Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Page A

not
talk
of it. We’ll show the grey unbelieving age, we’ll teach the whole damn World, that there’s a better Heaven than the pale serene Anglican windless harmonium-buzzing Eternity of the Christians, a Heaven in Time, now and for ever, ending for each, staying for all, a Heaven of Laughter and Bodies and Flowers and Love and People and Sun and Wind, in the only place we know or care for, ON EARTH .” 40
    But instead of “living romance,” Rupert meekly went home to Rugby after Clevedon. For three weeks his mother subjected him to “nightlyanti-Olivier lectures” (which meant attacks on Bryn, whom the Ranee wrongly suspected of being Rupert’s favourite Olivier). Meanwhile, Margery Olivier attacked him from the other side. Rupert had evaded Margery’s vigilance by turning up unannounced at Bank and for the Penshurst camp. But Margery made sure that Noel did not come to Clevedon, and made it clear to Rupert that his attentions to her were not welcome. After he went home, Margery followed up with a long letter that kept him up all night with anxiety. Rupert would only do harm to himself and Noel, Margery argued, if he declared his love outright and tried to draw her sister into a premature commitment:
    Love, for a woman, she said, destroyed everything else. It filled her whole life, stopped her developing, absorbed her. “You’ll see what I mean if you look at women who married young,” she grimly adds. “No woman should marry before 26 or 27” (why
then?
if it kills them). And later “if you bring this great, terrible, all absorbing thing into Noel’s life now it will stop her intellectual development,” etc. It’s a bloody thing, isn’t it? The Logical outcome is that one must only marry the quite poor, unimportant, people, who don’t matter being spoilt. The dream of any combined and increased splendour of the splendid you, or the splendid I with the splendid X – that’s gone. We can’t marry X. At the best we can, if we try to marry X, marry her corpse. 41
    Despite Rupert’s fulminations, he was probably being given good advice – even if it was tinged with Margery’s self-interest. Of the four sisters she was the most committed to intellectual and political causes; she was also the only one without a train of lovesick men. She was trying to be a New Woman and she wanted the same for Noel, a free space in which to work out her destiny. But it was naive to speak of Noel’s or Bryn’s destiny without accepting that their beauty was inevitably part of it. Nor did Margery admit how much she wanted to keep Rupert away from Noel in order to have more of him for herself.
    In laying claim to Noel, Rupert also had his own inner divisions to contend with. One side of him longed for marriage, to move from fitful immaturity to love and sexual fulfilment. But the other side loved Noel precisely because he imagined her as a nymph who would vanish into athicket if pursued. This Rupert, in his poems, harped on the physical and mental unsavouriness of old age. “Menelaus and Helen,” for example, fills in what Homer left untold:
    He does not tell you how white Helen bears
    Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold,
    Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold
    Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys
    â€™Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice
    Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.
    Often he wonders why on earth he went
    Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came.
    Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent;
    Her dry shanks twitch at Paris’ mumbled name.
    So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried;
    And Paris slept on by Scamander side.
    The poem reveals Rupert’s fear of actually sharing a life with any of the young women he might love. By the time he sailed to the modern wars of Troy at Gallipoli he was consciously acting the poem out, preferring a warrior’s early death to the long anticlimax – as