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

destroyed everything. There is more, as I said crazily before, to come and we hope better4

She felt a sense of freedom in the unencumbered rooms with all the problems of the past reduced to ashes and in possession of Love that ‘makes me blaze with a fire that I do not believe even Death will be able to quench’.5

The relationship with Constance ended at this time. Hitherto, Gluck had spent her weekends at Constance’s home, Park Gate, now it was Nesta’s home at Plumpton. After the fateful May 1936, Gluck made only a couple more visits to Park Gate. On one of them Constance said she was ‘bored about everything to do with flower pictures’, and Gluck walked in the park alone. On the other, after Gluck returned from summer with the Hensons in Hammamet, she went down to Kent for lunch and tea. ‘C. very stuffy to begin with and not much better after. Relief get home. Bed. Telephone N. 10.30. N. telephones me 11.20. Dial.’

And for Constance the regular midweek dinners and nights at Bolton House ended. She stayed once in June, a month after Gluck’s ‘marriage night’ with Nesta: ‘C. dinner and night B.H. Talk and say no more *’, was Gluck’s blunt diary entry for 24 June 1936, and once in November: ‘Awful evening Thursday’, was how that was recorded. A week later there followed a cryptic, confused exchange, the evidence of which Gluck saved from the flames and filed away. Mabel wrote Gluck a phone message ‘Flower Decorations rang up. Mrs Spry would like to spend Thursday and Friday evening with you.’ Gluck phoned the shop to say no (she was spending both evenings with Nesta). Constance’s private secretary, a Miss Lake, rang to say ‘No one rang from Flower Decorations last night. A mistake has been made.’ And both she and Constance sent letters.

‘Darling Gluck,’ read Constance’s (24 November 1936),

I’ve just had such an extraordinary message – ‘Miss Gluck sorry she can’t put you up on Thursday and Friday.’ It’s Greek to me! I haven’t dreamed of such a thing. It must be someone else. You must have thought me a perfect damned nuisance. We’ve tried to get you on the telephone to explain – or Miss Lake has – with no success and I’ve got to go off without having it explained to you. Love Constance.

And from Miss Lake on the same day:

I assure you that no message was sent to you on Mrs Spry’s behalf last evening. The shop was closed at 7o’clock and Mrs Spry herself left here at least an hour earlier. Any message being sent from Mrs Spry or for her would definitely go through me and no other person here would have any knowledge of this.

On the same day Gluck sent back Constance’s nightdress with a letter. The following Monday Nesta called to see Constance and whatever the purpose of the visit it prompted a grateful reply:

My dear Nesta

I really cannot tell you how I value what you did yesterday. It was a very generous, a very wise and a kind thing to have done. More of your spirit would help everyone.

I look forward to seeing you again, and I’d like you to feel very sure of me – of my friendship, of my wish to be of use and of help if ever that were needed.

I love courage and clear cut action – and anyone who has the first and behaves the last fills me with affection and respect. Excuse the grammar, the paper and the dirt!

My affectionate thanks

Constance

On the evening of Nesta’s visit to Constance, Nesta and Gluck went to a concert at Wigmore Hall. The following evening it was Covent Garden, the night after, the première of Ladies in Love followed by a cabaret. They dined mid-week at Bolton House and on 5 December – Constance’s birthday (now scratched out of Gluck’s diary) a Rolls Royce arrived at the studio to take Gluck to Plumpton for the weekend.

Whatever the circumstances (and Val Spry’s understanding was that Gluck had become so demanding of Constance and difficult, that Shav Spry forced an end to the relationship, for fear that Constance’s career would be hindered), a fatal rift happened at this time. They simply did not meet any more. It was the end of a friendship that had encouraged Gluck’s talent, furthered her career and taken her into the heart of thirties smart society. The relationship was reduced to ashes along with all the other burning.

One of Nesta’s first presents to Gluck was a gramophone and the songs of the day struck a special chord. ‘These Foolish Things’ was a favourite:

By the way I have ordered a new record – Cole Porter, very sentimental but clever, he’s the man who wrote ‘Miss Otis’. It’s sung by Virginia Bruce and is called ‘You’ve got under my skin’. [sic] I think you’ll like it. It’s not a dance record so it will do for us when we sit it out.6

Gluck went, while Nesta was away, to a season of surrealist films at The Everyman, Hampstead, and to an exhibition of eighteenth-century wallpapers at Sandersons which she found ‘beautiful and somehow consoling’. She saw Mae West in I’m no Angel. ‘Gawd! I was fascinated but never want to see her again’ and the Dionne Quins in The Country Doctor which she found marvellous, amusing and fascinating.

She tried to cut down on smoking, forty a day of Players Medium Cut (‘It’s the Tobacco that Counts’), and tried to cut down on Dial, but very often it was her only way of getting a good night’s sleep. She endured frequent visits to the dentist, a Mr Simpson, who told her he had never met anyone with such sensitive teeth. She bought new turtles for the fish tank, which she cleaned out regularly, but with equal regularity the turtles died. To salve the pangs of separation Nesta sent photographs of herself which Gluck scrutinized under a magnifying glass: ‘the little haze of mist