So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Penelope Fitzgerald
card, but it’s the picture I wanted to send, a favourite of Daddy’s too.
Ma
76 Clifton Hill, NW8
[postcard of the cover of Innocence]
[July 1986]
So glad to hear news but I feel bewildered and wd. like to ask so many other things, looking forward to seeing you on Monday week but please let me know won’t you if I can be of the least use** as really the things I’m doing are singularly unimportant now I come to look at them.
Collins have printed these cards at vast expense, please leave it casually on the mantelpiece if there’s room! And please could you look at the thunbergia in the greenhouse and fill up its water-dish, hope it has not passed away. No matter.
Still sneezing. So glad the house will soon be rid of the dreaded mark-sheets and brown envelopes,
So much love to you all
Ma
76 Clifton Hill &c
12 January [1987]
Dearest Tina,
They say it’s going on for several days, and ‘elderly people living on their own’, old folk, like myself, are given useful advice, which is to keep warm, and to remember that it is warmer inside than out – not quite true here, where all the pipes have stopped working and Theo has gone down to work (which he never does on Mondays) because there is central heating at the College of Heralds. He left his bath full of water and Desmond and I found it had turned to solid ice – would be bath-shaped if it was taken out, which Luke would like. And that’s the main point of this letter, to say how tremendous it was to see Lukey himself again, and more so, eating and bustling about and putting us all in our places. You and T have been so steady and patient with him all the way through and that’s made him able to come through it, because it was an illness, even if it’s never likely to come back again.
I wish I’d finished digging up the back garden before the great cold, as the frost would have got into the earth then and broken it up, but then there are so many things I ought to have done. I’m reading Virginia W.’s diaries again, not from the genius point of view, but all her little jealousies and miseries about the reviewers and the housekeeping and Leonard’s rash, and going upstairs to tell him (where he sat solidly pipe-smoking and advising Labour Politicians) ‘my book is hopelessly bad, I must destroy all the proofs at once’ and Leonard steadying her down and saying ‘you know you always say that, you know you say it every time’.
The lunch party on Sunday wasn’t at all what I expected, not really a Virago one, but it would have been wrong not to go. Tim Hilton cooked enormous quantities – mussels, wh. I couldn’t eat, but fortunately a little girl, a 5-year old, Lily, was also very critical of the idea of eating them and that, I hope, meant I wasn’t noticed so much – pasta with a nice sauce, wh. I thought was the main course, then a beautiful leg of roast lamb with roast pots.cut small and mangetouts – the baby (9 months) sat there very gravely and good as gold, reminding me a little of Paschal – he has a cot in their bedroom and a wooden playpen in the corner of the living-room (bookshelf built all round the picture-rail, quite a good idea, but how to reach the books? But the bookshelves were all completely full) – one of the guests, in fact the mother of shellfish-rejecting Lily, was Jemima Thompson, now living at 34 Well Walk, where I was brought up, with a nice journalist husband from Newcastle looking like Philip Larkin, and her mother, Ursula Thompson, but I don’t know if you remember them next door at Chestnut Lodge or going to stay with them near Lulworth Cove, or the little brother Toby, now a psychiatrist. I walked back with Jemima through the freezing Hampstead streets (she was going to give someone a Greek lesson, having given up her job at Time Life when Lily was born) – enough of all this, you’ll say.
Now a weather report on TV, showing those brightish clouds in the SW and very black ones in the SE, so hope it isn’t, in Lukey’s words ‘terribly cold in Weston’ you always manage to make things easy wherever you go, but still, with 2 tiny children, it does mean managing. – They keep saying it’s the coldest night for 425 years – but can it be worse than those nights in Fergie’s time, when the tree fell, and you all had to huddle into the living-room? Or indeed when Valpy was born, and all the patients crowded into my room because I had a new-born baby and so was allowed a coal fire? At least you’re not in the shop and won’t have to discuss the matter of the cold with an endless succession of people.
Desmond says he’ll ring up a plumber and take him out ‘for a few pints’. He (Desmond Maxwell) is not a bad sort really. I have one cold tap running (just), and a kettle of course. – He tells me (perhaps indiscreetly) that Theo’s ‘flat’ at the College of Heralds, which Joan told me (and I think believes) was to sleep in while he was on official duty, in case the Queen wanted to make someone a lord in the middle of the night – is really just a spare office with a sofa, in case he can’t manage to stagger home. And Joan bought some pretty tea towels for it!
I’m sure you don’t realise, as one can’t, working away at it, day by day, what an immense amount you’ve done at Moorland Rd, and how well everything is beginning to look. The hall, with the coloured glass, is such a good introduction to the house, then the other colours follow.
A letter from Broccoli Clark inc., Columbia, asking for my impressions of the Booker Prize. I think I might give them a few of my recollections, which would stop them being so painful, as surely nobody in England would be likely to read them.
I rang up Ria to congratulate her &, if everything doesn’t freeze up, hope to have lunch with her tomorrow, when she doesn’t have to lecture until 3.
We usually have the vegetable soup and French bread at Habitat and Ria recklessly takes more than one or indeed 2 of those miserable little squares of butter. I do hope nothing has frozen up in Bishop’s Road, there is such a complicated balance to keep going there, and of course Tom-Tom hates the cold, but he has plenty of room to extend himself there.
Theo has come in, and is smashing the ice in the bath. BBC advises elderly people living on their own not to cut down on the food, so shall have my dinner, parsnips and bacon.
Now I’m going to ask you something which I hope you won’t find mad or irritating or both, and that is, do you think that you and Terry could possibly find something else to go down on the living-room floor except the serape? I thought it was lost, and never expected to see it again, but since you’ve found it, and all the lovely colours (though not the right ones, I know) I should so very much like to keep it as what it really is, a bedspread, I haven’t one here in London and of course not the Bishop’s Rd bedsitter, (if John and Maria really feel able to do that) – it is the only thing I have left from Chestnut Lodge, as I wasn’t allowed the opportunity to say what I wanted to keep from the sell-up at Blackshore, and all the things I cared about most were sold – well, all that’s in the past, – but I carried the serape all the way from Mexico City, through N. York, then Halifax and back to Liverpool on the old Franconia, and it was never meant as a rug or a carpet, any more than your own heirloom patchwork quilt, and if it has to be on bare boards without any undercarpet I don’t think it will last long, if it’s walked over. Please don’t think me mad, or even worse, stingy, but please could you take it up, I was wondering whether the green cotton dhurries would do instead, they’re machine-made (the serape is hand-woven) and don’t matter a bit: but I suppose they would be the wrong colour? Anyway I would be glad to contribute to another rug for your birthday, if I could please keep the serape, I think you can see from the way it’s wrinkling up that it isn’t really intended to go on a floor? It never has before. – I wish now I’d kept the undercarpet from Theale, but no matter. Don’t be annoyed with me, truly I appreciate your goodness to me over so many years – it’s just a weakness of old age to want to keep a few ‘nice things’ connected with the past and the serape as we said is 35 years old – I could never buy one like it now – and I should so much like to keep it – perhaps it isn’t a ‘nice thing’ to anyone else, but it is to me. so