Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  And with that she stepped down from the chair and disappeared into her bedroom.

  Phyllis did not flicker an eyelid at her mother’s audacity. It was exactly as she had expected. A plan to outwit the lot of them.

  ‘Don’t forget to carry your bride over the threshold, Dick,’ came a muffled shout from Bella. She had retired to bed.

  It needed three taxis to take all of Bella and Alfred’s belongings. Two of the bailiffs shook Dick’s hand and helped him in with the tallboys. They spent over an hour unloading at Dick’s house. Phyllis had left her posy of heather behind, and by the time the newly-weds finally got a chance to sit down, they drank tea instead of champagne. Then they were late for the last flight to Paris. Dick drummed his fingers on the open front door as he waited for Phyllis to finish stuffing things in her suitcase. ‘Come on, for God’s sake!’ he muttered.

  They ran into the street and hailed another taxi.

  ‘What a wonderful woman your mother is,’ Dick said in the back of the car. ‘With what grace she creates problems and meets them and gaily surmounts them.’

  Within a few months, his attitude would change towards Bella. Yet Phyllis noticed it had only taken a few hours for his attitude to change towards her.

  Nothing was shifting. The lazy rituals of life in Paris had lost their attractions for both Dick and Phyllis, who were united by their restlessness. The same weary faces of friends were as familiar as the hard butter and baguettes, and all the cafés seemed identical with their nicotine-stained walls and draughty French panes. People may have been dressed in a red woolly scarf instead of a blue one, or wearing a heavier scarlet lipstick, but the conversations drawn out by red wine that spun round and round on the same point until the light went yellow, were the same. Their noses were dulled by the same smells – of French tobacco, of the waiters, of the patisserie, of the river, and of the city’s damp stone walls. Even painting in Paris had grown predictable. The city’s brightness had been drained and its sharpness had become blurred. The light that blankly shone on the buildings refused to throw any beautiful shadows.

  Before they got married, the couple had discussed how exciting it would be to abandon Dick’s apartment, Paris and everything, to go to Spain (for they both spoke fluent Spanish) on a painting tour. A bit like an old-fashioned Grand Tour, but without the grand.

  The hours they had actually spent alone together could have been counted on one hand. A piano concert in the Tuileries and Madame Butterfly at L’Opéra. Dick believed he had chanced upon his soulmate. Phyllis stood out among those coy, flirty girls who flitted their eyes up and down a man until he asked her if she would like a cigarette and then pouting, she would reluctantly strike up a conversation. Even though he had first met Phyllis years ago, as a gauche schoolgirl, he noted that she gave a slight wince at an arm around the shoulder, or a kiss on the cheek, just as he himself did. If Dick stared at her while she was in conversation with someone else, she might sense it and turn to smile at him, but there was nothing seductive in her look.

  Younger girls, Dick decided, were better for one’s ego. They adored an older man, and had the energy to indulge one’s every whim.

  To go off to Spain together was a way, Dick believed, he and Phyllis could get to know each other, without the quips and precious banter of their numerous friends. He also hoped that the dark passion of Spain, with its gloriously strong sun, might work on them both.

  ‘A fresh start,’ Phyllis had said.

  For if there was one temptation she could not resist, it was a fresh start. So, on their first morning together, they caught a train from the Gare d’Orsay and travelled south, through Biarritz, to Irun. In a figure of eight, they made their way around Spain, sometimes by donkey, sometimes by car and sometimes by train. It was a trip that lasted almost three years, before they settled for another five in Triana, Seville’s gypsy quarter.

  An account of their ramblings through the Basque countryside was recorded in their book Castilian Ochre – Travels with Brush and Pen. With ease and just as her eyes caught them, Phyllis describes the old towns, the women with their plucked eyebrows and hennaed hair, the cool, tall shuttered buildings and fawn-coloured oxen. Spain, she explains, is where nothing ever happens, and when it does, it is unexpected. Their only snippets of adventures are day to day encounters, jokes and misunderstandings with hotel staff, townspeople and local peasants, an Englishman abroad and a few near-misses of trains. Compared to the lurching unpredictability of her parents’ expeditions, the experience must have been a relaxing one for Phyllis. Or was it?

  On the cover of the book, Dick has drawn them both sitting side by side, their backs to the reader and with sketchpads on their knees. Rather tellingly, Dick’s right foot is slightly raised back on its heel and overlapping Phyllis’s foot, as if at any minute it may come down and trap her little shoe.

  More intriguing is the fact that the book cover says it is by Richard and Phyllis Pearsall – yet he only did the illustrations. All the text is written by Phyllis and when Dick actually speaks or is mentioned (albeit briefly) it seems as if he has somehow accidentally been caught up in her adventure:

  Our room was up in a high tower and the window looked down on to the village. It was bitterly cold out as a freezing wind was blowing down from the mountains. The lamps were flickering in the darkness on the balcony of every house, but there was not a living soul to be seen in the spectral square. The village seemed to be completely given up to the dead. Meanwhile the monastery bell kept up its unending tolling, the echo of each boom dragging itself almost to the next.

  ‘Confound that bell!’ said Dick. ‘It’s so damned depressing.’

  As they rattled in train after train down through Burgos, south to Valladolid and south-east to Madrid, their friendship became strained. Both could see it was useless, but even so they tried to make the relationship work. To agree on a location to paint. To not make all the decisions. To wait until the other had finished their canvas. To not take the first bath and the last clean towel. To stand closer and speak more gently. To be quiet without seeming sullen, to have privacy without appearing secretive, to be jolly without being annoying. Phyllis would have spun these around in her head, trying to weave them into each day simultaneously.

  Passion, at least, had never been a problem for Sandor and Bella, even when they had stripped down to pure hatred during one of their rows. Whereas here were two artists, each one believing themselves more talented than the other, and who had not so much as poached an egg for another person before, lashing themselves to a near stranger, for life, in the name of love.

  A rotten meal, a flea-ridden train, a damp bed, a throbbing head from the late-night chatter of castanets, a lost suitcase, an unsold painting . . . what ought to have been trifling annoyances grew into major causes of conflict.

  And for Dick it was obviously worse.

  Days and weeks that Phyllis had spent alone in the French countryside with her brother a few years before, had slipped by in a haze of painting, picnics and riverside sketching. Easy and quiet. Any jealousy that Phyllis may have had towards her older brother, evaporated with their peaceful companionship.

  On the early starts, to the sound of wood pigeons, they wobbled off on their bicycles laden down with baguettes, wine, rabbit pâté and paints. The only sound was the rasping tyres on the sandy lanes as they pedalled down to the river.

  These precious and rare times alone together must have given them both hope that one day, the younger Gross generation might be able to have a family of their own who would exist without fear. The fear of shouting, of failing and the fear of separation.

  Perhaps Phyllis had believed that her marriage to Dick would also flow into an undulating blur of beautiful days, each one spent devoted to their own canvas and their own thoughts. Instead, their self-imposed remoteness only made matters worse. Even as early as their first wedding anniversary Phyllis describes in Castilian Ochre how she bossily sends Dick off a train during a long stop to buy
some alcohol with which to celebrate.

  ‘Lyon!’ I said to Dick. ‘We must buy some wine here. It’s the anniversary of our wedding day.’ While he went to fetch it, I was left alone with a man in black.

  In a strange sort of way, the plain manner in which Phyllis chose to reveal their loveless marriage is a sneaky kind of testimony, so that if anyone in the future should not believe (or even blame her) for how ghastly her life with Dick had become, then there was proof, written down for all to see.

  From descriptions in the book and from interviews Phyllis gave years later, it is obvious that as soon as they were declared man and wife, Dick had somehow been overtaken by an irrational jealousy of Phyllis. Within months, his feelings of inadequacy had given way to an anger that he did not even attempt to keep under control. Unlike her father, Dick’s temper took the form of silent brooding that might rumble into a shouting match.

  There was anger, anger, anger, all the time. He wanted me to sell my pictures but as an artist he also wanted to sell his. But they didn’t sell. He was very jealous of my success and yet terrified about money. But if I painted it was wrong, and if it sold I was wrong. He was always finding fault. And if they keep finding fault, you walk out.

  Most couples who pull each other in opposite directions, after a while submit to each other; the extremes of their different characters lose momentum until both slowly catch the rhythm of the other to live and breathe in perfect sync. Dick and Phyllis never found that gentle harmony, where one could guess what the other was thinking, or walk side by side, step by step, without speaking but in perfect contentment. They could not go to a party without jealousy chasing them. Dick could not relax if he could not spot his wife, and Phyllis could not relax knowing her husband’s eyes were stalking her every gesture. If Phyllis had taken after her mother, she would have delighted in the power this gave her, possibly flirting with younger, richer men, whispering into the ears of her girlfriends and provocatively walking around the room, a glass in her hand, looking lost and then stopping on her own, knowing that it would only take a few seconds before the handsomest man at the party would come to her rescue.

  Fortunately, games were not Phyllis’s style. Her mother and father had tricked one another with enough of those for her to see that there were never any winners in games to do with love. Freedom was all Phyllis wanted from her marriage, freedom to paint, to do as she pleased and to do as she pleased without being challenged about it.

  Unfortunately, contentment would elude them both. For eight years, Phyllis carried on believing that everything was her fault. Just like her mother, berated by her father, the two women were forced by their spouses into believing they were the culpable ones, the ones at fault.

  Unlike Sandor, Dick’s foul temper reached beyond his marriage. Other people drove him into rages that were almost comical. Phyllis wrote about an incident one night in a tiny Spanish hotel:

  A noise of loud talking outside entered my dreams and finally woke me up. Dick was also awake, I could hear his sheets rustling.

  ‘Are you awake?’ he asked. I felt I could not keep up my pretence without laughing, though I was sad enough.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘They have no consideration,’ said Dick. ‘It wouldn’t be tolerated in any other country in the world.’ He sprang out of bed. ‘I’m damned if I won’t try to stop it.’

  Dick kept his finger pressed on the bell. Downstairs the bell rang like a fire alarm. The voices continued. I heard footsteps along the corridor. Dick pulled on his overcoat and his hat to hide his uncombed hair. Then a knock at the door. Dick whirled it open. I have never heard such a torrent of Spanish flow out of Dick.

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ said the man. ‘I will tell them.’

  Spontaneity and joy ebbed away from her painting. Her hands that flitted across the canvas became hesitant. Praise over her artistry was something Phyllis did not need, but the scathing undermining of her use of colour and form by Dick worked its charm.

  Every time Dick slugged back a drink and slammed the door behind him, Phyllis blamed herself for not making him stay. Pride would have stopped her from writing to her mother, while Tony would never have believed that his friend could turn so sour. Like many ill-treated wives, Phyllis picked apart the little things that she might have unwittingly done to upset Dick, in an attempt to rationalise his behaviour:I was also rather too popular with some handsome Spaniards, who woke us up at night singing serenades under our window.

  The scurry of rumours exist to this day, at the Geographers’ A-Z Map Company and even among Phyllis’s most senior members of staff, about her marriage status.

  ‘We always wondered if there ever was a Mr Pearsall,’ one director admitted. ‘She never mentioned him.’ Had she used, they wondered, Dick Pearsall’s name for business reasons, knowing that she would be taken more seriously as somebody’s wife, rather than as a spinster?

  Whatever the truth, it took until April 1935 for Phyllis to realise she could not stay married to such an unreasonable man. But when she did finally acknowledge that she could not take his intimidation any more she left within a week.

  ‘What do you do if they criticise you? You don’t say a word back. You just walk away.’

  It had been Dick’s plan to spend a week in Venice, Casanova’s birthplace. He knew it was the perfect time for the spring light to fall on the palazzi giving that sharp desert light that Turner had captured so well.

  In Phyllis’s mind, a half plan was slowly rolling itself back and forth, growing fatter and fatter, until she tired of it taking up so much space.

  Venice might be the place, she had thought.

  And it was.

  Sickened by Wagner and Chopin and the poets who had swooned over its fairy palace towers and maze of waterways, Phyllis was taunted by the shadowy bridges with their romantic connotations perfect for secret assignations. Oh, bugger Byron! she thought.

  Her smile, that had been held fast for so long out of duty, relaxed and became wider. She did not want to unwrap her water colours for the pinky marble palaces, nor capture the sunrise on the jasper-laced church walls. Furious with his wife’s indifference and for wasting their money, Dick became even more engrossed than he ordinarily would have been at some little bridge, where seawater from the Adriatic washed an exquisite tourmaline glow on the walls. Phyllis left him there squinting into the distance and dabbling in his oils, for what might have been days.

  Titian masterpieces could wait. She did not want to look at art. She walked alone along the sands of the Venice lido and through the noisy back streets. The diamond-pricked water of the Grand Canal shone at everyone but Phyllis. Couples draped like sloths across one another kissed in the rocking gondolas. On the Rialto Bridge, every man seemed to be whispering a promise to the woman he held. Inside every church, decked heavily with ancient ruby velvet, there would be a sightseeing couple, their fingers entwined and he, stopping every now and then, would kiss the top of her head.

  Twos and twos. Pairs of people. They made her feel giddy as they surrounded her in the hum of narrow streets. During the day she forgot to eat. Who knows where Dick ate, maybe at Harry’s Bar. At night, she and Dick would leave the Bauer Grünwald Hotel to go out for dinner in the restaurants of St Mark’s Square. A thousand candles and a thousand pairs of eyes bright. A knee touching, a cheek blushing, a musical conversation; Phyllis stored every intimate gesture of every man and woman. Perhaps Dick tried to make conversation. She did not see him any more. She could not hear him either. She had already gone.

  The following morning was a Sunday. The bells that so bothered Dick at night would not rouse him now. Phyllis knew he would sleep until midday. Methodically and slowly, she packed her suitcase. She counted her money. Enough to return to London. After a bath, she lined her clean and unused paintbrushes back in their box, with her sketch-books. Her eyes ran over the curled body of her husband, who would marry again one day, a girl from Ireland. She noted his grey shirt, trousers and socks danci
ng across the carpet. His hat. His shoes. She caught them in her head and walked out.

  Many years afterwards, in 1990, she told Patricia Mowbray in an interview for the Sunday Times Magazine:

  After eight years, I thought, do I really need to start each day with someone angry with me and always worried about money, instead of going out and doing something? And I left.

  But the leaving wasn’t easy. Guilt would trail after her until her death.

  In an unpublished interview with Anne de Courcy of the Daily Mail, she was once asked if there were any regrets in her life. She answered, ‘Walking out on my husband without saying a word. That’s the worst thing you can do to anybody. I did it because I can’t argue – my whole childhood was spent watching my parents fight.’

  It was the end of another chapter in her life.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘Kiss It Goodbye’

  The sound was of fingers drumming. As Phyllis shadowed the frilled and capped Sister down the corridor, past the series of cell doors, she forbade herself to picture what lay behind them, so she locked her eyes on to the ring of keys pirouetting from Sister’s waistband. ‘Present fears,’ she mumbled to herself, ‘are less than horrible imaginings.’

  The drumming ceased as a scorched voice escaped from the end cell.

  ‘Let me out. Let me out. Let me out. Let me out.’

  Phyllis found herself being prodded over the threshold of a red padded chamber.

  ‘Mrs Gross. It is your daughter to see you. I shall return in half an hour,’ shrilled Sister after she had clunked shut the steel door behind her.

  Unimaginable smells.

  ‘My darling Mama,’ Phyllis longed to say, but in reality it is doubtful that her mouth was able to move at all. Ceiling, floor, dead or alive, buried or exposed, wondered Phyllis as the soles of her feet began to sweat. A vision sliced her thoughts of her own mortality, of the choices she would need to make and of the choices that would have to be made for her. But before she could be smothered by her past, Phyllis was scooped back by her mother, hobbled in the corner spewing gobbledy-gook.