Twenty years later, now aged eighty-eight, the quietus of the grave has still been denied her. It has come as a surprise to nobody except herself that the intervening years have not been ones of sombre inactivity, but varied, energetic, enjoyable. There are many ways of growing old gracefully but almost all of them involve some degree of resignation, an acceptance of the fact that age imposes limitations, that incapacity must curb enterprise however actively the spirit may desire the contrary. Diana is not one for resignation. She will not go gentle into that good night, but will fight every inch of the way. She fears the decay of beauty, the loss of health, hearing, sight; but most of all she fears that she might no longer feel. The anaesthetic of old age, to many people a merciful mitigation of suffering, is to her intolerable. If she must suffer, she will do so in full consciousness; if she must sink it will be with all flags flying. Inevitably there are things that she cannot do, tasks beyond her powers, but only the total incapacity of her body is accepted as an excuse. So long as she remains alive there will be no failure of her resolution.
*
It would have been wholly uncharacteristic of Diana if she had not found the first few months of her new life in London intolerably painful. John Julius and Anne were so preoccupied with each other and their pursuits that she felt they had little time for her. Artemis now went to the Lycée Français, which she adored ‘and which has in a twinkling scotched her love for me – now it’s “O, you and your Greeks and your Round Table, Noona!”’ Jason, her grandson, had but to see her on his threshold to set up a yell to waken the dead. ‘So horrible has it been‚’ she told Susan Mary Patten, ‘that I feel past recovery. No pangs for Chantilly, or rather no wanting it back, but I miss the beauty desperately and the sort of shape life had.’ And yet she knew herself well enough to realize that her woe was exaggerated, and even to introduce some element of self-parody into her words. Martha Gellhorn understood her well when she wrote about this time: ‘The first suggestion of change fills you with horror, whereupon in no time you adore the new place and life. Oh, Diana, what if really you have a golden and blessed nature? And are happy as a sandboy always? Surely, unless you are lying in your teeth, the sum total of your life is 99.9% life-loving and therefore happiness?’
Partly to combat her depression, partly from her fear of missing something good, mainly because she enjoyed it, she was soon leading a social life by normal standards impossibly hectic. Three October nights, picked more or less at random, illustrate the pattern of her existence. On the first she was dragged – protesting, she maintained, though the protests can hardly have been vociferous – to a night-club called the Ad Lib where she spent ‘two really monstrous hours not hearing a word, not having a seat to myself, and not, on account of total darkness, seeing the Mods and Rockers dancing like Holy Rollers, nor yet the Beatles who go there nightly to relax’. Next night was a dinner for Charlie Chaplin. Diana sat next to one of Britain’s most eminent literary figures, who pinched her knee black and blue and demanded a kiss. ‘Worse was to come. He seized my hand as the Commendatore seized Don Giovanni’s and started to drag it to you know where. I was purple in the face, not so much with the shame as with the strain of writhing away. When the battle looked all but lost he was called on to make a speech, which he was far too drunk to manage. “I don’t think I ever liked you, Charlie,” he began, and after half a minute’s inarticulate mumbles collapsed back in his seat.’ The third night was dinner with Vivien Leigh and Noel Coward. After dinner they looked in on Douglas Fairbanks Junior – ‘dreadfully against my will’, of course – and then Noel Coward drove her home, ‘came in for a snifter and remained till 2.30 a.m. talking about his homosexuality’.
Though she grumbled about the cost, the lack of space, the inadequate cooking, she invited her friends frequently to Warwick Avenue. Cecil Beaton lunched there in November 1963. Caroline Duff, Lady Dufferin, the Baroness Budberg, Rupert Hart-Davis and James Mossman were the other guests; Mossman, a television personality of talent, beauty and sensitivity acute to the point of self-destruction, being at that time an habitué of Diana’s court. ‘Rough and wroughty conversation,’ Beaton recorded, ‘Diana winking and joking about her old age; talk about the new President, poems of Thomas Moore recited – a treat. The food personal, original and economical; as usual melon and avocado and dill, and a fish pie.’ Not only the food was economical. Vivien Leigh was in a nursing-home and Diana telephoned to ask what she would like to be sent. ‘For the Lord’s sake no more flowers, the place is full of them!’ said Miss Leigh’s secretary. ‘In which case I’ll be round to grab a few for my luncheon party,’ replied Diana. She rushed round, found a bath full of flowers and removed three dozen roses.
Her neighbours were a constant solace. Little Venice was a village; the inhabitants perhaps more exotic but no less parochial than those of other villages. Besides John Julius and his family there were the Lennox Berkeleys next door – ‘semi-detached but wholly attached’ as Diana described them. There was Diana’s niece Kitty Farrell and her family; old friends from Paris, Frank and Kitty Giles; Adrian Daintry the artist; Lord Kinross the writer; Lanning Roper the gardener; a later arrival Edward Fox, the actor; Robin McDouall, the Sapiehas. Together they formed a community who used the same shops, borrowed each other’s motors, visited each other’s houses. They provided a framework in which Diana could feel secure and at home as had never been the case in France.
She was as little disposed as ever to let comfort or convention stand in her way. Deciding at the last minute to go to a ball at Wilton, she discovered that the houses in the vicinity were full up. Not in the least put out, she organized a caravan and asked permission to pitch camp in the park. Aged eighty-five, she wished to fly to America but the fare was too much for her. Freddie Laker had recently introduced his cut-price trips across the Atlantic, but to get on one involved queueing for several hours. Diana wrote to him, proclaiming that he was the greatest contributor to the history of travel since Magellan or perhaps Columbus and asking whether, as a frail and impoverished old lady, she might exceptionally have a seat reserved for her. A secretary replied, starting the letter ‘Dear Miss Cooper’, and stating firmly that she must take her chance with the rest. Neither annoyed nor distressed, Diana rose at 3.30 a.m. and set off for Victoria to join the queue for the midday plane. A friend pointed out that she was being ridiculous; even if the money was not in her bank, all she had to do was sell an ornament. ‘But don’t you see?’ asked Diana incredulously. ‘It’s such an adventure.’
Saving money by fair means or foul was still one of her favourite games. Crossing from Athens to Hydra with Cecil Beaton she insisted on boarding the boat with no tickets, then seized two chairs from the lounge and installed them triumphantly on the first class deck. Stewards remonstrated. ‘Bring the Captain,’ trumpeted Diana. ‘Squatters’ rights. Possession is nine points of the law.’ The purser asked to see their tickets. Diana would have none of it. ‘We are first class! Look at my credentials. I’m too old to move.’ Cecil Beaton made as if to flee and was promptly rebuked for his cravenness. As they left the boat, he waited nervously for the police to arrive. But Diana reassured him: ‘Well, we got away with that one!’ Even worse was her habit of imposing economy on her friends. Ann Fleming, visiting Paris and longing to stay at the Ritz, was bullied into camping in the deserted house of Paul Louis Weiller, without heating, without hot water, and with a furiously resentful concierge denying her any nourishment.
No year went by without a month or two of travel, sometimes more. For several years she went every September to stay with Noel Coward in Switzerland, taking particular pleasure in the public swimming pool in Montreux. On her first visit she gazed enraptured at the glare of colour – electric-blue water, orange marigolds, blood-red roses, shocking-pink begonias. ‘Oh I do love it so,’ she said to her companion, Peter Coats. ‘It’s so pretty and so gay and not overburdened with taste.’ Later she took to spending part of the summer at the Hofmannsthals’ house in Austria. She went to Portugal with Iris Tree; to the West Indies several times; on safari to Kenya and Tanzania; to Nigeria to visit the Heads. In Kano she fell into the town sewer, bruised her leg painfully and removed much of the skin, tottered to her feet malodorous and bleeding, sharply instructed her fellow-travellers to stop fussing and resumed her tour of the bazaar. In Moscow she became so indignant when dinner had not arrived by 10 p.m. that, liberally primed with vodka, she invaded the kitchen and performed a Russian dance and songs taught her nearly fifty years before by Chaliapin. ‘All the kitchen joined in, I was the whizz of the scullions, they all kissed me, but I don’t think the dishes were hastened.’ She revelled in every new experience, yet there was always a suspicion of dismay behind the pleasure. At the end of a blissful holiday in Kenya with John Julius, Anne and Nigel Ryan, she noted bleakly: ‘I feel they’ve all got something to go back to and that I have not except for my little dog, though that makes up for a lot.’ When only a hundred yards from home, her son had to break it to her that the dog was dead.
She scored a dazzling success in Washington, where she went in 1963. Susan Mary Patten, now married to Joe Alsop, the doyen of political columnists, organized her programme. One by one the posterns of Camelot were stormed. To dinner the first night came Robert and Edward Kennedy – ‘a child with a very pretty wife’. ‘Politics, politics, total interest and talk is politics, but I rather like that,’ she told John Julius. ‘I got on very well with the Kennedy (“identify yourself!”) voice and a bombardment of questions like Max Beaverbrook. I love it, but it does land them with a saga or two.’ Next day she was taken to meet Lyndon Johnson. Joe Alsop had described him as ‘a frustrated force of nature’ but Diana found herself unable to form any impression because of the blinding neon-light before which he sat and the inaudible mumble which came to her through the screen of the Vice-President’s giant hand.
The central keep grew closer. The following day she lunched with Eunice Shriver, the President’s sister, and was taken round the White House. ‘She really has the wild originality of countenance and has always been in love with her brother Jack, looks like him, talks like him, but the Kennedys are all made out of the same clay – hair and teeth and tongues from the same reserves. I loved Eunice, so I enjoyed the very inferior plate of dog’s dinner sea-food poulticed over with tomato.’ They went to the Cabinet room, where the green baize was laid for a late afternoon meeting with a pad of paper in every statesman’s place. Announcing she was in love with MacNamara, the Secretary of Defence, Mrs Shriver wrote a frivolous Valentine on the pad in front of his seat. Encouraged, Diana scrawled ‘Love from Debo’ on the President’s pad; a message from his former sister-in-law, the Duchess of Devonshire, which she hoped might cause him some surprise.
At last came the day when the President came to dinner to see for himself this curious relic of a former age. Kennedy was known to have a weakness for British aristocrats but a dislike of old age; which feeling would predominate in this confrontation was anxiously debated by the Alsops. The daughter of the house was sent off to a friend, her bedroom filled with secret servicemen, a hot-line telephone installed so that the President could declare war if the mood took him, Jean the cook had her hair dyed blood-red for the occasion. The Kennedys arrived. ‘Nice to see you again,’ he began. ‘I believe “again” is the operative word for all those in positions of patronage,’ Diana told John Julius. ‘He may have been right, but I don’t remember ever having clapped eyes upon him.’ She had, eight years before at Paul Louis Weiller’s, but the meeting had hardly been a protracted one. She found him much younger than she had expected, ‘less puffy than the photographs or the deforming TV makes him’.
Dinner went as well as it was meant to. Afterwards a group round Jackie who must have, like her husband, total recall, because she’d read all my books and remembered a lot of those remarkable works. We talked about letter-writing. She said that in her whole married life she had had nine from Jack. I found Jackie much more beautiful than I had expected and a hundred times more of a personality. It is said that her near-divorce mood and his preoccupation with anything or anybody but her had turned to connubial comfort. It is said that she has the whip-hand as she cares not a jot for what people say and might walk out of the White House any day if so disposed. I suppose, too, vigorous animal though he is, few other beds are possible if always he is attached by wire to ‘War’ or ‘Peace’ and surrounded by tough secret servicemen.
‘What a woman!’ President Kennedy said as he left the house. She was at once invited back to the White House and feted by all Washington. ‘It was like suddenly having invited Nureyev,’ said Susan Mary Alsop, with the satisfaction of one who has scored a knock-out victory over the other Washington hostesses.
*
At home she devoted much time and energy to keeping alive her husband’s memory. Diana was never one to live in the past, loathed mawkish sentiment and the pious cliché; but the celebration of Duff was for her a part of living, far removed from the conventional solemnities of widow’s weeds and obituary addresses. She conceived the wording of his memorial in a moment of inspiration early one morning and wrote it on the wall of a house in a back street of Hydra. Only when she came to look for it again did she realize that all the houses in Hydra had white walls and all back streets looked alike. It took two days searching to find her handiwork and then she transcribed it and gave it to John Julius and Rupert Hart-Davis.
To her delight Duff’s friends suggested the setting up of a fund to endow a literary prize. Randolph Churchill was the leading spirit in its organization, won Diana’s undying gratitude but contrived almost to forfeit it when she met him in Monte Carlo, uproariously drunk, having lost the list of subscribers and taken no other step. ‘The dropsical brute has two secretaries and a ghost-writer,’ but still got nothing done, complained Diana bitterly; but she shamed him into action and a handsome amount was raised. Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades was favourite for the first prize, which Isaiah Berlin ruled would ‘start the thing off in a very respectable way’, but in the end it was felt a work in a single volume would be more appropriate. Alan Moorehead was the eventual winner, for his book on Gallipoli.
Winston Churchill volunteered to present the first prize. Diana was instructed to make sure that he limited his remarks to a few sentences praising Moorehead and Duff himself. She lunched with him the day of the prizegiving in his house in Hyde Park Gate which, by good fortune, adjoined the house of Sir Roderick and Enid Jones where the ceremony was to take place. ‘The poor beloved had had his third stroke,’ Diana told John Julius. ‘His face is less puffy and his beautiful hands young, unshaking and elegant, but his mind is like love; when you think you are sure of it, it’s flown, and giving up pursuit, it’s back with you.’ He found it impossible to grasp for more than a few moments what was expected of him. ‘Do you want me to stay away?’ he kept asking. Lady Churchill would patiently explain once again that he was to present the prize and make a short speech first. ‘Oh, am I?’ Diana then read the suggested address, broke down in tears half way through but managed at the second effort. ‘Toby the budgerigar helps the long meal to be weathered – very nice and tame and sits on Winston’s shoulders or one’s head and talks to itself and loves him, but it’s all come to that. Injurious time.’
The plan was for Churchill to shuffle through the garage between the two houses and avoid both the steep steps and the November air. Unfortunately the Joneses’ Rolls-Royce had rusted up and refused to budge, so the old man was forced to come round by the long way. Nothing deterred, he got through his short speech fairly well; Harold Macmillan spoke too, and Alan Moorehead, ‘and then it was the old war-horse saying “Ha-ha” in the battle, because warming and cleaving to his work, Winston said, “My dear, would you like me to wind up for you?” So up he got again with nothing to read from. He was for a flash the real Winston and ended with a joke about Gallipoli.’ ‘It was a wonderful, emotional party – perfect in every way,’ Diana reported. ‘I almost felt Papa was there, it was so to his taste and to his glory.’
The annual presentation of the prize, with all its complications over the selection of judges, winner and presenter, was an endless diversion to Diana. The Queen Mother presented the prize to Lawrence Durrell the second year and Princess Margaret to John Betjeman, the third. Diana for some reason was nervous about this last affair but had no cause to be. Princess Margaret looked like a ‘jewelled, silky bowerbird, with a close-fitting, wild duck’s preened feather hat, no hair, skin like a tea-rose, wonderfully pretty – and she made her funny, faultless speech with art and sophistication. Poor Betch was crying and too moved to find an apology for words.’ Sir Roderick Jones, ‘the only living man shorter than the Princess’, insisted on winding up with an interminable speech about the Empire, punctuated by whispers from his wife – half-proud, half-explanatory – of ‘You know, he’s eighty-one!’ He caused some offence to the Chairman of the Judges by referring to him as Sir Horace Bowra, an exploit matched the following year by the immensely aged Canon Andrew Young who remarked that Duff would always remain illustrious for his slim volume Operation Handbrake. The worst gaffe at a prizegiving came, however, from Diana herself some years later. Robert Lowell, who was to present the prize, suffered a serious nervous breakdown and was taken to a mental home. A substitute was arranged. Then at the last moment John Julius was told that Lowell had discharged himself and was on the way to the ceremony. At all costs he must be kept away from any kind of alcohol. John Julius rushed to the spot, to find Lowell, on his third glass of champagne and talking to Diana. ‘Darling,’ said Diana brightly. ‘I’ve just been telling this gentleman how the principal speaker has lost his marbles and been carted off to a loony-bin!’
Her life in Warwick Avenue was sometimes more eventful than even she desired. ‘There are more burglars than occupiers in this dusky district, who laugh at locksmiths,’ she wrote apprehensively as she was moving in. They struck first in 1966, when Iris Tree was staying in the house. Masked men broke in and tied up the two women. Diana watched with resignation as jewels and furs, including Paul Louis Weiller’s precious ‘coat of shame’, were bundled into suitcases, but protested when they came to the box containing love-letters. Fortunately the burglars proved to have little interest in such irrelevancies. ‘Why should this happen to me?’ she inquired histrionically. ‘I’ve done no harm and I’m charitable!’ Then the absurdity of her words struck her, and in spite of fear and discomfort she laughed aloud.
‘I wasn’t all that frightened at the time,’ she told Katharine Asquith, ‘but I got a reaction of fear ten days later. I listen now for the bell to ring and for those muffled feet and featureless faces to return for what they didn’t take.’ The worst affront came when she left the house to resume her interrupted evening and found that her car had been stolen too. She still managed to get to Covent Garden for the last act. ‘Sorry, but I was rather tied up,’ she remarked as she entered the box, a line which she had been long awaiting an opportunity to use. To Evelyn Waugh it was the loss of dignity which seemed most horrifying – a point of view which would have surprised Diana if she had heard of it. ‘There should be a Praetorian Guard of Pansies,’ Waugh told Nancy Mitford, ‘to keep a standing 24 piquet on all these widows …’ Nancy Mitford unsympathetically suggested that Diana had organized the burglary herself because the coat of shame was growing shabby and needed replacement from the insurance money. Paul Louis Weiller himself reacted more generously. ‘Achète-toi un nouveau manteau chez Balmain‚’ he telegraphed next day.
Some months later the muffled feet returned. This time Daphne Wakefield, still loyally helping out on the secretarial side, was in the house upstairs. She heard Diana say haughtily: ‘If only you would consult your colleagues you would know that this was not worth while.’ A few moments later came a cry of pain: ‘Oh, God, I’ve got a lump there. Don’t do that, you’re hurting me!’ Mrs Wakefield threw herself into the fray and got coshed for her pains. The burglars ransacked the house and, worst of all, took the ring which Duff had given Diana for their engagement and which had somehow been missed in the previous raid. When Daphne Wakefield recovered, she was horrified to hear of this loss. ‘It’s only a possession. What does it matter?’ said Diana calmly.
In both cases the police were friendly but ineffective. They were less friendly in 1968 when they invaded the house in search of drugs. Diana was delighted. ‘Never did I enjoy myself more since youth’s diversions.’ She talked endlessly to the press, questions were asked in parliament and there were even two half-hour debates on the adjournment. Nothing was found and the reason for the police suspicions was never fully explained. ‘Who cares anyway if a very old lady drugs or not?’ asked Diana plaintively.
Daphne Wakefield had had troubles more painful than a mere coshing. Some years before her daughter had been taken ill with polio and Diana put up the money to send her to a private hospital. She died before she even got there and Diana then insisted that the money be spent on a holiday to help the Wakefields recover from the shock. When Mrs Wakefield returned, still crushed by her loss, Diana rallied her with a firm: ‘Well now, Daphne, you’ve got to take pride in fortitude. The first thing to do is to have another baby.’ She did, and Diana was godmother. It sometimes seemed to Diana as she grew older her main purpose in life was to comfort the survivors when her friends and relations died. ‘You are the most wonderful friend,’ Ann Fleming told her. ‘No wonder there is always a queue of Kitty, Judy etc on your doorstep, all loving you, all with problems and relying on your courage, fabulous vitality, unselfishness and common sense.’
One of the most painful features of old age is the gradual extinction of one’s friends, and the greater the talent for friendship, the longer grows the list of losses. Evelyn Waugh she saw for the last time shortly before he died. ‘He has lost all joie de vivre, eats nothing, drinks a fair amount and thinks a journey to London a labour of Hercules. I attribute it to sleeping-pills, parendahyl in massive quantities, etc. O dear, O dear, it haunts me. I’m so very fond of the little monster!’ Iris Tree, whom she had helped financially and succoured for twenty years; Raimund von Hofmannsthal, ‘the dearest and goodest of men and the most generous and compassionate’; his wife and her niece Elizabeth Paget and her sister Caroline; Louise de Vilmorin; Churchill; Noel Coward; Katharine Asquith; Cecil Beaton – even to start to compile a list is to marvel at the number and variety of people who counted Diana among their dearest friends. And yet, though each new death pained her, in taking Duff death had already done its worst. She no longer had it in her to suffer deeply except over the tiny group of people who were everything to her. Michael Astor – soon sadly to be one of the losses himself – thought her at the age of eighty a little like ‘Queen Elizabeth in her later years: clever, hard, fine and formidable. Underneath the façade there is something cold and lonely.’ The coldness was there, but it was the chill of something long extinguished. A candle had burnt out. When a friend died she had always tended to put them out of her mind, to cut her losses. Now the loss itself seemed inconsiderable. She wrote sombrely to Bridget McEwen when her husband died that she had no words of comfort. ‘It can never again be what it was. Years don’t help all that much. One’s own death is less fearful, that’s all … nothing is any good when the love of one’s life is gone.’
Yet she never ceased to make new friends, seek new experiences. At dinner she was almost as likely to find herself between Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol as Harold Macmillan and the Apostolic Delegate; in both cases she would be amused, intrigued, insatiably curious about what was going on and what her neighbours were thinking and doing. Nigel Ryan, forty years her junior, became one of her closest friends, ‘the last attachment’ as she half self-mockingly described him. Four times he had sat next to her at dinner and she had asked him who he was. The fifth time he refused to tell her, ‘I’ve told you too often’. The sixth time she turned to him again: ‘Now, who are you?’ ‘Martin Bormann,’ said Ryan. She never forgot him again. Aged eighty-six she took up with Sir Robert Mayer, then about to celebrate his hundredth birthday, and was delighted when the Daily Mail announced their imminent engagement. A near contemporary had been jeering at her for spending so much time with somebody as young as Nigel Ryan. Now she herself was being squired everywhere by a man of thirty odd, while Diana’s name was coupled with someone by far her senior. ‘My dear,’ Diana wrote to her sweetly, ‘when you are my age you will realize that what you need is the maturer man.’
Her dog was almost as great a solace to her as any friend. Writhing, twitching neurotically, as much an insect as an animal, ‘Doggie’ – and later Doggie II and Doggie III – was a chihuahua, charmless to most of those who knew it but to Diana possessed of supernatural loveliness. Lurking in her sleeve, wrapped loosely in a shawl, it went everywhere with her; to Covent Garden, to Buckingham Palace, the more inaccessible the venue the more determined Diana was that it should not be left behind. Usually it behaved, when it did not Diana quickly repaired the damage. In a smart Soho restaurant Doggie escaped and defecated lavishly at the feet of a prosperous business man. Ugly scenes threatened but Diana rose to the occasion and within a few moments the bemused but enchanted business man was agreeing that really what was needed in the restaurant was a few more dogs; it was ridiculous of the head waiter to try to keep them out. In the innermost fastness of her bedroom, Doggie and the television helped to keep loneliness at bay, providing a soothing background of rustles, yaps and conversation, a convincing simulacrum of company when company was absent.
There was anyway a retinue of courtiers ready to be summoned if she felt in need of support. She used them as ruthlessly as she had always used her friends, though no more ruthlessly than she used herself when her friends had need of her. Violet Wyndham was one of the most faithful members of the inner circle. Diana would go to great lengths to help her, sacrificing a precious last afternoon with Nigel Ryan before he left for New York because she had long before promised to spend it with Mrs Wyndham. But she would also treat her friend with singular roughness. Driving her from Covent Garden one afternoon, the brakes failed and she bounced off a stationary lorry and ended up half way down some area steps. Diana was unhurt, Violet Wyndham in mild shock. Diana rapidly calculated that, if Mrs Wyndham were taken home in an ambulance, it would still be possible to get to her next appointment on time. An ambulance arrived. ‘But I’m quite all right,’ protested Mrs Wyndham. ‘Of course you’re not,’ said Diana, pushing her in. Then she discovered that the ambulance would not take a patient home, but only to the hospital. Violet Wyndham would have to be escorted there and would need visiting. Diana flung open the ambulance door and told her friend that plans were changed. Mrs Wyndham, by this time cosy on her bunk and rather enjoying the fuss, complained weakly that she needed hospital attention. ‘Of course you’re all right!’ said Diana, pulling her out and looking round for a taxi.
A prosecution followed for dangerous driving. As soon as the magistrate ingratiatingly said ‘Do sit down, Lady Diana,’ she reckoned she was in with a chance. Her defence was that the brake had suddenly failed. The prosecution counsel demonstrated at length why this was difficult to accept. At the end of his address Diana leant forward and said quaveringly: ‘I’m afraid I did not hear a word of what you said.’ He restated his case. ‘I’m afraid you really must speak up. I’m an old lady, you know.’ The third time the prosecution sounded altogether less compelling. ‘Was the brake hanging down before you started?’ he wanted to know. ‘I’m afraid I very rarely look under my car,’ replied Diana. By this time the prosecution was established as a brutal bully and Diana as his frail old victim. She was acquitted.
Some time later she ran into a large lorry on the Brighton road, her only defence being that she had not seen it. Remembering her earlier triumph she was anxious to appear in court and give witness in her own defence, but her solicitor, appalled at the thought of this blind old lady groping her way to the witness box and probably ending up on the magistrate’s bench instead, insisted that she remain at home. He got her off with a fine: to her own vast relief and the dismay of anyone likely to encounter her during her progresses at the wheel. ‘It’s like driving a swallow,’ she exclaimed after her first trial of a Mini – a comment which said as much about her technique as about the car itself. Somehow she always survived unscathed, in terms of life and limb unscathing too, though she tested the nerves of her grandson when she taught him how to drive. Aged eighty-six Diana drove herself to the north of Scotland and back again, an exploit which she threatened to repeat.
Parking in London was a problem, but she relished the challenge of devising notes that would soften the heart of the traffic warden. ‘Dearest Warden,’ she wrote one afternoon when entertaining Artemis. ‘Have pity. Am taking sad child to cinemar.’ ‘Dearest Warden,’ read another note. ‘Front tooth broken off; look like 81-year-old pirate, so at dentist 19a. Very old – very lame – no metres.’ The last message of all had about it the ring of incipient triumph. ‘Dear Warden. Please try and be forgiving. I am 81 years old, very lame and in total despair. Never a metre! Back at 2.15. Waiting for promised Disabled Driver disc from County Hall.’ Benevolent authority provided the disc, and from then on she could park with impunity on spots even more outrageous than those she had used before.
Though she rarely allowed it to interfere with her driving, let alone her social life, infirmities came thick and fast as she moved on into the eighties. ‘I’ve broken a rib by coughing and am clothed in inertia’; ‘I have broken my hands and cannot write’; her knee was drained of fluid for the second time in two months and rendered her temporarily a total cripple; ‘my thigh muscle has withered as it did in childhood. On my other side I’ve a lump of great pain in my wrist. Test match bowlers get it.’ Frail bones snapped with increasing ease, slipping when falling downstairs, stumbling over a stone when carrying Doggie and crashing full on her face rather than dropping the dog and using her hands to protect herself. Twice her nose was broken; the indignity of her appearance offending her more than the pain. Pain was something she had learned to live with and subdue. Once she broke a bone when her regular doctor was away and was visited by his keen, young stand-in.
‘I don’t want you!’ said Diana brusquely. ‘I want a pusher.’
‘But Lady Diana,’ protested the doctor, not keen on prescribing morphia or heroin or whatever it was his patient had in mind, ‘all you need is something to relieve your pain. Have you ever tried alcohol?’
‘Idiot!’ snapped Diana. ‘Don’t you know I’m an alcoholic?’
She never was an alcoholic but she would take drink to quell pain, nerves or melancholy. Always she used a modicum of restraint in her indulgence. Once in the West Indies she was taken to dinner with Claudette Colbert, who had long wanted to meet this legendary figure. Her conversation made little sense and at one point she laid her face on the warm plate and seemed to pass out. ‘Elle s’endort?’ inquired Miss Colbert above the recumbent figure. ‘Certainly not,’ said Diana, rallying with dignity. ‘I never sleep at meals.’
‘No money left,’ she wrote to Katharine Asquith, ‘weak at the knees, dragged painted face, dim eyes that veil many devastations, mustn’t groan.’ She had met George Brown at dinner the previous night, drunk as the lord he was shortly to become, who said when he was told her name: ‘It can’t be!’ ‘“It can be,” I replied. “I tell you it can’t be.” He was then shuffled off by someone and never will I know if he meant, “Well done, keep it up!” or “That it should come to this!”’
Her sight was a constant problem, particularly when driving. She had always found difficulty in recognizing her closest friends, indeed her reputation when young for insolent hauteur stemmed largely from her unavailing struggles to focus on whoever it was who was addressing her. Now she found it still more difficult, exacerbated by nerves when she knew that much was expected of her. Nigel Ryan was detailed to escort her to Buckingham Palace. Diana swept past the queue on the stairs, announcing that her leg would not let her stand, and rushed to a sofa in the corner. Nigel was told that it was his duty to warn her who was approaching. Since he knew few people there he was doubtful how helpful he would be, but said that he would do his best. A woman in white came over and said ‘Good evening, Diana. We meet tomorrow, I think.’ Diana’s hand tightened convulsively, a sure sign she needed help. Luckily Ryan could oblige; the woman in white was the Queen Mother.
She did still worse at the concert at the Festival Hall in honour of Sir Robert Mayer’s hundredth birthday. There was a reception afterwards and Diana, looking neither to left nor right in fear of not recognizing someone she ought to know, was wandering towards the bar. She got into conversation with a friendly little woman who apparently knew her well. Only when she recognized the magnificent diamonds did she realize that she was talking to the Queen. Belatedly she sketched out an arthritic curtsey and blurted out: ‘Ma’am, O ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t recognize you without your crown!’ ‘It was so much Sir Robert’s evening that I decided to leave it behind,’ concluded the Queen sweetly.
*
Sense of smell gone; sense of taste gone; eyesight impaired; hearing faltering; far from sans everything yet near enough to recognize the threat: Diana can face it all. What she cannot face is the terror of senility, the crumbling of the mind that is so much more dreadful than the body’s slow disintegration. In 1979 she flew to Strasbourg to help Paul Louis Weiller entertain the Queen Mother. She arrived at her hotel in mid morning, felt tired and rather ill and lay down to have a short rest. After, as it seemed, a few moments, she woke, dressed in her best Marks and Spencer frock and large straw hat and set off for luncheon. She found the other guests absurdly overdressed: did they imagine that they must wear long dresses in the middle of the day just because the Queen Mother was a fellow-guest? Looking out of the window she remarked how curiously dark it was. ‘Not really, for 8 p.m.,’ replied her neighbour. She had arrived, not late for luncheon, but in good time for dinner. ‘If I can do that, I can do anything,’ she concluded. She made a joke of it, elaborated it into one of her sagas, dined out on it for months; but there was real fear too. If she can do that, she can do anything.
Death she positively looks forward to; dying is another matter. To cease upon the midnight with no pain is an enticing prospect, but to cough your lungs out at five o’clock in the morning seems altogether less desirable. The arthritic C. B. Cochran had been scalded to death in his bath. Next door his wife heard his cries and thought affectionately what a boy Cocky was, singing in his bath at the age of seventy-nine. The image haunts Diana; it plagues her every time she has a bath. She is ready to die, but she wants to pick her own way.
To pick her own time too. If offered the most easeful death at midnight, her answer would be: ‘Thank you very much but would you please make it next Tuesday.’ She is still too concerned with life to welcome quick extinction. There is always a book she wants to finish; a friend to talk to; a party to attend, a play or opera to visit; John Julius is coming round for a drink; Artemis is expected back from America the day after tomorrow. Once, ill and dejected, she retreated to bed. Her grand-daughter went up to see how she was. ‘Artemis,’ she croaked weakly, ‘I think I’m going to die.’ ‘Oh, really,’ answered Artemis brightly. ‘When?’ Deciding it was hardly worth dying if that was the only reaction she aroused, Diana got out of bed and came down to dinner. Besides, there was a programme on television she did not want to miss. Tomorrow would be soon enough to contemplate the end.
Some would have pleaded for extra time to make their peace with God. Diana has no conviction of an after-life, no certainty that she will be on her way to see Duff again. Death will mean a cessation of pain; if it is also a beginning that will be a delightful bonus, but the prospect is not to be counted on. Thoughts of eternity preoccupy her not at all. She is wistfully envious of those with stronger faith, but no more believes that she can emulate them than that she can dance like Nureyev or sing like Chaliapin. She prays every night, but it is a childhood habit, never dropped for long but of little greater significance than brushing her teeth or turning on the light. Its principal value, indeed, is that of a soporific; sleep usually supervenes before she has completed her incantations. The framework of her prayers was taught her by Evelyn Waugh. ACTS is the magic word: A for Adoration; C for Contrition; T for Thanksgiving; S for Supplication:
A for Adoration. I can’t manage that at all. You need a lot of faith and I just haven’t been born with it. I have tried, but I’ve failed. I’m sorry, God, if you wanted me to adore you, you should have made me differently.
C for Contrition. That’s a wash-out too. Hilaire Belloc said the obstacle in my race to heaven was lack of remorse. I pray to God in my under-five way to give me remorse, but he never has. It’s not that I haven’t committed sins. I‘ve committed thousands, scarlet as anything – not that I think adultery really counts. But I don’t feel in the least sorry about any of them. I’m sorry, God, but it’s your fault again. I’m sorry I can’t feel sorry.
T for Thankfulness. This is where I really begin to score. It’s too easy. I can open the gates of thanksgiving for a start for the three people who most affected my life. Thank you, God, for my mother, for Duff and for John Julius. Thank you for all those I have loved and who have loved me. Raymond, Conrad, I don’t mention them by name, of course; it would be too hurtful if someone got left out. I know how lucky I have been in life and how much I have been given which other people haven’t had. Thank you, God, for giving me so much. He might have made a job of it while he was about it and let me off my depressions, but mustn’t grumble. Thank you for my friends. I’ve been so lucky in my friends.
S for Supplication. Of course for all and every one, the sincerest of all. First of all for John Julius; it goes on and on like an insurance policy. Protect, O protect him from crashes and hi-jacking and bombs and kidnapping and violence of all kinds. There’s a bit about the grandchildren and the rest of the family but it really concentrates on John Julius. Every time he goes on the motorway it’s two days of dread, two days to recover and come out in nervous spots. It’s dreadful to be so cowardly. Then there’s a prayer for the dead, singularly ill-formed, and a short prayer for Duff himself. I pray a little for myself. Take all my other senses if you must, O God; cripple me and deafen me; but please spare me what’s left of my sight. And please don’t let me have a stroke and become a vegetable.
You see how pathetically simple it is. In church I can’t pray at all. I think that’s really all there is to it. O no, there’s one more thing, if I’m still awake by then. Please, God, dear God, grant me an easy death and let it be quite soon.