A stranger to herself, p.1
A Stranger to Herself, page 1
Hilary Bailey
A STRANGER TO HERSELF
For Fanny Blake,
my editor,
and Mabel Longford,
September 13th 1887-September 3rd 1979
Contents
ONE
Kate Higgins, March 14th, 1991
TWO
Violet Crutchley, 1913
Kate Higgins, March 29th, 1991
THREE
The Levines, April, 1991
FOUR
Violet Crutchley, 1913
Kate Higgins, April 9th, 1991
FIVE
Violet Crutchley, 1913
Kate Higgins, April 18th, 1991
SIX
Kate Higgins, May 5th, 1991
Violet Levine, 1914
SEVEN
Violet Levine, 1917
EIGHT
The Levines, May, 1991
NINE
Kate Higgins, May 28th, 1991
Violet Levine, 1917
TEN
Violet Levine, 1933
Kate Higgins, June 16th, 1991
ELEVEN
The Levines, June, 1991
TWELVE
Kate Higgins, June 17th, 1991
Violet Levine, 1936
THIRTEEN
Violet Mackinnon, 1951
Kate Higgins, June 19th, 1991
FOURTEEN
Violet Levine, 1976
Kate Higgins, June 20th, 1991
FIFTEEN
The Levines, 1990
SIXTEEN
Kate Higgins, June 22nd, 1991
A Note on the Author
One
Kate Higgins, March 14th, 1991
I got the job of writing Violet Levine’s biography in the early spring of 1991, just over a year after she died at the age of ninety-three. I was commissioned by Askew and Askew, an old-established firm of London publishers, who had employed Henry James as a reader and also William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Love Peacock and, for all I knew, Chaucer’s uncle. They commissioned me because I was the first person to suggest the biography to them, because no one else seemed to be doing it, because I had no track record so I would work for little money and because I knew Roger Littlebrown, who was senior person there, due to the fact that I was sleeping with his cousin Andy. ‘Seeing’ or ‘having a relationship with’ his cousin Andy might be a more conventional way of putting it but I have my standards and even then I wouldn’t have liked to claim I was having a relationship with Andy. Most of the time I didn’t and when I did I had no idea what it was. After what happened I now have even less idea, of course. Still, I knew Roger, via Andy, so I’d contacted him to discuss the idea of a biography about Violet.
We had lunch at a place called La Somnambule, just off the Haymarket, where there were Raffles Hotel-style fans in the ceiling and on the walls old stills of French thirties and forties films showing Jean Gabin in a pulled-down fedora and Simone Signoret in a slinky evening gown. We ate tiny portions of food nicely arranged on plates and in the ladies the notice telling you not to put sanitary towels down the lavatory was in French. What about women who didn’t understand French, I wondered? Still, it was bright at La Somnambule, and pretty clean, though I noticed Roger Littlebrown, a big, fair man, built on Danish invader lines, was giving his curly lettuce and teeny bit of duck an old-fashioned look. He would probably have been happier in one of those grubby restaurants where old men in old waiters’ costumes plonk down heavy portions of British food and insult you. He was an ‘I’ll have the steak and kidney’ man, an ‘Oh good – treacle tart’ chap.
The food was neither here nor there to me – I had no appetite and was probably better off eating at La Somnambule, where there was hardly any food, than trying to get down a steak somewhere else. I was worried about meeting. I wanted to write the biography, all right, but I wasn’t sure I could. Andy had told me I couldn’t, for starters, pointing out that I’d never done anything like it before and hadn’t the right gifts for it anyway. In the meanwhile, the atmosphere at the restaurant was not kind to the shabby and unsuccessful and unconfident, and I was all three.
I might sound, now, as if I was pretty smart in those days. Knowing, office-wise, hard to shake, rattle or generally disconcert. In fact, I’m not that, even now. Then, I was a mere babe in the wood. This story is, among other things, about how they separate the girls from the women these days; and, I think, about how I started, at thirty-five years old, as one and ended up not long after as the other.
I looked at Roger, frowning at the menu in search of carbohydrates. I’d met him several times, the first time about eighteen months earlier, just after I found Andy at a press do for a book about the Gulf War, which had been written by a friend of his. I’d gone along at the instigation of Dave Gottlieb, who was the deputy editor of The Mag, a weekly I sometimes did a little, badly paid work for, and was glad to get it. So, about a week after Andy and I began our affair, and I thought I must be the luckiest, if the most nervous, woman in the world, Andy said, ‘Do you mind coming along to a pub to meet my cousin Roger? He’s a dull publisher. I’m going to be the best man at his wedding. Got to discuss the arrangements in as little detail as possible. I think his fiancée’s coming too. You’ll probably have to hear about the dress and the mortgage and so forth. I’m sorry about this. I’ve been dodging it for ages, but there you are …’
The evening passed much as expected. Roger and Sarah, his future wife, were formidable in their size, blondness and good humour. There was a point where they were laughing about having exchanged contracts on their new house, at a price they couldn’t really afford, just as the sitting-room ceiling collapsed on their heads, when I felt a pang of envy at their unity go through me. Like a knife-stab. I reminded myself that I loved Andy. He was better looking, more intelligent, more interesting than Roger. We were both, perhaps, more complicated than Roger and Sarah. And, I told myself, the last thing I wanted was marriage, a house in rising Dalston, with rising damp, original features and two years’ work in it, a plump baby. I wanted magic, even if it meant sleepless nights, anxieties, jealousies and jumping for the phone when it rang.
The next time I saw Roger was at the wedding a few months later. My presence went down fairly badly in Chichester, since the family, especially Roger’s parents and Andy’s mother, and many of their friends, knew Andy had left his wife Miriam and was being unreliable about money for her and the baby. They assumed, since it improved the plot, I suppose, and in order to have someone to blame other than Andy, their golden boy, that it was for me that he had left his wife and that I was the woman eating big meals on his credit cards, going on holidays and telling him Miriam could easily go out and get a job. It wasn’t true – I’d met him months after he left Miriam and some of the information about the money was news to me, and not welcome news either. Anyway, there’s no anonymity at a small wedding in a country town, nor any of the complicitous chat of city life either. All they needed was a scarlet woman from the metropolis, especially if she was divorced, and they got her – it was me. Afterwards I accused Andy of having brought me to take the heat off him – I certainly thought he shouldn’t have invited me to go. He said that without me he would have been too miserable to play the part of Roger’s best man properly. This might have been true.
We saw Roger and Sarah occasionally after that, and paid a visit to the maternity hospital when their child, Thomas, was born. We should never have gone because when we left the maternity ward Andy was green in the face and sweating heavily. I knew he hadn’t wanted a child by Miriam, that he didn’t like children, but I’d never realised it was a fierce aversion. If he’d acted like that every time he saw a baby, while all the time his wife wanted one, then she must have had problems. It also accounted for why he never went to see her and was being so mean about money – he felt she had betrayed him by getting pregnant and having his child. After that there were sporadic meetings with Roger and Sarah but I never got to know them any better and thought I never would, even if we went on meeting in the same way for the next ten years. Not that I imagined we would, since I always doubted if Andy and I would be together for the next ten months, or even weeks.
Nevertheless, it was Andy who seized on my remark, when I saw in the paper that Violet Levine had died, that I’d always wanted to know more about her, and perhaps now someone would write a biography of her, and said, ‘Well, if you’re interested, why don’t you do it? You’re always saying you want to get your teeth into something more than what you’re doing.’
Violet Levine was one of those figures who inhabit the landscape of your brain a bit like ghosts – Josephine Baker, Ernest Bevin, King Zog, Albert Chevalier, Madame Blavatsky – you know they’re there, you think you know all about them but when you think about it, you don’t. People used to say of her, ‘Wasn’t she involved with the suffragettes? She became an MP when she was quite old, didn’t she – then there was scandal …?’ They would eventually say, ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ and then look puzzled and try to remember if she was or not. She’d written her autobiography, I Affirm, in 1957. It was still in print, in paperback in fact, and many people, mostly women, read it. I had myself, twice, but it had a mysterious way of seeming to tell you everything while leaving you, somehow, doubtful at the end. In retrospect I can see it wasn’t chiefly the quality of the information – though Violet was a specialist in leaving gaps where she didn’t want to go into details, and cunningly masking the gaps, as if spreading branches over a pit. It was just as of
ten the quality of emotion in her narrative, or rather the lack of it. Quite often Violet’s account of her life was impassive and neutral, rather as if she hadn’t been the main protagonist. Later, of course, I understood why. Anyway, she seemed to have come and gone without achieving the semi-mythological status some people acquire, often those with less claim to fame than Violet Levine. Her long life had made her, publicly, an historical figure who was still alive. Her ambiguous position vis-à-vis eternity did nothing for her image. You’d see her name in the lists of December birthdays in the newspaper and feel amazed she was still alive.
Andy’s remark about my doing the biography, was partly made to point out my habit of complaining and doing nothing, but it made me haul myself up in bed. ‘Why not? I’ll see if anybody wants me to. I know,’ I said, looking at the unbelievably handsome face, slightly tanned, with very blue eyes and quite long, rumpled black hair, glossy as an Indian’s, ‘I’ll suggest it to Roger – it won’t be so bad if he tells me to get lost.’
Andy heaved himself up also and, muttering, ‘Leave the filofax till later,’ kissed me and bore me down. There’s no way of conveying the effect he had on me – I was like a little pile of iron filings poured in front of a magnet, every bit of me moving irresistibly towards him. Some men are like that, some women, too, and they can have a fearsome effect on those who have little else to cling to.
I still don’t know why, that morning, I made my absurd statement about intending to write a biography of a woman I knew almost nothing about, or how, that afternoon, I stood in the hall and made my call to a rather startled Roger Littlebrown, who paused, said, ‘Er …’ and then, having thought it over, fixed a date to meet me. It feels like fate now, but it probably came from a desperation I was only half aware of. To date, at the age of thirty-five, I’d been married, which meant following my husband, an army officer, about, moving every two years, always to somewhere beginning with B – Berlin, Belize and, in the end, Belfast – and I’d had a child and managed to write two novels, somewhat reviewed, totally unprofitable and now out of print. Then I’d left for freedom with my eight-year-old son, who was now ten and living with my parents in Brighton while I shared my friend Di Carter’s council flat in west London and did bits for mags and papers. The relationship, if I have to call it that, with Andy Littlebrown, vibrant radical foreign correspondent for The Witness, liberal Sunday newspaper, had the effect of taking my mind off my undefined life, while at the same time somehow focusing my attention on it. There’s nothing like being with a man with an airbag, deadlines, international phone calls and an armful of injections against nasty tropical diseases to make you notice an almost complete lack of movement in your own life.
At the same time I knew what was happening to me, more or less. Also, I knew I was up against it. I wasn’t earning enough to keep my child, which puts a woman in a dreadful situation. I could barely keep myself, in fact. I didn’t have a proper job. I didn’t have the qualifications or track record to get one which would pay me decently. I didn’t live with Andy, except when he was in London. Then I sometimes stayed at his flat, sometimes Di’s. I had half a career, half a child, half a man and half a home. Everything was on terms. I couldn’t see any way of changing the situation.
That was why, when I met Roger Littlebrown of Askew and Askew, I lacked confidence and intensity and why, I now know, he mentally cut the amount of money he might have been prepared to pay me by a third during the course of our lunch. I hadn’t done any homework on the subject and to him I was only his cousin’s girlfriend, not a solid status since the whole family obviously said to each other, ‘Well, we all know what Andy’s like.’ As the meal progressed I could see, too, that he was very tired. Shared parenthood was taking it out of him, evidently. In fact it turned out that he, Sarah and the au pair were all dog-tired, a far cry from a few years back when one individual, the mother, used to be suicidally tired by a young child, or, if she was rich enough, only a servant was exhausted. This, as it turned out, was one of the secrets of Violet Levine’s brilliant career – servants, and plenty of them. It wasn’t something she’d stressed in her autobiography.
But tired though he was, the moment came when Roger leaned forward, keen, or mimicking keenness as publishers have to, and said to me, ‘Tell me exactly why you want to write Violet Levine’s biography.’
I put down my glass and adopted the lively expression of the successful interviewee – intelligent and practical, but dedicated, as if about to start work in a run-down leper colony with an austere order of nuns. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had the second glass, though, because the expression faded almost at once and I just said, ‘She was born in the same year as my grandmother, as it happens, but she’s only just died. She was a suffragette. She had three children, a political career. She was a writer. She was active in two world wars – well, I’ve seen it said she was a spy in the Second World War and she must have been in her mid-forties by then. She stood up for good causes all her life from the vote to CND. What more do you want? It’s all there, isn’t it?’ Roger must have seen the point but, from me, he needed more. I leaned forward. ‘But I have no idea what she was really like – I don’t think anybody has. That’s what I want to find out.’ (And I did find out, by God, I did, more than I ever wanted to know.) I made my eyes glitter at the thought. Roger’s glittered spasmodically back. As I saw the light go out I said, ‘There isn’t another biography of her, you know. This is the first.’ And I saw the glitter turn to a steadier gleam. We were on. As I’d spoken I realised I really wanted to write the biography and would have been very upset if Roger had just gone off saying, ‘I’ll let you know.’
People might wonder about my basic seriousness and more, perhaps, about Roger Littlebrown’s attitude to publishing, and, more specifically, to publishing biography. Why did he so placidly hire his cousin’s mistress to write the biography of a famous national figure? Why didn’t he ask more questions? I think the truth is that he had to give me a crack at it because I’d thought of it first. In the meanwhile he had first call on the idea. If I didn’t work out, he could get rid of me and get someone else to do it instead.
Roger said, ‘I think we’d like to do this,’ and asked the name of my agent. I didn’t have one so he said he’d put a proposal in the post to me. In the end he offered me fifteen thousand pounds, half payable in advance, and the book to be completed in less than a year. It seemed like a long time and a lot of money then.
I gave up teaching the evening class in GCSE history that afternoon, leaving the pupils in the lurch. Andy left for Ho Chi Minh City that evening. He congratulated me when I told him Roger was interested in the book, and said, ‘I hope you’re not biting off more than you can chew.’ But as he picked up his bag, visa, passport, wallet and letters of introduction I suppose he was quite pleased I didn’t sit there, watching him getting ready to move, with the unspoken words hovering in the air, ‘Do you love me? Is there another woman? Is she in London, is she in Vietnam, New York? When will you be back?’ My air of being a dog left behind in the hall always made him uneasy. Though I did say, ‘When will you be back?’ and he replied, ‘Two weeks, possibly.’ He turned in the doorway, the tailor’s dream, bronzed throat coming out of the open-necked white shirt from a superior shirtmaker, his shiny hair hanging a little low on to the collar of his cream suit, a flash of the blue eyes over the shoulder. He was saying, ‘I’ll ring you when I can.’ I’ll always remember that moment – it’s nice to know you had the teen dream, the housewife’s Mills and Boon, just once in your life. Of course, the price was high, as it turned out.
I left his Notting Hill Gate flat, which was the top floor of two houses made into one, a dream of pale carpets, huge windows looking over little crooked roofs and full of sky, everything convenient and luxurious and taken care of by the daily, Mrs Connelly, including the plants and the unneutered cat, Rupert, who roamed his ginger way over the rooftops, raping and terrorising.
‘Cheerio, Rupert,’ I said to the battered cat, who lay stretched out on the pale carpet. He opened an eye at me and closed it again. I walked down the five flights to the bottom, my head filled with yearning for handsome Andy, and little did I realise, when I went into a bookshop on my way back to Henry Thackery House and spent my last five pounds on a new copy of Violet Levine’s autobiography, I Affirm, exactly what I was letting myself in for.
