Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  Reading Tête-à-Tête this year, I can hear Hazel on every page. I hear her voice, her clarity, her sorrow. It’s there she has answered the questions that were unanswered that afternoon in November 1976 when she had interviewed Beauvoir, and found her preoccupied with the decline of the man she had indeed loved since she was a student, and with whom she’d had a ‘pact’ that their love would remain lifelong, ‘primary’ and ‘essential’, but that it would not limit their freedom, including for other loves, other ‘contingent’ love affairs. Instead of sexual fidelity, there would be ‘transparency’ between them, an absolute honesty. It was clear from the start what this pact might look like from Sartre’s point of view: it had been lived before by many a man, if not with such existential clarity. It was the Greenwich Mean Time problem writ large in Paris. But what did contingent love and freedom look like to Beauvoir? Would she have the same independence to love in this way? If anyone knew that society viewed the infidelities of women very differently from those of men, it was the author of The Second Sex. ‘The tragedy for women,’ Beauvoir wrote, ‘is that we lose desirability before we lose desire.’ She was thirty-three when – during the war, as if there wasn’t enough to be anxious about – Sartre tired of her sexually and began a major new affair. In the spirit of transparency, she wrote to him that it was ‘especially in the mornings on waking that it causes me a little anguish’.22

  There’s a photo of her in Tête-à-Tête from 1950 during her affair with Nelson Algren. She was then forty-two. Taken from the door of a bathroom, we see her back view, naked, pinning up her hair after a bath. She is gorgeous: tall, firm back, an elegant waist, rounded bottom and sturdy, beautiful legs. And Sartre tired of her at thirty-three! Algren didn’t tire of her; he would have married her, but she had a pact to consider. He didn’t tire of her, but he tired, eventually, of the pact. Men, on the whole, do not tolerate a secondary position. So, yes, there were double standards, and no, three did not always fit. But for the most part she didn’t let on how much it could hurt. Sartre ‘hated tears’, and having once experienced jealousy during his twenties had made a ‘decision’ not to feel it again, arranging his life to ensure that he wouldn’t. Louise Bourgeois’ opinion was that he managed to keep the ‘protective, friendly, modest mother’ he’d had as a child in Beauvoir.

  Reading Tête-à-Tête, I see, with Hazel’s eyes and her judiciously placed exclamation marks, how well Sartre protected himself against not only his own jealousies, but the jealous tears of lovers as he moved from one vulnerable young woman to another. Part of his strategy of protection was to keep his lovers largely ignorant of each other. He lied to them, but not to Beauvoir, with the consequence that she, the great champion of truth-telling, became complicit in ‘situations’ (Sartre’s word) that required, for him, a ‘temporary moral code’, a philosophical out he devised in order not to compromise the fundamental challenge of truth. She may have gained some small comfort from knowing what was going on, but what did the tearful and demanding young women know of their lover’s ‘essential’ and ‘primary’ pact with her? In order to pacify a tearful woman Sartre would make last-minute cancellations to arrangements with Beauvoir, including when they were booked to travel together, sometimes for several weeks. She’d have made her arrangements with Algren to suit Sartre, and when Sartre changed his with her to suit his state of moral contingency, Algren wasn’t filling the gap. It was never an option that Sartre might bend his arrangements to fit in with her other loves. He did not, or could not, as my friend Ali Clark would say, ‘surrender the authoritative stance of the ego’, a move forced on Beauvoir, maybe, but necessary in the writer, and woman, she became. And yet the pact mattered to her – the intellectual fidelity, even, or perhaps especially, as ‘life sinks its teeth into my neck’.23 She lived the biographical illusion in both senses. She took up the existential challenge; she was the one, not Sartre, who understood the emotional cost of his slogan that ‘man was condemned to be free.’ And she lived up to the principle of responsibility with an acute eye to history, writing volumes of memoir, and refracting the more ambivalent aspects of her life onto her novels.

  ‘We are continually revising our memories and hopes,’ Hazel wrote in her introduction to Christina Stead, ‘rationalising disappointments, modifying the way we present ourselves to ourselves and others. Everything we do has a hidden aspect.’24 We have to continually revise, or we couldn’t live, and we couldn’t write. To do both, Beauvoir needed the biographical illusion in the other sense: the pact by which intellectual fidelity could trump the pain and grief of sexual loss. Did it act as a certificate in her hand? Did it mitigate the shame even a woman who has lived freely can still feel as her lovers lose desire for her and move to another, and another, ever-younger woman, never to return in that way to her, though purporting to love and respect her mind and her intellect all the more for the connection long gone?

  These are the thoughts of now, not then, thoughts I can’t have with Hazel. I could have them with Helen but she is in Melbourne, too far for a drink in a quiet bar – which is exactly what I’d like right now, at the end of a day as well as a chapter. I’d ask her if she remembers the image from Nietzsche – it must have come from Murray – about our lives being like boats swimming in the sea, and that while we know that one day our boat will capsize, it’s the faithful ‘good old boats’ of our friends – he says ‘neighbours’ – that keep us afloat through calm seas and good winds, a steady hand stretched to us in the storms and tempests we might wish we could protect each other from, and cannot. Or am I being nostalgic, remembering the house on the corner in these terms? A house, after all, that is long gone for all that it is vivid in memory − the phone on its table, the doors open to the sun – gone, the lemon tree in its large tub, long gone, twenty years sold, more. Helen is in Melbourne, Sophie is in London, Hazel is dead. Absence and presence shadow each other, the paradox of memoir, of words creating the illusion, the biographical illusion, of a house lived in now by who knows who, but once by us, in our forties, writing our books and keeping our boats from capsizing.

  Making Shapes Square Up

  6

  There’s a pub on the river outside Oxford, on a bend, near a bridge, close to a weir and a cutting. My father lived across the river and in winter when the trees were bare, he could see the lights of the pub from the window by his bed. Nearly a hundred years ago, when the devastation of the First World War was almost over, his parents, my grandparents, spent their honeymoon at that pub, five miles from the town where they both lived. Ted, my grandfather, had not seen active service, disqualified by weak eyes that were inadequate to the challenge of a gun yet without his thick, round glasses could see every pore on the greatly loved face of my grandmother, Gertie, every tiny fluff of hair on her lip, every crease on her as yet unlined skin. Ted and Gertie were married on the last day of August 1918, and it was at the pub across the river from the house where he died that my father was conceived.

  The rooms at the pub can still be let; £39 a night it cost me when I could no longer endure the tension in the house as he died. The bed was uncomfortable, the window small, but from it I could see across to his house, the river flowing, a dark channel between us. I saw when he switched off the light by the bed and the small light for the night nurse came on. I only stayed there one night – it upset him too much to see me exiled so close, and I didn’t like it either; not long after that friends in London lent me their cottage in a nearby village.

  My father took a long time dying. It was a hard, laborious death. Western medicine can keep the body going against the odds: surgery, radiation, the full panoply of the pharmaceutical industry – he had it all. But it was more than this, and more than a determination to live. It was, it seemed to me, the watching daughter, a matter of a soul bewildered by the mystery of its ending, and more, perhaps, by the nature of its living.

  My father’s name was Patrick William Medd, a lawyer born of a line of lawyers and clergymen who left Yorkshire
at the end of the seventeenth century and moved south to settle around Oxford. He was a man who would have been more comfortable had he been born in the nineteenth century, or even late in the eighteenth, like a distant relative on Gertie’s side, the reforming lawyer Samuel Romilly. Gertie’s mother’s family had been Huguenot refugees, and somewhere in this line was Romilly, the son of a jeweller in London’s Soho, a man almost entirely self-educated, who used a small inheritance to sit for the Bar, and from there became a Whig member of Parliament. As Solicitor-General, he introduced bills to reduce the number of offences punishable by death, of which there were over two hundred on the statute books, including for misdeeds as minor as pickpocketing, stealing from a shop or from a bleaching ground to the value of five shillings. Most of the bills Romilly put before the House failed to become law, though in 1814 he did succeed in abolishing the barbaric practice of hanging, drawing and quartering. He died in 1818 before the abolition of the slave trade in 1833 and the Great Reform Act of 1832, for which he had worked and argued throughout his public life.25 It wasn’t until Patrick was a young barrister after the Second World War that the death penalty was finally abolished; as Secretary to the Inns of Court Conservative and Unionist Society – which Patrick joined in the early 1950s after leaving the Labour Party, finding it ‘too socialist’ – he played a small but effective part in a process of reform set in train by Romilly. Poppy remained proud of Patrick for that, even after they divorced and she moved way to the left of him. What she never forgave was the way he buried himself in researching Romilly’s biography while she was struggling and needed his help in the months before she was taken to hospital with a ‘nervous breakdown’. She saw that book as an escape, so that he wasn’t really present even when she returned, and it was: escape and survival both.

  By the time my father had finished Romilly, I had left school and was doing a secretarial course – much to his dismay, having paid for an education that would prepare me ‘for the professions’. As a kind of atonement, I suppose, I typed a good slab of the manuscript and I’ve read the book, which Poppy never did, so I know the story well and how important Romilly’s Whig rectitude was to Patrick, who believed in a society of decent individuals, and although his liberalism – in a twentieth-century sense – gave consideration to the claims of daughters, it was a society of decent men that he judged himself by. As if to test him, fate had arranged not only to bring him to life in the wrong century, but to throw him into the society of women. Born into a family of sisters, and bringing into the world a family of daughters, he was a man who lived among women and yet kept himself distant and distinct. Kind when he was with us, solicitous for our education, proud of our achievements, attentive when we made our requests, he was nonetheless, in his own consideration as well as ours, another order of being. We all had insides – Girls’ insides, he’d say, can be very worrying – but until the day he was diagnosed with a cancer that had spread from his bowel to his liver, there was never the slightest suggestion that insides were anything that need concern him. Every day he caught the train up to London. As far back as I remember he daily left us for the Temple, that lawyers’ enclave between Aldwych and the Embankment, where he had his chambers and was a bencher of the Middle Temple. My earliest memories of the great edifice of the law were the fluttering gowns that appeared like bats along the huge stone hallways of the Law Courts. ‘An admirable manly atmosphere,’ Virginia Woolf said.26

  We’d be taken there, holding our mother’s skirts for safety, as part of the ritual school-holiday visit to London. From beneath his wig, those frizzled scrolls of wiry hair, would emerge our father, and although he’d gather us up for a treat at a restaurant along the Strand, something of that wig and gown, so recently shed, would remain with him, a kind of palimpsest, so that instead of insides – those leaky recesses of our bodies – he seemed to have a reinforced exterior. So much so that as a child it always rather shocked me to see him come out of the lavatory, or to notice a smear of blood on his face after he’d shaved. Of course I knew, but knowing is a many-layered business. And presumably he too knew that supporting the life he led in the courts and in chambers was a body with the frailties that flesh entailed. It was, after all, his body not his mind that had produced the daughters whose mewling and crying had filled his house for so many years. Yet with the diagnosis of his last disease came news of his insides that he found difficult to acknowledge.

  ‘Absolutely nothing to worry about,’ he said when I rang on a crackly line from Sydney. ‘Why don’t you put off coming over until I’m better?’

  ‘I was going to come while you’re in hospital,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want you troubled with that,’ he said. ‘And besides, if you come later, we could go on an expedition.’

  An expedition. Did he really think we’d be going on any more expeditions? But I abided, as I always had, by his decision, and booked my ticket for several months ahead when it’d be summer, and we did indeed go on an expedition. I drove him north to Yorkshire where my sister Jane lives, and after a few days there with her family, the three of us drove on north to the town of Westerdale, which our family had left back in the seventeenth century. The graveyard of the church is full of Medd tombstones, quite strange to see with a name as unusual as ours recorded in Yorkshire stone. Patrick had a map and after a sandwich at the pub in a village where everyone had noses like ours, we walked along the River Esk and up onto the Dales to find the house where the family began. Patrick managed the walk well considering the operation he’d had a few months before; it was a fine June day and we stopped several times beside the Esk, a small, tumbling river with grassy banks and overhanging trees, until we left it for the final climb up to the place marked Esklets on the map. We’d expected a village, or at least a hamlet, but no, nothing but the bare Cleveland Hills stretched into the distance. All that was left of our ancestral home was a chimney and the outline of crumbling walls, nettles growing from the long grass. We wondered at the modesty of our origins, walls that would have enclosed but a few small rooms, and in the slight laugh of that wonder, certainly for Patrick, and maybe also for Jane and me, there was an element of pride in a family who’d made their way by their brains – though I also had the thought, the image, of a young girl arriving at that bleak place to marry a Medd son.

  I have a photograph of my father and my sister from that trip, taken a few days later when we were in Northumberland and had crossed the causeway to Lindisfarne. A dry, salty wind was blowing in from the North Sea, and in the walled garden that Gertrude Jekyll had carved out of the bare slope of the island, Patrick is holding his Panama hat; his face is thin, his cheekbones pronounced, but in every other respect – his dress so careful and his specs polished clean – it would be quite possible to miss the illness of which he would die the next year. In the months after he had recovered from the operation that removed a large chunk of his bowel, he rarely referred to it, and when he did his comments were oblique. When I asked him what the surgeon had done, he talked about ‘rerouting his plumbing’. When he was taken over by pain or nausea, he’d apologise – I really am most terribly sorry – and absent himself. We’d creep past his door to see how he was, but he’d shoo us away until he was well enough to join us. It’s important not to give in to this, he’d say. In that first phase of his illness, before he was confined to the narrow walls of one room, the life of the house was curiously partitioned as if we were living two lives simultaneously: a public life undisturbed by illness or death, and a private layer that, rather like the lavatory, was never referred to and, had it not been for the bottles of pills on the kitchen table, might well not have existed. Betsy, Patrick’s second wife, the friend of Poppy whom he’d left her for, was by nature and predisposition more comfortable with the surface of things, and unlike Patrick, who seemed not to notice, became flustered at any sign of movement from the depths. In this she was supported by neighbours, doctors, even the local vicar. No one wished to speak of death. Look on the bright
side, the neighbours said. We find it kinder to be optimistic, the GP said. He’s in good hands, the vicar said. I really just called round to see if I could take some cuttings from the garden for the fete.

  Patrick, I had always thought, was one of those men whose face and mask had grown into one. There was no sense of a double life, of something struggling to get out. In his decent society of decent individuals he had been well-regarded, respected, even loved – if such a word can be used – by the men, the lawyers among whom he had worked. At the end of each day he came back to the family as if to the ground from which he grew, and he was no more conscious of this than a daisy is conscious of the earth into which it pushes its roots. If, when we visited, there were tensions among his women – his girls, as he called us, wife and daughters alike – he left us to it, as he did more literal manifestations of our leaky insides, and retreated to the garden where he tended the lawns and the vegetables, wide flowerbeds, the sunny nooks and shady corners where trays could be brought, deckchairs opened, books read. We, in our turn, spared him the details of the disputes that occurred in the kitchen between the wife he had taken in midlife and the daughters of his earlier wife. We, his daughters, found our ways around it mainly by avoidance, dashing down for the day, a couple of nights at the most, and by taking him off somewhere – a house, a gallery, a long walk. Until it came time for him to die. Then the masks of Englishness slipped and skewed, and our faces could not endure the weight. With Patrick it wasn’t that the mask he wore failed him – on the contrary, it could be said to have sustained him – more that it left him unprotected against other forces, other voices, which had, until that moment, been barely visible to him. Not so much the tears in the kitchen, the slamming doors, the running feet, though these did impinge on him as they had not before. But, if he wanted Jane to come down from Yorkshire, as he did, with her children, and Betsy would not accommodate their vegetarian meals – Your daughters are so difficult, Patrick – how was he to manage this if he could no longer drive to Sainsbury’s or take them out for lunch in Oxford? And when, on our return from the expedition north, the proofs of The Orchard were waiting for me and the courier was booked to collect them the next day, he couldn’t escape the loud voices on the stairs when Betsy wanted help with the washing, and I, in Patrick’s study with the proofs, refused.