Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806)

by Ritchie, Charles

  16 December 1969.

  Kenneth Clark in Civilisation, discussing Turner’s use of colour, writes: “Colour was considered immoral, perhaps rightly because there is an immediate sensation which makes its effect independently of those ordered memories which are the basis of morality.”

  Since I was eleven years old, perhaps before, I have at intervals played a kind of game in which I opened my eyes, looked about me, and willed myself to blot out all except what I at that moment saw before me, pretending that all was completely new, seen for the first time. So, too, with people. I have looked at my loved ones with an eye, and listened to them with an ear, from the outside. I have had at such times a sense of moral irresponsibility, a sort of self-induced drugged state, intensification of vision, dissociation from the human element. This game is dangerous. It has sometimes led to words and actions which would never have been in the linear order of my behaviour. These “fresh beginnings” have in fact not been beginnings, but escapes from habitual behaviour. They are a form of aesthetic immoralism, often bringing later remorse, but highly delightful at the time.

  Diana erupted into Wilton’s today to join me for lunch wearing trousers and a yachting cap with “HMS Indomitable” on it. She was in a gale of spirits from having parked her car with all four wheels on the pavement after banging into a van. She is not only accident-prone, I believe she revels in accidents and risks. She is, now nearing eighty, a woman for all ages, equally enchanting to that ninety-year-old billionaire Paul Getty, to up-and-coming politicians, to writers and artists, waiters and policemen, to philandering skirt-chasers, homosexuals and lesbians. Yet this Pied Piper plays no soothing or well-worn airs; she is unexpected, fresh as a clever child, has kept her immaculate beauty, and wears the lost glamour of pre-1914 with a touch of slapstick. She enjoys the company of the rich, but hasn’t forgotten what it is to be hard up. She tried to save me money on the luncheon by insisting on one lobster cutlet only between us, but Mr. Marx, the proprietor, circumvented her and managed to charge me £10.

  15 February 1970.

  Weekend at Hythe. Cold, sunny weather, but quite warm when you had been walking briskly up and down the sea-front past the Victorian seaside lodgings, past the 1920 bungalows (one of which is the seaside house in The Death of the Heart). Sun on calm blue water, a few stoutly coated figures fishing at the water’s edge, passing dog-walkers all muffled up. The curve of the bay, Dungeness in the distance, and behind me the romantic view of Hythe topped by its church tower. Then walking back past the now leafless trees of Lady’s Walk (which are in dripping leaf when Karen and her lover walk there in The House in Paris18), and so on up the hill to Carbery. Elizabeth does not join me in my walks. She says that neither of us ever stops talking and that when she talks as she walks the cold air catches in her throat and makes her cough. Her mind is now fixed on Ireland, going to live there. She says she will prowl around a little Regency terrace at Clontarf and choose a house there, or somewhere like it, not too far from Dublin. She will stay at Hythe only as long as I stay in London.

  10 March 1970.

  Lunched today at the Carlton Club with a Conservative peeress. She and I are not made for each other. She kept asking me questions like “Is it compulsory in Canada for every individual to destroy any waste paper in his possession?” I said, “No, I don’t think so. Probably most people just chuck it out.” “But I am assured, on very good authority, that it is compulsory in Canada.” (Well, if she knows, why the hell ask me?)

  As I was lapping up my machine-made turtle soup my nose began to spout blood, drops falling on the virgin snow of the tablecloth. I bolted off past the tables of Conservative MPS to the Gents’, and tried to ice my nose. When I returned to the table, the peeress said, in a brisk voice, “That shows you have been overdoing things.”

  22 April 1970.

  Particles of the past disturb my vision of today. I cannot throw away the scratched gramophone record of my particular experience. The needle is stuck in the groove and plays the same old tunes. Never more so than during this visit to Mary in the beamed and raftered cottage that she has left me in her will. She is one who “lives in the past.” That sounds to be a dreary occupation. I am not so sure that it is. In these last years when she has lived alone a loveless life of small friendships and village squabbles, she has gone over and over the past with such absorption that it has become far more real and vivid than the daily jogtrot. However, her version of the years which we shared is wildly different from my own. Which of us is lying? Perhaps neither. So much for history. Certainly I do not come well out of her story. (Elizabeth once said, “There is no woman who can’t knock a man off his perch if she tries hard enough.”) Yet as she and I sat side by side on a slatted wooden bench in her sunny garden, it seemed we were two old people turning over pages in a book we had written together. Who else but we two knew of this or that? “Is the smell of melting tar on a road still your favourite scent, Mary, as you said that day when we walked back from the beach house? And what about Mrs. Pulsifer in the seaside lodging, calling upstairs, ‘Breakfast is ready, bar frying the bacon.’ ” Now Mary says she loves her dog more than any man or woman.

  8 May 1970.

  For more than a week this hot, fine, flawless weather has gone on. I spend hours of each day in the parks, among the strollers and the lovers (two are making love in a group of daffodils!). The sun is drawing out the scent of the wallflowers. The burnished cavalry of the Household pass slowly down the Mall. Buckingham Palace has been refaced smart for the Queen’s return from Australia. The Season is getting under way.

  More echoes of the past at Laurence’s cocktail party. Laurence himself, whom I remember as a musical stripling, is a puce-faced and portly ex-opera singer. His cousin Marcie (an old flirt of mine) is now a broad-faced peasant with crinkled apple cheeks. There was a florid gentleman in a spotted tie there. I did not identify him, until the moment of departure, with an elegant and dissipated figure who was at Oxford with me and whose circle of “Golden Youths” I envied. We spoke of Billy Coster.19 I said, “Billy haunts me.” “Me too.” But as we talked of him he seemed to recede into a mocking laugh.

  19 October 1970.

  How much I miss Norman Robertson – how often I wish that I could talk to him. Nobody replaces him for me, or ever will.

  Back again to the diary after an immense interval and in a very different climate, for now we live in a climate created by others, those few in Quebec who have, in one of the most extraordinary exploits in our history, held up a nation to ransom.20 They have sought out the vulnerable parts in our society and are twisting and twisting the knife in them. Here in London they want to put Canada House under police protection, and also our house. I cannot believe that if I were kidnapped the present government would pay one cent for my ransom. At home it sounds like war but it is not – it is blackmail. Our immense Anglo-Canadian reserves of security – never a revolution, never a civil war, never a defeat, never an enemy occupation, never a humiliation – are at last being drawn upon. Our unbroken national luck has turned, and anger and fear combined may break down our national basis of compromise. Mike Pearson on TV was wise to remind us of this danger. Today a newly arrived French Canadian on the staff said to me, “I am ashamed to be a French Canadian. I feel I should skulk through the streets.” I said, “That is complete nonsense. We are all in this together. All Canadians feel the same.” But do all Canadians? I feel and think insistently about this sombre tragedy.

  20 October 1970.

  The funeral of M. Laporte. Every time the telephone twitches I expect more bad news from Ottawa. I have spent most of this last week on the long-distance telephone talking to Ed Ritchie21 at External Affairs and then relaying messages to and fro between him and Dennis Greenhill at the Foreign Office about the kidnappings. Fortunately one could not have two more sensible and unwordy men to deal with.

  1 November 1970.

  Elizabeth is just back from Ireland where she had revisited Bowen’s Cour
t22 in a busload of Catholic nuns, priests, and acolytes. The house, she says, is gone without a trace; the ground where it stood so smooth that she could only identify the place where the library was by the prunus tree that once used to obscure the light in one of the windows. She says it is better gone than degraded. She is happier, she says, in a different way, now than ever before – the happiness of old age, the day-to-day kind, sensuous pleasure in the visible world. She wants to go on living, and so do I.

  I suppose Jasper Cross must be dead by now. A small, scruffy collection of Communists were presenting a petition today at the door of the United States Embassy as Elizabeth and I came back from lunch. The other day we had to evacuate MacDonald House because of a bomb scare.

  31 January 1971.

  Lunched with Ted Heath, now Prime Minister, at Chequers. He was very brisk with his no-nonsense manner and his determined joviality. I like the man because he treats me as a friend, or a friendly acquaintance. Of course I knew him quite well when he was Leader of the Opposition. I feel at ease with him, which I rarely do with Prime Ministers while they are in office. They are usually all right before and after. I certainly never felt at ease with his predecessor, Wilson.

  1 February 1971.

  I have been re-reading Thackeray’s Pendennis and recovering from the itch. Pendennis is a young barrister in the 1830s, a man-about-town. After all, has London life changed so much since then? Or rather, is the life-style of such young men so very different? Pendennis is a sort of English version of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Very acute it is, too.

  In the evening went to meet the Quebec Police delegation, who are here for consultation with the British. The head man is a Norman French Canadian, blue-eyed, strawberry colour. Every so often you see that pure Norman type in Canada. He spoke of the FLQ and said that to them separatism was only a jumping-off place. What they really wanted was a revolution against the “Establishment.” He spoke as an intelligent policeman, saying that if you read nothing for three months but Che Guevara, Marx, Mao, etc., it would not be at all difficult to think as they do.

  After he left, a dreary little party here of middle-aged people talking about Youth. Always the repetition of the same boring sentiments … “I didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl” … “Mind you, I can tolerate long hair provided it is clean” … “They are brought up too soft” … “They despise money but they are always looking for a handout.” My trouble is that I can understand the misbehaviour of the younger generation, but not their aspirations.

  14 February 1971.

  St. Valentine’s Day. Went to see Nancy Mitford in hospital where she lies – dying? She says that people always tell her that she would not really have enjoyed living in the reign of Louis XIV because of the horrors of the medical treatments, but that, judging by her medical experience in the last few years, she might just as well have lived in the age of Louis XIV. She tried some jokes and so did I. We drank a little of her champagne. I brought her a bunch of freesias that I got off a barrow at the Marble Arch. I was touched – and surprised – at her being so glad to see me, but felt, as I often do visiting the sick, that I talked too much and nervously, hoping to amuse. Later I walked in the windy park feeling very sad about Nancy and about life.

  28 March 1971.

  Yesterday was a day of inexplicable exhilaration, of total happiness. Sylvia and I went down to Woodstock for the night. We arrived in the late afternoon and walked in Blenheim Park. The landscaped lake, the theatrical bridges, the woods behind, were all misted over as though seen through gauze in the ballet Swan Lake. It was like walking by the lake in the Bois together when we were first married, and the bedroom up the twisting staircase at the Bear Inn was a kind of birdcage, like our bedroom in the rue Singer in Paris.

  29 March 1971.

  I can no more imagine life after retirement than life after death. When I wrote to Ed Ritchie and told him that I did not wish to “cling to this job,” I meant precisely the opposite. I do wish to cling to this job, and of course he knows that I do.

  Elizabeth is in the Hythe Nursing Home. There is a sky above which makes you disbelieve in God – an opaque, inexorable sulk, unchanging, like a mood that is going to last forever.

  Douglas LePan comes to see me. He has begun to write poetry again after twenty years of silence. He and I drink together. We are friends.

  24 April 1971.

  The Duchess of Kent here for a tea party for Dr. Best of insulin fame. The thing about Royalty (which she must have learned after, or just before, entering that enclosed order) is the slow-motion bit – never hurry, just cool it and keep every step, every gesture, every word, limpidly leisurely. It is a game of control. If any of the other actors in the scene get out of phase by word or gesture, control them with the slightest jerk of the reins. It’s dressage. No wonder Princess Anne is good at it – she was trained that way. And against this background, conversation of dedicated platitudes; any throwaway line from the Royalty sounds, to the uninitiated, like an indiscretion.

  In the afternoon to St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Duchess of Kent says that it would be impossible to be inside that Cathedral without believing in God. I feel exactly the opposite, as if I were in a magnificent, poorly filled opera house.

  26 April 1971.

  Weekend with the Sitwells. We drove over to Easton Neston. As always there was a wonderful and enjoyable mix of people there coming and going, up and down the grandiose staircase past the statues in their niches and the painted grisailles, in and out of the superb drawing-room with its elaborate plaster-work. In all the rooms, seated or semi-recumbent figures lounging, talking, reading, making their entrances and their exits. A house of echoes and reflections – echoes on the stone staircase, on the long parquet-floored gallery, on the paving stones of the hall, reflections from the long windows which frame the formal gardens and the ornamental water. Our hostess, dear Kisty, is a charmer, so clever and so funny and a Scottish naturalness about her.

  19 May 1971.

  A letter from the Department – “I regretfully must confirm that you should plan your retirement at the normal date, that is, September 23, 1971.” So that’s that. It will take some sharp hustling to get out of this house by that date, with two months of the London Season and continual entertaining coming in between, and then the dead month of August. It is the end of thirty-seven years in the Foreign Service.

  They, particularly Louis Rogers, are trying to get me out of my spacious office in Canada House and into a utilitarian third-floor box in MacDonald House. No – I and my office go together.

  6 June 1971.

  Walked in Kensington Gardens. I had got up very early — 5:30 a.m. – pulled on my pants, old sweater, collected key and three cigarettes. The park was completely empty. The morning was fine, foreboding heat, the sun just risen. I walked and walked till I came to the statue of Queen Victoria sculpted by her daughter which stands in front of Kensington Palace. Turning round the statue I came under the vine trellis into the garden. After so much green of trees and grass, its yellows and browns and pinks, the red of the tulips and the brown of the wallflowers, burst on my eyes with a delightful shock. I was alone and happy. For some reason I thought of my mother and remembered how she used to challenge us boys to look straight into her eyes and how we tried and always flinched before that potent, mocking, mysterious gaze, something leonine about it, not feline.

  14 June 1971.

  Itching like hell – I wonder whether this is the change of life. I am emptied and flattened by the hours of Wagner with Loelia.23 The second Act of Tristan vented its full power. Never that I can remember have I been so totally transported into a realm of passion and tragedy which was yet quite credible. I feel as if Loelia and I had been consumed and exhausted in the same revelation. I thought of ringing her up and asking her how her Wagner is settling down, but she is at Ascot with her husband. The loss of credibility and the lessening of interest comes in the third Act, with the endless dying of Tristan. Nev
er underestimate Wagner’s capacity for stretching a duet. We were in the theatre for six hours.

  Earlier in the day I lunched at Aspinall’s, the new club in Berkeley Square. All the people who used to go to the West End restaurants have now migrated, either to the new gaming clubs or to Chelsea and Knightsbridge. At the table next to us were a quartet of young bucks – quite a change from the arty Chelsea world. Perhaps with the revival of Edwardian women’s hats this year will come revival of the Edwardian gamblers and womanizers, the earliest progenitors of Mayfair.

  12 July 1971.

  Returned to London from a Disraelian weekend in the country at the d’Avigdor-Goldsmids. Gloriously hot weekend; roses, roses all the way. House running on the velvet wheels of the rich. The diversified and diverting company staying in the house included my now-favourite writer, Anthony Powell. What more could one ask? Powell himself is unalarming to an almost alarming degree, young in manner, extremely nice, natural and charming.

  16 July 1971.

  End of the Season – and what a Season! Lunched with the Queen Mother. On the dining-room table great silver bowls of outsize sweet peas breathing over us, and the Queen Mother, herself breathing charm. This life of semi-friendship with Prime Ministers and members of the Royal Family will finish in six weeks’ time and I shall have vanished from the scene as if I were dead, only if I were dead there would be a memorial service for me and they all would come.

  Dinner at Claridge’s with Elizabeth. She had spent two days with Rosamond Lehmann at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Park (nicknamed Spook Hall), where there was a psychic convention. Elizabeth said there was much talk of reincarnation and that it gives one a pretty poor idea of God’s resources to think that He could run out of inventing new people and be reduced to using the same old material over and over again. Elizabeth was in splendid form, but she is not cured. I fear for this winter when I am away in Canada.