Stephen kept thinking of the tattered members of the International Brigade who’d fought in Spain, friendless and badly equipped. He compared them with the British forces in North Africa, well trained, well armed and backed this time by an entire nation. This war was for England; but it was also a moral cause. ‘Stephen’s conviction [was] that all repressive despotism had to be opposed by decency and insisting on truth. He had seemed so mild when we first met, that coming to know his strong-minded refusal to acquiesce in any political coercion and lies was to recognise a centre which was steady, even steely, in his peaceable nature.’
My mother practising the Schubert B-Flat Sonata in the early years of the war.
They discovered that they both had feelings of guilt about the First World War. As she puts it in her memoir: ‘So many of our generation had felt guilty for having missed the first war and for our existence as burdensome, as somehow responsible for the sadness and privations of our parents.’ Natasha’s guilt perhaps had more to do with the fact that she was illegitimate, but she resisted this thought.
Although at the age of twenty-one on the Wittersham holiday I had long since found a robust, even amused acceptance, of such relics of childhood, there remained a lifelong, lingering feeling of apology towards my mother for her lonely years of adversity. I had never entertained untoward feelings about illegitimacy, for it was clear that there was no reason for me to feel responsible for that, despite my sympathy for her moments of embarrassment. But I continued to feel a sorrowful indebtedness for the struggle she had bravely faced to support us both.
Stephen told her: ‘As very young children they had been appalled to feel their noisy play to be responsible for their mother’s bouts of illness, when she appeared looking over the banisters and declaiming, as Stephen said like Medea, “Now I know the sorrow of having borne children.” After her early death at the age of 42 they felt partly responsible for their father’s unhappiness, a burden they could not alleviate, and perhaps that they even had had a share in its origins.’ Stephen felt he’d rejected his father, towards whom he’d shown no sympathy after Violet died; but this took time to emerge. Years later, after I was born, Stephen told Natasha: ‘Our father must have been desolate after the death of our mother, and I don’t believe we gave him any comfort.’
At Wittersham, Stephen spoke openly about Tony and Inez. My mother summed up what he said in a simplification which has a certain truth, though I don’t believe it covers everything. He felt they’d failed, because he’d spent too much time working. ‘His devotion to his vocation in poetry was an unforgivable distraction – a sort of infidelity – for he was a transparently monogamous temperament.’ My mother cannot have found it easy to accept Tony and Inez, standing invisibly offstage throughout the Wittersham Interlude. But ‘monogamy’ was an admirable virtue. So was work.
He told her about his early years in Berlin with Christopher Isherwood and with his younger brother, Humphrey. She was prepared to forgive him. ‘He had lived his life in phases, and the earliest one of juvenile wild oats shared with Humphrey and with Christopher had in a few years been discarded like an animal shedding its skin. His monogamous devotion to Tony had foundered for reasons I well understood, and his latest disaster with Inez was to a union which had never been properly joined.’
Natasha told Stephen that his unsuccessful relationships with Tony and Inez were not his fault. ‘His assuming total responsibility for these failures was a far from wise interpretation, for Inez had been in a whirl of indecision, even on her wedding day, when she was still at Oxford.’ So, exit Inez. As for Tony: ‘The pattern of Tony’s restlessness had been lifelong.’
She told him: ‘From now on there is no question of blame. There is only us.’
‘I look back on that brief holiday as a time of exceptional élan in the feeling that we had dropped our childhood like unwanted luggage.’ They loved each other. Their guilts could be discarded. ‘The resolve I shared with Stephen to banish both self-blame and, in the future, any projecting of it upon each other, and to replace it with serene understanding of its origins, was to enhance the feelings of release from the past and rejoicing in the present which pervaded those happy snowbound days.’ He’d told her everything about himself. He was turning over a new leaf – or so she thought. But he might also have been giving her a warning: Don’t expect from me more than I can give.
They were married at St Pancras registry office on 9 April 1941.
‘As we made the responses, it was, as we later described it to each other, as if we were alone in some high place – a water-shed where our pasts flowed away into one ocean, and our future together was a stream flowing away to another great sea, as we stood there at its source.’ Together, they would descend the other side of this mountain, leaving the past behind. ‘Meeting in forgiveness and the miracle of marriage, I realised that it had been this acceptance of whole histories, reaching back into previous generations, which had been distilled into that one present moment, (almost a knife-edge), of the vow.’
Stephen wrote to Julian Huxley: ‘being married to Natasha will be quite different from just living with her, as she is really a very remarkable person’. Her character was in its way deeply religious. ‘“Being married” means something to her. This has a revolutionary effect on me, because nothing alters me so much as someone expecting something real from me, and the desire not to disappoint her in any way.’ This was part of his idea that he had no will of his own. He would try to live up to her hopes, because they were stronger than his.
My parents soon after their wedding.
For their honeymoon they went to Cornwall. There, he showed her the many versions of a poem on which he was working. She had no idea that it required so many revisions and restarts, but when he explained to her the idea of fidelity to an event, it related to what she was trying to do with her music. ‘For the poet or the composer there is fidelity to some original subjective experience, which is private and ultimately beyond the interpreter, however inspiring a reading there may be.’
She thought that Stephen’s creativity provided her with limitless support. ‘This rich vitality struck me like the liberation of entering another country, another climate, for apart from the Funtington circle, my not unlively musical world had been much narrower in focus.’ His world renewed her optimism. ‘Overtaken by this sudden upsurge in vitality and sensibility, music was once more intoxicating, the capacity to realise the beauty of phrasing that one intended or imagined seemed limitless … For me, the vast repertoire of masterpieces for the piano waiting to be mastered was no longer a daunting proposition, and one could set about wholeheartedly learning each single sonata.’
Walking in the countryside, there would be occasions when Stephen would become distracted. My mother read these as moments when he’d entered his interior world and she should not cross that boundary. ‘We would be chatting, in the way of friends or lovers, of an acquaintance or a landscape and yet – at a certain moment one could feel his need of silence and guess that some analogy with a dramatic or poetic theme had seized him, and he wished to chase after it in peace.’