Rosemary for Remembrance

'Well, I may write about innocent virgins,' she said, over a lavish lunch of pheasant and vintage hock, 'but I wasn't one when I married. I lost my virginity at 18 to Viscount Elmley, the son of the seventh Earl Beauchamp, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, whose glorious home, Madresfield Court, was the model for the house in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.

'My mother wanted me to marry Elmley, but I didn't find him attractive, which is just as well because, my dear, there was the most ghastly scandal.

'Lord Beauchamp was caught b****ring the footmen and had to leave England in the dead of night to go into exile. I mean, you can't have people b****ring the servants, darling, now can you?'
...
'The trouble was that I didn't find out until after I had married [her first husband] that he was a falling-down drunk. He was paralytic from morning till night, so our sex life was nonexistent. I was never in the slightest danger of getting pregnant by him.

'After a year of absolute misery, I began to take lovers.' As one does.
...
But [Cartland's and Lord Mountbatten's] relationship was entirely platonic. She was sharply aware that Mountbatten, emasculated by the infidelities of his promiscuous and nymphomaniac wife, Edwina, had scant interest in sex in his later years, particularly with women.

Over the coming years, William would seek out the sweet rains of Paris, the clefts in the rocks of Sydney's Botany Bay, the secret valleys of San Francisco and the great waters of Venice, in an almost ceaseless passage between the four cities of the world reputed to tolerate the homosexual community.