Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
The memorial service, a year later, was in St Martin-in-the-Fields.
I was walking down the aisle, looking for somewhere to sit, and saw Iris Murdoch in an otherwise empty
pew. As I went to sit down, she said, ‘I’m afraid this pew is entirely taken. People are coming.’ I realized she didn’t recognize me and backed off. Then Mart came and said
I should be in front with him and Isabel, his second wife. I was very touched by that.
I could take possession of Bridge House on 12 December 1990. In the meantime I stayed with my brother Monkey in Tufnell Park. It was a strange feeling to be homeless again.
Monkey gave me his sitting room to sleep in, and I borrowed a dress rail on which to hang clothes. Jenner and Terry offered me a room to work in in their house, and allowed me to furnish it heavily
with my books. I didn’t really need them: it just seemed comforting to have them there. I was working slowly, but every day, on
Marking Time
. I felt then as though
I
was marking
time until an unknown and new life began. Most days I dreaded it – dreaded being definitively lonely, cut off from so many of my friends. But another part of me looked forward very much to
leaving London and waking up every day in the country. I spent hours thinking about the house and how I wanted it to be.
For the first time in my life I was moving with money to spend – about a hundred thousand pounds, which had been the difference between the sale of Delancey Street and the price of the new
house – and it meant I could choose things, instead of making do. I decided that if I wanted my friends to enjoy coming to stay, I must make it extremely comfortable as well as pretty. I
planned to cut the eight bedrooms down to six, and make four good bathrooms and keep the shower room, to build a new staircase and do away with the spiral one, to buy a new large boiler so that the
heating and hot water would be plentiful, and finally to paint and paper all of the interior. The builders weren’t able to start on all this until March 1991, and I’d have three months
there with it in its present state.
On the day of the move, Minky and I and my dog, Darcy, drove down in our two cars, laden with everything I’d accumulated at Monkey’s. It was a clear, sunny day:
we left early, to be ready to receive the removal men who were due at two o’clock. We stopped at a pub for a sandwich but I could hardly eat for excitement.
The usual exhausting day followed, with men coming into the house asking where to put whatever they were carrying. I had two beds and getting them, and indeed anything else, up the spiral
staircase was a nightmare. In the late afternoon, by which time we were very tired, I went into the town to buy essential food for Minky and me and Darcy.
Minky had to go the next day and that night would therefore be my first alone in the house. Darcy, who always slept with me, jumped on to the bed, but it was I who was dog tired. She was
restive, then jumped off the bed to be violently sick – something she hadn’t done since she was a young puppy. I leaped out of bed and she looked imploringly at me – she wanted
desperately to go out and be sick some more. It’s very difficult negotiating a new house in the dark – I fumbled about for light switches, nearly stumbling over Darcy, who in her
desperation was ahead of me, but we managed it. I let her out into the garden. While she was out there, I reflected that it was a good test of the friendliness of a house if one could come
downstairs in the dark and not feel in the least afraid. It augured well.
Sargy and Fran employed a cleaning lady called Dawn Fairhead for two mornings a week, but told me that she’d be interested in working for me on the other three. She and her husband David
had worked for the previous owner. I interviewed them and liked them at once. It was agreed that David should do some of the gardening, and Dawn would come on the three mornings.
That first Christmas in Suffolk, Monkey, Minky and Ann de Boursac, one of the women’s group, and her daughter, Claire, came down. Monkey arrived a little early. The hall was unusable as it
was piled high with tea chests. We looked at the sitting room with some
despair. It had been painted an unappetizing dark spinach-leaf green with ersatz panelling picked out in
white. Monkey said, ‘We can’t stand this.’ He went out and bought brushes and a huge tin of white paint. We painted everything for nearly the entire night. It did look better. We
lit fires in that room and my study, but the house was cold. Christmas was jolly.
Soon after, I became ill with a fever that lasted about three weeks. Dawn and I didn’t know one another well then, and I’m sure she thought I was a chronic invalid, and dreaded
looking after me. She’d bring me tea and toast in the mornings, but she went promptly at twelve noon, and for the rest of the day I lay sweating or shivering, feeling too weak to go down and
make myself a hot drink. Every day Fran would come in at about five with some soup, which was very cheering. I slowly got better. I felt like an old shrub that had been transplanted, doesn’t
like it, and only grudgingly takes to a new position.
When I was better, I went back to work on
Marking Time
. I had my desk, typewriter and a chair in the study, and camped in the rest of the house. There was no point in unpacking more than
a minimum, since the whole house would become a mess when the builders came. The weeks before they did were a kind of limbo. I worked, made plans for the garden, and thought about colours for the
house. Darcy loved the country; she also took a tremendous liking to Dawn, and whenever I went to London, Dawn took Darcy home with her, sitting in the bicycle basket with her paws hanging out.
It was clear to me that when the builders
did
come I’d have to get out of the house, at least for the first demolition part. The work was supposed to take three months, but I
decided as soon as they’d demolished the old staircase and built the new one that I’d return and simply camp in the mess. Mr Hood was in charge of the builders: it was some time before
I realized that he comprised the whole firm. He had a team of chums with different skills, including a very good electrician and an equally good plumber.
I went to London to stay with my old friend Josie Baird, who’d bought a flat in Gloucester Crescent, opposite Ursula. I went down with a bug, and was there for a week
feeling too ill to do anything I’d planned – hunting for floor and wall tiles, wallpaper and carpeting. Then I stayed with Dosia and Andrew in Pewsey, taking my typewriter. They gave me
a bedroom to work in, and I used to watch a rookery that was situated in a row of tall poplars. The birds looked beautiful against the winter sky, taken up with their noisy conferences and their
frightful jerrybuilt nests – soothing when I got stuck.
I was about a third of the way through the novel and it was still in the sticky stage, where the scene I was writing was impossibly difficult, and the scene ahead seemed blissfully easy but when
reached proved just as hard. Dosia still had furniture and china from the old days when she first married Barry and I remembered it was Barry’s taste – and hers – that had first
made me look at my surroundings with a critical eye. In the evenings we read and played Scrabble and I sewed. Sewing has always been a tranquil resource for me. I am making something but it’s
nothing like so taxing as trying to make a book. I have sewed half a dozen carpets, seat covers and cushions over the years with varying degrees of success.
But after a week or two, I had to get back to Bridge House and the builders. Of course, they hadn’t done anything like as much as I’d hoped. Building work always starts with belying
speed: demolition is far quicker than replacement. Also, men
like
demolishing: it goes with their love of chopping down trees and burning things. I stuck with it for a few days, then asked
if I could stay with Sargy and Fran. The builders said all the dirty work would be finished in about two weeks, so for two weeks I boarded with the Manns and went to work in my study for most of
the day. Of course they
weren’t
finished in two weeks, but there was nothing for it but to return to the house, by then without hot water or even a working loo.
Macmillan wanted to publish
Marking Time
in November 1991, which required the manuscript to be delivered in August.
Jane Wood was a very good editor to work with. She
read chunks of the book as I wrote it, which enabled me to talk about it as I went, an enormous help. I used to stay with her sometimes in London, and she’d come down to me at others. We were
due to meet in Edinburgh for the festival and I managed to give her the last pages in our hotel. I had to read at the festival, and Doris Lessing was there, whom I knew slightly. I’d always
been rather afraid of her, but she was utterly disarming. We went shopping together, and I wanted a rather expensive jacket, and she said, ‘Go on. You’ve just finished your book, you
can have a treat.’ I loved her
unassumingness
. I also met Rosamunde Pilcher at a writers’ lunch; she was most generously nice to me about my work.
Marking Time
came out in November, as planned, and got a better reception than
The Light Years
. It took me the next two years to finish the third volume,
Confusion
, which
was published in the autumn of 1993. This was partly because, having got the house in order, I had lots of people to stay, and partly because I spent much time getting the garden going.
I was finding living alone in the country quite difficult and longed to find a companion of either sex to share the house with me – probably another of my unrealistic notions. That sort of
thing has to start far earlier in life. I was sixty-eight years old – hardly the age for amorous adventure. My contemporary friends had arranged their lives, naturally, and my younger friends
would be unlikely to wish to settle down in the country with someone between twenty and thirty years older than them. And yet it’s often difficult to be your age. Apart from the fact that I
wasn’t sure what this entailed, in many ways I didn’t
feel
my age. Like one’s appearance or handwriting, one retains an earlier impression of oneself and takes it for
granted, no longer
sees
what one is.
The failure of my third marriage had left me with no confidence with men, and sexual pleasure seemed now to be something that had happened a long time ago and to somebody else. Laurie wrote to
me about then, asking me if I’d drive him
about Spain for a book he was writing – ‘Strictly business. Strictly pleasure.’ But I couldn’t go,
another deadline was looming, and perhaps I was afraid, because I wanted to keep safe what I’d had with Laurie.
One autumn I got a letter asking me if I’d spend a Sunday in Petersfield selling and signing books in aid of Macmillan Cancer Relief. Patricia Wyndham signed the letter. I wrote back and
said I would. She arranged for me to get a lift down with Philip Ziegler, the diplomat and biographer, and invited me to stay the night with her. I’d met Philip years before and had, in fact,
reviewed his first book. We arrived in the dark, which I always like because you don’t know where you are, and when you wake up in the morning and see, it’s like a second arrival. It
turned out that Patricia and her husband, Mark, loved canals and wanted to meet me because Mark had read Robert Aickman’s book about the trip through Standedge Tunnel. It was the beginning of
a continuing friendship. I did a second year of book signing. They came to stay in Suffolk, and I took Monkey to stay with them. For two years running we had wonderful holidays on the French canals
in Mark’s boat,
Wilhelmina
, a large, comfortable Dutch boat ideally suited to river and canal journeys. Most of their lives were spent running the 999 club, which provided drop-in
centres for people in Deptford. But Patricia was also a keen painter, and when Fran started to teach painting for a week every year, Patricia joined the class. I’d have about eight of them to
stay and it was all – still is – very jolly.
Holidays, if you’re on your own and don’t want to spend them by yourself, are a perennial problem. One way round this, I found, was to get a newspaper to commission me to write a
piece, the place to be discussed. I’ve been lucky and have usually been able to choose. The
Sunday Times
employed me for several such trips: I went to Bali, to India, to China and
Sicily.
The latest of these ventures was to the Seychelles with my goddaughter, Minky St Aubyn. I’d always wanted to go there, so one January, when I was still writing about the Cazalets, we went.
We
had a good time. It was extraordinary to drive from the airport to our first hotel amid trees I couldn’t identify. There was a botanical garden in Mahé, the
capital and the main island, but when we got there, though there were fine specimens there were no labels, and the only wardens were giant tortoises, who took no notice of us. We went to Praslin,
the island that has the coco-de-mer and the only remaining black parrots in the world. We went to Frégate too, the best of all, since only fourteen travellers are allowed at a time, and
apart from the small encampment for us the island was wild and uninhabited – except, again, for huge tortoises. For the first time since my early childish passion for desert islands, I felt I
was on one. I could imagine how terribly isolated those shipwrecked in such a place might feel. There were pirates’ graves on that island.
I made one more trip to tropical islands, the Maldives, with Nicola. This was the first foreign holiday we’d had together, and for me it was an idyllic time. Nicola scuba-dived for which,
like Minky, she has a passion. She taught me patiently to use goggles – I’ve always had a terror of putting my head under water but she got me to do it, and to see all the amazingly
beautiful, ethereal, jazzy tropical fish at the water’s edge in their thousands. She tried to tempt me to the reef, where there were far more fish to be seen, but I still swim as if I’m
riding an upright bicycle, and thought that if I got there, I’d never get back. In the evenings the stingrays came in to be fed, rubbing themselves against us if they felt we weren’t
doing it quickly enough. We spent a week on each of the islands we visited.