Things got off to a bad start when Issie was evicted; Evelyn installed his stepdaughters in his daughters’ bedrooms. The next time Isabella came back to Doddington, she found she had been turfed out of her bedroom; the swan wall paper and glam-rock posters of Ziggy Stardust had been torn down and thrown out. She recalled that they were moved out of their bedrooms and installed ‘above the car port’ in the guest wing her father had added on to the house in the 1950s.
Evelyn was not a bad man but he was thoughtless and weak, and the saga of the bedrooms was typical of the way in which Evelyn now treated Isabella. Coming just months after her parents’ divorce and with that trauma still very much ongoing, it left her feeling unwelcome at Doddington in school holidays, and became a focal point for Isabella’s teenage rage and despair. It is the moment when Isabella began to feel rootless and that she belonged nowhere. This demon would develop into an obsessive fear that she would end up a homeless bag lady – a belief that would haunt her for the rest of her life and contributed to her eventual suicide, despite the fact that at the time of her death we manifestly were not homeless, with a flat in Eaton Square and also occupied Hilles, the wonderful Blow family seat on a thousand acres of land in Gloucestershire.
There was another problem with ‘The Steps’, as she called her young stepsisters; they were extremely good looking. She was particularly concerned that boys she was interested in would prefer her oldest stepsister, Louise, who was the closest in age to her.
Like many teenage girls, Isabella was very unsure about her looks. She liked her figure; she was petite, sexy and curvy, with wonderful 32B bosoms. She had huge, flashing, green-blue eyes, described by Rupert Everett as ‘mad’ and by Rosie as ‘beautiful’. She had slim hips, great legs and elegant feet.
But she felt strongly that her face was very ugly. She hated her protruding, ‘goofy’ teeth. She blamed her parents for being too mean to spend money rectifying these ‘combine harvesters’ when she was a teenager.
A father of some friends of hers who lived in Gloucestershire remarked to his sons that her face was ‘hideous’ but with a figure like hers she’d be ‘great in bed’.
Such callous remarks irrevocably coloured Issie’s view of herself. She once said to me, ‘When you’re poking the fire, it does not matter what is on the mantelpiece.’
I told her when I met her that she was beautiful – but it was too late. The damage had been done. She was convinced she had ‘an ugly face’.
A decade later in New York in the 1980s, Isabella visited a dentist who looked after Frank Sinatra’s and others stars’ teeth. The dentist told her it was too late for her to do anything about what she called her ‘yellow fangs’. Her habit of smearing her lips and teeth with lipstick was in part to deal with this perceived disfigurement. Her hatred of her face was another demon Issie carried with her for life.
Rona found Evelyn’s children hard to deal with. Rona believed in nannies, mealtimes, bedtimes, bath times and strict routines while Evelyn’s children more or less did what they liked, grabbing a bite to eat from the fridge when they felt hungry and going to bed whenever they pleased. Although ‘Baby’ Lavinia appeared to like the new structure, enjoying trips to the museum and organised activities, Rona and Issie battled each other. Rona recalls one occasion when Issie was going to a party. When Rona asked her what time she would like to be picked up, Issie brushed the request off and said she would make her own way home, which Rona found ‘ridiculous’ and completely unacceptable.
Issie was only 20 years younger than Rona, so when Evelyn told Rona, in a typically offhand fashion, that his three daughters had their own mother and that she was not responsible for them, it must have come as both a relief and a confirmation of what she already knew.
Isabella saw everything that Rona did as evidence that her stepmother was trying to drive a wedge between herself and her father. For example, one change introduced by Rona and resented by Issie was how she earned her pocket money. Issie had learned to operate the potato machine but Rona felt it was ‘beneath (her) dignity’ for Issie to work for her father. Instead, Issie had to ‘bicycle to the local Bridgmere nurseries’ to earn her pennies.
Lavinia remembered Issie crying in the morning and being very upset at having to go to Bridgemere.
Despite the sometimes brash exterior, Issie was still very much a little girl and the presence of her young stepmother created a rival and competitor for her father’s love. The battle for this love would cause Isabella terrible emotional pain, hurt and despair, and become another demon.
Isabella would never overcome this demon, or accept her stepmother. In later life she took to describing her as hurtfully as possible in public interviews, once referring to her in a profile in the New Yorker as ‘a creature my father met on a bus in Hong Kong’.
But her father had a love and a need for her stepmother, and he was about to become more dependent on Rona than ever.
Just under a year after their marriage, on 4 February 1975, Evelyn went into the private block of the North Staffordshire hospital at Stoke-on-Trent hospital to have an operation to remove a varicose vein and some lumps on his left leg. On 5 February 1975, he had the operation. A day later, he had swollen up like a balloon – gas gangrene had broken out in the hospital and three other patients in the private wing died. Fighting for his life, Evelyn was prescribed morphine, hydrocortisone, diuretics and antibiotics to reduce the swelling.
Five days later, to try to stop the spreading gangrene, the surgeon amputated his leg below the knee.
Issie firmly blamed Rona for the disaster claiming that Rona pushed him to have the operation because she thought his varicose veins looked unsightly on the beach.
It was unfair of Issie to blame Rona for the operation, for her father medically required it. But, by 24 March 1975, death was a real possibility, and Evelyn signed a new will in the North Staffordshire hospital, witnessed by the orthopaedic surgeon and a nurse.
In fact, Evelyn survived, but the change to the will was permanent. The dramatic secret of what he had written would not be revealed until his death in 1993.
On 9 April 1975, Evelyn had a second operation amputating his leg above his knee.
There was some discussion of suing the hospital for negligence. But Evelyn was having none of it. The hospital had far more money than he did to fight in court. Besides, the surgeon was a friend of his; they shot together in Staffordshire.
Indeed, the shoots after Evelyn lost his leg were one of Issie’s happier memories. With his artificial leg, he needed Isabella to hold him in case he fell over while shooting a ‘left and a right’ bird. For Isabella, it was a special time. She had her beloved father to herself.
With his leg stub rubbing against his artificial leg, Evelyn was to be in constant pain for the rest of his life. The pain and handicap were borne by him bravely and with dignity and there was rarely any complaint or fuss. Emotionally he may have been a weak man, but physically he was brave. Isabella inherited her father’s physical courage.
What really irked Isabella was the fact that Rona had not allowed her to see her father when he was in hospital. Thirteen years later in 1988, when Isabella took me for the first time to meet her father and stepmother for dinner at their home in Kensington Square, the subject came up. Rona explained to me that, in her judgement, Isabella was too young to deal with the sight of Evelyn in hospital with gangrene. I disagreed. Isabella was over 15 years old at the time and, I felt sure, old enough to have witnessed the admittedly distressing scene. Issie and I had both been brought up in the countryside where blood, gore and death are very much part of life. Rona had grown up in the city and town, and had the sensibilities of a city dweller.
But