Bloomsbury's Outsider (57 page)

It was not that Bunny objected to Magouche's lovers but he did expect to be the centre of her attention when he was with her. He also felt Magouche should have told him about Fielding. Bunny reasoned that such openness would not have changed his feelings for her. Instead it would have shown that she valued him as a friend as well as a lover. But like the Bunny of yore Magouche was adept at compartmentalisation. She had not anticipated that a postal strike and inaccurately relayed message would cause her compartments to conflate.

Bunny felt cuckolded and hated appearing foolish before Gerald, Janetta and Frances. He realised that Janetta and Gerald had colluded with Magouche in an elaborate scheme to keep him and Fielding apart. Frances, who arrived late on the scene,
considered the plot to separate Bunny and Fielding ‘rather too overt'.
¹¹
Fielding's relative youth and heroic stature did not help. Twenty-six years Bunny's junior, Fielding had been a war hero, leading the resistance in Crete, fighting alongside Cretan guerrillas and narrowly escaping execution by the Gestapo in occupied France.

Bunny had been away from Charry for two months, but still felt too weak to manage the journey home. Fanny came to his rescue, arriving on 3 January to drive him to France. Once home, Bunny determined never again to see Magouche. ‘Love is only valuable if one can return it', he wrote to Frances Partridge, ‘And I shall not feel love of any kind for Magouche again'.
¹²
Frances suggested Bunny should not be hard on Magouche, should remember that she loved him and not reject her affection.

Magouche wrote to Bunny stating he was her ‘nearest and dearest friend of the last eight years'.
¹³
She explained that she had not tried to deceive him, that when she had endeavoured to bring the subject of Fielding into their conversations Bunny seemed not to want to hear. In a frenzied act of excavation, Bunny went back through all Magouche's letters, and in an unsent letter to Frances Partridge, catalogued each reference to Fielding. ‘You see', he said, ‘she believes she can keep afloat by keeping her affairs in watertight compartments. She is quite right in this: the trouble arises when she tries to mix them.'
¹⁴
If Bunny didn't recognise the pot calling the kettle black, he also failed to
acknowledge that the whole situation had been caused by his own neglect to check whether she had been expecting him.

Over the ensuing weeks Bunny spent all day and most of the night unable to escape from what he called ‘this obsession'.
¹⁵
It was not until 27 February that Bunny's mind seemed to clear and he was able to write to Frances: ‘
Le brave Lapin est dans son assiette
' (‘Good old Bunny is feeling well').
¹⁶
At dinner, one evening, seated beside a doctor, Bunny asked about the effects of cortisone, explaining that he had taken a high dosage in Spain. The doctor replied that cortisone may have made Bunny vulnerable to infection, hence the flu-like symptoms. He was horrified that Bunny should have been given the drug, which had, he felt certain, contributed to his heightened emotionalism. Perhaps Bunny had suffered from
steroid psychosis
, a condition which can affect people on high doses. Abruptly stopping the treatment may have exacerbated the situation: the dosage should be gradually reduced otherwise irritable or delusional behaviour can ensue. Bunny's behaviour over Magouche was certainly uncharacteristic. He had not reacted hysterically like this when Angelica left him. Bunny kept his word and did not see Magouche again. In 1978 she married Xan Fielding.

The Master Cat: The True and Unexpurgated Story of Puss in Boots
was published in December 1974 while Bunny was in Spain. He was delighted with the illustrations: he had searched for someone who could achieve a similar directness to Ray and settled on his daughter Nerissa. Visually, it is a charming book with Nerissa's fine and appealing illustrations heading every chapter. It is written in the style of a fairy tale, but as Paul Scott warned
Country Life
readers, it certainly wasn't a children's book.
¹⁷
It has a Roald Dahl-like quality and is full of the macabre and grisly. Reviewers found it original, ironic and plausibly feline.

The Master Cat
is a testament to Tiber who ‘made some minor corrections and […] agreed to certify it as the tradition of his race, and believed by him to be true in all particulars'.
¹⁸
Tiber's paw print is the seal of approval. But the cat makes another appearance, for he is present on the back cover of the book, photographed sitting on his master's lap. Bunny admired his independent spirit but found it unsettling when Tiber would disappear, returning dilapidated from another altercation with the Wood Cat. In early 1975, just a few months after his immortalisation in print, Tiber disappeared again, this time for good.

‘You know', Bunny wrote to Frances Partridge in March 1975, ‘when I look back on my life there are only two women I have been completely in love with – Ray and Angelica'.
¹⁹
A week later he received a letter from a stranger – a twenty-five-year-old Australian environmental science student – proposing to visit him. She was the ex-girlfriend of a fan who had been corresponding with Bunny. Her name was Marie Harvey and she told Bunny she had light brown hair, would be wearing jeans and carrying a back-pack. He collected her from the station and she spent a week with him at Charry in April. Bunny told Frances the visit had been ‘
wonderful
', that he and Marie ‘became as thick as thieves & as close as the ivy & the oak & the longer we talked the more we liked each other & the barrier between 25 &
83 vanished'.
²⁰
Afterwards, Marie wrote to say how much she valued his friendship and affection. He had evidently impressed upon her the importance of sharing a bed in getting to know someone. ‘
Le brave Lapin
' was most certainly ‘
dans son assiette
'.

Marie spent two successive Christmases with Bunny. Together they made Christmas puddings and spent their evenings reading Carson McCullers, Conrad, Hudson and others of Bunny's favourite authors. Bunny enjoyed sharing his literary and culinary knowledge with her. Marie was genuinely fond of Bunny and if an intimate friendship between March and November seems unusual, then Bunny was an unusual man. As ever Frances Partridge can be relied upon to provide a window into his robust old age: ‘The athletic figure of his youth', she said, ‘retained considerable dignity even in his eighties […]. He was still ready and eager to dive into a pool of cold water […]. He was a happy, remarkably sane and lovable man.'
²¹

Bunny was still in demand. David Korda and the actress Jeanne Moreau were independently interested in filming
Aspects of Love
and Moreau visited Charry to discuss the matter. Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin sought occasional reviews from him for the
Spectator
and
New Statesman
respectively. Reviewing Virginia Woolf's autobiographical essays
Moments of Being
in the
New Statesman
(‘Lady into Woolf'), Bunny commented that like D.H. Lawrence ‘she will be interpreted
ad nauseam
instead of being enjoyed. So, ignoring interpreters, it is good to read what she says about herself.'
²²
In August Bunny was the subject of a celebratory feature in the
Illustrated London News
, entitled ‘A
Survivor of Bloomsbury'. He was evidently one of the fittest to have survived so long. Frederic Raphael also wanted to write an article on Bunny, and having contacted him, was invited to lunch at Charry. The article, which appeared some years later in
PN Review
,
²³
is curiously inaccurate, stating that Frankie Birrell (rather than Francis Meynell) founded the Nonesuch Press, and that a few months after the interview, Bunny was found lying dead among his grape vines. Bunny did not possess any grape vines at the time. Despite his willingness to help the biographers and researchers who came to his door, Bunny was sometimes irritated by superficial questions along the lines of ‘ “Do you remember any anecdotes about Lytton Strachey” '.
²⁴

‘One gets tired of being an exile', Bunny told Angelica, ‘not from the country but those one loves'.
²⁵
He planned to visit England in July, to receive an honorary D.Litt. from Birmingham University, but in March 1977 Bunny rushed to London on an unscheduled visit. Henrietta had fallen thirty feet onto concrete smashing most of the bones on her right side and breaking her pelvis. She was in Charing Cross Hospital, lucky not to be brain-damaged or paraplegic. Staying with Angelica, Bunny was surprised by the way she seemed both intensely familiar and strangely foreign to him. ‘We had known each other almost too well', he said, ‘& have each changed so much that one sometimes feels as though one of the steps in the staircase has disappeared.'
²⁶

Up She Rises
was published in March 1977. It is the story of Bunny's maternal great-grandparents Clementina Carey and
Peter Black, of his great-grandfather's sea-going adventures and Clementina's heroic trek from Scotland to the south coast of England to see her husband, in port for one day. Bunny's second-cousin, Jane Gregory, undertook much of the family research. Bunny thanked her in an author's note, but dedicated the book to the memory of Constance, ‘Translator of Russian'. As Bunny told Angelica, ‘In the past I despised reviews and if I thought the book good I didn't mind a damn […]. But I have a low – I suppose it is low – desire for recognition while I am alive! I get so tired of people who say they have read
Lady into Fox
.'
²⁷
The reviews were less widespread than for his previous books, but they were good. Peter Tinniswood, in
The Times
, declared it ‘a joy to read'
²⁸
and Susan Kennedy, in the
TLS
, thought it a ‘warm and affectionate portrait of a courageous woman'.
²⁹

In September, when Bunny underwent his annual medical test to renew his driving licence, he was given only a six-month permit. He blamed it on his spectacles, through which, he said, he could see no better than with the naked eye. ‘All I need', he reasoned illogically, ‘is a very powerful pair to read the letters in the test.'
³⁰
As his sight deteriorated, his driving became even more idiosyncratic. When Rosie Peto visited, she insisted on doing the driving because Bunny drove so fast it terrified her. Quentin and Olivier's daughter, Virginia Nicholson, recalls Bunny's habit of accelerating as he approached a junction, his eyes fixed ahead as he enquired whether anything was coming
while he sped across the road.
³¹
On one occasion Henrietta leapt from the car rather than endure the horror of his driving. Bunny would no more concede his sight had deteriorated than stop climbing ladders high into trees to collect his bees.

Neither David Korda's projected
Aspects of Love
nor the Patrick Garland film had got off the ground, but in 1975
A Man in the Zoo
was dramatised for BBC Television. Reviewing the programme in
The Times
, Alan Coren commented that Bunny was ‘a man who fenced literature off into a small perfection'.
³²
It was a nice accolade. In September 1977
The Sailor's Return
was shot on location in Dorset. It was directed by Jack Gold, with Tom Bell and Shope Shodeinde in the principal roles. Having relinquished the film rights to the book Bunny made no financial gain. The film was a critical success, but did not attract a significant audience, mainly because, as George Moore had observed, the ending was too bleak. A young Australian film-maker, Joanne Lane, had bought the rights to
Lady into Fox
, hoping to shoot the film with a cast of real foxes. Despite months attempting to train them, like Sylvia Tebrick, they preferred to be wild.

Bunny was engaged in another literary project, compiling an anthology of essays on the writers and artists he had known. It was, he told Sylvia, a sort of ‘brief lives', with Bunny as the catalyst. Alan Maclean thought the book would be so popular it would make Bunny rich, but as Bunny told Sylvia, ‘I don't very much want to be rich'. ‘I have all I need and enough tomato chutney for two years.'
³³
He had given Hilton Hall to his grandsons Oliver and
Edward and had long ago handed Ridley Stokoe to William. Bunny owned no property in France and the sale of L'Ancienne Auberge had largely benefited Angelica. He paid for an expensive steel hull to encase the leaking Moby Dick, before giving the boat to Fanny.

After years of silence, Bunny heard from Shusheila Lall, now living on a remote farm in Kulu province, India. She invited Bunny to stay, and remarkably, given the rigours of the journey, he said yes. But then he heard nothing from her. ‘As you see', he wrote to Sylvia, ‘I am not in Cashmere, or even Kashmir, and I am rather worried because my dear Shusheila, who sent me the warmest of invitations […] has not replied to two letters suggesting that I accept it'.
³⁴
Shusheila was in no position to follow through her invitation, having been murdered by her servants.
³⁵
It is doubtful Bunny ever knew this dreadful fact.

On 1 May 1978 the ranks, now extremely thin, were further depleted by Sylvia's death. She and Bunny had corresponded to the last. Twelve days later Bunny received sad news from Angelica. Duncan had died on 9 May, following a short illness. He ‘led a full & happy life and is a model to us all', Bunny replied, advising Angelica to follow Duncan's example and ‘live in the present'.
³⁶
Alone at Charry, Bunny did not follow his own advice, taking out Duncan's letters and reading them over and over again.