Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  When Nancy recovered – which took several months, spent at West Wycombe – the couple almost certainly resumed their affair, if more casually than before. They may have just been friends, but that is unlikely; the Frenchmen in Nancy’s novels like chatting to women but they also like making love to them, and there is no reason to believe that André Roy was any different. What is certain is that there was no rancour between them, no sense that things had been hideously soured, could never be the same again and indeed required relationship counselling: this amiable couple simply picked up the shattered pieces, and tried to be happy again. In 1942 Roy attended a party thrown by Nancy at Blomfield Road, at which Unity was present. She had arrived with ‘a ghastly old dress full of moth-holes’, so Nancy ‘crammed’ her into one of her own, leaving the back undone and putting a coat on top. But when she refused to make up her face, it was Roy who – trying to please? or perhaps he was just naturally, practically kind – did it for her. ‘So in the end she looked awfully pretty.’16

  Meanwhile another good thing had come into Nancy’s life. Her war work had been irreproachable, but remorseless. After her operation she may have felt the need for something less noble, and it turned up in March 1942, just as she was getting her strength back. She was given a job as assistant at the bookshop in Mayfair’s Curzon Street which her friend Heywood Hill founded in 1936; a blue plaque marks the years of Nancy’s time there.

  Heywood Hill is probably the most delightful bookshop in London, and it must have been almost as balming to Nancy as le Capitaine Roy. Entering the shop is an almost tentative business, rather like walking into the library of a slightly untidy, entirely civilised old person, the corners of whose home and mind are stuffed with fascinating things. This ambience cannot be replicated or faked or interior designed, although some do try. Heywood Hill obviously never tried to achieve its particular flavour, which was born of its private and highly personal ownership, and has accreted over years of calm and concentrated care.

  ‘Oh it was lovely,’ says Diana Mosley. ‘It’s still rather nice, isn’t it?’ During the war, when Nancy worked there, it was even more than that. Its ground-floor room didn’t just look like a private club, it very nearly was one, with a membership that included Evelyn Waugh, James Lees-Milne (at whose suggestion Nancy had taken the job), Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell17, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly (‘Smartyboots’)18, Raymond Mortimer and Gerald Berners19, in fact Nancy’s most amusing friends, all of whom came regularly to see her for a life-enhancing infusion of chat. Trumper’s was next door; the men could have a haircut then step straight into Heywood Hill where, as Lees-Milne recounts in his 1942 diary, ‘the horrid, pungent Brilliantine which they put on my hair nearly asphyxiated everybody. Nancy said that if there had been a window that opened, she would open it.’ Then, amid the scented heads and the rhythmic rustling of pages, the gossip would begin: of the parties in Emerald Cunard’s suite at the Dorchester, where she lived throughout the war, or at Sybil Colefax’s20 ‘canteen’ in Belgrave Square; of how ‘Osbert S. [is] on top of the world as he has been left £10,000... Sachie whom I saw rather sour “Ten pounds would have been so welcome.”’21; of how – according to Nancy – ‘the tart in Curzon Street, when asked how the war was treating her, replied that for a reserved occupation, £700 a week tax free, plus emoluments from the Government for reporting the indiscretions of soldier clients, was so satisfactory that she only wished she could open a second front.’22 As Harold Acton put it: ‘the very books seemed to join in the laughter during their exchange of gossip.’

  It was frivolous, but it was also necessary, as the bombs continued to fall, as Tom Mitford fought in Libya, Mark Ogilvie-Grant languished in a POW camp in Italy, Hamish St Clair-Erskine was taken prisoner after Tobruk and Robert Byron lay drowned in the sea, having been torpedoed on his way to Egypt. The world of Heywood Hill served a purpose for those left behind, or on fleeting return visits. It became a bright totem of civilisation, a small unifying force, an ITMA for the literary aristocracy.

  ‘Cecil Beaton came into the shop “such an oasis” & roared with laughter for an hour’, Nancy wrote to Diana, who from her Holloway cell perhaps found reports of this jollity a little hard to take. ‘The shop is really very gay now, full of people all day, & I am installed in the gas fire so manage to keep fairly warm.’ Diana did benefit from Nancy’s job in that she was sent parcels of books (Nancy also sent them to Jonathan Guinness at Eton, including a medical manual which was ‘pure porn, illustrated’23). Evelyn Waugh also received the parcels when, at the end of the war, he served in Croatia (‘A lovely parcel of books from you. Connolly’s “Grave”24... I think Connolly has lived too much with communist young ladies. He must spend more time in White’s’).

  ‘Went to Nancy’s bookshop’, Waugh wrote in his 1943 diary, ‘where I was told that it is now a daily occurrence for enormous majors in the Foot Guards to come in and ask for the works of sixteenth-century Spanish mystics.’ Of course it wasn’t Nancy’s shop, as such. But it is significant that this is how Waugh thought of it: although Nancy was an employee of Heywood Hill she had, through him, acquired her own Mayfair salon. The money was nice – £3.10s. a week made quite a difference, although later she would think it a pittance25 – but nicer still was being at the very heart of what Waugh called ‘a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London’. For the first time, Nancy was almost wholly surrounded by people who saw the best in her: who were, she realised with increasing pleasure, unable to resist her mixture of sharpness and cosiness, of high polish and good sense. The job at Heywood Hill, coming on top of the time with the Free Frogs, was truly allowing one to be lovely One.

  As was usual with Nancy, she gave the appearance of playing at her role of shop assistant with dilettante amateurism. In fact, as was also usual, she was rather efficient. The people she scared away were outnumbered by the ones she attracted. Of course entering the shop would have been like going into a small country pub filled with inter-related locals: all very well if you liked that sort of thing, but chilly or even irritating if you did not. It is easy to imagine the intimidatory nature of so much self-assurance gathered together in one room. One woman refused to put up with the club atmosphere: ‘A little less darling and a little more attention please’, she rapped out to Nancy, who was cooing into the telephone at the time.

  Harold Acton wrote an evocative picture of Nancy at the time she began to work at Heywood Hill, when euphoria pushed aside the creep of tiredness. He conveys her crisp, bright zest, her febrile chic, her resolute energy.

  Nearly always she walked to and from the shop, many miles from her dwelling in Blomfield Road regardless of blackouts, air raids and encounters with drunken soldiers [‘leave me alone I’m forty’ she squawked at one who made a grab for her waist].

  She walked briskly, for the sake of the exercise faute de mieux, even after a tiring day’s work or a night’s rest broken by air raids. Taxis were sporadic luxuries, and Lady Anne Hill remembers waiting with her for hours in pouring rain while at least sixteen packed buses rumbled tantalisingly down Park Lane. During weekdays they would lunch at a neighbouring canteen or at a British Restaurant.26

  In his affectionate, old-maidish way Acton goes on to describe Nancy’s physical presence, which had of course been enhanced by the best soin de beauté of all: flattery.

  Hers was a peculiarly English type of beauty and it did not belong entirely to this age. Her clear smooth skin and clear quizzical eyes under a high forehead with chestnut hair like a wavy turban above it would have been portrayed to perfection by Sir Joshua Reynolds [in fact her hair was nearly black as a girl – had she been dyeing it? More likely Acton simply got it wrong]. She appeared much younger than her age and her humour had the gaiety of girlhood.

  James Lees-Milne, a more caustic observer, created a very different impression of Nancy at this time. In a bizarre little vignette he described, in his 1943 diary, seeing her run towards the shop ‘to get warm. She ma
de a strange spectacle, very thin and upright, her arms folded over her chest, and her long legs jerking to left and right of her like a marionette’s. I really believe she finds it easier to run than to walk.’ The image is evocative but not kind: Lees-Milne is frequently hard on her in his diaries (Heywood Hill’s wife Anne, he wrote, was ‘worth a million more than the glittering women, like Nancy’). But his view of her, as some sort of mechanised ostrich, was peculiarly his own. Acton may have been biased also, but he restores some sort of balance with his eulogy to Nancy’s ‘natural good taste, not only in the clothes she wore. In those days she could not afford to indulge her love of elegance yet in the neat black velvet jacket and black wool skirt she usually wore in the shop she looked better dressed than many a more prosperous friend’. He cannot then resist a dig at his blond bête noire, the dreaded Prod: ‘her husband contributed nothing to her few amenities, if he ever wasted a thought on them.’

  But by that time – 1943 – Nancy would scarcely have noticed if Peter had given her a cheque for £1,000 to spend at Dior. Nor would she have cared if she never saw glamorous André Roy again. She had met the man of her life, Gaston Palewski: the ne plus ultra of Free Frogs, the original Fabrice de Sauveterre, and the person who more than any other opened her to the pursuit of happiness.

  Nancy was clever enough not to make the French lovers in her novels – all of whom contain the essence of Palewski – look like him. Even she knew that this would be pushing it. True, Fabrice is described as ‘short, stocky, very dark’, and ‘not even good-looking’, but he nonetheless lacked Gaston’s pitted skin, his receding hair, his almost Hitlerian little moustache. And Charles-Edouard de Valhubert in The Blessing is given the physical appearance – ‘tall, dark, and elegant’ – of a text-book French lover, or indeed of André Roy.

  ‘Oh Gaston – he was very ugly...!’ says Diana. But Nancy’s passion for him had nothing to do with the pleasure she had once taken in Peter’s boyish handsomeness. It went beyond that, far beyond normal notions of desirability into something deeper, more stirring and more demanding.

  Linda was feeling, what she had never so far felt for any man, an overwhelming physical attraction. It made her quite giddy, it terrified her. She could see that Fabrice was perfectly certain of the outcome, so was she perfectly certain, and that was what frightened her...

  She is unable to account for this attraction:

  ...he was exactly like dozens of other dark men in Homburgs that can be seen in the streets of any French town. But there was something about the way he looked at her which seemed to be depriving her of all balance.

  That was Palewski, all right. Although not a handsome man he had sexual confidence, and to a degree that Nancy had never known. When Gaston set out to seduce it made Prod and his little affairs look like showing-off to Mummy: here was a professional in action, and he made his move on Nancy not long after they met in September 1942, at the Allies Club off Park Lane. This first encounter came about because he had met Peter out in Ethiopia and could give Nancy news of him; the opening of The Blessing has Grace and Charles-Edouard meeting in exactly the same, ironical way. Charles-Edouard says – of Grace’s fiancé – that there is ‘Good news – that is to say there is no news.’ Palewski probably said something much the same to Nancy, then moved on to more interesting subjects.

  One wonders what he had expected her to be like, having met Peter in Addis Ababa, and imagines that he was surprised by this clever, nervy Francophile, so different from what Fabrice calls ‘these Veronicas and Sheilas and Brendas’. Palewski, meanwhile, was more than Nancy had expected. Even James Lees-Milne called him ‘a cultivated man’, and his standards were exigent. Indeed Palewski was, according to Harold Nicolson27, ‘one of the most conversational men I know, being able to converse with equal facility on Wedgwood dinner services and who was Albertine’. He was versed in both English and French culture, perhaps not deeply so, but to the highly civilised extent with which Nancy felt most at home. He himself was at home in London society; he was living in a Belgravia house belonging to an acquaintance of Nancy’s – Anne Rosse, sister of the designer Oliver Messel – and he knew the Axis powers of Cunard and Colefax (James Lees-Milne recorded, in his 1943 diary, meeting de Gaulle’s ‘rather spotty’ chef de cabinet at one of Sybil Colefax’s luncheon parties). So Nancy’s world was one that he understood, although he saw it through the enlivening gaze of a foreigner. Nothing could have delighted her more than this little tug between the familiar and the exotic.

  Above all, though, Palewski was funny: in Nancy’s idiom, filtered through Frenchness. ‘Comme amateur de porcelaine...’2* was the start of his reply to a pompous dinner guest asking his opinion of the atom bomb (this remark made its way into Charles-Edouard’s mouth; it really was too good to waste). His friend Alistair Forbes wrote that there ‘never was a more devout believer than Gaston in that maxim of Chamfort’s which says that the most wasted of all days is the one that has to pass without laughter’.28 None, perhaps, except Nancy? She had found in Palewski what she had never expected, a potential lover with whom she could develop her great gift of turning the stuff of life into jokes, stories, ‘wonderful confections embellished with the aromatic and exotic fruits of her own sugary imagination’.29

  At the same time he was someone whom she could admire. He was a man of substance: un homme politique of conviction as well as charm. Most importantly he was on the side of righteousness, a colonel in the Free French forces (Nancy would always call him ‘Colonel’ or ‘Col’). Originally from Poland, his family had been assimilated into France by the time of his birth in 1901; and indeed no one could have been more French than he (‘Charles-Edouard was the forty kings of France rolled into one’). He was educated to the hilt, including a year at Oxford. But the defining moment of his life came when he met Charles de Gaulle in 1934. From that instant he became his most faithful admirer, and remained so for all time. He accepted absolutely the belief – then derided in France – that a terrible German threat lay behind the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line; and, when war broke out, he rejected pacifism. In June 1940 he wrote to de Gaulle saying that he was entirely at his disposal. On his arrival in London, at the Free French headquarters in Carlton Gardens, Palewski was appointed de Gaulle’s principal political adviser: effectively, the General’s right-hand man. More diplomatic than his boss, he was immensely useful in keeping the Allies sweet. In 1941 he was put in charge of Free French affairs in East Africa, and when he met Nancy had recently returned from Ethiopia; hence Peter. What a refreshing solace she must have seemed to this tired and jolly sophisticate, when they met for their drinks in the garden of the Allies Club.

  Nancy asked Gaston to dine with her a few days later at Blomfield Road; he accepted with pleasure; and that, as one might say, was that. In the London autumn, as the trees sighed their leaves into the Maida Vale canal, they began their affair. ‘Being made love to by Fabrice was an intoxication, quite different from anything she had hitherto experienced’, Nancy writes of Linda.

  Now the fact that Nancy wrote this doesn’t absolutely mean that it was true of herself. She was a highly autobiographical writer, but she did not always deal in literal fact. And indeed, some commentators think that Linda’s sexual awakening with Fabrice was not Nancy’s. They believe that she loved her Colonel with a passion that was not so much physical as a craving for romantic chat, the ‘banter’.30 In fact they view her as uncomfortable with sex; partly no doubt because of the starched and pressed appearance that she always maintained, and partly because she was not particularly fanciable: too clever, too quick, too distant. But giving off an aura of sex is not at all the same thing as enjoying it; quite the opposite, sometimes. Despite her school-prefect-cum-spinster aspect, her air of perpetual virginity, there is no reason to think that Nancy felt anything other than that ‘lovemaking is delightful’, as she said in an interview many years later.31

  Yet in The House of Mitford (by Jonathan Guinness with Catherine Guinness) it i
s pretty well asserted that Nancy had ‘a very lukewarm attitude towards the joys of sex’. Why? Firstly because she put up with Hamish St Clair-Erskine for so long (although that can be explained in more ambivalent ways); and secondly because of the way she writes about the relationship between Louis XV and his mistress in Madame de Pompadour. This book, according to The House of Mitford, is full of ‘unconscious self-revelations’ about Nancy’s view of sex. ‘She plays down Pompadour’s physical role... she underlines the fact that too much sex made Pompadour ill.’ But there is no reason to think that this was also true of Nancy. It was simply a fact that the Bourbon kings were like sexual maniacs and that one of their mistresses was, as Nancy puts it, ‘physically a cold woman’. Why assume that she wrote everything from her own perceptions, that everything with Nancy was a form of autobiography? She was, yes, a highly personal writer; but she was also someone with an imagination, and indeed one of her greatest gifts is her ability to ‘personalise’ the experience of other people.

  Yet when she equates Pompadour’s ‘sex appeal’ with her ‘charm’, this leads The House of Mitford to conclude: ‘So to Nancy, sex appeal is just charm under another name; its base is not anything so crude as physical desire.’ Not so: she is simply writing about one particular woman, about Pompadour’s particular type of attraction. If that is Nancy’s last word on the subject, then where does this leave Linda’s physical weakening before the measured, knowing stare of Fabrice de Sauveterre? Linda understands ‘physical desire’ through and through; so too does Polly Hampton, who longs to ‘roll and roll’ with Boy Dougdale; there really is no reason why the Marquise de Pompadour should be taken as the benchmark for Nancy’s attitudes towards sex. Nor why it should be said, as a downright statement of fact, that ‘Nancy never came to terms with sensuality’. True, she was not a woman who enjoyed a great many love affairs; she valued friendship and conversation in a love affair; she was a romantic realist rather than a realistic sensualist; and she was not an epicurean in any area of her life, although this may imply that she was a connoisseur rather than a gourmande.