The more prosaic reality was that the marriage had simply broken down irrevocably. In the immediate aftermath there was a sense of being in limbo for both parties. For a number of weeks after she left Highclere, Catherine was too unwell to push on with the divorce. Her family ensured that she was well looked after and visited her at the nursing home, but her doctors had made it clear that what she required was total rest. That meant giving up alcohol and getting lots of fresh air, good food, gentle exercise and early nights. She was to have only close family to visit and absolutely no contact with her solicitors until she was better.
Catherine was at the convent for nearly three weeks. The choice of a Catholic sanatorium was surprising to her friends. The Wendells were Protestants through and through and Catherine had worshipped in the Church of England ever since her arrival in the United Kingdom. But as she grew unhappier she had started to seek out possible sources of meaning and guidance, and had become interested in the Roman Catholic Church. In the depths of her crisis she found herself desperately in need of spiritual comfort for the sickness she felt in her soul as well as her mind. She asked her mother and brother to look for a Catholic refuge that might allow her to explore her interest in the faith as part of her recovery and, despite the Wendells’ slight bemusement, they readily complied. Catherine needed to get better; it hardly seemed the moment to dip into the establishment’s traditional suspicion of the Roman Catholic Church.
Almina was extremely anxious about her daughter-in-law’s welfare. Porchey had told her about the meeting he’d had with Catherine at the Ritz, at which she had appeared to him to be desperately sad, but coping. Almina deduced that Catherine had acted with great bravery and managed to convince her husband that she was calm, but her worries were confirmed when she discovered that Catherine had entered a nursing home. She immediately wrote to her to invite her to stay at Alfred House whenever she liked. Just over two weeks later, on 5 June, Catherine Carnarvon checked in.
By the time she was well enough to consider her next steps, her brother Jac had done his research. He introduced her to Lewis and Lewis of Ely Place and thence to Sir Reginald Poole. Sir Reginald was a highly distinguished specialist in divorce cases and a great support to Catherine, softly spoken and calming. He informed Lord Carnarvon’s lawyers that Lady Carnarvon had been too unwell when the original admission of her husband’s adultery was obtained and that he would build the case for her anew, from scratch. Lord Carnarvon was once again followed round London and down to Bognor Regis, where the necessary evidence was procured to allow Lady Carnarvon to file for divorce and custody of her children. It was a start. Catherine, though still terribly sad, began to feel that she would come through.
Jac helped her to find a house. Number 30 Hertford Street was a late eighteenth-century London town house just off Piccadilly, in Mayfair. Catherine set about establishing it as a temporary home for her and the children, with the help of the staff who had come with her from Highclere. She was intensely touched by the loyalty of her employees, several others of whom moved into town to her establishment during the autumn of 1935 and spring of 1936.
The greatest loss to Porchey was George Fearnside, who had served as his butler for twelve years. Fearnside did not join Catherine; instead he took the opportunity presented by change at Highclere to retire from service. He was nearly sixty, so this was entirely reasonable. Nevertheless, Porchey might have hoped that his old retainer would stay a year or so and help him to maintain some continuity at a time of upheaval. The timing suggests that Fearnside, like so many others at Highclere, had feelings of fierce and divided loyalty to the separating Lord and Lady Carnarvon. Porchey’s domestic arrangements were rescued by Almina’s swift offer of her footman, Frederick Smith, who became butler at Highclere in the early autumn of 1935. As for Catherine, she was never a vindictive person, but she might have been forgiven for feeling a touch of Schadenfreude when contemplating Porchey’s situation at the castle.
Having set up house, the next thing was to find a school for Pen. Henry would continue at Heatherdown preparatory school, but it was no longer appropriate to school Penelope at home. Mademoiselle Huc would continue to provide extra tuition in French, as well as companionship for both Pen and Catherine, but Penelope was with her cousin Patricia enrolled in Miss Faunce’s day school in Bayswater.
As Catherine slowly pieced her life back together, Porchey found himself trapped in a maddening long-distance relationship with Tanis. Between May 1935 when Catherine left him, and November 1936 when his relationship with Tanis had run its course, he saw her for a total of just eight weeks. Part of this was surely due to Porchey’s sense of his obligations at home, but most of it was due to Tanis’s preference for spending the summer at her brother’s in the south of France and the autumn and spring in New York—without him. If Porchey had been looking for warning signs, they might quickly have been apparent.
There is no doubt, though, that he sincerely believed himself to be in love. He relished the time they spent together in France that summer, thought of her constantly, pressed her to come to visit him at Highclere. She did not, perhaps partly out of a sense that it would be inappropriate, but she did write him many long letters assuring him that she was missing him terribly and sent him even more sweetness and sympathy than before. Tanis had been divorced herself; she understood the state of melancholy and shock that had engulfed her lover. ‘I know that everything is crumbling around you at present … just exactly as it once crumbled around me.’
After they had seen each other in Paris, she wrote again to say that her friends had started to talk about his divorce in her presence, and to speculate about their marriage. ‘I know little about it but haven’t even seriously considered it yet,’ she commented, before going on to regale him with tales of dashing about France in her new Ford car, thanking him profusely for the exquisite jewellery he had given her and hoping that all manner of lovely things would happen for him, since he thoroughly deserved them.
In August they met up in Deauville and played golf, but were together only a couple of weeks before Tanis set off on her travels again. She spent the next month in Austria and then headed to Venice with Poppy Thursby (previously Poppy Baring, the former girlfriend of both King Edward VIII and the Duke of Kent) ‘to see how we like that.’ Tanis never stinted in sending fulsome letters, though they often contained explanations for why she really couldn’t speak to him on the telephone early in the morning or in the evening when she was rushing to a dinner appointment. Letters from Porchey followed her around Europe.
He consoled himself for her absence by throwing himself into racing, which always cheered him up. He had some notable successes with his horses, and as a jockey. The sporting press reported that ‘he smiles a lot and looks as if life is worth living.’ He had won the Welter Plate at Ripon in early May, beating an odds-on favourite, and his latest fancied colt was tipped by a journalist to win the Derby the following year. There was nothing better to look forward to in racing. Porchey also rode in several races on various occasions. He was feeling so positive that he offered a bet of £1,000 on 10 August that no amateur jockey could concede a 10-lb handicap and beat him, though it isn’t clear that anyone actually took him up on it. In September he rode his last race. His doctor had told him that, after his latest back injury, he was no longer fit enough to take part. It was a huge blow to Porchey to lose one of his great passions, especially at a time when he needed to feel busy to keep his mind off the collapse of his relationship with Catherine—and off Tanis, too.
He found sanctuary from this disappointment and the sad memories at Highclere at his mother’s house. She made no attempt to hide her disapproval of his behaviour and what she saw as his infatuation with Tanis, but she nevertheless wanted to help him get back on his feet. Porchey described her as ‘a grand old lady’ and though he refused to listen to her over Tanis, subsequent events demonstrated to him that he would do well to pay heed to her judgement. Above all, he knew that she could be
relied upon to help in a crisis, with her characteristic blend of pragmatism and brisk warmth. They squabbled frequently, usually over money, and even fell out for long periods, but they valued each other enormously and saw more of each other in the five years after Porchey’s divorce than they had in the previous ten. Almina always coped well with adversity and enjoyed being needed by the people she loved. She liked to help, and Porchey was in need of help.
Even so, she found his inveterate philandering intensely exasperating. In the September after he retired from racing, when Tanis was making plans to leave Europe for the States and resisting his pleas to spend some time in the UK en route, he attended one of Almina’s parties at Seamore Place. Porchey found himself dancing with a gorgeous woman dressed in white satin whose husband, so she told him, was away in Ireland. Almina spotted them slipping off upstairs, and when they reappeared half an hour later, she sidelined her son to administer a very pointed remark. Porchey was somewhat chastened, but not nearly so much as he was ten minutes later when the woman’s husband appeared. He had returned a day earlier than expected and rushed straight over to join his wife. Porchey downed a large Scotch to steady his nerves, and beat a retreat.
Such escapades were temporarily diverting, but Porchey was still pining for Tanis. His responsibilities to Highclere and his children did not keep him busy enough to stop him from moping and obsessing. Henry and Penelope continued to stay with him for the occasional weekend, but these visits were made stilted by everyone’s distress, and Porchey struggled to know how to behave. The business of the stud was now arranged, if anything, rather too well. He had come up with a new strategy that would yield more certain returns, and done a deal with the Aga Khan whereby he leased him 96 acres and 40 boxes, and took over the management of the horses. It was a clever piece of business but, since he had built up such a good staff, there was little for him to do except keep a general eye on things. Perhaps Porchey was hoping that some of his ‘tenant’s’ success might rub off on him. Of the previous seven years’ Derby winners, three had been owned by the Aga Khan, a remarkable achievement. Porchey’s record was good, but not on anything like that scale.
He was occasionally racked with guilt over the end of his marriage, but he fell back on the fact that he would make Catherine a very generous settlement by way of consolation. He might have felt more certain about the rightness of his actions had he been happier now, or had he had the prospect of certain happiness to come, but that was not the case. He spent the autumn of 1935 waiting for Tanis to send him word that she was moved by his argument that they were meant to be together, and for his divorce to grind through the legal system.
In December, he could bear it no longer. He wrote to Catherine to suggest that since Christmas was likely to cause them all pain, the best course of action this year might be for him to go away. He then booked on to the Aquitania, Cunard’s venerable and luxurious cruise liner, and set off for the States with his old friend Harry Brown. Porchey felt more and more that America was key to this next phase of his life. He was always something of a sensation seeker, and had become increasingly fascinated with theatrical and film people. He wanted a dash of Hollywood glamour in his life. This was surely a large part of Tanis’s appeal for him. She had aspirations to write a screenplay and connections with the Hollywood set.
Porchey had hoped to see Tanis but, though he sent her gifts, including a gramophone player, they didn’t meet up. He was disappointed, since he’d half convinced himself that she had already accepted his proposal of marriage, but he knew she could be flighty and, in truth, he still felt sure of eventual success. She wrote him more effusive letters from New York, and Porchey and Harry spent two happy months enjoying the sunshine, playing golf and hosting dinners at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach. As with so many Europeans before him, there was something of the desire for a fresh start in Porchey’s love for all things American.
Porchey was out of the country for an event that had been expected but, when it came, proved to be the starting gun for the greatest crisis ever to engulf the British royal family. The old King had been increasingly frail for some time. He complained that his poor health was made worse by the strain of his relationship with his heir, the Prince of Wales, whom he (and indeed most other observers, including the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin) considered dissolute and lazy. When his beloved sister died on 3 December, the King was so distressed that he cancelled the state opening of Parliament. He sickened in the New Year and died on 20 January 1936 at Sandringham, surrounded by three of his four surviving sons. (The Duke of Gloucester was confined to bed with laryngitis in London.) Queen Mary, composed and regal, kissed the hand of the new King, Edward VIII, after which he rushed to phone Mrs Simpson, apparently hysterical with grief.
By the time Porchey got back to London on 19 February, it seemed the whole of society was in thrall to the question of the new King’s relationship with Wallis Simpson. With the succession, King Edward’s single status had also become legitimate subject for speculation in the British media, as it had long been for the American and European newspapers. The tone, in Britain at least, was curious rather than scurrilous thus far, and there was no particular focus on Mrs Simpson, but the establishment knew that such punctiliousness could not last. As one headline from America’s United Press put it, ‘Will New King Marry Noble English Girl? Friendly With Many Attractive Americans’. Edward had indeed been linked with numerous different women, popular musicians such as Edythe Baker and married women such as Lady Furness, rather than the eligible European princesses that his parents and the political and social establishment were so keen to see him marry.
Porchey had met Wallis on a couple of occasions and never warmed to her, which meant that of late he had seen a great deal less of his old friend. The couple tended to cut people who didn’t side with them in what had developed into a pitched battle between them and the rest of their social circle.
King Edward VIII continued to live with Mrs Simpson at his country home, Fort Belvedere, and the affair became more and more intense even as the storm blew up around them. Queen Mary still hoped her son could be persuaded to do the job he had been born and trained for, but few in government shared her optimism: the new King’s government papers were more likely to come back with wine stains than signatures. As Alan Lascelles, his private secretary for eight years, memorably put it, ‘For some hereditary or physiological reason his normal mental development stopped dead when he reached adolescence.’ When Mrs Simpson voiced her approval of Count von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Ambassador, there was even greater mistrust of the King’s political judgement.
On his return from the States, Porchey stopped off in London to see Almina and his daughter. He also wanted to check with his solicitor on the progress of the divorce proceedings. He confided in his mother that the household was still somewhat short-staffed. It was Catherine who had always taken care of that side of things and he was at a bit of a loss. This was precisely the sort of problem Almina was good at fixing. She came up with the plan to reroute Robert Taylor—the twenty-two-year-old she had just taken on as first footman for Seamore Place—to Highclere, to serve under Smith the butler. Robert had been due to leave his small Welsh village in a week’s time for London. Now, he would travel instead to Highclere.
Robert had worked for a hunting family in north Wales, first as a hall boy, then a footman, and finally as acting butler. It was a remarkably rapid ascent for such a young man, even in a small household. On 29 February he bid his tearful mother goodbye and set off on a long cross-country train journey to Highclere. His new position was a huge promotion, and the first step in a career in Lord Carnarvon’s household that spanned nearly five decades. Forty-five years later, Porchey wrote in his memoirs that it was an accepted fact that Robert had long since attained the platonic ideal of perfect butler. Their relationship was based on deep mutual respect. By 1979 Porchey knew that in some fundamental way it was totally anachronistic, a last link to feudalism, as he put it, but
he described Robert and the other five members of his staff as ‘unique people, irreplaceable’. One senses that he means not just to him personally but in a more literal sense of being the last representatives of an almost vanished type of social and economic relationship between people.
When he arrived at Highclere village station on that day in 1936, Robert stepped from the train to the platform, retrieved his luggage with the help of a porter and steadied his nerves. He caught sight of a gleaming Rolls-Royce, just pulling away from the station, in which sat a little girl of about ten and her governess. The following day he would identify them as Lady Penelope and Mlle Huc. Now he looked around him and was relieved to see that there was another car pulling up, a small Vauxhall, and its smartly dressed driver was waving as if he had been sent to collect him.
Donald Alder, the second chauffeur, turned out to be an amusing man with a good line in jokes and wicked stories. As they turned off the main road, Alder turned to him and shouted over the noise of the car engine, ‘On no account should the likes of you and me be using the main entrance!’ as they swept past London Lodge. Robert’s mild alarm was dispelled by Alder’s infectious laughter. ‘Come on, man, what do you think will happen? Anyway, you should see the length of the drive. Bit different from what you’re used to, I imagine.’
They swung into the courtyard at the back of the house where Alder helped him down with his bags and waved him off. Robert stepped into the cool of the basement and was ushered the length of the corridor and into the presence of Mr Smith.
Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey Page 13
