The Real Mrs Miniver (34 page)

I
HAD
to cut myself off from you in order to make a fair trial of this business here and not be torn to pieces with nostalgia all the time. I have tried, honestly, to make a go of it, but I can't live like this. I'm not exactly unhappy, just paralysed, and hungry for expressed affection. Now that Robbie's at school there is nobody to touch, except a cairn puppy the farmer in Argyll gave him, which I look after and which cuddles up to me on the sofa and is very like Rob – small, quick, intelligent and loving.

Promise me, darling Liebes, that even if you have got involved with somebody else, & are living with her, or married to her, by the time I come over in the spring [for the publication of
A Pocketful of Pebbles
], you will at least put your arms round me & hold me close, & say something zärtlich.
1
(Damn – I knew that writing to you would plough me up & rouse everything that I have to suppress day and night.)

She steeled herself against ‘the expected thrust in the vitals', as she called it: the letter from Dolf which would inevitably follow, explaining that he had taken the sensible decision, and had found a charming girl, not blonde, a pianist actually, twenty-seven years old, interested in architecture …

Jan with Robert's cairn Culi, in 1945

But it wasn't a letter, it was a cable. And its message made Jan ‘melt with zärtlichkeit'. She wrote straight back to him, her longest letter ever – thirty-six pages. ‘My darling darling sweet love…'

It seemed to me almost impossible that you should still be ‘uninvolved and unchanged' after all my long silence & our intolerable separation. Oh, Liebstes, Liebstes, how wonderful that you still feel the same.

… The long and the short of it is that life in these circumstances is impossible. It is not life at all, but a limbo, a half-animal existence – no, not as warm as that. It cannot last. I am neither truly domestic nor creative, & I can't sleep, & I can't write, & I can't thaw out at all except with very old friends (and ex-'Friends' who are now friends only).

She described the months since sailing from Halifax: the stormy Atlantic crossing, the terrible holiday in Scotland, the exhausting cleaning of Wellington Square, and she brought Dolf up to date, showing him how the war had polarized Tony and her:

It became increasingly clear [in Scotland] that what he was finding it impossible to control was the fact that he is once more, & even more than before, madly irritated by my whole personality, voice, outlook & presence. In theory he is ‘very fond of me', ‘couldn't possibly
dis
like me', & other similar half-compliments which are more wounding than any insults. We have arrived at a sort of
modus vivendi
which consists of my keeping out of his way as much as possible and watching every word & gesture when I
am
alone with him so as not to madden him. He doesn't irritate me, except very occasionally (mostly when he's trying to do something practical in the way of carpentry etc., and being both clumsy and pigheaded about it). He simply stultifies and nullifies and sterilizes me. The worst thing of all is his inability or unwillingness to discuss any of our joint problems, until they're so far gone as to be almost insoluble …

Almost everybody I know is in the same state, if that's any consolation. A wise woman writer has suggested that there should be a moratorium on all marriages, owing to the war, & that any 2 people who want to re-marry should do so. The housing shortage is appalling. The latest Gallup poll says that 1 adult in 3 is trying to find different accommodation. We have turned into a nomadic nation.

Tony and Jan's friends kept saying to them, ‘Aren't you two lucky to have this lovely house to come back to!' (‘And the sword turns in the wound again.') The house was, in fact, ‘an ice-house'. The drawing-room was coldly tidy and unlived-in, the fire lit only when visitors came. Tony, when he was at home, spent most of the time in his upstairs bed-sitting-room, the room in which Robert had been born. Jan spent most of the time in her bed-sitter studio (‘a heavenly room, in which one could be
so
happy'). Janet found the atmosphere in the house so unbearable that she bought a Baby Belling and lived independently in her bedroom when she was not out at her business course. Robert was away at Stowe, and Jamie had still not returned from Yugoslavia. Nannie was the only binding presence: she lived on the top floor and was out at work all day, ‘but thank God she is here most nights for supper & provides a diversion & a link for the 3 of us.'

Longing to touch bits of London which reminded her of Dolf, Jan visited Mme Luhn, the landlady at 100 Denbigh Street who had called him down to the telephone that evening in November 1939. There she was, and her
pot au feu
was still simmering on the stove. Jan walked westwards along the river and knocked on the door of 113 Cheyne Walk, the place of assignations, where she and Dolf had heard tugs hooting and the evening-newspaper seller shouting of Nazi advances as they lay together postponing the moment of parting. Jan's friend Charles Spencer opened the door. ‘You wouldn't possibly have a room to let, would you?' Jan asked him. ‘I have, actually,' he said. ‘Not the one you used in 1940 – the one just across across the hall.'

Jan took it, cheaply. She now had a bolt-hole from the ‘ice-house'. But nothing could stop ‘the Jungles' coming back, which they did, soon after she had finished writing the November letter to Dolf. Until then, the busyness of getting the house in order had kept depression away, and had prevented her from facing up to her creative sterility. But now ‘the Jungles' were worse than ever: she found herself beset by irrational as well as rational glooms, and was caught once again in the vicious circle of illness and unhappiness interacting and making each other worse. Her doctor treated her for anaemia, low blood-pressure, and change-of-life depressions, and every night for two months she took sleeping-pills, which had, as she later described it, ‘a devastating effect'.

Just before Christmas, Jamie came home. The fire was lit in the drawing-room. With Robert home for the holidays and the family reunited, it looked on the surface (for a few days) almost as if the Minivers had come back to life. Jamie played Meccano with Robert, and Robert was thrilled to rediscover the older brother he had not seen for five and a half years. But Jan, still in her ‘Jungles', felt like an outsider, watching the family party through a window. At the end of the Christmas holidays the boys went away again. Emerging in the New Year from the worst of the ‘hell' – enough, at least, to be able to write a letter – Jan wrote to Dolf on 17 January 1946, her fingers stiff and cold because of the fuel shortage:

I have lost all joy & gaiety, & there is hardly anybody here I really give a damn about. I don't see how I can go on existing like this, in this hell of nothingness. And yet, when I try to face the alternative, of splitting up and busting things up for Rob, I just can't bear the prospect of it. It wouldn't be so bad for Janet, who is practically on her own anyway, but she does need a ‘background' of some kind when she's just beginning to go to dances, & I feel that even an only apparently united home is better than none.

Perhaps Jan remembered from her own childhood that, awful though it had been having parents who were icily polite to one another, having separated parents who were openly hostile to one another and nowhere one could truly call ‘home' had been even worse.

I see no immediate prospect of coming to America, and when I shall see you again God only knows – unless some miracle happens & our star lights up again. It is so very, very faint now, Liebes, that I can hardly see it twinkling at all. Was it all a dream, our happiness, & did we really once exist, and be together, and laugh & have fun? I feel more and more unreal, and more and more entrapped in the cast of some play where I don't belong. The only real thing here is Robert, with his shining intelligent eyes & his loving heart.

It was difficult, in the immediate post-war period, to get an exit permit for America unless you were going on Government business, or to do something which would help the dollar exchange. Clark Getts, the lecture agents who had ruled Jan's working life during the war years, were clamouring for her to come back and embark on another tour. If she accepted, she would almost certainly be able to ‘swing it', as she put it, and get a passage. But she couldn't bring herself to take it on. The tiringness and loneliness of the last one still haunted her. She was determined to stay out of Clark Getts's clutches.

Her sense of isolation was compounded by the ‘unintimacy' which had developed between her and Janet. But at last, in early 1946, they had a frank talk. Janet told her mother why she was feeling miserable and uncommunicative: she not only hated the atmosphere of the house and the dreariness of post-war England, but she was missing her friends, and pining for Thomi, and saw no way of getting back to America. Jan's heart melted at this, because it was so much the same story as her own. She told Janet about her love for Dolf – though she did not confess that the affair had been going on for six years. Janet was amazed – shocked – worried – delighted – she loved and admired Dolf – but what would be the outcome?

The ‘star' was fainter than Jan knew. During those two months of silence, between November 1945 and January 1946, while she was deep in the ‘Jungles' and not writing to Dolf, he was stationed in Indiana on his last stint in the Army before being discharged in March 1946. And there, on leave in Indianapolis, he met
‘l'Indianapolitaine'
or ‘the Indiana Compromise', as Jan later called her: a blonde, aged twenty-two, full of physical attraction, and irresistible.

The letter in which he confessed this has not survived, but from Jan's reaction it seems that Dolf played it down: she was bold enough to say (after admitting that the news was ‘agony'), ‘I know that no relationship that you or I will ever have with anybody else could ever be in the same street with yours or mine.' Her method – just as in the infidelity-imagining letter of 1944 – was to draw on the depth of the relationship between her and Dolf, and to brush aside any others as shallow and not worthy of discussion. All she needed to be sure of, she said, was that the visit to New York she was planning for the publication of
A Pocketful of Pebbles
(which had been postponed till the summer) would not coincide with a ‘visit from Indianapolis'.

She was not certain of the journey to America: her application to the Department of Overseas Trade (‘My publishers want me to be there to promote sales by means of personal appearances') had not yet been accepted. ‘I guess you feel the same about it as I do,' she wrote to Dolf on 8 April, ‘– a big longing combined with a small dread, because it's only, so to speak, another “furlough”, & must lead to another separation.'

But the very prospect of seeing Dolf, now a civilian again, and back working at the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia, and of being once again the centre of attention at book-signings, rekindled her ‘Winstonian' energies. She dared to get in touch with the BBC, and was welcomed with rapture. ‘I've been on the air quite a lot,' she wrote to Dolf, ‘transatlantic quizzes, & reading my own poetry on the North American Service. It's unspeakably relieving to be coming out of that bloody jungle at last: I've never lived through such hell as this winter has been, and I hope I never shall again.'

The Department of Overseas Trade said ‘Yes'. She could go. Delighted, she wrote to Frank Morley of Harcourt Brace telling him she would be in New York for publication day. Her letter crossed with one from Dolf telling her that her visit would coincide exactly with the ‘visit from Indianapolis'. It was, she wrote back to him, ‘the most damnable tangle.'

I could not endure to be in NY while she was there – it would be intolerable for all 3 of us. So I must just postpone my visit. Difficult, because the whole point was to be there on the day of publication, not 3 weeks later. I've written to Frank Morley to say ‘owing to further family complications' I now won't be able to arrive until the end of June. God knows what he'll think. Oh, damn, damn, damn … what a mess! I can't help seeing, in a detached way, how grimly funny it is in its way.

Once again, she braced herself for the inevitable letter in which Dolf would advise her not to come to New York at all, because he was going to marry
‘l'Indianapolitaine'
and had been trying to break it to her gently. His letter arrived. She didn't dare to open the envelope, but sat looking at it and feeling sick.

… And then when I finally summoned up enough guts to read it, it was like a sweet balm pouring all over me, & I felt (for the first time in months) warmed right through & not lonely any more.

You're right, Liebes. Involvements are more trouble & anguish than they are worth. Even real love brings enough anguish, God knows, in a world like this, all full of Displaced Persons – but real love
is
worth it, every time.