Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (42 page)

What Sydney did not see – would not have tried to see – was that the book would do more than any public recantations could ever have done to remove the taint upon the family name. As the popularity of
The Pursuit of Love
spread out to a million readers, and its authorial ‘voice’ grew as delightfully familiar as that of Noël Coward, so the word ‘Mitford’ would come to symbolize the World According to Nancy. Charm, ‘creamy English charm’ (in Waugh’s immortal phrase), would triumph over causes. Slowly, by degrees, Unity and her swastika would become a doolally posh-girl fashion statement, Diana a blonde icon of enigmatic cool, Jessica a sweet-faced Rosa Luxembourg preaching to the comrades in the accents of the lacrosse captain at Benenden. But
The Pursuit of Love
was far more profound than it was sometimes seen to be. In telling her story, Nancy was also laying out her philosophy of life. Amid the furore that followed publication in December 1945 – in modern parlance, the book went viral – it took a John Betjeman (‘oh you clever old girl’) to perceive as much. Like all the best art it contained paradox at its heart, a slow-burn of elegiac melancholy set beside an abundant faith in joy. This was Nancy’s faith, the courageous belief that happiness was something that one could choose: it was lightly expressed, and most seriously meant.

And it was her great gift to her family, to distil them into this creed. Of course it left out other things, as did the novel;
The Pursuit of Love
contains no portrait of Unity, no Diana; war comes to the book, but the wrecking ball of the 1930s does not swing among the Radletts with that same annihilating force. The revolt of the children against parental control is portrayed as a collective act of youthful folly. ‘This,’ wrote Nancy, ‘was the year when the parents of our contemporaries would console themselves... by saying: “Never mind, just think of the poor Alconleighs!”’

One year of hell? If only. The aftermath of the Mitford rebellions endured along with rationing. As late as 1947 graffiti scarred the door of Diana’s London flat in Dolphin Square. Mosley had a private line to the police in case of attack. The couple remained social pariahs: Evelyn Waugh, who had bowed down in worship before the pregnant belly of the young Diana Guinness, wrote a polite reply to her delicate reopening of civilities (‘how very nice to have a letter from you. I think of you often...’) but reserved his intimate friendship for Nancy. ‘You are not to say you are infamous & unfashionable it hurts my feelings,’ Nancy wrote to her sister. ‘Anyway
nobody
so beautiful & beloved.’

The goddess façade remained in place, but at a cost. After Tom’s death Diana had fallen ill again, the trauma of the years in prison revived in her, and she had nightmares in which she was torn from her sons and taken back to Holloway. To blame Mosley – as almost any other woman would have done – was unthinkable. Soon Diana would begin suffering from the debilitating migraines that recurred throughout her life, every one of them surely a symbol of the suppressions that raged beneath. Mosley, who had sold Savehay, bought sight unseen a house in Wiltshire – Crowood – plus acres of land to farm. In order to do so he asked Diana to return the family jewels that he had given her so that he could put them up for auction; she did so without a murmur.

But what Mosley really sought was a return to politics. In a way, one can only admire; whatever else he was, he was a life force. Perhaps his greatest talent was to believe in his own rightness about everything. His son Max would later state that Mosley renounced Fascism after the war,
³
and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this statement. Max Mosley is a truth-teller, just as his mother was. He is also a democrat, yet as a young man he saw no difficulty in supporting his father’s politics. The problem, as ever with Mosley
père
, was that the nuances of his undoubtedly able brain – which were apparent in what he wrote, and even in some of what he said – were overwhelmed by the theatrical, rabble-rousing, supremely unsubtle things that he
did.
In November 1947 he announced his intention to form a new party: the Union Movement. Some ten years before the signing of the Treaty of Rome, it sought to bring about a union of the European nations, but that was not the end of it. Mosley went on to state that Jews who had not had their roots established in Britain ‘for about three generations’ would be resettled: presumably in the convenient new State of Israel.

In May 1948 Diana wrote to Nancy that she had attended a meeting in Mosley’s old stamping ground, the East End of London (how the government must have wished that he was still restricted to that seven-mile radius). The police presence was strong, but ‘we always seemed to be almost
in
a terrifying procession of young & very strong looking Jews who were chanting “Down with Mosley”...’ If this was different from what had gone before, it was frankly hard for the casual observer to see any changes. Mosley’s old BU loyalists rallied round the flickering flame, although the person most enjoying the sound of his voice was surely himself. Meanwhile Diana knew only too well that her husband’s hour, such as it had been, was past. But she clung on with him, her mighty Ozymandias, in the splendid ruin of his near-isolation.

Diana was Nancy’s chief correspondent at this time. Their letters were frequent, mutually flattering, abundant with good will. This was probably because Nancy, for once, felt that the power was hers. After a couple of peripatetic years, moving to and fro between London and various Paris billets, she was now – money having smoothed the way – living in a supremely smart apartment in the
septième
(Rue Monsieur, £25 a week), prancing around in her exquisite New Look outfits, socializing with the
gratin
and with the kind of company (the Coopers, Cocteau, Coward) who stimulated her to the limits of her fantastical wit: ‘She really
is
the belle of Paris’ was a remark that Diana generously reported back to her sister. It was to Diana that Nancy retreated for a few months in 1947, when the dedication of
The Pursuit of Love
– for which Palewski had expressly asked – apparently threatened to cause him embarrassment in his political career. Nancy suffered a great deal over this, even more so since she knew that she had done nothing wrong but dared not quite say so.

In a sense, Diana was also the supplicant in her own relationship: what Mosley wanted was what happened. She did not see it that way, and she was right to the extent that she had chosen her role. Her willingness to close her eyes – to smile her way through her husband’s vigorous rants and demands and infidelities – was a deliberate decision. It had its price, but she always believed herself beloved and necessary: as indeed she was. She therefore viewed Nancy’s relationship with Palewski as a far more tragic business than her own marriage. ‘I think,’ she later said, ‘he was always slightly hoping that she would go back’:
⁴
meaning to London. With regard to the scandal over the dedication, which had sent Nancy scurrying obediently from Paris into exile, it was Diana’s belief that Palewski had semi-fabricated the problem. The left-wing newspaper that had intended to run a damaging article – beneath the headline ‘Hitler’s mistress’s sister dedicates book to Palewski’ – had in fact gone on strike (as Palewski would have known) and never printed the story at all. ‘I haven’t seen it,’ Nancy wrote to Diana, ‘& the Col won’t let me because it is apparently too revolting...’ In this instance, her trust in him was total. Another woman, more experienced in the handling of love, might have been suspicious when Palewski hustled her out of the country, saying that de Gaulle (always a metaphorical sword between them) must not be upset. Nancy, it seems, was entirely deceived.

Yet she too had chosen her role; and one might say that, for all the ‘
horror
of love’, it caused her less grief than did Diana’s thraldom to Mosley. Nancy’s life had become so charmed. ‘She greets you in a Dior dress, her waist so small that one fears it might snap at any moment.’ Thus wrote Evelyn Waugh, describing his epistolary soulmate in her Rue Monsieur
mise-en-scène
. ‘This is the only waspish thing about her; all else is sweetness, happiness and inexpressible levity.’
⁵
Her status as an author, reinforced in 1949 by the publication of her second masterpiece,
Love in a Cold Climate
, reached the exalted position for which writers pray, in which every single thing that they publish is received with rapture and no failure can really touch them. Her social life was a glitterball whirl. Even her brisk daily promenades through the grey-and-dusk boulevards, scattering beams and
bonjours
to all she beheld, brought waves of pleasure. ‘I feel almost too much on top of the world,’ she wrote to Diana in 1949. Did the fractured affair with Palewski really have the power to undermine such a very lovely life?

A complicating factor, however, was the sullen appearance of none other than Peter Rodd, who in 1948 decided to plant himself in Nancy’s flat, probably with the idea that she would pay him to go away. One evening she was dining with him and his dismal nephews in a restaurant where Palewski was at a table with another woman. In an untypical state of hysteria, convinced that he had proposed marriage to his dinner companion, she telephoned him as soon as she reached her home; and, compounding her error, rang again the next morning to apologize. ‘The rights of passion have been proclaimed by the French Revolution,’ he replied. It was kind, it was adult, it defused the situation; but it was also a calm, distancing admission of the fact that she loved him in a way that he would never love her. As was her way, she used the sentence in
The Blessing
, when her heroine Grace similarly confronts her unfaithful husband; the difference, of course, being that he
was
her husband. ‘The fact is I
couldn’t
live through it if he married,’ wrote Nancy to Diana. ‘He says I take a novelist’s view of marriage [true enough], that if he marries it will only be to have children & will make no difference at all.’

But here lay the other issue: Nancy was barren. It is possible, theoretically, that had she been younger and fertile – like a royal bride – Palewski might have considered her as a wife. (He always claimed that de Gaulle had an antipathy to divorce; although that, too, may have been an excuse of sorts.) It is also highly unlikely, although Nancy may have tormented herself over the thought.

Diana, however, viewed her sister’s childlessness as tragic in its own right. An oddly conventional view, from such a storming radical; yet it is what she professed to believe. According to Diana, Nancy’s will to happiness was brave but it was merely a shopfront: not a philosophy of life at all. ‘Unsuccoured’
⁶
was Diana’s word for her sister’s relentless snip-snapping humour, her insistence that one would find a joke in the journey to the guillotine. It was a brittle and highly polished carapace, behind which lurked Nancy’s own particular darkness, her despair and her spite. This, for Diana, was the real woman. She thought as much, despite familial affection, even before she knew that her sister had informed against her during the war; her wariness seems to have begun with the writing of
Wigs on the Green
, which – encouraged by Mosley – she viewed as a profound betrayal. When she learned of Nancy’s more serious act of treachery, she would naturally feel herself to be vindicated. ‘Diana hated Nancy,’
⁷
as a friend put it, towards the end of Diana’s life; which was a kind of truth, although not the whole truth.

Nancy could indeed hiss out a sudden jet of poison, as if something serpentine lay twisted inside her. ‘My mother used to say she planted a dart in people,’
⁸
said Diana (a very Sydney remark; if lack of love had bred the spite in Nancy, then her mother surely bore some of the blame for that). James Lees-Milne wrote that her remarks contained a ‘sharp little barb, barely concealed’. She could, undeniably, pull one up short. When Deborah miscarried in 1946 after an aeroplane trip, Nancy wrote to Diana: ‘Flying nearly always does it, you’d think people would know by now, but perhaps she’s really pleased.’ Even to Diana herself, very much favourite sister at that time, she was unable to resist wielding her wicked needle. In 1947 she asked if Diana’s house was on the procession route for the then Princess Elizabeth’s wedding: ‘or is there an 18b stand?’ Quite funny. Not kind.

Yet Nancy
could
be kind, forgiving, generous – ‘the warmest of them’, as Betjeman said, and was not he a judge to be reckoned with? She was very good to Diana’s and Deborah’s children. Diana’s son, the perceptive and intelligent Alexander, remembered her as ‘a wonderful aunt... a wonderful person to have known’.
⁹
And to Palewski – ‘I know one’s not allowed to say this but I love you’ – she revealed a capacity to feel that perhaps no man could ever meet. To Deborah, it was ‘absolute courage’
¹⁰
that led her sister to sublimate her emotions, allowing her romanticism to bloom through her imagination, while rationally seeking the most direct means to happiness. The sudden effusions of spite were a by-product, not the whole. To Diana they were the bedrock of Nancy’s nature, albeit covered with all those layers of
millefeuilles
deliciousness. ‘Of course’ – she wrote to Deborah – ‘we know that it was all part of her unhappy life & I don’t blame
at all
...
¹¹
Deborah was not as obsessive on this point as Diana, although she essentially agreed about her sister’s inner emptiness. After Nancy’s death she wrote in a kind of raging sadness: ‘I really think she had a FOUL life... I know she had success as a writer but what is that compared to things like proper husbands & lovers & children.’
¹²