Monday, 20 January
I am looking through Esther Harding’s chapter on the ghostly lover in her book The Way of All Women for something in connection with Josephine who was here yesterday. Josephine has for years hero-worshipped Leslie Howard from afar though she never met him when he was alive.156 It has now reached such a state that he has really become ‘a lover who is not of this world, but belongs to the spirit or ghost world.’ Since his death he has become more and more concrete to her and she now through mediums receives spirit messages of great comfort to herself direct from him. She is made so radiantly happy by these contacts and believes in them so fervently one dare not disturb her with one’s own views.
Friday, 24 January
My family make me feel old, cold, frigid, spinsterish, ‘booksy’, neglected, lonely. This is a very secret confession and has in it only a hint of resentment and despair. But I must have it out and look at it. I love my brother and his wife and their daughter, very dearly. And they seem to love me. They are kindness itself in their manner, as friendly as possible. But there is a gap that I find difficult to bridge and it makes me self-conscious. Pooh and I have led such different lives that we are almost strangers. Small-talk – that is all we have in common. I long to make contact and cannot. Perhaps I try too much to go back in time and cannot or will not assimilate the fact that he has had a wife and daughter for 15 years. The life he lives abroad that I once so envied does not now appeal at all. And dear, little Babs – she is the colour of her parents and I fail to make contact with her as I do with them. They do not know or understand the sources of love that warm and move me. They only see me on the outside, a lonely, ‘booksy’ spinster – they have met scarcely any of my friends, know really less about my life than I do theirs and our time together is short. They expect to leave for their next post, Lisbon, sometime in February. I have spent a few other afternoons and evenings with them. We all went to the circus, Ivy and Babs came with me and Lydia and her niece and nephew to the local panto. In time, in time it would work. I feel strongly that if only I were married it would all be much easier. Though if they did not like the husband it might be much worse.
Monday, 4 February
Feel forlorn, miserable; perhaps it’s the weather. Pooh sails for Lisbon on Wednesday. I hope to lunch with them all at Euston first, and then it’s goodbye for another three years. Ivy and Babs follow as soon as passage can be found for them.
The feeling of isolation I get sometimes, of being alone – not lonely – is terribly hard to bear. I don’t need company for company’s sake, having many resources. But I am only half-alive – the other half is missing, the old cry, the old ache. How many other people feel the same? Is there always something missing, even in the happiest of unions, as Graham Howe suggests?
Love what you have in hand … It’s not easy. When the wind blows from the east and there is slush underfoot and your only brother is always somewhere else, and the man you want never comes and you’re alone, alone, always alone trying to fill your life with other things. The whine of complaint and resentment creeps in. Dreams are such a warming consolation on a cold night. I indulge in them far too much. My love must be spent on realities.
Friday, 14 February
In a London tube this morning I saw a red-faced, pop-eyed, sex-hungry business man with a dark eyed, voluptuous woman. His hand was fondling hers on her lap and they both looked very happy; they had pleasant speaking voices, the woman’s deep throated, the man’s a little high-pitched with joy. It seems as though he could not believe his good fortune, could not have enough of her, or nearing the moment of parting could not bear to let her go. I did not find it disgusting or embarrassing, but immensely disturbing. That wonderful physical glow of happiness – I know it. It’s important. It shouldn’t be abused. I hope they won’t abuse it, I hope they’ll go on being happy, I hope they won’t be selfish and hurt others because of it. Don’t sneer, or condemn or be cynical about sex happiness as overwhelming as that. Use it. It’s here to help us. (But perhaps I was wrong? Perhaps she was his sister, daughter, good friend? No, I don’t think so.)
My dear N. I do love her. We spent a very pleasant evening together yesterday. I read her my first two chapters of Peg Woffington. She was encouraging, genuinely. I think she really did like it and was not being kind. I feel good about it, too. I see it as a sort of mosaic. I must get all the separate pieces made first before I can put it together in a pleasing pattern and I may collect too many separate pieces, but that doesn’t matter – they can be left out when the whole is done and I can start playing with the pattern. Wish I could work at it this evening but have to go to a Fabian meeting.
Thursday, 13 March
11 p.m. I think my Twinkle is dying. Why should this rend me to pieces so that I weep as much as I would for a loved human? More perhaps. He sleeps at the moment, and if he only lives through until I can get him to the cat clinic in Slough tomorrow morning – if it means only to have him destroyed. I shall be able to bear it better than if he dies this night. Why does it matter so much? Only a cat, one of many, yet as much a person in his way as any of my friends, and all his silly habits so well known to me. Every cat I have had has been a separate, individual friend with distinct, loveable personality, a miracle of independent life to watch and love. Every time they die or leave me, something in me goes too. It is replaced but never exactly the same, a similar plant in the garden but not the plant that was there with its individual twists, surprises and potentialities.
I have brought Twinkle up to my room with all the paraphernalia and am keeping the fire in. Nothing is too much trouble for anything one loves. He sleeps a sleep of exhaustion. After a battle we had to get a little milk and wine and oil down. He has eaten nothing for nearly a week and is now so thin, pinched looking, shrunk, his legs won’t support him. He has sudden bursts of energy, tries to jump on the draining board as I do the washing up, climbs on the bath to watch the fascinating water fall and swirl as though to prove to himself he is not so ill, or as though he felt he must just once more indulge this favourite curiosity and jump to the window to look into the garden and watch the birds. He looks longingly at the back door when it opens but is too weak to make a dash for it.
Please God, please let him sleep like this all night. I have a throat on me I’m going to regret and think that I caught it from Twinkle but can’t bother about it until I have found some ease for the cat. I’d have taken him today, but Mr Steward was busy with other matters and didn’t encourage me. Expect he has a lot of hysterical fussing unnecessarily on the phone.
Friday, 14 March
My little Twinkle died in his basket on the way to the clinic this morning. I went into the bank afterwards and when the nice girl clerk made enquiries on seeing the basket I answered in hoarse voice as hard as flint, ‘No cat … he has just died on the way to the vet … all very sad.’ And I was wanting to howl my heart out.
I can’t stop crying now I am home. There are so many cats, past and to come, why break your heart for one? My heart breaks every time. He suffered a great deal. The vet could have done nothing for him had I taken him sooner but put him to sleep. O my dear Twinkle. How you clung to life, wanted to live, wanted to play with my toes in the bath last night but couldn’t. There was nothing, nothing we could do. Death is so cold, remorseless. There are no compensations, none. He was here, a fortnight ago, in his pride and beauty and now he is quite gone. An hour ago I saw his thin, tortured corpse with mouth wide in his last agony. It’s so … understandable, horrible. Both my mother and father died in great pain and there was nothing we could do. My dear, dear Twinkle, little spark of life, where are you now? There must be something more for you, there must, not just the pool of life. The little bit of me that loved you so goes with you.
Later: The day wears on. I do things – shopping, notices of a local Fabian meeting and so on. But the grief in my heart. Can I give it no adequate expression? All for a cat? Why are words so stiff and hard? I go over i
t and over it. I shall hear his feet on the stairs when he was well.
There is Dinah. Please God don’t let anything happen to her. Don’t let Dinah suffer like that, or don’t let me ever let her suffer so.
Twinkle looked at me once or twice this week appealingly as though to say, ‘look at the state I’m in, can’t you do anything?’ and then, ‘well I suppose not. Just let me die, let me go into the garden and die alone quietly, it won’t take long …’ Are you at ease now my sweet in your Elysium? Is the grass cool and are there gentle hands to welcome you and give you real milk, you must be so thirsty, and lots and lots of delicious liver.
I couldn’t feel more grief, more loneliness at the loss of a human friend, which goes to prove how much I need a human being to live with and love as I do my cats. They help to fill a gap and to satisfy some of the emotion that must be satisfied.
34.
Auragraph
Wednesday, 26 March 1947
Dear N. is now to be called Nicola instead of Nockie, a name F. has made for her and suits her well. She is I think my dearest enemy. She sat on my bed yesterday after she was up about 7 a.m. and lectured me with the greatest kindness and affection about A. I’m never at my best at that hour and her thoughts are always freshest and most forceful then. She had to tell me what she’d been thinking. Swept at me like the Charge of the Light Brigade and left me crawling after my dead and wounded. As many women do, as she did for nearly 10 years with her American T., she says I am clinging to a corner I won’t spring clean. I am wasting myself on A., he is worthless. A man like that, who can behave as he does will NEVER etc. etc. She is never wrong about a man, the situation could never be a happy one …
I am dumb always before her onslaught. She means so well and speaks so much truth. But truth is never a plain tale and I cannot change my feelings to order. We are different people and behave differently. Her man must have the same intellectual stature – and in F. (whose friendship has lasted 5 years now) she has him. They are very happy indeed together, physically and mentally – as a lover and friend he is all she wants, the only ‘snag’ being their great difference in age. He is many years younger and looks it and this causes her much distress.
But my demands are not as exacting as hers. I know I must get my book on Peg Woffington done. N. is most encouraging and helpful over that and I am very grateful for it. I must do that because it seems the way I can use my talent and education. But to me it’s a secondary matter, not the most important. I need to earn a living, to supplement my diminishing capital – and to have interesting work, of course it’s important. To N. the idea of her work surviving in the British Museum and being read years after she is dead gives her great satisfaction. To me that doesn’t matter at all though I dare not say so. It seems much, much more important to pour into the world and to create as much love as possible – that seems more likely to endure here and on the ‘other side’ as the spiritualists say, than anything else. Dear N. We all say ‘dear N.’ She’ll never be anything but unique, attractive, interesting, giving forth original, bombshell views – living vividly, objectively, getting what she wants and always wanting something that eludes her.
Monday, 31 March
Sturt to Arnold Bennett in 1897:157 ‘Too much importance is attached to intellect. None of us have yet recovered from the surprise of discovering that we are animals who can think.’
Later that year Bennett goes to a Grieg Concert and notices among the audience two girls. One smiled all the time, ‘the other had a fixed mournful face. She never stirred and seldom spoke; she did not join in the applause, which was frantic. Her thin lips were set, and her dark eyes were set … I fancied I could see her in her daily existence, secretive, self-contained and occasionally, opening the gates of her soul to some companion.’
When I read that I saw a picture, an exaggerated picture of myself, or as I think some people sometimes see me. It’s too dreary and awful and I hope not true. But I think I know what she may have felt.
Thursday, 10 April
Mass Observation wrote recently that their aim was to collect private opinion ‘with the brake off’. But I find I cannot do this as often as I might and would like to, because it involves other people living now and seems unfair and might be dangerous – though it might be of great value to future sociologists. For my own personal ‘relief’, as I use this journal, such matter is generally unimportant.
Sunday, 13 April
I went this morning to another meeting of the Quaker Friends at Jordans – no form of religion has appealed to me as this does.158 It ‘fits’ Graham Howe’s philosophy. I have been praying blindly for a long while for a ‘sustaining’ faith – and perhaps this is it. One has to experiment. A woman spoke this morning on our need to listen to the still small voice. It is of course important but there are many voices and we must listen to and train them all to sing in unison, like a choir – the clamorous, greedy voices of the senses and appetites, the thin, petulant, persistent voices of the mind, the dark disturbing voices of emotion and the rushing mighty voice of the spirit. All their discords can be resolved into harmony, all developed and disciplined to sing together. Well, it’s easy to think about and write down. We have to live it.
Wednesday, 16 April
The British Museum Reading Room – somewhat terrifying at first but one gets over it.
Sunday, 20 April
Tomorrow I intend to buy a weekly season ticket and go up to BM each day, and the week after to work at home on results of research – probably carry on like that as long as I need.
Says Arnold Bennett in 1907, ‘In reading Smollett’s Travels it has occurred to me that I go about very blind, wrapped up in myself.’ We all do. The effort of accurate observation is a very big one. I think I must try to read more of Bennett’s work, and must certainly read again the last volumes of his journals which I don’t possess and wish I did. It is the man more than his work that interests me. More and more do I think people more important and interesting than the work they do – their work is only a small part of the whole person.
‘Water’ dreams early this morning. Also, as I woke, was being courted by two men: one middle aged, good looking, wealthy and a little Jewish with greying moustache, and a younger man, thin, with sharp features and intense dark eyes who had something to do with a drapery department in a big store. The moment of declaration and honest proposal was at hand and I was filled with great joy – and woke! (when of course I had to complete this pleasant dream for myself in a daydream before I got up).
Monday, 28 April
I must record this. N. says the strain has gone from my face, that my skin is clearer, I look eight years younger, very well, pretty, happy. I really have cut down my cigarettes from over 30 a day to 15 (it’s not easy to do this, and I should never have tried but for Mr Dalton!)159 I don’t want to give up smoking altogether because I enjoy it – I should like if I can to keep it to between 10–15 cigarettes a day, although at home it really is a struggle. I certainly do feel better than I have for a long while, and to have impressed N. with it is a real test – and all without a ‘love affaire’ too! Not that I don’t still want him often and with great hunger and am swamped almost as frequently with wishful dreams and fantasies. When I think of him it’s still basically: ‘Please come again on any terms!’ and it should be ‘No. If you really want to see me again don’t come as a one-night thief: if you want me, woo me on a different level, or don’t come at all.’
Friday, 2 May
Tomorrow, I hear, K. Moneypenny is paying her tenants a visit. I have to brace myself: to be courageous about this interview (two paying guests will be here too). Will she part with her cottage, or won’t she, or will she still be indeterminate? I should like to know one way or the other. If it’s the other then I shall re-orientate my life back to Homefield, incredible as that may seem, and plan to make it into a guest house for business and professional people for which I would advertise in the select weeklies.
Sunday, 4 May
No, she will not sell – she wants Wee. Well, it is her property. But she wants it as a pied-à-terre only. Fortunately she is a likeable person. We shall come to an arrangement. I am getting more used to the idea of possibly leaving Wee – I must not cling.
All this evening: the sun through after a long day of rain, and everything is shining. The joy of living almost too much to be borne. Can one have a breakdown from the reverse-of-depression? What is the opposite of depression? Exaltation? Elevation?
Tuesday, 6 May
And underneath, all the time, snapping, snarling, screaming with frustration, stamping, hating, venomous, contemptuous as Judas, mocking, insatiable. All the time this conflict continues. I don’t think that I am in any way abnormal sexually, but circumstances and current ideas and fears have moulded in me an abnormal longing for it – only because I don’t have enough of it. It’s like a deficiency of something important in one’s diet, such as sugar. I pray and pray continually that this big need in my nature may be satisfied soon – It may not seem apparent on the surface, so that people might assume I am ‘not really very passionate’. I need a normal amount of passion! This doesn’t mean I should turn into a Good-Time Girl and join the Vice Racket about which Hugh has been telling me – I don’t mean that sort of unrelated, raw, material-only sex. A later age may marvel that anyone like myself should find this such a problem and that it should take so long to solve. But it is one of the big problems of this age.
Friday, 9 May
A few cocktails at the Dorchester (at expense of Ascot Heaters) and my mood rockets. Went with Vahan who suddenly suggested that if we could find suitable land we could both build: for myself a replica of Wee, and for him and his family the house in the country they want. It seems to me a miraculous and fantastic idea: would be a wonderful solution of housing difficulties for all concerned. He thinks we could get permits.
A Notable Woman Page 39