Briefly, [Robinson] postulated that the government were just as fit persons to hold country houses as the National Trust, if it was a case of their having to provide funds. Mallaby, being a civil servant, was about to agree, but I gave him no chance to do so, interjecting, ‘By heaven, you’re not!’
Lady Astor was quite right when she said to Lees-Milne in 1947, ‘You are in earnest and you feel passionately, and I like that.’
A large proportion of these diaries has been published in the past; but the editor, Michael Bloch, has added passages of sexual revelation that Lees-Milne was not prepared to publish in his lifetime. One is about the unrequited love he conceived for a man called Mr Rapton. He met him on the Blue Train from Monte Carlo in 1953.
Presently someone was put into the seat opposite mine. He was an extremely good-looking young man of about 25 to 30. He spoke beautiful French but was reading a novel by Sinclair Lewis in English. Like me he seemed immersed in his book and neither addressed a word nor cast a glance at … me. But owing to the close quarters our feet and legs touched. After cautious and as it were accidental and occasional light pressures the game was evidently on.
They exchanged notes. Lees-Milne misunderstood his co-flirter’s note, and missed joining him in his sleeper, but had secured his name — Mr Rapton — and London telephone number. When he rang the number a woman answered and said there was no one of that name there. Mr Rapton was ‘everything I had desired in my most sanguine daydreams — tall, delicate, strong, sensitive, masculine, mature, young, arrogant, well-bred, mysterious, discreet, radiant, beautiful’. The episode made the diarist curse himself ‘for a fool and incurable waster of heaven-sent opportunities’.
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