A Man of Parts (5 page)

‘I hope you aren’t blaming me,’ says Rebecca.

‘I blame myself for his existence.’

They are both silent for a moment, remembering the circumstances of Anthony’s conception: a passionate embrace in the drawing room of his flat at St James Court, his hands under her clothes, her eager response … but there had been a servant in the apartment whose presence inhibited him from leading her to his bedroom where he kept contraceptive sheaths, so he pressed on, intending to rely on withdrawal, but lost control at the crucial moment. The same thought is in both their minds. What misery, what years of anger and frustration and recrimination had flowed from that brief spasm of pleasure! And still persist …

‘If Anthony insists on going through with this stupid divorce,’ Rebecca says, ‘I think you should emend your will and leave some money to Kitty.’

‘I’ve been thinking along the same lines,’ says H.G. ‘Enough to provide comfortably for the children.’

‘It won’t, of course, provide them with a father,’ says Rebecca.

H.G. shrugs. ‘It’s all I can do.’

Travelling home from Marylebone to High Wycombe in a stuffy first-class railway compartment, in the company of three elderly businessmen with bowler hats, peeping at her from time to time over their evening newspapers, Rebecca is overwhelmed by dread, the sense of a curse working itself out in delinquent fathers over several generations. Her father deserted his family when she was eight, going off to South Africa on some vague business venture and disappearing without trace, leaving his wife to bring up Rebecca and her two sisters on barely adequate means. Then she herself had to bring up Anthony on her own – admittedly with more generous financial support from his father, but H.G. kept his distance and his freedom – and now Anthony is planning to leave Kitty to bring up
his
children on her own. And what was the reward for the mothers whose lives were pinched and frustrated by the responsibility thrust upon them? They became the object of their children’s displaced resentment,
that
was their reward. She never gave up hope that her beloved Daddy would somehow return to the family with an honourable explanation for his absence, like the father in
The Railway Children
(how she had wept over the ending of that book!), until she was thirteen, when they heard that he had died. Later she learned from her mother that he had been an incorrigible philanderer, seducing their own housemaids and resorting to prostitutes. She recognises in retrospect that she was a difficult, disruptive child and adolescent, always quarrelling with her sisters and criticising her mother; Anthony was the same when he was growing up – hero-worshipping his absent father and blaming her for all the miserable experiences of his schooldays. She can so easily imagine little Caroline and Edmund in years to come repeating the same mistake, adoring Anthony and inflicting the same undeserved punishment on Kitty, as she struggles to bring them up, run the farm and, if she is lucky, find a little time for her art. The feminism Rebecca campaigned for all her adult life has liberated women sexually – the bolder spirits among them, anyway – but it has not redressed this fundamental imbalance in the relations of men and women: the female instinct to nurture their offspring and the male instinct to spend their seed promiscuously. H.G. is simply a more intelligent and more successful version of her father. Even Henry has disappointed her in this respect. Unfailingly kind and protective, admiring and supportive of her work (gamely escorting her round the wilds of Yugoslavia in dirty trains and flea-infested hotels when she was researching
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
), possessing impeccable manners, and enough money to allow her to live in some style, he is in every respect the perfect spouse, except that he is prone to infatuations with pretty young women, and he hasn’t made love to her since 1937. Lying beside him in bed one night she cried out in the dark: ‘Why don’t you make love to me any more?’ But he was asleep, or pretended to be, and said nothing. She has had other lovers herself, of course, since then, though none at present. She reflects despondently that her sexual life may have come to an end.

In June the war takes a dramatic turn, on the home front as well as abroad. On June 6th the long-awaited Allied invasion of France takes place – not, as was expected, at Pas-de-Calais but on the beaches of Normandy. The nation is gripped by excitement and suspense, eagerly consuming every morsel of strictly controlled news about the event. After a few days it seems that the operation has been successful, the Allied forces have obtained a secure foothold, and reinforcements and supplies are pouring in via the ingenious prefabricated Mulberry harbour. This surely is the beginning of the end of the war, long though the wait has been since Churchill famously described the battle of El Alamein as the end of the beginning. But then, just as people are starting to relax and celebrate, the bogeyman Hitler, like some demon king in a pantomime, produces a new weapon from his arsenal to show he is not done for yet: the V1, so-called by Goebbels, the first of two
Vergeltungswaffen
, ‘retaliation weapons’ designed to exact retribution for the Allied bombing of German cities. (No one knows yet what the V2 will turn out to be.) The V1s are small pilotless aircraft, painted an ominous black, with a bomb-shaped fuselage carrying a ton of high explosive and short stubby wings. They are propelled by a jet engine, mounted above the fuselage like the handle on a flatiron, which makes a distinctive droning sound, causing them to be nicknamed ‘buzz-bombs’ or ‘doodlebugs’ by the British public. When their fuel is consumed the noise stops, and the weapon falls to the ground. The heart-stopping seconds of silent suspense between the cutting out of the engine and the noise of an explosion as the missile hits its random target is a new source of stress for long-suffering Londoners.

This is a development in aerial warfare that H.G. has not foreseen. The V1s fly fast and low at all hours of the day and night, when they reveal their presence by a tongue of fire spurting from the jet engine. Anti-aircraft guns are of little use against them, and only the latest Spitfires and Typhoons can match their speed and shoot them down or tip their wings to send them spinning into the sea or open country (a difficult manoeuvre, but to shoot is to risk being blown up oneself). The V1 offensive began on the 13th of June, and by the end of the month two and a half thousand have been launched, of which about a third came down or were brought down in the Channel, a third in south-east England, and a third reached London. The numbers increase in July. It seems as if a new Blitz is beginning. Plans are made to evacuate women and children from the capital. The leaseholders of Hanover Terrace slope off back to their rural bolt-holes. Various friends and acquaintances urge H.G. to move to a safer location, but he dismisses these suggestions with scorn. The V1 offensive seems to have a tonic effect on his health. His appetite improves. He becomes more mobile, walking around the house and even, in fine weather, having short outings in the Park.

Moura visits him one day without notice, letting herself into the house with her latchkey, so it is a surprise, and a pleasant one, though she herself looks flustered. She travelled up to London that morning from her daughter’s home near Oxford to find her own flat with its windows blown out by blast from a V1. It was a shock, she says, and she asks for a brandy to calm herself. ‘Leave the bottle,’ she instructs the housekeeper when the drink is brought, and winks at H.G. Her capacity for brandy is legendary. When she pronounces ‘Hanover Terrace’ in her unique Anglo-Russian accent it sounds like ‘Hangover Terrace’, but he has never known her to be hung over – only the men who tried to keep up with her drinking the night before. ‘Why don’t you move in here till your flat is made habitable?’ he suggests, but she shakes her head, and pours herself another brandy. ‘No, I will go back to Tania’s.’ He does not suspect her of running away from the V1s. If only half of the lethal dangers she claims to have encountered and survived in her lifetime are to be believed – well, on reflection, probably half is about the right proportion, so say a quarter – if only a
quarter
of the perils she claims to have lived through are to be believed, there could be no question of her courage and nerve. ‘You could have the guest bedroom as long as you like,’ he says. She wags her finger at him. ‘Aigee! You are trying to break our agreement.’

Normally he was the one who dictated the terms of ‘treaties’, as he called them, with his women, but not with Moura. This one went back to the mid-1930s. She was willing to be his mistress, and to appear at his side in society, but she would not marry him and she would not live with him. When, after one of their many arguments, he said sulkily that in that case he wanted his latchkey back, she handed it to him on the spot. Subsequently she borrowed it for some particular reason and he did not ask her to return it, so she retained her freedom to come and go as she pleased. If they made love in Hanover Terrace after spending the evening together, she would leave him afterwards and go home by taxi. How often he had watched her from the bed as he telephoned for one and she put on her clothes by the dim light of a shaded table lamp – all except her stays, which she rolled up and put into a paper bag before leaving, because she couldn’t be bothered to struggle into them for the taxi ride.

‘Did you ever leave your stays in the taxi?’ he asks her on a sudden impulse.

‘What are you talking about?’ she says.

‘When you went home after we made love here, you didn’t put your stays on, you used to put them in a paper bag. I wondered whether you ever left them on the back seat of the taxi, and what the driver would have made of them if he found them.’ He smiles, but Moura doesn’t seem to be amused. Perhaps she doesn’t care to be reminded of her need for corsetry. She was a slim, lissome young woman when he first met her, but has an ample, slackly curved body in middle age.

‘What nonsense you talk, Aigee!’ she says. ‘Be serious. How are you – really?’

‘I’m feeling much better,’ he replies, ‘and all the better for seeing you.’ He does not see the need to tell her of Horder’s diagnosis, which he is beginning to distrust.

‘And the flying bombs? They don’t frighten you?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘But you must have your windows covered. Promise me.’ He agrees, reluctantly because it will make the house so dark, but there is always the glazed sun lounge, which cannot practicably be protected from blast.

All through July he writes regularly to Moura to assure her that he is surviving the V1 bombardment in good heart: ‘
Sweet little Moura, everything you told me to do I am doing. Everything you told me not to do I do not do. And so I am still alive although there was one doodlebug this afternoon which fell apparently on the edge of the world because I heard no more of it … All my heart & love, Aigee … Dear little Moura, we had a near one last night but all your injunctions are scrupulously obeyed & we are now living in a boarded up and windowless home. Physically I get stronger and stronger every hour. All of my warmest love to you, your devoted Aigee … Sweet my Moura, the robot bombs come in increased quantities but thanks to my punctilious observance of your instructions no harm has come to me (or to anyone else in the house) … I go on working & I grow more & more self reliant every day … I love you my dear & am as ever your Aigee
.’ The repeated references to Moura’s instructions about boarding up the windows are designed to bestow on her a kind of wifely status in his domestic arrangements. He has always been haunted by the fear of loneliness, of being without a woman companion devoted to his welfare, and he hasn’t entirely abandoned hope of persuading Moura one day to move into Hanover Terrace.

Sometimes he sits at the desk in his study, opens one of the two manila folders placed on its surface, and turns a few pages of the typescript it contains, making an occasional note or emendation with a fountain pen. These two works in progress, which he has been composing in tandem for some months, reflect his fluctuating moods as he turns from one to the other. One is a short text entitled
The Happy Turning
. It begins ‘
I am dreaming far more than I did before this chaotic war invaded my waking hours
’, and goes on to describe a recurring dream based on the daily constitutional he used to take in the Park when he was well.

I dream I am at my front door starting out for the accustomed round. I go out and suddenly realise there is a possible turning I have overlooked. Odd I have never taken it, but there it is! And in a trice I am walking more briskly than I ever walked before, up hill and down dale, in scenes of happiness such as I never hoped to see again
.

It is a slight, sunny prose fantasia, a carnivalesque reworking of his story ‘The Door in the Wall’. It owes something to the idea of ‘dreaming true’ in George du Maurier’s
Peter Ibbetson
, and even more to Henry James’s tale ‘The Great Good Place’. They are all secular myths of transcendence, of paradise regained. ‘
Nobody is dead in this world of release, and I hate nobody
.’ He meets and chats companionably with Jesus, whose ‘
scorn and contempt for Christianity go beyond my extremest vocabulary
’, and who asserts that his greatest mistake was having disciples. ‘“
I picked my dozen almost haphazard. What a crew they were! I am told that even those Gospels you talk about, are unflattering in their account of them
.”’ Sometimes he dreams of ‘
a purely architectural world. I apprehend gigantic facades, vast stretches of magnificently schemed landscape, moving roads that will take you wherever you want to go instead of your taking them
…’ But unlike the futuristic cityscapes of his utopian fictions, which people seemed to find so cold and inhuman, especially as visualised in Korda’s film
Things to Come
, in his dream ‘
endless lovely new things are achieved, but nothing a human heart has loved will be lost
’. He ends up in the Elysian Fields, discussing ‘
the Beautiful, the Good, and the True
’ with a group of poets, painters and artists, but this episode, probably to be the conclusion of the book, is still incomplete.