I think the most important thing to note is the series of articles begun by Graham Howe in Picture Post Sept. 17th – a copy of which N. has sent me. ‘Psychology,’ he says, ‘… can show you to yourself, but it cannot give you what you want. It is an instrument of reflection, a mirror. It is not a mysterious cupboard from which hope, long disappointed, can at last be magically fulfilled … We should learn from our mistakes and not be ashamed of them … our mistakes … are our stepping stones to better travelling … Patterns repeat themselves like gramophone records that go on playing round and round: and we are blind until we are shown the point at which we dodged the real issue, the meaning of the situation by which we were confronted perhaps even in our infancy. Now we get our second chance to experience fully what we avoided then … the crucial fact is that the fate which has always so desperately dogged our footsteps is our own …’
Patterns repeat themselves … and my problems repeat, although I think I have been shown the point at which I dodged the real issue. I had a lovely holiday in Portugal, I tell everyone. And I did. But it is only half-truth. I somehow got myself thrust right back into the old slough: uncertain of myself, desperately shy, awkward and hanging back when I should have advanced. Again the little girl who couldn’t make herself offer cigarettes to the Tommies until it was too late for them to accept.
My brother and sister in law were kindness itself. They couldn’t have been nicer to me or made more effort, in their own way, to make me welcome and give me a good time. They gave a big cocktail party, made me a member of the club, would not let me pay for anything – not even cigarettes and letters – kept me in bed for breakfast, gave me huge meals and a tonic, sent up my afternoon tea, took me out and about, took me shopping, and spoilt me thoroughly. What more could I possibly ask for or expect?
Yet there was one thing which they did not, perhaps could not do and that needed only my own courage and determination to set right. I longed and longed to enter more fully into the social life of their circle. Going to the Club alone was agony, and one Sunday I ran away as I reached the door and heard voices within, and had to walk right down the beach by myself and back to gain courage to make the entrance I had to make. If I had played tennis, and been able to roller skate, or play bridge, if I had gone on my own at weekends more often to watch the tennis and have tea … But underneath I know it was cowardice, lack of confidence in my own opinions and abilities. It was, I think, a very crucial and exacting test, and I failed.
And then came the voyage, by sea, home. But before I begin on that, what of the men in the community? Quite honestly, cross my heart, there were none who seemed even remotely eligible either for a passing affaire, or something more permanent. Most of them were youngish-to-middle aged, married men with young families, like my brother, pleasant, easy to know, easy to dance with, and a handful of junior bachelors ranging in age from early twenties to early thirties. All seemed quite likeable. In fact Colin Thomas, a lanky, slow but to me attractive 26 or so, I felt quite drawn to, but no opportunity gave me much chance for exploration. I never got really near any of them and felt that it did not greatly matter. I did not want any emotional complications, only to be one of the party, (fatal desire for a lone female when males are in a majority), and I was conscious of my age and had no wish to be thought cradle-snatching or after someone else’s husband.
But one of the bachelors (31/32, I saw his passport) came home on the Andes with us. I knew him, as I knew the others, casually, and now I know him a great deal better and don’t know how or why it has happened. He is a small man (Mac’s height) but thin. In many ways a slighter edition of Hugh, the hands are the same and the set of the features, though D.B. has a much nicer nose. I am not in the least in love with him and cannot imagine myself in any permanent situation anywhere with him. But I like him, and physically the attraction is mutual and admitted, and admitted as such only. He confessed eventually that he was going to meet a girlfriend in England whom he intends to marry. But he is not sure. And now he seems less sure. It is all rather naughty by certain standards, but hugely gratifying. He phoned today from London and we have arranged to meet at the Cumberland Hotel on Tuesday. Perhaps I shall ask him for the day to Wee. ‘I am a bad type,’ he said. It seems to be, fatally, my type. But this time I don’t care!
It has quite changed the colour – in retrospect – of my holiday, and I do say, with conviction, that I had a lovely time. But it was the voyage home that gave it that finish. Which only again shows what strange, unpredictable potency is contained in sex.
Sunday, 25 September
I have been stretched like a piece of elastic over a hard, bright interval and have snapped back into place with scarcely a pause. Everything here is exactly the same, the routine, the occupations, the people. It might have been a long dream, my holiday in Portugal, an extra day in bed. Only my clothes seem a little shabbier, a little more boring, the cottage dustier and more in need of new paint and clean covers than ever. Liberal activities are swamping all my spare moments again, I neglect the housework to clear the garden, cook and prepare the same kind of food in the same way, following the same round – wake, breakfast in bed reading papers, up, chores, shopping, see Peggy D., chores, lunch, garden, tea, garden, food to prepare, dusk at 7 p.m., more chores, meal, wireless, mending appointments, arranging visits, meetings … Tomorrow at 9 a.m., hairdresser, shopping, home preparing for rest of day, lunch [spent visiting] local paper with ad for insertion and to see an employment agency about a possible job, then on to stay with Joan at Golders Green.
Tuesday: what possibility can Tuesday’s meeting bring but, we hope, a pleasant evening, shared memories and probable final parting? What more can come of it all than that?
Thursday, 29 September
And what did Tuesday’s meeting bring? A very pleasant evening, yes. A promise that I would write to him now and then, and a promise from him to take back certain things for my family. He made, persistently throughout the evening, amorous advances that grew more and more intense and that I could not and did not want to resist, and he was saying all the time, ‘Get married. Promise me you’ll try to get married. A nice girl like you shouldn’t still be free. You’ll make someone a damned fine wife. And let me know when it happens, I’ll be the first to send a wedding present.’
We met as arranged, we had tea, a drink, saw The Third Man, dined in Dean St and pub-crawled till 11 p.m. Then he insisted on coming all the way to Golders Green on the bus with me and to Joan’s door. Joan insisted that I bring him in for a cup of tea (N. must be told of this gently) and then I saw him to the corner of Hoop Lane as we had missed our way coming and I was afraid he might lose his way back to the station. We sat on the cemetery wall saying good night. I almost became a fallen woman again among the gravestones. I could not get him to go. ‘You’re too darned attractive,’ he said.
How my vanity has enjoyed all this! How desire wept for satisfaction! How pleased the hungry body, how appeased and touched the lonely heart. But now he is in Manchester, I have been for over 14 hours back at Wee, been to Oakdene, to a Lib. committee meeting and my mind is crowding out with other things the impression of Tuesday evening. Shall I see him again before he sails? I hope so, though we haven’t a lot to talk about. I could not sleep for hours after he left me. I think he is unhappy. He said nothing about the girl he was supposed to be meeting here. I am much moved by his humility and his sympathy, but there is no fever in me. I think of him, fondly, gratefully, at intervals, and then forget the whole episode. I shall be hurt if he doesn’t fulfil his promises, I shall be hurt if I hear nothing more and then later that he is to be married or something similar, but it would not be the inflamed and angry wound I suffered so often with Mac, and others.
Friday, 30 September
The cottage is at last beginning to feel normal again. I feel very well, full of energy, though period is late. No qualms of conscious about this (I am not his mistress, actually – yet), but it is curious that it should be
so just now. I think it is because last month I was bathing in the icy Atlantic when it arrived and suffered some pain then. Or is it the new emotional upheaval or change of climate and rush of work?
I had told him quite a lot about myself on board, when his advances were even more intense. I hadn’t married because, I thought, I hadn’t wanted children. I had had lovers, four of them, and that the last one was killed in car smash. But I didn’t say how shy I was, how I ran away from the men I really liked, got drawn to the pirate type, and could never rouse any interest in the men who were drawn to me, the nice, serious, dependable type.
Sunday, 2 October
O fabulous, wonderful weekend! The manuscript arrived back yesterday while Babs and I were having lunch. I cannot bear it, I thought … I won’t look. But of course I had to. Curtis Brown have had an excellent offer from Hurst and Blackett, subject to certain revisions which I think I can manage easily, and on the whole want to do anyway.178 There can be no doubt about accepting it and forging ahead with the necessary work. I still can’t quite believe it – everyone thrilled. Little Babs squeaked and beamed all over with pleasure. Now she can tell her headmistress that her aunt’s book is to be published (we hope, we hope – oh, how this excessive caution pursues me!). I phoned Gus and told him, he was delighted.
Cannot look for a job now (I need cash, but time for Peg’s revision is much more urgent). What a joyous relief! I am still free to continue this life I love, see my friends, visit the BM and write.
Wednesday, 5 October
Lost: one period. It is now exactly a week late and has never been so late in my life that I can recall. What do I do? I don’t know. The problem is teasing, casts a blight on all my activities. I can’t be absolutely certain that there is no cause for alarm, that is the trouble. Could finger alone convey enough semen if the hand were covered with it? Considered in cold blood it’s a disgustingly sordid affair and even farcical. The point is, should I take the immediate action necessary – I still have long instructions from Joan obtained from her sister on the procedure. I wish I could get in touch with Tom. I wish, but wishing won’t help.
And this morning another tiresome letter from N. No moment of triumph is allowed to go untrammelled when she is near. About the book she can say little except urge on me the seriousness of my future authorship. But of poor D.B., of whom I have given the lightest accounts possible, I receive a long lecture on my suburban tendencies and that marriage is not the only means of happiness for a woman. Just as though I had decided to marry him! Oh blast the woman! Her one instinctive and un-admitted satisfaction is I do believe to probe other people’s weaknesses or be as upsetting as she knows how.
11 p.m. In bed. It has come, reluctant but definite and painlessly. With it lifts the cloud of uncertainty that marred my view of the immediate future.
Sunday, 9 October
Yesterday Tom sent an elderly lawyer friend of his to see me: shabby, unshaved, plump and exceedingly Irish with a passion for the eighteenth century, who has given me 31 introductions (he sat and wrote them all in the sitting room there and then) to VIPs in Dublin.
I have plunged into the eighteenth century and can see I may get involved with many other contemporary enthusiasts. But I am using (or trying to) this century as a means of living more fully in the twentieth century. That is what I want to remember: don’t run away from your problems here and now however well you write and see the past.
Ethel, who is coming to stay tomorrow, is not well. She must be nursed, persuaded to rest. This is just the sort of thing I need to keep me firmly grounded in the present.
Friday, 21 October
This question of marriage. I cannot help now and then reflecting that there is much in what N. preaches (and Joan, but with less virulence) – that marriage is not necessarily the only fulfilment for a woman. I have always found ordinary day-to-day living with someone else fearfully irksome. I enjoy my solitude and independence and take it now so much for granted that when I get these spasms for ‘love’ and marriage I don’t take into account what it would be like to have to adjust myself to someone else day after day, however deeply in love I might be. I am a self centred, selfish creature – it is so much easier, so much more comfortable and convenient to live alone.
And yet, and yet … No one has ever wanted (or said so at least) to live with me. That is what at forty makes me feel such a failure, that I have made such a poor show of my personal life. All my lovers slip away, as D.B. has done, without saying goodbye. Away they go, ghostly, unsatisfying, across the sea, to their death in a car, to study medicine, to Australia, to write plays, and that is the end.
Tuesday, 6 December
Seven weeks since I last wrote in here. I am extremely tired and feel [I am] looking older day by day, and it terrifies me. A stone in the heart. I see a woman in the mirror with untidy greying hair that I don’t recognise. I don’t inside feel older than I did in my twenties, I don’t feel older than the young things between 20–30 that I see around me in bus and tube and crowded London street. I don’t feel level with the plump middle-aged matron or the sophisticated woman of the world. I still feel as much hampered by inadequacy, inexperience, timidity as ever I did.
It is unbecoming, contemptible at 40. I have ‘sold’ a book. The contract is signed. But the terrible faux pas I made with the Agent over that has set me back years! I can’t go into it now. Suffice it to say I was grossly clumsy, stupid beyond belief in my dealings and it has taken much grovelling and anguish to reinstate myself. I have not met him or the publisher yet. Work on revision proceeds apace, is enormously interesting but much additional labour. I am eaten up with impatience and all sorts of ridiculous doubts and fears.
I have had one letter from D.B. N. has joined the Freemasons. P.D. is selling her home here and moving with husband and family to Blackheath after holidays. When the election comes I am to be Sub Agent for this area for the Liberals and everything else must cease. I am living again on an overdraft from the bank. It seems unlikely that I shall get any money for the book for 18 months or more.
My veins seem to be drying up. I feel chill, remote, detached, except when I am working full out on ‘Peg’, or when I am with Joan and her family, or P.D., or playing with my cats. I have, too, now an admirable domestic help who comes two mornings a week and so relieves me of the baser chores. And electric power on the ground floor which means a full fire in sitting room and kettle or iron in use in kitchen without danger of fusing the system. But joy, joy, the lovely, flowing warmth of rich contentment: where are you?
Sometime in Oct–Nov I met Priscilla Novy, the friend of Tom’s who read the Peg MS for the Pilot Press, pushed it for me, and passed it on to Curtis Brown. A young, attractive, likeable person, unhappily married with two children, and crippled now from an attack of polio.
Friday, 23 December
[Newspaper clipping]
There are some people of superhuman energy and Mr Churchill is among them, who regard diarists as ineffective individuals who seek solace for their own ineptitude by recording, night by night, the vain ephemeral things that they have done. I do not share this prejudice. I find in any factual diary what Dr Johnson called ‘The Parallel circumstances and kindred images to which we readily conform our minds.’ Being fascinated by the mysterious passage of time and by coincidence of experience I can read almost any detailed diary with delight. All that I ask is that it should be true.
Harold Nicolson in last Sunday’s Observer
Yesterday Babs and I met Pooh and Ivy and I handed over my responsibilities. Babs has been behaving quite differently this term. I mean her attitude to me. It is extraordinary and most pleasing. Ever since the sea voyage home when she saw me flirting with D.B. and also since the book was accepted. These two things seem to have caused the revolution I wanted and could not achieve in any other way. She does really seem quite to like me now.
Xmas Eve
‘Xmas is forced on a reluctant and dignified nation by the shopk
eepers and the press’, says Shaw. Yet through the glut of food and tinsel, balloons, gifts and false snow something else struggles. It has me torn to pieces every year and in tears when I am alone. It comes over the radio and in the faces of children and the smiles of harassed postmen, in carols and the good wishes from distant friends.
I have sold a book, I have sold a book, and now drink sherry all alone and write Xmas letters. Am in a delightful, benevolent glow … but wish, wish I could be sharing it.
Wednesday, 28 December
Harold Nicolson in one of his Observer articles, refers to the ‘illusion of hurry’ or words to that effect: we are obsessed and harried on all sides by a sense of urgency, hustle, things waiting to be done that must be done. Maybe we manage our lives badly, try to cram them too full to avoid being left alone with ourselves. But there is another side to it. If I let things slide, as I am prone to do, idle over the morning paper in bed, spend a couple of hours on this diary, go for a walk through the Beeches, listen to a play on the radio … then the washing up mounts in the sink, I find myself without a clean pair of stockings to wear when I have to go out, or a shoulder strap loose, some Liberal duty is neglected or the cats have no fish. And how possibly can any average modern mother with very little domestic help ever find time for cultural recreation? It must be over ten days now since I did any work on the ‘Peg’ MS because of Babs and Xmas – I have just had to leave it, but no mother could neglect her child like that. When I think of this I feel that I am forever wasting time if not working at the book. Urgency batters at one on all sides, one cannot escape it.
Brother Pooh has just phoned. I do so wish I could make proper contact there. My brother, my only brother, and nothing but cloud and awkwardness between us.
A Notable Woman Page 45