Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  Thea was having a doubly hard time: not only did she have to contend with grief over her mother’s death, but she felt it incumbent upon herself to hold the family together. In term-time, Thea lived in Oxford, but in the vacations felt she had to be in London to make a home for her father and two brothers. She felt torn, telling Bunny that she lived at home ‘because I love them there & I know they need me – so I say, “I must live their life if I really want to do my bit well, as long as I am here”. And the things I alone love are consequently made to suffer & wait until I am free. I am trying to live two ways at once.’17

  When Thea went to The Cearne she expected to find only the reassuring presence of Constance. Bunny knew Thea would be there that weekend, and told himself to avoid ‘entanglements’. But when he arrived, Thea’s glance of ‘radiant happiness’ was all the encouragement he needed. He soon forgot his resolutions, gladly accepting her invitations to bed on both nights. Thea told Bunny she was in love with him. ‘I don’t know if she is’, he mused, ‘but anyhow I feel as if I had done some good in my life, as I have cheered her up & made her happy.’18 Early in the morning, hearing Constance’s gasp of surprise on seeing his empty bedroom, Bunny rushed up to the attic, from whence he nonchalantly emerged pretending he had been collecting apples. (In his autobiography he emerges from the attic clutching a copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.) Afterwards, Thea wrote telling Bunny what a comfort he had been to her.

  Back at Taviton Street, Ray had changed her mind about Bunny and they were again on good terms. He knew he was in love with her, but wondered how long this could continue without sex. For the time being, however, he had an arrangement with Thea who decided ‘to have a perfectly settled sort of relation with me – that of seeing me once a fortnight or once a month & of going to bed with me after having dinner & a bottle of wine’. For Bunny, with his need for diversion and variety, this might have been ideal but he had had enough of chasing rainbows and wanted ‘someone who loves me & whom I love’. When Ray invited him to Tweenways to meet her family, he accepted, but not before warning himself to ‘take care not to marry her before I am absolutely certain’.19

  Bunny rehearsed his feelings in a letter to Ray – feelings so convoluted that they appear contradictory. ‘There are some people’, he wrote, ‘whom the more one sees & lives with the more precious they become […]. Others one loves and when one has been with them for some time one feels that they are not for oneself.’ ‘How can I tell’, he asked, ‘which you are?’ He added: ‘I shall never be indifferent to whether I hurt you & shall never hurt you on purpose though I shall by being myself, but I cannot help that.’20 He knew he was an unlikely candidate for exclusivity, but had the comforting certainty that if he strayed, it would all be down to his genes. It was a handy evolutionary get-out clause.

  Both Bunny and Ray were aware of the importance of that weekend. Would it mark a turning point, in which their love for each other strengthened, or would it have the opposite effect? According to Bunny’s diary, they had a long walk together followed by a picnic on a damp hillside. But there, frustratingly, the entry ends. On the next page, Bunny is back at Taviton Street and in the arms not of Ray, but Thea.

  This was very much the pattern of Bunny’s life in the last months of 1920. One evening he would be with Thea, another with Ray. Sometimes he saw Betty May, who told him her latest husband had left, that she had been married twice previously and had no money. Bunny gave her £5, borrowed from the shop till. He continued to see his Bloomsbury friends, spending a late night with Lytton at Taviton Street, and an even later one with Duncan at Gordon Square. Meanwhile Ray returned to Tweenways where her father was dying. She wrote to Bunny, telling him she wished he was with her: ‘Different as we are I think there are a lot of things we might enjoy together if the barriers were broken down. There is no use in being afraid of me now.’ ‘If you’re going to hurt me’, she added, ‘you’re going to hurt me – as you would say.’21 Although he confided his feelings for Ray to Lytton Strachey, Bunny largely kept her apart from his Bloomsbury friends. When he and Frankie threw a party at the bookshop attended by most of Bloomsbury, Carrington could only report vaguely to Lytton that they were joined by ‘a young lady of Bunny’s from the floor above’.22

  By February 1921 Bunny’s relationship with Ray had become sexual and Ray informed Bunny she wanted to have a child by him. Bunny told Constance: ‘I get on with Ray better than I have with any woman for some time, and as she is in love with me & I with her we are very happy.’ ‘I daresay’, he said, ‘we shall get married though the less that is talked up the better.’ Mindful of Bloomsbury’s antipathy to marriage in general, and to marrying outside the fold in particular, he hoped the matter could be hushed. He informed Constance that he was ‘quite sure’ marriage would make him ‘happy for a time’, and that in any case ‘it is obviously worth it. If we get tired of each other we can drift apart & it will still have been an excellent thing, particularly if we had a child.’23 His attitude to marriage was hardly one of ‘till death do us part’.

  Nevertheless, on 31 March 1921 Bunny and Ray were married at the St Pancras Register Office, with Tatlock and Hey as witnesses. Given Bunny’s expressed ambivalence to marriage and that he felt destined to hurt Ray, why did he marry? There is no doubt he loved Ray, but on his terms and in his way. He loved her deep sensitivity to her surroundings and enjoyed her outbursts of high spirits. In contrast to Thea, who was emotionally fragile and often exhausted, Bunny admired Ray for her stamina and strength, telling Constance ‘she is physically sound, & never ill’. He also valued her talent as an artist and that she disdained to ‘change the plates or dust the mantelpiece every day’.24 A more pragmatic reason for their marriage might be inferred from a poem which Bunny wrote for Ray in celebration of their spring wedding. It concludes with the lines:

  These shiny bursting buds, drenched with showers

  And unexpected love for those forgotten flowers

  All this is spring

  And this the cause & the occasion of our marriage

  Men cannot celebrate it. It may be sacred

  Like loneliness men destroy it,

  Like flowers crush it with their boots

  But birds announce it, and lambing ewes

  The stirring in the hive,

  All things newborn, reborn, young, alive,

  Make marriage music, bring us wedding gifts.25

  Notwithstanding the pessimism at the heart of this verse, it celebrates the fecundity of spring, promising another kind of birth. Ray told Bunny she wanted a child by him, and he had intimated to Constance that marriage would be a good thing ‘particularly if we had a child’. Even a pronounced ‘individualist’ like Bunny knew of the enormous stigma attached to children born outside marriage and to unmarried mothers. Bunny had also lived at Charleston at the time of Vanessa’s pregnancy and knew the great joy which a baby can bring. It seems very likely that Ray was pregnant when they married on 31 March as she was visibly pregnant by early July. Perhaps pregnancy expedited marriage, but they were already committed to the idea of having children. Even Lytton had heard that Bunny and Ray intended to ‘have a very large family’.26 Ray was thirty in 1921, and for a woman of her generation this was a relatively advanced age to be embarking on a first pregnancy. Less than a month into the marriage, closing the stable door after the horse had bolted, Bunny informed Duncan he was ‘thinking of beginning a family at any moment’.27

  Bunny thought Edward the only person who approved of the marriage, ‘and realised almost from the first that I had made a wise choice and been very lucky’. Constance was less easily won over: Bunny believed she would have preferred him to marry someone she already knew, perhaps Thea.28 Although Constance soon became fond of Ray, Bunny’s Bloomsbury friends were aghast at the marriage, which, according to Lytton ‘raised a universal howl of execration’ in Bloomsbury.29 Frankie Birrell was ‘distinctly cut up about it’, and Carrington thought Bunny was losing his eyesight ‘as well as
his wits’.30

  Duncan was furious. He wrote reproaching Bunny for not consulting his friends and for his selfishness in failing to take into account how they would feel. ‘It is a ridiculous argument’, Duncan stated,

  that there is no difference between a liaison & a legal marriage. A liaison is a relation between 2 individuals with no contracts & no reality in the eyes of the world. A legal marriage is at once a reality in the eyes of the world of the most odious sort […]. Also it apparently entails living together which makes it very difficult for your friends to forget that when they want to see you or ask you out there is somebody else who considers herself with superior claims left alone.31

  Duncan still felt entitled to ‘claims’ upon Bunny, but he also worried about the extent to which his relationship with Bunny was known to Ray. He told Bunny, ‘my happiness depends on something you can give me. But it must be alive & not dead.’32 Duncan managed to contain his anger sufficiently to paint Ray’s portrait as a wedding present, although he commented dismissively that Ray ‘sits like a cream cheese on a plate’.33

  It would be some time before Bunny and Ray had a permanent home in which to display Duncan’s portrait. The newly-weds moved from Taviton Street to Wells Street, just off Goodge Street, where they took two small rooms overlooking a cemetery. But Ray spent little time there, embarking on a protracted period in the countryside for the sake of her health and that of her unborn baby, as influenza remained rife after the epidemic of 1918. And so Ray adopted a nomadic existence, travelling between relatives and joined by Bunny at weekends. In some ways this suited them both. It obviously appealed to Bunny given his need for variety and diversion. As for Ray, as Bunny explained, ‘Ray was a woodland creature. She wanted the protection and shelter that woods gave, and among the beeches and the pines I saw her as I never could see her in London.’34

  Ray spent most of July with her sister Judy and brother-in-law Dick Rendel who were staying at Warbarrow Bay, near Lulworth Cove, in Dorset. There Ray, now visibly pregnant, felt self-conscious bathing before the young men on the beach. Bunny worried she might slip on the rocks or catch a chill, and warned her to avoid sailing at all costs. Ray revelled in her pregnancy, excited every time she felt the baby move, perceiving something ‘so alive’ within her. Bunny rehearsed names for the baby on the back of an envelope, scribbling: ‘Richard Duncan Sable Garnett is fixed.’35

  Bunny was busy in the shop, but he and Duncan often spent evenings together at the cinema or ballet. Bunny was also sitting to Duncan for his portrait and posing as a sailor for one of Duncan’s Bankside paintings. Despite his marriage, Bunny couldn’t let go of Duncan, still feeling he loved him ‘more than anyone in the world’.36 Ray’s absence, therefore, gave Bunny the opportunity to enjoy the best of two possible worlds.

  Exiled in the country, Ray lived for Bunny’s letters and for his irregular weekend visits. Her return to London depended on her mother providing a comfortable base, but having sold Tweenways, Mam was still house-hunting. In October she eventually took possession of number 27 Brunswick Square, in the heart of Bloomsbury. Even so, it would be some time before the house was ready as various improvements were required. Mam proposed to run it on communal lines, with bed-sitting rooms for her unmarried daughters Frances and Eleanor; Bunny and Ray’s quarters would comprise a large ground-floor sitting room and a bedroom on the second floor.

  As the birth approached, Ray became fearful. She experienced ‘distinctly swelling movements’ one afternoon, which she felt sure were ‘the last dying movements’ of her unborn child. ‘But’, she reassured Bunny, ‘I have done nothing violent & feel very well’.37 As the days passed, she became progressively alarmed, for the baby’s movements seemed to diminish. In October, Bunny received a frantic letter from her:

  I have to see another doctor. Dr Rooke thinks its all wrong – that the baby is dead. She is not sure – & anyway would want a second opinion. She has sent me to Dr Fairburn, 40 Wimpole St – 5.30. If it is so, I shall have to go into a nursing home almost at once – they do something to bring on the labour – When I recover everything is as before. If you can do come to Wimpole St […]. I long to see you.38

  Bunny accompanied Ray to the consultant, who informed them that they might have to wait as long as a fortnight before knowing for certain whether the baby was dead. To compound matters, Bunny had vacated their rooms at Wells Street that very morning. As Brunswick Square was not ready, Duncan had lent Bunny his studio and Ray was to have gone to stay with Constance at The Cearne. They went instead to Pond Place where they stayed overnight. The next morning, still homeless, and with no anticipation of a happy event, Ray entered the nursing home, Number One Nottingham Place. ‘She is suffering from shock a good deal’, Bunny informed Edward.39

  Bunny was also in shock. Having dashed off a letter to Constance, apprising her of the bare bones of the situation, that evening he sent her a more optimistic letter. Ray had experienced pains during the night and Bunny dared to hope this might signify the child was alive. ‘It is a great blessing’, Bunny wrote, ‘that when people are tired they can’t feel, & that when they are in physical pain they feel only that’; as ever protective of Constance, he added: ‘you needn’t think I am suffering […]. It has been a great shock to Ray, but it will soon be over I suppose.’40

  Bunny’s hopes were unfounded. The child had been dead for about two weeks.41 The cause of the stillbirth is not recorded. Modern antenatal care was in its infancy and foetal monitoring minimal. Ray did not seem to have been affected by placental abruption, the most frequent cause of stillbirth, as she did not experience the symptoms of searing pain or internal bleeding. Neither did she develop pre-eclampsia or eclampsia. For one third of stillbirths, then as now, there was no identifiable cause. In the 1920s there was no bereavement counselling, no funeral for stillborns, nothing to mark the passage from life to death. It was not something people discussed.

  Ray remained in the nursing home for two weeks. Bunny visited every afternoon, reading to her from Robinson Crusoe. He still felt numb: ‘I can’t go into the question of feelings’, he told Constance, ‘except to say that I think the war took my feelings out of me […]. I can’t feel anything acutely for more than four or five days. Ray I’m afraid can.’42 With the move to Brunswick Square still delayed, Bunny rented rooms at Caroline Place. There he installed the Marshalls’ old nursemaid, Nan Croucher, to care for Ray on her return. But when Bunny did finally move into Brunswick Square, he did so alone. Ray was on the move again, recuperating with Judy and Dick Rendel.

  With Ray away, Bunny turned his attention to the shop, which had cash-flow problems, partly because the proprietors were inclined to offer customers extensive and informal periods of credit. In November 1921 Siegfried Sassoon alone owed £75: an immense sum. Lytton thought the shop ‘a queer business’, commenting ‘somehow it subsists, though how one hardly knows, considering the extreme dreaminess of the shopmen’.43 Bunny and Frankie had anyway become rather bored with the business. They considered selling the stock to Bumpus, the booksellers of Oxford Street, and working as employees there. This idea was abandoned in favour of taking on a third partner who would bring fresh capital. In early 1922 they were joined by Ralph Wright, whom they had met when he worked at the Central Library for Students. Bunny described Wright as ‘a rather short man, whose head of glossy black hair, brushed straight back’ resembled ‘a seal’s head, emerging from the water’.44 He was sympathetic, sensitive and warm, and particularly well-versed in French and English literature, which endeared him to the two original partners. But his chief qualifications were a love of reading and flair for conversation, both prerequisites at Birrell & Garnett.

  Bunny missed Ray, telling her how unhappy he felt in her absence. She missed him too: ‘just when I’m in the mood for you[,] you lovely man, you bending bough, you star’. ‘I may not want you on Saturday’, she added, ‘Then it’ll be kiss me my love – God be wi’ you & I must be going in the morning’.45 Bunny still sa
w something of Thea. In November she wrote inviting him ‘to eat somewhere first & then we will see’, carefully directing the letter to the bookshop and not to Brunswick Square.46 But by early 1922 Ray felt completely well, and was, at last, living with Bunny there. With a permanent base, Bunny could revive the Caroline Club, and once again enjoy convivial play readings. Ray’s sister, Frances Marshall, the new assistant at Birrell & Garnett, was roped in too, but Ray would not take part, preferring to listen from the side-lines. It was not long, however, before her perambulations resumed: in April she learned she was pregnant. Once again Ray departed for the country, where in July she returned to Judy and Dick Rendel. Experiencing déjà vu, she told Bunny, ‘This place reminds me of this time last year’.47

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Perhaps the saving grace of man is to be an adjunct to a work of art.’1

  Bunny was researching foxes, reading about their habits, visiting the zoo and sites where there were dens. This interest arose because Ray had inspired him to write a story. They had been staying at The Cearne, where one day Bunny took Ray to the High Chart where he was convinced there were fox cubs. Finding there were none, Bunny turned to Ray, commenting “There’s no hope of seeing a fox – unless you were suddenly to turn into one”. He teasingly told her ‘how like she was to a wild animal, and how easily my intense love for her would overcome the trifling difficulties that would arise if she actually were transformed into one’.2 Bunny turned these whimsical musings into a synopsis for a book, which he entitled ‘The Metamorphosis of Mrs Tebrick’. He would write the text, but Ray’s illustrations would be integral.