Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  It was the worst thing that had ever happened in their marriage, worse than any of Louis’s haemorrhages. Those had brought them closer together, sustaining each other through the horror. But now, Fanny’s mental state threatened to drive them apart and that was terrifying. She had nursed Louis expertly and devotedly, but he didn’t know how to deal with this complete and inexplicable change of character. His mother, thankfully, had gone back to Scotland by the time Fanny was at her worst. The word ‘mad’ was never used by Louis, but the fear that Fanny was in some way mad never left him. It seemed to him that medical help of a sort superior to that available in Apia had to be sought, so he and Belle took her to Sydney. The change alone seemed to work a transformation – ‘the first few weeks were delightful: her voice quiet again – no more of that anxious shrillness about nothing that had so long echoed in my ears.’ But once back in Samoa, though taking the medicine prescribed – presumably some kind of tranquilliser – she ‘got bad again’. This time the ‘badness’ took the form of a melancholy that could not be breached. ‘I am broken on the wheel, or feel like it’, Louis wrote. If it had not been for Belle and Lloyd – ‘both as good as gold’ – he did not know how he could have managed.

  But manage he did, hoping the new medicine would eventually take effect, and ever optimistic that the old Fanny would be restored to him. He wrote to his mother that, though his wife had been ‘devilishly ill’, she had improved vastly. But Belle, to whom he was dictating the letter, broke in with a protest, telling Aunt Maggie that her mother was not improving but instead lying in bed, not eating, not speaking, not smoking. She was like a zombie, taking no interest in anything or anybody. But at least she was calm, and for that Louis was grateful. Just as, when he was so very ill, Fanny would develop illnesses of her own once the crisis was over, so he became ill now that she appeared to be recovering. Again and again they would each write in the terms Louis now used to his mother: ‘half my illness was the dreadful bother about Fanny’s.’ When a photograph taken of his wife in Sydney arrived, he thought, looking at it, that he should have realised how ill she was when she sat for it, whereas, in fact, he had thought her better. Her appearance in it was strange – she was, he wrote ‘pale, penetratin’6 and interestin”, but definitely not herself, not the beautiful Fanny he loved.

  Nobody else ever thought Fanny beautiful. At various times, she was described by Louis’s male friends as fiery, startling, and – a strange word for the times – sexy. Those were the compliments. The insults, of course, were far more numerous, insults about her weight, her hair, her skin and her clothes, the sort of insults hurled at Mary Livingstone so frequently. Women had been equally dismissive, failing entirely to recognise what Louis saw in her. What he saw was a kind of beauty, even then, in 1893, when she was fifty-three. Playing a family party game called ‘Truth’ one evening at the beginning of the worst period of her illness, Louis gave Fanny the maximum ten points for ‘Beauty’. She was annoyed with him, telling him not to be so silly but to play the game properly – she was quite happy to be awarded ten points for ‘Work’ and would hope to score them for ‘Intelligence’ but felt it was making fun of her to give her ten for ‘Beauty’. But Louis was solemn. He would not budge. ‘I am honest,’7 he said, looking at her steadily. ‘I think you are the most beautiful woman in the world.’ It was a tribute any wife would be proud of and reassured by, and yet Fanny appears to have remained dubious, seeing little beauty in herself. She’d never traded on her looks – she was all personality. And she had enough self-awareness and common sense to know that it was her daughter Belle who was the beautiful one. But this judgement of her husband’s – that she was beautiful – mattered. It was only one of many indications that sexually their relationship was far from dead, in spite of repeated illness and the other strains their marriage had been subject to. Louis desired his wife, never anyone else. He delighted in her physically, even if everyone else saw a plump, grey-haired, middle-aged matron. Hints of this creep into his correspondence all the time, even to his mother, to whom he described Fanny coming to him with a pair of corsets she’d made, ‘in despair’8 because she couldn’t get the laces to fit the holes (which he saw she’d plugged in on one side upside-down) and he took great pleasure in fixing them and then admiring her in the corsets. Then there was the time they were out in a boat and Fanny wanted to change her dress. She asked Louis to hold up a shawl so that she could do it discreetly and the boatman wouldn’t see, but when her head emerged from her gown she found him trailing the shawl and not using it as a screen at all – ‘he said he couldn’t countenance prudery.’ He loved to look at her, seeming to take extra pride in her voluptuous figure. Describing to his mother Fanny wearing a black velvet gown he’d bought her, he wrote: ‘You should have seen Fanny … she looked immense!’9 Immense was how he seemed to like her.

  Aunt Maggie, arriving back in Samoa after her year in Scotland, thought her daughter-in-law was ‘much more nearly herself than I expected, which is a comfort’, but a couple of months later she was reporting that Fanny wasn’t well and that she had gone with her to stay in the Tivoli Hotel in Apia to give her a rest. Fortunately, this was all Fanny needed, she was not suffering from anything more sinister; but Aunt Maggie was critical of Fanny having ‘dozens of schemes on hand’. Some of these were to do, as usual, with the estate – making a perfect, level lawn, for one – but others were social. Fanny was doing some entertaining, which Maggie relished, especially as it showed off the Heriot Row furniture she’d had brought out – she loved to see guests seated round her old dining-table. Fanny proved a good hostess too. Never in any of her previous homes had she been called upon to do any formal entertaining, but now that Vailima was finished and furnished, it provided the perfect backdrop for dinners and parties and she rose splendidly to the occasion. All the produce they served was from the estate, giving an added glory to the dinners. Louis boasted to Colvin of the abundance of raw materials – ‘salad10, beans, cabbages, tomatoes, asparagus, oranges, limes, pineapples – galore; pints of milk and cream; fresh meat five days a week’. Everything was fresh, nothing tinned. Indeed, if a tin had to be opened ‘the gnashing of teeth when it has to be done is dreadful … no one … knows what the Hatred of the Tin is’.

  There were many descriptions of festivities at Vailima, all of them attesting to the warmth and generosity of the hospitality and painting a seductive picture of the great house glittering with lights from scores of candles, high above Apia whence the guests came, riding up the recently improved track and tying their horses to the posts outside. Some were regular visitors, but others were from the ships docked temporarily in the harbour – often the entire crew was invited up for the evening. Louis wrote that he was swollen with pride at how magnificent his house looked. But there was also another kind of entertaining initiated by Fanny even before the house was properly finished and not on the same scale as these later lavish parties. She started a club, with Louis’s encouragement, consisting entirely of Samoans and what Aunt Maggie described as ‘half-castes, the Stevenson family being the only white people to be admitted’. Twenty-five people had been invited on Fanny’s fifty-first birthday and received on the front verandah, prettily decorated with Chinese lanterns and decked with flowers. Here they all sat and chose a name for their club (the Royal Vine-ula Club – vine-ula being the name of a flower), while sandwiches and cakes and lemonade were served. Fanny was chosen as president, and an entrance fee fixed for the future, and then they all sang songs. The purpose of the club was meant to be cultural more than anything, but ended up social, with everyone eagerly meeting once a month and enjoying simply coming together.

  Louis liked this. As Fanny had realised years ago, her husband was a much more gregarious character than he would ever admit. He might say he preferred to be alone with her but she saw his need for other company and how he drew stimulation from people gathered round him, having quite a taste for being the genial presiding host. If things had been otherwise, if they
had lived in England, then those rowdy evenings with his male friends, which she had thought so injurious to his health, might have satisfied this side of him, but as it was it had been up to her to create a substitute, which she did. The dinners and parties were not events she needed for herself – much more than Louis, she truly had no need of outside company. They diverted him, not her. For her, they were extra work when she always had too much work, and drained her of the energy she would much rather have spent on the garden. She rarely had the time any more to write letters – Louis claimed she’d stopped writing them altogether – and could only with difficulty keep adding to the articles she hoped would be published in book form. It was really, according to Louis, a cookery book, but Fanny herself referred to it as the ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife’ in which she would distil the accumulated wisdom of over thirty years of running very different households in very different circumstances.

  But the purpose of the proposed book was really to earn some money. Fanny, like so very many wives, longed to have money of her own, however well her husband provided for her, however generous he was. The money from Skerryvore, which could have been her own personal nest-egg, had gone into Vailima, though she had squirrelled a small amount away. ‘I thought’, she wrote in her diary for 1893, ‘sometime I might wish a few shillings for a private charity and hid it away.’ But she would have liked not a few shillings secreted but instead a regular means of earning far more than that – and she thought she was capable of it. ‘I would work very hard to earn a couple of pounds a month,’ she confessed, but what held her back was ‘my position as Louis’s wife’. It would not do. If she took gainful employment of any sort it would be seen as humiliating for her husband. But Fanny wanted to earn money for the same reason certain women have always wanted to do so: it would have meant power, power to do with it what she wished without need for consultation, or feelings of guilt or of being beholden. In her case, there was also the burden of knowing it was her family who drained Louis of his earnings. He never once threw this in her face, always regarding Belle and Lloyd and Austin as his children as much as Fanny’s; luckily, she never knew that Louis had written to his cousin Bob, just at the point when she was struggling to complete her collection of articles, ‘I sometimes feel harassed. I have a great family here about me: a great anxiety.’11 He meant more than his immediate family members, of course – he meant the entire household of servants – but the point was the same. Money was always a worry, and Fanny would have liked some of her own.

  What she wanted her own money for at that time, in 1894, was to help Mataafa, the Samoan chief whose candidature to administer the laws she and Louis supported. But another chief had been preferred by the joint rulers of Samoa (Great Britain, Germany and USA) and Mataafa, who defied the decision, was imprisoned. Fanny was roused to a great fury over this – as indeed was Louis, but he preached caution, not wishing to be ordered off the island for flouting the government. Each of them, on various occasions during their marriage, had taken great stands of principle, glorying in righteous indignation of one sort or another and appearing excited at the prospect of some measure of martyrdom, but usually it had been Louis who was inspired to champion some cause, and Fanny the one to back him and egg him on, proud to see him (as she thought) fearless. Now it was she who, of the two, was the more vehement and she despised him for holding back – ‘I intend to do everything in my power to save Mataafa,’12 she wrote in her diary, ‘… and if Louis turns his face from him by the fraction of an inch I shall wear black in public … if he is brought in to Apia a prisoner I shall go down alone and kiss his hand as my King. Louis says this is arrant, mad quixotism.’ In fact, she didn’t go alone when she went to the prison – Louis went with her – and she didn’t kiss Mataafa’s hand. Their visit, nevertheless, was very public, rather more so than Louis wished, and all the fault of a defiant Fanny, daring him not to match her. ‘He called me an “idiotic enthusiast”. Well, he’s another.’

  She was right. They both had in them a fanatical streak, they both indulged in manic behaviour when roused, and each recognised in the other this reckless trait. It was like answering like, part of their passion for each other, the spice that prevented their relationship from ever becoming bland. Sometimes, it made them seem antagonistic towards each other and misled people into thinking all was not well between them – the very ‘bite’ in their marriage could sound so fierce and frightening. They sometimes seemed to tremble on the brink of a violent public row, the tension palpable between them, their words sounding barbed and meant to wound. Once, at a dinner to which most of Apia had been invited, Louis made some remarks which were far from respectful towards America and something in his manner was interpreted by others as a slight to Fanny. And she, for her part, could address Louis in tones of what sounded to others like contempt – this was no way for a ‘good wife’ to speak to her husband. She didn’t care. ‘What sort of devil from hell is the British matron and why should I, of all people in the world, take her for my pattern of conduct? It is like being a sham paralytic.’13 But she was no paralytic, sham or real. She never dissembled. She was always ‘straight and true’, saying what she thought, never deferring to any superior authority Louis was supposed to possess by virtue of being her husband, and never fearing him. Her confidence in their partnership was complete – there was no need for remorse, for begging forgiveness. She expected him to understand, and he did, even if during her mental breakdown he was tested to the limit.

  Others did not. Louis was seen as the victim of an hysterical, possessive, domineering wife, as far from ‘good’ as it was possible to be. Only Lloyd, Belle and Aunt Maggie knew Fanny’s true worth, knew how for all her faults she was loved so completely by Louis and thought by him to be the perfect wife. He said it again and again in his correspondence to all his relations and friends, letter after letter over the years proclaiming his pride and immense satisfaction in his wife. But it made no difference. Outsiders looking in on the marriage were determined to see misery and pain, and to hold the wife responsible for it. It was she who had removed him to a godforsaken South Sea island to keep him to herself and in doing so she had ruined him as a writer. It was she who had saddled him with her family, draining him of money long after finance should have ceased to be a problem. They – Henley, Colvin and, in particular, Gosse – could not forgive him for preferring Fanny to them and so they maintained he was her prisoner. She was never the right wife, not the right age, the right nationality, the right class, the right type. She fitted none of their preconceived notions of what their young lad’s wife should have been. None of them had either the sense or sensitivity of Louis’s parents, who recognised with such speed and relief that their son’s marriage was like their own, a match between lovers, and that therefore nothing else mattered.

  Perhaps because Louis was so acutely aware of how Fanny suffered at the hands of his friends he frequently went out of his way to pay extravagant public tributes to her, and never more so than at the Thanksgiving Dinner Fanny had organised at the end of November 1894. It was one of the most spectacular occasions Vailima had ever seen, with all the Americans then in Apia invited and seated at the long table in the great hall. Belle described afterwards the huge, swinging lamps hanging over the table, throwing the highly polished Heriot Row silver into glittering relief and sparking off the crystal goblets and bowls. The food was superb (and all as usual provided by the estate, even the ‘pumpkins’ for the pies, which were really a brand of sweet potato Fanny had found growing in the woods) and the drink abundant – sherry, Bordeaux, Madeira and port with champagne afterwards. After dessert, Louis made a speech. He always enjoyed standing at the head of his own table in front of his family and friends, but this was a special speech, couched gracefully in language which rang with sincerity. He spoke clearly and carefully, saying how thankful he was for his wife, to whom he owed not only his happiest years but, through her devoted care, his very life. He had reason, he told them, to be grateful to Amer
ica for much that was brightest in his life, and that brightness was Fanny. His mother, listening, was moved as much by this tribute to her daughter-in-law as she was by the tribute her son went on to pay to her – it seemed right to her that Fanny’s worth should be so plainly acknowledged.

  It was as well that it was. The next few days, even though the sun shone and Vailima looked beautiful, Fanny was depressed, full of premonitions that something awful was going to happen. It was not unknown for her to experience such forebodings – like most emotional, highly strung people she swung between highs and lows and her imagination did the rest – but this time they were intense. She confessed them to Louis and her children and her mother-in-law, and they all did what people usually do in such situations – tried to reassure her, to remind her of other instances when she had felt the same and nothing had happened. Louis tried to tease her out of her gloom, telling her she was childish and riddled with superstition, but she could not be shaken in her conviction of impending doom. On 2 December, a Sunday, Louis read a new prayer he had written specially which sounded like another attempt to banish Fanny’s demons – ‘Go with each of us to rest … call us up … eager to labour, happy, if happiness shall be our portion – and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.’14 It seemed to help everyone relax and the day ended with a game of boisterous charades. The next day, Fanny heard him read to her the beginning of Chapter IX of his new novel (Weir of Hermiston) which she thought good, but still she was low, though containing her strange fears better. In a further attempt to distract her, Louis talked of future plans – maybe they would visit the USA the following year. He played patience with her, and then said he’d make his special mayonnaise for supper. Together, they mixed oil and lime juice – and then he suddenly paused, put his hand to his head, said, ‘What’s that?’15 and then ‘Oh, what a pain!’ and ‘Do I look strange?’ ‘No,’ lied Fanny, for once not straight and true, but terrified into pretence.