An Affair to Remember

Taking the canon of great literature as a guide, would you embark upon adultery believing it to be oodles of fun and a route to lasting happiness? Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina rather counsels against it, as do Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. More nuanced, when it comes to extramarital activity, is Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (1936).

It was my father who introduced me to Rosamund Lehmann. We don’t specialize in the genre, but ‘affair lit.’ was the beginning of our micro book club of two. I was taking A-level English and he, despite exclusively reading nineteenth-century novels, kindly committed himself to reading all the set texts. Thus he discovered Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence – an emotional dalliance that was premarital but still made no one happy – and the twentieth century. Ever since, we’ve swapped recommendations for fiction written roughly between 1850 and 1950, alternating a Brontë with Sybille Bedford, Thomas Hardy with Evelyn Waugh, enjoying their observations of life. At this, Lehmann excels: there are moments when the lyricism of her descriptive passages catches the reader in wonder. Those familiar with her earlier work, Invitation to the Waltz (1932: see SF no. 67), will already have met Olivia Curtis and Rollo Spencer. (It’s not, however, essential; I first read the books in the wrong order.) Then, the middle-class Olivia, daughter of a local mill owner, was 17, and having a painful, feeling-out-of-place experience at her first dance. The evening was saved by a brief but memorable conversation on the terrace with the dashing Rollo, heir to the grand house hosting the dance (though it’s not first-tier – Meldon is no Brideshead) and brother of Olivia’s schoolfriend Marigold. Four years later in publishing dates, but a decade later in Olivia and Rollo’s lives, we know the direction Weather will take the moment they meet by chance on a train, not having seen each other in the intervening years. She has married and separated, and is now working in London while renting a room from her cousin Etty. He is married – though not, we suspect, entirely happily. Neither has forgotten that moment on the terrace. Olivia is extraordinarily relatable. Lehmann recalled contemporary readers writing to her declaring, ‘This is my story! – how did you know?’, while one of the founders of the Virago publishing house, Carmen Callil, said Weather was her generation’s Bridget Jones. That relatability is helped by Lehmann’s shifting between the third and the first person. The latter gives us Olivia’s inner monologue, secret thoughts that would never be spoken aloud but might have been written in the journal she was given in Waltz. Occasionally, they’re delightfully low in generosity of spirit: ‘Nothing you did or conceived of could ever be gay: and do your children know yet they hate you?’, Olivia thinks when, during an interminable post-dinner drawing-room scene at Meldon – wearing a borrowed evening dress and still feeling like ‘an alien upon this hearth’ – she is shown a tapestry one of Rollo’s aunts is engaged in making. Olivia is not Lehmann – and yet there are similarities: by 1936, Lehmann too was separated from her first husband (and had married again). Olivia can write, has informed taste, and cares about such things as interiors: ‘he must think everything nice,’ she frets, the first time she brings Rollo to her bedroom, with its picture of ‘people sitting on park chairs under a plane-tree’ bought with a wedding cheque. The interior designer Nina Campbell, Lehmann’s first cousin once removed, confirmed that ‘Cousin Rosamund had great style’ when I raved about the book to her. Olivia’s friends are part of the new Bohemian set who’ve studied at the Slade, just as Lehmann in the 1930s mixed with the Bloomsbury group – her brother John had begun working for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1931. Most importantly, Olivia is a romantic:

Rollo, I haven’t had a lover. There was nobody I fell in love with, I didn’t try experiments: it was never worth it. Not because I’m cold, only because of love – because I believe in it, because I thought I’d wait for it . . .

At a time when some of Lehmann’s acquaintances were famously ‘living in squares and loving in triangles’, we might imagine that Olivia and Rollo could embark on their affair with some openness – but this parallel tale shows another side to the era. Familial ties are strong, and members of those families maintain distinctly Edwardian values. The first half of the novel, which includes that aforementioned drawing-room scene, illustrates the interwar years’ push-pull between progress and the past, desire and duty. That same duality is implied in the novel’s title. Their affair is protected by the ‘glass casing’ of their love, conducted always ‘indoors or in taxis or in his warm car . . . in the half-light in the deepest corner of the restaurant, as out-of-sight as possible’. Outside the glass is ‘the weather, the winter streets in rain, wind, fog’, Olivia’s ‘usual bus-taking London winter’. Great sacrifices have been endured: Rollo’s seldom-mentioned older brother has ‘died for England: going over the top, at the head of his men, shot through the heart’. More sacrifices loom but, like ghosts, they are visible only to those determined to see them: ‘Parting wiv ve Rembrandt was a terrible blow. And heaven knows what’ll have to go next!’ says Rollo’s lisping uncle. The country-house crisis is well underway, and Rollo, we learn, hasn’t even married for money. Yet appearances are maintained, along with servants: ‘Not one grain of doubt, ever, about the quality, quantity, time and place of their food and drink . . . No struggle about underclothes and stockings. Birthright of leisure and privilege, of deputed washing, mending,’ muses Olivia. Are they in denial, or can they not escape their upbringing? ‘I hate gloom, don’t you? For myself or anyone else . . . It’s so uncomfortable,’ Rollo tells Olivia. Why does Olivia fall for Rollo? For him, the appeal is obvious: Olivia is available, attractive, intelligent, and generally avoids expressing gloom, while Rollo is adept at compartmentalizing. For Olivia, the subject of her teenage dreams has a god-like aura; he’s handsome, glamorous, engaging, generous – though we also know, even before his mother says so, that he is weak. Olivia won’t allow herself to be ‘kept’, but she is happy to accept an emerald ring and a jewelled cigarette case. There are long drives and weekends away that bring delight, adventure and snatches of happiness. But there are also moments of longing, of lying to friends to maintain the secret, of being forced to frequent out-of-the-way places. Rollo has made it clear that he’ll never leave his wife, and Olivia doesn’t even dare to imagine that he might, but we, the readers, hope on her behalf for a different ending. We believe in their love. We know that Olivia would appreciate the Gainsborough Rollo is due to inherit (if it isn’t next to be sold), and we know how much she’d love to have children, to see them playing alongside those of her sister Kate. ‘When I see prams in the Park,’ she tells her, ‘I simply ache to have one to push . . .’ And so the denouement is cruel: the emerald and the cigarette case are sold to pay for what Olivia’s more experienced cousin Etty refers to as ‘the wages of sin’. Women always get the rawer deal in these circumstances. Tolstoy, Flaubert and Greene killed off their female protagonists. Olivia’s fate is less tragic, but it is still desperately sad: ‘It was fun, wasn’t it darling?’ Rollo insists as she’s breaking up with him, duty winning that particular battle. Still, we can’t assume regret from her either, at least not over the affair. There’s another ring that Rollo gave her, that isn’t sold: ‘It’s got to be such a part of me, I couldn’t not wear it,’ she tells him. Suddenly the end doesn’t seem certain after all, but we’ll never know because Lehmann never wrote a sequel. Rosamund Lehmann remained a romantic and didn’t allow experience to triumph over hope. In 1936, the year Weather was published, she had an affair with the journalist Goronwy Rees, which ended when she saw in the newspapers a notice of his engagement to another woman. Between 1941 and 1950, she had an affair with the poet Cecil Day-Lewis; they went on holidays and lived together part time, and Lehmann believed he would eventually leave his wife. He did – but simultaneously he also left Lehmann and married the actress Jill Balcon; elements of that affair are reflected in The Echoing Grove (1953). Is there a lesson in the novels and Lehmann’s life? I’m certainly not tempted by adultery. But I do appreciate her enthusiasm for love, and for finding a way through the gloom even in the face of suffering and change, and that is something I hold on to.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Fiona Mckenzie Johnston 2025