A Man of Parts (16 page)

He was completely unprepared for the emotional effect of the meeting. It was partly the setting – she seemed so at ease in the country, caring for her chickens, taking her favourites in her arms and stroking their feathers, calling them by their names, and then leading him round the garden, pointing out the vegetables and flowers she had planted, stooping to pull up a weed or stretching to deadhead a rose bush. She seemed more beautiful and blooming than ever, and he realised that this pastoral world was where she really belonged, not in the dingy, soiled streets of London where he had courted her. She bore him no resentment for deserting her nor jealousy towards Jane, and it struck him that very few women in her situation would have been so magnanimous. They spent a wonderful day together, in relaxed and friendly conversation. She had read most of his books and stories published over the past few years and was full of simple, unfeigned admiration for them. He could hardly believe it, but he felt himself falling in love with her all over again, and possessed with the mad idea of reclaiming her, reversing everything that had happened. He deliberately left it too late to cycle home before sunset so that she had to invite him to stay the night, and after Aunt Bella had retired to bed he tried to persuade her to make love. She stared at him with wide-eyed astonishment.

‘What
do
you mean, Bertie? Have you forgotten that I never pleased you in that way?’

‘It was all my fault. I was a clumsy, impatient lover then. It would be different now. I could make up to you for those unhappy nights. Let me, please.’

‘But how can we?’ she said simply.

He could hear Aunt Bella moving about in her bedroom upstairs, and thought that was perhaps the reason for her hesitation. ‘We can go out into your barn,’ he said. ‘I saw a heap of straw there to lie on. Or out into the fields for that matter – it’s a dry night.’

‘I think you’ve lost your senses, Bertie,’ she said firmly, like a mother speaking to a wilful child. ‘We’re divorced, and you’ve married again, and that’s an end of it.’

She made up a bed for him in a spare room, where he slept restlessly and woke early. He tried to creep out without disturbing her, just as he had left the house in Sutton that miserable Boxing Day morning, but she heard him and came downstairs to the kitchen and insisted on making him a breakfast. ‘You can’t cycle all that way on an empty stomach,’ she said sensibly. He gave her the cheque he had intended to leave on the table, for an amount which she said was too much, but he persuaded her to accept it. They embraced and he wept in her arms. She stood at the door of the farmhouse and waved to him as he rode away, indifferent to the beauty of the dawn sky and the milky mist rising from the fields, feeling drained and empty, convinced that he had lost all chance of lasting happiness in his life and that it was all his own fault.

In time he appreciated how sane and sensible Isabel had been, and what a moral and emotional mess they would have found themselves in if she had yielded to his pleas. But five or six years later he heard that she had married again; had been married in fact for a year. He presumed she had kept the information from him out of an empathetic sense that it would upset him, which it certainly did. For several days he was gripped by a frenzy of jealousy. The idea of another man possessing that body, and perhaps summoning the joyful response that he had failed to awaken, was intolerable. He destroyed every trace of Isabel that he possessed, every letter, every photograph, every memento of any kind, made a holocaust of them in the garden of Spade House, watched by his puzzled two-year-old son, and from a window by Jane, who knew very well what he was doing and why, but had the sense to say nothing.

Another few years later, when he was deeply involved with Amber Reeves, he met Isabel again and found that the ‘sexual fixation’ had vanished, this time for good. From then onwards he was able to relate to Isabel on easy, friendly terms in which there was not a scintilla of jealousy or desire. She and Jane got on well together, and Isabel stayed with them from time to time at Spade House and later at Easton Glebe. She used to help Jane on these occasions with typing his manuscripts and filing his papers. It pleased him to see their heads bent together over these tasks. It seemed a tribute to their maturity and civilised good sense that the three of them could calmly enjoy each other’s company after all the emotional storms of the past.

– It’s interesting that you employed several of your women as secretaries or amanuenses after you no longer had sexual relations with them. As well as Isabel, and Jane of course, there was Amber who contributed to the
Outline of History
in the twenties and to
The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind
in the thirties, and you paid Dorothy Richardson to proofread your books for many years …

– In most cases it was an act of friendship, to help them out financially.

– But it also allowed you to feel that in a way you still owned them, they were your pensioners, like elder concubines in the harem
.

– That’s a ridiculous suggestion! Jane acted as my secretary from the very beginning. She made it her occupation, and she got satisfaction from it. Dorothy really needed the money in the thirties, when her sales as a novelist were declining. I paid her fifty pounds to go over the manuscript of
Experiment in Autobiography
like an editor, and she was jolly glad of it. Amber was delighted to be published in those books. As to Isabel, I helped her financially all her life, one way or another, although when she remarried I wasn’t legally obliged to give her a penny. She helped Jane when she was staying with us as a way of expressing her gratitude.

– Still, one can’t help seeing a kind of pattern in your life. Once you have possessed a woman, married her, or made her your mistress, you tire of her more or less quickly; her very availability makes her less satisfying sexually, so you seek out another, or several others, for excitement, passion, release. Isabel became desirable again when she was no longer married to you
.

– I’ll be the first to admit that I need novelty and variety in my sexual life. In all aspects of life, actually. There’s something innately restless about my temperament. I called it the ‘fugitive impulse’ in the autobiography: as soon as I feel settled in a place or a relationship, I begin to feel bound and constrained, and have an urge to escape.
That
rather than sexual frustration was basically why I left Isabel and ran off with Jane, and when I saw Isabel again years later, beautiful and blooming, it struck me like a thunderbolt that our unsatisfactory sex life had been all
my
fault, because I was such an inexperienced and insensitive lover at the time, and I felt an overwhelming desire to make amends, to reverse the past. An absurd idea, but not basically a selfish one. And I didn’t tire of Jane as a lover because we got married. We were sexually incompatible from the beginning, and eventually we had to face the fact. We could have separated and divorced, but in every other way we were perfectly suited to each other and very happy in each other’s company. So we came to an understanding. We would remain married, Jane would remain my beloved wife, the caring mother of my children, efficient mistress of my household, gracious hostess to my friends, the indispensable manager of my business affairs, and I would have occasional discreet affairs with other women,
passades
as the French call them – passing fancies. It was a very civilised solution.

– Yes, so you say in the autobiography. But it wasn’t quite as cut and dried as that, was it? There was the letter she wrote to you after the birth of Gip, for instance. A love letter
.

– I don’t remember it.

– Yes you do. The one she signed ‘Your shameless wife in love.’ You kept it. You know where it is
.

He goes, rather reluctantly, to a filing cabinet where correspondence and other documents relating to Jane are stored in chronological order, and finds the letter without difficulty. It is undated, but headed ‘Spade House’. He reads it.

– ‘
Dearest, dearest, dearest, dearest – do not forget me – do not fail me. My dear love do not doubt. Do believe in me a little – till I make you quite believe – till I can show you. Oh, but I love you and I am just longing for the time to come. My very dear. Your (shameless) wife in love
.’

– That doesn’t sound like a woman who has come to an ‘understanding’ with her promiscuous husband
.

– No, we hadn’t got to that stage yet.

– And it doesn’t sound like a woman who was frigid. What do you think she meant by ‘shameless’?

– I don’t know. I wondered at the time.

He received the letter at the post office in Ramsgate about three weeks after Gip’s birth. Jane’s labour had been long and painful, the birth difficult, and he had found the experience profoundly upsetting. This, then, was how the act of love, one of the most exquisite sensations in life, fulfilled Nature’s blind purpose: in blood and sweat and cries of pain. He was not present at the birth of course, but he heard Jane’s cries from his study, and he saw the evidence of her ordeal as soon as he was admitted to the bedroom: the bloodstained sheets in the laundry basket, and Jane’s pale, exhausted face against the pillow, her hair lank and dark with perspiration. The doctor congratulated him and the nurse beamed as she cradled the newborn infant under his nose. He felt a thrill of wonder at the sight of his son, and a wave of tenderness for the wife who had borne him, and he kissed her reverently on the forehead. But almost at once a different reaction set in. Everything in the household revolved around the new inhabitant. His feeding, his excretions, his sleeping, his crying, were subjects of inexhaustible interest and concern, from the discussion of which he himself was largely excluded. The infant’s daily bath was a ritual of almost religious ecstasy for the group of ministering women, which soon included his mother-in-law. The home he had designed as a haven for productive work and civilised leisure was suddenly transformed into something between a crèche and a hospital. The ‘fugitive impulse’ cut in. He felt an irresistible urge to escape the suffocating atmosphere of child-centred domesticity – to jump on his bike and pedal away as far and as fast as he could manage.

Jane was not well pleased when he told her he was going off on a cycling trip just a few days after she had given birth. Where? When? For how long? she asked. He said he would visit his parents to tell them they were grandparents, and after that he didn’t know quite where he would go or when he would return. He just knew he had to get away, probably for two or three weeks. Jane sulked. She said she didn’t understand how he could leave her without reason at such a time, nor would her mother, nor would the servants. It would be very embarrassing and humiliating for her. He said he was sorry, but he had to get away, and he did, the very next morning. When he came to her room where she was resting in bed, to say goodbye, she did not speak, and when he tried to kiss her she turned her face away and the kiss landed on her ear. He put a couple of books and a minimum of clothing and toilet utensils into the pannier bags of his bicycle and set off on the open road with a feeling of enormous relief. After visiting his parents at Liss in Hampshire, where they now lived in a cottage superior to the one near Up Park, he explored Sussex and Kent, avoiding main roads, favouring quiet lanes through pleasant countryside, staying at rural inns or seaside guesthouses. He wrote postcards home at frequent intervals, giving Jane the name of his next port of call, and at these stopping-places he collected a series of letters from her, the tone of which quickly changed from cool to warm. It was clear that she was in a growing panic, fearing that the ill feeling provoked by his sudden departure might harden into a permanent estrangement.

Sexual relations between them had been suspended for some time because of Jane’s pregnancy, an abstinence made easier because he normally slept in the dressing room that adjoined their bedroom in Spade House. He often woke early with new ideas for some work in progress spinning in his head, and he could turn on the light, put on a dressing gown, and write at his desk without disturbing Jane, sometimes working through till breakfast time. When he felt in the mood for intercourse, which might be provoked by something he had read, or written himself, during the day, or by an encounter with some desirable but unattainable female, or if he were made aware by a glance or remark by Jane that a considerable time had passed since he had last demonstrated his love in this fashion, he would say when she prepared to go to bed, ‘Shall I come to your room tonight?’ and she always responded with a demure smile and a nod, unless it was the wrong time of the month. He decided that the upper-class custom of spouses having separate bedrooms had much to recommend it, not only for the freedom it gave him to work in the small hours, but because it retained a certain aura of romance for the sexual act which the habitual proximity of the marital bed tended to dissipate. The exercise of conjugal rights became a kind of assignation. It gave him a frisson of excitement, and guaranteed an erection, as he undressed in his bedroom, to think of Jane lying under the sheets in the room next door, freshly bathed and perfumed, waiting for him. He sensed that she also found the arrangement congenial, and that now she feared he might never come through the door that separated their rooms again.
Oh, but I love you and I am just longing for the time to come … Your (shameless) wife in love
. Sitting on the bed in his Ramsgate lodging house, he was both aroused and puzzled by this letter. She had never spoken to him in such language face to face. Obviously she wanted to say that she was looking forward to resuming sexual relations. But what did she mean by ‘shameless’? That she would eagerly co-operate in all the variations he had vainly urged her to try in the past?

When he returned home there was an emotional reconciliation, but it was some time before Jane intimated that she had fully recovered from the physical effects of the difficult birth and was ready to receive him in her bed once again. He for his part was solicitously tender and gentle in his lovemaking at first, and all was well, but when he became more adventurous she was as unhappy as always. Either the ‘shameless’ letter, and all it promised, had been written under the pressure of emotion which evaporated as soon as he returned home, or she had simply meant by the epithet that she was not ashamed to grovel before him to retain his love. So they resumed tepid conventional intercourse, and it was not long before she conceived again, both of them having agreed that little George Philip, now known familiarly as ‘Gip’, ought to have a brother or sister. It was a brother, as it turned out, and in due course the boys proved excellent playmates.