The Horror of Love by Lisa Hilton Read Free Book Online Page A

Edwardianstandards still pertained. Leaving the house in London without a chaperone was virtually impossible and even then certain areas, such as the clubland of St James’s, were off limits. The seedy nightclubs of Soho and Fitzrovia were banned, and even something as innocent as having tea in Oxford with Brian Howard was treated as a crime. When she was caught in the act, Lord Redesdale bellowed at his grown-up daughter that were she married this would give her husband grounds for divorce. At the age of twenty-two, Nancy dared to cut her long hair, to which Lady Redesdale responded that she would never get a husband now, and the minor transgressions of her generation – slacks, lipstick, the odd cigarette – were treated as major offences. So although Nancy was mixing with some of the most brilliant young men of her generation, there remained an innocent quality to her which she retained all her life (later, in Paris, she still seemed ‘almost virginal’, 3 capable of discussing the necessity of breaking with her family to become a painter with Brian Howard, but simultaneously enjoying fancy-dress parties and the shocking pleasure of an occasional cocktail.
    The painting idea never came to much. Nancy, astonishingly, was permitted to attend the Slade, but realized very soon that she had absolutely no talent: ‘What a very depressing drawing. I wonder how you manage to draw so foully, ’ was her teacher’s comment. Even more astonishingly, the Redesdales allowed her, at the age of twenty-three, to move into a bedsit in South Kensington. Much to the dismay of Jessica, who was already saving up to run away, this lasted a mere month. The advancing heaps of underclothes on the floor just became too menacing (‘No one to pick them up, you see.’). Nancy wanted freedom, but not the kind that came with a basin in the corner.
    Writing began to look like a serious way out. If one were posh but poor, gossip-writing was a useful source of pocket money. Nancy had paid for a visit to her friend Nina Seafield at Cullen Castle in Scotland by photographing the party for the Tatler . She went on to produce occasional pieces for Vogue – the plight of the bridal confidante in ‘The Secret History of a LondonWedding’, tips for the lady guest in ‘The Shooting Party’ (‘it is advisable to wear a little coat over your dinner dress … there are few houses where it is considered good form to rise during dinner and beat the breast in order to stimulate circulation’) – and then, through her family connection with the magazine, she secured a weekly column on The Lady , for which she attended the regular events of the Season, a Commem. Ball at Oxford, the Chelsea Flower Show, the Fourth of June. In the first three months of 1929, she had made a very respectable £22, and decided to try a novel.
    As a debutante, she was well past her sell-by date, yet Nancy needed money for something other than the maintenance of her self-respect. In 1928, she had met Hamish St Clair Erskine, then in his first year at New College. The second son of the notorious roué the Earl of Rosslyn, Hamish, in James Lees-Milne’s words, was possessed of ‘the most enchanting looks, though not strictly handsome, mischievous eyes, slanting eyebrows. He was slight of build, gay as gay, always snobbish and terribly conscious of his nobility.’ 4 The fact that Hamish was ‘gay as gay’ didn’t put Nancy off falling in love with him, even though he had had a sexual relationship with her brother Tom at Eton. Hamish’s one object in life was admiration, but along with his vanity he was endowed with huge charm and the ability to make his friends laugh until they wept, the best possible quality in Nancy’s eyes. She convinced herself that his heavy drinking, his love of sleazy nightclubs, his selfishness and irresponsibility needed only a firm, loving hand, and after five increasingly frustrating years on the deb circuit she was sure she was the woman to