Bloomsbury's Outsider (54 page)

At Hilton, Frances Partridge found the cold deathly and that even in bed, bundled in vest, flannel night-gown, bed-jacket and dressing gown with a smuggled eiderdown over the blankets, she could not get warm. ‘But none of this mattered', she observed, ‘besides the ghostly melancholy that drips from these walls,
apparently unnoticed by its inmates Bunny and William.'
²⁵
All was to change, as William, now forty-four, had fallen in love. The object of his affection was Linda Burt, whom Bunny described as ‘a delightful, quick-witted girl of twenty-eight. She is small, dark, with eager eyes, laughs a lot and plays the clarinet.'
²⁶
To Bunny's delight William announced that in July they would be married. In the circumstances Bunny felt he could not remain at Hilton, telling Quentin: ‘It needs a stout heart to cook & eat lonely meals at that long table.'
²⁷

In April 1969 Noel Olivier died. She suffered a stroke after tending a vine, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. Henrietta, who was at Hilton when Bunny received the news, heard him let out an anguished wail of pain. He told Quentin that Noel's death ‘leaves an awful gap. I knew and loved her from the time she was four years old.'
²⁸
To some extent, Bunny had raised his daughters with the Olivier sisters in mind, hoping, as Henrietta observed, that ‘we should grow up proud and fearless'.
²⁹
But there was another reason for his sadness. Several years later he wrote ruefully in his diary that if only he had asked Noel to ‘come to bed with me our lives might have been different'.
³⁰
To what extent this was wishful thinking or sentimental fantasy is unclear. But there is no doubt that she had been a mainstay in his
life and that he loved her even more than her sisters and had been closest to her as a child.

Still undecided about Hilton, in April Bunny set off for Italy with Frances Partridge, to stay with Magouche at Avane. ‘I feel I must be the only female he has travelled with in separate rooms', Frances reflected in her diary, ‘and only hope he doesn't feel humiliated before the hotelier.' With Bunny behind the wheel, Frances found the journey somewhat trying as he sped along relentlessly, unwilling to see sights. When they arrived all became clear: ‘Magouche was not expecting us before Monday at earliest, and our thundering advance now plainly shows as a valiant and obstinate attempt on Bunny's part to beat the band, and prove that he's not a dead dog yet, but a
man
.'
³¹

At lunch, one day, reminiscing about the Noel Olivier–Rupert Brooke–James Strachey triangle, Bunny flew into a rage in response to what he considered a derogatory comment by Maro Spender. According to Frances, ‘Bunny did a full, glaring half-turn and burst out in a pressurized voice “
no
, it wasn't like that
at all
” '. He was ashamed of his behaviour, noting in his diary that he had been beastly to Maro and felt upset himself. Frances was surprised later to hear Magouche saying, ‘ “Now everyone's in tears – Maro
and
Bunny” '.
³²
Noel was still much on his mind. With the exception of Harold Hobson, she had been the last link with his childhood. ‘There is no one', he lamented, ‘to whom I can talk about the past without explanations now.'
³³

From Avane, Bunny journeyed alone to St Martin-de-Vers where he found Nerissa, who had been living there for the best
part of a year. Together they went to the Château de Charry to view Le Verger, a converted outbuilding which was to let. Comprising one bedroom, a living room, kitchen, bathroom and a studio in a separate building, it was located three miles from the town of Montcuq, half a mile from the Château and commanded a splendid view to the south over a valley, the château turrets visible between trees. Bunny thought it perfect and decided to take it. He would no longer live at Hilton, he couldn't live permanently on
Moby Dick
, Angelica wanted to sell L'Ancienne Auberge and he recognised that Magouche's life was too full for him to share it on a full time basis.

There was one final family event at Hilton before Bunny's departure. It was the venue for a magnificent party following Linda's and William's wedding on 19 July. Bunny cooked a ham and a salmon and tables heaving with food were laid in the garden. Bunny told Sylvia it had been a wonderful party, and that Linda's relations ‘come from Islington. So did most of our other guests – including Angelica.' In the same letter he explained that William and Linda planned to move to Yorkshire and that he could not remain at Hilton alone. ‘I see', he said ‘that my life is uprooted and at a turning point', adding, ‘Adventure begins at seventy-seven, and I embark on it doubtfully'.
³⁴

Before embarking on any adventure, Bunny needed to complete the Carrington letters. In August, while Magouche was away, he occupied her Kensington house, working there with Amaryllis (who had taken a secretarial course) as his assistant. Immersed in long-ago Bloomsbury, Bunny was shocked to learn that Leonard Woolf had died. Leonard had been something of a mentor to Bunny, who often turned to him for advice. Leonard
appreciated Bunny's qualities, so much so that in 1943 he asked him to be his executor. Bunny now assumed he would have to take on this arduous role, but was relieved to learn that Leonard's companion Trekkie Parsons had been assigned the task.

In October, Bunny took Magouche on a tour of his northern haunts: they stayed at Butts Intake and then went to Ridley Stokoe. It was like a final pilgrimage; for Bunny had resolved to let Hilton even though he could barely countenance the practicalities of such a step. As William and Linda had moved to Yorkshire and Richard and Jane lived mostly in London, Bunny turned to Angelica for help, telling Quentin, afterwards, that she had come down to Hilton Hall ‘like the Angel of Death and for almost a week bonfires blazed and the junk and records of 45 years were consumed'.
³⁵
Emotionally exhausted, one evening in London Bunny was knocked down by a car when crossing the road. The driver rushed over to help him, only to receive a resounding punch in the face, followed by two more. A few moments later, Bunny realised that his reaction had been caused by feeling powerless, like a five-year-old at school.

He had been affected more than he cared to acknowledge by the prospect of leaving Hilton. For forty-five years it had been his home, the focus of family life, the locus of all his energy as a gardener and farmer. Returning there a few days after the London accident, Bunny found himself taking a corner too fast. He lost control of the car, charged some cottages and ended up stuck in a front garden. When, in November, Bunny wrote a letter of condolence to Sylvia following the death of her lover, Valentine Ackland, his words were as much a lament for his own
changing life as for Sylvia's loss: ‘I love the visible world so much that it consoles me to know that it is going on: however much we mess it up – day and night, high tide and low tide, summer and winter: forever […]. But such reflections are no help for pain and loneliness: for that there's no cure, my dear.'
³⁶

Bunny left Hilton for France on New Year's Day 1970. He stopped, en route, at Charleston, where he found Duncan gentle and charming and Quentin and Olivier as affectionate as ever. The next morning he dropped in on Lydia Lopokova at Tilton, before driving on to Newhaven. Grace Higgens thought he seemed a little confused: he arrived after tea, though expected for lunch, and took Olivier's spectacles to France, having mistaken them for his own. Bunny reached St Martin-de-Vers on 4 January, but it had not been a pleasant drive. The car went out of control on an ice-covered hill and Bunny had to let it slide backwards towards a ditch where it became lodged. Fortunately someone came and helped push it out but the whole experience magnified his sense of isolation.

At L'Ancienne Auberge he cleared cupboards and drawers in preparation for the furniture's removal to Charry. On 9 January he spent his first night in Le Verger alone. He wondered whether he would cope, whether he had the capacity to live alone, whether seclusion would cause him to age. But as he told Angelica, ‘I do feel this place is a home I shall cling to'.
³⁷
To Frances he wrote with more resignation: ‘For good or ill this place is
me
– not perhaps the Bunny Garnett known to so many – but the old man I really am.'
³⁸

Bunny returned to Hilton a month later to set about finding a tenant. Thus he established the pattern for the ensuing year: periods at Charry alternating with periods in London, an endless succession of journeys between. It was a schizophrenic existence, propelling him from peace and solitude to the frenetic social whirl of London and back again. It was as though he could not relinquish England for France, could not make the final break, could not, perhaps, exchange the ‘Bunny Garnett known to so many' for ‘the old man I really am'. Partly he could not relinquish Magouche. While he was in London it seemed natural to resume their routine of midweek dinners and nights on
Moby Dick
, but exiled in France no such routine could exist.

On 23 February Bunny arranged for a notice to be placed in
The Times
, advertising Hilton Hall to let. While trying to find a tenant for Hilton, Bunny was simultaneously endeavouring to sell L'Ancienne Auberge, to which he periodically returned. He found the combined processes unbearable, trailing through unfurnished rooms at L'Ancienne Auberge and an uninhabited Hilton Hall. Bunny was relieved when the script writer Johnny Byrne took on the tenancy of Hilton for two years.

At Charry Bunny began to make friends. He instantly warmed to Bysshe and Meg Elstob, who lived about ten miles away, and were both unfailingly kind, with a knack of turning up just when Bunny needed friendly faces. He gradually made other friendships, curiously always with expatriates, rather than the French, although Bunny eventually made friends with his French doctor, Doctor Cano, and his wife. As Bunny settled in, visitors came. In August Richard, Jane, Oliver and Ned arrived; later Angelica spent a few days with Bunny, en route from Morocco, bringing two carpets he had commissioned her to buy. Michael Howard,
his publisher at Cape also came, and was fed what Bunny described as ‘a most successful dish: sliced lamb's testicles (cold) in a tunny fish mayonnaise'.
³⁹
But the best and happiest event was the birth in September of William's and Linda's first child, Merlin. On receiving William's telegram with the news, Bunny burst into tears.

In late September he flew to Taos to take part in a D.H. Lawrence symposium with James T. Boulton (soon to co-edit Lawrence's
Letters
) and Harry Moore. It was a relatively brief stay and after a couple of days with Mina afterwards, Bunny flew to London. On 5 November
Carrington: Letters and Extracts from her Diaries
was published, the book launch coinciding with an exhibition of Carrington's paintings at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries in Mayfair, where according to Frances Partridge, the ‘crush was inconceivable'.
⁴⁰

It was not a straightforward book to edit, particularly given Carrington's idiosyncratic spelling and grammar which Bunny wanted to retain to reveal her charm. As ever, Bunny maintained that passages about living people would have to be left out and he certainly edited himself from the text. He excised ten lines about his love affair with Alix; nine about posing naked for Carrington and twenty-six about Frankie Birrell weeping over his marriage to Ray.
⁴¹
Raymond Mortimer and Michael Holroyd wrote glowing reviews of the book, although in other quarters the stereotype of elitist Bloomsbury prevailed. Even Gerald Brenan, reviewing the US edition, castigated Bloomsbury for being ‘very pleased with itself and inclined to look suspiciously
on outsiders'.
⁴²
But the book sold well and was chosen by two
Sunday Times
pundits as a Christmas book of the year.

Bunny really wanted a companion to live with him in France and his companion of choice was, naturally, Magouche. ‘Why won't she come away from it all and live with me and be my love', he complained, having lost sight of his earlier resolution to make no demands. Frances Partridge tried to make Bunny accept facts, telling him that Magouche's life was very busy with friends, lovers and sociability, and that the only thing he could do was make the most of what he'd got. Bunny had anticipated Magouche spending part of December in France with him, and in his disappointment he wrote a desperate letter to her friend Janetta Parlade. She replied, incisively, ‘when you write to insist that someone does what you want in the end they do it more out of loyal obligation than out of love'.
⁴³
Given all the changes in Bunny's life, he clung desperately to the idea of Magouche as the one constant. But he was deceiving himself. In Magouche he had found a lover who behaved, in some respects, much as he had done: she wanted freedom to do as she pleased and to love whomsoever she chose.

Bunny spent Christmas 1970 in Yorkshire with William, Linda and Merlin, moving on to spend several days at Butts Intake over the New Year, surrounded by deep snow. Alone in the silence, he remembered being there with Ray and with Angelica. It was as though he had one foot in the past and the other in an uncertain and lonely future.

‘This place is really paradise.'
¹

In the New Year of 1971 Bunny threw himself into a social round of family and friends, as if squirreling nuts against a lean winter. He was entertained by his daughters, dined with Harold Hobson, had lunch with George Kirstein at the Savoy and supper with Frances Partridge. He attended Duncan's eighty-sixth birthday dinner, Cape's fiftieth anniversary party, visited Rosie Peto on the Isle of Wight and Giovanna Madonia in Paris. He also stayed at Charleston where he wrote while Duncan painted: an interlude reminiscent of those moments of shared contentment during the Great War. Having achieved some sort of resolution regarding his position in Magouche's life, it was with her that he set off in February for Charry. They had what Bunny described as a ‘heavenly' time, Magouche leaving a few days shy of his seventy-ninth birthday.