A Man of Parts (33 page)

There was also a mundane reason to pursue this new project promptly: namely, his bank balance was dangerously low. He and Jane liked to entertain in style. They had a houseful of guests nearly every weekend, and the cost of food and drink and hot water
ad libitum
piped to every bedroom mounted up. He was in the process of adding a tennis court to the amenities of Spade House, which entailed extending and levelling his property, at considerable expense. His involvement in Fabian affairs over the past year had absorbed a great deal of time that would otherwise have been devoted to profitable authorship.
Tono-Bungay
was not a book he could toss off quickly. It was his most ambitious attempt to write a literary novel that would become a classic, but for that very reason it progressed relatively slowly by his own standards and was unlikely to be a best-seller when it was published. Putting all these considerations together there was a strong case for turning out
The War in the Air
quickly, while the idea was still bubbling in his head. Accordingly he sent an outline to his agent Pinker and said he could write it in a few months if somebody would give him an advance of £1,200, and knowing that his usual publisher Macmillan wouldn’t put up that kind of money, he wrote to him personally, describing the projected novel as a ‘pot-boiler’ which he proposed to publish with a less distinguished house. Macmillan raised no objection, George Bell & Sons came up with the ready, and he contracted to deliver the book by September.

As his anger and frustration at the outcome of the December meetings subsided, he resumed a cautious involvement in Fabian affairs. He agreed to be nominated as a candidate for the forthcoming Executive elections, and Maud Reeves persuaded Jane to stand as well, and also to join a women’s group she was forming within the Fabian. In February Maud succeeded in getting the Executive to approve in principle the incorporation of equality of citizenship for women into the Basis, to be ratified at a general meeting in six months’ time, and she saw Jane as a useful ally in ensuring that this victory was followed through.

In the same month he fulfilled his promise to address the Cambridge University Fabian Society which Amber Reeves had started in collaboration with a young man at Trinity called Ben Keeling who was already a member of the rather sleepy ‘town’ branch of the Society. More than ever he was struck by what an impressive young woman she had grown into – clever, articulate and beautiful, with brown eyes, a straight Grecian nose set in a heart-shaped face and a mass of dense crinkly black hair, which had earned her the family nickname of Dusa, short for Medusa. She was working hard, she told him, as she walked him round the grounds of Newnham before his lecture, and desperately keen to get a First in Part One of the Moral Sciences Tripos in the summer. She would sit Part Two a year later. ‘Women are not allowed to take their degrees, of course,’ she said, ‘but we take the same exams as the men and our results are published with theirs. It’s always such a thrill when a woman does well, it makes the men so sick.’ ‘How ridiculous that you can’t take your degree!’ he expostulated. ‘You should have gone to London University.’ ‘Well, it wouldn’t be quite as nice, would it?’ she said, with a gesture that took in the quietly elegant halls, built in Queen Anne style of red brick with white sash windows and gables, spaciously set out among lawns and shrubberies, and he had to admit she was right. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘I wanted to get away from home.’ ‘What about your Part Three?’ he asked. ‘There is no part Three. Part Two is Finals.’ ‘So why is it called Tripos?’ ‘I believe it was in three parts once,’ she said. ‘They say it goes back to medieval times, when students were given a three-legged stool when they graduated, one leg for each year.’

It seemed to him typical of Cambridge University that it wrapped up a degree course in philosophy in this mystifying fossilised language. The whole place – he stayed overnight and explored a little – aroused in him powerful contradictory feelings of attraction and repulsion, envy and derision. It was visually ravishing, even in winter; the fine architecture of the colleges, their quiet courts and time-worn cloisters, the green, groomed Backs, the willow-hemmed river, all blended together with a grace and beauty that had taken centuries to mature. And it was exhilarating to walk the cobbled streets of a town so clearly dedicated to the life of the mind, lavishly provided with booksellers, thronged by young people in gowns hurrying to lectures, or chattering and arguing with each other in teashops. He felt pangs of resentment and regret as he compared the ambience of the place with his own student days, the long daily trek through filthy noisy indifferent London to the bleakly utilitarian classrooms and laboratories of the South Kensington Normal College. How he would have loved to study here! But it was of course an environment steeped in privilege, and its retention of archaic and obsolete terminology, of peculiar customs and shibboleths, were methods of exclusion and defences against change. If I had the power, he thought, after a morning spent asking his way from strangers in the street, I would pass laws forcing the colleges to display their names on their frontages, and forbidding the pronunciation of ‘Caius’ as ‘Keys’.

But when he gave his talk – a bolder and more explicit version of his lecture on ‘Socialism and the Middle Classes’ – in a room packed with young people, mostly undergraduates, many of them literally sitting at his feet, he was disarmed by their admiration and enthusiasm. There was no need for him to feel inferior or excluded because he had not enjoyed their privileged education and his voice retained a trace of cockney vowels and glottal stops. To them he was a genius, a prophet, with a much broader vision than their tutors and professors, and a better grasp of the real world they were preparing to enter and hoped to improve. They lapped up his arguments for political, economic and sexual reform through the application of reason and scientific expertise. They were not of course representative of the student body as a whole. He was aware that not all undergraduates were as earnest and thoughtful as these – there were plenty of arrogant-looking young men in Cambridge whose overheard conversation, conducted in braying public school accents, indicated that they were more interested in rowing and hunting than ideas. Ben Keeling had more than once been threatened with a ragging by undergrads of that type. But these eager young Fabians were the hope of the future – especially the young women. They were the brightest and the best of their gender and generation, and conscious of carrying the standard for women’s rights, taking it from the hands of earlier generations who had struggled valiantly in the teeth of prejudice to obtain higher education for women. The CFS was in fact, Amber told him, the first Cambridge society to admit women as equal members from its foundation. After the meeting the committee bore him off to a convivial supper in Keeling’s rooms in Trinity where he fielded their questions and entertained them with anecdotes and was, he felt, particularly brilliant. Amber, radiant with the success of the evening, and the kudos she had acquired in the eyes of her friends by enticing this lion up from London, thanked him effusively afterwards. ‘You were absolutely wonderful, Mr Wells,’ she said, shaking his hand. ‘I do hope you’ll come to Cambridge again, if we have the cheek to invite you.’ ‘I think I would,’ he said, smiling. ‘I find it has many attractions.’ Of which Amber herself was certainly one. But having just extricated himself from an embarrassing entanglement with one young female admirer, he was not minded to get involved with another, even though she was more beautiful and much more intelligent.

He had in fact already begun a new relationship with a woman who was four years older than himself, the novelist Violet Hunt. They had known each other socially for some time because they had many literary friends in common, and contributed to the same magazines, so were often invited to the same parties. In late 1906 these encounters became more frequent and more flirtatious. Both of them were recovering from setbacks in their lives – he from the Fabian defeat and the associated Rosamund imbroglio, she from the recent death of her first lover, and the aftermath of being jilted by her second – and both were seeking consolation in a new amorous affair without entailments. Early in the New Year he wrote to invite her to lunch at Torino’s in Soho, which had private rooms upstairs: ‘
Be nice to a very melancholy man on Tuesday please. Come and Torino at one. I’m rather down, cross, feeble … No afternoon appointments
.’ She took the hint in her acceptance, mentioning that she would also be free in the afternoon. Thus began an affair which brought much uncomplicated pleasure to both parties.

Violet was the daughter of Alfred William Hunt, a water-colourist associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and often confused with the painter Holman Hunt on that account. Violet, whose own looks, with her long chin and mass of hair, were somewhat Pre-Raphaelite, grew up knowing this circle of artists and their mentor Ruskin. She told him that when she was thirteen, on hearing that the great love of Ruskin’s later life, Rose La Touche, had tragically died, she volunteered to marry him in Rose’s place. ‘Mama wrote to Ruskin, whom we knew quite well, to tell him of this offer, thinking he would be amused. He received it gratefully and with complete seriousness – said he would think about it and let us know. He had a penchant for very young girls, of course, and waited for years for Rose to grow up, but he decided not to wait for me.’ This was typical of the many anecdotes with which she entertained him when they lay together resting languorously after sexual intercourse in some room in London hired for the purpose. Long practised in amorous adventure, Violet greatly extended his knowledge of restaurants with
cabinets particuliers
, and hotels and lodging houses willing to rent out rooms by the hour, a secret metropolitan network of accommodation for illicit sex. ‘
Do you know of any convenient place for sin in Kensington?
’ he wrote to her once when he was arranging an appointment at the Natural History Museum. ‘
If so, write here and tell me and I’ll wire you if I can get away
.’ He received the address of a private hotel near the South Kensington Underground station by return of post.

They both believed in Free Love, but Violet’s experience had begun earlier and she had been tutored by one lover in particular, a man called Crawfurd, one-time diplomat and minor man of letters, who was a dedicated libertine. He was also, by her account, an unmitigated cad, who used her as his mistress for many years because he was married, and when his wife died promptly married another woman with money instead of Violet. Some years had passed since this happened, but the pain of rejection and betrayal obviously still hurt. At the time they lunched together at Torino’s she was grieving for her first lover, the painter George Henry Boughton, another married man with whom she had fallen desperately in love at the age of seventeen and pursued until he yielded to her importunate devotion. He eventually ended the affair in order to save his marriage, leaving her heartbroken, but his recent death had revived all her old tender feelings for him, and made her yearn for the comfort of someone else’s arms.

Violet had been a New Woman before the phrase was ever coined, fearlessly seeking her own erotic fulfilment from an early age, and prepared to pay the price that a hypocritical society exacted. Her novels dealt with the experience of similar young women, similarly placed, but the code of sexual reticence she was obliged to follow drew much of the potential sting from those he had sampled, sentimental stories of amorous intrigue redeemed by a cynical epigrammatic wit reminiscent of the plays of Oscar Wilde. She claimed Wilde had been an admirer in her youth and was once on the brink of proposing to her. Henry James, rather surprisingly, was a friend of her maturity, and entertained her occasionally at Lamb House. ‘I stimulate his imagination,’ she explained. ‘He knows what a depraved life I lead and milks me for lubricious stories of London Society, which he is too frightened to investigate for himself.’ She quoted a characteristic letter from the Master declining an invitation to visit her in London: ‘
You
are
Society, and I am more and more contemplative detachment – hanging on to the world after the fashion of a very obese spider by a thin thread of my own independent weaving
.’ They laughed together over this wonderfully vivid simile. ‘It deserves to be illustrated by Max Beerbohm, don’t you think?’ said Violet. ‘H.J. calls me the Great Devourer because of my appetite for social life, and the Purple Patch because of a purple overcoat I wore once, but also as a sly hit at my prose, I don’t doubt.’ It was true that Violet sometimes let her verbal facility run away with her in her novels, and that nearly all of them were a little too long for what she had to say, but there was no doubt about her fertility of invention within a fairly narrow compass.

At forty-five she had already lost the beauty for which she had been admired in her younger years, and painted heavily to disguise a poor complexion, but her body was still slim and limber, able to adopt any attitude in bed he suggested, and to demonstrate a few that were new to him. Her years with Crawfurd had made her shamelessly versatile in the art of love, and she did not hesitate to use her mouth and tongue to arouse him for an encore when they had time to indulge in one. ‘Now I know the real reason why Henry James calls you the Great Devourer,’ he said, watching her complacently as she performed this service, and causing her to choke with laughter. He liked a woman who laughed in bed. Violet was the ideal partner for a
passade
. Unlike Dorothy Richardson.

He continued to see Dorothy at infrequent intervals for rather perfunctory sex followed by long discussions of her emotional, psychological and philosophical problems. She was still locked in the curious triangular relationship with her celibate lover Grad and her ardent bi-sexual flatmate Veronica, and no nearer to resolving the question of her own sexuality. He wished he had never got involved with Dorothy, and blamed himself for doing so. He had undertaken a kind of therapeutic responsibility for her without having the necessary time and patience to exercise it, distracted as he was by his clandestine affair with Rosamund and his disputes with the Fabian Old Gang, not to mention the books he was trying to write at the same time. Sex for him was ideally a form of recreation, like tennis or badminton, something you did when you had completed a satisfactory bit of work, to let off steam and exercise the body instead of the mind for a while, but that was not what Dorothy needed, or at least wanted, from their assignations. He decided to put this to her one afternoon when they met at the hotel near South Kensington Underground station usefully recommended by Violet Hunt. When booking the room he had ordered a bottle of hock to be placed there in an ice bucket. Instead of getting into shirtsleeves and taking off his bow tie as soon as they were in the room, as he usually did, he remained fully dressed, gestured her to sit down in one of the two armchairs, and uncorked the bottle of wine. She looked at him with a wry, knowing, humourless smile.