Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  In fact, Louis had not yet written a great deal and nothing which had earned him real money or fame. Treasure Island was not published in book form until two years later, after Davos had been given up. Ten years before meeting Fanny, he’d published a slim historical pamphlet The Pentland Rising; two years after he met her, An Inland Voyage appeared and a year later Travels with a Donkey. Apart from these two travel books, some of his essays had appeared in book form but there had been no fiction yet. He had spent a great deal of time on trying to write plays, in collaboration with Henley, and Fanny had spent hours reading them and making suggestions as to how they could be improved. She did the same with the children’s story, about which she had been so dismissive, writing to her in-laws that she was trying ‘to see if I can help to find out where it breaks down’. Louis was happy for her to do so, reporting cheerfully to Henley that ‘the pert and hypercritical Fanny Van der Grift after reading the whole of Treasure Island has eaten much of her venom; thinks the end quite good and only wants a chapter or so rewritten’.2

  So whatever his friends thought, Louis himself welcomed and encouraged his wife in the role of critic. He talked about his work with her, the pattern of their days becoming one of his writing in the mornings and then in the evenings discussing the manuscript with Fanny after she had read it. There was, at this stage anyway, nothing secretive about his work – it was open to Fanny all the time. She was completely involved in all he did because this was how he wanted it. Their marriage was indeed a meeting of minds as well as bodies and no matter what others thought of his wife’s critical faculties he himself respected them. So did his father, quickly becoming convinced that not only should Fanny be listened to but that she should have control over what Louis submitted to editors and publishers. She accepted the responsibility willingly, even eagerly, and applied herself diligently to the task of vetting Louis’s writing without any apparent qualms. There was a slight note of self-importance in her observations to some correspondents as to her own usefulness and significance, but this was balanced by her anxiety to do the job properly. She never said she was too tired to do the reading (even of the tedious plays), or too bored to analyse what she had read, and she never felt Louis was patronising her. On the contrary, she knew he needed her as a sounding board just as he needed her in so many other, more common, ways as a wife.

  Her own needs in this second marriage were never of first importance, though like many strong women she had a yearning to be cared for herself, for someone to take charge of her welfare as she took care of so many others’. Louis certainly wasn’t capable of this. He couldn’t nurse himself never mind his wife, and Fanny felt the lack of this in that second Davos winter. The altitude didn’t suit her. She had endless headaches, was what Louis called ‘seedy’, and then became quite seriously ill with what he first described as ‘drain-poisoning’ and then suspected was cancer. He wrote to his mother that he was miserably aware ‘I am not fit to help her these bad nights and besides she scruples to call me till she is worse than she perhaps need have been.’3 Things got so bad that Fanny was transported to Zürich to be seen by a specialist, who finally decided the stomach pain she’d experienced and the passing of ‘stools of pure bile’ indicated gallstones. She returned to Davos, was dosed with laudanum, and, after nearly two months in bed, she recovered.

  But, clearly, Davos would not do. However much good it did Louis’s lungs – and, temporarily at least, it did them a great deal – the place made Fanny ill (her heart was affected) and depressed Louis. And it was so expensive. ‘I am eaten up with shame,’4 Louis told Henley, ‘… hot blushes consume me … all Davos has swindled me.’ He was still dependent on his parents, and reported them nearly ‘dry of coins’. He and Fanny would have to live somewhere warmer and cheaper when the next winter came. Spain attracted him – he had a dream of the Balearic Isles – but if not Spain, then the south of France where he and his mother had gone for their health when he was a child. But first another summer in Scotland with his parents had to be endured, the weather every bit as bad as the year before and the effect on Louis worse. He had a haemorrhage and feared that the doctor, whom he went to London to consult, would banish him to Davos again. But mercifully, the south of France was agreed to as a winter destination, so long as they were somewhere near pine woods. But who was going to find such a place? Fanny was too weak, still not completely recovered both from the gallstones episodes and what she referred to as ‘congestion of the brain’. Louis was hardly in a better state but at the same time desperate to get to France and so he went off with his cousin Bob to look around.

  Fanny didn’t really want to let them out of her sight, not trusting either him or Bob to be sensible. She knew perfectly well how dependent he had become on her. During the time at Davos, when she’d gone to Zürich, and once to Paris, he had become depressed and said he no longer seemed to take the pleasure in his own company which he had once done – ‘the results, I suppose, of marriage’. But Louis spoke French, as did Bob, and both of them were familiar with the Riviera, which she was not, so she persuaded herself that no harm could after all come from allowing him out of her sight while she gathered her strength. She stayed in Edinburgh, with his parents, and he and Bob went off as arranged, first of all to Montpellier. There, Louis had another haemorrhage. As soon as she heard, Fanny was decided: she must join him. Her mother-in-law was appalled at the thought of her travelling such a distance alone and still in poor health, but off she went, finally meeting up with Louis in Marseilles.

  The relief of being once more together was great, but the greater relief of finding somewhere to live was yet to come. They made a mistake, renting what seemed a perfect house near Saint-Marcel only to find the climate deadly. It was March before they were settled at Hyères, near Toulon, in the Chalet la Solitude, which Fanny described as being like a doll’s house, with rooms so small they could hardly turn round in them. But in compensation the garden was large and wild, with extensive views, and perfectly secluded. A day’s outing to Toulon was a delightful ride through lanes where the hedgerows were thick with roses and violets, the scents intoxicating. Toulon provided them with diversion, if they wanted it, but they did not want it often. This was their first real home, far superior to the rented chalet in Davos, and Fanny relished making it attractive. She had one maid, but did all the cooking herself, thrilled at the variety of local ingredients, but her real joy was the garden. She’d missed the cottage garden she’d had in East Oakland ever since she’d left it, and there had been no opportunity since to indulge her passion for growing things. Now, she was in the garden every day, planting herbs and vegetables as well as flowers, doing her own digging and raking and experimenting with different kinds of cultivation.

  Their life, that spring and summer of 1883, was simple and tranquil. In the morning, Louis wrote as usual while she attended to household duties; in the afternoon, after a good lunch (usually of salad from the garden) and a rest, he read his morning’s work aloud and they talked it over before Fanny made suggestions and offered criticisms; late afternoon they had a gentle walk until dinner (lots of fish), then they read and talked. The routine, and the climate, did them both good but not as much as it should have done. Louis had built up no resistance to germs and in May caught what he labelled an ‘influenza cold’. Fanny was back to being a full-time nurse again, ever her primary duty as a wife. This time, she had help. Valentine, the local young woman she trained to share the nursing (as well as much else) soon proved skilled and took her turn at Louis’s bedside. In addition to the usual symptoms, and the haemorrhages, Louis was again threatened with blindness, a severe case of ophthalmia. He couldn’t read, a deprivation of the very worst kind, much worse than being told not to move – he could tolerate that, as he had been obliged to do many times, but not to be able to read was almost insupportable. To help him endure this punishment (and he was quite surprised to find it actually was possible to be alive and not read) Fanny was instructed to go for their usual
walk in the afternoons and make up some story to repeat when she returned. She’d read of several outrages involving dynamite in London at that time, and so made up a tale about dynamiters to entertain Louis. He was very amused, so much so that he added to the story, as though playing consequences, and it became the basis for a book (which, when published two years later, bore both their names). Slowly, Louis recovered, but Fanny had her own worries. She was afraid she might be pregnant, which from every point of view – her age (forty-three), their financial situation (still perilous), Louis’s health (poor, requiring all her energy and time to safeguard it) – would be disastrous. But it was more than that, far more. Fanny was quite passionately against bearing any more children. When her daughter Belle gave birth to a son, Austin, while the Stevensons were in Davos, she wrote to her old friend Dora Williams that she was extremely glad Belle was so far away because otherwise she might have had this baby left on her doorstep: ‘And I don’t want a baby.’ Curiously, she added, ‘I have a moral conviction borne in upon my soul that that baby is mine … it is pretty hard, isn’t it, when one hasn’t the courage to venture upon one for oneself that someone else should do it for you.’5 Belle’s baby was a ‘misfortune’. If she now had one herself, the misfortune would be hugely magnified. For her husband, it was a different sort of anxiety. He’d always adored children and even though he had claimed, after the deaths of several children he knew, that he didn’t want a family because he wouldn’t be able to stand the pain of such tragedy if it happened to any child of his, there was a lingering regret in his mind. And of course his parents had no grandchildren. They loved Lloyd, but a grandchild given to them by Louis and Fanny would satisfy and thrill them in a way Lloyd never could. He began to fantasise the having of a son or daughter and his excitement grew as did the tension. But Fanny was not pregnant. When this became clear, the relief was mixed with a sort of sadness, on his part at least.

  There had been hints before of pregnancy scares and there were to be more to come but Fanny was not prepared to accept these as simply part of married life, about which nothing could be done – she was not Mary Livingstone, and times had changed. Contraception was not efficient, nor was knowledge of it freely available, but Fanny had lived in Paris where ways and means of preventing pregnancy were certainly more talked about than anywhere else. In 1879, the Mensinga diaphragm had been invented and in 1881 the first birth control clinic opened. This was in Holland, but the advice it made available spread quickly so that, though unable to go to any such clinic, Fanny had the opportunity to benefit from the advances in contraception. She had taken great risks even before she was married to Louis, sleeping with him in Paris, but in a strange way the risks did not lessen after their marriage but grew greater. In Victorian terms, she was old at forty-three and her health had not been good. Pregnancy would mean a threat to her strength and she had begun to believe she could not face it. There was no question, in the kind of relationship she had with her husband, of her being obliged to grant him his conjugal rights. Fanny never had to submit to Louis, as so many wives had to (and no doubt still have to). But at the same time, she was the one in whose interest it was to take every precaution available. The onus was on her, and she felt it. Her close reading of The Lancet, which she had sent out from London, was not only to keep up-to-date on possible treatments for Louis’s illnesses but to be on the look-out for new information to help herself. She was avid for all medical knowledge.

  She was also ever vigilant over possible epidemics – the very mention of the words ‘typhoid’ or ‘scarlet fever’ had her alert and ready to take Louis away. Cholera was what drove her and Louis from Hyères, where they had been so happy in spite of illness. Fanny swore she could see a cloud hanging over Toulon which meant cholera had swept through it (the cloud being of smoke from all the fires burning to clear out infected houses). Lloyd, who was staying with them on holiday from the English school where he had been sent this time when they moved abroad, said she panicked and insisted it was too dangerous for Louis to live any longer at Hyères. She forced him to leave, by easy stages, for London, partly to escape the cholera and partly to see specialists who could assess the state of his health and determine where they should live next. Once in London Louis was examined by a Dr Mennell, but there followed some confusion over the verdict. Dr Mennell thought Louis could safely live in England now, but another medical man, Dr Fox, ordered him back to Switzerland, and Dr Lauder Brunton and the eminent Sir Andrew Clark agreed with Fox. Neither Fanny nor Louis wanted to return to Davos, but by not doing so were they risking Louis’s already fragile health? Should they return to the south of France, avoiding unhealthy areas? Or should they risk a winter in England?

  Fanny, rapidly coming to believe she knew as much as the doctors, convinced herself that the blood Louis had been spitting, which she had seen but they had not, was bright red, not dark red, and therefore more likely to be from blood-vessels broken through coughing than from the lungs. She was sure a winter somewhere in the south of England, though certainly not London, would be feasible. The Stevenson parents were of course all for this – if they couldn’t have Louis in Edinburgh, at least they would have him in England and could visit easily. And Lloyd’s school was in Bournemouth, another attraction. It was to Bournemouth they went, first to see Lloyd, and then to stay, renting in November 1884 a house among pine trees (they were reputed to be good for lung diseases). Neither of them was well, though Louis thought Fanny’s poor health was a direct result of worrying over his coughing and dizziness and blood-spitting. What dramatically changed things for her was the news from Thomas Stevenson that he would like to buy a house for her. Fanny was ecstatic, hardly able to sleep for thinking that she was about to own a house. She was tired of renting properties, transforming their gardens, making dreary rooms attractive – and then moving on. Now, there would be a point to all her hard work.

  It took time and determination to find and then buy a suitable house, but in April Fanny concluded the purchase in Bournemouth of what was named Skerryvore, a two-storey, yellow-brick house in half an acre of ground. The garden was mostly at the back, with a lawn sloping down towards a small ravine full of rhododendrons and with a stream at the bottom. Suddenly energetic again, Fanny rushed to London to meet her in-laws and begin the delightful task of buying furniture. She bought three old oak boxes upon which she put cushions covered with yellow damask, and a cabinet and an oak coffer for a window seat and a beautiful convex mirror. Louis complained she wasn’t buying the necessary, ordinary things like tables and chairs, but he was pleased to see her so happy and busy. Soon, he had to admit that she had made the drawing-room ‘so beautiful that it is like eating to sit in it. No other room is so lovely in the world.’6 There was colour, especially yellow, everywhere. Now, at last, they could behave like any other married couple and entertain if they wished, and have friends and family to stay.

  This new freedom proved a source of conflict before long. Louis, still in poor health and often bored, wanted his old friends to come and entertain him, and they were only too willing to oblige, but Fanny, as ever, thought these chums exhausted her husband and she resented their presence. Then there were new local friends, people who arrived to introduce themselves, wishing to establish some social intercourse with the author of the by now famous Treasure Island. According to Fanny, they poured into Skerryvore ‘in droves’ and she found none of them interesting or amusing. She announced that she was breaking down under the strain. Her in-laws increased it. They, of course, were welcome, and she had spent a lot of time and energy on making Louis into a more appreciative son. ‘We have had,’ he wrote to his father, ‘a dreadful overhauling of my conduct as a son the other night, and the daft wife stripped me of my illusions and made me admit I had been a detestable bad one …’7 Fanny said he should show his parents how much he loved them and he was determined to try. But when they did come to stay, their presence was oppressive and, worse still, his mother arrived with a cold which Louis prom
ptly caught. It was one thing for Fanny to turn Louis’s friends out if they had colds, but she could hardly exert the same power over his mother, who did not in any case share the belief that coughs and sneezes spread diseases. She wrote to Colvin that she was so furious that suppressing her rage with her mother-in-law made her have one fainting-fit after another. If Louis died as a result of this infection she vowed it would be murder and his mother the murderess.

  Louis survived, and eventually the Stevenson parents left (though returning all too quickly), but still the visitors Fanny found so tedious kept coming. Louis found her resentment irritating. He even lectured her on her arrogance, telling her, ‘It is the mark of dull people to loathe others.’8 She was not being a good wife to sit in the corner of the room, silently glaring at his friends and complaining bitterly about them as soon as they left. But the truth was he found their social life pretty dreary too and longed for diversion of a different kind. His writing was not going well – he was trying to write some short stories for a new collection – and the couple began to have rows, some of them violent enough to alarm any witness to them. A neighbour, Adelaide Boodle, who became a regular caller, confessed she sometimes used to turn away when she approached Skerryvore and heard the shouting. But though these loud arguments at first alarmed her – ‘the casual looker-on might have felt it his duty to shout for the police’ – she soon realised that they signified not a real hostility between the couple but instead a complete freedom. They could, and did, say what they liked to each other – there was nothing suppressed, nor did either of them feel the need to keep up any kind of front. They could be themselves to each other. Arguing furiously was a distinct part of their marriage and one they both relished. Fanny said Louis’s obstinacy opposed her firmness of character and it was only natural that sparks should occasionally fly.