By the beginning of 1917 it seemed as if the war had been going on for a lifetime and would never end. Among those of Diana’s closest friends who had gone to the war, Edward Horner and Patrick Shaw-Stewart were still alive, but though she would never have articulated the thought, Diana had written them off in her mind as already dead. A protection of a kind against being badly hurt is to anticipate the worst and discount it in advance. Diana did this all her life. No one she loved could take an aeroplane without her spelling out to herself the horrors of crash, conflagration, violent death, funeral; no friend could blow a nose without influenza, pneumonia, protracted and fatal illness flashing through her mind. Edward and Patrick were doomed; it was only a question of when the telegram would arrive. Till that time came she would lavish her affection on them, devote to them every spare moment while they were on leave; but that each meeting would be the last she never doubted.
There remained Duff. There were those who said that, if he really wanted to, he could have escaped from the Foreign Office and joined the army. One of the de Crespigny brothers – either ‘Creepy’ or ‘Crawly’ de Crespigny, history has forgotten which – swore that he would shoot Duff if he had not joined up by the day the war ended. Neither physically nor morally was Duff’s courage ever in doubt – the discomfort of military life alarmed him more than the danger – but he accepted the embargo on his leaving the Foreign Office with the same equanimity as he later did his conscription. He was never one to waste his energies on shame and Diana worried far more than he did about his reputation.
Meanwhile he made hay while the sun shone. He still could not bring himself to concentrate exclusively on Diana. Cynthia Asquith recorded with satisfaction an evening when Duff ‘hovered around with would-be fondling hands’; shortly afterwards he tried to get her to himself when, to his ill-concealed annoyance, ‘Diana, Letty and Alan Parsons hooked on to us’. More serious was his fleeting passion for Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower. He tore himself away from a house-party at Panshanger where he had been fluttering lustfully around her to dine with the Parsons. ‘I am not in love with D and I am tired of Viola and Alan,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘This is a terrible thing and is probably only a phase but there it is.’ It was only a phase but it almost proved disastrous. Duff and Diana had a ferocious row, and the usual reconciliation did not take place next day. Piqued by jealousy as well as outraged by his harshness towards her, Diana was ‘bright and cold and diamond-hard’. Duff was dismayed. ‘Fool and brute that I am! This is terrible. All my love for her has come back and I could not bear to lose her.’ It took nearly three weeks of persistent courtship before his apologies were accepted. ‘I don’t believe we shall quarrel again,’ wrote Duff, ‘and I loathe myself for my temporary infidelity and vileness.’
Infidelities recurred and they did quarrel again, but never with the same savagery. They settled down into a happy almost conjugal pattern: lunching at small unfashionable Soho restaurants where none of their friends was likely to go, or privately in Duff’s rooms in St James’s Street, where they would eat slimming meals of lean meat or, still more austerely, Brand’s Essence and mineral waters; meeting at Arlington Street or in Duff’s rooms when he left the Foreign Office; dining frequently in the same parties or with the Montagus in Queen Anne’s Gate; moving on to the same balls; ending up in the same group at the Cavendish; at weekends often staying in the same country house where Duff would seek out Diana’s bedroom and lie with her in chaste if compromising intimacy. Their relationship, with all its strengths and limitations, was defined in a conversation which they held after a ball at the very end of 1916; Duff unusually sober, Diana rather drunk.
She told me that she had always loved Raymond more than me … That last night at Brighton he had lain with her though he had not been there when I went to her room in the early morning and couldn’t get in. I was much moved and amazed and it curiously made me like Raymond more than ever, though were he still alive I don’t know how I should feel. She assured me that she loved me best of the living, particularly lately, but I reminded her that she had often said as much while Raymond was alive. Why should I believe her? It was a thrilling revelation.
The Duchess by no means considered him best of the living; indeed her disapproval of Duff became more emphatic as her daughter’s partiality for him grew more pronounced. She could still do much to disrupt the even tenor of their wooing. Duff telephoned Arlington Street to be greeted by ‘some bitch who was neither your maid nor your mother’, who announced that Lady Diana was out. The bitch was Diana herself, unwilling to talk with her mother in the room. Archibald Sinclair had been causing trouble by reviving the theory that Diana was destined to be Princess of Wales, the Duchess seized on the idea and for weeks would talk of nothing else. When the Prince failed to dance with Diana at Irene Lawley’s ball the Duchess was furious, not with the Prince but, somewhat unfairly, with her daughter. Even when dreams of the throne faded, she was no better disposed towards Duff. She had allies in her campaign. Winston Churchill lectured Diana on the merits of Patrick Shaw-Stewart. Diana pleaded that Patrick was physically repulsive to her and that she preferred Duff. Churchill agreed that Duff was better looking, ‘and physical desire he thinks the only basis to marry on’, but felt that ‘the animal can be selected by one’s brain and not one’s attraction’ and that Shaw-Stewart would be in every way a worthier mate.
In March 1917 the Foreign Office decided to let some of its regular staff join the armed forces; ‘the scrimshankers were combed out’ in the phrase of a spiteful acquaintance. Duff’s reaction was exhilaration, though, he wrote in his diary; ‘I don’t own to it as people would believe it was bluff, and I dare say too that I shall soon heartily wish myself back.’ He felt as if everybody else had been taking part in an adventure from which he had been excluded; it would be uncomfortable and dangerous but it was not something to miss. ‘I am not afraid of death, though I love life and should hate to lose it.’ The main drawback to his joining the army was the pain it would cause his mother; ‘I think Diana too would mind.’
Diana did mind, with an intensity that both delighted and dismayed Duff. He tried to explain to her something of what he felt as they lay side by side early one morning. ‘She was so white and darling and pathetic’ She understood what he was trying to say but could feel nothing herself beyond fear and a vast sense of loss. ‘I am reconciled to the advisability of Duff, the straw, breaking the back of the Central Powers,’ she wrote wistfully to Patrick Shaw-Stewart, ‘but none the less loth to part from that straw to which I cling.’ He was to join the Grenadiers, the Colonel saying resignedly that, since they had already had the Sitwells, things could hardly get worse. ‘I hope he won’t be their mascot,’ Diana went on, ‘for we know what happens to those the Guards love.’
Duff’s record of his first days in the army was hardly soldierly. He was dismayed by the discovery that he would have to sleep with seven other people, mostly risen from the ranks, who appeared to him ‘common and inhuman. It seems unthinkable that I should have to share a room with them. There are really moments when I could have cried. The strangeness, roughness and degradation of it all appalled me. I wrote to Diana and told her how unhappy I was.’ Diana passed on the news of Duff’s misery in vivid detail to the Duchess, who spat out vengefully: ‘Do him a lot of good to rough it a bit!’ While Diana meditated some violent riposte, her brother John came to the rescue and assailed the Duchess with a catalogue of Duff’s qualities: his courage, his fitness, his skill at tennis. Diana wrote Duff a letter of comfort mixed with sage advice: ‘Fears surge that you will take neither trouble nor interest in it all, or the others, therefore they will not adore you. You will think this doesn’t matter, being temporary, but of course it does matter. To be thought to be keen, non-grumbling, generally jolly and loyal, is of the vastest importance.’
Duff went for his basic training to Chelsea Barracks and then, as an officer cadet, to Bushey, only a few miles from central London. He was never far out of Diana’s life, but she had grown to depend on him to occupy her days and his departure left a painful void. There was no shortage of people anxious to fill it. Among the most prominent was Ivor Wimborne. Ivor Guest, Lord Wimborne, was an Edwardian grandee of immense wealth, who considered that his money entitled him to anything which the droit de seigneur would not anyway secure him. It was of him that Belloc wrote:
Grant, O Lord, eternal rest
To thy servant, Ivor Guest.
Never mind the where or how,
Only grant it to him now.
The various high offices of state that had been conferred on him – culminating in that of Viceroy of Ireland – had signally failed to curb his greed and lechery. His redeeming feature was his generosity; as Diana said, he would rip the shirt off any girl’s back but give the coat off his own to the first person who asked for it.
He took a fancy to Diana and pursued her hungrily, lavishing on her presents and expensive meals. Diana always relished wealth and power and loved to be indulged; besides, Wimborne was good company. One night he took her to dinner at Oddenino’s – £4 for two with two bottles of good claret, which seemed indecently extravagant; paid the taxi-driver £1 for a four shillings fare on the ground Diana was the passenger; bribed the porter with £1 to let him take somebody else’s taxi; ‘I guess his evening out cost him near a tenner.’ He got little return for his investment. When he assaulted Diana in the taxi on the way home she repelled him vigorously. He sulked, and asked why she had to be different from every other girl, to which Diana replied that he had always told her she was unique, so she was trying to live up to her reputation. Undismayed, Lord Wimborne continued to pursue her, lasciviously muttering: ‘Baby, baby, I want you baby. I want to have you – not only in the vulgar sense, but I want to work with you and be your help and your foil, baby!’
His siege came to a climax when they were both staying with Diana’s old admirer, Claude Lowther, at Herstmonceux. Winston Churchill had been dining there, ‘poor love, frankly down and wretched, speechless, morbid, grim’, but good claret and grouse had cheered the party and Diana went contentedly to bed at 1 a.m. At 2 a.m. the Viceroy stood expectant at the door. Diana quailed but prepared for battle. ‘For half an hour I fought with amazing valour in darkness and utter silence. At 3, not getting a pea of his greens, he retired.’ Diana lay gloating over her triumph, half asleep. Then Lord Wimborne was back, this time in repentance. ‘Visualize the lecherous aristocrat kneeling at the bed-post, kissing and being silly with my blanketed feet, with, “O, baby, I’ve tossed for so long, I shall never sleep till I know I am forgiven. O, ma Diane, pity me. I will treat you as something so unique, baby, not like other women.”’ Diana rashly laughed at him, which Lord Wimborne interpreted as encouragement. He flung himself back into the attack. Diana feigned submission, then leapt for the door, ‘but in one goat’s leap he was beside me, and me off my feet and held high’. Rape seemed imminent, so Diana fell back on her last, least dignified line of defence and called to Phyllis Boyd who was in the next room. Her friend was already awake, speculating with interest on the tempestuous events next door; she rushed to the rescue ‘and cleansed and garnished the room in two ticks’.
Diana gleefully recounted her saga to her friends. Duff was outraged, not so much by the behaviour of the Viceroy as by the fact that Diana took it so lightly, telling him that she found it delightfully dixhuitième (always high praise in her vocabulary) and that she had no objection ‘to a few pictorial and featherlight adventures’. Next time she went to Herstmonceux Duff made sure that he was in attendance. He successfully protected Diana, but not her white poodle Fido. Claude Lowther alleged this animal would damage his trees, so it was shut in an upstairs room from which, piqued, it jumped twenty feet to the ground. Miraculously the dog survived, though Diana’s feelings suffered severely.
Of one thing Diana felt confident; the Viceroy’s eyes were open; never again would he attempt violation. Her mother was less sanguine and when Diana went to spend a weekend at Blenheim – notoriously a palace of ill fame – the Duchess issued her daughter with a service revolver that Patrick Shaw-Stewart had for some reason abandoned at Belvoir, and instructed her to announce loudly at tea-time that her maid always slept in the same room as her. The Duchess’s caution was more than justified; the Viceroy struck again. Luckily he was carrying a candle, which shed its first faint gleam on the barrel of the revolver. Lord Wimborne blenched and settled nervously at the end of Diana’s bed, alleging that he had merely looked in for an early morning chat.
With these experiences fresh in her mind it was bold of Diana to visit Lord Wimborne in his viceregal splendour in Dublin. She reasoned that, with Lady Wimborne on the premises and A.D.C.s and footmen in every cranny, she would be reasonably secure, but she reckoned without her host’s determination. On her arrival she was taken directly to the Viceroy’s study. She found him ‘all dithery and tossing down endless vermouths, babbling of how this visit was a dawn and going to be so strategically carried out that it would form a basis of an easy and unsuspected relationship’. Diana, who had no such relationship in mind, pointed out that a prolonged tête-à-tête was hardly the way to disarm suspicion. She was delighted by the pomp and gold plate, the footmen boasting pink calves and perruques, but was disconcerted when Lady Wimborne drew her confidentially to one side. She thought a word of counsel about the Viceroy was coming but instead heard: ‘I must warn you, dearest Diana, that in curtseying after dinner to H.E., we don’t use the gavotte or Court curtsey but rather the modern Spanish.’ Diana choked back the reply ‘You’ll get what bob you can from me, plus hiccups if it’s after dinner.’
Later came another interview with the Viceroy, with petitions to ‘come and say goodnight’ when the others were asleep. Diana thought that she had finally cowed him, but two hours later there he was again, crashing around her bedroom in the dark, cursing as he stubbed his toes against the furniture. He retreated after only a moderate tussle and Diana’s threat to leave Viceregal Lodge at dawn if she were molested any further. ‘God knows what in my demeanour has changed,’ she mused wistfully, ‘or why in a strange house I can never curl my hair or grease my face in security.’
Farce threatened to take on a more serious aspect when it was rumoured Ivor Wimborne was to divorce his long-suffering wife: ‘I have never seen Her Grace in such torment,’ Diana wrote to Duff.
In five minutes she saw in me the only co-respondent, spoke of servants bribed by Alice Wimborne to spy, elaborate and inform against me, till really she roused me to a fear of my own and I remembered the emerald in the drawer behind her [a present from Lord Wimborne] and letters of mine which could be read in court and reading incriminatingly.
Wimborne denied having any such intention, but when he drove Diana home a few nights later he hinted that this need not always be the case: ‘I am prepared to make sacrifices and take risks, baby.’ Diana was prepared to make sacrifices too, in this case to sacrifice her old friend Phyllis Boyd. Miss Boyd was delighted to divert the Viceroy’s ardour; she was paraded before him in Diana’s ‘indecently scanty bathing-dress’ and scored an immediate success. But Lord Wimborne had sufficient energy for a wife and a multitude of paramours; his death-bed was to be the only resting place in which he did not hope Diana could be induced to join him.
Duff disapproved of Lord Wimborne, but of Sir Matthew Wilson he was frankly jealous. ‘Scatters’ Wilson was a prototype of the Edwardian rake; ‘a fussy ebullient bounder,’ Cynthia Asquith described him, ‘with his blue eyes and hoarse whisper.’ His tastes were as traditionally rakish as his appearance; he prided himself on being responsible for more divorces than any other man in London and liked playing poker for high stakes with rich but innocent young men. Early in 1917 he set out to add Diana to his list of conquests. Diana promised Duff that Scatters did not attract her in the least, but her actions seemed to belie her words. At dinner with the Montagus she deliberately lingered so that Wilson could take her home; Duff stumped off in a black rage ‘not only of jealousy but also of sorrow that she should sink to such depths as Scatters and should offer herself to him under the eyes of men with the stamp of F. E. Smith’.
Duff’s misery came to a head when they were all staying at the Lovat Arms in Beauly, Inverness. Diana went off early to bed, promising she would lock the door of her room to keep Scatters at bay. Scatters disappeared. His suspicions aroused, Duff crept upstairs and listened at Diana’s door. ‘I heard whispering voices and sounds of the bed shaking. I listened in agony, such emotion as I have seldom known. At last I heard Diana say in a slightly mocking voice, “Goodnight, ducky”.’ Duff hid round the corner, watched Scatters emerge fully clothed and then stormed in to take his place. Diana was at first on the defensive; Scatters had arrived before she had time to lock the door, she had beaten him off with only a minor tussle. Then Duff admitted he had been listening at the door for ten minutes, and the tables were turned. ‘She cried and reproached me bitterly with not trusting and spying on her.’ Eventually honour was satisfied and a reconciliation ensued – ‘We had a night of the most wild and perfect joy.’
*
By this time Diana was working an average of five or six hours a day in the hospital at Arlington Street; less when things were peaceful; considerably more in the aftermath of a major battle. This schedule left her with plenty of time and energy for outside activities. Her passion for the theatre had not diminished. Katharine Asquith told Raymond that Diana was utterly stage-struck. ‘Tell me when next you write about the stage and why you like it,’ Raymond commanded from the front line. ‘It makes me think that you might like Ypres.’
Diana’s taste in plays was conservative but by no means narrow. She loved Shakespeare, Marlowe, Restoration comedy, Sheridan. She enjoyed most of Shaw, though her strongly literal mind rejected Heartbreak House: ‘Is it a real air-raid? IF not, what does it symbolize? If it is, why haven’t they spoken of the war at all?’ Ibsen she found grotesque: ‘What an antiquated old corpse Ghosts is – such passions to expend passions on, almost as antiquated as Oedipus’s panic at incest past.’ Almost anything that took place on a stage, however, would engage her attention; she only drew the line at a poetry reading: ‘You can imagine how old buggers like Newbolt and Hewlett and Seaman and Yeats – worst of all – lost themselves in the luxury of their drawling.’
Above all, she wanted to perform herself. Lowest form of theatrical life was the tableau vivant, and in such Diana often played a leading role. Cynthia Asquith remembered one in which she portrayed the Blessed Damozel – ‘funny enough!’ she commented sourly. It had first been suggested that Diana should be a fallen woman at the knee of Mrs Lavery’s Virgin Mary, but she did not take kindly to the idea. Among the other participants was Mrs Harold Nicolson, as Vita Sackville-West had now become – ‘Dear old Vita,’ Diana remarked, ‘all aqua, no vita, was as heavy as frost.’
Charity matinées were a cut up on this. Lady Essex organized a performance at the Gaiety Theatre in which professional actresses, mannequins and fashionable ladies mixed uneasily in a play which would have been bad under any circumstances and under these was appalling. The amateurs complained that the professionals did not know their parts and made no effort, while one of the professionals, Gladys Cooper, said: ‘It was a great success but the Society actresses couldn’t be heard at all.’ In this criticism it seems she was justified. ‘I hear that Dottie was “natural” but inaudible,’ wrote Raymond Asquith, ‘a queer reversal of her normal role.’ She achieved audibility at least when she played Britannia in a pageant at Leicester. She noted with satisfaction that she liked to hear her own voice on the stage, ‘though I have a strange conviction just after each phrase that I said the words completely wrong’. It was suggested that she might play Juliet for charity but the idea came to nothing. ‘It couldn’t be good,’ wrote Diana, ‘but it would be terribly exciting and good for me to do something of which I am truly frightened.’
Meanwhile she was herself being satirized in Mr Butt’s revue at the Empire. Duff and Diana went there in a party with the Aga Khan – ‘damned impudence’ considered Duff, and was relieved they arrived too late to see the offending scene. The Duke of Rutland took the same view and for once bestirred himself; the Lord Chamberlain was lobbied, Mr Butt reprimanded, and the scene cut so severely that only veiled allusions to Diana remained. She herself rather regretted it; her personality as purveyed by the Empire Theatre was not wholly flattering, but it was gratifying to be singled out for such treatment and she preferred tarnished fame to public indifference.
Her theatrical bent strayed over into private life. Dinner-parties were frequently enlivened by ‘stunts’ and Diana’s imitations of certain dowagers were celebrated. Clumps, one of the many after-dinner games that involved acting, was much in vogue. On the whole, though, her friends went in for more intellectual pastimes. The parentage game was popular. Eddie Marsh’s were deemed to be Tom Tit and Sappho, Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s Uriah Heep and Bernard Shaw, while Diana was generously endowed with Voltaire and Venus. Reading aloud was also in favour. At a dinner given by Alan and Viola Parsons for Augustine Birrell, Viola and Birrell read Lady Gregory’s ‘Workhouse Ward’ in a passable brogue, Duff intoned melodiously from Sir Thomas Browne while Diana ‘reclined on a couch à la Madame Récamier and was in excellent face and lovely dress’. Musical evenings occurred with regularity; usually highbrow or at least classical though once figuring ‘one Novello, who is by way of being a sort of ragtime composer’. Viola Parsons was supposed to be in love with Ivor Novello at the time. Duff disapproved of the liaison; Novello was ‘a very pretty, very suspicious-looking little creature, half the size of Viola and not nearly so manly’.
Her friends were not always appreciative of Diana’s performances – whether on stage or in private. After a party given by Lady Howard de Walden, Viola Parsons told her that she had looked ‘like a degraded peacock, that she had swayed and talked silly, that many had exclaimed in horror’. Diana was offended, especially since the two painters, Ambrose McEvoy and Philip Wilson Steer, reported that she had been the star of the party. Her morale was fully restored when Winston Churchill’s remarks were passed on to her: ‘The world has dealt very harshly with her, but she’s brave and hard-working and very misunderstood, and she’s of great worth in this sad world. Why the poor soldiers dying in agony breathe her name as they die. Clemmie, you must have her to lunch.’
The Howard de Waldens were hosts at a house-party in September 1917 at Chirk, a vast and dour castle in Wales in which they would put up their friends and a resident orchestra. The peace of the countryside was disturbed at 1 a.m. by a blaze of lights with rockets exploding round the house and the rattle of rifle-fire. Was it a zeppelin raid, an invasion? The guests met anxiously in Diana’s bedroom: Hugh Rumbold, in fancy dressing-gown, calling out melodramatically, ‘For God’s sake keep the women quiet!’; Margot Howard de Walden in hysterics; Wilson Steer maintaining it was a practical joke; Alan Parsons pouring scorn on so ridiculous an idea; Diana herself, ‘in glittering demi-toilette, rouged and powdered’, trying to telephone Lord French but getting no further than the village post-office. For three days the mystery was allowed to simmer, then it was admitted that in fact the whole thing had been a practical joke organized by some bored officers stationed nearby. A row followed, more explosive than the previous firework display. Viola Parsons, indignant at her husband being made to look a fool, protested that it was no surprise England was losing the war when such cads were running it. Lady Howard de Walden resumed her hysterics. Olga Lynn and Alan Parsons supported Viola and wanted to protest to the War Office. ‘Diana was gorgeous,’ recorded Cynthia Asquith, ‘generously acknowledging the excellence of the joke and redeeming the situation by her energy and address.’ If it amused the poor devils of soldiers, she maintained, it must be all right. In the end the subject was dropped and the party turned to table football.
Unpleasant piquancy was added to the joke when a few days later a stray bomb really did fall near Chirk, blowing in the windows of Diana’s bedroom. This was a freakish accident, but in London air-raids were relatively common. Diana disliked them greatly but felt it was the duty of the upper classes to set a good example. She was particularly put out when Smuts – ‘the biggest funk-stick of all’ – cried off dinner at Wimborne House at the last moment. He pleaded malaria but in fact, so Diana alleged, was afraid to venture out. ‘I personally have a dull permanent fear of raid-nights,’ she wrote to Patrick Shaw-Stewart, ‘luckily a little lessened by the appalling noise. The class difference in behaviour is tremendously obvious. Poor Edwin [Montagu] is the only throwback I have seen – he cannot eat or sleep and his hands go cold.’
Guy’s Hospital was bombed while she was there. She was just about to fall asleep when ‘those fucking maroons started. I darted into my uniform, expecting drill and every man his place; not a bit of it.’ After some moments’ indecision ‘a blowzy half-scared sister’ stuck her head in at the door and announced: ‘You can do just what you like, stay in bed, get up, anything.’ Diana was perplexed: she had no wish to be thought a coward, yet was quite as unwilling to show off by remaining exposed to unnecessary danger. Finally she attached herself to a group of obviously frightened nurses – reckoning they would be likely to behave most sensibly – and allowed herself to be led off to the massively constructed concrete nurses’ home. When the bomb fell many of the patients who were too ill to be moved were injured and some killed. Diana nursed the survivors and found them ‘proud as punch of their misfortunes, and inlaid all over with patines of brick and beams’.
The war ground inexorably on. In November 1917, Duff was playing cards when his sister Sybil asked him to come out for a moment. Irritated by her mysterious manner he complied, to be told that Edward Horner had been killed and that Diana was outside. He found her standing by the area rails, crying; and together they went off to her room in Arlington Street where they sat by the fire ‘talking a little and crying a lot. Edward meant so much in our lives.’ It took his death to bring home to Diana how much she had loved him; she told her brother John, ‘I used sometimes to long that conditions, even a catastrophe, might force me to marry him against my too sane judgement’.
Patrick Shaw-Stewart alone remained of those close friends who had gone off to fight at the outbreak of war. He lasted only another six weeks. On 18 December he wrote to say that he thought he might be sickening for measles, ‘but there may be something pleasant coming up for me about the second week in January which I should lose by being sick’. On 30 December he was shot through the head and died instantly. Diana was dismayed above all by her failure to experience the sharp pain that had followed the deaths of other friends. ‘First in my heart is an unceasing sigh for my blessed Edward,’ she told Duff, ‘so that although Patrick’s death is agonizing, I am truly numb to lesser woes. Or is it really that we are beasts and mind the loss of bodies that we loved and beauty that delighted us? How coldly I write – and yet you know that I loved Patrick, and had a greater sense of duty towards him than to anyone. I wish most terribly that you were with me to hold and melt me. I want melting. It is dreadful to feel like a frozen limb, incapable, paralysed, ugly too, very – and with forebodings of pain at the thaw.’
They were together again two days later, but time was running out for them. Duff knew that within a few months, perhaps even weeks, he would be sent to France. In February, when Viola Parsons was acting in Bournemouth, Duff and Diana followed her there for a week’s holiday. Scatters Wilson and Michael Herbert were technically part of the group, but did not intrude; Viola, in theory the chaperone, was at the theatre day and night. Lord Wimborne arrived and announced that he proposed to stay nearby at Canford and spend every day with Diana. He was assured that the Duchess of Rutland was to arrive the following day, Duff’s presence was concealed, and the unfortunate Viceroy was sent packing back to London. Duff and Diana spent almost their whole time alone together. ‘It was,’ wrote Duff in his diary, ‘a perfect life of companionship. I don’t think we either wearied for a moment of the other’s company. I certainly did not, but rather grudged every minute that we were separated, or accompanied by a third.’ When they got back to London Duff went to his flat to discover that his old brass bed had disappeared to be replaced by Diana’s present of an eighteenth-century wooden bed. ‘We felt like a couple returning from our honeymoon.’
At the beginning of April 1918 the departure date was fixed for two weeks ahead. They were driving round St James’s Park, ecstatically happy together, when they saw a body of men marching down the Mall. They were Grenadiers, Duff’s regiment, and they were on their way to France. ‘Immediately she burst into such a passion of tears that I have never heard from her. She cried that she could not bear me to go. I felt so sad and so proud; the moment was so beautiful and so dramatic’ He was due to leave on a Friday, then the draft was postponed till Monday, so they had a final weekend together. The last night Diana drove Duff to Chelsea Barracks. Monty Bertie, who was supposed to march the company to the station, was ‘too drunk to lead a horse to the water’, so Duff took his place. ‘I was so glad of this,’ Diana told Katharine Asquith. ‘The crashing band and drums through the deserted streets exhilarated him and made him gloriously happy and excited – but it was deathly to me. I went to the station. I had meant not to, but Duff begged – I think he wanted to be seen marching in – and there it was so terribly real and looked so terribly invraisemblable that it was all I could do not to run away. Darling Duff, I do think he is fairly content with his horrible lot, and that’s all the comfort I can find. The desolation is going to be dreadful.’
Looking around her she saw little reason to hope that her desolation would be short-lived. Asquith’s Government had fallen at the end of 1916 and Diana, who was fiercely loyal to her friends and viewed politics solely in the light of the personalities involved, could believe little good of the man who had replaced him. Asquith had been accustomed to poke fun at Lloyd George; he had told Venetia Montagu that he had once found him searching for Gallipoli on a map of Spain. Lloyd George was uncouth and common and had seemed singularly impervious to Diana’s charms. What could be expected of such a man? Yet what could be expected now of Asquith? Edwin Montagu had just got back from India and had painted a vivid picture of ‘the Old Bird – a vision of a great sack, an upright, righteous, patriotic, fine, worshipful sack, but shoved and flung about and goaded by Margot and McKenna and Runciman and all the Old Gang, and told to strike, be a man, look up.’ In Edwin’s opinion his epitaph should be: ‘Here lies the body of H. H. Asquith who married Margot Tennant but was Prime Minister for ten years.’
Diana was growing restless at Arlington Street. An air-raid briefly enlivened things – twenty planes overhead; indignant complaints from the Duchess, ‘It’s scandalous! Why do they let them get right over the house?’; men with fractured thighs who had not stirred for weeks leaping lithely from their beds; servants Diana had never seen milling around in the basement, ‘things from under sinks and stoves with light, blind eyes’ – but the savour soon faded. She bought two rabbits to keep on the roof but they fought instead of mating; an unpropitious augury, thought Duff. The Duke read in the newspapers that Diana had bought a pig and assumed resignedly that it would soon be established in her bedroom, but the alarm proved to be a false one. The Duchess sought to divert Diana by luring her down for a prolonged stay at Rowsley, ‘where she shall have a real rest, with no adorers with all their thousand demands and turnings-up’. Diana found the prospect unappealing.
After overt hostility or, at least, coolness for many months, the Duchess had suddenly warmed to Duff when he was on the point of leaving for the front, asking Diana what he would like by way of a present. Diana was not impressed by what she considered to be no more than a death-bed repentance – Duff’s, in the Duchess’s view, being the death. Relations with her mother had grown steadily worse over the previous two years. The Duchess had largely abandoned any attempt to control Diana’s daily life, but her passionate interest in her daughter’s doings grated on Diana’s nerves. Late in 1917 the Duchess decided that she had cancer. ‘I left her with mixed feelings,’ Diana told Duff. ‘Her death would make me straightaway free, brave and great, and yet now, impartially, I cannot face so much agony for her.’
Diana decided on flight. She would go back to Guy’s. The Duchess was outraged, swore that it would break her heart. Nursing at Guy’s was little better than walking the streets as a prostitute, ‘that awful Duff’ was at the bottom of it. Diana flared up and called her mother a tyrant, Letty intervened and argued that her sister was so overwrought that she would undoubtedly commit suicide if she were thwarted. In the end the Duchess gave way and by May 1918 Diana was back at Guy’s. She did not take the step lightly – ‘I shall loathe so much, not the hours, discomfort and life, but the dirt, suffering, smells and squalor’ – but she had somehow to distance herself from her family. In part, too, she felt that Duff was living in misery and danger and that she should not remain cosseted in luxury while he suffered; an urge to share his pain which would have been incomprehensible to Duff.
She stayed at Guy’s only a month, but it was a month that impressed her lastingly. She found herself for a time in a ward full of children of three and four who had been badly burnt. The current treatment was to pour hot melted wax on their wounds. Diana did the pouring or held the child down. ‘The pain is excessive and they scream like tortured, not babyish things.’ When Diana was not with the children she found herself in a ward of thirty senile incurables. Every morning she would lead one particularly pathetic old lady down to the Light Department for treatment. Once there, she left her with a group of syphilitic old men. ‘They are half-naked and more bled than bladders of shining lard. Their noses have apparently sucked all the blood from their bodies and scalps, for these glow like flames in a wax surround. Over them sit four pretty girls directing a blazing light upon them by way of cure. It’s enough to unhinge shaky minds.’
While she was at Guy’s, her old governess, Mrs Page, lost her beloved only son in battle. For eight weeks Diana braced herself to visit her nurse’s home and finally allowed her mother to drag her to the door, ‘sick with horror and embarrassment. Six times I shammed trying the bell while Mother watched me from the taxi. I drove home, relieved by the respite, and groused aloud that she should have been out. Isn’t it contemptible?’ Next day she returned alone and this time passed the door, but it cost her a sleepless night. In Guy’s she was forced to confront pain at its starkest. At least there was something practical she could do to relieve it, but her time in hospital fortified her in her belief that, if there were no such obvious contribution to be made, then the best thing to do about human misery was to pretend it was not there.
She left Guy’s with some regret. Hospital life, she concluded, was as much a waste of time as anything else, ‘but it certainly kids one into thinking one is indispensable, and home life after it is wanton and trivial’. She had been particularly dismayed by an operation for appendicitis performed by a beginner while the surgeon shouted advice. ‘No, no, not like that! There, you’ve hashed it.’ Poor patients who could not afford the surgeon’s fees had to submit themselves as training-grounds for the inexperienced. ‘Money is fine,’ Diana concluded.
‘Money is fine’ was one of her rules in life. She had no wish to be extravagantly rich, but she wanted the things that money could buy – comfort, clothes, holidays abroad, security – and she saw no need for over-sensitive scruples in getting what she wanted. If it pleased the rich to give her money or lavish presents, then it certainly pleased her to receive them. She would shamelessly exploit friends with wealth or power. Freedom with her friends’ money was linked to parsimony in the use of her own. Staying with Lord Rosebery at Dalmeny she begged the use of his Rolls-Royce to drive with a companion early one morning to a railway station some miles away. As they were leaving the house she disappeared for a moment, then reappeared furtively concealing a small package. Only when they were on the train and Diana rejected the railway breakfast did her companion discover what the package contained. Diana had stolen the kipper from the tray deposited briefly by a footman outside Lord Rosebery’s bedroom door. She told Duff that, when Thomas Beecham’s father, Joseph, was made a baronet, he had to pay £10,000 for the privilege. £4,000 went to Lady Cunard, £500 to Diana and the rest to Edward Horner to pay his debts. The feature about this curious story that particularly surprised Duff was that Edward’s debts should be so large.
Late in 1916 Lord Wimborne had been dismayed to see Diana getting on to an omnibus and next day sent her £100 in new, crackling notes. Diana longed to accept it but appealed to Duff and Edward Horner for advice. Duff refused to give his opinion; Edward had no such doubts and denounced her so fiercely for tolerating men like George Moore and Ivor Wimborne that he reduced her to tears. His view prevailed and the money was returned. ‘It was sorely needed,’ Diana wrote sadly, ‘but I had to do it, not in fear of him and his brag and his claims and quid pro quos, but for fear of that demon gratitude, that might blossom in my heart when next I am cornered … I argued with myself that gold should not carry such weight … but its value is tremendous and above all argument.’ The offer was repeated eighteen months later. This time Edward was dead and Duff laconically recorded in his diary: ‘Ivor gave Diana £100 of which she insisted in giving me £50. I took it.’
Another source of funds was Max Beaverbrook. ‘This strange attractive gnome with an odour of genius about him,’ as Diana described him in her memoirs, used regularly to hand out cheques for £100 to particularly favoured women – the criterion being only that they appealed to him on grounds of wit, beauty, or position. By the 1930s six women, including Diana and Venetia Montagu, received the press lord’s bounty at Christmas and on his birthday. Beaverbrook radiated wealth and power; at a whim he would transport his friends across the world in princely luxury, with a telephone call to his docile editors he could ensure that Diana’s latest exploit was trumpeted to the world or tactfully forgotten. He demanded from Diana nothing but her companionship, and she, beguiled by his charm and his ability to gratify her most outré wishes, was eager to give him what he wanted. She could sometimes treat him roughly, however. A friend seated behind them at the theatre heard Beaverbrook make some reference to Diana’s admirers. ‘A humble group,’ said Diana deprecatingly. ‘Oh don’t say that, I count myself as one.’ ‘I meant humble in my opinion, not in theirs.’
It was with Lord Beaverbrook that Diana first met Arnold Bennett, the author who had pilloried her in Pretty Lady. ‘How I loved my Arnold and how he loved my champagne,’ Beaverbrook wrote of him; a sad comment that was also unjustified, since Bennett too was captivated by his host’s daemonic charm. Bennett was apprehensive about how he would be received, but all went reasonably well – ‘some miscellaneous talk about life and women’. After the other guests had gone Beaverbrook asked Bennett what he thought of Diana. ‘I told him I thought she was unhappy, through idleness. He said he liked her greatly.’ Diana, though she found Bennett improved on further acquaintance, was at first not impressed by the novelist. Bennett argued that nothing one might notice was too mean to be written down. ‘I asked if there wasn’t surely a lot of illumination required in good writing – he said no, emphatically. I said anyway repetition of an unimportance might be avoided – he said no. I said you shouldn’t go on writing down a woman’s eyes as blue every time she walked on the scene, he said a woman’s face is not so important as her ankles, the which was exceedingly common, and the whole conversation stupid.’
Diana’s hunger for money was not inspired solely by self-indulgence. At the end of 1916 she had finally told Duff that she would marry him if they were rich enough. ‘There seems, alas, little prospect of that ever being the case,’ wrote Duff gloomily. He had not done much to improve the situation himself. Ten days before he had lost ‘a preposterous £1,660’ at chemin de fer; on the day of the diary entry he lost another £125. There were winnings too, but on the whole he was an unlucky or unskilful gambler. Diana constantly besought him to give up the pursuit. Each time he would promise to do so, only to succumb to temptation at the next opportunity. When she got news through Venetia Montagu of Duff’s second loss Diana cried the whole morning. ‘I felt most repentant and humiliated,’ wrote Duff sadly.
Several times Duff wrote from France to try to establish the amount of money she thought they would need before they could marry. He himself alternated between bouts of depression and more characteristic optimism. Diana wrote from the Angleseys’ house, Beaudesert, to describe the cloud of opulent misery that hung around her sister’s marriage. ‘Because the very rich are often unhappy,’ Duff commented, ‘we mustn’t make the common mistake of forgetting that the very poor always are. However, if we were married, we shouldn’t be very poor for long and would soon contrive, I feel sure, to be rich.’ The crux of the matter was the definition of ‘very poor’. Duff would have held acceptable penury to cover a small house in a relatively unfashionable part of London with no more than two servants, perhaps only one. Diana would happily have settled for this. To the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, however, it was inconceivable that such hardship should be inflicted on their daughter. ‘Two old people with three legs in the grave between them should surely never be allowed to hinder us,’ wrote Duff crossly, but Diana was still not prepared to defy her parents and embark on matrimony with no financial support beyond what Duff could offer. Somehow the Rutlands must be persuaded that Duff was acceptable as a son-in-law, and before there could be any hope of this the war must be over and Duff safely back in the Foreign Office or some more profitable occupation.
Meanwhile Diana was full of projects for making their fortune. What she was seeking was ‘a dignified money-making plan entailing the minimum of work’. First idea was for a nursing-home to be opened under the management of herself and Katharine Asquith – ‘No nursing-home fails, at least very few, and it seems to me that we start with tremendous advantages.’ A few weeks later came a still more ambitious vision, an aviation company for the carriage of passengers. For both these Beaverbrook was to put up the money; but though he was ready to lend the odd £100 whenever needed, he was too good a businessman to fling himself into serious enterprises without some assurance about their management. Diana did not inspire such confidence. He did, however, encourage her to invest in sugar futures and at his instigation she wrote to a commodity agent. The minimum investment required was £3,000, and in the end her courage failed her.
A flavour of desperation pervaded Diana’s thinking at this time. All her eggs were in one frail basket. If Duff were killed, what would be left to her? If he survived, would he ever make a husband acceptable in any worldly sense? At dinner at the Montagus, in June 1918, she found herself sitting between Lords Curzon and Hardinge. Each in turn asked her what she was going to do with her life.
My age claims the question, I suppose. It’s quite unanswerable. Curzon stuck to it in the obstinate way powerful brains do, blunt to sensitiveness, and cross-questioned me as to ambitious marriage. I renounced all ambitions and saw for the first time it was the truth. Hardinge’s breath was asphyxiating, so he had to be kept off the confidential touch. I lit a cigarette after dinner and outfaced Mother. I heard Edwin swearing it was the first time he had seen such a thing. After dinner I had a long, very confidential conversation with Lady Curzon. She was charming. She told me an amazingly characteristic fact about George. On marriage he made her sign a pledge that, in case of his death, she would never remarry.
But was to marry Duff to renounce ambition? As the letters flowed in from France, Diana became more and more convinced that he was a man of outstanding ability. With Duff in London his intemperance, infidelity, endless gambling, could cause dismay in even the most indulgent heart; when he was hundreds of miles away, in urgent danger, such peccadilloes were forgotten, only his charm, intelligence, high spirits, capacity for love were remembered. There was a didactic element in his letters which Diana, always greedy for knowledge, delighted in. ‘I must try to carry on your education even at this distance. In the first place you mustn’t put at the top of your letter “12 p.m.” because it signifies nothing. 12 can’t be p. or a. because it’s m. itself.’ A few days later he corrected her spelling of propaganda – ‘propregander’ in one paragraph and ‘propergander’ in the next.
But they were love-letters above all, and love-letters to satisfy the most demanding. ‘Didn’t Julian write “Life is Colour and Warmth and Light, And a striving evermore for these”? I always thought them the best lines in a rather over-praised and barbarous poem. And as colour and warmth and light become rarer and the possibility of their complete eclipse more thinkable, so much the more does one hunger and thirst for them and lie down and bask in them when they appear. You, my love, are the embodiment of all those three: the brightest colour, the sweetest warmth and the one dazzling light of my life.’ Coming from the bloody mire of Flanders such romantic rhapsodies had a ring of sincerity which might have been lacking in a letter despatched from St James’s Street to Arlington Street. Still more did they touch the heart when the words were scrawled in pencil on the way up to the front for what was to be a singularly fierce and almost Duff’s last battle:
… to tell you that I love you more today than ever in my life before. That I never see beauty without seeing you or scent happiness without thinking of you. You have fulfilled all my ambitions, realized all my hopes, made all my dreams come true. You have set a crown of roses on my youth and fortified me against the disaster of our days. Your courageous gaiety has inspired me with joy, your tender faithfulness has been a rock of security and comfort. I have felt for you all kinds of love at once. I have asked much of you and you have never failed me. You have intensified all colours, heightened all beauty, deepened all delight. I love you more than life, my beauty, my wonder.
Duff suggested that one day their letters might be brought together to provide a picture of the age. Alan Parsons perhaps might edit them. ‘It is I that must edit them,’ replied Diana proudly, ‘and if I must be old it is I that shall read them to the envious young, flauntingly, excitingly, and when they hear yours they’ll dream well that night, and waking crave for such a mythical, supreme lover.’
Alan Parsons wrote to Duff from Breccles to tell his friend how deeply Diana loved him. He was not sure how far Duff realized the strength of her feelings. ‘Sometimes when I have been happiest with her, and when I thought she was happy too, her face would suddenly sadden and she would say “I wish that Duffy was here.” I wish you would marry her, Duff.’ Duff told Diana of Alan’s letter, how in his reply he had told Parsons how far they were already committed to each other and that, ‘on your return, I intended to take you to my sleep and make you my joy, so at least there is one less to guard against, and at least one whom you can hold a candle past with unsecretive step’. Duff and Diana were perpetually amazed at the blindness of their friends to the love they felt for each other. At dinner at the Montagus’, Augustine Birrell asked what news there had been of Duff. Venetia said she had had one letter and asked if anybody else had heard. Some of their closest friends were there, yet none seemed to think it obvious that Diana would have been the most likely to hear. ‘With what dignity must we have lived before them,’ wrote Diana, ‘… with refinement and blatancy unseen.’
From Duff’s point of view the drawback to this was that Diana was still considered by others to be open to every kind of proposition. In August he was alarmed to hear that Scatters Wilson was the only unattached man at a house-party at Breccles, matched by Diana as the only spinster. Her letter reporting the party said suspiciously little about overtures, rattling of door-handles, midnight tussles. ‘But I suppose I am to believe that Scatters has taken a dislike to you … How hideous is my jealousy. I am ashamed of it.’ And so he should be, was Diana’s view. ‘Childish, old-fashioned, dirty little mind, cease your crudities!’ she retorted roundly. There was, could be, no other man in her life.
But all the resentment was not on one side. Stories reached Diana that Duff had been playing cards for high stakes while behind the lines; worse still, the failure of mail to be delivered for several days convinced her that she was forgotten. Her response was a wail of pain:
I am utterly wretched. All my misery has given way before a new agony, the proof that you don’t think of me. I fit all my actions to your whims, neither forgetting to date my letters, nor not to eat chocolates in the street. I beckon no new lovers, I take no pains to fetter the old, I even read for you and bone my meat, all this for someone who is as remote as God … Queen Elizabeth, when she dubbed knights, said ‘Be faithful, be brave, be fortunate’. I found it in a book yesterday and thought I would wish it to you tonight. It seems an irony now, when you prove faithless to me. I shall not write for a space.
She did, of course, the following morning indeed, when a crop of letters arrived. Duff had been in the front line and out on patrol the previous night. He had had to fix the password and had almost settled for ‘Diana’. ‘Would you like to think of fierce men crawling about no man’s land in the darkness and whispering your name to one another?’ Once Diana knew that Duff was actually in battle her imagination took flight. One night staying with friends near Beaconsfield she lay awake till 7 a.m., planning for the worst. Duff dead, there could be no future then. Duff seriously wounded. To whom should she first appeal: to A. J. Balfour, Beaverbrook, the Quartermaster General? ‘A threat of suicide if they opposed, and how it should convincingly be phrased.’ What to pack? From whom to borrow money? Max Beaverbrook was the answer. ‘My letter to Mother – all the wording of a frank and total confession.’ Diana was accustomed to weave tragedy from the thinnest threads of misadventure; with her lover in real peril her fantasies grew fearsomely. ‘No one but you among the righting millions is thought of so continuously or adored more.’
Duff’s luck held. He escaped injury, behaved with great gallantry, was singled out for his behaviour and eventually awarded the Distinguished Service Order, a rare achievement for a subaltern in the Guards. Diana thought it should have been a Victoria Cross and regretted only that General French was no longer Commander-in-Chief – ‘with me and Ghastly Moore to show him truth, your fame should have excelled’. She was immensely proud of Duff’s achievement, yet again quick to take offence when several days went by without a letter being received. She accused him of being so ‘puffed up and bewildered with conceit’ that all he could do was sit in solitude and think about himself. ‘Oh, little Miss Lackfaith,’ wrote Duff reproachfully, ‘Lady Jealousy, Countess Petulant, Marchioness of Pouts, Duchess of Malice, Queen of my Heart – God bless you, God kiss you since I cannot.’
The war was almost over. It was soon clear that Duff would never go into battle again. Instead he contrived a few days’ leave in Paris. For Duff Paris was the earthly paradise, city of infinite and subtle dissipation. He wrote to Diana, asking her how much he could or should tell her of what he did there. Her reply was the last letter he received from her before they were reunited:
Tell me as much or as little as you enjoy to confess. You know that I want your happiness above my own. From your arrival in Paris I absolve you from all letters, sincerity, superficial thoughts. ‘Rush into the folly,’ baby, darling, tell me nothing or all, I shall love you the same. If I was forced to voice a whim it would be (a) that you absented yourself from felicity with your own caste; (b) that with the help of every known device you keep your body clean for me; (c) that you do not gamble.
It was a generous letter, sincere beyond doubt; strange, perhaps, coming from a woman so much in love. It set the pattern for a lifetime.