Augustus John (38 page)

This mistake I make is considering Gus as a man instead of an artist-creature. I am so sorry for you, poor little thing, bottling yourself up about the baby. Shall we laugh at all this when we’re 50? Maybe – but at 50 the passions are burnt low. It makes no difference to now does it?… I do want to be there for your baby. I do want to be good, but I
know
I shant manage it.’
17

But so much of Ida’s analysis, it seemed to Dorelia, made ‘no difference to now’. Dorelia needed to simplify things in order to act, not to investigate
them more minutely. So far as action was concerned, there was only one new simplifying factor in Ida’s letter: she was no longer asking Dorelia to stay. Dorelia wrote back briefly and cryptically, stating that she would ‘treat it as an everyday occurrence’ and, she implied, wander off. But Ida, fearing that Dorelia would vanish before she got back, answered urgently:

‘Do not go until we all go, it would be so horrid… I want to go out from Matching Green all together and part at a cross roads – don’t you go before I get back unless you
want
to… We shall have dinner all together – no slipping away. My admiration of you does not prevent my hating you as one woman hates another. Gus doesn’t seem able to understand this – & it is so simple.’

As an inducement for Dorelia to remain until she arrived back, Ida promised ‘a bottle of olives… 2 natural coloured ostrich feathers and some lace!’
18

So Dorelia was persuaded to wait. Augustus had by this time gone up to yet another new studio
*3
in London, and the two women joined him there in the last week of March. This was to be the crossroads, the parting of the ways. He did not know that they had been corresponding, and seems to have believed that the crisis of Dorelia’s departure had passed: after all, no one had said anything. What then happened surprised everyone. ‘We had a
terrific
flare up,’ Ida afterwards (27 March 1905) told Alice Rothenstein.

‘…and the ménage was on the point of being broken up, as D[orelia] said she would not come back, because the only sane and sensible thing for us to do was to live apart. But I persuaded her to, for many reasons – and we settled solemnly to keep up the game till summer. Lord, it was a murky time – most sulphurous – it gave me a queer sort of impersonal enjoyment. After it we all three dined in a restaurant (which is now a rare joy) and drank wine, and then rode miles on the top of a bus, very gay and light hearted. Gus has been a sweet mild creature since.’

The ‘many reasons’ for Ida’s change of attitude are nowhere specified. Certainly this change puzzled Dorelia and also, it appears, was not really understood by Ida herself. The ‘queer sort of impersonal enjoyment’ she felt may have been the exercise of power. Where Ida led, Gus and Dorelia followed, and the knowledge of this may have given her satisfaction.

But one of the ‘many reasons’ was Ida’s dread of living alone with Augustus. If she remained with him, as she might have to do, then he would take other mistresses, and none of them was likely to match Dorelia. It had been Ida’s love for Gus that had drawn all three of them under the same roof; but it was her feeling for Dorelia that now held them together.

Augustus saw things somewhat differently. This last year, he reflected, they had been living rather too conventionally. ‘I get to think of London as Hell sometimes,’
19
he told Michel Salaman. Matching Green was better, but even there they were confined with ten perpetually growling cats, squeaking canaries, games of cricket and flocks of chickens outside, tadpoles within, and of course the children like acrobats forever falling into the coal scuttle. Perhaps it was the parrot that he had taught to swear in Romany that gave him the solution. ‘I want to buy a van or two next year… I expect I’ll take my family somewhere, Dorelia included,’
20
he had written to Sampson at the end of 1904. It would be just the thing for serious gypsy spotting, for hunting up bits and pieces of their vocabulary.

It was his old Slade friend Michel Salaman who came to the rescue. He had started out on his honeymoon in a smart new caravan, but for some reason decided a few miles into his marriage to sell it. Augustus bought it in the spring of 1905 for the handsome sum of thirty pounds, paid scrupulously over the next thirty years. But what was a caravan without a horse? Here too Salaman was able to help. ‘I might well use your horse,’ Augustus conceded. ‘…Before I take possession of it please give me some notion of his tastes & habits – I should not like to upset him by wrong treatment, and I know nothing of horses’ ways.’
21

By April all stood ready and the future shone bright. ‘I look forward to being out with a van or two,’ he wrote to Salaman, ‘our… multitude of boys are an amusing lot.’ The horse and van had halted near the centre of Dartmoor, a fine challenging place, if they could find it. ‘Probably I shall have a Gipsy to help in these matters,’ Augustus had speculated.

But for the time being horse and van were to have a more discreet role as Dorelia’s shelter for the birth of her first child. Ida, who had gone to stay with the Dowdalls in Liverpool, wrote to ask whether Dorelia ‘would like me to help you over the baby’s birth or if you’d rather I kept out of the way’, adding: ‘I’d like to and I’d hate to. I would rather come, probably only because I don’t like to be away from things.’

In the event Ida was not with Dorelia when the baby was born, and nor was anyone else. ‘I was surprised to hear you had your baby so soon,’ Gwen wrote from Paris. ‘I’m so glad everything has gone well, & it is such a charming one, it seems to be a real gipsy. I should like to come over, but I don’t suppose I shall… Goodbye & love to you.’
22

It was a boy, born in circumstances deliberately made obscure so as to conceal his illegitimacy. For the occasion Dorelia assumed the name of ‘Mrs Archibald McNeill’, wife of a naval officer long at sea, while Augustus on his arrival posed as her solicitous brother. Later on their identities changed. ‘I’m quite certain there is no penalty attached to having a bastard in the family,’ Augustus reassured her from a Liverpool pub called The Duke. ‘So better register him as my son – provided of course it isn’t published next morning in the Daily Mail or Express – as your family and my father no doubt take in one of those journals and such advertisement would be very disturbing. Have you stuck to that list of names? A sensation takes possession of me that Pyramus may be omitted or Alastir… The parish of Lydford wasn’t it?’
23

Pyramus was born at Postbridge on Dartmoor in late April or early May. Though Dorelia was alone (except for a large herd of cows), she was not far from an inn owned by a friendly landlord and his wife, Mr and Mrs Hext, who saw to it that a doctor and nurse visited her. Both Augustus and Ida had planned to be there, but Augustus ‘wearing my new suit so of course I cannot think very composedly’ was fastened in Liverpool where Charles Reilly ‘keeps at me about his scheme of a school of 10 picked pupils and walls and ceilings to decorate – and £500 a year’. Ida, meanwhile, was held at Matching Green in polite talk with her mother, who had determined to stay with her over Whitsun. In their absence Augustus and Ida both sent money, advice on diet (‘don’t live on potatoes’), and plenty of unanswered inquiries.

As soon as the telegram – in almost impenetrable Romany – arrived at Elm House saying Dorelia’s baby was born, Ida abandoned her mother and with mixed feelings churning within her hurried down, travelling through the night by train and arriving by eleven next morning. She found Dorelia lying along the caravan shelf which served for a bed, with her infant – ‘a boy of course’ – beside her. Augustus, ‘suave and innocent as ever’, turned up the following day ‘to kiss the little woman who is giving up much for love of him’, Ida wrote to the Rani. ‘The babe is fine, a tawny colour – very contented on the whole – we have to use a breast pump thing as her nipples are flat on the breast.’

A few days later the other children flocked down, shepherded by Maggie who had returned for the emergency, and they all settled down to graze upon the moor for two months, Augustus coming and going at intervals. ‘It is adorable and terrible here,’ Ida wrote. ‘We work and work from 6 or 7 till 9 and then are so tired we cannot keep awake – at least I can’t. Dorelia is more lively – owing perhaps to an empty belly.’ All day they were out of doors, wearing the same clothes, going about barefoot, growing
wonderfully sunburnt – ‘at least the women and children are – the Solitary Stag does not show it much’ – and eating double quantities of everything.

Ida seemed transformed in this new climate. They were in a wide valley, with dramatic distant hills and never-ending skies. It was not simply the open-air life that transformed her, but a change in Augustus’s attitude in the open air. ‘Gus is a horrid beast,’ she eulogized in another letter to the Rani, ‘and a lazy wretch and a sky blue angel and an eagle of the ranges. He is (or acts) in love with
me
for a change, it is so delightful – only he
is
lazy seemingly, and when not painting lies reading or playing with a toy boat. Then I think well how could he paint if he has to be on duty in between – duty is so wearing and tearing and wasting and consuming – only somehow it seems to build something up as well which is so clever.’ Ida hardly knew how to interpret this change. At the very moment one might have expected him to give his fullest attention to Dorelia, he had turned to Ida herself. She had lost confidence in herself to such an extent that she could not believe he loved her. But then what was Gus’s love? What was anyone’s love? ‘We had one flare up – nearly 2,’ she confided to the Rani,

‘…owing to Gus’s
strange
lack of susceptibility – or possibly by some human working, his being too susceptible. It is a difficult position for him. He is so afraid of making me jealous I believe – and he was not wildly in love with her – nor with me, only quite mildly. With the result that he appeared indifferent to her, while really feeling quite nice and tender, had I not been there. But Lord – it
is
impossible but interesting and truth-excavating.’

Despite the difficulties, and odd flare-ups, this was a marvellous summer for Ida. She adored living in the van. All their worries seemed to lose themselves among the rocks and heather of this open country, to float away with the procession of clouds across the great sky. Yet Ida knew they would have to work out something more permanent than this.

For Augustus too it was a happy summer. He was free to work, and work went well. ‘I have made a step forwards but what infinite worlds before me!’
24
he had written to Sampson. And to Michel Salaman also he wrote that summer: ‘I know now infallibly what is good painting, good imagination & good art.’
25
He was doing many etchings – romantic pieces entitled ‘Out on the Moor’ and ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ and a good study of Dartmoor ponies. Close by their camp was a spring for washing and drinking, which the women and children used; while in the evenings Augustus would stride off out of sight to the Hexts, sit in their plain flagged kitchen and warm himself before the peat fire. Back at the camp
he erected a tent of poles and blankets after the gypsy fashion and, like the Hexts, lit peat fires – but they were ‘usually all smoke’. At night they would retreat into the tent to sleep ‘and you can hear the stream always and always’.

The rest of this summer Ida and Dorelia passed together at Matching Green, while Augustus roamed the country between his school in London and his prospective school in Liverpool. In his absence the two women grew extraordinarily close. The whole basis of their friendship was shifting. They managed the house, looked after the children, made each other clothes and in the evening played long games of chess which Ida always won – ‘except once’, Dorelia remembered. Towards Augustus, it appeared, they now occupied very similar positions. ‘A woman is either a wife or a mistress,’ Ida had written to Dorelia.

‘If a wife, she has (that is, her position implies) perfect confidence in her husband and peace of mind – not being concerned about any other woman in relation to her husband. But she has ties and responsibilities and is, more or less, a fixture – and not free. If a mistress she has no right to expect faithfulness, and must allow a man to come and go as he will without question – and must in consequence, if she loves him jealously, suffer doubt and not have peace of mind –
but
she has her own freedom too. Well here are you and I – we have neither the peace of mind of the wife nor the freedom (at least I haven’t) of the mistress. We have the evils of both states for the one good, which belongs to both – a man’s company. Is it worth it? Isn’t it paying twice over for our boon?

Our only remedy is to both become mistresses, and so at any rate have the privileges of the mistress.

Of course I have the children and perhaps, being able to avail myself of the name of wife, I ought to do so, and live with G[us]. But I shall never consider myself as a wife – it is a mockery.’
26

The need to free herself from being Augustus’s wife ran very strong in Ida. She relinquished for a time the name Ida, calling herself Anne (or Ann), the third of her Christian names; and then, to escape further from her past self, signed some letters Susan.
27
Her mounting attraction to Dorelia in a curious way drew her closer to Augustus again. Like Gwen (whom she had also wanted to call Anne), she grew fascinated by Dorelia. ‘I know it makes you mad to hear me rave on about her,’ she teased Alice Rothenstein. ‘Dear old darling pure English Alice – I can’t help loving these fantastics however abnormally their bosoms stick out… as Gus says, she has the gift of beauty.’

Alone with Dorelia, Ida was as happy as she had been for a long time.
Envy and jealousy melted into love: she disliked their being apart even for a few days. ‘Darling D,’ she wrote while on a short visit to her mother, ‘Love from Anna to the prettiest little bitch in the world… I was bitter cold last night without your burning hot, not to say scalding, body next me – …Yours jealously enviously and adoringly Ida Margaret Ann JOHN.’