A Man of Parts (23 page)

‘Another Utopia, then,’ Edith said.

‘Yes, but with a more exciting story than the last one.’

‘It sounds wonderful!’ Rosamund said, gazing at him wide-eyed.

Later that day, before dinner, he went for a stroll with Edith. They passed beyond the confines of the moat and wandered through the overgrown and largely untended grounds until they came to an old summerhouse, and sat down on an ancient wicker sofa, where a most interesting conversation took place.

‘Why didn’t you like
A Modern Utopia
the first time you read it?’ he asked her.

‘I didn’t like the idea that married men could have affairs but their wives couldn’t.’

‘You think married women should be able to have affairs too?’

‘No. I don’t think either of them should,’ she said. He was surprised by this answer, which did not accord with what he knew about the history of her marriage, but he could hardly say so. Noting his silence, she said: ‘I mean I know they do, the flesh is weak, the heart is susceptible … I won’t claim that Hubert and I have been entirely … But I don’t think it should be publicly approved, taken for granted, as it is in your Utopia. I think we must uphold the traditional principle that sexual intercourse should be restricted to married couples.’

‘Even though we know it isn’t?’

‘Yes. If you had daughters like Rosamund you would agree with me. Young girls like her know everything and fear nothing. They don’t believe in religion, they read any books they like, Darwin, Marx, French novels, Havelock Ellis I wouldn’t be surprised, because we’ve brought them up – I mean liberal progressive people like us have brought our children up – in complete intellectual freedom. It makes them terribly vulnerable. I don’t worry about Iris, even though she is at the Slade, where all kinds of things go on. She’s a level-headed girl, and she’s being courted by a very nice man in the civil service … But Rosamund …’

‘But you and Hubert are Roman Catholics, aren’t you? Hasn’t that …?’

He left the question unfinished, but she inferred it without difficulty: ‘We were received fairly recently. Hubert in 1900 and I two years later. It was much too late to affect Rosamund’s upbringing. She’s a terrible little pagan, I’m afraid.’

He was surprised by this reply, because Bland had given him the impression that he belonged to an old Catholic family in the north of England who had been deprived of their wealth and property by the Reformation. He did not probe into this discrepancy however, but risked a direct question on a matter which puzzled him more: ‘I don’t wish to be rude, Ernest, but why did you both join an institution that is adamantly opposed to almost every principle the Fabian stands for?’

Edith looked a little embarrassed. ‘Yes, our friends who knew were surprised, some disapproving. Hubert had always been attracted to the Roman Church in a rather romantic, literary way, but he didn’t do anything about it until Fabian died. You know about that?’

‘Yes, I was very sorry to hear about it.’

‘I had a baby born dead once – that was bad enough. And one is always terrified of illnesses in infancy. But to lose a son at the age of fifteen, with his whole life before him … and he was such a lovely boy, my darling, my favourite …’ To his dismay, she began to weep.

‘Ernest – Edith – I’m sorry. Forget my impertinent question,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk of something else.’

‘No, no, it’s good to talk about these things occasionally,’ she said, taking a hanky from her sleeve and wiping her tears away. ‘You see it was such a stupid, unnecessary death, that was what made it so unbearable. It was just a minor operation, carried out at home, so minor that we had forgotten all about the appointment and Fabian was digging in the garden when the surgeon and the anaesthetist arrived, and I had to send him to have a bath and get into pyjamas so the operation could take place. The doctors left him sleeping off the chloroform. There was a muddle. I thought Hubert was with him, he thought I was with him. When Hubert went into the bedroom poor Fabian was dead – he had choked and suffocated while still under the anaesthetic. The poor child died alone. You can imagine how Hubert and I felt. We were devastated to lose our darling boy, and it was all our own fault.’ She wept again.

‘You mustn’t think that, Edith,’ he said, and put his arm round her shoulders to comfort her. ‘It was just damned bad luck.’

‘I know,’ she said, sniffing and blowing her nose. ‘And it’s kind of you to say so. But that’s how we felt. Hubert took it very hard. I think he decided to become a Catholic because he wanted absolution – they have confession you know, the real thing, not like the pale imitation you get in the C of E. When you’re received you have to confess the sins of your entire life, and they are forgiven. It seemed to work. He was able to forgive himself. He recovered his old energy and spirit. So I decided to follow him into the Church.’

‘And did it work for you too?’ he said.

‘Up to a point,’ she said. ‘But not as well as it did for Hubert. To speak the truth, we’re not really very good Catholics, either of us. We don’t go to mass very often – hardly at all in fact. But it’s a comfort to belong. It’s nice to know the Church is there if you ever need it, in the great crises of life and death, when the Fabian, frankly, isn’t much help.’ She smiled sadly at him. ‘Dear H.G., how kind you are to listen patiently to all this. And what extraordinary eyes you have.’

They both became conscious at the same time that his arm was still round her shoulder and their faces very close together. It seemed natural to seal the conversation with a kiss, and it was far from being a chastely decorous one. It was full on the lips and lasted some time, during which he put his other arm round her waist. When it ended Edith leaned her head on his shoulder and they were silent for some moments as he wondered, and presumed she was wondering, what to do next. Then Edith sighed, sat up, and separated herself from his supporting arm. ‘Perhaps we should go back to the house,’ she said.

He was fairly sure that if he had acted first he could have enjoyed more kisses, and who knew what might have followed? ‘
The flesh
is weak, the heart is susceptible
…’ Edith was a passionate woman, and Bland was conveniently absent on business in the north of England connected with his journalism. But on reflection he was relieved that he had not taken the opportunity to initiate a
passade
with her. His reasons were ungallant. She was taller than him by several inches and when he clasped her briefly in his arms he had taken the measure of her body’s considerable bulk under her flowing robe. When he imagined making love to her naked on a bed the picture he summoned up was faintly ludicrous. So it was as well that nothing irrevocable had been said or done between them in the summerhouse, and he could maintain an innocently friendly relationship with her, rendered more intimate by their conversation, but with no emotional complications. When Bland came back from his trip to the north he was able to look his host in the eye without a qualm.

Bland was in excellent spirits, for reasons that became evident when they went, at his suggestion, for a ‘breather’ after a late dinner delayed for his return. It was dark, but a full moon allowed them to follow the footpaths without the aid of a lamp. The moon cast sharp shadows of trees on the lawns, and prompted the thought that if a comet were as bright in the night sky every object would have two shadows, angled in different directions: he made a mental note to work that into his novel. Bland led him to a corner of the moat-enclosed garden that was screened from the house by trees and bushes, stopped beside a heap of compost and unbuttoned his fly. ‘I always like to piss in the open air, when I have the opportunity, don’t you?’ Bland said.

‘Well, there are some things I enjoy doing more in the open air,’ he said, as he followed suit. It was not his natural style of humour, but whenever he was with men like Bland – Frank Harris or Sidney Bowkett, for instance – he found himself drawn into it, while rather despising himself for competing on this low level.

Bland gave a knowing laugh. ‘And you don’t mean badminton!’ He spread his legs, leaned back slightly, and released an arc of urine which glittered in the moonlight and fell with a soft hiss on the compacted mound of leaves and grass cuttings. ‘Personally I prefer a nice big bed, with firm springs,’ he said. ‘Speaking of which … I made good use of such a bed last night, belonging to a young lady of my acquaintance in Manchester. I took her to heaven three times in as many hours.’ He finished his lengthy micturition with a grunt of relief, shook his penis, stowed it away in his trousers, and began to button himself up. ‘Not bad for a man of my age, eh, Wells?’

‘Not bad at all, Bland,’ he said, having already finished and adjusted his dress.

‘What’s the most times you’ve done it in one night?’ Bland asked, as they walked on.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I lose count after it gets into double figures.’

Bland roared with laughter and clapped him on the back. ‘You rogue! But if you prefer it al fresco you should try Blackheath one warm night, near the gates to Greenwich Park. All kinds of interesting ladies are to be met there.’

He couldn’t resist asking Bland how he reconciled these adventures with the teaching of his adopted religion. ‘Isn’t it a sin according to your faith, Bland?’

‘Of course it is. It’s very wicked,’ he said. ‘But it’s knowing that it’s a sin that makes it meaningful. For you fellows who don’t believe, it’s no more significant than a sneeze. For us it means risking our immortal souls. Fortunately there’s always confession.’

He wondered if Bland were joking, but it appeared that he was entirely serious. He couldn’t help reflecting that if Bland was saving up his sins for a deathbed confession, it would take a perilously long time to get through all of them, but managed to keep the thought to himself.

He stayed at Well Hall for a week, and made excellent progress with
In the Days of the Comet
. In the late twentieth century the elderly narrator, Willie Leadford, was recalling his life before the great Change which was brought about by the comet. Willie was a character much like himself when he was a young man, intelligent but hampered in his ambitions by the disadvantages of his humble background, and sexually frustrated. He set these early chapters in the Potteries, risking an accusation of poaching on Arnold Bennett’s territory, because he associated that place with one of the lowest points in his own life. But Willie’s home was closely based on Atlas House in Bromley:

A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as ours, a damp, unsavoury, mainly subterranean region behind the dark living-room kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty in our case by the fact that into it the coal-cellar
,
a yawning pit of black uncleanness, opened and diffused small, crunchable particles about the uneven brick floor. It was the region of ‘washing-up’, that greasy damp function that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape pipe, and rags of a quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called ‘dish-clouts,’ rise in my memory at the name
.

Recalling his mother’s life of drudgery and self-denial in this squalid environment, he worked through the complex emotions stirred up by her death and resolved them into a poignant portrait of a woman who was a victim of her society. ‘
She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time had been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existing order dominated her into a worship of abject observances. It had bent her, aged her, robbed her
of eyesight so that at fifty-five she peered through cheap spectacles at my face and saw it only dimly, and filled her with anxiety
…’ In Willie’s furiously jealous pursuit of his former sweetheart Nettie, and her new love, the upper-class Verrall, he explored his feelings for Isabel after their divorce and at the time of her remarriage. As always, writing these things as fiction, with the freedom to change, enhance, and with hindsight interpret one’s own experience, was cathartic.

As he was strolling in the garden before lunch on his last day he met Rosamund, and had a strong feeling it was not by accident. He was walking under the shade of a pergola when she appeared at the other end and came smiling up to him, like a pretty wench who had stepped out of some pastoral idyll, her bare feet shod in sandals, wearing a straw hat and a loose blue muslin dress with a neckline that showed her remarkable bosom to advantage.

‘Finished work for the day, Mr Wells?’ she said.

‘Yes, I’ve come to the end of a chapter, and I’m not ready to start the next one. I’ll leave it till I get home tomorrow.’

‘I just heard you were leaving us. What a shame, it’s been lovely having you here. You’ve become one of the family.’

‘It’s been lovely for
me
,’ he said. ‘But I have a family of my own – I really must get back to them. Shall we …?’ He gestured to a bench seat, and they sat down. ‘Well Hall is a perfect haven for a writer,’ he said.

‘Well, it may be for you …’ she said, with a faintly sulky set of her lips and jaw. Like her mother she had a sensuously fleshy chin reminiscent of Rossetti’s beauties, though not their hairstyle: hers was short and fair and gently waved.

‘I believe you have literary aspirations yourself, Rosamund.’

‘Yes. Well, actually I have published a couple of little children’s books.’

‘Really? I didn’t know. Congratulations.’

‘Oh, they’re nothing – I don’t boast about them. Little books for little children. One is called
Cat Tales
and one is called
Moo-Cow Tales
. Just hackwork, really – Edith got me the commissions. It was useful pocket money, but that’s all. I want to write something more grown-up, more original, but it’s hard when you’ve got two famous and successful writers like Edith and Hubert for parents, looking over your shoulder. And then they fuss so if I want to go out on my own anywhere. How am I ever going to be a writer if I don’t get some experience?’