Bunny stretched his midweeks in London to four or five days, dining with Angelica almost every evening, sometimes lunching with her too. Their nights were spent clandestinely together, decorum dictating a parting in the early hours, when Bunny would leave Angelica’s room or deliver her back from Mr Mumford’s. As this was not ideal, Bunny took a room at number 15 Charlotte Street, a stone’s throw from Angelica’s room at Vanessa’s Fitzroy Street studio. He bought second-hand furniture from the Caledonian Market and Angelica gave him an antique patchwork quilt for the bed. Now they would be able to make love without fear of the key rattling in their door, without anxiety that Duncan or Vanessa were hovering nearby. During the day they could pretend they lived together in this makeshift home. But reality intervened in the early hours, when Angelica returned to Fitzroy Street, to maintain the charade of being in her bed when Vanessa knocked to wake her in the morning.
Bunny delighted in his ‘secret room’, where he and Angelica spent as much time as possible, wrapped in each other’s arms, cocooned together, hidden from the world. He wrote Angelica a poem celebrating the coming of summer. It was strikingly similar to the verse he had given Ray in 1921.
You are the forward popprin pear
That blossomed while the trees were bare
Dusting with gold the bee’s rough head
That sipped of nectar. The petals fell
A bridal shower in the breeze;
The fruit set safe; and now, howe’er it freeze,
‘Twill grow and ripen well.5
Just as in Bunny’s references to bursting buds and lambing ewes in his poem for the pregnant Ray, Bunny’s imagery of pollination and ripening fruit unmistakably alluded to fecundity. When Bunny’s contraception failed, he found himself unable to refrain from nurturing a hope that Angelica was pregnant, though he recognised the havoc this would cause. Fortunately for everyone, his hopes were unfounded.
It was 1939: Bunny’s German translator, Herbert Herlitschka and his wife Marlys had fled Austria and sought refuge in London where Herlitschka hoped to find work. Just when Hilton Hall needed to be at its most calm and restful for Ray, Bunny offered the Herlitschkas his home as ‘an asylum’.6 They arrived on 24 March, Bunny’s gesture saving them from the fate of many so-called ‘enemy aliens’, who were rounded up and interned. Anti-Semitism remained rife in many quarters in Britain at this time, easily disguised as suspicion of German spies. It was characteristic of Bunny to help a Jewish colleague, even though he barely knew him.
In early April the conclusion of Ray’s treatment coincided with a letter from Constance to Bunny, which unusually contained the merest suggestion of censure. ‘I expect’, she said, ‘you won’t want or need to be in London except just for the day on Wednesdays & now that the boys are home & Ray’s treatment over you’ll want to be back at Hilton as soon as you can.’7 Was Constance aware of Bunny’s affair with Angelica? As ever with his mother, Bunny could not easily dissimulate. One evening his compulsion to share his happiness was so profound that he showed her a photograph of Angelica. Although Constance was the last person to judge, she was fond of Ray. She had always proceeded with Bunny on the basis of the subtlest of interventions. This time it did not work. A few months later, when Bunny took Angelica to tea with his mother at The Cearne, Angelica felt a little shy, wondering whether she would be welcome. As she later recalled, ‘I needn’t have worried’, as Constance ‘had long ago decided that Bunny’s love affairs had nothing to do with her, and were in any case peripheral to her passionate need for him’.8
Bunny lost little time in telling Ray that he had taken a London room. Of course she knew why. It was, according to Bunny, ‘a painful talk but not unfriendly and did not leave any new bitterness with either of us’.9 Ray had no energy for bitterness: her treatment had left her drained and ill. Bunny hoped that her spirits, at least, would be lifted by a stay at Butts Intake. They found everything in the house covered with mould; the wind raged; it rained. Even so, Bunny felt there was ‘something which makes up for everything – the shape of the ground – the way the stone haybarns rise out of the green grass – the gills tearing down in cascades of brown water’.10 He could not help living in the moment, enjoying the beauty of his surroundings, exhilarating in bracing walks with the boys, proudly observing their increasing strength and independence. Ray felt too ill to take the exercise she always enjoyed.
Back at Hilton, the fact of Bunny’s London room sank in. Ray cried because she believed it meant Bunny would leave her. How could she compete for his affection with a healthy twenty-year-old? At a time when she had a right to stability, Ray could do nothing to contain her husband. Her distress moved Bunny but the moment he was away from her ‘the physical happiness of being in love & being loved’ overwhelmed him.11 The situation was all the more difficult because neither could acknowledge to one another the nature of her illness. Ray suspected that her cancer had returned; Bunny was certain it had, but in order to protect each other the subject was skirted around, the name of the illness unspoken.
When Bunny left for London, Ray could not conceal her distress, for his Charlotte Street room symbolised life apart from her, and with the Herlitschkas in residence at Hilton, she felt dispossessed. Bunny had issued an open-ended invitation to them, assuming Herbert would soon find employment as an interpreter or translator. Bunny ferried him backwards and forwards to interviews in London, to no avail. He found it stressful maintaining a constant polite sympathy for his guests, even though he felt compassion for their predicament. He escaped to work in his room, or to dig the garden and plant potatoes in readiness for war.
On 15 May the Ballet Rambert production of Lady into Fox opened at the Mercury Theatre, London. Choreographed by Andrée Howard, Sally Gilmour had the lead role. Bunny took Angelica to the opening night, though Ray had been the inspiration for the book. Later that month, with Quentin as chaperone, Bunny and Angelica travelled to France. Unsurprisingly, the holiday gave rise to what Bunny described as a day of reckoning with Vanessa and Duncan. In taking Angelica away, Bunny felt ‘as though I were suddenly transformed into Robert Browning & that Fitzroy were Wimpole Street’.12 Although Angelica retorted that such an idea was ‘an insult to Bloomsburyan tradition’, in this corner of Bloomsbury, at least, Bunny appeared to be absconding with the very fruit of Vanessa’s and Duncan’s union.13 For Vanessa this was like his taking Duncan from her all over again. In Duncan’s eyes, it was a more than painful reminder of Bunny’s penchant for women during their love affair: it was Bunny’s ultimate heterosexual conquest.
Bunny wrote to Ray, reassuring her that he was bound to her and loved and needed her. But then he announced he wanted to divide his time between her and Angelica. Ray had been in this position before. Then, following a pattern to which they had both become accustomed, Ray resorted to silence. Bunny chastised her: ‘You detect coldness or falsity in me & then become dumb – & your inability or refusal to speak drives me to an irritation & cruelty I should not otherwise show.’ ‘I wish’, Bunny concluded, ‘we could arrange our lives with as little mess as my father & mother & Nelly.’14
Bunny could not understand Ray’s feelings precisely because he doggedly assumed the triangular relationship between his parents and Nellie Heath furnished a civilised template that could be easily emulated. He did not stop to consider whether or not this triangle had been entirely successful, or whether Nellie and his parents had simply appeared happy in front of him. It suited him to believe his parents’ marriage the epitome of enlightened bliss. He had been attracted to Bloomsbury because it emphasised similar freedoms. Ray’s sister, Frances Partridge, had negotiated a love affair with Carrington’s husband to whom she was now married, although it was common knowledge that Ralph Partridge was not faithful. But Ray was not of Bloomsbury. Partly Bunny kept her out; partly she did not share the same values.
Ray wasn’t going to accept Bunny’s statement regarding his parents’ marriage. Whereas Constance did not want Edward as a lover aft
er Bunny’s birth, Ray needed physical love. She asked Bunny if he expected her to settle into a position like Constance’s, adding, ‘I have wanted people as lovers & have gone on loving you. I cannot settle down to a life like your mothers with you as a frequent visitor[.] I would rather never see you again than that.’15
Bunny’s French interlude was anyway less idyllic than he pretended. Angelica felt ill much of the time, with headaches and intermittent fever. She spent several days in bed and even in France they maintained the fiction of separate rooms. In Bunny’s pocket diary, he recorded that he had told Angelica ‘about Duncan & myself which she did not know’.16 He did not otherwise record her response to this momentous news.
In Bunny’s absence, Ray wrote to Tim White, who was shocked to receive a dark letter in which she stated that she was ‘dieing / dying / dyeing’. But it was with Angelica’s health that Bunny was preoccupied. Soon after their return from France, Angelica developed a pain in her side. Bunny took her to see a doctor who advised admission to a nursing home, where she was diagnosed with a kidney infection. Angelica did not want Vanessa or Duncan to worry, asking Bunny to keep it from them, but he told Duncan. Of course Vanessa could not be kept out of the picture, but still fragile from Julian’s death, she was distraught.
Visiting Angelica, Bunny experienced an unsettling sense of dèja vu for she occupied the same room in the very nursing home where Ray had given birth to their still-born child. Vanessa invited Bunny to dinner to discuss the situation, although he soon discovered that ‘the friendly spirit of collaboration in a crisis had gone’. Vanessa wanted to know whether Angelica was pregnant, and demanded that in the event of a pregnancy, she should be informed in order to arrange a termination. Bunny was outraged, recording melodramatically in his journal: ‘When Vanessa demanded a promise that I should help her destroy my unborn child, without pausing to inquire what Angelica wanted […] my blood absolutely froze.’17 Only a few days before, Angelica had said she wanted to have his child, but they agreed the timing was wrong. Although Bunny was not against abortion per se, it was something he found hard to countenance in relation to his own potential offspring, partly as a result of the experience of having a stillborn child. He and Ray had both struggled when she had to have an abortion for the sake of her health. Although Angelica was not pregnant, Bunny knew in his own mind that had she been, he would have fought for the baby to be born.
Vanessa was furious with Bunny for taking matters into his own hands. Bunny was angry with Vanessa for treating Angelica like a child. He felt his loyalty was now to Angelica, he could no longer ‘run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’. Vanessa tried to insist on taking Angelica home, the doctor advised otherwise. Angelica felt powerless confronted with her mother’s steely determination. She wrote to Bunny from the nursing home, telling him that ‘In spite of all the things that have happened lately to show that our love is not going to have an easy time of it, I feel very happy. I love you more than I’ve ever loved you before.’ ‘If we both love each other’, she reasoned, ‘and understand what the other feels, it doesn’t matter what happens, we can deal with anything.’18
While Angelica recuperated at Charleston, Bunny contemplated his role in what seemed like an incontrovertible war. He told Mina Curtiss that he could not face another war as a mere spectator, believing he would go crazy ‘if I were not taking some part in what I care more intensely about than anything’.19 In August 1939 he offered his services to the Air Ministry. His interview at Whitehall went well enough, but everything remained rather vague. Soon afterwards, Ray and the boys left for a camping holiday in Ireland with Noel Olivier and her family. They would later join Bunny and Tim White in Mayo, but in the meantime, Bunny took Angelica to Yorkshire, where he had the good grace not to stay at Butts Intake.
Afterwards, Bunny rendezvoused with Tim White at Stowe, from where they set off to Ireland in a car crammed full of the dead rabbits and pigeons required to feed Tim’s two peregrine falcons, which occupied a perch placed across the rear seats. Bunny crouched uncomfortably in the front trying to avoid their vicious pecks, Tim’s setter Brownie in his lap. The holiday at Mayo was not successful: Bunny worried about Ray, who was far from well, and about the prospect of war. Tim could see that Ray was trying to hide the extent of her illness from her sons, and, he thought, from Bunny. He found her stoicism remarkable, commenting, ‘I have never met a greater woman than Ray’.20
Bunny did not stay long. On 3 September, when Britain declared war on Germany, he received a telegram from the Air Ministry asking him to report straight away. Leaving Ray and the boys with Tim in Ireland, he returned to London. A few days later he received a letter from Richard: Ray had been seized with convulsions and fainted. It had taken her a long while to come round, and Richard sat talking to her for half an hour while she remained dazed. Somehow she managed to drive back from Ireland to deliver the boys to school.
Everything was uncertain. Bunny was unsure what role he would play in the Air Ministry, having turned down the post of Assistant Private Secretary to Sir Samuel Hoare, Lord Privy Seal, on the basis that Hoare was ‘a fuss-pot & very correct’.21 At Hilton the Herlitschkas had taken in six refugee children, two teachers and a spaniel. Ray and Noel Olivier were thinking of renting a cottage for the duration at Melksham, Wiltshire, to be close to the boys’ school, which had relocated there from Wimbledon. Angelica, beside herself with worry that she would not be able to see Bunny, urged him to reconsider enlisting. Bunny’s main concern, however, was sixteen-year-old Richard, who hoped, in time, to go up to King’s College, Cambridge. Worried that his son would be conscripted at eighteen, Bunny turned to Maynard Keynes for advice, and was reassured that undergraduates remained exempt until the age of twenty-one.
Bunny was commissioned on 20 September. ‘I am afraid’, he told Mina Curtiss and Lincoln Kirstein, ‘it only means very humdrum office work. Really I find it hard to imagine myself in a uniform & feel some trepidation at what I have done: like a boy going to a new school.’22 Having passed his medical exam, Flight-Lieutenant Garnett was soon installed in Room 84/111 of the Air Ministry, King Charles Street, Whitehall. Curiously, the nonconformist Bunny immediately took to his uniform (drawing a rather fetching doodle of his uniformed self). Eddy Sackville-West thought Bunny looked ‘terrific in uniform’.23 Frances Partridge noted, ‘There was a side to Bunny that entered enthusiastically into what he was doing, down to the details of dressing up for the part’.24
Bunny wrote to Constance saying that his work was interesting but he was still vague as to his exact job. In the meantime he immersed himself in absorbing as much information as possible, ‘simply soaking, like a dry sponge, in water, in the facts & background of this war’.25 If Bunny did not know much about his new job, he knew it was hush-hush. Like many writers and journalists, Bunny was shunted into intelligence work in the Second World War. He would be working under Air Commodore Percy Groves, the Deputy Director of Intelligence in the Air Ministry, in AI.4, a new section of Air Intelligence. Groves had known T.E. Lawrence, so there was already a point of connection between the two men, and they immediately took to one another. Bunny could not have asked for a kinder or more sympathetic superior. Anyway, he found it all very exciting. As he told Angelica, ‘my secret vice is a passion for doing new things’.26 Not such a secret vice perhaps, but it was another opportunity to be reborn.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘You can have two emotions at the same time. One makes the other even more acute.’1
Bunny was engaged in writing a weekly news sheet, circulated to RAF stations to boost morale. He knew that the British RAF strength was considerably inferior to that of Germany, information he had ascertained from Air Commodore Groves. Nevertheless, it was Bunny’s job to maintain the fiction of British superiority and to suppress his instinct to tell the truth.
Fully occupied with war work, Bunny had to stop writing his ‘Books’ page. This he did willingly, feeling he had wasted his best years in jou
rnalism. Nevertheless, the New Statesman contains some of his finest writing. The essay format suited him, and his columns are delightful, reflecting his humour, intelligence, scholarship and wide-ranging interests. Reviewing Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) he began: ‘Looking at the curlews vanishing on strong wings over the moorland, there can have been few men so unimaginative as not to envy them their freedom.’2 It is a typical David Garnett opening, one which appears to bear little relation to the subject, until a few lines in Bunny links the curlew’s freedom with that of the author of Flush in choosing her subject. Another opening:
The snow has come down and there is more to follow in those leaden clouds to the north, but I shall seize the moments of sunshine, put on my coat and muffler, take my stick and step out bravely, for I must see a little life and breathe a little air; I cannot live with books all the time. There is air certainly, arctic air, but there is not much life on the whitened roads. The doctor has visited the village and the treads of his tyres are freshly marked, but everyone else seems to have spent the morning hurrying indoors, and even if I caught sight of a child hurrying along in Wellington boots with a milk-can in his hand I should not have added much to my stock of knowledge.3
This eventually arrives at a review of Pirandello, but not before a lengthy perambulation around the subjects of family stories and those of village life. As his son Richard commented, Bunny’s ‘Books’ pages ‘give a richer impression of the interests of his civilised and well-filled mind than can be found elsewhere, even in his three volumes of autobiography’.4 Bunny’s New Statesman articles are highly personal, reflecting not only his interests and scholarship, but also where he was or what he had been doing around the time of writing. The curlews in the Flush review signify he had been in Yorkshire, the snow in the Pirandello essay that he had been out in Hilton. Writing to Bunny from China in 1936, Julian Bell had commented, ‘I keep in touch with you more than most of my friends, thanks to the Statesman and your habit of writing autobiography in it’.5
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