Gluck Diana Souhami (smart books to read TXT) 📖

how warming it was to see my Tim smiling at me. It recalled happy days on that island. Some of the happiest.’15 From the ‘Boca Raton’, between Palm Beach and Miami, she wrote to Gluck (23 December 1945) thanking her for a cutting of a photograph of sheepdogs, shepherding little children. ‘And I especially liked to think somehow of my little Black’s small fingers (with the little brown mole just below the first finger knuckle) cutting it out, all serious, and folding it up and making a little star with ink to show it wasn’t the other side you meant with the American fashions!’

At the Chantry House life soon became problematic. Gluck took to recording Edith’s preoccupations as well as her own: the anniversaries of the deaths of her brother Ivan on 4 December and of Yeats on 28 January, Edith’s attacks of lumbago, visits to town, to the hairdresser or to friends. Alone together they had peaceful times. As a threesome the atmosphere was impossible. It was evidently intolerable to Nora that Edith and Gluck were having some kind of an affair in what was, after all, her house. The writer Marjorie Watts, widow of Gluck’s friend the Punch artist Arthur Watts, remembers the expression of disgust and pain on Nora’s face as, in the offices of The Lady, she voiced her horror that Edith could be behaving this way.16

Tension and battle of wills took the place, for Gluck, of depression. Years later she would say that she was the one who ought to have moved out of Chantry, not Nora, but that Edith wanted her to stay. Alison Settle and other friends found Gluck’s presence in the house unbearable. Gluck’s diary entries tersely chronicled the tension, week in, month out.

Alison to dinner, very rude about lampshade.

Write letter to Alison.

Alison comes round but does not come in. Nora upstairs.

E. goes to talk to Alison, who ran away, about not coming in night before. I tackle her, and E. and I refuse to go Saturday for drinks before lunch. Nora accepts.

E. and I alone. Lovely evening.

Nora returns 5 pm. Very grim.

Nora awful all day. Very rude at tea. Alison rings up and asks Nora to drinks at 6. Does not return til after 8. E. and I have drinks alone.

E. starts shingles on Tuesday. Dr Dingemans comes 11 am and gives Pethadine injection. Makes E. very ill and sick. Nor a horrible to me and E. Deluging rain.

Alison calls for first time to see E. Nora behaves like a fiend.

Have scene with Nora about E. and her behaviour to E. then ask Alison to see me in cottage. A. rude and insists on seeing me in road. E. upset and crying.

N. does not come back till I am. I tell her what I think of her.17

At the time of these scenes, in 1946, Gluck was fifty-one, Edith sixty-one, Nora sixty-three. It was not the settled harmony of middle age. For Nora it was a nightmare. There were tensions and shrieking matches. The situation struck a wedge between the sisters and then Gluck came to Edith’s defence against Nora. No doubt Nora felt betrayed by Edith. Gone were the shared holidays, the house parties and ease of life. Nor that year did Gluck earn any money from her painting. Her sole professionally earned income for 1946 was three shillings and ninepence – royalties on the sale of postcards of one of her flower paintings. Edith remarked of the cheque that things were looking up, which made Gluck laugh.

Gluck’s only painting in 1946, done in what she called the garden studio, was England. It was a romantic expression of the postwar calm she hoped for through her move to Steyning. A background plate shows a tranquil scene of a church and two figures and in the foreground are roses from Edith’s walled rose garden. But whereas previously Gluck had painted perfect blooms, these roses are blousy, some of the petals blighted and one broken bloom lies dying away from the group. Maybe it was a reference to those who died in the war, or a valediction to her love for Nesta.

Gluck and Edith went to Lamorna for a month in the summer, made bonfires, cooked lobsters and chicken and took long walks round the coves. Home life had not improved on their return to Chantry. ‘Return from Cornwall at 6 pm. Nora awful.’ was Gluck’s laconic diary entry for 5 October 1946. It was a conflict of feeling that could not be resolved. Nora felt unable to invite her friends and work colleagues to the house. She was, after all, editor of The Lady, which did not countenance ladies behaving in quite this manner. The feud became territorial. Gluck and Edith went to look at alternative houses and studios but in a half-hearted way. When Gluck put forward a proposal to have a prefabricated hen incubator reconstructed as a studio in the garden, Nora opposed the idea bitterly. She cried and would not give her agreement, but the scheme went ahead, none the less. When Gluck moved some of her things into one of the attic rooms in the Chantry House, unused for six months, and started to use it as a workroom, Nora took the key from the door and sat in the room. No castle would have been large enough to house them together. Letters and insults were exchanged. Nora’s friends found the situation shocking and sided with her against Gluck. Though a fatal rift was being driven between the two sisters, it seems that Edith was absolute in wanting Gluck to stay. When, however, Nesta, on a Plumpton stopover, visited Gluck alone in her studio cottage for an afternoon, Edith and Gluck then had a ‘dreadful upset’ – an intimation of the jealousy that was subsequently to plague their relationship.

Nora took to not going home at all, or going straight to bed after supper and staying there until after lunch, or escaping round to Alison Settle. When Gluck spent