'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  October 5

  I wake up early. Lie in bed. Feel guilty brooding on clothes. Wonder if I am very greedy, as six months ago I had one new suit made. I have just got a new dress from Mattli and I am now visualising a further suit for next spring. But this is after three years of no clothes and poverty. I tell Cyril it is compensation for being in this country and that since I don’t spend money on anything else it is reasonable (never buy cigarettes and don’t drink). He has just had a new brown gabardine suit made and spent an enormous amount for his red leather skating slippers, crimson pyjamas and shirts (with initials – not to mention the sums he spends in antiquaires). I go down to the kitchen before Mrs Lea arrives and make two breakfasts on separate trays, carefully finishing off the buttered toast under the grill at the end. Take Cyril’s tray into his room putting on ugly face, pretending to be Mrs Lea, grumpily laying it down on the bed and, after flinging the curtains back, stump out of the room muttering. Cyril laughs. ‘How would you like to celebrate our marriage anniversary?’ he calls, when I go up again with my own tray. ‘Good heavens!’ I exclaim, ‘what can be the matter with you?’ ‘Well, you seem to be sweet and in a good humour. If you’re going to be nice to me I’d like us to celebrate our anniversary. When is it, by the way?’ ‘I think it’s the tenth,’ I say. Later the post comes and there is a present of an eighteenth-century bowl from Lady Elizabeth Glenconner (Worcester, I think). He is pleased to have a present. I admire it and one minute later start grumbling at the mess he has made undoing the package.

  I have to tell Mrs Lea to please clean the base of the lavatory which is thick with dust. ‘What do you mean?’ she hisses, ‘I clean it every day.’ ‘How is it so black then?’ I ask her. Muttering, she goes in there with a pail of water. One hour later I see Cyril studying a cookery book. ‘I wish you could make crème brûlée,’ he says to me. ‘Well, read it out and tell me how.’ ‘I’ve told you several times but you’re too lazy to try anything new.’ ‘It’s not a question of laziness. I’m just sick of cooking. Besides, I have lost interest now you do the housekeeping. If you want me to care about cooking again you should be clever and give me a housekeeping allowance.’ ‘I used to give you money [two pounds at a time] but you hoarded it in your bag.’ ‘And then gave it back to you when you asked for it. The trouble is, you’re too mean.’ He jumps from his chair and rushes across the room. ‘You call me mean, when all my money goes on buying you clothes?’ and he picked up two books, Gale Warning, by Dornford Yates, and a science fiction novel, The Weapon Shops of Isher, hurled them across the room and ran upstairs muttering, ‘bloody bitch, nagging shrew’, and from then on silence. I consulted my diary, and found that today is our marriage anniversary and that I fear is how it is going to be celebrated.

  Yesterday, daylight saving came to an end and we went back to normal winter time. I put on my woollen underpants. The geese, the fowl and the guinea chicks are getting mad with excitement over some mouldy apples. We went to London on October 1 and stayed at the Ritz as Ann Fleming was giving a dinner for Cyril’s fiftieth birthday. The guests Peter Quennell, Elizabeth Glenconner, the Campbells, Joan Rayner, Maurice Bowra and, as I fell out at the last moment with gastric flu, the Foreign Secretary’s wife, Clarissa Eden. The after-dinner guests were Alan Pryce-Jones, who took Cyril a book on old-fashioned gardens, Cecil Beaton, who gave him some vintage brandy, Lucian Freud, Caroline Blackwood and Francis Bacon, who each took him a pot of caviar, Stephen Spender and Elizabeth Cavendish, Ali Forbes, Freddie Ayer, Sonia and her lover who, apparently, was given the English freeze-up. Ann Fleming: ‘Who is that pink-faced man over there? I tried for five minutes to talk to him, my dear, and then just GAVE UP.’ Cyril tiptoed in very late clutching his goodies (another magnum of brandy given by Evelyn Waugh who did not actually turn up) like a typical tipsy husband after a night out.

  October 14

  Have been in bed ill for three days. Doctor Balfour summoned. A lady doctor of the Stephen Potter kind. My heart sank when I heard her arrive. The noisy, effusive, jocular hoots of assurance as she backed the car into the hedge. Clump! up the stairs. Cyril had scrabbled into my room in advance. I saw him looking down the stairs as though at some fabulous monster – and there she was, a large bulky woman on crutches, hopping on one leg. I felt as though I ought to get out of bed and help her in. ‘May I sit on the bed?’ as she collapsed down puffing. ‘We have brought you lots of efficacious things here,’ delving into a sham hide bag. ‘Some little footballs.’ She was very proud of that analogy because she repeated ‘little footballs’ several times. She grasped my wet wrist to feel the pulse and thrust a thermometer into my mouth as she proceeded to ask a stream of questions. She then shook the thermometer hard and exclaimed in triumph ‘Excellent! Excellent! No temperature. What a good thing!’ It would have been the one thing that would have cheered me up! When I told Cyril that I had no faith in her, he said, ‘You don’t have to, it’s modern medicine we have faith in now.’ He stood over me while I took some stomach powder. ‘What a terrible place to be ill in,’ I kept muttering. ‘It’s a terrible place to be in without being ill,’ he returned. Throughout the day, he made a sudden halt before my bed and presenting an angry stomach said, ‘What am I going to eat today?…’ ‘Would you be very kind and make me a hot-water bottle? …’ He disappeared into the kitchen. Then there was a long silence and I wondered what he was up to. ‘How do you cook liver?’ he called. ‘Do onions take the same time to cook? …’ ‘Do you think you could please bring me a bottle? …’ Half an hour later: ‘My liver is wonderful,’ he shouted up. There was a pause. ‘Like some? …’ ‘Would you be an angel and make me a few Epsom Salts? …’ In desperation, I dragged myself out of bed and crept down the stairs. I met Cyril coming out; he half backed in again when he saw me and looked as though he would have liked to prevent my advance. An empty fruit tin was perched so that a thin trickle of juice had gone over the edge; an empty bottle of claret lay on its side; small blobs of flaky cream cheese dropped all over the floor; a large hunk of goose shit brought in on a shoe; a plate with the remains of some fat; squeezed-out halves of oranges piled all over the sink; grease spots all over the cooker and breadcrumbs strewn round like confetti. ‘You’ve managed to turn the place into an Irish hovel,’ I hissed to a receding back. ‘You’re a filthy one with your filthy tongue,’ I heard from two doors away. He then telephoned a number of people using my illness as an excuse to put them off. Having done that, he rang Joan and made a lunch date for the same day. ‘You seem to have taken a turn for the better,’ he told me to appease his conscience. ‘I will bring some Muscat grapes from London.’ ‘Quand même, would you mind bringing me up a bottle? …’ ‘What is there for me to eat this evening?’ The way he fled along the path to catch the taxi!

  Mr Coombes came with his bill, pretended to do a bit of gardening but was mostly hanging round the back door. There was a whispered conference between him and Mrs Lea when the taxi went. ‘’E really ‘as gone,’ she croaked, ‘’opped it.’ Then she too scurried away as though she had wild devils after her.

  The only person who has saved me from complete boredom is Thurber. Before that I was reading The Captive Mind by Milosz. I think this book is responsible for my ’flu. I became muffled in a black blanket. The future was black. And of course the past was too black to contemplate. I only have to see the book lying on the bed now still open at where I left off with its spine split in two facing up to feel black despair.

  *

  It is Saturday. I am almost completely recovered. Got fully dressed yesterday and spent a lovely afternoon in the garden killing worms. This morning I was up early and striding across the grass to let the fowl and her flock out. I then stood at the kitchen window watching them gobbling up the worms. What strange pleasures there are in life!

  December 1953

  We spend Christmas Eve at the Grand Hotel in two little centrally-heated single rooms, with wash basins, like luxury maids’ rooms, a bathroom along the passage. I ma
ke a fuss about getting out of trousers, saying I have nothing suitable to wear. Eventually compromise and change into the old black and white pleated check. It was lucky I did. Everyone had changed into low-cut wear with many furry tippets. Cyril donned his dinner jacket, but came downstairs very late, after a long soak in the bath. Both of us ill-humoured after drinking some blanc de blanc in our room. Throughout the meal neither of us spoke and we even managed to sit back to back. Very quick service; extra staff employed for the occasion. Woken in the morning by a Church Army band outside the window playing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. A walk on the leas. Arrive at the Flemings in good time for lunch. A large gathering of three generations. Ann Fleming’s father and step-mother. Ann’s daughter, Fionn. And, in Ann’s words, ‘I can’t imagine a Christmas without Peter.’ Mr Quennell in person and a rather nice blokey friend of Ian’s – best, best friend apparently. Since doing the Atticus column, Ian seems to have become a very dried-up and red-veined plain family man. Has lost any semblance of glamour or good looks, a bottlenecked figure with a large bum. Very bad manners – by that I mean a heap of something is plonked on one’s plate so that it trickles over the side. Atmosphere hearty. We are offered a Bloody Mary. Cyril holds forth on our previous evening, making it sound funny, but not coming out of it in such a good light as he thinks … ‘And then I said to her, “I suppose you’d like to take a look at the ballroom,” and a look was all she took …’ We had been told about their wonderful new pair of cooks. A rancid stuffing with the turkey, bottled chipolatas and another brown sauce with bits of turkey liver floating in it. The Christmas pudding was good, but the brandy butter was made with sham cream. Then, after tea, present giving. The Awkward Age from Peter, a Henry James he gave me ten years ago, although I didn’t tell him so. From Ian some sexy black pants with black lace and a hideous beige galoshes bag. A pair of nylon stockings from Ann. And then, because Cyril had previously said to Ann ‘I wonder how Peter will find a solution between meanness and avoiding to appear so,’ he gave me an extra present of some bath essence. We gave Ian a bottle of Taittinger blanc de blanc which he had mentioned in his book, without ever having drunk any. Ann was given an eighteenth-century Wedgwood pâté dish which I would have liked to keep.

  We left at six and broke down on the hill – out of petrol. We both got out of the car and walked off in separate directions, me taking a short cut so that I reached the garage first. I cried all the way driving to Eric Wood. Felt everything was miserable. Eric had arranged all his Christmas cards round the fake pillars in his sitting room and when I asked him how many he had sent he said about a hundred. A bowl of white Christmas roses were set in a Dresden dish. I am glad we didn’t stay long enough to see them droop. The same man from last Christmas was there, a louche, sadistic-looking, elderly queer with a loose jutting mouth, speaking little and seemingly bored. The dinner was a definite improvement on the Flemings. To start, something en gêlée, followed by an underdone joint of beef, braised celery and broad beans in a white sauce; a delicious mousse to follow. I had left off my woollen underwear and was christening my new red, striped, velvet trousers, so felt cold in the unheated dining room. Eric Wood read aloud Oscar Wilde’s Selfish Giant and we did our best to condemn it as whimsical.

  Next day Cyril spent pacing the grounds, as the new proud owner, and came back with plans for pulling down every surrounding house in the neighbourhood and making an annex for guests, a summer house on the hill and a guests’ garage on the opposite side of the road. Eric just acquiesced and went on mixing drinks. I enjoyed the latter part of the morning. ‘Have a little drinky?’ Eric said, and gave me a strong Martini while I watched him prepare the lunch, and we talked and I unwound some wool for knitting a scarf. I got a little drunk and felt benevolent, with the hope that perhaps life had something good still to offer.

  After lunch, we went off to look at a house for sale near Dover. A converted oast being sold for £3,200. Cyril had already promised me that he would make up the extra £700 if I should sell the cottage for £2,500. I told him not to expect much for £3,200 but he was determined the house should be a ‘dream’. It was bang on the road opposite a bleak field of barley. It had a good nuttery of hazels and we saw grey squirrels swinging from the top branches of some poplars. They looked so pretty leaping from one branch to another. We went back to have supper with Eric Wood and were shown the phoney Greek pillars again that look so out of place. After supper Cyril wandered round the garden and came back to tell us he had heard some strange snortings in the long grass beyond the Greek temple, so we both went back to investigate and a huge hedgehog shuffled onto the path. Cyril, in the attitude of someone pouncing on a large ferocious animal, tiptoed forward and flung a sack over it and gingerly swept up the beast. ‘Wasn’t I brave?’ he said to me. Eric would not let us take it into the house as he said it was a flea and lice carrier, so we tucked it into the back of the car. When we got home, Cyril unrolled the sack and tilted it onto the grass and the hedgehog, to my intense surprise, scuttled away in the direction of the holly trees and has never been seen since. It was almost as sad as the tame sparrow being swallowed up by Kupy.

  *

  The geese were killed on Saturday. Cyril had strongly objected to their being killed at all, but I promised him he wouldn’t hear, as Mrs Lea had informed me they would not screech while it was going on. ‘It’s too difficult for me to do,’ she said, ‘you have to lay a stick across their necks and step on it.’ Around ten o’clock we heard a car draw up. ‘Who is that?’ Cyril demanded. ‘I hope it’s not the man for the geese.’ We heard voices in the kitchen and then silence. I went down to investigate. ‘Is that your nephew come to kill the geese? If so tell him to take them away with him.’ ‘I’m afraid he’s gone, Madame.’ ‘And the geese?’ ‘They’re dead.’ ‘Take them away.’ I wailed, covering my eyes to blot out the sight of the poor geese. So, she hid them in the outhouse. I then had to break the news gently to Cyril. ‘As long as I don’t have to see them again,’ he said. Later we were having a combined bath and he said, ‘You won’t tease me, will you? But I think I’d like to eat one of those geese, after all, and,’ he added, ‘I would like it to be the largest.’ But, in the end, Cyril expressed a preference for the smallest. He was most adamant about it; he would eat that one or nothing. When I asked him why, he said the little one was obviously the most female and there might be something erotic about it. But, the other was simply ‘a big obstreperous rival male’. I have ordered the butcher to send the other one to Marjorie and John Davenport.

  Chapter XVII

  I Tatti

  Everything to Lose: Diaries 1945–1960, Frances Partridge

  January 1954

  We went over to Stokke one evening, where the Connollys, Freddie and Joan Rayner were staying. A return visit by the Campbells and Freddie next day, full of complaints of the Connollys. They had insisted on bringing their coati but it was not allowed to sleep in the nice hutch lined with straw prepared for it and had to share their bedroom, where of course it shat on the coverlet. Barbara sulked in her room and refused to come down to meals. She had asked to be taken to the early train on Monday, which meant getting up at seven.

  When Monday came and we drove Janetta to the station, we found the whole Stokke party pacing up and down the platform, their faces lavender with cold. Robin told me in tones of stifled horror that they had got up at seven and called Barbara, only to be told by Cyril that she was sleepy and had decided to take the NEXT train. So here they were, but Barbara refused to get into it, saying she had left some kind of basket behind at Stokke. ‘She’s going on the one-seventeen though,’ Robin said between clenched teeth.

  Diary

  January 6, 1954

  Icy cold. Mrs Lea stamping about the house muttering. We have just spent a horrible four days at the Campbells. I never wanted to go, but was tricked into it. The other guests, Freddie Ayer and Joan Rayner. Vast unheated house like a boys’ preparatory school, a twin-bedded room with a two-barr
ed fire giving out no heat. No privacy and Robin bursting in at all hours without knocking, bringing someone with him to inspect his dead father’s suits, a chest of silver and a cupboard full of shoes. A succession of meaty-coursed meals into which we all troop like penancing monks. Whimsical talk between Joan and Freddie, the latter very talkative and flamboyantly egomaniacal; says he is pleased with himself because he has been doing some satisfactory work lately. Robin, who doesn’t like me, is all the time on the nag. To make conversation, knowing Joan to be interested in cooking, I say, ‘Do you ever use any cooking GADGETS?’ She gives me a cold stare and drawls, ‘Only a FORK.’ In order to rouse them, I suggest that the inherited silver tea caddy (left by Robin’s father) would be pretty gilded; Joan does not approve of metals being made to seem what they’re not. I think to myself that she should be made to take a course of cleaning silver solidly for a year and then give us her views. Robin says he would like to see my powder box ‘since it’s been gilded’. I say, ‘But you’ve seen it already.’ ‘Not since it’s been put to some good use.’ he says. Heavy irony. He knows I don’t use powder. Joan and I never discard our coats. Nothing is drunk at the fatal hour and all good feeling for the coming year seems lacking. Cyril embraces Joan and glares at me. The Partridges arrive with Janetta who looks thin and peaky. Something unpleasant about Mr P. What is it? Conceit? Complacency? Just don’t feel I’ve got anything to say to anybody. Robin’s puritanism a drag. Seems to disapprove of all his friends’ wives; in fact, he is uncharitable about most women. Joan, though, is sacred (well-bred, intelligent, has a private income, is a generous provider of food and drink. Has the right friends … Maurice Bowra … Cyril … is also considered to be a beauty! And is too bluestocking to take an interest in CLOTHES).