Deceived With Kindness

by Angelica Garnett

  3

  Gordon Square

  More than half our time was spent in London, where Vanessa was now sharing No. 46 Gordon Square with Maynard Keynes. It was a large, tall house with high rooms looking onto the square. On the first floor, french windows opened onto a balcony with a black iron railing that ran across the width of the house and was repeated all along the row. Vanessa lived in the upper part, where the rooms were much smaller and the ceilings sloped as in a country cottage. Here, in her attic sitting-room, I was handed over to her every day after tea, to play in front of the gas fire, its intricate cones of blue and white changing to red and yellow, the little bowl of dusty water placed on the hearth like an offering in front of a shrine. I sat on the chequered coconut matting, rough and uneasy to my bottom, sheltered from the heat by Nessa’s knees, while her hands would take from the mantelpiece, and bring down to my level, the dried oranges and lemons she used for darning socks. I gazed at them in wonder, and threw them into the shadows. Nellie’s sudden appearance at the door provoked screams of anger, and she would carry me away, scarlet and protesting, leaving behind an anguished Vanessa.

  At bedtime I was sometimes allowed, as a privilege, to have my bath in Maynard’s bathroom, more splendid than ours. It was a luxury chiefly because of its larger size, but there were glass jars full of sponges and bath salts, and I well remember Maynard, in his elegant city suit, standing over me and showering me with these as I sat in the water. My doll Judy was also there, her stockinette limbs splashed with red ink, which, as I carefully explained, resulted from numerous operations.

  Nellie was genial, and, to judge from surviving photographs, attractive; but I never liked her, perhaps because I associated her with separation from Vanessa. She is connected too with the peculiar smell of linoleum, of a back lavatory and a dark little bedroom on the ground floor, of plates of porridge kept in the kitchen and returned to be eaten at teatime, and with a starched, unreceptive bosom. A London nightmare, which quite unjustifiably I blamed on Nellie, was a gruesome dream of white-skinned children whose arms and legs, like parsnips, were chopped off in a sea of blood. It recurred several times, and I grew to dread it.

  Another London scene of that time is of Duncan standing stark naked in the back bedroom. Coming in by chance, I was amazed at the sight of him; what on earth was this strange appendage hanging between his legs? Seized by embarrassment but devoured by curiosity, I turned my back on him, bent down and, putting my head between my own legs, continued my rapt examination of his anatomy, prompted by the feeling that if I was upside down no one would spot the focus of my attention. Carried away by a smiling Vanessa, I burst into tears.

  Another, quite different, occasion is also connected with Duncan. The large L-shaped room on the first floor is full of people. There are many children among the grown-ups, and in the warmth everyone is moving about and talking. There is the Christmas tree, decorated and lit with candles, and the long heavy curtains are drawn close. Standing by the sofa, I am suddenly accosted by a rather small Father Christmas. Whether he gives me anything or says anything to me I can’t remember, but I am enchanted by his presence. I turn away to call attention to him, and when I turn back he has disappeared! Dismayed and disappointed, I look for him everywhere, particularly behind the curtains where it is suddenly dark, cold and frightening. Vanessa, to whom I appeal, only smiles and shakes her head; for some reason I am convinced it was Duncan – and feel horribly defrauded.

  The same room saw many events, all of which were winter scenes, dark and glowing with the heat of the stove. They were moments of security, comfort and heightened enjoyment when, after tea, I had Vanessa to myself and could monopolise her. We had our favourite occupations, our favourite rituals when, even if Virginia or an intimate friend were there, Vanessa was indisputably mine. I could claim her innermost attention even while a murmur of remote talk was going on over my head. We roasted sugar lumps between the bars of the stove, turning them over so that there was a nugget of soft explosive sugar enclosed in a shell of caramel. Or I was allowed to make toast for the guests, different shades of brown for different people.

  On other days we would immerse ourselves in the intricacies of paper-cutting: Vanessa would gently soothe my annoyance at my own clumsiness, performing miracles with her long, be-ringed fingers. She would concentrate, frowning, the light from the stove glinting on her spectacles, while I watched a shape slowly forming under the slicing of the scissors, finally resolving itself into a row of ballet dancers that could actually stand on the table. One year saw a craze for exotic flowers which nodded and dangled at the end of long canes. Virginia was a good client for such products and often went home with her hands full. I remember one painting lesson, almost the only one Vanessa ever gave me, when she drew a little dog and surrounded him with a sea of black, giving him at the same time some pale green shadows. This, she said, was the secret of making him as white as snow.

  In the far-away basement Mrs Harland, Maynard’s cook, presided over the shining kitchen range. Tiny and vivacious, she had the skin of a wild rose, and seemed always to be making pastry. Rows of jam tarts covered the well-scrubbed kitchen table, their jewelled centres suggesting fragments of stained glass or the rings on Nessa’s dressing-table. I was often given a lick of jam or a piece of cake to celebrate my visits to that subterranean region where her husband, Pa Harland, was to be seen cleaning the silver in a small room with a baize door, called the pantry. He was said by the grown-ups to be lazy and untrustworthy, and he smelled strongly of whisky – but his Cockney charm had captivated Maynard, and continued to do so for some years. He always welcomed me with warmth, and I would consent, when there was a party, to being carried upstairs on his shoulders – from where the smell of whisky almost overcame me – to find myself in the drawing-room on the first floor full of powdered and scented ladies in parakeet-coloured chiffon; holding glasses in their hands and smoking cigarettes, they all seemed to be in a state of great excitement. Out of sight behind the door, Pa Harland would feed me on left-over strawberries and cream.

  London was filled with high dark buildings and hard surfaces, stone pavements and iron railings, areas filled with dustbins and steamy kitchen windows, and in the square huge plane trees with spotted, sooty trunks. In winter fog lurked in the air, and when it descended, a proper pea-souper, it entered the house by every crevice and enveloped the world in obnoxious but exciting unreality. The sound of the descending silence was ominous; the leaves dropped from the trees with noiseless finality to lie inert on the paths and pavement. The lights of a car would loom uncertainly from the limbo of the street, and if we were out we would hurry home, our throats and noses choked with smog. Indoors the gas fire seemed like an island, or far-off lighthouse, and we would sit there gazing at it and munching our buttered crumpets.

  Opposite the house was the square, encircled by the ubiquitous iron railings, enclosing a little world of paths and lawns, privet bushes and plane trees, and an ancient weeping ash which hung over a circular wooden seat. This was my playground, one in which I have no memory of meeting other children, but where I was perfectly happy if left to myself, lost in my imagination, but alive, as dogs and cats are, to the pungent smells of soot, privet, wet earth and grass that surrounded me. It was good to be allowed out even into such a limited arena, and there were moments when I felt impelled to push my nose between the railings to get an idea of what was going on outside. Everyone seemed extraordinarily busy – they mostly hurried past, looking neither to right nor left, concentrated on some personal problem. I stared unmoved, mystified by the behaviour of what seemed to be a distantly related species.

  The square was also a meeting ground where, if I had not already been hustled off to bed, I would sometimes see a group of familiar figures watching the tennis players and laughing at each other’s jokes. In the yellow evening light the moment seemed particularly precious to them, superior to a London busy with more exciting things. Then Clive, becoming conscious of the time,
would hurry off, hailing a taxi round the corner. The others would laugh, and say he was going to meet the Princess Bibesco or the wife of the French Ambassador, closing their ranks, knowing that they themselves had only a mutton chop to look forward to, without champagne. Their evening would no doubt be spent sitting under a lamp, reading anything from Tasso to the Daily Mirror. Conscious that all I had to look forward to was bed, the grown-ups would stare at me benignly and extend a caressing hand from time to time. It was on one such occasion that Bunny told me of the mating habits of worms, the only bit of scientific education I ever received.

  On our own side of the square I knew the Keyneses, the Stracheys, my Uncle Adrian and his wife Karen Stephen, with their two daughters, Anne and Judith, whose flat was above theirs at No. 50; during the summer there were also the Bussys in the top of No. 51. Raymond Mortimer lived round one corner, and Leonard and Virginia round the other, in Tavistock Square. It was a family network that gave me the feeling that this part of London belonged to us. On fine summer evenings one could sometimes see the Stracheys on their balcony, and I was once taken to see Lady Strachey shortly before she died. She stood on the landing outside the first-floor sitting-room supporting herself with a walking stick, and looking blankly at the wall above my head, since she was almost if not quite blind. I was struck by her massive size and immobility, her white hair parted in the middle, and her black dress which came down to the ground. It may have been Marjorie Strachey who accompanied me, wanting to confront me – although I was unaware of the relationship – with my great-aunt, and to join the two extremes of youth and age, so that long afterwards I should be able to say that I had seen this formidable woman, who herself had seen George Sand at the theatre and been an intimate friend of George Eliot.

  One of the rare but regular events was tea with Leonard and Virginia. Virginia I knew would treat me as a special person – almost as Vanessa did. Leonard, however, was another matter, and was the only member of the family who could successfully refuse me something I wanted, whose very tone spelt the finality of real authority, against which there was no appeal. He was dispassionate, and perhaps it was the perception of a different attitude which, while it impressed me, made me vacillate, unsure of what I wanted or why.

  With the Hogarth Press in the basement and the solicitors on the ground floor I found myself in a rigorous world of machinery and accounts, very different from our own. Occasionally I collected Virginia from her writing-room in the basement, where she sat by a tiny gas fire surrounded by a wall of books done up in brown paper parcels as though to shelter her from a bombardment. I felt the austerity of their lives compared with ours – which was much fuller of wine and laughter, and of the ribaldry supplied by Julian and Quentin. Virginia and Leonard’s Work allowed them only just time for a frugal meal; preoccupied with thoughts of the New Statesman or the House of Commons, Leonard encouraged no elbows on the table, cigars or liqueurs – he was off, like a secretary-bird, to more gripping occupations. When I arrived there, I knew that my claims on his time were strictly limited. At the tea-table, where we sat in high-backed chairs as though in a nursery, Leonard pretended to talk to me like a grown-up, pinning me down by a glance from his sapphire-blue eyes, under which I shrank into being what I was – a small child. After the meal he would offer me, with ritualistic hand, a striped humbug, of which he ate one after every meal. Virginia had different sweets of her own, and I was allowed one of each.

  Leonard then descended to the basement while Virginia and I retreated to the sitting-room at the top of the house, decorated by Vanessa and Duncan. It was this room which, bombed in 1940, flagrantly exhibited its coloured walls to the world at large, while the rest of the house lay collapsed into a pile of rubble. In the 1920s, however, it was an oasis of intimacy, shabby but elegant. The light shone in two yellow pools on either side of the fireplace – the scene was set for conversation. Virginia produced rolls of coloured paper which she had bought that afternoon from Kettle’s in New Oxford Street, one of her favourite shops, and with scissors, paste and pins proceeded to create a doll, the image of Ottoline Morrell, over which unexpected triumph she emitted hoots of laughter. On other occasions we hung out of the front window above the parapet, throwing out lumps of sugar for the cart-horses far below, bored by waiting for their drivers. They, however, snorted with indifference, and plunged their noses into hessian bags, to munch their hay.

  A year or two earlier than this Nellie went and Louie came. I accepted the change with a good grace, especially as from the first Louie possessed a moral ascendancy over me that attracted me enormously – to Vanessa this was a miracle. There were no more scenes about going to bed, and Vanessa even wondered what black arts she used – but there were none. She simply happened to be what I needed. Small and dark, she had a face like a squashed red apple with pips for eyes, and her short hair was tied up on one side by a floppy black ribbon. Timidity itself, when surprised on the stairs by Duncan or Clive she blushed all over her neck and was reduced to speechlessness – unlike Grace, who was always ready to pass the time of day, and perhaps say something foolish which was repeated with laughter at the lunch-table. In the kitchen, however, Louie could be fierce enough in favour of her own opinions. Unafraid of my tantrums, she exercised an authority based partly on affection, and partly on values inherited from generations of country people. Quite rightly, Vanessa trusted Louie and was relieved to be able to leave me in her hands; I was completely happy. Her great virtue was that she was rough and solid, and with her I learnt to a certain extent to think of things outside myself. But she was also repressed and limited, her mind like a Stilton cheese, riddled with airless little tunnels that ended in dust. She cared too much about the opinions of other people, and from her I learnt a whole string of words and phrases, a system of feeling that was utterly dull and conventional. No doubt I responded to it with relief as a change from the extreme sophistication of my family, but – although for the opposite reasons – it had the effect of stopping me from using my brains.

  My brief phase of religion owed much to Louie’s romanticism: she loved seeing the gentry in her Norfolk village kneeling on their embroidered hassocks, reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Her morality, however, was hardly exalted, and her vision of God was very vague. He never became real to me, lacking the attraction of Jesus, who may, I now see, have seemed more like Duncan. I had one delicious dream of Him which I could not shake off for a long time – but I should imagine this had more to do with budding sexuality than with religion. After going to church with Mrs Bell at Christmas, probably in an effort to demonstrate my independence from Vanessa, I improvised a ritualistic dance for the benefit of Maynard and Lydia when they came to tea. I heard them ask Vanessa in unbelieving tones whether I was religious, to which she replied with an evasive, deprecatory remark which had an instantaneous effect, like pricking a bubble, and marked the end of my flirtation with the Lord.

  4

  With the Bells at Seend

  At Christmas, we spent two or three days with Clive’s family at Seend in Wiltshire. For me, stimulated by the celebration of both Christmas and my birthday, the visit was one of excitement and pleasure, while for Vanessa it was an annually recurring period of boredom and misery. Her dislike must have grown with time, as she felt less and less justification in being there, constantly reminded by my presence that this was neither her place, nor mine. Ignorant of both facts I was unaffected by them, but Vanessa could remember her early years there as the eldest daughter-in-law, when her visits had been unbearably long. She had no sympathy with Clive’s father and found little to say to her sisters-in-law, Lorna and Dorothy, who were interested almost exclusively in horses, hounds and hunt balls. What Vanessa most disliked was the hypocrisy and pretentiousness of which the whole household was redolent, but to which I, for some years, remained insensitive. I took it all at its face value, sniffing the Victorian smells with pleasure – the leather bindings of the Illustrated London News, the chrysanthemums in the jardini�
�re, the smell of the spotless earth-closet and the polish on the oak floorboards. All these, added to the formality of our existence there, the presence too of the impeccable servants (some of whom were my friends), the hierarchy of the household, meant much to me: they created a yearly dip into romance, calling to mind the books I was fond of, such as Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden, and the novels of Charlotte M. Yonge.

  From Paddington we took the train to Devizes, where we were met by Ovens, previously the coachman, now taking as much pride in his smooth purring machine with its polished ornaments, and mahogany-upholstered interior, as he had once done in plaiting tails and combing manes. Upholstered himself in navy blue velour, there he was, touching his cap and holding open the door of the car. As he covered our knees with a rug, Vanessa sank back into her seat, dumb with apprehension, whereas I was feverish with excitement. Clive sat in front and talked to Ovens with ease about local events and people, whose names he remembered effortlessly. The huge silent car navigated the roads with arrogant smoothness: I watched the silver figure on the bonnet describe an arc across the landscape as it swung round to dip between the lodge gates under the bottle-brush fir trees, some pretending they were snow-laden even when the air was muggy and the sky like a bad watercolour. The gloom of the evening was intensified by the jagged shapes of the trees, seeming to presage the long winter night. And then an arched yellow window sprang out of the blackness, and there we were, drawn up outside the pseudo-medieval porch.