Every time Diana thought about Ned and Jillie’s engagement party – or looked at the handsome, elaborate invitation, designed by some arty member of the Highgate elite, no plain gilt-edged stiffy for the Curtis clan – she felt sick. It wasn’t that she still fancied Ned, but she still, in some distorted way, blamed him for her agreeing to marry Johnathan. She had never forgotten that night at the Savoy, and his rather public rejection of her and how she had fled to Johnathan to save face; she knew it was absurd, but she couldn’t quite face the prospect of seeing him become so splendidly and publicly engaged, when it was so precisely what she had wanted for herself. In the end a gloriously simple solution occurred to her: ‘Can we make some excuse?’ she said to Johnathan. ‘I just can’t face it.’
Johnathan said he was very surprised, and that surely all her old friends would be there. ‘Doesn’t matter to me, of course, I’d love not to go, so yes, make whatever excuse you like.’
Which she did, saying that things were very busy on the farm, and it would be very difficult for Johnathan to get away.
She was busy trying to be a good wife, for a while anyway, so time spent quietly together in Yorkshire was what she thought of as goodwill in the bank. She was waiting for a suitable moment to tell Johnathan that not only had she been booked for a three-day session, shooting evening gowns and furs for the all-important September issue of Style, the biggest issue in the year, where advertisers spent more money than all the others put together, but she’d been asked to go to Paris in January to shoot the collections. Every time she thought about that, her skin crawled with excitement. She had never ‘done’ Paris, and although she knew it was desperately hard work and you had to work through the night quite often, and you got to see almost nothing of Paris apart from its photographic studios, it still gave you a cachet, a standing as a model that nothing else could do. If you’d never done Paris, you just weren’t quite the thing; and Diana wanted to be quite the thing more than anything. She thought, all other things being equal, he would agree. The only thing was that Johnathan was becoming increasingly insistent on their having another child.
Jamie, he said, was alone too much, needed a little brother or sister. Diana didn’t point out that it would be about three years before the little brother or sister became any kind of a companion for Jamie, by which time he would have gone away to prep school anyway. She wasn’t exactly a good wife, so the least she could do was give him another baby. But if she was pregnant, she wouldn’t be going to Paris. Using contraceptives was out of the question – he would know; she would just have to hope.
And Johnathan did seem very determined. He came home earlier, spent more time with her when he was there and actually managed to persuade his mother to let Diana take over some of the farm paperwork, so that she was more involved – which she had always wanted, and argued (to herself at any rate) that their marriage would have been far happier for it. As Sir Hilary was worse, and very frail and in need of more care, Vanessa was actually quite grateful. There was no help for it, Diana thought, she’d just have to do what Johnathan wanted. She had sufficient sense of fairness to see that. The sex as always was dull – but more frequent.
At first she was lucky; her next period duly arrived and Johnathan, grateful that she was patently trying to do what he wanted, agreed, a little sadly, that she should go down to London for the three-day shoot for the September issue.
She had the most marvellous time. She was recognised now as being, if not one of the top models, then very high in the second division. Of course she wasn’t Barbara Goalen, whose elegant dark beauty was rather similar to her own, and who dominated the field, along with the other greats, Anne Gunning (fortunate, Diana often thought, that she had chosen to work under her unmarried name) and Fiona Campbell-Walter; but she had a reputation for incredibly hard work, and also for her skill at doing her own hair and make-up imaginatively. Moreover, she would help other, less talented, and newer girls do theirs. John French had once actually called her the Monet of the make-up box; she was incredibly proud of the title.
He wasn’t shooting the September issue, of course; he was booked exclusively for Vogue. But there was a new photographer on the scene, American, whose photographs had the look of Irving Penn; one interview with him in the Sunday Times said he had the gift of sprinkling his pictures with glamour dust. He and Diana had developed a rapport and he booked her whenever he could. As always in such partnerships, a kind of alchemy worked between them; their sessions were charmed. No photographer could draw out Diana’s glamour, her gift of making it sex-charged, as Freddie Bateman could. And he was young and attractive, with thick blonde hair and a preppy glamour of his own: and most assuredly not queer. Diana fancied him wildly, and he her. Nothing had happened yet, but it was said in the business it was inevitable.
The pictures they produced were extraordinary. He didn’t go for anything excessive – no wild exteriors and settings like the young Norman Parkinson – and his style was quite formal in the beginning at any rate, his posing careful, his lighting in the John French mould, bleaching out imperfections, enhancing bone structure; but with Diana there was a rawness, almost an insolence, that he brought in as well. She stared directly into his lens, hungry, sex-charged, and yet untouchably beautiful. When Freddie Bateman arrived with the contacts he knew perfectly well what treasure he was delivering; he stood, arms folded, smirking with excitement, while Blanche Ellis Brown, examining them, was to be heard shouting with excitement.