CHAPTER 17

HAVING BEEN brought up, happily, by my mother and grandmother to despise money, it remained, and still lingers on in my mind, a dirty word. My grandmother, if forced to mention it, would call it ‘filthy lucre’, where in the back of my mind it remains in a rosy cloud of indifference. A lot of it came from mysterious people called the Perpetual Trustees who were connected with rich, dead Great Uncle Harry, and through him to his widow, rich, foolish, generous Great Aunt Juliet. How Uncle Harry had obtained this money was never disclosed in my childhood. Aunt Juliet called it ‘dear, darling Harry’ as she telephoned the faceless trustees, her only remaining link with Uncle Harry. I knew that Daddy worked very hard as a doctor; I knew that there were many people who never paid him money, nor did he send them bills. Bills were things which came through the post and were addressed to Mummy, hurriedly glanced at before being stuffed into a kitchen drawer and sometimes taken out and given to the Perpetual Trustees when Aunt Juliet felt generous. Many school friends had many sheep and many cows and bullocks in thousands of sun-baked acres in what we called ‘the bush’. I did not wonder if these cost money or earned money: they were their equivalent of the kitchen drawer.

I am somewhat grateful for this training. It engenders a sense of unassailable security. If money is never real, its loss is a chimera.

I very much wish, of course, that I had not rushed to sell anything that I thought could raise money: my problem being the paucity of immediate cash. I am sick to think of what I then recklessly sold, often to any crook who came to the door. Family silver had long since gone, but there was a fine hoard of wedding present substitutes, and jewellery. A Georgian silver sugar coaster, a gift from film star Alan Ladd, went for a few pounds. I had lost so much weight that clothes went, too—all the remaining Dior New Looks. I thought of our cellar, bursting with wine and of the dinner parties I would never give again.

One of the more immediate and seductive delights of my Thai job had been the opportunity to acquire, at duty-free prices, an impressive cellar. I had long dabbled in a love of wine, unsupported by much knowledge although I liked to consider myself an expert, and boasted untruthfully of being a member of the august body of Tastevins. My bogus claim to this was not entirely without truthful foundation, but owed something to an alcoholic mist over the memory of my so-called training. On a trip through France sometime in the 1950s, Stanley Haynes and I had dallied in a village in the middle of the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. We visited, as are all tourists encouraged to do, the local cellars, somehow made friends with ‘le Patron’ and stayed a month, during which time I, euphemistically, helped. I remember hot, happy, damp and smelly afternoons spitting and swallowing, and tramping about in a haze of enthusiasm and alcohol. I did learn something, albeit from the aegis of a not particularly distinguished grape, and I remember that on taking our fond farewells some sort of embossed scroll was pressed into my hands. This, although long since lost, became, in my mind, my privileged entrée into the world of wine connoisseurs.

It did, nevertheless, stand me in good stead. I started to buy wine books and learn more. I realised how fortunate I had been in having a few startlingly clear early memories of imbibing. My grandmother’s oft-proffered glass of champagne had always been a good vintage from a grande marque. My first known experience of a great wine had also stuck in my mind because of its incongruous association. When I was seventeen or so, at a barbecue lunch at Palm Beach near Sydney—hot and sticky in swimsuits, gathered round the sausages—dear rich and generous Arthur Browning had insisted on pouring a bottle of Château d’Yquem into a bowl of particularly nasty tinned cream of chicken soup. He explained that this was how soup was served in Europe. Having no knowledge of that great glamorous distant world, I decided that when and if I got there, I would steer clear of soup.

The next time I encountered Château d’Yquem was my first country weekend in England at luncheon with David’s mother. With our pudding (at least I had learned between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four that it did not go into the soup) she gave us a bottle remaining from the cellars of Imperial Russia. It was a rich, deep, golden brown: I can’t remember the year but as her father, the Grand Duke Michael, had spirited it out of Russia with him before the Revolution in 1917, I imagine it may have been the late 1890s, and the date does ring some sort of a tinkle. But I do remember the taste, and the perfume. I understood for the first time the use of the word ‘nectar’. So Château d’Yquem became for me a landmark in my lexicon of wines.

The second fortuitous circumstance was the fact that my husband drank hardly at all, and smoked seldom. He had had to give up the smoking early in our acquaintance on discovering his heart condition, and had begun, with me, to drink wine for the first time in his life. As soon as my appointment to the Thai Embassy in London became official I sent off for all the wine catalogues from the leading wine merchants and began to realise how cheaply I could stock what was, miraculously, a proper London wine cellar. There can be few left, but ours was stone built, stone rack upon rack in arched soaring ranks, with a solid thick door, and approached through a small courtyard rather than down a flight of rickety stairs. It was dry, cool and commodious and had been built for no other purpose.

The third astonishing happening was that it was quickly discovered that Emmet had what I was assured by some of our new wine-merchant friends that rarity, a perfect palate. As the crates of wine were delivered Emmet read all my wine books. Soon he could be blindfolded and identify immediately the wine, and often the vintage. He was invited by Berry Bros, Saccone & Speed and the like to luncheons in the city where he became a prize exhibit. I never equalled it: mine was book knowledge, and now I have even forgotten that. What is left is our first cellar book, and sad reading it makes. Bottle after priceless bottle of glorious liquid was squandered nightly on whomever happened to come to dine—few of them appreciative, I fear.

The cellar book, started in 1953, reads:

Ch. Margaux, 1953, ch.b. 22/6p.

Ch. Mouton Rothschild, 1952, ch.b. 25/-.

Ch. Mouton Rothschild, 1947, ch.b.

Ch. Margaux, 1945, 30/-.

Ch. Lafite, 1947, 1 magnum—no price listed.

Ch. Lafite, 1953, 22/-6p.

Ch. Latour, 1953, 22/-6p.

Ch. Calon-Ségur, 1937, 26/-6p.

Ch. Haut-Brion, 1947, 21/-6p.

Ch. Haut-Brion, 1953, 22/-6p.

Ch. Cheval Blanc, 1952, 22/-6p.

Vosne-Romanée, 1947, no price listed.

Richebourg, 1947, 19/-6p.

…and so on to lesser growths, like Léoville-Barton, Lynch-Bages, Palmer, Léoville-Las Cases, dismissed in the shilling class. The great whites, the Puligny Montrachets, and the Meursault Charmes, are not dignified by price either.

Remorse prevents me from contemplating the guests, most of them quite unaware of what they were drinking. I am proud, however, of the food. I was learning to be a good cook. Removed from the telephone instructions of my mother’s cook, I turned, as did most of England’s postwar generation, to Elizabeth David.

As I moved house after Emmet’s death, so the cellar—then and in subsequent moves—became a major problem; second only, if not equal, to what to do with the books.

But at the time the wine could be said to be a financial asset as well as a storage liability. I had never met the wine writer Cyril Ray, but he had heard of my hoard and wrote to me. After some polite sentences of commiseration on the death of my husband he came quickly to the point.

He had heard I had one of the finest small private cellars in England. Would I consider selling part, if not all, of it?

Lists of available wines went between us. He would take all, of course, but marked his preferences, accompanied by expressions of anticipated joy in the drinking, if I wished to retain some. The final list was drawn up, price agreed, and Cyril Ray, no doubt, had planned his first dinner party.

I had two brooches left—both should have had the sentimental value I now, too late, bestow on them. One, all diamonds, was my mother’s; the other, diamond and emerald, a present from David—both still in their Cartier boxes. I sold them at Sotheby’s and kept the wine, explaining the switch to Cyril Ray, who wrote me a letter of congratulations.

‘Despite my own disappointment, I salute the most civilised act I have ever seen performed by a woman.’

Sometimes now, along with contemplation of those unworthy gullets down which disappeared most of my wine, I see similar brooches to mine displayed in auction-room catalogues, estimates well into the double if not triple thousands. I received £30 each from the Sotheby’s sale.

Not all the wine was drunk in the immediate years after Emmet’s death. Some twelve years later, settled in a larger and grander, but cellarless, house, I kept a stock of everyday ‘drinking’ wines in the proverbial cupboard (although a basement cupboard) under the stairs and the dwindling stock of first-growth clarets in a wholly unsuitable walk-in cupboard in one of the unused attic rooms. There were some of the 45s, most of the 61s, and four precious bottles of d’Yquem 37. We had an Irish couple of some incompetence, as cook/general and gardener/homme à tout faire, but of seeming honesty and undoubted good humour. The Spanish daily had just left and a new one engaged as we set off on holiday. A month later we came home, to find a clean house, but were greeted by Mr O’Leary with the news that they didn’t hold much store by this new one, yet another Maria, as she spent most of her time gossiping at the kitchen table from which vantage point she had frequently offered them a glass of wine.

‘Mrs O’Leary and I, we never touch the stuff,’ he stoutly professed.

What stuff, I wondered idly. The wine cupboard did not seem depleted to me. Mr O’Leary simply sniffed when interrogated further. It wasn’t until the next day that I thought of the attic cupboard, soon found empty. Sixty-six irreplaceable bottles had gone. It was a Friday: Maria would not appear again until the Monday morning, but the first people I thought of were my insurance company.

They immediately notified the police. It was out of my hands, and reluctantly and feeling both foolish and unkind I gave them Maria’s address, the O’Learys having repeated their saga of the kitchen table orgies.

Maria and her husband were flabbergasted. All those old bottles had been covered in dust and cobwebs—obviously forgotten and of no value to anyone. No wine could possibly cost more than 50p per bottle when new and presentable. There was nothing left to salvage, except a stack of empty bottles outside their door.

To their eternal credit, the insurance company paid up, the first time in their history they had had such a claim. We settled eventually on the sum of an average of £11 per bottle. I suppose in the 1970s this was a fair price. Similar bottles now fetch thousands in auctions but I daresay I would have found yet more unworthy but eager gullets by now and should instead count myself lucky to have had the £700. I would rather have the diamond brooches.

But I have skimmed forward in time. Back in 1957, I began to regret the splendid hedonistic disregard for worldly goods with which I had been brought up, the lavish life style of my mother and grandmother and great aunt which in following had managed to leave me stranded on an uncomfortably barren ledge.