Bloomsbury's Outsider (34 page)

Nevertheless, the question of the age difference between
Bunny and Angelica was less straightforward than he made out. As usual when embarking on an important love affair, Bunny put his feelings into verse, but this time the verse contained a sense of disquiet, a nagging ambivalence, and in the use of the word ‘trouble', a disturbing echo of the poem he had written at Charleston many years before:

First love comes but once & love is blind

Or else my name could never have been written

If she had eyes she must have seen my hair

Is white, my body fat, my chin double […]

And marks of weariness, & fear of death, & trouble

Seam all over my guilty face […]
¹⁷

Bunny's hair was indeed white, but still thick; he wasn't fat; his chin remained single and at forty-six he wasn't particularly old. However, his relationship with Angelica had a curious effect upon him. On the one hand he felt refreshed and rejuvenated by her youth and vitality. On the other he realised that the age gap was not going to close. Its very existence reminded him of his age and he began to be preoccupied by fears of aging and mortality.

The Lawrence
Letters
were not progressing as smoothly as Bunny hoped. Charlotte Shaw and Lawrence had exchanged six hundred letters, but she would not contemplate their inclusion in the book. Her reluctance stemmed from the fact that she was both a singularly determined and fiercely private woman. Lawrence was something of a surrogate son to her and she confided in him, confessing her private opinions on
subjects including marriage. Although devoted to GBS, Charlotte Shaw was always ill at ease with his public profile and hated the idea of being in the spotlight herself. Unaware of the deeply personal nature of her correspondence with Lawrence, Bunny went to see Mrs Shaw in August, hoping he could change her mind. Realising she was immovable, Bunny tried another tack, informing her that he had lost his heart to her. Such charm was wasted. She relinquished only ten letters, and these were to her husband.

Bunny and Vanessa had entered into a regular correspondence. It began with mutual concerns about Duncan's feelings and continued with Vanessa seeking Bunny's advice about her own relationship with Angelica. ‘My dear', Vanessa wrote to him, ‘you know that if my loving you & needing you is any good there I am – we
are
intimate I think, you & I'.
¹⁸
In between times, Bunny had taken Angelica to Mr Mumford's room. ‘I wish' he wrote to her afterwards, ‘I hadn't made love to you, but you are so adorable & wound your arms round me & your hair comes down & I can't help it'.
¹⁹
Angelica replied that she loved him very much, but did not want to be his lover. For all her flirting, she found the reality of a grown-up love affair more difficult to contend with. Bunny told her not to worry: ‘If I can't be one thing – a lover – I must be another: – a[n] old friend of the family you are to talk to: & are pleased to see.'
²⁰

Angelica had lost interest in acting and decided instead to be a painter. Her relationship with Vanessa had also become problematic. Vanessa confided to Bunny that she was very upset by
this, and worried lest her grief over Julian was the cause. ‘Bunny dear', Vanessa wrote, ‘I wonder if you can make things easier at all?'
²¹
The previous year Vanessa had revealed to Angelica that her father was Duncan, not Clive. Now Vanessa wondered whether this had any bearing on Angelica's icy distance. Vanessa's confessional manner was strikingly similar to the way she had behaved over Bunny's affair with Duncan. In ostensibly offering her daughter to Bunny, Vanessa was in fact attempting to hold onto Angelica. Bunny was right to think that Vanessa could not accept Angelica's growing up. Vanessa had recently lost one child and did not want to lose another, but her over-protectiveness caused Angelica to flee. Angelica did not dare go far: she could only escape into familiar arms, arms moreover which had long encircled her family.

In September 1938 Bunny worked hard completing the Lawrence
Letters
. With Vanessa, Duncan, Quentin and Angelica on holiday in France, he stayed in Vanessa's Fitzroy Street studio, working round the clock correcting proofs. The consequences of the Munich Crisis were evident on the streets outside. As Bunny told Vanessa, ‘London is full of dugouts. Some of the Tubes were converted into shelters for Whitehall […]. The hospitals were emptied. Billets were found for ½ million London school-children in the country. Everyone was given a gas mask.'
²²
These were uncertain times.

Bunny eventually finished the book in late October. ‘I am saturated', he wrote to Vanessa, ‘& drugged with the thousand details of the life of the most abnormal person I have ever had
anything to do with.'
²³
Bunny's work passed unscathed through the hands of both Jonathan Cape and the Lawrence Trustees. On 10 November, just ahead of publication, the first in a series of three articles containing a selection of the letters appeared in
The Times
. Twelve days later, when the
Letters
was published,
The Times
declared that Bunny ‘was the ideal editor for the purpose. He is quite unobtrusive, but no editorial direction could be more concise, more helpful, more illuminating than his.'
²⁴
The
Letters
sold extremely well: Cape could not keep up with the demand.

From Hilton, during Christmas, Bunny wrote to tell Angelica that she left him ‘beaming fatuously because you are
obviously
fond of me'.
²⁵
Angelica replied that her feelings were in turmoil, she could think only of him, that she loved him ‘too much but not enough' and wanted him to ‘believe I love you really – which I don't'.
²⁶
Bunny responded with delight: ‘It is clear that you don't love me much – and that at the same time you love me a good deal.'
²⁷
A few days later Angelica wrote, ‘The words I love you might escape me but if they do you must pretend you haven't heard them for I still won't admit on any grounds that I do'.
²⁸
With Hilton full of friends and Christmas cheer, Bunny carried in logs, cut the cake, carved the meat and talked to his guests, all the while thinking about his secret life with Angelica in London.

‘Your freedom may involve acute misery & anguish to the person you love […]. So what are you to do? Surrender your freedom – which means poisoning yourself slowly. Or lie, or break up a relationship which may be the most important in your lives?'
¹

In January 1939 Bunny became conscious of a subtle change in Vanessa's attitude. She seemed more hostile, tending to side with Duncan, inclined to hover over Angelica like a watchful mother hen. Bunny's love affair was, anyway, hampered by the want of a room where he and Angelica could be alone. Neither Mr Mumford's nor Angelica's bedroom at Fitzroy Street were ideal, both lacking privacy. In consequence, Bunny and Angelica looked forward to snatching a weekend alone together at Charleston. When Vanessa and Duncan announced they had changed their plans and would join them, it seemed like sabotage. ‘How can such a frail fleeting love affair as this between age & youth last more than a moment or two?' Bunny pondered
in his journal. ‘If we were free & let alone, it could take its course […]. But if we are dogged & watched we shall go mad.'
²

How could Bunny imagine they could be free? He had Ray to consider and his children. Whether or not he and Angelica cared to think about them, they were an unassailable fact. For the moment Bunny and Angelica preferred to maintain the illusion that life consisted only of each other. Within their bubble of happiness, Bunny gave Angelica all his attention, telling her she was beautiful, worshipping her. She found his charm and sophistication irresistible. He took her to restaurants, fed her oysters and lobster and gave her an antique ring. She wore the kilt he had given her, piled up her hair the way he liked, told Bunny she was sure of her love for him. Melodramatically, Bunny pronounced this the ‘last love of my life', adding ‘owing to Angelica's youth, it is like first love in many, very many ways'. He felt ‘half the time a boy; less than half an elderly man'.
³
Angelica's youth was an elixir which made him youthful too.

With that Bloomsbury propulsion towards honesty, Bunny informed Ray that he was in love with Angelica and that Angelica seemed to reciprocate his feelings. Ray retorted that there must be something wrong with Angelica, accusing him of cruelty. He felt compassion for Ray but could not keep away from Angelica. It was not simply a matter of what he called ‘passionate love', but a growing depth of feeling. ‘Isn't it queer', he reflected, ‘that at 46, I should experience greater intimacy, feel more absolute devotion than ever before?'
⁴

Bunny asked Vanessa outright whether he was in her good
books, and was not surprised when she confirmed what he suspected: she had turned to Duncan's point of view. Vanessa feared Bunny would make Angelica unhappy because as a married man, he could only spend part of his life with her. She spoke from experience: it was this part-time situation which she had endured throughout her relationship with Duncan; his absences with lovers, the knowledge that he was not wholly hers. Bunny could not admit to Vanessa what he privately knew: that Ray might die, that he might be able to dedicate himself to Angelica, after all.

Bunny had always enjoyed enormous energy, but now the demands of a complicated personal life had him charging in all directions. On a single day in February 1939 he spent the morning at Hilton, afterwards driving to London where he lunched with Angelica in her room and they spent the afternoon in bed. He then drove on to Wimbledon to collect the boys from school and delivered them to Hilton. Everyone remained in their appropriate compartments, Bunny transferring between environments with the ease of a chameleon changing colour.

When Ray discovered a small lump below her collar bone, Bunny knew what it was. It was the first sign of disseminated cancer. On 1 March 1939 he took her to see Geoffrey Keynes, who recommended a five-week course of x-ray treatment. Bunny told Constance that Geoffrey was on the whole reassuring. But he shielded the truth from Constance just as he did from Ray. Ray's x-ray treatment was delivered externally and she did not need to stay in hospital. In theory Ray was unable to stay with Bunny in London because he resided between Mr Mumford's and an unappealing hotel room. In practice she could not stay with him because his nights were reserved for Angelica. Ray thus stayed with her mother. She and Bunny were again in the same
city, and while it might have been expected that he would live there with her, that he might accompany her to her exhausting treatment, that he might comfort her afterwards, he lived only for Angelica. It was a cruel repetition of his behaviour over Norah and Bar.

Bunny stretched his midweeks in London to four or five days, dining with Angelica almost every evening, sometimes lunching with her too. Their nights were spent clandestinely together, decorum dictating a parting in the early hours, when Bunny would leave Angelica's room or deliver her back from Mr Mumford's. As this was not ideal, Bunny took a room at number 15 Charlotte Street, a stone's throw from Angelica's room at Vanessa's Fitzroy Street studio. He bought second-hand furniture from the Caledonian Market and Angelica gave him an antique patchwork quilt for the bed. Now they would be able to make love without fear of the key rattling in their door, without anxiety that Duncan or Vanessa were hovering nearby. During the day they could pretend they lived together in this makeshift home. But reality intervened in the early hours, when Angelica returned to Fitzroy Street, to maintain the charade of being in her bed when Vanessa knocked to wake her in the morning.

Bunny delighted in his ‘secret room', where he and Angelica spent as much time as possible, wrapped in each other's arms, cocooned together, hidden from the world. He wrote Angelica a poem celebrating the coming of summer. It was strikingly similar to the verse he had given Ray in 1921.

You are the forward popprin pear

That blossomed while the trees were bare

Dusting with gold the bee's rough head

That sipped of nectar. The petals fell

A bridal shower in the breeze;

The fruit set safe; and now, howe'er it freeze,

‘Twill grow and ripen well.
⁵

Just as in Bunny's references to bursting buds and lambing ewes in his poem for the pregnant Ray, Bunny's imagery of pollination and ripening fruit unmistakably alluded to fecundity. When Bunny's contraception failed, he found himself unable to refrain from nurturing a hope that Angelica was pregnant, though he recognised the havoc this would cause. Fortunately for everyone, his hopes were unfounded.

It was 1939: Bunny's German translator, Herbert Herlitschka and his wife Marlys had fled Austria and sought refuge in London where Herlitschka hoped to find work. Just when Hilton Hall needed to be at its most calm and restful for Ray, Bunny offered the Herlitschkas his home as ‘an asylum'.
⁶
They arrived on 24 March, Bunny's gesture saving them from the fate of many so-called ‘enemy aliens', who were rounded up and interned. Anti-Semitism remained rife in many quarters in Britain at this time, easily disguised as suspicion of German spies. It was characteristic of Bunny to help a Jewish colleague, even though he barely knew him.

In early April the conclusion of Ray's treatment coincided with a letter from Constance to Bunny, which unusually contained the merest suggestion of censure. ‘I expect', she said, ‘you won't want or need to be in London except just for the day on Wednesdays & now that the boys are home & Ray's treatment over you'll want to be back at Hilton as soon as you can.'
⁷
Was
Constance aware of Bunny's affair with Angelica? As ever with his mother, Bunny could not easily dissimulate. One evening his compulsion to share his happiness was so profound that he showed her a photograph of Angelica. Although Constance was the last person to judge, she was fond of Ray. She had always proceeded with Bunny on the basis of the subtlest of interventions. This time it did not work. A few months later, when Bunny took Angelica to tea with his mother at The Cearne, Angelica felt a little shy, wondering whether she would be welcome. As she later recalled, ‘I needn't have worried', as Constance ‘had long ago decided that Bunny's love affairs had nothing to do with her, and were in any case peripheral to her passionate need for him'.
⁸