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

burned her past and on which she had staked her future, was not working out. ‘Dearest Meteor,’ Nesta wrote (7 March 1949),

Gluck had a most terrible brainstorm yesterday and tried to jab her wrist with a knife … she shouted and raged for an hour, in which time she called me a Liar, Callous, Selfish, had done nothing for her etc.… She put on her heavy flying suit when I went to take Zar for a walk and scared everyone by disappearing. I looked everywhere – even rushed the car to the Downs. It was nearly dark when I discovered her walking in the fields. She had been walking for an hour and was absolutely done. I’ve told the doctor he must be drastic. Of course you must know nothing … the more she works herself into these fits, the worse her heart will get.

The year began peacefully enough for Gluck. Her first painting, to ‘christen’ her new studio, was an idealized drawing of Nesta’s head. She called it ‘Madonna’, or ‘Nativity’ and it speaks only of repose and love. With Gluck as her tutor, Nesta, too, set up a painting studio down at the Mill House. Grounded by the war, exotic travel and winter sports denied her, she turned for recreation to art. She proved a keen pupil and painting became a lifelong enthusiasm. She made no great claims for what she produced – Gluck in later years referred to her efforts as ‘daubings’ – but she had panache and was prolific. At some point one of her paintings was bought by the Los Angeles Gallery of Modern Art. Called ‘The Clutching Hands of Every Day’, it showed ‘nothing but hands writhing – holding one back from all things one wants to do!’ In a matter of months in 1940 she produced forty-five canvases, which she sold at an exhibition in the Reading Room of the Village Institute in Plumpton to raise money for the Red Cross. They were mainly landscapes and portraits and certainly free-flowing. ‘I am very proud of my pupil,’ wrote Gluck to the Meteor (18 September 1940), but she showed little interest in the exhibition and only went to it after Nesta criticized her for not doing so.

The winter of 1939–40 was sufficiently cold to allow skating on a friend’s pond, a small compensation for being kept from the Alps. A hen laid the first egg – cracked – on 27 January 1940, the second – cracked – on the 29th, the third – cracked – on the 30th and the fourth – whole – on the 31st. Gluck again resolved to give up smoking, this time to pay for Zar’s food, a resolve she again did not keep. Requests for commissioned portraits continued to come in. The Maufes kept hoping for theirs, Ida Copeland, a former Unionist MP for Stokeon-Trent, a Commissioner for the Girl Guides and wife of the Director of Copeland China Works in Cornwall, asked Gluck to paint both her soldier sons before they were posted overseas. She lived in Truro and Diana Giffard and Christabel Pankhurst were staying with her in March 1940 when she was urging Gluck to ‘come without delay’. ‘She looks rather like an insignificant little black beetle,’ Diana Giffard wrote to Gluck of Christabel (18 March 1940), ‘I simply can’t imagine her chaining herself to lamp-posts and being sent to prison.’

At Millers Mead Gluck was close to Nesta with enough work in the offing. The Meteor used her powers of persuasion on the Chief Petroleum Officer, Tunbridge Wells, to ensure her daughter’s ten-gallons-a-month ration got doubled so that she could motor with all her gear to fulfil her various commissions. But something was wrong with Gluck. She was suffering from what seem to have been anxiety attacks, her heart palpitating, worrying obsessively about practical matters, unable to get down to work.

The catalyst to the outburst described by Nesta came in March 1940 with Gluck’s servants, the Fitzgeralds. They lived in and she paid them £120 a year for all general duties. On the morning of the 2nd March, after a fraught weekend of rows with the Meteor over business matters, she told Fitzgerald to clean the windows. He refused, saying the sun was on them. She asked if he was refusing to carry out her order and he replied, yes. She asked him to repeat this in front of Mrs Fitzgerald, which he did, adding a few unrecorded insults. The couple were out of the house by 2.30 p.m. The doctor was summoned. He ordered Gluck to bed, told her to forget about work and gave her Haverol Oil capsules and an injection of ‘one of those very good vaccines’ – a dubious medicinal concoction of arsenic and iron – ‘made by Allen & Hanbury, recommended for cases of this kind by Sir James Purves Stuart, the great nerve Consultant’. On Nesta’s recommendation, a resident nurse was brought in. ‘When I saw her I gave a gasp of joy’, Nesta wrote to the Meteor (9 March 1940). ‘… I knew Gluck would like her. Tall, iron grey hair, grey eyes and a strong quiet face. Took command quietly. Gluck obeyed like a lamb!’ The doctor wrote to the Meteor telling her not to visit her daughter who was ‘on the verge of a serious breakdown’, that her heart was feeble and intermitting and that were it not for the help and support of Mrs Obermer matters would be worse.

The Meteor paid for the nurse – three guineas a week – sent down a revolving garden sun hut, large enough to take a day bed, put £1000 of Defence Bonds into Gluck’s account, paid a ten-shilling fine for her, incurred by driving through a red traffic light and wrote her sweet letters telling her to ‘forget about the war, the chickens, me and everybody’. Nesta organized replacement staff, looked after Gluck’s affairs and sent progress reports to the Meteor. Perhaps Gluck courted such responses to her neediness.