The novelist Mary Wesley never forgot the night of 26 October 1944. She was then 32, locked in a loveless marriage to ‘a perfectly nice but remarkably boring’ barrister, Lord Swinfen, and was dining at the Ritz with a friend from MI6 — she had worked there in April 1940, decoding the positions of German regiments — when she looked up and saw, seated at another table, the Royal Marines captain whom she had met only a few hours earlier at Les Ambassadeurs. ‘He kept sending me notes through dinner saying, “You can’t stay with that old bore. Come dancing.”’ Which she did.
After he had escorted her back through the bomb-blasted streets to the Rembrandt Hotel, she woke early — ‘because I knew it was something big and I’d just sworn to give up men’. The man rose earlier still, at 5am. ‘He’d spent the whole night ringing round London to ask who I was. I found myself in the lobby checking out, desperate to get away — when there he was, beside me.’
She told me: ‘He stayed there for the rest of his life.’
Eric Siepmann, 41, was a tall, impetuous Old Wykehamist who at school had beaten Richard Crossman for not cleaning his white shoes. At Oxford, to which he had won a scholarship as well, he provoked Evelyn Waugh to splutter: ‘Do I like Eric Siepmann? That’s an occupation as fatuous as balancing a pole on your chin.’ The novelist Antonia White, with whom he’d had an affair, called him ‘the wickedest man I ever met’.
The bi-polar third son of a brilliant German émigré teacher, Siepmann was a talented if volatile journalist who had a destructive habit of walking out of jobs because he refused to compromise.
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