The Viceroy's Daughters (20 page)

She was in agony. “If only you would be frank with me,” she wrote to Tom after they had returned home. “If you had said you would like to take Diana out for the day Sunday I would have known where I was. Oh darling, darling, don't let it be like that. I will truly understand if you give me a chance, but I am so kept in the dark. That bloody damnable cursed Ebury [his flat in Ebury Street]—how often does she come there? Do you think I just forgot all about her between the Fortnum and Mason party and last night? I schooled myself the whole week never to even mention her in case I should say something I regret.”

Her misery was compounded by a full confession from Tom. In an effort to reassure her that his continual affairs were no more than diversions, he decided one evening to make a clean breast of them. Cimmie was shattered by his revelations. “But they are all my best friends!” she wailed. She was so upset that she stayed at home instead of accompanying him to a dinner party; here Tom met his friend Bob Boothby, whom he asked to go and comfort Cim.

“What have you done to her now, Tom?” said Boothby, who loved Cimmie and had watched Tom's affair with Diana unfold in Venice.

“I have told her all the women I have slept with,” replied Tom.

“
All
, Tom?” asked Boothby incredulously.

“Yes, all,” replied Tom. “Except, of course, for her sister and stepmother”—a reference to his early flings with Grace and Irene.

Ill and miserable, Cimmie went with her two elder children to a spa called Contrexeville in eastern France to try and regain her health and, if possible, her joie de vivre.

While she was away the promised meeting between Tom and Israel Sieff finally took place—an encounter that both found promising. Three weeks later, on October 1, Tom's book
The Greater Britain
was published. The first edition of five thousand sold out immediately. Simultaneously, Tom launched the British Union of Fascists, with a flag-unfurling ceremony in the old New Party offices in Great George Street, Westminster. Cimmie made designs for a fascist flag, and both the Mosleys discussed how to turn John Philip Sousa's “Stars and Stripes Forever” into a fascist anthem, with words by their friend Osbert Sitwell.

The British Union of Fascists held its first public meeting on October 15, in Trafalgar Square, attended by a smallish crowd stand
ing in a fine drizzle. Georgia Sitwell, who had driven back with Sachie after a long beach holiday in Europe, noted rather jealously in her diary for that day: “Daddy and I went to hear Tom harangue crowd in Trafalgar Square. Few people—and of course Diana G. new girl.” Tom made his speech on the plinth at the bottom of Nelson's Col
umn. He was soberly dressed in a dark suit and tie, with a white shirt, but around him were eight men in black shirts, worn with gray flannel trousers.

Though that first meeting was peaceful, few that followed were. There was shouting and heckling at the next one, on October 25, in the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street—and the first hint of a racially divisive policy. “Fascist hostility to Jews was directed against those who financed communists or who were pursuing an anti-British policy,” said Tom, in his first public reference to Jews. Irene was worried, even though Maud, Lady Mosley, who was also there, told her that the reports of trouble were greatly exaggerated.

Three days later, Irene recorded: “Tom swaggers like a schoolboy . . . throwing two lads down the stairs at Farringdon Street. All this swagger and vanity for Mrs. Bryan Guinness and Doris Castlerosse. When he is such a magnificent orator and if he had vision could have carried the entire hall with him without descending to these blackshirt rows he seems to revel in. And none of his friends will tell him what a ridiculous figure he makes of himself.” When Israel Sieff came to see her on October 31 she realized that, in spite of all her efforts at bringing them together, this source of support was now closed. “I wished he could reclaim Tom and get him out of this awful musical comedyism. After his inane jibe to the heckler as coming from Jerusalem, Sieff told me he was now so bitter he will not give him money for his industrial investigations. Oh! how tactless Tom is. It makes me sick.”

At the end of October the Guinnesses gave a ball at their country house, Biddesden, in Wiltshire. No one seeing the faces of Tom and Diana as they greeted each other, or the white, wretched countenance of Diana's husband, Bryan, could have mistaken the relationship; and, as usual, the lovers disappeared during the evening.

Cimmie, now fitter, was making a determined effort to regain her former looks and style. She had spent time planning her new winter wardrobe, which she bought in Paris. The final touch was an impressive blue-fox-fur coat from Bradleys. Whether it would enable her to compete with Diana Guinness was another matter. On November 11, after lunching with Tom at the Ritz, Georgia Sitwell got a closer look at his new beloved. “Went to see Diana Guinness, looking lovely. Sensible, human but youthfully arrogant.”

It was a perceptive judgment. Only a few days later, Diana came to a decision that would throw terror into the hearts of all three Curzon sisters. Her marriage, she had come to believe, was a mistake, and she intended to leave her husband. Only someone supremely confident in her ability to survive in a social world hostile to divorce, and uncaring of family and public opinion, would have abandoned a man so kind, good-looking, loving and rich and by whom she had two children.

The Mosleys, who planned a large family Christmas with Irene, Baba, Fruity and the Metcalfe children, to be followed by a New Year house party, took a house in Yarlington, Somerset, for the holiday. Within two hours of Fruity's arrival at teatime on Christmas Eve, there was a falling-out between him and Baba, who disappeared to bed, refused to come down to dinner and banished her husband to a dressing room for the night.

The arrival of Brendan Bracken, Bob Boothby and the Sitwells restored the temperature, and on Christmas Day Fruity insisted on being Father Christmas. Almost at once, the children found his clothes hanging in the downstairs lavatory and the cry went up: “Father Christmas has left his clothes behind!” Then, from behind his white cotton-wool beard, came Fruity's unmistakable voice as he sought to distribute the presents: “Read the bloody names out, I can see nothing!”

Boxing Day afternoon was notable for its discussions and arguments over the New Year's Eve party planned by Cim: what to do and how to conceal it from the gossip columnists, who had already written it up and asked to come down and photograph the guests. Among them, invited by Cimmie—in a spirit of fatalism, bravado or altruistic love for Tom—was Diana Guinness.

19

“Goodbye My Buffy”

In January 1933 Diana Guinness took a small house in Eaton Square, just around the corner from Tom's bachelor flat. Although Tom had told both Cimmie and Diana that he did not intend to leave his wife, the Curzon sisters found this hard to believe. To them, the knowledge that this young woman had left her husband and virtually set herself up as a mistress within yards of her lover's pied-à-terre was a clear proof that she intended to lure him away from Cimmie. “My heart is in my boots over the hell incarnate beloved Cim is going through over Diana Guinness bitching up her life,” wrote Irene. Diana called it “nailing my colours to the mast.” What was perfectly clear to all of them was that the affair with Diana was different in kind and quality from any of Tom's previous liaisons.

All through that spring, Cimmie suffered bitterly. She knew she was no longer as attractive as she had been and the presence in her husband's life of this young beauty, with her charm, ease of manner and joyous, uncomplicated approach to life, made her feel fearful and defeated. Diana was told by her family and friends that she was ruining her life—her three younger sisters were forbidden to visit her—but she cared not a whit. That Diana was prepared to court social ostracism and set herself up openly as Tom's mistress seemed to Cimmie evidence of the younger woman's implacability, while in Tom's eyes, it could hardly have been a greater compliment.

Cimmie might have worried less had she known that her husband was seeing Baba almost as frequently as he saw Diana. Baba had been fascinated by her brother-in-law ever since, as a schoolgirl of sixteen, she had seen her adored older sister and her glamorous bridegroom as the incarnation of romance. From the start, Tom had treated his sister-in-law with a teasing intimacy, often involving physical horseplay that sometimes went too far (“Baba furious when Tom dropped her in the bath,” wrote Irene on one of these occasions).

Baba's growing interest in matters political and her longing for intelligent company brought her even more under the sway of Tom's powerful personality. Family loyalty apart, she was genuinely fascinated by the political ideas he expounded with such vision and clarity, and with Diana Guinness's arrival on the scene, she was able to justify her increasing pleasure in his company by telling herself that any influence other than Diana's was good for her sister's marriage.

As a result Tom, who saw Diana for lunch or dinner two or three times a week, saw Baba almost as frequently. Sometimes he saw both women as well as his wife on the same day, necessitating exactly the kind of emotional juggling he enjoyed. Often all three of them turned up at the fascist meetings he now held regularly, striding onto plinth or platform with a bodyguard of muscular young stewards “to incite the faithful and intimidate the enemy.”

Fascism, it seemed, was on the march. In Germany the new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had been in power since the end of January, his carefully choreographed public meetings evoking a quasi-religious response from a disheartened and impoverished people. Although many older people had voted for the Nazis, the average age of party members was thirty-two; and much of its message was to youth, a pattern followed by Tom with his call to British youth to throw over the “tired old men” of the government.

Not everyone believed that he was on the right track. “We discussed Mosley's position and I said that his fatal miscalculation was in believing that you could create a youth consciousness in Britain,” wrote Robert Bernays, the Liberal MP for Bristol North, in his diary for March 1. “They said too that he had gambled on a course and had not realised how tremendous were the forces that made for stability. Archie Sinclair said his trouble was lack of patience. He had determined, in 1924, to be Prime Minister in 12 years. If he hadn't been in so much of a hurry about it, he could have been.”

Tom, however, saw his future as the powerful, charismatic leader of a political force that would sweep away the old, exhausted parties. After his second visit to Mussolini in April 1933 he wrote in his magazine
The Blackshirt
: “Fascism is the greatest creed that western civilisation has ever given to the world.”

In the same month Irene also had a significant meeting. She had accepted an invitation from her friends Peter and Mary Hordern to stay at the villa they had taken on Lake Maggiore. The Horderns were already there, but Peter suggested that his brother Bill should drive her out to Italy with Sheila Graham, a young girl whose father, Miles, was already there.

Miles Graham was a good-looking man of exactly Irene's age, divorced from his wife Evelyn, a daughter of the earl of Lovelace. Their children, Sheila and Clyde, were largely brought up by Miles's mother, Ellen, married to Lord Askwith. Miles was of medium height, his military bearing emphasized by an athletic figure. Good-looking, clever—he had been a scholar at Eton—and virile, he was extremely attractive to women and for years had pursued a successful affair with the society beauty Lady Portarlington. Only those who knew him well realized that he possessed a fiendish temper. He was once supposed to have chased Winnie Portarlington around his drawing room with a knife.

He was also extremely ambitious. In that spring of 1933, the most important woman in his life was his mother, with whom he had an exceptionally close bond. This powerful personality, who had successfully brought up her own children through her writing, did her best to further Miles's interests in every way possible. Worldly and sophisticated, Lady Askwith regarded his liaison with Lady Portarlington as a feather in his cap rather than a moral blight. Recently, he had been suffering from a mysterious illness that today might have been diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: its main symptoms were exhaustion of mind and body. When he wrote to her on March 12 from his house in Little Stanhope Street that he hoped to go for a month to the Italian lakes “for sunbathing, which the doctor strongly recommends,” Ellen Askwith was delighted.

He added: “I have been thinking a good deal about politics lately—if only the new businesses succeed and they get used to my absence it might be a good opportunity to find an opening. I am 37 and it's nearly time to begin.” Both of them were to bear this in mind in the months to come.

Irene set off on April 12 with Bill Hordern and Sheila, who had met neither of them before, a prospect her father seemed to think would be appealing rather than terrifying. “It must be an exciting idea for her to motor across Europe with two unknown people,” he wrote to his mother. “I know Bill Hordern will be nice to her. Lady Ravensdale I hardly know but they say she likes children. All my best love Mummy darling. I miss you very much sometimes. Your darling Manikin.” In the event, Sheila disliked Irene so much that she put a metal model of Frankfurt Cathedral on Irene's seat in the car, hoping that the spire would wound her in the bottom. Graciously, Irene overlooked it.

Miles soon realized that this hardly known fellow guest could be one of the most helpful stepping-stones to his planned Westminster career. Irene's dark good looks were in full flower, her energetic tennis playing appealed to his sporting side and her genuine kindness promised warmth in a stepmother. Above all, her wealth, her title and the resonance of the Curzon name would add immense luster to the pretensions of any would-be Conservative MP.

On April 22 he proposed to her. As her diary records ecstatically: “Miles strolled in on me at 8:30 and we had our bubbly in Mary's room. Lying on our beds afterward he whispered into my ear would I give him children and marry him, and of all amazing things in utter calm I said I might. I did not believe myself. He told me with amazing delicacy and loyalty of his plight with Winnie and we beat round how to deal with her.

“After tea I went shopping with Mary and Miles in the car, and I dropped in on Patrick and Loelia [Westminster] before dinner. I could not make out my complete peace after all my years of worry and pain.” Mary, all unknowingly, had said to her in the morning: “I wish I could see you and Miles married.” What Irene did not know, and what Miles naturally did not tell her, was that he half suspected his hostess was in love with him herself.

After a walk to see a pretty little church we talked of Winnie and the great quandary he was in on the way home. I entirely bouleversed Mary with our news. She was wondrous sweet to me in begging me to get married out here quick or else Winnie would come charging out. I shall never forget the beauty of Miles's speech to me in the dining room. He was crying and holding on to my breast and some time he told me I could still take it as a joke and call it all off.

For Irene, tied up for so long in a hopeless love affair, conscious of the passing of time and the dwindling hope of the children she so much longed for, engagement to the personable, sought-after Miles represented sanctuary as well as happiness. Now she would be part of the magic circle, no longer subject to the faint patronizing of her younger sisters, no longer regarded as a worry, a burden or a useful stand-in.

At first all was rapture. Two days after they were engaged they became lovers. “My wedding Day,” wrote Irene at the top of that day's page in her diary, describing how she and Miles had “climbed the mountain to our little chapel and married each other before the altar”—a detail faithfully reported by Miles to his mother.

Miles, anxious to secure his prize and aware, as Irene was not, of the undercurrents in the villa, urged her to let him get a special license in Turin and to marry him there. But when she realized the situation, she felt it her duty to stay with the distraught Mary. “At breakfast Mary was in a bad state of nerves and jabbered at Peter and when she went out Peter, Miles and I knew it was because she was in love with Miles, and her behavior in handing him over to me had been a fearful strain.”

But nothing dimmed Irene's happiness, though she could not help noticing her sisters' differing, and characteristic, reactions to the news of her engagement—the one all warmth and excitement, the other coolly analytical.

Beloved Cim rang up from Denham, hysterical with joy and said Nanny and Andrée [Cimmie's former lady's maid and now housekeeper at Denham] had cried for half an hour. She gave a heavenly joy in her talk and took it as a lovely fairy story.

Baba from Paris a few moments later was much more froide and comme il faut and said what was his business and his appearance and who or what was he. Not much of Cim's lovely warm thrill. Peter and Mary had dined upstairs which gave Miles and me a chance of peace alone downstairs.

 

Mary behaved like a jealous child unwilling to give up its toy. A mere week after the engagement, Irene found her hostess hysterical, wild and screaming, refusing to allow her husband into the room. Irene managed to calm her eventually and tried to console the wretched Peter.

Then we talked the matter over [she wrote that night]. We all knew the basis of it. She is madly in love with Miles. I felt she had staged the whole scene.

My happiness was shattered when Miles took me to my room by him walking up and down in a frenzy and saying I had better call it off. Obviously I was only obsessed by him temporarily and I was doubtful of him. Mary had told him I was uncertain how good a mind he had got. Oh! the cruelty of it. Spent a nightmarish night, feeling desolate and wanting to chuck it all. I nearly went mad.

 

Next day everything was sunshine again, with Miles back on form, chat, giggling, games of backgammon, gaiety and fun and telegrams of congratulation from the two eldest Mosley children and Tom, “who hoped for a lot of little barons.” There was even a “marvellous” letter from his mother that brought tears to her eyes.

Mary was not done yet. She did everything she could to sabotage Irene's happiness, from telling her that Miles was making up to another female guest to running him down in every way. When Mary's husband, Peter, agreed with this judgment, calling Miles slick, a libertine and no companion for Irene at all, she was plunged in gloom but managed to dress for dinner in a devastating black dress and diamonds.

After dinner Miles, unable to guess what was wrong with her, came in to see her. “I lay holding his hand in dumb crying agony. I asked him to lie in the other bed and hold my hand all night. When he went back to undress Mary charged in on him and slated him and called him a cad and a brute and if he would not be nice to her she would ruin him and me and never stop working against us.”

Mary continued to do her best to prise Miles away from Irene, bombarding him with letters and saying that Irene had told her he was “no good sexually to her”—a canard she quickly disposed of. Irene would have been even happier had she seen the entry in Lady Askwith's diary: “A perfectly delightful letter—the letter of my dreams—from Irene.”

She and Miles decided that the only thing to do was to go away together. “From then on the world—my world—seemed to expand in peace and beauty . . . it was delicious dressing myself to look my best and going down to dinner with Miles. We got the band to play which got us all ‘woosy.' ” The only sore spot was a telegram from Lady Portarlington claiming that she had only heard of their engagement at a dinner party, to which Miles wired back tartly that he had written to her before anyone else and the letter must have gone astray. “Yet another letter gone astray,” she responded equally crisply.

Irene, who thought that Win Portarlington was probably lying, tried to smooth matters over by persuading Miles to let her write a letter saying that every effort had been made to tell her before anyone, after what she had meant to him for years, and together they took the letter to the post. On the way back, hearing music, they dropped in at a bar where people were dancing. “They played Tauber again for us and the man crooned and oh! it was heaven, and the moon and the nightingales from our balcony before we went to bed were the Garden of Eden. The nightingales chortled all night.” It was to be their last uncomplicatedly happy evening.