BOOK OF THE DAY: No Invitation Required: the Pelham Cottage YearsBy Annabel Goldsmith Leidenfeld Nicolson 177pp, £16.99
LADY ANNABEL Goldsmith, an indefatigably sociable daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry, must be London’s most benign high-fashion memoirist. Everyone portrayed in this slender volume of fluffy reminiscences “adored” everyone else – an all-star cast of adorables, including John Aspinall, “Aspers,” the gambling impresario and zoo-keeper; Patrick Plunket, an equerry to Queen Elizabeth (“He adored her from the outset.”); Geoffrey Keating, “witty, clever, charming” son of Matthew Keating, the first Irishman elected to the House of Commons; Claus von Bulow, “Clausikins,” the Danish aristocrat who was tried twice for murdering his wife and exonerated the second time; Lord Tony Lambton, the scandalous “Casanova of his time”; and Sir David Frost, of whom she writes: “The idea of August in Spain without the Frosts is unthinkable.”
Mark Birley, who married Annabel when she was 19, was, for a while, her most adorable husband. He adored their dogs (“All his paternal instincts for young dependent creatures were concentrated on dogs.”), and the dogs adored him. He adored Annabel so much, for the same while, that he named his fashionable London nightclub Annabel’s. Its glittering heyday, in the 1960s and 1970s, coincided with hers.
It was during those two swingingest decades that she and her first husband lived in the house which invests this book with its subtitle, its prime focus, and a certain flimsy unity. She was “transfixed” when she first saw “mysterious” Pelham Cottage, in a small lane off Pelham Street, Kensington.
“I can still remember the catch of pure excitement in my throat . . .” she writes.
“I could not believe that such an oasis could exist only a few yards from South Kensington Tube station. In my daze of delight, I knew immediately that I had stumbled upon something magical . . .”
“Pelham Cottage was my nest,” Annabel recalls, “a safe haven to which I could always return with great comfort and inner peace. At this time in my life I was rather shy and lacking in confidence, not always able to cope with the endless dinners and parties that Mark so enjoyed going to.”
Paradoxically, though she valued her home’s seclusion, the doors were never locked.
The cottage became “a sort of meeting point where people gathered to talk, drink, eat, sit in the garden and simply be among friends.”
Whenever the Birleys returned there, they never knew how many people had already let themselves in. In this free-and-easy milieu, Annabel overcame her shyness. In 1964, while still married to her first husband, but only just, she began what she calls her “affair” with Sir James Goldsmith, himself a philoprogenitive veteran of matrimony. She and Jimmy had five children altogether, so it became apparent they should get married and find more commodious accommodation. They found Ormeley Lodge, next to Windsor Park.
Her ladyship is a skilful writer, but her prose bewilderingly combines the manners of an over-excited schoolgirl and a worldly sophisticate. In both the incongruous styles of this adoration-fest, the sweetness is cloying.
Patrick Skene Catling has written novels and books for children
