Good Wives

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Good Wives Page 14

by Margaret Forster


  But then, dramatically, Sam reappeared – the report of his death had been a mistake. Instantly, Fanny’s hard times were over. There is no doubt that she was overjoyed to be reunited with her handsome husband, whom she loved in spite of his transgressions, and that Belle was ecstatic to have her father back. Promising that he was reformed, Sam got a good job as a court stenographer and moved his family into Fifth Street and to a pleasant cottage. There, in April 1868, just after Fanny’s twenty-eighth birthday, a son was born, named Samuel Lloyd. As a well-looked-after wife with no need to scrimp and save to make ends meet, Fanny was happy in San Francisco. But her contentment was short-lived – Sam could not resist other women. This time, Fanny didn’t wait for him to leave her. She left him. She went to the only place open to her, her family home in Indiana, ostensibly on a long-overdue visit to show her children to their grandparents. Sam pleaded for them to come back, promising once more to be faithful. Eventually, Fanny returned, but bringing her younger sister Cora as an ally. They bought a cottage in East Oakland, and there she settled down once more, with her errant but chastened husband. In some ways her married life had never been better. She loved the cottage, particularly its garden to which she devoted herself with gratifying results. She was happy as a mother, teaching Belle how to recite poetry, and making sure that she was proud of her unusual swarthy skin and dark eyes and hair, and not ashamed as she herself had been made to feel. She was a devoted but not a fussy mother, strict over manners but ready to encourage all kinds of imaginative games. Another son was born, in 1871, named Hervey, and it seemed that at last the stormy period of her marriage was over and that she and Sam and their three children had many happy, settled years ahead.

  It was at this stage of her marriage, when she was thirty-two and had been a wife for fourteen years, that Fanny discovered something about herself which she should perhaps have suspected earlier. Put simply, it was that by becoming a wife and mother so very young she had missed out on developing other parts of herself. Living in San Francisco had brought her into touch with the sort of people she had never known in Indianapolis, Reese River or Virginia City – artists, cultured people, bohemians who were sophisticated in her eyes and to whom she was greatly attracted. She wanted not only to become a part of their world but also to discover if she had their talent. She had always liked to draw, as well as to write, and now she wanted to test herself, to see if she could be trained. Belle, aged fourteen, had just left school (which she’d hated) to go to the School of Design. Fanny, aged thirty-two, decided to join her there. The director was Virgil Williams, and the class he taught had twenty pupils, of all ages. She quickly became friends both with him and his wife Dora. A governess was engaged to look after Lloyd and Hervey, and suddenly Fanny was in her element, even winning a medal for her drawings. Sam apparently made no objection to having a wife who was now an art student. (He was in no position to – he had another mistress. Unwisely, this woman once came to the cottage and was sent packing by an outraged Fanny.)

  But this time her rage was much more dangerous than it had been before. In the Virginia City days, she had learned how to survive on her own and she knew that if she had to she could do it again. If Sam forced her hand, she was quite prepared to stand alone. But more than that, she had lately realised that she might even have career prospects. She might not need to rely on essentially menial work such as sewing. In short, Fanny had become ambitious, she had new and daring aspirations, and if Sam was going to have his freedom she was determined to have a chance to expand her own horizons in a quite different direction. She would go to Europe and train further to be an artist. She would take her children and travel with them to Antwerp and change her life. The only obstacle, as she saw it, was the usual one for wives who wanted independence from husbands: money. She had none of her own. But Sam should surely pay for his sins. He could be persuaded to give her an allowance. In time, she might be able to support herself, if not through selling her paintings, then by writing stories. Another new friend of hers was Timothy Rearden, head of the Mercantile Library, who encouraged her to think she wrote well enough for a magazine to buy her work. There were all sorts of possibilities in her head and she was excited by them.

  But it was none the less a mad idea. Not for a moment does Fanny appear to have thought out the implications of crossing the Atlantic with three children, to indulge her own whims. She had made no enquiries about the art colleges in Antwerp and had no idea that they did not admit women. She had nowhere to stay, no contacts there at all. But Sam, instead of being scandalised and refusing to finance this crazy project, gave in to it. Maybe it suited him to have his family out of the way for a while (his mistress moved into the cottage pretty soon after Fanny left). He was by no means wealthy, but he agreed to a small allowance, just enough for his wife to manage on if she lived frugally. At the end of April 1875, she and the children and Miss Kate, the governess, left San Francisco on their exhausting journey to Europe. Fanny, who looked a decade younger than her thirty-five years, was taken for Belle’s sister, and a charming pair they appeared to all on board the ship. Offers of help were plentiful and Fanny accepted them – ‘When in difficulty’, she told her daughter, ‘look bewildered and gallant strangers will leap to our assistance.’1 The same ploy worked once they arrived in Antwerp. Fanny spoke not a word of any foreign language (and never bothered to learn any), but this proved no handicap. The Gerhardt family, who ran the inn she was directed to, took her and the children to their hearts and helped her find a house to rent. It was a little stone house, with four small rooms one on top of each other, but Fanny was delighted with it and ready to start her new life in Antwerp.

  Her delight was short-lived. Antwerp itself was a shock – with its narrow, cobbled lanes, so unlike American streets, its milk-carts drawn by dogs, and the clothes of the people (baggy trousers and smocks for men, wide-winged head-dresses and long cloaks for women) – but a far greater shock was her discovery that the Academy would not admit her and Belle. There was no point in staying in Antwerp – she would have to move on, to Paris, where she was told there were certain studios which accepted women. The thought of travelling to Paris was daunting enough – she felt so secure living near the Gerhardts – but what made it worse was that Hervey was ill. He needed rest and stability. But somehow they made the transition from Antwerp to Paris, and rented a sunny little apartment in the rue de Naples. Hervey was still sick, but no worse than he had been in Antwerp, and Fanny felt encouraged enough to leave the devoted Miss Kate in charge while she enrolled at Julien’s Atelier des Dames. It was crowded with women, some of them American like herself, all trying to find space for their easels, all solemnly drawing the nude models. Fanny felt comfortable there and made friends, but had no social life. Her evenings were quiet and long. She sat with Hervey, and sewed, and wrote to her friends back in San Francisco. Sometimes, but rarely, she wrote to her husband. He was still sending her money, without which she could not have survived. It confused her to have to confess to Timothy Rearden that she missed Sam and that he said he missed her and his children. She didn’t like to think what this might mean. Did it mean they still loved each other? Did it mean that it was not only in the strictly legal sense that she was his wife? She was a woman on her own and yet she was not. Back in America she had a husband to whom she appeared to be still emotionally tied.

  Belle and Lloyd were happy enough in Paris, though they both missed their father, especially Belle, but Hervey did not thrive. His illness was diagnosed as scrofulous TB, a particularly virulent and ugly disease. He grew worse, in spite of Fanny’s and Miss Kate’s nursing, and in his delirium called for his father. As the child grew weaker and weaker Fanny sent for Sam, telling him to come quickly if he wanted to see Hervey alive. Sam came, and was not just appalled but also frightened by the sight of his little boy vomiting blood and covered in oozing sores. Much as he loved him, he could hardly bear to look at him. Inevitably, in the middle of all this horror, there hung over the dy
ing Hervey the question of whether he would ever have come to this if his mother had stayed at home with him in San Francisco. On 5 April 1876, aged four, Hervey died a hideous and painful death. There was no money to bury him with any dignity. His heart-broken parents and his brother and sister followed the little white coffin to a common grave. Fanny was catatonic with grief, barely able to function. Sam was hardly in a better state, but he was not as exhausted as his wife, who had nursed her son through his final weeks. Sam and Belle walked about Paris, holding hands tightly but saying little, while Fanny sat silently in her room. As his wife, she was his responsibility and he still felt keenly for her. But she would not return with him to San Francisco. She was incapable, too worn out to consider such a journey. She needed rest, an opportunity if not to get over Hervey’s death (which she never would) at least to recuperate strength.

  Concerned friends told the Osbournes of a quiet little village called Grez, about two hours from Paris, where Fanny could convalesce. It was frequented in the summer by artists and she, like them, would find it a congenial environment. Sam went with her to inspect the place and was relieved that it appealed to her. On 14 April, Sam left to go back to America. Belle alone saw him off, hating his departure and almost afraid to be left in charge of her mother who grew paler and paler and seldom spoke – it was like being with a ghost. She didn’t know what the situation was now between her parents and didn’t ask. Neither of them would have been able to give her a satisfactory answer. Hervey’s death might have been expected either to bring them closer or finally to part them but the tragedy did neither. Fanny was too numb to feel anything, Sam too distanced from her to be able to sort out his own confusion.

  At first, life at Grez was dull, but its very monotony was what Fanny needed. She was well fed at the inn and its simple comforts suited her sombre mood. She didn’t want luxury. She liked the spartan arrangements. Miss Kate did not. As soon as they were settled, she left the Osbournes and went off to another post in Paris. Fanny and Belle sketched, Lloyd fished, and they all benefited from country life. The inn was a stone house with a large garden and was empty except for them, its two rows of bedrooms, with a single bathroom at the end, waiting for the arrival of the annual summer influx of artists. By the time the first of them came, Fanny was not quite so pale, though she had not yet recovered her usual energy. She appeared ‘in no sense ordinary’ to Birge Harrison, one of the first to arrive. Bob Stevenson, Walter Simpson and Frank O’Meara, the next arrivals, were captivated and intrigued by the sad-faced, quiet American woman and her pretty daughter. If she was a married woman, where was her husband? And was she pale because she had been ill, or for some other reason? Was she a real artist, or just playing? How would she fit in when the rest of the colony was complete? And the most interesting speculation of all: how would Stevenson’s cousin Louis react to her?

  Years later, Robert Louis Stevenson vowed he fell in love with Mrs Fanny Osbourne the moment he saw her. That moment was vividly described by Belle, who said she remembered very well glancing at her mother, as the assembled guests sat eating, and saw that she was looking intently towards the window opposite, where a young, slender man with a high colour had just appeared. He was leaning forward, ‘staring with a look of surprised admiration’ at Fanny, and she stared back at him. The mutual attraction was as instant, and as physical, as that – love, it seemed, at thrilling first sight. But love between a young, unattached man and a woman who was a wife and mother of two children. There was never any secret about Fanny’s status. The artists at Grez now knew that the mysterious Mrs Osbourne had an absent husband, who had put in at least one appearance at the inn. If Louis did indeed fall in love with Fanny the moment he saw her, he was bold to imagine he had a chance of declaring or fulfilling that love.

  But perhaps he was particularly susceptible to experienced women, to wives. The only other woman he had loved was also a wife, Mrs Fanny Sitwell, with whom he had been infatuated for years. She was separated from her husband by the time he met her in 1873, when he was twenty-three and she was thirty-four, and within a year he was regularly writing letters of adoration, declaring that he was ‘only happy in the thought of you’2 and that she had all his heart. But Mrs Sitwell hadn’t wanted his heart. There followed, before he saw Fanny Osbourne at Grez, two miserable years in which he continued to declare to Mrs Sitwell that he would never love anyone else, but at the same time concluded that ‘a good dull marriage with a good dull girl would be a good move’.3 Fanny Osbourne was neither a girl nor was she dull. She was, on the contrary, extremely unusual both in looks and in personality. There had been a clue to what attracted Louis in a woman in his admiration for a Miss Ward whom he’d met in the south of France – ‘I was greatly pleased with her manner. She came in so directly and shook my hand … and sate herself down in a chair and crossed her legs with quite amusing nonchalance. It is a blessing to see a girl who looks like a woman, after so many young ladies.’4

  Fanny Osbourne looked like a woman. She was not an unobtainable goddess like the beautiful, elegant Mrs Sitwell, but, like Miss Ward, was direct and unaffected and in appearance casual and lacking in artifice. Her body was womanly, full-breasted, round-hipped, and though she was small, just over 5 feet (1.5 m), she had a presence. Her dark eyes were watchful, and she did not smile much, but when she did her whole face became animated and glowing. Louis set himself to make her smile more often. He brought into Fanny’s life what Belle called ‘a sort of joyousness’ to which, in spite of her grief, she could not help but respond. Belle noticed, as the weeks of May and June went by, that her mother was beginning to look prettier, especially when, as the weather grew hotter, she wore a bathing suit to go boating with Louis and Bob and the others. It had sleeves, and a little skirt which reached below her knees; she tucked her curly dark hair under a scarlet kerchief and on her feet she had red espadrilles. She couldn’t swim, but she was fearless, loving the boisterous games on the river. It was as though she were discovering her lost youth, as though she were back in Indianapolis, the tomboy she had been before ever she became a wife. She regained some gaiety, and when they were all eating supper – delicious pot-au-feu served in a big yellow bowl, yards of bread, lettuce salads flavoured with garlic and tarragon – and drinking red wine, she joined in the conversation, full of opinions, capable of startling the men with her originality and critical insight, her voice low and even but commanding. Bob, as well as Louis, was under her spell, and she began to realise it. And she was attracted to them, at first to Bob and then, increasingly, to Louis. But where could these feelings end? In an affair? And where would that end? In disgrace, most probably, and complete rejection by Sam, which in turn would hurt and injure her children.

  The summer came to a close, the first of the autumn winds heralding the exodus of the artists back to their studios in Paris. Fanny left too, renting an apartment in Montmartre where an American friend already lived with her two children. Sam’s allowance was still coming in, enough to live on if they ate bread and herrings most of the time. Louis was also in Paris, almost penniless (though his ever-indulgent father Thomas constantly sent him money) and trying to write. He’d had one book published (The Pentland Rising – a slim historical pamphlet), but had made no money. By November, he was writing to his friend and mentor Sidney Colvin: ‘Life is very hard day by day … when I know so well I am making another tie about my heart.’5 To another friend, Charles Baxter, he was by the end of that month speaking even more plainly – ‘I am damnably in love.’6 So what was to be done?

  For that winter, nothing. Louis didn’t live with Fanny and her children but he used her address for post and was with her a great deal of the time. He wrote to Baxter, at the beginning of spring 1877, that ‘love … plays mighty hell … nothing will satisfy … but marriage’.7 But how could that be? Fanny was already married. And her husband made her life in Paris, such as it was, financially possible. But in March came the news that Sam was in financial difficulties and could no longer
send money. Fanny should come home. In May, he arrived in Paris himself but whatever passed between him and his wife, she did not go back to America with him. Instead, he went with her and his children to Grez where once more the artists had gathered. According to Belle, they all – all the Osbournes – had a happy week there before Sam went home alone. Ten days after he left, Louis arrived. What were people to think?

  What they thought is what anyone would think: here were a couple visibly in love but not free to be together. They were in a mess, and some might say it was of their own making. To marry Stevenson, Fanny would have to be divorced from Osbourne, a lengthy and difficult process to which he would have to agree, for she had neither the funds nor the appetite for a legal battle. Divorce, in late-nineteenth-century America, was just as much a matter of shame and scandal as it was in Britain. Her own family would be horrified, her children marked by her disgrace. The future as a divorced wife would be very bleak indeed, especially as Louis would be unable to support her and her family.

  Money, money, money – the lack of it complicated an affair that was already complex enough. Love would not feed and house Belle and Lloyd. The third winter in Paris was miserable (and the summer in Grez had not been so good either because of the poor weather). By this time, they had given up all pretence that they were not living together. Louis had moved in with Fanny and if they had not been lovers before, by then they were. Fanny was taking a terrifying risk. Louis’s long-suffering parents were intensely religious and their tolerance of their son’s wayward behaviour would certainly have limits. It was hard enough for them to send money to a son infatuated with another man’s wife, but if this woman bore him a child they might very well cast him off.

 

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