The Viceroy's Daughters Page 6

  no cutting, no haemorrhage, no tests and no pain. No instruments even are used. It is merely putting in a series of little objects, each a little larger than the other, to distend the mouth of the womb. The whole thing will take but ten minutes. There would not even be any need for chloroform were it not that modesty requires it.

  You will have to stay in bed for eight to ten days lying more or less flat on your back for the first few days but then sitting up in bed. All this is most gratifying, darling. They have told me that after the treatment and the operation the odds are greatly against a pregnancy in under six months but then it ought to be a certainty. It all appears to be plain sailing. It is such a relief to me.

  After the operation Gracie, who had no intention of giving up her independent life and freedom of action, left for the villa at Reigate which she had bought at the same time as the lease of Trent. She had the perfect excuse: her children needed country air. She had no intention of hurrying back, though Curzon longed for her return. “Oh to think that in a couple of days Girlie will be in her Louis XV bed. Goodnight my darling Girl and I hope this long period of distress and pain is now coming to an end and that very soon all will be right. Your own loving Boy.”

  Gracie had arrived in the Curzon family in the middle of worsening relations between Curzon and his two elder daughters. Both had inherited his powerful will, both had seen the independence that the war had brought to many of their contemporaries, both were young and longed for fun and excitement. Curzon’s attitude toward his daughters was as patriarchal as that of his own father, and his views on decorum and propriety were—as with many who have indulged themselves sexually—stricter than the norm.

  He felt himself entirely responsible for his motherless daughters and was determined to err on the side of precaution: young men who came to call were treated as assailants who had come to storm a fortress rather than potential friends or suitors. If he had had the chance, he would have chosen his daughters’ husbands for them—and he certainly wanted to retain control of their money. To any suggestion otherwise he reacted in aggrieved and hostile fashion.

  “If I felt I was in any way breaking away under-age or hurting you in that way your annoyance would be justified, but I am merely starting a three-month plan when my money will be my own,” wrote the twenty-one-year-old Irene plaintively in the summer of 1917. “Why could we not have talked it all peacefully out, without these unpleasant letters you always answer me with? Does it ever strike you that though you think yourself the badly treated father, that actions and decisions are only caused by your difficult and antagonistic attitudes to anything I ever say?”

  Irene, as the eldest, found home life particularly trying. Having hunted since childhood, by now she regarded it as a way of life rather than a sport and she wished to build her life around it. She still rode her old favorite, Dandy, the solid, reliable gray cob, but she had also acquired larger, faster, better-bred animals more suited to the Beaufort and the famous Leicestershire packs that she visited whenever she got the chance, her handsome, rather mannish looks set off by a beautifully cut dark blue habit and bowler hat.

  In London both Irene and Cimmie went out constantly. As Curzon’s daughters their circle was wide; as Astor protégées it was, if anything, wider. As Curzon remarked sadly in June of that year, “The girls are going out to one of their endless dinners so I shall be alone again.” Both girls had many admirers. Reggie Winn, later to marry one of Nancy Astor’s nieces, pined for Cimmie, but as he was a year or two younger she did not take him seriously.

  Baba, still only twelve and Curzon’s favorite, led a docile schoolroom life at Hackwood, visited from time to time by her father. “Poor little Sandra is alone at H, with the nice little governess. I had meant to go down to be with her but cannot stir. How many of those who see me in public realise, I wonder, how much pain and illness I have had or appreciate the misery of going through much that I have to undertake in the condition which I am compelled to accept,” he wrote to Gracie.

  It was perfectly true: sometimes his physical wretchedness was such that after a day’s work he would retire to his room and sob until worn out. Without laudanum, or other drugs, he often could not sleep.

  For Irene and Cim, it was a different matter. Home was not the cozy refuge it was to so many of their contemporaries. An anguished letter from Irene, written to her father in September 1917 after one of his reproachful talks, explains why.

  I know full well we were out a great deal but oh! Daddy! have you thought what my home life at Carlton House Terrace was like this summer? what untold misery you and Gracie have caused me until at moments I have felt I could bear it no longer. It was all so intolerable and we felt again and again you wanted Gracie to yourself and we sought our happiness elsewhere as life seemed one insurmountable obstacle after another at home. So I feel I must in justification explain why we were out so often. I must tell you I am beginning to feel I cannot bear all these burdens and quarrels much longer. At moments I feel desperate, and prepared to do anything. The uncertainties and eternal worries of my home life are too much for me. Daddy, do, do remember the incentive—your enjoyment—is not a one-sided case. Things might have been different if there had been warmth and understanding at home. . . .

  All these difficult months have done for me, and I must tell you the truth, that I simply cannot face trying it all over again at Carlton House Terrace, as I cannot see how it is going to change. I must lead my own life, and I want a home of my own, where I can live in peace. You must forgive this. I have tried God knows how many times to go on but now I am driven to tell you what I feel is the only solution.

  Also, for your own and Gracie’s happiness, it would be far better if Cim and I could have a home to ourselves in London with someone near and dear to us. I have thought and thought in my misery about it all and it seems to me the only hope. Daddy, I want you to think it over and see what can be done. I am sure it would be the best and fairest for you as well as for us.

  Your loving Irene.

  In July 1918, Irene escaped by going to France to work for the YMCA. What was to become a lifetime of voluntary work had started the year before, when she first went to talk and sing to the boys of the Broad Street Club, to whom she gave a small billiard table and whom she visited weekly for the next forty years. Now she wrote to “my Baba darling,” on August 29: “I have written to Daddy asking if he will send me £50 so that we can get the men comfy chairs and tables as the YMCA are so slow and tiresome and one longs to get the hut really comfy and nice. I so wonder if he will. He does not give much to charity and would be doing such a good deed but less than that is not much good. Darling, grateful thanks for the gramophone which Sister has brought back safely.”

  Cimmie had grown into a tall young woman with dark curly hair, an excellent complexion and a sweet-faced prettiness. If she had not been so attractive she might have been called strapping. Her chief charm was her nature, a genuine, unsophisticated sweetness that combined intelligence and warmth—all her life, wherever she went, she was immensely popular. On Armistice Night, November 11, her happy, uninhibited exuberance took the form of wrapping herself in a Union Jack, climbing onto one of the lions in Trafalgar Square, and leading those near her in a chorus of “Land of Hope and Glory.”

  Watching her in the crowd was a young army officer, his mood somber. When she climbed down afterward, he was standing nearby.

  “The war is over! Isn’t it wonderful?” she exclaimed, her face alight.

  “Is it?” he replied. “Do any of you think for one moment of the loss of life, the devastation and misery?”

  The young man was Oswald Ernald Mosley, known to everyone as Tom. On that November day, he was just six days short of his twenty-second birthday. He was tall, dark and pale-skinned, with a powerful and athletic physique. With his flashing eyes, fitness and high spirits, there was something of the healthy young animal about him; later, his preferred style of oratory would be equally physical, prowling around
the platform as he spoke and gesticulated with broad, sweeping gestures, a stabbing finger or fist thumped on a lectern.

  His war in France had been brief: he had arrived there at the end of January 1915, leaving his regiment to serve as a Royal Flying Corps observer for three months before returning to England again that May. He had rejoined the 16th Lancers in November and three months later had been granted special leave to see a specialist with a view to an operation on his right ankle—injured, the army was quick to point out, at home, “not in nor by the Service.”

  The injury and operation had resulted in his right leg becoming one and a half inches shorter than the left. Thenceforth, he had stayed in England, first on spells of sick leave granted continuously for a year, then, after a month with the first reserve of Lancers, at the Curragh in Ireland. Here, after a fortnight, a medical board found him unfit to march. At the end of February 1918 he began work at the Ministry of Munitions and five months later moved to the Foreign Office.

  Mosley, the eldest of the three sons of a womanizing father whose wife had left him on account of his constant unfaithfulness, was the heir to a Staffordshire baronetcy. He had been educated at Winchester, which he hated, not so much for the academic side—he had an excellent brain—but for its emphasis on “team spirit.” He was above all an individualist: he had excelled at boxing and, in particular, fencing, winning the Public Schools Championship at fifteen.

  After school he went to Sandhurst to train as a regular soldier. During the last two years of the war, working in London, he had begun what was to be a staggeringly successful career as a seducer. One of these love affairs was with the older actress Maxine Elliott, through whom he met eminent politicians such as Winston Churchill, Lloyd George and F. E. Smith; encounters which decided him to turn to politics himself. When Cimmie came across him in Trafalgar Square he was about to stand as a Coalition candidate for the safe Conservative seat of the Harrow division of Middlesex in the general election of December 14, 1918.

  With the war over, Grace plunged into the redecoration of No. 1 Carlton House Terrace. She brought a lavishness to all the rooms she occupied and used that was entirely feminine. Her bedroom at Hackwood had a Chippendale four-poster with a blue silk canopy and curtains embellished with ostrich plumes, gilt mirrors, trinkets and an immense number of silver candlesticks scattered over the mauve damask dressing table and her Chinese lacquer secretary. In her boudoir there were chaises longues covered in blue silk, little side tables with more knickknacks, Sheraton satinwood furniture and Adam bookcases in white and gilt.

  Since Curzon had first taken over the lease of the London house, much had been done to it. Telephone lines had been laid in 1907 and the water-powered passenger and goods elevators put back in order; by 1915 there were six water closets as well as one bathroom.

  Gracie tackled the house room by room. It was an ideal place for the parties she and Curzon planned to give. The ballroom, which had four long windows giving onto the balcony, was used for all the large official dinners for sixty or more that Curzon gave after his appointment as foreign secretary in January 1919 (following the resignation of Arthur Balfour). Guests sat at a series of smaller tables, identified by the color of the roses in silver bowls at the center, as a hired orchestra played outside. Flowers were sent up from Hackwood; sometimes, if Grace was planning a party soon after her return from the Riviera, she would bring back boxes of mimosa from Cannes. In the warmth of the hall, with its gold damask curtains and furniture, the tight yellow balls would soon uncurl and fill the air with their delicate scent.

  For “small” parties—of fewer than twenty-four—they used the ground-floor dining room, hung with black-and-white velvet curtains from Italy. The footmen, inspected by Curzon before being taken on for posture, gait and cleanliness of fingernails, wore knee breeches if there were more than fourteen guests and trousers if there were fewer: Curzon felt that a dinner party of twelve was almost a domestic occasion. When the Prince of Wales once attended a large formal dinner without wearing his Garter ribbon, Curzon (who had worn his) wrote to him afterward pointing out the discourtesy. The prince replied with a charming note of apology.

  As they turned into adults Curzon grew more distant than ever from his older daughters, to whom he was little more than a disapproving presence. Past the age when they could be treated as adoring pets who came in to watch him shaving, they shared a secret world of their own, with friends of whom he knew little. “Where Cim is I have no idea,” ran one note. “I never see her and do not even know if she is in the house.” Baba, now at Heathfield School in Berkshire, also seldom saw her father. The three sisters were close, writing to each other constantly, Irene in particular fulfilling a semi-maternal role to her youngest sister.

  For their father, there was another crushing disappointment in the spring of 1919 when Gracie suffered a second miscarriage. “What a blow! Poor Girly, poor Husband,” he wrote on April 16. “We must bear our disappointment, as so often before, and console ourselves thinking that it was too soon after these two months to expect anything so good. I wonder why Providence plagues us with all these false alarms and misplaced hopes. Will he ever relent and give us our own child? Never mind, Girly, you are more important than any child or a million children, so we will bow our heads and not cease to hope.”

  When one of their friends conceived after five years of marriage he was pathetically excited. (“What a challenge—and what an encouragement.”) He had, however, become extremely fond of Grace’s children, with whom he got on far better than with his own. In particular, he adored her small daughter. “Little Marcella is, as usual, the greatest angel.” His own children, he felt, were far less appreciative.

  Grace flung herself into the preparations for Cimmie’s coming-out season, delayed because of the war. It was a task after Grace’s own heart; for her, social life was a constant delight.

  London was gradually emerging from the aftermath of war. Wounded soldiers in their blue suits and red ties were disappearing from the squares and gardens, ballrooms that for four years had been turned into hospital wards echoed again to the sound of dance music. The great houses reopened: Londonderry House in Park Lane, with its famous staircase up which four could walk abreast; Brook House, also in Park Lane, with its white marble hall (nicknamed the Giant’s Lavatory); Devonshire House, with its garden stretching from Piccadilly to Berkeley Square; Holland House, in Kensington, with its three-quarter-mile-long drive winding through trees. Many male faces were missing, but the rules of chaperonage were still intact, and mothers, aunts or sometimes fathers sat on the familiar small gilt chairs ranged around the room, its brilliant lights deterring their offspring from anything even vaguely improper.

  Most of the time Curzon kept well away from Grace’s frenzied social activity—which, however, was not too all-consuming to prevent one of the fits of hysterical jealousy that had become a feature of their married life. For Grace affected to believe that Curzon still hankered after Elinor Glyn.

  “How glad I am that you are having so gay a time but why do you say ‘As you of course know, Mrs. G is in London!’ ” wrote Curzon on May 13, 1919. “Really, Girly, you are incorrigible. I have not now and I never have had any communication with Mrs. G since we married. I have kept my word. I have not the slightest idea whether she is in London or in Paris or either do I care. You ought not to say such a thing, for there is not a word of truth in the suggestion. After two and a half years do begin to believe, oh Girly, please.”

  Curzon’s ideas on the sort of man his daughters should marry were so definite that at the ball he gave for Cimmie in July 1919 he suggested a match with one of them to the young Oliver Lyttelton (later Lord Chandos) as he shook hands with him at the top of the stairs. “Ah, Oliver, good evening. It is my dearest wish, as I know it would have been that of your dear father, that you should become affianced to one of my daughters.” When Lyttelton, taken aback, reported this later to Irene and Cimmie, they were much amused.

 
For Cimmie, her father’s suggestion would have been too late: she had become involved with a much more determined suitor. Tom Mosley had duly won his Harrow seat with a majority of ten thousand, becoming the youngest MP in the House, and he had met Cimmie again briefly at Trent Park. She had forgotten him and looked puzzled when he said: “We meet again, Lady Cynthia. Don’t you remember Armistice Night?”

  His pursuit of her began in earnest a year later, on the hustings at Plymouth at the end of 1919. Both were campaigning for Nancy Astor in the by-election at Plymouth caused by her husband Waldorf’s elevation to the House of Lords on the death of his father. Cimmie, as a great friend and Cliveden habituée, spent much of her time with Nancy (“Cimmie is reported to be at Plymouth but as usual I am never told,” complained Curzon). Mosley had been brought into Nancy’s orbit by her sister Phyllis Brand, who found him immensely attractive and invited him to canvass. Unfortunately for Phyllis, he only had eyes for Cimmie.

  Curzon had little idea of Cimmie’s incipient romance. He was much more perturbed by Irene’s doings, and her growing desire for independence—and the use of her own money. He had written to her on January 21, 1917 (the day after she came of age), to explain that she was entitled to her share of the income coming from the Leiter estate and from the marriage settlements paid to him for his daughters’ benefit. On this last he said: “Probably the best thing would be to pay it into the joint account which I administer under the Court for the two other girls who are still minors, as your contribution to our joint homes.” That arrangement, he added, would only be until she married.

  But Irene did not see why she should contribute a large sum for the upkeep of a number of houses that she seldom used when what she wanted was a home of her own. For this, she would need more than the “allowance” suggested by her father. When appeals to him failed, she consulted the family lawyers, Humbert and Taylor, who wrote to Curzon in October 1919: