Bloomsbury's Outsider (17 page)

Ray was the product of upper middle class parents who valued education, science and creativity, tempered by vigorous outdoor pursuits. Her father, William Cecil Marshall, was a successful architect, runner-up in the first Wimbledon lawn-tennis championship and an amateur figure-skating champion. Ray's mother, Margaret (known by her initials as ‘Mam') was a woman's suffragist and talented musician. Ray had an older brother and sister, Horace and Judy, and, in descending order, a younger brother Tom,
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and two sisters, Eleanor and Frances.
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The Marshalls lived in Bloomsbury, at the corner of Bedford Square and had a country house, ‘Tweenways', near Hindhead, designed in the Arts-and-Crafts style by Ray's father.

Ray was shy. As a child she would leave the room rather than answer a well-meaning question from a family friend, and some found her shyness disconcerting. But Francis Meynell, an inveterate thrower of parties, perceptively observed that ‘when she came in her own face she was silent and apart; but if it was a fancy dress affair she wore a mask, and was then the gayest, the most approachable and approaching of women.'
¹³

Bunny was attracted to Ray for several reasons beyond the obvious: that she was sexy. First, she was an artist, and had already achieved considerable success as an illustrator of several published books including
A Ride on a Rocking Horse
(1917), a simple nursery tale which she wrote as well as illustrated. Bunny admired artists and through Duncan and Vanessa had come to view the world with an artist's eye. He and Ray also shared a love of the outdoors and of long walks and fresh air. Like Bunny, she
had visited Russia, where she travelled at the age of twenty-two in 1913, unable to speak a word of Russian. There was another similarity between Bunny and Ray: although Bunny was gregarious among friends, with strangers he could be shy. One customer found him retreating behind his desk ‘like some innocent wild animal that has never seen man before but who knows by the promptings of instinct that man is something to be mistrusted'.
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In September 1920 Bunny wrote to thank Lytton for a happy weekend, adding, ‘Miss Marshall has […] said nothing. She is more silent than anyone I ever met – but her eyes are eloquent. She has been looking at me all day long & I suppose I have been looking at her too […] then when our heads get too close she turns her head aside.'
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On the occasion when Ray touched Bunny's hand as they passed on the stairs, he felt the full force of an electric current. He had experienced the first intimation of the deeply sensual nature of this apparently shy and silent woman. When Ray suddenly announced she could pursue the relationship no longer Bunny broke down in tears, declaring: ‘I am in love with you. I don't know what to do […]. I felt so happy yesterday & so too on the stairs, but now I am upset.'
¹⁶
In this confused frame of mind, he travelled to The Cearne where Thea was staying, following the death of her mother.

Thea was having a doubly hard time: not only did she have to contend with grief over her mother's death, but she felt it incumbent upon herself to hold the family together. In term-time,
Thea lived in Oxford, but in the vacations felt she had to be in London to make a home for her father and two brothers. She felt torn, telling Bunny that she lived at home ‘because I love them there & I know they need me – so I say, “I must live their life if I really want to do my bit well, as long as I am here”. And the things I alone love are consequently made to suffer & wait until I am free. I am trying to live two ways at once.'
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When Thea went to The Cearne she expected to find only the reassuring presence of Constance. Bunny knew Thea would be there that weekend, and told himself to avoid ‘entanglements'. But when he arrived, Thea's glance of ‘radiant happiness' was all the encouragement he needed. He soon forgot his resolutions, gladly accepting her invitations to bed on both nights. Thea told Bunny she was in love with him. ‘I don't know if she is', he mused, ‘but anyhow I feel as if I had done some good in my life, as I have cheered her up & made her happy.'
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Early in the morning, hearing Constance's gasp of surprise on seeing his empty bedroom, Bunny rushed up to the attic, from whence he nonchalantly emerged pretending he had been collecting apples. (In his autobiography he emerges from the attic clutching a copy of Caesar's
Gallic Wars
.) Afterwards, Thea wrote telling Bunny what a comfort he had been to her.

Back at Taviton Street, Ray had changed her mind about Bunny and they were again on good terms. He knew he was in love with her, but wondered how long this could continue without sex. For the time being, however, he had an arrangement with Thea who decided ‘to have a perfectly settled sort of relation with me – that of seeing me once a fortnight or once a month &
of going to bed with me after having dinner & a bottle of wine'. For Bunny, with his need for diversion and variety, this might have been ideal but he had had enough of chasing rainbows and wanted ‘someone who loves me & whom I love'. When Ray invited him to Tweenways to meet her family, he accepted, but not before warning himself to ‘take care not to marry her before I am absolutely certain'.
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Bunny rehearsed his feelings in a letter to Ray – feelings so convoluted that they appear contradictory. ‘There are some people', he wrote, ‘whom the more one sees & lives with the more precious they become […]. Others one loves and when one has been with them for some time one feels that they are not for oneself.' ‘How can I tell', he asked, ‘which you are?' He added: ‘I shall never be indifferent to whether I hurt you & shall never hurt you on purpose though I shall by being myself, but I cannot help that.'
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He knew he was an unlikely candidate for exclusivity, but had the comforting certainty that if he strayed, it would all be down to his genes. It was a handy evolutionary get-out clause.

Both Bunny and Ray were aware of the importance of that weekend. Would it mark a turning point, in which their love for each other strengthened, or would it have the opposite effect? According to Bunny's diary, they had a long walk together followed by a picnic on a damp hillside. But there, frustratingly, the entry ends. On the next page, Bunny is back at Taviton Street and in the arms not of Ray, but Thea.

This was very much the pattern of Bunny's life in the last months of 1920. One evening he would be with Thea, another
with Ray. Sometimes he saw Betty May, who told him her latest husband had left, that she had been married twice previously and had no money. Bunny gave her £5, borrowed from the shop till. He continued to see his Bloomsbury friends, spending a late night with Lytton at Taviton Street, and an even later one with Duncan at Gordon Square. Meanwhile Ray returned to Tweenways where her father was dying. She wrote to Bunny, telling him she wished he was with her: ‘Different as we are I think there are a lot of things we might enjoy together if the barriers were broken down. There is no use in being afraid of me now.' ‘If you're going to hurt me', she added, ‘you're going to hurt me – as you would say.'
²¹
Although he confided his feelings for Ray to Lytton Strachey, Bunny largely kept her apart from his Bloomsbury friends. When he and Frankie threw a party at the bookshop attended by most of Bloomsbury, Carrington could only report vaguely to Lytton that they were joined by ‘a young lady of Bunny's from the floor above'.
²²

By February 1921 Bunny's relationship with Ray had become sexual and Ray informed Bunny she wanted to have a child by him. Bunny told Constance: ‘I get on with Ray better than I have with any woman for some time, and as she is in love with me & I with her we are very happy.' ‘I daresay', he said, ‘we shall get married though the less that is
talked
up the better.' Mindful of Bloomsbury's antipathy to marriage in general, and to marrying outside the fold in particular, he hoped the matter could be hushed. He informed Constance that he was ‘quite sure' marriage would make him ‘happy for a time', and that in any case ‘it is
obviously worth it. If we get tired of each other we can drift apart & it will still have been an excellent thing, particularly if we had a child.'
²³
His attitude to marriage was hardly one of ‘till death do us part'.

Nevertheless, on 31 March 1921 Bunny and Ray were married at the St Pancras Register Office, with Tatlock and Hey as witnesses. Given Bunny's expressed ambivalence to marriage and that he felt destined to hurt Ray, why did he marry? There is no doubt he loved Ray, but on his terms and in his way. He loved her deep sensitivity to her surroundings and enjoyed her outbursts of high spirits. In contrast to Thea, who was emotionally fragile and often exhausted, Bunny admired Ray for her stamina and strength, telling Constance ‘she is physically sound, & never ill'. He also valued her talent as an artist and that she disdained to ‘change the plates or dust the mantelpiece every day'.
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A more pragmatic reason for their marriage might be inferred from a poem which Bunny wrote for Ray in celebration of their spring wedding. It concludes with the lines:

These shiny bursting buds, drenched with showers

And unexpected love for those forgotten flowers

All this is spring

And this the cause & the occasion of our marriage

Men cannot celebrate it. It may be sacred

Like loneliness men destroy it,

Like flowers crush it with their boots

But birds announce it, and lambing ewes

The stirring in the hive,

All things newborn, reborn, young, alive,

Make marriage music, bring us wedding gifts.
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Notwithstanding the pessimism at the heart of this verse, it celebrates the fecundity of spring, promising another kind of birth. Ray told Bunny she wanted a child by him, and he had intimated to Constance that marriage would be a good thing ‘particularly if we had a child'. Even a pronounced ‘individualist' like Bunny knew of the enormous stigma attached to children born outside marriage and to unmarried mothers. Bunny had also lived at Charleston at the time of Vanessa's pregnancy and knew the great joy which a baby can bring. It seems very likely that Ray was pregnant when they married on 31 March as she was visibly pregnant by early July. Perhaps pregnancy expedited marriage, but they were already committed to the idea of having children. Even Lytton had heard that Bunny and Ray intended to ‘have a very large family'.
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Ray was thirty in 1921, and for a woman of her generation this was a relatively advanced age to be embarking on a first pregnancy. Less than a month into the marriage, closing the stable door after the horse had bolted, Bunny informed Duncan he was ‘thinking of beginning a family at any moment'.
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Bunny thought Edward the only person who approved of the marriage, ‘and realised almost from the first that I had made a wise choice and been very lucky'. Constance was less easily won over: Bunny believed she would have preferred him to marry
someone she already knew, perhaps Thea.
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Although Constance soon became fond of Ray, Bunny's Bloomsbury friends were aghast at the marriage, which, according to Lytton ‘raised a universal howl of execration' in Bloomsbury.
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Frankie Birrell was ‘distinctly cut up about it', and Carrington thought Bunny was losing his eyesight ‘as well as his wits'.
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Duncan was furious. He wrote reproaching Bunny for not consulting his friends and for his selfishness in failing to take into account how they would feel. ‘It is a ridiculous argument', Duncan stated,

that there is no difference between a liaison & a legal marriage. A liaison is a relation between 2 individuals with no contracts & no reality in the eyes of the world. A legal marriage is at once a reality in the eyes of the world of the most odious sort […]. Also it apparently entails living together which makes it very difficult for your friends to forget that when they want to see you or ask you out there is somebody else who considers herself with superior claims left alone.
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Duncan still felt entitled to ‘claims' upon Bunny, but he also worried about the extent to which his relationship with Bunny was known to Ray. He told Bunny, ‘my happiness depends on
something you can give me. But it must be alive & not dead.'
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Duncan managed to contain his anger sufficiently to paint Ray's portrait as a wedding present, although he commented dismissively that Ray ‘sits like a cream cheese on a plate'.
³³

It would be some time before Bunny and Ray had a permanent home in which to display Duncan's portrait. The newly-weds moved from Taviton Street to Wells Street, just off Goodge Street, where they took two small rooms overlooking a cemetery. But Ray spent little time there, embarking on a protracted period in the countryside for the sake of her health and that of her unborn baby, as influenza remained rife after the epidemic of 1918. And so Ray adopted a nomadic existence, travelling between relatives and joined by Bunny at weekends. In some ways this suited them both. It obviously appealed to Bunny given his need for variety and diversion. As for Ray, as Bunny explained, ‘Ray was a woodland creature. She wanted the protection and shelter that woods gave, and among the beeches and the pines I saw her as I never could see her in London.'
³⁴

Ray spent most of July with her sister Judy and brother-in-law Dick Rendel who were staying at Warbarrow Bay, near Lulworth Cove, in Dorset. There Ray, now visibly pregnant, felt self-conscious bathing before the young men on the beach. Bunny worried she might slip on the rocks or catch a chill, and warned her to avoid sailing at all costs. Ray revelled in her pregnancy, excited every time she felt the baby move, perceiving something ‘so alive' within her. Bunny rehearsed names for the baby on the back of an envelope,
scribbling: ‘Richard Duncan Sable Garnett is fixed.'
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