There are named place-cards and I begin the hunt for my seat. I am last to find mine, and as soon as I sit, Barbara erupts with annoyance. She had specially chosen a white rose for my napkin ring – the White Rose of Yorkshire – which is lying on the plate of my neighbour to the right. Someone has switched my placement card! Immediately I wonder whether the culprit has made the switch to be near me or to get away, but as I settle, and the white rose is restored, my neighbour to the left leaves me in no doubt that I am particularly welcome. She tells me that she is a divorce lawyer, a role of no small importance in the marital chess games of the Manhattan wealthy. How many around this table might she have served? Was switching my place-card the first step in a strategy aimed at my own marriage?
I reach for the neat vodka in the smallest stem of my glass cluster and steady my nerves, turning our conversation to Bob and Barbara and soon realising that here, around this table, among their friends, are the answers to so many questions I have for my subject’s Manhattan years. I set to work, both on my left and to my right, where I find Nancy Evans, Barbara’s former publisher at the mighty Doubleday in the mid-1980s.
By this time we have progressed from the caviar and smoked salmon on to the couscous and lamb, and Barbara deems it time to widen our perspectives. It would be the first of two calls to order, on this occasion to introduce everyone to everyone, a party game rather than a necessity, I think, except in my case. Thumbnail sketches of each participant, edged devilishly with in-group barb, courted ripostes and laughter, but it was only when she came around the table and settled on me, mentioning the words ‘guest of honour’ that I realised for the first time that I was to be the star turn. I needn’t have worried; there was at least one other special guest in Joan Rivers and she more than made up for my sadly unimaginative response.
Barbara tells me that Joan is very ‘in’ with Prince Charles: ‘She greeted me with, “I’ve just come back from a painting trip . . . with Prince Charles.” A friend of hers, Robert Higdon, runs the Prince’s Trust. Joan is very involved with that, giving them money. So she was there with Charles and Camilla and the Forbses at some château somewhere. She always says, “Prince Charles likes me a lot; he always laughs at my jokes.” But Joan is actually a very ladylike creature when she is off the stage, where she can be a bit edgy sometimes. In real life she is very sweet and she loves me and Bob.’
Joan is deftly egging Arnold Scaasi on as he heaps compliments on Barbara from the far end of the table. At the very height of his paean of praise, the comedienne rejoins that Arnold’s regard for his hostess is clearly so great that he will no doubt wish to make one of his new creations a gift to her. The designer’s face is a picture as he realises he has walked straight into a game at his expense, in which the very ethos of celebrity Manhattan is at stake. The table applauds his generosity, while Arnold begins an interminable descent into get-out: Alas, he does not have the multifarious talents of Joan to allow such generosity, he cannot eat publicity, etc., etc.
I felt I was being drawn in to Bob and Barbara’s private world. When we first met I had said to Barbara that I would need to be so, and she had begun the process that night. After cheese and dessert, coffee and liqueurs were served in the drawing room and one after another of her guests offered themselves for interview.
The evening reminded me of the glittering birthday party in the Bavarian ski resort of Konigsee in Voice of the Heart. The table setting was remarkably similar – the candlelight and bowls of flowers that ‘march down the centre of the table’, interspersed with ‘Meissen porcelain birds in the most radiant of colours’, the table itself ‘set with the finest china, crystal and silver . . . The flickering candlelight, the women beautiful in their elegant gowns and glittering jewels, the men handsome in their dinner jackets . . .’, and the conversation ‘brisk, sparkling, entertaining . . .’
In Act of Will the Manhattan apartment is added to the mix. As guests of Christina Newman and her husband Alex in their Sutton Place apartment, we, like Christina’s mother, Audra Crowther (née Kenton, and the fictional counterpart of Barbara’s mother, Freda Taylor), are stung by the beauty of ‘the priceless art on the walls, two Cézannes, a Gauguin . . . the English antiques with their dark glossy woods . . . bronze sculpture by Arp . . . the profusion of flowers in tall crystal vases . . . all illuminated by silk-shaded lamps of rare and ancient Chinese porcelains’.
Barbara’s passion for antique furniture and modern Impressionist paintings was born of her own upbringing in Upper Armley, Leeds. ‘My mother used to take me to stately homes because she loved furniture, she loved the patinas of wood. She often took me to Temple Newsam, just outside Leeds [where the gardens also found a way into the fiction – Emma Harte’s rhododendron walk in A Woman of Substance is Temple Newsam’s], and also to Harewood House, home of the Lascelles family . . . to Ripley Castle [Langley Castle in Voice of the Heart], and to Fountains Abbey and Fountains Hall at Studley Royal.’ These were Barbara’s childhood haunts, and it was Freda Taylor who first tuned her in to beautiful artefacts and styles of design, as if preparing her for the day when such things might be her daughter’s: ‘I always remember she used to say to me, “Barbara, keep your eyes open and then you will see all the beautiful things in the world.”’
In A Woman of Substance the optimum architecture is Georgian, and Emma Harte’s soul mate Blackie O’Neill’s dream is to have a house with Robert Adam fireplaces, Sheraton and Hepplewhite furniture, ‘and maybe a little Chippendale’.
In Angel, Johnny dwells on the paintings and antiques in his living room – a Sisley landscape, a Rouault, a Cézanne, a couple of early Van Goghs, ‘an antique Chinese coffee table of carved mahogany, French bergères from the Louis XV period, upholstered in striped cream silk . . . antique occasional tables . . . a long sofa table holding a small sculpture by Brancusi and a black basalt urn . . .’ Costume designer Rose Madigan’s attention is caught by a pair of dessert stands, ‘each one composed of two puttis standing on a raised base on either side of a leopard, their plump young arms upstretched to support a silver bowl with a crystal liner’, the silver made by master silversmith Paul Storr. There are George III candlesticks also by Storr dated 1815.
In Everything to Gain, Mallory Keswick feasts her eyes on a pair of elegant eighteenth-century French, bronze doré candlesticks, and her mother-in-law Diana buys antiques from the great houses of Europe, specialising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French furniture, decorative objects, porcelain and paintings.
For a dozen or so years leading up to publication of her first novel, Barbara wrote a nationwide syndicated column in America three times a week, about design and interior decor. She also wrote a number of books on interior design, furniture and art for American publishers Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and Meredith, long before the first commissioned A Woman of Substance. So, this design thing is, if not bred in the bone, part and parcel of her being.
But these mother and daughter trips out into the countryside had a more fundamental effect: they introduced Barbara to the landscape and spirit of Yorkshire, in which her fiction is rooted. In A Woman of Substance, Barbara sets Fairley village, where teenager Emma Harte lives with her parents and brother, Frank, in the lee of the moors which rise above the River Aire as it finds its way down into Leeds. ‘It was an isolated spot,’ she wrote, ‘desolate and uninviting, and only the pale lights that gleamed in some of the cottage windows gave credence to the idea that it was inhabited.’
Today she will say: ‘Fairley village is Haworth, but not exactly; it is the Haworth of my imagination.’ It could be anywhere in the area of the Brontës’ Haworth, Keighley or Rombalds moors. Barbara knows the area well. It lies within the regular expeditionary curtilage of her childhood home in Leeds.
The hills that rise up in an undulating sweep to dominate Fairley village and the stretch of the Aire Valley below it are always dark and brooding in the most clement of weather. But when the winter sets in for its long and deadly siege the landscape is brushstroked in grisaille beneath ashen clouds and the moors take on a savage desolateness, the stark fells and bare hillsides drained of all colour and bereft of life. The rain and snow drive down endlessly and the wind that blows in from the North Sea is fierce and raw. These gritstone