The Horror of Love (33 page)

Nancy accepted that she could hardly expect to see much of
Gaston during the crisis, but his refusal of a role at the heart of the new government was an incomprehensible blow. Gaston later explained: ‘My mission in Rome had too particular a character for me to abandon it … It seemed that my duty was, for a time at least, to remain in Italy.’ But Nancy knew him too well. She couldn’t reproach him – after the years of effort, endless work and the exhausting grind of a hostile political culture, Gaston deserved all the beauties Rome had to offer, and which he was so perfectly equipped to appreciate, but she had to confront the reality of her place in his life. She had clearly forgotten Elizabeth Bowen’s dictum that as soon as one is sad, one is ordinary. The dynamic of their relationship, that it was she who loved and Gaston
qui se laissait aimer
, had been something she could handle, and often joked about.

‘Oh, Colonel, I love you.’

‘That’s awfully kind of you.’

Yet she now had to accept that Rome was worth a discarded mistress. Gaston had never lied to her. He had promised her nothing and that was what she had got. ‘Why would you want to deprive me of all that I love for one thing?’ he asked her. For years, Nancy had convinced herself that she was the most significant woman in his life, the Pompadour to the pretty ladies in the Pare aux Cerfs, and Gaston had exposed the illusion. She felt foolish and angry.

A letter in June was clear-sighted and reproachful. ‘I’m no longer any use to you. When things go badly, you need me. When they go well you turn to other, prettier women. So, I no longer have a role,
le portefeuille est vide.’
(The metaphor is a glance at Gaston’s new ‘portfolio’, but also a sharp reminder that Nancy may not have always felt as serene as she appeared to about their different financial status – ‘
portefeuille’
also means wallet. It’s a horrid image, Nancy figuring herself as used up, turned inside out and cast aside.)

But there was still love there. Gaston could easily have used his position to keep his distance from Nancy. The guards of the Palazzo Farnese would have proved more effective Cerberuses
than the bewildered aides-de-camp at the Rue St Dominique in 1945. Nancy could have nourished her bitterness into a final quarrel, as Victor Cunard had anticipated. Their relationship could have dwindled into correspondence, with dignity maintained on both sides, but it did not. The next summer she was Gaston’s guest at the palazzo and returned there every year of his mission.

Her first visit took place in August 1958, ‘in dead secret’. Gaston was sensitive about his unusual status as an unmarried ambassador (he had taken Pauline with him from the Rue Bonaparte, a move which made him unpopular with the staff. ‘Pauline is a traitor’ was scrawled on the walls of the palazzo). Her visit was timed to coincide with the flight of the
beau monde
to the coast. As hardly ever, Nancy had her lover to herself, and sightseeing with the Colonel was an altogether delightful matter, quite different from trailing round dusty ruins with Prod. Gaston showed Nancy his favourite walk, to the church of San Agostino to see the Caravaggio Virgin, they visited the galleries and the antique shops. Nancy adored the heat and after a morning in the city happily sunbathed away the afternoons. ‘What the Colonel calls exposing my limbs to the Spanish Embassy, ’ she giggled. Paris seemed gloomy without him. ‘I sigh for the land of cypress and myrtle, I loathe the oak and ash. After 101 degrees in Rome I find it freezing here and pitch dark.’

Why would Gaston have bothered to dedicate time to Nancy had he not genuinely wished to see her when he might have been at Portofino with the Agnellis? Guilt, possibly, but
every
year? And in 1961, propriety was clearly no longer of consequence to the ‘
seul ambassadeur celibataire
’, as Nancy and Deborah visited in March, at the height of the Roman Season. The Duchess of Devonshire remembers it as a ‘real outing’, a week of non-stop parties at which she knew no one. Luckily, most conversation was in English. Italian ice cream was a joy, the smart Italian woman both a pleasure and a challenge. The duchess conjectured that by then there was little physical relationship between Nancy and Gaston, but recalls vividly after a week in their company
their intense pleasure in one another, talking about art, food, dissecting the social life, chatting and laughing endlessly. Nancy’s visits were not a duty to Gaston, they were a joy, and if she had had the strength to lock up the pain and resentment of early 1958 and allow herself to be happy again, does that make her a fool or suggest that finally she had become one of the women she had always written about, those who know how to handle their lovers?

Or, one might add, their husbands. At the end of 1957, Peter finally consented to a divorce. Prod had spite in his character, and while he had never cut up rough about Gaston it does seem rather pointed that he should have agreed to give Nancy her freedom at precisely the moment when her lover appeared to have slipped from her clutches. Since the early Fifties, Prod had been living on a boat at Golfe Juan, not far from Cannes on the French Riviera. ‘He looks exactly like some ancient pirate, ’ Nancy wrote to Evelyn, ‘bone thin, pitch black, white hair and beard and dressed in literal rags.’ Peter claimed that he had found someone he wanted to marry, though the identity of the lucky lady is uncertain and, as with most of his projects, it never came off. Nancy was obliged to appear in court to give evidence that her marriage had broken down, with predictable ‘peer’s daughter’ publicity from the papers. Given the Rodds’ lengthy and well-known estrangement, it was difficult to find a judge who was prepared to hear the case and four in fact refused. ‘Old dancers, I suppose, ’ Nancy remarked. ‘I had no idea I knew four judges!’

Lord Redesdale’s death in 1958 also came just as Nancy was learning to live with Gaston’s absence. Even a decade before, Nancy had described her father, then almost seventy, as ‘looking like ninety’, and James Lees-Milne, encountering him in Heywood Hill during the war, had been unable to recognize the terror of his youth and the handsomest man of his generation in the wizened, patient creature Nancy presented to him. Lord Redesdale’s life had ended with the war, and though she grieved, Nancy acknowledged this. ‘It is sad, ’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh, ‘but the odd, violent attractive man he used to be had already
gone except for an occasional flash. He was so very weak and so very deaf.’ Uncle Matthew was to have a last hurrah in the novel Nancy began writing in August 1959,
Don’t Tell Alfred
. Evelyn told Nancy he thought this her best novel, though it is generally considered the worst.

21

THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS

I
n an
Encounter
essay of 1955, Edward Shilson identifies a crucial shift in the attitudes of British intellectuals towards their own nation in the post-war period. In the 1920s and 1930s, he argues, the ‘whole notion’ of Britain or England was considered ‘repellent’. This was the view of‘nearly everyone [who] was considered worthy of mention’. In contrast, after the war, a new spirit of patriotism was nurtured by anti-Americanism.

From a harmless, amiable, good natured, powerful, ridiculous, loyal ally – a sort of loutish and helpful nephew, America suddenly seemed to develop into a huge challenging empire, wilful, disregarding Britain, criticizing Britain, lording it over Britain and claiming to lord it over everyone everywhere. Loyal British backs were arched at this peril and the terrible economic crises of the second half of the 1940s accentuated impatience with America.

In 1942, George Orwell had written a piece rehabilitating Kipling, with T.S. Eliot joining him to praise the poet formerly dismissed as a vulgar apologist for imperialism. Shilson correlates this shift with his suggestion that intellectuals were reconsidering their attitude to the culture of British gentry, returning to the security of reverence for establishment institutions: ‘a process of submission to the moral and cultural – but not the political or economic – ascendancy of the aristocracy and gentry’. In such a climate of endorsement of values which Nancy’s own generation
had professed to despise, before the war robbed them of their sense of confidence and autonomy,
Don’t Tell Alfred
, in other respects a slight little book, is bang on message.

The novel is once again narrated by Fanny, who finds herself after her husband’s promotion to ambassador to France in the curious position of châtelaine of the Hôtel Charost. The book has very little plot, being more a collection of observations tied together by a (frankly cringeworthy) story about Fanny’s youngest boy’s obsession with an American pop star, Yanky Fonzy, a flattering portrait of Diana Cooper as Lady Leone, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, the reluctantly outgoing incumbent, and a charming but incompetent secretary, Northey, who may have been drawn on the French girl of good family who had been recommended to Gaston at the Palazzo Farnese and promptly packed off after the Embrassadeur learned she couldn’t type. Presumably she wasn’t pretty, either. Yet together,
The Blessing
and
Alfred
are in many ways a distillation of what Nancy had absorbed from her fifteen years’ engagement with Gaston’s politics and a gently melancholic elegy for the country she so loved.

Nancy always discussed her reading with those to whom she was closest – her brother Tom in the Twenties and Evelyn and Gaston after the war. In 1928, she was particularly struck by Clive Bell’s
Civilization:
‘You must read it. He says that most people today are uncivilized (which I’ve always felt) … that the only three real civilizations that we know of were the Greeks, the Italians and the French eighteenth century. It is a most charming book and expresses things I have always felt and sometimes tried to say’. Bell’s book had been started before the First War, as a discussion of the ‘manifestations of civility’ in art and social mores, but the experience of 1914–18 led him to turn his rather bland assumptions into a questioning of what civilization actually was, or rather what kind of civilization could justify such destruction in its defence. In 1918, Leonard Woolf had concluded that ‘hatred, fear and self-preservation’ were the dominant traits of social psychology; in the decades between the wars these
manifested themselves in two distinct generational reactions. In the Twenties, distress and disillusion about the future were demonstrated in frivolity; in the Thirties, the decade of political extremes on both left and right, in a challenging of values which led to a mass conversion to ideology. In both decades, the fear that civilization was under threat was so ubiquitous that ‘there were few areas of intellectual endeavour, artistic, literary, scientific, philosophical, that were not affected in some form or other by the prevailing paradigms of impending decline and collapse’.
¹
Bell had little to offer by way of conclusion than Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century formula of‘sweetness and light’, which he attempted to sum up as

A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery, a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self expression and a liberal education, a contempt for utilitarianism and philistinism.

From her Parisian perspective on the transatlantic culture of the 1940s and 1950s, Nancy saw America as representative of precisely the opposite of this cherished list of values. She greatly enjoyed herself in the role of heretic. Sixty years after
The Blessing’s
publication, it is more true than ever that ‘it is considered nowadays perfectly all right to throw any amount of aspersions at poor old France and England, but one tiny word reflecting anything but exaggerated love for new rich America is thought to be in the worst of taste’. Unlike many of Nancy’s declared passions, including her devotion to France, which she exaggerated to tease friends like Evelyn, her loathing for America was entirely serious. In 1957 she told the
Herald Tribune:
‘I hate everything that has to do with American civilization, your plastics, your skyscrapers, refrigerators, psychoanalysis and Coca-Cola.’ One really is not allowed to say things like that any
more. People whom Americans term ‘liberals’ can get away with criticizing particular political policies, the injustice of big business, violence or racism perhaps, but to declare that one loathes everything about America is blasphemous. To be declaredly anti-American is to be instantly dismissed, as Nancy was by Rhoda Koenig in
The Sunday Times:
‘Mitford’s anti-Americanism was merely the more obvious expression of her unpleasant personality.’ Only nasty people, after all, dislike America.

At the ghastly Dexter dinner party in
The Blessing
, Hector D, who has taken over from Prod as the official most boring man in the world, delivers a speech on the ‘malaise in this country, a spirit of discontent, of nausea, of defatigation, of successlessness around us here in this very city of Paris’. What Europe needs is ‘some precognition of and practice of our American way of living. I should like to see a bottle of Coca Cola on every table in England, on every table in France.’