Mrs Guinness

by Lyndsy Spence

  The nurse obliged and then disobeyed her orders when she interrupted Diana and Strachey mid-conversation. She carried the baby into the room, for she could not believe any visitor would not want to see him. The baby held no charm for Strachey and, noticing its mop of dark hair, with forced enthusiasm he said, ‘What long hair!’

  ‘Oh,’ said the nurse, sensing his disdain. ‘That will come off.’

  With a mischievous shriek, Strachey lowered his voice to a confiding tone and asked, ‘Is it a wig?’

  The baby was named Desmond Walter Guinness, but Diana did not care for the name and she confessed to Strachey: ‘I don’t know why I have called him Desmond, only Bryan wanted such queer names he read in a book of them like for example Diggery. I thought it sounds like the comic man in Shakespeare, perhaps a gravedigger.’ The name symbolised more than a compromise, it was a battle of wills. With each passing day, Bryan’s constant attention grated on her and she could not fathom the logic behind his possessiveness. Love, to Bryan, meant being with the person you loved most and the more you loved them, the more you wanted to be together. Diana soon began to have outbursts of rage at Bryan, often chiding him and insulting his goodness.

  After such quarrels, Diana felt compelled to grovel for his forgiveness. The guilt of hurting someone as sweet natured as Bryan distressed her, though, in the back of her mind, she felt an urge to fight against his overbearing expressions of love. An ironic stance given Diana’s past affinity with lonely young men and her natural way of making them feel comforted and understood, yet she could not stand Bryan needing her so fiercely. As passive as he was to her moods, Bryan sensed the severity of Diana’s restlessness, displayed through his poem, Love’s Isolation:32

  I see into your sight …

  But oh, I cannot find

  A way into the light.

  Since their days in the nursery, Diana and her sisters were experts at hiding their true feelings from prying eyes. The shop front, as they referred to it, was often mistaken for vagueness: ‘a fault of our upbringing that it should be considered unthinkable to admit to weakness, misery or despair.’ The shop front deceived her closest friends, including Bryan, who soon put aside his doubts and decided that whatever stirrings of discontent Diana may have felt were due to the upheaval of the new baby.

  At the age of 21, Diana had experienced a full life. It was an age when her contemporaries were only just getting married, and her experiences had already eclipsed her eldest sisters, Nancy and Pamela, who were yet to marry. Bryan felt his sole purpose was to make Diana happy, and with her restlessness stirring at the back of his mind, he strived even harder to evoke the happiness from their first months of marriage. However, it seemed only Bryan could see glimmers of her true self behind the shop front. When Diana reunited with Carrington, she sensed nothing of her young friend’s sorrow and praised her physical appearance, noting that Diana ‘looked lovely in a curious bottle green jersey with a white frill around her neck’.33

  Diana’s unhappiness coincided with Strachey’s long and painful illness that struck him that winter. The happy foursome at Ham Spray had all but disintegrated. Gone were the days of endless laughter, rowdy supper parties and intellectual chatter. Strachey had been the hero of Diana’s youth. He was a pivotal influence on her maturity between the conspicuous ages of 19 and 21, and it seemed ironic that his final exit wavered over her own private turmoil. She watched her friend fade from a mysterious illness that had quickly ravaged him. Later the post-mortem concluded the cause of Strachey’s suffering was stomach cancer; a growth blocked the intestine and perforated the colon, though at the time it remained undiagnosed.

  ‘I have very little faith in there being any happiness for human beings on this earth,’ Carrington wrote to Strachey, three months before his death. As if she could foresee the misery of her life without him, she attempted suicide by locking herself in the garage with the car’s engine running. Rescued in time by Ralph Partridge, Carrington recovered to nurse her beloved Strachey for a few days before his untimely death at the age of 51.

  In the aftermath of Strachey’s death Carrington went through the motions of living, and she continued to visit Biddesden, as had been her routine for the past year. It was no longer the cheerful, ‘May we come over?’ telephone call which Diana looked forward to, but a vague, solemn figure consumed by grief. Carrington gave Diana an eighteenth-century waistcoat Strachey had bought years before. ‘We could never think of anyone worthy of it because it was so beautiful,’ she told Diana. Silk embroidered with little flowers, pink and blue, Carrington advised Diana to have it altered. ‘I’d like to think of you wearing it,’ she said.

  Diana was absent during Carrington’s last visit to Biddesden, where she seemed bright and cheerful, a complete contrast to her prior morbidity. On that particular visit, she asked to borrow Bryan’s gun. ‘What do you want the gun for?’ someone inquired.

  ‘To shoot rabbits,’ Carrington replied.

  ‘But there aren’t any rabbits.’

  At that moment a rabbit darted across the lawn. ‘Look!’ she shrieked, winning the petty argument. In that final statement her fate was sealed. After her guests had left for London, Carrington shot herself.

  Immediately after the deaths of Carrington and Strachey, Diana claimed her life was ‘useless and empty’. She sought comfort in her friend, the sculptor and fellow Bloomsbury, Tommy Tomlin. They began to take long walks through London and spoke of nothing except their deceased friends. Tommy knew suffering; he was gripped by bouts of depression, an unpredictable and menacing force which blighted his creativity. Diana felt useless at consoling him, for she was still caught up in her own personal grief.

  During one of their outings, Tommy suddenly paused, as though frozen, and turned to Diana. His ashen face and colourless eyes penetrated her soul and, without warning, he announced: ‘Everything in the whole world is terrible but there is one good thing … Hitler has lost grounds in the German elections.’

  NOTES

  32 Complete poem printed in Potpourri from the Thirties, Bryan Guinness.

  33 Carrington: Letters and Extracts from her Diary, David Garnett (ed.).

  18

  THE AGE OF REASON

  In 1932, Diana and Bryan moved from their first marital home on Buckingham Street to a vast, four-storeyed townhouse in Cheyne Walk, overlooking the Thames. The house itself was tinged by sadness. It had once belonged to the artist Rex Whistler and, prior to the Guinnesses moving in, the Earl of Dudley and his late wife Lady Rosemary, who was killed in a plane crash two years before. It was also in this house that the Dudleys resided with their 7-year-old son Jeremy before he was killed on the Embankment whilst on an outing with his nurse.

  Despite the tragedies suffered by its previous occupants, Cheyne Walk was a revelation for Diana as a society hostess and as a platform for expressing her exquisite taste in interior design. The panelled drawing room spanned the entire first floor, with long windows overlooking the Thames at the front and the garden from the back. Bryan gave her a free hand with the décor and she adorned the rooms with fine art. No expense was spared, even a small Aubusson carpet was installed in the children’s nursery. ‘So good for them to see pretty things when they’re crawling about,’ she trilled.

  Artists scrambled to paint Diana’s portrait, and among the first to be commissioned at Cheyne Walk was Augustus John. She did not favour him in the same light as Henry Lamb, thinking him elderly with bloodshot eyes (he was only in his fifties), but Bryan was fond of him and his family. Frequent confrontations between the couple were not uncommon and to avoid another disagreement she went along to John’s squalid studio at Mallord Street. Diana further appeased Bryan when she accepted John’s invitation to stay at Fryern Court. ‘Pubs and ‘shove ha’penny’ are not among the entertainments I enjoy,’ she bemoaned.

  John Banting asked to paint Diana’s portrait, resulting in a huge head and shoulders study on a canvas measuring 6ft by 4ft. She never cared for the port
rait, but felt compelled to keep it. Bryan bought it because Banting was poor and desperately needed the money.

  An impression of the young Mrs Guinness lingered in the higher ranks of society and she caught the attention of C.B. Cochran, who had ambitions of producing The Winter’s Tale on the London stage. He had only one leading lady in mind: the Hon. Diana Guinness. There was no evidence that Diana possessed any acting talent and she certainly did not harbour a dream of becoming an actress. For Cochran, it was simply a matter of marketing. By casting Diana in the role of Perdita, he would use her physical good looks and socialite reputation to launch her as a new star to the theatregoing public.

  Theoretically, there was nothing in Diana’s domestic life standing in the way; her two sons were in the nursery and Bryan was fond of the theatre. Dr Rudolph Krommer, an acquaintance of Diana’s, not unlike Helleu whom she kept around for his generous flattery of her, went to Cochran and talked him out of it.34 The project was abandoned and he hunted for another leading lady. For a short time Diana was bitter about the rejection, but she soon got over it.

  Diana’s attention was absorbed in the planning of a spectacular ball for 300 guests, young and old, rich and poor. They descended on the garden at Cheyne Walk, its trees lit from beneath with garden lanterns. Every detail was considered: a Russian orchestra played in the drawing room for those who wished to stay indoors and supper was served in the two dining rooms with maids wearing green and white floral dresses. On the warm night, Diana was a vision in a pale-grey dress of chiffon and tulle, adorning her frame with all of the diamonds she could lay her hands on. Dazzling in her tiara of ruby and diamonds, she left no doubt of her position as a leading society hostess. ‘I feel as if I had been raised from the dead,’ Robert Byron said in praise of her energy and execution of the ball.

  Two memories stood out for Diana: manoeuvring an intoxicated Augustus John out of the house and into a taxi, and the clumsy position of Winston Churchill as he leaned against the tall painting of Stanley Spencer’s Unveiling Cookham War Memorial which hung on the staircase, its position having to be defended by Eddie Marsh against Churchill’s hefty frame.

  Lack of personal possessions had become a familiar complaint throughout Diana’s childhood. There were so many children that even Diana’s clothes were not her own: ‘I was just their tenant on their way down from Pam to Unity.’ Perhaps for this reason, she was given the nursery bird, a goldfinch named Dicky. Conversing about what they possessed, she confidently announced: ‘Well, Dicky’s mine, he must be very valuable.’ At that impressionable age, Diana associated personal belongings with monetary value, regardless of how insignificant a thing might be.

  As she aged, Diana realised the cruelty of keeping a living thing in a cage, ‘it would put heaven in a rage’. To her delight, at the age of 7, Diana was given an object she had desired since she first visited Batsford Park. On display in the business room was a figurine of a Japanese goldfish made from pink jade, which had belonged to her grandfather, Bertie. ‘You must take great care of it,’ her father warned. It was irreplaceable, a memento of Bertie’s time spent abroad, and Diana kept it in her possession throughout the day. At night, she placed it on a table close to her bed so when she awoke, it would be the first thing she saw. After great care and consideration the inevitable happened: Diana dropped the figurine on to the stone floor and it smashed. ‘You’ve broken the goldfish,’ David said in grave tones. She had been trusted with something special – a rarity in every sense – and she had succeeded in destroying it.

  The enviable world in which she moved – summer balls, supper parties and trips to the theatre – were a minor distraction for Diana for, apart from her time on the social scene, she felt a deepening void in her life. Carrington and Strachey crept to the forefront of her mind, and she could no longer distract herself from her sorrowful feelings. Her life seemed empty and her position in the world, pointless.

  For some time, Diana had been kicking against the privilege which her life as Mrs Guinness afforded her and she sought a deeper meaning to her existence. The economic depression of the early thirties concerned Diana enough to bring up the topic when the opportunity presented itself, only to be humoured by Bryan and put off by Colonel Guinness.* The latter’s reasoning was that Diana, with her beauty, youth and position, had no cause to meddle in what was viewed as the government’s problem – male and upper class, at that. But society around her was changing radically and she found it to be a contrast of extremes – in January of 1932, the Archbishop of Canterbury had forbidden church remarriages of divorcees. Although Diana herself was not directly affected by this law, she resented its patriarchal, religious restraint.35

  To those who were privy to Diana’s intimate thoughts and views, it seemed her frame of mind ran from one extreme to the other. ‘Dotty Di’, the unkind nickname bestowed on her by Frances Marshall and Ralph Partridge at Ham Spray seemed fitting. She was a social butterfly, at home in fashionable salons and yet her thoughts wandered to the economic depression. This level of inconsistency did little to convince anyone that Diana was serious about social matters.

  A year ago, when she had turned 21, Diana gained the right to vote, but she did not use it. Had there been a Lloyd George Liberal in her constituency she would have voted for him but, alas, there was not. The Tories still held the majority and the ‘absurd figure’ of Ramsay MacDonald leading the country as prime minister was, she felt, unworthy of her vote.36

  In summer 1932, registered unemployment statics totalled 3.5 million. Hit hardest by economic problems were the industrial and mining areas of the north. The distressed areas, as they were called – slums – contained millions of Britons surviving on a meagre dole payment. Ramsay MacDonald and his Labour government failed to solve the problem. ‘Could it be beyond the wit of a man to manage the economy of a powerful and rich country which owned a quarter of the globe in such a way that its citizens could eat their fill and live in decent circumstances?’ Diana questioned. A question for which she found no answer.

  It caused Diana to resent her station in life: not the monetary privilege, but the ability to move through life relatively unscathed. ‘For the rich, however, life went on much as before the crisis,’ she bitterly recounted. Invitations to parties and balls, concerts, operas and plays, travels abroad, country house visits, hunting, shooting and horseracing was still their priority.

  Diana often told a tale, recounted from the early days of her marriage to Bryan. He led her through the woods at Versailles, where they became more and more lost. Adamant he knew the way, Bryan insisted on leading Diana deeper and deeper into the woods, until she abandoned all hope of finding a way out. Exhausted, Diana trailed behind him as he scanned every corner for an exit, all the while keeping up an optimistic pretence. She eventually gave up and sat under a tree, refusing to move until Bryan went to find a taxi. Diana had lost faith in him and even though he tried to convince her otherwise, she knew it was a lost cause.

  Opinionated and observant, Diana needed someone to guide her to the answers she sought. Bryan, as far as she could tell, was not suitable for the task in hand. She sought a strong protector and this was partly why she could not reciprocate the romantic love so freely dispensed by James Lees-Milne and Randolph Churchill, and now Bryan. The fates heeded her call and as she blindly tried to make sense of the world around her, a man entered her life who offered to lead the way. As the young and confused often do, she put all of her trust in him.

  NOTES

  * With the Conservatives being voted out during the 1929 elections, Colonel Guinness opted not to stand for re-election in 1931 and upon his retirement was given a hereditary peerage, the 1st Baron Moyne of Bury St Edmunds. For consistency he will be referred to as Colonel Guinness throughout.

  34 ‘… when I told him of the Cochran’s suggestion he poured gallons of cold water on the project; he even went to Cochran and talked him out of it.’ A Life of Contrasts, Diana Mosley.

  35 Diana often said:
‘Sometimes I think the Church of England is the fount of all evil.’ The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters, Charlotte Mosley (ed.).

  36 ‘The absurd figure of Ramsay MacDonald pretending to lead it [the country] as prime minister were a despairingly inadequate combination.’ A Life of Contrasts, Diana Mosley.

  19

  THE MAN, MOSLEY

  As with all of her admirers, Sir Oswald Mosley first caught sight of Diana from afar when she attended a ball given by the Duchess of Rutland at Sir Phillip Sassoon’s house in Park Lane. This impression of Diana, with her ‘starry blue eyes, golden hair and ineffable expression of a gothic Madonna’ stayed in Mosley’s mind long after this first, fleeting glimpse. ‘You were sitting with Billy Ormsby-Gore,’ he told her when they were formally introduced at Barbara St John Hutchinson’s 21st birthday party. Although the Mosleys and Guinnesses moved in similar circles, Diana could not recall seeing or meeting him. Her perfect tunnel vision overlooked Mosley on those prior occasions, and up until then she had no reason to make his acquaintance, she was content with her artistic friends.

  A deeper malice lurked in Mosley – ‘his eyes were as dark and as cold as a shark’ – but it was lost on Diana who, on their first meeting, found him dull. She was further disappointed by Mosley’s after-dinner speech which centred on politics. Cimmie Mosley, Diana decided, cut a frumpish figure, quick to defend her husband’s politics and overly sensitive to those who opposed them. Overall, Mosley left an indifferent impression on Diana.

  Bryan often urged Diana to share her intimate thoughts on whether she found a particular man attractive or not. Since Diana did not show signs of enthusiasm for Mosley, Bryan did not bother to question her. Though, by this stage in their marriage, Diana was prone to berate Bryan for prying and all too often it escalated into a fight.