A Man of Parts (13 page)

He was now busily engaged in writing short stories and humorous articles for newspapers and magazines. He didn’t have much luck with the stories, and the articles were his main source of income. Reading a novel by J.M. Barrie called
When a Man’s Single
while he was convalescing at Eastbourne in June had given him the impetus: there was a character in it who explained that the surest way to get published as a freelance journalist was to write amusing short essays on commonplace topics like pipes, umbrellas and flowerpots. He immediately dashed off a piece entitled ‘On the Art of Staying at the Seaside’, and sent it to his cousin Bertha Williams, Edith’s older sister, who worked as a secretary, to type it up for him. He submitted it to the
Pall Mall Gazette
, whose editor promptly printed it and asked for more of the same kind. In the months that followed he produced some thirty articles on subjects like ‘The Coal Scuttle’, ‘Noises of Animals’ and ‘The Art of being Photographed’. It wasn’t the most elevated form of literary composition, but it was a start – and the articles paid quite well in proportion to the time they took to write. He published them in a number of different journals, and it was necessary for him to travel up to London quite often – the house was conveniently near Sutton station – to cultivate his contacts with editors, deliver manuscripts and obtain new commissions; and although he had resigned from his position at the Correspondence College he was still associated with that institution and had occasional business with his former employer. These trips afforded numerous opportunities to meet Catherine, and to treat her to lunch at a restaurant or tea at the ABC teashop. In fine weather they would stroll in the Embankment Gardens beside Charing Cross station.

One unusually warm afternoon in November of that year, 1893, they were sitting side by side on a bench overlooking the Thames, which was at the turn of full tide, bearing its customary freight of barges, ferries, pleasure boats and rubbish down towards the sea. ‘It’s like a frontier, the river,’ he remarked. ‘See what a difference there is between the buildings on this side, and those over there.’ He pointed to the low, irregular outline of wharfs, cranes, warehouses and factories with their smoking chimneys on the south bank. ‘We have the Houses of Parliament to our right and Somerset House to our left – noble, dignified, expensive architecture, which says, “
This is London, this is history, this is where power is
.” Across the river it’s like an industrial slum – buildings thrown up and thrown together higgledy-piggledy to serve the needs of commerce without any planning, any concern for their appearance or the convenience of the people who labour in them. And beyond those buildings are real slums, tenements where people live in disgusting squalor, and beyond them again streets and streets of cramped terraced houses, or town houses divided up into apartments they were never designed for, that are not much better. Vast tracts of London are the same – the East End, for instance – but only here do the two worlds confront each other so starkly. This great ugly bridge’ – he gestured at the rusty hulk of the Charing Cross railway bridge – ‘is like an iron arm, the arm of the underprivileged masses thrusting its fist across the water into the face of the English ruling class – but it can’t quite reach – or the blow gets softened, absorbed, it becomes just a conduit for the wage slaves who flow in and out of the City every day … I’m afraid I’m losing control of my metaphor!’ He laughed and turned to look at Catherine, who was gazing at him in adoration.

‘No, it’s wonderful!’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful to listen to you talk. Mrs Wells is so lucky!’

‘Mrs Wells isn’t interested in my ideas, I’m afraid,’ he said wryly.

There followed a silence in which they both pondered the implications of this remark. He took out his pocket watch and examined it. ‘I’d better catch my train home,’ he said.

‘Give Mrs Wells my regards,’ Catherine said.

‘Catherine …’ He used her first name now when they were alone together, though he had not invited her to call him ‘Herbert’ or ‘Bertie’. He had never much liked the former name, and the latter would have sounded just a little too familiar. She had solved this delicate problem by not addressing him by any name.

‘Yes?’ she prompted.

‘Mrs Wells doesn’t know that I meet you when I come to London.’ He saw a gleam of excitement light up her eyes. ‘I think it’s best if she doesn’t. She might misinterpret the nature of our friendship.’

‘Of course,’ said Catherine, dropping her eyes. ‘I understand.’

‘Good.’ He stood and offered his hand to help her up, but she remained seated.

‘But it’s more than friendship to me,’ she said, without looking up at him. ‘I love you.’

He sat down again, sighed, and took her hand between his two. ‘Catherine … I’m a married man.’

‘I know,’ she said, looking straight ahead as if delivering a memorised speech. ‘I don’t expect anything from you. I don’t expect you to leave your wife and run away with me. I know it’s hopeless. But I just want you to know. And now you can catch your train home.’ She burst into tears.

Then of course he had to comfort her, hold her hand again, and in the gentlest possible way tell her that although he valued her regard, and was moved by it, there was nothing to be done about it, unless they were to stop seeing each other, which he would regret.

‘Oh no, not that! It would kill me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I spoke. It was stupid of me.’

‘No, it was very sweet of you. But we must draw a line under it.’ She nodded agreement. ‘And now I really
must
catch my train,’ he said, ‘and you too.’

In the days and weeks that followed, his thoughts often reverted to this conversation, and it was a shared, unvoiced descant to their talk on subsequent occasions. He was fairly confident that if he tried to seduce Catherine he would succeed, because she simply wouldn’t have the will to resist, but the consequences would be grave. She wasn’t an Ethel Kingsmill, experienced and fancy-free, with whom one could have an enjoyable tumble with no commitment. She was a virgin – he had never met a girl who was at once so intensely virginal in manner and appearance, and so uninhibited in discussing matters like Free Love and birth control – and she would not surrender her virginity except for unconditional love. Nor could he imagine her being content to be a covert mistress, sharing her lover with a wife. No, if he were to begin an affair with her it would soon come out, and there would be a smash. So he must restrain himself, though it was difficult to resist the temptation to take the ardent young girl in his arms and kiss her when they were alone together under the trees in a park, or in some alley after dark with deep shadows between the gaslights. He gave himself credit for his restraint, being aware of how much less scrupulous other men were, especially in the literary and bohemian circles on whose edges he now moved. And sometimes, when his sense of being trapped in a marriage that would never be fulfilling grew almost unbearable, he allowed himself to speculate whether a smash wouldn’t be the best solution for all concerned. ‘
I don’t expect you to leave your wife and run away with me
,’ she had said, but the negative statement had left the trace of a positive lingering in his consciousness. Suppose he did just run away with her? Could the consequences be worse than the dreary future, foreshortened by poor health, which extended before him now, like a narrow, high-walled cul-de-sac?

At this juncture Catherine herself took the initiative: she invited Isabel and him to spend a long weekend with her mother and herself at their home in Putney, in mid-December. The invitation was sent, very correctly, to Isabel, who was nevertheless puzzled by it. ‘Why has she invited us?’ she said, passing the letter to him over the breakfast table. ‘Just to be friendly,’ he said, quickly scanning the letter, which was as much of a surprise to him as to Isabel. ‘As she says here, she hasn’t seen much of us since we moved to Sutton. And her mother would like to meet us.’ ‘What will we do there, for a whole weekend?’ Isabel asked. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Chat, eat, go for walks, play cards – what people usually do on such visits.’ ‘We never have people to stay, except for family,’ said Isabel, which was true. ‘Well, perhaps we should,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should entertain more. We’re getting into a rut.’ He presumed that Catherine had not consulted him about this invitation so that he couldn’t discourage it – but what was the motive behind it?

It became apparent in the course of that weekend that, consciously or unconsciously (he inclined to the former hypothesis), she was nudging their relationship into the open and forcing matters to a crisis and some kind of resolution. She was dressed in her most charming and elegant attire, and was the most gracious of hostesses, her mother being content to take a back seat in this respect. ‘Amy has done it all,’ Mrs Robbins would say with a self-deprecating gesture, when any compliment was offered on the food provided, or on the arrangements for the guests’ comfort. ‘It is all Amy’s doing – such a resourceful girl – I don’t know what I would do without her,’ for all the world as if she were showing off a marriageable daughter to a suitor. Then without doing or saying anything which was flagrantly revealing, Catherine conveyed by countless nuances of speech and behaviour that she was on terms of considerable intimacy with him. She revealed that she knew exactly what his tastes in food were – what kind of jam he favoured on muffins, for how many minutes he liked his eggs to be boiled, and whether he preferred white or dark meat from a roast capon. She appealed to him to confirm her remarks on various features and amenities of London, including the ABC teashop in the Strand, as if alluding to shared experience. She referred to books he had lent to her, and arguments they had had about them. Mrs Robbins did not seem to find this degree of familiarity surprising, assuming (he supposed) that she had acquired it chez Wells, but he could see that Isabel was startled and disturbed by it. He felt both alarmed and excited by the little drama that was being played out in full view of the oblivious widow. How far would Catherine dare to go, and how would Isabel react to the provocation?

When they retired to the guest bedroom that night she immediately challenged him. ‘You and that girl seem to see a good deal of each other in London.’

‘Catherine? I see her from time to time, when I have occasion to go into the College.’

‘And into the ABC teashop in the Strand?’

‘It’s near Charing Cross – we walked to the station at the same time once or twice and stopped for a cup of tea.’

‘And how long have you been calling her “Catherine”?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I can’t remember,’ he said lightly. ‘Since I’m no longer her teacher, “Miss Robbins” seemed excessively formal. Why do you ask?’

‘If you can’t see you must be blind,’ Isabel said. ‘That girl is setting her cap for you.’

He forced a laugh. ‘Don’t be silly, dear, she’s just being nice.’ It was not with any ironic intent that he invoked her own favourite adjective, but it provoked her into making some very uncomplimentary remarks about Catherine in a voice which he had to beg her to moderate in case they were overheard. She went to bed in sulky silence, and turned her back on him without saying goodnight.

The next day did nothing to improve the atmosphere. Isabel was barely polite to Catherine at breakfast and even the imperceptive Mrs Robbins seemed vaguely to sense that something was not quite right. For his part he felt obliged to disguise his wife’s ill humour by an extra effort to be amusing and sociable, but as he could only achieve this by interaction with Catherine, responding to her cues, and engaging her in badinage, the effect was to deepen Isabel’s suspicions even further. It had been agreed in advance that they would make an excursion to Kew Gardens, Catherine pointing out that the glasshouses and hothouses provided a weatherproof diversion in midwinter, but these structures, crowded with exotic trees, vines, shrubs, flowering plants and cacti, also offered an excellent opportunity for her to display her botanical knowledge in conversation with him about the peculiarities of the various species. Poor Isabel was excluded from these discussions by her ignorance of the terminology, and obliged to trail behind the two scientists in vacuous conversation with Mrs Robbins. He was conscious of Isabel’s smouldering resentment, but somehow felt helpless to do anything about it – or perhaps simply disinclined to do so. The truth was, he was enjoying himself going round the glasshouses with a pretty girl who knew what she was looking at and could talk about it, and he didn’t see why he should forgo the pleasure. It gave him a vivid sense of what it would be like to have such a woman as a mate – someone who would share your interests and concerns, help you with your work, and identify with your ambitions.

Isabel was ominously silent on their journey back to Sutton, giving monosyllabic responses, if any at all, to his remarks. But when they got home she gave vent to her feelings, declaring that she was hurt and humiliated by the way he had carried on with Catherine. He defended himself, saying she was making an unreasonable fuss.

‘Unreasonable?’ Isabel echoed. ‘Anyone can see that the girl is in love with you. The question is – are you in love with her?’

The directness of the question took him by surprise. ‘I don’t know, I haven’t allowed myself to think that thought,’ he said, but even as he spoke he realised he was not telling the truth. Catherine was the one bright spot in his grey life, his meetings with her the only thing he really looked forward to, she was the one person who never bored or irritated him. ‘I think perhaps I am,’ he said.

‘Well then,’ Isabel said. ‘You must choose between us.’

She issued the ultimatum calmly, clearly, resolutely. If he wanted to stay married to her, he must promise to cut Catherine out of his life and never see her again. Suddenly his fate, his future, which had seemed so dully predictable, was open to thrilling, dangerous new possibilities. He turned and paced the floor of the drawing room to conceal what might look like an expression of elation on his face.

‘This is very sudden, Isabel,’ he said. ‘I will have to think about it.’