A Man of Parts (44 page)

‘Shouldn’t you have thought of that earlier?’ Blanco White interjected.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, suppressing the impulse to defend himself. ‘The point is this. I still love Amber, but it seems to me that the best way I can express that love is to let her go – into the care of a man who will cherish and protect her.’

‘You mean myself?’

‘Exactly.’

Blanco White was silent for a moment before he said: ‘I love Amber. I have always loved her since we first met. I have several times offered to marry her in spite of her deplorable relationship with you. She has consistently refused me.’

‘I think I could persuade her that it is the best thing to do,’ he said. ‘If you are still willing.’

‘I am willing – and if there is a child, I would adopt it as my own.’

‘That’s very handsome of you.’

‘Provided of course that she terminates her relationship with you.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

They didn’t actually shake hands on it, but that was the understanding between them when he left.

He spent the night at Spade House and explained to Jane that the experiment of living with Amber on the Continent for a few weeks had been a total failure and that he thought she should marry Blanco White. ‘I see,’ she said calmly. ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ he said. ‘Nothing you do could surprise me any more, H.G.,’ she said. ‘But will Blanco White marry her?’ ‘Yes, I saw him this afternoon,’ he said. ‘The problem will be persuading Amber.’

He took a boat from Folkestone to Boulogne the next morning, and arrived at the villa in Le Touquet to find Amber reclining on a chaise longue in the front parlour, covered with a blanket and wearing a martyred expression. It appeared that she had fallen down the stairs in the middle of the night, as she groped her way to the lavatory in the dark, hurting herself in the process. Fearing that she might have endangered her baby she had remained lying against the bottom steps until Marie, the woman who cleaned and cooked for them, arrived in the morning. Seriously worried by this account, he immediately summoned a doctor, who examined Amber carefully and declared that she had sustained no serious injury and that it was very unlikely that the foetus, if there was one, would have been affected. When the man had gone he asked Amber why she hadn’t got Marie to fetch a doctor as soon as she arrived, and the answer, that she didn’t trust Marie to get a good one, was unconvincing, especially as the doctor he summoned himself was recommended and fetched by Marie. When he pointed this out she accused him of harrying her with pointless questions instead of sympathising with her plight. He couldn’t suppress the suspicion that the accident on the stairs had in fact been a minor one, which Amber had wanted to present in the most dramatic way possible, to make him feel that it was somehow his fault for being absent. ‘You don’t really care about me,’ she complained. ‘You go off back to England whenever you feel like it, leaving me here all on my own at night. It’s not fair. It’s certainly not kind.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, Dusa, but I can’t live here like an exile,’ he said. ‘I have a family and a career to look after in England – I have to go back from time to time.’

‘Well then I don’t see the point of us being here.’

The unsayable had been said – fortunately by Amber. They contemplated it in silence for a moment, until he said: ‘It’s not really working, is it?’

Amber slowly shook her head.

‘Then we’d better go back,’ he said.

‘But to what?’ she exclaimed. ‘To where? It’s easy for you to say, “go back”, but I can’t live with you and Jane, not permanently, and I can’t go home – I can never go home now. I don’t want to live alone in some poky London flat waiting for you to call on me when you can spare the time from “your family and your career”,’ she went on, sarcastically echoing his own words, ‘afraid to go out and meet people in case they cut me or, even worse, pity me, as it becomes obvious that I’m pregnant. What do you suggest I do?’

‘You could marry Blanco White,’ he said.

She stared. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Quite serious. I saw him yesterday in London. He’s a very decent young man, and he’s still keen to marry you.’

Amber threw back her head and gave a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Oh is he really? So you went to see him and offered to give me back to him, did you? Without consulting
me
. The great champion of women’s rights, the fearless critic of the patriarchal family, is prepared to get rid of his troublesome mistress by palming her off on some chivalrous lawyer she doesn’t love. Did you offer to give me a dowry as an incentive? Or has money already changed hands?’

He had expected a tirade like this, and patiently absorbed her anger and her insults, waiting for her to run out of steam. The energetic way she strode up and down and gesticulated while she raged at least reassured him that she had sustained no serious injury. Then slowly he began to chip away at her resistance to the idea of Blanco White as a spouse. All right, she didn’t love him, not in the way they loved each other, but there were many happy marriages founded on affection rather than passion, his own being an example, and she had admitted more than once that she liked Rivers, and valued his affection and loyalty to her. He was a fine young man, serious and responsible, and had every prospect of a successful legal career. And he was ready to provide for the child, to adopt it as his own – that was the crucial thing. There wasn’t another man in England who would do the same. He went on and on in this vein for two hours or more, countering every objection Amber could raise, demonstrating that no other solution was possible, until she said wearily at last, collapsing on to the chaise longue and closing her eyes, ‘All right, I give in. It’s obvious that you want me off your hands.’

‘That’s not true, Dusa,’ he said.

‘Yes, it is. Tell Rivers I’ll marry him.’

This was the hardest moment for him in the epic argument. He longed to take her in his arms and tell her that he still loved her and that giving her up was the hardest decision he had ever had to make in his life, but he was afraid that if he did so there would be another reconciliation, another passionate consummation, and they would be back where they started. So he hardened his heart, and said, ‘When will you meet him?’

‘The sooner the better,’ she said, her eyes still closed as if to block out visions of the future.

He went into the town and sent a telegram to Blanco White to say that Amber had agreed to marry him and asking if he could meet her at Folkestone next day off the packet that departed from Boulogne at twelve noon. He received a reply the same evening, ‘
WILL MEET AMBER AT CUSTOMS STOP AM APPLYING FOR SPECIAL LICENCE
.’

He escorted Amber to Boulogne in the morning and saw her aboard the boat. It was an overcast day, chilly for May, and the sea beyond the harbour had a sullen grey aspect, flecked with whitecaps. Amber was pale-faced, having brought up her breakfast earlier from either anxiety or morning sickness, and expressed the hope that she wouldn’t be punished for her sins by seasickness as well. She had evidently decided to conceal whatever emotion she was feeling behind a brittle ironic wit, and he had a feeling that he was more likely to break down at their parting than she was. He placed her in a corner of the first-class lounge and made her comfortable with a rug obtained from a steward. The ship’s hooter sounded a warning blast. ‘You’d better get off the boat,’ she said. ‘It would be too silly if you had to hand me over to Rivers in the Folkestone customs shed like a bartered bride.’ When he leaned forward to kiss her goodbye, she presented her cheek, not her lips. ‘Goodbye, Dusa,’ he said. ‘Safe journey.’ ‘Goodbye, Master,’ she said, and at last there was a note of tenderness in that name. He hurried away before he made a fool of himself by bursting into tears.

In a shop near the harbour he bought a bottle of cognac, and that evening drank himself into unconsciousness, something he did very rarely. He was woken the next morning by Marie’s entrance into the parlour where he had fallen asleep fully dressed on the chaise longue. He spent a miserable day suffering from combined headache and heartache until he went for an icy swim in the late afternoon, after which he felt better, and slept reasonably well that night without the assistance of alcohol. But it was not until the following day, after receiving an economical telegram from Blanco White, ‘
MARRIED YESTERDAY AT KENSINGTON REGISTER OFFICE
’, that he began to plan a life without Amber.

First he summoned Jane and the boys to join him immediately, to make use of the rented villa. Gip and Frank were delighted to have this unexpected seaside holiday, and he enjoyed taking them for walks along the beach, shrimping in the pools left by the outgoing tide, and getting them to practise their French in shops and
glaciers
. Marie was somewhat shocked to discover that there was another, genuine Madame Wells, but adapted to the change of regime quickly, recognising in Jane someone who knew very well how to run a house. Blessedly relieved of all domestic concerns, he made a start on a new novel. It was to be a funny novel, somewhat in the style of
Kipps
, with no politics or sex problems or big ideas, about a henpecked, indifferently educated, unsuccessful, small-town shopkeeper who would eventually and almost accidentally rebel against his fate. It began:

‘
Hole!’ said Mr Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly increased emphasis: ‘’Ole!’ He paused, and then broke out with one of his private and peculiar idioms. ‘Oh!
Beastly
Silly Wheeze of a hole!
’

He was sitting on a stile between two threadbare-looking fields, and suffering acutely from indigestion
.

The book was a kind of escape from all the preoccupations of his private and public life in recent years, converting the experience of frustration and disappointment they had caused him into liberating, life-enhancing comedy. He chuckled a good deal to himself as he wrote; but there were also times when he would be suddenly reminded of Amber, overwhelmed by the sense of what he had lost, and he would carry on writing some farcical scene with tears wetting his cheeks.

As the days passed he became more and more certain that he did not want to go back to Spade House and pick up the threads of his accustomed life there. The place had been spoiled for him for ever by the failure of the great experiment in ‘triangular mutuality’ between himself, Amber and Jane. Giving up Amber had been necessary, but it had been a negative achievement, a kind of defeat. He had to start a new life in a new place. He outlined his plan one evening to Jane: they would move to London. It was the obvious place for both of them to be. He was sick of the hours wasted travelling up and down on the wretched South Eastern Railway. He would be at the centre of literary life, and she would have easy access to the concerts and art exhibitions that she liked to attend. ‘But the boys will miss the sea and the countryside,’ she objected. ‘They’ve been so happy and healthy there.’ ‘We’ll get a house in Hampstead,’ he said. ‘Near the Heath – plenty of fresh air and walking there – and near the new Tube station – the West End only twenty minutes away. Perfect!’ He did not mention – though it was a consideration he privately added to the balance in favour of the move – that now his great love affair was over he would more easily find consolation in the opportunities for
passades
that the capital afforded.

Jane put aside her doubts, as she usually did when he had made up his mind to do something, and played her part in persuading the boys of the superior attractions of London over Sandgate. He couldn’t wait to get on with the business, and took them all back to Spade House a week before the villa’s lease expired. He knew that Henry Arthur Jones was a frequent resident at the Folkestone Hotel, which he evidently found a congenial location in which to write his very lucrative plays, so might be tempted by the idea of a place of his own on the same part of the south coast. He accordingly wrote to him: ‘
It just occurred to me that you might like to think of buying my house. Don’t be alarmed! But I want very much to leave this place and live in London soon by reason of a web of almost impalpable reasons that affect people of our temperament, and the house is therefore in danger of going very cheap
.’ Henry Arthur Jones took the bait, and negotiations for the sale proceeded with unexpected smoothness.

He and Jane went to look at houses for sale in Hampstead, and his choice fell on one in Church Row, a street of elegant Georgian town houses which led from the main thoroughfare of the village to the parish church of St John, and was conveniently near the Underground station. Its architectural design – basement kitchen, a pair of rooms divided by folding doors on the ground floor, another pair on the first floor, and two floors of bedrooms above – was one that he had often criticised in the past, and he was conscious of a certain inconsistency in choosing it, but it was part of his wish to open a wholly new chapter in his life. He had created a model modern house at Sandgate, and had enjoyed his years in it, but now he fancied something different, something old, dignified, and steeped in history. Church Row, which had seen so many famous residents in its time, and the church itself, with its memorial to John Keats and the graves of John Constable and George du Maurier among others in its churchyard, had the kind of ambience he desired. He felt a twinge of conscience at condemning his servants to labour in a basement kitchen, and climb so many flights of stairs, but he had plans to modernise it and make it as easy to run as such a home could be, and although it had fewer bedrooms than Spade House, they would have fewer guests to accommodate than in the past, since most of their visitors at Sandgate came from London. Thus and thus did he quell any doubts he entertained or Jane voiced. He made an offer which was accepted, but he bought the house in Jane’s name, renouncing the usual privileging of a husband over his wife in the matter of property. At least, that was how he presented it to Jane; but it also made him feel freer in spirit knowing that, if the ‘fugitive impulse’ should ever possess him again, her home would be secure. They would not get vacant possession till August, and it was still only June, but he tempered his impatience for the move by reflecting that they would enjoy one last summer beside the sea, and got on with
Mr Polly
.