Carnival of Light || Paul McCartney/Beatles

08. Two Parties at Eton Row

Carnival of Light

08.

That night at Dolly's certainly wasn't my finest moment. Humiliating, confusing, revealing, the exact opposite of the way I'd been brought up – private feelings stay private. Oh, it was ghastly.

A week later, I delivered my collection of poems and short stories to Chatto & Windus with August 3rd, 1966 set as the publication date. To celebrate, I dropped acid with Matthew, Tara and Nicki at their house in Eaton Row, and the next day we all came down together in the living room, smoking grass and listening to records and giggling.

Tara and I came from two very different kinds of families with one very big thing in common: money. The Brownes were Irish aristocrats who'd married into the Guinness family fortune. The Beaufords were landed English snobs who exclusively married other landed English snobs.

Tara's socialite mother was a bohemian who raised him in European salons, introducing him to Salvador Dali and Humphrey Bogart, Lucian Freud and Peggy Guggenheim. My mother was a debutant who passed me off to a governess the moment I was freed from her womb. Our fathers were very similar, both dedicated members of the House of Lords, both older, and largely absent from our lives.

Tara and I got on like a house on fire from the moment we met. I wished I'd had his upbringing, and he wished I'd had his upbringing because it was so fabulous he believed everyone should be raised that way. He was, as Robert Fraser would say, fucking gorgeous. We had heaps of fun together and he thought I was the bee's knees.

Matthew went back to his club that afternoon – "Darling I am so proud of you, I love you to the ends of the earth" – and I caught a few hours of sleep in Tara's guest room until the new party brewing downstairs became too loud to ignore. I borrowed a teal-satin dress and a pair of white tights from Nicki, sorted out my messy fringe as best I could, took an upper to get me in the mood, and by midnight I was happily drinking whiskey-coke and bragging about Leanord Woolf to anyone who would listen.

Tara's friends were a cosmic crossblend of bohemian aristocrats, pop icons and soho vagrants. Two-thirds of the Animals and half of the Pretty Things had taken over the sitting room by the time I arrived downstairs. They were soon joined by Lord Harlech's impossibly cool offspring, Julian and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, as well as a drug dealer from Stepney Green called Basil and his little white dog Bricker. American Blues was playing on the stereo and the whiskey-cokes were stronger than usual. 

I sat among them, too worn out to be verbose but too alive to give up on the party. I found myself drawn into conversation with three girls who'd come with the Animals, all of them vying for Eric Burdon's attention.

"But why him?" I asked, petting Bricker as I took a drag off my cigarette. "He's just some bloke in a band."

"Are you mad?" One of the girls demanded. "Have you seen Eric perform on stage?"

"No," I admitted.

"Eric's got charisma," she explained. "It's so sexy."

"And his voice," a second girl groaned. "That low, deep voice just makes your shiver."

"And Eric is so handsome," a third girl sighed. "He really is better looking than Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney."

I shot Eric Burdon a curious look over my shoulder, trying to decide if he was better looking than Paul. He caught my eye and offered me a crooked smile. I smirked back at him and a few seconds later he came over to say hello.

"Beatrix Beauford," I offered him my hand. "How do you do."

"Hallo, pet," Eric smirked at me, and we flirted for a little while.