Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  I can’t write any more. I must get back to crying my eyes out over my eyes. O I do hope I’ll hear from you tomorrow. I’ll send you the Wu story about morticians if it comes. I left it behind at the sanatorium but they’ll send it on.

  February 25th, 1948 [Chantilly]

  At last a letter from you. I’m not awfully happy, but I will be when I get the hang of things. Aunt Norah [Lindsay], already in a death coma, is going to make a miraculous recovery. Aunt Madeleine, her sister, has asked me to write an obituary for The Times. Louise is away, which makes a Paris without trees. The snow is thick but after two blizzard days the pale pink misted sun glints faintly on the ice and the green copper roofs and gilded horses5 – very beautiful. I pad around in unzipped snow boots and am forever losing one like Cinderella and not noticing it till too much later to recover it.6

  Rufus has with determination landed a certain Mrs. Tiarks, a smoking useless lady, on to Papa as a secretary. I’ve got to ease her out. She can’t do shorthand and hasn’t a typewriter. Also she gets my goat from the lackadaisical chain smoking. Susan Mary is having a baby7 and faints a good deal. The Embassy salon vert especially looks horrible – no piano, no screen to peep from and see if the going is good, nowhere to hide the gramophone, radio, broken games, etc.

  I’ve at last been into the flat over the lodge that we are going to have from the 1st April. It’s delightful – two bedrooms, two recep., kitchen and small room for you, very quiet, prettily panelled and corniced.

  February 27th. My knee after this reducing rest has pumpkinned up again. It hurt so much that I bound it round with a little damp Thermogene. It had the effect of vitriol – purple inflammation and almost unbearable pain of fire. I groaned all night and this morning it’s better, mais hélas, je suis grippée.8 100° temp. and aching badly and so much to do. O I do miss you so much.

  The fashions have cheered me up. Molyneux at last has thrown away all the pads and uglinesses I fought so long, and now it’s romantic and sob-stuffy and adventurous, but with my cyst I can’t get away with even a semblance of faded beauty.

  Eric threw a cocktail yesterday. I love seeing welcoming old friends. Norah Auric’s9 portrait of Eric is exceedingly embarrassing – a huge naked Adonis. He’s delighted.

  Paris

  April 1st, 1948

  So they rang Papa this morning and Odette10 said she wanted a part in his new film about Lafayette, and Papa fell and was very polite to the pretty voice until they said ‘Poisson d’Avril’,11 and she also pretended to be an American official warning Bill [Patten] that Susan Mary had been caught changing a lot of Argentine pesos and Bill fell too. So much for April 1st. I forgot the date and played no games and no one worried to fool me.

  Then, piling the car up with pig tubs, we went down to Chantilly, where I arrived in good spirits but was quickly dragged down by Felix the gardener, who told me nothing would ever grow and that I should have bought a property in Bretagne if I wanted ‘returns’. I said California yielded still higher crops. He said the garden was too humid. I said it wasn’t as humid as England, famed for its gardens. He said the motor mower was a toy and quite useless. I said he’d better go back to the hand one. He said the motor one saved time. I said in that case it fulfils its object. He said it had broken, and to demonstrate how wheeled it over all the big cobblestones of the stable yard, which treatment would have broken any machine. So it went on – and in the house the pipes from the loos stick out like Leviathan’s intestines. The one thing I mind, and the one thing they promised me would not be. So, down in the dumps we came home to find the Pattens and Odette, and now it’s April 2nd and I shall get up and go to the market and buy a piece of fish and a cheese for our weekend at Chantilly. I shall be thinking of you and hoping you are happy.

  April 3rd. After scribbling to you yesterday, the bell rang once or twice and as I could not jump up to answer it, I left it. Soon it stopped. A little later a nicely dressed young gentleman walked in saying ‘I am presenting myself as maître d’hôtel.’ He wore a Newmarket style of mackintosh, brand new and a loosely tied white scarf à la Noël Coward. His trousers were pressed to a razor’s edge and his boots shone like jet. He said he was thirty but he had been learning his trade for fifteen years. Grander and grander houses he mentioned as having employed him. I felt I was having a master and tyrant sold to me, and my resistance faded out. I could see the end would be my murder for the money he thinks I have but there was no resisting him – cook, valet, secretary and above all débrouillard and getting-order-out-of-chaoser. So I said would he go and be interviewed by Papa, whom I telephoned warning him of the magnetism of André, for such is his name. Of course he engaged him.

  The eccentrics12 have had a big go at the house and it looks cleaner and brighter and in much worse taste – all furniture is turned killy-corner and little mats have been dug out of the lingerie on tables and piano. Papa and I spent a couple of hours in the cellar laying the precious bottles in their niches. Teddy, who bought most of it, has surpassed himself in folly. There are dozens and dozens of cases of Neuilly Prat (it takes us ever so long to get through one bottle) and cases too of Cinzano which you will have to get outside somehow. In the evening we read Phineas Redux and did the crossword and I worked at my patches13 and the wind roared like a lion.

  April 4th. I had a useful day’s work, chiefly spent in the cellar stacking champagne. You’ve never seen such a reservoir. I went to Chantilly and bought a fireproof dish in order that George should try his untaught hand at a cottage pie. I bought the papers and stationery and a purple umbrella,14 and then we took a walk and made the full round of our property, which extends as far as the eye can see and is grey with couch grass. I was dressed in scarlet tartan trousers, mobled15 head, Rumpelstiltskin’s hat and alas sockless feet in Moroccan shoes. The nettles are abundant but I rose above the stinging, forgetting that once before I had thought the moment’s pain mattered little as I weeded with bare hands a whole bed at Bognor. Heavens, I paid for it in the night. Urticaria, for such I think it is called, has a retarded action and came into its flood of agony about 2 a.m. So the night was a brute. Papa read and I patched16 and then to bed at 10.30. O I went to see M. Descamps17 bearing gifts in gratitude – a bottle of gin only – but he was away from home and I’m to go this morning après la messe.18 On the way I saw a little old tramp or perhaps workman of sixtyish fall flat on his face in the mud. I stopped the car and Good Samaritaned him on to his feet. He was babbling of the Foreign Legion in which he had served the world over, and of his sporting prowess. Alas, as I saw him walk away, very narrowly missing a fast motor, I realised he was both drunk and incapable.

  Chantilly

  April ?, 1948

  Chantilly was looking most beautiful – cold as dawn but radiantly pure-skied. The graceful white swans19 have four if not five eggs in the accustomed place between the banks. The house progresses not. The library, having galloped ahead for a bit is now static, mouldings and shelves missing and one thin coat of lilac paint only; downstairs bathroom a shambles still and Papa’s future bedroom a scrap-heap. Water, boiling in every tap, was on – not boiled by mazout but by our precious coal as an essay. The mazout arrived in a tank during the weekend but has not been tried out. Papa and I lunched at the Tipperary20 – badly – and walked to St. Firmin, buying a couple of whiting for dinner, some paraffin oil for salad and other oddments. We walked through the great park and admired the miracle of spring.

  Next day Kitty and Frank Giles and a young All Souls man called Fisher, son of the Archbishop of Cantuar, came to lunch. Kitty cooked a fine dish of eggs and mushrooms and bacon and I produced a foie gras and Papa looked after the wine. We spend a lot of time laying bottles down in the two cellars (red and white). It all looks professionally laid and very impressive, but my opinion is that the brick and mortar shelves are not up to the weight, and we may have a disastrous collapse. The two young men were delightful – amusing, clever and agreeing with Papa. In the evening it’s crossword,21
patchwork and Phineas Redux.22

  Sunday I had a hideous talk with old Regnier. He was crosser than ever, says he must have 6,000 a month more and that he’d like to go but can’t find lodging, that the food I gave him poisoned his wife (she really had scarlet fever). I said that the milk in the tins that she took to be poison was drunk by us all exclusively at the Embassy. He said the servants picked out the bad boxes for his wife. There was talk about the unusability of the mower and the auto-culto, the advisability of an under-gardener being engaged and the aside that he was pretty certain to be useless too. Then there was a grievance that I had burnt all his dry firewood and not paid for it (the first time I’d heard of it) ad nauseam. He naturally doesn’t understand the least what I’m talking about when I tell him that I dread visiting my own garden, that my hope is abandoned when I enter it, that the weight of my spirit after talking to him overcomes my small courage and extinguishes what rays I could give out. I ought to say ‘Vous m’emmerdez’23 and threaten him with the sack, and then perhaps he’d perk up.

  This morning we all came up – a sofa strapped on the camionette and both cars bulging with lamps and crockery and rugs and fish kettles for the new flat. I’ve now got two D-days – one Wednesday next when I must be out of this sty and into the opposite one (Thursday I go to London) and the 10th of May for Chantilly when Princess Elizabeth goes to Paris and might come to us. I have invited her. On 25th I go to St. Paul’s, 27th Buckingham Palace (I told you that?), so I shan’t have so many days to accomplish the Herculean labour.

  Tuesday dawn. Papa’s gone – took the ferry last night leaving me frozen and frightened and generally Gummidgy,24 so I had an egg with Nancy Rodd and was in bed by 10.30, making lists and torturing myself. Now it’s 8.45 a.m. and the eccentrics haven’t arrived yet and I wanted to be earlier than usual to start the déménagement.25

  I must get up without coffee, that’s all.

  April 23rd, 1948

  London again

  To think this is my first writing since I saw you. It’s the fault, I fear, of Dr. Desmond McCarthy,26 sent to me by Bertram to cure me of my melancholia. This he has been successful in doing by the primitive method of keeping me heavily drugged at night and lightly drugged by day. He has also cured me of all fine feelings, conscience, unselfishness, love of fellow-men, repentance, humility and mercy. So with new exhumed energy I applied myself to Chantilly and put you out of my mind.

  The cure has also produced wild extravagance, so I sent for the very expensive paper shop to come to St. Firmin and more or less ordered the papering of the stairs, and of all the rooms of the flat as well. Louise was back from the south, still working like a furious beaver for Chanel without pay. We had an exhilaratingly rough crossing, coming back to England on the noble Invicta. The sea was green and crested with foam, the sun blazed on the white cliffs and, in spite of decks slippery with sick, spirits were gay.

  Next morning betimes we were off to St. Paul’s27 the sun always shining on the scant flags and happy, happy crowds. I wore a new New-Looker28 and picture hat to cover my cyst, and Papa, dressed to kill, got rattled at being frustrated by the traffic police. It ended well because we started late enough for every approach to be barred save the Royal Gate at Constitution Hill, through which we bowled as to the manner born and drove all the way to St. Paul’s by the processional route. The crowds were all one could wish, packed the whole way, smiling and cheering, all and everybody. Outside the cathedral the sun doubled the glory of the Heralds, half gold, and the Palace Band, all gold, and the old Gentlemen at Arms, and a (to me new) posse of City Pikemen. Superb – straight from Covent Garden’s Faust, yet real – with real steely armour in ribs on their torsos, lace collars on the armour, steel helmets brimming over with ostrich, and pikes three times their own height. I hated to leave the colour for the dark cathedral (where they left the Iron Duke), for after passing the Beefeaters in their legion we of course sat in places from which I saw nothing. The choir had no strength, neither had the organ unless supported by the military. When I say I saw nothing I saw that ape Queen Mary burning bright in green gold, and a suggestion of blue which I took to be the Queen and her Princesses. There was the usual hopeless get-away, lost cars, flustered owners. All the men wore very ill-fitting tail coats, the younger ones made do with their fathers’ and the older ones had shrunk or bulged into deforming theirs. George Gage29 looked for all the world like a particularly grubby Eton boy – unpressed, unbrushed, unshined.

  Dinner with Bertram and the Hoffs and Papa and after dinner off to the Palace for a spot of cheering. We didn’t have to wait long before they were all out on the balcony, but it’s too far away. They are such specks and the diamonds can’t glitter at that distance.

  69, Rue de Lille

  April 29th, 1948

  The ball at the Palace was a splendour. We dined at Ann Rothermere’s. She is big with child but not very big, and dressed in Jamaica muslin and fichu, looked like an attractive Creole. She should have had a pretty handkerchief tied round her black curls; instead she had a bit of a tiara. Betty Cranborne had a bit of a one too and Lady Eldon, ten foot high, had thought it wiser to tie a bolster round her hips and drape her dress over it, also to buy a 10/6d diamond crown, quite invisible at her height of head, at Harrods. The whole effect was deplorable, but she’s so nice it didn’t matter. Then there was that donkey Anthony Eden and monstrous good old Lady Rachel Davidson – ‘in waiting’ on the Duchess of Kent but rising above it. That was it, except for the very beautiful Duchess of Northumberland in a proper crown of diamonds that was torturing her forehead. I fixed her after dinner with strands of cotton that took the weight off.

  There was no end to the prinking and preening and mouthing and combing, powdering and painting for the King, and the gentlemen in the dining room still were doing the same titivating downstairs. Lord Salisbury had his Garter in the form of a dickey buttoned on to his waistcoat and in my opinion much too horizontal, almost cummerbund. Papa’s G.C.M.G. we had dressed him in, with book of directions to instruct, was said to be all wrong, so pins were found and he was redraped. He wore a Star too, and a fine show of medals and some blazing sapphire links – that day’s gift from John de Bendern (J. de B., has taken, with view to purchase, a huge house in Ireland with salmon, snipe and neighbours, a Georgian house and all honkey-donk). To return to the ball: I enjoyed it very much and stayed till three. Beautifully dressed in a new Molyneux pleated pink tulle, semi-covered by pleated chocolate tulle and trailing a long garland of faded pink roses, I looked as well as I can these days. An aigrette hid my cyst and I had a lot of beaux and admiration – Antony Head, the Sitwells, Admirals Cunningham and Vian, George Lansdowne and a bit with the King. Papa had a sit-down with the Queen and lots of lovely women, Daphne Bath etc. Mr. Aneurin Bevan30 came in a dirty lounge suit.

  Chantilly

  May Day, 1948

  Things go from bad to worse. The new cook stinks and André’s still a detrimental. I’ve never had domestic trouble before. Everybody else has it always, but I started with Wade and Holbrook who had both started me and Papa before we had a house. Belvoir and Arlington Street were of course run by housekeepers and stewards and ultimately Father. I don’t remember Noona ever giving the house a thought though she would think nothing of having two marble pillars, Forum size, sent by sea from Italy for the garden. Then came the war and there was still Wade to grouse but run it all. Then sweet Chinese lulled me in their competence and genius. Mrs. Kelly31 and Wade for a bout, then four years of a Controller and secretaries, now no help nowhere. Henriette the cook looks a slayer and must have been an ogre’s cook who likes raw food – fi-fo-fum not yum-yum.

  All day we’ve been unpacking books, not that the shelves are dry. We put them in order on the floor and having not left paths through their density we can’t walk to the back rows. All the books are buckled and wet and dog-eared and the damp has brought off the labels, and they smell and are foxed and torn and scratched, and naturally gaps in eve
ry set. I found Papa’s first editions of Jane Austen and Fielding to my surprise in the Neuilly halfway house, carefully packed and labelled by me in a Molyneux box. Where O where are the other boxes of first editions? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

  May 2nd. The Pattens came down to an uneatable lunch of doubtful fish, quite tasteless and garnished with giant grey potatoes. A foie gras helped and the pots-de-crème were swallowable just. The shame was unpleasant enough and rose to an unprecedented height when Bill went to the gents’ to find it blocked and choked and stinking and unusable. Susan Mary, very broody, lay on the sofa looking into a future of cradles and nannies, while Bill and Papa and I played a bit of gin [rummy]. I won all the time, ding-dong-dell of ringers, but Papa evened out my gains with his losses. Papa on the wagon for May – a spot of claret at dinner.