Just a line to say I am running down to Oxford to stay with the Cobbs
for a week or two. It is simply impossible to work in this place at the
moment—the downstairs menagerie swarms over us all day. This is the
last time I’ll think of setting up housekeeping with a man on the
strength of a school and restaurant acquaintance. Of course, it’s
financially useful—but, damn it all! money isn’t everything, even when
one’s hoping to get married. Lathom will insist on being a little ray of
sunshine about the place. Damn sunshine. If it hadn’t gone joggling up
the perfectly good and placid atoms in the primeval ooze, they would
never have sweltered up in this unsatisfactory world of life and
bothersomeness.
The great idea now is to paint a portrait of Mrs. Harrison as a surprise
for Harrison on his return. Knowing Lathom’s style, I should say it
would be a very great surprise to him, indeed. It will probably be a
very fine work—the man can paint—but I wish they could get on with it
quietly by themselves and leave me alone. That poisonous old woman is in
and out the whole time. I daren’t emerge from my own room for a minute
without being collared and asked some imbecile question or other.
Impertinent old bitch. She’s a dangerous woman, too. In Harrison’s place
I’d give her the sack. She had the damned sauce to edge into my room
after me yesterday and ask whose photograph that was on my table, was it
my best girl’s? I said, No—it was my last mistress but three or four, I
had lost count. (It was Brenda’s, as a matter of fact.) I was told I was
a dreadful man and that Miss Drake ought to know the way I behaved. I
was furious. I don’t know how the devil she got hold of your name.
Lathom’s damned chattiness, I suppose—confound him! She wound up the
interview by saying, really, she didn’t think it safe to be in the same
room with me, and leered her way out. Disgusting fool! Fortunately, I
was only revising “Birth and Childhood,” or I should have been too
irritable to work for the rest of the day. I hope, for your sake, I am
not becoming neurotic—that would be the last straw.
Anyway, the Cobbs’ invitation came at the exact right moment to prevent
my doing something regrettable, so I’m barging off. Otherwise I should
probably have had a row with Lathom, which would have been a nuisance,
as I’ve paid the rent up to Christmas.
No news from Merritt yet. Probably he has slung the poor old MS. into a
drawer and forgotten about it. It could write its memoirs by this time:
_Pigeon-holes I Have Lived in_. How goes your latest?
My love to the Governor and everybody,
Your loving
J