It was a perceptive judgment. Only a few days later, Diana came to a decision that would throw terror into the hearts of all three Curzon sisters. Her marriage, she had come to believe, was a mistake, and she intended to leave her husband. Only someone supremely confident in her ability to survive in a social world hostile to divorce, and uncaring of family and public opinion, would have abandoned a man so kind, good-looking, loving and rich and by whom she had two children.
The Mosleys, who planned a large family Christmas with Irene, Baba, Fruity and the Metcalfe children, to be followed by a New Year house party, took a house in Yarlington, Somerset, for the holiday. Within two hours of Fruity’s arrival at teatime on Christmas Eve, there was a falling-out between him and Baba, who disappeared to bed, refused to come down to dinner and banished her husband to a dressing room for the night.
The arrival of Brendan Bracken, Bob Boothby and the Sitwells restored the temperature, and on Christmas Day Fruity insisted on being Father Christmas. Almost at once, the children found his clothes hanging in the downstairs lavatory and the cry went up: “Father Christmas has left his clothes behind!” Then, from behind his white cotton-wool beard, came Fruity’s unmistakable voice as he sought to distribute the presents: “Read the bloody names out, I can see nothing!”
Boxing Day afternoon was notable for its discussions and arguments over the New Year’s Eve party planned by Cim: what to do and how to conceal it from the gossip columnists, who had already written it up and asked to come down and photograph the guests. Among them, invited by Cimmie—in a spirit of fatalism, bravado or altruistic love for Tom—was Diana Guinness.
19
“Goodbye My Buffy”
In January 1933 Diana Guinness took a small house in Eaton Square, just around the corner from Tom’s bachelor flat. Although Tom had told both Cimmie and Diana that he did not intend to leave his wife, the Curzon sisters found this hard to believe. To them, the knowledge that this young woman had left her husband and virtually set herself up as a mistress within yards of her lover’s pied-à-terre was a clear proof that she intended to lure him away from Cimmie. “My heart is in my boots over the hell incarnate beloved Cim is going through over Diana Guinness bitching up her life,” wrote Irene. Diana called it “nailing my colours to the mast.” What was perfectly clear to all of them was that the affair with Diana was different in kind and quality from any of Tom’s previous liaisons.
All through that spring, Cimmie suffered bitterly. She knew she was no longer as attractive as she had been and the presence in her husband’s life of this young beauty, with her charm, ease of manner and joyous, uncomplicated approach to life, made her feel fearful and defeated. Diana was told by her family and friends that she was ruining her life—her three younger sisters were forbidden to visit her—but she cared not a whit. That Diana was prepared to court social ostracism and set herself up openly as Tom’s mistress seemed to Cimmie evidence of the younger woman’s implacability, while in Tom’s eyes, it could hardly have been a greater compliment.
Cimmie might have worried less had she known that her husband was seeing Baba almost as frequently as he saw Diana. Baba had been fascinated by her brother-in-law ever since, as a schoolgirl of sixteen, she had seen her adored older sister and her glamorous bridegroom as the incarnation of romance. From the start, Tom had treated his sister-in-law with a teasing intimacy, often involving physical horseplay that sometimes went too far (“Baba furious when Tom dropped her in the bath,” wrote Irene on one of these occasions).
Baba’s growing interest in matters political and her longing for intelligent company brought her even more under the sway of Tom’s powerful personality. Family loyalty apart, she was genuinely fascinated by the political ideas he expounded with such vision and clarity, and with Diana Guinness’s arrival on the scene, she was able to justify her increasing pleasure in his company by telling herself that any influence other than Diana’s was good for her sister’s marriage.
As a result Tom, who saw Diana for lunch or dinner two or three times a week, saw Baba almost as frequently. Sometimes he saw both women as well as his wife on the same day, necessitating exactly the kind of emotional juggling he enjoyed. Often all three of them turned up at the fascist meetings he now held regularly, striding onto plinth or platform with a bodyguard of muscular young stewards “to incite the faithful and intimidate the enemy.”
Fascism, it seemed, was on the march. In Germany the new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had been in power since the end of January, his carefully choreographed public meetings evoking a quasi-religious response from a disheartened and impoverished people. Although many older people had voted for the Nazis, the average age of party members was thirty-two; and much of its message was to youth, a pattern followed by Tom with his call to British youth to throw over the “tired old men” of the government.
Not everyone believed that he was on the right track. “We discussed Mosley’s position and I said that his fatal miscalculation was in believing that you could create a youth consciousness in Britain,” wrote Robert Bernays, the Liberal MP for Bristol North, in his diary for March 1. “They said too that he had gambled on a course and had not realised how tremendous were the forces that made for stability. Archie Sinclair said his trouble was lack of patience. He had determined, in 1924, to be Prime Minister in 12 years. If he hadn’t been in so much of a hurry about it, he could have been.”
Tom, however, saw his future as the powerful, charismatic leader of a political force that would sweep away the old, exhausted parties. After his second visit to Mussolini in April 1933 he wrote in his magazine The Blackshirt: “Fascism is the greatest creed that western civilisation has ever given to the world.”
In the same month Irene also had a significant meeting. She had accepted an invitation from her friends Peter and Mary Hordern to stay at the villa they had taken on Lake Maggiore. The Horderns were already there, but Peter suggested that his brother Bill should drive her out to Italy with Sheila Graham, a young girl whose father, Miles, was already there.
Miles Graham was a good-looking man of exactly Irene’s age, divorced from his wife Evelyn, a daughter of the earl of Lovelace. Their children, Sheila and Clyde, were largely brought up by Miles’s mother, Ellen, married to Lord Askwith. Miles was of medium height, his military bearing emphasized by an athletic figure. Good-looking, clever—he had been a scholar at Eton—and virile, he was extremely attractive to women and for years had pursued a successful affair with the society beauty Lady Portarlington. Only those who knew him well realized that he possessed a fiendish temper. He was once supposed to have chased Winnie Portarlington around his drawing room with a knife.
He was also extremely ambitious. In that spring of 1933, the most important woman in his life was his mother, with whom he had an exceptionally close bond. This powerful personality, who had successfully brought up her own children through her writing, did her best to further Miles’s interests in every way possible. Worldly and sophisticated, Lady Askwith regarded his liaison with Lady Portarlington as a feather in his cap rather than a moral blight. Recently, he had been suffering from a mysterious illness that today might have been diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: its main symptoms were exhaustion of mind and body. When he wrote to her on March 12 from his house in Little Stanhope Street that he hoped to go for a month to the Italian lakes “for sunbathing, which the doctor strongly recommends,” Ellen Askwith was delighted.
He added: “I have been thinking a good deal about politics lately—if only the new businesses succeed and they get used to my absence it might be a good opportunity to find an opening. I am 37 and it’s nearly time to begin.” Both of them were to bear this in mind in the months to come.
Irene set off on April 12 with Bill Hordern and Sheila, who had met neither of them before, a prospect her father seemed to think would be appealing rather than terrifying. “It must be an exciting idea for her to motor across Europe with two unknown people,” he wrote to his mother. “I
know Bill Hordern will be nice to her. Lady Ravensdale I hardly know but they say she likes children. All my best love Mummy darling. I miss you very much sometimes. Your darling Manikin.” In the event, Sheila disliked Irene so much that she put a metal model of Frankfurt Cathedral on Irene’s seat in the car, hoping that the spire would wound her in the bottom. Graciously, Irene overlooked it.
Miles soon realized that this hardly known fellow guest could be one of the most helpful stepping-stones to his planned Westminster career. Irene’s dark good looks were in full flower, her energetic tennis playing appealed to his sporting side and her genuine kindness promised warmth in a stepmother. Above all, her wealth, her title and the resonance of the Curzon name would add immense luster to the pretensions of any would-be Conservative MP.
On April 22 he proposed to her. As her diary records ecstatically: “Miles strolled in on me at 8:30 and we had our bubbly in Mary’s room. Lying on our beds afterward he whispered into my ear would I give him children and marry him, and of all amazing things in utter calm I said I might. I did not believe myself. He told me with amazing delicacy and loyalty of his plight with Winnie and we beat round how to deal with her.
“After tea I went shopping with Mary and Miles in the car, and I dropped in on Patrick and Loelia [Westminster] before dinner. I could not make out my complete peace after all my years of worry and pain.” Mary, all unknowingly, had said to her in the morning: “I wish I could see you and Miles married.” What Irene did not know, and what Miles naturally did not tell her, was that he half suspected his hostess was in love with him herself.
After a walk to see a pretty little church we talked of Winnie and the great quandary he was in on the way home. I entirely bouleversed Mary with our news. She was wondrous sweet to me in begging me to get married out here quick or else Winnie would come charging out. I shall never forget the beauty of Miles’s speech to me in the dining room. He was crying and holding on to my breast and some time he told me I could still take it as a joke and call it all off.
For Irene, tied up for so long in a hopeless love affair, conscious of the passing of time and the dwindling hope of the children she so much longed for, engagement to the personable, sought-after Miles represented sanctuary as well as happiness. Now she would be part of the magic circle, no longer subject to the faint patronizing of her younger sisters, no longer regarded as a worry, a burden or a useful stand-in.
At first all was rapture. Two days after they were engaged they became lovers. “My wedding Day,” wrote Irene at the top of that day’s page in her diary, describing how she and Miles had “climbed the mountain to our little chapel and married each other before the altar”—a detail faithfully reported by Miles to his mother.
Miles, anxious to secure his prize and aware, as Irene was not, of the undercurrents in the villa, urged her to let him get a special license in Turin and to marry him there. But when she realized the situation, she felt it her duty to stay with the distraught Mary. “At breakfast Mary was in a bad state of nerves and jabbered at Peter and when she went out Peter, Miles and I knew it was because she was in love with Miles, and her behavior in handing him over to me had been a fearful strain.”
But nothing dimmed Irene’s happiness, though she could not help noticing her sisters’ differing, and characteristic, reactions to the news of her engagement—the one all warmth and excitement, the other coolly analytical.
Beloved Cim rang up from Denham, hysterical with joy and said Nanny and Andrée [Cimmie’s former lady’s maid and now housekeeper at Denham] had cried for half an hour. She gave a heavenly joy in her talk and took it as a lovely fairy story.
Baba from Paris a few moments later was much more froide and comme il faut and said what was his business and his appearance and who or what was he. Not much of Cim’s lovely warm thrill. Peter and Mary had dined upstairs which gave Miles and me a chance of peace alone downstairs.
Mary behaved like a jealous child unwilling to give up its toy. A mere week after the engagement, Irene found her hostess hysterical, wild and screaming, refusing to allow her husband into the room. Irene managed to calm her eventually and tried to console the wretched Peter.
Then we talked the matter over [she wrote that night]. We all knew the basis of it. She is madly in love with Miles. I felt she had staged the whole scene.
My happiness was shattered when Miles took me to my room by him walking up and down in a frenzy and saying I had better call it off. Obviously I was only obsessed by him temporarily and I was doubtful of him. Mary had told him I was uncertain how good a mind he had got. Oh! the cruelty of it. Spent a nightmarish night, feeling desolate and wanting to chuck it all. I nearly went mad.
Next day everything was sunshine again, with Miles back on form, chat, giggling, games of backgammon, gaiety and fun and telegrams of congratulation from the two eldest Mosley children and Tom, “who hoped for a lot of little barons.” There was even a “marvellous” letter from his mother that brought tears to her eyes.
Mary was not done yet. She did everything she could to sabotage Irene’s happiness, from telling her that Miles was making up to another female guest to running him down in every way. When Mary’s husband, Peter, agreed with this judgment, calling Miles slick, a libertine and no companion for Irene at all, she was plunged in gloom but managed to dress for dinner in a devastating black dress and diamonds.
After dinner Miles, unable to guess what was wrong with her, came in to see her. “I lay holding his hand in dumb crying agony. I asked him to lie in the other bed and hold my hand all night. When he went back to undress Mary charged in on him and slated him and called him a cad and a brute and if he would not be nice to her she would ruin him and me and never stop working against us.”
Mary continued to do her best to prise Miles away from Irene, bombarding him with letters and saying that Irene had told her he was “no good sexually to her”—a canard she quickly disposed of. Irene would have been even happier had she seen the entry in Lady Askwith’s diary: “A perfectly delightful letter—the letter of my dreams—from Irene.”
She and Miles decided that the only thing to do was to go away together. “From then on the world—my world—seemed to expand in peace and beauty . . . it was delicious dressing myself to look my best and going down to dinner with Miles. We got the band to play which got us all ‘woosy.’ ” The only sore spot was a telegram from Lady Portarlington claiming that she had only heard of their engagement at a dinner party, to which Miles wired back tartly that he had written to her before anyone else and the letter must have gone astray. “Yet another letter gone astray,” she responded equally crisply.
Irene, who thought that Win Portarlington was probably lying, tried to smooth matters over by persuading Miles to let her write a letter saying that every effort had been made to tell her before anyone, after what she had meant to him for years, and together they took the letter to the post. On the way back, hearing music, they dropped in at a bar where people were dancing. “They played Tauber again for us and the man crooned and oh! it was heaven, and the moon and the nightingales from our balcony before we went to bed were the Garden of Eden. The nightingales chortled all night.” It was to be their last uncomplicatedly happy evening.
Soon these dramatic events would pale into insignificance. At home, Cimmie, who had had kidney trouble for several months, had begun to feel other symptoms of illness. She was passing water all the time and had a severe pain in the lower part of her abdomen. Thinking it might be appendicitis, she went to her doctor.
It was an era when operations to remove the appendix were medically fashionable but riskier than today because there were as yet no antibiotics. Cimmie had had a presentiment that her condition might not be straightforward, telling Lady Mosley and Andrée that she was frightened. “I don’t think I’m going to get well,” she said. To Andrée she added: “I have been fearfully unhappy.”
Her operation, performed on May 9, 1933, appeared to go well. After it, Tom went straight
to Diana’s little house for lunch. One of the other guests—only six could fit in the dining room—was Unity Mitford.
The following day, Miles gave the house party on Lake Maggiore a shock by reading out of the Continental Daily Mail the news that Cim had been operated on for appendicitis the day before and was doing well. Irene, who wired Tom in a frenzy, got a reassuring response, although she wept when she realized that it probably meant no Cimmie at her wedding. “Baba and Fruity mean nothing to me at it,” she wrote that night.
Another telegram from Tom told her that Cim had had a bad night but that progress, though slow, was definite. Irene’s worry was such that she could not sleep; the following morning she and Miles wired Tom to ask whether they should postpone their wedding or go ahead with it, as planned, either on May 22 or 23. It crossed with a telegram from Tom that arrived in the early evening: “Cim very seriously ill. Baba and doctors do not suggest your coming home. Will wire further developments.”
Irene, demented with worry, tried to ring Tom’s mother’s flat, a long-drawn-out performance in those days when every call had to go through an operator—several, in the case of a foreign country. As they spoke, Tom arrived from the nursing home nearby and, taking the telephone from his mother, told Irene that Cimmie’s appendix had perforated and peritonitis had set in. “Her strength was poor but she was holding her own. He would not urge me to come home but I must do what I felt like,” records her diary.
Though terrified of flying, Irene was determined to get home as quickly as possible; within minutes, Miles had found out the times of flights and connecting trains. Her maid Violet packed one small suitcase for them both; at seven the following morning, May 15, they began the long journey by train and plane, with several changes, finally arriving at Croydon airfield at 9:05 p.m., to be met by “sweet Baba, a little lone figure.” They went directly to Deanery Street. “Miles seemed to like my house and old Winks,” wrote Irene, “and we were so happy with each other that last evening before doom broke over us.”
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 21