Tenderness, page 35
‘I had no idea you were arriving today.’
‘And you – leaving? Shame!’
The exile loves her face, open, unaffected, radiant.
Eleanor watches Arthur struggle with the cases. ‘Frieda’s things, I take it?’ She cocks her eyebrow.
He growls.
She nods to Mary’s gift. ‘The nest, however, is essential.’
‘It is.’ He glances to the ground. ‘Which is why you are to have my typewriter.’
‘What?’ she exclaims. ‘Me?’ and she takes a step back. ‘Are you not long for this world, Mr D. H. Lawrence?’
‘Not if I have to hump my chattels as far as Hampstead. Have it, please – typing crucifies me at best. Be sure to visit me in our new abode. I expect you to come bearing wet maps, songs and poems. I shall be lost if you don’t. Come see me through this unbearable war, won’t you?’
She nods, and he squeezes her arm.
He goes next to Viola and draws her to him. ‘Thank you for your cow-shed, my dear friend,’ he murmurs. ‘Thank you for putting up with us – with me especially.’
She smiles up at him. ‘It was a pleasure and an honour.’
‘Give my best to Martin, won’t you?’
‘Give it to him yourself! We shall see you soon enough in Hampstead!’
He nods, steps back and looks away. ‘I hope so,’ he says. And he does in that moment. He does earnestly hope. Tears prick at his eyes. Why is his life so transient? Where are the roots of himself? Will Viola ever speak to him again once the story is out? He can feel it now – reality snapping at his heels. He presses her hand. ‘I couldn’t have finished The Tome without you.’
‘Nonsense,’ she says and quickly kisses his cheek.
Rain starts to blow through the quadrangle, and he suppresses a cough. Viola takes the hat from his grip and places it on his head. ‘I cannot wait till The Tome appears.’
He looks about him, at the red-tiled roof, the garden beds, at the cornfield across the lane where the stalks are bowing under their golden weight. ‘I feel as if I’ve been born afresh here,’ he tells her quietly.
Viola nods to the door of the cow-shed, to its blue-and-white plaque. ‘I do hope you bid au revoir to your little Madonna. She will be sad – even sadder, that is! – if you haven’t.’
He has laid his mine.
‘I shall miss both her and you nearly as much as your bathtub!’
Viola slaps his arm.
‘Well, at last!’ Eleanor declares abruptly. ‘You slow-coach!’
Another friend emerges from the orchard’s veil of mist. Everyone in the courtyard turns to see.
‘Luckily,’ Eleanor explains to the newcomer, ‘we’ve managed to delay Lawrence before he heartlessly abandons us. He should really be joining us for our walk, but apparently, he has his sights set on a dry train carriage, if you can credit it!’
Joan Farjeon demure and maidenly as ever smiles and nods to the assembly. Her hair is covered in droplets, and she clutches a handkerchief as if she might have a summer cold. At least the day is mild. She is down from London with neither husband Bertie, nor baby, it would seem. The exile takes off his hat to her, but Arthur is waiting, there is no time to speak or do anything more— when her sister arrives and takes her place at Joan’s side.
‘All present and correct,’ says Eleanor to Viola.
Rosalind.
Ros.
The woman from the snowy hilltop. The vision of that January day. He with Wilfrid Meynell’s field-glasses; she with her opera-glasses.
That wordless, dizzying exchange at the top of Sussex while the downland dreamed them both.
He feels a rush to the head, a wind knocking at his soul.
‘Mr Meynell, may I present,’ says Joan, ‘my sister, Mrs Rosalind Baynes.’
‘How do you do?’ says Mrs Baynes to the crowd of Meynells and friends.
Time cleaves into past and future.
Arthur revs the motor.
‘Yet another daughter,’ Wilfrid Meynell declares, ‘of the good Sir Hamo Thornycroft! You are most welcome, my dear.’
Mrs Baynes greets the Meynell sisters, with whom she was acquainted in their youth, on school hockey fields. Only then does she turn towards him, her expression intent but enigmatic. He is the departing guest of a family with whom she is slightly acquainted; he is a man she knows and knows not.
She is in her early twenties, perhaps six or seven years younger than he. Her gaze is veiled by the memory they share – she is shy, almost embarrassed – but that gaze is also direct. He cannot seem to separate himself from it, from her – and, unknown even to him, a study for a portrait in words forms in the gleaming strata of his imagination. She was young and beautiful and strong with life, like a flame in sunshine.
He can see the memory of the snowy day move across her eyes, in shafts of light and shadow, and there in the quad, strangely, he feels himself seen, truly seen, so unfaltering is her gaze. He was rather frail, really. Curiously full of vitality, but a little frail, and quenched. Her woman’s instinct sensed it. He is discomfited, and magnetised to the spot.
Arthur climbs out of his driver’s seat and takes the birds’-nest box from the exile. ‘That’s everything, Mr Lawrence.’ Which is to say: you are about to miss your train.
Wilfrid brushes himself of crumbs and offers his strong hand. ‘God speed, Lawrence. Don’t forget us – Palace Court, Kensington! Never far!’
Lawrence turns to Hilda. He thinks of the day she rushed into the cow-shed, overwhelmed by the news of her brother’s death. He remembers how slight her frame was in his arms.
‘Your lunch is on the car seat, Mr Lawrence. Mind you don’t sit on it!’ She reaches for his hand.
He kisses her forehead, as if she is the dearest of them all, and doubtless she is, for she knows the beautiful fragility of life better than any of them. Her brother was not yet eighteen when he was buried alive in a collapsed trench.
Everyone pretends not to mind the rain, which is heavier now. Madeline and the three girls walk him to the car. He hears the iambic thud of Sylvia’s heavy leg as they cross the front courtyard. He feels its echo in his heart as he goes.
He never got to know the girl. She was always too ‘apart’, too unto herself, mysterious, injured and remarkable. He had been moved by her – by her more than by the plight of her leg – and, unusually for him, it had made him shy to approach in the familiar way of kindly adults. Nor did she ever clamour after his affection in the way the other children did.
She possesses a powerful independence of spirit, and is luminous with it. Indeed, in some peculiar way, as he stands in the courtyard now, he almost loves her as his own, and he regrets she is not.
Ros…rose-flame. Has he imagined her? His eyes seek her out as he calls his final goodbyes and cheerios. But what can he possibly say? He is aware of his own passions; they are often tangled in farce. And he is a married man, a point of principle he values perhaps more than his wife herself.
He has almost certainly imagined her. Ros. Does that falsify his impressions? Or make them more true?
He will not know for another five years: Italy, the 10th of September, 1920. Hers will be the white house at the end of the terraced row, high on a hill overlooking Florence – a house and hill unimaginable to them now. The house will lie at the end of a steep track, above a flickering olive grove. Lights will arise in the balmy dark beyond her balcony, like night flowers opening. They will be new to one another, no longer the detainees of a country spellbound by war.
As the two stand – poised on the brink of an inscrutable future – in the grassy courtyard among the Meynell clan, something in their neurons, primitive and plasmic, something which admits no difference between memory and presentiment, brims with that September night to be, for such are the secret, unchartable transfigurations of love.
He forces himself to move along, smiling for all. He knows he won’t have children. He knows he won’t make an old man. He knows he won’t be back. Everyone is suddenly both precious and ghostly; charged with vitality and significance, and fading as he beholds them. But it’s too late to change his mind, and his nature will not brook indecision or vacillation.
Onward.
What choice does he have but ‘onward’?
‘I told Percy you were leaving us this week,’ says Madeline, taking his arm as they walk to the motor.
It would be rude to turn away from her as she speaks, to see if Rosalind still watches. He cannot think clearly, cannot hear. His heart is in his gullet, and she, Ros, is a miracle and a catastrophe both.
‘Percy said I am to thank you “most heartily” for looking after our garden. He asked me to send his goodbye and his great good wishes.’ She kisses his cheek, and Lawrence, confounded, climbs into the car.
Arthur releases the brake, and the exile pokes his head through the window. He salutes the little Lucas girls, who wait sternly in the rain for their mother. His eyes find her again, Mrs Rosalind Baynes. Her hair was nut-brown and all in energic curls and tendrils.
Who is she?
Joan has turned to speak to Monica, but Rosalind doesn’t join their conversation. She clasps her hands and stands as peaceably as she stood on that hilltop, returning his gaze.
The Meynellage begins to follow the motor as it pulls heavily into the lane. Rosalind disappears from view. A newcomer, she can only stand back as the family wave off their guest and dear friend.
England, the English people, make me so sad, I could leave them forever. He swivels in his seat for a final glimpse of the Colony. Mary has caught hold of Careless by the neck so that he can’t run after the car. The three little daisy-headed Lucas girls are scratching at the midge bites on their bare legs. Viola and Eleanor are performing a farewell mock-Morris-dance in the lane, knocking big sticks together to make him laugh as he drives off. He does laugh. Arthur watches in the rear-view mirror and he grins too. Monica joins the group waving in the lane. In the rain, she looks like a long-faced weeping Madonna. He sees Hilda pat her arm as she waves fiercely to him. Wilfrid Meynell rocks on his heels, thumbs in his waistcoat. In the field across the lane, Rory, the children’s pony, raises his head.
The exile feels disoriented, both buoyed up and jangled, as this vision of the Meynellage recedes. Madeline lifts her arm high as if to say, ‘Do not forget – we are here.’
In this moment of leave-taking, he suddenly feels as if they are indeed his family, a true family who will offer him, for life, their company and warmth. He wonders again what he’s about, what he’s doing, why he’s going, why did he write that story – and he is briefly overcome with an indecision that is alien to him. Go back, go back, a voice says. Eleanor, Viola, Hilda, Monica, little Mary – he misses them all already. And Rosalind: here, now, manifested. He will go back. He will withdraw his story.
Frieda seems to him in this moment like a lump, a growth which has been surgically removed from his person; once a part of him but now a foreign body.
He loves this place. He loves the Meynells. He loves them as if they are his own people.
Yet he does not turn back, and in little more than a month, when the proof-copy of his story ‘England, My England’ travels into the world, his name will be unspeakable in the Colony, and Mary’s book of photos from 1915, the Year of Our Special Guest, will be destroyed.
The car is moving slowly up the lane when Barbara, the youngest Lucas, is seized by a childish impulse. She breaks away from Madeline and begins to run – on plump legs clutching her doll – through the rain and puddles towards the car. She cannot reach it, of course, but the exile watches her stubby exertions through the rear window. Her bright cheeky face is earnest and, as she runs, she holds her baby-doll upright by its ankles, as if the doll, also, must watch him go, or bid him goodbye, or see him off the premises. Perceval Lucas’s youngest child holds her baby high, as if the doll is the last witness to the history they have all just become.
Daughter of the House
i
On the 10 a.m. London to Pulborough, Bernardine – better known as Dina – had just uncapped her pen when a large family burst into the empty carriage and seemed suddenly to be everywhere. She smiled brightly at the children, who bounced into their seats, excited at the prospect of a rural adventure beyond London. They had inherited their father’s big ears, which shone on each fair little head, as translucent as petals.
She turned to the window where the last of summer flickered by like the fly-end of a film reel. On the embankments, plumes of buddleia tangled with wild sweet peas. Coca-Cola bottles winked and flashed and an old, green iron mangle surrendered to rust. She checked her watch. Half past already.
Time flew.
The child beside her pressed in to see whatever there was to be seen. Behind them, a brother and sister kicked and squirmed.
She bit her lip and shoved her manuscript – that’s to say, half of what she tried to convince herself was a novel – into her satchel. Modern novels could be very slim, she consoled herself. Surely, she could manage a hundred and fifty pages, the length of a Virginia Woolf novel – if not with the brilliance of Woolf. Her Great-Aunt Viola had produced respected novels. But could she? If only she knew about something – about anything at all, really – or had something to say. Then the task might not have seemed so difficult.
One had to make up such a lot.
It was infuriating being young, and being forever told that novelists needed age and wisdom. What was she supposed to do for the next twenty years? Resign herself to mediocrity until brilliance finally dropped? She had stamina but she was no masochist.
She had tried sending off stories to the university review, but the editors were all very clever young men, and the last story had been returned with a one-word dismissal: ‘Florid!’ She sent others off to a few small but choice literary journals, but these, too, were all returned. ‘Not for us’. ‘Not sufficiently convinced’. The most encouraging reply was ‘Try again’.
It was a depressing sight each month: the ‘returns’ envelopes in her pigeonhole in Peile Hall poking out at her like fat tongues. The porter would often look up from his desk, understand that the next instalment of her unhappiness had just arrived, and offer wordless commiseration with a glance over his specs, as if to say, ‘No luck? Well, damn them.’ She liked the porters of Peile Hall. They knew when to offer a hanky and when to turn a blind eye.
She thought she should begin her post-mortem assessment of her latest rejection, a short story which brooded in her satchel alongside her half-novel. Even her name looked wrong on the return envelope. It didn’t sound like a writer’s name. ‘Bernardine Wall’. Was there, she asked herself, any less evocative a name for a novelist than ‘Wall’? She sounded like something one crashed into. Why couldn’t she be a ‘Meynell’, as Granny Madeline had been, and Great-Aunt Viola, and her great-grandmother too – Alice, who had nearly been appointed Poet Laureate, twice.
She couldn’t help but think, a little disloyally, that not to get that honour twice was almost worse than never having been noticed at all – a plight she understood – except that Alice Meynell probably hadn’t felt the slight as she herself would have. Everyone among her elders remembered Alice as a ‘gentle soul’, with neither ego nor selfishness. But Dina, while not entitled to any ego – by dint of talent or position – was not gentle either, and, moreover, did not want to be gentle. She wanted to see things, do things and have ‘experiences’. She wanted life, not a soft retreat from it.
Why, she wondered, did each generation always profess, in its grandiloquent way, that hope rested with the next generation, before passing the baton on so feebly? Then they, the same, down the decades. What good was that? It was a failure of courage, and a failure of imagination too.
She was twenty years old, and she went to parties, of course she did, but she could not bear to stand and smile for even one more garden-party, which were never really parties at all. Everyone nibbled like mice at crustless sandwiches and wrote thank-you notes afterwards, lying and saying they’d enjoyed it immensely. Worse still were her parents’ drinks parties, where everyone stood sipping sherry and murmuring vaguely.
Was she really to wait a further twenty years for significance to arrive in her life and on her pages? In the meantime, did she have to function as a smiling handmaiden to everyone else, discreetly accumulating ‘wisdom’, only to be told in twenty years’ time that she had missed a boat she didn’t even know was sailing?
But she couldn’t deceive herself. There was a problem, and she was it. Her nature was too passionate. Sometimes it made the ‘society’ of others seem mild to the point of sedation. Almost everyone else seemed content enough. What was wrong with her?
Only children, she decided, knew truly what life was for. As a child in the woods of Greatham and Rackham, she had known what it was to be alive under her skin, and she was determined not to forget it. Old people sometimes knew as well. Her grandmother, Granny Madeline, waiting for her now at Winborn’s, certainly did. She possessed a playful, irreverent streak that was ageless.
But Dina’s life to date, while outwardly fortunate and correct, had been sheltered: at Winborn’s with her grandmother till the age of seven; then to her convent school in Bayswater; now, at Newnham College, Cambridge. The most eye-opening sights she’d experienced were of the animals of Greatham, both domesticated and wild: roosting, rutting, laying, cantering, giving birth and dying in stables, woods and fields.
Outside Winborn’s, the bulls and stallions were still led up the lane each spring, decked in harnesses with red ribbon and bells, for the annual mating ritual. Everyone, from manor house and cottage alike, lined the route to clap and cheer. Sometimes, after the animal had passed, they raised a glass or fired an old revolver into the air. In its slow parade, the bull or stallion would snort and stomp, while under its ribbon and bells, its flanks rippled with muscle, and its undercarriage swung heavily to and fro.
