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Diana Cooper

Page 13

by Philip Ziegler


  With these experiences fresh in her mind it was bold of Diana to visit Lord Wimborne in his viceregal splendour in Dublin. She reasoned that, with Lady Wimborne on the premises and A.D.C.s and footmen in every cranny, she would be reasonably secure, but she reckoned without her host’s determination. On her arrival she was taken directly to the Viceroy’s study. She found him ‘all dithery and tossing down endless vermouths, babbling of how this visit was a dawn and going to be so strategically carried out that it would form a basis of an easy and unsuspected relationship’. Diana, who had no such relationship in mind, pointed out that a prolonged tête-à-tête was hardly the way to disarm suspicion. She was delighted by the pomp and gold plate, the footmen boasting pink calves and perruques, but was disconcerted when Lady Wimborne drew her confidentially to one side. She thought a word of counsel about the Viceroy was coming but instead heard: ‘I must warn you, dearest Diana, that in curtseying after dinner to H.E., we don’t use the gavotte or Court curtsey but rather the modern Spanish.’ Diana choked back the reply ‘You’ll get what bob you can from me, plus hiccups if it’s after dinner.’

  Later came another interview with the Viceroy, with petitions to ‘come and say goodnight’ when the others were asleep. Diana thought that she had finally cowed him, but two hours later there he was again, crashing around her bedroom in the dark, cursing as he stubbed his toes against the furniture. He retreated after only a moderate tussle and Diana’s threat to leave Viceregal Lodge at dawn if she were molested any further. ‘God knows what in my demeanour has changed,’ she mused wistfully, ‘or why in a strange house I can never curl my hair or grease my face in security.’

  Farce threatened to take on a more serious aspect when it was rumoured Ivor Wimborne was to divorce his long-suffering wife: ‘I have never seen Her Grace in such torment,’ Diana wrote to Duff.

  In five minutes she saw in me the only co-respondent, spoke of servants bribed by Alice Wimborne to spy, elaborate and inform against me, till really she roused me to a fear of my own and I remembered the emerald in the drawer behind her [a present from Lord Wimborne] and letters of mine which could be read in court and reading incriminatingly.

  Wimborne denied having any such intention, but when he drove Diana home a few nights later he hinted that this need not always be the case: ‘I am prepared to make sacrifices and take risks, baby.’ Diana was prepared to make sacrifices too, in this case to sacrifice her old friend Phyllis Boyd. Miss Boyd was delighted to divert the Viceroy’s ardour; she was paraded before him in Diana’s ‘indecently scanty bathing-dress’ and scored an immediate success. But Lord Wimborne had sufficient energy for a wife and a multitude of paramours; his death-bed was to be the only resting place in which he did not hope Diana could be induced to join him.

  Duff disapproved of Lord Wimborne, but of Sir Matthew Wilson he was frankly jealous. ‘Scatters’ Wilson was a prototype of the Edwardian rake; ‘a fussy ebullient bounder,’ Cynthia Asquith described him, ‘with his blue eyes and hoarse whisper.’ His tastes were as traditionally rakish as his appearance; he prided himself on being responsible for more divorces than any other man in London and liked playing poker for high stakes with rich but innocent young men. Early in 1917 he set out to add Diana to his list of conquests. Diana promised Duff that Scatters did not attract her in the least, but her actions seemed to belie her words. At dinner with the Montagus she deliberately lingered so that Wilson could take her home; Duff stumped off in a black rage ‘not only of jealousy but also of sorrow that she should sink to such depths as Scatters and should offer herself to him under the eyes of men with the stamp of F. E. Smith’.

  Duff’s misery came to a head when they were all staying at the Lovat Arms in Beauly, Inverness. Diana went off early to bed, promising she would lock the door of her room to keep Scatters at bay. Scatters disappeared. His suspicions aroused, Duff crept upstairs and listened at Diana’s door. ‘I heard whispering voices and sounds of the bed shaking. I listened in agony, such emotion as I have seldom known. At last I heard Diana say in a slightly mocking voice, “Goodnight, ducky”.’ Duff hid round the corner, watched Scatters emerge fully clothed and then stormed in to take his place. Diana was at first on the defensive; Scatters had arrived before she had time to lock the door, she had beaten him off with only a minor tussle. Then Duff admitted he had been listening at the door for ten minutes, and the tables were turned. ‘She cried and reproached me bitterly with not trusting and spying on her.’ Eventually honour was satisfied and a reconciliation ensued – ‘We had a night of the most wild and perfect joy.’

  *

  By this time Diana was working an average of five or six hours a day in the hospital at Arlington Street; less when things were peaceful; considerably more in the aftermath of a major battle. This schedule left her with plenty of time and energy for outside activities. Her passion for the theatre had not diminished. Katharine Asquith told Raymond that Diana was utterly stage-struck. ‘Tell me when next you write about the stage and why you like it,’ Raymond commanded from the front line. ‘It makes me think that you might like Ypres.’

  Diana’s taste in plays was conservative but by no means narrow. She loved Shakespeare, Marlowe, Restoration comedy, Sheridan. She enjoyed most of Shaw, though her strongly literal mind rejected Heartbreak House: ‘Is it a real air-raid? IF not, what does it symbolize? If it is, why haven’t they spoken of the war at all?’ Ibsen she found grotesque: ‘What an antiquated old corpse Ghosts is – such passions to expend passions on, almost as antiquated as Oedipus’s panic at incest past.’ Almost anything that took place on a stage, however, would engage her attention; she only drew the line at a poetry reading: ‘You can imagine how old buggers like Newbolt and Hewlett and Seaman and Yeats – worst of all – lost themselves in the luxury of their drawling.’

  Above all, she wanted to perform herself. Lowest form of theatrical life was the tableau vivant, and in such Diana often played a leading role. Cynthia Asquith remembered one in which she portrayed the Blessed Damozel – ‘funny enough!’ she commented sourly. It had first been suggested that Diana should be a fallen woman at the knee of Mrs Lavery’s Virgin Mary, but she did not take kindly to the idea. Among the other participants was Mrs Harold Nicolson, as Vita Sackville-West had now become – ‘Dear old Vita,’ Diana remarked, ‘all aqua, no vita, was as heavy as frost.’

  Charity matinées were a cut up on this. Lady Essex organized a performance at the Gaiety Theatre in which professional actresses, mannequins and fashionable ladies mixed uneasily in a play which would have been bad under any circumstances and under these was appalling. The amateurs complained that the professionals did not know their parts and made no effort, while one of the professionals, Gladys Cooper, said: ‘It was a great success but the Society actresses couldn’t be heard at all.’ In this criticism it seems she was justified. ‘I hear that Dottie was “natural” but inaudible,’ wrote Raymond Asquith, ‘a queer reversal of her normal role.’ She achieved audibility at least when she played Britannia in a pageant at Leicester. She noted with satisfaction that she liked to hear her own voice on the stage, ‘though I have a strange conviction just after each phrase that I said the words completely wrong’. It was suggested that she might play Juliet for charity but the idea came to nothing. ‘It couldn’t be good,’ wrote Diana, ‘but it would be terribly exciting and good for me to do something of which I am truly frightened.’

  Meanwhile she was herself being satirized in Mr Butt’s revue at the Empire. Duff and Diana went there in a party with the Aga Khan – ‘damned impudence’ considered Duff, and was relieved they arrived too late to see the offending scene. The Duke of Rutland took the same view and for once bestirred himself; the Lord Chamberlain was lobbied, Mr Butt reprimanded, and the scene cut so severely that only veiled allusions to Diana remained. She herself rather regretted it; her personality as purveyed by the Empire Theatre was not wholly flattering, but it was gratifying to be singled out for such treatment and she preferred tarnished f
ame to public indifference.

  Her theatrical bent strayed over into private life. Dinner-parties were frequently enlivened by ‘stunts’ and Diana’s imitations of certain dowagers were celebrated. Clumps, one of the many after-dinner games that involved acting, was much in vogue. On the whole, though, her friends went in for more intellectual pastimes. The parentage game was popular. Eddie Marsh’s were deemed to be Tom Tit and Sappho, Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s Uriah Heep and Bernard Shaw, while Diana was generously endowed with Voltaire and Venus. Reading aloud was also in favour. At a dinner given by Alan and Viola Parsons for Augustine Birrell, Viola and Birrell read Lady Gregory’s ‘Workhouse Ward’ in a passable brogue, Duff intoned melodiously from Sir Thomas Browne while Diana ‘reclined on a couch à la Madame Récamier and was in excellent face and lovely dress’. Musical evenings occurred with regularity; usually highbrow or at least classical though once figuring ‘one Novello, who is by way of being a sort of ragtime composer’. Viola Parsons was supposed to be in love with Ivor Novello at the time. Duff disapproved of the liaison; Novello was ‘a very pretty, very suspicious-looking little creature, half the size of Viola and not nearly so manly’.

  Her friends were not always appreciative of Diana’s performances – whether on stage or in private. After a party given by Lady Howard de Walden, Viola Parsons told her that she had looked ‘like a degraded peacock, that she had swayed and talked silly, that many had exclaimed in horror’. Diana was offended, especially since the two painters, Ambrose McEvoy and Philip Wilson Steer, reported that she had been the star of the party. Her morale was fully restored when Winston Churchill’s remarks were passed on to her: ‘The world has dealt very harshly with her, but she’s brave and hard-working and very misunderstood, and she’s of great worth in this sad world. Why the poor soldiers dying in agony breathe her name as they die. Clemmie, you must have her to lunch.’

  The Howard de Waldens were hosts at a house-party in September 1917 at Chirk, a vast and dour castle in Wales in which they would put up their friends and a resident orchestra. The peace of the countryside was disturbed at 1 a.m. by a blaze of lights with rockets exploding round the house and the rattle of rifle-fire. Was it a zeppelin raid, an invasion? The guests met anxiously in Diana’s bedroom: Hugh Rumbold, in fancy dressing-gown, calling out melodramatically, ‘For God’s sake keep the women quiet!’; Margot Howard de Walden in hysterics; Wilson Steer maintaining it was a practical joke; Alan Parsons pouring scorn on so ridiculous an idea; Diana herself, ‘in glittering demi-toilette, rouged and powdered’, trying to telephone Lord French but getting no further than the village post-office. For three days the mystery was allowed to simmer, then it was admitted that in fact the whole thing had been a practical joke organized by some bored officers stationed nearby. A row followed, more explosive than the previous firework display. Viola Parsons, indignant at her husband being made to look a fool, protested that it was no surprise England was losing the war when such cads were running it. Lady Howard de Walden resumed her hysterics. Olga Lynn and Alan Parsons supported Viola and wanted to protest to the War Office. ‘Diana was gorgeous,’ recorded Cynthia Asquith, ‘generously acknowledging the excellence of the joke and redeeming the situation by her energy and address.’ If it amused the poor devils of soldiers, she maintained, it must be all right. In the end the subject was dropped and the party turned to table football.

  Unpleasant piquancy was added to the joke when a few days later a stray bomb really did fall near Chirk, blowing in the windows of Diana’s bedroom. This was a freakish accident, but in London air-raids were relatively common. Diana disliked them greatly but felt it was the duty of the upper classes to set a good example. She was particularly put out when Smuts – ‘the biggest funk-stick of all’ – cried off dinner at Wimborne House at the last moment. He pleaded malaria but in fact, so Diana alleged, was afraid to venture out. ‘I personally have a dull permanent fear of raid-nights,’ she wrote to Patrick Shaw-Stewart, ‘luckily a little lessened by the appalling noise. The class difference in behaviour is tremendously obvious. Poor Edwin [Montagu] is the only throwback I have seen – he cannot eat or sleep and his hands go cold.’

  Guy’s Hospital was bombed while she was there. She was just about to fall asleep when ‘those fucking maroons started. I darted into my uniform, expecting drill and every man his place; not a bit of it.’ After some moments’ indecision ‘a blowzy half-scared sister’ stuck her head in at the door and announced: ‘You can do just what you like, stay in bed, get up, anything.’ Diana was perplexed: she had no wish to be thought a coward, yet was quite as unwilling to show off by remaining exposed to unnecessary danger. Finally she attached herself to a group of obviously frightened nurses – reckoning they would be likely to behave most sensibly – and allowed herself to be led off to the massively constructed concrete nurses’ home. When the bomb fell many of the patients who were too ill to be moved were injured and some killed. Diana nursed the survivors and found them ‘proud as punch of their misfortunes, and inlaid all over with patines of brick and beams’.

  The war ground inexorably on. In November 1917, Duff was playing cards when his sister Sybil asked him to come out for a moment. Irritated by her mysterious manner he complied, to be told that Edward Horner had been killed and that Diana was outside. He found her standing by the area rails, crying; and together they went off to her room in Arlington Street where they sat by the fire ‘talking a little and crying a lot. Edward meant so much in our lives.’ It took his death to bring home to Diana how much she had loved him; she told her brother John, ‘I used sometimes to long that conditions, even a catastrophe, might force me to marry him against my too sane judgement’.

  Patrick Shaw-Stewart alone remained of those close friends who had gone off to fight at the outbreak of war. He lasted only another six weeks. On 18 December he wrote to say that he thought he might be sickening for measles, ‘but there may be something pleasant coming up for me about the second week in January which I should lose by being sick’. On 30 December he was shot through the head and died instantly. Diana was dismayed above all by her failure to experience the sharp pain that had followed the deaths of other friends. ‘First in my heart is an unceasing sigh for my blessed Edward,’ she told Duff, ‘so that although Patrick’s death is agonizing, I am truly numb to lesser woes. Or is it really that we are beasts and mind the loss of bodies that we loved and beauty that delighted us? How coldly I write – and yet you know that I loved Patrick, and had a greater sense of duty towards him than to anyone. I wish most terribly that you were with me to hold and melt me. I want melting. It is dreadful to feel like a frozen limb, incapable, paralysed, ugly too, very – and with forebodings of pain at the thaw.’

  They were together again two days later, but time was running out for them. Duff knew that within a few months, perhaps even weeks, he would be sent to France. In February, when Viola Parsons was acting in Bournemouth, Duff and Diana followed her there for a week’s holiday. Scatters Wilson and Michael Herbert were technically part of the group, but did not intrude; Viola, in theory the chaperone, was at the theatre day and night. Lord Wimborne arrived and announced that he proposed to stay nearby at Canford and spend every day with Diana. He was assured that the Duchess of Rutland was to arrive the following day, Duff’s presence was concealed, and the unfortunate Viceroy was sent packing back to London. Duff and Diana spent almost their whole time alone together. ‘It was,’ wrote Duff in his diary, ‘a perfect life of companionship. I don’t think we either wearied for a moment of the other’s company. I certainly did not, but rather grudged every minute that we were separated, or accompanied by a third.’ When they got back to London Duff went to his flat to discover that his old brass bed had disappeared to be replaced by Diana’s present of an eighteenth-century wooden bed. ‘We felt like a couple returning from our honeymoon.’

  At the beginning of April 1918 the departure date was fixed for two weeks ahead. They were driving round St James’s Park, ecstatically h
appy together, when they saw a body of men marching down the Mall. They were Grenadiers, Duff’s regiment, and they were on their way to France. ‘Immediately she burst into such a passion of tears that I have never heard from her. She cried that she could not bear me to go. I felt so sad and so proud; the moment was so beautiful and so dramatic’ He was due to leave on a Friday, then the draft was postponed till Monday, so they had a final weekend together. The last night Diana drove Duff to Chelsea Barracks. Monty Bertie, who was supposed to march the company to the station, was ‘too drunk to lead a horse to the water’, so Duff took his place. ‘I was so glad of this,’ Diana told Katharine Asquith. ‘The crashing band and drums through the deserted streets exhilarated him and made him gloriously happy and excited – but it was deathly to me. I went to the station. I had meant not to, but Duff begged – I think he wanted to be seen marching in – and there it was so terribly real and looked so terribly invraisemblable that it was all I could do not to run away. Darling Duff, I do think he is fairly content with his horrible lot, and that’s all the comfort I can find. The desolation is going to be dreadful.’

  Looking around her she saw little reason to hope that her desolation would be short-lived. Asquith’s Government had fallen at the end of 1916 and Diana, who was fiercely loyal to her friends and viewed politics solely in the light of the personalities involved, could believe little good of the man who had replaced him. Asquith had been accustomed to poke fun at Lloyd George; he had told Venetia Montagu that he had once found him searching for Gallipoli on a map of Spain. Lloyd George was uncouth and common and had seemed singularly impervious to Diana’s charms. What could be expected of such a man? Yet what could be expected now of Asquith? Edwin Montagu had just got back from India and had painted a vivid picture of ‘the Old Bird – a vision of a great sack, an upright, righteous, patriotic, fine, worshipful sack, but shoved and flung about and goaded by Margot and McKenna and Runciman and all the Old Gang, and told to strike, be a man, look up.’ In Edwin’s opinion his epitaph should be: ‘Here lies the body of H. H. Asquith who married Margot Tennant but was Prime Minister for ten years.’

 

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