by Paula Byrne
The choice of the name Grainger for Angela’s maid is a private joke for Maimie’s benefit, but – consciously or not – by giving the name of her dog to the alcoholic character’s maid, Waugh reveals that he is beginning to fear for her own future. ‘Only Grainger, her maid, knew what was the matter with Mrs Lyne, and she only knew the shell of it. Grainger knew the number of bottles, empty and full, in the little pantry; she saw Mrs Lyne’s face when the blackout was taken down in the morning.’
Maimie was drinking far too much with her wine merchant husband. She was beginning to behave rather oddly, much to Evelyn’s concern. On leave in London in April 1942 he saw a lot of her. They dined and drank together, mixing caviar and Black Velvets. Then they went off to Vsev’s ARP post to drink port until the early hours. Later he saw Laura and felt that this was ‘the happiest leave of the war’. The only blot on his happiness was the troublesome influence of Vsev on Maimie.
He confessed his fears to Coote who, with the WAAF, had begun, in her own words, ‘a nomadic life of seventeen years’. Evelyn had been posted to Ayrshire, from where he wrote to Coote in the bantering style that characterises all his letters to her: ‘Darling Coote, Can’t you get posted to Ayrshire, which is full of Waafs … Could you not get into Combined Operations. Then we could write one another official letters full of deep double meanings.’ Evelyn asked if they could meet in London to drink utility port together. But then he gave her news of her sister: ‘Blondie, ever prone to bad company, seems to have fallen in with a very bad set of foreigners. I got her to dinner alone once and she was heavenly, like her old self. It seems she suffers from the delusion that she is a Queen. It is quite common (see Alice in Wonderland).’ Evelyn unequivocally blamed Maimie’s husband for her behaviour. Vsev was giving her delusions of grandeur and impossible hopes. Evelyn told Randolph Churchill that Maimie ‘expects to be called to the throne of the All Russians any day and has become gloriously sedate’.
In April 1942, Laycock called him back to the Commandos: ‘Chucker Laycock has proved most unchucking,’ he told Coote. But he remained mainly in London, with only menial tasks. He was drinking a lot and taking heavy sleeping drugs. He crashed two army cars. Charles Ryder in Brideshead says: ‘Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to feel old.’ That was Evelyn at this time.
In June, Laura gave birth to a daughter who was to become the favourite of all his children, Margaret. Two months later, at Combined Operations Headquarters, he disgraced himself by getting drunk. He had been to one of Maimie’s early morning cocktail parties and after a day’s hard drinking had dined with Laycock and his wife and the Randolph Churchills. He was so drunk that he could not even remember who else was there. ‘I began to trace a decline in my position in Bob’s esteem,’ he noted in his diary. He had no fixed base and was living in hotel rooms until Maimie offered to take him in, so he moved into her home.
At the end of August she organised a fair and circus on Hampstead Heath in aid of Yugoslavia. He went with Coote and his godson, Jonathan Guinness, whose mother and stepfather, the Mosleys, were in prison. Maimie’s circus was such a success that she sold the tickets twice over ‘and indignant crowds were turned away’. Evelyn reported that ‘she has no means of using the money she raises so lavishly’.
These were desultory months. 26 October: ‘Went to see Maimie and, in a daze, walked around exhibition. Went to supper with her and sat up late talking. Stayed the night with her.’ He wrote to Coote: ‘It is not unfair to say I never draw a sober breath.’ The same was becoming true of Maimie. They shared hangovers, oysters, long evenings of conversation over bottles, and then fell asleep together and felt much better. Vsevolode was made a major in the Serbian army: ‘He is so excited about it he was sick at Lady Crewe’s,’ Evelyn told Coote.
‘For two intimates, lovers or comrades, to spend a quiet evening with a magnum, drinking no aperitif before, nothing but a glass of cognac after – that is ideal’: that was Maimie and Bo’s life together in bombed-out London in the autumn of 1942, waiting for the fortunes of war to turn.
CHAPTER 21
The Door to Brideshead
Evelyn was still living with Maimie and her husband, in an uncomfortable single room in Montpelier Walk, SW7 (South Kensington). He would have preferred it without Vsevolode, who interrupted their late night drinking and gossip. He found the prince acutely silly and was irritated with their friends and dogs, so he decided to move out. He was doing a desk job, but waiting in hope that Laycock would ask for him to go to Africa.
In June his father died. On the very same day, the brigade left on ‘Operation Husky’ (the invasion of Sicily), without Evelyn. He was told that he would be sent for later. Evelyn was angry and bitter about this, but with Alec on active service in Syria it was up to Evelyn to go to his mother’s aid and sort out his father’s papers. Nothing survives in the way of grief-stricken letters or diary entries. His loathing of his father’s sentimentality had meant that he was always reluctant to express his own romantic side, especially in print. With Arthur’s death, it became possible for Evelyn to go forward with a more personal and sentimental novel than he had ever written before.
The promise to be called out to Italy in the first wave of reinforcements was overruled and he found himself removed altogether from the Commandos. Through the summer he remained on indefinite leave, waiting for a new posting. He spent time with friends, quarrelling with Diana Cooper but remaining close to Maimie. ‘Dined with Maimie where, by good chance, Vsevolode became ill and left the dinner table and us to two hours gossip’ goes a typical letter to Laura, down with her family at Pixton. She was pregnant again. Evelyn was once again the homeless wanderer awaiting his fate. The Army did not seem to need him and it seemed as though everyone else had something to do.
One evening in September he dined with Maimie and stayed the night. He got drunk and accused her husband of being a spy. Among the people they frequently talked about was Maimie’s old lover, Evelyn’s Oxford friend, Hubert Duggan. He was dying of tuberculosis. Evelyn wrote to Laura: ‘The news of Hubert is very bad indeed. He is allowed to see no one … He never sleeps and drugs put him into a delirium but not to sleep. He is in the blackest melancholy and haunted by delusions. There is nothing that can be done for him medically. Supernatural aid needed.’ Duggan had renounced his Catholicism for the sake of his longstanding mistress, Phyllis de Janzé. Now on his deathbed he had begun to talk of religion and returning to the Church, but felt that this would somehow be a betrayal of the memory of Phyllis, who had recently died.
Evelyn acted directly and decisively. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to save the soul of one of his friends. He went to see a Father Dempsey (whom he described as a big, fat peasant). The priest gave him a medal to hide in Hubert’s room and promised to call, saying, ‘I have known most wonderful cases of Grace brought about in just that way.’ But when Evelyn was told that Hubert would not survive the day he could not locate Dempsey. He found another priest, Father Devas. His interference annoyed Hubert’s sister, who was watching over him, and his nurse, but he was committed to saving his friend from Hell. Father Devas gave Hubert absolution and his ‘Thank you, father’ was taken as assent. Evelyn then returned to White’s Club and sat drinking with Randolph Churchill. When he returned to Hubert, the priest was still there, wanting to anoint him, much as his sister resisted. All of this is Evelyn’s own account:
Father Devas very quiet and simple and humble, trying to make sense of all the confusion, knowing just what he wanted … patiently explaining, ‘Look, all I shall do is just to put oil on his forehead and say a prayer. Look the oil is in this little box. It is nothing to be frightened of.’ And so by knowing what he wanted and sticking to that … he got what he wanted and Hubert crossed himself and later called me up and said, ‘When I became a Catholic it was not from fear’, so he knows what happened and accepted it. So we spent the day watching for a spark of gratitude for the love of God and saw the spark.
This was a cr
ucial moment for Evelyn. He had witnessed the operation of Divine Grace. He used the whole of this incident at the climax of Brideshead. Critics complained that the conversion of Lord Marchmain was wholly unrealistic, but as far as Evelyn was concerned it was a piece of reportage. To his theological mentor, Ronnie Knox, he wrote after the publication of Brideshead: ‘It was, of course, all about the deathbed. I was present at almost exactly that scene, with less extravagant décor, when a friend of mine whom we thought in his final coma and stubbornly impenitent … did exactly that, making the sign of the Cross.’
Twelve days later Evelyn returned to Pixton with the intention of starting his novel. Hubert’s death had made a profound impression on him.
On 3 October he attended an unsuccessful dinner party with Maimie and her husband, writing in his diary ‘The Russian’s intolerable.’ He also recorded a very rare row with Maimie over the Allies Club. The Russian alliance was becoming strained both privately and in the wider world of the war.
A Requiem Mass for Maimie’s erstwhile lover, Hubert, was held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception on Farm Street, in Mayfair, on 3 November. Father Devas officiated. Evelyn went with Maimie. Vsev was conspicuous by his absence. Evelyn was furious at ‘an untoward incident’ that occurred at the end of the service when the trumpets of the Life Guards sounded off the Last Post and the Reveille. Evelyn noted that the congregation finally understood the point of the service and were moved to tears, but the emotional silence was broken by one of his friends being ticked off by ‘an old warrior in plain clothes’ for failing to stand to attention. The appropriate reply should have been, according to Evelyn, ‘Sir, I have come to pray for my friend’s soul. Kindly keep your parade ground truculence out of this sacred place.’
Before he could get started on his new novel, he had to attend a parachuting course at Tatton Park near Manchester. He loved the experience, describing his first jump as ‘the keenest pleasure I remember’. But on his second jump he cracked his fibula, putting himself out of action again. He spent two weeks in the Hyde Park Hotel, being fussed over by friends.
At Christmas time, with Laura and the children still spending the war in the safety of Pixton, Maimie took Evelyn in. Much as he loved Christmas with her, he wrote in his diary: ‘I find my dislike of Vsevolode so overwhelming that I cannot sit in the room with him … Maimie is lost to me.’
In January 1944, with no official duties, Evelyn formally requested leave in order to write a new novel. The leave was granted.
He stayed at Chagford, working with intense concentration, for the whole of February. Unusually for him, he revised as he went along. He was revealing more of himself than ever before, and he wanted to choose the right words.
Then a call came from the War Office to say that his leave had been cancelled and that he should take up a new post as ADC to an unknown general: ‘so that ends my hopes of another two months’ serious work. Back to military frivolities.’
Southern England was preparing for the second front and needed all available men. Evelyn travelled to London to meet his new commander, Major General Ivor Thomas. He was so rude to him that Thomas refused to take him. ‘This is a great relief,’ Evelyn wrote: ‘the primary lack of sympathy seemed to come from my being slightly drunk in his mess on the first evening. I told him I could not change the habits of a lifetime for a whim of his’ (the particular offence was that he had spilled a glass of wine over the general). When he was transferred to a new general, he persuaded him forthwith to give him six further weeks’ leave to continue work on the novel. Back at Chagford he was annoyed to be turned out of the room in which he had grown accustomed to writing in order to make space for an adulterous affair between Lord Grantley and an actress. ‘I am sick at heart and lonely,’ he wrote, but in twelve days he had completed 28,000 words.
He sent a charming letter to his eldest child on her sixth birthday, telling her all about the present he had arranged for her – painting materials, colours and brushes of the kind ‘which real artists use, and when a thing is the best of its kind, even if it is only a little thing like a paint brush, it should be treated like a Sacred Animal. Always remember it is not the size or price of things that is valuable but the quality.’ Then he added, ‘You have been a great happiness to your mother and me for five years. It is very sad that I see so little of you.’
He wrote to Coote on 23 March, telling her about his novel: ‘I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays.’ It was a long and tender letter, honestly telling her all of his troubles and saying that when he was in London he barely drew a sober breath: ‘I was beginning to lose my memory which for a man who lives entirely in the past, is to lose life itself.’ He told her all his news, of his parachute accident, and how he had a lovely time when he broke his leg and all his friends visited him and cost him a fortune in drinks. Referring to himself as a dypsomaniac, he said: ‘I drove a General mad, literally, and both he and I were expelled from that headquarters together.’ He also told how Maimie’s husband was being a ‘great grief at all who love Blondie. It is impossible ever to see her alone and he has not now any wine left to sell one so there is no point to him at all.’ He included lots of gossip about mutual friends, and at the end of his letter added: ‘Don’t go East. Come back to us.’
He also wrote mysteriously: ‘What are the documents concealed at Mad?’ Coote must have mentioned something in a letter to him that does not survive – perhaps something to do with the family scandal. Boom and Mad were much on his mind as he wrote.
He was recalled to London at the end of March. While they were still deciding what to do with him, he ensconced himself in the Hyde Park Hotel and corrected his typescript. ‘My Magnum Opus is turning into a jeroboam. I have written 62,000 words.’ He had come to a natural break in the story and was happy to spend a fortnight getting drunk in White’s while he awaited orders. On 1 May, he gave dinner to two old Oxford friends, Harold Acton and John Sutro. He filled Maimie in with the details: ‘a fine dinner – gulls eggs, consommé, partridge, haddock on toast, Perrier Jouet ’28, nearly a bottle a head, liqueur brandy, Partaga cigars – an unusual feast for these times … I found their company delightful … Harold’s descriptions of service life as seen by a bugger were a revelation. He combines his pleasures with keen patriotism’ (Acton had finally been accepted by the RAF).
Two days later he returned to Chagford, struggling with ‘a very difficult chapter of love-making on a liner … I feel very much the futility of describing sexual emotions without describing the sexual act; I should like to give as much detail as I have of the meals, to the two coitions – with his wife and Julia. It would be no more obscene than to leave them to the reader’s imagination, which in this case cannot be as acute as mine.’ He wrote to Laura with a warning: ‘sexual repression is making mag. op. rather smutty’.
He made terrific headway through the month of May, during which Laura gave birth to his fifth child, Harriet Mary. At the end of the month he was assigned to No. 2 Special Air Service Regiment, though not given an active posting. On D-Day, Tuesday 6 June, he brought the book to its climax: ‘This morning at breakfast the waiter told me the Second Front had opened. I sat down early to work and wrote a fine passage of Lord Marchmain’s death agonies. Carolyn [Cobb] came to tell me the popular front was open. I sent for the priest to give Lord Marchmain the last sacraments. I worked through till 4 o’clock and finished the last chapter.’ That same week, appropriately enough, the Americans liberated Rome.
‘I think perhaps it is the first of my novels rather than the last,’ he wrote. He again described it as his ‘magnum opus’ and said to his agent that it ‘was very good’, explaining to him that ‘the whole thing is steeped in theology’. The epilogue and final tinkering were completed on 24 June, the Feast of Cor
pus Christi.
He was shaken by the advent of the new flying bombs (this was the time that he sent his books away from the Hyde Park Hotel back to the country and joked that his son should come to London – ‘a child is easily replaced while a book destroyed is utterly lost’). He was discomposed that, as one low-flying bomb came over, ‘for the first and I hope the last time in my life I was frightened’. He put this down to his being drunk and resolved to give up alcohol: ‘It is a cutting of one of the few remaining strands that held me to human society.’
A message arrived with the news that Randolph Churchill had personally requested Evelyn to join him on a mission to Croatia. Evelyn claimed jokingly that the commission came ‘in the belief that I should be able to heal the Great Schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches’. He was eager to accept, but worried that the posting wouldn’t come off, as he had had so many setbacks in the last three years.
Yugoslavia had been invaded by Germany and Italy, but had a number of resistance groups. It was thought that the presence of Churchill’s son would act as a visible symbol of Britain’s solidarity. The main resistance group was General Tito’s Partisans, now supported by the British, who had switched their allegiance from the Serbian Chetniks. Tito was presented to the British as a heroic figure who stood for religious tolerance. In fact, he was a shadowy figure with his own communist agenda.
Catholic newspapers in England had reported for some time the less palatable truth about Partisan activities, which included the murder of Slovenian priests and the desecration of churches. Evelyn had his own agenda for agreeing to Randolph’s offer, and he did not see Tito in quite the same way as he appeared to Churchill’s son. Evelyn initiated a fantasy that Tito was in fact a woman and a lesbian to boot. He called her ‘she’ or ‘auntie’, a joke that took advantage of Tito’s elusiveness and the fact that he was so little known outside Yugoslavia that there were doubts that he really existed.
