Other Women (23 page)

In the end it was Florence who sorted out the mess: either Lilian went or she did, she would not marry him. Hardy packed poor Lilian off home, although he did it very kindly and kept in touch with her for the rest of his life.

On 10 February 1914, Thomas Hardy and Florence Dugdale came together at last. If it was Florence’s fairy tale come true then she didn’t seem to enjoy it that much. She was constantly feeling jealous over Hardy’s memories and poems about Emma. The four years after Emma’s death were some of his most productive, especially for writing poetry. Florence found her husband’s absorption in his work to be a source of contention in their relationship. It is a wonder though, that having wanted to be a writer herself, she did not understand Hardy’s need to work. Often it is exactly that which attracts someone to a person that in the end pushes them away. Florence stuck by Hardy, worked as his secretary and sounding board. She seemed happy to work on anything that didn’t involve Emma.

In the last few weeks of Hardy’s life Florence stayed as close to him as she could, reading to him, chatting and attending to his needs. Yet it seems she may not have been there for his last words and final breath, which were given to Florence’s sister Eva when Hardy called her name saying, ‘What is this?’

Hardy left an estate worth £100,000 (around £212,000 in today’s money). It was broken up into bequests to charities and various relatives (the bulk going to his brother and sister). Florence was left the house, Max Gate, granted income from all Hardy’s royalties and a small annuity of £600. If she were to remarry this sum would halve. This was not Hardy being mean to his second wife, it was a standard clause to protect widows from being tricked into marriage by men just after their money.

What did surprise Hardy’s friend Sydney Cockerill was the fact that Florence had entered into an engagement with the writer J.M. Barrie only half a year after her husband’s death. The marriage never took place, Barrie getting cold feet and breaking off the engagement. Florence was both shocked and upset by his actions but they did remain friends. Perhaps in marrying Florence, Barrie had hoped to hold on to some last shred of his friend Hardy, but as time moved on he realised it would not work. When Barrie died in 1937 Florence was very sad. Yet she had another problem of her own to face, she had been diagnosed with bowel cancer and did not live much longer after Barrie’s death.

Rebecca West is known in her own right as a writer and intellectual. She was also, for a time, the second main woman in the life of H.G. Wells; she was for all her ideas of freedom for women, his mistress. Free love may have been the motto that both writers subscribed to, but when you look at the fact that Rebecca lived hidden away in an insignificant house, pretending not to be the mother of her son Anthony, one can’t help thinking there are echoes of times gone by when illegitimate births were seen as indiscretions to be concealed.

Rebecca West was born Cicely Isabel Fairfield but took up the pen name of Rebecca West after seeing a production of the Ibsen play
Rosmersholm
, which has a character of that name in it. Rebecca was writing for a radical women’s paper called
New Free Woman
but, despite the free thinking of the women in her own family, she thought that it was a good idea to keep her real identity under wraps, so as not to cause embarrassment.

Wells met Rebecca after she had written a lengthy review of one his latest books, the novel
Marriage.
In the article she calls Wells ‘the old maid among novelists’ and accused him of writing about sex with a mind that had been too long obsessed with science fiction. When Wells read the review he was intrigued and invited the little-known female writer to lunch, probably hoping that an animated debate would ensue. That first visit lasted well into the afternoon.

Wells’s first wife was his cousin, the beautiful and animated Isabel Mary. He met her in 1886 but they didn’t marry until 1891. Wells was to write about this first serious relationship in his autobiography, saying that he’d been made to wait to marry Isabel and that he was made to marry her in a church and that, actually, he didn’t believe in the institution of marriage anyway. Almost immediately things went wrong and in 1892 Wells met Amy Catherine Robbins.

Two years later, after the divorce with Isabel, Wells married Amy whom he renamed Jane. Jane was to become the mainstay of his life; she knew about all his affairs, stating that she realised he needed extended times to be alone or to do his own thing. The first time Wells showed any sign of needing his own space was after the birth of their first child, a boy, George Philip in 1901. Wells just disappeared.

Jane, with what became her trademark elastic attitude to her husband’s self-centred needs, told him that she would give him all the time and space he needed whenever he wanted it. This was probably how she kept him married to her. Wells described Jane as being delicate and ethereal, and at her funeral gave an elegy that was described by some as a total myth. One family friend said that Jane had been one of the strongest women they’d ever known. Wells’s words of farewell to his dead wife make one wonder if his wife was perhaps the greatest of his muses and his mistresses were just for fun.

H.G. Wells

West met Wells in 1912 and after their initial meeting an affair soon began. Rebecca has been likened to Ann Veronica, the heroine of one of Wells’s novels, calling on her married lover to make love to her. Whether this is true or not, the idea that the young writer was influenced by the older writer’s work and using it as a catalyst to bring them together makes the idea of mistress as muse particularly interesting: West may have become Wells’s muse but it certainly worked the other way too. Although the affair started passionately enough and involved two advocates of free love, it was Wells who first broke it off.

Wells was already involved with a woman he termed his mistress, Elizabeth Von Arnim, another writer. Perhaps Elizabeth was not as accommodating about sharing her lover as Jane was about sharing her husband, but the outcome was that Wells fled overseas. Before he left he told Rebecca that they would have to break off all communication between them, he couldn’t even stay her friend. Unable to understand or accept the huge wrench, Rebecca was on the point of suicide.

The young woman’s sensible mother took her daughter off to the Continent for an extended trip through France and Spain. Rebecca wrote and then published accounts of her travels and Wells, on reading these, initiated a reunion between them, telling her that her writing was ‘gorgeous’ and that he wanted them to be friends again. At this point in the history of the love affair, the modern reader begins to have doubts as to their sincerity in anything. Whilst both Wells and West were supporters of feminism,West reacted like the heroine of some soppy romance and Wells was behaving like a typical male chauvinist. Still, theory doesn’t always play out in practice. What Wells perhaps didn’t tell Rebecca was that his affair with Von Arnim (who Wells refers to as ‘little e’) was over and he was free to take another lover – or he needed consolation.

The outcome was that by 1914 Rebecca West was pregnant with Wells’s child. Jane was told straightaway. She had already known about the existence of another illegitimate child by Amber Reeves (also a writer). Amber was born in New Zealand but went to England with her parents to finish school and attend university. She and her parents were members of the Fabian Society. After Amber had given a student paper at the Philosophical Society, where she met Wells, it is said the couple went to Paris for a weekend alone. It soon became public knowledge that Amber and Wells were lovers. Wells was all for hiding the relationship but Amber couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t difficult for the people around them to discover the affair. One friend of the Wellses stated that the scandal was in the fact that the affair wasn’t kept hidden.

Rebecca West

In 1909 Amber Reeves was pregnant. She and Wells removed to France to get away from all the gossip. The two of them were hopeless at living together, neither wanted the responsibility of housework or cooking. This may well explain part of the reason that Wells was so grateful to his wife Jane, as she buffered him from mundane reality. Amber couldn’t cope at all and was packed off back to England by Wells while he remained overseas to write. When he too returned home, he and Jane took Amber into their house to live with them.

Before Wells’s baby was born in December 1909 Amber married a lawyer, George Rivers Blanco White. In her own writing she says that it was not a marriage of her choice but one made between White and Wells. She concedes it was one of the best things to have ever happened to her. The daughter, Anna-Jane, born on the last day of the year, was under the impression her father was White; when she turned 18 she was told the truth.

Six years later Wells’s latest mistress, Rebecca West, was about to give birth in a rather unattractive semi-detached house in an out of the way place: Hunstanton in Norfolk. She and Wells began an elaborate charade of being husband and wife. Wells became Mr West, a movie director, although sometimes he said he was a journalist. The child, Anthony, was brought up to call his father ‘Wellsie’ and his mother ‘Auntie Panther’. This was something that Anthony, as an adult, found very hard to forgive his mother for.

Wells and West kept their relationship going all through the war years. Jane and Rebecca were expected to be courteous to each other. Jane had grown used to this and saw it as an aspect of her wifely duties to her genius husband. Rebecca also played her part towards Jane with politeness. However, scratch the surface of these two women and what they really felt for each other was quite a different matter. Jane would go through all the letters Wells received, whether they were business or private – this was also part of her duty. With the love letters Jane would annotate them at their points of hypocrisy in regards to herself. Rebecca in turn would privately comment that Jane was a dominating witch. Wells, whatever his extraordinary charm was that made these otherwise independent and intelligent women fall over themselves for him, was unconcerned at the reality behind the façade; as long as he was happy then that was all that mattered. Apparently, when he took Rebecca and baby Anthony for a ride in his car, he later complained to Rebecca that all the attention focused on the baby and that it really made him question his love for her.

Jane, on the other hand, was his ideal: organised, domesticated and totally devoted to making his life comfortable. Why did someone like Rebecca West want the company of such a man? Love is blind the old maxim goes and perhaps it is true. The relationship between the writers was already beginning to show signs of strain. Rebecca had to resort to journalism to help pay the bills, while she longed to have the leisure to write what she considered serious work. Wells would have kept her financially, although maybe not in luxury, but Rebecca was adamant to stay independent. Anthony was a nuisance to her writing and at the age of 4, or even before that, he was sent to a Montessori boarding school. Anthony later wrote very bitterly about his childhood experiences and could not see how getting rid of him so early meant that she had ever loved him.