Bloomsbury's Outsider (37 page)

Returning home towards the end of April, Bunny worried that the boys would feel Ray's absence. He involved them in
sorting through her things, using the opportunity to rekindle memories of the past. They both seemed fine, but Bunny noticed that at bed-time, William returned his kiss and hug, which was unusual. Bunny had never seen Hilton more beautiful, the plum and cherry trees in full blossom. He was considering letting the house, the memories of Ray too painful for him to stay. Every now and then he suddenly remembered her, not the ‘dying despairing creature' ‘but the woman with whom I came here to live & whom I loved most passionately'.
²⁵

Despite his terrible sadness, Bunny recognised how fortunate he was, because unlike many bereaved, he felt he had a future. ‘Thanks to Angelica I can forget my life & the waste almost as though I were walking out of a tragic matinee into the spring sunshine.'
²⁶
He and Angelica planned to stay at Butts Intake when the boys returned to school. Bunny wrote to Vanessa, describing the place, hoping to regain her confidence. But Vanessa and Duncan were both against Angelica's living with Bunny, were perhaps embarrassed by it, for they wanted as few people to know as possible. They also worried that Angelica would end up a skivvy to Bunny's sons. Bunny assured Vanessa that Richard was quite capable of mending his own socks. He counselled Angelica to be gentle with her parents: ‘remember they are losing you – and losing you to someone whom everybody would think an ill suited companion, and about whom they have strong feelings of justified resentment'.
²⁷
If it seems odd that Bunny should think their resentment justified, as a parent himself, he could at least see the situation from their vantage point.

At Butts Intake, Angelica hid when the postman called; for propriety's sake Bunny informed Mrs Appleton, from whom he purchased milk, that Angelica was his secretary. Initially it was like a honeymoon, but even so, Bunny often experienced a numb feeling of unreality. He kept mentally going over and over his life with Ray, and if he allowed himself to feel happy, his happiness was undermined by the burden of the past, a burden made heavier by his sense of guilt. Bunny responded to emotional shock with what he described as ‘photographic sensitiveness to my physical surroundings', and in Yorkshire he was transfixed by the hawthorn blossom, by nesting birds and everything in nature which seemed ‘rich, warm, sunlit, peaceful'.
²⁸

Such beauty and peace contrasted markedly with what Bunny heard on his wireless. On 4 June the evacuation of Dunkirk was reported, accompanied by Churchill's celebrated speech, ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds'. Bunny was not idle; he was abridging the Lawrence
Letters
for a Book Club edition. But that summer of 1940, as the weeks passed and as England lived under the shadow of expected invasion, he regretted having resigned from the Air Ministry and felt removed from the centre of things.

While Bunny feared Constance would be in the area most likely to be bombed, his mother's concerns were more prosaic. She asked Bunny outright what he intended to do in the school holidays: ‘You could hardly have the boys with Angelica & you at Butts, could you?' ‘You must give them
time
', she advised, adding, ‘with discretion couldn't you get them gradually used to feeling Angelica a sort of adopted (and very delightful) sister'.
²⁹
At twenty-one, Angelica
was only four years Richard's senior, but given the nature of her relationship with Bunny, Constance's proposal was untenable. Angelica had anyway remarked to Bunny (when he took the boys to Charleston) that she thought from the way Richard looked at them ‘he guessed or half guessed what relationship we bear to each other'.
³⁰

Bunny and Angelica remained in Yorkshire until the end of July, when the boys broke up from school. He decided his sons' holiday should be spent at Hilton, but ignoring his mother's concerns, installed Angelica there. The presence of Noel Olivier and her five children helped deflect attention from Bunny and Angelica and diminished any sense that Angelica was stepping into Ray's shoes. The arrangement worked surprisingly well, Bunny busying himself bottling plums, Angelica painting, Richard in charge of the little ones and William doing the housework.

In contrast, Charleston remained firmly antipathetic to the couple. Bunny decided there was no point going there after one stilted afternoon with Maynard Keynes and Morgan Forster in attendance, when Bunny and Angelica had to pretend there was nothing between them, for Duncan's sake. It was extraordinary that such pretence should be necessary at the heart of Bloomsbury, but even Bloomsbury baulked at the Bunny–Angelica–Duncan helix with its inter-generational tangle. The real problem was that the helix was a visible reminder of another well-kept secret: that Angelica was Duncan's daughter. On one level this was obvious, as Angelica so closely resembled her father. But it wasn't something openly acknowledged or discussed.

In July the Germans began aerial attacks on airfields around
London and on 24 August dropped their first bombs on central London. When Bunny's barrel of plum wine blew a bung in the middle of the night he thought it was a bomb. More worryingly, a bomb rocked The Cearne, leaving Constance anxious. Bunny reassured her that only a direct hit could damage such a solid house, but he bought her a helmet to wear in the garden. On Saturday 7 September 1940 the Blitz began. This heavy and concentrated bombardment of London would continue for months. Bombers flew over by day and night, devastating the docks and destroying warehouses and their contents. In the Bloomsbury district, Vanessa's and Duncan's Fitzroy Street studio was destroyed as was Bunny's room on Charlotte Street, which, fortunately, he had emptied only three weeks previously. In Mecklenburgh Square, Virginia's and Leonard's flat and Hogarth Press premises were destroyed, while in Regent's Park, Adrian and Karin Stephen's house lost its roof to bombs. It had been six months since he left the Air Ministry, and with invasion a real concern, Bunny felt he had been too long away from war work and from London.

Having finally found a tenant for Hilton, in October Bunny and Angelica moved to Lower Claverham Farm at Berwick in Sussex. As Vanessa had complained to Bunny that she could not bear to be separated from her daughter, Lower Claverham was selected for its relative proximity to Charleston. Bunny disliked it from the outset: it was cramped, they had insufficient furniture, and knowing it was a temporary let, Bunny couldn't invest in cultivating a garden. There he and Angelica received several visits from Leonard and Virginia Woolf. They came in March 1941, just a week before Virginia drowned, having weighed down her pockets with stones. Her death was a great blow to Angelica, who returned to Charleston, briefly united with Vanessa and Duncan by grief.

It was with little regret that after eight months Bunny and Angelica vacated Claverham in June 1941, their landlord requiring it at short notice. After some searching (by bicycle as petrol was rationed) they found a thatched bungalow at Alciston, even closer to Charleston. But then Angelica became liable for National Service. She took up an offer from Mrs Curtis, the headmistress at her old school, Longford Grove, to work there as an art mistress. Angelica's departure coincided with Richard's decision to enlist in the RAF marine aircraft section, responsible for flying boats and Air Sea Rescue. Bunny wondered whether he should have discouraged him from enlisting, but recognised that Richard was his own man with his own moral outlook.

Bunny received a commission from the Air Ministry to write a propaganda book,
War in the Air
, intended for American consumption. He told Constance, ‘I never realised how terrific our victory in the air had been last summer. Thus my book has a magnificent subject.'
³¹
Bunny was also asked by the Ministry of Information to write a pamphlet on the campaign in Greece and Crete. This type of propaganda involved placing events in an historical context so close as to be almost immediate. Bunny was disciplined and scrupulous in this work. His method is apparent in advice he gave to the American historian Bruce Campbell Hopper on the subject of writing a history of air warfare: ‘Start with the scientific technical advance whatever it may [be]: show how that influences policy by making something new & [a] practical proposition – then tell the story of the actual air warfare as an illustration of carrying out this policy & using the new weapon. In that way the reader will never be allowed to forget
that the means are changing every few months.'
³²

In September 1941, when Air Commodore Groves invited Bunny to become his private secretary he jumped at the offer, but the job went through so many bureaucratic hoops that it emerged unrecognisable. The following month, however, a suitable post was found. Bunny would be working again under Groves, but as a civilian at the newly established Political Warfare Executive (PWE). ‘As you know', he wrote to Angelica, ‘I can say nothing about my work. But it is certainly most interesting.'
³³
Once again Bunny was to be involved in hush-hush propaganda.

Lodging with Leonard Woolf in his Clifford's Inn flat, Bunny was glad to be in London again. Dining, one day, in a restaurant he saw Duncan at an adjacent table, but his old friend cut him dead. Angelica longed to be with Bunny in London. She dreamed about an ideal life, telling Bunny it would be ‘purely domestic – to have a moderate sized family and a house – a large house where we could be really free and live as we liked […]. I should like to have a great many friends and to live in an atmosphere of being alive – I would paint every day.'
³⁴
Bunny responded with a pragmatic proposal. ‘I am going now', he wrote in November 1941, ‘to do something which may annoy you & which many people would think very unscrupulous. That is to ask you to marry me.'
³⁵

‘The most important work in this war is propaganda […]. It is a writer's job & as we have truth on our side [we] shall have a wonderful opportunity.'
¹

Bunny's marriage proposal was made with no great confidence. He was doubtful about the ethics of marrying a woman twenty-six years younger than himself and concerned that it would cause an irreparable breach between Angelica and her parents. He thought the age difference would curtail their marriage, doubting they would stay together for longer than a decade. Such pessimistic considerations were hardly the most romantic bases for wedlock, but Bunny was acutely aware that it was a huge step for Angelica, and he did not wish her to take it lightly.

In asking Angelica to marry him, therefore, Bunny laid before her all the objections he could think of. Time and again he asked her to carefully consider the situation, to think about the implications of having children, to realise her freedom would thus be constrained. He told her not to embark on marriage or children
‘unless the desire to do so is your own'. ‘I am already old', he explained, ‘& the risks for you are therefore greater as I am much more likely to get ill & die, or to become unable to adapt myself after the war & so fail to earn a living. Your tastes will also diverge more & more from mine because you will be expanding in every direction, while I shall be contracting or standing still.'
²
Writing to Angelica on 18 November 1941, Bunny declared outright that he would not be hurt or annoyed by a refusal.

Bunny's attitude towards marriage with Angelica was markedly different to that of his marriage with Ray. He informed Ray that he could not be faithful and was likely to hurt her. Now he assumed Angelica would not be faithful and would consequently hurt him. He told her she could trust him ‘to behave as you would wish if you fall in love with someone else'.
³
He thought that even if he were to dislike this hypothetical lover, he would be able to behave in a civilised manner. On the positive side, Bunny recognised marriage would make things easier socially, because he and Angelica could acknowledge publicly that they were a couple. Bunny also hoped it might encourage Vanessa and Duncan to accept the relationship. Most importantly, marriage would enable Angelica to avoid war work, as conscription of single women was to be enforced in December 1941. If Angelica remained unmarried, she would have to join one of the women's forces.

Angelica replied: ‘The fact that you have asked me to marry you makes me happy & rather proud.'
⁴
She did not reject Bunny's proposal and on the whole thought the pros outweighed the cons.
She was, anyway, in love with Bunny: he filled a gap in her life which neither her putative father, Clive, nor genetic father, Duncan, was able to fill. When Angelica was asked, in relation to this biography, what attracted her to Bunny, she replied ‘he was warm and rather slow – and all that added up to someone to me very attractive because what I needed was a father-figure and that he was exactly'. She also found him ‘very well-made, physically'. Referring to a photograph where he is captured from back view, climbing into a first-floor window wearing only a pair of espadrilles, she said: ‘you can see exactly how beautiful his body was'.
⁵

At the beginning of December Angelica told Bunny, ‘I now naturally often think of our getting married, and I think I am drawing nearer and nearer to the assumption that we shall be'.
⁶
She tried to discuss the matter with Vanessa, but Vanessa could not get beyond concern for Duncan's feelings. The upshot was that Vanessa told Angelica that ‘we – this household – can't really share your happiness as we might if you were living with someone who could easily & freely come here with you'.
⁷

Bunny endeavoured to get to The Cearne to see Constance once a fortnight. Now eighty, she was physically frail and nearly blind, but still retained her fierce independence and clear mind. Angelica recalled Connie's joy at seeing Bunny, which resembled ‘the unbridled pleasure of a puppy on the return of its master'.
⁸
He remained the centre of her world. One evening when Bunny was at The Cearne, Constance suddenly began speaking gibberish. Bunny helped her to bed and she regained her speech after
a while, but it was a worrying episode.