White Mischief (11 page)

When Broughton returned to Nairobi two days later, he and Diana settled in to what appeared to be a rhythm of lunches and dinners at the Muthaiga Club, of croquet games, bridge, backgammon and tea parties. Erroll was now constantly in the Club. The military headquarters, where he worked, was near by, and his house only a few hundred yards away. Broughton, who had known him slightly from previous visits, struck up a friendship with him. By the beginning of December, Broughton and Diana rarely had a meal without sharing their table with Erroll. Even when Diana had other plans, Broughton and Erroll usually lunched together.
*

What did Broughton think of Erroll? He described him as an “out and outer,” but also “one of the most amusing men I have ever met,” and above all Broughton wanted to be amused. He was also flattered by the attentions
of a younger man—it revived his self-image as one of the most glamorous officers in the Irish Guards.

“If you can make a great friend in two months,” he said in court, “then Joss Erroll I should describe as a great friend.” These were happy meals. Broughton could dazzle his new friend with his stories of the Liverpool Cup. the London seasons, the peculiar cases he had heard as Chairman of the Nantwich Bench, the affairs of his closest friends, and sample, in return, Erroll’s caustic wit and flashes of unashamed self-revelation.

Meanwhile, Diana had acquired two constant companions—her old friend Hugh Dickinson and a new one. Major Richard (Dickie) Pembroke, who had arrived in the course of duty. In fact, Pembroke had fallen in love with the wife of a brother officer in the Coldstream Guards, and regimental etiquette had demanded that he apply for a transfer. The lady did not follow Major Pembroke, however, and he was in the jargon of the day, something of an “extra man.” Occasionally he played bezique with Broughton. And he, too, fell in love with Diana. She thought him the dullest man she had ever met, and after their first dinner together she remembers asking him to remind her what his name was. “Dickie,” came the answer, “Dickie Pembroke.”

There was nothing astonishing to Broughton about these “sorties” of Diana’s. He had made a pact: she was allowed to enjoy herself. And yet he seemed to work his side of the bargain with a fastidiousness that was more than passivity; he seemed almost eager to concede his first claim.

Then, on December 5th, the Broughtons moved from the Club into their house at Karen, the Nairobi suburb named after Baroness Blixen. It was a solid Sunningdale Tudor structure, with twenty-two acres of grounds. Fifteen servants were engaged and put in the charge of Wilks and the head boy, Abdullah bin Ahmed, who was a “catch” from the Muthaiga Club. Broughton approached Sir Ferdinand
Cavendish Bentinck, Chairman of the Production and Settlement Board, and an old acquaintance, for a job. They seemed all set for the duration.

On December 18th, Broughton suddenly went to stay with Erroll in his house at Muthaiga, near to the Club, leaving Diana at home for four nights. They were reunited on December 22nd, when Gwladys Delamere held a joint birthday party for herself and Diana at the Club with forty-four guests. There was dancing “from sundowners to sunrise,” at what turned out to be one of the last soirées of the
ancien régime
. The guest list must have included many of Erroll’s former girlfriends, including Gwladys herself and Alice de Janzé, and possibly Idina. Paula Long described Diana and Joss dancing “as if they were glued together.” When two people find each other supremely desirable, as Broughton said later, there is nothing to be done except give in or run away. It was wartime and there was nowhere to run to.

Over Christmas the love affair crystallised. Most of their friends noticed that by early January the new couple were inseparable—particularly Diana’s other “licensed” escorts, like Dickie Pembroke, who said, “Anyone who saw them at that time would have thought they were in love.” Some acted as accomplices, particularly June Carberry, who was to become a kind of handmaid to the romance. But Broughton’s awareness only came slowly—at least so it appeared, and so he behaved.

By January 3rd, the deception of Broughton had begun. Diana and Erroll went to June’s house at Nyeri for the weekend, June having discreetly disappeared to Malindi, on the coast. On Monday 6th they returned to Nairobi. Broughton picked up an anonymous note from his rack at the Muthaiga Club which read:

You seemed like a cat on hot bricks at the club last night. What about the eternal triangle? What are you going to do about it?

He showed it to Diana at the Club that night and said, “What do you think of this?” They all laughed. And yet Broughton knew what was happening. He had tackled Diana on the subject of their trip to Ceylon, planned for that month, and received the excuse that the decor at the Karen house would not be ready and needed her supervision.

Broughton was forced to confront the problem when he and Diana gave a dinner party at. Karen on January 12th. Around the table sat Gerald Portman, Richard Pembroke, a Miss Lampson, Erroll, the Broughtons and Gwladys. Much of the energy that evening was generated by the Mayor of Nairobi, who picked a fight early on with Major Portman about the relative contributions of Britain and the colonies to the war effort. The shouting match was unstoppable. A glass candlestick was broken by someone hammering on the table.

“Did that improve matters?” Portman was asked later.

“Not at all,” he replied. “It was a particularly heated argument. It was so heated that I think there must have been something personal.”

The Mayor at one stage commented that if Mr. Portman felt as he did, why the hell had he come out here?

“It was a very unpleasant dinner to start with,” Broughton recalled. “Lady Delamere [Gwladys] and Mr. Portman had a most frightful row and abused each other like pickpockets, which is always embarrassing for a host. We then went into the room where we dance and where the piano is. Not content with their fight in the dining room, they began all over again, which, I must say, annoyed me very much indeed. The next thing I recall is that Lady Delamere and my wife went upstairs to my wife’s bedroom where they remained about half an hour. The men downstairs were very bored as they had nobody to dance with.”

The gramophone was now playing, but Gwladys, having turned her sights away from Mr. Portman and the war
effort to a more pressing topic, had effectively cleared the dance floor. First Lord Erroll had taken her aside, after dinner, in a small room on the ground floor. “He told me he was fond of Lady Broughton. Very fond,” said Glwadys, “that he would do anything for her and that he was determined to marry her; that he had never been so happy, and did I like her. He asked my advice and I advised him to make a clean breast of it to Sir Delves.” What did he say to that? “He said, ‘You are often right. I will think about it and let you know.’”

Then Diana approached her, or it may have been Gwladys herself who took Diana into the sitting room, and asked, “Do you know Joss is very much in love with you?”

Diana replied, “Yes.”

“What are you going to do about it?” enquired the Mayor. That was one of Gwladys’s favourite phrases.

Diana offered to show Gwladys around the newly decorated house and the conversation continued in her bedroom. “Does he want to marry you?” asked Gwladys. Diana replied that he did. Gwladys told Diana how fond she was of Erroll and that she would like to see him happy; that he had been unhappy with his first wife and that his second wife, Molly, had been too old for him. She suggested that this new love was Joss’s first chance of real happiness. Diana said she was fond of Broughton and didn’t want to hurt him.

“Yes,” said Gwladys, “but he is an old man and has had his life. Take your happiness where you can find it. There is a
war
on.”

Finally, Gwladys gave Diana the same advice she had given Erroll—to make a clean breast of it. “He will never give you up,” she said. “It’s the best thing you can do.” Joss had tried to persuade Diana that the marriage pact should now be invoked—Broughton had given his word, and it should be taken seriously. Diana, nevertheless, was wavering; she felt she couldn’t go through with it. It was
Gwladys’s official approval that finally persuaded her to go ahead.

Gwladys seemed to be promoting the affair under the veil of “sound advice.” Erroll had already told her that he was prepared to elope, and she said, “Don’t have any farewell scenes. Write a note and leave it on his pillow.” (She denied this later.) Now, after her conversation with the two lovers, she turned on Broughton and delivered the bad news.

Broughton had come upstairs to complain that the men below were very bored and had no one to dance with. “They came down,” said Broughton, “and Lady Delamere came and sat next to me. She was watching Lord Erroll and my wife dancing … I was sitting by her also watching them dancing. Lady Delamere said to me, ‘Do you know that Joss is wildly in love with Diana?’, and I’m afraid that gave me a great deal of food for thought and I became rather distrait and I did neglect my duties as a host in not being as attentive to Lady Delamere as I should have been. It confirmed my worst suspicions and I was very absent-minded afterwards.”

Despite the shock of discovering that his wife’s affair was public, Broughton now invited Erroll to stay the night. Such passivity, exaggerated friendliness, the concealing of his true feelings, was to become typical of Broughton’s behaviour; and Erroll’s lack of restraint was typical of his professional contempt for husbands. The two men even went riding together early the following morning, with Diana, in the Kikuyu Reserve.

Later that morning Broughton talked to Diana about the situation. (“I think you are going out rather too much with Joss.”) They lunched at Muthaiga with Erroll, then the parties split up. In the afternoon, Diana left Nairobi-by train to stay with June Carberry at Malindi, in a house full of air force personnel. No one knew that Erroll was joining the train at Athi station, just outside Nairobi, with his man, Waiweru, and his portable drinks cabinet. Hugh Dickinson would be staying there too.

“Only a very few people knew officially that they were in love,” said Dickinson. “I was stationed at Malindi at the time, but in pretty uncomfortable conditions. I was in charge of a small working party, so I left the sergeant in charge, and moved into the Carberrys’ house. When Diana and Joss arrived they told me they were in love. They actually told me they wanted me to be the first to know.”

Dickinson took one of the very few photographs of them together, on the Kilifi ferry: Erroll in uniform and shorts, Diana in tight slacks and dark glasses, standing beside an army car.

Broughton, meanwhile, had gone on January 13th to seek refuge with his old friend Jack Soames, at Nanyuki. When he arrived he was quite normal, but then, according to Soames, his behaviour changed. “We had a whisky and soda at six o’clock,” said Soames, “turned on the wireless at 6:45; had two more whiskies and sodas and he passed out completely.”

Broughton, who had been drinking heavily for the past week, had gone to Soames for advice. He was worried that Erroll, a much younger man, was taking Diana away from him; using racing jargon to make his point, he told his friend, “he had the better of me in the weights to the extent of fourteen pounds.” Soames delivered his advice: Broughton should see Erroll and ask him whether he was in love with Diana. “If he says no, tell him to buzz off. If they are in love with each other, cut your losses. Pack your boxes and get off back to England.”

As the drinking, and the effect it had on Broughton, became more extreme, Soames began to worry about his friend. Broughton told him that since his discovery of the affair he had taken to whisky and gin, and that this always sent him to sleep, although it made him depressed and maudlin too; that he wasn’t used to drinking quantities of spirits. He said that he had nevertheless begun to take whisky as a nightcap, “perhaps two or three,” since he had been in Kenya. Soames still didn’t think Broughton
was sleeping well, apparently, since he introduced him to Medinal—a form of morphine—during their four ponderous, depressed days together. Broughton took the bottle back to Nairobi with him and began to use the drug regularly.

He returned there on Saturday, January 18th. Diana and Erroll had already been back in Nairobi for four nights, staying together at Erroll’s house. June had returned on the 17th.

By now Erroll had telephoned Gwladys Delamere and told her, “Gwladys, we have taken your advice.” June Carberry was listening in to the call and heard him continue: “There will be no farewell scenes, and we are not going to leave a note.”

That same day, Broughton received his second anonymous letter in the Muthaiga rack. It read: “Do you know your wife and Lord Erroll have been staying alone at the Carberrys’ house at Nyeri together?” Broughton destroyed the note, and this time did not show it to Diana.

It seemed that nothing could get in the way of a Muthaiga lunch—for Broughton it always signified a truce—but at that particular meal on the 18th, as the four of them, including June, sat down together, the mounting tensions were beginning to show, particularly on Diana.
“It was quite pleasant,”
said Broughton later, “but my wife was frightfully upset and in a state of nerves.” She told Broughton that she wanted to speak to him later, and he must have guessed what was coming.

When they got back to Karen that afternoon, Diana told him that she was in love with Erroll. Broughton suggested, or so he said later in court, that she come to Ceylon with him for three months to find out if the affair was serious. Then he rang Erroll at his office: “Don’t you think you ought to see me, Joss?” They met within the hour at Erroll’s house. Broughton was early, strolled into the house, back on to the veranda and demanded a whisky and soda from Waiweru.

The confrontation between the two men was recorded by Waiweru and Erroll’s garden boy, who was cutting the grass. (“Erroll’s face changed like a person who has received bad news so as to annoy his heart; Broughton was speaking loudly and in heated tones, striking the chair with his fist, and Erroll was quietly listening in sympathy.”) Broughton maintained that the conversation was emphatic but unheated—a business discussion.