A Man of Parts (2 page)

As long as he was physically able to do so H.G. put on a tin hat and took his turn at fire-watching from the roof of Hanover Terrace, partly from a sense of patriotic duty and partly from a personal solicitude for the Aubusson carpet in his drawing room. It also gave him a gloomy satisfaction to observe from, as it were, a grandstand seat, the fulfilment of his prophecy as far back as 1908, in his novel
The War in the Air
, that future wars would be dominated by air power and involve the destruction of cities and civilian populations by indiscriminate bombing. Admittedly he had been mistaken in assuming that this strategy would be carried out mainly by enormous airships, big as ocean liners, rather than aeroplanes, but given the state of aeronautical engineering in 1908 that was not such a wild guess, and certainly didn’t seem so a few years later when German Zeppelins appeared in the night sky over England. Penguin Books considered
The War in the Air
still sufficiently relevant to the current war to reissue it in 1941, with a brief new Preface by himself that concluded with an epitaph he wished to have inscribed on his tombstone: ‘I told you so. You
damned
fools.’

Fire-watching is beyond him now, but there is little need for it. In the spring of 1944, the sirens seldom sound. The unexpected resumption of German night raids at the beginning of the year turned out to be just a token retaliation for the carpet-bombing of German cities by the British and American air forces and soon petered out. Now there is only the occasional hit-and-run daylight raid by some fast low-flying fighter-bomber that slips under the radar shield, and these rarely get as far as central London. Nazi Germany has more important things on its military mind: grimly resisting the advance of the Russian armies in the east, and preparing to repulse the invasion of occupied France which everybody knows is imminent. London is safe again, and one by one the leaseholders of Hanover Terrace are creeping back to reclaim their property, viewed with some contempt by H.G. who has been here for the duration, keeping to his routine, writing his books, answering letters, going for a daily constitutional – across the road and into the park, to the Zoo or the Rose Garden, or down Baker Street to the Savile Club in Brook Street, pausing for a browse in Smith’s bookshop on the way.

Lately he has had to give up these excursions – even the Rose Garden is too far. He is not well. He has no strength. He has no appetite. He rises late and sits in an armchair in the small sitting room, or in the sun lounge, a glassed-in balcony at the back of the house, with a rug over his knees, reading and dozing intermittently, woken with a start by the sound of his book sliding to the floor, or by his daughter-in-law Marjorie, who has acted as his secretary ever since his wife died, coming in with some letters that need answering or just to check that he is comfortable. In the evenings he is visited by his elder son Gip, Marjorie’s husband, or by Anthony, his natural son by Rebecca West, born on the first day of the First World War. He is conscious of these three people going in and out, scrutinising him with worried frowns. For some time he has had a nurse in the house at nights; now his physician Lord Horder has recommended that they employ a day nurse as well. He wonders if he is dying.

One evening in April, Anthony West rings up his mother. She receives the call at her home, Ibstone House, the surviving wing of a Regency period mansion, with its own farm attached, in the country near High Wycombe, where she lives with her husband Henry Andrews, a banker and economist now working at the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,’ Anthony says. ‘Horder says H.G. has cancer of the liver.’

‘Oh God!’ says Rebecca. ‘How awful. Does he know?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You’re not going to tell him, I hope?’

‘Well, I’ve been talking it over with Gip. We think we should.’

‘But why?’

‘H.G. has always believed in facing facts. He’s not afraid of death. He’s said so on many occasions.’

‘It’s one thing to say it …’

‘I don’t think we should discuss this over the phone, Rac,’ Anthony says, using the nickname she acquired when she married Henry and they began calling themselves Ric and Rac after two French cartoon dogs. ‘I wish I could have come over and told you in person.’

‘Because you’re feeling dreadful?’

‘Because I thought
you
would feel dreadful.’

‘Well, of course I do,’ says Rebecca, bridling slightly. Their conversations tend to be barbed with little implied or inferred accusations and rebuttals, which often turn into bigger ones.

‘I can’t get over to Ibstone at the moment,’ Anthony says. ‘We’re short-staffed in Far East and I’m very busy.’ He is currently working as a sub-editor in the Far Eastern Department of the BBC’s Overseas Service.

Anthony summarises Horder’s prognosis: H.G. might experience some remission, but he probably has only a year to live, at the most. They argue again about whether he should be told, until Rebecca irritably terminates the call. She goes to her study and records it in her diary, concluding: ‘
My chief anxiety is that Anthony should not be hit too hard by this news. I have made my peace with H.G. I have not forgotten the cruel things he did to me, but our affection is real and living
.’ Her diary is written with one eye on her future biographers, who will quote from it.

Anthony rings up Jean, a pretty young brunette with superb breasts who works as a secretary at Bush House, with whom he is having a passionate affair, and tells her the news about his father. She is sympathetic, but unable to enter fully into his emotions because she has never met H.G., and she cannot be introduced to him or to the rest of the family because Anthony is married to Kitty, who is running their farm and looking after their two children while he works at the BBC, and Kitty is at present unaware of Jean’s existence. Meanwhile Anthony when he is working in London lives in the mews flat at the end of the rear garden of number 13 Hanover Terrace, known in the family as ‘Mr Mumford’s’ after some former tenant long gone and probably dead.

‘Have you told your wife about us yet?’ Jean asks Anthony, lowering her voice so her flatmate Phyllis won’t hear. Their affair is consummated mainly in this flat, situated conveniently near Bush House, in daytime hours snatched when they are free and Phyllis is at work.

‘Not yet.’

‘When will you?’

‘I have to wait for the right moment.’

‘There’ll never be a right moment. You just have to do it.’

‘I can’t while we’re all absorbing this news about H.G.’

‘Well …’

‘I love you, Jean.’

‘Love you too. But I hate this hole and corner thing.’

‘I know, but be patient, darling,’ he says.

Some days later Rebecca receives a phone call from Marjorie, asking her to come and see H.G. ‘Would he welcome that?’ Rebecca asks. The wounds of their parting in 1923 or ’24 (it was never clear to either of them exactly when it became final) after a stormy and passionate relationship that had stretched over a decade, have healed, and they have been on friendly terms in recent years, but knowing that he has a life-threatening illness makes a visit potentially stressful. ‘He said he would like to see you,’ says Marjorie. ‘Then I’ll come,’ says Rebecca. ‘Does he know about his … ?’ ‘Yes,’ says Marjorie.

Rebecca takes with her a basket containing eggs and butter and cheese from the Ibstone House farm, precious largesse which the housekeeper receives gratefully. ‘Mr Wells can’t stomach the dried eggs any more whatever I do with them,’ she says. ‘A nice fresh egg soft-boiled might tempt him.’ H.G. has had a bad night and is not quite ready to see Rebecca when she arrives, so she is shown into the long drawing room on the first floor to wait. She has never liked the house: it is grand but cold and rather gloomy, with dark polished parquet floors and beige walls, furnished with impersonal good taste, like an expensive hotel. There is an Aubusson carpet in the drawing room and a Tang terracotta horse on the mantelpiece but they express the owner’s wealth, not his personality. H.G. never did have much visual taste, she reflects. He was obsessed with functionality in domestic architecture, but indifferent to décor, a fanatic for plumbing, but a poor judge of pictures. The house lacks a woman’s touch – Moura Budberg, his mistress when he bought the lease in 1935, wisely refused either to marry or to cohabit with him, and she has had no successor. Even his study, which Rebecca peeps into on her way to visit the lavatory, with its mahogany desk bearing a green-shaded reading lamp on a heavy ziggurat base, a matching inkstand and a leather-bound blotting pad, might be the office of the chairman of a bank – except that on the polished surface of the desk there are two foolscap manila folders, creased and dog-eared from use, one to each side of the blotter, which look as if they contain manuscripts rather than accounts.

In the ground floor cloakroom she examines her fifty-year-old face in the mirror for new wrinkles, and combs her greying hair. She refreshes her lipstick, powders her nose, and shapes her eyebrows with a licked finger, feeling a little foolish at this display of vanity – but one wants to look one’s best when meeting an old lover, even if he is sick and dying. She is amused to observe a notebook and pencil lying on top of a cabinet next to the W.C. – it was always H.G.’s habit to have notebooks scattered around whatever house he was occupying, in case some thought occurred to him which he could scribble down before he forgot it. She peeps inside the notebook, but the pages are blank.

The small sitting room to which she is summoned when H.G. is ready is cosier than the drawing room, but she finds him in low spirits, worried and depressed. He is slouched in an armchair beside a fire of smouldering slack, his neatly slippered, size five feet peeping from under the rug covering his legs. Anthony and Gip have told him that he has cancer, but not the prognosis. ‘I want to know how long I have left,’ he says plaintively, ‘but they won’t tell me. Even Horder won’t tell me.’

‘That’s because they don’t know. You could live for years, Jaguar.’ Long ago, when they were lovers, they called each other ‘Panther’ and ‘Jaguar’ in bed and correspondence, and she thinks the name will please him, but to her dismay it upsets him even more. A tear trickles from one eye down his cheek and loses itself in the roots of the moustache, now grey and rather straggling, with which in his prime he would tickle intimate parts of her anatomy.

‘I don’t want to die, Panther,’ he says.

‘Nobody wants to.’

‘I know – but we must. Of course one must. I’m ashamed of myself.’ He sits up in his chair, smiles, reaches over and squeezes her hand. ‘Thank you for coming to see me.’

‘I brought you some eggs from the farm.’

‘That was kind,’ he says. ‘And how are you? Are you writing?’

‘Only journalism. I can’t concentrate on anything more substantial with the war going on and on …’

‘You managed to finish
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
in spite of the Blitz.’

‘I had to. But it totally exhausted me. And what about you, Jaguar?’

‘Oh, I shuffle pages about. I have a couple of things on the go, but I’m not sure I shall finish either of them. Nobody’s interested in me now, anyway.’

‘Nonsense,’ says Rebecca, dutifully.

H.G. asks after Henry. ‘He’s working very hard at the Ministry on plans for post-war reconstruction,’ says Rebecca. ‘I must say it’s very reassuring to see him with his gaze fixed so confidently on the future, while the rest of us are biting our nails about the present. And how is Moura?’

‘She’s in the country, staying with Tania.’

‘Has she been to see you, since … ?’

‘Since Horder pronounced the death sentence?’

‘Don’t, Jaguar!’

‘I told Gip Moura wasn’t to be put in the picture yet. She’s not been feeling too well herself lately, and went down to Tania’s to rest and recuperate. I don’t want to upset her unnecessarily.’

‘I see.’ Rebecca ponders this information, uncertain whether to feel flattered or used that she has been summoned to comfort the stricken H.G. in preference to his mistress – if that is what Moura still is. The exact nature of their relationship has always been an enigma – to H.G. as much as anyone, he claims.

‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘I was afraid that if she was told I’m dying she’d come over all Russian on me, like some Gorky character, get maudlin drunk on brandy, and make me even more depressed than I am already.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Rebecca says with a smile. Moura, Baroness Budberg, does seem like a character who has stepped from the pages of a Russian novel, trailing melodramatic, barely credible stories of love and adventure: that she walked across the ice between Russia and Estonia at the time of the Revolution to get to her first husband and their children; that he was murdered on his estate and she later married the Baron to obtain an Estonian passport, paying his gambling debts in return and divorcing him shortly afterwards; that she was the lover of the British secret agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, and was suspected with him of involvement in the 1918 plot to assassinate Lenin, but found protection as secretarial assistant to Maxim Gorky. Rebecca knows this last detail is true because H.G. stayed with Gorky on a visit to Russia in 1920, and his confession to her on his return that he had slept with Moura, who lived in the Petrograd apartment, provoked one of their most divisive rows. Years after their relationship had come to an end, and his wife Jane was dead, H.G. met Moura again, decided she was the love of his life, helped her to settle in England, and tried in vain to persuade her to marry him. Anthony, who likes Moura and approves of her relationship with H.G., nevertheless believes she is a Soviet spy, as do several other people. Rebecca is uncertain whether to believe this or not: although Moura might have been a Mata Hari once, it is difficult to see the matronly, slightly dowdy fifty-year-old woman of today in that role. But being herself an outspoken critic of Soviet Russia, she keeps a wary distance from Moura.

These thoughts and memories slide across Rebecca’s mind as she chats to H.G. on light, neutral topics, until she notices his eyes are almost closed. ‘I don’t want to tire you,’ she says. ‘I’ll be on my way.’ She stands, stoops and kisses his cheek. It is no longer as smooth and plump as it once was, but his skin still smells faintly and pleasantly of walnuts, as it did when they first became lovers. Somerset Maugham asked her once, with a smile that was half a sneer, what had been the secret of H.G.’s sexual attraction, a man twice her age, not especially good-looking, only five foot five in height, and tending to corpulence, and she answered: ‘
He smelled of walnuts, and he frisked like a nice animal
.’