Diana was growing restless at Arlington Street. An air-raid briefly enlivened things – twenty planes overhead; indignant complaints from the Duchess, ‘It’s scandalous! Why do they let them get right over the house?’; men with fractured thighs who had not stirred for weeks leaping lithely from their beds; servants Diana had never seen milling around in the basement, ‘things from under sinks and stoves with light, blind eyes’ – but the savour soon faded. She bought two rabbits to keep on the roof but they fought instead of mating; an unpropitious augury, thought Duff. The Duke read in the newspapers that Diana had bought a pig and assumed resignedly that it would soon be established in her bedroom, but the alarm proved to be a false one. The Duchess sought to divert Diana by luring her down for a prolonged stay at Rowsley, ‘where she shall have a real rest, with no adorers with all their thousand demands and turnings-up’. Diana found the prospect unappealing.
After overt hostility or, at least, coolness for many months, the Duchess had suddenly warmed to Duff when he was on the point of leaving for the front, asking Diana what he would like by way of a present. Diana was not impressed by what she considered to be no more than a death-bed repentance – Duff’s, in the Duchess’s view, being the death. Relations with her mother had grown steadily worse over the previous two years. The Duchess had largely abandoned any attempt to control Diana’s daily life, but her passionate interest in her daughter’s doings grated on Diana’s nerves. Late in 1917 the Duchess decided that she had cancer. ‘I left her with mixed feelings,’ Diana told Duff. ‘Her death would make me straightaway free, brave and great, and yet now, impartially, I cannot face so much agony for her.’
Diana decided on flight. She would go back to Guy’s. The Duchess was outraged, swore that it would break her heart. Nursing at Guy’s was little better than walking the streets as a prostitute, ‘that awful Duff’ was at the bottom of it. Diana flared up and called her mother a tyrant, Letty intervened and argued that her sister was so overwrought that she would undoubtedly commit suicide if she were thwarted. In the end the Duchess gave way and by May 1918 Diana was back at Guy’s. She did not take the step lightly – ‘I shall loathe so much, not the hours, discomfort and life, but the dirt, suffering, smells and squalor’ – but she had somehow to distance herself from her family. In part, too, she felt that Duff was living in misery and danger and that she should not remain cosseted in luxury while he suffered; an urge to share his pain which would have been incomprehensible to Duff.
She stayed at Guy’s only a month, but it was a month that impressed her lastingly. She found herself for a time in a ward full of children of three and four who had been badly burnt. The current treatment was to pour hot melted wax on their wounds. Diana did the pouring or held the child down. ‘The pain is excessive and they scream like tortured, not babyish things.’ When Diana was not with the children she found herself in a ward of thirty senile incurables. Every morning she would lead one particularly pathetic old lady down to the Light Department for treatment. Once there, she left her with a group of syphilitic old men. ‘They are half-naked and more bled than bladders of shining lard. Their noses have apparently sucked all the blood from their bodies and scalps, for these glow like flames in a wax surround. Over them sit four pretty girls directing a blazing light upon them by way of cure. It’s enough to unhinge shaky minds.’
While she was at Guy’s, her old governess, Mrs Page, lost her beloved only son in battle. For eight weeks Diana braced herself to visit her nurse’s home and finally allowed her mother to drag her to the door, ‘sick with horror and embarrassment. Six times I shammed trying the bell while Mother watched me from the taxi. I drove home, relieved by the respite, and groused aloud that she should have been out. Isn’t it contemptible?’ Next day she returned alone and this time passed the door, but it cost her a sleepless night. In Guy’s she was forced to confront pain at its starkest. At least there was something practical she could do to relieve it, but her time in hospital fortified her in her belief that, if there were no such obvious contribution to be made, then the best thing to do about human misery was to pretend it was not there.
She left Guy’s with some regret. Hospital life, she concluded, was as much a waste of time as anything else, ‘but it certainly kids one into thinking one is indispensable, and home life after it is wanton and trivial’. She had been particularly dismayed by an operation for appendicitis performed by a beginner while the surgeon shouted advice. ‘No, no, not like that! There, you’ve hashed it.’ Poor patients who could not afford the surgeon’s fees had to submit themselves as training-grounds for the inexperienced. ‘Money is fine,’ Diana concluded.
‘Money is fine’ was one of her rules in life. She had no wish to be extravagantly rich, but she wanted the things that money could buy – comfort, clothes, holidays abroad, security – and she saw no need for over-sensitive scruples in getting what she wanted. If it pleased the rich to give her money or lavish presents, then it certainly pleased her to receive them. She would shamelessly exploit friends with wealth or power. Freedom with her friends’ money was linked to parsimony in the use of her own. Staying with Lord Rosebery at Dalmeny she begged the use of his Rolls-Royce to drive with a companion early one morning to a railway station some miles away. As they were leaving the house she disappeared for a moment, then reappeared furtively concealing a small package. Only when they were on the train and Diana rejected the railway breakfast did her companion discover what the package contained. Diana had stolen the kipper from the tray deposited briefly by a footman outside Lord Rosebery’s bedroom door. She told Duff that, when Thomas Beecham’s father, Joseph, was made a baronet, he had to pay £10,000 for the privilege. £4,000 went to Lady Cunard, £500 to Diana and the rest to Edward Horner to pay his debts. The feature about this curious story that particularly surprised Duff was that Edward’s debts should be so large.
Late in 1916 Lord Wimborne had been dismayed to see Diana getting on to an omnibus and next day sent her £100 in new, crackling notes. Diana longed to accept it but appealed to Duff and Edward Horner for advice. Duff refused to give his opinion; Edward had no such doubts and denounced her so fiercely for tolerating men like George Moore and Ivor Wimborne that he reduced her to tears. His view prevailed and the money was returned. ‘It was sorely needed,’ Diana wrote sadly, ‘but I had to do it, not in fear of him and his brag and his claims and quid pro quos, but for fear of that demon gratitude, that might blossom in my heart when next I am cornered … I argued with myself that gold should not carry such weight … but its value is tremendous and above all argument.’ The offer was repeated eighteen months later. This time Edward was dead and Duff laconically recorded in his diary: ‘Ivor gave Diana £100 of which she insisted in giving me £50. I took it.’
Another source of funds was Max Beaverbrook. ‘This strange attractive gnome with an odour of genius about him,’ as Diana described him in her memoirs, used regularly to hand out cheques for £100 to particularly favoured women – the criterion being only that they appealed to him on grounds of wit, beauty, or position. By the 1930s six women, including Diana and Venetia Montagu, received the press lord’s bounty at Christmas and on his birthday. Beaverbrook radiated wealth and power; at a whim he would transport his friends across the world in princely luxury, with a telephone call to his docile editors he could ensure that Diana’s latest exploit was trumpeted to the world or tactfully forgotten. He demanded from Diana nothing but her companionship, and she, beguiled by his charm and his ability to gratify her most outré wishes, was eager to give him what he wanted. She could sometimes treat him roughly, however. A friend seated behind them at the theatre heard Beaverbrook make some reference to Diana’s admirers. ‘A humble group,’ said Diana deprecatingly. ‘Oh don’t say that, I count myself as one.’ ‘I meant humble in my opinion, not in theirs.’
It was with Lord Beaverbrook that Diana first met Arnold Bennett, the author who had pilloried her in Pretty Lady. ‘How I loved my Arnold and how he loved my ch
ampagne,’ Beaverbrook wrote of him; a sad comment that was also unjustified, since Bennett too was captivated by his host’s daemonic charm. Bennett was apprehensive about how he would be received, but all went reasonably well – ‘some miscellaneous talk about life and women’. After the other guests had gone Beaverbrook asked Bennett what he thought of Diana. ‘I told him I thought she was unhappy, through idleness. He said he liked her greatly.’ Diana, though she found Bennett improved on further acquaintance, was at first not impressed by the novelist. Bennett argued that nothing one might notice was too mean to be written down. ‘I asked if there wasn’t surely a lot of illumination required in good writing – he said no, emphatically. I said anyway repetition of an unimportance might be avoided – he said no. I said you shouldn’t go on writing down a woman’s eyes as blue every time she walked on the scene, he said a woman’s face is not so important as her ankles, the which was exceedingly common, and the whole conversation stupid.’
Diana’s hunger for money was not inspired solely by self-indulgence. At the end of 1916 she had finally told Duff that she would marry him if they were rich enough. ‘There seems, alas, little prospect of that ever being the case,’ wrote Duff gloomily. He had not done much to improve the situation himself. Ten days before he had lost ‘a preposterous £1,660’ at chemin de fer; on the day of the diary entry he lost another £125. There were winnings too, but on the whole he was an unlucky or unskilful gambler. Diana constantly besought him to give up the pursuit. Each time he would promise to do so, only to succumb to temptation at the next opportunity. When she got news through Venetia Montagu of Duff’s second loss Diana cried the whole morning. ‘I felt most repentant and humiliated,’ wrote Duff sadly.
Several times Duff wrote from France to try to establish the amount of money she thought they would need before they could marry. He himself alternated between bouts of depression and more characteristic optimism. Diana wrote from the Angleseys’ house, Beaudesert, to describe the cloud of opulent misery that hung around her sister’s marriage. ‘Because the very rich are often unhappy,’ Duff commented, ‘we mustn’t make the common mistake of forgetting that the very poor always are. However, if we were married, we shouldn’t be very poor for long and would soon contrive, I feel sure, to be rich.’ The crux of the matter was the definition of ‘very poor’. Duff would have held acceptable penury to cover a small house in a relatively unfashionable part of London with no more than two servants, perhaps only one. Diana would happily have settled for this. To the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, however, it was inconceivable that such hardship should be inflicted on their daughter. ‘Two old people with three legs in the grave between them should surely never be allowed to hinder us,’ wrote Duff crossly, but Diana was still not prepared to defy her parents and embark on matrimony with no financial support beyond what Duff could offer. Somehow the Rutlands must be persuaded that Duff was acceptable as a son-in-law, and before there could be any hope of this the war must be over and Duff safely back in the Foreign Office or some more profitable occupation.
Meanwhile Diana was full of projects for making their fortune. What she was seeking was ‘a dignified money-making plan entailing the minimum of work’. First idea was for a nursing-home to be opened under the management of herself and Katharine Asquith – ‘No nursing-home fails, at least very few, and it seems to me that we start with tremendous advantages.’ A few weeks later came a still more ambitious vision, an aviation company for the carriage of passengers. For both these Beaverbrook was to put up the money; but though he was ready to lend the odd £100 whenever needed, he was too good a businessman to fling himself into serious enterprises without some assurance about their management. Diana did not inspire such confidence. He did, however, encourage her to invest in sugar futures and at his instigation she wrote to a commodity agent. The minimum investment required was £3,000, and in the end her courage failed her.
A flavour of desperation pervaded Diana’s thinking at this time. All her eggs were in one frail basket. If Duff were killed, what would be left to her? If he survived, would he ever make a husband acceptable in any worldly sense? At dinner at the Montagus, in June 1918, she found herself sitting between Lords Curzon and Hardinge. Each in turn asked her what she was going to do with her life.
My age claims the question, I suppose. It’s quite unanswerable. Curzon stuck to it in the obstinate way powerful brains do, blunt to sensitiveness, and cross-questioned me as to ambitious marriage. I renounced all ambitions and saw for the first time it was the truth. Hardinge’s breath was asphyxiating, so he had to be kept off the confidential touch. I lit a cigarette after dinner and outfaced Mother. I heard Edwin swearing it was the first time he had seen such a thing. After dinner I had a long, very confidential conversation with Lady Curzon. She was charming. She told me an amazingly characteristic fact about George. On marriage he made her sign a pledge that, in case of his death, she would never remarry.
But was to marry Duff to renounce ambition? As the letters flowed in from France, Diana became more and more convinced that he was a man of outstanding ability. With Duff in London his intemperance, infidelity, endless gambling, could cause dismay in even the most indulgent heart; when he was hundreds of miles away, in urgent danger, such peccadilloes were forgotten, only his charm, intelligence, high spirits, capacity for love were remembered. There was a didactic element in his letters which Diana, always greedy for knowledge, delighted in. ‘I must try to carry on your education even at this distance. In the first place you mustn’t put at the top of your letter “12 p.m.” because it signifies nothing. 12 can’t be p. or a. because it’s m. itself.’ A few days later he corrected her spelling of propaganda – ‘propregander’ in one paragraph and ‘propergander’ in the next.
But they were love-letters above all, and love-letters to satisfy the most demanding. ‘Didn’t Julian write “Life is Colour and Warmth and Light, And a striving evermore for these”? I always thought them the best lines in a rather over-praised and barbarous poem. And as colour and warmth and light become rarer and the possibility of their complete eclipse more thinkable, so much the more does one hunger and thirst for them and lie down and bask in them when they appear. You, my love, are the embodiment of all those three: the brightest colour, the sweetest warmth and the one dazzling light of my life.’ Coming from the bloody mire of Flanders such romantic rhapsodies had a ring of sincerity which might have been lacking in a letter despatched from St James’s Street to Arlington Street. Still more did they touch the heart when the words were scrawled in pencil on the way up to the front for what was to be a singularly fierce and almost Duff’s last battle:
… to tell you that I love you more today than ever in my life before. That I never see beauty without seeing you or scent happiness without thinking of you. You have fulfilled all my ambitions, realized all my hopes, made all my dreams come true. You have set a crown of roses on my youth and fortified me against the disaster of our days. Your courageous gaiety has inspired me with joy, your tender faithfulness has been a rock of security and comfort. I have felt for you all kinds of love at once. I have asked much of you and you have never failed me. You have intensified all colours, heightened all beauty, deepened all delight. I love you more than life, my beauty, my wonder.
Duff suggested that one day their letters might be brought together to provide a picture of the age. Alan Parsons perhaps might edit them. ‘It is I that must edit them,’ replied Diana proudly, ‘and if I must be old it is I that shall read them to the envious young, flauntingly, excitingly, and when they hear yours they’ll dream well that night, and waking crave for such a mythical, supreme lover.’
Alan Parsons wrote to Duff from Breccles to tell his friend how deeply Diana loved him. He was not sure how far Duff realized the strength of her feelings. ‘Sometimes when I have been happiest with her, and when I thought she was happy too, her face would suddenly sadden and she would say “I wish that Duffy was here.” I wish you would marry her, Duff.’ Duff t
old Diana of Alan’s letter, how in his reply he had told Parsons how far they were already committed to each other and that, ‘on your return, I intended to take you to my sleep and make you my joy, so at least there is one less to guard against, and at least one whom you can hold a candle past with unsecretive step’. Duff and Diana were perpetually amazed at the blindness of their friends to the love they felt for each other. At dinner at the Montagus’, Augustine Birrell asked what news there had been of Duff. Venetia said she had had one letter and asked if anybody else had heard. Some of their closest friends were there, yet none seemed to think it obvious that Diana would have been the most likely to hear. ‘With what dignity must we have lived before them,’ wrote Diana, ‘… with refinement and blatancy unseen.’
From Duff’s point of view the drawback to this was that Diana was still considered by others to be open to every kind of proposition. In August he was alarmed to hear that Scatters Wilson was the only unattached man at a house-party at Breccles, matched by Diana as the only spinster. Her letter reporting the party said suspiciously little about overtures, rattling of door-handles, midnight tussles. ‘But I suppose I am to believe that Scatters has taken a dislike to you … How hideous is my jealousy. I am ashamed of it.’ And so he should be, was Diana’s view. ‘Childish, old-fashioned, dirty little mind, cease your crudities!’ she retorted roundly. There was, could be, no other man in her life.
Diana Cooper Page 14
