The move was so sudden that Sydney, who had been on a cruise round the Aegean, had known nothing about it, and had to be told by Alida. Unfortunately, she took the opportunity to tell him at the same time about the Bookshop’s difficulties (the bank account was down to £27). In alarm Sydney replied that he could do nothing and on no account would he ‘induce people to enter into any business investments whatsoever in the Bookshop’. ‘I did not know Charlotte had gone away,’ he added. ‘I do not know where she has gone.’ Here was the other, less agreeable side of Cockerell. He did not like to be asked for anything directly, and he was only happy when he was in charge himself.
Charlotte terminated the lease at Delancey Street, put the furniture into store, and booked two rooms until the spring at St George’s House, opposite Chichester Cathedral. Exactly what they would do when they came back she didn’t know, but by October she and Anne were settled in to a life of extreme quiet, watching the starlings on the roof opposite as they drank their evening cocoa. From the coast they could look over the calm autumn sea towards the Isle of Wight. Anne grew no better.
By November Charlotte had to admit that neither the quiet nor the sea air were doing any good. There was nowhere else to go now but the studio, the last refuge. They had never before contemplated living there, or even spending the night, there was no hot water and anything they wanted to eat had to be brought up from the cook-shop in Fitzroy Street. Obviously it was no place for an invalid, but Charlotte, knowing that there were heavy medical bills ahead of them, did not dare to look round for another flat. Just before Christmas they saw a specialist, who seems to have told them only that something was ‘seriously wrong’ with Anne, and that she was not strong enough for treatment. Anne by now had grown very thin, and as pale as wax.
It was Maggie Browne’s ‘turn’ in 1926 to invite the Mews for Christmas. As soon as they got to ‘Anglefield’ Professor Browne decisively told them that Anne must have proper treatment. After the holiday he arranged for her to go at his own expense to a nursing-home in Nottingham Place. Such are the surprises which the dullest friends, the ones always taken for granted, can produce. The professor’s name was not to be mentioned, and Charlotte referred to him in her letters simply as ‘the Good Samaritan’. In the New Year Anne consulted another specialist, who diagnosed cancer of the liver. It was too late to operate, and he gave Anne three months to live.
Anne, who had been too nervous to spend a night in the house alone, and had quailed at the death of a parrot, faced this sentence with absolute cheerfulness and calm. ‘The brutal finality or fatal silence of doctors doesn’t move her,’ Charlotte said. ‘She simply says “I am all right” and talks of coming out in three weeks’ time.’ Sydney Cockerell, calling round on the 10th of January, found her dressed and sitting by the fire. ‘Assuming the doctors to be right in saying that Anne had but three months to live, I urged that she should be allowed to do as she pleased about going out, whatever the risk.’ On his advice, Anne was removed at the beginning of February from Professor Browne’s responsibility and taken to the Etoile in Charlotte Street, which had rooms to let above the restaurant, and was only a few doors away from the studio. Sydney liked to have his advice taken, and perhaps he was right in this instance, for it was almost like bringing Anne home. The Etoile itself was at that time a medium-priced Italian restaurant, favoured by publishers and their readers and writers of the unassuming sort. There was a cheerful noise, a sound of singing and a smell of cooking, and Charlotte stayed with Anne all day and only went away at night to sleep in the studio. A local GP, Dr Horatio Cowan, was called in. By April, however, Anne was so much worse that the hotel management were anxious for her to leave. Charlotte, distraught, begged Dr Cowan to let her nurse her sister in the studio, or, once again, to try ‘a change of air’. These things were impossible and another nursing-home had to be found, this time in Priory Road, West Hampstead, which was near to Katherine Righton and the Jarmans, but a long trip for Charlotte. Sometimes, however, they let her sleep in Anne’s room. She came every day with new novels to read aloud and amuse them both, starting with David Garnett’s Go She Must. If that failed, she described to Anne what the tortoise in the garden next door was doing, hour by hour.
Terminal illness is a great simplifier of daily life, everything being reduced to the same point of hope against hope. Anne’s mind was at rest. She had made a will, a very short one, leaving everything she possessed to Charlotte. Her Christian faith had never faltered. Visitors came, and she seemed untroubled by what was virtually the ordeal of dying in public. Among them was one of the Mew cousins, Ethel Louisa, now an elderly teacher on the verge of retirement. Ethel had known the sisters for more than fifty years, and during that time, as far as she remembered, they had never been parted for more than a few weeks. It worried her to remember that ‘a long time ago’ Charlotte had spoken of taking her own life. She took the opportunity of saying something in private about this, and was relieved when Charlotte said that now ‘she would not do it’. On the 7th of May Alida wrote to Harold Monro:
Last night Charlotte Mew came round and said that though Anne could not speak she was always writing down that she wanted to see me and so I had to go. I have never seen anyone so near death before and because of her illness (some wasting liver disease) she has no flesh on her at all hardly and looks like a skeleton. She could just speak and I talked of our flight to Paris and the robbery practised by the French porters, which interested her.
Queer how, looking towards the gas fire, and talking of the spring warmth we shall soon be feeling, she should have murmured ‘I shan’t want a fire soon.’ As I talked to her and she shut her eyes I felt they were sealed on her face and would never open, but they did. Aunty Mew says that Dr says any moment she may go down to earthly mould. Poor little Mew, it is more tragic than I can tell you – Her rough little harsh voice and wilful ways hiding enormous depth of feeling – now she will be entirely alone and her relation with Anne has been one of complete love, and I imagine the love of sisters (or brothers) more marvellous than any other as there can be no fleshly implications or sexual complexities, Alas –
But Charlotte knew that, however completely loving, she was guilty. In the summer of 1926, before she had decided that she must take Anne away, she had begun – in spite of what she had told Cockerell – to write a story. The setting is Brittany – the Brittany before 1914. The subject is two sisters living in the same house. Aglaë, the older one, stays at home and makes lace for a living. Germaine goes out to work, marries a fisherman (Aglaë can hear them together through the thin bedroom walls) and bears a child, Odette. Odette loves her Aunt Aglaë (who can play children’s games so well) ‘with an odd passion’, more, it turns out, than she loves her mother. The young husband is killed in an accident – ‘not yet thirty, and already under the earth behind the high iron gates at the top of the long hill’. Germaine soon picks up a lover, and reproaches Aglaë, who disapproves of him, with being no more than a vieille fille, a born spinster. And Germaine repeats Marguérite Gauthier’s cry: ‘Je veux vivre!’ Aglaë has nothing to answer. True enough, she has only been kissed once, à la fin de fête, by a drunk. But it was the drunk’s kiss which had made her realize that, all the time, she had wanted her sister’s husband.
After this the story begins to peter out, rambling along in a hopeless confusion of French and English. At one point Odette’s pet rat has to be poisoned, and buried in a cardboard box in consecrated ground. At another, Aglaë thinks passionately of Christ crucified ‘who had spoken gently to the woman taken in adultery and the Magdalen’. All the broken things in Charlotte’s life are assembled in this unfinished story as though by their own volition, and look more broken than ever. Even if the injuries to Anne existed only in her imagination, they were destroying her now. In the last few pages of the manuscript Aglaë is left alone with her sister’s new man, and realizes with deep repulsion that he wants to make love to her. ‘She thought … “I belong to myself from my head
to my feet, for he is not one of us, we are clean, but his hands are all stained.’” Then (after a missing page) the same man is claiming sympathy for his sister, who has never been allowed to marry because she has tuberculosis. The last phase has been reached, and she is dying. She looks calm enough, but her one dream has been of a happy marriage. Now she is condemned for ever.
In the spring of 1926 Charlotte almost lived at 43 Priory Road, deaf to the outside world. To Lady Ottoline, who still persevered with her invitations, she wrote a flat refusal, ‘as my sister is dangerously ill in a Nursing Home and I spend all my time with her and consequently have none for seeing anyone else’. To Sydney’s postcard, ‘I could come and take you out if that would help at all – My love to you,’ she gave a gentler answer, but she would not see him. By now it was bright early summer, but Anne was too weak to look out of the windows. ‘If there’s a mercy it can’t be long,’ Charlotte told Alida. After a terrible twenty-four hours, during which Charlotte never left her, Anne died at midnight on the 18th of June 1927.
‘Dear Sydney,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘Yes – it was over at midnight on Saturday – and now she can never be old, or not properly taken care of, or alone.’ Nor, she might have added, would Anne ever have to be ‘wonderfully cheerful’ again in the grip of intense pain, or answer brightly to enquiries, or be pitied as someone whose gift for painting had come, after all, to so little. Only very few people were asked to the funeral at Fortune Green Cemetery, but many more came, and people who had scarcely known Anne sent handfuls of flowers.
Edith Oliver was there to offer help, as she had been at the Gower Street School, as she had been when Charlotte ran off to Ella D’Arcy. Professor Oliver had retired from Kew, and the family was living at 2 The Grove, Isleworth, but in the same sober Quakerish surroundings, with the same agreeable drawings by Arthur Hughes on the walls. If ever Charlotte was to find peace, it would be here. Lady Ottoline, still determined to capture the eccentric poet, motored down to the quiet suburb and left flowers and messages. Eventually she sent a letter, ‘but as it hasn’t been answered,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘I hoped you would understand as everyone else has been good enough to do without my saying so that I am only seeing and writing to old friends. I came here to some – for quiet.’ Lady Ottoline had come up against a celebrity who did not care about celebrity, and she graciously admitted defeat.
The last of Charlotte’s visits that year was to Cambridge. In September Sydney was off again, this time on a tour of the classical sites of Greece, and the household, though Kate would never have admitted it, seemed to give a sigh of relief. She had invited Charlotte for two whole weeks (it would in fact be thirteen days, Sydney had corrected her). This was a precious time. It was not that Kate’s health was any better, only that she felt free, and it was not that Charlotte had recovered from Anne’s death, only that she knew that at Shaftesbury Road she was needed and wanted. On the 8th of October Sydney came back, and after two days’ furious activity making up his work at the Museum he saw Charlotte off on the 3.52 train to London.
Anne and Charlotte’s grave in Fortune Green Cemetery, Hampstead.
‘I desire my remains to be buried in the same grave as my late sister …’
The studio was as she had left it. Anne’s painting things were there, a screen she had decorated, a little head of a baby in plaster which they had taken with them through all their changes in fortune, the medicines, the old letters, Charlotte’s trunks, but, on top of that, all the clothes and bits of furniture they had decided not to store. It was not only a place of unbearable memories but a muddle, wretched to live in, impossible to ask anyone to.
Fortunately a stray cat was waiting for Charlotte outside the Studios. Indeed, it seemed to be expecting her. Otherwise she could hardly have brought herself to go in. But she told Kate Cockerell that she couldn’t bother to turn the place out. ‘It doesn’t seem worth while for oneself.’ She apologized for her wild handwriting, also for the way she was expressing herself, which seemed to have something quite wrong with it, ‘mais il faut écouter le coeur when there’s nothing else to listen to’.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Fin de Fête
1928 WAS A YEAR of stress for Alida Monro, Florence Hardy and Sydney Cockerell. During the snowy December of 1927, Hardy had fallen ill and showed signs of being tired of life, while Cockerell (to Florence’s growing irritation) spent more and more time at Max Gate. He was in attendance, waiting to take charge. When Hardy died, on the 11th of January 1928, Sydney, as literary executor, had his hands full. He had taken it upon himself to arrange the funeral and a fitting great man’s memorial, there was a mass of urgent business of all kinds, and he had asked Florence to read aloud to him, chapter by chapter, the manuscript of Hardy’s memoirs. This occupied most evenings, and yet, when he was going through the desk drawers and found a piece of paper on which Hardy had copied out Fin de Fête, he took the trouble to send it to Charlotte at once, knowing what it would mean to her.
Alida, for her part, was almost worn out by the business of moving the Bookshop from Devonshire Street (where the lease had finally run out) to Great Russell Street. The new premises were smaller and had to be shared with another publisher, Kegan Paul, and Alida despaired of recreating the old magic. The readings continued, but had to be held, at first, in the room set aside for Harold’s bedroom and office. When he went away (as he sometimes did) taking the key with him, she had to cancel the reading and explain things as best she could to the audience.
For Harold Monro himself, as he noted in his diary, this ‘period of horror’ began slowly. Conrad Aiken, in Ushant, recalls T. S. Eliot coming out of this same room and giving a warning that Monro was ‘not altogether himself. And Aiken ‘found the unhappy man seated at a table, his head in his hands, all but speechless, or his speech reduced to four-letter words … incapable of serving the cold collation which had been laid out on the sideboard, he rolled his head in his hands … and cursed his existence, but above all cursed the utterly meaningless caprices and bad jokes and filthy connivings of a destiny that would compel one to fall in love, for instance, with a dishonest little tailor’s assistant, who was utterly incapable of fidelity; and thus to destroy all that one had believed in, or been faithful to, in one’s life, all that was good’. Yet even in these dark straits Monro sent his authors their accounts for the New Year.
At the beginning of 1928, then, Charlotte would hardly have expected to see much of Alida or Sydney. She had spent Christmas with Katherine Righton in West Hampstead, wanting, no doubt, to be close to those who had been close to Anne.
In the New Year she went back to Hogarth Studios. Since Anne’s death she had dressed entirely in black, and, instead of her usual little hard felt, put on very straight, she wore a large black hat. In appearance she had become one of the eccentric little old ladies of the quartier, emerging only to go to the corner shop for cigarettes. But a close look would show how much she had changed since Dorothy Hawksley’s drawing of 1926. ‘Her wind-blown grey hair, her startled grey eyes, her thin white face, belonged to a reluctant visitor from another world, frightened at what she had undergone in this one.’
Now, when it scarcely mattered to her any longer, she found herself no longer poor. On the 31st of January her uncle, Edward Herne Kendall, aged 84, died of myocardial degeneration at his lodgings in the Harrow Road. Charlotte, as the last survivor (except Freda), became the sole inheritor of Grandmother Kendall’s trust fund, which amounted to about £8000.
The trust’s lawyers, James & James of Holborn Circus, must have been notified that the old man was sinking. It was probably at their suggestion (since Charlotte would soon have something considerable to dispose of) that on the 3rd of January she made her will. There were a number of small legacies and gifts; Kate Cockerell was to have any piece of china or silver she liked; Anne’s gold watch proved too difficult to bequeath and the problem of who was to have it was left to her friends. £2,200 was set aside for Freda’s maintenance, and
the rest of the estate was divided between Florence Ellen Mew, Ethel Louisa Mew and Katherine Righton. Charlotte asked that when she died she should be buried in the same grave as Anne. On the headstone there was to be an inscription: ‘Cast down the seed of weeping, and attend.’ The line is from the Purgatorio, Canto XXXI, where Beatrice reproaches Dante for his sins, and might be translated ‘this is no time for tears, consider what you have done’. It must be the most chilling inscription in all the rambling acres of Fortune Green Cemetery.
It also points clearly enough to Charlotte’s state of mind. If she looked, by this time, like ‘a reluctant visitor from another world’, it was from a purgatory of her own, the circle of self-punishers. In the will she had also given instructions that her main artery was to be severed, to ensure death, before she was placed in her coffin, and now she began to torment herself because she had not done the same thing for her sister, who might, in consequence, have been buried alive. Then it began to seem to her that Anne had not really died of cancer, but had been infected by the little black specks which could be seen everywhere in the studio. After a while Charlotte became terrified that she too was contaminated by the black specks, and would contract the same illness.
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