The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me

by Sofka Zinovieff

  The day of the funeral was Robert’s birthday – 5 November. He would have been seventy-six. The mauve doves picked flies from the wheels of the cars that drew up before the house, belying their role as sombre symbols of grief. Seeing Rosa crying, Alan said, ‘Oh my God, can’t she be given a tranquilliser?’ Also gathered at the house was Cyril, Robert’s brother (and Alan’s father) – a charming, white-haired old man carrying a shooting stick, who picked up coloured pigeon feathers from the gravel to stick in his bowler hat. As the coffin was carried out of the front door, Coote was first in line, dressed in widow’s black and fur hat, supported by Alan, who wore a morning coat and striped trousers. Behind them was my mother on Leo’s arm, then my younger brother, Kolinka, with me. Following us were the two ‘best men’ from Robert’s second wedding – Jeremy Fry and Andrew Crowden. Garth’s widow Betty and their daughter Susan were there, and last out of the house was Rosa, who locked the front door and caught up with the slowly moving line as we crossed the damp expanse of lawn. The private wooden doorway into the churchyard was open and we filed through it and entered the church.

  ROBERT’S COFFIN IS CARRIED FROM THE HOUSE TOWARDS THE CHURCH. HIS WIDOW, COOTE, HEADS THE LINE OF MOURNERS WITH HIS NEPHEW ALAN, FOLLOWED BY MY MOTHER, MY BROTHERS AND ME, THEN JEREMY FRY, ANDREW CROWDEN, GARTH’S WIDOW BETTY AND DAUGHTER SUSAN, AND ROSA

  The pews were filled with a wide variety of people: elegant women of a certain age whose appearance hinted at a past of wild parties and trips to the Riviera; young friends who had appreciated Robert’s mad excesses; gay men who had found refuge at Faringdon at a time when their relationships could have landed them in prison; local Faringdon people who had liked the eccentricity of the old squire; and estate tenants and employees. I was disorientated, aware of the curiosity many must have been feeling about me in my unlikely new role. Andrew Crowden gave the address, in which he described Robert’s wartime Arabian trip as fundamental in forming his priorities in life. Emphasising Robert’s love of Faringdon, and particularly the grounds, he said that his life ‘was given to Marvell’s “green thought in a green shade”’, something I didn’t understand until I looked up the seventeenth-century poet.

  The mind, that ocean where each kind

  Does straight its own resemblance find;

  Yet it creates, transcending these,

  Far other worlds, and other seas;

  Annihilating all that’s made

  To a green thought in a green shade.

  Robert was cremated in Oxford’s crematorium where Gerald had ended up thirty-seven years earlier. We were a small group of mourners watching the traction belt pull the coffin into the furnace.

  After the funeral, I was in shock. On the surface, this surprising set of circumstances looked rather romantic. Sometimes, as I walked down through the field to the lake, I felt as though I was viewing myself from the outside – like watching a film, or like those visions that dying people supposedly see, along with the tunnel leading to a bright light. I could appreciate the spectacular beauty of the place and the intriguing drama that had brought me there, but it was hard to make sense of how I would incorporate this twist of fate into my life. It was deeply confusing to find myself in what seemed to be almost a feudal set-up, where I was ‘Miss Sofka’, apparently Lord of the Manor, despite my gender. I was shown the special pew in the church that was allocated to me and told that I owned the rights to Market Place. It was so unfamiliar, it was anyone’s guess whether there’d be some arcane droit de seigneur and local virgins would turn up for inspection.

  I was Lord of the Manor but Rosa was the master of ceremonies. ‘You are not just Sofka any more,’ she crowed, wagging her forefinger at me in a threatening manner. ‘You are quite someone. You are lady of this house. People will respect you and you must show them who you are – isn’t it?’ In a letter to a friend I recorded that, after these episodes, ‘I would flinch or feel like bursting into tears, but I have also managed to laugh a lot.’ Once I tried to explain to the manic housekeeper that it was still important for me to carry on with my studies in Cambridge and Greece, adding that I wasn’t about to take up flower-arranging or looking for a suitable husband. ‘There could be worse things to do,’ she replied knowingly.

  ROSA PREPARING DINNER

  In the days that I stayed at Faringdon before returning to Greece, Rosa took me to meet the tenants who lived in the various flats in and around the house. The seven or eight occupants were mostly single women, known by all as ‘Miss Crack’ (the daughter of Gerald’s old chauffeur), ‘Miss Stone’ and so on. Rosa, however, was always Rosa, never Miss Proll. There was one young man. Rosa was very excited one morning before breakfast to pass on the gossip that he had been arrested as a peeping tom – something that only added to the slightly creepy, Gothic element in this hidden community.

  We reached their homes by descending into the long basement corridor – the world of ‘downstairs’ that I had previously only known from films. Many of the old service rooms (game larders, sculleries and early incarnations of kitchens) had disappeared, but the atmosphere remained one of servants and practicalities. Gone were the creamy cornices and parquet floors of upstairs. Here, the walls were coloured institutional greens and greys, the floor was concrete, and a stream of people, from gardeners and gamekeepers to postmen and plumbers, entered the area freely from the stableyard, with no impression being made on the main part of the house. There were more tenants living up the back staircase on the attic floor, in the stable block and in some scattered cottages. None of them were allowed to walk in front of the house or make themselves evident to its occupants. At one end of the corridor was the small office where the elderly Mr Rich kept the accounts and managed business matters for the estate. Sometimes there would be a line of men queuing outside the office, wanting their annual permission to fish in the lake. (Robert’s original permit cards had the unappealing warning: NO DOGS OR WOMEN ALLOWED.) Mr Rich looked like a benevolent tortoise and explained he had been begging Robert to let him retire for decades; his firm had been involved since Gerald’s day. He was off like a shot when I agreed and a local chartered surveyor working on the probate values was brought in to replace him.

  Back in Greece I was bewildered by the burden of guilt that descended along with this gargantuan bequest. It was like adding lead weights to the lightness I had discovered living in Nafplio with few belongings, when I believed (pitifully, it now seemed) that I had shed my past and the petty annoyances of the British class system. I did not share my mother’s fear that I would change, but I wondered how the world would react to me. How would I know if people were interested in me or my house? Would others take against me on account of my bizarrely bestowed privilege? Robert’s lasting influence from beyond the grave was becoming apparent; I recalled my undergraduate reading list on the complex implications of giving and receiving: Mauss’s The Gift describing the American Indians’ potlatch festival, where prestige was gained by giving away the largest amount of belongings, and Malinowski’s Trobriand Islanders negotiating the finer points of social status according to what one person could bestow on another. Even in Greece, I had noted how it is the host lavishing the guest with food, drink or presents who has the upper hand. You only have to witness the arguments over who will pay a restaurant bill to realise that it is giving and not receiving that incurs honour and influence. Everyone knows there is no such thing as a free lunch and it seemed the same was true in relation to a house.

  All the same, it was a relief to step back from the situation. In Greece, Faringdon became irrelevant. I was back to being a graduate student who stood out only because female English anthropologists were a rare sight in provincial Peloponnesian towns. As I tried to come up with a plan, I pondered different solutions. Could I turn Faringdon into something useful? An orphanage for musical children? An anthropological research centre? The financial situation at that stage seemed too fluid and precarious for grand schemes: not only would Coote need to be given a widow’s l
egacy (something Robert had overlooked), but Alan had to be bought out from the farm and his quarter-share of the whole estate. There would also be taxes to pay and there was talk of selling the entire contents of the house to pay death duties.

  When I returned to England, I went to Cambridge for seminars and library work and stayed at Faringdon when I could. Rosa continued her scheme to turn me into a suitable replacement for her master, transferring her single-minded loyalty from him to me, but disapproving of the other ‘young people’ she encountered in my wake. She insisted that I should take over Robert’s bedroom, and she got her way, though I made a point of decorating it and having a different bed. Rosa’s techniques were not subtle, but it was far from easy to resist. She was simultaneously domineering and submissive – a tyrant and a slave. When I asked to make my own bed she ignored me, and the prospect that I might cook something for myself was beyond her imagination. Her traditions were implicitly those established in the pre-war days, shored up by time and by the objects she venerated – the fine linen hand-towels with the Berners crest, the washed-thin sheets she kept alive by sewing them sides-to-middle, and the silver cutlery we used at table. When a sharp-toothed pike was caught in the lake, Rosa cooked dainty quenelles de brochet in a cream sauce. I could imagine Gerald discussing that in his day. It was impossible not to be pulled into this self-contained world.

  My friends couldn’t help being amazed when they came to stay for weekends. Some liked the gauzy, Hollywood glamour of the Crystal Room, while others preferred the courtesan’s-boudoir intensity of the Red Room. Some felt the presence of benign ghosts, others liked going through the books and photographs and playing the piano. They all enjoyed sitting on the porch steps in the morning sun, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday papers. I became aware of how we were part of a physical continuity: I had sat on the front steps with Robert when he was an old man, but there was also the picture of him and Gerald posing there in the 1930s with Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas and others. Then there were the faded photographs from the early twentieth century, with Gerald’s mother and stepfather, who sat there in wicker chairs and allowed their parrot out for a breath of air. I supposed the habit had stretched back to the 1780s, when Pye the Poet Laureate first surveyed the gardens and church from his newly built villa.

  Opening drawers, we found more old photographs of famous visitors from the 1930s and ’40s and were conscious that we were treading in their footsteps and sleeping in their beds. My mother told me that the painted day-bed in the drawing room had been Gerald’s bed, and when we lounged on it among the Victorian needlework and beaded cushions it was hard not to think of his short, stout figure in the same place. Did the pictures give any clues? High on the green walls above the piano was a collection of some of the ugliest, most unappealing portraits in oval frames. They seemed to be a joke, all either ‘simpering or morose’, and we competed to find the most grotesque, debating whether they were Berners ancestors and why they had been hung near the beautiful paintings of Victorian agricultural animals, Henry VIII, and the elegant young man in a doublet.481 Occasionally, stays at Faringdon felt almost like time travel or trespass. We would fish about in wardrobes and dress up in brocaded robes that Gerald had donned for photographs, or crimson ‘pink’ hunting jackets cut to fit Robert’s torso. I adopted my grandfather’s tailored black wool and cashmere coat – long and slightly baggy on me, its blue velvet collar dainty as a vole.

  I wondered about the scandals, love stories and rows that had taken place within the walls that now contained me and my friends, who were mostly in their twenties. But the past often seemed distant and elusive, as it can to the young. Coote regularly came over for meals, braving Rosa’s venomous expression and giving away nothing of her own terrible experiences with Robert. Following her estranged husband’s death, the decades of friendship with him and Gerald became the over-riding narrative; the rest was not mentioned. Robert had left her the rights to Gerald’s literary and musical output and she quickly set up the Berners Trust to promote his legacy. I was made a trustee and there were meetings in the drawing room followed by lunches along the lines of what many of the trustees had known in earlier days.

  I often tried to get Coote to tell me some stories about what it had really been like, to reveal a few of the secrets and lies, but her nature was founded on the value of tact. We did, however, spend hours going through the photograph album, although Coote stuck strictly to names and the occasional mysterious detail. She identified Doris Castlerosse as ‘a courtesan’, which I couldn’t understand at all, especially as the woman in question looked rather prim in a buttoned-up coat on the porch at Faringdon. Did this mean prostitute? Evidently not, but Coote would not elaborate. She would never have gossiped, and though I knew a little about Madresfield and her closeness with Evelyn Waugh, she would only say what a good friend he had been. Coote pointed out her sister, Maimie, déshabillée, frolicking with Robert on the beach at Ostia, but there was no talk of their relationship or why the word ‘SHIT’ was written on his back. And in the black-and-white pictures of Coote herself as a young woman – on a horse with Robert and Gerald, or at a party in the house – she looked remarkably the same as she did in her seventies. It was only much later that I came across a letter she had written Robert just after he told her about Gerald’s death and it helped me to understand more of her tight-lipped approach:

  THE FARINGDON PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM SHOWING RO BERT, MAIMIE AND OTHERS ON THE BEACH AT OSTIA, NEAR ROME. CENTRE LEFT: A RARE PICTURE OF GERALD IN A BATHING COSTUME, STANDING IN WHAT APPEARS TO BE A FOUNTAIN. COOTE NEVER REVEALED THE STORIES BEHIND THE PICTURES

  Darling Robert,

  Just a line to say I was so very sorry to hear about Gerald when you rang up just now. I am sure you must be missing him so much . . .

  He reached a standard of true civilisation, which we will never be able to explain to the young, but we were very lucky to have known it.

  Although the weekends I offered to friends and family were not the polished productions of Robert’s era, let alone Gerald’s, it felt as though there was a default setting for how a weekend would unfold. Rosa would discuss the menu plans and who would be ‘dining’. Even when it was my oldest friend, Sarah Horrocks, with whom I’d got into trouble for printing an ‘unsuitable magazine’ during Putney High School days, there was something of the Faringdon traditions that directed our behaviour. Sarah would make her way from a Bermondsey council flat where she lived with her toddler, Samuel, to scented baths in the early evening (even if our evening dress was probably jeans); drinks by the fire in the drawing room; meals in the dining room cooked by Rosa. Samuel liked the music boxes in the hall and played with the mechanical barking pug, though his favourite object was the doll-sized cushion of the mackintoshed flasher.

  Since Robert’s death, Rosa seemed to be increasingly unbalanced and Ben, the temperamental boxer, was following her example. When Ben began to eye Samuel as though he were a rabbit, I felt worried, and it was only thanks to one guest’s lightning response that the roaring lunge was intercepted before it turned into a nasty bite. Rosa was unable to appreciate that this was serious; the implication was that Samuel was too young rather than that Ben was a dangerous dog.

  When we shrieked and giggled at dinner and lay down under the dining table, it felt subversive, as though we were being mischievous children. We made jokes about Rosa being a Fascist, recalling a sketch from Dr Strangelove where Peter Sellers has to hold down his right arm to prevent himself automatically making a Nazi salute. Could she really celebrate Hitler’s birthday? we gasped. Sarah found a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the bookshelves, with what I believed was a fake inscription in German from the Führer himself: ‘To my dear Gerald.’ I suspected it was part of the provocative joke begun by Gerald after his trip to Germany in 1935 – something similar to the pornography contained inside the cover of a Bible or the defaced photographs of society ladies. But predictably the infamous book produced mayhem among my friends whenev
er it was dug out from the shelves. I ended up hiding it, ashamed of the dark seam of history that ran through what was now my house. Although I tried to make things less formal and more appropriate for a student and her friends, it was all so inappropriate anyway that it was a hopeless task.

  UST AS ROBERT switched from expansive host at weekends to running the estate during the week, so I was expected to take over this role when I was there. One day, Des and Don, the two ageing gardeners, asked me to come and ‘throw plates’ along the drive. It sounded like some peculiar medieval custom, until they explained that they were planting bulbs for the spring display. Robert’s technique for achieving a completely random, ‘natural’ pattern was to throw paper plates into position and the comic ritual was enacted each year. I duly took a pile and started making as haphazard a planting scheme as possible. Des also took the opportunity to make a few changes in the gardens and, with my agreement, the work-intensive, expensive and vulnerable delphinium beds were cancelled for the following year and something more practical put in their place. Don initiated me into the secrets of the dove-dyeing, letting me watch him as he washed the birds, gently bathed them in a bowl of brightly coloured pigment, and then placed them in boxes in the warm boiler room to dry off. Later, they’d be released into the sunshine and they’d strut about as if proud of their outrageous plumage.

  If choosing plants and trees and learning about the thrice-yearly dyeing routines were newly-discovered pleasures that pulled me closer to Faringdon, there were other aspects of my inheritance that were less appealing. I found myself attending frequent meetings with Alan, the accountant and the solicitors and having to act as though I understood much more than I really did about taxes, milk quotas and company law. Alan was a director and shareholder in the Berners Estates Company and was well informed about management issues. When we met in the study at Faringdon, he sat on the fender-seat, confident and apparently sanguine about his abrupt disinheritance. He was friendly – though when he greeted me, kissing both cheeks, he clenched my shoulders with such intensity I wondered whether there wasn’t a subconscious desire to raise the vice-like grip upwards towards my neck; how could he not detest me? But he seemed magnanimous. ‘You can buy yourself a car,’ he assured me. ‘There’s money available.’ Nevertheless, money was flowing out at an alarming rate, to prop up the estate, make long-neglected repairs to tenants’ cottages and pay off endowments. Alan agreed with the accountants that finances were dodgy enough for the youngest gardener, Martin, to be ‘let go’. One of the more harrowing moments in my early times was asking Martin into the study so I could fire him. There’d been no training for that in Cambridge’s anthropology department.