'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  April 9

  We got back to England to hear that old Queen Mary had died and her favourite operetta, Cavalcade, was being played on the radio, but we turned it off when the Titanic began to sink.

  Pop sounds amiable as he calls to me through the hole in the wall to ask how I slept. Mrs Lea is less frowning and mutters less since her Easter holiday. I enjoy my breakfast, fresh dairy butter, warm toast and tea piping hot. I finish off the remains of the Oxford marmalade. Pop says he doesn’t enjoy his. The butter tastes of marrow, tea lukewarm, and toast dry and cold. That I have eaten all the marmalade, but the accusation is said without bitterness because he has awoken in a good humour.

  The grey weather persists. From the window, stained, yellowy humps of grass made uneven by the worm casts. The leaf buds are constipatedly holding back. The nectarine against Kupy’s hut has already broken out in peach curl. In a fury, Cyril sends Coombes a telegram. ‘Nectarine blighted as usual. Please come as promised.’

  Back in England for five weeks. We are all the time awaiting something; is it the sun that never appears? Cyril says it’s the grave. He has a fan letter from a Dutchman complimenting him on his Coleridge review, in which he has described The Ancient Mariner as a barbarous jingle. Today, we finished off the Spanish ham that Bill gave us. It was minced, mixed with cream, egg yolks and mustard. The guinea chicks eat the last rinds. Have difficulty enticing Pop out of the bath. Mrs Lea bangs about in the kitchen, hopping from one foot to the other, holding a dishcloth, every two minutes saying, ‘Is he out yet?’ When I ask her if she would like to go to the Coronation, she says decisively not. How dangerous the stands look. And what a lot of money is being spent. She is sure the Queen does not want it, either. ‘Science fiction! That’s what it is,’ says Pop, emerging from the bath carrying his book and dressing-gown, a ragged towel partially draped round his brioche, beads of water glistening on his fat back. ‘It gets me, baby,’ he says.

  May 20

  Waiting, waiting, waiting for the spring? The summer? Whatever it is, it does not arrive. We have been having a trying time owing to Cyril’s book of Horizon comment. Yesterday, the first review. Philip Toynbee in The Observer, full of malice and unspecified criticism. All through the day, Pop’s hurt feelings exposed in different shades of pink all over his face. He lies on his bed in his kennel, groaning. I talk about it all the time to make it easier and give him what consolation I can. Assure him the rest of the reviews will be good.

  *

  Weidenfeld gave a party. It was a combined party for Cyril’s Golden Horizon. Was taken by Chuff who was wearing a new suit. Host offers a lukewarm Martini or sherry. Henry Yorke approaches. ‘You two together again!’ he beams. ‘Any news of Poppet?’ ‘We don’t correspond.’ ‘Why is that?’ His face lights up; ‘I suppose you tried to get off with Pol.’ HE HE HE! I beam at Dig Yorke; we never have anything to say. No one else approaches except Cyril who grabs my arm and says, ‘Keep away from that fellow,’ indicating Chuff. ‘Everyone is asking if we are separated.’ We return to the crowd. I greet Kitty. Jack Lambert is friendly. The Davenports snooty. I mutter inanities. Baroness Budberg friendly. Tom Hopkinson friendly. His wife, ditto. Joan friendly for once. V S Pritchett friendly. Jocelyn Baines friendly, but on the defensive. June in powder-blue chiffon, very much the insipid English beauty. Chuff buffeting and blinking with bent head, a tired bull’s stance. Ann Fleming and Peter Q converse on the stairs in a reclining pose, à la debs’ dance, in a heart-to-heart. Father d’Arcy and Isaiah Berlin in the distance.

  The end of May

  Yesterday, the ash came into flower. Have been reading the final volume of Koestler’s autobiography. A continuous repetition of the names of dead comrades and the circumstances in which he knew them. He hears his voice as a warning to the world.

  *

  Raindrops on the roseleaves like jewelled blobs. Cyril has gone to London to get some advance money from Weidenfeld. We are quite broke. The telephone cut off. Bills pouring in. We invite ourselves to the Campbells. Arrive at Ashford to find a Sunday train service and Charing Cross in the thick of the Coronation. A taxi pulls up. ‘You’re in luck,’ shouts the driver. ‘I’m the only taxi in London today.’ The procession route is barricaded off like a sacred walled city, the surrounding streets deserted, a lot of stray colonial-looking men standing in doorways sipping coffee out of thermos flasks, the streets littered with empty cartons, silver paper and squashed stubs. We cross to the Paddington Station Hotel where the Coronation service is being transmitted on television. To my surprise, it is really impressive. The Queen glittering, stately, a cleric walking calmly on each side, trainbearers and a general impression of rigid limbs and stiff necks all bearing weights … After sipping some disgusting coffee in the hotel lounge, stocked with motoring magazines, we board another train. We are met by Mary’s cowman. Two grey ducks quack at us, a litter of black ‘dak’ puppies like fat little puddings tumble out of the kitchen. I am shown the young bantams; how pretty they are. On entering the house, we are again struck by the filth. The stairs up to our rooms coated in dust. Dust seems to seep into one’s clothes. When one gets out of the bath, one is appalled by the floating filth on the surface. A long passage has to be traversed before reaching the communal eating room and Cyril remarks on the reek of chicken-shit as we go into each meal. The evening of our arrival, we are told there would not be much of a meal, as we were being taken to a fireworks display. So, we just ate oeufs Mornay, me helping to peel the eggs. It was a five-mile drive. We reached a large Queen Anne house beside the river, coloured bulbs were strung along the water front, a gramophone was playing and the music transmitted through a pick-up. As soon as we arrived it started to rain. A group of people stood about the hall, Ralph and Frances Partridge among them. We were offered nothing.

  Clusters of expectant faces wait about in the rain. Everyone making conversation. The fireworks went on for over an hour. One felt frozen. ‘They’re no good. They’ve become damp,’ the hostess wailed. ‘It’s the noise that matters,’ I said. ‘They are wonderful,’ said an old man from the village. She sighed with relief. ‘Do you really think so?’ It was all she wanted to hear. Nearing midnight, we were invited into the warm, brightly-lit, log-fired drawing room and offered beer and cake! Our hosts had both been in the Abbey and showed us their coronets. Then, Mary wanted to go on to a village dance with her cowman, but Robin made a fuss. We were all tired. The fireworks were certainly very fine; it was a pity it had rained. The following day, Robin showed me his roses. He takes great care of them, pinching off each greenfly in his fingers. It was an expensive visit as Cyril had taken a large parcel of champagne and claret. But the Campbells are cosy. The last evening, we motored thirty miles to dine with the Pritchetts. Mary had described Mrs VSP as being the best cook she knew. We had plovers’ eggs, tinned turtle soup and the most delicious duck, with a rich walnut dressing. Robin never spoke. We all stood about a great deal reading Vogue and Harper’s magazines. On the last evening at the Campbells, a rat scuttled across the kitchen. Mary said, ‘Take no notice, it’s one of our pets.’ I backed ‘Ambiguity’, the winner of the Oaks, picking on the name, and it came in at eighteen to one.

  *

  On Friday, we were taken to Marlborough, where we caught a double-decker bus to Salisbury. At the station we ran into Eddie Sackville-West and all three of us squeezed into the restaurant car. We ate a thoroughly nasty meal. I covered everything with Heinz mayonnaise; Eddie was shocked, ‘Do you really like it?’ he asked. ‘Not at home, but always on trains,’ I told him. A taxi met us at the station in Cornwall. We had a ten-mile drive to Newton Ferrars. It was so cold that I sat, with ice-cold feet, huddled up in my sheepskin coat. Bertie Abdy came in from the garden when we arrived. We saw his beautifully-polished leather slippers carefully laid out in the hall. There were some good-hearted jokes about the size of his feet – they did seem rather long and pronglike. He was wearing a thick, stone-coloured, cowl-necked pullover, of the Simpson variety. W
e all sat round a well-stocked teatable. There was a delicious-looking honeycomb on the table and I expressed a wish to have some for my breakfast (but I never did). I did not like Diane Abdy’s taste in interior decorating; it was a little Eric Woodish, only on a more luxuriant scale. Cyril was ticked off for carrying one of our suitcases up the stairs instead of leaving it to the butler. We dressed for dinner, the host wore a very becoming bottle-green dinner jacket with velvet facings. After dinner, we were shown the library which was full of precious objets d’art. Next morning, the midget hostess greeted me in trousers and was levered up on high green cork-wedge shoes. The food was disappointing, although in a typical English-good-cook way the puddings were excellent, particularly the crème brûlée. Sunday was spent motoring to the far end of the Cornish ‘boot’ and back in order to hear a musical festival which consisted of a young man seated at a piano, dreamily playing Arthur Bliss sonatas, surrounded by pots of pale hydrangeas. We stopped at St Michael’s Mount on the way. How beautiful the smooth sands looked and the sea so calm and grey. We chugged across in a small motorboat as the tide was up and were greeted by a walrussy host with a rich fruity voice who, with much pride, showed everyone his mounting cliff garden; the mesembryanthemums were very knotted and tight, laid out like deep purple-and-pink prayer mats, firm juicy succulents protruding from out of the rocks. Once at the top we seemed to be at a great height. Horror! Inside the fortress it was a cross between Peniscola and the Escorial, only less impressive. The heavy oak furniture. The chunky stone walls. Seated at a long oak table refectory-fashion, we ate tea, surrounded by portrait-burdened walls, paintings done by Opie, with one portrait of the present Lady St Levan done by Moynihan. After tea, a tour; a chapel; a chart room; a map room; some eighteenth-century costumes of great beauty. Afterwards, Cyril said, ‘One more room full of compasses, and I should have flagged.’ With boredom gnawing at my vitals and the horror of having to cope with any more fresh faces that had to be ‘looked into’ and ‘talked at’, I decided to depart.

  Monday was a day of tension. Cyril and I wrangling in whispers because of my going, every sound penetrating the walls. The cook and the butler rowing in the kitchen and the Abdys conversing in their quarters about the servant trouble. I caught a train to Truro and was met by Nancy.

  My stay with Nancy, a cipherine friend from Cairo, was not altogether a success. I felt her uneasiness, as when she is nervous she develops an unconscious sniff, and then she kept repeating, as if to assure herself, ‘Oh, it is nice to see you!’ And I was glad to see her. Her mother was a tall, bony, purple-faced woman, continually wandering through whichever room we were talking in, carrying a large dog’s bowl. ‘Do you see how alike we are?’ Nancy asked. ‘People talk to Mummy for hours under the impression they are addressing me.’ Nancy’s Uncle Harry was there, grunting, with swollen pouches under his eyes. They all talked across me at dinner, in the typical English fashion; I suppose they are so used to meals alone together that one probably is invisible to them. I had a bad night, waking in the early hours to a stampede of rats. I sweated a lot and had a final impression of having been visited by a vampire after discovering two small red scratches on my thigh. We ate some home-grown strawberries. ‘What are these?’ I asked. ‘Climax or Sovereign?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Mrs T. ‘Number Threes,’ said Harry. ‘They come in numbers now.’ Harry told us he’d tried to see the Coronation on a neighbour’s television. ‘It was hopeless,’ he said, ‘like rain falling.’

  *

  Go down to Hythe to see my mother. She tells me she has just missed winning the tote double. She irons my blouses. I watch horrified as she presses creases. She says she likes ironing and won’t let me do it. She tells me how much she now likes living alone and how she wondered when Daddy died if she would ever be able to.

  I meet Cyril later in the Sandgate bookshop. He is laden with calf-bound first editions bulging out of his pockets. ‘You are being self-indulgent today,’ I say. We go over to the hotel opposite and are joined by Edgell Rickword* and his wife. ‘Are they all unreadable firsts or readable seconds?’ ‘A bit of each,’ Cyril says. He has some Lamb Letters to Coleridge. Coleridge is the new craze at the moment.

  Mr Rickword has sex appeal. He was wearing a flecky-brown pullover, the kind a schoolmaster might wear, horn-rimmed specs and his eyes were blurred like a dead fish’s. He focuses on the ground, or so it seems, and talks in whispers, as though he has such a low opinion of himself that he doesn’t want anyone to hear what he has to say. He does not think The Ancient Mariner such a bad poem. Taken as a whole, it has a hypnotic effect. Cyril picks out two bad lines and says, ‘You can’t call that good.’ Mrs Rickword dashes in, carefully made-up face and black hair screwed back with a large tortoiseshell comb which should have been supporting a mantilla. She is extraordinary and seems to want to swallow us all up; she says everything with great force and looks permanently belligerent. Her small black eyes bore into one and when she speaks she seems to chew the air. ‘What has become of Honor Tracy?’ she asks. Cyril says he didn’t know her. ‘I used to know Brian Howard very well … I adore Basle,’ she says, ‘though you have to know the right parts, the special parts. I know them all.’ She snapped her jaw at us and glared like an animal at bay with nutty eyes hooded by a heavy brow. Suddenly, Cyril announced we were going to see a Joseph Cotten film in Hythe. We order a ham sandwich and rush out. ‘Rickword has sex appeal,’ I say to Cyril. ‘Not any more,’ C says, ‘he’s been sucked dry by communism.’

  May 28 Whitsun Weekend

  Yesterday, we went to lunch at St Margaret’s Bay. Lucian Freud was there, looking very clean and sunburnt. He has sly bluey-green cats’ eyes. If he is not there, he is invariably talked about and although he ran everybody down (bar Sonia) he was at his most sweet-natured. Ann Fleming and James Pope-Hennessy sat at either end of the table. Lucian next to James and myself beside the hostess, thereby placing two women and two men cheek-to-cheek. It was a poor lunch, as usual, with under-ripe melon, dried-up lobster and milky mayonnaise, a mushy insipid onion and lettuce salad, cold meat and inferior red wine. Ann immediately began reeling off her luncheon parties of the previous week. Her great pride this time was one consisting of Joan Rayner, Peter Watson, Koestler, Tom Hopkinson and his wife. ‘Why the Hopkinsons?’ we asked. She was anxious to see what Mrs H was like. ‘Oh, just idle curiosity,’ said her sister, Laura Dudley,† who was sitting on Cyril’s right. Apparently, Ann had not thought much of Mrs H. She liked Koestler. Laura Dudley said he became a fearful bore when drunk. He was not drinking, Ann said. LD said that you never notice he is drunk until he suddenly begins to lay down the law and hold the floor. Ann had wanted to take Lucian to the lunch but Ian, who had not attended, had objected. James Pope-H has bitten-down finger nails and a face the colour of mud. He described Weidenfeld as being oleaginous. They discussed Philip Toynbee’s review of Cyril’s Golden Horizon book. They thought Philip had behaved ‘monstrously’ and that he must be ‘a nasty piece of work!’ Sonia’s disappearance was discussed. C said it indicated that at last she was happy. Lucien said he was pleased for her to have found someone, but with her disposition he didn’t believe she had found much happiness. Then HAPPINESS was thrashed out. For how long was it possible to remain in a state of happiness? Ann thought it was not possible for longer than a fortnight. James P-H said he could be perfectly happy by himself and that places gave him as much pleasure as people, that he had recently spent a blissfully happy time alone in some watering place. They were all horrified. ‘James is like a candle talking to a lot of moths,’ said Cyril, and everyone laughed. ‘I thrive on tension,’ said Ann, ‘but it’s so exhausting. One needs a lot of vitality.’ ‘We all like tension,’ said Cyril, ‘and thrive on tugs-of-war so long as the rope is evenly balanced. When the tension and vitality go, there is your happiness, as with Sonia.’ They were all very exhilarated with the discussion and rose from the table flushed like radishes. Ann once stated that all she cared about was power and that sh
e would like to be fabulously rich in order to wield as much power as possible. When she enters a roomful of people, she immediately has to squat in their midst on the floor, she likes to be the core. The other day, at Joan’s party, when Ann went into ecstasies about a painter called Devas whose paintings she described as being ‘so cosy’, Robin Ironside sharply replied, ‘I don’t know that I agree that “cosy paintings” make for cosiness.’

  * Editor of a literary monthly of the 1920s, The Calendar of Modern Letters.

  † Then married to the Earl of Dudley.

  Chapter XVI

  Overnight in France

  Diary

  June 1, 1953

  Early last week, Joan Rayner telephoned and asked if we were prepared to leave for France. It turned out to be a plan she and Cyril had hatched together, that we should accompany her across the Channel, have lunch at Montreuil and see her off on the ‘rest of the summer’ tour round Europe. Cyril’s overdraft is so immense that he cannot cash any more cheques and no money is due before three weeks. But Joan has lent him twenty pounds, which will enable her to have company en route but does not help him to live within his means.

  *

  In preparation, we go to London. I have my legs shorn. Hair set and manicure. Very extravagant, I am sure, but perhaps I can be permitted these small indulgences to maintain a little confidence. London is empty, grey and tawdry with dirty flags and tattered streamers fluttering from the buildings. There are no taxis, the buses infrequent. The Ritz is full of people dressed up, waiting for transport. I am squeezed between two people on the bus, the man on my right presses into me, looking steadfastly out of the window at the park. I realise he is trying to get off with me; he is quite attractive, a road mender type. Laden with parcels (a new suit) I reach Charlotte Street later than instructed. Cyril glares, as he opens the door of Joan’s flat. We harangue each other all the way up the stairs. Joan glares, when I enter the sitting room. We finish a bottle of warmish champagne. Everything is packed up. The flat looks bleak, awaiting new tenants. We all pile into Joan’s new second-hand Bentley (original owner Philip Dunn). Me at the back directing the way. Once out of the built-up areas we speed up. I feel cold, but in spite of repeated entreaties for the window to be closed there is always a fraction left open. Neuralgic pain starts in my head. I undo parcel and wrap a small velvet jacket round my head. We make for the Boughton pub. All pile out, Cyril having spent most of the journey praising the good food there. After consulting the menu, C tells Joan that we have only dined there once (implying that if anything goes wrong he will not be held responsible). I have to contradict him. (Don’t see why he should get away with such a blatant lie, being one of the first people to criticise others for similar offence.) Joan looks at me very crossly. I am spoiling their fun. We eat a meal just like any other there. Bad, but Cyril is pleased because on his advice the owner has got in some good claret. It is 1934 and expensive. I drink it with smoked trout, my first course being marmite soup. A lot of port drunk afterwards. Cyril offers the owner a glass of port and tells him what was wrong with the dinner. The man betrays neither surprise or dismay; he says most of his clients don’t know what good food is, but that he is slowly teaching them. Flushed and content, Cyril pays the bill. I sometimes wonder, is he such a gourmet, after all? We press on. Cyril exaggeratedly well-mannered toward Joan in marked contrast to his attitude toward me, which is worse than that of a man to his dog. I am cross when we arrive at the cottage. While I go to put the geese to bed, I purposefully let them stumble into the house in the dark so that they both fall over a laundry basket barring the passage. When I get back, Joan says she would like a glass of water to take to bed, ‘if it is not too much trouble’ and might she have a hot water bottle ‘if it is not too much trouble’. A lot of mewing goes on between them as to what book she shall read in bed. They run through a hundred possibilities. I say sharply that the outhouse is crammed with miscellaneous reading matter and she only has to LOOK. She goes off without saying good night. Cyril and I wrangle over the lamps. He insists on putting a smoking Aladdin in her hut. I protest. There is a tug-of-war until I wrest it away. ‘You bloody bitch,’ I am told.