Fatal Glamour (8 page)

Justin's life and character fell under the long shadow of his father. Arthur Brooke had the characteristic stubbornness and emotional incompetence of the Victorian self-made man. He forced Justin to give up his natural left-handedness when he was small. When Justin decided that he
wanted to become a schoolteacher, like Badley, his father scotched that ambition too. Justin's two older brothers had gone directly from school into the family firm; Justin, his father decided, could best serve the enterprise by qualifying as a lawyer. He duly went to Emmanuel in 1904 but took a backhanded revenge on his father by devoting most of his time and energy to the theatre. Through Justin, Rupert began a long but not very fruitful involvement with the theatre too. His looks got him onto the stage, but once there he didn't quite know what to do with himself.

Jacques Raverat's father Georges was also a successful businessman in Le Havre, with much other property scattered around, including a Paris apartment and two chateaux. He was a friend of the educationalist Edmond Demolins, who in 1897 had published
A quoi tient la superiorité des Anglo-saxons
?
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The Anglo-Saxons were a superior breed, he argued, who had started by dominating the Celts and the Normans, and were now on their way to dominating the entire planet. They were a thoroughbred race who deserved to rule over lesser breeds and mongrels. Not only that, the English educational system produced well-rounded individuals with energy and enterprise, whereas the French Lycée aimed at nothing more than producing successful bureaucrats. Demolins went to visit Cecil Reddie at Abbotsholme and J.H. Badley at Bedales, and sent his son to the latter. Georges Raverat did the same for Jacques. When Jacques was sixteen in 1901, he left Bedales to study mathematics at the University of Paris. But he was discontented there, and in 1906 he persuaded his father to send him to Cambridge.

Justin Brooke could hardly miss a new arrival at King's who was making a splash with his looks and neo-decadent style, and who had the same name as his elder brother. Obviously, this Rupert Brooke and Jacques should meet, since they were both poets (though Jacques destroyed his verses without letting anybody see them). Jacques's first impression was not favourable. Rupert struck him as an affected schoolboy aesthete. After a while, he realised that this was how Rupert coped with so much open-mouthed admiration of his good looks: “a childish beauty, undefined and fluid, as if his mother's milk were still in his cheeks . . . The forehead was very high and very pure, the chin and lips admirably moulded; the eyes were small, grey-blue and already veiled, mysterious and secret. His hair was too long, the colour of tarnished gold, and parted in the middle; it kept falling in his face and he threw it back with a movement of his head.”
²

Jacques, Justin, and Rupert were soon talking from breakfast to midnight of poetry, art, sex, suicide; laughing at “the ridiculous superstitions about God and Religion; the absurd prejudices of patriotism and decency; the grotesque encumbrances called parents.”
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On 23 November, Jacques's mother committed suicide and he returned to France. He came back to Emmanuel in January, and he and Rupert would become the closest of friends. Rupert and Justin were never as intimate, though Justin remained at Cambridge and brought Rupert into a long series of theatrical projects. Jacques and Justin also made Rupert aware of what Bedales stood for, as an altogether different kind of school from Rugby. This connection became a vital one two years later, when Noel Olivier became a student there.

Justin had been taught by Badley that the spoken word had more life in it than the written one. He was a star actor at Bedales, and soon became a mainstay of the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club, specialising in leading ladies since female students were forbidden to act alongside men. His neat, birdlike features and twenty-two-inch waist made him a natural ingénue. Not surprisingly, his looks appealed strongly to his own sex, though he chose not to return the interest. So far as Jacques was concerned, Justin did not return anyone's interest. Justin once admitted that he didn't understand what friendship was, and had never been sorry to say goodbye to anyone. He was, Jacques felt, “incapable of passion, or even of deep affection. Nonetheless, we were very good friends on these terms and even, strangely enough, quite intimate.”
⁴

For Justin's production of Aeschylus'
Eumenides
in November 1906, Rupert was cast as the Herald. All he had to do was stand downstage looking pretty and pretend to blow his trumpet at the right moment. Rupert tried to make a joke of the adulation he provoked in the audience, but he was all too serious when he confided to Geoffrey Keynes his plans for getting ahead in Cambridge society: “I shall be rather witty and rather clever and I shall spend my time pretending to admire what I think it humorous or impressive in me to admire. Even more than yourself I shall attempt to be ‘all things to all men'; rather ‘cultured' among the cultured, faintly athletic among athletes, a little blasphemous among blasphemers, slightly insincere to myself. However, there are advantages in being a hypocrite, aren't there?”
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Rupert's posing and playacting came from the strange circumstances under which he had grown up, and from his awareness that other people
had become abnormally conscious of him. Because of his good looks he was flattered, sought out by both sexes, constantly noticed. Beauty meant being at other people's disposal, reflecting back to them whatever they wanted to see in him. He was forced into being secretive, even sly, because he was always juggling claims that had to be kept separate. Having dazzled some gathering, he would disappear down a rabbit hole and pop up at a different occasion. He ended up living “many subterranean lives,” and taking a positive pleasure in being at the centre of a web of deceit.
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Beauty also threatened Rupert's sexual identity: because his looks appealed equally to both sexes, he was left feeling confused and angry about roles that were imposed on him from without. Rupert's puritanical mother had deeply inhibited his sexual responses. By and large, he was not flirtatious. He held conventional ideas about sexual etiquette and would lash out against those whom he felt were pursuing him – especially if they were women, who seemed to him to be betraying their honour by taking the sexual initiative.

Jacques had been obliged to abandon his studies at Easter 1907. He would feel deathly ill for no good reason, then suddenly feel better. The doctors could not even decide whether it was his body or his mind that was sick. He had always been prickly and temperamental – a “Volatile Frog,” Virginia Woolf would call him – but now his moods were more extreme and he often found it a strain to be in company. No one at all realised that he was already in the grip of a progressive and incurable disease. Jacques's father took him back to France to recuperate, and by December he seemed well enough to join Rupert and his younger brother, Alfred, for a winter sports holiday at Andermatt in the Bernese Ober-land. But he suffered a “maniacal episode” on the train to Andermatt, and soon had to be removed from the hotel to a nearby sanatorium.
⁷
It is now recognised that acute hysteria in someone of Jacques's age, and with no history of mental illness, may signal the onset of multiple sclerosis. This was indeed his unhappy fate. But the disease was not diagnosed for another seven years, and in the meantime he was treated as if he was simply nervous and neurotic. Everyone sensed that he was ill; no one, least of all Jacques himself, could do much to help it.

Andermatt was part of the latest undergraduate craze: to spend Christmas skiing and tobogganing in the Alps. You could enjoy a fortnight's holiday – including train, hotel, and enormous meals – for about a pound a day. About half of Rupert's party were girls, many of them from the cloistered precincts of Newnham. At Cambridge it was forbidden for a male undergraduate even to go for a walk with a girl from Newnham or Girton. The skiers were strictly chaperoned, of course, by Mrs Leon, mother of the Newnhamite Marjorie Leon. Even so, Andermatt was a crucial step for Rupert out of the predominantly male world he had grown up in. Before going, he told his cousin Erica that the group would be “Mostly young, heady, strange, Females. I am terrified.” When he got there he reported that they were not so terrible as he had feared: “Several are no duller to talk to than males.”
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Behind the facetiousness lay a revelation: of the appeal of mixed company, and of one young woman in particular, Brynhild Olivier. This was Rupert's introduction to the four Olivier sisters, who would play havoc with his feelings, and draw out his poetic talent, for at least the next five years. Without their influence he might have remained little more than a conventional public school boy and minor Apostle. In the company of the Oliviers, he became a changed man; though, to his cost, he never succeeded in changing them.

Bryn, as everyone called her, was not a Cambridge student. She was brought by her older sister Margery, a leader of the Cambridge Fabians. Margery had been put in charge of her three younger sisters (the other two were Daphne and Noel) when their father, Sir Sydney Olivier, left England to become governor general of Jamaica in April 1907 and took Lady Olivier with him. Bryn, just two months older than Rupert, had been named after the wise queen in William Morris's
Sigurd the Volsung
. Her parents had many ties with the Morris and Edward Carpenter circles, and Sir Sydney had been one of the first Fabians (he and his friend Sidney Webb signed up in 1885). The Oliviers were founding members of the “aristocracy of the left” that had developed around the Fabian Society. The Webbs and the Shaws were childless, but families like the Oliviers, the Blands, the Peases, and the Reeves had produced a clutch of progressively raised children who had grown up with the Society and were now young adults. The four Olivier sisters were all handsome and made an overwhelming impression when seen arriving as a party, even more when accompanied by their equally striking parents. Their cousin
Laurence would become the most handsome and eminent of them all, though in 1907 he had only just been born. Of the sisters, Bryn stood out as the true beauty, with her father's riveting good looks. “Most fetching,” was one contemporary's verdict, “sweet, charming, gay. Very pale amber eyes.”
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Rupert had met someone who could snap up every glance in the room as effortlessly as himself.

The natural thing to do in the evenings, in those days, was to put on a play – and what could be better than
The Importance of Being Earnest
? As the obvious belles of the company, Rupert would be Algernon and Bryn, Cecily. To play the lover both in jest and in earnest was enough to sweep Rupert off his feet. “There is One! . . . oh there is One,” he told his cousin Erica, “aged twenty, very beautiful & nice & everything . . . My pen is dragging at its bit to run away with me about her. I adore her, for a week.”
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It was characteristic of Rupert to wonder whether he was experiencing his first love for a woman, or just playing the part expected of him in a holiday romance. What kept the affair within bounds was Bryn's ability to play the game without any risk of losing her head. She already had enough admirers to know how to take their measure; also, she was shortly to go back to Jamaica with her parents, where she stayed for most of 1908. Even if Bryn had been more pliant, a real love affair was not thinkable at Andermatt. The young ladies still wore long skirts to go skiing. They were not expected, nor did they expect themselves, to go to bed with anyone before marriage. If they should break this rule, the current state of contraception put them desperately at risk of scandal.

Groups like the skiers at Andermatt had scarcely existed before the Edwardian years. In Victorian times, propriety, and lack of an independent income, made it almost impossible for such mixed groups of middle-class youths to go on extended outings together. When they first appeared, around the turn of the century, their members still believed that the period between adolescence and marriage should be a sexual moratorium. Love could more easily spread among a cluster of friends, instead of being saved for the narrower pleasures of the couple. The wheel of sexual choice had begun to spin, but all had agreed to wait a few years before cashing in their stake. Too much sexual commitment could be the enemy of friendship. Prolonged courtship created the group, and the end of courtship would eventually destroy it.

Four months after Andermatt, on 10 May 1908, the Cambridge Fabians gave a dinner in honour of Sir Sydney Olivier, who was on a brief visit home from Jamaica. It was a “socialist meal” of one course followed by fruit, served to twenty-five people in Ben Keeling's rooms. Three of Olivier's daughters were in Cambridge for the dinner in their father's honour. Rupert already knew Margery, but it was his first meeting with Daphne and Noel, who had come back to England with their parents after several months in Jamaica. Rupert found himself opposite Noel at dinner. She was barely fifteen, and her contribution to the dinner party was to look shy and break a coffee cup. Despite Noel's awkwardness – perhaps because of it – Rupert was immediately stricken. For Bryn he had felt infatuation; for her younger sister, he developed a more serious and sustained passion. It was his first heterosexual love, but it followed the pattern of what he had felt for Michael Sadler, Charles Lascelles, and Denham Russell-Smith. All were younger than Rupert, so that he could feel in control; all were emotionally evasive, so that the relationship would not easily develop into a physical expression that might then burn itself out.

David (“Bunny”) Garnett saw Noel Olivier as a figure out of a George Meredith poem, like “Earth's Preference” (for the young over the old), “Daphne,” or “The Woods of Westermain.” Meredith's woods are full of dryads, mysterious girls who outrun the young men who seek them out. He lived at Box Hill, not far from the new forest suburb of Limpsfield Chart, in the Surrey downs. Sydney and Margaret Olivier had moved there with their daughters in 1895, into a converted double cottage called the Champions. Sir Sydney (as he became in 1907) was a man of commanding presence – handsome, athletic, and formidably intelligent. He had decided that the best way to put his Fabian principles into practice was to work within the Colonial Office for a more humane administration of the British Empire. His only weak point was his inability to put himself in the place of his less gifted fellows. “He was a law unto himself,” Bernard Shaw observed, “and never dreamed of considering other people's feelings, nor could conceive their sensitiveness on points that were to him trivial.”
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