A Man of Parts (11 page)

He shouldn’t have been surprised when he failed two papers that summer and therefore left the College without a degree, but he was – surprised and shocked. It was a humiliating, morale-shattering setback, which indefinitely postponed the possibility of marrying Isabel, and he directed some of his chagrin at her when he broke the news. They were in Regent’s Park, sitting on a bench in the dusk of a summer evening. He slumped with both hands in his trouser pockets, not holding one of hers as usual, gazing glumly across the lake.

‘What will you do now, Bertie?’ she asked anxiously.

‘I’ll have to get a teaching post in a private school somewhere,’ he said.

‘In London?’

‘Anywhere that’s not fussy about qualifications. In fact it might be better if it was a long way away,’ he said.

‘Why?’ She looked at him anxiously.

‘Since there’s no realistic prospect of our getting married, I’d rather not be tormented by the daily sight of you,’ he said, not seriously expecting that she would throw herself into his arms and offer to assuage his frustration, but out of a cruel wish to make her share something of his own bitterness. In this he was successful. She wept quietly, but said nothing. The park keeper’s doleful bell, signalling that the gates to the Inner Circle would soon be locked, tolled the end of their idyll.

After he had made numerous applications to pedagogic agencies one of them found him a post as usher at an establishment called Holt Academy, near Wrexham in Wales. Its brochure was promising, but the reality was deeply depressing: the classrooms were shabby, the food disgusting, the accommodation dirty, the headmaster incompetent, and the pupils mainly local farmers’ sons with no interest in learning anything. A miasma of deep provincial dullness hung over the village and the featureless surrounding countryside. A few days after his arrival he wrote to a college friend, Arthur Simmons, thinly disguising his dismay under facetious misspelling: ‘
I am hier in this gloomy neighbourhood & I wish I was dead. The boys are phoolish & undisciplined to an astonishing degree and the chemistry cupboard is not worthy of the name
.’ A month later he escaped from the place, but only through a mishap which threatened to fulfil his rhetorical death wish. A lout of a pupil maliciously fouled him when he joined in a football game, inflicting an injury which caused him to pass blood later. After a few days’ recuperation he returned to the classroom but soon collapsed, coughing up more blood. The injury appeared to be a crushed kidney, but the local doctor suspected he might also be consumptive. His mother arranged for him to convalesce at Up Park, where he had another haemorrhage almost as soon as he arrived, seeming to confirm the diagnosis.

His convalescence was not entirely idle. He took the opportunity once more to stock his mind from Up Park’s extensive library, and when he moved on from there and took refuge with another friend from college days who lived in the Staffordshire Potteries, an area improbably reputed to be healthy for consumptives, he made some tentative efforts at literary composition, including the first draft of a tale about travelling in time. But he was steeped in self-pity at the prospect of dying with all his aspirations unfulfilled, and without ever having had carnal knowledge of a woman. He discovered later that because consumption is an almost painless illness it encourages a dangerous passivity in its victims, and realised that he had been half in love with easeful death when in fact he was beginning to recover his physical strength.

The turning point occurred one brilliantly sunny day in the late spring of 1888, when he went for a walk in a small wood on the outskirts of Stoke where the fuming chimneys of the potbanks were invisible and wild hyacinths were blooming in profusion. He passed a pretty girl on the footpath, and raised his hat, meeting her eyes with frank admiration. She smiled shyly and walked on, while he stopped and looked back at her, appreciating the swing of her hips under her skirt. He lay down on a grassy bank among the hyacinths and inhaled their heady perfume. He imagined himself making love to the pretty girl, naked under the trees, like Adam and Eve in their nuptial bower, and then he substituted Isabel for her in his mind’s eye. He said to himself: ‘I have been dying for nearly two-thirds of a year, and I have died enough.’ He returned immediately to London and began to look for a job.

Suddenly he was filled with renewed energy, ambition and confidence. Over the next couple of years he obtained a teaching post at a private school in Kilburn, and then a much better paid position as tutor with a correspondence college that served external students of the University of London, where he made himself invaluable as a designer of teaching materials and editor of the house journal, and taught a course in biology for London-based students. Before long he was earning £300 per year. He became an external student himself, and obtained his B.Sc., taking first-class honours in Zoology, thus wiping out the humiliation of his expulsion from the Normal School of Science. He began to project for himself a career in education, but he had not given up his literary ambitions, and succeeded in placing an essay of scientific speculation called ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, developed from a paper he had given to the College Debating Society, with the prestigious and progressive
Fortnightly Review
. He sent the letter of acceptance to Simmons with a jubilant note scribbled on the back: ‘
Is this the dove with a sprig of bay? Is it poor Pilgrim’s first glimpse of the white and shining city? Or a mirage?
’ It was not a mirage, but all this effort took its toll on his health and he had two more serious episodes of illness, one with another haemorrhage. On each occasion he went back to work, after short periods of convalescence, with undiminished zeal, driven by the need to save enough money to marry Isabel and at last consummate his love for her.

In spite of that unhappy conversation on the bench in Regent’s Park they had not formally parted when he left London, because they had never been formally betrothed. He wrote to her occasionally during his time at Holt and Stoke, in the tone of a friend not a lover, letters to which Isabel responded in the same style, but when he returned to London he picked up the threads of their old relationship as if nothing had interrupted it. Isabel, for her part, had acquired no other beau in the meantime. Before long he was lodging with his Aunt Mary once more. As he prospered the family accepted that it was only a matter of time before he and Isabel married, and living in close proximity to her he became more and more impatient for this conclusion.

He imagined their wedding night with excited longing, but also some anxiety about his own inexperience. One evening, after working late at the College, instead of going home as usual, he acted on an impulse to walk down to the West End and find a prostitute. The woman he selected proved to be not as young and comely as she had seemed when she accosted him coaxingly in a shadowy street behind the Haymarket. She led him up a dirty staircase of creaking bare boards to a narrow, sparsely furnished room, and lit the gas jet. He saw that she was a mature woman with a tired, heavily painted face and when she flashed him a professional smile she revealed a disconcerting gap in her front teeth. She stripped off her clothes without coquetry and squatted over a basin of water to wash herself with a rag cloth as if her private parts were no more interesting or sensitive than a soiled plate. Nevertheless the brazenness of the action excited him, and he stared, hypnotised, at what he had only known by touch under Edith’s skirt. ‘Ain’tcher goin’ to take yer togs off, then?’ she said. And, as he hesitated, added knowingly: ‘This yer first time, is it ducky?’

‘Yes,’ he murmured, and turned his back to remove his jacket, shoes, trousers and drawers. He kept his shirt on: this was not to be the ideal, idyllic naked embrace he had dreamed of for so long, but merely a mechanical practice for that event. His erect penis stood out rudely between the tails of his shirt in spite of his efforts to conceal it. ‘My, you’ve got a big one for a little chap,’ the woman said, as she lay back on the bed and spread her knees. It was the first intimation he had that he was unusually well endowed in this respect, for he had had no opportunities to compare himself with other males since boyhood. Encouraged by the remark, he lay on top of the woman and began to butt at her crotch with his rigid member, but with little effect until she took it in her practised hand and guided him in. The act ended instantly, with an unstoppable, intensely pleasurable ejaculation, but it was accomplished. He was a man. Isabel seemed to sense it when he next looked at her. She flushed and lowered her eyes, as if she had perceived in his the gleam of a new knowingness in his desire for her, and shrank timorously from it.

He resorted to prostitutes again on a few occasions, simply for physical relief, using the rubber contraceptive sheaths which were readily available from seedy barber’s shops, backstreet pharmacists and purveyors of dubious reading matter – partly as a precaution against infection, and partly to get used to handling them, for he had no intention of starting a family as soon as he married. ‘Suppose we have children, Bertie?’ Isabel said once, trying to persuade him to wait longer, and save more money. ‘We won’t,’ he said. ‘But how can you be sure?’ ‘There are things one can use,’ he said. ‘Things?’ she echoed fearfully, as if she imagined that hard pointed instruments were somehow involved. ‘Rubber sheaths,’ he said, ‘which the man puts on.’ ‘Oh, Bertie,’ she whispered, blushing and covering her face with her hands. ‘Don’t.’ What did she mean by that monosyllable:
Don’t use them
or
Don’t embarrass me by mentioning them
? It did not occur to him until much later that she probably meant:
Don’t imagine I’m looking forward to this sex business as eagerly as you are
.

They were married on the last day of October 1893, in church. To salve his secular conscience he made a token effort to persuade Isabel to have a civil wedding in a register office, knowing full well that she and her mother would never agree. Isabel had made her conditions for marriage clear – enough money in the bank to afford a decent home of their own, and a ‘proper’ wedding. He had fulfilled the first one, taking a lease on an eight-roomed house in Wandsworth, an undistinguished but respectable suburb in south-west London, and he was not going to postpone their union any longer by making an issue of the second. There was a wedding breakfast – actually more of a meat tea – for family and friends in a restaurant round the corner from the church, but no honeymoon. The wedding night was spent in their new home.

It wasn’t the rapturous naked embrace he had dreamed of for so long. Isabel was shy of exposing herself to his hungry gaze. She used the bathroom first – their house boasted a proper bathroom with an efficient hot water system – and while he took his turn she disrobed and got into the double bed, pulling the covers up to her chin. When he prepared to get into bed beside her she asked him to turn out the light first, and when he stripped off his nightshirt and took her in his arms he found her swathed in a lawn cotton nightdress which she refused to take off. ‘I don’t want to, Bertie. Don’t make me,’ she begged. He was obliged to push the folds of linen up round her hips in order to enter her at last, and she gave a gasp of pain as he thrust through the hymen and spent, almost as quickly as with his first prostitute. Early the next morning, with a faint light coming through the curtains, he threw the covers off the bed, drew the nightdress up and over her weakly protesting head, and took her again with passionate urgency, trying in vain to arouse in her some reciprocating response. She winced and whimpered faintly under him as he plunged in and out, but that was all she did, and when he collapsed and rolled off her she pulled the sheet up to cover herself and turned away, weeping. ‘I’m sorry, dearest,’ he said, appalled, and putting his arm round to comfort her. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’ ‘I know, dear,’ she murmured, wiping her eyes on a corner of the sheet. ‘I know you have to do it.’ After a few minutes she sat up on the edge of the bed with her back to him and put her nightdress on again.

And that, sadly, set the pattern of their intimate life. He made allowances for her innocence and inexperience, trusting that in time she would begin to get some pleasure from intercourse and return his caresses, but she remained a passive partner in the act of love, regarding it as a kind of licensed assault inscrutably ordained by the Creator for the propagation of the human race, which women must therefore endure. He wondered gloomily if all women who were not prostitutes took the same view, but this hypothesis was pleasantly disproved one afternoon by Miss Ethel Kingsmill, a young woman who was an assistant and pupil of Isabel’s in the art of photographic retouching. Since her marriage, Isabel had worked at home for her old employer in Regent Street, collecting and delivering work once or twice a week, and her mother, Aunt Mary, had moved in with them to help with the housekeeping. As he himself often worked at home, all eight rooms were needed. Ethel was frequently in and out of the house, and always gave him a nice smile and a warm greeting when he encountered her in the hallway or on the stairs. She was quite attractive in a vivacious, wide-mouthed way, with a neat figure which she dressed in a showier style than Isabel: striped blouses with puffed sleeves and skirts that fitted closely over the hips. When she brushed past him on the staircase on her way to the photography workroom on the top floor there was a hint of coquetry in her movements and a saucy gleam in her eye. The conviction grew in him that little Ethel Kingsmill was no innocent virgin, and that she was interested in himself.

One afternoon he was marking biology exercises in his study when there was a knock on the door and on his invitation to ‘Come in!’ Ethel Kingsmill opened it and took a step into the room. ‘I’m going to make myself a cup of tea, Mr Wells,’ she said. ‘Would you like one?’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘Aunt Mary usually brings me one about this time.’

‘She’s gone shopping,’ said Ethel. ‘Up the West End.’