by Diana Athill
Colonel Rees-Williams did his part, but in vain. Jean had been right: she was the only person who could make sense of the amazing muddle seething in those bags. So I gave up, her brother put the bags back exactly where he found them, and Jean never knew what we had done.
It took her nearly two years to regain enough strength to look at the book again, and to add the scraps of material she felt to be necessary. She could do it, she said, because of a new pill prescribed, I think, by a new doctor – though it may have been her old doctor trying something new. Perhaps he was the most important contributor to the conclusion of that novel, so I am sorry I cannot name him.
It was on March 9th 1966 that she wrote to tell me that the book was finished – and that Max was dead.
My dear Diana
Thank you for your letter [knowing that Max was dying I had just written her a letter of affection and anxiety]. I don’t know what else to say. Max died unconscious, and this morning very early we went to Exeter crematorium.
A sunny day, a cold sun, and a lot of flowers but it made no sense to me.
I feel that I’ve been walking a tight rope for a long time and have finally fallen off. I can’t believe that I am so alone and there is no Max.
I’ve dreamt several times that I was going to have a baby – then I woke with relief.
Finally I dreamt that I was looking at the baby in a cradle – such a puny weak thing.
So the book must be finished, and that must be what I think about it really. I don’t dream about it any more.
Love from Jean
It’s so cold.
I asked if I could come to Cheriton to collect the book, which seemed to please her; that first visit was when Mr Greenslade, sent by Jean to pick me up at Exeter, told me about her attack on her disagreeable neighbour.
She had booked me a room at the Ring of Bells, the village pub, because although she had a tiny extra room it would be another two years before it was inhabitable. Her letters always bewailed the weather, and sure enough, when I walked the length of the village to Landboat Bungalows, where she lived in number 6, it was raining and windy; and the village, too, behaved as she always said it did. On a walk of about half a mile I saw not a single person, the houses all stood with their backsides to the road, and the two dogs I met – mongrels of a sheepdog type – peered at me with hostile yellow eyes through their sodden shagginess and sidled away as though they expected me to stone them. Later I would see Cheriton looking quite normal (though the houses turning their backs to the road on that stretch of it remained odd); but that day I thought ‘What a depressing place – she hasn’t been exaggerating at all’.
I had always thought of a bungalow as a detached dwelling sitting on its own little plot, but Jean’s was the last in a joined-together row of one-storey shacks, crouching grey, makeshift and neglected behind a hedge which almost hid them. They looked as though corrugated iron, asbestos and tarred felt were their main ingredients, and if I had been told that I must live in one of them I would have been appalled.
Jean could not afford to heat, and so didn’t use, the only decent room which, like her bedroom, looked out over what would have been the garden had it been cultivated, towards some fields. On the road side there was a strip of rough grass shaded by the hedge, and the door opened into a narrow unlit passage, bathroom on the left, kitchen – into which I was immediately steered – on the right. It was about ten feet by ten, and it was just as well that it was no bigger; the only heating, apart from the two-burner gas cooker, was an electric heater of the kind which has little bars in front of a concave metal reflector, which scorches the shins of the person just in front while failing to warm the space as a whole. The small table at which Jean worked and ate, two upright chairs, a cupboard for food and another for utensils were all the furniture, and this was the room in which Jean spent all day, every day.
I doubt whether she could have survived another year in Landboat Bungalows if she had not managed to finish Wide Sargasso Sea.
Its publication, followed by the reissue of all her earlier work except for two or three stories which she didn’t consider good enough to keep, brought her money: not a great deal of it, but enough to keep her warm and comfortable for the rest of her life. It also brought her fame, to which she was almost completely indifferent but which must have been better than being forgotten, and friends. Among the friends was Sonia Orwell, who made more difference to her life than anyone else.
Sonia struck me as tiresome. She often drank too much, was easily bored, which made her tetchy and sometimes rude, and was an intellectual snob without having, as far as I could see, a good enough mind to justify it. But although I suspect it was Jean’s sudden fame, rather than her writing in itself, which made Sonia take her up, once she had been moved to do so she was amazingly generous about it.
She financed long winter holidays in London for Jean every year from the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 to the end of her life, and she gave her many expensive presents. When I remarked on the amount she was spending she told me that she had always felt embarrassed at having inherited George Orwell’s literary income, and had decided that she must use it to help writers who were hard up. This she said shyly and apologetically, to stop me thinking she was more generous than she was, not to take credit for it. And more impressive than the money she spent was the sensitivity she showed in her determination to give Jean a good time. She didn’t just pay hotel bills: she did all the tipping in advance, she explained to the management the special kinds of attention this old lady would need, she booked hairdressers and manicurists, she bought pretty dressing-gowns, she saw to it that the fridge was full of white wine and of milk for Jean’s nightcap, she supplied books, she organized visitors … From time to time she even did the thing she most hated (as I did too): took Jean shopping for clothes. This was so exhausting and so boring that eventually we both went on strike – and it was Sonia who then saw to it that younger and stronger spirits took our place. It was also she who was the most active member of what we called ‘the Jean Committee’ – the meetings at which she, Francis and I discussed ‘Jean problems’, such as getting her finances in order, or trying to find her somewhere to live nearer London, and less mingy, than Landboat Bungalows. (In this we did not succeed: whenever we came up with a real possibility Jean would jib: ‘Better the devil I know’, she would say.)
My gratitude for all this was profound, because quite early on I had been faced with a daunting prospect.
Jean loved her daughter, Maryvonne Moerman. She longed for her visits, grieved when she left, talked about her often with pride and admiration. During her bad times she had never burdened Maryvonne with worrying facts, and when she had money she constantly pondered ways of leaving her as much of it as possible. Several times she asked me to find answers to questions about the inheritance of money from England by someone living in Holland, as the Moermans did after returning from some years in Indonesia; and she often spoke about writing an account for Maryvonne of how the past had really been. If she could get it right, she said, then Maryvonne would at last understand.
What was it that she so urgently wanted her daughter to understand – and, by unmistakable implication, to forgive?
How much of Maryvonne’s infancy was spent with her mother I do not know exactly, but I think it was almost none. Certainly she was for a time in ‘a very good home run by nuns’, and other nurseries were also involved. Fairly soon after her birth Jean got a job ghost-writing an autobiography in the south of France, one of its attractions being that if it worked she would be able to have her baby with her – but it didn’t work. And when Maryvonne was about four years old Jean went away to England, leaving her to be raised in Holland by her father. Maryvonne adored her father, and arrangements were made later for her to spend school holidays in England with Jean, which she remembers as enjoyable: but it is hard for any small child not to feel, if her mother vanishes, that she has been abandoned.
This Jean
could never undo, whatever she wrote, because the person she wanted forgiveness from was the abandoned child. Maryvonne the grown-up woman understood very well that she must accept her mother’s nature – her absolute inability to behave like a capable adult in the face of practical difficulties – and she was generous enough to forgive it; but nothing could change what Maryvonne the child had experienced. This cruel fact brought Jean to a halt each time she approached it, and did more than the weakness of old age to explain why Smile Please, the autobiography she attempted in her late eighties, ended where it did. And no doubt it was this haunt between them that caused Maryvonne’s longed-for visits always to end in some kind of pain and bitterness.
So after one of her visits to Cheriton, Maryvonne came to London and asked me to lunch with her. Jean had been talking of moving to Holland, and Maryvonne had decided that she must quickly establish that this was impossible. She told me that she would keep in touch with her mother and visit her from time to time, and that I could count on her to come over in an emergency, but that she could not have her with or near her all the time. I would have to take on the responsibility of looking after Jean, because she simply couldn’t do it. ‘It would wreck my marriage,’ she said.
I cannot deny that my heart sank, all the more so because I could see exactly what Maryvonne meant. I knew less about Jean then than I do now, but I knew enough to see that she could not be lived with; certainly not by a daughter she had dumped at the age of about four. All editors have, to some extent, to play the role of Nanny, and I saw that in this case it was about to expand – in terms of size, not of glamour – into a star part. And so it would most onerously have done if it had not been for Sonia’s invaluable help, and that of Francis. But he was soon to have his mother’s old age to deal with, so he had gradually to withdraw from practical involvement, whereas it was many years before a combination of financial trouble and ill-health caused Sonia to flag.
It was thanks to her that I got a glimpse of how enchanting Jean must have been as a young woman (when happy). Sonia had taken her out to lunch and they had drunk enough champagne to make them both giggly – ‘tipsy’ would be the word rather than ‘drunk’. When Jean got drunk (which I was not to witness until the last two years of her life) it was usually a disastrous release of resentment and rage; but this time her tipsiness hit the level which is exactly right. Everything became comic: she remembered – and sang – delightful songs; she told jokes; she liked everyone. She might have been enclosed in a pink bubble of Paris-when-she-was-happy-there, and it lasted until I had filled her hot water bottle and steered her into bed (I was taking the late afternoon and evening shift, as I usually did). Jean and I often spent enjoyable times together, but only with Sonia did she taste that sort of fun. Sonia, who knew Paris intimately, brought a whiff of Jean’s favourite city with her, and she drank too much; whereas I was so undeniably English, and liked to stay sober. With me Jean couldn’t quite let herself go.
That occasion was at the Portobello Hotel: the Portobello winter was the best of the treats provided by Sonia. The hotel was small, elegant in an informal way, and favoured by French theatre people. At that time it was being managed by a young woman recently celebrated in a Sunday newspaper as one of ‘the new Fat’ – a despiser of dieting who liked to wear flamboyant clothes and enjoy her own amplitude. She had, Sonia told me, made a special price for Jean because she loved her books (unfortunately she was no longer in charge when the next winter came round, perhaps because of her amiable tendency to make such gestures). The first time I visited Jean there I was greeted at the reception desk by a faun-like being in a pink T-shirt trimmed with swansdown which had little zipped slits over each breast, both of them unzipped so that his nipples peeped out. This seemed such a far cry from Cheriton FitzPaine that I wondered whether Jean, much as she longed for a change, would find it upsetting; but she loved it, was fussed over charmingly by both the manageress and the saucy faun, and would have been happy to spend the rest of her days at the Portobello. I think it was during that holiday that she played with the idea of dyeing her hair red. I protested, because bright hair-dyes make one’s skin look old, and she said: ‘But it’s not other people I want to fool – only myself.’
Where Jean was not happy was in a hotel which Sonia fell back on later, when she was beginning to feel the financial pinch which, together with illness, made her last years miserable. It was one of those comfortable but drab places near the Cromwell Road which are chosen as permanent homes by elderly widows, and Jean made her loathing of it brutally clear. Generosity inspired in her no more sense of obligation than it would have done in a six-year-old, and even after Sonia had moved her (as she quickly did) into a vastly chic and expensive establishment, she remained slightly sulky. It was to Sonia, not to her, that the manager of the rejected hotel had said that they were accustomed to – indeed, specialized in – elderly people, but Jean had picked it up the moment she crossed the threshold, and was not going to forgive the making of such a choice for her. Later still, when Sonia left London for a cheaper life in Paris, I and others often explained to Jean how her circumstances had changed. Jean would acknowledge her friend’s misfortunes with a ritual ‘Poor Sonia’, but her voice would be indifferent and there would be a distant look in her eyes. For her, inevitably, a friend who had gone away was a friend who was rejecting her.
Jean’s comparative sedateness with me made it a shock when I received a letter from a man who had been her neighbour in Beckenham, and who resented the acclaim she was getting for Wide Sargasso Sea. He wrote an unsparing, and horridly convincing, description of the aggressive drunken behaviour which had led to her arrests, and he also took it on himself to tell me about Max’s disaster, which Jean had never mentioned. I was able, therefore, to explain Jean’s lapses as a breakdown under strain. Only in her last few years did I begin to understand that ugly drunkenness had been her downfall, on and off, for most of her adult life. Before that, my personal experience of her had revealed her incompetence, her paranoia, her need for help and reassurance, and the superficial nature of her gratitude (‘I’ve got hold of some money’ was how she told Maryvonne of Francis’s gift, and glimpses of that attitude were not infrequent through the chinks in her politeness). But I also knew that she was very often charming, had an old-fashioned sense of decorum and good taste (she hated unkind gossip), and that however tiresome her muddles could be, I enjoyed being her nanny more often than I found it wearisome.
It did not really matter that the Jean Committee failed to find her a new house. Her bungalow was made so much more comfortable and pleasant by the hard work and ingenuity of two of her new friends, Jo Batterham and Gini Stevens, that – given more visitors, and the daily help which Sonia and I were at last able to find for her – she was probably as well off there as anywhere. Gini even took over the role of amanuensis for a while (Jean couldn’t type and was frightened of tape-recorders, so she always had to have that kind of help). Like so many of Jean’s relationships, this one ended in tears; but not before it had enabled her to put together the collection of stories, Sleep it Off, Lady, which would have been impossible without it.
Meanwhile Jean’s finances were, by a miracle, kept in order by an accountant recommended by Sonia on the grounds that he liked good writing and drank a lot.
A good example of a Jean muddle was the case of Selma vaz Dias, the actress who had adapted Good Morning, Midnight for the radio, and who saw herself, not without reason, as Jean’s true ‘rediscoverer’. The trouble with Selma was not that she made that claim, but that she thought herself entitled by it to become a bandit.
Although middle-aged and rather stout, she was a striking woman with bold dark eyes who wore clothes to suggest a dash of the Spanish gypsy, and was an ebullient talker. Jean had been delighted and grateful on learning of her plans for Good Morning, Midnight, had enjoyed her company when they met, and loved her infrequent letters. Knowing they had planned to meet when Jean brought the manuscript of Wide Sargas
so Sea to London, I telephoned Selma to report that she had been taken to hospital … and began almost at once to doubt the worth of her friendship. First, a surprising amount of prodding was necessary to make her visit Jean; then the visit turned out to be extremely short and to consist mostly of Selma complaining of its inconvenience to herself; and lastly, when I was giving her a lift home after it, she said almost nothing about Jean except: ‘You know, of course, that she used to work as a prostitute?’
Worse was to emerge. After the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea Jean confessed to worry about something which Selma had made her sign. It then came out that in 1963, on a visit to Cheriton, Selma had produced ‘a bit of paper’ which Jean understood to concern the broadcast rights of Good Morning, Midnight, Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, but which was in fact an agreement to give Selma fifty per cent of the proceeds from any film, stage, television or radio adaptation of any of Jean’s books, anywhere in the world, for so long as the books were in copyright, and granting Selma sole artistic control of any such adaptation. Jean was to say repeatedly that she thought being made to sign it was a joke – ‘I was a bit drunk, you see … well, a bit, very.’ However, two years later, when Selma got an agent to recast this same agreement in more formal terms, and he wrote to ask Jean whether she really did want to sign it again, she apparently felt that she must, and did so. (The agent had never met her, so I suppose was unaware of her near-idiocy in practical matters; otherwise he would, I hope, have taken a stronger line.)
