Gente gira - 14

Cecil Beaton. Teresa Jungman, 1941.

She was known as Teresa "Baby" Jungman, a beauty among the bohemian "bright young things" of 1920s English society, whose high-class hedonism inspired Evelyn Waugh to write Vile Bodies. She was also the unrequited love of Waugh's life, and the recipient of a huge number of letters from the author which, seven years after her death at the age of 102, are finally to be published.(...)

Jungman was the younger of two sisters for whom life was one prolonged party, with treasure hunts and pranks, that delighted the gossip diarists of the day. On one notorious occasion she posed as a Russian émigrée, telling a distinguished general and his wife that she would never forget the night she spent with him in Paris. When the general insisted that his only night in the French capital had been during the war, Jungman replied: "That was the night."

The Jungman girls posed regularly for celebrated society photographer Cecil Beaton, who was struck by Baby's "Devonshire cream pallor and limpid mauve eyes", along with "her hair, spun of the flimsiest canary-bird silkiness", which she would throw back "with a beguiling shrug of the head".

Her father was an Anglo-Dutch artist who married into a devout Catholic Birmingham family. After her parents' divorce, Jungman's mother married into the Guinness family.

Baby's wealth and beauty ensured a string of admirers, including the seventh Earl of Longford, who noted her devout Catholic faith, likening her to "a very friendly and fascinating nun". But her faith would have made any romantic interest in Waugh impossible, since as a divorcé he was ineligible for marriage in the church. In Brideshead Revisited, a similar obstacle prevents Lady Julia Flyte, of the aristocratic, Catholic Marchmain family, from marrying Charles Ryder. Jungman rejected Waugh's advances, but they remained friends.(...)

Alexander Waugh, who describes himself as an obsessive researcher, acknowledged that his family name probably influenced Jungman's decision to offer him his grandfather's most private letters. He said: "She appears in the Evelyn Waugh biographies, but not nearly as importantly as she should do because she refused to be interviewed. I interviewed her. It was the first time she'd ever talked about Evelyn Waugh.

"I was about to ask her, 'You don't by any chance …' She interrupted: '…have any letters?' I said, 'Yes, I was going to ask that.' She said, 'My bedroom next door. There's a basket.' There was a huge hoard of letters that had never been seen before – very interesting, intimate letters."

He added: "The tragic thing is she never really loved him. He loved her and wanted it to go further. She always held him at a distance. I [asked] 'why didn't you marry [him]?' She just said: 'Not exactly my type.' It was between the breakdown of his first marriage and his second marriage, to my grandmother."(...)

The letters date primarily from the early 1930s. In 1932 Waugh wrote to Jungman as he set sail for British Guiana: "My Darling Tess, Thank you so much for coming to see me off … Just feeling so low-spirited. I could have cried at any moment. I wanted very much to kiss you goodbye."

The following year he proposed to Jungman, only to be rejected. His grandson said Waugh was so depressed he fled to Morocco, where he wrote another classic, A Handful of Dust, a savage depiction of amorality.(...)

Daqui.