Too Close to the Sun (9 page)

When Denys grew bored with gambling, he went off to the college chapel alone to play the organ, and when he grew bored with that he went roof climbing, an urban substitute for mountaineering. Under cover of darkness, he maneuvered his long feet around corner tiles to find an accommodating waterspout; glissaded down the pillars of the Ashmolean; and conquered the north face of Trinity clock, commemorating the achievement by setting the hands to a new time. He was invited to join the Phoenix, a Brasenose dining club founded in the 1780s (and credited now as the oldest Oxford dining club still in existence). Eight times a year, twelve Phoenix men and their guests quaffed vintage Pol Roger and expressed their joy by hurling crockery down the stairs.
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But despite the reckless buccaneering, like Ronnie Knox, Denys felt that “Oxford was always a very poor second best” to Eton. He kept up with school friends spread throughout the university, crossing the cobbled courtyard of the Bodleian to Balliol staircases unchanged since his father’s day to catch Julian Grenfell striding out with his black greyhound, Slogbottom. He dined with Ronnie Knox, and made fun of Charles Lister, who still had his shoulder to the socialist wheel, organizing an Anti-Sweating Exhibition to publicize the plight of industrial workers and marshaling the female staff of the university’s Clarendon Press in a strike. Denys was bored by party politics. He had a naturally speculative mind, but it ran free, yoked only to the wings of imagination, and it could not be trammeled within the cage of theory. In preference to a night of debate at the Union, he went out drinking and fighting. “The only time I saw him rouse himself and that cynical smile leave his remarkably handsome face,” noted Alan Parsons, “…was in a street fight in Abingdon. He set about his opponents for twenty minutes or so and enjoyed himself hugely, gigantic and triumphant.” But his nonchalance concealed a state of mental alert. “Under a guise of laziness and even slovenliness,” Parsons continued, “Finch Hatton never let his keen brain rest idle for a moment.”

At the bookmakers or around the roulette table, Denys thrived on risk. Inheriting the family gene that ruined his uncle George, he had begun betting at school, and quickly found that it took him to a place where reality was blotted out and adrenaline hijacked his functions. Besides danger, he craved the visceral thrill of winning and the challenge of outwitting his opponents. Naturally, he was keen to fill No. 117 with gambling partners. When, in the winter term of his final year, a vacancy came up, he wrote to John Craigie asking if he would like to fill it. Craigie, a bluff golfer three years Denys’s junior who had kept a betting syndicate at Eton, was about to go up to Magdalen. “Denys was such a celebrity,” Craigie recalled, “that Dr Herbert Warren, president of Magdalen, allowed me as a freshman to say yes to this, and forgo my first year in college.” Craigie shared many of Denys’s delinquent tendencies, but even he could not always keep up. He remembered one particular roulette session at No. 117 attended by the mayoral bookmaker John Langley, Count Felix Elston, whose real name was Prince Yusupov, and C. T. Chu, a convivial little man who liked to bruit about the observation that he was “the 52nd heir to the Chinese emperor.” Craigie bailed out halfway through and was awakened the next morning by a gray-faced Feltham announcing, “It’s ’arf past seven, sir, the ball is still rollin’ and the Chinaman’s lost two ’undred.” In a single session, Denys had lost and retrieved his entire annual allowance of £300.

“In a long life, Denys has remained with me as an almost unique personality,” Craigie recalled in old age. “Above all was the remarkable individuality with which he said and did things, including games…[in golf ] even his swing was unique. He was generous to a degree and greathearted, popular, loyal and forthright. A non-sufferer of fools, he always amusingly chaffed them.”

By the time Denys left Oxford, he was gambling so ferociously that he was poised over the abyss of self-indulgence—a Prince Hal fallen into the hands of his own Falstaff. But the risks were, over time, to grow exponentially. The terrestrial pleasures of gambling failed to hold Denys down. He took to the air, where the stakes were higher.

THE YEAR DENYS
turned twenty, he fell in love with Catherine Bechet de Balan, a pretty young Frenchwoman a daring five years his senior. Known as both Kitty and Pussy, she spoke English and German without an accent and could hold her own in Spanish and Italian as well. At the age of sixteen, she had moved to London and lived with an aunt who was a friend of Nan’s. Petite and fragile, her skin almost transparent, like a shrimp in sunlight, she had an exotic side, as did many of Denys’s girlfriends, and once traveled around North Africa dressed up in the brocaded costume of a Moroccan beauty. Denys danced attendance when Pussy visited the Winchilseas in Harlech or stayed with Topsy at the family town house, and one summer he and she spent two months walking and fishing in Norway. But she was not his only girlfriend. Through Alan Parsons, he became close to Viola and Iris Tree, whom he met while he was at Eton. The girls were daughters of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm, who took the additional name of Tree. Although his half brother Max was more famous, Herbert was among the most influential figures in the theatrical world. He and his wife kept a fashionable house in London, and their three daughters—Viola, Iris, and Felicity—moved in the young aristocratic set that circled around the Ribblesdales, Asquiths, and Desboroughs. The asthmatic Parsons was an intimate member of this group, but he was poor (he was the son of a Surrey vicar), and when he began to court Viola her parents made their disapproval clear. When the pair became secretly engaged in 1908, Denys promised to be Alan’s best man. But he was more interested in Iris.

Born the same year as Denys, Iris was a dogged bohemian; according to her biographer, “romance was the star she followed until the end of her days.”
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With red-gold hair and freckles, she described herself, not unreasonably, as
jolie-laide.
She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and in 1913 was one of the first girls in England to appear with bobbed hair after snipping off her long plait on a train and leaving it on the seat. Voluptuous and outré, she puffed at a cigarette in a long holder, wore clunky amber and turquoise beads, and walked with a swagger. Epstein sculpted her, helmet-haired, and she wore dresses designed by members of the Bloomsbury group—Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell even wrote asking her to be photographed in one of their garments. Iris stood out for her reluctance to conform, like Isadora Duncan and the sculptress Kathleen Bruce. She was not especially intelligent or talented. She wrote bad poetry and later tried acting (she appeared as herself in Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita,
reading verse). But she inspired enthusiasm. Iris had been invited to house parties at the Plas, and once Viola became close to Alan, Denys saw more of her. He preferred bohemian women to society beauties. She, according to one of her sons, “was a romantic, and from what I now know about Denys Finch Hatton I can imagine how easily his personality would have fitted her concept of a hero in that epoch.” On warm June nights, he took the train to London and escorted Iris to the opera, where they heard Caruso from the back of the gods for five shillings, and afterward drank coffee behind the louche custard-yellow blinds of the Eiffel Tower on Soho’s Percy Street.

“Denys has taken a season ticket to London and spends all the time on the train,” Julian Grenfell reported to his mother in 1908. He was already finding the schoolboyish custodial regulations of Oxford too restrictive. Undergraduates were required to be at their billet before midnight, a rule that applied whether they lived in college or in digs. (The last train to arrive in Oxford from London in time to reach one’s room by the deadline was known as the Flying Fornicator.) The punishment for a tardy return was a gating, a period of confinement within college grounds. It was a landlord’s duty to submit a daily time sheet of his tenants’ hours to their respective colleges. After a short round of negotiations, Goodall, the landlord at No. 117, agreed to falsify reports in return for a rent supplement of fifteen shillings a week “for matches.” Denys was therefore able to return from the capital on the last train, known as the Post-Fornicator. Meanwhile, on Saturdays he and Iris went to Belvoir Castle, the ancestral home of the Duke of Rutland, for house parties at which a gong-beater with a waist-length white beard called guests to dinner along corridors still lit by candles, as both electricity and gas were considered vulgar (along with oranges and bananas, and oblong envelopes). Denys found it easy to seduce. He was not promiscuous, leaving instead, in many hearts, the tender pain of unfulfilled possibilities. His temperament was a devastating combination of the poetic and the classically masculine. “With his grand physique and his slow crooked smile, Denys was enormously attractive to women,” Bertie Cranworth observed. “Indeed, nature had presented him with more gifts than were the fair share of one man.” At about this time, however, Denys developed a fixation about the one physical characteristic that pierced his self-confidence: he had gone almost completely bald. His scalp had never recovered from an experience at the hands of a trichologist after he and Toby shaved their heads before a Norwegian fishing holiday. When Denys’s locks refused to grow back, his father sent him to a specialist, who applied ammonia. His schoolboy hat habit now became an obsession, and for the rest of his life he hated to be seen bareheaded.

IN THE WET SUMMER
of 1902, after Lord Salisbury left Downing Street with victory over the Boers in his pocket, his languid nephew Arthur Balfour was the first prime minister to go to Buckingham Palace in a motorcar and to the House of Commons in a homburg hat. In 1905, the motor omnibus arrived in the capital, followed two years later by motorized taxicabs. The telephone was proliferating (a line was even installed at the Plas in 1909), electricity was showing promise, and, most significant, attitudes were altering. There was a freedom to breathe not enjoyed by the Victorians. Bertrand Russell was born in 1872. Contemplating the tone of the generation born in the eighties (as Denys was), he wrote, “It is surprising how great a change in mental climate those ten years had brought. We were still Victorian; they were Edwardian.” But 1910, the year Denys went down from Oxford, turned out to be a traumatic one for the nation. The previous April, Lloyd George had introduced his People’s Budget, the most radical in history. It specifically taxed land and unearned income, imposing, among other measures, duty on mineral royalties such as those reaped by the Winchilseas from quarries they owned in Northamptonshire. The budget aroused furious resentment in the whole of the landowning class, and after seven months of splenetic struggle it was thrown out by the Lords. An election was called, in which the Liberals clung to power with a greatly reduced majority. But even if the Liberals held the Commons, the Conservatives, if they felt threatened, could fall back on the veto power of the Conservative Lords, as they had done in 1893 to block Gladstone’s bitterly disputatious Home Rule Bill. The Liberals were determined to destroy this absolute power, and in April 1910 the House of Commons approved legislation to remove the Lords’ right to veto decisions of the lower house. The Conservatives were equally determined to preserve their last rampart of privilege. The Liberal government was still set on home rule for Ireland, so the idea was floated, in order to prevent the House of Lords from again exercising its veto, of creating a new batch of Liberal peers. Henry and his fellow Lords were faced with the prospect of losing either the veto or their majority in the House. Either spelled disaster for their class. In the middle of this maneuvering, Edward VII expired. “I am miserable that the king should have died,” Denys’s freckly contemporary Patrick Shaw Stewart wrote to their mutual friend Diana Manners. “He was my favourite institution. There will be no more fun now of any sort.”

In the chambers of government it was open warfare, not fun. Throughout that summer, Parliament, and the establishment that supported it, focused on the constitutional crisis. The unpopular new king, George V, persuaded Asquith to fight another election before taking radical action. The fact was, however, that although Liberal fiscal reforms were draconian, they were a logical continuation of a process that had its roots in the Victorian age. The ground was shifting. The complexion of the House of Lords was changing, and, to a certain extent, so was that of the Conservative Party itself. Between 1886 and 1914, two hundred and forty-six new titles were granted, seventy of them in recognition of success in business or industry (several new Lords were brewers, and as a result the whole lot were known to the Old Guard as the beerage). The landed aristocracy in the House, and in power, was being watered down. On another front, there was a further assault on the status quo: in 1910 the Suffragettes entered their militant phase. It was time to leave.