The Lodger: A Novel (26 page)

“His poor wife! What a lot she has to bear.” There was an edge in Veronica’s voice. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

“Her name is Amber Reeves. I don’t know much about her, other than she graduated from Cambridge with a starred first, and she’s beautiful as well as brilliant. Bertie is greatly taken with her.”

Dorothy wasn’t surprised he had replaced her with such ease. Knowing him as she did, it seemed inevitable. Yet the thought of them together—Bertie looking at Amber with that focused gleam in his grey-blue eyes, saying the things he had said to Dorothy—caused an unexpected pang of jealousy.

At times, she missed Bertie. Perhaps, one never quite let go of past loves. She still had moments of wondering if it could have worked. Could they have reached a compromise, a way of existing side by side with his marriage, more or less satisfactorily?

The officer’s meal was being served. With slow, precise movements, he picked up his table napkin, rose to his feet, and came across to spread it on the cloth in front of Dorothy, over the blots of red wine and cigarette stubs left by the previous clients.

“Why, thank you,” Dorothy said. She could feel hot color spreading from her neck to her hairline.

The officer bowed stiffly, and returned to his table without a word.

“An act of chivalry, don’t you think?” she said uneasily to Veronica.

“You’ve lost none of your allure, my dear.”

Veronica’s eyes looked huge, like lamps or mirrors. In their clear surfaces, a myriad of tiny Dorothys danced. Dorothy felt herself flush again; she looked away, trembling with hope and trepidation.

Her gaze fell on the officer, who sat ignoring his food, staring back at Dorothy with a dogged tenacity that soon became embarrassing.

To her astonishment, Dorothy noticed Benjamin making his way through the crowded room toward them, looking uncomfortable and out of place. He was a little heavier, his beard was longer and bushier, but the determined plunging walk, the thickly waving black hair and brilliant deprecating eyes were the same.

“You didn’t tell me he was coming,” she said in a low tone to Veronica.

“I wanted to surprise you.”

They rose to their feet to greet him. His habitual expression of soulful melancholy sat oddly with the eagerness of his manner; he was like a small boy joining a party. Grasping both of Dorothy’s hands, his well-remembered rich deep voice rang out: “Ah, I am glad to see you, after all this time. How well you look. I must tell you, I enjoyed reading your wonderful book immensely.”

Dorothy smiled at him warmly. “My reading sessions with you were the foundation stones for my writing. What a wealth of literature you introduced me to: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky…”

Out of the corner of her eye, Dorothy saw Veronica shoot them a jealous look. “Let’s sit down,” she said brightly. “Dorothy, why don’t you go there, in the middle of us.”

When Benjamin had a drink in front of him, Veronica raised her glass again. “Tonight is a double celebration,” she announced. “We have some wonderful news. Benjamin asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

A broiling wave of jealousy tore through Dorothy; the room swayed around her. It was so hot and crowded, she could not breathe. She gulped down her champagne, scarcely aware of what she was doing.

Mustering all her strength, she forced herself to composure. And found herself rewarded by a tiny glimmer of relief. At least she knew where she stood now. She no longer hung in limbo, twisting. She had been cut free, once and for all.

Benjamin’s mouth smiled, but his eyes looked uneasy and would not meet Dorothy’s. Veronica kept the conversation going; she seemed to feel no pain at parting from Dorothy. She was plunging ahead into her new life with only the slightest of backward glances. “Respectability, security, all the things I thumbed my nose at before,” she said. “Well, they don’t seem so unattractive anymore. Ben is wonderful, and not like other men … in a way, he is my gift from you.”

There was one shadow, she admitted. Her family refused to countenance her marrying a man who was not only a foreigner, but a Jew. The wedding would take place at a small registry office. Only one of Veronica’s brothers, the youngest, had relented far enough to agree to be present. Veronica was refusing to allow her joy to be dampened by her family’s disapproval. She described the dress she was designing: pale grey crepe, with little ruffles of cream lace at the neck and sleeves. Dorothy could picture her in it; her glowing face framed by smooth tumbling ringlets.

“Are you still involved with the suffrage?” Dorothy asked, when Veronica had finished.

Veronica shook her head. “Actually, planning my wedding has driven all thoughts of it from my mind.”

Dorothy, feeling quite disproportionately indignant for the suffragettes, bit back the retort that the suffrage movement was full of married women. She was not the only casualty of Veronica’s capriciousness, she realized.

Prudently, she changed the subject: “Have you set a wedding date?”

“Yes; the twenty-eighth of October.”

“Why, that’s a few days before Mrs. Baker’s marriage to Mr. Cundy!”

“Mrs. Baker! I haven’t thought about her for ages. Do you ever see her?”

“I went to visit them a few days ago. For a couple who seem so mismatched, they are incredibly happ—”

Dorothy broke off, noticing Benjamin gazing with horrified astonishment toward a point above her left shoulder. Turning, she saw the officer standing just behind them. In his right hand, he brandished a fish knife.

“Leave her alone!” he said to Benjamin in an impeccable, but slurred accent. “I don’t like your face.”

Without thinking about what she was doing, Dorothy leapt up and seized him by the arm that bore the knife, holding on as hard as she could.

Benjamin half rose to his feet. Waiters hurried up to them.

Protectively, the officer swayed toward Dorothy. “Let me save you from that foreigner,” he implored.

She begged him to go back to his table.

To her surprise, he relinquished the knife and shuffled off quite meekly, murmuring “I’ll do anything for you.
Anything
.”

Dorothy sat down and reached for her glass. Her hand was trembling.

For a while, they sat in shocked silence.

“What a drunken fool,” Benjamin said, at last.

“He was harmless, poor lamb,” Dorothy protested. “Drunk enough to see me as girlish and interesting, that’s all.”

She gazed at Benjamin lounging in his chair. He was wearing a harsh shiny suit and a black-banded grey felt hat: he looked like a waiter in a seedy cafe. Examining him with the eyes of the drunken officer, she saw only a shabby foreigner. He looked simply disreputable.

Veronica excused herself to go to the powder room. As soon as they were alone, Benjamin turned to Dorothy, reaching for her hand. “Dorothy, is it too late for us, even now?” he asked hoarsely. “Half an hour in your company means more to me than a whole lifetime with your enchanting friend…”

Blood surged into Dorothy’s cheeks; she shook her head wordlessly, pulling her hand from his grasp. Benjamin’s face was pale and ravaged. The heavy white eyelids came down; when he raised them, his eyes burned with weariness and conflict.

Knowing him so well, Dorothy understood exactly what divided him. Part of him—call it the Russian part—believed she was essential and irreplaceable, and suffered acutely in losing her. Yet the Jew in him desired to fulfill what he saw as the wider aspect: the continuation of his race. “The race is greater than its single parts,” he’d said, a long time ago, and his view of life as an endless uniform pattern of humanity was one of the things that had put her off him. He was also lonely; he wanted to share his life with someone. Veronica delightfully assuaged several needs.

What a terrible mistake they were making! They were completely mismatched; they should never get married. In order to gain her freedom, Dorothy had not only introduced them, she had half-willed their union, sentencing them both to a lifetime of unhappiness.

She tried to bury the dark thoughts that crowded into her mind.
You are guilty. Guilty!
shrieked her conscience.

She told herself her friends were adults; they were quite capable of making their own decisions. In order to survive, she must drive the knowledge of her own complicity from her mind.

The officer was back at their table, fists raised against Benjamin. “I told you … I don’t like your fa—aace.”

Two waiters appeared, seized him by the arms, and bundled him without ceremony out the back door. A guard was placed next to it. When the officer tried to walk in again a few minutes later, the police were called.

“It’s my fault,” Dorothy said sadly, when the little drama was over. “If I had a grain of sense, I should have joined him for a short time, coaxed some food into him, and made an appointment to meet him again, which he would have forgotten by the next day. Then none of this would have happened.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Benjamin told her. “The man was a lunatic.”

Dorothy felt tears scalding her eyes. She bit her lip to stop them falling. What an upside-down world it was; everybody wanting the wrong person. “I won’t forget my thoughtlessness that caused a gentleman to be locked up,” she said tartly.

*   *   *

WHEN SHE REACHED
home, an avalanche of grief knocked her off her feet, leaving her wretched. She lay down on her bed and started to cry. Hard, painful sobs that tore her chest.

She was devoured by intolerable longing. She wanted to be in Veronica’s arms, making ravenous abandoned love, their clothes a tangled heap on the floor. She gave herself up to memories. She thought about the sensation of Veronica’s body moving beneath hers, the texture and taste of her. What was she going to do with the torrents of unfulfilled longing? How to quell them, when they were as much a part of her as breathing?

She cried and cried until there were no tears left, and the feeling of desolation began to lose its searing edge. She realized she was grieving for something that had died a long time ago.

New thoughts arrived; cooler thoughts. The officer at the Café Royal thought she was still desirable. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to find love again? The fortune-teller she visited so long ago had accurately predicted she would become a writer. She might be right about Dorothy marrying late, too.

Perhaps she would find someone she could be with, someone who didn’t want to dominate and possess her. Someone who had his or her own fertile and independent inner life, which would allow a certain distance in their relationship and give her the space to be herself. Dorothy also wanted a love she could be open and proud about. Surely it was not too much to hope for?

She was moving toward something … a lessening of yearning. Dare she call it peace? There were glimmers of brightness ahead. She only had to reach them.

Afterword: A Note on Sources

I stumbled on Dorothy Richardson by accident in the library of London University. I was searching for an angle on Virginia Woolf for my Ph.D. thesis that hadn’t been written before—without much success. Opening a book at random, I found a review that Virginia had written about a writer whose name I did not recognize:

Dorothy Richardson has invented … a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes …
(Review of
Revolving Lights,
Dorothy Richardson, from
The Nation and the Athenaeum
, May 19, 1923)

I was riveted. Who was Dorothy Richardson? How had she come to reinvent the English language in order to record the experience of being uniquely female? Interestingly, Virginia was elsewhere grudging in her praise of Dorothy’s work, as she was about other female contemporaries, notably Katherine Mansfield. I suspect she perceived them as rivals and threats.

Further investigation led me to Dorothy’s life work: the twelve-volume autobiographical novel-sequence,
Pilgrimage
. I began to read with mounting excitement, for it seemed that here was someone of undoubted importance, now largely consigned to oblivion. An enduring fascination with Dorothy was thus ignited, and a conviction that her remarkable story needed to be unearthed and retold. Many years and a Ph.D. thesis later,
The Lodger
was born.

My novel is a melding of fact and fiction, broadly following the known biographical outline of Dorothy’s life. Where it suited my purposes, I took certain liberties with the facts and the time scheme. For instance, in life, the first volume of
Pilgrimage
was published after the marriage of Veronica and Benjamin. In my novel, the book comes out before they get engaged. In reality, Dorothy’s friendship with Bertie Wells developed into a love affair over a ten-year period, but for the sake of narrative impetus, I fast-forwarded and had him seduce her during the course of one spring.

I also omitted some aspects of their lives, such as their mutual interest in Fabian Socialism, feeling it did not sufficiently enhance the interest of my account. I chose not to write about the Wells’s two young sons. By Bertie’s own admission, his children’s early care was largely entrusted to nurses and governesses (
H. G. Wells in Love
, p. 29); moreover, Dorothy didn’t appear to have had a relationship with either of the boys. There are other departures from fact; time and space do not permit me to list them individually.

My main source for writing
The Lodger
was
Pilgrimage
, and I am greatly indebted to it. Inevitably, there are similarities of character and incident between the two works. On occasion, I followed Dorothy’s narrative quite closely, particularly in the romance between Mrs. Baker and Mr. Cundy, in the early scenes with Veronica, and in the extraordinary way Dorothy engineered the relationship between Veronica and Benjamin. More often, though, my interpretation of events differs from hers. The shape and tone of the love affairs with Bertie and Veronica are my creation, as are Veronica’s prison experiences.