Augustus John (47 page)

To be reborn was what he longed for – not through death, but in the birth of Ida’s fifth child. ‘Oh for a girl!’ she had written to him, yet he knew that ‘I
always
have boys’. She referred to the unborn baby as Susannah, but noticed that she was ‘pushing about in a fearfully strong masculine way’. The contemplation of another boy, which still had the power to excite Augustus, only caused her heartache. ‘In 3 weeks – si on peut juger – a new face will be amongst us – a new pilgrim. God help it,’ she wrote to the Rani. ‘What right have we, knowing the difficulties of the way, to start any other along it? The baby seems so strong and large I am dreading its birth. How pleasant it
seems
that it would be to die.’

Wyndham Lewis – whom Augustus was now accusing of ‘the worst taste’, but whom Ida still liked – had spent much of his time recently at the rue Dareau. ‘Mrs John and the bonne [Clara] will have their babies about the same time I expect,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘ – I suppose beneath John’s roof is the highest average of procreation in France.’

As it turned out neither of these babies – nor yet a third one that Wyndham Lewis had so far failed to spot – were born under Augustus’s many roofs. After some hesitation Ida decided to have her child in hospital. ‘It is much simpler and I don’t pay anything,’ she explained to her mother. ‘I just go when it comes on without anything but what I’m wearing!’

Clara and Félice had by now both left,
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and Ida engaged a new nanny called Delphine for the children. ‘Gawd knows if she’s the right sort,’ she reported to Augustus, ‘ – one can but try. She’s fairly handsome 22 years old.’ Under these circumstances Ida was obliged to send word to Dorelia asking whether she would return to the rue Dareau while she was in hospital; and Dorelia, in agreeing, walked back into the web.

‘Augustus is well in his studio now and a beauty it is – and he has
plenty of models just at present… Dorelia – and all the kids – to say nothing of me in spreading poses,’ Ida wrote to the Rani late that February. Although the writing of letters made her feel ‘pale green’, she continued her correspondence right up to the time of her confinement. To lighten the black humour of some of these letters, she had told the Rothensteins: ‘we shall come up again next spring you know’. After which, she promised, all their worries ‘would melt away like the mist when the sun comes out’. But to the Rani, with whom she felt less need to dissemble, she confessed that it was not to the spring she was looking forward, but ‘to the winter for some inexplicable reason’. She was suffering from an ‘egg-shape[d] pessimism’ and ‘I am dreadfully off babies just now… in a fortnight or so the silent weight I now carry will be yelling its head off out in the cold.’

There was one further item of recurring news in the new year that seemed to promise, for all their heroic efforts over the last months, an indefinite spinning out of the complex network of their lives. Dorelia was again pregnant.

*

In the first week of March 1907, Ida walked round to the room she had engaged at the Hôpital de la Maternité, ten minutes away in the boulevard du Port-Royal. Nothing, as she had predicted, could have been simpler. The baby was born in the early morning of 9 March: it was a boy.

The complications began immediately afterwards. Mrs Nettleship, who had gone over to Paris partly for business and partly to see Ida, bringing with her on Ida’s instructions parcels of magnesia and dill water, special soaps and strong building bricks (‘by strong I mean unbreakable’), explained to her daughters Ethel and Ursula what was happening:

‘My dears, Ida is to have a slight operation. It is serious but not very dangerous. In 48 hrs she will be quite out of danger. It will be to-night – I can’t come home for a few days… They think a little abscess has formed somewhere and causes the pain and the fever. She has to go to a Maison de Santé [private nursing home] and one of the best men in Paris will do it. I am glad I was here as I could help… I have been running about all day after doctors and people.’
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Augustus seemed paralysed by these events. The waiting, the suspense, above all the stupefying sense of powerlessness unmanned him. It was a nightmare, and he like someone half-asleep within its circumference. ‘Apart from my natural anxieties,’ he wrote, ‘I was oppressed by the
futility of my visits, by my impotence, and insignificance.’
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Every decision was taken by Mrs Nettleship from her headquarters at the Hôtel Regina. It was she who chose a specialist and arranged to pay him sixty pounds – ‘I would have paid him £6oo if he had asked it’; it was she who organized Ida’s move to the new hospital and paid sixteen shillings a day for her room there (each sum scrupulously noted); it was she who wrote each day to family and friends keeping them informed of developments. She was particularly reassured that the specialist, besides being the best in Paris, was well connected (his wife was a niece, she ascertained, of a baronet) and had attended several diplomats at the British Embassy. When not busy at the hospital she would inspect the children at the rue Dareau, interview Delphine and even Dorelia, replant the entire garden there filling up the children’s mud-holes, and conduct David to his new school. ‘He talks about “the boys in my school” just like an Eton boy might,’ she noted with approval. Between times she managed to keep her business affairs going, sending off satisfactory messages to various titled clients. Her energy was prodigious, and in complete contrast to Augustus’s stupor. ‘Gus looks quite done up,’ she confided to Ursula. ‘He has the grippe and he is terribly upset about Ida. He does everything I suggest about Doctors and things, but has not much initiative – he has no experience.’

The
maison de santé
to which Ida had been removed was a light spacious building in the boulevard Arago. Somehow the atmosphere here engendered optimism. ‘The place is the very best in Paris,’ Mrs Nettleship reported. ‘…The nuns who nurse her are the most experienced and so quiet and pleasant. If it is possible for her to recover she will do it here.’

The crisis, which so galvanized Mrs Nettleship and demoralized Augustus, was seen by them at each stage differently. Where she is hopeful, he is pessimistic. ‘Ida has got over her operation better than we expected,’ she writes to her daughters, while Augustus the same day tells John Sampson that Ida ‘is most seriously ill after an operation’. While Mrs Nettleship busied herself with complicated plans for Ida’s recovery, Augustus would scribble out wan messages to the Rani: ‘She is a little worse to-day’

But on one subject they were agreed: the baby. Augustus indeed was the more enthusiastic: ‘The new baby is most flourishing so far. I really admire him,’ he told Margaret Sampson. ‘…He has a distinct profile. We called him Henry as it was the wish of Mother Nettleship to memorialize thus her great friendship with [Sir Henry] Irving.’ But on Dorelia and on Mrs Nettleship Henry imposed an additional strain. ‘He sleeps all day and cries all night,’ Mrs Nettleship wrote to Ursula. ‘Someone has to be awake with him every night.’ He was, she added, ‘a great beauty’;
but ‘I hope he will turn out worth all this trouble and anxiety.’ This pious hope was to echo, like a curse, down his life.

Ida was suffering not from ‘a little abscess’ but puerperal fever and peritonitis. ‘It all depends on her not giving way,’ Mrs Nettleship explained. ‘She is no worse to-night than she was this morning and every hour counts to the good – but she might suddenly get worse any minute.’ The main hope of her pulling through lay with what Mrs Nettleship called her ‘natural vitality’, but this had been worn away through the years to a degree that her mother did not know, and it was Augustus who saw what was happening more clearly. To Mrs Nettleship her daughter’s recovery was, once the doctors had done their best, a matter of simple determination. It did not occur to her that Ida might not want to live, that she could consent to die.

She was in pain and fever much of the time. Except while under the anaesthetic, she did not sleep night or day following Henry’s birth. Mrs Nettleship maintained a whirl of cheerfulness revolving round her bedside, almost a party, so that Ida should not realize the gravity of her illness. But Augustus had little heart for this charade. ‘I do everything that is possible,’ Mrs Nettleship assured Ursula. ‘She is very unreasonable as usual and wants all sorts of things that are not good for her. I have to keep away a good deal as she always begs me to give her something she must not have and I can’t be always refusing.’ Augustus could refuse her nothing. She made him ransack Paris for a particular beef lozenge; she demanded violets; asked for a bottle of peppermint, a flask of
eau de mélisse
:
he got them all. She seemed to understand that any definite activity came as a relief to him, and when she could invent nothing else for him to be doing she made him go and have a bath. To Mrs Nettleship it sometimes appeared as if he were acting quite irresponsibly, but she made no move to stop him. Perhaps Ida sensed some friction between them. ‘Either you’re all mad or I am,’ she told them.

But on the morning of 13 March she demanded something that even Augustus could not do for her. Sitting up in bed, she declared her determination to leave the hospital and go to Dorelia in the rue du Château. There she would cure herself, she said, ‘with a bottle of tonic wine, Condy’s, and an enema’. Augustus, in a panic, ‘got the doctor up in his motor car’ and at last he managed to dissuade her. But this was a bad day for Ida, and having relinquished the hope of joining Dorelia, her spirit seemed to give up the struggle.

‘I adore stormy weather,’ she had once written to the Rani. On the night of 13 March there was a violent storm, with thunder and lightning, lasting into the early morning. Lying in her hospital bed, Ida longed to be in the middle of it, somehow imagining that she was. ‘She wanted
to be a bit of the wind,’ Augustus wrote to the Rani. ‘She saw a star out of the window, and she said “advertissement of humility”. As I seemed puzzled she said after a bit “Joke”.’

The hospital staff tried to remove him, but Augustus stayed with her that night. Sometimes she was highly feverish, ‘her spirit making preparatory flights into delectable regions’,
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but there were periods of contact between them. He rubbed her neck with Elliman’s Embrocation and, when she asked him, tickled her feet. She pulled his beard about. To the sisters she remarked: ‘C’est drôle, mais je vais perdre mon sommeil encore une nuit, voyez-vous.’ In a delirium she spoke of a land of miraculous caves, then, with some impatience, demanded that Augustus hand over his new suit to Henry Lamb, who had recently turned up in Paris. Despite the fever, the pain had vanished and she felt euphoric. ‘How can I speak of her glittering smiles and moving hands?’ Augustus afterwards told the Rani. And to Margaret Sampson he wrote of that night: ‘Ida felt lovely – she was so gay and spiritual. She had such charming visions and made such amazing jokes.’

In the morning, after the storm was over, she roused herself and gave Augustus a toast: ‘Here’s to Love!’ And they both drank to it in Vichy water. It was a fitting salute to a life that had steered such a brave course between irony and romance. Mrs Nettleship came in shortly afterwards with Ethel her daughter, who had arrived from England. ‘We are just waiting for the end,’ Ethel wrote to her sister Ursula. ‘Ida is not really conscious, but she talks in snatches – quite disconnected sentences. Mother just sits by her side and sometimes holds her hand – she has some violets on her bed. I am just going to take the children for a walk – they are not going to see her as they would not understand, and she cannot recognize them.’

She died, without regaining consciousness, at half-past three that afternoon. ‘Ah well, she has gone very far away now, I think,’ Augustus wrote to Margaret Sampson. ‘She has rejoined that spiritual lover who was my most serious rival in the old days. Or perhaps she is having a good rest before resuming her activities.’

*

The relief was extraordinary. As he ran out of the hospital on to the boulevard Arago, Augustus was seized with uncontrollable elation. ‘I could have embraced any passer-by,’ he confessed.
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He had had enough of despair. It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was shining, the Seine looking ‘unbelievable – fantastic – like a Chinese painting’.
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He wanted to strip off the immediate past, wash away the domination of death; he wanted to paint again, but first he wanted to get drunk. ‘Strange after
leaving her poor body dead and beaten I had nothing but a kind of bank holiday feeling and had to hold myself in,’ he told the Rani.

Many of his friends were mystified and shocked. ‘John has been drunk for the last three days, so I can’t tell you if he’s glad or sorry,’ Wyndham Lewis reported to his mother. ‘I think he’s sorry, though.’
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Not everyone was so charitable. They blamed Ida’s death on Augustus, hinted at suicide, and attributed his ‘Roman programme’ to justifiable guilt. Guilt there must often be with death – guilt, grief and aggression. Augustus’s drinking was a desperate bid to recover optimism. When his friend, John Fothergill, wrote to express sympathy, adding that one had only to scratch life and underneath there was sorrow, Augustus replied: ‘Just one correction – it is
Beauty
that is underneath –
not
misery, which is only circumstantial.’ This he
had
to believe; it was his lifebelt. What confused him about Ida’s death, adding to his natural grief, was that it had come through childbirth, and that his children had been deprived of a mother as he had been. It seemed, then, that he was no better than his own father. He struggled against the tide of melancholia. But as the days passed he drank more.

Ida was cremated
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on the Saturday following her death, 16 March 1907, at the crematorium of Père Lachaise. Almost no one was there – certainly not Augustus. A number of people had written from England offering to come, but Augustus, who disliked formal exhibitions of sentiment, refused them all. ‘People keep sending me silly sentimental lamentations,’ he complained to the Rani. ‘I really begin to long to outrage everybody.’ The worst offender was poor Will Rothenstein who ‘never forgave’
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himself for not having gone out to Paris, and wrote long ‘Uriah Heep-like’ letters which Augustus found ‘unintelligible’.
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