1st January 1980
I’ve never been good at keeping New Year’s resolutions. As a child, and a pious child, too, I drew up lists with enthusiasm, but I should think most of the projects had withered up and died by the end of the first week of January. I have no reason to suppose I will do much better now, but today is the first day of a new decade, and I am an old woman. I still have my health, and my mental powers are only a little moth-eaten in places, but I am beginning to feel like a wasp in autumn; the circles I make are shrinking, and I make them more slowly. I feel the need to set my thoughts in order, and there are some things that need to be told. I intend to keep a diary this year, and to use it as a fishing net to trawl the past for whatever still lurks, whether marvellous or monstrous.
Just as I’ve never kept resolutions, I’ve never kept to diary writing, beyond scribbled notes to remind me of times of appointments. Every so often I’ve attempted something more interesting, something that would preserve a moment in time for future contemplation, something that would exercise my writer’s craft and explore the thoughts that flicker, flare and die in my mind every moment of every day, but somehow everything I wrote seemed false. Why had I selected that detail and not another? Why was I endeavouring to present myself in a good light to a non-existent reader? Was the reader, after all, non-existent, or was there a danger that my husband, my daughter, my servant, would break in and read things which could not then be gainsaid? And would I even know that such things had indeed been read, if the intruder did not choose to tell me? Their changed opinion of me could be leading them away from me down a path the very existence of which was unknown to me. Keeping a diary, which at first represented a kind of control, an ordering of experience, soon came to seem the very opposite.
My husband, Lionel Conway, kept a diary every day of his life. This record was impersonal to the point of eccentricity. Weather and wind directions were recorded daily, as were important political events, whether they interested him or not. His reaction to such events would be unguessable to the casual reader. He noted his own activities: ‘A.M. Caught up with correspondence. P.M. To the Scott Polar Institute. Freckleton gave a talk on the navigation of the Bering Straits. Dined with McVeagh.’ There was rarely more than that. The entry for 6th April 1930 reads: ‘Evelyn walked with me to Firle Beacon, where she agreed to become my wife. Deo Gratias.’ That ‘Deo Gratias’, the one glowing coal in all that ashy grey, could still have the power to move me to tears, were I to allow it.
It would be rational to assume that such diaries were evidence of a passionless man, a man obsessed with detail, a dry, reductive man who, in modern parlance, couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Such assumptions would be quite wrong. Lionel had, at times, been so consumed by passions that he developed strategies for reining them in, or giving vent to them in indirect ways. He was a geologist, but since boyhood he had had a great love of things nautical, and he had had the good fortune to combine these interests in Polar exploration. He was thirty years my senior, and when I met him his career as an explorer was over, though he was still advising younger teams and giving lectures about his experiences. He was a man of extremes, an elemental man, and his diaries reflect none of this. To an outsider the diaries would seem like an exercise in pointlessness, but to me, as to anyone who knew him well, the point of them is easily apparent. They are a system of self-restraint; self-restraint was all that stood between Lionel and mental collapse.
When I agreed to marry Lionel Conway, the Great Man, the hero of the frozen wastes, I took myself by surprise; I, who was thirty-five years old, I, who had made a vow after Jack’s death – to myself, not to the God in whom I found I no longer believed – that I would never consider marrying anybody else. Lionel was a widower, and had been for ten years. His marriage had been childless and, I gathered from friends, fraught with difficulty. The great love of his young life had refused to marry him because of religious differences; he had turned to her cousin, who was, I learned, physically similar and spiritually more flexible. This turned out to be a mistake. Isabella Conway was faithless, and one of the lovers she took was a close family friend. Lionel’s long absences, his difficult temperament, the lack of children, and the overarching memory of her cousin, Sylvia, the best-beloved, who died of typhoid soon after her final rejection of Lionel, go some way towards explaining Isabella’s behaviour, but her choice of lover was unfortunate, exposing Lionel to humiliating gossip and the loss of one of his oldest friends. I hope I was not so tactless.
Lionel never spoke to me directly about any of this. He feared confession of any kind; he saw it as a letting-go. Letting go was dangerous. Metaphorically as well as literally, he ran a tight ship.
When I first met my husband I was, most untypically, having an affair with a married man. He was a theatre manager with a dazzling wit and an even more dazzling smile. His name was Harry Bramante. I found him spellbinding, and I was not accustomed to being spellbound. Harry could dominate a room without crowding out anybody else. Never, before or since, have I met a man so at ease with his own body. Perhaps that was his Italian blood; certainly I’ve never come across a comparable quality in an Englishman. His long limbs seemed to glide under his clothes, his hooded eyes offered a world of possibilities. I jumped. His wife and four children hardly entered into it. I never saw them. It was an effort for me even to remember that they existed. This is not a chapter of my emotional history of which I am proud, and neither was it a short chapter. I was nearly thirty when I met Harry Bramante. My first volume of short stories had been published to modest but distinct critical acclaim, and I had nearly completed a novel, which made me feel that I was rather marvellous. I was feeling bold, and restless, and the social life I had established for myself in my twenties had begun to seem stale and tiresome. I was stout-hearted in my resolution never to marry, but I suppose it was unsurprising that, at that age, and in those days when one’s chances of marrying would theoretically have been dwindling fast, I should reward myself for my resolve by indulging in an affair like that. The shameful thing is that I gave so little thought to his wife. I don’t know if she knew of my existence. I just didn’t use my imagination at all, and that’s a crime. If Harry and I had been in love with one another… well, of course it would still have been wrong. But I wasn’t interested in falling in love. I continued the affair for several years, because he charmed and excited me. He never knew me, nor I him.
No man could have borne less resemblance to Harry than Lionel Conway. Harry was an urban creature, a lover of artifice; in his element among brittle theatrical people. I shouldn’t be surprised if Lionel never set foot in a theatre in his life. He disliked large social gatherings, though he enjoyed the company of trusted friends; London he regarded as a necessary evil. He never met Harry, nor knew of his existence except in the vaguest possible terms. Lionel and I met at a dinner given by my publisher, who was one of Lionel’s oldest friends and who was bringing out a book of his Polar reminiscences. I remember the sinking feeling I had when I found myself seated next to this mountainous man with his stiff white beard and fierce bright eyes. He was the guest of honour. It was a privilege to be placed beside him, but his dinner jacket was old and not especially clean, he ate his food in unnoticing snatches, and I dreaded that such a man would try to flirt with me. He did no such thing. Despite my sex and relative youth he talked to me on terms of the utmost equality, which I may say in the late 1920s was unusual. When the time came for the women to withdraw, I realized that he had not uttered one polite platitude, nor made one remark that was not direct and challenging and interesting. It intrigued me, too, that a man of his age should seem so uncomfortable with himself. I had not thought much about old age – and sixty and more seemed most certainly old, which is an opinion I no longer hold – but I had, I suppose, assumed that with age would come peace, and stability, and a rather dull kind of inner resolution. In Lionel Conway I saw none of these things. I found passionate intensity, perhaps even ferocity, and a questing spirit still looking for a place to cast anchor.
It seems that Lionel decided immediately that I could provide that place. He pursued me with all the impulsiveness of a boy of twenty, but none of the bashfulness. He had no sense of the proprieties of those times, so he invited me to dine with him or walk with him, to attend lectures, visit museums, go sailing with him on the Thames at Marlow. It was his single-mindedness that won me over. The energy of his pursuit made Harry Bramante seem frivolous, insubstantial. After six months of this courtship I felt I had no right to refuse. I didn’t love him, not as I had once loved Jack, but my feelings were warm enough to allow me to say ‘I love you’ to him, though not as often as he said it to me. I was moved by him, and no man had moved me for a very long time. I wanted to protect him, to be the solace of his old age. I valued his opinion of me, and I worked hard at converting the feeling I had when I was with him in public, which was akin to embarrassment, into insouciant pride. As for my vow that I would never marry, I explained it away to myself. This was different. This was no ordinary marriage – my life with Lionel could in no way parallel, and therefore betray, the life I would have had with Jack. Lionel and I were offering each other a mutually beneficial bargain; for me, the freedom to write, the nurturing admiration of a great man, and – yes, certainly – money, which I could use to expand my world. For him there was honour and respect, intelligent companionship and – I believed – a haven in which to rest. I hardly know why, but I never considered children as a possibility. The subject was not mentioned during our courtship.
6th January 1980
The colour of autumn crocuses. That is the first colour in my mind when I think of Knighton, because the autumn crocuses were in flower when I first came there as a bride. Three great spreads of them by the kitchen-garden wall, some bending over on their milky stalks like weary Degas dancers, some fanning their eager cups to the slanting sun. Pinky-purple, thin-veined, translucent. The most delicately genital of colours. Naked ladies. Meadow saffron. Autumn crocus. Lovely names, all of them.
I’d made several visits to Knighton before our marriage, but I’d always felt like an outsider. The house had been half shut up since Isabella’s death. A housekeeper lived there, and she kept a couple of rooms ready for Lionel, who used it perhaps one week in four. His study was on the ground floor. It was the least welcoming room in the house, cold, north-facing, with a gloomy outlook over dark laurels and rhododendrons, a very Victorian patch of planting which I was often tempted to get rid of but somehow never did. The study was crammed from floor to ceiling, every shelf crowded with Lionel’s diaries, notebooks, bound copies of lectures on nautical and Polar subjects. On the mantelshelf lay dusty treasures – a portion of a narwhal’s tusk, a piece of scrimshaw, a pair of sealskin slippers made for a faraway Eskimo child. And in the middle of the desk was the skull of the polar bear Lionel and his crew had shot and eaten during that famous winter they spent ice-bound at the North Pole. The skull reared up, sinister as an iceberg, its malevolent majesty undiminished by Lionel’s habit of filling the eye sockets with pencils, rubbers, and the feathers he collected on his walks.
On his own at Knighton, Lionel hardly moved out of the study, except for these enormous daily walks. Mrs Apps carried in meals on a tray, brought him the post and The Times, answered the rare telephone calls on the single receiver in the front hall. He slept in his dressing room on a put-you-up bed. I don’t think the marital half-tester had been slept in by anyone since Isabella died in it. I didn’t ask, but I gathered the dressing room had been Lionel’s sleeping place for quite a lot of their married life, too.
Most of the other rooms were shut up, the furniture veiled in dust sheets, the shutters barred. So when I came there as a bride in September 1930 and saw the autumn crocuses shining against the garden wall, it was as if I was seeing it all for the first time. Lionel had been energetic in setting things to rights for me. Apps was the gardener and handyman; for ten or twelve years he had done little more than keep the place orderly, but throughout that summer he and his boy Fred had laboured to perfect the garden, and when I arrived I found, rather to my private dismay, that there was hardly a blade of grass out of place. But I loved the sight of the fruit-pickers’ ladders leaning against the orchard trees, the baskets at the foot of each tree lined with green leaves and piled with damsons, greengages, yellow plums and whiskery cobnuts; the September spiders had cast glinting silver lines with quick gaiety from one basket handle to the next. And in the house the dust sheets were gone, the shutters folded back, the windows clean and open. For the first time I could look properly at the furniture and pictures. Mrs Apps had set vases of throbbing, sombre asters on the tables; from the kitchen seeped the purple smell of her jam-making. Lionel wanted to fill the place with love for me; it was all there for me to take. I hope I was gracious in my acceptance.
Let me remember that time as the best of my marriage. That was the time I came closest to giving Lionel what he wanted, to keeping my side of the bargain. He opened up his beloved house for me, invested in me the power to regenerate, to dispel old ghosts. He offered me respect and love and trust. I knew it, and if I didn’t repay in kind, I believe I came close.
I prefer to think of those rich autumn weeks at Knighton, rather than the wedding itself. I have no photographs of my wedding, which may be one reason why my memories of it are so patchy. In old age distant memory is said to grow clearer, but I can now recall no more of this day, which should have been so important, than I ever have. Both of us wanted the quietest of ceremonies. Lionel wanted a church, and I went along with that because it didn’t much matter to me. The church was near his Kensington flat – ugly, Victorian, and almost empty. No guests, no family; just us and my great friend Peggy Coombs for me, and on his side Alfred Winterson, the publisher who had introduced us. Alfred was jovial, back-slapping. Peggy was matter-of-fact. I could tell she wasn’t convinced about the wedding, though she had been pleased when Lionel, or the fact of Lionel, saw off Harry Bramante. Harry was a thoroughly bad idea in Peggy’s opinion, and as usual she was absolutely right.
I wore brown; a golden-brown suit with a high-necked bouclé jacket and a softly pleated skirt. It was made for me, as were most of my clothes at that time, and I remember it more clearly than anything else about the wedding. It was an excellent suit, with beautiful whorled buttons. Lionel was perhaps disappointed that I had chosen something so unbridal. Well, I softened it with a bouquet, an unusual mixture of ferns and tight creamy rosebuds, and Turk’s cap lilies. I can still see their rusty curls. After the ceremony I handed the bouquet to Peggy, rather awkwardly. She took it without enthusiasm.
What else? Nothing of the ceremony, no words, no vows – only the pools of coloured light like molten jewels on the stones of the church floor where September sun struck through the stained-glass windows. The wedding breakfast, afterwards, at an hotel, and I can’t even be sure which one. A couple of dozen of our closest friends, an uneasy mixture of seafaring men and Lionel’s scholarly scientists, and my political, Bohemian types. Alfred Winterson made a speech, of which I recall not a sentence, and Lionel made a brief reply, and I was horrified to see that he was choked with tears. I believe we cut a cake. I can see the sudden unfamiliarity of the ring on my finger as I lifted my glass of champagne, but the moment of putting on the ring – that’s gone. Just a sense of Lionel, black and bulky, by my side.
The honeymoon was a week in Paris. Poor Lionel! Fifty years of wrestling with the moods and mysteries of the high seas, and he’d married a woman who was sick crossing the Channel. Why Paris? Lionel was not interested in cities. London he tolerated, because he knew it, and because it contained people and institutions which were useful to him, but the great capitals of Europe meant little. I suppose he chose Paris in clumsy homage to what he saw as my cultural sophistication, but it wasn’t a good idea. He was baffled by my admiration of Monet’s sheets of water lilies, irritated by Manet’s bold Olympian stare. I remember him in a quayside restaurant, hungry, chafed with boredom, hauling reluctant oysters out of their shells. ‘Barely a mouthful,’ he grumbled. ‘Give me a nice juicy polar bear any day,’ I added, to tease, and he laughed, but only just. Paris frustrated him. Only in the shadowy spaces of Notre Dame did he seem at ease; a cathedral is, after all, something like a great ship.
So it was with relief that we returned to Knighton, where Lionel was sufficiently securely based to extend his very considerable generosity to me. What a sentence that is! Pompous and ugly. Why am I unable to write about Lionel without condescension? As a defence against guilt, a kind of padding to muffle the facts? He was the Great Man, I was the one who did him wrong. Let me state what Lionel was in single, simple words. He was brave, strong, just, pure, and kind. Huge passions surged through his life – anger, love, and grief. To these he never became accustomed. They crashed over him night and day, but they never eroded him; there was no crumbling into comfortableness. He sought repose in me, and I failed him. Perhaps for those first few months… well, that’s how I choose to remember. Autumn at Knighton, golden, blooming. Clots of mulberries, the red juice running down my wrist. Lionel behind me holding the basket, laughing as I crammed my mouth. ‘Hey, hey, my girl! How will we face Mrs Apps with an empty basket?’ I chose the best, the blackest, the sweetest, and held it out to him on the palm of my hand; the brush of his lips against my palm was – well, I could bear it. He held me, and my hands left ruby trails on his shirt front. Mulberries are only perfect when they’re just touched with decay.
And now I’m old, far older than Lionel was then, or than he lived to be. Lionel didn’t quite see out the Second World War, which was a pity. It’s always a pity not to know how things turn out. He died in 1944, just before Christmas. We’d made the parlour into a bedroom for him because the stairs had become too difficult. He suffered terribly from gout, which seemed most unfair, because he’d always been an abstemious man. What with gout and petrol rationing the last few years of Lionel’s life were limited, and he felt it. His spirit was restless. What I wanted most for him was to get him back on the sea in some form or another, but the war prevented it. I did, once, get him to Beachy Head, about a year before he died. I can’t remember how we managed that. A train to Eastbourne – then what? Could there have been a taxi? A bus perhaps… my memory is full of holes. But I do remember Lionel standing on the clifftop, leaning on his sticks, shaking in the cold wind but gulping down, sucking in great lungfuls of the salty air. His eyes glittered, brimful of fierce memories.
The stairs will be too much for me before long, even in this tiny cottage. I’ll be eighty-five this year, and I’ve no ambition to grow any older. I have my home help twice a week, and a young man in the garden; he’s the greatgrandson of old Apps and Mrs Apps, which is reassuring, or would be if I needed reassurance. I’m weary now, and I need to stop. I’ll sit by the fire and drink tea, and doze. But one thing has become clear to me, and I’ll write it down now, in case I lose it again. I know why I’m writing this. I’m writing it for Hester.