Fatal Glamour (29 page)

On 9 January 1912 Ka took Rupert to Victoria and put him on the train to Cannes. She would stay in London for a week, then go directly to Munich; Rupert would join her there as soon as he was fit to travel. Elisabeth van Rysselberghe met Rupert at the Gare du Nord and looked after him for two nights and a day at her parents' villa, before sending him on to his mother in Cannes. “I find myself so unmoved and kindly with her,” he reassured Ka, “Don't mind my being here a day. I'm not loving Elizabeth.” What he now wanted, he said, was “to turn altogether to you and forget everything but you, and lose myself in you, and give and take everything – for a time. Afterwards – doesn't matter.”
²⁸
In other words, they should agree to ignore their other commitments – for just so long as their affair lasted. Moved by guilt and concern for Rupert's collapse, Ka accepted his dubious terms.

She had no intention, however, of staying away from Henry. She wrote to him from Lulworth, asking to meet for dinner in London on 7 January. In the week before she left for Munich she pursued Henry shamelessly, deeply offending Ottoline Morrell (who had taken on Bertrand Russell, but was still clinging to Henry). Having been declared surplus to
requirements by Jacques and Gwen a year earlier, Ka was not willing to sacrifice herself on the altar of Rupert's jealousy. She would give him all the help she could, but neither would she give up Henry. This would not be made clear to him, however, until they met face to face.

Rupert, meanwhile, was being stuffed in Cannes, and consoling himself that he had at last cleared a path into the future:

I'm certainer than ever that I'm, possibly, opening new Heavens, like a boy sliding open the door into a big room; trembling between wonder and certainty. . . . I know now how beastly I was both to you and to Noel; and that one must choose – choose, being human – one thing at a time.

I couldn't give to either of two such people what I ought, which is “all.” Now I've got a sort of peace, I think; because I shall be able.
²⁹

During the three weeks of their separation he wrote to her daily, some of the letters thousands of words long. His mother was kept in the dark, though she realised her son was upset over something, and suspected Bryn of being responsible! In choosing Ka for his confidante and compulsively spilling out his troubles to her, he was making his own attempt at Dr Freud's new “talking cure”:

The pleasure of telling you about things is so extraordinarily great. What does it mean? Keeping telling you everything would, it seems, make such a wonderful and golden background for everything else between us. I've such a longing to get out of myself, my tight and dirty self – to put it all out in the sun, the fat sun. And it's so hard to tell the truth, to give oneself wholly away, even to you. So one wants to chatter and pour everything out . . . and then perhaps truth may slip out with it . . . I've never told anyone anything, hardly. “Secretive.”

Rupert believed that his breakdown was caused not by overwork – the standard Victorian explanation for mental illness in men – but by sexual frustration: “I've been half-mad, alone. Oh, it's all mixed up with this chastity, and everything's a whirl, and still I'm mad and tiny and
frightened . . . Jacques, being Jacques, went mad for half a year. I, being tougher and slower, defied chastity a bit longer, and then, naturally, would take it worse . . . It'll be a curious comment on civilization or women or something if I do go.”
³⁰

His sexual experience was indeed scanty for a man of twenty-four, consisting mainly of one night with Denham Russell-Smith and a half-baked affair with Elisabeth van Rysselberghe. Ka's refusal of a complete sexual relation at the end of 1911 had brought matters to a crisis: to be kept on tenterhooks by her was evidently more nerve-racking than to be kept firmly at arm's length by Noel. Since chastity had pushed him over the brink, it made sense to Rupert that physical possession of Ka would restore him to health. He kept telling her that his vacillations between her and Noel, lust and love, were now over; he wanted only her “deep breasts” and other charms:

It's funny, I still think, your idea that one doesn't – or that I didn't – love you physically, very strongly. When I felt last year, my whole conduct was wronging you, it wasn't, you know, that! It was that it'd come over me that I perhaps only loved you physically and very much as a friend, – that I'd still to “only connect” lust and an immense comradeship. But I didn't imagine I hadn't
those
, you know! It's
possibly
true that mere prettiness and champagne stir the penis most. But physical passion includes the penis but is more, it's hands and thighs and mouth that are shaken by it as well. And that's stirred by different things: strong beauty and passion and – undefined things.
³¹

Having lost Noel, loving and possessing Ka might restore his sanity and achieve his manhood. But somehow he still couldn't envision a mature and mutually committed life with her – only a few months of wandering around the Continent, after which they would go their separate ways. To a well-brought-up young lady like Ka, this cannot have looked reassuring. Henry was married already, while Brooke was proposing a good deal less than marriage. If she accepted his offer, her future prospects would be seriously dimmed. Rupert, thanks to the double standard, had much less to fear from a romantic liaison. Nonetheless, Ka bravely set off for Munich, with Justin Brooke for company,
on 16 January. She had convinced herself that she owed it to Rupert to be his mistress – and that she owed it to herself to end her “extraordinarily randy condition of virginity.”
³²
In the city of three thousand artists, safe from the prying eyes that surrounded her in England, she would take the plunge into bohemia.

On the night of 30 January 1912, Rupert and Ka both set off by train. In the morning they would meet at Verona, halfway between Cannes and Munich. Rupert had set his heart on meeting in Italy. From Verona, he fantasised, they might slip away to Venice and be lost to the world for months. But, when they met, it was more as patient and nurse than as lovers. Ka realised at once that Rupert was too weak to travel. She took him back to Munich the next day and installed him in the same rooms he had in Schwabing the year before, at Ohmstrasse 3. There, his landlady took over the task of fattening him up with Ovaltine and bromides. Ka was staying elsewhere with friends of Rupert, the Kanoldts. The two of them did not have much chance to be alone, especially when Hugh Popham turned up and accompanied them on their daily outings.

After a week Ka and Rupert went to stay overnight at Salzburg, but they still held off from the final act. At last, on 17 February, they left for a weekend at the Starnbergersee, twenty miles south of Munich. On the train, Ka confessed to Rupert that just before she left for Germany she had spent the weekend at a country house where Henry was a fellow guest. The news sent Rupert into a frenzy of jealousy and humiliation, since his whole relationship with Ka rested on the assumption that she had renounced her interest in Henry. But he was at least moved to claim her fully for himself.

As lovers, they must have been painfully awkward and uncertain – if not quite as bad as J. Alfred Prufrock (T.S. Eliot had finished the poem
eight months before, while staying at a Pension near Schwabing).
¹
Ka had gritted her teeth and “equipped herself” for the deed, presumably with the “irrigator” that James Strachey had earlier described to Rupert when he had hoped to go to Venice with Elisabeth van Rysselberghe: “The more recommended kind is a glass (or metal) cylinder with a hole in its bottom out which the tube leads, and ends in a kind of tap . . . You hang the cylinder – with the liquid – on a nail in the wall, and all you have to do is to turn the tap at the bottom of the tube, and the liquid rushes out. The enema is far the most popular instrument – and is generally effective. But it is essential to use it immediately after you've emitted.” There could hardly be any more messy and humiliating method of contraception, especially in a rented room with no bathroom attached. An alternative was Henry Lamb's method, “withdrawal before emission. But
that
requires an iron nerve – and if it fails –.”
²

Coping with the irrigator, and with the ghostly presence of Henry, cannot have made for a carefree night of love. Still, they had together crossed over a threshold, as Rupert recalled a month later:

I'm pitiful seeing the useless wasted spoilt old maids who creep down this road: and the young maids with their dirty suppressed decomposing virginity: and then I'm proud at them “Ka is not like you, and won't be. She knows.” . . . I remember the softness of your body: and your breasts and your thighs and your cunt. I remember you all naked lying to receive me; wonderful in beauty. I remember the agony and joy of it all: that pleasure's like a sea that drowns you wave by wave. I've the strength of an army, now. And I love you, in all the ways of love . . . I feel myself standing up proud and strong and erect & naked in front of you, with all my sex bursting into flame. I feel you under me and hear your low cries – You, Ka, you. Nothing else means anything.
³

The sexual thrill was not enough, though, for them to cast off every previous commitment. Three months later, D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Weekley would arrive a few kilometres away, at Icking, to live together as man and wife. Frieda had run away from her husband in Nottingham, and they expected never to live in England again. But the predominant concern for Rupert and Ka was, what would their families and friends think? What would their landlady think? What would
everybody
think? And the sexual act itself was so hedged about with taboos that it created as much tension when enjoyed as it did when denied. Even its essentials remained, to Rupert, something of a mystery:

The important thing, I want to be quite clear about, is, about women “coming off.” What it means, objectively – What happens. And also, what
you
feel when it happens. Have you (I'd like to hear when there's infinite leisure) analysed, with the help of that second night, the interior feelings you were yet dim about the first night (at Starnberg.)? And can you discover by poking about among your married acquaintances? . . . It's only that I want to get clear – perhaps it's a further physical thing we've to explore.
⁴

But everything was done in a hurry, and only four days after the weekend at Starnberg they were on their way back to England. Ka could not manage the strain of being both Rupert's lover and his nurse, while tacitly keeping a place open in her heart for Henry. She wrote to James Strachey that she was miserable and unsure of what to do with Rupert. He had to be fed and cosseted like a fractious child, but one with an adult capacity to wound and disturb. Rupert was also writing to James, telling him that he was leaning with all his weight on Ka. “It is infinitely wicked,” he confessed, “but I'm beyond morals. I really rather believe she's pulled me through. She is stupid enough for me to be lazy and silly enough for me to impose on her.”
⁵
To help Rupert feel better, Ka had to listen to endless diatribes about her filthy behaviour with Henry. When Dudley Ward came from Berlin to visit them, he calmed Rupert down and lightened Ka's burden. The most sensible plan, Ka felt, was to share the task of propping up Rupert between herself, Dudley and Mrs Brooke.

They left Munich on 21 February; when they arrived at Victoria the next day Ka returned to her sister's flat, while Rupert went on to Rugby. Now the understanding was that Rupert would spend two months recuperating in England. In May he and Ka would stay together again in Berlin, where Dudley could be counted on for support. Each would be under the care of their families while in England – especially Rupert, who was too feeble to look after himself at Grantchester and would have to be sequestered at Bilton Road. His mother got on his nerves, but she would protect him from others who would get on his nerves more, and from the dangerously exciting social life he had led for the past year.

Rupert now developed a new obsession: that Ka was as exhausted as he was, and should therefore submit to a similar invalid regime. When she moved to 38 Brunswick Square on 1 March, she should not “look after Adrian Duncan Maynard Woolf Sidney-Turner or any other inhabitant.” In the event, she stayed with her sister – perhaps because Virginia had suffered another nervous breakdown in February, or else because Rupert had objected so fiercely to her moving into Bloomsbury. For he had now appointed himself the guardian of her every move:

Ka, you've once given yourself to me: and that means more than you think. It means so very importantly that you're not your own mistress. And that, far more truly and dangerously than if I had you under lock and key – and with my “physical superiority.” It means that you're not as free to do anything as you were. It means you mayn't hurt yourself, because it hurts me, like Hell. It means you mayn't make mistakes, because I pay. It means you mayn't foolishly and unthinkingly get tired and ill and miserable: because you make me tired and ill and miserable.
⁶

Rupert's real concern upset him too much to be stated in plain terms. He was terrified that Ka might drift back into Henry's orbit and, now that she had given herself to one, give herself to another. But if women were so weak that they required constant male supervision, it followed that
any
man could make them do what he wanted; and most of the time Rupert could not be physically present to make sure of Ka. Having defined her as will-less and faithless, he had to live with the nightmare of what might happen to her in the moral quagmire of London.