For Baba, the New Year of 1941 was overshadowed by the departure of the Halifaxes for America. “I dread their going,” she wrote in her diary. “It seems like the bottom falling out of my present world . . . no letters, no dinners, no heavenly cosy evenings, besides the interest of knowing a bit what goes on in the world. I’m sure his success is certain and he may well be the key to getting America in finally, but it is a hard price to pay.” She was with them constantly in London before they left, only taking time off to drive herself, Irene, Nick and Vivien to Brixton Prison on January 13 so that the children could see their father for the first time since his arrest and detention eight months earlier. But their visit was fruitless.
“Did everything possible to see him but without success,” records her diary.
That evening Victor Cazalet, together with the builder of the hotel, Sir Malcolm MacAlpine, gave a huge farewell party for Edward and Dorothy at the Dorchester. He sent the Curzon sisters corsages of orchids, with which they bedecked themselves, but it did not make the entertainment any more appropriate, in Irene’s opinion: “47 people they would never want to see on their last day in England.”
The Halifaxes left on the morning of January 14. Baba went to church early; on her return, there were constant telephone calls as the final packing was completed and last-minute government messages came through. All the while Baba went backward and forward between Irene’s room and the Halifaxes, getting whiter and tenser by the minute. Finally, they had to part. “We were all three crying so much it was impossible to speak,” wrote Baba later. “The sweetness of Dorothy has been unbelievable. She might well have been bored by my friendship with Edward; instead, the things she said about what it had meant to him, and them both, made me want to cry.”
Baba came back from seeing them off just after eleven, fell into Irene’s chair and wept so copiously that Irene shed tears in sympathy. Sensitively, she left her sister alone for a while, going off to pay her bill and talk to people in the hall. At 11:45 Walter Monckton called in for ten minutes to report that the Halifaxes had sent a final farewell to Baba as they were being seen off at the station by the assembled cabinet.
Both of them wrote to Baba that day, Dorothy to say how she treasured Baba’s friendship and Edward Halifax a more intimate note from the train.
I have just opened your note, Baba darling. It has made it seem a little less beastly in one way wishing you goodbye this morning and in another infinitely worse. You need not be afraid that I will forget you or stop loving you, for I don’t think that would be possible, and the memory of you, and knowing you are remembering me in your thoughts and prayers, will be of quite untold help.
You were so good and brave this morning, with that horrible Miss Bennett and everyone else buzzing round. But we both knew what we both were thinking and, hard as that made it, it yet helped, for we were so very close together.
The Halifaxes crossed on the new British battleship, the King George V, to Chesapeake Bay. A letter from Charles Peake, the witty diplomat who was Halifax’s private secretary, suggested that all those close to Halifax were aware of how much Baba meant to him. “Edward sent you a letter in a cigarette tin which was soldered up, tied to a buoy and a flare, thrown overboard and subsequently picked up by a destroyer.* Most romantic I call it. I wish for many reasons you were here and think you will have to end by coming if the mission is to be a real success and he is to be happy.”
Peake’s letter was followed closely by one from Halifax himself, written on February 2. “You can guess how I am longing for a first letter from you. I tell myself that one might come any day now if they had sent a bag by air mail. It seems perfectly ages and ages since we said goodbye to each other in the Dorch. Anyway it is three weeks nearer the time when we shall see each other again.”
Baba was well aware that Halifax showed her letters to Dorothy. Certainly the letter which she wrote to both Halifaxes from Cliveden on January 24 was noticeably different in tone from Halifax’s, expressing simple friendship only, without the endearments and longing that thread his. “Here it is relatively peaceful and Nancy in a sweet mood. She thinks that it was a pity Waldorf and she were not sent to Washington as they could have carried on with Philip’s work as every connection he made and everything he knew of the U.S.A. was what she had taught him!
“Apparently the Pooh [their nickname for Winston Churchill] asked the hectic Corgi [Lloyd George] to join the band wagon but he refused except on his own terms which were a cabinet of five and an early meeting every morning with ministers fresh from their slumbers.” From Ditchley [the home of the Trees] two days later she wrote: “Everything heard at Cliveden proved to be wrong! The Corgi will never be a member of the Government as there will not be a war cabinet and anyway he hates the war.”
Halifax tried to counter their separation by maintaining a regular flow of letters, all numbered so that they would not be taken out of order, sometimes accompanied by extracts from his diary, sometimes giving her news from the U.S.: “I am sending you cuttings from the papers this morning on Wally’s operation for face lifting! To judge by the photographs she would have been better to leave it alone, I think! I am hearing mutterings about the governor of the Bahamas wanting to come up here. With the face-lifted one? I suppose so.”
All the letters breathe love and longing. “Jan 14 seems a terribly long time ago,” he wrote on February 10, “and all I have had of you since then is your photograph which looks at me as I write, and your last note, that I keep locked up but look at from time to time.” The epistolary log jam was soon broken. By mid-February he had received several letters from Baba.
He advised her on her marital difficulties.
I have thought a lot about your problem, darling, about how much you should say to F when he is doing something that is likely to put him wrong with other people. I would have thought you certainly should say what you thought, and why, very nicely. After all it takes two doesn’t it (or perhaps it doesn’t) to make a row and I would think that you could say your say in unprovocative form and when you saw a row likely to begin, step off and refuse to be drawn, saying that you had only thought it right to tell him how it might strike other people etc. Anyway I loved your asking my advice about it.
He added a cryptic sentence implying that some of their correspondence was shielded from Dorothy’s eyes: “Your little note where you abandoned the high tone of respectability pleased me much as you can guess. When you do abandon respectability, put it on a separate sheet from your regular letter (although your letters come to me unopened all right) . . . You are seldom out of my thoughts, my dearest, and I pray for you every day. May God continue to let us bring happiness to each other.”
The cold and her hard work took their toll on Irene’s health, but she continued to go to her committee meetings and to visit canteens. In mid-March, she paid a visit of a different kind, driving Nick over from Eton to Denham. Here they were met by the charming Colonel O’Shea, in charge of the intelligence work taking place in the house, so sensitive that they were not even allowed to walk through the gardens. The house was in excellent condition, the barn had been rebuilt and one of the cottages had even been fitted up with electric light and telephone.
As one of the Dorch inner circle, Irene naturally saw a great deal of Victor Cazalet, so she was not surprised to receive a confidence from him. He was, he told her, going to America in three days’ time with General Sikorski* for a short visit. Her first thought was that it would make Baba green with envy. She was, however, greatly taken aback by the next development. She had imagined that Victor would be going by the usual route, by clipper from Lisbon [the commercial air service to the U.S.], so was surprised to receive a letter from him in Scotland. She was even more surprised by its contents: a proposal of marriage.
It took her several days to come to a decision. She was very fond of Victor. Almost a year younger than herself—she was just forty-five—he was good-looking, intelligent, cheerful, rich, gregarious and, as Conservative MP for Chippenham, the friend of many ministers. They had much in common: Irene was passionate about music, Victor was a talented pianist; she greatly enjoyed tennis, at which he was a near professional; even more important, his faith was as deep as her own. She had many Jewish friends and intensely disliked any form of anti-Semitism; he was a keen Zionist and friend of Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s future president. Victor’s sister Thelma was perhaps Irene’s greatest woman friend.
Baba begged Irene to consider Victor’s offer, but she finally decided against it, even though she was fundamentally lonely despite her life of ceaseless activity. One reason was probably her suspicion that Victor was not really “the marrying kind.” So, on March 27, she wrote her refusal, sealed it up, and gave it to Baba to enclose in her letter to Halifax (which went by the diplomatic bag) as the quickest and surest way to reach him.
Devoted though she was to Halifax, Baba did not let his absence inhibit her lively social life. In fact Baba had so many admirers, who rang at all hours, that Irene found sharing her Dorchester room with her sister difficult. The three chief beaux, who seemed to be constantly on the telephone, were the American diplomat Averell Harriman, Walter Monckton and Leo d’Erlanger. Sometimes she would ask one or more of them down to Little Compton in a house party for the weekend; often they would take her to whatever gathering they had been invited to—generally something important or glamorous, as when she arrived back very late one night having dined in a large party with Walter Monckton, Lord Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken, Averell Harriman and others. “She certainly gets ‘in,’ on much more than me and gets all those people to do her bidding,” Irene noted enviously. “I had a bad morning of loneliness, fears and hopelessness,” she wrote on March 29, two days after turning Victor down.
To the outside world she appeared frantically busy. She worked daily in the East End, running a busy food center serving meals to the bombed-out. She also visited nurseries, where the warmth she always felt for children could be given free rein. “The children much enjoyed your visit,” wrote Father Edwyn Young after she had visited a children’s home in Wapping. “And this is not because you are who you are, but because they love your natural and friendly approach, and because they’ll always look on you as a friend, and a friend in the best sense—i.e., one who came to see and cheer them up when they most needed a little cheerfulness.”
But in her bouts of depression Irene wondered why she did not manage other more public achievements, such as speaking on the BBC like Violet Bonham-Carter, or why she did not have such devoted friends as Baba. “She can order them to do anything she wants. What is wrong with me that I fail on these lines? But I suppose if the poor and lonely love one as their friend it was like Christ and I am grateful.” For Irene, though, it was not enough, and gradually she began to turn to her old comforter, the bottle.
At the British embassy in Washington, the possibility of a visit by the Windsors had been mooted, a prospect viewed by Halifax with barely concealed repugnance. “You will be amused to hear about the Windsors,” he wrote at once to Baba. “He telegraphed home to say he thought of coming here and I was asked my opinion. I said that I deprecated it but if it had to be we had all better pretend to like it and do him well.”
Fortunately for the Halifaxes, the duke had just given an extraordinarily indiscreet interview to the American magazine Liberty. Sitting amid the white satins and chintzes of his drawing room in the Bahamas, dominated by a portrait of his wife over the mantelpiece, he had lamented the fact that he had never met Mussolini. Although he acknowledged that Churchill and Roosevelt were greater than either Hitler or Mussolini, he went on to say, “There will be a new order in Europe whether it is imposed by Germany or Great Britain.” The Duke even advocated that the United States should keep out of the war as it was “too late” to make any difference, adding that he himself could later act as mediator between the two sides. Churchill reacted immediately with a stinging telegram of rebuke. “The appended passage from the article in Liberty which has not been repudiated by Your Royal Highness gives the impression and can only bear the meaning of contemplating a negotiated peace with Hitler. That is not the policy of HMG nor is it that of the Government and the vast majority of people in the U.S.” Churchill requested the duke not to go to Washington; the duchess’s spending habits on visits to Miami were already incurring criticism.
The Windsor visit averted, Halifax turned to other matters in his letters home. All refer to his hoped-for visit from Baba, made more likely because his inquiries had led to someone who could fix her a return passage either by clipper or in a bomber. He was, he assured her, constant in his affections. He updated her on the war front.
Roosevelt is declaring the Red Sea open which means American ships can start carrying stuff to Suez. He is also I fancy considering direct convoying but I doubt whether he will get there just yet. And I guess he will start showing the fleet up a bit more in the Atlantic, with the object of knowing where raiders are not, which will help our hunting groups. They are also going to get hold of the foreign ships tied up here and this will influence South American states. So there is a good deal to put against the sinkings, and they are of course building as hard as they can.
I don’t like this Balkan scene a bit, though Egypt looks a bit better. As regards the Balkans, even if we get kicked out altogether I expect it will be less bad than if we hadn’t tried to help the Greeks. Morale is what is going to count in the long run, and the moralities. And this country I would guess will be moved by our desperate efforts to save Europe and the world. I fancy they are more and more feeling a bit self-reproachful while we are suffering, to be only making money . . . the real reason I should like to come [home in August]—apart from private reasons!—is to get in touch with what Pooh [Churchill] and Co are thinking, so that one can be intelligent here.
Baba in her turn regaled him with gossip, telling him of Victor’s proposal to Irene even before Victor knew he had been turned down. “First and foremost Victor!!!” wrote Halifax on April 17. “Dorothy and I have done nothing but smile whenever we have thought of it. Somehow it never would have occurred to me. I did not know he might be thinking on those lines. I would give a great deal to hear your nocturnal discussions on this with Irene. I see she has written to him and I have duly forwarded it. Do tell me if you can when you write as to the decision. I should hate to think of his poor little feelings being hurt. But it certainly is an odd idea.”
In early spring the Luftwaffe stepped up its night raids on London and the southeast while Germany’s success in other theaters of war kept the thought of invasion alive. Raids or not, Londoners did their best to lead normal lives, and Baba’s admirers were no exception. Walter Monckton, with whom she had been on terms of friendship since first they met, seemed now to have become a would-be lover. After they had both dined with the Willingdons in Lygon Place, Walter Monckton came back with Irene to the Dorchester to see Baba, and as Irene recorded: “After talking in my room they went into her bolthole and lay on the bed and chattered till all hours!!!” A letter from him in April certainly hints at a sexual relationship.
“Darling Baba, Not ‘hurtingly faithless!’ How can you say that when you keep me tantalisingly suspended between frying pan and fire. The fire just doesn’t begin to burn. The frying pan fries only too efficiently. But I agree toto corde with Edward. It is your bounden duty as a friend to extricate me from these perils. But it is you who are faithless. You extricate the Averells and the Bills but you allow this poor old man to sizzle—with cool detachment.”
After nine months came the last and greatest raid on London. On May 10, 1941, in the bright moonlight that became known as “bombers’ moon,” 550 German bombers dropped hundreds of high-explosive bombs and over one hundred thousand incendiaries. Fourteen hundred died that night—the most for any single raid—every railway station was hit and the chamber of the House of Commons reduced to rubble. It provoked from Fruity, who had come to accept their separateness, a passionate plea to Baba, begging her in the name of sense and judgment not to come to London. He wrote to her from White’s Club because his room at the Ritz, where he had spent the night, was unusable.
It was terrifying—a foot of ceiling and windows all over my room, rug, chest etc crashing into the passage buried in a heap of rubbish. No lights, no phone, no anything. One bomb dropped when I was in bed in the garden outside my window. The streets today are a foot deep in glass.
It is not fair on your three children if you do come up. Please believe me and act accordingly. Death is round every corner here in a night like last. It is even money if you escape, with at least your eyesight gone through broken glass. I implore you not to make the excuse of “dining with Walter,” “hearing Walter speak” or dining with Cazalet or people like the Halifaxes. These people have got to be here, doing their work. If you had work to do then I’d say do it and stay but having absolutely none it is very wrong for you to come near London.
That is all I can say. Your life is your own and you can throw it away if you so wish—it is your choice. But remember you are the mother of three children.
A few days later, the windows of Irene’s house were blown out again.
As the raids trailed off, work in the shelters diminished and Irene, with her experience of public speaking, began giving talks. She spoke on Abyssinia at various army camps and depots, lectured on East End shelters and Christianity at Malvern College, and addressed the joint annual meeting of the Lincoln branch of the National Council for Women and the Central Girls’ Club on the need for a religious faith as powerful as the German people’s belief in Hitler. She always tried to look smart and when, on June 1, clothes rationing was announced in the Sunday papers, she could not help regretting the number of clothes she had given to the maids at the Dorchester.
Gossip about Halifax in Washington filtered back through their friends. While Dorothy, warm, charming, tactful and hardworking, had become a favorite, Halifax’s reserved, patrician manner gave the appearance that he was standoffish and uninterested. As he was known as a foxhunting man, he had been invited to have a day with a pack in Pennsylvania about which he had written enthusiastically to Baba (“a very nice-looking pack, huntsman an Englishman who used to be with the Warwickshire, whipper-ins American, all very well turned out, a great many people in red coats”). No doubt this enthusiasm had made a sharp contrast with his usual rather aloof persona, for the press had lambasted him for indulging in such a luxury pursuit in wartime.
Victor Cazalet unhappily confirmed this. “He will never slip into the easy ways of P. Lothian, who was beloved by everybody,” he wrote in his private diary; and he urged Halifax one evening to ring up Roosevelt “just for a chat. Americans love this.”
Whether or not the ambassador did attempt such an out-of-character move is not known, but his long letters to Baba continued, filled with news and comment as well as plans to see her again. When Hitler invaded Russia he wrote, “I hope that as in the past, Russia may prove an unprofitable investment for invaders.” In another letter he noted presciently: “The U.S. Navy is all ready, as they think, for a scrap and most of them are just longing for some incident that will settle it. I shall be surprised if they don’t get it.”
At home, Irene had driven down to Eton on June 28 and, after watching cricket, had taken Nick to Denham, where Colonel O’Shea walked them around the house and garden. Everything was in apple-pie order: O’Shea’s men were making a trout farm in the gravel pit, the lawns were mown, and where two bombs falling nearby had hurled debris all around Cim’s sarcophagus the holes had been filled in and everything smoothed away.
A few days later she went to a dinner at the Dorch given by Mrs. Ronnie Greville. They were joined by Victor Cazalet, who had arrived back a week earlier from the U.S. after a ten-hour flight from Gander, Newfoundland, in a converted Liberator bomber. After dinner he took Irene back to his room, where they discussed his proposal of marriage. For the romantic Irene, who longed for love if not passion, what Victor offered seemed an unhappy substitute: it appeared that he was yet another of the men who saw her as a powerful aid to his career rather than as the love of his life.
“He said such bald cold things: that he knew he would get a governorship if he had a wife. But he was scrupulously fair about his side of the bargain—one’s freedom, etc. I asked God to give me ten days over it.”
Less than a week later, after she had presented the prizes and certificates at Parson’s Mead School, given them a talk and retired to bed weary, her mind was made up. Victor appeared in her room at 11 p.m. in his dressing gown; when he attempted the mildest physical contact she felt repelled. “Sickness when he wanted to shake my hand and offer me some small kiss of affection. It is no good. It cannot be done. I was frozen stiff. I could scarcely touch him.” Next day she wrote a final letter of refusal to Victor, then went out to Harvey Nichols and bought two hats.
With the Blitz over, London was much safer. Baba reappeared, having called Irene to ask her to fix a dinner party for her, and then went to visit Tom at Brixton. As often after she had seen him, she returned uncommunicative. Her emotions on seeing this ex-lover who had so grossly deceived her must have been a jumble of remorse, longing and guilt; and when he told her he hoped to go to France with Diana after the war “to achieve some measure of happiness” it must have struck deep.
Yet she continued to do her best to achieve his release, or at least secure better conditions for him in prison, attempting through Halifax to reach the prime minister and Herbert Morrison. Though Halifax had been thoroughly in favor of Tom’s detention—“I am glad to say we succeeded in getting a good deal done about fascists, aliens and other doubtfuls, Tom Mosley being among those picked up,” he had written in his diary in May 1940—his devotion to Baba meant that he commiserated with her over not being able to get Tom’s situation improved.
Irene found staying at Little Compton difficult. Baba’s authoritarian approach jarred on her, especially when it came to dealing with Nanny—a friend and virtual member of the Curzon family for over forty years. Baba wanted Nanny to stay at Little Compton and look after the Metcalfe children as well as Micky, and Andrée to get a job for the duration of the war; Irene felt Nanny should do as she wished. Neither wanted to stay at Little Compton, though they agreed to do so for the moment, and Irene’s maid Ida also gave notice, saying “she did not like the Compton atmosphere”—Irene felt it was because too much work had been piled on her.
She also found it difficult to still the undercurrent of envious resentment when Baba read extracts from the letters sent by Halifax and Dorothy. “Why does she get all this priceless and exquisite adoration, in its richness and splendour, but it does not come my way? I must be at fault somewhere. She gets the best of both worlds, even though her life with Fruity is misery.”
There was no doubt about the adoration. Halifax was—for him—in a fever of anticipation at the thought of seeing Baba again. “I just can’t imagine what it will be like when I first see you again in the old Dorch,” he wrote from Washington on July 27, 1941. “Do pray very hard that nothing may interfere.” A week later he was telling her: “I shall aim at getting off with a Friday night at Chequers and spending Sunday with you. Unless I arrive Saturday or Sunday I shall go straight to London and hope to find you in the Dorch!”
Baba’s relationships were a dominant theme in the lives of those who knew her well. Like the rest of the world, Irene and Nanny were mystified as to the exact nature of her friendship with Halifax. “We could not fathom the Halifax–Baba thing. Baba was in a secret glow of delight as the Foreign Office phoned her Lord Halifax was coming in a bomber and would arrive today and stay in London [Halifax’s return was in fact delayed for several days].” When Irene dined with Leo d’Erlanger, a Little Compton habitué, they spent hours talking about her sister—d’Erlanger said that Baba “should have grabbed Jock Whitney and got a good settlement for Fruity.” And when Irene drove the brilliant lawyer William Jowett to London after a weekend at Little Compton Baba’s situation came up again. Jowett’s advice was that if Baba really wanted a legal parting of the ways she should offer her husband a two years’ separation and, if he refused to cooperate, cut off his money.
Baba, meanwhile, was seeing as much of the Halifaxes as she could and, Irene felt, keeping them unnecessarily to herself. Once again, she felt hurt, this time when Baba refused to allow her to accompany their party to see the air-raid shelters at Bermondsey—Irene’s stamping ground—saying it would make too many. Even Victor Cazalet recognized Baba’s proprietorial attitude to the Halifaxes, and when he asked them to dine invariably asked her too—often without Irene. Despite their failed romance she was seeing as much of Victor as ever. In August she stayed with him at Great Swifts, his country house at Cranbrook in Kent, and in early September dined with him to meet the Chaim Weizmanns as well as often seeing Victor informally.
The Dorchester was still central to all their lives, more so now that Sibyl Colefax, for whom entertaining was as much a part of life as breathing, had hit upon the simple but effective idea that became known as “Sibyl’s Ordinaries”—dinners, generally on a Thursday, after which guests would receive a discreet bill the following morning. As the war drew on, the cost of the Ordinaries rose from ten shillings six-pence to fifteen shillings, the wine served was Algerian and, eventually, sherry ceased to be offered before dinner.
The first of these paid dinners was on September 18. Around the table at the Dorchester was Lady Colefax’s usual eclectic mix of politicians, writers and personalities. Irene, Adrienne Whitney, Juliet Duff, Gladwyn Jebb, Thornton Wilder, Mrs. Gilbert Russell, Sir Roderick and Lady Jones (the writer Enid Bagnold), Roger Senhouse and Robert Montgomery. Harold Macmillan failed to turn up and Baba, also invited, turned her down in favor of an evening with Victor Cazalet and the Halifaxes, soon to return to America.
At the end of the month, largely to further Baba’s efforts on behalf of Tom Mosley, the Halifaxes gave a small dinner party consisting of the prime minister and Mrs. Churchill; the chief whip, David Margesson, and Baba. “Winston started by coming and plumping himself down on the sofa at once and speaking of Tom,” runs Baba’s account of it. “I had asked Edward to talk to him about the prison and efforts to get them moved to the country. This had been done and Winston was charming, most ready to listen and saw no disadvantages in putting the couples together but Herbert Morrison [the home secretary] will be the stumbling block. He is hard, narrow-minded and far from human in a matter like this, and in any case he has a special dislike of Tom.
“One rather telling remark I thought was when I said it was awful to see someone like T in prison and Winston said: ‘Yes, and it may be for years and years.’ ”
The Halifaxes returned to Washington on September 20, 1941, flying first to Lisbon, where Halifax wrote to Baba, “I so long to hear your news, and your voice on the telephone at Bristol seems a terribly long time ago. But I build my castles for February [when they hoped to return to England].”
Back in Washington, the long, numbered letters resumed, with their adoring messages. “I long to get your first letter and I am marking off the days again until the time comes for my next trip over. I am keeping your last note for a little longer until I know it all by heart. Then it shall be destroyed!”
With the Halifaxes gone, Victor Cazalet had more time for his other friends. On October 10 Irene again went to stay with him at Great Swifts, where they were joined by her other admirer, Leslie Hore-Belisha. After lunch Hore-Belisha and Irene had a long walk, discussing Victor. “I sniggered inside to think of two beaux in one weekend whom I might have ‘taken unto myself’ but I am sure God guided me not to. Victor says Leslie is only absorbed with himself but I am not sure that criticism could not be applied also to the person who made it.”
Victor, unaware that Hore-Belisha was a rival, summed him up more prosaically. “Leslie can be very agreeable but he is getting far too fat,” he wrote in his diary. “I was rather doubtful if I had enough of the right food for him. However for one dinner he had soup, two goes of chicken, two helpings of pie and all the butter and biscuits he could collect.”
After dinner all of them were depressed by listening to Lord Haw Haw telling them how the German army was advancing, it seemed inexorably, on Moscow. Gloomily, Hore-Belisha predicted a great victory for the Germans in the Middle East, after which, he said, “They will then switch to us.”
Irene was still doing all she could for the Mosley children: discussing his future with eighteen-year-old Nick and entertaining for Vivien, now twenty. That October she took a party of Vivien and her friends to the Lansdowne to dine and dance, followed by a nightclub. She felt that she should visit Tom in Brixton Prison, but when she suggested it, both Nick and Baba failed to respond—though they took her car to visit him the following day.
Balked of a visit, on October 26 Irene sent Tom a long letter full of the news she had meant to tell him in person of Nick’s future plans and about Micky who had started at St. Ronan’s that term. Four days later, she received a brutally brief reply. It was a single line, written by Tom’s solicitor Oswald Hickson, saying only that a year at Oxford was better than a half [a term] at Eton.
Irene was disgusted both at Tom’s rudeness and his lack of interest in his children. “I shall take no more trouble with him,” she wrote in her diary, underlining the words heavily.