Fatal Glamour (21 page)

On midsummer day, at night, we'll make a solemn sacrifice again to the Gods of perpetual youth, to close the cycle and celebrate most worthily his deliverance and birth. I am pondering over the ritual even now: there must be fire; and water, clear spring water poured at sunrise out of a cup of virgin crystal; and wreaths of dog roses and honeysuckle; and there should be a bird in a cage to set free at dawn and a fair prayer to sing as we dance hand in hand round the leaping fire.

After Ka left Prunoy, the rest of them took up the idea of composing a Neo-pagan rite:

We had some fair days even after you went – for all that I was a little sad. And we invented fires, after bathing, between tea and suppertime. I wish we had thought of that before. We talked a great deal of the urgency of some kind of ritual, mystery, initiation, symbolism and we planned a great litany of the four elements. But I doubt whether it will ever come to anything. As Francis says, we are all much too rational and self-conscious – all except Frances perhaps, that child.
²⁶

Francis Cornford was steeped in Cambridge anthropology and well able to design a modern ritual for his friends. Nonetheless, they were right to doubt their power to be real, rather than Neo-pagans. Their best hope lay in poetry, that attenuated modern substitute for living myth. In poems like “Dining-room Tea” and “Grantchester” Rupert would come as close as any of them did to settling their quarrel with time and change.

The immediate quarrel for Rupert, though, was with Noel. Nominally, he had to pay tribute to the Ranee by spending the rest of August and all September at Bilton Road, and working on his Elizabethans. But he was
anxious to slip away for a couple of clandestine meetings with Noel, as a way of confirming the pledge that they had made to each other at Beaulieu River. After
Faustus
she went to stay at Walberswick, Suffolk, with Mary Newbery. Rupert wanted to meet her somewhere nearby, which she flatly refused to do. Then he wanted to turn up at Prunoy, and met with the same refusal. Once Noel had admitted her love for him, Rupert felt that she should be with him whenever possible, by hook or by crook. Noel had a very different prospect. She knew that if she presented Rupert as her fiancé she would bring down on herself a storm of disapproval, starting with her family, but also including people like Badley, who would never allow one of his pupils to be formally engaged, especially one who was still only sixteen. “If we cant meet without schemes,” Noel told Rupert, “I would rather, by far, not see you for half a year.”
²⁷
Apart from these social difficulties, she felt that having made her promise of love to Rupert, he should now wait quietly and calmly for the time, some years ahead, when they could get married. Knowing that she loved him should make him patient; whereas for Rupert it made him impatient to build a shared life. In that sense, exchanging vows in the woods at Beaulieu left them as much at odds as they had been before.

During 1910 several young men in Rupert's circle were becoming frustrated and impatient. How long could the young women they loved go on hinting that they would embrace sensuality some day – but not yet? Either their love had to be followed through to its logical consummation or they would pursue sex outside the group, as Rupert had already done surreptitiously with Denham Russell-Smith.

Towards the end of June, Jacques Raverat went walking with Ka Cox in the Lake District. Somewhere near Ullswater, love, as he put it, sat down between them like a “rude, unbidden guest.” In fact, this was the natural result of an intimacy that had already lasted three years. But their relations had always been lopsided. Although he was two years older than Ka, Jacques felt her to be more mature, more wise and good than himself. His ill health made him long to be mothered and protected. “Think of me but as a wild and wayward child,” he wrote to her, “and sometimes lay your cool hand on my head.” Yet in reaction against his own loneliness and dependency he had often denounced love, seeing it as a snare that had humbled too many of his friends. “To love and yet to be
perfectly free
,” he wrote her, “is not that an ideal?”
¹

In Gwen Raverat's novel, Ka is asked why she won't agree to marry Jacques. “He doesn't seem enough of a person somehow,” she replies, “he's such a baby. He doesn't seem worth marrying.” Jacques was full of grandiose plans, but he was also pathetically nervous and fragile, with sores along his wrists.
²
He kept pouring out his heart to Ka; for whatever reason, she would only return him friendship for love. Her years at Newnham
were now over, and she was living either with her sister Hester in London or at her own cottage in Woking. She wanted a vocation, but had no financial need for one, and no firm idea of what it should be. Meanwhile, she was active in Fabian causes and lecturing at Morley College for working men and women. Jacques proposed to Ka again several times during the autumn. She would neither accept him, nor send him away.

Rupert, meanwhile, was very much in the same boat. After
Faustus
, in August, Noel again told him that he was too disturbing and made herself unavailable. Two months later she granted him one of those hurried and semi-clandestine meetings at Edward Thomas's house. It was becoming clear that in agreeing to be “engaged” to him at Bucklers Hard she had actually committed herself to very little. In several poems of this time, Rupert imagined his love for Noel as no more than a death-in-life.
³

Godwin Baynes was another one trapped in the Olivier orbit through unrequited love for Bryn. He was twenty-eight in 1910, and already launched on his medical career. Bryn was fond of him, but not fond enough to commit herself to marriage. Baynes was not willing to be put off indefinitely, so when climbing in Wales at Easter 1910 he proposed to one of Bryn's cousins, Rosalind Thornycroft. She accepted him, though it would take them another three years before actually marrying.
⁴
The engagement may have contributed to Bryn's unsettled feelings during the year. She had never gone to school, much less university and it seemed time to find herself a vocation, now that she was twenty-three and with no immediate prospect of marriage. She had done some painting, and an art jeweller named Wilson agreed to take her as a live-in apprentice. Bryn worked with him for some months at Platt, in Kent. But the close work caused problems with her eyes, and the summer's excursions kept calling her away from her workbench.

Bryn's mother was always trying to keep her daughters by her in Jamaica, and Bryn agreed that when Margery and Daphne came back to England in October she would take their place. Before leaving, unhappy with the empty months that stretched ahead, she unburdened herself to Hugh Popham. Hugh jumped to the conclusion that she was in love with him – as, he confessed, he already was with her. Her response to Hugh was designed to cut off his hopes, yet one senses that she was sincere in speaking of her own unhappiness and confusion: “You made a person who was very fond of you and who had during the last few days gone through too many excitements and emotions for her nerves to be quite
steady absolutely unbearably sorry for you too. Perhaps you did not know I could mind things . . . I meant once, quite a long time ago, to warn you against myself – but it seemed altogether too silly and impossibly presumptuous . . . you must not make me hate myself any more.”
⁵
Perhaps she did not know herself what her trouble was, but it was not going to be resolved by someone who was two years younger than herself and still an undergraduate. Although Bryn was beginning to think that marriage and having children was the best thing for her to do, she did not see Hugh as a credible husband. When she came back from Jamaica after six months she refused his invitation to May Week and generally avoided his company. But Hugh would bide his time, and at last carry off the prize.

At the end of November, Rupert formed his own plan to break out of his impasse. He had already decided to spend the spring term in Germany. Before he went, he would go for a quiet holiday and settle things calmly with Noel. Margery and Daphne were going to the Alps with Hugh Popham, so Noel would be at a loose end for her Christmas break from Bedales. She would have to be chaperoned, of course, but Ka agreed to come and watch over her, and Jacques would be company for Rupert. The holiday would start the day after Christmas, at Lulworth Cove. “You'll have to arrange about Noel,” Rupert told Ka, “– unless you think she'd be a nuisance, and the conversation
too
much above her head. You'd be responsible (to Margery!) that that very delicate young flower keeps her pale innocence, and her simple trust in God unshaken by the world-worn scepticism of Jacques and me. You
appear
(which is the point) equal to
that
responsibility.”
⁶

Noel agreed to come to Lulworth, but with the caveat that “Margery knows best.” Then, on 22 December, she wrote to tell Rupert that she was going to Switzerland with Margery and Daphne instead. She claimed that she had made the decision herself, but Jacques went down to Limpsfield, and reported that Noel was “oppressed with a sense of responsibility to that woman her mother.”
⁷
If Noel went on holiday with two young men, might not Ka's presence make things look, if anything, worse? But Rupert believed this was just a pretext. Once again, Noel was using a conventional excuse to avoid an honest encounter with him. “What hurts,” he told Ka, “is thinking her wicked. I do, you see. Not very judicially, but I do. And what's to be done if you think a person you know so well is wicked? I don't see what I'm ever to do about Margery.”
⁸

Ever since Margery had flatly told Rupert to call off his stubborn pursuit of Noel he had made her the villain of the affair, for wantonly cramping her youngest sister's emotional life. But Margery had been in Jamaica from January to October, and Rupert should have realised that it made little sense to make her responsible for Noel's continued evasiveness. It was plain now, anyway, that Noel had been pulling her own strings all the time. “I find I've been a devil to Margery,” Rupert confessed to Ka, “as well as in every other way. She says she never interfered (after a momentary impulse). Noel agrees. Ecco! Where am I? . . . I
am
a beast, after all. Worse than ever. But apologising to Margery is a little thing; finding oneself in a mere Chaos of disconnexions is the horror.”
⁹
As he planned his holiday with Ka and Jacques, Rupert must have felt that his relations with Noel had reached, after two and a half years, a complete dead end.

Lulworth village was a single row of cottages, tucked cosily between the downs and the sea. From it you could sally out for strenuous walks along the cliffs around the miniature harbour. In those days before rural bus services Lulworth was well off the beaten track. Its remoteness and its layout (a bit like an ocean liner) made for an intense emotional atmosphere – as if the visitors had sailed away from their everyday life. After three raucous Christmases in Switzerland the party at Lulworth was there to take stock, rather than to celebrate. Gwen had wanted to come, but her family frowned on her going away without a married woman as chaperone. So there were only four arriving at Churchfield House on Boxing Day: Rupert, Jacques, Ka, and Justin. By day they rambled and picnicked up on the downs; in the evening they read
Prometheus Unbound
aloud. Justin was, as usual, the observer and the sympathetic ear, but between the other three the atmosphere was tense. They were each shifting their emotional investment. Jacques again asked Ka to marry him, and was again given the half-serious answer: “You're too much of a baby.”
¹⁰
Rupert was broody and went for long walks alone. He wrote to Bryn in Jamaica, telling her that it was time to seize opportunities and stop worrying about what people might say.

In her novel, Gwen Raverat shows the tip of the iceberg emerging, when Rupert and Jacques return to Ka's flat after the journey from Lulworth:

They sat like mummies on the sofa while she lit the fire. Jacques thought there was something terribly feminine about her heavy form, as she squatted on the hearth, puffing with round cheeks; something eternally servile and domestic, utilitarian. “She's a good woman,” said Jacques to Rupert. “A good squaw,” said Rupert. These were almost the only words that were said . . . The fire and the tea melted them a little, but they would not talk; and directly afterwards Rupert said: “Come on Jacques,” and with a couple of gloomy goodbyes they left. In the street Rupert's arm came through Jacques'. “I like men,” he said.
¹¹

At Lulworth, Rupert had turned towards Ka in reaction against Noel. Noel held aloof and always denied, whereas Ka served and accepted. But her acceptance stirred up crosscurrents of emotion in Rupert: a mixture of desire, contempt, repulsion, and the wish to reaffirm male comradeship against the world of women. Under all of these was a powerful sense of guilt for his own lack of integrity. “I'm red and sick with anger at myself,” he told Ka after Lulworth, “for my devilry and degradation and stupidity . . . I was mean and selfish, and you're, I think, of the most clear and most splendid people in the world.”
¹²
He was falling in love with Ka, but doing so in a way that was bound to cause trouble for her, for himself, and for Noel.