Tender Spaces

This was written a few days ago & I wanted to retype it but I guess it’s alright as it stands.

Dear Mummy,

I haven’t written to you for so long because I’ve been absolutely seething about this whole business. Your last letter is full of the advice that people have been giving and I know that you always need somebody to tell you what to do so I’ll tell you what I think.

1. You should be very annoyed with Gaëtane, because you went to a great deal and trouble and expense to maintain her in Chestnut Lodge; and firstly she should not have left and secondly you have every right to be annoyed by the way she went about leaving, and thirdly Gaëtane should have been made to realize that, having broken parole, as it were, she probably made things very difficult for the ones she left behind her as the regulations may well have been probably changed because of her.

2. You had no business sending 250 dollars to Gaëtane when I particularly asked that no money be sent under the circumstances; and as you did send it I think that you should have notified me at once that you were sending it and why and what the lawyer had said; instead of the very hedgy letter I did get from you about Gaëtane and her marriage.

3. This marriage of Gaëtane’s is not to be taken seriously, and I think that at least you ought to have seen Gaëtane first without her husband to try to get some insight into the situation. Peter Pratchett is some sort of a nothing whom Gaëtane is using to prevent her return to Chestnut Lodge, and from our point of view he is behaving very badly. He had no business marrying Gaëtane if he was not prepared to support her and no business abetting her departure from Chestnut Lodge without consulting her doctor and her family beforehand. Peter Pratchett would have to go a very long way to get any approval from me.

4. As Gaëtane has left Chestnut Lodge, she should now take her responsibilities upon her own shoulders, and not be expecting to have farms bought for her and allowances paid to her. If she can’t get a job or settle down to an acceptable way of life, or pursue her studies, then her doctor is right and she should be in a place like Chestnut Lodge having psychiatric care; if she were able to fend for herself then I would say that the year she had there was sufficient. But she has made no show of even trying to get a job, and she expects money to be provided to keep both herself and Rosie. And of course you in your eagerness to help fall right into the trap. Cathie, Gaëtane’s Aramon friend who comes riding with me says “Je crois que cette Rosie lui donne de mauvais conseils.” I agree. The nail on the head. I have absolutely no sympathy for that Rosie, who, if one is to judge from the letters she’s written to me and Paul is a candidate for the Looney bin, and I think that it is essential for Gaëtane that we remove her from her sphere of influence. Instead of which, you propose to set them up with a farm towards which you will pay $14,000 which they are to reimburse at $5 a month.

As Gaëtane says in her letter to me “Grandmère nous prête de l’argent pour une ferme, $14000, je ne sais pas comment on lui le payera. Si on achète mes peintures et celles de Rosamonde ça ira et on fera des crafts aussi mais je préfère mourir de faim que de faire semblant d’être autre chose que ce je suis alors je ne sais pas. Je ne m’inquiète pas trop. C’est choses sont beyond my understanding.

1. Gaëtane is already vague about it.
2. In the same way that when you sent her money to buy a horse, she chose a horse which was incurably lame, she will choose a farm which can never be profitable; all G. now wants to do is paint. I imagine that Rosie wants the farm.
3. As far as running a commune is concerned, Gaëtane is a genius at getting people quarreling who would otherwise get along. When I hear all about the school being divided into two camps, I can imagine that Gaëtane was one of the chief instigators of the scission.

Tom Durrie is the last person I would listen to; and I certainly think that you should have seen Rosie and the Hunts. I imagine that he was trying to protect his own reputation. The Hunts were no doubt offended that you did not see them, and as for Rosie, if you are planning to set her up on a farm you could at least have had a word with her. Gaëtane has been telling all these people how rich her grandmother is and how much it cost at Chestnut Lodge, and they are all pushing G, to get as much as she can out of you. The answer to that one is that you made the money available as it was essential that she get good care in happy surroundings; as she is now refusing that care the money will now be used to set up a Trust fund for Lorne who will be an invalid all his life.

• A maximum allowance of $25… Not enough to live on.
• If you are to lend the money for a farm you want to be certain that she can run it; you must expect her to have a degree in Agriculture and a year’s experience as paid labour on a farm.

It’s not fair, Mummy, to buy her a farm at this stage; she won’t be able to live on it all by herself and she’ll be almost forced to stay with that Rosie, who may or may not take drugs but seems to be in a chronically abnormal state. It’s too great a responsibility and it will be too great a failure for her to cope with. When I was her age I’d had a year of agriculture and knew I didn’t want a farm; and Gaëtane is much too sentimental about animals to make a profit raising them.

• That you would reconsider the question of allowance if Gaëtane were doing some serious studying or going to University.

I have written Gaëtane asking her if she wishes to have her marriage annulled, in which case I intend to do that. In her letter, which is mostly taken up with a very unGaëtanelike request for money to buy painting materials, as all she wants to do is paint… I don’t see why I should send her money for painting materials for her and Rosie when she had all of that provided at Chestnut Lodge and she didn’t even take the trouble to take lessons… She mentions her husband… Mon mari a toujours beaucoup à apprendre. Je ne crois pas qu’on retournera ensemble pour quelque temps en tout cas. Gaëtane is so attached to the people she likes that she can’t keep away from them; she is certainly not planning her future with Peter.

I have written to ask Gaëtane if she can come here to the mas as I have had a nasty fall and I am in very great pain.

I have had a very nasty summer and much trouble with Michael who can’t seem to decide what he wants to do. He went off to London two weeks ago to get a job; he wears his hair long and looks like a hippie and of course nobody is going to give him a job… He got one washing dishes in a French restaurant from 4pm till 8 at night but then lost it because he overslept(!) Anyway I’ve had three calls for Money and I can’t go on supporting him in London so I’ve told him to come back and do the vendages here. He drives me frantic with his guitar-playing, but I think that his brain is a little altered from taking L.S.D. and it’s bad for him to be alone in London.

Now there’s something I really must ask you. Is there to be any change in the Children’s trusts, or will the money come through normally in January as usual? I need to know this, because I have a final payment to make on the flats in Spain.

The second thing I want to ask you is: Can you lend me 10,000 dollars until I have sold the flat in Paris. I was hoping to attend to this last June, moving out and putting it up for sale, I mean, but then I had all that trouble with Michael and brought him back with me, and as every minute he was threatening to go off and join his hippie friends in Amsterdam I thought it better to worry about the flat later. And now I’ve had this accident and I can’t drive the car and Michael will be coming, and the first money-making (I hope) litter of Yorkshire Terriers is due in six weeks and heaven knows when I’ll be able to go and pack up my stuff and move or when it will be sold. In the meantime the mortgage on the mas has been unexpectedly not renewed, as the lender has died; which means that I’ll have to pay 6,000 dollars on very short notice. I did not want to use the children’s trust money for the mas, as it would be too difficult to make it available to them… I could try to get another loan, but that means ten percent lost for the notary; and if I did not have the interest to pay it would mean fifty dollars more a month, which I could use. The other four thousand dollars would be to buy a comfortable family car (I am thinking of the new Volkswagen) which I could use for the long distances I travel which would mean greater safety and comfort for my aching back than the Renault Van. I would keep the Renault for the carrying jobs around the mas, as the turn-in value is very low, and I hope that it would be an incentive for Michael to learn to drive & would help him gain confidence in himself; I’ve been trying to persuade him for two years now.

Also I have written to Gaëtane saying would she come if I sent her a return ticket to help me at the mas until I get over my accident. I did not know at this time that Michael would be coming. If she says yes then I’ll have to have some money to buy the ticket, and I used up the money I had in the bank in Montreal with all the expenses of this summer. My monthly allowance goes in about a week when there are several people to feed, as buying power has diminished so. (However I’m not complaining it is just that it is so nerve-wracking having money worries and I hope that I will make something with my dogs (Yorkie puppies are worth $200 each in France… But of course they’ve not hatched yet!)

If there is anything left over I have some very urgent things to have done at the mas…a hot water heater… I wish you could have seen me after the fall struggling up to the bathroom with kettles of boiling water so that I could have a good soak……A gate and bars for the windows and locks etc… a ditch behind the house so that the water doesn’t seep in when it rains… All these are things that I could attend to now, curtains to help keep the wind out. All the pipes repaired there are buckets everywhere for the drips!

7 Oct. 1971
Dear Mummy,

I got up in the middle of the night several nights ago and banged out several pages to you… Since then they’ve just been sitting here and I’ve been putting off correcting them and retyping them. Since then I’ve received your letter enclosing Gaëtane’s and the lawyer’s letters. Michael was due to arrive on Tuesday and was to have started his harvesting Wednesday, so that when the phone rang at 4.30 this morning and I dashed down in my bare feet, I was sure it must be he. However it was Gaëtane… a collect call. All about a farm for which she had to give an answer this very day… The more she went on about it the more I was against it… I thought that her answers were so childish and immature that finally I asked her if she had been taking drugs. She said some “kif” and once L.S.D. at the hospital and when she got out. I asked if Rosie was taking drugs and she said not any more. I said Well, to judge from the letter she wrote she must be quite mad, and she said yes, she is. I gather that the farm is to house the four of them…Mary and her boyfriend and Rosie and Gaëtane and between them they all know how to farm; and the Hunt parents will be glad to get rid of them because they don’t do anything at home and cost a lot of money. (Nell and I decided a long time ago that we thought that Mrs. Hunt was a rather grasping woman.) So that now that you’ve spent a fortune getting Gaëtane away from these Hunts, you’re going to spend another fortune keeping them all together again, and there’ll be no end to the begging letters you’ll be receiving. Gaëtane said that after all you had been spending 2,700 dollars a month for Chestnut Lodge, so that you could just as well buy her a farm. I said that I had been against that, that I thought she might just as well have gone to Verdun, but that Nell had persuaded me, saying that she thought you would be ready to spend the money for any one of us who needed it. I said that now that she was not at Chestnut Lodge I was going to suggest to you that the money be used to set up a Trust Fund for Lorne, who might never be able to be self-supporting.

Gaëtane at one point said : “Mais je suis folle, je ne sais que je suis folle!” I said that in that case she had better be very careful because she might find herself shut up somewhere.

I would now like you to write to Gaëtane and suggest the following ideas:-

1. That she has left Chestnut Lodge without her doctor’s accord, that the medical opinion is that she needed treatment and should have continued with it; and that as this treatment has been so frightfully expensive you have found it necessary to put money aside in case another emergency arises and it is necessary for her to complete her treatment.
2. That you have spend far greater sums of money on her than on any of the other grandchildren, and that you want to use your money to help some of the others.
3. That Gaëtane did not comply with the arrangements that you made for her at Chestnut Lodge, but went off without her doctor’s agreement. You were not consulted beforehand and had no part in these arrangements, therefore it is now up to Peter Pratchett to provide for his wife or for Gaëtane to provide for herself.
4. That when she had first asked you for a farm, you had liked the idea and wanted to help, thinking that it would provide a family home and livelihood for herself and Peter. Since meeting Peter, you realise that he is not the farmer type, and that although you know that Gaëtane is a hard worker, her studies have never included such things as animal husbandry, agronomy, parasitology, marketing and accountancy.
5. That agriculture has become more and more competitive with new and better methods coming in all the time, and that instead of buying her a farm at this time, when her marriage has got off to such a dubious start and may not last, you would far rather finance a course in agriculture studies (or in fact in any other studies, such as Beaux-Arts.)

We were in complete disaccord on the telephone… I was half asleep and couldn’t think quickly, in fact I’ve been worrying myself sick about Michael’s not turning up and giving no sign of life, now I think about it, his passport needs renewing and he may not have had enough money, but he could have at least phoned.

I asked Gaëtane about her marriage, and she said that she had done that for the sole purpose of not returning to Chestnut Lodge. I asked her if she wanted to arrange to have it annulled and she said no, because then we would send her back to Chestnut Lodge. I told her that a divorce would cost two or three thousand dollars, and she said that we would see about that in a few years’ time.

We must always bear in mind that Gaëtane thrives on adversity; if things are made too easy for her she does not cooperate or does something to upset everything.

And we don’t owe the Hunts anything, in fact the more we can do to get Gaëtane away from Mary and Rosamond the better it will be. So that if Gaëtane has to work for a living, it will help her to meet some other people. She learned to sell in the shop at Chestnut Lodge. Or she could go to work on a farm and find out what it’s really like. But if she decides to study, she must do so seriously, because she has wasted enough time and money already, and she must give some proof of her attendance at courses.

Gaëtane has firmly convinced herself that her grandmother is a millionaire, or it has been brought to her attention, but you must not forget that she is Paul’s daughter and you don’t want to turn her into a professional beggar. (When I told Paul that Gaëtane has asked you to buy a farm in B.C. he said That’s wonderful, we’ll all go there.)

Since the phone call, I have decided to ask you for a loan of only $2000, as I don’t want her to imagine that I am scrapping her farm in order to borrow the money myself. One of the apartments in Spain will belong to her, but I see no need to inform her of that for the time being. She seems to have no idea how much she has worried & upset everybody! Please keep me in touch with developments.

• Much love Fiona

P.s. I hope that you have recovered well from your car accident - I still can’t sit down (don’t laugh) - I’m sure something must have cracked!

P.p.s. G said she would not come to the mas as she did not have her passport.”