Tenderness, page 14
Later, Bunny alleged that Ford Madox Ford, or ‘Fat Fordie’ as he was also known, was writing propaganda for Wellington House, and had reported Lawrence and Frieda’s ‘German sympathies’ to his superiors – to atone, Bunny suggested, for the fact of his own German father.
It wasn’t impossible. Ford had championed Lawrence’s novels four or five years previously, but that was a world away now.
Yes, the Meynells were brave and generous to take them in. Even so, he could only hope that, in Greatham, there wouldn’t be too many of them flustering about the place. The kindness of Viola and her parents had saved him from the penury that stalked him, but he needed to work, not to be wheeled out for family occasions and the usual social bosh.
The Meynells were a clan. Viola’s father Wilfrid, the paterfamilias, had provided each of his grown daughters with a cottage at Greatham. A few sons popped up too on occasion. There seemed to be seven offspring. The mother, Alice Meynell, was an Establishment poetess figure known for her benevolence to younger and less fortunate writers. Famously, she and Wilfrid had saved the down-at-heel Catholic poet Francis Thompson from myriad demons and vices. They’d literally rescued him from the streets, published his work themselves, and ensured it an elevated readership. Whether history would thank them for it or not, he had remarked to Viola, was another matter.
In the way of many religious converts, Wilfrid and Alice Meynell made devout Catholics and had raised their children in the Old Church. The exile assumed – that is to say, he fervently hoped – he and Frieda would be let off the Latin mumblings and incense. Bad for his chest, he’d say. But the Meynells seemed, from all he’d been told, cheerful. Almost unfashionably cheerful. How was that possible? He was intrigued by large, exuberant families, if only because his own had been so pinched and fraught.
Viola, one of the younger daughters, was a fellow novelist, doing rather well, and charming with it. She had declared herself a great admirer of his Sons and Lovers, and had sweetly, without hesitation, insisted they take her cottage on her father’s property – a converted cattle shed.
Frieda burst out laughing, as only Frieda would – ‘Do you think us in some way bovine, my dear?’ – and Viola nervously explained that the cottage was now converted for human habitation, and really quite comfortable. The Meynells, she said, had dubbed it ‘Shed Hall’, but the designation was merely a family joke which had somehow stuck. She would, she said, happily move into the main house, Winborn’s, with her parents, who divided their time between Sussex and London.
Shed Hall, if not the stuff of enviable letterheads, could be no worse, he decided, than the miserable, muddy cottage in Chesham. Frieda, for her part, was of the view that it would be a flimsy shack on the south coast, and they would be friendless. But in a perfectly timed afterthought, Viola sent word that he and Frieda would have a housemaid; the woman would be provided by her parents.
Frieda started packing.
The stubborn question remained of how to pay for his wife’s divorce. It was unexpectedly costly, he’d discovered, to steal another man’s wife; costly to the tune of £150, and in this, the Year of Our Lord, 1915, he didn’t have £5 to rub together.
As they negotiated the snowy road, his typewriter, a recent gift from his new American poet-friend Amy Lowell, bounced and rattled in the footwell, between his feet. He’d lost time on the novel, with his five months numb in the grave of Chesham, and now he would miss spring publication, even with Viola Meynell’s offer to type up the manuscript professionally for him. He didn’t care. What was the use, he’d said only that morning to Frieda, of giving books to the swinish public in its present, hell-bent, war-mongering state?
We have to live, she said, with her characteristic shrug.
He was a married man, that shrug said. He had responsibilities. She was his responsibility, she, her handsome Prussian face, and its happiness. In Chesham, between the arguments, the depression, the bouts of fury, and the mutual threats of separation, he’d bought her a new hat, a new coat, and a necklace made of lapis lazuli. Of the £50 his publisher, Methuen, had advanced him, almost nothing remained.
He didn’t tell his wife that his £90 on publication would be claimed directly by her Husband-Professor’s lawyers before he, Lawrence, saw any of it. Why frighten her? The court had granted the divorce, but bankruptcy loomed.
And he badly needed new collars.
In the storm, there wasn’t another soul on the road. They crept on, ever deeper into old Sussex. Their driver whistled a nervous jingle as the snow drove at the car. Once, they teetered over a ditch, and the exile had to get out to push. Then they skidded onward, down twisting roads and lanes.
Frieda was heavy against his side. With his free arm, he made a porthole in the window’s frost and peered up at the fretwork of branches; they closed over the road, wrought in bright snow.
Near the hamlet of Greatham, the storm gave out. The sky cleared. The gabled roof of the old farmhouse, Winborn’s, came into view. He straightened to see over a snow-topped hedge, and something within him warmed. Viola had said that a good fire, jugged hare and wine would await them, whatever the hour. He was hungry. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had an appetite.
As the motor crept up the lane, he forced his frozen window down again. The stars swam above them like silver seed – reckless, rampant and yearning – in the dark womb of the night. The sky pulsed and here, he observed, in the beautiful middle of nowhere, the Milky Way was as thick as empyrean jizz; as bright, as glorious, as the wanks of the old gods.
The spirits of this place weren’t dead as they were in Buckinghamshire. He could feel them, and he could feel life returning. Libre, libero. For the first time in months, he thought that he and his wife – who had just awoken with pink cheeks and shining eyes – might even manage a warm-hearted fuck.
ii
The next morning, he found his old school-teacher’s overcoat in one of their cases, having conceded that his corduroy jacket was unequal to the day’s gusts. On their maid Hilda’s advice, he tied potato sacks around his shoes, and accepted Wilfrid Meynell’s kind offer of a pair of field-glasses. Frieda fussed at his neck with a muffler, offered by Viola, while Viola passed him a pair of her brother’s gloves. He rewarded her with a warm smile over Frieda’s shoulder.
Meynell children jumped like frogs from some hidden pond and pleaded to be allowed to go. Hilda shooed them away, and ‘Off, quick as you like,’ she instructed. He grabbed his old slouch hat.
He’d hardly started climbing when a gust took it, and he had to stomp through the drifts to catch its brim with a foot. He felt his face flatten as he walked into the wind and turned from it, looking down on what the Meynells, amongst themselves, called the Colony. He could see the roof of his new home. He was, in truth, delighted with Viola’s cow-shed. Already his mind was composing a scene for a story – about he knew not what. It was a reflex, a turn of mind.
On one side of this quadrangle was the long, long barn or shed which Marshall had made into a cottage for his youngest daughter Priscilla.
The cow-shed was a long, low building made of brick and stone, with a lovely little plaque by the door of the Holy Family in blue-and-white plaster. The Virgin’s face was caught in a sombre dream, and he felt irrationally glad of her company. The priest from Amberley, the nearest village, was a Meynell family friend, and had, said Viola, blessed Winborn’s and each of the dwellings in the Colony.
On his way out of his own door that morning, he’d raised a hand and touched the Virgin with two fingers. He wasn’t inclined towards Catholicism, but he was intrigued and comforted by its Madonnas. The Church of England believed it could do away with imagery and femaleness and mystery, and therein lay its greatest delusion. It was an immature Church, just a few hundred years old; it put a naïve faith in the rational study of the eternally irrational. That rationality had led his generation only to the trenches.
Inside their cow-shed, on first waking that morning, he and Frieda had discovered whitewashed walls, four working fireplaces, a grate loaded with logs, and solid, tree-like criss-crossings of dark beams; grand old timbers high-pitched. The sitting-room was austere and splendid, with a long, polished table. One could breathe in such a room. It reminded him of a refectory in a monastery, except, that is, when Frieda took to mooing like a cow, which she did, she said, both to amuse and ‘un-frighten’ herself. She found their new home ‘stark’.
One saw little blue-and-white check curtains at the long windows.
She let the kitchen curtains fall back. ‘It is so very rural, Lorenzo,’ she said, looking as if she might cry.
He conceded that they would indeed be more isolated than they had been in Chesham – farther from London, certainly – but there was no duck-pond to flood under their door, and Sussex was far more beautiful than Buckinghamshire. Their new home was only in want of a good bookcase, and he would start building one directly. He would lay linoleum as well. The main bedroom was a good size, and – luxury! – they had not one but two guest rooms. Hilda, their maid, was a marvel and a dear, the train service from London to Pulborough was surprisingly good, the walk from there to Greatham not so very far, and friends would come. He didn’t mention that he’d already written to Koteliansky, ignoring the fact that Kot didn’t like Frieda, nor she him.
Mein Lieber Kot,
Will you come down on Saturday – write and tell us the train. I think only Viola Meynell will be here. I will walk down to meet you – but come in the daylight. The cottage is not yet quite finished – there are many things to do in the way of furnishing and so on. But this is really a place with a beauty of character. Frieda likes the Meynells but is a bit frightened of the cloistral severity of this place. I must say I love it.
auf wiedersehn,
D. H. Lawrence
Miraculously, there was even a bathroom, with blue Delft tiles, a piped-in tub and gloriously hot water. He’d bathed very late the night before, after supper and failed relations with Frieda. He’d sat up to his neck, observing the outcrop of his ribs and the soft nub of his cock, while Frieda called ‘Moo! Moo!’ from the bedroom, half to entertain and half to beseech. ‘Where is my bull?’ she called. Her great gift was her eternal optimism.
* * *
—
As he climbed the snowy slope that first morning, the downland slept on, its flanks, bosoms and rumps blanketed in white-gold. The way was steep, and the snow knee-deep. He had to stop often to catch his breath in the gusts, bending double at times, and once lingering to exchange a few words with a shepherd. Each struggled to understand the other but the man, Lawrence finally deduced, had been digging out his flock since first light.
The exile looped the field-glasses over a pine bough and took off the fine Meynell gloves. Then he plunged his hands deep into the drift, where he felt almost immediately the cold, hard bone of a shin. With the shepherd at the other end, he got hold of a pair of legs and together they heaved, until a shaggy ewe emerged, like a yellow-eyed Lazarus from the tomb.
In his youth, he’d always enjoyed farm-labouring, especially when it came to tending the animals or milking the cows. He had, people always said in those days, a way with creatures. The shepherd looked up, mumbled terse thanks and an oath, then began pounding the animal back to life.
The exile had first come to Sussex, in May of 1909, in his former life as a Croydon school-teacher, on a walking holiday from Brighton to Newhaven, over the sea-cliffs, with Helen Corke. She’d been a colleague whom he might have taken as a wife had he not been determined to escape both Croydon and the school as fast as he could. On their holiday that year, it had been all easy sunshine, with frothy waves in the distance. Brighton was stately and magnificent, with its royal pavilion, a pleasure-palace which might have been dreamed up for ‘Kubla Khan’.
They slept in a hazel brake, deep in bluebells. They laughed at the Rottingdean windmill, squat and awkward. The sunshine, for the entire nine miles, there and back, was unbroken, with a gentle breeze to cool them as they walked.
Now, in the sudden grip of winter, the wind was the kind that took your skin off. The evergreens were silent, with boughs drooping beneath their cauls of snow. In the distance, the local waterway of the Channel, known as the Solent, was leaden grey.
He trudged on and clambered higher, sensing the footpath rather than seeing it. After eons of erosion and wear, the hillside slopes were smooth, like children’s drawings of hills, save for their ‘tumuli’, the burial mounds of ancient Britons. He remembered them, powerfully, from his previous trip, and he was determined to find them again, come spring. Before the Roman occupation of Britain, the people of Sussex had populated its high ground as much as modern people now did its lowlands.
He steadied himself on frozen branches as he climbed, stopping only when something caught his eye: fox dung on the snow, dense and dark with the fur of a creature consumed; a crossbill’s nest high in a pine – the chicks often hatched in the winter with snow on their backs. On the ground below the nest lay the remnants of the pine-cones from which the mother or father had prised the seeds. Higher still was a profusion of holly and berries, blood-bright against the drifts.
In the distance, on the tablelands of the Weald, the snow muffled everything, and the River Arun ran through it, a sluggish artery of silver. Beyond its south bank, the parallel tracks of the railway line, where they weren’t choked by snow, glinted with the illusion of infinity.
He heard a shrill ‘kee-kee-kee’ and turned his face skyward. The kestrel was not a big bird of prey but its stillness was magisterial, and free of all strain as it glided, then hovered, reading him as he read it, its wings gently beating the sky. Using the glasses, he made out the grey-blue underside of its wings and the white fan of its tail-feathers. Its peace, its wind-hovering patience, was briefly his.
Then it plummeted out of view, as if a string somewhere had been cut. The hunter dropped from a thousand feet to the ground within a matter of seconds. A vole or a field mouse must have run across the white of the hillside, as terrified, he imagined, as an infantryman sprinting across No-Man’s-Land.
From the hilltop, the hamlet of Greatham, a mile away, seemed not so much to have been established as to have been cast at the foot of the Downs, like a child’s abandoned toy bricks. According to Wilfrid Meynell, the parish was recorded in the Domesday Book and, if it had ever thrived, it was nearly extinct now, although still beautiful with a vestigial, fading life. A few chimneys puffed from the great manor house. Its glass-houses blinked.
Next to the manor house, and also apart from it, stood a twelfth-century, single-roomed church, as modest as a haystack. Meynell told him it had been built for Saxon shepherds, and that its walls were made with rubble from the Roman ruins of Sussex.
Nearby farm buildings lay dormant under the snow. He spotted the long, low rectangle of an ancient tithe barn and, not far from it, the steeply tiled roof of Winborn’s, glowing red against the white.
Winborn’s, as he’d discovered on arrival, was a seventeenth-century farmhouse with timbered walls, broody wings, and dark oak beams throughout. Not far from the tiny church of the almost extinct hamlet stood his own house, a commodious old farmhouse standing back from the road across a bare grassed yard. Meynell had added the library, which served as a reception room, and he had an ambition, Viola said, to build a family chapel. The whole arrangement was a pastoral idyll: eighty acres in span and, when not covered in snow, a patchwork of oak and elm, of wide lawns and rose bushes. It had a good-sized orchard too, plus shady woodland, and a dyke-bank with a beguiling ridge of dark pines.
When the River Arun overflowed its banks, as it did each winter, the family’s parcel of land was lapped by an inland sea, which made the soil of only haphazard use for agriculture. For that reason, when Meynell was first shown the property, it had been in want of a buyer for many months. It was also four miles from the nearest village. Yet its very uselessness and dilapidation charmed the literary clan. They had no understanding of the farming life, but they possessed fertile imaginations and quickly grasped what the place could be.
Meynell, a Catholic editor and newspaper publisher, took possession in 1911. That June, he and Alice the poetess, his lady-wife, were transported in a fly from Pulborough Station up the rutted lane. Their approach to Winborn’s was skimmed by nodding corn and crimson poppies. On the property’s far side, a herd of deer skittered across the scrubby heath of common land.
In time, the deer would encroach, eating their way through the family’s kitchen garden over successive seasons. Bracken and gorse invaded the tennis lawn. Field mice nested in tennis shoes. A thriving population of grass-snakes made London visitors yelp and jump. As tea was poured at the outdoor table in autumn sunshine, family and guests alike chose to ignore the skirmishes and guttural barks of the rutting deer.
The challenges, however, rooted the Meynells ever more deeply to the place, and the peace of Greatham became their sanctuary from London, especially once the National Madness was declared. Where did all the sane people go these days? Where could they put themselves? To speak against the War and the country’s self-inflicted wound was to be branded unpatriotic.
Viola explained that her father had been a Quaker until he converted to Catholicism at the age of eighteen. But he had stayed true to his pacifism. A quiet man of business and faith, he had no faith that the War could lead to anything but more war. On that, he and his new guest were entirely agreed. These days, Greatham was no longer merely the Meynells’ summer retreat from the bustle and aspirations of Kensington life; it was a pocket of peaceful resistance.
