A Man of Parts (10 page)

He must have had well over a hundred women in his lifetime, some on only one occasion, and he has forgotten the names of the majority of them. He was never able to decide whether he had a more powerful sex drive than other men, or was just more successful than most in satisfying it. Perhaps both hypotheses were true. So where did it come from, this sexual appetite? There was no obvious genetic or environmental source. Reading his mother’s diary after her death he found no hint of erotic awakening in the account of her early married life, only pleasure in young motherhood, heavily overlaid with pious Christian sentiment. His father was a virile-looking man, and more pleasure-seeking than his wife, but his passion was sport, especially cricket, and for social recreation Joe Wells sought the male companionship of the public house. When he was old enough to observe and reflect on such things, in adolescence, his parents’ marriage seemed to him completely sexless; they slept in separate bedrooms, and if this was, as he later suspected, a method of birth control, his father seemed to acquiesce in it. His brothers had been, as far as he knew, sexually unadventurous. Sexual matters were never discussed in the home, which was a matriarchal society in microcosm, four men ruled over by a determined little woman who imposed a rigid code of puritanical decorum in word and deed. The smutty jokes and anecdotes that circulated at school had disgusted rather than excited him. So what could explain his inveterate and inexhaustible desire for women, which began before he even knew the facts of life, and persisted into old age?

The first to affect him in this way were virtual, ideal and classical. These were allegorical figures representing the nations of the world in Tenniel’s political cartoons in the bound volumes of
Punch
which his father borrowed for him, along with many other books, from the library of the Bromley Literary Institute, when he was laid up for weeks in the front parlour of Atlas House at the age of seven or eight, recovering from a broken leg. A friendly young man, showing off his strength at the local cricket ground, had tossed little Bertie in the air for fun, but failed to catch him, and he fell on to a tent peg which broke his tibia. It was a curious coincidence that both father and son suffered a broken leg within a few years of each other, and with momentous consequences – catastrophic for the former, liberating for the latter. For that licensed orgy of promiscuous reading, in a home where this activity was normally regarded as a form of idleness – devouring works of history, natural history, popular science, adventure fiction, and bound volumes of
Punch
, as fast as his father could feed them to him – had laid the foundations of his future career as a writer. From the cartoons of
Punch
he acquired a precocious interest in domestic and international politics, but the personification of the nations – Britannia, Erin, Columbia, La France – as beautiful half-naked Grecian deities, with exposed breasts and thighs, also stirred feelings in him that he could not put a name to. All the women he knew were impenetrably covered in fabric from their chins to their feet. It was Tenniel’s drawings that first gave him an inkling of what might be found under those layers of cloth, and he furthered his knowledge in early adolescence by inspection of the plaster reproductions of classical statuary in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, goddesses even more scantily covered than Tenniel’s figures, with folds of drapery carved in the act of sliding from their magnificent hips, and all the more affecting for being three-dimensional. He took these images of women home with him stored in his memory and comforted himself in bed at night by conjuring them up in the form of flesh, willing the drapery to fall from their hips, a scenario which, if he turned on to his stomach and pressed his penis against the mattress, would provoke a delicious gush of spunk (as the rougher boys at school called it) without his incurring the guilt attached to actual masturbation. Not that he knew then the words ‘penis’ or ‘masturbation’, but when his mother, stripping his bed on washday, asked him sternly if he had been ‘touching himself’, he could honestly answer in the negative.

These encounters with virtual women implanted in him a devotion to the idealised female form and a longing to embrace the naked body of a beautiful woman, naked himself. The longing was intensified when he came across an old leather-bound edition of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
in the library at Up Park illustrated with engravings, one of which showed Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall, with Eve’s long tresses only half concealing her breasts, and a flower dangling from her hand barely covering her private parts, while Adam’s crotch was screened by the bough of a judiciously planted sapling. His arm was extended to lead Eve to their ‘Nuptial Bowre’ and although Milton was exasperatingly unspecific about what happened there and wrapped it up in stately poetic diction, it sounded thrilling:

Transported touch; here passion first I felt
,

Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else

Superior and unmov’d, here only weake

Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance
.

But it was many years before he was able to fulfil his dream of the naked embrace, years during which his sexual experience advanced very slowly and in a furtively titillating, frustratingly unconsummated fashion, always conducted through or under layers of clothing. There was for instance Edith, the youngest daughter of Alfred Williams, a distantly related ‘uncle’ who ran a school in Wookey, Somerset, with whom he stayed for a while at the age of fourteen in the period between his two apprenticeships, helping out as an unpaid classroom assistant. Several years older than himself and obsessively interested in sex, of which she had no practical experience but about which she possessed a good deal of information, Edith took it on herself to quiz him on his knowledge of the facts of life, and to correct his misapprehensions with a degree of detail that seemed to excite her as much as it embarrassed him. One hot day when they were sitting on a riverbank in the shade of a willow tree, she lay back on the grass, closed her eyes, and gave him permission to feel between her legs under her skirt to learn how women were made, and that was when he first discovered that they had pubic hair. The sensation was something of a shock and caused him to withdraw his hand with an abruptness he later regretted, but when he attempted to repeat the experiment at the next opportunity she slapped his face.

He had similar confusing experiences at the lodging house in Westbourne Park where he lived in his first year as a student at the Normal School of Science, sent there, ironically, by his mother because the landlady was known to her as the daughter of a piously Evangelical friend in Midhurst. This woman had in fact lapsed from the high moral standards of her parents and presided over a louche household in which the Sabbath was dedicated to the rites of Hymen rather than Jesus Christ. After Sunday lunch, a roast joint accompanied by beer and stout ale, the children were packed off to Sunday School with the servant girl, and the landlady and her husband and a married couple who were lodgers would retire to their bedrooms for a ‘lie-down’, though not before exchanging a good deal of badinage and innuendo about what this phrase denoted, leaving him in the company of a young woman called Aggie who was related in some way to the landlady. ‘Be good!’ the married couples would cry to the two young people as they departed, with leering smiles which were clearly an incitement to be the reverse. Even Aggie seemed to expect this, though she imposed strict limits on his exploration of her person when he fondled her on the sofa and attempted to undo various buttons and hooks on her apparel. ‘Oi! Stoppit! Not that! Not there!’ she would say, slapping and tugging at his hands. ‘What sorter gal jer fink I am?’ But she never showed any real indignation, or made any attempt to leave the room; she seemed content to spend the afternoon fending off his advances as if it were a recognised parlour sport, a kind of sedentary wrestling. Why he persevered he didn’t know, for she was not pretty and hadn’t an idea in her head, but there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go on a Sunday afternoon in winter if you were as penniless as he was.

The landlady herself seemed disposed to be more accommodating. One day she came into his bedroom to change a pillowcase and was surprised, or pretended to be surprised, to find him there. She was wearing a loose house-dress unbuttoned at the neck which gave him a view of her uncorseted breasts swinging freely as she stooped over the bed, and when she saw him staring she held the pillow coquettishly up to her chest. Some badinage followed and a playful struggle for the pillow in the course of which he managed to get his hand inside the dress. She reproached him for his impudence but did not immediately remove the hand. ‘Anyone would think you was a grown man, the way you carry on,’ she said. ‘I
am
a grown man,’ he said boldly. He did not add, ‘and in need of a woman’, but he had some hopes that she might supply that need in due course. Luckily for him, before that could happen, and possibly embroil him in a very ugly situation, he was whisked away from the house by a niece of his father who worked at a department store in Kensington and had been asked to check up on his welfare. She quickly gauged the moral tone of the establishment, and arranged for him to move to his Aunt Mary’s lodging house in the Euston Road. And there he met his cousin Isabel, on whom all his romantic and erotic longings would be focused over the next six or seven years.

He was having tea with his Aunt Mary and her sister Aunt Bella in the parlour of the lodging house on the Euston Road, a visit preparatory to moving there, when the door opened and a young woman of his own age came quietly in and stopped, hesitating, as she noticed him.

‘This is your cousin Bertie, Isabel,’ his Aunt Mary said to her.

He stood up and shook her hand, which felt cool and soft in his, and she smiled timidly and murmured a greeting. She seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful and wonderfully clean and fresh in appearance in spite of having been at work all day in Regent Street where she had a job retouching photographs. She had delicately modelled features and deep-set brown eyes surmounted by a head of densely curled dark brown hair. She wore a simple Pre-Raphaelite-style dress of dark blue wool which showed she had a slim waist and hinted at a shapely bosom. The thought that he was going to live in the same house as this vision filled him with joy.

The house itself offered only one small improvement on the one in Westbourne Park: it had a bathroom of sorts, with a temperamental gas-fired geyser that spat and dribbled hot water into a tub, which lodgers could use once a week at a fixed hour. But both houses were of the same type, replicated thousands of times all over the inner suburbs of London: meanly proportioned imitations of the upper-class town house, originally built for middle-class families with servants and ill adapted to multiple occupancy. His attic bedroom at Aunt Mary’s house had no fireplace and no other means of heating. Freezing draughts blew under the ill-fitting door and across the bare boards of the floor in winter, so that he sometimes studied with his stockinged feet resting in the open bottom drawer of the chest of drawers, wrapped in his underwear. But for the time being Isabel’s presence in the house made all its imperfections and privations bearable.

That they were cousins made it natural for them to be frequently in each other’s company without for some time arousing the suspicions of their elders that this was more than ordinary friendliness. They left the house in the morning together and he accompanied Isabel as far as the photographer’s premises in Regent Street before proceeding to South Kensington. On Sundays Isabel would put on her best outdoor clothes while he donned the top hat and tail coat he had acquired at a discount from the Southsea Drapery Emporium, and they would walk in Regent’s Park, or visit an art gallery or a church. Yes, a church! Isabel was not devoutly religious but she regarded occasional churchgoing as an index of conventional respectability, and he loved her enough to sit through the doleful hymns and boring sermons, preferably in a crowded pew so that he could squeeze up close and feel her thigh against his.

Isabel was impressed by his talk, different from anything she had heard before in her life, full of wild radical ideas imbibed from attending William Morris’s socialist soirées in Hammersmith, and astonishing scientific facts acquired from his courses at college: the evils of industrial capitalism, the vastness of the universe, the fossil evidence for evolution … She could not contribute more to these outpourings than an occasional expression of wonder and timid doubt (she refused to believe, for instance, that some of the stars she saw in the sky no longer existed, and that it was only the light they had emitted before their extinction, travelling across millions of miles of space towards the earth, that she observed) but she accepted his learned disquisitions as a kind of tribute to herself and a token of his devotion. For his part it was enough that she was his sweetheart, on whom all his vague dreams and ambitions for the future could be projected. He was well aware of being no great catch as a swain. He was pitifully thin from a poor and insufficient diet – there was a photograph of himself standing next to the skeleton of a great ape in Professor Huxley’s laboratory in which it was hard to tell whether he had any more flesh on his bones under his shabby clothes than the grotesque relic beside him. Acutely conscious of his physical shortcomings, he was grateful that he could walk out with such a beautiful girl on his scrawny arm. They kissed and cuddled when the opportunity arose, but if he became a little too ardent for her comfort she found ways, infinitely more delicate and tactful than Aggie’s, to disengage herself from his embraces. He was resigned to a long, chaste courtship: given Isabel’s character and their family relationship no alternative was imaginable.

He had passed his first-year examinations with distinction, but the amount of time he spent with Isabel during his second year at college caused him to neglect his studies, which had become inherently less interesting as he passed from Professor Huxley’s scintillating classes to those of a dull and dry professor of physics. In the evenings he skimped studying in his cold bedroom so he could hasten down to the back parlour where Isabel would be sitting by the fire, ready to chat, and when the weather turned warmer they would go out for evening walks in the Park. The consequence was that he failed one of his second-year exams, and did poorly in others. He was in some fear of losing his grant and his place on the course, but was allowed to continue into the third year. In spite of this warning he did not apply himself diligently to preparing for his final examinations. He was more interested in reading books about socialism, making provocative speeches to the College Debating Society, starting up a student magazine, writing stories, essays and poems, and other extracurricular activities, including his courtship of Isabel.