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

Cornwall, but these seemed to compound Gluck’s sense of domestic trap. They visited the Meteor in ‘The Priory’ and she recognized Nesta. Gluck no longer had the sustaining support of a relationship with either Nesta or her mother. Nesta had flown to her tropical island and the Meteor, in her madness, was beyond communication. She was being treated with Sodium Amytal and electroconvulsive therapy, but no treatment existed that could again balance her mind.

On the days she visited the Meteor, Gluck usually lunched with her brother at the Trocadero. Provided they avoided the topics of the Trust and her money, the meetings were amicable. A quiet word to him about her problematic car yielded a new one in 1954 – an MG Magnette. It seemed to Louis that she had settled down in a stable, if disappointingly unproductive way. Occasionally he visited Chantry but kept the meetings as neutral as possible:

L.H.G. and Doreen arrive 2.50 pm leave 5.10 pm. Entirely impersonal two hours. Everything ‘amiable’. Felt very sad after as not one sign of real affection or interest shown.3

She no longer dealt directly with him about her finances. She had found, in Brighton, an accountant, David Tonkinson, who became her homme d’affaires. He was fond of her, respectful of her talent, tolerant of her long phone conversations at nine in the morning and diplomatic with her Trustees. He tried to dissuade her from buying hour upon hour of his time, he was a senior partner in a large firm, but it was worth it to her to be insulated from dealings she knew she could not herself conduct in any pleasant way. For financial affairs that should, in the 1950s, have cost her between twenty-five and forty pounds, she was paying up to £500 a year. By the 1970s she was paying thousands.

In 1955 Gluck chose to enter into a deal with the Fund which bound her and Edith more closely together than ‘Love to all Eternity’. Both of them by that time lived off investment income and modest earnings. The Chantry House needed substantial repairs and was costly to run. The Fund agreed to buy the house and North Cottage, one of two cottages that were part of the estate, thereby giving the two women welcome capital. The Fund then let the estate to them at a rent of ninety-seven pounds and five shillings a year. Edith and Gluck were responsible for rates and maintenance. By the terms of the lease if Gluck moved out or died, Edith could be given notice. It was a standard enough lease, drawn up by solicitors, and no doubt the clause was meant as a safeguard against Gluck accruing houses in which she did not live. But it meant that Edith was now dependent on Gluck for the roof over her head. She was seventy, Gluck was sixty. To the Trustees it must have seemed simply as if they were helping two women of advancing years. But that same year the relationship between Edith and Gluck took a turn for the worse.

On 26 November 1954 a Steyning couple, David and Anne Yorke, dined at the Chantry. Gluck described it in her diary as a delightful evening. They ate pheasants, there was a great storm, the electricity went out and Gluck lent the Yorkes a torch to find their way home. ‘E. and I very late to bed but feel grand and it was fun.’ The Yorkes had married in 1950 and had two small sons. They lived in a manor house, Gatewick, grander than the Chantry, and themselves felt restricted by small-town life. Anne Yorke was Edward Burne-Jones’s great-granddaughter, David Yorke was descended from Sir Philip Yorke, the Earl of Hardwicke, Chancellor of England in the eighteenth century. Their interests were cultural, their manner informal and friendly, their connections aristocratic and artistic of the kind the Meteor and Nesta liked. The next day they introduced Gluck to the painter Claude Harrison and she bought a painting by him of the seafront at Brighton. Meeting the Yorkes cheered her, they were her first true friends in Steyning. There was none of the reserve and implicit criticism toward her that came from Edith’s camp.

On Christmas Day Gluck went to Gatewick – where there were silver-gilt table decorations – and had a ‘lovely evening’. Edith dined with Nora. The Yorkes saw in the New Year at the Chantry and invited the two women to join them in Spring on a Greek cruise. They accepted. The sale of Chantry House went through in March 1955. Two months later Edith, Gluck, and David and Anne Yorke left for a holiday organized by Hellenic Tours. David Yorke found Gluck entertaining but tiresome. She had to keep out of the sun, was for ever trying to conjure porters that did not exist, wanted breakfast in bed at expensive rates and a cabin on a short channel crossing. More crucially on the holiday Gluck seemed to transfer, in a way that was like the shadow of an obsession, the repeating of a worn pattern, her needy, romantic feelings to Anne. After they returned she catalogued in her precise, lonely fashion the hours spent at Gatewick in ‘The Tower’ – Anne’s private living room, Anne’s visits to the studio, her phone calls, their trips together to London and Brighton. Such incidents became the emotional focus of Gluck’s life. And the more she saw and heard of Anne, and they were in contact virtually every day from 1955 until the early 1960s, the more beside herself with jealousy Edith became.

Gluck monitored the tensions, scenes, recriminations and turbulent emotions that seemed more appropriate to adolescence and the opera than to gentrified English country life:

Go to Gatewick. Ouzo and sugarbush and long playing Marlene. Dietrich. A. in housecoat. Leave 8 pm.

Terrible scene E. about A Y. Feel like death. Very bad night.

Go to Gatewick 5.30 to 7.30. E. furious when I return. Exhausted, frightened and unhappy. All the old accusations and troubles.

Frightful morning. Hammer and