Dear supporters,
Ghost Variations came back from its editor without a number of chapters I'd envisaged as 'variations', but which seemed to hold up the action. Now that you've hopefully had a chance to read at least some of the book, I thought you might enjoy some unpublished sections as bonus material.
The chapter that follows was originally going to appear when Jelly visits the ailing Tom in the Dublin nursing home, towards the end of Part 1. She goes to stay with her old friend 'George' Yeats - wife of the poet WB Yeats, multi-talented and spiritualist-oriented. George was such a fascinating character that at first I couldn't resist making her into more of a presence than ultimately resulted. The chapter also includes a good anecdote (apparently true) about the time the poet Rabindranath Tagore came to visit...
Meanwhile, please join us at Leighton House on the evening of Tuesday 18 October, if you can, for the Ghost Variations concert that launches the Kensington & Chelsea Music Society's new season.
Happy reading!
Jessica x
(Above: George Yeats, portrait by Edmund Dulac)
GHOST VARIATIONS BONUS: THE GEORGE YEATS CHAPTER
The journey to Dublin was long and noisy: first the train, clattering for hours to Liverpool, then a ferry across rough winter waters that lashed and spat at the side of the boat and made her seasick. After that, it took some time at the quayside amid a din of Irish shouting in which she could hear the eddying accent but not the words, to catch a cab for the five-mile journey past the red-brown Georgian terraces of central Dublin and out to Rathfarnham, where the Yeats family lived.
Standing in the evening murk ringing the doorbell at the farmhouse, Riversdale, aware of chickens clucking in the yard, she wondered if she had come to the right place.
“Sai! It’s really you?”
“Dobbs!” And George, her dear, too elusive but most loyal friend, was on the step, in her arms, and Jelly felt the years sliding away from them: they were two giddy girls again, a Bohemian duo, each enchanted with the other’s exoticism. George even smelled the same – all lavender and musk – and her dark hazel eyes were as astute as ever. She’d gained weight, thanks to motherhood, and her glorious cascade of russet-coloured hair was greying, but Jelly had long ago judged that her face, with its strength of feature, would stay striking forever. How gratifying to see she was right.
Behind her, hovering in the hall, was George’s daughter, Anne, eager to meet the newcomer: she was fifteen, a chrysalis waiting to unfurl into her mother’s image. Michael, the younger of the two children, was still in his school uniform; he was his father in miniature, with the same broad forehead, jutting chin and full lips. Jelly held out her arms to them both; they quickly overcame their shyness to embrace this open-hearted guest.
“You poor thing, you’re sodden. Come into the warm.” George grabbed Jelly’s rain-drenched coat and hat, then hugged her again. “Oh, Sai, I’m so sorry you’re here for the reason you are, but I’m glad you’re here at all. Anne, be a dear, would you, and pop on a kettle for us? Michael, go and finish your homework, there’s a good boy...”
Shivering from the dank journey, Jelly took in the quiet house, breathing its soft intensity as if the air could bring the resonance of William’s poetry into her ears.
“He’s away,” said George, answering the unspoken question while she bustled into the kitchen. “He’s in London, working. Just as you come here, he goes there. Hey-ho! We can have a ladies’ evening together.”
Jelly leaned on the kitchen table, feeling at home: the house, like all the others George and William had lived in over the years, was quirky, bright and sensual, decorated as only George could imagine. Jelly couldn’t help wondering how her friend could accept the imbalance in her marriage; William must be pushing seventy by now, while George was only a few months older than Jelly. “He’s sixty-eight, if you were wondering,” George remarked, over one shoulder; she had always sensed unspoken thoughts. Psychic, of course. Or perhaps George simply knew her very, very well. Strange about old friends: if you spend enough time together in your formative years, the closeness never goes, but like a chameleon, changes colour according to place – and seems more remarkable every time.
“I wish I could say let’s go out dancing tonight,” said George, by the sink, “or go to a party and smoke cigars, or stay up reading out poems and playing music til dawn. But I’ve got a problem with my foot, I imagine you wouldn’t be in the mood, and besides, there’s nowhere to go.” She picked up a big earthenware teapot, poured two mugs of tea, then reached up to a shelf for a bottle that contained something amber. “A wee drappie?”
“What’s that? Whiskey? In tea?”
“A little pick-me up.” George smiled more at her cup than her visitor, adding a good dollop.
“I couldn’t. I’d fall over.”
“Helps me through.” George sipped. “Ahh, that’s good...Life’s not very simple these days, Sai. Sometimes I feel I’m trying to be ten different people all at once.” She rested one hand on the edge of the kitchen table, apparently supporting herself.
“Oh, Dobbs...Can I still call you Dobbs? Am I allowed?”
“Jesus Murphy, Sai, you always have, you always will. Don’t even think about changing.”
Jelly was trying not to remember that Georgie Hyde Lees – as she had originally been – had had a father who was extremely fond of his drink, too much so. It broke up the family, then dragged him into a premature grave. It didn’t necessarily follow that that made George the same...or did it? How did inheritance work? How did changes happen to people, day by day, without anyone noticing until it was too late? How could one stop these things happening? Or could one not, if it were somebody’s own choice? Jelly might know how to play the violin, but occasionally she felt she didn’t understand much else about how the world worked.
She couldn’t decide whether or not she was sorry not to see William. Thinking back, she could still hear his voice – his educated tones tinged with the slightest hint of Irish carousel – reciting his poetry to her and Rabindranath Tagore at the artist William Rothenstein’s studio.
It must have been 1920 or so; Jelly was posing, bored and restless, for her portrait with her violin. Rothenstein, his black eyes feasting on her as he worked, kept telling her to stay still, or to move her hand in a direction she wouldn’t normally move it while playing. She itched to get out into the sunshine in Holland Park and eat ice-cream. That was the first time she met Tagore; he knew Yeats through Rothenstein, who’d been to India and brought back copies of Tagore’s poetry. Soon the two writers became inseparable friends, if and when they were in the same place at the same time.
“Since I have nothing to do but stand here,” she glittered at them, “and in this room there are two of the greatest poets in the world, I think it’s only right that I ask you to recite me some love poetry while Mr Rothenstein is painting. Who will go first?”
Yeats read a favourite verse rhythmically, more like song than text; this was poetry, he declared, not prose, and must therefore sound like poetry, which meant bringing out the rhythms before all else. Tagore’s voice enchanted her as he rendered his own work with inflections, imagery and ideals so rich that any composer would have given an eye to put them to music. He matched Yeats’s artistry, and Jelly – though her naughty inner voice considered both men vain with their gifts – felt moved at being the recipient of these sounds, given specifically for her pleasure.
Next Rothenstein encouraged her to play instead of pose – he wanted to sketch her in action, he said, and besides, Tagore had not heard her yet. Jelly played Bach; the studio walls and generous windows surrounded it with resonance. She could see Tagore whispering to Yeats, and the artist’s eyes shifting between her waist and the canvas as his hands at work tried to keep up with hers. They applauded and begged her to continue. She obliged, pulling some Gypsy pieces from Hungary out of her memory, the faster the better, until Rothenstein, tears in his eyes, declared that his painting could never do justice to her.
“You could be a Gypsy yourself, the way you play,” remarked Tagore, when she’d put away the Bergonzi and swooped down to sit beside him. “Your Gypsy music could almost be Indian.” He knew about Gypsy culture, how the Roma people had come out of India and travelled across Europe carrying the sounds of the east in their caravans; before the music grew up in Hungary and across eastern Europe, it was born in the heat of the Subcontinent sun.
Jelly, listening to him, watching his lips moving within the great bushy woolliness that surrounded them, felt too young and very stupid. So she made Adila invite him to tea in Netherton Grove – Jelly and their mother were still living in Elm Park Gardens with Titi and Ralph at the time. Tagore turned up early, before anyone was home, and went into the Green Room to rest – only to be scolded by the maid, who mistook him for Caesar, the new puppy, whose boxy snout had a certain something in common with the shape of the poet’s beard.
“He never!” George laughed uproariously, and Jelly joined in.
“I often say the wrong thing,” Jelly confided. “I always feel so stupid. Because these men, Dobbs, they are so intelligent, they read everything, they know everybody, and what do I do? I play my violin. I didn’t go to school, I have crazy handwriting and I can’t write poetry.”
“They wouldn’t like it if you did. They want you to inspire them, not compete with them. They’re like tomcats, these writers. They stake out their territory. And if another dominant male appears, they fluff themselves up to look bigger, and then make the most outlandish noises they can to show how important they are. You are the bird that makes them chase you, though they know full well they’ll never catch you. Those men were mentally undressing you that day.”
“I didn’t really think about that,” Jelly admitted, colouring. “I thought they were just listening to the music.”
“Poor Sai... Come on, I’ll show you your room.”
Later, when the children were in bed, George and Jelly curled up in opposite armchairs beside the log fire. An enormous fluffy cat trotted in, shaking raindrops from its fur; George scooped him up onto her lap. “This is Pangur, my lovely fuzzy cat-boy. Isn’t he magnificent?” They chose wine ahead of hot chocolate – “I think we deserve both,” George said, leaning past her purring cat to pour claret – and, with the heat of the flames and the soft aroma of woodsmoke soothing their spirits, they drifted together into their memories.
“Garsington. Oh, I loved Garsington...” George beamed.
“Lady Ottoline – remember her? And David Lawrence? Did you ever read any of his stuff?”
“Yes, and Siegfried Sassoon…didn’t you try to seduce him?”
“Not exactly…but the poor man, he turned tail pretty fast. I never knew what I’d done wrong.”
“It wasn’t you, it was him…they say he bats for the other team. Oh, wasn’t it was fun, that Garsington set? You could be frightfully outrageous and people would just adore you for it.”
“What was the most outrageous thing I ever did?” Jelly asked.
“That time we took the sleeper train in Italy and you decided to get undressed with all the lights on when we were going through some station! And when I was shocked you said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, they’re never going to see me again!’”
“I must have looked quite good in those days. I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to do it now.”
“You look a lot better than I do... Besides, you can’t really do things like that when you have to set a good example to your children. Wiiliam was a senator for a while. We had to be respectable...”
“But don’t you feel – well, awfully constricted? What’s happened to all that – that Dobbsishness of yours?”
“I thought you said I hadn’t changed?”
“You haven’t. Not exactly...”
“You’ve been lucky.” George took a swig of wine. “I know it’s not easy, but you’ve been free to be you and to be the musician you are. You have a muse and you follow it. I love that freedom in you. But will you believe me if I say I wouldn’t have been without William and the children, not if you asked me to play every concert in the Queen’s Hall for a year?”
“You don’t play.”
“Well, of course not. But – it’s different if you have a talent. You do and, really, my talent was only for supporting other people while they’re talented.”
“But you have all sorts of talents. Art. Languages. Casting horoscopes. Being a wonderful mother. And what happened to your automatic writing? Do you still do it?”
George’s glass was empty. She reached for the decanter. “You wouldn’t believe it, Jelly. Four thousand pages...or something like that…”
Jelly hesitated. “I couldn’t see some, could I?”
“If you really want to.” George lifted Pangur onto Jelly’s lap before jumping up to invade William’s study. She had painted it sunshine yellow for him. Jelly suspected it was partly George’s colour schemes for the various Yeats homes – Oxford, then Ballylee Castle – that prompted Adila to press for something similar in Netherton Grove. After a few minutes, she reappeared, her face amber in the firelight, clutching a set of binders wider than her waist. “Here you are.”
“My goodness – is that it?”
“Less than half of it.” George put down the bundle at Jelly’s feet. “Help yourself. Have a browse.”
Jelly, to avoid disturbing the cat, propped a folder on the arm of the chair. She handled the papers as if they might scorch her. “Does he still ask you to do this, Dobbsy?”
“Sometimes I wish he would.” George sought out her wine glass. “He’s obsessive. He’ll delve into one idea absolutely for weeks or months or years, then he’ll move on. Now he’s involved with the work of a Swami.”
“Weeks, months or years?”
“Years. He wants to work with him on translating the Upanishads, which is an enormous job, and if he does then he’ll have to go to Italy to do it next year... He can’t see that this fellow is using him – he already brought out a book with him and he kept insisting on reading it to me and, honestly, darling, every single time I fell fast asleep. Sometimes I wish we were back at Garsington, or Eva Fowler’s...it all seemed so romantic. You’d play, and then we’d have a glass game session or table-tapping – and music and spirits, it all seemed so natural and so thrilling – “
“He’s a seeker – he always was. That’s why we love his poetry.” Jelly stroked Pangur, whose claws were flicking into her legs while he purred. She had almost forgotten about the spirit messages flowing out from the glass at Eva Fowler’s. She’d often been the star of those gatherings, but so preoccupied with her music that she took the rest for granted. If only she could remember...
“It’s so strange to think that it’s all the mysticism that brought us together in the first place, me and him,” said George. “Now, with everything else, it’s starting to feel so silly. Compared to the politics, you see. He has room for all this within himself at the same time, but I’m not sure I have – not any more. He’s always saying that political thought today has to face ‘the most fundamental issues’, that we need the educated classes to take charge, to make everything work. I hate it all – the Blueshirts, the ideologues. He’s been writing ‘Songs’ – awful, jingoistic, nationalist things – I do my best to tone it down, I really do, even if I’m just the typist...plus housekeeper, secretary, mother, interior decorator, gardener, manager and chicken farmer. Sai, more wine? I don’t want to keep you up if you want to go and sleep – but it’s so wonderful you’re here. You’re so easy to talk to.”
“Tell me things, then.” Jelly had no wish to be alone with no distractions from the prospect of tomorrow. “Tell me about you and William getting together. Because that was when you rather disappeared.”
“I disappeared? You were the one who was always on tour. I stayed at home and fell in love.”
“And this.” Jelly ran a finger across the fading handwriting that bore witness to George’s first years with William. She’d written all that, for him? ‘Automatically’?
“When you need perspective and answers... I think I must have, and it seemed that Theosophy had what I needed. You know about the Golden Dawn?”
“I remember a little...” Jelly turned the pages. Words drifted in and out of focus through a smog of exhaustion, alcohol and the time-warp effect of seeing George again. “Phases of the moon,” she read. “...Twenty-eight incarnations...gyres of history...”
“What are ‘gyres’?”
“Mixtures of opposites. Imagine a god – say, Jupiter – as a pointed cone. And one of his mistresses, say Leda, as another. The two intersect and penetrate one another. Or God and the Virgin Mary, if you prefer. Then the result is a gyre, something half divine, yet on the earth. Only it can be an idea too, you see. It can be a moment in history. Think of a span of two thousand years. Then at the midpoint of each half, each thousand years, there’s a moment where civilisation can reach its peak, and that’s a gyre. Say, ancient Egypt, or the Italian Renaissance.”
“So...around 1500AD?” Jelly found an image forming through the confusion.
“Exactly. And with Egypt, 1500 BC. It all helped William make sense of things. He based A Vision on things we wrote together, with the messengers, and...”
“Messengers?” That was the term that Adila and Erik used for the entities who supposedly delivered their glass game results.
“It didn’t come from nowhere. I may have started it to keep him by me, Sai – but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”
Jelly thought back to the garden parties: George in her twenties, red-setter hair blowing across her eyes, with the long skirts she insisted on wearing even when fashions were shorter, with Anne as a toddler and William away somewhere, laughing on the sloping lawn under the ilex trees, holding forth with dizzying ideas about higher consciousness, bringing the inner self as close as possible to God. How ecstatically they received the notion that living can be more than mere life. George and Jelly were young; they were certain they were right, and that real, Godly magic was possible if only they believed in it hard enough.
Perhaps those notions were what attracted William – or so George said, though Jelly reckoned her friend’s odalisque figure and gorgeous hair must also have had something to do with it. George was insecure: she wasn’t his first choice and she knew it. She could not compete with his long relationship with Maud Gonne, or his fascination with Maud’s daughter, Iseult, which was possibly even worse. George reeled him in with her mystic promises; once they were married she had to deliver.
“I delivered.” George drained her glass. “I delivered him out of his depression. I delivered all these pages which he could use as his basis. I delivered him a daughter and a son. I delivered him happiness. Poets aren’t supposed to be happy, that’s the trouble. It’s so stupid! Why shouldn’t someone work from joy, instead of sorrow? Find joy; then the creative self can fly. You leap higher if you take off from solid ground.”
“And the automatic writing, Dobbs? Didn’t you say...you researched, you read Cicero and Ptolemy and Plato, you stayed up all night reading... Or was it all real?”
George gave a sigh. “If only I knew. But I don’t. That’s the truth, I swear. I – just – don’t – know...” She stared at the heap of papers at their feet.
“How did you start?”
“I had to.” George took a swig. “When we got married, we went on honeymoon to the Ashdown Forest. And while we were there, Willy had a – a sort of crisis. He began to think he shouldn’t have married me.”
“What? Darling, you never told me that!”
“You were swanning around with Bartók and doing concerts nineteen to the dozen – and you were mourning Sep – I didn’t want to bother you. What happened was that he started thinking he still wanted Iseult, and that it was too late, but...well, you can imagine how I felt. I’d vowed to have him and hold him. The best way to do that was to...come up with something. I faked it, Sai. A few pages of automatic writing, to get him interested. I had something for him, then, that she didn’t.”
“Oh, Dobbs – how could you bear it?”
“You know – well, a few times the children were ill, and that was worse, of course. But apart from that, those were the most difficult days of my life.” George grabbed the decanter and refilled Jelly’s glass and her own. “And here we are. We got through. The thing is, I may have faked a few pages, but after that I found I could do it for real. It might never have started otherwise.”
“So...you hold the pen, clear you mind of all thoughts and let it move of its own accord?”
“Don’t you remember, Sai? We tried it at the Fowlers’.”
Jelly better remembered dashing around strange corners of large houses with Adila and Titi and George, screaming with laughter, fending off a great many men, and worrying about her bowing in the next piece. “My brother-in-law would probably come up with some explanation from Freud,” she said.
“I thought of that. Everyone has to think of psychoanalysis these days – but all I know, Sai, is that when I start to think that perhaps it was real, perhaps these ‘spirits’ really were moving my hand and taking over my mind, then I feel absolutely bloody petrified.”
Jelly had not spoken a word about Schumann, or herself, or Tom. Talking about anything else was the biggest tonic she could hope for. “Poor Dobbsy, I’m wearing you out. We should sleep. I’ll need some energy tomorrow.”
George got to her feet and stretched. “Too true, my dear. It’s quiet here. You’ll sleep well.”
Jelly hoped she was right. When she remembered what she must do the next day, she could wish the night ahead to be much longer.