The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

into the bushes. Each of them had an improving book to read, Milton (Evan), Dante (Cynthia), Dickens (Tony), and Conrad (Joyce), but no one got much beyond page 21. They were woken at dawn on cloudless mornings by what Joyce described as ‘the flat golden tonking of a thousand sheep-bells’.
    They noticed New Yorker -ish sights, such as other couples at the hotel doing vigorous exercises after bathing. Like many other literary Londoners, Tony and Joyce had subscribed to the New Yorker since its first issue in 1925. ‘Getting’ the Peter Arno and Helen Hokinson cartoons enhanced their sense of being cosmopolitan. Captions such as ‘Isn’t Chile thin?’ became part of family folklore. Little did Joyce know that one day she would (on her own admission) turn into a New Yorker cartoon figure herself, stealing into her garden in slippers each sweltering Manhattan dusk to measure her gladioli.
    In northern France on the last morning of the holiday the car got stuck in the mud, visibility was bad, a cross Frenchman shouted at them, they got stuck behind some pigs, there was a fallen tree across the road, and they had a puncture. ‘Our delay’, Joyce noted, ‘was due to BOG, FOG, FROG, HOG and LOG, and if only I could make out that the puncture was due to a loose COG, my happiness would be complete.’ Driving to London from Dover, Tony pretended to be a foreigner and asked directions in Catalan. Then it was back to the nursery again. ‘Found everything as right as rain at Wellington Square, and no po-faces among the staff, which does them all great credit, as two separate nurseries in one house has been known to lead to complications.’
    Just after this holiday Joyce reviewed for the Spectator a book called The Technique of Marriage, by Mary Borden. The fault she found with it was that Miss Borden underestimated ‘the importance of what one’s grandmother calls That Side of Marriage. As a wise man once said, sex doesn’t matter all that much when it goes right, but it is very important indeed when it goes wrong.’
    It was beginning to go wrong for Tony and Joyce, and it did matter. Embarrassment and awkwardness were seeping in, where seamless union had been. Their daytime irritations with each other led to night-time non-attraction. Joyce saw beside her in bed a golfer knocking back a pink gin in a club-house. Tony saw beside him a sulky, scarf-wearing collector of sea-holly. Joyce suggested that they should visit a doctor to discuss their sexual block, which they did, but to no avail. At about this time they agreed that each could look elsewhere for sexual satisfaction, provided it was done discreetly. There are signs that Joyce had entertained the possibility of infidelity as early as 1927. Her friend Philip Hewitt-Myring, the Leader Page editor of the Daily News, became ‘P.’ in her engagement book, and they met at 12.30 on many Tuesdays and Wednesdays. When he went to America as a holder of the Walter Hines Page Fellowship in Journalism in 1927 and 1928 she kept a note of each letter sent and received: ‘To P.’, ‘From P.’ But the affair, if it was one, was short-lived, and P. soon became Philip again and was chosen as godfather to Robert.
    Tony, sometime after the 1933 holiday in Majorca, began an affair with Cynthia Talbot. Nannie Good discovered that on her Chelsea walks with the children she had to be careful to avoid taking them along Walpole Street where Cynthia lived, because the Bluebird, with its all-too-recognisable number plate, was often parked there in the late afternoons.
    Cracks were appearing in the Wellington Square life which had been immortalized as such a paradise by Joyce and E. H. Shepard. A few doors down, at number 28, the Warrack marriage was breaking up; Jacynth was having an affair, and Joyce let her telephone her lover from the safety of number 16. The sentence ‘We talked about Tony and Joyce’ –