The Lost Girls Read online

  For a further week telegrams and letters went back and forth across the Channel: news (from Ralph) of Janetta’s prowess on the slopes; Ham Spray gossip (from Frances); talk of Jenny, a refugee from Austria and Ralph’s mistress, who, in the grand Bloomsbury tradition of tolerance and laissez-faire, Frances charitably indulged and seems even to have given financial support. ‘I sent Jenny her cheque yesterday, pretending I could scarcely write,’ she explained early in February. ‘Oh my, wouldn’t she have thought it a chance for her to come in my place?’ Jenny, she continued, was ‘rather down on Janetta, who she obviously resents as her successor’. It was meant as a joke, but beneath the guilelessness lies a hint that Frances had begun to fret herself over what Ralph – a dedicated ladies’ man – might be up to with sweet Wolfers.

  Curiously, at this point the tone of Ralph’s letters, formerly cheery and informative, began to change. ‘I don’t really get on well with her,’ he complained of his teenage accomplice. ‘She’s such a child and not a real companion . . . selfish, cross and vain, redeemed by occasional flashes of real sensitiveness and sweetness.’ What he omitted to add was that one night at the hotel he had appeared without warning in Janetta’s room, flung himself on top of her, burst into tears and declared his love. Janetta, deeply distressed by the sight of a married man twenty-seven years her senior making a spectacle of himself, told him to leave. Within a day or two he had returned to England, pre-empting his arrival with a long and agonised letter to Frances admitting that ‘If I’d stayed another week W and I would either not have been on speaking terms or lovers, so it’s a good thing from that angle too that I’m leaving. She’s rather a cock-teaser and I would have been worked up to reprisals.’

  Bloomsbury sangfroid being what it was, Janetta’s reappearance at Ham Spray ten days later passed without comment. But there were bigger fish about to swim into Janetta’s orbit. Angela had introduced her to Connolly sometime in 1937. Impressed by his personality (‘glorious’, she remembered) and flattered by the interest he took in her, she happily agreed to a proposal that came her way early in the summer of 1939. Janetta, after visiting Jan in Brittany, wanted to travel on to her mother’s bolthole in Cassis. Connolly, no stranger to Cassis or its amenities (Diana had stayed with him there), offered to escort her. All the romantic scenery that filled any stage on which Connolly made one of his assignations was quickly shifted into place. They would be Verlaine and Rimbaud, he proposed, roaming together through the French countryside, and what had originally been conceived as a direct journey from Brittany to Marseilles was swiftly transformed into a kind of magical quest, taking in the parts of France where he had always felt most at home and to whose mythological enchantments he had always responded: Tulle in the north, Rodez in the east, Tonneins in the west, southwards beyond Toulouse . . .

  There are several mementoes of this trip, accomplished in a grey Armstrong Siddeley brought from Paris and extending, as Connolly the ever-knowledgeable tour guide got properly into his stride, over several weeks. One is his correspondence with Jean who, apprised of the journey, professed tolerant amusement. ‘Darling is le cap Naio fun?’ she enquired in mid-May, assuming him to have already arrived at Cassis. ‘Who are you staying with, [Diana] or Miss JW? I am glad you have found somebody else who can read maps?’ Janetta, Connolly explained, was ‘a very sweet and passionate traveller’ who suited the ‘second adolescence’ on which he had now embarked. Another is The Unquiet Grave (1944), which re-imagines the tour in a series of densely elegiac fragments:

  For an angora pullover, for a red scarf, for a beret and some brown shoes I am bleeding to death; my heart is as dry as a kidney.

  Peeling off the kilometres to the tune of ‘Blue Skies’, sizzling down the long black reaches of Nationale Sept, the plane trees going sha-sha-sha through the open window, the windscreen yellowing with crushed midges, she with the Michelin beside me, a handkerchief binding her hair.

  Back-streets of Cannes: tuberoses in the window, the book-shop over the railway bridge which we comb for memoirs and detective stories while the cushions of the car deflate in the afternoon sun . . . torn maps, the wet bathing dress wrapped in a towel . . .

  Most of Connolly’s friends, on reading this highly emotional travelogue, assumed that its principal focus was his wife (‘he sees . . . Jean as the golden past of peaches and beaches and lemurs’, Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary.) But it was Janetta on whom Connolly bestowed a presentation copy complete with handwritten corrections and marginalia.

  There is no hint in The Unquiet Grave that Connolly was absorbed in any topic other than the moment, the scenery and his teenage companion, or that the atmosphere was anything less than idyllic. In fact, the trip was sometimes fraught with tension. There was a particularly difficult moment in the hotel at Vannes, when Connolly, as Janetta put it, ‘took it for granted that he could share my bed’. Overawed by the attentions of a man twice her age, sympathetic to her would-be seducer’s emotional predicament (‘he was very in love + preoccupied by 2 other ladies’), and not wanting to hurt his feelings, she gave in.

  There were further difficulties when they reached Tulle. At this time, all foreign nationals resident in France for more than thirty days required a permit. Janetta had come without one. Connolly advised her to apply at the town hall and went off to make some of his regular telephone calls. By this point a gendarme, his suspicions alerted by the sight of a very young Englishwoman, oddly dressed (Janetta’s travelling costume consisted of a corduroy suit with a French army cloak and walking stick), unchaperoned and in the company of an older man, decided to intervene. Janetta was detained. Asked where she had been, and where her mother was, she amused herself by replying that she didn’t live anywhere and hadn’t got a home. When he came to find her, Connolly was arrested on grounds of abducting a minor. In the event these difficulties were smoothed over by way of a telephone call to the British consul in nearby Bordeaux, but Connolly, who had a history of nervous encounters with vigilant authority, was badly rattled: in the days that followed he would barely allow Janetta to get out of the car and instructed her to ‘look older’.

  There were at least two other summer trips with Connolly through the French countryside, one of them undertaken with Peter Quennell and his wife Glur. To Quennell, this was a ‘calamitous holiday’. Deeply preoccupied with ‘a new love . . . a very young girl’, Connolly was also anxious about Jean, continually phoning the Paris hotel in which she was staying and growing yet more nervous when she failed to answer. There was a minor disaster when Janetta, helping the others to tie their bags to the roof of the car, hitched the spotted red handkerchief which contained her clothes to the bumper and then forgot to retrieve it. By the time she remembered, twenty or thirty miles along the road, all that remained was ‘a wreath of dusty shreds’. Her passport was run to earth at the roadside, but there was no sign of her leather wallet. Left in the town of St-Affrique in Aveyron, while she and Connolly turned back to see what might be lying on the asphalt behind them, Quennell and Glur found themselves pacing ‘torrid and narrow streets’, eyed by suspicious locals who took offence at the skimpiness of Glur’s shorts. In the end, they were attacked by a mob of stone-throwing children and had to take refuge in a church.

  What did the seventeen-year-old girl make of these excursions? An account of them written over sixty years later convicts Mrs Quennell of unpunctuality and applying too much lipstick, her husband of a lack of sympathy over the lost handkerchief and Cyril of taking too much interest in the local cuisine. There was a particularly disillusioning moment when, as he greedily attacked a plate of strawberries, she found herself revolted by the sight of the juice trickling down his white, hairy fingers: ‘I didn’t love C,’ she reflected, ‘+ I wondered what I was doing.’ But these were minor drawbacks. In general, Janetta was enchanted by his company, admired the countryside through which they passed and relished the information he imparted about France and its culture as the Armstrong Siddeley sped south. By the time he
decided to return to London, all the elements for a life-long friendship were firmly in place: ‘an extremely nice relationship,’ she remembered, ‘which just went on always.’

  Meanwhile, there were other relationships crashing into gear. At Cassis, Janetta had been introduced to a man named Hugh Slater – christened Humphrey Richard Hugh and known both as ‘Humphrey’ and ‘Hugh’ – currently ensconced in the town’s bohemian quarter with a painter called Elizabeth. Then in his mid-thirties, a Spanish Civil War veteran and aspiring writer who had risen to the rank of Chief of Operations for the Marxist International Brigades, Slater, like Janetta, was a creature of impulse. Shortly after her return to her mother’s house, he decided that he was in love with her. Janetta, trying to reconstruct the events that followed long years later, suspected that she had behaved badly. (‘Apparently when he was wondering whether he could leave Elizabeth I had said if you’ve got any guts you could. Which seems to me an appalling way to talk.’) Nonetheless, leave Elizabeth he did. Supported by Jan (‘I’m so glad yr with Hugh,’ runs a letter from early September, ‘I love him’), the couple fled to nearby Toulon, where Slater busied himself writing ‘letters to friends explaining how he’d run off with someone of just 17’. Funds were low. Sitting on the post office steps hoping for money to arrive, Janetta was startled to receive a packet from the gendarmerie returning the leather wallet that had fallen out of her bundle on the road to St-Affrique.

  Janetta’s account of this fugitive love affair has an odd, impressionistic quality: bright fragments of detail gleaming through the shadow of a world preparing for war: taking a bus to Geneva; realising that the short, stocky woman in front of them in the queue for the museum was Gertrude Stein; buying a Dutch cap at a chemist’s shop. She was supremely happy, Janetta thought, ‘living with someone as fond of me as H was’. An existence devoid of plans, aims or commitments had been suddenly exchanged for one of emotional and intellectual ferment. Some of Janetta’s contemporaries might have been bored by a daily round that seems largely to have involved Hugh ‘talking, telling me what to read, telling me about politics, about the civil war, about writers & writing & painting’. But the seventeen-year-old girl was aware that this didacticism played an important part in her emotional response: ‘It all really interested me & it contributed enormously to discovering that I loved him.’

  But amid the intoxicating scents of Hegel and Marx and the difference between ‘early revolutionary communism & the useless unintelligent narrow political commissars’, there were practical realities at hand. War was drawing closer. Slater, who had spent a month in jail in Perpignan on his way to Spain, was on a police list. They returned to England via Dieppe, where the hotel proprietors looked askance at the Woolworth’s curtain ring on Janetta’s wedding finger, and made for the Partridges. Here, in a foretaste of many other Ham Spray evaluations, Janetta discovered that ‘R & F didn’t really like H. & their manner to me was different.’ Happily Frances’s loyalty to her young protégée remained undimmed. When Janetta discovered she was pregnant, it was she who arranged the abortion and settled the bill. At the nursing home a courteous elderly doctor, who, Frances had warned her, looked like a frog, asked her if she really wanted to go through with it. Yes indeed, Janetta assured him. She was quite certain.

  By the end of June 1939, Connolly was back in London. Janetta’s involvement with him had come at a crucial juncture in his life. War was looming, his future was uncertain, and the crisis in his emotional affairs showed no sign of letting up. What was he to do? However great his obsession with Diana, he was still capable of writing a long letter to Jean – now returned to Paris – affirming his belief in marriage. The only obstacles preventing their reunion were his pride and her sloth, he even-handedly informed her. Four days later, on 24 July, came a second letter swearing that he loved her as much as ever. This was followed, a few weeks after that, by Connolly himself, half-anxious and yet half-optimistic, conscious, as the lights went out across continental Europe, that his private and professional lives were being slowly drawn together in a single point of focus and that the person capable of solving the dilemma in which he and to a certain extent Jean had lost themselves was one of their mutual friends. This was the arts-world impresario Peter Watson, in whose slipstream Connolly found himself caught up for at least the next ten years.

  However discreetly and unobtrusively pursued – he had a horror of personal publicity – Watson’s trail runs through vast areas of the upper-bohemian world of the mid-twentieth century. Much of this had to do with his money – even by the standards of the relatively untaxed 1930s he was a fabulously wealthy man – but far more of it seems to have stemmed from both his charm and his unabashed fondness for the good life. Spender, who became a close friend, remembered him as ‘one of those rich people who without seeming at all dependent on his wealth . . . manages to get the utmost in the way of pleasure and beauty out of riches’. Women adored him (‘Really wonderful,’ Janetta recalled, ‘kind and glamorous’), an attraction that was in some ways sharpened by his obvious homosexuality. Robbed of any sexual element, the compliments he paid his female friends and the shrewd advice he gave them could be taken at face value. Five years younger than Connolly, tall, slim and saturnine, he was the second son of Sir George Watson, a self-made baronet whose fortune came from a chain of retail dairies. Six months before his death in 1930, the margarine millionaire had established a seven-figure trust fund whose interest allowed Peter an annual income in the region of £50,000.

  All this, naturally, made Watson a figure of absorbing interest to his friends. Expensive cars transported him around London and his continental watering holes. Cecil Beaton, who loved him unrequitedly for many years, wrote solicitous letters. There was a Paris apartment in the rue du Bac stuffed with modernist paintings by Braque, Klee and Miró and, or so it seemed to fascinated onlookers, an enticing atmosphere of heightened sensibility and luxe. The Connollys had first met him in 1937 at the Austrian mountain resort of Kitzbühel. By Christmas the following year they had progressed to staying at the rue du Bac. Watson, it goes without saying, was Connolly’s kind of man, and for reasons in which self-interest contended with a genuine admiration for his new friend’s tastes and ambitions. One part of Connolly undoubtedly thought that Watson was exactly the sort of patron who might underwrite his literary schemes, but another part instinctively responded to the reserve and sophistication he brought to his dealings with the world. A third part, here in the late summer of 1939, was narrowly concerned by what he imagined to be Watson’s malign influence on Jean. The two, together with Watson’s boyfriend Denham Fouts, had seen a great deal of each other in Paris and Connolly feared that in any discussion of their marital disagreements, Watson inclined more to her side than his.

  To the problem of what Watson might be saying to Jean could be added the problem of what Connolly wanted to say to Watson. The idea of starting a literary magazine had long absorbed him. ‘Favourite daydream’ runs a note from as far back as 1934, ‘edit a monthly magazine . . . No advertisements. Harmless title, deleterious contents.’ As to why a promising young critic should want to set up as an editor, an explanation lies in the absolute centrality of magazine publishing to the literary life of the 1930s. From the stratospheric redoubts of Eliot’s New Criterion to the middlebrow readership attracted by popular papers such as John O’London’s Weekly, literary culture was to a very large extent conducted through the pages of weekly and monthly journals: small circulation, maybe – but with an influence that went far beyond their meagre readerships. From Connolly’s angle, the editorship of a literary monthly would bring enormous advantages: power, influence, social connections and almost limitless opportunities for nest-feathering.

  Nothing had come of the original project, but here in 1939 the omens looked more promising. Several of the era’s highbrow magazines, among them Eliot’s Criterion and Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse, had recently shut up shop: there was a small but promising gap in the market. If Wat
son could be persuaded to put up the money, Connolly reasoned, he might even see a return on his investment. An exchange of letters, in which Watson apologised for any misunderstandings about Jean, was followed by a lunch in Paris on the last day of August where Connolly set out his stall. Despite the fervour of Connolly’s advocacy, Watson was unconvinced. Irrespective of the scheme’s merits, he knew enough about Connolly – Connolly’s idleness, Connolly’s unreliability – to wonder whether he might make an effective editor.

  All three parties to the transaction – husband, wife and potential sponsor – woke up the next morning to discover that Germany had invaded Poland: Europe was effectively at war. Within a week all three were back in England. Jean went off to stay with friends in Yorkshire. Connolly, for whom the attractions of editing a literary magazine had been increased by the realisation that it might count as war work, decided to renew his suit. Meeting Watson at a party at Elizabeth Bowen’s in the last week of September, he took up the conversation that had lapsed nearly a month before in the Parisian pavement café. On this occasion Watson agreed. Time, it turned out, was of the essence. There were already rumours of other wartime literary magazines gestating in Bloomsbury parlours and publishers’ offices: Evelyn Waugh, Osbert Sitwell and David Cecil were trying to raise the backing for a monthly to be called ‘Duration’. As September gave way to October, at exactly the same time as Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force began to establish itself in northern France, editor and publisher set to work. Watson, still worrying about Connolly’s ability to manage the arrangements on his own, engaged Spender as associate editor and began to investigate some of the duties that the proprietorship of a monthly magazine would entail. Cyril, being Cyril, decided to take a short but invigorating holiday.