Deceived With Kindness

by Angelica Garnett

  It was a long day. After a bathe, we spent hours sitting on the large, slippery pebbles, eating Lottie’s cake. At last, feeling the cool of the evening on our skins, we set off towards the road, half a mile distant, only to realise that we had lost our money. Searching for it, we missed the last bus home. For some reason we never thought of telephoning, perhaps because the telephone was still an innovation at Charleston, and in the dark we spent some time finding a taxi. A little light-headed with sea air and fatigue, we rode home in comfort, imagining that the car was emerging from a dark forest stretching behind us to infinity, while on either side the predatory trees were forced to open and let us through.

  At last we arrived. Devil-like figures came running out of the house, lit up by our headlights. All at once we understood that we were the objects of anxiety: we were told that Duncan and Vanessa had gone out to look for us, and I knew that Vanessa thought we had been drowned. In the warm and brightly lit dining-room we were given boiled eggs by a concerned and unusually serious Grace. All at once there was the noise of a car, and Duncan was in the room asking for a glass of brandy. He hardly seemed to notice us but hurried out again. My egg became suddenly loathsome and my heart plummeted; I felt exceedingly small.

  We were sent to bed without seeing Vanessa, and lay in the studio on our mattresses brought in from the garden because of a threatened change in the weather. Flashes of lightning lit up the square panes of the skylight under which we were lying, and we could see the jagged leaves of the vine. I could see also the tops of the elms where they stood in a row beyond the garden wall. I waited, unable to sleep; after a time Vanessa came in and leant over us, smiling as though she were a goddess from the underworld. I was not expected to apologise, neither did she betray her previous anxiety. Everything was left in suspension. With relief I kissed her, and slept.

  6

  Langford Grove

  Vanessa sent me to boarding school when I was ten – or rather, I went at my own request, after the idea was put into my head by Louie, who wanted to leave us in order to get married.

  If I had little notion of what I was letting myself in for, Vanessa, who had never been to school herself, had exaggerated preconceptions, derived more from the novels of Charlotte Brontë than from her own childhood. She instinctively rejected Cheltenham, Neill’s School, Bedales or Roedean – each of which, different though they were, had too strong an individuality for Vanessa’s liking – and she asked among her friends for a school as little resembling one as possible. She finally chose Langford Grove, near Malden in Essex, which was run by an Irishwoman of character and charm, called Mrs Curtis, or Curty for short.

  Vanessa had long ago made up her mind that schools – and education in general – were a waste of time. The best education was assuredly self-acquired, and this was gained after one had left school. I do not know what she expected to occur while one was there, but she set little store by discipline, and hardly more by processes of the intellect. Herself uninterested in knowledge, or in the historical approach to any subject, she could hardly believe that anyone close to her might feel differently. When, as in the case of both Julian and Quentin, it became obvious that they did, she smilingly declined to involve herself, on the grounds of her fundamental incapacity. ‘You’re so clever, darling, but I’m afraid I can’t follow you,’ was in effect what she said, and though she never raised a finger to stop anyone doing what they wanted, such an attitude was in itself unhelpful.

  She assumed that I would feel the same as she did, and by a gentle persuasion and reluctance to inculcate in me any spirit of objectivity, had made it impossible for me to do otherwise. Convinced that I was going to be an artist, she decided that I needed no more education than she had had herself. Seeing also that I had showed promise of being good-looking, she thought that I would ‘get along all right’ without training of the mind: such indeed was her attitude of laissez-faire that one sometimes had the impression that she despised the intellect – or perhaps she only denied my right to develop mine, since she certainly admired the erudition of many of her friends, including her sister. For her own part, she had decided that artists didn’t have to think – visual artists, that is, as opposed to other kinds – and it had grown into an ineradicable conviction.

  Sending her children to school was therefore more of a practical measure – it would have been very difficult for her, with her professional life to take into account, to do otherwise. The best schools could do was to provide companionship, but she also thought that boys differed from girls: boys needed something tougher and more demanding than she could provide at home. Even so, schools were thought of as a necessary evil, their hardships were to be palliated whenever possible – Quentin, for instance, spent a term of his school life in France. Although I was younger when I started my formal education than either of my brothers, this was simply because I asked for it. I had ‘got it into my head’ that I wanted to go, and her overriding principle was permissiveness.

  Though my desire was only an instinct, it was surely a healthy one. I was aware of the cloying atmosphere that surrounded me, contributing to the disquieting ‘difference’ I felt between myself and my friends. I did not realise that going to school would not dispel it, given that Vanessa’s presence was to pursue me, undermining the whole purpose of the experience. I wanted to find firm ground but couldn’t: I was prevented at every turn either by Vanessa or Curty singling me out for special treatment. It was as though some secret agent had hold of me, and, struggle as I might, my feet would never hit the earth. At the same time I was torn between this struggle, which though genuine was uncertain, and the temptation to take advantage of their favouritism. I either revelled in privilege or used it to escape situations that demanded some slight objectivity or self-discipline.

  With Vanessa at Charleston, 1928

  The fact that I was pursued by the reputation of my family meant that I became secretly vain, and learnt very little. Thus on the level where I really needed help, school did nothing for me, and one could say that Vanessa’s prejudice was justified. But she herself was on the side of the devil, since she persuaded Mrs Curtis to let me drop any subject I found difficult. Latin, arithmetic and allied subjects, games and some other disciplines were successively crossed off my timetable until, in addition to music and the arts, I learnt only history, French and English. True, I would never have shone at any of the discarded subjects, except perhaps for Latin – but it was the demoralisation of not being put to the test like everyone else that was insidious and harmful. I did not realise what it was at the time, but this misplaced permissiveness ate into my morale like a beetle into a honeycomb. If the school had been more intransigent Vanessa would have disliked it – as it was, the school itself aided and abetted her in sabotaging its purpose. She could not believe that I wanted to learn anything – or that, if I did, such a wish was worth supporting. At bottom she felt, consistently enough, that it was all a lot of fuss about nothing.

  By the time I had been at Langford for two or three years, Mrs Curtis had fallen in love with Vanessa and Bloomsbury – she was one of the first enthusiasts – and no longer cared whether I was a good pupil or not. I could do no wrong and became the spoiled darling of the school, taking part in nearly all expeditions, concerts, theatricals and so forth at the expense of lessons. Enormously enjoyable, I can’t say that it was entirely uninstructive. It was indeed an extraordinary school where one was dragged out of bed late at night to take part in a play by W. B. Yeats; where often, instead of going to church, one was prized out of the brown crocodile of waiting girls to go on a picnic with Curty or to spend the day with her son Dunstan on his yacht. On these occasions we were treated as grown-up only to find ourselves on the following day back in the puerile, competitive atmosphere of a lot of small girls thrown together, out of touch with the outside world. Our venial sins were punished at intervals by Curty who gave us large chunks of ‘Lycidas’ or a piece of music to learn by heart – and yet we went in fear of her,
dreading her corrections, lightly handled though they were. The authority of the other teachers paled beside hers, and though no one ever said they went for nothing, none counted beside Curty. But she, presumably often bored by us, would disappear from view: we never saw her either go or return, but we knew from the general atmosphere that the mainspring of our lives was missing.

  Miss Baggs, yellow and scraggy like a Baba Yaga, with greasy hair wound into two plaits on either side of her head, was deputy, and though we supposed she admired Mrs Curtis as much as we did, her ideas of discipline were quite different. She thought that geography and maths, which she taught herself, were important in life, and disapproved strongly when I was permitted to give them up. In class she would look at us coldly from behind steel-rimmed spectacles, ‘Get up on your hind legs, children. Who can give me the square root of 21?’ We shivered like jelly, but recognised the fact that Miss Baggs cared, and wanted to make us care, about something beyond our laziness and obtuseness, about things beyond ourselves. She fought a lonely battle, however, and her mathematical approach to infinity was no match for Curty’s enthusiasm for culture.

  Girls whose normal recreations were horses and dogs, point-to-points and cubbing, were discovered to have quite other gifts and were persuaded to take up music, painting and acting. Scientific subjects, never having been taught, were not in question, but excellence at maths or geography now went unnoticed compared with an inclination for drawing or the piano. The walls suddenly blossomed with watercolours by Frances Hodgkin and Miss Fischer Prout, who was occasionally to be seen herself, veiled like a muslim lady, wandering along the garden path or installed at her easel in the evening, her brush dipped in cadmium, painting by electric light, which was her speciality.

  Apart from my calf-love for Curty, which dominated the whole of my time at Langford, I made several friends, none of whom can be said to have lasted into adult life. The most intimate of these was Beetle, who already had a great friend called Cinda. Beetle and Cinda were about a year older than me, and their relationship was that of two Red Indians: they signed their names in blood, kept locks of each other’s hair and wore each other’s clothes. They talked in a way that excluded everyone else in their vicinity, making it very tempting to insinuate oneself into their society. Beetle was tall, thin, almost gangly, with a dim little face staring from behind a pair of round spectacles. Pale and a little fierce, a flash of wit could suddenly transform her into a grinning imp, and an unsuspected will-power enabled her to exert a capricious authority over others. Cinda was athletic and handsome – she remains in my mind as a dim but pleasant extrovert. One summer, bathing in the Blackwater, she broke her arm, and was sent home to recover. During this short space of time I became closer to Beetle, and when Cinda returned, a little taller and less tomboyish than before, she accepted me as one of three with perfect equanimity. For myself, I had the pleasure of being a member of an élite, a small group within the larger one where I felt insecure.

  We had one glorious week-end when Curty drove us off to Blakeney Point, a bird sanctuary in Norfolk. We stayed the night in a small wooden hut on the dunes, Curty’s presence adding to our sense of excitement and privilege. All day we were blown upon by the rough, salty wind; sand was in our hair, our clothes and our food, the noise of the sea in our ears. Birds flew, or rather scudded, rose and dipped from air to water and back again, intent on mating and fishing. They were disturbed by our presence for they had eggs, and screamed incessantly. We learnt to tell terns from black-backed gulls, and these from others; we saw mottled eggs lying untended in little saucers of sand; and for two wonderful days we forgot Langford. The world belonged to birds, and we were amazed by their aggressiveness and vitality as they plummeted towards us in protest. Beetle and Cinda reacted with a wild delight that sent them, and myself too, careering down the dunes with our arms spread out, throwing ourselves into the sand only to jump up and rush away screaming with pleasure, until seized with a delicious exhaustion. We felt in perfect sympathy with one another, absorbed by an experience which reduced us to nothing more than grains of sand in the wind. Curty, enjoying it as much as we did, perfectly understood our ecstasy.

  Cinda soon left the school, and Beetle became Prima Donna Assoluta. When angry or sad the shadow on her face made my heart sink; her judgments were instant and irrevocable and she carried herself as proudly as a peacock. There was something aristocratic about her which procured her her own way even with the staff, with whom she took the all-or-nothing attitude of the romantic heroine. Wilful and spoiled, she was none the less gifted with an instinctive knowledge of other people’s feelings, very far from my own dissociated outlook. It was doubtless this that I found so fascinating and which gave her an advantage over me. Otherwise my only superiority was in being better at music and painting, and I was able to arouse her interest in the latter, so that we were often to be found painting side by side, sometimes on the same picture. She and I were now inseparable, and tried the experiment of asking each other home for the holidays.

  She lived with her mother and brother near Edenbridge, in Kent. Her father, a cousin of Mrs Curtis, had been poisoned by eating a crab in the West Indies, which conferred on Beetle the status of an orphan, a condition of which she took full advantage. Mrs Carr was tall, red-faced and kindly, not at all sad in spite of having seen her husband die in front of her eyes. Without much money she did all she could to give her children a good time. Their house, typically Kentish, had tile-hung walls and a gabled roof, set among laurels and privet on the crossroads of the village. In her bedroom Beetle showed me a book by Michael Arlen which was apparently delightfully wicked: in it I read that the heroine daringly touched up her cheeks with lipstick instead of rouge, which made me ponder – what, I wondered, was all the fuss about? For breakfast we had Hovis bread and tea which, different as it was from the thick uneven slices of toast and coffee that we had at home, contributed to my sense of unease in an unfamiliar environment.

  Our main amusement was a game of bicycle-polo invented by Beetle and her brother John, played on the crossroads. It was aggressive and skilful, and they were more practised than me, though as my reactions were quick I managed to hold my own in a game that threatened to be one of brother and sister against myself. Mrs Carr presided in the background and provided us with her own kind of entertainment. One afternoon we went to a large and wealthy household, where the young played tennis and the old, whist. As we never played either at home, it seemed to me an extraordinary way of spending a summer afternoon. I was doing my best, however, to hit a ball over the net, when suddenly I felt my stockings slip; making some excuse, I found my way to the lavatory, where I took them off and left them in a corner. When I rejoined the crowd, no one commented on my nudity until on the way home in the bus, Mrs Carr, noticing my long pale legs, started to tease me for being, as she called it, a country bumpkin, making me dimly conscious, almost for the first time, of the exasperation I could cause without meaning to.

  At home what did it matter if my legs were bare or my clothes in holes, so long as I was busy and happy? No one ever noticed whether I brushed my hair or cleaned my fingernails – if Mrs Carr had used the word ‘slut’ she would have been nearer the truth. Vanessa frowned on convention, and we imitated her, mentally elbowing out those who valued cleanliness and tidiness, as though there was no room in the world for both points of view. In our world indeed there hardly was – Mrs Carr would not have survived for five minutes – but no one seemed to think this might be our loss rather than hers. The walls round us were high and the conditions inside the castle odd. Though we were unbrushed, unwashed and ragged, our carpets and curtains faded and our furniture stained and groggy, appearances of a purely aesthetic kind were considered of supreme importance. Hours were spent hanging an old picture in a new place, or in choosing a new colour for the walls. I too would stand in the centre of the studio while a new dress was being dreamed up round me, as though I where a still-life of which the apples and pears were being ar
ranged with careful precision.

  To others our narcissism must have been painfully evident, while to ourselves it seemed as though we were exhibiting the purest spirit of objective detachment – in either case it was hardly an atmosphere which welcomed outsiders, and the very fact that we thought of them as such was a betrayal of our attitude. In fact we were almost encouraged to condemn people out of hand as though we had a divine right to judge, and dismiss those who didn’t make the grade. We not only got a wicked pleasure from doing it with many of those we called our friends, but also with the dead, artists such as Mendelssohn or the Pre-Raphaelites whom we had decided to despise. I was probably the worst offender, copycatting my elders without their wit, always able to raise a laugh by such means, until one day Bunny, my future husband, said, ‘You must stop being so disdainful of those who are unlike yourself.’ It was one of those rare occasions when criticism really sinks in, and I did stop, as though provided with a pair of brakes.

  Vanessa swayed uneasily between the two extremes. It was more from a desire to be friendly and to pass unnoticed, that she did her best, for instance, to dress suitably for Lewes High Street, where she was all but oblivious (or else philosophically resigned) to her lack of success. This hardly mattered, since she was clothed more completely by the formal perfection of her manner than by her moth-eaten coat and felt hat – the combination of the two merely made her more memorable. The regality which so impressed people also kept them at a distance, just as her children’s almost flagrant disregard of appearances alienated them. While we thought we were teaching the world a lesson in values, our insensitivity proved something of a barrier even to our friends. Several of mine admitted later that, when visiting Charleston, although welcomed with apparent friendliness, they were conscious of a mass weight of prejudice arrayed against them, which was, had they but known it, not so much embattled aggression as fear of invasion.