Read Online Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany - Free Book Online Page B

private tie with Denham himself.
    So you’ll understand it was – not with a
shock
, for I’m far too dead for that, but with a sort of dreary wonder and dizzy discomfort – that I heard Mr Benians inform me, after we’d greeted, that Denham died at one o’clock on Wednesday morning, – just twenty four hours ago now. 16
    The impact of Russell-Smith’s early death belongs to the story of 1912. In 1909 his role was to give Rupert an escape from his sexual impasse. That he was not in love with Denham made it easier to seize the passing opportunity. For someone of Rupert’s class, homosexuality opened a much easier and earlier path to sexual satisfaction. He may have felt “great tenderness” for Denham, but his main object was clearly “the boasted jump from virginity to Knowledge.” Having taken the jump, his interest in Denham soon dwindled. There is no suggestion that Rupert felt for his sexual partner anything like the deep passion that James Strachey had long cherished for
him;
nor did his one-night stand with Denham make any difference to his love for Noel or to his determination to marry her. Rupert now knew about “all that James and Norton and Maynard and Lytton know and hold over me”; but he made no move to join their circle as a sexual partner. It took him three years to even tell anyone else about Denham.
    It was part of Denham’s attraction that he was unknown to Rupert’s regular friends. The affair exacerbated his self-division, between the “dirtiness” of copulation and the “purity” of romantic love. “I thought of him entirely in the third person” and “[I] was horribly detached” sumup the relation between Rupert and his lover. And his secretiveness was stronger than ever, since he could hardly have discussed his escapade with any of his still virginal woman friends – least of all Noel. It is possible, also, that he might have had a few more passing encounters with men of a similar kind. Three months after Denham’s visit, Rupert was propositioned by a Romanian physicist he met in Munich. To James, Rupert made a joke of this. He described how the Romanian fell to his knees in front of him and groped at his fly, until they were inconveniently interrupted. 17 But Rupert agreed to go and stay with his new friend in Bucharest, except that a former teacher fell ill in Florence and he had to go there instead. On the other hand, it could be argued that Rupert’s experience with Denham had the paradoxical result of making him more eager and enterprising in seeking a female partner with whom he could enjoy “the dance of the sheets.”

5
Grantchester
June–December 1909
In a Grove
    As Rupert digested his mediocre exam results, he had a retreat already planned at Grantchester, three miles upstream on the Cam. He claimed that he left Cambridge because he was “passionately enamoured of solitude.” 1 But anyone who really wanted to be a hermit should not choose a picturesque spot within an hour’s stroll from scores of acquaintances. Before he moved there in June 1909, Grantchester was already one of Rupert’s favourite places, for tea in the famous orchard or bathing in Byron’s Pool, a secluded stretch of the river a few hundred yards from the village. Nor could he really be alone when living as a lodger with the Stevensons, who ran the teahouse. Their honey came from bees kept by the Neeves at the Old Vicarage nearby. Rupert would always be a lodger with someone, and there is no record of his ever cooking a meal in his life.
    Rupert’s exile made him even more of a Cambridge celebrity and the village became the backdrop for his performance as a student Simple Lifer:
    I work at Shakespere [sic], read, write all day, and now and then wander in the woods or by the river. I bathe every morning and sometimes by moonlight, have all my meals (chiefly fruit) brought to me out