The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me by Sofka Zinovieff Read Free Book Online

duty. Oddly, despite their alleged antipathy, his wife was on the boat too – her absence at the English memorial service was due to her being still at sea. Julia caused a family rumpus by remarrying the following year, confessing in a letter to her son, ‘I do not feel so sad as I thought I would. After all I had not a very happy time with your Father, and as you say, one ought to live a little for oneself! I wonder if you will be very surprised to hear that Col. Ward Bennitt is very anxious to marry me. It seems so funny at my age to have anyone so wildly in love with me!’
    GERALD IN 1905 AGED TWENTY-TWO, WHEN HE FIRST FAILED TO BECOME A DIPLOMAT
    The ageing newly-weds rented a new home in Berkshire – Faringdon House – and Gerald often went to stay there when he was in England. Old photographs show the house and gardens at this time in its more conventional Edwardian guise: ornate flowerbeds on the lawns, potted ferns in the drawing room, and lace-draped ladies reclining on wicker chairs on the porch. Creepers sprawl across the facade, so it looks very different to Nancy Mitford’s later description of the house as ‘plain and grey and square and solid’.39
    A CREEPER-CLAD FARINGDON HOUSE SOON AFTER GERALD’S MOTHER MOVED IN WITH HER NEW HUSBAND
    So much had changed around him, but Gerald was still frustratingly without direction or achievement. His lack of musical training would appear to rule out a career in that direction and the Foreign Office evidently didn’t want him. He was hardly on the look-out for a wealthy wife, as his father had been. The future must have looked quite bleak.

CHAPTER THREE
Russians, Radicals and Roman Catholics
    GED TWENTY-SIX, Gerald finally entered the diplomatic service, albeit as an honorary (i.e. unpaid) attaché, and left for the British Embassy in Constantinople. This was one way of starting a diplomatic career if an applicant was not successful in the exams, and it allowed Gerald to establish an existence that was not pressured by too many professional duties and in which he could pursue his own interests and pleasures. He set off in February 1909, travelling on the fabled belle époque Orient Express, which moved slowly through deep snow after its stop at Vienna. Leaving the familiar environment of Europe, Gerald must have found Constantinople a different world. The exotic theatricality of the polyglot, multicultural ‘Paris of the East’ appealed to him, with its colourful, diverse inhabitants: sailors and merchants mixing with Jews, Greeks and Armenians; veiled women and hookah-smoking men in red fezes; and the Friday army parade when the Sultan went to prayers. Gerald visited the Old Seraglio palace, where he admired the jewels (an ‘emerald the size of an orange’) and the dazzling views from the Golden Horn. Much of this was about to change; his posting coincided with great political upheavals as the Ottoman Empire gave way under the pressures of war and the radical new republican movement of the Young Turks.
    Gerald’s contemporary Harold Nicolson overlapped with him as a junior diplomat, and though they were friendly, some have seen Nicolson’s unkind portrait of a mannered young diplomat, ‘Titty’, as being based on Gerald:
    A peaky face, a little grey face with blue-black shadows, two small unsparkling eyes, a wet and feeble little mouth, shapeless hair. He had the sickly and unwashed appearance of an El Greco page: he perked his head on one side towards a long black cigarette holder: his other claw-like hand clutched a grey woollen scarf; he looked infinitely childish; he looked preternaturally wizened and old.40
    Much later, Gerald would exact his literary revenge, and annoy Nicolson with an absurd, puffed-up character largely based on him – ‘Lollypop’ Jenkins.41
    Gerald may have been a shy young man, but he was safely buttressed by the embassy system; by this stage he was already giving dinner parties (some with mischievously arranged guest lists)