Epilogue

DOLF NEVER SLEPT at 68 West 68th Street again, but took a suitcase to his mother’s apartment. He forced himself to hold down his job at Avery Library, though his heart was broken.

Jan’s funeral took place at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, but she was not buried in New York. ‘Imagine being buried in Queen’s!’ she had said, with a frown of distaste. Her ashes were taken to the parish church at Whitchurch in Buckinghamshire, where she had lived as a child, and a simple service of interment was held.

In 1957 Dolf married Beverley Kalitinsky, née Robinson, Canadian niece of the Beverley Robinson to whom Jan had told her secret at the Republican dinner party during the war. Dolf and Bev had forty-three years of cloudless happiness together, united in their love of architecture, German, French and English literature, music and conversation with friends young and old, in their book-filled apartment with a Mozart or Beethoven sonata open on the grand piano. Dolf never fathered a child, but Bev had a daughter from her first marriage, and the step-children and step-grandchildren from both his marriages remained Dolf’s family.

Between 1960 and 1980 he was Avery Librarian, expanding the collection by purchases abroad and helping to make it internationally known as one of the greatest architectural libraries in the world. If Jan had ‘set him free’ from his junior job there, this might not have happened. He was made an emeritus professor on his retirement, after which he was Editor-in-Chief of the four-volume Macmillan Encyclopaedia of Architects and founding editor of a still larger project, The Buildings of the United States, the American ‘Pevsner’.

I visited him and Bev at their apartment in West 87th Street in 1998 and 1999, and we talked for days, sitting near the chess table which Jan had made at the Austin Riggs Sanatorium in the depths of her depression. Dolf died in New York on 19 March 2000, a few days after his eighty-seventh birthday, and his obituary – like Jan’s – appeared in the London Times. His memoirs of growing up in Vienna and of Viennese refugees in New York were published to great acclaim in Germany and Austria, at the very end of his life. His sister Susan still lives in New York.

Tony married Peggy Barne in 1952. After the house of Cultoquhey was sold in 1955 they lived happily at Aberlady Mains House in East Lothian, near Muirfield Golf Course, and travelled a great deal together. Tony died in an aeroplane over India in 1971.

Jamie was twice married and twice divorced, and had three children. After farming at Cultoquhey he became a freelance journalist, and in 1976 he opened the smallest restaurant in Britain, with only one table, in Peebles High Street. Later, much more successfully, he became the world’s leading dealer in vintage fishing-tackle.

Janet and Pat Rance had seven children. In 1954 they took over the village shop in Streatley, Berkshire, which Pat transformed into one of the best-known cheese shops in the country. Janet wrote for the Reader’s Digest, and Pat wrote definitive books on French and English cheese. They died at the end of the 1990s, and ‘Lord of all hopefulness’ was sung at both their funerals.

Robert, my father, became a Scottish advocate, then an estate agent, and then an entrepreneur and a Planning Inspector. In 1962 he married Claudia Page-Phillips, née Tannert, who with her Jewish Austro-Hungarian parents had fled from Austria to England in 1938. They live in Sandwich, Kent, in the house in which I was born.