It was not edifying, this behaviour of Peter’s. Yet Nancy seems to have felt no rancour towards a man who had, on far too many occasions, caused her humiliation, suffering, the anguish of uncertainty. ‘He does more damage than a bomb’, she said, and meant it; but she also meant it when she said ‘old Prod is good at heart’. Remarkably, after such a bad marriage, she retained a kind of fondness for him. Perhaps the relationship had never contained the feelings that lead to hatred. ‘It may be necessary to have him certified’, wrote Waugh in 1954, when Peter was threatening to sue Ed Stanley (for what he saw as an offensive literary portrait) and Waugh (for his review of the book12 in which this was contained). ‘Do you mind particularly?’ To which Nancy replied: ‘No doubt Prod is a little bit mad, but that’s no reason to mock him & be unkind.’
Her husband had been unkind, however. Nancy had every reason to bear a grudge for his refusal to give her a divorce at the end of the war – an act of selfishness, or weakness, or malice, or all of the above, that had stifled Nancy’s enjoyment of her best years with Palewski. Yet it may have been that Peter, without wanting to, had done Nancy a favour by hanging around Rue Monsieur in the late 1940s. The fact of her marriage protected her against another fact: that, even if she had been free, Palewski would not have married her. Peter’s presence gave Nancy a beautiful cast-iron explanation for almost anything that went wrong with her lover. Had she and Palewski been able to do as they pleased, it would soon have become clear that what pleased him was not what pleased her. And this grim truth would have been hard to bear, lying like a shadow across her sunlit world.
Perhaps in some obscure way Nancy recognised this, and so did not blame Peter for clinging on: he was her alibi, in the Case of the Unwanted Englishwoman. Nor did she blame him for trying to make her feel guilty, even though his own infidelities had been many and careless. Being the sort of woman she was, Nancy always agonised a little over her marriage. ‘I feel very sad about Prod & of course remorse’, she wrote when he died in 1968. ‘But I couldn’t live with him.’
As might have been predicted Peter did not marry again. He continued to drift through his shiftless life, living in Rome after his yacht sank, ending up finally in Malta; humble, dependent upon hand-outs still, Sebastian Flyte at last. Nancy continued to feel a kind of sad responsibility for him. She sent him the odd cheque, and wrote to him up until the end; he died with one of her letters in his hand.
Her divorce had not been a trauma for Nancy; she was tougher than that (‘I was looking forward to my day in court’) and it had little real significance. But it represented a dismantling of the life she had known. So too did the death of her father, aged eighty, in March 1958.
At the end of the previous year she had paid an extended visit to England, and visited Lord Redesdale for the last time. ‘I loathe going there,’ she wrote to Besterman, ‘it fills me with nervous terror, but I must see my relations who are getting too old to come and see me here.’ So she made the journey to Northumberland and Redesdale Cottage, which ‘stands in the coldest valley in the north’.13
It was a depressing place, but it was the choice that Lord Redesdale had grimly made for himself, the life he had loved with such fierce, bewildered passion having ended with the outbreak of war. ‘It is sad’, wrote Nancy to Waugh, in reply to a letter of condolence on her father’s death, ‘but the odd, violent, attractive man he used to be had already gone except for an occasional flash. He was so weak & so very deaf...’ Two years later she brought him back to life in her last novel, Don’t Tell Alfred. It must have hurt to conjure Uncle Matthew again – ‘it went to my heart to see him now, stiff and slow in his movements’ – but Nancy was, yes, tough in some ways, and she knew that in a problematical book she could not leave out such a winner of a character (as he now was to her). Nonetheless the Uncle Matthew of Don’t Tell Alfred is a diminution of his earlier self. Not in any obvious way; although one has a faint sense that Nancy is basing him upon her own caricature, rather than his reality. But he is still tremendously funny, with his passion for cocktail parties (‘don’t you have them in Paris?’). He still has the life of ‘an old lion’, which her father had in fact given up without much of a fight. He is shown gamely going along with the youthful craze for music, so ridiculed in the book as a whole: ‘He’s not much to look at’, says Uncle Matthew, of the pop star with whom he has shared a ride to the British Embassy, ‘and his clothes would frighten the birds, but I’m bound to tell you he whacks merry hell out of that guitar. We had tunes all the way here.’ His vitality is compared with that of the young characters, and it measures up gloriously (‘I’ll go and sit down for a few minutes, then I’ll be ready for anything’).
So it is all there; but the context has changed so much – the life of Alconleigh is so long gone – that Uncle Matthew can only seem displaced and déraciné, using as he does every scrap of his resilience to recreate his own world, so solid yet so besieged, within London, Paris, places that are alien to him. ‘Such men... would not have been themselves had they not always been kings in their own little castles’, Fanny says to herself. ‘Their kind is vanishing as surely as the peasants, the horses and the avenues, to be replaced, like them, by something less picturesque, more utilitarian.’ Uncle Matthew is splendid still, but he is almost unbearably poignant, and all the more so when compared with the quenched reality of Lord Redesdale. Towards the end of Don’t Tell Alfred he takes his leave of the Embassy, of the book, of Nancy, in a brisk and wholly characteristic exchange: ‘“I shan’t come and disturb you in the morning, Fanny – I know you’ve never been much use before seven and I want to be off at half-past five. Many thanks...”
‘“Come again,” I said.’
But Uncle Matthew was gone.
The odd thing, perhaps, is that the loss of her mother in 1963 caused Nancy more pain. Not straightforward sadness, as with Lord Redesdale, but something more complex and intense. With her father, although they had seen each other infrequently since her move to France, she had the certain knowledge that there had been love between them, that despite the eccentric flourishes of their relationship it had been fond and warm; she also had the deep satisfaction of having captured this in print, and having given him the great gift of his mythical self. So there was no unfinished business, no residual guilt nor fury in Nancy; only sorrow for what David’s life had become, and that so big and vital a man should have ended, as she wrote to Jessica in America, as a box of ashes carried into Swinbrook church: ‘in the sort of parcel he used to bring back from London, rich thick brown paper & incredibly neat knots... Alas one’s life.’
With Lady Redesdale, however, the sense of unfinished business grew ever more pressing. The knowledge that her mother’s life had been desperate since the outbreak of war did not mitigate her dislike one jot. If anything, the sense that Sydney was entitled to sympathy made her all the more determined not to give it; it was a childlike reaction, and compelling evidence of the ‘chill’ that could blow through Nancy’s heart.
During the happy years of Rue Monsieur she did not give Sydney much real thought. She wrote funny, sharp letters, full of news and jokes. She felt sorry about Unity and the separation from Lord Redesdale, also when Sydney contracted Parkinson’s disease; but she was dealing with her mother at the delicious, bubbling remove that had liberated her into happiness and put her in a good temper for ten years, so it was easy to be nice.
Yet as the sparkling tide of her life began to recede, revealing the dark stony rocks beneath, so Nancy returned to the theme of ‘My Mother, the Ice Queen’. She channelled into the figure of Sydney a good deal of frustration. In 1962 the ‘Mothering the Mitfords’ essay was published in The Sunday Times, after which Sydney wrote to Nancy, saying: ‘It seemed when I read it that everything I had ever done for any of you had turned out wrong and badly, a terrible thought, and can’t be remedied now.’ Desperately sad; although within this is a delicate sense of someone fingering the guilt that Nancy was undoubtedly – and furiously �
� feeling. ‘Oh what a bad mother I have been, I’m so sorry, what can I do’ is a good line and not, one suspects, something that Sydney actually believed.
Most of the Mitfords took Sydney at her own valuation: the other girls did not share Nancy’s uncontrollable antipathy. But it is interesting that their father – whom Nancy resembled closely in some ways (more hot blooded than the rest?) – had also moved instinctively away from his wife. The Redesdales still corresponded and they saw each other occasionally, but that was all. It would surely have been better for David had he spent his last years with Sydney, certainly less horribly lonely if they had lived together after the death of Unity in 1948; yet he did not want it. He preferred instead that she should be on Inch Kenneth with her goats, and he in his icebox cottage with the safe stuffed full of firelighters, remote from each other and from life. Extraordinary, that these two glamorous, characterful people should have ended this way; and all the more so when one thinks of the sure, devoted, unchanging love between the Alconleighs in The Pursuit of Love, which has a timeless truth, and which in fact no longer existed at the time that Nancy wrote of it.
At the end, however, there was a kind of rapprochement. Sydney visited her husband at his bedside for his eightieth birthday, not long before he died, and according to Diana: ‘they seemed to have gone back twenty years to happy days before the tragedies. She sat with him for hours, Debo and I going in and out...’14 Perhaps David remembered the sombre, sensual girl whom he had worshipped, for whom he had bought a peach every Friday evening and with whom he had created this family, these Mitford girls, whose terrifying vitality had brought such quantities of tragedy, joy, shame, triumph.
For Sydney, her girls would bring her more pain before she died: not just Nancy’s essay but Jessica’s Hons and Rebels, published in 1960 and perpetuating to the point of extreme exaggeration the image, started by Nancy, of Sydney as a vague semi-nutter with Christian Scientist views on health. ‘Doubtless the author realises how “supremely unpleasant” she makes her family appear’, wrote Diana to the TLS, emphasising that the portraits of the Redesdales were ‘grotesque... meant to amuse, rather than to be “wise”, “loyal” or “truthful”.’ Nancy wrote to Jessica, praising the book but saying: ‘A slightly cold wind to the heart perhaps – you don’t seem very fond of anybody but I suppose the purpose is to make the Swinbrook world seem horrible, to explain why you ran away from it...’ Sydney would no doubt have smiled at the thought of Nancy accusing her sister of coldness. Yet the difference is there, albeit a subtle one: Jessica’s detachment was cheerful and considered, it was a rational act on her part to portray her family as Exhibit U in the Swinbrook museum. With Nancy, despite the control with which she wielded her icicle pen, coldness was not innate in her: it was her way of dealing with blazing emotion.
And she suffered for her mother when she arrived at Inch Kenneth in May 1963, along with all the sisters except Jessica, having been told that Sydney’s illness had moved into a critical stage. She was eighty-three; it was not unexpected; yet she fought it off, and in a way that aroused a helplessly characteristic reaction in Nancy. ‘Here it goes on & poor Muv is getting so fed up’, she wrote to Jessica. ‘She scolds us now for “dragging her back from the grave – what for?” But all we have done is give her a little water when she asks which isn’t exactly dragging...’
More gently, Nancy wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘Muv is failing – we are all here – it is very poignant... Two days ago she seemed to be going – she said perhaps, who knows, Tom & Bobo & said goodbye to everybody & said if there are things in my will you don’t like please alter it. I said but we should go to prison! & she laughed. (She laughs as she always has...)’ Eleven days later the prolonged scene – the beautiful middle-aged girls drifting around their mother’s bedroom, ‘half the time in tears & the other half shrieking’, their faces perhaps becoming indistinguishable to Sydney – came to an end. ‘We took my mother over the water to Mull on a marvellous evening, 8pm, with the bagpipes wailing away, it was very beautiful’, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh. It reads like a moment of healing, but it did not last. For the rest of her own life Nancy brooded and agonised over her relationship with Sydney, planning the autobiography that would tell all; a sad, silly thing for so clever and clear-eyed a woman to do, but if the life that she craved was to run its pure and sparkling course, then it needed, more and more, the dark wastegrounds on its banks.
Gaston Palewski had written to Nancy on Inch Kenneth, offering his sympathy (he had met Lady Redesdale – who knew of her daughter’s love for the Colonel – and had pronounced her enchantingly patrician when, at their first meal together in 1947, she picked out the truffles from her omelette and left them at the side of her plate). Nancy replied very sombrely. ‘I have a feeling nothing really nice will ever happen again in my life, things will just go from bad to worse, leading to old age & death.’
Her tone with him was different now. It was wary, as if a terrible hurt had been done to her; she had forgiven, just, but forgetting was utterly out of the question. And she had been hurt, to a degree that made the skirt-chasing behaviour of the post-war years look as harmless as a schoolboy’s hand in a biscuit barrel.
She had been right to intuit that the posting to Rome (her unluckiest city; one remembers her honeymoon) would change her relationship with Palewski for ever. What she had not imagined was what she heard in 1961, when she returned from a visit to the Colonel’s ‘pal-exquis’. The married Frenchwoman – Nancy’s near neighbour – with whom he had been having an affair had given birth to his son. The gossip was all over Paris. One hardly dares to think of how Nancy was told the news: at a party, over a glass of champagne? Gleefully? Pityingly? She must have known of this other woman’s existence, and would probably have found the thought of her just about bearable; she was used to it, after all. Whether she knew how seriously he took the affair is another story. Her one fear had always been that her lover would meet a woman who was not just an alternative to her, but all things to him. And although she had steeled herself – not least through telling the women in her novels how to cope with infidelity – it is one thing, in a love affair, to be prepared for what one expects. But the unexpected is another thing altogether; and this was a blow that had come out of nowhere.
A cruel blow, too, in the form that it took. Nothing could have hurt Nancy more than to learn that Gaston’s other lover was capable of doing what she was not: bearing a child. Of course she was hardly going to fall pregnant at fifty-six (oddly enough, it was at this age that she had, as she put it, ‘that utterly boring and pointless curse for the last time’15). But the wound of the hysterectomy – and of the miscarriages that had preceded it – would always remain open, and she no doubt tormented herself with the thought of how things might have been, had she been capable of conceiving at the start of her relationship with Palewski. These would not have been logical thoughts. For some time now Nancy had known that she would not marry the Colonel; in her more honest moments she may have recognised that such a marriage would not have been really happy, or even what she wanted. She also knew that children would, for her, have been a mixed blessing. She had known a great happiness that had nothing to do with such things, that had come to her not in spite of freedom, but because of it.
Nonetheless the thought of another woman having Palewski’s son would have touched a deep, raw place; it is a near-sickening notion, in fact; and the calmly pompous way in which Palewski wrote to Nancy about ‘le petit et gentil element nouveau’ in his life (ensuring that she accepted it with grace, else she would have been attacking the baby rather than his father) would only have probed the wound further. ‘Old age & death, what a prospect for us all’, she had written to Harold Acton in 1953 – ‘and we have no sons to soften them for us when our turn comes.’ The tone was lighter then; ten years on she would have felt her words more deeply, and envied Palewski this barely deserved gift from life.
He, meanwhile, was safely in Rome – perhaps just as we
ll for his future parental prospects – and blithely skating over the whole business. He had wanted a son, but he had no intention of marrying the child’s mother; indeed he was still willing to go on having and eating as much cake as possible. ‘La grande affection que je vous porte n’a en rien diminué’,16 he wrote to Nancy. She, however, knew that the child had changed things irrevocably; if only in the sense that Palewski was now tied in a way that he had never – most comfortingly for her – been before. ‘I wake up in the night & think of your new situation & I mind’, she wrote in 1962. One year on, the immovable facts – and the buried longings that they stirred up – had become no easier to bear.
The breach was supposed to be healed, all was now supposed to be what Nancy called ‘au mieux’ between them. Yet in 1962 a letter of Nancy’s makes clear that Gaston was indeed detaching himself, just as he had said he wouldn’t. Nancy wrote to him more coldly than she would ever have done in the old days, when he would bounce merrily into the Rue Monsieur and demand ‘What are the news?’ before sweeping her to bed, and testing to the full the ninety copper springs. Her 1962 letter concerned the fact that Palewski had accused her of speaking about him to a journalist. It was a mean thing to have said, impelled by casual disdain for her feelings, and in his more judicious mind he must have known that Nancy, a lady through and through, would never have done it. ‘I am most careful never to speak of you. If people say what does Gaston think I say he never talks politics with me & I hardly see him (too true).’ Then she goes on, and in a tone she had never used to him before: ‘I am all the same a respectable person.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 42