Charleston after Vanessa Bell was a different place, and Grace established a different relationship with her new master. Duncan Grant, 76, had not shared Vanessa’s hermit-like tendencies, and their relationship had often been heavy going and guilt-laden. Now the house hummed to his gregarious nature. A breezy irreverence and sense of equality was enjoyed between Grace and her new master (though he always remained ‘Mr Grant’). They took to watching the boxing together in the Higgenses’ little sitting room. ‘I cannot regard Grace as anything but a family appendage’,17 Duncan wrote to Bunny Garnett. She was emphatically not, to his mind, a servant. Although the regime relaxed somewhat, since Duncan didn’t much care about cleanliness, the constant flow of house guests vastly increased her workload. Grace was by now desperate to retire.
The younger generation took the place over once again: Angelica’s teenage daughters, their friends and boyfriends used it at will. Quentin, his wife Olivier and their three young children descended from Newcastle upon Tyne every summer holiday. For all of them, Grace and her rock buns spelt instant comfort. Clive Bell, 80, was too frail to do more than gaze wistfully at these miniskirted young girls, but he continued to arrive and depart with his garrulous companion, the artist Barbara Bagenal, until his death in 1964. Charleston still suffered from an erratic water supply, insufficient heating and freezing pipes in winter–at which time Duncan Grant would be ferried off to louche outposts in Morocco by one of his young male muses, leaving the Higgenses to their own devices. ‘Terribly cold’, wrote Grace in her diary, December 1961. ‘No water in the house. Afraid everything is frozen. Impossible to get warm with our electric fire.’ ‘I think you would like this place’, came a postcard from Duncan; ‘Every sort of flower in the garden…the sun is really hot.’ His status as an artist and his energy for painting continued undimmed–Grace was flattered by his ‘marvellous’ portrait of her, ‘full of life, much too grand for me’–but his mind was growing erratic.
How much more of her life should Grace give to this household? Quentin’s daughter Viriginia Nicholson believed that Charleston’s housekeeper must have loved her job, since by the 1950s it was ‘a seller’s market, servants were forever walking out. Grace chose to stay; she made her life there.’ She probably couldn’t explain even to herself why she stayed for so long. Grace didn’t expect her son’s generation to understand the pull exerted over her by her employers for half a century. Such unwavering loyalty belonged to another era, and she had been schooled in her values by a generation more remote still. When her own father was gravely ill during her final trip to Provence in 1960, Grace had agonised in her diary over whether or not she should return home to Norfolk. In the end she decided not to, because ‘he had always told me to stay with Mrs Bell’.
But Mrs Bell was now no longer there, and by 1968 she had had enough, judging by diary entries from her life as a 65-year-old:
21 February 1968: Mr Grant said Amaryllis wants to bring three friends down next weekend. I am so tired, & my back aches.
22 February: Aired downstairs room, and made up bed for Amaryllis. Told Mr Grant, why not get Henrietta [Angelica’s second daughter, aged 23] to come as housekeeper, he said he did not want her. I am too old to keep working & would like to leave, so that I could sit down & rest.
23 February: Amaryllis & her friends did not arrive until ten thirty in the evening, the Dinner was spoiled.
24 February: Amaryllis brought another friend name Boots for the weekend with his sheep dog. Extraordinary young man.
25 February: Mr & Mrs Spender left afterwards for London. Mrs Spender is the daughter of Maxim Gorky. She is very charming & considerate & left me a large tip.
26 February: Amaryllis & friend left for London after lunch, they did not rise until lunchtime, very untidy couple.
1 March: Scrubbed through lower passage.
2 March: Scrubbed bathrooms lavatorys & hall, kitchen this morning.
6 March: Washed my hair. Quite white.
She was a relic from another era: an upper servant, a housekeeper, now having to ‘do the rough’–the work of charladies–in a barely recognisable modern world. Grace’s son John claimed she turned a blind eye to what went on upstairs at Charleston: ‘It was something she became acclimatised to; that was the way of life.’ But Diana remembered Grace’s tight-lipped reaction when she’d make up two beds and find only one slept in: ‘The permissiveness of some of the guests–that was not good.’ In January 1961 Grace had bought a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to send to her aged mother Bessie (Penguin’s second edition, produced after winning the Obscene Publications trial). ‘Disgusting book’, she wrote in her diary, heavily underscored.
The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 had made for greater tolerance, and perhaps Duncan had become a touch casual. On 25 March, a day that ‘a black man from Brighton came to tea’, something inside her snapped. It wasn’t the young men per se, but the endless traffic of unexpected visitors: the bed making, the catering. Grace braced herself and bravely told Mr Grant that she would be retiring at the end of the year. ‘He is upset, said I should go for a holiday, but where can we go?’ When could they go, with house guests from May through to September? ‘I’m so tired, I wish I could go away & never come back’, she wrote on 2 September, a day Amaryllis knocked a large bottle of black ink over sheets, pillow case and carpet. ‘Work, work, work, & meals, so many people, Oh I wish my house was near a road so I could live in it.’
Grace’s Norfolk house had proved to be a white elephant. They had spent every summer holiday overseeing renovations, but neither she nor Walter had ever learnt to drive, which made the plan of retiring to the empty Fens an unfeasible one. They returned from a restorative fortnight in Devon in late September to be shown round her old friend Ruby Weller’s retirement cottage, ‘full of nice furniture given her by her children & Lady Keynes’. Charleston had now fallen into disrepair, with rising damp and rainwater staining the vibrant frescoes of another, earlier era. Frescoes, by Grace’s judgement, painted some fifty years ago. By the winter of 1970 she could take no more.