That past Christmas in Brussels, John had once more proposed to a woman Wystan had found for him. He had been relieved when she refused him. In January he traveled to London to attend Shipton’s RGS lecture on the Karakoram expedition and for a meeting at the Geological Survey and Museum. Wystan’s old bed on Upper Park Road was offered and gratefully accepted, though he’d relinquished it when Wystan passed through London en route to China; he and Christopher were to write a book about its war with Japan.
John’s recent paper for the Records of the Geological Survey of India, “The Structure of the Himalaya in Garhwal,” was a lithological and stratigraphic analysis of a two-hundred-kilometer-wide segment, from the Gangetic Plain in the south up into the Main Himalayan Range. The culmination of eight years of fieldwork, it was hedged with enough conditional clauses to render it well-nigh impenetrable. The paper aroused little interest. The director of the Geological Survey and Museum told him he was welcome to bring it along but he was more interested in hearing his views on Askell’s excellent work on Dorset.
Nancy Coldstream, too, would have been hard pressed to find the Garhwal on a map, but she had been keen to meet Wystan’s brother. Before leaving London John had taken her out for dinner. During a long candlelit meal he described his work while she lost herself in the dark blue of his eyes. There was something helpless and innocent in there, she decided, as if a veil hid the man within. He reminded her of Errol, her former fiancé.
Nancy had finally read an unexpurgated copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to see what the fuss was about. It had taken her two days and left her in raptures. Perhaps the gamekeeper was a prig. But she had been deeply roused by his encounters with Lady Chatterley. She was now resolved to become the D. H. Lawrence heroine Wystan once saw in her. Interrupting John’s description of his summer plans for the Alps, Nancy leaned over the table and arched one shapely black brow.
“Any other man would have kissed me by now,” she said.
He was instantly out of his chair and lunging across the table.
The idea had been to kiss her but instead he knocked her flat. Picking herself up, she was gratified by how suddenly John Auden’s uninviting reserve had been overtaken by enthusiasm. An easy conquest. Her affair with Louis had begun with a similar pounce, but that had been uninvited. She had stormed out of his flat in a rage at his presumption.
That was before Lady Chatterley.
In Zurich John Auden felt like a man arisen, freed of his crypt and blinking in the sunshine. He was bewitched: women like Nancy weren’t to be found in Calcutta. She said whatever was on her mind and assumed he knew everyone she did. No one had ever called him “Oh Johnnie my sweet my love” or “my bull calf” before. He had to wonder: would she marry him? He scarcely registered the presence of Louis MacNeice in her life, though Louis was a frequent visitor and came up often enough in her conversation. As did Bill and the state of her marriage. And someone named Errol.
The memories of 38 Upper Park Road followed him everywhere: the taste of sherry, the taxi home, the key under the mat. Wherever he went he saw her bedroom door closing, blinds being drawn against the dark, the electric stove ticking over and glowing. He recalled the texture of her hair under his hands, her smile willing him on and hungrily taking him in. He now felt capable of anything, as if magnetized to a new pole. She was all he had longed for during those cold dak bungalow nights. A fixed point.
It was perhaps this vision that blinded him to the little warnings embedded in the missives that followed him to Zurich. While Nancy overflowed with affectionate thoughts—“I do feel your going so poignantly” and “Darling if I can be of any use to you, you know I am at your disposal”—there were also provisos: “as long as it doesn’t hurt Louis or interfere with Bill.” She went so far as to admit she had a tendency to get carried away with feverish declarations. But John registered only her excitement at the prospect of seeing him again.
After being bombarded with letters from Zurich, Nancy invited John to visit her in Cornwall. In Bude he carried Miranda up and down the cliffs and showed Juliet the fossilized wave patterns on the cliff face. Nancy had been gratified. Louis regarded her daughters with a baffled stare whenever they appeared, she told him. So it was with a light heart that John returned to Zurich to join the foremost authority on nappe structures of the Western Alps on a brief expedition. A letter from Nancy awaited him on his return.
His heart sank on reading it. Nancy wrote that it was simply the case that Bill had more of the really important qualities, “with a few known exceptions,” than he did. And however shaky their marriage, she wasn’t ready to leave it. She regretted her waspishness during his Bude visit but admitted she would most likely behave exactly the same way had she the weekend to do over again. “The thing to be aimed at was independence,” she had advised him. He shouldn’t think marriage was the answer; marriage made no difference one way or the other. Only by thinking and acting independently was happiness possible.
While she had once loved him, it appeared, she no longer did.
He supposed it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Yet, reading her letter carefully, John noted that while Nancy drew a sharp distinction between her feelings before and her feelings now, she did still claim to love him quite a lot. He couldn’t help but wonder if their connection had, after all, suffered any revision. Perhaps this was what true love entailed, an inviting smile followed by a plate of soup in one’s face. His brief experience of freedom, of absolute mastery in the art of making a woman like Nancy happy, now gave way to something more compelling: the prospect of torment.
He planned another trip to London, writing Nancy that on May 28 he would fly from Zurich to Croydon, arriving at Victoria terminus at 1:35 p.m. If it suited her, might he stay Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, returning to Zurich on Tuesday, May 31?
By the time Nancy received his letter her memory of the Bude weekend had faded. Against her better judgment she became quite excited at the prospect of seeing him again.
“So my puss I expect I shall be very surly next weekend but just now I am very warm.”
Café Royal, 68 Regent Street,
London, July 1, 1938
Though his May visit was no more a success than the weekend in Bude, John was back at the end of June for another try. He’d been invited to the annual Himalayan Club Dinner at the Café Royal on July 1 and asked Nancy to accompany him (eight shillings, six pence per head, excluding drinks). She didn’t say no. The Café Royal was the epicenter of fashionable London. Augustus John, Noël Coward, and Winston Churchill were among those frequently seen at this vast, mirrored, and gilded establishment. Brigadier General, the Hon. C. G. Bruce, C.B. M.V.O., leader of the legendary 1922 and 1924 Everest expeditions, was presiding.
All John Auden wanted was in the room that evening. The Himalayan Club Dinner would be attended by men of distinction and renown. In such company Nancy couldn’t help but see him as a man among men. Members of the Everest Committee and the higher-ups of the RGS would not fail to note Nancy, dressed to the nines. Maybe that would open their eyes to him, John Auden, explorer and scientist, author of an excellent paper on the structure of the Garhwal Himalaya. Somehow it would all come together that evening at the Café Royal; his mountain, this woman, and the man he believed he might yet become.
Somewhere in the crowded room was Eric Shipton, just returned from Everest. The Tilman-led 1938 expedition, like the three previous, had been a bust and once again an early monsoon was said to be the culprit. There was not yet talk of another but Shipton was looking to speak with John about returning to the Karakoram. Shipton wanted to survey the Turkestan border west of the Aghil Pass, a sixteen-month undertaking. Michael Spender had already signed on. Spender was also milling about.
While the polar explorers and Everesters were still standing, whiskies and pipes in hand, John saw Bill Wager or Eric Shipton or Bill Tilman or some other worthy with whom he could claim acquaintance across the room. Whoever it was, John was intent on introduc
ing him to Nancy. But before they could reach him, Nancy’s eyes lit on another. Did John know him? So veering away from his original quarry, John introduced Nancy to Michael Spender instead.
The first thing she noticed was that his eyes were the color of cornflowers.
On his return to Zurich several days later John had a letter from Erica Spender. There wasn’t the slightest reason for her to write him, she admitted. Still, she couldn’t bear knowing how unhappy and lonely he was. This was something they had in common. She mentioned, too, that Michael had gone off sailing on the Scottish coast, but he would always be welcome to stay with her in London, or to write whenever he liked.
But John already knew that Michael was in Scotland. At Nancy’s suggestion, they had dropped him off at Stansted. John’s own departure had been disastrous. Nancy had declared the final curtain had dropped on their affair. Henceforth it would be entirely spiritual between them. Her letters, which had once arrived regularly, stopped. On the telephone she sounded distracted. Louis was with her, helping with the children, she couldn’t talk. His need to see her grew desperate. Knowing now that her moods were changeable, and hoping she might reconsider, John booked another flight.
Louis MacNeice might have warned him.
John found her consumed with anxiety over an ailing Juliet. When she embarked upon a new round of confidences, he pressed her to give him more of that love she had once given so freely. Before he knew it he had lost his temper and behaved in what Nancy called a violently selfish manner. Didn’t he see how upset she was over Juliet? But no, John thought only of himself and gave no thought to her happiness.
He drafted a letter of apology on his return to Zurich. Of course he had no right to be possessive. And perhaps he ought to have felt happy that she had found a valuable new correspondent in Cornflower but it was difficult to sustain that degree of objectivity. How could he rejoice in her happiness unless he was the one causing it? And then to hear that while she might be feeling only spiritual toward him and yet not necessarily so with Cornflower—he couldn’t bring himself to write Michael’s name—filled him with bitterness.
In the meantime, he asked if he might once more take up her guest bed on a trip to London. She wouldn’t have to change the sheets. Wystan’s sweaty ones would do. Wystan had since returned from China. John would be following him to Brussels from London. India was so very near now, and he needed to see her one last time before he left.
So yes, Louis might have warned him.
38 Upper Park Road, Belsize Park,
London, Summer 1938
Throughout the spring and summer of 1938 Louis MacNeice had met Nancy’s demand for letters, dishing out generous portions of London gossip he knew would please her while she was away in Cornwall. Had Nancy heard Augustus John had resigned from the Royal Academy? It was all over the Evening Standard. At the flat Rosina the nanny had washed the nursery walls; he was arranging the bookshelves. “And tomorrow, dearest, I shall do your drawers,” Louis added, naughtily. In the coming week there would be tea with Stephen to hear more of his muddled views on painting. “Speaking quite frigidly and leaving all sex out of it,” he told her that Stephen’s conversation suffered by comparison with hers and he awaited their next reunion with intense anticipation. In the meantime, he sent her a poem, asking that she keep it to herself.
She didn’t. She sent a copy to John Auden.
Seeing his rival approaching the doors of Lyons Corner House while he was having breakfast with Nancy, Louis had abandoned a half-finished plate of eggs and bacon and fled. Fantasies of violence and torture invaded his dreams. When he wasn’t having nightmares he was sleepless, spending half the night writing Nancy letters only to burn them in the morning. The mere appearance of her handwriting on envelopes awakened all his hopes and sent common sense flying. He knew how frantically a heart might beat waiting for a call. Hour upon hour he had listened with focused excitement for her taxi to pull up below his window, the impatient frenzy that awaited the step of her feet at the door. Dashed expectations of an assignation drove him to the point of madness.
There were times when he hated her, times when he was desperate to expunge every trace of her from his life. He told himself she was feckless, superficial, given to gossip and overstatement; she could be morose, intractable, and unbelievably nasty. He hated rows and Nancy’s temper was frightening. She never became violent, but she seemed to be daring him to. If he took what she said seriously, she would say she was pulling his leg. But if he failed to take her seriously, she might throw a cup of tea in his face. It was a neat little trap and Louis was not the first to fall into it. Even Wystan had found himself ducking a teacup and making the penitential return, flowers in hand.
But then there was her eagerness, her curiosity and ready sexual responsiveness, her deep distrust of those abstract notions that had tied them all up in knots these past ten years. Louis was haunted by a vision of her sleeping, like the beauty in the grove of thorns, inaccessible and lost. Yet on those nights when she finally arrived in his arms, a voice in his head accompanied the rhythmic knock of the bedstead against the wall:
Is this love? When will it end? When will it begin?
Such questions echoed in Westminster clubs, at 10 Downing Street, and all over London that summer.
Is this peace? When will it end? When will it begin? When Louis could take it no longer, he left London for Dublin.
So Louis might have warned John Auden, who calmly finished the plate of eggs and bacon Louis had abandoned, as he repeatedly warned himself. Louis would have told him to think of his pride and “in the name of reason, to cut his losses.” He would have schooled him, as he schooled himself, in how doubt, looking for a loophole, would compel him, like Chamberlain’s feverish pursuit of Hitler, “to gamble on another rendezvous.”
But John Auden was compelled to gamble that August and it wasn’t the last time he would. A week before his departure for India, John flew from Brussels and took Nancy, in town briefly from Cornwall, to lunch. He wanted to end his stay on a peaceful and composed note, even as the world itself appeared headed elsewhere. Then she borrowed a pound note off him and was gone.
When Eric Shipton rang 38 Upper Park Road in late September, hoping to speak with John about returning to the Karakoram in 1939 for his survey, he was only briefly flummoxed when he reached Michael Spender instead.
Victoria Station, London,
Wednesday, September 28, 1938, 2:00 p.m.
“I am so glad I’m here,” Stephen Spender had said, standing by the stove on the opening day of the 1938 fall term at the Euston Road School of Drawing and Painting. “It is such a relief to have finally decided to give up writing, even if I start painting so late.” Stephen wasn’t much of a painter, but the Boys had needed his fees.
“Oh, are you giving up writing?” the painter standing next to him had replied. “How strange, I have decided to write and to give up painting.”
A plumb line and a twelve-inch ruler were the principal teaching tools of the school, which had been founded by Bill Coldstream and a few of the Boys from the Slade. The ruler, held at arm’s length, verified distance; the plumb line was dropped in front of the model to establish how her body parts aligned, as if she were a conquered territory needing a new map. Like Michael Spender’s matrix of triangles, it was an empirical approach to the feat of representation, which enabled them all to firmly turn their backs on abstract art and political ideology. Stephen regarded the plumb line with alarm; his first brushstroke on the canvas was invariably his signature.
Three weeks into fall term, Stephen invited Bill Coldstream to the family Sunday tea with Granny. Perhaps Stephen thought Granny might benefit from Bill’s views on the Czech crisis. Bill had only just met Michael. When Erica found out Michael was having an affair with Nancy, Michael had moved to Upper Park Road to hide out. He arrived with his luggage just as John Auden departed for Brussels. There, at Wystan’s implacable insistence, John tore up the enraged telegram he ha
d prepared to send Nancy. He phoned her in Cornwall instead, accusing her of deliberately timing his departure with Cornflower’s arrival. It was a bitter ending to all his hopes. He was cursed.
That was where things stood with everyone when tea was poured.
The argument that ensued, however, was not about Michael’s affair with Bill’s wife but about Chamberlain, due to return that day from Germany. The PM had forwarded Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland to the Czech cabinet. They had until two o’clock Wednesday afternoon to surrender it. The Czech cabinet promptly resigned, throwing the ball back in Chamberlain’s court. Protesters were just then marching on Whitehall, crowding Trafalgar Square and shouting, “Stand by the Czechs! Concessions Mean War! Chamberlain Must Go!”
If further concessions to Hitler meant war, what did standing by the Czechs mean? The air was filled with an unfocused fear that made it difficult for anyone to think clearly. Bill appeared to be the exception. Had Chamberlain suddenly become as rabidly pro-Nazi as Lady Astor? Of course not, he assured everyone. Chamberlain wasn’t stupid or ill informed, just desperate for peace. As they all were, really. Bill was pulling every string possible to avoid being called up.
Stephen didn’t want war either but neither did he agree with Granny that peace was worth any price. And what price was he, personally, willing to pay? He wasn’t entirely sure. Christine lit into her brother, defending both Granny and Chamberlain. Though Michael sat there stone-faced, saying nothing, Stephen blamed him for setting Granny against him. Tea ended with Christine in tears.
Nancy, stewing in Cornwall, resisted being lumped together with those who had left the city as the crisis over the Sudetenland intensified. She was desperate to get back to London. She supposed Wystan had an earful from John about her wickedness and that her stock must have sunk quite low. Wystan was the one who told her neighbor of her affair with Michael. The busybody then promptly went and told Erica. Despite Wystan’s betrayal, she still expected him at Upper Park Road that coming Wednesday. Nancy instructed Michael to give Wystan a kiss for her and to make sure there was cream and butter in the flat for his breakfast.
The Last Englishmen Page 21