Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Page B

he feared it – of married life.
    To back up her views, Margery simply left Noel immured at Bedales, refusing to bring her out for any occasion where she might meet Rupert. He was unable to see her at all for five months after Penshurst. As autumn closed in at Grantchester, he began to suffer from fits of loneliness and depression. He had barely scraped through his exams, he was cut off from the girl he loved, he had struck so many attitudes that he no longer knew who he really was, and he was mired in sexual frustration that seemed likely to drag on indefinitely. All of this contributed to his seduction of Denham Russell-Smith in October, as a compensation for his failure with Noel.
    â€œThe Charm” shows how Noel fed Rupert’s imagination but not his need for everyday love or companionship:
    In darkness the loud sea makes moan;
    And earth is shaken, and all evils creep
    About her ways.
    Oh now to know you sleep!
    Out of the whirling blinding moil, alone,
    Out of the slow grim fight,
    One thought to wing – to you, asleep,
    In some cool room that’s open to the night,
    Lying half-forward, breathing quietly,
    One white hand on the white
    Unrumpled sheet, and the ever-moving hair
    Quiet and still at length!
    Rupert wrote this within a month of his adventure with Russell-Smith, which should perhaps be included among the evils that creep around the world at night. Certainly the “unrumpled sheet” on which the beloved lies contrasts with the “dreadful mess” on the bed of lust. Rupert’s sexual initiation, instead of giving him a more realistic vision of Noel, led him to make her even more of a wax figure, unconscious of desire.
Going to Town
    The Clevedon vision of escaping over the hills was a reaction to the opposite kind of shift that the Neo-pagans now had to make, from student life to a serious vocation. Rupert could live poetically at Grantchester, but most of them would have to make their way in London, and their outings would now be holidays from the work that held them in the capital. From 1909, London began to replace Cambridge as a centre for their shared lives. Even Rupert needed a pied-à-terre there, so he joined his father’s National Liberal Club. As clubs went, it was cheap and politically progressive. At one visit or another, he must have bumped into a fellow contributor to the
Westminster Gazette
called Raymond Chandler, a year younger than himself. They both wanted to be poets, but Chandler soon gave it up. His success, unlike Rupert’s, would come late, and be achieved by cynicism rather than sentiment.
    Gwen Darwin had been chafing at home for years. She did not have enough to do, her health was uncertain, and she felt smothered by an extended family that was almost an institution in Cambridge. She wished she had been born a man so that she could follow her interests withoutinterference. In the autumn of 1908 her parents finally let her study art at the Slade School in Chelsea. She would live with her uncle William, but to be an apprentice artist in the anonymity of London was to her a liberation and a joy. Justin had come at the same time, to be articled to a firm of solicitors as preparation for joining his father’s company. 42
    Jacques Raverat came to London in November, renting rooms in Chelsea. He was taken on as an apprentice at the Ashendene Press, where his project was to typeset Blake’s
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
. In the afternoons he studied drawing at the Central School of Art; after Christmas he transferred to the Slade, which brought him into daily contact with Gwen.
    Ka had decided to spend a fourth year at Newnham, but her social work projects often brought her to London, and the flat in Westminster that she shared with Hester became a centre for her Neo-pagan friends. Gwen Darwin, having escaped from her own dominating family, was especially charmed by Ka’s way of life – a home without parents:
    Ka’s flat was a