On the wonderful lawn under the ilex trees, Aldous Huxley had folded himself like a gigantic grasshopper into a canvas deckchair. His long arms were dangling across the back of the chair. He was twenty-two years of age. Aldous Huxley was dressed in straw-coloured jodhpurs with a dark brown corduroy jacket and a charming yellow tie Lady Ottoline had brought him back from London as a present. Frieda Lawrence stepped forth into the slimy ornamental pond that served as a swimming pool. Even in the pool, up to her armpits in the water like a sea lion in the zoo, she was chain-smoking nervously. ‘The water is too cold, isn’t it?’ Maria Nys asked. ‘Isn’t it, Lady Ottoline?’ ‘Of course, dear child—naturally—though delightful!’ Lady Ottoline boomed in her extraordinary voice. The sunshine was wonderfully hot. Augustus John was sitting in the grass, sketching a portrait of Maria Nys. The sunlight made little misty haloes of gold at her temples. Philip Morrell and Bertrand Russell were talking politics on a hushed, conspiring tone. A little way off, in the quiet village of Garsington or perhaps in Oxford, church bells were ringing. Maria Nys laughed. She looked at English habits and customs with the fresh eye of a foreigner and was completely bowled over by the wealth of beauty and intelligence around her. Lady Ottoline, Dora Carrington and Dorothy Brett walked around the pond. The dogs playfully hopped after them. ‘Maria Nys is attached to a Russian general,’ Brett whispered. I will have her at my house and then we shall know what she does with her evenings and how often she does it.’ ‘Philip doesn’t want Maria back in our house before Christmas because she flirts with him,’ Lady Ottoline said. ‘Tell Philip he mustn’t be cruel because a silly girl is silly,’ Brett said. ‘Maria Nys is a Belgium l-lass of lit-tle repute and w-worth,’ Dora Carrington spat out. ‘How true that is,’ Lady Ottoline said. ‘Still, Maria is a source of motherly concern to me.’ Lytton Strachey sat next to Aldous Huxley in a canvas deckchair. He closed his eyes and the inscrutable puzzle of his relations with his woman friends again flickered before his eyes. Take Dora Carrington, or young Maria. Why on earth was he so chaste during those Latin lessons with Maria, as if he were a saint? He suddenly saw how easy it could have been otherwise—he might have put his hand on her bare neck and even up her legs, with considerable enjoyment; and probably she would have been on the whole rather pleased. Lady Ottoline clapped her hands. It was dinner time. ‘Come along, mes amis,’ she said.

Katherine Mansfield had invented a short play, a kind of Ibsen-Russian drama. She wrote the words down in a notebook, a little sheet of pencil scribble for each of the six actors. Katherine’s husband played a Dostoyevsky character named Ivan Tchek. Lytton Strachey was the wicked grandfather. He wore a beard of red wool attached over his real beard. Dora Carrington was Lytton’s grandchild. Katherine Mansfield played Florence Kaziany and Aldous Huxley was Baillol Dodd, a doctor. In his long robes of white silk, he looked like a stork on two legs. Maria Nys performed the part of Jane, the unwanted child. She had the leading part.

Maria Nys was the eldest daughter of Norbert Nys from Courtrai and Marguerite Baltus from St Trond, thriving merchant communities at opposite ends of the Flemish countryside. The Nys family owned a large and flourishing textile business and the Baltus family, in a grand way, were artists and colonial traders. They were intelligent people at Garsington Manor, cultured and well-read. They had style, elegance, charm and wit. So many men to choose from, and so many women. But whichever choice Maria made, it would always be the wrong choice. She only loved Lady Ottoline, really—or perhaps Virginia Woolf. They were doomed loves. One night, Maria locked herself in the attic and swallowed a lethal dose of chloride powder. An Oxford doctor was rushed to Garsington Manor. He pumped Maria’s stomach and saved her life. She spent the next few weeks in a nursing home and was banned from Garsington Manor thereafter.

First they lived in St Trond for a few months, then a couple of years in Florence, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in Forte dei Marmi, in Suresnes near Paris, in Sanary on the Côte d’Azur. Maria was restless and always on the move. In 1936, they came to live in expensive but shabbily furnished ground-floor chambers in Albany House in London, next door to the Royal Academy. Regular visitors were Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline, Mary Hutchinson, Raymond Mortimer, Eddy Sackville-West and Maria’s psychologist friend Dr. Charlotte Wolff, who did research in the field of the human hand and the psychology of the gesture and its relation to the sitter’s personality. Dr Wolff had set up shop at a rate of two guineas per consultation. Her first clients to have their hand palms examined under the black lamp were Virginia