Restoration Heart: A Memoir
by William Cash Constable, 416pp, £20/$19.54
Restoration Heart will cheer anyone who has reached mid-life without finding fame, success, fulfilment or love. Approaching his 50th birthday William Cash is sunk in gloom, leafing through old love letters returned or never sent, his one cherished project on hold, all his friends either rich or successful or both. His own personal life is a calamity: a string of relationships with high-maintenance women who discover that the real passion of William’s life is Upton Cressett, an inherited Tudor wreck at the end of a remote and muddy lane in Shropshire. Quixotically rescued from ruin by his father, the house has been gutted and abandoned in William’s absence by gung-ho builders. His search for true love seems hopeless. Like the first renovators confronted by William’s ambitious restoration project, the girlfriends take fright and bolt.
This comic, ruefully philosophical account of his rake’s progress starts in the money-mad 1980s in LA, where as a gossip columnist and Times correspondent Cash is swept up into the Hollywood rollercoaster, sharing digs and partying with the hedonistic A-list Brit-set known to hostile Americans as “the Viles”, after Waugh’s Vile Bodies. In spite of his disillusion (“Just having a good time is a road to ruin, self-destruction and misery,” he writes morosely to one girlfriend), he returns to London an expert in the lifestyle of the mega-rich and founds Spear’s, the UK’s in-house magazine for millionaires.
A dashing but often penniless journalist, he moves in a world of champagne and cigar lunches, high-end brand names, celebrities, security guards and vintage car collectors; Harvey Weinstein makes an appearance, Liz Hurley is a close friend. Before long he’s making Hello! headlines with his marriage to Ilaria, a beautiful daughter of the Bulgari jewellery dynasty.
Predictably, Ilaria divorces him; so too does his second wife, unenthused by “the architectural salvage yard that I hoped would be our family home”. Next up is art dealer Helen Macintyre, but their promising relationship is cut short by a bombshell that will rock the political world. Helen confides that the father of her child is not her ex-partner, but Boris Johnson. Cash is aghast. “I felt I had inadvertently been pushed out into the hot glare of the Circus Maximus sand to fight against a popular and seasoned champion with a string of prize conquests notched on his leather belt.”
Inevitably the scandal breaks, and a media frenzy explodes around them. To escape the “ferret run” they flee to Antigua where, somehow unsurprisingly, they meet Piers Morgan on holiday. It is a classic case of the biter bit. Cash first met Morgan while “crouching together in the bushes” as they stalked Madonna at the Cannes Film Festival in the 1990s. Interrogated by Piers, texted constantly by Boris, Helen is “torn”. Before long, the heartbroken Cash has lost yet another prospective life partner.
Things are no better in Shropshire. Disasters bedevil the stop-start renovation of Upton Cressett, no sooner open to visitors than it is threatened first by wind turbines, then an industrial pig farm. To save his beloved local landscape, Cash embarks on a despairing campaign to challenge the new planning laws and alter the listing of his house to Grade I. He employs a pair of Romanian Big Issue sellers as housekeepers. Reviews from visitors on TripAdvisor plummet: “We soon had more ‘Terrible’ reports than anywhere else near Bridgnorth.”
This is the moment Cash retires to the barn to brood over his boxes of letters, wondering where it all went so badly wrong. But now, for once, something begins to go right.
Holidaying in Venice with his latest girlfriend, an interior decorator and milliner, he finds himself with someone unpretentious and genuine – a Catholic, as it happens, like himself. Overlooking his tendency to walk into canals and to seek out only the smartest restaurants, she falls in love with both him and Upton Cressett. And Upton Cressett itself begins to look up. His local and national campaigns have had an impact, and his research at last turns up findings that upgrade the area’s heritage listing. The wind turbines and pig farms are seen off. He hides his third and most hopeful wedding ring in the Norman font of Upton Cressett’s ancient church, and the married couple take on the renovation project together. Visitor numbers rocket; the place wins awards as Shropshire’s “best hidden gem”. The tale ends with Cash’s 50th birthday in the newly revived house, crowded with the friends, money-men and celebrities he once envied, but not any more.
The naïvely optimistic, all-too-human hero who blunders from one romantic car crash to the next in this entertaining, often poignant book, is straight out of Waugh or Wodehouse, two comic stylists Cash consciously echoes. But romantics are also perfectionists. Cash’s refusal to give up or compromise wins him true love in the end, and gains the coveted Grade I status for what is now a celebrated Tudor renovation. Every rake’s progress is a morality tale – not many are this heartening.
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