A MONTH AFTER Mosley’s decision to withdraw finally from British politics Diana heard of the death of one of her oldest friends. On Easter Day, 1966, Evelyn Waugh died of a heart attack.
After Waugh had abruptly dropped out of her life more than thirty years earlier, she had seen little of him, but lately they had begun to draw together again. Waugh had been anxious to clear up any misunderstanding that might remain. ‘I must not leave you with the delusion that Work Suspended was a cruel portrait of you,’ he had written ten days before his death. ‘It was to some extent a portrait of me in love with you, but there is not a single point in common between you and the heroine except pregnancy. Yours was the first pregnancy I observed.’ When Diana heard of his death she drove immediately to console Nancy, for years one of his closest friends.
With no political ties, the Mosleys’ life was much freer. As well as their usual late-summer holiday in Venice, they rented a house in Johannesburg during January 1967, in Bath Avenue, Rosebank. ‘There are lots of flowers and a good maid,’ wrote Diana to Nicholas. Again, as in Morocco the previous winter, there was a sudden, startling alleviation of Diana’s migraines. This time she realised that it was not only freedom from worry but the warm dry climate that helped. Henceforth, they went to South Africa most winters.
Mosley did not remain idle long. In 1968 he published his autobiography, My Life. It marked a change in the way he was perceived. Age, withdrawal from active politics and residence in a foreign country had blurred his satanic image. Even the Left paid tribute: Richard Crossman said that Mosley had been ‘spurned simply and solely because he was right’, while Malcolm Muggeridge called him ‘The only living Englishman who could perfectly well have been either Conservative or Labour Prime Minister’. A.J.P. Taylor wrote that he was ‘a superb political thinker, the best of our age,’ and the BBC devoted a whole Panorama programme to an interview with him by James Mossman – the first time he had been allowed on television for thirty-four years. There was a sense of expiation, a feeling that he had ‘served his time’ and, to some extent, a softening among those who had previously refused to meet him. In London, while there were still many people who would not sit at the same table as ‘that man’, others were intrigued rather than horrified when they heard he was to be a fellow dinner guest.
None of this rubbed off on Diana. She was still thought of as Hitler’s intimate, and her own views remained as sharp edged and unyielding as ever. In Mosley’s original draft of his autobiography, he had written of Harold Nicolson (à propos his resignation from the New Party), ‘One doesn’t take one’s pet guinea pig with one on an adventure into the jungle.’ When he replaced this caustic comment with a remark that Nicolson would have made a good Foreign Secretary, Diana objected scornfully. In her eyes, Nicolson had lacked the all-important ‘loyalty’ and the fact that he resigned because the New Party had changed direction was neither here nor there. Mosley, however, held firm to his modification.
Apart from Mosley, Nancy was the person of whom Diana saw most. Through her writing, Nancy was now a rich woman – in 1968 her income was £22,000 – with a charming small house, 4 rue d’Artois, in Versailles. Successful, established and popular, she was as desperately in love as ever with Col, now no longer French Ambassador in Rome. She lived for their meetings, now less frequent. Sometimes she would catch the train to Paris, sometimes Col would drive down to Versailles to lunch with her or sit chatting in the small drawing room that overlooked a garden full of wild flowers.
What Nancy had succeeded in putting out of her mind was the well-founded rumour of Col’s love for a married woman, Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord, Duchesse de Sagan. As long as Col was single, even though having affairs, she could feel that part of him still belonged to her – indeed, she could even hope that one day, perhaps, he would realise where his true happiness lay. She did everything she could to strengthen the thousands of tiny, invisible fibres that hold one person to another, even down to making her maid Marie, a peasant woman from Normandy, concentrate her culinary efforts on puddings. ‘I have a friend who likes puddings,’ she told her editor, Joy Law. When Col arrived to join them for lunch Mrs Law noticed that he took three large helpings of pudding.
The equation changed dramatically when the Duchesse de Sagan’s husband finally consented to divorce her. As Col had retired from politics, marriage to a divorced woman could no longer harm his prospects – one of the reasons he had always given Nancy for not marrying her.
When he came to tell her of his forthcoming marriage, she greeted him with the words, ‘Colonel, I’ve got cancer!’ He felt unable to break what he knew would be devastating news and had to return the following day to do so.
Nancy was shattered, but concealed her feelings under her usual mask of flippant mockery, quickly promoting the notion that it was merely another of the Colonel’s whims. She was aided by the fact that during the week he lived in his flat in the rue Bonaparte, spending only the weekends at the Duchesse de Sagan’s chaˆteau, Le Marais, forty kilometres outside Paris. ‘Gaston’s marriage is for those of riper years. Viz, no nonsense about living in the same house in Paris . . . nothing changed whatever in other words.’ As for her Paris friends, from them there was none of the pity that she would have loathed. Her friendship with Col was so well known and open that few thought anything of it; those who did know of the wartime affair regarded it as long past, and no one except the most intimate had any idea that Nancy had never ceased to love a man who blatantly pursued every pretty woman he saw.
Col’s engagement in March 1969 coincided with the beginning of Nancy’s fatal illness. Her family always felt that her cancer was the result of years of repressed longings and jealousy, followed by the deathblow of Col’s marriage – and certainly its severity only became apparent after his engagement. Almost from that moment, she began four years of suffering. She was in constant agony and none of the doctors – in all, she saw thirty-seven – could relieve it, as the pain, which began in her left leg, shifted all over her body.
The burden of care and consolation fell most heavily on Diana. During the years of Nancy’s illness, Diana visited her sister at least three times a week. She was very conscious that, as she later said, ‘The awful thing is, she doesn’t come first with anybody.’ Mornings were Nancy’s worst times; but occasionally, wild with pain, she would telephone Diana in the middle of the night. Diana, who could do little except comfort and soothe, would get up and drive over. She took Nancy to her agonising tests in the Rothschild Hospital and to doctor after doctor to try to find one who might alleviate the suffering.
Often, Debo came over. On 24 April 1969 a grapefruit-sized tumour was removed from Nancy’s liver in the first of several operations. ‘I sat with Naunce [Diana’s name for her sister] until 8.30,’ runs Diana’s diary.
. . . Sunday today and Debo has gone to the clinic without me. I had a frightful migraine in the night and felt I might cry in Naunce’s room. We finally spoke to the surgeon on Friday night and he said ‘Les renseignements ne sont bons’. Debo and I cried so much and on Saturday we sat with her all day and I had a deep talk with the nun and it all seems hopeless. Colonel has been each day. I telephoned him immediately I had spoken to the surgeon. Violette answered and I asked for him and he was rather strange (I thought) but I insisted he must visit continually and he said ‘Mais naturellement’.
There was no specific follow-up treatment after Nancy had returned to her little house in Versailles. ‘I am half relieved and half afraid,’ runs Diana’s diary. ‘Does it mean they think there’s no point in it? Apparently the advantages are not proven and the disadvantages are huge – one feels ill apart from the worry of getting to Paris each time.’
Both sisters realised how desperately ill Nancy was. Even Jessica, icily hostile to Diana for thirty years, paved the way for a visit by a letter to Debo. (‘I will be friends with Honks if she is willing to be friends with me.’)
There were occasional remissions, making the plunge back into pain even more traumatic. In October Nancy was well enough to fly to Germany as a guest of the government to research her life of Frederick the Great, accompanied by her sister Pam, her editor Joy Law and Joy’s husband Richard; but immediately after Christmas she was pulled down by ’flu. Diana, to her distress, could do little for her sister as she was looking after Mosley, who was just out of hospital after a hernia operation and reluctant to let her leave the house on any pretext. In any case, he thoroughly disliked Nancy.
As Mosley grew older he had become extraordinarily possessive of Diana. Years of being at the centre of her existence had accustomed him to his position as a domestic autocrat. Shirley Conran, who as a friend of Alexander’s often visited the Temple, was amazed by Diana’s subservience. ‘I was deeply impressed by the way she danced round him. She struck me as almost henpecked.’ The Laws also noted Diana’s deliberate subjection of her own personality to that of her husband. ‘For someone who so obviously had a mind of her own, she was absolutely at one with him always.’ If he said anything that could be construed as ill judged, she would intervene smoothly to deflect the conversation into another channel.
Mosley did his best to stop Diana visiting Nancy and she would set off, miserable at upsetting him and sometimes half-blinded by tears, to a sister who wrung her heart still further. Nancy, who would make a tremendous effort to appear serene and cheerful in front of someone she did not know well, could not keep up this brave pretence with Diana, who saw her at her weeping, tortured worst. Harrowed by Nancy’s misery, aware that her sister was utterly dependent on her and wanted her there as much as possible, Diana would return to a husband who did not hesitate to show his displeasure at her absence.
Torn between the two of them, Diana found her migraines rising to a crescendo, sometimes following each other with barely an hour’s grace. Pam, who often came from Zurich to stay with Nancy at weekends when Nancy’s manservant Hassan was away, was a furious spectator of Mosley’s behaviour towards Diana. But nothing shook Diana’s conviction of his unassailable rightness. ‘OM is bursting with ideas,’ she wrote to her prison friend Louise Irvine in August 1969 just after the Mosleys’ return from Venice. ‘How wicked and stupid it is not to listen to him.’
Her loyalty to Mosley was complete; she reacted like a spitting cat to anyone who offered even the mildest criticism of him, and only adulation would serve from anyone writing about him. The historian Robert Skidelsky, a friend of Max’s, was writing Mosley’s biography. Her diary records, ‘Read seven chapters. I think it spiteful,’ yet her fondness for Skidelsky and her natural truthfulness ensured that she wrote him charming, undoubtedly sincere letters. ‘You are incapable of writing a dull page. It is a wonderful gift in my opinion and no doubt you realise it. Hard writing, easy reading.’
Diana, who had seen more of Nancy than anyone else in the family, was convinced that Nancy’s anguish over Col was exacerbated by the acid of her temperament and that in Nancy’s own disposition lay the seeds of her illness. Some years later, she set out her theory, which went some way to explaining the value she herself had always put on surroundings that were beautiful, serene and harmonious
Spitefulness turns inwards. The French have an expression, ‘Il fait du mauvais sang’. Nancy was not ‘to blame’ for her illness, because a certain sort of person can find enough unhappiness to create his or her own ill health within almost any frame. The mind and body react on one another at least as much as crazy Christian Scientists think they do. Nancy, who always secreted a good deal of poison, ended by poisoning herself – though again, nobody’s fault and certainly not hers.
In Diana’s case, the emotional strains she was suffering resulted in an ulcer, diagnosed in December 1970, just after Christmas lunch with a miserable Nancy and a brightly social evening with the Windsors. Another strain on her was Mosley’s attitude to their son Alexander. Although Mosley had finally helped Max financially, he still maintained that Alexander was Nicholas’s responsibility. Generously, Nicholas continued his support to Alexander, with Diana adding what she could in a secrecy she hated.
One of Diana’s most salient qualities was honesty, often to the point of doing herself a disservice. She scorned dissimulation, yet where Mosley was concerned her true feelings often had to be suppressed or altered to achieve the complete loyalty to him and his ideas that she demanded of herself. In the final outcome, she would range herself on his side, no matter what the emotional cost of having to deny a principle she knew was right. ‘I do love Kit and his courage more than I can say,’ she wrote to Nicholas, ‘but of course I see the harm he does to Aly and I suffer for it.’
Mosley, as Diana once admitted, was ‘the strangest mixture of generosity and miserliness’. To the cynic, the generosity seemed to appear only in anything that involved himself – he kept an excellent cellar and was a generous host, he would never dream of taking Diana, or his friends, to any but the best restaurants, his clothes were beautifully tailored, his shirts handmade and he was extremely good to the servants who looked after him. He expected Diana to look elegant and liked her to dress at the great Paris couture houses – but he did not give her much to achieve this. Once a year she would buy a dress, or a coat, always in grey, black or beige, worn with simple white polo-neck jerseys; for dinner parties she invariably wore the same long black skirt. But neither short commons nor internal stress affected her beauty. Secure in both her looks and her style, she seemed completely without vanity (‘the last person you could imagine looking at herself in a mirror’, said Shirley Conran). She wore her grey-gold hair drawn back and twisted into a simple bun. This style, adopted to avoid hours in the salon of the fashionable hairdresser, Alexandre, suited her classic looks so well she kept it for years.
The terrible months dragged on. When Diana was in Venice, Debo and Pam replaced her at Nancy’s side. Nancy’s courage was immense. She never lost her teasing, acerbic wit and the semblance of gaiety. To one cherished correspondent, Raymond Mortimer, she wrote (in October 1970), ‘I’ve always felt the great importance of getting into the right set at once in heaven.’
In December 1970 Mosley was invited to address a Round Table at the Centre of Advanced International Policy Research in Washington on his European ideas. He was delighted and planned, with Diana, to stay with friends in Nassau first. Just at that point Nancy’s condition suddenly deteriorated. Unable to bear the thought of leaving her sister alone in France, Diana spent the morning of 12 January telephoning doctors in London to find a nursing home there for her sister.
All this in the teeth of opposition from K, who doesn’t want me to be bringing Naunce over to London on the first leg of my American journey, on the 19 [records her diary]. He thinks it will be an extra burden. Too true. Well, then I got a headache and went to bed for the middle of the day. Then K went down every hour or so to look for a letter which hasn’t arrived, the proof of one of his ‘broadsheets’, short articles he writes and sends to a long list of journalists and M.P.s. The wretched thing didn’t appear. It’s been in the post five days. He got more and more cross and finally very cross with me, because I’m supposed to have advised him not to have letters expressed. I probably said why not have only important letters expressed. At the Temple they are sometimes slower than ordinary post because they wait for a special delivery man. Anyway it was one of those days when K is in such a state that anyone living with him must feel their nerves biting and it was exactly the atmosphere conducive to a stomach ulcer. It’s nobody’s ‘fault’. K is angelic kindness itself about my headaches or any other ailment but he gets into a state of nervous gloom – about small things – which reacts on everyone near him. It is useless to sympathise and I just go into my room and read until the mood has changed.
Once in Nassau, as usual in the heat, Diana had a welcome cessation of her migraines – though they began to recur when a long telegram from Debo told her that Nancy had to have an operation on her spine. Gradually, the worst of the pain had begun to focus on Nancy’s back; now the doctors had found that a vertebra was pressing on a nerve, which might account for the excruciating torment. ‘Cry bitterly and long to be with her,’ records Diana’s diary; it was two days before she was able to stop tears rolling uncontrollably down her face.
Nancy spent eleven weeks in hospital, visited constantly by family and friends – among them Joy Law, who would call in to see Nancy and another friend there on the way home from work, taking with her trays of caramel creams, Nancy’s favourite toffees. But the operation did nothing to alleviate the pain Nancy was suffering.
Back in France, Diana acted as Mosley’s assistant, despatching and ordering books, sorting his papers, organising his letters, editing what he wrote; she was so useful that he was crosser than ever when she tore herself away to see Nancy. In April Mosley had a minor operation and in July, to speed his recovery, they went to Venice. Alexander came for the weekend. ‘He is brilliant and happy, more than I ever saw him,’ wrote Diana delightedly to Nicholas. And on 6 October, there was another ‘brilliantly happy’ day when she and Mosley celebrated their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary with lunch at Maxim’s.
But there was always Nancy. ‘One has completely run out of comforting words,’ wrote Diana to Nicholas. ‘They just sound too silly in face of the reality of pain.’ Her own headaches increased as the saga of misery and the strain of being torn between husband and sister continued. ‘I found Naunce in utter despair,’ wrote Diana of one visit to London. ‘She felt deathly ill and was in tears. I longed to stay but it was impossible. K had given up his room at the Ritz and was on the way to the air terminal. If I had stayed he would have had his birthday completely alone.’
Though Nancy returned home again, it was clear the end was near. When Debo telephoned on 19 May, Diana begged her to come over; Debo came, ostensibly to see her horse run at Longchamps. Together, Debo and Diana visited Nancy, who was being given increasing amounts of morphine. Then, on 21 May, Jessica came from California. ‘Naunce v. unkind to Decca,’ noted Diana’s diary. ‘Our meeting after all those years seemed completely easy and natural because we were both thinking only of Naunce. Decca has kept her childlike face but her voice has changed, not the accent but the tone of voice. I felt an unexpected sympathy, even affection, for her, and was surprised.’ Pam came at the beginning of June.
Apart from the hour or two four years earlier, it was the first time Diana had seen Jessica since the mid-1930s. Their meeting at Nancy’s deathbed was that of two strangers, though by the end Diana was writing (on 18 June), ‘I felt very drawn to Decca. Her communist past makes her less influential perhaps than a more politically neutral person would be. I felt all my old love for her come flooding back and have quite forgotten her bitter public attacks on K and me, or at least quite forgiven them. She struggles away on behalf of suffering humanity.’ With the conversation confined to Nancy’s illness Jessica, though less able to overlook the past, was able to say afterwards: ‘It wasn’t dreadful – we actually got along very well on that level.’
By the end, Nancy was torn between longing to die, as she often said to Debo in letters, and clinging to life – or, as Diana’s diary records, ‘at least some vague hope of recovery. I detect in her a quite strong desire to live, which in a way makes the whole horrible business even harder to bear. I can’t think of her without crying.’
Fittingly, Nancy wrote her last letter, on 8 June 1973, to Col. The pain, she wrote, was so terrible that ‘I hope and believe I am dying . . . the torture is too great. You cannot imagine. I’m very weak and would love to see you now.’
He was the last of those close to her to see her alive. Driving into Paris on 30 June, the feeling suddenly came to him that he must go to her. He ordered his chauffeur to take him to her house in Versailles. She was lying in her bed apparently unconscious but when he gently took her hand she smiled. She died a few hours later. She was cremated at Père Lachaise, with speeches from the Mayor, who read in French from her books, and an address by V.S. Pritchett – much of which Diana missed because of her increasing deafness. Nancy’s ashes were to be buried at Swinbrook, next to Unity’s; adding to the complications of funeral arrangements in two countries was the threat of a strike by airline employees. Diana changed all the tickets from air to sea, but until the last moment they did not know if they could get Nancy’s ashes to Swinbrook in time for the arranged burial.
One result of Nancy’s death was the growth of a real friendship between Col and the Mosleys. Diana had always liked him and the days she spent in his company after Nancy’s death – he helped with the notice for the Figaro and the arrangements for the cremation – served to turn liking into deep affection. Before Nancy’s death, Diana had refrained from accepting the invitations of the new Mme Palewski to Le Marais (the chateau was close to Orsay) for fear that Nancy’s feelings would be hurt. It was a delicacy that annoyed Mosley, who pointed out that Nancy would have had no such scruples in similar circumstances. Soon the Mosleys were lunching and dining almost every Sunday at Le Marais. Mosley too became very fond of Col. (‘Kit and Col. as one,’ wrote Diana in her diary.)
Nancy left her little house in Versailles to Joy Law. Joy had become a friend and by the time of Nancy’s death was virtually indispensable to her. She had worked extraordinarily hard on The Sun King, correcting, fact-checking, suggesting, amending, but had been paid only £500. The book had brought Nancy many thousands of pounds – the reason, thought Mrs Law, for Nancy’s bequest, since The Sun King’s accuracy and presentation had much to do with its success.
Nancy’s death brought no alleviation of Diana’s migraines. Diana was also rapidly losing one of her chief pleasures, listening to music. Her hereditary deafness had increased to the point where she could hardly hear music any more. The last time she had really enjoyed opera was when Robert Skidelsky took her to hear Callas sing Norma in Paris in 1965; she finally stopped opera-and concert-going after a Mozart concert, to which she had been taken one evening by her friend Jackie Gilmour, when she could no longer hear the clarinet.
On 1 March 1974, the Mosleys went through another marriage ceremony. In order to make their wills, they needed to produce their marriage certificate, which had disappeared somewhere in the ruins of the Third Reich. It seemed simpler all round to marry again. Weddings were in the air: Nicholas told them he was remarrying and nine months later Alexander telephoned to say that he too was getting married, to the beautiful Charlotte Marten, who became a devoted and much-loved daughter-in-law.
As well as the busy social life he shared with Diana, Mosley was still writing, appearing on television from time to time, and lecturing – at the Frankfurt Book Fair he spoke in German to a large audience without a single note. Though his main emphasis was on the desirability of a united Europe, his anti-semitism had not abated. The Nietzschean Superman might have been transmuted into the Hero, but the villain was still ‘the Judate [sic] money race’. When Frank Cakebread telephoned from Savehay to say that Cimmie’s tomb had been vandalised – local rumour had it that her jewels had been buried with her – Mosley’s immediate response was, ‘It’s the Jews!’
In 1975 Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Mosley was published, attracting much interest and many favourable reviews. From Mosley’s point of view, the attention of a respected historian set him firmly in context as a serious player on the political stage, many of whose forecasts – the loss of the Empire, the post-war decline of Britain, the need for integration into Europe – had now been shown to be correct. Skidelsky did not gloss over the more unpleasant manifestations of British fascism. But the reverence of the British for age (Mosley was now almost eighty), combined with the fact that he had long retired from active politics in Britain, had given him the status if not of an institution at least of someone who with hindsight had perhaps been judged too harshly. It was not exactly rehabilitation – but it certainly added a patina of respectability. When Lord Longford took him to lunch at the Gay Hussar, a favourite literary and political haunt of the 1970s, they found themselves next to Michael Foot, sitting at his usual table. Nervously, Longford introduced them as Foot was leaving. ‘A pleasure to see you over here, Sir Oswald,’ said Foot courteously. Mosley was delighted. ‘It couldn’t happen anywhere but England,’ he said to Longford. ‘Two old political enemies fraternising like that.’
In old age, Mosley’s personality had mellowed dramatically. ‘He has acquired a tolerance and wisdom which, had he only cultivated them forty years ago, might have made him a great moral leader,’ wrote Jim Lees-Milne. Earlier, at the Chatsworth ball for the coming of age of the Devonshires’ son Lord Hartington, Cynthia Gladwyn had described him as looking ‘fat, smiling and benign’ as he and Harold Macmillan chatted together – two old men with the exquisite manners of a previous age. Though there were flashes of the old arrogance and the same desire to command the table as he had once held crowds, everyone who visited the Temple spoke of his charm, his wide-ranging intelligence, the fascination of his company and his courtliness. He would refer to Hitler as ‘a terrible little man’ – words unthinkable from Diana. When Joy Law and her daughter were asked to luncheon at the Temple, Joy, who had made no secret of the fact that she was Jewish, was apprehensive if not hostile. Her mood soon changed:
I sat next to Kit and my daughter was on the other side. He made quite sure that my daughter was being looked after by the young man next to her and then spent the entire lunch talking to me as if I were the only person in the world. I was totally mesmerised. I’d been very leery about him before because a lot of my relations had perished during the war and so I had an inbuilt antipathy to what he stood for if not to him. But I found that this belief was just suspended while I listened. I found him an amazing, wonderful, charismatic man.
A luncheon with Baba Metcalfe was not so successful. For years, Baba had refused to come to the Temple. Neither her rage over Mosley’s treatment of her nor her hatred of Diana had lessened over the years. But Mosley, growing old, wanted reconciliation and Diana wanted this for him. Eventually, reluctantly, Baba was persuaded to come in 1976.The atmosphere was glacial and the experiment was not repeated.
In November 1976 Unity Mitford, A Quest, by David Pryce-Jones, was published. Like Jessica’s book Hons and Rebels, it made her sisters furious – and it was, they felt, again largely Jessica’s fault. ‘I’m afraid Decca behaved in an extraordinary way,’ wrote Diana to one friend. ‘She took D. Pryce Jones to see cousins and old servants who chattered merrily away. She is very much to blame because she is by way of having loved Bobo, her presence made them trust Jones.’ On 18 November the sisters wrote to The Times.
Sir,
A book has been published about our sister, Unity Mitford, which we do not accept as a true picture of her or our family.
We hold letters from a number of people quoted in the book, saying that they have been misquoted. Some of these letters were sent to the publisher before publication but to little avail.
Yours faithfully,
Pamela Jackson,
Diana Mosley,
Deborah Devonshire
Diana, too, had been writing. Her first book was her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts, published in the spring of 1977. It was witty, entertaining, vivid, moving, elegant – and contained no hint of recantation. ‘Jamiefn1 comes Sunday morning, to ask me to put more condemnation of German atrocities. Write him furious letter which K persuades me not to send,’ runs a diary entry of the previous October.
The book had a great success. Friends including Harold Acton and Alastair Forbes gave it predictably good reviews – but so did those who did not know her. Mary Warnock called it ‘This fascinating book’ in the Listener, and from the Sunday Times came, ‘Lady Mosley writes extremely well. She is constitutionally incapable of being dull. An autobiography of real distinction.’ ‘Wit and unsentimental warmth . . . To all those not averse to a little powdered glass in their bombe surprise: enjoy,’ said The Times. There were admiring letters from strangers. ‘We do not know each other but I wanted to say how immensely fascinating I found your book – gay, evocative and moving,’ wrote Alec Guinness. Diana appeared on the Russell Harty Show and was guest of honour at a Foyle’s Literary Luncheon at the Dorchester on 12 May, where she expected trouble. ‘I made sure of my sons coming so if the Chosen did decide to come and shout they would see them off the premises,’ she wrote to a friend in September. ‘In the end it was peaceful. A brave old General, a V.C. [Sir John Smyth] took the chair and Sir Arthur Bryant made a speech in which he said my book was about the two things that matter most in life, love and courage.’ The only person to be discouraging was Mosley. ‘Kit has made me promise not to write another [book],’ she wrote to Robert Skidelsky. ‘What he wants is for me not to write anything at all (though I always do it when he’s asleep).’
Mosley was becoming much less physically active, though he retained his regular weight of thirteen stone two pounds. He had Parkinson’s disease but responded so well to the drugs prescribed that the only giveaway was the occasional fall. ‘We are going to Paris for Xmas as we always do,’ wrote Diana to Louise Irvine on 15 December 1978, ‘and he loves the Palais Royal to potter in, just near our flat.’ He was no longer able to go for the long walks he had so enjoyed but he went out into the Temple garden as often as possible. Once, walking round the lake with his son Micky, he said, ‘I’ve had an extraordinary life and I’ve blown it all. But I have had extraordinary good fortune in the two women I’ve married. I adored your mother and it was a great tragedy when she died. I was equally fortunate to marry Diana, whom I love so deeply.’
fn1 Hamish (Jamie) Hamilton, her publisher.