Those Wild Wyndhams by Claudia Renton Page B

then he could. Harry promised. Pamela was delighted, although she protested that Harry had never been flirting. ‘His manner which has grown upon him misleads people … he says “How do you do” as if it was “you are the Soul of my Life” but he is unaware of this, I really believe like people who clear their throats continually,’ she explained to Mary. 14
    Osbert Sitwell, meeting Pamela in middle age, recognized the discordance between her image and her reality. ‘She was – though she in no way realized it – far from being a rather remote, reasonable woman, under which guise she saw herself, presented herself, and was accepted, but, to the contrary … violently and enchantingly prejudiced in a thousand directions.’ Her sitting room was filled with photographs ‘of the most astonishing rakes and rips’ whom Pamela would ‘unflaggingly, and with the greatest display of ingenuity defend’ or, where defence was impossible, ‘ignore’. 15 Pamela declared that she would not be ‘deceived by outside views!!!’, 16 but she was more than capable of deceiving herself by her own tortuous logic.
    Pamela maintained to Mary that the best way for her to get over Harry was ‘by
knowing
him not by not seeing him’, since separation only allowed her to gild him in her imagination. ‘If I in any way let my friendship with him spoil my life it would be voluntary foolishness on my part …’ she added. 17 Mary worried that Pamela was motivated merely by pique. When she found out that Pamela – who as Madeline Wyndham’s ‘Benjamina’, a biblical allusion to Jacob’s beloved youngest son, could twist her mother around her little finger – had persuaded Madeline to invite Harry to Clouds she was horrified. She immediately wrote to Madeline warning against this course of action. It was too late.
    Harry joined the tail end of a house party to find Pamela distracted by the company of a young man called Arthur Paget. 18 It was idyllic late-summer weather. The party had spent a ‘delicious’ week making excursions to Stonehenge, and taking long walks across the Downs. Pamela confessed to Mary privately that she thought more ‘highly of [Paget than] any man before … delightfully clever, original & nice – good & kind & honest (what a funny lot of adjectives strung together!)’. 19 Harry sulked, moped and glowered until finally (as no doubt he designed) Pamela confronted him on the Sunday afternoon in the empty hall, whereupon he told her ‘all that he meant
not
to say (so he says) but
I
think, it was all that he
did not expect to feel
’.
    Pamela wrote the conversation out in full for Mary. The exchange is worthy of a cheap melodrama, with Harry the moustache-twirling villain. Harry declared his love, explained (without explaining why) that he was not free, and asked Pamela – supposing that, in two years or so, he could make himself free – whether she would agree to be his wife. To Pamela’s surprise, as she stood incredulously by the fireplace with hands like ice, she found herself saying that she was not sure:
    ‘In the Summer I was afraid I let you think more than I was prepared actually to
do
– I think that I have changed.’
    And he put his head against the mantelpiece, & looked very miserable, & said: ‘Perhaps you are right’
    ‘But I cannot believe it – it seems so odd if you could, would you ask me to be your wife?’
    ‘I would’
    ‘And if in this next year I was to marry somebody would you mind?’
    ‘I would mind
awfully
’
    & then we were quiet for a long time.
    Harry then broke out into a rage of self-recrimination, berating himself for having broken his word to Madeline Wyndham, blaming his intolerable, uncontrollable jealousy, his feeling that to lose Pamela would be to miss ‘a most perfect good’:
    & again & again, I kept saying ‘I do not think you mean it – are you serious – do you really love me or do you think you do?’
    ‘
I love you, & you only, & you