Faul Lines Page 5

  Frank Wooster had entered Eugène’s life before the war. The illegitimate son of the Birmingham industrialist Sir Frank Leyland, he was a spendthrift who had run through such money as his father had given him. Educated at Uppingham, he had neither the skill nor the intention to earn his living, preferring to gravitate towards rich people willing to pay for him. One such was Paul Goldschmidt, himself raw material for Proust as a well-connected Jewish homosexual, and Frank moved to Paris to live with him. In those early days he had played golf at Le Touquet with P. G. Wodehouse, and it seemed plausible that Bertie Wooster had immortalized Frank’s surname with its unusual spelling. Frankie Donaldson, the first biographer of Wodehouse, was in some doubt that the dates fitted, so depriving Frank Wooster of what would have been his major contribution to the gaiety of nations.

  Frank had undoubted social gifts and a certain stagey presence. By the time I knew him, he had aged very well, and was still handsome and his manner debonair. His hair was white with a slight blue rinse to it. The drawl in his voice left the impression that nothing in life needs to be taken too seriously. A little vain, a little condescending, he was immensely careful about his appearance, dressy in a Noël Coward mode with silk shirts from Sulka and ties from Charvet. At informal moments he liked to sport a foulard round the neck and what used to be called co-respondent shoes, their white leather uppers contrasting with brown toe-caps. Asked what Frank was like, Harold Acton, someone more likely to sympathise than criticise, replied in the words of the music-hall song about a dandy of the period, “He was Gilbert the Filbert.” Commissioned in the First War in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, he had been on the Dardanelles expedition and remained in touch with General Sir Ian Hamilton, its commander. Serving later in France, he had been taken prisoner at Ypres, and his health was said to be delicate ever afterwards. Virtually his sole possession was a regimental drum turned into an unlikely coffee table in the drawing room of Mitzi’s rue de Surène flat.

  In her diaries Mitzi describes how in 1922 Eugène took her to Florence and brought Frank with him. Her coup de foudre on meeting Eugène’s friend was to determine their lives. The two of them went out sightseeing by themselves. Here was the first of numerous future occasions when something external, a gesture of Frank’s, a conversation by a particular tree, the sight of a cloud or a sunset, the gift of a piece of jewelry, the plucking of a flower, was enough to convince her that she was the chosen beneficiary of a higher order of things. During the outing that day in Florence they visited what she calls the cloisters at Montefalco, and there Frank’s “beautiful profile” was consecrated, so to speak. (These cloisters cannot be identified; there seems to be more than one Montefalco.) Whenever Frank was to do or say something that confirmed her idealisation, she attributed “a Donatello look” to him. “Somehow I realized that he would be my comforter,” she writes of that Florence outing – cleverly evasive wording in the circumstances. What’s more, Gustav had died two years previously, she had inherited Meidling from him, and she lost no time taking Frank there, in other words showing him who and what she was.

  Mitzi by then was the mother of four children; a fifth had been stillborn. Seemingly a conventional wife always disposed to indulge her husband, in her diaries she is in the habit of referring to Eugène either as Cocky or more usually as “my darling” or “my old darling.” Her obvious impatience with him nonetheless unbalances their relationship. Straightaway after her Florentine epiphany with Frank, she lets Eugène slip out of her daily narrative to the extent that he seems eclipsed. Replacing him as the target of her passions and plans, Frank becomes “my angel.” Repeating herself, she credits him with making her more and more ecstatically happy, linking this to a novel and unexpected note of religiosity. Throughout the 1920s many a day in the diary is opened or else closed with the refrain, “God bless us all three.”

  Here she is writing on 2 May 1928 (which happened to be Poppy’s fourteenth birthday but this she does not mention.) “I knew it, angel, I knew you would call me up … he woke me up at nine, oh! How sweet, asking a hundred times how I was…. Oh! the lovely hope in me all day of a sight of my necessary blessing.” [Frank arrives that evening at her flat in the Rue de Surène] “My angel! He looks a little tired, has surely got to look much older since two months, but he is bright, radiant. Each word, each look was a blessing kiss [ sic] … It struck me more than ever that we had two bodies. We are so perfectly one soul that I can never quite realize we are two.” In subsequent entries she describes herself kneeling before him, kissing his hands and repeating, “I felt our souls were one, one for ever.”

  At one point a friend, Lucie de Langlade, asked in a knowing whisper how Frank was. Mitzi was infuriated that anyone could mistake her angel for her lover – this relationship had to be on a plane elevated far above the physical. My father was adamant that Frank had confessed to him on the subject of sex, “There is one thing I can’t do for my Mary.” At another point she quotes Frank’s prediction of disaster in the event that she gave herself to him: “You always say if I deceived Cocky I would be quite lost.” Yet there are plenty of other intimations: “When he lay in my arms, looking up at me and saying so often, you sweetest one, I could but press him to my heart and long that all the prayer that was in me could pass through my hands and eyes over to him.” The tone of exaltation and wish fulfillment leaves open the reality of their relationship.

  On a journey before the First World War in the north of France, Eugène and Frank had seen an eighteenth-century house in Montreuil-sur-mer, once a garrison town with historic fortifications by Vauban, and half an hour from Le Touquet and the seaside. Built for a senior officer, the house is an architectural triumph of classical symmetry and ornamental detail, with large rooms on the ground floor for entertaining and half a dozen bedrooms upstairs. Imagining themselves living there in a kind of provincial retreat, the two men had never forgotten it and early in 1928 paid a visit there.

  The house is well within motoring distance of Royaumont and it was a caprice to hanker after it. Mitzi alone had the means to make the purchase and soon she incorporates it into her scheme of things as “our dream house.” The wife of the owner had the throwaway line, “When one of us dies, I shall retire to the country.” During negotiations, Mitzi comments that Frank “adores the Montreuil house we love. May we get it so that he can enjoy peaceful days there.” A visit to the house at that moment with Frank and Eugène led her to exclaim in her diary that she was “happy, more than one can think or know. I looked from one to the other of my dearest ones and prayed my gratitude.” That June she fires off another exclamation, “Montreuil is ours!”

  Was she facilitating the homosexual relationship between the two men or on the contrary breaking it up, and was this done consciously or unconsciously? For Frank, the acquisition of Montreuil was a security for the future and a tribute to his powers of manipulation. Was she hoping thereby to claim Frank for herself or to punish Eugène for being unfaithful to her? Impulses of revenge and possessiveness merge inseparably with illusion. Eugène’s surviving letters and little messages on single sheets of paper express rather pathetic distress that what was happiness to her was unhappiness to him. The apologetic tone is sometimes plangent, sometimes abject. Evidently he realised what was happening, but felt helpless to do anything about it.

  In November 1928, while the colour schemes and interior decoration at Montreuil were still under discussion, Mitzi and Eugène set off on a journey to Asia that was intended to take six months. Bubbles, their eldest daughter, accompanied them. This was an act of reparation for a crisis that strained family relationships. On the lookout for experts to manage her finances, Mitzi had found one called Toto Morange, and she thought to cement his loyalty by pushing Bubbles to become engaged to him. At the last moment, Bubbles refused to go through with this arranged marriage, the wedding presents had to be returned, and mother and daughter reconciled. Mitzi regretted leaving Max, “my adored Sonny,” but spared no thought fo
r the two abandoned youngest daughters except to observe that Poppy cried bitterly when her parents left Royaumont. With Miss Purdue, a lady’s maid for Mitzi, and twenty pieces of luggage, they embarked on a liner at Marseilles.

  They were to visit places in Ceylon and Indonesia; they liked Singapore and Kuala Lumpur; for Mitzi Penang and Angkor Wat were special highlights. In the manner of travellers, they enjoyed sunsets, animals, museums, choosing batik in the market and buying a picture from Walter Spies, the artist who was to become famous for his landscapes of the Dutch East Indies. But underneath the leisure and the luxury, the drama of this triangle was playing out. In the process Mitzi brought to a head the tactic of divide and rule that she applied in matters great and small for the rest of her life.

  The dominant character, Mitzi perhaps recognized where her feelings must lead her and sought to justify herself. At the outset, at any rate, she found Eugène “like a baby…. I can’t say how adorable and perfect he is these days in every way. And so sweet to me.” This mood did not last. Frank was trailing them on another liner on much the same course around Asia, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind. Through him “my soul feels as if it has found its harbour.” A ship’s concert sent her hurrying to her cabin to be alone with her thoughts: “I longed for the sight of you.” Eugène had become “quite stiff,” upsetting her. Seasonal shipboard parties were a strain, “He is awful at Christmas and New Year … what bliss that I can stand this now without the pain and sadness it used to give me.” She goes on as if addressing him, “How terrible you can be, how you take it out of me and for such nothings. A naughty spoilt child. When I think of the old age you are going to have I tremble.” In Vietnam one night towards the end of January 1929 Eugène went out by himself to Cholon, a part of Saigon, and did not return until almost dawn. “If I died you could go on living,” he then told her as recrimination got underway next morning, “not so if anything happened to Frank, he’s the air you breathe.”

  After Mitzi’s death, my Aunt Bubbles and I sorted some of her papers. In a folder was Eugène’s account of this voyage. Humidity had so affected the paper that the ink had run and there could be no discovering his side of the story. But Mitzi had preserved in a separate packet every one of the letters and telegrams from Frank that had been waiting for her in hotels and agents’ offices on shore. Surprisingly anodyne, even banal, they are full of the kind of advice one tourist might give another about where to stay and what to see. Rapture about souls is conspicuously absent. At most, he regretted their separation; he spoke of Eugène as “a funny old man” whom he hoped was helping and not hindering. Moreover he had with him someone he describes as “my little friend,” who bought things for himself rather too expensively in the market.

  “One doesn’t introduce someone like that into one’s family,” Eugène regretted. But that is what he had done. When they were on a ship sailing from Hong Kong to Shanghai this tangle of sexual competition and deception took a sudden unexpected turn. Eugène fell ill with pneumonia. In a privately printed memoir with the title I Loved My Stay, Bubbles records how her round-the-world adventure came to an end in the Astor House Hotel in Shanghai. “Everything began to crumble about me.” Nursing him, Miss Purdue reported to Mitzi that he seemed to be very upset, “He fears that he is not the only one in your heart.” Mitzi immediately lost her temper and went to talk to him “with a look of sheer fury on her face,” and a parting shot to Bubbles and Miss Purdue, “Don’t worry! I’m not going to hurt your patient.” Not quite fifty-three, Eugène died in the hotel on 1 March. A fortnight later the women sailed across the Pacific, with Eugène’s body on board. At Honolulu Frank joined them, and Bubbles confined herself to saying that at that sad time he was “a great help and comfort.”

  In the eyes of his children their father had been a victim, and victimhood did not suit him. Mitzi did not ask herself if he had died an unhappy man on her account. From the moment Eugène fell ill Mitzi stopped writing her diary. When she resumed four months later in July, she granted herself absolution. Although actually the main actor in the emotional struggle that had come to its unforeseen end in Shanghai, she depicted herself as passive. She was able to repress guilt by denying the way she had manipulated her husband and his lover. As though it was all the doing of these two men, she had been swung on an emotional seesaw of suffering and salvation, and on page after page she repeated herself in the manner of this passage: “God bless those who are left me. I thought I could never write again, but I must note these last days, must put down each detail of these peaceful, sweet, helpful hours. Without you, my angel, I could never have lived on, have stayed alone without my adored one…. Be blessed for the blessing of your sweetness, for each understanding look, for each comprehensive kiss, for those long dear talks about our adored one.” In one or two rooms at Royaumont, photographs of Eugène had a tombstone formality. He became something of an unperson, to the point that Alan used to say, “If we had known Eugène we wouldn’t have liked him.”

  That July, she and Frank decided that the strain of events had exhausted them and they had to escape. Just as she had shown him her Vienna so he would retrace for her sake some of his early life in England. The hotel in Eastbourne where they stayed, the rustic cottage they wondered whether to rent, were far removed from anything in her experience. During a walk on Beachy Head he told her that once before on this very spot he had heard an inner voice saying, “Do not despair, someone needs you,” whereupon he took her in his arms, “and now I know you were the one.” Whether by chance or design, the image he presented of himself corresponded exactly to the image she cultivated of him. At the age of six he had been sent to St. Andrew’s, a preparatory school nearby. They went visiting. Whether naively or not, she lets drop that the Brown family running the school “wondered at a lady friend of Frank’s.” However, Miss Brown was impressed by Mitzi’s deep mourning and upgraded her from Baroness to Countess. Mitzi came away satisfied that Frank had been “a delicate sensitive child,” and the separation from the mother he loved so tenderly was “the first great sorrow of his youth.” It is impossible to decide whether guilt, schizophrenia, or plain absence of self-awareness was impelling her coincidentally and frequently to switch from devotion to Frank straight into this sort of counterpoint about Eugène: “Oh! My Cocky, I cannot think of you without thinking that I can never, never, never stand the terrible cruel crisis. Oh! my darling, how could you die, where are you. In my heart more than ever alive as long as I live.”

  Mitzi’s children could not fail to observe how Frank had supplanted Eugène. That their father’s male lover should captivate their mother was the subject of endless speculation. Bubbles was virtually alone in having a good word to say for him. Born in 1907, she was a greater beauty than her younger sisters and made them aware of it too. Back in Austria in the autumn of 1929, Mitzi and Bubbles stayed at Langau, the home of Alphonse and Clarice Rothschild. A suspicious Mitzi asked Bubbles if she was in love, and discovered that she had fallen for Eduardo Propper de Callejon, a Spanish diplomat and supposedly the lover of Clarice Rothschild. A man of the world, he was thirteen years older than Bubbles. Mitzi invited him to lunch at Meidling, “to have a look at him,” she wrote. “He upset me terribly. To lunch we also had Alice Townshend, the widow of General Townshend of Kut [where he and his troops surrendered to the Turks in 1917] as she is née Cahen d’Anvers [an eminent Jewish family] of Paris. She is more British than the British. At lunch I heard this Spaniard say, Remember and note my words, in ten years it will be the end of England. Alice after lunch said, Throw that creature out, he is out to marry Bubbles.” Frank was in Munich and in October she summoned him to come and to make “his friend Bubbles” understand that she should give up Eduardo. But he concluded otherwise: The couple would be happy, and besides, “You are in business with interests all over the world and a diplomat can come in handy.” That was enough to settle it. On December 28 the Abbé Mugnier, a veteran of the Proustian circle, married Bubbles and Eduardo in
the church at Asnières, two or three miles from Royaumont. Eduardo was a Catholic through his mother, with Jewish origins through his father. He insisted that Bubbles become Spanish but said he would never put pressure on her to convert to Catholicism. Mitzi had chosen the date for the wedding, but because it fell within the year of Eugène’s death as usual she soon convinced herself that others were behaving with the express purpose of causing her to suffer.

  In the summer of 1930, Max summoned Frank to his house in Paris, and the fact that he was still in bed when Frank arrived must have spoken volumes. He had an ultimatum to deliver and it would not take long. He was now the head of the family, he said, he had been made unhappy by Frank and he did not want his younger sisters to go through what he had gone through. Frank was asked to leave at once for Royaumont, take away clothes he had left there and never come back. Instead he went to Mitzi’s flat in the Rue de Surène, where she found him lying on a chaise-longue looking ill. “It might kill you, the sorrow of it all,” he began. Playing on her emotional neediness, he explained that Max adored her and always felt that too much of her love went to him, Frank. Nor could he see how he had made anyone unhappy. Here was a clever appeal to take his side while finding a plausible excuse for the behaviour of the Sonny she claimed to adore. She fell in with it: “Long and silently, I kissed his hands and then very gently I told him, Max has married us.”

  The indignant Mitzi immediately confronted Max: Did he expect that she was never again going to see Frank? Unconditionally surrendering, he apologized and would make what amends he could. He and his younger sisters a few weeks later accompanied Mitzi to the Bayreuth festival. They then stayed at the Grand Hotel in Nuremburg. As though the scene ordering him to depart had never occurred, Frank came over from Berchtesgaden where he was with friends, and moved into the hotel. “I went to bed at 10,” Mitzi noted, “he undressed and in that red and white pyjama that suits him so beautifully he lay on the bed beside mine. I cuddled up in his arms. Utter confidence. Utter pure joy. My heart was beating much faster than his…. I prayed pressing his head to my heart. He stayed there. All at once he jumped up and said, ‘Must go now, my darling.’ How I longed for him to stay but when he says he wants to go I know it’s right towards our pure oneness that he goes [sic].”