A Man of Parts (4 page)

Rebecca is outraged and dismayed. She likes and admires Kitty, a gifted painter and a beautiful woman, whom Anthony wooed and won in the most romantic fashion in 1936, proposing on the second occasion they met, and persisting on subsequent occasions until she capitulated. It seemed to Rebecca at the time a typically impulsive, quixotic move on Anthony’s part, but for once it turned out well. Kitty, older and considerably more mature than Anthony, convinced him to give up his ambitions to be a painter because he would never be really good at it, and to become a writer instead, like his parents, and although he has yet to produce anything of consequence he has shown some flair in reviewing novels for the
New Statesman
. They have seemed happy together, especially after Anthony resolved his feelings about the war, which were divided between his pacifist principles and a reluctance to seem to shirk patriotic duty, by becoming a dairy farmer, a reserved occupation. He has taken to farming surprisingly well, as has Kitty, but about a year ago he accepted the offer of a part-time job with the BBC which seemed to him a more dignified contribution to the war effort, and now it has led to this silly infatuation. ‘Who is she?’ Rebecca demands of Anthony on the telephone, but he refuses to tell her. ‘I want to meet her,’ says Rebecca. ‘Well, you can’t,’ he says. ‘This is nothing to do with you, Rac. It’s between Kitty and me.’ ‘How can you think of deserting those two adorable children?’ Rebecca says, referring to Caroline aged two and a half and Edmund aged one, on whom she dotes. ‘Well, you wanted H.G. to desert
his
children,’ Anthony replies. Rebecca slams down the phone in a fury, and then regrets doing so, as she has more questions she wanted to ask. For instance, does H.G. know about this latest folly of his natural son?

H.G. does indeed know, because Anthony tells him, and receives a tongue-lashing on the evils of divorce that takes him by surprise. ‘But you divorced your first wife,’ he points out, ‘and were very happy with your second, I believe.’ ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ says his father, his voice rising to a high-pitched squeak, as it always does when he is agitated. ‘Isabel and I had no children.’ ‘Kitty and I will share time with the children,’ says Anthony. ‘Kitty is not vindictive. She’s really been very reasonable about this.’ ‘It’s more than you deserve,’ says H.G. ‘You’re a fool. I don’t understand you. I never have.’ ‘I’m in love,’ Anthony says. H.G. gives a snort of derision. ‘I should have thought you of all men would have understood that,’ Anthony says.

H.G. is silent, and glancing at him Anthony sees that his eyes are closed. Whether he is asleep or feigning sleep there is no way of knowing, but he does not stir when Anthony adjusts the rug over his feet and miserably leaves the room. He finds the night nurse in the kitchen, chatting to the housekeeper, and tells her that he is going back to Mr Mumford’s.

– I suppose he has a point
.

– What?

–
You’ve had more than your fair share of love affairs in your lifetime
.

– I had a lot of affairs. Love didn’t come into most of them. As far as I was concerned – and for most of the women too – it was just a mutual giving and receiving of pleasure. The idea that you have to pretend to be in love with a woman in order to have sex with her – which we owe to Christianity and romantic fiction – is absurd. It has caused nothing but physical frustration and emotional misery. The desire for sex is constant in a healthy man or woman and needs to be constantly satisfied. Love, real love, is rare. As I said in
Experiment in Autobiography
, I’ve only loved three women in my life: Isabel, Jane and Moura.

– Didn’t you love Rebecca?

– I was
in
love with her. And before her with Amber. But that’s a different matter. The most dangerous of all.

– Why dangerous?

– You
think
you’ve found the perfect partner at last – soulmate and bedmate …

– What you call the ‘Lover-Shadow’ in that secret Postscript you’ve written to your autobiography
.

– Exactly.

– You’d been reading Jung
.

– Yes, but it’s not quite the same as his Shadow. It’s a person, someone who embodies everything lacking in your persona, with whom you could achieve the perfect fulfilment which you have always dreamed of. But when you think you’ve found her, common sense goes out of the window. It’s as if you’ve taken a potion, or are under a spell – like the lovers in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. It’s a kind of madness. If that’s what’s happened to Anthony there’ll be a smash.

Anthony lets himself out of the back door of the blacked-out house and makes his way down the path with the aid of his shaded torch, inhaling the scents of hyacinth and lily of the valley invisibly in blossom, until he reaches the wall at the end of the garden. In defiance of blackout regulations he elevates the beam of his torch and plays it over the frieze drawn on the wall in lines of black paint by H.G. in his cartoon-like ‘picshua’ style, depicting the rise and fall of the Lords of Creation, a line of figures in profile beginning with prehistoric monsters and ending with men in top hats. Underneath is written ‘
Time to go
.’

There is a door in the wall which reminds Anthony of one of H.G.’s short stories, about a man who in childhood came upon a door in the wall of an anonymous London street opening on to a paradisal garden, full of sunshine and flowers and pleasant companions, which he longed fruitlessly to revisit for the rest of his days. There is no paradise behind this door – only Mr Mumford’s, a rather poky flat, in need of redecoration, furnished with odds and ends that Anthony remembers from Easton Glebe, H.G.’s country house in Essex, which he used to visit in the 1920s in his school holidays: a faded sofa with a tear in the upholstery, a gate-leg table, a revolving bookcase, and – whimsically mounted on the wall, like a trophy – a battered hockey stick, memento of many riotous games organised by H.G. in his prime for his weekend house-party guests. Banal, shabby objects, but the visits to Easton Glebe which they evoke
had
seemed like glimpses of paradise to the unhappy schoolboy.

He rings Jean, but the number is engaged, probably by Jean’s flatmate Phyllis who has interminable conversations with her mother most evenings. He sits down on the faded sofa and, to pass the time, takes from the revolving bookcase a thick omnibus edition of H.G.’s short stories, and turns to ‘The Door in the Wall’.

It begins: ‘
One confidential evening not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story
.’ Lionel Wallace was a successful forty-year-old politician who at the age of five or six escaped from his home and got lost in the streets of West Kensington. He came across a green door in a high white wall covered with Virginia creeper, a door that, once opened, led him into an enchanted garden. ‘
There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave one a sense of lightness and good happening and well-being; there was something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad … everything was beautiful there
…’ Two friendly panthers approach the little boy and one rubs its ear against his hand, purring like a cat. A tall fair girl picks him up and kisses him, and leads him down a shady avenue to a palace with fountains and all kinds of beautiful things and playmates with whom he plays delightful games, though he can never remember later what they were. Of course his story is not believed and he is punished for lying and running off from home on his own. For the rest of his life he yearns to return to the garden, but when he searches for the door in the wall he cannot find it, and when, on several occasions, he passes it by chance he does not stop to go through it because he is bound on some urgent worldly business – a scholarship exam at Oxford, an assignation with a woman that involves his honour, a crucial division in Parliament. These opportunities have become more frequent of late. ‘
Three times in one year the door has been offered me – the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it
.’

As Anthony reaches this point in his reading, the telephone rings. It is Jean. He is annoyed to be interrupted just a page or two short of the story’s ending, which he has forgotten, and fails to put the usual note of tenderness into his voice in their exchange of greetings.

‘Is something the matter, darling?’ Jean asks.

‘No. I was just deep in one of H.G.’s stories.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to intrude,’ she says ironically. ‘Shall I ring back later?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ he says. ‘I’m a bit upset, to tell you the truth. I’ve just had a rather painful telling-off from the old man.’ He gives her a brief précis of his conversation with H.G.

‘He’s got a bit of a nerve, hasn’t he?’ says Jean. ‘He wasn’t exactly a model of matrimonial fidelity himself, from what you’ve told me.’

Anthony gives a dry chuckle. ‘No indeed. But he didn’t like it when I sort of reminded him of that.’

‘Perhaps I should meet him,’ Jean says. ‘If he’s so susceptible, perhaps I could win him over.’

‘Not now, darling,’ Anthony says hastily. ‘Not yet.’

When the telephone call is over, he returns immediately to the story to find out what happens to Wallace. Oh yes, it comes back to him. He is found at the bottom of a deep shaft under construction for an extension to the London Underground, having gone through a door, carelessly left unlocked, in the temporary hoarding enclosing the building site, and fallen to his death – either accidentally or, more probably, deliberately. ‘
We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security, into darkness, danger, death. But did he see like that?
’

Meanwhile, in the small sitting room of the main house, the interlocutor has turned interrogator.

– You only loved three women in your life: Isabel, Jane and Moura?

– Yes.

– Two wives and one mistress
.

– I wanted to marry Moura after Jane died.

– But she refused
.

– Yes.

– Perhaps she was afraid you wouldn’t want to have sex with her any more if you were married
.

– What do you mean by that?

– Well, both your marriages were sexual failures, weren’t they?

– I would say disappointments rather than failures.

– Isabel disappointed you in bed?

– I was starving for sex when we married, but she couldn’t respond. I was an inexperienced lover, and she was a deeply conventional young woman.

– So fairly soon you sought more exciting sex with other women? Like that little assistant of hers?

– I didn’t seek out Ethel Kingsmill, she took the initiative. But yes, she showed me that there were women in the world who had the same appetites as I had.

– And a year or so later you left Isabel for your student, Amy Catherine Robbins – ‘Jane’ as you curiously renamed her
.

– I didn’t like the name Catherine, which she used because she didn’t like ‘Amy’, so I chose a new name for her.

– Not a very romantic one though, was it? No erotic associations. ‘Plain Jane’ … Jane Austen …

– What about Jane Eyre? She was passionate enough.

– Do you like that novel?

– No, since you ask. But—

– You left Isabel for Jane, and eventually married her, but as you say in your
Autobiography
she turned out to be just as disappointing in bed as Isabel. Isn’t it rather puzzling that you exchanged one sexually inhibited spouse for another? As Oscar might have said, ‘once is unfortunate, twice looks like carelessness
’.

– What are you getting at?

– Perhaps secretly, subconsciously, you never really wanted a fully sexual woman as a wife. Perhaps you only really enjoy sex when it is wild, unlicensed, transgressive. Perhaps Moura suspected that
.

– Nonsense!

– Is it?

‘He’s talking to himself again,’ Marjorie says to Gip when he calls at Hanover Terrace one afternoon, as he often does on his way home from University College. Quietly she leads him to the door of the small sitting room, which is ajar, and he stands in the passage for some minutes, listening. He cannot catch more than a few words and phrases, but the dialogic rhythm of the old man’s voice reminds him of something his brother Frank used to do in early childhood.

‘He had an imaginary friend he used to talk to,’ Gip says to Marjorie when they are back in the room that serves as her office. ‘I used to eavesdrop on him, because if he thought he was observed he would immediately clam up. If there was anything on his mind – if he’d done something naughty, for instance, and was wondering whether he would be found out or whether he should own up – he would discuss it with this other boy, putting the arguments on both sides of the question. I was fascinated. It was like listening to a radio play – though of course there was no radio in those days. Maybe H.G. is doing something similar, but in second childhood.’

‘Well it’s an interesting theory,’ says Marjorie. ‘We must ask Frank what he thinks next time he comes.’ Gip’s younger brother, a documentary film maker currently employed as a civil servant, allocating accommodation to bombed-out families, spends much of his time commuting in and out of London from his home in the country, and is able to visit Hanover Terrace only occasionally. The main responsibility of looking after H.G.’s welfare has fallen on Gip and Marjorie, but they do not complain. They are both devoted to him.

A few days later Rebecca comes to see H.G. again, deploring Anthony’s irresponsible behaviour. H.G. tells her he has done his best to dissuade their son from breaking up his family, but without success.

‘Why for heaven’s sake can’t he be content with an affair, like anybody else?’ Rebecca complains. ‘Kitty wouldn’t have minded if he’d been discreet – she more or less told me as much on the phone.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ H.G. says. ‘But Anthony is silly, theatrical and childish. Whether that’s some innate weakness of character, or the fault of his upbringing, it’s hard to say.’