A Time of Gifts
In 1973, John Betjeman wrote to Cecil Beaton recommending both Penelope and Joan for inclusion in a book on the history of photography which Beaton was writing. If Joan was, by then, a suitable candidate for a retrospective she would have been the last person to have pressed for it and would probably have hated the idea. The publication of Roumeli in 1966 had marked the end of Joan’s career as a photographer. Afterwards she might sometimes take photographs, but living in the Mani meant that it was no longer feasible to work as a freelance photographer. Besides, she now had her inheritance, the new house gave her other interests, and Paddy himself was making an increasing financial contribution from writing. The subject matter of Paddy’s two late works – A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) – is the writer’s search for lost time, a time that was both real and imaginary. These were books which could not be illustrated by photography. The passing of time, and the violence caused by war and politics, had brought down barriers across the frontiers of lands where Paddy had wandered as a young man with a rucksack on his back. Half of Europe was virtually inaccessible. Many years later, when at last the Iron Curtain had been removed, Joan and Paddy went to Bulgaria:
I’m just returned from our Bulgarian battering, long car journeys & sight-seeing get more exhausting, but it was well worth it. Of course Paddy looked in vain for his old towns & villages of over 50 years ago, now concrete industrial messes, & the beautiful footpath he took for days through dense forested cliffs along the Black Sea coast now nothing but high rise hotels & millions of East German tourists.1
Joan teased him by calling him Rip Van Winkle, but Paddy was close to tears.2
By 1976, the studio at Kardamyli was finished. It was separated from the house by a path through a small grove of lemon trees. Its single storey was square in shape, with a flat roof and vines growing up the walls. There were three rooms – a bathroom, a small bedroom just big enough for a single bed, and the main room, Paddy’s study, which was ‘lovely & large for striding up & down between sentences’.3 On two sides there were French windows, and there were further windows at the back and side. Here, Paddy could compose his sentences and paragraphs, pick out books for reference and inspiration, and turn the words around and around in his head or on the page until they were satisfactory. The books on the study shelves had an organization of sorts – even if it was only theoretical. Dictionaries in various languages, guidebooks, Oxford poetry anthologies, books on Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania and some books bequeathed to Paddy by Sir Aymer Maxwell stood on the shelves closest to him, behind his desk. Books relating to the Second World War were placed on either side of the back window. A set of Dictionary of National Biography volumes was arranged along a low bookcase built for Paddy by a friend called Jon van Leuven. There were yet more books in piles on tables and on the floor. Foreign translations of his works were on shelves in the small bedroom, where cats slept on the bed during the daytime. Paddy’s own desk was an adventure in itself. It represented his own special kind of personalized disorder, with the drawers labelled to give some idea of the contents. Aptly, one of the labels read ‘Total Confusion’. Another drawer was labelled ‘Vol III’, but all the drafts for the successor to Between the Woods and the Water were in folders on the shelves, and the drawer’s true contents were a mixture of broken spectacles, empty envelopes, pads of paper used and unused, stray photographs, pencils and postcards. Paddy also kept wads of small printed notices saying that he was very busy and unable to answer his correspondents, although these failed to stop anyone from writing.
A tin trunk contained typescripts of Roumeli, some travel brochures and a copy of Architectural Digest. At the very bottom of the trunk were two pennants from General Kreipe’s staff car, snatched as trophies, and on a table stood a box marked ‘KARDAMYLI. A CHAOS OF PHOTOS. & GENERAL MANI. Work for a rainy day. (Mostly Crete).’ A rainy day which never arrived.
In one corner of the room stood a tall, narrow set of drawers. These were full of blue airmail envelopes into which letters had been sorted by correspondent in alphabetical order. (Previously the letters had been stored in the roof space of the house, but the mice had found them.) All manner of people used to write to Paddy, so many that sometimes he did not bother to open the letters. The correspondents varied: there were old and intimate friends, unknown fans, an academic researcher who wanted a detailed analysis of Barbara Skelton’s charms. There was an Austrian who, using a multicoloured pen, kept sending instalments of a long, somewhat manic account of his own walk across Europe, until Paddy eventually wrote back and asked him to stop. Paddy also kept scores of coloured files on shelves built on either side of the back-wall window. The files were arranged in no order whatsoever, but stood up against one another, leaning this way and that. The information written on the covers as to what they contained may or may not have been accurate or helpful. One said ‘Interesting papers on Items’. On another was written, ‘Prints, reproductions, can’t bear to throw away’. The file contained early-nineteenth-century prints of molluscs, a random Christmas card and a watercolour drawing of an Indian scene. A green file, ‘Mummy’, was full of letters from Paddy’s volatile but loving mother.
The bedroom cupboards were also filled up – boxes of files and letters, two typewriters (one bought by Jon van Leuven in Kalamata, the other Bruce Chatwin’s, although Paddy never really learnt to type), pairs of sandals, photographs, a broken lamp, a pack of tarot cards. Here and elsewhere there were piles of books and bundles of papers. Somewhere, amidst all this disarray, was the story of Joan and Paddy and their lives together.
One January day, after surveying the state of the studio, Joan wrote to Patrick Kinross that, ‘It rains more here than it does in England & Paddy can’t work in his studio for the soaking walls. I’m writing a piece called “Portrait of the Artist as a Bower Bird”.’4
Paddy’s income as a writer had been satisfactory but not more than that. In April 1959, Hambro’s Bank informed him that they had received ‘a cheque for £1,217.17.4d from your publisher, John Murray [. . .] I trust you are having a happy and profitable time on your present journey.’ But gross royalties from 1976, 1977 and the first months of 1978 were only £1,417.87. Between Roumeli in 1966 and A Time of Gifts, eleven years passed. ‘We used to be famous once,’ Joan complained. In early 1976, Paddy at last handed over the manuscript of A Time of Gifts to Jock Murray – ‘What a sigh one heaves when that barrier is passed! It’s like going through the Looking Glass, and all looks different. I wish I were a better concentrator: feel like a grasshopper harnessed to a plough’5 – but he continued to make endless changes to his text to the very end. Murray once showed Jim Lees-Milne one of Paddy’s manuscripts. ‘A spider’s nightmare of corrections which he goes over and over again,’ Lees-Milne said. Murray told him that Lord Byron’s were just the same.
Over the years Paddy produced a considerable flow of articles, essays, obituaries, book reviews and pen portraits. They were less hard work than the slog of writing full-length books, and probably what he enjoyed doing best. Whatever Paddy wrote, Joan heard first. Joan was a good listener and a good reader, and she became Paddy’s sounding board. Paddy would bound triumphantly back into the house straight from his desk in the studio with papers in his hand and give them to her. Not immediately, but perhaps two or three hours later, Joan might say, ‘Haven’t you missed out the part about . . . and isn’t that the point of the story?’ Paddy would mouth an ‘oh’, turn round again and go back to work. For all his writings, it was Joan who provided judgement. She had an innate expectation of excellence, both for Paddy and for others. She was always encouraging and always tried to get the best out of people. Without Joan, there would have been even less writing.
A Time of Gifts was finally published in September 1977, over a decade after Paddy had started writing what he had intended to be a 2,500-word magazine article. The title, suggested by Sir Aymer Maxwell, came from ‘Twelfth Night’, a poem by Louis MacNeice: ‘For now the time of gifts is gone – / Oh boys that grow, oh snows that melt, Oh bathos that the years must fill’. The cover illustration by John Craxton depicts a young man in the foreground, his feet in snow while black birds wheel about him. He watches while the sun rises over distant peaks, Schlösser yet to be visited and a golden River Danube yet to be conquered. (The original sketches were actually made on Hampstead Heath, and young ‘Paddy’, the archetype of youth, was Craxton’s partner, Richard Riley.) From its first publication, A Time of Gifts was a tremendous success. ‘This glorious peregrination across Europe,’ wrote Philip Toynbee in the Observer, ‘is a reminder that the English language is still a superb instrument in the hands of a virtuoso skill with words, a robust aesthetic passion, an indomitable curiosity about people and places; a rapturous historical imagination. A writer, in fact, who is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.’ Gabriele Annan in the Listener was equally effusive: ‘This is very rich stuff [. . .] It is rich, not like chocolate truffles, with a homogenous texture, but like a terrine of game where resilient chunks of bird and beast alternate with layers of creamy pâté and fortifying jelly, and where you come upon the occasional crunch of an exotic pistachio nut or a spicy juniper berry.’
In November, Jock Murray reported to Paddy that ‘all goes spiffingly (forgive schoolboy language, but I am just back from giving a lecture to undergraduates at Oxford, where I rather overdid it)’. In 1978, A Time of Gifts won the W. H. Smith Prize, which was worth £2,500 and not taxable. Paddy’s income rose accordingly. His work was published overseas: A Time of Gifts even had a Norwegian translation. Among his financial papers there is a note to say that, after commission, his Dutch publishers had brought him an income of £73.76 for The Traveller’s Tree and £1,087.55 for Mani. Before long, all of Paddy’s back catalogue was republished and was to stay in print.
It was another nine years before the publication of Between the Woods and the Water. After the publication of A Time of Gifts, Paddy received a fan letter from Rudi Fischer, who lived in Budapest. A polymath, linguist and historian, Fischer was born in Kronstadt in Transylvania, the son of a Hungarian-Jewish father and a Saxon-Lutheran mother; he was, however, raised in Australia, where he was taken as a youth to avoid conscription in the Second World War. In his letter, Fischer pointed out a number of inaccuracies and misspellings, which he hoped was constructive criticism. Paddy was delighted, and a long friendship resulted. Rudi Fischer’s erudition was remarkable, and his knowledge of both Transylvanian history and the genealogies of Hungarian families was vast. In many ways, Between the Woods and the Water is the fruit of the friendship of Paddy and Rudi. Paddy wrote in his introduction, ‘My debt to Rudolf Fischer is beyond reckoning. His omniscient range of knowledge and an enthusiasm tempered with astringency have been a constant delight during all the writing of this book.’ But all the poetry was of Paddy’s own making, and his portrait of the Hungarian aristocracy just before their way of life was about to be obliterated, is a wonderful piece of literature.6 Just as with A Time of Gifts, the sequel was met with tremendous enthusiasm; it received the Thomas Cook Travel Award and the International PEN/Time Life Silver Pen Award.
In many ways, Paddy’s greatest collaborator was always Joan, and her influence on his next book would be even more direct than usual. In 1971, Paddy had gone to Peru with a group of friends in order to walk and climb in the Andes: Andrew Devonshire; André Choremi, a French lawyer; Carl Natar, who had been manager of Cartier’s in London; and Robin Fedden, who was now the deputy Director General of the National Trust, and his wife Renée. Twenty years after this expedition to South America, Paddy turned the letters he wrote to Joan in his absence into a slim book, Three Letters from the Andes. The book begins:
CUZCO August 3, 1971
At last the morning of departure arrived in Little Venice, but no sign of the ordered car. We dialled and dialled for a cab, everywhere was engaged, so in despair I started lugging my stuff to the pavement while Patrick Kinross stood in the middle of Warwick Avenue in his Persian silk dressing-gown waving and to some purpose. A taxi stopped at once.7
In a note serving as an introduction to the book, Paddy wrote that he had made only minor changes before the publication of the original letters, cutting out one or two irrelevant passages, topped and tailed it a bit but not much, and generally tidied it up to make it more presentable as a kind of memento of the journey. This was nonsense: as ever, Paddy was incapable of preventing himself from tinkering, and the original letters were in fact completely rewritten.
But it was not only Paddy who continued to travel. Joan shared his extraordinary wanderlust and just as he returned from South America, she went off to Samarkand:
Darling Paddy,
A rushed word, written with trembling hand before catching train to sister Diana, to say I suddenly seem to be going to Samarkand with Patrick [Kinross] and Alan P.J. on the 3rd. I feel a proper swine doing this without you but you know how I’ve always longed to go & God knows if there will ever be a chance again. God knows if it will be nice anyway as a dreaded package tour, 25 people organised by Connoisseur, so it should be cultured at any rate. Alan P.J., his Swedish boyfriend & his next potential American millionairess, Gladys Charles, who unlike the other one is charming by all accounts, & Patrick are the only ones I’ve ever heard of. Patrick said, ‘Why not come?’ & I of course longed to but of course no place as filled up months ago & then someone yesterday chucked & so P has arranged for me to go. Can you forgive me? We should go to Persia next in any case . . . Long to see you. The rumours are that you and Andrew leap to the top of every peak leaving others gasping below.
Tons and tons of love my darling & I’ll write a newsy little letter but must get this off by London post. xxx Joan8
They had barely got back to Kardamyli before they left again, this time for Turkey. ‘Our fleeting visit to Turkey was glorious & we pine to go back & see more,’ Joan wrote to Patrick Kinross on their return. Patrick had made innumerable visits to Turkey and knew the country well. In 1964 he had published a biography of Ataturk. As a result of his writings and his knowledge of the country he came to enjoy a reputation in Turkey almost unique for someone British.
Old friendships meant a tremendous amount to Joan – she almost lived through her friends – yet she had already lost so many of her generation. When Maurice Bowra had died in 1971, John Betjeman wrote to her. Joan replied, ‘I am most touched by your writing to me when you must be so miserable yourself. Of course life without Maurice will not be the same, something so good and vital and strong has disappeared as well as one’s oldest friend and I think of him the whole time.’9 John Betjeman had unveiled a plaque to Auden in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner only a month before Cyril Connolly’s death in November 1974. Now, in June 1976, shortly after Paddy and Joan had returned from Turkey, Patrick Kinross died unexpectedly. Joan wrote to Janetta who had briefly, by Patrick’s marriage to Angela Culme-Seymour, been his sister-in-law but was always his friend.
It’s so dreadful about Patrick. I feel utterly sad & miserable. He was really the last rock left in London, always so welcoming & generous & a marvellous friend all one’s life, never changing except to get nicer & nicer. I can’t bear the idea of never being in that lovely grubby friendly house again with Patrick bursting into one’s room in the morning with plans for the day [. . .] Paddy was on his way to stay with him but was intercepted at the airport by the kind thoughtful Coote who rightly couldn’t bear the idea of Paddy arriving at the house to find Patrick lying in state [. . .]
I will quote what Paddy says about Patrick. Masses of people came (you probably saw in Friday’s Times). Bier covered with flowers & such a beautiful Palladian church inside. I was shoved in a front box pew with John Betjeman; sun pouring in through leafy ivy-laced windows. John’s address from the pulpit excellent, a bit wobbly but v. moving. I’d been asked to choose the lessons: first Isaiah 35, read by P’s brother, second (by me) that lovely passage from the Apocryphal Gospel of St James that George Seferis loved so much. I got permission from the Vicar to read anything so uncanonical. Everyone said they were bowled over by the strangeness of it & the aptness [. . .] motion, then stasis, everything seized up like a fresco on a trecento Sienese religious pastoral: then released into action by the last verse; & all thought Patrick would have liked its lack of orthodoxy . . .* After the church, Lucy Lambton drove Coote & Miranda & me to Kensal Green, where the cremation seemed to be over in 5 minutes; then back to P’s house where he had left in his will that a party should be given for all his close pals, & there they all were & it was great fun, just as he would have liked.
The thing that worries everyone a bit is that he has left the house & its contents to Constance McNab* (why not Coote or some other deserving old pal?) who bores everyone stiff. It’s thought to be out of guilt for some passing affair he broke off 25 years ago [. . .] Anyway what a shame.
*A dreadful woman.
Very much love to you & Jaime
Joan.10
‘For all of us here, Patrick was chiefly a friend and mainstay of our happiness. At his table I met friends I’ve known for the rest of my life,’ said John Betjeman at Patrick’s service.11 One of those lifelong friends – of both Patrick and John – was, of course, Joan. John himself had not only a bottomless need for love but also to share it, and he did so with the Leigh Fermors:
Dearest Joanie and Paddy,
Your ingenious lines in that gloriously complicated metre have cheered me up a lot.* I hear the waves of the Aegean softly lapping against rock, and I picture Groundsel at Dumbleton striding over his acres. And I long to put into such catching rhyme and rhythm my memories of Sir Bolton and the Viscountess and the terrified children. To-day is like Siberia and there’s every chance of Feeble [his mistress of thirty years, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish] and me being sent to Gothland in the Baltic to look at the old churches there. What a life you and Joanie have had, and how wisely and well you have spent it, where the orthodox saints look down with olive shaped eyes from the walls of the basilica and the goats leap from crag to crag and the olives are silvery. Penelope comes to luncheon to-day and I have ordered chocolate éclairs for her but not for
Yours with love, John B.12
In the late 1940s, just as the Betjemans moved to Farnborough, strains began to show in their marriage. John was decidedly Anglican, and although he had religious uncertainties, he had no doubt about belonging to the Church of England. Penelope, on the other hand, had long been attracted to the Church of Rome, and in 1947 she began to receive formal instruction in Roman Catholicism with the Dominicans in Oxford. Betjeman was deeply hurt. Relations with Penelope grew more and more distant. This was almost literally so, for while Betjeman was insular, almost xenophobic, Penelope travelled widely. Joan once dined with both Betjeman and Penelope together after he had visited Kardamyli with Feeble. Joan told Paddy that she was paralysed with horror when Penelope turned and said to her, ‘But however did John get to you? He’s so hopeless at travelling abroad alone.’ Since the mid 1950s, Betjeman had a house at Cloth Fair, close to St Bartholomew’s Church. He kept up old friendships – Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, John Rayner (whom he asked to help his son Paul find employment). And he kept up with Paddy and Joan. Alan (‘the Captain’) married again, Mary Jean Thorne from Galveston, Texas, but neither Betjeman nor Joan was impressed. However John’s feelings for Joan were now touched with regret. After all these years whenever he met Joan he would still start singing the first lines of one of the hymns written by her great-grandfather, ‘Oh worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness (Bow down before Him His beauty proclaim)’, but change ‘Him’ and ‘His’ to ‘Her’:
It was nice to see that country-house, relief-nib handwriting of yours even though on Greek paper. I saw Paddy at Patrick’s. We met the Captain’s new bride. She seemed to rule the roost but I think the Captain will escape. I can’t tell just from our dinner party what she was like – whether there was any love there. I have an idea that the Captain is very kind and very weak. I would very much like to have far closer contact and of a physical nature, with you. But then, as you know, in letters to Abroad, one gets very indiscreet. I went and filmed at the Ritz in colour lately. I thought of you. I wish I had realised I could have spoken then. Look at me now, fat, bald and finished and knighted like Sir Henry Newbolt (good) and Sir William Watson (less good) and Sir John Squire . . .
Darling Joanie, ta ever so for writing. Hope you’ll forgive my bad handwriting.
Love, John13
What Joan thought of this late declaration of love we cannot know but doubtless she had always been aware of his feelings for her and was touched.
There were not only old friends to entertain at Kardamyli, but new ones too. As one generation of bohemian travellers had begun to die out, Paddy and Joan found kindred spirits in the next. Bruce Chatwin was already famous in his twenties for his golden looks, his flamboyant manner, his long walks and his conversation. Jim Lees-Milne, a neighbour of Chatwin in the Ozleworth Valley in Gloucestershire, described how Bruce ‘came in like a whirlwind, talking affectedly about himself’. He had no modesty and he showed off, but he also bubbled with enthusiasm, ‘still very young, not self-assured’.14 All the same, at the time, Lees-Milne was impressed and liked him. Although he was married, Chatwin thought he was homosexual, because of the way he had been brought up by his ‘unwise mother’.
It was Magouche Phillips who first introduced Bruce to Joan and Paddy in 1970, arriving together at Kardamyli from Patmos. Chatwin wrote to his wife, Elizabeth:
I am sitting on the terrace of Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor’s house in the Mani. Quite heavenly here. The whole Taygetos range plunges down into the sea and eagles float in thermals above the house – a low arcaded affair of limestone beautifully marked with red karst. Olives and pencil thin cypress clothe the terrace between the mountains and the sea.15
Joan grew very fond of him. She saw ‘the point of him’: the phrase Paddy and Joan liked to use to show approval of someone. For Bruce, the attraction was not only that Paddy was a great walker, but also that both he and Joan had known Robert Byron, one of Chatwin’s heroes; The Road to Oxiana was very high on his list of great books. Chatwin had theories about the importance of walking; for him man’s restlessness was a natural condition. For a long time he had been working on a book he called The Nomadic Alternative, which was to be his great masterpiece, proving all his speculations and philosophies. When his agent Deborah Rogers read the indigestible, leaden prose her heart sank: the book, as delivered in the early 1970s, was unpublishable. It would be more than a decade before his great idea would be ready for print.
As Paddy’s success had grown, Xan Fielding had continued to struggle to establish himself as a writer, and now saw a younger generation begin to surpass him. By 1975, Xan and Daphne had been married for twenty-five years. After Cornwall they had lived in Portugal, Tangier, and in France both in the Cévennes and near Uzès in the Languedoc, close to where Lawrence Durrell lived. Over the years, however, their marriage had become more and more unhappy – not least because they never made much money. In 1977, Janetta invited Magouche to spend Christmas with her and Jaime in southern Spain, and she suggested that she pick up Xan from the south of France on the way. Daphne, meanwhile, returned to England to see her family. Daphne phoned Xan every morning, not realizing that Xan and Magouche were by then in bed together. When Xan and Daphne saw one another again, he told her that he was leaving her.
In 1978, Xan and Magouche married, and moved to live in Ronda in the south of Spain. (Daphne chanced to meet an old friend, an American millionaire, and moved with him to Arizona.) Now that he was married to Magouche, Xan had fewer financial worries and, rather than working as a translator, he was able to do something more satisfyingly creative. He began writing a book about the influence of the winds on man, and wrote to Paddy:
[Magouche] generously gets on with almost all the chores while I try to get on with the winds. I came back with another briefcase-full of notes and photostats, including some exciting new material, and I have at last fathomed the sixteen colours of the four winds of the sky, on which the long-haired monks with painted eye-lids disputed in the hospice at Jarrow.16
By the end of the decade, Bruce Chatwin was at last an acclaimed and prize-winning author. When he was working on his second novel, The Viceroy of Ouidah, Bruce rented a house in Ronda for five months. In the afternoon, he usually went to swim in Magouche’s pool. When the glowing American reviews for In Patagonia arrived, he could not resist sharing them, and would always arrive at lunch, just when there was a captive audience. Then he talked. ‘He did see himself as a sort of present to mankind. He’d come with such nice ribbons and wrapping and heaven knows what goodies inside, yet you never did unwrap it,’17 Jim Lees-Milne wrote. Eventually Xan went off climbing in the Pyrenees in order to escape the younger writer’s gloating. ‘And so everyone is much more relaxed,’ Chatwin wrote.
Xan found it impossible to find a publisher for Aeolus Displayed, his book on the winds, so in 1983 he turned to Paddy for advice. Paddy made some changes to the text and then sent it to Elizabeth Sifton, Bruce’s American editor. Paddy wrote to his friend a few weeks later:
I’ve been meaning to write for three weeks and now that here I am pen in hand, I can no longer find the letter I wanted, in spite of hunting high and low viz. Elizabeth Sifton’s regretful return of the winds. Damn, on both headings! Her drift was that it was a fascinating and well written book, too good in the present state of publishing to be a commercial proposition, – it looked as if she was saying it was too good to publish, though not quite that. The only serious criticism she made is that the book didn’t seem to progress, and left the reader pretty well where he started. I must say, this remark went through me like an arrow, and I can’t help wondering whether my Florentine advice altering the order of the chapters is to blame for this. I am very surprised at their not taking it on, and would like to give them a good shake. I’ve just written a letter in which I said that, considering the amount of bilge that is published, it seems extraordinary that a book like the Winds (she freely admits it too, seems soft soap) should have such a hard coming of it.18
It is a measure of Paddy’s love for Xan that he should give him such support. The book, like The Nomadic Alternative, is virtually unreadable.
Chatwin, meanwhile, had returned to his own great idea. Like Paddy in his younger days, Bruce was very good at finding other people’s houses in which to write. In the autumn of 1984, after Paddy decided to swim the Hellespont, Bruce turned up again at Kardamyli. Joan wrote to her friends Michael and Damaris Stewart:
The Hellespont was glorious but of course agony for me as I knew he would never give up. ‘Tell him to swim faster,’ the nice Turk in the boat kept saying to me. ‘I can’t,’ said Paddy, continuing his stately side stroke & being carried past yet another landing place.
We’ve had a working winter, enlivened by the dazzling Bruce Chatwin, who has been staying with us or next door most of the time. He & Paddy go for tremendous walks & he’s marvellous in the kitchen.19
The ability to cook always raised someone in Joan’s estimation, but her praise was entirely justified. The Nomadic Alternative, the book Chatwin was struggling with, at last found form at Kardamyli as The Songlines, which was published in 1987 and reviewed by Paddy in the Spectator.
Although Bruce found Penelope Betjeman impossibly demanding and almost wilfully eccentric, she had become a sort of second mother to him. Then, two years after John’s death in 1984, Penelope died in India. Around ten in the morning, she had called in on her favourite temple. She received the blessing and rode on towards a place called Khanag, and was talking her head off to her Tibetan porter when her head tilted sideways and the talking stopped.
Bruce was shattered; his wife, Elizabeth, said it was the only time she had seen him in tears. He went immediately to Kulu to scatter Penelope’s ashes. He wrote to Paddy and Joan:
Yesterday morning, her friend Kranti Singh and I carried her ashes in a small brass pot to a rock in the middle of the R[iver] Beas which was carved all over, in Tibetan, with Om mani padme hum. He tipped some into a whirlpool and I then threw the pot with the remainder into the white water. The flowers – wild tulips, clematis, and a sprig of English oakleaves (from the Botanical gardens in Manali) vanished at once into the foam.20
Joan wrote to Billa Harrod saying that she had been reading Penelope’s letters, which was ‘agonizing’ – ‘I regret bitterly not going to Kulu with her – She was the most extraordinary & wonderful person & I feel so lucky to have been her friend.’21
Joan’s own family was also now touched by death. In 1972 her sister Diana, a widow for many years, sold her farm in Rutland and moved back to Dumbleton – which was home for her as it was for all the family – and built a house. She also kept a flat in London and most years she visited Paddy and Joan in Greece. Although sisters and in some ways close, as well as physically alike, they had little in common by way of interests – Diana was conventional and never approved of Joan’s bohemian friends. It had always been her sister Joan who was smart and glamorous and gained attention, but they had their memories, their past and family ties – and these mattered. In 1974 Diana’s eldest daughter Anna, who had made the curtains for Kardamyli, died. She was still only in her early thirties. In the autumn of 1985, aged seventy-eight, Diana began to lose all energy and the will to live. Her second daughter, Bridget, who was staying at Dumbleton, woke her in the morning, went away to fetch her breakfast and found her dead when she returned. Her heart had quietly failed. Bridget, whom Joan had once described to Paddy as ‘so pretty and gay and having a wonderful life with swarms of young men’ also died only a few years later. Joan never mentioned her family in her letters or her conversation with friends. It was as if she put different areas of her life into different compartments.
Bruce’s conjectures about walking and wandering had a less romantic side: they were also an excuse for unlimited sexual cruising. During the course of his many casual encounters he was infected with the HIV virus, which developed into AIDS. After a lingering illness, he died in Nice in January 1989, aged just forty-eight. His ashes were interred under an olive tree close to a ruined Byzantine chapel dedicated to St Nicholas, two miles above Kardamyli. Libations of retsina were poured over the grave and a prayer said in Greek. Then Paddy, Joan and Elizabeth had a picnic, which they thought he would have enjoyed.
Two years later, in August 1991, Xan died in Paris, where he was being treated for cancer. Joan wrote to Janetta:
Magouche arrived last night & is being wonderful, much calmer than she sounded on the telephone, & we talked about Xan & his life a lot at dinner in an easy way. It’s a horrid, cloudy, hot, damp day for the first time in the morning for ages, just when we wanted it to be perfect for bathing but M at least swam before breakfast & is now reading with a very energetic kitten trying to pull the buttons off her shirt.22
The following year, Magouche had Aeolus Displayed published privately.