There was a dissenting faction, of course, led by Cyril Connolly and the Bloomsbury Home Guard who ‘think my book utterly indecent on acc/ of not being about cabmen’s shelters & Hons Cupboard makes them vomit & they are all the more annoyed because they think its quite well written. I’ve just had this month’s Smarty’s5 Own Mag [Horizon] & of course the great joke is one does write better than all of them (not SB himself6) because even when they quite want to be understood they can’t be. As Tonks used to say “Why don’t they stick to cooking?” ’
The opinion that mattered most was that of the book’s begetter: Colonel was pleased with his portrait as the duc de Sauveterre, although constrained to point out that French dukes were not in life like that; ‘he then introduced me to one & indeed he can hardly have been more like the late Hartington & less like Fabrice. Still – fiction.’ He had been flattered, too, by Nancy’s dedication ‘To Gaston Palewski’ (‘Avec la dédicace, je dois entrer dans la gloire’). But then at the last moment, with the book already at the printer, he panicked, frightened that the Communist opposition would scent a scandal in his association with la soeur d’Unity Mitford, l’amie de Hitler. There was a flurried exchange of telegrams between Nancy and her publisher – ‘DELETE DEDICATION SUBSTITUTE LORD BERNERS’, ‘LEAVE GASTON IGNORE INSERTION PRINT AWAY’ – before Colonel calmed himself and allowed the dedication to stand. ‘Please never let Gerald know,’ Nancy implored Hamilton. ‘I count on you to be like a doctor & never tell tho it’s almost more than I can expect.’ No sooner was that panic over than another cause of annoyance came to light. In the last chapter Fanny’s mother says to her daughter about Fabrice, ‘He seemed to have settled down for life with that boring Lamballe woman; then she had to go to England on business and clever little Linda nabbed him.’ Now the Colonel had had a serious liaison with a lady of that name, as Nancy knew very well; ‘that boring Lamballe woman’ was put in expressly to tease; and tease it did. ‘Gerald says Diana [Cooper] says you are cross with me about the boring Lamballe woman. Don’t be cross, I can’t bear that. As for the BLW herself, tell her to write a book about me – I am very vulnerable. I hate her – hateful Lamballe who deserted you when you were a lonely exile & ran off with her own sort. It was a mean & shabby trick. All the same I will take anything you tell me out of the American edition.’ But it was too late: the Americans had already printed. All Nancy could now do was offer to delete the offending line before the book was published in France. And with that the Colonel (‘il est vain de pleurer sur le lait répandu’) was forced to be content.
Much as Nancy had been gratified by Linda’s enormous success, she could not feel happy while the cruel grey English Channel separated her from all she loved best. Her own idea was to get back to the Colonel as quickly as possible, for not only did she miss him but she knew very well that if she were away from him for long she would lose him. There was that terrible roving eye of his, and she had been badly frightened by how hard she had had to work to re-establish herself after their year’s absence from each other during the war. The Colonel was out of power now, the General having resigned in January, and his future was uncertain.
‘Colonel I know of nothing worse than when somebody one loves is far away & unhappy & one is quite quite incapable of helping them. Not only do I love you very much but also the Gen – & the hateful way in which he has been treated wounds me to the heart … I liked you being where I knew the set-up. When I felt sad I used to go past those men at the gate, past those men at the table, up the stairs, past that little squinting man & into the room where my darling colonel was working & working, & I felt well there he is, I know. Now it is all a mist – & then there are those hateful nieces. Don’t laugh & don’t say I know … there will be a long long silence now, no petite chose noire7, seulement l’épingle d’Alger – & I don’t like long colonial silences.’ When he did write or telephone it always gave her joy. ‘Your darling voice & your darling hand writing within an hour of each other is almost too much happiness. And I suppose the next best thing to having one’s sentiments returned is to have them appreciated.’ But when she did not hear, she was miserable. ‘Dear darling Colonel I think of you all the time don’t leave me for ever without a word of what is happening to you. I went yesterday to send you a telegram but then thought it would perhaps be a bore.’
Being a bore was the one thing she knew she dare not risk: she was often sad but her sadness must never be allowed to weigh upon the Colonel. ‘I’ve just written you a long sad letter which I’ve torn up – I don’t think you like being invited to regard me as a serious character … this is my Sunday letter – I’ve been writing to you for hours because the letter I tore up as well as being very sad was also very long. What will happen to me on Sunday mornings when I have to stop writing to you? Oh darling Colonel.’ It was clear then that the Colonel must at all costs be amused, and Michael Duff’s ball provided the ideal subject for just the sort of performance Gaston most enjoyed. This was the first big party Nancy attended since the beginning of the war and, having no suitable dress, she sewed an old nightdress on to the top of a discarded satin ball-gown. ‘I think at balls it is better to look a joke than dreary don’t you,’ she anxiously asked Diana. ‘I must say,’ she wrote to Colonel, ‘it was great great fun … I felt like a drowning man, the whole of my past life was there Chips [Channon] said to Emerald, surveying the scene “This is what we have been fighting for” to which clever old Emerald replied “Why are they all Poles?” … Prince Peter [of Greece] invited us to dinner in a kind of Chinese swimming bath (I do think foreign royalties are extraordinary) There were two horrible little Greek insect-women, one called Mrs Sitwell (I told Osbert & he said “Oh yes, those are the Jigga-Jigga Sitwells”) Prince P has a Norwegian girl friend who seems to wait faithfully for him & sees him once every 6 years, exactly like me. I felt for her … A friend of mine called lady Pat Russell writes from Austria that she was raped by 6 Cossacks (Hard cheese as she is a Lesbian) Very topical & in the swim of her isn’t it … I saw Penelope at the BALL she is going back to Paris lucky her. You would have loved the ball & oh the pretty young women back from running away to the country, now the war is over – come to London darling Colonel do & I promise you can see them (mustn’t touch).’
London was full of French Society – the Tour du Pins, the Massiglis, even Marc with his mother the Princesse de Beauvau. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice to poor Marc but he has a proprietory attitude as if he had been my lover for 25 years which I find impossible to bear.’ Every other person Nancy met seemed either to have just arrived from Paris, or be on the point of going there. It was too much to bear. ‘Can’t I come to Paris?’ she asked the Colonel. ‘You are the door-keeper of Calais to me.’
And really what was there to stop her going? She had given up working at the shop in March, and Peter was on the point of leaving for Spain to make a film. He and Nancy were on the friendliest terms but Prodd was the same old Prodd and nothing was going to change there. (‘We are dining on Tues to meet the Duchess of Kent,’ Evelyn was informed. ‘I’ve offered Prod 2/6 not to embarrass me, as I used to do with my sisters when my young men were coming to stay but I fear Prod is less venal & I dread his views on monarchy being aired.’) The marriage existed in name only, and Nancy’s longing to be in France was far stronger than any desire to keep up appearances with her husband. It was France she wanted, ‘all that bubbling & cheerfulness & endless flattery which goes on ceaselessly there. They never seem to want to take one down a peg, like English people do, & they seem, which is all that matters, to love one so much. Angels.’ And in April she was off.
1 Pretty Young Lady.
2 Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory.
3 Diana’s eldest son, Jonathan Guinness.
4 Alastair Forbes.
5 Cyril Connolly.
6 Smarty-Boots, a name originally given to Connolly by Virginia Woolf.
7 The Colonel’s phrase, trying to find the English for �
�typewriter’.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Paris
Nancy arrived in Paris in April 1946 knowing that she would never live in England again: from now on she was to devote herself to the pursuit of her love affair with the Colonel and with France. England represented everything that was ugly, hostile and cold: France was light and warmth. The unhappiness in her past – a lonely childhood, the sterile relationship with Hamish, her unsatisfactory marriage and failure to have children-were all represented by the bleak and barren British Isles. France, on the other hand, contained the Colonel, and it was on the Colonel that her happiness depended. Nancy was always inclined towards hero-worship, and Colonel was her hero. She knew in her heart that he was not and never would be in love with her; but the nature of her love for him, almost like a schoolgirl’s crush, allowed her to live with this knowledge. She lived for his whirlwind visits, for the hasty telephone calls between appointments, for the last-minute summons to run round and chat for fifteen minutes before he went out for the evening. Always she was expected to perform, to be at her best, to amuse and entertain. It was exciting because Nancy could never be sure when she would see him, when she would get the call to go on stage. But the excitement concealed a great emptiness: there was no ordinary life with the Colonel, none of the daily humdrum give and take, no waking up together in the morning or going out at night, no crossness or tiredness, none of the boredom, even, of married life, none of the emotional fulfilment of mutual love. Something had to take its place, and as she could not concentrate the powerful beam of her affection on one man, she increased its span to embrace the entire country. France itself, its people, its history and culture, its delicious food and pretty clothes, was bathed in a golden light, a light which, as in the pantomime, brilliantly illuminates the Good Fairy on one side of the stage, while on the other the Demon King (brandishing a Union Jack) is immersed in evil green. Thus Paris was the most beautiful city in the world, London so hideous it made one physically ill to go there; the weather in France was sunny and warm, in England one froze to death in those unheated houses and it never, ever stopped raining. Even the smells characteristic of the two countries exemplified the contrast: France was women’s scent and chestnut flowers and rich garlicky cooking, while in England one was made literally to retch by the smell of stale sweat, cold mutton, dirty clothes and unwashed hair.
None of Nancy’s friends was left in any doubt as to her feelings for her newly-adopted country. To Evelyn she wrote, ‘The day one sets foot in France, you can take it from me, PURE happiness begins … every minute of every day here is bliss & when I wake up in the morning, I feel as excited as if it were my birthday.’ Evelyn was unpersuaded – ‘I have long recognized your euphoria as a pathological condition … You have made great friends with a Pole who has introduced you to a number of other Poles …’ – but then Evelyn was not fond of the French. To her mother she described at greater length her reasons, leaving out the main one, for preferring to live in France: ‘For one thing I really can’t stand the English climate any more & in a world where the sun can shine on you all day see no point in continuing to live at the bottom of a well … Then there is an intellectual life here which has no counterpart at home & which I love. Then eating is a recurring delight here & so is walking about the beautiful town & so is the fact that real deep country is within ½ an hour, & a country where you can walk & then deliciously dine. Everybody is cheerful, nice to you, anxious to please. They wash & iron to perfection – there are none of the minor pin pricks of life everything goes on oiled wheels. You can drink wine at every meal. In fact, except for leaving a handful of friends who anyhow can come over here whenever they want to now, & relations who anyhow all live in the country & whom I only saw intermittently, I have no doubt at all that life here, for me is far the most agreeable life. I can come home for 3 months every year which will be quite enough …!’
Nancy’s move to Paris was important in another way, which had nothing to do with Gaston nor with the rival merits of the two countries. Away from home and divided by the Channel from family and friends, she had every opportunity for that form of communication at which she excelled – writing letters. Many of her friendships developed further on paper than they would have done in the ordinary course of meetings on social occasions and exchanging a few minutes’ gossip. Heywood Hill, to whom, once she had left the shop, Nancy turned back with affection, was one of these friends; Evelyn was another. Evelyn had particularly regretted Nancy’s departure (‘Nancy has gone to Paris leaving a grave gap in my morning’s routine,’ he noted in his diary in September 1945), but in fact their correspondence became as important to them both as any more contiguous relationship. To his many enemies Evelyn was the nastiest-tempered man in England, but Nancy saw past that and loved him, ‘knowing as I do the real bonhommie behind that mask of iron’. They quarrelled, of course, mainly about religion, a subject on which Nancy irritated Evelyn by preserving an incorrigibly flippant attitude; but they moved in the same world, found the same jokes funny, both revelled in gossip, and Nancy relied very much on Evelyn’s critical judgement. While in the process of writing a novel, she discussed every stage with him, and always sent the manuscript for his approval before showing it to her publisher.
And at first Nancy was gloriously happy. Gaston, out of office and with time on his hands, was much more accessible than before. ‘The Col is no longer governing France, so instead of always waiting about to be rung up & then hurrying round for ½ an hour I can see him for hours every day.’ The difficulty was that he was extremely hard-up, whereas Nancy for the first time in her life had money to spend, and could afford to do much as she pleased. Linda was still bringing in a healthy income, the film rights had been sold, there was the American edition and translations into several European languages.1 But so many of the pleasures of Paris – going to the theatre, eating in restaurants – were disappointing on one’s own, and the only company Nancy wanted was that of Gaston who absolutely refused to let her pay for him. ‘I’ve begged & implored him to have some of my millions but it simply makes him cross so I’ve had to desist,’ she told Diana. ‘When he isn’t asked out he eats things in tins which have been sent him from time to time by American friends & luckily conserved by his faithful Pierre – High Grade pork etc. Yesterday morning he rang up & said “franchement ma chère j’en ai assez du High Grade”. Isn’t it dreadful.’ Evenings which they spent together always began with Colonel opening a tin of High Grade in the rue Bonaparte where Nancy would join him after eating on her own in a bistro. Only if she were entertaining several people to a meal would he agree to be her guest. She described her first luncheon party to Diana: ‘2 bottles of champagne & 2 of red wine – lovely snails, chicken & port salut (don’t cry) which with tip came to £9. You must say that’s pretty cheap if one thinks of London. I had Maurice Bowra, Col, Marie Louise Bousquet, Paz Subercazeaux (Gerald’s enemy) & Marc de Chimay … Maurice is wonderful here, he launches unashamed into the most extraordinary French, never draws breath, & the frogs utterly love him.’
The Colonel, of course, had an extremely busy social life of his own: he had a wide acquaintance, was much sought after as a diner-out, and evenings alone with the tin-opener did not feature often. It was he who introduced Nancy into Paris society. Most of her friends in Paris were English whom she had known for years, like Geoffrey Gilmour, first met as a friend of Hamish in the twenties, now living in the rue du Bac; Alvilde Chaplin at whose house in Jouy en Josas Nancy often spent the weekend; and Violet Trefusis, that clever, tiresome woman, daughter of Mrs Keppel, who mesmerised a large circle of friends by her impulsive generosity2 and her habit of telling the most terrible lies, lies of mythological proportion always with herself in the starring role. (One of her favourites was that her real father was not Mr Keppel but King Edward VII himself, and at Buckingham Palace she clearly remembers being sent into the garden to play with the sceptre and orb.) Like Nancy, Violet, too, was a writer, and as such took herself
very seriously indeed: after her name in the Paris telephone directory, as it might be ‘épicier en gros’, was the entry, ‘fmm de lttrs’. The people whom Nancy now came to know through Gaston were not so much ‘gratin’, the old grand French with their pre-Revolutionary titles, but a sort of café society, people like Princesse Dolly Radziwill and her Danish husband Mogens Tvede, the Prince and Princesse de Caraman-Chimay, Marie-Louise Bousquet and Princesse Sixte de Bourbon-Parme. He was very careful, was the Colonel, that among his friends he and Nancy should never be regarded as a couple: if invited to the same occasion they must make their separate ways; Nancy was not allowed to ‘tutoyer’ him, nor did he care for her to address him by his first name. In the eyes of the world, they were no more than good friends from his days in London during the war; the world knew nothing of Nancy’s passion, nor of her anguish, nor of her tears on those many occasions when the telephone rang at the last possible moment with the Colonel cancelling the evening’s plans.
Her entrée into this glittering society made it essential that Nancy should equip herself with a couture wardrobe. One of the most painful disciplines of her visit to Paris the year before was denying herself the pleasure of buying clothes. But that was before the publication of her book, and prices then were far out of her reach. ‘The pre-war price of about £40 I could now afford,’ she had written to Muv, ‘but £100 really is out of the question. Oh I had to make an effort though! the devil whispers get it – you’ll never see anything pretty again for years & years, & you’ll wear it for 10 years, & that’s only £10 a year.’ Her one small extravagance was a hat but ‘I’m sorry to say the hats really are smaller again (mine is huge, but I got it a bit too soon) the really smart women all have lovely little ones with feathers, not ostrich, & bows … Maddening that one just missed the fashion, so becoming to one. Never mind, gallant old London won’t know this – except that gallant old Eng: ladies so love to pose a dolls hat over their gallant old huge yellow faces, that they will probably snatch at the news.’
Nancy Mitford Page 20
