Fatal Glamour (34 page)

If Bloomsbury was so corrupt, why was Rupert still hanging around them for news and company? Jacques, for one, thought it was high time that both Rupert and Ka made a clean break. They should live in the country, he told them, away from homosexuals and real and pseudo-Jews (by which he meant the Stracheys). He hated Jews, Jacques went on, because they crucified Christ daily. Given that the only Jew in the Bloomsbury group was Leonard Woolf, whom Jacques had never met, his denunciations had only the most slender connection with reality, which did not prevent Rupert from taking them seriously. It was a streak of rottenness within Neo-paganism, even if Jacques, Gwen, and Rupert were the only ones in the group who professed the anti-Semitic creed.

In the spring of 1912, Maynard Keynes had taken a fancy to ambling around the Cambridge countryside on the back of a horse. He liked it so well that he decided to organise a riding party in the summer. As a bachelor fellow of King's he was now prosperous enough to take over a small country hotel for several weeks, and invite his friends to stay for a week or two at a time. It would be more luxurious than the previous year's camp at Clifford Bridge, and this time Keynes would be host rather than guest. With Rupert in eclipse, Keynes could take over as the patron and master of ceremonies for young Cambridge. He was carrying on a mild flirtation with Bryn, inviting her up to Cambridge to go riding with him. Everleigh would again mix Neo-pagans and Apostles, but this time on Keynes's terms rather than Rupert's.

On 18 July Bryn and Noel met Justin at Waterloo (Daphne was to follow in a few days) and went down to Pewsey in Wiltshire. They were met at the station by Maynard, resplendent in a new riding outfit and boutonniere, and driven five miles across Salisbury Plain to the Crown Hotel at Everleigh. It was a big white foursquare house with a walled garden,
stables, and croquet lawn, looking directly out to the Plain. Bryn and Noel were given a whole suite of panelled rooms with several large four-poster beds. During the day there were four horses to ride; in the evenings they all read
Emma
aloud.

When the Oliviers and Justin arrived, the other guests were two Apostles – Gerald Shove and Gordon Luce – and Frankie Birrell. It was a cosy little male coterie, with the lively and campy Birrell setting the pace. He was being looked over as a potential Apostle, but did not manage to get elected. After Rupert turned up on Wednesday the 24th, Maynard complained to Duncan Grant that he enjoyed his old friends better than his new ones: “I don't much care for the atmosphere these women breed and haven't liked this party nearly so much as my last week's. Noel is very nice and Daphne very innocent. But Bryn is too stupid – and I begin to take an active dislike to her. Out of the window I see Rupert making love to her – throwing a tiny [illegible] in her face, taking her hand, sitting at her feet, gazing at her eyes. Oh these womanisers. How on earth and what for can he do it.”
²²

Rupert was not just flirting with Bryn; he was quarrelling with her too. Earlier in the month, he had invited her to go boating for a week in August. He still had tender memories of their cruise on the Broads three years before, with Dr Rogers as chaperone. Why not do it again on the Ouse, Rupert proposed – with Goldie Dickinson, who was keen to go, or perhaps just the two of them? The day she left for Everleigh, Bryn agreed to go, for the week of 4 August. But she preferred Beaulieu River, where they had camped in 1910, to Norfolk. Rupert should bring Dickinson, and Bryn would meet them there, with a companion who knew how to sail a boat. Since Rupert had spent several days sailing on the lake at Feldberg with Ka, he must have been miffed by Bryn's news that she was bringing an expert with her. At Everleigh he learned that the other sailor would be Hugh Popham. Having quietly scuttled Dickinson's participation, Rupert was now less than delighted to find that his romantic cruise with Bryn was going to be “chaperoned” by Hugh. With some other part of his mind, he was upset by Bryn's plan to leave Everleigh on Monday and walk across country to Poole Harbour – a jaunt of some sixty miles, which she expected to cover in five days. He thought it quite unseemly for a young woman to wander around unaccompanied like that.

Bryn spent the whole day arguing with Rupert about these arrangements. Exhausted, she finally told him that she and Hugh were going to
be married: “I found it almost necessary to give him some explanation of
you
and bless me if I didn't make a comprehensive statement about my feelings and intentions such as would have amazed you to hear! So there's another peg to this queer web one has drawn over oneself. Don't mind my putting it like that – it seems a little true sometimes – tho' its of course only one aspect and an unimportant one . . . I'm sorry about Rupert, but he knows his own bloody character best, I suppose.”
²³
Bryn had turned down Hugh's proposal in October 1910, and then pointedly avoided him for a year or more. But somewhere around her twenty-fifth birthday – 20 May 1912 – she took stock of her life and decided that marriage was the sensible thing for her to do. Despite her beauty, or even because of it, she had never formed any deep romantic attachment. She could easily have married into society or into the intellectual aristocracy, but she was not comfortable in either realm. Within the Neo-pagan circle, only Rupert and Justin Brooke were possible matches for her. Though she was fond of both of them, in 1912 neither of them was fit to make a husband. Rupert was tapering off from a nervous breakdown, his £150 per year or so from his mother was not enough to marry on, he had no regular employment and no fixed home. Justin was potentially rich, but he was at least as nervous as Rupert, and even more uncertain about his career.

Hugh, on the other hand, had just established himself in London with a flat and a job in the Prints Department of the British Museum. He had not shone intellectually at King's, but he was nice-looking, outdoorsy, and sensitive. Most people liked him, though he was already known for being painfully tongue-tied. When he first fell in love with Bryn he was still an undergraduate, two years younger than her and far less mature. By the time he renewed his suit he was more sure of himself, while Bryn had become more vulnerable and uncertain. She had more or less abandoned her training as a jeweller. Perhaps she was simply tired of all the excitable young men of the past five years, and thought that Hugh's quiet devotion would ballast her life. Whatever her reasons, she told him, early in July, that she was in love with him. Hugh needed no further invitation:

I think it is almost impossibly much to ask you to marry me. It means so much more to you, to lose and somehow you seem a being God never intended to marry. But if you love me as you do, you must. There is no intermediate stage, which is satisfactory or
convenient, do you think? So do. I don't know at all what you feel about having children and sexual matters generally: one must come to some conclusion on the subject. Do tell me. I don't think you are a person of very strong passions: but it is rather futile to try and separate one's body from one's heart in this way. I don't think I am either . . . Does it sicken you of marriage looking at it coldbloodedly in this way?
²⁴

This had none of the throbbing sentiment in Rupert's letters to Bryn. On the other hand, it was a straight question that required, and got, a straight answer. Hugh did not trail any clouds of promised glory. A modest flat, a suitable job, and a conventional marriage set the bounds of his ambition. Still, Bryn was dissatisfied with her single life, she was halfway through her twenties, and she wanted children. Hugh must have impressed her as more serious and potentially a better father than any of her other suitors. And so Helen was won.

Rupert was deeply upset by Bryn's news. He flatly refused to come boating at all; in fact, he feared he was again going mad. When she left on Sunday he refused to say goodbye, and the boating trip fell through because she and Hugh couldn't find anyone to chaperone
them
. Instead, they went climbing in North Wales with Oscar Eckhardt. Noel and Daphne left for the mountains too, for three weeks in the Bernese Oberland with their cousin Ursula Cox. Given the way Rupert had been acting, Noel probably thought that the best way to deal with him was from the other side of the Channel. The night after the Oliviers left Everleigh, Rupert sat disconsolately in his room. What could he do but summon up all his eloquence for a final appeal to Noel:

Oh, Noel, Noel, Noel, my dearest; think! Remember all that has been! It's more than four years since that evening in Ben Keeling's rooms, and the days on the river – when we were so swiftly in love. Remember those days on the river; and the little camp at Penshurst, next year, – moments then; and Klosters; and the Beaulieu camp; and one evening by that great elm clump at Grantchester; and bathing in early morning by Oxford; and the heights above Clifford Bridge camp; and a thousand times when we've gone hand in hand – as no other two people could; – and twice this year I felt your tears, Noel's tears, on my hand. There
are such things, such things that bind us . . . I cannot live without you. I cannot indeed. You can make anything of me – For you I'll do anything, or make myself anything – anything in the world.
²⁵

Sorrow in love begets insomnia, so Rupert reached for another sheet of paper. Time for a letter to Bryn. Could they go away together one more time, before everything “closed down” for her?
²⁶
They would have to act quickly, since the marriage date had been set only two months ahead. Having placed his bets on both red and black, Rupert filled up the days by playing poker with Maynard and Geoffrey Keynes. Two days later, it was Elisabeth van Rysselberghe's turn. She was going to be in England again in a couple of months, and Rupert wanted to see her. “If I can't give you the love you want,” he wrote, “I can give you what love and sympathy and pity and everything else I have. And I have a lot . . . I've had a lot of pain, infinite pain – I know what it's all like . . . I'm not worth your loving, in any way.”
²⁷

Meanwhile, Ka was staying with two aunts at the Swan Hotel, Bibury, in the Cotswolds. Keynes had invited her to Everleigh too, though not until after Rupert had left. She had not seen Rupert for two unhappy months and she simply couldn't stop crying, she wrote pathetically to Frances. All Ka asked was for Rupert to make up his mind about their relationship, and then meet to tell her. What
she
wanted had already been settled, a fortnight after she returned to England in June:

I love Rupert – I'm quite clear – and I'm waiting quietly now and getting as strong as I possibly can. To see if he has strength and love enough to heal himself and love me again. I have broken and hurt and maimed him – I see. O my dear – apart from me – it was wicked, it was awful to hurt so lovely a thing and so lovely a person. If I've destroyed love and strength in him (not for me particularly – but for everyone) there is no atonement and no help – I feel. I'm being very quiet – and I don't want to bother him now at all. He knows what it is and what there is to decide.
²⁸

The day after Bryn left Everleigh, Rupert wrote to tell Ka that he was ready to see her. Justin came by in his Opel and drove Rupert to meet Ka in the woods near Bibury. They talked for three hours while Justin waited in the car. When they returned, Ka was taken back to her aunts, while
Rupert and Justin drove on to spend the night at a hotel in Witney. This time, it really was the end of the affair. “I can't love her, you see,” Rupert told Frances. “So now it's all at an end. And she's passed out of my power to help or comfort. I'm so sad for her, and a little terrified, and so damnably powerless.” He went on to Rugby, and wrote Ka a letter that renounced his love, but not his grievance against her:

It's no good. I
can't
marry you. You must see. If I married you, I should kill myself in three months. I may, I daresay I shall, anyway. But if I marry you, I'm certain to. . . . You keep comparing your coming to Germany then [i.e., in February], with my marrying you now; and my emotions then, with yours now. There is no comparison. You had two ways before you, a dirty one and a clean one; coming to Germany was not even deciding; it was only giving the clean one a chance. You refused to marry me. You refused to forswear filth.

I felt ashamed because you were better and honester than I (ashamed – and yet superior, because you are a woman.). Yet it's not my lack of strength that makes me want not to marry you. It is my strength . . . When I found that I wasn't too dead for a sort of love, – but that it wasn't for you, that you
had
killed my love for you too dead, – it seemed to me useless to prolong waiting any longer.
²⁹

To break with Ka cleanly would not have been in character for Rupert. He remained obsessed with the sexual wound that she had inflicted on him, and went on trying to punish her for it. But the hope of marriage was gone, the child was gone and, except for one accidental collision, he would not see her again for two years.

“I was once in love with
3
people,” Rupert said later, about the events of 1912, “and that wasn't all jam.”
¹
It wasn't all jam for others, either. Rupert's vacillations between Ka, Noel, and Bryn broke the easy companionship that the Neo-pagans had once shared. No one had the heart to make a summer camp in 1912, nor would they ever assemble again with Rupert at their head. After five years, most of them wanted to reduce their stakes in the group. Several now believed in marriage more than in friendship; all had seen too much grief within their circle to have faith in their old dream of lives without age or care. They disagreed about politics, religion, the suffrage, and many other things. Some had simply realised that they didn't like each other much. “Youth is a very deceitful thing,” Jacques had told Frances a year before. “It makes one think so many people so much nicer than really they are, just because of that insolent flush of hot young blood. Middle age finds them all out in all their nakedness of soul – and body.”
²