In spite, or perhaps because of, the growing threat of war – as though the light while it narrowed also grew brighter – life in London was very pleasant. Vanessa, Duncan and I lived at No. 8 Fitzroy Street, now destroyed but then one of those mid-nineteenth-century houses with large rooms and heavy cornices, whose lower floors were occupied by Drown’s, the picture restorers, while the upper regions were allocated to various tenants. I had a room at the top which, though it looked on to the street, was reasonably quiet. In it I did everything except eat and have my bath; these functions were carried out in Vanessa’s studio, which was built out at the back, and reached by a long narrow passage bridging the gap between it and the rest of the house. Roofed with corrugated iron, it trembled and shook underfoot, heralding the approach of our visitors with a rumble as of stage thunder.
Vanessa and Duncan’s studios stood back to back, the mirror image of each other. From the little window in Vanessa’s kitchen one could see the legs and feet of Duncan’s guests tramping in single file along the last length of passage, at the end of which stood an empty, hooded porter’s chair, made of straw. A small door then led into the vast studio, whose magical, dusty space was lined with matchboarding, and called to mind the rehearsal rooms of Degas’ ballet dancers. First occupied by Whistler, then by Sickert, the place was a refuge from the progress of time and from the encroachments of modern life; it was made for the dreams and visions of the artist, floating, it seemed, in the London fog caught and held there since the nineteenth century. What wonderful, lofty and mysterious places they were, full of the paraphernalia of the artist, in each case so characteristic. Among the easels and models’ thrones, encrusted palettes and jars full of brushes, rotting still-lifes and the smell of turpentine, stacks of dusty canvases and saucers of drawing-pins and pieces of charcoal stuck together with varnish, Duncan had reserved a small island by the fire where there was a square piano on which his friend Mrs Hammersley or Harriet Cohen would play. A couple of guitars hung on the wall, faded but sumptuous textiles were flung over the bed where numerous cushions suggested the harem, lit by a lamp made from a piece of African sculpture. What could be more delightful for his friends than to sit there smoking, drinking and talking, conscious of a quality in the air they could find nowhere else?
Vanessa’s studio was divided in two by some long, embroidered curtains seldom drawn but delimiting one half as the working space while the other was our dining-room. There we ate on a heavy octagonal table whose surface was sheeted with aluminium; it never lay quite flat, and our knives and forks slid from hump to hollow as though on a metallic sea. Behind the studio a small room functioned as both kitchen and bathroom, dominated for a few hours each day by the gaunt and noble figure of Flossie, who did both the cooking and the shopping.
It was at this time that my adoration of Duncan was at its peak, If, at the age of six or seven, I had chosen him as my ‘husband’ in preference to Clive, it was probably because I felt instinctively that he was my father; but it was also because he was younger, more approachable and more gentle. He was never didactic, he never bullied, and seldom offered advice unless it was asked. Many people, afraid of seeming insensitive, exaggerate their emotional reactions. Duncan never did so; neither did he appear to repress his feelings, but remained intimately in touch with his instincts. Considerate and good-mannered, there was a sense of proportion in all he did. So long as he was able to paint, he seemed to have no egotistical impulses, and yet one always felt that he did exactly what he wanted. At the same time he was always ready to experience anything new, and had an elasticity of spirit that to me was like champagne, delicious and invigorating. Vanessa distrusted this quality, assuming that if he gave way to every temptation he would never do any work; but not only did he work as hard as anyone I knew, he lived for his painting as though it were a lover.
Duncan acted as a buffer between myself and Vanessa. I do not really know when my feeling of malaise with her started. I am tempted to say it had always been there – and indeed that is not impossible. Children are naturally guileless, and, although they cannot speak of it, immediately detect hypocrisy in others. I am certain that Vanessa felt guilty with regard to me, and, whether she would have admitted it or not, betrayed it by small, almost imperceptible signs. In addition, unreasonable though it may seem, I resented her age – less for the years it represented than for her lack of elasticity, both physical and moral. I needed a punch-ball to try my strength on, but if I hit out my fist encountered nothing but cotton wool – and I immediately felt ashamed of my violence. Such experiences are disorientating because it is natural for the young to want to be strong, but I could never even get into training. Much of my later weakness was due, I think, to learning not how to control myself, but how to repress my feelings. It was this attitude too which glued me to Vanessa’s side when I should have been out exploring on my own. But in Duncan’s presence her power to depress and make me feel inadequate evaporated. With her, I was like a boat stranded; when Duncan appeared, I floated free. When he was out in the evening, Vanessa and I would sit in the studio waiting for his return, each of us longing to hear his key in the door. He would arrive ruffling his hair and smiling, to recount his evening’s experiences – and for both of us it was a release.
Sometimes Duncan and I would go to a party together, leaving Vanessa by the fire. These occasions were a delight, if a trifle unnatural, since I should surely have been accompanied by some young beau. They nearly always ended with Duncan as the last guest, reluctant to go home because he was so much enjoying himself. Sometimes, however, it was they who left me behind, and I remember one such occasion when, after dinner at the aluminium table, Vanessa sat in the studio, reluctantly but patiently allowing herself to turn blue under the practised fingers of the actress Valerie Taylor, who was covering her face with grease-paint. A fancy-dress party must have been the reason for this metamorphosis; Vanessa ended by resembling a leaden Venus about to mount her plinth of stone.
Our weekly family meetings continued to take place in Clive’s flat in Gordon Square. Duncan, Vanessa and I strolled round there from Fitzroy Street, familiar with every brick and every paving-stone on the way. Traffic was negligible; it was more like a walk in a country town than the sky-scrapery, rock-hard metropolis of today. Bloomsbury seemed to have changed little since the days of Thackeray and Dickens, with street after street of Victorian houses, shabby, down at heel and hardly comfortable since they were too tall and narrow, but still full of domestic life and interspersed with shops that catered for the needs of the inhabitants. Vanessa would dress in something long and flowing with shawl and earrings, and, emerging from her strange, barnlike studio, would walk slowly along the pavement leaning slightly forward, more from apprehension than eagerness. Duncan, a cigarette hanging from his lips would tell me stories of how in Gordon Square he was once struck on the tongue by lightning, or of how, when Maynard was away, he helped himself to two entire crates of Moët et Chandon.
Lottie, as thin as a string bean, her lips a raspberry red, provided us with a meal worthy of a cordon bleu, and after dinner we sat in Clive’s bachelor apartment, his sitting-room filled with books, comfortable chairs and a sofa, and shaded lights glimmering in the smoke of cigars. Here we listened to Virginia’s excited and unbridled accounts of her long flirtation with Sibyl Colefax, or her more recent one with the Comtesse de Polignac. The pleasure of each occasion, for herself and the others, lay not only in itself but in a recreation of the past, a homage to friendship and affection. Like magnets, they still attracted each other, eclipsing all other friends in each other’s company. The past was so inextricably mixed with the present and so full of incident and emotion, and their minds and thoughts so well known to each other that every allusion, however slight, was caught and understood, every joke appreciated: communication was a luxury to which no effort attached.
It was here that Vanessa read aloud Julian’s letters from China, describing a world which, however vivid it was for her,
for the rest of us remained hard to imagine, although each member of the family, including Quentin, who was occupied at this time with political projects, wrote to him keeping him informed of events in England.
Eventually, after about a year and a half, Julian came home, resigning from his post at Wuhan University partly as the result of an amorous indiscretion, partly because he could no longer ignore the Civil War in Spain. He had grown thinner and was changed, and so was I. We were at first strangers to one another, attempting clumsily to rediscover our earlier intimacy. But there was not much time; all too soon he succeeded in persuading Vanessa and his friends that he must fight, although out of consideration for her he consented to go as a Red Cross ambulance driver rather than to the trenches. Once more there was a period of preparation, coloured by Vanessa’s unspoken anguish together with the usual anxieties of getting the necessary permits and equipment, enjoyable perhaps for Julian but for no one else. Vanessa accompanied him to Newhaven, and after what seemed an incredibly short space of time, he was gone – London was emptier.
Appropriately enough, I was dancing at the London Theatre Studio in a dramatic ballet on the theme of Goya’s ‘Desastros della Guerra’. It was my most successful part and one I very much enjoyed. In June that year we gave a fortnight’s showing to friends and public. One evening after the performance had started Duncan suddenly appeared in the narrow alleyway outside the theatre: Julian had been killed, would I come home immediately? Trembling, I climbed the ladder leading to the lighting platform from where Michel watched all our shows. Seeing something serious was wrong, he immediately came down with me and, hearing what had happened, put his arm round me. Of course, if someone else could take my part, I could go home.
I found Vanessa in bed, white and swollen with tears, almost unable to speak. I said I had known all the time that it would happen, and so did she, but apart from that first embrace we became no nearer to each other. Everyone’s effort was strained towards her, longing but unable to comfort her. Only Virginia and Duncan were of some use to her. Although not a mother herself, Virginia was imaginative enough to understand the kind of agony Vanessa was going through and was unafraid to talk of the past. Duncan, as usual, preserved his extraordinary serenity. Clive, however, pretended to a distressing detachment at a moment when detachment was impossible.
Before long we were at Charleston again, and Vanessa lay on a daybed in the studio looking down the empty garden path, occasionally weeping, more often exhausted. It was decided to publish a book made up of Julian’s letters from China and other writings with contributions from such friends as Maynard and Bunny. Vanessa slowly turned her attention to reading, writing and choosing, which, melancholy though it was, was better than the inactivity that had so far incapacitated her. In spite of Julian’s recommendation, in a letter she was to receive after his death, that she should work, it was some time before she stood at her easel again. Slowly, however, she reoccupied her place in the household, fulfilling her previous duties in an effort to restore a normality to which we had all grown so accustomed that we could hardly recognise life without it. The effort she made must have helped her, but nothing could restore her previous confidence in life which had been born of a feeling that, doing no harm, we should not suffer much. Although to a large extent she shared Julian’s beliefs, she was in no way consoled thereby for his death; her best resource, apart from work, was to focus her attention on her remaining children.
10
Child of Two Fathers
I remember that summer as endless, hot and tiring. One day when Vanessa was better she took me into the drawing-room at Charleston and told me that Duncan, not Clive, was my real father. She hugged me close and spoke about love: underneath her sweetness of manner lay an embarrassment and lack of ease of which I was acutely aware, and which washed over my head like the waves of the sea. It is hard to say what prompted her to tell me just at that moment – how much was due to a plan conceived long ago, and how much because of her actual state of emotion. It is very likely that she felt, however obscurely, that she owed this gesture to Julian’s memory. Not only would the knowledge she was about to impart help me to mature, but he would approve of the honesty of her gesture. At the same time she must have felt an immense need to unburden herself of the lie we had all been living under for the last seventeen years. Anxious about how I was going to take it, she said it need change nothing, since it was the intimacy of the present, not the facts of the past, that was important: my love for Quentin, for example, need not be affected by the fact that I now knew he was my half-brother. I remember the curious little shock this assertion gave me and I recognised the fact that I did indeed love him, though never before had I thought of saying so, which may indicate what an undemonstrative family we were. Although Julian had written to her that I was even more emotional than he was himself, I was not an outgoing child. If Vanessa expected me to show surprise at her information, she must have been disappointed: I hardly batted an eyelid, though when she left me to myself I was filled with euphoria. It was a fact which I had obscurely known for a long while. Whatever explosion there may have been occurred far below the surface: at the time I simply felt that a missing piece had been slotted into place.
Still, I did not talk to Duncan: perhaps I was afraid he would deflate my exultation. I preferred to gloat alone, unable to overcome my feeling that, with such a father, I had been marked for a special destiny. I was the little girl, red rose in hand, who falls in love with the prince, the hideous and charming beast. It never occurred to me that I was fantasising a Duncan that could never be. Nor did I realise, in my desperate need of a father figure, the true nature of my sacrifice. I should have spoken to Duncan. As it was, Vanessa said no more, he said nothing, and I remained closeted in dreams.
My relation to Duncan never got beyond this: I adored him, but the will to be his daughter was all on my side, and was received with no more than a bland serenity. It was an asexual barrier of simplicity and kindness which baffled me. I could not see round it, but – I cannot now help wondering – was there anything further to see? Assuredly there was, but it was too nebulous, private and self-centred to respond to the demands of a daughter. As a result our relationship, though in many ways delightful, was a mere simulacrum. We were not like father and daughter. There were no fights or struggles, no displays of authority and no moments of increased love and affection. All was gentle, equable, and superficial – it was indeed his ability to remain uninvolved that made him such a delicious companion. My dream of the perfect father – unrealised – possessed me, and has done so for the rest of my life. My marriage was but a continuation of it, and almost engulfed me.
So absolute was my confidence in their wisdom that I never thought of blaming either Duncan or Vanessa for their silence. Even later, when my resentment fell upon Vanessa, I never could bring myself to blame Duncan. This was years afterwards, when I had begun to realise what I had missed, and how deeply the ambiguity of the situation had sunk into me.
Although Vanessa comforted herself with the pretence that I had two fathers, in reality – emotional reality, that is – I had none. It was impossible to associate Duncan with any idea of paternity – and he never tried to assume such a role. Clive acted better, but carried no conviction, for he knew the truth. How different it would have been if we had all acknowledged it. Among other things, Duncan might have been able to show what affection he had. Vanessa never reflected that perhaps he too was inhibited by her prevarication, just as she never realised that, by denying me my real father, she was treating me even before my birth as an object, and not as a human being. No wonder she always felt guilt and I resentment, even though I did not understand the true reason for it; no wonder too that she tried to make it up to me by spoiling me, and in doing so only inhibited me.
As a result I was emotionally incapacitated – though it would be a great mistake to think that, had she told me before that my father was Duncan, my life would have been easier. My difficul
ties might indeed have been much the same, since his character would have remained constant. It was knowing the truth, instead of being deceived by those who had not fully considered the consequences of their lie, that would have changed everything.
But curiously enough, when the moment came, being told the truth made the world seem less and not more real. No one seemed capable of talking openly and naturally on the subject: Vanessa was in a state of apprehension and exaltation, and Duncan made no effort to introduce a more frank relationship. They gave the impression of children who, having done something irresponsible, hope to escape censure by becoming invisible.
Even Clive did not profit from my recently acquired knowledge; I was told by Vanessa that he preferred to look on me as his real daughter, and that therefore I had better say nothing to him. This was a great pity since Clive’s affection was based on something better than pretence, and his relief at seeing all the cards on the table would have led to an easier relationship between us. He would have understood, if he wanted to, that there was nothing to prevent him from thinking of me as a daughter, while on my side the very real affection I had for him might have been released.
Whether Clive was aware of it or not, my attitude to him was deeply affected by the ambiguity of the situation, and because I could see Vanessa’s feelings for him. I did not examine these at the time but I now understand that, while outwardly composed of trust and respect for his knowledge of the world, and an affection from which all effervescence had departed, she had, in expecting him to maintain a pretence, ridden roughshod over his finer susceptibilities. Did she never consider what was to happen at the moment when I appealed to him as my father, when I expected from him a moral support that he knew himself to be in no position to provide? Had anyone pointed this out, I think Vanessa would have said that, since Clive himself knew the truth, he had only to show his affection for me – without admitting that a permanent state of prevarication exacts its own dues. She might also have said that, had I been more precocious and more sensitive, she would have told me of it earlier, thus reducing the risks of an appeal to Clive. But she appeared to ignore the fact that, apart from and beyond affection, his answer would have been deprived of authority, and that it was this that I longed for, if only in the end to reject it.
Deceived With Kindness Page 14