Bloomsbury's Outsider (46 page)

At forty-seven, Rogers was ten years Angelica's senior, now a lecturer at London's Slade School of Fine Art, although he lived in Suffolk part of the week with his wife Elsie and their children. He was short, rotund and bespectacled, with dark curly hair. He and Angelica were lovers, and now it was Bunny's turn to remain at Hilton while Angelica went up to London every Tuesday or Thursday to be with Claude. Henrietta, then eleven, sensed something amiss, dreading the ‘clank of Angelica's footsteps' on the hall's stone floor, aware her mother was wearing her smart London shoes and would be away ‘making merry'.
¹³
Bunny knew
who Angelica was with, for in his pocket diary his notes of her expeditions to London are invariably embellished with the letters ‘CP', an oddly thin and rather pointless camouflage of ‘CR'.

On 4 August Bunny noted in his diary, ‘Talk with Angelica, confessed love for CP; said I would help if I could, felt mixture of pity & tenderness for her'.
¹⁴
Despite such bravado, the next day at the Hobsons', Bunny had to turn away in order to obscure the tears welling up in his eyes, when the folk song ‘O Waly Waly' played on the record player:

O, love is handsome and love is fine,

And love's a jewel while it is new,

But when it is old, it groweth cold,

And fades away like the morning dew.

Bunny's initial reasonableness soon gave way to feelings towards Rogers of loathing and anger. He worried their friends would find out, that it would be difficult to present a unified front, that the children would be hurt. He was particularly concerned about the possibility of local gossip, for sometimes Rogers met Angelica in Cambridge. As always, Bunny was torn between the need for civilised behaviour and his instinctive jealousy. By and large he behaved honourably, perhaps recalling his promise to Angelica of 1941: ‘you can trust me to behave as you would wish if you fall in love with someone else'.
¹⁵

Bunny turned to Pat Holtby for support, explaining he was unhappy though skirting the reason. She chastised him for being evasive, but she was intelligent and insightful and without
knowing that Angelica had been unfaithful, could diagnose the fundamental flaw in the Garnetts' marriage: that Angelica felt resentful. As Pat told Bunny: ‘It didn't matter when supreme love made it all feasible, but perhaps the bottom fell out of that when you were unfaithful […]. So the resentment gathers.' Pat wisely advised Bunny that Angelica needed ‘to admire you again – not pity you'. She also warned him: ‘you could make two mistakes – to ask for pity […] or to rush to the ego-massaging embraces of another'. ‘Sixty four', she added, ‘may be a difficult age, but thirty eight is too'.
¹⁶

When, at the end of August, Rogers left for a fortnight in Holland, Angelica was so upset that Bunny thought she would leave him. Instead, she had time to think, and told Bunny that her feelings for Rogers were less certain. Bunny hoped that the Italian holiday he and Angelica planned would strengthen their relationship and diminish Angelica's feelings for his rival.

The five-week holiday in the autumn of 1956 was mostly successful, although tensions surfaced. Initially they stayed with Giovanna at her family estate at Bertinoro, between Forli and Cesena in Emilia-Romagna. There they had the bizarre experience of being shot at by an invisible person while walking across fields in the dark, the bullet whispering overhead. It was the hunting season, but this was an odd time of day to hunt. Bunny and Angelica moved on from Bertinoro, driving from place to place and visiting art galleries. They returned via France, where they dropped in on Angelica's former drama teacher, Michel St Denis and were then dazzled by luxury at Château Mouton, where they stayed with Pauline and Philippe de Rothschild.

Angelica's affair spurred Bunny to write a new novel which he called ‘the jealousy one'.
¹⁷
Entitled
A Net for Venus
, the book analysed the destructive nature of jealousy. Bunny was trying to work through his own feelings regarding Angelica, but it was a bit close to home. As he told Mina, the subject of his story was ‘the old triangle – husband, wife, lover'.
¹⁸
With typical candour he gave his draft to Angelica to read, and she responded unfavourably. It was one thing to be celebrated as the heroine of
Aspects of Love
, another to be flaunted as an adulteress.

On 13 January 1957 Bunny noted in his diary: ‘Angelica told me painful things in afternoon: Future in doubt.'
¹⁹
He could not sleep, relying on pills, and felt devastated. To compound matters, his farm manager, Harry, was in hospital. As Bunny told Frances Partridge, ‘After diminishing my farming interest & vowing to leave all the work to Harry […], I have suddenly found myself precipitated back onto the tractor & the muck-heap'.
²⁰
He also had the children to look after and dinner to cook, as Angelica had gone to Newcastle to stay with Quentin and Olivier.

Exhausted by farm work, Bunny's emotional state continued to spiral downwards. Baling straw, he noted in his diary ‘Baler luckily broke down before I did'.
²¹
On the same page he recorded that his American editor, John McCallum of Harcourt Brace, had rejected
A Net for Venus
. His manuscript was, meanwhile, lodged at Chatto & Windus, but Bunny became impatient
waiting for a verdict. He complained that his editor, Ian Parsons, ‘doesn't reply, or read what I send him for over a month & I think that I deserve more courteous and efficient treatment. I have been with them for thirty five years […] have taken other authors to them, they have never lost money on any of my books, and I think I am ill-used, and won't stand it'.
²²
Bunny posted a testy letter to Parsons, stating he would not trouble him again. This crossed in the post with a letter from Parsons, rejecting the book. For the first time in his writing career Bunny was without a publisher. At a Memoir Club meeting, Julia Strachey noticed that he was completely absorbed in his own thoughts and seemed absolutely withdrawn.

Bunny had remained in touch with Barbara Ker-Seymer in the twenty or so years since their affair. Now she was living with her lover, the American sculptor Barbara Roett, on Homer Street, Marylebone. The two ‘Bars' as they were known, had a room to let, and Bunny took it. It was useful for attending Cranium and Memoir Club meetings, and it enabled Bunny to see Ann Hopkin without having to stay with her. Their sexual relationship had fizzled out, but they remained friends.

Angelica oscillated between chilly detachment and warm demonstrations of affection, leading Bunny to feel alternate extremes of misery and optimism. On the rare occasions when he and Angelica made love Bunny assumed she was being charitable. In July 1957, having dined alone in London and feeling unhappy, Bunny wrote her a desperate letter. The following day, at an exhibition at the Slade, Bunny narrowly avoided Claude Rogers. Back at Hilton, he handed Angelica his letter, which led to a painful row. Their relationship under duress, it was not the
best moment to embark on a family holiday with Quentin and Olivier Bell and their young children Julian and Virginia.
²³

On arriving at Asolo, in northern Italy, they found Quentin and Olivier already established in the rented house. It was too small to accommodate everyone, so William, Amaryllis and Henrietta would sleep in rooms elsewhere in the town. Although it was perfectly reasonable that Bunny's older children should make way for the Bells' infants, Bunny was furious. Quite why he should have been so angry and inflexible is difficult to determine, except perhaps in the context of his current vulnerabilities about Angelica. Quentin thought Bunny's determined adoption of the role of
père-de-famille
embraced his family as well as Bunny's.
²⁴
Bunny became progressively grumpy and isolated, his irascibility culminating at the end of a day-trip to Venice. William was driving with Bunny in the passenger seat. At the turning for Asolo, which Olivier and Will recognised, Bunny insisted Will drive straight on, barking ‘straight on' repeatedly. William drove on and on in the wrong direction, Bunny refusing to acknowledge or apologise for his mistake.
²⁵

Bunny had planned to focus on his new novel during the holiday, but found it impossible to do so. Once again Mina Curtiss came to his aid, inviting Bunny to work on his book at Chapelbrook. With customary diplomacy, she played down her payment for his passage in the guise of giving him space and solitude to write. Arriving on 2 November 1957, Bunny soon fell into a routine where he woke early, bathed, breakfasted, took a walk and then worked all day until dinner. When he climbed
Pony Mountain, he could not help thinking about Priscilla Fairchild, with whom he had ascended the hill all those years before.

In mid-November, Bunny went to Harvard, accompanied by his old friend, the poet Archibald McLeish, now Professor of Rhetoric. Having been asked to give an after-dinner speech on D.H. Lawrence, Bunny came armed with a batch of Lawrence letters inherited from Edward, which he hoped the university library might be willing to purchase. As they did not offer what Bunny considered a fair price, he came away with the manuscripts still under his arm.

On 28 November Bunny spent Thanksgiving at the Massachusetts home of George Kirstein, Mina's younger brother, the publisher and owner of the
Nation
magazine. The next day he went to New York, where he stayed at the Beekman Tower Hotel on East Forty-nine and First Street. Mina was also in New York, and although her apartment was too small to accommodate Bunny, they dined together every evening. They also dined with Mina's brother, Lincoln Kirstein, who had recently suffered a nervous breakdown. Apprehensive about how he would find his old friend, Bunny was relieved that Lincoln appeared happy, eager to reminisce about Stephen Tomlin and old times.

On another evening Bunny collected Mina, ‘stupendous in a huge mink coat, a string of vast pearls & the largest diamond ring ever seen'.
²⁶
They dined at the Plaza before attending a performance of Lincoln's New York City Ballet conducted by Stravinsky in celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday. The kind
of high life Bunny enjoyed with Mina in France seemed even more dazzling in New York. Bunny wrote to Angelica, telling her he longed for her, wished she was with him. She replied affectionately, saying she longed to be with Bunny, that he must have faith in his novel, and sending hugs. Writing again to Angelica, Bunny casually mentioned that Shusheila Lall had come to his hotel room on his first morning there, ‘& we sat & talked for an hour or so'.
²⁷

Bunny had first met Shusheila in 1950 when she arrived in London, estranged from her husband. At the time Bunny considered her ‘the most intelligent woman I have met for a long long time & of (Siamese) cat-like delicacy'.
²⁸
She was a year older than Angelica, exquisitely beautiful, with long dark hair, pale skin, large expressive eyes and a lovely figure clothed in an elegant sari. She told Bunny, at the time, that she felt a foreigner everywhere, and perhaps this, together with her wavering marriage, caused the deep melancholy which often cast its shadow upon her.
²⁹
Bunny had seen Shusheila once or twice since, when she alighted in London. Now she was living in New York, having achieved some sort of reconciliation with her husband Arthur Lall, India's Ambassador to the United Nations.

At lunch one day in New York, Shusheila told Bunny she had been propositioned by a truck driver. Bunny assumed she shared this confidence to encourage him to make a similar proposition. He reasoned that ‘If I tell a woman of a love affair I have enjoyed
it is usually because I want her to realise that love affairs are possible with me'.
³⁰
And so, three days later, Bunny took Shusheila back to his room where they made love. As he recorded in his journal, a journal created specifically to document the affair, ‘I was so excited by the fact of her taking me as a lover – at the age of 65 – that all my love making was shot through with astonishment'.
³¹
The following day when Mina threw a champagne cocktail party for Bunny, he barely spoke to Shusheila, but ‘all the time the thought of her being my lover and a sense of insane triumph and happiness possessed me. Of the 3½ million women in New York I was the favoured lover of the most lovely.'

Lunching with Shusheila the next day at his hotel, Bunny heard someone speak his name. It was Priscilla Fairchild, visiting New York and staying in the same hotel. Bunny hadn't seen her for twenty-five years. She was slender, grey-haired, still handsome and overjoyed to see him. Of course it did his ego a power of good to have his old lover meet the current model, and vice versa. One evening Priscilla went to Bunny's hotel room where they sat and talked for some time. When Bunny embraced her she smiled and disengaged herself. He thought it just as well, but a year later, when he learned she had died from a heart attack, he was pleased that fortune had thrown them together one last time.

It was presumably Shusheila who encouraged her husband to throw an ambassadorial dinner in Bunny's honour. Arthur Lall was as handsome as his wife was beautiful and he impressed Bunny with his way ‘of taking his own importance light heartedly for granted'.
³²
It was a surreal occasion. Despite the
grandiosity of the surroundings and formal attire, dinner turned out to be a buffet which the guests ate on their laps. Bunny became involved in a prickly conversation with Krishna Menon, leader of the Indian Delegation to the UN, who was not as impressed by Bunny's stories of Savarkar as Bunny imagined he would be. Moreover Bunny was pursued all evening by a woman who insisted his books had inspired her to such an extent that she wished to coalesce with him. But the highpoint of the event was Bunny's meeting with Carson McCullers, an author he particularly admired and had asked to meet. She looked sickly and crumpled with pain. Bunny's heart went out to her, and as her hands shook badly, he cut up her food. They established an instant rapport. She wore a green and blue silk kimono, and as they talked Bunny noticed a cockroach dart out of the garment's folds and run across her lap.