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CHAPTER 1
SCHUMANN AND THE SHABBY PROSPERO
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It was the first family home she could recollect. Sixty-six years after the Fairfield family moved out, Rebecca West still recalled the address: 21 Streatham Place, by Brixton Hill. Over time, her memories of the semi-detached, slightly dowdy Regency villa in South London became increasingly idyllic. The overgrown garden with its green woodpecker, and the magical, voluminous elder tree and grove of graceful chestnuts stayed in Rebecca's imagination. Generous high-ceilinged rooms, filled with fine, antique furniture worn beyond its best, and settled into shabby gentility, became the background of the first remembered years of a haphazard, but happy childhood. And, even in later years, the legacy of the ramshackle garden would remain: the scent of the elder tree would fill her with 'mystery and joy'.
In 1894, when the family settled there, Rebecca, then Cicely Isabel Fairfield, was just two years old, the youngest of three girls. Letitia, the eldest, was seven, while Winifred was five. Their parents, Charles and Isabella Fairfield, had chosen the area largely for practical reasons. Streatham was the only London suburb with all-night trams, convenient for Charles, who worked, albeit intermittently, as a journalist.
In those days, Streatham had an added advantage for the little girls. As part of the celebrations for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, many of her Indian troops were brought to London and billeted there for up to two years. These lavishly dressed, turbaned men loved nothing better than fussing over children in their baby carriages as they passed in the park. Cicely, known to her family as Cissie, was a dark child, and later she wondered if this was what had made her particularly appealing to the homesick soldiers. They would lean over her carriage, gesture to see if they might stroke the child within and watch delightedly as Cissie grabbed out to reach the hilt of a dagger whose precious stones and gleaming metal glittered in the sunlight. Occasionally these visitors even came to the house, presenting small gifts and sweets for the children and delighting in Charles' few words of Hindustani, learned by the side of his older brother, Digby, while the latter was preparing for a commission in India. Charles relished these encounters, impressing upon the children that they had to treat the Asiatic visitors with respect at all times, to compensate for the ignorance of other, stupid people in the country who would undoubtedly insult them. Isabella was by turns amused and wary.
The house, it seemed, was always filled with sound. Isabella was from a musical family; she played the piano expertly and at times used her skill to earn a living for herself and her family. Beethoven sonatas and Schumann's 'Carnaval' echoed through the rooms and out onto the street, causing passersby to stand at the Fairfield door to listen, and imbuing a lifelong love of music in each of the girls. Political discussions and arguments were audible from Charles' study. Stories were told by both Isabella and Charles, in the evenings after dinner. The house had an air that was 'thick with conversation'. But the liveliness of this home atmosphere, the longing of the neighbours, straining to hear the music from the Fairfield drawing room, belied the truth of the family's situation. The Fairfields were a family steadfastly aiming for respectability but constantly pulled back by debts and money difficulties, mainly attributable to Charles' irresponsibility.
Charles Fairfield had achieved some success as a writer and caricaturist for the Glasgow Herald and the Melbourne Argus; his political beliefs tended towards the right and he was a key member of the anti-socialist society the Liberty and Property Defence League. Charles and Isabella had spent the earliest years of their relationship in Australia and Charles wrote disapprovingly of the state socialism he observed there, claiming that it preached 'to willing disciples the despicable gospel of shirking, laziness, mendicancy, and moral cowardice'. Charles believed in educating his daughters, thinking that they could better raise children and run a house if they were educated, but opposed women's suffrage, writing articles for the Argus which criticized suffragettes and labelled them as 'strange shipwrecked, lost souls'.
He did not drink but his abstemiousness regarding alcohol contrasted with his sexual licentiousness. Not only was he promiscuous, but he had a marked predilection for women employed by Isabella as governesses and servants, as well as for prostitutes he picked up on the street. Isabella was aware of his affairs and would challenge him, asking if he meant to leave the family and marry whatever woman he was dallying with at the time. His reply was always the same: 'Good gracious no, I certainly don't intend to marry them!' Additionally he had a 'stock gambling mania' that meant the few things of value the family did have were sold or pawned in the pursuit of promised riches that never materialized. While they were living in Streatham one of the last heirlooms, a family portrait, was sold to provide food and rent, and Cissie regarded it as miraculous that the painting had managed to escape his speculations for so long.
The sisters grew up believing that Charles' family background was Irish and aristocratic. Property in Ireland, although mortgaged more than once and in a state of disrepair, supplemented the family's meagre resources with rental income throughout the girls' childhood. Despite Charles' womanizing and gambling, his undeniable charm meant that he retained a kind of romantic veneer for his youngest daughter; he would be portrayed as the 'shabby Prospero' in her novel The Fountain Overflows. Charles was the magical father in hand-me-down clothes, a brooding figure who looked 'exotic, romantic, and a zealot'. She proudly observed the farm girls flirting with him when they went together to buy milk and was captivated by his 'physical maleness'. She loved his 'extraordinary intellectual liveliness'. It was an idealized perception, a child's adoration of her father, but, in time, it would shadow every serious romantic relationship that Cissie ever had.
Charles was a skilled horseman and a gifted orator, family stories abounded about his brilliance. In one frequently recounted tale he was said to have held his own in a debate against George Bernard Shaw. Charles and the younger Irish immigrant Shaw debated all night in the Conway Hall until a weary caretaker came and turned out the lights. While she was growing up, Cissie was quick to draw comparisons between her father's personality and her own. She loved the fact that he kept late hours, just as she loved and took great delight in his approbation. She enjoyed recalling a time in Streatham when Charles found her playing in the garden soil. He asked her what she was doing and she explained that she was digging up conkers she had buried earlier. When he asked why, she replied, 'I am God and they are people, and I made them die and now I am resurrecting them.' Puzzled, but obviously impressed, Charles sat beside her and continued, 'But why did you make the people die if you meant to dig them up again? Why didn't you just leave them alone?' Cissie replied, 'Well that would have been all right for them. But it would have been no fun for me.' His amusement and admiration were obvious even to a toddler, and she ran to him and was swung up into his arms. When Charles related the conversation to his wife, he said that his daughter 'had blown the whole gaffe', and he saw an exciting future for her 'on the lines of the atheist popes of the middle ages'.
Charles took his impoverished family to Regents Park and Hyde Park to teach them the 'points of the horse', even though the family's social position was not one where such knowledge was useful or relevant. His was the air of a chaotically driven man, compelled to try to be the best at everything that mattered to him, and even more importantly to be seen to be better than any of his peers. Beyond that, even the doting Cissie conceded 'he had not a moral idea in the world'. Isabella attributed the downturn in family fortunes to Charles' recklessness, but his personal history was far more sinister than either his wife or daughters knew.
Charles Fairfield was born in County Kerry to an army officer who was a minor landowner, and his second wife. He was one of five children, with three brothers, Digby, Arthur and Edward, and a sister, Lettie. Digby went to India with the Royal Artillery and was dead of cholera by the age of only twenty-five. Arthur went on to marry a woman called Sophie Blew Jones. Her tales of her brother-in-law's early life were dismissed as fantasy by Cissie, who loathed her dreaded Aunt Sophie. At just over seventeen, Charles enlisted as an ensign in the Rifle Brigade, and was subsequently promoted to lieutenant. Based in his company's depot, he made the most of London, joining a club and the Royal United Service Institute. The Institute occupied several buildings between Whitehall Yard and New Scotland Yard and included a museum which was open to the public, and a library exclusively for the members' use.
The library and the museum housed a very impressive collection of books, coins, medals and regimental badges and were designed to be of interest to the intellectual officer looking for a good place to relax in a convenient location. Charles enjoyed these but also sought entertainment befitting an officer, in hunting and steeplechasing, becoming a moderately successful rider. Putting horses into races cost money and so he subsidized his activities on the turf by gambling – for quite considerable sums of money. His army career was short-lived and he resigned his commission only three years after becoming a lieutenant. He had served for just seven years and five months; four years had been spent at the depot and more than two years on leave, at a time when almost all of his contemporaries were on active service overseas.
Charles moved back with his mother and brothers and briefly took up a career on the stage, joining a company that specialized in burlesques of popular plays. Then, at the age of twenty-seven, Charles left London and his family, boarding the City of Baltimore and arriving in New York on 24 March 1868. But he no sooner set foot in America than he booked another passage and mysteriously sailed straight back to London. He applied for a post as Secretary at the Soldiers' Daughters' Home soon after his arrival. The charity had an office in Whitehall and ran a hostel at Rosslyn Hill in Hampstead. While waiting to hear about his application, penurious after his American trip, Charles visited his club and the Institute Library. The cabinets filled with coins, medals and badges proved too much of a temptation and, over the following two months, Charles stole more than four hundred specimens, making a half-hearted attempt to cover his theft by cutting out pages from the manuscript catalogue that related to some of the items he had taken.
He traded in the valuables he had hoarded, selling them at gold- and silversmiths in Soho, Covent Garden and the City, and less flamboyantly, at pawnbrokers, including one in St Martin's Lane. With the jewellers he used his own name, but with the pawnbrokers, he was more discreet. His final visit to the library was to lift a two-volume edition of Coleridge's letters. The goods found their way back to someone who recognized them and, a week later, when Charles returned to the library, he was detained. He was wearing one of the stolen gold coins, as if it were a medal, attached to his jacket.
He was quickly identified by a wholesaler from Garrick Street as the man who had sold him the stolen goods; Charles confessed, going so far as to volunteer the information that he had been cutting pages out of the catalogues to obscure how much he had actually stolen. Charles' mother, Arabella, and his brothers, Arthur and Edmund, were stunned and began their own search of the house in Pimlico as soon as news of his arrest reached them.
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On 1 October 1868, Charles was brought before Bow Street magistrates' court. Charles' former rank and good family meant that the case garnered a huge amount of publicity. The trial was covered in the London papers and the story was syndicated across the country; Charles was identified by name and by his battalion in the Rifle Brigade. Some headlines hinted darkly at the possibility of insanity. The second hearing came two weeks later and one of his brothers obligingly produced the pages from the coin catalogue which he had found stuffed and hidden in a drawer in Charles' bedroom. Additionally, there were sixteen gold and thirty-seven silver coins at home, which Charles had not had time to sell. Charles pleaded guilty and his barrister pleaded mitigation on the grounds of unsound mind. It was the only option; theft of such a magnitude could carry a prison sentence of up to twenty years. His actions did not seem entirely rational; his failure even to try to hide his crime, once it had been discovered, and the brazen way in which he had conducted it did not seem reasonable in the light of his evident intelligence. The court concluded that Charles did understand the nature of his crime, but made no explicit judgement as to whether he was sane or not.
Charles was sentenced to five years' penal servitude, an exceptionally light sentence given the gravity of his offence, and his family were left to decide whether to appeal to the Home Secretary for leniency. They did not. He was taken to Pentonville and immediately assessed as 'delicate' and 'thin', weighing just a little over ten stone, despite being five foot nine in height. The weeks in custody had taken their toll on his officer's physique. There was an added surprise; at some point he had been infected with syphilis. This was a secret, like his criminality, that Charles would keep throughout his life. Charles' family continued to visit him, despite the shame of his imprisonment, and when he was finally released, it was on licence to his old home address in St George's Square.
When Arabella died, less than two years after Charles' release, she left the St George's Square house to Arthur and Edward as well as equal shares in the Irish property. To Charles, a testament to his disgrace, she left only £600, less £50 she had already loaned him on his release from prison. When Edward died childless, he too did not include his black-sheep brother as an heir, instead dividing his inheritance between Arthur and Isabella.
A decade after Charles left prison he sailed to Australia aboard the John Elder. In Melbourne he met Isabella Campbell Mackenzie, thirteen years his junior. They married in 1883 and settled in St Kilda, a suburb of the city, to have a family. The missing years before his voyage, Cissie came to believe, were spent in America. She later told her sisters that their mother was Charles' second wife, and that he had been married to a woman called Allison, and given her a little boy. Cissie claimed to have found and met her half-brother, but the rest of the family, who were never introduced, remained sceptical as to whether he existed or not.
Isabella Campbell Mackenzie was a Scotswoman. Her immediate family included a brother, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who was the principal of the Royal Academy of Music. Isabella had made her own living, prior to her marriage, by working as a musical governess to a wealthy family in London. Her employees, the Heinemanns, were a cosmopolitan couple, a Jewish businessman from Hanover, naturalized as British, and his American wife; they had eight children. Isabella taught the two daughters, Emily and Clara, and the family were so taken with her that after she left she received a small pension from the mother, who had become as much of a friend as an employer. The relationship between Isabella and her former pupils also endured and the eldest daughter, Emily Bolland, became Cissie's godmother.
Acutely aware of the importance of appearances, Isabella worked hard to give her children some of the trappings of a middle-class life. But the concerts and theatre and clothes she saw as essential dwindled further and further away from financial reality each year. The time she had spent in St Kilda, just after her marriage to Charles, became imbued with nostalgia. When she spoke of their house near the beach, of swimming in the sea with her eldest children, her voice filled with longing.
In Britain, she searched tirelessly for scholarships and awards that might give her daughters the education she could otherwise not afford. Yet education was more than good schooling, and she allowed Cissie to play truant so she could see Sarah Bernhardt in a matinee. Isabella was ingenious at finding new ways to rescue the family from poverty. Typewriting was a new skill, much in demand, so she took classes, briefly supporting her daughters by typing for a couple of American evangelists, Torry and Alexander. When they learned of her musical abilities, she took charge of that side of their sermons too, whacking 'the Glory song out on the grand piano on the platform'. Her daughter thought it 'a very noble thing to do'.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Extraordinary Life of Rebecca West"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Lorna Gibb.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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