We became engaged not very long thereafter. We married on 10 February 1981 in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square. We chose the church with its sublime spire and then unrestored and umbrageous interior because Quentin was a dedicated circumnavigator of the globe under sail and it is the church of seafarers, and for its architecture, and on account of the charitable work it does among the addicts and the homeless of London.
My father, that is, my blood parent, had suggested that we marry in St Magnus the Martyr, for T.S. Eliot: ‘Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’. But there was some problem with parking.
Eyes were very important in our swift courtship. Quentin saw me across a room in Marsham Court where he was living. My impression was of hand-painted wallpaper, celadon in tone, and a young man with gold hair not apparently enjoying his own party. We did not speak. No one introduced us. I had just returned from India, where I had gone to convince a friend that it was home that he was pining for and not me, so I was rather thin and must have seemed interesting on account of not having slept for some days. Quentin made enquiries as to who I was and moves were made towards an introduction. We were both motherless, both tall, both longing for affection, both serious about children and animals and we each believed that we could make the other happy. With so much breakage in our pasts, too many house-moves, too much unsettledness, we married, we felt, with our eyes and hearts open.
Another romance was shaking confetti over the nation at the time. I was surprised when pretty Lady Diana Spencer chose my dressmaker to make her wedding dress, but who could be annoyed for very long, when my handsome prince was there? Our (I cannot say ‘my’; it was ‘our’ wedding after all) wedding dress was entirely covered with glass sequins, each one colourless, each one exactly like a tiny pierced contact lens.
My dress had a million eyes and it was to the future that they were turned as I went down the aisle on Papa’s arm towards my groom in the soft gloom of that great church, thirty feet of Argos-eyed glass and white taffeta train pouring itself down the aisle behind me. Daddy was in a front pew, having professed himself delighted not to have to take a central role; I wonder now.
From the tiara that held up my hair, released for the day from the Bank of Montreal, fell a long veil over my face. It too was scattered with brilliant lenses that made me feel as though I was seeing the day and the man to whom it gave me through shining tears of unquestionable joy.
Were marriages so tidy as to be best composed of opposites, how well we might have done; but in some ways I think we were too profoundly alike and are able better to love one another when not under the same roof but equal in our love for our children. Quentin is incontrovertibly the hero type. He camps under the stars with the Tuareg, he walks the Karakoram Highway, he loves the Hindu Kush, he is involved in the rehabilitation of boy soldiers in Sierra Leone. He works for the Red Cross. He does hidden good. When we met I thought he was ridiculously handsome with golden hair and a terrific beak like the old Duke of Wellington and he knew how to do things. I thought that it was pretty much as exotic as being able to stay on a bucking bronco to be able to drive, so it was inevitable that I became infatuated with this person who could do so much that I could not and to whom I felt I had so much to give. I did feel he was a kind of merman and it is the cruellest of fates to which, to this day, he will not allude, that his beautiful boat, Ocean Mermaid, launched by his mother, was burned in an accidental shipyard fire long after we parted.
However, it is restorative to see him on one of his hunters, Gus, Monty or Graf, and realise that he is once again connecting himself with the life for which he was made and that is in his blood.
In the dining room at his house at Farleigh are two tall portraits by Sir Francis Grant, depicting Isaac Newton Wallop, the 5th Earl, and his wife, Lady Eveline Herbert. The 5th Earl refused a marquessate and the Garter from Gladstone, thinking them ‘beyond his merits’. This Earl and Countess had twelve children and she embroidered a chair cover during each pregnancy, still managing somehow, in between all of it, to gather up into her social life, albeit briefly, Henry James, who wrote to his father from Eggesford, the Portsmouth house in Devon:
I am paying a short visit at what I suppose is called here a ‘great house’, vis. at Lord Portsmouth’s. Lady P, whom I met last summer at Wenlock Abbey and who is an extremely nice woman, asked me a great while since to come here at this point, for a week. I accepted for three days, two of which have happily expired — for when the moment came I was very indisposed to leave London. That is the worst of invitations, given you so long in advance, when the time comes you are apt to be not at all in the same humour as when they were accepted…
The place and country are, of course, very beautiful and Lady P, ‘most kind’; but though there are several people in the house (local gentlefolk, of no distinctive qualities) the whole thing is dull. This is a large family, chiefly of infantine sons and daughters (there are twelve!) who live in some mysterious part of the house and are never seen. The one chiefly about is Lord Lymington, the eldest one, an amiable youth of twenty-one attended by a pleasant young Oxford man, with whom he is ‘reading’. Lord P. is simply a great hunting and racing magnate, who keeps the hounds in this part of the country, and is absent all day with them. There is nothing in the house but pictures of horses — and awfully bad ones at that.
The life is very simple and tranquil. Yesterday, before lunch, I walked in the garden with Lady Rosamund, who is not ‘out’, and doesn’t dine at table, though she is a very pretty little pink and white creature of 17; & in the p.m. Lady P. showed me her boudoir which she is ‘doing up’, with old china & c.; and then took me to drive in her phaeton, through some lovely Devonshire lanes. In the evening we had a ‘ballet’; i.e. the little girls, out of the schoolroom, came down into the gallery with their governess and danced cachuckas, minuets & c. with the utmost docility and modesty, while we sat about and applauded.
Today is bad weather, and I am sitting alone in a big cold library, of totally unread books, waiting for Lord Portsmouth, who has offered to take me out & show me his stable & kennels (famous ones), to turn up. I shall try & get away tomorrow, which is a Saturday as I don’t think I could stick out a Sunday here…it may interest you [to] know, as a piece of local color that, though there are six or seven resident flunkies here, I have been trying in vain, for the last half hour, to get the expiring fire refreshed. Two or three of them have been in to look at it — but it appears to be no one’s business to bring in coals…
I have come to my room to dress for dinner in obedience to the bell, which is just being tolled. A footman in blue and silver has just come in to ‘put out’ my things — he almost poured out the quantum of water I am to wash by. The visit to the stables was deferred till after lunch, when I went the rounds with Lord P. and a couple of men who were staying here — forty in numbers, horses, mostly hunters & a wonderful pack of foxhounds — lodged like superior mechanics.
Although I have a soft spot for the 5th Earl, who is good-looking and sounds decent, one can feel that Henry James wasn’t perhaps putting his back into those so beautifully maintained dumb animals. During these blind years, I’ve been playing all sorts of silly games along the lines of who would you rather among the great writers be stuck in a boat with, and at first I thought the answer was a toss-up between George Eliot and Proust. But now I think, if we’re ruthless and it had to be one, let’s have Henry James. We can hide his correspondents Robert Louis Stevenson and Turgenev in his greatcoat pockets.