The Pillars of Hercules

She attended Oxford, and scandalized her family by having an affair with an Austrian in Spain. “Nowadays I would have spent some time with him and moved on. My uncles and aunts showed up—in Paris, where I was living with the man—they dragged us off to be married.” And so she was forced to leave Oxford University. This was in the 1920s.

“I went to Vienna and lived with my mother-in-law while my husband was in Rhodesia. I thought as my father had conquered Rhodesia I’d have all sorts of welcomes. We went. My first husband was good with horses. He could tame a wild horse, fix a roof. Clever farmer. But he had no mind at all.”

“What did you do in Rhodesia?”

She didn’t smile.

“We rode to hounds,” she said.

“Of course.”

“We chased every animal in Rhodesia. They were in great supply then. We lived about thirty miles from Marandellas—that was where we went for supplies, fording streams on the way. It was a rough life. We hardly knew the Africans. I spoke what they called ‘kitchen kaffir.’ It would have been different in Kenya. There were all sorts of diversions there. Rhodesia was second-rate.”

Everything was fine until Germany invaded Austria. “My husband could not claim to be Austrian anymore. He automatically became German. And I had no choice. I had to take his nationality, as his wife. We eventually divorced. Have I mentioned that he was excellent with horses but he had no mind? I went to London. I was a German national!”

“That must have been inconvenient.”

“We were at war with Germany, you see,” she said. “I put that right by marrying an agreeable little Englishman, to get a passport. It was a marriage of convenience.”

After a spell in Paris, she returned to London, and by chance entered an art gallery where paintings by Sir Francis Rose were being exhibited.

“Very strange ones. People either loved or hated his paintings. I thought to myself, I’m going to marry that man. I just had that feeling.”

And so it happened. She married Sir Francis Rose, and lived, as she put it, “absolutely at the center of things.” She was photographed by Beaton, knew Gertrude Stein and Picasso. “Picasso was a bit of a Sun King, such a personality. And such a libido.” Picasso had made a fruitless attempt on her virtue. Gertrude Stein, surprisingly, had not; but she had bought sixty-eight of Sir Francis’s paintings, and immortalized him by mentioning him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

We had ordered our meal—“Notice the stew on the menu? Corsicans stew everything.” Dorothy had the charcuterie for which Corsica is famous, and then oxtail. I had the soup and the fish. Meanwhile we were drinking wine, Patrimonio, from the north of the island; tippling and talking in the bright still restaurant by the sea.

“I am not betraying a secret when I say that Francis was homosexual,” Dorothy said. “Everyone knew. What’s the secret? And, well, men are unfaithful to their wives. That is how men are, that is what they do. But when a man is unfaithful in a homosexual way there is a sort of guilt that comes over him. That was the bad part.”

“You knew that he was homosexual when you married him?”

“Um, yes. I thought I could cure him.”

“What was his libido like. Not on the Picasso scale, was it?”

“He had a libido, yes. And very low friends. Francis Bacon—you know who I mean?”

“I’ve just read a book about him.”

“He had a very grisly talent. Nostalgie de la boue, perhaps. And my husband’s friends were very rough.”

Ready for yer thrashing, now, Frawncis? the young men muttered to Bacon, flexing a leather belt, and then the whipping began. So the book (written by Bacon’s friend Daniel Farson) had said. I told this to Dorothy Carrington.

“Oh, yes, I suppose so. All of that,” she said. “But these low friends kept him going. Our marriage didn’t last. After he died I felt a duty to go back. I met some of them. They had given him money, they had kept him.”

“They were loyal to him?”

“Yes. In a strange way. I think they were atoning for something in their own past.”

It cannot have been a blissful marriage, yet she was as compassionate and uncritical as it was possible to be.

“Francis always had his own set. Cyril Connolly was one. He was frightfully rude to me in 1972—he snubbed me. I said hello to him. He turned away. ‘I was always Francis’s friend, not yours,’ he said. He was horrid.”

“What about Corsica?” I asked. It seemed the right question—we were now on dessert.