A real minx, this one

Alastair Forbes

TEARS BEFORE BEDTIME by Barbara Skelton Chatting flirtatiously in Montparnas- se's Dome on their way to their first 'sweet night and adorable morning' (Cyril Con- nolly scripsit), Jean Bakewell, the appeti- singly attractive and only slightly androgy- nous Baltimore WASP who was the next year (after but not because he had learned that she was rich) to become Cyril's first wife, told him that she thought his 'pre- dilection for the femme fatale extremely stunted and boyish — you should have got through that', she said, 'by the time you were eighteen.' Twenty years later he had still not got over it and the author of this book is the one who was for a sizeable chunk of his life to hold him in thrall and to have a similar effect on many other men. That first marriage had held the young pair's conjugal attention span for the de- cade up to the war, a much longer sen- tence, incidentally, than many young peo- ple, or old come that, seem nowadays prepared to serve. Despite their comfort- able unearned dollar income, offering in- dependence in the truest sense, several occasions infoi med against them. One had been the beastly and botched back-street abortion an earlier coupling with an un- scrupulous fortune-hunter had forced Jean to have before finding happiness in Cyril's arms. This, it was later to transpire, was to make her not only fat — Cyril following suit through contentment with her excel- lent housekeeping — but also barren, this last to the genuine disappointment of both, despite the affection they bestowed on their surrogate babies, incontinent ferrets

Harnish Hamilton, f12.95

and lemurs. Another was Cyril's randy resolve, on being turned by Jean into a card-carrying heterosexual for ever after, to make up for the lost time of his homintern years by wasting too much of the rest on frantic and insubstantial infide- lities. Pace Auberon Waugh, who, for all his bubbling springs of brilliantly prolific talent not yet having written one word of literary criticism as good as Connolly's worst, admits to still seeing him primarily through the eyes of his own fat clown- check-suited snob of a father, there were, believe it or not, indeed lots of desirable girls desiring to touch and be touched by `The Man of Pleasure', or 'Man of P' for short, as Cyril was quite early on nick- named by Peter Quennell. It was the latter, for a considerable period her lover — not a past position to entitle him to immunity from insult all the way through her book, though he is permitted credit for one good joke at his friend's expense — yet certainly not one she had ever felt it necessary to be needlessly faithful to (he only just missed a Feydeau-like head-on collision with one exiting cuckolder to find her bed 'in rather a pickle and my pyjama bottom flung across the room') who had first brought Barbara to meet Cyril whose sentimental life was, however, at the time already quite encumbered. He had by then begun his 10 years' editorship of Horizon (the best literary magazine in the English-speaking world, be it recalled, and edited by the best writer of literary criticism in the English language), with the help of a troika-harem of girls who spoilt him something rotten two of them very pretty and another, the bossy and pretentious Sonia, later Orwell, in whom he nevertheless saw a kind of blowsy sexiness, especially in her cups, that most of the rest of us found a distinct turn-off. So the reader has some 80 auto- biographical pages in which to get to know the author before, by then already a diva ma non casta and well on the way to being a fully-fledged femme fatale, she begins her love affair with Palinurus. This affair, some appearances to the contrary and most of her book notwithstanding, was A True Love Story indeed, and lasted beyond their marriage, almost into the forever and ever.

Barbara Skelton has proved herself in the past to be a writer of sly perceptions and idiosyncratic style. It is absurd of her to dismiss her A Young Girl's Touch as `driver; she must know it was nothing of the kind. But after ten years' silence, she is a little out of practice.

One of this book's lesser reviewers (she has got enviable red-carpet treatment in some places), an Oxford librarian, who a dozen years ago rather more discerningly detected the 'calming qualities and the almost therapeutic process of recollection', has written in Mr Naim Attallah's maga- zine of 'her rackety upbringing', though it struck me as about par for the middle-class course.

Her Danish blood did not stop her having a sharp temper and a low flash- point. Yet she seems to have acquired a good stock of happy memories too; of an angelic grandmother and also of that same wave-spattered pebbly beach at Hythe so beloved of Elizabeth Bowen. She was also perfectly happy along with her younger sister as a day girl at her Chepstow Villas Catholic Convent (now transformed into apartments too upmarket for all but the yuckiest yuppies) until sacked at puber- ty after the discovery of a bundle of love letters written by herself to herself but signed in a forged hand 'Fred'. Home from boarding at Ashford High School she saw herself still in the glass as tun-faced, with slanting sludge-coloured eyes'. In the lat- ter her pretty Aunt Vera's Armenian husband — known inaccurately in the family as 'the dreadful Dago' — sought no complicity before groping her one evening in her nightie nor did he bother to seek any the next day when telling her herself to grope for some sweets in his schoolboy- fashion-opened-up trouser pocket, giving her a first but as yet indifferent touch of a penis. A school-leaver at 15, she was packed off to London there to room at the YWCA (by a surely Freudian slip this was printed in the proof-copy borrowed from me by Lord Weidenfeld as YMCA). She soon lost her virginity to her father's best and only rich friend, one of those respect- able bourgeois who are completely faithful to their wives and one other woman, their current mistress. Unusually, he was rather generous, her allowance being set at exact- ly half that bestowed on his Grosvenor Square wife. He was clean and Cologne- smelling but careless, so a former mistress had to be charged with arranging an illegal abortion followed by her chaperonage of the victim during convalescence at Reid's Hotel in Madeira. This duenna turned a blind eye to Barbara's fling with the hotel band-leader but sought unsuccessfully to persuade her to hold out for a life annuity from the sugar-daddy who might anyway have forgotten to index it. She couldn't be bothered. What she did not know at the time was that her abortion had left her, like Jean Connolly, barren.

'Cynicism' she writes tad set in'. She was wrong of course. She was sent to India to stay with her father's brother, a general no less. (On the Marseilles-Alexandria leg of the port-out trip, the young Crown Prince Farouk of Egypt was an unseen passenger). A snapshot in jodhpurs shows her far from bun-faced, her green-gold eyes as slantingly compelling as those of her tame leopard companion. In Poona she finally encountered First Love with a poetry-loving, poetry-writing R. E. cap- tain, sympathetically sighted stroking an elephant in the zoo and subsequently found to be fonder of native Indians than of the boring bearers of the White Man's Burden. He not only returned her love but even himself returned, without leave, as a surprise stowaway in her starboard-home cabin as far as Suez. Thence, under arrest, he was sent back to his regiment, not as he had hoped to be dismissed the service and permitted thus to rejoin Barbara, but to go to his death in a North-West Frontier skirmish — leaving her a posthumous pastiche–T. S. Eliot poem ending `. There is always hope. Charles on his way north to the war', lines not less heart- breaking for being without literary merit.

Back in London she had no difficulty, with her wonderful hour-glass figure, per- fect legs and seductive skin, in finding modelling work, though despite her allur- ing feline face she rather lacked the re- quired grace of movement for the job, Schiaparelli's chief vendeuse complaining that she was 'completement VIDE!' I doubt if this was ever quite the case, even when as high as a kite on booze or kif, but her thoughts were doubtless often wandering to the Kent countryside where she had with uncharacteristic providence acquired for £400 (£40,000 plus today?) a small cottage, nicknamed Cot, lovingly watched over in her absences and sometimes in her pre- sence by the nevertheless happily married Police-Constable Boot, who in wartime was to turn into as faithful and in his fashion as stylishly gossipy a letter-writer as that curlicues calligraphist Peter Quennell.

She hurries from a last post-Munich skiing holiday on the Parsenn to first the Phoney War and then the real thing which brought Dunkirk and then the fall of France and thereafter the arrival in Lon- don of De Gaulle and his Francais-Libres who, making free with London, made it seem less provincial, not least by creating healthy competition between the capital's French restaurateurs. Readers surprised to learn how much fish, fowl and game, to say nothing of offal, were consumed should know that it was all off the ration. One of the General's closest advisers at his Carlton Gardens HQ was Georges Boris (his real name, N.B. Tony Powell) a prominent leftish economist whose sister, niece and nephew (Olivier Wormser, be- fore his death to become a brilliant Gov- ernor of the Banque de France), all from the Haute Juiverie, Intellectuelle, Non- Croyante et Non-Pratiquante, I myself had known since childhood. Boris, Barbara writes, 'Kind and intelligent with bound- less energy . . . was desperate for a woman and I seemed to fit the bill.'

The author complains only of his jealousy (a fault common to most of her subsequent French lovers, few of them as distinguished as Boris). 'Once at a party, I was sitting beside another Free French- man, when Georges came across the room and slapped my face. But then I was in love with him so the gesture was pleasing.' Before long, with Mme Boris soon due to turn up, they split and she 'had no particu- lar feeling for him', when a year later, he gave her a Christmas present at a chance meeting probably in the centrally situated and heated Ritz, where old and young of all descriptions and sexual bents spent a great deal of their time in the hours preceding the opening of the night-clubs, much as the Adlon and Eden hotels were serving in Berlin. It was indeed a Gar- goyle Club regular, the surprisingly seldom sober Soviet agent Donald Maclean, who got her on the Foreign Service strength (the pock-marked Osbert Lancaster, who might have been supposed close to her von Stroheim ideal, had refused to support her candidature on being refused her favours) as a cipher clerk. As which, after a quite arduous three months' training, she was dispatched to Cairo by risky convoy via Freetown and Takoradi to Lagos and thence by air with a stop-over in the Sudan. This journey is very amusingly recounted, the narrative sparing neither her own sensual weaknesses (or strengths, depend- ing on how you look at them) nor the special brand of resigned wry humour she brings to bear on them.

Though in view of his expressed 'liking to have cheerful people about, none of your English poker faces for me,' King Farouk's invitation to her to join his entourage may seem on the face of it puzzling, what girl would not in her shoes have accepted it as far preferable to one to dine with that elephantinely clumsy diplo- matist Miles Lampson, the ambassador boss on whose orders she was soon re- moved from Cairo as a security risk and posted, after a fortnight's picaresque leave spent hitchhiking about Palestine and the Levant, first to Allied HQ at Caserta and then to Athens in mid-civil war. Farouk had excellent manners, was scrupulously clean and so far from being bored in his company she found 'his infantile side rather endearing'. Nor was she inconveni- enced by his gregariousness being ex- tended to the bedroom where there was nothing like a crowd and partouses were, if the expression be permitted, de rigueur. Her own performances clearly kept the British end well up and, although she says she would have preferred a split cane to the dressing-gown cord with which he chose to beat her, earned her a right royal seal of approval. 'She's a real minx, this one'. He seems to have rumbled his English favourite's personality pretty well — odd that, with his love of simple puns, he did not dub her farouche; responding to her praise for his driving during their only reunion years later when the days of his reign were numbered, by which time his glandular malfunctions had turned him into 'a huge sawdust filled teddy bear badly sewn at the seams' with 'A com- pliment from you is a rarity. I'll take it'. That reunion had taken place during the Year of what used to be called her 'trial marriage' to Cyril Connolly, a liaison first engineered by the 'very pretty' Natalie Newhouse, more often known as Nut- house, an emotionally and physically accident-prone girl, later the wife of the alcoholic but accomplished actor Robert Newton. Skelton forgets to relate how, when after putting her foot through a skylight while roof-top sunbathing, Natalie had fallen stark naked and swearing into some area where, her leg badly broken, she had to endure being apostrophised by a passer-by with an " Ere, you can't go about with no clothes on like that. It's disgust- ing,' a very British incident. Apart from her reluctant Wendy visit to Peter Pan Farouk in France, (for which Cyril sought and spent generous expenses from the Daily Mail in the hope of an exclusive interview which not all Barbara's Scheherazade supplications could secure for him, a case of mangoes being sent him as a consolation prize), her diary shows that the year was passed chiefly at the cottage. What it does not show, save in the charming back of the book-jacket picture of her looking up at him as they stand at its gate, is what others beside myself well remember, namely that she was evidently deeply in love with Cyril and he utterly bewitched by her, though, at least verbally he struggled from time to time to fight free of her spell. Only three of her sentences give the show away. 'Oak Cottage' incidentally renamed Oak Coffin by Cyril's best black humour — 'was indeed very small. It was only because we loved each other [my italics] that it was possible to live there at all. And no doubt it was partly due to our cramped conditions that we squab- bled so much.' After once panting up a slope through a herd of E.E.C. subsidised cows to inspect my own Sussex premises, he observed, after spotting a Radiguet first edition missing from his collection that I had en grand seigneur to give him, 'This isn't what I call a cottage; it has three loos.'

Besides, lots of their friends quarrelled just as much as they did if not so amusingly or memorably. Indeed, I was rather sur- prised to see her qualify Robert Kee's 'air of violence' as 'misleading'. Seeing red wine dribbling down Cyril, she thought- lessly asks 'What's that on your face?' and `Hate!' he swiftly replies, no doubt trying hard not to laugh at his joke. Years and years before they had met, in Spain (a country she describes awfully well when he finally takes her there to stay with his former American in-laws, the hospitable but tricky Davises) he had been much taken with a copla he liked enough to translate:

Mas quisiera contigo Vivir en guerra Que estar en paz con otra Que me quisiera Rather would I love with you To live at war Than at peace with someone who would love me more

And, as if to confirm the foregoing: `Saturday was the gayest day of the week. We would tear into Folkestone with Cyril doing witty impersonations all the way'. (I should add that to the end of his life these were a delight, though only one is quoted — Alan Pryce-Jones on one of those awful critics programmes; 'I thought it MADLY agreeable. I couldn't have enjoyed myself more'). 'After lunch we usually had a row.' After lunch of course they should have made love. But Cyril's libido was by no means still at the youthful peak it had been when he could boast of 'five times' in a Valencia afternoon and evening with his first wife. When it became evident that the female South American coati on which they lavished much frustrated parental affection needed a mate; Barbara could not help remarking that the cottage 'was full of unsatisfied women'. Cyril was a non-pareil father-figure with the pedagogic gift she greatly enjoyed profiting from but it was for carnal knowledge that she hankered, the hurly-burly of the apache dance's aftermath rather than a Cyril who `saying he was pleased to see me, whipped off his dressing-gown, sprang into bed and was asleep in no time'.

Read like a discursive letter interspersed with diary extracts or the notebook of a novelist-nouvelliste, Barbara Skelton's 200 pages (`Take notes and fix moments but leave the task of setting them in order to your old age', Cyril had advised himself in youth) provided me with enormous plea- sure and many of her anecdotes are as funny as they are fascinating. (Alan Pryce- Jones himself, despite the sustained bitchi- ness of Barbara's pen and camera when directed at his first fiancée Joan Eyres- Monsell, sometime Rayner now Leigh- Fermor, will surely find it difficult not to pronounce it 'MADLY agreeable'). Even Lord Weidenfeld told me he had liked it, though he is in an understandable state of apprehension about Vol 2 due next year. One mauvaise langue has even put it about that he was planning to remarry Barbara to put a stop to it, but I fear the truth is that it is with a much lesser Barbara and lesser writer, though a younger one, that he has it in mind to make his fourth try at the Dunmow Flitch.

If Hamish Hamilton had spent as much trouble over editing this nevertheless en- joyable book as they did organising its launch dinner at Le Jardin des Gourmets it would have been time and money well spent. The mistakes, proof-reading and otherwise, are often grotesque and far too numerous to list, though all of them could have been avoided, and probably would have been if Roger Machell had still been alive. The footnotes are quite insufficient and where they exist often absurdly in- appropriate. Bernard Berenson is quoted as once deploring 'some appallingly bad grammer (sic)' but would have deplored still more the rest of the book's bad spelling. One good reason why the author's A Young Girl's Touch was a work of art was that, long after the storm of the world had blown them apart, Cyril had spent such long hours polishing and editing it for her, not without pride. She really must earnestly strive for equally high standards next time. For the rest, it seems to me that she was lucky to love and be loved by that remarkable man and only just manqué genius. A little, even a lot of her espiegle egg on his ugly old mug has not made him a jot less widely missed as a friend or less endlessly rereadable as a writer.