Even if he had been the very pattern of proletarian bonhomie, Duff would have found opponents in the Government camp. A. V. Alexander, the First Lord of the Admiralty, came to Paris and interrogated the Naval Attaché about Duff’s weaknesses. The worthy officer was outraged at such incitement to disloyalty and refused to say a word against his Ambassador. Maurice Edelman was heard to boast that he would get rid of both Cooper and Franco before 1946 was out; in neither case was he conspicuously successful. Harold Laski dined and made the sinister comment: ‘Your party badly needs you in the House of Commons.’ ‘I don’t like him,’ noted Duff. Diana did her best to soften the visitors. John Strachey and his wife came to stay. ‘He a brontosaurus and she a squirming go-by-ground,’ Diana told her son. ‘I smelt hostility but have been able to dispel it. He is here to talk about cereals to others of his own ilk, and she to irritate me. I can see no other reason.’ The wives always seemed to fall to Diana and heavy going she often found them. Mrs Bellenger, wife of the Secretary of State for War, was ‘very German and very disagreeable. In Labour circles the female is usually more deadly than the male.’
Duff had little use for Clement Attlee. ‘Less impressive every time one sees him … really a poor specimen,’ he commented disdainfully. Diana was shrewd enough to suspect that Duff was missing the point of the Prime Minister, though she herself still hankered for the colour and panache of Churchill. A few months after the election the old man announced he was to visit Paris. The Coopers were determined to do him all the honour he deserved, but were equally aware that, as loyal servants of a Labour Government, they could not show themselves too partisan. They arranged a dinner at the Elysée at which de Gaulle was conspicuously affable. The women ‘coiled about Winston, and cried a lot and kept cigar-stubs and matches in memory. He quite enjoyed the emotion.’
He enjoyed it so much, indeed, that soon he was back again, this time with his daughter Mary. A dinner for the grandest French politicians was organized at the Embassy and a merry evening for Mary Churchill laid on by Duff’s drinking crony from White’s and private secretary extraordinary, John de Bendern. Churchill, however, announced that he was too tired for a formal dinner but instead would take his daughter to the Folies Bergères. Both dinners were therefore cancelled, the de Benderns’ cook gave notice, and a reduced party assembled at Maxim’s. ‘Having possibly endangered international relations,’ recorded Duff, ‘and certainly caused immense inconvenience to a large number of people, he seemed thoroughly to enjoy himself and was with difficulty induced to go to bed soon after midnight.’
For the two years after the fall of Churchill Diana was intermittently in an agony of apprehension lest Bevin should change his mind and Duff be dismissed. Rumours constantly crossed the Channel that so-and-so was being considered, that someone else said Duff would be out by Christmas. In June 1946 Duff asked Bevin bluntly whether there was anything in the stories. Bevin shuffled uncharacteristically. Personally he had a soft spot for Duff; he thought he was doing a good job; he would like to keep him on for a time at any rate; but there were difficulties; he could make no promises; Herbert Morrison, it was suggested, was a nigger in this particular woodpile. Diana’s fears were augmented. A few weeks later a young Frenchman, stuck for conversation, inquired politely: ‘Vous partez en vacances, madame?’ Diana clasped the mantelpiece convulsively. ‘Me go away!’ she cried in horror. ‘If I don’t hold on with both hands they’ll take the whole thing from us!’
‘The whole thing’ had now grown significantly. Wandering round the great park of the Château de Chantilly, Diana pushed through some rusting gates and found herself beside an eighteenth-century house of exquisite dignity and serenity, looking down the lawns to a lake and thence to the ornamental cascades and a hierarchy of stone gods and goddesses. A window ajar provided further temptation; she forced her way in and wandered entranced through a series of light, spacious, graceful rooms. They were almost wholly unfurnished, though an empty bottle of gin on every mantelpiece suggested recent habitation. Inquiries revealed that the house was called the Château de St Firmin, that during the war it had been lived in by the German Ambassador, Otto Abetz, that it belonged to the Institut de France but was leased by a former American Ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt. Bullitt had no wish to return to Chantilly himself and still less need of rent. He said that the Coopers could live there if they would provide linen for the house. Linen was unobtainable in France. Diana arranged with a friend to ‘liberate’ some in Germany, but when the consignment arrived it was found that all the sheets were designed to button on to blankets and were useless at Chantilly. Diana was in despair; then Bullitt suddenly lost interest in the whole affair and abandoned the lease. The Coopers took it on for the modest rent of £100 a year.
St Firmin became the house that Diana loved best in the world. Almost every weekend they would move down there, and their Sunday lunch-parties became part of the Parisian scene. She loved picnics and the park at Chantilly, vast, deserted, romantic, filled with unexpected and dilapidated pleasure-houses, was a picnic-lover’s paradise. One Sunday a party of guests was led away on what was alleged to be a brief preprandial sight-seeing expedition to a park belonging to an unknown Baron. They advanced to a round glade, where a folly-cum-boathouse stood beside a lake surrounded by classical statues. Shots were heard. ‘The Baron must be shooting today,’ said Diana casually. Then someone saw some bottles of sherry. ‘They must belong to the Baron,’ Diana suggested. ‘Let’s drink them.’ Shocked but amused the guests sipped the sherry. Someone ventured inside the folly and found it spread with rugs, wine in coolers and delicious food. ‘The Baron’s shooting lunch!’ cried Diana. ‘Let’s eat it.’ This time she had to overcome strong protests but she had her way and the party nervously set to. Only when one of the guests spotted that the silver came from the Embassy did they realize that they could eat and drink with a clear conscience: the Baron would not be coming that day. Another picnic was at night beside a lake, in a fairy-tale building called the Pavilion de la Reine Blanche. The table was laid on the landing-stage, candlelit with a splendid array of silver and china. As the moon rose over the towers of the Château de Chantilly, someone began to sing French ballads to a guitar. Fantasy, beauty and a proper respect for the creature comforts created a blend which even the most austere could relish, in which even the most formal could relax.
Chantilly was where Diana was most at home, and where she felt least doubts about her capacity to make others contented. She told Duff that she would be happy to lose the Embassy provided Chantilly could be retained, and though she deluded herself, her heart still soared whenever she passed its gates. In Paris she shone, she was admired, she was noticed and remarked on, she was happy, but she was never wholly at ease. François Mauriac wrote a celebrated passage about her in Figaro which both Duff and Diana quoted in their memoirs but which bears repetition for the way in which he evokes not merely her beauty but also the slight sense of alienation from the surrounding scene which hung around her.
A une fête de ces derniers jours‚ où les visages fermés des Slavs glissaient, tous feux éteints, à travers les groupes, j’observais l’Ambassadrice d’une nation amie, cette figure de Pallas Athénée qui épandait sur ce troupeau sombre et méfiant l’inutile lumière de ses yeux, statue encore intacte, témoin des époques heureuses, sa beauté adorable se dressait en vain, comme un dernier appel à la joie de vivre au dessus d’une humanité sans regard.
‘Un dernier appel à la joie de vivre’ – Violet Trefusis called her ‘the radiant incarnation of all the French had been deprived of during four long years’. Some she irritated, some she shocked, but she was a presence to be reckoned with and for the most part to be wholeheartedly welcomed.
*
Her last year at the Embassy was clouded with unhappiness. Conrad Russell had been ill even before she went to France, his never robust health strained too far by the rigours of wartime. By April 1947 he was dying, his grasp of reality slipping away; fo
r an hour on end he sat with an imaginary book on farming in his hand, reading aloud with perfect lucidity, turning over the pages at the right intervals. His last conscious words were: ‘Tell Diana how much I think about her.’ A few days before he died Katharine Asquith wrote in mingled grief and triumph to report that Conrad had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Diana wrote to Mrs Asquith that it was a miracle, she was ‘deeply impressed and moved and glad’. Her real feelings were somewhat different. Conrad had frequently talked to her ‘about the Papists, and never without contempt or jeers’. The Russells were born and raised as Liberal free-thinkers and the more Conrad had read on the subject the more sceptical he had become. Was his conversion no more than a deathbed vote of thanks to Katharine Asquith for so much love and care? Was he willed into it while hardly conscious? ‘We shall never know. I hope in my heart that he knew what he was doing, and that it has brought him peace and resignation as true faith does.’
She herself found that faith came no easier as she grew older. Evelyn Waugh urged her to join the Roman Church as being the only discipline firm enough to overcome what he saw as her fatal restlessness, her irresolution. She was attracted by the idea, in one way longed to be swept up in something stronger than herself, but knew she was incapable of it. ‘One cannot join something so serious as the Church for a whim, or as an experimental medicine. I must wait for the hound of heaven – or some force, some insistence.’ The hound never bayed, and she would have been disconcerted if it had. If pressed she might have admitted that she found undue preoccupation with the state of her own soul a little common. But this squeamishness did not preclude recognition of the value of faith and envy of those of her friends who enjoyed it. She had never included Conrad among them, and she found it difficult to conceive that he had somehow slipped away at the last moment into that charmed but mysterious band.
On 28 April she tried to tell John Julius what Conrad had meant to her:
My darling Conrad is dead. I cannot be too unhappy. He was longing to throw off his weary, disobedient body and the sooner his humiliation was over, the better pleased we should be. He was so wise and sound and uncensorious of morals, and his own rare humour was better than any other – angle, fancy and delivery. O dear, O dear, I don’t think I’ll write any more or think, when low, of the check suit, the turned-out toes, the stoop, the haircut by the ploughman with the help of a pudding basin, the deer-stalker cap I gave him, the zip-bag that brought his modest accessories and a pound of butter, eggs, the first primroses, the ‘short-legged hen’ and some pretty little kickshaw.
The jokes, the endless curiosity; the quizzical intelligence; the tolerance for others combined with the most exacting standards for himself; above all, the certainty that there was somebody who cared about her more than all others and was insatiably interested in her doings: all this Diana lost with Conrad Russell’s death. She was never to be short of friends but Conrad, she knew, was irreplaceable.
Even before Conrad’s last illness, her sister, Marjorie Anglesey, was seriously ill. The doctors professed themselves baffled. Lady Anglesey was indifferent; she felt that she was dying and that it was high time too; the cause of death was a secondary consideration. Diana was dismayed by her abandonment of hope and tried to rally her. ‘My darling Marjorie, where is your spirit?’ she asked. ‘Your letter came from my craven head, not yours, though I could not have made it so beautiful. Pas de faiblesse, no babbling o’ green fields. If it’s anaemia we’ll cure it with liver-extract. You are too old for T.B. We’ll cut out growths. Death is always outside the door, but don’t O don’t let me hear you say “come in”. You can’t leave us behind.’
Lady Anglesey could and did. By October 1946 she was clearly close to death. Raimund von Hofmannsthal, who had married Marjorie’s daughter, Elizabeth Paget, tried to persuade Diana that it was her duty to rush to Plas Newydd to join the mourning children. She was revolted by the idea. ‘I deplore the theory and practice of the wake,’ she wrote firmly. Grief was something to be endured alone, not shared or exhibited before other people. When her sister at last died, her predominant feeling was relief. Marjorie’s misery of mind and pain of body had haunted her for many months. ‘I think she was afraid, and this fear horrified me most because she was, as a rule, fearless and certain of being fearless, ready to laugh at me for my cancers and hypochondrias. Now, so far as we can imagine, she is no longer afraid or groaning.’ She was in London when her sister died. On her return, Duff summoned Susan Mary Patten to help cheer her up. Susan Mary arrived at the Embassy, brimfull of sympathy and anxious to offer such comfort as she could. ‘My darling, I’m so sorry!’ she cried, embracing Diana. ‘Never had such a crossing in my life,’ replied Diana gruffly and embarked on a lively saga about the battles she had had with various importunate officials.
*
By the spring of 1947 enough straws were in the wind to make it clear that Duff’s position in Paris was once again becoming insecure. The two names principally canvassed as successors were Oliver Harvey and Gladwyn Jebb. Duff knew them both well. He thought Harvey would make a respectable ambassador, industrious but dull. Jebb on the other hand, might be exceptional: ‘There is more life in him, but the Foreign Office will think he is too young as he has only reached the age of Napoleon and Wellington at Waterloo.’ Then the rumours died down again, and the Coopers decided they were probably safe until 1948. It was a halcyon summer, the more so because it seemed likely to be their last. In May there was a luncheon-party for Churchill at Chantilly. The old man started the day surly and depressed, greeting the overtures even of his beloved Odette Pol Roger with a churlish ‘Gwumph!’ Luncheon improved things greatly and by the time of the brandy he was launched into a passionate speech in defence of a united Europe. Then the party straggled down towards the lake. Churchill insisted on jumping a brook that stood in his way. Susan Mary Patten, who for some reason Churchill pretended to believe was French, took off her shoes preparatory to following him. Churchill waved her on with an encouraging flourish of his cigar: ‘N’ayez pas peur. Suivez-moir!’
After the party Mrs Churchill wrote to Diana: ‘How I do hope you will soon be assured of a calm, permanent tenure of your lovely Baby Palace with its cool crystal waters and its emerald lawns and pastures.’ She could not have wished it more fervently than Diana. But would the French Government allow them to stay on once the Embassy was lost? Might Duff conclude that they must return to England? Apprehensively, Diana began to look around for a house in London. To make matters worse, the Foreign Office had recently cut their allowances to pre-war levels and they were £4,000 overdrawn. Poverty and squalor seemed to lie ahead, certain to descend as soon as an unkind Government struck the fatal blow.
Early in September the blow duly came. Duff and Diana were not expecting it, certainly not expecting it in the shape of a somewhat bleak letter from the Secretary of State rather than a personal message. As soon as he had read it Duff hastened to tell Diana. ‘She took it superbly,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘as she always takes bad news.’ Duff’s former secretary, Daphne Wakefield, was staying with them at the end of a honeymoon trip. Dinner that night was in honour of the newly married couple and was particularly cheerful. Only next morning, when Diana had already left Paris on a provincial visit, did Mrs Wakefield receive a note telling her that the Coopers had not wished to spoil her last evening but felt she should know that they had been dismissed.
From that moment life was a fever of preparation. Diana resolved to go out with a flourish and held a farewell ball in December. Churchill was among the many English friends who flew over: ‘Winston was there to lend lustre to the feast,’ Diana wrote in her memoirs. ‘I lent it a skeleton.’ The skeleton rattled its bones merrily enough; only those who knew Diana particularly well would have detected that the occasion was not the happiest of her life. Every candle was lit, every piece of the great gilt service was gleaming on the tables, it was 5 a.m. before the last guests filtered from the courtyard. For some of them
it was a farewell to the Embassy as well as to the Coopers, for no new broom sweeps cleaner than that of an incoming ambassador, and the intoxicating free-for-all of the salon vert had gone for ever. For Susan Mary Patten it was one of the most beautiful parties of her life, yet ‘Diana and Duff had been so beloved that the party was bitter-sweet as it meant farewell’.
A few days later a large proportion of the guests streamed to the Gare du Nord to say yet another farewell. Diana was in tears, Duff was in tears, Cocteau was in tears, Gaston Palewski was in tears; it was a richly lachrymose occasion. Louise de Vilmorin was so overcome by emotion that she impulsively clambered aboard the train and proclaimed that, since the Coopers could not stay in France, she, a Frenchwoman, must go to England. The spontaneity of this moving tribute was hardly marred by the fact that her suitcase turned out to be on board already.
And so these three romantic years ended with a splendid, if slightly spurious flourish. It had been a great theatrical performance, and it was right that it should end with a melodramatic gesture. Diana had set an impossible standard for her successor to attain; a challenge which that successor very sensibly met by doing something entirely different. Diana had chosen her own battlefield and had triumphed on it. It was not the only battlefield, possibly it was not the best battlefield to have chosen, certainly it was not a battlefield that accorded well with the image of an austere and socialist Britain; but on it she performed as well as could have been required of her. It is doubtful if any other woman could have won for herself the position that Diana achieved in her three years at the Embassy in Paris; the fact that many women would not have tried or wanted to need not detract from her achievement.
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