Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  ‘A sort of shout of praise went up for Duff,’ she told Cecil Beaton. ‘He would have been so triumphantly pleased with it all; pleased with me too, I think.’ As The British Grenadiers died away and she prepared to leave London, she congratulated herself on having survived a painful ordeal with courage and fortitude. She suspected that the true ordeal was just about to begin.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘WHAT’S THAT LADY FOR?’

  For the last thirty-five years, Duff had been the centre of Diana’s existence. All her activities had been subordinated to his, even when she had pursued her career in the cinema and theatre it had been with the aim of making enough money to launch him as a politician. Half the pleasure she derived from her friends, her sight-seeing, her social life, lay in the sagas into which she would weave her doings for Duff’s entertainment. When they were apart no day went by without her writing to him, even after a few hours’ separation they would meet to an explosion of talk and laughter. In his absence she felt herself no more than half a person. She could discern no purpose for her life. She had once heard a child peer in wild surmise at Lady Juliet Duff, turn to its mother and inquire: ‘What’s that lady for?’ Now she asked the same question about herself and could find no satisfactory answer. She wrote to Evelyn Waugh a few months after Duff died:

  You have never, I think, known real grief. Panic, melancholia, madness, night-sweats, we’ve all known for most of our lives, you and me particularly. I’m not sure you know human love in the way I do. You have faith and mysticism, intense inner interests, a diverting, virile mind, gusto for vengeance and destruction if necessary, a fancy, a gospel. What you can’t imagine is a creature with a certain incandescent aura and nothing within but a beating, frightened heart built round and for Duff … I have had as you can imagine since January a lot of the solitude that you advise. The ‘reflection’ alas! is as it always has been, morbid, unedifying – vain and dangerous unless made healthy by the company of friends. For two days I am quite alone in these empty rooms with one thought, one prayer – ‘Let it end now’; an absurd feminine desire to die in the same way exactly as Duff. The ‘good account’ grief has turned me to is fearlessness of death, so let it come now before custom of living disinclines me for dying. The summing-up is that one survives as best one can, either by spiritual or worldly ways. I imagine as a rule by one’s habitual ways. My way has always been friends and distraction, you have always disliked it and condemned it, but in these dreadful days one must be thankful and lenient to the way found, for really there is no choice.

  ‘Friends and distraction’ were Diana’s formula for survival; distraction mainly in travel. Friends clamoured for the privilege of helping her. Her instinct was to run away, but she needed people to run with her. ‘They pass the old torch from hand to hand,’ she wrote: Alastair Forbes to Enid Jones to David Herbert to Jenny Crosse to Paddy Leigh Fermor. With Ali Forbes she paused briefly at Chantilly where another group of the faithful had gathered. It was the place she most feared to revisit, but though her time there was bad, it was not as impossibly bad as she had dreaded. Paul Louis Weiller gave a luncheon for her – ‘I, of course, splendid – but I can’t think how, unless Duff is helping. I really think he must be.’ Then she was off on her restless ramblings: to Madrid with Ali Forbes; Gibraltar with Enid Bagnold; Tangier with David Herbert. ‘I’m all right,’ she told John Julius. ‘Don’t worry for me. It’s only sometimes I can’t bear it and talk aloud, but I’m not mad or drunk or drugged or suicidal, all of which I’d expected.’ If only she could run fast enough, then somehow she would contrive to out-distance her memories; yet wherever she arrived she found her memories awaiting her. She was in Bologna for Duff’s birthday with Jenny Crosse – journalist daughter of Robert Graves. ‘He’d have been sixty-four – too young, my darling, too young. If I could get the cabin out of my mind it would help. Meredith says the past is blotted out, and if you taste oblivion of an hour, so shorten you the stature of your soul, but those two days obliterated would strengthen my soul, I’m sure.’

  With Paddy Leigh Fermor she went to spend a night with Berenson in the villa where she and Duff had passed part of their honeymoon. ‘Tell me, my darling, how it happened,’ the old man asked. Diana told him how calmly and painlessly Duff had died, ‘and he put his frail eighty-nine-year-old hands over his face and cried large tears’. Then Susan Mary Patten took on the torch. ‘Dope her with Chianti!’ had been Jenny Crosse’s advice, and at every station a bottle was procured and poured into the acquiescent victim. In Rome she had been sad and tired, but in a little Greek coaster bucketing out to Corfu she began to revive. Her recovery was further encouraged when the ambassadorial Rolls Royce failed to collect them from a remote village eleven hours from Athens. ‘Now we shall really travel‚’ announced Diana exultantly. She persuaded the local hotelier to write on a sheet of paper: ‘We do not speak, understand or read Greek and we must get to Athens. Can you help us?’ Armed with this they embarked on a series of uncomfortable journeys on local buses along lamentable roads and in a heavy storm – ‘Diana particularly pleased because the bus was jammed and every time it stopped the engine failed.’

  It was material worthy of a saga for the delectation of Duff, but there was no Duff. Every so often the recollection of her misery would catch up with her. At Olympia the beauty of the ruins broke down her reserve and she walked along sobbing piteously while Susan Mary tried to soothe her by reading from the guidebook in her most monotonous voice. ‘I had a bad cry because great beauty makes loss too near,’ she told Leigh Fermor. This letter provoked the complaint that even by her own standards it was exceptionally difficult to decipher. A letter to Jenny Crosse inspired still more offensive congratulations on the speed with which she had mastered Greek writing. ‘You can’t call that a good sign,’ Diana wrote plaintively to John Julius. ‘Can you explain? It is not re-reading them? Pam Berry used to say my letters made her very anxious.’

  It was May before she finished her Greek travels. Enid Jones suggested that she join her in an expedition to Basutoland, where she would find quiet at the top of a mountain. Diana knew this would not suit her. ‘It’s not in my nature to be quiet. I have no wealth within me. All stimulus has to come through my eyes and ears and movement. Once still, I’m listless and blank and tortured by dread thought.’ She could have spun out her odyssey by a few more visits, but it was six months since she had spent more than a single night at Chantilly and she hardly dared think what state the house and gardens were now in. As she grew nearer she prayed the journey would never end, knowing that the quiet of the house, Duff’s deserted desk, the empty bedroom, would bring home to her, as nothing else could do, the loneliness that lay before her. ‘It’s arriving that’s the rub,’ she told John Julius. The Italian servants were dreaming of making their life in America; a new gardener had to be found; her tenancy was in question; a vista of domestic disorder opened before her as the train drew into the Gare de l’Est and she prepared for the last lap of her journey – ‘Good morning Arturo. Good morning Percy. Bonjour Paris. Christ have mercy!’

  A new gardener was indeed a first essential. The garden had been transformed into jungle: ‘It’s as dense as virgin forest in Sumatra. Great gourds rot on the ground, Jerusalem artichokes, grown to monstrous height, meet across its vast width.’ Quarmi, the drunken incumbent, seemed hardly to have put his nose outside the local bistro. Now carbuncles sprouted from his head so that he looked like a monstrous pumpkin, his thighs had shrunk to nothing through colic and diarrhoea. ‘No one will go into his room,’ wrote Diana in despair. ‘Have I got this stinking albatross round my neck for life? Must I abandon the place to be free of him?’ She washed him and got him sober and took him to another potential employer, but when it came to the point he burst into tears and said he couldn’t bear to leave. So back he came, and Diana resignedly began to advertise for an undergardener.

  She endured Chantilly for two months before she fled to England. The craving to be constantly o
n the move had now diminished; she could endure brief inactivity, time for reflection. The next few years, however, were above all ones of travel. ‘You are such a kingfisher,’ complained Lady McEwen. ‘A flash of blue, a swirl and you are gone. “Diana is in London!” “No, where, where?” “I think she is leaving this morning.” “She may be back for one day next week.” “She is staying with Chips” – “No, with Oggie” – “No, on top of the Monument.” Always poised for flight from your own sad heart.’

  An expedition to North Africa with Ali Forbes and Iris Tree was marred by cold, wet weather, but at least got Diana away from Chantilly for two winter months. They made valiant efforts to drug themselves with hashish but achieved nothing by puffing innumerable pipes. Then Albert, the Arab guide, told them the rich ate it in a syrupy cake. Diana gave him ten shillings and he returned with a boot-blacking tin filled with the foetid mixture. They ate it with white sugar. ‘It tasted rather good, of fig paste, and Iris wrote incomprehensible poems all night and Ali had bad dreams and I had my usual horrid one.’ She was in a mood to find degeneracy in all she saw: the architecture, contaminated by Western fashions; the food – ‘half a burnt sheep, schlocky puddings eaten with wooden spoons, then artichokes smothering what we’ve got used to calling somebody’s feet’; the sordid beggars; the tasteless dancing. ‘What happened to the Arabs?’ she asked indignantly.

  They could once build and decorate and calculate, write and fight. We know Empires have lost their dominance, but Portugal is there, and Holland and Greece and Rome and France and poor old England, searching for beauty or some palliative or new morality. These hopeless Arabs search for nothing, a radio perhaps if you are a townsman, a street arab. Their women are beasts of burden, without a line or a harmony, huddled into shapeless sacks, with no idea, let alone hope of emerging from their muffled chrysalis. Ugh! I’ve had Arabs.

  Hardly returned from Africa she was writing to Stavros Niarchos to ask whether he would charter his boat to her. Niarchos did better and offered it free of charge. For several years a Mediterranean cruise in his yacht was part of the summer schedule. Paul Louis Weiller was another rich friend who put himself out to entertain her. Every summer she stayed at La Reine Jeanne, his house near Le Lavandou, ‘a Babylon of beauty and shame and flesh and hedonism’. In 1955 Queen Soraya was the main attraction, with ‘an invalidish senator, son of Ambassador Kennedy’ in a supporting role. The following year the Charlie Chaplins and the David Nivens were in the party. Diana felt ill at ease: ‘I don’t swim, except alone, I don’t sunbathe, and I can’t cha-cha and rock and roll as all the girls and Paul Louis do.’ Instead, she sat in a corner and read Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle; ‘excellent. It saved my reason.’ She was even more depressed when Onassis turned up in his yacht, though her reputation rose when she announced Greta Garbo was a guest, and soared when the actress fell on Diana’s neck and wouldn’t leave her. Twenty-seven guests from La Reine Jeanne went to dine aboard the Christina. The fountains played, the hi-fi reverberated, and the pool changed its vivid lighting from scarlet to emerald to blazing white ‘so that the all-but-naked swimmers darted and dived like terrified goldfish’. Once Diana would have relished it, now she felt sadly out of place. ‘I never got going at all. I had a strange aloof feeling that I was dead and watching the next century.’ She concealed her misery well; to at least one person on Christina that night she seemed radiantly beautiful and the liveliest, most interesting person there.

  At sixty-five she found, almost to her surprise, that the bourgeois virtues of Switzerland suited her far better than these meretricious splendours. She appreciated the order and the prosperity, the clean old men, the little girls with proper plaits and bows. All the animals were sleek and cared for; the cats never strayed; the cows were shaggy and serene, ‘with graven bells on handsome collars fastened with buckles worthy of a bishop’s shoes. I love the wholesome goodness of it all, rich earth and care, especially after the exquisite disorder of Italy.’

  But it was Italy that she visited most often. In Rome she found again la bande of the Paris Embassy, this time predominantly English but providing the same blend of artists and writers, talented, light-hearted, determined to enjoy life to the full. There was Jenny Crosse, married to Patrick Crosse, of Reuter’s; Judy Montagu, Venetia Montagu’s daughter, now married to the art-historian, Milton Gendel; Derek Hill, painter and Director of the British School; Iris Tree, with a one-room flat eight floors up above the Spanish Steps; Nigel Ryan, Crosse’s younger colleague, who was to become one of Diana’s closest friends in later years. They welcomed her as if she was their dearest friend and the fact that she was thirty years older than most of them was treated as a fact of entire irrelevance.

  With Jenny Crosse she went on what she knew would be a farewell visit to Berenson. Spirits were always hard to find at I Tatti, so Diana stoked up with gin in the car before they arrived. At lunch the old man complained that he felt ill and low.

  ‘Why don’t you get drunk?’ asked Jenny Crosse.

  ‘I’d much sooner die,’ he answered. ‘I’ve never been drunk.’

  ‘Nor have I.’

  ‘Have you?’ Berenson turned to Diana.

  ‘Constantly.’

  ‘But you always appear to be in good spirits. You don’t need stimulus.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve never seen me sober,’ suggested Diana.

  He was delighted by this idea. ‘I loved him as always,’ Diana told John Julius. ‘It’s so disarming a man of ninety-two being so demonstratively affectionate. I suppose it’s the same with all of us, but he makes you feel that he needs to hold your hand and that he must have one more embrace.’

  More and more she began to treat Rome as a second home, without the burdens of Chantilly and with her friends on the doorstep. With John Julius she went to visit the Pope and took him a cross to bless. Only afterwards did it occur to her that the cross was hardly suitable for the honour, made as it was out of the plaited hair of King William IV, his mistress Mrs Jordan and five of his illegitimate children, from one of whom Duff was descended.

  Wherever she went, however delightful the surroundings, congenial the company, black gloom would suddenly strike to dispel all pleasure. In October 1959 she spent what should have been an idyllic holiday in Ischia. ‘It’s too much for my familiar, my possessor,’ she told Paddy Leigh Fermor. ‘He creeps in through any cranny, black and stinking, and persuasive and plausible about life’s futility. Even drink failed me. I mustn’t go on holidays.’ The mood did not last long, within a few weeks she set out on her travels again, but it was painful while it lasted and grew no less so with the years.

  From about this time her journeys began often to be influenced by the whereabouts of John Julius and Anne, now in the Foreign Service. The relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is rarely a wholly easy one. If Anne had been meek or irresolute Diana would have overwhelmed her; but Anne was not, she was as strong-willed and as individual as Diana herself. While Duff was alive and Diana was both dependent on him and preoccupied by his needs, the two women had little over which to clash. When Duff died and John Julius was invested with much of the importance that his father had enjoyed in Diana’s life, some element of conflict became inevitable. Fortunately each respected the other’s qualities and a modus vivendi was not too painfully worked out.

  An indication of the squalls that might lie ahead had come at Vaynol the Christmas before Duff died. On Christmas Eve, when everyone moved off to bed, John Julius announced that he was going to help his mother for a few minutes. Anne felt that at such a time some attention ought to be paid to her and asked her husband to join her quickly. He did not appear for two hours, by which time Anne was thoroughly upset. Next morning she wept and hid in her room. Diana had been quite unconscious of hurting Anne by absconding with her husband; had merely felt she wanted some affection and found Duff temporarily unavailable.

  With Duff dead her needs became immeasurably greater. If John Julius and Anne neglected
to write to her when separated they were bombarded with reproaches: ‘Surely one of you could remember that I am an anxious creature and one lonely for family … I am cruelly preoccupied by your silence and lack of heart’; ‘Can your good generous hearts never understand how cruel it is to let me wait daily for the post and suffer morning and evening disappointment?’ Anne could understand her requirements but found them sometimes oppressive. When they were on holiday with the Leigh Fermors on Hydra, Diana would arrive at their bedroom door every morning at 8 a.m. ‘Come on, John Julius, Anne wants to sleep on,’ she would call, and take him off to breakfast in the village. At first Anne saw in such demands a battle for the soul, or at least the body, of John Julius, but gradually she accepted that Diana’s needs were not so extravagant; her mother-in-law was lonely, unhappy, craved attention and loved her son. Once back in London they came to an amicable if unspoken understanding. John Julius would be shared: if Diana wanted him for the evening and Anne for dinner then he must be returned promptly at 7.45. Eternally obliging, John Julius achieved the by no means easy feat of convincing both these forceful women that he was not sacrificing one in the interests of the other.

  The only time John Julius felt his mother had gone too far arose over his first diplomatic posting. A fluent Russian-speaker, he had hoped to be sent to Moscow. To his delight he was offered the chance, then suddenly Belgrade was substituted. He told his mother, who was horrified. ‘I meant you to be posted to Paris,’ she said. Only then did it come out that she had approached Eden and begged that John Julius might be sent to Paris or somewhere near. Eden had refused to interfere but had said he would come to the rescue if John Julius were despatched too far afield. This aid she had invoked when the posting to Moscow was announced, only to find him sent somewhere which seemed almost as distant and was certainly far less welcome to her son: ‘boring, music-less, only colleagues, no house, a landrover essential, no nurse will go with a child of one’, she told Paddy Leigh Fermor bitterly.