A Man of Parts (47 page)

His old adversary John St Loe Strachey, editor of the
Spectator
, had a much more decided opinion of
Ann Veronica
, though he waited till late November to deliver it. The piece was unsigned, but his style of magisterial condemnation was unmistakeable from its title, ‘A Poisonous Book’, onwards.

The loathing and indignation which the book inspires in us is due to the effect it is likely to have in undermining that sense of continence in the individual which is essential to a sound and healthy State. It teaches in effect that there is no such thing as a woman’s honour, or if there is, it is only to be a bulwark against a weak temptation … If an animal yearning or lust is only sufficiently absorbing, it is to be obeyed. Self-sacrifice is a dream and self-restraint a delusion. Such things have no place in the muddy world of Mr Wells’ imaginings. His is a community of scuffling stoats and ferrets, unenlightened by a ray of duty or abnegation
.

Strachey concluded by brushing aside possible defences of Ann Veronica’s conduct by quoting Samuel Johnson. ‘
Boswell tells us of a conversation in which he defended with sophistical excuses a woman who had betrayed her husband. Dr Johnson cut him short with his immortal – “My dear Sir, never accustom your mind to mingle virtue and vice. The woman’s a ———, and there’s an end on’t
.”’

He had hopes of keeping this review from Amber’s eyes, but he discovered when he next visited her that some anonymous person had sent it to ‘The Occupier’ of the cottage in Blythe, and she had it ready to show him. ‘I’ve seen it already,’ he said. ‘It’s vile.’ ‘What word is represented by the dash at the end, I wonder?’ she remarked, affecting a detached curiosity. ‘I believe it’s “
whore
”,’ he said. ‘But Strachey is too mealy-mouthed to print it.’ ‘I see,’ she said, and flushed perceptibly. A few minutes later she said she was feeling tired, and went to her room, obviously upset. He cursed the malicious person who had sent the review. At first he suspected Beatrice Webb, but on closer examination the hand on the envelope looked more like that of Hubert Bland, who could have got the address from Beatrice, and would certainly be gloating over the hostile reception the novel was getting, and want to make sure Amber saw this particularly wounding specimen. By a strange coincidence Rosamund Bland had at last got married that month to Clifford Sharp, just as the publication of
Ann Veronica
brought the scandal of his affair with Amber to the boil – or perhaps it wasn’t coincidence, perhaps the spectacle of them heading for a public smash had frightened Rosamund into matrimony with the man her parents favoured. But it was a queer repetition: his two young mistresses married off to faithful younger swains in the same year.

He received a letter from Violet Paget, a friend to him and his work for many years, who wrote under the name of ‘Vernon Lee’. Rumours of the scandal in which he was enmeshed had reached her ears, and she wrote expressing concern. He replied summarising the situation candidly, and concluded: ‘
There you are! You won’t for a moment tolerate it I know – nobody seems going to tolerate it – I won’t leave my wife whose life is built up on mine or my sons who have a need of me. I won’t give up my thinking and my meeting with my lover. I mean somehow to see my friend & my child & I mean to protect her to the best of my power from the urgent people who want to force her to make her marriage a “real one
”.’

It was a relief to write this letter, but he was well aware as he read it through how illogical and impracticable his defiant stance would seem to the recipient. He sent the letter anyway, but he was beginning to weary of the struggle, feeling like a stag at bay, bleeding and exhausted, surrounded by yapping hounds. He suspected that Amber and Jane were beginning to weary too, though neither of them admitted it. Jane did not visit Amber at Blythe, but corresponded with her and bought baby’s clothes which he took down there. It was fortunate that they had just moved to London, for in Sandgate Jane would have been the object of local gossip; their Hampstead neighbours were less inquisitive, or concealed their curiosity behind more urbane manners. But he was guiltily aware that some of Jane’s London friends and acquaintances had ‘dropped’ her, or found excuses not to accept her invitations.

As to Amber, she became more and more passive and contemplative as her pregnancy advanced, moving slowly about the cottage as if drugged, her thoughts focused on the coming child. Sometimes she would take his hand and place it on her belly to feel the baby kick, and then he would gently stroke the convexity through her smock, round and round in circles with the tips of his fingers – it was the closest they came to making love these days. ‘Do you want a boy or a girl?’ he asked her as he was doing this, sitting beside her on a sofa facing the fire, one dark afternoon early in December.

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

‘I hope it’s a girl,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have a daughter, as brave and beautiful as you.’

She smiled. ‘And what would you call her?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Anna Jane,’ he said eventually. ‘“Anna” because it’s about as close as you can get to Amber without causing confusion—’

‘And because of Ann Veronica?’ she interjected.

‘Perhaps … And “Jane” because she’s been such a brick in all this.’

‘Very well, if it’s a girl “Anna Jane” shall be her name,’ said Amber. ‘Providing Rivers agrees of course.’

‘Of course,’ he said. But the reminder of Blanco White’s prerogative depressed him somewhat, and he continued stroking her belly in silence.

‘He was here yesterday,’ she said after an interval.

‘Was he? He doesn’t usually come in midweek.’

‘He wants me to go back to him,’ she said.

‘Does he?’ he said, trying not to show how much this statement disturbed him. ‘And do you want to?’ He stopped the massage.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think, for the baby’s sake, I should. I’m very isolated here, when neither you nor Rivers is down.’

‘I’ll arrange for you to have a proper nursemaid when you bring the baby here,’ he said – it had already been agreed that she should go into a nursing home at his expense to have the baby.

‘Thank you, H.G., but … it’s not just the baby,’ she said. ‘Rivers is not prepared to go on like this. He said to me yesterday, “This nonsense has got to stop before you have the child.” ’

‘Did he? He’s got on a very high horse suddenly. What did you say to that?’

‘I said he’d have to talk to you.’

‘Rivers can talk to me until he’s blue in the face,’ he said, ‘but he won’t make me give you up.’

‘He seems to think he can.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

When he got back to Hampstead the following day there was a letter from Blanco White, requesting a meeting at his chambers; not so much a request, in fact, as an order, giving him a number of possible times in the coming days. He chose the earliest and made his way by Tube to Lincoln’s Inn the next morning with a sense of foreboding. This confidently assertive Blanco White, described by Amber and expressed in his letter, was a quite new persona, and there must be some reason for it.

When he presented himself at the chambers he was not directed to the crowded little office at the top of the stairs where they had had their previous conference – how long ago it seemed! – but ushered into a kind of boardroom with a big rectangular table of dark polished wood and upright chairs, and left there for some minutes to twiddle his thumbs and stare at the glass-fronted cabinets full of legal books, before Blanco White appeared with several manila folders in his hands. ‘Good morning,’ he said stiffly, and sat down on the opposite side of the table. He placed the folders on the polished surface and squared them up with his hands. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, without a trace of warmth in his voice. ‘I don’t think I will detain you for long. I am speaking, you understand, as a lawyer representing myself as Amber’s husband. The charade at Blythe has gone on long enough. Amber must return to me as my wife, and you must sign an undertaking not to see her or communicate with her for a minimum of three years. I have it here.’ He slid one of the folders across the table.

‘Amber must decide for herself,’ he said without touching the folder. ‘But I’m damned if I’ll sign any such undertaking.’

‘Then I will sue you for libel,’ Blanco White said calmly. ‘I have here’ – he patted the remaining folders – ‘a number of sworn affidavits from highly respected persons stating that they recognised the character of Ann Veronica in your novel as a portrait of Amber, and it is a plainly defamatory portrait. You have no doubt read the article in the
Spectator –
“the woman’s a whore, and there’s an end on’t,” and similar comments in other journals.’ The lawyer’s countenance was impassive, but there was a gleam of triumph in the eyes.

He attempted a derisive laugh, he blustered and jeered, he said he would see Blanco White in court, and he walked out of the room leaving the folder with the undertaking unopened on the table. But he knew in his heart he had lost. There was no way he could defend a libel suit without Amber being required to appear in court as a witness, and he couldn’t possibly put her through such an ordeal even if she were willing. He went directly from Lincoln’s Inn to Blythe and told Amber of Blanco White’s ultimatum.

‘Did you know he was going to do this?’ he asked her.

‘Not exactly, but I knew he was going to bring matters to a crisis of some kind,’ she said.

‘And do you want to go back to him and give me up?’

‘I don’t want to give you up, Master,’ she said. ‘But I think perhaps we have no choice. We’ve come to the end of the road. It’s been a great adventure, and I shall miss you terribly, but for the sake of our child – and for Jane’s sake, because it isn’t fair to expose her to the horrible gossip and slander any longer – I think it will be best.’

She began to weep, and he put his arms round her and wept too.

He delayed the process, he quibbled over the terms of the undertaking, reducing the term of three years to two, he withdrew his offer to pay for the nursing home (Pember Reeves would have to pick up the bill), but he signed the undertaking in mid-December, by which time Amber had left the cottage and been admitted to the nursing home in London to await the birth of her child. Since the legal agreement did not take effect till the beginning of the New Year he visited her there and accompanied her on walks in nearby Hyde Park, but this was his last gesture of defiance. He sought distraction from the inevitability of their parting in the preparations for the family’s first Christmas in the new house, and Jane arranged a pre-Christmas lunch party on the 22nd of December for Arnold Bennett, Robert Ross, Constance Garnett, the Sidney Lows, William Archer – and May Nisbet, whom they still entertained at holiday times by long tradition. Henry James was invited, but sent an unconvincing apology, no doubt disturbed by the spreading ripples of scandal. He asked Arnold to arrive early and took him into his study to tell him the whole story of the last nine months. ‘I don’t know how you could stand the strain of it, old man,’ Arnold observed finally. ‘Neither do I,’ he said candidly. ‘There were times when I nearly cracked up, I can tell you.’ ‘But now it’s all over, you must feel some relief.’ ‘I feel numb,’ he said. But he managed to simulate enough cheerfulness at the lunch to make it go off pretty well.

The next day he received a letter from Violet Paget, responding to his defiant one. As always, what this lady had to say was thoughtful and thought-provoking. Although she had found his story ‘
easy to understand, easy to sympathise with, even easy to excuse, it jars with some of the notions deepest engrained in me. My experience as a woman and as a friend of women persuades me that a girl, however much she may have read and thought and talked, however willing she may think herself to assume certain responsibilities, cannot know what she is about as a married or older woman would, and that the unwritten code is right when it considers that an experienced man owes her protection from himself – from herself
.’ Violet was no prude or puritan, but a lesbian who did not conceal the fact from her friends. If
she
thought this way, there had really never been any chance that he and Amber could have carried off their daring experiment in human relations. Violet added that ‘
In all this story the really interesting person seems to me to be your wife, and it is her future, her happiness for which I am concerned
,’ a sentiment for which he blessed her. The only good he could see in the end of the affair was that Jane was quietly and untriumphantly relieved that the long struggle was over.

On New Year’s Eve he received a message that Amber had given birth safely to a baby girl, and he wrote to Violet with the news:

Dear Friend
,

I have a little daughter born this morning. You wrote me the kindest letter & I clutch very eagerly at the friendship that you say is still mine. I don’t think there is any faultless apology for Amber & me. We’ve been merry & passionate – there’s no excuse except that we loved very greatly and were both inordinately greedy of life. Anyhow now we’ve got to stand a great deal – of which the worst is separation – & we’re doing it chiefly for love of my wife & my boys
.

Best wishes for the New Year

H.G. Wells