A Notable Woman
Page 42
Somerset Maugham’s voluble Miss Reid in ‘Winter Cruise’ diagnosed by the ship’s doctor: ‘That inordinate loquacity, that passion for information, the innumerable questions she asks, her prosiness, the way she goes on and on … it is all a sign of her clamouring virginity. A lover would bring her peace … The deep satisfaction which her being demands would travel through those exacerbated centres of speed and we should have quiet.’
I still admire Maugham immensely (much to N.’s continued annoyance) but sometimes I think that much of what he has written will in time fall to pieces and shrivel to dust. There is something of a Miss Reid in every woman who is sexually unsatisfied, but the remedy is not in ‘a’ but in ‘the’ lover. I should like to know how true that ‘Winter Cruise’ story is. The attentions of the Radio Operator might have quietened her, as Maugham describes, but I should like to know if they did. If so I think he must have been a remarkably skilled young man.
N. and F. have come together again (and are coming here next weekend). I am, I admit, immensely relieved but a little uncertain, privately, whether it was the right course of action for her or not. The affair of last autumn with devastating Jew has come to nought – she has heard nothing from him or his family and was apparently just a passing episode in his life.
Meanwhile a Communist fitter in her firm, with whom she has been very friendly, has fallen in love with her. She phoned me when I was at Joan’s on Wednesday evening and told me all about it and wants me to meet him. I am, she says, the only person she is confiding all this to, but I always take such statements with caution. I have a feeling she may be hatching one of her enraging match-making schemes and wants to push me off on to him. He is recently widowed and left with two children and is very unhappy. Was in love with N. before his wife (very ill with cancer) died. Oh, how can she imagine that he would be interested in me instead?
Tuesday, 24 August
Yesterday, just before lunch, came a tramp for hot water for his tea can. He had been before selling clothes pegs, the week of the heatwave just before Bank Holiday. Thin, with fresh looking face, broad, high cheekbones and pointed chin. Something elfish about him – sure his ears were pointed too. Bright blue eyes and walrus moustache, cloth cap, shabby clothes, but clean. In his eyes an engaging twinkle, the hint of an Irish accent in his voice, and a quiet, respectful manner. No bluster, no whining. Could I give him a drop of hot water? We began to talk of mushrooms and food while the kettle boiled. Then, could I spare a drop of milk in the tea can, and a drop in a bottle for him to take away. A cigarette? But no, that I could not spare. He picked up a butt end I had thrown away and showed me how to roll one in the fingers. Simple, really – what could be better than that? Would I like to buy his sweet coupons? And I gave him 2s. 6d. for them. Such is the effect of blue eyes and easy ways on soft-hearted women.
Thursday, 26 August
Leave house 10.30. In Slough get cigarettes, go to bank, buy cats’ fish, go to Woolworth’s where I get biscuits, Smith’s for notepaper and other things, another shop for typewriter ribbon. Buy a mat for kitchen in the market, a salty, watery lunch (but filled in space) at Granada cafe; then home. Then settled down to Liberal work. Stead arrives with notices for next meeting. Stead seems a sound and conscientious man for his job (the party agent for this division). Is (I think) a bachelor and should be eligible but isn’t. Something loose and wet about him. Large wet mouth, scruffy hair, slightly receding chin. Well, he’s nice enough I daresay, but no, somehow … I couldn’t.
Was going to study Liberalism but listened in to short programme on Holiday Camps. Shattering for people like me, such holidays, but evidently perfect for millions unlike me.
Sunday, 29 August
‘Life is a never ending source of delight!’ as N. said pouring rum. It has been an exceptionally successful and lovely weekend. N. herself is a joy and inspiration when she’s as well and happy as she has been these two days. She arrived tired and on edge again on Friday evening, but a little love-making with the right person works a miracle on what Maugham might call her ‘exacerbated centre of speed,’ and we do have peace, of a very entertaining and refreshing variety.
Little John Hansi Gussler was round again, and N. conceived an immediate and intense dislike for him. ‘You amaze me,’ says N. ‘I thought you didn’t like children … you have more patience than I’d have …’ Whatever makes her think that I don’t like children?
‘All men are buggers!’ has become a refrain with N. I begin to protest primly and she says ‘well, all the interesting ones …’ with which I cannot but agree wholeheartedly. I could at this moment swoon into a sickly daydream about the disturbing Harry C. whom I’ve met but once and dream about at night frequently (he is always cropping up in my dreams and sometimes very sordidly). But he is just the type for whom I could fall again, in the old way, heavily. I know. I knew when I met him. And I mustn’t. I must get a hold on myself about it before we meet again, as I think we may. But I can see him, feel him here in the cottage, so intensely. A Communist, a temperamental Irish poet and almost, I suspect, 10 years younger than I am.
A thought has just emerged. Perhaps it has shot up from some long germinating seed. I don’t think I shall keep the Mass Observation Diary anymore. I’ll ponder on this further. But I would rather continue with this as I am doing it now – with MO as its possible destination in mind. Perhaps I’ll write and tell them my intentions.
Monday, 30 August
At 2.30 start doing things with plums upon which busy since. Homemade plum chutney and bottled 4lbs in solution.
That mention of H.C … started the old imaginings, the foolish fantasies. And he was here with friends (a CP infiltration of Wee!) and I was with them, patient, adoring, listening, preparing food and tea and baths for the party, visualising all the sort of awkward situations that could arise, imagining his touch and tenderness and indifference. All so silly and exhausting. I woke this morning as tired as though I had spent half the night in hectic love making … and ashamed of myself. This hunger for rich, romantic personal adventures is I am sure very adolescent. But one does want them, one does.
Monday, 27 September
The strain of life. Babs arrives. We meet. We visit Granny. We do lots of shopping, we have fittings, we get packed off to school. Vahan comes for a few days’ holiday, pushed off here by Joan.
I want to write all my irritation out of me. Poor Vahan! He is feeble where he should be strong, obstinate where he should be elastic. Cowardice, moral cowardice, is the curse – or one of them – of this age. I sympathise most deeply with Joan, can understand why she gets into such rages with him, dissolves into tears and long sulks. He is a nice person, intelligent, kind, sensitive. But he is a stranger in a strange land who has lost his way. There is much of the oriental in him and he could be deeply philosophical with a strong inner peace which would help him and his family, but he has lost whatever of it he inherited in trying to adapt himself to our nervy western culture.
Sunday … disastrous. It is another lovely day. We all go over to Beaconsfield, I see Babs into school, and feel utterly deflated – all torn to pieces. I knew so well what she was feeling and could have cried. Vahan then takes me to look at building sites in which he is interested. We eventually fall into a hotel for drinks and dinner. I see frothy glasses of lager or light ale and long for some, but Vahan has to order me brown ale. I could have poured it down his neck.
Then we had to walk another mile or so for our bus and just missed getting on it because of the queue. An hour to wait. Should we walk? (Another three miles.) I am dead beat, still weeping inwardly for little Babs and exasperated to the limit with Vahan. He makes such feeble, such ghastly feeble jokes. He is feeble … and tries so hard to please, to be kind and polite all the time. This was where I wanted the strong male to take charge of the situation and stop a car for a lift. It can be done. I have done it. I sit on the bus stop seat and sulk. V. waffles. I say: you go ahead and walk, I’ll wait. ‘Oh do go and st
op a car!’ I cry desperately at last. But he wants me to go with him – he always wants someone with him, he is really an extremely shy person and I should feel compassion, not contempt. Then I decide we must walk it – he of course protesting: but a car may pick us up. Which it does. Nice North Country folk on their way back from Oxford to Slough, their little car crowded with apples, picnic basket, petrol tin, but they make room for us. Vahan pinches my behind in the dark which makes me savage so that I ignore him during the journey and talk to the woman in front.
He was hating me when he left this morning, just as I was hating him. But why, why can’t he take a look at himself, try to regain that inner sense of serenity and peace which he once had but has lost? We all need this, desperately. I gave him Walk On! to look at.167 Talked about this Buddhist Society. He was very lordly, indifferent, condescending about it. Oh, nothing is wrong with Vahan! Perhaps he harboured a secret hope of an exciting affaire with me and feels outraged at his failure. Poor Vahan! That’s all we say and go on saying. His daughter will make mincemeat of him.
I have also to remember that he is a foreigner and looks it. He is darker than an Italian, might almost be pale Indian, though not quite. It makes him different and conspicuous and oneself sometimes uncomfortably but I think unnecessarily self-conscious about it. When I have been with him I have never noticed any English man or woman treating him any different than they would one of their own race. Their behaviour is invariably impeccable which I should like to record to our credit, because race prejudice is such a deeply implanted bogey. I am sorry if I ever let it influence me when I am with him but I sometimes wonder if it does. Even Joan, brought up in Beadles traditions of tolerance, has been troubled by it herself at times.
Thursday, 30 September
Joan has just phoned. V. does not seem to have complained at all but given her the impression that he thoroughly enjoyed himself! I can’t believe it. He irritated me so much, and skilled though I may be at concealing these sort of feelings, he must have been conscious of some inner discomfort. Well, let it go. It only shows how much there is beneath the surface of any relationship that is never apparent or admitted.
I must confess in fairness that for the first day or two I enjoyed having him around, and he did help me enormously the day I had to go canvassing for the Liberals by talking over policy programme with me beforehand. It is just that kind of personal contact that I lack badly in my life – someone at home to discuss these sort of things with in a friendly and intelligent way. He was ‘just right’ on this occasion – he is a very sane supporter of the Labour government, not rabid at all, and thinks they have done and are doing really good work for the country. He is interested too in the Liberals and made helpful criticism, so that I was able to clarify my ideas and felt quite confident when I set out. Consequently it was not nearly such torture as I expected and I even found myself enjoying it.
I think I am going to be very fond of my niece. It is going to be hugely interesting having her under my wing like this. ‘Very good for you,’ says N. primly, which makes me laugh. Babs is immensely loveable.
‘Babs is immensely loveable.’
Jean, Babs and Ivy at Wee Cottage.
36.
Destroy, Destroy, Destroy
Monday, 18 October 1948
Thirty-nine years ago today, in the very early hours, I think, my mother sweated and groaned and delivered me. If celebrations are necessary they should be in recognition of her travail and triumph and my father’s relief and pride. I have been more or less ignoring my birthday for years now.
Today meet Peggy Denny to deliver Liberal literature for Thursday canvas. It pours with rain but we go. ‘What good Liberals we are!’ she remarks, handing me sopping pamphlets. We get cigarettes at a small store. We discuss Corbusier. She, as the former Mrs Val Harding, has entertained him, has seen his house and other work in Paris and does not think a great deal of either.168 I think the only way of coping with the world’s huge population will be to house them in the Corbusier manner as described in today’s News Chronicle.
Peggy D. is an autumn tree, a brown and gold beech leaf. She chooses always those sorts of colourings for her clothes and furniture – and as she handles them they are very attractive, very right and justly expressive. She has a beech-bronze mackintosh, she wears browns, autumn yellows and old gold. So unlike me: severe white walls, plain furniture, no objets d’art. She does not like gardening, cannot arrange flowers, and yet we seem to have so much in common. What I like most about her is that she has a complete full life of her own and does not envy me mine, but is interested and sympathetic, is alive to what is going on outside her own domestic circle. I do like her, more and more.
This is the age of the middle-classes. I want to expand on this subject sometime. There was an age when kings predominated – the priests, the trading classes of the Renaissance, the aristocrats – and then gradually through these last two centuries, the business man, the professional and the artist. The working-classes may come into their own standards and way of life – a Butlin camp existence extended and refined and beyond our present comprehension – but today is still ours, we of the middle-class without vast wealth, power, or responsibility or bitter economic struggles.
Tuesday, 9 November
The days tick by quickly like minutes, busily, happily. I wonder when the reckoning will come and what I shall do if I can’t sell ‘Peg’. She has come back from the Porcupine Press (in financial difficulties) and gone to the Pilot Press under Tom’s patronage. N. makes snarky infuriating remarks such as, ‘I could have told you about the publishers but you have to find out for yourself.’
Tonight I am off to a Liberal meeting in Slough. I am enjoying this work though I am sure I shall never become a really good canvasser. I slide through my interviews as quickly as possible, hoping I shan’t be asked awkward questions or expected to explain too much.
Wednesday, 17 November
Do the laundry, which has to be taken next door, where Lady S. detains me about an article by Aldous Huxley in World Review, and with remarks about my hair which raise all the old conflict. From my own family in early years onward I’ve been told I have ‘such lovely hair – if only you’d take a little trouble with it!’ It makes me feel I must be indeed a very lazy woman, and that the same comments could be applied to my complexion, figure, hands, and clothes. I am sorry, hair, if I neglect you, but you are temperamental, which no one understands, and we have only Mrs Hampton in the village to thank that people notice you at all. I can’t manage you on my own but I daresay I should brush you a great deal more than I do – but there never seems to be time.
Huxley’s article very good but very depressing. There is not and won’t be enough food to feed world population adequately. What are we to do? My inner, secret answer to all these problems, but which seems too foolish to utter because I cannot defend it, is, ‘God will provide.’ This comes from my ingrained early training which I can not shake off. I still believe in a benevolent, fatherly individual who takes a deep personal interest not only in me and all my small concerns but in every other person in the world. Yet when it comes to prayer, to talking directly with God as so many C of E clergymen and others declare one can do, and that he listens and replies, I cannot believe. I believe there is immense help to oneself in thinking good thoughts, in formulating certain kinds of prayer and saying them over in the heart – even so little a phrase as ‘God within me’ – and that in this way, if persisted in, one contacts a valuable source of goodness without which one would drift into the path of self-destruction and disintegration. But when one prays for an immediate, concrete answer to something – say money, urgently needed, a fine day for a special occasion, or advice on what to do in a particular and troubling situation – then God doesn’t [listen]. You have to work these things out for yourself.
Sunday, 21 November
As I drew out my dictionary, Virginia Woolf’s Walter Sickert: a Conversation fell onto the floor.169 Have j
ust re-read it, wondering a little why I had bought it thirteen years or more ago. There is a lot, I think, that I am forgetting about myself – of why I so much wanted to write, how easily I was moved by phrases, movements, a colour, or a scene. Encouraged by the Bartlett School teaching, I had developed something of a painter’s sensitivity which I have let lie dormant too long.
I have often felt aware of things – atmosphere, other people’s reactions – a sort of pattern of something that I can’t put into words. ‘Perhaps,’ Graham Howe once said to me, ‘the next time you come you’ll tell me how you feel.’ And not until today has anything of his meaning really filtered through to me. That I can feel – i.e. be conscious of feeling only, no words, no thought form in the mind at all – I know, and deeply at times. The trouble has been, partly, that I am always wanting to put all my experience into words, and when you stop to analyse and translate a feeling in the moment of feeling it, it begins to ebb away. Something is vitiated, lost. And why I have been doing this all my life is, perhaps, to escape pain. That is why in all major emotional upheavals I have rushed to my journal, as to aspirins. But I needn’t start at this dramatic end of the scale. I feel, for instance, so intensely about my cats, I love them so dearly. I want to record their lives and their poses and absurd expressions and the light and shade on their silly, soft delicious little bodies, the tabby markings, the delicate eyebrows, the twitching paw.
The things one can ‘feel’ like this throughout the day are endless. The milk bottle by the kitchen door, the pail of ‘pig’ refuse, a cobweb on the stair, the movement of people in a crowded shopping street. Sordid, greedy, drab, but works of God also with life streaming from and around them. Let it all soak in, feel it, and then, like Sickert ‘cloaked in the divine gift of silence, paint: lies, paltriness, splendour, depravity, endurance, beauty – it is all there …’ without analysing, criticising, pulling it to pieces, pointing a moral, trying to rip away, or reform, or whitewash the lies, paltriness and depravity. It must all be accepted and endured, digested. The intellect tends to tear it all to pieces.