She wrote nothing over Christmas but spent the festive season peacefully at home. A few days later the cold she had caught from Ronald turned into flu. The two of them felt “so bloody” that they spent the better part of an evening getting “Stinking.” A bottle of champagne at 6:30 p.m. had gone down so well that they had progressed to Burgundy at dinner after which “it seemed like port would be good for our throats, so we gave that a very fair trial; & ended the evening, some time later, with stout whiskeys.” Georgette enjoyed a drink.
Despite another bout of illness in the spring she began a new Regency and told Pat Wallace: “All the time the Plucky Little Woman goes on churning out her latest novel. This one is going to touch an All Time Low. No, really, it STINKS! Frere has just rung up to ask me for the title. I told him THE NECKLACE. He took it fairly quietly, but rang up a few minutes later to say, what sort of a necklace?” Frere’s reaction inspired Georgette to change the title to April Lady—another likely Shakespearean reference—this time from the “men are April when they woo” speech in As You Like It. She planned to write two books in 1956, in the hope of freeing herself from writing romances long enough to get a clear run at John of Lancaster. She hoped that by having an extra novel finished and put to one side she would at last get ahead of the tax man.
Since the beginning of April, she and Ronald had paid over £7,000 to the Inland Revenue. It was a vast sum and, quite apart from having to give up so much of her hard-earned income, Georgette hated “the thought that all this ill-gotten wealth is going to be squandered on objects I totally disapprove of, such as helping a lot of lazy sods to go out on strike for more pay and less work. If I didn’t believe that the Human Race is on its way out I don’t think I could bear it.” It was a privileged point of view. Although she had always worked hard and endured times of great strain, Georgette had never suffered actual deprivation or known what it was to go without. Her attitude was typical of someone of her upbringing, social aspirations, and conservative beliefs. She would have rejected any suggestion that she was callous or unfeeling about those less fortunate than herself. As far as she was concerned, she worked hard, paid her way, and was entitled to enjoy the fruits of her labors. To have the tax man take such a disproportionate share of her earnings was bad enough; to see the revenue spent on what she deemed to be pointless welfare schemes and feckless individuals was worse.
She signed the contract for April Lady in June 1956. “I really can’t be bothered to read the thing,” she told Frere, confident that she could disregard any clause she disliked and keen to get on with her next book. Richard had urged her to think of a new plot and with that in mind she had “dug up a lot more Regency slang, some of it very good indeed, and the best quite unprintable.” But she would not write it until summer and the Test cricket were over. “The English batsmen are making the Australian bowlers look like three pennorth of bad cheese,” she gleefully told Frere after listening to the Test on the radio.
She was enjoying a lazy few weeks to herself, for Ronald was away in the south of France with “a golfing acquaintance of untold wealth,” bathing, boating, and playing roulette. He enjoyed gambling and often played bridge for stakes—although not always successfully. A recent evening spent partnering Richard at Crockford’s had proved disastrous: “Father never held a card, & every finesse went wrong,” Georgette confided to Frere. “I don’t know what the sum total was, but I do know that he paid Richard his share of the loss by check!” and Richard’s “balance at the club was drastically reduced!” It was not only fine food and wine, shopping trips to Fortnum’s and Harrods, elegant hats, handbags, tailored suits, jewelry, first editions, and holidays at Greywalls that cost money in the Rougier household.
Richard had completed his studies earlier in 1956 and been called to the Bar by the Inner Temple. After obtaining a place in the chambers of Melford Stevenson Q.C. he had joined the South Eastern Circuit and begun working as a barrister. His suggestion that Georgette write something new had inspired her to turn “Snowbound” into Sylvester or The Wicked Uncle. She told Pat Wallace that she “hadn’t enjoyed anything as much as writing this book for years.” She was also cheered by the news that after only a month on the bookstands April Lady was already outselling her previous novels. Serialized in Woman’s Journal the previous October (under the annoying title “My Lady Cardross”) her fans had rushed to read the book. Georgette told Frere that she could easily “explain April Lady’s success! Almost the Top of the Popular appeal Stakes (amongst females) is the Rift in the Married Lute25—provided it All Comes Right in the End.” More good news was the sale of an option on The Conqueror to the British Lion Film Company for £4,000. This book had never been published in America and the film deal encouraged Georgette to think that the novel might now have a chance across the Atlantic. But even these good tidings were tempered by new tax demands.
Despite Rubens’s assurances that she would pay no more than £9,000, her last tax bill had been £11,000. After handing over another £3,000 to the Inland Revenue with more still to pay, Georgette was feeling increasingly exasperated with her accountant. “I think Jamaica would be too hot a climate for me, but what about the Channel Islands?” she asked Frere bitterly. “If I am going to be taxed on money I never so much as touched, because I.R. got there first, I think I’ll either leave the country, or go into liquidation, and not write any more books. I find it too disheartening.” Many of Britain’s top-earners did leave the country during the high surtax era, but Georgette was not one of them. A complete Anglophile, once settled in England after her earlier travels she could never have returned to live overseas. Her attitude was typical of many of her generation. She once summed it up in a letter: “I feel very much like an old man I once knew who ranked the animal creation thus: All Englishmen. Horses. Dogs. Foreigners.”
Her writing stalled in March 1957. Another bout of flu had been diagnosed as streptococcal throat and she could not sleep. Laboriously typing half a page a day she resolutely ignored friends’ well-meant suggestions that she shelve the novel and take a holiday. Only Ronald understood that leaving a book unfinished “would fret me into my grave.” But he had always understood her. Ronald knew better than anyone how to respond to her doubts about her writing or her struggles over a book. Georgette had once said of him during the Penhallow era that:
Ronald’s the only one with any real tact. Having said that he thinks it a fine book, he has no more to say, & remains unmoved by praise of it, shrugging his shoulders, & saying Scottishly: “Well, obviously! I told you so.” When Frere liked it, Ronald “thought he would.” When Percy hated it, that “confirms the opinion I’ve always had of that man.” How to be the perfect husband!
They were great friends. Georgette and Ronald shared many common interests and she endured his irascibility and outbursts of temper while he coped with her forceful personality and determination to be right. When they did fight it was usually over a point of history (one of their more serious arguments was over the Divine Right of Kings) or a word or phrase in one of her manuscripts, than over more mundane things like domestic problems or money. Their deep intimacy and mutual understanding failed only in the sexual side of their relationship. If Ronald ever chose to fulfill those needs with someone else he did so with complete discretion. In the mid-1950s Georgette would sometimes joke in her letters to Richard about father’s “Blonde” and chaff Ronald directly about his “Floozie.” This may have been typical family humor or it may have been Georgette’s way of letting her husband know that she knew and that if he was seeking physical comfort elsewhere she, like so many well-bred Regency wives, would always turn a blind eye.
25 A reference to the line from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: “It is the little rift within the lute.”
Georgette and Ronald in Paris
Blackthorns in Sussex
Georgette and Misty Dawn
Georgette and Richard in Cornwall
Richard and Johnny
Pastel 1929
Charles Leslie Rougier
Sylvia Heyer
Jean Rougier
“Pater” Charles Joseph Rougier
Georgette Heyer by Howard Coster, 1939
Georgette and Ronald at Dmitri and Dorothy Tornow’s wedding, 1944
Ronald, Georgette, Boris, and Richard
Richard, the gillie, and Georgette in Scotland
Percy Hodder-Williams
A.S. Frere
C.S. Evans
Patricia Wallace
Georgette’s favorite photograph of herself
Boris Heyer
Frank Heyer
Aunt Ciss and Aunt Jo
Richard at Cambridge
Susie and Dominic
George Ronald Rougier
Richard George Rougier
Georgette and Ronald
Georgette by Anna Murphy, 1959
Max Reinhardt and A.S. Frere by Desmond O’Neill
Ronald Rougier
Georgette at Greywalls
Georgette’s remaining notebooks
From Georgette’s Regency notebooks
31
It incorporates every last one of the characters which are my stock-in-trade, and ends with the sort of absurd scene which (I hope) raises my novels slightly above the Utterly Bloody Standard.
—Georgette Heyer
Sylvester turned out to be one of her long books like The Foundling and Friday’s Child. Worried that Dorothy Sutherland would be discouraged by the length Georgette spent a good part of April rewriting; by May she was sick of it. Sylvester was the first book for ages that really mattered to her. “I did once think I’d got something,” she told Frere, “it was better, until I got cold feet and cut out what wouldn’t please the fans.” She begged him to read it and give her his views. But Frere never committed to reading her books, though he did read Penhallow. He thought Sylvester would sell, however, and in late May sent Georgette an urgent request for a synopsis: “We go to press with the Autumn list next week. SYLVESTER is or should be one of the most important books in that list. Nobody in this office has seen a single word of it so far so, I ask you, how the hell can we describe it in the list?” She immediately sent a detailed description of the book and an assurance that it was much better than it sounded. She was going down to spend the weekend with Frere and Pat Wallace at their country house in Kent having facetiously warned them: “you do know that I shall bring a MS, & Read It Aloud to you, don’t you? Failing that, I shall Talk to you about My Art.”
Georgette turned fifty-five that August. She seemed increasingly susceptible to illness and a bee-sting at Greywalls had distressing repercussions. A painful attack of fibrositis was followed by internal trouble which meant “suffering the tortures of the damned, every time I eat anything that isn’t Boiled Fish or Boiled Apple.” She was stoical, however, and although she doubted she would last beyond Christmas had strength enough to express her delight at the Freres’ beautiful Christmas gift: “Darling-Frere, I shall CUT Boswell’s pages, because I am going to read him.” Georgette was a voracious reader with a wide-ranging and eclectic taste—although she confessed to sometimes struggling with modern novels.
She no longer read manuscripts for Heinemann but Frere continued to send her any new title which he thought might interest her and she often requested books after reading a review or talking to a fellow Inky. Georgette could be a tough critic and had no time for what she considered verbiage. Her preference was for those skilled in the craft of writing and her favorite authors were those whose mastery of language or distinct voice set their writing apart such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Noël Coward, Angela Thirkell, Stephen Leacock, Agatha Christie, Alistair MacLean, and Raymond Chandler. Georgette was even prepared to acknowledge her own ability (up to a point), though any hint of self-praise or a suggestion in a letter that what she had written was good was invariably and immediately qualified or contradicted. To have publicly admitted that she thought her writing good would mean committing the unforgivable sin of vulgarity. It was one thing to mention Ronald’s or Richard’s achievements, but to Georgette’s mind a well-bred person never bragged about her own success.
She could not ignore her increasing sales or escalating income, however. By 1958 her annual earnings had easily passed the £10,000 mark. More money meant paying more tax and a new demand for over £4,000 from Heron prompted an angry letter to Rubens, whose soothing responses and ineffectual communication did little to placate her. Efforts to pin her accountant down to a lucid explanation brought no satisfaction: “I never can make head or tail of the document he tells me to sign. Nor did it occur to me that when I employed an accountant to do my business I must watch his antics like a lynx.” Equally frustrating was Rubens’s assurance that the company setup was worthwhile, despite Georgette’s growing doubts about the benefits of running her books through Heron:
Whenever I say to Rubens that I can’t see the advantage in being a Company, he gets annoyed—but after a flood of plausible talk from him I still don’t see it. On the Company alone I pay Income Tax, Profits Tax, & Sur-Tax. On our private income, we pay Income & Sur Tax. On Richard’s fees (which in actual fact are only £500) I pay P.A.Y.E. & then Sur-Tax to the tune of £600 odd—because Rubens said it would be a saving to make him the principal stakeholder. All I can say is, I’ve yet to see the saving—because our Sur-tax hasn’t diminished.
After several attempts to resolve the situation she resentfully concluded: ““If this thing goes through, I shall have paid about £6000 in taxation before ever my earnings get into my private account. Then I shall pay private Income Tax, and Sur-tax.” To have earned over £10,000 in a year only to find herself with a balance of £2,000–£3,000 in Heron’s account and an overdraft of £800 in her own was bitter indeed.
The only solution was to keep writing and within weeks Georgette had begun Venetia. She thought it would be short, without much plot, but with a hero who would please her readers and a heroine she even confessed to liking. But tax concerns persisted: “I cannot concentrate on light & witty romances when I’m so worried.” She had no confidence in Rubens and little hope of winning her latest fight with the Inland Revenue. An offer from a German film company for a six-month option on Arabella would mean a £5,000 boost to her coffers if the deal went through.26 But she was not hopeful. The BBC wanted to produce a radio play of Sylvester and there was an offer pending for an option on TV rights for four of her novels. But films and television serials were possibilities, not certainties. In the meantime she was having to “contemplate a future composed of grinding out bright romances in a vain attempt to keep level with the Treasury’s demands” and beginning to think that “anything would be preferable.”
By spring Venetia was half finished and Georgette was having doubts about her fans’ reaction to such a simple love story—“Except that my hero is a Rake, which always gets my silly sex.” Despite feeling that she never did her best work when worried, Georgette proceeded to produce in Venetia one of her finest novels. A quiet book with a great deal of subtle humor she described it as “not quite like Me.” Although at one point in the novel she reflected on the essence of true love in a speech that may well have been a comment on her own marriage:
“You and Damerel!” she said after a long silence. “Do you imagine he would be faithful to you?”
“I don’t know,” said Venetia. “I think he will always love me. You see, we are such dear friends.”
Almost before Venetia was finished, Georgette had an idea for her next book.
She spent Whitsun in Rye on the Sussex coast watching Ronald and Richard playing in the Bar Golf Tournament. Georgette had always thought Rye an ideal setting for a story. She planned to “have a lovely week fossicking around for smugglers’ haunts, & what-have-you.” The new novel would not be written for another year but she was content to keep the idea simmering in the back of her mind while she gathered her material. Much to her sat
isfaction, Ronald won the Bar Tournament that year (narrowly beating Richard in the semi-final round).
After nearly twenty years as a barrister, Ronald had carved out a respectable niche for himself at the Parliamentary Bar. He would never be a brilliant lawyer but he was sound, reliable, and well able to argue a case. His proficiency at golf and bridge earned him the respect of his associates and he was considered a valuable member of the English Bench and Bar golf team. In March 1959 Ronald was appointed a Queen’s Counsel and on 7 April he formally took silk. Georgette attended his admission ceremony and enjoyed it enormously. She was very proud of Ronald’s becoming a Q.C., and for some time afterwards would refer to him teasingly as “little Silky.”
She sometimes watched him in court but found it disconcerting to see her husband so composed and dispassionate. While she admired his court persona, she thought it a stark contrast to his personality at home. Some years later, when Ronald was Chairman of the General Optical Council, she heard him praised for his
Georgette Heyer Page 33