Those Wild Wyndhams (21 page)

The following year, the poetry competition’s theme was ‘Marriage’. Harry Cust’s offering brimmed with ironic self-knowledge:

Harry Cust, by his lover, Violet Manners.

Contemporary paeans to Harry’s heavenly blond appearance must be measured against the adolescent Judith Blunt’s cool estimation: ‘fat podgy and coarse, his hair and eyes too light for his red complexion’.
⁸
Indisputably, ‘Cust bulged with sex.’
⁹
His quicksilver charm could, and did – quite literally – lay all before him. His ‘harem’
¹⁰
included his long-term mistress, Violet Granby (as Violet Manners had become when her husband succeeded as Marquess), and Lucy Graham Smith. Harry did not adhere to the Souls’ morality. He conceived sexual improvidence as an aristocratic right; moral restraint was mealy-mouthed and middle class
.
‘What if all had been forbidden
but
the apple? Imagine polygamy advanced by God and man, and at this moment all the upper classes would have been dwelling in the joys of illicit constancy and despising the cowardly unenterprising middle classes who were forced to content themselves with profligacy,’ he mused to Mary in 1887.
¹¹
Violet had little truck with Souls morality either. By 1892, she was pregnant with Harry’s child.

By the summer of 1892, Pamela was the only one of the Wyndhams’ children yet to be settled. In May, Guy had married Edwina Brooke (nicknamed ‘Minnie’), a widow with two children who was five years older than he. Both Madeline Wyndham’s sons had sought out maternal figures, but this marriage was to prove very happy
.
Shortly afterwards Harry Cust joined the Wyndhams for a performance of Wagner’s
Tannhäuser
at Covent Garden, part of a sell-out season of German opera conducted by Richard Mahler. In retrospect, the choice was ominous.
Tannhäuser
skated on the edge of respectability, examining the choice between sacred and profane love. Wilde used it in
Dorian Gray
to reflect the darkness of his hero’s own soul
.

Seven years before, Laura Tennant had pitied women, who were expected to fight with ‘unarmed breast … as strongly as the cap and pied man’, and warned Mary about the capacity of the world ‘to see things in embryo’.
¹²
As Mary sat in the Wyndhams’ box and saw Harry’s exaggerated flirting with Pamela, leaning low over her to point out some detail in the programme, whispering in her ear, she was filled with foreboding. Harry was a close friend, but he was a dangerous proposition. His behaviour had the capacity to damage Pamela’s reputation severely. Yet it was possible that Harry was serious. To test if it was so, Mary invited him to Stanway when Pamela was there. By unspoken rule, if he accepted, it would mean that he planned to court her in earnest. Harry turned down the invitation. Mary and Madeline Wyndham decided to nip things in the bud before any further harm was done. They forbade both parties from seeing each other. A month passed in this way, causing Pamela intense anxiety as she scanned crowded ballrooms for his tall blond
figure, playing out in her mind what would happen if he ‘accidentally’ appeared.

Harry’s eventual appearance was every bit as dramatic as Pamela might have hoped. On 15 August 1892, a fortnight before Violet Granby gave birth to his daughter, Harry pitched up unannounced in Belgrave Square’s drawing room before a startled Madeline and a delighted Pamela. The incident, as recounted by Pamela to Mary, had aspects of a drawing-room farce. Barely had Harry managed to explain that he had turned down the Stanway invitation because ‘He does not want to make love to me (only less crudely expressed by him!)’
¹³
than the butler Icke precipitated into the drawing room a young ‘Mr. Allhuisen’ who was intending, most likely, to pay court to Pamela. Harry was hustled off into the front drawing room by Madeline Wyndham, Pamela left to sit and drink tea with the hapless ‘Mr. A’ while trying to eavesdrop on the muffled conversation behind the double doors.

Behind those doors, Madeline Wyndham laid down the law in somewhat unsatisfactory fashion. She told Harry he could see Pamela only if he promised to stop his ‘coarse flirting’. If and when he was willing to seek her hand in earnest, then he could. Harry promised. Pamela was delighted, although she protested that Harry had never been flirting. ‘His manner which has grown upon him misleads people … he says “How do you do” as if it was “you are the Soul of my Life” but he is unaware of this, I really believe like people who clear their throats continually,’ she explained to Mary.
¹⁴

Osbert Sitwell, meeting Pamela in middle age, recognized the discordance between her image and her reality. ‘She was – though she in no way realized it – far from being a rather remote, reasonable woman, under which guise she saw herself, presented herself, and was accepted, but, to the contrary … violently and enchantingly prejudiced in a thousand directions.’ Her sitting room was filled with photographs ‘of the most astonishing rakes and rips’ whom Pamela would ‘unflaggingly, and with the greatest display of ingenuity defend’ or, where defence was impossible, ‘ignore’.
¹⁵
Pamela declared that she would not be ‘deceived by outside views!!!’,
¹⁶
but she was more than capable of deceiving herself by her own tortuous logic.

Pamela maintained to Mary that the best way for her to get over Harry was ‘by
knowing
him not by not seeing him’, since separation only allowed her to gild him in her imagination. ‘If I in any way let my friendship with him spoil my life it would be voluntary foolishness on my part …’ she added.
¹⁷
Mary worried that Pamela was motivated merely by pique. When she found out that Pamela – who as Madeline Wyndham’s ‘Benjamina’, a biblical allusion to Jacob’s beloved youngest son, could twist her mother around her little finger – had persuaded Madeline to invite Harry to Clouds she was horrified. She immediately wrote to Madeline warning against this course of action. It was too late.

Harry joined the tail end of a house party to find Pamela distracted by the company of a young man called Arthur Paget.
¹⁸
It was idyllic late-summer weather. The party had spent a ‘delicious’ week making excursions to Stonehenge, and taking long walks across the Downs. Pamela confessed to Mary privately that she thought more ‘highly of [Paget than] any man before … delightfully clever, original & nice – good & kind & honest (what a funny lot of adjectives strung together!)’.
¹⁹
Harry sulked, moped and glowered until finally (as no doubt he designed) Pamela confronted him on the Sunday afternoon in the empty hall, whereupon he told her ‘all that he meant
not
to say (so he says) but
I
think, it was all that he
did not expect to feel
’.

Pamela wrote the conversation out in full for Mary. The exchange is worthy of a cheap melodrama, with Harry the moustache-twirling villain. Harry declared his love, explained (without explaining why) that he was not free, and asked Pamela – supposing that, in two years or so, he could make himself free – whether she would agree to be his wife. To Pamela’s surprise, as she stood incredulously by the fireplace with hands like ice, she found herself saying that she was not sure:

‘In the Summer I was afraid I let you think more than I was prepared actually to
do
– I think that I have changed.’

And he put his head against the mantelpiece, & looked very miserable, & said: ‘Perhaps you are right’

‘But I cannot believe it – it seems so odd if you could, would you ask me to be your wife?’

‘I would’

‘And if in this next year I was to marry somebody would you mind?’

‘I would mind
awfully
’

& then we were quiet for a long time.

Harry then broke out into a rage of self-recrimination, berating himself for having broken his word to Madeline Wyndham, blaming his intolerable, uncontrollable jealousy, his feeling that to lose Pamela would be to miss ‘a most perfect good’:

& again & again, I kept saying ‘I do not think you mean it – are you serious – do you really love me or do you think you do?’

‘
I love you, & you only, & you always
’

Mary, would even the most self-blinded flirt say that? Surely he would have kept to the suggested vaguenesses that he has hitherto spoken in – not compromised himself unless he meant it?

Harry’s final words were a masterpiece of manipulation: ‘I want to try & get as right as I can – and in the mean time no words of mine are to tie you in the very
least
– think of nothing I have said – when you are tired of me … you are to throw me away like a sucked orange, & marry the best man you can – though I shall be
furious
if you do – but that will be nothing to you.’
²⁰

On hearing of this ‘episode’, Mary was furious: ‘just like him I feel inclined to say & think he has shown great want of self-control
his great vice
. Why not now if he really means it?’ she asked her baffled mother.
²¹
Mary’s fingers were crossed for the ‘nice-sounding’ Arthur Paget, but she knew the ‘horribly clever’ Harry and her own sister too well for that. Mary was right. By Christmas Arthur Paget and another young suitor had been dispatched, the Wyndhams’ friends were beginning to gossip that the unorthodox parenting methods practised at Clouds were coming home to roost, and Percy was concerned enough to write to Mary about the matter at what was, for him, some length.

As a rule Percy concerned himself little with his children’s marriages. His personal experience made him sympathetic to the pull of ‘magnetisme, attraction’. He thought parents pushing their children into loveless, wealthy marriages were simply ‘wrong’. But he believed that relying upon mere attraction was far worse and he baulked at the ‘apparently insane’ justification of ‘love conquers all’ woven by his youngest daughter and Harry Cust.
²²
When he tried to enumerate the risks of marrying a man like Cust, he had to put his pen down, overwhelmed by the multitude that presented themselves. Eventually, he adopted a light-hearted tone, dividing the world into two camps: the ‘mad’ and the sane, who were their ‘keepers’. ‘Myself, Mamma and Pamela are undoubtedly mad, Mananai I am
sure
is a keeper.’ Mary seemed to veer between the two. Percy was clear where Harry stood. ‘N.B. He, Cust, is sane,’ he wrote in a tiny postscript that revealed the root of his misgivings: for, spiderlike, Cust seemed to be playing with Pamela, trapped like a fly in his web.
²³

As Christmas approached, the atmosphere at Clouds was tense. Percy’s doubts about Cust were growing, as were his fears for his wife’s state of mind. His irascibility was enhanced by the presence of all four of Mary’s children in the nurseries. Mary, considered by her contemporaries to be a devoted mother, was frequently absent from her children for extended periods of time: she spent almost six months of both 1890 and 1891, whether at a house-party, on a cure, ill, or in London, apart from them.
¹
During such absences, Mary frequently left her children at Clouds. It saved the Elchos the expense of running Stanway in their absence; and Mary disliked taking her children to Gosford, believing the journey too long. Cynthia Charteris visited Gosford for the first time that she could remember when she was six years old.
¹

Three and a half years of no physical relations had shown what a binding force sex had been for the Elchos. They bickered like children. In January 1891, Mary sent Evelyn de Vesci a long apology for their recent confused departure from Abbey Leix. The morning they were due to leave, Hugo refused: ‘said he had a boil on his nose & sat on his bed & would not dress’. Mary stormed off to the railway station, servants and luggage in tow before her rage quelled. She returned and played the ‘ma[r]tyr’. Eventually they took the later train that Hugo had wanted. In the process, Mary accidentally made off with John de Vesci’s latest copy of the periodical
Nineteenth Century
. She told Evelyn that she had left it with the railway porter. ‘I hope he will get [it].’
³
Evelyn was wearily familiar with contretemps like these.