So somehow I ended up after Vogue working first in a joke shop and then for a decorous old-style pornographer on Old Street, which was not the fashionable area it is now. In addition to packing tired copies of Fanny Hill and trying to get off the ground a rather interesting-sounding book about the Blunt family and equine blood-lines, I ended up, thinner yet this time, and attired in white, but in rather the same situation I had found myself in at the very beginning of Vogue, ineptly laying out a magazine with scalpel, cardboard and Cow Gum, though now in a small room in Old Street with one man instead of Vogue House with all its varied and often congenial wildlife.
This time it was the AA membership magazine that I was laying out badly, the AA being a large organisation that comes to the rescue of motorists in distress and whose headquarters are in Basingstoke. My new boss, the Old Street one, who regularly paid me in cash on a Friday morning and borrowed much of it back on Friday afternoons, took me on a trip to Basingstoke. We underwent a lunch with the bigwigs from the Automobile Association in their local hostelry. Mention was made of my having worked on Vogue. This to demonstrate experience with layout. I deprecated loudly but no one was reading my body language. The AA headquarters was, at that time, one of the tallest buildings in Basingstoke and from its boardroom might be viewed the Wiggins Teape building, known locally as the Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke. I laughed, then saw that my reaction was not the right one and sucked in the laugh.
I knew that I was acting and that I shouldn’t have been given the part, should never have auditioned for it. Anyone in their right mind would have sent me away as had the kind lady at Konrad Furs in South Molton Street, who simply said, when I went in there and asked for a job, ‘Do you really think you’re suitable, dear? Aren’t you a bit over-qualified? How much do you know about selecting pelts?’
Out beyond the edges of Basingstoke, a town that grew almost as one watched it, were roundabouts, aspin with vehicles, their owners very likely members themselves of the AA. Our presentation having been accepted, we were appointed designers to the Automobile Association of their monthly magazine. Going down in the lift, my boss said, ‘Seems a pity all that land being built on around Basingstoke. Still, you’ve got to put people somewhere and it’s as good a place as any.’ And so I got the layout job for the AA. The prefiguring of my being practically laid out before I got to the other kind of AA is not too neat to be true.
I stayed with this job for about a year, my ineptitude in most areas outstripped by that of my boss, over whom there was a Mr Big of whose visits I lived in fear. In another part of the building, doing I do not know what, worked a tired-looking man named Mr Bunce, whose assistant Nanette came in one day with what looked very like a broken jaw. The one solid benefit of the job was that opposite the office there was that beautiful repository for the dead, Bunhill Fields, where I walked when I could, reading the stones.
But by now I was learning to take a certain amount of care of myself. Our lugubrious next-door neighbour in Warwick Avenue, Tobias Rodgers, a dealer in Spanish incunabula, threw a tablecloth over his ping-pong table and had a party. At this party I enjoyed a conversation about Hogarth, about building wooden ships, about the deliciousness of non-fizzy Champagne, about how weird it was to be the only Jewish family in your small town in New England. I had met the man who was to stop me going out dressed inappropriately, make me eat more sensibly, and show me, in the Cosy Fish and Supper Bar in Whitecross Street, opposite my workplace in Old Street, how to eat a gherkin properly. For a start it was called a pickle. His band was called The Forbidden and their number ‘Ain’t Doin’ Nothin” was number forty-three in the New Wave charts. His nom de guerre was Jet Bronx. He is now more ordinarily known as Loyd Grossman.
As we worked on this chapter together and I gradually lost sight, Liv and I speculated as to what lies at the root of the changes that dictate fashion. I said to her that I’d always thought of it in two ways; that, as it were, there might be a cobalt mountain somewhere and therefore, to keep to cobalt prices high, blue must be the colour for the coming season. So I’d thought of it visually, the colours laid out as you see great heaps of pigment in soft triangles set in low brass bowls at the roadside in India.
The other way I’d thought of it is as an enormous sneeze of influence, so that everyone under the age of forty suddenly thinks that she has invented the notion of edging a cardigan with velvet or pinning an outsized rose on to her lapel. The great trick is the usual one with capitalism: how to make everyone feel that they are expressing their individual self by purchasing the very same thing as many millions of others. Who are the great sneezers of influence? People imagine that it is the fashion editors, but I think the truth is more mysterious and lies deep at the root of the levels of discontent with themselves that are imposed upon women and that we embrace with such delight and appetite.
I had, in London, broadly, two milieux when I first arrived there in 1976: homosexual men and grown-ups. Of course they often overlapped. The first world set me at my ease when I talked, as the purely heterosexual world did not quite. Drawn as I was to art historians, architectural historians and painters, I found myself often the only girl in a room. I was fond of dancing and with my close friend James Fergusson, an individual of impeccably sober mien, antiquarian bookseller and revolutionary of the newspaper obituary, I used to jump about a lot in gay clubs. Jamie is entirely of the marrying kind and I have the privilege of being godmother to his daughter Flora, who would be horrified to see how her father and I, whose common ground is fundamentally bookish and topographical since we are both Scots with a close interest in stone carving and every matter of calligraphy, font or letterpress, cut capers in the Embassy Club, Country Cousin and other dives. The other thing we did by night was drive in James’s Mini-Clubman van, looking at churches and the streets of the City. On these drives I would come closer to understanding my father’s detailed love of London.
What was I living on during these days? I sold a lot of my clothes, I didn’t eat unless I was taken out, I had a little overdraft, and I got mortifying jobs. I ghosted two books and modelled for Levi’s Jeans. It is a nice point that my first husband’s second wife was auditioned for the Levi’s job, but her bottom wasn’t big enough. I was conscious that I was wasting time and that I should be spending my days accumulating and building words or else teaching in some context or another. I wrote tiny pieces for the TLS, the Spectator, anyone that would have me. Essentially, these publications were doing me favours. I had no sense of building a career. I was flashy-looking but recessive.
The moment any form of recognition or success looked as though it might be looming, I scarpered. I longed for routine, for a project, for a means of making something with what I was fairly sure I had, some kind of baker’s gift to leaven things.
Instead I woke up every morning with my heart battering in fear of I did not know what as the cavalry horses trotted down Warwick Avenue in the dawn. If I had enough money I would buy a newspaper, occasionally applying for jobs. On the way to get the paper, I would say good morning to Stanley, the tramp who sat on the bench outside the house in Warwick Avenue. Of course he knew my name. I always gave him the money I didn’t have.
One day Stanley was reading a rather thick-looking book.
‘Good morning, Stanley,’ I said. ‘Is it any good?’
‘Don’t look, Candia,’ said Stanley. ‘I’m masturbating.’
I was reading all the time, munching through the shelves at Warwick Avenue and rereading Under the Volcano suspiciously many times, though I still didn’t know what was wrong. I remember overhearing Christopher Hitchens recommending The Blood of the Lamb by Peter de Vries to Martin Amis. I read it. I wanted that kind of steer on what to read next.
One or two properly adult friends had the energy and gumption to tell me to sit still and write a book, but I still hung back. My friend the publisher John Calman was angry at how I was, as he saw it, wasting my life by failing to write. He shouted accurate and therefore e
ven sorer accusations of time-wasting and expense of spirit at me in an echoing restaurant. I took umbrage, mainly I guess because I knew he was right. We fell into a stand-off. John was murdered in France at the age of thirty-seven by a hitch-hiker who used as his weapon cooking knives that John’s mother had given him. Nothing seemed susceptible of redress. This talented wilful passionate man had cared enough to say what should have been said. He paid me the honour of interfering as too few adults had in my wilful self-sabotage. If I had been attentive to John then, some disasters of my own if not of his life might perhaps have been averted. It is dreadful like a red spider shot into the head to think of his end. I dream of it never less than once a month, hoping to have reversed it by the time I waken. His mother outlived her son.
A new lodger came to Warwick Avenue. She had superabundant talent but also required system. When first she came to live with us the contained, feline Angela Gorgas was executing a series of quasi-tantric Indian miniatures for the Playboy millionaire Victor Lownes. Angela was angel-like, too, from every angle, actually embodying the entirety of her implausibly suitable name. She had hyacinthine locks, sooty eyes, a tremendous laugh, seemed to talk without moving her mouth, was half my size and was at the epicentre of more love polyhedra than one telephone line and front door could easily accommodate. If your arm was worth having then Angela was on it. She also made a sweet friend.
I became distracted from my own life’s path in the plots of the lives of others. I had no very strong sense, except when I was dressed up, of who to be. When dressed, I often overheard things that I disapproved of or feared. At one dinner party, evidently culled from the tips of various social icebergs, I overheard the unforgettably wrong-headed sentence, ‘That man is a traitor to his adopted class.’ I want one day to write the novel that fits around those self-revealing words.
I was learning the Lily Bart lesson but not taking it in.
Some of my friends were starting to get little dry coughs that wouldn’t go away. One friend I nagged at for a whole evening to go to the doctor. How he must have wished to back me away and how politely he concurred and said he would. They started to die in threes, the more outrageous ones, the ones who had given themselves girls’ names or only wore leather. Surprising people got thinner and thinner and then were dead. It was like a race that you did not want to win whose starting pistol had a silencer.
I received a long letter about the importance of d’Annunzio and about the health of his two Afghan hounds from my schoolfriend Edward Stigant weeks after he died in hospital in Milan. So his mother lost two of her three sons too soon.
Then, at last, I found a proper job rather than a hand-to-mouther. When people asked me the name of where I worked, they said, ‘You’ve made it up!’
Well I hadn’t, and it was a wonderful job, though I was a rotten employee. I was hired to write copy for an advertising agency whose name really was Slade, Bluff and Bigg. It was of small size and, which was startling for an advertising agency in the approach to the nineteen-eighties, radiant with principle. For every flashy account we had, there was a charity, for every glittery client, a quietly decent one. I was happy in my work, though I cannot believe how patient were my employers. Mr Slade, who was very musical, was a dedicated Liberal, the only Liberal indeed on the Greater London Council. His brother Julian wrote Salad Days. Mr Bigg had had a distinguished career in a much larger agency and lent calm authority to every meeting. Mr Bluff was a real sweetie and could handle such tricky clients as Gucci and Kutchinsky with his velvet paws. The agency was in bosky South Kensington. I had a room to myself. I shall never forget the art director because he told me two things: one was to write a book right then and the other that drink was no good for me because my character changed when I drank. And this was someone who had never seen me drunk. He himself never drank. I took neither piece of advice.
Loyd was in America pursuing his career in the world of punk. Actually, now I come to think of it, I suppose the answer to the question posed in passing above, about who creates the world’s fashions and trends, is probably none other than Loyd Grossman, sauce-supremo and anagrammatical arts tsar, and other such poly-national panurges.
To a considerable degree, the meta-Loyd whom the public sees was a creation of the nineteen-eighties. When first I met him he was writing a doctorate at the LSE about the effect of distilled spirits on the eighteenth-century working class in London and the author of a crisp book about the history of rock music. How less direct might his trajectory have been had he settled down with me and written treatises on the lesser-known pupils of Verrocchio.
Many of my Cambridge friends had departed to become professors in America. Perhaps it was a Hogmanay on Colonsay that drove Simon Schama off these shores for good? He certainly hated it so much that he mentioned it on Desert Island Discs. I felt so sorry, but I understood exactly. It was a mixture of heartbreak, weather, and what he apprehended as a glimpse of unreconstructed Philistia at play. He took refuge in the library at Colonsay House that he pronounced to be a decent though unadventurous Whig library. The record he chose to epitomise his short sojourn on the island was the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’. I’m sad he got that glimpse, and I have seen things through those eyes too, but the truth is, as always, more complicated. My Oxford friends had settled into their vocations, Rosa into cell biology, Jamie Fergusson into the world of antiquarian bookselling, my friend Fram Dinshaw into becoming himself a don at Oxford. Niall Hobhouse had left Cambridge early and set up as an art dealer specialising in art and artefacts relating to India. He is now profoundly involved with the philosophy and practice of architecture and of public housing. His public service genes came to get him.
In the story of a life, according to the best-conducted experts on etiquette, there are but three times when one should appear in a newspaper: when one is born, when one dies and, in the middle, when one marries.
On our first date, Quentin Wallop told me that he would never ask anyone to marry him.
We became engaged not very long thereafter. We married on 10 February 1981 in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square. We chose the church with its sublime spire and then unrestored and umbrageous interior because Quentin was a dedicated circumnavigator of the globe under sail and it is the church of seafarers, and for its architecture, and on account of the charitable work it does among the addicts and the homeless of London.
My father, that is, my blood parent, had suggested that we marry in St Magnus the Martyr, for T.S. Eliot: ‘Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’. But there was some problem with parking.
Eyes were very important in our swift courtship. Quentin saw me across a room in Marsham Court where he was living. My impression was of hand-painted wallpaper, celadon in tone, and a young man with gold hair not apparently enjoying his own party. We did not speak. No one introduced us. I had just returned from India, where I had gone to convince a friend that it was home that he was pining for and not me, so I was rather thin and must have seemed interesting on account of not having slept for some days. Quentin made enquiries as to who I was and moves were made towards an introduction. We were both motherless, both tall, both longing for affection, both serious about children and animals and we each believed that we could make the other happy. With so much breakage in our pasts, too many house-moves, too much unsettledness, we married, we felt, with our eyes and hearts open.
Another romance was shaking confetti over the nation at the time. I was surprised when pretty Lady Diana Spencer chose my dressmaker to make her wedding dress, but who could be annoyed for very long, when my handsome prince was there? Our (I cannot say ‘my’; it was ‘our’ wedding after all) wedding dress was entirely covered with glass sequins, each one colourless, each one exactly like a tiny pierced contact lens.
My dress had a million eyes and it was to the future that they were turned as I went down the aisle on Papa’s arm towards my groom in the soft gloom of that great church, thirty feet of Argos-ey
ed glass and white taffeta train pouring itself down the aisle behind me. Daddy was in a front pew, having professed himself delighted not to have to take a central role; I wonder now.
From the tiara that held up my hair, released for the day from the Bank of Montreal, fell a long veil over my face. It too was scattered with brilliant lenses that made me feel as though I was seeing the day and the man to whom it gave me through shining tears of unquestionable joy.
Were marriages so tidy as to be best composed of opposites, how well we might have done; but in some ways I think we were too profoundly alike and are able better to love one another when not under the same roof but equal in our love for our children. Quentin is incontrovertibly the hero type. He camps under the stars with the Tuareg, he walks the Karakoram Highway, he loves the Hindu Kush, he is involved in the rehabilitation of boy soldiers in Sierra Leone. He works for the Red Cross. He does hidden good. When we met I thought he was ridiculously handsome with golden hair and a terrific beak like the old Duke of Wellington and he knew how to do things. I thought that it was pretty much as exotic as being able to stay on a bucking bronco to be able to drive, so it was inevitable that I became infatuated with this person who could do so much that I could not and to whom I felt I had so much to give. I did feel he was a kind of merman and it is the cruellest of fates to which, to this day, he will not allude, that his beautiful boat, Ocean Mermaid, launched by his mother, was burned in an accidental shipyard fire long after we parted.
However, it is restorative to see him on one of his hunters, Gus, Monty or Graf, and realise that he is once again connecting himself with the life for which he was made and that is in his blood.
In the dining room at his house at Farleigh are two tall portraits by Sir Francis Grant, depicting Isaac Newton Wallop, the 5th Earl, and his wife, Lady Eveline Herbert. The 5th Earl refused a marquessate and the Garter from Gladstone, thinking them ‘beyond his merits’. This Earl and Countess had twelve children and she embroidered a chair cover during each pregnancy, still managing somehow, in between all of it, to gather up into her social life, albeit briefly, Henry James, who wrote to his father from Eggesford, the Portsmouth house in Devon:
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