Fatal Glamour (32 page)

Rupert

I'm glad you're so beautiful.
³³

It is small wonder that Rupert's goodbye to Ka the next day, Saturday, 20 April, was “shy and hurried.” Ka's dealings with him over the past fortnight had brought her to the end of her tether, and she went straight to Asheham afterwards for a rest in the country with Virginia. There she found another guest, Leonard Woolf. He had proposed to Virginia early in January, and had been told that she would have to know him better before giving him an answer. Now they were coming to the point, and it says much for Ka's nature that Virginia welcomed her company while making the most important decision of her life. On the 25th, Leonard sent in his resignation from the Colonial Service. Six days later, Virginia sent Leonard a cautious but encouraging statement of her feelings, and by the end of May they were engaged. Ka had thus seen two of her friends working out their future together with steadiness and mutual respect, despite a problematic sexual relation and Virginia's nervous fragility.
³⁴
It would be hard for Ka not to take this as a cue. Could she not, like Leonard, bring Rupert to grasp his destiny, through her powers of understanding and devotion? Both love and conscience now proposed to her that this would be her task in Berlin.

For two weeks Rupert waited for Ka at a Pension in Berlin. While there he received a letter from Noel (now lost) that asked him to apply some judgment and moderation to his relations with Ka. That was not how he had seen it, during the week of crisis in April. “Either I won,” he told Noel (that is, made Ka completely submissive to him), “or I lost and killed everybody.” That was why he needed a revolver, which he now had acquired in Berlin. And he needed the psychological hardness to go with it:

You see, it's no good going into it either weak or good. Either puts one into the power of the other side. And it's fatal to be in the power of that sort of woman. I know this sounds beastly to you, you little fool. But there it is. I tell you, I've done with the other business – the nobility and suffering business. It's not good for one, and I haven't got enough decency left to try it. Also, it's damned bad tactics . . . She's deserved a lot more than she has suffered and will suffer. If she's lost, the more broken up and spoilt she is, the better.

Ka's done the most evil things in the world . . . Think of the filthiest image you can for the fouling of the best things by the worst. Ka is doing that. For the sake of all those things, and for the sake of the Ka I used to know, and for the sake of the good love there was between us, I'd not care if I saw Ka
dying
of some torture I could inflict on her, slowly.
¹

Noel, reasonably enough, wanted to know precisely what terrible crimes Ka had committed, but Rupert always evaded that question. The measure of Ka's crimes was simply how he felt about them. This was not exactly madness; rather, it was a conviction that his emotions were the only reality that mattered. And what he felt was “buyer's remorse” on a grand scale: the venom he directed at Ka was in inverse proportion to his lust when he was looking forward to possessing her. No doubt his hatred was fuelled by misogyny, and by a specific disgust with the female body and female ways of showing desire. His night of sex with Denham Russell-Smith had not led to any morning-after shame or remorse. Nor did he have any such feelings towards Noel; rather, his letter changed tone halfway through, from vitriol against Ka to sentimental reminiscing about days of glory with Noel.

Having got that off his chest, for the moment at least, Rupert still looked forward to the sexual delights he would enjoy once Ka arrived. Each day he went out to explore the countryside, looking for a pleasant village where he and Ka could lodge as man and wife. Around 8 May she arrived, livelier and happier than Rupert expected, and no longer infatuated with Henry Lamb. What she had wanted was to live with Henry as his mistress; what he wanted was to take her to bed occasionally, and borrow a few pounds as needed. Rupert was still convinced, though, that Henry would get his hands on Ka again if she tried to live on her own in London. Nor was he as pleased as he should have been to hear that she had really been in love with
him
the whole time. He had insisted on this second stay in Germany because he hoped to cure his jealousy of Ka by getting complete sexual possession of her. But once he had removed her from her dangerous acquaintances, she lay heavy on his hands. He was too conscious of the other hands she had passed through. He didn't really like or trust Ka any more, he told Dudley. “Noel is the finest thing I've ever seen in the world; and Ka – isn't.”
²

Rupert and Ka set off for the Feldberg Lakes north of Berlin on 20 May, already aware of how badly their affair had gone wrong. At the Pension in Berlin they had not been able to stay together, but in the country they would present themselves as “Herr und Frau Brooke.” After a few days in Neu Strelitz they moved to Feldberg, on a lake where they could rent a boat. In a later sketch, he gave a glimpse of those days: “he saw quite clearly an April morning on a lake south of Berlin, the grey water slipping past his little boat, and a peasant-woman, suddenly revealed against
apple-blossom, hanging up blue and scarlet garments to dry in the sun.”
³
The trip lasted about two weeks and was cut short when Ka learned that her sister Margaret's engagement had been broken. Ka hurried back to England to console her, while Rupert returned to Berlin.

In July, when he had returned to Grantchester for a few weeks, Rupert summed up the Berlin trip in a bitter little poem called “Travel”:

'Twas when I was in Neu Strelitz

I broke my heart in little bits.

So while I sat in the Muritz train

I glued the bits together again.

But when I got to Amerhold,

I felt the glue would never hold.

And now that I'm home to Barton Hill,

I know once broken is broken still.

The “second honeymoon” of Neu Strelitz had turned into another fiasco. Rupert had fantasised hotly for three months about the sexual raptures they were going to enjoy, but when it came to the point he was either impotent or indifferent. Both he and Ka were ill, and the weather was gloomy. But the basic trouble was that he felt emotionally dead. Now that Ka had renounced Henry, and cared only for Rupert, he simply could not respond to her. When he was jealous of her, he seethed with lust, anger, and self-contempt; once she was secure, the “duty” of loving her made all his passions suddenly drain away.

To put the icing on the cake, Rupert finally got a reply to his parting letter to Bryn, after forty days. It wasn't “a” letter, he told James, it was “the” letter, an absolute smack in the face:

Refused – oh, Lord. There are some people (including all women) one should never propose to by letter.

“Dear Rupert,” it begins. So
that's
something. “R” is dropped. The words are well-formed. The letters go stiffly up and down. Not much give and take about
her
, a graphologist would murmur . . . The whole page gives the impression of a thoroughly superior housemaid.

I'd, of course, in the lonely evenings – oh, you know how one
does
it – been wistfully murmuring “Banque” to myself.
A hundred times
Highland Waters
sounded vaguely from beyond the balcony. A hundred times great beeches shadowily obscured the great yellow stove. A hundred times I felt – oh, but that, I remember, is a secret.

But she – oh, it had all passed from her, like water from a duck's back, or facts from a philosopher. Bank was past, was nothing . . . “I must say that Berlin, just now, seems like a fussy, exhausting irrelevance.” – But earlier than that she's – oh, so painstakingly, so deliberately, – drawn, with precision, the lines, all lines. Did I ever tell you women were vague, sloppy? Not at all, James: not at all. Clear as Euclid. She sizes up and dismisses my letter to her. The emotional one. “All things considered, disingenuous was, I thought, the word for it.” So that's at an end . . .

Oh, there are pieces of playfulness in it, which I've not quoted. Oh James: I think that Life's
just
too beastly to bear. Too utterly foul.

But it's the irresistible, false, fondness of the whole that pins me shrieking down.
⁴

Ever since their first flirtation at Andermatt in 1907 Bryn had dealt with Rupert as neatly and firmly as she had the rest of her impetuous suitors. Her watchword in all these affairs was simple: to preserve her self-control. At Bank, she had told Rupert how she had fallen hopelessly in love when she was nineteen. Whenever she saw the man the room swam and she almost fainted with passion. Her response was to hide herself away until she had “cauterised” her love; for nothing was worth the humiliation of being at someone else's mercy.
⁵
Now that she was twenty-five, years of living by rule had given her a glossy and almost impenetrable shell. Rupert's histrionics had small chance of cracking it; and no chance at all when in fact he hadn't proposed to Bryn, only let slip a few drunken hints about his feelings for her.

If Ka conceived while at Munich she would have been three months pregnant by now. When she went back to England from Berlin the immediate crisis was apparently over, which suggests that she miscarried either while Rupert was in Berlin by himself, or soon after she arrived in Germany. Perhaps it happened at Neu Strelitz, where she was ill with some unexplained ailment. That she had an abortion in April or May is
possible; but there is no evidence, and she would not have found it easy to arrange one. Whatever happened, it seems clear that Rupert was “off the hook” by the beginning of June. When Ka had to go back and comfort her sister, she and Rupert agreed to think things over separately and decide their future in two or three months' time. But the relationship was doomed, for his sexual interest in her was over.

Once Ka had gone Rupert was left in Berlin, staying with the newly-wed Dudley and Annemarie, and contemplating the wreckage of his life. He had wooed three women and won none; he had failed to get his fellowship; he had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Sex was the principal cause of his nervous breakdown; he could neither deal with his own desires nor tolerate other people's. He told Hugh Popham, who had got a job in the British Museum, that his ambition was to sneak in and spend the night embracing a female mummy; he had heard that most had died of syphilis, but hoped to find a clean one. A schoolboy joke, perhaps, but his reaction to Virginia's engagement to Leonard Woolf cannot have amused anyone but himself: “
I thought
the little man'ld get her. Directly he began saying he was the only man who'd had a woman she knew, and telling tales about prostitutes – oh, you should have seen the love-light dance and dawn in her eyes!
That
gets 'em. To him that hath shall be given: from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Even that which he
hath
, James: one by one. Two, two for the lily-white balls: clothed all in hair, oh!”
⁶

Rupert had always had a tendency to sexual hysteria, but loving Noel, so clear and firm by nature, had helped to keep it in check. When Ka came over to Berlin, she told Rupert that over the past few months James Strachey had fallen in love with Noel. For Rupert, this was the last straw. He did not fear that James would have much success: he was too neurasthenic, Rupert felt, and too obviously gay. But Noel was no longer a cloistered schoolgirl. She was following Ka into Bloomsbury, and wasn't nature bound to take its course?

It's on the whole better to be in love with her than with most women; because she is much harder and rather honester than they. She's a very ordinary person underneath the pink-brown mist, you know. And she's just a female: so she may let you down any moment. As she's unusually unemotional and stony, and as
she's backed up by her adamantine family with that loony-man at the head, she
may
be fairly safe . . . But I expect, really, she won't fall in love with anybody for at least two years. After that there'll come a day when she'll suddenly feel a sort of collapse and sliding in her womb, and incomprehensible longings. It's when the ova suddenly begin popping out like peas. Then she'll just be ripe for anybody. But not for you, dear boy. Some rather small and very shiny man, probably syphilitic, and certainly a Jew. She'll crawl up to him,
will
Noel, – to Albert Rothenstein, or Mr Foss (if she has
very
good taste), or Mr Picciotto, or (if he's joined us) Mr Applegate – and ask him to have her. And no doubt he will. I need hardly ask you to visualise it.
⁷

Looking across to London from Berlin, Rupert saw a society in which every fence was down. Lytton Strachey had ingratiated himself with Henry Lamb by playing the pandar between him and Ka. Rupert's younger brother, Alfred, was having an affair with Hilton Young.
⁸
Virginia, with whom Rupert had bathed naked at Grantchester, was now giving herself to a Jew. And James, along with other gay friends of Rupert's, was finding that he could love women as well as men. Rupert's own desires were so various and contradictory that they had to be rigidly segregated. He hated and feared Bloomsbury because it took a positive relish in bringing together impulses that he believed should never be allowed to meet. All of this lay behind his outburst to Jacques Raverat when Noel went to Virginia's for a weekend: “I suppose she's got too much sense – and she's got you and other wise people – to get spoilt in any way by the subtle degradation of the collective atmosphere of the people in those regions – people I find pleasant and remarkable as individuals.”
⁹