Читать книгу A Notable Woman - Jean Lucey Pratt - Страница 23

13.

Israel Epstein

Saturday, 29 August 1936 (aged twenty-six)

Luxembourg.

For a fortnight I hope no one can send me bills, solicitors cannot disturb me, and property need not worry me. We drove to Dover last night, lost our way and Martin his temper, arrived half an hour late but allowed on board. Belgium incredibly boring, drab, beaten, until we go beyond Brussels. Picnic lunch in Soignes Forest, lovely. Scenery from Namur to Bastogne and Luxembourg boundary enchanting. Dorothy and I sleeping in car, Martin in cart at side. Soon must wash in babbling brook.

Wednesday, 2 September

We have come through Luxembourg into Germany via Trier, the Saar, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, Titisee, the Bodensee, Meersburg, into Austria, Bregenz, and are now camped in the valley somewhere between Bludenz and Partenen. Nothing but mountains, fir trees, river blue sky and a sun setting on the further side of the valley. Martin and Dorothy have gone in search of milk.

It took me three days to realise I was abroad again: everything seemed so like England – trains, roads, cars, trams, European clothes. The civilised countries are getting alike. Everything in Germany very clean, efficient, stolid. A nation of mechanics, without imagination, kind, but ugly, bullet-headed, fat, corpulent, cigar smokers, beer drinkers. In Bavaria flowers in the windows everywhere. We went to a Biergarten last night in Lindau, but though the people there were well fed, I thought them dull, heavy, drably dressed.

Atmosphere in Austria a little different. A more dreamy light in the eyes of the people, villages still clean, but not so tidy. As Dorothy remarked, Austria seems the same as Germany but without that solidity.

M. rather mean-minded. Haggles about halfpennies and begrudges us a postcard. Dorothy is pretty, feminine, a little stupid, but easy to know.

Sunday, 6 September

We are now at the Gasthaus in the Falkenstein. Yesterday we spent partly at the Freiburg baths, and today we walked a little way into the Black Forest. They aren’t walkers, the others. I am not a walker either, but can walk the others tired without much difficulty. Martin doesn’t drink beer or spirits or smoke; his only appetite is for tea, which he drinks at any hour of the day. Lovely country, but a little too lush, too dark. I feel hemmed in, bowed down by mountains, vision barred and escape impossible.

Monday, 7 September

No marks left for a meal. We are feeding off nuts and peaches.

Friday, 11 September

Hampstead. Arrived back soon after seven. Cheeta was sweet but thinner and larger. Plants dusty and badly watered.

Wednesday, 16 September

Do not feel I have had a holiday at all, swept as I am into the turmoil again. Find I have been elected a member of the People’s Front Propaganda Committee.

From The Sunday Times … am gratified that I heard this story weeks ago:

‘There is this story, which is enjoying great popularity in Berlin. A lion escaped from a menagerie and arrived at a crowded restaurant in the dinner hour. Everybody fled in terror except one little man, who refused to move until the lion was near to him, when he took up a sharp knife and cut its throat. A newspaper reporter, who saw the affair from a doorway, rushed up and congratulated him “on the bravest deed I have ever seen,” and promised a full report in his paper the next morning. “May I have your name, please?” “Certainly,” replied the hero. “My name is Israel Epstein.” The journalist lifted his eyebrows and walked away. Next morning the following headline appeared: “Cowardly Jew attacks defenceless lion.”’

Sunday, 11 October

Our democratic liberties are in danger, so I am told. Everyone seems convinced of this – some say in the form of Fascism, an unreliable government, individual industrial interests, the Jews, Communists. The People’s Front may even be a mask from Moscow. Who is one to trust?

We want peace, individual freedom, free speech, equal opportunities. We would not tolerate a dictator. But we have no peace when partisan demonstrations cause disorder in our streets, when free speakers are bespattered with bad eggs, and opportunity is obviously the privilege of the minority.

‘The movement for a British Popular Front,’ wrote The Sunday Times political correspondent last week, ‘about which a good deal of noise was made in some quarters during the summer, is fizzling out.’ Is it? Although the People’s Front movement has brought these perplexities to my notice, and roused my sense of justice, I am still hesitant about its essence. If it is really a democratic movement, why has it not drawn in the more intelligent democrats? From what I have seen of them, the original members of the movement are regrettably peevish individuals, midgets with a grievance, hoping they have found something at last that will make them seem important. There is everywhere so much distrust. I would like to shrug my shoulders and leave it all for someone else to work out, which is an invitation to Fascism. We must learn to think and decide action each for ourselves.

Sunday, 18 October

For the first time in 27 years I celebrate the anniversary of my birth without either parent responsible for it. I have spent the whole day alone. Pooh has sent me a cable.

Saturday, 24 October

The exquisite Charles Scrimshaw is storming my imagination. I shall endow him with the usual extraordinary sensibilities and understanding, convince myself that his glances every Tea Dance in my direction are full of significance, and settle myself with him for the rest of my life – until I (if ever) speak to him. Then I shall discover he is not yet 25, is either married, thinking about it, or ‘pansy’ as Joan Silvester declares he is, because being inordinately conceited he combs his hair frequently before one of several mirrors.⁷⁶

Saw Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times this evening. A moving plea for the underdog.

Wednesday, 4 November

His glances in my direction seem more significant than ever. Nockie read my teacup a short while ago: ‘You’re going to be swept off your feet. Not a very tall man, and dark I think.’ Well, I wish the sweeping’d begin. I won’t endure another of these feeble infatuations. It is so easy, so fatal to fall in love with an idea.

The tenant moves with his family into Homefield this week. Cheeta has run away. I am afraid she has gone for good.

Monday, 9 November

Events have taken an unexpected turn. Mr Watson (of the People’s Front Propaganda Committee) descended upon me on Saturday with some letters to type, stayed to tea and wants me to have dinner with him one evening. I am flattered. Now Nockie has phoned to say that what she prophesied for me has happened to her. Did she read the wrong cup?

Saturday, 21 November

Nockie is in the thick of her affair: the situation is an astonishing one. Both are madly in love with one another, but he is married, and still loves his wife to whom he has been married only six months. He says he never believed a person like Nockie could exist outside fiction, and neither knows what to do next.

Friday, 27 November

I still feel in danger of drowning when I see Scrimshaw looking at me the way he does. He is insufferably conceited: he may only think he has found another mirror in me.

Saturday, 5 December

I am now collecting opinions on the King-Simpson bombshell.⁷⁷ My hairdresser was the first to tell me it was in the papers on Thursday morning. ‘One could forgive him making a fool of himself over something young and dainty, but an old hag like that …’

‘Thinks nothing of sending her £5 worth of flowers every week,’ said Mrs Rogers. That’s the sort of boyfriend I’d like. Aunt Emmie was so funny about it when I saw her in the summer: had I heard of someone at Belvedere who warmed his slippers for him?⁷⁸ Of course it was a dead secret and she mustn’t repeat names, but the lady in question was married, her name began with an S, and there was a firm of the same name in the Strand …

I am intensely sorry for him. I think the whole nation is (but no, I heard of someone’s uncle on Thursday night who said he needed horsewhipping). I do agree with the Statesman’s leader writer: he is being honest, and why won’t the government make a special law that the King’s wife need not be queen?

‘One did hope,’ said Aunt Maggie, ‘He would have chosen someone fresh.’

Thursday, 10 December

I pray that the King will neither abdicate nor give in to his ministers.

Tuesday, 22 December

King Edward abdicated. I was so sure he wouldn’t. Now everyone says War is upon us. I am so sure there won’t be a war.

The Scrimshaw infatuation continues to ferment.

Wednesday, 30 December

I have been reading through my Journals again. That affair with Colin in Bath – what a fool I was during the first weeks we met. I had him in the hollow of my hand, but like a strange toy in the hands of a clumsy child he slipped through my fingers. It was too late when I returned in the summer. Sometimes I think I will burn the Journals, rough notes and all. But when I read them through I know I cannot.

Saturday, 6 February 1937

I have not had such a bad attack of inferiority complex for months. For the past week I have had grave suspicions that Joan Spall has transferred her affections (for the third time since October) to Charles Scrimshaw. I have tried to ignore them and the pain it gives me. I have only the slenderest evidence and have been making mountains of it. I woke at 7 this morning in tears about it.

This is not an isolated instance: it has happened continually through my life, and weighs upon me heavily. Unless I make a supreme effort it will continue, so that I shall miss the affection and tenderness I crave. Without it, life is empty, however full of other things. The heart is hungry for the stimulating flow of love, and without the gift of it from another, the source in oneself dries up.

Tuesday, 9 February

The Empress Rooms … Joan Spall didn’t rush off to catch her train at 6.30, but was waiting suspiciously for someone in the lobby. I would so like to believe that C.S., in a discreet effort to get to know me, is trying to win Joan’s confidence first.

Wednesday, 14 April

I have finished The Suburban Chronicle.⁷⁹ It must now be read and criticised by sundry friends, then typed and turned loose among the publishers. I do not expect that it will be accepted anywhere very easily, but if it only brings me into contact with literary circles I shall be satisfied.

Sunday, 9 May

Coronation, coronation, coronation. The crowds nauseate and excite me. They nauseate me because their voices are loud, their clothes ugly, their manners vulgar. They excite me because they are excited and so friendly and good-humoured. I shrink from the vulgarity and messy emotionalism fostered by the commercial magnates – this sort of thing [from the Evening News, 8 May]: ‘If you are amongst those who have still things to buy – clothes, extra delicacies for the table, something new for the home, seats for the shows you want to see – utilise the short time left to your best advantage. Make an extra careful study of the advertisement columns of The Evening News, so that you may know without delay where your requirements are to be met to your certain satisfaction.’

I would like to feel one of a great, unified people paying homage to their new King, but I cannot. It is all so false. I wonder how much interest and loyalty they would show if it didn’t suit our tradesmen and the Church to excite it through the Press. People are saying it’s the last Coronation England is likely to have.

Saturday, 15 May

Saw something of the Coronation crowds and the fireworks on the Heath. Brilliant in spite of the rain. Had a long letter from Nockie, she suggests I go out to share a flat with her in Malta. Had a bad Scrimshaw attack on Thursday. Extraordinary. Thought I’d got over it.

Saturday, 22 May

The Suburban Chronicle came back, so magnificently typed and bound that it took me two days to summon my courage to read it. I felt as an artist must feel when he sees his first picture framed and realises it is not as good as it seemed on his easel. But I have sent it now to Jonathan Cape with a letter.

Sunday, 14 June

Jonathan Cape have returned the Chronicle.

Friday, 23 July

The Gods have given a sign. In returning The Suburban Chronicle, Lovat Dickson himself writes to me.⁸⁰ ‘The manuscript shows ability and cleverness. It reads rather like a first effort at writing by a talented person who does not know what she wants to write about. I think if you were to alter this or attempt something else you might do well with it. I want you to know that we shall always welcome and give careful attention to anything that you may send in to us to see.’

Sunday, 22 August

Today I must get the News of the World. On Monday 9th I went to the tennis court but no one was there, and someone had left a News of the World in which a buyer’s glove-judging contest tempted me. I spent the evening entering for it – a foolish bait of £500. Results published today.

Friday, 27 August

There was peace in Hampstead this afternoon as I walked up Willow Road, Flask Walk and Heath Street. People passing quietly about their business, children playing, old women walking their dogs, cats in the gutters. A cool afternoon, the sky a far, faint tremulous blue, fishes along the edges of the ponds, and I have never seen reflections in the water so clear and still. We shall remember such days with longing.

Thursday, 16 September

[From affixed blue letter paper headed ‘British India Line’.]

I have … boarded this tub for Malta. The travel agency phoned me on the Tuesday to tell me of this vacancy. I nearly died in the rush to get on board in time, and am now dying again with boredom.

Crowd on board mixed. Am singularly fortunate to be in the same cabin with Mrs Molly Joy, a nurse at the military hospital. Pretty, rather plump, full of energy, very outspoken and sure of herself within her orbit (anyone outside it is accordingly an imbecile). I like her. Gorgeously selfish. I doubt she would have noticed me if I hadn’t been in her cabin.

There are several young females on board, but most of them going East of Suez and chaperoned. One slender young thing called Kitty – whom everyone seems to despise – an artist of sorts, and I’m not sure I shouldn’t get on with her well. She skips and hops a lot – they say she’s affected. The half-caste who sits opposite M.J. at meals interests me. He has a very cultured voice, a Scotch name, good manners, but the colour in him is unmistakable – African probably, and it makes him, I think, a little self-conscious. (Later: I’ve nicknamed him Sharkie.)

What I detest about life onboard ship is its close, gossipy, uncharitable atmosphere.

Monday, 20 September

Malta. Never, never can I regret this evening. Landing at 10.30 p.m., a riotous party onboard, Nockie to meet me, drinks, drinks, drinks, and now here I am at 26, Strada Tigue. This is going to be no ordinary foreign excursion. I can hardly believe I’m here, the depressions of the past week washed away in gin, white wine, Benedictine, shandy and beer. Dear Sharkie, I’m glad I’m not staying on that boat or I might have fallen heavily, coloured though he was.

I have been given a room with a marvellous view: wide, wide windows, air wafting over the rooftops from the sea. We are going to have a good time here, Nockie and I, and I shall write my novel for Lovat Dickson.

Saturday, 25 September

Within a week the sirocco has reduced me to tears, for no particular reason except possibly the foretaste I have had of the difficulties that lie ahead. I know that Nockie is not going to be easy to live with. No person of her intense individuality could be. For the English here she has a supreme contempt, she dismisses them as a chattering, artificial horde of hysterical women and half-witted men.

My impressions of Malta: sticky, sticky heat, dust, ugly sandstone houses, bright sunlight, tiring on the eyes, the colour everywhere is dead – the colour of bleached bones, ill-treated cats, herds of degraded goats driven about the streets, screaming children, bawling hawkers, few trees, tawdry shops, priests, church bells, a gale-whipped Mediterranean from my window, wind, always wind. But through Nockie the place becomes a treasure island; treasure hidden, waiting for us to discover it.⁸¹

Thursday, 3 March 1938

I am on Spinola Palace roof, watching the Fleet go out for their spring exercises. An aircraft carrier seems to be leaving, decorated with bunting. Far out at sea were four destroyers and four cruisers. They have turned, and stand as if at attention.

The sky is grey with light, low clouds. Sounds of rifle practice from nearby barracks, traffic along the road, dogs barking, the flip-flop of Carrozzi horses, the wind has carried away my blotting paper, below me wanders a fat boy playing with carnival ball, imitation leopard-skin hat on his head. Four aircraft carriers have passed in a long line northwards.

Thursday, 24 March

Nockie is in a deep depression over the possibility of war. If Mussolini bombs Malta we shall be lucky if we have 24 hours’ notice. The Spanish may seize Gibraltar and close the Straits. What should I do, I was asked, if I was suddenly awakened by guns?

Yet for all this talk of bombs and dictators and death I believe that I shall survive, and that my journals – if nothing else – shall survive with me. Some of the old faiths must remain. I shall pack my papers and send them home.

Friday, 25 March

We are seeing the death of democracy, says Nockie. Sooner or later we shall have to fight for our Empire, though not perhaps for a few months. There will come a form of Fascism to England. We may win if we fight.

Monday, 28 March

Nockie describes me sometimes as an engaging rabbit who will not leave its burrow, and that I must go out and suffer experiences as she has done: ‘I have had more experiences crowded into my 34 years than most people have in a lifetime. A war would not help me, but it might do you a lot of good.’

It’s time I went home. God, please let me survive the next three months.

Wednesday, 5 July

The luggage has gone. Just like that. A completely wasted year as far as my work is concerned. Have learnt something more of life, met many people, but in essence am no happier, no clearer, no surer of myself or path. But if it is possible, this ambling is going to stop as soon as I get to Graham Howe.⁸²

Friday, 15 July

Hampstead. And now I am back again where I left off. Malta is an awkward dream that seems to have left little impression. Joan and Elsie Few gave me an uproarious welcome. The flat looks spotlessly clean, Joan has arranged flowers charmingly in my room.

It rained heavily as we approached Victoria. England was very grey and very green. I do not think that there are anywhere more beautiful trees than those in England. It is lovely, lovely to be home.

Friday, 22 July

I want a love affair. Something really exciting, stimulating. I know I am not unattractive, but I also know that love affairs don’t drop into one’s lap. I’m stuck, in danger of losing whatever little charm and ability for living I once possessed. Marriage with some worthy, reliable male seems the only hope. Today I counted up 8 or 9 possible paths to follow: architectural journalism, short story writing, the novel, ballroom dancing again, a job on the Dancing Times (through the Silvesters), furnishing and subletting flats as a commercial proposition, working for an architect’s diploma, marriage (to someone like Alan Devereux) or cutting adrift completely. I want, as Monica Haddow puts it, ‘to be rescued from virginity’. Feel myself growing flabbier and flabbier.

Urging myself to write to Graham Howe.

Monday, 25 July

I have been obsessed with the appalling idea of marrying Alan Devereux. In many ways so suitable – provincial upbringing, passionately fond of music, a very bad architect, loves argument, good physique, plays tennis well, owner driver of reasonable DKW,⁸³ tends to be conventionally unconventional, I like his sister – but oh one wants something more than this. I must be sure of physical reliability and possibility of satisfaction. I compare every man I think of in this way with Colin Wintle. I had no doubts about my desire to sleep with him at all; I still think that if we met again now I shouldn’t hesitate to have an affair with him. I wish we could meet and lay this bug.

I have had a cable from Barbados. Pooh and family expect to be in England by August 31st.

Friday, 29 July

I am still obsessed with the A.D. idea. I think it will be a long and difficult task, for he is obviously rather woman-shy. The idea is being most villainously encouraged by my friends. The Devereuxs go to Bavaria on Thursday. I made up my mind to join them so that I might have a chance of considering and settling this foolishness.

Wednesday, 3 August

The idea is with me day and night. All because I come home starved of affection, attention, caresses, a little scared by the approaching 30s, a little more tolerant of the idea of marriage, less willing to live alone.

A dream I had the other night is worth recording. I was stranded in Italy, brought into Mussolini’s presence, lavishly entertained and courted by him, was flattered by his attentions, had no doubt as to his intentions, but decided it would be amusing to lose my virginity to a dictator. But when he discovered I was a virgin he slapped me into prison. I tried to console myself with the thought that he is said to have syphilis.

Tomorrow we leave for Bavaria.

Friday, 19 August

I blush at my last entry. Nothing to record but another failure. We were bored with and irritated by one another. The object of my meditations was a muddler, fussy, with a tendency to meanness and narrow-mindedness. He bit his nails and gobbled his food and has a humiliating lust for cream cakes.

The Devereuxs, so Elsie tells me, are descended from Robert, Earl of Essex, their mother’s family from an illegitimate son of James II. I’m supposed to have an Elizabethan ancestor too, but it doesn’t seem to help very much.

Today I shall write to make that appointment with Graham Howe.

Friday, 26 August

I am

going to see

Graham Howe

(oh God!)