A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The story opens on a note of keen irony. ‘Much was said in the days of Monica’s early youth about being good.’ (Monica was one of E. M. Delafield’s own names and one may guess that she would rather not have been given it.) Goodness, in this context, means what is convenient to those in authority. Certainly, it has nothing to do with truth. Monica has been carefully trained to behave to men—beginning with her own father—exactly as they expect, and to say to them only what they want to hear.

  ‘Have you been to play whist at the Club, father?’

  The question dated from Monica’s nursery days. She asked it several times weekly, and never realized that it was a matter of complete indifference to her.

  At her first dance she catches sight of herself in one of the great ballroom mirrors and ‘saw that she was wearing too serious an expression. Both her mother and the dancing-mistress had warned her about this, and she immediately assumed an air of fresh, sparkling enjoyment.’ At home, after dinner, she sometimes plays the piano.

  ‘That will do now, darling,’ said Mrs Ingram. ‘I can hear father coming, and he may want to talk. Ring for coffee.’

  Monica obeyed.

  She was not really particularly interested in either the Adieux or Sobre les Olas, although she vaguely liked the idea of herself, in a simple white frock, dreamily playing under the lamplight and it always rather annoyed her that her conception of her own appearance had to be spoilt by the fact that, having no faculty for playing by ear, she was obliged always to keep her eyes fixed upon her music.

  Monica, then, is not a protester. She is conscious of the duties of her station as a young girl and accepts them without question. All time is wasted—so too is all friendship and all music—unless it can be shown to ‘lead to something,’ that is, a proposal of marriage, although it is assumed that the man is likely to try and get out of it if he can. If the offer is not made within the first three seasons, the daughter will have to share with her mother the cruel burden of guilt. Fathers can distance themselves; mothers, if they have failed, must live with failure.

  A possible exception to this rule is the handsome, formidable Lady Marlowe (her first husband had been a German Jew, but her second had been English, ‘so that was all right’). If her two daughters, Frederica and Cicely, prove unattractive to men, Lady Marlowe intends, so she frankly says, to banish them to a separate house and disown them. But such strength, and indeed such cruelty, can hardly be expected of all mothers, nor is it surprising that Frederica and Cicely droop, with dark shadows under their eyes and ‘pale, inefficient hands.’

  Monica does not have to suffer from this kind of brutal contempt. The novel would be very much weakened if she did, since another irony of the opening chapters is that her prospects seem so hopeful. She starts out with the goodwill of the entire household, although she knows very little about some of them—‘she had a dim idea that the kitchenmaid did actually sleep in the boxroom.’ She is crimped and squeezed into the desirable shape and launched into the drawing-room world. Once there, her first conversation on her own is a success. She has been able, for several minutes, to think of something to say to a man. It looks, then, as if she will be able to justify her existence and the fact that she was not born a boy. Her parents, who remind her so frequently of all they are doing for her, will not have to be disappointed.

  Every now and then E. M. Delafield indicates briefly (she is a very economical writer) how much human material is being wasted or suppressed. Left to herself, Monica has a good heart and a healthy capacity for normal happiness. She loves dancing for its own sake, and, disastrously, she loves Captain Christopher Lane. At his appearance on the scene her eighteen years of training, social, emotional and religious, collapse at a touch. ‘God must understand her, and must not allow her mother to guess anything at all.’ Captain Lane, to be sure, is not altogether real to her—‘he was masterful, exactly like people in books’—but he is also a powerful physical presence which has nothing to do with books. At the funfair—a strong metaphor for sexual excitement—she finds that she has forgotten her mother and her friends and, as the evening goes on, even time itself. She will never be allowed the chance to do such a thing again. Almost at once time reasserts its power, and becomes a threat. Although the flashy Captain only finds the opportunity for a few kisses before he is posted back to India, Monica’s reputation for niceness has gone. She has lost her marketable freshness. She and her mother will be left to count the anxious years as they pass. They are not quite hopeless, but their hopes will be pitched sadly lower and lower.

  ‘The Anxious Years’ is the title of the second, and by far the longest part of the novel. Monica, Mrs Ingram, and Parsons, the faithful lady’s maid, are left in a kind of unholy alliance to keep up appearances in Eaton Square. Monica, once a devourer of fiction, now creates it, inventing, with her mother, new variations of the true story. ‘They displayed for one another’s benefit a detached brightness that ignored everything below the surface,’ conscious, day in, day out, of ‘an undercurrent of sick envy and mortification.’ E. M. Delafield calls their pretence ‘gallant’ as they go through the daily formalities of dressing, shopping, driving out and back home again, which are all they know and which it would never occur to them to give up. Without these things their life would not be endurable.

  The men who are supposed to give meaning to their lives are a poor lot, almost all of them self-satisfied and self-deceiving. But the thin characterization of the men, in this particular novel, works very well. They are to be seen as a necessary condition of life rather than as human beings. Poor Monica is patronized by her father, sexually awakened and then ditched by the Captain, disillusioned by Carol Anderson, without understanding any of them. It could be said, indeed, that the true marriage, as the story works itself out, is between Monica and her mother. They have ‘the intuition peculiar to those who live together.’ From Monica’s first childish dependence she grows into the desperate conspiracy of the middle chapters, until almost imperceptibly she becomes the stronger of the two. ‘Darling, there’s no such thing as friendship between a man and a woman,’ is Mrs Ingram’s comment when Carol Anderson appears, but for the first time her voice is timid. Her last resort is the pretence that she can’t bring herself to let her daughter marry and leave her by herself. ‘Not that I’d ever grudge you your happiness, my precious one, but just for a few years more—I don’t suppose it’ll be for very long.’ And Monica, listening, feels ‘sick with pity.’

  Earlier in the book she has been jealous of the affection between her parents, and when Vernon Ingram is killed in an accident she envies her mother’s hysteria, her right, so to speak, to violent grief. Jealousy, in the peculiarly English form of accepted defeat (everyone else is more fortunate and more worthy of being fortunate), was of particular interest to E. M. Delafield. Unlike lechery and greed, it can never provide satisfaction in itself, only in the thought of someone else’s failure. In creating character, she held that

  to show one side only is to falsify it and therefore deprive it of all value…there are no wholly ‘nice’ people, or wholly ‘nasty’ people in real life, and they therefore have no place in the particular form of roman psychologique in which I happen to be interested.

  The jealousy that bedevils the gentle and pliant Monica is a product of ‘the whole tradition of her world, daily and hourly soaking into her very being, so that it became an ineradicable part of herself.’ There is, for example, the beginning of a real friendship between Monica and Cicely Marlowe. But the news of Cicely’s engagement (even though the man is not All Right) while Monica herself is still doggedly waiting and hoping, is almost too painful to be borne. ‘It added to her misery that she was ashamed of it, and despised and reproached herself for her unworthy jealousy.’ Still more disgraceful is her relief when the whole thing, after all, comes to nothing.

  Thank Heaven Fasting would be a sombre book if it were less witty, and less deceptively mild. Proceeding, as it does, in the kind of short p
aragraphs that were then thought suitable for the Woman’s Page, it concentrates from beginning to end, and with admirable clearness, on the main story. In this sense, it must be counted a classic. Characters and places are carefully limited. The tone is detached, or seems so. E. M. Delafield had, she said, ‘consciously striven, throughout the whole of my writing life, for ability to observe impartially, unbiased either by sentiment or by cynicism, and courage to record faithfully and without dramatic emphasis.’ She isn’t impartial, of course. What is the use of an impartial novelist? But she is accurate, calm, and lucid. She possessed what she called a phonographic memory, and could repeat, word for word, conversations which she had heard or overheard many years earlier. Dialogue, even in short snatches, is one of her great strengths as a writer. In Thank Heaven Fasting the conversations are often—as they are in real life—duels, open or disguised. Mrs Ingram has an easy victory over Monica.

  ‘Sit down, my pet.’

  ‘I’d rather stand.’

  ‘Mother said, Sit down, Monica.’

  Monica sat.

  The neurotic Frederica also challenges her mother, together with the whole system to which she has been condemned.

  ‘I don’t want to get married. I hate men. I wouldn’t marry anyone—whoever it was.’

  Lady Marlowe gazed at her in astonishment for a moment, and then laughed again.

  ‘So you’ve got to that stage, have you?’ was all she said.

  And Frederica, left alone, sinks her teeth into the flesh of her thin wrist to control herself. At the other end of the scale is Mr Pelham, amiably chatting on one of his punctual calls.

  ‘The other day’ remarked Mr Pelham, ‘I heard of a fellow who was sitting out a dance with a girl. They’d talked about all the usual things and didn’t seem to have anything more to say, and whatever he asked her she only seemed to answer Yes or No—so what do you think he suddenly did?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He suddenly asked her: “Do you like string?” Without any preliminary, you know.’

  Monica smiles, though only because she sees that she is expected to. But she understands as well as he does that between people who are obliged to talk but have nothing to say, anecdotes, even about string, are precious currency. There is something touching, however, about Mr Pelham’s admiration of the resourceful fellow, whom he doesn’t even know, but has ‘heard of.’ Mr Pelham is tedious—he is the sort of man who always calls a walk ‘a ramble’—but in his voice one can distinguish human kindness.

  If E. M. Delafield had a good ear, she also had an exceptionally sharp eye for (to quote one of her own titles) The Way Things Are. The house in Eaton Square dominates Thank Heaven Fasting. In Monica’s bedroom

  the furniture itself was all painted white, so was the narrow little mantelpiece on which stood the collection of china animals dating from nursery days. The pictures were framed in gilt—mostly ‘copies from the flat’ of Swiss scenery, and Italian peasantry, but there were also reproductions of one or two ‘really good’ pictures. These had been given to Monica from time to time, usually on birthdays, and she always felt that she ought to have liked them much better than she really did.

  In a rebellious moment she had wanted to take down the Sistine Madonna, but had not been able to summon the courage. Her upbringing has taught her that nothing must be taken more seriously than appearances. When she goes to her mother’s room after a party ‘to tell her all about it,’ she sees the nighttime Mrs Ingram, with whom she is quite familiar—her hair in a double row of steel wavers, her face glistening with cold cream, recruiting her forces for the next day’s grand pretence. Heavy meals come up from the basement kitchen, clothes are worn which can’t be taken off without the help of a servant, fires blaze, bells are rung, hairdressers arrive by appointment—every morning and evening bring the spoils of a comfortable unearned income. It is the only home Monica has ever known, and we have to see it turn first into a refuge for the unwanted, and then into a prison.

  In Thank Heaven Fasting E. M. Delafield returned to a theme she had treated much earlier, in Consequences (1919). In this novel, which was one of her own favourites, the heroine, Alex, is as naive as Monica, but much less able to do what is expected of her. She has suffered—unlike Monica, but like E. M. Delafield herself—from years of spiritual regimentation in a strict Belgian convent. Emerging, bewildered, at the age of eighteen she finds that her parents expect her—what else has she been growing up for?—to get married. She accepts a proposal from a man she doesn’t love, and who removes his pince-nez, with deliberation, before he kisses her. (This is also true of Mr Pelham and of Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View; it seems to be an Edwardian novelist’s warning signal.) With very real courage, Alex breaks off the engagement. In consequence, her mother’s world rejects her. She is undirected, untrained, thought to be odd and difficult. Her brother and sister do not want her, and as a last solution she drowns herself. Monica’s story, then, could be seen as a revised version of Alex’s; we must accept that comedy is crueller than tragedy. It is interesting to see how E. M. Delafield has quietly removed what might be called the extenuating circumstances. Alex dies because her sincerity is unforgivable. Monica retreats to the pretences of Eaton Square. Nanda, in Henry James’s The Awkward Age (who becomes unmarriageable because she is thought to have read a daring book), is shown as finer than all the men and women around her. Monica is not. Gissing’s Odd Women lose their means of support. Monica remains comfortably off. In a conforming society, she is a conformist. Her claim to sympathy is only that.

  And the reader does sympathize with Monica, all the more because she is unheroic, and finds it almost unbearable when, at the very end of the book, she wakes sweating and sobbing, afraid that after all there may be some hitch to prevent her marriage. One feels almost ashamed to be seeing her desperation at such close range. Was she capable of acting otherwise than as she did? So tightly does her world close around her that it seems, at first, that there are no choices open to her. She has heard faintly of alternatives—the New Woman, the suffrage movement—but she has been taught to regard them with horror, and is duly horrified. Lady Marlowe considers that women who demand votes are simply hysterical old maids, or wives who can’t get on with their husbands (she herself has worn out two). No New Women make an appearance (there is a hint of one in Mary Collier, who wears her hair straight and her clothes plain, but it is not developed) and there are no female salary earners—not even writers—among Monica’s acquaintance. At one point in the novel, however, when Cicely falls ill, the Marlowes call in young Dr Corderey (clever, but not All Right). Corderey has studied the unhappiness of idle women, and considers it an illness. They need treatment, he thinks, as much as any other patients. To Monica he says

  ‘I suppose you were never sent to school either, and you live at home, and have nothing to do…and if you were forced to earn your living tomorrow, you’d have to starve.’

  Monica, for an instant, felt offended, because she knew that her mother would think she ought to be offended. But he had spoken with so much sincerity that she could not pretend to disagree.

  ‘It’s quite true.’

  Monica is listening here to the voice of truth. She has heard it before, more than once. She heard it when she wanted to take down the print of the Sistine Madonna. She expresses it, if only for a moment, when she cries out ‘Why can’t one have a career, or even work, like a man?’ She knows that her mother’s grief has turned into self-indulgence. She has the capacity even to know herself, but what she sees dismays her. Better to look away. Here E. M. Delafield is relentless. We are not allowed to question the happiness of the happy ending. Quite against the tradition of comedy, the older generation has been proved, apparently, right. And all Monica has to wish for is that if ever she has a child, it will be a boy.

  From the Virago edition, 1989

  Passion, Scholarship, and Influence

  Dorothy Sayers: Her Life and Soul, by Barbara Reynolds

 
When she dined at Somerville High Table, as she quite often did in the late 1930s, we used to look up at Dorothy Sayers as she sat there in black crêpe de Chine, austere, remote, almost cubical. She told the dean that the students dressed badly and had no sense of occasion. We resented this because we felt that, although most of us had not much money, we had done the best we could. These, as it happens, are the very words of her illegitimate son, whom she supported, but never acknowledged in her lifetime: ‘She did the very best she could.’

  We, of course, could never have envisaged such a situation. We couldn’t have guessed at the weight of feeling behind her story ‘The Haunted Policeman’ (in which Lord Peter Wimsey’s son is born) or at the images which appear on the cover of this new Life—a frilly child, a slender young woman with a Leonardo smile, a jolly undergraduate dressed as a man and impersonating the conductor Sir Hugh Allen.

  Biographies of Dorothy Sayers—four at least, including Janet Hitchman’s Such a Strange Lady—have been published already, but this is the most authoritative by far. Dr Barbara Reynolds, who is editing Sayers’s letters, has read more of them than anyone else, and she met and corresponded with her for eleven years and collaborated with her on her Dante translations. (About this she has written already in The Passionate Intellect.)