A Man of Parts (17 page)

– And you made another little dash for freedom about that time, didn’t you? You went off on a walking tour in the Swiss Alps with Graham Wallas for a month, just before Frank was born
.

– Well, as Jane’s time approached we both became more tense and anxious, remembering what a hard time she had had with Gip. I thought it would be better if I cleared off – relieved my ‘fugitive impulse’ in advance as it were – and came back in time for the birth. It worked out very well. I had a great holiday and returned home fit and happy, ready to face all the domestic upheaval of a new infant.

– Having dallied with one or two compliant chambermaids en route
.

– Yes. Wallas was very shocked. He reproached me for my loose behaviour. Like many of the older Fabians he was liberal in principle but essentially puritanical at heart.

– Did you tell Jane about the chambermaids?

– I don’t think so, no.

– So when did you and she arrive at your ‘very civilised solution’?

– It’s hard to say. Although I sometimes referred to it as a ‘treaty’, we didn’t sit down at a table one day and hammer out an agreement. It wasn’t like that. Probably I said something after we’d had a tiff, or more likely I wrote her a letter, when I was away from home – we often communicated more frankly in letters than in conversation – about how much I loved and depended on her but that I needed other women from time to time, for purely physical relief, and I didn’t want to deceive her about it, but I didn’t want to rub her nose in it either, so couldn’t we just accept that, and enjoy the other wonderful things in our marriage? She didn’t agree immediately, but she didn’t reject the idea either, and we came back to the topic from time to time. One evening – a summer evening, it was still light, I remember, with a sunset glow on the garden – we were sitting quietly in the drawing room at Spade House, I was reading and she was doing some sewing, and she suddenly said, as if we had just been discussing the matter, though in fact it hadn’t been mentioned between us for some time, ‘I wouldn’t mind as long I know what you’re doing, who the women are that you’re going with. But you have to be completely honest with me. I hate the idea of being deceived. I hate the idea of other people knowing and pitying me or laughing at me behind my back.’ Of course I was very glad to agree. It was a great relief to both of us – I’d only concealed my
passades
out of a misguided wish to spare her feelings. I think that was the turning point. After that relations were much easier between us.

– Who was the first woman you told Jane about?

– I think it must have been Dorothy. But that was a special case – because she was Jane’s friend.

Dorothy Richardson had been a close friend of Jane’s at school – Southborough House in Putney, an excellent institution, to judge from these two alumnae, with an unusually liberal curriculum. They had lost touch with each other since leaving it, but once Jane was comfortably settled in Heatherlea she felt an impulse to resume contact and wrote to Dorothy suggesting they meet in a teashop in London (the same ABC in fact where his relationship with Jane had effectively begun). From this meeting she returned home full of excitement at the reunion, and of the story Dorothy had to tell, which Jane related to him that evening as soon as she had taken off her hat and coat. ‘Poor Dorothy! Her father was suddenly ruined a few years ago, had to declare bankruptcy – just like Daddy, only instead of her father it was her mother who fell into a frightful depression – and cut her throat with a bread knife while Dorothy, who was looking after her, was out for a few minutes. Can you imagine anything more horrific? But she seems to have got over it. Anyway, I’ve invited her to lunch next Sunday. You’ll enjoy meeting her. She’s quite clever, I think. Reads a lot.’

‘My books?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think so, but she’s heard of you of course. She was quite impressed that I’m married to you.’

Dorothy duly appeared the following Sunday and revealed herself to be not only quite clever, but also pretty in a rather stiff, doll-like way, with a solemn countenance that would occasionally light up with a delightful dimpled smile. She called Jane ‘Amy’ which was how she had been known at school, though her nickname there was apparently ‘Perky’. He chortled at this revelation, and Jane chided Dorothy for letting it out – ‘Now he’ll tease me to death,’ she said. ‘No I won’t, Perky,’ he said, eliciting a dimpled smile from Dorothy. He was amused to observe how Jane enjoyed showing off her new house and her new husband to her old school chum, and that Dorothy was clearly much more interested in the husband than in the house. She had evidently looked into his work since the meeting with Jane, and made some intelligent references to it without fawning. She confessed an ambition to ‘write’ herself one day, but earned her living as receptionist to a dental practice in Harley Street.

The visit was a success, enjoyed by all three of them for different reasons, and Dorothy never declined an invitation to repeat it. After they moved to Sandgate she was often a weekend guest at Spade House, sometimes alone and sometimes as one of a large party, listening to the literary and political chatter of the other visitors with a faintly sceptical air and occasionally making a deflating contribution of her own. He was impressed by her refusal to be awed in the presence of loquacious luminaries like Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Frank Harris and Fordie Hueffer, and he only gradually came to realise that this self-confidence was based on an impregnable egotism. She was insatiably interested in herself, in her own consciousness and her own identity, and relegated the rest of the universe in importance beneath that supreme subject.

She was clearly fascinated by him, but it was a fascination in which there appeared to be as much antagonism as attraction. She argued with him constantly, attacking his faith in science and progress, which she regarded as lacking a personal and spiritual dimension. She herself had no consistent ideological allegiance – she attended Fabian meetings occasionally, had an anarchist male friend, an exiled Russian Jew called Benjamin Grad, whose pronouncements she sometimes quoted, and for a time invoked against himself the arguments of an idealist Cambridge metaphysician called McTaggart. She wrote him long letters candidly exploring her thoughts and her reading, to which he replied briefly but promptly, encouraging her to develop her ideas into essays or stories. Underneath these intellectual exchanges there was a sexual cat-and-mouse game in progress of which both were aware, though she seemed unwilling to admit it. Whenever he took advantage of their being alone together to lay a hand on hers or put an arm around her waist she always calmly detached herself and continued their conversation without interrupting its flow. He was not used to meeting this kind of resistance from women who were obviously attracted to him, and it spurred him to greater efforts at seduction.

He thought a propitious moment had come early in 1905 when they were walking on the Folkestone Leas one afternoon, having left Jane at home looking after Gip, who had a temperature. They were caught by a sudden rainstorm funnelling up the Channel from the west, and took refuge in a shelter looking out over the sea. It was not the season for visitors and they were all alone. He turned the conversation to the subject of sexual relations, or as the pundits of press and pulpit often referred to it, the Sex Question. She, typically, turned it to her own sex question.

‘I’m a virgin, you see,’ she said with startling candour.

‘Really, Dorothy? You surprise me,’ he said, though in fact she didn’t. ‘That young man, Benjamin, you go about with – I thought perhaps you were lovers.’

‘No, Benjamin won’t sleep with me unless I marry him, and I don’t want to be married.’

‘You offered to sleep with him without being married, and he refused?’ She nodded. ‘Benjamin seems to be a very unusual kind of anarchist,’ he said. ‘A very unusual young man of any persuasion, come to that, to turn down a girl like you.’

‘Yes, he is,’ she said. ‘He spent a year in a mental asylum once.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Then you are quite right not to marry him.’ He put his arm round her shoulder and was encouraged when she did not shrug it off.

‘It’s not that I desperately want to have sex with him, quite the contrary. We get along very well without it. But I sometimes wonder if I ought to have the experience if I’m going to be a writer.’ She turned her head and looked at him solemnly. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you should,’ he said.

He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. She did not resist or try to turn her face away but she did not respond either. She accepted the kiss thoughtfully, like someone being offered a new kind of food, letting the taste linger on her palate while she decided if she really liked it.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t – not with you. Jane is my friend.’

‘Jane won’t mind. We believe in Free Love,’ he said.

Dorothy thought for a moment, and then stood up. ‘No, it wouldn’t feel right. It’s stopped raining – shall we go back?’

But some weeks later he received a letter from her addressed to him at the Reform, saying that she had just come back from a wonderful holiday in Switzerland and it would be nice to meet some time soon in London. There could be only one reason for her to write to him at his club – to prevent Jane from seeing her telltale handwriting on the envelope. Dorothy had evidently changed her mind.

He took her to dinner at a restaurant in Soho which Frank Harris had recommended, with private rooms that could be accessed without going through the main dining room. You rang a bell beside a plain door in a side street, and a waiter led you up a flight of stairs into a room with a small round table laid for two, a decanter and glasses glinting under a chandelier, red velvet curtains drawn over the windows, and a divan in the shadow beyond the circle of light for post-prandial relaxation …

– Dorothy described that room in her novel,
Dawn’s Left Hand
.

– And very accurately, considering it was written twenty-five years later. She must have made notes as soon as she got home that night.

– She described you both undressing after dinner, you humming tunelessly to yourself as you folded your clothes, and her finding she didn’t like your body when she saw you naked. ‘
His body was not beautiful. She could find nothing to adore … with the familiar clothes, something of his essential self seemed to have departed
…
’

– Yes, I could see that in her face. It put me off my stroke, I have to say. I mean, I never flattered myself I looked like Michelangelo’s David in the nude, but at least I was better endowed. It really put me off the way she stared at me. She seemed extraordinarily self-possessed for a woman who was about to lose her virginity. Standing there, stark naked, with her hands at her side, showing no embarrassment, no shyness, no desire. It was like a cold douche, just when you don’t need one. For the first time in such a situation I feared I would be impotent. And she seemed to sense this, because she softened and came over and put her arms round me, and then she said a very strange thing.

– ‘My little babe just born
.’ It’s in the novel. What did she mean by it?

– I’ve no idea. It’s clear from the book that she didn’t know either. I simply repeated it to her, and then I said, ‘Let’s just lie down in each other’s arms,’ and that’s what we did. We pulled a rug over ourselves and slept for a couple of hours, and then we dressed and went out to an Italian cafe she knew and had coffee.

Later, as he put her into a cab, and pressed a sovereign into her hand for the fare, he said, ‘Come to Sandgate next weekend.’ She said, ‘I can’t, I’m going to my sister’s,’ so he said, ‘Then come the weekend after,’ and she agreed. He knew he had to act as soon as possible to make up for the evening’s debacle, and he was mindful of the conversation he had recently had with Jane, when she said he must be open with her about the women he went with. He hadn’t put it to the test yet, but it had occurred to him while he was drinking coffee with Dorothy, scarcely attending to her chatter with the
padrone
, that this might be an opportunity to do so.

At home the next day, as they were sitting in the drawing room after dinner, he with his newspaper, Jane with her sewing, he said: ‘I saw Dorothy in town yesterday. I treated her to a meal.’

‘Did you? How is she?’

‘Very well. She had a wonderful holiday recently, in the Bernese Oberland.’

‘Oh, good. She needed one, I think. She was looking jaded last time she was here. She’ll soon look like a real old maid.’

‘Well, that’s the thing. She’s tired of being a virgin.’

Jane raised her head from the sock she was darning and stared at him. ‘She told you that?’

‘Her Russian boy-friend seems a spineless fellow, he won’t oblige. She wants me to make love to her.’

‘And do you want to?’

‘Yes,’ he said, simply. ‘You must know there’s always been a kind of sexual attraction between us …’

‘Of course. She’s obsessed with you.’

‘But she would never admit it. It’s always been a barrier between us, an irritant, a source of frustration – it’s why we’re continually arguing, the argument is sublimated sex. It’s why there’s always a sort of tension in the air when she’s here. I’d like to get rid of it.’

‘Then you’d better,’ Jane said, and bowed her head over the sock.

After a pause, he said: ‘I invited her down for the weekend after next.’

‘That’s all right,’ Jane said calmly. ‘We’ve nothing arranged for that weekend.’

‘Good,’ he said, and turned the page of his newspaper.

Nothing more was said between them on the subject, nor did he say anything explicit to Dorothy when she arrived on the appointed Saturday. But the three of them were all aware of what was going to happen. They went through their usual routine of a walk after lunch and book chat over tea, but it seemed to him that they moved as if in a trance and spoke by rote. After dinner the two women played piano duets for him, as they often did, and he lounged in his armchair musing on their curious relationship. They enjoyed scoring points off each other, and making sharp little jokes at each other’s expense. Dorothy teased Jane for being too much the fussy housewife, forever plumping cushions and straightening curtains and re arranging flowers in vases, while Jane criticised Dorothy for her dreaminess, her impracticality, her passive acceptance of a dead-end job. He always felt they did not really like each other, probably never had even as schoolgirls, yet there was a symbiosis between them which was stronger than liking, and it was epitomised by the spectacle of them playing the piano together, concentrating, co-operating, for his pleasure. He felt like a pasha in his seraglio, who had summoned his two favourite wives to entertain him, and for a while he indulged in a fantasy of enjoying both of them simultaneously that night, though it would be hard to imagine two less likely participants in an orgy.