Bloomsbury's Outsider (56 page)

Geographically distanced from Magouche, Bunny's time with her was all the more precious. They spent part of the summer in Greece and at Avane, and she stayed with him for ten days in the autumn. Afterwards, he found solace in a four legged companion, a tabby tomcat whom he named Tiber, after Carrington's cat. As Bunny told Sylvia ‘He has turned out to be handsome beyond belief, affectionate – he loves to lie in my arms, purring'. ‘I am', Bunny concluded, ‘his slave'.
²⁸
Bunny lavished his affection on Tiber, feeding him tit-bits, ministering to his wounds
after encounters with the Wood Cat, and presenting him with a ‘Mouse for morale'.
²⁹

In January 1973 Bunny told Frances: ‘I determined the other morning to live to be 100 – at least', explaining that ‘the sun was warm & the sky blue and the bare poles of the trees & the thick leaves underfoot were so incredibly beautiful that I feel very strongly that I never wanted to stop looking at the world'.
³⁰
Bunny was particularly happy because Amaryllis had arrived unexpectedly. He had not seen her since the previous spring and initially found her rather changed, but as they settled into one another's company, he thought her more self-assured and less self-conscious than before.

Bunny's contentment derived largely from Charry. Just before his eighty-first birthday, he wrote to Sylvia, saying ‘It is a blessing not to be in England' as he had found it upsetting there the previous year, returning to old haunts, dipping into the lives of friends and family which only served to remind him that his life had changed immeasurably, and he could not now call upon them at will. Telling Sylvia that Tiber had survived two bad fights with the Wood Cat, Bunny added: ‘He has to lead his own life. It's like my children.'
³¹
But he worried about his daughters. He did not hear from them often, and as he told Angelica, ‘When I don't hear anything I'm always afraid I shall hear of some disaster'.
³²

Bunny was working on his memoirs and on a novel based on his experiences at Sommeilles. In March 1973 his short stories were published as
Purl and Plain
. They had been written over a
period of more than fifty years, so he dedicated them to Sylvia Townsend Warner, for their friendship had lasted almost as long. Bunny explained that some stories were ‘written in fancy stitch; the rest of them are straightforward knitting'.
³³
The critics preferred the plainly stitched stories and generally also the earlier ones. Russell Davies, writing in the
Observer Review
concluded that ‘The best pieces are probably the oldest, or at least those which, reaching back into the author's memory, have a sepia-tinted quality of age'.
³⁴
Together they span Bunny's creative life. Reading them is like dipping into his novels and into the subtly differentiated times in which they were written.
Colonel Beech's Bear
, written during the Great War, harks back to an even earlier time, ‘the happy days before motor-cars' when Bunny was a boy at The Cearne. ‘I lived with my father and mother in a lonely cottage overlooking a great sweep of blue valley and shut in on all sides by a big wood in which I spent my childhood, creeping among the dry bracken like a serpent and imagining myself to be one of Fenimore Cooper's noble redskins.'
³⁵
Bunny had written this in another age.

That spring Bunny enjoyed a holiday with Magouche first in Venice and then at Avane. There, towards the end of April 1973, Bunny received a telegram from Angelica stating she would arrive that afternoon. He noted in his diary that the purpose of her visit was surely ‘to announce tragedy'.
³⁶
He was right. Amaryllis had drowned in the Thames. The coroner brought an
open verdict. There was no trace of drugs or alcohol in her body. Perhaps she had slipped off a gang plank near
Moby Dick
. Angelica was certain it was ‘a deliberate act, horribly courageous',
³⁷
‘perhaps not premeditated in a conscious way for long beforehand but a step to which she had felt magnetized for some time'.
³⁸
Richard recollected receiving a phone call from Amaryllis, shortly before she died, asking about working for the Samaritans. He wondered, afterwards, whether she really wanted help
from
them.
³⁹

Bunny believed it was ‘either an impulse or an accident', but added ‘what does it matter? Death matters. Not how or why it comes.'
⁴⁰
His initial response was to be alone, to withdraw. He found Magouche angelic in her compassion and consideration, but he really only wanted Tiber. He could not keep Amaryllis from his mind, and in the following months went over and over whether there was anything he could have done. He wondered whether she was constitutionally strong enough for an acting career; whether he had failed her by not ‘formulating rationalism' in her.
⁴¹
Inevitably, he felt ‘shame & bitterness' because he ‘might possibly have been able to prevent her action & enable her to live another fifty years enjoying happy daily life'.
⁴²
Magouche thought Bunny ‘absolutely magnificent', telling Frances ‘you see how he will deal with it, struggle with it naked as it were'.
⁴³

Amaryllis's body was cremated on 3 May. Bunny did not attend the simple service in London; instead he went to Sommeilles as planned. There he visited the cemetery and gazed upon the old family graves bearing the names so familiar to him. Georges Rawoit had died but several of Bunny's huts endured. Returning to Charry, Bunny was ‘glad & yet not glad to be alone for a bit – to return to the routine of daily life & be in my own little house'.
⁴⁴
There a letter from Frances was waiting, in which she told him that Alix Strachey had died. He reminded Frances that after someone's death, Alix had once remarked, ‘Our ranks grow thinner.' ‘Well', he observed, ‘they are scarcely ranks today'.
⁴⁵
The ranks were further depleted with the death of Harold Hobson, whom, Bunny sadly told Frances, was ‘honest & incorruptible as few men are'.
⁴⁶
‘I had known him all our lives', he reflected, ‘and there was a delight in finding him the same at seventy as he had been at seven.'
⁴⁷

‘May has been a beautiful but unhappy month', Bunny wrote in his diary, ‘I feel older & wonder how long I can keep on alone'.
⁴⁸
But in June he signed an agreement giving him a life tenancy of Le Verger de Charry. A few days later Giovanna arrived, bringing warmth and affection and lifting Bunny's spirits. When Henrietta and her boyfriend Michel turned up later in the month, Bunny wept with joy. Then Magouche came, helping him transform the studio into habitable quarters to accommodate guests. Richard and Oliver arrived to occupy
these new quarters, shortly followed by William, Linda, their children and the Peregrine Wind Quintet. After the emotional upheaval of Amaryllis's death, Bunny now began to feel that some sort of stability might be restored. Inspired by Tiber he returned to the long abandoned ‘Puss in Boots', now renamed ‘The Master Cat'. But he could not progress with his memoirs. He had been reading his 1938–9 diary, written when he was in love with Angelica. He knew now that he would never write volume four.

‘I wear my beret & old fishing jacket & talk French so perfectly that everyone thinks I am some distinguished person with an English accent.'
¹

Plough Over the Bones
was published in October 1973. Of all Bunny's novels it was the longest in gestation and the most biographical, but the biography is of place rather than people. Bunny's first attempt at the book occurred in early 1916, shortly after his return from Sommeilles. Working with the Quakers in France had affected Bunny so profoundly that nearly sixty years later he could vividly recall people and place. He dedicated the novel to the memory of Francis Birrell. It is not the story of the British who built huts (they are peripheral figures), but of Dorlotte (Sommeilles) and its inhabitants, of the effects upon them of the Battle of the Marne and its aftermath. It is a story of collective courage and the importance of place in people's lives. But Frankie Birrell is recognisably there, in a minor role, as Bruce, ‘a
small unkempt figure, in spectacles' who charmed everyone.
²
If the book has a central character it is Georges Roux, closely modelled on Georges Rawoit. But it is the French countryside and country life which occupy centre stage in some of Bunny's most lyrical descriptive writing.

It was well-received. Bunny would have enjoyed the review in the
Listener
, which proclaimed his realism ‘as sharp as a September apple: yet the whole has the mellowness of moss'd cottage trees'.
³
The Scotsman declared the novel ‘a work of powerful verisimilitude' and ‘testimony to Mr Garnett's love of the French countryside and its people'.
⁴
The Times
reviewer found the book ‘intensely moving', observing that Bunny ‘clearly shares a love for the things his villagers value as emblems of continuance – the home, the sturdy produce of the vegetable garden, the satisfactory zither of bees in an orchard'.
⁵
But it was Peter Ackroyd, the twenty-four-year-old
Spectator
critic, who really understood what Bunny was about:

Garnett's manner is generally a quiet one, and his prose has a lucid transparency through which the facts of his narrative shine. It is almost wisdom, for it allows him to narrate the social struggles of the villagers with exactly the same tone and emphasis as he details the atrocities and savagery of battle. This makes for a kind of solid truthfulness, and a generosity of spirit that does not emphasise one aspect of life at the expense of all others.
⁶

He concluded that Bunny's prose ‘suggests that each man – whether in battle or in love – is essentially alone'.
⁷

Bunny knew what it was like to be alone. He tried to model himself on Duncan, who lived so admirably in the present, but as Bunny told Frances Partridge, ‘My difficulty is that I cannot help loving although I know that it is inappropriate to do so. If I get a letter or even a postcard, I can banish the past … But after a month or six weeks [of] silence old feelings begin nagging like a hollow tooth.' Bunny felt particularly cut off from events when William's third child, Jessica, was born in January 1974.

Having completed
The Master Cat
, Bunny wondered what to write next. ‘You know how uneasy one feels', he told Frances Partridge, ‘when there is no bit of work for one to neglect.' He also confessed to committing a folly: he had arranged to buy a hive and a swarm of bees. ‘No fool like an old fool', he declared.
⁸
He reasoned that he ought to be reducing his responsibilities and that French bees were bad-tempered, but against such practical considerations he simply liked bees and knew they would make him happy. Frances exclaimed that Bunny ‘goes from strength to strength and almost makes one believe in immortality'.
⁹

He returned to England that summer, primarily to see his new granddaughter and research his latest book, a historical novel based on the life of his maternal great-grandmother, Clementina Carey. Bunny was happy because for the first time in several years he saw something of his daughter Fanny. They travelled together first to Wales to see Dicky Garnett then to Boughrood to stay with the publisher Michael Howard, and finally up the
east coast of Scotland to research his book. Even so, Frances Partridge observed a disquieting animosity towards Bunny on the occasion of Sophie's eleventh birthday, when Angelica and Fanny ‘ganged up' against him. Frances was astounded at their apparent inability to appreciate Bunny's ‘courage, the value and splendidness of his love', his ‘sanity' and ‘lack of self-pity.'
¹⁰
Many people admired Bunny for these very qualities and the extraordinary parade of visitors of all ages who made their way to Charry later that summer, testifies to the fact that he was appreciated and loved.

Although Magouche parcelled up the time she could spend with Bunny, he had spent most of March with her and with Janetta and Jaime Parlade at their villa, Tramores, in the hills near Marbella. Magouche was restoring a farmhouse in Andalusia, and Bunny looked forward to joining her there in November. He was suffering from sciatica and hoped the Spanish sun would act as a balm. In his customary haste, he set off having received no confirmation that she expected him at the time he elected to arrive. On 1 November he arrived at the farmhouse, Rosalejo, to find it deserted. Having booked into a hotel for the night, he woke in the early hours with a sudden realisation that Magouche had in fact tried to put him off. No letter had arrived because of a French postal strike, but Joe Derville had conveyed a verbal telephone message from Magouche, which was obviously inaccurately relayed.

Bunny went on to Gerald Brenan's where he received a telephone call from Magouche suggesting they meet at Rosalejo a week later. Meanwhile Bunny's sciatica worsened and he obtained cortisone pills from a local chemist. When he
was eventually reunited with Magouche they stayed in a rented apartment rather than at her house. Bunny saw little of her as she spent her days overseeing the builders and in the evenings she returned late, exhausted. Although surprised to receive an invitation from Janetta Parlade to stay at Tramores, Bunny accepted as Magouche seemed preoccupied. He was touched by Janetta's sweetness and consideration towards him, all the more so as he soon felt very unwell with flu-like symptoms, a temperature, trembling and depression.

On 14 December Magouche called a doctor, who instructed Bunny to stop taking the steroids. It took him almost a fortnight to recover sufficiently to be taken to Gerald's to make room at Tramores for Frances Partridge. It was only gradually that it occurred to Bunny that he was not wanted and had come to Spain at the wrong time. When Magouche brought Xan Fielding to Tramores Bunny was too ill to attach any significance to the event, but on a subsequent tour of Rosalejo it was obvious that Magouche and Fielding were sharing a bed.