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'Best of Times, Worst of Times' Lady Annabel Goldsmith

From The Sunday Times
November 1, 2009
Too wild to live
The matriarch of one of Britain’s most colourful families, recalls her beloved first-born son, Rupert, and his disappearance in treacherous seas off Africa
Annabel Goldsmith

My eldest son Rupert always felt himself to be inviolate; he thought he would live for ever, and so did I. One morning more than 20 years ago, he went down to the beach at Lome in west Africa. He was walking with the help of a stick as he had badly injured a leg doing wheelies on a motorbike to impress some girls. Swimming was helping it to get better.

The red flag was up: the sea, always treacherous, was unsafe to swim in. Yet Rupert folded his clothes, took off his watch and removed his wallet, placed them all in a neat pile, tipped the beach boy to look after them and plunged into the waves — as fearless of the elements as he had been all his life.

Rupert never came back. His body was never recovered, and my whole world fell to pieces.

He was my first child. I was 20 and had been married to Mark Birley for only six months when I found out that Rupert was on the way. I was living in the tiny one-bedroom flat at the top of my mother-in-law’s house in St John’s Wood, and getting pregnant was the last thing I had planned to do; in fact I was so naive that I made no connection with the awful feeling of sickness I was experiencing at breakfast time.

Mrs White, our housekeeper, loved nothing better than a good misfortune, and she was the first to notice. “Oh dear!” she sighed with relish, and brought me a cup of strong tea and a plate of Rich Tea biscuits.

She had a total aversion to sex; poor Reg, her husband, had not been allowed to have what she termed “his way” for many years. She took an active interest in my pregnancy, muttering ominously about the terrible pain I was to experience, and telling me in lurid detail about her own labour: “My Joyce, she took three days to appear.”

Along with most people of my generation — this was 1955 — I did not really know anything about how you had babies. My ignorance was compounded by having no one to ask; my mother had died, and the sight of Mrs White’s gloom-laden expression every time the word “confinement” cropped up was enough to make me change the subject immediately.

It was indeed a terrifying childbirth. I was left entirely alone apart from an elderly sister popping in to tell me to keep quiet. Eventually, once I was ready to push, several nurses appeared and tried to hold me down as I writhed about, screaming and yelling and kicking. Afterwards, exhausted, I simply wished to be reunited with my dachshund, Noodle.

On the second day, when I was a little better, Rupert was put into my arms and at last I took notice of him and saw that he was beautiful. My love for him just grew and grew. His beauty was such that it was difficult not to stare at him, all blond hair and extraordinary yellow-green, almost tawny, eyes.

However, looking back, I see that I certainly took some time adjusting to my new responsibilities. Much as I loved Rupert, I wanted to have the freedom to do all the things I had done before. Mark was not much better as a parent. Although he had always wanted a boy and was secretly intrigued by the idea of being a father, he certainly never wanted more than one child and in those early years was simply bored by babies.

When Rupert was two — soon after my second son, Robin, was born — I picked up the phone to hear my friend Maria Harrison’s excitedly urgent voice, her wonderful Latvian accent even more pronounced than usual: “Darling! I have heard of an amazing little house somewhere off Pelham Street in Kensington. You absolutely must go and look at it.”

Early the next morning I wandered up and down Pelham Street (which runs from South Kensington Tube station to Brompton Road) and spotted a little lane running off the end of it. At the bottom on the right was a rather dilapidated black gate. I turned the handle. To my surprise it opened, and I stepped inside.

I had the same sensation I am sure Mary Lennox must have had when she discovered the secret garden in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book. I stood for a moment and, like Mary, listened to the stillness. I could not believe that such an oasis could exist only a few yards from a busy Tube station.

Before I knew what I was doing I was racing up the road to find a phone box to call Mark. Fifteen minutes later, having excused himself from a meeting at his office at J Walter Thompson, he was standing beside me. Together we explored the large garden silently and reverentially. The house was a two-storey Regency building, painted white. The door was locked but, looking through the windows, we could see it was empty and quiet and uncluttered.

We moved in when Rupert was three — Mrs White came with us, of course — and when I think of that house I think predominantly of him. The memory of Rupert running happily around the garden is something indistinguishable from the memory of Pelham Cottage. The affection I still feel for the place is greater than for anywhere else I have lived.

It became my nest, a safe haven to which I could always return with great comfort and inner peace. From the first night to the day I left, whatever was happening around me, whatever turmoil I felt myself to be in, the house and the garden enclosed me and kept me safe within myself.

When I think back to my 20 years at Pelham Cottage, I am struck by the richness and variety of my life there — giving birth to three more children, India Jane, followed 13 years later by Jemima, then Zac, and welcoming Manes, Jimmy Goldsmith’s son from his second marriage, and his other children, and experiencing other pleasurable (and turbulent) changes in my personal circumstances.

Mark and I lived together there for some years before we separated, but even then he was still part of Pelham Cottage, as he bought one of the properties in the lane nearby and was in and out much as before.

When I started my affair with Jimmy in 1964, I was determined that Mrs White would not find out about it. But occasionally I would spend a whole night away and she knew that was out of character. One particular morning she grabbed me by the arm outside the children’s bathroom and swung me inside, saying, “’Ere, I want a word with you. You been carryin’ on. I never thought you’d do that. I always thought you was a lady.”

As I gazed at her in horror, she continued: “No, it’s no good trying to get out of it, My Lady. I know I done wrong but I read one of them letters you tore up and put in the basket.”

Desperately trying to remember what I had put in the letter, and forgetting my grammar in the process, I said: “You done what?”

“I know I done wrong. I shouldn’t have read the letter, but I had to know,” she stuttered.

“You done very wrong,” I told her firmly. However, I knew also that unless I made Mrs White an accomplice, life would be impossible, so I sat her down on my bed and explained that Mr G (her name for Jimmy) was really more of a platonic friend who helped me out financially and occasionally liked to take me out in the evening. Of course, sometimes he had to have “his way”, but that was men for you and to keep him happy I had to submit.

She cheered up and we had a woman-to-woman chat about how strange it was that men had to have sex, bemoaning our lot as the women who had to put up with it.

From that day onwards, Mrs White became my eager collaborator, loving the intrigue and her part in it. After all, she had seen me through bad as well as good times with Mark and realised I wasn’t solely to blame. She revelled so much in the secrecy of the affair that sometimes she went a bit too far, and when Jimmy telephoned she would come into the room where I was doing homework with India Jane and my niece Cosima and hiss loudly and conspiratorially, “It’s Mr G on the phone; I said it’s Mr G, he’s waiting for you.”

Jimmy rarely stayed at Pelham Cottage. I preferred to keep my life with him separate from the children when they were growing up. They never thought he was anything other than a great friend, and they adored him. Their own naivety, that trusting quality of childhood, as well as Mark’s impressive discretion when around the children, preserved their innocence.

I can still hear the children’s laughter ringing through the years as they and their friends played. In the lovely garden, hidden from the sights and sounds of South Kensington’s traffic, Rupert’s love of animals began to develop. He became the devoted owner of a chipmunk called Chukka, which he tamed from the wild and smuggled into Eton for his first term — although this comforting presence was not enough to diminish his homesickness.

I began to consider taking him out of Eton until Jimmy told me that, if I did, it would blight his life. Instead, Jimmy took me away to Jamaica for a few weeks in order to reduce the frequent and agonising contact Rupert and I had with each other.

On the day that someone at Pelham Cottage left the cage door open and Chukka escaped through the trees, never to be seen again, Rupert was heartbroken. I know that it was his fearless ease with animals that protected him on the day of his brother Robin’s terrible accident at Howletts, John Aspinall’s zoo in Kent. Robin, then 14, was mercilessly mauled by Zorra, a tigress in the early stages of pregnancy.

We were shattered by the ferocity of the savage attack. Robin was nervous. Zorra sensed this and was herself threatened by Robin’s height. She sprang on him, bringing him to the ground, and fastened her jaws around his head. It was only the heroic intervention of Aspers and his second wife, Min, that saved his life. While Aspers prised the animal’s jaws open, Min held on to her back legs to prevent her from ripping Robin’s body, as tigers do to their prey.

I cried for nine hours without stopping. Mark did not weep; much as he minded, he was too angry with me for allowing Robin into the cage and too shocked to respond to this terrible accident with tears. For years afterwards I was riddled with guilt over letting Robin into that enclosure, but I had had total trust in Aspers, who, of course, did not know that Zorra was pregnant and so catastrophically unpredictable in her behaviour. After enduring years and years of plastic surgery, Robin, with enormous courage and strength of character, overcame this terrible incident in his life and emerged as the wonderful human being he is today.

Aspers was my inspiration and guide to the wonderment and beauty of animals. I was there at the beginning, when he started to keep wild animals in his flat in Lyall Street in Belgravia. Rescuing them from a miserable and life-threatening existence, he had taken in Tara, a baby tiger, and Deddy, a capuchin monkey, and until he was able to relocate them to the country, he would often be seen walking them on a lead in the streets around Eaton Square. I thought he was an exceptional person to have taken these animals in and I loved to visit and spend time with them.

In the hectic 1960s, when acceptable boundaries and social codes really were being widened, I don’t think I knew anyone more eccentric and wildly passionate about things than Aspers. From his undergraduate days at Oxford he was determined to set up a casino that would rival in elegance and reputation the gambling venues of the 18th century. Thwarted by the illegality of gambling in Britain, he used to hold private gambling parties that became immensely grand, attracting some of the biggest gamblers in the country. His mother, Lady Osborne — “Lady O” — would provide the buffet supper; her game pie and fabulous desserts were renowned.

A police raid on one of these infamous gambling evenings — 21 members of the nobility were arrested — led indirectly to the legalisation of gambling in Britain, and Aspers was able to go above ground. With John Aspinall’s Clermont club upstairs and Mark Birley’s club Annabel’s in the basement, 44 Berkeley Square became the most fashionable, if hedonistic, address in London. Nowadays I am often asked if I am the Annabel of Annabel’s, and when I reply, it is with a huge amount of pride and honour. At the time, however, I didn’t realise quite what an iconic place it had become and didn’t truly appreciate how lovely it was of Mark to have named it after me.

It was after a successful bet that Aspers was able to purchase Howletts, a beautiful Palladian house near Canterbury, which was to become the home of his first zoo. I loved walking through the woods with him, accompanied by gorillas. The older ones could be quite rough when trying to play and would drag you behind a tree by your hair. I soon found that the best way to prevent this was to carry the smallest gorilla on my shoulders. But all this rough- housing was done in friendship; they were simply boisterous adolescents.

Aspers and Jimmy had been best friends since Jimmy’s early exit from Eton, aged 16, and hardly a day went by without lengthy conversations between them, usually while Jimmy was having breakfast in bed early in the morning.

When Jimmy started talking about wanting to have children with me, I was at first too frightened even to contemplate the idea. Although Mark and I were amicably separated, we were still technically married and we had three children, Rupert, Robin and India Jane. But one day, walking around Howletts with me, Aspers told me that I was making a terrible mistake, that Jimmy was desperate to have more children. Addressing me rather as if I were a Siberian tigress, he said: “It’s time you mated with Jimmy and gave him the children he wants.”

He tried to explain that I should consider it a great honour that Jimmy should want to have children with me, adding rather forbiddingly: “If you don’t do this soon, one day the affair will be over and you will be left with nothing.”

I began to understand the value of the commitment that Jimmy was offering me. I concluded that when a man asks a woman to have his child it is a wonderful thing.

In 1974 I became pregnant with Jimmy’s child, 13 years after India Jane’s birth. Mrs White was horrified. “Oh, I knew you’d fallen. I could tell it by your eyes and I think it’s dreadful; and frankly, My Lady, I know you done it and I know you’re going to have it, but don’t expect me to even give it a look.”

When Jemima was born I had the greatest difficulty keeping Jimmy and Aspers out of the room while I was having her, so excited were they both by the event. Aspers became chief godfather and, him being an atheist, albeit with his own religion and his own creed, we had a rather unusual christening — more of a naming ceremony — in the garden at Pelham Cottage. I can still see Aspers holding Jemima up high in the air and making his moving speech welcoming her into the world.

Needless to say, Jemima was rarely out of Mrs White’s arms. It was, as it had been with all my other babies, love at first sight. Jemima was followed rather too quickly by my son Zac, in 1975; and Mrs White, still expressing horror and shock, this time over how close they were in age, fell as much in love with him as she had with Jemima.

Sadly, in the mid-1970s I realised that we had to move from Pelham Cottage — I had five children; Benjamin would appear in 1980 — and by this time Jimmy wanted us all to live together as one big family. When we found Ormeley Lodge, on the edge of Richmond Park, I recreated Pelham Cottage in my bedroom there, much to the mirth of my children.

As Jimmy and I increased our family, I noticed Rupert’s gentleness and cherishing nature emerge in his behaviour with very young children. Ben, his youngest half-brother, 25 years his junior, was mesmerised by him. They all adored the way he would give them his whole attention, play games and read stories while ignoring all the adults around them. That Rupert would have made a wonderful father I have no doubt at all.

Both Mark and Jimmy wanted Rupert to come and work for them. Fatherhood had not come easily to Mark when the children were young , and it was only when Rupert got into Oxford that he realised his elder son’s talent; eventually, with much encouragement from me, they became devoted friends. Rupert was interested in making money, and the twin influences of Jimmy and Mark shaped much of his thinking. In Jimmy he benefited from seeing the model of a great financier and entrepreneur in action, and from Mark he inherited a love of the good things in life as well as owing him that great sense of life’s absurdities and his appreciation of lovely clothes and shoes.

Rupert wanted to make his own way in the world and resisted both men’s offers. I believe he was probably destined to become a writer; the letters that he sent me over the years, in particular when he was working on the International Herald Tribune in Russia after he left Oxford, made me laugh more than any professional satirist has ever done. His account of the visit of the daughter of a very senior journalist, hitting the flowing Russian vodka river in a big way as well as sleeping with the Brazilian ambassador, was unprintably hilarious.

If you give unconditional love to your children, you will always get it back. I have also discovered that you never stop being a mother; I am still mother to Robin, India Jane, Jemima, Zac and Ben, even though they are 51, 48, 34, 33 and 28. If any of them hurts themselves or gets into trouble, I always want to be there. But there was something different about my relationship with Rupert.

Having been so very close to me as a little boy, as he grew older our relationship became more than just that between a mother and son and more one of very close friends. The generation barrier dissolved, and as he became an adult I was still young enough to go out to dinner with him as an equal.

Sometimes I wonder if I have exaggerated in my mind the intensity of our closeness, but I honestly do not think I have ever had such a bond with anyone. There is something about the startling phenomenon of the first-born that never goes away.

I believe there was nothing Rupert did not share with me; I knew everything about his girlfriends and I would shake with laughter at his accounts of his amatory exploits, usually told against himself. His love affairs were always uproariously chaotic and complicated. The object of one, in Russia, was able to meet him only in a graveyard as her husband was very jealous and prone to following her everywhere she went. There was not a single gravestone upon which Rupert and his Russian lady had not recorded their mutual ardour, each encounter marked by a pattern of mosquito bites across his back.

In the mid-1980s he began working in Burkina Faso, a landlocked and poverty-racked country in west Africa — “a bloody miserable place”, as Mark put it. Rupert was setting up a business to establish a terminal for supplying grain to Nigeria. From his letters I know he was longing to come home.

When Mark came to see me at Ormeley a week after my birthday in June 1986 and told me that Rupert had gone missing overnight, I could barely believe what I was hearing; in a state of total terror, I begged him to tell me it was not true.

Even today, long after Rupert’s still unexplained death, the lack of finality continues to lurk in the back of my mind. Logic tells me that, having gone down to one of the most treacherous beaches in the area, where it was imperative not to go into the sea when the red flag was up, warning that a current could take him out but not bring him back in again, he ignored the warning and was caught by the relentless power of the tide, swept out to sea for maybe hundreds of miles.

But I am only 98% certain that is what happened; because his body was never found, there is always that tiny, tiny doubt. Was he picked up by the Russian boat moored in the harbour at the time? Was there any truth, given his fluency in Russian, in the rumours that he might have been working as a spy? I can never be completely sure.

In the few weeks after Rupert disappeared, I waited every evening by the telephone for some news from Mark, who had flown straight out to Lome with Robin, where they hired a private investigator. Mark would not let me go with them, even though I longed to, as he thought it would be too painful for me, but he confided afterwards how he came to dread the daily call he would have to make to tell me that the detective had found nothing; later on, I found it hard to talk to Mark about Rupert.

Three months after Rupert’s disappearance we held a memorial service at St James’s, Piccadilly. I was told the church was packed and that there was an impressive number of beautiful young women there, deeply and audibly distressed, but I remember very little of the occasion.

There is no resting place for Rupert, there is no grave; I planted a copper beech tree in the garden that reminds me of him. I have, of course, all his letters, in which I can still hear his voice full of laughter and love, and I have photographs of him all over the place at Ormeley so I can look at him the whole time. I derive much comfort from simply holding his watch and his wallet that were brought back to me from the beach where he had left them on the morning he went for that last fateful swim; but he is not here, and I miss him every single day.

Who’s Who

Annabel Goldsmith was born Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry.

Mark Birley was the son of Sir Oswald Birley, a society artist. He died in 2007.

Sir James “Jimmy” Goldsmith, son of an MP, was a hugely successful businessman. He died in 1997.

John Aspinall claimed he was conceived “under a tamarisk tree” when his mother had an affair with a soldier in India. He died in 2000.

Next week: lasting love

India Jane held her phone to Mark’s ear so that I could speak to him. ‘I love you more than anything, you silly old bugger,’ I told him. ‘I have always loved you and I will miss you dreadfully.’ Jane saw a change appear on his face, then he stopped breathing.

© Annabel Goldsmith 2009 Extracted from No Invitation Required: The Pelham Cottage Years, by Annabel Goldsmith, to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on November 12 at £16.99. Copies can be ordered for £15.29, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135