The severest test was still to come. On 19 September 1916 came the news of Raymond Asquith’s death. After his last leave he had written to her from France:
Your beauty and the deep despair of parting from it made me spin like a whipped top. The chance that I might never see you again seemed, like all chances, negligible, but the certainty that I should not see you again for several months, like all certainties, was – and is – as black as hell and as heavy as the hand of God. In those blessed ten days I had moments so dazzling that an eternity of torment could not square the reckoning. I had almost persuaded myself of impossible things and then suddenly I felt I was dragging you patiently but painfully through a valedictory routine staled for you by heaven knows how many reluctant repetitions … I know that I have pitched my claims immoderately high, that I have been exacting and rapacious beyond decency or wisdom, but before your beauty I am utterly helpless and can do no otherwise.
For Diana, Raymond’s claims could never have been pitched too high; she might not concede all he wanted but in her heart she felt that he had a right to it. His last letter was posted only two days before he died: ‘In an hour or two I leave the particularly odious place where I now am for one infinitely more odious. I fear it is a case of a peerage or Westminster Abbey.’ From a man who habitually belittled the dangers to which he was subjected, such a prophecy, however flippantly worded, inspired terror in the recipient. She did not often pray, but she spent much of the next two days on her knees, once in church before a lighted candle. Her state was so desperate that it came almost as a relief when the news arrived. The pain, she said, was physical: ‘a sensation never before felt … my brain is revolving so fast, screaming “Raymond killed, my divine Raymond killed” over and over again’. She was experiencing a despair far more absolute than anything she had endured before. ‘I have lost with him my energy and hope and all that blinds one to life’s horror. I loved him a little better than any living soul and the near future seems unfaceable.’
Almost her first impulse was to rush to the aid of Katharine; Katharine who loved her husband so totally, whose moon revolved perpetually around his sun, who had no Duff, no Patrick, no Edward in her life to offer consolation. She travelled to Mells where she discovered her friend crouched in a dark room over the fire, ‘too dead a thing to seek death, only craving to die from numbness’. She found some relief in trying to rescue Katharine from the blackest pit of misery, but her own grief grew no less sharp and she could not escape a nagging irritation that in the eyes of the world the widow was the one with the greatest right to mourn.
‘Raymond adored you,’ wrote Patrick Shaw-Stewart. ‘I hesitate how much I may say so when I think of Katharine.’ So far as Katharine was concerned, no such caution was necessary. ‘I love you and bless you always,’ Katharine wrote. ‘How could I have minded you loving Raymond and his loving you so much? It was in the fitness of things.’ Diana for her part comforted herself with the thought that she had not wholly lost Raymond; her feeling for him lived on in her love for his wife. ‘You are more Raymond than anything else, than his writings or his letters or his expressed thoughts remembered, and so you are more loved by me than anything or anybody.’ The two women did not always see a great deal of each other; their different patterns of life inevitably put a barrier between them; but each was always to regard the other as her dearest and closest friend.
Diana was a fighter, not one to lie down under the blows of fate. She knew what it was to live with depression, but recognized that in time it would pass. She fought the pain of Raymond’s death, fought it with all the resolution of one who knew life must go on and was determined to live it to the full. A month later she wrote to Patrick Shaw-Stewart:
The emotion of misery seems to me so squalid, low, devitalizing into stagnation and dregs, not purifying and spiritual as the last generation determined to think … Strange that grief should be so infinitely the biggest emotion. In no ecstasy that we know of can there not be found a thousand touches of chance that will reverse our state: physical pain, however slight; sudden uncertainty of pleasure and its never forgotten wings. Whereas in sorrow nothing can lighten one’s darkness, appearing as it does certain and unending. It is only energy of life and love that will drag us through … My darling Katharine has not got it; I have, thank God!
Her energy of life and love was never to burn so low again until Duff died thirty-seven years later, but on both occasions it dragged her through.
FOUR
‘THAT AWFUL DUFF’
By the beginning of 1917 it seemed as if the war had been going on for a lifetime and would never end. Among those of Diana’s closest friends who had gone to the war, Edward Horner and Patrick Shaw-Stewart were still alive, but though she would never have articulated the thought, Diana had written them off in her mind as already dead. A protection of a kind against being badly hurt is to anticipate the worst and discount it in advance. Diana did this all her life. No one she loved could take an aeroplane without her spelling out to herself the horrors of crash, conflagration, violent death, funeral; no friend could blow a nose without influenza, pneumonia, protracted and fatal illness flashing through her mind. Edward and Patrick were doomed; it was only a question of when the telegram would arrive. Till that time came she would lavish her affection on them, devote to them every spare moment while they were on leave; but that each meeting would be the last she never doubted.
There remained Duff. There were those who said that, if he really wanted to, he could have escaped from the Foreign Office and joined the army. One of the de Crespigny brothers – either ‘Creepy’ or ‘Crawly’ de Crespigny, history has forgotten which – swore that he would shoot Duff if he had not joined up by the day the war ended. Neither physically nor morally was Duff’s courage ever in doubt – the discomfort of military life alarmed him more than the danger – but he accepted the embargo on his leaving the Foreign Office with the same equanimity as he later did his conscription. He was never one to waste his energies on shame and Diana worried far more than he did about his reputation.
Meanwhile he made hay while the sun shone. He still could not bring himself to concentrate exclusively on Diana. Cynthia Asquith recorded with satisfaction an evening when Duff ‘hovered around with would-be fondling hands’; shortly afterwards he tried to get her to himself when, to his ill-concealed annoyance, ‘Diana, Letty and Alan Parsons hooked on to us’. More serious was his fleeting passion for Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower. He tore himself away from a house-party at Panshanger where he had been fluttering lustfully around her to dine with the Parsons. ‘I am not in love with D and I am tired of Viola and Alan,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘This is a terrible thing and is probably only a phase but there it is.’ It was only a phase but it almost proved disastrous. Duff and Diana had a ferocious row, and the usual reconciliation did not take place next day. Piqued by jealousy as well as outraged by his harshness towards her, Diana was ‘bright and cold and diamond-hard’. Duff was dismayed. ‘Fool and brute that I am! This is terrible. All my love for her has come back and I could not bear to lose her.’ It took nearly three weeks of persistent courtship before his apologies were accepted. ‘I don’t believe we shall quarrel again,’ wrote Duff, ‘and I loathe myself for my temporary infidelity and vileness.’
Infidelities recurred and they did quarrel again, but never with the same savagery. They settled down into a happy almost conjugal pattern: lunching at small unfashionable Soho restaurants where none of their friends was likely to go, or privately in Duff’s rooms in St James’s Street, where they would eat slimming meals of lean meat or, still more austerely, Brand’s Essence and mineral waters; meeting at Arlington Street or in Duff’s rooms when he left the Foreign Office; dining frequently in the same parties or with the Montagus in Queen Anne’s Gate; moving on to the same balls; ending up in the same group at the Cavendish; at weekends often staying in the same country house where Duff would seek out Diana’s bedroom and lie with her in chaste if compr
omising intimacy. Their relationship, with all its strengths and limitations, was defined in a conversation which they held after a ball at the very end of 1916; Duff unusually sober, Diana rather drunk.
She told me that she had always loved Raymond more than me … That last night at Brighton he had lain with her though he had not been there when I went to her room in the early morning and couldn’t get in. I was much moved and amazed and it curiously made me like Raymond more than ever, though were he still alive I don’t know how I should feel. She assured me that she loved me best of the living, particularly lately, but I reminded her that she had often said as much while Raymond was alive. Why should I believe her? It was a thrilling revelation.
The Duchess by no means considered him best of the living; indeed her disapproval of Duff became more emphatic as her daughter’s partiality for him grew more pronounced. She could still do much to disrupt the even tenor of their wooing. Duff telephoned Arlington Street to be greeted by ‘some bitch who was neither your maid nor your mother’, who announced that Lady Diana was out. The bitch was Diana herself, unwilling to talk with her mother in the room. Archibald Sinclair had been causing trouble by reviving the theory that Diana was destined to be Princess of Wales, the Duchess seized on the idea and for weeks would talk of nothing else. When the Prince failed to dance with Diana at Irene Lawley’s ball the Duchess was furious, not with the Prince but, somewhat unfairly, with her daughter. Even when dreams of the throne faded, she was no better disposed towards Duff. She had allies in her campaign. Winston Churchill lectured Diana on the merits of Patrick Shaw-Stewart. Diana pleaded that Patrick was physically repulsive to her and that she preferred Duff. Churchill agreed that Duff was better looking, ‘and physical desire he thinks the only basis to marry on’, but felt that ‘the animal can be selected by one’s brain and not one’s attraction’ and that Shaw-Stewart would be in every way a worthier mate.
In March 1917 the Foreign Office decided to let some of its regular staff join the armed forces; ‘the scrimshankers were combed out’ in the phrase of a spiteful acquaintance. Duff’s reaction was exhilaration, though, he wrote in his diary; ‘I don’t own to it as people would believe it was bluff, and I dare say too that I shall soon heartily wish myself back.’ He felt as if everybody else had been taking part in an adventure from which he had been excluded; it would be uncomfortable and dangerous but it was not something to miss. ‘I am not afraid of death, though I love life and should hate to lose it.’ The main drawback to his joining the army was the pain it would cause his mother; ‘I think Diana too would mind.’
Diana did mind, with an intensity that both delighted and dismayed Duff. He tried to explain to her something of what he felt as they lay side by side early one morning. ‘She was so white and darling and pathetic’ She understood what he was trying to say but could feel nothing herself beyond fear and a vast sense of loss. ‘I am reconciled to the advisability of Duff, the straw, breaking the back of the Central Powers,’ she wrote wistfully to Patrick Shaw-Stewart, ‘but none the less loth to part from that straw to which I cling.’ He was to join the Grenadiers, the Colonel saying resignedly that, since they had already had the Sitwells, things could hardly get worse. ‘I hope he won’t be their mascot,’ Diana went on, ‘for we know what happens to those the Guards love.’
Duff’s record of his first days in the army was hardly soldierly. He was dismayed by the discovery that he would have to sleep with seven other people, mostly risen from the ranks, who appeared to him ‘common and inhuman. It seems unthinkable that I should have to share a room with them. There are really moments when I could have cried. The strangeness, roughness and degradation of it all appalled me. I wrote to Diana and told her how unhappy I was.’ Diana passed on the news of Duff’s misery in vivid detail to the Duchess, who spat out vengefully: ‘Do him a lot of good to rough it a bit!’ While Diana meditated some violent riposte, her brother John came to the rescue and assailed the Duchess with a catalogue of Duff’s qualities: his courage, his fitness, his skill at tennis. Diana wrote Duff a letter of comfort mixed with sage advice: ‘Fears surge that you will take neither trouble nor interest in it all, or the others, therefore they will not adore you. You will think this doesn’t matter, being temporary, but of course it does matter. To be thought to be keen, non-grumbling, generally jolly and loyal, is of the vastest importance.’
Duff went for his basic training to Chelsea Barracks and then, as an officer cadet, to Bushey, only a few miles from central London. He was never far out of Diana’s life, but she had grown to depend on him to occupy her days and his departure left a painful void. There was no shortage of people anxious to fill it. Among the most prominent was Ivor Wimborne. Ivor Guest, Lord Wimborne, was an Edwardian grandee of immense wealth, who considered that his money entitled him to anything which the droit de seigneur would not anyway secure him. It was of him that Belloc wrote:
Grant, O Lord, eternal rest
To thy servant, Ivor Guest.
Never mind the where or how,
Only grant it to him now.
The various high offices of state that had been conferred on him – culminating in that of Viceroy of Ireland – had signally failed to curb his greed and lechery. His redeeming feature was his generosity; as Diana said, he would rip the shirt off any girl’s back but give the coat off his own to the first person who asked for it.
He took a fancy to Diana and pursued her hungrily, lavishing on her presents and expensive meals. Diana always relished wealth and power and loved to be indulged; besides, Wimborne was good company. One night he took her to dinner at Oddenino’s – £4 for two with two bottles of good claret, which seemed indecently extravagant; paid the taxi-driver £1 for a four shillings fare on the ground Diana was the passenger; bribed the porter with £1 to let him take somebody else’s taxi; ‘I guess his evening out cost him near a tenner.’ He got little return for his investment. When he assaulted Diana in the taxi on the way home she repelled him vigorously. He sulked, and asked why she had to be different from every other girl, to which Diana replied that he had always told her she was unique, so she was trying to live up to her reputation. Undismayed, Lord Wimborne continued to pursue her, lasciviously muttering: ‘Baby, baby, I want you baby. I want to have you – not only in the vulgar sense, but I want to work with you and be your help and your foil, baby!’
His siege came to a climax when they were both staying with Diana’s old admirer, Claude Lowther, at Herstmonceux. Winston Churchill had been dining there, ‘poor love, frankly down and wretched, speechless, morbid, grim’, but good claret and grouse had cheered the party and Diana went contentedly to bed at 1 a.m. At 2 a.m. the Viceroy stood expectant at the door. Diana quailed but prepared for battle. ‘For half an hour I fought with amazing valour in darkness and utter silence. At 3, not getting a pea of his greens, he retired.’ Diana lay gloating over her triumph, half asleep. Then Lord Wimborne was back, this time in repentance. ‘Visualize the lecherous aristocrat kneeling at the bed-post, kissing and being silly with my blanketed feet, with, “O, baby, I’ve tossed for so long, I shall never sleep till I know I am forgiven. O, ma Diane, pity me. I will treat you as something so unique, baby, not like other women.”’ Diana rashly laughed at him, which Lord Wimborne interpreted as encouragement. He flung himself back into the attack. Diana feigned submission, then leapt for the door, ‘but in one goat’s leap he was beside me, and me off my feet and held high’. Rape seemed imminent, so Diana fell back on her last, least dignified line of defence and called to Phyllis Boyd who was in the next room. Her friend was already awake, speculating with interest on the tempestuous events next door; she rushed to the rescue ‘and cleansed and garnished the room in two ticks’.
Diana gleefully recounted her saga to her friends. Duff was outraged, not so much by the behaviour of the Viceroy as by the fact that Diana took it so lightly, telling him that she found it delightfully dixhuitième (always high praise in her vocabulary) and that she had no objection ‘to a
few pictorial and featherlight adventures’. Next time she went to Herstmonceux Duff made sure that he was in attendance. He successfully protected Diana, but not her white poodle Fido. Claude Lowther alleged this animal would damage his trees, so it was shut in an upstairs room from which, piqued, it jumped twenty feet to the ground. Miraculously the dog survived, though Diana’s feelings suffered severely.
Of one thing Diana felt confident; the Viceroy’s eyes were open; never again would he attempt violation. Her mother was less sanguine and when Diana went to spend a weekend at Blenheim – notoriously a palace of ill fame – the Duchess issued her daughter with a service revolver that Patrick Shaw-Stewart had for some reason abandoned at Belvoir, and instructed her to announce loudly at tea-time that her maid always slept in the same room as her. The Duchess’s caution was more than justified; the Viceroy struck again. Luckily he was carrying a candle, which shed its first faint gleam on the barrel of the revolver. Lord Wimborne blenched and settled nervously at the end of Diana’s bed, alleging that he had merely looked in for an early morning chat.
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