The Viceroy's Daughters (22 page)

Next morning he thanked her for her sweet letter and said that though he saw all her points, to him Baba's flirtation was more than a simple crush and ultimately it would hurt both of them. Fruity stuck to his guns. “Move him I could not,” commented Irene, adding that she had a feeling Miles would have been equally mulish in the same situation.

Soon Fruity would have much more reason for complaint.

20

Keeping It in the Family

When Irene and the Metcalfe family returned to London, plans began in earnest for their various holidays. When Tom, at his most charming, arrived for dinner one evening in June, Irene discovered that she was to be pressed into service looking after both the Mosley and Metcalfe children. After he had gone, Baba came to Irene's bedroom for a chat.

Here she disclosed that Tom had asked her to accompany him on a motoring trip through Bavaria that August and that she was apprehensive of Fruity's reaction if she asked for a fortnight's “leave” for the trip. The obvious solution was for one or two other people to join them, but when she suggested this to Tom later that June evening, he made it perfectly clear that he wanted Baba on her own—or no one.

Anxious though everyone was to console Tom after his terrible loss, it seemed an extraordinary arrangement. Irene, remembering her own brief entanglement with him, was uneasy. Baba, she felt, was playing with fire. Thus she was astonished when Lady Mosley telephoned to beg Baba to go away with her son. Otherwise, said Lady Mosley ominously, a
third party
might go with him. The idea of Diana whisking him off was anathema to all three women, and Irene came to the reluctant conclusion that better “poor Baba” than “the horror.” Anyway, could Tom even contemplate Baba as a sexual stopgap when he still appeared so grief-stricken over Cim?

Lady Mosley's fears seemed to be justified when Baba rang Tom up on a day when he was supposed to be at Denham and found he had gone to London. The sisters assumed, correctly, that there could be only one reason: Diana. Filled with foreboding, Irene rang Lady Mosley, who confided that she was “terrified the horror had sent for Tom after her divorce was through and that she was doing everything to capture him.”

In fact, Diana was indifferent as to whether she married Tom or not, but the sisters would not have believed this had they known the truth. For a well-brought-up young woman with two small children to be content to remain a mistress to a widower—and a notorious lecher—was something they could not comprehend.

Tom's visit to Diana gave Baba further justification for her determination to set off with him. She had been half in love with him for years and, without the taboo of her sister's marriage, her underlying obsession with him surfaced, fueled by the intense intimacy of the past few weeks and the sudden reliance on her shown by Tom, normally so strong and self-sufficient.

But she was not accustomed to playing second fiddle, least of all to the hated Diana, and she was not prepared to embark on the longed-for trip without clearing this up. Her pretext for this was her well-developed sense of
comme il faut:
if Tom
was
seeing Diana, it was a flagrant gesture of brutal disrespect to the late wife he professed to love so deeply, and she could not help him—or provide company on his trip—if he continued to do so. It was not hard to carry Irene with her on this.

Irene and Lady Mosley met to discuss the Diana question. Tom, said his mother, had asked her to tell his sisters-in-law that he did not contemplate seeing Diana after his trip with Baba. Lady Mosley added that she had reported to him what she had heard: that Diana had said she was out to get him and that those who knew her said she was the most determined minx and talked freely to everyone. Tom refused to believe any of these tales; Diana, he said, was dignified and sweet and would never chatter loosely like that. Hearing this, Lady Mosley wept and said Tom was so marvelous to his children that perhaps Cim had died to save his soul. “I wondered!” wrote Irene, more cynical where Tom was concerned.

Tom, who found the idea of persuading the conventional Baba to come away with him on a such a risqué trip irresistible, had a ready answer for her doubts. With his usual facility, during one of their intimate dinners, he convinced Baba that seeing Diana was an obligation, like others he had had to take on after Cimmie's death, and that he could not shirk it. There was, he assured her, nothing in it; their relations were platonic. Baba could not make Tom see how cruel such meetings were to the memory of Cim.

Behind Baba's loathing of Diana lay an intense sexual and emotional jealousy. Her rationale for trying to make Tom, who was, after all, a widower, stop seeing Diana, newly divorced and equally free, was that “people would not stand for it, and his future would be destroyed.”

On June 27 the Prince of Wales, bringing his brother Prince George with him, came to stay at the house the Metcalfes had taken at Sandwich, on the Kent coast, for golf. The princes, driving their own car, without either valet or equerry, arrived so much later than expected, at 2
a.m
., that the Metcalfes and Irene had already gone to bed. A few days after the royal brothers left, the party, augmented by Tom, broke up, setting off in two cars for London.

Once again, Baba and Tom drove together, followed in the Metcalfe Rolls by Irene and a highly disgruntled Fruity. His wife, he felt, was becoming far too close to Tom. All the way to London he muttered angrily about “this Tom hysteria,” and Baba's “sacrifice” to Tom in watching and guarding him. Fruity thought this was rubbish and Tom's behavior hypocritical—Tom himself was responsible for Cim's death by his cruelty. At the house, Irene's thoughts ran on a different track: Baba told her that during the drive up Tom had promised over and over again to put Diana Guinness right out of his life. “I wonder for how long?” thought Irene dubiously. “Oh! if only forever!”

Baba's plans for the rest of the summer did not include her children. Returning from a brief visit to Scotland on July 10, her first engagement was a meeting to organize the day nursery to be set up in Cimmie's memory in Kennington. Both she and Irene looked “illish,” noted Georgia Sitwell, one of the friends co-opted for the project (the nursery eventually cost five thousand pounds to build; except for nineteen hundred ninety pounds from Lambeth Council, all the money was raised by Cimmie's friends). This decided, Baba began to prepare for a pleasurable summer ahead, flinging herself into beauty treatments, making telephone calls, seeing friends and finally, tactlessly, asking the childless Irene how she could get the new nanny trained. After her trip with Tom she must go to Scotland and also to America! “Must?” wrote Irene bitterly. “Why? and her children to be seen to!”

As the summer passed, Tom and Baba's increasing intimacy was unmistakable. Tom walked with Baba on the Savehay lawn in the warm evenings, his arm around her waist, whispering into her ear. When together, they had attention for no one else. After one occasion, dining with Lady Mosley, Tom and Baba, Irene wrote: “Ma and I were embarrassed to a degree as Baba and he gabbled in each other's faces and occasionally flung us a perfunctory remark.” When they were alone together, Lady Mosley reported that after much arguing Tom had finally told Diana Guinness there was no place for her in his life and refused to see her again for a while.

At Denham the following weekend, July 15, Irene began to wonder if Cimmie's death really had changed her brother-in-law. His attitude to his children was certainly different: at lunch he talked to Vivien about her school; afterward he played with the eighteen-month-old Micky on the lawn. What struck her most forcibly was that he showed to Baba a consideration and kindness she had never seen him employ toward Cim. Perhaps a close relationship with Baba, even if it seemed temporarily to go a bit too far, was the lesser of two evils. “I pray this obsession for Baba will utterly oust Diana Guinness,” she wrote before driving up to London to watch Tom massing his followers in Eaton Square before setting out on a march.

Baba's excitement at the coming trip with Tom had not altered either her dominating nature or her belief that her household should be run like clockwork even on a seaside holiday. Just before Irene left on a three-week Mediterranean cruise on the White Star liner
Homeric
, she was upset by “a rude and peremptory letter from Baba” forbidding her to take her beloved old Sealyham Winks to the house at Angmering, on the Sussex coast, where she was to look after Baba's children.

 

Baba, setting off alone with Tom across France in early August, plunged almost at once into a passionate love affair. For Tom, seducing this beautiful, sophisticated woman was part game, part challenge. Domination and sexuality were an intrinsic part of his being. Even his politics were sexualized, with their macho symbols of uniform, marching and insistence on virile youth. The conquest of a woman who herself was a charismatic, dominating figure—whether of her husband, her household, or a dinner table—was especially sweet. Then, too, there was the link with her dead sister, whom he had loved deeply despite his constant betrayals. To this unremitting sexual adventurer, the thought that he was sleeping with his wife's sister must have added an agreeable touch of forbidden fruit, with its frisson of incest. Then, too, it embodied a full-blown tease of the malicious kind he so enjoyed: poor Fruity, despite his anger, could do nothing to prevent it.

Baba tried to rationalize her behavior by telling herself that going to bed with Tom would get him away from the hated Diana Guinness. But she was too clear-sighted not to realize that to sleep with her dead sister's husband within three months of her funeral, abandoning her own husband and children to do so, could hardly be justified morally. Internally, she must have been torn apart. The principles of her upbringing had been firmly rooted. Loyalty—which of course extended to her husband—was one of the strongest strands of her nature. Later, she was to exhibit not only guilt but a sense of shame: she was too wordly-wise not to realize that most people were horrified that she should fall precipitously into the arms of the man who had caused her sister such terrible suffering.

Tom had told Cimmie (truthfully) that his endless affairs meant little: such sexual flings, he confided to his new love, Diana Guinness, were tremendous fun, to be treated almost as a joke. What was not a joke was if somebody, somebody of caliber, fell for him seriously. Diana's own open commitment had not only flattered him enormously but brought him to a degree of commitment himself. Now here was Baba, lovely, clever, desired, deeply in love with him and a constant reminder of the dead wife he had treated so badly. Keeping Baba happy, he could tell himself, was a form of recompense to Cimmie. Besides, there was the sheer delight of enjoying two such trophy mistresses simultaneously.

 

Irene spent most of September in Angmering while Baba was in Scotland, with her nephews and nieces. The children thought their “Auntie Ni” wonderful: she let them play wild games, took David shrimping and unlike their mother showed them much overt affection. When they looked for hermit crabs David remarked thoughtfully: “Mummy would never carry this seaweed for me.” Irene wrote her sister an eight-page letter about her children's doings, also noting: “How can Baba go and leave those priceless children when they are so profoundly interesting in their development?”

Tom was now in high favor with Irene, thanks to his apparent change of persona. She supported him in his political efforts, visiting the new headquarters of his British Union of Fascists, which she had promised to spruce up. It was at 122a Kings Road, formerly the Whitelands Teachers' Training College but now known as the Black House; in it lived the top echelon of the BUF and about fifty young rank-and-file Blackshirts, who drilled and trained under military-style discipline. She was delighted when Tom came to dinner at the end of September and described two successful meetings at Ashford and Aylesbury at which a number of farmers had been enrolled. “We had a wonderful evening of talk but he broke my heart when he said life was over, he wanted to put fascism on the map and he did not mind if a bullet met him,” she wrote in her diary that night. “He says Cim talks to him and is always by his side. We had great talks on Baba and Fruity and their future.”

Somehow, Irene had managed to convince herself that “sweet Tom” and her sister were the injured parties in the emotional triangle of the two Metcalfes and Mosley, and that poor jealous Fruity was the one who should see reason. She told her brother-in-law that, Tom or no Tom, it was his tantrums that were damaging their marriage. For eight years, she said, warming to her theme, Baba had been sweet to him and spoiled him, but her intellect was starved, so no wonder she blossomed with Tom. If Fruity did not accept their friendship, it would cause a deep rift.

When, in early October, Irene went with twelve-year-old Viv to Smith Square to pack up Cim's treasures, her heart was further wrung. The flood of misery when she looked at the photographs of her sister, so fresh and young and alive, turned to sympathy for Tom when he had to lie flat on his back in his Ebury Street flat with lumbago, and for several days she sent him all his meals. (She herself was having back trouble at the time, visiting the famous Dr. Cyriax almost daily.)

Harold Nicolson also thought Tom had changed, writing in his diary for October 11, 1933: “Whenever anything happens to remind him of Cimmie, a spasm of pain twitches across his face. He looked ill and pasty. He has become an excellent father and plays with the children. Cimmie's body is still in the chapel at Cliveden and he visits it once a week. It is to be buried at Denham in a high sarcophagus in a wood. Irene said that the children said to her: ‘We don't cry when you talk to us about Mummy, but we always cry when we talk about her among ourselves.' ”

By the fifteenth, however, Tom had recovered sufficiently to lead the fascist march past the Cenotaph in Manchester, watched by Irene, though because of his bad back he only walked a short distance. At 8
p.m
. there was a big meeting at the Free Trade Hall for which Prince Paul of Greece and the Mosleys' friend Zita James arrived to stay at the Midland Hotel. Outside the hall stood a huge crowd, some of whom were communists. Inside were about nine thousand people, hedged about with two thousand Blackshirts. Tom entered in his usual dramatic fashion, marching down the main aisle with a powerful floodlight on him and mounting the rostrum amid tremendous cheering. The meeting, save for two fights in the middle when five people were ejected, went smoothly.