My week with Beetle and her family came to an end, and Vanessa drove over to fetch us both back to Charleston. As soon as we found ourselves in the old open car with its splayed bumpers, wobbling like an armadillo across open country, Beetle became morose. She was extremely shy and ill at ease, poor child, even before coming in contact with the family in its entirety, and though Vanessa did her best to be kind she had not the knack of warm simplicity. At all events the visit was a disaster. It rained incessantly, and Beetle, expecting social entertainment of the kind she was used to at home, resisted my efforts to amuse her with painting, sewing or music. In despair I appealed to Vanessa, who sacrificed her time to read aloud Sherlock Holmes, sitting uncomfortably in our bedroom by a smoking wood fire, her voice almost drowned by the noise of the rain on the roof. What a relief when the bell rang for meals and we were able to shed some of our ennui in the dining-room, embarrassingly encouraged by Clive, always hopeful about the ‘charms’ of the ‘young ladies’ I brought to the house. Never did Beetle and I visit each other again, though at Langford our friendship remained as close as ever.
Very soon, however, Beetle shot up into maturity; she became pretty, elegant and assured, losing interest in childish things. Curty entrusted her with delicate social missions. It was obvious that life for her consisted of quite other, and so far to me mysterious objectives.
Nevertheless, school was becoming a bore: allowed by Vanessa to evade the exam for which everyone else was working as the crowning effort of their scholastic career, I was simultaneously deprived of this goal and alienated by yet one more difference from my own generation. At the same time I was permitted a certain amount of freedom. I went from Langford to London once a week to join Vanessa and Duncan in the National Gallery on Copying Day, when the public were discouraged from entering by being asked for sixpence. I felt self-conscious standing before Piero’s ‘Baptism’, painstakingly copying the two angels behind the tree. The rare people who did come would sometimes ask me my age – I was fifteen – and one day I found myself pictured in a magazine, looking tall, thin and austere, dressed in clothes more suitable for a woman of thirty, a reflection of Vanessa. (Oddly – or perhaps logically – it was this photograph which, in later days, Bunny kept pinned to the wall of his study.) It was, however, an immense pleasure to be in the cool, calm spaces of the Gallery, surrounded by pictures with which I soon began to be familiar, occasionally strolling round to look at other artists, some of them sitting on high stools, reproducing a famous masterpiece with infinite care.
Back at Langford, both music and the theatre became alluring passions. Louie had been the first to fire my enthusiasm for music, and had taught me the rudiments of the piano. Later I was sent to have lessons with Mrs Smyth, a plump little lady in black satin and a noted teacher of children. I learned to play with fluency, although I never heard a professional soloist until after I went to school. At Charleston all we had was a small selection of records, notably a contralto singing ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, by Handel, and Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, played in the summer evenings while the scent of the tobacco flowers surged in at the open door.
From these meagre beginnings music became of the greatest importance to me. Both Duncan and Vanessa were more musical than they knew. In Vanessa’s case it was a gift ruined by bad teaching, whereas Duncan, who had never had a lesson, could play his favourite tunes on the piano, even adding a rudimentary accompaniment. Later, I played duets with his mother Ethel, and had a lively musical relationship with both Oliver and Marjorie Strachey. At school we had what was, for those days, an excellent orchestra, and many week-ends were spent with Curty and her guests singing or playing chamber music. Thanks to her we heard wonderful musicians: the Léner Quartet came to play to us more than once together with Albert Sammons, Emmanuel Feuerbach and a lovely Finnish singer called Lillequist, who looked like a seal in softest black; even, I believe, the Busch Quartet. All came to perform for us at Curty’s enterprising invitation. My violin teacher, a German Fräulein and an excellent player, instructed me in the rigidities of an outdated style which did more to prevent than to encourage my efforts, so difficult was it to reconcile making a pleasant noise with what she called a ‘good position’. None the less she would sometimes play to us in the evening, filling the hall with sounds of Beethoven, her fingers moving on the fingerboard with the precision of a spider. I would sit rapt, trying to absorb the beautiful movement of the bowing arm, listening to the friction of the bow on the strings. Her skill, so effortless and intimate a part of her – never revealed to me in lessons, where she used to swear at me in German – was something I never tired of, so strange were the vibrations that she introduced me to.
On expeditions to London I was nearly always of the party – indeed on several occasions Curty swept Vanessa into her train and invaded her studio with groups of shy and giggling girls. Always beforehand with the world, Curty took us to see an avant-garde group of actors from abroad. Thus I saw at least three productions of the Compagnie des Quinze, a company organised by Michel Saint-Denis. Michel was a nephew of Jacques Copeau for whom, many years before, Duncan had designed the décor for Twelfth Night and Pelléas et Mélisande. Of all their plays, I was most impressed by Noè, by André Obey, largely because of Noah’s double role as a son of God – with whom he talked as though to an intimate, if invisible, friend – and as a father in his own right, to his tribe of a family. I also saw Lanceurs de Graines, and La Loire, in which the great river was impersonated by an old woman, and foxes and owls conversed together. I identified strongly with Noah, and when we returned to school I took the name part in an improvised production, re-enacting the role with a necessarily fainter flavour of paternal authority but, for myself, great satisfaction. I discovered that I had a stage presence, and enjoyed exploiting it.
It must have been about now that Curty tried to separate Beetle and myself. Our relationship had become suspicious and she did all she could to prize us apart. It was a mistaken insight, as, far from being in love, we were slowly disengaging ourselves from a friendship we recognised as exhausted. All Curty did was to revive a dying flame, and encourage us, from natural perversity, to persist a little longer. Thus, though Beetle was supposed to spend her prep-time in the library where I was not allowed, all I had to do was to invent some excuse for wanting a book, and the sight of me would be enough for her to follow me through another door into the shrubbery, where we would hold long, intimate conversations. It was on one of these occasions that she suggested, on a note of moral superiority, that I was illegitimate, the daughter of Duncan. I was indignant, suspecting from her tone of voice that to be illegitimate meant to be ostracised, but while protesting that I was Clive’s daughter, a flash of clairvoyance told me that she was right. There was, however, no more to be said, and I soon forgot about it.
7
At Home in Sussex
Meanwhile life at Charleston continued, bathed it seemed in the glow of a perpetual summer. The household fell into two halves: on the one hand the painters, on the other the writers. If we lived happily together it was largely because, like birds or animals, we each had our own territory, duly respected by the others. Within a domestic framework, rhythmic and reassuring, we all had space and liberty to pursue our own interests, meeting at regular intervals in the dining-room to be sociable and convivial.
Vanessa presided in the dining-room, the magnetic centre of all our thoughts and activities. At breakfast she was always down first, and sat for some time alone, enjoying her solitude. She had dressed and washed quietly, almost secretively, and would be in her habitual place on the far side of the round table, looking with dreamy reflectiveness at the still-life in the centre, or out of the window at the pond and the weather. Her gestures, for the most part slow and even cumbrous, would suddenly reveal her as a girl – virginal and inexperienced. Age showed itself, however, in her furrowed forehead, in the tortoiseshell spectacles balanced on the curve of her nose, and the deep vertical lines between
her eyes which recalled that life was uphill, sometimes painful. Nevertheless she was enjoying herself. The luxuries she would have asked for on her desert island would have been a picture by Giotto, and unlimited quantities of black coffee. Now, as she ate a piece of buttered toast with coarse salt and held a steaming cup in long, straight be-ringed fingers, she considered her letters, absorbed the temper of the day, and braced herself to meet its demands.
As always, she was divided: on the one hand she was entranced by what she saw in front of her, on the other worried by her responsibilities. She was faced with half an hour in the kitchen, deciding whether to have spotted dog or treacle tart for lunch, and listening to Lottie’s suggestions, jokes and complaints, which, as she found them irrelevant, she dismissed with a laugh, her hand flying to her head as though she had only just realised the depths to which Lottie could descend. She would have repudiated the idea that, as human beings, the servants were any different from herself, and she did her best to give them as much comfort and liberty as possible, but between them there was a wide gap, seldom crossed, even when she was genuinely fond of them. That she was gentle, patient and self-controlled underlined this distance, as though she were waving from a train to women working in the fields. She did her best, but she could not enter their world, and for them she remained in consequence always a ‘lady’.
Clive, Julian, Duncan and Vanessa at tea on the terrace at Charleston, 1932
But a divide of some kind, vague and unadmitted, stood between Vanessa and all of us. In our case it had nothing to do with class, and as she so evidently adored us, nothing to do with love and affection – and yet it had the effect of a seeming lack of sympathy and feeling, a black hole of impalpable depth. She herself was aware of it and would have given anything to cross it, but it affected all of us – those who, like myself, she could not bear to relinquish, and those like Clive, whose hold had slackened in an attempt to remain in touch, for whom she could no longer summon more than a stale affection.
A bad sleeper but of regular, predictable habits, Clive took time, after Grace had brought his jug of hot water and had drawn his curtains, to wash and dress. Unlike Vanessa’s, his toilet was a semi-public affair, and he could be heard shuffling on his carpeted floor from bathroom to bedroom – his were the only floors to be completely covered; ours had only rugs, the worm-eaten floorboards showing between – blowing his nose, gargling, brushing his teeth and talking to himself, while a delicate smell of toilet water seeped under the door and one could imagine him stretching out his chin to meet the razor. Finally, pink as a peach, perfumed and manicured but in old darned clothes of once superlative quality, he would enter the room and tap the barometer, the real function of which was to recall his well-ordered Victorian childhood. After greeting Vanessa he would help himself to coffee and settle down with deliberation to eat an orange, dry toast and marmalade.
His eyes, set in shallow sockets under eyebrows that occasionally twitched nervously, were a pale grey, reflecting few of his innermost feelings except his desire to be distracted from the thoughts which had been bothering him during the night. His food eaten, he pushed his plate away and, putting his immaculate fingertips together, made some statement about his plans for the following few days or hours. These concerned friends he had invited for the week-end, the time of tomorrow’s train to London, or whether he should pick the apples in the orchard. He was longing for conversation, but failed to interest Vanessa who made it clear that she was bored. Resigned, Clive would at last gather up his letters and disappear into his study, where it was taken for granted he did important work and must not be interrupted.
Duncan sometimes overslept, in which case someone would ask me to play a particularly irritating little Écossaise by Beethoven on the piano directly underneath his room. Eventually he would enter the dining-room, growling his dislike of the ‘beastly tune’, ruffling his hair through his fingers and blowing his nose on a large red bandanna. Insouciant and natural, every day he peeled an orange, ate porridge and drank coffee with fresh appreciation, almost as though he had never done it before, conscious perhaps that each new day was a miracle that might not be repeated. For him, objects seemed alive, never simply things, just as repeated actions never bored him but became a source of reiterated pleasure. After wishing everyone good morning and hitching up his trousers, which were tied round his waist with an old red tie, he would squat to help himself to porridge, kept hot on a low trivet in front of the fire, and tell us about his dreams – often very amusing – or about the book which, tradition has it, he absorbed by putting under his pillow.
On Vanessa’s emergence from the kitchen she and Duncan would retire down the long passage to the studio, which was half work-room and half sitting-room, redolent of oil and turpentine. Easels and paintboxes stood about, brushes, sometimes festooned with cobwebs, emerged from jugs or jam jars, palettes and tubes of paint lay on stools or tables, while there was often a bunch of red-hot pokers and dahlias arranged in front of a piece of drapery. The gun-powder-coloured walls were hung with canvases of many shapes and sizes, and some of Duncan’s favourite objects, such as a jointed – or rather disjointed – Sicilian wooden horse, a silver table-watch once given by her admirers to Lydia Lopokova, a fan and perhaps a child’s drawing, could be seen balanced on the mantelpiece or pinned to a spare piece of wall.
On either side of the large stove were two chairs where they sat, Vanessa smoking the first of her self-imposed allowance of cigarettes, Duncan one of an endless chain always hanging from his lips. Plans for the present and the future were discussed at this time of day, as though life could not be lived until it had been decided exactly how to do it. These included their accounts, left in abeyance perhaps for the last fortnight and now become a mass of small figures jotted down in sketch books and no longer intelligible. When these were sorted out, nearly always to the disadvantage of one or other of them, they turned their attention to higher things: one of them would ask – in a very cool, self-controlled voice – for criticism of a picture in progress. Vanessa would frown and, shading her eyes with one hand while she eliminated a portion of the picture with the other, would try to judge the effect of taking out a line or changing a colour. Criticism never went deeper than this and never touched on psychological issues, but these were the moments when Duncan and Vanessa were closest to each other. Where art was concerned they were united by their differences. Where Vanessa was timid and tentative Duncan would be audacious, and when he was disorientated she would be authoritative. She would straighten out his muddles and laugh at his perplexities, and when, as so often happened, her self-confidence failed her, he would support and reassure her.
When her work was being exhibited, her modesty was genuine and touching. But if anyone criticised Duncan’s work she immediately rose up in arms; her fury, her resentment and her desire to protect him knew no bounds. She became formidable, single-minded and ruthless, an upsetting sight to an opponent no matter what his motives may have been. If her sincerity was genuine it was also compulsive, a fact of which she seemed unaware. These were certainly some of the moments in which her feelings got the better of her.
If Duncan was elusive, egotistical and selfish in his love affairs, he submitted to Vanessa in every other area. She accepted this as a mother accepts the faults of a son; her compensations lay partly in the intense pleasure she took in Duncan’s personality, partly in the reassurance she got from working with him. It gave her courage to find that her ideas were understood almost before she had made them visible, and that, where painting was concerned, she could often be of help to him. At the beginning, although she found his approach stimulating, she criticised it for being shallow, but later, when she realised how different they were, she often emphasised the gap between them saying, ‘I can’t do such lovely things as you can,’ or, ‘Duncan has such extraordinary ideas – things I could never think of.’ When it came to her own work, Vanessa deprecated it almost to the point of denying its existence, while Dunca
n, put on the spot by this tactic, would say it was lovely. Then she would sigh deeply, having hoped for some more profound reaction. The rest of the morning was spent dabbing on the paint, both of them as contented as ducks on a pond.
While painting, Vanessa and Duncan had both developed a technique for carrying on a simultaneous conversation with whoever happened to be there, just enough to assure one of their presence. Much of what was said was almost devoid of thought – a repetition of last week’s or last year’s conversation, concerned with aesthetic preferences of a simple variety. Duncan, who liked starting hares, might say, ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that Alma-Tadema is a very remarkable painter.’
Vanessa, rising to the bait, would wrinkle her nose and say, ‘Duncan, how can you? Of all the vulgar, sugary toads, he’s the worst!’
Then I would chip in, asking for a description of Alma-Tadema, and would hear, among other things, how Duncan used to go to tea with his daughters in St John’s Wood. Then Vanessa would say, ‘It’s no good talking about such a degenerate race as the Academicians: what will Angelica say about us when she’s forty, I wonder?’ Impossible to answer: silence for a minute or two. Then Alvar Liddell’s voice over the radio, always on, would announce the Siegfried Idyll. Vanessa would have preferred to turn it off, but Duncan protested, saying he thought there was a great deal in Wagner – finally it was turned down, but becoming inaudible, soon turned up again – the Siegfried Idyll was after all very short and not an opera.
Deceived With Kindness Page 10