Those Wild Wyndhams by Claudia Renton Page A

Blunt’s cool estimation: ‘fat podgy and coarse, his hair and eyes too light for his red complexion’. 8 Indisputably, ‘Cust bulged with sex.’ 9 His quicksilver charm could, and did – quite literally – lay all before him. His ‘harem’ 10 included his long-term mistress, Violet Granby (as Violet Manners had become when her husband succeeded as Marquess), and Lucy Graham Smith. Harry did not adhere to the Souls’ morality. He conceived sexual improvidence as an aristocratic right; moral restraint was mealy-mouthed and middle class
.
‘What if all had been forbidden
but
the apple? Imagine polygamy advanced by God and man, and at this moment all the upper classes would have been dwelling in the joys of illicit constancy and despising the cowardly unenterprising middle classes who were forced to content themselves with profligacy,’ he mused to Mary in 1887. 11 Violet had little truck with Souls morality either. By 1892, she was pregnant with Harry’s child.
    By the summer of 1892, Pamela was the only one of the Wyndhams’ children yet to be settled. In May, Guy had married Edwina Brooke (nicknamed ‘Minnie’), a widow with two children who was five years older than he. Both Madeline Wyndham’s sons had sought out maternal figures, but this marriage was to prove very happy
.
Shortly afterwards Harry Cust joined the Wyndhams for a performance of Wagner’s
Tannhäuser
at Covent Garden, part of a sell-out season of German opera conducted by Richard Mahler. In retrospect, the choice was ominous.
Tannhäuser
skated on the edge of respectability, examining the choice between sacred and profane love. Wilde used it in
Dorian Gray
to reflect the darkness of his hero’s own soul
.
    Seven years before, Laura Tennant had pitied women, who were expected to fight with ‘unarmed breast … as strongly as the cap and pied man’, and warned Mary about the capacity of the world ‘to see things in embryo’. 12 As Mary sat in the Wyndhams’ box and saw Harry’s exaggerated flirting with Pamela, leaning low over her to point out some detail in the programme, whispering in her ear, she was filled with foreboding. Harry was a close friend, but he was a dangerous proposition. His behaviour had the capacity to damage Pamela’s reputation severely. Yet it was possible that Harry was serious. To test if it was so, Mary invited him to Stanway when Pamela was there. By unspoken rule, if he accepted, it would mean that he planned to court her in earnest. Harry turned down the invitation. Mary and Madeline Wyndham decided to nip things in the bud before any further harm was done. They forbade both parties from seeing each other. A month passed in this way, causing Pamela intense anxiety as she scanned crowded ballrooms for his tall blond
figure, playing out in her mind what would happen if he ‘accidentally’ appeared.
    Harry’s eventual appearance was every bit as dramatic as Pamela might have hoped. On 15 August 1892, a fortnight before Violet Granby gave birth to his daughter, Harry pitched up unannounced in Belgrave Square’s drawing room before a startled Madeline and a delighted Pamela. The incident, as recounted by Pamela to Mary, had aspects of a drawing-room farce. Barely had Harry managed to explain that he had turned down the Stanway invitation because ‘He does not want to make love to me (only less crudely expressed by him!)’ 13 than the butler Icke precipitated into the drawing room a young ‘Mr. Allhuisen’ who was intending, most likely, to pay court to Pamela. Harry was hustled off into the front drawing room by Madeline Wyndham, Pamela left to sit and drink tea with the hapless ‘Mr. A’ while trying to eavesdrop on the muffled conversation behind the double doors.
    Behind those doors, Madeline Wyndham laid down the law in somewhat unsatisfactory fashion. She told Harry he could see Pamela only if he promised to stop his ‘coarse flirting’. If and when he was willing to seek her hand in earnest,