Mrs Guinness

by Lyndsy Spence

  Parental interference was kept to a minimum, with Colonel Guinness offering Bryan only one piece of advice regarding married life: ‘There is nothing so barbarous as for a husband and wife to share a bathroom.’ David had a small input, too, when he sent Diana one of his dogs – a gun-shy Labrador named Rubbish, whom she loved.

  Before she could settle into married life, Diana had to complete one more initiation into the world of an upper-class marriage. As she had done the year before, Diana travelled to Buckingham Palace, this time with Lady Evelyn, to be presented at Court as the Honourable Mrs Bryan Guinness. The nervousness she had once felt as a young debutante was replaced with a blasé attitude. It was more of an inconvenience to traipse across town to the palace, decked out in the uncomfortable formal wear, standing in the draughty throne room waiting to be paraded before the king and queen. Before her name was called, it suddenly dawned on Diana that she had not practised the tedious manoeuvrings of a curtsey. Lady Evelyn must have read her thoughts, for she leaned into Diana and whispered: ‘We ought to have been practising our curtsies all day but I forgot.’

  ‘So did I,’ Diana earnestly replied. ‘I’ve been doing household accounts.’

  ‘Household accounts!’ Lady Evelyn squealed with horror. ‘How barbarous of Bryan.’

  It seemed a natural chore for Diana, as it was a familiar sight to see Sydney sitting at her writing bureau, filling out her accounts book with great precision. It was ranked with such importance that on the day of Deborah’s birth Sydney reached for her accounts book and neatly wrote: ‘Chimney swept’, completely overlooking the arrival of the baby. Her mother’s sensible advice on running a home would have to be abandoned, along with the elegant leather-bound accounts book she had given Diana with her initials printed in gold.

  ‘Barbarous,’ Lady Evelyn repeated, and she advised Diana to spend more money.

  In spite of her new wealth, Diana had not been extravagant with Bryan’s money. She never thought of Bryan as rich – he ‘never seemed like other rich men’ – until one day she nonchalantly expressed her wish for a diamond tiara. ‘Oh,’ he casually replied, ‘there is one for you.’ It had never occurred to Bryan that Diana would have craved such opulence. And it never crossed Diana’s mind that such an expensive item would be at her disposal.

  In political circles, the general election of May 1929 was referred to as the ‘Flapper Election’, due to women over the age of 21 gaining the right to vote. Diana, who had once engaged in political discussions during her summer stay at Chartwell in 1926, abandoned her Liberal sympathies in favour of a materialistic world. This fleeting political awareness hardly mattered when it came to the 1929 general election, as Diana was still too young to vote. Bryan’s family, as with her own parents, were staunchly Conservative, and that year Colonel Guinness ran for election.

  Diana and Bryan motored down to Colonel Guinness’s constituency in Bury St Edmunds. It was a pretty Georgian house and, as with the Parisian apartment, Lady Evelyn went there so little that she had never bothered to renovate it to her Gothic tastes. Diana was suspicious of Colonel Guinness’s political career, not because she thought him corrupt, but because she was merely baffled by his circumspect outlook regarding electioneering. He was clever and a good conversationalist, but he was not very good on the platform. The entire business bored him and he often reached for his pocketbook of jokes to punctuate his speeches. Another vice he relied on was alcohol – he confessed to Diana that he drank half a bottle of champagne to get through the entire ordeal of speeches. He kept the champagne in his briefcase and drank it straight from the bottle as he travelled in his chauffeur-driven car. If this was the world of politics, Diana wanted nothing to do with it. Diana was firmly anti-Tory, and loyalty towards her in-laws meant little to her. If she had been of an age to vote, she would not have voted for Colonel Guinness, and in that case she thought it best to abstain from the polls altogether. The Tories were beaten and a new Labour government was formed. With little to do, Colonel Guinness set sail in his yacht earlier than usual.

  Still, despite this disregard for politics, Diana found it difficult to escape the subject. Bryan took her to Berlin – Germany had always been a place she wished to visit – and she told Brian Howard of their impending trip. ‘You will love Berlin, my dear, it is the gayest town in Europe; in fact, my dear, you’ll never have seen anything like it.’ Their friend’s prediction proved correct. Diana and Bryan were not accustomed to the seedy exploits they witnessed in popular German nightclubs, where men pretended to be women and vice versa. ‘Grim,’ she sniped, for that would have been a more appropriate description.

  Tom Mitford was also in Berlin, studying law at the university, and when he met with Diana and Bryan his conversation centred on politics. ‘There are fights all the time among the students,’ he told them. ‘Sozis against Nazis. The other day one lot threw the other lot out of a window.’

  ‘Out of a window?’ came Diana’s astonished reply.

  ‘Well, not a very high window. But sometimes they do kill each other,’ Tom added. It was the first time Diana had heard the expression ‘Nazi’. She asked him which side he was on. Tom thought for a moment and concluded it was the Germans’ own affair, but if he was German he would be inclined to be a Nazi.

  ‘Would you?’ asked Bryan, perhaps in disbelief.

  ‘Yes; no question.’ Tom confirmed. He justified his decision with: ‘It will be either the Nazis or the Communists.’

  For the majority of the upper classes so keen to preserve their wealth, Communism posed more of a threat.

  Germany had been an awakening for Diana; the strange nightclubs, the violent political upheaval and Bryan’s indifference to it all made her question the world around her. She was unnerved by Tom’s explanation of the Nazi Party, then considered a band of thugs, but she longed to know more. Diana’s naivety was unravelling to reveal a hardened view on the world. Bryan was still caught up in sentiment and beauty and it did not occur to him that his young wife was mentally advanced beyond his capabilities. To Bryan, she was still the epitome of sweetness.

  Taking advantage of her gilded life, Diana embraced her social position and she made new acquaintances as she entered the world of opera and theatre. Bryan, who was usually quite anti-social, approved of her enthusiasm for the arts, for he, too, was a keen theatregoer and belonged to various clubs for Sunday performances. Recalling happy memories from her childhood, Diana remembered trips to watch Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon and the Matinée Classique in Paris. Since her marriage, she realised she had overindulged: ‘It is extraordinary how boring a boring play can be, how draughty the theatre in which it is performed can seem, how unending the intervals.’ After exhausting the traditional and modern plays and the musical comedies, Diana used the theatre to gain entry into a new social circle.

  During an outing to the opera with Bryan – who preferred to watch the performance and not mingle – Diana was introduced to Emerald, Lady Cunard, the American-born socialite who, in her youth, had fabricated an entirely new persona for herself. Changing her name from Maud to Emerald (because she liked them) and surrounding herself with the arts, she became a master at cultivating a materialistic lifestyle. As usual, her box was filled with interesting artists and fellow socialites, amongst them Diana’s hero from her youth, Lytton Strachey.

  Hoping to establish common ground with Emerald, who was old enough to be her mother, Diana approached her and timidly asked, ‘You knew Helleu, didn’t you?’

  ‘Helleu?’ Emerald snapped in her mid-Atlantic accent. ‘Of course I knew Helleu. Everybody knew Helleu!’

  The remark had disturbed her and Diana learned that Emerald loathed to be reminded of dead friends, it was only the living she cared about. Bearing no grudge against Diana, Emerald invited everyone back to her home at Grosvenor Square, otherwise known by her foes as the wasps’ nest.

  Supper tables were laid out in the upstairs drawing room where the Marie Laurencin pictures hung. And f
anning the spark of conversation in a way that was rare in London, Emerald encouraged her guests to converse freely, rather than limiting them to their neighbouring guest. She often pitted her guests against one another for her own amusement and to start a raucous discussion. Bryan skirted around the current of animated chatter, wishing he were at Buckingham Street alone with Diana. Suddenly, as she was apt to do, Emerald interrupted the lively scene, and announced: ‘Come along, Mr Strachey, I want you to sit next to Diana Cooper.’

  ‘I’d rather sit next to the other Diana,’ Strachey gallantly replied.

  Lytton Strachey, who was approaching his fifth decade, seemed older than his years. Diana warmed to this thin, gently mannered man who spoke in a high pitched voice. This admiration was founded on feelings of awe, as she had worshipped him for years, having read his books which thrived on nonconformist ideals.

  Strachey was a founding member of the elite, intellectual Bloomsbury Group, and intimidated by his intelligence, Diana feared Strachey would become bored with her. To her relief, they ‘flew together like iron filings and magnet’ and conversed easily about a vast range of subjects until the early hours of the morning. Strachey liked to teach, and she was eager to learn. This unabashed admiration from Diana shone, and although outwardly shy, he was prone to compliments. Above all else, her extreme youth seemed to please him.

  But Diana’s initial feelings of unease had not been unfounded. In a letter to his fellow Bloomsbury, Roger Senhouse, Strachey spoke of his reluctance towards her, whom he confided was ‘probably too young to provide any real sustenance’.

  11

  HE-EVELYN

  The frivolity of the upper classes during the interwar era encouraged the society columns to create new stars, who achieved notoriety through merely being the offspring of the aristocracy. Diana’s celebrity was in ascent; a dizzying element for a girl who had spent her childhood as the scapegoat for sibling teases and vitriolic putdowns. Now she had what all young debutantes desired: independence achieved through a brilliant marriage, masses of stylish clothes, a house in a desirable location of London, dazzling friends and a rich, adoring husband. Despite the materialistic distractions, Diana was soon to discover she was not as completely free as she had once thought.

  Influenced by leading society magazines, namely The Tatler and The Bystander, Diana began to throw lavish parties at Buckingham Street. Along with a reluctant Bryan, she hosted a tropical themed party on board the Friendship, a riverboat permanently moored at Charing Cross Pier. It brought together the prominent figures of the Bright Young Things and fellow aristocrats, who fancied themselves to be bohemian; the latter appealing more to Bryan, than his impressionable wife. Resenting this media association with the foolishness of the Bright Young Things, Bryan failed to see how their friends compared to the attention seeking ways of this youthful set which the author Evelyn Waugh so gleefully satirised.20

  Nancy was a great friend of Evelyn Waugh and his wife, also named Evelyn, and to avoid confusion they went by the monikers of ‘He-Evelyn’ and ‘She-Evelyn’. Knowing of He-Evelyn’s desire to witness this set first hand, Nancy invited the Waughs to Diana’s tropical party. Out of place in the gaiety of the Friendship, He-Evelyn silently observed the misbehaving guests dressed in Zulu costumes and sarongs, as ordinary commuters scurried along the embankment to catch the last train home.

  The Waughs existed on the fringes of Diana and Bryan’s inner circle; He-Evelyn knew Bryan from Oxford and She-Evelyn was a close friend of Nancy, who was staying at their five-room flat at 17A Canonbury Square. He-Evelyn liked people because they amused him or he was fond of them. Sometimes he sought their company because of some oddity which delighted the novelist in him, but he confined his true friendship to a very narrow circle. This very narrow circle would soon include Diana, of whom he had read so much in the pages of magazines, and owing to such whimsical reports of beauty and privilege, He-Evelyn had already made up his mind to dislike her.

  But to Nancy’s horror, the years spent in the library of Asthall were being regressed when Diana unintentionally snared her eldest sibling’s guests. Nancy had known He-Evelyn for years,21 though one look at her younger, glamorous sister and it seemed years of loyal friendship stood for nothing. As with Tom’s friends all those years ago, he became smitten with Diana.

  Two days after the feted tropical party, the Waughs’ marriage ended due to She-Evelyn’s affair with John Heygate. They gave up the flat at Canonbury Square and Diana offered Nancy a room at Buckingham Street. He-Evelyn came to visit Nancy but it was an excuse to see Diana, the latest object of his boundless curiosity.

  When they weren’t entertaining in London, Diana and Bryan spent most of their weekends at his parents’ house, Poole Place, on the edge of the sea at Bailiffscourt. Jessica and Deborah often travelled down with their nanny. It was a family affair, with Lady Evelyn in the Huts with Grania and Murtogh. Bryan threw himself into the juvenile antics of the children, especially the two Mitford girls, and he became their most treasured playmate.

  The sea coast and wholesome atmosphere failed to amuse Diana, and her critical eye was distracted by the odd architectural structure of Poole Place, which she announced as ‘frankly hideous’. The landscape’s appearance had severely changed since her first visit to Bailiffscourt the year before; the fields were no longer barren and forest trees were planted to form a barrier against the ferocious sea wind. She teasingly talked of building a tower constructed of steel and glass, where she could admire a silent view. Perhaps it was a jibe at the noise and intrusion of family life, with children and their nannies charging in and out of the huts, raising their voices and insisting on Bryan joining in on their games. He, in turn, would coax Diana to make an effort, too.

  The tower of steel and glass was a joke, but Colonel Guinness and Lady Evelyn did not understand this form of ‘Mitford teasing’. They believed Diana wanted to spoil the landscape they had been so keen to preserve when they purchased Bailiffscourt. Pondering the unintended insult from his daughter-in-law, Colonel Guinness offered to buy Bryan a country house of his own, but Bryan objected, claiming Poole Place was as good as any. It was only when Colonel Guinness said it was unwise for families to live on top of one another, as ‘it could lead to disagreements’, that Bryan realised his father was embittered by Diana’s joke.

  If Diana’s extreme youthfulness presented in her an unguarded moment of immaturity, her generosity more than made up for her juvenile streak. Her newest friend, Evelyn Waugh – who no longer required the title He-Evelyn given the abandonment of She-Evelyn – was consumed by the breakup of his marriage. His depressed demeanour, exacerbated by the need to stay at his parents’ house in Hampstead, was proving to be a distraction to his writing. So, Diana offered him the solitude of Poole Place as an ideal retreat to finish his manuscript. Waugh had accomplished his goal of obtaining inside knowledge on how this illusive inner circle interacted and, now with his ideas intact, he needed to form the plot of his novel, Vile Bodies.

  Warned by Diana of its ‘ugliness’, Waugh set forth to Poole Place in late autumn, undeterred by the freezing coastal winds and the noisy ferocity of the English Channel. Poole Place fascinated Waugh and he was equally intrigued by the work going on in the nearby fields, where Lady Evelyn was constructing her medieval vision. She wanted gnarled trees for the newly built house to nestle in and they were bought and transferred from afar, carefully replanted in the best soil, bound together in straightjackets of thick straw and tied down with great cables and pegs. The architect, Mr Phillips, obeying Lady Evelyn’s strict orders, imported squirrels and field mice to give the new trees a touch of authenticity. Eccentricity tickled Waugh and the sight of armies of men, lorries and cranes required for the trees was no exception.

  When Diana and Bryan motored down to Poole Place to visit Waugh, he insisted on being driven over to Bramber to see the museum made by a ‘disgusting clergyman’ who had killed and stuffed tiny animals, modelling them into a variety of biza
rre poses, such as a kitten pushing a guinea pig in a pram. Always a lover of animals, it made Diana feel sick, but Waugh enjoyed the grotesque spectacle. There was sometimes menace in his brilliant eyes.22

  The friendship with Diana and Bryan happened before Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism, an act which baffled those closest to him. He must have spoken to Diana about his interest in religion, for she once remarked to a friend: ‘Evelyn prays for me.’ The phrase struck a chord of ridiculousness, prompting the friend to scoff: ‘God doesn’t listen to Evelyn.’ At this point in their friendship, Waugh could see no fault in Diana and if she was prone to a waspish remark he did not take it to heart.

  Nancy vied for Waugh’s attention and, frustrated by his lack of interest in her, she wrote to him using age-old tactics to draw his attention towards her. She whined about her farcical love life and tried to engage him by speaking of her minor literary success. When she boasted of a small cheque, Waugh offhandedly told her to invest it in new clothes – by dressing better she might attract a rich man. Nothing else mattered, he only had eyes for Diana.

  NOTES

  20 ‘I remember at the time considering that this set was entirely alien to us and to our friends …’ Potpourri from the Thirties, Bryan Guinness.

  21 As opposed to his idol worship of Diana, Evelyn Waugh did not ‘idolise Nancy, he respected her’. Dr Barbara Cooke, research associate on the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.

  22 Recalled by Diana in A Life of Contrasts.

  12

  CONFINEMENT

  As summer began, Diana said goodbye to the last attachment to her childhood. Rubbish, the dog David had given her, mysteriously vanished from Poole Place, having torn away from the maid who was holding him. Two days later, when the police returned Rubbish, he was suffering from deep and painful gashes. Diana lay by his bed, imploring him not to die, but her desperate pleas could not save Rubbish. His frail body was ravaged by a recent attack of seizures and she made the humane decision to euthanise the dog. To make up for Rubbish’s death, Bryan presented her with a large Irish wolfhound named Pilgrim. The dog required constant attention, feasting on raw meat cut into small pieces and handfed to him by Diana. Although fond of dogs, she resented Pilgrim’s time-consuming ways.