Not only did Clive’s parents have to be taken into account, but also Duncan’s – or so I assume. Major Grant would probably have thought that something should be done, even that Duncan should marry Vanessa, which none of them wanted. Everything was all right as it was; they did not want the older generation meddling in what was primarily a practical situation already settled to their own satisfaction. As far as intimate friends were concerned, my birth was an open secret: the only voice of criticism was that of Bunny Garnett, who told Vanessa that in depriving me of my true father she was making a rash decision. Clive, more detached than Vanessa and wiser than Duncan, may have foreseen certain difficulties: he himself had to put up with what must at the time have been an embarrassing situation, though no one seemed to consider it as such. Owing to my likeness to Duncan, even my grandmother Ethel must soon have had her suspicions. I was the only person successfully kept in the dark.
Charleston, the house where I was born, was a large, compact Sussex farmhouse, standing by itself just under Firle Beacon, the highest point in the range of downs that extends from the River Cuck in the east to the Ouse in the west. At the foot of the Beacon was a cornfield, and between this field and the house lay the farm buildings, dominated by a magnificent flint barn and granary, underneath which stood the hay-wagons and tumbrils, at the time still in use. They were drawn across the chalk roads by huge brown horses, while the red-and-white cows munched their fill in the fields and the rickyard was full of haystacks, bristly and compact. In front of the house was a pond, beyond that an orchard, and lying next to it on the north side was a large walled garden.
The property never belonged to my family; my mother rented it from the farmer, who himself had it on a lease from the owner, Lord Gage. Vanessa was not interested in owning property, preferring the feeling that she could at any time change her mind and go somewhere else. She discovered Charleston in 1916, just when she needed a refuge for herself and her two sons, and for Duncan and Bunny. As conscientious objectors, Duncan and Bunny worked on Mr Hex’s farm a few miles away, returning at teatime, happy to find themselves in the sympathetic atmosphere created by Vanessa. Friends came for the week-end, and a close relationship was maintained not only with those who came from London, such as Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey, but with Leonard and Virginia, who, until they moved to Rodmell, were often at Asheham, only four miles away.
With the arrival of peace, however, the ménage à trois was to split up; though Duncan and Bunny were both there when I was born, they were longing to get back to a semblance of normal life in London after the rigours and isolation of the war, and Bunny, whose tastes had been only temporarily homosexual, was already attracted by the idea of other and quite different love affairs. It was only Vanessa who was immobilised – worried by a domestic crisis and almost certainly by the fear that Duncan might finally desert her, in spite of the fact that he was now the father of her child.
In addition, almost immediately after my birth I fell ill, an illness reluctantly admitted by the local doctor, who did not know what remedy to prescribe. Vanessa, very worried, sent a message to her friend Noel Olivier, who, unable to come herself, persuaded a Dr Moralt to make her way down to Charleston. Responding to her treatment, I began to thrive on Gray’s Powders and cow’s milk. My two brothers, Julian and Quentin, ten and eight years older than myself, showed their feelings at my arrival in the world by running amok in the schoolroom, and were sent to stay with Virginia, while Vanessa lay in bed in a house without running water, electricity or telephone. True, the war was over, but food and coal were still scarce, and in addition to her anxiety on my account, Vanessa had difficulty in finding servants. Five years later, writing to Margery Snowden, a friend she had met twenty years earlier at the Academy Schools, Vanessa described the situation thus:
Charleston Christmas 1923
… Here we are spending a very domestic Christmas. Really I think I shall advertise it. ‘Mr and Mrs Clive Bell and family at home at Charleston, Christmas 1923 – no one else admitted.’… I haven’t been here at this time since five years ago when Angelica was born. It was very romantic then – the first Christmas of peace and a most lovely moonlit, frosty night. I remember waking up in the early morning after she had been born and hearing the farm-men come up to work singing carols and realising it was Christmas Day, and it seemed rather extraordinary to have a baby then – perhaps I seem very sentimental, do I? but the horrors afterwards, when she nearly died through the doctor’s idiocy and every possible domestic disaster seemed to happen together, were so great that I rather forgot the happy part of it. I don’t think I’ve ever had such an awful time. But those sort of horrors are unreal in a sense – except the anxiety – they go and leave nothing. I daresay I’m becoming too reminiscent – you see the consequences of being in the same place again after five years.
My first conscious memory is not of Charleston but of France, always to me a second home, and of being carried, probably by Vanessa, up a flight of dark stairs, to find at the top a small, voluble lady in black, who gave me violet bon-bons. We were in Paris and she was almost certainly Angela Lavelli, a friend of Roger Fry, who occasionally offered her services to Vanessa as chaperone for her children. Whether the horns of the taxis honking in the rain, typical of the voices of Paris, belong to the same occasion I don’t know; and whether being put to sleep in the luggage-rack is real or only hearsay I am not sure. I seem to have felt the string of the rack, like a hammock swaying to the rhythm of the train; and when I was given soda water to drink for the first time, astonished by its autonomous activity, I christened it ‘prickly water’. It was on this journey that Grace, our maid, seeing the sun reflected in the window opposite, turned to Duncan and said, in wonder, ‘Are there two suns in France, Mr Grant?’ It was her first visit abroad, and she thought things might be different. Julian and Quentin turned her mistake into part of the continuous myth they wove about our lives, never allowing us to forget anything that had caused them the intense, slightly malicious joys of adolescence.
We were on our way to St Tropez, where Nessa had taken La Maison Blanche, a house belonging to M. and Mme Vildrac, situated a little way outside the town. It was Christmas and my third birthday. There was a long, light-filled room, a door on to the terrace, a buzz of talk … I was playing with my rag doll Judy, whom I hugged passionately. I had a secret which in some mysterious way was discovered: I had a temperature and was put to bed. This was the first of many occasions when I hoped to hide an illness, dreading I hardly know what: perhaps the act of surrender that illness implied, which once accomplished can be a voluptuous pleasure. At the same time, however, it allowed all kinds of people besides Vanessa disconcerting and intimate access to my body.
I remember being in a state of great anxiety because Julian and Quentin had locked themselves in the church. I imagined them there for ever, not understanding that doors could be unlocked. I was impressed and disturbed by their audacity, since I understood that it had somehow involved an affront to the clergyman or priest. It brought home to me the difference between my brothers’ lives and my own – theirs so independent, mine restrained by female authority. There I was standing in the hot dusty road with Grace and my nurse Nellie, in front of a white wall overtopped with black Cyprus, waiting for someone to fetch the key. The sunbaked landscape reflected the heat of midday, the hour when everything begins to tremble and the smell of southern cooking invades the air.
Another memory is one of extreme pleasure tinged with disbelief. Held in someone’s arms, I looked from a height into the shallow transparencies of a square pool contained within a band of grey granite. (I always supposed it was a municipal pool on the Place at St Tropez, but when I looked for it some years later it was not to be seen.) In a corner floated a couple of chinchilla cushions encircled by brown fringes, their centres blotched with blobs of rich brown, dark blue and white. It may have been the sight of these creatures that gave rise to my nickname, Jellyfish or Jelly-cat.
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A fourth memory is of a dream, which still gives me a feeling of pleasure, perhaps because it was in the tempera colours of Fra Angelico. In it Nellie and I walked along a beach which was entirely made of those tiny, fragile pink shells one finds on occasion by the sea. These I collected in a little box, while we slowly advanced beside the shining waves of ultramarine towards a tall cupboard, standing against the sky, ready to hold my treasure. The cupboard, painted with a design of yellow discs, is still standing in Vanessa’s old bedroom at Charleston.
It is at Charleston that I am next aware of myself. In photographs of the time I am grave, round-eyed and healthy, held by a smiling Nellie or a Madonna-like Vanessa, whose long straight fingers are too apt to find their way into every crevice of my body. It was then, at the age of five, that I first became aware of my own identity, and with it of an exaggerated sweetness in Vanessa which troubled me. Alongside the everyday brown bread-and-butter of my life in the nursery ran my relationship with her, conducted in the very different atmosphere of drawing-room and studio. My earliest sensations were of her propitiatory attitude, as though I held a weapon in my small, fat hands. Anxious not to provoke, she continually soothed and lulled me into acceptance. Cries, screams or the sight of tears upset her; if she could buy peace she was satisfied. I longed for her to want me to be strong and independent, whereas apparently all she desired was to suffocate me with caresses.
Every morning announced itself through the red and yellow curtains, which blew gently inwards over the wide floorboards. In a shaft of blue sunlight the motes of dust spiralled, dancing an invitation to the day outside. At the age of five one is nothing but a little animal: the world is made of light, colour, smells and sounds which are more urgent and compelling then than ever again. With the purity and violence of truth, life speaks its own multiple language: without need of interpretation, it is addressed intimately to oneself. I only needed time, unmeasured by the careful, restraining hand or voice, to understand all the things that shouted and whispered to me their various secrets.
The early part of the day was devoted to the walled garden. Its door opened with a rising shriek, and from the time it took to announce that it had shut, you knew, even if you couldn’t see, whether more than one person had come into it. If you were there first, you could hide behind a clump of flowers or one, of the upturned millstones that stood at intervals along the terrace. Sometimes, without being seen, I could get as far as the shed, filled with broken and discarded objects blanketed with spider’s web. Flower-pots, still containing earth, bulbs, a dibber, a rusty trowel, a few roorkee chairs and a pile of little pieces of coloured glass, intended for making mosaics. Apart from their colour, their grainy, semi-translucent texture fascinated me: I wanted to know them, and therefore to eat them – but was prevented.
Then there was the profusion of flowers, many of which, when picked and turned upside down, could be transformed into gorgeous princesses with a dazzling change of wardrobe. Throughout the summer, many hundreds of these were abandoned, left to wilt in a corner of the garden.
The garden walls were of flint and brick, supported here and there by sloping brick buttresses. Inside it was warm and sheltered, alive with the noises of insects and birds, which sounded different from those outside. In the early morning the sun shone through a milky mist, fragmented into particles of blue and scarlet. As it vanished, the walls began to sing with warmth; and my attention was caught by a butterfly, black and red with blotches of white. It settled on a michaelmas daisy but, when my hand stretched out to grasp it, gently wobbled away, until the breeze lifted it up to the height of the elm that stood outside the garden wall.
In front of the house there was a patch of gravel, possibly once a perfect oval, now distorted to some other, less elegant shape. The small, uneven stones slid underfoot, but conscious of the solidity of the earth underneath, I kept my balance. Numerous tiny creatures threaded their way among the boulders: spiders, beetles, ants, busy, intent and unaware of me, a female Gulliver in their midst. Giant though I was, I was perhaps less aware than they of our difference in scale. I was each ant, each beetle; I knew what it was to have six legs and swivel eyes, to hesitate, searching for information with trembling antennae, suspicious and fearful. The long grass too was full of creatures, turning, wriggling, hopping and floating in mid-air; and the pond, what was it made of? Was it solid, deep or shallow, good to eat or drink, hot or cold? My eyes alone could not begin to answer these questions; however earnestly I looked at the water, it was always playing tricks with me. How could it be solid, brown and dirty in the corner where the yew tree stood, and on the other side reveal each tiny flint and piece of gravel, passive but quivering? To see the willow tree upside down, its grey-and-dun-coloured shape interrupted by the rippling moorhen, was to catch a glimpse of another world where everything was the other way round, the trees at the top and the clouds, racing back to front, at the bottom.
In those days the pond seemed enormous. On the side near the farm a tiny stream, coming from the downs, trickled under the road, and drained into the pond. Here the shallow water revealed a bottom of flinty shingle, over which flashed the stickleback, disappearing into beds of watercress and forget-me-not. Sometimes, peering closely, it was possible to make out a caddis worm, done up in an untidy bundle of sticks. It was here too that the cows and horses were brought to drink in the evening, sucking the water through their tremulous, sensitive lips. The cows dribbled, and stared stupidly at their reflections, but the horses, calm and intelligent, lifted their heads to see all that was going on.
On the other side of the pond, where the water was deeper, it was held in by a wall of flecked and silver flint, threaded with a line or two of brick, finished by half-round bricks. Here the water was brown, hovered over by turquoise dragonflies. The yew trees which stood on this side of the orchard, plunged their dark shadows into the confused, umber-coloured liquid which reflected nettles, grasses and trembling sky alike. Somewhere in the tangle grew a bullace tree, which yielded little scented pink plums made by Lottie the cook into delicious pies. In those days there was also a syringa or philadelphus, whose druglike perfume invaded the July evenings.
Opposite the house was a huge willow, to me the grandfather of all the trees in the garden. Its silver leaves were not only loved but approved of by Vanessa and Duncan because they were not green, a colour they condemned as ubiquitous. Beneath it quacked the fat white ducks, gently nuzzling the duckweed, which winked and sparkled in the sun, each tiny green leaf lying flat and close-packed on the surface of the water, and in summertime there was a smell of mud growing stronger with the weeks that passed. One year there was a drought, and in the centre of the cracked and fissured clay hardly more than a puddle remained. Watching the iridescent bubbles on the surface, we could see a few carp flipping in their dying agony, while the bodies of their fellows stank where they had been stranded at the edge.
Julian and Quentin spent all the morning hollowing out great lumps of chalk, transforming them into intricate castle; and fortresses with galleries, towers, oubliettes and machicolations. With these they played a continuous war game, peopling them with armies of hips and haws which ran unsteadily down the grooves and hollows like ants in a heap. Too small to join in, I spent a lot of time concealed in the pampas grass which grew near the front gate, next to the bay tree in whose scented branches I had a house. When I tired of being a cook, serving up leaf-fuls of yellow-eyed daisies as poached eggs, I could follow the narrow path that ran between the pond and the long damp wall of the garden, to the orchard. Flanked by iris, it passed under the yews, where there was a carpet of dark brown needles, slippery to the feet. At the end of the path there was a Pre-Raphaelite rose that smelt of cold cream. When I was very small, Vanessa would hold me up to sniff and touch its faintly flushed petals. The grown-ups seldom came to the orchard, where twisted, unpruned apple trees, used as perches by the wood-pigeons and rooks, bore a few dozen apples that were violated first by the birds and then
by the wasps. Beneath them was a tangle of bryony and lords-and-ladies, so obviously poisonous, and a mass of reedy grass long enough to close over my head, as I looked through the interstices like a tiger in the jungle.
Behind Charleston to the south lay Firle Beacon and its supporting downs, like a row of half-submerged ancient elephants. Their massive grey humps protected us from the west wind, which brought not only the rain but a sea mist which rolled down their sides and hid them from view. Sometimes I would climb up through these clouds; from above they hid the house, the farm and everything except the tops of the trees, which looked as though they protruded from a sunken forest. And then the mood would change as the downs became the mirror of the sky, and the shadows of the clouds raced across their flanks, or, at other moments, lay like a massive barrier, flat and dark against the grey hillside. Sometimes we would climb right up, disturbing myriads of silken blue butterflies flitting from one miniature flower to another, and, standing exhilarated on top of the elephant’s forehead, we could see the thin pale line of the sea, and even sometimes the Channel steamer crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe. The wind, warm and gentle on a summer’s day, carried with it a suspicion of salt and, blowing from the south-west, had bent the few remaining thorn trees in the same direction, like old men with a load on their backs. In those days there were still many sheep and the turf was wiry and polished. There were strange hummocks and hollows in which one could lie and look up into the blue air, until one almost fell asleep from heat and stillness, disturbed only by the zooming of a bumble-bee or the distant rattle of the electric train as it wriggled across the Weald. But it was the dew-ponds that were so strangely magical: great circles of silver lying cool and undisturbed, gazing not only at the sky but at the centuries that had passed since they were made. My nurse Louie regarded them with awe and said that a sheep or cow once fallen in could never get out again. Julian described how the clay was smoothed with infinite care, puddled with a heavy stone at the end of a staff until it became dense and waterproof like a shallow pudding basin, and how, conserving the dew, the ponds always held some liquid for parched animals.
Deceived With Kindness Page 5