The Viceroy's Daughters (21 page)

Soon these dramatic events would pale into insignificance. At home, Cimmie, who had had kidney trouble for several months, had begun to feel other symptoms of illness. She was passing water all the time and had a severe pain in the lower part of her abdomen. Thinking it might be appendicitis, she went to her doctor.

It was an era when operations to remove the appendix were medically fashionable but riskier than today because there were as yet no antibiotics. Cimmie had had a presentiment that her condition might not be straightforward, telling Lady Mosley and Andrée that she was frightened. “I don't think I'm going to get well,” she said. To Andrée she added: “I have been fearfully unhappy.”

Her operation, performed on May 9, 1933, appeared to go well. After it, Tom went straight to Diana's little house for lunch. One of the other guests—only six could fit in the dining room—was Unity Mitford.

The following day, Miles gave the house party on Lake Maggiore a shock by reading out of the
Continental Daily Mail
the news that Cim had been operated on for appendicitis the day before and was doing well. Irene, who wired Tom in a frenzy, got a reassuring response, although she wept when she realized that it probably meant no Cimmie at her wedding. “Baba and Fruity mean nothing to me at it,” she wrote that night.

Another telegram from Tom told her that Cim had had a bad night but that progress, though slow, was definite. Irene's worry was such that she could not sleep; the following morning she and Miles wired Tom to ask whether they should postpone their wedding or go ahead with it, as planned, either on May 22 or 23. It crossed with a telegram from Tom that arrived in the early evening: “Cim very seriously ill. Baba and doctors do not suggest your coming home. Will wire further developments.”

Irene, demented with worry, tried to ring Tom's mother's flat, a long-drawn-out performance in those days when every call had to go through an operator—several, in the case of a foreign country. As they spoke, Tom arrived from the nursing home nearby and, taking the telephone from his mother, told Irene that Cimmie's appendix had perforated and peritonitis had set in. “Her strength was poor but she was holding her own. He would not urge me to come home but I must do what I felt like,” records her diary.

Though terrified of flying, Irene was determined to get home as quickly as possible; within minutes, Miles had found out the times of flights and connecting trains. Her maid Violet packed one small suitcase for them both; at seven the following morning, May 15, they began the long journey by train and plane, with several changes, finally arriving at Croydon airfield at 9:05
p.m
., to be met by “sweet Baba, a little lone figure.” They went directly to Deanery Street. “Miles seemed to like my house and old Winks,” wrote Irene, “and we were so happy with each other that last evening before doom broke over us.”

At seven-thirty the next morning, May 16, Lady Mosley telephoned. Cim was going downhill. After a better night she had had a relapse at 7
a.m
. and was being given saline injections as she was too weak for a blood transfusion. Without disturbing Miles, Irene dressed quickly and rushed to Lady Mosley's flat, where they ate a hurried breakfast. Tom, who dropped in for a quick wash, told them not to come to the nursing home. Then Baba appeared, icy cold in manner, and walked back there arm in arm with Tom. Fruity was the next arrival, and for an hour Lady Mosley and Irene had to listen to him until they crammed on their hats and made their way to the nursing home, where they sat in the waiting room while telephones rang and nurses scurried in and out.

Tom appeared, to ask Irene wretchedly if she wanted to see Cim—or would Irene rather remember her as she had been, radiant and lovely? Breaking off suddenly, he asked Irene and Andrée to fetch the flowers that had been sent from Denham to Lady Mosley's flat, to put beside Cim's bed. Baba sat on a chair placed directly outside Cim's door. After a while Miles and Fruity turned up; Irene sent them to Lady Mosley's flat for lunch, going back there herself for a cup of coffee before sending the two men off for a walk around the park and telephoning Nanny Hyslop that the outlook was bleak.

“Oh! that afternoon of horror,” wrote Irene in her diary. “Ma [Lady Mosley], Andrée and I crouched outside that door while my angel breathed her last few hours. Poor Tom came out once or twice and said he could get nothing through to her. If only the doctors had warned him she was going he had so much to tell her and now he was trying to get through to her how magnificent her life had been in its splendor and fulfillment. She had said to him that morning: ‘I am going. Goodbye my Buffy,' which she always said when he walked away through the garden at Denham.”

Even at this extreme moment the jealousies and antagonisms between oldest and youngest sister made themselves felt. “Baba sat in broken solitude in the bathroom and try as I would to hold on to her hand she turned away from every advance.” What Irene wrote next in her diary explains this coldness. “Ma told me, alas! alas! Cim had got her to read my last letter to her and so of course she read: ‘I only want you, not Baba at my wedding. Miles is a worker, thank God! not like Fruity. If Miles turns to Baba and not you to turn me out smartly I shall kill him.'

“My precious got weaker and weaker and oh! her stertorous breathing in the last half hour was torture to hear through the crack in the door where I could just see in the mirror Tom murmuring to her his last words of love.”

They learned from the doctor that from the start Cimmie had put up no sort of a fight. Both mentally and physically, he told them, she had never lifted a finger to live. All of them felt they knew why: Cimmie, who had fought for so long to keep her marriage going, believed that she had finally lost the battle and that Diana Guinness had taken her husband from her. From then on, those closest to Cimmie viewed Diana as directly responsible for her death.

Cimmie's body was taken to Smith Square, where lilies, roses and lilies of the valley surrounded the coffin, with a garland of roses plaited by Lady Diana Cooper trailing from it. Lady Mosley, Miles, Nanny and Irene knelt to pray at the foot and Irene swore to her dead sister that she would never fail her.

That day Georgia Sitwell, Tom's former mistress and wife of the Mosleys' friend Sacheverell, who had spent a wretched night thinking of Cim, went to see Andrée. “Despite her hatred of Tom she said no one knows how wonderful he has been. He spent every minute with her for a week. He talked to her for hours and hours as she lay dying and Andrée thinks she understood.”

Miles and Irene, who had been comforting the Mosley children, did their best to keep up the children's spirits through lunch. After it, Miles went to rest in the spare room. When he came down Irene could think of nothing to say to him. She sent him home and tried to get hold of Elinor Glyn, to whom she and Cimmie always turned in times of crisis, but she was out. Baba drove Tom down to lunch at Denham before they visited the Cliveden chapel together, where Cimmie's body now lay. Later Baba and Tom came to dine with Miles and Irene at Deanery Street, where they talked of Irene's trousseau, with Baba telling Irene how to improve her style.

So good was the rapport between them that evening that later, in the drawing room, Irene poured out all her worries over her seeming inability to respond to Miles after their blissful time in Italy. “Baba's sweetness, her understanding of marriage were a revelation to me and gave me back the balance and calm I was losing. I could not believe I had found such common sense and sympathy in her after all those years of coldness and before the men came in, we talked on Tom, the children, Diana Guinness in a barrierless spirit of understanding. I thanked God! When she phoned Tom was already in bed at Denham. With renewed peace in my heart, Miles and I got back to understanding and Italy, all barriers down and he said indelibly lovely things to my broken spirit.”

The next day she gave away to her maid Violet, her housekeeper Mrs. Shaw and the other servants all the clothes in her wardrobe that Miles, determined to smarten up his future wife, had ruthlessly discarded at the villa on Lake Maggiore.

 

Baba's extreme closeness to her bereaved brother-in-law was already beginning to worry Fruity—Irene noticed how edgy they were with each other but supported her sister. Baba must go to Cliveden with Tom if he wanted her to, said Irene; they must stand by and patiently wait as she was the one person on whom Tom depended for every
thing.

On May 19 there was a short memorial service for Cimmie at St. Margaret's, Westminster, Tom carrying gardenias and the children's posies of flowers laid on strips of brocade. “Unbearably sad,” wrote Georgia Sitwell. “I howled.” Miles, who had tactfully declined to be present, waited outside for Irene in his car and drove her home for lunch, where they were joined by Baba and Fruity. After getting her hair and nails done, Irene went to see Elinor Glyn, who had adored Cimmie. “We had a heartbroken talk and she read me her article on Cim for the
Sunday Graphic
. Elinor is always a great and devoted soul to us children.”

Life gradually resumed its pattern. Baba did her best to find her sister appropriate clothes for the new married life ahead and Irene nervously met her future mother-in-law and sister-in-law, Betty, over tea. Then came a visit with Miles to Baba and Fruity at their country house at Coombe in Surrey, where Irene's nerves began to jangle yet again when she sensed that her sister and her fiancé were dissecting her together after dinner while she and Fruity were playing the gramophone in another room. When she tackled Miles, he told her that Baba, known for her chic, could give her good advice on clothes that would set off her beautiful face. “I only say all this to you because I'm so proud of you,” he added. Irene melted, and allowed Baba to take her to Fortnum and Mason to choose lingerie, and to Cartier for a wedding ring on the pattern of her own.

However, she could not suppress her anxieties. Miles's indifferent health and languidness worried her—and her deepest emotions were still for Gordon. Again, she poured her worries out to Baba, who became scared and miserable for her sister in her turn. But the practical Baba was determined to do more than wallow in Irene's neuroses. She went to see Gordon, evoking from Irene the grateful diary entry: “She has helped me marvellously. I was nearly out of my mind.”

What chiefly worried Irene was Miles's apparent coolness. He was often aloof and distrait, complaining of fatigue and treating her, she thought, more like a sister than a beloved. Lady Askwith also sensed problems, writing in her diary: “Liked Irene immensely but felt anxious. She is very charming and easy to get on with and sensible. Pray God it goes right.”

The fatigue Miles complained of masked something more serious. Still in love with Lady Portarlington, he was finding it more and more difficult to sustain this engagement undertaken largely for the sake of his career. Slowly, it was beginning to unravel.

By the end of May 1933 Irene feared the worst. Their relationship seemed to be splintering against the rock of Miles's indifference. As it disintegrated, there were endless agonized discussions, icy kisses and quarrels that left Irene traumatized but Miles unmoved. “Nothing ever remains or makes any impression on my mind or troubles me for any length of time,” he remarked after one such contretemps, bouncing off her bed and leaving the room. Again, it was Baba who resolved the situation, while Irene and Miles were staying with the Metcalfes. After another tortured talk Baba went in search of Miles and found him sunbathing by the tennis courts. She told him she thought he should leave.

It was the end. There was a painful talk with Irene in his room before lunch and another in the woods afterward, where Miles apologized pitiably for hurting her, but saying that unless either party felt they could not get on without the other it was hopeless. Both wept bitterly and Irene fled in order not to say goodbye.

Baba tried to comfort her sister with the ambivalent remark that she must not be so miserable—after all, it was not as though Miles had been expressing undying love—but that they must strive to remain dear friends. As she pointed out to their luncheon guest, Lord Castlerosse, who had come to play golf with Fruity, there were many ways in which Miles was not right for her sister.

Irene's feelings for Miles remained strong for some time. When she heard Baba talking to him on the telephone she felt a terrible pang of misery. She had wasted years of her life in an unhappy and fruitless love affair with Gordon and the thought of what could be her last chance of happiness slipping away demoralized her. Lady Askwith too was sad when she received a letter from her son saying that the engagement was over. “I am very disappointed and unhappy,” she wrote in her diary. “I liked her so much—I thought Miles's happiness was secure and my anxieties over. Well, God's will be done.”

Soon, it was Irene's turn to help her sister. Staying with Fruity and Baba at Sandwich for golf in mid-June, she was startled when her sister returned unexpectedly to the house, weeping. Fruity had become furiously jealous over one of their golfing four, who had been invited to supper. Irene talked to Fruity, who would not listen, then she wrote to him, spelling out every point with a lucid clarity which she was incapable of bringing to her own affairs: Fruity's age compared with that of Baba, the unreasonableness of expecting such a beautiful and intelligent woman to go through life without being spoken to or made much of. He was lucky, she told him firmly, to have had such single-minded love for so long and he must not allow it to be crushed by a molehill. With Baba's approval, she pushed the note under Fruity's door.