'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  François took me to Claude Dauphin’s ravishing little château surrounded by meadows near Tours, and through him I met Iris Clert before she went into the art trade. She was running a handbag shop with her mother in the rue St Honoré and much later, after having her nose job (to look more Greek apparently) she had come to Cot to recuperate, quite suicidal, as she feared the celebrated Archibald McIndoe had snipped off too much.†

  At the top of Hauts de Cagnes there was a tiny bar where, during the evenings, the village fops and foreigners gathered. You didn’t have to squat long on one of Jimmie’s bar stools before someone came up, not to offer a drink, unless it be mineral water, but to shuffle you round the place to a pick-up. As well as ex-Maquis combatants, there were American art students living on a Guggenheim grant, Swedish and Spanish painters, even a German who had spent the war living clandestinely with an ugly mistress. Jews drifted back from camps and, maybe because they had suffered and Cagnes life was so frivolous, they gave the impression of being rather surly. Not only that, but Parisians with villas in Cagnes remained unabashedly anti-Semitic, as one observed when John Sutro flew down from Paris and we did a tour of the cafés, where John would whistle tunes from famous operas, to the annoyance of the habitués.

  The first person to shuffle me round the place was an ex-Resistance leader. Pierre Sauvaigo was a big handsome man, then studying for a lawyer’s degree, and during the evenings we got into the habit of meeting in a downtown neon-lit bar, where the atmosphere struck me as being strangely romantic on a sultry summer’s night, with ‘J’ai bu’ drooling away on the machine. Pierre became very possessive and went on employing Maquis tactics long after the combat. One afternoon, seeing me basking on the beach in the company of a cheque forger, he sleuthed us back to the villa and, when my companion left, he burst in to the bedroom shouting, ‘Garce’, and beat me up. He then vented the residue of his rage on the walls with the aid of a knuckle-duster. Terrified, I fled into Cannes, where people were so horrified to see my appalling bruises that they offered to go to Cagnes and beat Pierre up.

  Then, the Croisette abounded in jobless war veterans living on black market deals who assembled in the bar of the Carlton. Amongst them was an ex-bomber pilot who owned a twin-engined Consul plane that seated about six people. Graham was engaged in smuggling and took me on several trips. He would call up at the last minute and say, ‘I’m just off to Tangiers. Would you like to come?’ His plane was invariably parked on the outskirts of some airport. The first time, we took off over a herd of cows and then had to make a crash landing. We remained unhurt, but the watches he was carrying sprang out of their wrappings and hopped about the field. Graham’s instant reaction to any catastrophe was hysterical laughter. He drank a great deal, his evenings being spent on what he called the ‘Toot’. One would try to keep him away from bars as drink made him so aggressive, his rancour seemingly due to the fact he had been awarded the DSO. ‘They think that by giving you a medal,’ he snarled, ‘they can get away with anything.’ One time we went on a charter flight with a nightclub owner and his blonde Grosvenor House crooner. When we landed at a small commercial airport outside Paris, Graham got a tremendous ovation. The officials shook his hand and patted him on the back, as though they were all in on some enormous joke – smuggling, in fact.

  Then, should you be dropped blindfold in France, you would know where you were from the smell of Gauloises at customs. I used to enjoy smoking ‘pot’, which could be found in any Tangiers souk. You just had to go into a café and say, ‘kif, kif’, Arabic for intoxicant, and someone would lead you to a stall where hasheesh was sold in grimy paper sachets. There was one time in Tangiers when I stocked up on sachets to take back to England, stuffing them into my basket. For once, on landing at Cannes airport, the plane was searched. They even took up the floorboards. I went straight into the airport bar and ordered a drink, leaving the basket dangling on a bar stool, then I joined the others to undergo a baggage check. When we were released I went back into the bar, retrieved my basket and we all taxied on to the Carlton. Our last flight over the Alps in a thunderstorm skimming the mountains, with the plane bobbing about like a cork, was so scary that I was unable to fly again for several months, even on a commercial flight.

  From the villa I moved to the Vieux Auberge. Half way up the hill the Auberge de Cagnes had a beautiful terrace overlooking the sea where Poppet and I took our meals. It was run by M. and Mme. Delenne who had a son and daughter, and two poodles, Rita and Kiki.

  Jeanette was jolly and barrel-shaped. She worked very hard and was always flying into a rage. Jasmin rarely spoke. He remained grooved to the stove, a happy smirk on his face, revelling in his wife’s hysterical scenes. Rosa Lewis style, if someone left the bar without paying, the drinks would be put down on some regular lodger’s account. Jeanette often worked off her ill humour on some totally innocent victim. One winter, it was a young American writer who aggravated her because he never drank. She was bawling him out and, his French being limited, he kept repeating, ‘Mais, Madame Delenne, qu’est-ce que j’ai fait?’ So, it became his name. Laughing, Jeanette would shout from the bar, ‘Have you seen Qu’estcequej’ ai faitaujourd’hui? There’s a letter for him.’

  Many friends came to Cagnes. But Louise thought Gerda so tough she named her the Iron Girder. And Gerda was aggravated by Poppet’s voice, she claimed it was affected. Poppet was always in a good humour. She reminded me of the Chekhov character Olenka in The Darling, who puts her heart and soul into every amorous relationship, and as soon as one husband dies immediately finds another on whom to lavish her devotion, until too old to marry again she adopts a little boy to pamper.

  One time Poppet and I decided to lunch in Vence. We took the bus and on arrival made straight for the nearest bar where two coarse fellows plied us with Pernod. After lunch, they suggested we accompany them back to their work, and we found ourselves in an abattoir surrounded by hunks of meat and were entertained by the two butchers until they went home to their wives, each one with a string of offal dangling from the waist.

  Poppet never lacked admirers. One had been champion of the Tour de France, when, to my annoyance, the way to her room would be barred by a bicycle. We even followed that dreary sport, if it can be called such, as far as Draguignan and stood in the pouring rain with outstretched arms, administering lumps of sugar as her admirer peddled past.

  The last character to appear on the Cagnes scene was a Corsican ex-Maquis friend of Pierre’s who came down from Paris to supervise security measures when de Gaulle was to make a speech on the place Masséna. Monsieur le Préfet got into the habit of flying down weekends, which we spent in the Hotel Negresco. But, once, he turned up unexpectedly at the Auberge to find I was out, whereupon he spent hours pacing my room, ripping my clothes and filling all the Arden pots of beauty cream with black cigarette stubs. Soon after, he died of a strange tropical fever.

  By then, I was installed in a top-floor flat in Queen Street, where John Sutro and Peter Quennell were frequent visitors, as well as Gargoyle friends like David Sylvester looking very handsome in battledress, Xan Fielding and Jocelyn Baines,‡ so that I had a kind of salon. Xan would accompany me to the cottage. Once, while he was staying, the local parson came to the door with a book of Peter’s that he wanted to have signed. Whereupon, Xan quickly obliged him and the parson went happily away under the impression he had obtained the author’s signature. Jocelyn Baines then worked for a bookshop off Piccadilly where Sutro had an account, so that sometimes when he came to see me Jocelyn would bring me a book put down on Sutro’s account.

  The French can be very inventive when it comes to terms of endearment. You can be ma puce, une colombine, ma reine, mon doux ange, ma fille, bébé, mon mimosa, or simply, chérie; so that when Pierre wrote to say he was coming to see his ‘chou-chou chérie, pour te garder pendant huit jours, comme une proie à laquelle personne ne touchera; je ferai de mes bras un prison qui t’isolera du reste du monde anglais’ and I failed to take him
at his word, the visit turned out to have grave consequences. I was modelling for Mattli who had a salon in Carlos Place. Pierre would walk me to work. He understood very little English, but one day I left my diary behind and he soon gleaned the sense of ‘John Ritz 1.15’, ‘Jocelyn drinks’, and ‘PQ Etoile 7.15’. I got back to find all these pages with dates had been carefully dog-eared and from then on I was kept a prisoner and restrained from answering the telephone. Pierre became increasingly violent and showed me a gun he had hidden in his suitcase. When Poppet rang, we agreed to meet her for dinner at the Ambassador’s where I told her Pierre had resumed his Maquis tactics, whereupon we thought it wise to notify the police.

  The following morning, two plain-clothes men rang the bell of Queen Street and how sad I felt when Pierre was politely extradited!

  *June Osborne later married Randolph Churchill.

  †In her book of memoirs, Iris-Time (published by Denoël, 1978), Iris Clert writes: ‘François was our mutual friend. Tall, sandy-haired, unselfconscious, amusing, he was worldly and superficial – but madly sympathetic. He’d had his handsome nose broken in a car accident but, in spite of his boxer’s head, always found a way of seducing the most beautiful girls. Thanks to him, we were witness to a long procession of the most extraordinary creatures. One of them, Barbara Skelton, was a superb girl with panther’s eyes and became my best friend.’

  ‡Xan Fielding spent the war in the Greek Maquis sabotaging the Germans. Jocelyn Baines worked for the publishers Longman, wrote a book on Conrad and committed suicide in the late 1960s.

  Chapter X

  Cyril

  It was Natalie Newhouse who initiated a meeting with Cyril Connolly after the war, when he was living with Lys in Sussex Place. Natalie had been a regular correspondent throughout the Cairo era. She was a very pretty, witty girl with green eyes and dark hair worn in a page-boy. Natalie was always falling masochistically in love and doing destructive things like falling through a skylight, breaking a leg and spending months in hospital. Her great love was Ivan Moffat. But, when I got back from Athens, she was living in Tickerage Farm with the actor, Bobby Newton, whom she eventually married. It was then she told me that Cyril was bored with Lys and was seeking someone new; she had titillated his interest, she said, by claiming I had a passion for learning facts, without adding that, once acquired, my memory failed to retain them. She then invited us both to lunch at the Etoile. I had become the proud owner of a red convertible Sunbeam Talbot and my popularity had increased. In fact, one year later, Nancy Mitford was to claim that Cyril had really been captivated not by me but by the Sunbeam.

  Peter Quennell was the first person to come on a trip. We drove to France passing through Beauvais to visit the flamboyant Gothic cathedral and join Cyril in Paris for some memorable meals. When I was due to join John Sutro who had booked rooms in the Hotel des Bergues, Cyril decided to follow me on to Geneva and booked into a hotel opposite the Bergues, on the other side of the lake, so that we could signal to each other from our respective rooms.

  When Cyril arrived, on the pretext of going to a coiffeur, I joined him for tea and caviar on the corner of the street. From then on we would meet every day, when Cyril would consult his guide and tell me where to take Sutro that night for dinner. ‘Here’s a very good restaurant,’ Cyril would say, ‘where you can get the best quenelles in Europe.’ By this time, Chuff, my pet name for Sutro, became increasingly surprised at my being so knowledgeable about Geneva restaurants while remaining ‘uncoiffed’. When he flew back to London I drove Cyril sightseeing.

  We visited Madame de Staël’s château, Rousseau’s house outside Chambéry and then drove up three thousand feet to see the Monastery of Chartreuse, only to be confronted by a hoarding announcing the monastery was closed, requesting us not to laugh, sing or smoke, but respect the sanctity and privacy of the monks … It was toward the end of this trip that I suffered the first of Cyril’s deflating quips. A heavy smoker, I was lighting up during the cheese course, when he said acidly, ‘I suppose you think the hollows in the gruyère are there for you to stub out your cigarette.’

  By then, he was beginning to pine after Lys and went off to meet her somewhere near Marseilles. We separated in Cannes, where, in a nightclub, I developed a crush on a Parisian lawyer, small and dark with an alluring dyke hairstyle, who came up and asked me to dance. A great coureur, wherever we went she invariably picked up some pretty girl in a cloakroom. She excelled in gallantry; no sooner had I pulled out a cigarette than she leant over with a gold lighter with such rapidity that my eyelashes got singed. We travelled back to Paris together. She insisted on driving the Sunbeam and, once there, bombarded my hotel room with bouquets. But her breasts made a mockery of all that masculinity and my enthusiasm abated when she shed her clothes.

  When I got back to Queen Street Cyril was living alone in Sussex Place. Although they met practically every day, he had made a final break with Lys who had taken on a lover.

  Diary

  March 9, 1950 Queen Street

  Chuff, having said for weeks he would give a party for Peter’s forty-fifth birthday, had, when the day arrived, forgotten to ask anyone. Xan Fielding came round for a drink, very spry and sweet, said Chuff’s new magazine, Vista, was going to be a great success and already saw himself as a future Hulton! When Peter arrived, he read out passages from Palinurus and said to me, ‘Has Baby read her Palinurus yet?’ I replied, ‘Why should I read it, when I live it every day?’ Chuff eventually got Pauline and Sylvester Gates to dine. I arrived at the Caprice feeling very tipsy, having drunk a lot of champagne. Had a gay and pleasant dinner until Pauline suddenly turned to Chuff, after giving me an arch look, and said, ‘Seen much of Cyril lately?’ After dinner, we went to a party. Cyril, who had done his best to make me jealous by saying that he was taking out a glamour-puss, turned up with a large dumpling.

  Last night Jocelyn Baines came to see me. I had the most appalling cafard. We played chess and won a game each, which put me in a better humour. We were having a very agreeable evening until Cyril rang up in a terribly self-pitying state. How could I have been so beastly as to send him back to his cold empty house? Was it because of Baines? That I was a selfish bitch. Why did I play chess with Baines and not with him? That he had no money, and Lys, who had said earlier she had ‘flu, had now gone out to dinner and it was all my fault. So, I packed my basket and trekked off to Sussex Place, expecting to find him in a terrible state of gloom, but he was prancing about the bedroom barefoot, very pleased with himself, feeling he’d scored off Baines, said he was pleased to see me, whipped off his dressing-gown, sprang into bed and was asleep in no time.

  July 13

  Cyril rang up early this morning. Said he had not slept all night, and was still brooding on the last two days and what I might have been doing. Said he had spent the greater part of the night allotting marks to all the women of his circus, according to their suitability as wives. I, of course, got fewer than any of them for spirituality, but top score for sex appeal, followed by Sonia Orwell, who had tremendous appeal in a blowsy way when blotto. Lys and Joan (Rayner)* got top marks for loyalty and giving a sense of security.

  Chuff had a tough time getting through on the buzzer. He had been told about a luncheon party given by Cyril at the Ritz. Waugh, who had been invited, had complained of the food, adding that he had the impression Cyril had asked a lot of people to lunch, forgetting he no longer had Lys as a cook. Later, I rang Cyril and said had his lunch been a flop? Very hurt, he replied, ‘But it went on until four …’ This evening Jocelyn came round with another book put down on Chuff’s account. When I said Chuff was broke, adding, of course, not broke as we know it, he kept repeating, ‘Oh, you are sweet, really.’ Then, the old mystic, Ned Grove, came round looking as absurd as ever with his lined India rubber face, eyeglass, sticking-out snout, bowler hat and brolly. He said, ‘I see you are very nervous tonight. We must give you a lot to drink.’ I knew quite well what he had on his mind. He never stopped t
alking about the god Pan and referring to a little black devil at the back of his head that manifested itself always when he was with me. He harped a lot on the imagination. How one should have more faith in the imagination than any medium, such as one’s sight. After all, he claimed, this tablecloth appears white to us now, but turn out the lights and what do you see!

  We had a very good dinner at the Etoile. When we got back to the flat, Ned became dreamy and sentimental. Did I remember the story of Miss Skelton’s onion? During the war, on one of my visits to Great Eastwards, when onions were almost impossible to procure, I managed to get hold of one, and kept it on the windowsill of Hertford Street, until one day it disappeared. A search was made, but the onion was never traced and from then a blight was cast over the house, until it was hit by an incendiary bomb. That kind of whimsy had great appeal to him.

  *

  Rise early. Cyril had to return to Sussex Place to shave and collect suitcase. Reappears in Queen Street two hours later. Departure delayed. Halt at Maidstone for a cold lunch during which I said I was feeling dejected and sick of life … What with the old circus round, and nothing but futility. ‘You ought to marry Jocelyn,’ he says. ‘I would rather join Patrick Henderson in Canada.’ C appeared quite troubled and said, ‘Has he asked you to?’ So I pretended that he had. The pork pie Cyril was eating got pushed aside. ‘Unfortunately, we can’t possibly marry,’ he said, with a trapped look, ‘as we don’t get on at all well when things go wrong and you couldn’t bear being poor. After all, it’s not as though anyone is likely to leave you any money we can count on.’