Gluck Diana Souhami (smart books to read TXT) 📖

somehow it is true’. Somehow, she felt sure, Nesta would sort it out:

I trust you absolutely to handle your own personal situation with regard to us, without question.… I was greatly relieved to feel you were going to do something to prevent things drifting. It will be much less wearing in the long run. But how or what you do to achieve this I would not presume to advise. I am completely happy and serene about it all. My instinct is to let you be and give you your head-because I can trust your heart. So my Italian Duchess – go to it! 2

So Gluck wrote while staying for a weekend with Wilfrid and Nancy Greene at ‘Joldwyns’, their Cornish home. The Greenes had had years of harmonious married life. It was this ideal of domestic accord that Gluck wanted unrealistically to achieve …

they made me ache. I didn’t envy them, only felt it a privilege to know them and know my fortune was and might be theirs. Theirs is the real thing, and how rare and precious. And with all my heart I believe it is our possession too, now and evermore.

Questions of context and commitment matter more as love proceeds. Three months later, during the St Moritz separation, when things were quite evidently still drifting, Gluck was alluding to

a plan of campaign, too full of matter for discussion and adjustment for me to write, but the only solution for everybody’s peace of mind and future well being. I feel you will approve and agree. It’s terribly simple like all good plans – and honest so it can’t be defeated (honest up to a point).

There cannot have been that many solutions on offer. They could choose between an affair, with all the excitement and problems of secrecy, separation and feigned casualness. Or they could end their relationship. Or Nesta could leave her husband and live openly with Gluck. It seems as if Gluck thought that this was what would be:

Friday, Thank God, morning, October 23rd

You say I can never know how much you love me. All I do know is that I could say the same to you, and I do not believe you will ever know how you fill and smooth out all the gaps and tears in my heart – making it whole and happy as I had always longed it should be.… I love you with my life. I can’t bear to leave you even like this, or to shut you up in the envelope but I must. You will be with me truly now and forever, so why should I mind.

Such absolute feelings, so close to jealousy, possession and pain, bring trouble in their wake. For more mundane reasons openness was not easy. Gluck lived in her beautiful Georgian house, had the studio designed by Maufe, the ‘Letter Studio’ in Cornwall and two or three full-time staff, but this was all courtesy of the Family Fund. She had a personal allowance to meet her needs, but no capital. Her own earnings did not go far. It is unlikely that her trustees would have revised her income to accommodate, in their view, even more remarkable transgressions of lifestyle. Her brother, Louis, one of the trustees, was at the time Conservative MP for Nottingham, absorbed in the problems of cutting public expenditure and urging the nation to rearm.

Both women moved in social circles where money was the key to the good life. Nesta, along with her works for charity and patronage of the arts, was enmeshed in an extrovert whirl of travel, parties, high fashion, servants, and all the expense of a stylish international social life, financed by her elderly husband. She had no wish to lacerate his feelings. Divorce was none too easy to obtain in the 1930s. Separation would have reduced her income and exposed her to scandal. She kept her marital status perhaps as much for her own sake as for Seymour’s. It was one thing to have an intense and secret love affair while seeming to conform to society’s rules, another, more unpredictable and isolating, openly to flout those rules and pioneer a different way. Perhaps separation was never mooted, but words like ‘forever’, ‘Eternity’, and ‘only you’, do suggest an exclusivity that it requires some strategy to achieve.

NINE

BLAZE WITH A FIRE

Gluck was so sure of her future that for a week she burned her past. A visitor to her studio at Bolton House in October 1936 remarked that it was like Golders Green crematorium and Gluck thought the simile apt as she fed the fire with diaries, letters, photographs, and reminders of her life. ‘My choicest moment today was burning several canvases.’1 She burned, for example, most of the picture done in the 1920s in Lamorna of Ella Naper raking a bonfire while Gluck watched. But she kept the fragment of herself. And she burned her ‘first serious paintbox’:

Poor old thing. An honourable and fiery grave. I had had it over twenty years and it was pensioned off about four years ago and now it’s gone because that half is gone and nothing is accompanying me now that does not serve.2

She was clearing out what she called the ‘clinging unrealities’ of her life. ‘Mabel and Gwen’ (her servants)

have been imitating a Greek frieze all day carrying away great stacks of stuff in procession. It is getting dark now and I have not stopped since this morning.… It is the purest heaven to feel so completely above all this possession and outside it all – and to know how bright the future is going to be.3

Good sense prevailed when it came to burning too many of her canvases:

You see dear Love just now I want to start such a new life that anything even vaguely smelling of the past stinks in my nostrils, but then it might not do so so much in other people’s, so I must I suppose be a bit careful.… What would it matter if I