There were other areas of incompatibility, but of these nothing was said, Syrie only later confiding to one or two intimates her distaste for her husband’s sexual demands. With his ginger hair now turning gray, his walrus mustache, red face, and paunch, and the heavy smell of cigars lingering on his breath, Wellcome at nearly fifty was unlikely to appear an attractive prospect to a young woman of twenty-one. It was more than that, however: there were hints of beatings and brutality, of sadistic tendencies, of pain inflicted in the bedroom that privately appalled her.
In June 1903, shortly after returning from a long tour of Canada and the United States, Syrie gave birth to a son, Mounteney. Both husband and wife doted on the boy, although his arrival, instead of bringing his parents together, acted to drive them further apart. Syrie, with a small baby to care for, objected to being made to continue with her husband’s demanding program, nor was she slow in making her objections clear. She sulked, he was irritable, and there were some ferocious rows, with Wellcome by no means always coming off best. He was proud of his chic young wife, but he expected total obedience and grew increasingly resentful of what he regarded as a culpable failure in her duty toward him; he was not pleased, either, that increasingly she seemed to prefer the company of other, younger men, to whom she was obviously most appealing.
In 1909 the Wellcomes were again in America, by this time on noticeably bad terms. After visiting New York, Washington, and California, they traveled to Ecuador, where they stayed at the American Legation in Quito. Wellcome, at the request of the United States government, was to inspect the sanitary conditions of the disease-infested Panama Canal Zone, a project enormously appealing to him, less so to his wife. Also staying at the Legation was an American financier, Archer Harman, and it was with Harman that Henry Wellcome suddenly and furiously accused his wife of adultery. Syrie vehemently denied it, but her husband refused to listen, and the scenes between them grew so violent that Syrie, frightened, left for New York. The pair neither saw nor spoke to each other again. A legal separation was brokered, with a generous personal settlement for Syrie of £2,400 a year, and custody of Mounteney until the age of eleven, during which time all his expenses would be met by his father. Whatever had or had not happened between Syrie and Harman, Wellcome was convinced of his wife’s guilt and considered her a deeply immoral woman; he never forgave her, and remained morbidly miserable for the rest of his life. He forbade her name or his nine-year marriage to be mentioned in his presence, and he passed straight to his lawyers Syrie’s emotional letters, most of them filled with plaintive requests for more money and anxiety about Mounteney’s health.
After the shock of the breakup subsided, Syrie reveled in her freedom, dividing her time between London and Paris. For the first time in her life she was her own mistress, well provided for and able to indulge her taste for luxury and an artistic bent revealed in her stylish clothes and furnishings and an almost theatrical flair for entertaining. Her father having died in 1905, Syrie moved her mother in to live with her at York Terrace, glad of the veneer of respectability that the maternal presence would provide. For there was no doubt about it: Mrs. Wellcome was not quite respectable. Although she had escaped the stigma of divorce, she was nonetheless looked at slightly askance by the more fastidious sections of society: not only was she guilty of desertion but there was subsequent evidence of flighty behavior, including a passionate affair with a glamorous young hussar. Other wealthy admirers incuded the duc de Gramont and one of the Bourbon princes, as well as the American department store tycoon Gordon Selfridge, who reportedly paid the rent for the house in York Terrace (for which, it was also reported, Syrie had had a doormat made reading WELLCOME). It was Selfridge, too, it was said, who helped subsidize Syrie’s expensive wardrobe, her lavish entertaining, and the wages of a sizable domestic staff, a butler and personal maid, cook, kitchen maid, car and chauffeur, which could scarcely have been afforded on the £200 a month allowed her by Wellcome.
At the time she began the affair with Maugham, Syrie was growing anxious. Selfridge was losing interest; she was in her mid-thirties, “a courtesan just past her prime;46” and although she enjoyed her life, she was beginning to crave security. Wellcome might divorce her at any time, none of her rich lovers had offered to marry her, and with middle age approaching she felt the need of respectable status and a large disposable income. Syrie also desperately wanted another child. Her devotion to Mounteney was visceral and deep; she had looked after him, worried over his delicate health and backwardness at school, and taken him with her whenever she could on her excursions abroad. But Wellcome had grown increasingly obdurate about his son, and when in 1912 Mounteney was sent to boarding school, his father began severely to limit Syrie’s access, causing acute anguish not only to her but to the boy, who had always been very close to his mother.
Thus in 1913, when Willie Maugham came into her life, he appeared to be everything Syrie wanted, “the most charming man in London,”47 rich, fashionable, and unattached. It was not long before Syrie determined to have him, and if that meant she had to do all the running, then that was what she would do.
Three or four weeks after the housewarming in 1914, during which time she and Maugham had seen each other daily, Syrie announced she was going to Paris, where she had the use of an apartment on the Quai d’Orsay, and suggested Maugham should come, too. They traveled separately, and on arrival he telephoned from his hotel to arrange to take her to dinner, afterward going back to her apartment, where for the first time they made love. The next morning Maugham returned to London, and when Syrie followed a few days later they fell into an agreeable routine of dining almost every evening at York Terrace, after which they would go to bed. “It was all very delightful,”48 said Maugham. “In the circles in which we moved it was an understood thing that I was Syrie’s lover…. I was proud of her and pleased with myself.” Her compliments were expert, she was sexy, and he delighted in her gaiety and vitality, appreciating the fact that she was always beautifully dressed and groomed, her instinctive chic an aspect he took particular pleasure in showing off. (After Maugham brought Syrie to call on his sister-in-law, Nellie, one of his little nieces recorded in her diary, “Uncle Willie brought Mrs. Welcome49 [sic] to tea in a very funny hat.”) Maugham sometimes accompanied Syrie on shopping expeditions on Bond Street, and enjoyed watching her slender figure parade in silk negligées and diaphanous tea gowns. Syrie entertained frequently and with panache, with Maugham now a permanent fixture on her guest list.
All this was good fun. Maugham knew that Syrie was impressed by him, and that his connection with the stage gave her a cachet with her friends; but he regarded their relationship as no more than a lighthearted affair between two sophisticated adults, neither of whom wanted any serious entanglement. So completely was he off his guard that he laughed when Syrie told him she was “madly in love.” He was touched, and his vanity flattered, if he did not for a moment take the declaration literally.
Then something happened that might have warned Maugham that the situation was far more serious than he had believed. He and Syrie were walking in Richmond Park when to his astonishment Syrie announced she wanted to have his child. Maugham was appalled: he had a weakness for babies and hoped one day to have children of his own, but not by this woman whom he did not love and with whom he had no intention of settling down. In the plainest possible terms he set out the immense difficulties, legal and social, of bringing into the world an illegitimate child, but Syrie brushed them aside, explaining that one of her brothers, married but childless, would be delighted to bring the baby up; then after three or four years she could adopt it and no one would be any the wiser. The plan was deceptively simple—so simple that for a moment Maugham was tempted—but then reason prevailed. He told Syrie that it was out of the question, he would have nothing to do with it, and she must not think of it again.
The following month, April 1914, Syrie invited Maugham to join her and a couple of friends in Biarritz. When after a few
days the friends left, Syrie suggested that she and Maugham should drive over the border into Spain, a country he loved and about which he had told her so much. Maugham was instantly wary: it was one thing to conduct an affair with a married woman behind closed doors, but flagrantly to travel alone with her, without a third party as chaperon, was asking for trouble: he had no wish to compromise Syrie’s reputation, nor did he wish to become involved in any punitive action that Wellcome might choose to bring against his wife. But Syrie reassured him: she and her husband had agreed to an amicable arrangement, she explained, whereby each was free to enter into other relationships. And so they set off, stopping the first night at León before going on to Santiago de Compostela. For the first time Maugham made love to Syrie without protection, carelessly leaving the precautions to her. After nearly a week in Compostela they drove to Paris and caught the Golden Arrow to London.
It was not long after his return home that Maugham received a shock. Syrie telephoned one morning and said she must see him urgently. When he arrived at her house he found her in bed, looking pale and tearful. She began to cry and told him she had had a miscarriage. “I didn’t want to tell you50 till I was certain,” she wept. Maugham was stunned, as he had understood her to have given up all idea of having a baby, but he said nothing of his disquiet; he sat down by her bed, held her hand and did his best to comfort her, drying her tears with his handkerchief. “Would you like to bring the affair to an end?” she whispered. “Do you want to finish it?” She was ill and unhappy; he knew of the painful situation over Mounteney, and he felt desperately sorry for her. “Of course not,” he said. “Why should I?” Within a short time Syrie had completely recovered, and over the next few weeks the couple resumed their familiar routine as though nothing had happened, dining and dancing, going to parties together, and lunching at the Ritz. Of Maugham’s friends, only Gerald Kelly was let into the secret. “I have got a great deal to tell you,”51 Maugham wrote. “But I dare not write it. I shall tell you of a very curious development, but in the most dreadful confidence.”
Maugham believed that he had had a lucky escape; he was perfectly happy to continue seeing Syrie in the short term, especially while she was still emotionally fragile, but the incident had shaken him, and it made him realize that as far as he was concerned the affair had no real future. Fond though he was, he was beginning to feel a little bored by Syrie’s company, uneasy at her dependence on him and fretting to be free. Although Wellcome appeared to show no inclination to divorce his wife, the possibility that he might made Maugham distinctly nervous. For safety’s sake he decided the best plan was to disappear for a while, and so he left London to spend the month of July with Gerald Kelly on Capri.
It was a short but idyllic period of respite. The two men stayed at the Villa Cercola, a little white-walled house above the town that was shared by the novelist E. F. (“Dodo”) Benson and Maugham’s old friend from Heidelberg, John Ellingham Brooks. Benson, whose discreetly homoerotic novel, Colin, vividly evokes this period on Capri, came over from England as often as he could, while Brooks was a permanent resident, the arrangement convenient because, as one of their neighbors delicately phrased it, “they had tastes in common52 besides literature, which made Capri a desirable retreat for them both.” The villa, facing south and luxuriantly draped in passionflower and plumbago, had a terrace running along its front and a big studio out at the back; lizards basked on the walls, the orange trees were in flower, and leisurely meals, cooked by the amiable Seraphina, were eaten under the shade of a vine-covered pergola in the garden. Mornings were devoted to study, Maugham working on the first draft of a new play, after which the four men walked down to the Bagno Timberino, where they swam in the translucent water, sunbathed, and eyed the local Capresi youth, as beautiful and as obliging as ever. Following a siesta in the shuttered cool of the house, Maugham had a lesson in Russian, given him by an eccentric émigré from Odessa who came to the villa every afternoon, after which there was usually a game of tennis or a stroll up the slopes of Monte Solaro; and after dinner a short walk to Morgano’s in the piazza to drink and play cards with the regulars, among them a newly arrived couple, the novelist Compton Mackenzie and his wife.
The Mackenzies had taken the Villa Rosaio on Anacapri, and there was a considerable amount of to-ing and fro-ing between the two households, the main focus for Maugham being the English newspapers that were regularly delivered there. “The bundle of papers that arrived53 by every post from England attracted him, and he did not pretend otherwise,” Faith Mackenzie recalled. “I did a drawing of him, showing nothing but a chair, an open newspaper and a pair of crossed legs, and called it ‘Somerset Maugham dines with friends.’” Compton Mackenzie, who had recently become something of a celebrity with the publication of his novel Sinister Street, relished the company of his fellow writers, even if he was sometimes made uncomfortable by the malicious teasing of Brooks by Benson and Maugham, who in his opinion “treated poor Brooks very badly.”54 It was easy to see why Brooks got on their nerves: fatter and balder than before, his weak, handsome face burned a rich terra-cotta, Brooks was otherwise unchanged; lazy, amiable, and self-centered, he bored the others by insisting on reading aloud from his translation of Hérédia, endlessly fiddled at but never finished, and tormented them by banging away badly at Beethoven on his upright piano. “He had fine perceptions,”55 wrote Benson, “[and] somewhere beneath the ash of his laziness there burned the authentic fire [but] he was inexcusably indolent.”*
The peaceful bachelor routine of the Villa Cercola was suddenly shattered at the beginning of August, first by the outbreak of war on the fourth, and second by a telegram from Syrie in Rome announcing her imminent arrival on the island. Maugham was appalled, his obvious panic infecting the other members of the household. Brooks rushed off “in a great flutter” to report the news to the Mackenzies, telling them that Maugham had got himself involved with a woman and was terrified he was going to have to marry her. “I don’t know what I shall do56 if Maugham brings a wife to the Cercola,” Brooks wailed. “I don’t think Benson will like it at all either.” Mackenzie, too, was shocked, and implored Maugham to stand firm. With this support behind him, Maugham immediately wired back begging Syrie not to come as he and Kelly were on the point of leaving for England. Syrie ignored the cable and arrived off the boat in Capri (much as she had arrived off the boat in pursuit of Wellcome fifteen years earlier in Khartoum), only to find Maugham, just as he had said, on the point of departure. Her brief stay can hardly have been passed in an easy atmosphere: none of them wanted her there, least of all Maugham.
London was a city in a state of chaotic preparation for war, the excitement and euphoria of the first few days having been quickly subsumed in the confusion of mobilization. At forty, Maugham was too old to enlist,* but he was passionately patriotic. “To me the very shape of England57 on the map is significant,” he wrote, trying to analyze his own particular brand of nationalism. “It is an emotion compact of pride and longing and love … an emotion which makes sacrifice easy.” He was determined to take an active part in the conflict before it ended, as surely it would, by the end of the year. Many of his literary colleagues, H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett among them, regarded their contribution in literary terms, writing about the war either, like Wells, from home or, like Bennett, by going out to northern France to describe for his readers conditions on the front. But for once Maugham had not the least desire to write: it was action he wanted. Assuming his fluent French was his greatest asset, he contacted his old golfing partner, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to offer his services, and was disappointed when Churchill’s reply enclosed a letter to be presented to a department head in Whitehall. With no intention of spending the war behind a desk, Maugham ignored this and applied instead to the Red Cross, which was on the point of sending a detachment of ambulances to the front and in need of interpreters. The maverick Sir Frederick Treves, surgeon-extraordinary to Queen Victoria and a distinguishe
d veteran of the Boer War, had been appointed head of Red Cross personnel at the War Office, and under his galvanizing influence a steady stream of doctors, nurses, orderlies, drivers, and stretcher bearers was daily crossing the Channel to France. Their contribution was vital, but it was the flexible, almost amateurish nature of the Red Cross, dependent on assorted, sometimes eccentric groups of volunteers at every level of ability, that appealed to the nonconformist streak in Maugham’s nature as well as to his spirit of adventure.
By the third week in October, his application accepted, Maugham was in uniform and ready to leave. Before he could do so, however, there had been a wretchedly unhappy interview with Syrie, during which she told him that she was again pregnant. Maugham was horrified. He felt that this time there was no question but that he had been deliberately trapped; he was angry and dismayed, too upset to be able to disguise his feelings. Syrie, expecting sympathy, was badly shaken by his stony-faced reaction. She burst into tears, sobbing that it was only because she loved him that she wanted to have his child. “She made me feel a brute,”58 Maugham recalled. Despite his sense of outrage, he wanted to behave honorably; although he had tired of the affair, he still retained an affection for Syrie, and there was something in the plight of a pregnant woman that never failed to touch him. Nonetheless he was adamant that he would not be panicked into promising any kind of permanent alliance. They talked, and gradually a relative calm was restored, and Maugham was able to set out exactly what he was prepared to do. “At last I promised that when she could no longer conceal her condition, I would fetch her and take her to some place where she could be confined.” And with that, Syrie was obliged to be content.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 19
