The Sugar House

Book 436: Virago Modern Classics

by Antonia White

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The year is 1920. Clara Batchelor, the heroine of The Lost Traveller, is now an actress with a touring repertory company and is passionately in love with the wholly unsuitable Stephen Tye. When Stephen betrays her, Clara betrays herself by agreeing to marry Archie, the fiance‚ she discarded four years before. A friendship but not a love match, the marriage is a desperate attempt by Clara to rekindle the safety of childhood. But neither of them are children any more and their dream sugar house begins to dissolve.

The Sugar House is the second in the trilogy sequel to Frost in May, which began with The Lost Traveller and continues in Beyond the Glass. Although each is a complete novel in itself, together they form a brilliant portrait of a young girl's journey to adulthood.

Release date: February 17, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

It is unusual for the publisher of a book to provide its preface. Antonia White wanted to write a new introduction to the three books – The Lost Traveller, The Sugar House and Beyond the Glass – which complete the story she began in her famous novel Frost in May. Now eighty years of age, and a novelist whose small output reflects the virulent writer’s block which has constantly interrupted her writing life, she preferred to talk to me. For though separated by age, country of birth and nationality, we share a Catholic upbringing which has been a dominant influence on both our lives. What follows is based on a long conversation I had with Antonia White in December 1978, and on the many times we’ve talked since Virago first republished Frost in May earlier that year.

‘Personal novels,’ wrote Elizabeth Bowen in a review of Antonia White’s work, ‘those which are obviously based on life, have their own advantages and hazards. But we have one “personal” novelist who has brought it off infallibly.’ Antonia White turned fact into fiction in a quartet of novels based on her life from the ages of nine to twenty-three. ‘My life is the raw material for the novels, but writing an autobiography and writing fiction are very different things.’ This transformation of real life into an imagined work of art is perhaps her greatest skill as a novelist.

Antonia White was the only child of Cecil Botting, Senior Classics Master at St Paul’s School, who became a Catholic at the age of thirty-five taking with him into the Church his wife and seven-year-old daughter, fictionalised as ‘Nanda’ in Frost in May. This novel is a brilliant portrait of Nanda’s experiences in the enclosed world of a Catholic convent. First published in 1933, it was immediately recognised as a classic. Antonia White wrote what was to become the first two chapters of Frost in May when she was only sixteen, completing it sixteen years later, in 1931. At the time she was married to Tom Hopkinson, writer, journalist and later editor of Picture Post.

‘I’d written one or two short stories, but really I wrote nothing until my father’s death in 1929. I’d worked in advertising all those years, as a copywriter, and I’d done articles for women’s pages and all sorts of women’s magazines, but I couldn’t bring myself to write anything serious until after my father died. At the time I was doing a penitential stint in Harrods’ Advertising Department … I’d been sacked from Crawfords in 1930 for not taking a passionate enough interest in advertising. One day I was looking through my desk and I came across this bundle of manuscript. Out of curiosity I began to read it and some of the things in it made me laugh. Tom asked me to read it to him, which I did, and then he said “You must finish it.” Anyway Tom had appendicitis and we were very hard up, so I was working full time. But Tom insisted I finish a chapter every Saturday night. Somehow or other I managed to do it, and then Tom thought I should send it to the publisher – Cobden Sanderson – who’d liked my short stories. They wrote back saying it was too slight to be of interest to anyone. Several other people turned it down and then a woman I knew told me that Desmond Harmsworth had won some money in the Irish sweep and didn’t know what to do with it … so he started a publishing business and in fact I think Frost in May was the only thing he ever published … it got wonderful reviews.’

Between 1933 and 1950 Antonia White wrote no more novels. She was divorced from Tom Hopkinson in 1938, worked in advertising, for newspapers, as a freelance journalist and then came the war. Throughout this period she suffered further attacks of the mental illness she first experienced in 1922. This madness Antonia White refers to as ‘The Beast’ – Henry James’ ‘Beast in the Jungle’. Its recurrence and a long period of psychoanalysis interrupted these years.

‘I’d always wanted to write another novel, having done one, but then you see the 1930s were a very difficult time for me because I started going off my head again. After the war and the political work I did I was terribly hard up. Then Enid Starkey, whom I’d met during the war, suggested to Hamish Hamilton that I should have a shot at translating and they liked what I did. After that I got a number of commissions and I was doing two or three a year but I was completely jammed up on anything of my own, though I kept on trying to write in spite of it. I always wanted to write another novel, and I wanted this time to do something more ambitious, what I thought would be a “proper” novel, not seen only through the eyes of one person as it is in Frost in May, but through the eyes of the father, the mother and even those old great-aunts in the country. Then suddenly I could write again. The first one The Lost Traveller took the longest to write. I don’t know how many years it took me, but I was amazed how I then managed to write the other two [The Sugar House and Beyond the Glass]. They came incredibly quickly.’

In 1950, seventeen years after the publication of Frost in May, The Lost Traveller was published. In it Antonia White changed the name of her heroine Nanda Grey to Clara Batchelor. ‘Of course Clara is a continuation of Nanda. Nanda became Clara because my father had a great passion for Meredith and a particular passion for Clara Middleton (heroine of The Egoist). Everything that happened to Clara in The Lost Traveller is the sort of thing that happened to me, though many things are changed, many invented. I wanted The Lost Traveller to be a real novel – Frost in May was so much my own life. So I changed her name …’ In every other respect this novel begins where Frost in May ends. It is a vivid account of adolescence, of the mutual relationships of father, mother and daughter as Clara grows to maturity and comes to grips with the adult world.

‘When I finished The Lost Traveller I thought of it as just being one book, and then suddenly I felt I wanted to write another one about my first marriage. That was The Sugar House, which I think is much the best of the three. In it I see Clara’s relationship with Archie (her husband) entirely through the eyes of one person, as in Frost in May – I think that suited me much better.’

The Sugar House was published in 1952 and takes Clara through her first love affair, work as an actress and a doomed first marriage. Unsentimental, often amusing, it is unusual for its moving description of a love between a man and a woman which is not sexual but which is nevertheless immensely strong.

Two years later Antonia White completed the story of Clara’s young life in Beyond the Glass.

Carmen Callil, Virago, London, 1979

Antonia White died on 10th April, 1980

The train call for the Number One Company of A Clerical Error was for nine o’clock. At half-past eight Clara Batchelor had already been sitting for a considerable time in the Refreshment Room at King’s Cross spinning out cups of tea and trying not to turn her head hopefully every time the door swung open. Stephen Tye had promised, if he could possibly manage it, to come and see her off. He would be off on his own first tour next week, and, having failed to get into the same company, it might be months before she saw him again.

‘I shall make inconceivable efforts to break away,’ he had said at lunchtime as, perched on stools in a crowded bar, they gulped beer and sandwiches in the brief space between his two rehearsals. ‘I’d cut the whole thing if this chap who wants me to have a drink hadn’t some sort of pull with the management. You do understand, dear girl?’

Naturally, Clara had understood. For several months the main object of her life had been to understand, comfort and amuse Stephen Tye. This excuse was, at any rate, reasonable. For three weeks the two of them had been no longer acting students but professionals. And, of all the new batch who in that summer of 1920 had begun to haunt agents’ offices, Stephen could least afford to miss any chance. He was thirty, far older than the other ex-officers who had used their gratuities to train at the Garrick School of Drama. Though his age gave him great prestige in Clara’s eyes, he himself was sensitive and occasionally morose about it. He was fond of exaggerating Clara’s youth and treating her as if she were a schoolgirl instead of just turned twenty-one. Whenever she tried to claim any experience of life he would say inaccurately: ‘You were in the nursery when I was mouldering in a Flanders dug-out.’

Since Clara was in love with Stephen Tye, she found it wiser not to argue with him. Above all, she tried never to make a fuss however much he teased her, patronised her, missed appointments, or turned up late in various stages of drink; wildly gay, pugnacious or suicidal. It was the war that had made Stephen drink, and, though she hated to see him drunk, she took it as a sign that he was more sensitive than other people and felt a respectful pity. She knew that Celia, the wife some years older than himself, who had died in the ’flu epidemic of 1918 had been in the habit of making fusses. Clara was sure that the faint hope of Stephen’s asking her to marry him depended on her being as unlike Celia as possible.

As she sat forlornly, trying not to watch the buffet clock and see how few minutes she would be able to snatch with him, she almost hoped he would not come. Try as she would, she could not help feeling hurt. How terrible if, from sheer tension, she were to make a fuss at the last moment. Better to lose her farewell kiss (he had, after all, kissed her very sweetly in the bar at lunchtime) than spend the long night journey to York tormenting herself for having said the wrong word or used the wrong voice or look.

Already, at distant tables, she could see some of the members of the Clerical Error company. There were the two elderly ones, Merton Mordish who played the heavy comic and Millicent Cooke who played the spinster aunt, deep in conversation. No one could have mistaken Merton Mordish, with his mane of grey hair, his wide hat and his caped ulster, for anything but an old actor. Even the way he slammed down his tankard and threw back his head as he drank suggested ‘business’. Millicent Cooke, whom the whole company instinctively addressed as Miss Cooke, looked more than ever like a real spinster aunt as, wearing a raffia-trimmed hat and a suit obviously knitted by herself, she sipped her tea with her prim unpainted mouth. At another table, alone, sat Maidie Spencer who played the bigger of the two girls’ parts and who was to be Clara’s room-mate. Under a black velvet hat with a stiffened lace brim, Maidie’s wide blue eyes were scanning the room as if in search of someone. Terrified that she should see her and come over, Clara bent down and pulled out of her suitcase the Herrick that had been Stephen’s parting gift and propping it open against the tea-pot, she kept her face well hidden and hoped that her new hat and coat would act as a disguise.

Her anxiety now became acute. She dared not raise her head to look towards the door for fear of catching Maidie’s eye. Yet, if Stephen were to come in, he would not know her new clothes either. He might waste some of those ebbing minutes searching for her. He might even give up and go away.

Without raising her head she managed to glance sideways into the steamy mirror behind the counter. Each time the swing-door was pushed open she could see the face of the newcomer dimly reflected. But it was never the narrow high-nosed face of Stephen; that face so easy to pick out at a distance because of its bleached pallor and hair so fair that it looked almost white. Her own reflection, at that odd angle, looked like a stranger’s. She could see little but her anxious eyes and two tufts of fair curls pulled forward on either cheek under the small unfamiliar hat. Her cheeks were still pink enough to need no rouge and her hair, though darker than in her teens, still bright enough for enemies to accuse her of peroxide. Stephen was fond of studying their two reflections in bar mirrors. ‘The sun and moon,’ he had said once: another time, when he was feeling morose, ‘the milkmaid and the ageing Pierrot’.

She stared into the mirror, as if by sheer force of will she could conjure the beloved face into it like a girl on All Hallow E’en. Her first sight of Stephen had in fact been almost like an apparition. She had gone one evening into the rehearsal-room at the Garrick, believing it to be empty as it was almost dark. Just as she was about to switch on the light she saw a man’s face reflected in one end of the long ballet practice mirror which took up the whole of one wall. She stood, frightened yet fascinated, half convinced she was seeing a ghost, for she could not make out anyone in the room itself. The narrow white face under the thin crest of hair almost as pale in the dimness, appeared to be suspended in the air. Then two long hands appeared, gesticulating, and she realised that the man in the mirror was wearing a black doublet and hose which, in the dusk, made his body almost invisible. She watched for a minute or two while the face and hands performed over and over again the same series of movements with very slight variations. By now she had realised that the reflection must have an original but that the real person was screened from her by a curtain. But already she had felt so strangely drawn to the face in the mirror that when, a few days later, she recognised it in the students’ canteen, she was already half in love with Stephen Tye.

It was not till some time after they had become an acknowledged and almost inseparable pair that she had asked him what he had been doing at that moment.

‘Rehearsing Biron. Love’s Labour’s Lost. I’m not worried about my voice. I can get most of the effects I want with that. But I need a lot of practice for gesture and facial expression. I must have looked slightly insane, mopping and mowing at my own reflection. I keep it up for an hour sometimes till I get what I want.’

‘But you get what you want in the end?’ she had asked earnestly.

He had laughed the musical, slightly ironic laugh she was to come to know so well.

‘As a stage character, yes, on the whole. In private life, by no means invariably.’

Much later she had ventured to ask him when he had first noticed her. He considered, with his head on one side and one pale eyebrow cocked.

‘Let me see now. Such a momentous occasion should not call for a great effort of memory. But ’pon my soul it does. I think you must just gradually have impinged upon my consciousness till I was aware of a certain hiatus when you weren’t about.’

Looking at the buffet clock and seeing how little hope she had left, she sighed. Already, absent from him only a few hours, she was conscious, not of a ‘certain hiatus’ but an enormous void. She wondered how she could possibly endure weeks, possibly months of separation.

Suddenly a large lace-brimmed hat blocked her view of the mirror and two large, angry blue eyes flashed accusingly at her.

‘There you are, you silly Wurzit,’ exclaimed Maidie Spencer. ‘What the hell are you doing, sitting there as pop-eyed as a ventriloquist’s dummy?’

‘I … I was waiting for someone,’ Clara stammered.

‘Well, he’s left you in the lurch, old dear. And you’ll get left in the lurch if you don’t stir your stumps. Our train’s been in five minutes. Everyone but you is aboard and Lister’s fuming. I signed on in this show as leading ingénue not as a bloody nursemaid.’

Clara sat crushed between two other members of the company in the middle of the seat of their reserved compartment. The lights were dimmed and she was the only one left awake. A heavy head lolled on each of her shoulders so that she could hardly move her own. Occasionally she dozed for a few moments only to be woken up by a crick in her neck or cramp in her legs. Though it was an August night and the carriage was stuffy, her feet were so cold that she wished that, like the others, she had brought a rug or a shawl or even a newspaper to wrap them in. They had chattered and played nap till midnight; then one by one, heads had sagged, eyes shut and mouths opened till the smoky air was filled with uneasy sighs and snores.

Maidie had cursed her soundly for making them too late to snatch corner seats. She had taken the cursing meekly, realising that it would be rash to quarrel on the first night with someone with whom she would have to share a room for months.

Clara, who had never shared a room with anyone, was by no means sure that she wanted to share one with Maidie Spencer. At one moment Maidie would be so refined that Clara felt she could never live up to such respectability; the next she would swear like a coster. Sometimes she behaved like a convent girl carefully guarding her modesty at a wild party; at others her great blue eyes would glitter knowingly as she egged on the men to outdo each other in dirty stories and found a double meaning in the most innocent remarks.

In three weeks of rehearsing that aged farce A Clerical Error, Clara had seen the theatre from an angle very different from that of the Garrick School of Drama. Never at student rehearsals had a producer addressed Clara as ‘You bloody little cow’ or shouted ‘Walk to that chair, damn you. Don’t teeter as if you thought your drawers were coming down.’ There had been moments when she had felt like walking out and never coming back. It was not as if she had always set her heart on being an actress. She had gone to the Garrick just as she had gone, at seventeen, to be governess to the Cressetts simply because someone else had suggested it and she had been anxious for a change. Her father had been strongly against it as, at the time, he had been against the other plan. Both times her mother had backed her up. In the end he had become reluctantly reconciled to the idea. As she had paid her own fees by writing slick short stories and advertisements, an aptitude she had discovered during a penitential year of war-work in a Government office, he could make no practical objection. Later, when he had come to some of the Garrick student shows and discovered that two of the actors on the staff had been at Cambridge with him, he had gone so far as to admit that the profession appeared to be becoming almost respectable.

As she studied the unconscious faces of the people who were to be her only companions for months, she realised that his worst fears would have been confirmed. The grey-haired Miss Cooke, sleeping composedly in her corner with a rosary twisted round one hand and a book on landscape gardening on her lap, was the only one to whom she would have dared introduce him. James Munroe, the elderly-looking young man with the frightened expression who never swore and never gave her beery kisses in the wings might have passed muster till he opened his mouth and piped ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m shore.’ But what would Claude Batchelor think of Brett Wilding, the rather more than middle-aged lead with his dyed hair so ingeniously pasted over the top of his head to hide the bald patch, his stock, his pointed shoes and his absent way of squeezing Maidie and herself every time he caught one of them alone? Lister, the stage-manager, looked like a racing tout and swore like a sergeant; Sam Brilliant, the A.S.M., was pure Commercial Road. She glanced down at the heads, one sleek and dark, the other fair and wavy, of Peter Belsize and Trevor Eton, leaning so heavily against her shoulders. She rather liked this preposterous pair, partly because they never tried to make love to her, partly because they had been kind and covered her mistakes in the first alarming days of rehearsal. Nevertheless their behaviour puzzled her as much as their strange, synthetic accents; a compound of cockney and stage public school spoken in a high-pitched lilt. They called each other: ‘Peter dear’ and ‘Trevor dear’ and criticised each other’s clothes in minute detail. During the first part of their journey, they had sat side by side manicuring each other’s nails. Then, as they grew sleepy they had asked Clara to sit between them. ‘We’ll protect your virtue, dear. You don’t mind if we use you as a pillow?’

Peter had said, rather unexpectedly: ‘Like Alice with a queen on each shoulder,’ and Trevor had giggled. ‘Naughty, naughty.’ Maidie had giggled too and then had asked, ‘Who’s Alice when she’s at home? A fairy?’ Whereupon they had all three giggled again and Clara had thought it diplomatic to giggle too. There were many occasions in the Clerical Error company when Clara was extremely vague as to what the joke, if any, might be. She found it safest to take her cues for laughter from Maidie so as not to risk being thought stand-offish.

As the train wheels turned in her weary head and the sparks flew past the window crowded with dim, sprawling reflections, she seemed to be embarking on a dream rather than a new life. The sense of isolation she always felt on railway journeys was emphasised by her being the only person awake. Already Stephen see. . .