Beautiful Shadow (58 page)

     Then in January 1968, Highsmith wrote a letter to Ann Clark, telling her that
she
was the love of her life and how much she regretted what had passed. ‘I wonder if anything will ever come of it?’ she asked.
⁴⁴
Of course nothing did, because Highsmith, as she herself realised, was in love with the idea of woman, not the reality. ‘It is quite obvious that my falling in love is not love,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘but a necessity of attaching myself to someone. In the past, I have been able to do this without any physical relationship – just to prove my point here. Perhaps a great source of shipwreck in the past has been to expect a physical relationship.’
⁴⁵

     Feeling alone and unhappy, musing on what might have been, Pat once again worried about her sanity. Her nervous system, she said, resembled that of her mother and she was all too aware of how Mary’s mind had degenerated into madness. Highsmith told a friend, the writer and critic Maurice Richardson, that she couldn’t bear his presence in her house as he acted as a catalyst to her anxiety. ‘As I said to him (quite honestly),’ she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer in February, ‘I fear the madness in me, quite near the surface.’
⁴⁶

On Saturday 2 March, Madeleine Harmsworth, a twenty-six-year-old journalist from London, arrived in Samois-sur-Seine to interview Highsmith about her work for
Queen
magazine. Highsmith found the Oxford graduate, with her long black hair and subtle oriental features, to be ‘most charming’
⁴⁷
and, emboldened by a few glasses of Scotch, proceeded to try her luck. Finding herself being seduced, Madeleine, who admired Highsmith so much she refused to call her Pat – she said it would be like calling Shakespeare, ‘Willie’ or Dickens, ‘Charlie’ – acquiesced and they spent that night together.

     ‘She was an idol of mine and it was flattering,’ says Madeleine. ‘I wasn’t averse to trying a bit of bisexuality. I was very young and impressionable, keen as a journalist and it seemed quite exciting. I was intrigued to know what sort of person could produce those books. I expected a fairly tortured soul because of the nature of the writing and I suppose that’s what I found.’
⁴⁸

     Madeleine stayed for the weekend and then went back to London, from where she wrote Highsmith a number of ‘increasingly warm letters’.
⁴⁹
Highsmith, in typical romantic fashion, asked the girl to ‘marry me for a year’.
⁵⁰
The couple planned when they would next see one another again and in April, Highsmith asked her housemate, Elizabeth, whether she was going away over Easter as she would like the house to be free so she could invite a friend – Madeleine. Although the request, in itself, seems reasonable enough, Highsmith may have phrased it in an insensitive way. Whatever the case, Elizabeth was incandescent for two days and demanded Pat find herself another house.

     ‘I have had to engage a lawyer myself, to protect myself from whatever “charges” are in store for me . . .’ Highsmith wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer. ‘My stomach is in a state of upset. I do hope to get out of here within a week.’
⁵¹

     From the 25 April until 6 May, Highsmith stayed with Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett in London, where she attended the Crime Writers dinner at the Park Lane Hotel with Madeleine as her guest. When she was in Britain she always took advantage of what she saw were the cheaper prices, stocking up on shirts and typewriter ribbons. ‘I dislike paying $2.10 for a typewriter ribbon here, e.g., so I stock up on such things in London,’ she wrote to Alex Szogyi.
⁵²

     Before she had left for her London trip, Highsmith had found a new house – in Montmachoux, six miles south-east of Samois-sur-Seine – and she signed a contract for its purchase for the equivalent of $18,000. ‘I shall be living alone, thank God,’ she said.
⁵³
When she returned to France, shocked by the student uprising, strikes and riots – in addition to the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, in April and then Robert Kennedy, in June – she declared that the world had gone mad. France seemed on the verge of a revolution. The Paris Metro was daubed with graffiti: ‘
Metro
-
boulot
-
dodo
’ or ‘Metro-work-sleep’, an attempt by radicals to rouse what they saw as the non-questioning, robotic mind-set of the French workers. President Charles de Gaulle responded by labelling the protesters, ‘
Cette chienlit
’ – ‘This shit-in-the-bed’ – a charge which was then scrawled over posters of the French leader, with the accompanying insult, ‘
La chienlit c’est lui
!’
⁵⁴

     Highsmith’s own immediate circumstances did not help the situation. Elizabeth, via her lawyer, refused to pay Highsmith for half the house. ‘One’s friends are not even one’s friends,’ she wrote in her notebook. ‘I hate the dog-eat-dog of the atmosphere here.’
⁵⁵
She loathed the fog of ‘corruption & dishonesty’
⁵⁶
which she thought permeated the whole country. ‘Hoarding Gauloises, filling bathtubs with petrol,’ she wrote to Koestler about the effects of the general strike. ‘It is no wonder this country lost the last war.’
⁵⁷

     On 20 June she moved into her new house in Montmachoux, a quiet rural village which had a population of only 160, mostly agricultural workers, labourers and their wives. From the church perched on a hillside Highsmith would have seen expanses of farmland and forest surrounding the village and the sweeping grandeur of the nearby Aqueduc de la Vanne. Above all she valued its isolated setting, almost revelling in its unsophisticated, non-bourgeois authenticity. ‘I have to dump my own garbage, take it in a big plastic bag in the back seat of the car about one kilometre to a sort of First World War battlefield,’ Highsmith said. ‘You have to collect the milk at 6.30 or else. There’s no bakery and no butcher in the village. I have to drive four to five kilometres to get meat for my cat.’
⁵⁸
She enjoyed the peace, especially the lack of people, and any inconveniences, she said, were ‘worth it to me to have a sense of elbow room’.
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     Ten days after moving in, Madeleine arrived to help her unpack and weed the garden, while Highsmith worked on a play,
When the Sleep Ends
, for the London theatrical producer Martin Tickner. It was during this visit that Madeleine came to realise that Highsmith’s image of herself was vastly different from the reality.

     ‘I’m afraid that Pat was given to delusions and thankfully, for my sake, I quickly discovered that,’ she says. ‘To begin with these comprised of very simple fantasies. For example, she gave the impression that she was a great gardener, that she loved cats and adored good food. My first impression was of her garden – a barren piece of dried-up grass, which I thought was a little odd. I’m very keen on animals but all I can say is that I would not like to have been her cat; the way she handled it or didn’t handle it was not that of an animal lover. And as for food – it didn’t enter into her mind at all.’
⁶⁰

     Throughout the summer Highsmith journeyed back and forth between her house in Montmachoux and London. In October, she and Madeleine were invited by Martin Tickner to a villa near Albufeira, Portugal, where she could work on
When the Sleep Ends
, which was set in a London drawing room and which she described as ‘slightly misogynistic’.
⁶¹
Highsmith wrote the female part for her actress friend Heather Chasen. ‘Pat was such a wonderful writer, but she couldn’t write dialogue,’ says Heather. ‘When I read the play, a thriller, I hated the role – this woman was a terrible bitch. I thought if that’s what she thinks of me, well that’s charming. She never wrote well of women, she didn’t seem to have any inside knowledge about them, they were all like cardboard figures. It didn’t come to anything; it wasn’t a very good play.’
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     ‘I do remember Pat trying to write a play which wasn’t at all successful,’ says Madeleine. ‘At that point I really was trying to distance myself from her, but she was persuasive and I went. It was as bad as I expected it to be. I was rather fond of Portugal until then. She was an extremely unbalanced person, extremely hostile and misanthropic and totally incapable of any kind of relationship, not just intimate ones. I felt sorry for her, because it wasn’t her fault. There was something in her early days or whatever that made her incapable. She drove everybody away and people who really wanted to be friends ended up putting the phone down on her.

     ‘It seemed to me as if she had to ape feelings and behaviour, like Ripley. Of course sometimes having no sense of social behaviour can be charming, but in her case it was alarming. I remember once, when she was trying to have a dinner party with people she barely knew, she deliberately leaned towards the candle on the table and set fire to her hair. People didn’t know what to do as it was a very hostile act and the smell of singeing and burning filled the room.

     ‘Of course she was an alcoholic and maybe that had something to do with her odd behaviour. Alcoholics are extremely boring people and the combination meant that one was associating with somebody who, I thought, was quite deranged. Young I may have been, but I wasn’t interested in being associated with someone like that. Had she been living in England our relationship would have stopped early on, but because of the distance it took a long time. And she was quite clever at hiding things, including her alcoholism. It took me a while to spot the nine-o’clock-in-the-morning drink. She didn’t fall about, like most alcoholics don’t, but the drinking would start the moment she got up. Once the initial excitement of being with a famous person wore off and I realised she had all these problems, I started to back away.’
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     Before Christmas, Madeleine had tried to split from Highsmith, but the affair lingered on into the new year. Then, while Pat was on a visit to London in January, Madeleine decided the time was right for her to tell Pat the truth, that she didn’t think their relationship had a future. ‘ “Maybe we shouldn’t sleep together,” ’ said the younger woman, ‘ “but maybe we can be friends.” ’
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In a letter to Alex Szogyi, Highsmith attempted to analyse what exactly had gone wrong.

     ‘I think it was decidedly my fault for making a play for Madeleine, succeeding, leading her on, with my letters. We had an acquaintance of 24 hours, in Samois, the rest progressed by letters . . . I must write to her again . . . and apologize for my own behaviour. I feel I have led on someone younger than I, unfairly. At the same time, I think she is thicker-skinned than I, so I hope there will be not a single tear shed. Madeleine is a political conservative. I find these people land on their feet. Or other people’s.’
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     Although Madeleine, when making the break, asked whether she could remain friends with Pat, she had no real intention of doing so. ‘I would have liked to have stayed a friend – she had precious few of them – but I couldn’t because she would make other assumptions and I didn’t want her to think there was any possibility that we might get back together,’ she says. ‘I always continued to admire her as a writer. And, in fact, her writing saved her. She knew that. She knew that it stood between her and, I would say, insanity. If she hadn’t had her work she would have been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholics’ home. If you look at the characters she writes about, they are her. It took a little while for me to figure this out, but all those strange characters haunting other people, and thinking and fantasising about them – they were her. She
was
her writing.

     ‘To me, her novel
This Sweet Sickness
is the one which most closely represents her. Like the book’s hero, she had a perception of her lovers which was different from reality. Without that, we wouldn’t have had the books, but unfortunately, it was a harsh price to pay.’
⁶⁶

Chapter 23

The false, the fake and the counterfeit