The Real Mrs Miniver (31 page)

5  You were sharing a room with another GI, owing to space shortage.
OR

6  You were sharing the room with a GI blonde.
OR

7  You were sharing the room with Janie [a married acquaintance, in whose house Dolf sometimes spent the night on his leaves].
OR

8  You were sharing the room with somebody else, not a GI blonde, but some other, new, ‘real' person.

She made herself face and analyse each of these possibilities in turn. It was an utterly un-‘blonde' letter, drawing on their deeper-than-physical bond of words and candour. It was an exercise in preparing for an end with Dolf, whenever it might come. This was how she dealt with the final three possibilities:

6  I want you to know, darling, that I don't mind in the very least. I know what you must have been going through about sex, partly because I've been going through it myself. I don't want to risk getting emotionally involved with anybody, so I stick to Miss Bates. But, as you know, if it were possible for a woman to go to a convenient and hygienic brothel, or to pick up the equivalent of a GI blonde, I would do so at the drop of a hat (or should I say at the rise of a clitoris?) So that's that. I wish circumstances were not such as to make it necessary, but seeing that they are, and seeing that you are so heavenlily, heavenlily highly sexed (thank God) – well, as I said, don't worry.

7  I also don't mind, sweetheart. I expected something of the kind to happen in that quarter, and I have had a feeling for some time that something has. Partly because you don't seem to go there as often as you used to, and partly because you don't mention her in your letters any more … Maybe you fell in love (or started to) with her and felt you oughtn't to go there any more because of [Janie's husband] Ted: or maybe you just both felt that electric something growing up in the air between you, and agreed that you'd better not meet. Or perhaps you both fell in love, or in lust, and you
are
meeting. Well, you needn't feel badly about it, if this is so.

8  Well, that's the worst of the possibilities, I admit, and when I thought that one out I did have a quarter of an hour of fairly acute pangs: but even that I managed to digest after a while, and get the sting out of it, by reflecting that you and I are no longer just ‘you' and ‘I'. We have been mixed up with each other so long and so sweetly and so intimately that from now to the end of our lives we shall be part of each other: therefore I shall always share in any loveliness you have, and you will share in mine. It is only by thinking oneself into this frame of mind that one can overcome or transmute jealousy. It is not easy, but it can be done, and genuinely, if one's love is deep enough.
    Well, there, as they say, the case rests, until I hear from you. All I implore, darling heart, is that you tell me the truth. For the sake of everything we've been to each other in mind and body; and for the sake of Mozart and Donne and Shakespeare and Goethe and Placzek and Struther and all the other poets and musicians alive or dead; and for the sake of all the beauty that our love for each other has helped us to discern and enjoy –
PLEASE
write soon and truthfully.

It turned out that Dolf had simply been sharing his room with a GI from Alabama, ‘a lazy son-of-a-bitch who wouldn't get up and go to the bathroom while I was talking (
any
Viennese would have).' ‘Oh, blessed, blessed possibility five!' wrote Jan. ‘How I love him, the fat slob. I could kiss him on his solid southern arse.'

*   *   *

In her new state of elation-after-depression, Jan turned her apartment at 214 Central Park South into a busy haven of helpers, friends, children and eccentric pets. ‘If you
knew
what life has been like for the last 3 weeks,' she wrote to Dolf on 2 August. ‘I've only been able to get scrappy help so I've been cooking and cleaning and looking after Robert's livestock (1 snake, 1 baby alligator, 2 turtles & 3 salamanders), & training Margie (the new secretary), and giving the baby its bottle & changing its diapers & I don't know
WHAT
all. Oh, I forgot, you don't know about the baby. She is called Barbara & is
COAL
black & very sweet. She belongs to the temporary maid (Rose) whom I captured in Harlem 2 weeks ago when I went up & raided the Slave Coast in despair. It's simply
heavenly
having a baby around again…'

Jan could say deliberately provocative things like ‘raided the Slave Coast' because she had a genuine love of black people. She craved their company. She and her black maids had coffee round the table each morning (not at all the done thing in 1940s New York), and this was not a mere patronizing gesture. There was real unselfconscious friendship. She would have despised the ‘politically correct' people of half a century later who refused to ask for ‘black' coffee but never had black friends in the same way as they had white friends.

Carl Sandberg, Jan and Paul Robeson at a gala dinner

Jan made two new ‘bosom friends' in the spring of 1944: one was the black actor Canada Lee, whom she had met while selling war bonds. ‘He is 37, very dark skin, and a swivel eye (from having been badly hit when he had to give up prize-fighting). He has a son called Carl, even blacker, a brother called “Lovey”, who is a postman; a divine old uncle called Mr Gaddesden (Gaddy) who is from South C'lina & fries chicken like a dream; & a host of friends, some Negro, some white.' The other was Bennes Mardenn, aged twenty-eight, a friend of a friend of Janet's, who was a struggling actor working as an elevator attendant. ‘Through him we've got to know a whole raft of struggling actors, musicians & dancers, mostly Jewish of Russian background but not in the least ghetto-ish, so don't start snorting, you old Viennese snob … These two new worlds converge in our apartment, and we sit up playing the mandolin, guitar, concertina, etc. & talking & drinking beer, wine & Coca-Cola till anything between 2 & 5 every morning. It is the kind of “student” life which I never had, and it's
heaven
compared with the depression & gloom I was in all last winter & spring. The only thing lacking is you, playing the piano in the jam session & being host with the wine & so on.'

Staying with Bev Robinson and his wife Marian in Canada in late August, she listed to Dolf the skills she had acquired in the last few weeks, many of them picked up at Robert's summer camp, Camp Kieve in Maine, which she visited on the way: 1 using a long-hafted woodman's axe, 2 using a scythe, 3 playing the guitar, 4 using a soldering iron, 5 making knotted string belts in different patterns, 6 whittling, 7 graphology, 8 cooking, 9 Yiddish, 10 Russian, 11 rifle-shooting.

I did (11) brilliantly at Rob's camp: he practically embraced me in front of the councillors. I was able to put over a
WHALE
of a talk against racial intolerance at supper, & they
LISTENED
, which I knew damn well they wouldn't have on the strength of any mere literary achievements. And later, sitting on the stoop of the council hall, I took a live snake out of the Nature Room & sat with it coiled round my wrist & fingers while I pursued the same line of talk. God, how they need it – at least half of the boys are from Baltimore & points south, & they stink on the Negro problem, & even on anti-Semitism. I had quite a run-in with one brat in the workshop on the same subject. Luckily I was, at that time, helping
him
to use a soldering iron, which was the best possible position to be in. I had a primeval longing to shove the white-hot soldering iron up his fat little Arsch …

Dolf's heart sank slightly when he read letters like these. When he first heard that she was feeling happier, he wrote: ‘This was really the greatest Sunday gift you could send me, Kleines.' But he now feared that she could only escape from ‘the Jungles' by throwing herself into this almost manic over-activity. He would have been more convinced of her recovery if she had taken up one new skill, rather than eleven. And as for all the shooting, snake-wielding and shoving things up arses – he detected suppressed rage which might turn dangerous if her mood changed.

She crawled under the foundation posts of the house in Canada, shot a porcupine, then skinned and dissected it. ‘I got out its heart, lungs, stomachs, 9 feet of intestines – I measured them – liver, kidneys, spleen & vagina; then I made the meat into a stew with onions & we all ate it for dinner; then I boiled down the head & four paws to get their skeletons to keep for Robert. I'm going to make the teeth & claws into a bracelet. A perfectly glorious day.'

This behaviour was Jan's final two fingers to ladylikeness. She was flaunting her tomboyishness and her taste for the shocking and disgusting, and had it not come after a period of depression it would have been purely hilarious. But again Dolf sensed that she was over-compensating.

Janet now had a boyfriend, whom she had met at the George School: Thomi Schmidt, a German-Jewish immigrant whose father had been murdered by the Nazis. ‘Mummy, I wonder how one ends a love-letter in German?' she asked, sitting at the desk at 214 Central Park South. ‘I bite my tongue out at the root,' Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘swallow three times, & then say casually, “Why not look it up in the dictionary?” I get a lot of gorgeous private pleasure out of the irony of the situation…' Trying to be a liberated modern mother, Jan took Janet to a doctor to get her fitted with a contraceptive diaphragm; her unshockability shocked Janet. Jan was adamant that Tony must not be told, in any letter, of Janet's love for a German, even this anti-Nazi one.

Dolf's furlough came up in September, and he went to New York for a fortnight. Reunited with him, Jan felt almost calm again, and whole. And for once, she left before he did. On 6 October she boarded
The Mohawk,
Train 5, Car 30, Upper 4, for what she rightly guessed would be her last lecture tour of the war years. ‘The farewell wasn't so bad this time, was it?' she wrote to him on the train. ‘Definitely it is
far
easier to be the one who goes away first. Next time let's arrange to go simultaneously in different directions – nearly as difficult as arranging to come simultaneously! (A propos of that, I am as randy as hell. But don't worry. I am so full of the sweetness of love that lust has no attractions.)'

She kept an un-private diary of this six-week trip, as well as writing private letters to Dolf. Reading both, the contrast between her outward stiff upper lip and her increasing inner exhaustion and loneliness stands out. Exactly the same ingredients which she had found so exhilarating on previous tours – staying in strangers' houses, looking out of hotel-room windows, being taken out for dinner, shaking hands with hundreds of people, being the centre of attention at the coffee-party after the lecture – now wore her down. She saw their dark rather than their light side. Remarks on her Details of Engagement – ‘You will be required to attend a private luncheon and make a 10-minute speech. This is a special privilege they require from all our speakers' – were merely tiring to contemplate. ‘Privilege', indeed!

She was not sure which was worse: staying with people (in which case you had to be on best behaviour), or staying in a hotel (in which case you were lonely in a room ‘which contained everything you needed but nothing you ever wanted to see again'). At St Louis she was a guest, staying with Mrs T. N. Sayman of 5399 Lindel Boulevard. There was a butler, and an over-sophisticated daughter, Do-Jean, who discussed the steak and kidney pie with her mother over the luncheon-table. ‘Do-Jean, they've made this much better this time.' ‘I don't know, mother. I think the kidneys ought to have been soaked still longer in red wine.' The atmosphere reminded Jan of ‘pre-prewar big country houses in England', and she had a nightmare afterwards of going back to Britain and being forced to live in a Big House with a butler. ‘I woke up almost in tears. God, how awful it would be.' After the St Louis lecture she slipped away to Walgreen's delicatessen for a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, to avoid dinner at the Saymans' table. At Wichita, Kansas, where she lectured at the University, she made friends with five college girls (Betty, Beverley, Joanie, Francie and Darline) and spent three relaxed evenings in their house drinking Cokes and 7-Ups and reading old copies of
The New Yorker
in front of the fire. She was becoming allergic to best behaviour.

At this very time Tony, a prisoner at Oflag 79 near Brunswick in Germany, was dreaming about precisely how wonderful it would be to live in a Big House with a butler. He was imagining the blissful reunion with his family. He wrote to Jan (she quoted the letter to Dolf), saying that he hoped ‘having a grown-up family would not make him feel too ancient', and that he was ‘longing to take up the threads of family life'. Waiting for the war to end, he was planning the future. He and his co-prisoners would establish the Brunswick Boys' Clubs, an idea they had dreamed up together, and for which many of them had promised generous sums of money. He might stand for Parliament, as a Conservative candidate in Perthshire. There would be long, happy summers at Cultoquhey (which he had by now inherited, his father having died in 1940). He would make the most of the house, as his parents never quite had … the food needed improving, and the wine cellar … he would install new bathrooms, and make sure there was endless hot water … he would invite his friends up for golfing house-parties, and for shooting, fishing and stalking … the gong would ring to dress for dinner, the last course would be a savoury (devils on horseback? cheese soufflé?), and there would be jazz records and billiards till late into the night.