Bloomsbury's Outsider (35 page)

Bunny lost little time in telling Ray that he had taken a London room. Of course she knew why. It was, according to Bunny, ‘a painful talk but not unfriendly and did not leave any new bitterness with either of us'.
⁹
Ray had no energy for bitterness: her treatment had left her drained and ill. Bunny hoped that her spirits, at least, would be lifted by a stay at Butts Intake. They found everything in the house covered with mould; the wind raged; it rained. Even so, Bunny felt there was ‘something which makes up for everything – the shape of the ground – the way the stone haybarns rise out of the green grass – the gills tearing down in cascades of brown water'.
¹⁰
He could not help living in the moment, enjoying the beauty of his surroundings, exhilarating in bracing walks with the boys, proudly observing their increasing strength and independence. Ray felt too ill to take the exercise she always enjoyed.

Back at Hilton, the fact of Bunny's London room sank in. Ray cried because she believed it meant Bunny would leave her. How could she compete for his affection with a healthy twenty-year-old? At a time when she had a right to stability, Ray could do nothing to contain her husband. Her distress moved Bunny but the moment he was away from her ‘the physical happiness of being in love & being loved' overwhelmed him.
¹¹
The situation was all the more difficult because neither could acknowledge to one another the nature of her illness. Ray suspected that her cancer had returned; Bunny was certain it had, but in order to protect each other the subject was skirted around, the name of the illness unspoken.

When Bunny left for London, Ray could not conceal her distress, for his Charlotte Street room symbolised life apart from her, and with the Herlitschkas in residence at Hilton, she felt dispossessed. Bunny had issued an open-ended invitation to them, assuming Herbert would soon find employment as an interpreter or translator. Bunny ferried him backwards and forwards to interviews in London, to no avail. He found it stressful maintaining a constant polite sympathy for his guests, even though he felt compassion for their predicament. He escaped to work in his room, or to dig the garden and plant potatoes in readiness for war.

On 15 May the Ballet Rambert production of
Lady into Fox
opened at the Mercury Theatre, London. Choreographed by Andrée Howard, Sally Gilmour had the lead role. Bunny took Angelica to the opening night, though Ray had been the inspiration for the book. Later that month, with Quentin as chaperone, Bunny and Angelica travelled to France. Unsurprisingly, the
holiday gave rise to what Bunny described as a day of reckoning with Vanessa and Duncan. In taking Angelica away, Bunny felt ‘as though I were suddenly transformed into Robert Browning & that Fitzroy were Wimpole Street'.
¹²
Although Angelica retorted that such an idea was ‘an insult to Bloomsburyan tradition', in this corner of Bloomsbury, at least, Bunny appeared to be absconding with the very fruit of Vanessa's and Duncan's union.
¹³
For Vanessa this was like his taking Duncan from her all over again. In Duncan's eyes, it was a more than painful reminder of Bunny's penchant for women during their love affair: it was Bunny's ultimate heterosexual conquest.

Bunny wrote to Ray, reassuring her that he was bound to her and loved and needed her. But then he announced he wanted to divide his time between her and Angelica. Ray had been in this position before. Then, following a pattern to which they had both become accustomed, Ray resorted to silence. Bunny chastised her: ‘You detect coldness or falsity in me & then become dumb – & your inability or refusal to speak drives me to an irritation & cruelty I should not otherwise show.' ‘I wish', Bunny concluded, ‘we could arrange our lives with as little mess as my father & mother & Nelly.'
¹⁴

Bunny could not understand Ray's feelings precisely because he doggedly assumed the triangular relationship between his parents and Nellie Heath furnished a civilised template that could be easily emulated. He did not stop to consider whether or not this triangle had been entirely successful, or whether Nellie and his parents had simply appeared happy in front of him. It
suited him to believe his parents' marriage the epitome of enlightened bliss. He had been attracted to Bloomsbury because it emphasised similar freedoms. Ray's sister, Frances Partridge, had negotiated a love affair with Carrington's husband to whom she was now married, although it was common knowledge that Ralph Partridge was not faithful. But Ray was not of Bloomsbury. Partly Bunny kept her out; partly she did not share the same values.

Ray wasn't going to accept Bunny's statement regarding his parents' marriage. Whereas Constance did not want Edward as a lover after Bunny's birth, Ray needed physical love. She asked Bunny if he expected her to settle into a position like Constance's, adding, ‘I have wanted people as lovers & have gone on loving you. I cannot settle down to a life like your mothers with you as a frequent visitor[.] I would rather never see you again than that.'
¹⁵

Bunny's French interlude was anyway less idyllic than he pretended. Angelica felt ill much of the time, with headaches and intermittent fever. She spent several days in bed and even in France they maintained the fiction of separate rooms. In Bunny's pocket diary, he recorded that he had told Angelica ‘about Duncan & myself which she did not know'.
¹⁶
He did not otherwise record her response to this momentous news.

In Bunny's absence, Ray wrote to Tim White, who was shocked to receive a dark letter in which she stated that she was ‘dieing / dying / dyeing'. But it was with Angelica's health that Bunny was preoccupied. Soon after their return from France, Angelica developed a pain in her side. Bunny took her to see a
doctor who advised admission to a nursing home, where she was diagnosed with a kidney infection. Angelica did not want Vanessa or Duncan to worry, asking Bunny to keep it from them, but he told Duncan. Of course Vanessa could not be kept out of the picture, but still fragile from Julian's death, she was distraught.

Visiting Angelica, Bunny experienced an unsettling sense of dèja vu for she occupied the same room in the very nursing home where Ray had given birth to their still-born child. Vanessa invited Bunny to dinner to discuss the situation, although he soon discovered that ‘the friendly spirit of collaboration in a crisis had gone'. Vanessa wanted to know whether Angelica was pregnant, and demanded that in the event of a pregnancy, she should be informed in order to arrange a termination. Bunny was outraged, recording melodramatically in his journal: ‘When Vanessa demanded a promise that I should help her destroy my unborn child, without pausing to inquire what Angelica wanted […] my blood absolutely froze.'
¹⁷
Only a few days before, Angelica had said she wanted to have his child, but they agreed the timing was wrong. Although Bunny was not against abortion
per se
, it was something he found hard to countenance in relation to his own potential offspring, partly as a result of the experience of having a stillborn child. He and Ray had both struggled when she had to have an abortion for the sake of her health. Although Angelica was not pregnant, Bunny knew in his own mind that had she been, he would have fought for the baby to be born.

Vanessa was furious with Bunny for taking matters into his own hands. Bunny was angry with Vanessa for treating Angelica like a child. He felt his loyalty was now to Angelica, he could no longer ‘run with the hare and hunt with the hounds'. Vanessa
tried to insist on taking Angelica home, the doctor advised otherwise. Angelica felt powerless confronted with her mother's steely determination. She wrote to Bunny from the nursing home, telling him that ‘In spite of all the things that have happened lately to show that our love is not going to have an easy time of it, I feel very happy. I love you more than I've ever loved you before.' ‘If we both love each other', she reasoned, ‘and understand what the other feels, it doesn't matter what happens, we can deal with anything.'
¹⁸

While Angelica recuperated at Charleston, Bunny contemplated his role in what seemed like an incontrovertible war. He told Mina Curtiss that he could not face another war as a mere spectator, believing he would go crazy ‘if I were not taking some part in what I care more intensely about than anything'.
¹⁹
In August 1939 he offered his services to the Air Ministry. His interview at Whitehall went well enough, but everything remained rather vague. Soon afterwards, Ray and the boys left for a camping holiday in Ireland with Noel Olivier and her family. They would later join Bunny and Tim White in Mayo, but in the meantime, Bunny took Angelica to Yorkshire, where he had the good grace not to stay at Butts Intake.

Afterwards, Bunny rendezvoused with Tim White at Stowe, from where they set off to Ireland in a car crammed full of the dead rabbits and pigeons required to feed Tim's two peregrine falcons, which occupied a perch placed across the rear seats. Bunny crouched uncomfortably in the front trying to avoid their vicious pecks, Tim's setter Brownie in his lap. The holiday at
Mayo was not successful: Bunny worried about Ray, who was far from well, and about the prospect of war. Tim could see that Ray was trying to hide the extent of her illness from her sons, and, he thought, from Bunny. He found her stoicism remarkable, commenting, ‘I have never met a greater woman than Ray'.
²⁰

Bunny did not stay long. On 3 September, when Britain declared war on Germany, he received a telegram from the Air Ministry asking him to report straight away. Leaving Ray and the boys with Tim in Ireland, he returned to London. A few days later he received a letter from Richard: Ray had been seized with convulsions and fainted. It had taken her a long while to come round, and Richard sat talking to her for half an hour while she remained dazed. Somehow she managed to drive back from Ireland to deliver the boys to school.

Everything was uncertain. Bunny was unsure what role he would play in the Air Ministry, having turned down the post of Assistant Private Secretary to Sir Samuel Hoare, Lord Privy Seal, on the basis that Hoare was ‘a fuss-pot & very correct'.
²¹
At Hilton the Herlitschkas had taken in six refugee children, two teachers and a spaniel. Ray and Noel Olivier were thinking of renting a cottage for the duration at Melksham, Wiltshire, to be close to the boys' school, which had relocated there from Wimbledon. Angelica, beside herself with worry that she would not be able to see Bunny, urged him to reconsider enlisting. Bunny's main concern, however, was sixteen-year-old Richard, who hoped, in time, to go up to King's College, Cambridge. Worried that his son would be conscripted at eighteen, Bunny
turned to Maynard Keynes for advice, and was reassured that undergraduates remained exempt until the age of twenty-one.

Bunny was commissioned on 20 September. ‘I am afraid', he told Mina Curtiss and Lincoln Kirstein, ‘it only means very humdrum office work. Really I find it hard to imagine myself in a uniform & feel some trepidation at what I have done: like a boy going to a new school.'
²²
Having passed his medical exam, Flight-Lieutenant Garnett was soon installed in Room 84/111 of the Air Ministry, King Charles Street, Whitehall. Curiously, the nonconformist Bunny immediately took to his uniform (drawing a rather fetching doodle of his uniformed self). Eddy Sackville-West thought Bunny looked ‘terrific in uniform'.
²³
Frances Partridge noted, ‘There was a side to Bunny that entered enthusiastically into what he was doing, down to the details of dressing up for the part'.
²⁴

Bunny wrote to Constance saying that his work was interesting but he was still vague as to his exact job. In the meantime he immersed himself in absorbing as much information as possible, ‘simply soaking, like a dry sponge, in water, in the facts & background of this war'.
²⁵
If Bunny did not know much about his new job, he knew it was hush-hush. Like many writers and journalists, Bunny was shunted into intelligence work in the Second
World War. He would be working under Air Commodore Percy Groves, the Deputy Director of Intelligence in the Air Ministry, in AI.4, a new section of Air Intelligence. Groves had known T.E. Lawrence, so there was already a point of connection between the two men, and they immediately took to one another. Bunny could not have asked for a kinder or more sympathetic superior. Anyway, he found it all very exciting. As he told Angelica, ‘my secret vice is a passion for doing new things'.
²⁶
Not such a secret vice perhaps, but it was another opportunity to be reborn.

‘You can have two emotions at the same time. One makes the other even more acute.'
¹

Bunny was engaged in writing a weekly news sheet, circulated to RAF stations to boost morale. He knew that the British RAF strength was considerably inferior to that of Germany, information he had ascertained from Air Commodore Groves. Nevertheless, it was Bunny's job to maintain the fiction of British superiority and to suppress his instinct to tell the truth.

Fully occupied with war work, Bunny had to stop writing his ‘Books' page. This he did willingly, feeling he had wasted his best years in journalism. Nevertheless, the
New Statesman
contains some of his finest writing. The essay format suited him, and his columns are delightful, reflecting his humour, intelligence, scholarship and wide-ranging interests. Reviewing Virginia Woolf's
Flush: A Biography
(1933) he began: ‘Looking at the curlews vanishing on strong wings over the moorland, there can have
been few men so unimaginative as not to envy them their freedom.'
²
It is a typical David Garnett opening, one which appears to bear little relation to the subject, until a few lines in Bunny links the curlew's freedom with that of the author of
Flush
in choosing her subject. Another opening: