9

From Curzon Street to the Caribbean

At the beginning of 1947, Joan and Paddy came back to an England in the midst of a harsh winter. It was bitterly cold. By the end of January, roads and railways were blocked by drifts of snow, power stations began to close for lack of coal and the electricity supply was restricted to nineteen hours a day. Bread, which had always been available during the war, was rationed for the first time because of a disastrous harvest the year before. For adults, there was a weekly allowance of a shilling’s worth of meat and one egg. Should the meat turn out to be tough, the ‘Advice for the Housewife’ column in the Listener recommended adding a tablespoonful of vinegar to the water before boiling. There were endless variations on how to use dried egg to make savoury sandwiches. The machines for dispensing sweets on station platforms had all rusted up from disuse. It was almost impossible to find suitable accommodation, and it was more than two years before Paddy and Joan were offered anywhere satisfactory. In the meantime, together with Xan, they took what Joan called ‘a hideous, furnished, tart’s flat’ at 11a Curzon Street, directly over Heywood Hill’s bookshop.1

‘Have you seen Joan? How is she?’2 John Rayner wrote to Tom Driberg at the very end of March 1947. Two days later the divorce nisi was granted on the grounds of his adultery with Isabel Delmer. The suit was not contested, but the solicitor had been negligent, hence the delay. Rayner was now living in Australia, ‘a land of milk, butter, honey, steaks, oysters, peaches, tweeds, woollens, books, sun, sea, kindness, geniality, the well-fed & well organised communist brake on industry’.3 He had been anxious for the divorce to come through as soon as possible, for he was both arranging marriage to a new wife and booking her into hospital for their first baby. John had met Miranda Lampson in Singapore, where her uncle, Lord Killearn, was high commissioner. Killearn had been British ambassador to Egypt in his previous posting, and Joan already knew Miranda, who was slightly older than her. Joan’s divorce from JR was just one of over 47,000 that year – it was a peak year for post-war divorces.4 She wanted it to happen, but when it actually came through she was unsettled by it. For Miranda, it was a great relief, and on 7 May she and John were married in Sydney. Their first son was born legitimately a week later. ‘Now grunting beside me is Mr. John Peregrine Rayner, a very nice little boy,’ John wrote to his mother, who regretted that his parting from Joan had caused ‘talk’.

Now that they were no longer soldiers in uniform, Paddy and Xan were keen to get started as writers, and they pulled all the strings they could. Xan, who lacked the anchor of Joan, was wondering what to do with his life, and wrote to Maurice Bowra. Bowra replied, regretting that he was unable to help.

I was extremely sorry to hear of the failure of your plans, especially after everything here had been fixed. I saw Birley* the other day and told him about it, and he was clearly most eager to help and will talk to the Ministry of Education people about you. But I have no great hopes of these bureaucrats. Anyhow do nothing in a hurry about going to Peru or Annam in case something turns up.

Joan and Paddy came here on a royal visit, Paddy wearing a most eccentric cloak – a priest’s or a goatherd’s I can’t remember which, and carrying a bottle of whisky. They were both in very fine form and fitted well into our academic atmosphere but then Joan was always very high-brow, and I am sure Paddy won scripture prizes before he was sacked for fucking the matron or whatever it was that led to his downfall. Glad you have met Pauline – one of the most eccentric girls I know, and I know a good many. Indeed sanity seems hardly to exist in the other sex.5

Paddy had bought his cloak from a shepherd in the Pindus mountains of Greece the previous year and it was typical of him to wear it. Bowra could never resist the temptation to be waspish. Joan and Paddy frequently kept different friends, and as far as Bowra was concerned, Paddy had intruded on his intimacy with his beloved Joan. Despite having much in common – a love of all things Greek, talking, war, medals and royalty – relations between Paddy and Bowra never really warmed. Across the road from Bowra’s Wadham College, however, Richard Dawkins, the eccentric professor of Byzantine studies and modern Greek, an honorary fellow of Exeter College and a man with an ‘inexhaustible liking for the young’,6 hero-worshipped Paddy and sent him innumerable badly typed fan letters.

In the September 1946 edition of Horizon, Cyril Connolly had published ‘The Cost of Letters’,7 the results of a questionnaire he had carried out among twenty-one contemporary writers. Questions included how much a writer needed to live on and, if he could not earn this sum by writing, what did he think was the most suitable second occupation for him? Inevitably, the answers varied greatly and frequently contradicted one another. Most estimates for living expenses were up to about £1,000 (£37,000 in 2016), with Elizabeth Bowen’s suggestion of £3,500 the most ambitious by far. Connolly gave his reasons: ‘If he is to enjoy leisure and privacy, marry, buy books, travel and entertain his friends, a writer needs upwards of five pounds a day net.’ Graham’s ever-indigent friend, the artist Robin Ironside, was less hopeful: ‘As an aspiring critic, mainly of painting, I require, for the satisfaction of my aspirations and having due regard to the present cost of living, a net income of £15 a week, an amount I have never possessed and am never likely to possess. Because I am too poor, I have never been to Greece or to America.’ On contemplating a second career, John Betjeman wrote, ‘I can only speak for myself. I would like to be a station-master on a small country branch line (single track).’ Connolly’s own response was frank: ‘A rich wife.’

Paddy had no money of his own and when Joan and he first met he had published little. Joan may have believed in Paddy’s talent as a writer but others in her family were fearful that his motives were as much financial as romantic. Joan drew an income from the estate which was supplemented by photographic assignments. The Dumbleton estate had survived the depredations of war in reasonable health but she was not wealthy. Formerly Joan had had a husband with a well-paid position, but she was now providing financial assistance for a lover with considerable charm and good looks but few clear prospects. Although Paddy succeeded in selling magazine and newspaper articles and reviews, which helped get his name into print, the rewards were small, and in the early years of their relationship Joan was forever giving him cheques for £5 or £10 (£185–£370). To her family, their lives together seemed eccentric and rackety (‘my mother keeps asking me why I haven’t got any clothes and making suggestions about how to get them,’8 she wrote). When Joan went home to Dumbleton, she had to go to the estate office to collect the fare for her journey back to London, and this only changed when she came into an inheritance on the death of her brother Graham in 1993. As well as being a skilful avoider of responsibility, Paddy was always clueless about money. There were arguments and Joan’s patience was clearly tried, yet eventually she decided to be as liberal as she could be. In 1950 she wrote to Paddy from Dumbleton:

I propose to pay into your bank account £30 a month from June for the rest of the year & an extra £50 to start you off & then you need not have all this bother & hell of asking me. It sounds terribly little darling but I do think you ought to try & make some money for yourself – I can’t think why really but it would be much better for you from every point of view. Also it’s about half of what I really must try to live on. Please don’t think I’m doing this so that we can see less of each other but only so that we needn’t be so much bothered by it all.9

Paddy and Joan would have to live on £720 a year, plus whatever else they might earn from writing and photography – money was going to be tight.

All this made the idea of returning overseas seem more desirable. ‘Pudding Island’, as Lawrence Durrell called England with contempt, was grey, dreary and bomb-damaged. He wrote to Xan: ‘I had no idea you were back in England [. . .] I didn’t expect you’d reconcile easy to slow London. It’s an old man’s country – the island for contemplatives and quietists. I’ve no doubt you’ll find your way out to the Mediterranean again.’10

The notion of ‘abroad’ represented liberation from all manner of British class conventions and inhibitions, as well as more definable things like warmth, sunlight, good food and good wine. It was also considerably cheaper.

The Betjemans invited Joan and Paddy to stay at their new home in Farnborough near Wantage. The Old Rectory was a large Georgian house with twelve acres of garden. John had insisted on buying the house because he was ‘potty’ about it. Situated amidst downland, ancient tracks and rolling cornfields, Farnborough had a population of just over a hundred and was the highest village in Berkshire. The water had to be fetched from a communal village pump and at night they used paraffin lamps. In the winter months the whole family huddled in the huge inner hall, which had once been a village schoolroom. But despite the lack of amenities and telephone there was ‘corking’ scenery across Watership Down, and there was also a library for Betjeman’s considerable collection of antiquarian books. Immediately after their visit, Joan and Paddy went to the Camargue for the Easter of 1947. Joan wrote to Penelope from her hotel in Les Baux, thanking her: ‘I did love staying with you so much & thank you a million times. I envy you your house & family so much, & you & John are just the wrong people to see before travelling – I feel like the Flying Dutchman.’ The Camargue turned out to be a disappointment – ‘pointless unless one rode about all day on a delicious white horse.’ The gypsies all lived in motor caravans with Aga cookers and maple furniture. The local wine was not good but it was a more lucrative source of income than bull breeding. Bulls were still bred for sport, but those that were left were for eating:

They were a special Camargue breed but Spanish bulls have been mixed with them a lot, until a fascinating old queer, The Marquis de Baroncelli de Javon, practically took over the whole Camargue. (Alas, he died aged about 75 a few years ago of a broken heart as the Germans had destroyed all his farm and house.) He stopped the mixed breeding & started again from the few remaining pure stock, and the same with the pure Camargue horses which were being interbred with Arabs . . . He must have had a wonderful life, dressed up in the cowboy clothes the guardians all wear, surrounded by the handsomest, worshipped by everyone in the Camargue but now he is dead. I suppose the ‘progress’ which he fought all his life will completely swamp what still remains of the real Camargue. It is lovely being in the south again & this place is perfect. Delicious food & masses of it for modest pension prices but nearly everywhere else is very expensive & bad. I far prefer a horse to a bicycle.11

In the summer of 1947, the publisher Lindsay Drummond Ltd engaged Costa Achillopoulos, a Greek photographer, to produce a book of pictures of the Caribbean. Costa, who had been brought up in Paris and England, was completely cosmopolitan. Tanned, with hair which had turned white overnight when he was twenty and green eyes, he seemed to have been everywhere and know everyone. In an age before mass travel he managed to sell his pictures without difficulty to magazines and newspapers, and together with his Rolleiflex camera, he was forever on the move. He was also amusing, self-deprecating and immensely good company. Paddy, who was a friend, was invited by Costa to go with him – he even offered Paddy his advance in order to make the voyage possible. Joan decided to accompany them, and in his preface to The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands, the account he subsequently wrote of their travels, Paddy acknowledged Joan as the Egeria – or spiritual guide – of the journey, and Costa as ‘not only its photographer and painter, but our motive force that launched it, its only begetter’.12

Paddy, Joan and Costa set sail at the beginning of October on the Colombie, a French ship which had recently been refitted after wartime use, and for the next six months they wandered by boat and by plane through French, Dutch, British and American islands of the West Indies – Guadaloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, Grenada, St Lucia, Antigua, St Kitts, St Eustatius, Saba, St Martin, St Thomas, Haiti and Cuba – to the point of exhaustion. Joan had her camera everywhere they went. When the photographs had been developed, she cut up the contact sheets and pasted the individual pictures into albums which Paddy used as aides-mémoires when he was working on The Traveller’s Tree. There are few references to Joan in his book, but Paddy includes a description as Costa and she wandered around the great cemetery in Guadaloupe. Joan had an enthusiasm for tombs and cemeteries which Paddy completely failed to share – especially when he was obliged to follow them in the baking heat.

Not even a dog was to be seen. But behind a tall crucifix stood a cemetery of such dimensions – Père Lachaise and Campo Santo gone mad – that, opening their cameras, Joan and Costa slid from their seats with sharp gasps of delight. For hours I trudged behind them round this blazing necropolis, down avenues of stucco vaults and tombs, Parthenons, temples of Vesta, and Chartres cathedrals, past urns and weeping angels, mournful marble Lucreces hung with brown wreaths and even shaded sometimes by evergreens white with dust, till they had seen and photographed their fill. These acres inhabited by the dead, these miniature halls and palaces and opera houses, were, it occurred to me, the real town, and the houses falling to ruins outside the railings were in the nature of a negligible suburb.13

By the time Joan had finished her third film with her last photograph – ‘an ochreous Aztec pyramid built round the faded photograph of a very old Negro in postman’s uniform’ – they left this city of mausoleums like ‘three pillars of fire’. ‘The dust that settled on our steaming faces turned us into zombies. It penetrated every orifice of the head and temporarily robbed us of all our faculties.’

Their feelings towards each of the Caribbean islands varied from one to the next, but the British island of Dominica with its pretty little capital of Roseau – ‘an Antillean Cranford’ – was one of the best. Little Union Jacks fluttered from the gables of the houses and ‘the brass plate of Barclays Bank gleamed in the morning air’. They visited the Free Library where ‘two young Negroes sat in the reading room, deep in the Bystander and Horse and Hound’, and Paddy wandered into the High Court, which was in full session. The Puisne Judge of the Windward Islands sat in his scarlet robe and wig under the Royal Arms, two ancient drums and a panoply of banners. An old peasant woman was being tried for murdering her husband with a hoe, and as Paddy entered the court an official was holding the weapon out for the inspection of the jury. It was like a scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland drawn by Tenniel.

The happiest part of their long odyssey through the islands was undoubtedly a prolonged stay at Pointe Baptiste, a house at the northern end of Dominica. They arrived one evening when it was growing dark and, turning downhill into a wooded hollow, they saw the windows of the house gleam through the tree trunks. After walking across the grass, they came to a large airy room and found drinks standing on a table amidst vast sofas and chairs and great quantities of books – ‘exactly the sort of library one sighs for anywhere’. They stayed at Pointe Baptiste with their hostess, Mrs Napier,* who was a member of the Dominican House of Representatives, many more days than was necessary, painting and reading and writing. When at last they left, they began to move back south for a journey into Carib country to visit a community of some of the original inhabitants of the islands, who had lived there before the Europeans arrived. The guide and head of the retinue was René, a lean and gentle young man who had studied divinity, and he was followed by three enormous porters who carried the luggage on their heads as they wound their way through the foothills of the volcanic mountain of Morne Diablotin.

From my position in the rear it was an impressive sight: René led the way, then came the porters, as slender and graceful as caryatids under their globular loads. Joan’s horse ambled after them, bearing a figure that looked as purposeful in its dark glasses and great straw hat as a mid-Victorian lady heading for the mission-field in Uganda. She was followed by Costa riding dreamily through the shadows in his sky-blue shirt and shorts, or alternatively, at pleasanter moments clambering up the glutinous pathway on foot. The path grew level at last, and through a gap in the trees we could gaze from our lofty headland into a deep gorge downy with tree-tops. The sea reached inland between the steep sides of the canyon to meet the emerging sea.14

At length they came to a Carib settlement: a meeting with the last survivors of an almost extinct race of conquerors, which was as impressive in its way as if the encounter had been with Etruscans or Hittites. A young Carib threw down a dozen coconuts from a palm tree before sliding down the trunk with his cutlass in his hand. The king of the Caribs opened the nuts and offered his guests the milk. He regretted that Mrs Napier had not accompanied them because, as her chief constituent, he wanted to have a serious chat about island affairs. When at last Paddy, Joan and Costa got back to Roseau they found that the old woman arraigned for murder had been acquitted that very afternoon – to general satisfaction – condemned instead to a year’s imprisonment, and they were just in time to hear the fine summing-up of the Puisne Judge of the Windward Islands.

‘We have been to practically every West Indian Island, British, French, Dutch and American & my mind is, alas, not broadened, but battered out flat with travel,’ Joan wrote to John Rayner as she neared the end of the journey. ‘They are all very beautiful & all different, but a bit woolly and green to travel about in. All very well to stay beachcombing in one spot drinking rum and eating avocados under coconut palms by a phosphorescent sea. Haiti, of course, was far the most interesting. All the Voodoo Gods have great charm but I especially liked the chiefs of the Kingdom of the Dead – Le Baron Samedi, Le Général Criminel and le Capitaine Zombie.’15 Haiti – unfortunately for Paddy – also had a picturesque cemetery, as well as an undertaker’s with an assortment of headstones, crosses and coffins. Its signboard advertised the identity of the owner; at the top he had painted a little white tortoise, and at the bottom a death’s head. The burials were provided by a Monsieur E. La Tortue, L’Ami des Morts. All of this was once again enthusiastically photographed by Joan.

From the Caribbean islands, Paddy and Joan went to British Honduras and carried on through Central America. Because of Guatemala’s claim on British Honduras it was legally impossible for a British citizen to travel directly to Guatemala, but they succeeded in finding a guide through the jungle:

Paddy & I, (Costa wisely went the ordinary way) walked for four days through the ‘bush’ to Guatemala, encouraged by a charming Indian guide called Exaltacion Pook, but it was too tough to be pleasant – mud up to the knees, crawling a lot of the time through the undergrowth, pricked and stung by every leaf, climbing on or under, or, worst, along, huge fallen trees. There is no path since the hurricane a few years ago – but we saw baboons, huge butterflies & orchids, & slept in hammocks in villages where they had never seen what, alas, they called ‘red people’ before – or in palm leaf shelters in the middle of the forest.16

From Guatemala they went south to El Salvador and on to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, which was celebrating Holy Week. Except for a few pages on Cuba, all the Central American republics were omitted from The Traveller’s Tree. The differences in their culture and social history, Paddy felt, were so considerable that they would unbalance the book. Besides, he hoped that an account of his subsequent journey might yield a sequel. That book was never written, however, and the draft notes he made towards it remain unpublished in a couple of old exercise books. At the end of their journey they were tired. Joan wrote that she was longing to get back to London ‘as really the people here, as opposed to the countries, have too little to offer’.

Paddy and Joan arrived at Tilbury on 20 May 1948. In The Times that morning they saw the headline ‘British Correspondent Killed’. It was Dick Wyndham. According to a story filed from Amman, he had died the previous day on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem while on an assignment for the Sunday Times. He had been photographing Arab troops as they moved into action when he was struck by a burst of machine-gun fire. Joan was deeply shaken and distressed. Wyndham, that ‘uncouth old schoolboy [. . .] a Sargent drawing of the 1914 subaltern come to life’,17 as Cyril Connolly called him, was dead. For Ian Fleming, he was ‘one of the great Bohemian figures of his age [. . .] a fine, careless figure, larger and more varied than the life around him’.18

Wyndham’s death marked the ending of Tickerage Mill, which Joan and that charmed circle of friends had known as a pre-war Arcadia. In another letter from Joan to Rayner she wrote about Dick: ‘It makes me furious to think of it, what a hopeless, stupid waste it all is. I’m afraid we shall miss him all our lives.’ Tickerage was being sold (a subsequent owner was Vivien Leigh), and Wyndham’s pictures went to Sotheby’s later in the year.

John was also dwelling on things lost. His wife Miranda was tall, blonde and slim and her physical resemblance to Joan was not unnoticed. John’s letters to Joan have mostly been destroyed, but he had obviously not recovered from the trauma of the break-up of their marriage. Joan wrote to him: ‘I got one letter from you this morning & another, very gloomy, some time ago, which I’ve been meaning to answer for ages. Thank you so much for them [. . .] You oughtn’t to feel gloomy, at any rate you ought to have little guilt & remorse – that should be more my side of it – but what’s the good? I shall obviously go on making a mess of things but I intend to try and enjoy myself while I do so.’19 At the end of the following year they met briefly in London and talked over old wounds and regrets. Once again John told her about his unhappiness and afterwards Joan wrote to him:

Darling John,

How unsatisfactory it was seeing you for such a horribly short time & how inadequate I feel about everything. I could kill myself for not having had a flat that week where we could anyhow have talked as long as we wanted. But I suppose these meetings in a void are always like that – too nerve-wracking & difficult whatever happens – & I doubt if we had talked for weeks whether we should have worked things out to our satisfaction – of course I had ’flu too and that didn’t help. I do think you are wrong to feel that you could have changed things by some means or by behaving differently or by being different in some way – I know it was entirely my fault & nothing could have changed my decisions – everything you ever did, in fact, only made me put off separating longer. I think Cyril is right in a way – I don’t think I shall ever be good at married life – which is the reason I don’t try again. But it was lovely seeing you & do please come back soon & let us then arrange to have more time.

I’m just off to Dumbleton with Graham for Christmas. I meant to write to you the day you left but felt entirely unable to & found every excuse – ’flu, Paris again to get my car, etc. Why? the feeling one can never explain or say what one means, I suppose.

My best love

Joan.20

Rayner stayed abroad for several more years in Australia and then returned to Singapore. Although he published a couple of books, he never returned to the world of journalism, and for the remainder of his working life he received a salary from the Foreign Office. Joan and he continued to meet and sometimes write to one another. Their letters were always warm and affectionate. John Betjeman, Tom Driberg and Costa, among others, remained mutual friends. In all John and Miranda went on to have four children.

In April 1948 Cyril Connolly suggested to the publisher Hamish Hamilton and his American associate Cass Canfield that they should let him write a travel book about Aquitaine, ‘a very balmy and civilised region of France’.21 Lacking money as ever, he persuaded Hamish Hamilton to give him an advance of £200 to help pay for the trip, which he thought would last for about two months. In return he would deliver 70,000 words for £350. Cyril’s original intention was that Dick Wyndham would accompany him as his photographer, but following his death he felt that Joan would be the ideal replacement. Joan was more than willing to accept the commission and on 4 August she left for France.

They met at Valence, south of Lyon. Cyril was recovering from food poisoning and a temperature, although he feared that his sickness might have been prompted by feelings of guilt: he had begun to tire of his partner Lys Lubbock, who had just left him to return to England. Cyril and Joan drove to a two-star restaurant where he could only sit and watch while Joan enjoyed the specialities of the house – truffled galantine de caneton and quenelles de langouste and a delicious white Hermitage called Chante Alouette. The following day, there was another excellent lunch and Joan took lots of photographs of the chef in the kitchen as he stirred pans full of wonderful sauces. In her pictures it is as if Joan is seeing France through Connolly’s eyes – market stalls laden with fruit and vegetables, a chef with a table of game spread out in front of him, a sideboard heavily laden with food sufficient for a banquet, and the restaurant itself, the tables, white tablecloths and cutlery all ready for the customers.

Paddy was already in France working on The Traveller’s Tree. He was staying with Walter and Amy Smart, his old Cairo friends, who had a house in an apple orchard at Gadencourt,22 a little village on the banks of the River Eure. Patrick Kinross was also staying. Joan sent her letters there. Her first was headed ‘Grand Café de Paris et de la Poste’ and written from Mende, a small town in Lozère.

I do miss you horribly – everything nice I see, eat, drink I wish you were here to share it. Lys is not here – for various good reasons she has gone back to London, & of course it is far nicer as it is, in a way. I was a little worried at first after all our talk, but I manage to keep my platonic travelling companion status with no difficulty; in which as you know I take great pride. And that tiresome old meddler Groddeck* has made me have the curse a week late for nothing [. . .]

Now today, after an entire morning waiting for a train to go, we are in the first lovely town; squares, plane trees, cafés, fountains & thin grey semi-circular slate tiles, in heavenly country of small rivers, gorges & almost rounded hills; & this afternoon after a little sightseeing, we go to La Malène on the Tarn and start on the Gorges de Tarn. The end of next week our address is chez Madame Riley, Chateau de Curemonte, Corrèze. Everything is a bit slower as we have no car & we shan’t be at Bordeaux until about Friday 20th. Could you meet me there? Cyril is all for it. There are lots of things round there in the way of photographs & drinking but if you don’t want to come I’ll try & hurry everything up as I really don’t enjoy this separation. What about it? it would be heavenly if you did come, but if you think it’s disastrous from the book point of view I shall understand, although there really isn’t all that terrible hurry, is there? It’s only in England one feels this terribly urgent rush. I hope I hear from you at Roquefort but please, please don’t say anything nasty as I couldn’t have it. I think every day that an island or mountain in Greece is the only place for us.

C. is being very sweet & easy & is heavenly to travel with. He really is hoping you come to Bordeaux & says we can all go to Ch. Mouton Rothschild when you arrive (as an inducement).

I do hope, my darling angel, you are having a happy time. Give my greatest love to Amy & Smarty – I am longing to be there. I hope you are not staying with some horrible femme du boulanger & darling, darling Paddy I am longing to see you again. I’ve taken lots of photographs but it’s been so far very difficult country & I have little confidence in the new camera. It should be better photogenically from now on.

Bless you my angel

All my love

Joan

Don’t get worried about jobs and things. It’s only in England one has to spend so much & I’m sure I can never live there. Forgive this untidy after-luncheon letter. Cyril sends love!23

A week later Joan wrote again to Paddy from the Château de Curemonte in Corrèze. She was staying with Peggy Riley, the European features editor of American Vogue. The previous year Cyril had met and entertained Peggy and she had invited him to stay with her in France. He had arrived at the chateau for the weekend and then, after a day or two, he said he had to meet a photographer on business. He reappeared with Joan. The weekend Cyril was supposed to stay turned into three weeks, and Joan was invited to stay too. She wrote:

This is the most heavenly place & I long for you to be here – it is everything you like. The house is small but built within the ruins of the old castle at the top of a very hand-knitted little village full of bearded women in fierce black shiny hats. Everywhere there is the most lovely view – wide rolling wooded hills, green lawn like fields, rows of flickering poplars, all very calm and happy. Today is boilingly hot and I am writing in the garden. No-one else is up although it is 12 o’clock. Soon I hope Peggy Riley will emerge with drinks and foie gras. She is extremely wise and you would adore her.* She is living here for 3 months with her lover, Georges Bernier, an ugly charming French intellectual of the best unboring French sort, a great gourmet . . . We have lovely conversations, arguments, discussions all day long & I seem to have talked more here than for the last two years and I wish, wish, wish you were here too. Incidentally the house belongs to the daughter of Collette, les mêmes moeurs as her mother and is full of sexy Lesbian books & pictures of snakes.

*Has lived for years in Mexico & sings lots of songs including Virgen de Guadaloupe. Aïe. Aïe. Aïe!

Unfortunately, the week before their arrival had been a disaster. Cyril had exercised to the full his talent for making life complicated both for himself and for those around him. Having been more or less in love with Joan for years, he had made his feelings about her all too obvious and had made a pass at her. A week alone with her had been too much of a temptation.

The only blot on all this (& this, my darling, is for your ears alone) is that things are getting a bit strained – why do these complications have to spoil things so often? I feel like a boringly monogamous bourgeois bitch but I can’t do anything about it. It seems so easy to make everyone happy but I can’t, and I’m getting very nervous & we will probably end up bitter enemies**. It’s not really as bad as all that but I feel gloomy & annoyed about it all & feel I should manage better than I do. Actually I think everything will be all right & I’m making a lot of fuss about nothing. Please don’t let Patrick or Amy get hold of this letter – I can’t imagine two worse people! Tear it up. We are staying here till Friday – they have a car and we drive about every afternoon & evening photographing & sightseeing, & then go to Bordeaux. I’m afraid now if you come there it will be rather hell for C., I couldn’t disguise my joy at seeing you, as much as I should like it, unless you very much want to, it would be better not to come . . .

Darling, what an incoherent muddled letter – worse than usual – but I haven’t much time to write & all the plans are vague & the sun is very hot & the Larousse Gastronomique, on which I write, is slipping on my knees.

Darling darling Paddy I do love you so.

A huge great hug.

Joan.

**No this not true. C is sweet but sad.24

In Happy Deathbeds, Connolly’s unfinished novel from that time, Joan appears as ‘Jane Sotheran’.

She had long legs, long ankles, toes like a Greek goddess, a neck that looked as if it had been artificially lengthened to support a princess’s dowry of gold curtain rings and a face whose chief features were two enormous eyes of clouded violet blue, usually concealed behind dark glasses, a small fine nose, a slightly protruding lower lip, wrinkled brow and pelt of short blonde hair.25

Connolly had also told his mother that he wanted to marry Joan after her marriage with John Rayner had ended. He believed that she was the only person who could have helped him get over his first wife Jean – ‘this Joan to end all Jeans’. Inconveniently, however, Joan was always away somewhere abroad because of the war and then in the Caribbean. During the week before Joan’s letter he had been able to indulge his fantasies about her again, as she wandered beside him in her ‘dark green cardigan and grey trousers, her camera slung over her shoulder and her golden hair bobbing as she walks, always a little fairer than you think, like the wind in a stubble field’. Although to please him Joan agreed to take part in a pretend wedding in a cave, during which they were interrupted by a party of boy scouts and some falling rocks, she had tired of being Cyril’s ‘lovely boy-girl . . . like a casual, loving, decadent Eton athlete’.26

Meanwhile, impervious to the upset he had caused Joan, Connolly spent his mornings in bed with maps and Guides Bleus working out ways in which Peggy and Bernier, who had a car, might entertain him. The trip to France eventually ended at La Rochelle, where Joan caught the train to Paris in order to meet Paddy. All that exists to show from the jaunt are a couple of envelopes of Joan’s photographs: Cyril never wrote a line of his projected book on France for Hamish Hamilton, nor did he return his generous advance on his expenses.