A Man of Parts (45 page)

Then there was a surprising development, heralded by a letter in his post one morning with Amber’s familiar handwriting on the envelope. He had banished all thought of Amber since she left: if ever his mind veered in that direction, triggered by some memory or chance association, he wrenched it back to focus on another topic. In particular he savagely stifled any private speculation about what she and Blanco White might be doing, or where they might be living, and no information on this matter had reached him from outside sources. Jane quickly learned not to say idly, ‘I wonder how Amber is getting on?’ He thought he had managed to draw a line under their affair, but the mere sight of her handwriting was enough to make his heart beat faster. He tore open the envelope and read the brief note inside. It said that she was married to, but not living with Rivers, for reasons too complicated to explain in a letter. She was staying temporarily with friends in Hertfordshire, and he could visit her there if he cared to hear the full story. She was definitely pregnant, and suffering from morning sickness, but otherwise well and hoped that he and Jane were too. The letter was addressed to ‘Dear Master’ and signed ‘Dusa’.

The news that Amber was not living with Blanco White jolted him with a powerful charge of irrational satisfaction. But why wasn’t she? He showed the letter to Jane. ‘Oh dear, they must have broken up already,’ she sighed. ‘Amber seems to live from one crisis to another.’ ‘I must go and see her,’ he said. ‘Is that wise?’ Jane said, giving the letter back to him. ‘I don’t care whether it’s wise or not, I must know what’s happened,’ he said, and wired Amber to say he was coming to see her the next day.

She was staying in a village near Hitchin with the family of an old school friend whose parents (the friend herself was absent) received him with wary and somewhat disapproving looks and ushered him into the drawing room where Amber was waiting. She looked surprisingly well, and as beautiful as ever, and he knew at once that he had not expelled her from his system – she was in him like a virus, in his body, blood and brains. Only the presence of her hosts checked his impulse to embrace her. It was a fine day, and they went out through the French windows into a landscaped garden and found a bench at the bottom in the shade of an oak tree, where she told him her story.

It was full of drama, and emotional twists and turns that would have strained the credence of a novel reader. The self-possessed manner with which she parted from him at Boulogne had been, as he suspected, a pretence. Inwardly she had been depressed and despondent, a mood that deepened into despair as the packet churned its way towards England. What was she doing, going to marry a man she didn’t love, with another man’s child in her womb? Was it fair to Rivers, never mind herself ? She felt she had messed up her life irretrievably, and a lot of other people’s lives as well. She was seriously tempted to throw herself into the sea and end it all. ‘I actually tried to climb the ship’s rail to see if I could bring myself to do it, but my skirt was too tight. I was saved from suicide by my vanity,’ she said with a wry smile. A steward spotted her struggling with her skirt with one foot on the lower rail, and escorted her away from danger. He locked her in a cabin, came back shortly with a cup of tea, and chatted to her until the boat docked. ‘I would like to thank that man,’ he said. ‘I would like to give him a reward. What was his name?’ ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘But he was very nice. He didn’t tell me off. He just said, “Nothing’s really as bad as it seems when you’re down, Miss,” and then chatted about his family.’

As she lined up on the deck to disembark she wondered if perhaps Blanco White had had second thoughts too, and would not be waiting to meet her – but he was there, reliable as always, at the end of the customs shed, in a dark suit and a bowler hat, with a furled umbrella in his hand, as if he had just stepped out from Lincoln’s Inn. He greeted her shyly, kissed her on the cheek, and asked how the crossing had been. She didn’t tell him that she had nearly thrown herself into the sea halfway through the voyage. As they walked to the boat train preceded by her porter he told her that he had made an appointment for them to be married in the Kensington register office at eleven o’clock the next morning, and had booked her into a nearby hotel for the night. She was taken aback by the short notice and asked if it had to be so soon. ‘There’s no point in delaying,’ he said. ‘I know your parents will be delighted when we tell them we are married, but if we tell them in advance they’ll want to be involved, and they would expect you to live with them in the meantime. Do you want that?’ ‘No,’ she said, emphatically. ‘Let it be tomorrow, then.’ ‘We will have to postpone a proper honeymoon, I’m afraid,’ he said with a nervous smile. ‘But I’ve got tomorrow – Friday – off, so we’ll have a long weekend at least. I’ve booked us into a hotel on the Thames, near Henley. Then one of the QCs in my chambers has very generously offered us the use of his pied-à-terre in Bloomsbury until we’ve found somewhere ourselves.’

There were other passengers in their compartment whose presence inhibited further conversation on any but the most banal subject, and in fact they passed the journey mostly in silence. Rivers was plainly pleased with himself for the efficiency of his arrangements, but Amber was appalled as the full consequences of her decision became real to her for the first time. The word ‘honeymoon’ had sent a shaft of apprehension through her. It wasn’t that she found the idea of sex with Rivers repulsive, but it was bound to be extremely embarrassing, both of them being conscious that she had been until yesterday another man’s mistress, and was probably pregnant by him. She had a shrewd suspicion that Rivers was not sexually experienced, and might very well be a virgin – so how would they manage the wedding night? Should she help him and risk shocking him by her immodesty, or leave him to humiliate himself by his own clumsy efforts? It didn’t bear thinking about, but she could think of little else until they got to the hotel in Kensington, by which point she had made up her mind what to do.

He had booked for her a small suite with a separate sitting room, so she ordered tea to be served there, and told him to stay while she changed from her travelling costume. Then over tea and scones she made a frank declaration: she would marry him next day, but on one condition, that until her child was born it would be – she was about to say ‘
un mariage blanc
’, but just stopped herself from making the dreadful pun – an unconsummated marriage. Anything else, she said, would be indelicate, indecent, it would make her feel like a harlot being passed from one man to another. But after nine months or so of chaste companionship, after her child was born, and adopted by him as he had generously offered, she thought they could begin to have a real marriage. She fully expected him to reject this condition, and half hoped that he would, but to her surprise he welcomed it with visible relief. It seemed that similar thoughts had been exercising him, and he agreed with everything she had said. He cancelled the honeymoon weekend and they moved directly into the borrowed flat. ‘But the chaste companionship didn’t really work,’ she said. ‘It didn’t last two weeks.’

Amber was happy with the arrangement, but Rivers increasingly was not, for reasons he could empathise with. To live in close proximity to that delightful creature, to share a small flat with her, to glimpse her dressing and undressing, however discreet she tried to be, and not to be able to make love to her, must have been an intolerable strain. At first Rivers negotiated permission for certain modest embraces and caresses, but when he showed signs of wanting to go further she resisted and accused him of breaking their contract. Rivers said he found the situation intolerable, and she said in that case they should live apart until the baby was born. He was reluctant to accept this solution, but while he was brooding on it she wrote to her friend in Hertfordshire and secured an invitation to stay with her. The loan of the flat was due to terminate soon and fortunately they had not yet committed themselves to other accommodation, so she packed her valises and told Rivers she was leaving. And that was her story to date.

‘Where is Rivers?’ he asked.

‘He’s gone back to his bachelor rooms at the Inns of Court,’ she said. ‘He visited me here last week. He’s been to see Father and Mother, and told them that we are married but living apart by mutual agreement until the baby is born.’ She stroked her stomach, not yet visibly altered, in a tender, automatic gesture as she pronounced this last phrase. ‘They were pleased he’s made an honest woman of me of course, but a bit concerned about how I’m going to manage on my own while we are separated.’

‘And how
are
you going to manage, Dusa?’ he said.

It soon became clear that she had invited him to Hertfordshire to get his advice and assistance on this point. She could not stay with her friend’s family much longer without imposing on them. She had very little money, not enough to find decent accommodation for herself in which to prepare for the birth of their child, and she couldn’t ask her father to increase the modest allowance he made her without putting herself back under his authority – or risking his cutting it off altogether. Rivers had offered to find her rooms in London somewhere, but she feared that this might prove the thin edge of a wedge of renewed intimacy and corresponding tension.

‘You can stay with us as long as you like,’ he said.

‘Thank you, but that wouldn’t be a good idea,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘If it got back to Rivers, and my parents – and it would be bound to – there would be terrible ructions. Rivers would say you’d gone back on your word, and with reason. What I’d really like is a place of my own in the country – somewhere like this village, I love it here. Somewhere Rivers could visit me, but not too often.’

‘Leave it to me,’ he said.

There were times in the next few weeks when he felt more like an estate agent than a writer. He was selling his own house, and arranging to buy another in Hampstead, as well as looking for a country cottage for Amber, all at the same time. ‘
It eats up time and brains
,’ he wrote to a new friend, Elizabeth Robins, asking for her help in the third of these tasks. She was a distinguished actress, and a friend of Henry James, in whose first play she had starred, but she was better known these days as a feminist novelist and playwright. He had met her recently at a dinner party and on discovering that she had some property in the country near London he sought her help in finding a suitable cottage for Amber. When in the course of their correspondence Miss Robins learned the facts of his relationship to the young woman on whose behalf he was acting, she delivered some sharply disapproving remarks about Free Love and recommended him to be quit of the entanglement. He replied angrily: ‘
Have you ever in your life known what it was to have a community of flesh & blood & pain & understanding with another human being? You
can’t
get quit
.’ In spite, or possibly because, of this outburst, Elizabeth Robins shortly afterwards offered for rental a cottage belonging to herself at Blythe, a hamlet outside the village of Woldingham, in a lush bit of Surrey near Caterham. He went to see it, and it was perfect – a thatched cottage with leaded casement windows and a walled garden with fruit trees. He wrote to Elizabeth Robins: ‘
I wrote you a cross rude letter & I bow beneath your feet. (But you were wrong about me.) I’m putting Amber into Blythe
.’ By early July Amber was installed there. He paid for a six-month lease, renewable – the baby was due early in the New Year – and undertook if necessary to subsidise Pember Reeves’s allowance to cover her living expenses.

‘What exactly are you trying to achieve?’ Jane asked him one day, watching him frowning over the lease. ‘To help the young couple, of course,’ he said. ‘To bring some stability into a very volatile situation.’ Which was true up to a point, but it was also true that by taking the initiative in the matter of the cottage he had found a loophole in the terms of his surrender of Amber to Blanco White, who was resentful of his intervention, but lacked the means to offer Amber an acceptable alternative. The marriage had not been consummated, and Amber was living apart from her husband to bring
his
child into the world. This surely gave him a moral right to continue to see her. And who could say what might happen in the future? Divorce would be easy if Dusa and Blanco White both desired it. And if she liked the country life as much as she claimed, perhaps the idea of being his mistress, with a home of her own, might not seem so alien to her as before. He wrote jauntily to Arnold Bennett at the end of July, congratulating him on a new play which had just opened in London, ‘
and bye the bye, it may interest you to know that that affair of philoprogenitive passion isn’t over. The two principals appear to have underestimated the web of affections and memories that held them together. The husband, a perfectly admirable man, being married attempted to play a husband’s part. Violent emotional storms ensued and I think it will be necessary out of common fairness to give him grounds and have a divorce – and run a country cottage in the sight of all mankind. I tell you these things to strain your continence, knowing you will tell no one
.’ But in August he wrote to reassure Miss Robins that ‘
There will not be a divorce – a quite satisfactory treaty has been made about that. I shall be about at Blythe a good deal and Blanco White will come down for weekends. Everybody is going to be ostentatiously friendly with everybody & honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense. Amber seems likely to be very happy in Blythe
.’ He took care to add: ‘
At present she has two puppies & my two little boys to satisfy her abounding maternity – while we move to Hampstead
.’

To send Gip and Frank, accompanied by Miss Meyer, to stay with Amber for two weeks while he and Jane attended to the move from Sandgate was not only very convenient – it was the best possible advertisement for their enlightened attitude to sexual relations. If people who regarded such arrangements as depraved could read Amber’s letter to Jane as the boys’ visit approached its end, and note the complete absence from its language of any hint of tension, animosity or jealousy – on the contrary the sustained tone of relaxed affection between the two women – they might be forced to revise their opinions. Jane had passed it to him at breakfast. ‘
Dearest Jane, Many thanks for your sons. They have been perfectly delightful and I’m awfully sorry they are going … I tried to wring from the boys some admission that perhaps they would like to come again … You’ll come yourself as soon as you really get over the house, won’t you? … Did you know that one rub of Wood Milne shoeshine keeps boots bright for days? I see from a bill head on my desk that it does. Thought you might find the hint useful … Dear Jane what ought one per week prepare ahead for four people? Rivers and H.G. and visitors
.’ He sometimes thought that if he could publish the complete correspondence of Amber and Jane in the
Times
the controversy about Free Love and their own practice of it would subside like a punctured balloon, but since that was impossible he did his best by soliciting the support of respected and influential people such as Elizabeth Robins. There was no way to stop the circulation of rumours and reports of his elopement to France with Amber, her pregnancy, the hasty marriage to Blanco White, and its sequel, especially in Fabian circles, so he wrote to as many potential sympathisers as he could think of, putting his side of the story in a favourable light.