At seven-thirty the next morning, May 16, Lady Mosley telephoned. Cim was going downhill. After a better night she had had a relapse at 7 a.m. and was being given saline injections as she was too weak for a blood transfusion. Without disturbing Miles, Irene dressed quickly and rushed to Lady Mosley’s flat, where they ate a hurried breakfast. Tom, who dropped in for a quick wash, told them not to come to the nursing home. Then Baba appeared, icy cold in manner, and walked back there arm in arm with Tom. Fruity was the next arrival, and for an hour Lady Mosley and Irene had to listen to him until they crammed on their hats and made their way to the nursing home, where they sat in the waiting room while telephones rang and nurses scurried in and out.
Tom appeared, to ask Irene wretchedly if she wanted to see Cim—or would Irene rather remember her as she had been, radiant and lovely? Breaking off suddenly, he asked Irene and Andrée to fetch the flowers that had been sent from Denham to Lady Mosley’s flat, to put beside Cim’s bed. Baba sat on a chair placed directly outside Cim’s door. After a while Miles and Fruity turned up; Irene sent them to Lady Mosley’s flat for lunch, going back there herself for a cup of coffee before sending the two men off for a walk around the park and telephoning Nanny Hyslop that the outlook was bleak.
“Oh! that afternoon of horror,” wrote Irene in her diary. “Ma [Lady Mosley], Andrée and I crouched outside that door while my angel breathed her last few hours. Poor Tom came out once or twice and said he could get nothing through to her. If only the doctors had warned him she was going he had so much to tell her and now he was trying to get through to her how magnificent her life had been in its splendor and fulfillment. She had said to him that morning: ‘I am going. Goodbye my Buffy,’ which she always said when he walked away through the garden at Denham.”
Even at this extreme moment the jealousies and antagonisms between oldest and youngest sister made themselves felt. “Baba sat in broken solitude in the bathroom and try as I would to hold on to her hand she turned away from every advance.” What Irene wrote next in her diary explains this coldness. “Ma told me, alas! alas! Cim had got her to read my last letter to her and so of course she read: ‘I only want you, not Baba at my wedding. Miles is a worker, thank God! not like Fruity. If Miles turns to Baba and not you to turn me out smartly I shall kill him.’
“My precious got weaker and weaker and oh! her stertorous breathing in the last half hour was torture to hear through the crack in the door where I could just see in the mirror Tom murmuring to her his last words of love.”
They learned from the doctor that from the start Cimmie had put up no sort of a fight. Both mentally and physically, he told them, she had never lifted a finger to live. All of them felt they knew why: Cimmie, who had fought for so long to keep her marriage going, believed that she had finally lost the battle and that Diana Guinness had taken her husband from her. From then on, those closest to Cimmie viewed Diana as directly responsible for her death.
Cimmie’s body was taken to Smith Square, where lilies, roses and lilies of the valley surrounded the coffin, with a garland of roses plaited by Lady Diana Cooper trailing from it. Lady Mosley, Miles, Nanny and Irene knelt to pray at the foot and Irene swore to her dead sister that she would never fail her.
That day Georgia Sitwell, Tom’s former mistress and wife of the Mosleys’ friend Sacheverell, who had spent a wretched night thinking of Cim, went to see Andrée. “Despite her hatred of Tom she said no one knows how wonderful he has been. He spent every minute with her for a week. He talked to her for hours and hours as she lay dying and Andrée thinks she understood.”
Miles and Irene, who had been comforting the Mosley children, did their best to keep up the children’s spirits through lunch. After it, Miles went to rest in the spare room. When he came down Irene could think of nothing to say to him. She sent him home and tried to get hold of Elinor Glyn, to whom she and Cimmie always turned in times of crisis, but she was out. Baba drove Tom down to lunch at Denham before they visited the Cliveden chapel together, where Cimmie’s body now lay. Later Baba and Tom came to dine with Miles and Irene at Deanery Street, where they talked of Irene’s trousseau, with Baba telling Irene how to improve her style.
So good was the rapport between them that evening that later, in the drawing room, Irene poured out all her worries over her seeming inability to respond to Miles after their blissful time in Italy. “Baba’s sweetness, her understanding of marriage were a revelation to me and gave me back the balance and calm I was losing. I could not believe I had found such common sense and sympathy in her after all those years of coldness and before the men came in, we talked on Tom, the children, Diana Guinness in a barrierless spirit of understanding. I thanked God! When she phoned Tom was already in bed at Denham. With renewed peace in my heart, Miles and I got back to understanding and Italy, all barriers down and he said indelibly lovely things to my broken spirit.”
The next day she gave away to her maid Violet, her housekeeper Mrs. Shaw and the other servants all the clothes in her wardrobe that Miles, determined to smarten up his future wife, had ruthlessly discarded at the villa on Lake Maggiore.
Baba’s extreme closeness to her bereaved brother-in-law was already beginning to worry Fruity—Irene noticed how edgy they were with each other but supported her sister. Baba must go to Cliveden with Tom if he wanted her to, said Irene; they must stand by and patiently wait as she was the one person on whom Tom depended for everything.
On May 19 there was a short memorial service for Cimmie at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, Tom carrying gardenias and the children’s posies of flowers laid on strips of brocade. “Unbearably sad,” wrote Georgia Sitwell. “I howled.” Miles, who had tactfully declined to be present, waited outside for Irene in his car and drove her home for lunch, where they were joined by Baba and Fruity. After getting her hair and nails done, Irene went to see Elinor Glyn, who had adored Cimmie. “We had a heartbroken talk and she read me her article on Cim for the Sunday Graphic. Elinor is always a great and devoted soul to us children.”
Life gradually resumed its pattern. Baba did her best to find her sister appropriate clothes for the new married life ahead and Irene nervously met her future mother-in-law and sister-in-law, Betty, over tea. Then came a visit with Miles to Baba and Fruity at their country house at Coombe in Surrey, where Irene’s nerves began to jangle yet again when she sensed that her sister and her fiancé were dissecting her together after dinner while she and Fruity were playing the gramophone in another room. When she tackled Miles, he told her that Baba, known for her chic, could give her good advice on clothes that would set off her beautiful face. “I only say all this to you because I’m so proud of you,” he added. Irene melted, and allowed Baba to take her to Fortnum and Mason to choose lingerie, and to Cartier for a wedding ring on the pattern of her own.
However, she could not suppress her anxieties. Miles’s indifferent health and languidness worried her—and her deepest emotions were still for Gordon. Again, she poured her worries out to Baba, who became scared and miserable for her sister in her turn. But the practical Baba was determined to do more than wallow in Irene’s neuroses. She went to see Gordon, evoking from Irene the grateful diary entry: “She has helped me marvellously. I was nearly out of my mind.”
What chiefly worried Irene was Miles’s apparent coolness. He was often aloof and distrait, complaining of fatigue and treating her, she thought, more like a sister than a beloved. Lady Askwith also sensed problems, writing in her diary: “Liked Irene immensely but felt anxious. She is very charming and easy to get on with and sensible. Pray God it goes right.”
The fatigue Miles complained of masked something more serious. Still in love with Lady Portarlington, he was finding it more and more difficult to sustain this engagement undertaken largely for the sake of his career. Slowly, it was beginning to unravel.
By the end of May 1933 Irene feared the worst. Their relationship seemed to be splintering against the rock of Miles’s indifference. As it disintegrated, th
ere were endless agonized discussions, icy kisses and quarrels that left Irene traumatized but Miles unmoved. “Nothing ever remains or makes any impression on my mind or troubles me for any length of time,” he remarked after one such contretemps, bouncing off her bed and leaving the room. Again, it was Baba who resolved the situation, while Irene and Miles were staying with the Metcalfes. After another tortured talk Baba went in search of Miles and found him sunbathing by the tennis courts. She told him she thought he should leave.
It was the end. There was a painful talk with Irene in his room before lunch and another in the woods afterward, where Miles apologized pitiably for hurting her, but saying that unless either party felt they could not get on without the other it was hopeless. Both wept bitterly and Irene fled in order not to say goodbye.
Baba tried to comfort her sister with the ambivalent remark that she must not be so miserable—after all, it was not as though Miles had been expressing undying love—but that they must strive to remain dear friends. As she pointed out to their luncheon guest, Lord Castlerosse, who had come to play golf with Fruity, there were many ways in which Miles was not right for her sister.
Irene’s feelings for Miles remained strong for some time. When she heard Baba talking to him on the telephone she felt a terrible pang of misery. She had wasted years of her life in an unhappy and fruitless love affair with Gordon and the thought of what could be her last chance of happiness slipping away demoralized her. Lady Askwith too was sad when she received a letter from her son saying that the engagement was over. “I am very disappointed and unhappy,” she wrote in her diary. “I liked her so much—I thought Miles’s happiness was secure and my anxieties over. Well, God’s will be done.”
Soon, it was Irene’s turn to help her sister. Staying with Fruity and Baba at Sandwich for golf in mid-June, she was startled when her sister returned unexpectedly to the house, weeping. Fruity had become furiously jealous over one of their golfing four, who had been invited to supper. Irene talked to Fruity, who would not listen, then she wrote to him, spelling out every point with a lucid clarity which she was incapable of bringing to her own affairs: Fruity’s age compared with that of Baba, the unreasonableness of expecting such a beautiful and intelligent woman to go through life without being spoken to or made much of. He was lucky, she told him firmly, to have had such single-minded love for so long and he must not allow it to be crushed by a molehill. With Baba’s approval, she pushed the note under Fruity’s door.
Next morning he thanked her for her sweet letter and said that though he saw all her points, to him Baba’s flirtation was more than a simple crush and ultimately it would hurt both of them. Fruity stuck to his guns. “Move him I could not,” commented Irene, adding that she had a feeling Miles would have been equally mulish in the same situation.
Soon Fruity would have much more reason for complaint.
20
Keeping It in the Family
When Irene and the Metcalfe family returned to London, plans began in earnest for their various holidays. When Tom, at his most charming, arrived for dinner one evening in June, Irene discovered that she was to be pressed into service looking after both the Mosley and Metcalfe children. After he had gone, Baba came to Irene’s bedroom for a chat.
Here she disclosed that Tom had asked her to accompany him on a motoring trip through Bavaria that August and that she was apprehensive of Fruity’s reaction if she asked for a fortnight’s “leave” for the trip. The obvious solution was for one or two other people to join them, but when she suggested this to Tom later that June evening, he made it perfectly clear that he wanted Baba on her own—or no one.
Anxious though everyone was to console Tom after his terrible loss, it seemed an extraordinary arrangement. Irene, remembering her own brief entanglement with him, was uneasy. Baba, she felt, was playing with fire. Thus she was astonished when Lady Mosley telephoned to beg Baba to go away with her son. Otherwise, said Lady Mosley ominously, a third party might go with him. The idea of Diana whisking him off was anathema to all three women, and Irene came to the reluctant conclusion that better “poor Baba” than “the horror.” Anyway, could Tom even contemplate Baba as a sexual stopgap when he still appeared so grief-stricken over Cim?
Lady Mosley’s fears seemed to be justified when Baba rang Tom up on a day when he was supposed to be at Denham and found he had gone to London. The sisters assumed, correctly, that there could be only one reason: Diana. Filled with foreboding, Irene rang Lady Mosley, who confided that she was “terrified the horror had sent for Tom after her divorce was through and that she was doing everything to capture him.”
In fact, Diana was indifferent as to whether she married Tom or not, but the sisters would not have believed this had they known the truth. For a well-brought-up young woman with two small children to be content to remain a mistress to a widower—and a notorious lecher—was something they could not comprehend.
Tom’s visit to Diana gave Baba further justification for her determination to set off with him. She had been half in love with him for years and, without the taboo of her sister’s marriage, her underlying obsession with him surfaced, fueled by the intense intimacy of the past few weeks and the sudden reliance on her shown by Tom, normally so strong and self-sufficient.
But she was not accustomed to playing second fiddle, least of all to the hated Diana, and she was not prepared to embark on the longed-for trip without clearing this up. Her pretext for this was her well-developed sense of comme il faut: if Tom was seeing Diana, it was a flagrant gesture of brutal disrespect to the late wife he professed to love so deeply, and she could not help him—or provide company on his trip—if he continued to do so. It was not hard to carry Irene with her on this.
Irene and Lady Mosley met to discuss the Diana question. Tom, said his mother, had asked her to tell his sisters-in-law that he did not contemplate seeing Diana after his trip with Baba. Lady Mosley added that she had reported to him what she had heard: that Diana had said she was out to get him and that those who knew her said she was the most determined minx and talked freely to everyone. Tom refused to believe any of these tales; Diana, he said, was dignified and sweet and would never chatter loosely like that. Hearing this, Lady Mosley wept and said Tom was so marvelous to his children that perhaps Cim had died to save his soul. “I wondered!” wrote Irene, more cynical where Tom was concerned.
Tom, who found the idea of persuading the conventional Baba to come away with him on a such a risqué trip irresistible, had a ready answer for her doubts. With his usual facility, during one of their intimate dinners, he convinced Baba that seeing Diana was an obligation, like others he had had to take on after Cimmie’s death, and that he could not shirk it. There was, he assured her, nothing in it; their relations were platonic. Baba could not make Tom see how cruel such meetings were to the memory of Cim.
Behind Baba’s loathing of Diana lay an intense sexual and emotional jealousy. Her rationale for trying to make Tom, who was, after all, a widower, stop seeing Diana, newly divorced and equally free, was that “people would not stand for it, and his future would be destroyed.”
On June 27 the Prince of Wales, bringing his brother Prince George with him, came to stay at the house the Metcalfes had taken at Sandwich, on the Kent coast, for golf. The princes, driving their own car, without either valet or equerry, arrived so much later than expected, at 2 a.m., that the Metcalfes and Irene had already gone to bed. A few days after the royal brothers left, the party, augmented by Tom, broke up, setting off in two cars for London.
Once again, Baba and Tom drove together, followed in the Metcalfe Rolls by Irene and a highly disgruntled Fruity. His wife, he felt, was becoming far too close to Tom. All the way to London he muttered angrily about “this Tom hysteria,” and Baba’s “sacrifice” to Tom in watching and guarding him. Fruity thought this was rubbish and Tom’s behavior hypocritical—Tom himself was responsible for Cim’s death by his cruelty. At the house, Irene’s thoughts ran on a different trac
k: Baba told her that during the drive up Tom had promised over and over again to put Diana Guinness right out of his life. “I wonder for how long?” thought Irene dubiously. “Oh! if only forever!”
Baba’s plans for the rest of the summer did not include her children. Returning from a brief visit to Scotland on July 10, her first engagement was a meeting to organize the day nursery to be set up in Cimmie’s memory in Kennington. Both she and Irene looked “illish,” noted Georgia Sitwell, one of the friends co-opted for the project (the nursery eventually cost five thousand pounds to build; except for nineteen hundred ninety pounds from Lambeth Council, all the money was raised by Cimmie’s friends). This decided, Baba began to prepare for a pleasurable summer ahead, flinging herself into beauty treatments, making telephone calls, seeing friends and finally, tactlessly, asking the childless Irene how she could get the new nanny trained. After her trip with Tom she must go to Scotland and also to America! “Must?” wrote Irene bitterly. “Why? and her children to be seen to!”
As the summer passed, Tom and Baba’s increasing intimacy was unmistakable. Tom walked with Baba on the Savehay lawn in the warm evenings, his arm around her waist, whispering into her ear. When together, they had attention for no one else. After one occasion, dining with Lady Mosley, Tom and Baba, Irene wrote: “Ma and I were embarrassed to a degree as Baba and he gabbled in each other’s faces and occasionally flung us a perfunctory remark.” When they were alone together, Lady Mosley reported that after much arguing Tom had finally told Diana Guinness there was no place for her in his life and refused to see her again for a while.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 22
