KEY POINTS:
Toby Eady cannot wait to return to New Zealand, where he will be joined at next weekend's Auckland Writers and Readers Festival by his wife, the journalist and author Xinran Xue, and Patrick Marnham, who wrote Wild Mary, the biography of Eady's late mother, the celebrated writer Mary Wesley.
Eady, a leading literary agent in Britain, has visited New Zealand twice and one of his most enduring memories of Auckland is dining at the Sky Tower's top floor restaurant. Eady is hoping to catch his own dinner during this trip, as he and Xinran will spend a week travelling around the country.
"I've always wanted to fish at Taupo", he says when I meet him at his London office. "From a very early age, I learnt that fly fishing is a good way of not having relatives around. I love water and I am fascinated by it and by the movement and stillness of it. One of the remarkable things about my mother is that she didn't have to be there all the time. She trusted me from a small child to fish on my own."
Eady was first taught how to tickle trout, snare pheasants, rabbits and hares and be chased and shot at by gamekeepers by Jacko, a young gypsy he met in the early 1950s when he and his mother lived in the small Hampshire village of Broughton.
"We would catch fish for the big houses so the cook would have trout to serve the guests who couldn't catch them themselves", says Eady. My mother never interfered, although she complained of eating too much trout now and again.
According to Eady, his mother was not good in the kitchen. "I had to teach her how to cook even simple things like risotto and stew because she had been brought up in a society where there were cooks. The Camomile Lawn [Wesley's most famous book] has this wonderful cook and a rabbit catcher called Will Payne, who lived to be 101. I met him when Sam Peckinpah was filming Straw Dogs in Cornwall, which was based on that community. I helped with the extras because the film people were terrified of the Cornish but they had all known me since I was a kid."
Eady, who was born in Penzance in 1941, spent his early childhood living at Boskenna, a Cornwall estate that would later provide the inspiration for the summerhouse at the heart of The Camomile Lawn.
The Cornish were very short people, says Eady. You are talking about people who were born in Victorian times and they never had a decent diet. They were the people who at the end of the film chased Dustin Hoffman and Susan George. They were just like that and they were the people who brought me up in these perfect conditions because my mother was in the war. She was in London and already separated from [her first husband] Lord Swinfen.
Eady loved Peter Hall's 1992 television adaptation of The Camomile Lawn but Wesley was apparently not so impressed. "She made this wonderful comment about how it was wrong when [actresses] Jennifer Ehle and Tara Fitzgerald were standing naked in front of the cameras", laughs Eady. I said they were very good looking but my mother said, "We never took our clothes off. There was no central heating so you got into bed with all your clothes on. Who wants to make love to a woman with goosebumps?"
Wesley who was born Mary Farmar; her pen name was derived from her family name Wellesley and Wild Mary was a childhood nickname was not a conventional or indeed, as Marnham relates, a very good mother.
"She was much happier talking to a man [for her biography] because she found men less judgmental about her failure as a mother, he says. She thought women were extremely severe on her from that point of view."
But according to Eady, Wesley had an ulterior motive for choosing Marnham.
"She said to me, A lot of people are wishing to write a biography of me but everyone they've suggested has no sexual awareness and they are very conformist people like Margaret Forster, they wouldn't begin to understand and I won't talk to her. Will you find me a biographer? Find me someone who understands the pressures of adultery", recalls Eady, who began working as a literary agent in 1967. Wesley's first novel Jumping The Queue was published in 1982.
"It is unfair to say that of Patrick but he wrote a very good biography of the great French writer Georges Simenon, about collaboration when Belgium was occupied by the Germans. My mother spoke fluent French and had been in the intelligence service. She knew about collaboration, she knew about the grey world we really live in rather than the black and white world."
Over the years, Eady and Wesley's relationship was often turbulent - at one point he was sued by other members of their extended family but he was very close to his mother during the two decades before her death in 2002.
"The last conversation I had with Mary was two days before she died", recalls Eady. She said, "I want to thank you, you have given me the best present at the end of my life." I said, "Do you mean Xinran?"
She said, "No, to lie in bed and talk about yourself for six months to an extremely attractive man [Marnham]. I have spent so many hours being talked at by men who want to talk about themselves so they can go to bed with you. My one regret is that I was too old and too ill not to be able to invite him into bed with me."
Toby Eady, Patrick Marnham and Xinran Xue will all appear at next week's Auckland Writers & Readers festival, Aotea Centre, May 24-27.
