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‘I wish – Oh how I wish – I had married an Indian half-breed’

MARRIAGE DISAPPOINTED ELSPETH Grahame. Sex was her first complaint, and Kenneth’s coldness. She did not keep her disenchantment to herself. Within a matter of weeks, she wrote to Emma Hardy, married to the writer Thomas Hardy, by 1899 a wife thwarted, saddened, overlooked, misused. Emma’s response was predictably dampening. ‘I can scarcely think that love proper and enduring, is in the nature of men… Love interest, – adoration, and all that kind of thing is usually a failure… Hundreds of wives go through a phase of disillusion – it is really a pity to have any ideals in the first place.’¹

Kenneth was no happier than Elspeth. For him there was no element of surprise. An obsessive fear of sex had preoccupied him from the moment he committed himself. ‘Once married I will try & be frankly depraved, and then all will go well,’ was his peculiar response to a letter congratulating him on his engagement: it reads as if he is desperately trying to convince himself.² His final letter to Elspeth before she left London for Cornwall was a heroic attempt to impress upon them both the strength of his physical ardour: ‘Don’t sorst [exhaust] yourself cos its a long journey down & I want ter do the sorstin of you wen you gets ere – so you’ve goter save up fer your luver my pretty oos awatin of you ere.’³ Elspeth’s mistake was to believe him.

Perhaps at the time of writing, Kenneth had meant it. He was no stranger to sexual fantasies. His description of Charlotte’s misbehaving dolls in a story called ‘Sawdust and Sin’ indicates at least imaginative familiarity with sex: ‘Rosa fell flat on her back in the deadest of faints. Her limbs were rigid, her eyes glassy.’⁴ Sadly, Elspeth, at thirty-seven, with her smart London clothes, her pet poodle and her lady’s maid in attendance, lacked the robust earthy allure of Coralie or Zephyrine or a chambermaid pert in her starched, pink-spotted frock – symbols of straightforward boyish lust. All Kenneth’s other fantasies of women cast them in untouchable storybook parts as fairies, princesses or enchantresses. Insofar as he was interested in sex at all, his taste took no account of the actuality of Elspeth’s body. His desires were polarized: exoticism or celibacy. Sexual fantasy for Kenneth was another form of escapism – like his explanation later of the attraction of cinema: ‘it is not exactly the sort of life we daily lead; and as we stroll homeward across the starlit common, towards our farmhouse, vicarage or simple cottage, we think “I wish – Oh how I wish – I had married an Indian half-breed!”’⁵ Even at her most fey, Elspeth Grahame offered none of the imaginary excitements of an ‘Indian half-breed’. As his friends mostly recognized, Kenneth had made a mistake in marrying at all. His instincts were those of a bachelor, even his perfunctory attitude to sex. He had no interest in Elspeth emotionally and little physical curiosity. He was happier ‘finding oneself immersed in Treasure Island for about the twentieth time’ or dreaming he was with Zephyrine and her ilk, ‘riding the boundless Sahara, cheek to cheek, the world well lost’, barricaded – by fear, habit or inclination – in a child’s view of adult relations.⁶

In London at the end of the summer, Kenneth returned to bank duties. He took a long lease on a house in Kensington, 16 Durham Villas: until the time came to move in, he and Elspeth lived at Bailey’s Hotel. Sarah Bath did not come with him from Kensington Crescent; she had declined to work for Elspeth. Elspeth set about transforming Durham Villas into a version of the Onslow Square house, complete with a crowded social life of the sort she had organized until recently for her stepfather. ‘Don’t never make me goter nuffin no more will you Minkie speshly wot they corls Kornversazshionies,’ Kenneth had written to her before they were married.⁷ Elspeth ignored him.

Their marriage scarcely outlasted their honeymoon of a handful of days in St Ives. Neither chose to record the cause of its pell-mell collapse. Kenneth recoiled from Elspeth, then he withdrew within himself. Sex was probably at the bottom of it; a combination of distaste, fear, even astonishment. In the house in Durham Villas, they embarked on parallel lives. Kenneth established a retreat in his study. ‘It looked like a nursery,’ a friend remembered. ‘Books there were certainly, but they were outnumbered by toys. Toys were everywhere – intriguing, fascinating toys which could hardly have been conducive to study.’⁸ The contents of the doll drawer at Kensington Crescent had overflowed into this cluttered stage set, where Kenneth escaped into make-believe to reconstruct his shattered innocence. Elspeth’s exclusion was cruel. She was every bit as unsuited to adult life as he. Although she mistook Kenneth in key ways, she had always understood his idealization of his own version of childhood. She had even written him a poem, in which she wished she were four years old and he playing with her like a doll, a gauche attempt to present her own adult desire childishly:

You should pinch my cheeks, and take

Me in your arms, or on your knee

Like some big doll, that would not break

Think what a plaything that would be.⁹

The only playthings Kenneth craved were inanimate. Afterwards he claimed of his writing, ‘In my tales about children, I have tried to show that their simple acceptance of the mood of wonderment… is a thing more precious than any of the laboured acquisitions of adult mankind,’ but he did not intend to share with Elspeth the wonderment at which he laboured, and his determination that wonder belonged to childhood, before husband and wife met, inevitably pushed her from him.¹⁰ Marriage revived his craving for solitude, like the narrator of ‘The Roman Road’ and for the same reasons: ‘when the sense of injustice or disappointment was heavy on me, and things were very black within’.¹¹ At least he was sufficiently fair-minded not to blame Elspeth for a mistake that was mostly of his own making. It was disappointment, not perceived injustice, that overwhelmed him in the months following his wedding.

Elspeth maintained appearances by entertaining. Beyond invitations to a handful of literary associates, including John Lane and his wife, Kenneth appears to have done little to ensure that her efforts succeeded. His ‘mind was not ruled by ordinary conventions. He made little attempt at small-talk,’ a guest remembered. Given his literary celebrity, excuses were made for him. ‘His silences were curiously companionable; & presently the thought would flow… He was a good – sympathetic – conversationalist because he was genuinely interested in the person he was talking to & in the latter’s views as in his own. Never a great talker in a mixed company, he would sometimes give utterance to his least conventional sentiments with genial but unhesitating conviction.’¹² For the socially minded Elspeth, the combination of unorthodox views and silences in women’s company must have been extraordinarily irritating.

Her unhappiness was acute, and contained its measure of recrimination. Unlike Kenneth, who had recognized his error in marrying Elspeth even before her arrival in Fowey, Elspeth had successfully buried any misgivings, only to find them swiftly exposed to the light. In her disillusionment she resorted to verse. Despite its indifferent quality, it accurately reflects her state of mind. Her poems tell a story of a couple entirely at odds; they paint a picture of a husband unconcerned by his wife’s suffering. She describes ‘cruel eyes whose radiant light/ Has cast a shadow as of night/ Over my heart, yet all the while/ Have no remorse, but sleep and smile.’¹³ The bitter, waspish ‘It would provoke a saint’ points to an unbridgeable divide: ‘If I should sigh, ah then you smile,/ And when I smile you sigh,/ But if I cry you laugh the while,/ And when I laugh you cry.’¹⁴ Common to all the poems is the extent of her incomprehension. Despite Emma Hardy’s gloomy fatalism, Elspeth was not yet ready to give up on the marriage for which she had fought so hard. ‘I’m quite sure if you only knew/ How often I say that I love you/ Then you would believe my words are true/ For ah I do, for ah I do,’ she wrote, as if she could recapture Kenneth’s heart with sincerity.¹⁵ Time and again optimism failed her. In a poem called ‘Rejected’, her suffering is irreparable; she is the archetype of the spurned lover, condemned to endure miserably: ‘The heart that thou hast broken no longer is mine/… Though my life’s over alas I must live.’¹⁶ She underlined the final line on the typescript of a poem she called ‘Give me a kiss that will last for ever’: ‘That the force of remembrance may vanquish regret’.¹⁷ It was a variant of Kenneth’s borrowings from Marcus Aurelius, stripped of any real expectation of solace. Remembering was cold comfort: her memories taunted her.

But Elspeth would gain one blessing, at least, from her failed marriage. Within weeks of her honeymoon, she found herself pregnant.

Alistair Grahame was born on 12 May 1900. He would be Kenneth and Elspeth’s only child and they called him ‘Mouse’. They were unsuccessful partners and unsuccessful lovers; they would become unsuccessful parents.

He was born prematurely. Kenneth described him at birth as ‘a big fellow & very good’: he was blind in one eye, and had a squint and was part-sighted in the other.¹⁸ Elspeth found childbirth traumatic and the baby’s disabilities, as they revealed themselves by stages, more traumatic still. The reactions of husband and wife overlapped: Kenneth ignored and Elspeth denied Mouse’s shortcomings. Instead they chose to consider him remarkable. For a time they persuaded themselves and anyone who would listen – and afterwards, Mouse too – that this was indeed the case. In doing so, they encouraged him to become a show-off; like Toad, he exulted noisily in his own exploits, ‘all conceit and boasting and vanity… and self-praise and… gross exaggeration’.¹⁹ As a child he was a bully and a prig, given to patronizing the servants and fighting small girls (‘ee not only smack them but dig is ten fingers deep into their tender flesh’, Kenneth reported unblushingly to Elspeth²⁰). He lacked the ‘pleasant sort o way with him’ that Kenneth had attributed to the Boy in ‘The Reluctant Dragon’. Once he was old enough, self-discovery proved painful. His birth did not resolve the deep fissures in his parents’ marriage, and a miniature of Elspeth painted by her sister during Mouse’s infancy shows a tired-looking, fluffy-haired woman struggling to smile. Instead, the child became a focus for unfulfilled longings, an antidote to disappointment. From birth he carried a weighty burden.

Even by contemporary standards, Kenneth and Elspeth played a limited part in Mouse’s upbringing. For Elspeth, nervous collapse followed new motherhood, a sofa-bound semi-invalidism. At some point before 1904 she undertook the first of a series of residential cures at Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire. Her illness was never clearly identified, but treated by both Elspeth and Kenneth with utmost gravity. Her doctors forbade even the effort of writing letters; they prescribed neck exercises, sulphur baths and cold soup with cream. To a friend, Kenneth described her as ‘a Living Skellington’.²¹ He himself indulged the weakness in his chest with journeys abroad, beginning with a trip to Marseilles in 1902 on which, despite his ailments, he ate ‘a perfectly whacking and stupendous quantity of bouillabaisse’; he travelled without Elspeth and never considered taking Mouse.²² In 1904, en route for Spain, he went to Paris with Atky, like Q one of Elspeth’s bugbears. In this hypochondriac ménage, Mouse spent much of his time alone with his Dutch nursemaid, disparaged by Kenneth as ‘Gnädige frau flat-foot’. There are suggestions that the boy felt isolated. When his nurse explained to him that ‘next of kin’ meant ‘your nearest and dearest’, he replied, ‘Then I suppose in my case the next of kin is the canary.’²³ Aged four, Mouse was stricken with severe peritonitis while staying with distant cousins of Elspeth’s. Elspeth was at Woodhall Spa, Kenneth in the Pyrenees. Throughout his lengthy convalescence at the seaside in Broadstairs, his parents were intermittently absent. Mouse did not tell them that, when the condition was at its worst, he saw visions of Christ, ‘my Friend… the Carpenter… He came to see me and sometimes I would go and talk to Him’.²⁴

Elspeth’s hagiographic attitude to her son offered her an outlet for the torrents of affection that Kenneth had rebuffed; she considered him a child of the ‘elfin-celestial sort’, born for some ‘high purpose’.²⁵ Her mythologizing began in Mouse’s cradle and stubbornly resisted all contrary evidence. How far she believed her hyperbolic claims at first is impossible to say. She was certainly capable of persuading herself of almost anything that held despair at bay, and she continued to trumpet her son’s perfections to the grave.