Mary, Mary

 Mary Wesley is on my mind as I wake up, nine books in a rapid row and then she said she had nothing more. She used her own life cannibalistically, but shrouded it in plot and character. Her life was her material.

I’m approaching the age when she began to write as a serious business. Her children were grown, many of the men she had loved were dead, so were her parents. She was estranged from her sister, and her good female friends were not the sort to care if they found their scandals revealed in a novel.

She was knitting sweaters to keep herself alive until she found that books would do that and much more lavishly too. She had learned to be frugal, and her children were provided for by her first husband’s estate so she became generous toward people of straitened circumstances, whether she was close to them or not. Her papers were filled with letters of gratitude, waiting for her biographer to find after she died.

She was beautiful to the last, more and more as she aged. She was described as small and finely drawn when she grew old and she indulged herself with cashmere and silk and good shoes, as soon as she was able to afford them. She loved a broad brim on a black hat and was photographed frequently in profile, displaying a firm little chin well into her old age.

Robert Bolt loved her enough to leave Sarah Miles for her, until he found that Mary was no longer the marrying kind but a woman who refused to submerge her own talents in the more demanding ones of a husband, a state that she knew far too well. He was twelve years younger than she but that wasn’t the problem. In her eighties, Mary flirted outrageously with a lover of a woman who was her age; the man was twenty years younger than either of them. She pouted later that she wanted a young man too.

She and her best friend were predators when they were young. “They hunted in pairs,” a man who had lived to tell the tale observed, and a photo of the two of them, sprawled full-length on a lawn surrounded by men and looking triumphant, bears witness to that statement.

She was often photographed in a two-piece bathing suit that bore little resemblance to a bikini but was ragingly daring in the 30s, with its bared midriff. Her figure looks almost statuesque with long legs; although Mary was a tiny woman, she had great presence and style. A photo of her after a court presentation, dressed in the robes of a peeress and holding a cigarette, her husband clipped out of the picture, just about sums her up.

It never occurred to her not to be a householder, in true British fashion. She was rooted in England and having her life flower under two world wars certainly did a lot to keep her that way. At least twice her second husband was given good jobs in Europe, and once Mary joined him there, in Berlin. But his mad first wife destroyed his career and that was the beginning of near-poverty and the death of travel.

She was desperately poor after that husband committed suicide. She had been keeping the household going until his death and then she fell ill. She had put her Dartmoor cottage up for sale and a prospective buyer found her there in bed, a sixty-nine-year-old woman who was too ill to speak, alone in a perishingly cold house. Unable to speak, she waved him on in his exploration. Instead he stopped and saved her life. “Double pneumonia” a doctor diagnosed and she was helpless with it for three weeks.

That improbable rescue was only one event in an eventful life that had to be tempered into credibility if it were to be put into fiction. Ten novels, all wicked fun except for the last which was dark and vicious. Then she stopped writing, having perhaps found layers that she no longer wanted to publicly explore, and died a woman who entered a whole new phase of being alive in her seventies, one that was of her choosing and that used her talent to the hilt.