Chapter Eleven - Disasters 1911-1912

My family had gone to the Isle of Mull in Argyll for our holiday in the summer of 1911; I had asked George to come, enticing him with climbing in the Cuillin Hills on Skye, but he had already agreed to go with Harold Porter to Snowdon. My father usually came up from town with us, but did not that year; my mother too stayed in London. I suppose this one fact might have aroused our suspicions, but it didn’t. My sister Therese, at nearly forty, was now considered old enough to act as chaperone, and all sorts of people came to stay. We shot, fished, stalked; sailed a chunky awkward island boat about Loch Stridain, swam in cold rough water before breakfast, picked raspberries in the garden and shelled peas on the wooden seats in front of the fuscia-clad whitewashed house. We read Havelock Ellis’ World of Dreams aloud after supper, and jotted down our own dreams for discussion at breakfast, sometimes confirming, sometimes disproving the great man’s theories; an improvement, to my mind, on the Freudian discussion of dreams at Bloomsbury. We learnt and acted out Synge’s Well of the Saints; a dominie rode eighteen miles on a pony twice a week to teach me Gaelic. It was a lovely life, full of the sense of permanence and timelessness which is so essentially a part of the Highlands. And then my mother’s letter came.

I remember that morning so clearly. 1911 was a summer remarkable for heat and drought, even in the rain-soaked West Highlands, and we were living out of doors in summer frocks, though it was already early September. We were sitting shelling peas by the narrow strip of lawn when the Sandy Post came puffing up the path, having bicycled five miles over a rough track to reach us. The last of our summer guests had gone and we were alone. My mother had addressed the letter to Therese, but she read it out to us. It was a pitiful story, and I realise now what it must have meant to my mother to write it. The plain fact was that we were ruined.

What had happened is this: on the day of my brother Bobbie’s funeral, four years before, my father had had a stroke, so mild as to be unnoticed by anyone until it was too late. He had what appeared to be a chill, and spent two days in bed; my father, who had never been in bed during the day by anyone he knew. He recovered, but his mind was never the same. In 1907 when Bobbie died, my parents had had £250,000 salted safely away in sound investments. In the intervening years, my poor father had taken to investing by the method of opening the Bible and picking texts at random with a pin. Why his manager Mr. Watson had not notified my mother of this peculiar behaviour earlier I cannot imagine, but by the time he did practically everything had gone. There was just enough to keep up the premiums on my father’s life insurance policy – our sole source of future income.

It was decided by my parents that we must live abroad; we girls could there manage on our dress allowance. The London house had already been let furnished as of December; later it would have to be sold. Jack could not go to Cambridge, as Harry had done, and must start earning his living at once; I must give up all idea of Oxford, and Helen of training her voice. My mother wrote in deep distress for us, fearing that we should find poverty very hard; of her own situation, dashed from luxury to penury just at the outset of old age, with an ailing husband on her hands, there was not a single word.

We discussed the matter after Therese had finished reading while we finished shelling the peas, and we children were all determined upon one thing: we were not going to live in a state of miserable economising in some cheap foreign hotel. We were all going to earn our livings somehow. Grace was still a semi-invalid after her winter bout with pneumonia, but she was a wonderful needlewoman and would sew; Helen thought she might make something out of her voice. Therese, characteristically, said then and there what she was going to do – go to America and teach English literature at some expensive school; and within a couple of months she was doing it. My own reaction, looking back, I find interesting.

I had never stopped writing in secret under a nom de plume and thought I could perhaps make some money by it. After we had eaten those peas, ever afterwards so intimately connected in my mind with this startling change in our lives – I took a copy-book and pencil and went a little way up the hill behind the house to a place I knew well and had come to love: a small glen running downwards towards the sea. In those days of early autumn it was full of vivid colour – the crimson of rowan berries, the enamelled brilliance of blackberry leaves in every shade from primrose to carmine. There, sitting on the soft dry heather and leaning against a rock stippled with black and grey lichen, I wrote a brief, agonised post-card to George in Wales, for his was the first heart to which mine turned in that awful hour, not only for its native sympathy, but for his practical experience of hardship:

Dear George-
Disaster here. News from home that we are ruined. I wish you would write and tell me how to get on, you are so clever at economising. I cannot wait for Wales. In haste, Cottie.
Then I whiled away the long afternoon, writing my first short story, Pepita’s Miracle; some twenty-three years later, it was published in America without the alteration of a single word, and brought me a hundred pounds, which even then was a considerable sum. Charles Masefield, who had helped publish some of my poems in the newspapers, gave more, with sketches, to his brother John, the Poet Laureate, who replied acutely that the poems were good but ‘Let her write a novel; that will show what her talent is really worth.’ Admirable advice from a literary point of view, but at the time, when we returned to London and set about tackling our new mode of existence, writing seemed too speculative as a means of livelihood. I had got to eat.

Through the good offices of another Lady Almoner, my climbing friend Edith Mudd of St. George’s Hospital, a climbing friend and my sponsor in the Alpine Club, I secured a job as assistant secretary in the Chelsea Branch of the Charity Organisation Society. My hours were from 9.15 to 6 o’clock, and I was paid twenty-three shillings a week. Helen, with her University degree, got a much better job as secretary to the Juvenile Advisory Committee of one of those new-fangled creations of Will Beveridge’s, the Labour Exchanges; Jack took a job through my father’s old friend Mr. Ross in Canada, and Harry joined the Army and went away to Australia. Jenny became private secretary to Adelaide Anderson, then the Chief Woman Inspector of Factories, and an old family friend. Cora, of course, was completely self-supporting as a don. My father and mother went abroad to Switzerland, where it was cheaper for them to live. They left in December, right after Jack departed for Canada, and we moved out of Elm Park Gardens. Therese and Cora were long since independent, but Jenny, Grace and I were established in a minute six-room flat in the Fulham Road for twenty-five shillings a week. An ex-nursery-maid, Yah, came to look after us. Grace would sew and keep house while the rest of us worked out in the world.

During 1912 the occasions for meeting George changed so drastically, due to our now both being in a wage-earning capacity. We had very few evenings, and there was an end of seasons in the Alps with guides and other agreeable occupations of the idle rich. A week in Wales, as that at the New Year, had become possible only with the most terrific actuarial calculations and even a country weekend involved the most stringent economies in lunches. But George helped so very much to lighten this rather abrupt transition to the ordinary life of your average poor person. I was frankly frightened at the idea of regular hours and regular work – my freedom and leisure sold into bondage. George had plenty of views on the value and blessedness of the state of work, with which to stiffen my back. Generally speaking he was inclined to regard the whole business as rather an escape from futility and philistinism than anything else. He also knew all about being poor, which was more than I did, and once again he put his knowledge at my disposal. He was fertile in resources and expedients, both for the best economies and for the act of spending wisely – lavishly and without anxiety – when you did spend.

So despite my initial anxieties I did have tremendous fun and enjoyed myself better than any time in my life. We were frightfully poor, although my mother had coerced my father into making us each a tiny allowance, less than half of what we should have cost him for our keep on the Continent. Often I was actually hungry, a rather surprising experience for people brought up as we had been, but a useful one; because I ate so much at breakfast, besides my kipper or sausage, my sister Grace, a rigid and practical housekeeper, put two rounds of the loaf on the table and as much butter as she thought proper, and that was all I got, whatever I said. Yah cut me sandwiches for my lunch, which I ate in the Chelsea Polytechnic dining-room among the students, paying a penny for a cup of coffee, and if I was feeling rich, fourpence for a helping of pudding. None of this mattered in the least. I was well, I was absorbed in my work and the social problems it raised; I saw, and made countless friends; I was as happy as a lark.

It was to George that I owed the brilliant idea of pawning my christening mug when funds were needed to finance a much-needed trip to the country. Dominick Spring-Rice, whom I had met at Pen-y-Pass, already a financier, gave me the further idea of selling the ticket. The proceeds of that brilliant idea financed some admirable country walks.

We used to assemble at Euston Station, a party of anything from 3 to 15 of us, and take the train out into the country, walk all day, have tea at an inn, and take the train home again. These walks became a regular institution and rather popular. They began to rival the Sunday Tramps, which still flourished under the care of Basil Williams. Some of the junior tramps seceded frequently to our lighter company, which caused Mr. Williams to remonstrate with us, and George Trevelyan to christen us ‘the Young Men and Young Women’s Unchristian Association’.

When we went anywhere in the Godalming direction, George would meet us at the station and piloted us over an immense variety of good country. He knew it well by this time and loved it dearly, and would tramp rapturously along at the head of the straggling band, causing one to note the special loveliness of every choice place through which he led us. He showed his usual private impatience with the slowness of the slowest. This seemed a perfect grace note to our last outdoor adventure in Wales.

At New Year 1912 we had been at Pen-y-Pass again, there was a large non-climbing attendance: Basil Williams, G. M. Trevelyan (Charles’ brother), Ralph and Valentina Howtry, Dominick Spring-Rice, Abe Lawrence, among others. Traff was there, brought by George to further infect him with mountaineering, but the result was rather an inoculation apparently. I had only one day climbing with him, but it was a good one. Clogwyn-y-Person, behind the Parson’s Nose, was being brought into fashion by H. O. Jones, and George and I and Trev Huxley spent a day there sampling the climbs already made and trying to invent new ones. We went up and down the cliff, which is short, I don’t know how many times. There was mist drifting about which made identification of the routes difficult, and it was cold, but nothing could check George’s energy.

I can see him now, roaming about, generally unroped, seeking a way, pausing in some airy situation in that very characteristic attitude: one hand almost stroking the rock while his eye wandered up and down, looking for clues and weighing possibilities, till he decided that something would ‘go’, then Trev and I were hauled out of our funk-hole and our talk about birds had to go too. It was great fun. He was always much too good for us and a little impatient at our slowness, but we were fairly energetic and obedient and thus earned some praise for our doings. There was a lovely moment when we were sitting at the top for the fourth or fifth time and suddenly, out of the mist, a great flock of snow buntings came about us, encircling us with a cloud of white-flecked wings like a flying snowstorm. Trev left us after a while, and we went down for the last time and made our final ascent – a new one joining two good chimneys with a good crack. George was in high feather over this achievement, and we tramped rather lazily back through Cwm Glas, very well pleased with ourselves. The sun shone out, red and angry, from under the clouds, as we crossed the slopes above Dinas Mot, turning all the ground about the Pass with a sinister glow. George said truly that it was at once theatrical and menacing and we started under its influence to make up a rambling ghost story about a cairned path on which nails came out of the boots of parties which were doomed to meet with an accident. We were pleased with that too, though Geoffrey pointed out derisively that parties whose boots lacked nails were bound to meet with fatal accidents.

That New Year, George showed definitely that he was better at people in bulk than he had been before. He entered much more into general conversation, launched sallies at meals, was less intolerant of frivolities and even permitted himself an occasional use of the current jokes. This latter was a great advance into sociability and ‘ordinariness’. He was always rather detached and fastidious about subjects for humour. He had his own private, often slightly malign sources of mirth, which gave him great satisfaction, but the general joke of a rather unsubtle kind usually left him rubbing his hair in desperate impatience. However, this time he came out much more into the general field, even contributing verses to the impromptu songs and countering irony with irony rather neatly.

Amongst the climbing folk was not the only place this new effort bore fruit. He had tremendous success with his boys after that, and wrote to me in May,
‘Have you seen Duncan’s pictures he is making for my class-room?’

These referred to two large mural-sized paintings that Duncan had agreed to do after coming down to spend the weekend with George at Charterhouse; they were in a Posty rendition of the style of Botticelli, and depicted scenes in Italy, from photographs made by George and Duncan.
It was at this time that some tête-à-tête had happened between them that didn’t come off very well, because Duncan wrote to George from London, covering his actions and words in a way that was classic Bloomsbury,
‘I did not mean to suggest that I was in love with you. For I am far too fond of somebody else to think to fall in love. But I cannot help wanting to express my feelings for people to them and mine are so complicated towards you that I was somehow conscious that a kiss would somehow do it.’ When I say complicated, I mean difficult to express in words which would make any sense to anyone besides myself. I think you are beautiful for one thing, and quite enchantingly mysterious for another...’ The ‘somebody else’ Duncan was in love with, at that time, was Adrian, with the situation rather more complicated by his feelings for Vanessa. Anyway, this repulsion of romantic advances did not harm their friendship, and Duncan completed the paintings in short order; they were to hang in George’s classroom until he left Charterhouse in 1922.

Literature and art were harnessed to the service of his work. ‘I’ve just been reading Frances Place and am enchanted. I wonder if a cheap edition is coming out – it would be very good for my form. Such is the arriere pensee of all my reading just now! By which token – do you know Jusserand’s Wayfaring Life in the 14th Century? Having said what a good book it was for some time past, I have now taken the trouble to read it, with a view to Chaucer in school – it’s even better than I used to say!’
He made considerable effort to get into human contact with the boys, seeing what he could of them out of school, organising expeditions with them to places of architectural or natural beauty, fostering their taste for literature and developing one for politics. The amount of energy and enterprise which he put into this side of his work was extraordinary, when one realises how small was his natural aptitude for cultivating the acquaintance of the immature human creature. He was not comfortable with children. It was only when young people reached an age where they could appreciate what mattered to him that he could take an active interest in them. An illustration of this arrived in the post a while later. ‘I am back and in media re already. How am I to read “Paradise Lost” with a form of 30 small boys? I am perplexed day and night by considerations of this sort.’

He could not bring himself to treat great literature merely as a school subject, and used to exhaust his ingenuity in trying to find means to bring its worth and beauty into the cognisance of his pupils. Since he valued education chiefly for its civilising influence on the mind and character, he could not refrain from attempting to conduct his educational activities in what he would have called a civilised way. He was a great believer in essays as an educational medium and his form was set down to write them on the most diverse subjects. ‘Candour’, ‘Popularity’, ‘Hypocrisy’ are three that I remember in a few cases where the effects produced were very good. His friends were laid under contribution to help in all this with suggestions for essays or for books to be read or even for original works of art. Hence Duncan Grant’s staying with him to paint two pictures for his classroom.

He was as has been said by others, working perhaps too much outside the ordinary scholastic framework of a public school to be a very successful schoolmaster, but he must have been rather an exciting one.

Friends visiting him at Charterhouse in the little house which he shared with one or two other masters found the room a litter of books and papers – books in French and in English – modern plays, which were being examined with a view to readings with his brighter spirits, Fabian productions, ill-used reproductions or photographs of Greek sculpture or modern French paintings – all more or less drowned in a sea of essays from his form.

One of the bonds between Duncan and George was that Duncan had tried, unsuccessfully, to become a schoolmaster, needing a regular income, as painting at that time for him was hardly lucrative. He had applied to the Leys School at Cambridge, but was turned down because of his boyish appearance and lack of experience. It reinforced how very lucky George was to have got the post at Charterhouse, despite his inexperience and absurdly youthful appearance. It was something of a joke between them as while George enjoyed working with his bright stars amongst the boys, schoolmastering at that level was a matter of necessity rather than passion. He had rather be writing, or teaching adults. Duncan meanwhile, managed only a week-long fill-in stint in Islington. He found himself greatly disturbed, he told George, in the garden at Fitzroy Square, that he fell automatically into the role of the overbearing schoolmaster, reacting sharply and swiftly to every little infraction.


‘It’s the danger of such environments,’ George agreed. ‘I have had to struggle against it myself.’
‘I wonder why?’ Duncan mused.
‘Patterning, I should think.’ George said. ‘However we disliked it, the persona of the public schoolmaster is heavily imprinted on us.’
‘Spoken like a Wykhamist!’ Duncan smiled.
‘The only master there I really liked was a renegade,’ George paused. ‘And what about you, at Hillbrow?’
‘Oh don’t speak to me of that horrid place!’ Duncan exclaimed. ‘I was wasted there, simply wasted, darling. It was such a shock, coming from India. Were it not for the art master I should have killed myself from despair!’
‘Just so,’ George said. ‘My point.’
‘Aunt Jane, bless her, had the best intentions. And James and Rupert were there after a bit. But I did there discover Burne-Jones, and that was the salvation of my life, a blessing! And ever shall be.’

‘Tell me,’ George prompted.
‘Oh my god, Galahad, you know it! The sense of design, the perfect rendering of the figures, the exquisite drapery! For years, I asked God on my knees at prayers to allow me to become as good a painter as he.’
George was smiling. He reached out and touched Duncan’s hand, squinting in the sunshine. ‘And not a schoolmaster,’ he said, bringing the conversation round again to its initial subject.
‘No,’ Duncan said with horror. Then, ‘Oh, it’s all right for you because you have progressive ideas and much more determination than I; I should never be able carry it off.’
Duncan was also painting George for the upcoming Second Post-Impressionist exhibition, and they spent many hours together in the former’s studio late that summer and into the autumn. It was wonderful having George in town so regularly. We went to the galleries and the British Museum when I could afford to do, or when George wore down my scruples and paid my fare. Sometimes we went to the Thursday or Friday nights in Gordon Square; that freethinking world part of my joy of discovery at that time, away from the sheltered days of Ridgemead or the gravely polite world of the typist at the COS. I took up smoking in earnest then and maddened George by threatening to cut off my hard-won mass of hair. But as often, we repaired to the homelier scene of supper in our kitchen in the Fulham Road, with everyone round the big deal table in the centre, and Grace not being niggardly for once with the bread and butter. There we debated classics, or read poetry, or hammered out a socialist programme of universal suffrage and freedom from entail. As much a sensualist as George was with respect to art and poetry, he could, as he had proved at Pen-y-Pass, rivet a group with hard arguments in favour of radical social causes.

So I cherished my notions of how perfect a match George and I were. To my sisters and to Jack he was like a brother, accepted as one of the family, and my mother was now too frequently away to counsel me as perhaps I ought to have been. I drifted in this pleasant dream world of fantasy and naïve affection, until the bubble burst late one afternoon in September.

Unknown to me, until years afterward, when I saw Duncan in London, he and George had had a conversation concerning me before I arrived to collect him for tea before going to an Alpine Club meeting. Duncan was at that time making his paintings and photographs of George, but while they worked, they talked, about the complications of life when one loves people of both sexes at the same time.

‘Vanessa complained to me about my “distance” as she called it,’ Duncan said from his easel, which was presently coloured in a strong red-orange background to his emerging portrait of George.
‘What did you say?’ George asked, from his place on the floor.
‘Well, I was hurt by her saying that she got no more from me than a brotherly affection,’ Duncan admitted. ‘I was paralysed by this as I always am.’
George was riveted. ‘What do you mean? Say more!’
‘Don’t move,’ Duncan murmured. He squinted across at George. ‘Ah, I see you have this problem as well. This would be with our dear Cottie?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought as much,’ Duncan frowned at the painting, rather than his subject, thinking. ‘I have to admit, I am so uncertain of my real feeling to her – is it affection, is it admiration, is it purely an intermittent sexual impulse? I don’t know – that I am utterly unable to feign more when I feel called upon to feel much, with the consequence that I seem to feel less than I do.’
‘I’ve asked myself those same questions,’ George mused, ‘with regard to Cottie. I adore her, but I just don’t know the answers, and until I do I don’t feel that I can be the sort of lover she so obviously – and desperately – wants me to be.... I find myself overwhelmed.’
Duncan laughed softly. ‘She would overwhelm many a heartier man! Even Roger, who is besotted with Virginia, is not immune. There would be sparks, but she wants the sort of masterful man who would keep her in hand and tell her what to do. She’d hate it, but she really wants that.’
‘You’re probably right,’ George murmured. He was not finding the conversation very helpful or enlivening, seeming rather only to point up his essential conflict without resolution.
‘I suppose, with respect to Nessa,’ Duncan said, ‘the only thing lacking in my feelings to her is passion. What of that there might be seems crushed out of me, by a bewildering expectation of it – which is hardly conscious – by her. I think I feel that if I showed any, it would be met with such an avalanche that I should be crushed. All I feel I can do in this case is to build slowly a completely strong affection on which she can lean her weary self.’
George ran his hand through his hair, despite the edict for stillness. ‘Well I don’t lack passion here exactly... do I? I don’t think so. Sometimes I can hardly control it, but other times it’s not there at all.’ He sighed. ‘But I do agree about building a case slowly. It is what I am trying to do. But, Duncan—’ and here his pain and confusion and downright fear reached out, ‘she doesn’t know about James or Geoffrey or Siegfried or Eddie or you, none of that, and if she is to understand me, accept me, she must. But I’ve been afraid to tell her,’ he admitted at last.
‘Why afraid?’
‘In some ways she’s very conventional and I’m afraid she would find it repulsive. I don’t want to lose her, but I can’t live with things the way they are, either.’
‘You must tell her, George, you simply must.’
‘I know,’ he said miserably. ‘I’ve known it from the first time I met her.’

Duncan’s painting was nearly finished, and I heard tell but never saw proof of photographic studies he had made of George along the way. Their sessions ran from the late morning until the sunlight faded in the late afternoon. When term began at Charterhouse and George would be more confined to Surrey at the weekends, so time was precious to me. I came to the house eagerly, having walked the long way from the COS office. The street door was ajar and silence greeted my slippered footsteps in the Bells’ echoey hall. I climbed the stairs to the studio, and with relief to the odd stillness heard the murmur of voices and Duncan’s deep-throated rich laugh. As I came down the bare hall, slanting sunlight streamed in the stained glass window high in the middle of the wall at the end of the passage, gilding the dusty walls in a kaleidoscope of translucent colour. The door was on the right, and I stepped into the silent room, anticipating finding Duncan cleaning his brushes and George behind the screens changing into street clothes. What I found took my breath away.

George and Duncan were standing a bare arm’s-length apart, Duncan in shirtsleeves and George as God made him, on the rug that was part of the painted scene. As I arrived unnoticed Duncan was just lifting his hand from George’s cheek with such unmistakable naked intimacy that even I understood. George wore the peculiar expression he sometimes affected in company, still and watchful, a deer ready to spring. Duncan murmured something inaudible at the distance and received a monosyllable answer, but I saw the bright spark kindle in George’s glance. The atmosphere was torpid with the familiar intimacy of an opium den. Some lesser members of the Bloomsbury set were keen on the freedom this drug loosed on the mind, but George had always scorned such habits in favour of the clean-lived way of the mountaineer. There was no unwitting potion at the bottom of this scene, I was certain of that much…. In the salons I had seen such gestures, had seen Duncan make such gestures to Adrian and others, and not understood. But I did now, painfully. Even George and Geoffrey had exchanged such a look on many occasions…. Love and intimacy. My mind balked. It was too much to take in.

I felt sick, with confusion, anger, jealousy, and gave a strangled greeting, fumbling with the latch of my pocketbook, rooted to the spot, but wanting to run away from this disturbingly illuminating scene. My thoughts were so riotous that I could not properly take in the terms and meaning. Only betrayal allowed itself to be named, although what precisely had been betrayed I could not say. We had no understanding, George and I. No promises had been made, even after Snowdon. We were, as he would surely say, simply friends, climbing friends in the Alpine Club…. Did it not matter to him that I was in love with him? He said it did, and I believed it. But how could he carry on like this if it mattered? What of all we had shared, on mountains and elsewhere? Did it mean nothing?

Duncan looked up quickly, colouring vividly. ‘Cottie!’ he cried, and came forward, but George turned away towards the screens in the corner with a studied nonchalance, along the way shrugging into the dressing gown that lay on the table as if it were all no matter. I was livid, and struggled to do what my mother would do, had done, in the face of betrayal.
‘Duncan,’ my voice was a bit shaky, squeaking and unnaturally high, but I forced my head up and with it a broad smile that would have dazzled the King. ‘How lovely to see you again!’
He clasped my hand in both of his, which were shockingly warm compared with my own. ‘Come and sit, won’t you?’ he said quickly, indicating the comfortably frazzled armchair beside the window. I was taller than he and he looked up at me earnestly. ‘Will you have a sherry? I am sorry to keep George so late. We went on a bit today.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ I answered, I hoped not mechanically, jettisoning my father’s temperance lectures. ‘Could I have a cigarette as well?’
‘Certainly,’ He was melting into the warm host role with ease and the tension in the room subsided a little as he fetched the wine.

Suitably plied with hospitality, but with shaking hands, I sank back into the chair and squinted at the painting, which sat on the easel to my right. The background was a reddish orange, with George sitting with knees drawn up, facing to the left, his dark hair falling into those arresting eyes, which dreamed in their unfathomable pale depths some unknown dream in the distance. For all the bold use of colour, his grey eyes and their dreams were the focus of the painting. Even unfinished, the work was stunning. I said so. Duncan peered at me keenly.
‘Thank you. I think so too. It will cause a stir.’ Ah. I saw through my confusion and upset that this was his aim. He certainly had in me. I gulped some sherry.
‘Would you like to see some of the photographs from our sittings?’ Duncan offered, like an eager parent with a new baby. Ah, the elusive photographs! Well. They would be less a shock now.
‘Yes,’ I said, to be polite.

He fetched them with alacrity, half a dozen beautiful, artistic nudes. They made the most of George’s beauty and the vulnerable, sensitive soul that shone from his eyes. In one he sat very much as he did in the painting, with his feet pulled up close; one was from behind, reclining full length; and another was in his classic climbing pose, the beautiful way he had of moving upwards on a long lifted thigh. They brought a catch to the throat and tears to the eyes, for in them was the essence of George, no more that fey creature, stiff or coy or sullen in posed snaps, but the seeking, gallant soul he was. Galahad. I wanted and needed to believe he really was that, and not the perverted creature the scene I had witnessed implied.

‘Oh, Duncan,’ I cried, ‘they are splendid!’ The tears spilled over hotly in my overwrought state, and at that moment George appeared, not as spry and eager as usual, but wary and watchful. He crossed the room diffidently with his hands in his pockets and I sprang from the chair, pressing the photographs on Duncan.

‘I’ve just seen the painting,’ I snuffled, ‘and Duncan’s lovely photographs. George, they are so beautiful!’ He visibly relaxed at this, coming forward with a shy smile, tossing his hair back and taking my hand. We were standing on the same spot he stood earlier, but the dazzling gilding sun was gone now and the light was grey. He was obviously relieved that I would not make a scene.
‘I’m glad you like them, Cottie. They were great fun to make.’ He ran a hand through his hair and smiled again, ruefully, ‘But not the sort of thing to bring out at when the vicar calls round.’ He was coaxing now, trying to get round me because of Duncan, and I would let him, because of Duncan, but I was hurting too much and, yes, was too vindictive to let him get away with it for ever. We made our farewells to Duncan, rather stiltedly, and departed.

We had a long evening ahead of us, for which I was now in no mood. I certainly did not want to be nice all evening, to pretend as if nothing had occurred. The best I could manage was an icy silence while he hailed a cab. All the way through Kensington I looked out the window at the passing scene, my mind in a whirl, willing him, daring him to speak, and growing more furious every moment when he did not. Finally, I rounded on him. He was regarding me with a painful, inscrutable expression; as much as I had been willing him to speak, he had been willing me to turn round so he could begin. But my sympathy was at the limit.

‘Well?’ I challenged. He opened his mouth to speak, but I went on relentlessly, and his expression grew more irritated as I proceeded: ‘Do you care to explain just what that charming scene I interrupted was supposed to mean? Was it an accident? Was it staged for my benefit? You certainly didn’t seem to care very much that I did see! Were you waiting to enlighten me? What a dirty trick to play on a girl! THIS is your “complication” all this while, that you have been keeping from me, leaving me hurt and confused? Why didn’t you tell me at once? How dare you play me along! Did you think I was supposed to understand these things, growing up at Ridgemead, with my parents? Good God, and your father a vicar! What did you mean dragging me to Bloomsbury with those people? How could you dare show your face in Elm Park as a suitor? My God, can you have utterly no idea how I’ve felt for you? What about Wales? Do you care at all, or am I really just a chum to you? Because if I am you should say so!’ I was crying now and it infuriated me. ‘You who value honesty and friendship above all things, how could you? How could you?’

There was the briefest of pauses. ‘If you are quite finished,’ George said coldly, ‘I would like to be given the opportunity to defend myself.’ We stared at each other, at an impasse. I was vaguely aware of having been unfair to him, but I was so hurt that I didn’t care. George ran a hand through his hair and looked out the window before commencing.
‘I never meant for you to see that,’ he said at last. ‘It certainly was not planned…. It’s just Duncan’s way. We are only friends, you may believe me on that….’ He sighed, drawing a long shaking breath. ‘We never have been lovers. You must believe that too... But there have been others, yes, and I have been trying to tell you and not tell you all these long years, and it has been an agony.’
‘Who?’ I demanded, bewildered, though I could guess a few, now. I didn’t know if I should believe him, about anything.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Who?’ I demanded again, desperately.
‘It doesn’t matter!’ he practically shouted at me.
I knew, suddenly, horribly: ‘Geoffrey!’
George drew in a breath. ‘Yes, Geoffrey.’ He let out the breath, shakily, in a defeated sort of way. He was not good at confessions.
I began to cry. What an utter betrayal of all my dear friends! Supposed friends. ‘I knew it, I should have known! Oh he never said! I hate him!’
‘No no no,’ George murmured, miserably, turning to me at last. ‘You don’t. You don’t really. This will pass.’

‘What about Len Slingsby?’ I demanded of him. ‘Geoffrey is so obviously besotted by the girl.’
‘Yes he is.’ George said, quietly. ‘And he is quite upset about her, you must know. His father and others in the family have put him under some pressure to marry and he would marry her if anyone, but she is too young, and—’ he looked at me directly ‘– he is afraid that she would not understand if he told her the truth, and he cannot do otherwise, because he cannot give up his attachment to men. It is a part of him, who he is.’ He paused here, and said quietly, looking at his hands, ‘you should probably know that it is why he was sacked from Eton, but please, don’t ever let him know that I told you, for it is yet for him a terrible pain, being publicly humiliated for “unnatural practises”.’ He looked up and sighed, visibly begging for understanding.

‘As for us, I make no excuses. I should have told you. I wanted to – and I was at the same time so afraid of losing you. It is why I gave you all those books, early on, do you see? But I really didn’t think about your seeing things, understanding things at the Bells’. They are just friends of mine. You must believe that I had no intention of enlightening you into the darker ways of the world. I know you are not worldly in that way. I shouldn’t like it if you were.’ His gaze engaged mine frankly. ‘I know this has shocked you, and I’m so very sorry for that…. I’m afraid I’m rather a bungler in this way myself, everything gets tangled up and….’ He halted, almost weeping in distress. ‘You must understand, I want you so much to understand why I have this fancy! It isn’t coarse or prurient, as you might think. I just can’t – I have no resistance to beauty of whatever kind, whether it is men or women or flowers or mountains, or pictures or poetry. I need it!’

‘...When I was at university I became involved in such a romantic friendship,’ he coloured vividly, his gaze falling, his voice faltering, ‘it did not turn out well. That was with James Strachey—‘
‘Lytton’s brother!’ Oh my god!’
‘Lytton’s brother,’ he confirmed unhappily. ‘It went badly because James was and is in love with Rupert.’
‘Oh my god!’ Were they all involved with women and men?
’This was just before I met you,’ he said quickly, looking up pleadingly. ‘You were such a balm, a revelation to me, but I was terribly confused.’ Tears gathered in his eyes again. ‘Dear, dear Cottie, I know I have been unfair to you, but I am still confused.’ His hands sought mine firmly, insistently, ‘Snowdon still stands. It meant ever so much to me as it did to you. You must believe it was not a feint, nor an endeavour to mislead you; I meant it, every word… Darling, when I am with you I am very sure that I love you; we have such a fine time, and no one understands me the way you do. There is no girl I would prefer to climb with, to be with.’ He shook his head, ‘but when I am away, I don’t know, I question myself endlessly whether it is right.’ He sighed again.

‘Frankly, it has been easier now that your father is ruined, for I should have hated to put myself in the position of marrying an heiress.’ My heart gave a leap, but his next words quelled it. ‘There is something wrong – oh not with you, but in me—’ he said quickly, ‘and I don’t know what it is.’ He met my gaze steadily. ‘And until I do, I think it is unfair to lead you along. That’s as much as I know, you must believe me.’ He looked at me for a long wistful moment. ‘I do care for you, dear darling Cottie, more than you know. Sometimes it overwhelms me, and perhaps that’s part of what’s wrong. I’ve never really been in love with a girl before—’ he smiled a little ruefully, ‘as you have seen. I know that I’m doing it all wrong. You are so good, and willing, and patient, that it seems churlish to ask you to bear with me yet a little more. But will you, until I sort myself out?’
The cab had stopped. How could I refuse that pleading glance? I loved him. But my pride was badly injured, and I found the notion of his fancying men, in any way, insulting and repulsive... But I could not scorn him, not George. Others I had but not he.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted honestly. I could hardly bring myself to look at him. ‘But I will think about it. I don’t want to lose you, either.’
‘Thank you, darling,’ he said with undisguised relief.

We passed the evening uneventfully, and after Tyndall’s lecture found a quiet nook in the AC Library with Geoffrey and Ursula Nettleship to compare our more recent experience with Tyndall’s. I could barely look at Geoffrey, and spent the whole evening in an uncharacteristic and miserable silence, which everyone had the grace not to remark upon. But I was completely shattered, devastated. And here was one worry I could not take to my sisters or my mother.
When I got home and in the next week, when I did not hear from George I convinced myself, miserably, that it had all been a sham. He had never loved me.

Oh I had been a delightful person and he was confident that he would find me delightful still, but there had never been any hint of love between us; our talk had been all of books and poetry and mountains – and sociology, after the fashion of the day. George surely never even asked himself, as he lay in his bed that night… whether he had been at all in love with me – I was convinced he was so sure that he had not. But how enormously he had liked me, as a friend. I had climbed beautifully, with strength and speed and great spirit; I had been charming to look at; poetry had breathed from me, apart from my pretty verses; I had been ardent and intelligent. And I had remained in his mind all these three years, a triumphant figure of youth and romance, with a virginal quality that held like some antique spell. Vera incessu patuit dea – Catullus. By her manner of walking I knew her to be a goddess. But it was from Keats too, Endymion. Diana. I remembered how often he said the words had sprung into his mind as he watched me, tall and slender, walking into a hotel dining room in the Alps, fresh from achieving some tremendous expedition. But there had never been any emotional nexus …it was all an intellectual fancy. No more his Diana, roaming the hills. It had never been! Oh it was too bitter! But I believed it, every word. I convinced myself of it.

I did not really understand what had happened between us, and was in a state of complete bewilderment as to what had gone wrong and why. From the cloud of pain and confusion there gradually emerged the conviction that I had somehow or other failed to get love right. Failed either to understand it or to live it. And because this mistake was so injurious and hurtful, I felt that it must somehow be rectified. For months, therefore, I took to reading Havelock Ellis and Aldous Huxley, under the guise of science. Neither took me very far. The cool lucid precision of Huxley was better than Ellis’ painful psychological excursions, and yet, life and love as I knew them had not felt like that. But this was probably only due to my ignorance and unconsciousness. If I had known myself better, no doubt it all would have worn this curiously cold and physical aspect; perhaps the idealist and aspiring love I believed in, which I had believed that George and I shared, was in fact pure illusion based either on our psychological peculiarities or on unrecognised sexual fantasies and impulses – at least on my part. Perhaps it was really true that the only fundamental reality in the relations between men and women was some form of sexual or even sensual impulse – and that if it looked otherwise, it was merely dressed out by the deceitful and vainglorious ego to sail under false colours.

Under the influence of such theories as these and in the effort to understand, my direct emotional life became all tangled up; distorted and dominated by a quite artificial intellectual attitude towards love and sex. It is the sole cause of all the misery that came afterward, for had I been in my right mind I would never have tangled up with Owen O’Malley. But all this tumult and psychological introspection had put me into a very dangerous and reckless frame of mind. Perhaps too, it was the influence of Bloomsbury welling up at last – the fascination behind the aversion, for repulsion must have its covert fascination to exert such a strong influence upon the emotions. I was determined, at any rate, to know about this side of life about which I had known too little, which going wrong, had ruined my happiness.