Читать книгу As It Was: A Memoir - Robert M. Pennoyer - Страница 11

My father’s two older brothers, Richard and Sheldon, were both so different from each other, and from my father. During the First World War Richard was in the Foreign Service in England when he met and married Winifred, whom we called Aunt Frid, the widow of the Earl of Shrewsbury, the first earl of the realm. Winifred’s son John, then age seven, had inherited the title when his father was killed during the First World War. Richard left the Foreign Service, became a British subject, and acquired the insufferable traits of a self-important, stuffy Englishman, thriving on his supposed closeness to royalty. In the summer of 1936, our local paper, the Tahoe Tatler, carried the following news item under the heading ROYALTY VISITS LAKE.

Lady Winifred Pennoyer, who is the wife of the brother of Paul Pennoyer and, by her previous marriage, the mother of the 21st Earl of Shrewsbury, is vacationing here with her husband and son during an interlude on a journey of the western hemisphere. Her son, whose full name is John George Charles Henry Alton Alexander Chetwynd-Talbot, is the premier earl on the rolls of both England and Ireland. The Pennoyers reside in London on court grounds set aside for members of the nobility. The Earl is a possible successor to the throne of England, coming next in line to the family of the late King George V, who was his godfather.

One can only imagine the machinations Richard must have gone through to secure publication of this account of his grandeur on the front page of the Tahoe Tatler, which had a circulation of 1,500 and rarely covered news even as far as Reno sixty miles to the east.

Sometime in the late 1940s Vicky met Uncle Richard at dinner with my parents. Self-absorbed, he paid no attention to this adorable, vivacious, exquisitely beautiful nineteen-year-old. Wanting to have a little fun, after dinner Vicky told me that I had to ask Uncle Richard if he liked her. So the next morning at breakfast (Vicky was not there), I put the question. He looked a little startled, then replied: “She is … r-a-ath-e-r … Victorian … haw … haw.” With his acquired English persona he had forgotten how to laugh naturally.

Uncle Richard and Aunt Frid had a son together, my first cousin Charles Edwin Paget Pennoyer, whom everyone called Kim. I first met him when I was about eight and staying at Wall Hall. Our mothers arranged for me and my nanny to visit him at the ancestral seat of the Shrewsbury earls: a Jacobean pile called Ingestre Hall, in Staffordshire, on the Welsh border. It was to be a stay of only a few days’ duration. Kim, who was two or three years older than I, made it painfully clear from the outset that he didn’t much like having his little cousin underfoot.

I roamed around on my own. I remember one of the servants running up to tell me that the obelisk in the Great Hall marked what he insisted was the exact center of England, and that the gatehouse had served as a prison for Mary Queen of Scots when an earlier Earl of Shrewsbury was her custodian. I was quite impressed with Kim’s older half-brother, John, the earl of Shrewsbury, then about twenty-two. My timing was bad: his favorite dog had just killed a sheep and was having to be put down, and John was in what can only be described as a state. He cut a dashing figure driving a little red MG roadster madly around the place. He came to visit us at Round Bush a couple of times. Paul remembered him taking one of our bikes and riding it straight into our fountain—and Dad avidly recording it all with his movie camera.

Richard’s royal balloon was punctured when his connection to royalty made the front page of the New York Herald Tribune in 1960 under the headline LONGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE DIVORCE CASE IN BRITISH HISTORY. John was suing his wife, the daughter of some brigadier general, and she was suing him, both on the grounds of adultery. Applying an ancient equity principle, the court denied the divorce because neither party had come to the court with “clean hands.” John had admitted under oath to having kept mistresses, and then it was proved in court that his wife had been intimate with their children’s tutor who was half her age (confirmed by testimony from two butlers, a secretary, a nanny, and a governess, all of whom had witnessed trysts on the Blue Landing of the Great Staircase of Ingestre, as well as in the White Room and the Bird Room). Years later I heard that John had moved to the Caribbean to live out his days with his Jamaican mistress.

When Kim visited Round Bush, he always wrecked my electric train, which I had set up on the attic floor; he liked nothing better than to cause a head-on collision of model engines. He was gay, never went to university and, seeing no future for himself in England, relocated to Kenya after the war. There he ran “Kim Safaris” as a “white hunter,” taking groups of people into the bush to photograph animals. He would set up a lavish campsite on the edge of Victoria Falls or some other impossibly scenic place, spread the fancy tablecloths, trot out the silver, and lay on a feast. Year after year the enterprise lost money. To cover his losses Kim borrowed from my mother again and again. I said, “Mummy, you can’t go on doing this—from now on, Kim is going to have to deal with me on these loans.”

When I looked closely I discovered that he was charging his clients less than it was costing him to run the business. His clients were people like C. Douglas Dillon, who could have well afforded to pay him at least enough to cover his expenses. Kim resented my intrusion. It all ended soon enough. After the British left Kenya, he came back from one of his trips and walked into his house to find three Kenyan generals sitting in the living room. One of them informed him, “This is ours now.” Kim had no choice but to return to England, where he died years ago.