and played an active part in the affairs of the city during the war. Colin himself went to Eton, to my immense satisfaction. There is a distinction about a public schoolboy that cannot be denied.
Wednesday, 15 August
I’ve got to get to know Colin. I’ve got to cut this nonsense out of me. Since those drinks with him this evening I’ve been in a flat stupor. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had gin on top of poached egg and tea. If I can’t make him want to marry me then I’ll give in and have an affair with him. Loved I must be or go on the streets. It is electric.
Perhaps the real difficulty is this: that I want to watch the play and act in it at the same time. I want to watch the evolving of my own drama.
Saturday, 25 August
I wish I were middle-aged and married, placidly touring England with a companionable husband, fat, comfortable and content, like the two Americans I saw at lunch.
Was it prelude, or merely an incident, that touch of his lips on my hand three days ago?
Tuesday, 28 August
I went round the works of the Chronicle again today. A sordid, confusing, dramatic process, printing. Colin I haven’t spoken to for a week. I feel that any day now I shall hear of his engagement to some Bath beauty – impending disaster is in the air.
Such an adorable and consoling letter from Howard this morning. ‘There seem to be very few men in London at the moment,’ he writes. ‘I suppose they’ve all followed you to Bath. Do come back home soon, we miss you so here.’ Nice, nice, nice! Howard and Gus have started rehearsing at the Old Vic for Anthony & Cleopatra.
Thursday, 6 September
For heaven’s sake, Jean, stand up and be brave! If you cower and slide and shiver anymore behind your silly little curtain of doubt and indecision he will never know or see or understand you. Can you really doubt what you’ve seen in his eyes?
Saturday, 8 September
I must go back and finish my last year at college, even if Mr Walker offered me a job now. It is my only chance of acquiring an extra amount of knowledge and academic training for which I think I shall be grateful in the future. Therefore it is no good encouraging Colin to fall in love with me. If I were not so clumsy I could do what I liked with him. My life I am still centring round my work; everything else must be embroidery.
Thursday, 20 September
Four more days in Bath. Then will begin the impossible scramble to get all I have to get done done. Move into Blandford Square, the unfurnished flat I’m sharing with Mary Kate; meet people; Liverpool at the weekend to meet Leslie and family who are now on their way from Jamaica.
I’m sure that I could win Colin completely. But it would be slow and delicate work requiring infinite patience. First to establish confidence in myself in order to establish confidence in him; then gradually to unfold myself, securing him cautiously by the thin, frail threads of mutual experience until the whole net is woven. Only then will he lose his fear of me and begin his own pursuit and struggle for conquest, while I, pretending to be blind, watch every movement and help every step.
Saturday, 22 September
White moonlight and hell. The black shadows and pale stars’ slate roofs like snow-drifts; wind through the pear tree, and drifting, broken races of cloud across the sky.
Colin makes love exquisitely. It is all I ever dreamt it might be, and he doesn’t care. No one’s touch has ever thrilled me more. But it exhilarates him only for the moment.
‘I may never see you again,’ he said without the slightest concern. And ‘I’m not a permanent sort of person.’ A passionate, casual devil who is going to break my heart. His, I believe, was broken long ago, and all his ideals shattered. ‘Yes, I had a stab at that when I was your age, but it’s not any good.’
I have absolutely no fear to restrain my desire this time. The cup has been lifted to my mouth and I am already intoxicated. It is real I know now, this wild dream of mine. He is as much in love with me as it is possible for him to be in love with anyone. Yet if I could only make him feel again, only break through the crust of his cynicism, then all this torment will not have been in vain. Fate will you be kind to me?
That terrible moon has moved from my window. What was it Colin said last night? ‘There are hundreds and thousands of people, married and with large families, who’ve never had a romantic moment in their lives. They are just stodgy, they fill up the world but don’t matter very much. It’s those people with that streak of lighting in them that makes the world go on.’
Thursday, 27 September
Wembley.
On Monday evening I discovered exactly the extent of my power over him. He has no desire to get married, but would be more than willing to have me as his mistress. ‘Can’t you pigeonhole the episodes of your life?’ he asked. ‘Tuck Bath away somewhere with Colin. “Oh yes, he had rather a nice mouth …”’
I know where I am at last. And I am not unhappy.
Sunday, 7 October
I am going to live as Francis Stuart lives, as Balzac and Goethe and Shakespeare lived – ‘prodigals of life, spendthrifts, gamblers. Adventurers, not studying life from a desk but in the midst of it.’59
I must read his Notes for an Autobiography, reviewed in this week’s Sunday Times, it sounds interesting, stimulating. A book, he says, ‘shouldn’t be in your head. It should be in your flesh and blood. There are too many books written from the head.’
We are to move from this flat. Being almost on top of the Great Central Railway, the noise of the trains is too much for Mary Kate. Her heart is weak and the doctor says we must leave.
Wednesday, 10 October
I met Nockie today as I returned from lunching with Leslie at Simpsons (divine roast beef!). She is starting as Science Correspondent for the Daily Mail. She was running around London enthusiastically, determined to do her best with it, looking incredibly attractive in grey and scarlet. In love again, she says, with someone new. Shall I, I wondered as I watched her scrambling gaily onto a 536 bus, also have to submit to the conditions of the age, loving only as circumstances allow, my only anchor work and a certain inner fortitude?
Sunday, 14 October
Wembley. I have just finished reading Noël Coward’s Post Mortem and am greatly bewildered. Coward is representative of London’s moneyed classes, a society which seems altogether rotten and horrible and terrifies me to death. I have always felt Coward’s work is always of the same kind, and a little too rich, of the caviar and champagne variety, emphasised always with such vehemence that it leaves one wondering if there really is anything in the world but caviar and champagne. But I know that there is: I discovered it in Bath and can discern it occasionally at home. It flows deeply and quietly …
And just as I was beginning to get all smug and sentimental about the happy English house, I went down to tea. Now I am not so sure, not at all so sure. It
