Fatal Glamour (27 page)

In the middle of these intrigues, Rupert's
Poems
were published by Sidgwick & Jackson, on 4 December. The volume was divided into two sections: the first decadent and implicitly gay, the second, after he met Noel, soulful and Neo-pagan. But Noel refused the dedication – partly, perhaps, because she suspected how deeply Rupert was now involved with Ka. Few of the poems had been written during 1911, but as soon as his thesis was done Rupert wanted to get back to his vocation – to be, he believed, “a great poet and dramatist.” The significant fruits of the past year were two longer poems: “Dining-Room Tea” and “The Fish” (an impressive fantasy on what it might be like to be alive, but not human). Only five hundred copies were issued, but it was enough to gain recognition for Rupert as a young poet to be reckoned with.

He had decided to go back to Munich in the New Year: ostensibly to perfect his German, but mainly because Ka had promised to meet him there, far from Bloomsbury gossip. Before going, though, he wanted a New Year's holiday like the one he had enjoyed the year before, with Ka, Jacques, and Justin. He had planned that holiday himself, on the principle of “four or six or so a good number. Too many, or too vaguely composed, won't do.”
⁴⁶
This year he was working up to sixteen hours a day on his thesis, so Ka would make the arrangements. Her ideas, however, were different from his. She decided to repeat, at Lulworth, last August's camp. Neo-pagans (including the Oliviers) would mingle with Bloomsbury, some new faces would be blended in, and no longer could the party be counted on one hand. One of the new faces was the painter Henry
Lamb, whom Ka had met at a party and found “fascinating.” Another could be called the last of the Neo-pagans, Ferenc Békássy.

“Feri” was still only eighteen, three months younger than Noel and a year younger than David Garnett. His parents belonged to the Hungarian landed aristocracy and lived in a romantic castle at Zsennye, near the Austrian border. They sent all six of their children to Bedales, probably because brothers and sisters could be together there and because of the school's emphasis on country pursuits. Mary Newbery remembered him at Bedales as gentle, sweet and shy – but not good-looking because of a weak chin. Though he had fallen in love with Noel at school, when he arrived at King's in October 1911 he soon got into the swim of gay Cambridge. Rich, intellectually adventurous and a poet, he at once caught Maynard's eye. Even with such a patron, he must have had unusual charm to be elected an Apostle only three months after his arrival. He was the first foreigner and the first Bedalian to join the Society. His brilliant debut indicates how popular Neo-paganism was with Bloomsbury at this point. Békássy soon became a frequent guest at 38 Brunswick Square, and Keynes would visit him in Hungary in the summer of 1912.

However, Békássy was an outsider's idea of a Neo-pagan rather than an established member of the group. Rupert did not like him very much, and not just because he was a rival for Noel's affection. When Békássy was made an Apostle in January, Rupert, who was in France, felt that he had been deliberately left in the dark. “The machinery for not having births till I was out of the way was a bit clumsy,” he complained to James. “The gloom of Cannes is a trifle lightened for me by the reflection that
gott sei dank
I've done with all that.” Unfortunately, Rupert's letter crossed one from James, containing a campy account of Békássy‘s successful debut at his first Saturday night meeting. Feri had shown great intelligence, James reported, and had also filled Keynes and Gerald Shove with such lust that they wanted to take him right on the ritual hearthrug.
⁴⁷
Rupert quickly snubbed his enthusiasm for Feri, but by then it was a bit late for James to retract, and say that the Society had taken a wrong turn in electing him.

Rupert's real problem with Békássy, one would guess, was that the younger man's game was too close to his own. Békássy was a precocious poet of real talent, in both English and Hungarian. His fate was to become the Rupert Brooke of Hungary, killed on the Eastern Front two months after Rupert's death. He was also enthusiastically bisexual though, in the
Bedales way, he probably stopped short of actually going to bed with anyone. He loved Noel, but he also aroused lust in the Society, and himself loved a kind of doppelganger for Rupert named Frank Bliss. Bliss entered King's at the same time as Békássy; he came from Rugby and he read classics. He was elected to the Society in November 1912, jointly with Wittgenstein, and was killed in France in 1916. But even James Strachey came to feel that Békássy went over the score when it came to multiple relations: “‘Feri' was here on Monday and talked to me for 5 hours. He came out like so many people – fairly confessed that he was ‘in love' with (only guess) cette eternelle Noel. ‘It runs on parallel lines' so he informed me ‘with my feelings towards Bliss.' O God – if there is such a thing as blasphemy. I felt like Rupert almost inclined for the dagger.”
⁴⁸
Békássy may have been included in the Lulworth party on Noel's recommendation. Then Rupert, in the wake of his heart-to-heart with Noel on the Embankment, announced to Maynard that there would be “no Oliviers.”

With the party set, Rupert sent off his thesis, slept for twenty-four hours in an armchair, and spent ten days with his mother. He started a poem on the state he had drifted into in the course of the past year:

All night I went between a dream and a dream

As one walking between two fires . . .

The soul, like a thin smoke, is spread

Crying upon the air.
⁴⁹

One thing he had not taken into account was that Ka might also be torn between rival loves, and might inflict on him what he had inflicted on her and Noel. At Lulworth, he was about to discover that the knife can cut two ways.

Rupert's break with Noel on 15 December was not just a predictable failure of first love. For three and a half years he had set his emotional compass by Noel's standard of female purity and self-control. As Ka stepped in to take her place, the polarity of Rupert's desire was reversed. Now he had to exert restraint on the frightening aggressiveness of female desire. His sonnet “The Descent” blames Ka for having pulled him down into the underworld of sex:

Because you called, I left the mountain height, . . .

And from my radiant uplands chose the blind

Nooks of your lost perpetual twilight.

For there your white and hungry hands were gleaming,

Your troublous mouth. And there we found desire . . .

There we found love in little hidden places,

Lost human love between the mist and mire.
¹

At the end of 1911, those hungry hands had thrown Rupert into panic and indecision. His first instinct with sex was to keep it a secret, as he could do with Elisabeth van Rysselberghe and Denham Russell-Smith; but Ka was connected to everyone he knew, and their intimacy was bound to be known. When she embraced Rupert in his room on Charlotte Street, the touch of that warm and desiring body threatened to shatter his
whole complex system of evasions and separations. To possess her would break the taboo that had allowed the Neo-pagans to see each other's nakedness, but never to seize and enjoy it. And with Ka there was a deeper threat: that she might turn into the sexual mother, a woman whose nurturing embrace concealed a predatory lust. As he came to know his old friend in this newly sensual way, Rupert both desired and feared consummation. When Frances Cornford said that Ka had “a frightening amount of sex,” she was thinking of the danger to Ka herself, but Rupert was probably more frightened than anyone by the prospect of a real affair with her.
²
Then Ka, through impatience or mere whim, suddenly turned to another man who seemed more capable of meeting her own eagerness to lose her virginity.

Rupert, with his rigid sense of sexual honour, was still a Victorian at heart. Henry Lamb was a modern, ruthless, and mischievous seducer. Four years older than Rupert, he was the son of a professor of mathematics and a younger brother to the Trinity don Walter Lamb. His sister Dorothy taught at Bedales. He had nearly qualified as a doctor when, in 1905, he decided to throw up his career and turn artist. In 1907 he married Nina (“Euphemia”) Forrest, also an art student. They went to Paris to live near Augustus and Dorelia John, which soon did for their marriage. Dorelia took a fancy to Henry, and Augustus to Euphemia. When the dust settled, Henry was left with a life-long attachment to Dorelia, while Euphemia struck out on a lively career as an erotic freelancer. Henry continued to take his cue from John, affecting gypsy ways, sudden changes of address, louche habits. Physically, however, he was a very different type. John was swarthy and boisterous, Henry was blond, slender, elusive, and prickly. In his own way he was as handsome as Rupert, and his chiselled features and “evil goat's eyes” appealed forcibly to women.
³

In the autumn of 1911, somewhere near Fitzroy Square, those eyes fell on Ka Cox. One of the things Henry had taken over from John was an affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell. She fixed Henry up in a studio next to her country house at Peppard, near Henley. But Ottoline was ten years older and a demanding patroness, encumbered with a husband and also, from the spring of 1911, an infatuation with Bertrand Russell. For Henry, Ka represented a target of opportunity. She enjoyed a private income, had vaguely artistic tastes, and had a reputation as a soft pillow to lie on. John was rich, and actually liked living in caravans; Henry was
hard up, was used to bourgeois comforts, and had few scruples about accepting favours from his friends or mistresses. He was also feeling the nervous strain of his
vie de bohème
, and was seeing the same hypnotist who had treated Jacques Raverat a few years earlier, Dr Bramwell. Marriage to Ka was more appealing than trying to scratch out a living in Chelsea. Even Lytton Strachey, weary of his makeshift life, had half-seriously thought of marrying a “soothing woman” like Ka.
⁴
Lytton was not really serious about marrying her, but he rather liked the idea that Henry might. For the past year he had been desperately in love with Henry, but he knew that such a confirmed “womaniser” would not respond to his physical needs. All he could hope for was Henry's company in society, or for long stays together at country hotels. In return Lytton would entertain him with scurrilous wit, pay his bills, and accommodate his love affairs. He had to be careful, however, that Henry did not take up with the kind of woman who might try to cut Lytton out. Ka had no establishment of her own, and was accepted in Bloomsbury because she was both likeable and biddable. She could not expect to remove Henry from his usual orbit, and she was soon too besotted by him to object to his whims, or his friends.

Why should Ka have fallen so hard for Henry, just when her affair with Rupert was coming to a head? In Rupert's view, it was his “baby ideas about honour” and his weak nerves that made Ka vulnerable:

Someone more capable of getting hold of women than me, slightly experienced in bringing them to heel, who didn't fool about with ideas of trust or “fair treatment,” appeared.

You'd met the creature at some party. I have your account: “Very unpleasant” you wrote “but fascinating.” “Fascinating”!!! I dimly wondered . . . and passed on.

The swine, one gathers, was looking round. He was tiring of his other women, or they of him. Perhaps he thought there'd be a cheaper and pleasanter way of combining fucking with an income than Ottoline. And his “friends” had come to the conclusion he might be settled with somebody for a bit. He cast dimly round. Virgins are easy game. Marjorie Strachey, I understand, was the first woman he met. What was her answer? Ka, was the second: an obviously finer object for lust, and more controllable. He marked you down.
⁵

Rupert took it for granted that Henry had exploited Ka's lust and inexperience. But no external pressure was needed to make her pursue him. In those heady days following the Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Henry enjoyed the glamour of being a talented artist. He was a bohemian city mouse after the country mice of Cambridge – those earnest but often droopy undergraduates who were Ka's friends before she moved to London. While Rupert floundered emotionally after being rejected by Noel, Henry had years of erotic experience. He knew what he wanted, and how to get it. Outshone by Bryn and Noel, cut out by Gwen, Ka now had two dashing young men in pursuit of her. Who could blame her for relishing her power?

Early in December Ka had invited Henry to join the party at Lulworth, and confided to Justin that she planned to flirt with him when he came. Rupert had gone to stay for a week in Eastbourne with his mother, to put the finishing touches on his thesis. Ka came to visit him there on 9 December, with the “madness in her mind” of her infatuation with Henry.
⁶
Rupert took the news of her outside interest badly. When he left for Lulworth on Thursday, 28 December he was still dazed and upset by it, as well as exhausted by work. Once at Churchfield House, he found that the Neo-pagans in the party Ka had arranged were heavily outgunned by Bloomsbury. Gwen and Jacques had come no closer than Studland, fifteen miles off, so that only Justin and Ka were left of the old crowd. The three Oliviers had been replaced by three Stracheys: James, Marjorie, and Lytton. Feri Békássy also came, and Maynard Keynes after a few days. Then, in what seemed a major shift of allegiance, Ka announced that when Leonard Woolf returned to Ceylon in May she would move into his room at Bloomsbury's
HQ
, the communal house at 38 Brunswick Square.
⁷

Rupert had expected a soothing week in the company of Ka and a few trusted friends. Instead, he had a houseful of Stracheys. Then, to fill the cup, Lytton drove a carriage to Wool Station on Saturday and returned with Henry Lamb, who had been spending Christmas with Augustus John near Corfe. Lytton and Henry stayed together at the Lulworth Cove Inn, but took their meals with the main party at Churchfield House, which now seethed with intrigues and flirtations. Marjorie Strachey took a shine to Justin, whom she called “Duckie,” while Lytton “would grope [Henry] under the table at meal-times in view of all the ladies.”
⁸
Lytton's original plan, according to Rupert, had been to stay with Henry at Corfe
and entice Ka to join them. Now Rupert gave them another opening by falling ill, on New Year's Eve: