LITMIR.BIZ

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in conversation with another woman’s husband, for suspecting more earthly inclinations. Among themselves they conceded a little more. Mary described herself to Hugo as a ‘little flirt …!’³⁰ but all maintained that this flirtation was innocent. Throughout the early years of their marriage, the Elchos conducted a double romance with the Ribblesdales. The two couples holidayed together in Felixstowe and the New Forest, splitting off into contented pairs: Hugo and Charty, Mary and Tommy. It was convenient, diverting and fundamentally harmless. As Mary explained, ‘Migs in practice (flirtation practice) dwells on the ambiguity of implications the possibility of a backdoor or loophole that Tommy considers the word to contain. Migs thinks it doesn’t matter what she says in her letters to men conks [admirers], provided she only implies it … for if brought to book she can say that they have misunderstood her – and nice men conks never take one to task.’³¹ In essence, it was courtly love, updated: men pursued, women teased, both remained beyond reproach.

      Yet Mary and Arthur’s relationship was different. ‘She reverences him,’ said Laura. Worryingly for Laura, upon broaching the issue with Arthur it seemed that he was not ‘as indifferent heart-wards to her as I at first thought – he said several things about it that gave me qualms’. Mary and Arthur’s obvious mutual attraction was not beclouded by the bavardage of ‘flirtation practice’. Within the context of Society this was dangerous: ‘the eyesight of the world … is vastly farsighted & sees things in embryo’, Laura warned Mary.³² The gossips of the New Club, seeing Mary and Laura dining with Arthur alone, could cause havoc.³³

      Laura was not the only person warning Mary that summer. Shortly after the Elchos had returned from Paris, Madeline Wyndham visited Stanway and had several lengthy private talks with Mary, undoubtedly about Arthur. Afterwards, Mary wrote to thank her: ‘I can’t say what it was having you here & what it is to have you at all. You are the best influence in my life & stronger than myself … as noble healthy & cleansing as a gust of … mountain air removing cobwebs from one[’s] moral mirror.’³⁴ But, despite these protestations, her behaviour did not alter at all.

      Mary had boasted that her mother, in the years before her marriage, had never quite been able to ‘fathom’ her. Now, it seemed no one could. Laura, analysing the situation, could only conclude that Mary, in the grip of fascination, neither knew herself nor could help herself, and that moreover infatuation blended with ambition: for ‘her affection for Hugo is strangely mixed up with her affection for the man she knows can, will & does help Hugo more than anyone else does’. For Laura, Mary was a woman buffeted by her emotions, and only Laura’s firm hand might prevent Mary from sleepwalking into disaster. ‘I never allow for a minute when I am with Mary that she is in love with A … were I to say “you are in love” she would believe me and poking the fire is productive of flame; & at present the conflagration is chiefly smoke,’ she told Frances Balfour, further placing the onus upon Arthur, as one capable of controlling his feelings, to put a stop to things.³⁵

      A letter written by Mary to her mother that summer suggests otherwise. Madeline Wyndham’s anxiety had been exacerbated, rather than eased, by her visit to Stanway. Shortly after leaving Mary, and while visiting her friend Georgie Sumner, she sent Mary a frantic letter. She did not directly mention the subject. Instead over numerous pages of increasingly illegible scrawl she dwelt long on the cautionary tale of Georgie, estranged from her husband, suffering ‘deadly remorse’, feeling she had ‘sinned against God & Man … and would die … sooner than act again as she did …’.³⁶ ‘I thought perhaps you might send me a wopper,’ Mary replied, treating her mother to a lengthy, strangely abstract discourse on the nature of wrongdoing. It is a tortuous read, but in short it divides the world into two classes: wrongdoers too stupid or wicked to know they did wrong; and those who knew, but did it anyway, preferring to face the consequences at a later date. Mary classed herself in the latter camp. The only remedy she saw was to ‘pray … to set one’s heart & to keep it fixed in the right direction & day by day the effort will become less … the backsliding & driftings less frequent – to be able to make one’s will want to do the right thing’.³⁷ Taken out of the abstract it is a startling admission. Mary’s heart was not fixed in the right direction. She wanted to be with Arthur.

      The following year, the Elchos and Arthur went on a walking tour of North Berwick. Printed backwards in tiny letters in Mary’s sketchbook from the trip are the words: ‘How I wish I could, but you know that would be impossible.’ It has been suggested that the ‘impossible’ thing was divorce, although it might have been sex, or even something more innocent.³⁸ It is startling to think that Mary could ever truly have contemplated divorce – which would have made her a social pariah, would have given Hugo custody of her children and would have destroyed Arthur’s political career. More likely, Mary simply chose not to think of the consequences at all. As Laura later said, it was a case in which ‘they hurt other people because they liked themselves too much …’.³⁹ But, for whatever reason, Mary faltered. After Madeline had failed to acknowledge her daughter’s easily decipherable code in the summer of 1885, Mary no longer attempted to confide in her. In fact, she seems almost to have stopped communicating at all.

      Desperate and panicked, Madeline Wyndham increased the barrage, while still maintaining that nothing was wrong. In frenzied underlinings from Hyères, as Mary’s birthday approached, she exhorted the Elchos to ‘Cling on to doing things together … come nearer to each other … you must both work together … don’t get separated in your lives.’⁴⁰ On the Elchos’ wedding anniversary, invoking the memory of the ‘good Dear good single-minded Child’ Mary had been two years before, she demanded that ‘Hugo … keep you from all pitch … I know he first loved you for all that & Married You to have a Wife different from all the world. I’m sick of some of the Wives I see … I love you. I believe in you. I worship you.’⁴¹ Mary broke her silence with cheerful obfuscation and a generous approach to the truth. ‘Hugo read … the birthday exhortation & wondered whether you thought I didn’t care for him any more!’ she said, ‘but I told him yr words were as warnings not as remedies … I don’t think two people could easily be more united than we are & will always strive to be … I would rather kill myself than make you miserable & disappointed in me.’⁴²

      Mary fell pregnant shortly afterwards (her second son, Guy Lawrence, was born on 23 May 1886). Yet the fact of her pregnancy was not enough to calm a ‘wretched’ Annie Wemyss, who had also heard the rumours, and that autumn recruited Laura to keep Mary and Arthur apart. Laura enlisted Frances Balfour. The two conspired to prevent Arthur from going to Stanway in December, for the house party which was fast becoming an annual tradition, ditching it themselves in order to keep him away: ‘v [sic] good of us I think!’ said Laura, who used her own six-months’ pregnancy as an excuse.⁴³ In the early months of the new year Laura trailed Mary like a shadow: almost every engagement with Arthur set down by Mary in her diary, whether visiting Sir John Millais’ new gallery or drinking hot chocolate at Charbonnel et Walker in the West End, notes Laura gently, inexorably interposing herself between the two, trying with all her might to reduce their relationship to innocent friendship.

       SIX

       Clouds

      As soon as the Stanway party ended, Mary left to join her family for their first Christmas at Clouds. The Wyndhams had finally moved in in September 1885. Throughout the autumn her excited younger sisters had bombarded her with letters giving her every detail of their ‘scrumtious [sic]’ new domain.¹ If Mary was disappointed by Arthur’s previous absence, she showed no signs of this to her family. She arrived at Clouds, loaded down with ‘millions of packages’, Ego, his nurse Wilkes (known as ‘Wilkie’), her poodle Stella and a cageful of canaries, and was rushed around

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