To celebrate their first wedding anniversary, Diana and Bryan had accepted an invitation from Kate Mulloney, who had taken a floor at the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido at Venice. Louisa couldn’t say for certain what Mrs Mulloney’s situation had been before, but as a widow she was extremely well-off. Her husband’s death had been written up in the papers as a tragedy, a fatal allergic reaction; the fact of Kate having been so drunk she had passed out and failed to call an ambulance had been successfully kept out of the reports, and she remained as central to London society as ever before. A year with the Guinnesses had given Louisa a new understanding of what it meant to be rich, as rich people saw it. She grasped now why the Mitford girls had complained of their poverty. From where she had been standing then – having grown up as the daughter of a washerwoman and chimney sweep – they had seemed to be practically rolling in money. But now, having worked for Diana for a year, she knew what that actually looked like.
It meant, for a start, having the latest fashions in one’s wardrobe instead of one’s dresses being made by the local seamstress. Let loose with a chequebook, Diana had evolved a style of her own fairly fast, one that showed off her carefully maintained figure at its best. Unfussy in silhouette, though she was fond of flounces on shirt fronts and cuffs, she tended towards rich textures of cashmere, wool, linen or silk in sharply contrasting dark and light shades; a white velvet cape over a long black coat was a favourite. Bryan was no dandy but he enjoyed complementing his wife with his own modern look. His beautiful suits were traditionally made in Savile Row, but he had certain touches – such as ties with narrow knots and jackets worn unbuttoned and loose, or off altogether, with shirtsleeves rolled up: tiny hints of his appreciation of the more artistic types.
Louisa liked her mistress’s husband; he was unassuming in many ways, modest and kind, not entirely at ease – she felt – with his position as a privileged young man. Indeed, he had tried to work: having passed his law exams soon after marriage he had joined a chambers as a barrister but soon discovered that he was given no cases, the clerk having determined that the others needed the money more than he did. So the young couple were generally footloose and fancy-free, both day and night, which meant trips to Ireland – where Bryan’s father lent them a vast house in Knockmaroon – or Paris. They had returned there at the end of the previous year with Nancy, who was now writing her first proper novel. She was a frequent visitor to their house, usually with a writer of some acclaim in tow, not least Evelyn Waugh, who seemed to think that Nancy’s career as an author was as promising as his. Mr Waugh had only just published a new book, Vile Bodies, and dedicated it to Diana and Bryan; Louisa thought Nancy might rather have minded.
Most weekends were spent staying with friends in the country, hunting or shooting in the winter months. When in London, residing at their house in Buckingham Street (rather larger than a dolls’ house as it had turned out), Diana and Bryan went to the theatre almost every night, or Diana went to concerts with her brother Tom, as well as to dinners, clubs or dances, or gave their own elaborate parties. For Diana’s nineteenth birthday in the summer of 1929, they had held a party themed ‘1860’, with a few hundred guests and the women required to wear enormous crinoline skirts with hoops. Only a month later they held an equally extravagant ‘tropical’ party on board the Guinness family yacht, the Friendship. Every outing was followed up by a newspaper report the next day, usually with a photograph of ‘the ravishing the Hon. Mrs Guinness’. Often, but not always, the accompanying item was written by Luke Meyer.
Luke had remained a friend of both Diana’s and Louisa’s. In the wake of Guy’s shocking revelation that he was engaged, Louisa had needed that friendship more than ever. Not, she strongly suspected, that Luke would ever be a romantic attachment, but she didn’t mind that. She had sworn off that altogether. It wasn’t as if she could be married and be a lady’s maid, in any case. For while she knew she remained nothing more than a servant, there was much about the work that she had begun to enjoy. To begin with, it was not arduous. She couldn’t even complain about lack of sleep as other lady’s maids did, for although Diana often returned home late, when Louisa needed to be ready to help her undress and prepare for bed, she slept late, too. There was some work to be done in washing and ironing Diana’s dresses and keeping her shoes, gloves, hats and bags spotless, but mostly it was a very ‘upstairs’ sort of life, with the two of them frequently going to the shops together, whether to prepare for the various parties or travel. Naturally, when Diana travelled, Louisa travelled with her and was accorded her own respect at the servants’ halls of the houses they visited, often seated on the right of the butler at the staff meals; it never failed to amuse her that the servants were more self-consciously hierarchical than the people they worked for. Upstairs, Diana would sometimes tell her late at night, the young men and women enjoyed breaking the rules of their parents, eschewing the ancient rules of seating according to title – and once, Diana had snickered, a woman had refused to leave with the rest of her sex after dinner but remained with the men to drink the port.
Sometimes the younger sisters – Unity, Decca and Debo – would come to London and Louisa would take them out, which they would all enjoy. Diana adored her younger sisters and they were completely enthralled by her glamour; as a gang, Louisa enjoyed the sensation of being one of them, deep in the centre of their teasing and jokes. As for the rest of Diana’s life, Louisa knew she was not one of the players but she somehow felt in the thick of the high life, often hearing the society gossip some time before it made it to the papers. Once or twice, slightly guiltily, she had even given Luke a story but never anything about Diana or Bryan. She might not have been curing disease or running for parliament like the fearless women featured in the newspapers but compared to where she had started in life, Louisa felt she had begun to achieve something, even if it was travelling more and meeting a wider circle of fascinating people than she was sure any of her ancestors would have done.
There was just one fly in the cold cream.
Louisa didn’t like Diana.
She couldn’t put her finger on why, exactly, or even when the rot had started to set in. Diana was perfectly nice to her, never high-handed or too exacting in her requirements. The excellent cook at Buckingham Street, Mrs Mackintosh (always called ‘Mrs Mack’), was almost slavishly devoted to her mistress, as was May, the parlourmaid who had formerly worked for Bryan’s parents. Nor was her employer dull or stupid: Diana was well-read, as up-to-date with the latest artists and writers as with politics, and never short of an opinion. She was very beautiful, of course – even more so now than when she had married, having lost something of her babyish plumpness around the chin and cheekbones, even now that she was in the later stages of pregnancy. She could be stubborn, wilfully sticking to her point even when her argument had been clearly lost, but this could be said of Nancy, and Louisa remained as fond of her. It was more a certain coldness that Louisa detected, a frigidity that remained even in the face of the warmth of another’s kindness. It was possible that at the root of it, Louisa felt sorry for Bryan, who was madly besotted with his wife, to a degree that she had to admit could not be easily matched in return. More than once, Louisa had found Diana asleep on the bed in the afternoon, with rose petals strewn on the pillow by Bryan as she slept, a newly written poem left beside her. This could be loving or oppressive, depending on your point of view, but was surely kindly meant and Louisa found herself reacting crossly to Diana’s complacency about her husband’s adoration.
With Diana pregnant now and the baby due in early March, Louisa felt an obligation to remain in her employ. And truthfully, in spite of this difficulty, she was reluctant to consider seriously giving up her work: she had a comfortable room in the centre of London, a roof over her head, the opportunities of travel, easy work … When she thought back to the squalor of the shared lodgings she had had to take in the time she’d spent away from the Mitfords, let alone the long hours working at the dress shop and the wandering hands of its owner, she wanted to retch. No, she had to stay with Diana and follow her, if not quite to the ends of the earth, then at least to Venice.