A Notable Woman. Jean Lucey Pratt
to dance.
Then she meets the new curate of her home suburb. He is 30-ish, falls in love with her and finally asks her to marry him. She finds she doesn’t know how to answer him. Her complexity is acute. She is not romantically in love with the clergyman, although she likes him well enough and finds him marvellously sympathetic.
It is this character about which I am most hazy at the moment. I want to meet Mr Wildman, the locum here while the Vicar is away. Ever since I heard of his coming the thought has been developing. ‘Seems a manly man,’ Ethel wrote. ‘Doesn’t mind going to a pub for a drink and won’t wear clerical garb but goes about in flannels etc.’ Which I thought sounded dangerous, such an easy way of attracting people in these days of general scepticism. A cheap bid for popularity. Yes, I do want to meet him, just to see if he is like that, and if he could be built into this book.
I am prepared to let the affair go as far as an engagement, and then in a sudden panic she breaks it off – crashing through all her theories and deciding to go her way alone.
All the time, of course, G. has a tremendous influence over her. He is in love with her and she not a little with him, but this they don’t dare to admit to each other for marriage is quite impossible, even if his health permitted.
Friday, 14 April
In collecting material for the 3rd character of my novel I feel I am in danger of letting myself in for something I shall regret. Supposing what I am now imagining were really to happen! It seems now that I hear of nothing else but the marvels and strangeness of Mr Wildman. Here is an account of his interview with the Wembley News:
‘“Many of the Church’s practices and customs are inconsistent,” he said. “There is a vast amount of hypocrisy in our modern church life … People are too easily shocked by frank references to the facts of life. Sunday cinemas? I am strongly in favour of them, provided that people who take this recreation go to Church first.” Mr W. has led an adventurous life. He has served on a windjammer and travelled all over the world. He has been a journalist and worked in a bank.’
I don’t like the photograph of him in the paper, but when studied carefully he has interesting eyes. Nonetheless I am deeply sceptical. I know exactly what I would like to say to him if I ever get the proper opportunity.
Easter Sunday, 16 April
Have just been to the 7 a.m. service. I have been trying to find out why I bother to go at all. I think it is mainly to appease my conscience and appease Daddy. I went too to see Wildman, but he was not taking the service. He handed round the wine and stood by the porch door afterwards: a pleasant voice and a pleasant face with very alert dark eyes. He is going bald on top of his head, but on the whole the impression was favourable, except for the callow youth who stood by his side. Ethel spoke of this youth: she has seen him about with him. Perhaps I’m being unfair. My putrid mind would leap at once to homosexuality.
Later: I am working myself into a positive fever over this man. It is quite absurd. I can’t forget his eyes. I know I’m riding for a fall, but I want desperately to meet him. To talk to him and get it over. The difficulty is that it may be weeks or months before it occurs. I would like to get my teeth stuck into his theories and worry them out with him, but I will not go to church to hear him, I will not be numbered with the unmarried spinsters who swell the congregation on his account. Until I have grasped the reality, until I have felt it, knocked against and bruised myself perhaps, I cannot continue the romance in my mind.
Sunday, 14 May
Well we have met Mr Wildman. He came over the other evening and stayed till 1 a.m. drinking Daddy’s port and telling the most entertaining stories. He horrified the parents and amused me vastly. I have no fear of complications ever arising between myself and him.
He is typical of the age: coarse, sincere and dramatic, very sincerely dramatic, plays to the public from the pulpit and is not ashamed to admit it. Nor to take out his front tooth to show how it is attached to the plate, not to tell us of the woman who invited him to sleep with her because of divine inspiration she had received from God.
Cheap – yes he is cheap, and appeals thereby to the poorer classes. He much prefers to turn the mangle while Mrs Jones gets on with the dinner than be entertained in the front parlour. All good in itself, certainly. He talked an awful lot of scandal in a deliciously unmalicious way.
I am going to Jamaica. I shall see Pooh again.43
Undated, probably early June
Damn, Hell and Blast. Ethel cannot see that my hair looks any better after it has been done by Mr Ed of Dover Street than when I do it myself! She is so blind stiff she cannot see that the paint is cracking off her own wooden nose. God what a mood I’m in tonight.
Monday, 5 June
I have never known Ethel to look so charming as she did this afternoon serving tea to us in the drawing room, wrapped in a thin, pale blue dressing gown; it gave her a strange air of gracious freedom. I think I am often unfair to her. I know she resents the fact that I don’t confide in her as much as I might do.
This morning I was again accused of being inconsiderate; it is always the one weapon she can most easily handle against me. And all the evidence is in her favour. I am selfish and inconsiderate and often strangely rude and unkind to her. Don’t I often come down to breakfast very late so that she is put to the most immense inconvenience of getting me a fresh one? Don’t I often come in very late at night and disturb her in her first sleep? She always does her best, and is working now without a maid for the sake of the family’s overdraft. And what do I ever do to show my appreciation? How many times have I compared her to a little wooden doll whose limbs will only move in certain set directions? I love my father – there is sun in him. And I had a great and dreadful thought the other night that she is one of those people who are sunless.
Thursday, 6 July
The more one dreams of a thing, the more it recedes from one in reality. I could have given him so much. Marriage with Gus would be hell I know, but it would have rich compensations. But he doesn’t know I have been in love with him for the past 18 months. Perhaps he never will know. Why should he?
I think the idea of marriage with any of his most intimate friends terrifies him. He is sexually so very fastidious. How may I teach him that the thing that matters is that hard rich jewel of trust, and that is what we could have. It is as if I have seen a lame man trying to hobble along without a stick and wanting to lend him my arm, but he would rather endure his difficulty alone rather than the humiliation of support.
I am free anyway to consider further advances, and if none come then at least I shall have had Chris and Gus and Roy and David, each for a few brief moments. I have considered marrying them all but have failed to run my dreams into reality. It is the bourgeois taint – that sickly desire, fostered by cheap novels and films, to hear a man say, ‘I have been waiting for you all my life … we were made for each other … it is fate.’ Miracles I suppose do happen – but they are rare, and there is no reason to believe they might happen to me.
I am afraid of loneliness as everyone else. ‘Somewhere, somewhere afar, a white tremendous daybreak’ – what is it Rupert Brooke says? That is what we aim at. I will not give Gus up. I know he is not the type to grow old. He couldn’t live quietly in a cottage. He belongs to the night and the footlights and all the glamour of the city and the circus. And I belong to the soil.
8.
Of Her Own Accord
Saturday, 22 July 1933 (aged twenty-three)
Jamaica.
It is astonishing how easily I am able to disconnect myself from the affairs and atmosphere that affect me in one place and absorb those of another. These last few days there has been a devil raging within me, and it was roused by the devil in Hugh Patrick (‘Bill’).
He has