I can see us now. We were sitting at the Temple, out of doors, it was a lovely evening and – telephone. And it was the surgeon. And he said: ‘I’m afraid it was cancer’. ‘Oh’. He said, ‘she might live two months, or it might be three, but it’s gone up into her liver, and although I took the tumour out there are sort of little bits in the liver, and I took as much liver as I could away but I had to leave some.’
So I went back to Kit and Debo, and we began to cry. I think we cried for about three days. And we kept going to see Nancy and pretending we were cheerful, and she was saying ‘I’m terribly well! The pain has quite gone!’, and all that. And we had been told two or three months.
Neither Diana nor Deborah was willing to say this to Nancy; although Jessica (who visited France that summer), schooled in the American way of Total Honesty, thought they were wrong: ‘She said we ought to have told her,’ says Diana. ‘But you see she was really a nervous person, I think it would have been an awful mistake myself.’ Of course this was true. Above all Nancy required her illusions. Had she been waiting for the hangman she would have sought to believe in an eleventh-hour reprieve; this was not much different.
It created a problem, however. In the scheme of things it seemed unimportant, yet Diana understood that it was anything but. After her operation Nancy had restarted work on Frederick the Great, but in a desultory way: ‘N says she has got on so well with the book that there is absolutely no hurry’, Diana wrote to Debo. ‘This kills one with guilt, in case finally she reproaches & says I could have gone quicker & finished if I’d known. So I have got a plot to ask the man they all like at Rainbird to ask her as a great favour to let them have it sooner – telling him why.’ Thus it was that Nancy wrote to her friend Joy Law (who had done the Rainbird picture research for The Sun King), saying that she really had to get cracking with Frederick: ‘it seems Hamilton have got a poor list for ’71.’
As it happened, Jessica was proved wrong, as was the surgeon, for in fact the operation upon Nancy’s cancer was completely successful. She did not have two or three months to live. And she managed – as she would surely not have done, had she expected to die at any moment – to visit Germany (with Pam and the Laws) in October 1969 and collect material for her book. She finished soon afterwards.
She suffered pain throughout 1969, sometimes very badly, as in June when she said ‘I’ve had to chuck Venice.’ Then in July she was ‘better every day – no more bed at all in fact, it is made, with its cover... went to the hairdresser and walked there and back (only 100 yards, but still).’18 And in August she wrote:
I’m really cured though I get sort of growing pains which are nasty but bearable. The lump which they carved out (benign like Bossuet) had nothing to do with the back, it was just an extra treat discovered by some busybody while examining me...
Frederick whizzes. I sit in the garden scribbling, without specs on account of the brilliant light...19
As Harold Acton wrote, ‘her obsession with Frederick was almost analgesic’: the sheer massiveness of the subject kept her going. There is something almost perversely courageous about a woman who writes the most difficult book of her life when her life became most difficult. Even if she did feel a little better by late 1969, believed herself essentially cured, it was still a defiant act of will to go plodding round East Germany and Potsdam in order to recreate Frederick’s Prussian campaigns. Most people would have given it a miss, stayed in bed with E.F. Benson, written a biography of Mistinguett instead. Nancy’s desire to push on with this serious work suggests a complex inner bargain: if she resisted the temptation not to write the book, she need not acknowledge the terrible thing that might stop her. Also there was something liberating in the work. ‘I suppose a cavalry charge must be the nearest thing to heaven on this earth’, she wrote to Raymond Mortimer. Nancy had a thick vein of steel that had little to do with her French love of prettiness and politesse, that was robust, austere, almost masculine. It was this unexpected side to her character that led her to write a long essay on Captain Scott, ‘A Bad Time’, published in her collection The Water Beetle, which with old-fashioned schoolboy respect told of male camaraderie, courage half-embarrassed by its own nobility, excruciating physical hardships. And then, in Frederick the Great, the battle strategies of the Seven Years War are analysed with an eye so cool, so impersonal, so truly interested that one would never imagine it could delight itself with Dior and Fragonard (‘my favourite painter, the pink bottoms I think are what one can’t resist’20). Writing about Frederick freed Nancy’s imagination in a way that things closer to home might not have done at this time: ‘I would like to be a pretty young General and gallop over Europe with Frederick the Great & never have another ache or pain...’.21
And although it is probably just another coincidence, when Nancy finished writing the pain almost instantly returned: ‘lancinating, ghoulish’, as Acton puts it. ‘She would just sit up in bed and cry with it’, says Deborah, to whom Nancy wrote in January 1970:
Pain killers. If one has a perpetual pain this is what happens. They kill it. They also give you a headache, make you stupid & stop you going to the loo. Then after about 4 hours the pain comes back & as well you have got a headache & can’t go to the loo & feel like death as well as having the pain...
If I weren’t afraid of it not working & permanently ruining my brain what there is of it I would have tried to take an overdose of something ages ago because I would much much sooner be dead than have this awful pain all the time.
One wonders if it would have been better had Nancy only had three months to live after her operation. Not that she would have agreed. There was Frederick, for one thing, and anyway she had not lost her hope of being cured. Indeed she was planning her next book, a life of Clemenceau: ‘He’s everything I like – a man of action + intellectual + joker + plenty of documentation (oh yes indeed!)’ she told Raymond Mortimer. But in April the illness exerted its iron grip again. She was in the Hôpital Rothschild in Paris:
cast on my book, no pillow, unable to write & almost unable to read, with, as fellow, the wife of a vigneron from Champagne (and I don’t mean Odette Pol-Roger!) She refused a chink of window & indeed had to have heavy linoleum curtains drawn over it & DID all night, into a pot between our beds never emptied or covered! Oh Raymond!... Colonel came unexpectedly & found them wheeling me back & was so appalled that he told Diana she must get me out...
The problem, as Diana says, was that ‘they never properly diagnosed her’. Or perhaps this was not such a bad thing? At least not knowing left Nancy with hope (‘You may say I long for death well yes, but I long even more to be cured’22). At the Rothschild hospital Diana was told that cancer would show up in the tests; ‘so when she’d done her awful ten days or whatever it was, Kit and I went to see the head doctor and I said, have you found anything in your microscope? He said: il y a rien de méchant. So how can you square that? I used to say to a great friend of mine, it must be cancer – and he’d say, of course it must. But they couldn’t find it!
‘And the old GP at Chatsworth said to Debo, you know, if she’d been an old poor woman and just had one doctor, she’d probably have been a lot better looked after.’ In fact Nancy saw thirty-seven doctors, between the time of her first illness and her death four and a half years later. ‘She was kept going from pillar to post. Kit would say oh, she must go to London, they’re so clever there – and then the London ones were hopeless – you know, it was really awful. I’m sure we didn’t do very well. But we did whatever seemed right at the moment.’
In a way, Nancy knew it all already. In The Sun King she had displayed an absolute contempt for doctors and their inability to diagnose, cure or save: Fagon, the court doctor, she called the ‘killer of princes’. She also wrote:
It is not a very reassuring reflection that in another two hundred and fifty years present day doctors may seem to our descendants as barbarous as Fagon and his colleagues seem to us. The fashionable doctors... stood then as they do now,
in admiration of their own science. As now, they talked as if illness and death were mastered... In those days, terrifying in black robes and bonnets, they bled the patient; now, terrifying in white robes and masks, they pump blood into him. The result is the same: the strong live; the weak, after much suffering and expense, both of spirit and of money, die.
The self-possessed clarity of this passage is almost unbearable; all too soon Nancy herself would be at the mercy of these purveyors of ‘one worthless formula and another’, these thirty-seven men who would take their tests and eventually work out that she was suffering from Hodgkin’s disease, or cancer of the lymph glands, said to cause one of the worst two or three pains known to man.23 Her scepticism about the medical profession, which pervades The Sun King like the stench of disinfectant, was prescient. So too was her description of Louis XIV’s own ending. ‘His death was long and dreadful and conducted, like his life, with perfect self-control.’
For Nancy’s bravery did not falter: the brightness that she had looked for at Versailles had been snuffed, but she continued to flicker with a trembling, determined vitality as the pain ripped through her. ‘I’ve always felt the great importance of getting into the right set at once on arrival in Heaven’, she wrote to Raymond Mortimer in October 1970. ‘I used to think the Holland House lot would suit me – now I’m not so sure... The thing is, one must be careful in a new place not to get into uncongenial company. Let’s make for the same objective – what do you think?’ Although Evelyn Waugh wouldn’t have thought much of it, Nancy did have a religious sensibility; it bore no relation to any recognised creed, but was connected to her belief that people should strive, and be allowed, to be as happy as possible, and should strive to allow others the same happiness. That a religion might make demands against happiness she found absurd; contrary to God’s intention. She saw through the hysterical sacrifices made by Julia in Brideshead Revisited (‘the God I believe in... likes people to be happy’, Nancy wrote to Waugh) and by Sarah, in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, who renounces her lover having promised God that she will do so if he survives a bomb blast. ‘The only thing I couldn’t swallow was that she could give up her lover like that... without having something to put in his place. I know that subconsciously she had something but I don’t feel that that’s enough...’ Nancy wrote to Waugh. ‘The fact that you can write of G. Greene’s heroine that “subconsciously she had something” is evidence of worse than defective education.’ But Nancy had no time for what she saw as grandiosity. Happiness was too precious a thing to be hurled into an ideal, a concept, that would simply eat it up to no good purpose: that, to her, was an act of immorality.
Her life, from 1970 until she died more than three years later, was something close to torture. Its comfortlessness is almost beyond imagining – this wrecked woman lying desperately on the bed in her strange house, so remote somehow from the life that might have brought consolation; her poor skeleton of a body – she weighed around six stone – shaken by tumultuous earthquakes of pain that she was barely able to contain; her head fogged with drugs but fighting for a lucidity that nonetheless brought terror and loneliness, or a frank disbelief that this could now be her life, or thoughts of the Colonel making love to Violette, or memories of the smiles of dead friends, or images of a past life in which Tom and Unity ran lively as puppies and her father cracked his stock-whips outside the windows at Asthall – it was beyond endurance, and yet Nancy endured it, and sought with all she had left in her for joy and jokes, in which she still believed. Even then she would not have exchanged this torture for the two or three months of life that had been assigned to her in 1969. ‘Odd as it may seem I get a lot of happiness,’ she said. This was her religion: it had a reality, a concreteness, above all an effect upon those who saw it, that went way beyond dramatic abstract gestures.
‘Do go on praying’, she wrote to her friend Tom Driberg – ‘I will let you know what happens’. But, she continued, ‘I used to believe so unshakeably in God but I can’t any more – or at least... I feel, like Frederick the Great, that He takes no notice of individuals.’ In truth her faith had always been elsewhere: in the possibilities of life itself, in its irreducible gift. And now comfort would be found in the same place as ever: in Nancy herself, in the philosophy that she was called upon now, as never before, to try to live. Two Parisian friends had once taken her to jovial task, because she always described them as ‘shrieking’ over some joke or other. ‘If we were being taken off in a tumbril you would say we were roaring with laughter –!’ said her friends. ‘Well you probably would be’, was Nancy’s reply. ‘There is always something to laugh at.’
But Nancy’s comfort lay also in illusions: ‘he who has lost them is seldom happy’, she had quoted in Voltaire in Love. She had faith, still, in her recovery. She would have found it as hard as anyone to believe that this was happening to her, that her life would never again be more than this dark square of racking pain, that the only respite would be death; she would not, in fact, have believed it, and her letters trace a desperate graph that pushes, over and over, up towards hope. ‘Very much better’, she wrote to Jessica in April 1971, ‘cured by an Honest Injun after nameless useless horrors had been perpetrated by the Faculty here. I had: a lumbar puncture AGONY, a major operation AGONY, deep rays SICK & FAINT for a fortnight... Anyway I feel much better.’ This complicated rigmarole of treatments, by the Fagons of a London hospital, cost around £3,000. It was reported in the Evening Standard that Nancy had been ‘laid up for the last two years with a bad back’, news that produced vast quantities of get-well letters. Six weeks later the pain was as bad as ever before: ‘I don’t think agony is too strong’, she told Raymond Mortimer. ‘So I read & read as you may imagine...
‘Oh Raymond what is to become of me? Colonel says Cécile de R[othschild] pique une depression nerveuse. I say give her a pain in her leg for a week & she’ll soon snap out of that. Never has the world seemed more beautiful & agreeable to me than it does now...’
She took pleasure, still, in the world outside her window: her champ-fleuri garden full of animals and birdsong, in whose beauty she longed to believe, else why was she not still in Paris? Yet this was one of the most pitiable illusions of all. Nancy’s dream had been of a cultivated wilderness. She had a horror of the kind of ‘lady water-colourist’s heaven’ described in The Pursuit of Love and, says Diana, ‘she despised the idea of a lawn. But of course it became a disaster. So sad looking!’ Nancy’s garden became ‘an unkempt jungle’24. Any hint of cultivation was smothered beneath tussocks of grass with hay growing out of them; purple cabbage heads poked through the undergrowth. From the bedroom window, however, the garden could be the colour-dotted tangle of Nancy’s dreams. As Linda had done from her flat high over Paris, she could watch as ‘the skeleton tree-tops began to fill out, they acquired a pinkish tinge, which gradually changed to golden-green’. She could hear the birds. She became absorbed in the activities of some blue tits, ‘all in a perpetual rage like an English family on holiday’, and nursed a blackbird with a torn wing for two days. ‘Fearful drama going on about the blackbirds’ nest which has been half blown down while two vile cats sit gazing at it... There are still only eggs so it will be a fortnight before the birdies fly’, she wrote to Alvilde Lees-Milne. ‘I wish you could see the garden now there is this explosion of roses, really wonderful because of the mixture of colours, one forgets how divine it is...’
A few days later she wrote again, to tell Alvilde that ‘Hassan put his curly head among the roses and announced three half-fledged babies but I dread the day when they fly.’ Hassan, a sweet-natured Moroccan boy, had replaced Nancy’s beloved Marie, one of the great friends of her life rather than a servant, who stayed with her until 1969. She was then in her seventies, and Nancy wrote that she ‘is so affected seeing me like this that it makes her ill, so I’m sending her home to prendre sa retraite.’ Hassan was a good cook – not that this was much use to Nancy by then – and sought constant small ple
asures for his employer: ‘he found one of my hedgehogs & brought it in & so on – you know, the sort of person one can do with.’ Yet for all his kindness, he was no efficient Normandy housewife; and one has to think that Nancy’s sufferings would have been eased by Marie’s bustling presence. Her rigorous standards would have imparted a bright cheerfulness, reminding Nancy of a life that was not merely an unpunctuated scream of misery but had its small, sane, civilised routines. As it was, with these props removed, Rue d’Artois became something of a lost house, pervaded by a slow and creeping squalor. ‘Hassan had no idea of how to clean anything,’ says Diana. ‘Nancy had a big bedroom and a big bathroom which was lovely. But the other bath – I think it was poor Woman [Pam] who found out – it was grey, the whole thing. Nobody knows how dirty that house was, it used to worry Woman terribly.’ This was the responsibility of the femme de ménage, Madame Guimant – ‘this scrappy lot of servants costs me £3,000 a year’ – who from Diana’s account was a poor replacement for Marie; nonetheless Nancy left her ‘quite a lot of money’.
But Hassan (‘My good Moor’) did at least care about Nancy, and this was her comfort, sometimes useless, always essential: that there were people who cared. Her sisters had become rocks. The unsentimental Mitford bond was unbreakable as ever. Diana drove to Versailles constantly. Her relationship with Nancy had not always been easy: her husband had never liked her; the differences between them were more than evident, even though Diana did not at this time know of Nancy’s great betrayal during the war; but all that was irrelevant, their closeness was a transcendent thing, and so Diana visited almost every day. ‘I used to stand outside the front door and think, what am I going to find? Sometimes agony, and sometimes very high spirits, you know [which may on occasion have been due to the brandy that Nancy – never a drinker – would take to dull the pain]. But she longed for One, and she longed for Pam.’
Life in a Cold Climate Page 46