John Higgens married Diana Piper on Cup Final day, 2 May 1959. As Nottingham Forest played Luton Town at Wembley, televised live on Grandstand, Grace and Walter hosted a crowded reception at the brick and flint Trevor Arms in Glynde following a traditional church wedding. Diana wore ‘a white ballerina length lace & nylon dress’, while bridesmaid Sally looked ‘very sweet in a pink embossed nylon dress’. Grace was every inch the proud mother in grey suit and hat, still with faint social ambitions (‘the Champagne was a great success’), and annoyed that Walter had forgotten his braces so he didn’t look as smart as he could for the photos. The Bells were not there, though they sent a generous cheque. Four days later Vanessa took to her bed, dangerously ill. ‘Mrs Bell’s heart very bad’, wrote Grace in her diary. ‘Doctor said she must stay in bed & have no salt. Very worried.’ Her mistress was three weeks short of her eightieth birthday.
Grace was now 56, a matronly figure in a flowered overall straining over her bosom and tied tightly round the waist, a rigid iron-grey permanent ‘set’ and rheumatic joints. Now that her son had left home, she began to use her diary to make sense of the life she had chosen for herself. It was too late now to change its course.
There was a mood of reckoning, of taking stock. ‘Walter & I have been married 25 years & we have been very happy & very lucky’, she wrote. ‘We have a son, whom any mother or father would be proud of, & we have our health…we are indeed fortunate people.’ Grace did not appeal to God to get her through; she’d go and eat a cream bun and get her hair permed (‘looks very nice’). Events beyond her small world were beamed into the sitting room each evening on the six o’clock news, recorded in her diaries as they happened: student riots in Paris, first man on the moon, the Vietnam War, Cliff Richard singing ‘Congratulations’ in the ‘Song for Europe’ contest.
To the Bloomsbury set she was now known as ‘The Angel of Charleston’, a name coined by Duncan Grant. It was no longer Vanessa, famous hostess, but Grace who was the mainstay of the house. She had become indispensable. As ‘the backbone of Bloomsbury’ she held enormous power, but there is no sense of this in her diaries. Rather, she seems still helplessly beholden to the family and its needs. In the winter of 1960 Vanessa Bell took Grace back to the South of France for an open-ended sojourn, leaving the now retired Walter to fend for himself and Diana heavily pregnant with the Higgenses’ first grandchild. ‘They collared her,’ Diana told me, ‘and although Grace was quite outspoken she always felt she had to be there for them. She had to look after them.’
‘I am very lonely’, wrote Grace from La Souco, an ant-infested villa near Monte Carlo with leaking taps and broken light switches, ‘& would much rather be in Sussex with Walter, Blotto & Sam’ (the dog and cat). ‘Goodness I am bored.’ While Vanessa and Duncan were setting up their easels and painting the view, Grace was fiddling about with the gardener’s primus stove to heat soup and boil eggs because the house had run out of gas. Her attempts to get to know the gardener and his wife–Grace had a ‘great capacity for friendship’, according to her son, ‘all types and all walks of life’–were noted with faint disdain by Vanessa. ‘Grace, who gets in touch with everyone, has been talking in some peculiar language to the old people below and makes them give her oranges and grapefruit and anything she wants’, she wrote to Jane Bussy, whose house they were staying in. ‘I have impressed it upon her that they all belong to you and not to the old couple.’ Grace noted in her diary that, ‘Mrs Bell said I was not to talk to her [the gardener’s wife], poor old dear, but I shall take no notice, I am glad of her to talk to. Still no letters from England. Rained hard all day.’
There were brighter moments, too–Prince Andrew’s birth; everyone complimenting her chicken risotto; a wonderful spree in Ventimiglia with Angelica, now 42, bringing back ‘a very smart twin set which would cost me about six pounds in England’. (How Grace loved to dress up after all that depressing wartime utility wear.) Like her 18-year-old self, she still had a nicely observant eye for detail: ‘The coach driver raced round the corners, spitting out of the window’, and ‘We have a leg of lamb for lunch, with as much meat on as Marlene Dietrich’s leg.’ But no longer did Mrs Bell have the power to reduce her to misery with a stern look. Grace was bored, but she was no longer intimidated.
Her mistress was infuriatingly vague on when they might return. After several enquiries from Grace, Vanessa took the unusual measure of entering her housekeeper’s bedroom late in March to announce slightly sheepishly that they ‘might stay on longer’. Was the boot now on the other foot? It appears that Vanessa was a little nervous of Grace’s authority, and had entered her private space to reassert herself. ‘Mrs Bell informs me she has changed her mind about returning to England’, wrote Grace. ‘Extraordinary woman never says the same thing twice. I don’t know what to do.’
Vanessa Bell died at home the following spring, in 1961. She was tended throughout the night by her housekeeper, who spooned warm broth into her mouth and kept vigil. ‘So brave’, wrote Grace as the bronchitis worsened. ‘When the doctor asked her how she was, she said much better, her breathing is terrible.’ She made up the bed for the night and changed her mistress’s nightshirt. Vanessa passed away at midnight–still ‘Mrs Bell’ to Grace and reserved to the last, though pathetically dependent. ‘I shall miss her terribly’, she wrote. They had been partners for forty years–half a lifetime, longer than many marriages; and at such close but very separate quarters. They’d shared moments of raw grief and pure terror; of doting joy over grandchildren and proud satisfaction over vegetable plots. Both loved juicy steak, zinnias, sunshine, small babies. Neither could function without cleanliness and order in the home.
They were like two halves of the same coin–though not once had mistress and housekeeper been photographed together. Her relationship with Grace was in the end the most consistent thing in Vanessa Bell’s life, providing more stability than her marriage to Clive Bell or her companionship with Duncan Grant, who could never love her in the way she wanted. Strange as it now seemed, these two women, on different sides of the class divide, had made a silent pact with each other–and on that last trip to France there had been the sense of a circle closing.
While others mourned the great artist, mother and muse in words and letters, the housekeeper had the job of clearing out her mistress’s room. ‘Had a bonfire & burnt Mrs Bells’ mattress & lots of her clothes, & pillows. Cleaned out her room & got it ready for Mr Bell.’ At Vanessa’s interment on 12 April there was just Duncan, Angelica, Quentin and Grace at the graveyard in Firle. Grace was taken aback by the austerity of the ritual: ‘There was no one there’, she wrote in her diary; ‘no Clergyman, no flowers except what I and Angelica took, & no service, we did not go into the church, the undertakers just put the coffin into the grave, we looked into it & then left.’ This, to her mind, was not a proper leave-taking.