Fatal Glamour (20 page)

Three weeks later, after much scheming, Rupert managed to see Noel briefly at Bedales. He had made contact with the writer Edward Thomas, who lived in his Geoffrey Lupton house at Wick Green. His wife Helen was teaching part-time at the school. Noel could come to have tea with him, though she had to be accompanied by another girl and have a pass signed personally by the headmaster.
¹⁴
A fortnight later they were together again at Bucklers Hard, on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire. It had been a shipyard in the eighteenth century, building warships with timber from the New Forest. Bryn and Dudley Ward had scouted the place after the cruise on the Broads. They found hay fields, a splendid landing-stage from which you could dive, and two rows of old brick cottages with a grassy street between them. It was then a remote clearing surrounded by woods, far from the over-built mecca for trippers that it is today.

The Beaulieu camp was carefully organised in proper Bedalian style. There was a large cook tent, borrowed from the school, and a small lugger rented for the two weeks they were there. Most of the days were spent either in or on the river. Rupert and Dudley came from their Fabian caravan tour to join Ka Cox, Godwin Baynes, Jacques, Noel, and Bryn. An outer circle included Harold Hobson, Hugh Popham, Bill Hubback and Eva Spielman (now engaged to each other), Sybil and Ethel Pye, and their younger brother David. One quiet evening – it may have been on his twenty-third birthday, 3 August – Brooke went aside with Noel to gather wood and asked her to marry him. They had known each other for over two years, but she was still only seventeen. Her response was a half measure: to accept Rupert's proposal, while not allowing him to tell anyone of her decision.
¹⁵
But it was obvious that something was up between them, and Jacques's vignette suggests how it may have appeared to the other campers: “she accepted the homage of his devotion with a calm, indifferent, detached air, as if it were something quite natural. No doubt she was flattered by his attentions, for she cannot have failed to see something of [Rupert's] beauty and charm; also, she saw how he was sought out, admired, showered with adulation on every side. But he did not inspire respect in her; she found him too young, too chimerical, too
absurd.”
¹⁶
What Jacques saw was only part of the truth. Six months later, Noel gave Rupert her own understanding of what had happened at Beaulieu:

He bowed his head and said the truth about what he felt; I understood and was sorry and I loved his head so I kissed it and then he and history made me believe that I was a lover as well as he.

I'm not, Rupert. I'm affectionate, reverent, anything you like but not that. And so I get worried and sorry when you look devoted and I don't mind about Ka or German Duchesses at all, and I never feel jealous; only affraid of your loving me too much.
¹⁷

Yet Noel ended her letter by telling Rupert she would always love him. What she meant, presumably, was that she could love, but could not be a lover in the sense of wanting deep commitment and physical closeness.

What about feelings of sexual desire? In all the thousands of words exchanged between Rupert and Noel, this is the great unspoken question. It seems to have been taken for granted by the Olivier sisters, as by most young women of their class, that it was both the safest and the most moral thing to remain a virgin until marriage. Noel almost certainly followed the rule, according to a letter that her friend Mary Newbery sent her in 1914: “Well, I have done it, taken the plunge. But we always considered, once in love, what is marriage, it just follows. But does it? I love him, and he loves me – but I have not settled that I want to marry him . . . You are quite right to have hung back – Just wait till it really happens and you won't hesitate for an instant.”
¹⁸

When it came to sex, the tribal customs of Bedales were paradoxical, reflecting the peculiar beliefs and magnetic personality of The Chief. Badley managed to convince his students that it was weak and silly to fall in love with anyone. Justin Brooke, for example, was handsome, charming, and ready to strip off at a moment's notice. But during Neo-pagan times it all led to nothing: “Until I was twenty-seven, I avoided things with a puritanical and somewhat cowardly dexterity. I was a boy in every way. Then one day a person whom I shall never cease to honour and be grateful to, insisted on kissing me. I was surprised, rather shocked and intensely disappointed about it all. But the lady persevered: made me realise things and then when I began to make love to her sufficiently obliquity left me, so that all was well.”
¹⁹

An engagement that was kept secret, and set no date for the wedding, was hardly a real engagement at all. Neither Rupert nor Noel had a clear understanding of how far they were bound to each other. Nor were they any more free to spend time alone together. They could at least be in touch for another fortnight, when they moved on from Beaulieu to work on an encore performance of Marlowe's
Faustus
. It was staged on 17 August for a group of visiting German students. Women could join the cast this time because it was not an official university production. Justin Brooke, who returned from tramping around California and British Columbia at the beginning of July, was immediately recruited to direct the play. He cast Francis Cornford as Faustus, Jacques as Mephistophilis, and Rupert as the Chorus. There were appropriate supporting roles for various other Neo-pagans. Bryn made a dazzling Helen in a low-cut robe with powdered gold in her hair. She didn't have to speak, just make the audience believe in “the face that launched a thousand ships.” The only thing she had to rehearse, she joked, was how to walk like a lady. Ethel Pye embodied the Deadly Sin of Lechery – perhaps her extreme admiration for Rupert had been noticed? – and Ka was Gluttony. Noel was a humble understudy to Envy.

Again, the play itself seemed secondary to the preparing and celebrating of it. Bryn, Noel, and the Pye sisters stayed at the Old Vicarage, a stone's throw from Rupert's lodgings at The Orchard. Sometimes they came home from rehearsals by water, Rupert skillfully guiding the canoe along the dark and winding river. Their diversions, when they stayed home, were swimming and reading aloud. Whatever Rupert's stiffness onstage, he was a magnetic reader in company. He needed a sympathetic audience to loosen his tongue, and he had a shrewd eye for setting, like reading
Paradise Lost
high up in a chestnut tree with Noel and Sybil. In the evenings it might be
Antony and Cleopatra
or Meredith's
Modern Love
, over at the Old Vicarage:

Our sitting room was small and low, with a lamp slung from the ceiling, and a narrow door opening straight onto the dark garden. On quiet nights, when watery sounds and scents drifted up from the river, this room half suggested the cabin of a ship. Rupert sat with his book at a table just below the lamp, the open door and dark sky behind him; and the lamplight falling so directly on his head would vividly mark the outline and proportions of forehead,
cheek and chin; so that in trying afterwards to realise just what lent them, apart from all expression, so complete and unusual a dignity, and charm, I find it is to this moment my mind turns.
²⁰

Sybil was in love with Rupert, of course, and saw him through hungry and uncritical eyes. Jacques's view of those days of rehearsal was much less sentimental:

He read Noel his poems – poor Rupert – and others too – Donne, Milton, Yeats, Swinburne – in his slow, slightly affected voice; she listened politely but a little bored and often, I think, completely mystified; she would have understood Chinese poems as easily. I still remember seeing him, when he was painting some piece of scenery, touch the tip of her nose caressingly with his brush, as she came over to watch; she seemed to find this joke much more to her taste than serious readings or conversations. It was, it must be said, more suited to her age. In all, she felt for him only a certain affection, tinged with a little disdain. But Rupert did not take it too hard. He was completely given over to his adoration of her; bitterness – along with desire – had not yet entered into his heart.
²¹

To break the tension there was always Byron's Pool, where, Rupert teasingly told Lytton, “It wouldn't stiffen you even at all to hear of what it was the rosiest chatteringest delirium for me to do – bathing naked by moonlight with the ladies. For I, of course, am with Jane [Harrison] in these matters.”
²²
Sybil Pye remembers him coming from the river and hanging upside down from a poplar tree to dry his long hair, a pose that reminded her of a Blake woodcut. Rupert was playing the game of “to the pure all things are pure” with his entourage of four comely young women. They
were
pure, so far as we can tell; but Noel was naturally without shame, whereas Rupert was consciously trying to deny his puritan heritage. And at what point would the game become earnest, when they all had to make their sexual choices, and live with them? Gwen Darwin expressed the longing of many of them that their maturity should never arrive:

I wish one of us could write a “Ballade des beaux jours a Grantchester.” I can't bear to think of all these young beautiful
people getting old and tired and stiff in the joints. I don't believe there is anything compensating in age and experience – We are at our very best and most livingest now – from now on the edge will go off our longings and the fierceness off our feelings and we shall no more swim in the Cam – and we shan't mind much . . . If one of those afternoons could be written down just as it was exactly it would be a poem – But I suppose perhaps a thoroughly
lived
poem can't be written – only a partially lived one. O it is intolerable, this waste of beauty – its all there and nobody sees it but us and we can't express it – We are none of us great enough to express a thing so simple and large as last Thursday afternoon. I don't believe in getting old. I hate it, I hate it –
²³

After
Faustus
, Jacques Raverat returned to France to join in another attempt to build a new form of life. A family friend called Paul Desjardins, professor of literature at Sèvres, had bought an ancient Cistercian abbey at Pontigny, near Auxerre. He restored it, and in August 1910 held the first of a series of intellectual assemblies there. The aim of Pontigny, as Jacques understood it, was to become “the stronghold of European
Culture
against all barbarian invasions: americans, utilitarians, fanatics and all other materialistic incarnations of Evil; and it is to combine a revival of craftsmanship and scholarship working as it were hand in hand.”
²⁴
In the event, Pontigny became a successful talking shop for French and British intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Andre Gide was its most prominent supporter. More inspiring for Jacques was a gathering of his English friends at his family home at Prunoy, on the northern fringe of Burgundy. Frances and Francis Cornford were invited to come in September, along with Bryn, Noel, and Ka. Rupert asked Ka if he should try to escape from Bilton Road and come himself, to harmonize the clash of sensibilities:

It will be splendid for both parties – and for everyone else – if Brynnoel and France/is love each other. But that sort of joining-up is made easier by an extra person who knows and loves both lots and has a calmer, more intriguing and farseeing mind than the
romantic dreamer Jacques. So that I felt, though they of course
would
join, Francis' brooding and Frances' energy and Brynnoel's shyness and partly affected stupidity might
just
possibly make it less complete and happy than it would be under the benign encouragement of one so wise and so competent in
both
the languages and natures as (I was perfectly confident!) myself . . . (No, I'm not pretending, even to myself, that I imagine you hadn't thought of it just as much as I; having seen, as you did, for instance, the frightened gleaming silence of Bryn and Noel at Faustus' time – in company.)
²⁵

In part, Rupert just wanted to bridge a cultural gap. Francis Cornford was a thirty-six-year-old don with a brilliant book on Thucydides, Frances an offshoot of the Cambridge aristocracy even if she had not herself gone to university. Bryn, on the other hand, had never sought an intellectual career; at this time she was trying her hand at making jewelry, with frequent interruptions for country outings or going to London theatres. Noel was aiming at medical school rather than university. One can see how both sisters might have been intimidated by the bantering intellectual style of Cambridge, and also how they might hold on defensively to their own powers of beauty, vigour, and tribal solidarity.

What had been overlooked in all this anxious anticipation was the effect of the place where they were to gather. Probably his English friends joked about Jacques's château, imagining it as an oversized country house; when they arrived, they would find a combination of domestic charm and grandeur. Georges Raverat, its first bourgeois proprietor, had bought the Château de Vienne in 1901 from the impoverished Comte de Goyon. It had been built between 1710 and 1725 by the Lalive family, favourites of Louis XIV, after they had razed the medieval château that stood on the site. Used mainly in the summer for hunting, the château was not built for warmth, but for light. The main block had great windows that gave a clear view right through the building. There were scores of rooms of all shapes and sizes, towers with conical roofs, huge chimneys for the wood-burning stoves in the cellars, stables, a walled kitchen-garden, and some seven hundred acres of woods and tenant farms. Best of all, for these particular guests, was the sweeping park behind the house that led to a large and secluded artificial lake.

Jacques went for long walks with Bryn and found her “more marvellous than ever . . . radiant and wild rose like.” With his romantic sensibility, he dreamed of some charm to preserve the friendships he had enjoyed since his recovery in 1909. When he had seen Justin off to America nine months earlier, they were already planning a ceremony for his return: