Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (9 page)

By the age of eighteen, Nancy was desperate to leave home. It didn’t occur to her to volunteer as a nurse as Diana had done. She already knew that she wanted to be a poet so the regulated life of a VAD would be intolerable to her. Her only alternative, as far as she could see, was a purely traditional one. Marriage would force her parents to settle some money on her and it would set her up in her own house, where she could write, entertain and dream without interference.

Poor Sydney Fairbairn was almost accidental to the equation. And even if Nancy had moments of clarity when she knew ‘it was an idiotic thing to do’, she couldn’t resist the deliverance Sydney promised. ‘It was wartime,’ she later wrote in her diary. ‘[I] did it, went through with it all so as to get away from Her Ladyship and have a home of my own.’
³

Her enthusiasm for the plan was reinforced by the gratifying displeasure it gave her mother. Maud had been hoping for a more extraordinary match for her only daughter, and like the Duchess of Rutland she’d dared hope as high as the Prince of Wales. More selflessly, she worried that Sydney and her daughter were disastrously unsuited, and as the wedding approached she tried, as gently as she knew how, to question whether Nancy really wanted to marry him. But already the press were buzzing with reports of a most interesting engagement between Mr Sydney Fairbairn, an officer with the Royal Bucks Hussars and ‘one of the best looking in his regiment’, and Miss Nancy Cunard, ‘the only child of two tremendously rich people [and] one of the catches of the season’.
⁴
So on 15 November 1916, out of a dogged combination of honour and perversity, Nancy became Sydney’s wife.

*   *   *

It was with hindsight, and much accumulated resentment, that she would later refer to the twenty months she had lived with Sydney as ‘a detestable period’, a grim ‘caesura’ in her life. During the first weeks of their marriage, visiting friends and travelling, the couple had managed to skate over the gulf that lay between them, but by the summer of 1918, when Sydney’s leg was sufficiently healed for him to return to the war, Nancy could barely endure his company. Her nerves were grated by his talk of war and sport, and by the army friends who filled the drawing room of their little Mayfair house. She felt more confined than she ever had been at Maud’s. It was almost impossible for her to focus on writing, and she possessed no skills with which to change her situation. Not only was Nancy confrontational and intemperate by nature, while she was growing up, she’d been given no example of how two people might accommodate each other. The only child of parents who had spent as little time as possible together, Nancy had scant knowledge of how to make a marriage work. She knew only how to run away.

Her parents had met in 1895 in New York, where Sir Bache had come looking for a rich and fertile American wife. He was already forty-three and feeling the urgency of producing an heir for Nevill Holt, the magnificent estate in Leicestershire that he’d inherited from his grandfather, the shipping magnate Samuel Cunard. Living quietly in the countryside with his dogs, his horses and his hobbies, Sir Bache had failed to meet a suitable wife. But with the costs of running Nevill Holt rising every year, he was now willing to follow the example of so many other British aristocrats in offering his title as a trade for American money.

Miss Maud Alice Burke was dazzlingly desirable to Sir Bache on every count. Aged twenty-three, she was blonde, blue-eyed and spirited; her little bird-like body, piquant pink and white complexion, ready wit and inquisitive mind made most of the English women he knew appear stolid and dull. The fact that she came with a $2 million dowry, more than capable of plugging the bottomless expense of Nevill Holt, made her irresistible. The normally slow-moving, inarticulate Sir Bache was pitched headlong into the first sexual romance of his life.

As for Maud, she, too, was in a hurry to marry. Growing up in San Francisco, she’d had an unconventional family life. Her mother, widowed when Maud was in her teens, had surrounded herself with a succession of protectors, and it was to one of these, a rich and cultivated businessman called Horace Carpentier, that Mrs Burke had entrusted the education of her only daughter. Carpentier apparently made a habit of adopting young girls as protégées, and although there was no scandal attached to these relationships, they were unusual. Under Carpentier’s guidance, Maud grew both intellectually and socially precocious, and, in relation to other young girls of her generation, sexually aware. By the age of twenty-one she had entered into an affair with the Irish writer George Moore, whom she’d met on a trip to Europe.

It had been a passionate experience for them both: Moore was captivated by Maud’s intelligence and her unexpectedly challenging sexual confidence; Maud was excited by Moore’s experience of the world, his distinguished literary reputation and his evident desire for her. Yet she was no bohemian: she was seeking respectability as well as love, and in her first attempts to secure a husband, she made a fatal miscalculation. Returning to America, she met the grandson of the late King of Poland, and his enthusiastic interest led her to assume they were about to get engaged. She allowed gossip to leak into the press, only to discover that Prince André Poniatowski had his sights on another, more socially elevated girl. She was forced to issue a humiliating correction and was still smarting from this when she was introduced to Sir Bache in New York. Although he was neither brilliant, like Moore, nor regal, like Prince André, she convinced herself that the shy spark of enthusiasm in his heavy features held the promise of a romantic nature. Most importantly, Sir Bache Cunard would make her an English Lady.

Less than a year later, when Maud gave birth to Nancy on 10 March 1896, she knew she had made a mistake. But she remained undaunted. Declaring with brutal clarity that motherhood was ‘a low thing – the lowest’, and that she would never get pregnant again, she moved on to planning a brilliant social career for herself, with Nevill Holt as her theatre of action.
⁵

The house itself was beautiful, a long grey-gold building of crenellated walls, towers and cloisters. Sir Bache revered its four-hundred-year-old history; indeed, Nevill Holt was the love of his life. But Maud thought it cluttered and gloomy, and since it was her money that was being used for its upkeep, she saw no reason why she shouldn’t remodel the house to suit herself. Ruthlessly, she stripped out the duller Victorian furniture; she introduced light and colour into the rooms with oriental rugs and modern silk upholstery, and she repainted walls and woodwork, including some historic oak panelling.

Maud’s renovations caused Sir Bache almost physical pain. He was beginning to feel like a stranger in his own house, even more so when Maud began to entertain on a grand scale. She held large dinners, trawling the best local families, including the Manners, for her guest lists, and organized weekend parties (or Saturday-to-Mondays as she learned to call them) for the smart new friends she met on her trips to London. Within a short time she was regularly playing hostess to writers like Eddie Marsh, Max Beerbohm and Somerset Maugham, as well as leading politicians such as Balfour and Asquith. According to the ambitious San Franciscan socialite Elsa Maxwell, it had become a ‘social benediction’ to be a guest of the vivacious Lady Cunard.
⁶

Sir Bache had little in common with Maud’s new set. He disliked their loud, clever talk and the laxity of their morals. At Nevill Holt, sleeping arrangements for the guests were famously helpful to those engaged in love affairs. Increasingly Sir Bache took himself away to his workshop, where he immersed himself in the metalwork that was his passionate hobby, or disappeared on long shooting and fishing trips in Scotland. ‘I don’t understand what is going on in this house,’ he said, after returning home early and finding Maud’s guests still riotously installed. ‘But I don’t like it.’
⁷

Maud, too, was often absent from the house, shopping, travelling or enjoying a discreet tryst with one of the many men rumoured to be her lovers. And as both parents diverged on their separate lives, little Nancy found herself stranded in the gulf between them. It was normal for children like her to be looked after by nannies and governesses, but not to be so deprived of family life. Diana Manners had grown up among a tumble of siblings, friends and relatives, and had had a doting, if occasionally distracted, mother. Nancy, however, was left on her own for weeks, even months, at a time, with only the staff to take care of her. An early photograph, taken when she was about five or six, shows her standing in the great doorway of Nevill Holt, a tiny figure, poignantly dwarfed by the grandeur of her surroundings.

Even when both her parents were home, Nancy rarely saw them outside the designated hour when she was taken downstairs in a white lace dress to be quizzed on her progress in the schoolroom. Nancy knew enough from the very few children of her acquaintance – her cousins Victor and Edward, and the Manners children at Belvoir – that this was not how other families behaved, and she harboured the guilty terror that her parents would have loved her better if she had been a boy. When Maud offered her chocolates from the lavish box that was always open by her side, Nancy sometimes averted her face, wishing for embraces, not sweets.

Later she described herself as a detached, solitary child, ‘wondering much in silence how life was going to be’.
⁸
She didn’t know how to fill the huge empty spaces around her except, increasingly, with acts of rebellion and fantasies of escape. And she became more angry and more lonely with the arrival of the formidably named, and formidably disciplinarian, governess Miss Scarth.

Miss Scarth appeared suddenly when Nancy was about nine, replacing a high-spirited young Frenchwoman who had been much loved by Nancy, but considered ineffective by Lady Cunard. The testimonials Miss Scarth brought with her, including one from the mother of Vita Sackville-West, commended her as an expert teacher, but to Nancy she seemed a tyrant, rapping out French verbs and historical dates with the aid of a steel ruler, enforcing cold baths and porridge every morning and restricting her favourite outdoor treats, such as paddling in the large pond close to the house.

Scarth became a monster, the first of many in Nancy’s life, and her regime induced in Nancy an implacable hatred of authority. For the rest of her life she would associate food with punishment, haunted by the image of congealing food sitting on her plate and Miss Scarth’s insistence that she could not leave the table until every scrap was eaten. Hating her governess as she did, Nancy retreated inside her imagination, reading incessantly and writing secret stories and poems. In the grounds outside the house she created a world of private places: a hollowed tree, a ditch she filled with her special treasures – a strangely shaped flint or a pretty glass bottle.

During these childhood years her closest confidante was George Moore, or GM as Nancy learned to call him. Although he and Maud were no longer lovers, Moore was a regular visitor to Nevill Holt, and to Nancy he became a substitute father. Sir Bache loved his daughter, but it was an awkward, baffled love. He had little idea how to communicate with her except on the subject of horses – at his insistence Nancy was taught to ride almost as soon as she could walk, and at the age of six she was ‘blooded’ in her first hunt.

GM, however, talked all the time. In his easy, garrulous way he quizzed Nancy about the books she was reading and the childish poems she was writing. When the weather was fine he took her on long walks through the grounds and local countryside. They made an odd couple – little Nancy in the absurdly smart outfits Maud insisted she wear, GM in his bowler hat and tightly laced boots – but Nancy considered Moore to be her ‘first friend’, and when she was old enough to understand the gossip that circulated (inaccurately) about him being her biological father, she half yearned for it to be true. Moore, too, was very fond of Nancy and worried that she wasn’t happy. Much as he adored Maud, he could see that she was an unnatural mother, and it distressed him to hear Nancy announcing with unnerving calm, ‘I don’t
like
Her Ladyship.’
⁹

But still Nancy craved her mother’s presence. When Maud was away life was suspended: ‘Things will not be very bright,’ she noted in her diary after seeing her mother depart on yet another jaunt, ‘nothing much [will] happen.’
¹⁰
When Maud returned the house was suddenly brilliant with weekend parties, games of tennis and croquet and bridge, and ‘beautiful exciting ladies … in shot silk and striped taffeta’.
¹¹
Nancy loved to spy on the adults and to be given her own special ‘duties’, checking the supplies of Russian cigarettes, books, sweets, writing paper and flowers in each of the guest’s rooms. If ever Maud had a whim to show off her daughter, Nancy was ecstatically compliant. She allowed herself to be dressed up as a Velázquez Infanta in black velvet and lace; she posed for one of Maud’s sculptor friends as ‘the soul of childhood’ with a little mob cap covering her fair hair and an owl perched on her shoulder. Willingly she showed off her prodigious stock of facts. Some smiled indulgently at this sharp-featured performing monkey, others felt her precocity bordered on the monstrous. When Nancy was older, Maud took her to London for occasional trips to the theatre and opera. Eddie Marsh was present when she saw her first performance of
The Marriage of Figaro,
and was startled by her peculiarly adult response to the production: ‘Between the acts Nancy said in her high little squeaky toneless voice, “The Count is exactly like George the Second. The Countess I should put a little later – about 1790.” What are children coming to?’
¹²