The Moth and the Mountain Read online

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  Maurice Wilson had fallen in love with an Australian who lived in Wellington. Born in Tasmania in 1893, she was christened Ruby Russell. By the time Wilson met her in 1924, everybody called her by her chosen name, Mary Garden. Her pseudonym was selected with care. There was a world-famous opera star and fashionista from Scotland called Mary Garden, who sang to packed houses and enjoyed scandalizing journalists. (The singer once told a reporter that her secret to staying slim was a naked swim at midnight.) The Australasian Mary Garden hoped that by taking the same name she might bathe in the famous soprano’s sparkling reflection. The ploy worked.

  Mary was a dressmaker, and a fierce and successful businesswoman. On travel documents, she imperiously described herself as a “modiste.” In 1924, she established her first shop in Wellington, Mary Garden Creations, which promised “exclusive but inexpensive” clothes for the fashion-conscious kiwi woman. Mary was her own best brand ambassador. In a photograph taken on the day of her marriage to Wilson, in Wellington, in February 1926—high summer in New Zealand—she looks fabulous. She is wearing a dress in the flapper style, with a mantilla veil, and is showing more leg than might be deemed strictly proper at one’s wedding. Her two bridesmaids, in flapper bobs and dresses, beam at the photographer, while Wilson, in a sober gray suit, carries his wife’s white gloves and his own top hat. The newspapers reported the wedding as being “quietly celebrated,” presumably because the groom was a divorcé, but there was nothing immodest about the bride.

  Maurice Wilson on the day of his marriage to Ruby Russell/Mary Garden, in 1926.

  The couple settled in a house at 102 Oriental Bay, in the most fashionable part of the city. Money poured in. Mary was not only skilled at the machines, but she knew how to run a tight business, and she understood advertising. Demand grew. Within a year of opening, Mary Garden Creations had a staff of forty. Soon, Mary was using the profits from the business to buy property as an investment. Wilson and she would eventually move into one of her acquisitions—a large apartment in a block that Garden owned, in a fashionable area of the city.

  Wilson worked in his wife’s business. With his knowledge of textiles from his upbringing in Bradford, he was an asset to Mary Garden Creations. He also earned significant sums of money, which suggests he held equity in his wife’s firm. But the relationship was unbalanced, at least by the standards of the 1920s. Mary’s name was above the door, and her money spoke loudest in the marriage. Maurice was, in some senses, a kept man.

  For a while, this imbalance mattered little, and Wilson enjoyed a comfortable period. He was no longer scrabbling around in the postwar mills of Bradford, but was enjoying his status in the higher rungs of New Zealand fashionable society. Together the couple attended fine parties and tennis matches. Wilson developed a love of horse racing, which endured. Still, the ghosts of Flanders were never far away.

  * * *

  In August 1930, Mary told the New Zealand press that she was embarking on a combined business and pleasure trip to “the most important fashion centres in the world,” including New York, London, and Paris. The Great Depression, which came to New Zealand, as it did to many countries, after the stock market crash of 1929, had pinched her business, but Mary Garden Creations remained profitable. She set off from Auckland on the SS Aorangi, on the first leg of her world tour, with the name on her newly printed passport reading “Mrs. Ruby Wilson.” Her friend Winnie Cohen joined the ship in Sydney and accompanied her around the world.

  Maurice Wilson stayed behind. However, four months later, on December 11, 1930, he boarded the same ship—the SS Aorangi—and sailed on the same route that his wife had taken: to Vancouver, Canada, via Sydney, Australia, and Honolulu, Hawaii. This seems like a strange turn of events—a slow-motion pursuit across the Pacific—but in fact, Wilson was not chasing his wife. He was running away.

  When Wilson stepped foot on the Aorangi, he had become restless to the point of mania. He would later write that the world seemed “topsy turvy” to him. In another letter he explained that he was suffering from a “serious nervous breakdown.” For a correspondent who is normally euphemistic about his state of mind, such frank language is telling.

  Wilson attributed his severe depression to “overwork,” but his illness, and sudden departure from New Zealand, are not so simply explained. In the 1920s, doctors in Britain and the United States were seeing veterans of the Great War who exhibited neurasthenic tics that began long after their military service had finished. Their symptoms seemed to have been catalyzed or exacerbated by other stressors: fraught relationships, a death in the family, work troubles. Might Wilson have been suffering from late-onset post-traumatic stress?

  There was certainly enough in his life to cause him deep sadness. Wilson had left England after the death of his father. Then, in 1928, while he was away in New Zealand, Stanley Wilson had died at the age of twenty-four. Stanley had contracted an overwhelming infection, and then a blood clot in the brain. He was staying at 18 Cecil Avenue, in the house Mark Wilson had bought for his sons, when the infection killed him.

  Maurice would have learned the news by letter. The last time the two men had seen each other was on the dock at Wellington, as Stanley left New Zealand in 1924 to return to Bradford, in the middle of Maurice’s breakup with Beatrice. For the rest of Maurice’s life, he would wistfully recall his relationship with his younger brother—the owner of the make-believe Christmas-morning sweet shop, at which Maurice was the only customer.

  * * *

  If Wilson boarded the ship for Canada in the dying days of 1930 feeling “topsy turvy,” then, he had good reason. But, typically, in this moment of crisis, he sought female company. Traveling on the Aorangi with Wilson was a striking thirty-one-year-old woman with dark hair and green eyes named Lucy Pitman, who worked as a fashion buyer in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, and was married to an Australian named Herbert Pitman. Lucy Pitman was tough. She had been married once before, to a man named Griffin, who was known to settle arguments violently. She had left the marriage after only a year.

  Lucy Pitman’s voyage to Vancouver in December 1930 was a business trip—one of several she took to North America in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She intended to visit several cities on the west coast of the United States before returning to New Zealand. Wilson seems to have accompanied her as far as California. They arrived in Vancouver on the Aorangi on New Year’s Day 1931 and crossed the border into the United States the following day as traveling companions. What you long to know is whether Wilson and Pitman knew each other from Auckland, or whether they struck up a relationship on the boat. Either scenario is plausible. But, given that Pitman, like Wilson, worked in the women’s fashion industry in New Zealand—a small society—it seems most likely that the pair knew each other before the trip. And then you wonder, Was Lucy Pitman the reason Wilson stayed behind as his wife left for a world tour without him?

  Whatever spurred his trip, and whatever the precise nature of the relationship between Maurice and Lucy, Wilson’s actions delivered the coup de grâce to his marriage. When he crossed the border into America, he wrote that his next of kin was his mother, in Bradford—not his wife, in New Zealand. In his mind, his relationship with Mary was already over. (Mary had, by contrast, written Wilson’s name down as her next of kin four months earlier.) Wilson never saw his second wife again. She traveled ahead of him, as promised, to London, to Europe, and home to Wellington.

  Wilson, meanwhile, went south with Pitman. They rode the train as far as California, where he met with a doctor about his depression and anxiety. The doctor, Wilson would later write, was unable to help him. Meanwhile, the country Wilson traveled through was in the grip of its own depression. Between November 1930 and January 1931, eight hundred banks in America closed their doors—including the Bank of United States, which took $160 million of deposits with it when it sank. The effects for the economy were disastrous. By the time Wilson arrived in California, thousands of unemployed
young Americans had migrated to the state in search of work.

  Wilson had family on his mother’s side who’d emigrated from Yorkshire to Portland, Oregon; he also had cousins who lived in San Francisco, California. It’s possible that Wilson stayed with his family, although given the impropriety of his traveling arrangements, he may have chosen to stay in hotels. In any event, Pitman and Wilson soon parted. She traveled back to New Zealand from Vancouver in April, to return to her husband. Wilson’s journey continued, via Chicago, and back into Canada, to the Eastern Seaboard, and to the port of Saint John, New Brunswick.

  In the early days of April, 1931, after a journey of four thousand miles across the North American continent, and an absence of more than seven years from England, Wilson boarded the Duchess of Bedford, bound for Liverpool, England, with money in his pocket, and the black dog on his back. He was going home—whatever that word now meant to him.

  * * *

  Wilson stepped off the Duchess of Bedford into a country drowning in the wettest April anybody could remember. You imagine him, on the sodden Liverpool docks, recalling all the extraordinary, big-skied places he had so recently visited: Honolulu, Sydney, Vancouver. Now he was back in Britain, where the clouds were still knitted together, where the pubs still closed early, where the class system still dominated, where money was still tight, where the military authorities still refused to acknowledge the debt they owed him, and where his family would want to know why—as he turned thirty-three years old—he refused to settle.

  Wilson went to see his mother, Sarah, in Bradford. She was sixty-six years old, lonely and infirm. After the sudden death of Stanley in 1928, she wanted what remained of her family to stick around. Sarah tried, along with her two eldest sons, Fred and Victor, to persuade Maurice to stay in Bradford, to work in the wool trade, and to “use his brains.” Her prodigal and restless third child could think of nothing worse.

  Wilson moved to London, rented a room, and attempted to imagine his next adventure. The city was at once the capital of the biggest empire the world had ever known, and a foggy, careworn place in the grip of an economic crisis after the steam train of the Roaring Twenties had hit the buffers of the stock market crash. There were diversions: speeches, plays, movies, fabulous nightclubs. J. B. Priestley—Wilson’s contemporary from Bradford, who was by now a famous writer—spent many lively nights in the “43,” a club on Gerrard Street in Soho that was awash with celebrities, politicians, and cocaine. For a period that autumn, Wilson stayed at the Hotel Metropole, a high-class establishment with its own nightclub and resident band, the Midnight Follies. Evidently, Wilson still had plenty of Mary Garden money.

  London could not detain Wilson for long. Nowhere could. On October 23, 1931, six months after he returned to England, Wilson traveled to Southampton, where he boarded a commercial liner, the Carnarvon Castle. The ship was bound for Durban, South Africa, via the Suez Canal. Not for the first time, Wilson gave his profession as “accountant” on the manifest, even though he appears to have had no training in accountancy. Perhaps Wilson had overseen the books at Mary Garden Creations and therefore felt justified in calling himself to the profession? Perhaps, he thought accountant sounded better than a more truthful description of his status. Itinerant entrepreneur? Dreamer? Chancer? Evidently, in his short period of living in London in the summer of 1931, Wilson had made a new plan. On the manifest of the Carnarvon Castle, Wilson’s “country of intended future residence” is listed as South Africa. He also had a partner.

  Miss Kathleen Dicks, a single, twenty-seven-year-old dress designer from St John’s Wood in northwest London, traveled on the same ship as Wilson and, like him, designated her future permanent residence as South Africa. Dicks and Wilson also sailed home together, from Beira in Mozambique, six months later. Their joint presence on this unique itinerary could be a strange coincidence. But the chances of its being so are negligible. Both Wilson and Dicks intended to emigrate to South Africa, and both traveled back on the same ship, from a remote port in a different country, more than a thousand miles away from where they disembarked six months earlier.

  Assume Wilson and Dicks were together, then. It is possible that the relationship between Wilson and Dicks was nonsexual. It may even have been a purely business arrangement. Wilson might have been trying to replicate the success of Mary Garden Creations in a new part of the British Empire, using Dicks as his principal designer. But it seems likely that an unmarried woman traveling seven thousand miles by sea to a foreign country in the early 1930s, while accompanied by a man, would have done so as part of a couple—albeit a couple with a cover story. Wilson was, after all, still married.

  Whatever happened in Africa, it was a failure. Over the southern hemisphere’s summer of 1931 and 1932, Maurice and Kathleen traveled from South Africa to Mozambique—most likely on the new railway. They sailed home to Southampton on a German liner named the Ubena, via the Suez Canal, with a brief stop on the island of Mallorca. Once back on English soil, Maurice and Kathleen appear to have parted at dockside. Two years later, Kathleen married a bank clerk named Strickland and moved to the suburbs of London.

  No such regular middle-class existence awaited Wilson. He returned to England as spun around as ever, and he found temporary accommodation in a small flat in north London. Soon, however, he would meet a woman who would change everything for him—one he could not so easily whisk away on an ocean liner. Enid Evans was the audience he had been waiting for.

  CHAPTER FIVE BULLET-PROOF SOLDIER

  • 1932 •

  Wilson met Len Evans in a car showroom, where he worked for the London branch of the Firestone Tire Company of Akron, Ohio. The two men hit it off. Evans invited Wilson to dinner at his flat in Maida Vale, in northwest London—an area that was popular both with the commercial middle class and with a more bohemian set. Frequent jokes were made about mistresses kept in Maida Vale apartments. Semifamous artists and writers—Nancy Mitford being the most notable—lived in the area. Sharing a small apartment in a mansion block, as Len and his wife, Enid, did, was considered quite a modern arrangement for a married couple. But the Evanses were childless after sixteen years of marriage, so they made an urban bargain: a smaller place in a more fashionable neighborhood.

  There were fireworks at the dinner. Wilson was soon besotted with Enid. When you read his letters to her in the months that followed, you see that he was not so much obsessed with Enid’s physical appearance as her capacity for wonder. Enid was slim and stylish, for sure. But her most important quality to Wilson was that she loved his stories. Their relationship was essentially one of narrative. Enid had never been anywhere exotic. Wilson had been everywhere: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, America, Africa, the muddy fields of northern Europe. What tales he could tell.

  Wilson’s stories, however, were peppered with lies. It’s evident from reading his letters that he told many consequential untruths to Enid. He wondered, in one note, what would happen if “I ever get married” and spoke about his “good old days of early freedom,” when in reality the wreckage of two failed marriages lay in his recent past.

  If Len could see the mutual infatuation between his wife and Maurice Wilson, it did not seem to distress him. This odd threesome became inseparable. They would often hit the West End of London for dinner and then go dancing as a trio. The nightclubs of London had a palpable transgressive atmosphere, as if revelers were shaking off the economic gloom around them. The men wore white tie and tails, and the women wore fabulous, sleek dresses. Cabaret entertainments featured troupes of dancing girls, winsome sopranos, and flashes of undergarments. Waiters ensured the spirits flowed. And so, you picture the three of them—husband, wife, cuckoo—in this sultry environment. What happened when the tables were cleared and the dancing began? Who danced with whom? Who watched from a distance?

  The nights would often continue back at the Evanses’ flat at 101 Biddulph Mansions, where the three friends carried on talking into the small hours in front of the fire. I
n these late-night conversations, Wilson narrated the less salacious details of his life in his customary grandiose way. Nights would sometimes finish with Wilson crashing on the floor of the couple’s dressing room, while the object of his affection slept with her husband next door.

  The arrangement was strange, but it seems to have brought joy, in different ways, to all three parties. Despite the obvious inconvenience of the Evanses’ marriage to Wilson’s romantic aspirations, he seems to have retained genuine affection for Len. The feeling was reciprocated. Wilson also seems to have found, in the Evanses’ home, something like a sanctuary. In his letters, he refers often to his affection for the flat he called “101.” Wilson appears to have simultaneously desired Enid on her own, and to have desired her marriage. That both these prizes were beyond his reach, and seemingly in conflict with each other, did not dampen his ardor.

  In the early summer of 1932, however, the atmosphere within this idiosyncratic ménage à trois began to sour, as Wilson struggled again with sickness and depression. His visits to the Evanses became less regular. The nights out in the West End ceased. He was racked by a cough. Wilson became convinced that he had contracted a terminal illness—perhaps tuberculosis. He lay in bed. He lost weight. His mind was crowded with mortal thoughts. Eventually, Wilson wrote the Evanses a note: “I must shake this thing off. If I come back to you, you’ll know that I am alright. If you don’t see me again you’ll know that I am dead.” The couple did not hear from Wilson for several weeks.