NATASHA SPENDER
55
happens there's something wrong." All the same he felt he belonged
for he wrote lO Stephen earl y in 1957: " I ra ther feel now tha t the
Spender fam il y is my famil y. And I need the Spender famil y far more
than they need me. Insofar as it is possible I shall alwa ys consider
rn yse\[ one o f the Spender famil y."
Clea rl y the previous summer had been a false recovery. We had a ll
rea lized lha t sporad ic eu phori a does not show an authentic recovery
from grief, but neither did the docility and dependence of hi s Ga rda
conva lescence, which had been , though contented, sometimes almos t
somnambuli st. At tha t time the true ba ttl e had not ye t arrived , for
though hi s new fri ends had p rov ided some continuity o f refuge, a new
life in a new country was no setting in which he could resolve the
ambi guity inlO which a person is anyway plunged by loss, particula rly
that loss of every ancho r to p rev iou sly ingrained habits centered on
such a long-s tanding, encl osed menage. Perhap s t.h e new ba ttle fo r
equilibrium had begun not onl y because of the approaching emo tiona l
storm o f th e anni versa ry, but also becau se hi s vi sit to La Jo lla had
undermined hi s illusion o f "belong ingness," and in his second vi sit to
England he felt himself to be a refu gee ra ther than a vacation er.
However, in spite of these overt and more authentic outbursts,
delusory elements remained a pparent in the over-anxiety and euphoria
attached to the outcome o f my qui te ordinary o peration , possibly due
to the unconsciou s purpose of retri eving his own lost past, for the fact
that one of hi s n ew protective companions had
survived
may have
given him an unconscious feeling o f reprieve from the prospect of the
continued inner turmoil of gri ef which was the dynamic underl ying
preoccupa ti on.
So the overriding reason for bad times a t Carlton Hill was drink, I
believe, to drown the fiercely conflicting images of his past life; and any
other reason he p rojected to certa in selected fri ends of his was a self–
deception simila r to reason s he had invented in earlier crises to explain,
for instance, the a brupt end of hi s oil-tycoon career. He published an
articl e on Cissy's dea th which seemed both a tender relinquishment of
his vani shed life and an act of covert reparation to her for his recent
violent feelings fo r which he seemed to have corresponding ly violent
feelings of guil
t.
Some of us spent a number of peaceful afternoons helping
Raymond so rt the many letters of sympa thy and fellow feeling from
bereaved readers o f the
Daily
Express
to whom his rather ViclOrian and
elega ic p icture o f fa rewell had brought comfort. He also in vited
some of these correspondents
lo
tea, and would afterwards retail their
