by D. J. Taylor
Anxious to conciliate her, he bought an expensive wristwatch and commissioned Topolski to bear it home, but this, too, was a source of disquiet as the messenger seems to have imagined that the errand would be a good way to insinuate his way into Janetta’s affections. There was confusion over the identity of the donor and in the end Janetta had to be reassured that it was Kenneth rather than her Polish admirer who had sent the gift.
Meanwhile, in the diary entries being sedulously filed at Ham Spray, Janetta remained a constant source of anxiety. During a visit in early September Frances saw her face become ‘grey and set’ as she read a letter from her father announcing that Rollo’s body had been found in Tunisia, buried beside his aeroplane, and re-interred in a military ceremony. ‘Thought a good deal about the passing of youth,’ Frances recorded later in the autumn. ‘Here is Janetta in the full bloom of youth and beauty, able to make anyone’s heart beat faster, yet does she seem to realise the advantages of her lot? Or its impermanence? Not a bit.’
Already there was a suspicion that in departing for the East, Sinclair-Loutit had fallen into a pit from which he would never be able to extricate himself. Janetta’s friends wrote to commiserate and fish for information. ‘I am afraid that by now Kenneth will have gone + do hope you are not feeling too low’, Diana wrote consolingly. A second letter, sent from the nursing home in which she was about to give birth to her first child, asks ‘if he has said anything yet about what he wants to do’. But whatever Janetta may have said in her letters to Cairo – none of which survives – was making Sinclair-Loutit steadily more uneasy. ‘Oh darling wolfers don’t get the idea I’m no longer a factor in your life or you in mine,’ he consoled her at the end of September. ‘I do see a very good chance of your coming out as a private person soon after we get in, say in the New Year.’ They must ‘try not to fret’ he counselled a month later.
Sinclair-Loutit continued to balance the responsibilities of his new position with a lurking realisation that his emotional life required him to return to England. Late in November 1944 he left for Bari, by way of Athens, as UNRRA made contact with the Yugoslav partisans. In the early part of the New Year he was confirmed as director of Yugoslav health and relief services. By this stage the majority of Janetta’s friends were still supportive. Sonia reported that she had recently been talking to the writer Arthur Calder-Marshall who had ‘seen Kenneth both in Cairo + at Bari, + he said . . . he thought there was every chance of K. resigning + coming back’. Diana professed herself ‘convinced that the old boy will find a way of getting you out or coming back himself, so I do hope you are not feeling too despairing about this’.
Meanwhile mother and daughter had been spending Christmas at Ham Spray amid a select Bloomsbury gathering that included the critic Raymond Mortimer. Snow fell and Frances recorded Janetta ‘stalking about on Burgo’s stilts with her long hair swinging; Nicky trotting purposefully about, a tiny Father Christmas, in her red siren suit frosted with snow’. On New Year’s Eve the company celebrated Janetta’s twenty-third birthday. Writing to a friend she noted that ‘we all sat down to write forecasts for the year to come. Somehow when it came to the point I couldn’t think of anything likely . . .’ If Ralph Partridge and Mortimer were ‘insanely optimistic’ about the prospects for an end to war and prophesying an armistice within 3–6 months, then Janetta was, understandably, weighed down by her private troubles. The situation was ‘hopelessly unsatisfactory’, she declared, but she had resolved to ‘slog on’.
By this stage Sinclair-Loutit had a plan. ‘Things have looked up quite a bit here + next time I write I expect to have something pretty definite to say’, he wrote early in the New Year. His idea was that Janetta, possibly accompanied by their daughter, should join him in Yugoslavia. To this end he applied for compassionate leave (‘Dear Wolfers . . . I am determined that you shall never feel unsupported, forgotten, neglected, side tracked, secondary or anything else’). But the ground was slipping away from beneath his feet. Arriving at Ham Spray early in spring 1945 he found that whatever credit he might have amassed with the Partridges had altogether disappeared. Frances was ‘utterly opposed to any thought of Janetta and Nicolette moving out of England into a newly liberated Belgrade’. The returning lieutenant-colonel reckoned his leave ‘paradisiacal’, even if Janetta was largely silent (‘I no longer loved him, no longer wanted him, no longer even liked him’), but he realised that in underestimating Frances and Ralph’s influence on her view of the world he had made a fatal mistake.
When VE Day came on 8 May, the couple were once again half a continent apart, Sinclair-Loutit carousing at the French Embassy at Belgrade and arranging the Free French air-flight that he was still convinced would bring his family out to join him, Janetta sending accounts of the London celebrations back to Frances and Ralph. Ever a Bloomsbury girl, for whom the sight of massed humanity would always be faintly suspect, she reported that she found the crowds ‘very depressing indeed, and the flags and decorations pathetic although often very pretty’. If the bonfires were ‘wonderful, bringing back the old ecstasies of staring into a fire’, then they also stirred terrible memories of the Blitz. As for the war-weary Londoners, ‘I so loathe the masses of boiling people with scarlet dripping faces, wearing tiny paper hats with “Ike’s Babe” or “Victory” written all over them.’
The early summer of 1945 also heralded a change in Janetta’s domestic arrangements. Significantly, and emphasising the hold he continued to exert over her, they involved Connolly. The lease of 49 Bedford Square was about to expire; Cyril and Lys needed somewhere else to live. It may well have been Elizabeth Bowen who told them that 25 Sussex Place, an elegant Nash house near Regent’s Park, was available for lease from the Crown Commissioners. To acquire the property, the underfunded Connolly realised that he needed an additional lessee. He found her in Janetta. The obvious assumption is that Janetta took this step to escape from a relationship that had begun to turn sour. In fact, Sinclair-Loutit recalled being involved in the negotiations and signing some of the papers. Having looked over the premises – so spacious and well-appointed that Frances, visiting them for the first time, was stunned by their ‘grandeur and beauty’ – the new leaseholders divided up the accommodation, with Connolly and Lys allotted the master bedroom, study, dining room, drawing room and kitchen, and Janetta and Nicky occupying the top floor and basement. The division struck at least one onlooker as unfair. Evelyn Waugh, supplying a conspectus of Connolly’s activities to Patrick Balfour, reported that ‘He and Mrs Lubbock have imposed on a dead-end kid called, I think, Jacqueline [sic], a former connection of yours, half-sister of Angela; she has bare feet like a camel . . . and a baby by a communist doctor.’ Waugh, attending one of Connolly’s lunch parties at Sussex Place, where Janetta had been pressed into service in the kitchen, had been fascinated to discover that she went about her work without shoes. Thereafter she appears in his diaries and the letters exchanged with Nancy Mitford as ‘Mrs Bluefeet’.
Connolly’s father, too, objected to the shared lease: ‘I am sure that divided ownership cannot possibly be a success or work smoothly,’ he told his son, ‘you will grow to hate each other every time you meet on the stairs or the other gives a noisy party’. There were to be plenty of noisy parties, but Sinclair-Loutit’s immediate difficulty with regard to Sussex Place was the question of whether he would ever get to occupy it. Frances’s diary for the summer of 1945 is full of warning signs. In mid-June, she noted that Janetta ‘still sees no solution of her relation with Kenneth – he never refers to returning from Belgrade and she feels the position is hopeless’.
Five days later came a yet more ominous entry, recording the visit to Ham Spray, under the auspices of their mutual friend Nicko Henderson, of Robert Kee, ‘a delightful young man, just back from three years in a German prison camp’. A former bomber pilot whose plane had been shot down on the Dutch coast in 1942, tall, saturnine and melancholically intent, Kee made an instant impression on the Partridges. Almost from the p
oint of meeting him, they began to wonder whether he might do for Janetta. (‘That’s the man for her’, Ralph is supposed to have exclaimed.) That a subsequent introduction swiftly bore fruit is confirmed by an entry from mid-July 1945 in which Frances notes that ‘Kenneth is suggesting that they go out to Belgrade, but she doesn’t want to, resists thinking about it’, and adds, in the very next sentence, the information that ‘She has been seeing Nicko’s friend Robert Kee, but I don’t know how much.’
By mid-September, Frances was reporting that while Kenneth has arranged a permit for Belgrade, he has begun to realise that ‘something is the matter’. Janetta and Robert’s relationship had by this stage advanced sufficiently far for them to be able to go on holiday together in the Welsh mountains. Shortly afterwards Frances was taken to inspect the newly refurbished house at Sussex Place. The contrast between Janetta and Nicky’s rooms, with their well-chosen colours and freshly painted fixtures, and the apartments grandly colonised by Connolly and Lys was a source of bewilderment: ‘he has stuffed them with symbols of success and good living’. Neither the heavy furniture nor the sideboards groaning with decanters, silver coffee pots and antique porcelain had any attraction for the high-minded Frances: ‘I think the worse of him after seeing it.’ The visit coincided with another ‘pathetically anxious’ letter from Sinclair-Loutit, who had clearly got wind of the Welsh interlude, and whose representations caused Janetta to sink into a chair with ‘a lost tragic expression’, remarking that ‘I feel I shall really have to go on with him. I can’t face it all.’
As very often happened when Janetta’s complicated amours reached boiling point, another interested party was manoeuvring into position. A fortnight later, Frances noted that Janetta had sent a ‘useless, awful letter’ to Belgrade ‘saying she wouldn’t go . . . and he must come back to London’. Connolly, on the other hand, urged her to depart, on the plausible grounds that this would be more likely to sabotage the relationship than renew it: ‘As Janetta has the sense to see, [Connolly] would like her to be always unattached.’
There was also a suspicion, gradually amounting to certainty – a subject on which Sinclair-Loutit’s memoirs are unforthcoming – that he was involved with another woman in Belgrade. The heap of photos brought back in the summer had contained several incriminating shots of a pretty girl in a driver’s uniform.
By the final week of October, a crisis loomed. As a torrent of letters and telegrams continued to arrive from Yugoslavia, Frances professed herself bewildered by Janetta’s unwillingness to give up the relationship, ‘for it is plain that all trace of love for Kenneth has gone, and that what is left is liking, pity, some respect and a sense of responsibility’. With Sinclair-Loutit on the point of returning home, Robert Kee seems to have decided that he would be better off monitoring the proceedings from afar. Then, while staying at Ham Spray, Janetta was called to speak to him on the phone. She returned, according to Frances, with her face beaming to report that ‘Everything seems to have changed.’
Whatever Janetta’s precise situation with regard to Sinclair-Loutit and Kee, Frances was still able to report the receipt of a letter written ‘in a frame of mind as near as lunacy’ as she had ever been in. Sinclair-Loutit, returning to England in the last week of October and joining the household at Sussex Place, noted that ‘there certainly was a welcome, but something lacked’. There was also a ghastly moment when he picked up the telephone extension and heard the male voice at the other end ask the silent Janetta if she was still there. At this point Sinclair-Loutit seems to have believed that Janetta would accompany him back to Belgrade, leaving Nicky behind. Matters came to a head on 2 November, when Janetta announced that she would be taking Nicky to Ham Spray and expected Kee to join them there. Clutching at straws, Sinclair-Loutit asked if he could escort them to Paddington.
At Ham Spray, a domicile which had seen its fair share of trauma – Lytton Strachey had died there in 1932 and Ralph’s first wife Dora Carrington had killed herself as a result – the day seemed to be filled with ‘a feverish disquiet’. It began with Janetta telephoning to report that everything was ‘too awful’, that she had decided against Belgrade and thought she ought to leave Sinclair-Loutit on the spot. An hour or two later the cortège reached Paddington, to find Kee lurking on the platform: ‘I could not have been confronted with a clearer demonstration of my loss’, Sinclair-Loutit admitted. Long before the party could have reached Newbury, he rang Ham Spray to ask the Partridges to take care of Janetta and Nicky, to remark that he thought Kee a weak, immature character and not fit to be trusted with their happiness, and, it appears, to be told a few home truths about how Ralph and Frances truly regarded him.
Ralph answered the phone: ‘his cold unhelpfulness and sudden brutality was cruel. He made it aggressively clear that my call was unhelpful.’ Frances, a shade more sympathetic, assured him that it would all work out for the best, ‘as the two of you are so very different’. Sinclair-Loutit decided that he had been deceived by the Partridges’ good manners. Ham Spray politesse ‘had concealed from me the shallowness of their acceptance of me as the right partner for their truly beloved Janetta’. Not long after this, Ralph and Frances drove to fetch their three guests from Newbury (‘a pathetic group on the dark station platform’), Sinclair-Loutit made two more heart-broken phone calls (‘the old house is bursting with all this drama and tension’, Frances noted) and went off to drown his sorrows in Connolly’s eagerly proffered claret (‘a great help but it is not a cure’).
Though buffeted by the emotional typhoon that had blown through their house, the Partridges could not help exulting in its aftermath: ‘When Ralph and I are alone together we chorus Robert’s praises . . . I don’t remember Ralph ever before taking such a liking to a younger man.’ Convinced that Janetta had made the right decision, they did their utmost to dissuade her from briefly returning to Sussex Place a day or so later, and were highly relieved when she came back to report that ‘Kenneth had been quiet and matter-of-fact and accepted everything’.
The usual recriminations flew back and forth, and the customary positions were taken up: Frances’s diary gives short shrift to the mutual friend who had suggested that the couple ought to stay together for the sake of their child (‘is there not great cruelty in condemning a girl of twenty-three to spend the rest of her life with a man she doesn’t love and who has for some time been living with someone else?’). The child, now two years old, was, as Frances puts it, ‘reacting to the situation in her own way’, entering the dining room at Ham Spray at breakfast time ‘at a red-faced tearful gallop, one arm outstretched towards Janetta, her hair flying, a tiny Tintoretto bacchante’.
From the sidelines, gossips fastened eagerly on whatever tantalising scraps Connolly chose to let fall. Nancy Mitford wasted no time in conveying details of a visit from ‘Smarting Smarty’ to Evelyn Waugh: ‘His description of the final Bluefeet parting beats everything . . . He says in the end it was so mixed up with who should have the electric boiler that sentiment & feeling seemed no longer to exist.’ And Connolly, she reported, had another source of anxiety: ‘He is very cross because now Mrs Hugefeet will be very poor & Smarty foresees lodgers, & worse.’
How had Sinclair-Loutit failed? Where, apart from the obvious mistake of leaving for Belgrade and taking up with another woman, had he gone wrong? Like many another incomer who had presumed to infiltrate the world of the Lost Girl here in the early 1940s, he had assumed that he could do so on his own terms. Three years down the line, it was not that he had been betrayed, or that any one – with the exception of the Partridges – thought his credentials inadequate: after all, his friendship with Connolly pre-dated his relationship with Janetta and Connolly had even printed his essay ‘The Prospect for Medicine’ in the June 1942 number of Horizon. Rather, it was that he had failed to understand how efficiently the denizens of the milieu he had wandered into could close ranks if they imagined that the principles on which it was founded were somehow being imperilled. However much Co
nnolly might have liked the younger man, he preferred the women in his circle to revolve, in a greater or lesser degree, around himself. However much the Partridges might be prepared to tolerate Janetta’s emotional attachments to men of whom they disapproved, the fact remained that what they thought was good for her and what she thought was good for her did not always coincide. The Lost Girl might at various times in her career be vagrant, impulsive, detached and indecisive, but the people who organised her professional and social lives – Connolly in particular – were generally anything but.
By now it was Christmas 1945. Having divided up the contents of his former home, Sinclair-Loutit retired to Yugoslavia. Janetta and Nicky spent the festive season at Ham Spray, where Nicky was fascinated by the elderly Bloomsbury veteran Saxon Sydney-Turner. The post-war world loomed, and with it a new kind of Lost Girl life.
Interlude: Anna
Not all the Lost Girls precariously at large in wartime London were in their early twenties. If the Horizon secretaries tended to be young, stylish and good-looking, then the outer margin of Connolly’s circle also extended to older women, middle-aged veterans of the Jazz Age and the thirties reckoning up the cost of many years’ bitter personal experience. None of them, it might be said, was as odd, as demon-haunted or ultimately as talented as the slight, silent and deeply traumatised figure of Anna Kavan.