In January 1933 Diana Guinness took a small house in Eaton Square, just around the corner from Tom’s bachelor flat. Although Tom had told both Cimmie and Diana that he did not intend to leave his wife, the Curzon sisters found this hard to believe. To them, the knowledge that this young woman had left her husband and virtually set herself up as a mistress within yards of her lover’s pied-à-terre was a clear proof that she intended to lure him away from Cimmie. “My heart is in my boots over the hell incarnate beloved Cim is going through over Diana Guinness bitching up her life,” wrote Irene. Diana called it “nailing my colours to the mast.” What was perfectly clear to all of them was that the affair with Diana was different in kind and quality from any of Tom’s previous liaisons.
All through that spring, Cimmie suffered bitterly. She knew she was no longer as attractive as she had been and the presence in her husband’s life of this young beauty, with her charm, ease of manner and joyous, uncomplicated approach to life, made her feel fearful and defeated. Diana was told by her family and friends that she was ruining her life—her three younger sisters were forbidden to visit her—but she cared not a whit. That Diana was prepared to court social ostracism and set herself up openly as Tom’s mistress seemed to Cimmie evidence of the younger woman’s implacability, while in Tom’s eyes, it could hardly have been a greater compliment.
Cimmie might have worried less had she known that her husband was seeing Baba almost as frequently as he saw Diana. Baba had been fascinated by her brother-in-law ever since, as a schoolgirl of sixteen, she had seen her adored older sister and her glamorous bridegroom as the incarnation of romance. From the start, Tom had treated his sister-in-law with a teasing intimacy, often involving physical horseplay that sometimes went too far (“Baba furious when Tom dropped her in the bath,” wrote Irene on one of these occasions).
Baba’s growing interest in matters political and her longing for intelligent company brought her even more under the sway of Tom’s powerful personality. Family loyalty apart, she was genuinely fascinated by the political ideas he expounded with such vision and clarity, and with Diana Guinness’s arrival on the scene, she was able to justify her increasing pleasure in his company by telling herself that any influence other than Diana’s was good for her sister’s marriage.
As a result Tom, who saw Diana for lunch or dinner two or three times a week, saw Baba almost as frequently. Sometimes he saw both women as well as his wife on the same day, necessitating exactly the kind of emotional juggling he enjoyed. Often all three of them turned up at the fascist meetings he now held regularly, striding onto plinth or platform with a bodyguard of muscular young stewards “to incite the faithful and intimidate the enemy.”
Fascism, it seemed, was on the march. In Germany the new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had been in power since the end of January, his carefully choreographed public meetings evoking a quasi-religious response from a disheartened and impoverished people. Although many older people had voted for the Nazis, the average age of party members was thirty-two; and much of its message was to youth, a pattern followed by Tom with his call to British youth to throw over the “tired old men” of the government.
Not everyone believed that he was on the right track. “We discussed Mosley’s position and I said that his fatal miscalculation was in believing that you could create a youth consciousness in Britain,” wrote Robert Bernays, the Liberal MP for Bristol North, in his diary for March 1. “They said too that he had gambled on a course and had not realised how tremendous were the forces that made for stability. Archie Sinclair said his trouble was lack of patience. He had determined, in 1924, to be Prime Minister in 12 years. If he hadn’t been in so much of a hurry about it, he could have been.”
Tom, however, saw his future as the powerful, charismatic leader of a political force that would sweep away the old, exhausted parties. After his second visit to Mussolini in April 1933 he wrote in his magazine The Blackshirt: “Fascism is the greatest creed that western civilisation has ever given to the world.”
In the same month Irene also had a significant meeting. She had accepted an invitation from her friends Peter and Mary Hordern to stay at the villa they had taken on Lake Maggiore. The Horderns were already there, but Peter suggested that his brother Bill should drive her out to Italy with Sheila Graham, a young girl whose father, Miles, was already there.
Miles Graham was a good-looking man of exactly Irene’s age, divorced from his wife Evelyn, a daughter of the earl of Lovelace. Their children, Sheila and Clyde, were largely brought up by Miles’s mother, Ellen, married to Lord Askwith. Miles was of medium height, his military bearing emphasized by an athletic figure. Good-looking, clever—he had been a scholar at Eton—and virile, he was extremely attractive to women and for years had pursued a successful affair with the society beauty Lady Portarlington. Only those who knew him well realized that he possessed a fiendish temper. He was once supposed to have chased Winnie Portarlington around his drawing room with a knife.
He was also extremely ambitious. In that spring of 1933, the most important woman in his life was his mother, with whom he had an exceptionally close bond. This powerful personality, who had successfully brought up her own children through her writing, did her best to further Miles’s interests in every way possible. Worldly and sophisticated, Lady Askwith regarded his liaison with Lady Portarlington as a feather in his cap rather than a moral blight. Recently, he had been suffering from a mysterious illness that today might have been diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: its main symptoms were exhaustion of mind and body. When he wrote to her on March 12 from his house in Little Stanhope Street that he hoped to go for a month to the Italian lakes “for sunbathing, which the doctor strongly recommends,” Ellen Askwith was delighted.
He added: “I have been thinking a good deal about politics lately—if only the new businesses succeed and they get used to my absence it might be a good opportunity to find an opening. I am 37 and it’s nearly time to begin.” Both of them were to bear this in mind in the months to come.
Irene set off on April 12 with Bill Hordern and Sheila, who had met neither of them before, a prospect her father seemed to think would be appealing rather than terrifying. “It must be an exciting idea for her to motor across Europe with two unknown people,” he wrote to his mother. “I know Bill Hordern will be nice to her. Lady Ravensdale I hardly know but they say she likes children. All my best love Mummy darling. I miss you very much sometimes. Your darling Manikin.” In the event, Sheila disliked Irene so much that she put a metal model of Frankfurt Cathedral on Irene’s seat in the car, hoping that the spire would wound her in the bottom. Graciously, Irene overlooked it.
Miles soon realized that this hardly known fellow guest could be one of the most helpful stepping-stones to his planned Westminster career. Irene’s dark good looks were in full flower, her energetic tennis playing appealed to his sporting side and her genuine kindness promised warmth in a stepmother. Above all, her wealth, her title and the resonance of the Curzon name would add immense luster to the pretensions of any would-be Conservative MP.
On April 22 he proposed to her. As her diary records ecstatically: “Miles strolled in on me at 8:30 and we had our bubbly in Mary’s room. Lying on our beds afterward he whispered into my ear would I give him children and marry him, and of all amazing things in utter calm I said I might. I did not believe myself. He told me with amazing delicacy and loyalty of his plight with Winnie and we beat round how to deal with her.
“After tea I went shopping with Mary and Miles in the car, and I dropped in on Patrick and Loelia [Westminster] before dinner. I could not make out my complete peace after all my years of worry and pain.” Mary, all unknowingly, had said to her in the morning: “I wish I could see you and Miles married.” What Irene did not know, and what Miles naturally did not tell her, was that he half suspected his hostess was in love with him herself.
After a walk to see a pretty little church we talked of Winnie and the great quandary he was in on the way home. I entirely bouleversed Mary with our news. She was wondrous sweet to me in begging me to get married out here quick or else Winnie would come charging out. I shall never forget the beauty of Miles’s speech to me in the dining room. He was crying and holding on to my breast and some time he told me I could still take it as a joke and call it all off.
For Irene, tied up for so long in a hopeless love affair, conscious of the passing of time and the dwindling hope of the children she so much longed for, engagement to the personable, sought-after Miles represented sanctuary as well as happiness. Now she would be part of the magic circle, no longer subject to the faint patronizing of her younger sisters, no longer regarded as a worry, a burden or a useful stand-in.
At first all was rapture. Two days after they were engaged they became lovers. “My wedding Day,” wrote Irene at the top of that day’s page in her diary, describing how she and Miles had “climbed the mountain to our little chapel and married each other before the altar”—a detail faithfully reported by Miles to his mother.
Miles, anxious to secure his prize and aware, as Irene was not, of the undercurrents in the villa, urged her to let him get a special license in Turin and to marry him there. But when she realized the situation, she felt it her duty to stay with the distraught Mary. “At breakfast Mary was in a bad state of nerves and jabbered at Peter and when she went out Peter, Miles and I knew it was because she was in love with Miles, and her behavior in handing him over to me had been a fearful strain.”
But nothing dimmed Irene’s happiness, though she could not help noticing her sisters’ differing, and characteristic, reactions to the news of her engagement—the one all warmth and excitement, the other coolly analytical.
Beloved Cim rang up from Denham, hysterical with joy and said Nanny and Andrée [Cimmie’s former lady’s maid and now housekeeper at Denham] had cried for half an hour. She gave a heavenly joy in her talk and took it as a lovely fairy story.
Baba from Paris a few moments later was much more froide and comme il faut and said what was his business and his appearance and who or what was he. Not much of Cim’s lovely warm thrill. Peter and Mary had dined upstairs which gave Miles and me a chance of peace alone downstairs.
Mary behaved like a jealous child unwilling to give up its toy. A mere week after the engagement, Irene found her hostess hysterical, wild and screaming, refusing to allow her husband into the room. Irene managed to calm her eventually and tried to console the wretched Peter.
Then we talked the matter over [she wrote that night]. We all knew the basis of it. She is madly in love with Miles. I felt she had staged the whole scene.
My happiness was shattered when Miles took me to my room by him walking up and down in a frenzy and saying I had better call it off. Obviously I was only obsessed by him temporarily and I was doubtful of him. Mary had told him I was uncertain how good a mind he had got. Oh! the cruelty of it. Spent a nightmarish night, feeling desolate and wanting to chuck it all. I nearly went mad.
Next day everything was sunshine again, with Miles back on form, chat, giggling, games of backgammon, gaiety and fun and telegrams of congratulation from the two eldest Mosley children and Tom, “who hoped for a lot of little barons.” There was even a “marvellous” letter from his mother that brought tears to her eyes.
Mary was not done yet. She did everything she could to sabotage Irene’s happiness, from telling her that Miles was making up to another female guest to running him down in every way. When Mary’s husband, Peter, agreed with this judgment, calling Miles slick, a libertine and no companion for Irene at all, she was plunged in gloom but managed to dress for dinner in a devastating black dress and diamonds.
After dinner Miles, unable to guess what was wrong with her, came in to see her. “I lay holding his hand in dumb crying agony. I asked him to lie in the other bed and hold my hand all night. When he went back to undress Mary charged in on him and slated him and called him a cad and a brute and if he would not be nice to her she would ruin him and me and never stop working against us.”
Mary continued to do her best to prise Miles away from Irene, bombarding him with letters and saying that Irene had told her he was “no good sexually to her”—a canard she quickly disposed of. Irene would have been even happier had she seen the entry in Lady Askwith’s diary: “A perfectly delightful letter—the letter of my dreams—from Irene.”
She and Miles decided that the only thing to do was to go away together. “From then on the world—my world—seemed to expand in peace and beauty . . . it was delicious dressing myself to look my best and going down to dinner with Miles. We got the band to play which got us all ‘woosy.’ ” The only sore spot was a telegram from Lady Portarlington claiming that she had only heard of their engagement at a dinner party, to which Miles wired back tartly that he had written to her before anyone else and the letter must have gone astray. “Yet another letter gone astray,” she responded equally crisply.
Irene, who thought that Win Portarlington was probably lying, tried to smooth matters over by persuading Miles to let her write a letter saying that every effort had been made to tell her before anyone, after what she had meant to him for years, and together they took the letter to the post. On the way back, hearing music, they dropped in at a bar where people were dancing. “They played Tauber again for us and the man crooned and oh! it was heaven, and the moon and the nightingales from our balcony before we went to bed were the Garden of Eden. The nightingales chortled all night.” It was to be their last uncomplicatedly happy evening.
Soon these dramatic events would pale into insignificance. At home, Cimmie, who had had kidney trouble for several months, had begun to feel other symptoms of illness. She was passing water all the time and had a severe pain in the lower part of her abdomen. Thinking it might be appendicitis, she went to her doctor.
It was an era when operations to remove the appendix were medically fashionable but riskier than today because there were as yet no antibiotics. Cimmie had had a presentiment that her condition might not be straightforward, telling Lady Mosley and Andrée that she was frightened. “I don’t think I’m going to get well,” she said. To Andrée she added: “I have been fearfully unhappy.”
Her operation, performed on May 9, 1933, appeared to go well. After it, Tom went straight to Diana’s little house for lunch. One of the other guests—only six could fit in the dining room—was Unity Mitford.
The following day, Miles gave the house party on Lake Maggiore a shock by reading out of the Continental Daily Mail the news that Cim had been operated on for appendicitis the day before and was doing well. Irene, who wired Tom in a frenzy, got a reassuring response, although she wept when she realized that it probably meant no Cimmie at her wedding. “Baba and Fruity mean nothing to me at it,” she wrote that night.
Another telegram from Tom told her that Cim had had a bad night but that progress, though slow, was definite. Irene’s worry was such that she could not sleep; the following morning she and Miles wired Tom to ask whether they should postpone their wedding or go ahead with it, as planned, either on May 22 or 23. It crossed with a telegram from Tom that arrived in the early evening: “Cim very seriously ill. Baba and doctors do not suggest your coming home. Will wire further developments.”
Irene, demented with worry, tried to ring Tom’s mother’s flat, a long-drawn-out performance in those days when every call had to go through an operator—several, in the case of a foreign country. As they spoke, Tom arrived from the nursing home nearby and, taking the telephone from his mother, told Irene that Cimmie’s appendix had perforated and peritonitis had set in. “Her strength was poor but she was holding her own. He would not urge me to come home but I must do what I felt like,” records her diary.
Though terrified of flying, Irene was determined to get home as quickly as possible; within minutes, Miles had found out the times of flights and connecting trains. Her maid Violet packed one small suitcase for them both; at seven the following morning, May 15, they began the long journey by train and plane, with several changes, finally arriving at Croydon airfield at 9:05 p.m., to be met by “sweet Baba, a little lone figure.” They went directly to Deanery Street. “Miles seemed to like my house and old Winks,” wrote Irene, “and we were so happy with each other that last evening before doom broke over us.”
At seven-thirty the next morning, May 16, Lady Mosley telephoned. Cim was going downhill. After a better night she had had a relapse at 7 a.m. and was being given saline injections as she was too weak for a blood transfusion. Without disturbing Miles, Irene dressed quickly and rushed to Lady Mosley’s flat, where they ate a hurried breakfast. Tom, who dropped in for a quick wash, told them not to come to the nursing home. Then Baba appeared, icy cold in manner, and walked back there arm in arm with Tom. Fruity was the next arrival, and for an hour Lady Mosley and Irene had to listen to him until they crammed on their hats and made their way to the nursing home, where they sat in the waiting room while telephones rang and nurses scurried in and out.
Tom appeared, to ask Irene wretchedly if she wanted to see Cim—or would Irene rather remember her as she had been, radiant and lovely? Breaking off suddenly, he asked Irene and Andrée to fetch the flowers that had been sent from Denham to Lady Mosley’s flat, to put beside Cim’s bed. Baba sat on a chair placed directly outside Cim’s door. After a while Miles and Fruity turned up; Irene sent them to Lady Mosley’s flat for lunch, going back there herself for a cup of coffee before sending the two men off for a walk around the park and telephoning Nanny Hyslop that the outlook was bleak.
“Oh! that afternoon of horror,” wrote Irene in her diary. “Ma [Lady Mosley], Andrée and I crouched outside that door while my angel breathed her last few hours. Poor Tom came out once or twice and said he could get nothing through to her. If only the doctors had warned him she was going he had so much to tell her and now he was trying to get through to her how magnificent her life had been in its splendor and fulfillment. She had said to him that morning: ‘I am going. Goodbye my Buffy,’ which she always said when he walked away through the garden at Denham.”
Even at this extreme moment the jealousies and antagonisms between oldest and youngest sister made themselves felt. “Baba sat in broken solitude in the bathroom and try as I would to hold on to her hand she turned away from every advance.” What Irene wrote next in her diary explains this coldness. “Ma told me, alas! alas! Cim had got her to read my last letter to her and so of course she read: ‘I only want you, not Baba at my wedding. Miles is a worker, thank God! not like Fruity. If Miles turns to Baba and not you to turn me out smartly I shall kill him.’
“My precious got weaker and weaker and oh! her stertorous breathing in the last half hour was torture to hear through the crack in the door where I could just see in the mirror Tom murmuring to her his last words of love.”
They learned from the doctor that from the start Cimmie had put up no sort of a fight. Both mentally and physically, he told them, she had never lifted a finger to live. All of them felt they knew why: Cimmie, who had fought for so long to keep her marriage going, believed that she had finally lost the battle and that Diana Guinness had taken her husband from her. From then on, those closest to Cimmie viewed Diana as directly responsible for her death.
Cimmie’s body was taken to Smith Square, where lilies, roses and lilies of the valley surrounded the coffin, with a garland of roses plaited by Lady Diana Cooper trailing from it. Lady Mosley, Miles, Nanny and Irene knelt to pray at the foot and Irene swore to her dead sister that she would never fail her.
That day Georgia Sitwell, Tom’s former mistress and wife of the Mosleys’ friend Sacheverell, who had spent a wretched night thinking of Cim, went to see Andrée. “Despite her hatred of Tom she said no one knows how wonderful he has been. He spent every minute with her for a week. He talked to her for hours and hours as she lay dying and Andrée thinks she understood.”
Miles and Irene, who had been comforting the Mosley children, did their best to keep up the children’s spirits through lunch. After it, Miles went to rest in the spare room. When he came down Irene could think of nothing to say to him. She sent him home and tried to get hold of Elinor Glyn, to whom she and Cimmie always turned in times of crisis, but she was out. Baba drove Tom down to lunch at Denham before they visited the Cliveden chapel together, where Cimmie’s body now lay. Later Baba and Tom came to dine with Miles and Irene at Deanery Street, where they talked of Irene’s trousseau, with Baba telling Irene how to improve her style.
So good was the rapport between them that evening that later, in the drawing room, Irene poured out all her worries over her seeming inability to respond to Miles after their blissful time in Italy. “Baba’s sweetness, her understanding of marriage were a revelation to me and gave me back the balance and calm I was losing. I could not believe I had found such common sense and sympathy in her after all those years of coldness and before the men came in, we talked on Tom, the children, Diana Guinness in a barrierless spirit of understanding. I thanked God! When she phoned Tom was already in bed at Denham. With renewed peace in my heart, Miles and I got back to understanding and Italy, all barriers down and he said indelibly lovely things to my broken spirit.”
The next day she gave away to her maid Violet, her housekeeper Mrs. Shaw and the other servants all the clothes in her wardrobe that Miles, determined to smarten up his future wife, had ruthlessly discarded at the villa on Lake Maggiore.
Baba’s extreme closeness to her bereaved brother-in-law was already beginning to worry Fruity—Irene noticed how edgy they were with each other but supported her sister. Baba must go to Cliveden with Tom if he wanted her to, said Irene; they must stand by and patiently wait as she was the one person on whom Tom depended for everything.
On May 19 there was a short memorial service for Cimmie at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, Tom carrying gardenias and the children’s posies of flowers laid on strips of brocade. “Unbearably sad,” wrote Georgia Sitwell. “I howled.” Miles, who had tactfully declined to be present, waited outside for Irene in his car and drove her home for lunch, where they were joined by Baba and Fruity. After getting her hair and nails done, Irene went to see Elinor Glyn, who had adored Cimmie. “We had a heartbroken talk and she read me her article on Cim for the Sunday Graphic. Elinor is always a great and devoted soul to us children.”
Life gradually resumed its pattern. Baba did her best to find her sister appropriate clothes for the new married life ahead and Irene nervously met her future mother-in-law and sister-in-law, Betty, over tea. Then came a visit with Miles to Baba and Fruity at their country house at Coombe in Surrey, where Irene’s nerves began to jangle yet again when she sensed that her sister and her fiancé were dissecting her together after dinner while she and Fruity were playing the gramophone in another room. When she tackled Miles, he told her that Baba, known for her chic, could give her good advice on clothes that would set off her beautiful face. “I only say all this to you because I’m so proud of you,” he added. Irene melted, and allowed Baba to take her to Fortnum and Mason to choose lingerie, and to Cartier for a wedding ring on the pattern of her own.
However, she could not suppress her anxieties. Miles’s indifferent health and languidness worried her—and her deepest emotions were still for Gordon. Again, she poured her worries out to Baba, who became scared and miserable for her sister in her turn. But the practical Baba was determined to do more than wallow in Irene’s neuroses. She went to see Gordon, evoking from Irene the grateful diary entry: “She has helped me marvellously. I was nearly out of my mind.”
What chiefly worried Irene was Miles’s apparent coolness. He was often aloof and distrait, complaining of fatigue and treating her, she thought, more like a sister than a beloved. Lady Askwith also sensed problems, writing in her diary: “Liked Irene immensely but felt anxious. She is very charming and easy to get on with and sensible. Pray God it goes right.”
The fatigue Miles complained of masked something more serious. Still in love with Lady Portarlington, he was finding it more and more difficult to sustain this engagement undertaken largely for the sake of his career. Slowly, it was beginning to unravel.
By the end of May 1933 Irene feared the worst. Their relationship seemed to be splintering against the rock of Miles’s indifference. As it disintegrated, there were endless agonized discussions, icy kisses and quarrels that left Irene traumatized but Miles unmoved. “Nothing ever remains or makes any impression on my mind or troubles me for any length of time,” he remarked after one such contretemps, bouncing off her bed and leaving the room. Again, it was Baba who resolved the situation, while Irene and Miles were staying with the Metcalfes. After another tortured talk Baba went in search of Miles and found him sunbathing by the tennis courts. She told him she thought he should leave.
It was the end. There was a painful talk with Irene in his room before lunch and another in the woods afterward, where Miles apologized pitiably for hurting her, but saying that unless either party felt they could not get on without the other it was hopeless. Both wept bitterly and Irene fled in order not to say goodbye.
Baba tried to comfort her sister with the ambivalent remark that she must not be so miserable—after all, it was not as though Miles had been expressing undying love—but that they must strive to remain dear friends. As she pointed out to their luncheon guest, Lord Castlerosse, who had come to play golf with Fruity, there were many ways in which Miles was not right for her sister.
Irene’s feelings for Miles remained strong for some time. When she heard Baba talking to him on the telephone she felt a terrible pang of misery. She had wasted years of her life in an unhappy and fruitless love affair with Gordon and the thought of what could be her last chance of happiness slipping away demoralized her. Lady Askwith too was sad when she received a letter from her son saying that the engagement was over. “I am very disappointed and unhappy,” she wrote in her diary. “I liked her so much—I thought Miles’s happiness was secure and my anxieties over. Well, God’s will be done.”
Soon, it was Irene’s turn to help her sister. Staying with Fruity and Baba at Sandwich for golf in mid-June, she was startled when her sister returned unexpectedly to the house, weeping. Fruity had become furiously jealous over one of their golfing four, who had been invited to supper. Irene talked to Fruity, who would not listen, then she wrote to him, spelling out every point with a lucid clarity which she was incapable of bringing to her own affairs: Fruity’s age compared with that of Baba, the unreasonableness of expecting such a beautiful and intelligent woman to go through life without being spoken to or made much of. He was lucky, she told him firmly, to have had such single-minded love for so long and he must not allow it to be crushed by a molehill. With Baba’s approval, she pushed the note under Fruity’s door.
Next morning he thanked her for her sweet letter and said that though he saw all her points, to him Baba’s flirtation was more than a simple crush and ultimately it would hurt both of them. Fruity stuck to his guns. “Move him I could not,” commented Irene, adding that she had a feeling Miles would have been equally mulish in the same situation.
Soon Fruity would have much more reason for complaint.