Fatal Glamour (25 page)

For two years after he joined the Society, Rupert had deliberately kept Apostles and Neo-pagans apart. The Neo-pagans knew little or nothing about the Apostles. They could see why James constantly hung around Rupert, but why did Rupert tolerate him? James had a nervous dislike of women; he was sensitive about his ailments and his physical awkwardness, but could be cuttingly sarcastic to people who threatened him. “He felt for our group, and perhaps especially for Ka, a kind of jealousy,” wrote Jacques. “He had the face of a baby and the expression of an old man; he seemed to take no pleasure or interest in material life or the physical world, and to exist only in the realms of pure intellect.”
²⁰
But jealousy is also a bond. Two quite different groups of friends wanted to claim Rupert. In the long run they were bound to find a way to share him – and to discover, in the process, other things they had in common.

To Rupert's divided and compulsively secretive nature, such a merger was deeply threatening. “He did everything he could to hold off a rapprochement,” recalled Jacques. “He may have been right, but despite all his efforts he couldn't prevent it. Finally James, whom he could not keep away, made the treaty of union between these two milieux, which had become too curious about each other, but which were deeply incompatible. The results were sometimes comic; but the rapprochement led Rupert into an ordeal that was sufficiently cruel and tragic to justify fully the instinctive fear he had of it.”
²¹
A good index of relations between the two groups was the connection between James and Noel. James first became interested in her because she was loved by the person he loved.
This was a pattern with him: he had told Rupert in February that he had “flirt[ed] half heartedly with Michael [Sadler] and Alfred” – Rupert's former beloved and his brother.
²²
In Rupert's room there was a picture of Noel; in James's a picture of Rupert. If James could get close to Noel, the triangle would be completed and he would be less of a yearning hanger-on in Rupert's life. After putting him off for two years, Rupert arranged for James to meet Bryn and Noel while they were staying at the Old Vicarage during the production of
Faustus
, in the summer of 1910. But James for some reason failed to keep the appointment. “Bryn was especially eager,” Rupert told him. “And I'd very carefully brought Noel up to the point at which she could and must meet an Apostle. So there's a year or so lost for
her
education. And even you might have Widened a little.” If he did not actually meet them, James had discovered by going to the play how attractive the Neo-pagan ladies could be: “The beauty of the evening was of course Bryn as Helen of Troy – though chorus [Rupert] was also admired in some quarters . . . I had the pleasure of seeing Noel Olivier in the audience. She certainly looks intelligent as well as beautiful. I expect you'll hear more of her before you die.”
²³

Lytton did not get to know Noel and Bryn until three years later, when he shared a holiday cottage with them in Scotland. “Noel is of course more interesting,” he then observed, “but difficult to make out: very youthful, incredibly firm of flesh, agreeably bouncing and cheerful – and with some sort of prestige. I don't quite know what. I suppose somehow of character: as for the intellects, I couldn't see much trace of
them
.”
²⁴
Firmness of flesh seems to have been James's fancy, for two weeks after seeing Noel he was struck at the Fabian Summer School by another “delightful Bedalian . . . an absolute boy.”
²⁵
This was Alix Sargant-Florence, the only girl to play cricket for the boys' First XI. “Very handsome, built like one of the Medici tombs,” was Mary Newbery's memory of her. Ten years later she would become James's wife.

It took until the summer of 1911 for the fences between the Neo-pagans and Bloomsbury to come down altogether. Rupert kept shuttling between London, Grantchester, Rugby, and Limpsfield, often with two or more Oliviers in tow. Diaghilev's Russian Ballet, in its first astounding London season, was a magnet for him and for them all. After one performance, Lytton claimed that “the audience for it contained everyone I knew in Europe.”
²⁶
At the end of July, Rupert was going to
Scheherazade
for the third time. James had sent him a note asking if he could meet Noel there, to see if she was as amazing as he imagined. Rupert did better: he invited James to dine with Margery and Noel before the performance at one of his favourite haunts, Eustace Miles's vegetarian restaurant. James was as far removed from the Bedales type as one can imagine, and Noel gave short shrift to his finicky intellectualism. Nonetheless, a friendship was launched that would have great consequences for all three of them.

Having given the Neo-pagans a name, Bloomsbury now drew them into its androgynous embrace. Duncan Grant came to Grantchester to paint; Lytton took lodgings in Cambridge for June; and a troop of friends came up for the end-of-term festivities. James Strachey reported to Rupert that Maynard Keynes had buggered Justin in the middle of one garden party, to the embarrassment of the Neo-pagan onlookers. Translated from Apostolic hyperbole, this meant that Keynes had tried to fondle Justin – whom he fancied as a “faun or creature of the wood” – and was sent off empty-handed.
²⁷
In fact, the sexual currents were flowing in the opposite direction. Their revels with the Neo-pagans showed how the “Bloomsbuggers,” as Virginia called them, were being converted to the pleasures of mixed company. Many of them would marry, in due course – or at least, like Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey, set up house with a woman. And Virginia decided that it would be an interesting experiment to stay with Rupert for five days at the Old Vicarage.

Virginia had kept an eye on Rupert's career through her friends in the Apostles and in spring 1909 they had become casual friends, going to Ottoline Morrell's for tea and meeting at James Strachey's rooms in Cambridge. On the latter occasion, however, Virginia decided that Rupert's silence meant disapproval of her presence, and the friendship languished until her interest in Ka revived it.
²⁸
Whenever Virginia went to Cambridge she became sensitive to the complacencies of male society there, and their instinctual closing of ranks against female intrusion. At Grantchester she felt herself to be on safer ground. She went there in mid-August to see how Rupert's version of “Life in the Country” might compare with her own, also to see how much of his charm might rub off on her at close quarters. Not too close, we may be sure – they slept on opposite sides of the Old Vicarage – though both might relish spreading some whiffs of scandal among the curious onlookers. Mostly they ran a joint literary workshop: Rupert with his thesis and forthcoming collection
of poems, Virginia at her endless revisions of her first novel,
The Voyage Out
. The climax of the visit, if legend be true, came when he got her to bathe naked at Byron's Pool and showed off his party trick – jumping in and emerging with an instant erection.
²⁹
Virginia, who prided herself on knowledge of earth closets and “the female inside,” presumably took it in her stride. More nymph than maenad, she was not to be bowled over by Brooke's caperings. Perhaps, like many beauties, they were also relatively immune to each other.

When Virginia left, Rupert came with her for a short visit to Firle. They made their way through London despite a railway strike at Victoria – where Rupert, Virginia reported, “tried to work up some Socialist enthusiasm.” Whether it was in Virginia, the passengers, the workers, or Rupert himself is left unclear. Some skepticism about Neo-pagan politics is surely apparent, and also in Virginia's further comment that “He does not eat meat, except when he stays here, and lives very cheaply.”
³⁰
Rupert did boast at this time that he dressed himself on three pounds a year; this may not have been too far off the mark, since when not naked he was at least barefoot, and most of his eye-catching open-necked shirts were made by Ka. His role as the Noble Savage of the Cam was relished as much by Virginia as it was by him – so long as the good humour of it lasted.

During Virginia's visit to Grantchester, Rupert was already planning a more ambitious venture. This was to be “Bloomsbury under Canvas,” a joint camp with the Neo-pagans. Jacques had first proposed this to Virginia in April; since then Maynard Keynes had met the Oliviers (through Mary Berenson) and other new links had been made. “The company going to Camp,” Rupert told Maynard, “is quite select and possible company for such delicate blooms as Virginia and Duncan; and Bryn is white with desire that they should come.”
³¹

The chosen spot was Clifford Bridge at the edge of Dartmoor, where a long meadow bordered the River Teign as it ran through wooded hills. Earlier in August the Old Bedalian camp had been set up there, and Justin Brooke arranged for the Neo-pagans to take over their gear on 24
August. Lytton was installed beforehand at nearby Manaton, where Rupert had discovered an attractive guesthouse in a rocky valley. At Becky House, Lytton could work on his first book –
Landmarks in French Literature
– and walk on the moors with a series of Apostolic visitors: G.E. Moore, Gerald Shove, and Leonard Woolf (who had just returned from five years in Ceylon).

The company provided for Bloomsbury included the Olivier sisters (except Margery), Justin, Geoffrey Keynes, and an old Bedalian named Paulie Montague. Paulie was a devotee of Elizabethan music who made his own instruments – both very Bedalian hobbies. He joined the Royal Flying Corps and was killed on the Macedonian front in October 1917. Maitland Radford also turned up, and made Bryn nervous by falling in love with her. The surviving photographs show the Neo-pagans all dressed for the part, while Gerald Shove lies on the ground in a suit and a trilby hat. He lasted only one night, though this was enough time, according to Ka, for him to fall in love with Bryn too.

Hovering at the fringes were James Strachey and Maynard, both more at home in the drawing room than with a canoe or sleeping bag. James turned up late and spent a miserable night under a bush, wrapped in a blanket. For a confirmed hypochondriac this was pretty game, but he went back to the comforts of Becky House after being lampooned by Rupert:

In the late evening he was out of place

And utterly irrelevant at dawn.

Lytton wisely stayed away altogether, pointing out to Rupert that the ground was rather an awkward shape for sitting on.

Maynard, however, more than held his own. “Camp life suits me very well,” he told his father. “The hard ground, a morning bathe, the absence of flesh food, and no chairs, don't make one nearly so ill as one would suppose.” With his usual competence he passed the threefold ordeal that made one an honorary Neo-pagan: “sleeping on the ground, waking at dawn, and swimming in a river.”
³²
Virginia, too, did nobly. Ka brought her down two days after the camp had begun. On her first evening she walked eight miles from the station with Ka, found no one there on arrival, and ate rotten blackberry pudding by mistake in the dark. A picture shows her sitting on the ground with Rupert, Noel, and Maitland Radford in front of a five-barred gate. Her hair is tied in the
approved Neo-pagan gypsy scarf and her expression is, reasonably enough, quizzical.

Virginia must surely have been amused by the Neo-pagan cult of nudity. Someone at Clifford Bridge tried to immortalise the occasion by taking nude photographs of the campers. Maynard Keynes had taken such pictures of Duncan Grant when they were on holiday in Greece the year before, and he had told Duncan that “when I'm at Burford everyone who stays with me will be forced to have their photographs taken naked.”
³³
Whether Keynes was the one with a camera at Clifford Bridge is not known; the photographs are not now to be found.

The camp lasted for eighteen days, and, by the end, nerves were strung tight. Bryn, who was in charge of cooking and finances, took a dislike to Justin. “Poor old Bryn, what are we to do with her?” Rupert asked Ka; but he didn't know what to do with himself either. Finally, he lost his temper and went off by himself, and lay out all night, crying, on a hill by Drewsteignton. Ka had left by then, so it must have been Noel who drove him to fury and despair, as she so often did. He went from Clifford Bridge to stay five days with James and Lytton at Becky to get over it. They roamed the moors laughing and arguing – Lytton, with his knickerbockers and tam-o'-shanter looking like “a mechanical Scotch Christ on a walking-tour.”
³⁴

When the camp was just beginning, Rupert was already musing on how to save it from “devouring time.” On the day Virginia and Ka arrived, the others had walked over to Crediton to see Paulie Montague's parents. During the camp Rupert wrote “Dining-Room Tea” about that visit. The poem is a tribute both to Noel and to the whole group that formed the setting for Rupert's love. One might keep an individual friend for life, but these gatherings of ten or twelve were like a moment in the play of a fountain: a combination of people, place, and emotion that was lit up for a moment, then gone forever:

they and we

Flung all the dancing moments by

With jest and glitter. Lip and eye

Flashed on the glory, shone and cried,

Improvident, unmemoried;

And fitfully and like a flame

The light of laughter went and came.

Proud in their careless transience moved

The changing faces that I loved.

Then the poet seizes on a single face in the crowd – surely Noel's – and the flow is arrested:

Till suddenly, and otherwhence,

I looked upon your innocence.

For lifted clear and still and strange