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

poems. Got very upset by them.’ ‘N only came in for ten minutes. Very short. Was most depressed by her. She went to Boo for day. Came to see me however at 8 pm for few minutes. Was very sweet then.’ ‘N. comes 6.30 but only for 1/4 hr.’

When, in 1941, Nesta went to Newcastle for ten days and Gluck received only four letters, three phone calls and a telegram, she became extraordinarily miserable and depressed. ‘Send telegram. “Plus que moi” etc.’, she recorded. And she wrote poetry that reflected her hurt – sonnets in Shakespearean style:

I heard the sea and the incoming tide,

I felt your heartbeats throb against my own.

I thought I held you fast … but from my side

I found that you and all delights had flown.

Then I remembered how you lay at rest,

And heard the gulls cry in the tremulous day

I saw your dear hair tumbled on your breast

And languorous vigour of your darling clay.

And how your eyes, as you lay quietly sleeping

Were shadowed by one graceful arm flung wide,

The passionate night your gentle form belying …

Oh God must I forever be denied

Such life with you – Must we forever part

And I go lonely, with an aching heart.

Nesta’s absences highlighted how isolated Gluck was in Plumpton. This was her exclusive relationship. She had staked everything on it and it was not so much going wrong, as not going anywhere. Her life in the thirties in Hampstead had been social and fast. As time went on at Millers Mead she dined more often than not alone. Few people visited her in an everyday way. Seymour, if he came to pick up Nesta, did not come in. Craig stayed with her for a month or so in November 1943, but Gluck was horribly nervy with her and burst out about how hopeless everything seemed. When the Meteor visited for weekends she and Gluck argued constantly about the Trust. On several occasions Gluck wrote to her mother not to discuss business matters when they met; all that, she said, could be dealt with in writing and she wanted to preserve their relationship apart from the Trust. But the subject was too pressing to avoid.

Gluck noted down her profound worries with a cool regard for the truth. This was how it was. She wished for things to be different but did not know what to do. It was not the world war that threatened her. She bought blackout paint for the windows, walked to see bodies brought from a German plane shot down less than a mile away, and did not wake when nearby aerodromes were bombed at night. Her worries were about love, money and where she could call home. She was abstracted and lost things – the cigarette case Nesta gave her, her lighter, her shooting-stick, her fountain pen. Dr Richards warned her to be very careful. And she did a self-portrait of herself looking for all the world like the Duke of Wellington, arrogant, combative to a hostile world, allied to masculinity as a definition of hardness and pride. This was not at all the cheeky chappy of her 1926 self-portrait, and not at all the face of a person who would write again and again in her diary, as she did, ‘no telephone calls, no letters, terribly upset about it all’.

Though on a crucial level she was unhappy, life was not all gloom. She had a distractable disposition and quick-changing moods and if fun was on offer, she liked to have it. There were still with Nesta the games of badminton, shared walks on the Downs, times spent reading aloud in the hut: Paradise Lost or Moby Dick, Yeats, Blake and Plato; or listening to music, or singing duets, or sunbathing in the nude – though the fads of sailing, skating and riding had faded forever. Often enough she would note, disarmingly, ‘a lovely day’. Her good friends were there though it is doubtful how much they knew of her problems. When in February 1941 she was both feeling miserable and having problems with staff, which meant that she had to make her own tea and feed the chickens, Noel Boughey phoned her every evening to see how she was getting on. Gluck stayed with Wilfrid and Nancy Greene at their wartime home, ‘Wilderness’, in Holmbury St Mary, near Dorking, messed about in the garden, listened to Haydn and Beethoven on their gramophone and went with them to tea with Max Beerbohm and his wife and had a happy time.

It was not that Nesta neglected Gluck for long or was ever angry with her in other than a passing way. It was simply that she did not have the disposition for exclusivity. Years later she talked of ‘the tyranny of friendship’.2 She knew that she drew problematic people to her, and then could not be the answer they desired. She was so much the opposite of Gluck, which was perhaps where attraction lay – so unobsessive, easy with people and physically fearless. She believed in Gluck’s exceptional talent, gave what she could and wanted her to be happy. Each Christmas she bought her a diary and inscribed it with all hope for the coming days. ‘To my Tim’ she wrote in Gluck’s 1943 diary ‘with so many large hopes that the days be filled with large joys (and small too) small as Tiny Tim’. Gluck would always drop work to have time with Nesta. She resented interruptions from others and longed for them from her. As the war went on, Nesta took on more and more speaking engagements and, as suited her, travelled the country – often on her motorbike. She had been awarded an OBE in the first war for similar charitable works. She resisted telling Gluck her every move and to Gluck such evasions were betrayal and lies. Gluck was again having arsenic and iron injections and taking sleeping pills. But her true drug was her moments with Nesta. Those moments elated her, she deflated