Mrs Guinness

by Lyndsy Spence

  It had been almost a month since Helleu last set eyes on Diana, and her short hair, he opined, was ghastly, but it did little to diminish her looks. In her spare time, Helleu escorted Diana around Le Louvre and the Château de Versailles, giving her impromptu lessons on paintings, fine art and sculpture. After their day-long excursions, he treated Diana to luncheon where she ordered Sole Dieppoise and Sancerre. Although infatuated by her appearance, his behaviour was always proper. Seizing this moment of high spirits, Helleu asked her to sit for a portrait. There was no question of what her answer would be, for Diana it was the ultimate compliment.

  ‘I pose for endless pictures,’ Diana confided in a letter to James Lees-Milne, and Helleu’s flattering comments, she claimed, ‘never become boring because they are always unexpected.’ Helleu sketched and painted Diana several times, and his most favourable piece was a dry-point etching of her head in profile view. The strong lines detailed her ethereal beauty: an attractive jawline, emphasised by her shingled hair, cut as short as a boy’s at the back with the sides reaching her ears, formed into soft waves.

  The sketch was reproduced in the popular magazine L’Illustration, and the prolific recognition turned Diana into a minor celebrity at the Cours Fénelon. The excitement was short-lived and the elderly sisters hastened to plant a dart; ‘Helleu?’ they hissed at the modern-looking girl sitting before them. ‘It is not Helleu to me at all. Frankly I think it is very pre-war.’

  Helleu’s flattery was never ending and, rather blinded by Diana’s beauty, he expected his fellow artists to share his enthusiasm. He brought her to visit his friend, the sculptor Troubetzkoy, who at the time was working on a head of Venizelos, the Greek politician. ‘Bonjour, monsieur, la voici la Grèce!’* Helleu jubilantly cried as he pointed to Diana, standing before the sculptor in her plain clothing and her face devoid of makeup. Venizelos, engrossed in his work, cast a lacklustre eye over Diana, before turning away, barely acknowledging her. She felt a fool and thought her exuberant old friend had gone too far. To the sculptor and politician (and many of the grown-ups around her) she was merely going through what the French so lyrically called ‘l’âge ingrat’ – the awkward age.

  Sensing that her husband’s young friend was pining for familiar home comforts, Madame Helleu provided Diana with an inviting atmosphere away from the Avenue Victor-Hugo. After lessons, she would drop in for tea and often stayed to supper, indulging in Madame Helleu’s heavenly cuisine of roast veal, boeuf en gelée, îles flottantes and rich black chocolate cake. Helleu loved to see Diana eat and he would happily exclaim: ‘Mais prenez, prenez donc!’** The Helleus’ daughter, Paulette, although several years older than Diana, became a critical friend. Paulette found fault with Diana’s clumsy homemade clothing and her lack of make-up, still strictly forbidden. She might have attacked Diana’s weak spots, but she could not deny her beauty, and that sparked an unspoken rivalry between the artist’s daughter and his adolescent muse.

  The once friendly letters exchanged between Diana and James Lees-Milne had slowly dwindled to complete silence. After Diana’s departure for Paris, Jim became morbidly obsessed with a recent divorcee, Joanie, the daughter of his mother’s cousin. Jim sent her love poetry – the typical gesture he would use time and time again with those he admired – and Joanie responded by driving down to Eton to take him to tea. In the New Year of 1926, they eventually began an affair, resulting in Joanie becoming pregnant. However, there is no certainty that Jim fathered the child, for she had so many casual affairs. The baby8 was stillborn, and he was haunted by guilt, stemming from his view that he had caused a human life, conceived in sin, to perish. Deeply disturbed by the incident, Jim fled England for Grenoble, where he studied a university course in French.

  Jim’s thoughts turned to Diana and the memories he held from their happier days in the library at Asthall Manor. The notion of being in love with an unworldly teenager was less troublesome than his love affair with the older Joanie, whose life came to a tragic end when she drowned herself in Monte Carlo.

  Filled with a sense of nostalgia, Jim wrote to Diana, playing to her frivolous vanity by addressing her as ‘Mona’ (after the Mona Lisa). Her letter, after a spell of silence ‘dropped here today like the gentle dew from heaven. I cannot express my delight but imagine it as being intense … How I would adore to have a picture of you by M. Helleu.’ He implored Diana to send him a memento; a snapshot of her Parisian self so he could see for himself if she had retained her Raphael face. ‘You can’t imagine what a joy it is to me the thought of having your face with me.’9

  Diana was becoming accustomed to receiving compliments on her beauty, rather than her brains, and the tokens dispelled in his letters were not a rarity. Jim confessed: ‘One can never love a friend too much,’ though by now he thought of her as something ‘higher than a friend’. As for Diana, she was secretly pleased with his infatuation and had begun to recognise her power over the opposite sex, using it to exploit those who cared about her. Her letters adopted a priggish tone, boasting of her liaisons with French boys, after which, she warned Jim, ‘Don’t feel jealous.’

  It thrilled Diana to evoke feelings of jealousy, to torment the poor love-sick Jim, when she, herself, had been the victim of Nancy’s cruel teasing and Paulette Helleu’s condescending treatment. Now, it seemed, Diana had the upper hand and she made it clear to Jim that she only confided in him because he was ‘so far from England’s green and pleasant land, where scandal travels fast’.

  Diana’s liberal lifestyle in Paris continued and she had become an expert in deceiving the elderly ladies. Although she was permitted to venture out alone during the daytime, Diana was forbidden to go out in the evening without a chaperone. She cared little for their rules and she feigned invitations to sit for Helleu, or cited extra music lessons with her violin instructor. Once out of their supervision, Diana met the young man in question. She juggled several suitors, always escaping with them to the darkness of the cinema, then the height of sophistication for a teenager. She spoke confidently of a trip in a taxi around the Bois de Boulogne with a boy named Charlie (Charles de Breuil), a fairly rich count, extraordinarily handsome, but very vain.

  Before Diana had encountered Charlie, she enjoyed a flirtation with a young suitor named Bill Astor, heir to Viscount Astor and his immense fortune. Diana said little of her experiences with Bill, except that she had only flirted with Charlie because French flirting interested her and because it made her think of Bill. At a loss for words, Jim praised her mental fidelity towards the unsuspecting admirer.

  Diana dutifully penned chatty letters to her mother, but Sydney was too preoccupied with the preparations for Nancy and Pamela’s parties – they had already come out as debutantes but had failed to become engaged – to give much thought to her younger daughter’s daily life. A dull round of lessons, she imagined. Only Diana and her diary knew the truth.

  Neither Sydney nor David relished the idea of entertaining and they made a dreary saga of the details, writing to Diana, ‘The dance is turning into an immense bore …’ Sydney sent Diana a parcel containing a pair of ‘evening knickers’ and a dark-blue silk dress with white polka dots. Diana was delighted with the underwear, a sophisticated treat having only just shed the fleece-lined liberty bodice her nanny forced the children to wear. The euphoria dimmed when she tried on the silk dress, only to discover it was too big.

  The whirlwind of Diana’s social life did not interfere with her schooling, and her end of term report that March spoke glowingly of her ‘parfait’ conduct, describing her as ‘excellente élève dont nous garderons le meilleur souvenir.’*

  The glittering atmosphere was not to last; Helleu fell gravely ill and his death from peritonitis at the end of March was a bitter blow to Diana’s self-esteem. The man she worshipped, and who for three months had worshipped her, was dead. ‘I shall never see him again …’ her letter ached with melancholy ‘… never hear his voice saying, “Sweetheart, comme tu es belle”.’**

&nb
sp; Shortly before Helleu’s death, Diana had called at his flat, hoping to visit her ailing friend. Paulette answered the door. ‘May I see him?’ She desperately asked.

  ‘Of course not.’ Paulette brusquely turned her away.

  In a sad letter to Jim, Diana wrote, ‘Nobody will admire me again as he did.’*** Jim might have disagreed, but he refrained from telling her otherwise and wrote only to console her.

  NOTES

  * ‘You are the most voluptuous woman.’

  * ‘Oh, much worse.’

  ** ‘Do not tumble down the stairs.’

  * ‘Hello, Sir, here is Greece!’

  ** ‘Eat, so eat!’

  * ‘An excellent pupil, we will keep the best memories.’

  ** ‘Sweetheart, you are beautiful.’

  *** Reflecting on this comment in her old age, Diana said: ‘What a horrifying little beast I must have been.’

  7 Letter from Diana to James Lees-Milne, February 1927, Diana Mosley: A Life, Jan Dalley.

  8 Michael Bloch describes this incident in James Lees-Milne: The Life. This episode of Milne’s life had been omitted from his memoirs, Another Self.

  9 Letter from James Lees-Milne to Diana, 1927. James Lees Milne: The Life.

  5

  THE UNHAPPY YOUTH

  ‘I have grown a little older, and more intense in my passions of love, sorrow and worship of beauty. To look at, I am the same. Pray for me, to your gods whatever they are. I am very unhappy,’ Diana wrote to James Lees-Milne. The melancholic mood was to last. When she returned to England for the Easter holidays, she was further disenchanted by the family’s new home, Swinbrook House.

  Swinbrook was truly monstrous, inside and out. The building’s exterior could have been, according to Diana’s younger sister Jessica, anything from a mental institution to a girls’ boarding school or an American country club. It was so unlike Sydney to care little about a house and it puzzled the older girls why she had overlooked such an important project. David had a free hand in the design of the house and, unlike Asthall Manor with its Jacobean architecture, Swinbrook was a large, rectangular grey structure with an interior decorated in mock-rustic charm. The drabness of the house was a disappointment for Diana and her sisters, all except Deborah, who loved it.

  The greatest insult for Diana was the lack of creative outlets and the privacy that was so freely enjoyed in the library at Asthall. There was no library in Swinbrook, no place where the older children could be alone, and Tom’s piano was placed in the drawing room. He hardly ever played, as he did not care to when people barged in and out, slamming doors and carrying on loud conversations with little regard for his musical practice. The only form of entertainment was an indoor squash court, impossible to play in with its bare, windowless walls and deafening echo.

  There were no fires in the individual bedrooms and despite the costly installation of central heating, the rooms were always cold. Diana sought refuge in the linen cupboard, huddling next to the heating pipes as she lost herself in a world of literature. Her favourite writers were Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and J.B.S. Haldane, because of their rejection of accepted social standards.

  ‘Go out, darling,’ Sydney encouraged her. ‘Of course you’re cold if you sit indoors reading all day.’ Diana had no desire to go out, as she had outgrown the rough and tumble games that her little sisters Unity, Jessica and Deborah still enjoyed. Diana moped around Swinbrook, taking daily walks with Pamela to ease the boredom of life at home. Her independence, she felt, had been stolen from her and the suffering she experienced with the death of Helleu hardened her.

  Somewhere beneath this morbid facade, Diana was still a romantic at heart. She was intelligent enough to realise that not all relationships were platonic. Jim’s letters from that time, although an escape from the dullness of everyday life, drew her attention to his love for her. In a sophisticated manner, she declared, ‘Sex is after all so unimportant in life. Beauty and art are what matter. Older people do not see my point of view.’ Diana failed to elaborate on the ‘older people’, surely a jibe at Jim, who was two years her senior. She did not, however, discourage the correspondence.

  In a similar light as Helleu, Jim praised her looks, perhaps hoping to evoke a sense of familiarity, but it did not work. ‘I have got dark skin and light hair and eyes which is an unattractive paradox,’ she chastised him. In the same sentence, Diana asked if he had seen the various beauties: Mary Thynne, Lettice Lygon and Georgie Curzon, to name a few. Jim’s passion could not be quelled, so Diana accepted his gift of books and often shared her critique of his poetry.

  Finally, Jim was reunited with Diana in person. The sight of her in the flesh stunned him at first. She was no longer the sweet-natured 14-year-old girl he had mentored in the library at Asthall. The long hair, which he had admired and likened to Botticelli’s seaborne Venus was gone. Although not outwardly fashionable, she began to alter her looks to appear more grown up in her appearance. This adult version of Diana inspired the same feelings of passion he had felt for Joanie, who wore chic clothes and Parisian scent.

  Preoccupied in instigating a romance with Diana, Jim impulsively sent her a poem.10 Diana’s response was not what he had anticipated, and with a critical eye she advised him, ‘Read Alice Meynell’s short essay on false impressionism called The Point of Honour. This is not meant to be rude …’ Taking on an intellectual tone, she confidently told him, ‘Byron was a selfish, beautiful genius and not really more selfish than many men and most artists. As to Augusta, she was of the same temperament as I am, and just about as silly.’

  Although she was 17 and soon to be coming out as a debutante, Diana was still viewed as a child and, given her status, she was excluded from Nancy and Pamela’s social gatherings. The guest list was made up of Nancy’s clever and artistic friends, most of whom were high-camp homosexuals who swooped down from Oxford, puzzling Sydney, delighting the little sisters and enraging David. Diana and her sisters would largely surround themselves with ‘irresistible’ homosexual men all of their adult lives.

  During such a gathering, an acquaintance of her older sisters, named Bill (she did not confide if it was Bill Astor), was at Swinbrook for a supper dance. After supper, at about 10 o’clock, Bill slipped away from the party and found himself at Diana’s bedroom door. Improperly dressed in only her nightgown, she rushed out to greet him with a kiss on the lips. The entire ordeal, Diana told Jim, lasted about thirty seconds before she pushed Bill away and slammed the door in his face. She was afraid of Sydney’s reaction should she get caught, and the severity of her action suddenly struck her with a sense of morality, ‘I have quite chucked the Frenchmen, they are nasty, sensual brutes really.’ She did not elaborate on whether she was turning her attention towards English men.

  Diana may have exerted a liberal attitude towards fleeting flirtations, but she was not so discreet in concealing her liaisons from prying eyes. One afternoon, after sitting at Sydney’s desk to write in her diary, she joined Pamela for a walk. During the walk, it dawned on her that she had left the diary not only on Sydney’s desk, but also open. The girls raced home, hoping the opened diary had gone unnoticed. It was too late, and by the time Diana reached the house, Sydney had read about not only her sittings with Helleu, but of her unchaperoned evenings with Charlie and the other young men. A row escalated into a bitter exchange of words, with Sydney accusing Diana of being ‘wanton’ and exclaiming, ‘Nobody would ask you to their houses if they knew half of what you had done!’

  The diary, a piece of sordid literature to Sydney, was swiftly burned and evidence of Diana’s shocking trysts no longer existed on paper, except for what she had confessed to Jim. Diana’s privacy had been violated, but her punishment was even worse. She was withdrawn from the Cours Fénelon, where she was due to return after the Easter holidays. Diana consumed her meals in uncomfortable and guilty silence, with both parents staring at her as though she had committed a grievous sin.

  Diana was furiou
s at the lack of support from her older siblings. Only Pamela had shown a glimmer of sympathy when she tried to save the diary from Sydney’s clutches, but that vanished when she reminded Diana of her stupidity in leaving it out in the open. Nancy accused Diana of being ‘a bundle of sex with no soul’ and Tom agreed. She was deeply hurt by Tom’s betrayal, ‘I will never be anything but cold towards him until he owns himself wrong.’

  In spite of Sydney and Nancy’s accusations, Diana’s virtue remained intact. For Jim, plagued by his own borderline sordid affairs with his fellow schoolmates at Eton and his cousin Joanie, it would have mattered little had she compromised herself with another man. For Sydney, the damage was done. With Paris out of the question, Diana, who had briefly enjoyed independence, was demoted to nursery life. She was sent to her great aunt Maude’s pretty cottage at Bucks Mill in Devon, along with Nanny Blor, Unity, Jessica and Deborah.

  The macabre surroundings of Bucks Mill held no mystique for Diana. The cottage, said to be a built above a smugglers’ cave, clung to the edge of a cliff, overlooking a waterfall below. The younger sisters delighted in the thrilling story of their summer lodgings, but Diana was too disgruntled at the practice of bathing once again, as she had done in Paris, in a tin bathtub placed before the kitchen coal range.

  Diana’s plight was emphasised by her lack of money, no cultural outlets and the bleak and humiliating company of her younger sisters and ageing relatives. Nancy sent Diana gloating letters, boasting of endless dances in London, supper parties, trips to the theatre and meetings with intelligent young men. Diana’s daily life was pale in comparison and she referred to the summer of 1927 as ‘an age without a name’. She lived for her afternoon walks to the local shop to collect the Daily Mail, which was running a serial of The Story of Ivy by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Capturing Diana’s attention, it was the story of a young, beautiful woman called Ivy – compared in the narrative to George Romney’s portrait of Lady Nelson – who married easy-going, laidback idler Jervis Laxton for his money. Having squandered his fortune, she is terrified of a future stricken by poverty. On a whim, Ivy visits a fortune teller who predicts a stranger will enter her life, bringing with him a lot of money. The fortune teller also warns of an ominous event which threatens to blight her forever. Printed in cruelly short extracts, its unpredictable plot kept Diana’s mind occupied, though on Sundays the newspaper was not printed and she ached with boredom.