The Great Silence (37 page)

Ottoline’s love affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell had ended in 1916 when Bertie had fallen in love with a beautiful 20-year-old actress, and Ottoline missed the ‘most divine’ physical intimacy that the relationship had on occasion brought her. For a while she had clung, not always with dignity, to her friendship with Siegfried Sassoon. He had left the sanctuary of William Rivers’s hospital at Craiglockhart, and she fancied herself in love with him. His
feelings for her, although affectionate, were not what Ottoline was seeking.

The day before the Armistice she had greeted Sassoon at the large front door, a bright peacock feather in her hand, her delicate musky scent inescapable. Bach’s music had filled the grey-painted hall, swirling round its pinkish-red curtains and the house smelled deliciously of incense and baskets of spicy oranges, their colour disguised beneath a skein of cloves. An invisible but all-pervasive mist had floated in from outside, clouding for a moment the ground-floor rooms, where the oak panelling had itself been painted ‘a dark peacock-blue green’.

But Ottoline had found Sassoon in a highly nervous condition, talking incessantly and jumping from one subject to another ‘He cannot concentrate his mind, stammers, and then dashes on all about himself,’ she later wrote in her diary. She found him to be ‘spoiled and his head very swelled’. In what Virginia Woolf called ‘her queer nasal moan’ used when upset, she announced that she never wanted to see Sassoon again, finding him ‘so coarse, so ordinary’ and so changed from the young man she had first met two years before.

The cost of running Garsington and entertaining all her friends had accelerated. The contributions made by its two full-time lodgers, the painters Mark Gertler and Dorothy Brett, were not enough to cover their upkeep but Ottoline did not press them for more. She never refused self-invited guests even though sometimes she confided to her diary that their presence depressed or discomforted her – ‘I imagine them having dirty underclothes,’ she wrote, and as a result she felt ‘contaminated and damp’.

And yet she pronounced herself’sick of the eternal money question’ which ‘weighs us down for ever’. ‘We are ruined,’ Philip told her as she went one more time to her jewellery box. This time, the most precious of all the jewels her mother had given her, ‘the French crown jewel necklace’, went under the hammer at Christie’s. Ottoline was unsentimental about the sale. Just as she was unconcerned about eating a bun that had fallen on the floor (however dusty, it was there to give sustenance) so necklaces were there to bring in cash. A quarter of a century earlier, her mother had paid £500 for it, and this time the pearl necklace that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette netted her £1,300, which helped pay off some of the
farm’s debts. For now, Ottoline reasoned, she would far rather relinquish a jewel and be certain of remaining at Garsington. The bright vibrancy of its garden seemed to her ‘a miracle of beauty’, especially ‘the long nasturtium border and along by it a double row of zinnias and behind them the asters and behind that the sunflowers and some apricot roses coming up between’.

Money worries diminished in importance, however, when Otto-line allowed herself to dwell on her physical appearance. She was aware that she had developed ‘an obsession with my own ugliness’ and Brett had given her cold comfort when she cheerily dismissed her friend’s looks as ‘not so bad’. The psoriasis that Ottoline had suffered from for much of her life was becoming ‘horribly depressing’ and there were times when she felt as if’every little pore is a possible spot’. Augustus John had recently finished a portrait of her for which she had dressed in a flamboyant black hat and a black silk dress which although dramatic had the unfortunate effect of flattening her bosom and eliminating much of her femininity. While she thought the top half of her face looked ‘fine and tragic and like me’ she was disappointed by everything from the nose downwards: ‘the mouth is too open’, she thought, ‘and indefinite as if I was washing my teeth and all the foam was on my mouth.’ Ottoline watched Virginia enviously, looking ‘exquisite with her lovely lip and nose’, although disappointed that Virginia ‘has no ordinary human feelings at all. If one draws near to her and kisses her one finds nothing, nothing, no response at all, no drawing near, only delicate aloofness pushing away.’ Perhaps the psoriasis repelled Virginia; that month the skin disease had erupted all over Ottoline’s powdered face.

She tried to alter her appearance. She cut off her long hair which when short became thicker and curlier. And she went one step further. She dyed it bright red. She experimented with wearing different fabrics as a means of cheering herself up, rejecting anything in wool, preferring silk and feeling more confident in things ‘slippery and light’.

Her diary was her confessional although she was doubtful that the pages would ever be filled with any deep sense of satisfaction. ‘Inside me is always the tossing search,’ she wrote, ‘to search for the hole in life in which I should naturally fit.’ At the back of the leather
journal she kept a running list of the books she was reading: the poetry of Dante, Ezra Pound, some Proust, and a novel by a new writer, Rebecca West, a tale of an army officer’s homecoming called
The Return of the Soldier
.

T. S. Eliot and his wife Vivien had stayed one weekend and Otto-line immediately felt an empathy with Vivien whom she found to be ‘so spontaneous and affectionate’ and who, like Ottoline, suffered from migraines and gastric upset. The T at the end of Vivien’s surname as she signed it in the visitors’ book at the end of the weekend resembled a J with its long, tapering and slightly fragile tail. Ottoline had no interest in any romantic association with Tom, but she was frustrated by her own fear of his intellect and was determined to overcome it. After a ‘delightful evening’, Ottoline made ‘a valiant effort’ and invited Eliot upstairs to her book-lined workroom on the first floor of the house. But after they had talked in front of the fireplace, she was not sure how well the conversation had gone. ‘He makes me very shy,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I feel his mind is so accurate and dissecting and fits in every idea like a Chinese puzzle and my mind is so vague and floating. And I feel he must think me such an ass.’

The crude boorishness of post-war society troubled her. As a supporter of the Sinn Fein movement she had been to a volatile meeting at the Albert Hall where the sight of an old man being dragged out by his neck and another biting a fellow protestor in the leg convinced her that ‘truly we are near primitive brutes’. That spring, though, there was an evening of joy for Ottoline, who never failed to be elated by the theatrical, when she heard a recital by the singer Raquel Meller and was enchanted by her ‘Spanish, beautiful, liquid melting face and very lovely voice’. For Ottoline she encompassed ‘a most absolute expression of poignant romance and feeling’. She told her friends of the beauty of the voice of the woman who by chance bore almost the same name as her mother’s adored gamekeeper. On the bus back home she had sat next to a veteran of the Crimean War, a conflict that evoked Ottoline’s irrepressible sense of romance. The old soldier told her how once, wounded and lying in a hospital bed, he had received a visit from Florence Nightingale who had bent over and kissed him.

In preparation for the summer Ottoline had indulged herself by buying a lovely new Chinese velvet coat and by having ‘two pieces of stuff’, one of yellow cloth, the other of grey blue satin, made into dresses at the dressmakers, Victoire. She also ordered a Henry IV-shaped jacket and full skirt in reddish plum satin. She could not really afford it but like Iris, the heroine of Michael Arlen’s
Green Hat
, her sense of life’s completeness evaded her even in the acquisition of her favourite clothes. ‘I love being really rather gorgeous,’ she wrote, while admitting that ‘it is absurd too and in my other side I am so unhappy at the selfishness of getting so much for myself.’

Clothes and opera singers and friendships with poets were not enough to banish loneliness or to alter the circumstances of the narrow white-sheeted bed. She longed for either silence or the deep intimacy of requited love. She never seemed to have enough time or even patience for her 14-year-old daughter. Julian had whooping cough that May and the noise irritated and unsettled her. Ottoline went alone for a weekend to Underley, a large comfortable house in Cumbria where the ‘no-noise velvet pile carpets’ brought her a brief interlude of cherished quiet.

In June 1920 Ottoline pasted a photograph on to the blank page opposite her entwined initials. She wrote two words: ‘summer’ and ‘Garsington’ beneath the picture. The photograph had been taken in the sealing-wax red panelled Red Room. In the picture Mark Gertler, the ever-present Garsington lodger, sits beside her, half invisible inside the huge fireplace, boyish, curly headed. Standing next to her is T. S. Eliot, whose signature in Ottoline’s visitors’ book had become almost as frequent as that of Lytton Strachey. Eliot, large nosed, in tweed jacket and pale trousers, a book tucked under his arm, is looking down at Ottoline in her floor-length satin dress, from beneath which protrude her high-heeled, tightly laced shoes. She beams up at him from her seat in a high armchair in evident admiration.

That summer Ottoline’s lawns at Garsington, stretching out into the Oxfordshire countryside to the water meadows beyond, were patterned with the yellow dapple of buttercups and cowslips. They seemed more crowded than ever with dons and students from nearby Oxford and the owners of the smartest local country houses. The notoriety surrounding both the lovely grey manor house and the hostess (whose
large nose reminded small boys of a witch) meant that invitations to visit were contrived on the flimsiest of introductions. One neighbour, Margot Asquith, wife of the former prime minister, who lived at The Wharf, Sutton Courtenay, treated Garsington as a place of entertainment for her own guests, arriving – so one undergraduate, David Cecil, observed - with a medley of companions who ranged from ‘international tycoons and foreign ambassadors to out of work actors and schoolboys on holiday’. They would spread themselves out beneath the branches of the holm oak that Aldous Huxley thought ‘resembled a great wooden octopus’. Walking among them was their hostess with her ‘antique irregular stones like childish molars’ (Cecil again), the triple strand of pearls as ever at her neck, as she ‘maintained an air of patrician detachment and an enigmatic gleam in her strange eyes’.

When the outside guests had gone home, Ottoline would exchange her ankle-gathered trousers and Grecian crêpe de Chine blouses for a ‘pink maillot and peplum-style tunic in rainbow colours’. Dressed in this way she would descend into what Carrington called ‘that cesspool of slime’, the pond in which the Garsington guests all swam although the cowman had drowned in it and a huge black boar had once tumbled into its stinking fetid water.

A new employee, a young stonemason called Lionel Gomme, had come to help with some terracing in the garden. Lionel lived in the village with a famously intimidating and jealous foster-mother. His chief passions in life were football and cars. But he was a countryman, a child of nature, able to recognise every species of butterfly and to give a name to the tiniest beetle. He was 26. Ottoline was twenty-one years older. On 5 June, a day or two after he had begun work, Ottoline left her slim white bed and moved across to the open window of her bedroom. Below her in the sunshine she watched as, half kneeling, he began to form a new terrace, his shirtsleeves rolled right up to his elbows, his hands dripping with the sticky wet plaster that he was gently smoothing with a small trowel on to the grey Oxfordshire stone.

A few days later Ottoline brought out her camera and took a picture of the young man, hatless and wearing dungarees, holding her own pug and with a broad open-mouthed smile directed straight at the photographer. She stuck two of the photographs into the body
of her diary. That evening she wrote her first impressions of this ‘very remarkable boy’ with whom she had not yet exchanged a word. He had ‘a very intelligent face – and extremely beautiful’. What is more he looked ‘like a poeT’ – Ottoline’s long and satisfied stroke to the T travelling fully, as if exhaled, along the whole length of the word.

She was apprehensive, however, reminding herself that ‘the superficial talk that men get from living with uneducated men is such a barrier’. Though certain of the young man’s intelligence, she feared he was unused to conversing much with anyone outside his work. For a brief moment also, she was doubtful whether she had the ability to attract him. Four days later she just happened to arrange to be outside in the garden, painting a metal seat a blue-green colour, while conveniently nearby ‘my beautiful boy’ was making a base for a statue. She was baffled at how to break through their mutual shyness. She knew not only that she needed to gain his trust but that she wanted to ‘inspire and help him’.

In her diary she wrote down a further ambition, but on second thoughts crossed it out, at first with two firm strokes and then for double security with a neat dense coil of inky barbed wire. Ottoline was 47 but the jottings might as well have been those of a 16 year old. She was astonished and giddy with the realisation that she had fallen totally and all-consumingly in love. Over the next few weeks she gradually found the courage to talk to this beautiful young man, in her voice that could be at once emphatic and sing-song and which Bertrand Russell had described as ‘very beautiful, gentle, vibrant’.

She began to call the object of her fascination by the name he had been known by in his family for most of his life: Tiger. One day at the end of the month she took Tiger into Oxford to show him the colleges, and two days later he came to her room, and took her hand in gratitude. He told her, she remembered later that night, that ‘he felt I was a friend’. Ottoline’s girlish delight in this new friendship and Tiger’s evident response to these flattering attentions by his extraordinary employer began to dissolve barriers. The only obstacle remaining to its further development, Ottoline felt, was that ‘I am old and he is young’.