A Man of Parts (57 page)

He had known Baring for some years and liked him, in spite of their very different backgrounds and beliefs: he was the son of a banker-made-baronet famous for risky financial speculation, and a Roman Catholic convert. He had been educated at Eton and Cambridge, which he left without a degree, but it must have been out of boredom with the curriculum rather than academic failure, for he possessed high intelligence and an enviable gift for languages which had led to a distinguished and adventurous life as a diplomat and foreign correspondent. He had covered the Russo-Japanese War for the
Daily Telegraph
, staying on in Russia as their correspondent, and had written an excellent book on Russian literature. From Baring he learned that all his own books had been translated in Russia and published in a collected edition in 1909, and were widely read – something he had been unaware of, and which pleased him even though he derived no royalties from the sales. He had expressed an interest in visiting the country one day, and Baring had promised to arrange it, recommending that he go in midwinter in order better to understand the Russian character. ‘The climate is utterly different from ours,’ Baring said, ‘much more extreme. So are the people.’

He certainly found St Petersburg – a hugely enlarged Venice locked in frozen waterways and covered in dirty snow – less like England than anywhere he had visited before, the impenetrability of the language and the strangeness of the Cyrillic alphabet reinforcing its dream-like improbability. ‘
St Petersburg is more like Rebecca than any capital I have seen
,’ he wrote to her soon after their arrival, ‘
alive and dark and untidy (but trying to be better) and mysteriously beautiful
.’ He knew only one person there – Maxim Gorky, whom he had met in New York in 1906, when their respective tours of the country coincided. They found then that they had much in common and got on very well together, though needing an interpreter to converse. As well as both being storytellers from humble backgrounds and with socialist sympathies, they shared a vulnerability to censorious moralists. Shortly after Gorky arrived in New York to an enthusiastic welcome, it was discovered that the gracious lady who accompanied him, Madame Maria Andrevieva, was not his legal wife, and a storm of public outrage was whipped up in the press. The bewildered couple were ejected from their hotel and refused admission by others, and were in danger of being incarcerated on Ellis Island to await deportation, lest they should infect the New World with their depravity, when they were rescued by a rich and enlightened American who took them into his house and entertained them privately for several months. ‘The best months of my life,’ Gorky recalled with a hearty laugh, when they were reunited in St Petersburg. ‘I never got so much written in the time.’ Baring interpreted on this and many other occasions when he met writers, journalists, politicians and liberal aristocrats, and without him he would have been lost.

He found the volatile political atmosphere of St Petersburg exciting, and sensed that although Russia was deeply backward by Western European standards there was a readiness for radical change among the intelligentsia which made the Fabians and trade union-backed Labour politicians at home look timid in comparison. Progressive political opinions were not however incompatible with hedonism in St Petersburg. His evenings were crowded with invitations to parties where wine and vodka flowed freely, and suppers in restaurants where the provision of
cabinets particuliers
was more blatant than in London or even Paris. The glittering high-ceilinged dining room of the Hotel Metropole, humming with laughter, chatter, and the music of a gypsy orchestra, had a balcony that ran round all four sides with doors and little curtained windows behind which customers entertained, and were entertained by, ladies wearing flamboyant gowns and a great deal of paint and jewellery.

At another time he might have been tempted to take advantage of this convenient arrangement, but he was determined to be faithful to Rebecca. He wrote to her regularly, combining assurances of his love and longing with practical instructions on what to say to Llandudno landladies. ‘
You are Mrs West. I am Mr West. Write and arrange that you are to stay at Llandudno until your baby is born. Mr West is in the cinematograph business, and he has to write things. He wants a quiet room to write in and he has to have a separate bedroom. (Though he proposes to spend much time in your delicious bed.) Make this clear and get everything comfortably arranged. That house has to be our home. We have to settle down and work there and love there and live there, and you have to see that it is all right. You have got to take care of me and have me fed and peaceful and comfortable. You are going to be my wife—
’ He suspended the rapid movement of his fountain pen across the hotel notepaper, realising that this last was a rash thing to say, but he couldn’t cross it out without revealing his second thoughts, and he hadn’t time to rewrite the letter – Baring was waiting below in the lobby to take him to have dinner with Vladimir Nabokov, a distinguished criminologist who was apparently an admirer and had a fourteen-year-old son devoted to his scientific romances. He let the word ‘wife’ stand, but continued in a vein so rhapsodic and hyperbolical that Rebecca couldn’t possibly take it literally: ‘
We will have great mysteries in each other’s arms, we shall walk together and eat together and talk together. You are the woman and you are to be both the maker and ruler in all this life. Panther, I love you as I have never loved anyone. I love you like a first love. I give myself to you. I am glad beyond any gladness that we are to have a child. I kiss your feet, I kiss your shoulders, and the soft side of your body. I want to come into the home you are to make for me. I shall hurry home for it. Get it ready
.’

They were reunited in mid-February and spent two days and nights in Mrs Strange’s house in Pimlico. When their sexual starvation had been allayed by several bouts of torrid jungly intercourse, they turned their attention to practicalities. Rebecca had not corresponded with Llandudno in his absence, having discovered that the railway connections with Easton were appalling and it would have taken him all day to make the journey. It seemed that his choice of that location had been based on a ludicrous misreading of the timetables in Bradshaw, and instead he now proposed Hunstanton on the north Norfolk coast: equally remote from London, but relatively easy to reach from Easton via Bishop’s Stortford. They must go there to look for a suitable dwelling as soon as possible, he declared – but by separate trains, in case they were observed together. Rebecca laughed, thinking he was joking, and when she realised that he wasn’t said, ‘Aren’t you taking discretion to extremes?’ ‘It’s for Jane’s sake,’ he lied. ‘It will save her a great deal of embarrassment if our secret is kept.’ ‘I had to tell Mother, of course,’ she said, ‘and Lettie and Winnie.’ ‘And how did they take it?’ ‘Badly,’ she said. ‘Mother feels you betrayed her trust, seducing me after being a guest in her home.’ ‘But
you
invited me to tea,’ he said, ‘and
you
seduced
me
– well, pursued me anyway.’ ‘Quite so. I told her that. It didn’t make any difference. Lettie thinks I’ve been a fool, and that you took advantage of me. I don’t think you will be invited to tea again – not until we are married.’ ‘Hmm, that may be some while off,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t raise their hopes prematurely.’ ‘But you said in your letter—’ she began. ‘I know I did, Panther,’ he said quickly. ‘But I meant that we would be married
spiritually
. My marriage with Jane is not a real marriage, it’s a convenient companionship. We haven’t been lovers for years. You are my mate – soulmate and bedmate. One day – when my boys are older – we may go through the tedious legal formalities to satisfy your mother and sisters, but that won’t change the nature of our relationship.’ He tried to convey the idea he had of the future: two marriages, two homes, one official and sexless, the other secret and passionate. ‘Do you mean we should keep the child, and bring it up ourselves?’ she said. ‘If you wish. It’s entirely up to you,’ he said magnanimously. ‘No, I don’t wish,’ she said. ‘I want to be free to write.’ ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘But won’t I feel sad when it comes to giving him – or her – to somebody else?’ ‘We’ll find a model couple who will let us visit him – I’m sure it’s going to be a boy – whenever we like,’ he said, ‘and take him on treats and holidays whenever we want to. He’ll call us Uncle and Auntie.’ ‘Uncle Jaguar and Auntie Panther!’ she said, laughing, delighted with the scenario he had summoned up.

They travelled separately to Hunstanton, met by arrangement in the station buffet, and found furnished rooms to let in a house which was suitable if not seductive. ‘Brig-y-don’ on Victoria Avenue was a raw red-brick terraced house with bow windows that jutted out into a patch of front garden, and from the first floor gave a view of the Wash and a sideways glimpse of the North Sea, looking cold and grey at this time of year. A summer resort for people in search of a quiet holiday with bracing air, Hunstanton was as still as a tomb in February. Rebecca looked glum at the prospect of spending the next six months there, but he did his best to cheer her up. ‘You will get a lot of writing done,’ he said, ‘and I will spend as much time as I can with you.’ He kept his word, visiting her every week for at least two days, often more, and while he was away he stoked the fire of her passion by amorous anticipations of their next meeting: ‘
I shall lay my paw upon you this Wednesday night & snuff under your chin and bite your breast & lick your flank & proceed to other familiarities. I shall roll you over & do what I like with you. I shall make you pant & bite back. Then I shall give you a shake to quiet you & go to sleep all over you & if I snore, I snore. Your Lord. The Jaguar
.’ Rebecca sometimes reproached him for writing these naughtily explicit letters, asking him to imagine the consequences if their landlady Mrs Crown should come across one, but he knew that she found them arousing. Their sexual life remained as exciting as ever, and as her belly swelled it became more comfortable as well as conducive to their private fantasy to come to climax in the natural position of feline copulation, Rebecca crouched under him as he covered her from behind, with her head buried in a pillow to muffle her yowls lest they reach the ears of Mrs Crown downstairs. For her benefit and that of the neighbours they acted out the revised story he had prepared of a busy journalist visiting his pretty young wife whom he had brought to this healthy spot from smoky London for her confinement. They took sedate walks arm in arm on the broad beach when the tide was out, or along the grassy cliffs when it was in, filling their lungs with deep breaths of the famous air, and smiling politely at passers-by.

The two clouds that cast a shadow over his spirits that spring concerned his professional life.
The World Set Free
was published and poorly received by the reviewers. The premise of atomic energy and atomic bombs was considered too preposterous to obtain even a willing suspension of disbelief, the message was one they had heard from him too many times before, and his attempt to enliven the narrative at the end by having a wicked German emperor try to sabotage the creation of a world government was deemed more appropriate to a boys’ weekly magazine than an adult novel, and likely to inflame the already dangerously overheated popular prejudice against Germany. This reception was a blow to his self-esteem, exacerbated by imagining the smug satisfaction Elizabeth would take from it. But shortly afterwards he received a more wounding blow – more like a stab in the back – from, of all people, Henry James.

James had responded six months previously to
The Passionate Friends
as its author knew he would, professing exaggerated admiration for the ambition of the enterprise but finding much fault with the execution, and he had replied as he always did, admitting his faults in the Master’s own hyperbolical manner: ‘
It is when you write to me out of your secure and masterly
finish
, out of your golden globe of leisurely (yet not slow) and infinitely
easy
accomplishment that the sense of my unworthiness and rawness is most vivid. Then indeed I want to embrace your feet and bedew your knees with tears – of quite unfruitful penitence
.’ Perhaps he had overdone the imitation of James’s epistolary style on that occasion and the older man had noticed, or perhaps it was the Magdalen image that gave his game away and caused offence. But tweaking an old friend’s pomposity in private correspondence was one thing – attacking a colleague in the
Times Literary Supplement
quite another. In a long two-part article published in that journal at the end of March and the beginning of April, James surveyed ‘The Younger Generation’ of British novelists, meaning those younger than James; he and Arnold Bennett, both now in their mid-forties, figured prominently and came in for severe reprimand. They were held up as the most successful of contemporary English novelists, but by the same token the worst, because they set the others such a bad example – sacrificing beauty of form, intensity of effect, all the qualities which made the novel an art, to ‘
value by saturation … They squeeze out to the utmost the plump and more or less juicy orange of a particular acquainted state and let the affirmation of energy, however directed or undirected, constitute for them the “treatment” of the theme
.’ James had a good go at Bennett on this score, and then turned to Wells:

The more he knows and knows, or at any rate learns and learns – the more, in other words, he establishes his saturation – the greater is our impression of his holding it good enough for us, such as we are, that he shall but turn out his mind and its contents upon us by any free familiar gesture as from a high window forever open (Mr Wells having as many windows as an agent who has bought up the lot of the most eligible to retail for a great procession
).

He flushed as he read this, and read it again several times. It was extremely, deliberately insulting, this image of his mind as a receptacle of miscellaneous rubbish carelessly emptied from on high on to the heads of any persons unfortunate enough to be passing below, with the added insinuation of cynical commercial motives in the acquisition of numerous windows from which to perform the action. He showed it to Jane, who laughed. ‘Is he referring to slops being emptied from tenement windows, like they used to do in Scotland, calling out “Gardy loo!”’ ‘I doubt it,’ he said, ‘but it’s quite offensive enough without that interpretation. I can’t think what’s got into him.’ ‘Envy, probably,’ she said. ‘Nobody could envy me the reviews I’ve had for
The World Set Free
,’ he said. ‘Envy of your sales, I mean, your fame,’ she said. ‘That’s why he has it in for you and Arnold. You know he always hankered after a big popular success and never got it.’ ‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘But basically we have utterly different ideas of what novels are for. We’ve both been writing increasingly insincere letters to each other for years, and it’s a relief in a way that it’s finally over. The gloves are off.’ Jane looked at him shrewdly. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of writing to the
TLS
about it, H.G.,’ she said. ‘You’ll only make yourself look small and hypersensitive.’ ‘No, I’m not going to write to the
TLS
,’ he said. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Don’t let it get under your skin.’