The Viceroy's Daughters (6 page)

For Irene and Cim, it was a different matter. Home was not the cozy refuge it was to so many of their contemporaries. An anguished letter from Irene, written to her father in September 1917 after one of his reproachful talks, explains why.

I know full well we were out a great deal but oh! Daddy! have you thought what my home life at Carlton House Terrace was like this summer? what untold misery you and Gracie have caused me until at moments I have felt I could bear it no longer. It was all so intolerable and we felt again and again you wanted Gracie to yourself and we sought our happiness elsewhere as life seemed one insurmountable obstacle after another at home. So I feel I must in justification explain why we were out so often. I must tell you I am beginning to feel I cannot bear all these burdens and quarrels much longer. At moments I feel desperate, and prepared to do anything. The uncertainties and eternal worries of my home life are too much for me. Daddy,
do, do
remember the incentive—your enjoyment—is not a one-sided case. Things might have been different if there had been warmth and understanding at home. . . .

All these difficult months have done for me, and I must tell you the truth, that I simply cannot face trying it all over again at Carlton House Terrace, as I cannot see how it is going to change. I must lead my own life, and I want a home of my own, where I can live in peace. You must forgive this. I have tried God knows how many times to go on but now I am driven to tell you what I feel is the only solution.

Also, for your own and Gracie's happiness, it would be far better if Cim and I could have a home to ourselves in London with someone near and dear to us. I have thought and thought in my misery about it all and it seems to me the only hope. Daddy, I want you to think it over and see what can be done. I am sure it would be the best and fairest for you as well as for us.

Your loving Irene.

 

In July 1918, Irene escaped by going to France to work for the YMCA. What was to become a lifetime of voluntary work had started the year before, when she first went to talk and sing to the boys of the Broad Street Club, to whom she gave a small billiard table and whom she visited weekly for the next forty years. Now she wrote to “my Baba darling,” on August 29: “I have written to Daddy asking if he will send me £50 so that we can get the men comfy chairs and tables as the YMCA are so slow and tiresome and one longs to get the hut really comfy and nice. I so wonder if he will. He does not give much to charity and would be doing such a good deed but less than that is not much good. Darling, grateful thanks for the gramophone which Sister has brought back safely.”

Cimmie had grown into a tall young woman with dark curly hair, an excellent complexion and a sweet-faced prettiness. If she had not been so attractive she might have been called strapping. Her chief charm was her nature, a genuine, unsophisticated sweetness that combined intelligence and warmth—all her life, wherever she went, she was immensely popular. On Armistice Night, November 11, her happy, uninhibited exuberance took the form of wrapping herself in a Union Jack, climbing onto one of the lions in Trafalgar Square, and leading those near her in a chorus of “Land of Hope and Glory.”

Watching her in the crowd was a young army officer, his mood somber. When she climbed down afterward, he was standing nearby.

“The war is over! Isn't it wonderful?” she exclaimed, her face alight.

“Is it?” he replied. “Do any of you think for one moment of the loss of life, the devastation and misery?”

The young man was Oswald Ernald Mosley, known to everyone as Tom. On that November day, he was just six days short of his twenty-second birthday. He was tall, dark and pale-skinned, with a powerful and athletic physique. With his flashing eyes, fitness and high spirits, there was something of the healthy young animal about him; later, his preferred style of oratory would be equally physical, prowling around the platform as he spoke and gesticulated with broad, sweeping gestures, a stabbing finger or fist thumped on a lectern.

His war in France had been brief: he had arrived there at the end of January 1915, leaving his regiment to serve as a Royal Flying Corps observer for three months before returning to England again that May. He had rejoined the 16th Lancers in November and three months later had been granted special leave to see a specialist with a view to an operation on his right ankle—injured, the army was quick to point out, at home, “not in nor by the Service.”

The injury and operation had resulted in his right leg becoming one and a half inches shorter than the left. Thenceforth, he had stayed in England, first on spells of sick leave granted continuously for a year, then, after a month with the first reserve of Lancers, at the Curragh in Ireland. Here, after a fortnight, a medical board found him unfit to march. At the end of February 1918 he began work at the Ministry of Munitions and five months later moved to the Foreign Office.

Mosley, the eldest of the three sons of a womanizing father whose wife had left him on account of his constant unfaithfulness, was the heir to a Staffordshire baronetcy. He had been educated at Winchester, which he hated, not so much for the academic side—he had an excellent brain—but for its emphasis on “team spirit.” He was above all an individualist: he had excelled at boxing and, in particular, fencing, winning the Public Schools Championship at fifteen.

After school he went to Sandhurst to train as a regular soldier. During the last two years of the war, working in London, he had begun what was to be a staggeringly successful career as a seducer. One of these love affairs was with the older actress Maxine Elliott, through whom he met eminent politicians such as Winston Churchill, Lloyd George and F. E. Smith; encounters which decided him to turn to politics himself. When Cimmie came across him in Trafalgar Square he was about to stand as a Coalition candidate for the safe Conservative seat of the Harrow division of Middlesex in the general election of December 14, 1918.

 

With the war over, Grace plunged into the redecoration of No. 1 Carlton House Terrace. She brought a lavishness to all the rooms she occupied and used that was entirely feminine. Her bedroom at Hackwood had a Chippendale four-poster with a blue silk canopy and curtains embellished with ostrich plumes, gilt mirrors, trinkets and an immense number of silver candlesticks scattered over the mauve damask dressing table and her Chinese lacquer secretary. In her boudoir there were chaises longues covered in blue silk, little side tables with more knickknacks, Sheraton satinwood furniture and Adam bookcases in white and gilt.

Since Curzon had first taken over the lease of the London house, much had been done to it. Telephone lines had been laid in 1907 and the water-powered passenger and goods elevators put back in order; by 1915 there were six water closets as well as one bathroom.

Gracie tackled the house room by room. It was an ideal place for the parties she and Curzon planned to give. The ballroom, which had four long windows giving onto the balcony, was used for all the large official dinners for sixty or more that Curzon gave after his appointment as foreign secretary in January 1919 (following the resignation of Arthur Balfour). Guests sat at a series of smaller tables, identified by the color of the roses in silver bowls at the center, as a hired orchestra played outside. Flowers were sent up from Hackwood; sometimes, if Grace was planning a party soon after her return from the Riviera, she would bring back boxes of mimosa from Cannes. In the warmth of the hall, with its gold damask curtains and furniture, the tight yellow balls would soon uncurl and fill the air with their delicate scent.

For “small” parties—of fewer than twenty-four—they used the ground-floor dining room, hung with black-and-white velvet curtains from Italy. The footmen, inspected by Curzon before being taken on for posture, gait and cleanliness of fingernails, wore knee breeches if there were more than fourteen guests and trousers if there were fewer: Curzon felt that a dinner party of twelve was almost a domestic occasion. When the Prince of Wales once attended a large formal dinner without wearing his Garter ribbon, Curzon (who had worn his) wrote to him afterward pointing out the discourtesy. The prince replied with a charming note of apology.

 

As
they
turned
into
adults
Curzon
grew
more
distant
than
ever
from
his
older
daughters,
to
whom
he
was
little
more
than
a
disapproving
presence.
Past
the
age
when
they
could
be
treated
as
adoring
pets
who
came
in
to
watch
him
shaving,
they
shared
a
secret
world
of
their
own,
with
friends
of
whom
he
knew
little.
“Where
Cim
is
I
have
no
idea,”
ran
one
note.
“I
never
see
her
and
do
not
even
know
if
she
is
in
the
house.”
Baba,
now
at
Heathfield
School
in
Berkshire,
also
seldom
saw
her
father.
The
three
sisters
were
close,
writing
to
each
other
constantly,
Irene
in
particular
fulfilling
a
semi-maternal
role
to
her
youngest
sister.

For their father, there was another crushing disappointment in the spring of 1919 when Gracie suffered a second miscarriage. “What a blow! Poor Girly, poor Husband,” he wrote on April 16. “We must bear our disappointment, as so often before, and console ourselves thinking that it was too soon after these two months to expect anything so good. I wonder why Providence plagues us with all these false alarms and misplaced hopes. Will he ever relent and give us our own child? Never mind, Girly, you are more important than any child or a million children, so we will bow our heads and not cease to hope.”

When one of their friends conceived after five years of marriage he was pathetically excited. (“What a challenge—and what an encouragement.”) He had, however, become extremely fond of Grace's children, with whom he got on far better than with his own. In particular, he adored her small daughter. “Little Marcella is, as usual, the greatest angel.” His own children, he felt, were far less appreciative.

Grace flung herself into the preparations for Cimmie's coming-out season, delayed because of the war. It was a task after Grace's own heart; for her, social life was a constant delight.

London was gradually emerging from the aftermath of war. Wounded soldiers in their blue suits and red ties were disappearing from the squares and gardens, ballrooms that for four years had been turned into hospital wards echoed again to the sound of dance music. The great houses reopened: Londonderry House in Park Lane, with its famous staircase up which four could walk abreast; Brook House, also in Park Lane, with its white marble hall (nicknamed the Giant's Lavatory); Devonshire House, with its garden stretching from Piccadilly to
Berkeley Square; Holland House, in Kensington, with its three-quarter-
mile-long drive winding through trees. Many male faces were missing, but the rules of chaperonage were still intact, and mothers, aunts or sometimes fathers sat on the familiar small gilt chairs ranged around the room, its brilliant lights deterring their offspring from anything even vaguely improper.

Most of the time Curzon kept well away from Grace's frenzied social activity—which, however, was not too all-consuming to prevent one of the fits of hysterical jealousy that had become a feature of their married life. For Grace affected to believe that Curzon still hankered after Elinor Glyn.

“How glad I am that you are having so gay a time but why do you say ‘As you of course know, Mrs. G is in London!' ” wrote Curzon on May 13, 1919. “Really, Girly, you are incorrigible. I have not now and I never have had any communication with Mrs. G since we married. I have kept my word. I have not the slightest idea whether she is in London or in Paris or either do I care. You ought not to say such a thing, for there is not a word of truth in the suggestion. After two and a half years
do begin to believe
, oh Girly, please.”

Curzon's ideas on the sort of man his daughters should marry were so definite that at the ball he gave for Cimmie in July 1919 he suggested a match with one of them to the young Oliver Lyttelton (later Lord Chandos) as he shook hands with him at the top of the stairs. “Ah, Oliver, good evening. It is my dearest wish, as I know it would have been that of your dear father, that you should become affianced to one of my daughters.” When Lyttelton, taken aback, reported this later to Irene and Cimmie, they were much amused.