Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (14 page)

It is unlikely that Diana wrote in her diary the things that Helleu said to her, all that ‘Sweetheart,
comme tu es belle
’ and the like. The cinema dates would have been enough to spark her father’s rage (as when Uncle Matthew goes berserk at Linda and Fanny, after they slope off to lunch in undergraduate rooms in Oxford: ‘if you were married women, your husbands could divorce you for doing this.’) The cold disapproval of her mother would have ostensibly sprung from the same source. ‘Nobody,’ she informed her daughter, ‘would ask you to their houses if they knew
half
of what you had done.’ Yet one does wonder whether the real issue, for Sydney, was Diana’s straightforward desirability – especially to Helleu (however circumspect the diary entries, it would not have been hard to read between the lines.) As a girl Sydney had also been painted by Helleu. His summer studio had been a yacht moored at Deauville, where Thomas Bowles had sailed with his daughters; Helleu had admired Sydney for her noble, sensuous looks; it is no easy thing for a woman to realize that the qualities she once possessed are now in the grasp of another – in fact it is the most difficult thing of all, even when that other is one’s daughter. A maternal woman can cope with it but Sydney, for all her virtues of strength and sense, was not maternal. Time mellowed her towards Jessica and Deborah; by then their prettiness was no longer something to be intensely coveted. But the relationship with her two most spectacular daughters, Diana and Nancy, was complex, and perhaps understandably so. Straightforward pride in one’s children is assumed to be an instinct, but it is not always that simple. Diana later took her mother’s part staunchly, but back in 1927 – when she was removed summarily from the Cours Fénelon and exiled to a great-aunt’s house in Devon with her three youngest sisters – this affection for Sydney was a long way in the future.

Of course by today’s standards Diana had done nothing wrong, and the furore seems laughable. Nevertheless there is a quality to the relationship with Helleu (which reads rather like something from a French arthouse film) that hints at the Diana to come. She must have known that the poor man was going crazy about her. At just sixteen, an age when most girls would have been either giggly or uninterested, she instead allowed something to flourish: something both innocent and not innocent. Helleu’s worship of her played out against a backdrop of painting and sculpture, and thus, in an ineffable yet powerful way, the amorality of great art became conflated with the amorality of beauty: what this brief sentimental education taught Diana was that a girl who looked as she did, that is to say like one of the white marble sculptures in the Louvre, created her own laws of behaviour. ‘You have no fundamental moral sense,’ wrote Randolph Churchill in 1928, in a fit of pique that achieved a degree of perceptiveness. ‘In other words, though you rarely do wrong, you do not actually see anything WRONG in sin. With all of which you will, I am sure, agree.’ She may have been flattered by this; she may or may not have agreed. Churchill’s words were not quite accurate – Diana was not, in the sense that he meant, a sinner; in the ordinary way she was kinder, straighter and more generous than most. But in some way he had divined in her a peculiar quality of
will
. It was as if the world was different for somebody like her, who fitted the exigent demand of Dr Astrov in
The Seagull,
that ‘everything about a person should be beautiful’.

This was emphasized in Diana because she did not behave like a ‘stock’ beauty. Except in the early years of her first marriage, her clothes were nothing special; she had the grace of a ballerina, but none of the usual mannerisms of a good-looking woman. She seemed to be without vanity, devoid of coquetry. At the same time she was wholly aware of her looks and, for all her apparent sphinx-like quiescence, she abounded in sensuality. It absolutely rippled through her. How confounding she must have been, both to men and to women, in her dynamic serenity, her warmth and her coolness, her superior brains and her physical perfection – how could she not, in truth, have felt that she could do
whatever she wanted
and it would be all right? Helleu was just the start of a career in conquest; she surely realized that.

Her parents may have realized it too, dimly, which is why they stashed her away in Devon through the summer of 1927. It was a stupid thing to have done, like putting a young lioness in a playpen, guaranteed to create the urge to flee. She ‘ached’, as the Mitford girls put it, during three months of atrocious boredom, which finally ended with a visit to the Churchill house at Chartwell (Winston’s daughter Diana was a good friend). There she re-encountered the scientist Frederick Lindemann, who advised her to study German – which her parents refused – and fell down before her like a ninepin, just as Helleu had done. After her unofficial debut that autumn, at the Radcliffe Infirmary ball in Oxford, Lindemann rang to ask how many proposals she had received. He was, quite incidentally, the first person Diana ever met who abused somebody (Nancy’s close friend Brian Howard) purely on the grounds that they were a Jew.

Then came the Astor dance; where among the guests, mingling with Mosley and co., was a comely young man – neat-featured, soulful of expression, not overly tall – named Bryan Guinness. He knew Nancy and Pam slightly, and therefore would have spoken to Diana that night. It was not until May, however, that the pair sat next to each other at a dinner party – again arranged for one of the Astor daughters – in Carlton House Terrace, and Bryan in his turn succumbed to that vision of pale perfection. In July he and Diana both attended a ball in Grosvenor Square, and later that month another at Grosvenor House on Park Lane. On that occasion Bryan asked Diana to marry him. She did not say yes immediately, but wrote a note when she got home to accept his proposal. His reply was touching, open, wholly characteristic. ‘I still don’t know how much you love me, nor really understand what you felt last night. But I am glad. I am glad that you are glad. I am glad that I love you. I am altogether glad again.’

Bryan, then aged twenty-two and not long down from Oxford, belonged to one of the richest families in the country, awash with money from its brewery business. His father, Colonel Walter Guinness, later Lord Moyne, was a Conservative MP, his mother Lady Evelyn an enchanting – one might even say Mitfordian – eccentric. (When Bryan informed Lady Evelyn that his intended bride could cook, she responded in her characteristic whisper: ‘I’ve never
heard
of such a thing, it’s
too
clever.’). The Guinnesses owned two giant houses in London – one at Grosvenor Place (numbers 10 and 11 knocked together, oligarch-style); the other in Hampstead – as well as a chunk of the Sussex coast, an estate in Hampshire, land in Dublin, a flat in Paris and so on. This was the kind of wealth that shrugs off slumps and depressions, like coats falling from one’s shoulders. Bryan himself was a beneficiary of the Guinness Trust, founded by his grandfather, from which he received the then vast sum of £20,000 a year. He was also handsome, kind, clever, artistic, a poet and would-be novelist – the perfect counterpart to Diana, but also entirely in thrall to her. He was, in fact, overqualified as an escape route from Swinbrook. Nevertheless, that is essentially what he was. When he exclaimed that their love would last for ever, she replied in a delicate murmur: ‘Well, for a long time, anyway.’

What finally ensured Bryan’s success was the attitude of the Redesdales, who yet again went in for laying down the law, telling Diana that she was too young to marry and that a year must pass before her engagement could be announced. This time they had a point. Yet their former severity meant that Diana, as was her way, had become obdurate. Bryan, who of course wanted to capture his bride as soon as possible, tried to arrange a meeting with her father. ‘I never come to London if I can avoid it,’ wrote David, on the verge of rudeness, ‘and as I can avoid it at the moment I am not likely to be there for some time...’ But having used this tone he was on the back foot; he lacked the confidence to carry it through, particularly as by now even Sydney saw the marriage as a fait accompli. Not long afterwards he had a manly talk with Bryan in the billiard room of the Marlborough Club, and an agreement was made to a wedding the following Easter. It was what David called ‘the thin end of the wedge’. The couple married at St Margaret’s, Westminster on 30 January 1929. Diana, dressed with the help of Nanny Blor in a parchment-tinted satin picture gown and Lady Evelyn’s veil, walked down the aisle in front of eleven bridesmaids including Nancy and Unity. Jessica and Deborah were ill and unable to attend, which according to Diana ruined the day.

In a final attempt to assert themselves, the Redesdales had objected to a religious wedding. Diana, they said, was not a believer. This was quite true – she was a staunch atheist – but Bryan was shocked nonetheless. In his naive young voice (so contrary to that of the determinedly ironic age) he wrote to Diana, explaining his desire to be married in church. ‘Just as painters embody ideas of spring, summer, autumn or winter allegorically in human shape, so we realize this idea of beauty, which includes Christian kindness (which is beauty of deed) has been embodied in a personal deity. My worship of this ideal beauty is directed towards its most perfect manifestation, which is yourself...’ It was an interesting take on the philosophy of Helleu.

X

Looking back at the behaviour of the Mitford parents, their haphazard attempts to harness girls who were naturally kicking up their heels, one has the impression that they asked for some of what they got, when the rebellions began in earnest. In Dorothy L. Sayers’
Gaudy Night
, Lord Peter Wimsey says of his wayward nephew that ‘he is not amenable to a discipline of alternate indulgence and severity; and indeed I do not know who is.’ Yet as with the Mitford childhood, who can say whether what the Redesdales did, or did not do, made much difference in the end? There is a limit to the effects of parental control, whether it is wielded wisely or without much logic.

Of course it was not easy for Sydney Redesdale, bringing out all those daughters, knowing that some of them had the potential to be loose cannons, hoping that following the rules would get her – and them – through. The worry and the work of it took over her life for sixteen years. Unlike Mrs Bennet, she could not simply take her girls everywhere en masse and hurl them at young men. There were six court presentations, six coming-out balls, six lots of clothes, six sets of debutante lunch parties and suppers (at which Sydney used a porcelain set that had belonged to Warren Hastings; an earlier Mitford had bought it at a sale to raise funds for Hastings’s trial – ‘Heaven knows,’ wrote Deborah, who took the remains of the set to Chatsworth, ‘how much of this priceless china was smashed in the hurried washing-up after midnight’). For any mother, let alone Sydney, it was a huge palaver – not least because so much depended upon it: this was where one found out if a girl would sink or swim. Poor Lady Montdore in
Love in a Cold Climate,
whose daughter Polly is the most beautiful of the season but who is nonetheless a flop (‘isn’t she lovely,’ the eldest sons would say, before going off with ‘some chinless little creature from Cadogan Square’), is in a rage of fatigue and frustration at the whole process. Probably some of the mothers – the younger, flightier ones – had a rather marvellous time themselves, taking a house in London and scurrying hither and thither with a perfect alibi for who knows what. On the other hand they were very much in the company of women, sitting on gilt chairs with the other mothers, pushing a piece of salmon around a Goode’s plate as they sussed out the competition and agonized over who would nab the Prince of Wales: debs’ lunches were a sort of school gate in pearls. Lady Montdore is particularly exercised about the way in which Aunt Sadie’s daughters are ‘snapped up’ the moment they show their faces outside the schoolroom. This was not entirely true of the Mitford girls, but one can imagine all that bright beauty causing a shudder of fury nonetheless. There must have been a collective relief (suppressed beneath the well-bred smiles) when Diana was swept from the stage almost before she had stepped on to it.

Typically of the family, the Mitford debuts were a mixture of the homespun and the grand. Nancy, like the oldest daughter Louisa in
The Pursuit of Love
, came out at her family’s country house, surrounded by relatively old men – the Airlies, her uncles Jack and Tommy – wearing a home-made dress and with very little idea of how to dance. The novel has Uncle Matthew importing twenty oil-stoves to alleviate the pervasive cold, which has a ring of terrible truth. So too does the description of the band – ‘Clifford Essex’s third string’ – resting up before the dance at a local cottage. Clifford Essex’s Band (first string) was much in demand at London balls; its name, together with that of Pilbeam’s, Jack Harris’s and the 400 Club, recurred as phrases in the strange echoing poetry of
The Times
social pages (‘The Clifford Essex band played...’). Nancy was a constant presence at these parties. In April 1923 Sydney took a house at Gloucester Square – not particularly smart, but on the mysterious radar of the upper classes – and so it began: Nancy at a dance held by ‘Mrs Lamb’ at 47 Grosvenor Square, Nancy at Bathurst House on Belgrave Square, Nancy with her parents at Londonderry House, the great Park Lane mansion inhabited by the political hostess Lady Londonderry (tamely adored by Ramsay MacDonald) and her wildly adulterous husband. Nancy was presented in May: that bizarre ceremony in which a girl curtseyed to the King and Queen and then became, miraculously, ‘out’. She sat in the long queue of Daimlers and Rolls-Royces that inched its way down the Mall to Buckingham Palace, watched by the same sort of crowds as would today line a red carpet with smartphones to hand – in those days debutantes were news. Their dresses were described in
The Times
with the hunger for detail (more decorously expressed) now accorded to those of Oscar-nominated actresses. Nancy’s was ‘of white and gold brocade with a train of old lace’; no mention of a shop or designer, so again it must have been home-made (probably by her mother’s maid Gladys, with material bought at John Lewis) and set off by wonderfully white doeskin gloves. She would have looked marvellous. Her slim and buoyant figure, the body of a patrician athlete (like Katherine Hepburn in
The Philadelphia Story
), was perfect for the 1920s and perfect for clothes – Dior came later, but she got away with even the scratchy unyielding tweeds described in
Love in a Cold Climate.
Although not strictly a beauty, with her mournful Pierrot eyes and a neat little mouth made for mockery, the eighteen-year-old Nancy was a lovely thing to behold. Probably all the debutantes were, even the plain ones, in their white and their youth.