Katherine has been up since seven thirty. The curtains have
been drawn back and the tall shutters pushed open to let in
the winter sun. The first floor room she’s been given
at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man is square,
high ceilinged and decorated after the French style - the walls
a chilly blue, the ceiling painted with gold stars. There’s
a draughty window giving a view down across the bare January
garden to the gatehouse of the Chateau. As if to echo the season,
the room has a worn and rather shabby grandeur. The antique
furniture is a relic of more prosperous times - a wooden bed,
the two chairs pulled up close to the fireplace, the washstand
in the corner, the vast clothes press occupying almost the whole
of one wall. There are French engravings on the walls and a
rug on the floor to give a touch of colour but the whole impression
is comfortless. The room has been imprinted by the character
of its history - once a luxurious French chateau owned by a
king’s mistress, subsequently occupied as a Carmelite
foundation, converted back into a private residence in the nineteenth
century and then abandoned to dereliction before the war in
1914. Although now re-occupied by Gurdjieff’s eastern
tribe, something of the monastic spirit still clings to it.
There’s a damp stain in the corner of the ceiling and
that smell peculiar to old buildings - a mingling of last night’s
ashes, wood polish, damp plaster and the indefinable odour left
by generations of human bodies and their functions. Overlying
everything is the persistent smell of Russian cooking - fermented
milk and cabbage soup - that seeps up from the kitchens below.
Katherine is sitting at a table underneath the window with a
fur coat clutched around her shoulders. She’s holding
a pen, but the ink has long been dry on the words written in
the notebook in front of her. She puts down her pen to blow
on her fingers and read the lines she had hoped to complete
when she came here.
‘...an exquisite day ..... one of those days, so clear,
so still, so silent, you almost feel the earth itself has stopped
in astonishment at its own beauty ......’
It’s a beginning and, although Katherine has spent the
last twelve weeks systematically tearing up a series of beginnings,
today, as she picks up her pen again to form new sentences with
her nib, she feels new possibilities, though they are qualified
by a series of conditional clauses. If only it were not so cold;
if only spring were not so far away; if only she did not cough
so much. . . . . The fire in the grate is almost out, but the
log basket’s empty. In her journal, just above that last
entry there’s a list of Russian words and phrases she’s
been learning. They read like a poem.
I am cold
Bring paper to light a fire
paper
cinders
wood
matches
flame, smoke.....
In the leather writing case at Katherine’s elbow are
two unfinished letters. The one she has been trying to write
to her sisters tails away in an exhausted scrawl half way down
the second page. It’s dated 31st December - over a week
ago - but she simply doesn’t have the energy to finish
it at present. And what more can she say? How could Jeanne and
Chaddie, with their Kensington and country house mentalities,
ever understand what she’s doing here. Ridiculous even
to try.
‘As you know I came here for a ‘cure’
but it’s not a ‘cure’ in any ordinary sense
of the word , the cure consists in leading as full and as different
a life as possible, in entering into as many new interests as
possible. In taking up all kinds of new things of any sort and
description. Purely medical treatment there is none, as we understand
it, or not enough to mention. We are about 50-60, mainly Russians,
established here in a colony, and leading a very particular
kind of communal life ..............’
In a few hours her husband John
will be here - at her own invitation. His photograph sits on
her table - three quarter profile - the dark rumpled hair, the
slim, almost feminine face, the troubled expression that is
irresistible to women. Katherine’s been musing about John
and their relationship throughout her stay here, through the
sleepless hours of those interminable nights when her lungs
burn, her heart pounds and thrashes in her chest and all the
terrors and regrets of her life parade themselves around the
room. In October, when she first came here she’d written,
in a fit of depression, to tell him that it was all over between
them. ‘I now know that I must grow a shell away from you.
I want, I “ask” for my independence’. Her
desire to cut herself adrift from him had been inspired by the
need for absolute truth. Her relationship with John has so often
been a lie - a romantic fiction played out in their letters.
How easy it was to colour things differently in retrospect.
‘Looking back, my boat is almost swamped sometimes by
seas of sentiment. “Ah what have I missed. How sweet it
was, how clear, how warm, how simple, how precious!” And
I think of the garden at Isola Bella and the furry bees ......
But then I remember what we really felt - the blanks, the silences,
the anguish of continual misunderstandings.’
So why has she given in to this sudden sentimental desire for
John’s presence here? Katherine can’t really answer
that question. It’s the paradox of their relationship
- to be together proved impossible, yet to be apart was to long
for him again, despite the fact that he’d hurt her so
much, first by falling in love with Princess Elizabeth Bibesco
- such a stupid girl! - and then with Dorothy Brett; that second
affair so much more of a betrayal because Brett was a friend.
He’d also picked up a prostitute and then, instead of
going with her to a hotel room and doing what one usually did
with such women, taken her to the Corner House, bought her a
cup of tea and talked to her. That was so typical of John. His
inability to act maddened Katherine, but it was also somehow
endearing. He was like a perpetual child abroad in the world.
His need to tell her about his misdeeds was also thoroughly
juvenile. Did he know how much it hurt when he stood before
her - metaphorically - in his letters, explaining and absolving
himself, crestfallen, lip trembling, like a naughty child who
hopes to be forgiven because he’s had the courage to confess
before he’s found out?
But then, inevitably, as she muses on his failings, her own
sins rise up to reproach her: Francis Carco (pointless to argue
that she’d not been married to John at the time), Garnet’s
baby (a hurt too deep to quantify), her teenage passion for
Maata, Floryan’s blackmail, that first ridiculous marriage,
her cruelty to Ida, and other sins never to be told or thought
of, that stalked her dreams and the dark silent hours of early
morning. (‘There’s always just one secret -
just one - that never can be told.’) People advised
her to write it all down to experience, but it wasn’t
all experience - there was pain, terror, suffering, ‘waste
- destruction, too.’ She’s spent years of her life
trying to make sense of it.
Then in London last summer there’d been a crisis - Spiritual?
Physical? Katherine can’t be sure. Everything she’d
ever written seemed full of showiness and those ‘writerly
tricks’ she so despised in others. Her whole existence
had suddenly seemed stale and false to her - she’d concealed
too much for too long, tried to be too many things to too many
people until she hardly knew who she was any more. She’d
written sarcastically in her notebook ‘Let me take the
case of Katherine Mansfield. She has led, ever since she can
remember, a very typically false life.’ It was not enough
just to be able to write - ‘Literature is not enough!’
- one had to know how to live too. Katherine had tried to explain
to John before Christmas that she was longing for ‘a far
more truthful existence - I want to learn something that no
books can teach me, and I want to try & escape from my terrible
illness. . . . . I want to be real.’ That is why she had
had to come here. To heal the psyche, to make herself whole,
in the hope that a perfect balance of flesh, intellect and spirit
- what Gurdjieff called Hand, Head and Heart - might enable
her ravaged body to be healed. This is what he had promised
her. He had studied widely in Persia, Afghanistan, India and
Tibet, and told his followers that ‘too much attention
has been paid in the West to the development of the mind, and
too little to the emotions.’ His aim was to discover ‘faculties
and forces’ that are innate but dormant in the human organism.
Katherine, who has tried every conventional cure in Europe as
well as the latest and most risky medical theories with no perceivable
benefit, is putting her faith in Gurdjieff as a last resort.
She’s aware, in the rational part of her mind she’s
endeavouring to escape from, that a thousand people a week are
dying from tuberculosis, but she doesn’t want to accept
that she might be one of them. Here, at the Institute, people
treat her as a person, not a hopeless invalid. The illness that
has crept through her body and dulled her mind, obliterating
her personality with its own fatal persona, absorbing too much
of her energy and precious writing time, can be shrugged off
and left in the corner of the room like a garment. Here she
is neither Katherine Mansfield the writer, nor Mrs Murry the
patient. There is only the inner life. Nothing is expected of
her.
A note from Ida is on the table at her elbow, its tone hurt
and chiding. It says only, 'I am enclosing the coat and the
underwear you asked me to buy.' But Katherine knows that Ida
is fretting and thinking, 'Why have you invited John who is
so thoughtless and unkind to you? Why not me, your own L.M.,
the person who has loved you so devotedly, so steadfastly all
our lives, since I first met you when you were fourteen and
fresh from New Zealand?'
Katherine can feel Ida’s powerful emotional eye directed
towards her from the farm where she’s living and working
at Lisieux - a job chosen so that she can be close, hoping that
Katherine will send for her, wanting to be the one indispensable
person Katherine cannot do without. [Very anxious about
K. Woke in the night hearing her call me - so distinctly that
I answered aloud - such a cold wind.] Ida’s photograph
is not on her table, but Katherine can see her self-conscious,
awkward body, her stolid face, with the moustache above her
trembling lips, her huge hands, her dark brown Labrador eyes
which are bottomless pools of need. Ida’s love is absolute
and unendurable. [Received letter from K with great relief
- Also annoyed ps evidently an answer to my letter . I shouldn’t
have sent that letter - it was a weakness. If only I could always
keep the personality of independence - going on living - I could
write to her - wrote today.......]
Her letters are full of questions about clothes - she worries
about Katherine’s comfort. [Has she all those beautiful
things she misses? ] She has sent a camisole, some stockings
and a pair of shoes. Would Katherine like another skirt? A blouse?
Her purchases are often unsuitable. Katherine knows as she unpacks
a hideous jacket from the excesses of brown paper and string
that Ida deems necessary for postal transportation, that she’s
spent hours agonising in the shop between the coral and the
green - only to choose the very one that Katherine’s bound
to hate. Inevitably she will realise her mistake only after
she’s arrived home, and feel obliged to tuck apologetic
notes into the parcel to excuse the fault. Worst of all is the
undertone of love and grief in every letter. Katherine is reminded
with every communication that for Ida she is already dead. Why
must Ida be so tragic? It is the one thing that both Ida and
John have in common. They have both nailed her down in her coffin
and are, in their own ways, already tending her grave.
Ida’s unconditional devotion has almost driven her mad
at times, but here, at Fontainebleau, Katherine is conscious
more than ever of their interdependency. The second letter in
her writing case is for Ida. ‘Dear Ida ..........you have
been in my mind all day........’ As Katherine looks at
the well-worn leather writing case that accompanies her everywhere,
she remembers that it was a gift from Ida at Isola Bella - the
‘one perfect thing’ that cancelled out all the imperfect
things that Ida has given her and looking at it takes Katherine
vividly back to the Villa Isola Bella at Menton, ‘the
olive trees before and the cotton tree along the twisted fence
and the red roses and big starry-eyed daisies’. It is
with difficulty that Katherine wrenches her mind away from the
sentimental reflections she has forbidden herself, to concentrate
on the immediate present.
‘We are in the throes of theatre building which ought
to be ready by January 13th . Gurdjeff has bought 63 carpets
for it and the same number of fur rugs. The carpets which were
displayed one by one in the salon last night are like living
things - worlds of beauty . And what a joy to begin to learn
which is a garden, which a café, which a prayer mat,
which ‘l’histoire de ses troupeaux’ and so
on. My thoughts are full of carpets and Persia and Samarkand.’
When Ida had brought her to Fontainebleau for the first time,
Katherine had commented that she thought Gurdjieff - with his
astrakhan hat and handlebar moustache - looked like a Turkish
carpet dealer and they’d both laughed. It’s ironic
to discover now that he is - at least in one of his incarnations.
He has almost as many selves as she has herself.
Katherine lifts her pen again. ‘I am looking for signs
of Spring already. Under the espalier pear trees there were
wonderful Xmas roses which I saw for the first time this year.
They reminded me of Switzerland; and somebody found four primroses
the other day. . . . .’ This is the domestic language
that Ida understands, the practicalities of the physical world.
Katherine jokes about Ida being ‘my wife’, but it’s
very close to the truth. Ida has always looked after her physical
needs; she understands the little, trivial necessities of female
life. Only to Ida can Katherine confess that the depilatory
cream she’d used to remove hair from her upper lip has
stained her skin navy blue, or that she is planning to have
her hair rinsed in henna; only to Ida can she describe the horrors
of shopping for a hat with John in Paris. It’s difficult
for Katherine to imagine now, how important those things once
were to her. Appearances mean nothing here. ‘My blue dress
is in large holes. Those cashmere cardigans look as if rats
have gnawed them. As to my fur coat - it’s like a wet
London cat. The last time I was in the stable I caught one of
the goats nibbling it. . . . . Write and tell me how you are
will you? Dear Ida? ........’
The letter is folded into her blotter. John will post it for
her when he comes. Ida - who knows her so well, so perfectly
otherwise - has never understood about John, about the ties
that bind them to each other. [I am jealous - no. It’s
not jealousy - only it hurts to feel that K wants a life with
Jack - not with me - with someone - not me - I can’t make
a life with her - I can’t understand. It seems to me that
in friendship your life is quite alone..... ] Katherine
herself doesn't fully understand her relationship with John,
though she’s spent a lot of time here reflecting on it.
She tells herself that she’s forgiven him, that it’s
time for reconciliation. In anticipation of his visit she has
re-instated her fringe - a hairstyle she’d abandoned when
she came here - preferring simply to draw her hair back from
her face. The need to comb down her fringe is somehow symbolic.
Today, she is once more Mrs John Middleton Murry.
At least in this place she’s learned to deal with fear.
Did anyone know what it was to live constantly with the fear
of death? It was at Isola Bella that she’d first coughed
bright red blood into her hand. The terror of that moment, to
die perhaps with nothing finished, everything in her mind and
nothing written. To know what one was capable of and also to
realise that one might not be given the chance to show it. She
had vowed then that she would write like a demon, not waste
a single second of whatever life she had left.
But what has she accomplished in the four years since then?
The question takes shape in front of her, in the shadowy corners
of the room, demanding nothing less than Truth. A few stories,
far too few to count for anything, a multitude of book reviews,
written out of financial necessity, endless useless letters.
But not the novel that sits inside her like a gigantic growth,
rooted in her mind, not yet committed to paper. She has no energy
to write it yet. In the mornings she has scarcely the strength
to put on the warm underclothes that Ida has sent and go downstairs.
She’s written nothing worth keeping for months, but the
ideas have begun to flow again and she had told her friend Olgivanna
a few nights ago about this revival of the old belief:
‘I want to write a book. This is after a long period
of passivity; I am going to write a wonderful book. I must soon
get well enough to start to work on it......I have begun many
times, but I am not yet ready, it seems. However the idea is
clear enough . . . . . Two people fall in love and marry. One,
or perhaps both of them has had previous affairs, the remains
of which still linger like ghosts in the home. Both wish to
forget, but the ghosts still walk......’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John Murry arrives after lunch from Paris. He had written a
few days earlier to tell Katherine that he had a leader for
the TLS to finish and would take the night boat from Newhaven,
arriving in Paris early on Tuesday morning. He went first to
a hotel to collect some clothes and a pair of shoes that had
been bought for Katherine and brought over on the ferry by an
acquaintance. Brett had suggested that the customs might be
suspicious of him if he travelled with women’s clothes
in his luggage, so he’d asked a Mrs Nelson to take them
for him. It didn’t occur to John that he might simply
have told the customs officials that they were a present for
his wife. Katherine, knowing John’s incompetence in the
business of travel, has sent him precise instructions on how
to get to the Priory from Paris. ‘You get out of the train
at Avon and take a cab here which costs 8 francs with tip. Ring
the bell at the porter’s lodge and I’ll open the
gate. ...... I hope Tchehov’s wife will be here. I have
gone back to my big lovely room too, so we should have plenty
of space to ourselves.’
For John the meeting - their first in four months - is fraught
with anxiety. He vacillates between total denial and profound
despair. He wants to believe that she can recover, but in his
dark moments is convinced that she will not. The Katherine who
comes towards him is ‘more like a wraith than a woman.’
She reminds observers ‘of a candle light, pale, tiny,
bright but frail, to be extinguished by a draught.’ Her
face, by contrast, is radiant, her cheeks flushed with tuberculosis
and her feverish eyes appear enormous above the gaunt cheekbones.
John, in his self delusion, believes her to be better. Katherine
introduces him to her friend Olga Ivanova, her doctor James
Young, a young Lithuanian girl called Adele Kufian who has fallen
under Katherine’s spell, and then the great man Gurdjieff
himself, who speaks so little English, French or German the
possibilities of conversation are virtually nil. Then Katherine
takes John up to her room for a private talk.
Katherine tries to explain why she’d felt the need to
cut John off. Her love for him had had to die, however painful
it was going to be. “It was killing us both,” ......
“I felt that I could not bear it, - tearing my heart away
from yours. But I managed to do it.”
John blames the teachings of her mentor Gurdjieff and assumes
that this is ‘part of the spiritual discipline of the
place . . . . . thus to sacrifice one’s earthly affections.’
Although he is happy when she tells him - “I have won
through, at last..... My love for you has all come back to me,
renewed and purified, - and greater than ever. That was why
I wanted you to come” - he’s aware of underlying
feelings of confusion and dread. Katherine’s heightened
emotional state worries him; her unquestioning espousal of new
age philosophies is at odds with his own devotion to logic and
reason, and she’s surrounded by men he fears may be charlatans.
Over the last few months he’s read books recommended by
Katherine in an attempt to understand what she’s doing,
but the ideas they contain remain mysterious in the light of
his agnosticism. He can’t follow her leap of faith. John
is out of his depth among people who have embraced an alien
philosophy, though he finds an instant rapport with James Young.
The doctor had been first a surgeon, and had then studied under
Jung to become a psychotherapist. At Fontainebleau he’s
exploring the healing possibilities of Gurdjieff’s New
Age theories and sharing a room with A.R. Orage - a man John
detests and regards as being a negative influence on Katherine’s
life and health. It is Orage that John blames for introducing
Katherine to Gurdjieff. Without him - so John believes - she
would never have entered the Institute and might have spent
the winter in a more comfortable environment.
Gurdjieff is in the middle of a massive project, the details
of which have filled Katherine’s letters. He’s recently
bought an old aircraft hangar used by the French in the war
and transported it into the garden of the Priory. There it’s
being transformed into a huge performance space called the ‘Study
House’ big enough to accommodate three hundred people.
The metal walls are being decorated with murals and a floor
has been constructed of clay bricks made in the Russian fashion.
There’s a perfumed fountain in front of a dais used by
performers, a gigantic throne under a canopy for Gurdjeff himself,
and raised terraces round the walls covered with Russian furs
and oriental carpets for spectators to sit on. To please Katherine,
John takes a paintbrush and helps Olga decorate some glass panels.
Olga tries to explain the principles they live by and tells
John that in the Institute they try to create an atmosphere
of overwhelming love; that this love is a healing, creative
force.
When the bell rings for dinner, it has begun to rain, but Katherine
refuses an umbrella to walk across to the main house, telling
Olga; ‘I love the rain tonight, I want the feeling of
it on my face.’ After supper they all go into the salon
for an evening performance of music and dance. Katherine has
a special seat beside the fireplace where gigantic logs are
spitting and crackling. Tambourines jingle in the background
and they can hear musicians tuning up their instruments. Katherine
seems agitated and aloof. ‘I want music,’ she says
to Olga. ‘Why don’t they begin? ... I simply must
see the ‘group’ tonight. Will they do the ‘group’?’
She wants John to see the centre piece of the Priory’s
philosophy transmuted into dance - a ‘prayer’ in
movement and music - a synthesis of body and mind that comes
from the Sufi tradition. The music begins; the dancers prepare
themselves. They are going to do the ‘group’. Katherine’s
thin face is glowing with expectation. For her, though not for
John, the music is a spiritual experience.
When the performance ends at ten thirty, many of the participants,
including Olga, go back to the Study House to continue working.
There’s very little time now before the Russian New Year
on January 13th and it has to be made ready for the celebration.
Katherine, exhausted by the effort of the day, goes back to
her room escorted by John and Adele. Climbing the stairs steadily
without support, hoping to show John just how well she is, strains
Katherine’s body and her lungs to the limit.
She begins to cough and, as she enters the bedroom, bright,
arterial blood begins to spurt through the fingers she puts
over her mouth. ‘I think . . . I am going to die,’
she gasps. John, terrified, runs downstairs to call for a doctor.
Adele tries to staunch the flow of blood with a towel. When
John returns, James Young and another doctor push him aside
and John leaves the room with one last, anguished glance at
his wife. Although she can no longer speak, the expression in
Katherine’s eyes is beseeching.
All efforts to stop the haemorrhage are useless and, at eleven
o’clock, Katherine is pronounced dead. John is comforted
by Olga and Adele, who have waited on the landing outside the
door with him. They are all in shock, barely able to function
coherently. A telegram is sent to Ida at Lisieux, asking her
to come immediately.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The following day, Ida arrives on the afternoon train and moves
into Katherine’s room at the Priory. Ida had felt intuitively
when they parted in October that she would never see Katherine
again, and just before Christmas she’d woken in the early
hours of the morning in her room at Lisieux ‘from a dream
of the knowledge of death’, the tears coursing down her
cheeks. Katherine had wanted to deny the fact of dying; had
wanted everyone around her to ignore her illness and behave
as if nothing was the matter. But it’s not always possible
when one loves someone so much. Ida doesn’t like to think
of Katherine dying in such a cold, inhospitable place surrounded
by strangers. She finds some comfort in talking to Olga who
tells her that this was not the case - on the last evening Katherine
had been ‘so full of the spirit of love that she was transformed’.
Katherine’s body has been laid out in the chapel at the
Priory. Ida is horrified by the cheap white wooden coffin that
John has chosen - ‘so bare and cold’. She goes up
to the room and brings down the ‘brilliantly embroidered
black silk Spanish shawl’ given to her by Ottoline Morrell
and covers her with it. Remembering Katherine’s love of
flowers, she brings in whatever winter blooms she can find in
the garden - Christmas roses and snowdrops - and arranges them
on the coffin.
Ida tries to keep her grief contained and concentrate on the
practical aspects of the task in front of her. While John negotiates
with Pompes Funebres and sends telegrams to friends and family
informing them of Katherine’s death and the date and time
of the funeral, Ida has the personal, distressing job of sorting
through Katherine’s clothes and belongings, packing what
must be taken back to England, identifying the keepsakes that
Katherine has bequeathed to her friends. Ida had been with Katherine
at the hotel in Switzerland last summer when the will had been
drawn up and witnessed by the maid and the proprietor, so -
even though it will be several days before it’s given
to John - she’s familiar with its contents. The making
of the will had seemed an ominous event to
Ida, but Katherine had passed it off lightheartedly. She was,
of course, going to live for ever. After she reached the Priory
she’d written to Ida that although she felt better; ‘as
a precaution I shall send my will to the Bank in case of accidents.’
Katherine’s gold watch and chain, placed on the mantlepiece
after her death, have been left to Ida as a ‘symbol or
pledge, ........ to assure me that she was still going forward’.
The fur coat has been left to John’s mother, though it
has suffered dreadfully during its time at the Priory and is
now unfit for anything. Katherine had practically lived in it
to keep out the cold, even scraped carrots in it when on kitchen
duty. The embroidered Spanish shawl which is now draped over
Katherine’s coffin has to go to Anne Rice. The rest of
her clothes are left to Ida. A list of other small bequests
to friends and family will also have to be filled. Ida knows
the list by heart. Everything else has been left to Jack.
Ida, whose own parents died while she was young, has more experience
in the business of funerals than John. He remains stunned and
utterly incapable of rational thought. Katherine had once instructed
him humorously to choose a young and pretty wife to follow her
and ‘give her my little pearl ring’. John immediately
gives it to Adele Kafian and a disgusted Ida interprets it as
an engagement. Adele is sensible enough to return the ring after
a tactful interval.
On Thursday several ‘young literary men’ arrive
from London for her funeral. One of them is the novelist Henry
Tomlinson, whom Katherine had been encouraging just before she
died. Millar Dunning, who scarcely knew Katherine but has become
a close friend of John’s in the months since she left,
has come to support his friend. Murry’s assistant editor
W.N. Sullivan has also come, despite the fact that Katherine
had thought him ‘a queer fish’. She once complained
that he ‘set her teeth on edge’. Murry’s brother
Richard - who had to some extent taken the place of her own
brother in Katherine’s life - is there but not her greatest
friend, the Russian writer Samuel Koteliansky, who is deeply
distressed that the authorities have refused him a travel permit.
Being a Russian immigrant, he isn’t free to come and go
as he pleases. It’s a strange mixture of people who knew
Katherine only slightly and are there because Murry has asked
them to come and those for whom Katherine’s death is a
personal tragedy.
In the evening they all go to have dinner at the Chalet de la
Floret in Fontainebleau, where some of them are staying. Given
that the group have only Katherine in common, it’s a rather
strained social occasion. Ida becomes upset and walks up and
down the garden outside with Orage, comforted by the fact that
he’s one of Katherine’s closest friends and has
known her almost as long as Ida herself. The two of them - Orage
and Ida - have known Katherine longer than anyone else in the
room and have memories no one else can share. Orage tells friends
that Katherine is the only woman he has ever truly loved.
Over dinner the conversation becomes quite wide ranging and
attitudes are sometimes critical towards her. ‘Why had
she come here? What had led to Ouspensky? How? When?’
There are strong differences of opinion between Murry and his
associates and Katherine’s friends from the Institute
- Orage in particular. Ida stands up and tells them she doesn’t
think they should be talking about Katherine like this when
she isn’t there ‘to defend or explain herself’.
Her disconcerting outburst breaks up the party.
Katherine’s sisters, Jeanne and Chaddie, and her friend
Brett, although not at the dinner, arrive at the Priory on Friday
morning; ‘such a beautiful day’. After lunch, Katherine’s
coffin is loaded onto a hearse drawn by four black-plumed horses
to be taken to the small Protestant church. Her coffin is still
draped in Ottoline's shawl and decorated with the flowers Ida
has ordered from Paris. Dorothy Brett has brought a basket of
Lily of the Valley tied with pink ribbon. There are very few
wreaths. Had the funeral been in London it would have been a
very different affair. Many of the people prominent in Katherine’s
life are missing - the Bloomsbury contingent - Virginia and
Leonard Woolf, Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Katherine’s
literary cousin Elizabeth von Arnim - now the estranged wife
of the Earl Russell - T.S. Eliot, Mark Gertler, E.M Forster,
as well as close personal friends such as Koteliansky and the
painter Anne Rice. Katherine’s eldest sister Vera is in
Canada and the Lawrences are in Mexico.
The service is in French and, despite the fact that so few of
Katherine’s friends or family have been able to travel
here, the little Church is quite crowded - the congregation
swelled by people from the Institute. The eulogy, written by
John, is given by a minister who did not know Katherine at all.
There’s an air of total unreality. After the service the
coffin has to be taken to the cemetery. It seems to the mourners
‘a very long way’. The funeral cars are forced to
travel at a ‘crawling pace’ behind the horses. Ida
can’t bear it and gets out to walk beside the hearse,
‘miles and miles very slowly’. Winter days are short
in the northern hemisphere and it’s ‘bitterly cold
and almost dark’ by the time the cortege arrives. There’s
confusion at the grave-side as the coffin is lowered into the
ground. The minister, ‘his white hair shining in the dim
light’, waits for John to throw in the traditional handful
of earth, but he’s standing, immobilised by grief and
can’t be prompted. Ida, realising that something is called
for, throws in the small bunch of marigolds - one of Katherine’s
favourite flowers - that she’s been holding.
That evening a funeral meal is served in the new Study House
and ‘an immense number of dishes’ carried round
for everyone, and there are ‘dancers, with music and many
lights.’ Tomorrow is the Russian new year. Copious amounts
of wine are served to everyone and John, who has never had much
of a head for alcohol, is observed ‘talking far too much
and laughing hysterically.’ Orage takes Ida to one side
and asks her to take John up to his room.
In her own room, lying on the bed where Katherine has so recently
died, Ida feels ‘completely numb, as though I had been
shattered, like some brittle thing, into tiny fragments all
scattered and no more LM left at all.’
