Gertrude Bell (24 page)

There was another woman in the house who may have suspected the truth. Marie Delaire could not have failed to notice her mistress's anxiety about her summer wardrobe. There were a dozen fittings for new dinner dresses, hats to be retrimmed, linen skirts to be taken up, alterations to last year's costumes, and a dozen filmy white blouses to be sewn with
pin-tucks and edging: the new fashion was to wear your fine blouses with a string of pearls inside, so that they could be seen through the delicate fabric.

And so Dick came to Rounton for a few days in July 1913. After the day's excursion, the gallop across the fields, the noisy, cheerful dinner followed by coffee and card games in the drawing-room, the babble of voices would gradually diminish by ones and twos as the guests said good night and drifted upstairs to their rooms. Gertrude and Dick sat on by the fire together, talking and looking at each other.

To her it was a dream: it would have been like this if they had been married. Her happiness was an intoxication. Here was the man she loved, here was the family she loved, in the house that she loved. Reserve after reserve was breaking down, but there must have been an awkwardness, too, an unspoken question about the night to come. Perhaps, obliquely, she let him know where her room was. At last she went up to bed. Unpinning her hair, she heard him knocking softly at her door, and let him in. They stood, his arms around her, her heart beating fast, then sat a little uncomfortably on the bed. They talked, half in whispers. Grave as ever, he was difficult for her to read, but as always, she found there were no limits to what she could say. She explained her feelings: her happiness to have found the man she could love—and her misery to have found him already married. He pressed her to him, full of affection, and they lay down. Folded in his arms, Gertrude told him that she was a virgin. His warmth and attentive sympathy were boundless, but when he kissed her and moved closer, put his hands on her, she stiffened, panicked, whispered “No.” He stopped at once, assuring her that it didn't matter, and when tears came into her eyes he comforted her for a few minutes and told her nothing had changed. Then he slipped away and out the door.

The next day, another jarring round of distractions and entertainments wound to its end. It was impossible to speak to him for long, and then he was gone. His thank-you letter, written on 13 August, followed shortly afterwards—she snatched it from the hall table and ran upstairs to read it in private:

My dear Gertrude

I am so very glad you took me to Rounton. I so much enjoyed it, the people, the place, the garden, the woods, everything. They are a vital setting
to my friend, however many other frames she fits in. And I am so glad you told me things, and found you could talk to me. It's that I like—just openness and freedom to say and do exactly what one wants to do. In your mind I think there was a feeling, natural at first openings of doors, that it wasn't properly appreciated. But it was—I love openness—I've always ever since those early Turkey days wanted to be a friend of yours—Now I feel as if we had come closer, were really intimate friends—I've gained so much and I want to hold it. The loneliness—why we are all born alone die alone really live alone—and it hurts at times—Is this nonsense or preachments? I don't care—I must write something, something to show you how very proud I am to be your friend. Something to have meaning, even if it cannot be set down, affection, my dear, and gratitude and admiration and confidence, and an urgent desire to see you as much as possible . . .

All the good luck in the world,
Yours ever, R.

“All the good luck in the world!” She was mortified, humiliated. Where did such a letter leave her? She read and reread his words, turning and twisting them to extract the last drop of meaning. She tried to compensate for the coolness of the letter by dwelling on the words “we all really live alone.” This must be a reference to the unsatisfactory state of his marriage, but it told her nothing new. Her spirits plummeted again. Was he really saying, “Don't be embarrassed, I appreciate the depth of your feelings, I'm glad you weren't inhibited, let's be friends?”

But she wanted to be so much more than friends. In a flash she saw that the intimate evening at Rounton was momentous for her in a way that it was not for him. He was so much more experienced than she was: he had told her of his numerous encounters with women. Her own love life had not been successful. She felt things too deeply and had suffered too much over Henry Cadogan to lightly repeat the experience. Twenty years had passed, but it remained by far the most important affair in her life, a poetic, heartfelt engagement that had prompted Florence and Hugh to investigate his past and his finances, and to turn him down—or at least to counsel several years of waiting. Then had come his death from pneumonia as a result of falling into the icy river, which left a question mark over what had actually happened. It would have been traumatic at any age to have committed yourself to a person you loved, to
have had to break that commitment, and then to hear that your lover had died in a way that would always raise agonizing questions.

Cadogan's death had left her wounded: she would flirt, but she would not commit. Attractive as she was in her warmth and energy and perfect health, lovely as she could look with her red hair and slim, strong body, few men could break through her reserve. She had had one particular admirer, one Bertie Crackenthorpe, whom she first noted was “very devoted”—and then, with mounting irritation, she found him “always at my elbow listening.” Soon after this, she wrote him off: “I've seen quite enough of him for the moment!” Then there was the short-lived but deeply felt relationship with Florence's nephew Billy Lascelles, kept on the boil by several family holidays. When that was over and she had grown up, she examined her feelings in a detached way: “. . . how odd it is to realise that those fires are ashes now, no vestiges of spark, thank goodness! No excitement, no regret. All that remains is a memory of sadness that aches curiously at times, but which is far and far from demanding his presence.” Later, she had a flirtation with a charming Yorkshireman, Will Pease. Her watchful half-sister Molly wrote: “Gertrude flirts awfully with him,” and Elizabeth Robins, the family friend, thought that they would become engaged. But whatever Pease intended, Gertrude evaded him. The affair proceeded no further than affectionate banter.

Love came only twice to Gertrude. This time it had moved her to the depths of her soul. The effect it had on her was perhaps due, in part, to her almost complete lack of sentiment and to her formidable intellect. She was not likely, as another woman might have been, to confuse affection with passion. As Florence, who knew Gertrude better than any other woman, was to write: “In truth the real basis of Gertrude's nature was her capacity for deep emotion. Great joys came into her life, and also great sorrows. How could it be otherwise, with a temperament so avid of experience? Her ardent and magnetic personality drew the lives of others into hers as she passed along.” She had learnt, long before her thirties, to live without a lover, and no woman was better equipped to compensate, filling her life with adventures of so many other kinds. At the same time the longings that had not been fulfilled were expressed in her extraordinary aptitude for poetry that she had had since her schooldays, when reading Milton made her “want to stand on her head for joy.” The expression of
the most distilled emotions, poetry was the only dimension in her that her stepmother was disappointed not to see fully realized. Had the lack of a lover and husband, Florence would wonder, inhibited this powerful source of feeling in her stepdaughter?

Doughty-Wylie had proceeded from Rounton to Suffolk. From there he wrote again to add a strange corollary to his letter:

. . . By the way, talking of dreams—Rounton ghosts visited me the next night also. Is there any history of them? Some shadowy figure of a woman who really quite bothered me, so that I turned on the light. It wasn't your ghost, or anything like you; but something hostile and alarming . . . She . . . was a long, shadowy woman thing that swept and swept across my bed like a hawk, stooping and said nothing, and I didn't know who the devil she was, but she meant attack, and I wanted the light . . .

Rounton was only forty-one years old, and had been occupied by Hugh and Florence since 1905.
*

Dick returned to London to find a stack of letters from Gertrude. Undoubtedly he was flattered by the attentions of this much respected woman, and didn't want to lose her friendship; but while her letters addressed the issues that tortured her, his responses stopped short of any sense of commitment. “. . . Wonderful letters, my dear, which delight me. Bless you. But there can be no words to answer you with. Well—let's talk about other things . . .”

And then came the hammer blow. A letter from him at his club told her that he had accepted a post in Albania, with the International Boundary Commission. “My wife is in Wales. She'll come up when I wire to her and go with me—till we see the hows and whys and wheres . . . I have turned into my old bachelor quarters in Half Moon Street, no. 29. Write to me there . . . while I am alone, let's be alone.” Perhaps in recognition of what this news would mean to Gertrude, and to comfort her a little, he signed himself “Dick” for the first time. Any hope she had of seeing him again soon, or of distancing herself from the despair she felt after his visit to Rounton, was gone at a stroke. His letters were her lifeline.
She had read them so many times she knew them all by heart—but now she wondered, had he allowed their correspondence only out of pity, saying to himself, “I'll soon be gone, and that will be that?”

She expressed her misery to him, and he tried to comfort her. “My dear, this shall go to speak with you—to give you my love and a kiss as if I were a child or you were.” She was only a beginner where love was concerned. Perhaps she made mistakes, pouring out her longing for him too early, urging him to leave his wife. In his oblique way he tried to communicate to her the link between these longings and the frustrations of self-imposed chastity. From the kindness of his heart, and somewhat clumsily, he was trying to tell her that she should not be ashamed of any of these emotions: “Last night, a poor girl stopped me—the same old story—and I gave her money and sent her home . . . So many are really like me, or what I used to be, and I'm sorry for them . . . These desires of the body that are right and natural, that are so often nothing more than any common hunger—they can be the vehicle of fire of the mind, and as that only are they great . . .”

Then, a warning: “Judith knowing you well and having always before seen your letters would find it very odd to be suddenly debarred them and on voyages our lives are at close quarters.” Gertrude was frantic. Didn't he want her letters? She would put it to the test. She stopped writing, and he rose to the bait. Reassurance came from him at once, at the end of August: “A blank day, my dear. I am tempted to wonder—did I say too much? Or was it that you thought the time had passed? Or were you too occupied? Away with all such things. In the chains we live in—or I live in—it is wise and right to wear them easily.” She built on her small victory, by asking how she could best write to him in Albania. He replied:

Of course call me Dick in letters, and I shall call you Gertrude—there is nothing in that—many people do—my wife doesn't see my letters as a rule, but as she often writes to you herself we have always passed them across—but oh how I shall miss them . . . There is another thing that has to be done—tonight I shall destroy your letters—I hate it—but it is right—one might die or something, and they are not for any soul but me.

Nothing, she felt, could be worse. It was a goodbye, and it was followed by another: “. . . if I can't write to you, I shall always think of you
telling me things in your room at Rounton . . . the subtle book eludes, but our hands met on the cover.” “The subtle book” was always, she recognized, his metaphor for sex. “. . . And you'll go on being the wise and splendid woman that you are, not afraid of any amazement and finding work and life and the fullness of it always to your hand. And I shall always be your friend.”

She had reached the crossroads of her life. At an age when it was realistic to relinquish hopes of meeting a man she could marry and with whom she could have children, she had met exactly the kind of man she had always been looking for—one who could not be belittled by her own achievements, a man she could compare with pride to her powerful father and grandfather. Less likely than most women to have an unwise affair, she was still very vulnerable. Nonconformist, mould-breaking—feeling, being, and making it plain that she was superior to almost all the men she met—she had hidden for so long behind her lines of defence that she was caught unawares by his hold on her. In her few melancholy moments hitherto, it was only the lack of a husband and family that gave her pain. There was never the slightest bitterness or jealousy in her references to Elsa's and Molly's children, whom she found enchanting. Valentine Chirol had noticed how, on a holiday visit to Wales, she had reduced a group of lively children in his garden to spellbound silence with a ragbag of stories, some serious, some ridiculous. Children brought out her playful side, and Florence had shown her how to be silly with children in the best possible way. At her Stanley cousin's coming-out dance, there were about twenty little girls with whom she had danced wildly all evening.

With all her erudition Gertrude was still the same person she had been at Oxford when, feeling too hot one day, she had jumped into the river with all her clothes on. She would be the first to leave a lunch table at which the children had been fidgeting and bickering, to chase them into the garden or collect a bat and ball and start a loud and argumentative game. At Mount Grace Priory, she had recently arranged a splendid picnic party for all the children in the family, and her letters are littered with affectionate comments about her little nieces. “I don't think I ever saw anything more adorable than Moll's children. There's no question about Pauline's being pretty, I think she's quite charming.”