Fatal Glamour (30 page)

Ka, whether out of a desire to be honest or a streak of malice towards Rupert, promptly reported that she had spoken to Henry at a social gathering. “I wish to God you'ld cut the man's throat,” he fired back. “See very little of the man, for God's sake. And don't be more of a bloody fool than Nature made you.” Her contacts with Lytton Strachey aroused an even deeper, and more complex, fury. “I'm glad Lytton has been having a bad time,” he fumed. “Next time you have one of your benignant lunches with him you can make it clear to him I loathe him – if there's any chance of that giving him any pain.” Yet Rupert's most devoted male companion in these difficult months was James Strachey, now that Jacques was married and Dudley settled in Berlin. Stuck at Bilton Road with the
Ranee, Rupert needed James's weekend visits, but knew that anything he said to him was likely to go straight to Brunswick Square and environs. “I can't ‘talk' to James,” he told Ka. “I suppose he knows little, and misunderstands . . . And I feel, rather wrongly, suddenly – that he's a Strachey – a brother, anyhow, of Lytton Strachey. He loves you: but it may be it's only his love for you that matters to him, not you. You know how the Stracheys feel? James
is
better than the rest. But one can't tell.”
⁷

Whether or not James was better, he was unshakably loyal. “God damn you,” Rupert wrote to him before one of his visits, “God bum roast castrate bugger and tear the bowels out of everyone . . . You'd better give it up; wash your bloody hands. I'm not sane.”
⁸
James came anyway, as he always would until he was beaten off. Writing Virginia a letter of sympathy about
her
breakdown, Rupert regaled her with a piece of Rugby scandal:

Church circles are agitated by what happened at Holy Trinity three Sundays ago. In the afternoon there is first a Choral service, then a children's service, then a Service for Men Only. Two fourteen-year-old choir boys arranged a plan during the Choral Service. At the end they skipped round and watched the children enter. They picked out the one whose looks pleased them best, a youth of 10. They waited in seclusion till the end of the Children's service. They pounced on their victim, as he came out, took him, each by a hand, and led him to the vestry. There, while the Service for Men Only proceeded, they removed the lower parts of his clothing and buggered him, turn by turn. His protestations were drowned by the Organ pealing out whatever hymns are most suitable to men only. Subsequently they let him go. He has been in bed ever since with a rupture. They were arrested and flung, presumably, into a Reformatory. He may live.
⁹

In telling Virginia this, was Rupert mad, or just bad? Probably he was unaware that she had been sexually abused as a child by her half-brothers, and had a continuing phobia about being molested. Nonetheless, to write in this vein to someone in her condition was insensitive at best, sadistic at worst.

Noel seemed to be the one person towards whom he still had a conscience. “I see how beastly I was to you all the autumn,” he wrote, “I'm
ashamed of myself . . . I can't tell you all I want to, yet; because it isn't mine to tell – till it's finished with.”
¹⁰
Her answer was simply that they had to wait and see how they would feel when they met, some months ahead. Her life, meanwhile, was not standing still. Now nineteen, and living a much less cloistered life as a London medical student, men were lining up to woo her. She was corresponding with Feri Békássy at King's, was being treated to tea and Wagner by James Strachey, and Adrian Stephen was also putting in his bid. All this attention she treated rather offhandedly; her real dedication was to her studies, which she pursued with her typical single-mindedness. From time to time, she heard about Rupert's illness but treated the news with a mixture of wariness and suspicion that it was just another pose. In the Olivier household, he commented sarcastically, it was “not done, or thought of” to get upset about his kind of misfortune.

Ka was overflowing with sympathy, but having her come to Bilton Road posed dangers of its own. If she and Mrs Brooke disliked each other, Rupert would be torn between them. If they liked each other too well, it would raise the spectre of an official engagement and marriage. He got Ka invited, after much hesitation; then he told his mother she had been at Munich, and another storm broke. It took all Rupert's dramatic skill to convince the Ranee that Ka was only a casual acquaintance whom he had met in Munich by chance. Meanwhile, he was regaling Ka with boasts of the “ferocious tempestuous ocean of lust” that he had in store for her. Somehow, though, it was not tempestuous enough to make him defy his mother and marry Ka. And when she came, the first time they had seen each other in a month, he could only lash out at her for her past misdeeds. Once she had left, he collapsed and cried himself to sleep. “Everything's gone from me –” he lamented, “love for Noel, writing, everything – is swept away.” The only thing he had left was Ka's renewed promise to be with him in Berlin in May. But, back in London, Henry fell off his horse and Ka volunteered to apply fomentations to his wounds every morning. Once again, Rupert began to bombard her with letters that swung back and forth between indignation and despair. Yet going to bed with Ka had got him fantasising about Bryn, the most beautiful and sexually appealing woman he knew. He wrote to James that they should “abduct Bryn for Sunday to the Metropole at Brighton – and go shares.”
¹¹

By the end of March, Rupert was finding life at Bilton Road unbearable. “Mention
nothing
connected with my life,” he told Geoffrey
Keynes before he came to visit, “no names, nothing, for the Lord's sake. Relations between the Ranee and me are peculiar. And one must be very cautious.”
¹²
He learned that he had failed to get his fellowship, though it was hinted that if he applied again his chances were good. Dr Craig had forbidden him mental work, but writing seemed to be the only occupation open to him. His thesis could be resubmitted without much revision, so he had no further need to grind away in libraries. If he stayed at home, his mother would prevent him doing anything, and would keep most of his friends away as well.

It was time for a break out, clearly; but Rupert was not really fit to be about on his own. He would need continuous help from his friends – for example, Jacques and Gwen: “I can't sleep. I'm leaving this Hell. I've got to defer the Deluge a month or two yet. I'm going – I don't know where – with J. Strachey for the weekend . . . I'm entirely depraved and extremely unpleasant – but can I sleep in your Studio? . . I'm much less bother than last time.”
¹³
Where he really wanted to go, it was becoming evident, was back to Noel. He told Ka that his love for Noel was “gone . . . swept away,” but Ka must have known him better than he knew himself. She could see that the woman who had not yielded to Rupert would always stand higher in his heart than the one who had:

I shall see her once – I'm so ashamed (she's, you'll understand,
good, fine, wonderful)
– before I leave England. And then, you see, I may not see her for years, or ever, again . . . I'm sick with a sort of fear, of seeing Noel. She – you don't know what she stands for – stood for to me – Do you I wonder understand about love, Ka? – it's rather a holy thing – I shall say (for a certain amount I
must
tell her) “I've taken away my love from you, Noel. I've given all my love to Ka. And she –” Perhaps Noel'll ask “what's she done with it?” (as one asks after a dog one sold last month) – I daren't look at her.
¹⁴

Rupert fled from his mother's house on Thursday, 28 March. He had dinner in London with James and Bryn, then went on to spend the night at Jacques's and Gwen's studio flat in Baron's Court. Rupert had decided
that it was time to take them into his confidence, and get them to share his obsession about Ka's flirtation with Henry: “I can't bear that I should go about knowing some things alone. Jacques and Gwen and Justin – I feel I
must
tell them the horror, the filthy filthy truth. It's unbearable, suffering alone. I want to see their pain – . . . And you – you'd see their faces – or be able to talk to them – people who
love you
– about things. Now, you see, it's so twisted. I'm the only decent person in 1912 you know – everyone else is in 1911.”
¹⁵
The next night Ka came to see them, and after she left Rupert told Jacques and Gwen the story of Lulworth and its aftermath. He told them, too, that he and Ka were going to Germany in a month as man and wife, and that he wanted to marry Ka but she wouldn't have him. Having got this off his chest, he left the next morning for a long weekend at Rye with James. What Rupert did not say, however, was that he and Ka had slept together at Munich. Jacques solemnly advised him that they would both see things more clearly when they were no longer virgins. Jacques and Gwen were inclined to see the whole affair as a bad case of premarital jitters, with one partner emotionally faithful and the other wavering. The reality, of course, was far more complex – and put Rupert in a much worse light.

As soon as Rupert was out of the way, Ka came over for a tête-à-tête with Gwen. Jacques claimed to be too ill to see her, but was in fact too angry. They both felt that Ka, after the fiasco of her broken romance with Jacques, had gone against the grain of her nature by plumping for female independence, free love, and the company of degenerate intellectuals. Gwen, especially, was now taking an unashamedly conventional line:

I think there's been too much nonsense about these Stracheys. Treating them as equals and all that. It's sentimental and encourages them. They
are
parasites you know, all of them . . . I for one am a clean Christian and they disgust me.

You seem to me to have absolutely no fineness of instinct about a certain goodness (there's no other word) which is essential. You have forgotten God. You think in your arrogance that you can manage your own life – But there is a humility more important than any intelligence. You have not the mind to govern your instincts – you are terribly muddled by education and talk . . .

PS
Why do all these people think that you are only good enough for a mistress and not to be married? You
are
you
are;
and to be loved all your life . . . Jacques says Rupert has wanted nothing in the world but to
marry
you, for ever so long.
¹⁶

Becoming a married woman had made Gwen much more outspoken – in fact, downright aggressive. Her stock of ideas was relatively small, but she made up for this by the ferocity with which she proclaimed them. She prescribed for Ka what had worked for herself: marriage, and large doses of hard work. Ka, in her state of willful self-assertion, was a loose cannon, dangerous to all her friends, and especially dangerous to Gwen, since who knew when she might again throw herself at Jacques? As a Darwin, Gwen demanded of Ka earnestness and sober commitment; as Jacques's wife, she condoned libertinism in the man but was appalled by it in the woman.

Jacques was less overbearing, but just as emotionally grievous. In the name of their love – which he claimed still continued – he asked Ka to reconsider her whole course of action since they broke up. Rupert truly loved her, Jacques believed, despite his current state of muddle and hysteria; but Ka's love for Henry was “not convincing, not inevitable.” Going to Germany was a dangerous half-measure. To escape disaster, they must take a single, bold stroke: “If I were Rupert I'd not have you for a month, for a mistress. It's but a sop to your conscience. It should be all or nothing. You give him all except the one thing he wants, which is your love . . . I think it's cowardly these reservations. Marry him first even if you must leave him afterwards one day. But these back-doors – that's not facing life.”
¹⁷

Both Gwen and Jacques were now unshakably convinced that their two friends belonged together. Years later, they were still waiting for Rupert to return and claim Ka's heart. When he died, much of the tragedy for them was that this reconciliation was now impossible. They kept making excuses for Rupert's erratic passions. In any case, they felt that only Ka could give him the ballast he needed. They viewed Bloomsbury as a rival and in many ways an enemy camp. Ka was too impressionable, anyway, to run in that company. She was not an intellectual nor sophisticated enough to treat sex as a game, as Gwen explained to Frances Cornford:

It was [Ka's] first going to Rupert at Munich that shocked me – not her going if she had admitted it was for love – but her going and saying “I don't love you – I nearly hate you, I love H.L., I came out of pity”; she did it out of a mixture of real and unadmitted love for R. and a sort of false intellectual vanity and desire for self abasement.

Rupert loved her then – if she had been honest then – if she had married him (then or within a month or 2 afterwards) – he would have loved and respected her always. It's an intellectual vanity – her actions have been instinctive all through – her words were simply rubbish. In this matter all through she has been simply pushed and driven by her sex. It was that pure and simple with H.L.
¹⁸

The Raverats' judgment of Ka may not have been fair, but what mattered was that she herself was coming to agree with it. Her wide-eyed devotion was bound to irritate anyone so restless and cynical as Henry. He was starting to complain about her to his intimates and she must have sensed his dissatisfaction. Ka was becoming more receptive to Rupert's protestations of love, and more inclined to believe that marriage would pull them out of their emotional swamp. Unfortunately, any real move towards marriage was guaranteed to make Rupert shy away from her, though neither she nor the Raverats understood this feature of his emotional makeup.