Certainly she saw through the faux-daring of those who tried to make sex too important, too serious. In 1971 she wrote to Heywood Hill, saying, ‘I tried Nicky Mosley’s book.32 How can people read such stuff? I love the way he sort of stands back, breathes deeply, & inserts some dirty thought, too obviously in order to be with it...’ But this hardly implies an inability to come to terms with sensuality, more an intense boredom with a modern obsession. As she wrote in Pompadour: ‘in those pre-Freudian days the act of love was not yet regarded with an almost mystical awe’; and there, yes, one does sense a brisk authorial voice.
Essentially, the impression given by her mature writings is that she had an adult acceptance of the place of sex. Within their well-dressed exterior, her post-war books have a comfortable understanding of physical passion, in all its wonder and absurdity. She does not, as she would say, go droning on about it; that was not her way. Her take on the physical is more like that of, say, Muriel Spark, whose novels, although highly eroticised, always let clues and implications pulse delicately beneath their smooth texture. Nancy’s own books are stuffed full of sex: how could they not be, when they are so intimately concerned with the pursuit of love and la ronde of society? The Bolter, Cedric Hampton, Charles-Edouard de Valhubert: all are driven by their sexuality, although none of this is made explicit. None of it needs to be. Nancy didn’t pry into the ways of the world, she simply knew what they were. And beneath her pristine veneer she was almost shockingly unshockable. In Don’t Tell Alfred, one of Fanny’s young sons turns up at the Embassy (Fanny is now English Ambassadress in Paris) and starts telling her about his low-life exploits as a Spanish tour operator: ‘some of the girls do sleep with customs officers’, he says, trying to épater his hopeless old mother. To which Fanny replies, in the authentic voice of Nancy: ‘But how do they have time? I always seem to be in too much of a hurry to sleep with people at customs.’
Meanwhile, back with Nancy and Palewski: her sexual awakening is clearly accepted as fact by those who were closest to her. Diana alludes delicately to it: ‘She probably first knew happiness with him, on a certain level...’ and Debo refers to the ‘extraordinary experience’ of the early months with Palewski. These are women who feel no need to explain what is in the nature of things; it is obvious what they are saying. On the other hand Alistair Forbes, in his Spectator review of Nancy’s letters, just comes right out with it: ‘...to a beguiled and consenting party like Nancy his [Palewski’s] pleasure-giving skills in the sack made her conclude that although she had at the time adored her honeymoon [not quite true in fact] with her Wagnerianly pretty but pretty rum husband, Peter Rodd had quite simply been ignorant of the facts of love-making life.’ Again of course, this relies on the evidence of The Pursuit of Love, which is not to say that Nancy didn’t experience bliss in the arms of Gaston Palewski. It is simply to underline that so much, with Nancy, is inferred from her novels.
And Fabrice is, undoubtedly, an idealisation: a Palewski who is not a third-generation immigrant with terrible skin, but a rich duke with impeccable antecedents, and a magnificent spare flat in the 16ème into which he installs Linda. He is also the greatest lover since Don Giovanni. Everyone wants to go to bed with Fabrice: when news of his imminent arrival reaches Lady Montdore’s house party, at the start of Love in a Cold Climate, ‘the women... turned their heads like dogs who think they hear someone unwrapping a piece of chocolate.’ This was not quite the case with ‘Monsieur Piebald Palewski’, as Diana Cooper called him in a letter to Evelyn Waugh.33 His status as a love-maker was rather the obverse of Fabrice de Sauveterre’s: he wanted to go to bed with everyone.
He had to conceal this behaviour from the puritanical de Gaulle, whose ‘female llama surprised in her bath’34 aspect would have turned to stone had he been forced to confront the faiblesse of his aide. ‘I once saw Gaston’, says John Julius Norwich,
at the British Embassy in Paris [where Lord Norwich’s father Duff Cooper was ambassador after the war], at some big dinner party, sitting on a sofa with Daphne Weymouth as she then was35, who was lovely and funny and sexy, though not I think interested in the Colonel. But after dinner he was sitting next to her, and he was bouncing up and down with excitement going ‘j’ai envie de toi, j’ai envie de toi’, over and over...
Another time at the Embassy – he was sitting next to Virginia Charteris at dinner, and he went over like a ripe ninepin at this jolly fresh-faced English rose, you know. And he invited her to lunch the next day. And she was rather pleased, and said oh, Gaston Palewski’s invited me out to lunch, and we said: watch it. Just watch it, that’s all. This man’s a terror. And she said oh, come on, don’t be silly, I’m a married woman, I can look after myself. So off she goes at 1 o’clock to his flat, and at twenty past one she’s back. And we said: what happened? And she said well, it’s the most extraordinary thing that ever happened. I go up to his flat, I ring the bell, expecting a sort of man in a white coat to say come in and offer me a glass of sherry – what I get is the Colonel, stark naked and in a considerable state of excitement.
All in a day’s work for such an homme à femmes. As was the apocryphal reply given by one clever lady, to whom he offered a lift home after a party in his official car: ‘No thank you Gaston, I’m very tired, I had better walk.’ But this? ‘I once actually asked somebody’, says Lord Norwich, ‘what it was like going to bed with the Colonel. And she said it was rather like being run over by an express train.’
This really is not Fabrice, that civilised yet earthy connoisseur of the female response. Was Nancy such an innocent as to think that it was? And was Palewski such a figure of fun, such a Casanova in cap and bells?
Who knows? But one must say this: the set around people like Nancy and Palewski was above all a gossipy one, which loved little better than urban myths like the Naked Colonel and the Lady. Too many people say that Palewski was a rampant womaniser for it not to be true, but it was also a totem of tittle-tattle amongst the mid-century social gratin: any story that confirmed it would have been embraced with open arms (‘my dear, did you hear what that terrible Colonel did the other day in Mollie Madrigal’s entresol...?’). And Nancy’s version of the Daphne Weymouth story is quite different from John Julius Norwich’s: ‘Daphne was here – oh what a bitch she is’, she wrote to Diana from Paris in 1946. ‘She made a terrific pass at the Col & her tactics were absolutely all in, for getting me out of the way. However the Col roared with laughter & (I believe) resisted.’ Which may not have been true either; but should not be dismissed just because it doesn’t fit the myth. As for the story that Palewski was a frantic rather than an accomplished lover – here, too, the lady beneath the express train would have known the funniness of what she was saying, and probably did not resist the desire to exaggerate.
Alistair Forbes wrote that Palewski was one of those men who – as Voltaire said of himself – could ‘talk away their face’ with a woman within half an hour. Evelyn Waugh’s son Auberon wrote that his own young daughter had met Palewski when he was in his eighties, and ‘fell for him completely’. So too did many women in French society. Diana, on the other hand, says: ‘I was fond of him, and he was fun. But he wasn’t charming, really, because he was very clumsy, you know, making passes at people who weren’t the least bit interested in him... He was awfully nice. But I don’t think being in love with him – one couldn’t have been.’ Diana, however, had her own sexually confident man in Oswald Mosley and so, unlike Nancy, she would not have been susceptible. Palewski must have had something, even if not everybody saw it. Perhaps Nancy, with her implicit insistence upon the cultured, joking, chit-chatting side of a love affair, brought out the best in him; which, sadly for her, left the worst for a great many other women.
And this, above all, one must also say: whether Nancy was truly transported to ecstasy by Palewski is not, in the end, the issue. The point is what she wrote about it all, the effect it had upon her mind, her soul, her sensibility, rather than upon her body. Something in the qual
ity of her lovemaking with Gaston made her want to describe Linda’s with Fabrice as transfiguring, poetic, the greatest imaginable happiness. That is the important thing. After Fabrice has joined the Free French, and Linda is forced to return to London and wait for him there, he visits her unexpectedly one morning, and ‘all was light and warmth’. The couple fall into bed for hours; then Linda says to him:
‘Oh Fabrice, I feel – well, I suppose religious people sometimes feel like this.’
She put her head on his shoulder, and they sat for a long time in silence.
Nancy had believed in love for as long as she could remember, she had looked for it in the wrong places, she had resisted it with her French capitaine (‘But what of Roy?’ wrote a bewildered Mrs Hammersley); and now, with this urbane and not unkindly man, she fell completely. It was as if a dam had burst. The feelings flowed over Palewski in unstoppable gushes. Again, he was not a suitable recipient: like Peter, he was utterly incapable of fidelity. But in a way this did not matter. He had so much of what Nancy wanted: unlike Peter, who had always somehow been able to diminish her natural capacity for happiness, Gaston opened it up to the skies with his laughter, his lightness of touch, his belief in civilised values. He made her feel that life was a joyful business, and he did this even though he would also, in time, make her very unhappy.
In some mysterious way, this cutting loose with Palewski may have been connected to Nancy’s hysterectomy: she could take a man for pure pleasure, her ties had been cut as surely as her poor fallopian tubes. By becoming free from one part of the female destiny – children – she also became free to fulfil another part of it: love.
That is not to say that she felt no guilt about the ending of her marriage, nor that Peter was sanguine about her behaviour. He came back from Italy in Easter 1944 ‘looking bronzed, tough and well’, and marched into Heywood Hill in a barely contained rage. James Lees-Milne, who saw the Rodds that night at the Ritz, noticed how it seemed that Peter ‘might lash out at poor Nancy at a moment’s notice’. In August he described seeing them for dinner at Claridge’s, where he was again stuck in the midst of a terrible, to him incomprehensible, atmosphere such as only marital rows can create. ‘If Peter had not been present it would have been more enjoyable... He puts Nancy on edge, and makes her pathetically anxious not to displease him. Now why should a husband put a wife under such an obligation?’ Why, indeed? Because he knew that he was not the only unfaithful party in the Rodd marriage. (André Roy he had probably not been aware of; he need not have known the reason for Nancy’s hysterectomy, as he was not then in contact with his wife: ‘I never hear from Peter or he from me it is too depressing like the grave’, she had written to Diana from her hospital bed.) He also knew that he could, with sadistic ease, induce guilt in as innately moral a woman as Nancy. She would have disliked the idea of confrontation – hence her conciliatory conduct – even though Peter could hardly have won any argument on the subject of unfaithfulness. But what she really wanted, from the time she began her affair with Gaston, was a quiet life. How far she thought beyond that is difficult to say: the war put the whole situation into limbo.
She had had eight, one imagines perfect, months with the Colonel in London, lunches at the Connaught Hotel and evenings at Blomfield Road – and oh, the romance of him turning up there late at night, whistling Kurt Weill songs at the window – during which time the future would have been another country: a fact, but not one that needed consideration. For most women, however, such present-tense living cannot last. As Jasper Aspect says in Wigs on the Green (written in what would have then seemed another life), they ‘have a passion for getting relationships cut and dried’. When Palewski went off to Algeria with de Gaulle in May 1943, no doubt with regret but without undue pain, Nancy was left to fret and agonise. This was war, of course. Partings were inevitable. But the masochistic love of sacrifice, which had sustained her through the Blitz, was a different business now that her loss was so directly personal. And it was bound up with Palewski’s own nature, which was frustratingly elusive. When he left, he would leave completely, even if he later returned to her. Absence, with him, would make the body grow randier; Nancy probably realised this in the clear-sighted part of herself, while the romantic part desperately hoped otherwise. She must have suffered when left to sleep alone again in bombed-out Blomfield Road, listening to the falling V1s or, on a quiet night, to the scuffling of the chickens in her garden.
She wrote many letters to Palewski, so many indeed that he referred to being showered in a ‘charmante avalanche grise’ (her Harrods envelopes were grey); this must have hurt, all the more for being said so pleasantly. ‘J’avais employé le mot “avalanche” pour des raisons de style mais non pour me plaindre de l’abondance de vos lettres’3*, he wrote in retraction; yet they both knew that his remark had been an acknowledgment of the truth. It was Nancy who was making the running, who wrote about visiting him in Algiers, who wrote, full stop – while Palewski was simply receiving it all, saying ‘Venez donc’ when he knew that she couldn’t, encouraging her to ‘Écrivez, écrivez’ even though he could not always be bothered to reply to the letters. Now she needed the advice of one of her heroines: Amabelle Fortescue from Christmas Pudding, who would have told her to invest in her affair with Palewski no more or less than it deserved; or Sophia Garfield from Pigeon Pie, who would have delicately eased into her own hands the reins that controlled the relationship. They could do it, and Nancy could tell them how, but she was unable, all her life, to do it for herself.
‘I feel rather anxious about you darling’, wrote Mrs Hammersley. ‘I must tell you that I never would have thought your heart would prevail over your reason... Perhaps it’s a good thing P[alewski] will be absent for a bit. I don’t mean to be harsh but, at one remove, you will be able better to take stock of the future and of your own feelings. It’s important in life to keep balanced.’
Mrs H would not have written this had Nancy not given her good cause. Not since the days of Hamish St Clair-Erskine was Nancy talking about a lover as she did about Gaston, telling her friends so much about the affair (and its shortcomings). She was a strange mixture, in this respect, of reserve and candour. As John Julius Norwich says, she would come right out to people with ‘oh darling, the Colonel, I worship the ground he walks on’. But even here there was an element of concealment, as if the very blatancy with which she shared her feelings was a way of masking them.
Yet this contradiction implied another: between the adult nature of her love affair with Palewski, and the very girlish manner in which she conducted it. In one way hers was a very grown-up passion. This was a real man, after all, a figure of standing and experience, not an overgrown boy: he required handling as such, and up to a point Nancy was capable of doing this; she kept Gaston amused and contented in her company. But in another way she treated him as a sort of teen idol, a very public crush. Like a teenager in the delirious throes of a first affair, she loved to show off about him. This is from a letter written to Palewski in June 1944: ‘Osbert Lancaster said at luncheon on Fri: that Aly F[orbes] told him you were so frightened in that raid on Thurs: that you kept ringing him up36 – I said furiously that is a total lie I was with Palewski all night. Sybil Colefax: all night? N.R. Well, you know what I mean.’ It is purest adolescence, and who knows what Palewski made of it (‘ma chère amie! Do these people need this information?’).
It really is the kind of behaviour she went in for during the Hamish phase. And one has to wonder if maybe, just maybe, this was how she liked it. However keen she was on Gaston, she surely knew enough not to run after him – a man who loved la chasse as he did – and proclaim her love at every opportunity: she was practically forty, she must have learned that much by then. Yet that is how she behaved. And by so doing she handed Palewski the power to make her extremely miserable, which actually need not have happened. Love, as she knew very well, was something that should be handled by the head as well as felt in the heart.
Palewski’s
greatest hold over Nancy was his eternal elusiveness; had he been doing the pursuing then he might have become less of a fascinator, might instead have shown himself in a light that revealed his Flying Scotsman lovemaking and his acne-scarred skin. But this he never did, because he never got close enough for long enough. John Julius Norwich says, quite rightly, that the Naked Colonel and the Lady story is, ‘as Nancy would have said, a hoot, but not so funny if you were Nancy, because I don’t think he ever did that sort of thing to her’. Yet the irony is that had he done so, had he pursued her in the blatant way that he did other women, she would almost certainly not have wanted him quite so much. No doubt he knew this. Nancy made Palewski more desirable by her unfulfilled desire, and this probably sustained him through the trials of his other amatory adventures. Her regard meant something to him; he had no desire to lose it; it suited him very well to keep her trying to keep him. Indeed, the complete imbalance in the relationship – Nancy saying ‘I love you’, Gaston saying ‘That’s awfully kind of you’ – was what maintained it for so long: far longer, on both sides, than any of their other liaisons. As she herself would later say, perhaps thinking just a little of her own situation, the man should have the upper hand in a love affair; although she may not have meant this to quite such an extent.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 24