Winter. Christopher Nicholson

ma’am.’ It is Nellie who speaks; Elsie is a mouse of a girl.

      ‘Well; there it is. I don’t care which of you does it, but please get it done.’

      ‘Yes, ma’am.’

      They do not like me, I am convinced of it. I cannot tell why, but I have never known how to talk to servants. It is just the same with Mr. Caddy and Mrs. Simmons. I never manage to strike the right note, I always sound so severe. Did his first wife manage any better?

      While they set to work I take Wessie outside and give him his usual brush. We both enjoy this. Dear little Wessie! I don’t know what I would do without Wessie, truly I don’t.

      Five minutes later, I am back in the drawing room (which still smells of soot). Settled at my desk, I examine the post. More than half of the letters bear London post-marks, which is usual; the majority of my husband’s readers are city-dwellers who dream of living in the country. For them the country is a perpetual summer. O, what I could tell them of country life in the winter!

      Carefully I slit the envelopes with my paper knife. First, a letter from the President of the Wimbledon Literary and Scientific Society, inviting Thomas to attend one of its monthly meetings. ‘I am confident that you will have a warm and appreciative audience, for many of our members are avid readers of your novels and will be gratified by your presence.’ The answer is no: honoured as he is by the invitation, his health is not good enough nowadays for him to travel up to London, but he wishes the Society well.

      Secondly, a letter from a female journalist, who is preparing an article for a newly established women’s magazine, ‘The Modern Woman’. She claims to be a lifelong devotee of his work (as do most journalists), and asks whether she may call here in order to carry out an interview. The magazine is illustrated, and she hopes that it is acceptable for a photographer to accompany her. She suggests two dates in the middle of December or, failing those, one in early January (any later and she will miss what she calls her ‘dead-line’). She and the photographer will catch the London train and arrive about noon, if that is convenient. The answer, again, and emphatically, is no, it is not convenient: he is too busy to give interviews, but wishes her well with her article.

      A letter from The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children asks for support. I reply to this on my own behalf, sending a cheque for five pounds. I can ill afford it, but the way that children are treated in the slums of the East End horrifies me.

      What next? Two letters requesting his autograph. These autograph-hunters are so persistent. Many of them employ cunning ruses, pretending to be young children, writing in misshapen capitals; but I am not fooled.

      Next, a letter from a Miss Eleanor Pope of Islington, who declares that she loves his novels more than those of any other writer, and praises his profound understanding of the female mind; even George Eliot, she writes, does not come close. O! Miss Pope! Sit down, let me tell you the truth –

      Another letter: this one from a Mr. Edward Bowles of East Grinstead who has apparently expended much time and energy on the task of identifying the locations of the places mentioned (though with fictional names) in the novels. He attaches a list of such identifications which he is ‘pretty well certain’ are correct, but if there are any errors he would like to know of them. Several places, despite much research (last spring he undertook an extensive cycling tour of Wessex), he has been unable to identify. He lists them. Mr. Bowles appears to be entirely unaware that: a) a book has been written on this very subject and b) several prefaces to the novels make it clear that certain locations are impossible to identify because they do not correspond to real locations!

      Now to the parcel, which turns out to hold a manuscript collection of poems by a gentleman of St. Albans, one Harold Blacker. Mr. Blacker has written before, it seems, for his accompanying letter, in a florid hand, begins thus:

      My dear Sir,

      Thank you for the exceptionally kind letter which you sent me last year about ‘The Rains of Paradise’. I am pleased to say that I have now completed another volume, ‘The Rowan Tree – An Odyssey in Twenty Poems’, which I enclose with great admiration for a man who as all acknowledge stands preeminent in the world of modern letters.

      Why am I spending my life on this drudgery? Am I not worth more? I am a writer too! Jumping up, so suddenly that my chair topples to the floor, I rush up the stairs to his study. I fling open the door and brandish the paper knife which I find sprouting in my hand. Why do you never think of me, you who are supposed to know so much about the female mind? Why do you take me for granted? Why do you never write any poems about me? What has happened between us? What about the trees? Why O why will you not accede to this one, small request? Why are you so obstinate?

      Of course I do nothing of the sort – just think of my reception! Instead, as his dutiful secretary, I pull up my typewriter, and answer each letter in turn, taking a carbon copy which I put in a file. Already I feel exhausted. Even as I sit here, my entire body seems to be aching and my nerves are strung to snapping point. I cannot breathe!

      How ridiculous this is. All round the country there are women whose situations are incomparably worse than mine, women living in the slums, women too poor to eat properly, women married to ne’er-do-wells and drunkards who beat and abuse them. What do I have to complain of, of what do I have to complain? I live a more than comfortable life here, I am lucky to be alive, I have books and clothes and food and a husband who loves me even if it is not in his nature to show it; count your blessings, Florence. You are alive! Think of the hens, pecking and strutting; unconscious creatures, they live for each moment, they do not fret themselves with questions. Think of little Wessie as he scampers hither and thither, his black nose twitching as he investigates some new scent on a blade of grass. These are good thoughts, and yet how hard I find it to hold on to them, how easy to revert to the old way of thinking: the weight of the trees, the length of the silences, the passage of the years, the sense of my inner self slowly darkening and drying, the sense of myself dry as an old gourd, dark as a shadow, the sense of something having gone wrong without being able precisely to say what it is, the sense of not being as completely alive as I ought to be, the sense of not being alive at all. Perhaps that is it, the sense that life is passing me by, or has already passed me by without my noticing; or perhaps it is the sense that this house is hostile to me because I am not his first wife. Sometimes I convince myself that she lies at the heart of the problem, and that she still lives here, in the air, in the trees, in the empty rooms; she is the true mistress of the house, and this is why I have such difficulties with the servants. No doubt she ordered the servants about without the slightest qualm. Do this! Do that!

      I am determined not to mention her name, I am determined not even to think her name, although one of the things I have learnt is that often in trying not to think about a particular individual one ends up thinking of nothing but that individual, and in exactly the same way the more I try not to think about my neck the more vividly it returns and with it the possibility that Mr. Sherren for all his skill failed to remove every last particle of the infected tissue which is consequently growing back at this very moment. My mind is not my own, that is the truth, I cannot control my thoughts.

      But, the truth is, the house is like a shrine to her. The calendar on the desk in his study is permanently set to the date upon which they first met, the shawl he insists upon wearing around his shoulders as he writes, and without which, he claims (a ludicrous claim), it is impossible for him to write well, was made by her; and on her death day we have to stand in po-faced solemn ceremony over the grave at Stinsford in which she is buried and in which he himself eventually plans to be buried (an honour from which I am presumably excluded). Let me add that the shrubbery in the drive is in the shape of a heart to signify his love for her, a love which, if it ever existed, did not exist in the last years of their marriage, when they lived in a state of mutual hostility. He has forgotten all that. (Have I forgotten? I have not forgotten.)

      He sits there in the gloom and writes I know not what: another melancholy poem, in all probability. If the trees were cut back, is it not possible that he would begin to write poems that were not so very dark and melancholy, but full of light and hope? This is what I often think, that things might be different, be better.

      Lying