Gluck by Diana Souhami (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

worth’ – and guarded at opposing anything that might add to her daughter’s happiness, was putting out warning references to society’s terms: ‘… That bloody insistence on S. and you as the “Ideal Couple”.… It bores me,’ Gluck wrote.1

In January 1937 Mr Sawyer’s pulse rate was down to fifty and his appetite gone, he was dozing most of the time and ‘sinking slowly’. Nesta wondered whether to cut short her winter holiday in order to be with him. Her mother, troubled by a bad leg, sent depressed bulletins to St Moritz, hoping that her daughter would come home. Gluck tried to interpret the facts:

My heart I want to say something about your Father.… I have a feeling of responsibility about negating the gloom of your mother’s letters. I do think it true that he is getting steadily weaker, that he does not eat enough and is dozing most of the time. But with your stay daily getting your strength up it seems unnecessary to curtail it when this state of affairs … may continue for a month or more.… If my impressions are correct I think if you come back when you thought of doing so it will be all right.

Gluck, who revered the concept of truth, colluded in keeping the affair secret in order to avoid pain and scandal. But her sexual orientation was no secret and she could not always hide her feelings. Her jealousy of Seymour, her hatred of being marginalized by his socially legitimate claim to Nesta, and her fear that Nesta was not matching her own passion, spilled out. Bothered by the vagaries of the post, afraid that her three letters a day to the Carlton were not getting through quickly enough, she suggested an alternative strategy, to speed communication. Nesta replied: ‘It doesn’t matter, as I pass the Carlton daily to go to the skating rink there won’t be any delay in my getting your letters, so either way all is well.’

For Gluck, alone with the ‘Demon’ as she called it, of her artistic ambition, living her life through Nesta and scarcely allowing letters to get through the box before opening them, Nesta’s restraint in waiting until morning for a letter that arrived the previous evening, was tantamount to indifference:

In bed, Thursday morning, 7 January (1937)

My one instinct was to fly backwards into nothingness – no contacts, no heart, no feelings. I was furious with myself having bothered to find out what posts would reach you most quickly. What did it matter – if you didn’t get them at night next morning would do.

Your mother was right, I ask too much – and yet I do not ask what I am not prepared to do and give myself.… You will never know the turmoil, the rage, quite cold blooded that seized me – just the same rage that I got at Plumpton when Seymour kept us both hanging about and I did not know when you were coming in to see me.

Don’t make any mistake – I know you love me, I know how you love me and I know that nothing like this can prevent me loving you, but my ears went back and I felt that armour close with a snap again round my heart which had become, I suddenly realised dangerously softened …

I went to bed. There was nothing else to do – I was sick with myself for minding at all. I had so nearly reduced feeling to insensitiveness and now I had let it get all vulnerable again. I determined not to think about it and when in bed took Dial [a barbiturate available only on prescription or the Black Market] and a purge and hoped by this morning I would find it was all exaggeration and a result of being overtired. At 3 am I woke up with the headache worse than ever and took two aspirin and slept till nine. I felt better and calmer but it would not be possible just the same not to write all this to you.… You see darling, when you are near or with me, it’s like a warmth that keeps me from analysing and retrospecting and gradually I melt and feel human and creative and happy and all the suspicions bred by my life so far just seem impersonal and of no account and are lulled and I am tamed and safe and happy in it. Then when something like this happens I can feel my ears go back, I can feel my jaw set, I can feel that overwhelming urge to fly – to the desert I know so well it would be, but it seems safe somehow.…

I don’t think with all this outpouring of words I have made it clear what I minded. I manage, and you manage, to keep some semblance of our true relationship going, but when you are the chattle, as far as your goings and comings are concerned, of someone else, then I become it too and that, at sudden moments like last night, becomes intolerable. I feel as if I was being hamlugged about, and not to know where you are, so even if I wanted to telephone or telegraph I would be uncertain, or have to duplicate the contact, because of someone who has first claim on you being uncertain and erratic and you having to follow suit fills me with a crazy fury.

Do try to understand. I have understood all your very strong feelings about the clutching things in my life. I suppose it’s just the old Adam pouring upward to my brain but you are the only human being I have ever trusted and therefore loved. I do love you and I know what your love is for me and it is true that you sustain my spirits but I am human after all and if what I have written is small and seems a fuss about nothing, don’t forget that it is the tiny things that count and that