A reception was then held at Rutland Gate (let at the time, but repossessed for the occasion): two ambassadors attended, as well as two duchesses (Marlborough and Sutherland) and a couple of aesthetes (the poet and critic Sir John Squire, the painter Clive Bell). Many of Nancy’s old friends were there, including Mary Milnes-Gaskell, Nina Seafield, Mark Ogilvie-Grant and Hugh Smiley, no less, now married to Cecil Beaton’s sister. Evelyn Waugh was not present: he had just begun proceedings for the annulment of his first marriage. The Times informed its readers that ‘the honeymoon is being spent in Rome, and the bride travelled in a dark green woollen coat and skirt with a duck-egg-green jumper’. It sounded idyllic: Peter and the new Mrs Rodd were to have use of an apartment in the Palazzo Giulia, a beautiful hangover from Lord Rennell’s days as ambassador. The eternal city and eternal bliss, no less.
At first, it did sound blissful. ‘Why do people say they don’t enjoy honeymoons?’ Nancy wrote to Unity. ‘I am adoring mine.’ With awful immediacy, however, a strained note crept into the song of gaiety. A postcard sent to Mark Ogilvie-Grant is of course ironic: ‘I am having a really dreadful time, dragging a badly sprained ankle round major & minor basilicas & suffering hideous indigestion from eating goats’ cheese. However I manage to keep my spirits up somehow. NR. And all my shoes hurt.’ But it is not the tone that one would expect from a brand new bride, wandering through one of Europe’s most glorious cities, arm in arm with her best beloved. It hints – to say the least – at real and instant dissatisfaction. It conveys an image of Nancy and Peter, aimless, tired and slightly bored, she longing to get out of her shoes, he longing for a drink, connecting with neither Rome nor each other.
It later transpired – uncharacteristically, Nancy confessed it to Peter’s sister, Gloria – that the couple had spent much of their honeymoon arguing. Peter was spending money like it was going out of fashion and showing few signs that this, for him, was any sort of new life at all. Thereafter Nancy never felt about Rome in the way she did the other great European cities. ‘Surely no other capital city can be quite so uninhibited about its underclothes or allow them to hang like flags across the streets’, she wrote in 1952, in an essay – ‘Rome is Only a Village’ – which reads almost like a revenge upon the place. Understandably, in the circumstances. How disillusioned she must have been there, as she approached the new year of 1934.
She struggled against such feelings, as anyone would – Nancy more than most – and when she returned to England her will to happiness asserted itself. She remembered what marriage had brought her: a life of her own at last. It wasn’t total independence, as the couple relied on a small allowance from both sets of parents (slightly uncomfortable this; she and Peter were getting on in years to be living off handouts). Nonetheless a letter to Mark Ogilvie-Grant in January 1934 – ‘I am awfully busy learning to be a rather wonderful old housewife’ – reeks of restored good cheer.
The Rodds had moved to Strand-on-the-Green, a small stretch of intense prettiness, edged with smart little dolls’ houses, that borders the Thames just beyond Kew Bridge. Nancy’s home, Rose Cottage, was on the road behind the river and was actually rather plain, a dark pink square with over-large windows, a walled garden and ‘a pig & two parrots over the porch’. It was far from the world of Rutland Gate and Eaton Square, and heaven knows what Lady Montdore would have thought. ‘We are going to be damned poor you see’, Nancy wrote to Mark. But with his help, and much enthusiasm and taste, she gave her first home an air of spare and simple chic. ‘That little house was really exquisite,’ Debo later recalled; ‘there wasn’t an ugly thing in it.’ Like her mother, Nancy had a real talent for giving ease and beauty to her surroundings, even on a very short shoestring. ‘She had’, says Alexander Mosley, ‘a great gift for mise en scène.’
And she enjoyed playing at being a wife. Very nice it must have been for her, and a very attractive sight she must have been for her neighbours, this slim alert figure full of smiles. Merrily she busied herself finding cheap pieces of furniture to set alongside her Sheraton desk, and walking her beloved bulldogs, Milly3 and Lottie, along the towpath. She had a servant, of course, to spare her the agonies of picking up underclothes (‘I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting’, says Linda in The Pursuit of Love, when she is married to the impoverished Christian, ‘and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened’). Peter was working in a bank again; things looked better, as if Rome had been a bad dream. Nancy acquired a little car but, as she wrote (a little over-enthusiastically?) to Unity, ‘I go less and less to London as I love it here so much’. This was not a marriage as Diana’s had been and Deborah’s would be; as Nancy’s might have been, had she accepted Hugh Smiley. It was more what we would think of as modern, the stuff of one of our more upmarket colour supplements: the skinny stylish career woman, her delicious and faintly delinquent husband, their pert little dogs, the jolie-laide house in W4.
But this is image only. Beneath the sunlit surface of smart living on the cheap, of bridge parties reported in the Evening Standard (‘a gay, light-hearted affair of the cheerful kind that hasn’t happened much since the days of the fabulous past’, a bit effusive for a night of card-playing) – beneath all this, what was really going on? The rogue factor was Peter. What were the Rodds’ feelings for one another? How did their relationship develop after that uneasy honeymoon? Nancy’s mixture of volubility and reserve makes it difficult to say.
Perhaps the most striking thing is how much less she writes about Peter than she ever did about Hamish. He appears occasionally in her letters, as an acquaintance would, and is usually doing separate things from his wife: ‘Peter went to a cocktail party at the Lancasters...’; ‘Peter didn’t enjoy his cruise much as they had such bad weather...’ Lottie the bulldog gets more coverage from Nancy than her husband does: ‘Lottie is away being married – oh how sweet. I long for the puppies – her husband is an angelic dog.’
This reticence in itself is enough to arouse suspicion. Had Nancy been happy with her husband, had he also been an angelic dog, she would have said so: happiness was the theme to which she would always, if possible, return in her letters. Conversely, had she been disappointed, she would have kept quiet about it. That was her nature. Therefore one assumes that all was not as she would have wished it. She had wanted to be in love with Peter, she had wanted to marry him, but the reality was not what she had expected. And this was not, as with Hamish, a child’s infatuation: it was a grown-up situation. She probably despaired about it, behind her resolute veneer.
‘She took it very seriously,’ says Debo. ‘Because you know brought up as we were, marriage was pretty important.’ (As late as 1952, when Peter was long out of her life, Nancy praised the undergraduates of the Cambridge Union for using her married name: ‘The boys are heaven... very polite (Mrs Rodd, no nonsense about Mitford).4) Debo continues: ‘I mean for instance when Diana and Bryan got divorced, it was like the end of the world. So I think Nancy would have gone into it really meaning it – and I think she was a very staunch person you know, she did her best, but nobody could have coped with Peter. Not as a serious character, not for ever.’
Within a short time, Peter had left his banking job. He had done so in expectation of something that would eventually be much better, but which did not come to pass. ‘What you say about Peter has rather upset me,’ wrote Lord Rennell to Francis, rattled beneath his diplomat’s poise; ‘I was under the belief that he had a definite engagement with Hamburger and was to begin on £500 a year. It was on the strength of this assurance that I went into the question of settlements and discussed the whole matter with Lord Redesdale who was equally convinced that he had a definite undertaking from H. I am now afraid that as usual the whole story was built on a mere possibility without any substance.’ The Rennells were clearly panicked by the idea that they might be tapped for more money. ‘What on earth h
ave they got to live on except the allowance he gets from us’, boomed her ladyship, not quite accurately as a good deal of the Rodds’ income came from Nancy: her writing, and dividends from the stocks and shares she had bought with the money from her first two books. All in all they had about £500 a year. Even in the 1930s this wasn’t much, and certainly it was not ideal that Peter had lost the chance to double it. Before the announcement of her engagement, Nancy had said that the wedding would not take place if there were not enough money to live on properly (‘if we can get some we shall marry and if we can’t we shan’t’5). It had not occurred to her that, once in the marriage, things would get much worse.
Her father-in-law expressed real concern, beneath his cautiousness. ‘One feels a little scared about the young couple and I am wondering whether their house is healthy or whether they get enough to eat and keep warm... They do not tell us much, but one cannot help realising that since he gave up £600 a year on an over optimistic hope of a better job it must be rather difficult for them to get along on the remainder... I should like to be reassured that these repeated attacks of flu are not the result of inadequate resources.’
If the attacks of flu were Peter’s, they were probably an excuse for not getting up and doing anything. But there was a sense, in Lord Rennell’s words, of something not at all right within the Rodd household, as if beneath the façade lay a creeping squalor. The bailiffs were more than once at the door (Nancy deployed Mitfordian insouciance, offering cups of tea and blithe smiles, although what she felt is anyone’s guess). ‘Peter was so bad about money,’ says Diana, ‘because when Nancy made a little money he just used to borrow it from her. I don’t know whether he gambled – I just don’t think he ever had a proper job.’ What he did was continue to drink heavily, and go on benders in nightclubs. Quite early on, he began to see other women. It is impossible to know when exactly he was first unfaithful, but certainly by 1935 – after little more than a year – he was declaring love for the married Mary Sewell (also a novelist, and the daughter of Edwin Lutyens).
However she might have tried to be realistic and French about it all, this would have been agonising to a woman as proud and romantic as Nancy. In the first two years of her marriage, whilst she was bustling with determined good cheer around Strand-on-the-Green, her husband had denied her everything that she could reasonably have expected of him: love, support, fidelity. She was forced to grow up in ways she would not have dreamed. Loyalty, and a desire not to admit that she had once again made a bad bet, demanded that she stick it out with Peter. But he was quite possibly the worst man she could have picked. All the things she wanted, like cheerfulness, stability, elegance, money, good behaviour, amusement – things which might have come her way through marriage, but which she found when she lived alone – were impossible to achieve with Peter. A different kind of woman (more managing, more experienced) might have forced him to hold down a job, turned a coolly blind eye to his debauches, kept him in some sort of line. Perhaps Mary Sewell might have done this, although being a successful mistress does not necessarily make one a successful wife. But she would probably have handled Peter better than Nancy did (certainly she got more joy out of him: she was said to remember him as a most tender lover). Nancy’s smiling stoicism, desperate optimism, ineffectual sniping and essential lack of grasp upon her situation made her a hopeless wife to this hopeless man. She was far too good for him, and she was also not much good to him.
In fact it is hard to imagine Nancy living the reality of marriage. ‘A girl must marry once. You can’t go on being called Miss – Miss all your life, it sounds too idiotic’, says a character in Wigs on the Green, written in 1934. It goes on: ‘All the same, marriage is a great bore – chap’s waistcoats lying about in one’s bedroom, and so on. It gets one down in time.’ Of course Nancy liked the idea of marriage, the status, the home-making side. And she believed, always, in the supreme importance of love. Yet at the same time she was not fitted for intimacy: one can scarcely picture the pristine Nancy sharing a bathroom with a man, or making love on the Aubusson, or wandering about semi-naked while Peter fastened a collar-stud. Always there is this sense of innate separateness, something both girlish and spinsterish, something hooked-and-eyed into rigid place. And Peter – like most husbands – would probably have felt easier with someone less bright and clever and unpractised, more consolingly womanly.
Quite soon, then, he was slipping out of the marriage, as he slipped out of everything: what had been a dream of something new and free had become a prison of unwanted responsibility. It was the pattern of his life, and one can’t help but feel a little sorry for someone so gifted and so all at sea. Yet the humiliations and privations that he inflicted on his wife, out of sheer moral indolence, were unforgivable, and only intensified as the marriage went on. Harold Acton, whose dislike of Peter (‘a superior con-man’) leaps like a tiger off his fragrant pages, blames the failure of his life with Nancy on a simple inability to be faithful: ‘Probably he was a natural philanderer who could not endure the marriage tie.’ True though this is, philandering is a symptom of something deeper-rooted: either that a man doesn’t care enough about his wife, or that he is restless about his life, or (as with Peter) both. Perhaps he would have liked to be faithful to Nancy? Perhaps she was unable to hold him? For whatever reason, the wild urge for the new and the free took a grip; and off he would go to the Savile Club for a booze-up, or to Mary Sewell’s for some illicit sex, and the horrors of poverty and miserable matrimony would dissolve in a haze of pleasure. Pretty commonplace stuff, really – except that neither Peter nor Nancy were commonplace people.
In 1936 they moved back into London, possibly in an attempt at a new start. Peter was earning again, and the couple took a house in Blomfield Road, near the canal at Maida Vale. Nowadays this is a serene oasis, in which multi-million-pound villas sit calm and unassailable around the water. Before the war it was rather raggedy, and the houses not considered particularly desirable (‘It was one enormous red light district’, according to John Julius Norwich. ‘Brothel brothel brothel Nancy brothel brothel brothel – you know, all the way’).
‘Dear you should see this house,’ Nancy wrote in November 1936 to Simon Elwes, the husband of her sister-in-law Gloria. ‘You see everybody’s houses are so pretty nowadays so I set out to try & make this as ugly as I could for a change & my goodness me I’ve succeeded.’ Typical Mitfordian exaggeration; but with a tense, darting hilarity about it that hints at unhappiness.
Later in the letter she did more than hint. She liked Simon and his wife6, and anyway was telling them what they already knew about the state of play chez Rodd. First she refers to their persistent money troubles: ‘However, the boom. That’s all Rodd says when I point out what a jolly new set of bailiffs we are acquiring.’ Clearly Peter’s job in the City was not solving all their problems (he may have stuck to it because it enabled him to meet Mary Sewell every day, both at lunch and in the evenings). Nancy knew all about this affair of Peter’s, as did the Elweses: ‘it’s lovely being in London because now Rodd can go out with his girlfriend who has a spoon face & dresses at Gorringes & I can go to bed & this is fine for everybody’s temper. Also I can go out with people like Raymond Mortimer and Willie [Somerset] Maugham who like the sound of their own voices punctuated by giggles, but who hate being told about the origin of toll-gates by Rodd. And all these things were more difficult at Rose Cottage.’ This is written with bravery, and with the faith in jokes upheld, but it shakes with a kind of furious misery. It is as if she can’t even trust herself to write Peter’s name.
Nor was she always so stoical. At bridge parties attended by the Sewells, where Peter and Mary would smoulder at each other across the score-cards, Nancy’s absurd trick was to stand up and faint; her husband would then carry her out of the room (‘she’s only trying to get attention’) and return, metaphorically rubbing his hands, to his mistress. These hysterics were hardly the behaviour of the woman Nancy wanted to be. In her 1940 novel, P
igeon Pie, she describes her heroine, Sophia, sitting at a dinner whilst a vampish rival for her lover, Rudolph, ‘droops her eyelids’ at him; Sophia, cool as vichysoisse, simply waits it out. ‘Women are divided into two categories’, Nancy wrote in the book, ‘those who can deal with the men they are in love with, and those who cannot. Sophia was one of those who can.’
By the time of Pigeon Pie it was really too late for Nancy to ‘deal with’ Peter. But Rudolph bears a certain resemblance to her tricky, sexy husband, and there was surely some retrospective wish-fulfilment in her conception of Sophia as a calm, controlling charmer. She knew full well that it was better not to faint at the bridge table. Diana would never have done such a thing. But Nancy, for all her restrained outward appearance, was a woman who felt things passionately; and although she was able to distance her emotions she always found it hard to deal with them.
So it is almost unbelievable that in 1936 – that grim and grinding year – she should have gone away to Normandy with Peter and the Sewells. The holiday was given an air of respectability by the presence of Jessica Mitford; but heaven only knows what the couples thought they were doing. It was a disaster for Nancy, who simply left Peter and Mary to it every night and went to bed (‘She thinks nightclubs are boring’, Decca wrote to Deborah, with a touchingly scathing innocence). A photograph from the time tells all anyone needs to know about where this marriage had got to. Nancy has a matronly arm around Peter’s shoulder and a face like malt vinegar; he, meanwhile, looks unrelaxed and unrepentant, although aware that there is something to repent over. It is a stunningly miserable image, of a shrew and the man who has made her shrewish. One thinks of the breathless hope with which Nancy went into her life with Peter (‘I am going to be married to a very divine person’), of the real and intense dedication that she made to her marriage, and one feels for her pointless sufferings.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 14
