A Man of Parts (72 page)

She had had no lover for a considerably longer period, and had resigned herself to celibacy for the remainder of her life, but the opportunity of one last lovely fling with so charming and attractive a man was too tempting to refuse. So she abandoned herself to it, and gloried in it, and gave thanks to the goddess beneath whose image she enjoyed it, night after night. But now it was all over. ‘Or is it?’ she wonders, looking down at the green and brown quilt of English fields, and the ribbons of winding road with little toy cars crawling along them. When they parted that morning, Francis urged her to come back to Nuremberg for the verdicts, which would probably be some time in the fall, and promised to write in the meantime, maybe even make a quick trip to England himself. The idea of going back to Nuremberg for the verdicts makes good journalistic sense, and she is confident that Ross would commission a second article. Perhaps after all, she thinks, as the captain instructs the passengers to fasten their seatbelts, and the plane tilts downward to begin its descent, perhaps this relationship need not be just a brief flare of passion, but has some way to go yet. It has certainly given her a new lease of life. Henry will be waiting at the airport to meet her. Will he detect in her face the lineaments of gratified desire?

She has a pleasant surprise at Croydon: not only Henry, but Anthony and Kitty and her two grandchildren are also there to greet her. It is good to see them all happily together after the upsets of the recent past. Caroline holds a hand-made placard, ‘Welcome Home Granny’ – in imitation, no doubt, of many such signs she has seen decorating the homes of returning servicemen. If only they knew what Granny had been up to in Germany! Everybody comments on how well she looks. ‘It’s all the wonderful food I’ve had,’ she says. ‘There’s no rationing for the Yanks in Nuremberg.’ Henry stares at her with a puzzled frown for a moment, and then says, ‘You’ve got a new hairdo, Rac.’

‘Yes, do you like it?’

‘Very nice.’ He kisses her on the cheek. ‘Have you had an interesting time?’

‘Very interesting.’

‘Good, you must tell me all about it.’

She tells him about the trial as he drives them home, and mentions that she met an old friend from before the war, Francis Biddle, one of the chief American prosecutors.

‘Well that was nice for you.’

‘Yes, very nice,’ she says. She is back in England. Nice-land. Henry-land.

Soon after she gets back to Ibstone House she rings up Marjorie to enquire about H.G.’s health. ‘There’s no change really,’ Marjorie says. ‘He gets out of bed and comes downstairs for a few hours, but most of the time he keeps to his bedroom. I think he’s getting weaker by infinitesimal degrees, but it’s hard to tell. He said one day, “I’m waiting on the banks of the Styx for that bloody ferryman to come. I wish he’d hurry up.”’ ‘Oh dear, how sad,’ Rebecca says. ‘I’ll try to come and see him. I took some photos of the courtroom in session at Nuremberg he might be interested to see.’ ‘He would like that,’ Marjorie says. ‘Perhaps the week after next,’ Rebecca says. ‘I must write this article for the
New Yorker
while it’s all still fresh in my mind.’

For the next six days she works hard at her article. She describes Francis’s manner, seated on the high bench at the top of the courtroom, ‘
like a highly intelligent swan, occasionally flexing down to commune with smaller waterfowl
’, and smiles to herself imagining him reading that. He sends her an erotic love letter, and she replies archly reproving him. He writes again, asking her to let him have a letter that he can show to Katherine – he has mentioned her a lot in his letters home and he is afraid Katherine is getting suspicious. She feels a little chill as she reads this and does not reply.

On the seventh day after her return from Germany she wakes feeling unaccountably anxious and apprehensive, and sits at her desk all morning without being able to produce anything worth printing. The waste-paper basket fills with screwed-up balls of discarded foolscap. In the afternoon she asks Henry to drive her to the head of a valley three miles away so that she can walk home downhill. It is a fine day, warm but not too hot for comfort, with small fluffy white clouds moving slowly like grazing sheep in a clear blue sky. Her mood of the morning begins to lift. Perhaps it was provoked by Francis’s rather demeaning request for a letter to show Katherine. It had lowered him in her esteem, and reminded her uncomfortably of the triangular relationship between herself, H.G. and Jane in years past. What slaves we are to our genitals, she thinks, what quantities of time and energy and spirit we waste on contriving their conjunction with another’s, and then on concealing it. I should break with Francis now, but I am too weak, and so the affair will drag on for a while until he decides not to jeopardise his marriage any further. And so it goes on between men and women, always has and always will.

As she approaches the house, Henry comes out to meet her with a grave expression on his face. ‘Marjorie phoned,’ he tells her. ‘H.G. died this afternoon.’

‘Oh my God,’ Rebecca says. ‘I must have had a premonition this morning.’

Marjorie gives a very detailed account of H.G.’s death when Rebecca phones her that evening. ‘It was quite sudden and unexpected. He’d kept to his bedroom for the last week or so, but he sat up at his table for meals, and read the papers and did the
Times
crossword as quickly as usual. The day nurse was off for two hours this morning, so I popped in and out to see him several times, and he seemed just as he had been for ages. Perhaps a bit more tired – and more gentle. He could be very irritable at times. But when I did some little thing for him he said, “Thank you, Mrs Wells”, and smiled at me. Nurse came back on duty, and I went home at lunchtime feeling quite happy about him. Then at four o’clock nurse phoned me to say he was dead …’ There is a pause while Marjorie evidently stifles some tears. ‘Sorry,’ she says, and continues. ‘Apparently he rang for her and sat on the edge of the bed and asked her to help him take off his pyjama jacket, as if he was going to get dressed. But then he put it on again and got back into bed. He said to her, “Go away, I’m all right,” and lay down and closed his eyes. Ten minutes later she looked in, and he was dead.’

‘He died alone, then,’ says Rebecca.

‘That was what he would have wanted,’ says Marjorie. ‘He always hated being ill, being pitied. He just slipped away when no one was looking. His expression was quite peaceful.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right,’ says Rebecca. ‘I’m glad for his sake the end was peaceful and painless.’

Nevertheless, she thinks, as she replaces the telephone in its cradle, there is a poignant absence of poetry in H.G.’s passing. That the writer who imagined so many violent and sudden deaths in his stories, deaths of individuals and massacres of crowds, the destruction of armies and fleets, the inundation of whole populations, and the death of the planet itself, should leave this life in so quiet and banal a way seems somehow anticlimactic. But perhaps not inappropriate. His life was like that of a meteor, or rather a comet – he explained the difference to her once, and she can hear his voice now, the voice of a born teacher. ‘They’re both astral bodies that invade the solar system from time to time, lumps of rock and ice from God knows where in interstellar space. But meteors burn up when they hit the earth’s atmosphere and leave a white trail in the night sky we call a shooting star, or they’re larger lumps of rock that sometimes impact on the earth – meteorites. Comets enter our planetary system on eccentric orbits of their own. They consist mostly of ice and dust which vaporise as they pass near the sun and create a sparkling tail which can be millions of miles long and visible from earth with the naked eye, until they disappear, for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, before they reappear.’ That seems to Rebecca a good analogy for H.G.’s career, and as a writer she depends upon metaphor and simile to give things meaning and definition.

H.G. was like a comet. He appeared suddenly out of obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century and blazed in the literary firmament for decades, evoking astonishment and awe and alarm, like the comet of
In the Days of the Comet
which threatened to destroy the earth, but in fact transformed it by the beneficial effect of its gaseous tail. H.G. also aspired to leave a transformed world behind him, and even if he didn’t succeed (who could?) he had a liberating and enlightening effect on a great many people. As time went on his imagination and intellect dwindled in brightness, gradually people ceased to look up and stare in wonder, and now he has passed out of sight. But there are eccentric orbits in literary history. Perhaps one day he will glow in the firmament once again.

MY PRIMARY SOURCES
for this novel were numerous works of fiction and non-fiction by H.G. Wells referred to in the text itself, most importantly his
Experiment in Autobiography
(2 vols, 1934) and the ‘Postscript’ to it, about his sexual life, which he wrote for publication after he and the women mentioned in it were dead, and which was published in 1984 under the title
H.G. Wells in Love
, edited by his son G.P. Wells; also
The Correspondence of H.G. Wells
, edited by David C. Smith (4 vols, 1998), the letters collected in
Henry James & H.G. Wells: a Record of their Friendship, their Debate on the Art of Fiction and their Quarrel
, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray (1958), and in
Arnold Bennett & H.G. Wells: a Record of a Personal and a Literary Friendship
, edited by Harris Wilson (1960), and letters not included in these collections which are quoted in some of the biographies of Wells and others listed below.

Among biographies of H.G. Wells I found
The Time Traveller: the Life of H.G. Wells
(1973; revised 1987) by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, and
H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life
(1984) by Anthony West, especially useful, supplemented by other books including: Michael Coren,
The Invisible Man: the Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells
(1993); Lovat Dickson,
H.G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times
(1969);
H.G. Wells: Interviews and Recollections
, edited by J.R. Hammond (1980); Andrea Lynn,
Shadow Lovers: the Last Affairs of H.G. Wells
(2001); Gordon N. Ray,
H.G. Wells and Rebecca West
(1974); David Smith,
H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal
(1986); Antonina Vallentin,
H.G. Wells: Prophet of Our Day
(1950); Frank Wells,
H.G. Wells: a Pictorial Biography
(1977); and Geoffrey West,
H.G. Wells: a Sketch for a Portrait
(1930). The most recent biography,
H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life
(2010) by Michael Sherborne, was published as I was finishing
A Man of Parts
, but not too late for me to take advantage of his meticulous scholarship; it contains many facts unobtainable from previous biographies, and enabled me to make numerous corrections and additions of detail to my novel. Among reference guides to Wells’s life and work I am indebted to John Hammond’s
An H.G. Wells Companion
(1979) and
An H.G. Wells Chronology
(1999), and Geoffrey H. Wells’s
The Works of H.G. Wells 1887– 1925
(1926). Critical studies of H.G. Wells from which I profited include: Bernard Bergonzi,
The Early H.G. Wells
(1961); John Batchelor,
H.G. Wells
; Peter Kemp,
H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape
(1982); and
H.G. Wells: the Critical Heritage¸
edited by Patrick Parrinder.

Biographies of, and autobiographies and collections of letters by, people who knew Wells with varying degrees of intimacy, were valuable sources of information. They include: Tania Alexander,
A Little of All These
(1987); Enid Bagnold,
The Autobiography of Enid Bagnold
(1969); Barbara Belford,
Violet: the Story of the Irrepressible Violet Hunt and her Circle
(1990); Nina Berberova,
Moura: the Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg
, translated by Marian Schwartz and Richard D. Sylvester (2005); Julia Briggs,
A Woman of Passion: the life of E. Nesbit
(1987); Bernard Crick,
George Orwell: A Life
(1980); Margaret Drabble,
Arnold Bennett
(1974); Gloria G. Fromm,
Dorothy Richardson: a biography
(1977) and (ed.)
Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson
(1995); Ruth Fry,
Maud and Amber: a New Zealand Mother and Daughter and the Women’s Cause 1865 to 1981
(1992); Victoria Glendinning,
Rebecca West: a Life
(1987); J.R. Hammond,
H.G. Wells and Rebecca West
(1991); Michael Holroyd,
Bernard Shaw
(3 vols, 1988–91); R.H. Bruce Lockhart,
Memoirs of a Secret Agent
(1932); Lucy Masterman,
C.F.G. Masterman
(1939); M.M. Meyer,
H.G. Wells and his Family
(1956); Doris Langley Moore,
E. Nesbit
(revised edn. 1967); Berta Ruck,
A Storyteller Tells the Truth
(1935); Carl Rollyson,
Rebecca West: a Saga of the Century
(1995); John Rosenberg,
Dorothy Richardson: the Genius they Forgot
(1973); Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.),
Selected Letters of Rebecca West (2000
); Keith Sinclair,
William Pember Reeves: New Zealand Fabian
(1965); Karen Usborne, ‘
Elizabeth’: the Author of
Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1986);
The Diary of Beatrice Webb
, Vol. 3, 1905–1924 (1984), edited by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. Several novels in Dorothy Richardson’s autobiographical novel-sequence,
Pilgrimage
, notably
The Tunnel
(1919),
Revolving Lights
(1923) and
Dawn’s Left Hand
(1931), portray H.G. Wells in the character of ‘Hypo Wilson’ with what he admitted was, at least in the first of these books, ‘astonishing accuracy’, and provide insights into the nature of her relationship with him and Jane.
Agent Moura: My Secret Agent Auntie – Baroness Moura Budberg
, a documentary film made for the BBC in 2008 by her great-great-nephew, Dimitri Collingridge, and available on DVD, was of great interest to me.