The new year, 1966, started off well for AW. It began with his final Pictorial Guide at the printer, and he was finishing off writing Fellwanderer, researching Pennine Way, and there was Betty McNally, the light of his life, stealing time with her, arranging secret trysts, experiencing the sort of joy he had never known in his life. He was growing a bit more daring, ‘accidentally’ meeting her in the street, even contemplating inviting her to local functions which he had to attend. Life was so exciting that he had even forgotten that his fifty-ninth birthday was coming up on 17 January.
Monday
Thank you for your letter, Betty love. It wasn’t really expected, because we hadn’t said we would write, and its warm reassurances were not really necessary, because I am now utterly convinced that our love for each other is deeper by far than any word could tell, but it was very welcome, as any sign or sight of you must always be.
Oh Betty, Saturday night! Yes, I was happified too. I wanted desperately for you to appear so that I could say I was sorry for Friday, and you did and we had tea and we loved each other in the darkness. Another wonderful day.
Yesterday I spent re-writing FELLWANDERER ready for typing. I’m still not sure about this and think it safer to get a few opinions before it goes to the printer. Yours first, please.
Mr Firth has just been in with the last rough proofs for Book Seven, and I am enclosing the ‘personal notes in conclusion’ for you to read.
Betty dear, it’s bitterly cold again.
Do please go now and buy an electric blanket (the best; not a cheap one) as a gift from you to you. Promise the girls one each if they do well in their exams.
The chastity belt can wait a while.
Look! It’s working ….
BETTY DEAR
I LOVE YOU
RED
Dear Betty,
Until I saw you in the street this morning, I hadn’t realised it was my birthday. It was sweet of you to appear so unexpectedly, and to wish me many more, and to offer me flowers for my desk. I could have kicked myself afterwards for not taking your flowers after you had taken the trouble to bring them, but they would have been too great an embarrassment. It was a lovely thought, and I spoiled it for you. I’m sorry, Betty, really I am. In fact, I didn’t behave at all well this morning. I was unkind. I had much on my mind. A cloud has settled on me and I can’t get rid of it.
Your card, and J and A’s [Betty’s daughters], are the only ones I have received, but Miss Thompson (typist) brought me 20 cigarettes and a box of matches, and Mr Duff bought me a blackcurrant tart which was a beastly thing to eat and squirted all over the desk and my clothes and dripped on the carpet. I went to Blackburn on Saturday morning (never did your bedroom light shine more brightly!), spent the afternoon with Doris [Snape], and came back very disturbed. Things are not all right with the business, and I may have to go over again. I told her about you, up to a point, and this was a bad mistake.
Yesterday I sorted out many old photographs, and have put some at one side to show you next Saturday. I tried to sort myself out a bit, too. It was a poor day. I was still disturbed about my visit to Blackburn.
Miss Thompson typed FELLWANDERER for me over the weekend, and I will let you have a copy next Saturday and would value your opinion as to its impact on lady readers. There is a letter today from Molly Lefebure, agreeing to read and criticise it from the point of view of a professional writer. Donald James, Librarian, has agreed to look through it for obscenities. And the fourth opinion, I think will have to be Mr Firth’s, representing the man in the street. I ought really to ask Mr Griffin, but he talks far too much.
Thank you for your charming letter this morning. It did me good to read of your simple faith in me, after a weekend of doubts in myself. I am so glad about the blanket: it must take my place for the time being. Already I am jealous of it!
I have had two ‘backwords’ for the Old Folks Treat and cannot make up my mind about inviting Margaret and yourself. I seem to have got myself into a mood when I cannot make up my mind about anything. I think I had better not. It isn’t really convenient for you, anyway, and may not be at all for Margaret. I have others I can ask.
Thank you, too, for the supplementary birthday presents. I will bring these on Saturday so that you can tell me how they work. You’ve no idea how my heart sinks when I see the word DIRECTIONS.
I am missing you terribly, Betty. It isn’t so much that I want my arms around you; I need your arms around me. Today I feel just a bit that circumstances are getting me down, but I’ll be alright by Saturday. If I’m not, Upper Long Churn Cave will cure me, for you can’t take worries into caves, and if Upper Long Churn Cave doesn’t, you must. Perhaps all I need is happifying, and only you can do that for me. It’s been a long long time to have to wait, Betty. Maybe I love you a little too much. I can no longer manage without you.
Your equipment for Saturday should include a hatpin!
With all my love,
X: today
X: tomorrow
X: Wednesday
X: Thursday
X: Friday
Red
Oh golly, I can’t wait!
Monday afternoon
Betty, my own and only-ever sweetheart,
I know how you feel, love, because I feel just the same way. I too am obsessed. I too am hungry for an experience. I too want the companionship of my beloved all the time. I too find Sunday a day of no hope. I know when it dawns that it will be a blank. Every other day has its prospect of a meeting, by chance or planned, but never Sunday. I gaze up the valley and think of the last time and the next time: the last time with tenderness and the next time with eagerness. I am empty, and aching, and wanting you; but happy. As long as I know there will be a next time I shall always be happy.
Cindy is in worse case. She is staying in for a week or two and being courted zealously by a white poodle from Underley called Pepi, who appears every morning soon after daylight with his tail wagging and waits patiently through out the day on the doorstep, going home at dusk with his tail drooping. His is, however, a great optimist and most faithful in his daily attendance, and Cindy is tremendously excited.
I love you as you love me, Betty dear, and cannot tell you how much, but I long for the time to come when I can show you, and then you will know.
Saturday was wonderful, every moment of it. I loved the delightful intimacy (non-technical) of the bus journey, with all the other passengers intent on going about their business and paying no attention at all to their two fellow-travellers intent only on each other. I think Mr James [Donald James, Kendal Borough librarian] would permit the word ‘cocoon’ (of happiness) in this instance, although of course he wouldn’t understand and would completely disapproved of our secret caresses – on a public transport vehicle, too! The very idea! But you are so sweet: I must keep touching you and cannot help myself. The iron discipline is melting away.
Betty dear, I am terribly and wretchedly sorry for behaving so badly. The very last thing I ever wanted to do was to cause you any distress at all. You must believe that.
But things have gone tragically wrong. I ought to be right on top of the world, but find myself suddenly in the bitterest depths. I am in bad trouble, and must find a way out of it myself. Nobody can help me in a positive way (although I wish someone would show me how to fry an egg!) and, in the circumstances, you least of all. Thank you for your kind letter, but please do not try. You can help only by being there when it is all over.
I am grateful for six months of the most wonderful happiness. I was not entitled to this, and now, for a time, I must pay for it.
I am too confused in my mind to explain anything yet and sorely troubled by a conscience I had forgotten I had. I feel like a man who has been betrayed, but in fact know I have been caught in my own betrayal.
There have been dark passages in my life before, but I have always emerged in the sunshine. This will happen again. In the meantime you will not hear from me; but, Betty please, you must trust me to do what I think is right.
Red
What had suddenly gone wrong? From his reference to trying to fry eggs, it looks as if he is on his own – so presumably Ruth, his wife, has left him. It would seem as if she has found one of his love letters from Betty, or some kind neighbour has reported spotting them together somewhere.
He decides to bash on with his Pennine Way research and agrees to the offer of a lift to Buxton from another female friend, Mary Burkett, who became Director of the Abbot Hall Gallery in Kendal in 1966, and thus had quite a bit of official business with the Borough Treasurer. He is not in any way romantically attracted to her, but it shows that he had can and does have female friends, all perfectly respectably. So much for any gossips.
The Palace Hotel, Buxton, Derbyshire
Thursday night
Dear Betty,
I am in room 72 in this very palatial establishment – and guess who’s next door in Room 73? Yes, you’re right. Destiny has played another of her tricks. It’s Miss B. I can, and will, explain everything when I see you.
The drive down was OK – no touching, positively! – but we ran into bad weather, mist and rain, before arriving here at 9 o’clock. Prospects aren’t too hopeful for tomorrow.
Wish you were here
After several weeks of not meeting, communications start again with Betty, and arrangements to meet her. AW is still on his own but his son Peter has returned on leave from Bahrein.
Wednesday evening
Betty dear,
Thank you for your nice long letter, love. It was sweet. Even the written lines were decidedly friendly; what lay between them, unsaid, I hope I interpreted correctly.
I have read it over and over again. With the family united once more, these will be happy days for you, shortened though they are, unfortunately at present, by your hospital duties. Three brilliant women under one roof, each scintillating in her own sphere! A home of erudition and scholastic attainment, of academic study and learned conversation (or do you throw things at each other?). To think I so nearly became a paying guest! What field of knowledge I have denied myself! What intellectual discourses I have missed! What a barren desert is my life now, and how it might have flourished under the tuition and example of three lovely goddesses of wisdom! (or do you bicker?). Betty love, you have much to be thankful for and much to be pleased about. You have more than repaired the damaged past. You have built something finer out of the ruins. I wish I could have helped and been more, much more, than a late witness.
Of course I will be in a seventh heaven of delight to see you on Friday. I have often vowed to myself that I would go to the ends of the earth to see you and it seems odd that I should now suggest that Orton is too far. In the short time available to you, I mean. Tell you what, love: I will be at Fox’s Pulpit, if I can find it, from 2.45 to 3.45, reaching it by road from the Sedbergh bus at Black Horse; the easiest way for you would be by Appleby Road, Docker Garths, Lambrigg road-end and Firbank (narrow but surfaced road). There is a bus back at 4.15, so you could be home in good time, by 4.30. But if you find it is inconvenient after all, or if Jane wants you with her, please don’t try to come. It would be O.K. with me. I want to visit Fox’s Pulpit, anyway.
Peter was over to see me on Saturday, and has been here again yesterday, all day, and today, morning. He intends to come tomorrow and Friday, so I have had to tell him I shall be away both days. He has brought a tape-recorder and is building up a library from my records, which will make his visits frequent. His appearances are not likely to follow any pattern, and there is no prospect of a love-in yet. He has hired a car (110 pounds for 10 weeks). On the 25th of this month a friend is coming up to join him, a youngish man I have met and like, and I have suggested that he can stay here with me: I have found some more blankets. The ulterior motive, not yet disclosed, is that he can pay for his keep by Hoovering the house.
AW then thinks of a really clever cover. An American fan called Ade Meyer, a wealthy widower, who has been reading the Pictorial Guides from the beginning, is coming on a visit staying in Grasmere, and wants to have a walk with AW. How perfect it will be if Betty comes along as well, a harmless threesome of middle-aged persons, walking the fells …
Dear Betty,
Your letter today did me a world of good, and I must write and thank you for it. I feel much better in my mind after reading it, and re-assured. I need to see you and I need your advice, and there is little time to lose. I am troubled, but not so troubled that I cannot see a way opening ahead to a fuller and better experience of life.
Saturday is definite; it must be. Mr F. is back at work and has promised to help with his car. Ade is still keen, and will pick me up at 9.15. Please be ready at 9.25. You will need your boots.
See you then, love
Red
The walk with Ade and Betty goes well, and they do it again, as Ade seems to get on so well with Betty. AW hopes they will all be friends. In fact he encourages Betty to have a walk just with Ade. Meanwhile he is taking the first stages in getting a divorce from Ruth.
Monday
Betty dear,
The days I spend with you are the happiest I have ever known. They are, to me, like days on parole from prison; days in the sunshine after long confinement in the darkness. Saturday was such a day, a wonderfully happy and (in spite of everything) carefree twelve hours. The unpleasant things didn’t seem to matter while you were with me, and I could forget them. You are a constant delight to me. Perhaps it was as well that Ade was with us. If we had started loving each other at Cauldron Snout, or in the Moss Shop Shelter, or in the black sinister gorge (all likely places) – ! we were late enough as it was.
I shall always associate you with Upper Teesdale, and for me there is sadness in the thought that our work there is ended: but I hope we shall go again, the two of us, and walk again amongst the flowers. Promise!
I want you to go out with Ade, as much and as often as you like. He is hard work at times, I know (he reminds me of an old St Bernard dog), but really a delightful man and I greatly admire his determination and independence. Quite obviously and understandably he is fond of you. He is a stranger in a strange land and has need of friends. Yes, please go with him, and make him happy – up to a point (there must be no sprigs of heather sticking in your jumper when you come back to me!). Show him your home, your daughters, Krishna [Betty’s cat]…. Besides, I have the idea of suggesting a pact – that the three of us do the John Muir Trail together in 1968, and I’m serious about it. For you and me this could be a heavenly holiday. But it depends on how well you and Ade get along during the next few weeks. It depends on nothing else. The barriers are falling.
Mr F. has been in. He was greatly impressed by High Force. Mr F. wants to come with us again, definitely. Super, being with three men, you said.
I cannot solve the mystery of the letter of last November, which is now deepened because I was quoted as mentioning Jim by his full name (i.e. surname). The man who came to see me said that the solicitor had the original, and this appears now to have been a trick. The whole business mystifies me. Your suspicions must be right. Somewhere I have been careless. Perhaps it was because this particular piece of evidence was so tenuous that, having mentioned it, it was not brought up in discussion again. However, thank goodness you are not involved. You are much too precious. I would never do anything to cause you distress.
Thank you for your letter. I have today spoken to the Lancaster solicitor on the telephone. He sounds very nice. He will start the ball rolling by asking JrB to submit a draft agreement, incorporating their client’s wishes, and then I will have to go to see him.
I had better not see you again until 9.30 July 9th, love, desperately though I want to. If I do not write again before then assume that everything is going smoothly, and please, please, do not worry. My own initial anxiety is turning into profound relief.
Go out with Ade, and be in high spirits. Remember (if you like the idea) that you are working for an adventure in the High Sierras for us. How proud Ade would be to play host to us in his own territory! I enclose the map of California. Take this with you and let him show you where he lives.
Oh Betty love, just think ahead a year ….
Red
Kendal, Thursday
Dear Mrs McNally,
I said I wouldn’t write, but you must have known I would have to. I think I did, too. The days are so long and empty, the nights so lonely and troubled. I am only half a man when you are away from me, and half a miserable wretch prey to all sort of fears and apprehensions. You cannot know what a comfort to me you have become, but it is no longer a comfort that satisfies me across a distance: you must be near. Your letters help, and I must thank you for finding the time to write. I didn’t fully realise that Ade had become a problem to the extent that you are now really disturbed about him. I am sure he will want to talk about you next Saturday, and I will make it an opportunity to give him advice such as befits my seniority in age and my longer friendship with you, but of course I must do this without letting him suspect that you have already confided in me. I’m sorry things are going awry. Leave it to me to straighten them out. You won’t need to do or say anything. Was the parting caress in the car last Saturday staged for his benefit, or mine? On Thursday, feeling rather miserable, I thought I may as well go down to Lancaster and make myself completely so, which I did. I will tell you about this visit, on the 23rd. I found your name (twice) in the Gazette report, and felt very proud!
I now have the photographs of you and Ade on the High Cup journey last Saturday and a fortnight earlier. These are good, but there is unmistakable devotion in his eyes as he looks at you in two of these pictures and an obvious urgency in the need for me to talk to him. He must be stopped before he too begins to wonder what it would be like; it would be cruel to let his thoughts carry that far. Two other pictures are very good indeed – how bonny you are! – and from these I am having enlargements made for both of you. I will let Ade see them all next Saturday and then send them to you on Monday with news of the day’s events. On the office photograph now enclosed, Miss T is on the right of the front row, and prim and proper as always.
Next Sunday I shall devote all day to the drawing of Fowl Ing House, and have it ready for your return. The evenings this week are being spent gradually working up-river from Middleton, on paper, in a state of mind excited by memories and a lot of maudlin sentiment. You are walking ahead of me as I trace the path through the meadows and along the riverside. Sometimes you stop and wait for me. I remember, with misty eyes, every awkward stile, the place where we rested (if rest is the word). The places where you vanished into the bushes. It is a tortured pleasure to do this, with you so far away … Betty love, when I am gone you must go back there often and walk amongst the flowers again. If there is any sort of after-life at all, it is there, by the Tees, I will come back to you.
Put me out of my misery. Have a good time. Don’t worry about anything here. Now just look out of the window and along the busy street – and think of the lonely moor around Maize Beck, and poor Ade stuck in the bog, and the little cave we found when, for a minute, we were alone and hidden from the world. And make your choice.
Come back, chick, come back!
Red
… 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd,
AW, alas, had never told Ade that he, AW, was romantically involved with Betty, so the inevitable happened …
Sunday evening
Betty dear, this letter will be the most difficult I have ever written. I won’t like writing it, and you won’t like reading it. But, after yesterday, there are some things that must be said, and quickly. I am sorry to have to say them in a letter, when you have no chance of immediate reply, but you happen to be in Dublin and I am sat here in a lonely house, with a heart turned to tears, and cannot wait until I see you again.
It concerns Ade and yourself, of course. Nothing I say must lead you to think that I have changed my opinion about Ade in any way. He is the most generous, most considerate man I have ever known. A gentleman, as I always wanted to be – and never made it. Nor have I changed my opinion about you. You are the sweetest woman in the whole world, and always will be. Yet yesterday Ade and I came near to having a blazing row. As I expected, our Saturday walk was all ‘Betty this’ and ‘Betty that’ (except that I do wish he would say Betty and not Beddy!) and at first I was wagging my tail, mightily pleased, because there are so few people I can talk to about you and because compliments about you always make me feel so proud. But then he went on to tell me about his more personal relationships with you – the late evenings you had had together, the telephone calls, the places you had visited in his company, your calendar of future engagements – and I could feel my innards shrivelling up. He was brutally frank and open about everything, brutally so only because he did not know my feelings for you and may also have assumed that you may have mentioned these events to me anyway already. Betty, this affair has gone much further than I imagined from the very little you have told me. With pleasure he reported that after Dufton (‘I don’t want him to come home with me’ you said) he was with you until 11.35. In the car coming back you will remember that he mentioned the ‘beautiful ladies’ who were joining him on the following day. Guess who they turned out to be? How stupid I was about that! Why didn’t you at least tell me? It was no kindness, if that was your intention. I wouldn’t have been hurt. I would have been happy for you, and pleased about it – but not when you are being deliberately secretive. We have never had secrets from each other before. That is what hurts.
Our main discussion was on the seat provided by Mrs Lewis on the summit of High Pike. (I was going to take you there one day, remember?) Ade told me all his plans for you, more that he has yet told you, and certainly more than you have told me; and he told me of other arrangements made with your knowledge and consent. There is Place Fell and Sharrow Bay, a family party, the day after Cross Fell, Blencathra at your request. You are to have dinner with him at the George, Keswick. He intends to see you, or at least speak to you, every day during the remaining seven weeks of his stay. He is going to insist that you visit San Francisco this autumn. He has suggested you have a few days with him in London. Oh Betty love, why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to find out like this? What is going wrong between us?
I don’t object to what you are doing (because I asked you to see him as often as you wanted, and make him happy), and can’t (because in Ade lies your best chance of happiness). But I wish you had told me. I was shocked into silence. He didn’t know, but his words were slowly killing me. I had no idea you and he had become so close.
He has wonderful plans for you, and is absolutely convinced and absolutely sincere. He told me his financial position, as though I were your guardian instead of merely a cast-off lover. I gave him my consent. A really wonderful new life is being offered to you, by a generous man who loves you. You should accept it.
I ought not to be in the picture at all, not even in the background. The solicitors are meeting on Tuesday next to consider figures that will leave me 5 pounds a week to live on (after meeting commitments such as tax, mortgage, etc) plus what I can get from my books (they may want some of that, too). And smoking costs me 2 pounds! There is clearly no future for me and certainly none for you with me.
Saturday was a bonny day, but Ade took all the sunshine out of it for me. After hearing him, how could I tell him that I loved you more than he ever could, that I had known you in dreams long before we ever met? Nor could I tell him of my own troubles. I had very little to say all the way back. There seemed nothing I could do but tell him I would pull out of the trinity, leaving the two of you to sort yourselves out. This I did when we got to Grasmere, and he was dreadfully upset (still not realising why) and in fact we spent the evening in the car park at White Moss (of blessed memory), arguing about it.
I’m sorry, love, but it seems the only thing to do. I am desperately unhappy – the past week has been wretched, with you out of reach, and the next will be worse. I am so terribly alone. Last night I had no sleep at all. I feel like a sinking ship after everybody has left it.
Ade will tell you the story. He is visiting you on Friday for a ‘late night’ if he is not allowed to collect you in Liverpool. I have said, only after much persuasion and only after he had threatened never to see either of us again, that I will turn up on Saturday for Cross Fell to explain to you what I feel. But really there is nothing more to be added, except thanks for all you have done for me and for giving me the happiest days of my life. Please don’t ring me on Friday. There is nothing I can say over the telephone, and in any case Ade will be with you all day if he brings you from Liverpool.
I enclose the photographs. Ade has ordered more enlargements. He wants me next Saturday to take a picture of him kissing you, so you see how impossible things have become. He may get his kiss, that’s up to you; but it will certainly not be recorded on my camera.
Please don’t worry. I will see you on Saturday at 9.30, as so often before, but for the first time I shall not be looking forward to it. I will bring the drawing of Fowl Ing: I have been working at it since 8.30 this morning and will finish it before then. As for the Pennine Way, I don’t know. The spark has gone.
This is a hateful thing to do to you, I know. But I am hopelessly in love with you, and ‘hopelessly’ has now become he operative word. I ache for you, but it would get worse, not better, if we carried on as before. I have one satisfaction, the way things have turned out – that I never kept my promise. On my dying day I will still be wondering what it would be like!
Sorry, love, sorry
Red
I didn’t bow out very gracefully, did i? I’m terribly sorry now. I had a rough bringing-up, and the grittiness still comes out at times.
Betty, you don’t have to reply to a letter that should never have been written. If I do not hear from you at all, I will get the message, perhaps better than if you tried to tell me.
Let’s end it romantically, as it started, please, love. Let my farewell present, very appropriately, be this record of the theme music from Dr Zhivago. Please play it when the house is quiet, and mark well the words, for these are the words I wanted you to hear from me. I was clumsy and cruel. So try to forgive me.
With all my heart, dear, I hope you find the happiness you never found with me.
Red
However, Betty wrote back at once, telling him not to be so silly. There was nothing between her and Ade. AW was just imagining it was more serious than it was.
Friday morning
Betty love, your reply filled me with remorse, but did me a world of good. I didn’t mean to slap your face so hard. I have been so terribly lonely without you. An age has passed since Bowes Moor. All week I have been distressed, heart-broken, that our friendship should end so unhappily. It has needed Ade’s intervention to teach me that I could not face a future in which you had no part. I love you, and only you, and always shall. If you had to take a whip to me you could not alter that.
I am sorry for some of the things I implied in my letter. I was always a bad loser. But last Saturday I was given the impression that you had encouraged Ade in his hopes, although you had led me to think differently. Betty, it was a nightmare experience. I was having to listen to the last things I wanted to hear, and there was no escape. He was so confident, so possessive. He had asked you to get a divorce, and then all you had to do was sign on the dotted line. It was as easy as that.
I don’t blame Ade. In his position, I would have been in a seventh heaven of delight, too, and wanting to enthuse about you to others. Ade is a go-getter: it is his training, and a national characteristic. But I have since had misgivings. He is offering you wealth, security, servants, good social contacts, city amenities. Think hard, love. Isn’t this where you came in, twenty years ago? Please be very sure of yourself, and please, please don’t make the same mistake again. Don’t be hustled into a trap. Don’t be taken for granted. If you want to consider him seriously, play for time. Ade could not give you the sort of love you need, as I could, but the trouble with me is that I have so much love for you and so little else.
Sweetheart, I didn’t want to believe that you could forget so easily the pledges we made to each other last winter. I didn’t want to believe that your thoughts were now all of San Francisco and no longer of Kirkcarrion, or that our plans of a cottage by a stream were not really important. And I just couldn’t believe that the unexpected final caress in the car a fortnight ago, about which I wondered, was a Judas kiss. You could never do that to me!
Perhaps I could have a few minutes alone with you tomorrow? I will not stay in your company long, having no wish to witness Ade’s courtship. You could drop me off at Orton Scar, and I will have a walk along the limestone edge to Asby and Appleby, and return by bus. You and Ade will want to talk, and make arrangements for Sunday.
I shall be with you an hour or so after you receive this letter, and it will make me a lot happier to see your sweet face again. But let it be smiling, Betty, not sad, so that I can think, at least for a little longer, that I have not lost you after all, and that our love for each other is still running pretty high (mine for you is in full spate!). Tell me with your eyes what your lips may not have a chance to say.
Red.
Over the summer, all three continued to meet and go for walks – as AW had still never got round to telling Ade that Betty was his chosen one. Then on 3 August, Betty rang AW at work to say that Ade had proposed …
Wednesday
Arising out of your telephone call today –
Betty love, listen. You are worrying your pretty little head over a problem that does not exist. A man has offered marriage. You do not love him. You know, and I know, that you never could. Why can’t you see the answer as clearly as I do, or as Laura would? It must be no. It cannot be anything else.
You confuse a simple issue in your mind by thinking that I am involved. Love, I am not. Your answer to Ade has nothing to do with me. I am separate from it. My own misgivings arise from your muddled thinking. You are giving me the impression that if I say yes, your answer to Ade will be no. and conversely, if I say no, your answer to Ade will be yes. From what you tell me I am sure you are giving Ade the same impression. You are driving some sort of a bargain, and showing little sense about it. The shrewd, mature, intellectual woman is behaving like a silly schoolgirl. Remind me to smack your bottom on Saturday.
Ade is ready to settle for marriage without love. He has suffered a rebuff (which he is not accustomed to) and his instincts are in revolt. He had a business arrangement, all planned, and it has collapsed. No, of course he won’t like it. He wants a wife (preferably, but not particularly, you), and just see if he doesn’t get one within the next year or so. And then you lecture me about his strong moral fibre! Snap out of it, love. Send him home to his Jewish mistress. Moral fibre, indeed!
You must tell him that the more he persists, the less you like him. You must tell him, the next time he parades his worldly possessions before you, that you are not on sale to the highest bidder. Just close your eyes for a minute, and picture the slobbering old fool smirking at you at bedtime, not one night, but every night. And me in a lonely bed at the other side of the world. You would end up screaming. You must be crazy, even to think of him. Remind the man of his noble resolve not to come between us. You see now what it was worth. Moral fibre, indeed!
I am not offering you love. I am giving it to you, as I have for the past thirty years, and I always shall: I can’t help it. It is you I want, not any woman. Just you. More than love I cannot promise. You must trust me. When you persist in asking for assurances, you make me doubt, not myself, but you.
When you are in Keswick tomorrow night, and Ade is showering his gold and frankincense and myrrh on your lap, spare a thought for me slaving away (I wish I could say in a garret) on the Pennine Way – I shall be in the vicinity of the sinister limestone gorge where my heart was crying out ‘Betty, please’, not knowing then that the man who was spying on us was your new lover – and remember that I am working not for my future, but ours. It may only be a small cottage, and there may not be much to eat, and the rickety bed will squeak like mad, but, oh Betty, it will be a place with so much love in it that it will flow out of the windows and up the chimney and lose itself in heaven. Spare a thought, too, tomorrow night, for Kirkcarrion. My memory is better than yours: for me, Kirkcarrion means ‘for ever’.
Oh golly! Sometimes I even wish I didn’t love you so much. But not really. I love to love you. I want you to love me the same way. Just for the love of it. Now off you go to Keswick. Let Ade see the lovelight in your eyes, and let the doddering old clown know it is not there for him.
You are a funny little thing. All winter you profess your affection, and show it, and then when a man walks past with his pockets bulging and gives you a wink you wriggle out of my embrace and go after him and I have to get to my feet, exhausted by your attention and pull you back. Hold me close for ever, you said. Yes, I will, but do stop trying to break away!
Your bedroom light, on at 8.30 this (Thursday) morning, would tell me you remember Kirkcarrion, and send me to work happy and assured.
Red
It would seem that Ruth at this stage had not completely gone, but was returning home from time to him. But then she did leave – and he was left to look after himself, all alone.
Thursday afternoon
Betty dear, please do not see me or ring me tomorrow (Friday). There has been another hysterical outburst at home and a stated intention of leaving me on Saturday of this week. I am very worried about these latest developments, and am finding myself in a situation I cannot control. I know very well that in these circumstances I should ask you to cancel our Saturday arrangement, but I want to see you so much and tell you what has happened. There is nobody else I can talk to. If you think it better that we should not meet on that day, don’t come and I will understand. There is a danger of becoming implicated. Circumstances on Saturday morning may prevent me from turning out myself, although I desperately want to get away from events for a few hours. If anything should happen tomorrow that makes it clear that I shall not be able to keep our rendezvous, I will write again tomorrow.
ON LIVING ALONE
Well, of course, my spirits took a nose-dive as I watched you drive away through the rain. I felt bleakly that you were leaving me forever, leaving me in a sea of troubles of my own making. I was depressed, and frightened. Yours was the hand I wanted to hold, and I no longer could. You had gone. There was a bus waiting for Settle, and so I went to Settle and had a meal big enough to last me until Monday in the dining-room of the Golden Lion, where you and I dined last November after a visit to Haworth. Out in the street I ran into Harry Robinson and wife (alibi!) and another woman (which I suppose is all right if your wife is present). Rather oddly, they had been doing the Settle-Carlisle railway journey, and return. I was in a bad state of mind on the journey home, naturally, and extremely apprehensive as I approached the house. Surprisingly, the lights were on and the lady of the house in residence. Supper was served and nothing was said.
I had a wonderful night’s sleep, for which you must take full credit. You are a clever girl. You’ve got the know-how, somehow! Nothing had gone from the house. A busy day’s work had been done. In addition to the week’s washing, the summer curtains had been taken down and the winter ones put up. The television set had been moved to its winter position, nearer the fireplace. Everything was neat and tidy.
This morning I carried on with my book (Wyther Hill to Middleton) while a busy morning’s cleaning and cooking was going on. I had an excellent dinner, and returned to my book. The dinner plates were washed up and put away, and Cindy prepared for going out. THEN, at 1.30, she announced her departure to her new home in Kentmere and there ensued a fairly rational conversation, at last. She has rented School Cottage, just by the church, for a few months, furnished, at the reasonable rent of 3 pounds a week. The cottage is the converted school-house and very attractive. Peter will stay there when he comes. I offered to pay her 10 pounds a week while she is there (which she accepted, and protested it was much too much) and gave her 40 pounds for the next four weeks. Her intention is still to go to Blackburn to live, and I then asked whether she would say how much a week she would want from me then, after I had retired. Would she not agree a figure with me now, and save all the unpleasantness and expense of solicitors? Yes, all right, 7 pounds. All right, I said, 7 pounds. We are to inform our solicitors accordingly, but ask them to leave the matter in abeyance until she has discussed her position with Peter.
Had she kept a key? Yes. Would she come in once a week to do the washing? Yes, if the solicitor said it was all right for her to do so, she would come every Saturday (the only day when there was a bus) and wash and bake for me.
I felt dreadfully sorry for her. She is obviously in a state of extreme nervous depression, probably ill, and confused and unhappy. Off she went, in the rain, after doing everything she possibly could for me in the house and writing out full instructions about the milk and newspaper and coal arrangements, on how to de-frost the fridge, and so on. She has gone to a place where she will be desperately lonely, where the winter months will be severe, where there are no shops and no link other than the Saturday bus. She has no TV, but hopes Peter will provide one.
She has gone, a tragic figure, a faithful wife who can no longer live with her husband because of his conduct. I have driven her to this. I am relieved that we have reached an agreement, and grateful for the further delay. It seems there will be no scandal now for people to gossip about, that I need not now have to explain what has happened, or, if I have to, can tell a plausible story that she is away for a time for reasons of health.
Selfishly, my first concern is for myself, and I am pleased I have come out of this trouble fairly satisfactorily, or look like doing. If I had anything of my conscience I should now be in a desperate state of mind, but I honestly haven’t, and I am not. I am deeply sad that she had found it necessary to go, particularly so because Kentmere is not a place where she will find happiness, but only an awful loneliness that, I am sure, will not bring the improvement in health and mind she badly needs. These things she can only find amongst her many friends in Blackburn.
So that’s it, love. Next Saturday I shall go out with Mr Firth, or, if he is not available, to Gargrave alone. I cannot see you just yet – it would be quite wrong. I will write again next Sunday.
A funny thing – this conversation I have reported interrupted my notes on Kirkcarrion! I am not feeling too good, but, as you said, I am resilient. I will get over it.
Red
Monday
Thank you for your letter. Please do not trouble to write again until you hear from me next week.