Irrepressible (29 page)

His mother-in-law’s way of life was “an extremely slow one but not uncomfortable,” Bob understated in a letter home. “Muv’s lonely barren life here is relieved, we find, by six servants (a cook, a housemaid, a boat-man and 3 others to take care of the sheep, cattle and goats) the house is large and comfortable (10 bedrooms and 4 modern bathrooms) with substantial outbuildings for servants, live-stock, etc. Also standing on the island are impressive ruins of a fifth century church and graveyard.”

For Decca, the place was full of ghosts:

Leaving the island and Muv (with plans to see her again in London), the company went to Chatsworth, the Devonshires’ estate, which Bob described as “very comfortable, just a little bit bigger than Versailles.” The house would stand in for Pemberley in a remake of the film
Pride and Prejudice
, inspiring one reviewer to describe Chatsworth as “the size of a small planet.”

A greater contrast to the Treuhafts’ family life would be hard to imagine. Debo had noted her distress at her sister’s domestic life when she had visited Oakland in 1950, and now it was Decca’s turn. “I had come back to a different world, and a largely different family,” she would write. Looking
through Debo’s wedding scrapbook Decca found, next to Queen Elizabeth’s formal congratulations, her own telegram offering “HONNISH CONGRATULATIONS ON A SUCCESSFUL SEASON’S DUKE HUNTING” Decca had never been one to wallow in Marxist self-abnegation; she was anything but austere. She could delight in a formal garden, an eighteenth-century tea tray, but because of the battles she had so recently fought, it was sometimes hard to relax in such surroundings. She still adored playing funny word games and singing silly songs, but she often seemed humorless to Debo. Sisters may sympathize: Both Debo and Decca shared the anguish of having lost babies. And sisters may judge: The duchess looked at the people’s representative and found her short haircut unbecoming, her trousers masculine, and her chain smoking deplorable. The gap between them seemed vast.

Through much of her visit, Decca suffered what she called an agony of ambivalence: “Having taken such pains to get away from them . . . I had longed to see them, yet found myself constrained in their company, awkwardly separated by the twin gulfs of time and outlook. They were wonderful hosts and I was not a good guest.” She was ill at ease regarding how her family and friends might treat her husband. Bob, overall smarter and better educated than most of the aristocrats he encountered, didn’t care much what they thought of him except in the way it might affect Decca. Of course, he knew he must have been compared to Esmond (who might not have been particularly popular but who had still been one of them). Decca said, “Actually Bob fared better than I did. For him, my family was a hilarious spectator sport.”

She and Bob visited the Communist Party headquarters and tracked down old friends like Philip Toynbee. In 1954, Toynbee had published a portrait of the young Decca in his affectionate memoir of Esmond Romilly called
Friends Apart
. She admired his book, and at their reunion, they picked up their friendship, easily teasing and sparring as they had in their youth. Decca was “dazzled by the openness and ease with which the Party functioned in the relatively free air of England.” If she felt a smidgen of regret that she had not remained where things were a bit easier, she also
recognized that life in California had pushed her to greater adventure and further courage—the House Committee on Un-American Activities had in effect made Decca American.

Decca had been looking forward to her reunion with Giles Romilly. Both she and Esmond had adored Giles. In his youth, he had been a “brilliant, attractive person,” and their reunion was a shock to her. He was exactly her age, thirty-seven, but looked twice as old. Life had been difficult for Giles. Decca blamed the doctor who treated him after the war for prescribing the barbiturates to which she thought Giles was “hopelessly addicted.”

Nellie Romilly had died leaving Decca and Dinky disinherited. But Giles was sympathetic and wanted to help Decca financially if he could. Meanwhile, the Romillys’ lawyer conceded that Nellie had made some kind of error regarding Decca’s inheritance, the consequences of which remained unclear. To her sister Nancy, Decca explained, “It seems the Romillies wrote their wills out all wrong and as a result they didn’t succeed in cutting me off.” Decca claimed she was “inheritance prone” in the way some people are “accident prone.”

 

MEANWHILE, MUV STILL hoped to reconcile her family, but Decca categorically refused to meet Diana. Toynbee asked if she didn’t out of “sheer curiosity” want to see her sister again? Whatever curiosity she once had felt had long since soured by the colossal disappointment she felt for the older sister she’d adored. And what about Farve? He told Muv he was willing to meet. He might have enjoyed, among other things, the chance to revisit her audacious effort to donate her portion of Inch Kenneth to the Communist Party—a subject that angered him to the day he died. Decca consulted Bob and Dinky, both of whom encouraged her to see her father, but Decca “wasn’t all that keen.” Although she said, “I’d have been quite interested to see him. I offered to see him,” she stipulated that he not take the opportunity to shout at Bob or Dinky. Muv said those were “impossible conditions” and dropped the subject. Over thirty years later, Decca would say, “When
you’ve had this much of a break, and when you’ve had this much bitterness going on, there’s no real point in exacerbating it.”

Lord Redesdale was as mercurial as his daughter was tough-minded. Toward the end of his life, Nancy was playing a parlor game with her father. “Whom would you like best to see coming round the door,” she asked.

“Decca,” he said.

THE TREUHAFTS WANTED to visit Hungary. Just as Decca felt nostalgia for the prewar Lyons tea shops, where she’d loitered when employed as a market researcher, Bob had a hankering for the tastes and sensations of his grandparents’ village. At first, it looked as though he wouldn’t get his wish. American Communists had no clout, and the Treuhafts’ visas were stalled indefinitely until one small deceit set off a chain reaction in their favor. In casual conversation with the Hungarian consulate in Austria, Bob mentioned that their ward, Nebby Lou, who was Paul Robeson’s niece, especially wished to visit Hungary. (This wasn’t strictly true—but Robeson
was
a close friend of the Crawford family.) The great singer’s celebrity in the socialist world was without peer, and the Treuhafts’ ties to his relation resulted in an immediate issuance of the necessary credentials. Decca and Bob felt justified to tell the white lie—certainly all they had done to promote the idea of social justice, and their sacrifices entitled them to see the “living face of Socialism.”

Invited to tour model homes and factories, they found those first days exhilarating. Decca wrote an article for the
People’s Daily World
, “We Visited Socialism,” which reads like a giddy tourist’s chronicle. She reported on their tours of a collective farm and a children’s railway, the ballet and culture houses. Music and dancing abounded. At one point, Dinky was “whirling away to the strains of ‘Song from Moulin Rouge’ in the arms of a Hungarian army colonel. At the end of their tour, their hosts asked them to stay on a few days more until the Walt Whitman centenary, which they
were surprised to discover was a holiday in Hungary. Then a waiter asked them to deliver a letter to his brother in America, and a young teacher who had implored them to meet her English-speaking husband canceled the appointment for fear of repercussions. A few more such encounters gave them clues to an undercurrent of unease, dissatisfaction, and fear, but the Treuhafts were—as tourists often are—obtuse and apparently unaware of the depth of discontent that would erupt into counterrevolution in less than a year.

While Decca, Bob, and the two girls were driving from Hungary to Paris, Nancy was suffering great misgivings about their visit. She had a settled routine of disciplined writing and, in the French capital, moved within a circle of intellectuals, politicians, and socialites. She feared the disruption of her writing routine and resented the emotional eruption her sister’s visit might evoke. “How I dread their arrival,” Nancy wrote to Diana.

After two days on the road, Decca and company appeared at Nancy’s Parisian home on the Rue Monsieur. Marie, Nancy’s housekeeper, had to uncomfortably report that Nancy had taken refuge in England with the duchess. Drama reigned. Decca phoned from Nancy’s home phone, and just as she heard her sister’s voice for the first time in sixteen years, Nancy hung up on her. She may just have been anxious about seeing her younger sister again and expressed this in diva fashion. Her letters from the period also demonstrate an unsupported fear that the Treuhafts, once entrenched in Paris, would never leave again. Most likely, Nancy was angry that Decca had appropriated her telephone to make what was then an expensive call between England and France. A half hour later, Nancy phoned back “on Debo’s nickel,” (as Bob observed), and the sisters settled in for an amiable chat.

While Bob and Nebby Lou returned to the United States, Decca and Dinky checked into an inexpensive hotel in Paris and waited for Nancy to join them. Her elder sister had sent Decca fifty British pounds for the books she said she’d taken from Decca and Esmond’s flat in London after they had left for America. Decca remembered those “tattered old left-wing volumes not worth 5 shillings,” and she was grateful for her sister’s generosity.
Nancy was apprehensive up until their actual reunion, after which she was relieved that Decca was not a barbarian or puritan, and Dinky was pretty and well behaved. For her part, Decca was glad to report that her elder sister was still “marvelously good company” and “still funny . . . & is not a fascist or an idiot.”

In the end, Decca’s reunion with Nancy was a good one, full of escapist occupations and sensory delights. Dinky would watch and listen to her aunt and mother together and wonder at their voices. Nancy’s accent was “a combo of plummy tones and very down-to-earth vocabulary.” Decca’s accent had mellowed over her years in America, but in conversation with Nancy, she spoke and shrieked as before. Decca was pleased to have this last stretch of time before her return to the United States, where she knew the FBI would immediately confiscate her passport as they had Bob’s. The sisters laughed about the absurd contrasts in their lives. To the unemployed Decca, Nancy’s routine as a working writer held enormous appeal.

A
s A TEENAGER, Decca had wanted to run away to a London bedsit, and at thirty-eight, she came to feel as she had long ago at Swinbrook, bored and stymied. In 1956, she dreamed of going to Alabama to join the Montgomery bus boycott. In that case, she needed a new running-away account. She wanted a new job. The turn her life had taken away from idleness and privilege would come to mean nothing if she wasn’t occupied. When she, Katharine Graham, and Binnie Straight had stayed up all night in Washington talking about how girls with position and wealth had extra responsibilities to make things happen, she’d had no idea how satisfying it would be to work hard. She could keep busy with hundreds of campaigns, but any socialite might volunteer. After all those years of studying Marxism, she knew it wasn’t just a philosophical position. Her own character drove her to oppose unemployment. Certainly, nobody would criticize if she took a little time off; nobody would think her a parasite if she let Bob pay the bills for a while. But she felt burdened that he was the only breadwinner. Hanging around the house held little appeal; her talents lay elsewhere.

In late spring 1956, the advertising department of the
San Francisco Chronicle
hired her to sell classified ads. She told Muv about the funny experience she had after just a week’s work, when the shop steward pointed out her name in the union paper as a new hire. He said, “I know it’s such a thrill to see one’s name in print in a newspaper for the first time.” It was a great joke at home that the work she was doing was “highly classified.” She was wildly overqualified for the job—she’d book ads, which would run, and then she’d book others. Just as in the CRC, she spent most of her day on the telephone soliciting money, and her manager was impressed with
her productivity. She was exceeding expectations, and they were glad to welcome such an enthusiastic new employee. To cap it all, she won several prizes for her achievement in telephone sales. There were new colleagues to meet and coffee breaks when the gossip was about
I Love Lucy
. Best of all, and meager though it was, there was that paycheck. Years later, she confided to her young friend Anthea Fursland, “Money, besides being the root of all evil, is the root of all independence, and it’s frightfully important to feel you can earn your own way.”