Tenderness, page 15
And how the exile craved peace. Fragments, whole chunks, of him had flown off by the day – into the rain of Chesham. They got trampled in its mud. He had holes in him, and not only in his clothes. The cold of the rain got in; the muck too. Yet if there was still a grief in his brokenness, there was also a queer new energy and intent, now that he had landed in Sussex. Something bigger pulsed within. It was not a clarion call – no, it was certainly not that – but a life-hum sounded through his cracked spirit. His novel, for him the bright book of life, might even carry him forward.
A good story was a form of communication, mind to mind, spirit to spirit. It sent life sparking from stranger to stranger, across space, decades and centuries. Human sympathy – human attention – had magic in it. Any real story fizzed with sympathy – the writer’s and reader’s – across time, over rows of typographical marks; those low boundary fences of the imagination, hurdled.
He wasn’t interested in the polished hard bricks of creation; of life trapped in edifices; in perfect symmetries on the page. True life held a looseness, a flux and influx, floods and barren fields, frozen winter and spring’s green pulse. He’d risk jerkiness, the errant, the raw on the page. Other men risked far more daily – he’d seen that in the dark mines of his boyhood. Many were broken, with nothing more to mark their lives than a gaping maw of earth.
He felt a failure most days, it was true, but here, among the old gods of Sussex, life seemed possible. The air was so startlingly clear, and anyway, only the dead were ever safe.
‘I ought’ He turned again towards the rooftops of Greatham. He was lucky to be in possession of a novel to finish, a cottage, a maid, a bath and a typist.
How impossible it would have been ‘I ought never’ in that moment to grasp his own words, blowing back at him from the future ‘I ought never, never to have gone to live at Greatham.’
* * *
—
Earlier that same morning, they’d breakfasted with the Meynells a veritable horde of them – over a bountiful table of food. Wilfrid Meynell, the clan patriarch, was a short but robust northerner in a good grey suit; a smoky torch of a man, puffing on a clay pipe, full of life and generosity. He enjoyed, evidently, the sentimentality of big family life and the cultivation of a genteel, cultured home. But he was quick, canny and clear-eyed. The exile could see as much in his gaze. As they spoke, Lawrence sketched his host in his mind’s eye.
He was a business man, but by nature he was sensual, and he was on his knees before a piece of poetry that really gratified him. Consequently, whilst he was establishing a prosperous business, at home he diffused the old Quaker righteousness with a new, aesthetic sensuousness, and his children were brought up in this sensuous, aesthetic heat, which was always, at the same time, kept in the iron grate of conventional ethics.
His wife, Alice, was as small and delicate as her husband was robust. She was dark-eyed and dark in complexion, with a subtlety of perception which impressed the exile. Her poems were too distant – generationally and stylistically – for his liking; she was fond of sonnets, quatrains and a certain elevation of form, but her reputation was still going strong. She had, only a year or two before, been proposed by some for the role of Poet Laureate, for a second time, and her Collected Poems had recently been published.
Viola explained that her mother loved Greatham but had been down from London only little of late because of poor health migraines usually, which Alice called ‘wheels’. ‘I’m down with one of my wheels, alas.’ But her gladness at the sight of new visitors was heartier than she herself was, and she insisted that he and Frieda finish off a box of French chocolates, bought for the holiday season but opened only the evening before. ‘You had a long, trying journey last night, and you must be restored!’ Frieda readily agreed, although they had not yet breakfasted. Alice Meynell winked, as if she were colluding with a greedy child whom she couldn’t help but indulge.
The introductions at the long breakfast table were complex. There were not only many names to learn but nicknames, married names and myriad branches of the family tree. The clan seemed to treble and swell, almost queasily as the exile ate, and the room was full of various dark, madonna-like Meynell women, moving in and out. They themselves had their own grace, but it was slow, rather heavy. They had every one of them strong, heavy limbs and darkish skins, and they were short in stature.
Afterwards, Viola played hostess in the library while a younger married sister arranged coffee, trays and armchairs around the great hearth. That sister – whose name he’d forgotten – was, apparently, a fine painter; she’d studied, Viola said, at the Slade School and still painted actively, though now a mother; a sweet-faced toddler slept on a cushion in a willow basket on the sideboard. Frieda asked if she might pick her up, and Lawrence had had to remind her that the child was sleeping.
The library was a large, book-lined sitting-room dominated by a cheery fire, and busy with Italian bric-a-brac and William Morris wallpaper. Alice took Frieda – the new, if not blushing, bride – by the hand and told her that they were most welcome.
The older woman had a natural warmth. She hoped that he, ‘Mr Lawrence’, would be able to get on with his book ‘here in the wilds of Sussex’, and that he would not find her family too overwhelming. She confessed – and he liked her immediately for it – that she often had to take to the water-closet when she needed to compose a poem.
She congratulated him on his objections to the War. Francis, her son, was of the same sound mind. She seemed to emphasise the word ‘sound’, and he wondered if Viola had told her mother, out of kindness, about his breakdown in Chesham.
As guests, they were shown miscellaneous family photographs and portraits, including a framed drawing by John Singer Sargent. The celebrated American had made a study of Alice in her youth.
The exile nodded politely as he assessed it. He said he enjoyed a little drawing and painted himself, or had in his youth; that he had taught painting, drawing and botany to the boys at the school in Croydon.
‘You were a teacher?’ asked Viola, joining them, and he nodded, remembering that former self.
Of the Sargent study of her mother, for courtesy’s sake, he expressed no view. The Americans, like the English, he thought, painted clothes rather than bodies. Both nations were lacking a single artist of the human body to compare to Picasso, Michelangelo or Degas. It was an emotionally stunted artistic history. Renoir, for all his limitations, knew how to paint with his penis.
Frieda, always bored by conventionally polite occasions, separated from the group and moved to the library window to signal to her husband her desire to leave. She looked out to where Madeline’s three little girls were playing in the snow, making snow-angels. She sorely missed her own three.
When she had appeared at the school gates, a few months before, shortly after her Register Office wedding, they had looked positively frightened of her. Even dear Monty, her eldest, her only son, had turned pale. Elsa, in her panic, had tried to pretend, in front of her chums, that she didn’t know who ‘the woman’ was. After two years away from them, ten-year-old Barby, the youngest, seemed actually not to know her. She’d burst into tears at the sight of the woman reaching for her through the bars.
What on earth had the Weekleys been telling them about her? She asked Lawrence, but although he loved children, he hardly knew hers, and the problem for him was mostly a theoretical one. At times, he ran out of patience with her altogether. He had married her, hadn’t he? He was scrambling to find the money for her divorce, wasn’t he? He couldn’t fix everything! If he could have ‘magicked up her children’, he would have, without hesitation. He would have been a second father to them.
As it was, he said, there was only one thing for it: she must ask for Lady Ottoline’s help. She might exert influence on Professor Weekley. But Frieda would have to be kind to her. He would invite her to stay. What more could he do?
When Wilfrid Meynell joined Frieda at the window and asked after her, she blinked away a tear and declared that the fire was making her sleepy, which is when the exile saw poor Meynell tug on his short grey beard, as unsure in that moment how to entertain the golden-haired daughter of a German Baron as he would have been a Teutonic goddess.
Viola was quick to intercede. Most of the family were returning to London that afternoon, she told Frieda, casually but reassuringly. They had been so pleased to meet the new residents of the Colony, but they couldn’t stay. She and Lawrence would have peace and quiet. She would herself stay, of course, as arranged, and she would make a start the next day on Lawrence’s manuscript.
The exile departed Alice’s company, to spare Viola the problem of his wife. He was, he declared, most grateful for her help with the manuscript. Privately, he knew there were hundreds of handwritten pages. Six hundred perhaps. He told her he’d have it all ‘out of him’ by the end of February. He had promised his publisher that there would be no flagrant love-passages in it, but he admitted to Viola that he and the Messrs Methuen might see things differently. She nodded and said she would mark up passages he might wish to ‘re-consider’.
Viola’s sister Madeline crossed the room to them, with her three little girls in tow. Madeline explained to the guests that she, her husband and their family had, until quite recently, occupied a primitive place, called Rackham Cottage, at the far edge of the Colony, in a sunny dell, under a sprawl of old oak trees. The property marked the border where the Meynells’ cultivated acreage met the shaggy land of the public common.
Madeline was thirty-one or thirty-two, he estimated, and had a husband, Perceval Lucas – Percy – who had been stationed for training in Epsom since September, when he’d volunteered for active service. Madeline passed the guest a framed photograph which stood on the sideboard. It had been taken the summer before – by ‘our little niece Mary’, Viola added. The photograph was of a cricket team, or rather half a team. In July, Percy Lucas had been playing cricket on the green and, afterwards, ‘Mary, our sister Monica’s only child’ had asked the men if she might take their picture with her new Brownie camera.
In time, a few chairs and stools were pulled up. It was a relaxed assembly agreed for the benefit of an eager child. Standing a little nervously before the men, she had gripped her camera by her waist, turned it on its side to peer down into the side-viewfinder – in order to make a rectangular picture. Then she’d composed her subject, kept her belly very still, and – flip! – pulled the lever.
Madeline was distracted at that moment by her own pleading children. In the interval, Viola informed the exile that ‘dear Percy’, Madeline’s Percy, was ‘a gentle man’ – ‘thoughtful if a little indifferent to things,’ she said with a smile.
‘Oh?’ he said.
She reached after words, still smiling brightly. ‘A little adrift, I suppose one might say, in his own world.’
He gathered that Perceval Lucas had taken the entire family by surprise that summer when word of the Declaration of War reached Greatham. It was not thought that married men, and particularly not married men with children, would be conscripted, although the regular army was on the verge of being quickly outnumbered on the Continent, or would be, certainly, without new British recruits in their tens of thousands. The authorities were targeting boys and young men, but Percy Lucas, along with his cricket friends, presented himself, on the first day, at the recruiting office. ‘It was a noble thing to do,’ Viola said – and ‘I’ll leave it at that,’ said her face.
Madeline re-joined their conversation. For the benefit of their guests, she pointed out her husband in the photo, seated on the ground at the end of the front row. He was tall, slender but strong in build, with long supple legs pulled up into the frame. His pose was both concentrated and languid. He possessed a handsome face, with the aquiline nose of an old county family. The gaze was intelligent, sensitive, reserved. An eyebrow was raised, suggesting a capacity for irony. He had a head of fine, silky hair, the kind that had ripened from blond to brown with age; he wore it oiled and parted sharply in the middle.
Percy Lucas, the exile saw, was even-featured, clean-shaven and effortless in his cricket flannels. Here was the flower of English manhood. Here was a man who was entirely at ease in his land, free from incongruities and intensities. He had the look of a calm, clever batsman, one who knew how to conserve his energy and react instinctively. Percy stared back at Mary’s lens, and his gaze said: ‘I am precisely where I am meant to be – I could only ever have been here.’
It seemed to the exile something near magical, such a sense of belonging; of rightness, of assurance in the ground beneath one’s feet. He returned the picture to Madeline, stood and reached for a bowl of walnuts.
It was a job to crack them. He felt the weakness of his hands – small hands on long arms. Everything about him was disproportioned: his hands, his clubby nose, his narrow chin. When he was young, he had been lithe and milky-white. Now he was merely thin and pale.
What sort of man, he asked himself, would willingly throw himself headlong into a war which had neither required nor demanded him? Perceval Lucas had to be either bloodthirsty or morbidly selfless. Which was it?
And from that morning forth, the mystery of Perceval Lucas was an irritation which scratched away at the exile’s brain. ‘A gentle man,’ Viola had said of her brother-in-law – ‘thoughtful if a little indifferent to things. Adrift in his own world.’ Why run at a war? What was the man running from? In his absence from the gathering, Perceval Lucas suddenly seemed to the exile to be more forcibly present than anyone in the room.
And so a story of England, of Perceval Lucas’s England, flickered strangely to life in those otherwise inconsequential minutes of a convivial breakfast in 1915 – ‘England, My England’ – a powerful story which was unknown even to its author as he laughed, cracked walnuts and joked with the Meynells. A powerful, poison-dart of a story soon to fly – decades into the future.
Madeline Meynell Lucas, Viola’s sister and Perceval’s wife, was a warm-hearted, pretty woman, and capable too by all accounts. Her family was generous. Their children were beautiful. Percy Lucas clearly lived in peace, thought the exile, and with enviable ease. He had a flat in Bayswater and the young couple must transfer themselves from time to time from the country to the city. In town they had plenty of friends, of the same ineffectual sort as himself, tampering with the arts— He also had a little paradise there in Sussex with Madeline’s family, in his cottage in the sunny dell.
At the window, Wilfrid Meynell had somehow managed to sustain the attention of Frieda, who, unknown to him, actually enjoyed the company of any man of distinction. Lawrence, Viola and Madeline now crossed from window to hearth, and he, their guest, chatted away, tossing shells onto the fire. But even as he happily proffered walnut halves to each woman in turn, he felt something queer cut through him, a hot knife from breastbone to bowel; a curious, seeping hatred for a seemingly virtuous man he did not know and had never met. What a peculiar thing hatred was – and yet no less real for that. He was not blind to the truth of himself: he had, he knew, a large but crooked heart.
Madeline took up the poker and prodded a burning log deep into the grate. As she did, she admitted to him, in a quiet tone, that, since her husband’s departure for the army, she preferred their London flat to Rackham Cottage, which was too lonely and remote for her liking. Nor could she keep up with the garden ‘dear Percy’ had dug and devoted himself to. In fact, her husband had been repairing the log-bridge over their brook when he found he had to report for duties. The bridge was left unfinished. She worried it was unsafe, especially for the local children. The exile assured her he’d be glad to have a look at it once the snow was melted. He was handy with a hammer and nails.
Percy had, she said, in reply to his question before it came, joined up with men he’d known since his schooldays, even though some were a good deal younger than he. They’d been on the local cricket team together and in the same Morris-dance group, and although none of them could recall who’d first had the idea of joining up, one had somehow inspired the next ‘and so on’, she said with a vague wave of her hand. They had responded decisively to Lord Kitchener’s call for volunteers. Now, incredibly, they were in training as officers in the Public School Brigade. She blinked, as if her brain could not catch up. It was so unexpected, she said. Her husband never argued with a soul, nor could he even bring himself to kill a snake! ‘Let be,’ she said. ‘That is always Percy’s golden rule, “Let be.” ’
She shook her head, banishing tears. Then she lowered her voice again and confided to the exile that Percy’s decision had taken her aback at first. Before he had converted to Catholicism in order to marry her, he, like her own family previously, had been a committed Quaker. A pacifist, in other words. Also, their girls were still so young and they needed— She stopped herself. The idea of war was simply so far removed from all she – from all they as a couple – knew and held dear.
She was very proud of her husband, of course. She didn’t mean to suggest that she wasn’t. They all were. He had even ‘cheated at’ his army eye-test a little, memorising in advance the lines of an eye-chart, when he might have, legitimately, accepted a ‘fail’ and stayed at home. Yet he’d been determined not to break his promise to his old friends, given they were already through.
The exile’s immediate thought was of the man’s promise – his vow – to her, his wife, and as if sensing it, Madeline conceded that his going had been an ‘adjustment’. After his departure for the army camp, Rackham Cottage – on her own with the three children, the nurse and governess – had become simply too difficult, even with others often nearby at Winborn’s. These days she and the children visited from London instead, on school holidays and for special occasions, of which the Lawrences’ visit was one! She and her girls tended to stay in the main house, now that Percy was away, but this time, the children had hankered after their old cottage for the weekend, and Arthur, her father’s man, had left them a heap of dry wood on the hearth. Only they hadn’t realised they’d be snowed-in by morning!
