Nancy had not seen Jessica for seventeen years when her sister also came blundering in, on a visit in August 1955 with her new husband, Robert Treuhaft, and two children. This should have been a glorious reunion but Nancy got extremely cold feet (‘I’m half delighted, half terrified’5) and absconded to stay with Deborah. Meanwhile, the Treuhafts, all unaware, arrived at Rue Monsieur, were admitted by Nancy’s maid Marie, and given the strange news that Madame was chez la duchesse de Devonshire. Jessica then – as she later told the story – telephoned Nancy: ‘“Susan!” “Susan!” “Where are you?” “I’m in your flat!” “You beast, that’s frightfully expensive!” Crash!!’ Later Nancy rang back and the sisters had ‘a lovely chat; as Bob said, “on Debo’s nickel”.’6
But Nancy continued to stay away, and fretted about the presence of Jessica and her family in Rue Monsieur. It was as though she imagined Coca-Cola-swilling yanks among her horribly breakable European bibelots: ‘Oh dereling oi am in great and terrible despair’, she wrote to Diana ‘...the Treuhafts have moved into Rue Mr., and I can’t bear it.’ Of course this was nonsense. ‘In fact they behaved perfectly’, she told Diana a couple of days later, ‘and I think Marie must have thought I’d quite lost my head... Well, I had, too!’ Nancy returned to Paris and had an enjoyable time with her sister, to whom she gave fifty pounds, pretending that this was payment for books taken years earlier from Jessica’s flat (the books had been worth a few shillings). This episode showed with intense clarity the contradictions in Nancy’s nature: the disloyalty and the loyalty, the generosity and the mean-spiritedness, the desire both to maintain a distance and to have it infringed.
Jessica had made a sudden disruptive surge into her life; she wanted to be able to cope but couldn’t quite do so. Like a domestic animal, Nancy liked what she was used to. And her habitude by this time was the company of friends and enemy-friends: the couple Dolly Radziwill and Mogens Tvede, the beloved old ladies Violet Hammersley and the Countess Costa, the English girls Pamela Berry, Diana Cooper and Violet Trefusis, the clever boys Cyril Connolly, Raymond Mortimer and James Lees-Milne, the delicious homosexuals Harold Acton, Victor Cunard and Mark Ogilvie-Grant (who now lived in Greece), the charmingly normal Billa Harrod, Cynthia Gladwyn and Alvilde Lees-Milne, the exotic Contessas Christiana Brandolini and Anna-Maria Cicogna (with whom Nancy would stay in Venice, in an apartment in the Dorsoduro). Gaston Palewski was un autre genre, but above everything else he was Nancy’s friend.
These were people whom she knew very well, who shared her belief in the civilising force of society. Dreadful or dull though they may sometimes have been as individuals, as an entity they were solid, united, dedicated to the now near-extinct cause of adult amusement. They were not people who would have brought their children to dinner parties, or talked school catchment areas across the table. They had servants and no television, which helped; but they did strive for wit and elegance, the things that being adult is supposed to signify but no longer really does. Some of them were batty, but at least they didn’t mumble miserably into a wine glass about their mortgage.
So Nancy’s friendships were satisfying, sometimes very close. With Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who as Diana says ‘was really like a brother to her’, or the ‘old ladies’ Mrs Hammersley and Madame Costa, who were almost like mothers, Nancy did have something like the loving certainty of a blood relationship. This was one of her great comforts. Yet with most of these people, with whom she spent a great deal of her life, the connection was different from what one would find in a family. In a way it was much easier, and the affections more easily displayed. Diana tells of how Nancy would rave about the flat owned by Dolly Radziwill and Mogens Tvede in Paris: ‘they had one or two nice things in the flat, and they had a little Rubens on an easel which was sort of the nicest thing they had. Well her description of it, you’d think it was Versailles, the Louvre and the Metropolitan rolled into one – because she was so fond of them! If it had been ours, she would have thought nothing of it. I mean Chatsworth, she was supposed to have said that there was nothing beautiful there, and it’s just the most beautiful place one’s ever seen. She was very funny in those ways.’
Yet the odd implication is that Nancy was more at ease – more herself – with her sisters than with her friends. If the jealousies were deeper, the emotions stronger, they were still more significant and enduring. The bizarre little episode with Jessica shows as much. The fallings-out within the network of friendship happened in a relatively cool way: people got too close and then got fed up, which again is not the kind of thing that happens in families. In 1962, Nancy wrote about Pamela Berry to Evelyn Waugh (with whom, incidentally, her relationship was just about perfect, mainly because they never saw each other): ‘I must tell you that I don’t love Pam as I used to. She is spoilt... her faults are getting worse and she doesn’t mellow.’ Now Pam and Nancy had once been thick as thieves – ‘I say you and Pam Berry have got crushes on each other’, Waugh wrote in 1948 – but it was in the nature of friendship that it should not be a till-death-us-do-part affair, that it should allow freedom and change and all the other things that family does not.
Friendship – for which Nancy had a true gift – made both more and fewer demands upon her than family. In a way it was easier; in another way, it was much more tiring, because it demanded the maintenance of the shop front. Nancy believed so overwhelmingly in social standards, in the self-imposed duty to shriek and be shrieked at, in maintaining what John Julius Norwich calls ‘her cool, her sparkle’, that her friends could never be people with whom she would sit in her nightdress, clutching a cup of tea, and weeping about why the Colonel hadn’t telephoned when he said he would, or what is the point of my existence? What, indeed, would have been the point of that?
She believed in ‘smiling politeness’. It would have been hell to her to row with Victor Cunard or to snap at Mrs Hammersley: that kind of thing was all very well within the family, but with one’s friends? Never. It reduced one to the level of a Violet Trefusis, someone who showed their baser nature in a setting designed, as Nancy saw it, to civilise it out of existence: the irony being, of course, that it was precisely Nancy’s attempts to conceal her feelings that led to them being revealed. And this she did not like. She was proud. She wanted to be like the Queen in La Princesse de Clèves, the book she had translated in 1950, perhaps paying special attention to this sentence: ‘Il semblait qu’elle souffrit sans peine l’attachement du Roi pour la Duchesse de Valentinois, et elle n’en témoignait aucune jalousie; mais elle avait une si profonde dissimulation qu’il était difficile de juger de ses sentiments...’6*
So it is not so surprising that Nancy realised more and more the value of solitude. She was, wrote Cynthia Gladwyn after her death, ‘something of a recluse’. At the same time, and again this is not such a paradox as it seems, she adored company. But rather than lower by the barest inch her social standards, or deprive herself of what she most valued in social contact – its exquisite freedom from sadness and solemnity, its alternative and dazzling reality – she would choose, increasingly, to be alone.
And this: was it faute de mieux? Again, who knows? The desire for a quieter, different life sounds an occasional note through her letters, even in the glory days of the early fifties in Rue Monsieur: ‘I’m engulfed in – not work exactly – but sort of work & the Paris season, & feel frantic and overdone’, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh in May 1952, when life was full of fun and success. ‘Too many English, telephone all the morning so that I can’t get out of bed, all wanting money – three borrowers yesterday & trying to cope with my sketch7, my S. Times article and a cocktail party for 150 which I give next week for Blessing in French. It’s too much. I ought to live in the country at this time of year, but then Col? It’s too difficult...’ Yet she would never have dreamed of giving less than her all to any of it. Scarcely a second of her life was lived on auto-pilot. So remarks like the one to Waugh, about wanting to slip off the merry-go-round, are perfectly understandable; and no
t to be taken too seriously. Her exhaustion was only what lay, like a tired and happy puppy, on the other side of her buoyancy.
As time went on, however – as she grew older, and the exuberance that had sustained her for ten magnificent years began to drain away – then Nancy was revealed as someone for whom solitude was the natural state. She still went out a lot, but sometimes it was a relief not to: ‘No dearest I can’t go to a ball even for you’, she wrote to Waugh in 1956, in reply to an invitation to his daughter’s coming-out dance. ‘Ce n’est plus de mon âge & I’ve no wish to make a guy of myself.’
She was in her fifties by then, although Harold Acton makes constant reference to her ageless appearance and her freedom from illness: ‘When I asked her to recommend a Parisian doctor she replied with a faint air of disgust that she had never needed one.’ Nancy had a disciplined physicality, utterly natural to her: she was the kind of woman who would spend her days walking about Paris, skittering lightly through her beloved streets, rather than sitting slumped in what she would have called a ‘motor’. The reverse of this was that she would also spend long mornings in bed, reading, writing letters, waiting for stamina to flood back into her; it was the same principle as solitude between social engagements. She was physically insubstantial, as unfurnished as a yearling, and what flesh there was dropped away very easily; she also had the lowest blood pressure ‘for my age anyone has ever had – & I faint in the morning continually’, as she told Evelyn Waugh. At the same time she had a slightly febrile energy; and a tensile toughness, as though her body held within it a steel armature, which had kept her going through the war and kept her young in Paris.
The only real sign of ageing was eye strain, which began in the early 1950s (‘I seem to be going blind – can’t read all day as I used to’8) and was eventually a great problem: ‘I am truly very much handicapped now by my eyes being so poorly’, she wrote to Waugh in 1960. She also grew lined (‘I should love to have my face ironed’9), partly no doubt because she relished ninety-degree heat: ‘boiling sun oh the bliss’. But this in no way detracted from her attractiveness, which had always lain in her debonair aspect rather than in pulchritude; as her 1966 television appearance shows, her spry and restless elegance was still there at an age when most women have succumbed either to gravity or the knife. Her love of clothes was undiminished and always would be (she is wearing what looks like a Dior on television, smart as you like and sleeveless, quite something at the age of sixty-one). Nor did she fear growing old. ‘The Col is 50 & minds. I’ve never minded any of the terrible ages that have overtaken me so don’t quite understand’, she wrote to Waugh in 1951. Of course she was aware of age, as who is not: in 1957 she would write of Voltaire: ‘I see him as old at 54 and to me 54 is old although I’m nearly it.’ But she had too little vanity to worry about physical changes. Nor was she insecure in that way; she found it funny, if anything, that she had been urged to wear more make-up by Harold Acton, Raymond Mortimer and Cecil Beaton (the Three Weird Sisters) and that after an attempt to dye her hair she had been asked by her hairdresser: ‘Mais qu’est-ce que ce curieux reflet vert?’ Eventually she did rid herself of the grey: ‘Have had my hair dyed boot black’, she wrote to her mother, ‘& look lovely.’
By the mid-1950s she was starting to slow up, all the same. For ten years or so she had lived on the sheer miraculous thrill of being in France, where the smallest routine moment – the cup of real coffee, the cheerful sound of ‘bonjour Madame’ instead of the mumbled ‘good morning’, the emergence from the silent streets around Rue Monsieur on to the wider bustling world of the Boulevard Raspail – had been separate, alive, its every detail lit from within. Now, although the joy of France was as real and strong as ever, the magical fires were burning less brightly. She was getting older; it was as simple as that; and it was part of the joy of Nancy that it had taken her so long to do it.
And so she confronted the square, grey salon at Rue Monsieur, and for a few more years she was contented to be alone there. It was not what she had thought would happen; few people do; but as what she had always known became finally clear, that Gaston Palewski would never marry her, so she began to accept solitude. Occasionally she would throw out this sort of remark – ‘Oh how I wish I knew some rich millionaire, it’s a thing one needs as one gets older’ – and probably, somewhere beneath the joke, she meant it. She never stopped worrying about money although she had plenty. And the thought of being alone at what she called THE END may have occasionally frightened her into thoughts of marriage. But deep down Nancy realised that she was not that kind of woman. ‘Nancy, in her heart of hearts, was... a bachelor’, wrote Harold Acton: it is the most striking sentence of his memoir, and it cuts straight through – as perhaps it needed another bachelor to do – all the triteness of ‘oh poor Nancy, the sadness of her lonely life’.
‘Yes I think Harold was quite right,’ says Diana. ‘I think she was very happy on her own, and in the end she realised that. She loved people in and out, but didn’t really want someone living in the house, you know. I think she was, yes, a natural bachelor.’ Debo: ‘I don’t think she was ever lonely.’
Nancy was not the type of woman that she celebrated in her books, who knew how to handle their female destiny. She had wanted to be such a woman: like Coco Chanel she would probably have said that the greatest achievement for any woman was ‘être aimée’. And one might say that she could have achieved this had she only been a better picker of men: that a string of sheerest bad luck had taken her to this solitary place, this bachelor’s life.
She would probably not have agreed. She thought that people had more control over their lives than that. Her hysterectomy, of course, had been out of her hands, and it affected – how could it not? – the way she thereafter viewed her life. As often as not, however, what seems like fate is directed by a subliminal choice; or an overt choice, as when Nancy went bravely marching upon Paris at the end of the war, in pursuit of a man whom she knew in her heart could not be captured.
‘I wonder if we are all as exactly like ourselves as Voltaire was from the beginning to the end of his life?’ she would later ask. One wonders how she would have answered that for herself. Had she always, inevitably, been moving towards life in France? She would not have realised it, of course, as a girl dreaming of love or a wife dreaming of happiness. Nancy had believed in the fulfilment of her female destiny – like her sad twin Jean Rhys, whose exquisite ghost shadowed her along the Left Bank – only to find that she had mysteriously become a writer instead, that the wrong turns of her life had brought her to the right place, that however much this was faute de mieux it was also what had been meant.
Nancy’s was a writer’s life: she was, as Debo said, ‘The French Lady Writer’. Yet her temperament was and was not that of an artist. She did and did not detach herself. She did not just imagine; she tried to live what she imagined. She did not just write Madame de Pompadour, its world acquired a here-and-now reality for her. The Paris with its new faubourgs, where the nobility built their ‘pale honey colour’ houses and their gardens ‘full, in summer, of orange trees and oleander’; Versailles, with its rooms ‘crammed to bursting point’ and the sound outside the vast windows of ‘the King’s hunt in the forest’: she dreamed these back into life. No wonder she hated finishing the book: ‘The trouble is my imagination won’t switch off all of THEM at Versailles,’ she told Raymond Mortimer almost six months after completion. ‘I haven’t got them out of my system.’ Such was the nature of her artistry. She created her glorious construct of France, through which the spirit of the eighteenth century shimmered; and it did not just infuse her books, it penetrated her life as well. ‘She lived as closely to that ideal as she could,’ says Alexander Mosley. ‘A lovely life, a delightful life.’ And that was what she had wanted, what she strived for: that was her achievement.
‘Most pleasure comes from illusions’, she quoted in Voltaire in Love, ‘and he who has lost them is seldom happy.’ After Pompadour, a different ki
nd of reality would start to move into Nancy’s life. Like ‘the poor Marquise’, overtaken by the humiliation of her failed role in the Seven Years War, and by the congestion that crept remorselessly through her lungs, Nancy would find the Fragonard colours of her life begin to shadow. But she would cling to her vision of ‘a civilised, decorous, beautiful way of living’ (Alexander Mosley), and to her philosophy of joy and jokes, which would sustain this brave woman through the encroachment of the great dullness.
The world of Voltaire in Love, published in 1957, was as cleverly delineated as that of Madame de Pompadour, but it was less intensely a part of her own. This was Nancy’s first truly grown-up book. It is marvellous stuff, once again, and she herself thought it her best; yet it has a different quality from the books that had gone before. For the first time, one feels the weight of professionalism upon her. ‘How difficult it is to write & in the end what is the aim?’ She wrote this in a letter to Evelyn Waugh; a sure sign that she was now doing it for a living.
The research that went into her exposition of the love affair between Voltaire and Emilie, Marquise du Châtelet – ‘not an ordinary love. They were not ordinary people’ – is truly scholarly in its refusal to treat with anything but meticulously recorded fact. There are no slurrings over, no guesses unless they are admitted to be such, no flights of fancy. There are opinions, of course, but that is different, and anyway they do not take quite so much of the ‘Louis XV was really rather a duck’10 form. Voltaire in Love and its successors, The Sun King, published in 1966, and Frederick the Great, published in 1970, are works of unusual intelligence. They have all Nancy’s worldly yet childlike clarity: like Pompadour, they are characterised by her grasp of human nature, its influence upon grand ‘historical’ events. But they are also, somehow, adult books. They do not bubble with the feeling that here are new worlds to be written about; they do not have that quick breath of creativity, that delighted sense of daring, that love, in fact, which infuses every sentence of the first four books that Nancy wrote after the war. They are readable, but they are not, like the others, infinitely readable; and this can only be because some spark in the author, some spellbinding glee in the discovery of what she was capable of doing, has been replaced by the knowledge of what she can do; and that it is her destiny – her sole destiny – to get on with it.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 40