The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  She had been away since November, and she did not return to London until the following July. The choir, the students, the plans for a national college, and all the rest of it vanished from her mind as surely as the winter snows. The orphans were not so easy to dispose of. The advertising cart gathered leaves in the garden, the sandwich men had given up their boards, but the children still had to be fed, cared for, dosed with medicine, and kept disciplined. That was not Harry’s job. But whose job was it? It seems incredible that she could abandon that responsibility and get away with it. However, though she did not know it, the long vacation she took from her rejection by Gounod was beginning to have repercussions wider than what to do about the children.

  There were new players coming onto the scene, one of whom was Georgina’s mother. The timorous Louisa had shown no wish to meet her daughter after the marriage to Harry and its disastrous effect on Morgan Treherne. After her husband’s death she still kept her distance, salving her conscience by sending Georgina a small allowance every Christmas. The accompanying notes were vague and noncommittal. It was her duty as a woman to defer to a man, and that man was now Dal. Louisa learned with alarm that unforgivable Harry had begun to exchange letters with Dal in his role as head of the Trehernes. Their purpose was brutal and businesslike. Behind Georgina’s back, the most awkward question of all was being put: could her actions be described as those of a mad person? Or perhaps the question was differently nuanced. How would the Trehernes react to such an assertion, and would they stand in Harry’s way?

  Georgina arrived in Switzerland in March, still firing off letters to Tavistock House and getting back answers signed by Harry—phrased, she thought, in rather more stylish terms than was customary with him. It at last occurred to her that he might not be writing them himself. When she got the chance to subpoena documents in the divorce action that eventually resulted, she found copies of these letters. They had been drafted for him by his lawyer. Moreover, she discovered that all the correspondence, including her suggestion that he move out as far as Freddie Warre’s, had been shown to her mother and the rest of her family

  to make them believe I was a terrible woman and that “I had chucked him out of doors!” . . . One will appreciate that in spite of my (legal) flair, I could not have suspected something as Machiavellian as that, but I did imagine there might be a woman at the bottom of it, because he ended up by giving me the idea he had a grievance at this arrangement to live apart, and that he wished thereby to pay court to some woman that he wanted to seduce, given there is nothing that does seduce a woman more easily than the pity she feels for a man abandoned by his better half.

  All these thoughts occurred to her in her walks beside Lake Constance, seven months after last seeing Harry, the house, and her orphans.

  She did at last come home, not without a little Machiavellian plotting of her own. She wrote to a man she knew named Alfred Nodskou, who had been a dilatory and minor member of the Gounod Choir, a property developer who let furnished apartments. The idea was to enter London secretly, stay a few days with him, and spy out the land. The blind old man who was father of the Rawlings children was summoned to the Nodskou address and confirmed to Georgina that there was indeed a woman in the case. He was naturally unable to describe her. Nodskou, meanwhile, had contrived a scheme that she should buy a house he owned. He was very persuasive. It would be a fallback if things turned out badly. With her usual capacity to be duped by plausible men, she agreed, signing away £1,000 for a house worth maybe a third of that.

  Early on Tuesday morning, July 4, she set off for Tavistock House, arriving a little after nine. She found Marian Westmacott and the children coming down to breakfast—“a little late, in my opinion, but there was my big difficulty—not the children, but the grownups on whom I was obliged to depend.” Harry was in the habit of rising late, and while she waited for him to show himself, she snooped around. She found the name she thought she was looking for—someone named Amy Oliver. She seemed the most likely candidate for Harry’s attentions. (It was not for another ten years that she realized she had been barking up the wrong tree.) She crept about on the ground floor, looking for more evidence. With a stroke of genius, she called for the housekeeping accounts. Someone, for some reason, had ordered twenty pounds of veal the previous Sunday, not one scrap of which remained by Tuesday. It was the kind of detail that was conclusive: Harry had been enjoying himself while she was away. It seemed to her unfair.

  At half past twelve the unsuspecting Harry came down to breakfast and—as well he might be—“was visibly knocked sideways, but I leapt into his arms and embraced him with all my heart.” She found him uneasy and unresponsive. He refused to compliment her on her new costume, bought in Paris a few days before, and explained that he had to go out after breakfast and had engaged to dinner that evening three of his Garrick friends, Freddie Warre and the artists Sandys and Alfred Thompson. Georgina felt a migraine attack coming on. She went to bed and did not come down again that night. In the detailed account she gives of this fateful Tuesday, the children are not mentioned once. The one piece of remorse she felt was at the condition of her pugs Dan Tucker and Jarby. One was paralyzed, the other blind. She felt bad about being away from them so long.

  Harry’s use of lawyers to draft his letters was the first step in divorce proceedings. He had to move extremely cautiously. He was fairly sure, after consultations with his solicitor, Neal, that under the terms they had agreed, if he left the house now, she could not subsequently sue him for divorce on the grounds of desertion. He was in fact quitting because he could not stand it anymore, but in law the arrangement was a separation and nothing else. There remained the matter of her adultery. This was a way of ridding himself of her altogether. The most recent of his suspicions concerning what was then called criminal conversation fell on the unfortunate George Werranrath, whom he believed to have slept with his wife in a Strand hotel room the previous year. But Werranrath had gone to America. The much more obvious candidate for any action of this sort was Gounod, but that made difficulties for Harry, since it could be easily proved that he was complicit in most of what went on between the Frenchman and his wife. There were other candidates, some going back six years, but here he risked alienating his new allies, the Trehernes. Mrs. Treherne did not wish to see her daughter in court on charges of adultery, or for anything else. Her concern was with Georgina’s sanity.

  So much was made by Georgina of her mother’s treachery in what was to come that it bears examination here. Louisa was far from the action (if one counts a train journey of two hours or more), insulated from the world of real events by invalid retirement in her daughter Emily’s house near Worksop. The image one has of her is of someone sitting more than moving about. She found even the smallest problem too much to contemplate, and her capacity for giving family advice on any subject was compromised by the long shadow Morgan’s madness had cast over her life. It was all very well for her children to scold her now, but Louisa had gone along with things another wife and mother might have rebelled against much earlier. This she had not done for the sake of keeping up appearances, and despite her heroic self-abnegation, things had ended in the ugliest way possible. Thirty years of excusing Morgan to others had come to the point where he was unable to recognize her and was as mad as anyone could be. Nobody and nothing could palliate the simple truth: the M.P. for Coventry was insane in the way such things are represented in the most sensational books and plays. In the last years of his life he had gone to live far, far away, beyond the reach of anyone’s compassion. A second experience like that was more than she could contemplate.

  As for Harry, when Georgina came back that Tuesday and shocked him so much, it is really the last time he is seen in the story with any clarity. Many another man would have jibbed at living with her under the terms she set, especially since their arrival in London. The enigma in Harry was his easygoingness, his laconic good nature. As he approached forty, he had endured—and often enjoyed—fifteen
years of an extremely rackety marriage. In the conversations he was having nowadays with his brother-in-law, Dal must have struck him as the most colossal prig. Harry was no angel and not especially complex or sophisticated, but he knew Georgina as well as anyone else on earth. What was sad about her unexpected return was that his interest, his curiosity, and his compassion had come to an end. He had been her support, her chiding critic, a long-suffering friend to her genius. Now he had nothing more to give. The week after she returned he quit the house and went to live with Freddie Warre.

  Menier

  1

  One of the uninvited guests at Tavistock House in the days when Gounod lived there was a compatriot of his, Anarcharsis Menier. Menier first called in December 1873. He introduced himself as from a small commune near Bordeaux and more recently Paris, where he had spent the Siege and Commune. In his native village, he assured his fellow countryman, the family name was so well respected that men removed their hats at the mere mention of it. There had been distinguished Meniers in the Year One, friends if not intimates of the revolutionary heroes. But he was not there to brag about his republican credentials, which in truth he had been forced to refurbish a little for the present circumstances. He came as an artist. He explained how he had written a play that Gounod might like to use as the libretto for an opera. An accompanying note, clipped to the text, summarized the situation: “I sent M. Valnay a three act comedy which he has given back saying: ‘the characters are too naturalistic; the piece lacks the grotesque; the characterization is well sustained: wit is absent; as a consequence I will not play it.’”

  This meeting took place during the time of the much-publicized Littleton libel case, and it may have been the newspaper accounts of it that drew Menier to Tavistock House. Menier shrewdly ended the cover note to his play with this familiar complaint, as from one embattled artist to another: “These general criticisms, if I accepted them without examination, would lead me to think that the skies of England had boiled my brains.”

  It was a crude but bold pitch. Wasn’t Gounod himself a victim of English perfidy? The skies of England shone as fiercely—perhaps much more fiercely—over the Court of Common Pleas as on the head of Anarcharsis Menier. Perhaps Gounod, a fellow artist, would do him the honor of reading the work? Unfortunately, Gounod found the idea very resistible—Menier was asked to leave his manuscript and wait for a considered reply, which as the composer explained might be some time in coming. He was very busy; M. Menier would of course understand; yet the work looked promising, etc.; something might come of it. Menier noted that the bouncy and buxom Englishwoman at Gounod’s side was more encouraging. Not having read a word of the text, she was quite sure it was eminently playable. The problem, as he had correctly identified, was England, always an enemy to talent. Menier heartily agreed.

  There were, however, many things working against the author of The Spidder and the Fly, not all of them to do with the title. Menier was extremely unprepossessing, an overweight and unhealthy man of about Harry and Georgina’s age, with lank hair and a pale, even a bloodless, complexion. Georgina noticed how dirty his fingernails were, and how stiff with cigar ash his waistcoat. His manner with Gounod had been wheedlingly intense. The note attached to the manuscript was written on letterheaded notepaper from the offices of a journal called La Liberté Coloniale which he and his brother ran. He signed his name above the title “Editor in Chief,” and while it was true that the Paris office was in the rue de la Victoire, an irreproachable address, Gounod was forced to excuse himself from knowing anything at all about this particular journal. Menier explained only too willingly.

  The purpose of La Liberté was to resettle the poor of France in her newest colonial possessions where they might find God and make a new start in life. All that was required was capital, and the shrewd investor who also had an eye to the spread of civilization and the French language might make a fortune. In other words, the newspaper was a thinly disguised stock prospectus. Through their contacts, Menier and his brother had managed to secure a deal to develop what he described as several thousand hectares of prime farming land on the Pacific island of New Caledonia, without troubling to explain to investors that the territory had only recently been brought under civil control and its backwood ravines (which was where the land was situated) were occupied by extremely restless natives. Negotiations had proceeded admirably, and he and his brother were arranging to charter a ship for the first colonists when the Franco-Prussian War began. Patriots before they were capitalist entrepreneurs, they at once gave up their plans and joined the National Guard. But, as Menier explained hastily, in view of Gounod’s own position on this matter, that was another story.

  The play he had entrusted to Gounod was part of the detritus the composer left behind in his flight. Three years passed. Then one day the sharp-eyed little crooks of the Rawlings family, who were in the habit of reading tidbits out to Georgina from the newspapers (she kept a particularly close eye on wills and bequests), happened to see the forgotten Menier’s name mentioned in a case at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. He and his wife were implicated in some cloudy business about a case of child stealing.

  Georgina at once sent the Rawlings boys to Bow Street to try to discover where Menier now lived. Their task was an unexpectedly easy one—he lived a few doors down the street from the court. He replied to her note with a welcome promptitude. It gave him and his wife great pleasure to accept an invitation to visit Tavistock House once again. Georgina had recently discovered the missing manuscript while dusting in the library, and it was arranged that M. Menier should come to tea, take back his property, and tell her what had brought him to his present sorry state. The story turned out to be a gripping one.

  Menier’s wife was named Angele. Her sister Gabrielle died in the Commune, leaving two children, one of them a little girl nicknamed Bichette. The father, who was the plaintiff in the Bow Street case, was a terrible man named Duprat. For his many crimes and misdemeanors during the Commune and after, Duprat had suffered what the French call la mort civile, removing from him all legal rights. Angele now wished to adopt Bichette and bring her up as her own (her motherliness did not extend to the older child). With this in mind she had snatched Bichette and brought her to London. But thanks to the ignorance of the English courts, the poor creature had been taken from her and returned to her father. When Georgina asked where the child was now, the answer was unexpected. She was in Brussels with her grandfather, where, of course, English law did not apply. It would be the simplest thing in the world to sort out the legal niceties there and restore Bichette to her loving aunt. That is, the couple added significantly, for anyone who had the fare to the Continent. Quite by chance—or was it chance?—Angele provided the clinching detail. Her eyes cast down, she confessed that she herself could not have children, and that had made her especially sensitive to the fate of this particular child.

  Georgina reached into her gown, and her hand closed on the only money she had there, which happened to be a £50 note. She gave it to the Meniers, bidding them to find Bichette and set to right the wrongs done to the family by English justice. Their protestations of joy were wonderful to behold, and Georgina felt a special bond with Angele Menier that she hardly bothered to hide. The two women had hit it off in an instant. The Frenchwoman was roughly her age and height, a short and dumpy blonde with dark eyes and an appealing eagerness. She was also a natural sentimentalist, and Georgina, who completely lacked this attribute in her own makeup, found herself entranced. People who wore their hearts on their sleeves confounded her as much as people who made jokes or wore other social masks. Nevertheless, she felt she had met a soulmate.

  Angele Menier was the kind of woman whose eyes filled with tears and whose lips quivered at the merest suggestion of cruelty and injustice. It was true that when she laughed it came out as a raucous smoker’s cough, and her husband let it be known that in matters of appetite she was regarded as “the human cormorant,” but that was part of her charm. A
ngele had been cheated by the world of men, and so had Georgina. The one thing men were good for—to give children—had not happened to either of them. Angele (and this at least was genuine) indicated by sighs and glances that Anarcharsis was a sorry disappointment in bed. Measured by his essential scruffiness, his wife seemed contained and even chaste. He wanted to talk about business, the iniquities of the legal system, and the stupidity of Mr. Flowers, the police magistrate. She wanted to talk about Bichette.

  A few days after their departure for Brussels, there was bad news. Some minor complications with the lawyers meant they must ask for more money, as much again. Georgina sent it.