The Viceroy's Daughters (24 page)

As the season gathered momentum both sisters moved from party to party. Irene's pleasure in such gaiety was rudely shaken when one of her friends told her that all her Jewish friends were turning against her because she was to be hostess at a fascist ball. The event in question was a dance arranged by Lady Mosley to raise money for the BUF, which took place at Prince's Galleries on June 27.

The ball drew an attendance of about seven hundred; Irene, Tom, Baba, Lady Mosley and the writer Francis Yeats-Brown shared a table. Tom spoke briefly in an appeal for funds to build an election machine, telling his listeners: “Within the last twenty months a flame has been lit in this land which time will not extinguish or destroy.” At midnight Irene, elegant and distinguished looking in tiara and a sapphire blue dress that made the most of her dark coloring, presented program prizes.

She had played her part loyally at the ball, but she was finding herself more disenchanted than ever with the behavior of Tom and Baba. Her sister now told her to prepare herself for another English seaside holiday with Nanny and the younger children, as she had organized a rented villa in Toulon for Tom, herself and the older Mosley children.

On and on went the summer balls. At the Astors' (“ultra grand,” wrote Robert Bernays, “with the American Ambassador, the Elliots, Anthony Eden and Lothian”), the party took place against the background of disturbing news from Germany. One of Hitler's closest colleagues, Ernst Roehm, the brutal, homosexual and overambitious head of Hitler's brownshirts, had been “liquidated” on June 30 in what became known as “the Night of the Long Knives.” At least eighty-four others whom Hitler believed were implicated in a counterrevolutionary plot also lost their lives.

A few days later, a ball at the Hurlingham Club was made memorable for Irene when she sat at a table with Miles Graham's former mistress, Winnie Portarlington, who remarked to her: “I am going to Le Touquet to see Miles play in the Bucks Handicap Golf Tournament.” Irene was so disturbed that she left at twelve-thirty. “What vile taste to show me she still owned him,” she scrawled in her diary.

There was no comfort at Savehay Farm. Tom and Baba seemed, she thought, to take her absolutely for granted. “I resent the way I am looked on as a sort of governess, no thanks, no love, and Baba and Tom arm-in-arm all over the place and Ma and I looking like two waiting housemaids. Tom's fighting bull terrier came and slept on my chest. It was lonely too.” But Tom, who realized that without Irene to play a central role at Denham his own life would be immeasurably more difficult, was not going to push her too far. The first time he saw her alone, at the end of July, he set himself to win her over, deploying all his charm and gift for intimacy; Irene, who still found him fascinating, melted completely.

At the beginning of August she and Nanny set off for the seaside with Micky and the twins, where she would also have a chance to think over the Nevile Henderson question in peace. She realized that she would soon have to give him a definite answer one way or the other. She was fond of him, but she was not in love. After a week, she left Nanny and the children and motored to Padstow, where she had arranged to meet Nevile. They swam in a tinglingly cold sea and Irene noted with faint scorn that he shivered for half an hour afterward. His good qualities were legion, she knew; he was a clever man with an interesting life still ahead of him in which she could share and he was endlessly patient—so much so that his acquiescence in her moods and whims irritated her.

She could not put her feelings into words, so she wrote her suitor a letter, begging him to understand that she wanted to leave. “Oh, oh dear! Why do I feel so violently that if he touched me or kissed me I would shudder and yet he is so sweet with all his conceits and tics and would make some less strong-minded woman blissful. I walked to and fro with him beating around the marriage question. When we sat on the lawn before tea he was touching, calling me My Sweet and kissing my fingers and saying how he loved me being with him and it does not move a tremor in me. Oh dear!”

Next morning at breakfast she told him she had meant what she had said in her note; then, leaving a speechless Nevile, she went upstairs to pack. But when she felt his arm around her shivering with tension as if, she thought, he were about to explode, her soft heart got the better of her for the time being.

It was all too much. When Nancy Astor, who always tried to run her friends' lives, wrote telling her to accept Nevile—a protégé of Nancy's and a popular guest at Cliveden—Irene asked Nancy to leave her alone. “The very attempts of people tend to drive me in the opposite direction, as I resent being dictated to like a child when I
must
know my own mind as a woman of 39, though I am fully aware you all do it in love and friendship. Can you see that, dearest Nancy, and understand? Your always loving Irene.” When another friend lectured her at length on Nevile's merits and why she should marry him, Irene recorded that she felt like a cornered, snarling vixen.

At the beginning of September she went to stay with other friends, who had also invited Nevile. They talked on the terrace from six until it was time to change for dinner and for the first time ever Irene felt truly relaxed with him. After dinner another talk, warm and understanding, made her feel that perhaps there was a flicker between them. But when he woke her at eight the following morning for a walk in the sun it had gone. “I was cold, grumpy and unforthcoming and really wanted none of him or any male at that hour.” At breakfast, her host held forth spiritedly against independent selfish spinsters, with frequent nods of the head toward Irene, reducing her and her hostess to hysterical giggles. Although she received an endearing letter from Nevile, written in the train on the return journey, at last her mind was finally made up. She would not marry him.

 

After the Albert Hall meeting, it seemed that Tom's fascists were a viable political force. “Baldwin is convinced that his main job is to keep his party together,” wrote MP Robert Bernays that autumn. “I think he is probably right. A split in the Conservative party is Mosley's hope. Without the aid of the Rothermere press he was able to fill the Albert Hall last month. No other politician could come within measure of that but of course London is peculiarly susceptible to stunt politics. Still, it was a great achievement. It seems to indicate that Hitlerism is not nearly as unpopular as we would like to imagine.”

As for the communists, they were more determined than ever to demonstrate against what they saw as the fascist threat. On September 9, they held an enormous counter-Mosley rally in Hyde Park, in which Tom's former lieutenant, John Strachey, played a prominent role.

By mid-September the Mosley family was back at Denham. While Tom and Nick were occupying a rainy afternoon by shooting rats in the barns, Irene crept to Cim's pink marble sarcophagus, now installed in its memorial garden, and prayed to God and her sister's spirit to guide her in her dealings with Cim's children—and husband. “I was nervously worried at the dim future of all those children and the babe and wished to God they were my own. Tom is such an undependable quantity.” This anxiety was dispelled when Tom—who must have been delighted at Irene's ready assumption of domestic responsibilities—agreed without hesitation to all her plans and suggestions for the future.

But this halcyon period did not last. Tom soon reverted to his former ways with the children, in particular his malicious teasing of his daughter. He was quick-tempered, brutal and sarcastic, suddenly rounding on her—as he had done with Cimmie—in public. Irene was an unwilling spectator and did her best to redress this by teaching Viv bridge and spending as much time with her as she could manage, though after one particularly cruel jibe all she could write in her diary was “Ugh!”

Though Baba was so deeply involved with Tom, she was still anxious to keep her other admirer, Count Dino Grandi, on a string. When she returned from a visit or the country she would wire to Tom, and if he was at Denham he would rush up to meet her; if he could not, she would arrange an assignation with Grandi by note. “Naldera darling,” he wrote from the Italian embassy in September 1934, “I get your letter just now, coming back from Virginia Water. I had in mind to ask you to come, one of the next days. I cannot today. I will try to ring you tomorrow evening and have a quiet hour with you.” On another occasion Irene, calling on her sister for an impromptu cup of tea, found Grandi there. “Gulped tea and bolted,” she wrote. “He stayed till 7:30!!”

Irene was under no illusions about their relationship. Going to lunch with her sister she often found Grandi there and Baba “gay as a cricket.” When Grandi wrote, as he often did, to Irene—who as a rich, good-looking woman and a peeress in her own right was exactly the sort of distinguished social figure he wished to cultivate and persuade of Italy's friendliness—Baba became extremely jealous. She would demand to know what was in such letters and once, when Irene did not open a letter from him that had just arrived but took it upstairs to read, flung furious accusations at her of trying to steal him from her.

Irene, who was finding it more and more difficult to cope with her sister's dominating ways and influence over Tom, was nevertheless unselfishly pleased when she thought she had done them both some good. She knew that for Tom the link with Grandi was important (how important would only emerge after the war) and when she found herself at a party at the Savoy Hotel with Grandi in early October she made a point of eating supper with him and talking until two-thirty. When she got home she woke Baba, to tell her all Grandi had said about her. Grandi had managed, in Irene's words, to convey “his adoration of Baba tempered with huge tenderness and the yearning to control this love and not to mar it all. Very remarkable in a Latin!” She felt, she concluded, that through this talk she had perhaps been able to help all three of them.

22

Baba and Diana: Sharing Mosley

In November 1934 Tom brought a successful libel case against the
Star
and was awarded five thousand pounds in damages. Sir Patrick Hastings summed up for him, cunningly manipulating Norman Birkett's reference to a denunciation by Tom of the Jews into a point in his client's favor. Afterward, Tom and his two sisters-in-law, who had attended the court every day, celebrated his victory with a sumptuous lunch at the Savoy.

Irene's health had been pulled down by her operation and back pain. When she went up to her house near Melton for some hunting with the Quorn her groom, Fox, told her that she was so changed and thin he had hardly recognized her. But nothing prevented her from her usual busy round of charity committees, work for her East End clubs, luncheon parties, plays, concerts and dinners, though these were now fitted in with seeing as much as possible of the Mosley children. Often, they stayed with her in London; she went to their school plays and prize-givings and “the blessed one,” two-year-old Micky, came to her bed in the morning and played.

Now that the initial flush of grief was past, Tom had reverted to seeing less of his children. They had been looking forward to a family Christmas, but on Christmas Eve Tom announced that his friends Paula and Bill Allen were coming to spend Christmas with them. The children were so upset that when the Allens arrived Nick refused to dine downstairs with them, Viv stayed upstairs with him in sympathy, and Nanny was in tears. Irene remained chatting politely until half past eleven, then she and Ma Mosley went upstairs to console Nanny and help with the Christmas stockings and the presents, which were put in a pile for each child under the tree.

Again, Irene melted when Tom came in just before going to bed to look at Micky in his crib. He looked, she thought, sad and lonely as he left the room; this, her adoration of her little nephew and her abiding feelings for Tom combined to dissipate her annoyance. She told Baba about this later on the telephone but Baba, jealous, listened in icy silence.

On Christmas Day Irene breakfasted with the children in the nursery and was thrilled with Viv's delight at her present—Irene had turned Cim's old Persian lamb coat into a cape for Viv. At teatime Tom did his celebrated Father Christmas routine for Micky's benefit.

This followed the same pattern as always. At the sound of bells in the garden Nanny would exhort them: “There's Father Christmas!” They would rush outside and Tom, dressed in his Father Christmas robes, face largely covered by fluffy white beard and whiskers, would quickly climb a stepladder to a ledge in the wide Garden Room chimney. When the children returned, saying they had just missed seeing him climb through the chimney, they would see him descending from the chimney inside with a sackful of presents. When he had finished distributing them, he would reverse the process when they ran outside to watch in vain for him. Rushing in excitedly with their presents, they would find Tom in his study and exclaim: “Oh Daddy, you missed him
again
!”

This was the last spasm of Tom's apparent change of heart over his children. He returned to being an absentee father, who took little or no part in their lives, so much so that to his youngest son he would be simply an amiable stranger. His overriding interest in his political plans was so apparent that the Curzon family solicitor felt convinced that he would subordinate the children's interests to his own and sell Savehay Farm. Irene was particularly worried about Micky, whom she had come to regard as the son she had never had. Her diary entries frequently started with phrases like “The blessed one sat on my bed with his books.” “That angel sat on my bed with his motor cars.”

Halfway through January 1935 she decided to tackle the problem head on. She took the family solicitor down to Denham and showed him over Savehay Farm. He, recognizing at once Irene's sense of responsibility toward her sister's children, said that as she gave so much time to them, and as the head of the Curzon family, she had a right to decide what would be a fitting home for Micky. He also suggested that if the official solicitor thought otherwise, she should consider proposing to the Leiter trustees in America that they should form a trust under which Irene as guardian could distribute the money for the children. With such a trust, he pointed out, Tom could not touch a penny of it.

On January 26, just as Irene arrived for tea with Baba and Fruity, Baba was leaving to go to a film with Tom. Fruity seized the opportunity to unburden himself. “I had two hours of poor Fruity on the disruption of his married life and Tom's influence over Baba,” she noted. “His real love for her was deep and touching and he would give her anything for her happiness except hand her over to Tom.” She returned home to find Tom, this time with Nick, standing at the front door in the snow.

When Nick had gone to bed she tackled Tom about his disruptive influence on the Metcalfe marriage, but after half an hour's unhelpful discussion he made an excuse to leave. On Sunday after church Fruity dropped by for another hour's inconclusive talk. He took her back to lunch with him and Baba at Cowley Street—a sticky lunch with awkward silences—then all three went to a concert at the Albert Hall. Halfway through the concert, Fruity got up and left.

The miserable situation hung over them all. Irene could not face a planned visit to Grandi and canceled it; when she telephoned Baba she was told that Fruity had disappeared. Irene tracked him down to his sister Muriel's; when she told Baba of his misery, Baba in her turn broke down and cried. A few minutes later, as Irene was playing a last game of poker with the children, Baba and Fruity rang in turn, Fruity saying he had to see her that evening.

Irene returned from her dinner party at eleven to find Fruity waiting in her drawing room, and they talked for a further hour. “It is pitiful and paralyzing the fix they are all in,” she wrote that night. “I cried myself to sleep in an agony that
someone
was creating such horror. Oh! that
he
had never been born.”

The triangular drama dragged on, with Irene cast in the role of negotiator. One sleepless night she wrote a letter to Fruity, but under the stress of emotion her writing, always appalling, was indecipherable, so she had to repeat everything she had written over the telephone. Immediately afterward it was Baba's turn (“two hours of tortured talk. My brain will break”).

Next day she felt so exhausted and overwrought that she put off her luncheon engagement on the pretext of a temperature and got her maid to telephone Fruity to say she was going away. There were more letters, telephone calls, meetings with Lady Mosley, talks with Baba and Fruity's sister Muriel.

At the beginning of February, Fruity came to see Irene yet again. He was resigned, dignified and miserable. “How sad I felt when he left, that rare thing smashed, [himself] not wanted and having to face the inevitable. I tried to make him see I knew what he was feeling as I gave seven years of my best time, 26 to 33, to someone who tossed me aside in the end,” she wrote.

Later the same day, Baba telephoned to say that Denham would be let for the months of May, June, July and August (in the event it was not), and that Irene must find a house by the sea for Nanny and Micky. Her tone was aloofly authoritative. As always when she felt guilty and ashamed, she was stricter with her children, sending them coldly about their business and snubbing Irene with a cutting indifference.

To add to the difficulties, Tom's lack of interest in his children had extended to the one member of the household who was indispensable. Nanny Hyslop had been a central figure in the children's lives since their birth, valued by Cimmie for the total love and loyalty she gave the Mosley family. At the very least, Nanny would have expected to hear of any changes that might affect her from her employer himself. Yet Tom had not spoken to her since the previous November—almost three months ago.

Irene was shocked to learn from Nanny that a governess had been hired, and from Nick that Diana Guinness's children were coming to live at Denham. The children had told Nanny that Tom planned to get rid of her in the autumn when Micky started school and she was terrified of being turned into a glorified housemaid and waitress to the Guinness nanny until her departure. It was all that awful Diana, thought Irene.

The quarrels with Baba went on. Baba, infuriated that her sister should involve herself and forgetting her own confidences to the ever-sympathetic Irene, was often so rude that Irene would put down the receiver. There would be more calls from Fruity, telling Irene that she was the only sane person among them and that he was sticking to her advice despite the rows.

As always when things became too much for her, Irene went away, this time returning to Melton for some hunting before setting off on yet another cruise. She had done what she could; now it was up to the three people concerned. Her main feeling was one of anger; she felt that, once again, she had been “put upon,” the more so since Baba had not bothered to thank her for all her help with the children and the arrangements for the Mosley and Metcalfe summer holidays.

Baba in fact had plenty to occupy her. She was seeing Dino Grandi constantly and he was confiding both his political and personal worries to her, from finding the right specialist to remove his tonsils to the worsening situation in Africa (Mussolini had long wanted to expand his colonial empire and his troops were massing along the border between Italian Somaliland and Abyssinia).

Darling, thank you so much for having rung me up—it has been a beastly day today [he wrote on March 18]. I don't know what I can possibly do tomorrow. The whole world is
really
going mad. The most unreasonable things are done everywhere . . .

We shall have a date tomorrow if I do not go to the sea? [to convalesce]. Thank you so much, darling.

You looked so beautiful the day before yesterday! Your eyes and complexion reminded me of Watteau or Fragonard.

G.

 

Back in Italy for Easter, he wrote to her just as assiduously:

I have thought of you so often here. Everything is going well, so far at least. Everybody [i.e., Il Duce] satisfied and happy.

You looked so lovely at the tea party but, so much pale, darling. You spend too much of yourself, I know that. Will my letter find you somewhere in the country? I hope so. When I shall be back I will come for a quiet talk and a cup of tea. So many things to tell you, darling! I would see you happy, that's all. Au revoir, darling.

G.

 

If Baba hoped to make Tom jealous, the friendship with Grandi was a vain ploy. As Tom's mistresses were invariably married, he was used to sharing his women; and his attitude to sex was so frivolous as to preclude jealousy—how could you be jealous of another player in what was no more than a game?

In any case, Baba's friendship with Grandi, Mussolini's representative in Britain, suited his purposes. As recently discovered archives reveal, Mussolini had been subsidizing the BUF for the past two years, with Grandi as the conduit, and Tom was anxious for this to continue. The organization's running costs were high, membership was falling—and, at only one shilling a month, brought in little at the best of times—and rich supporters had been put off by Tom's public declaration of anti-Semitism. Grandi had the ear of Il Duce; Baba, he knew, would always sing his praises to Grandi and the latter's
tendresse
for her might just tip the scales.

Baba preferred not to think about the strange financial link between her lovers, and its implications in terms of political behavior—or even possible treachery. Neither Tom nor Grandi ever spoke about it and it was not a subject she wished to bring up. Years later, she was asked whether she knew what was going on. For some time she remained silent, finally replying, “Of course, I thought I knew what was going on. But if you ask me ‘Had I got evidence?' the answer is ‘No.' ”

That spring there was an indication of the hostility Tom had generated even in traditionally apolitical circles. When Irene wrote to Princess Alice to ask if she would open the children's day nursery founded in Cimmie's memory, her lady-in-waiting, Lady Katharine Meade, telephoned to say that Princess Alice would be delighted to do so—provided Tom were not present. Irene, after an argument with Baba, who said that they must bow to the princess's wishes, sent back a note to Lady Katharine to say she could not accept those terms as Cimmie had loved Tom to her dying day. For good measure she added that politics and propaganda should not enter into such an occasion. The princess agreed to come.

 

The rows between the Metcalfes intensified. One even took place in the august surroundings of a court ball on June 13, 1935, while Irene, in topaz parure and tiara from Cartier, was admiring the gold plate as she and the Metcalfes drank coffee after the royal procession.

This event was remarkable in that it signaled unmistakably to his family and friends the prince's growing obsession with Wallis Simpson. The king had banned Mrs. Simpson's appearance at court, but the prince was determined that she should attend the ball. When he tackled his father directly, the king said he could not invite his son's mistress on such an occasion. The prince swore that she was not his mistress and the king accepted his word. His staff was more skeptical. His former private secretary, Alan (“Tommy”) Lascelles, declared that he would find it as easy to believe in the innocence of their relationship as in “a herd of unicorns grazing in Hyde Park.”