Lady Constance Lytton

by Lyndsey Jenkins

  John did not come home in January as expected and instead went to Rhodesia with his regiment. Once again, months went by with barely a word, and even when a letter did finally arrive it only made her wonder, ‘Does he ever think of the past or the future in connection with me?’63 She became terribly depressed. ‘My life today seems like an inland stagnant pool,’ she told Adela. The news from the war was bleak. His regiment was now engaged in the fighting and there were daily reports of officers being killed. But was it worse to wish him safe away from the battlefield when John so wished to distinguished himself on it? Like thousands of wives and fiancées around the country, she tracked the progress of the war in great detail; wished, hoped and prayed.

  On holiday in Derbyshire, Constance stared and stared at a couple in their hotel, so obviously in love, and wished fervently that she could experience the same with John. They set her imagination on fire. On the train home she confessed to Adela that she would go to bed with John, even if there was no prospect of marriage, even ‘if I should have given away all that makes the position of a single woman decent, socially speaking; that I should be for ever more beyond the pale and shunned by all my relations etc; that I should have no right to self-respect’.64 It is the most extraordinary declaration to make for a woman of her time and position. But it shows something of the martyr in her nature. She would be prepared to sacrifice everything, even if she got nothing in return. The only thing that put her off was the prospect of having children outside of marriage, and the thought of Edith. ‘It would be impossible to do anything which would give her moral pain,’ she concluded. Still, the wild lengths that her thoughts had run to, imagining all sorts of unlikely prospects and theoretical circumstances, show that she was firmly in the grip of an obsession.

  But what was the alternative? Only her empty life with Edith, and this wasn’t enough. ‘From the no-roots of my own life I long so desperately to have any life I’m interested in,’ she told Aunt T in desperation. ‘I have nothing to offer in return for whatever show I’m given in other people’s lives. This makes me a debilitating kind of lap-dog. Every night when I go to bed I feel a fearful kind of hunger in my arms for something to belong to of my own.’65 Though she loved her mother, she found her almost impossible to live with. In Neville’s careful words, ‘They were intensely fond of one another, and yet their natures and temperament were entirely different, and, had their tempers been less sweet, there must have been some friction as the result of such radical differences.’66 Edith enjoyed being a grand lady. She knew her place and encouraged others to keep to theirs: she liked a well-ordered world. She preferred to dispense charity from above, as was proper; she did not have Constance’s intense empathy for the sufferings of others. Constance tended to go along with Edith to keep the peace, but she still had her own wishes and desires, and the frustrations seethed inside her. She was over thirty but treated like a child. She deeply resented being treated ‘as a semi-maniac; my wishes studied only to oppose them, it being a kind of accepted thing that if I want a thing it’s bad for me and therefore to be refused … it’s the kind of attitude behind everything which gets on one’s nerves at times’.67 It’s easy to imagine the awkwardness and tension, the deliberate misunderstandings and the unspoken accusations, thinly veiled by politeness, that characterised their lives. But there is no doubt that while they found each other exasperating, they genuinely loved each other. Edith was always ‘Angel Mum’ in Constance’s letters. It’s probably fair to say they would have loved each other more if they had spent less time together.

  The Ponsonby family did not understand or accept Constance’s wish to have some space. They continued to write, to forward on his letters and to invite her to visit. Eventually, Constance gave in. In January 1901 she went to visit Lady Ponsonby ‘& talk with her as to why not see her and Maggy … sick head,’ she wrote in her journal, and then told Adela, ‘She was too beloved for words.’68 The final illness and death of Queen Victoria occupied her thoughts for the following weeks. Edith had been due in attendance but was asked not to come; instead she went to view the lifeless body of the Queen at Osborne. Edith rode in one of the carriages in the funeral procession; Constance went to see it and reported that it ‘was the most choking and impressive public thing I’ve ever seen’.69 The new Queen, Alexandra, asked Edith to stay on as a lady-in-waiting. Edward Marsh’s dog died around the same time and Constance wrote an effusive note of consolation, describing the death of her own beloved dog fourteen years earlier. The letter is edged with a black border, perhaps for the Queen and perhaps for the dogs.70

  On 24 March, Constance had a letter from John, but also noted cryptically in her diary, ‘arraignee du matin, chagrin’. It is a French proverb, about a spider in the morning meaning bad luck. ‘JP 35 today (born 1866 March 25),’ she wrote the next day. ‘2 years 46 weeks older than me.’71 In May, she read in the paper that he had been promoted to Major and was commanding the 5th New Zealand Regiment. Maurice Baring came for a visit in June and, though she liked him for himself, she liked more the features and the voice that recalled his cousin.72 But then in June there was ‘unhoped for goodness’ when she had the news that John was coming home, via New Zealand. She had been writing ‘what by now?’ in her journal and, on 24 June, she was able to report back to herself, ‘Wonderful things.’ She then started asking herself, ‘What by this time next week?’73 His ship docked in Southampton on 8 July, and on the 9th he wrote to her, asking whether he might come for a visit and saying, ‘Shall look forward immensely to seeing you again.’74 More ominously, he also wrote to Edith to say he was still no richer. Edith, however reluctantly, invited him to stay. In the meantime, John’s brother Frederick presented him to the King and he was honoured with a South African War Medal.75

  At the end of July, just after Adela’s wedding, John came to see her at last. The relief of seeing him alive and well was tremendous. He was just as wonderful as ever, as she told Adela:

  All the imaginings and memories seemed stale and full and unenchanting compared to the real. Best and least looked for of all, I’d so rehearsed the lesson ‘He doesn’t care for you or realise, except to the extent of a small worry, that you care for him’ that it was surprising to find him kind and considerate and even seeming to like talking to me.76

  But, for once, John seemed to have made up his mind to act decisively. They went for a walk and he ended things once and for all. When he left the Danes on the early train the next day, Constance believed it was for ever.

  She had told herself for many years that there was no hope, but it made the end no easier. Her imagination took a new and wild turn and she began bargaining with God, as she had done years earlier when Gerald Balfour’s life seemed in danger. She considered offering her life so that Edith’s friend Mrs Cory might get better, but then decided this sacrifice would be too easy. Instead she resolved to give up loving John, so that Adela might find true love and happiness in her new marriage. The decision seemed right, but did not make her happy. First she had ‘a sort of rage storm … a sort of fury against JP which nothing can describe’. Then she was plunged into depression. ‘All happy things seem far off … and there clouds through the gloom, war horrors and cases of misery, stories of broken lives, broken limbs and broken hearts, and feeling of heavy load that no-one can lift all around me,’77 she told Adela; while to Aunt T she wrote, ‘Tho’ this inevitable has … been obvious to outsiders from the first, and I myself have realised it and stared at it for the last three years, yet the actual happening of this break has been different and worse than I expected.’78 She gave up writing in her diary, unless it was to mention him. In June, in the midst of her excitement about John’s homecoming, she had turned ahead to her diary for 12 August and asked her future self, ‘How about JP now? Will he be in England?’ Now she answered tersely: ‘Yes he’s in England & I’ve seen him & I shan’t see him again.’79 She dreamed about him and his family and was reduced to recording those dreams instead of actual letters or m
eetings. She could not stop thinking about him. She tucked a press cutting into her journal called ‘Songs of a Plain Woman No. II’.

  There’s little I wish for, just taking

  The goods the gods give

  With a fate to be marred in the making

  A life I must live;

  Through desolate space,

  Yet blessed in remembering only

  Your blessed face

  …

  I crave not your love, nor your notice

  This thing will suffice;

  To be near you on earth, to be with you

  In God’s Paradise

  To have loved you – to love you for ever,

  My glory shall be

  And this – precious possession can never

  Be taken from me!80

  John was awarded a Distinguished Service Order in October. Before the end of the year he wrote to her, ‘which seems to show he would like present things altered to better’, though she was realistic enough to conclude that this was probably his family leaning on him. Still, even his pity was better than nothing, especially if it would mean he would write when he next went abroad. She knew that a clean break would be better for all concerned, yet she couldn’t make one. John was due to return to South Africa in February 1902 and she desperately wished to see him again before he went. Then a letter arrived from her cousin Edith Earle, who was married to Aunt T’s son Max. As Edith Loch, she had known John well in South Africa. She asked to meet Edith Lytton for lunch, and Constance fervently hoped that it meant John was indirectly reaching out to her. It turned out the opposite was true. John was in love with someone else. Constance barely slept for three nights, collapsed into sickness, and only collected herself enough to write a final letter to John before he departed England again. Then he wrote to say that he would be in touch when in South Africa. Perhaps the break was not to be clean at all. She took to reading his old letters, over and over, to prove to herself that there had been something there and she had not, as her family seemed to believe, simply imagined the whole thing. She even read bits out loud to Edith to prove it.81

  Her diary for 1902 is missing. The following year, 1903, makes a poignant contrast with the diaries of a decade earlier. Then, she had enthusiastically noted all the books she had read and reviewed; now she has shrunk to commenting on her illnesses and the weather, as well as the birthdays and visits of her increasing tribe of nephews and nieces. ‘I don’t mean entirely to live in the past,’ she told Aunt T, but she couldn’t help herself. She made clippings from the newspapers whenever they mentioned John, or his regiment, or his family. She even tried to make the best of John’s new love affair, which did not seem to be going well. ‘She sounds a perfect and ideally suited sort,’ she told Betty magnanimously, ‘and it makes me wretched that his family and friends should take the line of saying he must keep away entirely from a short-sighted view of his happiness.’82 This is her inner martyr talking. Surely she must have been just the slightest bit pleased that he was now experiencing what she had endured for so long. In 1906 she heard that the object of John’s desire had married someone else. Her diary entry for Christmas Day that year says, ‘Left off wearing the ring.’83

  The intervals between scraps of news became longer and longer. (Though that didn’t stop the family gossip. ‘From Adela via Aunt T – via Gerry – via Betty – Montgomery heard that family perturbed that I still care for JP – feared this would prevent his marrying,’ she wrote in her diary in 1903.)84 Her contact with Maggy and Lady P shrank and then disappeared, though one year she had a Christmas card from Lady P which said, ‘Si l’espace nous separe la Pensee nous raproche.’85 (‘If it is space that separates us, it is Thought that brings us together.’) After 1900, Maurice Baring was her main source of information about John. She saw Maggy and Lady P again in 1907 and they didn’t mention John once. She knew though, that his regiment was being sent to Egypt, and fretted over the impact the climate would have on his health. Later that year, she wrote to Adela that she simultaneously wished for a glimmer of hope and knew that if the past came back it would only be more painful. She tried to be grateful for what she had had: meagre as it was, it had taught her what joy was. Yet ‘there remains something incongruous within me that doesn’t grow old and experienced with the rest … but turns round now and then on its starved bed and shrieks out for food and drink with a strength all useless and uncanny coming from I don’t know where’.86

  Constance never got over her disappointment with John Ponsonby. Because the letters between them have not survived, we may never know for certain why they did not get married early in their relationship. Lack of money may have been important, but it cannot be the only reason: it did not stop either of his brothers marrying well. Arthur had married Dorothea Parry, daughter of the composer Hubert, as far back as 1893, while, as we have seen, Constance was asked to be a bridesmaid at Frederick’s wedding to Victoria Kennard in 1899; and John was the oldest son, who might fairly expect a reasonable inheritance. Nor is it fair to blame Edith for getting in the way (though Maggy once called her ‘the Ogre’).87 Many years later, Victor wrote to Betty, ‘I wonder if poor Mother realises how much suffering she caused all unknowingly through want of sympathy.’88 Edith also disapproved of Edwin Lutyens at first, but through persistence and patience, Edwin and Emily would eventually get married. Constance thought that Edith was being selfish and difficult, but Edith seems to have seen clearly what Constance did not: marriage was never realistically on the cards. Constance got carried away with her infatuation and John didn’t know what to do about it. His family may have wanted him to marry her, but that doesn’t mean that he wanted the same. If John had really cared for Constance, he surely would have made more of an effort. He hardly ever wrote, and when he did the letters were usually unsatisfactory. But it’s not fair to blame him for this either. The conventions of the time and the fact that there had never been a formal agreement may have made it more difficult to extricate himself. It was a hopeless situation.

  But if Constance didn’t marry John Ponsonby, why didn’t she marry someone else instead? Perhaps because, as the cliché goes, she wasted the best years of her life waiting for the wrong man. Presumably, though, a woman of this class, attractive if not beautiful, would not lack for alternative suitors if she made herself in the slightest bit available. In 1897, Emily wrote to Edwin about another prospect who was ‘anxious to marry Conny’. Unfortunately, ‘he is crass and idiotic and anything he does is wrong. He is to deal with exactly like a jibbing horse and it does tire me getting him along … Darling Conny! It is delicious the idea of brilliant Conny marrying such a foozle headed old bore.’89 But Constance never seems to have sought out anyone more suitable. Looking back with a quarter of a century’s hindsight, Neville suggested that she was so gentle, merciful and kind that she inspired adoration among women but was unlikely to prove attractive to potential husbands. ‘Men fight shy of women who are saints,’ he concluded.90

  Perhaps, too, she may have looked at her siblings’ marriages and thought she was better off out of the whole business. With the exception of Betty, her siblings all had extremely complicated relationships. Between 1893 and 1896, when Constance’s relationship with John was the most promising and hopeful it would ever be, Emily was playing a dangerous game with her father’s womanising friend Wilfred Scawen Blunt.91 Constance could see the direction this was heading and warned Emily to make it clear to Blunt that they could only ever be friends. But Emily, perhaps out of innocence, or perhaps enjoying the drama, failed to keep the situation under control.92 She fancied herself in love with him. There were late-night rattlings at her door. There was even a mock Arabic wedding ceremony. This was playing with fire. He was married, nearly thirty-five years older than her, and had been a close friend of her father. Blunt’s daughter Judith was also Emily’s best friend: Judith seems to have been half in love with Emily herself.93 Through her mother, Judith was descended from Lord Byron and his daughter, Ada Lovelac
e. Her life was all but destroyed by fury at her emotionally manipulative father’s constant bad behaviour. While carrying on his flirtation with Emily, Blunt also fathered a child with Mary Elcho. Judith was made to act as a go-between between Blunt and his mistress. When Emily confessed to her friend that she was thinking of eloping with her father, Judith told Emily what he was really up to.