A Man of Parts (31 page)

‘In a narrow behavioural sense, no there wouldn’t be,’ he admitted. ‘But the experience would be qualitatively different in a socialist state.’

‘I wonder,’ she sighed sceptically. ‘Don’t imagine that I fail to see the attraction of Free Love. I know I could love other men besides Sidney –’ she glanced smilingly towards her husband to indicate this was a mere hypothesis, but he had his head down over his helping of treacle pudding – ‘and perhaps it might be intellectually stimulating to have an intimate relationship with another man who has the same aspirations as oneself. Perhaps it would extend one’s understanding of human nature –’

‘It would, Beatrice, I assure you,’ he said cheekily.

‘But for every illicit union in which there is an educative and life-enhancing effect on the couple concerned,’ she said earnestly, ‘there are a hundred – a thousand – in which the only motive is the gratification of lust. Human beings are so volatile and irrational where sexual desire is concerned, that I fear the consequences of removing the traditional constraints on it. I believe men and women will only evolve upwards by subordinating their physical desires and appetites to the spiritual and intellectual side of human nature. That is the faith that sustains me.’

He was tempted to speak up for lust, but thought better of it. ‘Have you read my new novel?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she replied, ‘not yet. I’ve read
about
it of course.’

‘Ah well, you have obtained a very distorted view of it. The point of the ending of that novel is that the characters who are enjoying what we call Free Love have already evolved in exactly the way you hope humanity will develop. They are like gods. Sex for them is no longer a dirty furtive business carried out in secret and surrounded with shame. It is blessed. It is a gift you give freely to those you love, and receive in return. It has a valued place in people’s lives, but it doesn’t dominate them and torture them and obsess them. It leaves them free to get on with the business of perfecting collective life.’

‘Well, I must read it,’ said Beatrice, visibly impressed.

Not so Sidney. ‘Some more treacle pudding, Wells?’ he asked. He was always bored by what he called airy-fairy discussions of this nature.

Beatrice was true to her word: at the end of the month she wrote him a brief note to say she had read
In the Days of the Comet
. It had not changed her mind about Free Love, but it had finally convinced her that women should be enfranchised, and she had written to Dame Millicent Fawcett, leader of the moderate, non-violent suffragettes, to pledge her support. A letter from Dame Millicent in the
Times
a few days later made this information public. He was surprised and delighted: surprised because there was not much about the suffrage issue in his novel, and delighted because it was a significant blow to the patriarchal caucus in the Fabian. Maud Reeves was overjoyed. The tide seemed to be moving in his favour again, and he felt in good heart for the General Meeting which had been arranged for the 7th of December. He decided to take a break from Fabian politics, and to go to Venice, unaccompanied, to start a new novel, an ambitious and partly autobiographical condition-of-England novel provisionally called
Waste
. He chose Venice because he didn’t know anybody there and it would be empty of visitors in November, and told Jane he didn’t want to be disturbed with any letters or telegrams except in the direst emergency. He took a room on the top floor of the Grand Hotel with views of San Giorgio and the Salute across the misty lagoon, and wrote without interruption for three weeks.

There was a formidable heap of mail waiting for him on his desk when he returned home, and a parcel with his complimentary copies of
The Future in America
, published in his absence. He had dedicated it to Dorothy Richardson under her initials, ‘D.M.R.’, hoping this would make up for his rather neglecting her of late. Jane was surprised to see the dedication, which he had inserted in the proofs. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Dorothy knows nothing about America, and she’s not interested in it.’ ‘Just for friendship’s sake,’ he said. ‘Won’t people think that your friendship must be rather a close one?’ Jane said. ‘Nobody will recognise her behind the initials,’ he said. ‘Very few people know her middle name is Miller.’ Spotting an envelope with Dorothy’s handwriting on it he plucked it from the pile. It contained not, as he anticipated, a letter thanking him for the dedication, but a cutting of her unsigned review of
In the Days of the Comet
severed from the pages of
Crank
. Yet that was in its way a kind of letter, since a strain of personal grievance against himself for not taking her seriously enough ran through it. Dorothy expressed a hope that one day he would write the great novel of which he was capable, but this one was not it, and in order to succeed he would have to overcome the limitations of all his work in the depiction of women. They were almost without exception, ‘
one specimen carried away from some biological museum of his student days, dressed up in various trappings, with different shades of hair and proportions of freckles, with neatly tabulated instincts and one vague smile between them all
’. It was, he thought, possibly the first time in literary history that a book had been unfavourably reviewed by the dedicatee of another book by the same author. He sensed more trouble ahead from difficult Dorothy.

There was a more welcome letter from Henry James congratulating him on
The Future in America – ‘I have done nothing today but thrill and squirm with it and vibrate to it almost feverishly and weep over it almost profusely (this last, I mean, for intensity of mere emotion and interest)
’ – though as usual a backwash of reservation followed the foaming wave of compliment: ‘
what primarily flies in my face is
you
and your so amazingly active and agile intellectual personality – I may even say your sublime and heroic cheek – which I can’t
sufficiently
resist to feel (as much as I want to), that you tend always to simplify too much
…’ And as usual there was a wistful reflection on James’s failure to make an equivalent mark with his own latest publication,
The American Scene
, which poignantly happened to be on the same subject. ‘
I think you, frankly, – or think the whole thing – too
loud
, as if the country shouted at you, hurrying past, every hint it had to give and you yelled back your comment on it; but also, frankly, I think the right and only way to utter many of the things you are delivered of
is
to yell them – it’s a yelling country, and
my
semitones, in your splendid clashing of the cymbals (and
theirs
), will never be heard
.’ James! There was nobody like him.

The good humour this letter put him into was abruptly shattered by one from Rosamund. She wrote in her round, schoolgirlish hand to say that Edith had found a compromising
letter from himself making an arrangement to meet at the cottage back in August.

She must have gone through my bureau drawers – she’s totally unscrupulous about invading people’s privacy – and came across that old letter. I know you told me to destroy all your letters, and usually I do, but I wanted to keep one from you as a kind of proof of our love, proof that I was not dreaming the whole thing … I used to take it out and look at it and kiss it sometimes. Fortunately there was nothing very explicit in it, but it did say you had enjoyed our last time in the cottage together and that you would be there again ‘next Wednesday’ and it was signed ‘With love, H.G.’ Of course there was the most awful row, Daddy was absolutely furious, and they cross-questioned me and made me cry, but I think you would have been proud of me because I didn’t admit that we were lovers. I said we had a very intimate friendship and that you used the cottage to write but it was a convenient place to meet and talk occasionally and that Alice had told you she approved of our friendship. I’m not sure that they believed me but they decided not to force the issue any further, but I’m under a cloud here, and they watch me like hawks, so be warned. All my love, Rosamund
.

He swore softly, screwed up the letter and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. On second thoughts he retrieved it, smoothed it out and showed it to Jane. ‘I was afraid something like this would happen,’ she said. ‘You can’t say I didn’t warn you.’ ‘No, I can’t and I won’t,’ he said. ‘But what shall I do about it?’ ‘Nothing,’ Jane said. ‘Except stop seeing the girl, of course.’ ‘Oh well, that’s no great sacrifice,’ he said. ‘And hope she does nothing foolish,’ Jane added. ‘So far she seems to have behaved very well in the circumstances.’ ‘I think she may even be enjoying it, in
a curious kind of way,’ he speculated hopefully. ‘She obviously sees herself as the heroine of a novel.’ He was thinking to himself that perhaps for Rosamund this was the best way their affair could end, with a dramatic climax of love thwarted by tyrannical parents rather than a slow cooling of interest on his part.

But another letter in the pile, from Sydney Olivier, gave further cause for anxiety – and anger. Olivier wrote to warn him that Pease and Bland, alarmed by the success of his lecture on ‘Socialism and the Middle Classes’ were lobbying energetic ally against him in the run-up to the General Meeting, and that Hubert Bland was spreading scandalous stories about him among senior members of the Fabian, namely, that he had betrayed his oldest friend, a certain Sidney Bowkett, by having an adulterous affair with his wife, and that Bland had recently discovered Wells had designs on his daughter Rosamund and had only just succeeded in foiling his dastardly plans. ‘
I know it’s pretty rich for Bland of all people to accuse you of libertinism
,’ Olivier wrote, ‘
and of course I’ve no idea whether his allegations have any basis. But I thought I should warn you of what he is up to. Everyone knows Bland is a womaniser, I mean everyone in the Fabian who matters. It’s been going on for so long that it’s taken for granted among us, as a rather pitiful character trait, like a weakness for drink. But we all know Bland is never going to have control of the Fabian’s policy and future development. He’s regarded as harmless, therefore. You are not. You matter. Take care
.’

This letter provoked another, louder oath. Sidney Bowkett! How in God’s name had Bland got to know Bowkett, and dragged out of him that ancient grudge on account of Nell? Probably a chance meeting in the saloon bar of some Manchester hotel; he vaguely remembered hearing many years ago that Bowkett had moved to the north. As for Rosamund, he now realised why Bland had not wrung from her a confession that they were actually lovers – it allowed him to accuse Wells of plotting seduction without compromising his daughter’s honour. It was a damned awkward situation. He could not deny Bland’s accusation about Bowkett because it was true, and he could not deny that he had tried to seduce Rosamund without unchivalrously revealing that she had taken the initiative in their affair. He could not defend his conduct by pointing out that both women were adults who slept with him of their own free will without reviving the Free Love controversy.

The very next day he went up to London and confronted Pease in his clammy underground office in Clement’s Inn. ‘I understand Bland has been spreading stories about me,’ he said. ‘Really? What kind of stories?’ Pease said suavely from behind his desk. ‘Don’t pretend you haven’t heard them,’ he said. ‘I really can’t answer your question unless you tell me what you are referring to,’ said Pease. ‘Then perhaps I could clear up any misunderstanding.’ ‘I believe you know very well what I’m talking about,’ he said. ‘I just want to say that if you and your friends on the Executive want a dirty fight, you can have one. I know a thing or two about Bland’s private life which I shall have no hesitation in broadcasting to the world if he doesn’t stop slandering me.’

‘Bland of course is a Roman Catholic,’ said Pease. ‘I understand that the Romans make a distinction between slander, which is false, and detraction, which is true. He told me once that detraction is considered the greater sin, because it cannot honestly be withdrawn.’ He smiled. ‘An interesting paradox, don’t you think?’

They duelled like this for a few more minutes, Pease parrying his bluster by pretending not to know what he was talking about while obliquely indicating that he knew very well, until he burst out, ‘Damn you, Pease, and damn your friends. I know you look down on me because my parents were in service and I didn’t go to public school and Oxbridge and I still have some cockney vowels when I speak, I know you call me a “common little cad” behind my back—’

‘I assure you I have never said anything of the kind,’ Pease said haughtily.

‘Well, if you don’t say it, you think it,’ he said. ‘Common I may be, but I’m not a cad. If you want a prize cad, you need look no further than Bland.’ And with that he walked out, not feeling very pleased with himself. He had relieved his feelings, but at the cost of exposing his own weakness and insecurity. It had been a mistake to come.

On his way out he passed through the General Office and observed Rosamund in conference with young Clifford Sharp beside the Fabian Nursery noticeboard. She saw him and turned pale. Sharp shot him a hostile glance. The patter of a typewriter faltered and stopped as its operator observed the encounter with barely disguised interest, an indication of how far down the Fabian hierarchy gossip had carried. He greeted them formally – ‘Good morning Miss Bland, good morning Sharp’ – and did not linger, pretending he was late for another appointment. It was raining outside and he had forgotten to bring an umbrella. As he hesitated under the arched entrance of the Inn, peering at the leaden sky, Rosamund rustled up behind him. ‘Oh, H.G.,’ she said, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Did you get my letter?’ ‘Yesterday,’ he said. ‘I only got back from Venice yesterday.’ ‘I didn’t know you were away,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so worried. I thought you were angry with me.’ ‘I’m not angry with you, Rosamund,’ he said. ‘I’m angry with Edith for reading a private letter not addressed to her, and with your father for spreading malicious gossip about me. This is the last thing I need before the General Meeting next week.’ ‘I know, it’s awful,’ she said. ‘What shall we do?’ ‘Well, you could begin by not running after me in public places,’ he said unkindly. ‘It only encourages the gossip.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and looked as if she was about to cry. He glanced around to check that they were unobserved, and took her hand. ‘Be strong, my dear. Be dignified. We have done nothing to be ashamed of.’ ‘No,’ she said, nodding eager agreement. ‘Ignore the gossip, don’t answer intrusive questions.’ ‘Right,’ she said. ‘But will we be able to see each other again – alone, I mean?’ ‘I fear not,’ he said. ‘Not for a long time. Not until this has all blown over.’ ‘And then will you take me to Paris?’ ‘Maybe,’ he said, smiling, and thinking to himself that he was as likely to take her to the moon. ‘But you promised,’ she said. ‘Did I? Then of course I will, one day,’ he said, squeezing her hand, and giving her a quick peck on the cheek. It seemed the only way to escape before they were observed engaged in a suspicious tête-à-tête.