Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (43 page)

Nobody can know how much Nancy truly suffered from being denied her female destiny. She was a concealer; even the ‘telling’ of her passion for the Colonel was a kind of deflection. And as her sisters were not fully in her confidence at the time – they knew of Palewski, but not the true, complex nature of the relationship – they could not really know how Nancy felt about it. From the outside, of course, it looked bad: other people’s love affairs quite often do. A woman in her forties, mooning helplessly over a man who fitted her in between General de Gaulle and any juicy peach who allowed him a squeeze? How sad, how pathetic, how silly. But that was not the whole of it. She did, indeed, go through the pangs of disprized love, but that was, as she knew, the deal. Palewski brought her priceless pleasure. And he loved her in his way. He treasured her company, which could be among the best on earth. As for the lack of children: Nancy’s thoughts on this were not consistent, they could hint at ineffable pain or intense relief, although either way the subject was raw. The flicked quip about Deborah’s miscarriage may have been an involuntary expression of this. To Evelyn Waugh she wrote: ‘Don’t... tease me about not having children, it was God’s idea, not mine.’
¹³
Yet that does not mean that what she had was purely compensatory: mothers sometimes assume this, but they are not always right.

What her sisters did not, perhaps, understand was that Nancy’s life was fundamentally different from theirs: she was a creator, a writer, and as such experienced the world most intensely in her mind. ‘N’s life was all in fantasy world,’ Deborah would later write to Diana, as if this were a rather sad thing. But what Nancy created in her imagination
was
real to her, in a way that they would never quite grasp. The love affair between Fabrice de Sauveterre and Linda Radlett was poignant; not just in itself, but in its fundamental difference from its real-life counterpart; this may have been painful to Nancy but, in her artist’s heart, Fabrice and Linda were satisfying as reality could never be. When she said that she was happy, even when it appeared that this was impossible, she was probably telling the truth: such was the strength of the illusions that she could conjure. Such was the will to joy, in which Diana was surely wrong to disbelieve. Nancy’s post-war correspondence with Evelyn Waugh is enough on its own to constitute a rebuttal. It is impossible to say which of the two is the funnier, but where Waugh is surreally dry, depressive and droll, Nancy darts with an aerial high-spiritedness that is too vital and effortless for fakery.

Similarly with those two exquisite novels. Although they see their world with absolute clarity they are not satires, as were the four books that came before (
Pigeon Pie
less so). Nancy was never a natural social critic – she is more E. F. Benson than Evelyn Waugh – and in her two masterpieces there is no judgment
whatsoever
, not of Boy Dougdale with his origami-like sexual proclivities, nor of Cedric Hampton with his taste for rough trade and eye to the main chance. What permeates them instead is a glad affirmation, a simple sparkling delight in the human condition. And so these are joyful novels, even when the story that they tell becomes tragic. There are some things that a novelist cannot hide –
Wigs on the Green
is full of wary discontentment about the married state – and Nancy’s mature default position was not that of an unhappy person. ‘Sophia was amused by life’: yes, indeed. And yes, Nancy did want a life of bliss with Gaston Palewski, but not in the way that her sisters would have pictured it. Rather it was what Fanny perceives, through her creator, in
The Pursuit of Love,
when she describes her own deeply contented family life as ‘composed of a series of pin-pricks’: nannies, children, noise, boredom, housekeeping, her husband’s unaccountable moods. ‘These are the components of marriage, the wholemeal bread of life, rough, ordinary but sustaining; Linda had been feeding upon honey-dew, and that is an incomparable diet.’

Anyway there is – is there not? – something a bit rich about Diana’s assertion that Nancy was pitiably deprived. As with Diana and Jessica: were these two sisters really so different? ‘I’ve given up everything – my family, my friends, my country,’ Nancy had once stormed at Palewski, upon which he roared with laughter, ‘& then of course so did I.’ The same was true of Diana, and it was not a laughing matter. The marriage to Mosley had brought opprobrium, jail, the strain of enduring his recreational affairs, which resumed in the 1950s – and
that
, if you like, was spiteful. (It also proved that even then there were women who could not resist him.) Diana’s sons were a priceless gift, but she fought with her husband over the Mosley boys, particularly Alexander; the only subject on which she did confront him. So was the knowledge of Mosley’s love – deep, but deeply selfish – sufficient repayment for what Diana had offered? Were her splintering migraines not the equivalent of Nancy’s sudden shafts of malice: the inevitable fissures in a life sustained by illusion? Not that illusion is necessarily a bad thing, so long as it can be maintained. Both Nancy and Diana preferred it that way; both were able to keep their intelligence separate from their hearts. And these profound similarities made the differences between them – Diana was never disloyal, rarely spiteful and always controlled – all the more apparent.

What is especially interesting is that Diana showed a willingness to forgive Jessica for the kind of behaviour that she reviled in Nancy. This was despite the fact that Jessica would not shift from that obdurate stance against her Fascist sister: ‘the public Decca is somebody unforgivably callous & hard’, wrote Diana to Deborah. But, as she also wrote: ‘The private Decca is Decca.’ Given Jessica’s behaviour towards Diana, this was a remarkable statement. It was an absolute reversal of the judgment upon Nancy, whom Diana viewed as a delightful social being with the cold blood of a lizard. It was also fiercely reminiscent of the way in which Jessica forgave in Unity what she could not in Diana. In other words, the twin queens among the Mitford sisters were both judged according to their dominance: with a harshness that the rest did not excite.

At the same time – and this was entirely typical of the complexity within that six-ply weave – Nancy and Diana had enjoyed a kind of laughing alliance against Jessica. Together they mocked what they viewed as her righteous pomposity. In 1947, for example, Jessica had written to Nancy lecturing her quite seriously on the dangers of forgiving Diana. By this time she had given birth to her second son, Benjamin, and was living near San Francisco, where she had become deeply involved in the Civil Rights Congress – formed around this time – and in raising money for the American Communist Party. There was a touch of Mrs Jellyby about her, bustling about angrily for her causes, leaving her household to fend for itself. Her mother-in-law, Aranka – Hungarian by birth, a custom milliner in New York – was critical of this attitude, and could not believe the sordid back-yard in which the children played, but Jessica became very fond of her. She thought her a warm woman: unlike Sydney. Nevertheless when Nancy met Aranka in Paris (for the fashion shows), she reported gleefully to Diana that Aranka had moaned incessantly about her daughter-in-law: ‘“My Bob never thought of being a communist till he met her”.’ Diana replied by quoting Mosley, who had suggested that when all was said and done only one Mitford had ever harmed a Jew: ‘Decca.’ Which was, incidentally, an off-colour joke in the Nancy style.

In 1948 Sydney, now aged sixty-eight, flew to California to visit Jessica (whose children – Lord knows what they can have been told – believed that they would have to bow to their grandmother). It was an impressive show of intent, of the desire to heal a breach that was ostensibly about Sydney’s pro-Fascist sympathies but that had, as ever, run far deeper into the territory of the emotions; as was proved when during the visit Jessica launched a sudden missile attack, screaming and storming at her mother as they stood together in her kitchen. The obsession with school recurred – why, she wailed, had Sydney refused to allow her to go? This, in itself, was a symbolic grievance: of what, it is hard to say, other than a generalized feeling that Sydney had been an inadequate mother, that the home life she had created had not been the one that Jessica had wanted. From a grown woman who had caused her own share of grief to the family, this display of hysterics was not overly attractive. It may even have struck Sydney as rather American.
Nancy
, at least, would not have behaved like that; but one also wonders whether Sydney would have reacted as gamely if she had. She made great efforts with Jessica, even to the point of meeting her Communist friends (did they know that she had shaken the hand of Hitler?) She liked her son-in-law; who was, as it happened, quite clever enough to make up his own mind about becoming a Communist. To that extent, the visit was a success, although it did not prevent Jessica from returning to the theme of her awful upbringing in
Hons and Rebels
, nor allying with Nancy against their mother in later life.

Diana, of course, was enraged by that. She loved Sydney, who had shown such stalwart loyalty during the war, with an intensity of protectiveness. And she was disgusted by Jessica’s desire to demonize their mother, just as she was by the same urge in Nancy. Yet Jessica did not
bother
her in the same way. When Nancy showed reluctance to make the dire journey to Inch Kenneth, Diana asked Deborah the tentative question: ‘She hasn’t got much heart?’ but made no such comment about Jessica, who did not visit their mother at all. Nancy had skipped off to France, yet she did not sever ties in the definitive way that Jessica had done, leaving Sydney to cross the Atlantic with an olive branch in her ageing hands.

Devotion to Mosley meant that his allegiances were Diana’s also, and he disliked Nancy. Diana wanted to see her, but she was always made aware of her husband’s teeth-grinding antipathy, and felt obliged to share it. There may, however, have been something more: something to do with the simple, infinitely difficult sister relationship, which in the Mitfords was writ so large. It is clear enough that Nancy was jealous of Diana. But was the opposite also true? Did Diana envy that creative gift, that perfect little novel, which used their shared past and won acclaim for Nancy alone – did she even envy the freedom to lead that effervescent Parisian life, while she was glued to the side of her tempestuous man? Possibly. And what of the friendship with Evelyn Waugh, whom she had once held so easily in her thrall? Later Diana reviewed the published correspondence between Nancy and Waugh, and without much evidence posited the idea (to Deborah) that Nancy had been hurt by Waugh’s teasing ‘Open Letter’ in response to the ‘U and Non-U’ furore: it seemed to be something that Diana
wanted
to believe. She was at pains to make clear that his last letters had in fact been written to
her
. They were both passionate women, these two Mitford girls, although one sought to hide this beneath a slightly cracked veneer, the other more successfully within the guise of a smiling Madonna. Whatever emotions Nancy felt for Diana, these would surely have been reciprocated in strength.

After Nancy found soaring success as a writer, all her sisters sought to emulate her – even Pamela considered a book (‘it would be nearly all Food!!!’) – and colluded in their different ways with the fame that
The Pursuit of Love
had brought them. Like the public, albeit with reservations and self-awareness, they bought into Nancy’s mythmaking. As Nancy wrote of
Hons and Rebels
, ‘In some respects she has seen the family... through the eyes of my books’:
¹⁴
it was true, in a way, of all the sisters. Just as Diana had led the troops into the darkness of battle by her defection to the Fascist cause in 1932, so Nancy did the same with her shift into the sunlight of public adoration. Because of Diana, they had become the ‘mad, mad Mitfords’. Because of Nancy, they all – with however great a show of reluctance – became the Mitford girls.

III

At the start of May 1948, Sydney returned home from San Francisco. She was visited in London by Diana, who wrote to Nancy that their mother having a bad time – yet again – with Unity, ‘who had spent a guinea on some dead roses for her & then was taking it out of her like mad by saying she had a temp of 103...’

The ambivalence of Nancy’s feelings towards Sydney – the fact that she did not actually want to dislike her – had previously expressed itself, in her sidelong way, by a real concern about the impossible strain of the life that her mother was leading. She had suggested to Diana that they – and Deborah, who was of the same mind – pay towards a separate establishment for Unity, ‘with an attendant & an ample supply of bed linen’, but she was uncertain as to how she could broach the subject. ‘
Oh
for Tom.’

Sydney was, indeed, terrified by the thought that she would die before Unity. What, after all, would become of her? ‘I believe’, wrote Nancy, ‘she half thinks Boud will be on the streets like a poor stray dog.’ Somebody could indeed have been paid to look after her, somewhere close to one of her sisters (they too must have dreaded the prospect); but the patience displayed by Sydney was unlikely to be replicated elsewhere. Unity remained physically strong, as well as immensely irritable, and in 1947 had taken a part-time job in a hospital in High Wycombe, washing up and serving tea. But the bullet in her brain was like one of those bombs buried in wartime: at the slightest touch it could decide to become active. The high temperature that she complained of on her mother’s return from America may not have been invented out of pique. Diana’s letter was written on 2 May, at which point Unity had twenty-six days to live.

She and Sydney took the long journey to Inch Kenneth, the place of refuge that catastrophe would soon visit once more and – as with the death of Tom – acquire a peculiarly nightmarish quality. At first Unity seemed well enough, but a couple of weeks after arriving on the island she went to bed with a fever. Sydney’s communications with the mainland were not made by phone, or in any remotely convenient way, but by hanging a black disc on a garage door that could be seen through binoculars: via these means, a doctor was called. The high winds and rough sea meant that he was delayed for several days. By the time he reached Unity her temple was bulging, her temperature very high. ‘I am coming,’ she said suddenly. Then her mother knew that she was dying.