by Gillian Gill
The situation was further complicated when once, in Duncan’s absence, Bunny told Vanessa “that he had for a long time wanted to sleep with her and that if she did she would find he got less on her nerves.” Vanessa’s response was to look at him with “those childlike blue eyes” and say it was impossible for them to have sex because Duncan was bound to find out “and it would upset him dreadfully.”
When Bunny went off for several days in February 1918, the distraught Duncan turned to Vanessa for advice and comfort. In the self-analytic diary he wrote intending that Bunny should read it, Duncan wrote, “I copulated on Saturday with her [Vanessa] with great satisfaction to myself physically. It is a convenient way females have of letting off one’s spunk and comfortable. Also the pleasure it gives is reassuring. You don’t get this dumb misunderstanding body of a person who isn’t a bugger. That’s one for you Bunny!”
It was as a result of this unromantic release of spunk that Vanessa Bell finally got pregnant by Duncan Grant. Once the pregnancy was confirmed, having fulfilled this peculiar obligation to the woman for whom he felt deep affection and to whom he was so indebted, Duncan Grant politely but firmly declined to ever seek physical comfort with her again. That February night in 1918 was probably the last time Vanessa Bell, then a month short of her thirty-ninth birthday, took a man into her bed. Henceforth she would be more Artemis than Aphrodite—but, like Demeter, she would have a daughter.
❧
On Wednesday, July 27, 1918, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary how she had sallied forth from Richmond on the train for one of her “field days” in central London. After lunching at the 1917 Club, where younger women like Fredegond Shove, Alix Sargant-Florence (not yet Strachey), and Carrington were often stimulating to the point of abrasion, Woolf walked over to 46 Gordon Square, expecting a warm welcome. This was the house that the four Stephens had leased after the death of their father in 1904, the house that Vanessa and Clive Bell took over for themselves after Thoby Stephen’s death and their marriage, and that Clive sold to his friend Maynard Keynes in 1916. At number 46, Virginia Woolf found her sister Vanessa Bell, as well as Clive Bell and his current maîtresse en titre, Mary Hutchinson. Vanessa was supervising the packing and removal of furniture and other personal belongings to Charleston.
Vanessa Bell was visibly enceinte, the moving of her stuff out of Gordon Square under the eyes of her husband and his lover was stressful, and the arrival of her sister was at best inopportune. What might Virginia in her diary be recording about the complex negotiations between Vanessa and her husband and his mistress, on the one hand, and her sort-of lover Duncan and his on-and-off lover Bunny on the other? What might Virginia blurt out to some random person when she next spent the weekend as Lady Ottoline Morrell’s guest at Garsington? Apart from anything else, Clive, registered as a conscientious objector, was supposed to be doing manual labor on the Morrell estate near Oxford, not flitting about London with his inamorata.
And Virginia did sometimes get carried away when in lively conversation. A few months after her encounter with Vanessa and Clive and Mary at Gordon Square, Virginia, on a visit to Lady Ottoline at Garsington, let slip to the young painter Mark Gertler that her sister Vanessa did not much care for Mary Hutchinson. Vanessa didn’t, of course—and who could really blame her?—but Virginia’s remark got echoed back, annoying Clive, upsetting Mary, and threatening to upset the apple cart at Charleston. “A fortnight ago all Bloomsbury rang with my crimes,” wrote Virginia on October 26. “MH [Mary Hutchinson] was conveyed about London in a fainting condition in taxi cabs; Lytton [Mary’s cousin and confidant] was appealed to come to her rescue; Duncan, Clive, Vanessa—all were in agonies & desperations . . . I’m beginning to think that friendships maintained in this atmosphere are altogether too sharp, brittle & painful.”
Keeping things from Virginia, lest she blab, was thus standard procedure for the Charleston set, and in the summer of 1918, Virginia knew far too much about what was going on in the Sussex farmhouse. Virginia knew that the child her sister was carrying was Duncan Grant’s and that the pregnancy was something Vanessa had long wanted. She knew that Vanessa was fiercely determined to keep the paternity of her third child a secret. She knew that Vanessa would face serious social and financial problems if she were widely known to be the mother of an illegitimate child.
As we have seen, divorce from Clive was never an option Vanessa considered, and marriage to Duncan was never even on the table. At a time when homosexual men frequently married for the domestic comfort, social cover, and children that wives offered, Duncan Grant was an exception. He was emphatically, immovably not a marrying man. Unlike Maynard, he was not in the public eye and the corridors of power, so he would never need a Lady Keynes to stand by his side in a nice fur coat and ram the lid down on all rumors of his homosexual past. And Duncan had never shown any interest in having children. He found Vanessa to be a charming companion. She offered, without fuss or complaint, the material comforts that mattered to him. When she painted by his side, she did not chat. But since she gave all this freely, out of love, what reason would he have to marry her?
The stirring of the baby in her womb made Vanessa happy, and it confirmed the image of her as beautiful, fertile mother goddess, which held such appeal for her gay chums like Lytton, Maynard, and Harry Norton. At the same time, however, the pregnancy put her very much at her husband’s mercy. If Clive Bell should choose to deny paternity of the child in her womb or, worse still, sue for divorce, Vanessa Bell could, of course, countersue on the grounds of his infidelity with, say, Mrs. St. John Hutchinson, but it would do her little good. Vanessa Bell liked to see herself as a bohemian rebel against the stuffy conventionality of her Kensington past, but divorce was a step too far. It would put her in the class of notoriously promiscuous women like the wives of the artists Augustus John and Henry Lamb, or worse still, Frieda Lawrence. When she and D. H. Lawrence fell in love, Frieda von Richthofen Weekley had abandoned her first husband and her children, and now Lawrence was celebrating her tempestuous nature and sexual abandon in one scandalous novel after another. To Vanessa Bell such public displays of promiscuity were abhorrent, and given how avidly the British public read the divorce columns, she risked seeing the affairs of her Charleston household breathlessly reported in tabloids like the Daily Mail if she divorced.
Worse yet, divorce would ruin her financially and damage the prospects of all three of her children. Even after he and his wife ceased to sleep together, Clive Bell continued to pay his wife an allowance and kick in occasional money for her and their sons. Once, for example, seeing his wife so dirty and unkempt, he paid to hire an extra man at Charleston to operate the pump that kept the household supplied with water. If her new baby was accepted as a Bell, Vanessa would get that lovely check for a thousand pounds from her father-in-law, and all the Bell grandchildren were slated to come into a modest inheritance when their grandfather died.
Without the Bell money, Vanessa would have to fall back on income from the legacies she had received from her father, her sister Stella, and her brother Thoby, plus any art commissions she could secure. In 1912 Vanessa Bell had been delighted to sell her first canvas for five pounds, and now, with the patronage of dear Maynard, she was getting forty or fifty pounds, but her painting could not be counted on for reliable income, and to paint she needed free time. Before the war, Vanessa Bell had enjoyed the services of a reliable domestic staff of four or five, and once the world got back to normal, she expected to do the same. When Vanessa Bell got word that one of the Olivier sisters was not only bringing a bastard child into the world but also planning to look after the baby herself, Vanessa was appalled. The care of children was something she had always delegated to women servants. So Vanessa Bell saw an imperative need to keep Clive lined up as the prospective father, and if that meant being very nice indeed to Mary Hutchinson, then so be it.
Virginia Woolf understood all of this, and as we can all now attest with the volumes in front of us, sh
e put none of it into her diary and not very much in her letters. Virginia loved gossip almost as much as Clive and Lytton did, but, viewing her diary as a literary document that would someday appear in print, Woolf offers only that version of Vanessa that Vanessa herself would enjoy reading. What posterity will know of Vanessa Stephen Bell from Virginia Stephen Woolf will be praise, even adulation. The diarist may note on a visit to Charleston that Vanessa is busy making herself “a small brown coat,” but the sister refrains from pointing out that Vanessa needs a new coat to stretch over the illegitimate child in her belly.
But when, on her arrival at Gordon Square in July, loyal Virginia found herself under combined attack from Vanessa, Clive, and Mary, she was indignant and could not resist fighting back just a little by recording a snatch of dialogue. She relies on Leonard (whom she allowed to read her diary and who didn’t have much use for the Bells) and her prospective reader (that is, us) to work out what is going on and to get the joke.
[Clive Bell to Virginia Woolf] “You’ve wrecked one of my best friendships . . . by your habit of describing facts from your standpoint . . .”
“What you call God’s Truth,” said Nessa. “One couldn’t have an intimacy with you & anyone else at the same time—You describe people as I paint pots.”
“You put things in curl, & they come out afterwards” Mary murmured from the shadow of her sympathetic silence.
For preeminent gossips and self-declared tellers of the “honest” truth like Clive and Vanessa, this was, to use an old English expression, a bit rich.
❧
During the late summer and fall of 1918, Virginia Woolf was in frequent correspondence with her sister about securing a reliable domestic staff for Charleston. At a time when many young women could earn decent wages in the munitions factories, this was a difficult assignment, and in despair at one point, Virginia volunteered to dispatch both of her own resident servants, Nelly and Lottie Boxall, to help out at Charleston. At this suggestion, however, the Boxall sisters, who had been to Charleston before, refused to move to Sussex, and Vanessa got testy.
Virginia was not being wholly self-sacrificing in offering to dispatch the Boxalls. She could see that it was iniquitous to have two young women “chained in a kitchen to laze & work & suck their life from the two in the drawing room,” but social conscience did not make her actually like the Boxalls, who exercised an insidious form of control over her. While claiming devotion to their employers, Nelly and Lottie took advantage of their mistress’s guilt by going off on personal business whenever it suited them. They also engaged in acts of carelessness that verged on passive aggression, on one occasion upsetting onto the floor a whole charge of type for the Hogarth Press that Virginia had laboriously sorted. When Nelly was hospitalized in 1929, Virginia was able to secure the services of a sensible middle-class woman who, though refusing to scrub, was a good cook and spoke, as it were, the same language. Virginia was overjoyed—but Nelly recovered from her operation and insisted on coming back!
Virginia Woolf liked to feel that she could cope with just a regular charwoman, and when a new kitchen stove was installed at Monk’s House, her final home in Sussex, she happily cooked for herself and Leonard. But when guests descended on the Woolfs, which they did on many weekends, when Virginia was working to deadline or confined to bed for days, which happened a lot, Leonard needed someone to run the house, however imperfectly. Having once been sovereign of a small province in Sri Lanka, he, unlike his wife, had no difficulty dealing with a few fractious domestics.
In September 1918, Virginia and Leonard were at Asheham, the Sussex country property they were then renting, and Virginia biked the eight miles over to Charleston, hoping to have a bit of her busy sister to herself. Virginia was eager to make plans with Vanessa for the birth of the new baby, due around the turn of the year, and assess the situation at Charleston. Had Clive definitely undertaken to claim the new baby as his? How was Duncan reacting to the whole paternity issue? With the war finally coming to an end, when was Bunny planning to move out?
These were the kinds of intimate matters that Vanessa and Virginia hated to put in letters since they knew that their domestic staff took time off, between the dusting and scrubbing, to read any diaries and correspondence left lying about. It was easier, the sisters found, to keep secrets from one’s dearest friends than from one’s parlor maid or governess. Vanessa and Virginia could discuss the things that mattered most in their lives only when face-to-face and alone, which was almost never.
Indeed, in September 1918, Vanessa had barely sent the boys out to play, seen Duncan off with his easel and palette, and settled some pressing housekeeping matters when Clive Bell and Mary Hutchinson arrived at Charleston unannounced. They did not come on foot from the station like most guests, but in a hired motorcar. In her diary Woolf wrote, “Mary produced chocolates, cakes & sweets in abundance. I’m ashamed to say that that is my chief impression, but I left soon after, so that I left unsaid and unasked all my ideas and questions. She [Mary] was, as usual, mute as a trout—I say trout because of her spotted dress, & also because, though silent, she has the swift composure of a fish. I walked home, shoving my bicycle, too badly punctured to ride.”
The contrast between the affluent couple with their motorcar and confectionary delights and the disappointed sister pushing her bike the eight miles home is poignant—as the novelist Woolf understood very well.
On December 13, Vanessa Bell wrote to Virginia Woolf, thanking her for agreeing to look after Julian and Quentin during the fast-approaching confinement and giving very precise information on how to feed and entertain her sons. “I see that it is after all a great thing so to bring up an Ape,” wrote Vanessa to Virginia, “that he’ll come to your rescue in time of need.” Had I been Virginia Woolf, I would have been offended by that.
On December 25, a month or so after the armistice ended almost five years of war, in the icy upstairs bedroom at Charleston, Vanessa Bell gave birth to a baby girl. The baby weighed in at seven and a half pounds, and was laid in a shoebox. She would eventually be known as Angelica.
Virginia and Leonard had made sure to be at Asheham over Christmas, and Julian and Quentin were driven over to the Woolfs when the birth seemed imminent. The agreement reached between the sisters was that the boys would return from Sussex to Richmond with their aunt and uncle and stay there for some weeks until their mother was able to have them home again. As it turned out, Virginia came down with a very bad case of flu in early January, her illness exacerbated by acute pain in her jaw from an abscessed tooth, so the boys were obliged to spend some time in the care of servants at their father’s flat in Bloomsbury.
Clive Bell himself was away, that is to say not in London with his sons, not in Sussex with his wife, and not in Wiltshire with the Bell family. By pre-arrangement, Duncan Grant sent a telegram in Clive’s name to Clive’s parents, announcing the safe arrival of a third grandchild. The new baby would be a Bell, and legitimate, and Vanessa’s mind was at ease, with everything going according to plan.
Clive Bell was willing to do what his wife wanted and accept the child sired by his good friend Duncan as his own. Clive felt no animosity toward his wife, and for a wife to have a child out of wedlock and for a husband to give that child his name and his standing in society was definitely grand seigneur. Clive the avid historian might have cited the 1st Lord Melbourne, who had done as much for the second son of his wife, Elisabeth; this child rose to be Queen Victoria’s first prime minister.
To put it crudely, Duncan Grant had, for his part, signed on to be a sperm donor and nothing else. Though only six years younger, he was treated as a teenager by Vanessa, and that suited him very well. Infidelities and illegitimate children were not unknown in Duncan’s upper-class Scottish family (his mother had had a rather frisky youth), but such things had always been kept under wraps. A divorce and an implicit claim of paternity might threaten his promising career, and it was not what his family, especially his mother, wanted
for him. Relations between Mrs. Grant and Vanessa were courteous but cool, and even though the Grant clan, unlike the Bell parents, was perfectly aware of Angelica’s parentage—the child bore a distinct resemblance to her father—it was not something they cared to remark on, then or later.
The only person who raised objections to the Clive-Vanessa-Duncan pact to make Clive the new baby’s official father was, surprisingly, David Garnett. His own parents, to whom he was deeply attached, were left-wing intellectuals, and he saw Vanessa’s reasons for claiming her child as a Bell as bourgeois money-grubbing. Bunny himself was eager to be a father—he would eventually have six children by his two wives—and at night in bed with Duncan, Bunny argued that Duncan was wrong to sign away his paternal rights at the behest of others. Bunny felt that it was time Duncan stopped acting like a teenager and accepted the responsibilities of a man, and after all Vanessa might be giving him the only child he would ever have. How would it feel to see another man act the father to his child?
In the bitterly cold January of 1919, however, with the telegrams sent and the newspapers informed, the official paternity of the unnamed baby girl was on the record and definitively off the agenda at Charleston. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were facing their first parenting problem, and it was an urgent one. The baby could not keep her food down and lost weight instead of gaining. As we saw in earlier chapters, Vanessa had experienced difficulties with feeding in the first weeks of the lives of both her older children. Probably she hoped to nurse her third child, but when her breast milk did not come in, no wet-nurse was available. When Angelica failed to thrive, the woman hired to take care of the baby proved less than useless, and the local doctor prescribed “orange juice and dilute carbolic.” Unsurprisingly, this treatment almost killed the patient.
