Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [79]
Not long after the newlyweds’ arrival in Canada, with Antoinette’s maid and many trunks of clothes, Antoinette began sending plaintive letters to Gabrielle and Adrienne, begging for a passage home. Little is known about Antoinette’s time in Canada but, apparently, Oscar’s father insisted his son finish his training as a lawyer in Toronto, and said he would work better if he studied there alone. Antoinette’s maid soon left her, but Antoinette was obliged to remain alone in Ontario with her in-laws. She spoke almost no English and was desperately unhappy. The replies to her letters that came from Paris exhorted her to persevere. Could she not try out her Chanel clothes from her trousseau on the stores in Detroit? All that is known of how Antoinette went about this is that she was unsuccessful.19
Two days before Christmas 1919, Diana telephoned Duff Cooper to say she had just arrived in London. Arthur had, meanwhile, started for the south of France, and she was to join him in a fortnight.20
Diana lunched with Duff Cooper and her friend Lady Rosslyn, then flirted with Cooper as their taxi crawled through the London traffic. Cooper had dropped Diana back at Asprey’s for tea with Lady Rosslyn, but noticed that Diana had forgotten her book. Turning back and finding her still standing outside Asprey’s with her friend, Cooper returned the book and drove off. Reading the paper the following morning, he realized why, standing there on the pavement, Lady Rosslyn had looked so awful. She was about to give Diana a terrible piece of news that Lord Rosslyn had cabled her, and for which there was no good way to prepare Diana.
The details were sketchy, but a few hours earlier, as Arthur was driving to the south of France, it appeared that one of his tires had burst. The car was flung upside down, it exploded into flames, and he had died in the blaze. While the car was burned, almost to a shell, Arthur’s mechanic, Mansfield, was badly injured but had managed to escape. Duff Cooper wrote: “December 24, 1919. The first thing I saw in the Daily Express this morning was the death of Boy Capel, Diana’s husband, who was killed in a motor accident in the south of France on Monday [22 December]. I was very shocked.” Arthur had almost certainly spent the night before that fateful day with Gabrielle.21 Then he had set out with Mansfield to make the 620-mile journey south.
Some weeks later, when Lady Rosslyn told Duff Cooper how dreadful it had been breaking the news of Arthur’s death to Diana, she added a bleak insight into the workings of their marriage. She said “how impossible Diana’s relations with Capel were becoming, how he had entirely ceased to live with her and hardly ever spoke to her. That he confessed she had got on his nerves and he could barely stand her presence.”22
It seems odd, under these circumstances, that Arthur and Diana had been planning to meet up in a fortnight. Was he going to attempt another beginning with his wife, in which case he may well have formally broken off his affair with Gabrielle before driving south? Or had Arthur simply said good-bye to Gabrielle at Garches with the intention of ending his marriage when he met up with his wife in the south of France after Christmas? Whichever of these conclusions Arthur had made, one is left with the mournful understanding that while the resolution of this state of affairs had to end sadly for at least one of these three, instead it became a tragedy.
Whatever confused thoughts had filled Arthur’s head as he sped south to Cannes for Christmas with his sister Bertha—rather than spending it with his wife and baby girl—we will never know. But in the very early hours of the following morning, Arthur and Gabrielle’s companion from Royallieu