Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (45 page)

In 1950, meanwhile, the year that Deborah became a duchess, Diana and her husband took the decision to leave Britain. It had perhaps been inevitable; although the Mosleys were now less isolated, they were in a sense exiles within their own country, and their new faith in the European ideal led them to France (and to winters in Ireland, where their son Max loved to hunt). With their extraordinary talent for finding beautiful houses, which never deserted them even in the worst days of excoriation, they bought a dilapidated white house with a Palladian facade, the Temple de la Gloire, at Orsay. It was a palace, albeit in miniature: ‘It’s charming, but where do you live?’ asked Diana’s friend (and companion semi-outcast) the Duchess of Windsor. Just as Deborah was doing in Derbyshire, Diana absorbed herself in restoring the house, which could have been conceived by a designer as the perfect stage setting for her statuesque beauty: at forty she was quite undiminished in looks and would have been ideally placed on top of one of the Temple’s Corinthian columns. A frequent visitor was Nancy, from nearby Paris: ‘she very very often came,’ as Diana later said, although Mosley ‘would have much preferred she hadn’t, but I always wanted her. They got on outwardly all right, because of me I suppose, but they must have both been making an effort. I suppose manners – !’
¹⁷
The sisters spoke every morning on the phone; one can imagine Mosley’s pacings and tuttings as the middle-aged Mitford girls gossiped and shrieked. Diana was habitually torn, made to feel uncomfortable, required to show nothing of her feelings, as her husband’s possessiveness extended to the relationship with her sister. It was rather monstrous. It was as though, whatever Diana gave her husband, he would merely ask for more. There is no question that he loved her, but love is filtered through character, and therefore Mosley’s love was an egotistical one. One might even say that it was sadistic, that he took pleasure in seeing the goddess at his feet. What a sense of power that would give – especially with a woman like Diana! The fact that she would always retain her dignity, that it was in fact impossible to bring her low, meant that she had his absolute respect; meant, too, that the game of maintaining her thraldom would always be fun to play.

He was right, however, to be suspicious of Nancy. Whatever Diana privately thought of her, their closeness ran very deep – again through mutual respect, a sense of equality – but proximity meant that the latent jealousy in Nancy reared up again. If Diana had hoped that her sister would effect a smoothing of the entrée into Paris society, she should surely have known better. Nancy did not particularly want her glittering friends to meet the Mosleys. For some time she tried to keep Palewski away from them. Some instinct of privacy perhaps directed her; although she would not have especially wanted to hear the Colonel’s rapturous hymns to her sister’s deathless allure.

The Mosleys were unwelcome at the embassy, now presided over by Sir Oliver Harvey, with whom Nancy was very friendly (she described his replacement of the celebrated Diana and Duff Cooper in her last novel,
Don’t Tell Alfred
). Diplomats were forbidden to visit the Temple. Unsurprisingly, the Rothschilds had no desire to do so. So Nancy may have calculated that it would do her no good to bring the devil Mosleys into her circle; better to flutter around them in Orsay and institute a de facto seven-mile radius. Yet it is more likely that she was impelled by the memory of 1929, when her beloved aesthete friends, the Swinbrook Sewers, had defected to Diana. Having conquered Paris, how could Nancy bear to step aside again?

IV

For Jessica, the adherence to the Communist creed was making her life difficult, although she would have relished that: she had always liked a fight. In 1950 she and her husband had tried to visit England, but were refused passports. Instead Deborah visited America in 1952, and described to Diana how ‘a figure appeared who somehow was Decca and yet
completely
different... Oh Honks.’ True to form, Jessica claimed that she had stopped writing to Nancy on the grounds that she was ‘living with [sic] a Gaullist’.

Yet by now there was far more to Jessica than the youthful posturing to which she reverted with her sisters. Her husband later described how the Civil Rights Congress appealed not merely to the black population, but to

left-wing whites... My wife became interested in it. She became Secretary-Treasurer of the East Bay local [where she lived outside San Francisco] and devoted herself to it for ten years. Pretty much on assignment to begin with, from the Communist party. You had to find a place where you were going to be active – a ‘mass organization’ – and this was her mass organization. As lawyers, my partner and I were the only ones in the East Bay who would take these cases.
¹⁸

In 1951, through her husband – and the Civil Rights Congress that handled the defence – Jessica became involved in the case of a black Mississippi man named Willie McGee, who was sentenced to death for the rape of a white woman. With three female friends she marched bravely on Jackson, where lynching was commonplace and Ku Klux Klan membership quite normal, and organized a mass protest. She was not alone in her belief that the case against McGee was unproven and racially motivated. William Faulkner, Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson were among those who joined the international pressure on President Truman to reconsider the sentence. He did not: McGee was executed. In his last letter to his wife he wrote: ‘Tell the people the real reason they are going to take my life is to keep the Negro down.’ Jessica was left like Linda in
The Pursuit of Love
, helplessly lamenting the Scottsboro’ Boys (nine black youths accused of raping two white women): ‘I’ll bet they’ll be electrocuted in the end...’

Yet it had been noble behaviour. Jessica had displayed the bright aristocratic fervour of Eugenia Malmains in
Wigs on the Green
– she was frightened of nobody – but for once a Mitford cause had absolute right on its side. Not that it was portrayed that way in the press. In an America seized with the fear of Communism – rather as Britain had been in the 1930s – the McGee protesters were regarded as a bunch of rabble-rousers. The fear of Communism (Reds under the bed) had already shown itself during the war, with a government ‘loyalty program’ in place in Washington, and the Dies Committee established as a precursor to the House of Un-American Activities Committee. But by the 1950s, the nuclear era, a kind of hysteria took hold. The Treuhafts’ phone was tapped. Both were under surveillance. In a report dated 3 October 1950, the FBI ‘recommended that a Security Index card be prepared on the above captioned individual’: Jessica. Her husband was sent a ‘written interrogatory’, which, as he later said, made it clear that there were no charges but nevertheless contained a real threat:

‘We have information to the effect that you’ve attended social events where Communists and other subversives were present. Is it true that you subscribe to the
Daily People’s World
?... Is it true that you contributed money and raised money for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Appeal?’ Well, these were the ones that came to me and I threw them right back... I went beyond denying. I really attacked their right to ask these questions.

In 1951 Jessica was subpoenaed by the California State Committee on Un-American Activities. Her interrogation is, again, oddly familiar: reminiscent of the questioning put to Diana by the Advisory Committee in 1940. Jessica was asked whether she had ever been a member of the Communist Party, or had maintained a bank account for the Civil Rights Congress. In mockery of her accent, she was asked whether she belonged to the Berkeley tennis club: rather like asking Esmond Romilly if he attended Royal Ascot. To all questions – except the ridiculous last – she pleaded the Fifth Amendment. When the procedure ended she fled to a safe house until the hearings were over. Yet the very real fear of being subpoenaed again lasted for several years, during which time she and her husband were effectively on high alert, their movements watched, their activities under continual suspicion. As late as 1971 she was named by the House of Representatives on a list of ‘radical and/or revolutionary speakers’. In its perverse way, it was a little like being Sir Oswald Mosley, of whom Diana wrote to Deborah in 1966: ‘He is really an
outlaw
’.

Jessica was rewarded ungenerously for her attempts to save Willie McGee, and not merely by Truman and the McCarthy brigade. In 1955, not long after the family moved to a new house in Oakland, California, Jessica’s ten-year-old son Nicholas had embarked upon the usual boyish means to supplement his pocket money: a paper round. Cycling home one day, he was hit by a bus. His sister Constancia, who had been out looking for him, heard the sound of the crash. As she crouched beside her brother, who lay dying as she watched and waited for the ambulance, a neighbour remarked that this might not have happened if his mother had spent more of her time with her children.

It was Julia again, the baleful whispers that those feckless Romillys should never have had a baby that they could not look after. It was unspeakable: and Jessica never spoke of it. She was unable to mention Nicholas in her autobiographical writings, nor could she look at his photograph. Very much like Nancy, who, when the news of her brother’s death came during a visit to Gerald Berners, sat down to dinner among the guests as if nothing had happened, so Jessica smiled and pretended as the grief twisted inside her. Having finally been granted a passport, she decided to take her husband and two surviving children on a trip to Europe, and find a kind of strange solace among Mitfords. The Treuhafts visited Sydney at Inch Kenneth, then Deborah at Edensor House. Deborah also gave Jessica the tour of Chatsworth, but confessed to Nancy she had not enjoyed doing so; she had sensed sanctimonious disapproval, what she later described as Jessica’s ‘bigoted sort of liberalism’; as if her sister might at any moment seize a priceless artefact and sell it for the Communists.
¹⁹
And indeed, what connection could there be between the glowing young Duchess of Devonshire, a Romney to the life, and the woman who, in her stern uniform of trousers and Eton crop, had marched on Mississippi? Only that sisterhood: frail, tenuous, yet somehow unbreakable. Then the Treuhafts made their way to Paris, to the Gaullist fraternizer. They arrived at the Rue Monsieur, as arranged, and found that Nancy was not there. Alarmed by Deborah’s reports, picturing a gang of belligerent Americans drinking Coca-Cola from the Waterford, she had made her own visit: to Chatsworth. Oh these Mitfords.

Again, it was not kind. But Jessica was not the sort of person to whom one could show sympathy; for Nancy, her fellow concealer, it would have been particularly difficult. Their relationship was brisk, fond, sometimes arm’s-length – ‘I don’t die for her as much as I pretend to,’ Nancy later told Evelyn Waugh – although on other occasions she would write that Jessica was ‘such a darling’. They had their own bond, especially against their mother. As Diana had it, they were both liars about Sydney – liars by nature – and both for the same reason, the unhappiness of their lives. It was true that Jessica and Nancy did collude in a kind of bitterness that the other sisters did not possess. It was also true that Jessica had sustained a series of appalling blows, which surfaced with a steely smiling courage at least equal to Nancy’s. Yet both these women had a sense of profound fulfilment: their work was of primary importance, in a way that it was not for the rest. By now Diana had begun writing – in 1953 Mosley had started a new publication, the
European
, edited by his wife – and her reviews and diary were a cool, spare variation on the Mitford voice that resonated with quality. But this was not her life, it was done first and foremost for Mosley. For Jessica, and especially for Nancy, it was different. Not
faute de mieux
, simply the way it was.

In the end – because her sense of guilt was strong, except with Diana – Nancy returned to Paris and found the Treuhafts sitting peaceably in her flat, behaving like normal people, not even looking for a baseball report in
Le Monde.
She gave her sister £50, pretending that it was payment for some of Jessica’s old books that she had kept for herself. They were worth a few shillings, if that. It was a typical gesture, oblique in its charity, neatly side-stepping gratitude. In fact all the sisters, including Diana, contributed with Sydney to a small amount for the Treuhafts, whose principles left them rather poor but did not extend to refusing the allowance (nor, when Jessica’s writing made her rich, would she resist the decadent lure of Dior).

Fifty pounds was quite a lot of money in 1955, but by then Nancy’s success was towering. ‘How dull things would be without Miss Mitford,’ as
The Observer
very truly had it. Her translation of the über
-
sophisticated André Roussin play,
The Little Hut
, had opened at the Lyric Theatre in 1950 and ran for 1,200 performances before transferring to New York. (To avoid travelling to the opening – Nancy’s theatrical antipathy to America being what it was – she claimed to have been a Communist before the war: Peter Rodd’s idea.) Her third novel,
The Blessing
, was published in 1951, a sublime take on the relationship between a naive Englishwoman and her attractive, amusing, compulsively unfaithful French husband. As she had often done in the past, she used the book to write a behavioural manual to herself: her advice was to be less romantic, more Parisian; despite her best efforts, she struggled in real life to follow these instructions. The novel was less well received than its two predecessors – the expectation had been more of the same – although Evelyn Waugh, to whom it was dedicated, was quite right to dismiss the criticisms. The novel was poised, wise, realistic to the point of extreme cynicism, illumined by the romantic view of France: as ever, only Nancy could have done it. ‘They can’t bear to see a writer grow up,’ wrote Waugh, with the generosity of one entirely secure in his talent. ‘Everyone I know delights in
The Blessing
and I am constantly buoyed up with pride in the dedication.’