All the prince’s intimates poured down, from his brothers to the earls of Dudley, Kimberley, Rosebery, Derby, Sefton, Westmorland and Londesborough. Most came to hunt, the men immaculate in white buckskin breeches and glossy top hats, the women in beautifully tailored blue or black habits (women invariably rode sidesaddle with these shire packs), with white linen waistcoats or stocks and bowler hats.
Others, like Baba, came simply to enjoy the social life—during the winter months Melton became a microcosm of smart Mayfair society. There were balls, like the one given by Lady Ancaster just after Christmas 1923, to which Baba went, and innumerable dinner parties. Marquesses, counts, earls and rajas attended the annual performance of Gilbert and Sullivan by the operatic society or danced with the public at British Legion dances in the Corn Exchange. On several occasions there were three royal princes at dinners organized by the local branch of the National Farmers’ Union. One was the Prince of Wales, who said in proposing a toast to the farmers: “I am trying to pay off a debt, or I should say a fraction of the debt, that I owe for many happy days of riding over your land.” As the prince said in one of his letters to Fruity, you could jump one of these Leicestershire cut-and-laid fences six abreast. There were social events every evening, including a weekly dance at Craven Lodge; after dinner, poker was a favorite amusement, with sums the equivalent of thousands today being won and lost nightly.
So chic did Melton Mowbray become when the Prince of Wales made it his winter headquarters that the prince’s favorite Embassy Club opened a branch there above a shop in the Market Place—the prince’s passion for dancing was almost as great as for hunting. The first dance, held at the King’s Theatre in November 1923, with the prince as guest of honor, was comparatively makeshift, with the footlights given colored shades, the sides of the stage banked with orchids and ferns, and curtains instead of the London Embassy’s mirrored walls, but like the later, more sophisticated dances it was packed. The single Curzon sisters were both there, Irene in gold tissue, Baba—one of the prince’s partners—in green and silver brocade.
That winter, Baba often visited Irene. When the bitter quarrel between Curzon and his two elder daughters over their inheritance had taken place, Baba, still at home, had heard the story from her father’s point of view. At first she believed that it was her sisters who had behaved badly and there was a temporary coolness. But good relations soon resumed. Like everyone else, she adored Cimmie, and she was fascinated by Tom. His potently male aura and the immediate assumption of intimacy natural with a sister-in-law who was only a schoolgirl when they first met had flattered and bewitched her. She was still young enough to find Irene’s semi-maternal attitude comforting and reassuring, and staying with this older sister, so well established at Melton, provided a welcome escape from the difficulties of life at home. Although she did not hunt, she loved the diversions of Melton. Everywhere the prince went, Fruity Metcalfe went too, so she and Fruity met constantly. It was during these visits that Fruity fell deeply in love with her.
Baba was used to male admiration. She was also conscious of her youth and inexperience, and well aware that this was not a match that would please her father. Fruity was seventeen years older than she was, only of her world by the freak of chance, and the violence of his emotions scared her. She wrote to him in December 1923 to tell him that she loved him—she thought—but on the other hand she might easily meet someone else. What she made absolutely clear was that she did not want any kind of commitment at that moment.
Fruity, a generous-spirited man, responded with impassioned declarations of love and a promise to give her all the time she needed. “Dearest Love, God is not kind to allow me who worship you to be the cause of hurting you. It is not right that my love for you, and your love for me, should be the cause of making your life, which is a far from happy one in some ways, even more difficult than it at present is. Forgive me, sweet woman that I love—forgive me.
“I want you, I need you, I want to see you, look at you, be near you. You say you want a year, or is it a day. Yes, Yes, my love, take what you want and all you want.”
In February 1924 the Prince of Wales had an accident that aggravated his family’s worry about the dangers to which his passion for riding was exposing him. While riding one of his hunters around a jumping circuit he took a fall and broke his right collarbone. Fruity, who was with him, tied up his arm and took him to the nearest surgery. Later on that month the prince, his arm in a sling, went to Paris under his favorite incognito, Lord Chester, taking Fruity with him. They went stag hunting, to the Folies Bergère and to a dinner at the British embassy.
At the same time, Baba was recuperating from an operation for appendicitis and was whisked off by Irene for a long weekend in the bracing air of Brighton. Before she left she scribbled a short letter to the Prince of Wales apologizing for being such poor company at their last evening out in a party. He replied immediately with a charming note that shows the depth of their friendship: “Surely you know me well enough not even to say you’ve been rude and that night of all times when you weren’t really fit to go out and dance so soon after the operation. I know you did it so as not to cart me which was sweet of you and much appreciated by me. You must take care of yourself. Yours, E. P.”
Only weeks later, in March 1924, Fruity was the one injured, while trying out a new horse for the prince at the Aldershot Command drag hunt near Long Sutton in Hampshire. The horse fell at the third jump, a high fence with a ditch, and Fruity was hit in the face by the hoof of the horse following. This time it was the prince who dashed to get help and, with his brother Henry, visited him in the Cambridge Military Hospital. Fruity’s jaw was broken, his face needed twenty-seven stitches, his lips were torn and several teeth knocked out.
Treatment by the noted plastic surgeon Harold Gillies restored his looks, though his nose, said one columnist, was now more that of Caesar than Apollo. The prince, said Fruity, was kindness itself, especially given his attitude to illness. “When the P is well he doesn’t want anyone near him who is not well too,” wrote Fruity to Baba. “He’s a funny lad, but very lovable and has always been wonderful to me.”
The king and those around him had become worried by Fruity’s influence on the heir to the throne. The two were inseparable, confiding everything to each other and sharing jokes and code words inexplicable to others. Both had an obsession with clothes and would spend hours discussing cuffs or the placing of buttons (Fruity almost invariably wore checked suits, the prince often favored gray).
Even before Fruity’s advent the prince’s love of horsy sports, in particular hunting, had made his family fearful. It was natural that Fruity, a brilliant horseman who had been employed by the prince to manage his horses, would encourage the prince in what was rapidly becoming an obsession. Like many Irishmen, Fruity had an excellent eye for a horse, and he was determined to see that his royal master was mounted on the sort of animal that would take him to the front of the hunt.
As the prince was a rider of almost desperate recklessness who did not care what risks he took, inevitably he often came to grief and it seemed quite possible that one day he would suffer serious injury, even death. At least one serious accident or fatality every season is recorded in Irene’s hunting journal: “Mike Wardell larking about on the way home from hunting over a little fence got a thorn in his left eye and had to have it out.” “Lord Derby’s only daughter Lady Victoria Bullock never regained consciousness after a bad fall. All the royal brothers out as usual this season.” “While the Prince of Wales was out, a former Master of the Pytchley was killed when his horse fell and rolled on him.”
The prince fought to keep Fruity, the king to have him sent away or at least no longer in his son’s household. The question was shelved for a while when the prince decided he would visit his ranch in Pekisko, Canada, in the early autumn of 1924, stopping off en route for a few days in New York to watch the international polo. He managed to avoid being accompanied by Admiral Halsey, instead tak
ing Fruity and Brigadier Gerald (“G”) Trotter.
G Trotter, who had lost his right arm in the Boer War and wore his uniform sleeve pinned across the front of his tunic, was a genial man whose main pursuit was pleasure. His official post was assistant comptroller of the prince’s household. Although more than twenty years older than the prince, he was his constant companion, deplored almost as much as Fruity.
Fruity went on ahead, in August, with the prince’s polo ponies. By now deeply in love with Baba, he could hardly bear to leave her. “It’s only six hours since I left you, my dear Love, wet-eyed but oh so brave, for my sake I know. You were just grand my darling and I thank you for it and know how much of a strain it was for you to bear up, and smile. I realise well how you felt in that taxi, with the wee dog, returning to Carlton House Terrace (that strange house that has given me some such wonderful moments and yet I dislike it; mainly because I know you do, but also because it seems to stand solid and massive between me and you my beloved).”
Fruity’s intuition was correct. The last thing Curzon would have wanted for his youngest and most beautiful daughter, who could have married literally anyone she chose, was a man with no money, no title, no land and no compensatory position in politics. Indeed, once, told by the butler that the hat and gloves in the hall belonged to “Major Metcalfe,” he had stormed upstairs to Baba’s sitting room and almost thrown Fruity out—though this was in part due to his stringent belief that tea and cucumber sandwiches, brought in by a footman, were not an adequate chaperone for any unmarried daughter of his.
The lovesick Fruity wrote to Baba constantly. “I’ve not talked to you for such a long time but you’ve never left my thoughts—never. I’ve been comparing you with others (I am honest) and you’ve won, without a race. They just don’t come up to you in any way. You have them beaten before the start. I’ve seen a few lovely women and girls but your beauty, Pansy darling, overwhelms them.”
He was leading his usual active life, playing tennis and golf on Long Island, swimming and dancing as well as getting the ponies fit for the prince’s arrival from Canada. When the party did arrive, in mid-September, there was a jolting shock in store.
The prince seemed to have turned away from Fruity—his sudden abandonment of those he professed to love was to remain a feature of his character—in favor of G Trotter. Although Fruity did not know it, it was an eerie foretaste of what was to come; then, he was quite simply wretched. “It just cannot go on unless there is a big change very soon,” he wrote unhappily to Baba. “I feel it so terribly. I have never let him down, never. I have done every possible thing for him, and now this. No wonder I feel miserable. There is d——d little left for me.
“You, my love, are not for me either. I know it and feel it (and hide it even from myself).”
Baba wrote to him often (“you have no idea how much your letters mean to me”) and the princely party was feted constantly—there were balls, parties, race meetings, polo matches and, as Fruity put it, “one bathes in champagne.”
The prince’s defection rankled. Fruity was loyal to the core of his being; and the prince’s arbitrary, casual replacement of himself as chosen companion by G Trotter hurt him badly. “The P seems very happy, he’s enjoying himself a good deal,” he wrote to Baba. “He and old G never leave one another, it’s almost uncanny. The P refers every single thing to G now, G is the only person who knows anything of HRH’s movements or ideas . . .
“I wonder where you are and what your thoughts are and if you are making someone love you. I fear it’s only too easy and too probable. No one is kissing you, is there darling? Tell me. No—don’t.”
In September he was writing to her: “You see, all the love I gave him before is yours now, and it matters so little to me what he thinks or cares about me. I’ll do my job with him but the personal thing I once gave him is gone forever. If he wants me, I’ll respond—but that’s all I can ever do now. I loved that young man with the very best God put into me but I can’t feel ever again the same as I did. You have all my thoughts, my best feelings. One can’t divide things—I can’t, anyway.”
In Fruity’s mind, he had lost the two people he loved most—and was to love most in all his life. This mood may have accounted for an episode that could have had embarrassing consequences. One night Fruity had visited a house of ill repute and, finding himself unable to pay, was chased out of it by the prostitute to whom he owed money—minus his trousers, which she had stolen. Worse still, in them was his wallet, which held several letters from the prince. Fortunately, no harm was done. After the tour Tommy Lascelles, the prince’s private secretary, told this story to his neighbor at a dinner party, without realizing she was a friend of Baba’s. Next day Fruity arrived at his house unannounced before dinner and knocked him down in his drawing room (they made up their quarrel a few months later).
The prince’s seeming rebuff did not last long. Once back in England, hunting with Fruity from Craven Lodge as often as possible, the old intimacy was quickly reestablished—to the king’s annoyance. “Had a talk with D on getting home about Metcalfe. I found him very obstinate,” reads the king’s diary for November 6, 1924.
Fruity was far less certain of Baba’s feelings. The coolest-headed of Curzon’s daughters, she was also the most mondaine. As she grew older, her friends and family came to believe that, as the saying goes, her head invariably ruled her heart. In fact, it was the other way around. In addition, she was only twenty, and she was in love. The arguments for and against marriage to Fruity raged in her mind, a torment often confided to his sister Muriel Russell.
As for Fruity, the high hopes and idealistic enthusiasm with which he had accompanied the Prince of Wales back from India soon evaporated. He did not have a place on the prince’s permanent staff. Worst of all, it seemed as if there was no future for him with the girl he loved. If his army career were not to suffer irreparably, he had to rejoin his regiment. Late that autumn, he wrote Baba what must have been one of the most difficult letters of his life:
Dear Love, It is not easy for me to write. I’ve thought out letters to you during this last six weeks, I’ve written letters and burnt them. I’ve spoken to you, in my mind, hundreds of times. You have been with me, in my poor thoughts, day and night since you left me. You can disappear from St. Moritz and I just hear vague rumors of your movements from people whom I hate to hear them from. You return suddenly without any warning—you are in London when I am there. I hear from my sister of your arrival, then you walk with her and she tells me of your troubles. My poor darling child, I feel deeply for you in your worry and uncertainty. May God help you in your trial. I only wish I could.
I would do all in my power to make you happy. All—all—all. Dearest one, it does hurt me so to know you to be wasting any of the hours of your life unhappy and in trouble. If you have felt this period as Muriel tells me you told her you had and you are still undecided whether you really love me or not, then dear one I am afraid that unknown to yourself (perhaps because you do not like to think it true) you have not yet really loved. You have yet to feel all the happiness (and sorrows I fear) that only true love can bring to you.
Now Pansy my love I will keep out of your way. If we do meet do not fear of my manner to you. I will appear just the same to those who look on. You may come here to stay with Nancy Tree, well, I’ll go to London if you wish it. I will do all I can to let any wounds caused through me heal, as indeed time does very quickly. You are through the worst, darling. The big thing is you have proved you can do without me. If you had felt otherwise—well, I’d not be writing this letter. Now, sweetheart, I leave for India for certain. Maybe I sail next month, or there is a faint chance I may not leave until after the hot weather. Anyhow, I leave England and all in it for certain, and then your worries are greatly over.
I write this letter hoping it will help you. Remember also that I will always help you in any way that I feel is really for your eventual happiness. You can always call on me because I just lo
ve you with all my heart and soul. There is no need to answer this as it will hurt you to do so.
For Fruity, the future looked bleak.
11
The Passing of the Viceroy
Fruity was well aware that he was not the kind of man that the world—and Baba herself—expected her to marry. Even though she said she returned his feelings, he felt that he should point out his unsuitability from a worldly point of view. Just after Christmas 1924 he wrote to tell her so. “All the love and adoration that God has made me capable of is all I offer you. It’s been yours for some long time now. Do with it as you will—I will understand.
“. . . I am not worthy of you. Things are against us. Age, position, money, brain. I mean you want a lover with ambition, with big ideas, a man to make a name for himself in this so cruel world. I am not blaming—I understand. But I love as you will never (I think) be loved again. Remember—I love you terribly—and I’ll never change.” He was to be proved right on every count.
Fruity had an unexpected ally in the Curzon camp. Grace was anxious for him to bring his suit to a successful conclusion. She did not enjoy seeing Baba unhappy, torn between love and the knowledge that marriage with Fruity would distress Curzon; even more, she wanted to get Baba safely off her hands before launching her own daughter, Marcella (then at finishing school in Paris). Marcella, though extremely pretty, was a shy girl and the last thing Grace wanted during her daughter’s first season was the constant presence of a beautiful stepdaughter distracting possible suitors. “I must say I do like your stepmother,” wrote Fruity to Baba. “She is perfectly sweet to me.” Better still from his point of view, Grace accustomed Curzon to the presence of Fruity in Baba’s life and, more gradually, to the idea that Baba’s feelings were engaged.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 11
