Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  The unpredictability was not all on one side. Diana was as versatile as Duff and in her infinite variety lay much of her attraction. One evening they went to a concert of Spanish music at the Aldwych Theatre, Diana wearing Spanish hat and shawl. Afterwards they returned to Duff’s flat where Diana stripped to the waist, danced and sang arias from Carmen. Then they contentedly ate biscuits and drank white wine before the fire. A fortnight later they took a picnic to the Sussex downs. Duff sat on a little knoll, while Diana, feeling the need for exercise, ran round and round him. ‘She looked strange and romantic in her smart London clothes, transplanted to this lonely rural scene. I laid my head in her lap and she read to me “Atalanta in Calydon”.’ They went on to spend the weekend with the Asquiths, where Diana insisted on going prawning, went into the sea up to her waist, caught nothing and adored it. They matched each other in their capacity for getting fun out of life; Diana more adventurous, more indifferent to discomfort or the risk of being thought a fool; Duff more reasoned, more cultivated in his appreciation.

  The simplest pleasures became sublime when they were together. After a typical Coterie dinner one night in October 1915, Duff and Diana walked back to 10 Downing Street with the Raymond Asquiths:

  We all loved each other so much. It was very beautiful. We dropped Raymond and Katharine, then Diana and I sat down, or rather lay on the steps that led down from Downing Street into Horseguards Parade. There we remained under the shadow of the damned old Foreign Office, under the very window where I worked by day, locked in each other’s arms for quite a time. It was odd and romantic and delightful. Then we walked on very slowly and with many delicious pauses. We embraced under the lamp in the middle of the Parade, and under the dark trees of the Mall, and in St James’s Street. Finally we sat again on the steps of Lord Zetland’s house in Arlington Street and exchanged the most wonderful kisses of all. A memorable night.

  The stern rules of pre-war chaperonage had indeed been forgotten. Diana held obstinately to her refusal to let any man deprive her of her virginity before her marriage, but this still left much scope for mutual satisfaction. Again and again Duff recorded that they had gone further than ever before, ‘and with such art and distinction’. ‘She is the only woman with whom excessive intimacy never breeds the slightest shadow of contempt or disgust. This is, I think, not only because we never proceed to extremes. With most women the further one goes, the more one is disillusioned; with her exactly the opposite happens. She assures me that she has never abandoned herself with anybody else in this fashion and I am inclined to believe it. How I adored her. I don’t suppose there is any more beautiful thing in the world than she naked to the waist.’ Once, when the Duchess was away, they derived particular pleasure from invading her sitting-room, lighting the fire and making love in front of it: ‘Diana almost naked with her hair down is a memory to warm and thrill me when I have one foot in the grave.’

  The relationship was far from wholly straightforward. Diana had no intention of committing herself irrevocably: yes, she loved Duff; yes, perhaps, she loved him more than anyone else; but she was not really sure, it was all very difficult, how could anyone think straight in the middle of a war? Duff, for his part, suffered from the common masculine complaint of doubting whether it is possible to be in love with anybody who is in love with oneself. When Diana retreated he was in hot pursuit, if she advanced towards him he nervously recoiled. ‘I don’t know whether I’m in love with her or not‚’ he wrote only a few weeks after the lyrical episodes just described. ‘I fancy not, but I have far more fun with her than anyone.’ He could easily contrive to be in love with three or four women at the same time – and go through the appropriate motions with half a dozen more; sometimes indeed it seemed that making overtures to a woman was an automatic reflex, as another man might reach for his gun when he saw a pheasant, or his glass when he saw a bottle of wine. ‘I think my heart is made of paper,’ he wrote ruefully. ‘It catches fire easily, flames beautifully, but it is all over in a minute and another firmer, harder, slightly smaller one is born in the ashes.’

  Even when the course of true love ran at all, it was afflicted by periodic tempests. One evening in the Cavendish Duff so enraged Diana that she struck him in the face and made his lip bleed. In return he gave her what he described as ‘the gentlest tap on the cheek’, whereupon she stormed out of the hotel. Duff luxuriated in the expiation of his sin. ‘I left you last night with the mark of your fingers on my face, which I need hardly say I enjoyed and [which] tingled deliciously for hours … Bless you, my sweet, and bless your strong cruel hand.’ Not long afterwards Duff detected in Diana doubts about his love for her and wantonly fed her fears. That evening on the way to the theatre he rashly admitted that he had been playing with her. Indignantly she slapped his face, jumped from the cab and ran home. Usually such rows were followed by equally fiery reconciliations which both enjoyed, but Diana had less stamina than Duff and could not always endure the quarrels which seemed to him a natural part of any love-affair. ‘Duff dear,’ she wrote towards the end of 1916:

  I can’t bear it at all. You will no longer help me with my moods or be patient with my tired ways. You will not even let me lie quietly without raging at the little I sometimes needs must deny you. There is so rarely a night spent together that we do not make hideous with our complaints of one another. Tonight was a climax. I kept calm long enough to remind you not to berate me. I did not check your ill-temper, but augmented it. You ridiculed me till my heart shrank from myself, then you stopped it beating by trying to step out of a fast taxi, and then you ground it to atoms by telling me I caused you all possible pain. So we will rest from each other for a little and if possible return together restored to peacefulness.

  This time it took two days of abject apology before reconciliation was achieved.

  Duff demanded from Diana a fidelity that he had no intention of offering her himself. When he felt she was paying undue attention to Michael Herbert – once again a soldier about to return to the war – he abused her roundly, calling her vile and treacherous and, worst of all, common. Diana knew the violence of his temper and was usually ready to let the storm die out, but on this occasion she was stung to protest. ‘You have no more love in you than a penny-in-the-slot machine‚’ she scribbled furiously on the back of an envelope. ‘I am tired, tired of your incessant rending of me … It is not for you to borrow my epithet “common” to use against me, you who behave more like a street dog, with your conspicuous sensuality, and loud fighting snarls.’

  Duff was inclined to take it for granted that Diana would marry him if only certain financial and familial problems could be regulated. As early as 1914 he had told her that she was the most remarkable woman of her generation. Sir Richard Steele had said of somebody that ‘to love her was a liberal education’. Duff sought to improve on this by saying that to love Diana was to love one’s own age in its highest manifestation. He had found the mate God meant for him: ‘But God’s schemes never quite come off and it seems highly improbable that I shall ever marry you.’

  The main difficulty was money. Duff believed that if enough of this was available, the Rutlands’ other objections could quickly be overcome. But British aristocrats expected their daughters to be maintained in the style to which they had been accustomed, and Duff could hardly support a dustman’s daughter, let alone a duke’s; could hardly provide her with a bungalow, let alone a Belvoir. From the Bachelors’ Club, on the wings of burgundy, Duff put forward a scheme by which he would realize all his capital – perhaps £10,000. On this they would live for a year in great style while Duff gambled heavily. If he won, they would live happily ever after. If he lost, he would kill himself by subtle means and Diana could live on his life insurance: ‘What is there wrong with my plan?’ Diana thought there was a lot wrong with it. She was not yet finally convinced that she wanted to marry Duff, certainly she did not feel inclined to defy her parents. Elopement, even for a woman of twenty-three, was a drastic step and Di
ana valued her comfort and her connections too highly to risk them except as a last resort.

  Meanwhile things got more rather than less difficult at home. Someone, probably a servant but perhaps one of Duff’s disaffected mistresses, had begun writing to the Duchess, reporting that Diana went alone to Duff’s fiat. The Duchess said nothing of this to Diana but spoke to Claud Russell, who passed on the news. Duff found Diana wretched with worry and reluctant to visit him again. He dined alone. ‘If only,’ he wrote disconsolately in his diary, ‘we had some money and could marry.’

  *

  Early in July 1915 Duff and Diana, with the Raymond Asquiths and the shortly-to-be-married Montagus, went for a weekend to Brighton. After dinner Duff and Diana decided to ramble romantically on the moonlit beach. They were not extravagantly drunk but far enough gone to make the navigation of a flight of steps a hazardous undertaking. Down they tumbled and Diana broke her leg. She was carried to the hotel and, two days later, by ambulance to London. The Duchess was told that she had unluckily slipped getting out of Edwin Montagu’s motor-car, no mention was made of Duff’s presence at the weekend party, but somehow he and Nancy Cunard were allowed to make up an incongruous trio with the Duchess in the ambulance escorting Diana to the nursing-home. Sir Arbuthnot Lane, one of London’s most eminent surgeons, was summoned to operate. Duff was disturbed by the choice: ‘I have always understood that his speciality was not legs. I had heard that he was one of those ambitious people who look higher. I can only hope that he will keep his ambition under control during the course of the operation.’ In fact Lane did a workmanlike job, but the fracture was a complicated one and it was nearly two months before Diana left the nursing-home in Manchester Street.

  It was one of the happiest periods of her life. Her leg caused her some pain but morphia dulled the agony and, taken in company, helped to create a festive atmosphere. Her friends rallied to visit her and life was a perpetual party. Sir Arbuthnot, looking in at 10 p.m. on his late rounds, found Edwin and Venetia Montagu, Raymond and Katharine Asquith, Duff and several others eating lobster and cold grouse and drinking champagne. When Cynthia Asquith called at a more conventional time she found Lilian Boyd, Jacqueline de Portalès, Katharine Asquith and Felicity Tree in attendance. Diana ‘was lying really looking exquisitely gleaming in a lovely primrose crêpe-de-chine nightdress on a very successful theatrical bed, surrounded by flowers and air balloons. Ice-coffee, strawberries, chocolates and nectarines were strewn all around her. The chief topic was the desirability of mothers, and the best methods of circumventing them.’ The Prime Minister, Augustine Birrell, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Maurice Baring – well over two hundred different friends and acquaintances flowed past the sick-bed.

  To be cosseted, loved, flattered, made the centre of attention, above all to be wholly free from responsibilities, was close to heaven for Diana. She might not have been content for long with such inactivity – there were too many things to do, people to see, places to visit – but at that time a return to the womb was what she wanted most. She feared the moment when she would have to plunge back into real life, and as the moment of departure neared, so her apprehension heightened. ‘It’s bloody autumn in this room – fewer flowers and more faded, decreasing balloons, blasé nurses and in my heart the panic of recovery and all it entails.’ She had created an artificial world inside the nursing-home – bright, cosy, secure – and she did not wish to venture forth.

  For outside her world was disintegrating. As one by one those whom she loved most dearly were killed in battle, so she grew to fear that all would go, that the war would never end, that nothing would survive. To those emerging from the carnage of the trenches, the lot of the civilian left behind in London must have seemed truly enviable. To Diana, resolutely smiling so as to make more enjoyable the last leaves of her friends, waiting with sick apprehension for the telegram that would tell her there was no need for further fear, it sometimes seemed as if her fate was the unhappier one.

  First of her friends to die was Julian Grenfell. Diana had never been particularly fond of him, nor was she one of those who thought ‘Into Battle’ the finest flower of English poesy. She had too much commonsense not to suspect that while he who would not fight might indeed be dead, he who would fight was likely to be dead a great deal quicker. She did not doubt the necessity for young men to die for their country, but she could not share Grenfell’s heroics or glorify death in the way of her far dearer friend Maurice Baring: ‘I am sorry for us but not for him. For him it is a privilege and a prize before anything he can have dreamed before the war.’ Julian Grenfell’s death seemed to her a pitiful waste, and the waste became tragic when his brother Billy was killed two months later. She had written to Billy Grenfell from the nursing-home only a few days before – ‘Misfortune has empire over me and is relentless, first with measles and then with a double fracture of the tibia and fibula … complaints have lost their value when all complains.’ Her moans read pitifully thin when the letter was returned to her unopened. ‘There was nothing more glorious ever born than Julian and Billy,’ she wrote to Lady Desborough. ‘As their mother I should have been mad with pride; that you will still be.’

  Even before Julian Grenfell had died, however, war had obtruded into the heart of the Coterie. In May 1915 Edward Horner was severely wounded and moved to a hospital near Boulogne where his life was said to be in danger. Diana appealed for help to George Moore and within forty-eight hours she, Sir John and Lady Horner, Edward’s sister Katharine Asquith, the Duchess of Rutland, Sir Arbuthnot Lane and a special nurse were on the way to France. At the time Diana gave no thought to the abuse of privilege which her journey represented and was indifferent to the criticism. It was not even a case of one law for the rich and one for the poor, grumbled many whose sons and husbands were left to die alone, it was one law for Diana Manners and another for the rest of mankind. ‘One cannot but sympathize with their deprecation,’ she wrote many years later, ‘but which of those many would not have grasped at the same chance?’ For her the exercise was fully justified when Edward, being carried into the hospital on a stretcher, opened his eyes to find all those he loved best around him and murmured ‘O darling, this is heaven!’

  Edward Horner did not die, but Charles Lister did, from wounds received at Gallipoli. Patrick Shaw-Stewart wrote in despair when he knew his friend was dying. ‘If Edward, George, Raymond, Ego and I are left, we can yet reconstruct a makeshift universe. But I suppose at least one more of us is bound to be killed.’ Within two years not one but every one was dead.

  George Vernon was the next to go – ‘Poor darling little George, always spoilt and pampered, with more frailties than any of us.’ On 26 October 1915 Diana wrote to him: ‘George, my pretty, please contrive to get a dash of dysentery and be posted home for two months.’ By a bitter stroke of irony he had already taken the first part of her advice and was in hospital in Malta. On 10 November he lost consciousness, briefly revived and asked the nurse to write down what he knew would be a last message. Hardly able to raise his voice above a whisper he dictated: ‘Darling Dottie: Goodbye, darling. Love. Love. Love. Goodbye sweetest, God bless you.’ Then he took the pen and tried to write his name. He got as far as G, gave up and began to scrawl ‘Love’. Halfway through the word his strength was exhausted, the pen wavered and straggled to the bottom of the page, his head fell back on the pillow and he died.

  When Diana heard the news she summoned Duff and they lunched together at the Hanover Restaurant, trying with mulled claret to dull the edge of pain. Later that night she scrawled a note to him: ‘My darling. It’s 11 and for two hours I can’t stop crying. If only you were by me, I would. O Christ, the misery, and the morphia not working. O Duff, save yourself. If you die where shall I be? My poor George. If only I could stop crying.’ It was the worst blow that had so far struck her and she was herself surprised by the intensity of her reaction.

  ‘I didn’t realize quite what George’s death would mean to you,’ wrote Letty
from Egypt where she had followed her husband Ego Charteris. Her moment of agony was soon to follow. Ego was missing, reported a prisoner, then discovered to have been dead all the time. Letty was prostrated. She lacked the resources to deal with such a tragedy. ‘I don’t believe I’ve got any brains – only a heart, oh, such a heart. No philosophy, no religion. Ego was my religion!’ Diana was called back from a country visit to succour her sister. She wrote next day to Edward Horner:

  What the despair is like you cannot think. 10,000 times would I sooner bear it, or see you or any of us (except Katharine) in such torture than poor darling Letty. She lies still all day and night moaning gently and with the prettiest babble – ‘Sweet, sweet, Ego. How can I face the long years? What shall I do with all his clothes? What does one do?’ – till I feel more desperate than her and would love her to die. I know in her mind she is dreading herself, dreading never knowing love again, never having more children – but perhaps my eyes are out of proportion for tears.

  *

  It was about this time that Basil Hallam wearied of the white feathers and sneers and joined the Balloon Corps. His balloon was shot down by a German fighter and he fell 6,000 feet. Raymond Asquith watched his death and wrote with chilling nonchalance: ‘He came to earth in a village half a mile from where I stood, shockingly foreshortened, but recognizable by his cigarette case.’ For Diana it was just one more blow but a cruel one. She was dancing to Alex and his all-black band when the news was whispered to her. For once she broke down in public and fled the room.

  Her spirits now seemed permanently low and the battle to keep up a good appearance became increasingly exhausting. To Edward Horner she complained that her will had become a mere cypher, it could hardly impel her to open her eyes in the morning, let alone to go out in search of pleasure. To read, to think, even to talk seemed gargantuan tasks. ‘My mood is maudlin. I cry so often, even at parties, and have to go home, and at night for loneliness.’ Yet she never allowed her grief totally to conquer her; when she felt that it was her duty to appear in public and put on a good face, she could still do so. Duff recorded one evening at Belvoir when she broke down just before dinner and doped herself with brandy and sal volatile. ‘She is strange and wonderful in the way she takes her sorrow, treating it like an illness which must be got over as soon as possible, doing all she can to be cheerful, laughing and talking till tears come like a sudden seizure and she has to give way. She tells me that when she cannot stop crying she reminds herself that in a comparatively few days she will cease to wish to. I think this is a new way of treating grief and perhaps the best.’