ON THE evening I was rung up by Jean’s editor and told that Jean had died in hospital in Exeter, Sonia Orwell came to dinner. When she arrived, I said, “It’ll be a sad evening,” because I imagined Sonia, who was perhaps closer to Jean than anyone else, would have been the first to hear. But she hadn’t heard, and, in the passage where we stood, she stared at me for a long while. “May I use your telephone?” she asked. She rang different people; she wanted to find out what had happened and what she could do, and there was a dry gravity in her voice.

I went with Sonia and other friends by train to Exeter for the cremation. There were few of us in the chapel. Four men in badly fitting dark suits brought in a tiny white casket, placed it on a platform, and stood back; a minister read a passage from the Bible about “death in life,” and a curtain closed about the casket.

Later, in a working men’s pub by the train station, we all talked. Sonia said, “We didn’t know what a rare bird had made its nest in our tree.”

On the train back to London, everything I looked at was stark. Whenever I looked at Sonia, her face in the grey light appeared set; her narrowed eyes were hard.

Sonia, from Paris, wrote me a letter about Jean:

She was, towards the end, so very old and so senile so much of the time. And I think that people who live so much alone tend to “highlight” just a few incidents or thoughts in their lives and come out with these over and over again while other things, since they’ve not been used to talking about them, never, never get mentioned—they’ve been buried too deep to dig up again. Jean was the sort of essence of someone who’d forgotten how to talk naturally through having been isolated, which accounts for the yards of subconscious she dragged up when drunk, her endless thoughts about the “unfairness of it all,” blacks, politics, etc., because this is the way a lonely person behaves when she finds herself at last in company. I mean a person who wasn’t really born to be solitary, rather the opposite, but finds herself alone through quirks of fate or character. I felt sad that you’d never known her as early as I did because there’s no describing her charm, at moments, in those days, and also no describing how selfless she could be when she thought about her friends or other people or, indeed, people in general. I remember that winter when we moved her from that ghastly hotel to the one off the Portobello Road, I knew she was ageing so rapidly and I think being in that “old people’s” hotel must have been quite abominable to her. I remember her saying how awful it was to be old etc., but always adding, “But darling I’m not old inside” and how all that winter I heard distinguished aged people say exactly, but exactly the same thing in the same words: “I don’t feel old inside,” “I don’t feel old inside.” It was awful.

I think perhaps, too, you don’t, or didn’t quite realize that Jean did have reservations about you taking down her book just simply because you were a writer yourself. She told me time and time again how impossible it was for one writer not to, quite unconsciously, alter or rewrite another writer and I think she was torn between her quite clear understanding that you could perhaps help her more because you were a writer—after all what’s a perfectly ordinary dim-witted young “secretary” to make of a jumble of words which would have some magic for anyone who was of the métier—and her terror that two writers never have the same “voice” and that, without meaning to, you were in fact writing her book for her in a way she wouldn’t have written it herself. I do absolutely see her dilemma and in a sense she couldn’t cope with it because she was too old, too helpless, and not lucid enough. But I think this explains why she wanted to talk about writing so much with you, and why she both so enjoyed doing this and again, perhaps you don’t realize her generosity in this, why she wanted in any tiny way she could to help you. It also explains how hard it was for you to get her to do any long stint of work. Her terror of you writing her book would overcome her and drink would muddy up her mind entirely because she was drinking in a panic-stricken way. Yet she always wanted to give you something: an idea, a new shirt, some knowledge she just might have that you didn’t. It was all much, much sadder than I think you realize.

I’m only so very glad she’s dead. The other day I was walking along the street and suddenly saw the white choker which Jean had been wanting, and which we had been hunting for, for years, and I was overcome by a sort of relieved indifference: “It doesn’t matter a damn that it’s there,” I said to myself and was amazed that I felt no grief: in fact felt nothing more than a sort of: “Tiens, pity it wasn’t there some years ago,” and no more.

Sonia had introduced me to Jean at a luncheon party at her house. At the head of the table of six people, Sonia talked while Jean, a little lady wearing a new spring hat and slumped in her chair, was silent; as Sonia talked, I noted tears rolling down Jean’s face, but she didn’t wipe them away and let them drip, she told me later, because she didn’t want to draw attention to them and make a fuss. If Sonia noticed, she ignored Jean’s tears; she kept the conversation general, and the general conversation was high over Jean’s hat.

There was this strong sense in Sonia’s treatment of Jean: that she would help Jean in whatever way she possibly could, even to washing and ironing her clothes, but Jean must not presume she was the only person in the world who was in a position to need help.

•

The next year, I was with Sonia in Jean’s hotel room as Sonia made out a shopping list for a party. Jean said, “Please don’t forget the vermouth for me.” Sonia, baring her teeth, answered her, “Do you think you’re the only person at the party who is going to drink?” Jean frowned and her eyes went vague. Sonia said, “Think first of what the people who are buying you the vermouth may want.” Jean said quietly, “Yes.”

Sonia seemed to think that Jean should feel no guilt for being helpless—helpless not only physically, but, by some accident of character, psychologically—but that she should feel guilty whenever she presumed on her helplessness as a means of making others attentive to her.

Sonia did not like people to talk about themselves in a group; alone with her, one could talk at great length about, not oneself, but one’s problems with one’s husband, wife, lover, friends, taxes, flat. Sometimes when I arrived at Jean’s hotel I would find Sonia on the edge of a chair, leaning towards Jean, half reclining on a sofa among pillows, and I’d feel I had come into a room, filled with smoke, in which great intimacies had been exposed. Sonia would smile at me, and Jean, too, as from a far distance; I was sure Jean had been telling something to Sonia which she had perhaps not told anyone else, ever, and the revelation hung in the air like the smoke. If Sonia wouldn’t let Jean think she was unique, Sonia herself thought she was.

While Jean was in London on her winter visits, I, when alone with Sonia, talked about Jean, and if I said, with a certain possessiveness, “Did you know that Jean was once . . .?,” Sonia always answered, “Of course I knew.” Then she said, “I don’t like your imagining you’ll find out from Jean secrets which she wouldn’t share with anyone else. Everything you’ve said about Jean that she’s told you I’ve known, in greater detail, from her, and there is a great deal she has told me which she hasn’t mentioned to you, I’m sure.” “I’m sure,” I said.

Then Sonia said to me, “I’m a snob. I’m not helping Jean because she’s just anyone. I’m helping her because she’s Jean Rhys.”

In her world of special people—writers, painters, musicians, philosophers—Sonia thought of herself as someone to help them; and, among them, she would say, “Don’t think you’re special.”

About Sonia, Jean said to me, “She is the only woman I trust.”

Sonia organized Jean’s London life for her, and exhausted herself doing it. She kept Jean’s agenda—a sheet of paper ruled into large squares which Jean could see—filled. It was not easy to find people to visit Jean, and, often, they did not return for a second visit. If Sonia could not get anyone to visit, she went to Jean herself, at lunch time and supper time, and then put Jean to bed.

Sonia once came to dinner after having got Jean into bed with her hot-water bottle, her glass of milk and pills by her side, and having switched off her light, and Sonia said to me, shaking her head, “She’s a monster. She’s a total monster of selfishness.”

At tea at Sonia’s house, a friend, an actor who had made a date to visit Jean that evening, said, jokingly, that he was rather dreading the visit, and Sonia, staring hard at him, said angrily, “You don’t understand at all how utterly, utterly lonely she is. You joke, and should be weeping, because Jean’s state is desperate.” He got up quickly and left for Jean’s hotel. Sonia said to me, “No one, no one understands Jean’s total, total desperation.”

I thought that for Sonia to prepare breakfast for herself must have been almost beyond her because of exhaustion; with how much greater effort did she prepare parties for Jean, after which, she said, she would have to collapse completely.

Helping Jean, Sonia couldn’t collapse, no matter how great the strain, because Jean needed her help.

One of the winters when Jean was in London, I took Germaine Greer along to her hotel to introduce them. Before we went in to see her, Germaine bought a bottle of champagne, and she and I followed a young man with the bottle into the room. Jean, sitting at the end of a sofa in her long blue, padded housecoat, jerked to attention, a look of bewilderment in her large eyes, the colour of her housecoat. At the other end of the sofa was another, younger woman writer.

Germaine sat in an armchair. As we drank champagne, she talked about breast cancer, and described how the breast is clamped into a kind of vise for the operation. Jean seemed to be listening closely, then she leaned towards the other woman and said that she had been to a shop and seen some pretty hats.

When, the next time I was with Jean, I asked her what she had thought of Germaine, she said, with that small jerk of her body with which she always started to speak, “I liked her. I’m sure she must be very courageous.”

Germaine went down to Devon to visit Jean in her cottage.

At a drinks party, while I was speaking with Sonia, I saw Germaine stride towards us. She said to me, “I’ve solved the problem of how to help Jean.” She and Sonia did not know one another; I didn’t introduce them, as Sonia turned to Germaine, smiling with her teeth, and said, “We’re perfectly capable of taking care of Jean ourselves, thank you.” Germaine stepped back and turned away.