But all the resentment was not on one side. Stories reached Diana that Duff had been playing cards for high stakes while behind the lines; worse still, the failure of mail to be delivered for several days convinced her that she was forgotten. Her response was a wail of pain:
I am utterly wretched. All my misery has given way before a new agony, the proof that you don’t think of me. I fit all my actions to your whims, neither forgetting to date my letters, nor not to eat chocolates in the street. I beckon no new lovers, I take no pains to fetter the old, I even read for you and bone my meat, all this for someone who is as remote as God … Queen Elizabeth, when she dubbed knights, said ‘Be faithful, be brave, be fortunate’. I found it in a book yesterday and thought I would wish it to you tonight. It seems an irony now, when you prove faithless to me. I shall not write for a space.
She did, of course, the following morning indeed, when a crop of letters arrived. Duff had been in the front line and out on patrol the previous night. He had had to fix the password and had almost settled for ‘Diana’. ‘Would you like to think of fierce men crawling about no man’s land in the darkness and whispering your name to one another?’ Once Diana knew that Duff was actually in battle her imagination took flight. One night staying with friends near Beaconsfield she lay awake till 7 a.m., planning for the worst. Duff dead, there could be no future then. Duff seriously wounded. To whom should she first appeal: to A. J. Balfour, Beaverbrook, the Quartermaster General? ‘A threat of suicide if they opposed, and how it should convincingly be phrased.’ What to pack? From whom to borrow money? Max Beaverbrook was the answer. ‘My letter to Mother – all the wording of a frank and total confession.’ Diana was accustomed to weave tragedy from the thinnest threads of misadventure; with her lover in real peril her fantasies grew fearsomely. ‘No one but you among the righting millions is thought of so continuously or adored more.’
Duff’s luck held. He escaped injury, behaved with great gallantry, was singled out for his behaviour and eventually awarded the Distinguished Service Order, a rare achievement for a subaltern in the Guards. Diana thought it should have been a Victoria Cross and regretted only that General French was no longer Commander-in-Chief – ‘with me and Ghastly Moore to show him truth, your fame should have excelled’. She was immensely proud of Duff’s achievement, yet again quick to take offence when several days went by without a letter being received. She accused him of being so ‘puffed up and bewildered with conceit’ that all he could do was sit in solitude and think about himself. ‘Oh, little Miss Lackfaith,’ wrote Duff reproachfully, ‘Lady Jealousy, Countess Petulant, Marchioness of Pouts, Duchess of Malice, Queen of my Heart – God bless you, God kiss you since I cannot.’
The war was almost over. It was soon clear that Duff would never go into battle again. Instead he contrived a few days’ leave in Paris. For Duff Paris was the earthly paradise, city of infinite and subtle dissipation. He wrote to Diana, asking her how much he could or should tell her of what he did there. Her reply was the last letter he received from her before they were reunited:
Tell me as much or as little as you enjoy to confess. You know that I want your happiness above my own. From your arrival in Paris I absolve you from all letters, sincerity, superficial thoughts. ‘Rush into the folly,’ baby, darling, tell me nothing or all, I shall love you the same. If I was forced to voice a whim it would be (a) that you absented yourself from felicity with your own caste; (b) that with the help of every known device you keep your body clean for me; (c) that you do not gamble.
It was a generous letter, sincere beyond doubt; strange, perhaps, coming from a woman so much in love. It set the pattern for a lifetime.
FIVE
MARRIAGE
The London to which Duff returned was superficially much the same as the city which his friends had left four years before. Many of the faces had vanished, but the dress, the houses, the social rituals survived. Man and master took off their uniforms and settled back with apparent satisfaction into their former roles. There was no such conspicuous social revolution as followed the Second World War; the Unionists triumphed at the general election and the nation returned a parliament of ‘hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’; Labour won only some sixty seats and the day when they might form a Government seemed still remote; the red flag was hoisted on Glasgow Town Hall, but its brief flutter caused only a frisson in the complacency of the ruling classes. The rigid protocol of pre-war society was never fully restored but the structure remained intact. To men like the Duke of Rutland, little if anything had changed.
Least of all had anything changed so far as the marriage of his daughter was concerned. Duff came back from the wars on 31 October 1918. As he walked into his flat the telephone rang. It was Diana. Duff passed the time till she arrived pacing up and down the room, wondering if it could all be really happening. ‘She came, and all that I had hoped of happiness in the last six months came true.’ The following weekend they went to stay with the Montagus at Breccles. Diana went to Duff’s room but hardly had she arrived than Alan Parsons walked in. Viola was ill, he had gone to seek help from Diana but had found the room empty. All their good resolutions about flaunting their relationship to the world were at once forgotten. Duff pretended to be half asleep; Diana hid under the bedclothes; as soon as Alan had gone she rushed back to her room by another staircase and was ensconced there by the time he arrived to look for her again.
To go on in this way would have been impossible, yet Duff knew that in the immutable world of the Rutlands he was as unacceptable as ever. His D.S.O. counted as nothing against the fact that he was, in The World’s amiable phrase, ‘a mere lieutenant without fortune, title or position’. Without future either, in the Duke’s judgement; a clerk in the Foreign Office in 1918 could achieve respectability but hardly greatness. ‘I think by gutter journalism, shady politics and crooked finance we might climb to pinnacles of power and have great fun en route,’ wrote Duff cheerfully, but the Duke would not have seen the joke. Duff had £300 a year from the Foreign Office, about the same amount of his own and £600 a year from his mother; no great wealth but enough to maintain a handsome standard of living. To the Duke, however, it was poverty; added to which Duff was what Lady Sackville described as ‘a contemptible parvenu’ and popularly believed to be a drunkard, a lecher and a gambler.
The situation seemed to be dragging on indefinitely with no one wishing to be the first to speak. Diana longed for one of her friends to take on the task. The Duchess interrogated Katharine Asquith, complaining that she could not sleep at night for fear her daughter might marry ‘that awful Duff’. Katharine denied any knowledge of such a plan. ‘It’s a pity,’ commented Diana, ‘for the poor old thing needs acclimatizing – but I’m very glad it’s worrying her.’ In the end it was Viola Parsons who plucked up her courage and broke the news. An appalling scene followed, from her room upstairs Diana could hear her mother screaming and moaning and a night-nurse being summoned to administer sedatives. Yet still nothing was said directly between the people principally concerned.
It was ten days later, at the Victory Ball at the Albert Hall, that Duff finally bearded his future mother-in-law. They retreated to a sofa on one of the upper floors and Duff addressed her, to his own mind at any rate, with ‘great eloquence and marvellous command of temper’. The latter was called for. The Duchess was ‘insulting, illogical and quite impossible to keep to any point’. She started off on Duff’s finances, then when he began to argue his case, said she knew nothing of money and cared less. It was his drunkenness she objected to, his bad character, his dissipated friends. The whole thing was a plot organized by Alan Parsons and Olga Lynn. Anyway, Diana did not even love him; otherwise she would not have gone to parties the previous week when Duff had been ill with flu. She had some reason for misunderstanding her daughter’s feelings. Diana always found it hard to talk of love, to her mother she felt it was impossible. She never stated bluntly that she adored Duff and could not live without him
; the Duchess, eager to believe the contrary, was convinced Diana was only advancing this ridiculous project out of pique or a wish to escape from parental discipline.
Next morning Diana at last confronted her mother. The Duchess was beside herself. She said she would prefer her son to have been killed in the war or Diana to have cancer to this impossible alliance. Then she stormed from the house to recruit allies elsewhere. She did not find as many as she had hoped: ‘Her Grace is raising tallywhack and tandem all over London,’ wrote Ettie Desborough unsympathetically. Diana retired to bed, as was her habit in moments of stress, and by the time her mother returned to the battle some calm had returned. Her great cause for despair, it seemed, was that Diana’s love for her was dead. Diana could have withstood her mother’s rage more easily than her misery. That night, she told Duff, she dreamt that she and her mother were walking down a long passage at the end of which they saw Duff coming towards them. A meeting was unavoidable; so the Duchess said: ‘This is fate, so see how I will make full reparation and greet him lovingly.’ Open-armed and smiling she advanced, ‘and I just remember seeing you raise your gold-knobbed cane to her when I woke exhausted.’
‘Mummy is in an awful state,’ the Duke of Rutland wrote to Marjorie Anglesey. ‘I really think Diana will kill her.’ If the Duchess had not been in an awful state, it is unlikely the Duke would have been particularly put out by these developments. He was a detached and easy-going man and could soon have been cajoled into acceptance of what most people felt to be a reasonable if not particularly meritorious match. The Duchess, however, offered him no opportunity to weaken. When Duff, fortified by a stiff dose of port, called on him at Arlington Street, he was met by a wall of courteous obstinacy. The Duke was affable, ‘dear-fellowed’ Duff liberally, admitted he had always liked him, but gave no hope of a change of attitude even if Duff reappeared in six months, with £1,000 a year. ‘This,’ wrote Diana indignantly, ‘is analogous, though more gentlemanly, to kicking him out of the house, and a great insult to the man I have told them with holy resolve that I intend to marry.’
John Granby was now brought into the firing line. He was more temperate than his parents, but argued that a year’s delay was desirable to give all parties time to think. He doubted whether Diana really knew her own mind. Diana’s reply was firm:
For many years I have wanted to marry Duff because I know that when I am with him I am perfectly happy, that his mind I adore, that his attitude towards me and love and understanding are only equalled by mine towards him. I am not a giddy baby of eighteen but sensible, calculating for my happiness and in this well tried, for I have spent all my time and thought for two years with and for Duff … If I gave you the impression that I was not fond enough of Duff to warrant the disaster I have brought on this unfortunate household, it is because I find tremendous difficulty in baring my heart, much more than my body, and even now it is costing me a lot to confess.
She had a nightmare Christmas at Belvoir. John, Letty, and her sister-in-law Kakoo took it in turns to reason with her, and when she tried to discuss the matter with her mother, the Duchess turned the conversation to cancer and her own imminent demise. Her uncle Charlie Lindsay was most nearly an ally, but even he spoiled the effect by admitting that he had never seen Duff rise from the table completely sober. He too felt a year’s delay reasonable and Diana at last agreed to put this to Duff. ‘I could hardly bear it but suppose we must. Suppose we love each other less in a year? God, what a conspiracy of cruelty it is! Strengthen me, Duffy, I feel in despair.’
Early in 1919 the Duke wrote to Duff to say that if he would take no further steps regarding his engagement for twelve months, and the couple still wanted to marry after that period, then no further obstacle would be put in their way. The Duchess had prepared the first draft of this letter and scribbled in a covering note: ‘I told D that I found you very obdurate and firm. I said this wishing to get out of her head that I was the only one against it, and that you would do anything I wished.’ The Duke proved that occasionally he could ignore his wife’s wishes when he crossed out her final sentence, which said that he could never look on the match with any favour, and replaced it by a promise to do all he could to help. He wrote the same day to Diana asking her to read the letter. ‘In doing so I would urge you to remember that your mother and I are only anxious for your future happiness – their own don’t much matter – and you must also remember that it is within the bounds of possibility that they may have a clearer vision as to this than you. Anyway, do not doubt their very deep love for you, which is the reason for their present action – as I assure you they are suffering for and with you, very deeply.’
By now the press was hot on the trail. Cassell’s Saturday Journal gleefully reported that the couple would have to live on ‘£300 a year and a ducal curse’. Anything about Diana was grist to their mills; the Bulletin even announcing that she had seemed unusually pale at a recent weekend party. ‘She explained that she had sat up all night tending a sick lily but that it had died at dawn.’ The real explanation, it was archly hinted, was to be found in the failure of a certain father to pay attention to the bidding of his daughter’s heart. The Duchess was so enraged by newspaper reports that an engagement already existed that she caused a formal démenti to appear in The Times: ‘We are requested to state that there is no truth in the report that Lady Diana Manners is engaged to be married.’
Neither her father’s dulcet tones, nor her mother’s intransigence, affected Diana’s determination to marry Duff. She was more disconcerted by the attitude of certain of her friends. Claude Lowther besought her to draw back. ‘Don’t, I pray you, bind yourself for life to some slave you neither adore nor repect – but for whom you may have a profound pity. You possess youth, transcendental beauty, genius and a darling nature. Don’t for God’s sake be weak and in a moment of despondency marry a man who does not even know how to love.’ Tommy Bouch was equally discouraging. He could accept Duff as a fellow-subject ‘but as soon as you raise him up to be King, the situation is changed’. He would return to his hunting, Viola to her drama, the magic circle of Diana’s vassals would be dispersed. So much might have been expected from the former courtiers who saw themselves displaced; more surprising was the thinly disguised hostility of Edwin Montagu, who urged restraint and showed sudden and unexpected affection for the Duchess.
The rich old men who always rejoiced to serve her saw no reason to take any such line; Lord Wimborne and George Moore were both offering to pay the rent of whatever house Duff and Diana chose to live in: ‘Few other couples, I wager,’ wrote Diana proudly, ‘have men fighting to pay rents, rates, taxes for them.’ George Moore did even better and offered to give then £6,000 a year from the time of their marriage. They discussed the matter and at first decided to reject it, but, wrote Duff, ‘the more I think about it, the more I like it’. In the end Diana wrote to refuse the offer but in the tones of one who hoped to be over-persuaded. She perhaps overrated her skill as a letter-writer. The £6,000 were never forthcoming, though Moore deposited £500 in Diana’s bank, guaranteed her overdraft and took a box at Covent Garden in her name. ‘I hate the Opera,’ wrote Duff gloomily. Meanwhile Beaverbrook paid £200 for four articles in his new Sunday paper which Diana was to sign and Duff to write.
During the period of waiting it was tacitly agreed that Duff would keep away from Arlington Street. Once, when the Duke was at a Garter ceremony, the Duchess away and Diana recovering from flu, she was tempted to smuggle Duff in for a quiet supper. Prudence prevailed: ‘the risk of dignity suffering was too great, and besides the old bugger might have caught him in the courtyard and, being armed, would have belaboured him with his sword.’ Inevitably they all met in London society. At a party given by Lord Furness, Duff and Diana going up the stairs met the Rutlands coming down. Duff decided it would be best to cut them, Diana thought anxiously of her dream, but the Duke looked benign and gave his daughter a playful tap.
The Duchess tried to distract Diana by
taking her to Paris. The Peace Conference was on and they saw much of Lord Beaverbrook who was with Venetia Montagu ‘living in open sin at the Ritz in a tall silk suite with a common bath and unlocked doors between, while poor Ted is sardined into the Majestic, unknown and uncared for’. Beaverbrook enraged the Duchess by telegraphing to the Daily Express that Diana and her mother had come to Paris to buy the trousseau. They dined with the Aga Khan, a meal so memorably rich that Diana, who cared little what she ate, took the trouble to record the menu. Emerald-green oysters were followed by fine soup in which floated a marrow-bone boiled to a shining ivory. Then came what Diana described as ‘souls in sauce’ and with them, served on great flat silver dishes, frizzling soft roes. Chickens’ wings resting on inky truffles gave way to foie gras ‘pinker than Helen’s cheek and cut like cottage loaves – in its wake a dozen fresh green asparagus apiece’. Entremet and Brie concluded the meal. The company was less satisfying, particularly the Frenchman who told her: ‘Je suis très keen sur le sport. Tout l’hiver c’est le rugby et puis, l’été, le waterpolo.’ Next day she took a long and no doubt badly needed walk with the Aga Khan. ‘I talked to him at length about my life, as I do to all who will listen. He was sympathetic and wound up with an offer to furnish my house – but I am losing faith in these promises.’
On 25 March the Rutlands gave a great ball at Arlington Street; the Queen of Rumania and the Prince of Wales dining there first. Duff went with Diana to Covent Garden in the early morning to help buy the flowers but was pointedly not invited to the ball. The Prince danced twice with Diana and talked to her at length. ‘So I take it you are to marry the Prince of Wales after all, and Duff will be appointed Lord High Chamberlain,’ wrote Tommy Bouch archly. The Duchess may even have cherished some hope of a last-minute miracle but she was given no satisfaction. The Prince asked Diana whether she was really engaged, congratulated her and said that he knew Duff by reputation and would like to meet him.
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