NO SHRED OF compunction for his wife – beautiful, sweet-natured and helplessly devoted to him – had ever prevented Mosley from pursuing whatever woman took his fancy. ‘Tom Mosley had a blonde siren in tow at the party and had no eyes for anyone else – not even that eye trick which he obviously thinks very fascinating and which indeed has a great effect on some people,’ wrote one prospective mistress jealously of another when she saw him up to ‘his usual tricks’ at one of Syrie Maugham’s parties.
Most of these women were friends of Cimmie’s, the wives of couples with whom the Mosleys dined, danced or went abroad. Mosley’s tastes were catholic, ranging from sophisticated older beauties such as Sylvia Ashley, Katherine d’Erlanger and Paula Casa Maury, with whom he had a long-standing affair, to Georgia Sitwell, the dark and pretty young wife of Sacheverell Sitwell. All would be asked by the unsuspecting Cimmie to stay at Savehay Farm, near the village of Denham, in Buckinghamshire.
Savehay Farm was an old half-timbered red-brick manor farmhouse; its lawns, on which Mosley used to practise pistol shooting, ran down to the River Colne, the county boundary. The Mosleys had bought it in 1926 for £5,000, a price which included the surrounding 123 acres of land. A long, winding drive led past red-brick barns and a cottage or two to a high red-brick wall which sheltered the house. Downstairs there was plenty of room; upstairs, what with their own bedroom, their two small adjacent bathrooms, Mosley’s dressing room, day and night nurseries for their children and Nanny Hyslop’s room, there were few spare rooms. To provide for overflow guests and their own servants – butler, footman, cook, kitchenmaid, housemaids and Cimmie’s French lady’s maid Andrée Eberon – the Mosleys added an extension designed by their friend and fellow socialist, the architect Clough Williams Ellis.
Here, amid Cimmie’s trestle tables, wheelback chairs and chintzes, there would be gossip in front of the log fire in the panelled drawing room, or dressing up for charades and amateur theatricals in costumes designed by another great friend, Cecil Beaton (known to the Mosleys as ‘Ceckle’). On sunny summer weekends there would be croquet on the lawn between the herbaceous borders, tennis on the two courts beside the drive, or sunbathing and swimming in the River Colne. ‘Tom evidently fancies himself very much in bathing shorts and displays with pride a sunburnt, muscular torso,’ noted Georgia Sitwell, who spent her twenty-third birthday at Savehay.
So open was Mosley about his penchant for one or other or sometimes several of these women that Cimmie at first did not suspect that he was being unfaithful. Yet, as Georgia later admitted, ‘Of course I went to bed with Tom. We all did, and then felt bad about it afterwards.’
Georgia became so deeply involved with Mosley that her obsession was the cause of endless fierce quarrels with her husband Sacheverell, exacerbated by the awkwardness of constant social involvement – the Mosleys often came to Sitwell poetry readings, the Sitwells would join the Mosleys for supper at the Savoy after a play. ‘Sash and Tom came with me, a curious trio. I felt alternate waves of hysterical laughter and annoyance at the situation,’ wrote Georgia in her diary after one such occasion. At the beginning of September Georgia dragged her husband off to join her lover and his wife in Antibes, where she found a party that included the Casa Maurys, John Strachey, Robert Boothby and Cimmie’s sister, Lady Ravensdale – the long-suffering Cimmie lent Georgia a bathing hut, cushions and beach loungers.
Georgia was, however, clear-sighted enough to recognise that, charming as Mosley might be, his own emotions remained unengaged. ‘I wonder if Tom felt anything at all, then or ever?’
Ironically, she was also in the process of becoming friends with the woman who would soon supplant her – Diana. She and Sacheverell went to supper at Buckingham Street (‘Sashie admires Diana enormously’), they met at parties, Georgia went to tea with Diana and they admired each other’s opposite looks. Bryan and Diana, believed Georgia, were utterly devoted to each other.
Mosley’s pursuit of other women followed a regular pattern, beginning with lunch at restaurants such as the Ritz, the Devonshire or Boulestin – both the Mosleys followed the fashionable habit of lunching separately. First, politics would be discussed, then, imperceptibly, the conversation would shade into more personal matters. When, in 1929, Mosley acquired a bachelor flat, 22A Ebury Street, seduction became even easier. Officially a pied à terre for his political work in London, in reality it was little more than a garçonnière. Entered through a discreet front door past two doric columns, it had one huge, pillared room, the shapeless sofas and chairs done up in browns and beiges, the walls hung with eighteenth-century fencing prints. There was a small kitchen plus a bathroom, and the chauffeur’s wife came in and cleaned. The pièce de résistance was the gallery bedroom with its huge double bed. Here, at the touch of a concealed button, warm air wafted down over the occupants.
Cimmie, wanting to believe in her husband, was easily deceived. When Mosley, out of parliament after the formation of the National Government in 1931, announced that he was taking up fencing again, she was overjoyed. She was expecting their third child and experiencing a difficult pregnancy. Harold Nicolson, who was devoted to her, often called to see her as she lay on her sofa. One afternoon, as they discussed Mosley’s ‘incurable boyishness and joie de vivre’, Cimmie declared that fencing would serve as a safety valve for her husband’s overflowing physical energy. In fact, it was the perfect pretext for slipping away to assignations with mistresses, now that the many excuses open to a Member of Parliament were no longer available.
During the twelve years since his marriage to Cimmie in 1920 Mosley had had up to three dozen affairs. His libido and his singlemindedness played a part in the relentless impulsion towards these conquests, as did his upbringing. His father had been a successful womaniser in the louche convention of the ‘fast’ Edwardian set whereby young unmarried girls were ‘out of bounds’ but it was almost obligatory to pay court to an attractive married woman if you found yourself alone with her.
A man of great energy and force, Mosley’s desire to control, to dominate, to be the victor, the most powerful in any group or relationship, was so strong as to be a compulsion. Early on he had discovered his power over women and his successes with them had become a drug, feeding his need for adventure, challenge and admiration. His gaiety, handsomeness – in the idiom of the day the Tatler described him as having ‘John Barrymore looks’ – buccaneering attitude and notoriety meant that he usually succeeded and, as with all pleasurable skills, he enjoyed practising them. In the winter there was shooting; in the spring and summer what he called ‘flushing the coverts’ – going round the balls and parties of the London season to spot the latest crop of attractive young married women. Until he met Diana, he had never fallen in love with any of them.
On the whole, Cimmie did not find out. When she did, she minded bitterly. Mosley would cajole her, make love to her, swear that not one of them was anything more than a diversion and assure her, truthfully, of his love. For she was, in every way except as provider of sexual excitement, the perfect wife and partner for a man so deeply committed to politics. Mosley had few men friends: men tended to dislike his arrogance and mistrust his behaviour. But everyone adored Cimmie. The deep affection between them made many, who would not otherwise have done so, accept Mosley. ‘They are really fond of each other for all their squabbles and infidelities,’ wrote Harold Nicolson. The distress her husband often caused her was, however, plain for all to see.
Cimmie was peculiarly vulnerable to such emotional blows. Her nature was gentle and straightforward; her upbringing in many ways had been similar to that of an orphan, with no reassuring older figure to offer intimate advice, comfort or understanding. She and her two sisters had lost their mother when they were still in the nursery (Lady Curzon died in 1906) and had been brought up by their widowed father in conditions of terrifying strictness and grandeur. Curzon’s natural style was lofty and autocratic, while the meticulousness and passion for detail that marked his Viceroyalty of India meant that he enquired closely and penetratingly into every aspect of his children’s lives, from what they were learning to the cost of their underwear.
Inquisitions took place at mealtimes. Luncheon, and later dinner, in a dining room five minutes’ walk away from the kitchen and always eaten off silver plates and dishes (part of a service for seventy-two), became a form of viva voce that the Curzon daughters dreaded. Their father would first discourse on great events, then put his children through their historical paces by firing a series of questions at them. Unsurprisingly, they were usually so paralysed with fear that they were unable to answer, upon which he would round on the unfortunate governess, who would find herself equally struck dumb with nerves.
No pains were spared to make the girls fit consorts for princes, or at the least dukes or aristocratic conservative statesmen in the Curzon mould. The eldest, Irene, was sent to Dresden for two years to study music, singing and piano before returning to make her debut in 1914; the theatre and opera, together with hunting, remained her passions all her life. Curzon, who had not allowed her to meet any young men before, now gave a great ball for her at Carlton House Terrace (at which he forbade her to wear make-up). Soon afterwards, he remarried, and in 1917 gave a small coming-of-age dance for her at Trent, Sir Philip Sassoon’s house (reported by the press as a huge London ball under the headline ‘Curzon dances while London burns’). It was, though, an important festivity: the equivalent of the coming of age of an heir. Curzon, who had no son, had secured that one of his titles, the barony of Ravensdale, should pass to his eldest surviving daughter. It also marked the beginning of the breakdown of what relationship there was between Curzon and his daughters.
The ground was the fortune their mother had left them. Lord Curzon had always treated his daughters’ incomes as his own, spending them freely to maintain the way of life to which he felt entitled. When they were small this was, of course, no cause for discord and, in any case, largely justified since Kedleston was their home and no expense was spared on their education or debuts. When they grew up and wished to have the use of their trust funds themselves, it was another matter. The first to argue the point was Irene: she wanted to buy a hunting box in the shires, she wanted to travel, she wanted to patronise artists and musicians. Her father was furious, Irene stuck to her guns and there was an open breach.
When Cimmie told her father she wanted to marry Mosley, his first reaction was to pull down Debrett (always known as the Red Book in the Curzon family) from his library shelves and to look up the Mosley family. He could discover no evidence on which to refuse his daughter her choice and reluctantly gave his consent. Even more reluctantly, for by now he had learned that she, too, wished to remove from his grasp the money her mother had left her, he allowed her to be married from Carlton House Terrace.
For Curzon, his worst fears were justified when, shortly after Cimmie and Tom Mosley were married, his new son-in-law carelessly signed an answer to an official invitation, which had been worded and typed by his secretary: ‘Dear Lord Curzon, The wife and I will be pleased to accept . . .’ Curzon wrote to his daughter castigating her for this solecism, for her slipshod approach, for her lack of education – here pointing out the money he had spent on governesses – and listing a number of ways in which the invitation could have been answered correctly. Curzon’s letter covered eight pages.
After this, Cimmie seldom saw her father.
Curzon’s youngest daughter, Alexandra (Baba), devoted to Cimmie, was sixteen and still in the schoolroom when Cimmie married. Thanks to her cloistered upbringing, her sister’s glamorous husband was the first man with whom any kind of close friendship was permitted. From the start, Mosley fascinated her. To Baba, just beginning to dream of love and romance, Cimmie and Tom seemed like creatures out of a fairy tale and she found a vicarious pleasure in imagining their love. What she did not realise was that though her feelings for her sister were of passionate admiration and love, those for Mosley were a schoolgirl crush that would later develop into a full-blown infatuation.
By the time Baba came out the pattern had been set: the three sisters, estranged from a father who had never been more than a distant figure, turned to each other for support, advice, comfort and love. When Mosley married Cimmie, he stamped himself as the predominant male figure not only on Cimmie’s life but on the lives of Irene, older but single, and the adolescent Baba. Both fell in love with him, first Irene and then, more deeply, Baba. Both suffered unadmitted passion that put a fierce edge of jealousy on their feelings for Cimmie and each other. If Mosley appeared to prefer one, it was torture for the other; and while they hated to see their beloved sister made miserable by his unfaithfulness, they could not help forgiving him.
When Diana, so clearly more important than his other infidelities, appeared, she provided a focus for the sisters’ rage and guilt, and she was soon mythologised into a demon figure. Both Irene and Baba hated Diana for the rest of their lives – half a century on, Baba still could not bear to speak of her.
For his part, Mosley had not been worried that Diana had almost ignored him at their first meeting. She was so great a prize that he was prepared to take his time. The most beautiful young woman in London, adored wherever she went but with an impeccable reputation, she presented a challenge more compelling than any of his previous conquests. They had met at the psychological moment: he was out of both government and parliament and therefore had the time to concentrate on winning her; she was finding that the bonds of her marriage were chafing. The luncheon invitations began, the web of words was spun. And soon they were deeply involved in a passionate love affair.
A cause, be it political, patriotic or religious, presented in the person of someone to whom one is greatly attracted sexually, is almost irresistible. Diana, like most of her generation, believed, as she put it, that ‘things had gone desperately wrong in England’. She was deeply conscious of the poverty, the hunger marches, the lethargy of Baldwin followed by the vacillations of Ramsay MacDonald, the stock market crash, the flight from the pound, the unemployment that left once proud and self-respecting working men and their families starving and humiliated. She already knew of the Mosley Memorandum; now, as Mosley expounded his ideas, she listened with the growing feeling that here was the answer. ‘Even at the beginning there was not only passion, though of course it was very strong, but also politics,’ she wrote later of those first months:
Every time we dined or lunched – restaurants mostly – he talked. Occasionally we argued. But on the whole I was completely converted.
In 1932 we all – everyone with the slightest intelligence – thought about politics. We believed that our parents’ generation had made the war, that by will plus cleverness its horrible legacy could be cancelled out, and the world could be changed . . . He seemed to me to be a prophet of this changed world one longed for and I thought: If I can help him as he seemed to think I could, then nothing else mattered in the very least.
She would come back glowing to Buckingham Street and pour it all out to her friend Cela Keppel, who was staying with the Guinnesses for her second London season. ‘Isn’t the Leader wonderful!’ she would exclaim as she recounted their lunchtime conversation, or she would tell Cela how marvellous his lovemaking was compared with Bryan’s inexperienced advances. As Cela was by now equally fond of both Guinnesses, she found it difficult to know how to answer these confidences.
It was clear Diana was in the grip of a physical passion so strong that it blinded her to everything else. She knew that Mosley was a philanderer, but she did not care. Gentle-seeming, amusing and affectionate as Diana was, she was also completely ruthless. She took not the slightest notice of Bryan’s objections to her lunching with Mosley even when he took the painful step of writing her a letter forbidding it. She was very fond of Bryan, but she was not going to let loyalty to him, the effect on their two children should the marriage be threatened, or the devastation she might cause, stand in her way.
She was perfectly open about these meetings and inevitably her friends soon realised her involvement with Mosley. They were horrified, adding their voices to the growing chorus of disapproval. ‘You can’t – you mustn’t see him. Come and lunch with me instead.’ But nothing, not even the knowledge that she was jeopardising a marriage to a kind and loving husband and an enviable way of life, and least of all the quarrels and reproaches over her behaviour, deflected her for a minute – especially when Mosley let her know that he had dropped Georgia Sitwell and Paula Casa Maury, the two women he had been sleeping with when he met Diana.
In April 1932 the Guinnesses moved from Buckingham Street to a larger and more beautiful house, 96 Cheyne Walk. It had been built in 1760 and had once belonged to Whistler. Diana redecorated it completely, painting most of the old walls and panelling white, with some rooms washed in pale blues, pinks or golds. One of the chief beauties of the house was its first-floor panelled drawing room, its tall windows at each end overlooking a long, L-shaped garden at the back and the river in front. Diana painted the panelling grey and white and put on the floor a huge Aubusson, which Lord Moyne, who was extremely fond of her, had given them. One of the two smaller Aubussons, which she had acquired for Buckingham Street, was put in the children’s nursery. ‘So good for them to see pretty things when they’re crawling about,’ she would explain. On the same principle, her two small boys, angelic-looking with their blond curls, were often put into dresses, because ‘little girls’ clothes are so much prettier’.
Once in Cheyne Walk, Diana became more of a social icon than ever. She was offered the part of Perdita by C.B. Cochran in a production of The Winter’s Tale. The society paper, the Bystander’s reporter saw her ‘looking lovely and talking to – I should have said being talked to by – Mr Randolph Churchill’; the Tatler informed its readers that the Honourable Mrs Bryan Guinness was among the young hostesses ‘responsible for the fashion of wearing trousers, not beach pyjamas, in the privacy of their gardens. At Biddesden she wears corduroy slacks in the colder weather, with hand-knitted jumpers, and grey or white flannel trousers with sleeveless shirts in the summer.’
On 7 July the Guinnesses gave a grand party in Cheyne Walk, part housewarming and part coming-out ball for Unity, now eighteen, and a Mitford cousin, Miss Robin Farrar. It was a warm night; in the long, floodlit garden filled with the scent of roses a Russian orchestra played for those of the 300 guests who did not feel like dancing in the panelled drawing room. Supper was served in the two dining rooms, monastic-looking with their white walls, sparse furnishings, refectory tables and arches. In an echo of Lady Evelyn, the maids who served were wearing green and white flowered dresses instead of uniform. The beauties were there in force: Lady Weymouth in black and white cotton, Lady Jersey in pale blue with a blue feather boa, Lady Lavery in white, Penelope Dudley Ward in pale blue and silver lamé, Unity in white satin with a black velvet sash. Winston and Clementine Churchill brought their daughter, Diana, and Augustus John arrived with one of his daughters, Poppet. All three Curzon daughters were there: Irene (now Lady Ravensdale), Baba with her husband Major Edward Metcalfe whom she had married in 1926 – known as ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, he was a close friend of the Prince of Wales – and Cimmie with Tom Mosley.
Diana, in love and by now certain that she was loved, looked glorious in a grey tulle and chiffon dress with a skirt that fell in soft flounces to the ground. Round her neck was the diamond necklace given her as a wedding present by her parents-in-law and on her head a small tiara of diamonds and rubies. ‘You were dazzling as the presiding goddess, fresh and dewy from Olympus,’ wrote Emerald Cunard afterwards.
Others felt the same. ‘Now I know the meaning of the old term, “rout” for dance – someone who routs the rest. Thus did you,’ wrote Cela’s adoring brother Derek.
‘Thank you so much for your beautiful party, where I left my hat and the remains of my heart,’ volunteered Augustus John, who was painting Diana at his Mallord Street studio. ‘When can I get hold of you? You looked so ravishing last night that I am reconsidering the picture.’
‘It was the best party ever given, even by you,’ said Robert Byron. ‘I feel as if I had been raised from the dead by it.’
For Diana, it was something more. She was twenty-two and she had found her fate. That night, some time before a pink and gold dawn glittered on the river outside, she and Mosley had committed themselves irrevocably to each other.
At the same time, Mosley had told her that he would never leave Cimmie.
Next morning, Diana told Cela, ‘I’m in love with the Leader, and I want to leave Bryan.’