A Man of Parts (66 page)

And indeed there was. The police and the ambulance men had seemed sympathetic and discreet, but a reporter on the
Star
, a popular evening paper, got wind of the story the next morning, perhaps from the hospital, and having ascertained from Hedwig Verena’s landlady that she had visited Rebecca West earlier, went round to Queen’s Gate with a photographer in tow and asked her for a comment and a photo of herself with Anthony. She shut the door on them and phoned him in a panic asking him what had happened. When he explained she said, ‘Oh my God! What shall I say to them?’ ‘Nothing – send them round to me,’ he told her, knowing they would not be satisfied until they got something to print, and gave a short dignified statement when they arrived. ‘It is true that a young woman entered my flat uninvited and threatened to commit suicide, and actually attempted to do so while I was seeking assistance. Fortunately she did not succeed, and she is being treated in hospital for minor injuries. I do not wish the matter to be talked about, and I do not intend to add to the snowball of rumour.’

He telephoned Rebecca and arranged to meet her in Kensington Gardens that afternoon to discuss the situation. She was not as angry with him for sending Frau Gatternigg to her as he had feared – but then she had no idea of his previous relationship with the woman; as far as she knew, Hedwig’s invasion of his flat and demented behaviour was totally unexpected. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into it, Panther,’ he said. ‘There will be a report of some kind in the
Star
this evening. Hayes says the best thing we can do is to dine out conspicuously and go on to a theatre, behaving as if nothing serious has happened and we are not in the least disturbed.’ They carried off this performance – rather well, he thought – at the Ivy that evening, and later at Wyndham’s Theatre, knowing that the Late Evening edition of the
Star
was on the streets outside, with a long and fairly accurate account of the incident under the headline,
‘
WOMAN ATTEMPTS SUICIDE IN FLAT OF H.G. WELLS
’
. It mentioned that this person had ‘
visited the home of a well-known woman novelist in Kensington and acted in a strange manner
’ on the same day.

A few other papers repeated the story the following morning, but with no more details, and mercifully there were no journalistic sequels. He blessed his good relations with Beaverbrook and Rothermere, both of whom promised to help when he appealed to them, and instructed their editors that ‘H.G. Wells is not news for the next two weeks.’ Hedwig, having been advised that she would be liable to prosecution for attempted suicide, returned to Austria as soon as she was able. Before the end of Beaverbrook’s and Rothmere’s helpful embargoes, the story was, in journalistic terms, dead.

– You were very lucky
.

– I was. Mind you, Hedwig had no real intention of committing suicide. She’d had some practice in cutting herself without doing serious damage. I discovered later that she’d used the same trick before, in Austria, when she was spurned by some lover.

– Your account of that episode in the Postscript to the autobiography is very misleading as regards Rebecca’s part in it. You say there that you discovered, when you met her in Kensington Gardens, that Hedwig
‘
in the rôle of a literary admirer and possible interviewer, had visited Rebecca the previous day – I suppose with the idea of staging a triangular situation
’,
as if you yourself had nothing to do with it
.

– I didn’t feel it was relevant.

– It was very relevant! Rebecca’s involvement was what made the story potentially so sensational. It wasn’t just a matter of a famous writer and a deranged fan – as you say, it became a triangle: the famous writer, his mistress and a jealous rival of the mistress. And it was all your fault
.

– Yes, quite true.

– Why on earth did you send the woman round to Queen’s Gate? Anything might have happened. She might have attacked Rebecca
.

– I honestly don’t know. I was desperate to get rid of her, and it was fearfully hot that day in London – ninety-two degrees. I sometimes think the heat made me almost as deranged as Hedwig. Of course, I didn’t yet know how dangerous she was, but it was certainly an irrational thing to do, sending her to Rebecca. When I came to write up the whole episode I really couldn’t explain it, so I left it out.

– In other words, you were too embarrassed to admit your folly even in these allegedly candid confessions?

– I suppose so, yes.

– She told people later that it was the Hedwig episode which finally convinced her that you were completely selfish and didn’t really love her, and that she would have to break with you
.

– Not true, actually – or only half true. I was selfish, but I did love her. And anyway, she didn’t break with me immediately.

– No, she went for a cure to Marienbad with a friend, and you followed her there and made a nuisance of yourself as usual
.

– I did. The rope that held us together was fraying, but it wasn’t quite severed. After that we had a short holiday in Swanage with Anthony, for the boy’s sake, and were quite happy together for a few days, until she raised once again the question of my divorcing Jane and I refused, so we went back to bickering about the terms of my support for her. She wanted me to settle £3,000 a year on her. I gave her a large lump sum instead and said I would look after Anthony’s school fees. She was thinking of making a life for herself and Anthony in America, where she had good contacts in journalism, and went off for a long lecture tour there in the autumn of ’23 to assess the opportunities. She stayed until the following spring and decided in the end that she didn’t want to emigrate, but it was clear from the sparseness and the tone of her letters that when she came back to England, she wasn’t coming back to me. And yet …

– And yet?

– It wasn’t easy for either of us to write
Finis
under our story. The world was full of men she couldn’t talk to as she talked to me, and of women I had only a brief and simple use for. I went to Lisbon where the Galsworthys were wintering and paired up with a very pleasant red-haired young widow who was as much in need of consolation as myself, but it was only a
passade
. Rebecca, I gathered later, had experiences of a similar kind in America, all of them ephemeral and some alarming and upsetting. When we returned to London in the spring we were both very much aware of each other’s presence, and occasionally we met – once by chance in the theatre, and a couple of times by arrangement – and actually made love again, but it was different, we couldn’t revive the old Panther–Jaguar intimacy, we had hurt each other too much. In September Rebecca went off to Austria with Anthony and some friends, and I decided I would make a journey round the world, a project I had often planned and never followed through, but first I had to go to Geneva to address the League of Nations Assembly.

– Where Odette Keun turned up
.

– She’d heard somehow that Rebecca and I had parted and she’d read in a newspaper that I was going to be in Geneva, so she hastened there from Grasse where she was living at the time, and called me up and invited me to meet her at her hotel that evening.

– And instructed the reception desk to send you up to her room, where she had turned out all the lights and was waiting for you behind the door, doused in jasmine perfume and wearing only a negligee, and led you like a blind man straight to the bed
.

– It was clever of her, because her face was not conventionally pretty, as I discovered next morning: she had a prominent nose and a rather long chin. But she had a supple, slender body and she was like a monkey on heat as a lover. She’d been converted to Catholicism as a young girl and spent three years in a Belgian convent preparing to become a nun before she was dismissed for allegedly tempting a priest to kiss her, after which she made up for lost time by acquiring sexual experience from some fairly louche characters in Marseilles and Paris. I discovered that she wasn’t French, but the daughter of a Dutch father and an Italian mother, brought up in Constantinople. She was a fizzing cocktail of mixed genes and cultures, but intelligent and articulate and she had read nearly every book I had written.

– So when she said she adored you and wanted to devote her whole life to serving you on any terms you prescribed, you succumbed, and went to Provence with her after your speech to the League of Nations, and rented a
mas
called Lou Bastidon in the hills outside Grasse, looking down over orchards and olive groves towards the Mediterranean, and you liked the situation and the climate so much that for the next nine years you divided your time between France and England, most of them in a
mas
you had built to your own design called Lou Pidou, which had a plaque over the fireplace, ‘
Two lovers built this house
.’

– Odette’s idea, which I indulged, but we had such fierce and frequent rows that I kept calling in the stonemason to remove it, and then requesting him to put it back again when we were reconciled, until he got fed up and refused to do it any more. But I really don’t want to talk about Odette.

– Why not?

– Of all the women I’ve known well – and known in the biblical sense – she’s the only one whom I remember without any affection at all. With amusement at times, at the outrageousness of her behaviour, and bitterness often, but not affection. There were other women I parted from unhappily, but who subsequently became friends again – Isabel, Rebecca, and little E, for instance; even Hedwig, who recovered from her madness and sent me a nice letter of apology. I met her years later with her husband and advised her about getting a novel published. But Odette nearly drove me mad with her moods and her jealousies and her demented behaviour, which became worse and worse as time went on. I made a treaty with her at the beginning of our relationship, that she would be my companion in France but not invade my life in England, and was free to do what she liked while I was away from her. To make her independent I gave her a regular income, and the usufruct of Lou Pidou. For a few years she kept to the agreement, and wrote obsequious letters to Jane assuring her that she was looking after my health and general welfare. Jane was quite happy with the arrangement, since it meant she could go off to Switzerland for her holidays while I was in the south of France, winter sports and mountain walks now being too strenuous for me, and she considered Odette much less of a threat to her own status than Rebecca had been. She even gave us a nice picture by Nevinson for Lou Pidou. But after Jane died, in ’27, Odette became discontented. She wanted to be openly recognised as my companion, in England as well as France.

– She probably hoped you would marry her
.

– And perhaps I would have done – God help me – if she’d played her cards right and been sweet and tender to me in my grief, but she couldn’t control her egotism, her competitiveness, and her temper. She badgered me and teased me, she showed off to my friends when we entertained them at Lou Pidou, and delighted in shocking them by using four-letter words which she falsely claimed I had taught her, and by making embarrassing allusions to our sexual habits. She complained that I spent too much time away from her and that she was lonely in Grasse, so I acquired a flat for her in Paris, where I could visit her more easily for short periods. Still she wasn’t satisfied, and broke the terms of the treaty by following me to England. I threatened to leave her, but she didn’t believe that I would sacrifice Lou Pidou, and persisted. In the end I did give up Lou Pidou – with great regret, for I loved the place – because I couldn’t stand the relationship any longer. It was as if the monkey had climbed on to my back, and was digging her claws into me all the time. I had to be free of her. But still she tormented me – she settled in London and spread malicious gossip about me, and about Moura, who I had linked up with again. She went to Amber Reeves’s house one day and proposed that, as two women who had been wronged by me, they should go round to my flat and shoot me in revenge: she actually had a small revolver, which Amber relieved her of and handed in to Hampstead police station later, pretending she had found it on the Heath. Odette published a book called
I Discover the English
in which she said Englishmen were unimaginative lovers who made the sexual act as boring as cold suet pudding, knowing that readers privy to our relationship would take the remark as a reflection on me, and she threatened to sell my erotic letters to her, a piece of blackmail I defied her to carry out, for I was not ashamed of them and they would have demonstrated conclusively that our sexual antics, so far from being like cold suet pudding, would have made Etruscan vase-painters blush.

– And she wrote a review of
Experiment in Autobiography
, called ‘H.G. Wells – the Player’, published in three parts in
Time and Tide
.

– Yes.

– Which you allude to dismissively as ‘very silly articles’ in the Postscript¸ though they weren’t silly at all
.

– They certainly didn’t constitute a review in the normal sense of the word. They were eight thousand words of character assassination, an act of spiteful revenge – and not just Odette’s. The Literary Editor of
Time and Tide
then was Theodora Bosanquet.

– The devoted secretary who typed Henry James’s last pained letter to you
.

– Exactly. She’d been waiting for nearly twenty years to punish me for
Boon
, and now she saw her chance – hiring my discarded mistress to review her ex-lover’s book. It was a disgraceful abuse of editorial power. Rebecca was appalled when she read it and wrote me a sympathetic letter. She was on the journal’s board of directors, but it was too late for her to do anything about it.

– You must admit the piece scored some palpable hits. Shall we have a look at it again?

– I’d rather not.

– Then I will. She begins by paying tribute to the influence of your early work
.
‘
It is quite impossible that anyone outside those generations which he was freeing should understand the wildness of the glory and happiness of our relief. I remember when I read, as an adolescent, that noble work
First Things and Last Things
,
I sobbed with the ecstasy, the almost intolerable sense of organic liberation that it brought
.’
She anticipated what Orwell said about you: ‘
It would be no more than justice to give his name to the twenty-five years between the ’nineties and the War. For it was he who largely wove their intellectual texture
.’
But she has an interesting theory about what motivated you. She describes you as a genius who in early life was trapped in an environment that was impoverished in every sense – materially, spiritually, culturally and sexually – and that when you managed to break out of it, you were for ever afterwards trying to take revenge on the world that had nearly condemned you to obscurity and an early death
.
‘
His motivation was first and foremost the revolt of a powerful and outraged ego
.’