Shortly before the war, D. H. Lawrence’s friends, the expatriate American painter Earl Brewster and his wife Achsah, together with their daughter Harwood, arrived at Cimbrone. In an unpublished autobiography Achsah Brewster put down her impressions of Ernest’s renovations and the miscellaneous erotic objects picked up on his travels round the world. The place was, in its fashion, like the depository of William Wetmore Story’s great studio in Rome, which had so impressed Ernest when young and made him envy the illusory life of artists. Here are ‘statuosities’ that greatly irritated Lawrence and a picture that brings to mind E. M. Forster’s pagan ‘Story of a Panic’.
‘How entrancing everything looked to our uncritical eyes,’ Achsah Brewster remembered,
the spacious halls, sweeping gardens, views as wide as if we had been translated to heaven above all earthly contacts. Our hearts were light, it was spring time … the sun soaked through our bones … The gardens hung fragrant from terrace to terrace, among pools and statues and groves, over tilled fields. Wide terraces and rooftops open to the sky, pergolas and arcades opened from the rooms.
My room was off the music-room, with green glazed tiles and a fireplace carved of grey, volcanic stone. The window opened on to the large sunny terrace where we always lingered. Above the bed, spread over with Kashmir silk embroidery in rich, solid design, hung a six-foot canvas of a Rubens, a nude nymph under a tree overtaken by a goat-hoofed faun … I shut my eyes.
… Lord Grimthorpe’s suite lay between the salon and library, adjoining a sun-parlour with a marble Ariadne stretched on a panther. Along the hall were bronze females, replicas from Pompeii. The library was stored with Greek amphoras and vases, good and bad statues, elaborately shaded floor lamps, and books, books, blessed books, broad couches and embracing chairs. An isolated salon was in the entrance garden where a fountain dripped over a Verrocchio ‘putto’.
… We went from the library to a stairway grilled off on one side by a wrought-iron inwoven design of rare beauty. Then we emerged into the dining-hall with its Arabic traceries of windows open to the breathless view of the Avoccata, Mariore, Minore and the sea and sky. This part of the house was covered with honeysuckle in spring, the fragrance blew in from the open windows, and bees hummed. That beautiful dining-hall with its long refectory table … a Pietà statue placed on it! There were two upright paintings by Andrea del Sarto in reds and greens, hieratic in treatment.
In the afternoons the Brewsters usually ate below in the crypt, with its vaulted roof and stone pillars leading to an orange garden where, in summer, immense salvers of fruit were heaped – musk melons, peaches, pears and purple, white and pink figs. A copy of Donatello’s David stood further off among the roses and a stone pine avenue led out to the belvedere. At the end of the pine walk was a Roman temple, open on all four sides and, higher up, a broad conifer grove planted with larches, firs, cedars and blue spruces – and higher still stood a quadrangle of horse-chestnuts.
Britain’s ageing Casanova, Frank Harris, whom Ernest had befriended and, during the winter of 1909 – 10, invited to Cimbrone to write his controversial Life of Oscar Wilde, held strong opinions on the garden. He would stroll in this garden of an afternoon, taking the air and becoming engrossed in conversation with the head gardener, Nicola Mansi. He was a renowned horticultural scholar assisted in his work by many under-gardeners who would form an intense ring round the two men. Frank’s eyes would blaze as he pointed aggressively to various plants and statues. At a suitable distance his wife Nellie, seeing the head gardener waving his hands with much energy and excitement, feared they might be fighting – until both of them would smile and begin quoting Dante to each other. ‘Our wonderful gardener knew Dante by the yards,’ Nellie reckoned. For Harris’s birthday, coming down from their cathedral-like bedroom, they found the baronial hall filled with flowers and they drank ‘the best champagne and wines’, Nellie remembered. ‘How happy we were there. There was a great terrace that seemed to look over the whole world – Frank worked and we danced and life was a wonderful thing.’ But Harris himself, once a reckless social climber, was less delighted. Describing himself as being heavily ‘pregnant with four or five books’, he had come to feel that Ernest, who had expressed confidence that he ‘would come through’ (though deploring the fact that he was writing about Wilde), tended to waste his time by introducing him to members of the aristocracy who seemed to believe they were helping him simply by allowing him to shake their hands. ‘I can’t get away till Tuesday,’ Harris complained. ‘I’ve done my best but Beckett insisted I must stay for it seems Royalty – the Duke and Duchess of Connaught – are coming tomorrow – what good I’m to get out of that God alone knows … I’m tired of this rot – this society rot all false and insincere … I hate the people.’
Two of Ernest’s three children, Ralph and Lucille, had married before the war and would sometimes visit Cimbrone. Lucille especially loved the place and it was she who made friends with the Brewster family. In Achsah Brewster’s memoirs there is a mention of Ernest staying there shortly before the war with ‘a young, fair-haired Englishwoman, Mrs Green’ whom she describes, in inverted commas, as his ‘ward’. In June 1915 Ernest made a Will in which he appointed Mrs Florence Green as his executor. Having made provisions for his three legitimate children, he left ‘the residue of my property both real and personal after payment of my debts funeral and testamentary expenses and legacies to my godchild Mrs Florence Green absolutely’. Two years later he added a codicil to this Will, transferring shares in various companies to her and ‘my property in Italy known as the Castro Leone Estate in the Province of Salerno’. He gave her some additional money ‘to enable her to build a house at Castro Leone’ and drafted a request to his son Ralph to pay her a yearly sum to bring her income up to £400 a year free of tax. In the event of Ralph selling the Villa Cimbrone, he directs him to pay her £2,000. This codicil is devoted entirely to the security and interests of this mysterious woman ‘in fulfilment of the promise and undertaking made to Mrs Florence Green at the time of her marriage’.
There is no sign of Florence Green or any husband among the guests at the Beckett family’s weddings or funerals in England and no knowledge now of an estate in Salerno called Castro Leone. In Ernest’s Will she occupies a place of equal significance to his children – more than a ward or godchild would naturally occupy (these would appear to have been honorary titles). She is clearly not a woman of independent means or living under the protection of a husband. She may have been Ernest’s illegitimate daughter or his last mistress – and possibly, in one of these roles, an obstacle to Eve marrying Ernest.
In 1916 Ernest returned to England to see his unmarried daughter Muriel who was ill. He was ‘present at the death’ on 16 June that year when she died of ‘general tuberculosis’. This was especially cruel: for he seems to have caught tuberculosis from his daughter. Beginning to feel ill, he did not return to Italy but travelled up to the Nordrach-on-Dee Sanatorium at Banchory, a few miles south of Aberdeen. This vast and isolated sanatorium incorporated a German approach to treating tuberculosis, with its unswerving routine of rest, milk, meat and more rest, and an emphasis on brisk, fresh air supplied through large, perpetually open windows. Somerset Maugham, who went there at the end of November 1917, observed the macabre way in which, lined up in their deckchairs along the veranda, ‘the tuberculars fall in love with one another’. He later turned this observation into a short story in which a man and a woman agree to marry despite their knowledge that this may shorten their lives. Their romance, however, is used to illustrate Maugham’s view that suffering does not ennoble us but makes us ‘petty, querulous, and selfish’. It was here, on the afternoon of 9 May 1917, that Ernest died, aged sixty, of pulmonary tuberculosis. In a last codicil to his Will, he asked that he be cremated and his ashes preserved in an urn to be sent after the war to the Villa Cimbrone.
3
All About Eve
She had grown up in a world of horses. Her father (a
n Old Etonian and Lieutenant-Colonel in the Grenadier Guards) was a slim and wiry figure, reputed to be ‘the best looking man in the army’, who devoted most of his life to ‘the pursuits of a country gentleman’. In short: he was a keen rider to hounds, a useful oarsman and a fine shot. But he pursued nothing with more diligence than hunting. There was no separating him from his celebrated mare, Bella Minna, and it was wonderful to see them racing over the pastures as the hounds settled to their work. He was a considerable landowner, his fox coverts being well-stocked and many famous hunts starting off near these strongholds. It was difficult to persuade him to talk of much else – his political views were so unpronounced that even his nearest kinsmen and closest friends could not be certain what they were. But his opinions on how to improve the hounds, how to weld together the old and new schools of hunting and maintain the goodwill of owners and occupiers of land over which they galloped were often quoted at the Yorkshire Club. When he put by the horn, sounding so cheery and challenging in the brisk morning air, he called up many bright and happy hours. These were splendid days. His jaunts and jollities could find an honourable place in the pages of his contemporary, the novelist Robert Surtees. No one, it was said, not even Captain Slingsby himself, had more beautiful hands or a steadier eye, or showed more devotion to the sport than ‘Colonel Fairfax of the Blues’. It was a sad day when, on 19 February 1879, the gallant Colonel handed over the mastership of the York and Ainsty Hunt to Captain Slingsby and was presented by members of the hunt with a group picture of themselves.
Thomas Ferdinand Fairfax was only forty-four when he died of cancer in February 1884. Much of his land had to be sold to pay off gambling debts. Eve was aged twelve. There was a provision made for her in his Will guaranteeing her £4,000 on reaching the age of twenty-one or marrying under that age with the consent of her mother. But although the gross value of Thomas Ferdinand Fairfax’s estate was calculated at over £25,000, when all his debts were paid the net value was nil.
If there was a more adventurous rider to hounds in Yorkshire than Colonel Fairfax it had been his wife. She was a brilliant horsewoman – everyone agreed she had one of the finest seats in the county. She was seldom seen off a horse. Her exploits in the saddle delighted readers of the Yorkshire Post. They relished episodes such as the time when ‘she jumped her horse over a stream but the moment she touched the banks, they gave way. The horse fell back into the ditch, rolling upon his rider and passing her below him in the mud and water. He struggled furiously in the stream, and the spectators held their breath with horror, for no one dreamed but that Mrs Fairfax was dead. A moment later however she emerged half-drowned, suffocated and exhausted. In spite of the condition she was in, she sprang on her horse again, forced it to take the stream in which she had so nearly found her death; and, wet as she was, went on after the hounds as if nothing had happened!’
Eve was named after her mother: she was Evelyn Constance and her mother Evelyn Selina. They came to dislike each other and this similarity of names sometimes irritated them. ‘I wanted a petite dark girl – and look what I’ve got!’ Eve heard her mother exclaim as, tall, fair and self-consciously awkward at the age of thirteen, she entered a room full of staring guests. Evelyn preferred her sons, Guy and Bryan. Guy, who was a year older than Eve, was packed off to Eton, and Bryan, the youngest child, dispatched to Winchester. Little money was wasted on Eve’s education; and once she was in her ’teens she stayed at home with her mother. Guy turned out a steady churchman, a staunch Conservative and solid cricketer. He listed his recreations as ‘all sports and fox-hunting’. His father would have been pleased to see him described as ‘a brilliant man to hounds and as good a heavyweight as could be found anywhere in England’. Bryan, who went from Winchester to the Royal Military College and served in the Durham Light Infantry, settled down after the war as the owner of a prolific stud farm.
Eve was as enthusiastic about all sports as were her brothers – there was really no alternative in the Fairfax household. She was judged to be ‘the champion of the ladies’ at cricket and, sometimes got up in a faultless costume of white flannel, or adding brightness to the scene when prettily attired in a scarlet petticoat and gypsy bonnet, would display ‘great agility’ in the field and was admired for her vigorous ‘late cuts and fast runs’. In a match against the men all playing left-handed and led by Ernest Beckett, Eve was the highest scorer and the women handsomely routed the men. On a horse, any horse, she was as comfortable as the rest of her family. When young she would ride her pony, summer and winter, the eight miles across open undulating country with wide horizons, small woods and farming villages, to her school, and stable it at an inn near York. On her route back she often stopped to have tea with the Archbishop. Later, when she was invited to balls or dinner parties, she rode out carrying her evening dress in a saddlebag.
Her mother became increasingly fierce and eccentric after her husband’s death. It was said that she used to go to bed with a piece of string tied round her toe and hang it out of the window. Each morning the gardener used to pull the string to wake her up. But however early she started the day, she had little time for Eve and did not trouble to have her presented at Court when she was eighteen or nineteen. ‘I had a funny bringing up – not bothered about much,’ Eve recalled in old age. In the late 1880s she became friendly with ‘Prince Eddy’, the Duke of Clarence, who was garrisoned at York. He was suspected of being Jack the Ripper and had made several visits to the Fairfax family home – Eve, it was said, sometimes ‘walked out’ with him. (He was the Prince of Wales’s eldest son, and second in line to the throne but, when Prince Eddy died at the age of twenty-eight, his younger brother became King George V.) Prince Eddy insisted that Eve be presented at Court – ‘all girls of our sort were at that time but mother didn’t bother,’ Eve told a friend. After Prince Eddy’s death ‘I arranged that a dear friend Lady George Gordon Lennox would do it – so she took me and we sailed into Buckingham Palace. She had the entrée as her late husband had some job at Court … I was 24 instead of being 18.’
Her mother’s interest in Eve was confined to her marriage. But she did not marry. She was handsome but, even in her mid-twenties, still something of a tomboy. Perhaps, too, there was some pleasure to be enjoyed from thwarting her mother. Everything would change for Eve after her mother’s death in 1901 at the age of fifty-three. In her Will, Evelyn Selina Fairfax made her elder son Guy her executor and trustee, leaving £3,000 absolutely to her younger son Bryan and a further £3,000 for Guy to invest and pay the income to Eve – an arrangement that was to cloud their friendship (one of the difficulties being that their mother’s estate was valued at less than £1,500). She also left her ‘trinkets and ornaments of the person except my Diamonds unto my daughter’. The diamonds went to Guy Fairfax with the rest of the estate.
Within a year of her mother’s death Eve became engaged to marry Ernest Beckett. He presented her with his family pearls and it was then that he commissioned Rodin to make a sculpture of her head and shoulders. They had known each other for several years as friends, but this was now a love affair. She kept his letters for almost sixty years as evidence that she was loved and then, at the age of ninety, sent them to Ernest’s daughter Lucille. ‘What wonderful love letters!’ Lucille wrote. She could hardly believe such a man of the world who ‘had been more than a little intimate with some of the most famous society women of his day, could possibly have written such pure and tender letters of love. What an extraordinary character – never hardened or made blasé by life, he remained eager and enthusiastic about everything to the end … I am happy to have them – on the other hand they make me very sad … Why you didn’t marry each other in 1904 will always remain a puzzle to me – there was nothing to prevent it and loving you as he did, it seems quite unbelievable. Perhaps at heart you felt he was too old? Over 20 years is a big difference.’ In fact there were fewer than fifteen years between them.
In the last years of her life, Eve let it be known that Ernes
t had proposed to her and she had refused him. But it was she who kept his letters, not he who kept hers. What evidence remains suggests that Ernest walked away from the engagement, leaving her with a melancholy that shows through her letters to Rodin. She had to tell him that, owing to ‘money difficulties’, Ernest could not pay for the bust – ‘rather an awkward job for me,’ she admitted.
It was important for Lucille to think well of her father. She had not always done so. He had persuaded her to marry Count Otto Czernin, a man she did not love – a marriage which, despite their four children, she later sought to annul (both Eve Fairfax and Alice Keppel had attended the wedding ceremony in 1903). Lucille wanted to eradicate this hostile memory of her father and refashion his character so that it resembled what she believed to be essentially her own. She willingly surrendered to the belief that it was Eve, and not Ernest, who had ended their love affair. These letters from almost sixty years back, showing Ernest in his most romantic vein, gave Lucille a sympathetic father she could cherish. ‘A 1000 thanks – it was too dear of you to give them to me,’ she wrote to Eve in February 1962. ‘For I am so like him as a character with faith in life and in people and the eagerness for everything that comes – even at my age [seventy-seven].’
Eve in her later years would not tolerate the notion that she had been Ernest’s victim. In her prideful and imperious imagination there was only humiliation to be incurred through having been proposed to by Ernest Beckett MP and then rejected by Lord Grimthorpe – whether she had been sacrificed to financial needs or set aside for another woman hardly mattered. Far more invigorating, once he was dead, was to take the initiative and manoeuvre herself into more dignified territory. Otherwise she was merely ‘damaged goods’, someone who had lost her chance and lived on in the shadows of life – an embarrassment to everyone.
A Book of Secrets Page 7
