Bright Young Thing who broke Evelyn Waugh’s heart
...though he found plenty of solace with ‘voracious’ women from Morocco to the Riviera
the patron saint of travellers – ‘gold, Cartier, very expensive’, he told Diana Cooper, ‘saved out of her pocket money. Deeply moved’.
They motored to Tilbury Docks. ‘Deadly lonely, cold, and slightly sick at parting,’ Evelyn wrote in his diary. ‘Teresa drove off to lunch with Lady Astor in London. We sailed at about half-past two. Down the river in heavy rain. Heart of lead.’
ON HIS return in the spring of 1933, he seemed even more devoted. ‘I think of you all the time,’ he wrote in July. ‘I believe you are the first woman I have ever been in love with … I love you so much.’
When he was told in October 1933 that his marriage would be annulled (although the annulment would not actually be delivered until three years later), Evelyn felt free to propose to Baby.
He wrote to a friend that he had ‘popped question to Dutch girl and got raspberry. So that is that, eh. Stiff upper lip and dropped c**k. Now I must go. How sad, how sad’. But it was not long before Evelyn began beseeching her again. Baby told him that she could no longer accept kisses or presents from him and sent back the chain he had bought her as a Christmas gift. But as so often, the messages soon became mixed and the easiest way for Evelyn to cope was to go abroad.
On December 29, he wrote to Baby from a ship bound for Morocco: ‘You will say it was sly to go away without saying anything… But please believe it isn’t only selfish – running away from pain (though it has been more painful than you know, all the last months, realising every day I was becoming less attractive and less important to you) – but also I can’t be any good to you without your love and it’s the worst possible thing for you to have to cope with the situation that had come about between us.’
He treated his friend Diana Cooper to his tales from Fez’s red-light district: ‘It was very gay and there were little Arab girls of 15 & 16 for ten francs each & a cup of mint tea.
‘So I bought one but I didn’t enjoy her very much because she had skin like sandpaper and a huge stomach.’ More to his liking was a girl called Fatima, whom he briefly thought about installing in his own lodgings.
‘She is not at all Dutch in her ways,’ he told another friend, Maimie Lygon. ‘She is brown in colour and her face is tattooed all over with blue patterns v. pretty but does not play the piano beautifully, she has a gold tooth she is very proud of but as we can’t talk each other’s language there is not much to do in between rogering.’
BUT it wasn’t until January 1935 that Evelyn found a woman who could replace Baby in his affections. He had been asked by Gabriel Herbert to stay at Pixton Park in Somerset. It was his third visit to the chaotic Herbert family home.
When he arrived, he found a large party of boisterous young people and ‘God they did make me feel old and ill’, he told Maimie. But he found himself falling in love with the youngest of the Herbert sisters, Laura, whom he had barely noticed before but now confided to Maimie that he had taken ‘a great fancy’ to. Shy, reserved and rather frail, Laura was different to the girls with whom Evelyn had previously fallen in love. Yet, as he perhaps sensed, behind the quiet facade lay a resolutely independent character with an original, ironic sense of humour and a surprisingly violent temper.
Evelyn’s courtship of Laura ran far from smoothly. In early February 1935, having invited her to London, he greeted her with a hangover and ‘could only eat 3 oysters and some soda water’, he told Maimie. ‘And I was sick a good deal on the table so perhaps that romance is shattered.’ However, it was not.
In the spring of 1936, Evelyn wrote Laura what amounted to an exceptionally straightforward letter of proposal: ‘Tell you what you might do while you are alone at Pixton. You might think about me a bit & whether, if those wop priests [the Catholic Church deciding on his annulment] ever come to a decent decision, you could bear the idea of marrying me. You haven’t got to decide, but think about it. I can’t advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you, but think how nice it would be for me.’ The response was favourable. They married in April 1937.
Before the wedding was announced, Evelyn wrote to Baby: ‘She [Laura] is very young indeed. Very thin and pale with big eyes and a long nose – more like a gazelle really than a girl… silent as the grave, given to fainting at inopportune moments, timid, ignorant, affectionate, very gentle, doesn’t sing, Narcissus complex, looks lovely on a horse but often falls off. I love her very much and I think there is as good a chance of our marriage being a success as any I know.’
Baby was godmother to Laura and Evelyn’s first child, Maria Teresa, born in March 1938. Evelyn and Laura remained married until Evelyn’s death aged 62 in 1966.
© Philip Eade 2016 Extracted from Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited, by Philip Eade, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced £30, on July 7. To pre-order a copy at the offer price of £24 (a 20 per cent discount) until April 17, call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk. P&P is free.