In the end, Bunny’s emotional determination overcame what had become a feeble and uncertain resistance. At bottom my love for him was simply a delusion – a dream which I had not the strength to sacrifice. Nevertheless, there was a moment when I thought of running away to a friend, but inertia, fear and ignorance prevented me. Seeing this, Bunny became even more urgent in his demands. He did not mean to be terrifying, but, like many people whose horizons are limited by a single, compelling objective, he was unaware of the impact he made. I saw myself being swept along by a dangerous current, but was unable to lift a finger to prevent it. An appeal to Vanessa would have saved me, but it was impossible to make: I preferred the unknown to the known, although I knew inwardly that I was doing the wrong thing.
We did not invite Vanessa and Duncan to the wedding, an omission which Quentin tried to repair. But we did not listen to his arguments, and I now see that it would have been impossible for Bunny to tolerate their presence at a ceremony which so flagrantly symbolised his victory. They were deeply wounded, and never afterwards alluded to what they probably considered as a piece of boorish stupidity.
The wedding took place at the substitute for the Guildhall, which had been bombed. We invited Frances and Ralph Partridge as our witnesses, together with my stepson William, who had just left school. I had on a too-short pink cotton dress and a straw hat more suitable for a woman of forty, into which I had pinned a rose. Standing in the small dreary room where the ceremony was held, I was for a moment almost overcome by panic: supposing, when the clerk asked for my consent, I said, ‘No’? What a marvellous way out, what a simple solution! But I said, ‘Yes’, and the deed was done. I drowned my sense of guilt in champagne at the Ivy, Clive’s favourite restaurant, where we had lunch. Then we caught the night train to Northumberland, where Bunny had just bought a small property.
Sadly and characteristically, neither Duncan nor Vanessa ever said a word to me of their disappointment: to them, such a thing would have been an act of unkindness, and they resolved to make the best of a bad job. Nevertheless, Bunny’s relations with Duncan remained for many years chilly and distant, although with Vanessa he maintained an intimacy which was less stultified than my own, writing letters which enabled her to know more of me than I was aware of.
As for myself, I seemed unwittingly to have plunged into a stagnant pool where nothing ever changed. My effort towards liberation from Vanessa had ended in a feeling of guilt and its concomitant paralysis. Although she was now over a hundred miles away, Vanessa was omnipresent: I still had not understood that some kind of confrontation was necessary – running away would solve nothing. With the birth of my children I undertook too many responsibilities, in an effort to disguise the fact that I was both lost and unhappy. Vanessa had always said, ‘All I want is for you to be happy, darling,’ – and now that I was not so, it seemed that the least I could do was pretend. As a matter of fact, I had never understood her anyway: it had always seemed to me that it was not happiness as such, but life that one wanted. What I had found, however, was not life, but a backwater, and I suppressed my unhappiness because I was ashamed of it. Little did I realise the poisonous nature of this attitude, nor how I was laying myself open to the traditional bugbear of the Stephens, masochistic self-pity, handed down, it seemed, from one generation to the next.
12
Nessa’s Death
It was in 1944, when I was pregnant with my second daughter, that Vanessa discovered a lump in her breast, which she mentioned to me in a letter, telling me at the same time that she expected to be operated on almost immediately. I was in Yorkshire with Bunny when I received a telegram from Duncan to say that the operation had been successfully performed. No one called it a mastectomy or said it was cancer: the severity of the ordeal was submerged under a veil of stoicism and mystery. Vanessa must have suffered enormously from an experience for which in those days there was no psychological preparation and no support to be found from sharing it with others. For someone of her temperament this would in any case have been difficult, and she retired to the wartime austerity of Charleston rather as a wounded animal creeps into its lair, where Quentin’s gentleness and Duncan’s optimism may have done something to allay her natural anxiety. It was Vanessa’s misfortune that at that time cancerous illnesses were regarded almost as though they were family scandals, to be brushed under the carpet; no one quite realised what she had been through, least of all myself. With the passing of time, however, she regained her strength, and salvation came to her through my children – she completely surrendered herself to their spontaneous affection.
By 1947 I had four daughters, the youngest twins. The years of their childhood gave me infinite pleasure – more than I can put into words. I felt and was very close to them, and at least one of them has told me that as a mother I was vivacious and full of gaiety. I certainly did not spend all my time moping about the failure of my marriage since, for one thing, I could not bear to admit that it was a failure. I was young and energetic, I loved country life, and, in addition to looking after my family, filled my time with projects of one kind and another. I continued to paint, to dressmake for myself and the children, to sing and play the piano and the violin, in what amounted to almost a fever of activity.
One of the reasons for my lack of emotional growth was the amount of hard work which I put into running my household. We lived in the same house in Huntingdonshire that Bunny and Ray had occupied when Duncan and I visited them before the war. Ray had left traces of her own personality on this charming seventeenth-century house, and the effect was so sensitive and fragile that I was afraid to touch it. It was only very gradually that, as walls and furnishings needed to be repainted or replaced, I felt free to impose my own more robust taste. We had little money and no luxuries, the house was unbelievably cold and draughty, our methods of heating antiquated, our supplies of hot water inadequate. For the first seven years of their lives the children were, it seemed, always ill, especially in winter.
It is true I had help, but as I refused to give up music and painting I was in a constant state of fatigue, and went to bed each night almost giddy with exhaustion. As I have said, a lot of this was unnecessary – a way of escaping thought and reflection. But it happens to many young mothers; once the extraordinary and irreplaceable experience of maternity has receded, one’s horizon becomes limited to that of the children and one is temporarily incapable of further development. Even if there had been time to make new contacts I would have found it impossible to profit from them, and holidays offered only physical relaxation, not spiritual renewal.
Although Bunny was helpful and sympathetic, my dulled sensibilities only made our relationship less equal. In addition, there was social life. The house was often full of visitors: we had many friends in Cambridge as well as in the village, and, seeing my life through their eyes, I built up an image of myself as the perfect young mother-housewife-hostess, and spent much of my energy living up to it. The only drawback – and it was a very serious one, symptomatic of what lay underneath – was my growing misunderstanding with Bunny, and his shattering rages, which, disconcertingly and tragically, often included the children.
If it is true to say that it was because of them that I stayed with Bunny, it is not an excuse I defend; those disposed to indulgence will sympathise with my doubts about how to bring up four children on my own when I was unqualified for any profession. But I know that, had I had the courage, it would have been possible to separate earlier, and it might have done the children less harm to live precariously with me than to stay as they did with parents who were obviously and increasingly unhappy together. It was Bunny who would have suffered, and would have both reproached and tormented me, and it was this more than the unknown future that was for me the stumbling block. If I ever had to justify my own point of view, my reasoning turned to jelly, my defences into men of straw. Confused and doubtful even when my emotions were strong, how then could I persuade Bunny to accept my departure? And to depart
without his consent – knowing that my children were also his – seemed to me an utter impossibility. But I did not try – and perhaps I am unjust to him.
Perhaps it was because of Bunny’s greater emotional power, or the contrast of my own youth and inexperience, but I came to think of him as ‘impervious’. He had made up his mind about a lot of things and thought he knew the truth. He entrenched himself in what he knew he felt: his emotions were not spontaneous, but often whipped into a paroxysm of feeling. His sincerity lay in the desire to prove his feelings genuine, and I felt embarrassed to see him writhing in the effort, rather than just letting the emotion itself run through him.
In early days I was swept off my feet by Bunny’s concern for me: never had I experienced anything of the kind, except for certain brief moments with Julian. Either I was blind to his excess or, having been deprived of displays of feeling, I hungered for them. When we were man and wife, however, I gradually became repelled by his emotionalism, which always seemed just off the mark. I became afraid it would distort my own emotions, and took to keeping them more and more to myself. I began to imitate Vanessa’s habit of reserving her most precious feelings to herself, and appeared far colder and more critical than I really was; and this to Bunny was anathema.
This was only one of the tortuous ways in which our misunderstanding grew, almost as though it had a will of its own. We had both sinned not only against each other but against ourselves, and were suffering for it. Had I had the courage to face my own feelings, I might perhaps have faced Bunny. We might have arrived at a modus vivendi, or I might have left him sooner than I did. For me, age and authority were great obstacles. It was obvious that I needed help but I did not know how or where to find it, and I was almost as afraid of help as I was of everything else.
During my entire marriage my relation to Duncan and Vanessa remained far too close. I saw them whenever I went to London and, when it again became possible after the war, we often went abroad together. Incestuously bound up with each other, we found each other’s company more familiar, less exacting and, by the same token, less stimulating than anyone else’s. For me there seemed to be no one else; domesticity put me out of bounds on the one hand, and on the other my close association with my parents hedged me round with invisible barriers.
In spite of my inability to keep away from them, my relation with Vanessa had not changed, and was as negative as ever. When I visited Charleston, I would sit with her by the studio stove, unable to utter a word. Neither of us knew what was wrong: we were submerged by inertia and depression. I do not know what prevented me from taking the initiative, why I did not think of asking questions, of opening up the past – and with this way blocked, there was no other. It is true that when she did talk she continued to ‘poke fun’; her irony was unquenchable. But although it was amusing it was defensive, and barred the way to deeper emotional exchange. I was painfully conscious of an undercurrent of thought, the masochistic nature of which repelled me. I was still too young, too egotistical also, to sympathise with an attitude in which all I saw was a refusal to participate in the more vital aspects of life. With too great a facility we attributed Vanessa’s chronic melancholy to the death of Julian; but although this had dealt her a gigantic blow, I felt that it had brought out something in her that had always been there, of which I had been conscious even as a child. I knew that Vanessa was longing for a demonstration of love – like Virginia though, unable to ask for it frankly – while on my side my feelings were frozen. The key to emotion was lost; we both sat there like flies in amber, impotent.
Amongst ourselves, Vanessa often gave way to the temptation of self-denigration, applying it, not without reason, to her own appearance, but far more distressingly to her painting. I never heard her say she was pleased and proud of something she had done, and the effect of this attitude was demoralising. It was directly opposed to the side of her which insisted on being right, and it was disconcerting to realise that, although she felt morally certain of being able to control other people’s lives, she was in a state of confusion about her own. In talking about her work she was really talking about herself, and her despairing statements about the inferiority of her painting were one interminable question addressed to Duncan who, though he may well have understood its nature, was in no position to satisfy her. She longed for recognition not so much as a painter but as a woman, and this he could not give her.
According to Paul Roche, in 1918, the year of my birth, Duncan had told Vanessa that he felt incapable of having further sexual relations with her. Thus her victory, if it was one, in keeping Duncan for herself was at best pyrrhic, gained at a cost she failed to assess. She seems to have accepted it as a necessary sacrifice for the privilege of living with this immensely attractive yet incomplete human being, to whom she was so passionately attached, and there must have been a strong element of masochism in her love for him, which induced her to accept a situation which did permanent harm to her self-respect. In other words, she lost sight of herself as a valid individual. By the time I am speaking of, their relationship, though deeply affectionate, was lop-sided, even though it appeared justified by years of habit. Vanessa, having allowed herself to suffer at Duncan’s hands, was compelled to idolise him in order to vindicate the loss of her physical fulfilment: had he been less of a genius the sacrifice would not have been worth it. She gained companionship with a man she loved on terms unworthy of her whole self, infinitely damaging to her pride. Whereas Duncan remained young and vital, she became old for her years and fixed in her attitudes.
Vanessa, 1951
It is tempting to wonder whether, if Vanessa had known what she was doing to herself, she would have acted differently. In her picture ‘The Tub’, painted in 1918 and now in the Tate Gallery, there is a young woman standing stark naked and alone by a tub of water, which is I feel sure a self-portrait symbolising not only loneliness but a moment of truth and self-questioning. It suggests that she was aware of having reached a crisis, and through her painting was calling for help. She put the painting away, and for many years it lay in the attic, as though the situation it recalled was too disturbing to be contemplated.
I was always puzzled by the difference between her painting during the war and that which followed. Part of the reason for both her and Duncan’s change of style was to be found in their natural reaction to a profound difference in the quality of life itself, but in Vanessa’s case a greater maturity seemed to be accompanied by a lessening not only of self-confidence but of vitality. The remarks of her less sensitive friends, confusing her work with Duncan’s, were not without percipience; instead of standing on her own, she now seemed to lean for her inspiration on him. Her compensation for this loss of autonomy lay in his love for her as a mother figure, his trust in her, and their mutual sympathy over painting, which, as far as her consciousness went, were enough. His charm and magic never palled or became stale; he remained the apple of her eye.
In her own quiet and concentrated way Vanessa found much to enjoy, and it was perhaps her grandchildren, in whom she had no vested interest, who brought out her most human and delightful qualities. She spoiled them outrageously – the prerogative of grandmothers. She left in the minds of my two elder daughters, inevitably those who knew her best, the memory of deep affection and humour. She read aloud to them, as she had to me, and having as a result of long wartime evenings taken to knitting, a tube of brightly striped sock grew slowly longer and longer; when she reached the end of a round or a page there was always a moment of doubt as to whether knitting would take precedence over reading, or vice versa. Her steel needles moved slowly in and out, exploring their way through each stitch, coaxed rather than flicked by her long sensitive fingers. An eternal spiral descended into her lap, produced almost unconciously: what she was making seemed hardly to concern her – she resembled the Goddess of Earth eternally reproducing the symbol of creation. As she read, her spectacles would slip to the end of her nose while she ran her eye along the page, ready at t
he same time to catch any sign of restlessness on the part of the children. Her voice, grave and cool, rising and falling monotonously, hypnotised and calmed her listeners.
From Charleston, Vanessa maintained a loving correspondence with my children, her notepaper covered with drawings of cats, goldfish and little girls, while the post often contained parcels of finished socks and other small presents. There were also outings to the zoo and the theatre which, in spite of inevitable exhaustion, she enjoyed immensely. With age she had become thinner and more bent, dressing in clothes of grey and iron black. She had never dressed in the same way as other people; her clothes had always been defiant of convention and since middle age they had become increasingly unrelated to her own beauty. Whether she realised it or not, they were a further expression of her disappointment in herself. She had never indulged in, or more probably could never be bothered with, the refinement and elegance of a Mary Hutchinson or an Ethel Sands, but then her physical splendour had always been there, whether she paid it attention or not. Now in age her clothes seemed to say with dignified finality: ‘You must take me as you find me.’
Despite looking a little reminiscent of a peasant woman minding a herd of goats, she emanated distinction. Her movements were slow and tentative, her manner enquiring but impressive. In the Charleston dining-room she presided over the table painted by herself; it was round, but where she sat was the indubitable head of it. There she ruled for forty years, dispensing food with measured precision and increasing frugality. In front of her stood the joint of cold beef from which day after day she cut a few grey slices, while at the bottom of the salad bowl there lurked some leaves of lettuce, and in the pewter dishes which Julian had brought back from China there were hardly enough sprouts and potatoes to satisfy our appetites – not that we actually suffered from hunger, but the old prodigality had withered. The meal always ended with her making coffee, of which the concentrated drops, like some alchemic potion, fell one by one into the pot. Without seeming aware, we all watched her lift the heavy kettle and tilt it, allowing just the right amount of boiling water to fall on the coffee grounds, from which a cloud of steam arose with a hiss like some tame serpent. This had always been for me the perfect cadence at the end of a meal, the resolution towards which all the events of the morning converged, ushering in the withdrawn privacy of the afternoon.
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