A Man of Parts (6 page)

The tone of the other text is very different. It is entitled
Mind at the End of its Tether
.

The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that his world is at the end of its tether … The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded. He is telling you the conclusions to which reality has driven his own mind, and he thinks you may be interested enough to consider them … Foremost in this scrutiny is the abrupt revelation of a hitherto unsuspected upward limit to quantitative material adjustability … The writer is convinced that there is no way out or round or through that impasse. It is the End … The limit to the orderly secular development of life had seemed to be a definitely fixed one, so that it was possible to sketch out the pattern of things to come. But that limit was reached and passed into an incredible chaos … Events now follow one another in an entirely untrustworthy sequence. No one knows what tomorrow will bring forth, but no one but a modern scientific philosopher can accept this untrustworthiness fully. Even in his case it plays no part in his everyday behaviour. There he is at one with the normal multitude. The only difference is that he carries about with him this harsh conviction of the near conclusive end of all life … It does not prevent his having his everyday affections and interests, indignations and so forth … Mind may be near the end of its tether, and yet that everyday drama will go on because it is the normal make-up of life and there is nothing else to replace it
.

Nothing could illustrate this paradox more vividly than Anthony’s marital crisis and its repercussions. While the fate of Europe hangs in the balance in Normandy, where the Allied forces are bogged down and unable to advance, hampered by bad weather, which has broken up the Mulberry harbour, grounded air support for the invasion force, and turned the deep lanes of the Normandy
bocage
into mud, while V1s dart noisily across the skies of south-east England in ever-increasing numbers, to expire lethally like heavy birds stricken with heart attacks above the roofs of London – while these events, which are signs and portents to the scientific philosopher, are in progress – what most exercises the minds of Anthony and Rebecca and Kitty and their close relations, and what they talk and telephone and write letters about obsessively, is this drama in their personal lives. Whose fault is it? Anthony’s or Kitty’s? Or the Other Woman’s? What is to be done? How will it all end?

Rebecca arranges a meeting between Anthony and Henry, hopeful that her husband’s calm counsel will be more effective than her own in bringing Anthony to see sense. Anthony agrees but then cancels the appointment. Rebecca criticises this evasive behaviour and points out that there are financial aspects to Anthony’s proposed divorce on which Henry’s advice would be useful. ‘Then let Henry speak to Kitty,’ Anthony says, and arranges for them to meet for lunch one day early in July at the Carlton Grill. Although she has not been invited, Rebecca insists on accompanying Henry, and he is too apprehensive of her temper, when crossed, to resist. Kitty, already tired of the stream of letters Rebecca has been sending her, comprehensively condemning Anthony and promoting herself as Kitty’s chief ally and protector, resents her unexpected appearance in the Carlton Grill bar and retaliates by taking Anthony’s side in the discussion that follows. Four years older than Anthony, but secure in her blonde good looks, Kitty refuses to play the role of the injured spouse, and adopts a philosophical view of the situation, saying ‘such things do happen – men fall in love’. ‘But Anthony is not acting normally,’ Rebecca retorts. ‘I can tell when I speak to him on the phone that he is not in his right mind.’ ‘That’s funny, that’s exactly what Anthony says about you,’ says Kitty tartly. ‘And I wish you wouldn’t get at Anthony about Caroline and Edmund,’ she adds. ‘Surely,’ Rebecca asks, ‘I have a right to tell him I think he will regret leaving his children?’ ‘No,’ says Kitty. ‘That’s a matter between Anthony and me.’ ‘Mayn’t I even offer an opinion?’ says Rebecca. ‘No,’ says Kitty, ‘that’s my business, not yours. You shouldn’t interfere.’

Henry coughs and says he will see if their table is ready. But there is no table to be had – it seems there was some misunderstanding between Henry and Anthony about reserving it – so they get a taxi to the Ritz. On the way Kitty goads Rebecca further, remarking that Anthony shows signs of maturing at last, and she is hopeful that he will grow out of his current infatuation. Rebecca says she is a fool – Anthony is utterly irresponsible and mentally unstable. Over lunch, of which not much is eaten, the more Kitty defends Anthony the more hysterical Rebecca grows in her denunciation of her son. He is evil and vile and brings nothing but suffering on everyone he is involved with. There is something fundamentally base about him. She wishes she had never brought him into the world. She wishes he were dead. Gradually the diners at the tables around them fall silent, awed and fascinated by this torrent of eloquent vituperation. Eventually Henry beckons to the head waiter and together they escort Rebecca from the dining room and put her into a taxi to Marylebone station, Henry returning to apologise to Kitty and finish his lunch. ‘I’m afraid Rebecca is under considerable strain,’ he says.

When Kitty describes this episode to Anthony by telephone that evening he rocks himself in his chair, groaning and laughing with his eyes squeezed shut, visualising the scene, half appalled and half elated at having his prejudices against his mother so thoroughly vindicated. Relaying the story immediately to Jean he embroiders it, as a novelist might, to heighten the effect, so that in his version Rebecca is lifted from her chair by Henry and the head waiter and carried bodily from the dining room with her legs kicking in the air, still shrieking anathemas against Anthony, until the swing doors close on her, a detail he likes so much that he believes it actually happened. Jean however seems to find the story more alarming than amusing. ‘I don’t think I could ever face meeting your mother,’ she says down the line. ‘It would be like going into a house where you know there’s an unexploded bomb, waiting to go off.’ ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Anthony says. ‘She’ll calm down eventually.’ And indeed by the time Henry gets back to Ibstone that evening he finds Rebecca in a comparatively submissive mood. He reproaches her for her behaviour in the Ritz dining room and accuses her of making an unprovoked attack on Kitty. ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper,’ Rebecca says, ‘but in fact she provoked me a great deal. I don’t think you can have heard everything she said – you know you’re getting deaf, Ric.’ This she has found is a sovereign way to silence Henry since he cannot deny that his hearing is deteriorating and therefore cannot be sure that he hasn’t missed some vital bit of information.

At the end of July there is good news at last from the Second Front. American armoured forces break out of the Cherbourg Peninsula, rout the German defences around St Lô, spread out through Brittany and race towards Paris, which is liberated on August 25th without German resistance. British and Canadian troops take Caen and push swiftly into north-eastern France. H.G. arranges to publish part of
The Happy Turning
in a magazine, the
Leader
, in October. But hopes of a swift end to the war are dashed in September by the costly failure of the airborne attempt to secure three bridgeheads over the Rhine at Arnhem. In the same month the second of Hitler’s
Vergeltungswaffen
, the V2, is launched against London. There is absolutely no defence against these huge rockets with a 3,000-pound high explosive warhead, and hardly any warning of their approach, since they travel at five times the speed of sound. If you should happen to look up at the right moment you might see a small red glow in the sky seconds before there is a devastating impact on some unfortunate street or office block or store, but that is all. In a way the V2s are less frightening than the V1s because there is no pause for fearful suspense and no possibility at all of taking shelter. Either your number is on the warhead or it isn’t, and if it is you will never know. This breeds a kind of fatalism in the population, a tendency to ignore the crump of an incoming rocket unless it is very near, or to register the sound of its detonation with a mere shrug or grimace. H.G. did foresee the development of rocket weapons in his early books, but not quite on this scale. He closes the
Happy Turning
folder and opens the one containing
Mind at the End of Its Tether
.

Hitherto, recurrence has seemed a primary law of life. Night has followed day and day night. But in this strange new phase of existence into which our universe is passing, it becomes evident that events no longer recur. They go on and on to an impenetrable mystery, into a voiceless limitless darkness, against which the obstinate urgency of our dissatisfied minds may struggle, but will struggle only until it is altogether overcome
.

There is no way out or round or through
.

Meanwhile Anthony’s marital crisis remains unresolved. Kitty calmly declines to co-operate in obtaining a divorce, and Anthony finds he has no will to force the issue. One evening, as he sits in silence with H.G., lost in troubled thoughts about Jean, and Kitty and the children, trying to do moral and emotional equations in his head which never come out, Anthony glances at his father, who has been dozing in his armchair, and is startled to see that the bright blue-grey eyes are open and glaring at himself.

‘Hallo, H.G.!’ he says. ‘Woken up?’

‘You look worried,’ says his father.

‘Well, naturally … I don’t want to hurt Kitty, or the children. I want to do what’s best for everybody.’

‘It’s not those Nazis in the BBC then?’

‘What Nazis?’

‘The ones who are blackmailing you.’

After a few more questions Anthony ascertains that H.G. believes he is being manipulated by Nazi agents who have infiltrated the BBC.

‘That’s complete nonsense, H.G.,’ Anthony protests.

‘Is it?’ says his father sceptically, and closes his eyes again.

It doesn’t take Anthony long to trace this bizarre fantasy to Rebecca. The publication in 1941 of
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
, half a million words on the history, topography, ethnography and culture of Yugoslavia, established her as an authority on that country as long as Britain supported its royalist government in exile and the Serbian General Mihailovi
ć
’s resistance campaign against the German occupation, her sympathies being emphatically pro-Serb. But now that Churchill has switched Allied support to the Croat Tito’s communist partisans she feels isolated and vulnerable to attacks by left-wing commentators and politicians. She has mentioned this concern to Anthony, and hinted that the pro-Tito faction in the Foreign Office might get at her by throwing suspicion on his role in the BBC. He had paid little attention to this typically paranoid suggestion at the time, but now he sees a connection with H.G.’s crazy delusions which makes him reach immediately for the telephone.

‘Rac – have you been talking to H.G. about my being blackmailed by Nazi infiltrators at the BBC?’

‘Of course not. Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘You’ve had no conversation at all with H.G. about my position in the BBC?’

There is a pause before Rebecca resumes in a more defensive tone. ‘Well, as you know, I’m concerned that my enemies might exploit your past record to discredit you and compromise me …’

‘What do you mean – my record?’

‘They know that you were a pacifist for a time, and they’ve probably found out that you were under police surveillance as a suspected spy at the beginning of the war.’

‘That was a total farce, as you know, Rac!’

He and Kitty had come under suspicion when they were entertaining some Belgian friends at their Wiltshire farm. Overheard Flemish was mistaken for German, flapping curtains were interpreted as semaphored signals, and the farmhouse was searched for incriminating evidence by frowning rustic constables who solemnly impounded Anthony’s foreign books, maps, guides, and a collection of toy soldiers given to him in childhood by H.G.

‘It may have seemed farcical to you, but they only suspended the investigation because I had friends in high places, like Harold Nicolson and Harold Laski,’ says Rebecca.

‘But have you been talking about this to H.G. lately?’

‘I may have mentioned it,’ she admits.

‘Well, he’s converted it into a crazy conspiracy theory of his own about Nazi infiltrators at the BBC blackmailing me. I’d be much obliged if you would disabuse him.’

‘Well, I’ll try … But it sounds like the onset of senility, I’m afraid.’

‘Just do it,’ says Anthony and slams down the phone.

Whether she did or not he is unable to ascertain. He swears to his father that there is no conspiracy of any kind against him, and enlists Gip and Marjorie in support, but H.G. continues to goad him with allusions to ‘your Nazi friends at the BBC’ from time to time. Whether these barbs are prompted by dementia or conscious malice, Anthony is unable to decide, but this additional source of friction between them causes him pain and does nothing to improve relations between himself and his mother.

Then suddenly, in October, the crisis in Anthony’s marriage is over. After sex one afternoon in Jean’s flat, lying in the bed amid the tangled sheets, smoking a cigarette, and watching Jean put on her stockings, examining each one carefully for ladders, Anthony mentions that H.G. is altering his will to leave some money to Kitty and the children in the event of a divorce. Jean is disconcerted by this information. ‘Will it be taken from what you were to get?’ she asks. Anthony says it will, as seems only fair. Jean disagrees. She doesn’t see why the money should have to be deducted from Anthony’s inheritance, since his father must be jolly rich. ‘Not all that rich,’ he says. ‘H.G. doesn’t earn a huge amount from his books these days, and when he did he spent it freely and gave a lot away.’ ‘All the more reason to make sure you get your fair share of what’s left,’ Jean says. Anthony accuses her of being mercenary. Jean takes offence. They have a blazing row, and she asks him to leave. He says he won’t come back. She says that’s fine by her. Who knows if H.G.’s will was the real
casus belli
, or whether both of them were tired of the affair and looking for a pretext to end it?