Tenderness, page 18
Forster would meet him only once or twice again, in the safety of polite company. But he would not forget the starling on their walk, beloved of his host; or Lawrence’s patience with Mary, the little girl with the camera; or poor Hilda, bereft and grieving, in Lawrence’s unfaltering embrace.
v
February 16th. Lady Cynthia Asquith, the daughter-in-law of the Prime Minister, and the pre-eminent English beauty of her time, was fair-haired and classical in her features, with wide, intelligent eyes of rare – turquoise – blue. She’d met the Lawrences in Margate on a seaside holiday two years before, when Lawrence had been enormously kind to her children, including John. Her elder son, a boy of six, was a highly unusual child who made animal noises, shouted or cried uncontrollably at family gatherings and in public, and apparently troubled his grandfather, the PM, nearly as much as the War.
Her husband, Herbert – or ‘Beb’ as he was known – was at the Front, and she was very much alone these days. Lawrence believed he knew just the thing for it. He dashed off a note informing her he would meet her off the 12.10 at Pulborough. She would enjoy the four-mile walk to Greatham. That was the plan – unless the telegram boy rushed in or the heavens gave way.
* * *
—
For the photo, Mary assembles Lady Cynthia, Lawrence, Frieda, her own mother Monica, and, at Mary’s insistence, Arthur. They stand in a row in front of Wilfrid Meynell’s shined and waxed motor-car. Lady Cynthia parts her lips and stares into the blue distance, chastely flirtatious with the future viewer.
Frieda grips sad Monica by the waist, as if simultaneously to prop her up and make her smile. The Lawrences, contrary to their own initial expectations, have grown very fond of Monica. She is a sensitive woman, original in her thinking, and an honest observer of herself and others. In the photo, she peers up shyly. The exile turns from the camera to listen to a burst of birdsong. A blackbird is going hard at it, to get his whistle clear of winter rustiness. Frieda elbows her husband in the ribs, he grimaces, and, at her suggestion, on the count of three everyone except Arthur says: ‘Moo!’
Mary pulls the lever.
* * *
—
Beyond the frame, later that day in the small cathedral-city of Chichester – a nearby market-town – they observed perhaps as many as a hundred soldiers in uniform sitting, laughing and smoking at the Market Cross. They were waiting for the army transit, and Lawrence could imagine, only too well, where – what horrors – they were off to.
Monica, Frieda and Lady Cynthia moved in and out of dress shops, although Lady Cynthia had already confided to the exile that she, like him, was cash-strapped. She asked if he would stand guard outside each shop, because she ‘could not be seen buying off-the-peg’.
‘She wearies me a bit,’ he murmured to Monica and Frieda as they waited with him, outside the best ladies’ shop in Chichester. ‘Pip-pip!’ he called to his guest, hurrying her as much as he dared.
Frieda was inclined to agree. ‘She is quite nice, but – I feel sorry for her. She is poor in feeling.’ Even so, Frieda was canny enough to know that a PM’s daughter-in-law was never poor in connections, and before Lady Cynthia drove off from the Colony – in a car sent by Downing Street for her safe return – Frieda clasped her hand and made her promise she would visit again ‘soon!’
* * *
—
February 17th. Jack Middleton Murry, the young writer, editor and lover of Katherine Mansfield, visited next, bereaved at his beloved’s departure for the Continent, full of ‘unutterable’ miseries. He arrived in Pulborough in darkness and stumbled through the floods, only to succumb that first evening to a cold sweat and mucous fever.
The exile made an excellent nurse. He took matters in hand, rubbing his friend down with camphorated oil, an event which Jack Murry would later find recounted in close detail in Aaron’s Rod. For a long time he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man’s lower body – the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted.
It would be a truthful account, so truthful it would bring Murry up short as he read. He had glowed. They both had, and their friendship grew closer and warmer as a consequence of his new-found dependence on Lawrence.
Yet the following day, when Jack Murry declared himself ‘out of the woods’, his host-turned-nurse proceeded – in Jack’s words – to ‘crucify’ him, both for his neglect of his lover Katherine and for her infidelity, which was unfolding in Paris, he confessed, even as he and Lawrence spoke. When Murry ruefully compared her infidelity to Frieda’s own long history, his host glared: Frieda’s infidelities were not true infidelities for ‘they mean nothing to her’.
The corner of Murry’s mouth twitched.
‘And your point is?’ asked the exile.
‘It’s high time you enjoyed a little meaninglessness of your own.’
‘It wouldn’t suit me.’ It was he who dispensed the advice, not the reverse.
‘Not tempted?’
‘I am a happily married Puritan, who lives by my conscience and will not stoop to mere gratification.’ More to the point, he knew Frieda would not tolerate it, for she was quickly jealous.
Later that week, the two friends walked up Rackham Hill into the Downs. The first primroses shook brightly on the breeze, flickering like candle stubs in the afternoon gloom.
In the meantime, Frieda took to her bed with what she sulkily claimed was Murry’s cold, but in reality, it was a deep sense of injury; her husband had raged at her again – a horrible, explosive episode. First, he threw two plates at the wall. In response, Frieda hurled one of Jack’s walking boots and accidentally hit her target in the head. To Murry’s eyes, Lawrence was suddenly nothing less than demented; a raving demon. His entire countenance altered strangely.
The younger man stepped between the raging-weeping pair but to no avail. Only when Hilda entered, to prepare supper, did Lawrence bow his head and lope past her, through the door into the cold shock of night.
* * *
—
Lady Ottoline came again that February, this time with her lover Bertrand Russell, the philosopher-son of an Earl. Very kind, decided Lawrence. Dignified. Quite ugly. A forthright face with intent, honest eyes. A weak chin and an unusual shape of head, as if packed with additional brain-power at the back. A clever-jacks, by all accounts. A maths whizz.
In Mary’s photograph, Russell holds a piece of ploughland chalk-stone and, with it, he draws the symbol for infinity on her mother’s garage door, where the motor-car is kept. Although faint in the photo, Russell’s drawing covers most of the door.
Monica came out to see the assembled, and smiled wanly. No, she would not, she told her daughter, join any photograph.
The exile, a bystander to the moment, can be seen at the edge of the frame, a synecdoche of himself, a pair of trouser-legs and brogues.
Later, in the kitchen, Russell would suck his pipe and nod over the gravy Lawrence made at the stove. They spoke easily, through the steam of boiled vegetables. The exile spoke of the Ancient Constitution and The Levellers, of Blake and ‘Jerusalem’, the radical hymn, and its ‘arrow of desire’; of his own formation in the Nonconformist church; of the Tolpuddle Martyrs – pardoned by Russell’s own ‘clear-sighted grandfather PM’, who was, two years after their scandalously harsh sentence, Home Secretary of the realm. Russell nodded and recalled the rough-whiskered, gentle old man from his childhood. He had kept peppermints for his grandson in an old snuff-box.
The exile clung even now, he said, to the tradition and spirit of British radicalism, of freeborn men, of Common Law and Common Land. It was all they had, he said. It was the best of what they had. Unusually, he spoke with a restrained passion – the moderating effect, perhaps, of Russell’s quiet gravitas. Redemption, the exile said, had first to be imagined. Healing would never spring from horror. A broken country knew only how to go on breaking, and it risked being forever at the mercy of opportunists, industrialists and political predators. Words alone – honest words, compassionate words, respectful exchanges – could begin to mend it.
Russell tasted the gravy at the end of Lawrence’s spoon and nodded. He was a pacifist, he said. He suspected he was being watched by MI5 and murmured that he might be ‘excommunicated’ by Trinity College for his pacifism. Before bed that night, Russell told Ottoline that Lawrence had helped him to understand many things.
In the sitting-room, Jack Murry had been allocated to the refectory table to entertain the ladies. He sat, trying to hide his jealousy of the devotion Lady Ottoline heaped on the absent Lawrence. Wasn’t he, Jack, also a writer of merit? At the same time, he eavesdropped on the kitchen tête-à-tête, jealous of Lawrence’s new affection for the tête of Bertrand Russell. And still, he felt utterly wretched about Katherine running away to her new French lover.
Even as Jack yearned for attention from Ottoline or Lawrence, Frieda craved the attention of handsome Jack Murry – with his deep-set eyes, his even features, and his strikingly dark widow’s peak. The day would come when he would succumb wholly to her attentions, but on this particular evening, he ignored her whenever politely possible, and seemed only to bother to come to life when Ottoline spoke.
Frieda pouted. Wasn’t she, Frieda von Richthofen, also high-born? She resented Ottoline, while also privately, fervently hoping that their guest, one of the grandest women in England, might help her, a fellow noblewoman, find a way to spend time with the children from whom she had been cruelly separated by her ex-Husband-Professor. She railed at the injustice and started to weep at the table. She also coveted her guest’s pearls.
Ottoline, for her part, said only that she would do what she could – she would write Professor Weekley a letter, pleading Frieda’s case – and she wondered privately when Russell might emerge from gravy-making to save her.
Her hope was dashed as Frieda clapped her hands. ‘You must think me a very poor hostess indeed, Ottoline. You and Russell must stay the night!’
Ottoline blanched.
‘That way,’ continued her hostess, ‘you may take your time and enjoy dinner, without the worry of the long journey back.’
Of course, there was still the pretence to be respected, the one in which everyone conspired – namely, that Russell was not sleeping with Lady O., for each was married. Frieda turned to Jack, instructing him. ‘Murry, you will sleep with us. Ottoline, you will have the room you had last time, our best, and Russell shall have Jack’s room. Jack shan’t mind.’ She glanced his way. Jack made a guttural, stammering noise. ‘Lorenzo and I have a double bed,’ she added reassuringly, ‘and Lorenzo is only thin.’
Lady Ottoline remembered her cold sleeplessness of earlier that month, and the silverfish in the bathroom. She declined ‘aristocratically’, which is to say, with neither explanation nor apology. And that was that.
* * *
—
In the ghost of Mary’s photo, Jack Murry and the exile are laying the green linoleum in the long sitting-room of the cow-shed, in a wash of morning light. The roll of lino has been felled and is a palm tree no more. The two men are at their most content, their closest – and their blurriest too – as the snap is taken. They would not be still! complained Mary. Their sleeves are up. Murry cuts the lino, and the exile is on his knees, banging each sheet into place, with one arm raised high and a pencil behind his ear.
What are arguably John Middleton Murry’s most memorable words are yet to be written. As he unrolls the lino, that particular work of criticism is still unimaginable, as is the bomb of a book to which it refers, as is the courtroom drama in which Murry’s words will aid and abet the attack on the final novel of his former friend. By the time of the infamous courtroom scene, both men will be dead, and yet their words will clash.
In Greatham, we are still forty-five years away from that drama, but reality is porous. Time seeps. In Mary’s viewfinder, Jack Murry adopts a wicked face as he slashes at the lino, like The Ripper himself and, behind the neat triangle of his beard, Lawrence laughs, his eyes alight.
* * *
—
Together they beat the new flooring into submission in a triumph of a morning. The following day, Murry was gone at first light, without so much as a goodbye to anyone. Why the sudden departure?
Katherine Mansfield’s train was due in Victoria Station at 8 a.m., and her cast-aside lover was determined to be there on the platform to woo her.
The exile was bereft. Jack was gone, gone. He’d gone running back to Katherine like a whipped dog.
A knock came on the door, early. The exile leaped from his chair. Jack had changed his mind! But no, it was only Mary, saying she needed to practise her copperplate letters in preparation for her lessons with the exile, which were to begin ‘soon’. He told her, ‘No, not soon – not until May.’ But she sailed past him, over the threshold, her little dark head held high. Then she glanced up at him, reading his features cautiously, and poured herself a cup of tea from their morning pot.
In truth, Lawrence, in his gloom, was glad of her company. Perhaps her mother, Monica, had sent her over to the cow-shed to give herself an hour or two of peace; Monica was always slow to ‘right herself’ in the morning.
He joined the girl at the refectory table and set her to writing out lines: ‘Jack Murry is a bad boy because he does not stay here long enough. Jack Murry is a bad boy because he does not stay here long enough.’ He instructed her to continue, down the page and onto the next, until he lost track, and the edge of her hand was smeared with black ink.
The dictation was interrupted at last by Hilda, eyes darting with nervousness as Lawrence opened the door to her. She was clutching something behind her back. A telegram, as it turned out. It had been delivered moments before to Winborn’s – for Mrs Lawrence.
Frieda read, then collapsed at the table. Mary fled. Lawrence stood above his wife, cupping her head to his stomach.
Her father, the Baron, was gravely ill. The doctor said he wouldn’t survive the month.
‘You must go to him, madam,’ said Hilda.
‘I must, Lorenzo,’ she said.
‘Of course you must.’
Sometimes, it was still possible to forget, momentarily, that the War was on, that borders were closed, and that it was, in fact, impossible to go to her family – or it was if she wanted to return to England. No one’s mind could catch up quickly enough with the new reality. The world had turned inside-out.
Uncharacteristically for Frieda, she was so despondent that she neither wept nor railed against the War, nor bemoaned her fate in a country which had confined her free spirit to rural Greatham. She merely disappeared into their bedroom, refusing to come out all day and night, even for dinner. At last, the exile called to her that he had made a shepherd’s pie.
‘Lamb?’ she said quietly, her eyes dull as he entered their room with her plate on a tray. ‘We can’t afford lamb.’
‘Don’t fret. Not lamb,’ he said. ‘Shepherd. I went out and killed one myself.’
A smile got the better of her mouth.
Then he sat down by her side and fed her, forkful by forkful.
* * *
—
The following day, when Frieda was feeling more like herself, it was he who was overcome by the fluey-cold bug which, as she reminded him, his fair-weather-friend Jack Murry had brought to their door.
She persuaded Monica to lend her Arthur and the car so that she could go to Chichester to buy herself two quality black frocks – a day-dress and a gown – for her mourning. The exile imagined their bills of sale in the post, and his temperature soared. Frieda said she would get him something for it at Boots Cash Chemist, the dispensary in Chichester.
‘What can they give me for you?’ he growled.
Frieda missed the point altogether. ‘Oh, I’m feeling quite well again, dear Lorenzo. The shopping trip shall revive me.’
Propped up in their guest-room bed, in a flannel shirt buttoned to the neck, he felt miserable and alone. The bug had reduced him to a churl of an invalid, and he wanted no one to see him. Even Wilfrid Meynell, his Greatham benefactor, was turned away. For the sake of his novel, he conceded only to receive Viola, his typist, and her friend, the fledgling poet Eleanor Farjeon.
Eleanor was lively and she loved hill-walking. He liked her immediately. She was plain, with heavy eyebrows, thick specs, and a chin which doubled as she spoke, although she was thin and not yet jowly or middle-aged. She was, he feared, the sort of endearingly vibrant young woman whose destiny was bound to be one of unrequited love of the most intense variety, followed, ultimately, by spinsterdom. It was all wrong, he decided, for she possessed a wondrous smile which made him sit up and forget he was ill. How hard the world could be on women.
Bunny Garnett would have to marry her. That was the solution. He would tell Bunny as much himself. She was too marvellous not to be seized by life.
Eleanor had kindly agreed to help Viola type up the remainder of the manuscript. Viola refrained from saying that she herself was struggling with eye strain.
Eleanor, as well as her brother Herbert Farjeon – a London playwright he knew something of – was in the Bax brothers’ circle of friends. As the exile understood it, the Bax gang favoured the opera, Russian ballet and cricket above all. David – Bunny – was a member of that circle too, and Eleanor spoke fondly of him. She had been glad, she remarked, through her friendship with Viola, to find at least a few decidedly literary people of her own age.
