Together and Apart, page 1
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Margaret Kennedy
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
PART One – TOGETHER
Together
The Grandmothers
The Wife
The Husband
The Protégée
On the Beach
At the Station
Interference
The Look
Indiscretion
The Friends
A Wasted Morning
The Return
The Quarrel
Midnight
Morning
The End of the Holidays
PART Two – WRATH
Wrath
PART Three – APART
On River Cliff
The Accolade
Father and Daughter
Alone
Mother and Son
Interior Decoration
Happiness
The Turning Point
Truth
The Escalator
Decree Absolute
PART Four – TIME AND CHANGE
Kenneth
Mark
Alec
Eliza
Joy
Max and Betsy
Years Unborn
The History of Vintage
Copyright
About the Book
Betsy Canning is dissatisfied with life. She has always taken pains to be healthy, popular and well-treated, but despite her wealth, her comfortable homes and beautiful children, happiness eludes her. The problem must lie, she thinks, in her marriage to Alec, and a neat, civilised divorce seems the perfect solution.
But talk of divorce sparks interference from family and friends, and soon public opinion tears into the fragile fabric of family life and private desire. Alec and Betsy’s marriage will not be the only casualty, and in this newly complicated world, happiness is more elusive than ever.
About the Author
Margaret Kennedy was born in 1896. Her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, was published in 1923. Her second novel, The Constant Nymph, became an international bestseller. She then met and married a barrister, David Davies, with whom she had three children. She went on to write a further fifteen novels, to much critical acclaim. She was also a playwright, adapting two of her novels – Escape Me Never and The Constant Nymph – into successful productions. Three different film versions of The Constant Nymph were made, and featured stars of the time such as Ivor Novello and Joan Fontaine; Kennedy subsequently worked in the film industry for a number of years. She also wrote a biography of Jane Austen and a work of literary criticism, The Outlaws of Parnassus. Margaret Kennedy died in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1967.
ALSO BY MARGARET KENNEDY
Ladies of Lyndon
The Constant Nymph
Red Sky at Morning
The Fool of the Family
Return I Dare Not
A Long Time Ago
The Midas Touch
The Feast
Troy Chimneys
Lucy Carmichael
The Oracles
The Wild Swan
A Night in Cold Harbour
The Forgotten Smile
To Rose Macaulay
Alas! They had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain.
* * *
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart’s best brother:
They parted—ne’er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining—
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between;
But neither heat, not frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
With marks of that which once hath been.
COLERIDGE (from Christabel)
PART ONE
TOGETHER
Together
I
Letter from Betsy Canning to her mother.
Pandy Madoc,
North Wales,
August 8th.
DEAREST MOTHER,
I’m sorry the Engadine isn’t being a success, but I’m not surprised. Why on earth did you trust the Gordons to choose a hotel? You might have known better. How is father’s lumbago? For heaven’s sake don’t go on sleeping in damp beds till you both have pneumonia. Move to somewhere more comfortable. You are both too old to camp out in mouldy little inns.
Here it is lovely – fine and hot. All the children are back from school, and we have a school friend of Kenneth’s staying, Mark Hannay, so the house is pretty full. We can’t overflow into the cottage, because Alec, in an expansive moment, has lent it to the Blochs. You know? He’s that very clever Jew who designed the sets for the German production of Caroline. That’s how Alec got to know him. Now they are persecuted, and had to escape in the middle of the night or something, in the clothes they stood up in. Absolutely penniless and swarms of rather uninviting children. He is trying to get work over here. I feel one ought to be sorry for them. But being persecuted doesn’t make people nicer somehow, and I do wish Alec had told me before he offered them the cottage; it’s very inconvenient – right in the middle of the summer holidays.
Well now mother, listen. I have something to tell you that you won’t like at all. In fact, I’m afraid that it will be a terrible shock and you will hate it at first. But do try to get used to the idea and bring father round to it.
Alec and I are parting company. We are going to get a divorce.
I know this will horrify you: the more so because I have, perhaps mistakenly, tried very hard to conceal our unhappiness during these last years. I didn’t, naturally, want anybody to know while there was still a chance of keeping things going. But the fact is, we have been quite miserable, both of us. We simply are unsuited to one another and unable to get on. How much of this have you guessed?
Life is so different from what we expected when we first married. Alec has quite changed, and he needs a different sort of wife. I never wanted all this money and success. I married a very nice but quite undistinguished civil servant. With my money we had quite enough to live on in a comfortable and civilised way. We had plenty of friends, our little circle, people like ourselves, amusing and well bred, not rich, but decently well off. Alec says now that they bored him. But he didn’t say so at the time.
I must say it’s rather hard on me that he took so long to find out what he really wanted. He says it’s all his mother’s fault, and that she bullied him so that he was past thirty before it ever occurred to him to call his soul his own. I dare say this is true, but I have to suffer for it.
If I had known I was marrying a professional librettist I should never have taken it on. I always loved the things which he and Johnnie Graham wrote together: I do think he is inspired when he writes words for Johnnie’s music. But I never imagined that they were going to turn into the Gilbert and Sullivan of this generation, and, when they got their first operetta produced, I was always against it. I would so much rather it had just been a hobby. I wanted it to be produced by amateurs, by their friends. When it was such an enormous success, of course I was pleased in a way, but I felt even then that there was something just a little vulgar about it all. And when, after the success of the second opera, he gave up the Civil Service, I was horrified.
Of course he has made a lot of money and is, I suppose, quite famous. But I never could feel that it was a worthwhile profession for an educated man like Alec. It isn’t as if he and Johnnie were producing great works of art. They don’t pretend to be; they say themselves that they are only out to provide entertainment. I cannot respect Alec as much as I did when he was at the Ministry doing an obscure, dull, but useful job, ‘helping to get the world washed and dressed.’ And he knows it. Can you understand this, you and father? I know you would never have breathed a word of it to me, but I always felt that you weren’t quite happy about it in your heart of hearts – that you thought it a pity when he left the Ministry.
We no longer have the same friends. He seems to be completely submerged in the stage world. He is so popular and so genial. Everybody likes him and he likes everybody. Our house is perpetually crammed with people with whom I have nothing in common, who simply regard me as ‘Alec’s wife’ if they even know me by sight, which often they don’t, I really believe. They’ve never heard of father, or, if they have, the word ‘professor’ merely suggests to them a sort of stage cartoon, an absent-minded old man with a beard and a butterfly net. They are the most complete set of Yahoos; however, they’re Alec’s friends, and he has a right to his own tastes, though how a man of his brains and sensibilities can like to hobnob with such a crew is something which I cannot understand. My friends, as you can imagine, don’t mix with them at all well.
Reading this over, I feel it sounds rather like a list of grievances, as if I were the only sufferer. But indeed Alec has suffered equally. I’m not the right woman for him any more, and he can’t be happy with me. I will tell you two things to prove this which I would never have told you if we had not decided to make a break. He does, no
Then why didn’t I divorce him before? Because of the children. I felt they ought to have a home, that we must all stay together as long as any decent appearance of harmony could be kept up. And now, because of the children, I have changed my mind. I now think that they would be happier if Alec and I gave up this miserable attempt. They are getting old enough to feel the strain and the tension, especially Kenneth, who quite realizes that Alec doesn’t always treat me considerately, and resents it violently. A father and son can mean so much to one another; it would be terrible if they become permanently alienated. I don’t want the children to grow up with a distorted idea of marriage, got from the spectacle of parents who can’t get on. I think the time has come to be quite open with them about it. I shall say:
‘Your father and I have made a mistake. It’s a pity, but people do make these mistakes sometimes, and if they are candid and sensible it can be set right. It is nobody’s fault. We are not suited to one another, but we have not quarrelled, and nobody is going to be angry or bitter. We are going to part in a friendly and civilized way. You will see quite as much of both of us in the future as you always have, and everybody will be happier all round.’
Now, mother darling, do try to look at this quite rationally. Don’t just cry out that a divorce in the family is a disgrace and that such a thing has never happened to us before. Who is going to suffer? Doesn’t it mean a better life for everybody? Isn’t it really sensible? Alec can marry the woman who really suits him, I can live my own life with my own friends, and the children will grow up free from resentment and bewilderment. I know it’s very sad that my marriage is a failure. But what’s the good of pretending that it isn’t? We have both tried to make it a success and it doesn’t work.
I’m writing to tell you now because we have decided to end it all rather quickly. Alec is going off on Wednesday with the Hamiltons, on their yacht, as he does every summer. He is never coming back, and he’s going to write to me and say so, and send me the necessary evidence, so that I can divorce him. (Naturally I wouldn’t dream of dragging the other woman into it. It will be a pure matter of form.) Perhaps you had better burn this letter. Anyway, don’t show it to father; just tell him what I’ve said and try to make him see it in a sensible light. Leave out this bit about the evidence – that we have settled it all beforehand, I mean. He is so conscientious about things like income tax, etc., he might think it was collusion.
Now I must stop, as the post is just going, though I feel as if there was a great deal more to say. Do try to understand. And please don’t blame Alec. It has been quite as much my fault.
Your very loving
BETSY.
P.S. – Alec’s mother knows nothing of this. We shan’t tell her till it is too late for her to interfere.
Telegram from Mrs Hewitt to her daughter.
engadine horrified letter am returning england immediately entreat do nothing irrevocable till I see you expect me wales wednesday evening have said nothing to father mother.
The Grandmothers
Emily Canning, mother of Alec, was a widow and lived on Campden Hill with one old servant. But her existence was not lonely or inactive. She had a large circle of friends, varied interests, and a craving for power which preserved her from the lethargy of old age.
The desire to influence and to dominate, to play a leading part in the lives of other people, had always been her ruling passion: her talents and capacities were such that she had been able to indulge in it freely. She had beauty, charm and wit. She had the gift of creating drama, of raising the emotional temperature, of charging any relationship with an intense personal feeling. To be a friend was, for her, to be a partisan. A difference of opinion was disloyalty. People of both sexes and all ages fell easily in love with her. Those who did not were provoked to an irrational, a too violent dislike. But very few were able to remain entirely indifferent to her, or to preserve their peace of mind if once she had crossed their orbit.
She had one quality which is not infrequently found in characters of this type – the gift of second sight. Her feats of divination were well authenticated; even her enemies admitted them, while to her friends they were a source of pride. She had seen several genuine ghosts. Sometimes, when the telephone rang, she knew who was trying to speak to her before she had taken off the receiver. She had premonitions about unexpected letters or visits, and her dreams were, beyond all doubt, prophetic.
On Tuesday night, or rather very early on Wednesday, she had a most remarkable dream. It seemed to be morning and a person was bringing in her breakfast tray. But this person was not old Maggie, her maid; it was Henrietta Hewitt, mother of Alec’s wife, once her friend and now, for many years, an enemy.
Mrs Canning was furious at this intrusion, but pretended to take no notice of it and began to eat her breakfast. Presently, however, she was forced to raise her eyes. Henrietta’s face was hanging over the end of the bed. The body seemed to have vanished; that long, stupid, mulish face hung solitary in the air, like a mask. It looked pinched and grey. Eyes and nose were red and the pale lips were working. A torrent of words came out of the mouth, every one of which was inaudible. Tears poured down the haggard cheeks. But no sound came to Mrs Canning, who stared and said coldly:
‘I think you will regret this.’
Which she had said before at the end of their great fight years ago. And now she could hear faint snatches of words:
‘… So ill … my temperature is going up … up … so ill … cold wind … I can’t go on … I can’t….’
‘I’ll make you sorry for this,’ cried Mrs Canning fiercely.
Suddenly she threw a large card-case which was there. The face made a ghastly, shrill twittering noise and vanished. In an abrupt transition to the waking world she was sitting up and staring at the foot of the bed, where no face was. Morning, early sunlight, filled the room. London sparrows were making a terrific noise, twittering in the plane tree outside the window.
After a few seconds she threw off the nightmare bewilderment and realized that she had been dreaming. The clock on her dressing-table stood at a quarter to six.
She lay back on her pillows, and thought how odd a dream it was, and wished, as all dreamers do, to tell somebody about it immediately. Gradually the conviction gained upon her that this was one of her prophetic dreams. Today she would certainly receive a visit from Henrietta, and the unlikelihood of the thing only made her the more positive. She began to be agreeably excited, already telling the story of it to her friends.
‘I hadn’t the least reason to suppose she was coming. I knew the Hewitts were in Switzerland. And … as you know … there is no love lost between us … oh, yes … it’s all old history now … one tries to forget it … but Henrietta was unforgivable … she behaved abominably….’
Twelve years ago Henrietta, her friend, her ally, had suddenly turned against her. She had come and said the most monstrous things, come with a card-case, too, which was the height of absurdity between intimates and co-grandmothers. The hen-witted creature must have thought that this touch of formality would give her confidence. An inveterate fidget, she kept turning it round and round in her hands as she talked, giving her antagonist a chance for a jibe.
‘I see you hold all the cards,’ Mrs Canning had exclaimed.
Whereat poor Henrietta had flushed and started and dropped her case on the floor. She was easily routed. But unfortunately the jibe had a double edge. She did hold all the cards. From a spate of ill-chosen, incoherent words her meaning became clear.
‘… Young people do resent interference. One must let them make their own mistakes, though, of course, Betsy has always been a very practical girl; still, there are many occasions when I’ve wished she would let me advise her: that nursery-maid, for instance, I could have told her. I’ve had so much experience of girls from orphanages, I mean, it’s only one instance, and indeed, dear Emily, you mustn’t think that I don’t sympathize and understand. We mothers are all the same, and it does seem very hard, because we only want to help. But, you see, in Wales there is very good bathing.’
