Читать книгу An Unlikely Countess: Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway - Ziauddin Yousafzai, Louise Carpenter - Страница 8

On 15 May 1979, on a draughty platform at Waverley Station, Edinburgh, Lord and Lady Galloway, fresh to their titles and in a muddle with their luggage, were preparing to board a train headed for London. ‘If I can have this opportunity of going to the House of Lords, I shall take it,’ Lily Galloway had told their French lodger, Marie-Laurence Maître, in their tenement flat as she packed.

Lily, dressed in a bottle-green velvet suit, which was a touch thin at the elbows and cuffs, but brushed up on the lapels, struggled as usual with their trunks while Randolph Galloway walked ahead, hands clasped stiffly behind his back. If anybody had cared to study their expressions, in him they would have observed a vagueness, as if he inhabited another world, one he did not much care for but from which he could not escape, and in her the opposite, the alertness of a proficient nurse in constant anticipation of a crisis. Randolph was easily unsettled by noise and commotion – as a child he would become quite hysterical if a train blew its steam – and he was prone to wandering off. Lily would have to maintain vigilance.

Their brief wedding announcement had been published in the court and social pages of the Daily Telegraph on 1 November 1975. Lord Garlies, then heir to the Earldom of Galloway, had married Mrs Lily Budge, youngest daughter of the late Mr and Mrs Andrew Miller, of Duns, Berwickshire. In February 1976, following their church blessing, a large photograph of them appeared over a page of the Edinburgh Tatler with a brief caption outlining how the reception had taken place at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh. The picture alone revealed that Lily was some years older than her husband and would not by any stretch of the imagination be capable of providing an heir. And while blessed with a mop of thick black hair and two rows of straight, pearly white teeth, she could not be described as a beauty. To those in Scotland who followed the births, deaths, and marriages of the aristocracy, the announcement that the 12th Earl of Galloway’s son and heir had married came as a shock. The reception had not taken place at the family seat of Cumloden, Newton Stewart, and the 12th Earl of Galloway and his daughter, Lady Antonia Dalrymple, did not attend the party.

Randolph Galloway, recognised by the Stewart Society as head of the Stewart clan, noted in Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knight-age as the 13th Earl of Galloway, Lord Garlies, Baron Stewart of Garlies and a Baronet (Sir Randolph Keith Reginald Stewart, 12th Bart. of Corsewell, and 10th Bart. of Burray) was now about to take his seat in the upper house. He stood at over six feet and possessed a broad, athletic build. He had thick black wavy hair, parted and combed back from his high forehead, a strong square jaw and light, piercing blue eyes, sometimes hidden behind heavy black-rimmed spectacles. He was slim and handsome in the new three-piece suit, picked and paid for by Lily.

On arriving in London unscathed by drama, Lily and Randolph went to 20 Great Peter Street, SW1, the clergyhouse of St Matthew’s, Westminster, offered by the Vicar Prebendary Gerard Irvine. (Shortly afterwards, they would move to temporary accommodation in SW5 and thereafter use a series of cheap tourist hotels such as The Hansel and Gretel, £12.65 a night including VAT and breakfast.) The following day, 16 May, Randolph took his seat and Lily settled herself on the red leather pews of the Peeresses’ gallery, front row, first in. She watched over him proudly as he sat mute on the Conservative benches in front of her. He did not deliver a maiden speech, which was for the best.

Outside the gates of Parliament, she posed for a photograph. ‘The Lords is the most caring place in the world!’ she later told a newspaper reporter. ‘If I had my way we would live in London permanently.’

When Lily was not guiding Randolph about the wood-panelled corridors or sitting in the chamber, with her eyes attentively trained on him in the manner of a dog to its master, she could be found in one of three places: in the House of Lords’ stationery cupboard, availing herself of as many complimentary cards and envelopes as would fit into her handbag; on the telephone to family in Scotland, a service which was also complimentary; or in the tearoom, knitting needles in hand, eating tea and toast with the Scottish peeresses who befriended her.

There was nothing in Lily’s outward appearance to distinguish her from the other peers’ wives except perhaps a little weariness. She was set apart principally because she had no interest in behaving as expected. Her occasional guests from Scotland saw that she liked to congratulate the other wives on their appearance – ‘My, Lady so and so, what a dear little hat you are wearing today’ – and every morning, on entering the House, she made a point of inquiring after everyone’s health – ‘Good morning Mr Skelton [then a junior doorkeeper], how are you? And how is your mother? Oh, will you send her my regards?’

Lily and Randolph considered themselves to have an important patron. The 17th Earl of Lauderdale, Patrick Maitland, a well-respected Scottish hereditary peer, former MP for Lanark, former reporter for The Times, and one of the last men in Britain to make use of a large ear trumpet, had come to know them through the ecumenical pilgrimages he organised to St Mary’s Kirk, his private chapel in the parish of Haddington, not far from Edinburgh. They were, he had long ago concluded, a very curious couple, at times exasperating, but of the sort that he found himself drawn to helping, often against his better judgement. When Lily had asked for his help in completing the necessary paperwork to propel Randolph to the House of Lords, however, he had had few misgivings. He had lent a hand, confident, as was she, that the act of elevating Randolph to the role for which he had been born might be the making of their marriage. Now that they had succeeded, within days of their arrival Lord Lauderdale found to his dismay that his good deed had returned to torment him. Lily sought him out whenever she could, falling into step beside him as he puffed his way down the corridors, or crying out to him across the tearoom. Soon, Lord Lauderdale found himself darting behind pillars to avoid her, not easy for a man of his girth. On the rare occasions that he escaped Lily’s notice, he would watch with bemused fascination as Lily and Randolph huddled together with furrowed brows, poring over the weekly whip, ‘more out of excitement than understanding’.

Word quickly spread about Lily and Randolph’s circumstances. While the Scottish peers and peeresses might return weekly to imposing seats scattered throughout the lowlands and highlands, they were not inclined towards the high life. But even by their standards of frugality, they saw that the new recruit was unusually strapped. Lady Saltoun, chief of the Fraser clan, a cross-bencher and another addition to the upper chamber that year, recognised Randolph’s limitations immediately. She remembered him as a teenager, when he was Lord Garlies, and it made her shudder. As an eighteen-year-old girl, she had been forced by her parents to dance with him at a masonic ball in Glasgow. It had been an awkward experience and one she was keen to forget. But despite faint memories of whispered talk of the boy’s disappearance from Scottish society, his sudden and unexpected reappearance in the House of Lords thirty years later met no interrogation or indiscretion.

During those early exhilarating days, Lily experienced a feeling of true belonging. It was a feeling of power and privilege by proxy. But it was to become apparent that Randolph could not fulfil his role. Some time before they left, Lily had an encounter that reminded her of how far she had come from her world, one to which she could not now return and to which she felt she had never spiritually belonged.

The reminder came in the stately if unlikely figure of Lord Home of the Hersel, who had succeeded Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister in 1963, but who had now returned to the upper chamber as a life peer. Lily did not hesitate when she saw him walking towards her in a corridor. She stopped him in his tracks. Speaking without pause in her thick Borders accent, as was her way, she reminded him of that time when they had met quite by chance more than forty years ago. The encounter had been at the Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh, at the wedding reception of one Bunty Johnston, the daughter of R. J. Johnston, a lawyer and the County Clerk of Berwickshire. Lily would not normally have attended such a function but her older sister, Etta, was the Johnstons’ servant girl and Lily had been invited too, as she helped Etta with the Johnstons’ spring cleaning. ‘Oh Etta, I must come, I must!’ she had said. ‘It’s the only time I will ever have the chance of seeing the inside of the Caledonian Hotel.’

‘How nice to see you again,’ the former Prime Minister replied, either out of impeccable memory or, more likely, impeccable manners. ‘It has been a very, very long time.’