A Man of Parts (60 page)

– But you didn’t become a pacifist
.

– No, but neither did Shaw, for that matter. His real point of view was hard to pin down, as usual. He liked to goad people into re-examining their assumptions, but all he usually succeeded in doing was to annoy the hell out of them. Some of the writers who were at that meeting convened by Masterman wanted him tarred and feathered.

– On the whole, established senior writers didn’t come out of the war very well, did they? From the safety of their studies they filled the newspaper columns with patriotic poems and anti-German rants and confident predictions of the course of the war which were invariably wrong. The heroes were the young poets who fought and died, and the conscientious objectors who were vilified and sometimes locked up for their principles

– I wouldn’t disagree with that. It was a queer war – unimaginable horror on the Western Front, and life going on much as normal at home, only a few hundred miles away. Of course there were shortages and so on, and later on a few air raids, but for much of the time, if you didn’t read the newspapers and you didn’t have a close relative involved, you could forget that there was a war on at all – in fact one
tried
to forget it, otherwise it was too depressing. We went on having weekend parties at Easton all through the war, with hockey and tennis and badminton, and charades and dancing to the pianola in the barn.

– You were fortunate in being, at forty-eight, too old to be expected to fight, and with sons much too young to be called up
.

– I was aware of that, aware I was an object of envy, and almost resentment, to friends with husbands or sons at the Front – especially if they were among the casualties. Poor old Pember Reeves, for instance, was completely broken up when his son was killed, and never replied to my letter of condolence. I couldn’t blame him. Of course I was affected by the deaths of young men I knew – especially the brilliant young men I’d met at Cambridge, Rupert Brooke, for instance, and Ben Keeling. But as the war got worse and worse I felt my personal immunity undermined my authority to speak about it. I was less and less comfortable as a propagandist, but frustrated in my efforts to find a more useful role. There were frustrations in my private life too …

The elation, almost euphoria, he had felt on the first day of the war was produced by the convergence of Rebecca’s safe delivery of their child and his vision of a mission for himself in the great historic conflict ahead. But just as the war became bogged down in a costly and indecisive struggle with no happy resolution in sight, so, to compare little things with great, did his relationship with Rebecca. Looking back later, he realised that the seed of all its problems was letting Rebecca keep the baby, but how could he have denied her? When he arrived at Brig-y-don to see his child for the first time she was suckling him, looking down with a fond smile as he lay cradled in her arms, with mouth clamped to her nipple and nose squashed against her generous breast. She looked up briefly to say, ‘Hallo, Jaguar,’ and returned her gaze to the child. ‘What a beautiful sight,’ he said, stooping to kiss her forehead. ‘Madonna and child.’ ‘I love him,’ she said. ‘I want to keep him. I couldn’t bear to give him to somebody else.’ ‘Then you must keep him, Panther,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Jaguar!’ she said, with a radiant smile, and raised her face to be kissed again, this time on the lips.

Later he tentatively restated the case for adoption: bringing up the child would be a time-consuming responsibility, interfering with the literary career she had planned for herself, and making it more difficult to keep their relationship discreetly hidden. But she shook her head vehemently in denial of these obvious truths. One couldn’t be writing all the time, and anyway he could afford to provide her with servants, couldn’t he? And as to the risk of public disapproval, she didn’t care. All she knew was that the baby was her child and she wanted to bring him up. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘What shall we call him?’

They agreed to call him Anthony Panther West. Rebecca chose the name ‘Anthony’ mainly because it had no associations with her family or his. ‘Panther’ was his own suggestion, a defiant reference to the love which had produced the child. The clerk at the Register Office of Births, startled by the second forename, looked up with his pen poised in the air and asked him to spell it out before inscribing it, with obvious disapproval, on the certificate.

Lettie, who had hitherto shown no sign of forgiving him for seducing her young sister, seemed at last to warm towards him to some extent and thanked him for agreeing to support Rebecca in her desire to keep the child. ‘I don’t say it’s a sensible thing for her to do,’ Lettie said, ‘but it’s generous of you.’ ‘Well, I’m a rich man,’ he said. ‘I can afford to give her that.’ Mrs Townshend, who arrived on the scene a few days later, approved his decision. ‘
It was delightful to see R.W. with her boy
,’ she wrote. ‘
It would be a thousand pities to separate them. Suckling is a wonderful calmant. A lover at discreet intervals isn’t enough for her: she needs a baby and a home as well. Even as a writer she’ll do better work if she has them. I don’t know how you‘re going to manage it
.’

The first task, obviously, was to find a more suitable home than Brig-y-don for mother and child. He accordingly asked Mrs Townshend to look for somewhere at a convenient distance from Easton, and she soon found a substantial detached house called ‘Quinbourne’ outside the village of Braughing in Hertfordshire, only a dozen miles from Easton Glebe. There he settled Rebecca in September, with a full complement of servants – housekeeper, nursemaid, housemaid and cook – and for a while she was happy. She was infatuated with her baby, pleased to be mistress of her own household for the first time, and even began to do a little journalistic work. But then, as autumn gave way to winter, the disadvantages of her situation made themselves felt. Quinbourne, formerly a farmhouse, was isolated, at the end of a muddy track some distance from the village, and although he was able to run over in Gladys to see Rebecca at frequent intervals, for most of the time her servants were the only people with whom she was in regular contact. The Irish midwife who had delivered Anthony, and stayed on as his nurse, was a treasure, but not intellectually stimulating company. The other women, having guessed that Anthony was his child, and discovered his real identity, began to intimate their disapproval in a multitude of sly hints that she dared not challenge. This petty harassment turned ugly when the housekeeper was caught by Rebecca attempting to pilfer money, and retaliated with blackmail, threatening to tell Jane of the existence of his mistress. The threat was simply dealt with by telling her that Jane already knew, and the woman was dismissed, but she persisted in spreading scandal in the neighbourhood. Then one day the cook burst into the dining room and began to make mad, obscene allegations against the nurse and housemaid. It transpired that the poor woman had just heard she had lost the third of three brothers killed in Flanders, and had tried to drown her grief in brandy. She deserved only pity and sympathy, but it was an upsetting incident, which further increased Rebecca’s dissatisfaction with her situation.

‘It’s like being marooned on the dark side of the moon here,’ she said, developing this analogy from some astronomical remark of his own. ‘This house is a satellite of Easton Glebe. Anthony and I revolve round your other life, but we can never share it, and we must remain invisible to your family and friends.’ Her sense that he enjoyed another life only a few miles away, full of interesting visitors and amusing entertainment from which she was excluded, was a constant source of niggling discontent, and it was no use for him to say that at present Easton Glebe was made unbearably noisy and inconvenient by the extensive building work that was in progress, and that Jane complained that he was neglecting
her
by spending too much time in Braughing. Rebecca responded by alluding to his ‘promise’ to marry her one day, and hinted that the sooner he divorced Jane for that purpose, the better. This suggestion he firmly squashed, but he agreed that the current set-up was unsatisfactory, and that she ought to move to London where she would be able to see her friends easily and take a more active part in literary life. The spring of 1915 was devoted to pursuing this plan, and by midsummer she and Anthony were settled in a villa called ‘Alderton’ in Hatch End, on the northern outskirts of London, with Wilma Meikle, a friend from suffragette days, as housekeeper and companion, and the usual complement of servants. He felt it was still necessary for their benefit, and that of the neighbours, to invent a cover story for this new ménage. Rebecca was ‘Miss West’, bringing up her orphaned nephew, and he was a family friend overseeing their welfare who occasionally visited and stayed the night in the guest room. This pretence, he strongly suspected, fooled nobody, but respectability was precariously maintained.

There were times when he felt that instead of having a wife and a mistress he had two wives, two households to maintain, two sets of domestic obligations, and not enough sex. When he stayed overnight at Alderton, he had to go through a pantomime of retiring to the guest room, creeping along the landing to Rebecca’s room later; and once arrived there he had to be careful about the amount of noise they made. Only in occasional short stays at a hotel on Monkey Island in the Thames, snatched while Wilma looked after Anthony, could they really let themselves go in bed. If Rebecca was happier now, he himself was not.

The war, which he had confidently predicted in one of his newspaper articles would be over in 1915, was going badly, with no end in sight on the Western Front, and the Dardanelles campaign designed by Churchill to end the deadlock was already an obvious failure. He had made a start on a new novel about a prosperous middle-aged author called Mr Britling who had believed the war would never happen, but when it did break out identified enthusiastically with the Allied cause. Britling was to become gradually disillusioned as the sterile destructiveness of the conflict became evident, most agonisingly in the death of his own son on the Western Front, but would grope his way out of despair to some kind of positive resolution. Of what kind, he hadn’t yet any idea, being still at the pre-war stage of the story. Mr Britling had ‘
a naturally irritable mind, which gave him point and passion … He loved to write and talk. He talked about everything, he had ideas about everything
…’ He was a transparently autobiographical figure, even down to his erratic driving and enthusiasm for an idiosyncratic form of hockey, except that he had been married twice and had a grown-up son, Hugh, by the first deceased wife, as well as two young ones by the second one, Edith, with whom his relationship closely resembled that between the Wellses. ‘
They were profoundly incompatible … For several unhappy years she thwarted him and disappointed him, while he filled her with dumb inexplicable distresses … Only very slowly did they realise the truth of their relationship and admit to themselves that the fine bud of love between them had failed to flower, and only after long years were they able to delimit boundaries where they had imagined union, and to become – allies … If there was no love and delight between them there was a real habitual affection and much mutual help
.’ Vainly seeking a woman with whom he could have a totally fulfilling relationship, Britling had been serially and sometimes scandalously unfaithful to Edith, and currently had a mistress who lived in a house within easy motoring distance of his home. She, however, was based not on Rebecca but on little E – ‘
Mrs Harrowdean, the brightest and cleverest of widows
’ – who had seemed just what he needed when she first came into his life, but had proved tiresomely critical and demanding recently, and he was looking for a way to terminate the relationship with a minimum of stress. Britling lived in a place in Essex called Matching’s Easy, occupying a dower house which was a faithful replica of Easton Glebe. He employed a German tutor for his younger sons called Herr Heinrich, and a secretary called Teddy, married to a local girl called Letty, who had a sister called Cissie. The novel was a kaleidoscope containing many recognisable fragments of his life, shaken up with some invented ones to make a new pattern. He wasn’t at all confident about how it would turn out, but Rebecca was encouraging when he showed her the first few chapters.

Rebecca herself was preparing to write a short book of literary criticism for a series called ‘Writers of the Day’. The general editor, who admired her book reviews, had invited her to contribute to the series on a subject of her own choice, and she proposed Henry James – to his displeased surprise, since Rebecca was well aware of how James’s treatment of his own work in the
TLS
had offended him. He knew that her admiration for James was far from uncritical, but nevertheless there seemed to him a kind of disloyalty in the dedication she brought to the project, reading and re-reading James’s immense
oeuvre
with an assiduity quite disproportionate to the scale of the commission. In this slightly piqued mood he took
Boon
out of its drawer and read its anti-Jamesian polemic as a kind of salve, with such enjoyment that he went on with the book, finding it a welcome distraction from writing and thinking about the war, and brought it to a conclusion, or at least an end, since it remained a collection of disconnected episodes and discourses. He didn’t show it to Rebecca – he didn’t show it to anybody except Jane, who typed it for him, and Fisher Unwin, who agreed to publish it. He told himself that he didn’t want to disturb Rebecca’s concentration on her work in progress by his irreverent treatment of her subject, and that the book would have more impact generally if it arrived unheralded and unexpected, but the real reason for not trying it out on other readers, as he usually did with new books, was an intuition that they might advise him not to publish it, a possibility he did not wish to contemplate. When he received the first finished copies in mid-June, and read the title page, he felt a surge of wicked glee.