‘We will discuss it further when we meet,’ Lucille promised. The pact they were to make, a story they told others, suited them both. For his daughter, Ernest became a singular man hounded by ill fortune – had his wife lived he would have risen high in politics and served his country nobly. As it was, he created at Cimbrone an aesthetic palace, Lucille believed, almost Buddhist in its atmosphere, where he could pursue the esoteric religions that were to be her inheritance. ‘You may be sure that, next to yourself,’ she wrote to Eve, ‘no one could treasure them [his letters] as I do.’ But they did not survive her death.
Those years before the Great War were the most emotionally active of Eve Fairfax’s life, though they left much turbulent wreckage in their wake. She had told Rodin that she wished to be an actress. But she took no bold step such as José had done – perhaps her insistence on high social position made such a step impractical. In any event, she contented herself with amateur performances mostly in the Yorkshire Pageant Plays. These were open-air, sometimes processional shows celebrating great moments in the country’s history and performed by townspeople and local children. Eve favoured queenly roles – Eleanor of Aquitaine, Margaret of Anjou, Queen Elizabeth (‘no mere imitation, ’ Professor Hubert, writing in one of the Yorkshire newspapers, described her, ‘but a perfect representative of the Royal Sovereign’). She also played in charity productions at Yorkshire theatricals including A Woman of No Importance and was praised for her ‘wonderful elocutionary power’. In later life she was reputed to have been so exemplary as Lady Bracknell that people told her she had missed her vocation.
In her early forties she was still an attractive-looking woman – possibly more so than she had been in her early twenties. Romantic rumours inevitably clustered round her. She formed a close friendship with Sir William Eden, the amateur painter adept at turning compliments into insults. When, in the mid 1890s, Whistler sent him a letter of thanks for the hundred guineas he had been given for a little portrait of Lady Eden (‘You really are magnificent … I can only hope that the picture will be even slightly worthy of us all’), Eden decided to take offence and lose his temper. The two of them brought out the very worst in each other, their differences leading to two battles in the Paris courts on the competing claims of owner versus creator over works of art (made famous in the early twentieth century after the publication of Whistler’s book The Baronet and the Butterfly). The Baronet (father of a future British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who, it has been suggested, lost his wits in a similar aggressive style over the Suez crisis in 1956) was a wealthy, sometimes generous, often irascible, self-tormented character with romantic leanings, which for a time pointed rather peremptorily in Eve’s direction. ‘Just answer “yes” – no arguments please!’ he wrote when declaring his affection for her with an offer of financial help. He showed his love, too, by treating her to convoluted analyses of her character: ‘though intelligent, you are not intelligent enough, dear Eve – or perhaps you are too intelligent. At any rate you are not stupid: for if you were, you would not be admired, if not loved by yours truly William Eden.’
Among some single pages of letters to Eve that have survived her years of wandering are statements of passionately incomplete love. ‘Charlie’ begins his letter from Lower Berkeley Street to ‘my own darling’ and, poignantly omitting the most vital words, assures her that ‘whatever happens to either of us in life we shall be always and for ever to the end dear one’. A learned professor writes of the temptation to ‘give up my liberty to you’ and explains why, in the interests of scholarship, he must not do so: ‘for a short period of (I admit) intense joy, I should make myself miserable for the rest of my life.’ The Beckett family was sure she had an affair with Ernest’s womanising brother Gervase, a Soames Forsyte character (a successful businessman with poignant leanings towards the arts) who, on his wife’s death, married his regular mistress with disastrous consequences. They liked to believe that she had also been involved with the youngest Beckett brother, Rupert. ‘All Becketts make bad husbands,’ Eve said.
Her air of superiority suggested in some people’s minds that she was a virgin and they were happy to congratulate her, and themselves, on prolonging this condition. ‘It is an inexpressible pleasure to me to know that I have left you as I found you as pure as you were as a child, and have not taken any advantage of your loving trust and confidence in me,’ one hesitant suitor propounded. ‘ … I love your fine natural mind. You really hate wicked things & all the naughtiness attending them in speech, writing and other ways.’
These men, it seems, were wary of Eve as if conscious of something vengeful in her. She is no longer the tender, vulnerable figure who was engaged to Ernest and who sat to Rodin. She was perhaps an example of Somerset Maugham’s belief in the damage suffering inflicts on people. When the Duke of Grafton proposed to her hoping she would accept him, not for his title or money, but simply for himself, she replied ‘Rather a tall order’ and brusquely turned him down. She allowed herself brief infatuations for people who were securely out of reach – an actor, for example, whom she saw playing Jesus Christ at the Oberammergau Passion Play. But she was careful not to expose herself to more suffering. It was the men who must take that risk. The Duke of Wellington (a one-time suitor of Alice Keppel’s daughter, Violet Trefusis) described the feelings Eve provoked in many of her admirers. She had invited him to come and see her privately: but he would not. ‘What would be the use?’ he replied. ‘Either you would let me get to know you very intimately, or you would not. If you did not, I should suffer, to no purpose. If, on the other hand, you did, I should soon fall entirely into the drama and light literature of many nations … I know that you could make a fool of me very quickly, if I were rash enough to come within striking distance; so I mean to keep some hundreds of miles between us. I quite recognise that you could give me pleasure that not one in a million could give. That makes me want you; but it also warns me not to want you.’
Remaining unmarried, Eve presented her friends with something of a puzzle. There was talk that she was the daughter of a royal duke and, perhaps inevitably, whispers of an illegitimate child. Echoes of these rumours still lingered in the air when, over eighty years later, I began my researches into Eve’s life and met a younger generation of men and women belonging to the families who had known her in Yorkshire. I was highly sceptical of these stories – they were characteristic, it seemed to me, of the gossip that often follows someone who has grown into a local legend. Apart from the speculation over her relationship with Rodin, I heard a rather vague story of a son who had been dispatched to South Africa – which had its confused roots, I suspected, in José’s son. I was surprised when Eve’s solicitor, Charles Dodsworth, told me matter-of-factly that he had seen the birth certificate of her child. Then, among the papers of Ernest’s grandson Christopher (the fourth Lord Grimthorpe) I saw a photocopy of this certificate. I have it before me as I write.
The date of birth is given as 7 March 1916, the name of the mother is Evelyn Fairfax and her occupation listed as being ‘of independent means’. But could this really be my Eve Fairfax? She would have been forty-five – not impossible, of course, but rather old to give birth to a first child in those wartime days. There were few people who could be less accurately described as being ‘of independent means’ – though this is the description Eve would most likely have given. The child was born at a nursing home with royal connections, at 15 Welbeck Street, in London. The matron, Clara Nelson Smith, who was ‘present at the birth’, had been awarded the Royal Victorian Medal by Queen Alexandra following an operation there on His Serene Highness Prince Francis of Teck (the brother of Queen Mary). The Prince had died and his Will was sealed to avoid a scandal (setting a precedent for future royal Wills). The matron, who was in charge of the files, had been honoured for her discretion. This was a perfect setting for the birth of Eve’s illegitimate son. Yet I was still reluctant to accept it as authentic.
Then I looked at the mother’
s address on the certificate: 64 Gloucester Place. This was the home of Eve’s friend Maud Hope (the Hope and Milner families were connected by marriage). John Francis Mordaunt is the name on the birth certificate. The first two names lead nowhere with certainty, though the first Fairfax to be recorded in the family tree, born in York in the eleventh or twelfth century, was John Fairfax; and Francis may have been chosen to recall Prince Francis of Teck (certainly Eve would have been happy to make this link). Mordaunt is unusual. Examining the family tree of Eve’s mother, I see that her father was Sir William Mordaunt Edward Milner, and his father Sir William Mordaunt Sturt Milner, and his father again Sir William Mordaunt Milner – indeed, there are Mordaunts everywhere in the family reaching back to the second baronet, Sir William Milner of Nun Appleton who, in the early eighteenth century, married Elizabeth Mordaunt, daughter of the Hon. and Rev. George Mordaunt. It may not excite today’s reader, but this alliance entitled the Milners to quarter the arms of Mordaunt, Howard and Plantagenet – which would have appealed to Eve. This arcane world with its distinguished blood of ancestral vintage is where she sheltered from the actual world around her. I am finally convinced that John Francis Mordaunt was her son.
No father is named on the certificate. But among the Grimthorpe family papers, with the birth certificate, is a letter sent to Christopher Grimthorpe by the Hope family, which identifies the father as Désiré Defauw, a Belgian violinist and concertmaster. As a refugee in England during the war, he led the Allied Quartet (sometimes known as the Belgian Quartet) with Lionel Tertis (viola), Charles Woodhouse (piano) and E. Doehard (cello), which was centred in London but also toured the country. Lady Cynthia Asquith, who met them all in 1918, has left a vivid glimpse of Désiré Defauw her diary: ‘The first violin, Defauw – a ghastly sight in a yellow wig – fell in love with me, said dancing with me was enivrante [intoxicating], toyed with the tangles in my hair, which he compared to flames, and even went so far as to ask me to bite off a piece of chocolate for him! I have never seen people so happy as those four men – they did admirable stunts … Defauw did some excellent ones – an acrobat, a cock, an elephant, and so on …’
Désiré Defauw was almost fifteen years younger than Eve and aged thirty at the time of John Francis Mordaunt’s birth. He was to enjoy a successful career abroad after the war, his ‘Concerts Defauw’ becoming famous throughout Europe before he went to the United States, conducting major American orchestras and being appointed musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He died in the United States in July 1960. I can find no reference to a son named John Francis Mordaunt in any published writings about him. And there is no record of a child of that name having died in England in the years immediately following his birth. He disappears.5
Eve worked for the Red Cross during the First World War and in a bookbinding company during the Second World War. Otherwise she had no employment except as a companion, not paid but paid for, of a few grand people such as the Ladies Scarborough, Helmsley and Wenlock (the latter, being deaf, was equipped with a massive trumpet and a typewriter with which to carry on conversations at greater distances – conversations which spoke of such amazing exploits that she decided to treat the trumpet and the typewriter as diabolically inspired). Some of these ladies would leave Eve trifles in their Wills and her brother Bryan was to bequeath her almost £8,000 when he died.
While it was thought she was going to marry Ernest, Eve continued to give her home as being Bilbrough Manor, which then belonged to Guy and his family. That was still her official residence when, on 30 May 1908, the Yorkshire Gazette published a bankruptcy notice as having been served on her. At a meeting of her creditors on 26 June, a deficiency of £225 in her affairs was reported, which she attributed to ‘living beyond her income’. But she had no income. She was described as a spinster and a descendant of General Fairfax ‘of Cromwellian fame’. This must have been a humiliation for her family and it was her younger brother Bryan, who had served in the army in South Africa and met the art patron Lionel Phillips, who helped her sell the Rodin bust to the Johannesburg Gallery for £800. She would sometimes stay with Bryan at Whitwell Hall in York, and very occasionally with Guy at Bilbrough Manor, but she was not encouraged to remain with her family and began to drift apart from them.
She filled her time with various ladylike occupations. She played an aggressive game of croquet, was a shrewd bridge player and embroidered curtains and cushions with birds, centaurs, swans – and on one occasion the clever design of a backgammon board. Though she picked up information about literature, she was never a great reader.
In 1909 Lady Diana Manners gave Eve an enormous empty volume in which to record her life. It was sturdily bound in leather and bore a device embossed at the front with the letters E. F. surrounded by a pattern resembling a wreath. As a frontispiece there appears a contemplative picture of Eve as Queen Margaret of Anjou in the York Pageant that year, wearing a crown and gazing serenely into the distance. On the title page is inscribed: ‘Eve Fairfax. Her Book’ and the date: AD MDCCCCIX. Below this has been inserted the engraving of a young damsel, or damozel, plucking thoughtfully at a bow having loosed her arrow into the forthcoming pages while, with a pencilled caption in Greek lettering, the reader is advised that this is Artemis (or Diana). There is also space for the book’s provenance: ‘Given to her by Diana Manners’. At the corners of the page, paying tribute to biblical Eve, are decorations depicting blushing apples on a leafy stalk, a serpent coiled round a flourishing tree, a device showing two enjoined capital Ds (the second in reverse), and finally what appears to be a faint smile or perhaps a crescent moon on its back.
Eve Fairfax, too, had, as it were, been cast out of Eden. Her engagement was over, she had been declared bankrupt, obliged to sell her most treasured possession, the Rodin bust, and was now homeless. In 1909 she was close to her fortieth year and, with half her life presumably over, her future seemed imprisoned by her past. Diana Manners chose as an epigraph to Eve’s Book a quotation from Shelley’s prophetic lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound: a work of radical optimism in which Prometheus, the champion of mankind, is released from incarceration in ‘a ravine of icy rocks’ where Aeschylus had bound him, and united with Asia, the Spirit of Love. Shelley creates a benign and hopeful world in which goodness and free will bring light out of darkness. This is what the epigraph, Demogorgan’s lines from Act IV, promises:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy power which seems omnipotent;
To live and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire and Victory!
This is followed by equally aspirational quotations from Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio; from Alfred de Musset in French and Maeterlinck in English: all with a similar message – that life is not over until it is over (and perhaps not even then) and that wisdom needs to be constantly changing from childhood to death.
Eve’s Book was intended as a diary, but she made it into something more bizarre: partly a social calendar, partly a volume of autographs, partly an eclectic anthology. It is an omnium gatherum, a vast vade mecum, following no order and having no chronology, theme, agenda, prescription. It becomes the reverse of a visitors’ book: it is the visitor’s book, a book of collected hosts and their guests pinned like butterflies to its pages. For Eve herself it would serve as a book of memories, opening up dense pages of compliments and compensations in her prolonged, singular peregrinations. To read it for very long feels like holding one’s breath under water.
Many poems or lines from poems were added along the years. People likened her to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (‘Time cannot wither her nor custom stale / Her infinite variety’) and one contributor quo
ted from Donne’s Elegy IX, ‘The Autumnal’: ‘No spring, nor summer beauty has such grace / As I have seen in one autumnal face.’ Other quotations are more indistinct and disturbing – for example, two lines from Humbert Wolfe: ‘There was a thing to do; and it is done now; / The high song is over.’ The poets who were fellow guests in the houses where Eve arrived carrying Her Book penned their own poems:
There on the Norfolk tow-path,
Where the River Waveney rolled,
I stood like the child Pandora,
Suddenly old.
These were the last lines of ‘Zany’ by Dorothy Wellesley. The last lines of Edith Sitwell’s ‘To Eve’ also touch on lost youth:
The moon for ever seeks in woodland streams
To deck her cool faint beauty; thus in dreams
Belov’d, I seek lost suns within your eyes;
And find but wrecks of love’s gold argosies.
Edith’s father, Sir George Sitwell (who had appointed Eve his son Sacheverell’s godmother) wrote a version of Paradise Lost and Regained, which he also dedicated to Eve.
Oh Eve, to thee a happier chance shall bring
The Dragon’s fruit without the Dragon’s sting.
Adam shall find his Eden in thine eyes,
And whisp’ring Love lead back to thy lost Paradise.
Laurence Whistler contributed a long poem, which set out to answer the question put in its first line; ‘Man, what is man?’
A Book of Secrets Page 8
