Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  In fact, towards the end of the Janet Nicholl cruise, he had another relapse, bitterly disappointing himself as well as Fanny. He blamed it on the heat in his cabin where he had been hard at work. The thought of returning to Sydney, where he had been so very ill, did not appeal to him while he was still so weak, so instead he stayed at Nouema, the ship’s last stop before Australia, while Fanny and Lloyd went on alone. She was reluctant to leave him, but thought that it might be better if she went ahead to prepare for his reception so that he could slip in as quietly as possible once he was well enough to join her. This he did, quite quickly, but almost immediately caught another cold and was prostrate. It was terribly depressing. Illusions of returning to England were smashed – even a visit would be fatal for Louis’s health. He was obliged to write and tell his friends so. When they heard the news, instead of being sympathetic and understanding they were disbelieving and angry. And they blamed Fanny. She, not ill-health, was keeping Louis from them. Reading their letters, Fanny cried all night. She was cast as the possessive wife, endlessly manipulating her husband to his disadvantage. They had never seen him in the South Seas, mostly healthy and well, living an outdoor life and revelling in his ability to walk and ride and do all the things a man of forty ought to be able to do. In England, he’d spent more than half his time in bed, coughing or wheezing, whereas in the tropics, if he was ill, he recovered quickly and was hardly prostrate at all. The lesson was glaringly obvious to Fanny, but his friends refused to believe it. She was cutting Louis off from them and – or so they were convinced – from the source of his work, from its inspiration. What, after all, had he written since he left England? Nothing whatsoever to compare with Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And very nearly nothing at all. Fanny was ruining his work, robbing him of his genius by keeping him in an unstimulating environment.

  Fanny was made to feel like some kind of criminal, and nothing Louis could say could soften the impact of his friends’ hostility. But she knew she was right – Louis could not risk going back to England – and so she just had to accept the criticisms. Even Sydney was not good for him. It was the start of the Australian winter and the sooner they were back in Samoa the better. She organised their return passage on a German steamer, but first she sent Lloyd back to England on an important mission. Skerryvore, her Bournemouth house, given to her by her father-in-law, would have to be sold. The money was needed to build and decorate the Vailima house and since it was her family who were draining Louis of his money (principally Belle and Joe Strong), it was time for her to contribute her share. ‘But this money is yours,’3 Louis protested. True. It was. It was her only money, her valuable bit of economic independence, but since what was Louis’s had always been hers, she thought that what she had should be his. They shared money as well as everything else, and she was extremely conscious she had had very little to share.

  There were other important decisions to be made before she and Louis left Sydney. If he was never again to go to England, what should be done about his mother? They could not leave her in Edinburgh alone. Lloyd was instructed to bring Aunt Maggie back with him. Then there was Belle. Belle assumed that she and Austin would be staying in Sydney, supported by Louis if Joe could not make a living. She’d never wanted to leave Honolulu, and having given way on that one because she had no choice, she was reluctant to give way again. Why should she move on a second time, when she had made friends in Sydney and grown to like it? The answer was: because her stepfather said so. He wanted his family together. Joe Strong was draining him of money and he wanted him away from temptation and under his eye. But it was more than that. He told her that she and Lloyd were all the family he had and he didn’t want them far away. He wanted his family to be a unit, with himself its head.

  What Fanny thought is not known. Having Belle and company resident in Sydney might well have seemed to her preferable. But whatever her feelings, it was agreed that the Strongs would follow on when Vailima was ready. Meanwhile, she and Louis would go and camp there.

  V

  AS SOON AS she got back to Samoa, Fanny had to start working harder than she had done in her whole life, apart from her Reese River days (when she had been young, strong and healthy). By the summer of 1890, she was fifty years of age and for the previous decade had been plagued by a variety of ailments which made her physically much weaker and mentally not nearly as resolute and steady. Her husband needed to be looked after with ever-increasing care and she could not look to him for the kind of practical help she needed. Finding help was one of her major problems. Previously, in the houses they’d rented throughout their married life, she had had to find household maids, but maids were not top priority at Vailima. What was called for was a good deal of brute strength to put the estate into proper shape. She needed labourers to work under her supervision in the garden and to finish the interior of the house. She didn’t speak any Samoan and with her famous inability (and unwillingness) to learn foreign languages she was not likely to pick it up easily.

  And yet this exhausting period had its satisfactions and pleasures. She and Louis lived in the temporary wooden cottage, which Moors had erected. It had only two rooms, but Fanny’s home-making instincts soon had them looking attractive, the walls hung with ‘tapa’ (the local cloth made from bark and decorated with patterns), the floors covered with woven straw mats, the windows hung with pink and maroon cotton curtains which she’d quickly run up and Louis’s books carefully arranged on six shelves. It was cosy and colourful, and both of them enjoyed the intimacy of their quarters. But Fanny wasn’t in the cottage much – she was out from dawn to dusk struggling to make a garden out of the cleared area of bush. She had grand ideas of making it not simply beautiful, full of all the flowers and shrubs she could persuade to grow, but also valuable, producing all the fruit and vegetables they would need to live on. Louis admired her efforts tremendously; writing to friends, he described how ‘rain or shine, a little blue indefatigable figure is to be observed howking about certain patches of the garden. She comes in heated and bemired up to the eyebrows.’1 But slowly, she made progress, directing her Samoan helpers with emphatic gestures to make them do what she wanted and to plant everything the right way up. Almost every plant she tried flourished, and flourished rapidly. The pigs were harder. She was determined to keep pigs (as well as hens) much to Louis’s amusement. He wrote that she fought endless battles with her ‘wild swine’ and would not let the big black sow outwit her.

  Naturally, all this outdoor work, a lot of it heavy, tired her, but to Louis she seemed finally in her element. She was, he teased her, a peasant through and through – he saw her as glorying in battling with the land which she owned, and loved as much as any human being; he, on the other hand, was an artist and could not get excited by ownership. If he meant this as a joke, or thought his wife would be complimented by being told she had the soul of a peasant, he miscalculated. Fanny was hurt. It depressed her to be so labelled and then she was annoyed that it depressed her. She wanted to be an artist too, if a feeble one compared with Louis. He’d made her feel suddenly inferior in a way he never had done before and she brooded over the slight. ‘My vanity’,2 she commented, ‘lies prone and bleeding.’ But it was more than her vanity which suffered. She was not, in fact, a vain woman but she did cherish certain dreams of achieving some measure of literary or artistic merit and did not like to have them exposed as illusions. If she was indeed a peasant there was the implication that she should stick to peasant-like tasks and she did not want to be condemned to such a fate, however inspired she was by transforming the estate into something productive and lovely.

  Meanwhile, the main house was being built and in this Louis was as involved as Fanny. He might not be able to do the field work, though he had a go at slashing the undergrowth (a sign of how much better he was), but he could pore over plans and make decisions about rooms and features. Each of them drew and redrew the plans, trying desperately to keep the price of building, and of fitting
the interior, down. Every single bit of the materials – glass, wood, nails, pipes, paint – had to be imported from Sydney or America. The cost was prodigious, however hard they tried to effect economies. Some everyday things they fixed on turned out to be appalling luxuries, such as a chimney so that they could have a fire. Who in the South Seas had chimneys? No one. Building it was extravagant, costing thousands (and thought mad). It was Fanny who did battle with the builders, standing over them and trying to make herself plain through the sheer force of her personality. It was even more exhausting than working on the land, and gave her terrible headaches, but after six months of this it was Louis who went to Sydney for a break, not Fanny. But for once she seemed almost relieved to be on her own, though also a little nervous. Lying in the cottage at night, it would suddenly strike her how isolated she was, dependent on one servant, a German called Paul, for her safety if anything should go wrong. There had already been a taste, though a mild one, of what a hurricane could be like, and she had felt the tremor of an earthquake once. Her bedroom was not the most reassuring place to be, either – it was crammed with tobacco tins and wine bottles, for which there was no room downstairs, as well as all their clothes, and her easel and paints (though little painting had been done since Paris), as unlike a woman’s bedroom as it was possible to imagine. In the dark, it was quite sinister and claustrophobic.

  Louis was away longer than she expected because he fell ill, and had to be nursed in Sydney by his mother who had just arrived from England. She was coming to live with them, or rather to see if she thought she could. Fanny had misgivings too. Aunt Maggie, for all her spirit, was a most proper Victorian lady who had very set ideas about behaviour. Fanny had not been fooled by the readiness of her mother-in-law to adapt during their voyages together – those were adventures; living in Samoa would be something much more challenging. For a start, there was the problem of a lady’s maid. Fanny didn’t have one. She did everything for herself, and in the matter of clothing and adornment, the chief concerns of a lady’s-maid, ‘everything’ amounted to very little. Maggie would expect a maid and there was none available. ‘The bush is no place for fine lady companions,’ Fanny wrote in her diary, and expressed the hope that her mother-in-law would manage with help from herself. She was a little alarmed to find that when Louis arrived with his mother she had brought her own sofa with her. Life in Samoa was not one of lying on sofas, and in any case there was nowhere to put it in their crowded cottage. Quite how Aunt Maggie was going to fit in was far from clear.

  In her letters home to her sister, Aunt Maggie’s own doubts emerged, though carefully glossed over with apparent delight at what she found. Louis, now recovered again, looked tanned and well, if even thinner than usual, and Fanny she thought blooming, in spite of all her hard work. She was amazed at the triumph of Fanny’s garden, describing all the onions, turnips, parsley, tomatoes, green peppers and bananas growing in abundance – she had never seen anything like it. But the hours her son and daughter-in-law kept did not please her. Breakfast was at the heathenish hour of six a.m., lunch at eleven a.m., dinner at five p.m., and then bed at nine p.m. She realised this routine was in response to the climate, but all the same she found it hard to get used to. The weather was poor, with days and days of heavy rain, and finally Aunt Maggie could stand this strange existence no longer. She did the sensible thing, returning to Sydney, to wait there in comfort until the big house was ready. It was a relief all round. There was perhaps also a little smugness in Fanny’s diary entry that her mother-in-law had not been able to tolerate the discomfort that she herself had tolerated for months without respite.

  By April (1891), the main house was ready for occupation, though far from finished. From the outside, it looked striking, with its peacock-blue painted walls and bright red roof and verandahs, but inside it was less impressive, reminding some visitors of an empty barn. Fanny had wanted the house to be airy, partly for reasons of health and partly for aesthetic reasons, and every effort had been made to give a feeling of space, with sliding glass doors opening on to verandahs so that the rooms seemed to project outside. Colour was important. She hung a yellowish-terracotta ‘tapa’ in the dining-room and had the ceiling painted cream; the large windows had curtains of cream and silver gauze lined with orange silk; and the doors were painted the same peacock-blue as the outside. She and Louis were to have separate rooms, for the first time. No reasons were given for this decision, except for the fact that each liked a different colour scheme. Fanny wrote that she liked ‘a soft jewelled look’, pinks and reds and dark green, while Louis preferred black, white and light blue. She took a lot of trouble preparing her mother-in-law’s room, anxious to make her as comfortable now as she had been uncomfortable before. She gave her a sea view, put white mats on the floor, and painted the walls pale green. Aunt Maggie, returning in mid-May, was pleased with it and everyone relaxed. But this time she had not come alone. She had brought with her from Sydney a young woman, called Mary, to be her maid, deciding after her previous brief experience that she could not be doing without one. Right from the start, Mary’s presence created tension. All the other servants were Samoan and Mary could understand neither their language nor their ways – she was isolated and inclined to be aloof, with no intention of trying to integrate herself fully into the household. She tried Fanny’s patience sorely – asked to do the slightest thing, Mary would say it was not her job. She was Mrs Margaret Stevenson’s maid and companion, and hers alone.

  To add to the tension, the Strongs had arrived at Vailima, completing the family unit. At least the presence of eight-year-old Austin gave Aunt Maggie something to do – she became his teacher, though all she taught him was poetry and prayers. But it gave some structure to her day which Fanny felt she needed. Aunt Maggie spent a great deal of time in her room writing letters, and otherwise, apart from reciting poetry with Austin, had nothing more interesting to do than varnish all the books in the house (to preserve them) with her maid Mary. She admired Fanny’s diligence in the garden, telling her sister in letters how amazing her daughter-in-law was and how ferociously hard she worked, but nevertheless there crept into her praise a hint of disapproval. In her opinion, Fanny worked too hard, and no good would come of it. She noted in August of that first year that ‘Fanny has not been very well lately – I fancy the result of a long course of overwork … she has really laboured prodigiously … and I have often predicted a breakdown’.3 It was no part of being a good wife to turn herself into a full-time estate manager: in her mother-in-law’s opinion, she had her priorities wrong.

  But Fanny saw things differently. It was vital Vailima should be self-supporting and if she didn’t run the estate nobody would. Louis was writing, Lloyd looked after the servants, Belle helped Louis (she was becoming his amanuensis) and looked after Austin, and Joe Strong was so unreliable that he disappeared down to Apia most of the time. Far from helping Fanny, he infuriated her by drinking heavily and taking a Samoan mistress. Joe, she decided, would have to go, and that meant a divorce from Belle. Fanny seethed over the situation, which grew worse all the time. Not only was her son-in-law a drunkard and womaniser, he was also discovered to be a thief, ‘robbing the cellar and storeroom at night with false keys’.4 Louis could keep fairly calm about all this, but Fanny couldn’t. She found it hard to keep calm about anything. Her rages, and the way she worked herself up into them, quite alarmed her mother-in-law, who believed that Louis should live in an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity and it was his wife’s duty to create this. But the effect on Louis of her fury with Joe Strong was not nearly so upsetting as people imagined. In fact, it was Fanny’s volatile nature which went on attracting him – he loved her obvious passion about everything. One thing about his wife: she was never boring.

  On the other hand, once the second full year at Vailima was nearly over, she was becoming increasingly difficult. Louis reckoned the trouble began round about the beginning of 1892. Even before that, Fanny had suffered spells of ill-health – h
eadaches, dizziness – but a short holiday on her own in Fiji had seemed to put her right. Her mother-in-law noted that on her return she looked ‘very well and thoroughly set up by the change of air’. But the improvement hadn’t lasted. She seemed to lose her temper more frequently and often it was with Louis. There was, wrote Louis to Colvin, obviously ‘something wrong’,5 but what? Was it physical or mental? He was ‘miserably anxious’ and at a loss over what to do. Sometimes the scenes Fanny created were ridiculous and petty, such as when she voiced her hatred for someone Louis liked, and refused to have them in her house; but sometimes they seemed truly hysterical and based on nothing. According to Louis, she ‘passes from death-bed scenes to states of stupor’, lying for days without moving. At least that was better than having her ranting and raving. This was not the wife he had known for the last twelve years, but some other creature. He called in the doctor who announced there was no danger to life. ‘Is there any danger to mind?’ Louis asked, and was told that this was not excluded. After the doctor’s visit, there was a scene worse than any before, so awful, Louis wrote to Colvin, that he couldn’t ‘harrow’ him with it. It was ‘a kind of set against me; she made every talk an argument, then a quarrel; till I fled her and lived in a kind of isolation in my own room’. Every time he came out of it, there was another attack – ‘a hell of a scene, which lasted all night – I will never tell anyone about it, it could not be believed and was so unlike herself … Belle and I held her for about two hours; she wanted to run away.’