Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (7 page)

If Diana’s circle had become addicted to the distractions of dancing and drinking, she herself began flirting with other addictions too. When the strain of nursing and the exhaustion of partying became too much, she increasingly quieted her nerves with a dose of ‘jolly old chlorers’ (chloroform) from the local chemist or with an injection of morphine. Everyone was doing it. While hashish and the very new import, cocaine, had dubious associations with crime and bohemia, morphine was deemed purely medicinal. Packets of paper impregnated with the drug were marketed as gifts for the boys in the trenches, whilst to those waiting at home it was a catch-all remedy for insomnia, anxiety and every variety of physical discomfort.

Diana craved the ecstatic stillness she got from morphine, the feeling that she had become ‘utterly self-sufficient … like a Chinaman, or God before he made the world … and was content with, or callous to the chaos’.
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She came to crave that detachment even more urgently when Raymond Asquith, one of the dearest of her friends, was due to be transferred from officer training camp to the Front in the spring of 1916.

Raymond was fourteen years older than Diana and had long been the undisputed leader of her male friends. ‘We all liked him the best,’ she admitted simply.
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He was handsome, poetic and clever, and although far out of her orbit when she was a teenager, he had been tender towards her earnest precocity and towards her star-struck parroting of his opinions. Even though he had got married in 1907 to Edward Horner’s sister, Katherine, the bond between them had grown. Diana felt most naturally herself in Raymond’s company, and it was almost inevitable that as she became older, their intimacy deepened into something like love.

Neither would do anything to hurt Katherine, and their relationship remained perfectly chaste, but in the destabilizing atmosphere of war, restraint was harder to maintain. Before Raymond’s departure to the Front became imminent, Diana raced down to visit him at his training camp in Folkestone, careless of what anyone might think. She might have loathed Moore’s groping, but she longed for Raymond’s touch. They met in a local inn, and what passed between them was clearly passionate, for afterwards he wrote, ‘Even into this foul and dingy inn the recollected glory of your beauty flings its unquenchable beam – and your darling darling charity of last night.’ Diana responded to her own ‘darling’ Raymond in equally impetuous terms: ‘I have loved so utterly your last two beseeching letters. I was longing for you to claim me again, and now you have done it fully.’
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They did not become lovers; whatever ‘charity’ Diana offered to Raymond, the affair was not consummated, and that fact allowed her to believe she was doing nothing to injure his wife. On the contrary, her love for Raymond made her feel closer to Katherine, and it was with the latter that she shared a desperate, pain-numbing needle of morphine on the night that Raymond was transferred to France.

Nor did Diana let her secret emotions interfere with the continuing drama of her public flirtations. She was constantly in the company of other men, and while this was a diversion and a camouflage for her true feelings, it was also part of wartime culture. Diana believed it was only honourable to take care of her officer friends when they were on leave, allowing men like Patrick Shaw Stewart to kiss her, accepting their declarations of love as though they had an actual future together.

Again, everyone was doing it. Between 1914 and 1918, across all the social classes, there was an increase in sexual activity outside marriage as soldiers on leave sought out physical consolation and many more women seemed willing to offer it. Some of these couplings led to hasty weddings, some to unwanted children. With birth control remaining clumsy and inadequate, thick rubber condoms for men, toxic douches for women, the proportion of illegitimate births during these years rose by 30 per cent in Britain alone.

Diana, however, retained some of her former caution. Even though she’d learned to scorn her mother’s hypocrisy in matters of sex she was scared to risk her virginity, even for the sake of a doomed officer. She fully expected to keep this carefully tended asset for the night of her marriage, and in moments of candour she admitted to herself that she was rarely tempted otherwise. Diana found sensual delight in many things, in dancing, drinking and in lovely clothes, but while the teasing dance of seduction was delicious to her, she recoiled from the more committed, messy prospect of sex. Even when she liked a man enough to allow him up to her bedroom in Arlington Street when the Duchess was absent, she kept their love-making within very specific constraints.

Of these men it was Patrick Shaw Stewart who demanded most, begging Diana over and over again to let him into her bed, even if she would not marry him. But it was Duff Cooper to whom she permitted the most. Duff had the advantage of being constantly on hand – his government-protected work in the Foreign Office kept him in London, and out of the army. But in ways that Diana found hard to identify, he was also very attractive to her. He fell far short of Raymond’s heroic beauty, his head was too large for his small feet and hands, and the downward cast of his eyes had an almost melancholic aspect. In the company of strangers he could also seem bookish and gruff. Yet, alone with close friends, and especially with women, Duff came alight with a witty, passionate ebullience and he had a power to charm that was disturbingly effective.

Duff adored women and, thanks to his close relationships with his mother and sister, he understood them well. He also prided himself on being a sexual connoisseur capable of running simultaneous affairs with a chorus girl, a titled lady, or the wife of a painter. However, he had long claimed that Diana was his ideal and, even before the war, had been writing her archly sentimental letters, in which he cast himself as her adoring troubadour: ‘As for loving you best in the world, I think that might happen all too easily. I am really rather frightened that it will, for I feel that you would be terrible and have no pity.’
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It was in a similarly extravagant vein that he wrote to her on 23 June 1914, concluding with the unknowingly but horribly ironic farewell, ‘Goodbye, my darling – I hope that everyone whom you like better than me will die very soon.’
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Death, of course, did come very soon, and Diana was increasingly reliant on Duff to console her as, one by one, the men with whom she had danced and flirted before the war were killed or injured at the Front. He was tenderly protective of her grief, writing to her in 1916, ‘Your little face was so thin and sad tonight and I wished so to be alone with you and tell you how I loved you.’
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He discovered too that his initial flamboyant devotion was deepening into a more adult kind of love. After a day spent visiting St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey in March that year he wrote in his diary that she had opened his imagination to ‘lots of things … I had never noticed before … The pleasure of doing that sort of thing with Diana is indescribable.’
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And while Diana still yearned for Raymond, she began to fall in love with Duff. Even his bad habits had a charm for her. He gambled and drank too much, and incorrigibly lusted after other women, yet it gave her a pleasurable feeling of release to fight with him over his flaws. Sometimes Diana worried that she lacked passion, that her deepest emotions were blocked. Even in the most bitter wrangles with her mother, she rarely shouted or slammed a door. Rowing with Duff, however, she felt her emotions pour out in a satisfyingly clear current: during one argument in 1915 she actually hit him, and hit him so hard that his lip bled.

The ugliness of the scene aroused her, even more so the reconciliations that followed. With many people Diana was nervous of being forced into intimacy; dogged by her childhood fear of appearing shallow or dull she much preferred playing to a crowd. Alone with Duff, however, it was easy to talk and react, and with him too she felt a rare sexual confidence. He clearly desired her, but the fact that he never forced himself on her encouraged her to become more creatively responsive. One evening he came to her room as she was getting dressed for a tableau vivant – a popular entertainment during these years, in which decorative young women posed in costume to raise money for the war effort. Diana was wearing an ornate Russian headdress and ropes of pearls, and when Duff begged her to undo the bodice of her dress so that he could admire her, half-naked, in her finery, she gave him a performance worthy of Maud Allan.

Duff found Diana’s combination of seduction and chastity to be very aphrodisiac: ‘She … understands the game and how to play it … There is a great deal to be said for the love making that sends one away hungry.’ Blind to the irony of his own double standards, he noted that her dance of withholding and yielding kept his feelings at an exquisite pitch. The women who allowed him ‘excessive intimacy’ inevitably produced in him a reaction of ‘contempt or disgust’.
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Diana was grateful for Duff’s tact, yet she was beginning to fret about her cautious and self-conscious virginal state. She judged herself to be lacking in poetry and generosity, especially when compared to the behaviour of some of her friends. Two in particular, Iris Tree and Nancy Cunard, were apparently using the war as an excuse to abandon all social restraint. Although a few years younger than her, they ran with the wildest crowds at the Café Royal and the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho. They rented a secret studio in the bohemian district of Fitzrovia, where they held riotous parties, and were often in the company of male strangers, with whom, it was said, they were recklessly intimate.

Diana was in some ways irritated by their behaviour, which she considered extreme and naive. When she visited their studio she was appalled by its squalor – the beds were unmade and the floor was littered with the detritus of parties: empty champagne bottles (broken at the neck to save the trouble of pulling a cork), overflowing ashtrays and, in the bathroom, traces of blood, semen and vomit. But she was reluctantly impressed by the number of lovers that Nancy and Iris appeared to take. ‘They have more courage than me – and can seize an opportunity and hug and crush it against their palates irrespective of the taste and they are very happy while I go starved, and hesitating and checking my every impulse for fear of losing my pedestal of ice.’
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She felt old and anomalous. Another more passionate woman would surely have yielded to Duff’s seduction. Another woman would surely have made love to Raymond while she’d had the chance in Folkestone.

But such a chance would never come again, for on 15 September 1916, Raymond was shot on the battlefield of the Somme as he was leading his men out of their dugout. His was only one of hundreds of thousands of lives claimed by that summer’s most bloodily futile battle. All over Europe women were receiving letters and telegrams, informing them of the deaths of their husbands, sons or lovers. Yet Diana could think only of Raymond. The pain was excruciating: ‘My brain is revolving so fast, screaming, “Raymond killed, my divine Raymond killed,” over and over again.’
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After the deaths of other friends, she had been able to weep for a few harrowing hours, then stoically return to her nursing and the nightly tarantella of denial. The loss of Raymond, however, was unendurable.

In the past Diana had suffered from occasional depression – days of dark listlessness she couldn’t explain – but misery now settled into her like a toxin, a ‘squalid low’ emotion that prevented her from sleeping or concentrating on work.
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This time Duff couldn’t help her. He had eventually persuaded her to explain why Raymond’s loss had been so very terrible, and while he had been ‘moved and amazed’ by the revelation of Diana’s secret love – he too had adored Raymond – his sympathy had inevitably been replaced by jealousy and resentment.

He grew emotionally distant, noting harshly that grief was making Diana look ‘tired and worn’ and he lost patience with her sexual reticence. Painfully he wondered what caresses she had permitted Raymond but denied him. When she clumsily attempted to reassure him that of course she loved him best ‘among the living’ he was furious. ‘How’, he taunted her, would he ‘know that was true’ since she refused him what he desired.

The two of them were actually spending more time alone together: dining in Duff’s little flat in St James Street, walking through the streets of London, taking little jaunts to the countryside with picnics that Diana had carefully prepared. Yet often their quarrels made these occasions hateful, and by mid-November 1916, Diana suggested they would be better apart. ‘Duff dear I cannot bear it at all you will no longer help me with my moods or be patient with my tired ways. You will not even let me lie quietly without raging at the little I sometimes needs must deny you.’
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They were reconciled, yet still the quarrels continued. Duff lost £170 at a single sitting of chemin de fer, and she told him despairingly that it was final, ‘our relationship can never be the same again’.
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When Patrick Shaw Stewart confided his continuing determination to marry Diana, Duff reacted with a shrug of equanimity, already wondering if he might be falling in love with another woman.

But in June 1917, he and Diana found themselves suddenly clinging to each other, as close as they had ever been. The massively depleted British army had finally introduced conscription, and was even extending the call-up to men in government-protected jobs. Duff was one of them, and when he heard the news he couldn’t help a surge of wild elation. Sitting behind a desk while others fought and died, he had craved ‘the experience and adventure everyone else has had’.
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Yet excited as he was, he knew that the odds were terribly against him surviving, and the knowledge that he might never see Diana again refocused all his love and tenderness. As for Diana, the fear of losing Duff blotted out her lingering grief for Raymond. Schooled in the nightmare calculations of war, she began to count up, obsessively, the amount of time they had left together: ‘I knew that for a little time he would be sent to a cadets’ training college. I would see him less and less until he went to France. Then, with fair luck, once or twice on leave then Never never, never.’ In real terror for her own mental state she wondered, ‘Who will keep me sane,’ when she had lost him, as she surely would.
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