Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  Angelica asked Bunny to take her to London Zoo, ‘I love it & would especially with you. Or let’s go to the seaside or ask me to come and spend a day at St Ives.’7 Instead, Bunny invited her to dine with him in London. She turned him down, as she had accepted Virginia Woolf’s invitation to the opera, and felt she could not refuse her aunt; ‘as I’m not so frightened of you’, she replied to Bunny, ‘can I dare ask you if another day would do[?]’8 Judging by Bunny’s pocket diary, it would seem they did not have their dinner, but instead Angelica went, with Duncan, to Hilton for the weekend of 11 and 12 December. Richard and William were at home. On the Sunday Bunny, Richard, William, Duncan and Angelica walked to a nearby village. The next day Bunny took Angelica and the boys to Cambridge to catch an early train to London, where Richard and William returned to school. What Ray did that weekend, or what she thought, is unrecorded.

  Bunny and Angelica were partly drawn together through shared grief. They had both suffered major bereavement in recent months. Bunny had lost his father and Tommy; Angelica had lost her adored brother; Julian had also been an important part of Bunny’s life for more than twenty years. From Angelica’s point of view, she had known Bunny since earliest childhood: he was familiar, trusted, part of the fabric of her family. She did not need to make the same effort as she would with someone new or her own age: the repertoire of jokes, teasing, mutual friends and shared history was already in place. Of course, Bunny could have tried more actively to discourage Angelica. He might have toned down his expressions of affection; he might have invited Duncan to Hilton alone; he might have stopped treating Angelica like the sophisticated young woman she wanted to be.

  But Bunny was flattered; he worried about aging: surely Angelica’s evident attraction to him was proof that he remained desirable? Moreover, Angelica was extremely beautiful. With her well-defined regular features, generous cupid-bow mouth, large grey eyes shaped like those of a classical sculpture and perfect amalgamation of Vanessa’s and Duncan’s best features, she was irresistible. It wasn’t only Angelica’s looks which appealed. She was intelligent, although her intelligence was formed more by the Bloomsbury love of good talk and intellectual discussion, than any more formal schooling. At school she had been allowed to drop subjects which failed to interest her, so her education was largely restricted to art, English literature, music and French in which she was already well versed.

  Bunny did not set out to find himself a young girl. He was not a lascivious or predatory older man, but Angelica’s youthful exuberance was appealing. Youth promised health and vigour, the very attributes which were diminished in Ray. For the last two years Bunny’s relationship with Ray had been compromised by the uncertainties of her health. She could no longer perform some physical activities, like rowing, as the radium treatment had weakened the muscles in her right arm, and her pectoral muscles had also weakened following her mastectomy. But it was not only the physical effects of her cancer which were corrosive: the psychological aspects of the disease, the ever present fear of its return, remained unspoken between Bunny and Ray. As he later wrote in his autobiography: ‘all the time the fear was there in both of us and just as the diseased cells crept slowly back and multiplied after being checked by radiation or carved out by the knife, so fear grew in her and terrified her’.9

  Angelica was like a fresh canvas: there was no history of deceit, no unhealed wounds and no recriminations. It was the freshness of her untroubled life which appealed, a freshness which momentarily seemed to blow all his cares away. Although their relationship had been conducted largely by correspondence, in February 1938 Bunny suggested to Angelica that ‘we might get in the habit of meeting when we’re in London’.10

  Bunny asked Duncan how he would feel if he (Bunny) ‘became too fond of Angelica’. Duncan reflected that

  Nessa & I had often remarked about A’s affection for Bunny & we had even joked to A about her frequent letters from Bunny, I took the whole matter as rather a joke & it was not until Nessa asked me if I thought there was anything serious in A’s feelings (& remarked how she refused to read Bunny’s letter when it arrived till after breakfast which she thought indicative of a certain excitement & anticipation) that I began to consider the whole thing seriously.11

  While Duncan pondered whether it might be better if Angelica fell in love with someone her own age, Vanessa seemed more sanguine. In typical Bloomsbury fashion she was content to keep everything circulating within the Bloomsbury family, remarking to Duncan ‘that in any case A must fall in love with someone very soon & that perhaps Bunny was not a bad person to start on.’ A few days later Vanessa had evidently thought more upon the matter, because in an unusually Victorian manner she told Duncan to ask Bunny about ‘his intentions’. And so Duncan trumped Bunny’s question with another: ‘By the way what are your intentions regarding my daughter?’ He used the word ‘intentions’ wryly, amused by its old-fashioned tone.

  Bunny countered prickly by demanding what Duncan had meant by using the word ‘intentions’. Annoyed by Bunny’s ‘excessively emotional condition’, Duncan became angry. In turn, Bunny accused him of behaving like a Victorian father which made Duncan more enraged. Duncan reflected that the episode had given rise to ‘all sorts of unnecessary emotions’, asking himself, in his diary, whether he was jealous, but failing to mention of whom. They had fallen into that same pattern of behaviour which had proved so destructive at Charleston during the Great War. Duncan worried about the ‘uncontrolled self ignorance of B when he falls in love’.12 It was a difficult situation: for Duncan knew Bunny all too well in the very way he feared Angelica might come to know him, too.

  Bunny immediately wrote to Vanessa, telling her about his talk with Duncan. ‘My love for Angelica’, he explained, ‘is made up of every sort of love; it is mixed up with my love of you & Duncan & the past; but it is extremely strong & sincere & I think unselfish as far as love can be unselfish.’ But he made clear that he had scruples and that he and Angelica were not lovers: ‘If she were five years older, or had had a love affair, we should almost certainly have been lovers long ago’, he said, adding ‘I shan’t try to seduce Angelica.’ He told Vanessa that she and Duncan needed to recognise that Angelica was no longer a child and deserved to be treated as an adult.13 A few days later Bunny wrote again to Vanessa, to clarify what he had said about being ‘unselfish’: ‘What I meant was I should never hurt her if I could help it & that I accept the fact that I shall be hurt myself.’14 This was the first time he considered that he might be the recipient as well as the perpetrator of pain. Bunny then appealed to the Bloomsbury insularity to which Vanessa was prone, reasoning with her that he at least was a safe bet, for Angelica might otherwise fall in love ‘with someone who feels ill at ease with all of you & profoundly hates & despises all the things you care about’.15

  Vanessa wrote Bunny a surprisingly placatory letter in which she stated: ‘I must tell you that I really feel only so glad when I see how happy & alive she is with you. I agree with you in thinking you can have an intimate relationship which will be happy for you both – & even if there are risks involved when aren’t there? […] I want her happiness more than almost anything & I’m simply very grateful to you for giving her so much.’16 Vanessa thus gave Bunny her blessing over Angelica, just as she had given him her blessing over Duncan many years before.

  Nevertheless, the question of the age difference between Bunny and Angelica was less straightforward than he made out. As usual when embarking on an important love affair, Bunny put his feelings into verse, but this time the verse contained a sense of disquiet, a nagging ambivalence, and in the use of the word ‘trouble’, a disturbing echo of the poem he had written at Charleston many years before:

  First love comes but once & love is blind

  Or else my name could never have been written

  If she had eyes she must have seen my hair

  Is white, my body fat, my chin double […]

  And marks of weariness, & fear of death
, & trouble

  Seam all over my guilty face […]17

  Bunny’s hair was indeed white, but still thick; he wasn’t fat; his chin remained single and at forty-six he wasn’t particularly old. However, his relationship with Angelica had a curious effect upon him. On the one hand he felt refreshed and rejuvenated by her youth and vitality. On the other he realised that the age gap was not going to close. Its very existence reminded him of his age and he began to be preoccupied by fears of aging and mortality.

  The Lawrence Letters were not progressing as smoothly as Bunny hoped. Charlotte Shaw and Lawrence had exchanged six hundred letters, but she would not contemplate their inclusion in the book. Her reluctance stemmed from the fact that she was both a singularly determined and fiercely private woman. Lawrence was something of a surrogate son to her and she confided in him, confessing her private opinions on subjects including marriage. Although devoted to GBS, Charlotte Shaw was always ill at ease with his public profile and hated the idea of being in the spotlight herself. Unaware of the deeply personal nature of her correspondence with Lawrence, Bunny went to see Mrs Shaw in August, hoping he could change her mind. Realising she was immovable, Bunny tried another tack, informing her that he had lost his heart to her. Such charm was wasted. She relinquished only ten letters, and these were to her husband.

  Bunny and Vanessa had entered into a regular correspondence. It began with mutual concerns about Duncan’s feelings and continued with Vanessa seeking Bunny’s advice about her own relationship with Angelica. ‘My dear’, Vanessa wrote to him, ‘you know that if my loving you & needing you is any good there I am – we are intimate I think, you & I’.18 In between times, Bunny had taken Angelica to Mr Mumford’s room. ‘I wish’ he wrote to her afterwards, ‘I hadn’t made love to you, but you are so adorable & wound your arms round me & your hair comes down & I can’t help it’.19 Angelica replied that she loved him very much, but did not want to be his lover. For all her flirting, she found the reality of a grown-up love affair more difficult to contend with. Bunny told her not to worry: ‘If I can’t be one thing – a lover – I must be another: – a[n] old friend of the family you are to talk to: & are pleased to see.’20

  Angelica had lost interest in acting and decided instead to be a painter. Her relationship with Vanessa had also become problematic. Vanessa confided to Bunny that she was very upset by this, and worried lest her grief over Julian was the cause. ‘Bunny dear’, Vanessa wrote, ‘I wonder if you can make things easier at all?’21 The previous year Vanessa had revealed to Angelica that her father was Duncan, not Clive. Now Vanessa wondered whether this had any bearing on Angelica’s icy distance. Vanessa’s confessional manner was strikingly similar to the way she had behaved over Bunny’s affair with Duncan. In ostensibly offering her daughter to Bunny, Vanessa was in fact attempting to hold onto Angelica. Bunny was right to think that Vanessa could not accept Angelica’s growing up. Vanessa had recently lost one child and did not want to lose another, but her over-protectiveness caused Angelica to flee. Angelica did not dare go far: she could only escape into familiar arms, arms moreover which had long encircled her family.

  In September 1938 Bunny worked hard completing the Lawrence Letters. With Vanessa, Duncan, Quentin and Angelica on holiday in France, he stayed in Vanessa’s Fitzroy Street studio, working round the clock correcting proofs. The consequences of the Munich Crisis were evident on the streets outside. As Bunny told Vanessa, ‘London is full of dugouts. Some of the Tubes were converted into shelters for Whitehall […]. The hospitals were emptied. Billets were found for ½ million London school-children in the country. Everyone was given a gas mask.’22 These were uncertain times.

  Bunny eventually finished the book in late October. ‘I am saturated’, he wrote to Vanessa, ‘& drugged with the thousand details of the life of the most abnormal person I have ever had anything to do with.’23 Bunny’s work passed unscathed through the hands of both Jonathan Cape and the Lawrence Trustees. On 10 November, just ahead of publication, the first in a series of three articles containing a selection of the letters appeared in The Times. Twelve days later, when the Letters was published, The Times declared that Bunny ‘was the ideal editor for the purpose. He is quite unobtrusive, but no editorial direction could be more concise, more helpful, more illuminating than his.’24 The Letters sold extremely well: Cape could not keep up with the demand.

  From Hilton, during Christmas, Bunny wrote to tell Angelica that she left him ‘beaming fatuously because you are obviously fond of me’.25 Angelica replied that her feelings were in turmoil, she could think only of him, that she loved him ‘too much but not enough’ and wanted him to ‘believe I love you really – which I don’t’.26 Bunny responded with delight: ‘It is clear that you don’t love me much – and that at the same time you love me a good deal.’27 A few days later Angelica wrote, ‘The words I love you might escape me but if they do you must pretend you haven’t heard them for I still won’t admit on any grounds that I do’.28 With Hilton full of friends and Christmas cheer, Bunny carried in logs, cut the cake, carved the meat and talked to his guests, all the while thinking about his secret life with Angelica in London.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘Your freedom may involve acute misery & anguish to the person you love […]. So what are you to do? Surrender your freedom – which means poisoning yourself slowly. Or lie, or break up a relationship which may be the most important in your lives?’1

  In January 1939 Bunny became conscious of a subtle change in Vanessa’s attitude. She seemed more hostile, tending to side with Duncan, inclined to hover over Angelica like a watchful mother hen. Bunny’s love affair was, anyway, hampered by the want of a room where he and Angelica could be alone. Neither Mr Mumford’s nor Angelica’s bedroom at Fitzroy Street were ideal, both lacking privacy. In consequence, Bunny and Angelica looked forward to snatching a weekend alone together at Charleston. When Vanessa and Duncan announced they had changed their plans and would join them, it seemed like sabotage. ‘How can such a frail fleeting love affair as this between age & youth last more than a moment or two?’ Bunny pondered in his journal. ‘If we were free & let alone, it could take its course […]. But if we are dogged & watched we shall go mad.’2

  How could Bunny imagine they could be free? He had Ray to consider and his children. Whether or not he and Angelica cared to think about them, they were an unassailable fact. For the moment Bunny and Angelica preferred to maintain the illusion that life consisted only of each other. Within their bubble of happiness, Bunny gave Angelica all his attention, telling her she was beautiful, worshipping her. She found his charm and sophistication irresistible. He took her to restaurants, fed her oysters and lobster and gave her an antique ring. She wore the kilt he had given her, piled up her hair the way he liked, told Bunny she was sure of her love for him. Melodramatically, Bunny pronounced this the ‘last love of my life’, adding ‘owing to Angelica’s youth, it is like first love in many, very many ways’. He felt ‘half the time a boy; less than half an elderly man’.3 Angelica’s youth was an elixir which made him youthful too.

  With that Bloomsbury propulsion towards honesty, Bunny informed Ray that he was in love with Angelica and that Angelica seemed to reciprocate his feelings. Ray retorted that there must be something wrong with Angelica, accusing him of cruelty. He felt compassion for Ray but could not keep away from Angelica. It was not simply a matter of what he called ‘passionate love’, but a growing depth of feeling. ‘Isn’t it queer’, he reflected, ‘that at 46, I should experience greater intimacy, feel more absolute devotion than ever before?’4

  Bunny asked Vanessa outright whether he was in her good books, and was not surprised when she confirmed what he suspected: she had turned to Duncan’s point of view. Vanessa feared Bunny would make Angelica unhappy because as a married man, he could only spend part of his life with her. She spoke from experience: it was this part-time situation which she had endured throughout her relationship with Duncan; his absences with l
overs, the knowledge that he was not wholly hers. Bunny could not admit to Vanessa what he privately knew: that Ray might die, that he might be able to dedicate himself to Angelica, after all.

  Bunny had always enjoyed enormous energy, but now the demands of a complicated personal life had him charging in all directions. On a single day in February 1939 he spent the morning at Hilton, afterwards driving to London where he lunched with Angelica in her room and they spent the afternoon in bed. He then drove on to Wimbledon to collect the boys from school and delivered them to Hilton. Everyone remained in their appropriate compartments, Bunny transferring between environments with the ease of a chameleon changing colour.

  When Ray discovered a small lump below her collar bone, Bunny knew what it was. It was the first sign of disseminated cancer. On 1 March 1939 he took her to see Geoffrey Keynes, who recommended a five-week course of x-ray treatment. Bunny told Constance that Geoffrey was on the whole reassuring. But he shielded the truth from Constance just as he did from Ray. Ray’s x-ray treatment was delivered externally and she did not need to stay in hospital. In theory Ray was unable to stay with Bunny in London because he resided between Mr Mumford’s and an unappealing hotel room. In practice she could not stay with him because his nights were reserved for Angelica. Ray thus stayed with her mother. She and Bunny were again in the same city, and while it might have been expected that he would live there with her, that he might accompany her to her exhausting treatment, that he might comfort her afterwards, he lived only for Angelica. It was a cruel repetition of his behaviour over Norah and Bar.