Life Worth Living by Campbell Lady Colin

Author:Campbell, Lady Colin [Campbell, Lady Colin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781910050866
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2015-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

9

The end of any marriage is a time for grieving, and grieve I did. I wept for the loss of my dreams, for all the good times I had not had, for all the efforts I had made which had come to nought, for all the pain and suffering and degradation I had endured, for the loss of my innocence, for my introduction to disenchantment, evil and destructiveness. My one consolation was that the trauma was now at an end. I had spent all but the first six weeks of my marriage recovering from broken bones and beatings, and it was a tremendous relief to know that I would now be conducting my life without further physical violence or pain.

Free at last of Colin, I also noticed how deeply I was able to sleep. Ever since his first death threat in March, I had been sleeping with one eye open, so to speak, in case he tried to ‘top me’, as he had put it. Hungry once more for life and its pleasures, as soon as I was settled at Richard Adeney’s house in Notting Hill, where my brother was living, I picked up the telephone and called my friends, and even an attractive man from my single days. Count Giorgio Emo di Capodilista was a scion of a grand Italian family I had met through my ex-boyfriend David Koch. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear from me, and took me to dinner at the Chelsea Rendezvous, then back to his Belgravia mews house, where we did what all adult heterosexuals did in the 1970s.

Attractive and thoughtful though Giorgio was, I decided that I could not circumvent the grieving process by distracting myself with men. I would have to go through it before I could enjoy being with another man. As well as the emotional distress, there were physical effects of what I had suffered to be dealt with. I weighed less than a hundred pounds and could barely eat. And night after night, I had terrible nightmares in which Colin Campbell was beating me or trying to kill me. Sometimes these could be quite embarrassing, for I would scream out in my sleep.

‘Wake up,’ Mickey would say, coming into my bedroom. ‘You’re having another nightmare.’

To spread the burden until I found a place of my own, after a time I went to stay with Mary Anne Innes-Ker. ‘You married into the most notorious family in the British aristocracy,’ she said. ‘There is bad blood there. You should never have married Colin. It was doomed to failure before you took the vows.’

Each day I made a concerted effort to find myself somewhere to live. I yearned for stability. Finally, I stumbled upon just what I wanted: a sweet little house on Denbigh Street in Notting Hill. ‘Don’t take it,’ my brother counselled. ‘It’s too expensive [it was the princely sum of £50 per week]. Why saddle yourself with responsibilities after what you’ve been through? Give yourself a rest. Share a flat.

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