Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets, Pt 2

Last time I considered why Olivia persists with a lover (I’ll call him X to avoid spoilers) who always places his wife first. She seems passively, unreflectingly to accept this ambivalent position, because she’s in love with him. ‘The Other Woman doesn’t make too many demands’, she thinks at one point.

Later in the novel she’s warned off X by a close relative of his, who’s found out they’re having an affair: ‘Don’t waste yourself’, she’s told…

It’s hard to sympathise with Olivia’s wilful submissiveness. People who commented on the novel after my first post yesterday tended to be put off by this.

Early in the relationship her interior monologue reveals of her view of X that ‘he’s a bit weak and in a muddle…’

Olivia appears able to articulate in her thoughts the harsh reality of this affair: he’s unworthy of her, and she’ll never supplant his beautiful wife. Then she dismisses such thoughts.

When they’ve first consummated the affair, the lover says approvingly:

“You’re the only woman who doesn’t go on about things. You leave people alone. It’s so refreshing.”

That’s how he talks.

This is how she thinks about what he’s said:

I’ve got everything…He’s my lover…It was enough. Enough belongs to me…Perhaps not possessive like some women, I’d think, smug. Congratulating myself, saying: “I don’t think I’ve ever been very jealous. I suppose it’s not my line.”

That smug complacency passes and she suffers pangs of jealousy about his wife. So why does this apparently intelligent, no longer young and innocent woman put up with a man who seems so transparently to be using her, taking advantage of her compliance?

When he gives her an expensive ring for her birthday, she’s able to see that

It said nothing about us, just brilliant, unimpeachable, a public ring, saying only with what degree of luxury he could afford to stamp a woman.

Ouch. Her acceptance of the situation – of his patronising swagger – is bewildering. Then he gives her a less expensive ring, and she’s charmed, he’s redeemed. He always is. He’s charming. And very rich. Used to getting what he wants. He even utters the ultimate cheat’s excuse, when Olivia challenges him about deceiving his wife: ‘What people don’t know about can’t hurt them, can it? I’m not hurting her as long as she doesn’t find out, am I?’

Olivia says she’d feel worried in his position (or does she mean the wife’s?)

‘I do see how difficult it is for you,’ I said, awfully understanding.

That sounds like self-criticism. She is aware of her illogical acceptance of things. Then his reply:

‘Women are dreadful creatures. They will want to have their cake and eat it too. It’s what they call being honest. If my wife had a lover I hope to God she wouldn’t see fit to tell me so. I call this confession and all-above-board business indecent.’

He talks in clichés, his selfishness is breathtaking. So too, surely, is Olivia’s complicity here? Olivia replies:

‘That’s because you’d feel it was such rotten luck for the other chap to be given away’, I said. ‘You’d mind that almost as much as the unfaithfulness. It wouldn’t be cricket…You don’t like women really, do you?’

‘There’s one or two things I quite like about them,’ he said in that beginning voice, kissing my ear. [My emphasis]

So. Homosexuality ripples through this narrative, as it did Invitation, which I wrote about recently HERE. Could it be that these lovers aren’t quite as heterosexual as they appear?

Shortly before this, soon after that first consummation, Olivia had doubts about whether this was love. She thinks of her closest friends, Anna and Simon:

I love Simon; but that’s different again, never to sleep together, that’s certain…All the same, just then I thought: I love Simon, not [X] – thinking I’d done something against Simon somehow…it was mad of course…

So Simon is gay? At least, unattainable. The lovers spend a weekend in Simon’s country cottage with friends:

Colin and [X] hit it off from the word go…

Olivia’s friend Colin is usually melancholy, but with X ‘His face was alight’ as he frolics in the river, diving from X’s shoulders.

Afterwards, dressing, they stood in the sun by a thorn bush, towels around their waists, lighting cigarettes for each other, slipping their shirts vaguely over their roughened heads, their clear, hard, square-breasted chests – deep in talk, not hurrying, forgetting the rest of us.

This looks very like homoerotic flirtation.

Later, X complacently dismisses the news that Colin is a psychoanalyst (analysis is ‘just an excuse for gutlessness’ in his view). He has ‘too much in the brain-pan, I expect, to settle down’. So it’s not Colin’s intellect he’s attracted to. Olivia’s thoughts on this idiocy:

For the first time I realised it’s no use telling him really what people are like. He doesn’t care to inquire…If I weren’t in love with him, would this matter rather? Might I get irritated? Bored?…[Ellipses Lehmann’s]

Then speaking aloud she feigns happiness with him.

So: she isn’t entirely oblivious of the defects in her anti-intellectual, feckless lover. He may or may not be a philanderer, and a little dim. He may not be entirely keen on women. Why does Olivia stick with him? Is she attracted to men who are unable to reciprocate her feelings? Is this her way of escaping commitment to a banal, conventional partnership with a man?

Another possibility: Olivia is an aspiring writer herself. During the course of the novel, especially when the errant lover goes missing with his wife (or slaughtering wildlife in Scotland with equally boorish gentry), Olivia tries to write again. And fails. She can’t finish anything.

Is the lover then a convenient excuse for Olivia not to try to produce any art herself? She lives in a semi-bohemian world in London, with friends who are photographers, artists, writers and left-wing intellectuals. She likes their company. Appears to aspire to an artist’s creativity.

Perhaps she finds safety in this doomed obsession with X, for whom she neglects her writing. He’s therefore a convenient excuse for inactivity. By committing to him, she’s taking the easier, less risky option. OK, she won’t have domestic bliss, children, a constant partner. But neither will she have to confront the baleful truth if she doesn’t really have the talent to be a writer.

Passivity then as the lesser of two evils. X, the risky, self-centred, dim-witted lover, as a kind of emotional/artistic tranquilliser? A substitute for taking the real risk.

Once again I’d commend blogger Heavenali’s take on this and many more of Lehmann’s works HERE

Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets (1936; Virago Modern Classics edition, 1996)

 This novel continues the story of Olivia Curtis, whose first ball at the age of sixteen was the subject of Invitation to the Waltz (1932), about which I wrote recently HERE. Now ten years have passed, Olivia has married a disappointing man named Ivor, and separated from him two years before the novel opens.

Like the earlier novel, there is little in the way of plot — we simply see Olivia enter into a passionate, tumultuous affair with a married man (I’ll try to avoid spoilers).

The married lover had also appeared in Invitation. His treatment of Olivia can be generous, chivalrous and romantic, but he also makes it quite clear that he loves his valetudinarian wife, a beauty who had miscarried and therefore forbids sex with him, convinced another pregnancy would kill her. This story looks suspicious when we see how things turn out. The man always places his whimsical wife’s needs first, leaving Olivia in pining solitude much of the time. We never gain insight into the wife’s true identity: all is filtered through what others say, especially her errant husband.

My initial problem with this scenario is that I found the man a selfish cad. He justifies his cavalier treatment of the smitten Olivia by saying he’s never promised her commitment, and that he likes to keep things ‘simple’. This he palpably fails to do.

Olivia, on the other hand, seems to lapse into the role of doormat. She indulges all of her lover’s moods, excuses his absences (and worse), and, if anything, shields him from pain and anguish, even when she’s suffering unspeakable hardship. When she undergoes an emotional and physical crisis, she prioritises his peace of mind at her own emotional (and material) expense.

I found her apparently submissive behaviour irksome at first. But at Bloomsbury Bell, blogger Naomi wrote that she too found this passive role reprehensible in a post-feminist world.

She also raises another possibility, one that I find plausible. Olivia enters into this seemingly doomed, dead-end affair to escape the conventional role expected of women like her. Her more beautiful elder sister, Kate, who we saw in Invitation was admired and envied by Olivia, has married (a man pointedly called ‘Rob’) and produced four children – the domestic life is shown to be draining away all her glamour, vivacity and spirit. The sisters’ roles are reversing.

Early in the novel this is revealed as so often with Lehmann in the free-indirect-discourse modernist style that slides into and out of third- and first-person narrative voices: it’s the moment early on when Olivia is visiting her ailing father. Kate is there at their parents’ house too. The mother sides with Kate, because she is more compliant, saying she’ll drink the soup their mother has made, while Olivia refuses it. Mother says to Kate:

“Yes.” Approval and exasperation struggled in Mrs Curtis’s voice. “You’re a sensible girl, thank goodness.”

As children it was always sensible Olivia who had the ‘big appetite’ and Kate was ‘the fussy one’.

‘“And now I gorge,” said Kate languidly…”It’s motherhood.”

They turn to the merits of women not being ‘scraggy’ or skinny, but ‘nicely covered’ , as Kate now accepts she is (my previous post about Invitation pointed out the focus on desirable female appearance and the importance of looks). But she adds, ominously, that ”as a matter of fact, Rob really prefers them on the skinny side.” Her mother dismisses this ambiguous statement as nonsense: ”Rob has far too much sense.”

Mrs Curtis’s manner conveyed an arch benevolent unperturbed reproach: for Kate, cured of that early tendency to tart defiance…had long since turned out entirely sensible and satisfactory. Kate, bless her, had slipped with no trouble into a suitable marriage within easy motoring distance. As the wife of a young doctor with a good country practice, a solid man, a man with a growing reputation…[but now] they were very cosy, very happy together…[ellipses mine].

The narrative focalises on Mrs Curtis here, taking on her voice (though it’s notable that Lehmann never does this with male characters), slipping into ever more fractured interior monologue:

A comfort, yes, a comfort, now that Olivia…now that [her son] James…phases, we hope; phases, of course…above all, now that [husband] Charles…Saved, but a ruin…I know it…Hush…Pass on. [ellipses in the text]

An unattractive model of the trials for women of married life: is this the kind of fulfilment to aspire to? It’s not surprising Olivia rejects it.

Her own marriage ended in disappointment: Ivor seemed a romantic artistic type, but fell short of her expectations. When she meets up with him again by chance when her affair is in crisis he’s superficially caring and attentive, but spoils it all by suggesting they give it another go – a prospect that appals her. Why turn into Kate, or her mother?

So the lover provides all the sex, companionship and conversation she wants. She’s prepared to forgo the usual benefits of commitment — or even of a true meeting of minds. True, she’s jealous of the languid wife, and longs to have a child of her own, but it’s a price she convinces herself she’s prepared to pay.

As she falls asleep in her parents’ house, in her old room, we are given a Molly Bloom kind of interior monologue. She’d never had a lover before, never tried ‘experiments’,

not because I’m cold, only because of love – because I believe in it, because I thought I’d wait for it, although they said schoolgirlish, neurotic, unfriendly…It was because of you [the lover]. I shall tell him all that. I’ll tell him…He’ll say: I feel the same, it’s worth not spoiling…He’ll say: Darling, I’m so glad…If he were here now…I want him here…[ellipses in the text]

As her thoughts shift to unsatisfactory sexual/emotional experiences with Ivor, they drift off towards the lover and his wife, she longs for his letter:

will it be speaking in his voice; saying darling, saying Olivia darling, will you…

Yes, I’ll say…Yes. Anything you say. Yes. [ellipses in the text].

 

I’m not convinced this entirely represents the kind of compromise/escape Naomi mentions in her blog post, though. This sounds like unadulterated, adulterous romanticism. Olivia is in love with love. Maybe not with the man. This attitude, she reflects dimly, is ‘schoolgirlish’, but also in some ways ‘neurotic’. Why ‘unfriendly’? To the betrayed wife? To potential lovers? Or to herself? As she lapses into sleep her thoughts are significantly ambivalent.

Now I’ve gone on too long. I’ll continue next time with some other suggestions about the intriguing possibilities to be found in this fascinating, subtle novel, and its frank, courageous exploration (portrayal?) of a young woman’s emotional and sexual yearnings and confusions. This is not the simple tale the married lover hoped for. Thank goodness.