Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Delancey Street

  WEK WAS POORLY. For some time now he had been suffering from a muscular weakness, which made it difficult for him to hold on to his perch. He had probably been affected by the damp of the Gordon Street basement, which had also ruined some of Charlotte’s books. According to Alida, Charlotte ‘would frequent the parrot house of the Zoo at any moment of the day, and sometimes at night if she could knock up the parrot man, to get help for him’. But even the assistant keeper could not arrest old age, and by 1921 he had to give it as his opinion that the bird ought to be destroyed. May Sinclair had been faced with the same problem in 1914, when her black cat, Tommy, was sinking. Having asked the vet for the exact lethal dose, she had administered it herself, holding Tommy on her lap until he ceased to move. It was one more example of May’s strength of mind.

  Anne and Charlotte felt quite unable to undertake anything of the sort, and, since the tough old bird disliked men so much, it was impossible to call in the vet. Among their friends only Alida was young, strong and practical enough to help them, and Wek had no objection to her. Alida, then, was ‘summoned’ (as she put it) to Gordon Street, where she found that the two sisters had already been to the chemist for chloroform and a sponge. They also had a cardboard box ready, of the right size for a parrot’s coffin. In a room at the back of the basement, in complete darkness except for one candle, she followed her instructions, put the anaesthetic in Wek’s cage and covered it with a blanket. Then ‘the dreary procession of three’ sat down next door to count the correct number of minutes prescribed by the chemist. This dependence on ‘what the man had said’ was Miss Lotti-like in the extreme. He turned out to be wrong, however. When Alida went back and put her hand into the cage Wek gave her a sharp nip, and, dreading to prolong her situation, she wrung his neck.

  Mr Alden, assistant keeper of the parrot house at the London Zoo in the 1920s and 30s.

  Wek had been at Doughty Street and even, when Anna Maria was still a girl, at Brunswick Square. His cantankerous nature had seemed proof against time. Now the childhood of two generations was buried with him in the cardboard box in the dark back garden. Sydney Cockerell showed a rare tact in offering childlike consolations. He gave Charlotte a spray of white heather and stood her supper with vanilla ice-cream, then ‘having a little time to spare before my train went with her to a cinema near the Tottenham Court Road tube and saw Charlie Chaplin in a war piece Shoulder Arms. We had neither of us (strangely enough) seen him before and we were delighted. He is a very remarkable artist and is now in London, and without doubt the most popular hero in the whole world.’ (One can feel Cockerell hesitating here, but Chaplin would never be, in his sense of the word, ‘a great man’. He was not likely to have anything to contribute to the Fitzwilliam.)

  Charlotte seems to have had no holiday in 1921 except for a few days during October at a hotel in Salisbury. She had once spent half-an-hour there in the Cathedral close between trains, and remembered the rooks, and she came down to hear them cawing again. In this kind of mood she might, on an impulse, go anywhere. In her letters to Florence Hardy she speaks of walking by herself, undaunted by anyone she met on the roads, and getting ‘a rough tea’ for threepence. She did not so much want to see new places as to visit cities where, for however short a time, she had once been happy.

  The end of the year, in spite of the mild success of the new Farmer’s Bride, was overshadowed by worries about 9 Gordon Street. The lease would be up in 1922, but the Mews had, of course, always known that. They seem to have hoped, though without any encouragement from the Bedford Estate, that they might be allowed to stay on at the same rent, keeping the lodgers. The Estate, on the contrary, now required them to leave and to pay all the inside dilapidations on the damp and neglected house.

  Walter Barnes Mew was no longer in practice, and Charlotte employed another firm of solicitors, Layton’s. In spite of her usual deep suspicion of any man with whom she had business transactions, she managed to get this firm to write a very good letter for her. Hugh Layton told the Estate that his client, Mrs Mew, was ‘about ninety’ (she was actually eighty-four) and constantly under a doctor’s care. Her trust property brought in about £300 p.a., but of that £130 had to go to support Freda, who was described simply as ‘very delicate’. Of the other two daughters, one ‘does some light work which brings in a very trifling income’. Searching round for any kind of evidence that they had improved the property, Layton recalled the £100 spent on the drains about ten years before. Finally he spoke of the shock to his client, at her age, of moving house, and felt sure the Estate would want to spare her any additional anxiety – i.e. the worry over the bill for dilapidations might kill old Mrs Mew and in that case they would be little better than murderers. Perhaps anxious to get rid of their impoverished lease-holders without any fuss, the Estate agreed to release them from liability.

  It was not a good time to look for a new place. London was full of demobilized young men, hoping to marry or to find room for the families they had already. And Charlotte and Anne, only half-recovered from ’flu, were not too well either. They seem (probably in order to cut down the medical bills) to have done a certain amount of self-doctoring. Certainly their Culpeper’s Herbal, that great standby (particularly for female ailments), had fallen almost to pieces, and was too shabby to be lent to Florence Hardy, who also wanted to consult it.

  On the 17th of December Cockerell called on the Mews and ‘heard a sad story about their having to turn out of their house in March. They have a great struggle against poverty, adversity and ill-health.’ A proof of his genuine concern, which Charlotte and Anne must have felt, is that they gave way at last to the luxury of confiding in him. ‘I have told practically no-one about our affairs,’ Charlotte told Sydney, ‘and don’t mean to untie the hens!’ Over the New Year she went down to Cambridge and, as a particular treat, Sydney showed her the Brontë letters in the Fitzwilliam, and let her hold one of them in her hand.

  But by the end of February Charlotte had found nothing suitable, and was seriously thinking of selling the furniture and moving into a hotel. In addition to her own furniture, Anna Maria had inherited all Aunt Mary Kendall’s ‘household articles’, and although a certain amount must have been discreetly parted with over the years there was still some nice china left, a set of Adam chairs, the Chippendale looking-glasses, and so on. It would be a desperate step, and Ma might well ‘take notice’ and ask where the things had gone. Still, at all costs, and even if it meant a hotel, they must stay within the familiar Bloomsbury and Regent’s Park area where they had lived almost the whole of their lives.

  Charlotte patrolled the house agents, as she had once done for May Sinclair. Only in March, the cold, wet March of 1922, did she find somewhere that might do, the upper two floors of 86 Delancey Street, between Camden Town and Regent’s Park. There were, she said, two rooms, two attics and a dark kitchen, fewer rooms than in the dungeon at Gordon Street, but it could pass as a ‘good address’, and it had the advantage of being high up and airy. Looking down from the windows, you could get a glimpse of children playing and sometimes a Punch and Judy in the street below. Opposite there was a convent with green-painted shutters which reminded Charlotte a little of France. ‘But so long as you can come it’s no matter where,’ she wrote to Sydney.

  Delancey Street is farther to the north of London than Bloomsbury, and gradually the Mews began to see more of friends in Hampstead. This was particularly true of Anne, who had a good friend, Katherine Righton, an artist at West Hill Studios. Katherine was a figure-painter; so too were Henry and Margaret Jarman, who had a studio in the same block. Anne herself was not exhibiting anything at the moment, only going round other people’s shows with her usual good humour, making Charlotte think that ‘whatever the others are, Anne, poor Angel, must be the most long-suffering of the lot’. It was probably Anne’s idea that Henry Jarman, who exhibited at the Academy from 1899 to 1938 and was a very reliable, painst
aking artist, should do a portrait of Charlotte, to be hung in the Fitzwilliam. But Charlotte, with the fierceness of a primitive who fears that his likeness may be stolen, refused. She did not want to sit. This didn’t disconcert either the Jarmans or Katherine Righton, who loved her for Anne’s sake.

  Meanwhile the routine of the Bookshop had been severely upset by the Monros’ strange marriage. In February, March and April the readings had to be suspended, ‘owing to the unavoidable absence of those responsible for their organization’. By this was meant Alida’s trip to France and Harold’s withdrawal to a clinic for alcoholics. The Chapbook had to be suspended for a time and even after that appeared irregularly, although some of its most interesting numbers (Gordon Craig’s essay, for example, on the political value of marionettes) and some of its most beautiful cover designs date from 1921–2. There was no shortage of contributors either. They besieged the shop, and Monro was obliged to print an announcement that on no account could he read manuscripts brought round by hand. But conditions were hardly right for idealists to run a business. Its early success had given rise to competitors. In Devonshire Street itself a Peasant Shop had opened which offered, besides books, hand thrown pottery, plaited felt rugs and slippers, shepherd smocks, dalmatics, ‘Thibald’ jerkins, handmade jewellery and figurines of the Ballets Russes – all the software, in fact, of the Higher and Simpler Life, while Monro continued to stock only poetry and drama and books about them. Furthermore the Peasant Shop unkindly put it about that the Bookshop stayed open until 6.30 because its daytime sales were so small, whereas the late hour was really to help office workers for whom (in Wilfrid Gibson’s words) poetry would be ‘like sparkling water running over grass’.

  Charlotte was not needed any more to help out with her water paints – the rhyme sheets were colour printed after the first series and the price raised to fourpence each – but her letters show that she went often to the Bookshop, and it seems likely that she lent a hand there in some capacity. She had to take a bus now from Delancey Street, but, as it turned out, she was glad to have left Gordon Street. In 1922 speculators had begun to clear the south side of Euston Square Gardens, just at the top of the street, to replace it with more pavements and more houses. ‘They are cutting down the great plane trees at the end of the garden,’ she wrote in The Trees Are Down, feeling her heart go with them. ‘Half my life it has beat with these.’ Better, after all, to look down out of the Delancey Street windows, where you could get at least a glimpse of the green tree-tops of Regent’s Park.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Loss of a Mother

  OLD MRS MEW never went up and down the steep stairs at Delancey Street without help. But on 8 December 1922, what Charlotte and Anne most dreaded happened, in spite of all their vigilance. Ma fell, and broke her femur. A nurse had to be called in for some of the day duties, and the two sisters took on the night watch between them. Poor old Anna Maria was no more than a dried husk, a sliver, a tiny bag of bones, clinging on to life through her two sane daughters who fought to keep her from slipping away. The doctor could only say that her condition was ‘dangerous’.

  Charlotte, whether it was her turn of duty or not, slept very little and wrote her letters, she said, between one and two in the morning. During some of the time snatched for herself she wrote what was her last poem sent out for publication (although a number of others, which cannot be dated, remained in manuscript). These three verses, Fin de Fête, appeared in The Sphere for 17 February 1923.

  Sweetheart, for such a day

  One mustn’t grudge the score;

  Here, then, it’s all to pay,

  It’s Good-night at the door.

  Good-night and good dreams to you –

  Do you remember the picture-book thieves

  Who left two children sleeping in a wood the long night through,

  And how the birds came down and covered them with leaves?

  So you and I should have slept, – But now,

  Oh, what a lonely head!

  With just the shadow of a waving bough

  In the moonlight over your bed.

  The speaker in Fin de Fête accepts frustration (even if the sweetheart grudges it). He is not mad or even in danger of madness, still there is the characteristic lapse back into the language of childhood. The lovers have to pay with loneliness for what in any case seems to be innocent, with a fairy-tale’s innocence. The two babes in the wood in the story, however, had their enemies, otherwise the birds would never have had to hide them. But Fin de Fête has none of the bitterness of Saturday Market. There is no resentment against whoever it is who has prevented what should have been. The whole of Charlotte Mew’s upbringing and her whole emotional experience had made it plain to her that there is a ‘score’ for human happiness and that we have no right to avoid payment.

  Sydney Cockerell made one of his rare miscalculations when he offered to take Charlotte’s mind off things by getting up a lunch party, the kind of thing he liked to call ‘a little gathering of understanding folk’. She refused. ‘Sympathy is not the forcible administration of one’s own patent remedy,’ she told him, ‘but a consideration for – even if one cannot understand it – the other person’s point of view.’ Then she added, relenting a little, ‘I know very well that your intent is kindness, but quand même.’ On 12 May 1923 Ma died in hospital, of bronchial pneumonia.

  ‘My dear Mrs Hardy,’ Charlotte wrote to Florence on mourning paper, edged with black, ‘my mother has been with me all my life and as yet I don’t know how much of my own has gone with her. But for her it is release.’ Florence, of all her friends, old and new, probably understood these feelings best, being a natural looker-after and guardian, with an old and delicate mother of her own. Charlotte could neither eat nor sleep. She described the death, which the doctor had understandably called ‘inevitable’, as ‘a stupefying blow – and I feel like a weed dug up and thrown over a wall’. The simile is striking, comprising as it does the death, the move from the old house, and the feeling of worthlessness which, in the very depth of her being, she believed must be punished and rooted out. But the saddest part of the situation was that to most of their acquaintance Anna Maria’s death seemed an absolute blessing. The two talented daughters had done all that they possibly could for their old parent; now at last they were free. Edith Sitwell, who had met Charlotte at the Bookshop in 1919, saw her as a grey and tragic woman ‘sucked dry of blood (though not of spirit) by an arachnoid mother’. And even Alida, whose own mother had died that February, had always thought of Ma as a kind of joke, ‘treated very much as if she were a naughty child’. Secrecy brings its own penalties, and it would have been necessary to have stood by Henry’s graveside and visited Freda at Whitelands to know what Anne and Charlotte felt when they buried Anna Maria.

  Charlotte Mew in 1923.

  Now, in the hours suddenly left empty after night and day nursing, they had to think how to manage next. The Kendalls had always intended that Charlotte and Anne, the family’s last hopes, should be looked after. But between the Kendall women, their solicitors, and the easy-going Fred, this forethought had come to very little. With Anna Maria’s death, all three shares of the grandmother’s trust fund had reverted to the mysterious Edward Herne Kendall, and were being administered for him. This money in time would come to the descendants, Charlotte, Anne and Freda, but at the moment he was still living, a solitary old man, near Kensal Green Cemetery. As to Anna Maria’s own inheritance, most of that had been converted into the annuity of £300 p.a., which expired with her. What was left was divided between her three daughters, but not equally, because Freda must of course have her maintenance made up to the sum (they now decided) of £100 a year. Of their own, Charlotte and Anne still had a small income from the Brighton house properties left to them by Aunt Mary Kendall. They might possibly have £150 a year between them altogether, after Freda was properly cared for, and the rent of 86 Delancey Street (probably because they had had to take it in a hurry) was high. Charlott
e had lamented to Alida that, in order that Ma should not feel their ‘lowered social position’, two-thirds of their income would have to go on rent. This may have been an exaggeration, but the rent was probably over £100 a year. Finally, Anna Maria’s remaining effects were valued at £272.12s.8d. These sums must have been very discouraging.

  There are various estimates as to how little a writer could manage on at the beginning of the 1920s. The short-story writer H. E. Bates thought that £250 was easily enough, provided you lived in the country. Robert Graves and his first wife were managing on £150, including his disability pension, but his mother-in-law had bought a cottage for them. T. S. Eliot, when a fund was being raised by his friends to rescue him from his job in a bank, said it would have to be not less than £500 a year. Alida’s salary from the Bookshop, after the war, was £156. In London she was still living in one room, and going down to the basement to put a penny in the gas for hot water, but Harold paid for the country cottage, the housekeeping, and for a number of other expenses.

  To look at the problem from another viewpoint, what could Charlotte and Anne not do without? They needed tea and cigarettes (on which they were said to live), a little coal in winter, their subscription to Mudie’s Library (though Charlotte had a reader’s ticket for the British Museum), and third-class railway fares; all their loyal old friends pressed them to come and stay, this being the most acceptable, perhaps the only, way of relieving poverty without giving offence. They needed postage stamps, writing paper, something for buying Christmas presents, painter’s materials for Anne. No new clothes – Florence Hardy had thought Charlotte ‘shabby’ when she first came to Max Gate, and shabby she remained, though her boots and umbrella were not of the kind which would ever wear out. The studio might seem an obvious extravagance, but Charlotte knew this must never be given up. It was a proof that Anne, even if she wasn’t doing much at the moment, was still an artist, and would soon be working again. But besides the studio, where there was only a cold-water tap on the landing, they needed a roof over their heads.