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

obsessive and a distraction from her work. ‘Darling Tim,’ Nesta wrote when Gluck was seventy-five:

When I suggest that some of your ‘ways’ could be improved it meant courage on my part – It would have been far easier to be a Yes-man. But it is only for you who else could it possibly be for – not me – not Edith!

It is to try and show you that your path could be made easier – but I suppose a Leo cannot change his spots!! You have had the same problems ever since I knew you. I must just look on with anguish because I love you.

Her friendship with the Maufes ‘one of my proudest friendships and your faith in me as an artist one of my greatest comforts in times of despair’ – was clouded by the campaign. ‘If you have solved the difficulties, does that mean you will now paint?’ Prudence wrote (20 January 1964), when Gluck lectured to the Royal Society of Arts on ‘The Dilemma of the Painter and Conservator in the Synthetic Age’. ‘I do so tremendously hope so … even you will not live for ever and “that one talent which is death to hide, lodged with me useless”? Lord how I wish I could paint like you.’

The long years of not painting afflicted Gluck with a sense of self-betrayal. But though her campaign wasted her talent, it was not in itself a waste. Her persistence led to an unequalled scrutiny of artists’ materials, a greater understanding of the properties of oil paints and a revision in ways of preparing canvases. As a conservationist, she challenged the paint manufacturers to account for their products at a time when there were few safeguards for consumers. The British Standards Institution formulated and published a standard for the naming and defining of pigments. And the colourmen provided her with paints which she felt to be free of the ‘suede effect’ – paints she was later to describe as ‘a joy to use’. At too great a cost to herself she got, more or less, what she said she wanted.

EIGHTEEN

LACUNA

Gluck was difficult to live with during her fallow years. Edith’s interest was in Art and the realm of the imagination, not campaigns about paint. And she, like Nora, before long was made to feel excluded by a triangle of relationship. For Gluck, if love had proved elusive, marriage was to become a trap.

Life at the Chantry House was companionable enough from when Nora left in 1946 until about 1954. Servants, prepared to tolerate Gluck’s demands and uncompetitive rates of pay, were found. Mrs Guy, employed as a laundrymaid in 1952, stayed twenty-five years and did whatever she was asked.

I was a bit scared of her at first. The greengrocer brought the fruit and vegetables up. I had to let her know as soon as he arrived. She came straight out and weighed everything. The grapes were two ounces under. Back they had to go and I had to take them. I said to my husband, I’m not working there. He said, that ‘show that sort of people get on. That’s how they got money, because they look after it. But she was a very good friend to me. When my first grandson, a mongol boy died, it was her that pulled me through. Her kindness.1

The house was run with military precision. Menus were planned, with the housekeeper Mrs Gurd, at the beginning of the week. Breakfast – China tea and toast – was taken to Gluck and Edith in their respective bedrooms. Edith then worked in her study on book reviews or her ‘With Prejudice’ page for The Lady. Gluck worked on her paint-war papers, and her various campaigns, with transient secretarial staff, in the Yeats Room. Lunch was at one, in the dining room – two courses and sometimes a bottle of wine – then coffee in the drawing room. The wines came with the compliments of J. Lyons & Co. Edith liked cooking, but was dissuaded by Gluck who regarded it as the servants’ domain though she made reference in her diaries to Edith’s ‘wonderful puddings’. In the afternoons Gluck went to her studio.

They shopped in Brighton, saw Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, Lilli Palmer in Oh My Papa and Grace Kelly in Cornish Seas. Despite Edith’s indifference to opera, they went to first nights of Alceste, Ariadne auf Naxos, Idomeneo and Macbeth at Glyndebourne. They spent motoring holidays in France, weekends in the Beach Hotel, Worthing, and summers in Cornwall. On Coronation Day, in June 1953, they listened all day to the ceremony on the wireless. They went sailing in Cowes and dined with J. B. Priestley, a work colleague of Edith’s from the twenties, who lived nearby. Edith went up to the annual party for The Lady, held at the Savoy, and stayed overnight in town. Gluck went into Brighton to search for suitable Valentine cards for Edith in the early Februaries of their life together, and on Gluck’s birthday Edith always put fresh-cut roses on her breakfast tray.

They cared for each other’s illnesses and frailties. Edith, who by 1953 was sixty-eight, suffered from bouts of low blood pressure, headaches and days of feeling peaky. Gluck had days of staying in bed because of arthritis, bronchitis and depression. Her friend, Hermia Priestley, attending one of her lectures on paint standards in the fifties, thought how rapidly she had aged.2 Her panache and flair were gone. She still got her hair cut at Truefitts in Bond Street, but it was a mannish haircut, rather than a daring style. She had a navy-blue nautical suit and brass buttons made at Cowes, but it was by no stretch Stiebel or Schiaparelli. She now bought her shirts and pyjamas at Marks & Spencer in Brighton.

Nesta wrote and floated through. She broke her nose surfing in Hawaii and had a new, aquiline one constructed. She and Gluck spent brief holidays together, on the Isle of Wight and in