A Man of Parts (14 page)

She rose from her chair. ‘Don’t keep me waiting too long,’ she said. ‘Meanwhile I’ll sleep in the spare bedroom.’

The next day he went up to a foggy London early in the morning and hung around the College until Catherine appeared. She was surprised to see him. ‘We must talk,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a lab class now,’ she said. ‘All right, I’ll wait,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll come,’ she said, sensing the urgency of his mission. ‘I’ll cut the lab.’

They walked into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and perambulated the gravel paths, as the benches were too wet to sit on. It was a grey, damp day, and moisture dripped from the leafless boughs of the trees. Barristers in black gowns and clerks carrying stacks of legal papers loomed out of the mist, stared at them as if sensing their drama, and retreated into it again. He told her of Isabel’s ultimatum.

‘So what will you do?’ she said in a scarcely audible whisper.

‘I can’t give you up,’ he said.

‘Oh!’ she murmured. She staggered and seemed about to faint.

He took her in his arms and kissed her. ‘I love you, Catherine,’ he said.

‘You know
I
love you,’ she said, leaning against him. ‘I’m so happy.’

‘But listen to me, my darling. It won’t be easy. It will be very hard. We’ll be living together “in sin” as they say.’

‘I don’t care. It will be a marriage of true minds.’

‘You’re so sweet,’ he said, and kissed her again. ‘But there will be a scandal. Your mother will be distraught.’

‘Oh, poor Mother!’ Catherine exclaimed, but it was with a kind of laugh. ‘Yes, she will be upset, but I can manage her.’

‘Your whole family will be outraged. I shall be cast as the black-hearted seducer.’

‘They can’t stop me. I’m twenty-one.’

‘You’re a wonder,’ he said, and kissed her once more.

‘Tell me what I must do,’ she said.

‘Nothing, for the moment. First I must speak to Isabel. Then I will look for rooms for us somewhere. Then – the sooner the better – you must join me. It will be best if you do it without telling your mother – slip out of the house and leave her a letter. Otherwise she will try to stop you somehow, even though you
are
twenty-one.’

‘You mean – elope?’ Her eyes shone with the romantic thrill of the word.

‘Exactly.’

‘But not till after Christmas,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear to leave Mother all alone at Christmas.’

He agreed readily, since Christmas was little more than a week away. He escorted her back to the College and then, with just a squeeze of her hand, since it would be reckless to embrace in the environs of the place, took his leave, and made his way back to Charing Cross and the train to Sutton.

Isabel accepted his decision with sad resignation. ‘I knew which of us you would choose,’ she said. ‘I was never clever enough for you, Bertie, and I never could be.’

‘It’s not that, Isabel,’ he said, when he should more truthfully have said:
It’s not only that
. ‘It’s that we are not suited to each other as lovers – you know what I’m talking about. Maybe it’s because we are cousins. I love you, I think you are a wonderful and beautiful woman, but it is more like a brother-and-sister love than married love.’

‘And you think she will satisfy you that way?’

‘I believe so, yes,’ he said.

‘Have you slept with her?’

‘Of course not!’ he said. ‘She’s not that kind of girl, anyway.’

‘Well, I hope you’ll be happy, Bertie,’ she said.

In a curious way he never admired Isabel more than in the week their marriage collapsed, and it would have been easier to part from her if she had acted the role of the wronged wife, screamed abuse at him, thrown things, hit him, and given way to hysterics. Her calm dignity in the crisis made him feel guilty at deserting her, and he was aware, from a conversation in raised voices he overheard, that Aunt Mary, so far from supporting her daughter, thought she was being a fool – ‘driving him away’, as she put it, ‘just on account of a flirtation with a silly young girl’. There were moments when his own resolution faltered, and if Isabel had responded to his speech about brother-and-sister love by stripping naked in front of him in their bedroom that night and inviting him to take her as roughly and passionately as he liked, who knew what might have happened? But it was not in her nature to do any such thing. So he went on preparing for his departure.

He came to an agreement with Isabel to remit a regular amount of money to her on a monthly basis. ‘That will do until we get a divorce,’ she said. The word ‘divorce’ had a slightly chilling effect on his spirits. ‘Must we divorce?’ he said. ‘Must we bring the law and lawyers into what is essentially a private matter of emotional cross purposes?’ ‘Don’t you want to marry the girl, then?’ she said, surprised. ‘We don’t believe in marriage as an institution,’ he said. ‘Well, I do,’ Isabel said. He registered the implication that she herself might want to re-marry one day, and found the idea so disturbing that he hastily banished it from his mind.

He went back to London to look for accommodation for himself and Catherine, and found a pair of rooms in Mornington Place, Camden Town, on the ground floor of a terrace house. It was slightly depressing to feel himself slipping back into the lodging-house era of his life, but there was no hope of renting anything better, since he would have to support Isabel as well as Catherine for the foreseeable future. In a nearby cafe he wrote a letter to Catherine giving her the address of the lodgings, and instructed her to meet him there on Boxing Day. ‘Don’t give the address to your mother, of course – tell her she can write to you at Camden Town general post office. Wear a plain ring on your ring finger and remember you are “Mrs Wells” to our landlady,’ he wrote. Even apostles of Free Love must needs be discreet. He walked back to Charing Cross past shop windows in the Strand festooned with gaudy Christmas decorations and stacked with Christmas gifts. The sound of carol singers announcing tidings of comfort and joy in Trafalgar Square carried faintly to his ears.

He could have wished the crisis in his marriage had occurred at a different season, for the approach of Christmas and its associated rituals and festivities seemed like a mocking, ironic commentary on their domestic misery. ‘Do we have to have a Christmas dinner?’ he said, appalled to see a turkey being prepared in the kitchen on Christmas Eve. ‘We’ve got to have something,’ Isabel said with a shrug, ‘so it might as well be a turkey. Mother is very fond of a turkey, she looks forward to it every year.’ ‘As long as we’re not going to pull crackers and wear paper hats,’ he said, and immediately regretted his sarcasm as Isabel flashed him a look which said very clearly, ‘
And whose fault is it that we’re having a horrible Christmas?
’ The three of them, Isabel, Aunt Mary and himself, ate the roast fowl and its usual accompaniments almost in silence, with his trunk packed and waiting in the hall for his departure next day. He was very nearly sick after the meal.

He crept out of the house early in the morning while Isabel was still asleep – or if not asleep, in bed. He couldn’t face saying goodbye to her in person, and instead left her a note, as tender as he could make it without seeming hypocritical. He pushed his trunk to the station in a wheelbarrow, and gave a porter a shilling to return it to the house. At the ticket office he asked out of habit for a ‘return to Charing Cross’ and quickly amended the request to a single fare. Once he was seated in the train, and it began to move, his spirits lifted. A new life lay ahead, full of risk, uncertainty – but also freedom! And a new female body, slim, pliant, nubile, to hold in his arms and introduce to the pleasures of physical love.

Catherine arrived in the early afternoon in a hansom cab with two valises. She looked pale and anxious, threw herself into his arms as soon as they were alone together, and clung to him as if to a mast in a storm at sea. Minutes passed before she spoke.

‘I had to tell Mother,’ she said at last. ‘I couldn’t just leave her a letter. It seemed cowardly.’

‘How did she take it?’ he asked.

‘How do you think? She sobbed and she wept and she went down on her knees and begged me not to go to you. It was terrible.’

‘My poor darling,’ he said. ‘But you came. My brave girl!’

‘She only stopped the hysterics when my cab arrived and I said I would go and get the lady next door to look after her – then she suddenly pulled herself together. It was the thought of having to explain everything to a neighbour …’

‘Better than smelling salts,’ he said with a smile, and then corrected his expression in case it seemed too flippant a remark.

‘I left her prostrate on the sofa, with a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne pressed to her forehead. Fortunately cousin Jemima and her husband are visiting for tea today, so she will have some support.’

‘Tea!’ he said. ‘What a good idea. I will ask our landlady to make us some. Tea and muffins.’

The landlady, who was German, seemed to have guessed that he and Catherine were very recently married, if married at all, and it probably took no great discernment on her part to draw this inference from their self-conscious behaviour. She was however well disposed towards them – almost too well, in fact, serving the tea and muffins, and later their supper, with many significant smirks and nods and gestures. She had a way of looking gloatingly at them and rubbing her hands together that was almost indecent, and he could see Catherine shrinking uneasily from her attention. He had a sense that if Mrs Scholtze could have infiltrated their bedroom unobserved she would have sprinkled rose petals on their mattress.

He had in fact already decided that he would not attempt to consummate their union that first night. Catherine had suffered enough stress that day, and he wanted to avoid a repetition of the debacle of his wedding night with Isabel. Besides, his need was not so urgent as it had been on that occasion when he released the pent-up desire of years. After Mrs Scholtze had carried away the supper trays, bidding them an almost visibly salivating goodnight, he turned the key in the door, and Catherine, hearing the click of the lock, looked at him with a kind of tense solemnity, as if steeling herself for an ordeal. He embraced her and said, ‘I think, dearest girl, we should not become lovers in the fullest sense tonight. Let us wait until you are more rested and relaxed. Tonight, let us just sleep in each other’s arms. Would you like that?’

‘Oh yes!’ she said instantly, relief flooding her face.

Their accommodation was the original dining room of the house, divided by folding doors left permanently closed to create a living room in the front half and a bedroom in the back. He allowed her to undress and get into bed before he joined her. A single candle on the chest of drawers dimly lit the room. Catherine, her hair down and spread out over the pillow, wearing a nightdress buttoned up to the neck, smiled timidly at him, and then turned her head to stare modestly at the wall when he began to undress. He pulled on his nightshirt before he removed his trousers and drawers, blew out the candle and got into bed beside her. When he drew her into his arms she snuggled up to him with a contented sigh and if she felt his erection through their nightwear she did not shrink away from it. Perhaps she didn’t know what it was. Only when he began to stroke her back through the thin fabric of her nightdress, and allowed his hand to slide down and cup her buttock did she stiffen as if startled. But nobody, he reflected, had touched her there since she was a baby. He removed his hand and placed it in a more decorous position and, obviously exhausted by the emotions and exertions of the day, she soon fell asleep, leaving him to plot the manner in which he would, in due course, possess her. A pleasure postponed was a pleasure enhanced.

In the event it was postponed longer than he anticipated. The next day Catherine could not resist going to the Camden Town post office to see if her mother had already sent a message to her there. Indeed she had, but as Catherine turned away from the counter with the envelope in her hand she saw cousin Jemima’s husband, Reginald, watching her with a triumphant expression. She had been ambushed. She hurried from the post office, but he caught up with her outside and demanded to be taken to their lodgings to confront ‘the bounder who has seduced you’. ‘He didn’t seduce me. I went to him of my own free will,’ she said. ‘If there was any seducing it was mine,’ she added boldly. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ Reginald said. ‘Your mother is beside herself, she can’t stop weeping. We are seriously concerned for her sanity – read for yourself.’ He pointed to the letter in her hand. ‘I will read it in my own good time,’ she said. ‘Now kindly leave me alone, or I will call a constable.’ She turned her back on him and walked swiftly away, and he did not attempt to detain her. All this she told her ‘seducer’ on her return to the house in Mornington Place, laughing and crying as she did so.

He praised her courage and called her his ‘heroine’. He proposed they should go to bed immediately and make love. But she said she was too upset by the incident, and her perturbation was increased by reading the tear-stained letter from her mother.

‘She says she will kill herself.’

‘Nonsense. Just emotional blackmail,’ he said.

‘I know, but I must see for myself,’ she said.

Catherine went immediately to Putney, and sent a telegram later that day: ‘
MOTHER POORLY STOP AM STAYING WITH HER FOR ONE OR TWO DAYS STOP TRUST ME STOP ALL LOVE CATHERINE
.’

In spite of the concluding words of the message he was apprehensive that once she was back in the family home pressure would be put on her to stay there and give him up, especially if her relatives discovered she was still
virgo intacta
. He began to regret that he had been so chivalrously considerate of her maiden sensibility, for he would look, and certainly feel, very silly indeed if he found himself all alone in a shabby London lodging house, having deserted his wife without securing his mistress. These misgivings turned to alarm the next day when Reginald and his brother Sidney called on him, having somehow obtained the Mornington Place address. They were rather large and intimidating men, dressed like undertakers in top hats and black overcoats with black kid gloves, and they issued vague threats of legal action against him for abduction or enticement if he did not sign a document promising not to contact Catherine again. He laughed in their faces and told them, with more confidence than he felt, that nothing could keep himself and Catherine apart. It was a relief when she returned next day and learned with indignation of her relatives’ intervention, of which she knew nothing. ‘It’s outrageous,’ she said. ‘They had no right to interfere.’ ‘They didn’t get this address from you then?’ he asked. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Uncle Reginald must have followed me here from the Camden Town post office that day. Did you think I would tell them?’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘not willingly, but I thought they might have bullied you.’ ‘I wouldn’t have told them if they had used thumbscrews,’ she said, and she looked at that moment like some virgin martyr in an old painting calmly defying her tormentors. He was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for her steadfastness and with relief that she had returned to him and he folded her in his arms. ‘Tonight we will be lovers,’ he whispered, and she murmured her assent.