The Heald sisters had lived together harmoniously for most of their lives. Mother, to whom they were devoted, lived with them until her death shortly before the move to Chantry in 1934. She was in later years a dumpy figure rather like Queen Victoria and had a reputation for making the best coffee in London. Before moving to Steyning they owned a fine Regency house at 24 St Petersburg Place, near Hyde Park, with a red Riley in the garage and a flat for the chauffeur at the top of the house. (Edith was an erratic driver, known to go to sleep at the wheel.) They earned their standard of living through ability and hard work. They were not, like Gluck, born into money. Their family, originally from Larne in County Antrim, Ireland, moved to Accrington in Lancashire. ‘… my Lancashire great-grandmother smoked a pipe among her men folk and joined in their discussion on that startling fellow Tyndall and the possible effect of the newly projected Atlantic cable …’ Edith wrote in the Sunday Express, 19 July 1927. Throughout her life she kept up the Irish connection. She had a cottage in Rosapenna, in Donegal, and she and Gluck went on walking holidays there. In later years Gluck painted landscapes on these Irish holidays.
There were two brothers, Harry, who became an engineer, and Ivan who was killed in the 1914–18 war. Each year after he was killed, until the end of her own life some sixty years later, Edith put an In Memoriam tribute in The Times. He too was a journalist; he wrote humorous, satirical pieces for the Manchester Guardian. An anthology of his work, Ivan Heald: Hero and Humorist, was published when he died in 19175 a collection of lighthearted, youthful pieces on such topics as Americans in London, philately, an Anarchist meeting in Newcastle, or ‘How to Buy a Straw Hat’. In the war he was commended for conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty. He sent his mother and sisters reassuring letters from the graveyards of Alexandria and Gallipoli:
When we arrived we found the trenches strewn with dead Turks and bits of dead Turks. It is not really half so ghastly as you would think, or maybe it is that we have lost all of our sense of these things.… I think I can stand it all better than anyone here and I am never despondent. I do hope you won’t trouble about me whatever happens.… I want you to send me some garden seeds like nasturtiums and calceolarias and things so that I can have a wee garden. Also another drawing pad and a modern Greek primer and some Japanese water colours and things. And some whiskers and moustaches for the national theatre that I hope to start here.
Father was never mentioned. Mary, their mother, left him, though she had no money, when the children were in their teens. Rumour had it that he drank and womanized. None of them subsequently saw him and on an occasion when Nora was drawing up a family tree, she left him off it with the remark ‘We don’t mention him.’6
In an article for the Daily Express, 10 August 1929, called ‘Men Who Interest Me’, Edith cited the King, Albert Einstein ‘a man who thinks in immensities … his mental adventures seem to me more terrifying than journeys to polar silences or solitary Atlantic flights …’, Edmund Dulac ‘… he could have been just as famous as a musician or a writer or an actor, and can cook a chicken with the same perfection with which he draws an Arabian princess in an enchanted forest’, G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells, whom she described as
attractive … but too reasonable to be mysterious and do not excite my curiosity as much as Mr W.B. Yeats, whose grave manners and melodious conversation seem to take one back to a more spacious ancient world, who can be as practical as any other Irishman (which is saying a lot) and yet sees the fairies and has dealings with spirits …
It seems that Edith was the last of Yeats’s lovers. She first met him when, aged twenty-one, she was in Manchester attending a lecture of his. Of their early relationship there is no record, but after Gluck’s death in 1978 about sixty letters from Yeats to Edith were sold to the Houghton Library, Harvard. Personal and passionate in tone, they date from 1937 until his death in 1939, keep her informed of all aspects of his work, invite her comments on the progress of his poems and cover such matters as his radio broadcasts with Dulac, the affairs and disputes of the Abbey Theatre, his family, friends and contemporaries. In 1937, when Edith was fifty-three and Yeats seventy-two, he was writing to her (29 May 1937) sentiments that echoed her own views on the ‘better bouquets than those we get at our first dances’. He wrote, in words that commend the romantic sensibilities of older people, of how, had Edith been younger, true intimacy between them would have been impossible. He told her he thought the finest bond of all occurs ‘when we have outlived our first rough silver’ and of how sweet this bond can be to the old and the half old. He spoke of his profound hopes for their friendship and of how peaceful the understanding and sympathy she accorded him made him feel.7 In a letter to Maud Gonne in June 1938 he described Edith as ‘one of the best-paid women journalists in the world. She found she had no leisure so she gave up the most of it.’
He stayed for months at a time in the Chantry House. Edith evidently revered him and provided him with an ideal environment for work. The ‘Yeats Room’, as it was called, was kept just for his use. He wrote many of his later poems and plays for the Peacock Theatre there and discussed his work with her: ‘When we meet at the end of the month I shall have much poetry to read you …’8 When in England he would stay with the poet Lady Dorothy Wellesley (who, though married to the Duke of Wellington, had a sexual preference for women) at her home Penns in the Rocks in the village of Withyham, about thirty miles from Steyning, and then move on to the Chantry House.
By 5 February 1938 he was writing to Edith that in England she alone mattered to him. They went on holiday to the south of France – to Monte Carlo and to Cap Martin, where they stayed at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour.9 On these trips Edith looked after him – he was suffering from a heart condition that made his ankles swell – and acted as his chauffeur.
His letters to her became quite impassioned – a mixture of friendship, timidity, romance and longing. They showed a growing dependency on her – her love of his work and understanding of it, the peace and comfort of the Chantry House, the quiet of her personality and her talk.
By 15 March 1938 he was writing of how, after a sleepless night, he wanted her arms to make him sleep. On 25 June he told her that what was left to him in life was hers. On 5 September he wrote of needing her as earth needs Spring and of how, in his fantasy, he began with timidity to hold her. On 12 September he wrote that he longed for her in body and soul, that his feelings forther transcended speech and that he wanted to say to her the kind of foolish things sometimes read out in breach of promise cases.
His wife, George Yeats, was unperturbed by his interest in Edith. ‘You won her goodwill,’ Yeats wrote to Edith of George and spoke of having her blessing for them to go away together. George Yeats wrote sharp letters to Edith from her home in Rathfarnham in Dublin about ensuring that WB took his medicine:
Do please extract from him his prescription for the digitalis mixture and make him take it twice a day while he is still with you.… He needs so much intellectual stimulus that you and others can give, but he unfortunately also needs that heart stimulus. And nobody can feel more passionately than I that he has to return to this desolate place.10
Both Edith and George shared a vigil over Yeats’s body the night after he died on 28 January 1939 at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Menton in the south of France. ‘… I watched over him until 4a.m.’ Edith wrote (26 August 1968). ‘His features had become even more noble and beautiful than I had known them. It was a wonderful southern night of stars and I remembered that “the heavens themselves blaze forth the deaths of princes”.’11 To commemorate him Edith put a plaque on the wall of Chantry House: ‘William Butler Yeats 1865–1939 wrote many of his later poems in this house’.
Edith was generous, appreciative and nurturing of talent. Her book reviews, too, were receptive, informed and filled with insights. She gave to Gluck the same loyalty and devoted appreciation that she had given to Yeats. She thought her gifted, referred to her genius, and made allowances for her impossible te
mperament. Gluck noted in her own diary a comment, that perhaps alleviated her guilt over her own difficult behaviour, made by Yeats to Edith: ‘We who create have to cultivate our wild beasts; most people have to subdue them.’ The theatre critic and diarist James Agate, who knew Edith well, wrote in his Ego diary volumes ‘Edith is a tower of sympathy to people in trouble and spends her quick and noble mind generously.’12 The writer, Anne Scott-James, whose parents often used to stay at the Chantry, until Gluck moved in, describes Edith as an intellectual and a good conversationalist. People thought her reserved, rather self-effacing, with a droll sense of humour, and given to making pithy asides. She remarked, for example, as a dull, newly married couple left a tea party at the Chantry, ‘How nice that they’ve married each other, and not one of us.’ And James Agate recorded lunching with her and the publisher Alan Dent at the time of Edward VIII’s scandal with Mrs Simpson, and Edith commenting: ‘Peter Pan is a charming play for children. It is not a rule of conduct for a great nation.’13 She had a kittenish, mischievous smile when saying such things, so Edmund Dulac nicknamed her Kokoscha (Russian for little kitten). He did a drawing of her to capture that expression.
Gluck entered the sisters’ intellectual, civilized world five years after the death of Yeats. Nora evidently had reservations about the ménage à trois from the time when Nesta called in to see her at The Lady offices in September 1944. Edith was adamant at wanting Gluck to live with them and thought it would work out. For Gluck, whatever her feelings about Edith, the move seemed to offer solutions to her problems. It took her away from the pain and disappointment of her relationship with Nesta and it resolved her struggles with the Trustees over the upkeep of Bolton House. Bolton was sold, after a few more rows, in 1945 to a Dr Martin Pollock of the Medical Research Council and the money reverted to Gluck’s Trust. But she kept on the studio and had a wall built at the end of the paved garden, at a cost of £50, to separate it from the house.
Gluck felt, too, that Chantry would provide an atmosphere conducive to work. Here were professional women who had made their own way, depended on no one else’s money and had earned their success. It was away from the West End whirl, the Meteor’s pressures, Nesta’s dilettantism. Here was solid professionalism where she could, above all things, work.
She moved in on 6 October 1944 still smarting from Nesta’s ‘beastly about me’ visit to Nora the week before. She brought with her, her Broadwood piano and mahogany four-poster bed, seven-foot long, five-foot six wide, with reeded columns. The Yeats’ Room was cleared as her study and a cottage in the grounds became her studio. She wrote a letter to Nesta cancelling a proposed visit to the Mill House. Nesta replied and sent a copy of whatever she wrote to Nora, which upset Gluck a great deal. For a few days after moving in, Gluck felt terrible with heart palpitations and what was probably an anxiety attack, but it passed and she declared herself happy.14
Friends of the Heald sisters from the outset expressed discomfort at Gluck’s arrival. The atmosphere quickly became awkward and their visits tailed off. In 1945 Gluck endured a kind of breakdown, diagnosed as neuritis. She went to a private rest home in Middlesex. Rayner Goddard, who the following year was to become the Lord Chief Justice, had written to her on 24 January asking her to accept a commission from him to paint Wilfrid Greene. He intended presenting the picture to the Inner Temple. ‘I of course leave everything to you, but I confess that I should like nothing so much as a replica in oil of the drawing – it was so excellent a likeness and I could see every side of his character in it. At any rate you will give me something as good won’t you?’ Because of illness Gluck had to postpone the sittings and did not deliver the picture until 1949.
On first arriving at the Chantry, Gluck did little but try to get strong and adapt to her new circumstances and to separation from Nesta. The initial friction and resentment at parting passed, and the deep loyalties resurfaced. Gluck was never far from Nesta’s thoughts or affections. With the war over, Nesta and Seymour resumed their travelling life. In New York she visited the actress Leonora Corbett, who had moved there toward the end of the war. ‘The first thing I saw when I went into her bedroom was “The Glory of Mud” looking beautiful’, Nesta wrote to Gluck. This was a seascape, of which there is now no trace, done in Dorset in the 1930s, on an island they called their Shangri La. ‘You can imagine how warming it was to see my Tim smiling at me. It recalled happy days on that island. Some of the happiest.’15 From the ‘Boca Raton’, between Palm Beach and Miami, she wrote to Gluck (23 December 1945) thanking her for a cutting of a photograph of sheepdogs, shepherding little children. ‘And I especially liked to think somehow of my little Black’s small fingers (with the little brown mole just below the first finger knuckle) cutting it out, all serious, and folding it up and making a little star with ink to show it wasn’t the other side you meant with the American fashions!’
At the Chantry House life soon became problematic. Gluck took to recording Edith’s preoccupations as well as her own: the anniversaries of the deaths of her brother Ivan on 4 December and of Yeats on 28 January, Edith’s attacks of lumbago, visits to town, to the hairdresser or to friends. Alone together they had peaceful times. As a threesome the atmosphere was impossible. It was evidently intolerable to Nora that Edith and Gluck were having some kind of an affair in what was, after all, her house. The writer Marjorie Watts, widow of Gluck’s friend the Punch artist Arthur Watts, remembers the expression of disgust and pain on Nora’s face as, in the offices of The Lady, she voiced her horror that Edith could be behaving this way.16
Tension and battle of wills took the place, for Gluck, of depression. Years later she would say that she was the one who ought to have moved out of Chantry, not Nora, but that Edith wanted her to stay. Alison Settle and other friends found Gluck’s presence in the house unbearable. Gluck’s diary entries tersely chronicled the tension, week in, month out.
Alison to dinner, very rude about lampshade.
Write letter to Alison.
Alison comes round but does not come in. Nora upstairs.
E. goes to talk to Alison, who ran away, about not coming in night before. I tackle her, and E. and I refuse to go Saturday for drinks before lunch. Nora accepts.
E. and I alone. Lovely evening.
Nora returns 5 pm. Very grim.
Nora awful all day. Very rude at tea. Alison rings up and asks Nora to drinks at 6. Does not return til after 8. E. and I have drinks alone.
E. starts shingles on Tuesday. Dr Dingemans comes 11 am and gives Pethadine injection. Makes E. very ill and sick. Nor a horrible to me and E. Deluging rain.
Alison calls for first time to see E. Nora behaves like a fiend.
Have scene with Nora about E. and her behaviour to E. then ask Alison to see me in cottage. A. rude and insists on seeing me in road. E. upset and crying.
N. does not come back till I am. I tell her what I think of her.17
At the time of these scenes, in 1946, Gluck was fifty-one, Edith sixty-one, Nora sixty-three. It was not the settled harmony of middle age. For Nora it was a nightmare. There were tensions and shrieking matches. The situation struck a wedge between the sisters and then Gluck came to Edith’s defence against Nora. No doubt Nora felt betrayed by Edith. Gone were the shared holidays, the house parties and ease of life. Nor that year did Gluck earn any money from her painting. Her sole professionally earned income for 1946 was three shillings and ninepence – royalties on the sale of postcards of one of her flower paintings. Edith remarked of the cheque that things were looking up, which made Gluck laugh.
Gluck’s only painting in 1946, done in what she called the garden studio, was England. It was a romantic expression of the postwar calm she hoped for through her move to Steyning. A background plate shows a tranquil scene of a church and two figures and in the foreground are roses from Edith’s walled rose garden. But whereas previously Gluck had painted perfect blooms, these roses are blousy, some of the petals blighted and one broken bloom lies dying away from the g
roup. Maybe it was a reference to those who died in the war, or a valediction to her love for Nesta.
Gluck and Edith went to Lamorna for a month in the summer, made bonfires, cooked lobsters and chicken and took long walks round the coves. Home life had not improved on their return to Chantry. ‘Return from Cornwall at 6 pm. Nora awful.’ was Gluck’s laconic diary entry for 5 October 1946. It was a conflict of feeling that could not be resolved. Nora felt unable to invite her friends and work colleagues to the house. She was, after all, editor of The Lady, which did not countenance ladies behaving in quite this manner. The feud became territorial. Gluck and Edith went to look at alternative houses and studios but in a half-hearted way. When Gluck put forward a proposal to have a prefabricated hen incubator reconstructed as a studio in the garden, Nora opposed the idea bitterly. She cried and would not give her agreement, but the scheme went ahead, none the less. When Gluck moved some of her things into one of the attic rooms in the Chantry House, unused for six months, and started to use it as a workroom, Nora took the key from the door and sat in the room. No castle would have been large enough to house them together. Letters and insults were exchanged. Nora’s friends found the situation shocking and sided with her against Gluck. Though a fatal rift was being driven between the two sisters, it seems that Edith was absolute in wanting Gluck to stay. When, however, Nesta, on a Plumpton stopover, visited Gluck alone in her studio cottage for an afternoon, Edith and Gluck then had a ‘dreadful upset’ – an intimation of the jealousy that was subsequently to plague their relationship.
Nora took to not going home at all, or going straight to bed after supper and staying there until after lunch, or escaping round to Alison Settle. When Gluck spent Guy Fawkes night, 1946, with Nesta at the Mill House, Nora and Edith, alone together at Chantry, did not speak. The servants quit, unable to stand the atmosphere. Nor did Nesta help. When dining at the Ivy Restaurant with Lord Londonderry, a former Leader of the House of Lords, she overheard a conversation critical of Gluck and affairs at Chantry House. She relayed this to Gluck, who sent letters to Alison and Nora. Christmas at the Chantry House that year was on the frosty side.
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