The Horror of Love (31 page)

Nancy Mitford was much better equipped to deal with infidelity than many women today. Within her social class, adultery was regarded as entirely routine and had been for ever. So long as there was no scandal, both sexes were more or less free to do as they chose once a couple of legitimate children had been produced (hence the shibboleth of never remarking on paternal resemblance in an upper-class child). The burglary scene in
Love in a Cold Climate
is staged to little other narrative purpose than to demonstrate Nancy’s familiarity with the mores of house-party corridor-creeping. The husbands all assume the burglar sneaking through their rooms is Fabrice de Sauveterre and mutter, ‘Better try next door old chap, ’ before going back to sleep, while the wives ‘breathlessly murmur what words of encouragement’ they know in French. Nancy might also have observed the examples of two women to whom she was extremely close, Dianas Cooper and Mosley, whose husbands were the ‘Olympic class adulterers of the pre-war period’.
⁵

Duff and Diana Cooper’s marriage was superlatively happy, as was that of Oswald and Diana Mosley, yet neither man made any secret of the fact that monogamy wasn’t really up their boulevard. Diana Cooper positively encouraged many of Duff’s liasions. One evening at Emerald Cunard’s, Duff was clearly making a play for his dinner companion, so the hostess hinted that Diana might like to take him home. ‘Why, he’s not bored yet, is he?’ asked Diana.

‘Don’t you mind?’

‘I only mind when Duff has a cold.’

On another occasion, where Ann Charteris, the wife of
Viscount Rothermere and later Ian Fleming, was staying in the guest cottage of the Coopers’ house at Bognor, Duff insisted on walking her down the garden path after dinner. Anticipating a lunge, Ann suggested that another guest might care to come along. ‘Oh, don’t spoil it!’ whispered Diana. Her attitude, she explained to her son, Lord Norwich, was that other women might be the flowers, but she would always be the tree. She was not always entirely equanimous, however. When Daisy Fellowes turned up in Paris after the war and resumed her affair with Duff she was jealous, but not nearly so much so as Louise de Vilmorin, who made tremendous scenes. Diana comforted her husband’s mistress so thoroughly that the Duchess of Windsor remarked she would never have an affair with Duff because it would mean having Diana hanging around the whole time being nice to her.

Diana Mosley also claimed that she always knew her husband would return to her, yet conceded that sexual jealousy was the worst possible kind, and that she had on occasion suffered a good deal. When they met, Mosley already had a reputation as a great philanderer. He had confessed his past relationships to his wife Cynthia Curzon when they became engaged (‘well, all except her sister and her stepmother’) but continued to cut a swathe through the most beautiful women of the London Season, an occupation process he referred to as ‘flushing the coverts’. In twelve years of marriage to Cimmie, he had at least thirty-six affairs, an average of three lovers a year, following an efficient strategy of lunch at a smart restaurant like Boulestin’s or the Ritz, then a hop back to his bachelor pad in Ebury Street. Harold Nicolson claimed that Mosley and his first wife were extremely fond of one another, despite their quarrels over his infidelities, but when he met Diana Guinness Cynthia knew that for the first time she had a serious rival. Diana’s biographer suggests that she ‘rationalized’ her own affair with Mosley in the belief that if he had only one mistress then his wife would suffer less. Certainly Cimmie behaved outwardly with perfect restraint. It was quite common for adulterous couples to socialize together, as the
Rodds had done with the Sewells, and Cimmie permitted ‘the Guinness’ to be invited as a guest to Savehay, the Mosleys’ family home in Buckinghamshire. Georgia Sitwell, another Mosley mistress (‘of course I went to bed with Tom. We all did and then felt bad about it afterwards’) recorded the ‘irritating’ behaviour of Diana and Mosley one such weekend. The Sitwells went to Antibes with the Mosleys, the Guinnesses met them in Venice and if Diana expected Mosley to change his ways when she had given up everything for him and his wife was gone, she was wrong.

Diana had left a husband who had only ever treated her with love and generosity and made herself a virtual pariah in doing so, yet Mosley began his affair with his second sister-in-law, Baba Metcalfe, practically as soon as Cimmie was buried. Diana was extraordinarily calm. Holidays were split between them. At Toulon in 1933 Diana stayed for the first two weeks, Baba the second, while the next year, when Mosley took the Rodds’ villa at Posillipo, Diana arrived to be shown to the bedroom Baba had just vacated. ‘It’s not Auntie Baba in there, it’s Mrs Guinness, ’ the housekeeper was obliged to explain to Mosleys son. At the time of Nancy’s marriage, Diana went so far as to abort Mosley’s child (a process which, aside from the emotional stress it caused, was at the time illegal and brutally unpleasant) to avoid a scandal, yet even after her own marriage to him in 1936, Mosley continued to see Baba and to claim to his sisters-in-law that he only saw Diana occasionally. ‘All through the Thirties it was as if I had two wives, ’ he admitted. He took his business partners in the failed radio station project to Parisian brothels, and long after he married Diana and they had moved to Orsay he continued having affairs with younger women, sending them flowers and extravagant presents.

Diana’s tolerance of Mosley’s frankly appalling behaviour has often been presented as a model of dignity and restraint, but then what else was she to do? She had sacrificed her life twice over for Mosley, missed out on her sons’ infancy, endured prison and virulent enmity. It was not her style to make scenes. ‘If she
disagreed with him she would simply close her enormous blue eyes and both she and Mosley would laugh. When she opened her eyes again the conversation would have changed and whatever was disagreeable would have disappeared.’
⁶

Nancy’s continuing love for a faithless man has, over and over, been seen as pathetic, deluded, humiliating; Diana’s, by contrast, noble and intelligent. Paul Johnson suggests that Gaston (‘a shit – a stereotypical Frenchman with a dash of Polish shit’) exploited Nancy, Lord Weidenfeld that she was ‘unsuccessful as a woman’, Lord Norwich that she was ‘making a fool of herself’. Yet in a world where monogamy was not seen as a prerequisite for happiness, why should Nancy be singled out as the patsy? ‘We all pitied her, ’ adds Lord Norwich. ‘Barking up a perfectly hopeless tree.’ Had Gaston married Nancy, then no one would have pitied her at all.

Nancy decided, as her friend and her sister had done, that to elevate fidelity at the expense of everything else in her relationship was simply childish. Unlike many modern women who insist on sexual continence as ‘non-negotiable’ and make themselves extremely miserable in the process, Nancy, like others of her time and class, rejected this. She did suffer, she did feel jealous and vengeful, but she was prepared, as she had not been in 1941, to negotiate the inevitable ‘falling off of physical love’ in terms of a wider and ultimately more fulfilling idea of what love could be.
The Blessing
which, she wrote to Gaston, ‘of course, all husbands love’, is her articulation of this process, whereby the profoundly English Grace undergoes an unsentimental education in
l’amour à la Française
.

Early in the novel, Grace is warned by Mme de Valhubert that a woman who puts her husband first seldom loses him.

‘Well, I daresay, ’ said Grace with some indignation, ‘that a woman who lets her husband do exactly as he likes, who shuts her eyes to every infidelity and lets him walk over her, in fact, would never lose him.’

‘Just so, ’ said Mme de Valhubert placidly.

And this is what Grace learns to do. She comes to believe that her husband’s relationships with other women have no meaningful impact on her own, that they are merely a distraction which fills his time away from her, ‘like hunting or racing, a pursuit that takes him from you of an afternoon sometimes and does you no harm’. In the days of celebrity love cheats, when disappointed wives are rallied by the press to leave their ratty husbands, this is tantamount to blasphemy, but Nancy’s refusal to put sexual fidelity at the centre of her life with Gaston worked very well. ‘In those pre-Freudian days the act of love was not yet regarded with an almost mystical awe, ’ she wrote in her biography of Mme de Pompadour. She was quite reconciled to the modern notion of friends with benefits.

And her reward, she perhaps thought, would be that one day her errant man would love her best as Charles-Edouard does Grace. It’s there already, in
The Pursuit of Love
, in the eccentric episode of the Alconleigh mineral collection, Uncle Matthew’s prize, which Uncle Davey cheerfully pronounces to be stone dead. The passage is often read as an example of Uncle Matthew’s unpredictability, his odd liking for those who ought to offend him, but it makes much more sense when read in the context of Gaston’s favourite English poet, Lovelace. The italics are this author’s.

Why should you swear I am forsworn

Since thine I vowed to be?

Lady, ’tis already morn,

And ’twas last night I swore to thee

That fond impossibility …

Not but all joy in thy brown hair

By others may be found

But I must search the black and fair

Like skilful mineralists that sound

For treasure in unplowed-up ground
.

Les Femmes du Monde

Then, if when I have loved my round,

Thou prov’st the pleasant she,

With spoils of meaner beauties crowned

I laden will return to thee
,

Ev’n sated with variety
.

At Louisa’s ball, Linda Radlett, whose pursuit of love will eventually end in the arms of Fabrice, ‘did get as far as taking one of her partners to see the diseased stones’. The mention of the minerals hardly makes sense in the novel as anything other than a private and poignant joke for the colonel. Considered in this fresh way, it is revelatory. Before she even left for Paris, Nancy was letting him know she would be prepared to wait.

19

GOVERNMENT

U
ntil 1951, Gaston was frequently on the move. As national radio was hostile to the idea of De Gaulle broadcasting, and those organs that did support him –
L’Etincelle, Le Rassemblement
and the
Liberté d’Esprit
– had only limited circulation, the general undertook a long series of tours in the regions to promote the RPF. The party gained 35 per cent of the vote in the municipal elections of October 1947 and within a year membership had risen to half a million, second to that of the Communists. As they traversed the ‘hexagon’ from Marseilles to Nancy, Rennes to Grenoble, Gaston, so often dismissed as a ‘
salonnard’
, proved himself a powerful orator.

Meetings were often disorderly, interrupted by Communists who accused the RPF of Fascism, but Gaston reiterated: ‘You will not prevent us from speaking … we will come back, and earlier than you think. And you will be obliged to listen to us.’ (Though stirring, Gaston found this speech rather a bore as he was sometimes obliged to give it three times a month.) His anger at what he believed to be the blindness of Communism was evident in his addresses, and he was prepared to take considerable risks to express his views. During a tour of the Midi Pyrenees in 1949, the Communists adopted the tactic of filling the halls where he was due to speak with gangs of heavies. A colleague, talking of the intimidation of RPF speakers in both Paris and the provinces, called Gaston the bravest of them all. While the Communists believed they were working for freedom and revolution, Gaston insisted, they were merely the drones of an
imperialist military machine which was exploiting them. To their rage, he was actually speaking from experience, his visit to the Kremlin with De Gaulle having provided him with a first-hand perspective on Stalinism. In Perpignan, agitators threatened to throw him into a canal, at Albi they stormed the platform, knocking him over and kicking him, while at a small village in Ariège the attacks were so fierce that he ended up in hospital.

Despite a professed hatred of electioneering and party politics, Gaston was beginning to think about formalizing his political role, not least as his financial position was extremely precarious. The appointment of Georges Pompidou to his former position of
chef de cabinet
, on his own recommendation, released him, not without some relief, from his direct obligations to the general. ‘Like me, ’ he wrote to the future president of the Republic, ‘you know to what point it is necessary to be near him, how much he deserves, and, more than anything else, how much he needs disinterested advice.’ It was ‘an immense comfort’, he added rather patronizingly, to know that he would have Pompidou in the rearguard of the RPF advance.

In the 1951 elections, Gaston won a seat as RPF member for the Seine and returned to the Palais Bourbon for the first time since 1940, taking his place on the first rank of benches of the Right. Officially, the RPF was still in Coventry so far as other parties were concerned, but despite the general’s proscriptions against any steps towards compromise, Gaston began discreetly to establish links with them. He was particularly interested in education reform, and took up one of the many cultural posts which were to distinguish his later career, the presidency of the committee for the preservation of the cathedral of Saint Denis.