A Man of Parts (46 page)

The Reeveses’ relief at the marriage of their daughter quickly evaporated when they learned that her seducer was still seeing her and paying the rent for her cottage, and there was a good deal of sympathy for them among the Fabians. The Old Gang obviously regretted that they couldn’t expel him from the Society because he was no longer a member, but Pease wrote frostily to Jane requesting that she resign her position on the Executive in view of circumstances well known to her, which threatened to bring the Society into disrepute. The Webbs were particularly appalled by these circumstances and began to interfere. Sidney, using Shaw as an intermediary because he was too angry to write himself, deplored his inflammatory self-justifying letters, and declared that the honourable thing for him to do would be to find an excuse to go abroad for a year. But Shaw passed on the message in a tone of urbane detachment that would have displeased its originator. ‘
Webb is pretty savage with you for writing to keep up the agitation. He wants you to go away to the East for a year, and write a book about oriental marriage customs, to keep you from making mischief with occidental ones
,’ he wrote, and took a surprisingly sympathetic line about his continuing involvement with Amber and Blanco White: ‘
It is entirely proper that the young couple should have the friendship of such a distinguished man if they are lucky enough to get it. And A. is such an ungovernable young devil that nothing short of a liberal allowance of interesting society will ever keep her from the wildest adventures. So if you will follow the negative part of Webb’s program (no more letters) and omit the Asiatic part, matters will proceed very properly, gossip or no gossip
.’ He was delighted to receive this letter, so different in tone from the lecture Shaw had given him about the Rosamund affair, and replied at once: ‘
My Dear Shaw, occasionally you don’t simply rise to a difficult occasion, but soar above it & I withdraw anything you would like withdrawn from our correspondence of the last two years or so … Matters are very much as you surmise. Amber has got a little cottage in Blythe, Woldingham. B.W. works in London, & goes down in his leisure time. I like him and am unblushingly fond of her & go down there quite often. The Reeves don’t know how often & the heavens will fall if Reeves finds out
.’ Pember Reeves was more incensed than ever with ‘the blackguard Wells and his paramour’, as he apparently referred to them in conversation with his friends, and it was in fact hard not to feel some compassion for him. Disappointed in his hopes of returning to political life in New Zealand, he had resigned as High Commissioner earlier that year to accept an appointment as Director of the London School of Economics, only to find at the outset of his first academic year in post that the whole institution was buzzing with the scandal surrounding its most celebrated postgraduate student, his daughter.

It was reassuring to have Shaw on his side at this time, especially when Beatrice Webb began to get involved, writing peremptorily to Amber early in September, ‘
You will have to choose – and that shortly – between a happy marriage and continuing your friendship with H.G. Wells
.’ Astonishingly, she seemed to have only recently heard of the whole history of their affair – Sidney must have shielded her from the gossip as long as he could. She declared that the Webbs’ friendship with himself was at an end, and commenced a vicious defamatory campaign against him, as he discovered one day when he was staying with Sydney Olivier, home on leave from Jamaica. Olivier, opening his mail at breakfast, gave a chuckle as he was perusing a letter, and passed it to him: ‘Here’s something that will make you laugh, Wells.’ It did not. It was a circular letter signed by both the Webbs but obviously written by Beatrice, to ‘
all our friends who have daughters between the ages of fifteen and twenty
’, warning them of the predatory sexual habits of H.G. Wells where innocent young girls were concerned. He immediately fired off a brace of furious letters to Sidney, threatening a libel action, which according to Shaw frightened him into making Beatrice desist from her poisonous letters – but not from involvement in the affair.

When he arrived at the Blythe cottage one day towards the end of September Amber greeted him with the announcement, ‘Beatrice Webb was here yesterday.’

‘Really? What did she say?’

‘She said I should break off all relations with you and live either with Rivers as his wife, or if I don’t want to do that, live with my family, and that if I go on seeing you in this irregular way I will eventually be cast out of decent society, and probably end up as fallen women usually end up in novels. Well, she didn’t say that in so many words, but that was the gist of it.’

‘Beatrice Webb is an interfering bitch with the soul of an old maid, married to another old maid,’ he said angrily. ‘She looks at you, radiant with the expectation of motherhood, and feels only envy and spite. What business has she coming down here?’

‘Well, I asked her to, actually,’ Amber said.

He stared. ‘Why on earth did you do that?’

‘I used to like the Webbs. They were important influences on me when I was a young girl, and I admired Beatrice particularly. I was rather touched when she wrote to me the other day, giving me her advice. I wanted to try and explain how we saw things. It wasn’t any use, though.’

‘Of course it wasn’t.’

‘But she sincerely wanted to help. When I said there was no possibility of my going back to live with my family she offered to try and arrange a reconciliation, and she really meant it.’

‘Beatrice can’t help us – she’s stuck in a rigid moral framework built on foundations in which she herself doesn’t really believe.’

‘She kept saying – “But you have to choose, my dear girl – between Blanco White and Wells – you can’t have them both, society won’t let you. If you want your husband, you must go back and live with him. If you want Wells – though I can’t imagine why you should – you’ll have to divorce your husband, and Wells his wife,” and I said, “Well, I’ve got them both at present, Rivers and H.G., and we get along very nicely together.” And she said, “You don’t mean to say that your husband will tolerate that state of affairs indefinitely?” And I said, “Well, we have hopes of him,” and she threw up her hands in dismay – or surrender.’

He laughed. ‘Good for you, Dusa!’

In fact Blanco White’s view of the situation was obscure. It was understood between them that his own relationship with Amber was now chaste, and this was also the basis of his self-justifying missives to friends and enemies. He and Amber had not cheated on this contract, in spite of some temptation early in her residence at the cottage, and as her belly swelled it ceased to be an issue. Pregnancy in a curious way gave her back a kind of virginity, or at least chastity. She presided over the cottage like a Virgin Queen, with himself and Blanco White as courtiers dancing attendance on her, and she obviously rather enjoyed the role. She beguiled the time when she was alone by writing a novel, and even began to learn a few housewifely skills from Esther, the very competent cook and ‘general help’ they had hired locally. Blanco White was polite and friendly to him in a reserved sort of way on the rare occasions when their visits to the cottage coincided, but they avoided discussion of personal matters, talking instead about politics, mainly the long-running struggle between the government and the Lords over Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’, which threatened a constitutional crisis and had the whole country enthralled. Considering the amount of gossip and attention the young man must be attracting as he went about his professional work, he was conducting himself with admirable dignity and restraint – but what would he want after the baby was born? It was hard to imagine him approving an arrangement he and Amber speculatively discussed, of her continuing to live at Blythe as Mrs Blanco White, perhaps with a female companion for respectability’s sake, visited discreetly by himself and her husband at different times. He thought that Blanco White must have in mind a future less like the conclusion of
In the Days of the Comet
, but was not inclined to press him on the matter and risk disturbing the delicate balance they had achieved at Blythe.

He had brought with him to the cottage an advance copy of
Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
, which Fisher Unwin were about to publish as their leading title of the season, and he presented it to Amber with a twinge of misgiving. He had not shown it to her before in any form, feeling that it was Jane’s prerogative to read his work first, and Jane when she read the proofs had said, ‘You know this will be taken as the story of you and Amber, don’t you?’ He had rejected the prediction, pointing out all the differences between the fiction and reality which he had taken care to establish. ‘Ann Veronica comes from a much more suburban background than Amber, and is much more naïve. She goes to London University not Cambridge, and studies biology not philosophy—’ ‘Mere details,’ Jane said, ‘that anyone can see through.’ ‘And there are two characters much more like me, or people’s notion of me, than Capes is,’ he continued, ‘and Capes is divorced by his wife in the end but we’re not going to get divorced – ever.’ And he gave her a kiss to underline the point, which pleased her. Still the conversation unsettled him, and he knew in his heart that he had kept the novel from Amber’s eyes out of a fear that if she saw it she would demand changes and deletions that he could not bear to make. Lately she had been expressing curiosity about the book, and he could postpone showing it to her no longer. She took the volume, elegantly bound in reddish brown cloth with gilt lettering and decoration, exclaiming ‘At last!’, and opened it by chance at the dedication page. ‘“
To A.J
.” Who is that?’ ‘A composite of Amber and Jane, of course,’ he said. She smiled, and said she would take it up to bed and begin it before she went to sleep.

The next morning she came down late to breakfast looking pale and haggard, with the book in her hand, having sat up all night reading it. ‘Ann Veronica is me,’ she said accusingly. ‘This is our story.’ ‘No, it’s not, Amber,’ he said testily, and went through the same arguments he had used on Jane, with the same lack of success. It always annoyed him that people didn’t understand that fiction could only be made out of life, and there wasn’t a decent novel written by anybody which didn’t have a good deal of the writer’s experience in it, but that didn’t license them to treat the whole thing as biography. ‘They will, though, given half a chance, and you’ve given them much more,’ Amber said. ‘Even the name “Ann Veronica” sounds like an anagram of mine.’ ‘But it isn’t,’ he pointed out pedantically. ‘It’s near enough,’ Amber retorted. ‘And she takes a course in jiu-jutsu! All my Cambridge friends will recognise that. Why did you put it in?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said feebly. ‘And this is the worst possible time to publish it!’ she said. ‘It’s bound to draw attention to our relationship.’ She was of course absolutely right, but until now he had managed to exclude from his consciousness this obvious truth. ‘Can’t you stop it?’ she asked. ‘I’m afraid not, Dusa,’ he said. ‘It’s too late. The books are already in the booksellers’ stockrooms, the review copies have already been sent out. We must just batten down the hatches and sit out the storm.’

And a storm there was, though it built up slowly. The early reviews of
Ann Veronica
in the
TLS
and the
Athenaeum
were favourable, but there was a warning of what was to come in the
Daily News
, from R.A. Scott-James. ‘
As a novel it is a brilliant and interesting one
,’ he wrote. ‘
But as everyone knows, Mr Wells uses the novel as a medium for expressing his views. I maintain that Mr Wells’s psychology is wrong in its foundation. He is right in his protest against the modern world, against its lack of opportunities for development, but it is not frustrated sex impulses which are responsible for the evil; they are merely a symptom; you will not put things right by promoting some mighty sex-passions
.’ This was a fair point, responsibly argued. But a review by the pseudonymous ‘John O’London’ in
T.P.’s Weekly
took a more populist and polemical line. ‘
Decidedly, then
, Ann Veronica
will be read and talked about this winter by the British daughter. All I can say is that I hope the British daughter will keep her head. That Mr Wells’s story may do considerable mischief is too clear
.’ John O’London feared that the British daughter, faced with temptation, might quote and act on Ann Veronica’s words to her married lover: ‘
To have you is all-important, nothing else weighs against it. Morals only begin when
that
is settled. I don’t care a rap if one can never marry, I’m not a bit afraid of anything – scandal, difficulty and struggle … I rather want them. I do want them
.’

In retrospect this speech seemed something of a hostage to fortune. He and Amber now had plenty of scandal, difficulty and struggle to bear, and neither of them found it pleasant. The novel was banned by the circulating libraries, denounced by the National Social Purity Crusade, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Mothers’ Union, and the Girls’ Friendly Society. It was anathematised from the pulpit, one canon declaring that ‘
I would as soon send a daughter of mine to a house infected with diphtheria or typhoid fever as put that book into her hands
.’ The same kind of public condemnation that had been visited on
In the Days of the Comet
now descended on
Ann Veronica
, but with increased intensity, fuelled by gossip that the central love affair in the story corresponded closely to one in which the author was currently involved. The revised ending he had added to the novel in which Ann Veronica was legally married to a divorced Capes and reconciled with her father and aunt made no difference to the outrage of the moralists, and was frequently picked on by literary critics as contrived, so that he regretted now that he hadn’t been more honest and left his principals living in sin.

All this controversy was of course good for sales, and Fisher Unwin were rubbing their collective hands as the orders poured in, more than compensating for the circulating library ban. But the sales figures did not compensate for his own discomfort. He was conscious that he had become an object of pity and a cause of embarrassment to some of his friends, and that they were avoiding him. He received fewer invitations to social events, and when he put in an appearance at his clubs, members he recognised at a distance seemed mysteriously to disappear from sight if he took his eyes off them. If he was not mistaken, Henry James performed this vanishing trick at the Reform one day, and sent a letter subsequently, acknowledging the gift of
Ann Veronica
, in which his attempt to praise and damn the novel in the same long exhalation of breath was more than usually strained: ‘
The quantity of things
done,
in your whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration – so much so that I was able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength of the feeling communicated, and the impetus accepted, almost as much as if your “method” and fifty other things – by which I mean sharp questions coming up – left me
only
passive and convinced, unchallenging and unenquiring (which they
don’t
–
no they don’t!
)’