A Man of Parts (18 page)

What followed was done quietly and discreetly. He bade Jane goodnight in her room, kissed her gravely, and retired to his own bedroom where he read for an hour. Then, wearing only a bathrobe, he went softly along the corridor to the other end of the house where the guest bedroom was situated. The door was unlocked, as he expected. He entered quietly and shut it behind him. ‘It’s cold in here,’ he said. ‘You must have a window wide open.’ She said nothing, but showed she was awake by making a slight noise as she moved in the bed. It was almost pitch dark in the room but he did not attempt to turn on a light or pull back the curtains – he had no intention of letting her see him naked this time. He felt his way towards the bed, and dropped his robe to the floor. As his eyes accommodated to the darkness he saw her lift the bedclothes, and he got in beside her. She was naked too, and lying on a towel – a thoughtful touch, if a shade clinical, like a patient laid out on an operating table. He did what he had come to do, and it was soon accomplished. It was not ecstatic, and he had not expected it to be. He got out of bed and put on his robe. ‘Goodnight, my dear,’ he said, and stooped to kiss her. ‘I’m not here,’ she said, speaking for the first time. ‘You’ll come back,’ he said, ‘and it will be better. Don’t attach any importance to these preliminaries.’

In fact they never slept together in Spade House again. They met a couple of times in London in a seedy hotel near Paddington station, but Dorothy always seemed uncertain whether she really wanted an affair with him. Then she moved from her lodgings to share a one-bedroom flat with a member of a women’s club she had joined, a formidable forty-year-old spinster called Miss Moffat, as if to ensure that she couldn’t receive him in her own bed, and he began to lose patience with her. The only positive thing that had come out of the episode was that his understanding with Jane now seemed to be on a firmer footing.

– But you didn’t tell her about
every
woman after that …

– Well, no, I didn’t. But if it was anyone she knew, or might meet, or might hear about, I told her. It made a great difference. I think she felt empowered by knowing, in a curious way. In due course she accepted my having long-term mistresses as well as
passades
, in fact even gave me advice about them, and wrote friendly letters to them, and sent them presents. Some people found that quite extraordinary, extraordinarily tolerant or extraordinarily depraved, but it was consistent with the Free Love principle on which we eloped together.

– So it was a kind of open marriage, but open only on your side
.

– Jane didn’t want to have lovers.

– Are you sure? She wrote some short stories about women trapped in unsatisfying marriages, longing for romantic adventure. You collected them in
The Book of Catherine Wells
.
Could we have a look at that?

He goes to the bookcase and takes down
The Book of Catherine Wells. With an introduction by her husband, H.G. Wells
, published in 1928 a year after her death from cancer. Chatto & Windus made a nice job of it. The three photographic portraits of Catherine at different stages of her life are not printed on the page, but mounted like photos in a private album. How beautiful she was!

– But how sad she always looked in photographs, even snapshots. Do you have a single one of her smiling?

– I don’t know.

– You would if you had one
.

– I remember her smiling and laughing in life. That’s enough for me.

– This late story of hers called ‘In a Walled Garden’ – an interesting echo there of your own story, ‘The Door in the Wall’, only in her case the garden is a prison, not a paradise. The heroine is married to a dull, egotistical poet and man of letters called Bray, who changes her first name to suit his taste, just as you changed Catherine to Jane, and who doesn’t satisfy her sexually—

– But that’s because he made love to her ‘delicately and reverently’ – hardly my style.

– Well, isn’t that typical of the way writers conceal their autobiographical sources? Simply reverse the facts: instead of a too rough lover, a too timid one. Jane learned that trick from you. And anyway it doesn’t affect the fundamental
donnée
of the story, that the heroine is sexually unfulfilled, so that when a handsome young photographer comes to take a portrait of her husband, who is absent, she falls instantly in love with him. ‘
Mate of mine! Found! Found!
’ she thinks. She resolves to take the initiative next time he calls, but he doesn’t return, and she never sees him again. So she decides to seek fulfilment in motherhood instead. The last line is: ‘
But it was not Bray’s child she desired
.’

– Yes, well, I admit when I read that story I felt a twinge of discomfort. It was published in a magazine with a very small circulation, but I could imagine it being passed around among my friends – and enemies – and being chuckled over. ‘
Jane getting her own back, I see!’ ‘H.G. getting a taste of his own medicine
.’ That sort of thing. Of course I didn’t say anything to Jane about that aspect of the story. She showed the first draft to me in manuscript, as she always did, and I confined myself to purely literary comments. I remember questioning ‘
Mate of mine! Found! Found!
’ A bit out of character, I felt, a bit too D.H. Lawrence, but she stuck to it.

– You could hardly have complained about the content, considering how often you portrayed unsatisfactory marriages in your novels, some of the wives bearing a resemblance to Jane in various ways
.

– Absolutely. She never complained to me about that either. It was part of our understanding that I was free to make use of our lives in fiction. If you’re writing about contemporary life there’s really no alternative but to draw on your own. But that story, and a few of the others, did make me think, rather sadly, especially after her death, that there was an unfulfilled hankering for romance in Jane – or rather Catherine. That was why I called the book,
The Book of Catherine Wells
.

– Catherine was the woman with unfulfilled romantic longings. The part of herself she suppressed when she accepted your renaming of her as ‘Jane
’.

– That’s a somewhat prejudicial way of putting it. I don’t think she had a libido to suppress. As I say here, in my introduction to the stories: ‘
Desire is there, but it is not active aggressive desire. It is a desire for beauty and sweet companionship. There is a lover, never seen, never verified, elusively at the heart of this desire. Frustration haunts this desire
.’

– But suppose it had been more active and aggressive. Suppose it hadn’t been frustrated indefinitely. Suppose she
had
taken a lover?

– Then I would have gone mad with jealousy.

– You admit it
.

– Othello would have paled in comparison.

– In spite of your belief in Free Love
.

– I believe in it as an ideal to aspire to. Unfortunately it’s always liable to be undone by jealousy. I preached against jealousy in many of my books, but I could never entirely free myself from it. On occasion it has totally possessed me – when Isabel remarried, for instance, and when Moura went back to see Gorky in Russia in ’34 and lied to me about it – but Jane never gave me any provocation of that kind.

– Very fortunate for you
.

– It was.

Strangely, the only moment when he feared to discover some infidelity on Jane’s part occurred a few weeks after she died, in October 1927, and after her final illness had brought them together more closely than for many years. He was in the south of France, where he spent a good part of the year in those days, when he received a telegram from Frank telling him that Jane had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. She had been unwell for some time, but made light of it and, typically, had booked herself in for an exploratory operation without telling him, so as not to be a bother. He came home to Easton Glebe immediately, and spent the next five months with her as she slowly declined, admiring her fortitude, her patience, her lack of self-pity, and doing his best to care for her. She wished only to survive to see Frank married, but sadly she died on the day before the one appointed for the wedding, to be held at Easton as the bride was a local girl. The couple were married privately, the wedding celebration was cancelled, and there was a funeral a week later to which he invited a large number of friends, and at which he made an exhibition of himself, blubbing noisily as a friend, the classical scholar T.E. Page, read a eulogy which he had composed but did not trust himself to deliver. ‘
We have come together in this chapel today
,’ it began, ‘
to greet for the last time our very dear friend, Catherine Wells. We meet in great sadness, for her death came in the middle season of her life when we could all have hoped for many more years of her brave and sweet presence among us. She died a victim of cancer, that still unconquered enemy of human happiness. For months her strength faded, but not her courage nor her kindness. To the end she faced her destiny with serenity and with a gentle unfailing smile for those who ministered to her
.’

For several years past she had rented a small flat in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Museum, as a kind of haven, a place that was only for her. Neither he nor any other member of the family had ever been inside it. She did not make use of it very often and seldom spent more than a few hours there at a time. She used it for writing – it was difficult for her, she said, to write her own things when she was at home at Easton or in their London flat, surrounded by the evidence of his own prolific literary career, and engaged in helping him manage it. He understood that, and encouraged her to take the flat, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ as Virginia Woolf would call it a few years later, in the title of a book he liked better than most by the same hand. He had made a little joke to Jane when he paid for the lease about trusting her not to use it as a love nest, provoking a faint smile and a shake of the head in response. He had never entertained the slightest suspicion of her doing any such thing – until the day, not long after her funeral, when, as part of the melancholy business of sorting out her affairs and disposing of her effects, he took the keys from her bureau drawer neatly labelled with the address in Bedford Place and went there to clear the flat of her belongings.

On his journey he was suddenly afflicted with a dread of discovering in the flat some evidence of a secret romantic life, of a lover whom she had met there unknown to him. He told himself the idea was ridiculous, but he could not shake it off. Perhaps it was his own fictional imagination that fuelled the suspicion – it would be just the kind of reversal that a novelist would think up, the serial adulterer confronted with the evidence that he had been cuckolded by his submissive little wife when he could no longer accuse her … or perhaps it was the operation of his own bad conscience, punishing him with these disturbing thoughts for not loving Jane enough while she was alive. Whatever the reason, he was almost trembling with apprehension when he arrived at the house, and had some difficulty fitting the keys into the locks on the front door and the door to Jane’s flat.

As soon as he stepped inside, however, his fears evaporated. It was a small sparsely furnished studio apartment, with a narrow divan bed, a bureau desk and chair at the window, an easy chair, a bookcase, and a chest of drawers. There were a few prints on the walls, still lifes and seascapes, and a vase of dried flowers on the hearth next to the gas fire. Everything was neatly in place – the bed concealed under a tightly fitting coverlet, the cushions on top symmetrically distributed, the implements of writing tidily arranged on the surface of the desk. It was a room as eloquent of chastity as a nun’s cell. In the drawers of the desk he found the manuscripts of her stories and poems, most of which she had shown him, and the ones that he had not seen before contained no hints of unsuspected amours. But collectively they did suggest a wistful regret that there was an area of life, the area of passion, from which she knew she had been excluded. It was an intimation that rose from the handwritten pages, as delicate and intangible as the faint trace of her favourite perfume in the trapped air of the room. Sitting there at her desk, he resolved to collect the best of these writings into a book that would be a memorial to her.

– So when did sexual relations between you and Jane cease?

– I don’t know. I can’t remember. It wasn’t something we agreed explicitly. The intervals between intercourse got longer and longer, and eventually it just stopped.

– But you must have some idea of when that was
.

– It was probably about 1907, 1908. Maybe 1909.

– The time of your affairs with Rosamund Bland and Amber Reeves
.

– But it wasn’t as if Jane was jealous or angry with me over those girls, and said ‘Never come to my room again.’ In fact she was an absolute brick. I couldn’t have survived that time without her support, during the Amber affair especially. That nearly broke me, you know. I was mad with anxiety – everything I’d worked for over the past decade seemed to be spinning out of control: my literary career, my political mission, my private life, all at the same time.

– Well, you brought it on yourself
.

– Yes, I brought it on myself.