The Real Mrs Miniver (35 page)

It was to the poor girl from Indianapolis that Dolf had to break news gently. Her last words to him were, ‘My dearest wish is that someone would love me as much as you love that woman.'

*   *   *

‘Oh darling honey Liebes Du – I am really & truly, wirklich und warhäftig, coming!' Jan wrote to Dolf on 27 May. She had a seat booked on an aeroplane, the Flying Dutchman. ‘I'm arriving on 29 June & can stay till 2 Aug. when I must get back for Robbie's holidays.' She planned to rent an apartment so she wouldn't feel ‘alien & visitorish' in a hotel.

The Dutch Airlines publicity dept. has rung me to say that reporters will be waiting for me at La Guardia – so for God's sake don't meet me, because it would be simple hell not to run into your arms. Besides, I'll probably faint dead away with sheer joy when I see you, which would be most awkward if done in public. I'll ring you up as soon as I get to a telephone, & then I'll come right over to your apt. & stand on the exact spot on the floor where I said goodbye to you 14 months ago (or 14 million years, or 14 minutes, whichever way you choose to think of it).

Ask Pauly to get in 6 dozen oranges, please. I shall drink a gallon a day at first, I expect.

The face lit up by the photographers' flashes at La Guardia was thinner and more careworn than the one which had sailed away fourteen months before, and the hair was greyer. But the eyes which greeted Dolf were unchanged. The poem Jan had written to him in 1940 in her schoolgirl German still held true:

Staatenlos, heimatlos

Gehen wir immer,

Staatenlos, schwer zu sein,

Heimatlos, schlimmer.

Staatenlos? Heimatlos?

Nein, liebes, nein,

Weil du mein Heimat bist,

Und ich bin dein.
2

Chapter Fifteen

I am a captive in a cobweb's mesh;

    
Frail is its tracery, yet I cannot stir;

Fast as I tear the strands, they grow afresh

    
And hold me here with you, a prisoner:

Habit, long musty, set in instinct's place,

    
Pale duty, and a maze of trivial ties,

And craven kindness – since I am loathe to face

    
Your wounded and uncomprehending eyes.

        
Steel chains might yet be snapped, and I be free:

        
But O! these clinging cobwebs strangle me.

From ‘Cobwebs', in
Betsinda Dances

 

‘T
HAT WAS A
wonderful, heavenly 38 days' leave,' Jan wrote to Dolf on the aeroplane back to Britain on 7 August 1946. ‘It got happier and happier, and all the jungles & bitched-upness that we'd both been going through got smoothed out, like a rumpled sheet in the wake of an iron. We're both of us so difficult for other people (it seems) and so unrestful and temperamental – and yet for each other we are perfect – so easy, so restful, and so constant.'

‘It got happier and happier' suggests that it was less than happy to begin with. Exhausted after the nomadic years of war, hardened by fourteen unfulfilling months apart, bewildered by one another's recent efforts at infidelity, they now had to embark on yet another existence, this time with Jan as short-term visitor and Dolf as resident, employed citizen. But gradually during these thirty-eight days of readjustment, as the ‘bitched-upness' faded, Jan emerged from confusion into a state of clarity about her parallel lives.

The time had come, she decided, when she must free herself from the strangling cobwebs of her marriage. Evenings with Dolf, home from the Avery Library in her rented apartment on East 70th Street, gave her a glimpse of possibilities which made a resumption of life in Wellington Square intolerable, even absurd. It would mean going back to the strain of acting a part for which she was miscast, after tasting the ease of naturalness.

During the war, the thought of breaking up her marriage had been almost unthinkable: Jan had shuddered at the violence of its effect. It would have undermined her whole ‘Mrs Miniver' persona, vital as Allied propaganda, and destroyed her reputation. It would have been cruel to Tony in his prisoner-of-war camp, and unsettling for the already unsettled children. But now, the pressure to maintain an outward show of marriedness had eased. She was no longer the professional ‘happily married woman', so fearful of scandal that she fled from a hotel in O'Neill, Nebraska just because someone recognized her voice in a washroom. Tony was a civilian, and her youngest child was now aged fifteen. The sheer boredom and spiritual sterility of living with Tony, day after day, month after month, had taken the sting out of any decision to part. No one could say they hadn't tried. It seemed now that the choice was obvious, between what was natural and what was artificial. For years she had clung, privately, to the guilt-inducing state of ‘having her cake and eating it' – to the stability of an upper-class marriage and the excitement of an affair – and this, she knew, would be hard to give up. She was keenly aware of the pain she would inflict by breaking up the ‘family pattern', but there was now an overwhelming sense of inevitability that this must happen. She would have to take the consequences.

Having put her personal life above her career by postponing her trip to New York until three weeks after the publication of
A Pocketful of Pebbles
in May 1946, she could hardly be surprised that the book began to sink without trace. It was a patched-together and plainly produced collection of her poems, fables and wartime lectures, plus the pre-war
Try Anything Twice
– a compendium of fifteen years of her wit and wisdom, full of good stuff, but out of date and lacking unity. There was no introduction, and no guiding voice to carry the reader from the pre-war to the wartime frame of mind. The
New York Times
gave it a bad review, and it produced only a trickle of royalties. The title, chosen by Jan, did not help. Without the magic word ‘Miniver' (Jan forbade the inclusion of the dreaded name) it meant nothing to most people. The book's luke-warm reception dented her writer's confidence, already low. She realized she would have to produce powerful, and fresh, material if she was ever to be a bestselling author again.

A few days after her arrival at Prestwick Airport on 8 August, she and Tony agreed to separate, and to seek a divorce.

‘You, bless you,' she wrote to Dolf, ‘understand how little the actual divorce matters in all of our lives: it is the mere formal burying of a corpse – or rather of a skeleton which is so bared and whitened by sun and vultures that it doesn't even stink any more, but has acquired a certain stark integrity and bearableness. The hellishly miserable time was when it still had flesh on it but needed burying, and when we were still trying, first, artificial respiration and, second, a kind of amateurish embalming.'

Breaking the news to Robert was as dreadful as she had predicted: he was as upset as she had known he would be. Now she had done it. The pattern was broken. But there was one last week of family life before the planned date of separation. In this week, a new friendliness filled the air at Wellington Square. ‘The atmosphere in the house is so peaceful and even gay,' Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘that it must seem even more incomprehensible to Robbie that we are going to part.'

Packing and sorting out her belongings, Jan managed not to cry. But one thing moved her very much. Walking into Tony's bedroom when she didn't know he was in, she found him fast asleep.

He was curled up on a little sofa which was the first piece of furniture we bought, and looking very small and thin and sad. When people are asleep, they should not be looked at unawares by other people. Their defences are down & their masks are off. Poor Tony: he has so much sweetness in him. ‘Twenty-three years with the wrong woman' has cramped his style and soured him, but he will be free now and will blossom again into his natural gaiety. I think he is hating this week, and feeling – as anybody well might – that if we can get on as well as this for a short time, why can't we do it always? But he knows really, as I know, that these few days owe their harmony & serenity to the fact that they
are
a finale. The concert is nearly over, and the people who have trains to catch are already groping for their hats.

‘Incidentally,' Jan wrote to Dolf in the ‘P.S.' at the end of that letter written in the last week with Tony, ‘I bought a house yesterday, 17 Alexander Place.' Her jewellery (about which she was unsentimental) had recently been stolen from the car, and with the help of the insurance she had enough money to buy this leasehold house in South Kensington. Of all the impulsive purchases she ever made, this was perhaps the rashest: she was intending to live in New York for eight months of each year. ‘But I came to the conclusion that it was more important to have my bigger “residence” this side of the Atlantic, not only because I want to make a nice home for Robbie, but also because when I'm on the other side, with you, I'm so happy that I don't need possessions.'

In her days as a
Times
Fourth Leader writer, producer of ‘Miniver' columns and wartime lecturer in America, Jan's distinctive voice had been that of the cheerer-up, the noticer of small pleasures, the anatomizer of happiness. Now, as her mind was growing darker, she began to reveal the other side of that talent, and to use the same powers of observation to anatomize unpleasantness. It was perhaps the mental equivalent of her apparent urge to dissect porcupines. Rather than glossing over the activities of 27 August, the macabre last afternoon of her marriage, she described them in detail to Dolf. At two o'clock she took Culi (the cairn terrier which the farmer in Argyll had given Robert) to a ‘large, sinister house' in Kensington to be ‘married'.

I was greeted by a tall thin cruel icy-faced Belgian doctor. His wife was away & there was no one in the house except him & me & the two dogs. We left them in the back kitchen to get on with it (it had a slippery tiled floor on which Culi skidded). We watched them through the glass doors for a bit, Dr Borel being very cold & impersonal & technical, & me standing there thinking, ‘For Culi, this day is the beginning of family life: for me, the end.' Then we went upstairs to find a drink, & he couldn't find it, so he walked around showing me his pictures by people I didn't know about, & I kept thinking, ‘The Jungle is coming back & I need a
DRINK
.' Finally he had to go to a meeting & I had to get back to cook dinner (the last I'll ever cook for Tony). So we went off in two taxis, & I finished cooking the dinner which Nannie had got under way & it was excellent – roast wild goose and a sort of soufflé thing – and afterwards we all washed up (the last time, I kept thinking quite dispassionately, that he and I shall stand at a sink together). Then we all went upstairs & had coffee & played a few records, & then I excused myself & went to bed with as large a drink as rationing would permit, & the wind howling outside the windows.

The next day was clear and sunny, and ‘fresh as the freshness of new life that we were both starting on'. Jan cooked pancakes and coffee for the family, and then Tony's hired car arrived, to take him to catch a train to Scotland. He hugged Janet and Robert, but not Jan: Janet and Nannie thought this unpardonable, but Jan thought it ‘perfectly understandable and therefore forgivable'.

Then [Jan continued to Dolf] Tony turned & went into the car & up Wellington Square & out of my life. And I sat down with my back to the window, & finished my breakfast, & lit a cigarette & opened my letters & read
The Times.
There was no need to put on an act: it was no act. It was just like drawing a line under a signature, or throwing away the husk of a walnut from which the kernel has been eaten.

Later in the morning, an immense feeling of relief began to grow in me, which has been ripening ever since like a beautiful swelling purple plum. Darling, I am free. Je suis libre. Ich bin frei. Have you taken it in? I can hardly believe it, even yet.

That same week, Janet left for America to take up a job working as a secretary for
Good Housekeeping,
Robert went to Scotland with Tony for three weeks' stalking, and Jamie arrived in London. He had at last been granted compassionate leave from the Army, on the grounds that he was needed at home to ‘patch up his Old Folks' affairs', as he put it. But when he arrived, Jan convinced him that he was too late. So he spent much of his leave sitting with her on the roof-garden, and she felt she was meeting him properly for the first time. ‘To paraphrase the old cliché about one's children's marriage,' she wrote to Dolf, ‘I have lost a husband and gained a son. I never really knew him before, except during the school holidays before the war. And even then, not properly, because I always had to keep up a pretence of being Parental and Happily Married. Suddenly we have both become
people
– and, darling, he is delightful.' They discovered their joint tastes for wine, Strega, Bach, olives, John Donne, travel, dirty jokes, and getting one's house into ‘a gorgeous mess'. These initial impressions of life post-marriage were encouraging. Perhaps this was what it was going to be like: you changed from being a parent to your children to being their friend.

In October Jan sailed to New York, where she stayed for five months. Short of money, having spent it on Alexander Place, she decided to revel in poverty. She pretended to her family that it was through force of necessity that she was obliged to look for accommodation in Hell's Kitchen, the unsalubrious area around the West 50s and 9th Avenue, near where the Lincoln Center now is. But in truth she was actively seeking a slummy existence as an antidote to the final months of icy grandeur in Wellington Square. There was also an element of self-punishment: the charade of being a happily married, secure ‘Mrs Miniver' wife was well and truly over, and she wanted to steep herself in the potential consequences. She stayed for two weeks in a seventh-rate hotel with cockroaches on the floor (‘not the black English kind which go “squoosh” but the slim American kind which go “squeesh”‘). There was, even now, no question of living with Dolf: she was still married, and when they parted in the early morning they still had to look out of the window to make sure no one was watching.