Tim Jackson - Virgin King (Text Only)

After a few weeks, Kristen began to fret about her half-finished architecture course, and (though she did not tell him this) the live-in boyfriend that she had left in America.

‘You don’t need to go to architecture school,’ said Branson, with the unshakeable confidence of someone who knew that university could not have taught him anything he did not already know. ‘You can do the architectural work on the Manor.’ Before the summer was out, Kristen therefore found herself making regular visits to the Phillips auction rooms in nearby Bayswater, buying up huge pieces of cheap antique furniture for the Manor. Her best find was a second-hand billiard table, which cost £50 and required six people to manoeuvre it into position in the old house.

She soon found her own individuality being subsumed into a set of shared concerns about the business. Every aspect of Branson’s life – from his dealings with colleagues at Virgin to his negotiations with the Inland Revenue – became part of hers. Kristen also found that she got on very well with Eve Branson, Richard’s mother. Like her own mother, the head of the Branson household would tolerate no laziness or newspaper reading on Sunday mornings. Instead, guests at the Surrey farmhouse were required to swim, play croquet or feed the pigeons. When Richard and Kristen went to stay at the family house before they were married, they were invited to join his parents in their bed in the morning for sausage and eggs and strong tea.

The wedding took place at the village church of Shipton, and the party followed immediately afterwards at the Manor. It was an odd occasion; Branson’s friends and colleagues dressed up in morning dress and grey top hats, their long hair splaying oddly from the sides. Branson’s bank manager from Coutts, a guest of special importance given the cash-flow requirements of the business, was first on the receiving line. Kristen’s father paid for the party.

When they returned to London after a suitably energetic holiday on a Greek island, Kristen began to prepare for the couple to move from the houseboat on the canal to a small terraced house in Denbigh Terrace, near Portobello Road. The bank manager justified his invitation to the wedding by providing them with a mortgage that allowed Branson to offer £80,000 for the house; in keeping with the gap between their means and aspirations, Kristen then devoted herself to decorating it in style on a shoestring, making the curtains herself and imbuing the house with a sense of style and proportion befitting a former architecture student. Their one extravagance was a huge, lavish sofa in which Branson would slump as he made endless telephone calls. Meanwhile, Kristen would cook – brilliantly, her friends told her – for the dinner parties whose frequency was matched only by the short notice at which she had to prepare them. In quieter moments, the two would stroll down to Holland Park and talk about their ambitions to live one day in one of the huge stucco houses there that were now so far beyond their financial reach.

As they settled into Denbigh Terrace, Kristen became used to seeing her husband deep in conversation at all hours with Nik Powell, Simon Draper and Ken Berry, a clerk whom Branson had plucked from the accounts department to become his personal assistant. It did not take her long to realize how important his work was to the man she had married. Any doubt that there might have been was dispelled by Branson’s impulsive decision to give Mike Oldfield the Bentley that he and Kristen had received as a wedding present from Ted and Eve. The splendid car was given to Oldfield as a reward for agreeing to perform Tubular Bells at a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Kristen was given strict orders not to tell her mother-in-law, for fear of hurting her feelings – and it was in fact long, long afterwards that Eve discovered what had happened.

Kristen’s first response to Branson’s devotion to business was to try to behave like him: to throw herself into design decisions about the Manor, or to rush to and from the Virgin Rags clothes shops that were opening up inside the record stores, trying to make some order of the chaos that was the mark of Virgin’s first and last venture into clothes retailing. She also worked hard as Branson’s back-up in mollycoddling Virgin artists – spending a number of days, for instance, cheering up Mike Oldfield at an isolated country cottage, and at one point arranging to return a Mercedes roadster that the pop star had bought on the spur of the moment and then decided a week later that he did not like. But soon Kristen tired of trying to compete with her husband, and began instead a crusade to attract his attention. But he did not take the hint – not even when Kristen sent him a poem about the fact that they always seemed to meet in the hall at Denbigh Terrace, when Branson was rushing busily to his next oh-so-important meeting.

Kristen would afterwards declare that her decision to start sleeping with other people was a reaction to the fact that Richard had let his work get out of control. It was not a question of being unfaithful; even if she spent the entire night away from home, she never sought to be secretive about what she was doing. More, it was a cry for help. ‘I wanted some private life for us, that’s all I wanted,’ she remembered. ‘I just wanted half an hour a day.’ Branson, meanwhile, suggested that the couple should have children. His wife could not resist responding with sarcasm, asking him how he intended to fit in another obligation into a life which left little enough room for her as it was.

Matters came to a head when Branson asked Kristen to help him entertain a rock star whom he wanted to sign to the record label. The artist’s name was Kevin Ayers; it was he who had lent Mike Oldfield the tape machine on which he recorded his demo of Tubular Bells. He was older than Branson and Kristen, and he had all of her husband’s self-assurance without the naivety. The couple went to meet Ayers and his woman friend at the shop in Notting Hill Gate, drove the pair down the motorway to see the Manor, and then brought them back to the houseboat in the evening for dinner. Kristen cooked lobster while Richard told the jokes. Everyone drank too much; Ayers produced some cocaine, which the inexperienced Branson sniffed with him for the first time in his life – and the evening ended with Kristen in the arms of Kevin Ayers. She later claimed that Branson sought consolation from the woman that Ayers had brought with him; Branson denied that this was the case.

Although the spark of mutual attraction between his wife and Ayers was evident the following morning even to Branson, the marriage did not end immediately. Ayers pursued Kristen with flowers, presents, letters and telegrams. She went to Australia for a while to get away from everything and think, but Ayers found her there. She went to live with him briefly in France, returned to England for an attempted reconciliation with Branson – and then left again, this time for good. On the day she left, Branson was on the telephone at Denbigh Terrace, engrossed in a long negotiation to sign the Boomtown Rats to Virgin Records. The echo of his voice, raising the offer minute by minute, resounded in her ears as she slammed the door of the house for the last time. Months later, when she was living in a house in France without electricity and utterly cut off from the outside world, Kristen would imagine as she walked in the fields that she could hear the sound of the ringing telephone that had helped to destroy her life with Richard Branson. What almost broke her heart was the fact that Branson later offered to change his entire life in order to bring her back. He was willing to give up work, go and live in the country, make another life – and he told her so in letter after pleading letter. But it was too late. They divorced, citing Kevin Ayers as the co-respondent.