All around her, friends seemed to be dying off at an alarming rate: the forest was getting thin. Victor Cunard was the first to go. When Nancy arrived in Venice for her annual holiday in July 1960, he was already in hospital in Asolo where she went to see him nearly every day. ‘It’s a great worry & also not much fun panting up there, 3 hours in buses, because he’s in such a bad temper. I always thought people on their death beds lay with angelic smiles saying I forgive you – not O.V. who has cooked up every grievance, over a friendship of 25 years, to fling at my head.’ He died a few weeks after she left, and when she returned the following year she found she missed him ‘too terribly … I had a long sad talk with our banino, Vittorio, which consisted of him reciting the names of dead people & me crying & saying Oh Vittorio.’ She was in Venice when she heard of Eddy Sackville-West’s death in 1965. ‘Had no idea, on acc of never bothering to look at the paper I suppose. Graham Sutherland said what a pretty shawl you’ve got on – I said Eddy gave it to me – he said Eddy who’s dead? DEAD? I nearly fainted … Oh dear, I mind Monsewer.’15 And, three years later, she was in Venice when she heard the news of Peter’s death, dead of an embolism in a hospital in Malta16. Diana ran into Nancy walking along the Zattere, ‘dressed in black. Looking rather sad & then needless to say we began laughing again.’ She did feel sad, Nancy told her, and remorseful in a way; ‘but I couldn’t live with him I don’t believe a saint could have without going mad.’
Mrs Hammersley died in 1964, the memory of her prophesies of doom and graveyard cerements haunting Fontaines for the two years Nancy continued to go there after her death, until in 1966 Madame Costa died. So did Dolly Radziwill and Roger Hinks (who had been so unencouraging about the sights in Athens): ‘Oh yes the Turkish Lady17 – I MIND. I lunched with him at the Invalides (good restaurant) & there was a great deal of sighing when one oeuf en gêlée was hard – luckily the second one was soft. Had we guessed it would be his last luncheon we could have gone to Maxims! I can never get over the strangeness of death … Père Lachaise is full like the Ritz & everything else nowadays. Ay de mi.’ In 1969 Mark died of cancer in hospital in London. Nancy wrote to Cecil Beaton, ‘I minded passionately about Mark – I suppose he was my oldest intimate friend; he really knew all about me. The reason, so odd, is that he was the only young man my father liked & therefore one could invite him without the risk of his being shaken like a rat.’
Death was very much on Nancy’s mind, and in her letters to Evelyn she held several long conversations with him on the subject. ‘Darling Evelyn If you’re not busy (& if you are, when you’re not) will you explain something to me? You know death – (My brother Tom aged 3 said once Grandfather, you know adultery – ) Well, one dies, is buried & rises again & is judged. What happens then between death & the end of the world? … One or two friends (Catholic) were quite as much puzzled as I am, when I put it to them, & said they wld be glad to know what I find out on the subject.’ Evelyn took trouble with his replies (‘At the moment of death each individual soul is judged and sent to its appropriate place – the saints straight to heaven, unrepentant sinners to Hell, most (one hopes) to Purgatory where in extreme discomfort but confident hope we shall be prepared for the presence of God. Our bodies remain on earth & decay …’); but Nancy, flippant as ever, continued to insist that to her the Last Judgment sounded just like ‘finding one’s coat after a party I hope the arrangements are efficient … I’ve always felt the great importance of getting into the right set at once on arrival in Heaven. I used to think the Holland House lot would suit me – now I’m not sure. One would get some good belly laughs no doubt, but Sans Souci might provide more nourishment.’ Then in 1966 Evelyn himself died, his death depriving Nancy not only of one of her oldest friends but of the source of her most important correspondence. ‘Oh Evil when has one been so sad?’ she wailed. ‘I’m in despair … He was such a close friend & I suppose knew more about me than anybody. I think he was v. miserable in the modern world. It killed Théophile Gautier in 1871 (& may well end by killing me).’
In 1963 Muv died. Although deaf and over the past few years shaky from the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease, Muv had continued to live her quiet life, dividing her time between London (padding off to Harrods to change her library-book and going to the cinema with her friend Lady Barnes) and Inch Kenneth, her beloved island off the west coast of Scotland. It was a beautiful place, lying at the mouth of Loch na Keal, surrounded by the craggy slopes of the western Highlands. Here Muv was able to live in perfect peace in a large, comfortable, modern house filled with family photographs and with her favourite French furniture. She kept goats, grew her own vegetables, and walked her little dog José beside the seaweedy rocks of the island’s small perimeter.
In April 1963 Nancy came over to London to ‘arm’ her mother to a family wedding, that of Princess Alexandra to Angus Ogilvy at Westminster Abbey, an occasion which provided some rewarding copy. ‘Oh the get ups I never saw worse … Joan Ali Khan next to me in pale green & pale brown paisley satin & blue satin shoes & bedroom hair covered with a net & a bow & she was better than most. Violet [Trefusis] was got up like the Fighting Temerair … I’m sure English women are dowdier than when I was young. The hats were nearly all as though made by somebody who had once heard about flowers but never seen one – huge muffs of horror … The only one of the foreign royalties who didn’t look as if she had just been lynched was the Greek Queen – all the others were pathetic – weedy, dowdy & pop-eyed … Q of Spain rather splendid – the Queen excellent, though in washy green which I do hate … Pss Anne quite lovely … Muv, in black velvet, lace & diamonds, was marvellous she looked so pretty.’
Straight after this Muv travelled up to Inch Kenneth while Nancy went over to Ireland to spend a few days with Debo. She was in Ireland when the news reached her that Muv had had a stroke and was dying. All the sisters (except Decca in distant California) gathered at the island – Nancy and Debo from Ireland, Pam from Gloucestershire, Diana from Paris. They took it in turns to sit by Muv’s bedside, to keep the fire going and give her little spoonfuls of food or a sip of water. Muv was restless, had to be turned constantly, said again and again how she longed only to die. She asked to be carried to the window to take a last look at the magnificent view up the Loch. ‘Two days ago she seemed to be going,’ Nancy told Mark ‘– she said perhaps, who knows, Tom & Bobo & said good bye to everybody & said if there are things in my will you don’t like do alter it I said but we should go to prison, & she laughed. (She laughed as she always has). Then she rallied & here she still is – we long for her to go in her sleep quietly.’ But for two weeks Muv lived miserably on. Nancy wrote to Decca, ‘Here it goes on & poor Muv is getting so fed up. She scolds us now for “dragging her back from the grave – what for?” But all we have done is to give her a little water when she asks which isn’t exactly dragging! Three times now we have been gathered round as she seemed to be going & then she has rallied. The fact is she’s fearfully bored & no wonder … Oh dear oh dear Susan it’s really awful & you’re lucky not to be here.’
She died on May 25. A neighbour said prayers over the coffin in the drawing-room, then ‘she was taken across on the most perfect evening I ever saw, at high tide (8 pm) Flag on the Puffin at ½ mast – bagpipes wailing – Puffin filled with all of us & about 7 crofters whom she knew, all old friends, who had done everything … It was very sad but wonderful & one felt how different from dying in the London Clinic, the whole thing seemed natural & REAL.’ She was buried at Swinbrook on May 31, laid beside Farve on a day of brilliant sunshine, the Cotswold countryside ‘a mass of blossom & cow parsley, brilliant blue sky & flowers for her such as I have never seen … I really think I shall never be able to cry again.’ Although she had never been close to her, Nancy was deeply shaken by her mother’s death. She wrote sadly to the Colonel, ‘I have a feeling that nothing really nice will ever happen again in my life, things will just go from bad to worse, leading to old age & death.’
1 At the
end of her life Nancy apologised to Diana for these dark suspicions and admitted that she now saw they had been groundless.
2 In 1898 a French force hoisted the tricolor at Fashoda, in the Sudan. Kitchener immediately replaced this with the British and Egyptian flags while inviting the French to withdraw – which they eventually did, but only after some days of tense negotiation between London and Paris.
3 Art-historian and British Council Representative in Athens.
4 Sir William Hayter was Ambassador in Moscow from 1953 to 1957.
5 One-time the Times correspondent in both Paris and Rome, at this period retired and living in Venice.
6 Ministre d’Etat chargé de la Recherche Scientifique et des Questions Atomiques et Spatiales.
7 Dressed by Dior, Lanvin or Patou, Nancy was always the epitome of chic, and it was a cause of regret to her that although her clothes were French, she never looked other than unmistakably, one hundred per cent English. ‘La bougie anglaise,’ ‘the English candle’, her French friends used to call her.
8 Neuphilologische Mitteilungen.
9 The passage referred to is that disquieting attack of Uncle Matthew’s on the vulgarising effects of education on Fanny’s vocabulary: ‘ “Education! I was always led to suppose that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talk about notepaper – the irritation!” ’
10 ‘The last straw is Harrods won’t stamp ones notepaper any more.’
11 Mockbar is a pun on the Russian spelling of Moscow – Mockba.
12 Chevalier replied with aristocratic restraint, ‘Ne vous en inquiétez surtout pas. Chaque fois, Madame, qu’il m’arrive quelque chose de ce genre, je me console toujours en pensant qu’il est arrivé bien pire à des gens beaucoup mieux que moi. Et je m’arrange pour survivre.’
13 But Evelyn Waugh described it as ‘her most mature and satisfactory story.’
14 Handasyde Buchanan joined the shop in 1945, later becoming a partner. He married Mollie Friese-Greene in 1948.
15 After ‘Monsewer’ Eddie Gray, a member of The Crazy Gang. The Mitford system of nicknaming could be elaborate. Debo, for instance, was frequently addressed as ‘Nine’ as that was what her older sister pretended to assume her mental age to be. Alphy Clary was ‘Sacred’, from the line in Coleridge’s poem, Kubla Khan, ‘Where Alph, the sacred river, ran’. And ‘The One without the Parsley’ was one of the two French Féray brothers (‘Yesterday I was walking past W. H. Smith when I saw the one without the parsley standing like a stork reading that book … about the Empress Elizabeth … The one without the parsley, by the way, was still deep in the book when I repassed 10 minutes later’). The key to this is that one of the Féray brothers had a moustache, the other did not. In the Eddie Cantor comedy, Roman Scandals, the hero has to give the wicked Emperor a chalice of poisoned wine. There are two chalices, one poisoned, one not. To make sure that he gives the right one, he puts a sprig of parsley in the poisoned chalice, saying to himself, ‘The one without the parsley is the one without the poison.’ Thus, the Féray brother without the moustache …
16 Since the end of the war Peter had found himself at a loose end. His mother had left him a modest income (supplemented from time to time by cheques from Nancy and from his brother Francis) on which he was just able to live without working, first on a boat in the Mediterranean, then, when that broke loose from its moorings and sank, in a small flat in Rome, and finally in an even smaller flat in Malta. He had many love-affairs but never remarried. In the last few years of his life he succeeded in giving up the heavy drinking which had for so long been a habit. A letter from Nancy arrived on the morning of his death, and when he died he was found holding it in his hands.
17 Roger Hinks used to sit watching the passing scene from the balcony of his house in Athens, looking for all the world, said Nancy, like a Turkish lady of olden times.
CHAPTER TEN
The Last Years
The year following Muv’s death, 1964, Nancy began work on a new book, a retelling of the story of Louis XIV and the château of Versailles, ‘one of those boring books millionaires give each other for Christmas’. The original suggestion had been a history of the château itself but this Nancy was reluctant to do: she had already covered much of it in ‘Pomp’, and had no desire to deal with the reign of Louis XVI and the dreaded Marie-Antoinette: ‘I loathe M-A, the heroine of the Anglo Saxon race, to such a point that I would find it hard to be fair to her & her wretched husband.’ But The Sun King would break new ground and, as Heywood shrewdly pointed out, ‘Has all the sniff of a seller too, as Hotbrick Hamilton must be twigging’. In order to get started she went in September to stay for six weeks at Fontaines where the dying beauty of the autumnal countryside induced in her a pervasive feeling of melancholy. ‘My book has rather come to a standstill,’ she wrote to the Colonel. ‘After 1700 all the old friends are dead, just like real life. Oh dear, I sometimes feel very sad.’ But soon she was under the spell of the high-heeled periwigged tyrant and by January of the following year the book was finished, for once to her complete satisfaction. ‘It dazzles me whatever it may do to the public so somebody is pleased.’
Hamish Hamilton had intended that The Sun King should repeat the conventional format of Madame de Pompadour, but while Nancy was still working an her text a new proposition was put forward. George Rainbird, the publisher and inventor of the ‘coffee-table book,’ had recently had an enormous success with a big, gorgeously illustrated work on Tutankhamun which he now wanted to follow with a similar book on a similar subject – in other words a king who had left behind him great works of art. Louis XIV was an obvious choice. The idea of a co-edition was attractive to Hamish Hamilton as Rainbird’s imprimatur guaranteed sales all over the world; Nancy, too, was impressed by the large sums of money mentioned and liked the promise of lavish illustration. Rainbird’s chief picture-researcher, Joy Law, came over to Paris to discuss the choice of pictures and the lay-out of the pages. This was a completely new concept in publishing, a book in which the pictures should be not an interruption to, but an integral part of, the text: as you read about Madame de Maintenon or the interior of Louis’s magnificent château, so there would be the lady’s portrait or a double-page spread in full colour of the Galerie des Glaces.
The result was a book that was as magnificent to look at as it was entertaining to read. From the first sentence – ‘Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de la Vallière at the same time; Versailles was the love of his life’ – one can almost hear the sigh of pleasure and relief with which Nancy returns to the past and her beloved France. The Sun King, dedicated to Raymond Mortimer ‘in gratitude, I fancy,’ he said, ‘for my vain attempts to explain to its author the difference between a colon and a semi-colon’, was greeted with adulatory reviews, nearly all of them remarking not only the liveliness of Miss Mitford’s style but the splendour of the illustrations. There were one or two dissonant voices: Harold Nicolson ‘takes exception of the word Sodomite which, he says, reminds him of Mr Odoni & the Bishop of Sodor & Man. I asked what I ought to call the adherents of that cult & he says metallists. All right – so long as one knows’; and, as with Madame de Pompadour, some critics objected to the pure gold light in which Nancy bathed her far from pure gold subject. Lucy Norton, the learned translator of the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, was one, but Nancy’s rose-coloured vision was not to be tainted by reality. ‘Of course I suppose there was that black side but I’m sure people like La Montespan, Mme la duchesse or all the little chatterers round the Dsse de Bourgogne never noticed it & I don’t believe I would have. Mme
de Maintenon did but then she was a life-hater. You speak of the Inquisition but the worst we hear of is ghastly Mme Guyon’s eight comfortable years in the Bastille – and she asked for it … I feel one would have said who is tired of Versailles is tired of life. I did try to put a little shade by going on about those tiresome peasants & galley slaves. But there you are – it’s all a matter of temperament isn’t it.’ What meant more to Nancy than any of the ‘rave’ reviews, more even than the phenomenal sales1 was the news that General de Gaulle had read The Sun King, praised it, and been heard to say that every member of his Cabinet should buy it. ‘MISS!’ Nancy exclaimed to Debo. ‘I nearly fainted with excitement.’ It was on the strength of this that the Colonel approached de Gaulle with a request that Madame Rodd should be awarded the Légion d’Honneur, on the grounds that ‘[Ses] romans … montrent tous la France sous un aspect attirant et sympathetique … Elle est devenue une sorte d’incarnation de la francophilie britannique …’ But on this occasion the answer from the General was a characteristic ‘Non’.
With The Sun King out of the way Nancy awarded herself a long holiday, going first to Ireland, then to Chatsworth for the ball to celebrate the coming of age of her nephew Peregrine, then to Venice as usual in July. ‘Enjoyed it in patches,’ she told Debo, but there were too many sewers about, the most objectionable of whom were Brigitte Bardot and a crowd of film people staying with the Agnellis. ‘Audrey Hepburn looks charming (& makes idiotic observations but at least her looks are nice) But Yul Brner [sic] looks utterly revolting & has got a showing-off American wife & as for A.H.’s bearded American husband all I can say is DON’T. They are all quite without grey matter. Actors, & when you’ve said that you’ve said everything.’ After Venice she went on to Florence to stay with Harold Acton at La Pietra – ‘complete perfection … One wakes up in a room larger than the Chatsworth drawing room with sun streaming onto the bed so that one has a comfortable sun bath. Then the art, both in the house & the galleries knocked me silly. We lunched & dined out in wonderful villas with such gardens. Oh Italy, there’s nothing like it.’
Nancy Mitford Page 27
