Boris said I could bring up his secret baby
Society writer WILLIAM CASH reveals a breathtaking untold story
ISTILL have the receipt from lunch at Mark’s Club in Mayfair. I can tell it was long and that we finished with two glasses of Courvoisier on the empty roof terrace as Helen smoked her Silk Cut. I remember the electric heaters glowing above us in the gunmetal sky as we spoke about my divorces and her failed relationships. We talked about our future together – and how I hoped that Helen would trust me to be a stepfather to her beautiful daughter.
But most of all I remember the explosive impact of what came next:
‘William,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something you should know. About the father of Stephanie.
‘Nobody else knows other than my family. This has to stay absolutely between us and you cannot tell anybody.’ ‘No secrets then,’ I said. ‘It’s Boris.’ ‘Johnson?’ ‘I’ve known him for years,’ she continued. ‘I’m an art adviser to the Mayor of London’s office. He’s smart and funny. One day he may even be Prime Minister.
‘I’m so torn, William. He texts me the whole time but I never know what’s coming next.’ I swallowed hard. ‘What’s he really like?’ I asked. ‘Did you love him?’ I hadn’t wanted to use the present tense. This shouldn’t change anything at all between Helen and me, I told myself as I reached for my brandy.
But I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. The B-Bombshell would ruin everything.
WHY did I take Helen Macintyre to Mark’s, the private members’ club where I’d had my wedding lunch after each of my two failed marriages? Was it a deliberate choice, an attempt to erase the past? There was certainly plenty to forget.
The start of that year had been bleak. Still wounded from my second divorce, at the age of 43 I was yet to have any children. And to make matters worse, the ancient manor house that was my life’s other passion was once again in serious disrepair.
Even today, Upton Cressett’s diamond-leaded windows and stacks of twisted chimneys look as they would have done some 450 years earlier. It’s as authentically Elizabethan a building as any you will find in England.
It became my home in the early 1970s when my ‘restore-awreck’ parents left Islington in North London for a derelict ruin in Shropshire. It had always been my dream to live there with my own family, although this seemed an ever-more distant prospect.
My first whirlwind marriage had been to Ilaria Bulgari from the famous Italian jewellery family and lasted little more than three years.
I was served with divorce papers on the eve of my 40th birthday after my wife hosted a dinner for me but then failed to appear.
Next came Dr Vanessa Neumann, a green-eyed beauty known in the diary pages as the ‘Cracker from Caracas’ thanks to her Venezuelan heritage and because she’d previously dated Mick Jagger. I proposed with a ring produced from a sock amid a tropical storm. This time, we lasted less than 12 months. Now, feeling past my prime, I faced the twin tasks of finding a chatelaine for Upton Cressett and renovating the oldest brick-built manor house in the county. Solo. I was, to paraphrase Jane Austen, a single man in possession of a good house – and very much in need of a wife.
FOR five intense months in 2010 I thought I’d found the answer in the form of an art dealer as beautiful as she was mysterious. Helen Macintyre had her own gallery in St James’s with a cosy office on the top floor containing a sofa in chartreuse-green velvet. She exuded 1950s Parisian glamour, spoke several languages and could often be found sitting at a table outside Franco’s restaurant in Jermyn Street with a cigarette in hand and her two dachshunds – Monty and Carlo – snuggled on her lap inside a dark fur coat.
Helen was way out of my league as a potential girlfriend and already had a very rich Canadian boyfriend called Pierre Rolin, a property developer who flew her around the world on a private jet.
We’d first met two years earlier, in the lobby of the Grosvenor House hotel.
I already knew a little about Helen. I’d heard she was friends with people such as TV political interviewer Andrew Neil, that she was close to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, for whom she was an unpaid ‘art adviser’, and that she lived in a large townhouse in Belgravia with a chef, a butler and a chauffeur.
At the time I was a journalist commissioned to interview a Qatari prince who was staging an exhibition of his photographs – hawks, desert sunsets and so on – at a Mayfair gallery.
It was the bank holiday Monday just before my June wedding to Vanessa, but I dutifully showed up to meet the organiser of the show, who happened to be Helen.
She breezed into the hotel lobby at 9am in a cream Chanel suit and introduced herself.
‘Hello,’ she said in a disarmingly open way. Her Delft-blue eyes flashed. She smelt of Dior and Silk Cut.
At the time, I was deeply in love with Vanessa, thrilled at the prospect of becoming her husband in a few days’ time. Yet the first instant
Helen smelt of Dior and Silk Cut – an enigma wrapped in mink
The instant I met her Delft-blue eyes, a fuse blew inside my head
I met Helen’s eyes, a fuse blew inside me.
I could hear myself asking banal questions about the Qatari photographs when another dialogue altogether was going on inside my head: ‘If I wasn’t marrying Vanessa, I’d marry Helen, or at least try to.’
Absurd but true.
WE BECAME friends and – with my marriage to Vanessa collapsing after just a few months – trusted confidantes. Helen, I realised, belonged in a Thackeray novel, an enigma wrapped in mink. When she invited me to her house, the butler wore white gloves and a rare vintage Château d’Yquem was served with foie gras. Pierre, the boyfriend, was nowhere to be seen.
We sat at opposite ends of an enormous polished mahogany diningtable. Before dinner, she had asked me to choose some wine.
‘Help yourself to some from the rack,’ she’d said. ‘I’m not drinking.’ This was unusual.
There was none of the usual stuff from Waitrose or Tesco. Instead, the kitchen rack was piled with dusty £500 bottles of Latour, Pétrus and the like.
Not long afterwards, I got a call. Helen wanted to meet me at The Wolseley restaurant on Piccadilly for a drink.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she announced, disarmingly candid as ever. This was the summer of 2008 – the baby was due in November.
I congratulated her, but sensed there was more to it than that.
‘Pierre’s like a nomad,’ she explained. ‘However glamorous the planes, the yachts and the holidays sounded, I was pretty lonely as he was hardly around.
‘He rented a yacht in the South of France for two weeks last summer and I found myself on deck most of the time with just the captain and crew.
‘Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t work out how my life had ended up like this. And then I got pregnant.’
I went to see her at London’s Portland Hospital when she gave birth to a daughter, Stephanie, named after Helen’s sister, who had died young.
We shared a glass of champagne as she showed off her baby, a pretty bundle with a shock of blonde hair. Yet there was no sign of Pierre. And Stephanie looked nothing like him.
THE year 2010 marked the 40th anniversary of my family living at Upton Cressett, which seemed a good time to start the major restoration of a building I was already calling ‘Money Pit Manor’.
For the English, our houses are often so much more than just bricks and mortar. In my case, Upton Cressett had always been the most dependable of my relationships, more so than any love affair or marriage. The truth is that I was partly to blame for its terrible state, having employed a cowboy builder whose idea of ‘renovation’ was to wreck the place. It resembled an architectural salvage yard.
With the foundations of my life falling away beneath me I, too, required as serious a makeover as my Elizabethan house.
In February, I found myself at traffic lights in South Kensington when a car caught my eye, as did the woman behind the wheel. I recognised the mint-green Mini Cooper belonging to my art dealer friend Helen Macintyre. She’d won it in a raffle, of all things.
I tapped on the window and said something along the lines of: ‘Areyou-free-for-lunch-need-to-talk?’ Helen parked up and we headed for a little restaurant on Walton Street nearby. I ordered a bottle of Provence rosé, and then another.
Now divorced from Vanessa, I was telling Helen about another romantic failure – this time a brief entanglement with a 26-year-old interior designer.
But Helen had something much more interesting to say: ‘Pierre and I have split. In fact, I’ve moved out and taken a house in Chelsea where I’m living with Stephanie.’ ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ ‘Pierre’s in trouble. He hasn’t been around. He’s always travelling. Things have been falling apart for months. He’s under investigation. Administrators were knocking on the door. I don’t know exactly what’s going on but Stephanie has to come first.’
Helen had every right to be scared. The assets of Pierre’s prop
The baby girl had a shock of blonde hair – and looked nothing like Helen’s wealthy boyfriend