Bloomsbury's Outsider (24 page)

Meanwhile, Bunny took the matter into his own hands. First he wrote to Garrow, stating that ‘it would save a great deal of pain for all parties' if he did not join Ray. ‘It is idle to pretend', he added, ‘to being reasonable when one is not'.
³⁶
He didn't send the letter and instead arranged to meet Garrow that evening at his London flat. There Bunny informed him that if he were to join Ray at Salcombe, it would radically alter the Garnetts' marriage. Bunny wrote to Ray afterwards telling her: ‘when I think of you, of Richard, of William, of everything my happiness is built on, then I am in despair, am dead'.
³⁷
Ray replied: ‘you know that I have lived in torture for months because of my feelings about you – & my unhappiness didn't seem to hinder you at all. I've been in despair so often.' The problem was that Bunny and Ray loved and needed one another, but their
expectations were completely different. Ray knew Bunny would go off with someone else again, whenever he chose to do so. ‘What a hypocrite you have been', she added, asking: ‘Darling Bunny do have sense – do you love me or not.'
³⁸

The problem was Bunny's double-standards, his assertion that ‘I cannot be other than I am', while insisting that Ray remained at home, holding the babies and waiting for him to return at weekends.
³⁹
Although he always maintained that jealousy was a redundant and unnecessary emotion, he was not immune to it. But it angered Ray that Bunny could be jealous while all the time he insisted that she should not. Bunny may have been particularly jealous because this was not Ray's first affair. In a letter to Ray of 22 July, Bunny referred to ‘this second affair'
⁴⁰
and in a later letter on the subject of fidelity, he asserted ‘I was jealous of Theo'.
⁴¹
Was Theo Powys Ray's lover? Did she have an affair with him, perhaps when she stayed with him at East Chaldon in February 1926, at which time she referred to him as ‘a darling'? Or was he instead a kindly father figure to Ray?

After the holiday, Ray went into the nursing home, as planned. From Hilton, Bunny wrote her a letter full of muddled emotions: love, anger, remorse for his own behaviour, confusion. His rational self wanted to permit her to ‘Do what you like, love whom you like. Be yourself as I am myself.' But, he admitted, ‘I can never pretend to offer you equality'. ‘I shall never forget this, or forgive it, I shall never feel again for you the certainty & happiness that the
swallow feels: the air will not let it fall & bruise its poor feathers.'
⁴²

Ray had barely recuperated when Bunny took off again for France, this time with Duncan, en route to Cassis, where Vanessa had taken a house.
⁴³
From France he wrote exuberantly to Ray, in a shaky hand, as if under the influence of alcohol: ‘Darling', ‘I want you I want your company as a friend, as a lover, I want you […]. I long to see you, to run my eye over you: to hug you in my arms […]. I am starved of everything I hold dearest being away from you.'
⁴⁴
Absence, or absinthe, had clearly made his heart grow fonder.

‘In all marriages there are disagreements, in which one of the parties has to give way to the other.'
¹

In the spring of 1928, Bunny was working on a new novel,
No Love
, and contributing an introduction for the latest Nonesuch volume, a selection of Joseph Conrad's
Letters
which Edward was editing. Bunny was in the unusual position of commenting on his father's writing, although this he did tentatively. ‘One or two sentences', he advised, ‘need thinking over.' ‘Please don't', he added, ‘be incensed by this criticism.'
²
Bunny found Edward's selection heart-warming. ‘I love you', he wrote to his father, ‘I think of you very often; especially lately I have been all through the Conrad letters in revise proof twice & they help me to recreate you as you were at different ages.'
³

Although Ray's affair with Garrow Tomlin had angered Bunny, it did not affect the friendship between the two men. It
seemed perfectly natural for Bunny to spend a weekend away with Tommy and Garrow and the latter's visits to Hilton continued much as before. But at Easter, when Frances Marshall and Ralph Partridge were staying at Hilton, Frances noticed that Ray had over-powdered her face and that her eyes were red. Conversation turned to whether some people were essentially tragic while others were comic. Ray said, ‘I feel I'm a very tragic character, though I'm not unhappy. I feel like […] some […] mutilated thing.'
⁴

In June Ray set off at short notice, taking Richard and William with her to La Bergère, Vanessa's house at Cassis. Duncan had only recently written to Bunny, presciently as it happened, telling him that the house was available for rent during the summer. Shortly after Ray's departure, Bunny wrote to her from Hilton, saying he was all right and progressing with
No Love
. ‘I think it unlikely', he added, ‘that I shall see Norah this month'.
⁵
Norah was Norah McGuinness, a thirty-six-year-old artist, married to the poet Geoffrey Phibbs (also known as Geoffrey Taylor). Bunny had met her earlier in the year when she brought some drawings to the Nonesuch office hoping to find work as an illustrator. She was beautiful, with large dark grey eyes, bobbed wavy brown hair, serious cheekbones and a generous smile. According to a paper Bunny wrote many years later for the Memoir Club, he had become sexually obsessed with Norah. It was this obsession which caused Ray to flee to France.

‘Darling Ray', Bunny wrote, ‘you ask me to write to you & tell you what I am feeling quite honestly.' He told her he was unhappy without her, that he wanted her badly ‘in every way'; missed her,
could not bear to be separate from her. And then with his usual misplaced candour, he undid any good he might have done, stating that he felt ‘wretched' about Norah.

I don't love her as I love you – how could I when she is almost a stranger to me – but I like her very much, I am quite charmed by her. She is headover heels in love with me, and what's to be done. It is a hopeless business […]. All human emotions are wrong; mine particularly. I am in love with you, depend upon you, but I cannot bear not seeing her, & want her to amuse me. I often wish I were an eunuch: it would simplify things: too much I dare say for my happiness.
⁶

Ray responded in the way she knew would hurt most: with silence. Bunny wrote remonstrating with her for her lack of communication. ‘You might reflect', he chided, ‘that I'm extremely lonely & continually tormenting myself.'
⁷
He had in fact been enjoying a sociable time with the Meynells at their new house in Essex. Garrow was a fellow guest, and they spent their time basking naked and wrestling in the sun. Bunny informed Ray that he had easily thrown his adversary. ‘Just now', he crowed, ‘I am in rather splendid condition.'
⁸

In Ray's absence Bunny had time to reflect, again acknowledging his hypocritical treatment of her. ‘Honesty is the only way: & if I'm honest I say that I need you desperately, that I cannot share you with anyone. And then I have not the character
or the desire even to be faithful myself.'
⁹
‘You say', Ray countered, ‘you must love others & I must not – & you don't know what I object to. I suppose really I feel very much the same as you. I am too unhappy living with you when you are longing always for someone else. I'm miserable because I can't satisfy you in any way.' ‘Sometimes', she remarked pointedly, ‘people can forget other longings when they love one another & trust one another.' ‘Of course', she added, ‘I love you & want your fidelity. I think of you as the one solid thing in life.' But Ray knew this was an illusion, for at the back of her mind she feared that ‘bye & by [sic] you will find someone free to go with you & you with them & you will be gone'.
¹⁰

Bunny justified his double-standards in evolutionary terms: ‘For you to be jealous of my loves is as if you were jealous of my reading books & bursting into tears over their pages. For me to [be] jealous of you is selfish but the wisdom of preservation.'
¹¹
It did not seem to occur to him that such wisdom might not have been a uniquely masculine attribute. Ray's response was appropriately sarcastic: ‘What it is to be a man.'
¹²

With Ray out of reach, Bunny characteristically came to find her more appealing than ever. ‘Every now & then', he said, ‘I take out your photograph from my pocket-book & gaze at your bottom & your lovely legs, & the reflection of your face & your breasts.'
¹³
‘Soon', he told her, ‘we shall be together again, and a pair of happy lovers I think, as we have so often been in the past.'
Bunny proposed joining her at Cassis, announcing he would arrive on 12 July. She told him not to come, but when William became ill with diarrhoea, changed her mind, feeling the return journey would be easier with another adult pair of hands. ‘I expect', Ray remarked caustically, ‘we shall hate one another when we meet as much as we do now.'
¹⁴
Bunny spent ten days at Cassis before returning with Ray and the children to England. There is no record of the nature of their reunion, but less than a month later, Ray was in East Chaldon, staying with Theo and Violet Powys.

In early September Ray wrote to Edward, asking if she could come and see him. ‘I am very unhappy', she explained, ‘and should like to talk to you because I think you'd be sympathetic to both Bunny & me.'
¹⁵
Edward was very fond of Ray and felt much sympathy for her. Even though he was a great tease, he always teased Ray in a kindly way, as evinced by a poem which Ray sent him, ostensibly from Richard:

Has anybody seen my grandada

A saucy man is he

If you find my grandada

Tease him as he Teases me.
¹⁶

Ray found it an enormous relief to confide in Edward. He was not disloyal to Bunny, on the contrary he tried to reassure Ray about the strength of his son's love, but he provided a sympathetic ear at a time when she was most in need of one. For Bunny
had taken rooms in Hampstead where he was living with Norah McGuinness.

Bunny had visited Norah in Ireland in early September, and while there, he met her husband Geoffrey Phibbs, who had written to Bunny suggesting they meet. Ironically, the situation may have been convenient for Phibbs, as he had come under the spell of the poet Laura Riding, Robert Graves's mistress, with whom he had recently started to live in Hammersmith in a ménage
à quatre
with Graves and his wife Nancy Nicholson.

At twenty-eight, Phibbs was charming and rather shy. Bunny could not help but like him.

Ray threatened to leave Bunny but she was not in a position to do so. She was financially dependent upon him, and even though she continued to work as an illustrator, such work was sporadic and had to accommodate the children. Moreover, in an unequal society, divorcées were stigmatised. Adultery remained the only acceptable grounds for divorce and although Bunny had committed adultery, it was a messy business proving it. Ray would not have wished to cite his lovers, and Bunny would not have enjoyed spending a night in a hotel with a paid prostitute in order to be ‘caught in the act'.

When she needed to get away, Ray left the children at Hilton with Mrs Thorpe, who helped in the house. In London she stayed in Bunny's basement flat, at 37 Gordon Square, two cramped rooms rented from Vanessa, who lived above. Despite their proximity, the two women had little contact, Vanessa reporting to Bunny: ‘your mysterious wife haunts the basement & I sometimes see her flitting like a bat round the square.'
¹⁷
On one occasion, Bunny saw Ray pass on the Tube and he thought she saw him, too.

Bunny continued to insist that he loved Ray passionately while protesting that he could not ‘escape the blind folly of loving Norah'.
¹⁸
‘My love for Norah', he informed Ray, ‘does not
conflict
any more with my love for you than my love for Tommy conflicts with my love for Lytton, or Duncan.'
¹⁹
Ray responded with silence. It was the only weapon she had and she deployed it well. Within a month of moving in with Norah, Bunny was yearning for Ray. He returned to Hilton on 13 November and, by early December, Ray was again basking in his uxorious warmth.

The cost of financing a Hampstead flat, Bloomsbury basement and Hilton Hall had left Bunny very short. He could not draw upon his Nonesuch salary as they had cash-flow problems. In December he turned to Prentice for an advance on
No Love
. Prentice agreed, but wary of both the censor and Bunny's tendency to stretch the boundaries of literary propriety, Prentice wanted assurances that Bunny was not writing another
Well of Loneliness
(Radclyffe Hall's recently banned ‘lesbian' novel). Bunny reassured Prentice that the book was ‘entirely heterosexual', although it contained ‘a good deal of love – including adultery'.
²⁰
That year Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions, had banned James Joyce's
Ulysses
on grounds of alleged gross indecency. The Nonesuch Press responded by issuing a prospectus entitled
Bodkin Permitting
.

In November Bunny wrote a fan letter to another author, Dorothy Edwards, whose short stories,
Rhapsody
(1927), he
admired. ‘Who and what are you?' he asked her.
²¹
She replied, ‘As to who & what I am. I think if this is a mystery it is that I am Welsh.'
²²
The two writers arranged to meet in January 1929, when Dorothy would pay one of her infrequent visits to London. She told him that he would recognise her, because she would be wearing a grey cloak ‘and a slightly provincial air'.
²³