The Honeymoon (22 page)

Then she saw him. He was standing across the room, absolutely still, just as he used to be when he got up from bed at night. Unmistakable, the big head, the wiry hair sticking out messily on either side of his head, his mustache. He was naked. She saw his small body, his thin legs, the vague shape of his genitals. He was standing there as
if he’d briefly left their bed and now he was coming back to her.

He was looking straight at her. She could see his features quite clearly now. But his expression — it wasn’t his usual one. His eyes were solemn, there was no laughter in them, only a terrible seriousness she’d never seen before. They bored into her, as if her surface, her immediate self, didn’t matter to him.

She opened her mouth to utter his name, but nothing came out, she couldn’t speak. Fear, terror that he’d vanish, made her clamp her lips shut.

“George … is that you?” she said, forcing out the words. He didn’t move. She pleaded, “George, how could you have left me?”

She put her legs over the side of the bed as if to stand up and go to him. “I’m going to die without you,” she said. “I am … I am …” She stifled the rest, afraid he’d disappear.

Still, he said nothing, but watched her intently, his eyes piercing as if he were seeing through her to something beyond.

She was about to touch her toes to the floor, to go to him, but she held back. Instinctively, she knew that if she came too close he’d flee, and he would melt into the air.

A full minute must have passed. He hadn’t moved, his eyes were still fixed on her. She said softly, “Don’t go, darling. Please don’t leave me.” She saw his eyes move, shift. She might have blinked, she didn’t know. And then there was only the wall, the flat gray wall, the silent portraits.

The room was empty. He was gone. The night was all clarity now, banality.

Outside the window, a faint gray-pink light was beginning to suffuse the sky, dawn was coming, the morning clangor would be starting soon.

She lay back in the bed, her senses quickened, alert. He was not her laughing man now. It was as if he had been transformed by his journey, that voyage that only happens once.

She couldn’t go back to sleep.

Gradually, the morning light filled her eyes. He’d been there. She knew it and believed it.

But maybe it was just a vision, an aggregation of love and memory fueled by grief and desire. Someone, not the God in whom she did not believe, but her own God, the accumulation of some universal spirit and moral force, all the love she had inside her, had sent him. Just as he had been sent in those dark autumn months in London, after the awful ending with Spencer, when her life seemed fixed forever, when she had no hope left, only the drudgery of work.

H
e would come to the Strand in the relentless autumn rain, all wet, shaking himself off like a dog, and find her in the office in the back of the house, her legs over the armchair with her feet toward the fire as she worked through her manuscripts. He’d sit down opposite her and warm himself, steam rising from his damp coat. When she looked up, he was watching her.

“You really are the backbone of this place, aren’t you?” he said.

“Well — the unpaid backbone.”

His eyes drifted to the fire. His habitual gaiety seemed muted these days, his manic jokes. “You seem a bit sad,” she remarked.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But I’m very pleased with the Goethe article.” He’d written a piece on “Goethe as a Man of Science” for the
Westminster
.

“Yes, it worked well,” she said.

“Thanks to your editing. It was a bit disorganized, I’m afraid.”

“A little. But I’m glad we published it,” she told him. “I think you’re right, people don’t know about all of Goethe’s scientific work, the botany and geology.”

“He said he didn’t take any pride in his poetry, that he was proudest of his work on the theory of color.” Lewes had been trying for years to write a life of Goethe, but his efforts were constantly interrupted by his having to write articles for money.

She patted the pile of proofs in her lap and sighed. “Oh, dear. This is just endless.”

“What about Chapman? Why isn’t he doing any of this?”

“He spends every minute urging his creditors to pay him and soothing his investors.”

He looked at her intently. “What say you to this?” he asked. “I have press orders for
Masks and Faces
tomorrow at the Haymarket. Would you go with me to cheer us both up?”

“But —” She hesitated. “Would Mrs. Lewes be with us?”

“She’s got the children to take care of. I promise you, Mrs. Lewes won’t mind in the slightest if we go to the theater together.” She thought she detected a faint bitterness in his voice. “It’ll be very funny.”

That night, as they sat next to one another in the theater, she was conscious of his physicality, his masculinity, the vague scent of his wool jacket and his skin. At first she didn’t look directly at him, and held herself nervously apart from him. But soon, they were laughing together, touching one another’s arms at the silly jokes — the married squire Vane courting Mrs. Woffington; the main character, Triplet, frantically writing comedies in his garret to earn money to feed his starving family; and the two critics, Soaper, who praises everything, and Snarl, who hates it all.

The play over, they stepped out lightly from the theater, their spirits cleansed by laughter. They walked home along Haymarket, through the thick yellow fog and the damp
cold coming in off the Thames. She shivered and tucked her scarf around her neck. He moved around her so he was nearer the river, to protect her from the cold, then he took her arm and moved closer to her.

“Shall we get a hansom?” he asked. “Is it too cold for you?” His body next to hers was warm, wiry, her own height, shielding her.

“It’s too expensive,” she said. “I’m so glad I came. Laughter does make one forget one’s sorrows.”

“Indeed.”

He accompanied her to the door of 142 and followed her inside. It was late, the drawing room was deserted, the lights dimmed, the fire was down to its embers, the only sound the steady nighttime ticking of the grandfather clock. Standing in the entrance hall, before she’d removed her coat, she smiled at him. Then he kissed her on the lips. Instinctively, she wanted to pull back, but his lips were soft and full, the kiss unexpectedly enveloping.

He stepped away. “Pardon me,” he said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t help myself.”

She looked about. “You really shouldn’t be here.”

“Could we just sit awhile in the drawing room? There’s still a bit of a fire.”

“I suppose so.” She removed her coat and sat down on the settee opposite the fireplace, clutching her arms around her body for warmth. He crouched down and stoked the coals, threw a log on, and the embers burst into flame. He came around and sat beside her. The room grew warmer.

“You’re married,” she blurted out. “I don’t think I could bear …” She left it unfinished. She didn’t say, “another married man, a man who belongs to someone else.”

“My marriage is dead,” he said firmly. “I’ve got to move out of Bedford Place, as soon as I can do it. But I can’t afford to at the moment. I have to support my family.”

“How many children do you have?”

“I had …” He paused, as if this was difficult to say. “I have three boys, Charley, Thornie, and Bertie. We lost our littlest one, St. Vincent, a year and a half ago.” His face dropped in an expression of inexpressible sadness.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Twenty-two months old. Measles. We lost another one too, early on, a little girl. Only four days old.”

“There must be nothing like it,” she said. “I’m not a parent but surely, God, whoever He — or She — is, didn’t mean this to be.”

“And … in addition to my own three boys, there are two others now.” He took a breath. “Or at least they bear my name.”

He paused. “I feel I should explain.” He hesitated. “You have a way of listening that makes one want to confide in you.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling grimly. “Yes, that’s been said. I have one attribute, at least.”

At this bit of self-deprecation he looked at her sharply.

He went on. “In the beginning, Agnes and I were both believers in free love.”

“ ‘Free love,’ ” she echoed with bitterness. “I’ve seen the results of that — only pain.”

He paused, looking at her as if thinking this through, but he didn’t answer.

“We were happy,” he said. “We had our little boys. But I’m afraid I left Agnes to manage by herself too much. I was
always out and about, furthering my career, trying to earn money, at the theater. Then my play
The Noble Heart
went on at the Olympic. My friend Thornton Hunt and I were trying to raise money for the
Leader
. I admit that I — I foolishly strayed. Agnes sensed it, asked me about it. I told her the truth, perhaps I shouldn’t have. To my surprise, perhaps stupidly, she was distraught.

“Then Agnes became pregnant.”

He stopped. “She told me that the baby was Thornton’s. I was — there’s no other way to describe it — shattered. Our agreement hadn’t included having children with other people. Thornton was my best friend. I’d even named my son, Thornie, after him. But as I admitted, I — strayed first. Agnes said she’d never get rid of the baby. We’d lost our little girl early on and she couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t punish her for it. Look what I’d done. The baby, Edmund, was born just three weeks after little St. Vincent died.”

“But how did she know it wasn’t yours?”

“He looks just like Thornton, very dark-skinned. The Hunts are from Barbados, you know.”

“Did you confront Thornton?”

“No. In an odd way, I couldn’t blame him either, though he’s married with children himself. He’s got seven with his wife, Kate.”

“Seven? It can’t be!”

“Yes. Then Agnes had Rose. She’s Thornton’s too. By then Agnes and I had ceased all intimacy.

“That’s when I met you at Jeff’s Book Shop,” he said. “I noticed you at once. I’d heard about you, that you were the brilliance behind the throne at the magazine. You had a way of looking at a man, making him feel he was the
most important person in the room. And you have such an enchanting voice.”

He hesitated. “I think you should know, I allowed Agnes to put my name on the birth certificates of her first two children with Thornton.”

“Why?”

“I’d acceded to our arrangement that we could each have other lovers to begin with. And the children were innocent. It wasn’t their fault they’d been born. I couldn’t let them be bastards. I never knew my own father. He abandoned my own poor mother when I was a baby. I never saw him again.”

As he told her his story, she thought, he wasn’t ugly at all. His eyes were dark and searching, he had full, red lips, a thin, tensile little body.

“That means that I can never divorce Agnes,” he said, “because, by giving the children my name, under the law I condoned Agnes’s adultery.”

He waited, letting that sink in.

“And Thornton,” she asked, “does he acknowledge them as his?”

“He and I, we haven’t ever discussed it. Some things are better left unsaid. He knew that I’d been unfaithful to Agnes. As I said, we were all freethinkers …” He gave a grim little laugh. “Free to be miserable would be a better way of putting it.”

“Does he give Agnes money for them?” She knew that Lewes wasn’t rich, he was always foraging for money by selling articles.

“How well do you know Thornton?” he asked. “He’s always begging for loans, saying he’s got all his children to support. If anything, he’s poorer than even I am.”

“You support Thornton’s children, too?”

“How can I feed some of the children in the house and not the others? Yes, I feed them.”

He drew back. “I’ll go now,” he said. He stood up and waited a moment. Then he said, “But I’m never going to let you be alone again.”

He took his hat and coat and umbrella from the rack and was gone.

She sat there, contemplating what he’d said. Here was another man who believed in “free love.” And yet he seemed so worn down by despair, broken. She believed, or she
wanted
to believe, she thought, the truthfulness of his regret, his sorrow. In spite of herself she was moved, that he refused to let Agnes’s children with another man suffer, that he took the full blame for what had happened between them, that he refused to condemn his wife. He didn’t ask for sympathy or praise for his decision not to abandon his family.