Maynard's War Chapter 7
An uncertain future
Thank you for reading Maynard’s War, and welcome to my new subscribers. I hope you enjoy this latest chapter. Chapter 8 will be available next Sunday, 2nd February at 11am. Please do share with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks, Mark.
March 1915
Keynes had taken up his Treasury post in mid-January and quickly realised he would have to make the most of every opportunity. The first of these came with his appointment to a committee charged with finding a solution to the problem of rising food prices. The answer, once he had persuaded his fellow committee members of its merits, was to arrange regular imports of wheat from India at below market prices. He was able to conduct the negotiations himself using his knowledge of the commodity markets and a couple of contacts from his time at the India office.
He was disappointed at the inability of his colleagues to see the way to a solution. Admittedly they didn’t have his contacts or special knowledge of the trading relationship with India, but they seemed to know nothing at all about the workings of the markets, believing that the government was unable to exert influence over them. “What is government for if it can’t dictate terms to the markets when the country is in dire need?” he had asked them, exasperated.
His work on the Cabinet Wheat Committee got him noticed. In early February he travelled to France, part of a small delegation led by Lloyd George, and including Walter Cunliffe, the recently ennobled Governor of the Bank of England, and Edwin Montagu, a friend from his Cambridge undergraduate days, who was now Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Basil Blackett went as secretary to the delegation. Sir George Paish had by this time been moved to a room outside the main building, apparently excluded from Lloyd George’s inner circle.
Montagu had been Keynes’ principal sponsor at the India Office and would have been instrumental in persuading Lloyd George to bring him back. Having him on the trip would make things easier once they got to Paris where they would be meeting delegations from the Allied powers, most importantly the French and the Russians. The aim was to come up with a financial framework to ensure that each country could finance the considerable costs of prosecuting the war however long it took to extinguish the threat from Germany.
As with most such negotiations, the difficulties would be political in nature. The economics were simple: they just had to ensure that each of the allied powers had access to sufficient credit to finance the manufacture and transport of munitions and other supplies, and to pay their troops. The problem for Keynes would be persuading his superiors, and their foreign counterparts, that the mechanics of international finance were not especially complicated, and that liquidity could be maintained as long as the allies were prepared to share key information.
Keynes was determined to stamp his authority on the negotiation as quickly as possible but Blackett urged him not to go in with too many guns blazing, at least not on the first morning. They agreed that Montagu would be key. He had a first class brain and, unusually for a Treasury minister, a good understanding of economics. He would also be able to give them a sense of the Chancellor’s thinking.
Vanessa was spending more time looking past her canvas than at it. Not that there was much to see beyond her window. It was one of those dreary London winter days when light was in short supply. But it wasn’t the gloom outside that was draining her of inspiration, rather her struggle to come to terms with all that had happened in the last year.
She had fallen out of love with Roger Fry even more quickly than she had fallen for him. He had rescued her from a marriage that had promised so much, only to be destroyed by her husband’s serial infidelity and her sister’s insane jealousy. She had become used to thinking of Clive and Virginia’s juvenile liaison as an affair. But it was only an affair in that it damaged the lives of other people, notably hers.
Everybody knew that despite Clive’s efforts, Virginia would never sleep with him, and so it remained until Leonard Woolf had returned from Ceylon and married Virginia, as if ordained by the gods. It had, in fact, been ordained by Lytton Strachey, at whose feet Vanessa was happy to worship in gratitude for his timely intervention.
Lytton’s achievement in promoting an outcome which was at once in the interests of Leonard, Virginia and herself was remarkable, although she did worry for Leonard, given what he was taking on. But if he was able to love Virginia unconditionally, in a way she never could, their marriage might stand a chance. On the other hand, were Leonard to stray, surely a possibility given Virginia’s apparent frigidity, then it could prove disastrous for her sister’s health, and by extension for Vanessa. But they did seem a good match, and two years in, the marriage appeared strong despite Virginia’s continuing health problems.
She might have remained happily married herself had Clive not been such a fool. He was still sparkling company when he wasn’t in one of his boorish moods. And while she couldn’t have known his true nature, she didn’t doubt that he had loved her. She wondered if, for men, even men like Clive, for whom convention was something to be transcended at every opportunity, marriage was nine tenths a matter of possession. Her sister, it seemed, was happy to be possessed, but she was not.
She had thought a great deal about what she wanted next: she wanted a relationship of equals. For all his charm and empathy, a relationship with Roger would not have been one of equals, even if he would have been faithful. With Duncan, although the relationship had only recently made it out of her mind and into the real world, she knew they would live as equals. She wasn’t sure how she knew it, but he would let her live her life exactly as she wanted. Clive couldn’t and Roger wouldn’t.
There was one complicating factor: Duncan loved men and was unlikely to stop loving men. She wanted to believe that such an arrangement could work; that a relationship with Duncan would bring enough to compensate for the presence of men in his life. She believed it would, but the war added a level of uncertainty which clouded all such judgements. The only person she could talk to about it was Maynard, but those conversations invariably left them both depressed. She had been disappointed when, on his return to London, he had declined her offer to take his old room upstairs because he couldn’t face seeing Duncan every day.
Then there was the question of children. She loved being a mother and for some time now had wanted to add to her brood. A sister for her two boys would be perfect. She and Clive hadn’t slept together for more than a year, but despite his shortcomings, he was still the best option. But could she really return to his bed? If she did, he would be bound to manufacture a new set of marital obligations that she would be unwilling to fulfil in the face of his continuing infidelity.
But if not Clive, then who? She couldn’t see Duncan as a father. She’d only managed to get him into bed on two occasions, and he didn’t seem entirely comfortable either time. Surely intercourse with a woman of her experience was superior to the sodomy to which he was apparently addicted, but Duncan was clearly going take some convincing of the fact.
She was distracted by the voice of a newspaper seller on the street outside. She couldn’t make out what the man was saying, but she didn’t believe a word that was printed in the newspapers in any case. Everything was reported as a victory for the allies and likely to bring forward the end of the war, but most of what she heard from Maynard completely contradicted the information released to the public. She wondered if there were any journalists of integrity left on Fleet Street. They had become propagandists for the war; none cared about the truth.
If only people knew how badly things were going, if only they were able to relate to the scale of casualties, then surely there would be some kind of uprising against the war and the government would be forced into talks with Germany. She could understand the argument that the war must be fought to a conclusion if there were any such conclusion in sight. But nobody, including Maynard, who infuriated her with his ability to put his true feelings to one side in order to justify his continuing involvement, was able to demonstrate how it might be brought to a swift end with the allies victorious. Both sides stood to lose far more from continued fighting than from a negotiated peace.
She looked back at her canvas, now liking what she saw. If she couldn’t know what the war would bring, she would concentrate on the things that were within her control: she would continue painting; she would continue to be married to Clive; she would do everything in her power to become the sole object of Duncan’s affections; and she would contrive, somehow, to become pregnant again. That should be enough to be going on with, she thought, as she mixed the colours for the rim of her coffee tray.
Thanks for reading Maynard’s War. Subscribe for free to ensure you never miss a chapter. Or take out a paid subscription to help me to deliver chapters on time.
And if you’re interested in all things Bloomsbury, and specifically 20th century British art, do check out Victoria K. Walker’s Beyond Bloomsbury. It’s fabulous.
