‘I can’t conceal that it is a body-blow to me,’ wrote Diana in distress. ‘I was forewarned from the day you both talked of the pleasures of Clapham, for I saw what must happen. I had looked forward too long to the end of loneliness, a double house or two flats with dressing-gown access … I expect when I collect myself I shall realize it’s all to the good. I shouldn’t write you this and I was determined not to and put off writing, and now I feel if I bottle up my sadness it will cork, so this is really an anti-corking letter.’
This cri de coeur had immediate effect. A house was discovered in Warwick Avenue – ‘the Red Light District’ as Evelyn Waugh described it – not with ‘dressing-gown access’ but only a few hundred yards from the Norwichs’ house in Blomfield Road. It was not ideal but it had a garden, a big drawing-room, a large and tranquil bedroom in which Diana could conduct the greater part of her activities, enough room for the most cherished books, pictures and ornaments. It would do well enough for what she had satisfied herself would be her few declining years.
The idea of leaving Chantilly caused her little distress, the physical process of so doing almost broke her nerve. ‘My mind reels with what has to be done,’ she told Katharine Asquith. ‘Change of residence is as hard as reversing gravity.’ There were problems with the British customs, problems with the tax authorities, problems with the Institut. What was to be taken and what left behind was the most painful problem of all. Duff’s library preoccupied her particularly. Somehow it must be broken up – ‘no space in the Space Age’ – but which books should go to Warwick Avenue, which to John Julius, which to the Embassy? Her friends poured out from Paris to help her with the work of demolition. On the last day Diana urged her assistants to pick every flower in sight and leave the garden a green desolation. It was a reflection of her mood.
And so the gates closed for the last time on the ravaged garden, the empty rooms already possessed by the peculiar squalor and bleakness that afflicts a house deserted by its owner. She had lived there for fifteen years, some of them among the happiest of her life, some the most miserable. A link with Duff was severed, but she knew she would feel close to Duff wherever she was, no less in London than Chantilly. What distressed her was not what she was leaving behind but what lay ahead. She was almost seventy years old. At Chantilly she had been in touch with her younger self, there was a thread of continuity which linked her to middle age. Now the thread was cut, she was beginning life again as an old lady. Bleakly she visualized an existence of increasing decrepitude; fading faculties; pain; worst terror of all, senility. Her infinite capacity for expecting the worst led her into a welter of anticipatory gloom. All was for the worst in the worst of possible worlds; all that remained was to sit it out until released by the merciful quietus of the grave.
FIFTEEN
OLD AGE
Twenty years later, now aged eighty-eight, the quietus of the grave has still been denied her. It has come as a surprise to nobody except herself that the intervening years have not been ones of sombre inactivity, but varied, energetic, enjoyable. There are many ways of growing old gracefully but almost all of them involve some degree of resignation, an acceptance of the fact that age imposes limitations, that incapacity must curb enterprise however actively the spirit may desire the contrary. Diana is not one for resignation. She will not go gentle into that good night, but will fight every inch of the way. She fears the decay of beauty, the loss of health, hearing, sight; but most of all she fears that she might no longer feel. The anaesthetic of old age, to many people a merciful mitigation of suffering, is to her intolerable. If she must suffer, she will do so in full consciousness; if she must sink it will be with all flags flying. Inevitably there are things that she cannot do, tasks beyond her powers, but only the total incapacity of her body is accepted as an excuse. So long as she remains alive there will be no failure of her resolution.
*
It would have been wholly uncharacteristic of Diana if she had not found the first few months of her new life in London intolerably painful. John Julius and Anne were so preoccupied with each other and their pursuits that she felt they had little time for her. Artemis now went to the Lycée Français, which she adored ‘and which has in a twinkling scotched her love for me – now it’s “O, you and your Greeks and your Round Table, Noona!”’ Jason, her grandson, had but to see her on his threshold to set up a yell to waken the dead. ‘So horrible has it been‚’ she told Susan Mary Patten, ‘that I feel past recovery. No pangs for Chantilly, or rather no wanting it back, but I miss the beauty desperately and the sort of shape life had.’ And yet she knew herself well enough to realize that her woe was exaggerated, and even to introduce some element of self-parody into her words. Martha Gellhorn understood her well when she wrote about this time: ‘The first suggestion of change fills you with horror, whereupon in no time you adore the new place and life. Oh, Diana, what if really you have a golden and blessed nature? And are happy as a sandboy always? Surely, unless you are lying in your teeth, the sum total of your life is 99.9% life-loving and therefore happiness?’
Partly to combat her depression, partly from her fear of missing something good, mainly because she enjoyed it, she was soon leading a social life by normal standards impossibly hectic. Three October nights, picked more or less at random, illustrate the pattern of her existence. On the first she was dragged – protesting, she maintained, though the protests can hardly have been vociferous – to a night-club called the Ad Lib where she spent ‘two really monstrous hours not hearing a word, not having a seat to myself, and not, on account of total darkness, seeing the Mods and Rockers dancing like Holy Rollers, nor yet the Beatles who go there nightly to relax’. Next night was a dinner for Charlie Chaplin. Diana sat next to one of Britain’s most eminent literary figures, who pinched her knee black and blue and demanded a kiss. ‘Worse was to come. He seized my hand as the Commendatore seized Don Giovanni’s and started to drag it to you know where. I was purple in the face, not so much with the shame as with the strain of writhing away. When the battle looked all but lost he was called on to make a speech, which he was far too drunk to manage. “I don’t think I ever liked you, Charlie,” he began, and after half a minute’s inarticulate mumbles collapsed back in his seat.’ The third night was dinner with Vivien Leigh and Noel Coward. After dinner they looked in on Douglas Fairbanks Junior – ‘dreadfully against my will’, of course – and then Noel Coward drove her home, ‘came in for a snifter and remained till 2.30 a.m. talking about his homosexuality’.
Though she grumbled about the cost, the lack of space, the inadequate cooking, she invited her friends frequently to Warwick Avenue. Cecil Beaton lunched there in November 1963. Caroline Duff, Lady Dufferin, the Baroness Budberg, Rupert Hart-Davis and James Mossman were the other guests; Mossman, a television personality of talent, beauty and sensitivity acute to the point of self-destruction, being at that time an habitué of Diana’s court. ‘Rough and wroughty conversation,’ Beaton recorded, ‘Diana winking and joking about her old age; talk about the new President, poems of Thomas Moore recited – a treat. The food personal, original and economical; as usual melon and avocado and dill, and a fish pie.’ Not only the food was economical. Vivien Leigh was in a nursing-home and Diana telephoned to ask what she would like to be sent. ‘For the Lord’s sake no more flowers, the place is full of them!’ said Miss Leigh’s secretary. ‘In which case I’ll be round to grab a few for my luncheon party,’ replied Diana. She rushed round, found a bath full of flowers and removed three dozen roses.
Her neighbours were a constant solace. Little Venice was a village; the inhabitants perhaps more exotic but no less parochial than those of other villages. Besides John Julius and his family there were the Lennox Berkeleys next door – ‘semi-detached but wholly attached’ as Diana described them. There was Diana’s niece Kitty Farrell and her family; old friends from Paris, Frank and Kitty Giles; Adrian Daintry the artist; Lord Kinross the writer; Lanning Roper the gardener; a later arrival Edward F
ox, the actor; Robin McDouall, the Sapiehas. Together they formed a community who used the same shops, borrowed each other’s motors, visited each other’s houses. They provided a framework in which Diana could feel secure and at home as had never been the case in France.
She was as little disposed as ever to let comfort or convention stand in her way. Deciding at the last minute to go to a ball at Wilton, she discovered that the houses in the vicinity were full up. Not in the least put out, she organized a caravan and asked permission to pitch camp in the park. Aged eighty-five, she wished to fly to America but the fare was too much for her. Freddie Laker had recently introduced his cut-price trips across the Atlantic, but to get on one involved queueing for several hours. Diana wrote to him, proclaiming that he was the greatest contributor to the history of travel since Magellan or perhaps Columbus and asking whether, as a frail and impoverished old lady, she might exceptionally have a seat reserved for her. A secretary replied, starting the letter ‘Dear Miss Cooper’, and stating firmly that she must take her chance with the rest. Neither annoyed nor distressed, Diana rose at 3.30 a.m. and set off for Victoria to join the queue for the midday plane. A friend pointed out that she was being ridiculous; even if the money was not in her bank, all she had to do was sell an ornament. ‘But don’t you see?’ asked Diana incredulously. ‘It’s such an adventure.’
Saving money by fair means or foul was still one of her favourite games. Crossing from Athens to Hydra with Cecil Beaton she insisted on boarding the boat with no tickets, then seized two chairs from the lounge and installed them triumphantly on the first class deck. Stewards remonstrated. ‘Bring the Captain,’ trumpeted Diana. ‘Squatters’ rights. Possession is nine points of the law.’ The purser asked to see their tickets. Diana would have none of it. ‘We are first class! Look at my credentials. I’m too old to move.’ Cecil Beaton made as if to flee and was promptly rebuked for his cravenness. As they left the boat, he waited nervously for the police to arrive. But Diana reassured him: ‘Well, we got away with that one!’ Even worse was her habit of imposing economy on her friends. Ann Fleming, visiting Paris and longing to stay at the Ritz, was bullied into camping in the deserted house of Paul Louis Weiller, without heating, without hot water, and with a furiously resentful concierge denying her any nourishment.
No year went by without a month or two of travel, sometimes more. For several years she went every September to stay with Noel Coward in Switzerland, taking particular pleasure in the public swimming pool in Montreux. On her first visit she gazed enraptured at the glare of colour – electric-blue water, orange marigolds, blood-red roses, shocking-pink begonias. ‘Oh I do love it so,’ she said to her companion, Peter Coats. ‘It’s so pretty and so gay and not overburdened with taste.’ Later she took to spending part of the summer at the Hofmannsthals’ house in Austria. She went to Portugal with Iris Tree; to the West Indies several times; on safari to Kenya and Tanzania; to Nigeria to visit the Heads. In Kano she fell into the town sewer, bruised her leg painfully and removed much of the skin, tottered to her feet malodorous and bleeding, sharply instructed her fellow-travellers to stop fussing and resumed her tour of the bazaar. In Moscow she became so indignant when dinner had not arrived by 10 p.m. that, liberally primed with vodka, she invaded the kitchen and performed a Russian dance and songs taught her nearly fifty years before by Chaliapin. ‘All the kitchen joined in, I was the whizz of the scullions, they all kissed me, but I don’t think the dishes were hastened.’ She revelled in every new experience, yet there was always a suspicion of dismay behind the pleasure. At the end of a blissful holiday in Kenya with John Julius, Anne and Nigel Ryan, she noted bleakly: ‘I feel they’ve all got something to go back to and that I have not except for my little dog, though that makes up for a lot.’ When only a hundred yards from home, her son had to break it to her that the dog was dead.
She scored a dazzling success in Washington, where she went in 1963. Susan Mary Patten, now married to Joe Alsop, the doyen of political columnists, organized her programme. One by one the posterns of Camelot were stormed. To dinner the first night came Robert and Edward Kennedy – ‘a child with a very pretty wife’. ‘Politics, politics, total interest and talk is politics, but I rather like that,’ she told John Julius. ‘I got on very well with the Kennedy (“identify yourself!”) voice and a bombardment of questions like Max Beaverbrook. I love it, but it does land them with a saga or two.’ Next day she was taken to meet Lyndon Johnson. Joe Alsop had described him as ‘a frustrated force of nature’ but Diana found herself unable to form any impression because of the blinding neon-light before which he sat and the inaudible mumble which came to her through the screen of the Vice-President’s giant hand.
The central keep grew closer. The following day she lunched with Eunice Shriver, the President’s sister, and was taken round the White House. ‘She really has the wild originality of countenance and has always been in love with her brother Jack, looks like him, talks like him, but the Kennedys are all made out of the same clay – hair and teeth and tongues from the same reserves. I loved Eunice, so I enjoyed the very inferior plate of dog’s dinner sea-food poulticed over with tomato.’ They went to the Cabinet room, where the green baize was laid for a late afternoon meeting with a pad of paper in every statesman’s place. Announcing she was in love with MacNamara, the Secretary of Defence, Mrs Shriver wrote a frivolous Valentine on the pad in front of his seat. Encouraged, Diana scrawled ‘Love from Debo’ on the President’s pad; a message from his former sister-in-law, the Duchess of Devonshire, which she hoped might cause him some surprise.
At last came the day when the President came to dinner to see for himself this curious relic of a former age. Kennedy was known to have a weakness for British aristocrats but a dislike of old age; which feeling would predominate in this confrontation was anxiously debated by the Alsops. The daughter of the house was sent off to a friend, her bedroom filled with secret servicemen, a hot-line telephone installed so that the President could declare war if the mood took him, Jean the cook had her hair dyed blood-red for the occasion. The Kennedys arrived. ‘Nice to see you again,’ he began. ‘I believe “again” is the operative word for all those in positions of patronage,’ Diana told John Julius. ‘He may have been right, but I don’t remember ever having clapped eyes upon him.’ She had, eight years before at Paul Louis Weiller’s, but the meeting had hardly been a protracted one. She found him much younger than she had expected, ‘less puffy than the photographs or the deforming TV makes him’.
Dinner went as well as it was meant to. Afterwards a group round Jackie who must have, like her husband, total recall, because she’d read all my books and remembered a lot of those remarkable works. We talked about letter-writing. She said that in her whole married life she had had nine from Jack. I found Jackie much more beautiful than I had expected and a hundred times more of a personality. It is said that her near-divorce mood and his preoccupation with anything or anybody but her had turned to connubial comfort. It is said that she has the whip-hand as she cares not a jot for what people say and might walk out of the White House any day if so disposed. I suppose, too, vigorous animal though he is, few other beds are possible if always he is attached by wire to ‘War’ or ‘Peace’ and surrounded by tough secret servicemen.
‘What a woman!’ President Kennedy said as he left the house. She was at once invited back to the White House and feted by all Washington. ‘It was like suddenly having invited Nureyev,’ said Susan Mary Alsop, with the satisfaction of one who has scored a knock-out victory over the other Washington hostesses.
*
At home she devoted much time and energy to keeping alive her husband’s memory. Diana was never one to live in the past, loathed mawkish sentiment and the pious cliché; but the celebration of Duff was for her a part of living, far removed from the conventional solemnities of widow’s weeds and obituary addresses. She conceived the wording of his memorial in a moment of inspiration early one morning and wrote it on the wall of a ho
use in a back street of Hydra. Only when she came to look for it again did she realize that all the houses in Hydra had white walls and all back streets looked alike. It took two days searching to find her handiwork and then she transcribed it and gave it to John Julius and Rupert Hart-Davis.
To her delight Duff’s friends suggested the setting up of a fund to endow a literary prize. Randolph Churchill was the leading spirit in its organization, won Diana’s undying gratitude but contrived almost to forfeit it when she met him in Monte Carlo, uproariously drunk, having lost the list of subscribers and taken no other step. ‘The dropsical brute has two secretaries and a ghost-writer,’ but still got nothing done, complained Diana bitterly; but she shamed him into action and a handsome amount was raised. Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades was favourite for the first prize, which Isaiah Berlin ruled would ‘start the thing off in a very respectable way’, but in the end it was felt a work in a single volume would be more appropriate. Alan Moorehead was the eventual winner, for his book on Gallipoli.
Winston Churchill volunteered to present the first prize. Diana was instructed to make sure that he limited his remarks to a few sentences praising Moorehead and Duff himself. She lunched with him the day of the prizegiving in his house in Hyde Park Gate which, by good fortune, adjoined the house of Sir Roderick and Enid Jones where the ceremony was to take place. ‘The poor beloved had had his third stroke,’ Diana told John Julius. ‘His face is less puffy and his beautiful hands young, unshaking and elegant, but his mind is like love; when you think you are sure of it, it’s flown, and giving up pursuit, it’s back with you.’ He found it impossible to grasp for more than a few moments what was expected of him. ‘Do you want me to stay away?’ he kept asking. Lady Churchill would patiently explain once again that he was to present the prize and make a short speech first. ‘Oh, am I?’ Diana then read the suggested address, broke down in tears half way through but managed at the second effort. ‘Toby the budgerigar helps the long meal to be weathered – very nice and tame and sits on Winston’s shoulders or one’s head and talks to itself and loves him, but it’s all come to that. Injurious time.’
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