The Pursuit of Laughter (79 page)

‘How did you come to meet Evelyn Waugh?’

‘He was a friend of my first husband at Oxford. There were a group of them. We were all tremendous friends from the end of 1928. You should remember that in 1930 I was only 20. I was very fond of Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, John Sutro and a little later of John Betjeman. I think those were the ones we loved.’

‘And what was the relationship between your smart trendy group and, say, Noël Coward and his set?’

‘Well, we looked on Noël Coward as an
elder
. When you’re 18, everyone over 25 seems an elder, don’t they? He was never part of our group.’

‘I was surprised to discover how late people often went to bed in those days. When you went out to parties, what time did you go to bed?’

‘If it was a good party about 6 in the morning. If it was a rotten party, more like
midnight
.’

‘I’ve seen invitations to private houses where the dancing began at 10.30 pm. And the nightclubs were open until 4 or 5 too. Clubs opening that late have only returned to London in the last 10 years.’

‘We used to go to nightclubs to annoy our parents really. I never enjoyed them. It was considered rather slow not
ever
to go to a nightclub. After I was married I seldom bothered with nightclubs. We preferred to sit and chat and if I went to bed I loved to have people in my room. We used to have a table in my bedroom for dinner, 3 or 4 of us, sitting and
laughing
, very frivolous.’

I have a theory that people who were young in the 1820s, the 1890s, the 1920s and the 1960s, have rapport. I was a teenager in the 60s and those other decades have also played a vital part in my personal liberation. They are young-in-heart decades. The people I have known who were young in the 1920s and 1960s have a gay, soigné, unprim quality. Diana has it. Historically of course there are differences. For example the British Empire was at
its most geographically extensive between the two world wars, but Diana says ‘We were much more interested in Europe—France, Italy, Germany, Spain—than in the British Empire. I never went to Canada or Australia.’

One suspects they thought the British Empire hopelessly middle-class. Tangoes in Seville or ice-cream on Ischia were much more the thing. And yet la jeunesse dorée were conditioned by the Empire in a fundamental way. It gave them an automatic confidence, an assumption that the world was their garden, that they could go anywhere and do anything. Also the pound was strong: they had the money too.

‘Have they been on to you yet for the
Vile Bodies
film?’

‘BBC television has been on to me for an interview. But I can’t face it really. That man you mentioned last time—’

‘Stephen Fry,’ fills in Jean-Noël.

‘He said he wanted to hear my voice and arranged to come. But he cancelled.’

Jean-Noël says ‘He sent a note cancelling for the following Friday, as though the appointment were a week later than it was but he knew it wasn’t.’

‘I wonder who will play Elizabeth Ponsonby?’ enquires Diana tactfully. ‘You know who I mean?’ (This was the girl on whom Waugh modelled Agatha, the heroine of the book.) ‘She was
completely
the queen of the bright young people and rather wild and was the one who started drugs in that generation really. I think she died young. She faded out in some way.’

‘
Vile Bodies
, the book I mean, was finished in that flat round the corner here, wasn’t it.’

‘I was pregnant with my first son so we came to Paris in the autumn of 1929. My
parents
-in-law had this flat which they never used, marvellous servants in it, a wonderful cook. So we borrowed it and as it had many bedrooms and, you’ll be glad to hear, bathrooms, we had people to stay, my sister Nancy, Evelyn, they were all writing books. My husband was writing one too.’

‘Was Waugh a good guest?’

She clasps her hands to her breast and half closes her eyes. ‘Absolutely perfect. Always amused. Terribly pleased with anything like a delicious restaurant. Oh, he was so
easy
to please.’

‘I gather he couldn’t speak French.’

‘No, I don’t think he could. What he loved was to go to the Musée Grevin which is a sort of Madame Tussaud, terrible horrors, Christians being eaten by lions, that was the kind of thing Evelyn really loved. I don’t know if it still goes on.’

‘It does,’ interjects Jean-Noël. To-day he is wearing rather more make-up than Diana but as we get going the matt surface of his maquillage softens and he begins to glow. Jean-Noël has written a terrific little book,
Les
Anges du bizarre
, a rhapsody on grand twentieth
century
eccentrics. Diana’s in it. He writes ‘
Les mitfordphiles—il existe aussi des mitfordphobes—
évoquant
sans
cesse l’irresistible originalité de leurs heroines
.’

Diana’s son Ali [Alexander Mosley], who lives down the street with his wife Charlotte,
is also with us. He must have been extremely good-looking as a young man with a solid head and fine brown eyes. He’s easy-going and calls her ‘Mum’ a lot.

‘Waugh didn’t like music much,’ I say.

‘No, he didn’t like anything wonderful. I don’t believe he ever went to the Louvre. He liked Pre-Raphaelites. He liked country life—because he’d never had any.’

‘How long was he with you in Paris?’

‘I should think a fortnight. Not long. We were always on the move in those days. Evelyn’s first marriage had broken up—or the break-up was happening. He was so
cheerful
and full of jokes that one couldn’t imagine that he was suffering but apparently
underneath
he was. His first wife was a pretty little person but I think quite silly.’

‘Did he change after his divorce?’

‘He did.
Vile Bodies
was his first success and success changed him but what really changed him was religion.’

‘Are there particular things in his writings which he took from you?’

‘I think so. All novelists pick up things. We were very intimate friends for about a year. He was always there. People say
Work Suspended
was me but I don’t think it was. Bits of me perhaps.’

‘And that slang he develops in the early books—too sick making, too shy making—did he invent that or did he take it from you?’

‘Partly both. It was always very ephemeral. The next year one would have a new favourite word.’

But often these things are much older than one imagines. I’ve since discovered that ‘too sickening’ occurs in the slang sense on page 10 of Arnold Bennett’s
The Old Wives Tale
, first published in 1908. The aesthetes of the 1870s and 80s used phrases like ‘too utterly
marvellous
’. Mock cockney, popular in the 1960s, was also a 1920s thing, but in fact it was invented by the Regency dandies.

‘The break with Waugh—there’s something not quite right—he contrived it perhaps.’

She shrugs, sighs, puts her head on one side, and looks at me with those limpid eyes.

‘We were such great friends. I couldn’t go out much because I was going to have the baby. Towards the end of that period he was more or less the only person who came to
dinner
. Of course the moment I was free from the baby I wanted to rush—you’ve got to remember I was only nineteen.’

‘You married and started a family early. Would you like to have had a career?’

‘Not really. I’m too lazy. And a lot of the places I rushed Evelyn probably didn’t know the people. He’d become very possessive and got terribly cross and started saying you can’t have so-and-so to dinner. Everything I did was wrong. Since I had a lot of people who thought what I did was all right, I preferred to see them. One doesn’t want somebody
carping
all the time. But I missed him very much.’

‘After the war he explained that it was because he’d fallen in love with you.’

‘Yes.’

‘But it feels more like his social insecurity than infatuation.’

‘A bit of both. When I came to write my memoirs I thought why
was
there a rift? So I wrote to him and he said it was jealousy. I wrote back and asked why was it jealousy and he said I’d put Robert Byron and Harold Acton above him. Well, it wasn’t true.’

Also Acton and Byron were both homosexual as well as friends of Waugh’s (Harold Acton said that none of his own books ever made him so famous as being the dedicatee of Waugh’s first novel
Decline and Fall
). There is something engineered about Waugh’s bowing out of Diana’s life. It was social discomfort but also the artist’s instinct for self-
preservation
. She had developed into the most glamorous and upmarket of the Mitfords. It was too much for him. By the end of 1930 it was all over, ‘though we kept noticing each other at parties and things, sort of in the distance.’

‘Did you meet him properly again?’

‘After the war we
occasionally
lunched together. Never a crossed word I’m glad to say. When we were living in Wiltshire I had to go up to London for the dentist. We had Gerald Berners staying with us who was furious with me for going to London for the whole day. When I got back he was on the doorstep and asked “What did you do?” and I said “I lunched with Evelyn who told me that he
prays
for me every day.” And Gerald said “God doesn’t pay any attention to Evelyn”.’

‘Where was the lunch?’

‘Probably at that place in Curzon Street which was marvellous after the war because it had lobsters.’

‘The Mirabelle?’

‘It wasn’t the Mirabelle. I don’t think that existed then. He was a very clever man who realised that what one needed was protein. He obviously had some secret island in the Hebrides with masses of langoustes and lobsters. My sister Unity used to go to a thing called the British Restaurant where you could get a lunch for a shilling. There was a chain of them. She went to the one in Oxford. She’d have her lunch then go back to the end of the queue and have another one. And everyone would whisper oh it’s her. She was always recognised because she was so huge.’

‘I tell you what I loved in your book, that photograph of William Acton.’

In the new edition of Diana’s memoirs there is a remarkably anachronistic photograph of William Acton at his studio in Tite Street [included in the plate section], Chelsea. He is looking up from reading a newspaper and wearing designer stubble, a raffish scarf and
slip-on
shoes with no socks. It was taken in 1938 but it could have been last week.

‘He was Harold’s younger brother and had exactly the same wonderful voice that Harold had. But he was completely different in character. Harold was always very hard working and William really was hopeless, even at Oxford. He had rooms high up in Peckwater Quad and he used to sniff—or can you drink ether? Anyway ether was his drug. He was completely out of it and fell from the high window down into the quad and was totally unhurt. If you’re unconscious you fall so gently apparently. But all this was a
mad worry to Harold. They set up together in an enormous house in Lancaster Gate and William said he was going to sell furniture. He did—lovely baroque and rococo things. We bought wonderful shell chairs from him. But it obviously didn’t pay. I suppose Mrs Acton funded it all. Harold had become a tremendous favourite with all the London
hostesses
and of course William never was because his behaviour was impossible really. Harold said he couldn’t bear another minute of it and took him back to Florence so that their mother could look after him. Harold went off to Pekin and was lost to us. But in 1938 a sort of reformed William came back from Florence to London and it was then that he painted all those pictures of the ladies he knew, including one of me.’

‘Was he gay like Harold?’

‘Yes, he was. But he had no ménage. I never heard of any special person he was in love with.’

‘Somebody should do a double biography of them. His death was a bit of a mystery.’

Briefly the sad downward look. ‘Well, the last time I ever saw him was—I ran into him in Piccadilly on my way to visit my husband in prison and I said to William come with me on the bus as far as Brixton so we can chat. It was June 1940 shortly before I was arrested myself. And I said what are you doing now? Because most people were so busy with the war. France was just falling. It was a terrible moment. And he said ‘I’m learning Urdu.’ But in the end the war caught up with him and he was in some
ghastly
regiment according to Harold and he managed to get himself back to Italy and his health gave way. He’d abused it all his life with drugs and he just died in the camp hospital in 1945. When he joined me on the bus he was looking quite healthy but he must’ve gone back to his drugs.’

He was found unconscious in his bath in Ferrara just before the end of the war. Many people have called it suicide.

‘And when was the last time you saw John Betjeman?’

‘I expect at Chatsworth. We were always great friends but he used to say I
can’t
go to Paris, it’s so ugly and I can’t eat the food, and then he’d
scream
with laughter.’

The original typescript of
Vile Bodies
Waugh gave to Bryan and Diana in January 1930 at the time of the book’s publication. For many years it was presumed lost but was
discovered
in Jonathan Guinness’s library in 1984 and sold at Christie’s the same year for £55,000.

‘Jonathan was Evelyn’s godson. I suppose Jonathan was hard up. Of course they’re very valuable Evelyn’s manuscripts. Evelyn was such good company, that’s what one must remember. He always saw the funny side of
everything
in those days. He only became serious later. Small and like a little ball of energy, but later with definite, furious opinions about everything. It must be so awful to be married to someone like that.’

‘Hopping up and down in those vivid checks.’

‘When I first knew him he was very poor and dressed just like any undergraduate
really
, grey flannel bags and a tweed coat, very nondescript I should say. But very tidy always. He still lived with his parents at that time. The extravagant checks were way in the future.’