Free The Horror of Love by Lisa Hilton Page B

ankle round major and minor basilicas and suffering horrible indigestion from eating goats’ cheese. However, I manage to keep my spirits up somehow. PS And all my shoes hurt.’ And to Unity: ‘Why do people always say they don’t enjoy honeymoons?I am adoring mine.’ The hint of the negative is just a little too strong for the joke to take. In a Sunday Times essay of 1952, Nancy commented that ‘Arnold Bennett once said that “pavement” is the most beautiful word in the English language, a sentiment which must be echoed by anyone who has ever tottered about on Roman cobbles and splashed in and out of Roman puddles, trying to avoid death from the huge buses which squeeze their way between the palaces at ninety miles an hour’. Nancy’s true feelings about her honeymoon came out in Pigeon Pie , her 1939 novel of the ‘Phoney War’. The husband of the heroine, Sophia Garfield, is purportedly modelled on Francis Rodd, while Peter is cast as the dashing, raffish lover Rudolph, but many of the brothers’ traits are conflated. Sophia ponders:
    How soon she began to realize he was a pompous prig she could not remember. He was a sight-seeing bore and took her the Roman rounds with dutiful assiduity, and without ever allowing her to sit on a stone and use her eyes. Her jokes annoyed and never amused him; when she said that all the sites in Rome were called after London cinemas, he complained that she was insular, facetious and babyish.
    But in many ways, Nancy was . She and Peter did in fact share a sense of humour, and she would make a point of repeating his better lines to her correspondents, including Gaston, throughout his life. He made her laugh a lot, always the most important characteristic for Nancy, and one of his better-known teases, declining an invitation from Von Ribbentrop to the German Embassy in Yiddish, was a perfect example of the alignment of their humour (though Nancy did remove the letter from the post as she feared it would create unpleasant publicity). But even as early as the honeymoon, Nancy sensed that she would never prove capable of really holding Peter. Curling Hamish’s hair had hardly prepared her for a full physical relationship, so one wonders about the sex. The enforced intimacies of a honeymoon (sharing a bed is one thing, sharing a bathroom quite another)lurk behind the slightly awkward cheerfulness of her letters.
    Peter was an experienced lover but, like many Englishmen of his generation, and like Sir Conrad in The Blessing , he appeared to prefer to make love with ladies whose profession it was. A nervous twenty-nine-year-old virgin with a tendency to shriek could hardly have been an arousing prospect.
    The extent of Nancy’s actual sexual experience is difficult to ascertain. Peter’s sister described her disparagingly as ‘shop-soiled’, though that may have been merely a reference to her long ‘affair’ with Hamish. The world of the Bright Young Things floats in a historical miasma of licentiousness, but one historian of the period notes that it was in fact one of the most ‘tightly regulated’ eras in English history. 3 Avid press coverage of outrageous parties disguised the fact that young women like Nancy still lived in a constrained and chaperoned society in which the sexes occupied largely separate spheres. Assuming that Nancy was aware of Hamish’s tendencies (and Driberg’s delights aside, there are enough hints in Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding to suggest that she was), had their protracted engagement been a means of evading a mature sexual relationship? Nancy’s mother could not have been much help on the subject. When a friend explained to her what she might expect on her own wedding night, she recoiled in horror – ‘a gentleman would never do anything like that’ 4 – and when Nancy went on to experience gynaecological difficulties, she remarked vaguely that she thought women had millions of eggs, ‘like sturgeon’. No one could mistake the