Bloomsbury's Outsider (18 page)

Bunny was busy in the shop, but he and Duncan often spent evenings together at the cinema or ballet. Bunny was also sitting to Duncan for his portrait and posing as a sailor for one of Duncan's
Bankside
paintings. Despite his marriage, Bunny couldn't let go of Duncan, still feeling he loved him ‘more than anyone in the world'.
³⁶
Ray's absence, therefore, gave Bunny the opportunity to enjoy the best of two possible worlds.

Exiled in the country, Ray lived for Bunny's letters and for his irregular weekend visits. Her return to London depended on her mother providing a comfortable base, but having sold Tweenways, Mam was still house-hunting. In October she eventually took possession of number 27 Brunswick Square, in the heart of Bloomsbury. Even so, it would be some time before the house was ready as various improvements were required. Mam proposed to run it on communal lines, with bed-sitting rooms for her unmarried daughters Frances and Eleanor; Bunny and Ray's quarters would comprise a large ground-floor sitting room and a bedroom on the second floor.

As the birth approached, Ray became fearful. She experienced ‘distinctly swelling movements' one afternoon, which she felt sure were ‘the last dying movements' of her unborn child. ‘But', she reassured Bunny, ‘I have done nothing violent & feel very well'.
³⁷
As the days passed, she became progressively alarmed, for the baby's movements seemed to diminish. In October, Bunny received a frantic letter from her:

I have to see another doctor. Dr Rooke thinks its all wrong – that the baby is dead. She is not sure – & anyway would want a second opinion. She has sent me to Dr Fairburn, 40 Wimpole St – 5.30. If it is so, I shall have to go into a nursing home almost at once – they do something to bring on the labour – When I recover everything is as before. If you can do come to Wimpole St […]. I long to see you.
³⁸

Bunny accompanied Ray to the consultant, who informed them that they might have to wait as long as a fortnight before knowing for certain whether the baby was dead. To compound matters, Bunny had vacated their rooms at Wells Street that very morning. As Brunswick Square was not ready, Duncan had lent Bunny his studio and Ray was to have gone to stay with Constance at The Cearne. They went instead to Pond Place where they stayed overnight. The next morning, still homeless, and with no anticipation of a happy event, Ray entered the nursing home, Number One Nottingham Place. ‘She is suffering from shock a good deal', Bunny informed Edward.
³⁹

Bunny was also in shock. Having dashed off a letter to Constance, apprising her of the bare bones of the situation, that evening he sent her a more optimistic letter. Ray had experienced pains during the night and Bunny dared to hope this might signify the child was alive. ‘It is a great blessing', Bunny wrote, ‘that when people are tired they can't feel, & that when they are in physical pain they feel only that'; as ever protective of Constance, he added: ‘you needn't think I am suffering […]. It
has been a great shock to Ray, but it will soon be over I suppose.'
⁴⁰

Bunny's hopes were unfounded. The child had been dead for about two weeks.
⁴¹
The cause of the stillbirth is not recorded. Modern antenatal care was in its infancy and foetal monitoring minimal. Ray did not seem to have been affected by placental abruption, the most frequent cause of stillbirth, as she did not experience the symptoms of searing pain or internal bleeding. Neither did she develop pre-eclampsia or eclampsia. For one third of stillbirths, then as now, there was no identifiable cause. In the 1920s there was no bereavement counselling, no funeral for stillborns, nothing to mark the passage from life to death. It was not something people discussed.

Ray remained in the nursing home for two weeks. Bunny visited every afternoon, reading to her from
Robinson Crusoe
. He still felt numb: ‘I can't go into the question of
feelings
', he told Constance, ‘except to say that I think the war took my feelings out of me […]. I can't feel anything acutely for more than four or five days. Ray I'm afraid can.'
⁴²
With the move to Brunswick Square still delayed, Bunny rented rooms at Caroline Place. There he installed the Marshalls' old nursemaid, Nan Croucher, to care for Ray on her return. But when Bunny did finally move into Brunswick Square, he did so alone. Ray was on the move again, recuperating with Judy and Dick Rendel.

With Ray away, Bunny turned his attention to the shop, which had cash-flow problems, partly because the proprietors were inclined to offer customers extensive and informal periods of credit. In November 1921 Siegfried Sassoon alone owed £75: an immense sum. Lytton thought the shop ‘a queer business', commenting ‘somehow it subsists, though how one hardly knows, considering the extreme dreaminess of the shopmen'.
⁴³
Bunny and Frankie had anyway become rather bored with the business. They considered selling the stock to Bumpus, the booksellers of Oxford Street, and working as employees there. This idea was abandoned in favour of taking on a third partner who would bring fresh capital. In early 1922 they were joined by Ralph Wright, whom they had met when he worked at the Central Library for Students. Bunny described Wright as ‘a rather short man, whose head of glossy black hair, brushed straight back' resembled ‘a seal's head, emerging from the water'.
⁴⁴
He was sympathetic, sensitive and warm, and particularly well-versed in French and English literature, which endeared him to the two original partners. But his chief qualifications were a love of reading and flair for conversation, both prerequisites at Birrell & Garnett.

Bunny missed Ray, telling her how unhappy he felt in her absence. She missed him too: ‘just when I'm in the mood for you[,] you lovely man, you bending bough, you star'. ‘I may not want you on Saturday', she added, ‘Then it'll be kiss me my love – God be wi' you & I must be going in the morning'.
⁴⁵
Bunny still saw something of Thea. In November she wrote inviting
him ‘to eat somewhere first & then we will see', carefully directing the letter to the bookshop and not to Brunswick Square.
⁴⁶
But by early 1922 Ray felt completely well, and was, at last, living with Bunny there. With a permanent base, Bunny could revive the Caroline Club, and once again enjoy convivial play readings. Ray's sister, Frances Marshall, the new assistant at Birrell & Garnett, was roped in too, but Ray would not take part, preferring to listen from the side-lines. It was not long, however, before her perambulations resumed: in April she learned she was pregnant. Once again Ray departed for the country, where in July she returned to Judy and Dick Rendel. Experiencing déjà vu, she told Bunny, ‘This place reminds me of this time last year'.
⁴⁷

‘Perhaps the saving grace of man is to be an adjunct to a work of art.'
¹

Bunny was researching foxes, reading about their habits, visiting the zoo and sites where there were dens. This interest arose because Ray had inspired him to write a story. They had been staying at The Cearne, where one day Bunny took Ray to the High Chart where he was convinced there were fox cubs. Finding there were none, Bunny turned to Ray, commenting “There's no hope of seeing a fox – unless you were suddenly to turn into one”. He teasingly told her ‘how like she was to a wild animal, and how easily my intense love for her would overcome the trifling difficulties that would arise if she actually were transformed into one'.
²
Bunny turned these whimsical musings into a synopsis for a book, which he entitled ‘The Metamorphosis of Mrs Tebrick'. He would write the text, but Ray's illustrations would be integral.

Ray looked forward to Bunny's weekends with her in the
country, but in the summer of 1922 he often kept away, explaining that the shop and his novel claimed his time. Ray chided him for his ‘talk of being busy' and for being ‘cruel'; ‘You make me angry talking such nonsense to your own wife'.
³
But Bunny's time was also taken up with three new friendships, each destined to be highly significant.

In June, Mina Kirstein, an American intellectual and bluestocking appeared in the bookshop. She had bobbed dark hair, beauty and brains. It did not take long for Bunny and Mina to fall in love, although Mina later declared, ‘Our relationship from his point of view had certain limitations and remained uncomfortably platonic in spite of both our efforts to overcome my scruples'.
⁴
Mina believed in the sanctity of marriage, or at least in saving herself for the moment.

A month or so later, Bunny made friends with the young sculptor Stephen ‘Tommy' Tomlin, who had come into the bookshop looking for books on art. Bunny was attracted by his charm and the ‘delightful intimate smile' which ‘played about his mouth'.
⁵
According to Frances Partridge, Tommy was not conventionally good-looking, but ‘short and strongly-built, with the profile of a Roman emperor on a coin, fair hair brushed back from a high forehead, a pale face and intelligent grey eyes.' She added that he ‘dented the hearts or minds, or both, of most people who met him'.
⁶
At twenty-one, Tommy was nine years younger than Bunny. He had left Oxford prematurely partly as he had lost interest in
studying law, but mainly as a result of a breakdown following the drowning of his close friend, Michael Llewelyn-Davies, one of J.M. Barrie's ‘Lost Boys'. Tommy then took up his vocation as a sculptor, training under Frank Dobson. He lived, at least part of the time, in the village of Chaldon Herring, otherwise known as East Chaldon, in Dorset. Here he befriended the writer T.F. Powys, and through him, came to know another writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner. It was she who Tommy sent to Birrell & Garnett in August, and who was to become the third of Bunny's trio of new friends.

Sylvia arrived at the bookshop clutching Powys's manuscript,
Hester Dominy
, which Tommy thought Bunny might help to get published. There Sylvia encountered ‘an extremely young-looking man whose hair was long and thick and untidy and whose suit was so blue that I felt he might blow up his horn at any moment'.
⁷
Retreating behind a bookshelf, Bunny observed ‘an alarming lady with a clear and minatory voice, dark, dripping with tassels […] with jingling earrings, swinging fox-tails, black silk acorn hanging to umbrella, black tasselled gloves'. She addressed him ‘in sentences like scissors'.
⁸
Their friendship, which always remained platonic, was consolidated when Bunny accompanied Sylvia to the Blackwater marshes in Essex, a landscape which she loved. She was touched when Bunny pulled an acorn from his pocket and planted it in a field. Bunny adored Sylvia's humour and admired her writing, and they embarked upon a friendship lasting more than fifty years. Unusually, both Sylvia and Mina addressed him as ‘David'.

Tommy invited Bunny to East Chaldon, which Bunny described as ‘bewitched', ‘with the moonlight slanting down between the high and mighty sycamores, the thatched cottages like a covey of sleeping partridges huddled together in a hollow of the downs'.
⁹
From there he wrote to Ray, now staying with Connie at The Cearne, to tell her how charming Tommy was and that ‘We have been leading an idle life – talking till 2 am about Jesus & Blake & so on'. ‘The principal excitement', he added, ‘is Powys'. ‘He is an amusing man of fifty
¹⁰
or so with piercing blue eyes, an ecclesiastical mouth & a very humorous smile.'
¹¹

Tommy dented Bunny's heart, writing to him after his return to London: ‘There are lots of soul stirring things I want to say to you […]. I am glad you liked being here. If you enjoyed it half as much as I enjoyed – you know the formula […] – but I mean it. I like you […] Love Tommy.'
¹²
Although there is no direct evidence of an affair between Bunny and Tommy, it seems highly probable. In a letter to Ray, written in 1928, Bunny referred to the ease with which he could make friends and fall in love, adding: ‘You were not jealous of Tommy.'
¹³
Tommy was bisexual, and as Julia Strachey, who later married him, noted: ‘One thing was paramount: Tommy's daemon insisted that not only with their souls but definitely with their
bodies
everyone must him worship.'
¹⁴

Bunny became one of Tommy's main patrons, commissioning seven sculptures, including a stone bust of himself.
¹⁵
Tommy featured prominently in Bunny's autobiography, where Bunny sometimes wrote cryptically so that the casual reader might infer one meaning, and those
in the know
, could interpret another. Quoting the following lines from Blake, Bunny compared Tommy to the angel in the verse, a comparison which could be read as alluding to Tommy's bisexuality:

I asked a thief to steal me a peach,

He turned up his eyes.

I asked a lithe lady to lay her down,

Holy and meek she cries.

There came an angel who without one

Had a peach from the tree

And still as a maid, enjoyed the lady.
¹⁶

In the autumn of 1922, Birrell & Garnett moved to larger premises on Gerrard Street, in the heart of Soho and in what is today Chinatown. ‘I don't know how they can possibly survive such a thing', Lytton exclaimed. ‘They seem to me […] to live in a complete mist. A twelve years lease!'
¹⁷
In the 1920s Soho was at the centre of London's Bohemia, the location of restaurants serving ‘foreign' food, of nightclubs, coffee houses and brothels. Moreover the location was hardly the centre of
London's book trade. The Taviton Street premises at least had the advantage of being within Bloomsbury in the neighbourhood of many customers. It was not that Gerrard Street was any great distance from Bloomsbury, more that London districts have distinct identities which can change abruptly at the turn of a corner.