping, notorious as the home of Colonel Barker, a woman who pretended she was a man and married a Brighton girl. We loved this story which had filled the newspapers and I was considered very lucky to be going to see the place formerly hallowed by the presence of Colonel Barker. I soon
discovered
, however, that one must not mention Colonel Barker at Bailiffscourt; her name was taboo and Lady Evelyn preferred to forget that she had ever existed.

Lady Evelyn Guinness, her children, their Willoughby cousins, and two nurses lived in the Huts. These really were huts, made of pitch pine and set on brick foundations. They smelt deliciously of raw wood and salty air. They were planted down in the middle of a cornfield, and at the bottom of the field was the sea. There was a quite exceptional glare
in summer outside the Huts; the flat treeless landscape, the enormous sky, the ripe corn and the sea reflecting back the light of the sun almost blinded one.

Lady Evelyn, like Farve, was a builder. She was going to build a very strange house; already her mind was full of her plans for it, but meantime the family put up in the Huts. Bryan and I wandered about the fields or sat on the beach. Sometimes we all went for a picnic on the Downs. When we reached the chosen spot the drivers of the cars unpacked a huge tea, a frying pan, a pat of butter, and eggs. ‘Diana’s so clever, Mummy, she can cook,’ said Bryan, bursting with pride.

‘I’ve never
heard
of such a thing, it’s
too
clever,’ said Lady Evelyn in her whispery little voice.

‘I can’t really. Only fried eggs. Anybody can do fried eggs,’ I said modestly, but Lady Evelyn and the nurses took up the refrain. To cook! It was too wonderful.

At that time she was in her early forties; a very pretty, slight, fair-haired and blue-eyed person with a very tiny voice. Her voice was not exactly soft; it was more like a miniature hard voice, scarcely audible. She never raised it. She had a ferocious collie called Lady which bit men visitors. ‘Lady! Lady! What do I see you doing?’ Rather naturally, Lady never noticed this reproof, what with her own growls and the exclamations of her victim.

Lady Evelyn loved wild flowers growing among the corn and did her best to
encourage
them. Not only in the fields near the Huts were poppy and cornflower seeds strewn in profusion; all the way down in the train from Victoria to Arundel she would lean out of her carriage window in springtime, scattering weeds and seeds as she went. ‘I’m afraid Walter doesn’t quite approve,’ she told me. Walter, Bryan’s father, was Minister of Agriculture.

Lady Evelyn was on our side, but said she could not write to Muv and Farve. ‘I shouldn’t dare,’ she whispered. While Parliament was in recess Bryan’s father was away on his yacht—far away. He did not go to the Mediterranean, but to distant, savage lands.

In September he was expected back. Lady Evelyn and the children left the Huts and went to Heath House, Hampstead. ‘I wish we could stay on at Bailiffscourt,’ she said. ‘Such beautiful weather. But I must go at once because of Christmas.’

‘
Christmas
, Lady Evelyn?’ I cried. ‘But that’s three months off!’

‘Oh yes,’ said Bryan, ‘but it takes Mummy a good three months to do her Christmas. In fact she’s really at it the whole year.’

This astonished me so much that I asked Rosalie and Pink McDonnell about it one day. ‘Aunt Evelyn’s Christmas is terrific,’ said Rosalie. ‘In fact Uncle Walter can’t stand it. He always leaves England the moment Parliament rises because of the Grosvenor Place Christmas.’

Colonel Guinness, who turned up eventually, had a long talk with Bryan. I was invited to stay at Heath House; Bryan met me at Paddington and drove me to Hampstead. When we arrived his mother was gardening. She was walking along a path with a watering can, watering it here and there, if that is the word, with milk. ‘Mummy’s encouraging the moss’,
explained Bryan.

The garden was quite big by Hampstead standards; it looked rather sad. Ugly tufts of murky, untended grass and weeds sprouted everywhere, there were over-grown hedges with holes and gaps in them, and not a flower was to be seen except the odd dandelion and thistle. ‘Mummy can’t bear garden flowers,’ Bryan told me. ‘She only likes wild ones, and of course they don’t do very well in London.’

Lady Evelyn pointed vaguely here and there. ‘You can’t imagine what a perfectly
ghastly
pergola there used to be,’ she said, adding in a horrified whisper, ‘And there were hideous roses—in beds.’

Inside, Heath House had also been transformed to Lady Evelyn’s taste, and one saw what Bailiffscourt would eventually become.

Colonel Guinness seemed not to notice either the garden or the house. He talked about politics, people and health.

‘
What
! No vitamins?’ he said when I refused some raw carrot. The food was excellent; we ate it off a worm-eaten refectory table. I felt very shy of Bryan’s father. He was kind but distant to me; but he had promised Bryan to write to Farve.

Every evening we dined early and went to a play. In the mornings Lady Evelyn did her Christmas shopping, and in the afternoon she scattered milk over the grim garden.

Farve gave in and we were officially engaged. I spent my time between Swinbrook and Grosvenor Place, where the Guinnesses returned in October. Lady Evelyn shopped all day now, as there were only about seventy shopping days till Christmas.

Grosvenor Place was like Heath House only much, much more so. When you approached the great, ugly Victorian imitation of a French château and walked up the steps the door opened at once. This was the work of George, the door man, who sat all day watching the entrance from a little window in the porch. He was by way of being clumsy. ‘Did George knock you down?’ was Lady Evelyn’s first question when one arrived. George led the way across a dark hall with stripped pine panelling to the lift, which looked like a tiny medieval closet. The lift whizzed up several floors and was opened by a
nursery
-maid. Tea, and in fact most of life, was spent in Grania’s nursery. Lady Evelyn herself slept in one of the night nurseries. The day nursery was a large cheerful white room with a bright fire, plenty of toys and books, and sofas covered in chintz. While the rest of the house was almost pitch dark, lights blazed in the nursery. Lady growled and made little dashes, but she only bit men guests; Raymond and Edward Greene, great friends of Lady Evelyn, always came to Grosvenor Place wearing riding boots because of the collie.

If one arrived for luncheon or dinner George handed one over to the head parlourmaid and the full oddity of Grosvenor Place was unfolded. The downstairs rooms were lined—panelled is not the word—with rough, blackened wood. The fires were encouraged to smoke and smoulder, because the effect Lady Evelyn wished to create was that of a house so ‘early’ that chimneys had not been invented. The furniture, besides refectory tables black with age—or with simulated age—one did not always quite believe in the
Grosvenor Place furniture—consisted of dozens of Spanish chairs, of various sizes but similar design, a strip of dark, hard leather for the back, another for the seat, with many a rusty nail to catch a stocking here and there in the crumbling wooden frame. The lamps were made of bent pieces of iron holding sham yellow candles with yellow bulbs of about five watts shaded in thick old parchment—tallow, not wax, was the note.

On the tables were pewter pots containing bunches of grasses and wild flowers, and there were polished pewter plates and dishes to eat off. The forks had two prongs. The pewter things were made by Day, the head chauffeur, in a garage. He had given up driving and spent his whole time making more and more pewter plates, because Colonel Guinness liked to have dinner parties of over a hundred people. Lady Evelyn thought entertaining a tiresome bore, but she did it for his sake, only insisting that there must be enough pewter for everybody. To have had to fall back on silver or china would have been too
humiliating
.

On the day of a dinner party the cars went out of London at dawn, crowded with maids; when they got to the country they filled baskets with cow parsley, grasses and
buttercups
and then hurried back to London and changed into their medieval gowns made of stuff with a pattern of wild flowers on it, to be ready by the time the guests began to arrive.

The guests behaved rather badly; they all pretended to get hay-fever from the floral decorations. I sat next to Philip Sassoon at one of these dinners; he was quite furious because Lady Evelyn could just as well have had orchids everywhere instead of cow
parsley
and moon daisies, and gold rather than pewter. He loudly disapproved of her
eccentricity
.

Grosvenor Place had two of everything because it was numbers 10 and 11 knocked into one house. One of the big staircases was entirely taken up by Murtogh’s slide. After a visit to a fair he had said to his mother: ‘Why can’t we have a slide from the top of the house to the bottom?’ and immediately a beautiful, polished wooden slide was built and fitted on the staircase. Everybody, not only Murtogh, played on the slide. It was a marvellous idea perfectly executed.

Lady Evelyn’s father was still alive. His only son, Uncle Ronny, was a bachelor of about fifty. He was charming and rather eccentric; he believed in the Hidden Hand and the Jewish World Plot. Colonel Guinness had no patience with Uncle Ronny’s pet theories, but as he was a member of the government Uncle Ronny deluged him with literature about them which went straight into the waste-paper basket.

As soon as our engagement appeared in
The Times
, wedding presents began to pour in. When the presents were all arranged Lady Evelyn looked at them reflectively.

‘The glass will be the easiest,’ she said. ‘It only needs a good kick.’ She said silver was much more of a problem. ‘Walter and I had such luck, all ours was stolen while we were on our honeymoon.’