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

background. I have terrible struggle all day trying to work out Cyril’s portrait. A. comes to studio 3.30–4.30. N. ticks us off in a curious way about E. and general situation. A. and I fed up.5

Gluck kept the Yeats Room, her study and her new studio locked when she was not working in them, which angered Edith because of its implication of lack of trust. The studio, separate from the house, could be reached either through the grounds of Chantry, or from the road:

I told A. she did not know how I suffered nervous tension owing to her refusing ever to come through to the studio by the Chantry House. Because just when I should have been quiet after lunch I was on tenterhooks that I could not get out to the studio in time to let her in. She was equally unhappy at the thought of running into E. or coming into the house at all, the amosphere of which she says she loathes.… I said I could not go on feeling that if the studio gate was locked, she would not come round to the Chantry House front door. I pointed out that it was, after all, half my house … she said of course she would come to the house if necessary only it was like Jane Eyre and Rochester.6

To get away from the ‘general situation’, Gluck went each year for a fortnight in the late 1950s to a health clinic, Enton Hall, in Sussex. A regime of fasting, enemas, colonic irrigation, steam baths, cold baths, massage and very early nights resulted in rapid weight loss. She checked in weighing around ten stone and checked out weighing nine. Breakfast was hot water and an orange, lunch tomato juice, and supper a leaf or two of lettuce and perhaps a yoghurt. From time to time she got dizzy and breathless and had to be revived with Ribena laced with ‘something else’. With the help of a homeopathic doctor there, a Dr Pink, she touched on the truth of what was wrong:

He asked me innumerable questions about how much pleasure I got out of my work. Could not get him to talk diets as he came back repeatedly to this theme. In the end after telling him everything about my work, reactions to same, hours of work and what I had been doing about paints and linseed oil, he suddenly said: ‘Diet is not what is wrong with you. You are suffering from frustration with your work. ‘And then, though of course no one could know it better than I, I realised how fearfully true this was and how I must concentrate all my forces on seeing I could get back to happy unfrustrated work with all else kept at bay. I liked him … I feel I have wasted my life and especially the last ten years. I must get back to what I was.7

The chief problem in keeping all else at bay was that she perceived herself as the victim. It would have shocked and astonished her to hear people say, as they did, that she was powerful and manipulative. She believed herself to be revolving around the needs and demands of Edith and Anne without acknowledging how she caused them to revolve around her own needs and demands. Both women phoned and wrote to Gluck at Enton, and she phoned them and wrote to them each day. They visited her and brought gifts – all in a fortnight’s separation:

We lay and talked looking out of the open window. The air was keen. I said to A. ‘I don’t intend to revolve round anybody any more. People will have to revolve round me or I can’t have any people in my life. ‘… She went at 6 pm not allowing me to see her off. She left some lovely chestnut buds and I missed her …8

A week later Edith arrived bringing a huge bunch of flowers:

blossom, giant snowdrops, grape hyacinth, blue hyacinths, narcissi, white and yellow and large and small daffodils – very sweet smelling and the epitome of Spring. Also books to read.… After a rest a long talk about my changed views and attitudes. At first E. was very stubborn and tried to bring out all the dreary old complaints, but I soon stopped it by saying no amount of recriminations would alter me, that the past must be buried utterly, I would not be a battleground any more and that everyone without exception would have to observe this, or I would just dispense with their companionship.… After tea she went at 5.30 pm and I felt much more at peace. Telephoned to see if she was all right at 9.45 pm as she had seemed very tired and failing when she drove away.9

From Anthony Kimmins, a client at Enton and son of the founder of Chailey Heritage School for which Nesta and Gluck had raised money before the war with their exhibition of Royal furniture, Gluck heard rumour in 1959 that Nesta, widowed two years previously, intended to remarry.

‘We shall all soon be hearing of the wedding and how Honolulu blazons it forth’ he said with a cheery wave. This gave me a great shock as Nesta had denied emphatically last year that there was any truth in the rumour. I said ‘who is it?’ and he could not recall the name but said he owned a ranch and most of the island. I said I thought it would be a good thing to happen, and he agreed, but I felt sore and angry.10

Gluck immediately wrote to Nesta to ask if the rumour was true. She got an unsatisfactory reply and wrote in her diary:

I answer at once … my only comment on her unbelievably typical evasions about marriage was ‘Congratulations! as they say in “My Fair Lady”.’ The rest of the letter was about ‘Illustrated London News’ and linseed oil. Let’s see what she makes of that. My relief if she marries will