Fatal Glamour (7 page)

In such letters, Rupert likes to go too far, and then be laughed at for his posturing. But so much effort goes into the joke that he no longer seems to know the difference between his showing off and his real feelings. Long before he met Sadler, he was writing poems about despair, doomed love, “red mournful Roses.” He tried to get his beloved to respond in kind to his “odorous and jewelled phrases,” but all he got from Sadler in return was “Sunday is very dull now that you are not in Chapel.”
³⁵
Antinous failed to live up to his name. Once the affair was
over, it was immortalised in fashionably homoerotic love poems (“My only god . . . dreams of men and men's desire”), seasoned with portentous hints of outlaw status (“I dared the old abysmal curse”). If Rupert was in love, he was also well aware of what being in love required of him: “You wonder how much of my affaire is true. So do I. (So, no doubt, does he!) It does not do to inquire too closely. It is now very pleasant. Some day perhaps we shall grow old and ‘wise,' and forget. But now we are young, and he is very beautiful. And it is spring. Even if it were only a romantic comedy, a fiction, who cares? Youth is stranger than fiction.”
³⁶

Probably the “affaire” went no further than smouldering glances and the occasional kiss. Rupert always had to watch out for his mother, as he would tell Ka Cox (two weeks after he had gone to bed with her for the first time), “‘Katharine Cox seems,' she almost beamed, ‘to go
everywhere
.' ‘Oh, yes,' I agreed: and then we were fairly launched on you. I felt the red creep slowly up – Damn! It's just as it always was; even from the time when the holiday mention, at lunch, of the boy of the moment, in the House (with apologies, dear!) left me the level red of this blotting-paper, and crying with silent wrath.”
³⁷
There was no chance at the school of any obviously flamboyant carrying-on without Mrs Brooke seeing it or hearing about it. Rupert's secret life was mainly confined to letters, or an occasional country walk with his beloved.

The Sadler affair ended in July 1906. It must have been Sadler who broke it off, though they had to part in any case. Sadler was going to Oxford, Rupert to Cambridge. His heart was “slightly fractured, or at least strained,” and Rupert could only write a poem imagining that they would meet again when both were old and grey:

Some day I shall rise and leave my friends

And seek you again through the world's far ends,

You whom I found so fair,

(Touch of your hands and smell of your hair!)

My only God in the days that were!
³⁸

Rupert consoled himself by staying for ten days with the Russell-Smith boys at Brockenhurst, in the New Forest. “I forgot my weariness for a time,” he told his classmate Geoffrey Keynes, “in assuming the part of cheerful imbecility. I played it so well that for a time I deceived myself
too.” His letter of thanks to Mrs Russell-Smith had a private joke: “I loved it all . . . and especially one of the hammocks – the one further from the house. Please give my love to it – a delightful hammock!” It was delightful because, as Rupert told James Strachey, Denham Russell-Smith “had often taken me out to the hammock, after dinner, to lie entwined there.”
³⁹
Larking around in the forest and on the tennis court by day, snuggling in the hammock by night. Rupert and Denham had been fondling each other in the dorm at School Field for some time, perhaps going as far as mutual masturbation. But it was never a romantic affair like the one with Sadler, and, when he went to Brockenhurst, Rupert had already fallen in love again with another boy in his house, Edwin Charles Lascelles. Denham would not come back into Rupert's life, and his bed, until three years later.

That affair had begun in the spring of 1906. Lascelles was just sixteen, three years younger than Rupert, and had been at Rugby for two years. He had aristocratic connections, to the earls of Harewood, but he left Rugby early and made no great mark in later life. He got some small parts on the London stage from 1911 onwards, but never established himself as a professional actor.
⁴⁰
During the war, Lascelles was commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps, a relatively safe berth. Afterwards, he seems to have lived quietly on a private income, in a cottage at Drewsteignton, Devon. He never married, and when he died in 1950 most of his money went to his housekeeper and to the
RSPCA
. Rupert kept a photo of Lascelles in his room at Cambridge, and continued to see him in later years. He seems to have been more seriously in love with Lascelles than with either Michael Sadler or Denham Russell-Smith. This would be a reason for keeping very quiet about the affair, and none of their letters have survived. About Lascelles's looks we have only Rupert's praise of his “brunette radiance.”
⁴¹
They were close for a few months in 1906, though in the autumn they could only see each other when Rupert came home from Cambridge. That was a time when he felt unsettled at King's and was nostalgic about leaving Rugby. But in January 1907 something went wrong, just about the time that Rupert's elder brother Dick died of pneumonia: “I came up [to Cambridge] on Thursday, partly to escape my Rugby School friends who were coming back that day, and whom I daren't face, and partly that I might be alone. Another thing has happened that hurts a great deal, too; but that affects only me so I suppose it doesn't matter.”
⁴²

Most likely he had received a letter from Lascelles ending their relationship. When he spoke later of the “enormous period of youthful Tragedy with which [he] started at Cambridge,” he meant both the loss of his schoolboy love for Lascelles and the struggle to make a place for himself at King's after his “effortless superiority” at Rugby.
⁴³
If the “other thing” was breaking off with Lascelles, he was probably the inspiration for four of Rupert's poems, later in 1907: “My Song,” “Failure,” “Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening,” and “The Wayfarers.” All of them are laments for lost love, in which Rupert expresses himself more directly than in the neo-decadent style of his earlier poems. “The Wayfarers” is dated June 1907, around the time that Lascelles left Rugby, perhaps to travel:

Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place

Made fair by one another for a while.

Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;

The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.

Virtually all Rupert's erotic feelings, until near the end of his second year at Cambridge, were directed towards boys. All were younger than him. This was not at all unusual for public school boys of his generation. His three main love affairs at Rugby were sentimental and idealistic, with only limited physical expression. The red line between the Higher and the Lower Sodomy was anal penetration, and Rupert almost certainly did not cross it. Still, he twice showed that he considered sexual coercion a normal feature of school life, and that he would defend the strong against the weak. Once was around 1907, when he came to the defence of Mr Eden at Hillbrow. In 1909 he stepped up again to defend a Rugby master accused of buggery of a pupil.
⁴⁴
Three years later, he told Virginia Woolf about the rape of a ten-year-old boy by two fourteen-year-olds, which he seemed to find highly amusing. These episodes show that Rupert was uncritically loyal to the public school code, in which the sexual exploitation of weaker boys was taken for granted. If it became known, it should if possible be covered up and smoothed over. Beating and bullying, similarly, were accepted as just part of the order of things; it would be a worse crime to “sneak” about them. “Take your punishment and never complain” continued to be the word when it came to the greater horrors of the Western Front.

Rupert would only lose his equilibrium when dealing with something not provided for by public school training: emotional intimacy with a young woman. The only one he was at all close to when growing up was his cousin Erica Cotterill, who was six years older. They kept up a bantering correspondence over the years, but there was no romantic interest on either side.
⁴⁵
The one woman Rupert did know intimately was his mother. He chafed against her moralistic regime, but could never break away from her. She posed no threat to his affairs with boys because he took good care that she would know nothing about them. He would be equally secretive about heterosexual affairs later on, but he was always ruled by his mother's ideas about how women should behave and could never meet any other woman on her own terms. In his gay relationships, he could either get what he wanted, or else carry on blithely when faced with disappointment. On the other side of the street, Rupert could never be comfortable with any woman he cared for (except perhaps with his Tahitian loves, Mamua and Taatamata). Worse than that: he could be utterly destructive towards them, without any remorse or insight as to why he was being so nasty. It may be that all public school boys were likely to have “difficulties with girls” later on, but with Rupert this disability was specially damaging, both to himself and to others. We can put part of the responsibility on Mrs Brooke, also. As a clergyman's daughter, a former matron, and the wife of a housemaster, she too belonged heart and soul to the public school system. Even for a sensitive boy, there was no place to hide. Those who tried to reject the system, or make fun of it – Graves, Waugh, Connolly, Orwell – still carried it with them all their lives. Rupert could be no exception.

For Christmas 1906 Rupert went home to Rugby from Cambridge for a month. While he was there, his brother Dick died of pneumonia, after only a week's illness. He was six years older than Rupert, and the two were not especially close. Dick was not as strong as Rupert, emotionally or physically, nor as brilliant. He had started a business career in London instead of going to university. But Parker Brooke took the death hard, and lost whatever authority he had kept within the family. Rupert now became both Mrs Brooke's favourite son and the “man of the family,” the single focus of her ambition and her powerful will.

In April, Rupert went to Florence with his brother Alfred, who was now a pupil at Rugby too, and still living in their father's house. At their pension in Florence a fellow guest asked Rupert if he came from a public
school, and after a minute's contemplation pronounced, “Rugby!”
⁴⁶
Nothing abashed, Rupert went off to place flowers on the graves of W.S. Landor and A.H. Clough: both poets who had died at Florence, and both old boys of, yes, Rugby. “I have been happier at Rugby than I can find words to say,” he would write later to Frances Darwin: “As I look back at five years there, I seem to see almost every hour golden and radiant, and always increasing in beauty as I grew more conscious: and I could not, and cannot, hope for or even imagine such happiness elsewhere. And then I found the last days of all this slipping by me, and with them the faces and places and life I loved, and I without power to stay them. I became for the first time conscious of transience, and parting, and a great many other things.”
⁴⁷

There is no reason to doubt that this schoolboy happiness was indeed more real than almost all the emotions that Rupert experienced afterwards – more real because it was part of a more enclosed and less ambiguous world than anything he would know in later years. He experienced his first year at Cambridge as a second act to his time at Rugby, and in almost every way a disappointing one. One reason for the disappointment was that he continued his habit of dividing his life into separate compartments, each with its own set of friends. They saw that Rupert came and went, but about
where
he went they often were left in the dark. This policy worked for Rupert for at least four years after his arrival at Cambridge. In 1911 he finally tried to unify the different elements of his life, only to find that they were explosive when combined.

The next three chapters describe Rupert's parallel lives: his most crucial attempts at friendship and love in from 1906 to 1910; his political career; and his membership in the Apostles. My justification for this treatment of his Cambridge years is that Rupert at this time lived in compartments of his own choosing. One of them was closed off by the vow of secrecy he had taken when becoming an Apostle. The second compartment was his political life as a Young Fabian. This remained separate because most of his older friends in the Apostles were keen Liberals and scornful of his enthusiasm for socialism. One the other side, that of “friendship and love,” most of his deeper emotional ties were not formed within the Fabian circle. From
Chapter 5
onwards, all these interests will be merged in a single narrative of his life.

Rupert Brooke went up to King's College to read classics because his father had done the same, because his uncle Alan Brooke was dean of the college, and because he had won a scholarship. Until a few years before, King's had been a college exclusively for Etonians, and it still kept an atmosphere of aristocratic leisure. But within a few days of his arrival at King's in October 1906, Rupert became friends with two young men who came from a different mould. Justin Brooke (no relation) was at Emmanuel College and sharing lodgings with a fellow student there, Jacques Raverat. Justin's father was a small grocer in Manchester who single-handedly built up his shop into one of the largest tea merchants in Britain: Brooke Bond. Arthur Brooke could well afford to send his four sons to public school, but, like many progressive Northern businessmen, he mistrusted the education provided for the sons of the gentry. However, he was open-minded enough to send three of his four boys to J.H. Badley's new progressive school in Sussex, Bedales. Justin Brooke arrived there in 1896, when he was eleven years old. After two years, his father transferred him to Abbotsholme, a more radical establishment. Three years after that, one of the headmaster Cecil Reddie's regular scandals erupted and Justin was returned to Bedales, where he became head boy in his last year.