The Cuckolded Husband

The Cuckolded Husband
(As told by William Morris)


There will always be a certain amount of sympathy for the adulterer. Trapped within a tedious marriage, he seeks the nearest means of escape. This holds true for a wife who is unfaithful. Some vital ingredient must have been lacking to drive her into the arms of another man.

What about the cheated spouses? Our reputations are tarnished even though our behaviour has conformed to written morals. An invisible cloud hangs over us, everywhere you go you can hear people muttering:

“There’s that man who was deserted by his wife. It’s not as though you can blame her, is it?”

Now, in my Last Will and Testament, I resolve to set the matter straight. I shall write what I believe to be an accurate account of my friendship with Gabriel Rossetti and his subsequent affair with my wife, with less hatred and prejudice than there may have been a few years ago. He is dead and I am soon to follow.

If I close my eyes, I can see us as we were years ago: Ned, Gabriel and me. The Infernal Triangle…

When Ned Burne-Jones and I graduated from University, we had plans to conquer the world. I was determined to become an artist and what I lacked in technique I more than made up in enthusiasm.

We made an odd pair, tramping the streets of London. Even in youth there was something dusty and grey about Ned: long, thin, his soft eyes hiding under spidery brows. His hair was stringy; he was stringy… like a relic dug up from a cellar.
I may have had delusions about my skills but none about my looks. I was portly and square-faced, feet splayed apart and arms comically short. I hid a blunt chin beneath a wiry beard- my hair was a jungle that refused to stop growing. I would visit a barber once a week but, come the next outing, it had sprouted back.

One of Nature’s mysteries…!

Ned made inquiries as to who were the best contacts. We had heard of the Pre-Raphaelites, naturally. Ned considered them very daring; he’d have given his eyes to sign up on the membership list. I remember seeing this exquisite set of watercolours; all knights and fair ladies, borrowed from the Camelot legends. I asked who they were by and here came the tingling reply:

“Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”

With a name like that, he could only be a genius. Dante=after the poet, Gabriel=after the archangel.

(It wasn’t until later I learned his real name was Charles).


So you can imagine the excitement when Ned burst into my lodgings one morning, crying out:

“Guess who wants to meet us! Gabriel Rossetti!”

Of course I abandoned whatever I was doing and dashed outside. I was halfway down the street when I realised I’d forgotten my hat.

“Forget the wretched hat,” Ned snapped. “So what if your curls get blown out of place? I’m sure the Maestro won’t mind.”

I was being ridiculous- of course he wouldn’t. From the snippets of information I had gathered, the artist’s life-style was unconventional and his habits strange. He wouldn’t care if a wet, wild-haired ‘Topsy’ Morris turned up on his doorstep.

The door swung open as though enchanted. A slender, long- haired man with a sleek beard and olive-green eyes exclaimed irritably:

“What the blazes do you want?”

Ned and I shared an uneasy glance. Perhaps this hadn’t been such a good idea. Yet Ned, so reliable in a crisis, pressed. We had been invited the previous week and despite being non-entities yet, everyone in England should soon know our names.
Gabriel seemed impressed. He threw up his hands (an extravagant gesture we would come to shamelessly mimic) and observed:

“I suppose I’ll have to let you in. Get a move on!”

Some may have found this reception brusque; others still extremely rude. Yet it was entirely to my taste.

The house was narrow and crooked, full of side-rooms and draughty corridors. He disliked standing up to an easel: it was far more his style to do drafts on his knees then transfer to canvas, using real models for the faces.

With a snap of his fingers a mountainous blonde appeared (Fanny Cornforth, his housekeeper; also his mistress). Before long she had supplied us with more cups of tea and slabs of ham than we could be expected to eat in a fortnight. He gave this unassuming meal such praise the poor woman was floating on air. But not without giving us a brazen smile and wink as she left.

He was a fascinating talker. He spoke of Society (anyone he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing), techniques in vogue, about strikes and the Empire… I remember him announcing, a wicked glint in his eye, he regularly held Life Classes there.

“The models are quite naked, you know,” he smiled, taking sly sideways looks to see how this affected us. I treated him to a cold, steady stare. Ned almost spilt his tea.

When we left that evening, we were the best of friends. We had been visiting one another’s houses for several months when a notice arrived in his energetic handwriting:

Murals to be painted at Oxford. Bring along yourselves, your imaginations and any amount of paint.

As an afterthought:

Keep Topsy away from the cakes: he’s getting too fat.

Huh! I thought I was looking remarkably trim. It was an on-going joke; on his side at least. It never occurred to him I might find these remarks hurtful.

What a time! The jokes we shared! The Oxford murals are mostly faded, but my memories of those charmed days have not. Technically we were there for the commission, but the highlight was definitely once we laid our brushes aside, and were left to our own devices.

Gabriel was the centre of an admiring band. We copied his outlook, his dress sense, even his way of speaking. Beautiful women became ‘stunners’ overnight and there was no creature as precious as the tame wombat that followed him up and down the University halls. He fed it scraps at the table (knowing full well the landlady disapproved) and always spoke to it as though it understood. Since it was squat and hairy, he named it ‘Topsy’- another stab in our war of words.

Accompanying us was Lizzie Siddal, Gabriel’s fiancée. She was a willowy, frail, good-looking girl; her coppery hair like a lit candle round her head. She was often seriously ill and not above blackmailing Gabriel with this whenever he looked ready to scarper with another woman. She had artistic leanings of her own, and more than a little talent. She has her own role to play in this drama: if she hadn’t insisted she and Gabriel go to the Opera on a particular night, I would never have met Janey.

Gabriel loved the Opera. Indeed he had a special affection for anything that showcased tempestuous, overblown emotions. On this occasion he was disappointed and instead of concentrating on the scene before him, scanned the audience for interesting faces. And halted.

Sitting in the box directly above theirs was an apparition.

A face rose above the hundreds of others- a face as powerful and dark as Lizzie’s was gentle and fair. Sensuous lips, heavy eyebrows, long muscular neck and the deepest dark green eyes. A veil of smooth, dark, lustrous hair.

It’s impossible to tell whether it was love at first sight. A story he wrote later (along with the collection of sonnets he dedicated to her, The House of Life) suggests this. I can imagine him hesitating as he finished contemplating this stranger and returned to Lizzie. Did she realise he had betrayed her, if not in action, in thought?

I doubt it. She moved closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder.
Ever so carefully, he turned round. The unknown woman met his eye then and smiled.

He made a point of introducing himself immediately after the show. A few days later he brought her into the workshop where Ned and I toiled away at our easels.

I can’t write of love. What is generally regarded as love seems to be Gabriel’s form of self-indulgent despair. What I experienced-and do to this day-was an ache in the pit of my stomach. Upon her entering the workshop I knew, with absolute certainty, I must have her.

She was solemn, sedate and made herself useful. I admired these qualities: society women with their inane banter were two a penny. As she hadn’t that privilege- she was a groom’s daughter- she lacked their insincerity and superficial ways. When she spoke it was quiet, toneless and serious, containing much common sense.

An excellent cook, she often served up food and cake for we artists. I watched her rolling and kneading the dough; pinching at the bundle with her deft, slender fingers. I would become distracted by the spiral of raven hair tickling her neck, and wonder why it so disturbed me.

Ned sometimes stopped to talk to her; Gabriel too made impromptu visits, tempting us from our work with his wit and clever stories. Janey would wander out into the workshop, wiping her floury hands on her apron, and laugh and joke with him. I wondered how everyone else could be so easy, so natural. Occasionally she narrowed those beautiful sea-green eyes and ask:

“What do you think, Mr Morris?”

Embarrassment crept over me like a scalding. I stammered some incoherent reply, looking at my feet- which seemed enormous- or my hands- which looked too raw and rough. Anything other than at her.

I still have my first sketch of her. I found it amongst my papers the other day and admit to crying. It’s poignant in its idealism of a ‘love’ that offered so many small hopes; none of which were fulfilled. I used it for my first (and last) full-length painting. Entitled La Belle Iseult, it shows her as a mediaeval queen, standing in her bedchamber. It was never completed. I wrestled with it on and off for two years, eventually giving it up as a bad job. By now it hurt to be in the same room as her.

So I scrawled ‘I can not paint you but I love you’ across the back of the canvas. She never mentioned this but undoubtedly saw it, being in the perfect position to read it.

Stemming naturally enough from the sittings, we began to spend more time together, discovering common interests. One desolate afternoon, when it was too wet and cold to go out, I taught her how to weave; flinching as my rough hand with its dirty nails skimmed her alabaster ones with their moon-shaped nails. Not noticing my discomfiture, she concentrated on her task. Over the next few months, she became an expert; colours, patterns and people flashing through the loom like a magic lantern. The Lady of Shallot, I called her, as she smiled wanly.
When she grew tired, I read to her from the fashionable book of the time. That season it was Barnaby Rudge (a choice Gabriel later mocked as “so very Morris”- meaning pedestrian and vulgar).

When I asked her to marry me, there was uproar. Friends and relatives were baffled by what I was doing. My companions maintained that walking with and admiring her was one thing, but marriage quite another. William Rossetti dismissed the idea as “insane”, and I have to confess I paid no attention. I had never cared for him and it seems the feeling was mutual. He never quite forgave the time his brother, criticising one of my stories, said it was ridiculous, someone having a dragon for a brother- I had retorted better a dragon than a bloody fool. Reflecting this, the animosity between him and Jane was always great.

Ned summed up the overall attitude with: “She’s a lovely girl- but will she make you happy?”

I was adamant. No other woman would do.


The years went by. God blessed our union with daughters- Jane (known as Jenny) and Mary (always called May). They were the image of their mother but (needless to say) inherited my cranky disposition.

I gave up hope of ever becoming a decent painter; instead branching out into interior design. ‘The Firm’, as it was known, was soon selling more furniture and wallpaper prints than any other industry in the country. As well as this, I discovered a love of writing. I had various volumes of poetry published, some under the collective title of The Earthly Paradise. These received considerable critical acclaim.

This, I feel, was the august of our marriage. Although Jane’s health was generally poor, and I had to take her to the most expensive spas in Europe to recover, I never tired of having her to speak to, to be with. I believed she took pleasure in my company also.

It was on such a trip I wrote Love Is Enough, possibly my best-known poem:

Love is enough: though the world be a-waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the skies be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder,
And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter:
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.

Love, those glorious, too-distant days, was enough. I would look at Janey over my preparatory sketches, over the drafts of poetry, and shake my head at all the doubters and dissenters. They had said that a marriage between two people of such different backgrounds and education could never last.

Had we not proved them wrong?



To Gabriel God was less kind. Collectors shunned his paintings and he was often hard up. I offered to mail him a cheque but he refused. He wouldn’t accept anyone’s charity.

The last, truly devastating blow came: Lizzie’s death. An inquest declared an open verdict but to those in the know, it was most definitely a suicide. Lizzie had become addicted to the drug opium but would stop short of lethal dosage. If she had overdosed, it was intentional. Saddest of all, the autopsy revealed she was going to have a baby.

One story circulating (which I never heard confirmed) is she pinned a note to her bed-jacket. It read, very simply:

Take care of Larry (her handicapped brother).

Her husband indulged in a typically Mediterranean outburst of grief. The poems he had been writing during the eleven years they were together were sealed in her coffin. He received guests as normal but no one was fooled.

Old flirtations let him know they would happily replace her. According to Ned, Fanny had actually sat upon his knee; spreading her brass-yellow hair over her shoulders and smiling seductively.

“I know I can make you happy,” she told him. “Like in the old days…”

Gabriel gently but firmly pushed her away. “It’s not the old days anymore, Fanny. My wife is hardly cold in her grave. What kind of man would I be, to just forget her?”

He started work on Beata Beatrix as her memorial.



It must have begun in the mid 1860s. I do know that by 1868, it was patently obvious.
When did I suspect?

For some time I had been worried by her behaviour. A secretive, withdrawn woman by nature, she had become even more so of late. I thought it might be prolonged grief for Lizzie’s death; they had been close.

She showed no interest in the children and was blatantly rude to my fellow Socialists when they visited the house. I grew tired with having to apologise for her bad manners. I challenged her one night:

“Jane-what is this about?”

She fixed her gaze on the window facing the garden. I doubt she had heard me.



One evening she was excitedly scampering the halls, making sure everything was in place. We were entertaining a large party of friends; one of whom was Gabriel. He made a point of being ‘fashionably late’. I saw her move from a group of women friends and out into the corridor. She peered behind, hoping no one was following her. Curious, I stood by the door- frame so I could see down the hall.

It was Gabriel. Although no words were exchanged, the tense, highly charged atmosphere left nothing to the imagination. He stared into her eyes; she watched him adoringly. It was as though no one could break through into their private world.

He put an arm round her neck and steered her into one of the drawing rooms.
My best friend and my wife were lovers.

Lovers!

I could tell you every detail of that hallway. The design on the carpet, the ornaments, the arrangements… It is as though it is frozen in time, and imposed upon all that, their silhouettes- him impassioned, her loving; like the abject females in his paintings.
I had never inspired such a look in her.

I was a fool. This wonderful marriage, which I had boasted of, had celebrated in verse, was a sham. She didn’t love me. Possibly she never had.

The critics were right. Not because of the discrepancy in class, but simply because who I was, and who Gabriel was. I had tried so hard to be a gentleman, and to do the right thing, I had lost sight of the fact it was excitement that moved one soul to love another. I couldn’t compete.

I walked in the opposite direction; could feel myself trembling. I felt as though one of my times was coming on, but I had to shut that out, to receive the guests as though everything was ordinary. I had to drench myself in water before I calmed down.



Those dreadful days, I fell more and more upon Ned Burne-Jones’s company. He was the one friend left in whom I had any trust, and he had marital problems of his own.
Having finished a relationship with Maria Zambaco, one of his models and an undeniable ‘stunner’, he had returned apologetically to his wife, Georgie. This cued a whole series of incidents; the most hair-raising being when he roused me in the middle of the night to come down quickly, since Maria- half-hysterical, and dressed only in her night-gown- was threatening to drown herself in the Thames. We fortunately persuaded her otherwise.

Dramatic though the fall out from Ned’s affair was, it could not help but remind me of my own situation. Far from fading over time, the wound cut quicker and deeper.
It has to be every man’s nightmare situation. Although I loathed Gabriel’s name and would only spit it in a fit of anger, I had to endure it. I endured the crude cartoons and insulting rhymes he composed- I was variously cast as ‘the Bard and Petty Tradesman’ or the ‘Infant Hercules’. My interest in boating was lampooned in a poem beginning ‘Enter Morris, moored in a punt’- and worse still, I knew Jane approved of these pastiches.

She would snatch the letters as they arrived, and sit reading them on the settle, sometimes in peals of laughter. Later I would come across them on her writing desk all in Rossetti’s distinctive hand, all featuring some ludicrous caricature of me. I don’t know what hurt most: that she liked these burlesques, or she thought so little of my feelings she didn’t attempt to hide them.

As for Gabriel, his behaviour was erratic, unpredictable and- at times- dangerous. He would launch into wild, inexplicable rages, and drug himself into a stupor. He seemed incapable of understanding what effect this had on those around him, how it impinged upon his relationships.
When caught in such a fugue, he hared round London like one possessed; eventually banging at the doors and windows of our house, calling Jane’s name.

Perhaps the most incredible thing he did in this period was exhume Lizzie’s coffin. He said this was necessary, to retrieve the poems he had buried with her, but did not attend the operation himself. It certainly confirmed his role as the most eccentric and talked about artist in the City. Opinion was divided as to whether this was touching or lunatic. Rumours said that she had not decayed, and was as lovely as ever. She was as good as canonised in the public eye.

Meanwhile, I had the implications of scandal to consider. In the beginning I took her to see Rossetti and brought her back; later I arranged it so we had a joint lease on Kelmscott Manor. I hated the thought of that man in my house, but it had to be preferable to the torturous rides to Cheyne Walk, where Janey would sit with her hands crossed in her lap, enveloped in silence.

Looking at her in profile- the sight of her still inflamed me, after all I knew, and had happened- I wondered how it had come to this, where it had gone so wrong, when this charade would end. I wanted to meet her eye, but her face remained inscrutable. She stared straight ahead.

The only thing she said was “Thank you” as I helped her out of the carriage; briefly touching her gloved hand. I wanted to hold her, plead with her not to go inside, but by that time she would already be over the threshold; Rossetti’s cat’s eyes gleaming in sly triumph.

A year of such visits was enough.

I did anything to lend it an air of respectability. Society was gossiping, and the girls were at the age where they started to ask awkward questions. I couldn’t have their names, or mine, associated with this sordid affair.

I put up with his intimacy with my children. Many a time I came home to find Jenny and May crawling around on the floor, shouting with laughter, and Rossetti larking with them like a third child. He was particularly fond of May, and would leave little letters for her at the table at meal times.

One time I was passing, I thought about looking in. I changed my mind when I heard her say- “I wish you were my father”, and his reply of, “Oh, if only, May.”
The door was slightly ajar, and since May had her back to it, I hoped I could leave without her seeing the expression on my face. Rossetti saw, however, and he merely raised a sardonic eyebrow.

There was also the message projected by his paintings-that I was a cruel husband, keeping Jane against her will. I may be guilty of a thousand and one crimes. I recognise I failed in my duty as a husband: why else would she turn to someone as wilful, as unstable? I was never cruel though.

Never.

It burnt out, as such relationships do.

His love and dependency on Jane bordered on obsession. His drug consumption was appalling: he told his biographer he took one hundred and fifty grams of choral a day.
This left him sick, partially blind and prone to hallucinations. His mood swings became more frequent and extreme.

I was shocked the last time I saw him. Gabriel the indefatigable, who, when I was young and impressionable, seemed the incarnation of health and energy; had radiated such charm and brilliance, was haggard and wasted.

A shambling wreck of a man, his talent devastated.

Janey said she feared for herself and the children now his mental health was slipping.
And on this yellow note, the affair came to an end.



I was holding a Board Meeting in the drawing room when the news arrived. I heard the shuffle of feet on the second floor.

A gasp.

Then a long, drawn out, choked sob. It was horrible-like the dry of a wounded animal.
I had been expecting this for months. She must have too.

Why, when the man had caused nothing but acute suffering, did I feel pain?
I shut my eyes, blotting out memories of a youthful Gabriel, laughing like a fiend…

“Rossetti- sometimes you’re an angel and sometimes you’re a damned scoundrel!” I heard myself say.

I had to go and comfort my Jane.

He had his chance-and he lost her. As she needed me so seldom, I may as well make the most of it. As it wasn’t too late.

It couldn’t ever be too late.


Afterwards…

William died October 3rd 1896.

Leading up to his death, Jane- who was rapidly losing her looks- was having an affair with Wilfred Blunt, a political radical. She discussed both William and Rossetti at length with him. She explained she had never loved her husband, seeing him as a means of financial security and independence. She found his devotion to her tiresome, but since she had made her bed, she had to lie in it.

Of Rossetti, she said she had loved him at first but- “it did not last long. It was very warm while it lasted… If you had known one another, you would have loved him, and he would have loved you…

He was the best of men.”


THE END