Over the Hills and Far Away Page 10

  He lived with his mother and unmarried elder sister Millie. The Warnes’ large, late-eighteenth-century house in Bedford Square remained a focus for boisterous family parties ; unlike the Potters the Warnes relished one another’s company. Beatrix visited Norman in the offices of Frederick Warne & Co., in Bedford Street, Covent Garden, always in the company of a chaperone. Like Pigling Bland first encountering Pigwig at night in Mr Piperson’s kitchen, their behaviour was circumspect – not constrained by fear, as in Pigling’s case, but due concern for proprieties. Their courtship – in equal measure Beatrix’s doing – was partly epistolary ; no one chaperoned their exchange of letters.

  A precise quality in Beatrix’s character promoted the relationship. No matter in relation to her books was too small for consideration and so the letters flowed back and forth, cementing regular meetings. Beatrix scrutinised her proofs minutely : she substituted a full stop for a comma ; she queried the quality of coloured inks and the hyphenation of words in typesetting ; she worried about endpapers, ‘something to rest the eye between the cover and the contents of the book ; like a plain mount for a framed drawing’.15 Her early letters are tentative. Beatrix asked questions, requested information, sought guidance, reassurance. Even before publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit on 2 October 1902, she had suggested a second title, a book of rhymes ; she busied herself with printing The Tailor of Gloucester independently, informing Norman of progress nevertheless. At first, Beatrix’s letters to Norman Warne indicate a balance of power tilted in the latter’s favour : Norman has the publishing experience, commissions lie in Norman’s gift. Her letters go further. Through the written word they construct a dialogue between writer and recipient : they insist on complicity. Beatrix’s questions require answers, her suggestions responses, and when her confidence falters, it is clearly Norman’s part to reassure her : ‘I thought my owls very bad when I went again to the [Zoological] Gardens,’ she wrote of preliminary sketches for The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.16

  Yet Beatrix had inherited her measure of both her grandfathers’ acumen and clear-sightedness. Anthropomorphism on the page did not imply feather-headedness on the author’s part. From her earliest letters, Beatrix was attentive to the business aspect of her connection with the Warnes. ‘I should wish, before signing an agreement, to understand clearly what arrangement it would imply about the copyright ; and what stipulations would be made about subsequent editions, if required,’ she wrote in May 1902 ; her father accompanied her to Bedford Street to inspect contracts.17 She did not trouble to conceal from Norman the firmness that, in different guises, had always played its part in her make-up : ‘I am vexed that the samples of print have not come yet, I hope they will by Monday.’18 For good and ill, spontaneity undercut formality in Beatrix’s letters. Norman Warne can never have been deceived about his newest author’s disposition.

  It was a measure of Beatrix’s growing attachment to Norman that she balanced firmness with concessions, as in the letter she wrote in March 1903 on the subject of an endpaper for The Tailor of Gloucester and The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, both of which Warne’s planned to publish that Christmas : ‘I am afraid I generally say what I think, but I assure you I will draw it any way you like  !’ 19 Gradually she revealed to Norman the strain of her life at home, her father ‘difficult’, ‘fidgetty’ and, in time, ‘complaining’ (Beatrix blamed ‘muscular pain’20), her mother so demanding ‘it does wear a person out’.21 It was one approach to intimacy. Within the privacy of a letter she could express what was prevented in person by the repressive chaperonage of Miss Hammond – older now and stone deaf but still vigilant when called upon – or one of her mother’s servants.

  For the first time since childhood, Beatrix found herself completely occupied. Within fourteen months, Frederick Warne & Co. had issued her stories of Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin and the Tailor of Gloucester. By the end of 1903, The Tale of Peter Rabbit had sold 50,000 copies ; Beatrix was a bestselling author, with an income of her own. Her satisfaction had many aspects. Her illustrations had been printed for Warne’s by Edmund Evans ; in her childhood Evans had printed illustrations by Caldecott, Crane and Greenaway. What Warne’s called the ‘little books’ made Beatrix busier than she could remember. ‘Often the mere position of a word makes all the difference in the balance of a sentence,’ she explained.22 She ‘took trouble with the words’ : ‘trouble’ took time.23 In addition there were regular visits to Bedford Street and sometimes daily letters to Norman. ‘Side-shows’ increased her self-imposed workload : Peter Rabbit’s Race Game, a board game based on her story ; designs for Peter Rabbit wallpaper – Beatrix deliberating between Sanderson and Liberty as her preferred manufacturer ; and a Peter Rabbit doll, which she made herself, using the bristles of a broom for whiskers. She registered the doll’s patent herself too.

  Predictably her parents were not amused by these all-consuming distractions. Rupert’s health had begun a steady decline : ‘fidgetiness’ became curmudgeonly. On 13 July 1903 Beatrix referred to ‘such painful unpleasantness at home this winter about the work’.24 Loyalty did not allow her to elaborate : no elaboration was needed. ‘Work’ had never featured in the Potters’ plans for their only daughter. There are suggestions of pettiness in Rupert and Helen obstructing Beatrix’s efforts. Snobbery too. In February 1904, Beatrix declined an invitation from Fruing’s wife, Mary Warne. She had been asked for lunch and to look at the doll’s house Norman had made for Mary’s four-year-old daughter Winifred, to help her with illustrations for The Tale of Two Bad Mice. ‘I hardly ever go out, and my mother is so “exacting” I had not enough spirit to say anything about it,’ Beatrix apologised to Norman.25 The Fruing Warnes lived in Surbiton, on London’s southwest perimeter, a carriage ride from Bolton Gardens. At the age of thirty-eight, Beatrix could not summon either energy or courage to challenge her mother over use of the family carriage. As tactfully as possible, she explained her mother’s inevitable distaste for Surbiton.

  Any amount of ‘unpleasantness’ was preferable to returning to that former existence in which she had described herself as ‘so much asleep and out of life’. By the summer of 1903, with no new story in hand and the prospect of imminent departure for the Lake District with her parents, Beatrix panicked. ‘I had been a little hoping… that something might be said about another book,’ she wrote to Norman. ‘I could send you a list to consider, there are plenty in a vague state of existence, & one written out in a small copybook.’26 There is a note of pleading beneath the conversational tone.

  For Beatrix, her ‘little books’ had taken the place of painting and the schoolroom menagerie. With the absorption typical of all her obsessions, she immersed herself wholeheartedly. Candidly she told Norman, ‘I do so hate finishing books, I would like to go on with them for years.’27 ‘I always feel very much lost when they are finished,’ she wrote.28 Her books offered Beatrix distraction from claustrophobic proximity to her ageing parents, especially what she described, with telling use of inverted commas, as the ‘weary business’ of the family’s ‘summer “holiday”’.29 Those books lay in Norman’s gift. In the summer of 1903, at Fawe Park, Keswick, with Norman’s agreement, Beatrix began work on sketches for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny. In this unlikely fairy story, Norman’s encouragement amounted to chivalry of sorts.

  *

  On 26 July 1905, Beatrix re-read the end of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. ‘It was always my favourite,’ she wrote to Millie Warne afterwards. ‘Do you remember Miss Austin’s [sic] “Persuasion” with all the scenes & streets in Bath?’30 The previous day Norman Warne had proposed to Beatrix Potter.

  Like much in their relationship, it happened by letter. By letter Beatrix accepted Norman. She was days short of her thirty-ninth birthday and had recently finished The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan, a comedy of manners that, like The Sly Old Cat, addresses the obligations of hospitality and the meaning of generosity. ‘With patience and waiting,’ she decided, ‘my story had come right.’31 It was no
t to be.

  It had been a cautious courtship, Beatrix shy, reserved and inexperienced emotionally, Norman her match for emotional inexperience with, until then, little visible appetite for female company. At no point had they spent time alone together, even when Beatrix visited Mrs Warne and her unmarried children at home in Bedford Square. Discreetly, their letters reflect their progress towards love. Two years after their first meeting, Beatrix leavened book business with personal anecdote : ‘I had a funny instance of rabbit ferocity last night’ ;32 acknowledgement of her parents’ exactingness provided grounds for sympathy, contrasting with Mrs Warne’s treatment of Norman and Millie ;33 Beatrix mentioned the vagaries of her health, including a ‘provoking’ cold.34 On 9 November 1903, she described Norman’s previous letter as ‘kind’ : her choice of adjective points to the emergence of something more than a working relationship.35 Six weeks later, she addressed Norman himself as ‘Johnny Crow’. She asked him to make her ‘a little house’ for Hunca Munca. For the briefest instant, her letter tingles with gentle flirtation.36 By the summer of 1905, Norman had relaxed sufficiently to mention to Beatrix toothache and his visit to the dentist, a more personal revelation a century ago than now.

  For her part Beatrix did not conceal from Norman that he had become indispensable to her creative process – ‘it sometimes gives me a fresh start to have the drawings looked at’37 – nor her disappointment when her visits to the offices in Bedford Street were prevented. From Warne’s first negotiations for The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901, the ‘little books’ had occupied a central place in Beatrix’s life. As Beatrix’s editor, Norman had come to share that place. Two decades after the engagements of her cousins Kate, Blanche and Emily, Beatrix imagined herself Anne Elliot, Norman her Captain Wentworth. After long years of waiting, she had finally achieved emotional fulfilment. ‘When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point,’ Austen asserts. For Beatrix it looked like journey’s end.

  But her joy proved solitary and short-lived. Hot on the heels of his proposal, Norman fell ill after a sales trip to Manchester. Unaware of the seriousness of his condition, Beatrix attributed it to ‘drinking bad water’ ; she worried nonetheless. On 29 July, the Warnes’ doctor ordered bed rest. Norman’s absence from the office meant that Beatrix could not arrange to see him for days after accepting his proposal. In the meantime, at home, in terms that did not spare her feelings, Rupert and Helen – especially Helen – made clear their opposition to the match. They had nurtured ambitions for Beatrix’s marriage at nineteen : twenty years later, they appear to have consulted their own convenience. Neither, it seemed, wished to give Beatrix up. And that was not all. Helen, living on a cotton-milling fortune, would not condone her daughter’s connection with ‘trade’, whatever the nature of the trade in question ; her reaction was extreme. Rupert did not oppose his wife. Beatrix dug in her heels. ‘Publishing books is as clean a trade as spinning cotton,’ she told Caroline Hutton angrily.38 Like Mr Tidler in The Tale of the Faithful Dove, she ‘stuck to [her] post in speechless indignation ; [she] threw [her]self into an attitude of defiance’. All in vain : her parents refused to yield. Beatrix agreed not to mention the engagement outside the two families ; stubbornly she wore the ring that Norman had given her. A letter to Harold Warne, written on 30 July, suggests something of her perturbation : ‘You will not think me very cross if I say I would rather not talk much yet about that business though I am very glad you have been told.’39 Unnerved by her parents’ vehemence, she began to worry that Norman was being precipitate, four years after their friendship had begun.

  In the event, Norman’s death from lymphatic leukaemia on 25 August prevented further arguments between Beatrix and her parents. Rupert and Helen had opposed their daughter : through no virtue of their own, they had won. At first she had fled from their intransigence to stay with her former governess, Miss Hammond, at the latter’s house in West Hampstead. Respite was brief. In the first week of August, as previously arranged, Beatrix accompanied her parents to Llanbedr, a small village on the Welsh coast in Merionethshire, which she described as ‘a country of little rough pastures & stone walls’.40 (That Rupert had left it too late to book his favourite Lake District holiday house, Lingholm, near Keswick, after ten successive holidays in the region may be indicative of his state of mind that fateful summer.) Habit and conditioning were powerful forces in Edwardian family life. Nothing indicates that Beatrix protested against going away with her parents, albeit the diary she resumed in Llanbedr is notable for the amount of time she spent alone. As in the past the Potters travelled by train. An indoor staff of two kitchen maids, two housemaids and a parlour maid accompanied them ; the groom, coachman, carriage, a horsebox and two horses made the journey separately.41 Rupert photographed the family equipage several times during the five-week holiday. Amid narrow lanes and uneven dry-stone walls its appearance is incongruously smart.

  Beatrix never saw Norman Warne alive again. A delay in delivering the telegram sent by the Warnes to Llanbedr prevented Beatrix from returning to London in time. In his bedroom at Bedford Square, Norman died on 25 August : for days he had been unable to swallow anything but milk. Beatrix had written to him the day before he died, ‘a silly letter all about my rabbits, & the walking stick that I was going to get for him to thrash his wife with.’42 He was too weak to read it.

  She had had her premonitions. Two days earlier she stopped writing her diary. She resumed it after a week, working back through the terrible vanished days that overwhelmed her memory. In this retrospective account, the hills and fields of Merionethshire are full of signs : a stone drinking trough that resembles a coffin, a sick cow, ‘lean as two boards with great big eyes’, that made her wonder when Norman ‘would begin to get hungry and feed up again’.43 An awful pregnancy shadows her final entry, for the day before Norman died. The landscape is still, as if waiting ; all colour has leached out of it, leaving only ‘grey light’, a ‘pearly grey’ haze of ‘silver sea’, a ‘leaden colour’ over the headland, as if the lifeblood has drained away from the very country itself. ‘I remember thinking the evening was as still as death – and as beautiful,’ Beatrix writes, before breaking off. ‘As I was looking at it there came out through the mist over the sea just for a few seconds – a gleam of golden sunshine – “In the evening there shall be Light” –’.44

  In adversity she drew succour from the beauty of nature ; she looked to the landscape for tatters of reassurance. She retreated behind poetic insipidities, a facile contemporary rhetoric of death, in which suffering and beauty combined and flashes of sunlight offered the balm of divine comfort. Within this careful, conventional idiom Beatrix held powerful emotions in check. She knew now that she had been wrong a decade earlier, when she wrote ‘I think men have stronger feelings than women.’45

  She may not have attended Norman’s funeral. A letter written later suggests she saw his body before burial ; afterwards, she visited his grave in Highgate Cemetery, with the new engraving on the family tombstone ; she fretted about plants to cheer the plot. Then she left London again for Wales, Gwaenynog in Denbighshire, the home of her uncle-by-marriage, Fred Burton, ‘a little old man, deaf, placid, rather dateless, excessively obstinate, very mean as to ha’pence, unapproachably autocratic’ and a widower since the recent death of her maternal aunt Harriet Leech.46 Beatrix travelled with two rabbits, Josey and Mopsy, ‘in a small wooden box’, and her hedgehog Mrs Tiggy.47 It was a short visit. She shared Fred Burton’s interest in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture, Gwaenynog and its landscape thrilled her, but a house in mourning offered her no comfort.

  Early in September she examined second proofs of The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. She suggested to Harold Warne a new story, The Tale of Jeremy Fisher, first outlined in her picture letter to Eric Moore in August 1893 and again, with variations, in a letter to Molly Gaddum, the daughter of her cousin Emily, in October 1895 : ‘a frog… went fishing and
had a bite, but the fish jumped out of the boat before he could put it into his basket.’48 Work would be her distraction. In the meantime, she snatched time alone ; she had her animals for company.

  Back in London at the end of the autumn, Beatrix painted the view from the schoolroom window. A monochrome study – light ebbing from the dying day – its dull shadows and the lifeless winter branches of tall trees have a leaden significance. The contrast with a similar view, painted in 1882, showing the distant tower of the Natural History Museum framed by leaves, is marked. She stayed with Mrs Warne and Millie ; she painted the Warnes’ dining room, the view across Bedford Square, Norman’s bedroom. At Christmas she sent Millie a copy of the last sketch she had painted in Llanbedr : a view of a barley field. ‘I try to think of the golden sheaves,’ she wrote. The image of harvest was painfully at odds with Norman’s unnaturally short life and Beatrix would struggle to make sense of her loss ; she came to regard Norman as ‘a saint’.49 ‘He did not live long,’ she wrote to Millie, ‘but he fulfilled a useful happy life. I must try to make a fresh beginning next year.’50

  She kept the engagement ring that Norman had given her, wearing it on her right hand ; she kept his pipe and a cache of his letters ; she kept his umbrella too for the remainder of her life. ‘I think it is a comfort to have pleasant memories, if nothing else,’ she told Millie.51 She did not ask for the return of the engagement present she had given Norman on 1 August, one of the Cinderella illustrations she had completed in 1895. It was a moonlit scene of a pumpkin coach drawn by rabbits. In the Cinderella story, the magic lasts only until midnight, then the accoutrements of fairy tale resume their everyday forms and enchantment vanishes. It was a painful metaphor.