Lady Constance Lytton Page 8

  In the meantime, John visited several times during the summer, and in September there was a flurry of letters as he pondered his next career move.25 He would soon be returning to South Africa, but ‘it is really very difficult to say what will happen to me afterwards … the hopeless fact remains that I can’t afford to live even in my own battalion’. Planning months if not years abroad and not asking her opinion about it, as well as mentioning his lack of money again, is not a strong indication that he was thinking of a shared future with her. But she wrote back telling him that ‘the lifting of the yoke of restrictions would remove all burden and false position, misunderstandings etc’, and he responded with ‘some things which I feel have insured me a foundation of happiness for life’.26 It was enough to give her hope, even after he went back to South Africa with the Lochs in October. She was determined to try to keep all their relations out of their relationship in the future. They were telling her that it was in her best interests to give up and cut off all contact. She refused, and was obstinate enough that Edith eventually gave up and allowed Constance to write. She was desperate to keep up her bond with his relations. She wrote to Maggy with such emotional honesty that it was an instant cause of regret, saying she had created ‘an impossible situation between her and me’. Maggy could not treat Constance as John’s fiancée because her status was ambiguous and uncertain.

  Early in 1895, Constance began writing for a journal called The Realm, where she earned £20 a quarter: her first regular salary.27 Priced 3d, The Realm covered the week in politics and the arts alongside ‘miscellaneous’ essays and ‘personal recollections’. Constance’s job, once again, was reviewing novels, though the real work was in the reading, with every article covering several volumes, each briskly dispatched in a few hundred words. She wrote to Aunt T:

  I feel so invigorated by this new work. The first day I sat up till 2 am doing the work and letters, accounts, etc. Got up 7 next morning, walked to station, lunched off brown bread and butter and three gingerbread nuts, walked home from station, same lunch, no tea either day, walked home from station. Felt rampantly well.28

  Her articles in The Realm were unsigned, so perhaps Constance felt valued for her skills rather than her name, and at least this would give Emily less cause for complaint. But Constance soon gave up her new profession. ‘She found it took her too much from home,’ Betty wrote: both Emily and Edith believed that all Constance’s time was best spent with Edith.29 Perhaps it was too much to argue with her family over her work and her faltering relationship at the same time. After her summer holiday, mentions of The Realm and references to reviewing peter out in her journal; by the following year, they have disappeared.

  On holiday in Florence in May, Constance met John’s cousin Maurice Baring. His mother was Lady Ponsonby’s sister; his father was part of the Barings banking family. Then only twenty, he would become one of the country’s best-known writers, as a journalist, poet, novelist and playwright; he was also a close friend of Ethel Smyth.30 At first, Constance was only interested in Maurice for his associations. ‘He has gestures, tones and looks that betray his lineage. Result … desperate flirtation at once,’ she told Betty. ‘I grew loud over this, and ended up with one of my worst giggles … to the alarm of everyone else.’31 Then Maurice let her down by going to Naples instead of taking her on a promised excursion.

  Oh! so aggravatingly like the family his writingless way of doing it. I know if ever my matters run smooth and banns are published, wedding arranged etc. that I shall be waiting at the church, (as the bridegroom generally does … I can see myself hovering about the Altar) and that the other person will never turn up.32

  Despite this early hiccup, Maurice and Constance spent much of the rest of the holiday together, becoming lifelong friends and regular correspondents. Sadly few of their letters have survived – in fact, Betty says they were ‘destroyed’ – and one wonders if this was because of what they may have revealed about the John Ponsonby relationship.33

  When they returned home in June, Edith received an unexpected letter from Balmoral. The Queen, ‘having a grateful sense of yr husband’s distinguished services, as well as a sincere admiration of the way in which you have borne yr sorrows & trials’, asked her if she would become a lady-in-waiting. Edith fretted over the decision. Being a lady-in-waiting was no great hardship, requiring just a few weeks’ service a year. It came with a salary of £300. Now the family income was just £1,900 a year, that was a very significant sum. Yet Edith hesitated. She had got used to a quiet life and was reluctant to go back into public. She tentatively suggested that a maid of honour post might suit Emily instead, but Emily turned this down indignantly, declaring that she was a republican. It was Gerald, Betty’s husband, who persuaded Edith to accept the offer – not least because otherwise she might not be able to keep Neville at Eton.34

  Edith’s four years as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria were uneventful. Her diary of her time at court is not very interesting and mostly comments on the weather, the dinners and the drives. She spent two fortnights with the Queen each year, sometimes at Osborne, sometimes at Balmoral and sometimes at Windsor, which she liked most as it enabled her to see Neville. These interludes were a welcome break for Constance: she enjoyed being on her own sometimes. She went to stay with Betty in Ireland, where Gerald was now the Chief Secretary. She appears in the court circular pages of The Times during the late 1890s, attending state concerts or balls in the London palaces; not very often, but almost certainly more frequently than she would have liked.

  John returned to England after about six months in South Africa and came for a short stay in August. Whatever Edith saw on this occasion, it was enough to set alarm bells ringing again and she banned Constance from writing to him. On 26 October, Constance wrote in her diary with evident relief, ‘Decree lifted, alright again!’ John’s father died on 21 November, but he sent her a telegram telling her not to come to the funeral. She saw him with his siblings and Lady P after Christmas.35 By now, she was marking all her journal entries relating to John, his letters or his relations with a cross, making it easier to find them when she went back over her notes.

  The next time Constance saw John was in April 1896 when he came to stay for a weekend. Constance was in raptures, but the visit was not a success. He was ill and tired and seemed sad, but given the fact that she tried not to talk to him when she saw him, for fear of family scrutiny, she did not really know why.36 The uncertainty was terrible, and brought on a bout of depression. ‘I’ve been having the most sickening time with myself,’ she told Adela.

  Can’t think what it is that suddenly lets me down to the lowest depths without a word of warning … I now seem to have slipped to the very bottom of the pole and know that the inducement which led to my climbing it is gone, worse still perhaps was never there, and the power to imagine it again won’t come back either.’37

  John came again in August and Constance did her best not to be awkward, or give away anything of her feelings, or even to have a minute alone with him. ‘Hardly talked to him and never looked till one last moment on the last day,’ she told Adela.

  All I did, and didn’t do, must have helped to lift me off his conscience. Of course the moment he had gone I began to wonder if I need have been quite as wasteful of diamond moments, and wise still to wonder if he could have thought me a fraction unkind. But he never ‘sees’, and never thinks anything, so I only consoled myself with the knowledge that he couldn’t have repented at the time or afterwards, ‘What a bore that she sticks so!’38

  In November, he came again, which was cause both for complete elation (‘the most dreamlike true thing almost that my life has known’) and total despair (‘the woeful realisation … of how hopelessly ugly I’ve grown lately, and that I don’t possess a single garment of any kind that isn’t acutely hideousifying [sic]’.) He was – as usual – late. The next morning, he proposed that he might stay after breakfast. But the rest of the family were going out, and Edith said he
must go with them. Had he planned for the two of them to be alone for a reason? Was this a moment that was missed?39 If so, it was an opportunity which never came again. ‘For three years she fed on hope; for another eleven years she continued to cover up a volcano of feeling with no hope,’ Betty wrote sadly.40 This unsatisfactory encounter, so longed-for and so disappointing, dragged her down through 1896. It was not until January 1897 that she was able to tell Adela: ‘Suicidal mania gone. No self-deception, no nonsense.’41 Her birthday entry in her journal that year reads: ‘Cleaned. Darned … Did flowers. Played.’ These are what passed for birthday treats.42

  Though she had given up journalism, working for her aunt was a different matter. It was exactly the sort of dutiful task that appealed to Constance and was acceptable to her family. Throughout 1896, Constance helped Aunt T to write the book that became Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden. It is a mixture of instruction and anecdote; half-diary and half-guide to household management; the upper-class and scatty offspring of Elizabeth von Armin and Isabella Beeton. The tone reflects what Aunt T was: a lovely, but undeniably batty, aunt, with fixed and eccentric opinions, who careered through life and expected others to catch up. On 28 May, for example, she extolls the benefits of gravel paths, then instructs the reader on the best way of packing flowers, then offers advice on making fish sauce and risotto. Aunt T had personality in spades, and it shines all the way through the book. ‘Weeding!’ she exclaims. ‘What it means to us all!’ Her class is very evident: ‘Get the village blacksmith to make you some flower-pots – he will understand that,’ she says; but so is her worldly practicality: ‘Celeriac is an excellent vegetable, not very common in England, and when carefully cooked, with a good brown sauce, forms a valuable contribution to the winter supply.’43 Though she herself was a vegetarian, there are plenty of recipes for omnivores: chicken ravioli, roast hare and oxtail soup. Once the year in the garden and the kitchen has been dealt with, Aunt T turns to more general topics, such as how to raise children. ‘The longer I live, the more I believe that a woman’s education … should be awakening and yet superficial, teaching her to stand along and yet not destroying her adaptability for a woman’s highest vocation, if she can get it – which is, of course, marriage and motherhood,’ Aunt T opines. ‘Marriage should not be a woman’s only profession, but it should be her best and highest hope.’44 How much might this have affected Constance, still no nearer to realising her best and highest hopes.

  Unexpectedly, Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden was a bestseller. It went into twenty-eight editions – it was still being reprinted after the First World War – and there were to be three sequels. Constance’s work is acknowledged in the preface: ‘These Notes would never have been extracted from me without the encouragement I have received from all my dear nieces, real and adopted, and the very practical assistance of one of them.’45 The appendix, on the art of Japanese flower arranging, is directly attributed to Constance; it was a particular interest and hobby of hers. Apart from that, it is impossible to disentangle exactly what Constance’s contribution was, but she appears to have been a kind of amanuensis, cajoling and patiently keeping Aunt T on track until it was complete. Constance received £75 for her work.46 Later, she regretted taking the money, turning what should have been a family duty into a professional transaction, and decided to try to pay it back.47 The book is dedicated to Edith. Their shared delight in the publication was short-lived, though, as Aunt T’s husband died in an accident soon after; Constance went to visit and comfort her.48

  But her main preoccupation was John and their lack of contact. She saw him for the day in April and then there was total silence. On 28 June, she wrote in her diary, ‘Three months since seen JP,’ and then every Tuesday for the rest of the year, she added to the list: three months and one week; three months and two weeks; three months and three weeks. By August, she was reduced to writing, ‘Heard JP lost cigarette case and wished for it.’49 Neither Emily’s marriage to Edwin Lutyens nor Victor’s twenty-first birthday celebrations that month – at which Edith wore the same outfit, perhaps reminding her children that money was still in short supply50 – could distract her from her obsession. Emily’s wedding was notable mostly because John sent a present. Shortly afterwards, Constance wrote in her diary despairingly: ‘10 times seen, 7 times a letter by this time since April 5 last year. This year not once nor one letter.’51 A visit to Ireland that autumn with Edith did not cheer her up.

  Constance had to hear it from a friend that John was planning to go to Niger with his regiment – only to hear from Maggy and Lady P that this was off. When she saw them in November, their attitude gave her a renewed glimmer of hope. The way that ‘Lady P’ talked over the situation made Constance feel sure that they both wanted the same thing, and it was wonderful. ‘Oh … that a real live someone else to whom I haven’t talked should turn and talk to me as if it was all something real and still alive. Instead of the feeling of a stale me more of something that praps [sic] never was,’ she told Adela.52 It is odd that Lady P was encouraging Constance to cling on if there was still no prospect of John inheriting or earning enough money and still no formal understanding, to say nothing of the fact that he had been ignoring her for months. Perhaps Constance was reading too much into whatever Lady P actually said, for soon after came the only letter from John which seems to have survived.

  Dear Lady Conny,

  … I have just been offered a post in the Uganda Rifles, which after family deliberations I have accepted. It means a two years job, and I shall be seconded from my regiment … Two years rather a long time but I hope to save a bit out there although I have to provide myself to start with, with jams and potted meats to last two years … I hope you will think it a good thing as it may get one on a bit, and perhaps it may lead to getting a nomination for the Staff College out of it…

  Yours very sincerely,

  S.53

  Was she supposed to wait? Would this salary be enough to support married life when he got back? Nothing was clear to Constance. These words, as she reported to Adela, ‘may mean something although they also may mean nothing’. Constance was hopeful they meant something, saying, ‘When I think of these things I can’t believe my own happiness.’ But he had not written to her in over a year, nor seen her in nine months, nor consulted her on his plans. He doesn’t even wish her a Merry Christmas. His noncommittal attitude was all too clear to Edith, who was extremely upset by this letter. She didn’t want him to come and say goodbye. ‘Wished I’d “set him free”, “give him up”, not see him before he went, etc etc. That he didn’t care for me one bit, never came to see me or took any trouble to be nice, only warmed me up just before he went away, etc etc,’54 Constance told Adela. She saw this as Edith being obstructive and annoying. She did not contemplate the possibility that Edith was right. Eventually, since Constance said that if John wasn’t allowed up to the Danes she would simply go down to London and see him, Edith relented.

  This visit seems to have given Constance further cause for hope, as she told a friend that ‘the rasping thumping groaning pain of questioning whether he cares a rap about me and only getting “No” for answer has ceased’.55 That didn’t mean that they were any nearer to getting married. Constance seems to have taken an almost masochistic pleasure in pining after a lost cause. She would not tell him how she truly felt and tried her best not to be an obligation, a bore or a stain on his conscience. She told herself that all that mattered was that he loved her, whether or not they ever got married. But he left for Uganda in January 1898 and there was still no engagement. Her journal for this year records his movements as well as hers. When she had letters or news, she would go back and note where he had been on a particular day.

  In February, she went to visit Maggy and Lady P. They obviously loved her, particularly Lady P, ‘who talked to me as if I had almost a share in the family circle’. It was wonderful not only to have news from John in Uganda, but to hear anecdotes and stories about his character and his childhoo
d. But it wasn’t enough when ‘he has been dead lame for a time’. She began to feel that it was silly to try to be a part of a family where she didn’t really belong. She decided to try to loosen the ties between them. Still, when John’s younger brother Arthur got married at Easter, ‘after years of seeming quite impossible’, she must have wondered whether her own seemingly impossible situation would end the same way. She was asked to be a bridesmaid, but had to decline as she was going to Venice with her family for a month.56 Neville’s friend Edward Marsh came with them. He was a civil servant and in 1905 became private secretary to Victor’s great friend Winston Churchill; as such, he will recur in this story.

  John wrote once in a while from Uganda, but with neither the frequency nor the tone that Constance hoped for. Letters took weeks to arrive; she began predicting when he might receive hers, and then calculating when she might have one back. He signed the letters ‘ever yours’ but didn’t respond to any of the ‘special bits’ in her own letters.57 For more substantial information, she had to rely on the letters home to his family, which they forwarded to her and she copied out. Her desire to hear news overcame her resolution to put some distance between herself and the family, partly because she was so worried about him. The regiment was caught up in fighting throughout the second half of 1898; his movements were uncertain; and he was periodically laid low with fever. Once or twice he wrote unprompted, which only encouraged Constance’s imagination more, especially when he said he was ‘hoping for another letter from you which will buck me up considerably’.58 He seemed lonely and he was certainly uncomfortable, with only goat to eat and warm water to drink during his illnesses.

  In October 1899, the second Boer War broke out. ‘It knocks me bang up against reality in the midst of so much that’s sham and hypocritical, and hysterical,’ Constance told Aunt T. ‘The thought of war doesn’t grate on my nerves as family quarrels, female jealousies … do.’59 It is rather surprising that she didn’t take a more critical approach to the war, given that Olive was an outspoken opponent and was even interned for a period. Constance was primarily concerned about the consequences for her friends and relatives who went out to fight – especially, of course, what it might mean for John. His regiment was far away from the fighting for the moment, and he was due home in January, but there was still the possibility that he and his comrades may be drawn into the conflict. Aunt T, like Edith, suggested to Constance that she tell John she didn’t love him anymore. It was rather a heartless thing to do in the circumstances, and Constance refused, though it was now four years since they’d even breathed a word of marriage. She had, though, given up seeing the Ponsonby family, and told both John and his family that she had done this ‘so that when he comes home there may not be the shadow of an expectation on the part of my people’.60 She was often ill this year. She felt terrible for almost the whole of January, had a ‘sick headache,’ in April, rheumatism in her shoulder in September, and lumbago in December. ‘Felt rather slack’, ‘dead tired’ and ‘very exhausted’ were also noted.61 These illnesses were surely connected to her constant worrying. This only got worse when Aunt T’s son Syd was killed in the fighting; her cousin Edward Loch was also injured. But Edith was angry that Constance seemed to be escaping family duties and wasting her time on an impossible dream, and burst out in frustration that if Aunt T had lost a son she had lost a daughter.62