The Viceroy's Daughters (4 page)

Elinor
would
have
made
an
admirable
stepmother.
She
taught
Baba
to
paint,
she
told
the
endless
stories
that
children
love
and
she
was
genuinely
fond
of
them
all.
Clayton's
health
was
declining
and
she
had
begun
to
cherish
hopes
that
if
she
was
widowed
Curzon
would
propose
to
her.
She
did
everything
she
could
to
cement
the
bond
between
them,
from
reading
translations
of
the
classics
to
interesting
him
in
the
spiritualist
séances
then
fashionable.
Being
good
at
psychic
games
such
as
table-turning
(when
“spirits”
were
invited
to
answer
questions
by
rapping
or
moving
tables,
in
darkened
rooms)
was
a
social
asset
in
those
days
when
the
physicist
Oliver
Lodge
had
made
“piercing
the
veil”
respectable.
Curzon,
like
most
of
his
friends,
enjoyed
this
dabbling
in
the
supernatural
and
Elinor
prided
herself
on
her
psychic
abilities.

Curzon's feelings were more complicated. In modern parlance, he blew hot and cold. Elinor was a bewitching mistress but his women friends, whose influence in such matters was powerful, disapproved of her. Some schisms, especially those inspired by politics, could be ignored, and the Souls did not allow their political differences to interfere with their friendships. But the female Souls were ferociously possessive of their “dear George” (shortly after her marriage, Mary had told her mother, “My path is strewn with roses and the only thorns are unforgiving women”) and they disapproved of Elinor. She did not come from their tightly linked circle, she was notorious for the sexual explicitness of
Three Weeks
(ironically, the only erotic book she ever wrote) and she took dear George away from them. Mary Leiter had at least been extremely rich.

Like Mary, Elinor was totally adoring. “Oh! my heart! to see you there master of those ten thousand people, calm, aloof, unmoved,” she wrote in her journal in early December 1910. “To hear your noble voice and listen to your masterly argument. To sit there, one of a rough crowd, gazing up at your splendid face and to know that in other moments that proud head can lie upon my breast even as a little child. Ah me! these are the moments in life worth living for. And what matter that sometimes you are cruel and aloof even to me. Have you not a right to be since you are entirely king of my very being?”

It was at this moment that Curzon chose to tell Elinor that their affair should end and that they should be no more than “tender friends.” One of the reasons, he told her, was the “chattering of servants.” Another was more probable: he was an ambitious man and he did not wish to present any avoidable weakness that might stand in the way of his return to high office. A mistress known for a book that had been castigated as immoral by reviewers and which had caused her exclusion from the grander house parties would offer plenty of chances for both scandal and ridicule. His parting present of a pair of diamond-and-emerald earrings did nothing to soothe her. “How can either you or I crush the longing in our veins for each other's arms and lips?” wails her journal. “I am free and you are free and now we must starve and ache because the situation is too difficult and interferes with your life.”

Elinor could hardly believe that Curzon's decree was final (“You in the prime of life with the red blood rushing in your veins”), especially after receiving a wistful letter from him. As she crossed the Atlantic on a brief visit to New York, her entry for February 15, 1911, records sadly: “I can never love you less. However you will, you can come back to me and I will love and soothe you and be tender and true.” These words came true sooner than either of them expected.

5

Enter Grace Duggan

The rupture with Elinor gave Curzon more time for his friendship with Nancy Astor, who still showed no sign of anything but complete marital fidelity. His letters, with their amorous but resigned undertone, show the extent of his devotion. “It has just come to me to say that I am truly dearly devotedly fond of you and that I wouldn't lose your affection and your confidence for anything in heaven above or the earth beneath,” he wrote just after Christmas 1910. But chaste adoration was not enough for Curzon and he soon resumed his affair with Elinor. She had no illusions as to the excitement which her voluptuous proportions could evoke in him (“he is a most passionate physical lover”) but she wanted her idol to love her as completely as she did him and she went to great lengths to please him in as many ways as she could.

She was a clever woman and she talked to political friends like Lord Milner so that she could discuss affairs of the day with perception and acumen; she read the Greek authors to whom Curzon had introduced her, she even indulged the broad vein of bawdiness which she had discovered lurked beneath what Margot Asquith called his “expression of enamelled assurance.” Just as the nude in art did not shock if it was given the pretext of a classical background, so writing that would otherwise be condemned as salacious could be accepted if presented with sufficient intellectual and historical gloss. Where
Three Weeks
outraged with its open description of adultery, the libidinous goings-on of fifteenth-century castle-dwellers and peasants as described by her friend, the respected medievalist Professor Thomas Lindsay of Edinburgh University, would not.

Lindsay responded admirably to her request for an essay on the more esoteric of these customs. “I'll not apologise for the very great coarseness of much that I have written,” ran his letter, “as you asked me not to withhold real information on that account.” The accompanying bundle of manuscript, covering such subjects as “Priest or Knight, the Better Lover?,” “Nudity” and “Indecent Games,” lived up to his promise, with its mingling of chivalrous custom, louche behavior and—of particular appeal to Elinor—its exposition of the Renaissance belief that the sexual act was not a thing apart but the
only
complete and perfect form of love.

While Curzon pursued his varied interests, the life of his daughters was one of routine, mostly revolving around governesses and schools and, for Cimmie, long months of treatment for her back which ultimately proved successful. The summers were spent at Curzon's villa, also called Naldera, at the seaside resort of Broadstairs, where their father would join them for a day or so.

In 1911 Curzon was turning over in his mind the question of “finishing” his eldest daughter, now sixteen. “I have been over to Paris to see about Irene's education,” he wrote to Nancy Astor in August 1911. “I plan to place her with a French lady to study certain aspects (only) of Gallic life.” In the event, he sent Irene to Dresden, noted for its music, buildings and general culture and, thanks to German links with the royal family and many members of the aristocracy, then at least as popular as Paris for the cultural education of a young woman. For Irene, music was to remain an abiding passion that not only gave her joy and consolation but influenced many future friendships—and love affairs.

She had been sent to Dresden with the children's governess as chaperone. At home, Curzon was occupied in interviewing a replacement. Baba wrote excitedly to Irene: “Darling sweet Nina, Miss L came this evening. We talked about lessons and after played ball, she has brought a bike with her! She seems very nice, she is so jolly, she does lovely painting on chiffon and does all sorts of nice things. We are going to take her around the woods this morning, she is very sad we have no dog or cat. Goodbye sweet Nina from your loving Baba.”

Perhaps the governess's influence caused Curzon finally to relent and allow Baba the dog she had been begging for—naturally, chosen by him rather than her. He selected one on a basis that to him seemed quite logical: the first dog had trotted confidently in and relieved itself against the red Foreign Office box, after which every other dog followed suit. The only one that did not was a Pomeranian. Baba named it Bobby.

 

Curzon believed that he led a quiet life, dedicated to duty in spite of constant pain and an ambition shattered by the debacle of his resignation as viceroy. “I am supposed to seek the footlights. Little do they know what a business it is to get me on to the stage. How many of them, I wonder, have any idea of the long hours spent in bed and the aching back, of the vicious and severe pain in the leg, of the fearful steel cage in which I have to be incased when I undergo any strain in which standing up is involved.” His belated earldom in 1911 did little to modify these feelings, while those for Elinor grew stronger. By the time she took a house in Green Street, Mayfair, to bring out her daughter Margot in the spring of 1912, Curzon appeared to be deeply in love again, marking his return with a sapphire-and-diamond ring to match the earrings he had given her earlier.

But the relationship was still on a sporadic and clandestine basis. Elinor was never invited to Curzon's large house parties at Hackwood, for instance, when up to twenty of his friends arrived with an equal or greater number of servants—and she was certainly not asked to the dinner he gave at the end of June 1912 to celebrate the completion of I Carlton House Terrace, attended by eighty-six of his friends, including most of the Souls and a miscellany of others ranging from potentates like Lord Derby to hostesses like Lady Cunard.

Instead, Curzon would dine with her secretly, though never as often as she wished, leaving her with the longing ache with which she was by now so familiar. She would sit waiting for a word from him. “I am listening—for what? a telephone ringing? it rang at that moment but it was only a shop. Here is the footman with a telegram—my pulse thunders in my ears but it is only an unimportant missive about tonight.” She did not fool herself. “What a man most desires to do
that he will find time for
even if he snatch it from sleep. Realise that if he does not write it is because writing is
not
what he most desires to do. He may love you just the same but the subtle thought of whether he makes you happy or unhappy does not enter into his scheme of things.”

By the end of July she had come to a clear vision and was chiding herself: “Fool to sit there and eat your heart out. Why live like a nun away from the world? forever brooding on one thought, the concentrated essence of fidelity to one man. He does not value you the more for it. He enjoys his life and his friends, his life is full of interesting things, he does not rebuff the admiration of women as you do of men.” It was true: to Nancy Astor he would respond immediately, especially if he thought there was the slightest chance of seeing her. “Faithful dog that I am I reply at once though it is past 1 am. Of course this is because I love and think of you and to hear from you means that faithful little girl has turned a thought to me.”

Nancy was never too busy for his daughters and often asked them to Cliveden. “Dearest Cim and Baba, It was so awfully kind of you to write me and I loved getting your letters,” came one note in February 1914 when she was indisposed. “Perhaps your Papa will motor you over next week just to see me in the afternoon. I shall write and beg him to do so because it is so dull lying in bed. I feel it is your duty to come and visit your old Governess, who has been so kind to you for many years. You and Baba will I hope be careful hunting. With a great deal of love, Affectionately Yours, Nancy Astor. Love to Irene.”

Elinor, meanwhile, began to see other men and in 1913 even, gently, to encourage their friendship. The following year, she decided to make herself less available and early in 1914 went to live in Paris where, thanks to French relatives and a court of admirers, she felt happy and at home. Curzon's devotion seemed assured: that spring, he commissioned a portrait of her by the fashionable society painter Philip de Laszlo and when his daughters asked for Elinor's address so that they could write to her, he gave it to them immediately: her influence could bring nothing but good to motherless girls.

In many ways, Elinor fulfilled his ideal of womanhood: she was beautiful, intelligent, discreet, she did not attempt to interfere with his life and above all—though she earned her living by her pen—she was not tiresomely independent. All his life Curzon spent much time and energy in trying to keep women in what he regarded as their proper place—drawing room, bedroom, boudoir and, if they were of the lower classes, kitchen. In the House of Lords he brought the heavy artillery of his classically trained mind to bear on their demand for the vote (“I believe that the great majority of men hold that female suffrage will be injurious to the Empire and the State”). He did concede that it should be the electorate rather than Parliament which should decide whether women got the vote, but as the electorate was entirely male there was little danger there.

He himself produced fifteen reasons why “woman suffrage” was undesirable, concluding with the effect on India if women were seen to have any hand at all in the government of the mother country. Small wonder that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was to note of Irene (in a letter to Venetia Stanley, the young woman he adored, a month after the outbreak of war): “The Curzon daughter seemed quiet and a trifle gauche. I expect he is rather an overwhelming father.” Curzon was even reluctant to ask women who openly disagreed with him on this important point to the great coming-out ball he was giving for Irene, writing plaintively to Nancy Astor: “Must I ask that red-haired little tiger cat Frances Balfour who abuses me on every suffragist platform?” Otherwise, he brought all his characteristic attention to detail to this important rite of passage.

The ball took place at Carlton House Terrace on May 4, 1914. Nothing was spared to make it a success. A supper room was created in the garden, its seventy-foot-long walls covered inside with blue canvas, lace curtains at its windows, eight chandeliers, the drawing-room carpet on the ground and with tapestries brought up from Hackwood hung on the walls. The first-floor drawing room, its floor cleaned, polished and waxed, was turned into the ballroom, with small gilt chairs for the chaperones all around. To reach it, a special covered staircase, lined in blue-and-buff muslin, was constructed from the pavement to the drawing-room balcony with its French windows. The library doors were removed so that this could be used as a passage through to the cloakrooms. Casano's band (considered the smartest), with twenty musicians led by the great man himself, was hired at a cost of forty-three guineas, including the bringing and removal of three grand pianos.

There were flowers everywhere—carnations and lilies of the valley on the supper tables, golden hanging baskets overflowing with white roses in the hall, massed hydrangeas in the fireplaces and orchids in every alcove—and almost as many dukes and duchesses: the Marlboroughs, Devonshires, Rutlands, Sutherlands and Portlands were among the fifty-two guests at the dinner party beforehand (the cost, noted Curzon carefully, was twenty-five shillings a head). The setting alone cost £438 6s 6d and Gunter's supplied supper for four hundred and a full staff of waiters for £230. The wine was from Curzon's cellars. “The Queen,” he noted, “drinks sparkling Moselle at dinner and supper, the King whisky and Berlin seltzer.” But at the last minute the royal couple had to absent themselves owing to the death of the duke of Argyll, Princess Louise's husband; instead they came to tea with Curzon and Irene that afternoon.

It was a polished and appreciated entertainment; as he told Nancy afterward: “People were very good about [it] and I think it repaid all the trouble.” Irene, dark and graceful, “with a great look of the mother she lost,” reported one society paper, wore the obligatory white with a single string of the magnificent pearls that had belonged to Mary. Unfortunately, as she knew no young men owing to her father's Victorian belief that these dangerous creatures should be kept away from girls until they came out, her only dancing partners were elderly uncles.

When war was declared on August 4, 1914, Curzon offered his services to Asquith immediately but was rejected. “Pitiful that at 39 one was thought fit to rule 300 millions of people, and at 55 is not wanted to do anything in an emergency in which our whole national existence is at stake,” he reflected bitterly. His children were loyally indignant for him. Baba drew a pen-and-ink sketch of the head of her father's nemesis, Lord Kitchener (now at the peak of his fame as sec
retary for war), marking it phrenologically, its different sections labeled with various qualities such as “misjudgment,” “short-sightedness,”
“ambition,” and “egotism.”

To Elinor, who had returned from France, he lent his holiday villa Naldera at Broadstairs. Here her daughter Margot would listen to the guns booming on the other side of the Channel. He also invited the Belgian royal family, whom he had met with Mary in the South of France, to stay at Hackwood for as long as they wished. Though the king of the Belgians returned to the unoccupied part of Belgium, his three children—Charles, Albert and Marie-José—remained at Hackwood throughout the war.

Baba was the one who saw most of them; she and Marie-José played piano duets together, were exactly the same age and remained friends all their lives. Baba disliked Albert, largely because of his unkindness to her beloved dog Bobby, into whom, to annoy her, he would attempt to stick pins.