Mary-Kay Wilmers

Keeping women, like keeping horses, is one of the many things the rich can do that other people can’t. They may do it for reasons of financial prudence but if so it’s the sort of prudence that only the rich can afford. One of the girls Edna Salamon talked to met her man in a lift: ‘I told him that I was really hard up and if he wanted to go out with me he’d have to pay me … He asked if £500 was enough.’ She said £50 would do and hasn’t been hard up from that day to this. There must be men who don’t find it easy to keep a mistress as well as a wife but the ones Ms Salamon met in the course of her researches generally claimed that ‘it made more economic sense’ than going through a divorce. ‘He didn’t want me to have any less luxury than his wife,’ a middle-aged Texan said of her lover: ‘I always had a new car to drive – lovely clothes – memberships at the best private clubs.’ The prudence may be as much emotional as financial: an abandoned wife whose former husband didn’t want her to have any less luxury than his girlfriend would have less reason to feel grateful. Or it may not be a matter of prudence at all. Even the nicest husbands must have more fun buying zippy cars for their doxies than sedans for their wives.–

‘Contemplating a worn piece of green velvet on her dressing table, I felt my whole being dissolve in love. I have never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been abandoned by another woman, allowed Miss St John to hold her hand. She even allowed her, Victoria Glendinning reports, to accompany her in her car ‘all the way’ to Tonbridge: in Tonbridge Christopher was put on a train back to London. But on the way out of London – on the Westminster Bridge Road, to be precise – Vita had ‘stretched out her left hand’ and told Christopher that she loved her, and when they got to the station in Tonbridge Vita parked the car in a side street and gave Christopher ‘a lover’s kiss’. (‘I never knew unalloyed bliss with V. except on that November day.’) The lover’s kiss was followed by ‘one night of love’. Then it was all over.–

One evening in December 1975 David Plante called on his friend, the novelist Jean Rhys, who was staying in a hotel in South Kensington: ‘a big dreary hotel’, she said, ‘filled with old people whom they won’t allow to drink sweet vermouth’. She was sitting in what the receptionist called ‘the pink lounge’, wearing a pink hat. She was then in her eighties. He kissed her and told her she was looking marvellous. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ she said, ‘I’m dying.’ After supper and a great deal of drink, they went up to her room: ‘sometimes her cane got caught between her legs and I had to straighten it.’ They drank some more and talked about her life. Five hours later, David Plante got up, took a pee and told her he had to leave.‘ “Before you go,” she said, “help me to the toilet.” ’ He took her there and left her, in her pink hat, holding onto the washbasin. Sometime later she called to him.

Nicholas Mosley’s parents, Cynthia Curzon and Oswald Mosley, were married in the Chapel Royal, St James’s on 11 May 1920: ‘Cimmie’s wedding dress had a design of green leaves in it, in defiance of a superstition that green at a wedding was unlucky: there was also a superstition that it was unlucky to be married in May. Cimmie herself chose the music: during the handing-over of the ring the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde was played; though the organist, a newspaper reported, did his best to make it inaudible.’ She was 21 and sometimes described as ‘wild’; her father, Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, fearing what he called her ‘bolshevick’ tendencies, was relieved that she had chosen a reasonably promising young man whose family he knew. Mosley, Robert Cecil reported to Curzon, was ‘not in the first flight’ but had ‘a good future before him’. He was two years older than Cimmie; very dashing (though Curzon at once remarked on his ‘rather Jewish appearance’), and the youngest MP in the House. He was then a Tory. Cimmie had wanted a small, quiet wedding, but the King and Queen were present, as were the King and Queen of the Belgians, who were flown across the Channel in two two-seater aeroplanes for the occasion. The marriage lasted 13 years and there were three children – Nicholas was the eldest son. In May 1933 Cimmie died. A memorial service was held at St Margaret’s, Westminster, where, once again, the Liebestod was played.

‘I grew up,’ says Patricia Hearst, describing what life had once been like for the granddaughter of Citizen Kane, ‘in an atmosphere of clear blue skies, bright sunshine, rambling open spaces, long green lawns, large comfortable houses, country clubs with swimming-pools and tennis courts and riding horses.’ It must have been a nice life, and would look pretty in the cinema, but heroines endear themselves by their difficulties and until the SLA kidnapped her Patricia Hearst’s only difficulty was that she was a bit short. Five foot two – not a dwarf, but her girlfriends were taller. ‘Most things came easily to me,’ she says a little later,‘sports, social relationships, schoolwork, life. I had only to apply myself to them and I found I could do them well, to my own satisfaction.’ Is she trying to tell us that it was especially brutal of the SLA to intervene in a life that ran so smoothly, or is it that she wants us to know that she wasn’t some kind of neurotic who could be expected to crack up in difficult circumstances?