Shooting Star (Kindle Single) by Sabbagh Karl

Author:Sabbagh, Karl [Sabbagh, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

6.

Elizabeth

While the milestones in Ramsey’s professional life are relatively easy to chart through the succession of papers and talks he gave, there are tantalising lacunae in his personal life. Ramsey’s letters to his wife, when we have them, are honest and revealing about all aspects of his life. But, not surprisingly, we only have them for the brief periods when he and Lettice were apart. And his diary-keeping was confined to a year at school and odd spurts during 1921 and 1925. One of the gaps, perhaps the most important in understanding his personal life, occurs between August 1926, and July 1927.

On 1 February 1927, there’s a brief glimpse of domesticity mixed with philosophical musing in a letter Frank wrote to his friend, Sebastian Sprott: ‘Our baby Jane grows very fast [she was nearly four months old, at this stage] and is very good in the sense of not crying. So far it is evident that her existence is to her a+. I wonder when it will cease to be so. It strikes me that a baby’s world is far more visual than I supposed. She obviously has some idea of visual space but none at all of tactual [sic]. I don’t know how long this continues.’

But the next letter we have to Lettice, written in July 1927, has the following: ‘I feel well and happy, not exhausted as usual after being with E! ... E isn’t going for her holiday till next week so I thought she might come here for next week end, but she thinks my mother would be disturbed. I think so too. So I’m going up on Friday just for the night and she is going home on Saturday.’

So who is this ‘E’ who had appeared on the scene? And does the fact that Ramsey’s mother might be disturbed mean that the two were in a close relationship? And if so, why on earth was Frank writing to Lettice about her?

The next letter in the sequence, on 1 August, makes things clear, although even by the liberal standards of the Bloomsbury set, it leaves nothing to our, or Lettice’s, imagination. It starts with a merry birthday wish:

Many happy returns of the day! I’ve just got back from London. I went up yesterday with Sebastian and we had lunch with Elizabeth. Then I went to Cook’s. E was very tired by a frantic week’s work getting finished. We went to Étoile and had a v. good dinner with drink and enjoyed it enormously. But afterwards it was rather a fiasco. She was nervous about having me in her room, and I got very nervous and reacted after my excitement at dinner, and I couldn’t sleep. (Our copulating which went better at the weekend somehow went wrong through my nervousness and selfconsciousness. I think she enjoyed it but I didn’t. How funny it is!) Today we went to Hampton Court which is lovely but I felt tired and I wanted her to spend another night with me

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