Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  In the summer of 1878, Louis was ill. He was frequently ill, as Fanny now knew, but this was different. There was something wrong with his eyes, and when she thought he was threatened with blindness Fanny acted. She took him to London to see a doctor whom he trusted. While there, she met his friends, Sidney Colvin and Mrs Sitwell, who were polite and kind to her, recognising the sincerity of her love for Louis and her concern for his welfare. She was being a good ‘wife’ to their talented young friend even if she was, in reality, a bad wife to her own husband. The strain made Fanny herself ill. She had to stay in bed, in Colvin’s house where she and Louis were staying, and was embarrassed to have ‘the solemn Mr Colvin … and the stately … Mrs Sitwell sit by me and talk in the most correct English about the progress of literature and the arts. I was rather afraid of them … but they … came down to my level and petted me as one would a kitten.’8

  As soon as Louis had seen the specialist and his eyes were improving, he went home to Edinburgh and Fanny back to her children in Paris. He hated being apart from her – ‘no dear head upon the pillow’ – and couldn’t sleep for being so miserable. It was nearly two months before he could get himself back to Paris, with money given, yet again, by his parents. ‘I want coin so badly’,9 he wrote to Colvin. So did Fanny. ‘Her nerves are quite gone’, Louis wrote to Mrs Sitwell, and there was another cause for concern. ‘We have many strong reasons for getting her out of Paris in about a month’,10 he wrote, and asked Mrs Sitwell if she knew of some cheap farmhouse they could rent in the English countryside. Why would he specify the timing, unless for some reason it was crucial? Perhaps Fanny suspected she was pregnant, but if so she was either mistaken or had an early miscarriage. Whatever the reason for the sudden desire to hide away in the country, this move was never made. Instead, Fanny prepared herself to face the inevitable. Sam had not sent any money for a long time and Louis had very little, not nearly enough to support her. She would have to return to America or face real poverty. She would have to go back anyway, to face Sam and discuss with him what was to be done. If she was to stay with Louis she had to get Sam to release her from marriage to him. There was really no alternative, unless she was to be Louis’s mistress but never his wife.

  In July, she came to London with her children to find a ship to take them home. Belle said she was never told why they were going – Fanny did not discuss matters with her, offered no explanation at all. They stayed in cheap lodgings in Chelsea until they sailed. Louis took them to the station where they boarded a train to take them to Liverpool from where they would sail on a Royal Mail steamer. Lloyd, aged ten, and already devoted to Louis (though he still loved his own father), remembered Louis saying goodbye then walking down the platform without once looking back. Nobody knew what, if anything, had been agreed. Was Fanny going to seek a divorce? Or had they agreed on some sort of trial separation? The precise details of the parting were never revealed. All that is known is that it was painful and that Fanny went back to resume life as a legally bound wife.

  II

  IT IS EASY enough to discover how Louis felt once he and Fanny had parted – he wrote enough letters to friends describing his absolute misery and sense of loss; but it is hard to judge Fanny’s state of mind. He was on his own, she was not. She went back to being truly a wife after three years of being a wife in name only. From all the evidence that is available, which consists of other people’s observations, she did not descend into the state of wretchedness endured by Louis. Instead, she seems to have made a determined effort to be a wife once more. Sam’s behaviour over the past twenty years might have become repugnant to her, but Sam himself had not. And Sam didn’t want a divorce. What he wanted was to persuade his wife, in the well-worn tradition of deceiving husbands, that his affairs meant nothing.

  But to Fanny, of course, they did mean something. They meant that Sam preferred other women to herself on one level, and a very important level, at least. And now that she had had as her lover a man who did not so much as glance at another woman, a man to whom she was all, she had someone to measure Sam by. This measuring took a long time and was far more painful than it appeared on the surface to those around her. Fanny took her children home to Indianapolis when she arrived in America and it was obvious that her family thought she and Sam had patched up their differences and were once more to be united. They wanted her to stay married for reasons of respectability. Their attitude to divorce was no different from that of Louis’s parents, however different as people they might be. Fanny saw at once that she could expect little sympathy and absolutely no encouragement here. Her young sister Nellie (aged twenty-two), whom she took with her when she joined Sam in San Francisco, had no notion that Fanny was brooding over what she should do.

  There was no one to whom Fanny could talk freely. For six months, she did not write to Louis, not even a note, which caused him great distress. He was ill (with a swollen testicle) and rather oddly put the ‘true cause of my illness’ down to ‘that rough time when letters did not come’.1 Fanny had decided that she must see if she could survive completely without him. According to Belle and Nellie, she seemed to get on rather well. Sam had rented a house in Monterey after he and Fanny had spent a week’s holiday there and the family loved it. Fanny took up riding again and became sunburned and healthy-looking as she rode her mustang to rodeos and slept in barns in the hay with a group of friends she had made. It was an active, outdoor life in the sun and it suited her in a way city life never had done. She liked the rented house they lived in – it was a simple, two-storey adobe house, sparsely furnished – and she liked her neighbours. There was an artists’ colony in Monterey, as there had been in Grez, and congenial company for her. Belle loved it too and began to forget O’Meara, one of the artists in Grez, with whom she had been infatuated, much to Fanny’s disapproval – she didn’t want her daughter to marry too young, as she herself had done, though Belle was already four years older than she had been, nearly twenty-one. What her mother had not realised, however, was that Belle had fallen in love with another artist, Joe Strong. Joe proposed to her but Belle didn’t dare tell her mother who, she was convinced, would disapprove – even though she liked Joe, and made use of him by telling Louis to write to her at his address so that Sam wouldn’t find out.

  But Joe would not be put off. Something Fanny said (of which there is no record, so it could well have been bluff on Joe’s part) convinced him that she was planning another marriage for Belle. There seemed to him only one course of action: to appeal to Sam, which he did. Sam was sympathetic and gave his approval, Joe bought a special marriage licence, and the two of them were married secretly, the bride so unprepared for the elopement that she was wearing an old grey dress and scuffed shoes. As soon as the hasty service was over, they went to San Francisco, where Sam had found them an apartment. Fanny was furious. She went at once to San Francisco to confront her daughter and it was, said Belle, ‘a painful interview’. Whereas Sam had given his blessing (and some money), Fanny was contemptuous – Belle had been a fool, becoming the wife of a man she had known for only one summer (though she had, strictly speaking, known him very briefly before ever she was taken to Europe).

  It appalled Fanny that Belle could make the same mistake she had made herself and, in her haste to become a wife, fail entirely to consider either the consequences or properly assess the qualities of the man she was marrying. But more importantly, Joe had no money. Fanny knew what having no money would lead to. Sam’s generosity would not last, and when her father failed her Belle would turn to her mother. And if there were children … Fanny could hardly bear the thought. It depressed her to witness the mess she felt Belle was making of her young life, but then she was becoming depressed anyway and the joys of Monterey no longer cheered her. She had tried so hard to go back to being a good wife to Sam but it was becoming harder and harder to succeed.

  Louis had written to Colvin that year that ‘perhaps I have been spoiled by a very perfect relation and my heart having been
coddled in a home grows delicate’.2 Beautifully put, and exactly how Fanny herself appears to have felt. She had tried to stifle memories of her ‘perfect relation’ with Louis but had failed. Sam did not help. At first indulgent, renting the Monterey house because Fanny loved it, and willing to commute to San Francisco where he worked, Sam grew less and less interested in visiting her. When he arrived for a weekend, there were arguments, often noisy and, in a relatively small house, easily overheard. Lloyd heard one in which his mother burst out, ‘Oh Sam, forgive me!’ He didn’t know for what. Fanny had plenty to forgive Sam for, but why would she be moved to ask his forgiveness unless it was because she had confessed her love for Louis? Belle, before she ran away with Joe, recalled hearing the word ‘divorce’ used, and she was aware her mother had mentioned the possibility of divorce to her own family in Indianapolis. They were violently opposed to it, as she’d known they would be, not only her parents but also her brother and four sisters. They were concerned about the disgrace, the shame, the effect on the children, and not least the question of who would support her.

  Surprisingly, this worried Fanny least. She’d supported herself years ago and believed she could do it again. Sam was devoted to Lloyd, so she knew he would always contribute to his son’s welfare. The economics of divorce, which in the nineteenth century made it a terrifying prospect for women, and which was the strongest of deterrents, no longer seemed to frighten Fanny. Living in Paris, virtually penniless, she had been afraid, but in Monterey, with Sam working in San Francisco, and very close to his children, she did not think she would starve or be homeless. What caused her more anguish was her own indecision about the future. Was she asking for a divorce to free her from Sam, in order to regain her independence? Or did she want a divorce to free her to marry Louis?

  By the end of that summer of 1879, with Fanny gone fourteen months, Louis was also feeling desperate. His life, he wrote, was ‘the impersonation of waiting’.3 He waited for a letter ‘to clinch things’. It never came. Instead, a ten-word telegram arrived. Nobody knows what those crucial words were, but Louis cabled back, ‘Hold tight. I will be with you in one month’,4 suggesting that Fanny’s words had been ones of desperation, a sudden outburst of longing for him. He wrote to his cousin Bob that ‘Fanny seems to be very ill’5 and to his literary friend W. E. Henley that she seemed to have ‘inflammation of the brain’. He sailed for New York within a week of receiving the famous telegram, ‘a little off my nut’ as he put it. His friends were appalled (and so were his parents, who did not know of his departure till they read the letter he’d left). Henley went so far as to blame Fanny – ‘I hoped she would be brave and generous enough to give him up.’6 He didn’t want to see Louis ‘get mixed up once more in a miserable life of alarms and lies and intrigues that he led in Paris’.

  But Louis did want it. He didn’t see his life with Fanny as being like that at all. From New York, Louis went on to Monterey, arriving there exhausted and ill, kept going only by the thought of the passionate reunion awaiting him. It was a terrible let-down. Fanny, instead of being ecstatic, seemed almost embarrassed to see him, as though she had never really expected him to come and, now that he had, was overwhelmed by the implications of his arrival. He looked awful. He’d lost a stone (6.3 kg) on the journey and was haggard and weak. Fanny let it be known to her Monterey friends that the visitor was a well-known writer on a lecture tour. But as suddenly as he arrived, Louis disappeared, to go off on his own into the surrounding hills, camping. Ostensibly, this was for his own good, because Fanny’s sister Nellie was suspected of having diphtheria. But there was more to his abrupt departure. Within a week of his reunion with Fanny, before he went wandering off, he had written to Colvin that ‘all is in the wind, things might turn out well or might not’ and that there was ‘frankly no decided news’. To Baxter, he went so far as to write that he had ‘a broken heart’.

  So what was Fanny playing at? Having apparently sent him a telegram which he interpreted as a cry for him to come to her (though there is no knowing if this interpretation was intended by her) she now hustled him out of her house as quickly as possible. Maybe she was afraid Sam was about to arrive on one of his erratic visits, maybe the diphtheria scare was genuine, but whatever the reason her lack of any convincing welcome hurt and bewildered Louis. Within a few days of starting to camp, he fell ill with a fever and only through the kindness of two rancheros, who found him 18 miles (29 km) from Monterey in a state of collapse and took him to their ranch, did he survive. When he was better, he returned to Monterey where he boarded with a French doctor rather than stay with Fanny. After a month, seeing Fanny daily but not living with her, he was more confident that everything would turn out well and that he had been right to come, however strange his reception. ‘The effect of my arrival’, he wrote to Baxter, ‘straightened everything out.’7 There was, after all, it seemed, to be a divorce and then he would marry Fanny and live happily ever after. He longed for her to be his wife as well as his lover – the distinction was important to him. But he admitted that he had been in a state of terrible anxiety for the first weeks in Monterey, not knowing if Fanny could or would bring herself to the point of insisting on a divorce, or if her husband would agree to one. The impression he gave was that without an agreement between the Osbournes to divorce, he would have gone home. This time, it was to be all or nothing.

  The strain seems to have made Fanny ill again. Her ‘inflammation of the brain’ flared up and the doctor, according to Louis, gave him ‘the worst account of her health’. At this point, he received a telegram from his distraught mother, saying that his father was seriously ill and he must return. But Louis would not return. Fanny was more important to him than his parents, much though he loved them, much though he acknowledged he owed to them. In his own eyes, however, Fanny was already his wife – ‘I won’t desert my wife’,8 he wrote to Henley – and her illness was of more concern to him than his father’s. He now expected to be cut off without a shilling and even boasted that he didn’t care, Fanny was worth it. The divorce was expected to go through soon, but for the sake of decency months must elapse before he could actually make her his legitimate wife. On 12 December, according to Louis, Fanny would obtain her divorce, freeing her from Sam. Louis told Colvin that Sam behaved well, and commented, rather oddly, that in return he and Fanny would wait to marry to avoid scandal for him. Sam was willing to support Fanny until she remarried, which in Louis’s straitened circumstances (earning nothing and thinking his parents would no longer send him money) was vital. But then Sam lost his job and could give Fanny nothing. She had left Monterey and was back in the East Oakland cottage, which Sam let her live in, so had a roof over her head, but otherwise must fend for herself and Lloyd.

  Louis’s friends back in England were almost as distressed as his parents. In their opinion, any marriage between him and Fanny would seal his doom as a writer. He was about to burden himself with what one of them described as ‘a divorced invalid’ and they saw it as their duty to try to get him to come home before this happened. Colvin, like Henley earlier, thought Fanny should have cared enough ‘to leave him to forget her’. Everyone saw her as a schemer, always intent on trapping Louis, and attributed to her the most base of motives: greed. She knew he had wealthy parents and was said to be after his inheritance. But what they left out of their reckoning was that Fanny no longer expected Louis’s parents to give him anything. She thought they hated her and that once their son had made her his wife their hatred would deepen. A future as Louis’s wife could never have been thought by her to be a financially secure position. His own income was paltry, despite three books and some praise from critics – ‘the want of coin’ was more pressing than ever. Fanny would not be marrying for money or glory, whatever his friends thought. She would be marrying for love, and a love that might not endure for long because Louis was a very sick man (with a lung complaint never properly identified).

  Meanwhile, he was living in rooms in San Francisco trying to w
rite and seeing Fanny only when she managed to come over from East Oakland. It was an unsatisfactory arrangement, frustrating for both of them, but part of that waiting-game they had agreed to. In a way, it pleased them both to be putting themselves through this test – as Louis wrote to his friend Edmund Gosse: ‘few people before marriage have known each other so long or made more trials of each other’s tenderness and constancy. I do not think many wives are better loved than mine will be.’9 This time, Fanny would enter into marriage with a thorough knowledge of her husband and absolute confidence in his devotion. Knowing this, her own health improved markedly during the early part of 1880. She had no more ‘fits’, no more ‘inflammation of the brain’ (which may have been only symptoms of depression). But Louis’s always perilous health worsened. He wasn’t eating properly and he found the strain of waiting much more difficult than Fanny. He had an attack of malaria in January and then, in March, his first lung haemorrhage.

  Fanny thought he was dying. Dismissing all considerations of propriety, she moved Louis into her cottage and nursed him devotedly, determined not to allow him to die. She was a good nurse, efficient but not fussy, knowing the importance of nursing mind and spirits as well as body. For five weeks she looked after him and then he began really to recover, though he was very frail and announced he would make ‘a very withered bridegroom’. But the shock of the haemorrhage had decided both of them that they should delay their marriage no longer. Louis needed mountain air to convalesce and if they were to seek it they must go together as man and wife. They would marry in May and go to the mountains. He still had no money to cover the expense, but in mid-April his parents cabled the news ‘Count on £250 annually.’ Far from cutting him off, they had already paid for his medicines and now they capitulated completely. Fanny was going to be their son’s wife and they finally accepted this. Perhaps Louis had counted on their love for him working this miracle all along, but Fanny had never expected it, and now it became important to her to be a ‘good wife’ for the Stevenson parents’ sake as well as his.