Magnificent Rebel by Anne de Courcy

Author:Anne de Courcy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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In the late autumn Nancy returned to England. Her father had become ill and she went to his home, Haycock House, a large and gloomy building, to nurse him during the sad last days. ‘It has all been rather terrible,’ she wrote to Sybil, ‘to see someone die.’ But then, although both had held great affection for one another, there had seldom been any real closeness and certainly no meeting of minds.

Most of the fortune Sir Bache had inherited had disappeared. What was left, apart from the appurtenances that reflected his sporting life – his guns, hunting prints and so forth – which went to various male relatives, he left everything to Nancy, who received a total of £14,418 13s 2d52 and a life-size silver figure of a fox that had been presented to him by his hunting friends. Maud was nowhere mentioned in his will, though after he died GM wrote to her, perhaps in would-be consolation, ‘I loved you in the beginning and shall love you to the end.’

During her time in England, Nancy had taken a small house in Sussex. Sometimes she went to London, where she visited her ‘first friend’. ‘Nancy called here,’ wrote GM to Maud at the beginning of January. ‘We had a long talk and walked to Hyde Park Corner together, and would have walked farther if the rain hadn’t come on. The subject of our conversation was her prose story. I told her the lines I wrote about you and she seemed to like them.’ At other times friends came to stay. To Janet Flanner she wrote to say ‘I would rather hear anything from you than from any other teller,’ asking her to come and stay and promising ‘cat for lap and dog for walk – a yard and a half of books – plenty of wine – sleep without dreams and baths without shudders – do come’.

As well as acquiring a capital sum, Nancy was now completely free again. Neither she nor Sydney Fairbairn had done anything about a divorce, but when Sydney wished to remarry it became essential and in 1925, six years after they had separated, they were finally divorced.

Nancy was not ‘single’ for long. When she returned to Paris in the spring of 1926 she started a new love affair with a man she had met earlier, Louis Aragon. So intense and so passionate was their relationship that towards the end of her life she said that he was probably the only man who had ever really loved her.

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