The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (39 page)

Diana rejected
her mother’s ‘chronic eligibles’, as she called them. She did not want to marry someone with ‘coronets on their fingers and coronets on their toes’. She wanted to marry an ‘Unknown’. Lord Rocksavage bored her; his conversation, she reported to a friend, consisted of ‘three words, adaptable to any remark: “Oh,” “Really,” “Right-ho!” ’ Bobbety Cranborne, ‘with his loose gaping mouth’, was unattractive; and she ‘despised’ the Prince of Yugoslavia, describing him as ‘a shiny little black thing’.

But she had never imagined that Violet would force George Gordon Moore on her. Moore, despite his many millions, was not eligible. He was married and thought to be of ‘Red Indian’ descent.
In private, her parents
referred to him as Little Big Head.

In asking Diana to encourage his interest, Violet was sweeping aside her principles; not only that, she was breaking every one of her own strict rules. She knew Moore to be of dubious moral character. In the spring of 1914 she had attended a dance at 94 Lancaster Gate. The numbers of single unchaperoned women had shocked her: ‘GM and Sir J are running a bordello!!!’ she told Charlie the morning after.

Violet was also riding roughshod over her daughter’s feelings.
Diana
loathed George Gordon Moore – or George Gordon Ghastly, as she called him. He was the very last person she wanted to encourage.

They had met at a house party
in the summer of 1913. The house, Stanway, a beautiful Jacobean manor in Gloucestershire, belonged to the Earl of Wemyss, the head of the Charteris family.
The director of a merchant bank
, Lord Wemyss had put up the development capital for Moore’s railway company; after making a large sum of money from his investment, he had introduced the American to his friends. His imprimatur, as Diana recalled, meant that the rumours circulating about Moore were ignored.
‘His riches were evident
but maybe an optical illusion, so his countrymen said. Harsh things they whispered – “Kicked out of the States”, “Just a crook”, but we all believed in him, especially the Charteris family, whose protégé and patron he was.’

The moment he saw Diana, Moore was captivated by her – as most men were. She was recognized as a great beauty.
At dances before the war
, Winston Churchill and Eddie Marsh played a game based on Marlowe’s line: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ Standing together at the edge of the dance floor, they would allocate the debutantes a tally of ships. Only two faces earned the full thousand – those of Diana Manners and Clementine Hozier, Churchill’s future wife.

Diana was not just beautiful, she had a presence, an ethereal quality about her, which drove both men and women to startling raptures as they struggled to capture it.
Enid Bagnold
remembered seeing her for the first time coming down the stairs like a ‘muslin swan’: ‘her blind blue stare swept over me. I was shocked – in the sense of electricity. Born in the city I wanted to storm, the Queen of Jericho swept past me.’ Others wrote of ‘her hair, pale gold and with the delicate texture of ancient Chinese silk’ and her ‘love-in-the-mist eyes’. To her admirers, part of her magnetism was that she was brilliantly exotic.
Raymond Asquith
, the eldest son of the prime minister, described her presence at a house party at Lord Manners’s home, Avon Tyrrell, as being like an ‘orchid among cowslips, a black tulip in a garden of cucumbers, nightshade in the nursery’.
Her beauty
,
Cynthia Asquith recalled, had ‘that festal quality which made every occasion she graced a gala. “Lights Up” was the stage direction at her entry, and when she left the room “brightness fell from the air.” ’

After the party at Stanway, Moore, who was sixteen years older than Diana, pursued her relentlessly:
‘I understood very little of what he said
, but I caught his unclear accents of admiration,’ she remembered, ‘and he courted me in his own exaggerated way, although he had a wife and children. He gave me to understand that these hindrances could be liquidated and that his every living hour and his vast fortune would be dedicated to me – to me and Sir John French.’

Describing Moore as a ‘most unusual man
, Red Indian in appearance with straight black hair, flattened face and atomic energy’, Diana found his attentions suffocating. Everything about him repelled her – his accent, his stocky physique, his lack of sensibility and education. He had no knowledge of the works of poetry and literature that enthralled her, and to which she and her circle of friends constantly alluded. Diana was fey and naively romantic; Moore’s passion, particularly his sexual longing, terrified her.
In a letter to Raymond Asquith
, she likened his attentions to a ‘vile torrent of gravy and steaming putrefying blood’. To her horror, he was prone to pounce; ‘O Raymond, it was so sullying, almost mutilating and scarring,’ she wrote after he had tried to kiss her.

Among Diana’s circle, the war was already loosening social conventions.
At 8 Fitzroy Square
in Bloomsbury, two of her closest friends, Iris Tree and Nancy Cunard, hosted parties that were notorious for their debauchery. Convened at the last minute for officer friends home on leave from the Front, they turned into orgies. Diana always declined invitations to attend the parties. She disapproved of sexual licentiousness. The morning after one party, she went round to Fitzroy Square to help clear up. The squalor disgusted her. Everywhere, there were ‘champagne bottles broken at the neck to save the trouble of drawing the cork’, ‘pools of blood and vomit’, and ‘frowsty unmade beds’.

Diana’s reticence about sex added to her allure.
‘She was probably the only virgin there,’
Duff Cooper commented ruefully after
attending a gallery opening with her. Patrick Shaw Stewart, another of her admirers, was constantly trying to persuade her to marry him or, failing that, at least to go to bed with him. ‘You, you see, always want to keep (1) me (2) your old virginity. Whereas I always want to get (1) your heart and soul (2) your worshipful body.’

The thought of having to ‘make nice’ to the lascivious George Moore was abhorrent to Diana. Yet, as she realized, she had no choice but to go along with her mother’s diktat:
‘My brother John
was the last male issue of our noble house and the trenches were certain death,’ she remarked grimly, looking back on the episode:
‘To get my brother
to GHQ was her obsessing hope. She thought that only I could coax this boon out of Moore.’

Diana saw Moore at every opportunity throughout that winter. To do so necessitated leading a schizophrenic existence.
At her mother’s insistence
, her time was split between Shad Thames and Mayfair. If Diana was assigned to a morning shift, Violet would arrange tea parties at Arlington Street so that she could see Moore for a few hours before returning to Guy’s for the evening shift. On her days off, Violet forced her to go to the theatre and to the opera with him.

Encouraged by her apparent interest, Moore showered her with gifts.
Among them, as Diana recalled
, was ‘an ermine coat to the ankle (my mother chose it from Jay’s), a monstrous little monkey called Armide with a diamond waistbelt and chain, Maupassant’s works in full morocco, countless
éditions de luxe
, and a cream poodle called Fido cut en papillon with pom poms and bracelets of fluff and a heliotrope bow’. Twice weekly, he sent her a box, ‘the size of a coffin’, full of Madonna lilies;
and he gave her jewels
too: one, a gigantic sapphire, was said to have belonged to Catherine the Great. ‘All this had to be accepted,’ Diana wrote to her son many years later. ‘Not difficult to accept, you’ll say, but I really did hate him.’

It was bad enough having to accept an embarrassment of gifts from a man who repelled her, but it was the dances that Moore held in her honour that Diana found unbearable.
‘I was very young
and couldn’t cope at all,’ she remembered.

They took place at 94 Lancaster Gate.
Nicknamed the Dances of Death
, because no one knew which men would be alive when the next dance was held, the parties were bacchanalian. Moore spared no expense. Interior decorators were summoned to create a theme for each occasion. One evening, Bakst’s vibrant set designs would adorn the ballroom; on another, erotic drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. At every dance, hundreds of purple orchids and pink camellias, grown in hothouses and specially shipped in, festooned the tables.

Moore left it to Diana and her friends to choose the guests. Held behind ‘barred doors’, and limited to an exclusive fifty people, the dances quickly earned a reputation for excess.
‘Parents were excluded
. We dined at any time,’ Diana recalled: ‘The long waits for the last-comers were enlivened by exciting, unusual drinks such as vodka or absinthe. The menu was composed of far-fetched American delicacies – avocados, terrapin and soft-shell crabs … The dancing, sometimes to two bands, negro and white (and once to the first Hawaiian), so that there might be no pause, started immediately after dinner. We kept whirling to the music till the orchids were swept away in favour of wild flowers.’

During dinner, Moore insisted that Diana sit next to him. When it was over, he would become jealous if she danced with anyone else.
‘The parties were the delight
of my friends but I, who could not like him because of his passion for me, found the position acutely painful,’ she remembered. Her friends steered a wide berth. While they had no qualms in accepting the American’s hospitality, they did not like him either.

Cosseted alone with Moore, Diana was forced to keep up the pretence of flirtation for hour after hour.
Mindful that her brother’s life
might depend on how well she performed this charade, she had to put up with endless turns around the ballroom, letting him ‘murmur love or Chich-techicher-chich-chich hotly in my ear as we shuffled and bunny-hugged around’. Escape, unless she wanted to spoil her friends’ enjoyment, was impossible.
‘I wanted to leave
at a reasonable hour, drive twice around Regent’s Park with a swain and be dropped home at an hour compatible with hospital duties the next morning.’ But the minute she left, Moore would turn down the lights and dismiss the band. ‘When you leave, the place is a morgue,’ he told her.

Frequently, Diana went straight from the dances to morning prayers in the chapel at Guy’s.
The thirty-minute service
began at six thirty and was followed by a breakfast of tinned eggs and ‘stalish fish’. As she described it, an eagle-eyed sister, sitting on a rostrum, watched over the nurses while they ate. ‘My trouble was wanting not to eat. Often I would be called with several other miscreants after the meal and reproved severely. Did I know that nurses were different from
other people? Their lives were dedicated to the sick, maybe dying, and they must keep up their strength by a sensible diet in order not to be found wanting.’

At 8 a.m. came the start of her ten-hour shift.
Despite the strict discipline
, Diana was enjoying the job at Guy’s. After a difficult beginning, she had overcome the doubts of her superiors. Nurses were not expected to feature in the newspapers, or to have the prime minister enquire about their welfare; suspicious of her glamour and her privileged background, the senior matron had thrown her in at the deep end.

The first weeks on Charity, a women’s surgical ward, had not been a success. No one told Diana how to perform the menial tasks allocated to her – or where the things she needed to perform them were kept.
‘I was given
a very unattractive little boy of two or three as my own patient,’ she remembered: ‘He was recovering from appendicitis. I clung to him and tried to ingratiate myself. I was told to give the boy a bath and dress him cleanly. This meant a spate of agonizing questions. What bath? Where are the clean clothes? What soap? I had no idea how to wash a child (half-invalid) of two. I seemed to have done nothing practical in all my twenty years. The child yelled as though I’d put it on the rack.’

But, to her immense pride, it was not long before Diana was accepted as a competent member of the nursing staff.
Her conduct sheet was immaculate
and she was popular with the patients and the other nurses. She had not fainted at her first operation and, as she recorded proudly, she was soon allowed to administer injections, cut abscesses and prepare patients for the operating theatre. In recognition of her capabilities, she was given one of the toughest nursing jobs at Guy’s.
‘I was moved after a few months
from my dear Charity Ward down to Ashley Cooper Men’s Accident Ward – very different – a high, gaunt, sunless ward, busier and much sadder.’ For the most part, the patients were dockhands who had suffered horrific accidents at work – ‘paralytics and spinal cases that in minutes had lost their powers utterly’, as she described them. Every one of them had to be washed and fed. Some were so badly injured they died within a few hours of being admitted.

The satisfaction that Diana gained from the challenges she faced at work compensated for the evenings she was forced to endure with Moore. Nonetheless, it was a period of intense unhappiness for her.
‘I had earned the hard name
of a “scalp-collector”,’ she recalled. Her flirtation with the American angered her many admirers, some of whom were her closest male friends.
‘On the whole my own impression
is that her beauty is increasing and her humanity dwindling,’ Raymond Asquith wrote to Edward Horner, a friend and rival for Diana’s attentions: ‘I am training myself to admire her as a natural object – the Alpine sunset, the Pink Terrace in New Zealand – instead of the damned unnatural and extremely provocative one she really is.’ In an agony of jealousy, Horner wrote to Diana herself:
‘I can’t understand
your form of loving people. I can’t constitutionally believe in your loving me, and a couple more.’ George Vernon, another of her admirers, also accused her of distributing her ‘favours to all with impartiality mixed with a curious caprice’. Diana was aware that her very public flirtation with George Moore served only to reinforce her reputation for capriciousness. It also cast her as a fortune hunter. Very obviously, money was all Moore had in his favour. As he whirled her around the dance floor, she found it intensely hurtful that she was unable to explain to her friends why she appeared to be in his thrall.