Free The Horror of Love by Lisa Hilton

dreams of an attaché’s posting to Peking, but they collapsed when he discovered the necessity of sitting a competitive examination. He was determined on success, but was still arrogant enough to demand it on his own terms.

5
    THE FASCISTERS

    W hen she met Gaston Palewski in 1942, Nancy had long since decided that her husband, Peter Rodd, was the most boring man in the world. She minded less about his fecklessness, drunkenness, laziness and dishonesty, but she had already acknowledged to herself that their marriage was a failure. In a matter of days she had rebounded straight from the unwilling arms of Hamish St Clair Erskine into an engagement with Peter, and now, twelve years on, she was no longer prepared to keep up her impeccable ‘shop-front’, even to herself.
    In his favour, the Hon. Peter Rodd, known, inevitably, as Prod, was genuinely brilliant. He had been a Balliol man, in the days when that meant something, at least until he was sent down for entertaining women in his rooms. He was an extremely gifted linguist and appeared to be an expert on the most recondite subjects. He was also gloriously handsome, a tow-haired Adonis with an enthusiastically heterosexual reputation. Evelyn Waugh described his looks as reminiscent of the ‘sulky arrogance’ of the young Rimbaud, his features combining a classical hauteur and sensuality to give him a look of ‘a chorister on his way to a brothel’. 1 And he was, in Diana’s words, ‘wild’, which may have appealed to the reforming, maternal instinct Nancy had so embarrassingly wasted on Hamish. He was also very cosmopolitan, a result of his upbringing as one of the five children of a highly glamorous diplomatic couple, Lord and Lady Rennell. After serving in Egypt, Sweden, Norway, Abyssinia and Germany, Peter’s father, Rennell Rodd, had been appointedambassador to Rome in 1908, and Peter and his brothers grew up multilingual and rootless in an endless shift of different schools and countries.
    After his ignominious departure from Balliol, Peter was sent down the traditional black sheep’s route of a job abroad, in a Brazilian bank. He spent his time there drinking and polishing up his Russian and Portuguese before being arrested as a destitute and extracted by his elder brother Francis, who worked at the Foreign Office. Peter clearly had a promising future as a loser, and this was the first of many times when his family would be obliged to bail him out. Brazil was followed by a short spell in the City (sacked), a post with The Times in Germany (sacked), then a two-year trip with the patient Francis to the Sahara. When he became reacquainted with Nancy, whom he knew slightly from the debutante scene, he was employed by an American bank in Lombard Street, though within the first year of their marriage he had once again lost his job.
    Perhaps, having tried most other things, Peter fancied having a go at wedlock. Or, to take a kindlier view, perhaps he was seeking ballast, something to pin down his waywardness and force him to grow up. Either way, he had proposed to numerous women – on one occasion, two in a single night – before Nancy accepted him at a party, and though he wrote to her suggesting squirmingly that the proposal had merely been a joke, Nancy for once refused to see it. Battered by Hamish’s rejection and veering dangerously close to the fearsome age of thirty, she too had found a life raft and she was determined to cling to it. Nancy had certainly become engaged to Peter with painful alacrity, but she was no longer the immature girl who had made eyes at Hamish while her serious suitor proposed. Peter represented pretty much her last chance, and she knew it. In the volume of family letters she edited, The Stanleys of Alderley , Nancy is quite hard on the ‘old, pathetic, ugly’ spinster daughters, Rianette and Louisa. Jessica goes into more detail about the terrible fate of the Maiden Aunt,
    a gentle, wispy type who lived alone in a small London