Elisabeth Furse, who died on Monday at the age of 92, was one of the most amazing hostesses London has known. One could not say she had a ‘salon’, for the word carries connotations of politeness and self-restraint which were entirely foreign to her. When I first descended the fire-escape-style steps to her basement flat in Belgravia in the mid-Eighties, she had already been inducting shy young Englishmen into the charms and horrors of bohemian Central European life for half a century. Her flat felt like a Berlin flea market. It was dominated by a long table at which 20 or more people could sit down to dinner, squashed together on rickety chairs. One saw enough in the candlelight to tell that the room was very dirty and disorderly, decorated with extravagant bits of kitsch, filled with old things that might be priceless or might be junk, amber necklaces and once-raffish clothes, books and newspapers in many languages, presents crudely wrapped and waiting to be distributed to friends and the children of friends.
Mrs Furse’s portable typewriter, at which she poured out her thoughts to her friends in long, passionate and almost illegible letters, stood somewhere amid the chaos, loaded with a piece of paper removed from one of the grandest hotels in Venice.
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