Fatal Glamour (38 page)

Fair enough, but there were two things Cathleen did not know. One was that saying “wait until we are married” allowed Rupert to hide how fearful he was about getting married at all. He would reveal this to his male confidants like Eddie or Jacques, but there is no record of his telling Cathleen herself. His other evasion was about his habit of separating love from lust. When away from her, he campaigned relentlessly to get Elisabeth van Rysselberghe or Phyllis Gardner into his bed. Paying that debt to lust made possible his ethereal love for Cathleen. In a hyacinth wood, he told her that they were experiencing what Donne had described in “The Ecstasy”:

Our souls (which to advance their state,

Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,

We like sepulchral statues lay;

All day, the same our postures were,

And we said nothing, all the day.

Cathleen wrote later that she wanted a lover who would “caress her soul” rather than her body. She seems to have remained a virgin until she married, in her early thirties.
⁴⁸
Rupert could restrain himself too, but only when he was with her. His affair with Phyllis was coming to a point of decision. She was beginning to scent danger in Rupert's friends: “he had been drawn into a vortex of would-be original people, who to satisfy their own base natures had made inconstancy a principle.”
⁴⁹
Her knowledge of these people was limited because Rupert had sealed her off from any contact with them. The Cornfords were the opposite of inconstant, nor were the Neo-pagans base. Rupert must have told Phyllis something about the Henry Lamb/Strachey/Keynes vortex, but he was in the process of escaping from it. He did not need instruction in how to be inconstant – and also how to keep Phyllis in the dark about Elisabeth and Cathleen. But his was the inconstancy of a fractured self, quite different from the avant-garde promiscuity of Bloomsbury.

What Phyllis wanted was constancy in legal form. No woman was going to put salt on Rupert's tail there, so a crisis was not long in coming. The occasion was another session of exploration at Eddie's:

“I must have you
here
,” he said, laying a hand over what is delicately referred to by artists as “the central point of the figure.”

“Yes – sometime,” I said.

Impatient with any delay, Rupert took to addressing Phyllis as “a rotten female.” “All women are beasts!” he announced, “and they want a vote – but they'll never get it!”
⁵⁰
What Rupert wanted was “the central point of the figure”; but would he ever get it? He asked Phyllis to go away with him for a weekend, but upset her by trying to explain about contraception, to which she replied, “I don't see how any female who isn't a beast can consent to the thing which you asked me to consent to: practically the murder of her possible offspring . . . But if going on seeing you means that: intercourse without result – I do definitely refuse it. Why don't you want me enough to do so much as consider the possibility of marrying me?”
⁵¹
If Rupert was going to marry anyone at this point, it would be Cathleen. But he said nothing to Phyllis of her rival; instead, he treated her to a philosophical disquisition on the “two ways of living: the normal and the wandering.”
⁵²
Since his was the wandering way, it was useless for Phyllis to expect commitment from him. They should take their pleasure, then wander off in different directions.

Phyllis did neither: she went home to Tadworth at the beginning of March with a nervous breakdown. Rupert went to Rugby with the flu. Phyllis's mother fired off angry letters to him about his caddish behaviour, which convinced him that leaving the country was the best way of dealing with female beasts of various sorts. An angry mother was especially fearsome; hopefully her arm would not reach as far as California. “I'd better go, you know,” he told Ka on 7 March, “I'm not doing anyone any good here, myself nor nobody.”
⁵³
In fact he was doing harm, to at least two young women. Getting the news of his fellowship success, a day later, did nothing to change his mind. It gave him a welcome £120 per year, and King's did not require anything in return for the money. Instead of taking up rooms in college in October, California was where he would be. It would take him nearly three months to actually get on the ship, but there was no tie strong enough to keep him in England.
Cathleen, lovely as she was, belonged in that “not enough” category. To convince himself of this Rupert wrote a cynical little poem, “The Young Man in April”:

In the queer light, in twilight,

In April of the year,

I meet a thousand women,

But I never meet my Dear.

If he did not meet his Dear, it was not for want of trying by Eddie. On 11 March he gave a dinner to celebrate Rupert's fellowship. W.B. Yeats was the guest of honour, but Eddie also invited three new ladies (and no Cathleen). Lady Cynthia Asquith was married to the prime minister's son Herbert, and Clementine Churchill was married to Winston. The third lady was Violet Asquith, the prime minister's daughter by his first marriage. She was good-looking, literary, highly strung, and the same age as Rupert. She had carried a torch for Winston and may have attempted suicide when he became engaged to Clementine. Since she was the only single woman there, Eddie may have marked her as a good match for Rupert. They did become close, but if there were romantic feelings they were only on Violet's side, and she remains one of the might-have-beens in Rupert's life. The Asquiths were not an aristocratic family, so he would not have been jumping too many rungs of the ladder in marrying one of them. Eddie's plan succeeded to the extent that Rupert and Violet became friends, and Violet probably would have liked them to be more than that. But Rupert had his hands full elsewhere. A month later she invited him to her birthday dinner at 10 Downing Street, where the other guests included George Bernard Shaw, Edmund Gosse, J.M. Barrie, and John Masefield. Violet liked to have writers and artists around her, though Rupert was the only one who was young, handsome and single.

In early April, Rupert's status as a celebrity was recognised by an invitation to have his picture taken by the American photographer Sherrill Schell.
⁵⁴
His casual clothes, and the informal setting of Schell's Pimlico flat, made for a new style of portraiture. In time, the pictures would do as much as the poetry for Rupert's romantic image. He tried to laugh off the results, especially the profile shot for which he had stripped to the waist: “very shadowy and ethereal and poetic, of me in profile, and naked-shouldered. Eddie says it's very good. I think it's
rather silly.” Rupert sent these comments from a stately home at East Knowle where he and Eddie were staying with George Wyndham, Lady Cynthia Asquith's uncle.
⁵⁵

On 10 February Rupert had lunch with Hugh Russell-Smith, Geoffrey Marchand, and their fiancées.
⁵⁶
Marchand was a former president of the Cambridge Liberal Society. It was a reminder that when marriage began, friendships were likely to end. Russell-Smith had been Rupert's closest chum in Rugby days; his brother Denham, dead for seven months, had been more than that. Hugh had been a visitor at Harvard and was getting ahead in his academic career at St John's, his old college. His career would be cut short on the Somme in July 1916.

In mid-April Rupert moved temporarily to Albert Rothenstein's studio flat at 5 Thurloe Square, behind the South Kensington Tube station. Though he would sneer at him behind his back, Rupert kept Rothenstein as his token Jewish friend. He was, after all, an artist rather than a financier.
⁵⁷
Possession of the studio would make it possible for young ladies to visit privately, and even spend the night. But the field was dwindling. Cathleen was away on tour, and in any case not a candidate for sex. The friendship with Violet Asquith was flourishing, but had not ripened into an affair. Phyllis Gardner was secluded with her mother at Tadworth. That left Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, and Rupert kept up his siege during April and May. “I want more,” he told her, “I want to ‘complete' our memories.”
⁵⁸
But that was not what Elisabeth wanted. She had been shocked and hurt by Rupert's behaviour when they went away to Devon. Probably that resembled what had happened with Phyllis – that Rupert had attempted intercourse, but had not managed to complete it. Elisabeth may have loved Rupert, but she wanted true love and marriage in return. Once he was at sea, at the end of May, Rupert explained why she was not going to get it from him:

I'm in love, in different ways, with two or three people. I always am. You probably know this. I'm not married to anybody, nor likely to be. A year and a bit ago I was violently in love with somebody who treated me badly. The story is a bloody one: and doesn't matter. Only, it left me for a time rather incapable of loving anybody.

As for you, child: I have two feelings about you now, which alternate and mix and make confusion. I like to be with you . . . But
quite apart (in origin) from all that, you – move me to passion . . . The fire in you lights the fire in me – and I'm not wholly responsible. Only, my dear, that's all there is: those two things. I don't want to marry you. I'm not in love with you in that way.
⁵⁹

He would like to live with her sometime for half a year, Rupert continued, so long as it was on his own terms. Meanwhile, he advised her to get over her love for him and become independent. “I have been so great a lover,” he would begin a poem, later; but the poem is about beloved things and sensations, rather than people. Rupert's letter to Elisabeth was belated, but at least it let
her
know where she stood.

The rest of May was taken up with the list of things to be done before Rupert sailed for New York. He had to spend time in Rugby, to placate his “bitter and enraged” mother.
⁶⁰
She was furious both that Rupert was leaving her alone, and not following in his father's footsteps by taking up his fellowship at King's. He could hardly explain that Phyllis Gardner's mother was even more bitter and enraged, which settled his internal argument about whether to stay or to go. In March he had told Gwen Raverat that he was torn between two passions: for “various women in London,” and for escape to the South Seas.
⁶¹
By the middle of April he had decided that he must leave the country for some time. One reason was to be away before Ka came back from Germany. But more pressing, surely, was a direct demand from Mrs Gardner that Phyllis's nervous state made it essential that he should go. This would be the context for the way Rupert broke the news to Cathleen: “I do love you so: and yet I'm going to leave England in May. I've got to go, for a bit. Because I promised. I got mixed up with a woman. Do you know how human beings tear each other? I've been so torn, and torn so. But everything's very complicated, and one day I'll explain, maybe.”
⁶²

The practical concern about travelling was eased by Naomi Royde-Smith's commission for a series of travel articles for the
Westminster Gazette
. Most of the payment was in the form of expenses, including return tickets by ship and train from London to California. Nonetheless, Rupert would come back from his travels with a substantial overdraft at his Rugby bank.
⁶³
Eddie Marsh left England before Rupert, on 9 May, to tour the Mediterranean with the Churchills and Asquiths. He held a farewell dinner for Rupert and Cathleen before going, also inviting two of her old flames, Gilbert Cannan and Harry Ainley. If this was designed
to extract a commitment from Rupert by making him jealous, it did not succeed. He was worried about how Cathleen might manage without him, but not worried enough to cancel his trip. The same went for Ka and Noel, exposed to the temptations of London. Ka was still in a bad way, he felt, and not getting better. He could only ask the Raverats and Cornfords to do their best: “I think the sooner she gets quite clear of me, the better. But I think the idea of ‘leaving her to work out her own fate' is silly. It doesn't apply to young women . . . Be gentle with her; remembering she's a feeble fool.”
⁶⁴
Noel had better defences, and the problem there was more on Rupert's side: how was he to cure himself of being dependent on her? She agreed to have dinner with him the night before he left, after he promised to keep himself under control: “I get along very well without you: and lead a fairly happy life. I have a dreadfully consistent and faithful disposition, I'm afraid; . . . However, as time goes on Love grows potential and not actual. A comfort. And I've succeeded in hardening my heart against you.”
⁶⁵

As usual, at dinner they could not articulate what had gone wrong. Rupert did achieve clarity in one quarter: he had been forbidden to write to Phyllis, but the day before he left England he told her mother that he was “sorry it has all been like this; and that you think me so disgusting. Goodbye.”
⁶⁶
The next day Denis Browne saw him off at Euston, and at Liverpool the
RMS
Cedric
was docked, ready to take him to New York.
⁶⁷

Rupert and Phyllis met again once, in October 1914, when he was in the Royal Naval Division and just back from Antwerp. They had lunch, with Phyllis's mother, at Gatti's in Covent Garden. By this time Mrs Gardner had transferred her lion hunting to Robert Frost, who became contemptuous of her ambitions – both poetic and social. Phyllis had become a devout Christian, and accepted Rupert's death with resignation. She never married, and devoted herself to breeding Irish wolfhounds. At her death in 1950 she left the records of her love for Rupert to the British Library, not to be opened until 2000.