A Man of Parts (51 page)

She came to Candover Street looking happy and well, spoke eloquently of the joy she had in the baby Anna Jane, and showed him a photograph of their child at its christening. ‘Christening?’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said somewhat sheepishly, ‘but it’s only a social ritual really, and Rivers wanted her christened, so I didn’t argue.’ All her references to Blanco White were positive. ‘He’s a good father,’ she said at one point, ‘and a good husband.’ ‘I’m glad to hear you say so,’ he said, ‘since I was in a sense the matchmaker.’ ‘You were right, Master,’ she said. ‘It was the only solution.’ It gave him a thrill to hear the old term of endearment. But why had she come? She said that she was writing a novel – a new one – and wanted to give him the first few chapters to read for his opinion, but even as he agreed he thought this was more of a pretext than an explanation. He decided that it was simply an internal declaration of independence. A year ago Shaw had written a play called
Misalliance
, privately performed because it was far too risqué to get past the Lord Chamberlain, a kind of highbrow farce about sexual goings-on among a group of socially variegated people. The heroine, an outspoken and shameless young woman called Hypatia, was reported by several friends who saw the piece to be based on Amber. He had not seen the play, but he had read it. The glib young hussy Hypatia was a very shallow version of Amber, but she had one line that struck an authentic note: ‘
I don’t want to be good and I don’t want to be bad: I just don’t want to be bothered about either good or bad: I want to be an active verb
.’ Amber wanted, had always wanted, to be an active verb, not a passive one. The agreement she had entered into, to cut off all communication with him for two years, was an infringement of her liberty, and this private act of defiance was necessary to her self-respect.

He had cooled a bottle of Mosel in advance of her visit to cover any initial awkwardness or embarrassment at their first meeting after so long an interval. It proved unnecessary but it encouraged an easy flow of conversation. They spoke of old times, sometimes with laughter, sometimes with tears on her part. They sat with their arms round each other on the divan bed, and after a while it was more comfortable to lie down. They ended up performing the best active verb of all. ‘I didn’t mean to do this when I came here, Master,’ Amber said afterwards, ‘but I’m glad.’ ‘So am I, Amber,’ he said, and kissed her tenderly.

She visited him again a week later, this time with the intention of making love, but also to say it would be for the last time. ‘I didn’t want you to think I regretted what happened last week,’ she said. ‘But if we go on, Rivers is bound to find out, and I don’t want to hurt him.’ He was glad to agree. He discovered that time had healed the wound of their enforced separation. The bitterness he had felt then was a fading memory, as was the passion of their old relationship, and he had no desire to revive either of these disturbing emotions. He was trying to construct a quieter, calmer life.

Not long afterwards Elizabeth von Arnim returned to England and signalled her availability. She had acquired a flat in St James’s Court, Westminster, and wrote to say that she looked forward to entertaining him and Jane there, and perhaps meeting himself alone somewhere else. He invited her to Candover Street, and she arrived one afternoon, smartly dressed as always, but wearing a hat with an opaque veil. ‘I feel very wicked,’ she said, as she removed this piece of apparel, ‘like a character in a French novel.’ ‘Isn’t that part of the fun?’ he said, removing some other items of her clothing. ‘Goodness me!’ she said, helping him with the hooks and eyes on her costume. ‘How impatient you are!’ ‘Well, I’ve missed you,’ he said, ‘I’ve been undressing you in my head for weeks.’ ‘Have you indeed,’ she said. ‘Tut, tut.’ But he could see she was excited by this badinage and soon they were entwined on the bed in vigorous and joyful intercourse.

After they had slept briefly she showered while he made them a pot of tea, and when he came out of the kitchenette with the tray he found her demurely dressed again, every button and hook secured in its proper place. Perhaps she had found a long hair in the bathroom, or spied a hair-clip under the bed, for she said thoughtfully, as she stirred her cup, ‘Do you have other women here?’ He did not deny it. ‘If you and I are to continue as lovers that must cease,’ she said. ‘Very well,’ he said, smiling. ‘Let us make a treaty. I will give up other ladies, but you must accept that I will never give up Jane.’ ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I have no wish to come between you and your family. We must take care that she doesn’t find out.’ ‘Oh, Jane won’t mind,’ he said, and saw that this reply was a surprise, even a slight shock, to her. ‘In fact I’m sure she will approve,’ he added. ‘I see,’ she said, though he was not sure she did.

But he was right, of course. Having long accepted that she could not respond to his sexual needs, and that he would find satisfaction elsewhere, Jane preferred that it was with one person rather than several, someone she knew and respected, who could be relied upon to be responsible and discreet. The Countess von Arnim, or ‘little E’ as he now began to call her, was eminently eligible for this role, all the more because she declared her intention, while keeping her London base, of residing mainly in Switzerland, where he would be able to visit her without any embarrassing publicity. She had made a good deal of money from her play, and from the sale of the Count’s properties, to add to the royalties from her books, and she intended to use this small fortune to build herself a chalet on some mountainside in Switzerland, a country which she associated with happy times in her girlhood. He shared her enthusiasm for Switzerland, and also for house-building, and joined enthusiastically in her search for a site in the Jura, hiking by day and staying overnight in mountain chalet-inns. Fräulein Teppi Backe, who had been governess to her children and was now her companion, accompanied them for appearance’s sake, though Teppi was well aware that he found his way to E’s room most nights. On two occasions they managed to break her bed, and it amused him to observe next morning the dainty, diminutive Countess, who looked as if she weighed about six and a half stone, coolly reporting the collapse of this item of furniture to an incredulous innkeeper in her fluent but formal German. She couldn’t find a site that satisfied her exacting criteria in the Jura, so they transferred their search to the Valais area, and there discovered the ideal situation near Randogne-sur-Sierre, in the foothills below the winter sports resort of Montana, said to be the sunniest in the Alps, with a stunning view over the Rhône valley that opened out to include the Pennine Alps, the Mont Blanc range and the Simplon. An architect was commissioned, and designed to Elizabeth’s specifications an enormous building that was more like a chateau than a chalet, with sixteen bedrooms, four bathrooms and seven lavatories. She explained that she intended to entertain her friends there and to make it a holiday place for her children, and for their families in due course. The building work was contracted and completion promised for the autumn of the following year. It was already named by its owner,
Chalet Soleil
.

Meanwhile he and Jane had agreed that they wanted to get out of Hampstead and find a place somewhere in the country not too far from London where they could recreate the kind of life they had enjoyed in Spade House, perhaps on a slightly grander scale. Visiting his friend Ralph Blumenfeld, the editor of the
Daily Express
, who had a house at Great Easton near Dunmow in Essex, he was much taken with the area – pretty, unspoiled farming country only forty miles from London. Most of the property there was owned by Lady Frances Warwick, who occupied the stately mansion Easton Lodge, and having been introduced to him by Blumenfeld, she agreed to let him have the Old Rectory at Little Easton on a short lease. Landowner and tenant were equally delighted with the transaction. Lady Warwick, reputed to have been a mistress of the late King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales, was an unusual kind of aristocrat, having been converted to socialism after her marriage, and while continuing to live in patrician style herself was patron and hostess to a large circle of progressive writers and politicians, to which he would be a most welcome addition. To him the handsome red-brick Georgian Rectory, though in need of some modernisation and refurbishment, appeared immediately as an ideal dwelling place. Spacious reception rooms opened off a wood-panelled, stone-flagged square hall, from which rose a broad staircase leading to the upper floors and numerous bedrooms. The house looked across its lawns and over cornfields towards the village, and possessed a large barn in which he immediately saw himself organising games and theatricals. And, vitally, this idyllic place had an excellent railway connection to London via Bishop’s Stortford, the trains stopping by request at the Easton Estate’s private halt only a mile away.

He signed the lease in August 1911, and they used the house initially as a weekend retreat, but he and Jane both liked it so much that the following spring they made the Rectory – renamed ‘Easton Glebe’ to weaken its ecclesiastical associations – their permanent home, keeping on Church Row temporarily as a London base, but with the intention of selling it and purchasing the Easton house on a long lease. The boys revelled in the wide open spaces that surrounded the house, and their freedom to explore them. A tennis court was laid out on one of the lawns, and the barn was cleaned and furnished for indoor games and theatricals on wet days. On most weekends they had a party of friends to stay who were always enchanted with and envious of the place. He had a spacious study on the ground floor but intended to create also a secluded suite on an upper floor where he could sleep or write at any time of the day or the night as the mood took him. Jane, as resourceful as always, took on the task of executing his plans, and herself set about restoring the neglected gardens to order.

Meanwhile he accompanied little E to Switzerland to observe the progress of the Chalet Soleil, which like every other building under construction in the history of the world was behind schedule, and would not be completed by the autumn, but was promised to be ready by Christmas. They stayed in a neighbouring chalet owned by the singer Jenny Lind, and spent their days hiking through the foothills and pine woods, taking a simple picnic with them in their rucksacks, and making love after their lunch on mattresses of pine needles covered with their clothes. Little E enjoyed sex in the open air as much as himself, and relished the sensation of sun and breeze on her naked skin. They knew where the local peasants were working and there were few tourists about in early summer, so there was little risk of being surprised
in flagrante
. He took trips with her that year to Amsterdam, Paris and Locarno, where they stayed in grand hotels and disported themselves decadently on sprung mattresses and among pillows stuffed with goosedown, but no lovemaking between them pleased him as much as those rustic copulations on the hillsides of the Valais, rendered all the more natural by the circumstance that contraceptive precautions were, she assured him, no longer required. She had reached that stage in a woman’s life conveniently early.

In September
Marriage
was published, and was rapturously received, fulfilling to excess his hopes that it would restore him to respectability in the eyes of the great British public. ‘
A book that thrills with the life, the questioning, of to-day. Whatever the autumn publishing season may produce, it is not likely to bring us anything more vital, more significant, than “Marriage
”,’ declared the
Daily Chronicle. ‘What a brilliant, stimulating, and even exalting book this is … The observation, the cleverness, the almost vicious gaiety, the religious curiosity of the book, are wonderful
,’ said the
Daily News. ‘Alive with flashes of the most perfect insight at every turn … It grips the reader from cover to cover
,’ enthused the
Sphere
. He had not had such a royal flush of laudatory reviews since
The War of the Worlds
. Even his old journalistic enemies, the scourges of
In the Days of the Comet
and
Ann Veronica
, were charmed, and purred their appreciation: ‘
Mr Wells has put all his cleverness into this long story of an engagement and marriage between two attractive and, we may add, perfectly moral young people
,’ said the
Spectator
, while
T.P.’s Weekly
described it as ‘
a thrilling and inspiring book
–
and one that can be placed on a puritan’s family bookshelf
’. He laughed disbelievingly as he leafed through the cuttings sent to him by Macmillan with a congratulatory covering note – even the author didn’t think the book was
that
good. But the extravagant praise made up for some of the critical injustices of the past, and he was not going to complain about it.

There was only one starkly dissenting review, albeit in a publication of small circulation. A writer called Rebecca West wrote a withering critique of
Marriage
in the
Freewoman
, a lively little magazine less than a year old which aimed to broaden the feminist agenda beyond the single issue of the vote to include sexuality and culture, and even dared to criticise certain aspects of the suffragettes’ campaigns. The previously unknown Rebecca West’s witty, combative contributions to this journal had already attracted his attention, beginning with a bold attack on Mrs Humphry Ward, who personified the English idea of a ‘serious’ novelist, partly on the strength of her genealogy (granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby, and niece of Matthew Arnold) but mainly because her novels were about the waning of Christian faith, and had characters who earnestly debated how its theology could be modernised and its morality preserved. ‘
The idea of Christ is the only inheritance that the rich have not stolen from the poor
,’ Rebecca West asserted in ‘The Gospel According to Mrs Humphry Ward’. ‘
It is now a great national interest (not a faith), and as such is treated with respect, and as securely protected from “modernising” as the tragedy of
Hamlet.
And although Mrs Ward has been “turning her trained intellect” (to quote her publisher) on the universe for nigh on sixty years, that has not struck her. She regards the Englishman as going to church with the same watchful eye for possible improvements as when he attends the sanitary committee of the borough council
.’ He knew good polemical writing when he saw it, and chuckled appreciatively. Mrs Humphry Ward was used to fending off the arguments of orthodox Christians on the one hand and of militant atheists on the other, but it was easy to imagine her discomfiture at being attacked from this quite unexpected direction and being portrayed as an ideological robber of the poor. He did not however enjoy being at the sharp end of Miss West’s scorn himself. Her review began: