A Man of Parts (28 page)

‘But that presupposes a completely transformed society,’ he said, ‘when Free Love is universally accepted, and everything between men and women is open and above board. The Bland household is the reverse of that. Well Hall turns out to be a house of lies – of concealment and hypocrisy.’

He felt that very strongly when he next returned there, not long afterwards. The Blands were hosting a big summer party to celebrate the engagement of their daughter Iris to her civil servant. The Wellses had been invited to stay for the weekend and had accepted, both parties tacitly agreeing to conceal the tensions that now existed between them. On the surface it was a gay occasion. The sun shone down on the ivy-covered walls of the old house and its gardens in the late afternoon, and as dusk fell light poured from the open windows and Chinese lanterns hanging from the trees were reflected in the moat. There was a splendid cold buffet laid out between silver candlesticks in the big hall, prepared by two Swiss male cooks whom the Blands now rather grandly employed, and the drawing room was cleared for dancing to piano and violin. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ Maud Reeves cried enthusiastically as she greeted him, throwing out her arm to embrace the whole occasion, and of course he agreed. But in truth Well Hall no longer seemed the idyllic demi-paradise it had been for him a year before. Rosamund’s revelations had cast a retrospective shadow over his previous perceptions of the place and its inhabitants, making the latter seem no longer charmingly eccentric, but devious and dangerously irresponsible. The death of the adolescent Fabian, for instance, when you thought about it, was not a tragic accident, but the consequence of culpable carelessness. Imagine forgetting that your son was booked to have a surgical operation, however minor! Fabian would have eaten breakfast that day – why would he not? – contrary to standard procedure before an operation. He probably choked on his own vomit while coming round from the chloroform, alone and unattended, while Edith was no doubt scribbling away in her room, lost in the dreamworld of one of her stories, and Hubert was, what, probably rogering Alice Hoatson …

At this point in his thoughts Alice herself came up to him, where he stood alone on the terrace overlooking the moat, and asked him if he didn’t want to go into the house and partake of the buffet. He said he would when the crowd around the table had diminished. She seemed disposed to linger and talk – rather to his surprise, for in all the time he had known the Blands he had seldom exchanged more than a few words with her. She was appropriately nicknamed ‘Mouse’, for she was small in stature (and seemed especially so when standing beside the Blands) and quiet and self-effacing in manner. He had never known anyone who made so faint an impression on one’s senses, like a figure slightly out of focus at the edge of a family snapshot. Now that he knew something of her personal history she had become an object of great interest to him, but it was difficult to connect the melodramatic story Rosamund had related with this diminutive, grey-haired, softly spoken woman of utterly unremarkable looks.

They chatted for a while on trivial topics, and then she startled him by saying: ‘I’ve been pleased to see that Rosamund and you are becoming great friends.’

‘Well, I er, I do my best to help her with her writing, you know,’ he stammered, though in truth she had still not shown him any work in progress, and he had been too busy with his own to urge her to do so.

‘Yes, that’s very kind of you. I’m not sure she has real talent in that direction, but we shall see. Apart from that, it’s good for her to have a mature man like you to confide in.’

‘Is it?’ he responded lamely, quite confounded by the tone and drift of her conversation.

‘Yes. She’s a very pretty and popular girl, and the young men flock round her, but she’s not ready to commit herself, quite rightly. I’m afraid that Edith and Hubert will try to marry her off as soon as they can, to make her safe, like Iris.’

‘Safe?’

‘You know what I mean: respectable. In spite of their own free and easy ways, they like to keep up appearances. They will encourage some young man to court her. Clifford Sharp, for instance – he’s keen on her.’

‘Is he?’ He felt a little stab of jealousy at this information. He had had a few conversations with Sharp and found him a dour character, ambitious to make his mark on the Fabian, but lacking originality and charm.

‘She needs time to discover herself, to become a woman without becoming the property of some man.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ he said, sincerely.

‘So that’s why it’s good that she has a friend like you to counsel her, tell her about life. The only mature man she is close to is Hubert. And Hubert …’ She sighed. ‘Well, Hubert is Hubert.’

There was a wealth of implication in this cryptic utterance, but he didn’t have the nerve to try and draw it out. The tenor of her remarks about Rosamund betrayed at every point a mother’s concern in a way he had never detected in her speech previously. It seemed certain that Rosamund had told her that she had revealed their secret relationship to him, but he dared not ask in case he was wrong.

‘Yes, Hubert is Hubert,’ he said with an air of profound and sympathetic understanding.

They heard the sound of Edith’s voice through an open window calling inside the house: ‘Mouse! Mouse! Has anyone seen Alice?’

‘I must go, Mr Wells,’ she said, and flitted away in the dusk like a shadow.

Later that evening he danced with Rosamund – having first, for form’s sake, waltzed with Jane and Edith. To Rosamund as they parted he murmured, ‘I’m going to take a breather on that seat in the pergola,’ where ten minutes later she joined him, approaching hesitantly until he called her name. There was barely enough light to see by from the hazy half-moon, filtered through the bramble roses that covered the pergola.

‘Golly, it’s dark under here, H.G.,’ she said, sitting down beside him.

‘Your eyes will accommodate soon,’ he said. ‘I wanted some privacy.’

‘Is that so you can kiss me again?’ she said archly.

‘No,’ he said, ‘so we won’t be overheard. I had a rather extraordinary conversation with Alice, earlier this evening. Or rather, she had it with me. She seemed to assume that I know – know she’s your real mother.’

‘Yes, I told her I had spoken to you, in confidence of course,’ Rosamund said.

‘Ah, I thought so … She seemed to approve.’

‘Yes, she does,’ Rosamund said. ‘She thinks you’re a counterbalance to Daddy.’

‘A counterbalance?’ For the second time that evening he felt the conversational ground shifting under his feet. As she didn’t answer, he said: ‘She did say something cryptic about your father.’

‘What’s “cryptic” mean?’

‘Difficult to interpret. She said, “Hubert is Hubert.”’

‘Yes, Hubert is Hubert,’ Rosamund said, nodding. She kicked off her shoes and wriggled her feet. ‘Gosh my feet hurt. New shoes.’

‘Rosamund,’ he said gently, ‘I must know what you are talking about.’

After a long pause she said: ‘It’s just that lately he’s been very affectionate towards me in a way that I feel is … more than fatherly. I don’t mean that he’s done anything rude, but … it’s just, when he kisses me, or gives me a hug, which he’s always done a lot, ever since I was a little girl, well he squeezes just a little too hard, or he goes on just a little too long, especially if we’re on our own. It makes me feel uncomfortable, but I don’t know how to stop it. I know that if I said the slightest thing about it to Daddy he would get into the most frightful paddy and accuse me of having a depraved imagination … And maybe it
is
my imagination …’

‘Have you spoken to Alice about this?’ he asked.

‘Not explicitly, but she knows, I can tell … she doesn’t miss anything.’

‘Then it isn’t just in your imagination,’ he said.

‘No, I suppose you’re right,’ she said. ‘But it’s so difficult to know what to do when you’re a girl who is … who hasn’t … who isn’t experienced … you understand?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand.’

‘You hear so much talk about sex, and read about it in books, and you don’t know what or who to believe, and anyway, words can never tell you what it’s actually
like
. Is it wonderful, or just ordinary?’

‘It’s both wonderful and ordinary,’ he said.

They then had a long conversation about sexual love, in which she asked most of the questions and he gave most of the answers, until he put a question himself: ‘Do you mean you would like me to make love to you, Rosamund?’

‘Yes, H.G. I want you to.’

‘Even though I’m not in love with you? I like you, but I’m not in love with you.’

‘I don’t care.
I’m
in love with
you
. I have enough love for both of us.’

She threw herself into his arms at that, and seemed to assume that he would complete her sexual education on the spot, or in some unoccupied outbuilding on the estate, but he calmed her down and counselled caution. As the Blands were soon returning to Dymchurch he said he would think of somewhere near there where they could safely meet, and let her know. ‘But if you should change your mind in the meantime, just—’

‘I won’t,’ she said, and silenced him with a kiss.

IN THE FIRST
summer of the new century, when Spade House was being built, he had rented a cottage in the flat fields below the village of Lympne on the northern edge of the Romney Marshes, as a place to which he could retreat, to think and to write, when Arnold House and its environs became too noisy and busy. It was the most basic kind of accommodation for the poorest kind of agricultural worker, just two bare rooms, with an outside earth privy and a well for water, but it served its purpose and cost him only a few shillings a week. He had furnished it with a table and chair, a couch and a few other bits and pieces, bought second-hand so cheaply that he left them there when he gave up the lease. He began
The First Men in the Moon
in that cottage, and had his narrator Bedford, sole survivor of the lunar expedition, splash down in the sea near Lympne when he returned to earth in his anti-gravity sphere, and recover in the hotel there. Back home in Spade House, following his conversation with Rosamund in the scented darkness of the pergola at Well Hall, he cycled out one day to inspect the cottage and found it unoccupied, with his furniture undisturbed. The farmer who owned the building was willing to let him rent it again on the same reasonable terms.

It was an ideal place for discreet assignations with Rosamund while the Bland family was in residence at the Other House, in an isolated situation at the end of a rutted cart track, equidistant from Sandgate and Dymchurch. Jane was not surprised when he took the cottage again as a writing retreat – she was used to his sudden flights from domesticity – but when he mentioned casually one day that Rosamund had called on him there she grasped the implication immediately. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘Perfectly,’ he said. He thought of it as completing a young girl’s education at her request. The Blands did not apparently see anything suspicious in Rosamund’s new enthusiasm for taking solo cycle rides in the country – which is to say that Edith didn’t, because Hubert was fortunately detained in London a good deal of the time, and if Alice Hoatson guessed what was going on she kept it to herself. The cottage was not the most comfortable of love nests, but its rustic simplicity conferred a kind of pastoral innocence on their trysts. The couch was somewhat damp, but he dragged it out into the sun and it soon dried. The roof leaked in one place, so he put a bucket under it when it rained, and they washed themselves in the water, which was softer and warmer than from the well.

The lovemaking was sometimes a little too like a tutorial for it to be fully transporting for him – Rosamund being prone to ask if she was ‘doing it right’ at inappropriate moments – but naked she was a sight to arouse any red-blooded man. Her beauty was already at its full-bloomed, voluptuous perfection, and he felt privileged to enjoy it before it was overblown. She would arrive usually a little while after him, flushed and breathless from the cycle ride, or more likely with excitement and exaltation at the consciousness of being a grown-up woman at last, secretly meeting her lover. He was surprised and amused by how rapidly she progressed from bashful maiden modesty to bold confidence in the ritual of disrobing, soon being quicker than himself to strip off her clothes. Reclining on his couch, its dowdy upholstery covered with an old Liberty throw brought from Spade House, she would turn her dark brown eyes up at him with a coquettish smile that hesitated between that of a licentious mistress and a naughty schoolgirl, her full, widely separated breasts standing out proudly from her torso, reminding him of a copy of Goya’s ‘
Naked Maja
’ he had seen on the wall of a brothel once. They met perhaps half a dozen times in the cottage that summer, and on the last occasion she forgot to worry about whether she was doing it right and came to a genuine, uncontrollable climax, crying out in surprise and joy. ‘You said it was both ordinary and wonderful,’ she said afterwards, ‘but that was
extra
ordinary and wonderful.’ He felt something like a teacher’s complacency at the end of a successful lesson.