Valentine Ackland, page 5
When she was fifteen, in 1922, Molly had been sent to a finishing school in Paris after leaving school early because of ill-health. She was rather young for this rite of passage but an older schoolfriend, Emily Black, was going, and it seemed a good opportunity to send Molly too. The school at 9 rue Ybry was a typical Ackland choice; not exactly what it seemed, but adequate to give the impression to their wealthy neighbours that Molly had all the luxuries that their class expected. It was not in Paris proper, but the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, which in comparison seemed like a provincial town.
The house was in the same street as Coty’s scent factory, which spread its heady perfume over the surrounding area, and indicated the social level of the place. Anne-Marie, Yvonne and Germaine de Rigny, three not-very-kind sisters, received English girls into their house to impart sophistication. But, far from being well-bred, they had no particular education, and one of them worked secretly in an embroidery shop. The girls were shocked when they discovered this, and their parents would not have been amused by the irony that women sullied by trade were preparing their daughters for society. However, perhaps aided by their own sharp consciousness of class distinction, the sisters could deliver the training. Their charges were chaperoned to art galleries and concerts (a commute into Paris), and taught to speak and read French, keep ‘company manners’, dance, dress and make up like adults. They also learnt more nebulous skills: how to oblige a young man to ask you to dance, how to refuse. Best of all, they acquired ‘polish’, a patina of elegant good manners, ‘for which,’ Valentine commented, ‘I have been passionately thankful through all my life; it is the best protective skin I know.’ 25
The process of developing it was initially painful. Everyone was homesick, the food was awful and none of them could speak French. There were four English girls in the house, and Molly shared a room with Emmy. To entertain her, Molly wrote a serial Gothic novel called The Ravens. Whenever there was a love-scene, she resorted to a long row of dots; when Emmy grew restive and complained, Molly explained loftily that this was propriety – in fact she was vague on the missing details. After a while, the novel was abandoned (‘the first of my prose-works to run their inevitable life-cycle’) 26 and Molly took to writing poetry far into the night. She wrote by candlelight, with a purple quill pen and purple ink, smoking gold-tipped Turkish cigarettes, in front of a plaster skull resting on a book. The other girls began to succumb to French decadence, too, drinking liqueur miniatures in their rooms, playing bridge for money, and making shopping trips into Paris. Mlle de Bergerain, who accompanied them, was a cultured woman who sought to educate her charges about French literature and contemporary art, and Molly responded to this new world enthusiastically. Her education hitherto had been singularly mundane, and intellectual endeavour was regarded with suspicion; the trip to Paris was intended to impart a fashionable veneer, nothing more. But this was still the Paris of Gertrude Stein, Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, and the icons of Modernism; by inhaling the atmosphere of this foreign city, Molly was beginning to be aware of the important issues of her adult life.
In April, a new girl arrived. Lana was eighteen, very attractive, already spoke fluent French and, most importantly, was sophisticated. She was ‘extremely well-dressed, her hair … was beautifully-waved, she was made up, but properly, with much more powder and lipstick, and much more tactfully applied’ 27 than the other girls had yet managed. Molly’s compatriots decided that Lana was common, and promptly closed ranks to exclude her. An enormous row broke out over the fact that her father smoked his pipe in the street, which was allegedly ‘not done’. 28 Molly couldn’t remember if her father did or not, when appealed to, and the implications of the row apparently passed her by. Although she could sympathise with the Rignys’ difficult struggle to maintain their position in post-war Paris, she was vague about the signifiers which differentiated Robert Ackland FRCS, CBE from other fathers who were not quite gentlemen. Perhaps her reading of Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy (in which she underlined almost all of the section Love – Sex – Friendship) had inspired her with its vision of a socialist, homosexual utopia. It’s also probable that about social hierarchy, as most other matters, she was still very naive.
One afternoon in the spring, Molly was ill in bed. The house was empty, the others were all out, except for Lana, who had stayed to keep her company. She sat on the bed, and they talked, until Lana interrupted Molly’s vivid description of a leper colony by kissing her on the mouth. ‘Don’t you know how much I love you?’ 29 she asked. Molly, inexperienced as she was, ‘recognised the face of love at once.’ 30 Her response was immediate: in a
wild confusion of ecstasy and shyness, I clasped her in my arms and she kissed me again and again … my blood burned me, my heartbeat stifled me, I felt as though something had exploded inside me and I had been blown to atoms. 31
Valentine always remembered and idealised this moment when young Molly discovered the romantic universe; the lilac was in flower outside the window, Lana was gorgeous in silk and perfumed with Quelques Fleurs, the spring nights were warm.
Lana exchanged her privileged single room with Emmy, so as to share with Molly. There was a stay of consummation when Ruth came to Paris to celebrate Molly’s sixteenth birthday, and booked them both in to the Hotel Roosevelt. Here Molly scored a minor triumph; she arrived first, fully made up and in evening dress, and her mother walked past without recognising her. When Molly spoke to her, Ruth cried out in her histrionic way ‘Darling – they have made you grow up!’ 32 and kept staring at this unfamiliar adult. Molly’s height was now an attribute, she walked elegantly, with a smooth gait, her thinness was fashionable, and her hair was a chic shoulder-length bob. Her paralysing self-consciousness was disguised by a cool reserve which Lana, for one, found fascinating and enigmatic. Ruth’s awkward child had blossomed suddenly into a striking young woman.
In the hotel, Molly received her first love-letter, from Lana. After reading it, she examined herself in the mirror for visible signs of change, and was amazed by the ‘intense, burning, amorous excitement’ she saw looking back at her out of her own eyes. On her return, Lana had filled the room with flowers – white irises and lilac – ‘like you’, she said.
7.Molly as a debutante.
They had to endure a long evening of formal dinner, company manners, conversation practice and dancing – although they danced together. When Molly at last hurried upstairs she found a note: ‘Do not be afraid, my darling.’ 33 She undressed behind a screen and scrambled into bed; after a discreet interval Lana joined her. The memory of that night made the experienced Valentine a little sentimental; she recalled their innocence and delight. ‘We lay awake all the time, finding absolute joy in kissing and caressing and beholding – amazed to find each other so beautiful.’ 34 Valentine recounted this episode with nostalgic tenderness not because it represented sexual enlightenment (for she gave Bo the credit for her real initiation into sexual love) but because it embodied a more complete epiphany.
Molly now experienced a profound revelation, which dispelled all her previous shyness and anxiety. She had been dimly aware ‘that there was a considerable expanse of Me as yet untouched and unknown’, and by acknowledging this identity, begun the search for it. ‘But when I lay down in love,’ she wrote, ‘I was instantly released into my whole own self … I knew that I possessed myself as well as, because of, possessing her.’ 35 In that moment, Molly discovered the key to herself, and recognised the unknown ‘Me’. She recorded the significance of the affair with Lana: ‘That less-than-month in the Spring of 1922 controlled the whole course of my life.’ 36 It was the first step on the way to becoming Valentine.
The idyll was intense, but brief. Molly believed that this had never happened before to anyone, that ‘it was a miracle, a special grace.’ 37 Lana was, perhaps, a little more experienced, for she urged discretion on Molly, explaining that other people would not understand, and might therefore want to put an end to it. When the time came to return to England, ‘to separate lives, and to a society both powerful and ignorant’, 38 Molly began to have misgivings, too. Despite the pledges of faith, the gifts exchanged and love-letters written, Lana’s villa at Green Lane in Eltham seemed very far from St James’s Court, the Acklands’ enormous London apartment, reassuringly near Buckingham Palace. Ruth’s well-meant remark that Lana was ‘a pretty little thing’ 39 enraged Molly by its understatement. Her family obviously found it ‘horribly important’ 40 that Lana’s mother worked, as a buyer for a wholesale dressmaking company, that they lived in the suburbs, and were not (as Molly’s friends had immediately known) in the same class. Molly still loved Lana devotedly, but among her own family she began to see how difficult this love was. Joan, known for her gift of ‘venom-speaking’, 41 saw the possibilities in the situation immediately.
Ever since this sibling-interloper Molly had appeared on the scene, Joan had tried to do her harm. The situation of displacement and jealousy wasn’t unusual; it was Joan’s pertinacity which was extraordinary. She never forgave her parents for their betrayal, and she hated the young pretender with an intense and murderous fury which never abated; all her life she suffered from nightmares in which her parents did not recognise her. Molly realised that Joan was a ‘tormented spirit’, and ‘in an odd way … was always passionately sorry for her’, 42 but she was also terrified of her. ‘Joan was a hard, hard scourge on the back of a child’, Valentine wrote, ‘and I bear the marks still and I always shall.’ 43 (This was not mere metaphor – Joan’s bullying violence was physical, as well as psychological. ‘I was terrified’, Valentine recalled, ‘of the violent flush of anger and the way her eyes blackened just before she abused or struck me.’) 44
While Molly was a child, Joan told her quite seriously that they were Cain and Abel: ‘I am fated to kill you’, 45 she said, and as an adult she wrote articles under the pseudonym Kane. Towards Molly, she adopted a policy – prior to the intended murder – of watching her continually, criticising her every move, allowing her to have no privacy and ridiculing her very ordinary childishness. Under this regime, Molly developed an intense self-consciousness, and the habit of observing herself and commenting – before Joan did – became so strong that the adult Valentine bemoaned her lost spontaneity, doubting that she ever acted without ‘the shadow of that double-vision “This is me doing this –”.’ 46
Joan was an expert at long-running persecutions, such as the pretence that Molly was really ‘an Idiot’ 47 (with a mental disability which explained her stupidity), which she maintained for years. She told Molly that her parents wanted it kept secret so they would deny it if she asked them, and of course she never dared to. Joan seized every opportunity to distress Molly; when they saw a woman with an enormous bosom on the bus, Joan assured Molly that hers would be like that when she grew up. (How did she know that this would horrify Molly?) And, as a matter of course, Joan spied on her sister, read private poems, letters, or diaries which she attempted to hide, and mocked them mercilessly.
When thirteen-year-old Molly fell in love for the first time she was with her parents in Alassio for Christmas 1920, having been ill with the Spanish flu epidemic. She was smitten by Italy, and by a fellow-guest at the hotel. Myra was eighteen, liked to be admired, and was happy to hold Molly’s hands and tell her she was like a knight in shining armour. Molly knew she was in love, and the obvious plan seemed to be to run away, disguise herself as a man, and return to marry Myra. (She had a slight anxiety that Myra would mind that Molly was actually ‘a long, badly-dressed schoolgirl’ when she noticed, but Molly decided that ‘she would be so much in love with me that a small thing like that would not trouble her.’) 48 This adolescent love might have passed relatively painlessly, since Myra was evidently not one to discourage adoration – although she might have declined marriage – if Joan had not joined them. When their parents returned home, Joan swiftly relegated Molly to a child’s place, and secured Myra’s affections for herself. ‘During those two months,’ Valentine recalled, ‘I experienced every pain and humiliation I have since felt.’ 49 Her jealousy was adeptly tended by Joan, who sent Myra notes, enjoyed private jokes, danced with her, brushed her hair, and read Kipling to her – to Molly’s acute agony.
Even when Joan was a married adult and Molly still a vulnerable adolescent Joan never relented, though sometimes she pretended to. ‘My sister loathed me,’ Valentine stated baldly, ‘and occasionally staged dreadful scenes of reconciliation or confession: in which she told me how much she hated me and how tormented she was.’ 50 This was Joan’s ultimate weapon, to offer Molly love, apparent kindness, a redeemed relationship. And Molly never learnt to say no and avoid another humiliating rejection.
As adults, Joan intervened in her sister’s private life by warning off potential friends, lovers, husbands or employers with poison pen letters or confidential chats, explaining that her sister was an ‘unstable’ character. She was still doing this when Valentine was in her fifties, and wrote of the ‘great, continuing injury’ 51 Joan had done her – but Valentine judged that she would never know the full extent of the damage. Possibly Joan could not leave this troubled relationship behind her because she could not abandon her own pain. As Valentine sagely observed, she was always ‘one to embrace anguish, and to run back for another hug, too.’ 52 This was Joan’s tragedy; it drove her to sabotage her sister’s happiness and divide her family, confirming Sylvia Townsend Warner’s judgement that even if Joan did not intend harm, ‘She is harm.’ 53
Joan was soon aware of the situation between the Paris-returned Molly of 1922 and her new love Lana. She read Lana’s love-letters and understood their implications, and spied on the pair at Winterton. When she showed Ruth the letters, her mother did not question the propriety of Joan intercepting them, but managed to deceive herself as to the exact meaning of their content. She had a little talk with Molly, suggesting with much embarrassment that perhaps her friendship with Lana was ‘just a little too strong’. Molly asked aggressively what she meant? Ruth, rather flustered, mentioned the possibility of schoolgirls getting ‘too devoted’ and then going mad as a direct result of ‘being horrid’. 54 She also, confusingly, mentioned a hat shop in Maddox Street which the police had raided because of the girls there being very horrid. (Valentine later remarked on the curious coincidence whereby it was in Maddox Street that she learnt ‘the very things my poor mother was now trying to tell me.’) 55 But at the time she had, unsurprisingly, very little idea what Ruth was talking about. It was just like The Ravens: ‘there was always a row of dots just where the explanation should have come.’ 56
Ruth was reassured when Molly told her that it was ‘all right’ (whatever it was), and promised that the friendship would not become ‘too exaggerated’. 57 Joan was thus temporarily foiled, mainly by her mother’s determination to avoid unpleasantness if at all possible. Molly was extremely confused – especially about the mysterious hat shop – but she did realise that the love between herself and Lana was not a unique miracle devised especially for them, but something which happened to other lovers too – and ‘apparently some people thought it wrong’. 58
Although they wrote and telephoned every day, Molly missed Lana, and was delighted to be invited on a motoring tour of the Continent with her family, in September 1922. They set off in an enormous Studebaker car, Lana and Molly in the back seat, ecstatically happy, holding hands under the fur rugs. But the drive across the battlefields of Flanders appalled Molly; the trenches were still stinking and choked with debris, reminding her of the mud-caked and battered helmet her mother had brought back from a tour of Flanders as a grisly ‘souvenir’. 59 She never forgot the sight of the devastated land, nor what her imagination could picture there.
It was not an entirely easy trip for other reasons, too; to begin with, Molly was appalled by the opulence and bad taste of Lana’s home, startled by her mother Peggy’s dyed hair, and shocked to discover that their male escort was not Lana’s father but Peggy’s lover, as was obvious even to innocent Molly. Then, she had all the wrong clothes for the journey, and her parents had neglected to give her nearly enough money; kind Peggy offered to buy whatever she needed, but Molly had been taught to refuse such acts of generosity. After a blissful week alone with Lana in Grindelwald, in sight of the Italian Lakes, they turned homeward. In Paris they stayed at the Hotel Continental (according to Molly’s parents ‘too vulgar for anyone to stay in’) 60 and in its excessive splendour she felt humiliated by her shabby clothes. Despite this ridiculous mortification, there was Lana. ‘She was sensitive,’ Valentine recalled, ‘full of delicacy, full of amorousness and subtlety. She made love with exquisite fervour and abandon.’ 61 This must have been some compensation for the other difficulties of the holiday.
On her return, Molly felt that her life had changed; she was growing up. Valentine summed up her experiences:
I had been abroad three times; I had lived in Paris; I had discovered poetry; I had fallen in love. And these are bare statements, like the outline maps we used to be given in the Geography class; filled in with their rivers, railways, county-boundaries and cities, they covered quite a considerable part of the country I was learning to live in. 62
This glimpse of an adult country she could inhabit, of possible happiness, was brief. While Molly was away, Joan (who was recently engaged) had taken the opportunity to show Lana’s letters to their father and make sure their implications were fully understood. The results were all she might have hoped.
