‘For the sake of companionship’, in adolescence Marguerite was sent to Mrs Coles’ school at the end of the road. It was popular with actresses. Mrs Patrick Campbell’s daughter Stella went there, Ellen Terry’s daughter Edy Craig and the Vanbrugh sisters, Violet and Irene. Marguerite was often in trouble, ill and absent. She recorded ‘inflammation of the lungs’, ‘a good many painful poultices’, ‘days spent at home, days spent in bed and always missing the pantomime at Christmas. There seemed a fatality about it.’
Her spelling, as ever, put her to shame. One teacher made a point of reading out her mistakes in class. ‘“Now I wonder what this word can be” she would drawl then spell it letter by letter as I had spelt it.’ The only success she remembered was a prize – from the Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals – a certificate and book for a story about kindness to animals. Animal suffering was an abiding concern in her life. She identified with their helplessness. She had pets, the canary Pippin, a pug dog Joey, an Airedale Yoi. And grandmother ‘gave all she had in circumstances that were none too easy’.
Despite the tensions, life was privileged materially and artistically. The studio and house at Trebovir Road were filled with students. There were standards of excellence, expectations of achievement, careers carved through talent and work. There was music all day from ten in the morning. Marguerite said she wished, when she opened the front door, to be greeted sometimes by a sound other than singing.
Music helped her dyslexia. She improvised songs on the piano and her grandmother wrote down the words. On her own assessment these verses showed ‘not a vestage of talant’. They were about ‘Joey’, ‘Moonbeams’, ‘The New Year’ – ‘Oh innocent year your life’s begun, Who knows the sin ‘ere you are done.’ But she was encouraged. Her grandmother paid for their printing. Aged fourteen, Marguerite gave them as Christmas presents. Signed ‘Marguerite Toddles’ and dedicated to the composer of light operas Sir Arthur Sullivan, they were doggerel laced with despair:
Sing, little silent birdie, sing,
Why do you sit so sad?
For now is born the baby spring,
And all things should be glad.
Sullivan told her mother that Marguerite ‘had ink in her blood’. He taught counterpoint at the College and was Marguerite’s trustee. Another visitor, Arthur Nikisch, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, hearing her improvise at the piano, said she should be trained at the Leipzig Conservatoire. She believed that ‘had she wished she could have become a really great musician’. ‘Proximity of opportunity’, she said, blunted her musical career.
Maria Visetti grew disaffected with her new husband. Visetti kept a carriage with two horses, a groom, housekeeper and maids. Parties at Trebovir Road were frequent and lavish. Dvoˉák, Tchaikovsky and Elgar were guests. The family took cures and the waters at Homburg and Bagnoles, spent summers at music festivals in Italy, Dresden, Prague, Bayreuth. But Visetti’s friends spurned Maria and viewed his marriage as a disaster. ‘They did not like her kittenish flirtation any more than they liked her assumption of intellectual superiority … Politics, literature, science, painting and even music, she gave her opinion on all these with startling decision and a paralysing lack of understanding.’
Maria Visetti fretted at her unpopularity. She raged at his infidelities and accused him of humiliating her in front of the servants and of bringing his mistresses into her house. He called her nagging, manipulative and destructive and said she was ruining his career. He had a way of pushing the end of his moustache into his mouth when agitated. His hands shook and he would go white with rage. She threatened scandal and said she would leave him. In their scenes he smashed the china and called her abominable and a devil. Both were profligate and spent beyond their income. There was a constant spectre of debt and they siphoned off money from Marguerite’s trust fund for their own use.
Marguerite hated them both, retreated inward and nurtured grandiose ideas of her own importance. ‘She knew she was different and at times it worried her. She tried to look this difference in the face, to grasp it and to give it a name, but it invariably eluded her. Whatever it was lay hidden out of sight within the depths of her innermost being.’
She viewed herself as misunderstood and special. Her room at the top of the house, long with low panelling, became a setting for solipsistic withdrawal. She kept her possessions in obsessive order, unlike her mother who left everything lying around. On a wall she hung a large wooden crucifix. The image of the martyr with the crown of thorns and driven nails, she felt, applied to herself. She imbued this room with a mix of religiosity, artistic ambition and sexual desire. At her desk she struggled with her poems and bits of prose – a description of a face in a crowd, or of a ship sailing.
Alone a great deal, she fantasized about being ‘a jeaneous’ and a lover. ‘I can scarcely remember the first time I fell in love. I think I was a lover even from my mother’s womb.’ She got by without parental affection but always pined with desire for some girl or woman – her piano teacher or a girl in a silk dress. Her mother, to whom she said something of these desires, told her she was perverted.
In later years she took characterizations for her novels from her formative years: daughters who are victims but who long for a life elsewhere; mothers like leeches; weak, shadowy fathers. And beyond these doomed characters she imagined a God who chose those who suffered, a mother who was gentle and loving, a dignified father of noble blood.
From her real mother, father and stepfather she learned the controlling power of sex –
