The Viceroy's Daughters (15 page)

 

In 1928, for the first time, the Curzon sisters spent Christmas apart. Baba and Fruity had sailed for America on the
Olympic
, after Nancy Astor had given a huge farewell lunch for them. Irene was at Melton, lonely and miserable despite the parties: “barring Flash no one in the room caring if I looked lovely or hideous, and I fled home in a black fog, alone and on my feet and in a sudden fear of utter loneliness. All the years here have never made me walk home alone before in utter horror of everyone only wanting bed.” But she gave a dinner party on Christmas Eve, won thirty-five pounds at poker on Christmas Day and drank port with the Prince of Wales at the Quorn's Boxing Day meet—his first day's hunting that season.

The Mosleys spent Christmas with their children at Denham, returning there on Boxing Day after a visit to the fount of socialism in its purest form: the house of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. After they left, Beatrice wrote in her diary: “It struck us both that he and she had changed—partly from his long illness last autumn and winter,
*
partly from the ups and downs of electoral failure and success; also from social boycott by their own set and an uneasy position in the Labour Party. He is disillusioned. Labour politics for an aristocrat are not attractive—current and cross-current from left and right and very little real comradeship.”

In Mosley, the Webbs believed that they saw a possible future leader of the party to which they had given their lives. “With his money, his personal charm and political gifts, his good-looking and agreeable wife,” wrote Beatrice, “he is dead certain of Cabinet office and possibly has a chance of eventual premiership.”

14

Lady Cynthia Mosley, MP

Accidents in the hunting field did nothing to check the sport's popularity. Everyone who could, hunted; even politicians came to Melton
to pick up a little of its glamour by association. Stanley Baldwin,
brushing up his image of the bluff, warm-hearted countryman, stayed with the Master of the Quorn during the season of 1928–29, following hounds in a phaeton drawn by a white cob. The equipage plunged over the Leicestershire grass, Baldwin's familiar cherrywood pipe gripped between his teeth all the while.

The king and queen did not share Baldwin's enthusiasm. For years they had been worried that the Prince of Wales, a bold and reckless rider, might kill or maim himself in the hunting field. When the king fell ill in the autumn of 1928, the thought that his heir might soon succeed him must have given this anxiety a sharper edge. The prince, who had returned from South Africa because of his father's health, did not begin his hunting that season until Boxing Day. Almost immediately, there were three fatalities with his favorite pack, the Quorn, that would have reached the ears of the king and queen.

The royal couple began to put pressure on their son. Although the prince attended the Melton Ball in January 1929, gay as ever, with the foxtrot all the rage, two dramatic changes were about to take place in his life, bringing “the Melton years” to a close.

The first was a new mistress. That January, while his longtime beloved, Freda Dudley Ward, was away in Palm Beach with her husband, the prince ran into the voluptuous Thelma Furness again and immediately invited her out to dinner. She accepted equally promptly. Very soon, they began a highly charged and passionate affair. The prince would arrive for his regular Thursday nights at the Embassy Club with Thelma, and sometimes also her twin sister Gloria Vanderbilt, both in chiffon dresses with row upon row of narrow diamond bangles on their wrists which they called their “service stripes.” On other nights they could be seen at the Kit-Cat Club with Prince George, bringing with them most of the Melton set.

The second change affected Fruity and Baba. The prince finally yielded to parental pressure and gave up hunting. On Saturday, February 23, 1929, all his hunters, with the exception of one old horse, were sold by auction at the Repository in Leicester. “HRH The Prince of Wales is not hunting any more, or riding in any point-to-point races this season,” the auctioneers, Warner, Sheppard & Wade, announced in their catalogs and posters.

At once the prince's life became much more London-based. He had his own apartments in London, at York House in St. James's Palace, and turned some of his furious energy into renovating them, chiefly by removing some of the warren of bedrooms and replacing them with bathrooms, a ballroom and a new dining room where a hundred people could be seated. The chintz sofas and portrait of Queen Mary over the drawing-room chimneypiece remained.

St. James's was a royal palace, but the prince had always wanted somewhere he could think of as his own, preferably in the country, where he could have complete privacy. He asked his father for Fort Belvedere, a battlemented semi-derelict royal property, half small castle and half house, six miles from Windsor. The king agreed at once.

To the prince, “the Fort,” as he always called it, became home; and he loved it, as he always loved, passionately. He gutted its interior, installed central heating and, following the American custom he so approved of, bathrooms for almost every one of the bedrooms—a rarity when many large country houses still existed on just one or two. He planned a ballroom, a basement gymnasium holding a practice golf tee and net, and a steam bath. The lily pond beneath the battlements was replaced with a swimming pool and a tennis court was laid out. He chopped down the yew trees growing close to the house, which kept every room on that side in perpetual shadow, replaced the Victorian laurel shrubbery with rhododendrons, and cut paths through the woodland of fir and birch.

It was not a particularly large house—the walnut table in the dining room hung with Stubbs paintings seated only ten. The best furniture, Queen Anne, was in the library. His bedroom, with its Chippendale bed, had tall windows hung with dark red chintz curtains that looked out on the terrace. Family photographs stood about and there was a miniature stairway at the foot of the bed so that his favorite Cairn terrier, Cora, could climb up. Thelma slept in a bedroom that could have been designed for one of the
grandes horizontales
of the Belle Epoque—walls of pink satin, an enormous four-poster hung with the same material, flounced, looped and gathered to each bedpost by pink ostrich feathers.

Although the hard labor of chopping down trees and hacking away years of undergrowth mopped up the prince's physical energy, it did not supply the adrenaline high of hunting. He began flying lessons, buying himself a De Havilland Gypsy Moth. A road was made from the front door of the Fort to Smith's Lawn in Windsor Great Park, where a private royal aerodrome was built. The king, determined to keep his heir safely on the ground, countered by forbidding the issue of a flying license.

 

Emotional crisis rather than change dominated Irene's life. Men seemed to float in and out of her orbit, a number of them becoming lovers—in January 1929, for instance, she saw Arthur Rubinstein again, dining at the Embassy with him in a party for four. “He drove me home and we had a long talk. Whenever I see him he breathes life and humour and vitality into me.” It was, perhaps, that evening that their long-drawn-out and sporadic affair began, although Arthur was anything but reliable—the next day she waited in vain for him for half an hour with John McCormack and his wife until they eventually gave him up and went to the cinema without him.

She had several other admirers. Though Myrtie Kellett had put her foot down and Flash was seldom allowed to see her, another, Paul Duhamel, was besottedly in love. Unfortunately, he chose to propose to her the night after she had had dinner with the man she loved, Gordon Leith, and had gone on to spend the rest of the night dancing with him at the Embassy. “G. took me home and was adorable but I told him I could not face dinner at his house with Cuckoo. It nearly drove me mad.” After this, Paul Duhamel's declaration that, for him, she had all he wanted in a woman “of sex, charm, wit, taste and brains” fell flat. “I told him I had only loved one person for six years and he [Paul] was wonderful and asked nothing of me but to see me and give me of his friendship—just another tragedy in my life.”

The lunches, the dinners, the parties, the hunting, the poker, the charity work, the cocktails, the concerts, the presidency of the Melton Mowbray Amateur Dramatic Society and the Leicester Symphony Orchestra (with its concerts conducted by the up-and-coming young conductor Malcolm Sargent) and the late-night suppers continued. A determined champion of women, Irene was also chairman of the British Women's Symphony Orchestra, for whom she collected money
: it was, as she correctly said, the only medium through which women students could learn the art of orchestral playing—impossible in the male-dominated orchestras of the day.

Outwardly, she seemed to have everything; inside she was gnawed by loneliness. Men who had professed undying devotion, like Bobby Digby, had married other women. Both her sisters were married, with the children she longed for. Worst of all, her affair with Gordon Leith seemed to be no nearer fulfillment. To be kept on the end of a string for six long years—for that is what it amounted to—would make any woman despair. For Curzon's daughter, it was intolerable. Though humble at heart, Irene was sophisticated enough to know that her advantages in worldly terms amounted to a full hand—she was good-looking, independent, titled and possessed of a fortune enough to be a magnet in its own right.

And yet, at thirty-three, she was emotionally caught in a net from which she could not seem to break free, waiting for the love of her life finally to leave his wife and claim her. Every time the proud spirit she had inherited from her father revolted at this humiliating position and she attempted to put distance and time between them, as with her cruises, Gordon would seek her out and renew his promises and the affair would start up again.

Affectionate lectures from her old family doctor, roses from other men, counsel and comfort from Elinor Glyn, could not stop the sleepless nights and tumultuous thoughts. “All day I had a sob in my throat and the ache of wanting someone to take me into the sun for a month and forget everything, but every one I love has a wife or is tied,” she wrote on April 23. Eventually, she broke down, bursting into tears while lunching with Baba. It was a complete reversal of roles. From then on the balance of their relationship shifted. Baba comforted her sister and told her she would talk to Gordon.

One opinion, however, was never enough for Irene. When a friend advised her to consult her brother-in-law Tom Mosley, she did so, rather nervously. To her surprise, he was kind and understanding. He would, he said, speak to Gordon and find out his intentions.

At last the nightmare of waiting was over. Tom's intervention had cut the Gordian knot. He was able, as one man to another—and as a man known for his own extramarital affairs to another man indulging in one—to ask Gordon the direct question: “Do you intend to marry my sister-in-law?”

The reply was equally direct. “I'm afraid not, old boy.”

Tom did not feel he could tell Irene this himself and deputed Baba to do so. On May 6 Irene went to Baba, “who gave me my doom,” records Irene's diary. Baba told the weeping Irene that Gordon had seemed staggered at the thought that anyone would expect him to leave Cuckoo. “So I must never see him again,” the day's entry ends dolefully.

 

Irene had turned to Baba rather than Cimmie not so much from choice but because all Cimmie's time was taken up with politics. She was not only speaking on Tom's behalf in Smethwick as well as appearing up and down the country with Ramsay MacDonald and giving garden parties for Labour Party workers at Savehay Farm, she had decided to stand for Parliament herself in the general election of May 30, 1929. She was extremely popular in the party. The tough trade-union leaders were flattered when she asked them to dinner and her all-around niceness made the coterie of MPs surrounding Tom her devoted friends.

Her constituency was the safely Conservative Stoke-on-Trent, where her opponent, Colonel Ward, had achieved a majority of four thousand five hundred in the previous election. She spent much of her time there, speaking constantly, doing her best to meet as many people as she could and expressing Labour policy with a heartfelt sincerity. Because of Cimmie's looks and style, her opponents immediately dubbed it “the mannequin election”; she tried hard to dress down, usually campaigning in a beige coat and skirt and brogues, though she enlivened these with a chic scarlet hat and gloves “just to show which side I am on.”

The straightforwardness of political campaigning was a contrast to the emotional turmoil of her private life. Tom's infidelities tortured her, but as long as she could believe that (in his phrase) they were no more than his “tiresome ways” and that no one could take her central place at the core of his life, she was able to keep some sort of equilibrium. Even when he acquired a bachelor flat in Pimlico, 22b Ebury Street, which was little more than one huge, elegant bedroom, even when he had a brief affair with the wife of a Conservative MP who acquired a photograph of him naked—passed around the Tory front benches while he was making a speech from the Labour front bench—she forgave him, though often not until there had been blistering rows and scalding tears.

From early on in their marriage Cimmie had determined to do more than simply fill the role of wife and mother. When Tom crossed the floor of the House, she had abandoned her Tory heritage without a qualm, cutting herself off from many of her friends—though neither Mosley thought for a moment of adjusting their lavish and hedonistic way of life to the more puritan
Labour ethic. Instead, they simply carried on with the same social calendar, encouraging like-minded friends to join them; soon, their favorite summer resort, Antibes, was described (in
The
Times
) as “a summer club for the socialist intelligentsia.”

Cimmie's appearance, too, exuded glamour rather than socialist earnestness. When she and Tom accompanied Ramsay MacDonald to Berlin, where he was lecturing to the Committee for International Discussion on October 16, 1928, it was Cimmie who entered the Reichstag first, Cimmie's clothes—gray silk dress, gray velvet cloak, ermine cape and string of pearls—which were lovingly described rather than the MacDonald lecture. She had embraced socialism with the fervor of the convert, yet it was hard to equate her persona with Harold Nicolson's description of her as “profoundly working class at heart.”

But her zeal and dedication were genuine. For Cimmie, politics was not something one picked up and put down, or an occupation chosen to please her husband, and she resented Tom's slight air of patronage. When Irene and two other friends were staying with them at Savehay Farm a fortnight before the general election, these strains erupted shatteringly. “A most tragic and painful row took place between Cim and Tom at dinner over the cars for the Election and he was vilely rude to her,” recorded Irene. “She is so exquisite and faithful in her love and he so ruthless of her. I wish at times he could disappear off the face of the earth as he only brings her endless agony.” Next morning Tom took the Mosleys' Bentley and Irene had to telephone for her own car to come and take her sister to London.