Alone in the house, she said its upkeep was killing her, that it was dead to her without Edith, and she talked of moving permanently to the studio. She wrote one of her pithy, bitter little poems:
I’ve had ’em large
I’ve had ’em small
I’ve had ’em short
I’ve had ’em tall
They’re all the same
What e’er the frame
The first and last
Are most steadfast
Steadfast Edith certainly was. And the last.
It was all too late to make amends. There were too many wrongs to right. It was not Edith’s infirmity but her own that stopped Gluck from painting now. She had the place to herself, her perfect oils, her first-rate canvases. The Fine Art Society wanted any work of quality she cared to produce. The critics were as gracious about her work as in her heyday. She had shown, with the technical excellence of ‘The Path’ and ‘Rage, rage …’, that none of her ability had waned. Her staff saw to the cooking, the shopping, the cleaning. Her accountant managed her business affairs and negotiated on her behalf with her nephew, Roy, who had succeeded his father as Steward of the Fund. Money was there as needed. Her doctor, Richard Boger, the last in a succession of practitioners who tried to treat her, gave a great deal of his time. She still had, above everything, the ambition to paint good and lovely pictures. That was the altar on which so much else was sacrificed. But ever more by the day the pains of age prevented her from working.
In autumn 1975 she went for the last time to her cottage at St Buryan. ‘Edith very sweet and glad I was going to Cornwall to create’4 No creation came – she had an attack of emphysema and spent most of the time in bed. The rose, her favourite flower, that she was going to paint ‘as perhaps no one has ever painted it before’, wilted in her studio. And, to her dismay, she and Nesta suffered some kind of quarrel, which led to a coolness Gluck could not endure:
Whatever you do would never alter what has kept our friendship alive for over 40 years and so many thousands of miles apart. During the whole of that brief telephone call I was in tears.… Dearest Zgr can we not now return to the precious lien that binds our friendship and forget all the trivial misunderstandings that have, and are, causing me great unhappiness. I have as you know a heavy and increasing burden of responsibility to see that Edith does not die miserable and feeling, as she does, that everyone has forgotten and deserted her.5
In September 1976 Clare Griffin told Gluck that she was going to have a baby the following April. ‘You’ve got one child, why do you want another?’ was Gluck’s unenthusiastic response. ‘My sole means of transport was removed at a stroke,’ she wrote to Martin Battersby. The following week Miss Vye said she would be leaving at Christmas. Her name had been on a council housing list since 1950 and now she had the chance of a flat in the nearby town of Storrington. Gluck panicked and saw herself without support. She immediately made arrangements to move Edith to a nursing home close by Chantry House in Steyning. ‘We are not telling her anything in order to avoid upsetting her, but fear from something she said at our last meeting that she has an inkling but no details.’, Gluck wrote to the matron of the new home. Edith had been at Homelands for nearly two years. The staff knew her and were kind to her, the place was pleasant and efficiently run. The only virtue of Carisbrook Nursing Home was that it was close to Chantry. Edith was moved there on 11 October and died, in unfamiliar surroundings, a few weeks later, on 5 November.
Gluck had spent the previous couple of days in London. She had stayed at the Westbury and seen Chorus Line with Nesta and they had dinner together. On the way home Gluck visited Edith:
Leave Nursing Home approximately 5.45. Home by 6 pm. Lovett sees to luggage.… Miss Vye had supper downstairs and my drink was left in my bedroom. I said I would put tray on landing. All this took place before 10.30. Then I mucked about and at last exhausted got into bed but before lying down telephone rang. Boger spoke. It was 11.15 pm. Rang for Miss Vye who helped me put on some warm clothes over pyjamas and then waited for Dr B to fetch me. We left Chantry House at 11.25 to go back to the Nursing Home.6
Gluck went into shock. For days she told no one of Edith’s death. In the small hours of the night that Edith died, Miss Vye, on her way to her bathroom, heard Gluck crying and saying aloud, ‘O Edith I’m so sorry. Forgive me.’ The funeral was at Worthing Crematorium on Friday 12 November, a laurel wreath with no inscription or identification the sole adornment on the coffin. Gluck seemed not to recognize anyone at the funeral and spoke to no one. Edith’s obituary in The Times referred to her friendship with Yeats, and spoke of her as one of the principal women journalists of her period. Her ashes were buried in Steyning churchyard alongside those of her
