Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  Her novels tell the same story. There are openly unwanted babies, like Linda’s Moira in The Pursuit of Love and Polly’s stillborn in Love in a Cold Climate (which ‘took one look, according to the Radletts, at its father, and quickly died again’). These children are not expected to bring happiness, and Moira – that ‘besotted little coward’, as Linda unashamedly thinks of her – does not. But then there are the children who bring obvious and irreplaceable pleasure, who cause worry and heartache but are simply in the joyful nature of things: the Radletts themselves, Grace du Valhubert’s son Sigismond in The Blessing, Fanny’s three boys in Don’t Tell Alfred (‘I am always pleased when my children turn up. The sight of them rejoices me, I rush forward, I smile and I embrace’).

  Nancy was immensely sane about the whole thing, really. With some grace, she stood poised between an ineffable regret for what she had lost, and a relieved realism about what she had gained. She resisted bitterness, although she could never quite relax about the subject. Typical of her remarks was this coolly gallant one to Deborah, in 1964: ‘I always think what a mercy not to have children but now I see Sto I’m not so sure... Perhaps I will leave him everything.’ And to Evelyn Waugh, a little raggedly: ‘Don’t... tease me about not having children, it was God’s idea, not mine.’

  But who, at the time of her hysterectomy, would Nancy have wanted to have a baby with? Not her husband, that was for sure. The fragile dream of a child to kick the Rodd marriage into lasting life was over. Indeed an interesting question would have been posed to Nancy, had the ectopic pregnancy not saved her from having to answer it: how on earth would she have explained to everyone that she was carrying a baby who was not her husband’s?

  Peter disappeared into the war in 1941 and did not properly return until March 1944. The child could hardly have been his. Nor would she have wanted it to be. Although Nancy had quite liked the idea of Peter’s baby when she conceived it in 1940, a year on the glamour of his wartime heroism had pretty well worn off. He was Prod again, unsatisfactory and unfaithful, self-important and self-centred (another one of those in the house? no thank you). He was also away much of the time in Addis Ababa, and not very interested in receiving visits from Nancy. In fact the marriage, as had been inevitable once the flurry of war died down, was reverting to the way it had been before Perpignan. The only difference was that the war – and other things – had made Peter even cockier than before.

  In a letter to Mrs Hammersley from August 1940, Nancy had told of how some casual new friends were ‘most kind but trying to induce me to leave my (I must say wretch of a) husband... As it is only a question of £.s.d. & the said hubby having a hole apparently in his pocket like a bottomless pit, I shall struggle on in matrimony despite them. How people do long to break up ménages I have often remarked on this in life...’ So she would not then have taken such a step. She believed in marriage. As she wrote in her appointments diary for 1941: ‘Marriage is the most important thing in life & must be kept going at almost any cost’. She was starting to see, however, that the ‘cost’ was getting just a little too high.

  For some time Peter had been having an affair with Adelaide Lubbock, Nancy’s cousin, whose son, Eric, had been a page at the Rodds’ wedding. In the early years of the war, the ‘sweet-voiced’ Mrs Lubbock was ‘in charge of another ARP post in distant Chelsea’8, and Peter would hare off to see her when on leave in London.

  A 1950 letter to Evelyn Waugh suggests that this affair of Peter’s had been going on since as early as 1938: ‘he said that for the last 12 years he has considered himself as married to Adelaide’, Nancy wrote. If this is accurate, and there is no reason to think otherwise, it would mean that Peter had been sleeping with Mrs Lubbock at the time that he and Nancy were in Perpignan, and when Nancy became pregnant by him in 1940. Peter would have been quite capable of enjoying a little revival in his marriage while pleasuring a new mistress. It is also possible that Nancy knew about the affair all along, and was sufficiently insouciant not to worry about it. Adelaide was a relation and a friend; Nancy may have simply thought good luck to her. But this does not quite square with the impression one gets from her letters: those that she wrote between 1939 and the end of 1940 are, as has been shown, pretty much pro-Peter, and although they do refer to his mistress it is in the most innocent of terms (‘Golly9 and Adelaide Lubbock are sending their children away by the next boat’, Nancy wrote in June 1940). It would appear from this that she did not know about the affair, or at least that it was not serious.

  Yet a letter to Mrs Hammersley, written at the end of 1940, is almost openly despairing, so much so as to suggest that Nancy recently found out what was going on. It reeks of the fear of a sexually unwanted woman: ‘My hair is going quite grey – I don’t think you’ll know me, my skirts fall off and my clothes hang on me. I feel older than the hills – not a bit young any more isn’t it horrid and my own life has honestly ceased to interest me which must be a bad sign.’ Not long afterwards, writing with painful sincerity in her 1941 diary, Nancy is clearly struggling to grasp the reality of her marriage. She may in the past have acknowledged what Peter was like – she did so in Wigs on the Green, when she portrayed him as the feckless charmer Jasper Aspect – but the tone in the diary was new: sadly and sternly rigorous. She wrote that ‘the most critical moment in a marriage is the falling off of physical love, which is bound to occur sooner or later & only an experienced woman can know how to cope with this. If not properly dealt with the marriage is bound to go on the rocks.’ This was true of the Rodds, and had been for a long time. But Nancy had not wanted to admit it, had not known how to admit it. She would express it better, at a greater distance, in the passage in The Pursuit of Love where Linda muses upon her life with Tony Kroesig. Here, she was only just starting to understand what it all really meant: that the marriage was over and that she had nothing else to go to. It is amazing how stoically cheerful she remained, how seldom she lapsed into despair.

  She and Peter had been living together, on and off as usual, at Rutland Gate. Nancy moved there in October 1940 when the nightly bombardment around Blomfield Road became too much. The Mitford family home was filled with Polish Jews evacuated from the East End. Nancy was genuinely fond of them (‘my sweet refugees’) while enjoying the annoyance that she imagined they caused to her mother: ‘You can’t imagine how beastly Muv is being – she now regards me as a Jewess & is so horrid both to & about me. Also says if she had all the money in the world she would not ever live in the house again after the Jews have had it.’ Exaggerated? Probably. Sydney was irritated by the dirty state of her house – unreasonably, as there was just one maid – but a letter to Jessica refers to the evacuees in quite sympathetic terms. Nancy’s dislike of her mother knew no bounds at this time, however; and a houseful of Jews chez l’amie de Hitler presented an opportunity for an irritable tease.

  The evacuees kept Nancy extremely busy, and sometimes in surprising ways. ‘Oh dear a little creature here aged 16 is in the family way... shall I be obliged to wield a knitting needle & go down to fame as Mrs Rodd the abortionist? (I might join Diana which would be rather nice).’10 Meanwhile the bombs continued to threaten an end to such sad little personal agonies. ‘These ton bombs are Hitty’s new joke & quite a good one the effect is of an earthquake & besides you hear them screaming down for ages... Ha ha ha such a little comedian.’ But Nancy had become as stoical about Hitler as about her husband (Osbert Lancaster11 was later to say that her troubles with Peter had trained her to put up with the bombs). James Lees-Milne recorded in his diary for 1944: ‘Nancy boasts that she is not the least frightened of the fly bombs.’ Certainly that was what she wanted people to think: ‘do pray I shan’t be hit, I feel you have a pull’, she wrote to Violet Hammersley in characteristic tone.

  Once again, as she saw it, her family was letting the side down. There was her mother, whose temper had indeed become worn by the constant to-and-fro between what Nancy no doubt saw as the Fascist outposts of Unity in Swinbrook and Di
ana in Holloway. Then, in December 1940: ‘Farve has turned up roaring like a bull because everything is not just as he always has it.’ This uneasy trio was on each other’s nerves even in that vast house, as they all were by sorrow and feuds and simple lack of food and sleep. Again, too, Nancy was flat broke. Peter sent money only irregularly from Ethiopia, her allowance from her father had been cut at the start of the war, and handouts from Lady Rennell stopped on the death of her father-in-law (who had probably been the one conscientiously urging the payments). According to Nancy, the money was now being used ‘to build a ball room in memory of my pa in law. I keep saying how I wish she were religious, a nice marble X would cost far less.’ Penniless and bombarded, she nonetheless continued to draw a rigorous comfort from her endurance of it all. She was in there with the Londoners, smiling and sticking it out (‘if somebody does take cover you can be sure they are up from the country’).

  And a couple of fairly casual sentences, in a letter of March 1941 to Mrs Hammersley, held the promise of her reward; although she did not know it as she wrote them.

  A friend of mine at the War Office (M.I.) begs me (this is a secret) to worm my way into the Free Frog Officers’ Club in any capacity & try to find out something about them. They are all here under assumed names, all splashing mysteriously large sums of money about & our people can’t find out anything about them & are getting very worried. I’m afraid it’s no good for me as I have never moved in Frog society & wouldn’t know who was who anyway. I feel it is your duty!... It is known they are riddled with spies eg Dakar [details of which planned operation had been leaked to the Vichy administration]. Isn’t it tricky. Seriously I don’t see what I could do & it would bore me to death to work in an officers’ club anyway.

  In fact this unnamed War Office friend was one of the most powerful agents of fate in Nancy’s life. Presumably he had asked her to do her Trojan cheval act because she spoke unusually good French, if ‘of the est-ce-que variety’.12 Also she was asked because she was a pretty and elegant woman (Mrs Hammersley, who looked like a sixty-three-year-old Cassandra, swathed as she always was in a dark entanglement of shawls and veils, would not have done so well). But the friend could not, for one moment, have imagined what extraordinary riches would flow – towards Nancy, rather than him – from his plea.

  It is amazing how reluctant she sounds, in her letter to Mrs H: hob-nobbing with French officers was surely preferable to scavenging for a ‘proper’ dinner for her father, or listening to the sullen fears of a pregnant teenager, or watching her mother run her fingers over Rutland Gate for dust. Back in September 1940, however, Nancy had shown herself rather exasperated with ‘the Frogs’ for whom she was helping to run a canteen at White City. It was the height of the Blitz, everyone was trying to keep their heads up, and meanwhile – she wrote to Mrs Hammersley – they ‘really are behaving like spoilt children, complaining they are kept awake at night & one today started a long histoire about how he hadn’t been taken to the theatre at all...’ At this point, Nancy’s feelings about the French were fairly typically English. With her unbending attitude towards the war, she would not have been impressed with the way France had caved in and let the Nazis goose-step all over Paris. The White City Frogs were temporary internees from Dunkirk, and Nancy had neither admiration nor longing for them. She treated them like so many ‘kittens, I never stop laughing all day... English soldiers or brave de Gaulle ones can never replace these nice lily-livered jokers.’

  She did not really think this. What Nancy desired above all was to be able to look up to a man. His morals in the bedroom might be suspect, but outside it they must be honourable. Peter managed, just about, to fit the bill on this score. But what Nancy then craved – as had become clear in her novels – was that this impeccable moral courage be the source not of self-regard, but of self-mockery: that a man should be able to laugh as he went into battle, shriek in the face of both la gloire and la mort. If he could not do that, he became the kind of crasher that Peter was now hopelessly revealing himself to be. Not just in his conversation (‘he talked incessantly in his boring manner without appearing to listen to one word we said’, wrote James Lees-Milne after an evening with him at the Ritz in 1944; ‘the sad truth is that one should believe only a quarter of what Peter says’); but in the endless, sordid, humiliating grind of his behaviour, which – as Nancy now saw with deadly clarity – was unleavened by charm or grace.

  She did not really think, yet, that joking men could be lovers: that a lover could be fun. As a girl she had had her jokes with Hamish while her potential husband, Sir Hugh Smiley, sat across a dinner table, a monolith of gravity. Peter, too, was always pompous when behaving well. He had been able to make Nancy laugh, but it was not to him she turned when she wanted to ‘scream’; his nature lacked that innate sense of the ridiculous. No – the greatest fun was to be had with those who were hors de combat sexually, like the cowardly Frogs, or men such as Robert Byron and Mark Ogilvie-Grant. And so, like Louis XV before he met La Pompadour, she ‘had never known that particularly delightful relationship of sex mixed up with laughter’. Nor, it seemed, could an English soldier supply it. But ‘brave de Gaulle ones’ could; and would.

  Having obeyed instructions and infiltrated the world of the Free French Officers, Nancy wrote to Jessica in July 1941: ‘I live in a slight world of frogs now, always the nicest & funniest. You can’t imagine how wonderful they have been, the free ones I mean.’ What bliss these men must have seemed to her, water in the desert with their manners, their flattery, their straightforward male appreciation of a woman in all her late-blooming glory. How different from Englishmen; how very, very different from Peter. The Free French were elegantly ranged on the side of righteousness, they opposed Pétain and Vichy and everything that Nancy abhorred. But they saw no loss of face in fun and frivolity: rather they saw necessity.

  Perhaps Nancy exaggerated this joking aspect of the Free Frogs; she so wanted it to be true, and so deserved a break from Peter, who is to blame her if she turned this band of Gallic sophisticates into a sexy male chorus of shrieking Mitfords? But there was more to it than that. What she recognised was that here, for the first time in her life, were men who knew how to deal with women. The jokes, indeed, were part of that (‘you’ve only got to make it laugh’, as Alfie says, ‘and you’re home and dry’). These were not hung-up public school boys who regarded the female breast as a dummy to suck, or a mistress as something to show off to the (forty-year-old) chaps in Pop. These, Nancy felt, were the kind of men who would handle her naïvety while relishing her worldliness. They might make her happy as individual lovers but, even more importantly, they would do so as a race.

  The Pursuit of Love is, of course, profoundly engaged with this difference between Englishmen and Frenchmen. Nancy had presumably been longing to say it, and she did not hold back. Here is Linda, lunching at the Ritz with her lover, Fabrice, who is on brief leave from his own work as a Free Frog:

  They talked of this and that, mostly jokes. Fabrice told her scandalous stories about some of the other lunchers known to him of old, with a wealth of unlikely detail. He spoke only once about France, only to say that the struggle must be carried on, everything would be all right in the end. Linda thought how different it would have been with Tony or Christian. Tony would have held forth about his own experiences and made boring arrangements for his own future, Christian would have launched a monologue on world conditions subsequent to the fall of France... Both would have spoken to her exactly, in every respect, as if she had been some chap in their club. Fabrice talked to her, at her, and for only her, it was absolutely personal talk, scattered with jokes and allusions private to them both.

  This was the renaissance of the ‘personal’ in Nancy’s life, after too long of aridity and sorrow and schism. In the summer of 1941 she began a love affair with one of her Frenchmen: Roy André Desplats-Pilter, a rich and cultivated man of her own age, nom de guerre André Roy.

  It is ironic that after so much in
fidelity on the part of Peter, it was Nancy’s love affair that brought her marriage to an effective end. For all the acceptance with which she wrote about adultery, it was not really her style: she was innately pure of heart, and what she liked was to lose herself in the love of one person then ‘never look to right or left’.13 She did not sleep with André Roy out of a desire to end her marriage, nor a desire to even the score (although she would have been entitled). But she would have regarded an affair – on her part, that is – as proof that her marriage was at an end. Otherwise she would not have been able to do it.

  She was not in love with André Roy. Perhaps because of this, their affair is the only one that she conducted in an ‘adult’ manner: she didn’t attribute to it emotions that were inappropriate, she actually took it for what it was, which is rarer than one might think in the vertiginous world of love. What it was, undoubtedly, was the most glorious respite from the wearisome world of Peter Rodd. Roy makes the occasional, rather circumspect appearance in her letters (perhaps it amused her to tell and yet not tell about him): ‘I found a delicious piece of Hôtel Montalembert notepaper’, she wrote to Jessica in July, ‘but didn’t dare write on it... so I wrote to a glamorous Free Frog I know instead & I expect he’ll think it a poor-taste joke.’ And then to Mrs Hammersley: ‘Actually this Sunday I am making an effort for the Entente & taking the glamorous Capitaine Roy to West Wycombe14 for the day. Praiseworthy?’

  Whether Nancy regretted her affair when it led to the ectopic pregnancy; whether she shuddered to think that she might have given birth to André Roy’s child, with all the shame that would have implied – who knows? She does not seem to have thought like that: it was not her way. The love affair had given her new life in a dark time, that was how she saw it then, and how she continued to see it. Roy visited her in hospital, where he found her reading Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (‘Châteaubriand – assommant,’1* he remarked). He may have been shaken to see her there, shocked by so disproportionate an outcome to their light and pleasurable liaison. Nancy had almost died, after all (‘my mother-in-law was told by the surgeon that I shld be in danger for 3 days... I long to know if they bothered to look under R in the deaths column’15). And Roy himself had only four years to live; he died of tuberculosis at the end of the war.