Rosabel turned to the mirror and placed it on her brown hair, then faced them.
‘Oh, Harry, isn’t it adorable,’ the girl cried, ‘I must have that!’ She smiled again at Rosabel. ‘It suits you, beautifully.’
A sudden, ridiculous feeling of anger had seized Rosabel. She longed to throw the lovely, perishable thing in the girl’s face, and bent over the hat, flushing.
‘It’s exquisitely finished off inside, Madam,’ she said. The girl swept out to her brougham, and left Harry to pay and bring the box with him.
‘I shall go straight home and put it on before I come out to lunch with you,’ Rosabel heard her say.
The man leant over her as she made out the bill, then, as he counted the money into her hand – ‘Ever been painted?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Rosabel, shortly, realizing the swift change in his voice, the slight tinge of insolence, of familiarity.
‘Oh, well you ought to be,’ said Harry. ‘You’ve got such a damned pretty little figure.’
Rosabel did not pay the slightest attention. How handsome he had been! She had thought of no one else all day; his face fascinated her; she could see clearly his fine, straight eyebrows, and his hair grew back from his forehead with just the slightest suspicion of crisp curl, his laughing, disdainful mouth. She saw again his slim hands counting the money into hers … Rosabel suddenly pushed the hair back from her face, her forehead was hot … if those slim hands could rest one moment… the luck of that girl!
Suppose they changed places. Rosabel would drive home with him, of course they were in love with each other, but not engaged, very nearly, and she would say – ‘I won’t be one moment.’ He would wait in the brougham while her maid took the hat-box up the stairs, following Rosabel. Then the great white and pink bedroom with roses everywhere in dull silver vases. She would sit down before the mirror and the little French maid would fasten her hat and find her a thin, fine veil and another pair of white suède gloves – a button had come off the gloves she had worn that morning. She had scented her furs and gloves and handkerchief, taken a big muff and run down stairs. The butler opened the door, Harry was waiting, they drove away together… That was life, thought Rosabel! On the way to the Carlton they stopped at Gerard’s, Harry bought her great sprays of Parma violets, filled her hands with them.
‘Oh, they are sweet!’ she said, holding them against her face.
‘It is as you always should be,’ said Harry, ‘with your hands full of violets.’
(Rosabel realized that her knees were getting stiff; she sat down on the floor and leant her head against the wall.) Oh, that lunch! The table covered with flowers, a band hidden behind a grove of palms playing music that fired her blood like wine – the soup, and oysters, and pigeons, and creamed potatoes, and champagne, of course, and afterwards coffee and cigarettes. She would lean over the table fingering her glass with one hand, talking with that charming gaiety which Harry so appreciated. Afterwards a matinée, something that gripped them both, and then tea at the ‘Cottage.’
‘Sugar? Milk? Cream?’ The little homely questions seemed to suggest a joyous intimacy. And then home again in the dusk, and the scent of the Parma violets seemed to drench the air with their sweetness.
‘I’ll call for you at nine,’ he said as he left her.
The fire had been lighted in her boudoir, the curtains drawn, there were a great pile of letters waiting her – invitations for the Opera, dinners, balls, a week-end on the river, a motor tour – she glanced through them listlessly as she went upstairs to dress. A fire in her bedroom, too, and her beautiful, shining dress spread on the bed – white tulle over silver, silver shoes, silver scarf, a little silver fan. Rosabel knew that she was the most famous woman at the ball that night; men paid her homage, a foreign Prince desired to be presented to this English wonder. Yes, it was a voluptuous night, a band playing, and her lovely white shoulders …
But she became very tired. Harry took her home, and came in with her for just one moment. The fire was out in the drawing-room, but the sleepy maid waited for her in her boudoir. She took off her cloak, dismissed the servant, and went over to the fireplace, and stood peeling off her gloves; the firelight shone on her hair, Harry came across the room and caught her in his arms – ‘Rosabel, Rosabel, Rosabel’… Oh, the haven of those arms, and she was very tired.
(The real Rosabel, the girl crouched on the floor in the dark, laughed aloud, and put her hand up to her hot mouth.)
Of course they rode in the park next morning, the engagement had been announced in the Court Circular, all the world knew, all the world was shaking hands with her …
They were married shortly afterwards at St George’s, Hanover Square, and motored down to Harry’s old ancestral home for the honeymoon; the peasants in the village curtseyed to them as they passed; under the folds of the rug he pressed her hands convulsively. And that night she wore again her white and silver frock. She was tired after the journey and went upstairs to bed … quite early …
The real Rosabel got up from the floor and undressed slowly, folding her clothes over the back of a chair. She slipped over her head her coarse, calico nightdress, and took the pins out of her hair – the soft, brown flood of it fell round her, warmly. Then she blew out the candle and groped her way into bed, pulling the blankets and grimy ‘honeycomb’ quilt closely round her neck, cuddling down in the darkness …
So she slept and dreamed, and smiled in her sleep, and once threw out her arm to feel for something which was not there, dreaming still.
And the night passed. Presently the cold fingers of dawn closed over her uncovered hand; grey light flooded the dull room. Rosabel shivered, drew a little gasping breath, sat up. And because her heritage was that tragic optimism, which is all too often the only inheritance of youth, still half asleep, she smiled, with a little nervous tremor round her mouth.
Jean Rhys
[1890–1979]
Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, on the British island of Dominica, to a Welsh doctor and his Creole wife. She was the fourth of five children. The family lived in the capital, Roseau, but made frequent visits to her mother’s family plantation, where Rhys’s maternal grandmother and great-aunt lived. Rhys cherished these visits, and her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) draws upon their reminiscences of Dominica in the mid-nineteenth century.
Rhys was educated at a convent in Roseau where, despite whites being the minority, the children were brought up to mimic the manners of English ladies. Her strong sense of identity with Dominica and her perception of England as ‘unreal’ meant Rhys soon grew to understand the problematic relationship between colour and class. In 1907 Rhys left Dominica for England, where she attended the Perse School in Cambridge and later the Academy of Dramatic Art in London. After two years her father’s death left her without funds and, feeling that she was not wanted by her family in Dominica, Rhys chose to remain in London. For the next two years she toured England as a chorus girl with a theatre company.
Rhys’s unhappy experiences with the company led her towards writing and in 1913 she began to note down everything that had happened to her. Rhys supported herself financially with the help of an ex-lover (a relationship that had ended with her having an abortion), and through various stage, modelling and waitressing jobs. Then in 1917 she met her future husband, Jean Lenglet. Lenglet told Rhys that he was a journalist (though it later transpired that he was a French spy) and within a few weeks he had proposed to her. Looking for a new beginning, Rhys accepted. In the first three years of their marriage, the couple moved between Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna and Budapest. Both worked, but they were never financially secure. In 1920 Rhys bore a son who died three weeks later. Shortly after her son’s death, it became clear that in order to get money Lenglet had been selling stolen goods. Despite the fact that Rhys was pregnant again, the couple were forced to live like fugitives. They returned to Paris at the end of 1922 and, desperate to earn money, Rhys began translating Lenglet’s articles to sell to English papers. It was through these efforts that she met the writer and publisher Ford Madox Ford, to whom she showed her early notebooks. That same year, in 1923, Lenglet was finally arrested and sent to prison.
Encouraged by Ford, and through him introduced to the Parisian literary set, Rhys began writing stories. By 1927, having adopted the pen-name Jean Rhys, she was developing her precise and clear style. However, she had become uncomfortably dependent upon Ford, and although he lived with his companion, Stella Bowen, she moved into their house and began an affair with him. These events were to become the basis of her first novel, Postures (now known as Quartet, 1928). By 1927, Rhys was separated from Lenglet. That same year, while on a visit to London, she met Leslie Tilden Smith, a literary agent and publisher’s reader whom she later married in 1932. Smith was to play a valuable and supportive role in Rhys’s career, editing her work and keeping her in contact with the publishing world.
During the 1930s, Rhys published three novels, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). In each, her vision becomes increasingly pessimistic and destructive as she describes the same lonely, alienated and unwanted female figure battling against the forces of class and culture. These were themes that vividly echoed her own sense of personal exile and loss. In 1936, before completing her third novel, Rhys had visited Dominica for the first time in thirty years. Although she was disappointed by the political and social changes, in a letter back to a friend she spoke of feeling a passionate sense of belonging that was so lacking in her life in Europe.
During the 1940s and 1950s Rhys disappeared completely from the literary scene. In 1945 Smith died of a heart attack and two years later Rhys married his cousin, Max Hamer. They had little money and their misfortunes culminated in Hamer being imprisoned for three years over a case of fraud. Throughout these desolate years Rhys lived in total obscurity, but despite being slowed by age and ill-health she had already begun work on the first draft of Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel based on an idea that had been with her since reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in 1906. In the late 1950s the editor and critic Francis Wyndham sought her out in order to gain permission for a radio adaptation of her novel Good Morning, Midnight. Wyndham became her mentor and for the next seven years he helped her through the completion of her new novel. By now Hamer’s health had broken down completely and he died in 1966, shortly before the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys’s new novel was well received and undoubtedly her best achievement. She wrote steadily until her death in 1979, publishing two more collections of stories, Tigers are Better Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976). Her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, was published posthumously in 1979.
Rhys arrived in Britain as a ‘colonial’ young woman from the Caribbean and, as she makes clear in ‘First Steps’ (from Smile Please,), she soon found herself baffled by everything, from the weather to the plumbing. Loneliness quickly enveloped her life, and this passage reflects the lifelong unhappiness that she felt trying to adapt to the country that she eventually made her home.
First Steps
On the sea it was still warm at first and I loved it, though I could not get over the huge amount that people ate. First there was a large breakfast, all sorts of unfamiliar dishes. At eleven o’clock the steward came round with cups of Bovril. Then a huge lunch of four or five courses.
I ate my way steadily through and could scarcely walk when I got up. Then my aunt explained that we were meant to take only a little of each course. Lunch wasn’t over until half-past two. At five, tea: another huge meal with cakes, bread and butter, jam. Dinner at eight o’clock was the most important meal and the longest. The orchestra playing at meals enchanted me. They gave a concert and I sang. Everyone applauded and I told my aunt that when I got to London I would go straight on to the stage. She laughed heartily.
Then, quite suddenly it seemed, it began to grow cold. The sky was grey, not blue. The sea was sometimes rough. My aunt sat on deck in a thick coat with rugs round her. There were rugs for me too, but still I shivered. It was a very grey day when we reached Southampton and when I looked out of the porthole my heart sank. Then I thought ‘Now at last I shall see a train.’ I had seen toy trains. They were always brightly coloured, green, red, blue, so I stood on a platform at Southampton station bewildered because I could see nothing that resembled a train.
‘But I don’t see the train, where is it?’
‘Right in front of you,’ said my aunt and stepped into what I thought was a brown, dingy little room. There were racks overhead and people sitting in the corners. This, then, was a train. I said nothing and after a while the train started.
Before long we were plunged into black darkness. A railway accident, I thought. We came into the light again. ‘Was that a railway accident?’ – ‘No, it was a tunnel,’ my aunt said, laughing.
We stayed at a boarding-house somewhere in Bloomsbury, it may have been Upper Bedford Place. The first morning I was in London I woke up very early. I lay for what seemed an age. There wasn’t a sound but I wanted to see what London looked like so I got up, put on my clothes and went out. The street door must have been bolted, not locked, or perhaps the key was in the door. At any rate I got out quite easily into a long, grey, straight street. It was misty but not cold. There were not many people about, nor much traffic. I think I must have found my way into New Oxford Street and then walked to Holborn. It was all the same, long, straight, grey, a bit disappointing. I began to feel hungry, and as I had kept careful count of the turnings I was soon on my way back. It must have been about half-past seven. When I tried the door it was open and there was a maid in the passage who seemed astonished when she saw me. I said ‘Good morning’ but she didn’t answer.
