The Viceroy's Daughters (25 page)

The signs had been there for some time. Lady Loughborough, a great friend of the Prince of Wales since the time fifteen years earlier when his brother the duke of York had been in love with her, had been chairman of the Derby Ball, held annually on the eve of the Derby in aid of the Royal Northern Hospital. On the first occasion the Prince of Wales promised to come and bring a party. He did this for ten years, until 1935, when a friend warned Sheila Loughborough that if she wanted the prince at her ball that year, she had better write and ask Mrs. Simpson to take tickets.

“Why should I write to Mrs. Simpson, whom I have never met?” she asked. Instead, she telephoned the prince on June 3, the day before the ball, and told him there was a rumor he might not come. He assured her it was unfounded. But at the dinner beforehand, the duke of Kent, sitting next to her, handed her a note under the table. It was from the prince, contained a cheque for one hundred pounds, and simply said: “Cannot be at the ball tonight as am going to the country.” He was with Mrs. Simpson at Fort Belvedere.

A week later, the MP Victor Cazalet, brother of Irene's great friend Thelma Cazalet, was noting in his diary: “Long talk with Prince of Wales. Mrs. Simpson has complete control. He never leaves her. King and Queen very worried.”

In August the prince wrote to his cousin, Louis Mountbatten, regretting that he had to abandon the idea of a cruise on a destroyer that they had planned for the summer. The reason was not far to seek: he could not conceive of a holiday without Wallis Simpson, and as this was a private trip in an all-male environment she would be unable to accompany them.

 

Denham and the company of the Mosley children were an uncomplicated relief to Irene after the emotional maelstrom of her sister's household. The welcome she received from her beloved Micky was a joy. “When that blessed Babe hugged me and said he wanted to say his prayers to me it was pure happiness and made up for all meanness and pain during the week.”

Baba, who came down with Tom but without her husband, was in a better mood. Both made a point of being nice to Irene, so that when Tom asked her to approach her friend Lady Rennell to find out if she would rent her villa at Posilippo on the Italian Riviera for the month of August, she agreed. Once again, Baba intended to go on holiday with Tom but without her husband, ostensibly to help Tom with the children. The rows, the tears, the discussions, the pleas of the wretched Fruity, the advice of her sister, the disapproval of those in their circle, weighed nothing against Baba's passion for her glamorous brother-in-law. Nor did the fact that when she herself left after a fortnight, she would be replaced for the rest of the month by Diana Guinness.

Somehow she had managed to make herself believe Tom when he explained that his relationship with Diana was now platonic and that he could not abandon a young woman who had invested so much in him emotionally. She was also aware that he always did exactly what he wanted where women were concerned. When Irene dined with Baba and Fruity on their terrace, bringing with her all the information about the Posilippo villa, Fruity's misery was tangible but it touched Baba not a whit. “I got all the Naples stuff out. Poor Fruity on seeing it seemed downcast and tragic,” wrote Irene. Quietly she told him she thought it would only make matters worse if he went too.

The opening of the Kennington day nursery on July 1, 1935, provided a welcome respite from the emotional storms of the past few weeks. Irene had been indefatigable, organizing everything, writing personal notes to thank helpers, sending out the invitations and arranging the flowers on the day—huge vases of blue delphiniums, rambling roses in pots in the entrance passage. She bought the matron a jeweled lapel pin, sent with a special letter of thanks, and could well congratulate herself that everything looked “too perfect for my Love.” Just before lunch she collected Vivien from Ma Mosley's flat while Andrée met Nick, up from Eton, at Waterloo. At the nursery, she showed around a reporter from the
Daily Mail
and a man from the new Gaumont British News.

The forty-strong audience at the opening ceremony included not only Lambeth Council workers and subscribers but luminaries like Winston Churchill, Brendan Bracken and the Noel Bakers. At three o'clock the archbishop of Canterbury arrived, to be photographed in the big playroom, introduced briefly by Irene and then to make a speech about Cim and her great qualities so touching that Irene could not see for tears and Churchill also wept. A meandering oration about Lambeth by the mayor brought the audience down to earth and a vote of thanks to him was ably seconded by Baba in an elegant little speech. Tom, white and sad, was silent.

A few days later, the premiere of the first three-dimensional Technicolor film,
Becky Sharp
, at the New Gallery cinema, was held in aid of the Kennington day nursery. The major shareholder in this new process was an old friend of Baba's, the American Jock Whitney, who had begun to visit the newly important British market regularly.

The emotions engendered by the opening of the day nursery were soon dissipated and the relationships between Tom and Baba, Tom and Diana, and Baba and Fruity once more a constant theme. Even at the Eton and Harrow match on July 13, Tom's mother seized the opportunity to discuss her son with Irene.

“I got very weary of the tirade on Tom's misdemeanors, she has gone dippy, poor dear, on the subject,” wrote Irene, forgetting that she herself was just as vehement in refusing to accept Diana Guinness's presence in his life. “I sent my car for Viv and Nick as that fright Mrs. Guinness was at Denham with Tom, to fetch them to Baba's.”

Unsurprisingly, with Tom entertaining Diana, Baba's other admirer, Count Grandi, arrived; naïvely, Irene thought of this as a “lovely surprise.” After dining out, she and Grandi drove back to her London house together, where he further won her affection and approval by having a long, sympathetic conversation about her woes.

On July 28 Tom, Baba and the two elder Mosley children set off for their Posilippo holiday. As the mail plane to Rome took off from Croydon airfield at 6
a.m
. in a dense mist Irene and Nanny returned to London, to prepare for their less exotic holiday with Micky and the twins in Cornwall.

While at Holywell Bay, Irene heard Baba's version of a near miss between Tom's two mistresses. Diana Guinness had suffered a devastating car crash in which her face was cut so badly that her looks were only saved by the brilliant plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, whose skill was such that she was left without a mark. While she was lying in the London Clinic, Tom wrote to her lovingly, urging her to “hurry up and get better” so that she could come out and join them as planned for the last part of the holiday. Unable to bear the idea of lying in bed for another few days, Diana sent a telegram to Tom, persuaded her father to smuggle her out and caught the plane to Rome. She arrived before her telegram—and therefore quite unexpectedly—while a dinner party was in full swing at Posilippo.

“James came and whispered Mrs. Guinness has arrived. Tom had wired her not to come till Thursday and she said she had not got it. Lie!!” wrote Baba on August 9. Tom, adept at explanations, had slipped out of the dining room to see Diana, who had gone straight to bed, exhausted after her escape from the nursing home and the long journey. “I didn't realize you were coming,” he said to her, but without rancor. “I'm so sorry,” she replied, “but I did send a wire.” Five minutes later it arrived.

After their dinner guests had gone, Tom managed to assuage Baba's jealous fury by assuring her that he had not known Diana was coming and was furious with her for doing so. He told Baba that he had ordered Diana to stay in her room and not appear while she, Baba, was there and that he, Tom, did not wish to speak to her. Diana, he pointed out, as Baba simmered down, was simply there to convalesce. His masterstroke, which convinced Baba that he really did not care whether Diana was there or not, was to whisk Baba off for a romantic three-day “honeymoon” on his motor yacht
Vivien
to Sorrento and Amalfi, where they stayed each night in the best hotel, leaving the children and Andrée on board the boat.

Placated, Baba left for Tunis in a happier frame of mind, after which she set off on a trip that took her through the Kiel Canal on to Leningrad, Moscow, Teheran, India, Petra, Amman, Tripoli, Venice, Milan and Paris before finally returning to London at the beginning of December.

Awaiting her return was a letter from Dino Grandi. Britain had withdrawn the sanctions imposed on Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia. The
Daily Express
published a picture of Grandi leaving the House of Commons and captioned it “The Winner.” When the paper reached Rome, Mussolini, who regarded only himself as meriting this title, became so explosively angry that Grandi was recalled at once. Grandi, who had realized for some time the threat posed to his relationship with Baba by the return of her old flame Jock Whitney, seized the opportunity offered by his recall to try and sever their physical liaison. He left a note explaining his abrupt departure:

I thought the best thing was to let you think the worst of me and I do not pretend or ask this letter will change anything. The only thing I cannot help doing is just to tell you goodbye—we leave today at 2 pm. I will not be so far from you—we go to Sicily at Agrigento for a fortnight of crocodile life in the most splendid solitude, just in front of Tunis—namely, of you.

This will suggest lots of thoughts to me but I sincerely hope it will not suggest anything to you, darling!

I have
not
come to see you. I do know that you will
not
forgive me. But, believe me,
this is the best.

There are things which one finds so difficult to explain—and you know me enough to realise how difficult for me is to say things which is so sad to talk about.

Please understand. I am sure that time will come soon, old things will come again, as they were. I feel just the same now
as I have always felt
. But I know that by then your friendship will be gone, perhaps forever. My risk is great but I have no other choice.

 

Tom's affair with Baba, on the other hand, continued as if nothing had happened. Politically, however, he was at a low ebb. Not a single BUF candidate had gained a parliamentary seat in the general election of June 1935 that had swept Stanley Baldwin into power and given the Conservatives a massive majority in the new National government. The financial contributions from Mussolini had ceased abruptly. Grandi, as shrewd as he was socially adept, now believed that the BUF would never be a force to reckon with in British politics. He told Mussolini that “with a tenth of what you give Mosley, I feel I could produce a result ten times better.”

With help from Italy at an end, Tom turned to Germany. It was a path smoothed for him by his other mistress, Diana Guinness, who, though only twenty-five, had already met all the Nazi leaders. She had first gone to Germany in 1933 almost on a whim. That August, alone and depressed in London, with the recently widowed Tom on his motoring holiday with Baba, Diana had wanted to distract herself. She persuaded her sister Unity to accompany her to Munich; Hitler's press secretary, whom she had met at a party in the spring, had told her he could introduce her to the new chancellor, adding that the music, museums and architecture of Munich would be a joy to them both.

The Mitford family had always had strong cultural links with Germany. Austen Chamberlain, the great friend of Diana's grandfather, the first Lord Redesdale, had written Wagner's biography, to which Lord Redesdale had contributed the foreword. Diana's brother, Tom, a year older than she, with whom she felt a twinlike affinity, had won the music prize at Eton and considered music as a career: for this reason he had visited Germany several times and come back extolling its beauty and the renaissance of its people under the new chancellor.

Hitler, with his dark deeds then in the future, was the man everyone wanted to meet. As Victor Cazalet wrote that autumn, “One must admit Hitler has done a great deal with the Germans and many of his social reforms are excellent.” Although neither of the sisters managed to meet Hitler on that first visit, both were overwhelmed by the drama and excitement of the first party rally (in September 1933), with its blood-red banners, use of floodlighting and ecstatic, roaring crowds focused on the solitary figure of the führer.

Diana began to learn German at once while Unity, obsessed with the desire to meet her hero, persuaded her parents to let her return to Germany and, by dint of placing herself constantly in Hitler's path, was finally introduced to him at the Munich café he frequented for a late lunch. Once the longed-for meeting had been achieved (on February 9, 1925), she wrote joyously to Diana, who returned to Germany and was introduced to him in her turn. Quickly, Diana established an entente with the Nazi leader.

Apart from the fact that she wore makeup (frowned on in the Third Reich), she conformed exactly to the tall, blond, beautiful Aryan looks that Hitler favored. In those early days he had a penchant for aristocrats—he would often entertain the kaiser's relations—and he credited English ones with far more political influence than they actually had. Above all, surrounded by yes-men as he was, he enjoyed the frankness of the two Mitford girls. Though they clearly admired him greatly, they were not at all overawed and their refreshing high spirits made a welcome change from nervous party officials at the end of the day. With Diana, the more stable and intelligent of the two, he would discuss anything from films to the relationship between their two countries.