A Man of Parts (65 page)

After they returned to England, conscious that he had not been the easiest of travelling companions he wrote a letter thanking her for ‘two and half months of almost unbroken happiness’, to which she replied tartly that she wished he had expressed this gratitude at the time, since it had not been evident from his behaviour.

– There was a pattern here, wasn’t there? You were always trying to persuade her to extricate herself from domestic and family ties, to go away with you on your own, but whenever she actually managed it you behaved deplorably. The same thing happened a year later – only you were even worse. You went to America to report on the Washington Peace Conference, had a fling with Margaret Sanger, went about the country being lionised, and sailed back to meet Rebecca in Gibraltar for a holiday in Spain. But you made the holiday sheer hell for her. As soon as you transferred to the
Maria Cristina
in Algeciras, you started throwing your weight about, to her acute embarrassment
.

– I wasn’t well. I was exhausted from all the travelling, and I had a sore throat.

– You ordered the manager of the hotel to phone the Admiral of the Fleet at Gibraltar Harbour for a naval doctor to attend to it. ‘Just tell him it’s H.G. Wells who is ill,’ you said. ‘He’ll send someone immediately
.’

– That was a little presumptuous, I admit. But the retired English doctor they dug out from the foothills behind Algeciras was a hopeless quack – he could only prescribe a gargle for my sore throat.

– Perhaps a gargle was all that was required. When you moved on to Seville you treated Rebecca so rudely in public that the English chaplain there took her aside and offered to wire her parents to come and fetch her. In Granada you walked out halfway through a party with dancers and poets given in your honour by Manuel de Falla. When you got to Paris on the way home you refused to take Rebecca with you to visit Anatole France because, you said, she was not good-looking enough
.

– So she claimed. I may have said she didn’t look smart enough. We’d just arrived in Paris – her clothes were creased and her hair needed doing.

– That was still insulting
.

– She could be just as personal. She said I was getting a paunch.

– And so you were! You can’t deny you behaved abominably on that trip
.

– I was in a strange state in those years. I was having a kind of extended nervous breakdown, like Sir Richmond Hardy. I was outwardly successful – ‘the most famous writer in the world’ – but inwardly dissatisfied. The praise I got was not the kind I wanted or from the people I wanted to get it from. It made me arrogant and irritable – I was aware of that, but I couldn’t control myself at times.

– Why on earth did Rebecca put up with you? Again and again you had tremendous rows, again and again she would say she’d had enough, and again and again you would wheedle your way back into her favour and her bed
.

– I wasn’t always as difficult as that time in Spain, and even then we had happy interludes, days when we got on very well together and enjoyed ourselves. We were both exceptional people and we knew it. We were interested in the same things, we stimulated each other intellectually and creatively as well as erotically – it seemed destiny that we should be lovers. But yes, in retrospect it was surprising how long we stayed together, because we were temperamentally incompatible. Rebecca’s sensibility was essentially tragic. Jane was right – it wasn’t accidental that she took her assumed name from Ibsen. All her life she liked to act out the part of the tragic heroine, with tears, hysterics, melodramatic gestures … I hated her when she was like that. My temperament is essentially comic – I want life to be enjoyable, I like festive occasions and happy endings, I like sex and games, and when things go seriously wrong in my life – I don’t mean things like a sore throat, but a real disaster – I try not to let it show to other people.

– So why did the relationship last as long as it did?

– Basically because Rebecca went on hoping that I would divorce Jane and marry her. That’s why she would put up with my moods, and make up after our quarrels. And it wasn’t a one-way process. More than once I wrote her a letter saying I thought we should probably part for the sake of both our sanities, but she never wrote back saying unequivocally, ‘Yes, I agree, let’s do it.’

– Perhaps that was because those letters of yours were never unequivocal. They were full of fond nostalgic memories of your happy times together, and admissions of your sins against her, and expressions of your undying admiration for her. They were more like love letters than end-of-the-affair letters. No wonder she hesitated, when you proposed separation, to take you up on it
.

– She hesitated because she still hoped to marry me. She didn’t really believe that I would never divorce Jane. To my mind, we had a potentially perfect relationship when it started: Jane to look after my creature comforts and organise my professional life and be the perfect hostess for the entertaining that we both enjoyed; Rebecca to be my lover, fellow artist and soulmate. But she wasn’t satisfied with that role alone – she wanted both, and Anthony gave her a kind of right to both, she thought. He was the incarnation of her claim on me, and he was a constant bone of contention between us even after we split up: arguments about how much I should contribute to his education, whether I could adopt him, and – when she blocked that – what access I could have to him. I’m afraid he had a pretty difficult childhood, Anthony. When he was very young he thought his mother was his aunt and I was his uncle, and then Rebecca told him she was his mother but he should still go on calling her ‘Auntie’, and then years later she told him his uncle was really his father.

– It sounds like a Freudian nightmare. You and Rebecca could hardly have done more to make him neurotic in later life if you had tried
.

– I admit some responsibility for his later fecklessness. But he rarely reproached me. He always idolised me and blamed his mother for his upbringing, which was unfair on her, and embittered her towards me for a long time. It was all a mess and a muddle, that triangular relationship, an unholy family. It would have been better for Anthony if he had been adopted by a nice couple of caring responsible parents as I had intended, or if Rebecca and I had parted much sooner.

And the parting itself was never a clean, decisive break. It was impossible to put one’s finger on a particular letter or remember a particular conversation of which one could say, ‘That was it. That was the irrevocable statement of intent to separate.’ Not even the Hedwig Verena Gatternigg affair had that effect.

This youngish Austrian woman – she was in her early thirties, and married to an officer on a Danube patrol boat in the shrunken post-war Austrian navy – came to London in the autumn of 1922 with an introduction from her mother, whom he knew slightly, and called at the flat in Whitehall Court which was his London base at that time, to propose translating one or more of his books into German. On that occasion Jane was with him and they gave tea to Frau Gatternigg. She was pretty, with long-lashed brown eyes under a lustrous head of hair, and an elegant figure – but also a withered hand which gave her a certain pathos and made him sympathetic to her request. Her spoken English was excellent. As she was interested in education, he suggested she might translate
The Great Schoolmaster
, a book he was writing about Sanderson of Oundle, who had died suddenly and dramatically of a heart attack earlier that year while giving a public lecture at which he himself was presiding. He gave her a carbon copy of the chapters that Jane had already typed out, and she returned a few days later to ask some questions about the text. On the next occasion she called (this time without an appointment) Jane had returned to Easton, and Hedwig Verena made it very clear that she wanted more than German translation rights from him. ‘I want you,’ she said, showing she had read
Ann Veronica
attentively.

It was not in his nature to reject a frank advance from a woman, face to face. The propositions which he received occasionally by post from strangers were a different matter, and these days he seldom followed them up; only recently he had declined one from a writer called Odette Keun, whose book
Sous Lénine, My Adventures in Bolshevik Russia
, he had reviewed favourably when it was translated from the French and published in England. She had thanked him effusively for the review, and declared herself a devoted admirer of his work, who had dedicated an earlier book to him without his knowledge; she was at a loose end with nothing to live for, and asked him to come to Paris and give her two or three days to make him happy. Intriguing as the offer was, prudence counselled against accepting it for several reasons. He replied that he already had a lover to whom he could not be unfaithful, and she accepted this virtuous excuse with resignation. Frau Gatternigg, appealing to him in person, was a different proposition, and he thought that if he rejected her overture she would be bound to attribute it to revulsion from her withered limb and be deeply hurt, so he responded gallantly. In fact when she was naked in his bedroom he found her deformity invested her with a novel and slightly perverse fascination which made him particularly vigorous. She for her part was passionate and effusively grateful, and if he had never seen her again he would have had only agreeable memories of the occasion and almost counted it as a good deed.

Unfortunately she began to pester him with love letters and urgent requests to meet him again, some of which he weakly indulged, and once she tricked him into an assignation by telling him she was staying near Easton with a married couple who were great admirers of his work and would be thrilled to meet him. When he responded to this bait by driving over to the house, Hedwig Verena opened the front door, dressed in a filmy tea gown and little else, and led him immediately upstairs to a bedroom, explaining that her married friends were away and had left her to look after the house. He felt increasingly uneasy about continuing the affair, if one could call it that, but unable to bring it discreetly to an end, until to his relief she finally went back to Austria.

He was unpleasantly surprised to receive a telephone call from her on an exceedingly hot day in June of the following year, when he was on his own at Whitehall Court. ‘I’m back, H.G.,’ she said. ‘When can I see you?’ ‘You can’t, Hedwig,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m much too busy, and will be for the foreseeable future.’ Undeterred she came to the flat soon afterwards, pretended to the maid who answered the doorbell that she had an appointment, and was shown into his study. When she tried to embrace him he backed off and held up his hand. ‘No, Hedwig.’ ‘But I love you!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘ I do not love you. I never loved you, and I never said I loved you. We had an enjoyable
passade
last year, but that was all it was.’ Upon which she sat down, uninvited, and said sulkily, ‘You are very cruel, H.G. You are very cold. It is because of Rebecca West, is it not?’ ‘What do you know of Rebecca West?’ he said angrily. ‘What everybody in London knows, that you are her lover,’ she said, smiling maliciously. It seemed to him that her withered hand now gave her a sinister, witch-like appearance. She added: ‘Perhaps I will tell her that you were
my
lover last year.’ ‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’ he said, standing over her threateningly, now really angry. ‘No, no, of course I would not, I am joking you,’ she said, making a rare idiomatic error. ‘But I would love to meet her and talk to her about books and ideas. Perhaps I could interview her. Give me a letter of introduction to her, and I promise not to mention that we had what you call a
passade
.‘

In the end it seemed the only way to get rid of her, so he scribbled a brief note of introduction to Rebecca and sent Hedwig round to Queen’s Gate, instructing the housemaid not to admit her if she returned. He learned later that Rebecca received the visitor with much puzzlement, and that her maid was so concerned by the latter’s appearance and manner that she went out into the street to check that a constable was on point duty at the corner in case he should be needed. Hedwig chattered away in a bizarre fashion, praising Rebecca’s work extravagantly, inviting her to borrow her flat in Vienna, describing in detail an unhappy affair she had had with an English diplomat there, and gesturing so wildly that she sent a sewing-box flying to the floor and broke it. But she kept her promise not to reveal her intimacy with himself, and Rebecca, after suffering a fervent embrace, eventually managed to ease her out of the flat.

That evening he was in his dressing room, changing for a dinner with Lord Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, and wondering how he would bear a starched shirt and dinner jacket for a whole evening in the stifling temperature, when he heard the sounds of someone being admitted to his study. It was Hedwig. Unfortunately the maid had gone off duty without passing on his instruction to her substitute, and Hedwig had talked her way into the flat. When he entered the study she was standing in the centre of the room facing the door, wearing a waterproof raincoat, and he just had time to reflect that this was a strange garment for such a hot day before she threw it open to reveal that she was naked except for stockings, a suspender belt and high-heeled shoes. ‘You must love me!’ she cried, ‘or I will kill myself. I have poison. I have a razor.’ He instantly grasped the urgency of getting not only help but also witnesses to the madness of her behaviour. He went to the door and called down the passageway to the maid to summon the hall-porter of the building, but when he turned round Hedwig had already thrown off the waterproof and slashed her wrists and armpits with a cut-throat razor.

Fortunately she had not severed an artery, but she was bleeding profusely when he took the razor from her, propped her up in an armchair and covered her with the waterproof, having checked that there was no vial of poison in its pockets. ‘Let me die, let me die,’ she declaimed, and as others arrived, ‘I love him, I love him.’ The hall-porter, an ex-army sergeant-major, proved to be a model of calm efficiency in summoning the police and the ambulance service, and Hedwig was whisked off to the Westminster Infirmary, from which he received in due course a telephone message that she was not in danger. This was an immense relief: if she had succeeded in committing suicide he would have been finished. There would have been an inquest and a public scandal that would have made the Amber Reeves affair look petty in comparison. Even so he was well aware that the press could make something very damaging out of the incident if they wished, and his solicitor Hayes, whom he contacted by telephone, agreed. ‘We must try and persuade your friends in the Newspaper Owners’ Association to suppress the story as far as possible,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid there’s bound to be something in the papers tomorrow.’