All About Eve
She had grown up in a world of horses. Her father (an Old Etonian and Lieutenant-Colonel in the Grenadier Guards) was a slim and wiry figure, reputed to be ‘the best looking man in the army’, who devoted most of his life to ‘the pursuits of a country gentleman’. In short: he was a keen rider to hounds, a useful oarsman and a fine shot. But he pursued nothing with more diligence than hunting. There was no separating him from his celebrated mare, Bella Minna, and it was wonderful to see them racing over the pastures as the hounds settled to their work. He was a considerable landowner, his fox coverts being well-stocked and many famous hunts starting off near these strongholds. It was difficult to persuade him to talk of much else – his political views were so unpronounced that even his nearest kinsmen and closest friends could not be certain what they were. But his opinions on how to improve the hounds, how to weld together the old and new schools of hunting and maintain the goodwill of owners and occupiers of land over which they galloped were often quoted at the Yorkshire Club. When he put by the horn, sounding so cheery and challenging in the brisk morning air, he called up many bright and happy hours. These were splendid days. His jaunts and jollities
could find an honourable place in the pages of his contemporary, the novelist Robert Surtees. No one, it was said, not even Captain Slingsby himself, had more beautiful hands or a steadier eye, or showed more devotion to the sport than ‘Colonel Fairfax of the Blues’. It was a sad day when, on 19 February 1879, the gallant Colonel handed over the mastership of the York and Ainsty Hunt to Captain Slingsby and was presented by members of the hunt with a group picture of themselves.
Thomas Ferdinand Fairfax was only forty-four when he died of cancer in February 1884. Much of his land had to be sold to pay off gambling debts. Eve was aged twelve. There was a provision made for her in his Will guaranteeing her £4,000 on reaching the age of twenty-one or marrying under that age with the consent of her mother. But although the gross value of Thomas Ferdinand Fairfax’s estate was calculated at over £25,000, when all his debts were paid the net value was nil.
If there was a more adventurous rider to hounds in Yorkshire than Colonel Fairfax it had been his wife. She was a brilliant horsewoman – everyone agreed she had one of the finest seats in the county. She was seldom seen off a horse. Her exploits in the saddle delighted readers of the Yorkshire Post. They relished episodes such as the time when ‘she jumped her horse over a stream but the moment she touched the banks, they gave way. The horse fell back into the ditch, rolling upon his rider and passing her below him in the mud and water. He struggled furiously in the stream, and the spectators held their breath with horror, for no one dreamed but that Mrs Fairfax was dead. A moment later however she emerged half-drowned, suffocated and exhausted. In spite of the condition she was in, she sprang on her horse again, forced it to take the stream in which she had so nearly found her death; and, wet as she was, went on after the hounds as if nothing had happened!’
Eve was named after her mother: she was Evelyn Constance and her mother Evelyn Selina. They came to dislike each other and this similarity of names sometimes irritated them. ‘I wanted a petite dark girl – and look what I’ve got!’ Eve heard her mother exclaim as, tall, fair and self-consciously awkward at the age of thirteen, she entered a room full of staring guests. Evelyn preferred her sons, Guy and Bryan. Guy, who was a year older than Eve, was packed off to Eton, and Bryan, the youngest child, dispatched to Winchester. Little money was wasted on Eve’s education; and once she was in her ’teens she stayed at home with her mother. Guy turned out a steady churchman, a staunch Conservative and solid cricketer. He listed his recreations as ‘all sports and fox-hunting’. His father would have been pleased to see him described as ‘a brilliant man to hounds and as good a heavyweight as could be found anywhere in England’. Bryan, who went from Winchester to the Royal Military College and served in the Durham Light Infantry, settled down after the war as the owner of a prolific stud farm.
Eve was as enthusiastic about all sports as were her brothers – there was really no alternative in the Fairfax household. She was judged to be ‘the champion of the ladies’ at cricket and, sometimes got up in a faultless costume of white flannel, or adding brightness to the scene when prettily attired in a scarlet petticoat and gypsy bonnet, would display ‘great agility’ in the field and was admired for her vigorous ‘late cuts and fast runs’. In a match against the men all playing left-handed and led by Ernest Beckett, Eve was the highest scorer and the women handsomely routed the men. On a horse, any horse, she was as comfortable as the rest of her family. When young she would ride her pony, summer and winter, the eight miles across open undulating country with wide horizons, small woods and farming villages, to her school, and stable it at an inn near York. On her route back she often stopped
to have tea with the Archbishop. Later, when she was invited to balls or dinner parties, she rode out carrying her evening dress in a saddlebag.
Her mother became increasingly fierce and eccentric after her husband’s death. It was said that she used to go to bed with a piece of string tied round her toe and hang it out of the window. Each morning the gardener used to pull the string to wake her up. But however early she started the day, she had little time for Eve and did not trouble to have her presented at Court when she was eighteen or nineteen. ‘I had a funny bringing up – not bothered about much,’ Eve recalled in old age. In the late 1880s she became friendly with ‘Prince Eddy’, the Duke of Clarence, who was garrisoned at York. He was suspected of being Jack the Ripper and had made several visits to the Fairfax family home – Eve, it was said, sometimes ‘walked out’ with him. (He was the Prince of Wales’s eldest son, and second in line to the throne but, when Prince Eddy died at the age of twenty-eight, his younger brother became King George V.) Prince Eddy insisted that Eve be presented at Court – ‘all girls of our sort were at that time but mother didn’t bother,’ Eve told a friend. After Prince Eddy’s death ‘I arranged that a dear friend Lady George Gordon Lennox would do it – so she took me and we sailed into Buckingham Palace. She had the entrée as her late husband had some job at Court … I was 24 instead of being 18.’
Her mother’s interest in Eve was confined to her marriage. But she did not marry. She was handsome but, even in her mid-twenties, still something of a tomboy. Perhaps, too, there was some pleasure to be enjoyed from thwarting her mother. Everything would change for Eve after her mother’s death in 1901 at the age of fifty-three. In her Will, Evelyn Selina Fairfax made her elder son Guy her executor and trustee, leaving £3,000 absolutely to her younger son Bryan and a further £3,000 for Guy to invest and pay the income to Eve – an arrangement that was to cloud their friendship (one of the difficulties being
that their mother’s estate was valued at less than £1,500). She also left her ‘trinkets and ornaments of the person except my Diamonds unto my daughter’. The diamonds went to Guy Fairfax with the rest of the estate.
Within a year of her mother’s death Eve became engaged to marry Ernest Beckett. He presented her with his family pearls and it was then that he commissioned Rodin to make a sculpture of her head and shoulders. They had known each other for several years as friends, but this was now a love affair. She kept his letters for almost sixty years as evidence that she was loved and then, at the age of ninety, sent them to Ernest’s daughter Lucille. ‘What wonderful love letters!’ Lucille wrote. She could hardly believe such a man of the world who ‘had been more than a little intimate with some of the most famous society women of his day, could possibly have written such pure and tender letters of love. What an extraordinary character – never hardened or made blasé by life, he remained eager and enthusiastic about everything to the end … I am happy to have them – on the other hand they make me very sad … Why you didn’t marry each other in 1904 will always remain a puzzle to me – there was nothing to prevent it and loving you as he did, it seems quite unbelievable. Perhaps at heart you felt he was too old? Over 20 years is a big difference.’ In fact there were fewer than fifteen years between them.
In the last years of her life, Eve let it be known that Ernest had proposed to her and she had refused him. But it was she who kept his letters, not he who kept hers. What evidence remains suggests that Ernest walked away from the engagement, leaving her with a melancholy that shows through her letters to Rodin. She had to tell him that, owing to ‘money difficulties’, Ernest could not pay for the bust – ‘rather an awkward job for me,’ she admitted.
It was important for Lucille to think well of her father. She had
not always done so. He had persuaded her to marry Count Otto Czernin, a man she did not love – a marriage which, despite their four children, she later sought to annul (both Eve Fairfax and Alice Keppel had attended the wedding ceremony in 1903). Lucille wanted to eradicate this hostile memory of her father and refashion his character so that it resembled what she believed to be essentially her own. She willingly surrendered to the belief that it was Eve, and not Ernest, who had ended their love affair. These letters from almost sixty years back, showing Ernest in his most romantic vein, gave Lucille a sympathetic father she could cherish. ‘A 1000 thanks – it was too dear of you to give them to me,’ she wrote to Eve in February 1962. ‘For I am so like him as a character with faith in life and in people and the eagerness for everything that comes – even at my age [seventy-seven].’
Eve in her later years would not tolerate the notion that she had been Ernest’s victim. In her prideful and imperious imagination there was only humiliation to be incurred through having been proposed to by Ernest Beckett MP and then rejected by Lord Grimthorpe – whether she had been sacrificed to financial needs or set aside for another woman hardly mattered. Far more invigorating, once he was dead, was to take the initiative and manoeuvre herself into more dignified territory. Otherwise she was merely ‘damaged goods’, someone who had lost her chance and lived on in the shadows of life – an embarrassment to everyone.
‘We will discuss it further when we meet,’ Lucille promised. The pact they were to make, a story they told others, suited them both. For his daughter, Ernest became a singular man hounded by ill fortune – had his wife lived he would have risen high in politics and served his country nobly. As it was, he created at Cimbrone an aesthetic palace, Lucille believed, almost Buddhist in its atmosphere, where he could pursue the esoteric religions that were to be her inheritance. ‘You may
be sure that, next to yourself,’ she wrote to Eve, ‘no one could treasure them [his letters] as I do.’ But they did not survive her death.
Those years before the Great War were the most emotionally active of Eve Fairfax’s life, though they left much turbulent wreckage in their wake. She had told Rodin that she wished to be an actress. But she took no bold step such as José had done – perhaps her insistence on high social position made such a step impractical. In any event, she contented herself with amateur performances mostly in the Yorkshire Pageant Plays. These were open-air, sometimes processional shows celebrating great moments in the country’s history and performed by townspeople and local children. Eve favoured queenly roles – Eleanor of Aquitaine, Margaret of Anjou, Queen Elizabeth (‘no mere imitation, ’ Professor Hubert, writing in one of the Yorkshire newspapers, described her, ‘but a perfect representative of the Royal Sovereign’). She also played in charity productions at Yorkshire theatricals including A Woman of No Importance and was praised for her ‘wonderful elocutionary power’. In later life she was reputed to have been so exemplary as Lady Bracknell that people told her she had missed her vocation.
In her early forties she was still an attractive-looking woman – possibly more so than she had been in her early twenties. Romantic rumours inevitably clustered round her. She formed a close friendship with Sir William Eden, the amateur painter adept at turning compliments into insults. When, in the mid 1890s, Whistler sent him a letter of thanks for the hundred guineas he had been given for a little portrait of Lady Eden (‘You really are magnificent … I can only hope that the picture will be even slightly worthy of us all’), Eden decided to take offence and lose his temper. The two of them brought out the very worst in each other, their differences leading to two battles in the Paris courts on the competing claims of owner versus creator over works
of art (made famous in the early twentieth century after the publication of Whistler’s book The Baronet and the Butterfly). The Baronet (father of a future British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who, it has been suggested, lost his wits in a similar aggressive style over the Suez crisis in 1956) was a wealthy, sometimes generous, often irascible, self-tormented character with romantic leanings, which for a time pointed rather peremptorily in Eve’s direction. ‘Just answer “yes” – no arguments please!’ he wrote when declaring his affection for her with an offer of financial help. He showed his love, too, by treating her to convoluted analyses of her character: ‘though intelligent, you are not intelligent enough, dear Eve – or perhaps you are too intelligent. At any rate you are not stupid: for if you were, you would not be admired, if not loved by yours truly William Eden.’
Among some single pages of letters to Eve that have survived her years of wandering are statements of passionately incomplete love. ‘Charlie’ begins his letter from Lower Berkeley Street to ‘my own darling’ and, poignantly omitting the most vital words, assures her that ‘whatever happens to either of us in life we shall be always and for ever to the end dear one’. A learned professor writes of the temptation to ‘give up my liberty to you’ and explains why, in the interests of scholarship, he must not do so: ‘for a short period of (I admit) intense joy, I should make myself miserable for the rest of my life.’ The Beckett family was sure she had an affair with Ernest’s womanising brother Gervase, a Soames Forsyte character (a successful businessman with poignant leanings towards the arts) who, on his wife’s death, married his regular mistress with disastrous consequences. They liked to believe that she had also been involved with the youngest Beckett brother, Rupert. ‘All Becketts make bad husbands,’ Eve said.
Her air of superiority suggested in some people’s minds that she was a virgin and they were happy to congratulate her, and themselves, on
prolonging this condition. ‘It is an inexpressible pleasure to me to know that I have left you as I found you as pure as you were as a child, and have not taken any advantage of your loving trust and confidence in me,’ one hesitant suitor propounded. ‘ … I love your fine natural mind. You really hate wicked things & all the naughtiness attending them in speech, writing and other ways.’
These men, it seems, were wary of Eve as if conscious of something vengeful in her. She is no longer the tender, vulnerable figure who was engaged to Ernest and who sat to Rodin. She was perhaps an example of Somerset Maugham’s belief in the damage suffering inflicts on people. When the Duke of Grafton proposed to her hoping she would accept him, not for his title or money, but simply for himself, she replied ‘Rather a tall order’ and brusquely turned him down. She allowed herself brief infatuations for people who were securely out of reach – an actor, for example, whom she saw playing Jesus Christ at the Oberammergau Passion Play. But she was careful not to expose herself to more suffering. It was the men who must take that risk. The Duke of Wellington (a one-time suitor of Alice Keppel’s daughter, Violet Trefusis) described the feelings Eve provoked in many of her admirers. She had invited him to come and see her privately: but he would not. ‘What would be the use?’ he replied. ‘Either you would let me get to know you very intimately, or you would not. If you did not, I should suffer, to no purpose. If, on the other hand, you did, I should soon fall entirely into the drama and light literature of many nations … I know that you could make a fool of me very quickly, if I were rash enough to come within striking distance; so I mean to keep some hundreds of miles between us. I quite recognise that you could give me pleasure that not one in a million could give. That makes me want you; but it also warns me not to want you.’
Remaining unmarried, Eve presented her friends with something
of a puzzle. There was talk that she was the daughter of a royal duke and, perhaps inevitably, whispers of an illegitimate child. Echoes of these rumours still lingered in the air when, over eighty years later, I began my researches into Eve’s life and met a younger generation of men and women belonging to the families who had known her in Yorkshire. I was highly sceptical of these stories – they were characteristic, it seemed to me, of the gossip that often follows someone who has grown into a local legend. Apart from the speculation over her relationship with Rodin, I heard a rather vague story of a son who had been dispatched to South Africa – which had its confused roots, I suspected, in José’s son. I was surprised when Eve’s solicitor, Charles Dodsworth, told me matter-of-factly that he had seen the birth certificate of her child. Then, among the papers of Ernest’s grandson Christopher (the fourth Lord Grimthorpe) I saw a photocopy of this certificate. I have it before me as I write.
The date of birth is given as 7 March 1916, the name of the mother is Evelyn Fairfax and her occupation listed as being ‘of independent means’. But could this really be my Eve Fairfax? She would have been forty-five – not impossible, of course, but rather old to give birth to a first child in those wartime days. There were few people who could be less accurately described as being ‘of independent means’ – though this is the description Eve would most likely have given. The child was born at a nursing home with royal connections, at 15 Welbeck Street, in London. The matron, Clara Nelson Smith, who was ‘present at the birth’, had been awarded the Royal Victorian Medal by Queen Alexandra following an operation there on His Serene Highness Prince Francis of Teck (the brother of Queen Mary). The Prince had died and his Will was sealed to avoid a scandal (setting a precedent for future royal Wills). The matron, who was in charge of the files, had been honoured for her discretion. This was a perfect setting for
the birth of Eve’s illegitimate son. Yet I was still reluctant to accept it as authentic.
Then I looked at the mother’s address on the certificate: 64 Gloucester Place. This was the home of Eve’s friend Maud Hope (the Hope and Milner families were connected by marriage). John Francis Mordaunt is the name on the birth certificate. The first two names lead nowhere with certainty, though the first Fairfax to be recorded in the family tree, born in York in the eleventh or twelfth century, was John Fairfax; and Francis may have been chosen to recall Prince Francis of Teck (certainly Eve would have been happy to make this link). Mordaunt is unusual. Examining the family tree of Eve’s mother, I see that her father was Sir William Mordaunt Edward Milner, and his father Sir William Mordaunt Sturt Milner, and his father again Sir William Mordaunt Milner – indeed, there are Mordaunts everywhere in the family reaching back to the second baronet, Sir William Milner of Nun Appleton who, in the early eighteenth century, married Elizabeth Mordaunt, daughter of the Hon. and Rev. George Mordaunt. It may not excite today’s reader, but this alliance entitled the Milners to quarter the arms of Mordaunt, Howard and Plantagenet – which would have appealed to Eve. This arcane world with its distinguished blood of ancestral vintage is where she sheltered from the actual world around her. I am finally convinced that John Francis Mordaunt was her son.
No father is named on the certificate. But among the Grimthorpe family papers, with the birth certificate, is a letter sent to Christopher Grimthorpe by the Hope family, which identifies the father as Désiré Defauw, a Belgian violinist and concertmaster. As a refugee in England during the war, he led the Allied Quartet (sometimes known as the Belgian Quartet) with Lionel Tertis (viola), Charles Woodhouse (piano) and E. Doehard (cello), which was centred in London but also toured the country. Lady Cynthia Asquith, who met them all in 1918, has left
a vivid glimpse of Désiré Defauw her diary: ‘The first violin, Defauw – a ghastly sight in a yellow wig – fell in love with me, said dancing with me was enivrante [intoxicating], toyed with the tangles in my hair, which he compared to flames, and even went so far as to ask me to bite off a piece of chocolate for him! I have never seen people so happy as those four men – they did admirable stunts … Defauw did some excellent ones – an acrobat, a cock, an elephant, and so on …’
Désiré Defauw was almost fifteen years younger than Eve and aged thirty at the time of John Francis Mordaunt’s birth. He was to enjoy a successful career abroad after the war, his ‘Concerts Defauw’ becoming famous throughout Europe before he went to the United States, conducting major American orchestras and being appointed musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He died in the United States in July 1960. I can find no reference to a son named John Francis Mordaunt in any published writings about him. And there is no record of a child of that name having died in England in the years immediately following his birth. He disappears.
Eve worked for the Red Cross during the First World War and in a bookbinding company during the Second World War. Otherwise she had no employment except as a companion, not paid but paid for, of a few grand people such as the Ladies Scarborough, Helmsley and Wenlock (the latter, being deaf, was equipped with a massive trumpet and a typewriter with which to carry on conversations at greater distances – conversations which spoke of such amazing exploits that she decided to treat the trumpet and the typewriter as diabolically inspired). Some of these ladies would leave Eve trifles in their Wills and her brother Bryan was to bequeath her almost £8,000 when he died.
While it was thought she was going to marry Ernest, Eve continued to give her home as being Bilbrough Manor, which then belonged to Guy and his family. That was still her official residence when, on 30 May 1908, the Yorkshire Gazette published a bankruptcy notice as having been served on her. At a meeting of her creditors on 26 June, a deficiency of £225 in her affairs was reported, which she attributed to ‘living beyond her income’. But she had no income. She was described as a spinster and a descendant of General Fairfax ‘of Cromwellian fame’. This must have been a humiliation for her family and it was her younger brother Bryan, who had served in the army in South Africa and met the art patron Lionel Phillips, who helped her sell the Rodin bust to the Johannesburg Gallery for £800. She would sometimes stay with Bryan at Whitwell Hall in York, and very occasionally with Guy at Bilbrough Manor, but she was not encouraged to remain with her family and began to drift apart from them.
She filled her time with various ladylike occupations. She played an aggressive game of croquet, was a shrewd bridge player and embroidered curtains and cushions with birds, centaurs, swans – and on one occasion the clever design of a backgammon board. Though she picked up information about literature, she was never a great reader.
In 1909 Lady Diana Manners gave Eve an enormous empty volume in which to record her life. It was sturdily bound in leather and bore a device embossed at the front with the letters E. F. surrounded by a pattern resembling a wreath. As a frontispiece there appears a contemplative picture of Eve as Queen Margaret of Anjou in the York Pageant that year, wearing a crown and gazing serenely into the distance. On the title page is inscribed: ‘Eve Fairfax. Her Book’ and the date: AD MDCCCCIX. Below this has been inserted the engraving of a young damsel, or damozel, plucking thoughtfully at a bow having loosed her arrow into the forthcoming pages while, with a pencilled caption in
Greek lettering, the reader is advised that this is Artemis (or Diana). There is also space for the book’s provenance: ‘Given to her by Diana Manners’. At the corners of the page, paying tribute to biblical Eve, are decorations depicting blushing apples on a leafy stalk, a serpent coiled round a flourishing tree, a device showing two enjoined capital Ds (the second in reverse), and finally what appears to be a faint smile or perhaps a crescent moon on its back.
Eve Fairfax, too, had, as it were, been cast out of Eden. Her engagement was over, she had been declared bankrupt, obliged to sell her most treasured possession, the Rodin bust, and was now homeless. In 1909 she was close to her fortieth year and, with half her life presumably over, her future seemed imprisoned by her past. Diana Manners chose as an epigraph to Eve’s Book a quotation from Shelley’s prophetic lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound: a work of radical optimism in which Prometheus, the champion of mankind, is released from incarceration in ‘a ravine of icy rocks’ where Aeschylus had bound him, and united with Asia, the Spirit of Love. Shelley creates a benign and hopeful world in which goodness and free will bring light out of darkness. This is what the epigraph, Demogorgan’s lines from Act IV, promises:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy power which seems omnipotent;
To live and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire and Victory!
This is followed by equally aspirational quotations from Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio; from Alfred de Musset in French and Maeterlinck in English: all with a similar message – that life is not over until it is over (and perhaps not even then) and that wisdom needs to be constantly changing from childhood to death.
Eve’s Book was intended as a diary, but she made it into something more bizarre: partly a social calendar, partly a volume of autographs, partly an eclectic anthology. It is an omnium gatherum, a vast vade mecum, following no order and having no chronology, theme, agenda, prescription. It becomes the reverse of a visitors’ book: it is the visitor’s book, a book of collected hosts and their guests pinned like butterflies to its pages. For Eve herself it would serve as a book of memories, opening up dense pages of compliments and compensations in her prolonged, singular peregrinations. To read it for very long feels like holding one’s breath under water.
Many poems or lines from poems were added along the years. People likened her to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (‘Time cannot wither her nor custom stale / Her infinite variety’) and one contributor quoted from Donne’s Elegy IX, ‘The Autumnal’: ‘No spring, nor summer beauty has such grace / As I have seen in one autumnal face.’ Other quotations are more indistinct and disturbing – for example, two lines from Humbert Wolfe: ‘There was a thing to do; and it is done now; / The high song is over.’ The poets who were fellow guests in the houses where Eve arrived carrying Her Book penned their own poems:
There on the Norfolk tow-path,
Where the River Waveney rolled,
I stood like the child Pandora,
Suddenly old.
These were the last lines of ‘Zany’ by Dorothy Wellesley. The last lines of Edith Sitwell’s ‘To Eve’ also touch on lost youth:
The moon for ever seeks in woodland streams
To deck her cool faint beauty; thus in dreams
Belov’d, I seek lost suns within your eyes;
And find but wrecks of love’s gold argosies.
Edith’s father, Sir George Sitwell (who had appointed Eve his son Sacheverell’s godmother) wrote a version of Paradise Lost and Regained, which he also dedicated to Eve.
Oh Eve, to thee a happier chance shall bring
The Dragon’s fruit without the Dragon’s sting.
Adam shall find his Eden in thine eyes,
And whisp’ring Love lead back to thy lost Paradise.
Laurence Whistler contributed a long poem, which set out to answer the question put in its first line; ‘Man, what is man?’
Forged in four seconds of distracted fire
Unkindly cast into the world to cool
In the cold wind of loneliness – until …
… until, after death, loneliness again envelops him:
And even in the grave, I dare say, lonely
Till the dark figures of the trees break through –
Woman, you make us at your pleasure – only
That our poor bones may be embraced by yew.
There are several entries in foreign languages – a Hungarian folk song, a German quatrain and Leon Montenaeken’s short poem on the vanity and the shortness even of a long life.
La vie est vaine:
Un peu d’amour
Un peu de haine –
Et puis – bonjour!
La vie est brève:
Un peu d’espoir,
Un peu de rêve –
Et puis – bonsoir!
The bleakness of these poems is offset by continual dewdrops of flattery. One contributor mentioned ‘my overwhelming love’ but neglected to say who he was. ‘So honored to add my name in this Book of Memories,’ added an indecipherable American. People found it increasingly difficult to come up with something generous and appropriate – ‘Satan finds Books for idle hands to write in,’ cautioned Sophia Kennedy. Perhaps the most inappropriate cliché of all for someone virtually homeless and so sharp-tongued was delivered by Ernest Beckett’s niece Beatrice who had married William Eden’s son Anthony Eden. ‘No place like HOME!’ she wrote. ‘Eve makes the final cosy touch.’
Opinions differed as to whether it was better to fall back on quotations or attempt something personal. A few people escaped this choice by contributing drawings or watercolours, most noticeably Chloë Preston, who filled several pages with excruciatingly cute paintings of Dutch Dolls, grotesquely sentimental children, wide-eyed dogs and a spotted cat with a pink scarf.
Sybil Hart-Davis (one of Gervase Beckett’s lovers – their son was the well-known publisher Rupert Hart-Davis) quoted Walter Pater to the effect that we are all under sentence of death – adding, however, that ‘we spend the interval in song’. Ethel Thomas used Emerson’s words on love (‘Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just’). Gwladys Chaplin left a message possibly for biographers: ‘Be to my virtue very kind. / Be to my faults a little blind.’ And there were lines from Meredith on swallows and swans, by William Blake on happiness, Queen Christina of Sweden on weakness, and Nietzsche on the shortcomings of men. But no one quoted Andrew Marvell who had spent two years (1650 – 52) teaching General Lord Fairfax’s daughter languages at Nun Appleton where he wrote many of his lyric poems and stored up memories for some of his later work. ‘The quiet country existence of Nunappleton released in him the tastes which he could most happily express,’ wrote Vita Sackville-West in her short biography of Marvell, ‘and the two years he spent there were, poetically, the most fruitful of his life.’ This would have pleased Eve more than other people’s poetry.
Breaking suddenly into verse Sir Hedworth Williamson sought to denigrate himself in contrast to other contributors:
Of talent too modest, of genius too cold
Like Berners to write, or like Rodin to mould;
But you can win flowers from climate most harsh,
From a barren old Moore, or a watering Marsh …
Lord Berners had contributed a few bars of music, an Allegro Spirito written ‘under the influence of drink’: George Moore’s signature next to the date (11 November 1915) was considered a sufficient tribute and Eve went to the trouble of pasting in a congratulatory card from Rodin.
One of the oddest passages in the book (stranger than the lines from Richard Savage’s dramatic poem ‘The Bastard’ and the quotation from a letter by Mary Queen of Scots on the morning of her execution) was provided by Edward Marsh (one of Harold Nicolson’s discarded lovers), who copied the Last Will and Testament of a lunatic who died in an asylum in Illinois – underneath which, Marsh’s knighthood being absent, Eve has added ‘for me. Sir Edward Marsh’. Perhaps these entries illustrate the panic that filled some of the contributors when Eve slowly approached them with her monstrous and forbidding volume. Sir Hedworth Williamson, while praising Eve, ended with a vigorous curse upon Her Book:
… and Eve of lost Eden, I will you no evil,
But heartily wish your old book to the Devil.
Eve was to carry this portmanteau of a book from place to place for over fifty years. Though the pages blew from it like leaves from a tree, it increased in bulk and irregularity as she stuffed into it all sorts of photographs, letters, bits and pieces. So it began to resemble a huge and dilapidated saddle of a horse, a chaotic artefact that was a part of Eve’s personality: her pride and her penance. Like an extraordinary tramp, she travelled the country between Castles, Halls, Granges, Manors, Priories, Abbeys weighed down by its heavy load like a figure from The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ernest Beckett’s daughter Violet Trefusis gives a picture of her in her novel Pirates at Play.
Poor Francie … was one of those popular elderly girls whose happiness was purely vicarious … It had taken her the best part of ten years to realise that popularity could become a substitute for love … Of course she never got married … Much in demand
for week-ends (Francie is such a good mixer) the only tribute she exacted was a caricature or ribald verse in her visitor’s book, which was her most valued possession. It was a stout tome bound in green morocco; the addresses of nearly all the stately homes in England figured in it; neatly cut out of the writing paper and placed above a view of the house, there would follow the signatures of her fellow guests, some laboured doggerel on the hunt ball, or a frieze of the local ‘meet’ done in coloured chalks borrowed from the nursery. There were also a few meticulous watercolour sketches of salmon flies, and half a dozen dance programmes with tiny white pencils attached …
The Keppels were among the many families that signed in. The heads of these families often bore the names of places: Chesterfield, Devonshire, Norfolk, Plymouth, Southampton, Wellington, Westminster, Windsor, Zetland. Other signatures were hyphenated, the most endearing of which was Gregory Page-Turner (Adrian Book-holding Jones disdained the hyphen). Perhaps some jokers were making fun of Eve. Archbishops, generals and foreign royalty filled up the pages and there was a picture of the Prince of Wales fondling a baby kangaroo in Australia (1932). Rosamond Lehmann copied down a page from her novel Invitation to the Waltz describing the seventeen-year-old Olivia Curtis running into the sunlight, Hilaire Belloc added a poem and so did Vita Sackville-West’s one-time lover Geoffrey Scott, while John Betjeman, Harold Nicolson and Somerset Maugham contented themselves with signatures. There were plenty of actors’ autographs from Ellen Terry to Michael Dennison. Then I come across a Concert Programme dated 22 July 1915 given in the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops at Norfolk House. Tertis and Rubinstein are playing with several other musicians including Désiré Defauw. A piece
of blue paper has been inserted which reads: ‘DEFAUW (on music programme)’. This concert took place a year before the birth of John Francis Mordaunt and was possibly Eve’s first meeting with Désiré Defauw.
And there is one name, probably entered in the mid 1960s, which also catches my eye: Mordaunt Milner – which may indicate that Eve’s son had been absorbed into her mother’s family. So, amid all the chaos and oddity, the poetry and applause, this is a book of secrets.
At the age of eighty Eve seems to have come to the decision that Her Book had finally grown too cumbersome and unwieldy for her to manage. She wrote to Johannesburg asking whether the art gallery there would like to add it to her Rodin collection. The curator replied that he would be delighted and Eve sent it with a somewhat apologetic note: ‘It is really a very small part of my life – the gay side – and I am afraid it is all rather a muddle as I had some loose leaves put in at one time which seemed to upset things. They are all my friends, great and otherwise … I don’t know if the book is suitable for your museum but I hope and think you and others will find amusement and interest in it.’
The book had become an encumbrance to her and a torment to others. But once it has gone she misses it as if she has lost some essential part of herself. It represented much more than ‘a very small part’ of her life: it was an anchor that she dragged from one harbour to another; it was also her daemon. In its absence this prodigious object gained the affection of those who had dreaded seeing Eve bent over or beneath its substantial bulk as she approached them. Without it she was no longer quite the legendary figure she had been. She was diminished.
After half a dozen years without Her Book she wrote to the Johannesburg art gallery asking whether she could have it back. Maybe
she had hoped to be paid for it; maybe the gallery had expected something that was attached more closely to Rodin. In any event, both sides were happy to see it returned – the art gallery photocopying a few Rodin items before letting it go. In her mid-to-late eighties Eve could no longer drag this hefty property around with her. Instead she would solicit items that she could take back and give to it, like a mother bird feeding its young.
She seldom stayed anywhere long. Between the wars people had lent her their London flats and country cottages from where she set out on her peregrinations. Sometimes she stayed at a large unheated house in the village of Acomb on the outskirts of York. It had been bequeathed to the spinster daughter of a one-time precentor of York Minster on condition that she look after a pack of collie dogs – duties that Eve occasionally took over in what she called ‘that doggie place’.
In her seventies, she still sometimes rode side-saddle through the streets, a striking figure in her top hat and veil, a long dark skirt, jabot and black coat. And she would make appearances at the Snow and Summer Balls in the Old Assembly Rooms in York. One of her favourite staging posts was the Yorkshire Club, a big, rather dismal and somewhat Gothic, red-brick, late-Victorian building with white stone dressings, overlooking the river on the approach road to Lendal Bridge. There she sat, a frail but powerful figure, as if enthroned, her luggage cast around her, her face plastered with white make-up invaded by irregular dots of rouge and a bright cherry-red mouth, and wearing enormous earrings. The staff treated her with a mixture of reverence and exasperation. This was principally a men’s club, a watering place for gentlemen visiting their Yorkshire estates. But Eve managed to find a hideout in one of the attics until this became known and she was invited to leave.
Afterwards she found a room above a stuffed-birds shop at Petersgate, and then again at the top of a house over a woollen shop at Stonegate: both districts of York. She suffered painfully from arthritis during her nineties and had great difficulty going up and down the stairs – throwing down her sticks first with a terrible clatter and then sitting on each stair as she descended. She went upstairs backwards.
Like an itinerant refugee, she still made her way round the country. Her stamina was extraordinary. And she grew adept at calculating how long she could stay before her hosts became too irritated – and how soon she could return. Arriving for a long weekend, she stayed six months with her cousin Lady Serena James at St Nicholas, Richmond. ‘Those whom the gods love die young,’ she announced, ‘and I am eighty-seven.’ She was eighty-eight by the time she left. She enjoyed telling people that ‘I shall be immortal in art galleries all over the world after my friends are dead.’ In all moods and weathers she was protected by the aristocracy: she was one of them and they looked after her, arranging for cars to take her from one place to another, telephoning the next batch of hosts on her itinerary to make sure she was met when travelling by train. She was not always polite and saw no reason to be grateful. Why should she be? After all, was she not a direct descendant of the famous parliamentary general, Lord Fairfax, who had defeated Charles I’s troops at the Battle of Naseby? The answer, strictly speaking, was no: Lord Fairfax had no direct descendants. But she was of the true blood and belonged to one of the two branches of his family. She spoke of His Lordship as if his ghost were following a
few paces behind, shadowing her, giving her special status and authority. She was imperious, abrasive, amusing, lively, entertaining, cross and sometimes raucously snobbish.
Men liked her more than women did – she flirted with them but treated women dismissively. She was sometimes rude with servants too, but children liked her. They liked her rudeness, which sounded funny when she insulted adults in her old-fashioned Yorkshire voice – dropping the gs in huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, and pronouncing her rs as ws when she referred to the presents people had given her as ‘Wubbish!’. When she gave presents she would frequently take them back. But there were genuine presents for children in the huge overflowing bag she carried round with her: it was a bag of treasures, a medley of biscuits, embroidery, sixpences, underclothes, everything … But sometimes she would frighten them, particularly at night when they heard the awful tapping of her sticks and the crack of her bones as she found her way up to one of the bedrooms, her legs so bent she was forced to move sideways like a crab, clutching for support with hands that had grown into arthritic claws. She was the very image of a witch – except for her face. All her life she remained ‘fair of face’ as a genuine Fairfax should be and in some ways that face grew more remarkable: full of vitality and mischief-making.
For her hundredth birthday a lunch was hosted by Lord Savill at the Yorkshire Club. Friends travelled there from all over the country, seeing one another, many of them, after intervals of many years and with gasps of amazement at their being still alive. Eve appeared very much alive. She gave a short, fluent and amusing speech but complained that she had not been offered enough wine.
Following a stroke, the last seven years of her life were passed in the Retreat, a Quaker hospital in York, founded in 1796, which specialised in treating infirmity and providing mental health care. The heads of
three families paid for her: Lord Grimthorpe, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Linlithgow. Visiting her there towards the end of 1971, her friend Serena James came away very distressed. ‘She was sitting in a small room surrounded by obviously mentally sick ladies,’ she wrote. ‘She herself seemed more alert – she implored me to take her away, suggested a taxi … She is undoubtedly very unhappy.’ She asked whether Eve could be moved from this small annexe to the main building where she might be able to play cards and ‘would see some men’. The following February she was transferred to ‘more congenial surroundings’ in one of the central wards.
She seemed for a time more settled. Some days there were echoes of her former self. During a pause in a Christmas Nativity play, her voice boomed out: ‘I can’t hear the bloody fairy!’
When the young historian Hugo Vickers visited the Retreat in March 1977, he was escorted to the Charlotte Ward and advised to ‘look helpless’ until a nurse brought Miss Fairfax to him. Eventually she arrived in a large, high-backed wheelchair wearing a mauve dress. ‘She moved and reacted very well. We shook hands and I introduced myself,’ he wrote. ‘She asked a lot of questions about me, where did I come from, what did I do, was it my first visit to York … did I have brothers and sisters … Eve asked my age. “I’m somewhat older,” she said … Lunch arrived and she fed herself without problems. It really is remarkable.’
Hugo Vickers was writing a biography of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough, and wanted to see whether her name appeared in Eve’s monumental book. A nurse heaved it to him. ‘It was quite amazing,’ he wrote. He turned the pages and there it was, Gladys Deacon’s signature, accompanying a quotation from Baudelaire. At the end of his visit Eve said to him: ‘It hasn’t been a silly life, it’s been a useful one. Anyone who saw the book could see that.’
When Hugo returned the next day he was told Eve was asleep. They wheeled her through in her geriatric chair but she did not wake up. ‘She looked absolutely like a wax-work,’ he wrote. ‘ … They said she sometimes spends as long as three days like that. So I had been very lucky the day before.’
She was suffering from senile dementia as well as arthritis and needed constant observation. Sometimes she claimed to be Queen Elizabeth I (the part she played at one of the York Pageants). She could not stand unsupported but often forgot this and had several falls. The nurses aggravated her – they did not come when she called them. She was often disorientated, not realising she was in a psychiatric hospital, and was frequently upset, confused and outspoken. At night two nurses had to raise her several times from her bed to prevent incontinence.
She died of bronchopneumonia at half past three in the morning of 27 May 1978, five months short of her one hundred and seventh birthday. There was a memorial service at St James’s Church at Bilbrough. She had made a Will with various dukes and barons as her trustees, but since she had no money it was not proved and she died intestate.
The Times obituary of Eve Fairfax, on 12 June 1978, described ‘this grand old lady’ as representing ‘a fascinating chapter of history starting in the reign of Queen Victoria and ending after man had successfully walked on the Moon’. But she belonged to neither world. Without money, a husband or recognised children, she lost her position in late-Victorian and Edwardian times; and without employment her nomadic existence led nowhere in the twentieth century. She was like someone waking from a dream and not knowing what is real or imaginary. In Her Book, she copied out a speech made in 1944 by Dr Temple, the Archbishop of York, arguing that ‘the burden of work’ was often ‘a
curse’ and that, in spiritual terms, unemployment had its blessings. Perhaps this was the basis of the claim she made to Hugo Vickers that her life was ‘useful’. It was, in the words of the Rodin scholar Marion J. Hare, ‘a genteel tragedy’.
Her Book, with its great empty spaces, its undergrowth of clichés, its photo parade of men and women on horses, of children and flowers, dogs, prime ministers, and then the dark floating passages of poetry, is truly her autobiography. I look through it one last time and enter her world again. Among the crowded signatures there are few revealing facts. But I sense that I am closer to Eve. She carried this great book so far, valued it so highly – and now it rests in my hands. While I slowly turn its stiff and crackling pages I feel I am about to come across something unexpected and significant. This is the excitement and mystery of research. I trawl through many famous names that have signed up to the statement that she ‘will never be forgotten by …’. Yet she makes no appearance in their biographies and autobiographies. She is a legendary character in a small world, all shadow by the end – the substance vanishing with time. It is as if her story is written here in invisible ink, which appears faintly when you breathe on it. In an interview she gave to the Star shortly before going into hospital, she was asked if she had any regrets and replied: ‘Yes, only one, and that is I never married. I was very popular in my time and had many offers. Maybe, if I had married, I would be better off today.’ Then, without being asked a further question, she adds that she knew various people in South Africa, and ‘had relatives there, including Sir George and Lady Milner, of Cape Town’. If I were a novelist I could arrange for her son Mordaunt to meet Ernest Beckett’s son Lancelot in South Africa and carry on their adventures there.
Prising open two pages that had become stuck together, I suddenly come across Ernest Beckett, who, signing himself Grimthorpe and
recording the date as 15 May 1915, two years before his death, copied down a devastating verse from Swinburne’s poem ‘Dolores’ written in reversed dactyls.
For the Crown of our life as it closes
Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust;
No thorns go so deep as the roses
And love is more cruel than lust –
Time turns the old days to derision
Our loves into corpses or wives,
And marriage and death and division
Makes barren our lives –