WHEN DIANA LEFT him, Bryan went through agonies of misery and humiliation. The break-up of the house at Cheyne Walk, where only a few months ago they had given a party that seemed to celebrate their joint happiness, was the public admission that his marriage had failed. He could hardly bear to undertake the necessary domestic arrangements – and, as those around him indignantly sympathised, why should he? ‘For her own sake and as far as possible for the harmony of the Cheyne servants, Mrs Guinness to tell them herself,’ ran a scribbled note to his secretary, Miss Moore. ‘Dear Mrs Guinness,’ she wrote on 6 January 1933, ‘Would you mind seeing the servants yourself about the dissolution of Cheyne Walk and consequent future arrangements? They are so hurt that it has come through me and not through their mistress. We all want the road to be as smooth as we can make it and it would help very considerably if you would do this.’ At the bottom Bryan had pencilled a note to Diana. ‘The servants are resenting your going so much and the tiny flat will send them off the deep end again. I shall be thankful when it comes to an end.’
He could still hardly believe that Diana’s decision was final, even though she found him a flat, 143 Swan Court, and was decorating it. ‘Darling, I really do think you are kind,’ he wrote, when she offered to arrange his books for him. ‘I do love you for it. I mean, I would if you wanted me to.’
His father was made of sterner stuff, urging his son to stand up for himself and tell Diana that her behaviour was unacceptable. Before leaving for three weeks in Switzerland, Bryan wrote from beneath the parental roof at Grosvenor Place – probably to his father’s dictation – to protest at her public appearances with the man whom he believed had stolen her from him.
I would be very grateful if you would not give your lunch party at the Savoy Grill as I am lunching there with Reggie myself. I tried but failed to get through to you on the telephone to say this. I cannot consent to your associating with Mosley, either at Cheyne Walk or anywhere else. I do not mean that I shall send a policeman to fling him out but I cannot in any way condone your meeting him. Love from Bryan
Unity was not allowed to stay with her sister in London, partly because of the Redesdales’ disapproval, partly because the ambiguity of Diana’s marital status made her an unfit chaperone. Debo, much younger, was too preoccupied with the hunting, riding, skating and animals that took up most of her waking thoughts to do more than simply accept Diana’s mysterious absence. Yet the Redesdales had not completely given up hope that Diana might be persuaded to return to Bryan. Sydney still saw her from time to time and on 12 January wrote a final appeal.
I was so glad I was able to see you the other night and to realise what I did think was the case: the affection you have for Bryan through and beyond everything. His worst fault seems to be a too great fondness for you and perhaps you on your side are too impatient. Do, I beg you, think well before you throw away what is worth while and good for what is nothing and bad. Surely with the amount of real affection you and B have for each other you should be able to get on together if both of you try to. It really is worth trying. As to the other, even if it were possible, it could only end badly, and quickly too. I believe your own good natures which you both have so largely will bring you through. It has been a great trouble to us and to everyone, I believe, who knows you both. When I talked to B about it, he took all the blame. That isn’t fair, and you would both have to alter your ways a little, I dare say, but it must be worth it.
Perhaps, thought the Redesdales, the opinion of someone Diana’s own age might influence her. Her best friend Cela, who shared the general view that Diana was making an appalling mistake, had developed pleurisy and was to be sent out to Mu¨rren that January to join her aunt and younger brother. Would Cela ask Diana if she would come out to Mu¨rren with her? Once away from daily contact with Mosley, thought her parents, Diana might come to her senses and realise the enormity of what she was doing.
Cela was surprised though delighted when Diana cheerfully accepted her invitation – for her part, Diana felt a break from the rows with her parents and the guilt she was feeling every time she saw Bryan’s white, miserable face would be welcome. She had sworn Nancy to secrecy over her whereabouts, so it was only when Diana herself sent him a wire to say she was thinking of him and giving her address that Bryan was able to write to her, as he lay in bed with flu at Swan Court. ‘I have not written to you before because I thought you did not want me to write . . . It is very bad for us to think of each other. We must stop it. All the dye will be washed out of my eiderdown if I go on like this. Still I think a little annual tear on the 30 of January can be allowed . . .’
He felt too rotten to go down to Biddesden for the lawn meet of the Tedworth; Pam ‘did the honours’ instead. Each fresh arrangement was painful, such as writing to Diana to let her know that the superb Biddesden cook, Mrs Mack, wanted to go to Eaton Square with her and was prepared to accept the lower wage Diana would offer (‘it is much better she should go to you contented than stay with me disgruntled’). There was also the miserable and humiliating business of explaining to those who had seen Diana and Mosley lunching together, or who had asked Diana and Bryan to dinner parties, that he and Diana were now separated. His novel Singing Out of Tune, about a couple whose marriage goes wrong and who separate, was due to come out soon; he begged her to tell everyone that it was not their story.
No efforts by Cela and her aunt could alter the steadiness of Diana’s purpose. She treated the ten days in Mu¨rren simply as a well-earned respite. ‘I have read five books and learnt to waltz on the ice since I have been here and I am feeling like heaven in rude health,’ she wrote to Roy Harrod on 30 January.
When Diana returned, she went to see Bryan immediately. On 1 February he had scribbled her a note about the Mitfords’ great friend Mrs Ham, known for her delight in catastrophe. ‘She was doubly delighted to find illness joined to matrimonial disaster. I need hardly say she is borrowing the car tomorrow to visit a friend who is dying of cancer.’ The amused tone of this made Diana think Bryan might, after all, be beginning to accept the situation, and she relaxed into her usual warm, affectionate and good-natured manner. To Bryan, her friendliness gave a glimmer of hope. Late on the night of Sunday 5 February, after she had left him in Swan Court, he wrote a last, passionate appeal. It was dignified, moving and realistic; few women could have read it without tears or second thoughts. On Diana its effect was to intensify her desire for a quick, clean break.
I was afraid that while you were in Switzerland you would decide to return to me because you couldn’t face the material situation. That has not happened and this is all to the good. But now that you have seen me, do you not find any impression made on a heart that absence may have made grow fonder without its being aware of it. Don’t you find that I am the one you will miss most? Are you sure – are you really sure that the circle of our love is complete? Don’t you feel any impetus along a second circle round the same centre?
Are you positive that you love Tom more than me? You say you cannot do without him – but can you do without me? I have already pointed out his strength, which lies in the sacrifices you would have to make for him. I have already begged you to leave that out of account in weighing us up. His weakness may lie in his power and his charm, which enable him to do without you. If you must take Biddesden into account against me, you should also take the 11 and more feathers in his cap against him. You were my ewe lamb. He may turn from his flock to take you. He may value you but one day it will be too late.
So think, think, day and night. I have loved you so much and with such an unusual love. I have been so entirely devoted to you. But you must search yourself and inspect the inmost corners of your feelings. I am the one who gave you Jonathan and Desmond. Think, think, whether I did not get some lasting chord in you that will always be there belonging to me. Think of the time when you were coming round from the chloroform and the bottom of your mind was confused with the top – what did you find then? Was it me you wanted – that was natural?
Who did you want as you came to? Was it me or Tom? I don’t know, perhaps it was Tom. Perhaps I am arguing against myself. Certainly he has captured your sexual fancy. Certainly he has captured your imagination. But which of us rules the unknown areas of your subconsciousness, where your most real emotions dwell? Which of us would you most want to breathe in your ear if you were dying? (neither, says you).
It would not be easy to build up a life together again, in fact the easiest course from a material point of view, certainly from mine, is to make the breach final. Yet I have this strong feeling that we both belong to one another, that we are bound by our mutually broken virginity. Are you sure that there is no side of you which feels itself my wife as I feel myself your husband? . . . what I hoped and decided would be a good sign would be if you seemed to warm towards me when you saw me and that you seemed a little to do. Perhaps it was only pity and kindness and sentimental memories but see if it was not anything more. Ask yourself the question night and day, I beg you. Love Bryan.
Instead, she stepped further away, moving into the Eatonry (as her Eaton Square flat quickly became known). The grant from the Grosvenor Estate paid for a new bathroom as well as for £200-worth of white paint which transformed its dingy interior. Bryan’s generous allowance, made to her on marriage, easily covered the £300 a year rent. He also gave her the Cheyne Walk furniture – they had spent such a brief time there that they had not finished furnishing it – but she refused to take his present of ‘The Unveiling of Cookham War Memorial’. ‘It is such a marvellous picture,’ she told him, ‘and it is not right that I should take it.’ Sadly, Bryan removed it to hang at Biddesden. She did, however, accept the manuscript of Vile Bodies since Bryan said he felt that it really belonged to Jonathan.fn1 She managed to have the Aubusson carpets she loved in two of the small rooms by dint of swapping her own large one for two smaller ones. The tiny dining room, with its red velvet banquettes which could seat six, was usually full. Mosley was constantly there. ‘So marvellous with the boys,’ Diana would say. ‘He knows what to say to children and jollies them along and makes things interesting for them.’
To Cimmie, a Diana who had left her husband was a menacing figure. In those days few women would have taken a step that would render them so declassée. This open flouting of convention appeared a blazing public statement of intent. Diana’s abandonment of Bryan must have made it seem to Cimmie as though she were utterly sure of her lover – or that Mosley had already secretly decided he would leave Cimmie and marry her. Whichever alternative was true, Cimmie felt that the husband she loved so much was no longer hers and she suffered terribly.
For Mosley, Diana’s solitary state was an irresistible compliment. That such a young and beautiful woman should have sacrificed her marriage, an immense fortune and a position at the peak of society simply to make herself more available to him was the final, conclusive proof of his virility and attractiveness.
Bryan did his best to adjust to the situation. Finding Biddesden intolerably lonely, he made one of the trips abroad he so enjoyed, this time to the Greek islands. ‘I don’t know how far “sad memory” will “bring the light of other days around me” for I am determined to control dismal associations as far as I can,’ he wrote to Nancy on 28 April.
During April Cimmie and Tom Mosley had been to Rome to take part in an International Fascist Exhibition – Mosley and seven of his men represented the BUF, with a black banner emblazoned with a small Union Jack and the fascist symbol. During the visit, Mosley was received by Mussolini, and flatteringly invited by Il Duce to appear with him on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia.
It was a heady moment. As the excited roars of the crowd rose to their ears, Mussolini’s flamboyant gestures and frowning, blue-chinned posturing no longer seemed ridiculous but the response of the central actor to his country’s love of spectacle, an affirmation that here, truly, was the leader. In any case, Mussolini’s theatrical style and exaggerated masculinity appealed strongly to Mosley, for whom politics and sexuality were inextricably mixed. ‘Fascism is the greatest creed that Western civilisation has ever given to the world,’ proclaimed Mosley’s editorial in the next issue of the Blackshirt, the BUF weekly paper.
On returning, Mosley went straight to see Diana. By now Cimmie was desperate, so much so that one day Diana asked Mosley why Cimmie minded about her so much more than the other women he had had affairs with. ‘She probably didn’t know about most of them,’ replied Mosley. Then it struck him that it might help to take Cimmie’s mind off Diana and reassure her that nothing would affect their marriage if he made a clean breast of them all. He went home and did this. ‘But they are all my best friends!’ wailed the unfortunate Cimmie.
She was too upset that night to accompany her husband to the dinner party to which they had both been invited, so Mosley went by himself. There, to his relief, he found their friend Bob Boothby. Would Boothby, he asked, leave the dinner party early and go and see Cimmie who was, he explained, miserable and needed comforting?
‘What have you done to her now, Tom?’ asked Boothby.
‘I’ve told her all the women I’ve been to bed with since we’ve been married,’ said Mosley.
‘All, Tom?’ asked Boothby.
‘Yes,’ replied Mosley. ‘Well – all except her sister and her stepmother.’fn2
Boothby duly left early and did his best to convince Cimmie that it was her and her alone whom her husband really loved.
Perhaps it was only coincidence that Cimmie’s final decline began within days of Mosley’s devastating frankness, or that she could not face the luncheon party on 4 May given by her close friend Georgia Sitwell, now revealed by Mosley’s disclosure to have been a recent mistress. The pencil note for that day in Georgia’s diary reads, ‘Cim supposed to lunch but taken ill.’
Cimmie and Mosley spent the weekend together at Denham in an atmosphere of mounting tension with, on Cimmie’s side, increasing physical wretchedness as well. On Sunday evening there was a brief cessation of both. Mosley poured them a cocktail and they strolled across the lawn together. One of the housemaids, Elsie Corrigan, was sitting on the wide window-seat of the servants’ sitting room writing a letter home on her Sunday evening off; as the Mosleys passed they handed her their empty glasses. She watched them walk, arms about each other, laughing and smiling, into the orchard beyond.
That night they had a terrible quarrel, which left Cimmie shattered. Mosley walked out, drove up to London and went to see Diana, who told him that she had just asked Bryan for a divorce; at Denham, Cimmie wept through a sleepless night. In the morning, as usual unable to bear any rift, Cimmie wrote to her husband, characteristically and generously blaming herself.
Darling heart, I want to apologise for last night but I was feeling already pretty rotten and that made me I suppose silly. Anyhow I had a star bad night of feeling wretched and this morning was all in with sickness and crashing back and tummy ache. I can’t think what it is . . . no temp. so there’s nothing to worry about.
She was wrong. That evening, she was rushed to a nursing home with acute appendicitis. The appendix burst and she was operated on the same night.
At first no one was anxious. An appendix operation was commonplace, Cimmie was only thirty-four and seemingly strong – Mosley was so little worried that immediately after the operation had been successfully performed he went to the Eatonry for lunch – among the other guests was Unity, meeting ‘the Leader’ for the first time.
But despite Cimmie’s open-air, smiling, sturdy appearance, her health was poor and had been getting worse. The congenital spinal curvature, inherited from her father, which she had had from childhood, had gradually developed into lower back trouble that became more and more painful. While she was carrying Micky the pain was so severe she had to have morphia to relieve it and after his birth she found she was unable to take any form of active exercise – even sneezing hurt badly. The kidney trouble from which she had been suffering for months refused to be cured and she picked up numerous other infections. Perhaps more relevant still, she had been under intense emotional strain and miserably depressed ever since, almost a year earlier, she had realised the seriousness of her husband’s feelings for Diana.
Cimmie’s illness was reported in the newspapers and it was from the Continental Daily Mail that Irene first learned of it – she had just become engaged at the age of thirty-seven and was in Switzerland with her fiancé, Captain Miles Graham. She wired at once to Mosley, who telegraphed back that all was well and there was no need for her to come home. Instead, she wrote to Cimmie, telling her of her engagement and saying that she wanted her, Cimmie, but not Baba, to come to the quiet wedding she and her fiancé planned in Switzerland – so would she please not tell Baba about it. For by now the relationship between eldest and youngest sister had so deteriorated that the jealousy simmering under its surface had almost reached the point of open expression. Irene, her eyes sharpened by her own love affair, must have realised the depth of her youngest sister’s obsession with Mosley. Her intuition was well founded: all that year, Mosley had been juggling not only his wife and Diana but Baba as well, lunching and dining with each several times a week. Sometimes he would see all three on the same day.
Three days later, Mosley wired Irene again, this time to say that Cimmie was critically ill with peritonitis. Irene flew home at once with Miles Graham, arriving on 15 May to be met at the airport by Baba, but was too late to see Cimmie that day.
Cimmie’s condition deteriorated terrifyingly fast. The next morning she was too weak even for a blood transfusion; instead, she was given saline injections. Baba, a grim-faced sentinel, sat outside the door of Cimmie’s room, refusing to let Irene in – Cimmie, too weak to read her own letters, had asked Baba to read the one Irene had sent from Switzerland, with its fatal sentence, ‘I only want you, not Baba, at my wedding.’ Irene sat outside with Mosley’s mother and Cimmie’s maid Andrée, while Baba sobbed and Mosley tried brokenly to speak to his wife. By now all of them had given up hope.
A few hours later, Cimmie was dead. ‘Tom came out after a bit, he hugged Baba pathetically,’ wrote Irene in her diary, the flame of jealousy flickering as she added, ‘If I had not kissed him on the stairs he would have passed me by.’
It was as well she did not know why he was going down the stairs. He was looking for the nearest place from which to telephone in privacy. A few minutes after Cimmie’s death, as Irene made arrangements to have the Mosley children collected and their nanny told the sad news, Mosley was ringing Diana to say that his wife had died.
Diana was shattered. ‘It seemed a harbinger of unhappiness,’ she wrote later. She thought it would be the end as far as she and Mosley were concerned. She knew that he had been genuinely devoted to his wife and she believed that he would be so overcome with remorse and guilt, at the unhappiness he had caused Cimmie and its possible contribution to her death, that he would give her up. ‘My heart is full of dark forbodings,’ Diana wrote to a new friend, the don Roy Harrod. When Mosley called in at the Eatonry that evening (on his way to Denham) to tell her that they would not be able to see each other for some time, her worst fears seemed realised, even though he assured her, ‘It will be all right.’
Cimmie’s sisters saw it from a different perspective. ‘Oh God what a terrible doom for Tom!’ wrote Irene that night, ‘and to think that Cim is gone and that Guinness is free and alive and oh! where is there any balance or justice!’ They thought then and later that Diana was responsible for Cimmie’s death – not, of course, for her illness but for the fact that she refused to fight it, metaphorically turning her face to the wall.
Many of Cimmie’s friends also believed that Diana was the direct cause of Cimmie’s death; or, as Cimmie’s daughter put it, ‘Diana destroyed my mother. I don’t retract the word destroy. Peritonitis is what killed her but with Diana there, she didn’t want to live.’
After seeing Diana, Mosley was driven back to Denham. Irene, sitting at dinner with Miles Graham after consoling as best she could Cimmie’s children, Vivien and Nicholas (Micky was still a baby), heard the crashing of the car’s passenger door. Before the housemaid Elsie Corrigan, waiting at table (the butler and footman were still at Mosley’s London flat), could reach the front door, Mosley came in looking, thought Elsie, ‘like a man demented’. Asking her to give him a whisky and soda, he went straight upstairs to the children. Miles Graham, made deeply anxious by Mosley’s wild and anguished demeanour, asked Elsie where Mosley kept his guns. One pistol, she told him, was under Mosley’s pillow – she saw it every day when she made the bed – and its pair was in the top drawer of his chest of drawers. Graham removed them both.
Many, including Nancy Astor, believed that Mosley’s show of grief was theatrical. The maudlin description by the doctor on the case (‘how Sir Oswald stood the anxious strain I do not know . . . it may seem a rather strange thing to say but they had a very beautiful time together during their last few days’) which appeared the day after Cimmie’s death did nothing to counter this.
But there was no doubt that Mosley had loved Cimmie deeply. Even Andrée, Cimmie’s maid and confidante, who loathed Mosley for his treatment of her mistress, told Georgia Sitwell that no one could have been more marvellous during Cimmie’s final hours. ‘He spent every minute with her for a week. He talked to her for hours as she lay dying and Andrée thinks she understood.’
Mosley commissioned a sarcophagus by Lutyens, to stand in a memorial garden in the orchard to which they had walked on that Sunday evening – their last happy moments together. Until this pink marble tomb with its simple inscription ‘My Beloved’ was ready, Cimmie’s coffin lay in the Cliveden chapel a few miles away – it was while canvassing for Nancy Astor that Cimmie and Tom had met each other. On 19 May there was a private funeral service attended only by Mosley, his mother and Cimmie’s two sisters; later the same day there was a memorial service at St Margaret’s, Westminster, characterised by the fact that the only people in black were members of the BUF in their new shirts – Cimmie’s friends had been told not to wear mourning.
Everything that was reported to Diana of these last rites made her more fearful and apprehensive. ‘I am very depressed and depressing,’ she wrote a few days later to Roy Harrod, ‘– when I come and depress you on Sunday may I bring Cela Keppel.’
Bryan’s agreement to a divorce, in which he would be named as the guilty party, did not cheer her. At dinner parties she looked white-faced and wan; when Mosley came to see her for the first time after Cimmie’s death in mid-June, they had a blazing row, provoked by his asking à propos of her forthcoming divorce, ‘Well, have you jumped your little hurdle yet?’ Cut by this seeming frivolity, she turned on him furiously. ‘It isn’t “a hurdle” – you are talking of my whole life.’ It was a far more serious quarrel than the spats they often had in the early days; Mosley, realising this, apologised at once and they made it up.
Cimmie’s death united the two surviving Curzon sisters in a hatred of Diana so virulent that the rivalry between them took second place. Irene realised that Baba was Mosley’s preferred companion, while Baba’s passion for her brother-in-law, no longer held in check by Cimmie’s presence, found more overt expression. Hysterically, she begged Mosley to give up Diana as in some way ‘hurtful’, as Irene put it in her diary at the end of that June, to the memory of the dead Cimmie. ‘Baba fairly let fly about Diana and how she loathes her and she tried to make Tom see that if he went on like this he would be utterly killed and his future smashed as people would not stand for it . . . and he still cannot see what he is doing to beloved Cim through it all.’ Sisterly outrage concealed furious jealousy: to console the grieving widower, Baba was to obtain a fortnight’s ‘leave of absence’ from her husband Fruity so that she could motor through France alone with Mosley later that summer. To facilitate this jaunt Irene was to agree to take Cimmie’s two older children on a holiday while Micky remained at home with his nanny.
Mosley, well versed in juggling female emotions, managed to convince both Baba and Diana of his need to see each of them. To Baba, as Irene noted, he explained that he had to see Diana occasionally because he could not ‘shirk his obligations’ and that he had to dine with her ‘platonically as he says’ from time to time. He persuaded his mother to tell both Curzon sisters that he had no intention of seeing Diana again after the motor trip with Baba – for Baba, this must have seemed a signal that he felt as deeply for her as she did for him. To Diana, whose divorce hearing had been scheduled for June, he said that if it became known that he was seeing a lot of Baba this would make an excellent cover for himself and Diana during the six months between the decree nisi and the decree absolute.fn3 In addition to the possibility of a failed divorce, any scandalous publicity would have been as bad for both of them as if Mosley had been cited as correspondent, so when he went to see Diana after dark, slipping round the corner from his flat to the Eatonry, he would tap on a ground-floor window with his stick to make sure a visit was safe.
Irene, on the emotional sidelines, knew only that Mosley now seemed wrapped up in Baba: ‘I pray this obsession with her will utterly oust Diana Guinness.’
On the practical side, Irene had a leading role. She had broken off her engagement and now became the Mosley children’s surrogate mother. She sold her house in Deanery Street, had her old dog Winks put down, dismissed her staff and went on a cruise before taking up her new role. She then moved into Savehay, where she supervised the running of the household, with Cimmie’s former lady’s maid Andrée as housekeeper, and kept the accounts, which had to be approved by the Official Solicitor.
The Mosley children were now entitled to their mother’s £10,000 a year from the Leiter Trust in Chicago and, as minors, had been put financially under the care of the Official Solicitor. Mosley contended that without his children’s income he could not afford the upkeep of Savehay Farm with its large staff, and it was agreed that the children’s income should be used to keep up what was, after all, their family home.
Diana’s divorce was due to be heard on 15 June 1933. The day before, three of her sisters, Pam, Unity and Nancy (who had a room at the Eatonry), had come round to tea to give her courage for her appearance in the witness box. What Diana, but none of the others, knew was that Hamish St Clair Erskine, unable to bear the charade of his engagement to Nancy any longer, was desperate to break it off. He had told Diana he thought the only way was to pretend to be engaged to someone else. ‘You must be very careful,’ said Diana. ‘She might do herself an injury.’
After tea the Leader arrived. He greeted the admiring Unity warmly (‘Hello, Fascist!’) and gave her a badge bearing the fascist emblem. Pam, who disliked him intensely, left, but the others stayed on for supper. As they ate, Hamish telephoned. He asked to speak to Diana, hoping to get her to act as his intermediary, but when the caller was announced Nancy rushed to the telephone. Brutally Hamish broke it to her that he was engaged to someone they had both agreed they thought was awful. Nancy begged him to come round and he agreed. Mosley left hastily, and Diana and Unity took themselves off to a cinema.
Nancy was shattered. ‘I knew you weren’t IN LOVE with me but . . . I thought that in your soul you loved me & that in the end we should have children & look back on life together when we were old,’ she wrote pathetically the same night. The contrast between her life and Diana’s must have seemed doubly galling. Here was Diana almost carelessly throwing away something she, Nancy, had never known – a loving husband – for something else equally missing from her own life: a physical passion. For although Nancy, like Pam, disliked Mosley, it was impossible for anyone living at close quarters with Diana not to recognise the sexual and emotional intensity of her relationship with Mosley.
At the divorce hearing the following day, Diana was granted a decree nisi. Bryan did not contest her petition: he had duly gone down to Brighton and spent the night in an hotel with a professional lady hired for the purpose, bestowing a large tip on the maid who brought breakfast so that she would be sure to remember having seen them together.
The financial arrangements had been settled quickly and amicably. Diana had refused to try to obtain the huge sum that could have been extracted from a very rich man who was technically the guilty party. Nor did she want any part of the marriage settlement from Bryan’s parents which had temporarily made her such a rich woman. Her solicitor’s comment that ‘you are signing away millions’ left her unmoved. She did not want to be rich, she said, nor did she want anything that could be described as ‘loot’; she merely wanted enough to live on. She gave Bryan back the Guinness tiaras and brooches, keeping only the presents he had bought her since their marriage – a three-strand cultured pearl necklace with a diamond clasp, huge and beautiful Victorian paste earrings and an exquisite bracelet of diamonds and cabochon rubies.
Bryan, anxious to be as generous as he could be to the woman he still loved deeply, asked her to name whatever sum she thought would enable her to live comfortably. She agreed to accept £2,500 a year, in those days an income that could provide two or three servants – Diana had a cook and a nanny – elegant clothes and a car. Bryan, who thought Mosley, even if he married her, would later abandon her, insisted that this income should be hers for life and not cease if she remarried.
After the divorce, Bryan, who wanted to sink out of sight, spent more and more time at Biddesden. He would sometimes have friends to stay for weekends and would invariably ask Pam, still managing his farm, to join them. She would enquire carefully of the parlourmaid, May, who the other guests were, before giving her answer – if the party included Evelyn Waugh, of whom she was terrified, she always refused.
Diana was largely cut off from the grander side of society. Though a few of the well-known hostesses still invited her to stay – one was Mrs Ronnie Greville – to the majority of the older generation she was an undesirable. Quite apart from their hatred of divorce, there was intense disapproval of her behaviour; pity and sympathy for their contemporaries the Redesdales; and shock that anyone should abandon a marriage quite so quickly and for quite so ‘shop-soiled’ a Lothario. Apart from this, at a time when upper-class young girls were strictly brought up and chaperoned for at least two seasons, the presence of a beautiful young woman (only a few years older than these debutantes) who had left her husband would have seemed a threat to many wives and a temptation to many husbands.
This ostracism passed Diana by completely, since the legion of her own friends remained steadfast. She would go to the cinema with Henry Yorke or Nigel Birch, to concerts with her brother Tom, to Emerald Cunard’s evenings. She went as Poppaea to John Sutro’s Roman fancy-dress party at the Savoy; she had herself photographed for Cela’s brother Derek Keppel, who had worshipped her since he first met her (‘My one and only darling Diana,’ he wrote from Sialkot, where he was stationed with his regiment, the 13/18 Hussars, ‘You are the divinest of all women . . . I do adore you so’). Twice a week she would go with Unity to the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, afterwards bringing Unity back to dine at the Eatonry, often with Mosley, evenings which laid the groundwork for much of Unity’s later obsession with the fascism of Nazi Germany.
A few months earlier, in the spring, Mrs Richard Guinness – the wife of a distant cousin of Bryan’s – had invited her to meet ‘a very interesting German’. This was Putzi Hanfstaengl, who worked for the new German Chancellor, dealing with the British press. Diana could speak only a word or two of German, but Putzi, thanks to his American mother, spoke English fluently. He idolised Hitler, whom he had known for twelve years – it was to Hanfstaengl’s wife and sister that Hitler had fled after the failure of the 1923 putsch, and few men were closer to the new Chancellor than Putzi. He told Diana that if she came to Germany for the Nuremberg Rally that September, he would introduce her to Hitler.
fn1 In 1984 Jonathan sold it at Christie’s for £55,000.
fn2 One year in St Moritz, Mosley, unable to ski because one leg was so much shorter than the other, had had a fling with the voluptuous Grace Curzon, then in her late forties, while Cimmie was on the slopes.
fn3 In those days if the Kings Proctor had evidence that a divorce petitioner had committed adultery and had not disclosed it to the court, he could apply to the court for the Decree Nisi to be rescinded.