A Man of Parts (38 page)

‘Invite her, of course,’ he said. ‘Let her stay as long as she likes. The boys will be delighted.’

‘And you, H.G.?’

‘Well of course, I’m always pleased to see Amber. You too, I think?’

‘Oh yes. I’m very fond of Amber. If I had a daughter I would wish her to be like Amber.’

‘Well then! Let her come – and everybody will be happy.’

When Amber arrived she showed no signs of the nervous prostration her mother had indicated. She ate with appetite, slept soundly, and seemed to have her usual energy. She ‘revised’ in the mornings while he was working, and in the afternoons went for walks with him which she told Jane were as good as revision, if not better, because they talked about books and ideas. In fact their conversation became increasingly personal and intimate as the days passed. She told him about her childhood, how she had hated London after the open air life of New Zealand – ‘no freedom, no seashore, just streets and streets of sooty brick houses’ – and described a home life surprisingly lacking in warmth, both physically and emotionally. Physically because both Maud and Pember had been Christian Scientists in youth and had never quite renounced faith in the power of mind over matter, so they kept the windows in the house open all through the winter, even if members of the family had colds, and when the girls reached the menarche they were given no special concessions or cosseting when they had their periods but on the contrary were made to take especially long bracing walks, in all weathers. Amber mentioned this without embarrassment, glancing at him to see if he was shocked – which he was not, of course; but he was impressed by her candour and the trust in himself it implied.

They were walking along the seashore, crunching the shingle under their feet, as Amber reminisced in this vein. Maud’s commitment to the cause of women’s rights had not apparently made her a compassionate mother. ‘Once when I complained that she didn’t really love me, she boxed my ears and said she had more important things to do than fuss over ungrateful children. And in spite of all her progressive ideas about women’s rights, she never helped me or Beryl much with the problems of growing up. She was too embarrassed to talk about sex to either of us – she thought it was enough that we had the run of Father’s library and could look up anything we wanted to know.’

‘And did you?’

‘Oh yes, of course. But encyclopaedias and medical textbooks can only tell you so much.’

She stopped and turned to look at a commotion of gulls soaring and swooping above something, a shoal of fish probably, in the sea.

‘They don’t tell you about love,’ she said. ‘They don’t tell you about desire.’

‘No, you have to go to novels for that,’ he said.

‘But novelists don’t tell you what you really want to know – they’re not allowed to.’

‘True,’ he said. ‘In the end you must find out for yourself.’

‘I want to,’ she said. ‘But it’s difficult.’

Neither of them dared to look each other in the face as they spoke. Their relationship was like a bowl that had been slowly filling with unacknowledged feelings until now it was brim full – the surface tension was actually convex, and it only needed one more drop to set the whole thing overflowing unstoppably.

The moment came two days later, when they were effectively alone together in Spade House. Mrs Robbins was unwell, and Jane had gone up to Putney to visit her, staying overnight and leaving the two boys in the charge of himself and Amber and the servants. Amber threw herself into the role of surrogate mother with enthusiasm and to the boys’ great delight. But when they had been played with, fed, bathed and put to bed, and she had read them a story and kissed them goodnight, and returned to the drawing room, she became more subdued and pensive. It was a mild spring evening and he suggested they go out into the garden before they had their own supper. They strolled up and down the lawn, and then sat down on the garden bench outside his shelter, looking out over a sea wrinkled by dwarf waves and stained by the orange glow of the declining sun. He made conversation on the topic of the Altrincham by-election, which he had been thinking about that morning. Winston Churchill, required by parliamentary rules to stand for re-election because of his recent appointment as Liberal President of the Board of Trade, was opposed by his own adversary of the previous year, the Conservative Joynson-Hicks, and by a socialist candidate called Irving sponsored by the Social Democratic Party, an extremist faction in the Labour movement. Irving had no hope of being elected, but would split the progressive vote. He was minded to write an open letter to the electorate of Altrincham urging socialists to vote for Churchill as the best way of furthering the cause of socialism in the long run, and he wanted Amber’s opinion on this project, which was likely to arouse controversy among the Fabians, because it was the Society’s official policy to support all socialist candidates in parliamentary elections. It was the kind of issue which would normally engage her eager interest, but her responses to his exposition were listless, abstracted, almost bored. ‘What’s the matter, Amber?’ he said. ‘You don’t seem yourself this evening.’

‘Don’t I?’ she said.

‘No. Is it because you’ve got to go home soon?’

‘No, not exactly,’ she said.

‘Is it because you’re worried about those exams? You really don’t need to be.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t care less about the beastly exams!’

He knew intuitively where the conversation was leading, but forced an uncomprehending laugh. ‘Well, this is a change! What is it then?’

After a long pause, she said, in a small voice, without looking at him: ‘I’m in love, if you really want to know.’

‘I see.’ After an even longer pause, he said: ‘And who are you in love with?’

‘
You
of course! You!’ She turned and threw her arms round his neck, and sank sobbing on to his breast.

He cradled her in his arms, pressing her body against his for the first time, feeling its heat under her thin dress. ‘Why are you crying, Amber?’

‘Because I love you, and you don’t love me.’ She spoke indistinctly, her face still buried in his shirt-front.

‘But I do love you, Amber,’ he said.

‘You mean, like a father …’ she mumbled.

‘No, like a lover.’

She sat up and stared at him. ‘Do you really?’

For answer he kissed her.

‘Am I dreaming?’ she said when she opened her eyes.

‘No,’ he said, and kissed her again.

‘But what about Jane?’ she said. ‘You love Jane.’

‘Yes I love Jane, and Jane loves me, but there are many kinds of love, Amber. You’ve read
A Modern Utopia
, you’ve read
In the Days of the Comet
, you know my views on free, healthy, life-enhancing sexual relationships. Jane shares them.’

‘You mean … she wouldn’t mind?’

‘She won’t mind,’ he said.

Nevertheless he had a scruple about consummating their new relationship in Jane’s absence and without her knowledge, in her own home. Instead he proposed to Amber that they lay naked in bed together that night, without making love, as a kind of rite of betrothal. ‘And if you decide afterwards that you don’t after all want to go any further, then you must say so, and I will understand,’ he said. ‘Oh, I won’t,’ she said. ‘But I think it’s a wonderful idea. It’s so … so … fine!’

He came to her room when the one housemaid who lived in had gone to bed and was sure to be soundly asleep. Amber was waiting in the pitch dark, wide awake and naked under the sheets. They embraced and lay in each other’s arms, exploring and gently stroking each other’s bodies like blind people. It was an intensely erotic experience. ‘Is that your … ?’ Amber whispered. ‘That is my erect penis,’ he said, ‘a column of blood, one of the marvels of nature, a miracle of hydraulic engineering.’ ‘It’s enormous,’ she said. ‘Will it hurt me when you … ?’ ‘It may hurt a little the first time,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind anyway,’ she said. ‘I want it inside me. I want you inside me.’ In his younger days he would have found it difficult to restrain himself from satisfying her wish instantly, if only to avoid an embarrassing ejaculation, but at the age of forty-one he had attained a measure of control over his sexual reflexes. ‘And I want that too, my darling,’ he said, ‘but if we wait, it will be all the sweeter when it happens.’

It happened one afternoon some days later in a rented room in Soho, on a bed that creaked and twanged under their every movement, but the seedy setting didn’t matter. Amber was wonderful. In the daylight that filtered through the thin curtains her body was as delectable as it had promised to be under his blind touch in Spade House, shapely but lithe, with a delta of dense black pubic hair that set off her milk-white skin. She gave a cry that mingled pain and pleasure as he penetrated her, and when he had spent she wanted immediately to do it again. He smiled at her ignorance of male physiology. ‘I’m afraid at my age – at any age, actually – an interval is required,’ he said. ‘Let us sleep now.’ When they woke they made love in a more leisurely way, and she had a rapturous orgasm. ‘You have a natural aptitude for love, Amber,’ he told her, without flattery, as they lay side by side, sated and happy.

‘Call me Dusa,’ she said. ‘My intimate friends call me Dusa.’

‘All right – Dusa. I love your Medusa hair – in both places.’ He stroked her pubes and she giggled. ‘But what will you call me? “H.G.” sounds a bit formal in bed.’

‘I’ll call you “Master”,’ she said. ‘Like the young Samurai to their teacher. Would you like that, Master?’

For an answer he turned and kissed her. Would he like it! The word on her lips was enough to stir his limp penis into life again.

In the remainder of her Easter vacation they snatched every opportunity to meet in the Soho lodging house for joyous copulation, and when she returned to Cambridge for the summer term good fortune provided a perfect excuse for meeting her there. Ben Keeling was giving an informal dinner party in honour of Sir Sydney Olivier (as he now was, following his appointment as Governor of Jamaica) accompanied by his wife and his two elder daughters, one of whom, Marjery, was at Newnham and a friend of Amber’s. He and Amber were both invited to this event and he arranged to escort her to it. He arrived at Newnham in time for tea and took advantage of his trusted status at the College to possess his young mistress in her bedroom in Clough Hall, covering her mouth with his hand to stifle the sounds of her ecstasy lest they reach the ears of the virgins and spinsters passing on the staircase or in the gardens below the open window. ‘Bite on my hand, bite me,’ he hissed, and she did; the indentations were still discernible on the cushion of his thumb hours later, if anybody at the party for the Oliviers had looked closely. They arrived late, with the meal already in progress, and were greeted with a cheer, but he was ragged a little for his open letter to the Altrincham voters, recently published, and had to defend himself, sitting beside Amber on a window ledge with their plates on their knees because all the seats at the table were taken. This company was used to his presence in Cambridge by now and their arrival together raised no eyebrows. Only Olivier met his glance with a quizzical and faintly admonitory regard.

The next day he went to hear Amber give a paper to the Moral Science Society in which she developed an argument of her favourite philosopher, Schiller, challenging the presumption in logic that A is either B or it is not B, whereas in reality nothing is permanent and fixed. A is always becoming more or less B, and vice versa. It is only the human mind that has to hold a thing still for a moment before it can think it. He listened rapt with admiration and pride in his possession of this peerless creature, who could so effortlessly move from sensual abandonment to the lucid analysis of problems in epistemology. After the meeting she accompanied him to the station to catch his train, and waiting for it to arrive they paced the platform which pointed like a long finger towards London, resisting with difficulty the temptation to link arms or hold hands in case they were observed.

‘When will we meet again, Master?’ she said.

The name was like balm to his soul whenever she uttered it, but the question she asked had been bothering him. ‘I don’t know, Dusa,’ he said. ‘I can’t keep popping up to Cambridge without arousing suspicion. And anyway, you’ve got to revise for your Part Two.’

‘I’d much rather revise with you than here,’ she said. She was thoughtfully silent for a few minutes, and then came up with a plan. There were no more lectures and tutorials for students taking examinations, who were left free to prepare on their own. ‘The consequence is that Newnham is like a mental sanatorium at this time of the year, girls going mad with anxiety or overwork and having nervous breakdowns all over the place … It’s infectious. I could easily persuade Mother and Father that I would be far better off revising on my own, in a cottage in the country somewhere. You could meet me there.’

‘Well, it’s worth a try,’ he said.

It seemed to him unlikely that the Reeveses would agree, but when he got home to find a letter from Macmillan accepting
Tono-Bungay
for the advance he had demanded, he felt that Fortune was favouring him, and that the ruse would succeed. He told Jane that he was thinking of getting away for a week soon, to work on a new novel.

‘And will Amber be joining you?’ she said.

This was the first open acknowledgement by either of them that he was having an affair with Amber, though Jane had clearly sensed that a new relationship had been formed between them as soon as she returned home from visiting her mother in April. ‘I hope so,’ he said.

‘Shouldn’t she be preparing for her examinations?’

‘Well, that’s exactly the point.’ He repeated the arguments that Amber was going to put to her parents. ‘I’ll work on my novel, and she will do her revision.’ As she looked sceptical, he added: ‘She’ll be able to concentrate much better that way, Jane. She’s head over heels in love with me. And I with her, to be honest.’

‘I know,’ Jane said with a sigh. ‘I could see it coming. I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it.’