Fatal Glamour (19 page)

Taking over his father's job closed the circle of Rupert's upbringing. He had been born in a house near Rugby School, and now he had become a master there. The worst thing about it, he found, was the company of the other masters. He wrote an exasperated poem to Dudley about his eagerness to escape, but one passage showed how much affection he still had for schooldays – or rather, for schoolboys:

They do not know the Light.

They stink. They are no good. And yet . . . in spite

Of the thousand devils that freeze their narrowing views

(Christ, and gentility, and self-abuse)

They are young, direct, and animal. In their eyes

Spite of the dirt, stodge, wrappings, flits and flies

A certain dim nobility. . . . So I love . . .

each line

Of the fine limbs and faces; love, in fine,

(O unisexualist!) with half a heart,

Some fifty boys, together, and apart,

Half-serious and half-sentimentally.

By unisexualist, Rupert seems to have meant someone who combined male and female qualities. Or did he just mean one who loved his own sex? In either case, Rupert's attraction to young males was inseparable from the world of public school, where he had triumphed on the rugby field and first fallen in love.

As he wound up as house master, Rupert also helped his mother to retire from School Field. She chose to live a quarter of a mile away in a large semi-detached house at 24 Bilton Road, separated from the traffic only by an exiguous front yard. “It's the first time I have ever lived at a number,” Rupert reported. “I've always been at a house with a name, before. The difference is extraordinary.”
⁴
The difference was that Mrs Brooke had slipped down a rung or two within the middle class, and the kind of hospitality she could offer Rupert's friends was correspondingly reduced. The contrast between his home and such places as the Oliviers' house in the woods at Limpsfield, still more the Raverat château at Prunoy,
was now much wider. Rupert had become one of the least well-off in his circle of friends.

Lack of grandeur might have been made up by charm, but 24 Bilton Road had only pretentiousness and gloom. In a misguided attempt to create privacy, its architect had put the entrances of each semi-detached around the side, in a dark little porch with columns; the stuccoed facade had a sinister blankness, as if the inhabitants had been bricked up inside. With Alfred now at Cambridge, Mrs Brooke would live mostly alone. When her sons visited, they would enter a sealed environment. Rarely, now, would Rupert's disturbing young friends, with their breezy manners and unsound beliefs, cross the threshold. The memories of schoolboy prowess that Rupert enjoyed when he visited School Field were gone. Bilton Road was a constant reminder that his family was in decline.

Parker Brooke's death consolidated the Ranee's emotional hold on Rupert. The death itself did not move him deeply, or not visibly so at least. It was part of the Neo-pagan creed to claim that they and their parents belonged to utterly different worlds. For Rupert, however, no real separation was possible. When he visited his mother, he slipped into his father's vacant role. He bowed to her moral authority, even as he chafed under the yoke and looked forward eagerly to the time of release. But always, before long, he would be drawn back. In any case, he could not afford an open break. Parker Brooke had built up a capital of at least £15,000, all of which he left to his wife. This would yield an income of about £600 per year.
⁵
Instead of passing on a share to her sons, thus making them financially independent, she promised Rupert an allowance of £150 per year, paid quarterly. She did pay it for the rest of his life, though it was never increased. She also provided for his younger brother Alfred, now a freshman at Cambridge. Rupert had just enough to live on, and could get some further earnings from freelance writing and winning academic prizes (in 1913 he would gain a second income as a fellow of King's). He might make £40 or £50 per year from literary earnings, but his whole way of life remained precarious when his mother could cut him off at any time. He could have achieved independence by taking a job, to be sure, except that the only thing he was qualified for was schoolmastering, and he had just learned how intolerable that was. So a silver cord kept him tied to his mother. He could never make himself a permanent home anywhere else during the five years of life that remained –
as if to do so would be disloyal to the woman who followed his affairs, with anxious love and reproof, from Bilton Road.

From late 1909 onwards, Rupert wrote a series of poems complaining about Noel's failure to live up to their trysts earlier in the year, in the New Forest and at Penshurst. In “The Hill,” the most romantically appealing of these poems, the beloved turns away on a momentary impulse:

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,

Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

“We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.

Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said;

“We shall go down with unreluctant tread

Rose-crowned into the darkness!” . . . Proud we were,

And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.

– And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

“Desertion” says little more about her reason for slipping apart:

Was it something heard,

Or a sudden cry, that meekly and without a word

You broke the faith, and strangely, weakly, slipped apart?

You gave in – you, the proud of heart, unbowed of heart!

Was this, friend, the end of all that we could do?

Rupert's long separation from Noel had ended when he wangled an invitation to the annual Shakespeare play at Bedales. He went down on 18 December 1909 with Jacques. We do not know what passed between Noel and Rupert, but he was bitterly disappointed by the meeting. Margery managed to keep Noel from joining Rupert at Lenzerheide after Christmas, and may not have been above trying to turn her against Rupert by passing on gossip about him. Perhaps Margery saw Rupert flirting with Bryn at the riotous Slade Arts Ball; perhaps Margery, there or in Switzerland, decided that Rupert was flirting with herself. Whatever the provocation, or the interference by Margery, Noel clearly felt that
Rupert was too ardent and needed to be cooled off. Rupert had been trying to write shorter and less florid letters, perhaps in the hope that this might make Noel more willing to open up to him. He always found it difficult to write a sincere letter, he told her, because of his “folly and evasion and cowardice.” Noel trumped him by saying that, when it came to letters, “evasion and cowardice succeed very well.”
⁶
At this point, whether in letters or in love, evasion alone was Noel's weapon of choice.

Bunny Garnett had been infatuated with Noel since the age of about four, and regularly tried to breach her defences. In a letter of April 1910 she tried to explain herself. Bunny's father, meeting her on the train from London to Oxted, had told her that all the Oliviers were afraid of emotional commitment, of “giving themselves away” to another person. That was not quite it, Noel said; in fact, she
had
fallen in love, and more than once (she surely had Rupert in mind in saying this). But for her, youth meant that one had such passions while knowing, at the same time, that they wouldn't last. Therefore, one wasn't touched to the quick or deeply threatened by them; and the whole charm of being young, for her, was precisely in recognising that one's feelings weren't permanent.
⁷

It is not clear whether Noel offered this as an explanation or an excuse. She was secretive to a high degree – not from any fondness for intrigue, like Rupert, but because she was just “close” by nature. Mary Newbery and Noel liked each other well enough when they were at Bedales to share a bath regularly, but Noel never said anything about her love affairs. Men who were attracted to Noel found her maddeningly impervious and invulnerable. They could scarcely appreciate how she limited her spontaneity in order to protect her youthful freedom of action. Indeed, Noel found that after years of holding back her emotions they did not appear on cue when she decided that she was ready to commit herself at last. She did not truly fall in love until she was nearly forty, and then she did so with all the risk and abjection that she had so carefully steered away from in her teens.

During the winter of 1909–10 Rupert saw Noel only once, and he felt that she was deliberately hiding from him. Trapped in his schoolmastering at Rugby, he longed to see her as soon as he was released in April. What he got instead was an offhand note: “you don't climb at Easter, so good-bye for some time.”
⁸
He tried to intercept her train at Birmingham when she passed through on her way to Wales, but missed her and was left standing like a fool on the platform. All he could do was fall back on
the Society and go to Lulworth Cove for a week with James and Lytton Strachey. Lytton was nursing a frustrated desire for George Mallory, the most recent athletic beauty to catch his eye. With Rupert pining for Noel they got on better than before, and would remain good friends until the upheavals of 1912.

The Oliviers, and several other Neo-pagans, were keen Morris dancers and rock climbers. Although he had been capped for both rugby and cricket at school, Rupert would neither dance nor climb. He feared, probably, the different kinds of exposure that went with these pastimes. At Bethesda, near Snowdon, Noel joined Bryn, Jacques, Godwin Baynes, Rosalind Thornycroft, Bill Hubback, Eva Spielman, Mary Newbery, and H.A. (Hugh) Popham – a Cambridge diving champion who struck Ka Cox as “an odd silent lonely sort of party.”
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This was Jacques's first opportunity to get to know Noel well, and his description of her suggests what Rupert was up against:

She was fairly short, but very strong and well set on her feet. Much later a rejected lover could say that she looked just like a chest of drawers and, to be malicious, the comparison had just enough truth in it to be funny. She had an admirable head, admirably set on her handsome round neck, brown hair, flat complexion, the face very regular and unexpressive, even a bit hard. But it was lit up as if by the beam of a lighthouse when she turned her large grey eyes to you. One could hardly bear their gaze without feeling a kind of instant dizziness, like an electric shock. They seemed full of all the innocence in the world, and of all the experience also; they seemed to promise infinite happiness and wonderful love for whoever could win her . . . But one would be quite wrong. Like her sisters, she had been raised according to the most modern and advanced principles, in almost complete liberty. They had picked up a few practical ideas about life, and above all an emancipated and determined appearance. But their parents, overly intellectual, had not given them the breathable milieu that they needed in order to develop. One sensed that they all lacked something . . . You didn't have to know [her] for very long to see that her great beauty, and her excessively perfect health, were matched by only a good average, practical intelligence, little sensitivity, no tenderness, no imagination.
¹⁰

That spring, Rupert tried hard to beat down his love for Noel, since she was so firmly and painfully resistant to his ardour. “There's a stage where one believes she's a ‘great creative genius,'” he told James Strachey two years later. “It's rather a nice one. It lasted 22 months with me. Conversation with her breaks it down in the end.”
¹¹
Conversation, at least, was more possible once the summer got under way. In late January 1910 Margery and Daphne had gone to see their parents in Jamaica, not returning until early October. With only Bryn to watch over her, Noel became more accessible physically, if not emotionally. At the end of April, Rupert went down to Limpsfield with Jacques for four days. They walked cross-country to Toy's Hill with Noel, Bryn, and Ethel Pye, savouring the first bluebells in the spring woods and the smell of the wet earth. In the pub where they had tea, there was a canary which, it was decided, looked exactly like Jacques.

Bryn came up to Cambridge soon after and the high summer of Neo-paganism came into full swing. This was the golden age of mass breakfasts under the apple blossoms in the orchard at Grantchester: the women still primly attired in shirt-waist blouses and skirts, the men in ties – except for Rupert in his open-necked blue shirt (matching his eyes), orchestrating the day's amusements. A punt was moored at the foot of his garden, for long excursions up and down the river. Inviting Bunny to visit, Brooke promised him “apple-blossom now, later . . . roses bathing and all manner of rustic delight, cheeses, and fruit.”
¹²

This friendly invitation had some guile mixed in. Bunny was nice enough, but he was barely out of school. His major attraction was knowing the Oliviers so well. Encouraged by Rupert, he set up a cruise on the Norfolk Broads for five days at the end of June. Their companions would be Godwin Baynes, now the medical officer of health for Hampstead; Bryn; and an old family friend called Dr Rogers to serve as chaperone. Bunny shared a cabin on the wherry
Reindeer
with Rupert, and found him “simple, sincere and intimate, with a certain lazy warmth.”
¹³
Rupert had plenty of warmth, to be sure, but not much simplicity. In his dissatisfaction with Noel, Rupert was again finding Bryn very appealing. The long days on the water showed off her gaiety, and her supple figure, to advantage. One sister for lust and liking, one for love; he pondered this riddle as he sat on the deck writing a long essay for the Harness Prize
(which he won) on the English puritans. Inspired by his Neo-pagan company, Rupert jeered merrily at the absurdities of the puritan mind. He had not yet realised how much puritanism there was in himself, and how violently it was due to erupt.