Deceived With Kindness

by Angelica Garnett

  But however strong the physical attraction, I refused to say I loved him; I felt obscurely that real love was a different matter, and my heart was full of doubts which refused to disappear, although I could not put them into words. I was so inexperienced, so ignorant of myself, so doubtful whether I had any right to be listened to. The grown-ups, as I still thought of them, were lined up behind me waiting expectantly to see what I would do; and, at the time, I failed to recognise that Bunny belonged to their generation, not to mine. That was why, I later realised, no one of my own age had stood a chance beside him.

  I was as putty in his hands, and many of his acts had a symbolic quality, as though he wanted to mould me into the sort of woman he needed. He took me to Ste Menehould in the north of France, where he had spent several months in the First World War working with the Quakers to rebuild the houses which had been destroyed. He stopped short of taking me to Ray’s cottage at Swaledale in Yorkshire, much loved by her, but he drove me to Kettlewell nearby, where we enjoyed sardine picnics in the high, clear air, looking at the black-faced sheep and listening to the call of the curlew. After a slow start, I came to love the north every bit as much as he did. Although it was natural for him to want me to share his own enthusiasms, his behaviour was addressed as much to Duncan and Vanessa as to myself. It was very much as though he was saying to them, ‘Stop me if you can!’

  These moments of mixed happiness and anguish took place against a background of the Civil War in Spain and the growing certainty of a European war. In anticipation of this, Bunny had entered the Air Ministry, spending half the week in Fitzroy Street, where he had rented a room opposite my own, and the other half at Hilton. In the autumn I started going to the Euston Road School as an art student, but the following term was almost entirely taken up by an illness which, foolishly concealed, proved to be painful though not dangerous. As none of our bed-sitting rooms was suitable for an invalid, Bunny put me in a nursing home – a rather dramatic development which brought Vanessa to London in a state of intense anxiety. It would have been more tactful to put me to bed in her studio and call the family doctor, but Bunny realised how little I relished being nursed by Vanessa. He was in a difficult position in which nothing he did would have been acceptable to everybody; as it was, the episode made apparent the precarious nature of our family relations, underlining our inability to communicate with each other. I recovered, however, and all seemed to be well again.

  In September war was declared: we listened to Chamberlain on the radio in the garden at Charleston, which was glowing with the reds and oranges of the dying summer. The unreality of the occasion was in itself frightening, and yet there we all were – except for Julian – untouched and uncommitted, and seemed likely to remain so. As the suspension of hostilities continued throughout the autumn, so our sense of reality declined in direct ratio to the mounting tension: each day we expected and almost wanted something to happen, but were relieved when it did not.

  The winter was cold, but the austerity of rationing had not yet begun; at Charleston we were comfortable enough. It was decided to celebrate my twenty-first birthday just before Christmas. Everyone was determined to make it a remarkable occasion, from Lottie, who slaved for a fortnight beforehand, to Vanessa, who thought of and organised it. Neither was I completely devoid of enterprise, since I had picked up a young German from Hamburg in the Charing Cross Road, where we were both looking at sheets of second-hand music.(When Bunny heard of his existence, mentioned in all innocence, he treated me to a devastating scene of jealousy with which I was ill-equipped to deal.) The young man was called Eribert; he was tall, thin and miserable, cut off from his country and hardly able to speak English. I invited him to my party, where he found himself in a situation rather like that of Le Grand Meaulnes, in a remote farmhouse full of people of all ages in evening dress, intimate and familiar, related to one another in ways that to him were a mystery. People’s manners were free and easy, they were out to enjoy themselves; there was a defiant abundance of food and drink, and afterwards music and dancing. Every time Clive addressed Eribert, he rose to his feet, clicked his heels together and saluted. Much to Clive’s credit, he did not bat an eyelid; he may indeed have enjoyed a politeness so unlike our own.

  Eribert brought his flute and played it with Marjorie Strachey at the piano. She had not changed, remaining as fierce and vital as ever, delighted to be asked to a party for the young. She put on a garment of transparent purple held together at the back with a single brooch which, if it had come undone, would have revealed more than any of us were prepared for. After our supper of game pie and a good many glasses of wine, she set herself to entertain us with her star turn, the songs of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Aiken Drum’, whose britches were made of haggis bags. Her sense of humour was grotesque and achieved a lewdness I have never seen equalled, a ribaldry all the greater as none was meant, since these were nursery songs intended for children. Her appearance on these occasions was an asset; seedy, yellow-toothed, blowsy, like a wax candle melting in its socket, all her wit and vitality leapt into her small brown eyes, gleaming like polished boot buttons in her violently nodding head. Her finger wagged in admonishment, underlining the moral of the tale. Needless to say, her success was complete: we could not have enough of her and thought that everyone must feel the same. But poor Eribert was upset and terrified, and was finally discovered to have shingles, and so put to bed. Besides being the last party at Charleston, it was also his last moment of gaiety and civilisation before going to a camp for enemy aliens and thence to Canada, from where much later he sent me a postcard.

  In the early spring Ray died, and Bunny took a farmhouse in the Weald, about five miles from Charleston. It must have been about this time, one day at Rodmell, that Virginia took me aside and asked me whether I was going to marry Bunny, implying that it would distress Vanessa very much if I did. At the time I had little thought of the future, a future threatened with the unknown caprices of war and social upheaval, and I said in good faith that I had no intention of it.

  Meanwhile from our farmhouse we watched the Battle of Britain, seeing the Messerschmitts and Spitfires spiralling to earth as the smoke from their fuselage streamed upwards. In the air the planes were like toys, and it was hard to believe that the airmen manipulating them held our fate in their hands, so abstract seemed their performance from below. One evening Bunny mentioned an incident he had heard of, which involved shooting a German pilot on the ground after his plane had been shot down. The degree of Bunny’s pleasure at this piece of so-called heroism shocked me intensely, not only as a reflection of the times we were living in but as a revelation of his own nature. To my protests he would only say that it was wartime and that I did not understand war. I could only stare at him and, thankfully, agree.

  It was here at Claverham that I last saw Virginia, who with Leonard – and in spite of petrol rationing – came over to tea. With more than her usual insistence she clung to her ‘rights’, to which I reacted with more than my usual impatience. Perhaps I sensed a greater intensity than ever under her endearments, and for some reason could not respond with as much warmth as she would have liked – but then when could one ever have done so?

  ‘Do you love me, Pixerina?’

  ‘Of course I do, Virginia.’

  Three days later I went down to the village to telephone to Charleston, and Clive told me she had disappeared, and was believed drowned. When, on returning to the house, I called out to Bunny, he put out his arms to embrace me with a warm bearlike gesture that in a crisis I learnt to expect from him.

  At Charleston I found a fragile but not overwhelmed Vanessa: it must have been an event she had expected for most of her life, and now that it had happened it had lost its power to shatter. Virginia’s death merely confirmed the general pessimism and sense of futility which surrounded us. On Duncan’s arrival from London she broke the news to him, and we all three clung together in the kitchen, in a shared moment of despair, feeling that the world
we knew, and the civilisation Virginia had loved, was rapidly disintegrating. Leonard, white from exhaustion, though as always objective and dispassionate, sat in the drawing-room and told us how they had found her body in the river, the river that Julian had loved, and where I could remember a dolphin that had once tempted Virginia down to the bank to stand beside us, watching its strange and lovely antics.

  Bunny, who on Ray’s death had been given compassionate leave from the Air Ministry, was now transferred to a secret propaganda department at Bush House. For the time being we lived in a service flat in Clifford’s Inn. It was a new block, built between the wars, and predictably depressing. We felt like ants in an ant-heap making our way up innumerable stairs and down corridors to rooms like prison cells, where every evening we had difficulty in eliminating the shafts of light that came from our windows. This, and my methods of cleaning, rudimentary and unpredictable, eventually provoked the displeasure of the management, who regularly sent round a lady resembling a hospital matron to spy on its tenants. Our only relief was dining in the basement restaurant, where we were sometimes amused by the sight of Nancy Cunard carrying on with her lover at a nearby table.

  It was in these hideous and claustrophobic surroundings that Bunny began to talk of marriage, a proposition which at first I firmly resisted. Now that I was living with him in London, Vanessa and Duncan’s presence impinged on us far less than it had the year before, since they had become more or less settled at Charleston. Vanessa, who had always been in favour of a love affair, thought that marriage would be a fatal mistake. She foresaw responsibilities that she thought me unprepared for, as well as the sacrifice of my freedom to paint. She thought that Bunny at forty-eight was too old and that my feelings for him were unlikely to last; she was also afraid that I would suffer from his being something of a libertine.

  She told me none of these things, however, emitting a vague feeling of worry and distress, the effect of which was to exasperate me. Her fears were not only for me but for Duncan, who had shown himself to be upset and jealous. Had the situation been less fraught with unavowed emotion, much of it impossible for me to understand, I might have felt free to enjoy my love affair without committing myself; but the feelings it provoked floated just beneath the surface, incomprehensible and menacing. Vanessa hovered in an anguish that I now find so easy to understand, holding long tête-à-tête conversations with Bunny. Her one desire was to protect both myself and Duncan, as it appeared, from life itself, when what I most needed was liberty and freedom. I should of course have asked questions; but I had been told the ‘truth’ so often that I thought I must know it. I had been brainwashed until I had no mind of my own. At the same time Duncan, Bunny and Vanessa were too closely bound together for there to be any room for me; the last thing they wanted was an illumination of the past, of the obscure corners they hoped to forget.

  Myself, aged 19

  It is easy to see that both Duncan and Vanessa were suffering from a jealousy that would not have been so painful had my lover been of my own generation. Bunny was an intimate part of their past, and that he should step out of it and dare to claim their daughter as his wife seemed to them nightmarish, and utterly unjustifiable. Neither of them could tell us what they felt, partly because they were not prepared to put all their cards on the table, but also because Vanessa, in trying to protect first Duncan and then myself, only succeeded in preventing us from understanding each other. Traditionally speaking, it should have been Duncan’s role as a father to rise in protest. But although Vanessa did get him to write a letter to Bunny, it had no effect – Bunny was deaf and dumb. I never saw the letter, but it is evident that Duncan’s inadequacy arose from the fact that he did not feel like a father; how then could he behave like one? In addition, the intimacy between him and myself was too fragile to encourage my confidence, and a further complication was that my feelings for Bunny were essentially those of a daughter. How far Vanessa and Duncan understood this I am not sure: at any rate, they never found it possible to talk of it.

  To many people it must have been obvious that my feeling for Bunny was not that of a wife, or wife-to-be; Maynard, for instance, appealed to him not to go on with the marriage. Bunny, however, had the bit between his teeth and not even Maynard’s eloquence and authority could stop him. He was always immensely attracted by youth, drawing from it a strength which enabled him to remain young himself for an amazingly long time. In some ways an excellent attitude, it was also a distortion, a failure to recognise the passage of time and its inevitable results. He was afraid of death, and – perhaps another facet of the same thing – afraid too of failure as an artist. He hoped that by marrying me he would take on a new lease of life.

  It had never struck me as odd that Duncan, Bunny and Vanessa should have lived together during the years that preceded my birth. I had been brought up to think it perfectly natural, and, like Vanessa lacking in curiosity, I was not given to questioning the acts of the older generation. It would be only too easy for me now to see their situation in terms of sexual indulgence, jealousy and revenge though this is not how it appeared at the time, and may be over-dramatic. Perhaps it was natural that no one told me the one fact that seems to make sense of Bunny’s behaviour: that he had proposed bed to Vanessa and had been rejected. Even though I now know this, I still find it hard to believe he was in love since nothing he ever said pointed to more than a natural affection for her. But his affection coexisted with an unacknowledged resentment, and its only outlet lay in abducting her daughter.

  When Bunny said at the cradle-side that he meant to marry me, no one took him seriously, it was so evidently an extravaganza disguised as a compliment, and neither Duncan nor Vanessa was in the habit of analysing other people’s behaviour. But Bunny meant it literally, and did not forget it, and, knowing his nature, I find it impossible to believe that it was unconnected with jealousy, and perhaps with a desire to assimilate one who had been a part of both Duncan and Vanessa. Bunny longed to be loved, and to take possession of the loved one. If his insight into the workings of his own mind had not been obscured by egotism, Bunny might have realised what he was doing, since he could not be said to lack imagination. It seems clear enough now that when he carried me off to live as his wife and be a stepmother to his sons, his purpose was, at least in part, to inflict pain on Vanessa.

  He knew also that he was driving a wedge between Vanessa and myself, one that in fact remained for ever. It was in this situation that Vanessa showed an almost saintly generosity, not only proving Virginia’s early dictum true, but putting into practice the virtues of tolerance and forbearance so dear to Bloomsbury. It was hard for her to see her only daughter become a domestic slave, giving up, in practice if not in theory, any claim to the brilliant future Vanessa had hoped for. Bunny’s egotism must have seemed unbelievably insensitive, as though he were stealing the single unequivocally successful result of her liaison with Duncan. Once more in the drawing-room at Charleston there was a scene between Vanessa and myself. She may have tried to tell me what her feelings really were, but became hysterical – an unnerving experience, which I could not face the risk of repeating. It is only now that I wonder what it was she was trying to tell me. My inadequacy as comforter, and my lack of the most rudimentary understanding, haunt me to this day.

  Had I been a son things would have been very different, since I am sure Duncan would have had shown a much stronger interest in my existence. As a daughter, however, I was Vanessa’s exclusive property, and as a female I was led to believe that I would need all the protection she could provide. Her strong desire to shield me was a partial atonement for what she felt she had deprived me of, and it caused me both annoyance and frustration. This is a fairly common experience between parents and children, but I had to deal with the entire weight of Vanessa’s personality – difficult to resist as she was used to having the last word in all situations of importance.

  Nor had I ever really allowed myself to realise how close Bunny and Duncan’s relat
ionship was from 1915 to 1918. I paid lip-service to the broad-mindedness of my parents, but I was shocked, not morally but physically, by the idea of homosexuality – a natural result perhaps of Duncan’s lack of response to me – and I was unable to bring myself to think about it. Neither did I understand how incestuous my relationship with Bunny was. In the early months of our affair he suffered from moments of impotence, and must have realised something of the kind himself. Bunny also felt a guilt which he tried desperately to repress, and which, at the time, I saw no reason for. He attempted to justify his feelings with an intense and exalted romanticism which, allied to the character I had created for him of omnipotent father figure, was exactly calculated to disarm me. The story of our marriage could be summed up as the struggle on his side to maintain the unlooked-for realisation of a private dream, about which in spite of an almost wilful blindness, he must have had deep misgivings; and on mine the slow emancipation from a nightmare, which was none the less painful because I thought of it as almost entirely my own fault. Years later he would never admit that there was anything out of the ordinary in his love for the daughter of an old friend and her lover, with whom he had been so intimate. But he was never interested in the truth behind his feelings, only in their strength, which was for him their justification.

  It is dangerous to talk only of people’s secret motives, not only because one may so easily be wrong, but even more because they form but one strand among the many that make up a human being. Bunny, though I think he was actuated by selfishness, egotism and perhaps revenge – none of them attractive characteristics – and though this led him to make a victim of an ignorant and unsuspecting girl who was unable to defend herself, was not entirely a villain. As well as loving me for being Vanessa and Duncan’s daughter, he loved me for myself, and in many ways he was singularly generous. Had I not married him, he would, have been a perfect friend, one in whom I could have safely confided and who would always have given me good advice. When I eventually left him, although he was deeply hurt and never really recovered, he could not wish me ill: whatever he failed to understand he courageously tried to put up with.