Chapter Fourteen
Wandering, I have discovered
Much treasure on my way, and none more precious
Than the meaning of Going Home, the real meaning.
One traveller said: ‘Home’s where I hang my hat.’
Well, there’s some truth, but not all truth, in that.
Add two more letters – then, instead of part,
You’ll get the whole: ‘Home’s where I hang my heart.’
Part of ‘Going Home’, from A Pocketful of Pebbles
OUTSIDE EUSTON STATION, Tony hailed a taxi. ‘To the King’s Road, please.’ As it swept southwards through bombed streets and past Nelson’s still-standing Column, Jan basked in the sound of Robert and Janet laughing with their father over the drunken breakfast menu. It was like music. In Tony’s smile to her from across the seat, she felt once again the warm, shared pleasure of co-parenthood which she had not known for five years. Tony was gazing with delighted amazement at his fourteen-year-old son and elegant seventeen-year-old daughter.
Only Jamie’s presence was needed was to make his happiness complete, but Jamie was in Yugoslavia with the Scots Guards, having been refused compassionate leave. During rough games in the Officers’ Mess a few days earlier, Tony explained, Jamie had squirted a brigadier with a soda siphon, and his commanding officer was not, in the circumstances, inclined to grant him special favours.
Tony looked astonishingly well, Jan thought: thinner and balder, but not wasted or sunken-eyed. Indeed, the sparkle of schoolboy mischief was still in his eyes, even more so than before, perhaps because he had been stuck in a succession of horrible boarding-school-type establishments for three years. (‘Picnic? I’ll give you picnic!’ As the taxi drove past St James’s Park, Jan could hear her nannie Lala’s words.) She knew how much he must be treasuring these first moments of family life regained. But was he, like herself, privately agonizing about the question of that night’s sleeping arrangements?
Looking out of the taxi window at the thin and war-weary Londoners scurrying about near Victoria Station, Jan tested her conscience. She was deeply moved – she had known she would be – to see these people who must have lived through the bombing, and to see the city of her childhood so changed, with unexpected empty plots and vistas where buildings had been. But she did not feel the violent assault of guilt which other Londoners claimed to have felt on returning from wartime exile. She reflected that in her own way she, too, was war-weary after five nomadic years as Allied propaganda.
The taxi passed Wellington Square, but did not stop. The house Jan glimpsed at the far end on the left looked shut up and neglected. It was uninhabitable, Tony explained, having been vacant for several years, and the basement kitchen had dry rot.
‘Just here, please.’ They drew up outside King’s Court North, a 1930s block of flats next to Chelsea Town Hall where Jan’s childhood friend Frankie Whitehead lived; she had arranged to put them up for a short time in a flat belonging to a friend. She greeted the new arrivals from America with delighted hugs, and didn’t mention bedrooms. They all went straight out to supper at the Queen’s Restaurant in Sloane Square, a favourite of Tony and Joyce’s from pre-war days. Some other friends came too, including Anne Talbot. It was an evening of celebratory reunion, with funnier-than-ever stories from Tony (the comedy enhanced by the blackness of the German-prison context) and lots of laughter and catching of eyes across the table. Anne observed ‘Tony and Joyce’: they seemed to be as good a ‘team’ as ever, giving one another leads in conversation. What was the truth? Was it not odd that on their first night together for five years they should choose to have dinner in a large group, rather than alone? Anne would no doubt find out.
After supper they walked home, and Jan noticed the length of Tony’s stride: he must be revelling in stretching his legs after the years of confinement. She lagged behind to have a private word with Frankie, and suspected that Tony might earlier have done so too. Frankie did not raise an eyebrow, and nor did Tony when Frankie said, in the hallway of the spare flat, ‘Now, it’s time you all went to bed, and this is the way you’d better arrange it – Janet in the small bedroom, Tony in the large one, Jan in the living-room and Robert in the tiny bedroom in my flat.’ The hurdle had been crossed: and, once crossed, Jan supposed it would be easy to arrange things similarly in Wellington Square.
The next day, Saturday 28 May, Tony took his wife and children for a walk. They walked all day, through Kensington Gardens to Campden Hill and beyond, on and on, left and right, through countless streets and squares. They had to run to keep up with him: crotchets, once again, to his minims. Tony told Jan about the Brunswick Boys’ Club scheme: £13,000 had been raised in the prisoner-of-war camp, in the form of promissory notes. She was impressed by this active altruism in him. She recounted anecdotes from her lecture tours – she knew he would laugh at ‘My dearrr, I feel purrrged’, and the ‘Mrs Miniver’s Fruit Salad Plate’. He told her about his other plan, to stand as the Conservative candidate for Perth and East Perthshire, an ambition which was part of his vision of himself as a rural gentleman. It was such a safe Conservative seat that if he were to be adopted, he would almost certainly win. The election was to take place in a fortnight’s time, and he suggested that all four of them should go up to Perthshire to do a spot of what he called ‘baby-kissing’, in aid of his cause.
Legs aching, Jan, Janet and Robert collapsed onto the sofa in the furnished flat. The next day, and the day after that, Tony again took them for walks, through miles of bomb-damaged streets, pausing only to foregather for drinks every now and then with friends who had been ‘in the bag’ with him or for lunch at the Lansdowne Club. On Monday evening they were joyfully reunited at last with Nannie, who since the beginning of the war had been running the children’s crèche at the Lyons food factory. She agreed to come and live with them again as soon as 16 Wellington Square was fit for habitation.
King’s Court North was too small, Tony said on Tuesday. He would sleep at the St James’s Club from now on. He hoped nobody would mind. ‘No – that’s a good idea, darling – do,’ said Jan. Janet and Robert were told that it was merely a matter of shortage of space.
It was five days before she put pen to paper to Dolf, who was still in California. ‘The children and I’, she wrote, ‘are founding a Society for the Rehabilitation of Exhausted Wives and Children of Hundred-Per-Cent Fit Returned POWs – starting off with a monumental foot clinic. Tony has walked the 3 of us off our feet since we’ve been back.’ She then wrote this tribute to Tony’s resilience:
Really, the British are an indomitable people. He was 42 when he went overseas into action, and had never known any real hardship, hunger or humiliation: and now, after going through the Battle of Egypt – the defeat part, not the intoxicating victory march of El Alamein; after 3 years in 6 different prison camps in 3 different Axis or occupied countries; after spending a winter in the Italian mountains dressed in thin desert uniform (khaki shirt and shorts) plus an old tartan plaid wrapped around him; after going literally barefoot for seven months, in order to save his only pair of shoes for a possible escape march; after being shackled in unheated closed cattle trucks on the long journeys between the various camps (during one of which journeys, taking it in turns with the others to peer out of a small crack in the truck, he fell madly in love with what glimpses he could get of the Tyrol); after being under almost continuous heavy bombardment for a year (from our own planes over Brunswick, 2 miles away, which they reduced to flat earth); after going for months without any parcels, mail or news of his family getting through to him; and after spending the final four months in a state of semi-starvation: after all this, he emerges unscathed physically, improved mentally, passed 100% fit by the doctors, a good deal thinner, very slightly balder, politically conscious for the first time in his life, sweet-tempered and humorous as ever, and hell-bent to plunge into politics and walk up mountains stalking deer … I GIVE UP – and so does the enemy.
(Tony’s only comment on the shackling business, which he must have hated very much, was ‘Silly buggers – they didn’t realise we’d all learned to pick locks in our school days. We got them all off long before the end of the journey.’)
Dolf had asked her not to write to him until she had had time to judge the situation fairly. This was how she judged it. Dolf should ‘cancel all blondes’, because there was a good chance that he and she would be able to be together a great deal in the future.
It seems – I gather from Frankie, for of course he would die sooner than make the spiritual effort of saying so to my face – that Tony is immensely proud of my work in the US, and thinks it would be a tragedy if I didn’t continue it. I’m sufficiently conscious of my own faults and irritatingness to realise that he is probably damn glad that I’ve found an outlet for my Winstonian energies at last, and I’m sure he sees – as I do – that the situation provides us with an excellent and face-saving excuse for being apart for several months in the year, without any formal separation and stuff. We still have a great fondness and respect for each other. On the surface, and indeed as far down as the topsoil or even the subsoil, we enjoy each other’s company, and we have a deep satisfaction and pride in our co-parenthood of the children.
‘Without any formal separation and stuff…’ Dolf, reading this, saw his life stretching ahead, this forbidden love affair carrying on for years, always unofficial, always interrupted by heartbreaking farewells. By clinging to ‘the family pattern’, as she called it, Jan was asking him to be a perpetually waiting side-character. He could not, he decided, close his eyes completely to the attractions of blondes.
The meeting to adopt the Conservative candidate for Perth and East Perthshire took place at the Station Hotel, Perth, on 9 June. The candidates were Mr A. J. O. Maxtone Graham and Mr A. Gomme-Duncan. All Tony asked of his wife (knowing her left-wing leanings) was that she should promise not to stand against him as a Labour candidate if he was adopted. Jan and the children were invited by one official to listen to the speeches. A different official then mistook them for members of the Conservative Association, and handed them voting papers. Resisting temptation, they handed them back, unmarked: only members of the Association were supposed to take part. Alan Gomme-Duncan won the adoption by two votes. Had it not been for the scruples of his wife and children, Tony would almost certainly have become an MP in the 1945 General Election. He took his defeat in good humour, and decided to spend the funds earmarked for election expenses on renting a house in the West Highlands for a two-month shooting, stalking and fishing holiday. (Cultoquhey, requisitioned by the Army, was not released until 1947).
It sounded wonderful: the Western Highlands were ‘practically Austria’, Jan felt; and the chosen place was Appin, the country of her lifelong hero Alan Breck of Kidnapped. She would be able to roam in the hills to her heart’s content, dreaming of Dolf and David Balfour. Tony’s desire was to recreate the paradise of pre-war Scottish family summers: tea on tartan rugs, trout, salmon, grouse, pheasant and venison for dinner, drawing-room games in the evening, constant laughter and physical exercise to drown out any strains in his marriage.
But Jan had a way of turning holidays sour. The pressure to be ‘having a lovely time’ brought out the worst in her: it was the negative side of the same cussedness which made her the life and soul of the crowd on any derailed train, or ship battered by a Force Seven gale. Previous holiday bad moods, notably in Vienna in 1929 and Los Angeles in 1943, paled by comparison. Even Robert, who had no inkling of the cracks in his parents’ marriage, began to sense, in Appin, that something was wrong, though his mother reassured him that Tony’s irritableness was just ‘prisoner-of-war neurosis’.
Tony told Jan he had arranged the holiday partly ‘to give her a good rest’ but, indiscriminately generous as ever, proceeded to invite a stream of guests (his golfing friends for the most part), some of whom forgot to bring their ration books, and one of whom (a former POW, Harry Webb) instantly embarked on an affair with Janet. There were sixteen in the house, and the only employed help was one washer-up for four hours a day. Food and petrol were short, and power cuts were frequent because the fast-running burn which powered the private electricity system had dried up in the August heat.
Many months later, Jan described the holiday to Dolf: ‘It was one long round of cooking on an enormous old kitchen range, gutting rabbits and birds, cutting up venison, hoisting huge iron saucepans, and walking two miles to the telephone and many more miles in search of something to shoot. Some of our guests were co-operative, some (notably Janet and the S.O.B. she had an affair with) were not.’ But the people who were there remember it differently. Jan’s helpfulness in the kitchen was, in reality, short-lived – it was Tony’s sister Ysenda who did most of the rabbit-gutting and saucepan-heaving; Jan actually purloined the best saucepan in the house to pursue a ‘manic ploy’ (as Janet called it) which involved boiling up cows’ feet to make glue.
Jan saw Tony as the one who was impossible to live with. ‘My main mistake in my first letter to you,’ she wrote to Dolf months after the event, ‘was to use the adjective “sweet-tempered” about Tony. I did not realise then, so well did he conceal it, how much the POW business had affected his temper. He turned out to be irritable & quick-tempered & even, eventually, admitted this, after several blazing rows and much verbal rudeness (which is entirely unlike him). He got into a state of neurotic depression & couldn’t persuade himself to get out of bed, etc. – you know the symptoms.’
She did not admit that she, too, was bringing poison to the marriage. How could she do otherwise, when her heart was not in it? Tony irritated her because he fell short of Dolf in all the characteristics which now mattered to her; and she was as irritable as Tony.
One day she vanished, leaving a note on the hall table: ‘I have gone to join my friends the gypsies in the heather.’ She was gone for a night and a day, no one knew where. It was exasperating for everyone, and upsetting for Tony.
‘The nicest part of the whole holiday,’ she wrote innocently to Dolf afterwards, ‘was the horse, Dick, which the farmer lent me, and on which, at one particular moment when the situation became intolerable, I ran away for 24 hours, staying in a farmhouse and catching up on sleep.’
This letter to Dolf was not written until November 1945. For five months, from the end of May onwards, Jan cut herself off from him: she had decided it was the only way to give her marriage a decent chance of working. Tony saw, in Appin, that it was not, but (being a bottler-up and avoider of ‘scenes’) he could not bring himself to say so to Jan’s face. They communicated through Anne Talbot, who was one of the house-party. Jan confided to her about Dolf, and she claimed to have known all along. Tony (not yet aware of the depth of Jan’s love for Dolf) told Anne that as far as he was concerned the marriage was over, and they should separate. Jan persuaded him, through Anne, that this would be grossly unfair to the children, and that they hadn’t given themselves a chance in the old, familiar, roomy surroundings of Wellington Square, which they both loved and which was the last place in which they had been truly happy together.
This was a new twist in the plot, one which Jan could not have foreseen while daydreaming on trains during the war years. Then, she had vaguely hoped that some opportunity would come, without her having to instigate it, which would give her an easy escape route from the marriage. And now, here it was: Tony was suggesting a separation. But she couldn’t agree. Not only that: she actively (through the medium of Anne) persuaded him to change his mind. For honour’s sake, and her conscience’s, she knew she must convince herself that her motive for leaving him (if she ever did) was not that life would be better with Dolf, but that life had become irretrievably intolerable with Tony. She was not yet convinced of this. Her children were very much in her mind, especially Robert, who was about to start at Stowe, and to whom (being the youngest) the ‘family pattern’ mattered particularly. For her children’s sake she was prepared to argue against herself in this way, and to forgo Dolf if she could find a joyless but bearable modus vivendi with Tony.
So she and Tony threw their energy into making 16 Wellington Square habitable. Everything in its fourteen rooms was grimy with Blitz dust. Tony, working at Harris & Dixon again, was finding office life futile and unfulfilling. He came home each evening not to play with trains but to move furniture and put up shelves, with a sense of pointlessness and crushing disappointment in his heart. A dance for Janet: that was it, they would give a débutante dance, he decided. Perhaps that would warm the house up, filling it once again with laughter, champagne and jazz music. The invitations went out: ‘Mrs Anthony Maxtone Graham At Home…’ Needless to say, it was a successful evening on the surface, but dismal beneath. Janet, still pining for Thomi Schmidt, was unimpressed by the young men her parents had invited, most of whom she had not met before. Being ‘hostess and mother’ made Jan feel acutely old.
‘Well,’ Jan wrote eventually to Dolf, ‘the cage is ready, but the bird doesn’t fly back.’ You could dust a house, you could install a new kitchen, you could give a dance, but you couldn’t breathe warmth into a house without happiness, and this was still lacking. Tony and Jan stopped having rows and an atmosphere of icy politeness descended, which was worse. On 28 October, able to bear the loneliness no longer, Jan wrote to Dolf. She apologized for her long silence.
I HAD to cut myself off from you in order to make a fair trial of this business here and not be torn to pieces with nostalgia all the time. I have tried, honestly, to make a go of it, but I can’t live like this. I’m not exactly unhappy, just paralysed, and hungry for expressed affection. Now that Robbie’s at school there is nobody to touch, except a cairn puppy the farmer in Argyll gave him, which I look after and which cuddles up to me on the sofa and is very like Rob – small, quick, intelligent and loving.
Promise me, darling Liebes, that even if you have got involved with somebody else, & are living with her, or married to her, by the time I come over in the spring [for the publication of A Pocketful of Pebbles], you will at least put your arms round me & hold me close, & say something zärtlich.1 (Damn – I knew that writing to you would plough me up & rouse everything that I have to suppress day and night.)
She steeled herself against ‘the expected thrust in the vitals’, as she called it: the letter from Dolf which would inevitably follow, explaining that he had taken the sensible decision, and had found a charming girl, not blonde, a pianist actually, twenty-seven years old, interested in architecture …
Jan with Robert’s cairn Culi, in 1945
But it wasn’t a letter, it was a cable. And its message made Jan ‘melt with zärtlichkeit’. She wrote straight back to him, her longest letter ever – thirty-six pages. ‘My darling darling sweet love…’
It seemed to me almost impossible that you should still be ‘uninvolved and unchanged’ after all my long silence & our intolerable separation. Oh, Liebstes, Liebstes, how wonderful that you still feel the same.
… The long and the short of it is that life in these circumstances is impossible. It is not life at all, but a limbo, a half-animal existence – no, not as warm as that. It cannot last. I am neither truly domestic nor creative, & I can’t sleep, & I can’t write, & I can’t thaw out at all except with very old friends (and ex-’Friends’ who are now friends only).
She described the months since sailing from Halifax: the stormy Atlantic crossing, the terrible holiday in Scotland, the exhausting cleaning of Wellington Square, and she brought Dolf up to date, showing him how the war had polarized Tony and her:
It became increasingly clear [in Scotland] that what he was finding it impossible to control was the fact that he is once more, & even more than before, madly irritated by my whole personality, voice, outlook & presence. In theory he is ‘very fond of me’, ‘couldn’t possibly dislike me’, & other similar half-compliments which are more wounding than any insults. We have arrived at a sort of modus vivendi which consists of my keeping out of his way as much as possible and watching every word & gesture when I am alone with him so as not to madden him. He doesn’t irritate me, except very occasionally (mostly when he’s trying to do something practical in the way of carpentry etc., and being both clumsy and pigheaded about it). He simply stultifies and nullifies and sterilizes me. The worst thing of all is his inability or unwillingness to discuss any of our joint problems, until they’re so far gone as to be almost insoluble …
Almost everybody I know is in the same state, if that’s any consolation. A wise woman writer has suggested that there should be a moratorium on all marriages, owing to the war, & that any 2 people who want to re-marry should do so. The housing shortage is appalling. The latest Gallup poll says that 1 adult in 3 is trying to find different accommodation. We have turned into a nomadic nation.
Tony and Jan’s friends kept saying to them, ‘Aren’t you two lucky to have this lovely house to come back to!’ (‘And the sword turns in the wound again.’) The house was, in fact, ‘an ice-house’. The drawing-room was coldly tidy and unlived-in, the fire lit only when visitors came. Tony, when he was at home, spent most of the time in his upstairs bed-sitting-room, the room in which Robert had been born. Jan spent most of the time in her bed-sitter studio (‘a heavenly room, in which one could be so happy’). Janet found the atmosphere in the house so unbearable that she bought a Baby Belling and lived independently in her bedroom when she was not out at her business course. Robert was away at Stowe, and Jamie had still not returned from Yugoslavia. Nannie was the only binding presence: she lived on the top floor and was out at work all day, ‘but thank God she is here most nights for supper & provides a diversion & a link for the 3 of us.’
Longing to touch bits of London which reminded her of Dolf, Jan visited Mme Luhn, the landlady at 100 Denbigh Street who had called him down to the telephone that evening in November 1939. There she was, and her pot au feu was still simmering on the stove. Jan walked westwards along the river and knocked on the door of 113 Cheyne Walk, the place of assignations, where she and Dolf had heard tugs hooting and the evening-newspaper seller shouting of Nazi advances as they lay together postponing the moment of parting. Jan’s friend Charles Spencer opened the door. ‘You wouldn’t possibly have a room to let, would you?’ Jan asked him. ‘I have, actually,’ he said. ‘Not the one you used in 1940 – the one just across across the hall.’
Jan took it, cheaply. She now had a bolt-hole from the ‘ice-house’. But nothing could stop ‘the Jungles’ coming back, which they did, soon after she had finished writing the November letter to Dolf. Until then, the busyness of getting the house in order had kept depression away, and had prevented her from facing up to her creative sterility. But now ‘the Jungles’ were worse than ever: she found herself beset by irrational as well as rational glooms, and was caught once again in the vicious circle of illness and unhappiness interacting and making each other worse. Her doctor treated her for anaemia, low blood-pressure, and change-of-life depressions, and every night for two months she took sleeping-pills, which had, as she later described it, ‘a devastating effect’.
Just before Christmas, Jamie came home. The fire was lit in the drawing-room. With Robert home for the holidays and the family reunited, it looked on the surface (for a few days) almost as if the Minivers had come back to life. Jamie played Meccano with Robert, and Robert was thrilled to rediscover the older brother he had not seen for five and a half years. But Jan, still in her ‘Jungles’, felt like an outsider, watching the family party through a window. At the end of the Christmas holidays the boys went away again. Emerging in the New Year from the worst of the ‘hell’ – enough, at least, to be able to write a letter – Jan wrote to Dolf on 17 January 1946, her fingers stiff and cold because of the fuel shortage:
I have lost all joy & gaiety, & there is hardly anybody here I really give a damn about. I don’t see how I can go on existing like this, in this hell of nothingness. And yet, when I try to face the alternative, of splitting up and busting things up for Rob, I just can’t bear the prospect of it. It wouldn’t be so bad for Janet, who is practically on her own anyway, but she does need a ‘background’ of some kind when she’s just beginning to go to dances, & I feel that even an only apparently united home is better than none.
Perhaps Jan remembered from her own childhood that, awful though it had been having parents who were icily polite to one another, having separated parents who were openly hostile to one another and nowhere one could truly call ‘home’ had been even worse.
I see no immediate prospect of coming to America, and when I shall see you again God only knows – unless some miracle happens & our star lights up again. It is so very, very faint now, Liebes, that I can hardly see it twinkling at all. Was it all a dream, our happiness, & did we really once exist, and be together, and laugh & have fun? I feel more and more unreal, and more and more entrapped in the cast of some play where I don’t belong. The only real thing here is Robert, with his shining intelligent eyes & his loving heart.
It was difficult, in the immediate post-war period, to get an exit permit for America unless you were going on Government business, or to do something which would help the dollar exchange. Clark Getts, the lecture agents who had ruled Jan’s working life during the war years, were clamouring for her to come back and embark on another tour. If she accepted, she would almost certainly be able to ‘swing it’, as she put it, and get a passage. But she couldn’t bring herself to take it on. The tiringness and loneliness of the last one still haunted her. She was determined to stay out of Clark Getts’s clutches.
Her sense of isolation was compounded by the ‘unintimacy’ which had developed between her and Janet. But at last, in early 1946, they had a frank talk. Janet told her mother why she was feeling miserable and uncommunicative: she not only hated the atmosphere of the house and the dreariness of post-war England, but she was missing her friends, and pining for Thomi, and saw no way of getting back to America. Jan’s heart melted at this, because it was so much the same story as her own. She told Janet about her love for Dolf – though she did not confess that the affair had been going on for six years. Janet was amazed – shocked – worried – delighted – she loved and admired Dolf – but what would be the outcome?
The ‘star’ was fainter than Jan knew. During those two months of silence, between November 1945 and January 1946, while she was deep in the ‘Jungles’ and not writing to Dolf, he was stationed in Indiana on his last stint in the Army before being discharged in March 1946. And there, on leave in Indianapolis, he met ‘l’Indianapolitaine’ or ‘the Indiana Compromise’, as Jan later called her: a blonde, aged twenty-two, full of physical attraction, and irresistible.
The letter in which he confessed this has not survived, but from Jan’s reaction it seems that Dolf played it down: she was bold enough to say (after admitting that the news was ‘agony’), ‘I know that no relationship that you or I will ever have with anybody else could ever be in the same street with yours or mine.’ Her method – just as in the infidelity-imagining letter of 1944 – was to draw on the depth of the relationship between her and Dolf, and to brush aside any others as shallow and not worthy of discussion. All she needed to be sure of, she said, was that the visit to New York she was planning for the publication of A Pocketful of Pebbles (which had been postponed till the summer) would not coincide with a ‘visit from Indianapolis’.
She was not certain of the journey to America: her application to the Department of Overseas Trade (‘My publishers want me to be there to promote sales by means of personal appearances’) had not yet been accepted. ‘I guess you feel the same about it as I do,’ she wrote to Dolf on 8 April, ‘– a big longing combined with a small dread, because it’s only, so to speak, another “furlough”, & must lead to another separation.’
But the very prospect of seeing Dolf, now a civilian again, and back working at the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia, and of being once again the centre of attention at book-signings, rekindled her ‘Winstonian’ energies. She dared to get in touch with the BBC, and was welcomed with rapture. ‘I’ve been on the air quite a lot,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘transatlantic quizzes, & reading my own poetry on the North American Service. It’s unspeakably relieving to be coming out of that bloody jungle at last: I’ve never lived through such hell as this winter has been, and I hope I never shall again.’
The Department of Overseas Trade said ‘Yes’. She could go. Delighted, she wrote to Frank Morley of Harcourt Brace telling him she would be in New York for publication day. Her letter crossed with one from Dolf telling her that her visit would coincide exactly with the ‘visit from Indianapolis’. It was, she wrote back to him, ‘the most damnable tangle.’
I could not endure to be in NY while she was there – it would be intolerable for all 3 of us. So I must just postpone my visit. Difficult, because the whole point was to be there on the day of publication, not 3 weeks later. I’ve written to Frank Morley to say ‘owing to further family complications’ I now won’t be able to arrive until the end of June. God knows what he’ll think. Oh, damn, damn, damn … what a mess! I can’t help seeing, in a detached way, how grimly funny it is in its way.
Once again, she braced herself for the inevitable letter in which Dolf would advise her not to come to New York at all, because he was going to marry ‘l’Indianapolitaine’ and had been trying to break it to her gently. His letter arrived. She didn’t dare to open the envelope, but sat looking at it and feeling sick.
… And then when I finally summoned up enough guts to read it, it was like a sweet balm pouring all over me, & I felt (for the first time in months) warmed right through & not lonely any more.
You’re right, Liebes. Involvements are more trouble & anguish than they are worth. Even real love brings enough anguish, God knows, in a world like this, all full of Displaced Persons – but real love is worth it, every time.
It was to the poor girl from Indianapolis that Dolf had to break news gently. Her last words to him were, ‘My dearest wish is that someone would love me as much as you love that woman.’
* * *
‘Oh darling honey Liebes Du – I am really & truly, wirklich und warhäftig, coming!’ Jan wrote to Dolf on 27 May. She had a seat booked on an aeroplane, the Flying Dutchman. ‘I’m arriving on 29 June & can stay till 2 Aug. when I must get back for Robbie’s holidays.’ She planned to rent an apartment so she wouldn’t feel ‘alien & visitorish’ in a hotel.
The Dutch Airlines publicity dept. has rung me to say that reporters will be waiting for me at La Guardia – so for God’s sake don’t meet me, because it would be simple hell not to run into your arms. Besides, I’ll probably faint dead away with sheer joy when I see you, which would be most awkward if done in public. I’ll ring you up as soon as I get to a telephone, & then I’ll come right over to your apt. & stand on the exact spot on the floor where I said goodbye to you 14 months ago (or 14 million years, or 14 minutes, whichever way you choose to think of it).
Ask Pauly to get in 6 dozen oranges, please. I shall drink a gallon a day at first, I expect.
The face lit up by the photographers’ flashes at La Guardia was thinner and more careworn than the one which had sailed away fourteen months before, and the hair was greyer. But the eyes which greeted Dolf were unchanged. The poem Jan had written to him in 1940 in her schoolgirl German still held true:
Staatenlos, heimatlos
Gehen wir immer,
Staatenlos, schwer zu sein,
Heimatlos, schlimmer.
Staatenlos? Heimatlos?
Nein, liebes, nein,
Weil du mein Heimat bist,
Und ich bin dein.2