So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ draw herbs &c – I want to give a party in the autumn, for all these Hampstead people who’ve asked me out, but Mary says yes and I could ask the S——–s (who are absolute death) and the vicar (with pectoral cross, guaranteed to wreck any party) &c. – do you think she’d be hurt if I suggested 2 different parties, I’d be glad to help with both of them? I don’t say my acquaintances aren’t awful, but they are differently awful, and I had hoped to give them something hot to eat and even sit down, do advise.

      Two calls asking to buy frig.

      Mary says my book-jacket for Offshore is terrible – as you know she usually praises everything. Gloom.

      Virginia Surtees rings up very madly and says we must all unite to stop the M——–gallery (he’s just sold this lovely Burne-Jones) as he is only a hairdresser who has married one of his wealthy clients and knows nothing about pix; also I’ve got to go to lunch to meet the Director(ess) of Jewels at the Bmuseum – I know nothing about jewels and care less – and now I owe her 1 dinner and 1 lunch, it’s all so hopeless.

      Don’t know if this article would be of interest – prob: not as you’ve finished it long ago – dreaded name of Ackermann appears!

      I was knocked down by a bus queue and have a round bruise on my arm, just like the mark of Cain,

      much love ma

      

       76 Clifton Hill, NW8

      [postcard]

      [April 1983]

      

      It was a lovely Easter and like all inhabitants and visitors to Theale we hated to go, but as you stood waving goodbye in the doorway in your brown corduroy pinny you looked, we all of us suddenly felt and said, very pretty, and a good deal better^* – much love and thanks to you and Terry XX Ma

      Have not prepared anything for anywhere – feel I’m going rapidly downhill.

      P.S. Rosa Moyesii. I don’t know who Moyes was, a Himalayan explorer I daresay.^**

       76 Clifton Hill, NW8

      11 May [1984]

      Love and remembrance^* for May 15th

      I’m sorry this is an oldish card, but it’s the picture I wanted to send, a favourite of Daddy’s too.

      Ma

      

       76 Clifton Hill, NW8

      [postcard of the cover of Innocence]

      [July 1986]

      So glad to hear news but I feel bewildered and wd. like to ask so many other things, looking forward to seeing you on Monday week but please let me know won’t you if I can be of the least use^** as really the things I’m doing are singularly unimportant now I come to look at them.

      Collins have printed these cards at vast expense, please leave it casually on the mantelpiece if there’s room! And please could you look at the thunbergia in the greenhouse and fill up its water-dish, hope it has not passed away. No matter.

      Still sneezing. So glad the house will soon be rid of the dreaded mark-sheets and brown envelopes,

      So much love to you all

      Ma

      

       76 Clifton Hill &c

      12 January [1987]

      Dearest Tina,

      They say it’s going on for several days, and ‘elderly people living on their own’, old folk, like myself, are given useful advice, which is to keep warm, and to remember that it is warmer inside than out – not quite true here, where all the pipes have stopped working and Theo has gone down to work (which he never does on Mondays) because there is central heating at the College of Heralds. He left his bath full of water and Desmond and I found it had turned to solid ice – would be bath-shaped if it was taken out, which Luke would like. And that’s the main point of this letter, to say how tremendous it was to see Lukey himself again, and more so, eating and bustling about and putting us all in our places. You and T have been so steady and patient with him all the way through and that’s made him able to come through it, because it was an illness, even if it’s never likely to come back again.

      I wish I’d finished digging up the back garden before the great cold, as the frost would have got into the earth then and broken it up, but then there are so many things I ought to have done. I’m reading Virginia W.’s diaries again, not from the genius point of view, but all her little jealousies and miseries about the reviewers and the housekeeping and Leonard’s rash, and going upstairs to tell him (where he sat solidly pipe-smoking and advising Labour Politicians) ‘my book is hopelessly bad, I must destroy all the proofs at once’ and Leonard steadying her down and saying ‘you know you always say that, you know you say it every time’.

      The lunch party on Sunday wasn’t at all what I expected, not really a Virago one, but it would have been wrong not to go. Tim Hilton cooked enormous quantities – mussels, wh. I couldn’t eat, but fortunately a little girl, a 5-year old, Lily, was also very critical of the idea of eating them and that, I hope, meant I wasn’t noticed so much – pasta with a nice sauce, wh. I thought was the main course, then a beautiful leg of roast lamb with roast pots.cut small and mangetouts – the baby (9 months) sat there very gravely and good as gold, reminding me a little of Paschal – he has a cot in their bedroom and a wooden playpen in the corner of the living-room (bookshelf built all round the picture-rail, quite a good idea, but how to reach the books? But the bookshelves were all completely full) – one of the guests, in fact the mother of shellfish-rejecting Lily, was Jemima Thompson, now living at 34 Well Walk, where I was brought up, with a nice journalist husband from Newcastle looking like Philip Larkin, and her mother, Ursula Thompson, but I don’t know if you remember them next door at Chestnut Lodge or going to stay with them near Lulworth Cove, or the little brother Toby, now a psychiatrist. I walked back with Jemima through the freezing Hampstead streets (she was going to give someone a Greek lesson, having given up her job at Time Life when Lily was born) – enough of all this, you’ll say.

      Now a weather report on TV, showing those brightish clouds in the SW and very black ones in the SE, so hope it isn’t, in Lukey’s words ‘terribly cold in Weston’ you always manage to make things easy wherever you go, but still, with 2 tiny children, it does mean managing. – They keep saying it’s the coldest night for 425 years – but can it be worse than those nights in Fergie’s time, when the tree fell, and you all had to huddle into the living-room? Or indeed when Valpy was born, and all the patients crowded into my room because I had a new-born baby and so was allowed a coal fire? At least you’re not in the shop and won’t have to discuss the matter of the cold with an endless succession of people.

      Desmond says he’ll ring up a plumber and take him out ‘for a few pints’. He (Desmond Maxwell) is not a bad sort really. I have one cold tap running (just), and a kettle of course. – He tells me (perhaps indiscreetly) that Theo’s ‘flat’ at the College of Heralds, which СКАЧАТЬ