Love in Bloomsbury by Frances Partridge

Author:Frances Partridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Part II

9

The Plateau

The path to maturity follows an eventful contour, over hills and into valleys, but there are times in most lives when it reaches a level space – a peaceful alpine meadow with flowers in the luscious grass and a chalet or two. And it may well debouch onto a plateau such as Ralph and I seemed now to have attained, for five years were to pass before any momentous change took place in our lives. A happy marriage has no history worth mentioning, or – as Alexander Herzen said of History – ‘no libretto’. But at about this time I fell into the habit of spasmodically scribbling notes in a journal, and I therefore propose to let extracts from these take over the thread of my story for a while.

By way of prologue, however, I shall dip a spoon into the ordinary current of the days we spent at Ham Spray. One evening after dinner, as a change from paper games or poker, Lytton read us his account of a day spent at Charleston, and afterwards someone suggested that everybody present should write down what they could remember of the day that was just ending, though our accounts were not to be shown until at least a year later. What happened to the other efforts I do not know, or indeed whether they were ever written. My own turned up recently among some papers.

One day at Ham Spray, May, 1927

From my fourposter bed in the Pink Room I heard Carrington’s voice calling “Breakfast!” I had shockingly overslept, as I so often did when soothing farmyard noises took the place of the London racket and the struggle to get to the bookshop. Framed by the green and white posts and yellow curtains of my bed I saw the large square window beyond, with the branches of the pollarded aspens whipping across it diagonally, trimmed with their fluttering leaves. Every few minutes the sun came from behind a cloud, and lit them like footlights. As I slowly toppled out of bed I remembered my dream – about being in a complicated sort of train which demonstrated a new law of Nature: that it was possible to go in two different directions at the same time. My train was going both to Oxford and to Cambridge – this seemed profoundly significant. I must tell Ralph. He came in at this moment, and we talked for a little about Julia and Tommy and the prospects for their love affair, also Carrington’s with Gerald; and wondered why lovers were so bad at adaptation to each other’s natures, yet always expected it themselves. Ralph said: “No-one can alter his or her character.” And I: “Possibly not, but they can sometimes modify their behaviour.”

I went along to the bathroom where I found Julia in a mauve silk dressing-gown. She frowned at herself in the glass: “Tut-tut, my hair – it looks just like a slum child’s.”

Breakfast was on the verandah, and the sun shone down

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