Fatal Glamour (35 page)

Frances felt that the immediate need was to get all the emotional invalids on their feet, which also meant keeping them apart from each another. When Rupert came to her after his painful farewell to Ka, she told him bluntly that he should leave England for at least a year, and go far beyond reach of Ka or Noel. Picking oranges in California, or similar unthinking manual work, was the best thing for him. He was, she felt, “all jangled and neurotic and terrified of everything . . . If he doesn't go off and work hard (till he's so tired at night he can only just crawl to bed and sleep) I feel he'll become contemptible and drifting or lose his
self-respect irrevocably.”
³
In principle, Rupert agreed, though it would be nearly a year before he actually set sail. He was not going to marry Ka or Noel, but neither was he going to leave them alone; and he also had his vendetta with Bloomsbury to pursue. He was supposed to go on a restful holiday in Scotland with James, but as the time approached Rupert bombarded him with abusive letters:

To be a Strachey is to be blind – without a sense – towards good and bad, and clean and dirty; irrelevantly clever about a few things, dangerously infantile about many; to have undescended spiritual testicles; to be a mere bugger; useless as a baby as means, and a little smirched as an end . . . Buggery, with its mild irresponsibilities and simple problems, still hangs about you. You can't understand anything being really important – except selfishly – can you? So you'll not understand the possibility of “He that is not with me is against me” being occasionally true . . . It becomes possible to see what was meant by the person who said that seeing you and any member of the Olivier family together made them cold and sick. But then I suppose you can't understand anyone turning cold and sick to see anybody with anybody else – except through jealousy, and that makes hot – ; can you? It doesn't happen in buggery.

Soon James was invited to Rugby for the coup de grâce. “The explosion,” he reported to Lytton, “has had every motive assigned to it except the obvious one. Oh lord there
have
been scenes. And the dreadful thing is that he's clearly slightly cracked and has now cut himself off from everyone. It's all a regular day-out for a cynic – but unluckily I'm not one.”
⁴

The “obvious motive” was James's dogged and unfruitful courtship of Noel. Once Rupert had cast off Ka, he was filled with remorse that he had ever faltered in his ideal love for Noel: “I fell in love again with Noel with the frenzy of weakness and the desperate feeling that, after the impossible filth and pain, things might yet go well with me – a mad vision – if that came off. So it was bad with me when it appeared how utterly she'd fallen out of love with me. I felt I
couldn't
live. All August and half September I'd tossed about among things; but generally coming back to that plan of suicide.” Noel, however, was casting off any love she had
had for Rupert. “He thought I wouldn't mind if he went off with Ka,” she confided to Mary Newbery, “but I did.”
⁵
Later in the summer, when she went to visit Gwen and Jacques at Prunoy, Rupert spilled before Jacques the accumulated sour grapes of his involvement with the Oliviers:

[Noel] got tired of me about a year ago, and also she's extremely romantic, in the young woman's way, of conceiving love as only possible towards a person you don't know. She's rather frightened, now, I think, of going on flirting; so she wants to be rid of me, very much. She's one of these virgin-harlots of modern days; a dangerous brood.

Yes, Margery is the only decent one of the family (though Bryn's been extraordinarily nice to me.)
⁶

By mid-September Noel was back in England, and willing to give Rupert as much time as he needed to come to terms with their being “just friends”: “I won't be argumentative now. And when we talk, I'll try not to be harsh and dogmatic . . . But you
must
try not to be too upsetting. You can reduce me to dumb helplessness through despair, when you explain all your misery. I
must
help you, if I can.”
⁷
Like so many other meetings, this one at Limpsfield was no help, either in changing Noel's mind, or making Rupert accept that change was not on the menu. “She refused for hours,” he told Ka, “to consider seriously even the possibility she might love me again. It was only the sight of my agony (she's rather soft, besides stupid) that made her offer to wait a year before finally deciding against me. I've gone off on that.”
⁸

During her stay with the Raverats, Noel probably learned more about how deeply and compromisingly Rupert had been involved with Ka. Noel could only repeat, over and over, that she was the last person qualified to save Rupert from his loneliness and despair. When she was a child, Edward Garnett had looked her over and said: “Heart – hard. Hard as nails!” Noel heard, and “grinned with pride.”
⁹
Apart from her hard heart, Noel pointed out that as she had got to know Rupert, she had discovered qualities that she had come to hate. His emotional demands were relentless, as was his fury when they were not satisfied. “Yes you
want
marriage,” Noel said, “and you almost need it; but you shouldn't have it till you can do without it.”
¹⁰
This was good advice, though not of a kind that Rupert was willing or able to hear. From his point of view,
Noel's firm resolution to “do without it” had tarnished their relationship from the beginning: “There's one other thing, I see about myself. That waiting wouldn't ever quite have done. For other people, perhaps; but not for me. I've too much burning inside. You scorn males for it, and dislike it. But it's there. I need marriage or some equivalent: and I should only rage till I get it. Don't curl your maiden lip. It's you that are unpleasant: not me.”
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Another bitter pill was that when Rupert went to Limpsfield, his usual room was now reserved for Hugh Popham. In three weeks, he and Bryn would be man and wife – a pill even more bitter. Rupert had told her that he was going to go to America, or shoot himself; in either case, they should meet for a last walk before she got married and never saw him again. Bryn replied that he wrote a lot of nonsense; but since they were both to be in Scotland, she agreed to meet him at Carlisle to go walking for a day or two at the end of August. “If they object to us in inns,” Rupert joked, “I shall say you're my aunt.” At the last moment, though, Bryn stood him up. She got a mild case of flu and found she couldn't face any more emotional sessions with Rupert: “I'm better now and think it was rather disgraceful of me – but no good could have come of my seeing him. He's evidently got to get through this – what ever
this
is, by himself. I cant help being slightly muddled by his rhetoric even after all these years and dont say the things I meant to when I'm with him, so what's the good? One comes away feeling baffled and exhausted.”
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On 3 October 1912 Bryn became Mrs Hugh Popham, after an engagement of two and a half months. She had got married briskly enough, but already her friends were hearing about her misgivings. The wedding itself was a little pinched: Sir Sydney and Lady Olivier were in Jamaica, and Rupert's antics discouraged Bryn's friends from making any great celebration. Though she had wanted a church wedding, she settled (at Hugh's insistence) for the registry office, with a going-away supper afterwards at the Richelieu restaurant on Oxford Street. Bunny Garnett, James Strachey, Arthur Waley, and Ka were among the guests, but Rupert stayed in his tent at Rugby. Garnett recalled Bryn, in a rust-coloured tweed dress, “glowing with beauty” as she went off with Hugh from Paddington. Later, however, she confessed that she had sat in the train and “looked at her husband with a sinking feeling.”
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Rupert must have contributed to her depression by sending her an unconventional wedding present: a long letter bewailing their five years of
lost opportunities. In this secretive, shy, and ignorant world, he told her, he was queerer and shyer than most – and with “more to be dishonest about.” So, in all, they had barely come within hearing distance of each other:

Oh but come, don't even you, my dear “sensible” unmorbid straightforward Bryn, think that everyone
is
infinitely incomprehensible and far and secret from everyone, and that approach is infinitely difficult and infinitely rare? One tells, some times, some people, a
few
things, – in a misleading sort of way. But any
Truth!
– – Oh, Bryn! One of the great difficulties, and perils, you see, in ever telling anyone any truth, is the same as in ever loving anyone, but more so. It gives them such a devilish handle over you. I mean, they can
hurt
. If I love a person and say nothing, I'm fairly safe. But if I tell them, I deliver myself bound into their hands.
¹⁴

Rupert would not claim that he had loved only her all this time, but his joy in seeing her beauty and knowing her had been one of the good things in his life. After Bank, especially, he had wanted passionately to explore the joys of the body with her, and he knew she had the courage to carry off an affair finely. But he was sick, and too shy to ask her directly. His hopes of going away with her in August had collapsed when she told him, at Everleigh, that she was engaged. Rupert had lectured her on the importance of marriage in a way that she found “dreadfully conventional.” At the same time, he now admitted, he had wanted to inveigle her into an affair before the wedding came and made it too late. Bryn's caution had prevented that, and here was Rupert sitting in his mother's house at Rugby, consumed with jealousy of Hugh – for possessing Bryn's fineness and beauty – and lonely envy of their shared life. But Bryn, during Rupert's lifetime at least, had made her bed and settled into it.

Ka, unfortunately, was left alone through all this, and deeply unhappy. Ottoline Morrell saw her in July, and thought her “evidently devoted to Rupert – and missing him very much after having lived with him as his wife . . . She says she feels so tied to him – and that is I believe the effect on women
much
more than on men. – I don't know if once or twice would have that effect but I think any length of time would.”
¹⁵
Ka's closest friends, the Raverats, still cared deeply for her, but they no longer
respected her. They agreed with Rupert that she was, for the time being, incapable of making her own decisions. Gwen did not even want to see her at Prunoy – because of the danger that Ka might fall in love again with Jacques! Frances felt the Raverats should have been more sympathetic to Ka, and “not pressed her so hard to marry Rupert.” But she agreed that Ka should be kept away. “She's got a frightening amount of sex,” observed Frances, “and it isn't under control. She ought never to have lived this strange modern life.” Though friends and family gave her some help, mainly Ka had to get through the aftermath of Rupert's rejection on her own resources – “honestly and truly suffering,” Frances felt, “and bearing it with real courage and simplicity.”
¹⁶

By the autumn of 1912, most of the Neo-pagans were embarked on separate lives. Ka was living mainly in London, and trying not to cross Rupert's path. After a honeymoon in Holland and Belgium, Bryn set up house with Hugh in Regent Square – around the corner from the London School of Medicine for Women, where Noel was studying. Gwen and Jacques took their own advice and went to live in the country, at Croydon near Cambridge. Before they came back to England from Prunoy, Gwen admitted that she had no desire to take in lame ducks, as Frances always seemed willing to do: “I don't a bit want to see anyone ever again. I feel as if I'd only just left them a minute ago, all grovelling and wallowing about like tadpoles in a pool. When you look at each one of them separately, they're very very nice, but as a whole they're incredibly wearisome . . . I don't want to see poor turbid Rupert or sad Ka.”
¹⁷

From now on, Rupert vowed to denounce the “miasmic atmosphere” of intellectual London. Asked to speak to the Apostles in October, he gave a talk that amounted to a declaration of war. His theme was his new-found passion for active goodness, rather than ethical contemplation as he had learned it from Moore:

I think, now, that this passion for goodness and loathing of evil is the most valuable and important thing in us. And therefore it must not be in any way stifled, nor compelled to wait upon exact judgement. If, after ordering your life and thoughts as wisely as possible, you find yourself hating, as evil, some person or thing, one should count-five, perhaps, but then certainly hit out . . . I see the world as two armies in mortal combat, and inextricably confused.
The word “He that is not with me is against me” has gone out. One cannot completely distinguish friend from foe. The only thing is to thwack suspicious heads in the neighbourhood. It may contribute to winning the battle. It is the only battle that counts.
¹⁸

This was really a picture of Rupert's own emotional state, out of which he created a similarly disordered world. But he could not go on as he had done over the past year. He had to deny his own darker impulses, or else go down into his underworld and perhaps never come out. If he could no longer be a happy pilgrim, he must turn into a crusader. He could still have allies and, when war came, comrades; but the ideal of a life based on friendship, which he had tried to live for the past five years, had gone out of him. Also, a life based on the Platonic worship of Noel. In October he told Ka he hated Noel, and by January 1913 she was marked down for the snub direct. At the Shaw/Belloc debate, he informed Ka, he “unluckily ran into that swine Noel. However we put up our noses and cut each other, which was good fun.”
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