Nancy Mitford (21 page)

Another good deed for 1961 was when, as she told Mrs. Ham, ‘I went to talk to 150 girls of twenty doing advanced studies are you impressed? For some reason I wasn’t really
frightened
and it was very enjoyable. The Professor who took me said “voilà—je leur ai donné un bon petit Noêl!”’

Like me, Nancy received innumerable questionnaires about our friend Evelyn Waugh. In October 1960: ‘An American who is writing a book about Evelyn uses me as principal
adviser
. Such questions as, is Freddy Furneaux-Smith (
sic
) Sebastian? Why didn’t you and Diana Cooper become Catholics? Did Tony Last go abroad to read Dickens because he couldn’t
visualize
life with Diana Cooper? simply pour in. Without telling actual lies I don’t discourage his notions. “We are to visit Garsington which will be great for us. All those places where the bright young set used to have fun!”…’

‘I said to the Wid (Mrs. Hammersley) “Look, the swallows are going.” “I can’t imagine why they ever come.” Oh dear, nor can I. Luckily I got boiled in Venice before the weather turned there.’

Luckily, too, while so many friends were failing her aged hostess Mme Costa was still going strong. From Fontaines Nancy wrote to Mark, 16th January, 1961: ‘I was ordered down here by Mme Costa and gladly came—after about a month in Paris I stifle. It’s funny—ten years ago I used to think they were the oldest people in the world here. Now Mme Costa is 86, and M. de Rohan Chabot 94. He still says—enfin sole—when it appears, on Friday. The maid, Thérèse, is 93 and Jeanne Rödel’s mother 95. The two latter keep nearly dying and then coming to again. One is lapped in luxury and for some reason never bored at all…’

‘How I wish I had a farm—I always do when I’m down here in this rich beautiful
country
… I think country life is preferable to town life only if one can have a big house like this and unlimited servants (here there are eight and a wonderful daily). Otherwise one might get lonely. The alternative would be to farm oneself, but I don’t think these farms ever come on the market. The farmers round here are immensely prosperous and collect incunables in their spare time! Most awfully nice people. No doubt we shall both end up in towns despite all these day dreams!’ (To Alvilde Lees-Milne).

At all seasons she rhapsodized about existence at Fontaines: ‘If this place is ideal in the autumn, it is fairyland in the spring… I never heard such a dawn chorus—the cuckoo is here though not yet the nightingale—nests everywhere, and the larks! On our moulin walk they are literally deafening: seen from the moulin the house is buried in blossom. Oh how I crave to live in the country—but where?’

‘The
Sunday Times
have offered me
£
500 (most I’ve ever had) for a piece on French
country
life. I propose to describe Fontaines exactly, only all names disguised. I don’t think Mme Costa would mind, do you? If I ask her beforehand it makes such a thing of it. After all
people
are for ever describing their friends, en clair, in mémoires. Of course you (Mrs. Ham) will figure largely—Suez, etc—Mrs. H I thought. Please comment. I’ll let you read it first if you like.’

The resulting
Portrait of a French Country House
was reprinted in her most personal book of essays
The Water Beetle
, dedicated to Mrs. Hammersley. ‘I do hope we shall all meet in the next world,’ she told her, ‘though Evelyn predicts Limbo for me.’

The next world: for the time being Nancy was perfectly satisfied with this one in spite of occasional grumblings, not meant to be taken seriously. Fundamentally sceptical, she longed for evidence of an after-life. Who better than Evelyn Waugh, a staunch Roman Catholic, would enlighten her about his faith? ‘I wrote and asked Evelyn exactly what happens to us when we die and he wrote four pages of minute detail,’ she informed Mrs. Hammersley (13th June, 1961). ‘I bet you don’t know. I asked a whole table of R.C.’s here and they hadn’t a clue (as English tourists always say about everything). Very interesting what he tells.’ (23rd June, 1961) ‘I’ve put Evelyn’s masterly exposé into the archives. Briefly it is this. We die and are judged at once. Saints (?) go straight to Heaven. Sinners straight to Hell. The rest of us get varying
sentences
in Purgatory. At the Last Trump those still remaining on earth are judged. Those who are serving their sentences have to join up with their bodies (like finding one’s coat after a party. I hope the arrangements are efficient). The only bodies who rose again at once are Our Lord’s and Our Lady’s. The body (the good) is US because we do not, like the Mahomedans, believe that body and spirit are two separate things. I wrote and asked Evelyn why, if the body is us, we are not told to take care of it but on the contrary encouraged to tease it. He said that Cyril Connolly’s idea that the body ought to be fed on foie gras and covered with kisses is not
regular
—the body must be mortified. Oh yes—the end of the world is also the end of time. Isn’t it interesting! I can hardly wait.’

The unpalatable facts of death were forced upon her with disconcerting frequency. Much
as she ‘minded’—and she was easily moved to tears—she deprecated the display of grief. ‘I shall be very much surprised, and rather cross, if you die before me,’ she told Mrs. Hammersley. ‘You know how you are always dreaming of my demise—well, I dreamt it the other day. Marie had laid me out and people were défiléing past my bed and I heard the Colonel’s faithful Pauline saying “elle n’a plus son joli sourire”. Are you in floods, heart of stone?’

About her own demise she could speak light-heartedly, especially to one much older than herself. But from now on the consciousness of absences became intensified, for so many of her close friends, Mme Costa, Princess Dolly Radziwill, Tony Gandarillas and Mrs. Hammersley, were older than herself. Since ‘that Russian injection for eternal youth’ Tony Gandarillas had ‘suddenly begun to look a hundred’. The shock was greater when they were of the same age, or younger. To Alvilde Lees-Milne she wrote (8th February, 1962): ‘You will be sad to hear that George and Elizabeth Chavchavadze have been killed, motoring home from the funeral of Lulu’s brother. Thank goodness they were killed outright. Poor George had already had one bad accident and no doubt ought to have given up driving. Oh dear I
mind
. It so happens I’ve seen a lot of Elizabeth lately—she was such a comfortable friend—George seems to have run into the back of a lorry which braked suddenly to avoid two colliding lorries… (19th February) It was all very terrible—ghastly details—but the thing is they were killed at once. Poor Denise [Bourdet]. The only paper that could be found had her telephone number so she was rung up at 5 a.m. to be told two people were dead and who were they?

‘The funeral was the most beautiful I ever was at. Russian and R.C. priests together in
perfect
harmony. Russian choir. One felt transported and consoled. A huge turn-out of course, every friend, and true sadness. (When I think of C. of E. funerals—what Debo calls the utter ghastly drear of them—I feel it would be worth turning R.C. to have one like Elizabeth’s!) Of course the two coffins made it particularly moving. They were buried at Passy. Who next? Dolly without a doubt. I mind
terribly
.’

‘I shall have to go over soon and see Mama. The bother is they won’t let me back without being vaccinated which terrifies me. Stupid I know. So I must put by some days to be ill before coming… (17th March) It seems old Blighty, as well as everything else, is now a dangerous smallpox area and they won’t let me back unless I’m vaccinated… Marie is terribly against and keeps bringing in the paper to show me photo graphs of people who have died
dans d’atroces
souffrances
of vaccination (not of smallpox!)… Our splendid Bardot got on to television and described exactly what happens in the slaughter houses and there’s a terrific fuss. 30,000 people wrote to her and the ministry is obliged to act. I love her for it.’

Evelyn Waugh had dedicated
The Loved One
to Nancy, knowing that she shared his
appreciation
of the horror-comic, an English blend of the farcical and the macabre—in her case at a discreet distance. She recoiled from the formal lying in state of friends and shunned the
chapelle ardente
for which the practical French had a cult she could not comprehend. It amused her none the less. When the famous Misia Sert died her friend Princess Dolly Radziwill had reported: ‘Mlle Chanel was there doing up the corpse. “Alors, Coco était en train de faire ses ongles—j’ai trouvé ça très bien de Coco, seulement je te dirai—elle I’avait un rien trop maquilée.”
Literal
Loved One
.’ And after the demise of Comtesse Edith de Beaumont, ‘she lay in her ballroom in white lace and everybody popped in here after. “Pour moi c’était le dernier des bals”, said one, and another, “White lace, such a good way of using it up. I never know what to do with old lace.”’

If she were plunged in gloom, she quickly rose to the surface: no use repining. The
reticulated
pattern of her existence varied slightly from year to year: visits to her mother and
sisters
in England, Scotland or Ireland, to Mark Ogilvie-Grant in Greece, to Contessa Cicogna in Venice, to Mme. Costa at Fontaines, and sometimes to Princess Dolly Radziwill or Tony Gandarillas in the South of France.

All of Nancy’s friends remarked that she and her sisters seemed never so happy as when they were united: they would rush together with screams of delight and with neither eyes nor care for anyone else. Patrick Leigh Fermor recalls: ‘It was tremendous fun being with three of the sisters together. They would gang up by twos against the remaining one for teasing purposes—more in pious commemoration of schoolroom usage and custom than anything else. When it was Debo and “Woman” (Pam) against Nancy, they would call her “the Old French Lady” or “
Poor
Nancy, she’s a frog you know!” If Nancy should ever use a French word in conversation, automatically and expressionlessly Debo would say “
Ah oui!”
or
“Quelle horrible surprise!
” often both, e.g.: Debo: “Come
on
, old French lady!” Nancy (appealing to a third party with a sigh): “Poor child, she’s wanting, you know.
Un peu toqué
…’ Debo “
Ah oui? Quelle horrible surprise!
”’

‘When Nancy and Debo combined against Woman, both would imitate her rather
idiosyncratic
way of talking, which I think she loved. The basis of Nancy’s onslaughts on Debo, when her turn came, were accusations of illiteracy (unfounded, in my theory, because, though never
seen
to read, she’s so full of surprises that Xan Fielding and I determined long ago that she must be a secret reader: cupboards full of books discovered after decease, we suspect, like all the empty bottles found after a secret drinker dies.)’

‘When young the great thing was, by appealing to Debo’s love of animals, to wring her heart until tears rose to her eyes “welling up” was the expression used, just as “mantling” means to blush (“Did you well up?” “I’m not sure, but I think I mantled.”) Debo was
nicknamed
“Nine”, as if she had not developed since that age. Nancy would wring her heart and make her well up about a poor little spent match, alone and unloved in a match box, etc.’

‘At Lismore Nancy found a postcard in the village shop, depicting in sombre colours an old Irish peasant sitting sadly and pensively on the right side of a grate. “Look, Whistler’s Father!” she exclaimed. It was wonderfully apt in colouring, style and position, and Nancy sent off a score or so to various friends.’

‘In Fermoy, Co Cork, she was spell-bound by a wax dummy in a dress-shop window,
discoloured
, flyblown, with horse-hair shingle moulting, wearing a 1925 cloche hat and a low-waisted short skirt of the period, and half-melted, so that the figure was stooping over in a drunken lurch. Whenever plans were dis cussed she said, “Do let’s go and have another look at that lady in Leigh Fermoy!” She and Eddy Sackville and I went to see a marvellous garden belonging to Mrs Annesly at Annsgrove (Cork). There was some giant gunnera like mammoth
rhubarb, dangerous, man-eating looking plants. Later, when someone came under unfavourable comment, Nancy said, “The fiend! Let’s throw him to the gunnera!” In the same garden I sat on a bench which promptly came to bits. “Look what the boy’s done now!” Nancy said. I pointed out that both legs were rotted hollow. She looked and said, “Ah well, perhaps there were faults on both sides…”’

‘It was nice hearing Mitfordese in so unpolluted a flow “When do they
loom
, the fiends?” “No sewers to dinner today, I trust.” “It’ll all loom in the wash, I dare say.” The fire was
getting
low. Nancy peered at the grate and said weakly, “I note no bellows.” At a picnic on the edge of a wood a huge fire was built whereupon Nancy gathered a small handful of sticks, threw them on and sat down firmly, saying “No Mohican me”.’

In a short article about Ireland Nancy wrote that she had not been prepared for the
primness
of Dublin, nor for the plainness of the colleens. ‘Where are the shawls and petticoats and pretty bare feet? They must have gone to Hollywood.’ In reply to her enquiries about the Little People a keeper told her that the Russians were driving them away and nobody saw them now. But she found the country-house life unremittingly pleasant ‘the guests move in for a long stay with their dogs, their children, their fishing rods and needlework’—and concluded: ‘One is happily back in the nineteenth century.’

Already she was consulting Sir Hugh Jackson about another subject she had in mind, the embryo of her
Frederick the Great
. 12th October, 1961: ‘Might not
Frederick’s Frenchmen
make an amusing book? Of course the démêlés with Voltaire have been described, better than I could, by Carlyle and Macaulay, still the modern public may not know much about them and there are other very funny episodes one could describe (rather improper I fear, but still—!) I think if I went slowly my eyes would stand up to it. Do tell me if you like the idea.’