To Steyning friends she confided her sorrow at having parted with her pictures and her anxiety that, as so many of them were under one roof, some catastrophe might overwhelm them all.
He became a good friend and she referred to him as her patron. He talked to her on the phone almost every day, encouraged her all he could, sent roses on her birthday and on a weekend when Nesta was staying at the Chantry, invited her, Gluck, Edith and Miss Vye to lunch. Gluck intended to paint his portrait, but somehow no time was found. He urged her to shape her notes on painting, paints and the Gluck frame into publishable form and introduced her to a prospective biographer, Susan Loppert.
Gluck wanted her life in print, as she wanted her pictures in public galleries and her immortality assured. But she was too egotistical and authoritative for co-authorship. If anyone was doing the writing, she felt it should be she. For eight months in 1975 Susan Loppert drove to Steyning once a week to interview her. The meetings were amicable, if emotionally unrevealing. Problems arose over the drawing up of an agreement. They disagreed over the time needed to complete the book and over the division of anticipated profits. But the most serious stumbling block was the question of Gluck’s editorial control. She wanted a clause stipulating that the manuscript be submitted to her for approval which would not be ‘unreasonably withheld’. Susan Loppert feared such a clause might mean the right to bowdlerize whatever she wrote. Both negotiated through agents, but the differences proved irreconcilable and the project foundered.
Such continuing interest in her and her work shored up Gluck’s spirits while homelife got ever more dismal. Edith had a series of bad falls and needed constant care. As with the Meteor’s illness, Gluck again coped badly with a medical problem:
Feel might go mad or have coronary.… Bad day as usual. Try to get some work done but very nearly impossible. Feel very ill and desperate.
E. difficult beyond words ending with bad crash in bathroom which overthrew the mangle.
E. in serious condition. A total collapse. Dr Frank visits.
My birthday starts with terrible depression. E. has v. bad fall in her bedroom just before lunch. Is shaken all day.
E. behaves horribly all day.
After Miss Vye left to rest, E made to get up and lift clock off mantelpiece. Nerves gave way and I went to studio till teatime.
E. has several falls. Very wilful. Very bad night – stormy weather.
E. unmanageable. Monstrous.1
Gluck was unable to accept that Edith, who was embarrassed by her own frailty, could not overcome it. She was angry with her for it. She watched her every move and reprimanded her constantly – for trying to put a log on the fire, for not wearing her shawl, for spilling her tea. No doubt she watched because she cared, but it cannot always have felt like that to Edith. When Tony Carroll visited Chantry, on a bad day for Edith, alone with him she said of her painting by Stanley Spencer, ‘Apple Tree in Snow’, ‘Do you think if I sold that I’d have enough to get out?’ Gluck was unable to accept that time can wipe away a distinguished career and make a very clever woman very helpless. Nor would she leave the running of the house to those whom she had employed to do the work: Miss Vye, Mrs Gurd, Mrs Guy, Mr Lovett. As ever, she became consumed with all the material domestic matters she professed to hate.
Gluck’s brother arranged for the installation of central heating and of a chairlift up the stairs. A neighbour, Clare Griffin, came to work as a personal assistant, advising Gluck, listening to her, chauffeuring her, helping in the house, going to the bank to get her money – Gluck insisted on single pound notes, which she then put in drawers and forgot about. Gluck wanted to complete another rose picture and start the new law pictures, but she spent little time in her studio.
And Edith was fading. She became incontinent. Gluck, at her wits’ end, responded without mercy. The doctor, seeing how badly they were managing, suggested Edith go into a nursing home. She heard of the plan and felt betrayed. Her confusion was intermittent, her problems those of mobility and motor control. Before leaving Chantry, her home for more than forty years, she systematically destroyed all the records of her life – her letters, diaries, writings. She tore up or burned basketful after basketful of papers. But the letters from Yeats she saved. On the red Charles Jourdan shoebox, containing Gluck’s love letters to Nesta written in the 1930s, she left a note ‘All lies’.
Nesta, eternally crystal, strong and uncomplaining, offered the promise of a kind of haven from such facts of life. ‘It is not believable that Edith should have been so afflicted,’ she wrote to Gluck in 1975.
You have been plunged most cruelly into Hell. When you can you must come to me and stay as long as you can. Any time. Suddenly – if you see an opening. There will always be room.… Darling Tim … I want you to feel you are not alone and if there’s anything I can do, please, please tell me.… This letter is full of more than words.
Gluck agreed to the nursing home, but the decision filled her with ambivalence and guilt. As ever, the sacrifice was to the merciless and demanding god of Art: ‘I do not know how her condition can be treated here safely …’ she wrote to Nesta.
If she came back … I could never leave the house without fears and certainly it would finish any possibility of painting or creating any more … I was only just beginning to come back to some sort of feeling out of a suicidal numbness …
The nursing home, ‘Homelands’ was about eleven miles
