Sunflower

Rebecca West

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781453206744
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature générale

A beautiful actress of the 1920s faces painful decisions about her lovers and her future in Rebecca West's posthumously published semi-autobiographical novel
Star of the stage, Sunflower has everything but the attention she craves from her long-time—and married—lover, Lord Essington, a brilliant and intense man occupied with more intellectual thoughts. Eager for a more rewarding experience, Sunflower must decide whether another "great man, " the Australian Francis Pitt, will offer a more traditional relationship and happiness. Written during West's own psychoanalysis and never finished, Sunflower ponders topics of the power struggle between the sexes, and a woman's freedom to determine her romantic destiny.
Drawn heavily from West's own relationships with H.G. Wells and Lord Beaverbrook, this roman à clef gives a glimpse of the author's own struggle to find a satisfying relationship.

IV

IT was plain that he did not love her, for he never wanted to see her alone. She walked for a time in the desert of that thought; and then perceived that Harrowby was still standing at the door of the car, waiting for orders.

She began, ‘Up to—’ and then checked herself. ‘Harrowby, you don’t look well.’

‘I’m quite all right, Madam.’

‘But you can’t be all right. Not when you’re looking like this. I’ve noticed for some time back you haven’t been too bright. But I haven’t seen you look like this, ever—’

‘I suppose, Madam, it’s up to Mr Pitt’s as usual.’

‘Yes, Harrowby. But if you would rather not drive today, I’ll take a taxi and you can go home.’

He slammed the door. But it was not rudeness, just jumpy nerves, for he opened it and shut it all over again, very softly this time, and his eyes travelled towards her face, though they got no further than her throat, and his mouth worked as if he were trying to smile. Poor thing, he did look so white. He looked almost as bad as he had after that motor accident they had last year on the road from Cannes to Grasse, when she had opened her eyes and found herself lying on a bank by the roadside with him kneeling beside her …

Her mind turned its back on his misery and forgot it. Keeping her eyes on the dove-coloured carpet of the car so that nothing should break the thread of the fairy-tale, she thought of what it would be like to stay at Cannes with Francis Pitt. It had never been quite right with Essington, for he did so hate places where people enjoyed themselves; he himself went just because of the climate. It would be nicer to go with Francis Pitt. It would be nice to have tea at the casino about four o’clock, sort of listening, but not too hard, because it did not matter and the air was a little too warm, to somebody quite good singing; and after an hour or so go out and stand for a while looking across the wide bay as the sun set behind the mountains of Cap Estérel. The little harbour by the town was always so pretty then, with the old fortresses lying up on the hill, looking as if life really was like a bad play, the kind of play Lewis Waller used to act in, which, say what you like, would be nice; and the avenue of plane trees by the sea looked lovely, for their dark trunks and branches were dissolved by the dusk and the last few leaves which had survived from the autumn into the winter seemed to hang unsupported, a suspended shower of golden rain. Along the road behind them flashed the automobiles, the great luxurious Riviera automobiles, with their air of being, as one would have thought it impossible for machines, no better than they ought to be; their air of wearing jewelled garters on their axles; stopping outside the little but inordinate Riviera shops, cubby-holes of yellow light, where people who were laying up money for their children sold pretty things who had not that idea in air warmed to stew away what might remain of thrifty resistance, and wrote in ledgers with an expression of petty victory after the bell on the closing door had given that glutted, muted note, which was so different from the ping with which it let in the customers. Funny, silly, trivial, amusing place. But on all that they would turn their backs and they would walk, her hand on his coat-sleeve, along the quay where the millionaires’ yachts are moored, their rigging like nerves against the red and gold, the fine intricate nerves of some fleet, capricious, veering beast. They would walk right to the end of the quay, she and Francis Pitt, and would stand looking at the lovely sunset, which now would be covering the sky with all the colours one could not wear because one was fair; which was a pity, still if one ever had a daughter who was dark one could dress her in them. With the flames behind them the Estérel mountains would be like shapes cut wildly out of black paper. It was funny how you could not do even a simple thing like looking at the sunset if you were with Essington. He would slew one round till one looked to the south-east, towards the dull, flat islands instead of the mountains, over grey waters untouched by the sun. Beauty seemed to irritate his mind as an unshaded lamp irritates the eye, it was too much for his poor nerves, he put up his cantankerousness as a shield against it as he would have put up his hand against the light. When she said how she liked the romantic fortresses he looked up at them, made one of his disparaging, mewing noises, and rather spitefully, like a man alluding to the advancing age of a woman, pointed out how trifling a piece of modern artillery would be needed to blow them to pieces. And the shops and the automobiles and the cake-like casino made him gird at the injustice of the social system; though she knew it was really their pettiness he disliked, for he always kept quite calm when they were motoring out of London through the nasty little brown brick houses and the stores where poor people are sold rubbish, and those were surely far horrider results of the social system than Cannes. But with Francis Pitt one would not get the beginning of any such wranglings with life, because one would do nothing, absolutely nothing, not even anything mental, not because one was lazy, but because if one was with him one would be doing something that absolved one from the duty of doing anything else … something interior and secret that would give one the right to be purely passive. It was true that he did not give her that feeling now when they saw each other, but she felt that at any moment their relationship might take a different turn of some sort and she would get it. It was as if she were holding a berry in her mouth and waiting for a signal to crush it between her tongue and teeth and flood her palate with the flavour that she wanted. Well, to go on to Cannes, maybe she would dance a little with him after dinner, for he loved to dance, though he was terribly bad at it. Foxtrotting with him was like being adrift on a choppy sea not in but with a small boat. But his clumsiness was not annoying, it made one smile and think of the squarish stumbling limbs of a child just learning to walk. That would be the only time she would be active in the whole day. Probably the best hours of all would be those spent furthest away from activity, in utter lethargy, in the warm nearest that waking can come to sleeping. Her teeth denting her lower lip, she imagined herself lying quietly on her bed in a darkened room, her arms close to her breast, her hands folded against her cheek, so that they felt companionable, as if they might have been someone’s face, a child’s face, her lids just raised so that she could look at the bright oblong between the half-closed shutters and see Francis Pitt standing on the balcony outside. He would have his back to her, he would be leaning over the rail looking down into the well of warm afternoon beneath, up which were coming the broken voices of people who were walking about, playing tennis, doing all the things she was not doing any longer. She did not want him to turn round and speak to her, for by that time everything would have been said, they could take each other for granted. Simply she would lie and notice how, standing black against the sunshine, he looked taller and broader than he really was; and would try to accept the illusion, to see that picture with uncorrected vision, because he did so hate being small. It occurred to her that perhaps that was why men shut up women in harems in all hot countries, so that the women should sit in the shadow and see the men silhouetted against the glaring light, bigger and stronger than they really are. She laughed, but not at him; at them all. He was not nearly so bad as lots of them.

The car stopped with a lurch and a grinding of the brakes. Harrowby had nearly driven past the signals of a policeman on duty and was now having an argument with a red face under a helmet and a couple of swinging white gloves. The face got redder, evidently Harrowby was being very rude. This was the second time that week there had been this sort of trouble, for just a day or two before when she was on the way up to lunch with Francis Pitt there had been the same sort of unpleasantness at one of the crossings on Finchley Road. He never used to do these things. Something very disagreeable must be happening to him. At this reminder that the characteristic quality of life was always to be a little upsetting she realised that she would never go to Cannes with Francis Pitt, because he did not love her. He could not love her, since he never wanted to see her alone.

Again she looked down so that nothing should break the threads of the story, and thought of what she had got out of life in spite of its determination not to go quite smoothly. She had seen more of him than she had ever hoped. It had been wonderful. While the play was rehearsing Essington and she, and sometimes she alone, had gone up there nearly every other night for dinner; but she could not do that now, and would not be able to till goodness knows when, for the play, bother it all, was a great success. Essington seemed to like going to the Pitts’, which had surprised her. He did not even complain of the length of the drive across London, though ordinarily he hated going further for his dinner than a ten minutes’ journey. The truth was that he was really very deeply moved by what was happening to Hurrell. Every time he made the visit Hurrell’s room was more exactly what his terror of the disagreeable most resented: his old friend’s body under the sheets had less of human roundness and more the rectilinear shape of a narrow box, and the face on the pillow, which had been familiar to him all his life, which it was urgent that he should continue to recognise, for if it became different anything and everything might become different and he would not know where he was, had in fact become terrifyingly different, because it was patterned as definitely as a moth-wing with the shadows of monstrous pits of emaciation in the cheeks, at the temples, around the eyes; and there were horrible times when the sick man made a strangled noise and they had to leave him quickly because of some breakdown in physical dignity; and there were worse times still when he suddenly fell asleep, falling like a man who has been clinging to a ledge over a precipice and whose fingers have let go, and they could not leave him till they had gathered round the bed to make sure that he had not fallen further than sleep. One would have sworn that all this could not have been tolerated by Essington, who took it as a breach of loyalty, a betrayal of the citadel to the forces of unpleasantness, if anybody belonging to him was so ill that they had to call in a doctor. But miraculously he was kind, he was bravely, wittily kind, he made constant visits to the dying man that were increasingly beautifully unconcerned, brilliantly trivial. It was amazing to see him padding the room with his cat-like grace, spinning round on the balls of his feet, while with delicate buffoonery he made a monstrous fuss about a cold he alleged he had caught, though there was no visible sign of it, or purred awful things about Oppenshaw and Bryce Atkin and, in short, behaved so exactly as one would not behave in a death chamber that Hurrell ceased to say as he did every few minutes if she and Francis Pitt were left alone with him, ‘Of course I know well I am not really ill. I shall be about in no time.’

All this had made her very proud of Essington. It seemed to her that the shock of finding his old friend about to die had burst the dam he had built against the springs of tenderness in his own heart, and that at last he was going to admit that he was really quite nice about all sorts of things. And she had taken it as confirmation of this, though on thinking it over she supposed there was indeed no logical reason why she should have done so, when he came home one evening with a diamond and emerald bracelet from Cartier’s as a present for her. It was the first time he had given her any jewellery; indeed, it was one of the very few times he had ever given her anything. And it was a beautiful one, that crackled with light on one’s arm, and had a pattern of emerald scattered like leaves among the frosty brightness of the diamonds, so that it was as if spring was diving headfirst through a winter sky; and he must have gone to the shop specially, and spent some time choosing things, and paid out quite a lot of money all at once. It was all right really, he did love her, he was very generous at heart. She cried a little and kissed him, and he seemed glad in a curiously anxious, humble way, that she liked his gift. Then she suddenly exclaimed, because she had caught sight of the clock and perceived that if they stood about looking at the bracelet any longer they would be late for dinner with Francis Pitt, and hurried him out to the car. Once they had started she realised that she had put out the glow there had been between them. But that could not be helped, they would be five minutes late as it was, and as Francis Pitt ate hardly any lunch he ought to get his dinner punctually. Anyway it had been established that her Essington was kind and dear, and that he was going to admit it more than he had ever done before, so she began talking of what she planned to do for Parkyns who that morning had been told by the doctor that she had phthisis. It was not that she was giving him gloomy details, or that she wanted him to help her, for she could easily do it all out of her money. What she did want were suggestions as to how she could do for Parkyns what he was doing for Hurrell, make the heavy thing light.

But almost at once he began to click his tongue impatiently, to twitch his long fine hands; and she had to stop, in case he should say the thing, so clever that it must be true, which would worry her when she woke up at night and make what she was doing for Parkyns seem silly. It was evident that he was not going to be any kinder than he had been before. In spite of Hurrell there was no real change in him. She saw what he had done. It was his cleverness again. Life had forced him into a position when he had to feel pity, but he had got round it by putting a peculiar male twist on the situation, by deciding to specialise on Hurrell as the dying man, the only dying man, his dying man, on whom he should lavish so much tenderness that he would earn absolution from being kind to anybody else, as one who has served on a jury in a lengthy case gets exempted from such service for seven years. It was the same sort of prudent investment he had made in his wife, Mabel, whom he had selected as the woman he was good to. He had given her everything material she could want, that fine quiet house in the country which he visited politely and did not rush into to upset, and a great deal of money for her famous simple clothes and her collection of snuff-boxes and miniatures; he wrote to her every other day when he was away, not scratching letters saying that he had been thinking over her last performance (for one thing, the lucky woman did not have to give any) and it was so stupid that he would have to leave her, but friendly letters suggesting ways by which she might get her gentle pleasures out of life; then, since he could not enjoy being the lover of a woman to whom he was kind, he turned to his mistress and could enjoy illimitably his relationship with her because he could make her life a misery, and always argue that that must be her fault, since he was a kind man to women, and could prove it by his relations with his wife. He was utterly inhuman. He was a monster. Her face flamed. But he did not mean it, he had been betrayed by his false religion of thought. It was his faith that nothing could be evil save the passionate instinctive gesture: thought was the means by which mankind was saved from its vile propensity to instinct. Because the means he took to batten his egotism on life was cool and intellectual he felt they must be saved and should be pushed to the extremest lengths. It was as if a masseur became infatuated with the mere idea of kneading flesh so that he pounded and pounded the body of his patient into lifeless pulp. Finding herself forced again to a point at which she felt horror for him she looked down at her bracelet. He had given her that, he loved her, he was generous. She took it off her arm and clasped it tightly between her fingers, as one clasps an amulet, as one clasps an amulet in which one does not quite believe, in which it is absolutely necessary that one should believe.

It had been good to get out of the car and go into Francis Pitt’s house. That evening he was sitting in the hall waiting for them. Darkness was thick among the curious ugly furniture which had the look of defiant artists’ squalor that tombstones and pews have, as if the clumsy craftsmen who made them knew that the human occasions they catered for befell so inevitably and so innumerably that they need never fear unemployment and could let their blunt fingers make meanness with impunity. She did not have to see them unless she tried, she did not have to ask herself the question of why he chose to live among such ugliness. If she kept her eyes wide, in the way that makes them look most beautiful when one goes into a room, all she need see were the flowers, the excess of flowers that was the trademark of this house, clots of delphinium and peonies, seeming suspended in the darkness, since the vases which supported them and the tables which supported the vases were drowned in the rising night, and his face, his earthy, bedabbled face of grief, all of him that was visible above the black blur of his clothes. It was as if this was a place where one could have the things that mattered, beauty and that other thing, the thing that was behind great plays and acting (real acting, the sort she could not do) without having to pay all one’s attention to the creaking mechanism of intellect that did not even make them, that merely hoisted them up to a position where they could be viewed by the human mind. When she thought that she had a feeling as if she had plucked a cloth from a globe and found it gleaming crystal. She saw the way life should go, and turned sullen eyes on Essington because it was not his way, but slipped from whatever it was she had been thinking, and she was not quite sure what that was, into joy based on the fact that Francis Pitt was not dressed for dinner. That meant that she and Essington would be the only guests. It was true that there was a sleek-headed young man sitting beside him, but he would not be staying, he was taking something down in a little book, he was a secretary from the office in the City which Francis Pitt kept just to collect the current earnings of the fortune he had so miraculously made before he was thirty, which he had so obstinately and with such distinction refrained from increasing since he had returned to England and fallen in love with politics. She was very glad, for it was never so nice when there were other people. For one thing, Francis Pitt, oddly enough, considering that above all things he wanted to be liked, was a very bad host. When there were more than half-a-dozen people meaning seemed to fade out of him; his brows came down so that one could not see his eyes, his mouth pouted round a big cigar so that it became merely thick lips, he sat on at table long after everybody else wanted to get up and there was no conceivable reason why he should linger. It appeared to her part of his unique perfection that he should be a bad host. Obviously it proceeded from his childlikeness. Just as he could not put the ugly furniture out of his house and get in new because he felt that that was a thing for grown-ups to do and he was never quite sure that he had really grown up, so he could not entertain guests because he felt that his father and his mother ought to be doing it instead. It made her want to touch him, to stroke him.

Those were still the days when he used to look at her at the first moments of their meeting, with a hard, grinding look as if he were rubbing some thought they both knew of against her consciousness. Then, as on every other night, as soon as his hand unclasped she would sit down in the chair which he seemed to want her to sit in, and the two men would exchange the duetting remarks about the day’s news wh...