It is a convention in the British Foreign Service that a retiring head of mission should not visit his former post until a year or so after his departure. Life, it is felt, is difficult enough for a new ambassador without the previous incumbent in the background observing that that is not how things were done in his day. The Coopers accepted that this was desirable in principle but felt that in their case the practice must be different. Most retiring ambassadors had a home awaiting them in England; they only had the house at Bognor, now rapidly disappearing beneath the suburban tide. Most ambassadors had no especial stake in the country in which they had last served; they had Chantilly, which the French Government was prepared to let them keep. Duff would pay far less in taxes, cling on to many of his diplomatic privileges, enjoy the status of an ‘ancien ambassadeur’; it seemed to them inconceivable that they should abandon all this to return to England, where politics seemed closed to them and no other job immediately offered.
Within a few weeks of their departure from the Gare du Nord, Duff and Diana therefore found themselves packing for the return journey. It was hardly a propitious start to their new life. By the evening before their departure from London Duff was already fuming over the barriers which officials were erecting in his path. Diana and Louise de Vilmorin disturbed his concentration with their conversation and ‘he lost his temper, head and good manners and flounced to bed, red with rage and refusing to wish Lulu goodnight’. Diana, as white as Duff was red, soon followed, but was so indignant that she refused to speak to him. ‘I know I’m spoilt,’ said Duff contritely, ‘but I am sorry.’ ‘One can’t cure hurts with apologies always,’ retorted Diana, and they went to sleep in grim silence.
Next morning was still worse. Either through fear or rage, Duff did not call Diana till eight, and the Golden Arrow left at nine. Pandemonium ensued, porters sitting on trunks that would not close; Diana, almost naked, barking instructions at anyone within earshot; parcels in one direction, cases in another, this to be sent to Belvoir, that to be left with Lady Cunard. Some ferocious telephoning delayed the train and they scraped aboard. Duff was more than ever in the dog-house. ‘I let him out on the SS Invicta. We couldn’t arrive in Paris like two sticks.’
The first night back in Paris was an awful presage of the future. ‘Je me sens un peu perdue‚’ she admitted to Gaston Palewski. ‘Pauvre Diana,’ he replied, and a great lump welled up in her throat. They had borrowed the Military Attaché’s car all day but had sent it away in the evening. When they decided to go out to a restaurant for dinner they went on foot. It was cold and raining. The first restaurant was closed. So was the second. They were wet before they found one that was open and wetter still by the time they got back to the flat Loel Guinness had lent them in the Rue de Lille. ‘When we were in bed I found that Diana was crying,’ Duff noted in his diary.
She is really unhappy about the fall from grandeur and the evening’s walk brought it home to her. I was deeply touched and surprised. I have many weaknesses but have never cared for being grand. I liked living at the Embassy, which she made very comfortable, but I always felt as though I was living in a hotel. I suppose that Diana enjoyed the position and enjoyed entertaining, though she often complained of it at the time. One always enjoys doing what one does well. To me the restoration of liberty makes up for everything, but I am sad that she should be sad.
It was several weeks before they moved back into Chantilly and even then they were met by a chaos of packing-cases, books stacked on the floor, pictures leaning against the walls, all the old copper pans covered with verdigris, 799 bottles of champagne with ten magnums and one rehoboam to be stacked in the white wine cellar, servants absent or incompetent, the only food in the house porridge and tinned pilchards. Even the crocuses seemed bowed and mutilated, ‘none of that looking joyously to a new heaven of a million straight little throats that one gets in St James’s Park’. Instead of being stimulated by the challenge, Diana was depressed; for the first few days she was frequently in tears. ‘I do so hate the maîtresse de la maison life,’ she complained to John Julius. ‘I like to be a Queen or a tramp.’ She was bored, she was fretful, she felt herself ill-used. The scene was set for conflict with those whom she felt had supplanted her, ‘the horrible Harveys’.
Ambassadors traditionally disapprove of their successors; with the wives disapproval is often elevated to hatred. Usually, however, an ocean or at least a frontier divides the rivals; the previous incumbent is either savouring the delights of retirement in the Home Counties or organizing coffee-mornings in Tegucigalpa. Diana was on the spot, rancorously disposed, ready to view any alteration to her Embassy as a slight, surrounded by friends who delighted in passing on or inventing offensive comments which the Harveys were alleged to have made about the old rægime. Relations would have been difficult between the Coopers and any new arrivals; with the Harveys they were quickly strained to and beyond breaking-point. Diana considered Lady Harvey dull, insipid, bourgeois; Lady Harvey felt Diana to be a frivolous and flashy wastrel. Each saw the bad side of the other and made no attempt to appreciate the qualities. To apportion blame would be a fruitless task, but greater understanding on either side might have avoided a world of chagrin. It would also have deprived Parisian society of a most enjoyable scandal; one which Lady Harvey hated and Diana more than half enjoyed.
From a few days after her return to Paris Diana began to conduct raids on the Embassy to collect items of furniture which she claimed belonged to her. Lady Harvey would notice a chair or chandelier had vanished, ask where it was and be told that Lady Diana had called for it that morning. Then came the day of the Harveys’ first grand luncheon-party. Diana chanced to call at a quarter to one in search of more of her possessions. The guests arrived to find her in the hall. ‘Chère Diane! How lovely to see you here. We didn’t know you were coming to lunch.’ ‘Oh I’m not invited. We never are. You’ll find the Harveys up there somewhere,’ with a gesture upstairs. The guests clustered around her while upstairs the Harveys waited and wondered. Diana extended her attention to the staff as well. The chauffeur left to become Duff’s valet. ‘He has never valeted but it’s such a pleasure he wants to leave the Embassy for the Chantillians.’ Diana, of course, was quite taken aback when the proposal was made to her. ‘True, I’d seen him yesterday when I went to collect some leavings and asked him if he knew of anyone of about his age who would like the job. True, I elaborated on the charm of the situation – good food, foreign travel, smart car, etc. etc.’
Everything Lady Harvey did was analysed and triumphantly ridiculed. She was said to have told the Bishop of Tanganyika that the library was a beautiful room considering the books. Could illiteracy be more clearly proven? She exhibited Diana’s Napoleonic bathroom with the comment that her predecessor had decorated it because of her love for North Africa. Could idiocy be more complete? She ‘hung a sparse row of her own pictures round the green salon’s walls as though for sale; a Segonzac and a Derain etc.’ Some might have thought that even a sparse row of Segonzacs and Derains was an enviable possession, but Diana would have scoffed at a gallery of Rembrandts or Leonardos. It was, however, somewhat provocative of Lady Harvey to change the colour of the carpets and curtains in Duff’s library. This exquisite room had been designed by Charles de Bestigui, filled with Duff’s books and donated to the Embassy: ‘that those ignorant, execrably tasted Harveys can have had the nerve to touch it entirely passes forgiveness’.
Diana’s tendency to abuse the Harveys to anyone who would listen could cause embarrassment. Lees Mayall joined the Embassy as First Secretary, an old friend of the Coopers but very properly loyal to his Ambassador. By the time he arrived things had gone so far that it was tacitly accepted no member of the Embassy staff would visit Chantilly. Repeatedly he refused invitations, then one day Diana arrived uninvited at his house when mutual friends were staying there. She ate and drank nothing but talked merrily. As she left she said: ‘Now I’ve been to your house, you must stop refusing to come to mine. I promise not to say a word against the Harveys.’ From then on the Mayalls went regularly to Chantilly and Diana kept her word. All the same, they thought it best not to mention their visits at the Embassy. Then came the time that Oliver Harvey, who had hitherto refused to ask the Duke of Windsor to the house, was ordered by Churchill to repair the omission. He obeyed under protest and showed his feelings by inviting only members of his staff to meet the guests of honour. The Duchess walked round the circle in a frigid silence; then at last came to a face she knew and cried: ‘Lees, how lovely; that was fun at Chantilly last Sunday, wasn’t it?’
Royal visitors provided a tasty bone to be fought over between the rival establishments. The first time Princess Margaret visited Paris, Diana, who had not been invited to the Embassy, left word that she was at Chantilly and would love a visit if the Princess had time. The message was not delivered and when Diana saw her at the opening of the British Hospital, she said that she had felt certain it had gone astray – ‘this last was not said naughtily. I meant in the general brouhaha it was natural.’ To Diana’s great satisfaction, Princess Margaret insisted on rearranging her schedule to include a visit to Chantilly. Nobody was there except the Coopers and Nancy Mitford. ‘Off home she drove, gay, and I’m sure delighted with the outing. It had the tang of the Forbidden. She had clearly been genuinely appreciated by disinterested people – there was fun and the three hosts were in a sense famous. Eric [Duncannon] told someone that she had said it was what she had most enjoyed in Paris.’
Next time the Princess came to Paris, this time for a Hospital Ball, Diana arranged an evening at Chantilly – ‘not more than twenty or thirty, all young, in order to keep away my frog friends and Maudie Harvey’. Cecil Beaton was there – hardly notable for his youth – and Greta Garbo; John Julius played the guitar, two American folk-singers provided a cabaret, Princess Margaret sang and played the piano for an hour, the park was floodlit and the party ended at 4 a.m. eating roasted chestnuts round a brazier. It could hardly have been more successful, and like most of the best parties, its informality concealed careful organization. Months before Diana had written to Cecil Beaton: ‘The point of this letter is to beg you and Greta to come and stay with me when Princess Margaret visits Paris. The Hospital Ball she may like or hate, but I’m throwing a party on the 22nd.’
Princess Elizabeth visited Paris in May 1948, shortly after Diana had heard the dread news of the Harveys’ plans for the Embassy library. ‘She was really deeply hurt,’ wrote Duff. ‘She thinks it was done out of spite and swears she won’t go to the reception for Princess Elizabeth.’ She was still more put out when Oliver Harvey cut several names off the list of guests submitted by the French authorities on the grounds that they had been collaborators, including two who had regularly visited the Embassy under Duff. Curiosity and propriety triumphed over indignation, however, and in the end she went, making her point by the chilliness of her manner; ‘the frights got the frozen mitt, not a smile broke from me’. Needless to say, everything seemed badly done: the Borghese candle-sticks had been suppressed and no candles were used; ‘the gloomy hosts stood looking ghastly under the deforming light of a much brighter candelabra’; the band was inaudible; the flowers were arranged by somebody imported from Constance Spry; it was all safe, unimaginative, dull. Duff was less discriminating or more objective: ‘I am bound to admit it was a good party and well done.’
The feud soon became part of Parisian folklore and many of the more colourful incidents related to it are apocryphal, or at least exaggerated almost beyond recognition. Nancy Mitford, prominent in the British colony in Paris, took particular pleasure in fanning the flames and dining out on the stories that arose from it. In Don’t Tell Alfred she wrote a novel about a former ambassadress in Paris who secretly took up residence in a gatehouse of the Embassy, thereby causing confusion and chagrin to the new incumbents. The incoming ambassador and his wife bore little resemblance to the Harveys but Lady Leone was very evidently modelled on Diana. Miss Mitford sketched out this character to Diana while still working on the book. ‘As it might be me?’ asked Diana doubtfully. ‘Yes, tee hee hee hee!’ was the reply. Diana certainly did nothing to discourage the enterprise and paid for her failure when the Evening Standard published an article alleging that she knew all about the book in advance, had given her permission and had even suggested some refinements. The Coopers, said the article, had set up a rival Embassy and split the British colony into squabbling fragments. Diana contemplated a libel action but was advised to forget the matter.
For Nancy Mitford it was an amusing game, for Lady Harvey unmitigated pain. For Diana it had something of both elements. She enjoyed baiting the Harveys, criticizing their activities, frustrating their projects. Many people would have said that the vendetta was a light-hearted affair for her, a stimulating entertainment. The real depth of her bitterness was shown only when Duff died and Diana flew back to Paris with his body. Lees Mayall was sent out to the airport with messages of sympathy and promises of help from the Ambassador. Diana emerged for an instant from her shocked apathy. ‘You can tell those bloody Harveys to go to hell!’ she snapped.
*
Meanwhile life at Chantilly was settling down. Diana took it for granted that bankruptcy lay ahead. An interview with her solicitor confirmed her fears. ‘We’ll not be able to live in France,’ she told John Julius, gazing far into a dismal future, ‘and I and Papa will drive to your home to ask for shelter, and your beastly tart-wife will be like Goneril and Regan merged and bang the flimsy door in our nose, and we’ll get a hulk on Bosham marshes as Peggotty did before us, and Papa will make love to the paid help and I will be Mrs Gummidge.’ Duff saw the same solicitor and emerged altogether more ebullient. His writing was earning him several thousand pounds a year. He joined the board of Wagons Lits. Alexander Korda appointed him Chairman of the Paris subsidiary of London Film Productions at £2,500 a year – ‘I like and trust Korda,’ Duff not surprisingly noted. They paid practically no taxes. ‘It all seems to me quite satisfactory but Diana never stops worrying.’
Cecil Beaton took Greta Garbo to Chantilly while the Coopers were in England. ‘Even in her absence she loved Diana; for she said she must be a woman who loves rural things.’ Memories of wartime Bognor had inspired Diana to repeat her farming triumphs. The first her friends knew of it was when Chips Channon heard what sounded like quacking coming from his extravagantly sumptuous blue and silver Amalienburg dining-room in Belgrave Square. Investigating, he found twelve ducklings which Diana had put there to rest before taking them on to Chantilly. A few days later a cow and four pigs were also on their way to France. They were supposed to arrive at 10 p.m. and Diana spent the whole night fully dressed in a fever of excitement. In the event, they did not appear till breakfast on the following day. The pigs lacked charm but Diana was quickly seduced by the cow, who was ‘very small, very thin and as gentle as a sleepy baby – tiny undangerous horns, a very pale face with Panda eyes’.
The routine of life at Chantilly quickly adjusted to accommodate the farmyard. A dinner-party was disrupted when the mother-goat gave birth to kids, the Beits were almost sent packing back to London in disgrace when they let the cow escape from the orchard and Diana got badly stung pursuing it through a nettle-patch. The French shared Diana’s pessimism about the future, which did not suit her at all; what she wanted was cheerfulness against which she could react. They made a lot of hay and, as she tottered under a heavy load towards the stack, she asked Quarmi, the gardener, whether he thought the cow would like it. ‘Je ne le crois pas,’ he answered gloomily. Quarmi had a fine line in the ghoulish, mitigated by a cleft palate which made most of what he said unintelligible. One of the few episodes which Diana understood in full was his account of his daughter’s visit to hospital with a fibroid in her womb. Diana reassured him that the condition was not serious, common in women, one she had endured herself. ‘Oui, mais Madame n’urine pas noir,’ said Quarmi with some relish. ‘On peut uriner jaune, rouge et même bleu, mais Madame n’a pas uriné noir.’
Diana was determined that the wedding bells must chime for Caroline, the sow. She was loaded into a trailer and taken to a neighbouring farm where there was said to be a suitable mate. Frustration; ‘a furious daughter, the kind that will grow up a tricoteuse of the Communists’, shouted from an upstairs window that the hog had been castrated. On they went to a second farm, only to find that this hog had been despatched to a happer rootling-ground. The third farm belonged to an ogre whose first words were ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum’ but who eventually admitted that he had a fine boar. It proved too fine for Caroline. The farmer cast one scornful look at the poor creature and ruled that her teats were badly hung, she was undoubtedly diseased and sterile. The only hope was that she might make acceptable pork for Christmas. ‘We got home in darkness, having given poor piggy a tiring, costly and abortive wedding trip.’
Diana’s English friends were relieved that she was resorting once more to this healthy and relatively harmless pastime. She, for her part, longed for their visits but found that they did not always make life easier. The comings of Evelyn Waugh, in particular, tended to be beset by fearful rows. Diana once went to the airport to meet him, having deposited her other guests at a circus in the town. At the interval she was back, looking gloomy. ‘Evelyn’s plastered,’ she reported. There he was, in cloth cap and loud tweeds, clinging on to a guy-rope so as to remain on his feet. As the rope was at an angle of 45°, so was Evelyn Waugh. Diana took him home and shut him in his room to sleep it off, but by the time the party got back from the circus he had escaped and was annoying Lady Juliet Duff, who was trying to do the crossword.
Next day he was still drunkish. Duff endured him with sinister calm until, at lunch, he made some offensive remark about Mountbatten. This provoked an explosion: ‘How dare a common little man like you who happens to have written one or two moderately amusing novels, criticize that great patriot and gentleman? Leave my house at once!’ Evelyn Waugh left the room but not the house, and next day told Rupert Hart-Davis, a fellow-guest: ‘Don’t really like Cooper. Very fond of his wife.’ For a time he kept away from Chantilly, but Diana delighted in his company. Once he took her to the Ritz in London, even though she assured him that it was no longer what it had used to be. He asked for a wine list.’ “Red or white?” said the waiter. “What do you mean?” said Evelyn. “Well, you can have a carafe of either,” said the waiter. Before Evelyn had time for his stroke, he added “O, I see, you wants it bottled.” “Is there no wine-waiter or wine list?” gasped Evelyn. All this a great joy for me. Poor Evelyn doesn’t know and is too proud to realize his ignorance and learn.’
They went together to stay with Somerset Maugham at Cap Ferrat. Alan Searle, who was filling the role of hostess, offended Diana by giving Waugh the better of the two rooms and offering him rather than her a sprig of heliotrope. Waugh had vitamin tablets in his bathroom, while Diana merely had aspirins. Evelyn Waugh called Somerset Maugham ‘Doctor’ every other sentence and read his new novel aloud for more than two hours after dinner. Diana did not find him altogether easy to travel with. He objected to her habit of dropping in at every hotel where she had ever stayed to gossip with the proprietor, and hated having things pointed out: ‘“Don’t miss the swans,” sort of thing; so it’s sealed lips when I see the spring’s pageant.’
When he began to come to Chantilly again things for a time went more smoothly, though abuse still flew on occasions. Cecil Beaton heard ‘Diana and Evelyn being appallingly rude to one another – really vilely, squalidly rude’. Diana took particularly vigorous offence one day when the maid was ill and she ‘in my dressing-gown, barefeet and nightcap’, took Evelyn Waugh breakfast in bed. He surveyed the tray and commented disapprovingly that it ‘wasn’t properly furnished’. ‘Well, I let him have it. I said “Really Evelyn, it’s too much to put on such an act!” and I gave him the full benefit of everything that I’d been bottling up about his pretentiousness. It really rankled with him, but it’ll do him good!’ Waugh was disconcerted but not discomfited. ‘Goodness the Coopers were crazy,’ he reported to Lady Mary Lygon. ‘Both Sir Alfred and Lady Diana fell into the most alarming rages. No self-control at all, it comes from living with the volatile frogs.’
A few months before Duff died he had another flamboyant set-to with Evelyn Waugh. ‘Duff has a well-known weakness for uncontrolled rudeness,’ wrote Diana to Waugh. ‘We all have grave weaknesses. Baby’s is melancholia and cowardice. You have some too.’ Waugh left in dudgeon, was persuaded to return and passed a further happy week at Chantilly. After he had left, Randolph Churchill showed him a letter which Diana had written, describing the row with Duff. Waugh, offended, wrote Diana a letter ‘coldly aimed to hurt – arrows heavy as lead, curare-tipped’. She was deeply distressed. ‘Baby is not rude,’ she wrote, ‘but both men in this story are exceptionally rude in their cups. Since recriminations are the note, neither Baby nor Duff would have told all and sundry that their hosts were trying to poison them. She will not write again, it’s too painful to face the leaden answers devoid of understanding or love.’ For once the element of farce that pervaded her rows with Evelyn Waugh was lacking – ‘Oh, Evelyn, Evelyn, how can you have done it to me?’ A reconciliation of a sort was patched up, but it was not till after Duff’s death that they really renewed their friendship.
Graham Greene was another author who visited Chantilly at this period. She greatly admired his writing and was fascinated by his tormented relationship with his faith. ‘I think it’s guilty love which has put him all out,’ she concluded; hence The Heart of the Matter which had just been published. He had been to Padre Pio’s mass but had feared to talk to him afterwards in case his life might be altered as a result. Hugo Charteris bombarded him with questions: ‘Would you welcome death, Mr Greene?’ Mr Greene admitted that he would, though Diana could not decide whether he was prompted by alcoholic depression or a wish to be free of Charteris’s interrogation. ‘I think Graham Greene is a good man possessed of a devil,’ Diana concluded, ‘and that Evelyn is a bad man for whom an angel is struggling.’
When remonstrating with Evelyn Waugh for picking quarrels, Diana complained that she had only a handful of men friends left in the world, one of them ‘the frog who people can’t endure’. The intolerable frog was Paul Louis Weiller, ‘Poor Louis’ as Diana habitually referred to him, a man of great wealth, power and generosity. Cecil Beaton remarked shrewdly that Diana combined a gift for using her friends and the amenities they had to offer, with a complete lack of selfishness. Paul Louis Weiller exemplified this admirably. Diana relied on him for food, drink, every kind of entertainment; he was constantly making available his Rolls-Royce or one of his many houses – ‘I’ve cost him a pretty penny and he can afford it’ – and yet in return she defended him loyally against his legion of enemies, gave him real affection and procured him the entrée to many places where he would otherwise never have penetrated. Thirty years later, when he had almost ceased to be of use to her, she was still writing to the British Ambassador to get him invited to a party for the Queen Mother. She was not in the least embarrassed by him, or his generosity. He gave her a mink coat from Dior worth – in 1951 – £4,500: ‘I like people to know he gave it to me,’ wrote Diana. ‘I consider it does him credit.’ ‘The coat of shame’, she christened it. It proved something of a liability. ‘It entails being chained to it, insuring it, not sitting on it, having to have better hats and gloves and bags, always thinking it’s lost or stolen, storing it all summer, ultimately being murdered for it.’
Her gratitude for Paul Louis Weiller’s attentions was the greater since she felt that she had been to some extent dropped by her French friends since she had left the Embassy. ‘I know something of the sag in one’s social shares when you’ve no longer a Government background,’ wrote Ronald Storrs, ‘but I shouldn’t have thought that would have affected them.’ Nor did it to any great extent. The Coopers remained an ornament at any party and only the drearier official invitations no longer reached them. But there was a big difference between dropping in at the salon vert to see your friends and have a drink with the British Ambassadress and trailing all the way out to Chantilly to do the same thing with Diana Cooper. Diana had vaguely assumed that la bande would remain faithful and reconvene in fresh surroundings. That they did not was due more to geography than to lowered status, but they did not, and the fact distressed her. Even so close a friend as Louise de Vilmorin came far less often to see her. She was confirmed in her dislike of the French. In Panegyric Ronald Knox had suggested that the Reformation destroyed good fellowship. Diana disputed this hotly. ‘There’s good fellowship in the U.S. There are no nastier people than the frogs who were little affected by it, while the Scandinavians are comparatively pure; less wily than wops, less cruel than Spaniards.’ Duff preferred the company of his English cronies, and more and more Chantilly became a redoubt of foreigners; cosmopolitan certainly, but where the French rarely went unless soaked in alien culture.
Diana was lonely, and the state was one for which she was ill-equipped. Three years in the social turmoil of Paris had weakened her aptitude for amusing herself. ‘I have no life, no beckoning delights, no admirers (there’s the rub),’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Duff scribbles and I’m left to Mrs Dale’s Diary or the Benvenuto Cellini-ism of the Third Programme. There is no sap in nature, or in me – not in pain or acute melancholy, I languish dully, not happily resigned.’ This vision of the housewife solacing her long hours with soap-operas from the BBC was a caricature of the reality. By the standards of most fifty-six-year-old wives of retired husbands her life was one of spectacular gaiety, crammed with incident and colour. But it was not what she was used to, and she found no comfort in the reflection that the lives of others were drab compared to hers. Duff was puzzled and a little irritated by her appetite for society, complaining that three nights running she had dragged him to Paris when he would rather have been dining peacefully at home. Diana knew that her restlessness was irrational but could not control it: ‘I’m bored, John Julius. Sad, isn’t it? This is not a life I could ever tolerate – from early childhood I was always praying for excitement.’
In The Loved and Envied, Enid Bagnold presented what was intended to be a faithful portrait of Diana in old age. Diana was gratified by the attention, and told the author it was a striking likeness, but when she came to consider the noble, serene shadow which Enid Bagnold had discovered, she wondered whether a few more sittings might not have yielded a truer picture. Ruby Maclean is ‘almost my opposite,’ she told her son, ‘with no fears and frailties, panics and pains’. Panics and pains were particularly evident in the first few months after their return to France. Boredom and discontent became translated into imaginary illnesses. By the summer of 1948 Duff was worried enough about her state to pack her off to an English doctor, who recommended a plethora of drugs. Diana, who distrusted all drugs except those she prescribed herself and procured illegally, had little faith in his proposals.
She pinned her faith on a man who cured anything except cancer and V.D. – the latter being about the only disease from which she never thought she suffered – by a system of footbaths. To supplement this she also consulted the immensely aged Dr Salvanoff, Professor of the Universities of Moscow, Paris and Berlin. To follow his course in its entirety would have been a full-time job: seven pills to be taken half an hour before every meal; constant hot baths with a secret fluid added; private parts thickly greased with vaseline before immersion; hot water bottles to be laid on the liver for forty-five minutes three times a day. Meanwhile, the chauffeur, Jean, was vomiting continually. ‘I do think servants should not be ill,’ wrote Diana peevishly. ‘We have quite enough illness ourselves without them adding to the symptoms.’
‘She hates old age and she fears death,’ wrote Duff in his diary. ‘I wish I could help her but I don’t seem to be able to.’ She was distressed that she could not do everything she had been used to, and refused to admit that this was so until the facts compelled her to face them. She fought old age by taking greater pains to preserve her beauty. The Evening Standard gleefully reported that she was having a face-lift; she had visited a plastic surgeon before going to the clinic; she wore dark spectacles and her face was swathed in light bandages; ‘then my age, which I resent (stupidly) and a bit about my rheumatic legs – altogether too horrible and malicious’. The worst of it was that she was not having a face-lift anyway: ‘the spectacles were put on to hide a cyst, the bandages my poor little bald-pate nightcap.’ She met Sam White, the Evening Standard representative in Paris and, more in sorrow than anger, complained about this unfair concentration on her doings. ‘I suppose if I had piles you’d put that in,’ she concluded sadly. It was not as if she was habitually preoccupied with her appearance. Often she looked strikingly unkempt. Malcolm Muggeridge saw her at Ann Roth-ermere’s ‘looking quite extraordinary with blond wig and sinewy bare legs, a more prosperous version of demented women to be seen on benches in Regent’s Park muttering and going through wastepaper baskets in the early morning’.
Drugs, footbaths, face-lifts may have contributed, but the main reason for her regaining her spirits was that she grew used to her new condition. By the autumn of 1948 she was herself again. The cure seems to have started in Milan when she appeared in a vast hat and sunglasses and was hailed as Greta Garbo. A week or two later she told Duff that she felt really happy. ‘Pathetically, she said, “I feel like other people: you can’t imagine how heavenly it had asked her to bathe with him. ‘Accustomed all her life to such attention, she has been missing it.’ Certainly she blossomed on this holiday. At Aix they spent a riotously successful night with Winston Churchill. Mrs Churchill had left that afternoon for London; ‘I am afraid her absence increased the gaiety of the evening,’ noted Duff. Churchill had recently been taught Oklahoma and abandoned a quarter of a century’s addiction to six-pack bezique. He played very badly but with enormous relish till the early hours of the morning. Diana’s confidence, never more than frayed, had now returned in full. ‘I keep the table in roars,’ she told John Julius. ‘I’m considered the wittiest, funniest, most original angel that ever visited this dull earth. It puts up the morale splendidly.’
The fact that Duff so obviously welcomed old age did much to soothe her. He was entirely without regrets for lost consequence, enjoying his writing, relishing his liberty, a model of elderly contentment. ‘Duff’s Sir Deaf Cooper now,’ wrote Diana, regretting the way in which he would lose track of a general conversation, then catch at some half-heard remark and join in with an irrelevance. But Duff did not seem to care a scrap, so why should she? Most important of all, he loved her and depended on her as much as ever. On the twenty-ninth anniversary of their wedding he presented her with a set of verses:
Fear not, sweet love, what time can do
Though silver streaks the gold
Of your soft hair, believe that you
Can change but not grow old.
Though since we married, twenty-nine
Bright years have flown away,
Beauty and wisdom, like good wine,
Grow richer every day.
We will not weep, though spring be past,
And autumn’s shadows fall,
These years shall be, although the last,
The loveliest of all.
The poetry may not have been his finest, but he never wrote from a fuller heart.
Duff’s satisfaction was still greater when, after the return of the Conservatives in 1951, he was made a peer. To him this meant not only a coveted honour but also a forum for his speechifying in the House of Lords. For Diana it seemed only retrograde. All her adult life she had been Lady Diana, daughter of a duke. Now she was to submerge her identity in that of a mere viscount. She suggested hopefully that Duff might style himself ‘Diana’ or even ‘Ladydiana’. Lord Ladydiana would sound nice. Duff countered with ‘Marrington’. John Julius and Diana scoffed at this leaden flight of fancy and came forward with Unicorn, Lackland, Sansterre, Erewhon, St Firmin, St James, St George, St Virgil, Templer. Still more adventurous, Diana tried Love-a-duck and Almighty. Duff was not impressed. ‘One can make a joke but one can’t be one, not from choice anyway,’ he observed cogently. He brooded, then, without consultation, settled for Norwich. ‘Of all names Norwich is the most horrible,’ wrote Diana in dismay. ‘Porridge’ would have been better, a word which seemed to her to be spelt much the same way. ‘“Man-in-the-moon” better still, though coarse, me being Diana the moon.’ ‘A little Norwich is a dangerous thing,’ was Duff’s retort to this barrage of wit, but he failed to convert his wife to the beauty of her new style. She always disliked the name, was surly when congratulated on what she considered her demotion, and swiftly followed Duff’s ennoblement with an announcement in The Times that she wished to retain her former name and title.
She hankered after England, though her visits seemed increasingly connected with the deaths or diseases of her friends. She went to Breccles to visit Venetia Montagu, who was given only a few weeks to live by her doctor. At the end of the First World War and for fifteen years thereafter, Breccles had been a favourite resort – a place of comfort, beauty, gaiety, shoots, fireworks, picnics, rest. ‘This last visit was like an old woman looking in a glass and seeing her youth’s radiance. Very agonizing.’ Emerald Cunard died the same year. After her first heart-attack she told Diana that it was ‘extremely pleasant – one was floating among clouds’, and her end now seemed equally peaceful. She left Diana a third of her estate, but this was to amount to little beyond debts. Diana did not mourn her dying; it came, she knew, at the proper time, and in the proper place. It was right to die where one had spent most of one’s life. She knew that she, too, wanted to die in England.
Duff’s new jobs involved much travel; to Venice for the film festivals, to various European capitals for meetings of the Board of the Wagons Lits. Diana’s sight-seeing remained as voracious as ever. In Rome, when she went with the Altrinchams to the Vatican, she was outraged to find it closed. They battered their way past successive Swiss Guards, then met what seemed an immovable barrier. She recounted her eventual triumph to John Julius:
I said Count Sforza [the Foreign Minister] had given me a name to ask for in case of trouble and I’d forgotten it. No good. I asked them to telephone the Count. They saved me by saying the Foreign Office would be shut. I told them to imagine I was Winston Churchill. What would they say then? They said ‘Chiuso’. It took the old trick of us not moving and the three of us forming an obstacle in a bottleneck to get us moved on to the next barrier. Suddenly tedium is stronger than guardianship, the morale gives, the pass is sold. The same thing at the second gate, this time with a senior man in civvies. I got as far as a laughing. ‘Siamo molto, molto importante’. This shook him into telephoning to some higher power or principality, which produced a tiny little priest carrying the key of the Sistine Chapel.
Eventually another priest appeared, who took them into parts of the Vatican not normally seen by the public and gave them tea and biscuits. It was a most satisfactory demonstration of the fact that her powers were not yet fading. But, ‘You can see why I was glad Papa hadn’t come.’
Her morale needed some such boost, for on a short visit to Holland earlier that year with her son, she had been disconcerted to find that her knee hurt and she grew tired. Duff wished that she would recognize she was growing older and could not do all she used to do. Diana would not accept defeat so meekly. Defiantly, she went to a monster exhibition of Flemish art and did not skimp a single picture. The European-American hand, she decided sadly, had lost its cunning. The Chinese, perhaps, could still do work of quality but we ‘have pressed buttons for too long now, tapped type-keys, used machinery whenever possible and got used to “the pot of paint thrown in the public’s face”’.
Rich friends continued to lavish hospitality on them. They stayed with Daisy Fellowes on her yacht and had their car pushed into the harbour; by drunken sailors, thought Duff; by Communists, Diana told the press – ‘They hate my husband!’ They stayed on Loel Guinness’s new yacht too. There was debate about the name. Diana? Gloria, after his wife? Gloria Mundi? Better Sick Transit, suggested Diana. Bestigui’s great ball at the Palazzo Labia in Venice was the apotheosis of rich friends’ entertaining. Even the Aga Khan said he had never been to a better party. Costumes were to be of 1743. ‘We can always be cheapjacks (what are they?)’, mused Diana, ‘or itinerants, or blackamoors or tumblers, or Ambassadors from Lapland or the Gobi.’ In the event she was the centrepiece of an Antony and Cleopatra tableau after Tiepolo’s mural in the same palazzo. She was dressed by Oliver Messel and Cecil Beaton, while herself feverishly sewing at a sack for Duff so that he could take a flask of brandy with him – Bestigui parties being notoriously short on alcohol. She arrived by gondola to find four thousand people massed outside the Palazzo Labia cheering each new arrival. She stepped out assisted by her negro pages, wrote Susan Mary Patten. ‘I don’t think that I ever saw anything more beautiful than that – the light from the palace windows falling on her face and the pearls and the blonde hair.’
*
John Julius was by now twenty and up at Oxford. The year before he had been sent to improve his French at Strasbourg. His mother warned him not to get engaged or married. ‘You must see a world of women before you pick one and don’t get picked yourself, especially not in the street or bar. They’ll contaminate and deceive you and most probably give you diseases of all kinds, and so méfiez vous now you’re on your own and keep yourself and your love for somebody almost exactly like me with a happier disposition.’ Dutifully he kept free from the harpies of Strasbourg, but long before he had seen even a village of women he was engaged to Anne Clifford, a talented artist and daughter of Sir Bede Clifford, former colonial governor and member of an old Roman Catholic family. Duff and Diana approved of Anne but deplored the timing; insisting that at least the wedding should await the end of John Julius’s period at Oxford. ‘Good and pure and strong,’ Diana found Anne. ‘I admire her very much for her beauty and her sense and her not smoking or drinking or lolling, for her uprightness and her fun.’ Her only faults were her mother and her Clifford voice, for neither of which, Diana charitably conceded, could she properly be blamed. Her Catholicism left Diana unmoved; indeed, the only person to be disconcerted was Evelyn Waugh, who had expected indignation at the thought of the noble house of Norwich falling to the papists and instead found acquiescence, even approval.
Her friends assumed Diana would be jealous at the thought of her only child being removed from her so young. Diana was herself uncertain about her reactions and relieved to find that she was already resigned to John Julius’s marriage. ‘Once he made his own friends I knew my day was over and accepted it easily,’ she told Katharine Asquith. If loss there was, she had lost him when he went to Oxford. Besides, he was being particularly nice to her: ‘I don’t know if it’s pity for the old girl or feeling loving and tender all round.’ She reassured her son that she did not feel even a flicker of resentment. ‘Jealousy is very rare in my case and is reserved entirely to sex.’
She found some attractions in the role of mother-in-law, with the chances it offered for giving advice to all and sundry. John Julius was urged at all costs to avoid being common, for instance by calling Anne ‘darling’ or pet names, or showing any intimacy in public. ‘In private la question ne se pose pas,’ she added somewhat ambiguously. She offered useful tips for married life. ‘A man’s strength with a woman is her terror of losing him, irrespective of how much she loves him.’ John Julius should bear this in mind if Anne came over acid at any point. Anne found her warm and welcoming, though making it clear that in John Julius she was securing a treasure whose worth she must realize and whose happiness must be her chief concern. Anne was slightly alarmed by her, but much more amused and stimulated. The first time she saw her mother-in-law-to-be in full cry was at dinner with Louise de Vilmorin. She was struck by the way Diana encouraged her to exhibit her talents. The older woman so stage-managed things that she was soon sitting with a waste-paper basket on her head while Anne sketched her as the Madonna. Anne recognized what she felt must be the most important single reason for Diana’s social success; the fact that though she loved to be the centre of attention, she felt any occasion less than a success if others present did not also show themselves at their best.
John Julius married in 1952. A few months before, Diana stated the credo by which she felt their future relationship should be governed. ‘Whenever you are in pain of heart or body,’ she told her son, ‘or in despair of jams, dishonour, disillusion, nervous apprehension, drink or blackmail, you may rely on your old mother trudging through snow and through bars to perjure and to betray, to murder or – most difficult of all – to behave courageously to help you. But in your smooth days I must be courted and petted and needed, or I can’t react. I was ever so with lovers too – neglect never roused me, only true love and cosseting got good exchange. I’m thankful that you have not turned out a pederast and I suppose I’m glad not to be Mrs Coward or even Mrs Beaton, but they have recompenses.’
There were times when Anne was to think the terms a little stiff but on the whole she felt that Diana gave a great deal more than she received or expected to receive.
*
Duff had become sixty in 1950. Diana felt that even his resilience could hardly survive this awful trial. ‘I can’t bear you to mind,’ she told him. ‘I’d much rather mind myself than see you sad over a matter of days. Dear love, you’re always telling me the best is still to come.’ So he was, and so, to his mind, it was. He found himself as happy as he could remember having been in his life, concerned only that Diana was less content. The solitary flaw was his health. For most of his life he had lived intemperately, he had eaten and drunk too much; now it was beginning to tell. ‘I study his every gesture, gurk or twitch, determined with dread to find him in bad health’, wrote Diana, and though she was perfectly capable of manufacturing major tragedy out of a cough or itch, hard evidence in the shape of headaches, indigestion, sleeplessness, was accumulating to support her fears. In May 1953 he was taken violently ill in the night, uncontrollably vomiting black blood. He was rushed to hospital and the haemorrhage stopped, but not until he had lost a dangerous amount of blood. When Diana saw him the next morning she was dismayed by his appearance – ‘bleached he was – with hands like plaster-casts and face of wan ivory’ – but he was cheerful, even ebullient, and seemed to be enjoying the experience. The only thing that dismayed him was that his diet was confined to milk, boiled rice and asparagus – a régime that convinced him he must recover and come home as soon as possible.
Meanwhile there was the Coronation taking place in London. Diana’s first instinct was to stay in Paris with her husband, who was clearly too ill to travel. Duff insisted that he was in no sort of danger and that of course she must go. Coronations did not happen every day and provided exactly the blend of pageant and romantic flummery which she loved most. Diana did not need much convincing. She felt for the royal family and the institution of monarchy that combination of irreverence and passionate loyalty that is so often found among the British of every class: the royals were there to be gossiped about, mocked affectionately, sometimes sharply criticized, but they were a vital part of national life. When Lord Altrincham published a modestly critical article about the monarch in 1957, Diana was warm in the Queen’s defence. ‘Have you ever heard of “tweedy” as an adjective?’ she asked her son. ‘Is it pejorative? I should have thought it meant sensible, flat-shod, wise, honourable people who work in the country, die in the wars, save what they can for their many children.’ When Princess Margaret renounced Peter Townsend – ‘I blubbed. I think it’s noble and splendid of her if she’s set on him, as I was told by inner rumour that she was.’
Though nagged by constant fears for Duff’s well-being, her morale soared as soon as she arrived in Coronation-struck London. The decorations she found at first disappointing but they grew on her ‘with the English faces which were the great decoration. Finest hour over again; 1940 at its rarest, nothing too difficult for anyone, all for all and wild gaiety and cockney jokes.’ The night before the ceremony she walked down the damp, chill Mall to see ‘the Belsen camp of happy sufferers – giant French letters spread over them, sou’westers, Everest equipment’. Then it was back for brief sleep, a struggle into ‘a dead lady’s ducal robes patched up’, and dawn departure for the Abbey. One by one the great ones arrived: Princess Margaret, ‘rather dusky and heavy featured’; the ducal husband, ‘bigger, better, newer robes than the others, padded to a François i er width by admiral’s epaulettes.’ Then the touch of bathos, the emergence of seven maids with seven mops, dressed ‘as in smart American Hot-Dog stands in hygienic white overalls and caps. At circuses they sweep up elephant droppings but what could those fairy royal feet have left – soles that had not left red carpets since birth?’ At her side Lady Mowbray twittered in panic because her husband had to walk backwards down the steps with a long train. ‘He’ll never manage. He has to put on his spectacles to read the Oath and with them on he can’t see the floor.’ ‘Couldn’t he snatch them off?’ asked Diana, ever helpful. ‘I told him to, but he’s so dreadfully obstinate,’ whispered the despairing Lady Mowbray. Lord Mowbray survived his ordeal and Diana’s heart leapt as the ceremony moved towards its climax: ‘It could not have been more moving and true and touching because of the size and grace of the central figure.’
She returned to Duff enthused with the delights of London and more convinced than ever that this must eventually be her home. She found her husband better then she had feared but not as well as she had hoped. Over the next few months he gradually picked up his strength and by the winter seemed almost himself again. ‘I am so glad the darling old hot-cross-bun is really better,’ wrote Lady McEwen from Marchmont, where they went to shoot in December. Then it was on to the Michael Duffs’ at Vaynol for Christmas. A cruise to Jamaica was to complete the convalescence; arranged with great difficulty and now dreaded by Diana. Duff had a heavy cold when they left Vaynol and was coughing painfully by the time they reached the Colombie at Southampton. It was eleven on a cold, wet night when they boarded, to be greeted by a bevy of captains, pursers and other magnificos. ‘Get rid of them all, I feel rather sick,’ muttered Duff. Diana made everyone go away, then pleaded with him to give up the trip and get off the boat. It was impossible, said Duff. The luggage was aboard: there was no tolerable hotel in Southampton; besides, sea air was just what he needed to cure his cold and set him up.
Diana was by now haggard with worry, but forced herself to remain silent and not irritate Duff by asking constantly after his health. Next morning he seemed a little better but was obviously restless and uncomfortable. At last Diana asked him how he felt. ‘Not really right,’ he answered. ‘And at noon it happened,’ she told Cecil Beaton, ‘a rush to the bathroom and a bigger, redder haemorrhage than he’d had before. “Poor child,” he said, “you said you couldn’t go through it again.” I regretted then so often having whined if Duff drank so much as an extra glass of red wine – “Please not, I can’t go through it again.”’
Diana found the ship’s doctor and Duff was given morphia and the drug with which their French doctor had equipped them. With proper hospital attention he might have pulled through, but at sea, and with the boat now tossing severely, there was little hope of checking the loss of blood. ‘I became uncommonly calm and executive,’ wrote Diana, and, ‘I recognized this calm as a fatal sign.’ Though she could not admit it even to herself, she had decided that all hope was over, ‘hence the calm – it’s hope that makes one hysterical’. The doctor and the jolly old infirmier scoffed at her fears, there was no question of Duff dying, he was not even seriously ill. ‘Do they think I am going to die?’ asked Duff, with the same calm as he would have inquired whether dinner was ready. With relief she told him that they had pooh-poohed the idea. ‘It was true, true, but I think if at that moment they had told me his end was so close I would have told him.’
Duff, white and frail, was now being sick every two hours. ‘His trouble was torturing thirst – he was allowed no water, for the bleeding had to stop and I could only give him drops on my fingers, and he said once “It’s you. The others would give it me.”’ It was 31 December. As Diana sat by her dying husband, the clamour of singing and laughter floated up from the dining-room where the passengers were celebrating the Réveillon. It was a macabre backcloth for the tragedy, and for the rest of her life the sounds of New Year’s carnival – the laughter, the music, the popping of corks – were to haunt her with signal potency. In the early hours the sickness stopped, ‘but what was left? Not enough to colour his flesh or turn his heart into beats; no hope of transfusions of another’s blood – the sea still rolling – his breath shorter – no pain – no consciousness.’
He lasted through the night and the next morning but slipped away with the daylight at 3.30 p.m. the following day. Diana spent the last hours in the adjoining bathroom, slumped in exhausted apathy. The doctor urged her to come to the bedside. She refused. If Duff recovered consciousness she would be there, otherwise she would leave him to die alone. ‘Un peu de courage!’ urged the doctor. ‘It was not a question of courage. I did not want to watch him unconsciously die. I greatly hope no one but strangers will watch my last breath. I heard no sound though I was within three yards or less. I dreaded the groans – no sound – he faded like the day and left me the night.’ She could not even bring herself to look at him, though before she left the cabin she bent over his sheet-swathed body ‘and kissed what I felt was his brow and said “Good-bye, my darling, my darling.”’ She was physically exhausted, emotionally void, and yet in a curious way felt a sense of liberation. ‘Looking back and writing about it all makes me realize that never in my life have I felt more natural – perhaps it’s not strange, but I’d imagined myself a grief-stricken woman feeling embarrassed or savage or shy. None of these things.’
The ship docked at Vigo and a charter-plane flew Diana and Duff’s body back to Paris. ‘Diana came down the steps looking like an angel from Chartres Cathedral,’ wrote Susan Mary Patten, ‘Very beautiful, very calm.’ Photographers and journalists thronged around but another close friend, Kitty Giles, flung herself against Diana, arms outstretched, and walked backwards to the car, shielding her from intruders. An evening followed of bright chatter at Chantilly, before Diana fell into drugged sleep. She woke at seven the following morning and insisted that Mrs Patten should identify a quotation for her – ‘I wish I could remember it,’ wrote Susan Mary, ‘for it was lovely – about being very cold and alone but it not mattering, because the Elysian fields are warm.’ Then Diana sat up, practical as always. ‘This is no good, Susan Mary, you and I reading poetry. It would be better to have breakfast.’
The cortège moved on to England. Duff was to be buried at Belvoir, but Diana stayed in London. A few months before she had told John Julius that she almost never went to funerals. ‘Public ones I grace by official duty, but not the burials of those I love. The idea jars upon me; exhibition of grief, the society duty side, does not, in my heart, fit.’ Till the last moment she was uncertain whether she would react differently when the moment arrived for Duff to be buried. She did not. ‘I did not want to hear the clods fall or be the central tragic figure, to court or dodge photographers.’
In London, she spent a few days of fierce sociability, finding in an endless procession of friends and acquaintances some relief from the pressure of her own misery. Great offence was caused by a letter of condolence beginning ‘My dear Diana’ and ending ‘Yours sincerely, Evelyn Waugh’, but word of her indignation got back to the author and he made amends with a hurried note to ‘Darling Baby’ from ‘Bo’. He visited her next day to find her in consternation because Lady Juliet Duff had taken it on herself to ask Lord Salisbury to read the lesson at Duff’s Memorial Service. Diana at once telephoned him to insist that he must not be embarrassed by the request, she would never have dreamed of asking him herself. Only when she checked her flow of apologies did Lord Salisbury get a chance to say that there was no task he would be more honoured to undertake. ‘She was very wild and witty, full of funny stories,’ Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary; and everyone who saw her in those few days remarked on her febrile animation.
The Memorial Service was the day after the funeral. Diana lurked in a side chapel and saw almost nothing but Churchill with tears streaming down his face, heard little except for the murmur of surprise when The British Grenadiers was played as a voluntary. ‘The obituaries treat Duff as a mixture of Fox, Metternich, Rochester and the Iron Duke,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh. Only The Times was sharply critical in its final judgement. Few widows need expect to hear their recently perished husbands treated with scorn or hostility, but Diana had more right than most to find comfort in the press and letters of condolence.
‘A sort of shout of praise went up for Duff,’ she told Cecil Beaton. ‘He would have been so triumphantly pleased with it all; pleased with me too, I think.’ As The British Grenadiers died away and she prepared to leave London, she congratulated herself on having survived a painful ordeal with courage and fortitude. She suspected that the true ordeal was just about to begin.