In June Nancy returned to the shop with her book finished. It was summer, the war was over, restrictions were being relaxed and friends starting to return from overseas. Peter was back, happily organising German prisoners, and Mark had been released from his prison-camp. Nancy wrote to Muv, ‘He looks like a horror photograph, his knees are enormous lumps & his arms like sticks, but alive & well & immensely cheerful. He says in prison they dreamed of nothing but food & his dream was – do you remember that layer-cake with jam you used to have? well that! Isn’t it too funny. I’d quite forgotten it but of course it used to be a feature of our lives. He has been in 13 prisons.’ For the first time since the beginning of the war Nancy had a little money of her own – Hamish Hamilton had given her an advance of £250 (‘which I call enormous’) and she was longing for some new clothes. Good clothes were a necessity, almost a matter of health, and Nancy had suffered more than most from the make-do-and-mend policy of the Duration. Mme Massigli, the newly-arrived French ambassadress, was a source of great torment on this count. Mme Massigli’s clothes, she told Diana, ‘make one feel Cinderella in the cinders … She comes into the shop & I can’t sleep on account of her clothes, wondering how mine could be made over but of course they couldn’t It is a different shape altogether. I really stayed awake all one night, it simply bothers me – I hadn’t realized how utterly dowdy we all are, & of course my Worth suit, which has just arrived is no pleasure at all now! What a horrible bore!’
With all this going on, and the general atmosphere of change and excitement in the air, the job at the shop seemed more than ever arduous: it tired and bored her, and she had worked herself up to a strong feeling of resentment against the Hills. It was the Hills whom she made into the target for her unhappiness and frustration, complaining that they were mean and drove her too hard. But Heywood and Anne were not mercenary; it was just that in business matters they were naive and impractical, barely managing to keep their own heads above water. Nancy worked hard, but so did they; her salary was small, but Anne Hill’s was smaller. The truth was that Nancy longed to be away: she was pining for Paris and the Colonel.
The Colonel had returned to Paris in August 1944, walking by the General’s side on the famous progress down the Champs-Elysées. He was beside himself with happiness, home at last in the centre of the civilised world: ‘Paris est admirablement beau. Les fumées des usines ont disparu. Le ciel est ravissant.’ And then, ‘Quand venez-vous à Paris?’ If only she could! But although Colonel was liberal in his invitations, he did not seem prepared to make any practical suggestions. While the war continued he knew very well there was no more possibility of Nancy coming to Paris than there had been of her joining him in Algeria. He was delighted to continue their correspondence; he was more than grateful for the presents she showered on him: ‘Après les lettres, le café. Après le café, le jersey … J’ai jauni de plaisir en voyant les oeufs en poudres.’ But if ever it began to look as if Nancy might after all be able to come, his genial offers of hospitality turned cold: he would try and find her a room in a hotel but there could be no question of her staying with him: ‘Vous connaissez notre froide respectabilité’; he would of course be pleased to see her, but she must understand that he was a very busy man, concerned with ‘le poids écrasant de mes occupations, dont vous ne semblez pas apprécier le caracte tout sérieux’.
But with the coming of peace, it suddenly began to look possible. Farve, for once sympathetic to Nancy’s state of penury and her wish to do more with her life than work as a sales assistant, gave her £3,000 with which to buy a partnership in the shop, the idea being that she should concentrate on building up a strong line in French literature, giving her the excuse of going over, often, to Paris. Heywood approved the project, a licence was obtained from the Board of Trade, an exit permit from the Foreign Office, and by August in soaring spirits she was making ready to leave. ‘Went to Drummonds about my passport wearing my new hat,’ she told Muv. ‘The typists & clerks got such terrible giggles they were paralized & couldn’t attend to anything it must have made their day. Did I tell you a woman on a bus said if she could see herself as others see her!’ On September 2 she wrote to her mother again: ‘I’m off at last, on Wed: I think Should you care to do so, it would be a great kindness if you could send my butter to M. Gaston Palewski, (Cabinet du General de Gaulle) 1 Carlton Gardens SW1 & put from Mrs Rodd 12 Blom & in large letters VALISE. Ava Anderson says the breakfast one gets is terrible, insufficient & the bread gives you diarhea all day, so I am taking dozens of oatcakes.’
Paris, in that first autumn after the war, was a city pared to the bone. Conditions were far more austere than in London: accommodation was almost impossible to find, fuel shortages were acute and, because there was no system of rationing, only the rich who could afford the exorbitant prices of the black market had anything except vegetables to eat. Through the Colonel’s influence Nancy was installed in a small left-bank hotel in the rue Jacob, ‘the kind of hotel O Wilde died in – aucun confort, no bathroom, or loo except dans le couloir … washing is rather dreadful, a pint of hot water once a day! … Breakfast here is 2 pieces of dry black bread & hateful acorn coffee, black, 8/6 so now I eat oatcake, of which luckily I brought some, & water … I eat in workmens’ restaurants mostly little bits of cat I think & feel alternately very hungry & very sick. Like this I can live on £1 a day for everything – rather wonderful I suppose when the weather gets cold I shall die, like a geranium.’ But all through September and October the weather continued perfect, a true Indian summer, brilliant blue sky day after day, the leaves on the plane trees yellow and gold. To Nancy, her perceptions heightened by emotion, the capital of France was the most beautiful place on earth. ‘I must come & live here as soon as I can,’ she wrote to Muv. ‘I feel a totally different person as if I had come out of a coal mine into daylight … It is such a holiday – getting up when I like (shamefully late) sleeping all the afternoon & reading a book in the boiling sun by the river … I’m doing a lot of business of various kinds – getting my book translated I think, giving an interview to a French paper & so on besides books business. All great fun. I am as happy as can be.’
The cause and root of her happiness was of course the Colonel. To be in the same city, living in the very next street, talking to him every day on the telephone, holding herself ready to run round to his office in the rue Saint-Dominique whenever he had half an hour to spare, all this was now the essence of life to Nancy. To Gaston himself it was nothing of the kind. He was pleased to see his chère amie of those few hectic months in London, author of that charmante avalanche grise, amused as always by her wit and her outrageous stories, but far too busy to give her much time. He was now in a position of considerable power, heading a Cabinet in de Gaulle’s Gouvernement Provisoire which included among its members Michel Debré and Georges Pompidou. He was one of the few members of the government given the use of an official car, and it was Palewski, all the world knew, who had the ear of the General. If it was a question of having a telephone installed, or a collaborating member of the family sprung from gaol, it was Palewski whom one petitioned. On those occasions when he was free to arrange to meet Nancy for dinner, more often than not he telephoned at the last minute to cancel, leaving her in floods of tears to face an evening alone in her bedroom.
But this was never admitted. Nancy lived in ‘a whirl of happiness’, her one terror, as currency restrictions were stringently enforced, running out of money and having to return home. She was doing well in her book-buying, attending sales at the Hôtel Drouot and making friends with all the most reputable booksellers – M. Camille Bloch in the rue Saint-Honoré, Mlle Jeandet in the rue de Verneuil, M. Caillandre on the Quai Malaquais whose unvaried greeting was so particularly gratifying: ‘Ah! voici la Parisienne!’ Unfortunately, although Nancy worked hard both buying and selling, ‘Nobody in London takes the slightest interest in my activities, Dearest doesn’t answer my letters & Mollie just says it makes more work for her – I see her
point vividly but it’s all rather discouraging I must say. What I’ve done in fact is to establish a branch of HH here which will take up to any amount of books from us at 30% more than we pay for them which must be quite a cop.’ Then Evelyn came up with a scheme to make a little money: Randolph Churchill had been commissioned by a group of American newspapers to write a column on Paris; would Nancy, for two guineas a time, send him a Paris letter every week to appear under Randolph’s by-line, to be read only by Americans. ‘No shame, no effort,’ as Evelyn pointed out. At first demurring, for the mysterious reason that ‘social gossip [is] not my strong point’, she soon agreed, keeping Randolph supplied with chatty paragraphs on fashionable Parisian life – the black market, a musical soirée, the pathetic situation of the writer Henry de Montherlant. ‘Montherlant is hiding in Paris but nobody bothers to look for him. Rather humiliating, like when one hides for sardines & nobody comes!’ Whenever she could she worked in a reference to the Directeur de Cabinet: ‘The elections are of course the great topic … All the attacks & they are many & venomous, are directed against Palewski, who is presented as a sinister Eminence Grise – l’ennemi du peuple. GPRF (Gouvernement Provisoire de la Republique Française) which is on all their motor cars etc, is said to stand for Gaston Palewski Regent of France.’ Randolph repaid Nancy’s efforts on his behalf by writing ‘an absolutely hateful article’ about Palewski in a French Communist Paper. The Colonel saw it and was seriously annoyed, more, it is true, for fear of what the General would say than on his own account. ‘Voulez vous lui dire de ma part qu’il n’est pas d’usage en France d’écrire sur les gens avec lesquels on est en relations d’amitié ou de camaraderie, sans leur avoir montré au préalable ce qu’on veut publier, et que dans ces conditions je renonce a toute idée de chasser le tigre avec lui.’ ‘How I wish none of my friends could hold a pen,’ Nancy wailed. ‘I’ve now got what I haven’t had for years, an ENEMY, & have ranged myself on the side of the hottest Randolph haters.’ Nancy’s relationship with her obstreperous cousin continued in this pattern for several years. ‘You see he rings up, sounding like a rusty old bicycle going up a hill, & is very disarming – then one goes to see him & is subjected to an hours bellowing roaring unpleasantness. I always say never again & always succumb.’ The point was finally reached, however, when Randolph went too far to be forgiven. One evening in May 1947, Nancy and Gaston with Momo Marriott, a wealthy American friend, met Randolph for dinner. ‘Dinner wasn’t ordered, in a crowded restaurant, before Randolph began bawling insults about Gen de G & this continued until coffee. Everybody listened with fascination. The Col tried to laugh it off, then became angry couldn’t get up & go because hemmed in by the table & Momo & because it would have made more of a thing you know … When we got into the street … [Col] said Ma chère Nancy! to which I replied Ma chère Colonel! Indeed I was almost in tears. Never never again. Odious little creature – spitting, sweating, shrieking, oh the horror of him.’
Nancy returned to London in the second week of November filled with a determination to go back to Paris as soon as she possibly could. ‘Oh my passion for the French I see all through rose coloured spectacles … Apart from love or anything, I must come & live here, & if one makes up one’s mind things generally happen don’t you think,’ she asked Diana. But there was another matter to be attended to first. Her novel, The Pursuit of Love, was published on December 10. It was an instant and phenomenal success. If ever there were a case of the right book at the right time, this book was it. Funny, frivolous, and sweepingly romantic, it was the perfect antidote to the long war years of hardship and austerity, providing an undernourished public with its favourite ingredients: love, childhood and the English upper classes.
Far more even than Nancy’s previous novels, The Pursuit of Love is intensely autobiographical. The heroine, Linda Radlett, is beautiful, feckless and tender-hearted, one of the seven children of Matthew Alconleigh, an eccentric backwoods peer known for his defiant philistinism and the terrible force of his temper. The story is told by Linda’s cousin, Fanny, who comes frequently to stay at Alconleigh (a composite of Batsford, Asthall and Swinbrook), rapturously joining in the Radletts’ thrilling, savage family life – the feuds with Uncle Matthew, days out hunting on the Cotswold uplands, the cosy conversations about sex in the linen cupboard known as the Hons’ cupboard, after the Radlett children’s secret society.
As Linda and Fanny grow up they start to dream longingly of love, yearning for the day when they will be swept off their feet by some dashing and romantic man. But it isn’t quite like that. Linda marries straight out of the schoolroom, first a handsome, complacent bore called Kroesig, then a dedicated Communist, Christian, devoted to his cause and with little time to spare for his wife. Both times Linda believed herself to be in love, and both times it had proved an illusion. Then, on her way home from the south of France, she is picked up – no other word for it – by a Frenchman in the Gare du Nord: a short, stocky, very dark Frenchman in a black Homburg hat. And thus begins the one true love affair of Linda’s life. Fabrice, duc de Sauveterre, is one of the great fascinators, clever, funny and amorous, a man of the world and French to his fingertips. He installs Linda in a pretty apartment in Paris, and here for nearly a year she lives a life as near perfect happiness as it is possible to attain. Then comes the war: Linda has to return to England while Fabrice disappears into the Resistance. She sees him only once more, when he suddenly appears for twenty-four hours on a brief mission to London. In the end Linda dies giving birth to their child; and at about the same time Fabrice is caught by the Gestapo and shot.
It is all here, all Nancy’s life, in this novel, exaggerated in parts, circumstances changed, fantasies fulfilled (Fabrice tells Linda he loves her), but as a testament of her heart and mind it is true to the last letter. The hero is, of course, Colonel as Fabrice, down to the smallest detail, from his demands to be entertained – ‘Alors, racontez!’ – to his habit of bursting into little snatches of song, and even the face he makes when knotting his tie. Prodd is divided into two as Linda’s two husbands, Christian who cares only for causes and is ‘so detached from other human beings he hardly notices whether they are there or not’; and Tony Kroesig, pompous and clever, his head full of a ‘vast quantity of utterly dreary facts, of which he did not hesitate to inform his companions, at great length and in great detail, whether they appeared to be interested or not’. Eddy Sackville-West appears thinly disguised as Fanny’s hypochondriacal Uncle Davey; and Gerald Berners as Lord Merlin, with his expensive, cultivated taste, his diamond-collared whippets and his love of ingenious teases (Merlinford’s telegraphic address is ‘Neighbourtease’).
But the character who dominates all the others, just as he dominates his own large family, is Lord Alconleigh, Uncle Matthew, a portrait of Farve in all his glory, drawn with that devastating combination of caricature and unerring psychological accuracy which is one of Nancy’s greatest gifts as a novelist. Irascible, unreasonable and tender-hearted, there he is cracking his stock-whips on the lawn, up at dawn and roaring at the housemaids, his eyes flashing a furious blue as he repeats his unshakable conviction that, ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends!’ There is his favourite epithet ‘sewer’, his favourite records (‘Fearful the death of the diver must be, Walking alone in the de-he-he-he-he-epths of the sea’) and his habit of falling asleep at the dinner table. Although in middle age she became convinced that she had never been fond of either of her parents, Nancy’s depiction of her father as Uncle Matthew is deeply affectionate; frightening and funny, he is also endearing, and there is no question but that Nancy was speaking her own mind in these words of Fanny’s: ‘Much as we feared, much as we disapproved of, passionately as we sometimes hated Uncle Matthew, he still remained for us a sort of criterion of English manhood; there seemed something not quite right about any man who greatly differed from him.’
Nancy wrote the novel from beginning to end in three months. Never before had she found a book so
effortless to write, and never would she do so again. It was as though falling in love had given her access to a creative source of which previously she had barely skimmed the surface. Evelyn read the manuscript, and it was Evelyn who suggested the title. Hamish Hamilton had no hesitation in declaring his enthusiasm for Pursuit (‘the word brilliant has been used’). He recognised it as a winner from the first, asking only for a few, very minor, editorial changes: ‘p. 252 – re Dunkirk. I know exactly what Linda means and I think she would probably have said it, but I have a hunch that Miss Mitford ought to tone down line 6. There are just too many people who didn’t think it Heaven.’ His faith in Linda was amply repaid. The critics praised it – ‘Highly diverting from the first to the last page’, ‘More truth, more sincerity, and more laughter than in a year’s output of novels’ – the public bought it, read it and, it sometimes seemed, talked of little else. It was the Book Society Choice for December, with 200,000 copies sold in the first twelve months. Hamilton had told her that in the end Linda might earn as much as £750, but she made more than that (£798) in the first three weeks, and in six months over £7,000. From all sides the congratulations poured in. ‘Clever, clever Nancy,’ wrote John Betjeman, ‘I am proud to know you.’ Uncle Matthew, whose opinion was awaited with some trepidation, ‘sat with his nose in the book & grunted out various corrections: “Never got the stock whips in Canada, a bloke from Australia gave them to me” & so on. He was delighted with it but cried at the end.’
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