Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (41 page)

Palewski was an
homme aux femmes
, practised in the art of seduction to the point of social notoriety, although not to his own satiation (one story had him inviting a married society lady to lunch at his flat, and opening the door to her stark naked). He could resist no pretty woman – and Nancy had been rendered very bright and lovely by André Roy – and his way of speaking to her, of courting her, was that of all those Free Frogs combined to the power of ten. The laughing, formal flattery of the men at the Officers Club had made her buoyant, but Palewski had the remarkable power of concentration, of making a woman feel singular, singled out, even as he cast half an eye upon the new arrival in the doorway. ‘Fabrice talked to her, at her, and for only her...’ Thus she described the first Frenchman of her novels,
the
Frenchman, Fabrice du Sauveterre in
The Pursuit of Love
, the man who launches himself into Linda Radlett’s life with the same bowling force as Palewski did into Nancy’s.

‘Linda was feeling, what she had never so far felt for any man, an overwhelming physical attraction. It made her quite giddy, it terrified her.’ Fabrice, like Palewski, is short and stocky and physically unremarkable. He is also – the Pemberley touch – a rich duke. But long before Linda knows this she has fallen, hard and irrevocably, just like her creator. After Peter Rodd, with his sulky little-boy handsomeness and scuttling, showing-off affairs, this was a man at last; his extraordinary confidence with women was something entirely new to Nancy. And she had never before known that love could be
fun
. Palewski was amusing and amused; within the formal French
vous-vous-
ing, the civilized familiarity with Proust and every species of porcelain, there lay an anarchic lightness of spirit that called to the same thing in Nancy, and made her almost alarmingly alive.

For him, she too was different, not a bit like the smart little ‘Veronicas and Sheilas and Brendas’ (Fabrice’s phrase) who were cautiously obsessed with his reputation and whispered about him avidly over their gin and limes. Nancy was clever, nervy, as enchantingly English as a Wedgwood teacup yet somehow detached from the society that she knew too well: already she was hearing the siren call of ‘La Marseillaise’
.
And she had an eagerness, beneath her polish. She was oddly untouched despite the liaison with André Roy, which now dissolved swiftly into the smoky wartime air. That had been a sophisticated affair, taken for what it was. Neither party had allowed the image of Nancy’s wrecked fallopian tubes to touch their kindly feelings for the other, and that was the behaviour of grown-ups rather than deluded romantics. Yet with Palewski, who had knocked her sideways, Nancy reverted to a kind of girlhood state: despite her innate discretion she could not help showing off about him, revealing to dinner party guests that she had been with him ‘all night’ and getting a kick out of their fascinated shock, laying out her heart like an open hand of cards for him to assess and play accordingly. He was a very adult proposition, and she was able to cope with him as such. Yet the tsunami of emotion that had swept over her and carried her off to his bed, where she enjoyed herself as never before, was too great for concealment.

She was still no Sophia in
Pigeon Pie
, calmly retaining control as she picked her way towards fulfilment with her tricky, desirable lover. She was Linda, ‘telling’ all. Not to her sisters; they were only partly aware of what was going on; although Peter Rodd clearly knew something was afoot, and on his return to England in 1944 marched into Heywood Hill in a towering rage. Like many serial adulterers, he was peculiarly affronted when his erstwhile victim played him at his own game. ‘He puts Nancy on edge,’ wrote James Lees-Milne, who dined with the couple at Claridge’s, ‘and makes her pathetically anxious not to displease him. Now why should a husband put a wife under such an obligation?’ Nancy was not a natural at infidelity; for all her Mitford airiness she had a powerful sense of guilt, and indeed of correctness. At the same time she was fearful that Peter’s perversely possessive behaviour would make her affair impossible. In fact she was unsure how it would continue at all. Palewski was back in France; he visited London briefly in June 1944, then returned for the liberation by the side of his triumphant general. ‘Yes I do feel gloomy without the Col,’ wrote Nancy to Violet Hammersley (who, having asked plaintively, ‘But what of Roy?’, now counselled caution), ‘but I don’t believe it will be another year before I see him again...’ She wrote him so many letters that, in allusion to her grey Harrods envelopes, he referred to a ‘
charmante avalanche grise
’
.
This hurt her, and he made efforts to retract. But she knew that she was the one in literal pursuit of love,
l’une qui aime
, while he was the
l’un qui se laisse aimer.
He, above all, was the person whom she had ‘told’.

This was a wrong move at the very start of the game. When Nancy wrote, in her biography of Madame de Pompadour, that in every successful love affair the man has the upper hand, she was possibly telling herself that she had done the right thing in giving Palewski so much power. Theirs was not a mutual love, she felt more for him than he for her, and of course he knew that. Yet with a very worldly mixture of
gentillesse
, elusiveness and experience, he found an equilibrium that kept the uneven seesaw in play. ‘I love you, Colonel,’ she would say; to which he would reply ‘
I know.
’ It was a game indeed, although the price that Nancy paid to her opponent was higher than he deserved.

It was not quite as simple as that, however. Nancy never looked at another man after meeting Palewski, and in a sense he became her life. In September 1944, by which time he had returned to France, she wrote to her mother: ‘Oh to live in Paris, I’d give anything.’ Almost exactly a year later, she did just that: like Jessica, she prised herself from the cling of the past and gave herself to an unknown future in which, by sheer force of will, she found happiness. Her stated reason was to set up a Parisian connection for Heywood Hill (as Evelyn Waugh put it, ‘selling Cobbett’s
Rural Rides
to the French’). This was her own idea, and she was doing it for Palewski. ‘I
can’t
live without that military gentleman,’ she wrote to Diana. But it was something else too: ‘Life
is
more agreeable here.’

She might have gone anyway. What was left for her in England? The grieving parents, the irreparably damaged sister, the errant husband; the grey bombsite of London; the daily work at the bookshop, in which she had been invited to become a partner but with whose nine-to-five she was now heartily bored. It is hardly surprising that, as much as with the man, she had fallen in love with the mirage of Paris. When she wrote of Charles-Edouard de Valhubert that he was ‘the forty kings of France rolled into one’, that is also what she felt about Palewski. Had he been English, the impulse to love would have been so much weaker. He symbolized a Fragonard world of elegance, prettiness and courtesy; a world of the past, certainly, but that was what Nancy now sought to inhabit, knowing full well that it was where her kind belonged. This was the France that she would describe in
The Blessing
– one of sumptuous parties full of gorgeous people untouched by war and obsessed with
placement
, with houses full of possessions miraculously saved from the Germans – and in which she utterly believed. Indeed she would find it for herself, at the golden embassy presided over by her friend Lady Diana Cooper (whose husband Duff was appointed ambassador after the war), at the
maisons de couture
run by Dior and Lanvin, in the words of Voltaire and St-Simon. If it was not quite the reality of Paris, that did not matter. Like Diana, she had the ability to close her eyes to what she did not wish to see: the aftermath of Occupation, the summary reprisals against collaborators, the women with viciously shaven heads. The most powerful aspect of Nancy was her imagination; to her, therefore, the gleaming France that she inhabited was
not
illusory, it had an absolute truth. ‘They were all exactly like ONE, that’s the truth!’ she wrote of the court of Louis XV. The eighteenth century was what now called to her – rational, amused and civilized – although it left out the part of her nature that had been formed in childhood, which was romantic and emotional and entirely English.

Yet this faith in France, which was just as strong as her sisters’ belief in ideology, was what compelled her. It was a writer’s faith, above all. With the death of her hopes of children she moved inexorably towards a life of creativity, where perhaps she had always been destined to be. And Palewski was subsumed within it; however real her feelings for him, it was the literary variation upon them that she treasured, the rose-scented affair beneath the Parisian skies that defines Linda Radlett’s existence. Love is always, in some measure, a matter of illusion. Look at Diana with Mosley. Nancy had never chosen men with whom she might have had a contented, ‘normal’ life. When she could have had a rich, steady, sensible husband like Sir Hugh Smiley, she had instead conceived a passion for the openly homosexual Hamish St Clair-Erskine, and accepted a nonchalant proposal from the blatantly unsatisfactory Peter Rodd. Now there was Palewski, unfaithful as they come, stating quite plainly that even if Nancy were to obtain a divorce he could never marry her because General de Gaulle would not like it.

So was she, as has been suggested, simply a bad picker? Or is there in fact no such thing: one picks the people that one wants, often these are the wrong people and, in some obscure way, that was the intention. Again, look at Diana. Without Mosley, her life would have been immeasurably different. Judged by an outsider, it would have been infinitely better. But if anybody ever had the power of choice, it was she, and Mosley was what she had wanted. Nancy, an extremely attractive woman, could also have chosen ‘better’: a man like André Roy for example, who was able to handle her somewhat ‘unfeminine’ brains and treated her impeccably. Another Free French officer, the Prince de Beauvau-Craon, was immensely keen on her (‘do you think of me a little bit?’) but he aroused no interest. It was as though the as yet untapped talents within Nancy led her, in some way that she herself may not have acknowledged, to men who would leave her free. ‘If anybody wrote to me like that I’d be sick,’ she would later remark, tellingly, about the publication of Lord Curzon’s wildly effusive love letters.
¹
‘Oh goodness how greatly I prefer the Colonel’s respectueusement.’ Although she had tried very hard with her marriage, her ambivalent remarks about her pregnancy in 1938 – ‘2 Peter Rodds in 1 house is unthinkable’ – suggest that in her most mysterious self she did not want the normal woman’s fate.

‘
Faute de mieux
’
²
was Deborah’s crisp judgment on the life that Nancy did achieve, that of an enormously successful writer. Deborah, being what she herself called a ‘total female’, sought a husband who would give her a proper, secure, family environment, within which unhappiness would be incidental, rather than in the nature of things. The men that Nancy chose were absolutely
bound
to cause her suffering. And, however unnecessary that had been, it was real. She had tried to kill herself over Hamish, was made bitter and distraught by Peter. For Palewski she would eventually pass through fires. Yet her romantic imagination, the part of her that drove her art, was entirely fulfilled.

‘Oh Fabrice, I feel – well, I suppose religious people sometimes feel like this.’

She put her head on his shoulder, and they sat for a long time in silence.

As early as 1942 Nancy had been scribbling away beneath the bombs at what she called ‘my autobiography’.
The Pursuit of Love
was dedicated to Palewski, who inspired its exquisite later passages, but she did not write it for him, nor because of him. In October 1944 she was offered the partnership in Heywood Hill, which would have been easily manipulated into setting up the Paris connection; yet she was dismissive and suggested that they wait until after the war. What she most wanted, at that moment, was to write her book. ‘My fingers itch for a pen.’ She was given three months’ leave, and it all poured out. It was there, perhaps, that Palewski had his influence. Through him she understood
how
to write
The Pursuit of Love
: the sublime directness of its style. ‘
Racontez
– racontez
,’ says Fabrice to Linda, urging her on to tell stories of her family in her ‘sing-song Radlett voice’. ‘
La famille Mitford fait ma joie
,’ Palewski had said to Nancy, as she enchanted him like Scheherazade throughout their early courtship, the evenings spent à deux in her Maida Vale house, where he would turn up outside the window whistling snatches of Kurt Weill. With her peculiar childlike clarity, her magpie instinct for the glinting detail, she conjured for her kindly, ironic, war-weary lover the magical English fable of her vanished upbringing. And this ‘telling’, this straightforward act of narration in the first person, was the key that finally opened the gate to her gift. For the first time there were no devices, except the writer’s trick of shaping fact to make truth. She told her own story, in her own way, and by the grace of art the Mitford family was made indestructible.

II

‘This family again,’ Sydney wrote curtly to Jessica, after reading a couple of chapters of
The Pursuit of Love
, and expressing scepticism about Nancy’s claim that it would make her £1,000. (In fact it made £7,000 within six months: ‘I sat under a shower of gold.’)

Her father, meanwhile, had ‘cried at the end’, as Nancy wrote to John Betjeman: ‘He had read a sad book once before called
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
& had hoped never to read another.’ His sublime reimagining as Uncle Matthew, the man he had in part been, must also have struck at his heart. So too the transformative mystery whereby the Mitfords were given back their leaping vitality, and seemed to spring like hares across the land he had once owned.