Seduced by a PSYCHOPATH
He was a stranger who the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard welcomed into her home – and bed. Then worried relatives uncovered a terrifying secret. She had been...
He burst into a rage, hit her and stormed from the house
JANE had become something of a celebrity after the success of her family saga The Cazalet Chronicle, and her appearance on Desert Island Discs in October 1995 generated a lot of letters from listeners, including one from a man who said he had fallen in love with her voice.
A correspondence developed, followed by phone calls. Jane, as Elizabeth Jane was known to her friends, could not remember whether it was then or later that she told him she had cancer. The letters continued in the New Year as she was having radiotherapy. Then came a letter saying that he loved her.
I’ll call him Malcolm Shane: not his real name, but there are good reasons for withholding it. He seemed to have had a sad life, was separated and lived in Orkney. When he kept telling Jane how beautiful she was, she wrote back to say that this was nonsense, since she was now fat with white hair.
Nevertheless, she enjoyed the liter-
FOR all the plaudits, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard spent her life yearning for love. And, as we told last week, she conducted a prolific series of affairs with some of the best-known literary figures of the day, including future husband Kingsley Amis. Her need for affection brought passion, terrible sadness – and more. As the second and final extract from this acclaimed new biography reveals, an ill-judged romance late in life placed the novelist in mortal, and only narrowly-averted, danger…
ary flirtation and arranged to meet Malcolm in March after she had undergone an operation on her leg. By now she had told her friends about him, and how excited and fluttery she felt at the prospect of meeting him.
They urged her to be sensible and to meet him somewhere neutral, such as a London hotel. But Jane, now 72, felt daunted by the prospect of tea in London. Both of them would feel awkward and shy, it would be a disaster. Instead she decided to have him to stay at her house in Bungay, Suffolk, for the weekend of March 15 to 18, 1996, with other guests.
Jane’s friend, the writer Selina Hastings, came to visit early that month, and drove Jane on a shop- ping expedition for waterproof mascara, since she knew she would be moved to tears when she saw him; and a froth of silky lingerie, nightgowns and petticoats, which she referred to as her trousseau.
‘She was so excited,’ said Selina. ‘Like a 17-year-old.’ She asked another friend: ‘Supposing he wants to make love to me? What should I do?’ The friend replied: ‘You never really forget what to do… it’s like riding a bicycle.’
There was no doubt in Jane’s mind that they would have sex. It was now 16 years since she had left Kingsley and there had been no sex for some years before that.
When Malcolm arrived, Jane wrote: ‘We had a glass of wine together before the rest of us had dinner.’ She noticed that while Malcolm wasn’t particularly goodlooking, he possessed enormous charm. She could see that he was nervous, because his palms were sweaty. Over dinner he was quiet, but he was probably tired from the journey.
As soon as the other guests retired, Jane told Malcolm that ‘there is something we have to get out of the way’, and led him upstairs.
‘As is my wont when afraid of something, I plunged in and invited him to share my bed. It was clear at once that this was his element. But, less like other people I’d known, he made no sudden conquest, said we needed time – or rather, I needed time to get to know him. This remark enchanted me.’
He left on the Monday morning and their letters resumed, with Jane waiting for the postman ‘like a schoolgirl’. Jane invited him to stay again for ten days, so they could get to know each other better.
Jane’s daughter Nicola collected Malcolm from Norwich airport. ‘How’s Jessica?’ he said when they were in the car, meaning Jane – which was not a good start. He also showed Nicola the programme for a horse show in Somerset, where he and his second wife used to live (he had recently left his third).
She had died in a riding accident at the show that day, he said, and he had written her name on the cover. The programme was a few years old, but Nicola was instantly suspicious. She knew the West Country riding community and had no recollection of any fatal accidents. Nicola said nothing, but made a note of his wife’s name.
During the visit, Malcolm suggested coming to live in Bungay and buying a cottage. Jane recalled: ‘I felt what he really meant was that he wanted to live in my house with me, and something told me that this was a bad idea.’
Yet she was not yet ready to listen to the warning bells. ‘I enjoyed sex with him, and we talked together very companionably,’ she wrote. ‘It felt extraordinary to be having a sex life.’ Yet there were odd things about him. Although he was only 62, he seemed to have no job, not even a hobby. ‘All he wanted to do was look after me. This sounded both nice and not quite right.’ Malcolm was living in a council house in Orkney, and admitted to some credit-card debt which Jane paid off for him. She also paid his air fares.
During his second visit, Jane had a bad fall which left her bed-bound. Malcolm nursed her devotedly, and ended up staying a month. During this time, much to Jane’s discomfiture, he proposed. He seemed to accept Jane’s insistence that she didn’t want to be married ever again, yet he continued paying court to her.
WHEN Malcolm left at the end of May, Jane felt a certain relief. ‘But no, as soon as he was away I thought of when he’d be back. “You like me in bed,” he said one day, and it was true. What he didn’t know was how unusual this was for me.’
She invited Malcolm to come again for ten days in July. But after she rebuffed a second proposal of marriage, Malcolm became very angry. Why wouldn’t she marry him? Wasn’t he good enough for her and her posh friends? He worked himself into such a rage that he hit her and then stormed out of the house.
Jane was terrified. She locked all the doors, stuck a chair under the handle of her bedroom door which had no lock, and barely slept. He
was out all night. By then other disturbing information about Malcolm was starting to emerge, including the fact that no one had ever died in a fatal accident at the Chew Magna Horse Show. ‘That was his big mistake,’ said Nicola. ‘Had he told us she had been killed in a motorbike accident, we might never have found out.’ Alerted by Nicola, Jane’s brother Robin had hired a private detective to look into Malcolm’s past. He had found out that Malcolm’s last wife had died not in a riding accident, but of a cerebral haemorrhage: and in people under 50, the most likely cause is injury to the head.
He had had three children, not one, as he claimed; and two of his wives had reported his violence to the police. Jane’s brother Colin, known since his schooldays as Monkey, was deputed to tell her. He sat her down, made some tea, and said: ‘I’ve got something rather awful to tell you.’
‘She listened very, very quietly and I had the feeling that while she was obviously very shaken, it did not come as a complete shock.’
After she had heard the truth from Monkey, Jane spent the night talking with Selina Hastings until she was exhausted with weeping. ‘Half of her was aghast and horrified and humiliated,’ said Selina. ‘The other, desperately mourning the loss of the man in her life.’
She told Malcolm in a letter that she now knew certain things about him that made her never want to see or hear from him again, and she was lodging a copy of the letter with her solicitor.
Jane poured her grief into a new novel, Falling, a thinly veiled memoir of the affair that was hailed as one of the most psychologically perceptive of all her books. A psychiatrist friend said it was one of the best portraits of a psychopath he had ever read. She also received a visit from Malcolm’s last wife, Linda, who had read an interview with Jane and guessed the truth. The story she told Jane was chilling. Malcolm’s mother had told her on their first meeting: ‘You should keep away from my son: he’s a dangerous man.’
Malcolm, she added, seldom left the house without a large carrier bag full of letters, which Linda secretly read one day in her car after he left them at home. The letters were all from well-known women, actresses and writers with whom Malcolm was in correspondence; and he had annotated the margins with remarks such as ‘too fat’ or ‘married’ or ‘not enough money’. Horrified and fascinated, she read on. When she looked up, Malcolm was running towards the car with a large stone in his hand. Linda scrambled out and was saved by the fact that the letters were caught by the wind. Malcolm dropped the stone and started scrabbling for them, which gave Linda the chance to run.
LINDA assured her that she was not the only one to be fooled. A few months later Jane had a postcard from New York, from Malcolm himself. He had evidently read Falling, as his message used the names of characters – and part of the plot – from the novel. ‘Dear Daisy,’ it read. ‘Here for adventure with the lady on the train. Best wishes, Hal.’ She never heard from him again; but in 2002 she received a letter from a woman called Wendy Barr in Orkney, telling her that Malcolm was dead.