A Man of Parts (42 page)

The early reviews of
Tono-Bungay
when it was finally published in February were mixed. The one that gave him most pleasure was surprisingly in the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘
Unless we are greatly mistaken
,’ the anonymous reviewer wrote, ‘Tono-Bungay
is one of the most significant novels of modern times, one of the sincerest and most unflinching analyses of the dangers and perils of our own contemporary life that any writer has had the courage to submit to his own generation
.’ Bennett was similarly laudatory in
New Age
, but then he would be. The
Spectator
, given its record of hostility to himself and his work, was better than he had anticipated: while deploring his ‘
dreary or lurid harping on the sex problem
’, it praised ‘
the passages in which Mr Wells is stirred to eloquence by the contemplation of the grandeur or the squalor of London, and by the magic of its ancient river. The romantic side of the mad game of modern commercial and journalistic adventure; the dodges of forcing worthless wares on a gullible public and getting rich quick, – all this is described with the utmost verve
.’ When he saw the name of Hubert Bland over the review in the
Daily Chronicle
, he braced himself for a verbal thrashing, but Bland was too experienced a journalist to betray any personal animus, and was aware that a tone of bored disappointment by a former admirer would be more wounding. Bland found the novel ‘
rather incoherent, not to say rather chaotic … Mr Wells’s habit of letting his pen wander at large is growing upon him. Presently the artist who gave us
Love and Mr Lewisham
will be no more. We shall have only a greatly inferior Sterne
.’

After all the effort, hope and anxiety expended on and generated by this novel, its publication was anticlimactic. It was not unanimously acclaimed as a masterpiece, but not universally damned either. His faith in the novel was unshaken by the criticisms, but it would have to make its mark gradually, over time. Meanwhile he got on with the revision of
Ann Veronica
. Among other things he added an epilogue in which Ann Veronica and Capes were shown four years after their elopement, back in London, married (Capes’s wife having agreed to a divorce) and affluent (he has had a success as a playwright), giving dinner to Mr Stanley and his sister, reconciled at last with Ann Veronica – who is expecting a baby. It was a fairly contrived happy ending, designed to appease any apprehensions Fisher Unwin might have about the reception of the book by the circulating libraries, and he was not particularly proud of it, but he salved his conscience by giving Ann Veronica a long speech on the last page in which she felt a kind of dread of the life she saw before her of respectability and riches, and appealed to her husband: ‘
Even when we are old, when we are rich as we may be, we won’t forget the time when we cared for nothing, for anything but the joy of one another, when we risked everything for one another, when all the wrappings and coverings seemed to have fallen from life and left it light and fire. Stark and stark! Do you remember it all? … Say you will never forget!
’

During these early weeks of the New Year he continued to see Amber in London, and as an occasional guest at Spade House, without any ripples of comment or condemnation reaching him. He began to feel that he had overreacted to the discovery of her indiscretions in December, until, at the end of February, there was a sudden alarming development. He got a wire one evening sent from a post office in Kensington saying ‘
FATHER KNOWS. I MUST SEE YOU. DUSA
.’ He wired back ‘
ECCLESTON SQUARE TOMORROW ELEVEN AM
’, and slept badly that night.

Amber had a latchkey to the flat and was waiting for him when he arrived, huddled by the gas fire. It was a cold, overcast day outside the grimy windows, and the familiar room looked shabby and cheerless without the promise of sexual release which usually brought him there. They embraced, and she clung to him as if reluctant to let go, but eventually they sat down and she told him what had happened.

‘Rivers went to Father and told him we were lovers.’

‘
What
? But you swore him to secrecy!’

‘I know.’

‘The little shit!’ The expletive burst out before he could suppress it. ‘Excuse my language, Dusa, but really that was very dishonourable. He swore an oath.’

‘Well, it wasn’t exactly an oath,’ she said sheepishly. ‘More like a promise, and he warned me yesterday he was going to break it. Of course I begged him not to, but he said he couldn’t stand by and see me “ruined” and do nothing to stop it. He said he was going to tell Father that he was still in love with me and wanted to marry me if I would give you up. He seemed to think that made it all right to break his word. I said I wouldn’t dream of marrying him under any circumstances, but it made no difference. He went straight round to Father’s office and told him. And then of course there was a terrible scene at home. He ordered Beryl and Fabian to go to their rooms, got Mother and me into his study, locked the door and raged at both of us for an hour. Poor Mother was in tears. He said I had disgraced the family, that Mother had connived at my dishonour and deceived him, and we had both dragged the reputation of New Zealand womanhood through the mud. I won’t tell you what he said about you …’

‘I can imagine,’ he said grimly. ‘What did
you
say?’

‘Well, of course, I defended you. I said I loved you, and it was mutual. That Jane knows and is happy about it. That we have a very special relationship between the three of us which we believed could be a model for future generations. And that I was twenty-one and free to make my own decisions about how I lived.’

‘And what did he say to that?’

‘He threatened to turn me out of the house, and cut me out of his will, like a character in a Victorian melodrama, and Mother said if he wanted to create a scandal that was the best thing he could possibly do, and he backed down a bit, and blamed her for encouraging me to go to Cambridge, which he said was the start of my moral decline. Then he began to sing the praises of Rivers, and said he was a very fine young man, and that I was very fortunate that he was still willing to marry me in spite of my being “damaged goods” as he charmingly put it, and that if I had the slightest remnant of a conscience, and the smallest consideration for myself and the family, I would accept Rivers’s proposal immediately, in which case a scandal might be averted, and he would be prepared to forgive me.’

‘And what did you say to that?’

‘I said I wouldn’t marry Rivers if he was the last man on earth. Which isn’t true actually, because I’m fond of him and I know he is doing what he thinks is right, according to his lights, but I wanted to make it clear that nothing could come between you and me.’

‘And it won’t, Dusa,’ he said, stretching out and covering her hand with his. ‘I won’t let it.’

They made love that morning after all, not with their usual joyous abandon, but simply, almost sadly, as a pledge of their determination not to be parted. In the ensuing days and weeks, however, he began to feel less confident of the outcome. Pember Reeves was no more capable of keeping his outrage to himself than Amber had been capable of keeping her love story to herself. He heard from several sources that Reeves was telling his friends that ‘the blackguard Wells’ had seduced his daughter, and vowing revenge. The High Commissioner was said to have obtained a gun with the intention of shooting him, and according to one lurid version of the tale sat every lunch hour in the bow window at the front of the Savile Club, to which they both belonged (Pember Reeves had in fact proposed him there), waiting with a loaded revolver for the blackguard to turn up, and so alarming the members that they begged him to resign. This was all palpable nonsense, since he himself had prudently resigned from the Savile the previous summer. But there was certainly some substance to the rumours, and for Amber the situation was deeply stressful. The poor girl was under intense pressure from her father either to marry Blanco White or to insist that he must marry her himself after divorcing Jane. ‘Otherwise,’ he thundered at her, ‘there will be no place for you in decent society.’ Maud, who had been shaken by the public exposure of the affair, and had a guilty conscience about her own part in it, suspended her feminist principles and sided with her husband, urging the merits of Blanco White, though she conceded that Amber might yet save herself from social disgrace if she only cut off all relations with himself immediately. ‘But I can’t give you up, and I don’t want you to divorce Jane – I couldn’t contemplate that for a moment,’ Amber wailed in one of their many conversations on the subject. ‘So what can I do?’ He suggested she should leave home and live independently in a flat which he would pay for, but the persona this proposal summoned up was obviously too close to the stereotype of the kept mistress for her to be comfortable with it.

One day early in April Amber contacted him at the Reform by telephone and asked him to come immediately to the room at Eccleston Square. She sounded in an emotional state. ‘I’ve come to a decision, Master,’ she said.

‘What decision, Dusa?’

‘Come,’ she said, and the line went dead.

He took a cab to Pimlico, filled with dread that she was going to say they must part. The idea of losing Dusa, of losing that loving, desirable, intelligent creature, of never holding her naked in his arms again, and still more the thought of her naked in Blanco White’s, with her ankles locked behind his neck, was simply unbearable. But when he let himself into the room and she smiled at him and held out her hands to him he knew that the decision she had come to was not what he had feared. It was however a shock.

‘Give me a child!’ she said.

‘A child? Why?’ he said.

‘If I’m pregnant they can’t make me marry Rivers, because he wouldn’t have me. And if I bear your child I will always have something of you, whatever happens.’

‘Dusa, you’re wonderful!’ he said embracing her, euphoric with relief, and carried away by the reckless romanticism of the idea. His mind was already busy with plans to adopt the child, perhaps even pretend that it was Jane’s, while Amber lived with them as companion, secretary, collaborator … if the Blands could get away with it, why not themselves?

So they set about the business there and then, all the more joyfully for not having to take any contraceptive precautions. They were truly two in one flesh at last, with no membrane of rubber between them. Amber gave a great shout when she climaxed, and afterwards, as she was lying limply in his arms, she said: ‘I’m sure I’ve conceived.’ He laughed. ‘Only the Virgin Mary knew as soon as that,’ he said. ‘You may mock,’ she said calmly, ‘but I felt it happen deep inside me.’ ‘Well, to make sure, we should repeat the procedure as often as possible,’ he said, and arranged to meet her in the flat the next day.

The following afternoon he was the first to arrive, and watched from the window as she came round the corner of the square and approached the house. She was hurrying, but her movements and expression seemed anxious rather than eager, and when she entered the room he could tell immediately that she had unwelcome news.

‘Promise you won’t be angry with me,’ she said.

‘What have you done now, Amber?’ he said.

‘Dusa.’

‘What have you done, Dusa?’

‘I saw Rivers this morning,’ she said. ‘I told him I was carrying your child.’

‘For God’s sake, Dusa!’ he exclaimed. ‘You can’t possibly know that – you won’t know for a month or more. Why on earth did you say it?’

‘I told you yesterday I was sure, but even if I’m wrong, sooner or later it will be true. I didn’t want to have to wait for weeks to tell him. I wanted to get it over with – I mean his ridiculous chivalrous plan to save me from your clutches by marrying me. I was sure he would recoil from me with disgust if I told him I was pregnant by you.’ She paused significantly in her narration.

‘You mean, he didn’t recoil?’ he said.

‘He looked horrified, and he said some things about you I won’t repeat, and he paced up and down for a bit without speaking, but eventually he said it didn’t make any difference. He still loves me and wants to marry me.’

‘Does he?’ he said grimly. He was beginning to feel rather intimidated by this young man’s dogged persistence.

‘And he said he would tell Father accordingly.’

‘Oh God!’ he groaned.

‘What I’m afraid of is that Father will try to force me to marry Rivers to save the family’s name. Not that he can, of course … But the scenes will be horrible. Mother will support him, I know she will. What shall we do?’

He thought for a few moments. ‘We’ll have to hide somewhere,’ he said at length. ‘Run away to some place where we can’t be got at, where we can be calm and think things out. We’ll go to France for a while.’

Amber’s face brightened, and she clapped her hands. ‘France! What a lovely idea.’

Jane as usual was a brick, albeit a puzzled and somewhat sceptical one. ‘You’re going to elope with Amber to France and have a baby with her?’ she said when he announced their plans. ‘Is that a good idea, H.G.? Is that going to help the situation?’

‘We’re not “eloping”, Jane, in the normal sense of the word,’ he said. ‘We just want to be alone and left in peace for a while to think things through. Amber doesn’t want me to leave you – she’s always made that absolutely clear.’

‘Yes, I know. I trust Amber, and I like her. But will a baby solve anything? Or will it just be another problem?’

When he had finished expounding the arguments for Amber’s great ‘decision’, which sounded weaker to his own ears the more he elaborated them, she shook her head and said, ‘Well, I think you’re both mad, but I see you’ve made your minds up. What do you want me to do?’

‘Just hold the fort. Tell people I’ve gone away to do some writing. Don’t tell them where.’

‘Where
are
you going?’

‘I thought Le Touquet,’ he said. ‘That way I can pop back from Boulogne any time it’s necessary.’