Pamela was then living in Switzerland, from where she would come to stay; again, the relationship between these two sisters had been difficult, and Pam had much to forgive; again, this was irrelevant. True to form, indeed reassuringly so, Nancy was still ‘not always very kind. Sometimes she was longing for her, and then after a bit she got bored. And Woman used to feel well, I’ve come all this way – I really felt sorry for them both. But she was awfully good, Woman was. Awfully good.’ When Nancy felt very ill it was Pamela’s pale, soothing presence that she craved.
Deborah, meanwhile, was in constant touch and Jessica made three visits. Her account of the last of these – in a letter to Debo – gives a sense of the fractious horror of pain, the way in which its power, that of a petty and pointless tyrant, can make sympathy hard to give:
Her eyes filled with tears & she said ‘everyone says there are masses of roses in the garden, why doesn’t anyone bring them up here?’ So I said I’ll dash and get some... So N. in cuttingest tones said, ‘I see your life doesn’t contain much art and grace’. Too true perhaps, but Hen! So I got lots more and put ’em round. Nancy: ‘I can’t think why you didn’t get them earlier, you’ve nothing else to do.’ In other words I think she’s rather taken against me...
To her husband, Jessica wrote: ‘As you know we’ve always been slightly arms-length in contrast with Nancy/Debo, Nancy/Diana or even Nancy/Woman, so it’s one of those things where, most likely, one can’t do anything right...’ It was probably true that Jessica would bring the least comfort to Nancy, and feel the least urgency to be with her. Yet Nancy’s pitiful snaps, as of a dying Pekinese, were only incidentally aimed at her sister. They were screams, pleas, fury aimed at the pain that pranced through her body with untiring steps, waving its armoury of knives and corkscrews, its fiendish energy gaining ever more strength from her suffering. Jessica was not the issue; nor were Nancy’s words to her. Of course a jibe like the ‘art and grace’ one was in character, but then Nancy was no saint and had never been one: she was simply learning how to die, as Madame de Pompadour had, ‘with a courage rare for either sex’.
But the pain ground her down; and it was not always attractive. ‘Since living – well, not actually living, co-existing – with Hassan’, she wrote to Raymond Mortimer, ‘my view of le tiers monde is greatly modified. He is a dear soul but the thought of giving him a vote makes me shriek.’ Five years earlier she would have resisted that kind of thing. If she had thought it she would also have thought her way past it; but now, with death clutching at her, she frankly could not be bothered to fight her prejudices. With such remarks she reverted to type, became the kind of person that she had dedicated her life to not being. Nor was it the sum of her opinion about Hassan, of whom she was in fact deeply fond (the last words she ever wrote, in a letter to Palewski, were ‘Hassan has been too wonderful’). But it was part of a pattern, the same pattern that was making her turn over in her mind the autobiography that she wanted to write and never would, that J’accuse letter directed at her mother.
She could rarely face her friends. Their concern was of course immense. No doubt they found it almost impossible to grasp that the seemingly ageless Nancy should, at the very height of her success, have been felled thus, stripped of her civilised accoutrements and reduced to the gowned anonymity of the hospital patient: it would have been one of those disasters that takes a long time to become real. Nancy herself would have been amazed, had she heard the news. Friends were desperate to help, although sometimes this desire irritated rather than comforted. ‘Cynthia [Gladwyn] is the limit’, she wrote to Heywood Hill in 1971 –
though all is so kindly meant. First she ordered me to drive to the other side of Paris, an hour at least each way, to see a faith healer. As the smallest movement hurts you may imagine what this would have done to me. I wriggled out of that whereupon I get a perfectly raving letter from an RC priest in London (medal enclosed)25 saying that C had begged him to do what he could for me... Meanwhile the Almighty, thinking no doubt that all this was going too far, decided to give me a booster & I had some appalling days...
Yet when she felt relatively well, or hopeful, she would still try to see friends. Back in 1970 she had gone to Venice for the last time – Diana saw her off in a wheelchair – and she even spoke of buying a flat there, which implies faith in a cure. Those who saw her seem to have known better: Harold Acton wrote that ‘when she moved one pretended to look in another direction’, and John Julius Norwich saw her ‘lying on a sofa, looking like death. And I only talked to her for five minutes, and I got the feeling that that was actually enough.’ This was what she could not bear; failing to relish her social obligations had always destroyed the point of them and, as she would later write to Raymond Mortimer, ‘I’m not one of those heroes (do they really exist?) who can be in agony without letting anybody see it, I’ve had to stop people from coming here it’s too depressing.’
But this – as she must have known – was because exile to Versailles had brought so much of her familiar life to an end. ‘People would ring up and say could they come,’ says Diana, ‘and she always said no. And she loved company really, and I used to say don’t say no, let them come, and she’d say I can’t. They’ll come all this way, and then I might have to say they must go away again, I’m in too much pain. Well, it was very thoughtful, but it was really rather a mistake. If it had been Rue Monsieur they’d have looked in the yard, and if someone had said go away they’d have gone away again.’
Gaston Palewski, however, visited several times a week. This required an answering effort from Nancy, but one imagines that she would have had it no other way. ‘I used to think I wish he’d come,’ says Diana, ‘and then I’d almost wish he hadn’t, do you know what I mean? He tired her quite, because she’d always try to think of things to amuse him, you know. It was quite a drama really.’ Although it should not be, illness is a humiliation: a solitary business in a sense, especially to a woman as proud as Nancy. No doubt she was still, in her extremis, worrying about whether the Colonel was worried about her, or whether the sight of her agony was causing him pain. Nevertheless his presence was saying something essential, that her love for him had had significance. He was not merely impelled by guilt, although there may have been a bit of that. Nor was he a saint: at the last lunch party she ever gave, in 1972, when he would have known the importance to her of his presence, he was still making Nancy anxious in the familiar old way – ‘Col in a hurry was annoyed by the delays’, she wrote – because the food was taking too long in coming.
Yet his great fondness for her was real and solid, as his love had never been: as undeniable now to Nancy as her physical torments. ‘Il n’y a pas d’amour, il n’y a que des preuves d’amour’:26 it was true of affection also, and the proofs were there, day upon day, in the quiet sound of his little spaniel padding about the house, in the feel of his eyes fixed upon her, sparkling and compassionate, in the practised touch of his hand. ‘For a few days the King hardly left her room’, Nancy had written when she described the death of Madame de Pompadour at Versailles: this, too, had acquired a kind of reality.
Towards the very end there was a further proof, when Palewski helped to get Nancy the Légion d’Honneur that she had longed for. It was awarded in 1972 (the CBE followed soon after). ‘...you may imagine’, she wrote to James Lees-Milne, who had sent congratulations, ‘that I am delighted to have been given the only honour I have ever coveted.’
In April 1972 Gaston Palewski came to the ugly white house at Versailles to make Nancy a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. She could barely walk that day, but Diana helped her down the stairs – a child could have carried her – and she stood while the love of her old life pinned the decoration to her dress. The tears poured down her face. It would have been a fitting end to the story; but Nancy still had a year to live, and although it would be filled with horror and agony, moments of ‘a pain like the end of the world’, she did not yet want to die.
‘Various joke
s keep one going’, Nancy wrote to Jessica in August 1972. They were not necessarily funny; ‘unsuccoured’, as Diana puts it; but the belief in them remained essential. For instance, at Nancy’s final lunch party at Rue d’Artois, Cyril Connolly had done ‘that thing I call rude of, as if one’s entrée were sure to be uneatable, bringing plover’s eggs from Hediard. They were raw.’ She was furious, and to Anthony Powell she wrote: ‘I shall never ask him here again.’ But when she returned to her almost-vanished self she said that she would laugh for the rest of her life at the image of Cyril’s plump, sad, voluptuary’s face covered with exploded yolk.
By 1972 she knew at last what was wrong with her; although she must have already guessed that it was cancer. ‘These boys alone diagnosed what I have got’, she wrote to Palewski from the Nuffield Hospital in London, where she had previously had an agonising and ultimately useless operation to relieve a fused vertebra. To learn that she had Hodgkin’s disease was, one would think, like hearing a death sentence confirmed. Yet Nancy was still waiting for the warder to bring the reprieve: her extraordinary life force flared again, and she turned the deadly certainty of her diagnosis into a reason for optimism. If they finally knew what it was, then they could surely get on and do something about it? ‘I’m quite quite sure now they will cure me & you know how sceptical I had become.’
When she returned to France, however, she wrote a letter to one of her doctors that took a different tone: ‘From a medical point of view I must point out that I’ve been twice to London now in the hopes of being cured of a vile pain which for 41/2 years has made my life unbearable. It still does... That is why I ask if in your view & that of Dr Hanham I’ve got it for life? I’ve never been so bad or at least worse...’
Still she fought, however. She wrote letters to friends, her writing looking shrunken and childish on the page. Books were her salvation; she clung to the words as if they were lighting the way to sanity, devoured Trollope and Isherwood and Gibbon (who ‘fills the gaps’): ‘How glad I am not to be one of those kids who can’t read.’ She had, by now, a nurse ‘of the lowest class’, as she told Raymond Mortimer: ‘I feel like a refined Prussian officer who has been picked up on the battlefield.’ The nurse cost £10 a day – unbelievably, Nancy continued to fret about money – but had become an absolute necessity. She now needed someone to help her eat the little pieces of cheese, prepared by Hassan, that had become her sole sustenance; she could not wash herself, and she required daily injections of morphine: the needles themselves were agony, so close was she now to the bone. She also took vast quantities of painkillers smuggled in from England (French doctors, ‘shockingly behindhand in matters of pain control’,27 would not give unlimited supplies): a final, precious service from her friends. The nurse helped with the pain but in other ways she was, according to Nancy at least, a ‘horrid old Gamp’, who would give ‘two sharp blows with the brushes’ if asked to brush her hair: ‘the bed-pan is an all-in wrestling match at which I am, screaming with pain, the loser & as for washing, one is the kitchen floor’, she wrote to Cynthia Gladwyn: her phrases still sang with Mitfordian life as her body shrivelled into nothingness. In the night, she told James Lees-Milne, ‘I long for Blor or Marie.’
Her last, supreme act of courage was to see death as the greatest joke of all: like her friends in the tumbrils, to defy and accept it with roars of laughter. ‘It’s very curious, dying, & would have many a drôle amusing & charming side were it not for the pain wh the drs try in vain to control’, she wrote to Lees-Milne in May 1973. ‘Debo was here for some days – the PRESENCE is so delightful. We had screams over the Will & the Dame [Alvilde]’s share. “But she’ll be furious if she only gets that”.’ And maybe, yes, one does hear the shrieks in the bedroom at Rue d’Artois, as if it were the chilly top floor at Asthall, outside whose windows lay a patiently waiting churchyard.
By June, the pain had won its battle with Nancy. There was nothing of her left, no body, no consolation. ‘Je veux me dépêcher,’ Jessica heard her whisper into the ear of her doctor. ‘Je souffre comme je n’avais pas imaginé’, she wrote to Gaston Palewski, in her last letter. ‘Je pense et j’espère mourir... Vous ne savez pas.’ Then a faint but familiar note sounded, from the blissful anguished days of Rue Monsieur: ‘My telephone doesn’t seem to work or else you don’t hear & that upsets me so I hate being telephoned to. The pain is so bad I can’t think of organising things & can hardly write at all, & if you don’t hear the telephone it makes things so difficult...’
Elusive as ever, the Colonel; yet throughout his life he retained the felicitous touch of the homme à femmes, and three weeks after receiving this letter, on the morning of 30 June 1973, he had what he later called ‘a premonition that I must see her’.28 So he drove to the faded white house once more, inside which lay a barely conscious Nancy, and ran up the stairs to her bedroom. (‘Oh! Fabrice – on vous attend si longtemps.’ ‘Comme c’est gentil.’) It may have been that she heard the bark of Palewski’s spaniel, but it seems that Nancy smiled when he took her hand. (‘She lay back, and all was light and warmth.’)
A few hours later Nancy died. ‘That was’, said the Colonel, ‘our last meeting.’
‘You will be a wonderful old lady’, Linda is told in The Pursuit of Love. But Linda dies. She is not the sort of person who dies; like her creator she had in her an infinite supply of life, of hope, of joy; but Nancy, too, was struck by the same casual irony. She too would have been a wonderful old lady. And the way her life ended is hard to contemplate.
She was cremated at Père-Lachaise, so she did in a sense fulfil her desire to rest, like Napoleon, ‘parmi ce peuple que j’ai si bien aimé’. Then she was brought to her other home, at Swinbrook, where her ashes were buried next to her sister Unity. The funeral was held on 9 July, on a beautiful day, ‘sunny with clouds which rendered the Windrush landscape blue’, as James Lees-Milne wrote in his diaries. The beau monde, much of it now worn and tired, made its way up the tiny flight of steep steps that take one from the country road to the churchyard, streamed past the graves of Lord and Lady Redesdale, and crowded into the little church in the calm, quiet, beating heart of England. There, in front of the assembled configuration of drooping black hats and sombre faces, of Diana, Deborah and Pamela with their heads swathed in tight black scarves, of the ghosts of Tom and Unity and Nancy’s many dead friends, ‘raised on a small blue velvet covering’, was a ‘tiny, common little wooden box, one foot by one foot, containing all that is left of Nance.’
But the Swinbrook grave does not contain Nancy. It holds the still, silent part of her. Her voice spills out and over it, light and sparkling as the Windrush on a sunlit day, flowing away from the stone mole on the tomb; into the glittering world of another reality.
~
We hope you enjoyed this book.
Laura Thompson’s next book, The Mitford Sisters, is coming in Winter 2015
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~
Laura Thompson
Also by Laura Thompson
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Preview
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On 7 November 1974, a nanny named Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement. A second woman, Veronica, Countess of Lucan, was also attacked. The man named in a coroner’s court as the perpetrator of these crimes, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared in the early hours of the following morning. The case, solved in the eyes of the law, has retained its fascination ever since.
Laura Thompson, acclaimed biographer of Agatha Christie, narrates the story that led up to that cataclysmic event, and draws on her considerable forensic skills to re-examine the poss
ible truths behind one of postwar Britain’s most notorious murders. A Different Class of Murder is a portrait of an era, of an extraordinary cast of characters, of a mystery, of a modern myth. Part social history, part detective story, it tells in masterly style one of the great tales of our collective living memory
INTRODUCTION
A Brief History of Murder, According to Social Class
‘Anything a Wimsey does is right and Heaven help the person who gets in his way.’
DOROTHY L. SAYERS, Strong Poison, 1930
PART I
The Lucan Myth
‘I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh – Very smooth he looked, yet grim…’
SHELLEY, The Mask of Anarchy, 1819
The famous murders all become myths, and that myth is not necessarily a distillation of truth. It is, more precisely, a distillation of our perceptions. It has a different kind of truth, symbolic rather than factual.
The myth of the Lucan case is a parable about class: a tale of aristocratic hubris. Every element in the story has been seen through that prism. The myth contains some truth, of course, but it is not the whole truth. Indeed it is not above telling lies. This book will go on to tell a different story, because the myth can’t be allowed to have things all its own way. Nevertheless there is nothing to be done with it. You can’t kill a myth. It is the way that a story settles, and however much you shake it up it will always fall back into position. It is the favoured version, the one that people have decided upon.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 47