It was twenty-five years before she visited Wing Lodge again.
This time she was alone. She remembered that she had been there before, with Mamie, although she couldn’t quite imagine why she had been staying with her: there had never been any real intimacy between their families. Dickie and Mamie had divorced not long after that holiday, and Mamie had died recently. One of the boys had drowned, years ago, she couldn’t remember which one (she would have to ask her mother). The visit, now, was uncharacteristic of Gina. She never went to stately homes or birthplaces, and she deplored the heritage industry; she gave ironic lectures at her university on the enthusiasm of the masses for traipsing humbly and dotingly round the houses where they would once, and only sixty years ago, have been exploited as estate hands or scullery maids. But then this was an unsettled time in her life, and she was doing uncharacteristic things. She was making her mind up whether to embark on a full-scale new relationship; she had been divorced five years earlier, and now her lover wanted to move in. On impulse, leaving her son with friends for the weekend, she had booked herself into a hotel and come down to this little town to be alone, to think.
She hadn’t imagined that she would actually go inside Wing Lodge, although she had been aware, of course, that the town she had chosen to think in was the one where John Morrison, who was still her passion, had spent his last years. She had perhaps had a quixotic idea that by moving around in his streets she might arrive at his clarity; needless to say the streets remained just streets, full of cars and tourists; and for someone used to London, there weren’t many of them to explore. With determined austerity, she had not brought any books away with her, imagining this would concentrate her mind. But the habit of years was too strong to break; over drawn-out coffees in the wood-panelled tea room, where the waitresses really did still wear white frilled aprons, she found herself reading the menu over and over, and then the ancient injunction against asking for credit in red calligraphy above the till, and then the left-behind sports pages of a newspaper. In the end she joined the little party of visitors being taken round Wing Lodge because there wasn’t anything else to do. She was a middle-aged woman now, tall and statuesque in a tan linen Max Mara skirt and jacket; in her mass of thick dark curls grey hairs were sprouting with a coarse energy which made her suspect that age was going to impose itself differently to how she had imagined: less entropy, more vigorous takeover. However she tried to shrink it to size, her habit of authority was conspicuous. There were copies of her book about the novels in the little bookshop upstairs, but she wasn’t going to own up to that; she followed the guide obediently about and listened with amusement to the way the wonderful works abounding in disruptive energy became, in the retelling, so much sad sawdust, so much lament, as Pound had put it, for the old lavender.
She wondered sceptically, too, whether the place was really arranged as Morrison would have known it. He and his wife had never had much money, even in the years of his critical success, and the couple were famous for their indifference to creature comforts. Friends complained that although the conversation was excellent you never got a decent meal or a good night’s sleep at Wing. Gina recognised one or two drawings she knew Morrison had possessed, and a few things he might have brought back from the East; but it must have been his wife who made Wing Lodge into this tasteful cosy little nest, after he died, when she inherited money from her family in America. No doubt the frail ladylike guide and her possibly lesbian frail ladylike companion, who must live here quietly together on the days when they were not intruded upon by a curious public, had added their bit of polish to the deep old charm.
In the study, where Morrison’s writing table was set out with pens and notebooks, as if he had just this minute stepped out for a walk in the fields in search of inspiration, there was also a shallow locked glass case in which were displayed first editions of the novels and some of his longhand drafts, as well as the copies that Anne had typed up on her Olivetti, scribbled furiously over in his dark soft pencil. Gina had handled his notebooks and typed manuscripts, and was familiar with his processes of composition. When the others had moved on, she peered closely into the case at one of the notebooks. These longhand drafts were not difficult to read, although his handwriting was odd, with large capitals and crunched-up lower case. She recognised the text immediately. It was the scene in Winter’s Day when the middle-aged daughter declares her love for the doctor, in the house where her father is dying. They have left him with the nurse for an hour, and the doctor is trying to persuade Edith to take some rest. A lamp is burning although there is daylight outside the windows; they are surrounded by the overspill of chaos from the sickroom, basins and medicines and laundry. Edith tells the doctor, who is married, that what she can’t bear is that when her father is dead he won’t be coming to visit any more. ‘Because we shan’t have our talks — you could have no idea, because you’re a man and you have work to do, of what these mean to me. My life has been so stupidly empty.’ She presses her face, wet with tears, against the wool sleeve of his jacket. The doctor is shocked and offended, that Edith’s mind is not on her father. Also, he is not attracted to her: he thinks with pity how plain she looks, haggard from exhaustion, and with bad teeth.
There weren’t many corrections to this passage in the notebook. It was a kind of climax, an eruption of drama in a novel whose texture was mostly very quiet. But Morrison must have cut the scene in a later draft; in the published book all Edith said when she broke out was: ‘Because we shan’t have our talks. I will miss them.’ Gina’s eyes swam with tears as she bent over the case, reading the words. She was astonished: she never cried, she never got colds, so she didn’t even have a tissue in her bag. Luckily, she was alone: she wiped her face on the back of her hand, and decided not to follow the rest of the party upstairs to the bookshop. Instead she made her way out into the exquisitely blooming back garden, and found a seat in a bower overgrown with Nelly Moser clematis and some tiny white roses with a sweet perfume.
Why did it move her, this scene of the woman giving away power over herself? It ought to disgust her, or fill her with rage — or relief, that a whole repertoire of gestures of female abasement was at last, after so many centuries, culturally obsolete. No one would dream of using a scene like that in a novel now. That wet face, though, against the rough wool sleeve, sent Gina slipping, careering down the path of imaginary self-abandonment. (Was the sleeve still there in the published version? She couldn’t for the moment remember for sure.) She could almost smell the wool and imagine its hairy taste against her mouth, although none of the men she had loved ever wore that kind of tweedy jacket, except her father, perhaps, when she was a little girl. It was sexual, of course, and masochistic: female exposed nakedness rubbing up against coarse male fibre; the threat of abrasion, of an irritated reaction on the finer, more sensitised, wet female surface.
You could see how it all worked. You could rationally resist it, and you could even — and here was the answer, perhaps, to the question that had brought her down to Wing Lodge in the first place — feel sure that you would never be able to surrender yourself like that, ever again. And yet the passage had moved her to unexpected tears. There was something formally beautiful and powerful and satisfying in it: that scene of a woman putting her happiness into a man’s hands. Beside it, all the other, better, kinds of power that women had nowadays seemed, just for one floundering moment, second best.