The Forsyte Saga 9: Over the River

by John Galsworthy

Genres: General Fiction; Classics

Synopsis

Clare Cherrell has come home, fleeing the clutches of her violent, abusive husband. When he pursues her she vows she will never return and sets about fighting him in bitter divorce proceedings. Dinny supports her sister all the way, but she has her own heartache to conquer, a grief which threatens to embitter her life for ever. Will the sisters make it safely over the river, or is the stream of painful memories destined to engulf their future?

Release date: August 4, 2011

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 284

Sample

John Galsworthy was born on 14 August 1867 at Kingston Hill in Surrey, the son of John and Blanche Galsworthy and the second
of four children. John Galsworthy senior, whose family came from Devon, was a successful solicitor in London and a man of
‘new money’, determined to provide privilege and security for his family. They idolised him. By contrast, their mother Blanche
was a more difficult woman, strict and distant. Galsworthy commented that ‘My father really predominated in me from the start
...I was so truly and deeply fond of him that I seemed not to have a fair share of love left to give my mother.’


Young Johnny enjoyed the happy secure childhood of a Victorian, upper-middle-class family. Educated at Harrow, he was popular
at school and a good sportsman. Holidays were spent with family and friends, moving between their country houses. After finishing
school, John went up to New College, Oxford to read law. There he enjoyed the carefree life of a privileged student, not working
particularly hard, gambling and becoming known as ‘the best dressed man in College’. But he could also be quiet and serious,
a contemporary describing how ‘He moved among us somewhat withdrawn ...a sensitive, amused, somewhat cynical spectator of
the human scene’.


The period after university was one of indecision for Galsworthy. Although his father wanted him to become a barrister, the
law held little appeal. So he decided to get away from it all and travel. It was on a voyage in the South Seas in 1893 that
he met Joseph Conrad, and the two became close friends. It was a crucial friendship in Galsworthy’s life. Conrad encouraged
his love of writing, but Galsworthy attributes his final inspiration to the woman he was falling in love with: Ada.


Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper married Major Arthur Galsworthy, John’s cousin, in 1891. But the marriage was a tragic mistake.
Embraced by the entire family, Ada became close friends with John’s beloved sisters, Lilian and Mabel, and through them John
heard of her increasing misery, fixing in his imagination the pain of an unhappy marriage. Thrown together more and more,
John and Ada eventually became lovers in September 1895. They were unafraid of declaring their relationship and facing the
consequences, but the only person they couldn’t bear to hurt was John’s adored father, with his traditional values. And so
they endured ten years of secrecy until Galsworthy’s father died in December 1904. By September 1905 Ada’s divorce had come
through and they were finally able to marry.


It was around this time, in 1906, that Galsworthy’s writing career flourished. During the previous decade he had been a man
‘in chains’, emotionally and professionally, having finally abandoned law in 1894. He struggled to establish himself as an
author. But after many false starts and battling a lifelong insecurity about his writing, Galsworthy turned an affectionately
satirical eye on the world he knew best and created the indomitable Forsytes, a mirror image of his own relations – old Jolyon:
his father; Irene: his beloved Ada, to name but a few. On reading the manuscript, his sister Lilian was alarmed that he could
so expose their private lives, but John dismissed her fears saying only herself, Mabel and their mother, ‘who perhaps had
better not read the book’, knew enough to draw comparisons. The Man of Property, the first book in The Forsyte Saga, was published to instant acclaim; Galsworthy’s fame as an author was now sealed.


By the time the first Forsyte trilogy had been completed, with In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921), sales of The Forsyte Saga had reached one million on both sides of the Atlantic. With the public clamouring for more, Galsworthy followed these with
six more Forsyte novels, the last of which, Over The River, was completed just before his death in 1933. And their appeal endures, immortalised on screen in much-loved adaptations
such as the film That Forsyte Woman (1949), starring Errol Flynn. The celebrated BBC drama in 1967 with Kenneth More and Eric Porter was a phenomenal success,
emptying the pubs and churches of Britain on a Sunday evening, and reaching an estimated worldwide audience of 160 million.
The recent popular 2002 production starred Damien Lewis, Rupert Graves and Ioan Gruffudd and won a Bafta TV award.


Undoubtedly The Forsyte Saga is Galsworthy’s most distinguished work, but he was well known, if not more successful in his time, as a dramatist. His inherent
compassion meant Galsworthy was always involved in one cause or another, from women’s suffrage to a ban on ponies in mines,
and his plays very much focus on the social injustices of his day. The Silver Box (1906) was his first major success, but Justice (1910), a stark depiction of prison life, had an even bigger impact. Winston Churchill was so impressed by it that he immediately
arranged for prison reform, reducing the hours of solitary confinement. The Skin Game (1920) was another big hit and later adapted into a film, under the same title, by Alfred Hitchcock.


Despite Galsworthy’s literary success, his personal life was still troubled. Although he and Ada were deeply in love, the
years of uncertainty had taken their toll. They never had children and their marriage reached a crisis in 1910 when Galsworthy
formed a close friendship with a young dancer called Margaret Morris while working on one of his plays with her. But John,
confused and tortured by the thought of betraying Ada, broke off all contact with Margaret in 1912 and went abroad with his
wife. The rest of their lives were spent constantly on the move; travelling in America, Europe, or at home in London, Dartmoor
and later Sussex. Numerous trips were made in connection with PEN, the international writers’ club, after Galsworthy was elected
its first president in 1921. Many people have seen the constant travelling as unsettling for Galsworthy and destructive to
his writing, but being with Ada was all that mattered to him: ‘This is what comes of giving yourself to a woman body and soul.
A. paralyses and has always paralysed me. I have never been able to face the idea of being cut off from her.’


By the end of his life, Galsworthy, the man who had railed against poverty and injustice, had become an established, reputable
figure in privileged society. Having earlier refused a knighthood, he was presented with an Order of Merit in 1929. And in
1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Although it was fashionable for younger writers to mock the traditional
Edwardian authors, Virginia Woolf dismissing Galsworthy as a ‘stuffed shirt’, J.M. Barrie perceived his contradictory nature:
‘A queer fish, like the rest of us. So sincerely weighed down by the out-of-jointness of things socially . . . but outwardly
a man-about-town, so neat, so correct – he would go to the stake for his opinions but he would go courteously raising his
hat.’


John Galsworthy died on 31 January 1933, at the age of sixty-five, at Grove Lodge in Hampstead, with Ada by his side. At his
request, his ashes were scattered over Bury Hill in Sussex. The Times hailed him as the ‘mouthpiece’ of his age, ‘the interpreter in drama, and in fiction of a definite phase in English social
history’.


Clare, who for seventeen months had been the wife of Sir Gerald Corven of the Colonial Service, stood on the boat deck of an
Orient liner in the River Thames, waiting for it to dock. It was ten o’clock of a mild day in October, but she wore a thick
tweed coat, for the voyage had been hot. She looked pale – indeed, a little sallow – but her clear brown eyes were fixed eagerly
on the land and her slightly touched-up lips were parted, so that her face had the vividness to which it was accustomed. She
stood alone, until a voice said:


‘Oh! here you are!’ and a young man, appearing from behind a boat, stood beside her. Without turning, she said:


‘Absolutely perfect day! It ought to be lovely at home.’

‘I thought you’d be staying in Town for a night at least; and we could have had a dinner and theatre. Won’t you?’

‘My dear young man, I shall be met.’

‘Perfectly damnable, things coming to an end!’

‘Often more damnable, things beginning.’

He gave her a long look, and said suddenly:

‘Clare, you realise, of course, that I love you?’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t love me?’

‘Wholly without prejudice.’

‘I wish – I wish you could catch fire for a moment.’

‘I am a respectable married woman, Tony.’

‘Coming back to England because—’


‘Of the climate of Ceylon.’

He kicked at the rail. ‘Just as it’s getting perfect. I’ve not said anything, but I know that your – that Corven—’

Clare lifted her eyebrows, and he was silent; then both looked at the shore, becoming momentarily more and more a consideration.

When two young people have been nearly three weeks together on board a ship, they do not know each other half so well as they
think they do. In the abiding inanity of a life when everything has stopped except the engines, the water slipping along the
ship’s sides, and the curving of the sun in the sky, their daily chair-to-chair intimacy gathers a queer momentum and a sort
of lazy warmth. They know that they are getting talked about, and do not care. After all, they cannot get off the ship, and
there is nothing else to do. They dance together, and the sway of the ship, however slight, favours the closeness of their
contact. After ten days or so they settle down to a life together, more continuous than that of marriage, except that they
still spend their nights apart. And then, all of a sudden, the ship stops, and they stop, and there is a feeling, at least
on one side, perhaps on both, that stocktaking has been left till too late. A hurried vexed excitement, not unpleasurable,
because suspended animation is at an end, invades their faculties; they are faced with the real equation of land animals who
have been at sea.


Clare broke the silence.

‘You’ve never told me why you’re called Tony when your name is James.’

‘That is why. I wish you’d be serious, Clare; we haven’t much time before the darned ship docks. I simply can’t bear the thought of not seeing
you every day.’


Clare gave him a swift look, and withdrew her eyes to the shore again. ‘How clean!’ she was thinking. He had, indeed, a clean
oval-shaped brown face, determined, but liable to good humour, with dark grey eyes inclined to narrow with his thoughts, and
darkish hair; and he was thin and active.


He took hold of a button of her coat.


‘You haven’t said a word about yourself out there, but you aren’t happy, I know.’

‘I dislike people who talk about their private lives.’

‘Look!’ he put a card into her hand: ‘That club always finds me.’

She read:

MR JAMES BERNARD CROOM,


The Coffee House,

St James’s Street.

‘Isn’t the Coffee House very out of date?’

‘Yes, but it’s still rather “the thing.” My Dad put me down when I was born.’

‘I have an uncle by marriage who belongs – Sir Lawrence Mont, tall and twisty and thin; you’ll know him by a tortoiseshell-rimmed
eyeglass.’


‘I’ll look out for him.’

‘What are you going to do with yourself in England?’

‘Hunt a job. That’s more than one man’s work, it seems.’

‘What sort of job?’

‘Anything except schoolmastering and selling things on commission.’

‘But does anybody ever get anything else nowadays?’

‘No. It’s a bad look-out. What I’d like would be an estate agency, or something to do with horses.’

‘Estates and horses are both dying out.’

‘I know one or two racing men rather well. But I expect I shall end as a chauffeur. Where are you going to stay?’

‘With my people. At first, anyway. If you still want to see me when you’ve been home a week, Condaford Grange, Oxfordshire,
will find me.’


‘Why did I ever meet you?’ said the young man, with sudden gloom.

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh! you know what I mean. God! she’s casting anchor. Here’s the tender! Oh! Clare!’

‘Sir?’


‘Hasn’t it meant anything to you?’

Clare looked at him steadily before answering.

‘Yes. But I don’t know if it will ever mean any more. If it doesn’t, thank you for helping me over a bad three weeks.’

The young man stood silent, as only those can be silent whose feelings are raging for expression . . .

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy: the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition
of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage. Clare landed from the tender in the usual hurly-burly, and, still attended
by young Croom, came to rest in the arms of her sister.


‘Dinny! How sweet of you to face this bally-hooley! My sister, Dinny Cherrell – Tony Croom. I shall be all right now, Tony.
Go and look after your own things.’


‘I’ve got Fleur’s car,’ said Dinny. ‘What about your trunks?’

‘They’re booked through to Condaford.’

‘Then we can go straight off.’

The young man, going with them to the car, said ‘Good-bye’ with a jauntiness which deceived no one; and the car slid away
from the dock.


Side by side the sisters looked at each other, a long and affectionate scrutiny; and their hands lay, squeezed together, on
the rug.


‘Well, ducky!’ said Dinny, at last. ‘Lovely to see you! Am I wrong to read between the lines?’

‘No. I’m not going back to him, Dinny.’

‘No, never, non?’

‘No, never, non!’

‘Oh! dear! Poor darling!’

‘I won’t go into it, but it became impossible.’ Clare was silent, then added suddenly, with a toss back of her head: ‘Quite
impossible!’


‘Did he consent to your coming?’

Clare shook her head. ‘I slipped off. He was away. I wirelessed him, and wrote from Suez.’

There was another silence. Then Dinny squeezed her hand and said:


‘I was always afraid of it.’

‘The worst of it is I haven’t a penny. Is there anything in hats now, Dinny?’

‘“All British” hats – I wonder.’

‘Or, perhaps, I could breed dogs – bull terriers; what d’you think?’

‘I don’t at present. We’ll enquire.’

‘How are things at Condaford?’

‘We rub on. Jean has gone out to Hubert again, but the baby’s there – just a year old now. Cuthbert Conway Cherrell. I suppose
we shall call him “Cuffs”. He’s rather a duck.’


‘Thank God I haven’t that complication! Certain things have their advantages.’ Her face had the hardness of a face on a coin.

‘Have you had any word from him?’

‘No, but I shall, when he realises that I mean it.’

‘Was there another woman?’

Clare shrugged.

Again Dinny’s hand closed on hers.

‘I’m not going to make a song of my affairs, Dinny.’

‘Is he likely to come home about it?’

‘I don’t know. I won’t see him if he does.’

‘But, darling, you’ll be hopelessly hung up.’

‘Oh! don’t let’s bother about me. How have you been?’ And she looked critically at her sister: ‘You look more Botticellian
than ever.’


‘I’ve become an adept at skimping. Also, I’ve gone in for bees.’

‘Do they pay?’

‘Not at present. But on a ton of honey we could make about seventy pounds.’

‘How much honey did you have this year?’

‘About two hundredweight.’

‘Are there any horses still?’

‘Yes, we’ve saved the horses, so far. I’ve got a scheme for a Condaford Grange bakery. The home farm is growing wheat at double
what we sell it at. I want to mill and bake our own and supply the neighbourhood. The old mill could be set going for a few pounds, and there’s a building for the bakery. It wants about three
hundred to start it. We’ve nearly decided to cut enough timber.’


‘The local traders will rage furiously.’

‘They will.’

‘Can it really pay?’

‘At a ton of wheat to the acre – vide Whitaker – we reckon thirty acres of our wheat, plus as much Canadian to make good light bread, would bring us in more than eight
hundred and fifty pounds, less, say, five hundred, cost of milling and baking. It would mean baking one hundred and sixty
two-pound loaves a day and selling about 56,000 loaves a year. We should need to supply eighty households, but that’s only
the village, more or less. And we’d make the best and brightest bread.’


‘Three hundred and fifty a year profit,’ said Clare. ‘I wonder.’

‘So do I,’ said Dinny. ‘Experience doesn’t tell me that every estimate of profit should be halved, because I haven’t had any,
but I suspect it. But even half would just tip the beam the right way for us, and we could extend operations gradually. We
could plough a lot of grass in time.’


‘It’s a scheme,’ said Clare, ‘but would the village back you?’

‘So far as I’ve sounded them – yes.’

‘You’d want somebody to run it.’

‘M’yes. It would have to be someone who didn’t mind what he did. Of course he’d have the future, if it went.’

‘I wonder,’ said Clare, again, and wrinkled her brows.

‘Who,’ asked Dinny suddenly, ‘was that young man?’

‘Tony Croom? Oh! He was on a tea plantation, but they closed down.’ And she looked her sister full in the face.

‘Pleasant?’

‘Yes, rather a dear. He wants a job, by the way.’


‘So do about three million others.’

‘Including me.’

‘You haven’t come back to a very cheery England, darling.’

‘I gather we fell off the gold standard or something while I was in the Red Sea. What is the gold standard?’


‘It’s what you want to be on when you’re off, and to be off when you’re on.’

‘I see.’

‘The trouble, apparently, is that our exports and carrying-trade profits and interests from investments abroad don’t any longer
pay for our imports; so we’re living beyond our income. Michael says anybody could have seen that coming; but we thought “it
would be all right on the night”. And it isn’t. Hence the National Government and the election.’


‘Can they do anything if they remain in?’

‘Michael says “yes”; but he’s notably hopeful. Uncle Lawrence says they can put a drag on panic, prevent money going out of
the country, keep the pound fairly steady, and stop profiteering; but that nothing under a wide and definite reconstruction
that will take twenty years will do the trick; and during that time we shall all be poorer. Unfortunately no Government, he
says, can prevent us liking play better than work, hoarding to pay these awful taxes, or preferring the present to the future.
He also says that if we think people will work as they did in the war to save the country, we’re wrong; because, instead of
being one people against an outside enemy, we’re two peoples against the inside enemy of ourselves, with quite opposite views
as to how our salvation is to come.’


‘Does he think the socialists have a cure?’

‘No; he says they’ve forgotten that no one will give them food if they can neither produce it nor pay for it. He says that
communism or free trade socialism only has a chance in a country which feeds itself. You see, I’ve been learning it up. They
all use the word Nemesis a good deal.’


‘Phew! Where are we going now, Dinny?’

‘I thought you’d like lunch at Fleur’s; afterwards we can take the three-fifty to Condaford.’

Then there was silence, during which each thought seriously about the other, and neither was happy. For Clare was feeling
in her elder sister the subtle change which follows in one whose springs have been broken and mended to go on with. And Dinny was thinking:
‘Poor child! Now we’ve both been in the wars. What will she do? And how can I help her?’


‘What a nice lunch!’ said Clare, eating the sugar at the bottom of her coffee cup: ‘The first meal on shore is lovely! When
you get on board a ship and read the first menu, you think: “My goodness! What an enchanting lot of things!” and then you
come down to cold ham at nearly every meal. Do you know that stealing disappointment?’


‘Don’t I?’ said Fleur. ‘The curries used to be good, though.’

‘Not on the return voyage. I never want to see a curry again. How’s the Round Table Conference going?’

‘Plodding on. Is Ceylon interested in India?’

‘Not very. Is Michael?’

‘We both are.’

Clare’s brows went up with delightful suddenness.

‘But you can’t know anything about it.’

‘I was in India, you know, and at one time I saw a lot of Indian students.’


‘Oh! yes, students. That’s the trouble. They’re so advanced and the people are so backward.’

‘If Clare’s to see Kit and Kat before we start,’ said Dinny, ‘we ought to go up, Fleur.’

The visit to the nurseries over, the sisters resumed their seats in the car.

‘Fleur always strikes me,’ said Clare, ‘as knowing so exactly what she wants.’


‘She gets it, as a rule; but there’ve been exceptions. I’ve always doubted whether she really wanted Michael.’

‘D’you mean a love affair went wrong?’

Dinny nodded. Clare looked out of the window.

‘Well, she’s not remarkable in that.’

Her sister did not answer.

‘Trains,’ Dinny said, in their empty third-class compartment, ‘always have great open spaces now.’

‘I rather dread seeing Mother and Dad, Dinny, having made such an almighty bloomer. I really must get something to do.’

‘Yes, you won’t be happy at Condaford for long.’

‘It isn’t that. I want to prove that I’m not the complete idiot. I wonder if I could run an hotel. English hotels are still
pretty backward.’


‘Good idea. It’s strenuous, and you’d see lots of people.’

‘Is that caustic?’

‘No, darling, just common sense; you never liked being buried.’

‘How does one go to work to get such a thing?’

‘You have me there. But now’s the time if ever, nobody’s going to be able to travel. But I’m afraid there’s a technical side
to managing hotels that has to be learned. Your title might help.’


‘I shouldn’t use his name. I should call myself Mrs Clare.’

‘I see. Are you sure it wouldn’t be wise to tell me more about things?’

Clare sat silent for a little, then said suddenly: ‘He’s a sadist.’

Looking at her flushed face, Dinny said: ‘I’ve never understood exactly what that means.’

‘Seeking sensation, and getting more sensation when you hurt the person you get it from. A wife is most convenient.’

‘Oh! darling!’

‘There was a lot first, my riding whip was only the last straw.’

‘You don’t mean—!’ cried Dinny, horrified.

‘Oh! yes.’


Dinny came over to her side and put her arms round her.

‘But, Clare, you must get free!’

‘And how? My word against his. Besides, who would make a show of beastliness? You’re the only person I could ever ever speak
to of it.’


Dinny got up and let down the window. Her face was as flushed as her sister’s. She heard Clare say dully:

‘I came away the first moment I could. It’s none of it fit for publication. You see, ordinary passion palls after a bit, and
it’s a hot climate.’


‘Oh! heaven!’ said Dinny, and sat down again opposite.

‘My own fault. I always knew it was thin ice, and I’ve popped through, that’s all.’

‘But, darling, at twenty-four you simply can’t stay married and not married.’

‘I don’t see why not; mariage manqué very steadying to the blood. All I’m worrying about is getting a job. I’m not going to be a drag on Dad. Is his head above
water, Dinny?’


‘Not quite. We were breaking even, but this last taxation will just duck us. The trouble is how to get on without reducing
staff. Everyone’s in the same boat. I always feel that we and the village are one. We’ve got to sink or swim together, and
somehow or other we’re going to swim. Hence my bakery scheme.’


‘If I haven’t got another job, could I do the delivering? I suppose we’ve still got the old car.’

‘Darling, you can help any way you like. But it all has to be started. That’ll take till after Christmas. In the meantime
there’s the election.’


‘Who is our candidate?’

‘His name is Dornford – a new man, quite decent.’

‘Will he want canvassers?’

‘Rather!’

‘All right. That’ll be something to do for a start. Is this National Government any use?’

‘They talk of “completing their work”; but at present they don’t tell us how.’


‘I suppose they’ll quarrel among themselves the moment a constructive scheme is put up to them. It’s all beyond me. But I
can go round saying “Vote for Dornford”. How’s Aunt Em?’


‘She’s coming to stay tomorrow. She suddenly wrote that she hadn’t seen the baby; says she’s feeling romantic – wants to have
the priest’s room, and will I see that “no one bothers to do her up behind, and that”. She’s exactly the same.’


‘I often thought about her,’ said Clare. ‘Extraordinarily restful.’

After that there was a long silence, Dinny thinking about Clare and Clare thinking about herself. Presently, she grew tired
of that and looked across at her sister. Had Dinny really got over that affair of hers with Wilfrid Desert of which Hubert
had written with such concern when it was on, and such relief when it was off? She had asked that her affair should never
be spoken of, Hubert had said, but that was over a year ago. Could one venture, or would she curl up like a hedgehog? ‘Poor
Dinny!’ she thought: ‘I’m twenty-four, so sh. . .