almost lost one of her hands. It was saved only at the cost of many painful operations and a physical discomfort she tried to alleviate with special bandages. It took her mother a long time to recover physically and mentally, Julie said.
The early 1960s was not a happy period for Jill, according to Julie:
She sold a Renoir painting to help her mother and buy me a Leica camera [Julie was embarking on a successful, if short, career as a photographer]. Michael gave her housekeeping money, but it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t in touch with domestic life, to put it generously. I was hostile to him then because I thought he was treating my mother very casually.
This last comment triggered Julie’s memory of a visit to Beaverbrook at his Cap d’Antibes estate. There Lady Beaverbrook, who was very fond of Jill (I found dozens of affectionate letters from her to Jill in Jill’s study) observed that Jill did not have a very nice dress to wear and ordered one made:
This humiliated my mother. She held it against Michael. I don’t know how you can use stuff like that. She felt that he was oblivious when he humiliated her. He didn’t know that £8 a week when my husband was giving me 20 and only earning a pittance wasn’t enough. She never liked to ask for money. She had her pride. When she couldn’t earn it, she’d sell something.
23
Julie told me that during the first week of Michael’s Dubrovnik stay (I arrived at the beginning of their second week there) several of his London friends had flown over as part of his commemoration of Jill in the City she loved. The wife of Bob Edwards (an intimate of Michael’s who edited Tribune after Michael left the job) told Julie that Michael was one of the most selfish men she had ever met. It seemed a shocking statement to me at the time; Michael was so affable and so obviously engaged with other people. He did not strike me as a monomaniac who would hold forth only about himself. But in effect, in Jill, he found a collaborator—as Carlyle had done with Jane—who might complain from time to time, but who never seriously challenged his own vision of himself or of the world he had a right to rule.
By making no demands (for example, “You must give up your career”), by seeming not to interfere in crucial decisions (should she abort the child she had conceived by him before they were married?) he effectively placed the burden of all decisions on her. She was the one who had to choose—over and over again. Michael could just be himself. This is the free ride men so often enjoy in their marriages.
Much later, when I interviewed Michael’s parliamentary colleague Leo Abse, I discovered that Leo viewed Michael’s solipsism in political terms; that is, because Michael could not see beyond the perimeters of the loving world constructed around him, he became (or perhaps always was) incapable of dealing with a world undreamt of in his philosophy. He was a partisan for his point of view, and it was very difficult for him to argue for any side other than his own. This is a common human failing, I suppose, but we seldom pursue our self-absorption with as much passion as Michael showed.
24
Jenny Stringer, as usual, was in charge of Michael’s itinerary. She was concerned that he get enough exercise. It was difficult but essential for him to walk. When I first met him in the mid 1990s, he could still walk quite vigorously with a cane but since then, the muscles in his legs had atrophied. He should have had physical therapy regularly, with home visits, but he had stopped even his once a week visits to a Hampstead therapist.
Jenny announced that she would come for Michael at eleven:
[MF] I’m doubtful Jenny.
[JS] Oh for heaven’s sake, it’s ridiculous. You’re not going to hang around here all day.
[MF] Hang around? I’ve got things to do.
[JS] I know. You can still come in [into town] for the walk. Can’t you?
[MF] No. Tell you what I might do ... I don’t want to disrupt your day.
[JS] You’re not disrupting it.
[MF] What I might do with you is walk up those steps [the Villa Dubrovnik had a steep set of steps up to the street] and then walk the opposite way.
[JS] Would you like to do that now?
[MF] No.
[JS] Why not? Then you won’t be doing any exercise all day. At the end of every day you say you need to get more exercise. The last three days have been very bad. You need to reform your ways. Let’s do it.
[MF] If you’ll just help me up the stairs. I’ll walk that way [away from town], come back and have the lightest lunch in Christendom, possibly only bananas.
The conversation reminded me that in spite of how accommodating Michael could be, a resistant element in him defied even the most skilful cajoling. But Jenny and Michael were not through, now almost putting on a show. Jenny ventured:
[JS] Supposing I said Tony Blair had sent a Rolls Royce to be up there at half past eleven?
[MF] You know what a bloody liar you are. Very difficult to know when she’s telling the truth, isn’t it?
[JS] Now you’re going to slump into one position and stay there.
[MF] No, I’m all against that too.
[JS] You heard what he said? He’s all against it.
Michael finally got up from the table, reciting his favourite mantra: “One to be ready. Two to be steady ... ” and with a succession of grunts he stood up.
25
There was no errand for Michael that Jenny would not undertake, no comfort for him that she would not arrange. Unlike many of the women surrounding Michael however, she was no adoring sycophant. She seemed sturdily independent and rather like Jill, kept him in line. Even so, protecting him was her mission, no matter how critical she might be.
I asked Jenny if she thought Michael appreciated Jill more during the last years of their marriage. Julie had said as much. “Well, he saw more of her,” Jenny replied. Had I heard about any rifts between Jill and Michael? Jenny asked. Was she obliquely referring to ‘Lamia’? I reported that Julie had told me Michael had alluded to rows with Jill. “Hm,” Jenny considered.
After some inconsequential conversation, I decided to come out with it:
[CR] Julie told me a very sensitive story, “I don’t see how you can put this in the biography, but it’s certainly part of the marriage and of who he is.” She told me he had had an affair with a Pakistani woman.
[JS] Yea.
[CR] Paul Foot knew about it. I guess you know.
[JS] I can elaborate on that. I can tell you how Jill felt about it.
[CR] I talked to Michael Bessie about it.
[JS] You’ll have to talk to Michael about it.
[CR] I would like to. I’m not writing a saint’s life ...
[JS] Of course not. No.
[CR] The marriage is strong enough to—if it’s an important story—it makes him more of a human being and the marriage more interesting.
[JS] Absolutely. You’ll
