Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  At last Fanny felt her suffering had been worthwhile – Louis was looking tanned and fit, as was Lloyd, and once she had land under her feet she, too, revelled in the island life. The islands were beautiful and the islanders friendly. Whole days were spent swimming and picnicking; even Aunt Maggie donned a bathing suit and had her first swim for twenty-six years. They were soon ‘red as lobsters’ and rather ashamed of ‘our own plain white legs’ when they looked at the lovely brown limbs of the islanders. They were in the open air all day long, ending with walks on the beaches in moonlight when Louis played his pipe. Everything was perfect, until they sailed on to Tahiti where, inexplicably considering how superbly well he had been, Louis was taken ill again. At the same time it was found that a mast was rotten on the Casco and the boat had to leave them there to go and be refitted. Fanny was as resourceful as ever, finding a house in which she could nurse Louis. Here he spent weeks recuperating, before moving eventually to the house of Princess Moë (ex-queen of the island) and becoming great friends with her and her family. Fanny was happy living like an islander (once Louis was on the mend) but his mother was not at ease. She was amazed that her daughter-in-law had gone so ‘native’, describing how she lay on a pillow in the chief’s smoking-room, taking a whiff of a native cigarette and passing it on in the approved way. She sat cross-legged with the women, too, and learned how to weave hats and baskets. Fanny relished every local dish, but it was not enough for her to enjoy the food – she was determined to learn how to make various specialities and wrote the recipes down in a special notebook where she’d written those for bouillabaisse in France and noodle soup in Indiana. She’d always been a good cook, but now her repertoire extended to include the exotic. Her mother-in-law was impressed – how lucky her son was to have a wife who was an excellent nurse and a good cook.

  Fanny was indeed a ‘good wife’, but she had children and that complicated her marriage to Louis. And as the Stevensons set sail on the refitted Casco for Honolulu, these complications hove into view. Louis had taken responsibility for Lloyd when he married Fanny and had been delighted to do so – he loved the boy, thought he was ‘dam fine’, and felt that if he was to have no children of his own Lloyd was as close as he could get to paternity. But Fanny’s daughter Belle was a different matter. Lloyd was twelve when Louis married Fanny, Belle twenty-two, herself married and therefore legally not his responsibility. But, however much her daughter’s marriage to the artist Joe Strong had angered Fanny, she could not entirely cast Belle off and neither could Louis. The Strongs’ marriage had had its problems almost from the beginning, and financial help had been requested, just as Fanny knew it would be. Reluctantly Louis had given it. Belle and Joe and their son Austin (born in 1881) had been living in Honolulu for the last seven years. Joe painted and Belle taught, and both of them enjoyed the life of the island – until Joe began to enjoy it a bit too much. He was drinking heavily and became ill. Belle maintained that the cause of his collapse was sunburn leading to blood-poisoning, which in turn caused a nervous breakdown. The two of them were in debt, and no longer getting on (and a second child had been born and died). It was towards this domestic situation that Fanny and Louis were now sailing.

  When the Casco swept into the harbour and the Stevenson party disembarked, Belle couldn’t get over how well and brown Louis looked and was equally bowled over by the change in her brother. Lloyd was now, at nineteen, thoroughly English in his speech and manner, though she also noted the gold rings in his ears – decidedly un-English. During the next four months the house Fanny rented on Waikiki beach became the centre of a new kind of family life, of which the Strongs were very much a part. Belle observed how her mother ‘managed’ her husband, protecting him from, as she put it, ‘draughts, colds, bores and fatigue’ without his even noticing it. But she also realised what Henley had noted long before, that under it all, Fanny was only a wife. Louis was emphatically head of the house, with his own rules which had to be obeyed, even by Fanny. (These rules were simple enough – talk within his house was to be confidential, no irritating topics were to be brought up at mealtimes, books must be treated respectfully – but they were real.) Louis was the breadwinner, his word was law in the Waikiki household, just as if he were a paterfamilias in Edinburgh. Belle liked him – she and Lloyd had always liked him – but she was wary of him. He and Fanny together had the power to dominate her and make her do what she might not want to do.

  In this, she was right. Fanny and Louis had decided that Joe Strong needed to be straightened out, and Belle and Austin to be brought under their wing. A week before the Stevensons were due to depart, on another ship, Belle was summoned by Louis and told she was to go to Sydney and wait for their arrival there. It was an order. Her mother, she observed bitterly, agreed to everything her husband said, while letting him be the one to say it. Belle wept and pleaded – she loved Honolulu and had wanted to stay there for ever – but it was useless. Saying of herself that she had always, unlike her mother, been ‘rather a meek person’ who ‘always obeyed the nearest man’ she dried her tears and started making preparations to leave for Sydney with the nine-year-old Austin. Joe would be separated from them, taken on the cruise with the Stevensons.

  Fanny was just as reluctant to leave Honolulu – ‘I hate the sea,’ she had vowed many times and on reaching Honolulu she’d told her mother-in-law she would never leave land again. But Louis loved the sea, and never felt better than when sailing. Besides, they had not yet found an island where they felt they could settle. Fanny, the great organiser, had failed to make progress on that one. Her mother-in-law, going back to Scotland alone to visit her sister, was told that Louis and Fanny would follow for a visit soon. Belle noted that Mrs Stevenson didn’t shed a tear when she departed, confident she would see her son the following year and that meanwhile his health would go on improving in the warm climate of the South Seas. Meanwhile, Louis wanted to buy a schooner of his own, but Fanny persuaded him to charter one, the Equator, for the meantime, and this they did, sailing from Honolulu in June 1889, taking Joe Strong with them. Fanny was the only woman on board, never having replaced Valentine (who had returned to California soon after reaching Honolulu) and feeling no need for female help or company.

  One of the qualities that Louis loved and admired most in his wife was this lack of a feeble side to her femininity. She was perfectly comfortable in an all-male environment, objecting only that all decisions about cooking should be referred to her. Seasick though she was, barely able to face the sight of food, she found herself having to choose menus for the cook to follow. At least this task grew simpler as they sailed first to the Gilbert Islands and supplies dwindled. The Equator was actually a trading vessel and it had been agreed that trading for copra could continue while the Stevenson party was settled temporarily on an island. They were put ashore at Apemana, where they spent six weeks. Fanny loved it. She always had seeds with her, and sowed onions and radishes here, which flourished in record time giving them fresh vegetables, a much needed addition to their diet. Louis had been heard to say, ‘I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips,’ and Fanny felt much the same.

  The next port of call, when the Equator returned, was to be Apia, on the island of Samoa. On the way, they were hit by a hurricane. The excitement of the heavy seas and violent squalls of wind exhilarated Louis but Fanny, though courageous, found it hard to endure. She was glad her mother-in-law wasn’t there to suffer the discomfort of being drenched, as the cabins let in water under the strain of the torrential rain and the whole ship was awash. It was a relief to reach Samoa in the Navigator Islands and get land under her feet, though Apia didn’t attract them at first. They themselves were not exactly attractive to the inhabitants either, looking, as one of the local missionaries described them, like a troupe of down-at-heel entertainers. Fanny, dressed in a decidedly crumpled ‘holoku’, wore a huge, battered straw hat and carrier her guitar; Louis had a calico shirt on, and wore a pair of thin, baggy cotton trousers; Lloyd
’s earrings were large and golden ones and he wore dark glasses (only because his eyes were weak), and Joe as ever looked the macho artist with his moustachios.

  They stayed with a white trader called Moors, who had a Samoan wife, and here Fanny sat on his verandah facing the sea and tried to take stock. Louis would roam the ocean for ever if she let him, but it would not do, not just for herself but for the family as a whole, and even more importantly, for Louis’s work. He couldn’t write comfortably or in any regular, settled fashion on board ship, and she wanted to see him write. But she also wanted a home again, a proper home, with a garden she could plan and cultivate with a long-term future in mind. Louis still imagined he would return to England when he was completely better. Though she doubted if such a return would ever be wise, she could not say so, since it would imply that she thought he would never be healthy enough to withstand the cold winters of his homeland. The thing to do, surely, was to go along with her husband’s fantasy and at the same time encourage his other ambition also, to have a residence of some sort in the South Seas. Samoa would do very nicely, not just because the island was more beautiful than it had at first appeared, but because communications with England were, relatively speaking, good. There were three ships calling each month which could take and bring mail, on a regular route between San Francisco and Sydney.

  The search began. Moors took them away from Apia up into the hills, where immediately they noticed the difference in the air. This was the place to be, just a couple of miles from the town and yet remote enough to provide perfect seclusion. They bought 314½ acres (127.5 hectares) of what was really only bush, wild land without any dwelling on it. Moors would have the land cleared and a temporary cottage erected while a house was built to their own specifications; it would be large enough to accommodate Joe and Belle and Austin and Lloyd and Aunt Maggie whenever they wished to live with them. Louis wrote excitedly to Baxter that this little estate, christened Vailima (meaning five waters), had everything – stunning views, lush vegetation, complete privacy. Funnily enough, Fanny was not so enthusiastic. She was the one who wanted to put roots down and have a real home, but going along with Louis’s passion for Vailima was, in her own mind at least, a form of compromise. She had to go with the tide – Samoa was where her husband showed himself more than willing to buy a property and if she hummed and hawed with reservations he might never be brought to the point of decision again. Samoa, and Vailima, it would have to be, or they would wander around the South Seas for ever and she’d be doomed to a life of seasickness. She tried to be as excited as Louis, but could not get over her instinctive dislike of the Samoans (whereas she had loved the Tahitians) or her dread of the vast amount of work needed to turn Vailima into a self-supporting unit. She would have to do everything herself and felt exhausted and alarmed at the prospect. But she was determined to put a brave face on it. She didn’t want people to think she was sacrificing herself for the sake of her husband as a ‘good wife’ should. ‘In fact,’ she wrote, ‘I can’t make a sacrifice for him; the very fact that I can do the thing in a way makes a pleasure to do it, and it is no longer a sacrifice, though if I did it for another person it would be.’2

  The building of even makeshift accommodation was going to take time, so while it was being done, and the ground cleared for the larger enterprise, Louis decided to pay his long-promised visit to England, going via Sydney. His health was just about the best it had ever been – ‘[in] his present state of almost rude health’, wrote Fanny – and he was anxious to see his friends and visit his publishers as well as enjoy ‘civilisation’ for a little while. Lloyd had gone ahead, joining Belle and Austin, who had been waiting in Sydney, as instructed, for the last six months. Their party arrived at the Hotel Victoria in February, once more inviting comment at their extraordinary appearance. If Apia found Fanny’s ‘holoku’ strange, Sydney found this weird dress even more so, though it was her best grey silk, and Louis’s ‘good’ suit was so creased after months in a packing-case that it looked shabby beyond belief. The grand Hotel Victoria received the couple snobbishly, unaware that they had a famous author in their lobby, and so the Stevensons removed themselves to another, less impressive hotel. Neither of them could tolerate judgements about people made on the basis of their attire.

  They were both looking forward to what Sydney had to offer – bookshops, restaurants, educated company. In fact, almost two years of roughing it, whether on board ship or on small islands, had given them a taste for the sort of social life they normally professed not to need. In spite of a warm welcome, Sydney proved a disappointment. In no time at all, they were both sick of journalists wanting to interview them and the adulation of Louis’s fans soon palled. But worse than that, he caught a cold, the first for ages. The doctor moved Louis to the Union Club, saying this was where he could be properly cared for, but the club was an all-male one and his removal there meant Fanny could not be with him night and day. Their plans to go on to England went ahead, but had to be scrapped when Louis did not recover. Instead, he developed a fever and then, to Fanny’s despair and his own anguish, he had a haemorrhage. The only thing to do was to get him back to the warm South Seas as quickly as possible. But the maritime unions were on strike and the quays full of ships at anchor – no one was sailing anywhere.

  Fanny’s resourcefulness in this crisis was greater than ever before. She showed an absolute determination to surmount all obstacles and get her very sick husband back to a climate where he could survive. She herself went to every single shipping office, searching for a ship, any ship, that would take them back to the South Seas. She would not take no for an answer, feeling sure that someone somewhere would be flouting the unions, or that there must be some essential traffic the unions would have to allow, or even that in this vast harbour there would be a ship crewed by non-union sailors. So it proved. She found that the Janet Nicholl, a steamer belonging to a Scots firm – how appropriate – and crewed by Melanesians was about to sail. She went to see the captain, who turned her down flat, so then she contacted the owners, threatening them that her husband, her famous husband, would die on their hands if they did not grant him a passage. Belle, who had heard one owner tell her mother very firmly that such a thing was out of the question, was astonished, on returning to the room, to hear him giving instructions as to how to reach the Janet Nicholl and board her. Fanny’s powers of persuasion owed nothing to feminine wiles but instead to sheer toughness – when she had to, she could intimidate others, a trait of hers in which her husband revelled.

  Getting Louis on board was an anxious business. The tension of manoeuvring the board-like stretcher to which he was strapped, wrapped up in blankets, over the high bulwarks was not helped by drizzle, or by the rolling of the ship. There was an atmosphere of doom, with Fanny sitting silently in the rowing boat, eyeing the ship’s blackened hull (black-painted sides covered in coal dust). She and Louis had never been on a ship as sinister-looking as this one. Belle had no confidence in the ‘half-naked black men’ who carried the sick man to his cabin, and was frightened by the sound of a drunk lurching around on deck. But Fanny, who kept a diary on that trip, found the old Janet Nicholl much more comfortable than the Equator had been. For a start, there were two bathrooms, and a wide deck to walk on once calm seas were reached, as well as a large airy saloon. Even the food was good. There was only one other passenger, a Mr Buckland, known as Tin Jack, a trader, and he fascinated Louis. By the time the ship reached Auckland, Louis was beginning to recover and Fanny felt she could go shopping. So did Tin Jack, unfortunately. He bought, among other things, some fireworks to amuse his native retainers when he got back to his trading post. These exploded one night and the flames set light to the baggage. Everything blazing was hurled over the side in a panic, but just in time Fanny spotted that a trunk about to go the same way contained Louis’s manuscripts. She managed to persuade the sailors to extinguish the flames on deck and keep the scarred trunk.

  In spite of this fright, Fanny reckoned
afterwards that the cruise on the dour-looking Janet Nicholl was ‘perhaps the happiest period of my life’. It was a statement as strange as Louis’s own, that he had only ever been happy in Hyères. What was there to make Fanny so happy on that voyage? Louis was still ill, if regaining strength daily as soon as they reached warm seas; she was not as seasick as she had been on other ships but she still preferred dry land; and she records that she had rheumatism. But on the other hand, she had her husband to herself and she was keeping a journal to supplement his diary and so had the feeling of working with him, which she liked. She felt mentally as well as emotionally intimate with him, a feeling she treasured. Louis, she wrote in her journal, was ‘a man of few intimate friends and even with these he was reticent to a degree’. Baxter, Henley, Colvin, Gosse and even Mrs Sitwell might have contested that last phrase, but Fanny was supremely confident of her closeness to her husband. She was proud of it, and rejoiced, on board the Janet Nicholl as it ploughed its way towards Samoa, that the bond between them had strengthened with time.

  But still she longed to have a home to return to and fretted during the cruise about what kind of progress would have been made at Vailima. Apia was one of the Janet Nicholl’s ports of call, so she and Louis had the chance to inspect their new property. They were relieved to find the estate had been cleared, ready for building to start, and that a small wooden house had already been knocked together for their temporary occupation when they returned. Neither of them was quite sure when that would be – they were going to cruise for three months. The strange thing was that Fanny, anxious though she was to have a home, did not seem to regard Vailima as their absolutely final destination. She seemed to imagine that a place which would appeal more to her might be found and wrote that she hankered after an island like Nassau, not far from Samoa. The Janet Nicholl sailed past it and she longed to go and inspect it, but the surf was too rough for her to attempt going ashore in the boat. Louis went with the sailors and came back enthusiastic. He was well again, looking tanned and fit, obviously well able to jump in and out of boats. Fanny, on the other hand, was not (however much she later vowed how happy she had been). Apart from her rheumatism, she had other troubles: once more, she was convinced she was pregnant – which, at her age (fifty exactly) would have been remarkable. She was surely not pregnant but menopausal. She was well read in medical lore and well acquainted with her own body, so for her to tell a friend years later that she had thought herself pregnant seems odd. It sounds almost as if she were trying to make clear that her marriage was flourishing in all respects, including the sexual, however ill her husband may have been.