The Viceroy's Daughters (41 page)

 

Baba in her turn regaled him with gossip, telling him of Victor's proposal to Irene even before Victor knew he had been turned down. “First and foremost Victor!!!” wrote Halifax on April 17. “Dorothy and I have done nothing but smile whenever we have thought of it. Somehow it never would have occurred to me. I did not know he might be thinking on those lines. I would give a great deal to hear your nocturnal discussions on this with Irene. I see she has written to him and I have duly forwarded it. Do tell me if you can when you write as to the decision. I should hate to think of his poor little feelings being hurt. But it certainly is an odd idea.”

In early spring the Luftwaffe stepped up its night raids on London and the southeast while Germany's success in other theaters of war kept the thought of invasion alive. Raids or not, Londoners did their best to lead normal lives, and Baba's admirers were no exception. Walter Monckton, with whom she had been on terms of friendship since first they met, seemed now to have become a would-be lover. After they had both dined with the Willingdons in Lygon Place, Walter Monckton came back with Irene to the Dorchester to see Baba, and as Irene recorded: “After talking in my room they went into her bolthole and lay on the bed and chattered till all hours!!!” A letter from him in April certainly hints at a sexual relationship.

“Darling Baba,
Not
‘hurtingly faithless!' How can
you
say that when you keep me tantalisingly suspended between frying pan and fire. The fire just doesn't begin to burn. The frying pan fries only too efficiently. But I agree toto corde with Edward. It is your bounden duty as a friend to extricate me from these perils. But it is
you
who are faithless. You extricate the Averells and the Bills but you allow this poor old man to sizzle—with cool detachment.”

After nine months came the last and greatest raid on London. On May 10, 1941, in the bright moonlight that became known as “bombers' moon,” 550 German bombers dropped hundreds of high-explosive bombs and over one hundred thousand incendiaries. Fourteen hundred died that night—the most for any single raid—every railway station was hit and the chamber of the House of Commons reduced to rubble. It provoked from Fruity, who had come to accept their separateness, a passionate plea to Baba, begging her in the name of sense and judgment not to come to London. He wrote to her from White's Club because his room at the Ritz, where he had spent the night, was unusable.

It was terrifying—a foot of ceiling and windows all over my room, rug, chest etc crashing into the passage buried in a heap of rubbish. No lights, no phone, no
anything
. One bomb dropped when I was in bed in the garden outside my window. The streets today are a foot deep in glass.

It is not fair on your three children if you do come up.
Please
believe me and act accordingly. Death is round
every
corner here in a night like last. It is
even money
if you escape, with at least your eyesight gone through broken glass. I implore you
not
to make the excuse of “dining with Walter,” “hearing Walter speak” or dining with Cazalet or people like the Halifaxes. These people have
got
to be here, doing their work. If you had work to do then I'd say do it and stay but having absolutely none it is very wrong for you to come near London.

That is all I can say. Your life is your own and you can throw it away if you so wish—it is your choice. But remember you are the mother of three children.

 

A few days later, the windows of Irene's house were blown out again.

As the raids trailed off, work in the shelters diminished and Irene, with her experience of public speaking, began giving talks. She spoke on Abyssinia at various army camps and depots, lectured on East End shelters and Christianity at Malvern College, and addressed the joint annual meeting of the Lincoln branch of the National Council for Women and the Central Girls' Club on the need for a religious faith as powerful as the German people's belief in Hitler. She always tried to look smart and when, on June 1, clothes rationing was announced in the Sunday papers, she could not help regretting the number of clothes she had given to the maids at the Dorchester.

Gossip about Halifax in Washington filtered back through their friends. While Dorothy, warm, charming, tactful and hardworking, had become a favorite, Halifax's reserved, patrician manner gave the appearance that he was standoffish and uninterested. As he was known as a foxhunting man, he had been invited to have a day with a pack in Pennsylvania about which he had written enthusiastically to Baba (“a very nice-looking pack, huntsman an Englishman who used to be with the Warwickshire, whipper-ins American, all very well turned out, a great many people in red coats”). No doubt this enthusiasm had made a sharp contrast with his usual rather aloof persona, for the press had lambasted him for indulging in such a luxury pursuit in wartime.

Victor Cazalet unhappily confirmed this. “He will never slip into the easy ways of P. Lothian, who was beloved by everybody,” he wrote in his private diary; and he urged Halifax one evening to ring up Roosevelt “just for a chat. Americans love this.”

Whether or not the ambassador did attempt such an out-of-character move is not known, but his long letters to Baba continued, filled with news and comment as well as plans to see her again. When Hitler invaded Russia he wrote, “I hope that as in the past, Russia may prove an unprofitable investment for invaders.” In another letter he noted presciently: “The U.S. Navy is all ready, as they think, for a scrap and most of them are just longing for some incident that will settle it. I shall be surprised if they don't get it.”

 

At home, Irene had driven down to Eton on June 28 and, after watching cricket, had taken Nick to Denham, where Colonel O'Shea walked them around the house and garden. Everything was in apple-pie order: O'Shea's men were making a trout farm in the gravel pit, the lawns were mown, and where two bombs falling nearby had hurled debris all around Cim's sarcophagus the holes had been filled in and everything smoothed away.

A few days later she went to a dinner at the Dorch given by Mrs. Ronnie Greville. They were joined by Victor Cazalet, who had arrived back a week earlier from the U.S. after a ten-hour flight from Gander, Newfoundland, in a converted Liberator bomber. After dinner he took Irene back to his room, where they discussed his proposal of marriage. For the romantic Irene, who longed for love if not passion, what Victor offered seemed an unhappy substitute: it appeared that he was yet another of the men who saw her as a powerful aid to his career rather than as the love of his life.

“He said such bald cold things: that he knew he would get a governorship if he had a wife. But he was scrupulously fair about his side of the bargain—one's freedom, etc. I asked God to give me ten days over it.”

Less than a week later, after she had presented the prizes and certificates at Parson's Mead School, given them a talk and retired to bed weary, her mind was made up. Victor appeared in her room at 11
p.m
. in his dressing gown; when he attempted the mildest physical contact she felt repelled. “Sickness when he wanted to shake my hand and offer me some small kiss of affection. It is no good. It cannot be done. I was frozen stiff. I could scarcely touch him.” Next day she wrote a final letter of refusal to Victor, then went out to Harvey Nichols and bought two hats.

 

With the Blitz over, London was much safer. Baba reappeared, having called Irene to ask her to fix a dinner party for her, and then went to visit Tom at Brixton. As often after she had seen him, she returned uncommunicative. Her emotions on seeing this ex-lover who had so grossly deceived her must have been a jumble of remorse, longing and guilt; and when he told her he hoped to go to France with Diana after the war “to achieve some measure of happiness” it must have struck deep.

Yet she continued to do her best to achieve his release, or at least secure better conditions for him in prison, attempting through Halifax to reach the prime minister and Herbert Morrison. Though Halifax had been thoroughly in favor of Tom's detention—“I am glad to say we succeeded in getting a good deal done about fascists, aliens and other doubtfuls, Tom Mosley being among those picked up,” he had written in his diary in May 1940—his devotion to Baba meant that he commiserated with her over not being able to get Tom's situation improved.

Irene found staying at Little Compton difficult. Baba's authoritarian approach jarred on her, especially when it came to dealing with Nanny—a friend and virtual member of the Curzon family for over forty years. Baba wanted Nanny to stay at Little Compton and look after the Metcalfe children as well as Micky, and Andrée to get a job for the duration of the war; Irene felt Nanny should do as she wished. Neither wanted to stay at Little Compton, though they agreed to do so for the moment, and Irene's maid Ida also gave notice, saying “she did not like the Compton atmosphere”—Irene felt it was because too much work had been piled on her.

She also found it difficult to still the undercurrent of envious resentment when Baba read extracts from the letters sent by Halifax and Dorothy. “Why does she get all this priceless and exquisite adoration, in its richness and splendour, but it does not come my way? I must be at fault somewhere. She gets the best of both worlds, even though her life with Fruity is misery.”

There was no doubt about the adoration. Halifax was—for him—in a fever of anticipation at the thought of seeing Baba again. “I just can't imagine what it will be like when I first see you again in the old Dorch,” he wrote from Washington on July 27, 1941. “Do pray very hard that nothing may interfere.” A week later he was telling her: “I shall aim at getting off with a Friday night at Chequers and spending Sunday with you. Unless I arrive Saturday or Sunday I shall go straight to London and hope to find you in the Dorch!”

Baba's relationships were a dominant theme in the lives of those who knew her well. Like the rest of the world, Irene and Nanny were mystified as to the exact nature of her friendship with Halifax. “We could not fathom the Halifax–Baba thing. Baba was in a secret glow of delight as the Foreign Office phoned her Lord Halifax was coming in a bomber and would arrive today and stay in London [Halifax's return was in fact delayed for several days].” When Irene dined with Leo d'Erlanger, a Little Compton habitué, they spent hours talking about her sister—d'Erlanger said that Baba “should have grabbed Jock Whitney and got a good settlement for Fruity.” And when Irene drove the brilliant lawyer William Jowett to London after a weekend at Little Compton Baba's situation came up again. Jowett's advice was that if Baba really wanted a legal parting of the ways she should offer her husband a two years' separation and, if he refused to cooperate, cut off his money.

Baba, meanwhile, was seeing as much of the Halifaxes as she could and, Irene felt, keeping them unnecessarily to herself. Once again, she felt hurt, this time when Baba refused to allow her to accompany their party to see the air-raid shelters at Bermondsey—Irene's stamping ground—saying it would make too many. Even Victor Cazalet recognized Baba's proprietorial attitude to the Halifaxes, and when he asked them to dine invariably asked her too—often without Irene. Despite their failed romance she was seeing as much of Victor as ever. In August she stayed with him at Great Swifts, his country house at Cranbrook in Kent, and in early September dined with him to meet the Chaim Weizmanns as well as often seeing Victor informally.

The Dorchester was still central to all their lives, more so now that Sibyl Colefax, for whom entertaining was as much a part of life as breathing, had hit upon the simple but effective idea that became known as “Sibyl's Ordinaries”—dinners, generally on a Thursday, after which guests would receive a discreet bill the following morning. As the war drew on, the cost of the Ordinaries rose from ten shillings six-pence to fifteen shillings, the wine served was Algerian and, eventually, sherry ceased to be offered before dinner.

The first of these paid dinners was on September 18. Around the table at the Dorchester was Lady Colefax's usual eclectic mix of politicians, writers and personalities. Irene, Adrienne Whitney, Juliet Duff, Gladwyn Jebb, Thornton Wilder, Mrs. Gilbert Russell, Sir Roderick and Lady Jones (the writer Enid Bagnold), Roger Senhouse and Robert Montgomery. Harold Macmillan failed to turn up and Baba, also invited, turned her down in favor of an evening with Victor Cazalet and the Halifaxes, soon to return to America.

At the end of the month, largely to further Baba's efforts on behalf of Tom Mosley, the Halifaxes gave a small dinner party consisting of the prime minister and Mrs. Churchill; the chief whip, David Margesson, and Baba. “Winston started by coming and plumping himself down on the sofa at once and speaking of Tom,” runs Baba's account of it. “I had asked Edward to talk to him about the prison and efforts to get them moved to the country. This had been done and Winston was charming, most ready to listen and saw no disadvantages in putting the couples together but Herbert Morrison [the home secretary] will be the stumbling block. He is hard, narrow-minded and far from human in a matter like this, and in any case he has a special dislike of Tom.

“One rather telling remark I thought was when I said it was awful to see someone like T in prison and Winston said: ‘Yes, and it may be for years and years.' ”

The Halifaxes returned to Washington on September 20, 1941, flying first to Lisbon, where Halifax wrote to Baba, “I so long to hear your news, and your voice on the telephone at Bristol seems a terribly long time ago. But I build my castles for February [when they hoped to return to England].”

Back in Washington, the long, numbered letters resumed, with their adoring messages. “I long to get your first letter and I am marking off the days again until the time comes for my next trip over. I am keeping your last note for a little longer until I know it all by heart. Then it shall be destroyed!”