The Viceroy's Daughters (12 page)

“You, my love, are not for me either. I know it and feel it (and hide it even from myself).”

Baba wrote to him often (“you have no idea how much your letters mean to me”) and the princely party was feted constantly—there were balls, parties, race meetings, polo matches and, as Fruity put it, “one bathes in champagne.”

The prince's defection rankled. Fruity was loyal to the core of his being; and the prince's arbitrary, casual replacement of himself as chosen companion by G Trotter hurt him badly. “The P seems very happy, he's enjoying himself a good deal,” he wrote to Baba. “He and old G never leave one another, it's almost uncanny. The P refers every single thing to G now, G is the only person who knows anything of HRH's movements or ideas . . .

“I wonder where you are and what your thoughts are and if you are making someone love you. I fear it's only too easy and too probable. No one is kissing you, is there darling? Tell me. No—don't.”

In September he was writing to her: “You see, all the love I gave him before is yours now, and it matters so little to me what he thinks or cares about me. I'll do my job with him but the personal thing I once gave him is gone forever. If
he
wants me, I'll respond—but that's all I can ever do now. I loved that young man with the very best God put into me but I can't feel ever again the same as I did.
You
have all my thoughts, my best feelings. One can't divide things—I can't, anyway.”

In Fruity's mind, he had lost the two people he loved most—and was to love most in all his life. This mood may have accounted for an episode that could have had embarrassing consequences. One night Fruity had visited a house of ill repute and, finding himself unable to pay, was chased out of it by the prostitute to whom he owed money—minus his trousers, which she had stolen. Worse still, in them was his wallet, which held several letters from the prince. Fortunately, no harm was done. After the tour Tommy Lascelles, the prince's private secretary, told this story to his neighbor at a dinner party, without realizing she was a friend of Baba's. Next day Fruity arrived at his house unannounced before dinner and knocked him down in his drawing room (they made up their quarrel a few months later).

The prince's seeming rebuff did not last long. Once back in England, hunting with Fruity from Craven Lodge as often as possible, the old intimacy was quickly reestablished—to the king's annoyance. “Had a talk with D on getting home about Metcalfe. I found him very obstinate,” reads the king's diary for November 6, 1924.

Fruity was far less certain of Baba's feelings. The coolest-headed of Curzon's daughters, she was also the most
mondaine
. As she grew older, her friends and family came to believe that, as the saying goes, her head invariably ruled her heart. In fact, it was the other way around. In addition, she was only twenty, and she was in love. The arguments for and against marriage to Fruity raged in her mind, a torment often confided to his sister Muriel Russell.

As for Fruity, the high hopes and idealistic enthusiasm with which he had accompanied the Prince of Wales back from India soon evaporated. He did not have a place on the prince's permanent staff. Worst of all, it seemed as if there was no future for him with the girl he loved. If his army career were not to suffer irreparably, he had to rejoin his regiment. Late that autumn, he wrote Baba what must have been one of the most difficult letters of his life:

Dear Love, It is not easy for me to write. I've thought out letters to you during this last six weeks, I've written letters and burnt them. I've spoken to you, in my mind, hundreds of times. You have been with me, in my poor thoughts, day and night since you left me. You can disappear from St. Moritz and I just hear vague rumors of your movements from people whom I hate to hear them from. You return suddenly without any warning—you are in London when I am there. I hear from my sister of your arrival, then you walk with her and she tells me of your troubles. My poor darling child, I feel
deeply
for you in your worry and uncertainty. May God help you in your trial. I only wish I could.

I would do all in my power to make you happy. All—all—all. Dearest one, it does hurt me so to know you to be wasting any of the hours of your life unhappy and in trouble. If you have felt this period as Muriel tells me you told her you had and you are still undecided whether you really love me or not, then dear one I am afraid that unknown to yourself (perhaps because you do not like to think it true) you have not yet really loved. You have yet to feel all the happiness (and sorrows I fear) that only true love can bring to you.

Now Pansy my love I will keep out of your way. If we
do
meet do not fear of my manner to you. I will appear just the same to those who look on. You may come here to stay with Nancy Tree, well, I'll go to London if you wish it. I will do all I can to let any wounds caused through me heal, as indeed time does very quickly. You are through the worst, darling. The big thing is you have proved you can do without me. If you had felt otherwise—well, I'd not be writing this letter. Now, sweetheart, I leave for India for certain. Maybe I sail next month, or there is a
faint
chance I may not leave until after the hot weather. Anyhow, I leave England and all in it for certain, and then your worries are greatly over.

I write this letter hoping it will help you. Remember also that I will
always
help you in any way that I feel is
really for your eventual happiness
. You can always call on me because I just love you with all my heart and soul. There is no need to answer this as it will hurt you to do so.

 

For Fruity, the future looked bleak.

11

The Passing of the Viceroy

Fruity was well aware that he was not the kind of man that the world—and Baba herself—expected her to marry. Even though she said she returned his feelings, he felt that he should point out his unsuitability from a worldly point of view. Just after Christmas 1924 he wrote to tell her so. “All the love and adoration that God has made me capable of is all I offer you. It's been yours for some long time now. Do with it as you will—I will understand.

“. . . I am not worthy of you. Things are against us. Age, position, money, brain. I mean
you
want a lover with ambition, with big ideas, a man to make a name for himself in this so cruel world. I am not blaming—I understand. But I love as you will never (I think) be loved again. Remember—I love you terribly—and I'll never change.” He was to be proved right on every count.

Fruity had an unexpected ally in the Curzon camp. Grace was anxious for him to bring his suit to a successful conclusion. She did not enjoy seeing Baba unhappy, torn between love and the knowledge that marriage with Fruity would distress Curzon; even more, she wanted to get Baba safely off her hands before launching her own daughter, Marcella (then at finishing school in Paris). Marcella, though extremely pretty, was a shy girl and the last thing Grace wanted during her daughter's first season was the constant presence of a beautiful stepdaughter distracting possible suitors. “I must say I
do
like your stepmother,” wrote Fruity to Baba. “She is perfectly sweet to me.” Better still from his point of view, Grace accustomed Curzon to the presence of Fruity in Baba's life and, more gradually, to the idea that Baba's feelings were engaged.

Then came other welcome news. The Prince of Wales had fought long and hard to take Fruity with him on his forthcoming tour of British Africa and South America in March 1925 but had not been able to persuade his father to allow this. What Fruity had not realized was that the prince was also doing his best to see that his friend was not left stranded. “I got this [an extract from a letter from the king] by a letter from the P. sent to me early this morning,” Fruity told Baba. “Oh dear, I felt so ashamed of myself this morning having doubted him.” The prince had written: “I hope this will make you less sunk. Look in and
wake
me
before you go to Liverpool, no matter how early. EP.”

The extract from the king's letter of January 18 read: “I am glad to hear that you hope now that you have a billet for Metcalfe
in England
under the W[ar] O[ffice] when you start in March for S.A. I shall of course be ready to help him to get it when you let me know what you wish me to do.”

From Fruity's point of view, Curzon was not such a terrifying ob
stacle as he would once have been. As 1925 opened, his health and morale were in steep decline. When the first Labour government gained office in January 1924 he had, of course, lost the foreign secretaryship, but when, ten months later, Labour was overturned by a huge Conservative majority, he confidently expected his old job back. When the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had told him that he was not to return to the Foreign Office it was an appalling disappointment. Although he did not wish to take up a lesser appointment he was chivied by Grace into accepting the figurehead positions of lord president of the Council, leader of the House of Lords and chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defense. “As you know,” he wrote to her on November 8, 1924, three days after the fateful Baldwin interview, “I would not have swallowed what I have done or consented to take office again were it not that you so strongly wished me to do so, and that I am always urged to do the big thing though with equal regularity it is always forgotten as soon as done.”

He felt miserable, frustrated (“a new Government formed and I with no boxes coming in and nothing to do”), disillusioned and lonely. He had perforce accepted that he was to have no heir; two out of his three children were estranged and the third appeared to be in love with a nobody. His country did not seem to want his knowledge and experience, yet lack of departmental responsibility did not mean that he saw more of Gracie—indeed, she may have pressed him to accept the lesser governmental posts against his wishes to keep him as much as possible out of her way.

To console himself, he went to stay with one of his oldest women friends, Consuelo, the former duchess of Marlborough, now Madame Jacques Balsan, at the Balsans' house on the French Riviera. “They have 350 acres, bought from nearly 80 persons, a huge property running right down to the sea. The upper part is terraces, the lower is a pinewood. It is wonderful what they have done and with what taste,” he wrote to Gracie, who had also been invited but had found reasons not to come.

Even with the Balsans, he felt the need to work and spent much of his time in his room writing his book on India (“I hope I am not being an inordinate bore. I kept to my room most of the morning and again later and do not think that I interfere with their domestic life”). It was also a way of keeping disappointment at bay. Both the Balsans found him much changed, Consuelo telling her next visitor, Winston Churchill, that although he was a charming guest, full of anecdotes and wit, he was “sad and humble. The Fairy Queen [Grace] flouts him and laughs at him and now he is no longer the All Highest.”

Gradually Curzon emerged from his shell, remarking approvingly that Jacques Balsan (whom he had not met before) was much better than he expected. “They are an extraordinarily well suited couple, he is very intelligent and well informed, she is, as always, very sympathetic and sunny and sweet.” Grace, he hoped, would arrive soon; she had promised to come for the last three days of his visit—but yet again there was a cancellation. He went back to London in February, shedding tears when he left the Balsans and telling Consuelo that he had not had such a happy holiday since he was a young man.

On March 5, while dressing for dinner at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was due to speak to the university's Conservative Association, he suffered a severe hemorrhage from the bladder. The following morning before breakfast Grace arrived to bring him home to Carlton House Terrace.

It was quickly apparent that he was gravely ill. It is possible that he had had some inkling he might not live much longer: during the holiday with Consuelo he had told her that he constantly thought of Mary and had suddenly remarked, “I know that Mary will be the first to greet me in heaven” (“I hope that she will have got a comfortable and noble Mansion ready for him and precedence all arranged with the Authorities,” Churchill wrote to his wife when he heard this).

At Carlton House Terrace, Curzon lay in bed discussing and amending his will and compiling a long handwritten memorandum of forty-four clauses, detailing everything from the whereabouts of his papers to a defensive note about his expenditure of Leiter money. “Should the plea ever be put forward that the pictures [in his various houses] were purchased with the funds that would ultimately fall to my daughters, the reply is that I bought nearly the whole from funds belonging to me personally which I saved up for the purpose; and that if I had bought them with Leiter money, I had a perfect right to do so under the orders of the Court out of the allowance made to me personally by the Court.” The final result, together with a codicil, he signed on March 8 with his butler and nurse as witnesses.

He was operated on on the same day. Afterward he lay in Grace's big comfortable bed in her big comfortable bedroom, attended by Sir Thomas Horder, the king's doctor. There was no disguising the seriousness of his condition and Grace and Baba spent most of their time with him.

When Irene, who had been in bed with flu and a temperature of 102 two days earlier, heard that he was desperately ill, she drove up from Melton Mowbray. At the door of Carlton House Terrace she was turned away by a footman. She was so shattered by this final rebuff that she went straight to the Carlton Hotel, where she retired to bed for two days. In her autobiography, Grace gave as her reason for refusing Irene entry to the house that the arrival of a daughter so deeply estranged would lead Curzon to believe he was dying (that her own presence was so rare that ten days of constant attention might not give him the same idea seems not to have entered Grace's head).

Baba, with no mother and separated from both her sisters, miserable at seeing her father suffer and at the thought that she might soon be orphaned, was under intense strain. Apart from Grace, the only person she could really talk to, albeit by letter only, was Fruity, who kept in daily touch by note. Although she did not tell her father of this, Curzon had become aware of their growing closeness, for during these last days he told Grace: “I think Baba may marry Major Metcalfe.”

Fruity's steady, constant sympathy and understanding must have reassured Baba that here was a man who would always protect and care for her. “I just can't go to bed without letting you know how well I understand what you've been through today, my poor sweetheart,” runs one typical letter. “The uncertainty, the gloom, the shock of seeing your father worn out, fighting for his life—it has been just terrible. My dear one, I feel for you deeply.”

A week after the operation Curzon developed congestion of the right lung. As he fought painfully for breath it was obvious to the doctors and those around him that the end could not be far off. As he got worse, he asked to see the woman he had once loved so deeply, Elinor Glyn. The message (recounted later by Baba to Cimmie and from her to Elinor Glyn's daughter Juliet) was never passed on; Gracie's jealousy endured until the end. On March 18 he wrote a last letter—this final missive from the vast pile of his lifetime's correspondence an almost illegible protestation of loyalty to the king, who was about to set off on a Mediterranean cruise.

That day the doctors told Grace there was no hope and Sir Thomas advised her to tell her husband he was dying. “He is a very great man, and it would be wrong to deceive him any longer. He should be told the truth so that he may prepare his mind in his own way.” When Curzon asked Gracie what the doctors had said when she returned to his room she replied gently: “Darling, I'm afraid you are very bad.” Closing his eyes, he repeated the Lord's Prayer. They were the last words he spoke. The next day, March 19, he lapsed into unconsciousness and the following morning, at 5:30
a.m
., he died, with Grace, his brother Francis and Baba at his side. It was Baba's twenty-first birthday.

“Beloved Pansy,” reads a scrawled note from Fruity. “My poor child. I feel deeply for you, especially on such a day. What a birthday for you! My poor darling, every happiness should be yours on this day. But one thing, my love, there is, I feel sure, for each and all of us, only a certain amount of happiness that is to be our portion in this life and as now you are not being granted your natural share then it is
yet
to come to you and you will get it, I promise you.”

Irene, who had inherited her father's barony of Ravensdale, did not comment at all on his death. Instead, a note in her journal merely says: “Old Dandy sent to the Kennels, to my great grief.”

 

The funeral service was at Westminster Abbey on March 25. Curzon's coffin, made from a two-hundred-year-old oak from Kedleston, was covered with an antique red velvet pall embroidered with the Curzon arms in gold and studded with gold nails. His Order of the Garter, Star of India, Order of the Indian Empire and Victorian Order lay on purple cushions at the foot; the pallbearers were Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the lord chancellor, the speaker, the chancellor of the Exchequer, Lords Salisbury and Birkenhead, Asquith and Ramsay MacDonald.

There was a second, family service at Kedleston the following day when Curzon's coffin, like the coffins of past generations of Curzons, was placed in the white marble vault of the chapel he had restored, on a white marble shelf, beside the white marble effigy of himself that he had commissioned during his lifetime. Next to it was a space holding a postcard with the words “Reserved for the second Lady Curzon” in Curzon's handwriting in the thick blue pencil he always used. Two carriages and a dining car were engaged for the family and friends who traveled up. “Scatters Wilson who has come partly because he is in love with Lady Curzon and partly because it is on the way to the Grand National, Fruity Metcalfe who has come because he is in love with Baba Curzon,” wrote the author and diplomat Harold Nicolson in his diary. “They talk racing all the way up.” After the interment, the party returned to the house, where Nicolson noted seeing Baba and Cimmie. “Very upset. Very sweet.” Irene was not present.

Curzon's will, thanks to the emendations and alterations he had made just before his death, was an extraordinarily badly drafted document. Nevertheless, it made one thing perfectly plain: Gracie was to inherit virtually everything. To her went the remaining twelve months of the lease of I Carlton House Terrace and those contents not destined for Kedleston; to her went Hackwood (which had another eigh
teen months of lease to run) and all its contents, from horses, carriages, cars and chandeliers to pictures, tapestries and furniture; to her went Montacute House and its contents; she also received a jointure of one thousand pounds a year from the Kedleston rents. His daughters and his stepchildren, as Curzon pointed out, were amply provided for by their respective Leiter and Duggan inheritances; nevertheless, to his Duggan stepchildren he left five hundred pounds each “as proof of my affection.” His beloved Marcella inherited in addition the villa Naldera at Broadstairs, together with all its contents. The two castles, Bodiam and Tattershall, went to the National Trust, together with generous bequests for their upkeep.