MOSLEY’S LAST YEARS were sunny. Diana no longer liked him going to Paris by train, as she was frightened his slowness would cause him to be trapped in the automatic doors, but although at eighty-three he could only walk a few steps and was having treatment for his leg, he was still swimming twice a day. His ability to savour the moment enhanced his delight in the Temple. Almost every day he would say to Diana, ‘We’ve had a lot of bad luck in our lives but what luck we had when we found this.’
He enjoyed social life as much as ever. At luncheon parties he was the leading actor. At a pause in the conversation, he would make his entrance, emerging from his small sitting room into the large salon, where the party was gathered for drinks. He would beam at all the guests in turn, then slowly and dramatically descend the winding staircase to the dining room. Sonorous phrases, many rooted in past attitudes, would roll out over Emmy’s boeuf à la mode or poulet aux poireaux. ‘The weak must be rooted out in order to ensure the survival of the strong,’ he would intone when discussing a damaged plant in the garden. Jewish guests would look uncomfortably at their plates.
One such Jewish guest was Maître Blum, the Windsors’ lawyer, who had met the Mosleys through Gaston Palewski (her husband, a French general, was a friend of Palewski), but she was in any case a useful acquaintance. Lord Longford, as chairman of Sidgwick & Jackson, had commissioned a book about the Windsors from her. It was published in 1980 and drew mixed reviews. The well-disposed called it a tribute to a friend, other critics complained that she had glossed over many of the more discreditable episodes in the Windsors’ lives.
Soon afterwards, on 13 September 1980, Diana wrote to Nicholas: ‘I am a bit worried about Kit. He would love a visit if you are not too busy.’ When Nicholas came over the following month he brought up a subject that had been on his mind for some time. ‘Someone should write about you,’ he said to his father during the course of one of their long conversations. ‘People either think you are God or the Devil, but what’s interesting about you is the truth.’ Mosley was at first non-committal, then, in the middle of Nicholas’s last lunch at the Temple, suddenly turned to Diana and said, ‘Diana, I have made up my mind. When I die I want Nicky to have all my papers.’
As the autumn drew on Mosley became weaker. After his eighty-fourth birthday (on 16 November) he spent most of his days sitting in his big armchair by the blue porcelain stove in his study. Diana kept a daily chart of his temperature, watching him lynx-eyed for any change in his condition. Often at night he almost fell out of bed and she had the exhausting task of heaving him back into position.
On 2 December, after two restless days, he seemed better, sitting in his chair and eating his supper with appetite. At about 9.30 Diana helped him to bed, undressing him, as she had for months past, and putting on the bedsocks he needed for warmth. As her diary records: ‘We said to each other “You’re all the world to me” and over and over again “I love you”. I went to bed myself, because that’s where the bell would ring. I read for a while and then went to sleep and almost at once the bell woke me, at 11 p.m., and I flew to his room. He was uncomfortable and I pulled him down in the bed and rearranged the pillows and he said “You are so kind” and I said “You’re the whole world to me” and kissed him.’ The same thing happened at one a.m. and at two. When Mosley tried to apologise for waking her Diana reassured him lovingly that he must ring whenever he wanted her.
At four a.m. she awoke with a violent start. She ran towards her husband’s room and, seeing the light was on, tiptoed to the door and peeped in. He was lying on his back on the floor and there was blood on the carpet. ‘I hugged him and covered him with blankets and cried and begged him “Darling, darling, come back to your Percher” but I think I knew he had died.’
She rushed out and banged on Jerry’s window. He came at once and telephoned Aly and the doctor, who confirmed death. Aly and Cha arrived at 5.30.
We all sat in despair. I blamed myself terribly for not staying with him. But if I had been in his chair and dozed off I probably wouldn’t have heard anything because I’m so deaf – the bell was so loud there was no question of not hearing it.
But I couldn’t and can’t and never shall be able to get over the fact that he died alone. My only comfort is that it was not that he couldn’t find the bell – I mean that he was groping for it – because he’d got his light on.
Next day the tributes and the visitors began. Diana, sitting in the salon that suddenly seemed so empty, ‘told everyone who would listen how terrible it was that I couldn’t hold his beloved hand at that great and unique moment of death’.
Mosley’s funeral, elaborate, secular and moving, was at Père Lachaise on a freezing December day. The music included the March from Tannhauser and passages from Mozart’s Requiem, Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ and Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Nicholas read Swinburne’s ‘Before the Beginning of Years’; Micky read ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’ by Arthur Clough. Aly read stanzas from Paul Valery’s ‘Le cimetière marin’, beginning ‘Et Vous, Grande Ame . . .’ In place of Max, who could not trust himself to speak, Jonathan read a poem by Goethe. There was no nonsense about stiff upper lips: as Diana wrote later, ‘I must say one was in floods the entire time.’
There was one incident of black farce which Mosley himself would have appreciated. Following normal French practice, the cremation, which took around twenty-five minutes, took place beneath the funeral room during the service, so timed that as the last piece of music was played curtains at the front of the room drew back to reveal the urn, ready to be collected by the deceased’s widow or family. But at the end of Mosley’s funeral it was clear something had gone wrong. The final piece of music was repeated, to be followed by a deathly silence.
Eventually a sacristan crept up to Diana, wringing his hands. For twenty minutes the congregation waited, until the sacristan reappeared, twisting his hands more furiously than ever. Mosley’s corpse, it transpired, was taking an unprecedently long time to be consumed. ‘Even in death he’s made his last V-sign to the world,’ thought his son Micky admiringly. Diana, glancing around at elderly Parisian friends, by now chilled to the marrow in the icy chapel, rose to her feet with a murmured, ‘Well, darlings, I think we’d better go back to Orsay otherwise he won’t be the only one . . .’
Two days later, the urn was delivered and Mosley’s ashes were scattered by the lake he had so loved.
Mosley left everything to Diana for life and then to Alexander and Max, with the exception of family pictures, which went to Nicholas and some objets to his older children. The Temple was valued at £300,000 and the flat in the rue Villedo at £60,000. Diana wrote at once to Nicholas to explain why his father had not remembered his older children in his will. ‘He intended to write to you and Viv and Micky telling you that his reason for doing so was not that he loved you less than them but because he thought it equitable, as you inherited from your mother, whereas I have nothing to leave to my sons. When he told me about this I urged him to write to you three but he obviously never did so.’ Under French law, the three older children would have been entitled to a portion of his property unless they renounced it. All three did so. Mosley’s beautiful clothes – too small for Aly, too big for Max – went to Emmy’s brother.
Diana’s grief was wild, overwhelming, endless, impenetrable. For months her sister Debo thought she might commit suicide, so total was the blackness in which she was shrouded, so complete and utter her despair. Weeping, she told Nicholas, ‘I sometimes feel that the day that ruined my life and your father’s life was the day I met Hitler.’ Nicholas, immensely admiring of this truthfulness, attempted to comfort her. ‘It wasn’t you who ruined his life,’ he said. ‘You brought him great happiness. In any case, he was fifteen years older than you – what he did he did himself.’ Good sense, the love of her family and the constant support of friends finally pulled her back from the brink of killing herself.
At the beginning of 1981 she faced a task she had been dreading: the sorting of Mosley’s papers. Most were stored in the cellars of Lismore, where they had lain since the burning of Clonfert. She invited Nicholas to come with her and Alexander, so that he could look at them and take what he required for his book. Sack after sack was brought up and spread out on the billiard table; Nicholas took most of them, with Diana’s blessing. ‘Darling Nicky, I know you’ll do the book wonderfully,’ she said. To Jonathan she wrote, ‘Nick is very fond of Kit. Although his book will not be quite what I’d have written, it will nevertheless squash some of the stupider rumours and ideas. And the fact that it’s written by someone who doesn’t agree with him politically will make it more effective.’
That spring and summer, Nicholas went again and again to Orsay, staying in his father’s old room, to talk to Diana about every aspect of his father’s life. One day she put a package of letters in his hands. They were his mother’s letters to his father. Diana had discovered, after his death, that Mosley had always kept Cimmie’s letters by his bed. ‘I don’t know what to do about these,’ said Diana, ‘but I think you ought to have them. They’re awfully sad – but they do show I wasn’t the first.’
At the end of June, Diana felt able to go and stay with an old friend, Lord Lambton, in Tuscany. She took the train to Florence, but unthinkingly did not lock the door of her sleeping compartment. For safe keeping, she had put all her jewellery in her handbag; during the night, this was rifled and her jewellery taken along with all her money. Penniless, she took a taxi to the Excelsior in Florence, where Lord Lambton was well known, and breakfasted there as she awaited his arrival, brooding sorrowfully on the loss of her diamond brooch, the last of the Mosley family jewels and a precious remembrance of her husband. ‘Then I heard Kit’s voice,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘saying as he always did: “Those things don’t matter in the least. What matters is people, and love. You must never let the loss of material things get you down.”’
Hearing the beloved voice affected her so deeply that out sightseeing later, when she felt faint, she mistakenly dismissed this as the after-effects of grief.
In August Diana, Alexander and Charlotte went to stay with Max and Jean in the south of France. Walking back to the car from dinner at a restaurant in the village, Diana fell flat on her face. Spells of giddiness followed. More alarming still, she found that her body would not obey the commands of her brain. She had volunteered, as her daily holiday ‘chore’, to clear away the simple lunch while the others went off for a siesta, but she found that washing up the few plates and glasses and putting them away took her two hours instead of ten minutes.
Worse was to come: at Orly, somehow becoming detached from Alexander and Charlotte, she was found wandering dazed and confused at the other end of the airport.
‘I am in a very poor way,’ she wrote on 23 August in handwriting that was barely recognisable as hers,
lost all balance, can’t do my hair it just falls down in a tangle. It takes me three hours to dress, I can’t find the sleeve to put my hand in. Can’t find my mouth with food but try to stick the food in my eye. If I read on the sofa I find myself sitting on the floor. Charlotte found me a doctor – there aren’t any in August – and I am having injections, and about 20 different pills. Results so far nil. Do be sorry for me . . . I still can’t believe Kit has gone.
Her family realised it was an emergency. Max, insisting that his mother be flown to London to his friend Professor Watkins, a brain surgeon, chartered a private plane. From Biggin Hill she was taken by ambulance to the London Hospital. She was operated on at the beginning of October by Professor Watkins, who removed a large brain tumour, which proved to be benign. She was kept icy cold, without food or drink, for two days. As she swam slowly back to consciousness, she heard the hospital chaplain ask if she would like communion, followed by Debo’s voice saying indignantly, ‘She’s not even allowed Ovaltine so there’s no question of wine.’
Physically, she recovered amazingly quickly. Visitors, from Joy Law to Lord Longford (‘He thinks I’m Myra Hindley,’ muttered Diana), were soon allowed. Emotionally, she felt unbearably weak. ‘I feel I am not fit for human company,’ she wrote to Nicholas. ‘I am so depressed. Longing for the Temple and yet what is in the Temple now that he isn’t there? I have completely lost the will or desire to live.’
Arrival at Chatsworth proved the turning point. ‘Within minutes I felt completely different. The terrible stale air and general hideousness of the hospital made me so miserable the nights seemed endless. I now feel as if I’ve come back from the dead. Just looking at beautiful things makes me cry.’
After ten weeks she went home.
Diana’s illness altered her appearance. Her weight fell from her lifelong nine stone nine pounds to seven and a half stone; when her hair, which had been shaved off for the operation, grew back, she kept it short. The most dramatic change of all was also the most welcome. After the operation, the migraines that had been torturing her for years vanished completely, never to return.
She would have suffered them again willingly if it would have brought Mosley back. ‘Nothing seems worthwhile to me now and I just grieve over Kit and wonder and wonder whether if I’d been cleverer I could have kept him going,’ she wrote in her diary on 5 September 1981. And to Robert Skidelsky: ‘A saying. L’homme est un animal inconsolable mais gai. That exactly describes me. I can be gay at moments but I shall never never get over the loss of Kit. Somehow when it comes the end is so terrible in its finality.’ It was particularly so for Diana who, as an atheist, was denied the consolation of any belief that they might ever be together again.
The Temple had become like Verlaine’s ‘vieux parc, solitaire et glacé’. The male swan had died; putting his head beneath his wing, he was found like a great white egg on the edge of the lake. The melancholy sight of the female floating solitarily on the lake only served to reflect Diana’s own loneliness. On 3 December 1981 she wrote to Nicholas, ‘Darling Nicky, One year today but for me it really seemed like the night before last, because that was the terrible night.’
Nicholas was still the one to whom she wrote most intimately. ‘I cry much less now,’ she told him on 29 September 1981. ‘I can’t help it at times. It’s so awful not to hear him say: “Percher, you’re all the world to me.”’ And at the end of January 1982, a short note said simply, ‘Darling Nicky, I miss you terribly.’ It was the last time she was to write him a loving letter.
In 1982, before publication of the first volume of Nicholas’s biography of his father, Rules of the Game, he sent the typescript to Diana with a note saying, ‘Everything here has come out of our conversations over the last year. I don’t think there’s anything in it you’ll say isn’t true, even though you may not like everything.’
Diana’s first response was enthusiastic. ‘Darling Nicky, I have just finished your excellent, fascinating, funny, at times unbearably tragic book. Though if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think you’ve quite got the whole story of Kit’s wonderful optimism . . . I realise he had faults but they are puny in relation to his virtues and talents. All fond love, do come over.’ There followed eight pages of minor corrections, mostly factual.
‘I am so moved by your letter, I don’t know what to say,’ replied Nicholas, adding that he had made all the corrections ‘and as the book only takes us to 1933, the “wonderful optimism” comes later and will be in the second volume.’
Four days later, on 17 March 1982, another letter from Diana arrived. It was wild, bitter and miserable:
Now for a more considered opinion [it began. The book] is a bitter attack on the man, his politics, his whole being, such as no enemy could have written, because naturally something from ‘inside’ is so much more damaging. My own feeling is intense disappointment. When I think that . . . his most intimate letters to your mother and hers to him should be published less than two years after his death! How terribly she would mind. I am sure you remember her well enough to know. All their rows, her jealousies and naggings, his duplicities (all inseparable from infidelities but which, because people want to hate him and because she died, become a sad prelude to tragedy) exposed and by their own son! . . . You have painted the portrait of a brute and a fool and not of the amazing person your father was. In any case there’s little to be done because it’s the whole bitter tone throughout the book that is so painful. IT IS BRILLIANTLY DONE WHICH MEANS IT WILL BE READ FOR ITS EXCELLENCE as well as for the scandal and the tragedy . . . ‘Taste’ is a matter of opinion, I suppose, but it does seem distasteful to the last degree to publish their poor little letters, for the whole world to gape at . . . I started this letter ‘darling’ and to me you have been a darling but my poor wonderful real darling – you have kicked him below the belt over and over again.
Scarcely had Nicholas recovered from the shock and pain of this attack than another letter arrived on 21 March. This one had no opening endearment but simply started:
Thank you very much for taking Bryan out of your book. He would have minded so dreadfully. As to me, I used to quite like a fight. All my fights, all my rude letters to people, were about Kit. Frank [Longford] was remembering last night I wrote one to him . . . If I fight you now, it is with one hand tied behind my back because it will be thought it’s because of a 50-year-old scandal. You know, and I know, that I don’t mind a bit what is said about me. But I’ve lost the will to fight. I long and long not to. I thought Kit was absolutely safe in your hands. You gave no hint. Unluckily it is a brilliant book with a dramatic and tragic story which will give unending joy to all our enemies. The whole family will suffer. Those poor little letters! How could anyone, least of all their son, give them to be gloated over. Oh Nicky! How I wish I’d died when they operated on my brain. Any other biographer would of course have had no access to such private and painful things because I should have read everything and put safely away what was impossible to print now.
It is easy to understand Diana’s feelings about the Mosley–Cimmie letters (‘they are far the worst part’ she wrote in a second letter on 17 March). They are loving and intimate, often written in baby talk, sometimes using various animals as pet names. Embarrassing though they may be to read after the passage of years they are, in many ways, typical of their era, with its somewhat whimsical sentimentality and its passion for animal nicknames such as ‘Bunny’, ‘Piggy’ or ‘Kitten’.
It was useless for Nicholas to point out that Diana herself had handed over these letters freely – as he thought – for him to draw on. Or that both of them had always known that, as Robert Skidelsky had written Mosley’s official, political biography, Nicholas would write something more personal and intimate, showing his father as a human being as well as a politician. Or that, as a biographer, Nicholas’s instinct was to set down everything that could contribute to the portrait of his father as he was.
For Diana, none of these considerations clouded the narrow, piercing focus of her judgement. Her tunnel vision allowed her to see only what she thought of as Mosley’s supreme virtues. No compromise was possible. Her violent shift of opinion from praise to venom was, in aggravated form, an example of the split in her personality that had taken shape over the years. At her core she was essentially honest, but over-riding even her deepest feelings was her worship of Mosley. Denying this would be to deny the huge emotional and psychological investment of the years of increasing unpopularity, the suffering of prison and of isolation in a foreign country and would also allow the possibility that he had been wrong. Where Mosley had been able to admit (to his son Micky): ‘I’ve had an extraordinary life and I’ve blown it all,’ Diana could not admit this for him. With his death, the hardening carapace of blind loyalty closed over her head. Against this imperative, nothing else counted. ‘I once thought I would have to cut Jim Lees-Milne out of my life because he wrote something rude about Kit in a book,’ she told Robert Skidelsky. ‘Then typically Kit simply didn’t mind in the very least, so I wasn’t deprived of a lifelong friend.’
Nicholas’s book had also brought Diana face to face for the first time with the acuteness of the pain she had caused Cimmie. ‘Until this moment I never realised how much she suffered,’ she had written to Nicholas on 10 March 1982. ‘I am not pretending it would have made me give him up, but in small yet important ways it would have made me behave differently.’
The shift in her attitude was dramatic and irreversible. Against what she saw as Nicholas’s treachery neither their years of mutual devotion nor his financial and emotional generosity counted in the slightest. The high priestess had taken over and terrible was her wrath. Nicholas was transformed into the ‘duplicitous bastard’ or ‘my vile stepson’, blasphemer against a secular deity whose godlike qualities and oracular pronouncements were not to be challenged.
The reviewers looked at it differently. Nicholas’s book was a love story, a family story, a son’s story, said one. ‘A brilliant two-volume memoir,’ said another. ‘Lucky the father who has such a son to plead his cause,’ said the Sunday Telegraph. The Times was more guarded. ‘One cannot help feeling that, for all his good intentions, Mr Mosley may have dropped another bucketful [of mud] over his father’s head.’
Before the second volume, Beyond the Pale, was published, Nicholas again sent the typescript to Diana. Again she reacted furiously, accusing him of dishonour in including some of Mosley’s letters to her in prison.
‘As you well know, I gave them to you at a time when I wanted to help you in every way to write the book that you pretended to me you wanted to write. As soon as I read your first degraded volume I asked for them back.’ She did not want to go to law, she said, ‘but please make it clear that I strongly object, and that being associated in any way with your book is repugnant to me’.
Although Nicholas included a statement to that effect, nothing softened her attitude. On 30 June 1983 she wrote to Robert Skidelsky. ‘I have read Nicky’s ghastly effort. It is marginally less spiteful than Volume I . . . I am sorry to say he is the lowest and most dishonourable of men, in addition to being insanely jealous.’ The volte-face was complete. She made this clear publicly, in an interview in the Daily Express on 4 December 1983. ‘I shall never speak to him again, though I used to be fond of him.’
She had dedicated her life to Mosley, now she became the keeper of the shrine.