The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

  Another question worth asking about these transactions is: what did each of the parties to them want? Connolly, by this time, was clearly contemplating marriage, although – Connolly being Connolly – his steps towards it were tentative in the extreme. ‘Talk of our living together, preparatory to marriage,’ Barbara noted in mid-August. ‘He said that if two people who live together don’t marry within the first year, they never will.’ Half an hour after this exchange, he returned to say that ‘he thinks he has been in a married state too much in his life’. If this sounds as if all the decisions were being made – or rather not being made – by Connolly, then Barbara, too, was capable of giving as good as she got. ‘B. is certainly unhappy, but she is tough and she is so horrible to me that I don’t feel guilt about her,’ he wrote at about this time. But what did Barbara want? Establishing what she felt about Connolly is made more difficult by the fact that her diaries and memoirs are clearly written for effect, intended to memorialise the dumpy figure found marinating in the bath or sprawled over the bed as a great comic character. Beyond this a yearning for security, that eternal wish to stave off boredom and the sense of some elemental coming together uneasily contended, together with a suspicion that both would happily have walked away from the relationship had a better offer presented itself.

  The stage was set for the first great drama of their life together. It began one summer day in Queen Street when, with both Connolly and Quennell conveniently on the premises, the telephone rang. The call was from Paris. The caller was Farouk, not seen for six years, who, according to Barbara’s account of their conversation, remarked: ‘It would be nice to see you again. Why don’t you come out and join us?’ A less sophisticated man might have baulked at the idea of a woman he wanted to marry disappearing to France to reacquaint herself with a former lover who happened to be the King of Egypt, but Connolly urged her to go: ‘After all, a king’s a king.’ Barbara left London more or less on the spot, was met at La Baule in Brittany, to which Farouk had moved on, by Freddie of ancient memory and taken to join the royal entourage, at this point quartered on two floors of the Hermitage Hotel. Her host, fatter and seedier than when they had last met and resembling ‘a huge sawdust teddy bear badly sewn at the joints’, tweaked her ear affectionately and told the assembled company ‘She’s a real minx, this one.’ With her customary sangfroid, Barbara settled down into a routine that involved accompanying her host each evening to the casino (she was given a thousand francs but expected to stay seated beside him as a kind of mascot once this was lost) and being summoned each morning by a member of the royal bodyguard to join him for breakfast.

  Connolly, meanwhile, was working hard to monetise the trip. The Daily Mail, possibly instigated by Quennell, was prepared to commission a piece about the royal visit to Brittany, although any face-to-face interview would, as Connolly knew, be problematic: Farouk detested journalists. When he arrived in La Baule, the King refused to see him, although he and Barbara were allowed to meet for drinks. Shortly afterwards, Farouk announced that he and his entourage were leaving for Biarritz. Desperate for something that would give his copy bite, Connolly cooked up a plan, told Barbara that he would be sitting drinking coffee outside the last café out of town as the cortège passed by and she should try to persuade her escort to stop. Sure enough, as the fleet of cars sailed into view, a fat, chair-bound figure with a suitcase could be seen on the pavement, but no amount of pleading on Barbara’s part could induce Farouk to halt. The royal party proceeded to Biarritz, where she was pursued by reporters ‘wanting to interview the English mystery woman’. Barbara, too, was determined to make a profit out of her holiday. Although large sums continued to be lost at the roulette table, she managed ‘to put enough aside to give Cyril some cufflinks and provide for our eventual trip back’.

  As for her dealings with Farouk, one notes once again her complete inability to be anyone other than herself: sardonic, unimpressed, never likely to wilt in royalty’s shadow. Farouk, praised for his driving skills, declared that ‘a compliment from you is a rarity, I’ll take it’. As well as the thousand francs a night gambling stake, the royal bounty included a ring with emerald chips and a gold cigarette holder, but Barbara was unmoved by ‘a large vulgar clip inlaid with multi-coloured stones that was pinned onto my evening dress like some badge of merit’. Subsequently the party moved on to Cannes and Barbara, her unlooked-for holiday at an end, returned to England by way of the Dordogne. Visiting the Egyptian Embassy to collect her suitcase, which had been despatched in the diplomatic bag, she discovered a crate of mangoes which Farouk had sent as a present for Connolly.

  By now marriage was definitely in view, even if friends and former lovers counselled caution (‘Don’t do anything in a hurry,’ Lys advised. ‘If you and Barbara are really suited . . . then marry her in six months’ time) and Barbara’s behaviour sometimes seemed calculated to forestall it. On a September trip to Paris, where Connolly arrived with a ring, they attended a nightclub where Barbara, conspicuous on the dancefloor, went out of her way to be agreeable to all the men present except her future husband. Still the ever-indecisive Connolly hesitated to commit himself, fearful of what marriage to Barbara might entail, still more fearful of what he might be missing if he let the opportunity go by. ‘After a year’s talk of marriage, we have decided that that is to be the day’, runs an entry in Barbara’s diary from 5 October 1950.

  They were formally united at Elham Register Office, with PC Boot as the main witness. When at one point Connolly was found to have disappeared from the room, the clerk took Boot for the husband to be. ‘If I weren’t a married man, I’d take his place readily,’ the policeman declared. The wedding breakfast – in fact a lunch – took place ‘in sullen silence in Maidstone’. A gigantic basket of exotic plants later arrived from Farouk. Friends of the couple looked on with a mixture of mock and genuine horror. ‘There is I believe no doubt that Boots has married the Sultan’s Circassian slave’, Evelyn Waugh informed Nancy Mitford later in the year.

  The evidence is conclusive tho it is not known whether he gave her a ring. A Mrs Hulton gave him a wedding breakfast. After the fifth course, Boots had a seizure, fell off his chair frothing & gasping, was carried straight to a waiting van & whisked off to Tring where he spent the first fortnight of married life in a padded cell being hosed and starved and worse . . . Their total capital is £5 . . . two sacks of sugar and a cottage in Kent which belongs to the sultana . . . He writes daily to Lys begging to see her & saying how wretched he is, but she is adamant.

  As with nearly all the elaborate fantasias with which Waugh entertained Nancy Mitford, there is more than a grain of truth in this conspectus. The Connollys’ income as they embarked on their married life would be severely reduced. Sussex Place, now in need of substantial repairs, was becoming too expensive to maintain. Sutro had presumably intended the flat at Queen Street for Barbara, rather than Barbara and a husband. Even more ominous, perhaps, was the fact that almost from the moment that he emerged from the Register Office Connolly began to feel that he had made a mistake. The post-nuptial atmosphere can be gauged from an entry in Barbara’s diary three days after the wedding when they were staying at Queen Street. Still worrying that there might be headlines of the WRITER WEDS FRIEND OF FAROUK kind, Connolly began the morning by going downstairs to fetch the newspapers. Finding none, his anxiety switched immediately to faint disappointment. Barbara suggested that he make some toast. ‘Don’t know how to make toast.’ After drinking half a cup of tea he sank back into bed ‘like a dying goose, still in his dressing gown’. Two days later, she found him standing stark naked in the bedroom and staring into space ‘in an attitude of despair’. What was the matter? Barbara wondered. ‘It’s marriage. I feel trapped.’

  Barbara’s suspicion that her newly married husband was pining after Lys was confirmed by Quennell, and also by an argument about Sussex Place, where Barbara declined to live on account of its rundown state: ‘What you don’t realise is that it’s like that
because its chief ornament has gone’, Connolly told her. ‘I feel very badly about Lys and therefore very badly about marrying Barbara,’ Connolly guiltily informed Hamish Hamilton a few weeks later, ‘though I think it will turn out all right hence my general furtiveness and persecution mania.’ Barbara declared herself restive and dissatisfied, saddled with a man who spent his time either soaking for hours in the bath or plodding off to his club to study the racing form. Only a month after the wedding ceremony another argument about whether they should live on the top floor of Sussex Place and let the rooms beneath turned into ‘a heated discussion until we are screaming at each other’.

  Christmas was spent among relays of Connolly’s grand friends – a stay at the Faringdon estate in Oxfordshire which Lord Berners had bequeathed to his companion Robert Heber-Percy, dinner with the Mosleys, another supper with John and Penelope Betjeman. It was all too much for Barbara, who recorded herself suddenly turning on him with a shout of ‘My God, you are a bore’. On New Year’s Day she woke at noon with ‘screams for food from Hubby who has put on an inch of jowl since Christmas’. On what she called ‘bad guilt days’ he took to lying in the bath groaning, ‘dense steam seeps from under the door and spreads round the flat, and I hear an ectoplasmic voice crying “A million miles from here,” pause. “A million miles from here,” or “I wish I was dead.”’ Two days later he went off to have a drink with Janetta. Shortly afterwards, Barbara noted another ‘pining-after-Lys phase. They have had secret meetings every afternoon this week.’

  But Lys’s door was now firmly shut. At about this time she announced that she had been offered an assistant editor’s job at the US firm of Doubleday and would shortly be leaving for America. Here, she thought, she might be able to clamber out of the emotional sink to which eight years of living with Connolly had condemned her: ‘I cheer myself up by thinking of the excitement of going to America. I have several admirers, but am not in the mood for love or sex – nor do I want to entangle myself with anybody. If I can remain free for a while I have a chance of growing up and stopping the arrested development.’ Connolly responded with a desperate letter declaring how much he wanted her back, but it was too late. The fog of mutual antagonism that hung over the Connollys’ relationship can be gauged from Joan Rayner’s account of a dinner party to which she had invited the newly married couple early in the New Year:

  Skelton left before C, the only one not to enjoy it in a furious temper of course, although C could not have been kinder to her, and when he got home about 4 she had locked him out of the flat. It took him about an hour to get in after nearly being arrested, and then apparently he socked her good and proper and slept on the sofa in the sitting room. Robin [Campbell] and I were going to lunch there but C met us at an exhibition in a frightful state, asking us what he was to do, longed to leave but nowhere to go, couldn’t be alone etc, Barbara was still in bed crying so C went home to lunch alone to make up his mind . . .

  There is a suspicion that at least some of the reports of Barbara’s bad behaviour in early 1951 are slightly exaggerated, if only because the people who filed them tended to be Connolly’s friends rather than hers. Neither Joan nor the Campbells, with whom she and Connolly spent an uncomfortable weekend in mid-January (‘Had a sleepless night in a too-narrow bed with Hubby heaving about like a giant seal’), regarded her as anything more than a dangerous nuisance, a poor substitute for Lys when it came to the vital task of providing Connolly with the kind of settled domestic existence that would enable him to make best use of his talents. By the spring Connolly and Barbara were back at Sussex Place, part of a curious household that included the journalist Philip Toynbee, Toynbee’s young American wife and the abandoned Robert Kee. ‘He is in great trouble,’ Waugh gleefully reported to Nancy Mitford:

  Absolutely hates his wife whom he has taken to live in Sussex Place (telephone cut off for non payment & water too by the look of him) with Toynbee, whom he absolutely hates because he has a steady job, and Toynbee’s new wife – a juvenile American typist – and Mr Somebody who is the broken hearted last husband of Blue Feet . . .

  It was the beginning of April 1951, and they had been married for a little over six months.

  Interlude: Parents and Daughters

  Most groups of youngish people end up defining themselves by way of opposition to their parents, or at least to the generation that their parents may be thought to represent. The history of the Bright Young People is a succession of anguished stand-offs, occasionally conducted in print, more often at house parties across a no-man’s-land of smashed glass, purloined brandy bottles and badly behaving guests.

  With the Lost Girls this generational divide is at once more ambiguous and more intense. Nearly all of them, by their late teens, had either purposely removed themselves from family homes, been encouraged to depart, got on badly with relatives with whom circumstance forced them to live (Diana) or, in the case of the orphaned Lys, found themselves driven out into the world by sheer force of circumstance. Their relationships with the people they left behind them were correspondingly flawed. Barbara always assumed that her mother had no love for her. Janetta claimed to dislike her father, the ‘bogus’ Revd Woolley, adored her mother Jan but remained a victim (or so we infer) of the benign irresponsibility of a woman who allowed her teenage daughter to travel halfway across France with a man twice her age. Sonia, having flounced out of the Kensington boarding house to begin a new life among the artists’ garrets of Fitzrovia, seems to have been closest to her half-brother.

  Undoubtedly, amid the tart remarks and self-conscious throwings-over, a fair amount of cake was being had and eaten too. Whatever individual Lost Girls might have said, or thought, about their fathers and mothers, the family home nearly always served as a refuge when funds were low or emotional crises loomed. Barbara’s progress around war-torn London was punctuated by visits to her parents’ home. For all her complaints – see the letter to Janetta from January 1945 which talks about her family ‘burying their disappointment’ – Sonia seems to have enjoyed her Christmases chez Brownell. The idea that Janetta was estranged, or at any rate kept at arm’s length, from her clerical father is disproved by her habit of keeping his letters and the number of appearances he makes in her wartime diaries. ‘Geoff’ addresses his ‘darling Janetta’ from camp in Pirbright in the early part of the war; he visits the house near Dorking and discusses military strategy with his son-in-law; he enquires humorously about Angela and her prospects; he sends gifts to his grandchildren (Nicky remembered an inscribed copy of Winnie the Pooh lying on the nursery shelf at Sussex Place: ‘I think he had more to do with us than Janetta makes out.’) It doesn’t sound like a generational impasse although, naturally, such things are in the eye of the beholder.

  On the other hand, the contrast between a Lost Girl and a representative of the world she had left behind was instantly apparent to disinterested observers. The biographer Jeremy Lewis, driving Barbara through Kent towards the end of her life, was suddenly made aware that he would ‘shortly experience something not vouchsafed to any of her husbands, lovers or friends’. This was Barbara’s sister Brenda, then resident in Hythe. Barbara’s aim was to abstract a painting which she had presented to Brenda but now wished to reunite with a similar artwork owned by her god-daughter. Arriving at the house, where they lunched frugally on supermarket ham and salad, Lewis inventoried their respective dress styles. Barbara, then in her late seventies, was wearing a cowboy shirt with the top three buttons undone, skin-tight jeans and a pair of cowboy boots. Brenda (‘homely, familiar and very easy to talk to’) sported a maroon twin-set, a plum-coloured tweed skirt and fur-lined suede boots. The two sisters talked desultorily for a while, after which Barbara, unable to nerve herself to execute the theft, told Lewis that he was eating too slowly, got up from her chair and stalked out of the house.

  12.

  The Invisible Worm: Cyril and the Women

  I am very frightened and only if you made me feel you really loved me &
needed me could I have the courage to marry you. For the eight years I have known you, you have been the only person in my life.

  Lys, letter to Connolly, early 1950

  If anything brought the Lost Girls together, it was their relationship with Connolly and, by extension, the world through which he strode. Whether they were living with him, employed by him, pursued by him or merely wistfully regarded by him from afar, he was the fulcrum on which their existence turned. To read their correspondence – the hundreds of letters that Lys addressed to him during the eight years they were together, the dozens of earnest notes from Sonia that followed him around continental Europe in the later 1940s, the countless intimations of reproachful regret filed by Diana after the end of their love affair – is instantly to become aware of something that can only be described as a collective obsession, a grand, communal passion sweeping up half-a-dozen individual consciousnesses in its net.