Simultaneously, however, Diana was taking energetic steps to achieve the end she professed not to desire. In 1921 she had an operation to enable her to have a child. This gained nothing, and the following year a surgeon diagnosed a fibroid in the womb and said that it must be removed. Diana was alarmed and depressed, bolstering her morale by a massive intake of cocktails, and Duff went out to seek another doctor, who obligingly declared that a further operation was quite unnecessary. Instead Diana was packed off to the Pyrenees, to follow a cure that Eugénie had taken nine months before the birth of the Prince Imperial. In spite of so encouraging a precedent this too proved a failure. Diana now had recourse to Dr Arens, a celebrated gynaecologist who claimed personal responsibility for some of the noblest babies in Britain. Some said that his responsibility was more personal than was proper under the medical code of practice, others that he retained a squad of fecund footmen always ready to impregnate the aristocracy for a suitable fee. Whatever his methods, they did not work with Diana.
She turned to wilder schemes. Duff should have a child by a carefully selected prostitute and the infant would then be adopted into the family. The plan foundered on Duff’s reluctance to cooperate. Diana tried again. Iris Tree was about to have an illegitimate child by her current lover. Diana knew that if she were to adopt the child overtly, Duff would complain about the bad Tree blood whenever it misbehaved. He must therefore remain ignorant of the child’s ancestry. Iris was booked into a nursing-home in Gower Street and it was arranged that the baby should be left anonymously on the Coopers’ doorstep. This scheme was foiled by Iris Tree, who decided she wanted to keep the baby for herself. In despair Diana concluded that a boy would undoubtedly be a bugger and a girl a whore; she was better barren.
Then came the Nassau holiday. Diana’s period was late, she felt sick, she had toothache, she found a blue vein on her chest: all, she was told, infallible signs of pregnancy. Nervously she wrote to Duff of her symptoms. ‘I’m sure it’s climate or something wrong and not a baby, because it never is a baby. And if it is a baby, it may be a nigger, because who went even for a trip to the West Indies has nigger descendants for ever, and don’t tell me the Victorian wives did funny things with niggy-wiggs, so it must be the climate and air that produces the wool and ebony.’ If it wasn’t a niggy-wigg, she gloomily concluded, everyone would assume it was a Herbert. ‘I feel so frightened and so disinclined for such things at my time of life.’ In a moment of panic she took a large dose of quinine, hoping to produce an abortion, then rejoiced when the foetus appeared unruffled by this treatment. Her mood now was one of exultation, coupled with doubts as to whether it could really be true. ‘It is so naughty of me to raise your hopes when it may all be my giant nerves and my obedient imagination.’
It was not a false alarm. Exultation soon faded, to be replaced by resigned dismay. Diana disliked pregnancy, found her appearance grotesque and the delay interminable. Everything fed her fears. The nurse advised her not to engage a nanny yet: ‘Better see what happens.’ A hare got up in front of the car, a sure sign that the baby would have a hare lip. She went to hospital to have an X-ray: would she see a normal child or ‘a kinkajoo or a big Buddha? I shall be surprised at nothing.’ She went into labour, or thought she did, on the road between Bognor and London and was delighted that she would get it all over ‘before they could sharpen their knives – but alas, the little bugger gave one look and retired again. I guess he knows when he’s well off.’ She had to wait another week before she went off to Lady Carnarvon’s nursing home, pale-faced, smiling gallantly, casting a last, longing look at the house which she knew she would never see again.
It was, in fact, a difficult birth. Her son was born by Caesarean section – in honour of which Julius was added to the traditional Manners name of John – and for several hours Diana’s life was in some danger. She quickly recovered, however, and settled down to ensure her son a proper start in life. The richest among her friends, including Lord Beaverbrook and the Aga Khan, were included among the godparents. A 150-year-old cradle was refurbished for the lying-in-state. And then, after all her trouble, the baby developed jaundice just before the christening. A yellow baby would never do. John Julius was powdered and rouged, doped, covered with a film of muslin and exposed triumphantly at the ceremony. All agreed it was a great success and mother and baby were both exceptionally handsome.
With this behind her, Diana felt that her duty as a mother was largely done for the next few years. She had little enthusiasm for babies, nor indeed for children except her own. Her Paget nieces so disliked her when they were young that they wrote her name on the bottom of their boots and tramped to and fro on the beaches of Anglesey, hoping they would wear her out. They found her brusque, insensitive, intolerant of their efforts, indisposed to make concessions for their youth. ‘Lady Diana, despite her innumerable social duties, visits the nursery regularly,’ reported the Sunday Express reverently, but the visits were cursory and day-to-day management was left to nannies and nursemaids. The fact that babies bored her did not, however, stop her worrying distractedly if anything seemed to be going wrong. Duff did not share her concern. She rushed to him in anguish because John Julius was losing weight. ‘So for God’s sake stuff the little bugger up with nourishing vitamins!’ Duff retorted.
Things changed dramatically once the child had a mind of its own. From the time that he was four or five Diana took a close, continual and passionate interest in John Julius’s education. Greek myths and British history were the staples of good scholarship; Diana pounded these into her son whenever an opportunity arose and often when others might have said that it did not – in church, for instance, or during a dull play. Pictures of the English kings were cut from a book and pasted on a screen for easy memorizing. Learning by heart was all-important; pocket-money had to be earned by recitation. Geography was capital cities, in particular those about which she knew; she was keen on Quito but bored by Caracas. Arithmetic was no doubt useful but not a subject about which a gentleman need concern himself unduly. French was essential. The Duchess was outraged when Diana dragged her son off to France with a temperature and without Nanny. The noise and bustle, she feared, would ‘tire that sensitive brain and start an inward fretting. It’s not economy that makes her go without Nurse or Maid, but to make him have intensive French talking.’
The sensitive brain survived. At least once a week it was taken on an outing, to a cinema or perhaps the Aquarium. Diana did all the things that Nanny didn’t do, like race John Julius down the street. She ran like the wind and won the parents’ race at her son’s school with hardly any cheating. All plans were abandoned if they were in a car and a fire-engine was seen. Diana would cling to its tail, helter skelter through red lights and one-way streets until the two of them could ooh and aah contentedly at the scene of the disaster. One thing she failed to instil in her son, however, was her arrant lawlessness. John Julius could never accustom himself to his mother’s headlong charges across the Sussex downs, ignoring signs forbidding entry, pushing aside barriers, putting the sheep to flight; still less accept her conviction that in city traffic it was a case of sauve qui peut and damned be he who first cried, ‘Hold, enough!’
There were plenty of people who alleged that John Julius was not Duff’s son. It is curious how many of Diana’s acquaintances, let alone those who knew her only through the newspapers, believed that she was sexually promiscuous, almost degenerate. Beverley Nichols described what he thought her to be in 1927 and the novel was sent to Duff: ‘There is the old, old character of the heartless society girl who rogers right and left and thinks it vulgar to fall in love. That is what they think you are – poor oafs!’ A constituent wrote to inquire about the forthcoming divorce in which the Duke of Kent was to be cited as co-respondent. Scandalmongers delighted in putting Diana into bed with one man or another, sometimes two at once. Diana was mildly flattered by such canards. She did not wish to be accused of infidelities, but would have regretted it if nobody had thou
ght her capable of them. Randolph Churchill was told by a woman in Algiers that Diana was a grande amoureuse. He passed it on to Evelyn Waugh, who laughed heartily. Diana was indignant. ‘How the hell can he tell if I am or not? Just because I never responded to his dribbling, dwarfish little amorous singeries, he need not be so sure!’ John Julius’s birth after so many years of childless marriage was enough to set the gossips buzzing. Michael Herbert was one of the putative fathers, St John Hutchinson, Reinhardt; but most popular candidate of all was Conrad Russell.
*
Conrad Russell was first cousin to the Duke of Bedford, as individual as any member of that quirky family and far more amiable than most of them. Six feet four inches tall, stooping under a thatch of white hair, huge feet splayed out in penguin gait, his features were noble and yet humorous, a fair indication of the strange intelligence that lay within. He had started life as a stockjobber, made some money, disliked the process and retreated to the country, where he farmed with limited success but total dedication. He had a small house at Mells and from this base tranquilly cultivated his crops, his mind and his friendships. Himself ascetic, he was indulgent towards the self-indulgence of others. Wise without being worldly-wise, infinitely interested in the vagaries of others, protected by a shield of innocence, he was almost unshockable: ‘What strange and curious things you tell me,’ he would exclaim with mild delight. ‘I love my Conrad with a C because he is courageous and cuddlesome and courtly and a charmer of charmers,’ Diana wrote to him on his birthday. An aura of charm hung around him, not the superficial charm that can be turned on and off like a light, but the charm that stems from benevolence and joy of life. He was a profoundly happy man and loved to make others happy too. ‘I think,’ he once told Edwin Montagu, ‘that one’s first duty is to make life as pleasant as one can for the people one is thrown with.’
Diana had known his brothers for years but really became aware of Conrad for the first time when visiting Mells during the run of The Miracle at Cardiff. She liked him immediately and, on an impulse, asked him to come back to Cardiff with her to see the show. To her astonishment, he accepted. At once she lost her nerve. How would she entertain this strange, silent man? She confessed her doubts to Katharine Asquith and was reassured; Conrad was exactly the sort of man she would like. And so they went off together ‘and he loved The Miracle, and afterwards we had a little supper, and in the morning we walked the town and he held my hand in his pocket for it was so cold, and he told me he loved me, and he told me the same every day until he lost consciousness in death’. ‘Cardiff is engraved on my heart,’ Conrad wrote to her on his return. ‘You were so perfect to me and I have no words to thank you for your sweetness.’
Diana’s acceptance by Conrad was total. Within a few months she received the ultimate accolade when Moonshine’s heifer calf was christened Diana in her honour. ‘You can tell Diana by her white rump,’ was the future instruction to visitors. As well as this came a constant stream of presents; jewellery for the most part but many other lesser trinkets designed to please or amuse her. Diana constantly reproached herself for accepting so much, but as constantly overruled her conscience on the subject; ‘I should help my fool and his money to keep together – but there it is, I am weak as water and can’t but be excited to death about the present.’ To have curbed Conrad’s generosity would have been to deprive him of a signal pleasure – ‘just about the most roaring, stamping, cracking, galloping fun I ever had in my life,’ as he told a censorious neighbour. His sisters, who felt their bachelor brother to be their private property, deplored the relationship and tried to point out its dangers. Conrad was not impressed. ‘I suppose they see me as a besotted poor fool helplessly in the clutches of a heartless, frivolous whore who is just amusing herself by making a fool of me.’
They corresponded endlessly. Conrad delighted in long, gossipy letters; rambling idiosyncratically around the events on his farm, the movement of his shares, visitors to Mells, books, politics and the wonders of Diana. Diana’s replies tended to be brisker and briefer except on her travels, when she would write diary-letters giving a detailed picture of her doing: ‘You scribe in your day-book, ja?’ as she was asked in Kiel. The arrival of one of Conrad’s letters was always a moment for rejoicing. Diana slipped back gratefully into his tranquil world and persuaded herself that she would like to share it: ‘If only I could live in this simplicity, how happy I could be – appreciative of all – smooth and collected – time for all – to read The Times, to read books, dream more agreeably, no stuffing, no boozing, no smoking, no pretending.’
Give me, O indulgent fate!
Give me yet before I die,
A sweet yet absolute retreat
Through paths so lost and trees so high
That the world may ne’er invade
Through such windings and such shade
My unshaken liberty.
Diana, as no doubt the Countess of Winchilsea, would have been horrified if an indulgent fate had granted her request, but both liked to dream of pastoral felicity and Diana found it vicariously in Conrad’s letters.
Conrad relished platonic flirtations with beautiful, high-spirited and usually high-born women. Daphne Weymouth, though second to Diana, was a warm favourite. ‘I came up to London yesterday afternoon,’ Conrad told Diana, ‘and made a bee-line for Lady Weymouth’s bedroom. It was unlucky that Henry her husband had the same idea. I mustn’t complain. He has as good a right to be there as I have.’ But with Lady Weymouth, as with Diana, the relationship stopped at hand-holding and friendly kisses. The fact that he wanted no more was one of the many things about Conrad which endeared him to Diana. He was loving but sexually unexacting. This was so obvious to most people who knew him well that it is surprising to find some of them firmly believing the contrary. Evelyn Waugh, for one, was confident there was more to the relationship than platonic love. Kommer, on the other hand, elected to be jealous of Waugh. ‘If he has to be jealous of anyone it really might be me,’ commented Conrad. ‘It is galling to think that Wu is considered more dangerous than me.’ Conrad himself was above jealousy:
I believe in your affection for me, dear Diana, and I think you love me far, far beyond my deserts. I have not lost my surprise at it. I shouldn’t wonder if you liked other men – some better than me possibly – but what can I do about it? And suppose you are Lord Beaverbrook or Albert’s mistress? I don’t see what I can do about it. You wouldn’t be likely to give them up to please me. I should make myself ridiculous by asking you to.
To those who were determined to find an alternative father for John Julius, and who rejected Conrad, if for no other reason than that he only came into Diana’s life three years after her son’s birth, Albert Ashfield seemed a hopeful substitute. Though born in England, Lord Ashfield had spent most of his life in the United States before he was called back to manage London’s fledgeling underground system, and become celebrated as ‘Lord Straphanger’ and the creator of London Transport. Diana met him when she was hired by Kensitas to find captains of industry ready to advertise cigarettes. Beaverbrook introduced her to Ashfield, who in turn passed her on to Thomas Lipton but pledged himself to help her in any other way. He proved himself the staunchest of friends until his death. When she complained of a shortage of transport during an electoral campaign, he provided a motor-car and chauffeur which arrived every day with a white camellia for her to pin in her cap. But though Diana appreciated his wealth, his power, his determination to make all smooth before her; though, indeed, she loved him dearly; it was not a relationship with passion in it. Simply through his constant importunity, Lord Wimborne might have appeared a more formidable threat to her fidelity, but by now she had perfected her technique for keeping him at bay. The fact that Conrad did not include him with Ashfield and Beaverbrook in his list of putative lovers would have caused Wimborne great offence but was an accurate estimate of his position.
Beaverbrook was a more interesting case. Diana was fascinated by him, slightly fri
ghtened of him, very conscious of the fact that Duff could not endure him and finding this, in a perverse way, something of an attraction. The two men clashed most fiercely at the time of the Westminster by-election. Duff was champion of the official Conservatives supporting Baldwin; the press lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook mounted a spectacular barrage in favour of the anti-Baldwin Conservative, Sir Ernest Petter; no other candidate stood. The full ferocity of Beaverbrook’s attack was, however, muted by his affection for Diana. At one moment he could have damaged Duff’s campaign, perhaps even destroyed his career, if he had published some slanderous remarks Duff had rashly made about his opponent’s war record. Diana went to plead with him. ‘I know what you’ve come for,’ he grunted, and promised not merely to suppress the news himself but to try to get the press as a whole to do the same. He succeeded. Another time one of his favourites produced some especially vituperative copy about Duff. Beaverbrook censored it. ‘Do you love your wife?’ he asked. ‘Well, I love Duff Cooper’s wife, so lay off him!’
With the official Conservative party in disarray, Duff needed all the help he could get. The Duchess of Rutland and Emerald Cunard attended all Petter’s meetings, ostentatiously reading pro-Baldwin newspapers. Whenever they heard mention of Beaverbrook or Rothermere they would raise their eyebrows and exclaim, ‘Degenerates, they’re both degenerates!’ A dignified butler informed one of Duff’s supporters that he would be voting for Petter, since Sir Ernest was a man of title while Mr Cooper was merely a clerk in an office, and a foreign office at that. Butlers and the like were Diana’s especial responsibility. She was delegated to address the housemaids at the Ritz – ‘but I can’t even address a golf ball,’ she protested plaintively – and then held a meeting at 85 Eaton Square for the assembled domestic servants of the neighbourhood. Her message was admirably free of political content. ‘My husband is a good candidate,’ she told them. ‘I don’t know if any of my staff are here. They would tell you I’ve never had a bit of trouble with him.’ The meeting was such a success that two more proved necessary. Duff triumphed over Petter and the press lords by more than five thousand votes.
Diana Cooper Page 23