Gertrude Bell (66 page)

By the end of the month, the issue between the cook and Zaiya had clarified itself:

I spent last week in acute discomfort on account of Zaiya's having so completely made it up with my cook as to marry his daughter. It's less inconvenient when they beat one another over the head than when they enter into matrimonial alliances, for Zaiya being a bridegroom and the cook having to cook the wedding breakfast there was no one left to cook or wait. I billeted myself on Mr. Cornwallis and Sir Aylmer . . .

The friendship of Gertrude and Cornwallis thrived on proximity and their shared loyalty to and fondness—even love—for the King. They discussed his character exhaustively at lunches, and sharing as they did so many social events hosted by the King they were often thrown together in the evenings and at weekends at dinners, shooting parties, card games—the King liked bridge and chemin de fer—and the usual swimming picnics by the river.

More and more she came to love the coolness and buoyancy of swimming, and the picnics provided some of her happiest moments. She teased the King about his poor performance as a swimmer. She would change under the fig trees, helping herself to ripe fruit as she dried her hair, then emerge to eat bonfire-roasted fish under the tamarisk trees. It was, she said, the only meal of the week that she really enjoyed.

Perhaps because of the difference in their ages, she fifty-three, Cornwallis thirty-eight, he felt able one evening to tell her something of his unhappy marriage, and his loneliness within it. A misty, romantic, note entered her descriptions of such evenings.

I went up river in the last glow of a wonderful sunset to where Mr. Cornwallis, Captain Clayton, Colonel MacNiece and the Davidsons were just beginning dinner at the edge of the fig gardens. We lay there in the dark till past 10 o'clock talking . . . while the stars came out one by one. Don't fancy for a moment that we thought of them as constituents of an infinite firmament; for us they were adornments of the skies of Iraq . . .

Soon the group fell into the habit of spending Sundays together. Gertrude was not, for once, the only woman. She liked Iris Davidson and found her intelligent: she had picked up Arabic “wonderfully fast,” unlike so many of the British wives in Baghdad. “I've added the
Davidsons and Mr. Cornwallis to my permanent list of friends,” she reported.

In 1923, the never-mentioned Mrs. Cornwallis left her husband and sailed for home; and in Gertrude's letters, the frequently mentioned “Mr. Cornwallis” had already become “Ken.” Christmas was usually the nadir of the year for Gertrude, who missed her family more than ever in a deserted Baghdad. But that year, it was different. She joined Cornwallis, Faisal's brother Zaid, and Nigel Davidson for a six-day shooting party in Babylon. As Marie packed her trunk, she made a point of putting in Gertrude's most beautiful silk and lace nightdresses. Gertrude asked her why she was doing that, and reminded her that it was just a hunting party. The French housekeeper had hesitated a moment before replying that Nur al Din, Ken's Sudanese manservant, might see them. It is unlikely that Ken or his servant were in close enough proximity to Gertrude at night to admire the nightdresses, but she came back from the expedition extraordinarily happy: “Altogether I think no more delightful expedition has ever been made in Iraq.”

Sadly, after the Christmas highlight there came some sort of a break. That summer Cornwallis would be going on leave to England to deal with his wife's divorce proceedings. By the end of January she wrote to Florence that she was profoundly unhappy, and for some ten weeks after that she did not mention “Ken” in her letters at all. Subsequently writing to her half-sister Molly, she briefly outlined her attempts to convince him that she could make him happy, and describes her love for him as that of a mother and sister combined with “that other love.” An acutely uncomfortable Cornwallis presented a stony façade to these representations, and began to avoid her. She was to him an incomparable woman, a precious confidante, and unique in having so many interests in common with him; but he was fifteen years younger, and not looking for a mother or a sister. Never petty or ungenerous towards those she loved, she continued to think him one of the finest men she had known. When he went to England, she asked Molly to invite him to lunch. The rift between them slowly closed, and their companionship returned with his gift to her of a puppy from his spaniel's litter. Once again, he collected her mail when she was confined to bed, but kept back anything that looked as though it would tax her energies. Such emotional upheavals, however, leave scars: brave as ever,
she found herself a little less resilient, more solitary, and, since she had relied on him for internal news about what was going on in the palace and the Cabinet, she felt herself perhaps a degree less well informed.

Once the Treaty had been proclaimed, and the mandate issue put aside, the King ordered the preparation of elections to the Constituent Assembly. This would ratify the Treaty, approve the Organic Law for the future government of Iraq, and establish an electoral law so that the first parliament could be elected. At this point the Naqib resigned, his place as Prime Minister to be taken by the younger Abdul Mahsin Bey. There was a parallel change of government in London in 1922, when the Conservatives took office under Prime Minister Bonar Law. They brought in a new pledge for the early evacuation of British personnel from Iraq. Once again, Cox was called to London to review Britain's role in Iraq. He returned with yet another addendum to the Treaty, a protocol which limited Britain's involvement to four more years. Nonetheless, it gave Faisal almost more than he had asked for. Now the question was, would Iraq be ready to defend and govern itself in only four years?

At the end of April 1923, Cox finally left Iraq. His last act of kindness to Gertrude was to sanction the cost of an additional drawing-room to her summer-house, in recognition of all the entertaining she did there for the good of the Secretariat. When he had distributed his menagerie and given his last garden party, it not only seemed like the end of an era—it was. Nobody felt his loss more keenly than Gertrude. She wrote to her parents:

All this time rather tears the heart strings, you understand, it's very moving saying good-bye to Sir Percy . . . What a position he has made for himself here. I think no Englishman has inspired more confidence in the East. He himself was dreadfully unhappy at going–40 years' service is not a thing one lays down easily . . .

I must tell you something very touching . . . Sir Percy has sent me a photograph of himself in a silver frame and across the corner he has written: “To the best of comrades.” Isn't that the nicest thing he could possibly have written?

The new High Commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, had arrived the previous December to familiarize himself with the job. He had been among the first handful of officials to join Cox in Basra, as a remarkably successful Revenue Officer. Gertrude herself had written of his achievements in her White Paper on the civil administration of the region. Dobbs took firm charge of Britain's responsibilities for security and foreign affairs. Elections could now go ahead. Faisal toured the country encouraging the population to go out and vote. Dobbs followed not far behind, so that all could see the united commitment to a democratic Iraq. “As if by magic, the political atmosphere cleared and even the most distant tribesmen of the Euphrates and of the Kurdish hills enrolled themselves as voters with alacrity,” Dobbs recorded later.

Over the six years he had been Civil Commissioner, it had become routine for Cox to talk things over with Gertrude several times a week. Dobbs discontinued that habit—as she acknowledged, there was no reason why he should go on with it. But she liked her new chief well enough, and found Lady Dobbs kind and considerate, dispensing from the Residency much amusing conversation and the most delicious lunches.

Gertrude was looking forward to seeing her half-sister Elsa and her husband, now Vice-Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, who were to visit Baghdad on an official cruise on board the flagship
Chatham
in October 1924. Coinciding with their arrival, Molly's elder son George Trevelyan was expected too, and would go on to join the Richmonds at their destination, Ceylon. She had planned all kinds of entertainments for them, and was heartbroken when she became seriously ill with bronchitis just before they arrived. The King's personal physician, “Sinbad”—Sir Harry Sinderson—called on her twice a day, would not accept a penny for his trouble, and decided that she was not well enough to have George at home; the young man stayed at the Residency instead, and Lady Dobbs put her car at Gertrude's service as she improved just enough to drive the Richmonds around and show them Baghdad. Nevertheless, some of the family had now seen Gertrude when she was seriously unwell, and conveyed to England their deep concerns about her health. She had made light of her illness in letters to Hugh and Florence, but the bronchitis had been complicated by heat exhaustion and a virtual collapse. On top of that, the news that Elsa brought from home was bad. The Depression,
combined with strikes, had hit the Bell fortunes hard. Elizabeth Burgoyne, in the second volume of her book on Gertrude based on her personal papers, reveals that she told her friend Nigel Davidson that “black depression had settled on her like a cloud; she even asked him to pray for her. In his opinion private griefs, as well as loneliness and a sense of frustration, combined to prevent her from ever again being really happy.”

She was further saddened in February 1925, when her much loved dog, and Ken's too, as it was staying with her at the time, died of distemper within twenty-four hours of each other:

I don't know which of them I loved most, for Sally was with me all the summer while Ken was on leave. I shall now miss Peter most—he was always with us, in the office and everywhere . . . we neither of us had any idea that it was distemper, the very worst kind that ends in pneumonia. Peter caught it and died after agonies of stifled breathing at 4 am this morning . . . and Sally died after the same agonies at 5 pm. So you will understand that I am rather shattered.

This time, Hugh and Florence would brook no excuses. She was in no fit state to go through another summer in Iraq. She was forced to agree; but the King did not: “Faisal, when I say I'm going home next summer replies with asperity: ‘You're not to talk of going
home
—your home is here. You may say you are going to see your father.' ”

Marie accompanied her, and they arrived in London on 17 July. Gertrude, wrote her stepmother, “in a condition of great nervous fatigue . . . appeared exhausted mentally and physically.” The doctors who were asked to see her, Sir Thomas Parkinson and Dr. Thomas Body, took the same view: that she required a great deal of care and ought not to return to the climate of Iraq. It was a serious warning—perhaps even more than that. Her old Oxford friend Janet Courtney was horrified by how thin and white-haired Gertrude had become since the portrait drawn by John Singer Sargent on her trip two years previously.

As soon as she was up and about again, Gertrude started to take an interest in the younger members of the family, and particularly in her nineteen-year-old niece Pauline, Molly's daughter. Pauline Trevelyan was to recall many years later how Gertrude was always cold, wearing a
full-length silver fox fur coat all day, even indoors in summer, at both Sloane Street and Rounton: “She would stand with her back to the fire smoking a Turkish cigarette in a long holder, and discoursing on . . . people past and present, history, letters, art and architecture, her travels, archaeology, our family—and how devoted she was to all at home, above all to her father.”

Frail, but burning with her perennial enthusiasm, Gertrude swept Pauline off to the British Museum to explain the history of the Assyrian exhibits, then to the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the Constables, inspiring her niece with her own passions. She called at the Stanleys, and invited her recently widowed cousin Sylvia Henley to accompany her back to Iraq; then visited the Churchills at Chartwell. When Janet Courtney went for dinner in Sloane Street one night with Gertrude and her father, Gertrude asked her if she could think of anything she could do if she remained in England. Janet suggested a few days later, in a letter, that her friend might stand for Parliament. She replied:

You dear and beloved Janet,

No, I'm afraid you will never see me in the House. I have an invincible hatred of that kind of politics . . . I don't cover a wide enough field and my natural desire is to slip back into the comfortable arena of archaeology and history . . . I think I must certainly go back for this winter, though I privately very much doubt whether it won't be the last . . .

Goodbye, my dear . . .

Did she mean the last winter in Iraq, or her last winter?

About this time, Hugh and Florence told her what she had feared to hear: that for financial reasons they were about to shut Rounton up and depart for a small, though beautiful, house on the Bell estate. Mount Grace Priory, the restored abbot's house set in the ruins of an old abbey and monastery, presented an elegant face to the bleak Yorkshire landscape, but contained only a handful of rooms. The knowledge that the Philip Webb mansion, symbol of the great Bell empire, would soon be gone, and everything with it, lent a poignant fatefulness to these few weeks.

Before the end of her visit, Hugh offered to give a dinner at the Automobile Club for Faisal, who happened to be in London for medical
treatment. The party included Cornwallis, who was particularly attentive. He called at 95 Sloane Street, and was on the platform to see her off to Yorkshire at King's Cross station the day after the dinner.

Accompanied by Sylvia and Marie, Gertrude left London at the end of September, waved off by a collection of devoted friends including Sir Percy, Domnul, and Faisal. She wrote a loving letter to each of her parents as she left. Florence commented: “We all felt after this last visit of Gertrude to England that she had never seemed more glad to be with us all, never more affectionate and delightful to all her Yorkshire surroundings.”