A Man of Parts (15 page)

– But it wasn’t the rapturous shared experience you had hoped for, was it?

– I didn’t really expect it would be. I said to her ‘The first time it may hurt, but after that you will feel pleasure. More and more pleasure as time goes on.’

– But she didn’t
.

– No. She tried, for my sake – that night and the nights that followed. She tried harder than Isabel. She took off her nightdress to please me. She let me have a lit candle on the chest of drawers when we made love. But it was like teaching someone to swim when they’re terrified of the water – she lay beneath me with every muscle in her body tensed, her arms round my neck, holding on for dear life, like someone afraid of drowning. As time went on she became a little more pliant, a little more responsive, but not much. When we went abroad for the first time, in ’98, to Italy, I picked up a copy of Aretino’s
Postures
in a bookshop in Florence, but she wouldn’t look at them, let alone try them.

– Did she ever have orgasms?

– I don’t think so, no. Sometimes, later on in our marriage, after we made love she claimed she had enjoyed it, but I was never convinced. Basically, she lacked lust. Whereas for me sex is the joyful relief of lust. It’s an animal thing. I like to be like an animal in bed with a woman, to bite and lick and wrestle before I take her. Jane hated that, she couldn’t join in the animal game. She was too fragile, too delicate, too fastidious.

– But you knew what kind of a girl she was before you eloped with her. ‘Catherine’ wasn’t the sensual type
.

– I suppose I thought I would awaken her sexually. And when I failed at first, I presumed it was just the effect of her upbringing, which was repressed, prudish, fanatically ‘respectable’, in an English middle-class Low Church suburban way. She’d rebelled against that intellectually with all her New Woman stuff, but not with her body. And then it wasn’t the most auspicious setting for a sexual initiation, that pair of rooms in Mornington Place, with no bathroom in the house, and a landlady who acted like a procuress … We got out of there pretty smartly. Jane found us lodgings in Mornington Street, just round the corner, with a nicer landlady, but the rooms were almost identical and there was still no bathroom. We had a tin tub just big enough to stand up in. I used to tease Jane by peeping at her though a crack in the folding doors while she was having a strip-wash, and offering to come in and scrub her back. We were like a couple of kids, really, playing at ‘mothers and fathers’. We were full of our own audacity in defying the world. Living together without being married made even the most decorous lovemaking seem daring. We were acting out a sort of Shelleyan rebellion against a hypocritical, repressive social order – we gloried in our freedom from property, duties, responsibilities. Not that we were idle, far from it. Our landlady provided us with our meals on a tray, so we were free to read and write all day if we wanted to. Jane helped me research my journalistic articles, wrote them out in a fair hand, and posted them to my cousin to be typed.

– She didn’t go on with her studies. She didn’t get her degree
.

– She couldn’t. It would have caused a scandal at the College. She took typing lessons instead, so she could type up my manuscripts and save us money. And she wrote a few little things herself which got published after I polished them a bit. We were a team. We got a thrill out of waiting for the post, wondering whether there would be an acceptance in one of the envelopes – or a cheque! We desperately needed money, and journalism seemed the best way to make it, until
The Time Machine
was published and my boom began. We moved out of lodgings to our first proper home, in Woking, and then to Worcester Park – quite a substantial house that was, with a name, ‘Heatherlea’, not just a number, and a half-acre of ‘grounds’ rather than a garden. We sniffed victory then – I mean victory over the people who had disapproved of our elopement and tried to keep us apart. Jane’s mother, who had sold her own house, helped with the expenses and moved with us into Worcester Park for a time. She was finally reconciled to our union when Isabel and I got divorced and I married Jane as soon as the decree came through. We both agreed there was no point in continuing to live in sin for the sake of a principle – fighting prejudice on that particular issue just consumed too much time and energy.

– It didn’t worry you that for the second time you were getting married to a woman who couldn’t satisfy you sexually?

– I think I hadn’t yet come to that conclusion about Jane. Or perhaps I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Everything else in our partnership was going so swimmingly, I didn’t want to bring that problem into the open, and neither did Jane. We conspired together to ignore it for some years. We developed a childish private language, and a sort of mythology, to avoid confronting the true nature of our marital relations. It involved pet names and amusing burlesques on our domestic life, in doggerel verse or in my little comic ‘pichuas’. She was ‘Bits’ or ‘Miss Bits’, an imperious and practical-minded female, and I was ‘Bins’ or ‘Mr Bins’, a weaker character who was usually in the wrong and rather afraid of her. It started when we were living together and continued into our marriage. I still remember some of the ‘pomes’:

Our God is an Amoosing God. It is His Mercy that This Bins who formerly was Ill is now quite well and Fat And isn’t going bald no more nor toofaking and such For all of which this Bins who writes congratulates him much
.

That one ended:

I sits and sings to Lordy God with all my little wits. (But all the same I don’t love ’Im not near what I love Bits
.)

We had a lot of fun with this kind of thing. We were substituting fun for the lust that was missing from our marriage.

– So you looked for lust elsewhere. When did that start?

– I think it was when we were living at Woking, through my old friend from Bromley days, Sidney Bowkett. I hadn’t been in touch with him since we left school, but one day I read a report in the newspaper about a playwright of that name who was the defendant in a case of plagiarism. I knew it must be him because it’s an unusual name and as a boy he was always dreaming of going on the stage. He’d been touring a play in the provinces allegedly based on George du Maurier’s
Trilby
, which of course was already a tremendous hit as a play in London, with Beerbohm Tree. I can’t remember what happened in the case – I think he lost – but I wrote to him and he turned up one day at our house in Woking, surprised to find that his old school chum was the rising young novelist H.G. Wells. He had married a very attractive blue-eyed Jewess, an actress called Nell de Boer, and they were living in a cottage at Thames Ditton, not far from us, so I began to see quite a lot of him. We went for cycle rides through the Surrey lanes, talking about life and art and women, especially women. Bowkett was a great one for the ladies, or so he would have me believe, and regaled me with very vivid accounts of his conquests. Frank Harris was another acquaintance in those days who liked to boast in the same way. It was very coarse talk, but inflaming. I began to hanker after something a bit gamier in that line than I was getting at home, and before long I obtained it – with Nell Bowkett, in fact, when I called at their cottage one day and found Sidney was in Town on theatrical business. Or maybe it wasn’t business – Nell had no illusions about his faithfulness and was disposed to get her own back, and I was very ready to oblige, on more than one occasion. I put the two of them into
Kipps
, years later, as the Chitterlows, suitably cleaned up to make a couple of Dickensian comic characters, though by that time they were separated. Nell Bowkett was the first of my adventures in adultery – I mean as regards Jane. I hadn’t been faithful to Isabel either, of course. There was Ethel Kingsmill, and some other casual encounters after her. I was faithful to Jane until Bowkett turned up in Woking and started putting ideas into my head.

– But that wasn’t for very long, was it? Less than two years after you eloped with her?

– True. But it wasn’t until some time later that I took every opportunity to ‘get’ women.

It was some time before he overcame the diffidence ingrained in him by his humble background, his small stature, his chronic ailments, and the squeaky voice from which he could never entirely eradicate a trace of the ‘common’, and realised that his increasing success and fame as a writer made him attractive to women. It was not until he and Jane had settled in Sandgate, and started to build Spade House, that he began to appreciate this fact, and by that time his increasing prosperity had made good his physical deficiencies to a considerable extent. He would never be tall or handsome, but there was now a spring in the step of his small, well-shod feet, there was a smooth sheen to his skin, and strong muscle beneath it, firmed by regular exercise. Even his moustache had grown less straggling, more glossy and dense. He was told by several women that the gaze of his slightly hooded blue-grey eyes was peculiarly penetrating and had an almost hypnotic power over the subject on which it was turned. And it gave him confidence in the game of seduction that when their clothes were off he could rely on his
membrum virile
(‘the Honourable Member for Sandgate’ as he sometimes personified it in amorous badinage) to rise impressively to the occasion. But it was the glamour of his literary reputation above all, and the possibility of intimate access to the man behind the books, that attracted susceptible women to him like the action of a magnet on iron filings. In most cases he found he only had to ask in order to receive, and sometimes they asked first. For example, that Australian woman – he couldn’t remember her name, only her golden curls, above and below, and the way her body was marked out like a map in sharply defined areas of pale and suntanned skin – who was visiting London and wrote to him care of his publishers to say how much she had enjoyed reading
Kipps
. She also invited him to call at her lodgings and spend some hours with her which she hoped would be mutually enjoyable – after reading
Kipps
of all novels, with one of the most sexually innocent heroes in contemporary fiction! And it
was
a very enjoyable afternoon.

Once they were settled in Sandgate he often spent two or three days midweek in London, staying overnight in a small flat he leased in Clement’s Inn, meeting publishers and editors, lunching or dining with friends, going to literary parties. In this way he encountered ladies who were very willing to have sex with him, and as long as they were mature and experienced, with the same frankly hedonistic attitude to the activity as himself, there were no unpleasant repercussions. Women like Ella D’Arcy, for instance, the green-eyed, red-haired author of wryly elegant short stories frequently published in
The Yellow Book
, or the novelist Violet Hunt, not quite as beautiful as she had been when Ellen Terry reportedly described her as ‘out of Botticelli by Burne-Jones’ but still alluring, whom he consoled after the unhappy end of a long-term love affair. Such discreet, sophisticated ladies caused him no embarrassment or notoriety. It was the young ones, the young virgins who wanted to be initiated into the mystery of sex by the celebrated writer and radical thinker, it was they who got him into hot water and blew his public career off course: Rosamund, Amber, Rebecca … And there was Dorothy, too, Dorothy Richardson, though she hesitated longer than the others before asking him to relieve her of her virginity, and was more discreet about the consequences.

– We will come to the young virgins in due course. There are still some questions to answer about the wives. You say in your autobiography that Isabel thought ‘
lovemaking was nothing more than an outrage inflicted upon reluctant womankind
’, but in another place in that book, discussing Jane’s inability to respond to your sexual needs, you say, ‘
there arose no such sexual fixation between us, as still lingered in my mind toward my cousin
’. Isn’t there some contradiction there?

– Not really. I was frustrated by Isabel’s frigidity, I resented it, and I took my revenge in trivial infidelities, but it didn’t make her innately less desirable to me. I admitted in the autobiography that even while I was arranging to elope with Catherine I might very well have changed my mind if Isabel had made an effort to bind me to her.

How strong the tie still was he didn’t really discover until three years later. He and Isabel corresponded from time to time about practical matters concerning their divorce, but did not meet until 1898. Early in that year she wrote to tell him she had bought a small poultry farm in the country near Virginia Water, and was planning to run it with the help of her Aunt Bella. She had been reading
The War of the Worlds
with amazement: ‘
Where in the world of all that’s wonderful do you get your ideas from? And you make them so realistic too. It’s marvellous
.’ Some months later she wrote again to say that she was in a little difficulty over meeting some bills and asked for his help. The sum involved was not very large, and he could easily have just sent her a cheque, but he felt an irresistible curiosity to see her again, so one fine day in June he put his chequebook in his pocket and cycled over from Worcester Park to the farm. He was now a keen cyclist and thought nothing of a ride of some two hours’ duration.