The Real Mrs Miniver (33 page)

After supper they walked home, and Jan noticed the length of Tony's stride: he must be revelling in stretching his legs after the years of confinement. She lagged behind to have a private word with Frankie, and suspected that Tony might earlier have done so too. Frankie did not raise an eyebrow, and nor did Tony when Frankie said, in the hallway of the spare flat, ‘Now, it's time you all went to bed, and this is the way you'd better arrange it – Janet in the small bedroom, Tony in the large one, Jan in the living-room and Robert in the tiny bedroom in my flat.' The hurdle had been crossed: and, once crossed, Jan supposed it would be easy to arrange things similarly in Wellington Square.

The next day, Saturday 28 May, Tony took his wife and children for a walk. They walked all day, through Kensington Gardens to Campden Hill and beyond, on and on, left and right, through countless streets and squares. They had to run to keep up with him: crotchets, once again, to his minims. Tony told Jan about the Brunswick Boys' Club scheme: £13,000 had been raised in the prisoner-of-war camp, in the form of promissory notes. She was impressed by this active altruism in him. She recounted anecdotes from her lecture tours – she knew he would laugh at ‘My dearrr, I feel purrrged', and the ‘Mrs Miniver's Fruit Salad Plate'. He told her about his other plan, to stand as the Conservative candidate for Perth and East Perthshire, an ambition which was part of his vision of himself as a rural gentleman. It was such a safe Conservative seat that if he were to be adopted, he would almost certainly win. The election was to take place in a fortnight's time, and he suggested that all four of them should go up to Perthshire to do a spot of what he called ‘baby-kissing', in aid of his cause.

Legs aching, Jan, Janet and Robert collapsed onto the sofa in the furnished flat. The next day, and the day after that, Tony again took them for walks, through miles of bomb-damaged streets, pausing only to foregather for drinks every now and then with friends who had been ‘in the bag' with him or for lunch at the Lansdowne Club. On Monday evening they were joyfully reunited at last with Nannie, who since the beginning of the war had been running the children's crèche at the Lyons food factory. She agreed to come and live with them again as soon as 16 Wellington Square was fit for habitation.

King's Court North was too small, Tony said on Tuesday. He would sleep at the St James's Club from now on. He hoped nobody would mind. ‘No – that's a good idea, darling – do,' said Jan. Janet and Robert were told that it was merely a matter of shortage of space.

It was five days before she put pen to paper to Dolf, who was still in California. ‘The children and I', she wrote, ‘are founding a Society for the Rehabilitation of Exhausted Wives and Children of Hundred-Per-Cent Fit Returned POWs – starting off with a monumental foot clinic. Tony has walked the 3 of us off our feet since we've been back.' She then wrote this tribute to Tony's resilience:

Really, the British are an indomitable people. He was 42 when he went overseas into action, and had never known any real hardship, hunger or humiliation: and now, after going through the Battle of Egypt – the
defeat
part, not the intoxicating victory march of El Alamein; after 3 years in 6 different prison camps in 3 different Axis or occupied countries; after spending a winter in the Italian mountains dressed in thin desert uniform (khaki shirt and shorts) plus an old tartan plaid wrapped around him; after going literally barefoot for seven months, in order to save his only pair of shoes for a possible escape march; after being shackled in unheated closed cattle trucks on the long journeys between the various camps (during one of which journeys, taking it in turns with the others to peer out of a small crack in the truck, he fell madly in love with what glimpses he could get of the Tyrol); after being under almost continuous heavy bombardment for a year (from our own planes over Brunswick, 2 miles away, which they reduced to flat earth); after going for months without any parcels, mail or news of his family getting through to him; and after spending the final four months in a state of semi-starvation: after all this, he emerges unscathed physically, improved mentally, passed 100% fit by the doctors, a good deal thinner, very slightly balder, politically conscious for the first time in his life, sweet-tempered and humorous as ever, and hell-bent to plunge into politics and walk up mountains stalking deer …
I GIVE UP
– and so does the enemy.

(Tony's only comment on the shackling business, which he must have hated very much, was ‘Silly buggers – they didn't realise we'd all learned to pick locks in our school days. We got them all off long before the end of the journey.')

Dolf had asked her not to write to him until she had had time to judge the situation fairly. This was how she judged it. Dolf should ‘cancel all blondes', because there was a good chance that he and she would be able to be together a great deal in the future.

It seems – I gather from Frankie, for of course he would die sooner than make the spiritual effort of saying so to my face – that Tony is immensely proud of my work in the US, and thinks it would be a tragedy if I didn't continue it. I'm sufficiently conscious of my own faults and irritatingness to realise that he is probably damn glad that I've found an outlet for my Winstonian energies at last, and I'm sure he sees – as I do – that the situation provides us with an excellent and face-saving excuse for being apart for several months in the year, without any formal separation and stuff. We still have a great fondness and respect for each other. On the surface, and indeed as far down as the topsoil or even the subsoil, we enjoy each other's company, and we have a deep satisfaction and pride in our co-parenthood of the children.

‘Without any formal separation and stuff…' Dolf, reading this, saw his life stretching ahead, this forbidden love affair carrying on for years, always unofficial, always interrupted by heartbreaking farewells. By clinging to ‘the family pattern', as she called it, Jan was asking him to be a perpetually waiting side-character. He could not, he decided, close his eyes completely to the attractions of blondes.

The meeting to adopt the Conservative candidate for Perth and East Perthshire took place at the Station Hotel, Perth, on 9 June. The candidates were Mr A. J. O. Maxtone Graham and Mr A. Gomme-Duncan. All Tony asked of his wife (knowing her left-wing leanings) was that she should promise not to stand against him as a Labour candidate if he was adopted. Jan and the children were invited by one official to listen to the speeches. A different official then mistook them for members of the Conservative Association, and handed them voting papers. Resisting temptation, they handed them back, unmarked: only members of the Association were supposed to take part. Alan Gomme-Duncan won the adoption by two votes. Had it not been for the scruples of his wife and children, Tony would almost certainly have become an MP in the 1945 General Election. He took his defeat in good humour, and decided to spend the funds earmarked for election expenses on renting a house in the West Highlands for a two-month shooting, stalking and fishing holiday. (Cultoquhey, requisitioned by the Army, was not released until 1947).

It sounded wonderful: the Western Highlands were ‘practically Austria', Jan felt; and the chosen place was Appin, the country of her lifelong hero Alan Breck of
Kidnapped.
She would be able to roam in the hills to her heart's content, dreaming of Dolf and David Balfour. Tony's desire was to recreate the paradise of pre-war Scottish family summers: tea on tartan rugs, trout, salmon, grouse, pheasant and venison for dinner, drawing-room games in the evening, constant laughter and physical exercise to drown out any strains in his marriage.

But Jan had a way of turning holidays sour. The pressure to be ‘having a lovely time' brought out the worst in her: it was the negative side of the same cussedness which made her the life and soul of the crowd on any derailed train, or ship battered by a Force Seven gale. Previous holiday bad moods, notably in Vienna in 1929 and Los Angeles in 1943, paled by comparison. Even Robert, who had no inkling of the cracks in his parents' marriage, began to sense, in Appin, that something was wrong, though his mother reassured him that Tony's irritableness was just ‘prisoner-of-war neurosis'.

Tony told Jan he had arranged the holiday partly ‘to give her a good rest' but, indiscriminately generous as ever, proceeded to invite a stream of guests (his golfing friends for the most part), some of whom forgot to bring their ration books, and one of whom (a former POW, Harry Webb) instantly embarked on an affair with Janet. There were sixteen in the house, and the only employed help was one washer-up for four hours a day. Food and petrol were short, and power cuts were frequent because the fast-running burn which powered the private electricity system had dried up in the August heat.

Many months later, Jan described the holiday to Dolf: ‘It was one long round of cooking on an enormous old kitchen range, gutting rabbits and birds, cutting up venison, hoisting huge iron saucepans, and walking two miles to the telephone and many more miles in search of something to shoot. Some of our guests were co-operative, some (notably Janet and the S.O.B. she had an affair with) were not.' But the people who were there remember it differently. Jan's helpfulness in the kitchen was, in reality, short-lived – it was Tony's sister Ysenda who did most of the rabbit-gutting and saucepan-heaving; Jan actually purloined the best saucepan in the house to pursue a ‘manic ploy' (as Janet called it) which involved boiling up cows' feet to make glue.

Jan saw Tony as the one who was impossible to live with. ‘My main mistake in my first letter to you,' she wrote to Dolf months after the event, ‘was to use the adjective “sweet-tempered” about Tony. I did not realise then, so well did he conceal it, how much the POW business had affected his temper. He turned out to be irritable & quick-tempered & even, eventually, admitted this, after several blazing rows and much verbal rudeness (which is entirely unlike him). He got into a state of neurotic depression & couldn't persuade himself to get out of bed, etc. – you know the symptoms.'

She did not admit that she, too, was bringing poison to the marriage. How could she do otherwise, when her heart was not in it? Tony irritated her because he fell short of Dolf in all the characteristics which now mattered to her; and she was as irritable as Tony.

One day she vanished, leaving a note on the hall table: ‘I have gone to join my friends the gypsies in the heather.' She was gone for a night and a day, no one knew where. It was exasperating for everyone, and upsetting for Tony.

‘The nicest part of the whole holiday,' she wrote innocently to Dolf afterwards, ‘was the horse, Dick, which the farmer lent me, and on which, at one particular moment when the situation became intolerable, I ran away for 24 hours, staying in a farmhouse and catching up on sleep.'

This letter to Dolf was not written until November 1945. For five months, from the end of May onwards, Jan cut herself off from him: she had decided it was the only way to give her marriage a decent chance of working. Tony saw, in Appin, that it was not, but (being a bottler-up and avoider of ‘scenes') he could not bring himself to say so to Jan's face. They communicated through Anne Talbot, who was one of the house-party. Jan confided to her about Dolf, and she claimed to have known all along. Tony (not yet aware of the depth of Jan's love for Dolf) told Anne that as far as he was concerned the marriage was over, and they should separate. Jan persuaded him, through Anne, that this would be grossly unfair to the children, and that they hadn't given themselves a chance in the old, familiar, roomy surroundings of Wellington Square, which they both loved and which was the last place in which they had been truly happy together.

This was a new twist in the plot, one which Jan could not have foreseen while daydreaming on trains during the war years. Then, she had vaguely hoped that some opportunity would come, without her having to instigate it, which would give her an easy escape route from the marriage. And now, here it was: Tony was suggesting a separation. But she couldn't agree. Not only that: she actively (through the medium of Anne) persuaded him to change his mind. For honour's sake, and her conscience's, she knew she must convince herself that her motive for leaving him (if she ever did) was not that life would be better with Dolf, but that life had become irretrievably intolerable with Tony. She was not yet convinced of this. Her children were very much in her mind, especially Robert, who was about to start at Stowe, and to whom (being the youngest) the ‘family pattern' mattered particularly. For her children's sake she was prepared to argue against herself in this way, and to forgo Dolf if she could find a joyless but bearable
modus vivendi
with Tony.

So she and Tony threw their energy into making 16 Wellington Square habitable. Everything in its fourteen rooms was grimy with Blitz dust. Tony, working at Harris & Dixon again, was finding office life futile and unfulfilling. He came home each evening not to play with trains but to move furniture and put up shelves, with a sense of pointlessness and crushing disappointment in his heart. A dance for Janet: that was it, they would give a débutante dance, he decided. Perhaps that would warm the house up, filling it once again with laughter, champagne and jazz music. The invitations went out: ‘Mrs Anthony Maxtone Graham At Home…' Needless to say, it was a successful evening on the surface, but dismal beneath. Janet, still pining for Thomi Schmidt, was unimpressed by the young men her parents had invited, most of whom she had not met before. Being ‘hostess and mother' made Jan feel acutely old.

‘Well,' Jan wrote eventually to Dolf, ‘the cage is ready, but the bird doesn't fly back.' You could dust a house, you could install a new kitchen, you could give a dance, but you couldn't breathe warmth into a house without happiness, and this was still lacking. Tony and Jan stopped having rows and an atmosphere of icy politeness descended, which was worse. On 28 October, able to bear the loneliness no longer, Jan wrote to Dolf. She apologized for her long silence.