A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  In 1971, when Veronica was again in a distraught state, Lucan took her to Greenways nursing home in Hampstead. According to her own account, she agreed to go under the influence of sleeping pills, administered by Lucan. When she arrived she ‘felt she couldn’t face it’.32 As before, there was a scene; she ran away and took a bus home. The ex-police officer who now says of Veronica, ‘Once you get into that mental health system, there’s no escape’, makes a serious point. The irony is that the myth is correct, because Lucan’s attempts to treat Veronica made the situation so much worse; yet at the same time it is a falsification, because this was not what he intended. It is impossible not to sympathize: but for both of them.

  Lucan now did as Ian Maxwell-Scott had done, and began spending nights away from home. He often stayed at the Eaton Row mews or the St James’s Club. He also began confiding in friends about his marriage, and this was later interpreted as telling them that Veronica was mad in order to undermine her. Certainly it did set in stone the alliances that were already being formed, which left Veronica isolated. ‘The over-riding suspicion’, it was later said, ‘is that nobody, at least no male, ever tried to conduct a sensible conversation with her, and never tried to see beneath her anger and defensiveness… Her qualities were never weighed in that marginal socialite world of smart gambling where appearance counts a little too much and from which she was impatiently dismissed.’33 There is truth in this, but it sets aside the fact that those of Lucan’s set who were inclined to like her had, with time, found this difficult to do. Michael Stoop, who found Veronica to be ‘clever, astute and subtle’, went on to say that she was ‘aggressive and unbalanced. It made her an extremely dangerous type of woman.’ A man who worked at the Clermont states flatly: ‘That wife of his was a ball-breaker. Whatever he did or didn’t do, there was mitigation.’

  ‘No long-term friendship could ever last,’ says Christina, ‘because she wasn’t well. The whole thing was a nightmare, for everybody concerned.’

  Lucan’s own family despaired of the apparently insoluble situation. Veronica complained to them, as well as to Christina, that Lucan was physically violent and mentally cruel. She claimed that he had tried to strangle her and to throw her down the stairs. He countered that Veronica had hurled herself about the house to bring up bruises, then taunted him with the threat of arrest. The family members believed him, not her, for which they themselves would later suffer accusations: of taking the side of evil against innocence.

  The police, naturally enough, took the view that he was violent during the marriage. Yet there is a contradiction within a story told by Roy Ranson. He gives credence to an allegation by Veronica that, when the couple went hunting, Lucan picked a fiery mount in the hope that it would throw her. Later, however, Ranson uses this story to an entirely different end. Lucan, he wrote, relayed Veronica’s accusations about the horse to his friends, gleefully citing this as evidence of her paranoia. In other words, and despite the inherent paradox, Ranson tries to have it both ways. Lucan wanted to injure Veronica physically, and damage her mentally, all with the same horse.

  According to Ranson, this story about the horse was also one of the many rumours that rose within the Clermont like twists of smoke. It was whispered that Veronica did not merely make unreliable accusations against her husband, but that her own behaviour was bizarre and extreme. Such rumours, which grew stronger after the murder, persist even now and have become ever more lurid in the telling; they are absurd and utterly unbelievable.34 But none of this mischief-making ever comes from people who actually knew the situation as it was. There is certainly no sense that it came from Lucan himself, although he could be blamed for starting the hare, as it were. It was the hysterical chit-chat of those on the fringes, the Clermont hangers-on who longed to contribute their snippet and who later spouted merrily to the press, who had a field day gossiping about poor old Lucky and his absolutely frightful wife. It is the kind of thing that happens in a club, a closed community: a grisly fact of life, and at least as damaging to Lucan as to Veronica.

  The real source of the problem was John Aspinall. He positively loathed Veronica, being the sort of man who had no time for a woman who did not keep quiet and look gorgeous and let the men do their thing. He relished seeing her formally booted from the circle around which she had hovered like a spectre of doom. She was unlucky; a hex; she prevented Lucan from giving his full attention to gambling. As the stories about the marriage began to permeate the Clermont, Aspinall pranced about like his satanic majesty, fuelling the fires, making a florid show of loyalty towards his noble friend. ‘Who knows into what red hell one’s sightly soul will stray under the pressure of a long, dripping attrition of a woman who’s always out to reduce you, to whom you are stuck and from whom you’ve had children,’ he would later declaim.35 Again it was Lucan who was damaged by this. Nobody could have been as bad as Aspinall made Veronica out to be; the conclusion, therefore, was that his defenders were the bad ones. The conflicted discretion of the rest became tainted by his shameless verbosity, just as the Clermont set, harmless in the main, was painted in his violent technicolour. There is the faint possibility that Aspinall foresaw this, and enjoyed the idea.

  Certainly he and Lucan were close. Aspinall had fond feelings towards the man he called ‘my fifth, sixth or seventh best friend’36 (a typical tease), but they were also those of a cat that plays tenderly with a mouse. There may have been a kind of envy, for the young god who had strolled casually into the Clermont all set to make his pile. Soon Lucan would be wrapped tight in Aspinall’s clutches; and there was an obscure sense, beyond the financial, in which Aspinall would relish this momentous fall. ‘Yes, who needs a friend like Aspinall,’ says Bill Shand Kydd; he was, as Harold Acton said of Violet Trefusis, ‘the kind of friend who makes you long for a foe’.

  But when Veronica Lucan snapped in 1972, and threw the wine into a woman’s face in the bar of the Clermont, John Aspinall erected the barricades: we are all with Lucky, and the damnable wife can go to blazes. The end of the marriage, which had been resisted for so long, was now an inevitability.

  In December 1972 Veronica sacked the nanny Lilian Jenkins, who had worked for the family throughout the whole period of the marriage breakdown, and was described as ‘fiercely loyal to Lucan’. The dismissal, Lucan said, ‘was at ten minutes’ notice and against my wishes’.37 There was a furious row. The Lucans then spent Christmas with his sister Sally and her family at their vicarage in Guilsborough, Northamptonshire. This, too, was a disaster. On Boxing Day Veronica returned to Lower Belgrave Street with the children. As 1973 began, Lord Lucan summoned his wife’s GP, Christopher Powell-Brett, to confirm that she could be left. On 7 January he moved into the mews house at Eaton Row, and never returned.

  House Blue

  ‘I like a good detective story. But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that – years before sometimes – with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day. Zero hour.’

  AGATHA CHRISTIE, Towards Zero, 1944

  It was in 1973 that Lord Lucan’s finances were irreparably weakened. The reason for this was not gambling in itself, although that had done its own damage. It was the attempt to gain custody of his three children, followed by gambling in an attempt to recoup the cost of the High Court case. When one has to win, one cannot; Dostoevsky’s ‘calm and calculating’ head is set on fire by the lethal spark of necessity. Chasing a future makes it run away. All gamblers know this, but what one knows is not the same as what one does: that is how Lucan’s life went wrong.

  Although Lord Lucan is now a symbol of the gambler, embodying the very essence of its frantic follies, until his life reached its crisis point there was nothing particularly noteworthy about his gambling; not, that is to say, in the high-end world that he inhabited. There, he was just one of a kind. There were, as his wife put it, ‘enormous swings of t
he pendulum’, but that was normal. The swings were nothing like as extreme as those experienced by some of his friends. He did not, as David Stirling did in 1960, write an IOU to John Aspinall for £173,500. He did not lose as heavily as Daniel Meinertzhagen, and he certainly did not throw money around as maniacally as Ian Maxwell-Scott, who was by nature the gambler that Lucan is said to have been. Lucan did become that gambler: but by degrees, by a kind of chance.

  Certainly his gambling worsened throughout the nine years of his marriage. He was selling things: books at Sotheby’s, the three marble heads commissioned by the 2nd Earl, the Laleham property that had once been home to the Lucans’ bailiffs. His living expenses with Veronica had been astronomical; as his sister says, ‘he had to survive in that other world, the world of the highfalutin.’ He was cash-poor. Nevertheless the situation could still have been salvageable, for the very reason that it was still not one of absolute need.

  That is not to say that becoming a ‘professional gambler’ had been anything other than folly. ‘An intelligent person can do a very foolish thing,’ says Stuart Wheeler. ‘Perhaps not a very stupid thing, but a very foolish thing.’ The choice, if it can be called that, had been born of two delusions: that it was possible to beat the odds, and that there was something earl-like about the gambler mentality. Winning with grace, losing with even more grace; these do require a noble stoicism. Non-gamblers would not see it that way, but there is a kind of gallantry about the way in which a gambler accepts fate. As Lord Lucan would have recognized, and with an intensity of fellow-feeling, one sees it in a Deptford betting shop just as in a Mayfair club. But in the club this gambling mentality permeates the man. It defines the man. To a Lucan, conscious of the ancestral centuries, this was a consoling retreat. As with Lord Hastings one hundred years earlier, it demanded nothing from him, although it took so much of what he had. It replaced the tricky business of making a life. And when life beyond the club became unbearable, it was hardly a choice at all to hole up within the silk and gilded bunker.

  As much as anything, it supplied a routine. By the 1970s Lucan’s days had acquired the rigid, repetitive quality that was again a form of refuge; ‘if once the hair weren’t accurately combed, the shoes properly laced, every object exactly placed, the same bus caught every morning, The Times always carried under the left arm, the entire structure would collapse. The deluge, in fact.’1 Lucan was not a bus-traveller, but the principle was the same. Nick Peto says:

  I used to work in a commodities broking business at the top end of Piccadilly. John used to come virtually every day, swing round our office on his way to the Clermont. He always had his first drink, or two, of the day with us, at about half past eleven. I wouldn’t say that was particularly unusual at that time, although he would have got up quite late, so it was early to be starting. It got him going in the morning. And he would leave us at about quarter past twelve and start gambling.

  Then came lunch. An afternoon watching the racing, playing backgammon. Then back to Lower Belgrave Street, bath, change: and back to the clubs for dinner, more drinking, then the lethal move upstairs to chemin-de-fer until three, four or later. ‘One morning,’ says Pierrette Goletto, who was nanny to the Lucan children in 1974, ‘I heard his friends walking past the house. He must have won – they were calling Lucky, Lucky, Lucky! It was six in the morning – they were coming back from the club and I was getting up.’ The Portland, the St James’s, Crockford’s and the Ladbroke formed a tight circle of friendly satellites that could be landed upon at any chosen hour. But the sun around which they revolved was the Clermont.

  As both he and the club slid past their prime, so they entered into a relationship that was something like a Faustian pact. Lucan offered his aristocratic bearing in exchange for a place of sanctuary. He was a diamond inside Aspinall’s lovely jewel box: just by being there, sitting at the chemmy game with his languid recherché air, he ensured that the tone did not go flat. ‘He was a presence at the table,’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen. Lucan became a house player, a ‘house blue’, working for Aspinall. ‘Not all the time, though, and only if it was a really big game. There were only a thousand members, so there wouldn’t necessarily be enough players to make up a game. A house player would sit there and attract them. Aspinall would double John’s hand to raise the stakes.’ By the late 1960s several of the Clermont gamblers were playing for the house, having lost so much of their own money. Meinertzhagen himself was one, as were Charles Benson, Greville Howard and Nick Peto. ‘I was a house player at two places,’ says Peto. ‘The Clermont and the White Elephant. We were all bust, really.’ Of the stint at the White Elephant, where Lucan had celebrated the birth of his son with such delight, Peto later wrote:

  I had to play poker all night until the last people departed, which was normally about four o’clock in the morning. I was allowed to keep 25 per cent of my winnings, but if I lost, that would be put on the slate also. Of course in the morning I had to go off as normal to my job. Mancini [the proprietor] was a very tough cookie and I dread to think what would have happened if for any reason I had let him down.2

  Aspinall’s fist was wrapped in far softer materials, but nevertheless the house player was in an odd position: valuable yet beholden, like a butler. When the club was taken over by Playboy the system ended, being no longer necessary given the flood of new money and players. As a leaving present from Aspinall, a reward for services rendered, Lucan was handed an envelope containing his own bounced cheques.

  Yet he was not actually broke. He had the trust money, the Belgravia house and the mews behind it, the residue of Laleham and Mayo, the heirlooms, the jewels, the silver. His money was not liquid, which meant overdrafts. He had certainly not ‘made his pile’ at gambling. The disappointment must have been crippling, if he allowed himself to think about it. But the knowledge did not stop him: he was unable to raise his head and see the world beyond, the one that would have shed its light upon folly.

  How boring his life sounds. Wilfully so. There would have still been jokes, friends, excitements, the flame of alcohol; nevertheless it was a long way from the sane and healthy pleasures of powerboating, or standing in the winners’ enclosure with his racehorse Le Merveilleux, or being young. But the alternative to the club ritual, which was life with his wife, had become impossible. Anyway Lucan had nothing now to spare for carefree pleasure. His energies, outside of gambling (which had a mechanistic aspect by this time), were grimly concentrated upon the penultimate battle of his marriage: getting his children away from his wife.

  There are marriages that end decently. It does not have to be a descent into the inferno. But the nature of marriage, or partnership, makes it likely that it will be. To marry is to lay oneself bare to another person, to whom one is bound not by blood but by choice. There is little that the blood tie will not forgive, equally little that the marriage tie will; and when it comes to separation, the hardest thing of all to forgive is that one has made oneself vulnerable to this other, now alien person. The rage of Henry VIII against Anne Boleyn was that of a man who had exposed his truest self to a woman whom he now wanted not to exist. ‘It amazes me now that for several months after she went I was v cut up about it, wanted her back, contemplated a poem on the subj if you don’t fucking well mind,’ wrote Kingsley Amis,3 six years after his divorce from the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, with whom he had once been as adoringly besotted as a teenager. This has nothing to do with the person, everything to do with the mysterious destructiveness of the tie. ‘Nobody can hurt you like a husband,’ wrote Agatha Christie, whose own first marriage ended desperately. Of course marriage can do the opposite thing, enhance and strengthen two lives. But if the wrong natures collide, then the dance of lust and role play, which is how partnerships begin, will never mature into serenity. It can even turn dangerous. In a case of wife- or husband-murder, as Christie reiterated in her detective fiction, always look first to the spouse.

  With the Lucans, strip away the veneer and it is clear that they
could only bring out the worst in each other. Perhaps neither of them should have married at all, although in their different ways they both needed to do so. Even so, they might still have got away from each other intact, lived to fight another day, had there not been children in the marriage. Frances, George and Camilla were the spoils of war, the three aces in Veronica’s hand. As long as she held them, the power was hers.

  When a marriage ends, there are almost always two versions of its story: the wife’s and the husband’s. The battle of the marriage segues into a new power struggle, over whose version will acquire the illusion of truth. Each side acquires camp followers. In Lucan’s case, he was supported, pretty much unreservedly, by everybody who saw him and his wife at close quarters. Yet Veronica’s version of the marriage became the publicly accepted one. It is quite extraordinary, the extent to which the wife’s part was taken by so many of the people at the edges of this story. After the events of November 1974 it was only right, of course, that Veronica should become an object of sympathy. But the way in which this permeated backwards, streaming through every aspect of the previous ten years, is striking. Facts were dismissed, ignored, or interpreted as being Lucan’s own fault. As much as compassion for Veronica, in fact, what was really being evinced was visceral loathing for her husband.

  Because a man of his kind is generally assumed to be the dominant partner, the weapons of the ‘subjugated’ woman are not easily perceived. They can be small, stealthy, deployed with a delicacy that is often beyond male understanding. Although the battle-lines were writ particularly boldly in the Lucan marriage, it is far from being the only one in which the wife has won the arguments in the public sphere. This is the prerogative of the apparently weaker party: the underdog, with whom the British instinctively sympathize. And because Lucan’s supporters were, like him, assured and upper-class and incapable of expressing themselves with emotional intuitiveness, they too were dismissed. Even the Shand Kydds, who bore much of the brunt of the fallout from the marriage and took on the Lucan children; even kindly Kait Lucan, who was condemned for putting her son’s interests in front of those of her daughter-in-law (a woman who ironically valued the title of countess as passionately as Kait had despised it).