Gluck, Diana Souhami [good novels to read in english txt] 📗

Two weeks after the funeral Gluck suffered another heart attack. On Christmas Eve she felt ‘unspeakably sad’ as she stayed up late wrapping her presents and getting in a mess with the paper, labels and cards. On Christmas Day she lunched alone with Miss Vye who left for good the following week. Gluck bore no rancour and they stayed on visiting terms. After Miss Vye, there followed a succession of temporary housekeepers and after the housekeepers a succession of state-registered day and night nurses.

There was no more talk of painting now. Bow-chested with asthma, her heart none too certain, Gluck got through the days. On many occasions Lovett carried her to her bed, she grew so frail. The world was out of reach. She lay, sideways, across her huge four-poster so as to watch from her window the changing sky and the view of Chanctonbury Ring, the clump of beech trees on the South Downs that, in 1939, she and Nesta called ‘YourOur downs’. ‘Out of reach.’ she wrote. ‘One might as well expect to reach Katmandu or the top of Everest as the end of this bed.’ She listened to Chopin and Debussy, ran the house from her room, and wanted to be gone. She likened herself to a tattered sail, shredded by the gales of life ‘A blinding glimpse of sun, but promise there was none.’ Along with jotted instructions about servicing the Aga, oiling the door locks, calling the piano tuner, planting the lobelias and feeding the fish, she asked for the end. ‘My pain within’, she wrote.

Why could I not join the rout

of wind and rain and sky and sun

and tattered finally beyond repair

cease to despair.

Again, and yet again, and then again – a pressing occupation for the last ten years of her life – she added codicils to her Will. When the codicils became too numerous, David Tonkinson began afresh and another Will was drafted. It became a document of assertion and, in its omissions, of vendetta. Her miniature silver paintbox, on a silver necklace, given to her as a child by Sir Joseph Lyons, was to go to the Victoria and Albert Museum; her easels and painting materials and bottles and tubes to do with her experiments on paint to the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution; her books to the London Library; her Picasso bronze hand to the National Gallery of Scotland; her Kemmler grand piano and Amati violin to the Royal College of Music; her diamond horseshoe tiepin and coral bull’s head tiepin to Anne Yorke’s sons; her silver and jewellery to her nephews and niece; the drawings Munnings did of her down in Lamorna, in those heady years when she first realized she was an artist, the drawing Arthur Watts gave to her when they were neighbours in Hampstead, the Redouté watercolour of pansies and the Dürer engravings bought when she moved to Chantry; the drawings by Cocteau, Beerbohm and Leslie Blanch – all she carefully distributed, then redistributed, to her friends and relatives.

Only the young were to receive material reminders of her – there was nothing for Louis or Nesta. As for her money, there was no question of it reverting to The Fund. ‘They don’t need it,’ she remarked. What she felt to be the injustice of her economic dependency, of being bound by her father’s terms, of having to defer to her brother, had kept her simmering throughout all her years. She used her Will to settle a score. She wanted her much-loved cousin, Julia Samson, her great nieces and nephew and her faithful staff all to receive token amounts. The bulk of her money – and she had accrued some £90,000 – she was to assign, in equal divisions, to the Donkey Club, Wivelsfield Green; the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution; The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

At Christmas 1977, Gluck endured a stroke which ravaged her physically, but left her mind unimpaired. She was dying and she knew it. Her brother, none too well himself, and his wife had booked to go to Switzerland for their winter holiday. Lady Gluckstein suggested they either cancel or go on the understanding that they would miss Gluck’s funeral. They went on the trip. Gluck’s cousin, Julia Samson, drove through the January fog from London to Steyning to see Gluck one last time:

We talked and had tea. She thought of me as young and her sensibility wouldn’t have let her make a young person sad. I said I’ll come and see you next week. She didn’t say anything, just looked at me and her eyes were very very sad. There was a passion there inside. Perpetual liveliness.7

There was no next week. Gluck died the next day on 10 January 1978. She was eighty two. In her Will she stipulated that she wished to be cremated and to have a non-denominational service. With religion, as with gender, she wanted something singular. For her, God was the divine judge, Love the eternal goal, Art, at its best, a linking of the two, and her own individual light the only clue to follow.

To her nephew Roy fell the task of trying to organize a service she might have wanted. He took her request for a non-denominational service to mean no reference to God and no presence of clergymen. As a procedural guide, he loosely followed the Liberal Jewish Synagogue form of burial. Those who knew her, gave readings of passages and poems. She had asked in particular for a reading of the words of Christian at the end of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘I leave my sword to him who can wield it. My scars I can take with me.’

Her brother, despite bad weather, ill health and his assurance to his wife that they would keep to their holiday plans, cut short their trip to Switzerland to attend the funeral. He took no part in the service, though his youngest son