A Man of Parts (27 page)

They met at the Other House one weekend when the Blands were entertaining a number of visitors from London, and he and Jane were invited over to join them for an informal tea party. Rosamund was in good spirits, excited by her new office, and very confident now of her attractiveness to men. He observed her flirting with Cecil Chesterton, G.K.’s less famous and less amiable brother, and attracting disapproving glances from Clifford Sharp, a young journalist who was the chairman of the Nursery Committee, before she noticed his arrival and came bouncing and smiling across the room to greet him. ‘I want to ask you a favour,’ she said. ‘Will you give a talk to the Nursery in the autumn on Sex and Marriage? The committee was unanimous that I should ask you.’ He told her that he had agreed to address a plenary session of the Society on this topic in October and had to save his powder for that, but would be glad to talk to the Nursery on some other subject. ‘Socialism and the Arts, perhaps?’ She looked a little cast down. ‘All my friends will be disappointed. We so admire what you are saying about the oppression of women and relations between the sexes.’ ‘Well, I daresay I could work something in about that,’ he said with a grin. ‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you have some possible dates. And how are you getting on with your novel about the comet?’

‘It’s virtually finished,’ he said. ‘It comes out in September. I’m correcting the proofs, but I want to add an epilogue.’

‘You said at Well Hall last year that there was a love story in it. What kind of love story?’

He hesitated, but his head was full of the book and the temptation to talk about it to a comely young admirer was impossible to resist. ‘If I tell you, will you keep it to yourself?’

‘Of course!’ She flushed with pleasure at the idea of being entrusted with this secret.

He looked round the crowded drawing room. ‘I can’t tell you here – too noisy. And too nosey! Let’s go into the garden.’ They passed through the open French windows into the overgrown garden and sat down on a bench screened from the house by giant hollyhocks.

‘Well, the hero, Willie,’ he began, ‘is a young man from an impoverished background, rather like mine in fact, and is in love with a beautiful girl called Nettie, but she falls in love with a handsome young chap called Verrall. Willie is furiously jealous, and as Verrall is well-off there’s class hatred as well as sexual jealousy in his bitterness. He pursues the young lovers to the seaside—’

‘Are they lovers, then? Not married?’ Rosemary interjected.

‘Yes, lovers. They have gone to live in an isolated community by the sea where such unions are not disapproved of. Willie tracks them down. He has a gun, and intends to murder them.’

‘Oh!’ Rosamund clasped her hands together, and pressed them against her bosom.

‘And the climax of his quest coincides with the outbreak of war between England and Germany. There is a night scene. A huge naval battle is going on out at sea – guns booming and flashing on the horizon. The comet is shining down, bigger than ever, huge, flooding the beach in an eerie light. Willie sees the two lovers taking a midnight swim in the sea, coming out of the surf in their tight bathing costumes, all the beauty of their young bodies revealed.’ He paused, struck by a thought. The description of the bathers derived from his memory of May Nesbit emerging from the sea at Sandgate, and he realised now whom Rosamund had reminded him of, that day when she turned and raised her hand at the end of the pergola at Well Hall.

‘Wonderful,’ Rosamund breathed. ‘I see it vividly.’

He went on with his summary. ‘In a paroxysm of insane jealousy, Willie follows them to their cottage with the gun in his hand. And then, on the way, he is suddenly overcome by a kind of cloud of green vapour and falls to the ground unconscious. That’s the end of Part One. Part Two begins with him coming round out of what feels like a refreshing sleep. In fact he has been unconscious for days. He is a changed man. His heart is full of peace. The simplest thing – a wild flower, a stalk of ripe barley – fills him with joy. As he explores the world he finds that everyone has changed in the same way, under the influence of the green gas left by the comet as it narrowly missed the earth. He discovers the Prime Minister in a ditch – a bit of a stretch for the long arm of coincidence, but in this kind of novel you can get away with it – who now sees the folly of war and vows to put an end to it. He arranges a truce with Germany. He convenes a conference to draw up a constitution for a World State—’

‘But what about Willie and the lovers?’ Rosamund asked.

‘He meets them of course, and all his jealousy has vanished. They immediately become firm friends, all three. But there is a snag: Willie and Verrall like each other – but they
love
Nettie. They have a man to man talk, and they agree that one of them must give up his claim to her, and obviously Willie’s is the weaker. But then Nettie says, “Why must it be one or the other? I love you both, for different reasons. Why does love have to be so exclusive, one woman owned by one man. Why can’t we be a unit of three equals” – or words to that effect.’

Rosamund was clearly excited by this turn in the story. ‘You mean, she offers to belong to them both – in every way?’ she said, wide-eyed.

‘Yes – she hints as much. But the men can’t contemplate the possibility. The old male possessiveness is too deeply ingrained in them. So Willie sadly goes on his way, and dedicates himself to assisting with the great task of remaking human civilisation, razing the filthy old cities and building light, clean new ones.’

‘Oh,’ said Rosamund. ‘What a shame. Poor Willie.’ She unclasped her hands and let them fall to her lap.

‘But he meets a nice woman called Annie, and marries her and has children by her, and they join Nettie and Verrall and live happily ever after as a kind of extended family.’

‘Oh, well, that’s not so bad then,’ Rosamund said, smiling.

He did not tell her, since he had not yet decided how to write it, that in the epilogue he was going to make it clear that Willie and Nettie finally became lovers, but not exclusively so, the two couples amicably cohabiting in a world that had come to accept Free Love as the norm.

‘Perhaps we should rejoin the party,’ he said. ‘People will be wondering what we are up to.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Mr Wells,’ she said flirtatiously.

‘I think it’s high time you stopped calling me Mr Wells, Rosamund,’ he said. ‘My friends call me H.G.’

Another blush of pleasure flooded her cheeks. ‘Thank you, H.G.!’

It crossed his mind that seducing Rosamund would be as easy as plucking a ripe peach from the tree.

But he did not act on this intuition immediately; never, in fact, for you could hardly call what happened a seduction, unless he himself was the object of it. Rosamund sent clear signals in further encounters between them that she was eager to know sexual love, and would like nothing more than to be initiated by a mature, experienced lover whose discretion could be relied upon and whose intellect she revered. He hesitated to respond, conscious of the dangers inherent in his relationship with the Blands. She was a good-looking young woman in a plump, wholesome, nubile way, but he did not feel an irresistible desire for her, and as if perceiving this she set about making herself interesting to him by some astonishing revelations about her parentage.

These were triggered by a casual remark he made about her eyes one evening at Spade House. She had brought young John Bland from Dymchurch to play with Gip and Frank, and they were staying overnight. While the boys were put to bed and dinner was prepared under Jane’s supervision, he poured himself and Rosamund schooners of Madeira and suggested that they take their drinks out on to the terrace. But there was a chilly east wind blowing, so they moved to the garden shelter (as he now called his shed-cum-study) and sat looking out through the open door as the sun declined towards the sea in the west. She raised her glass to the light and commented on the beautiful colour of the wine: ‘It’s the colour of your eyes, Rosamund,’ he said. ‘And your mother’s.’

‘You mean Edith?’ she said. ‘Edith is not my mother.’

He gaped at her. ‘Edith is not your mother?’ he repeated. ‘Then who is?’

She looked at him over her glass, as if both pleased and scared by the effect of her words. ‘If I tell you, you must keep it as a secretest secret.’

‘All right.’

‘Alice,’ she said.

‘
Miss Hoatson
?’ He was astounded. But … you don’t look like her. You look much more like Edith.’

‘I know,’ said Rosamund. ‘It was very convenient when I was adopted – the same colour eyes and everything.’

‘And who is your father?’ he asked.

‘Daddy, of course,’ she said.

‘Hubert! Good Lord … How long have you known?’

‘He told me when I was eighteen. And afterwards Alice filled in a lot of the details.’

Then, having sworn him again to secrecy, she unfolded a story so extraordinary that for a while he wondered if she was making it up, but he was soon convinced of its truth.

‘Alice was a friend of Edith’s in the early eighties,’ Rosamund began. ‘She worked for a pittance on a women’s magazine Edith used to write for. Edith became pregnant soon after Fabian was born – too soon – and Alice moved in with her and Daddy to take some of the domestic strain off Edith as her time approached. Sadly the baby was born dead. Edith was terribly upset – Alice told me Daddy had to practically tear the poor little corpse from her arms to see to the burial – and Alice stayed on in the house, not Well Hall of course, a much smaller one in Lewisham, or perhaps it was Lee, they were always moving house in those days … anyway Alice was a huge support to Edith in this crisis. But she soon had a crisis of her own to cope with: she was with child herself – me. She didn’t tell Edith who the father was – just that it was someone she couldn’t possibly marry – so Edith suggested she should move in with them permanently as a kind of housekeeper, have the baby under their roof, and she and Hubert would adopt it and bring it up as their own child. So that’s what they did. It seemed like the perfect solution. Daddy was very glad to go along with it.’

‘As well he might be,’ he could not resist interpolating, as Rosamund took a sip of her Madeira. ‘It got him out of a very sticky situation, I’d say. When did Edith discover the truth?’

‘I think when I was about six months. Apparently there was a terrible row, but she had become too attached to little me by then to reject me – at least that’s her story. Daddy told me she threatened to have me adopted by somebody else, and he said that if I went he would go too. But Alice thinks Edith suspected all along he was the father. She knew Daddy’s naughty ways with women and she made no attempt to discourage his attentions to Alice – rather the contrary, because Alice had an admirer whom Edith didn’t like, so she encouraged Daddy to see him off. She’s not very consistent, you know, Edith.’

‘Neither is your father, Rosamund, I’m bound to say,’ he remarked. ‘I’ve heard him singing the praises of monogamy more than once.’

‘No, you’re right …’ she said. ‘They’re both full of contradictions. I suppose that’s why they still love each other, in spite of everything. Because they do, you know, in their odd way. But whenever there was tension between them, I think the fact that I was Alice’s daughter, not Edith’s, would open up like an old wound, and add to the bitterness. My childhood memories are full of rows between them, with Edith suddenly bursting into tears, usually at the dinner table, and flouncing out of the room and going to her bedroom, and Daddy groaning, ‘Oh
God
!
’ and going upstairs to pacify her.’

‘But you never guessed the truth when you were a child?’

‘No. Not even when Fabian died – I was thirteen – and I overheard Edith having hysterics and screaming, “Why did it have to be Fabian? Why couldn’t it have been Rosamund?”’

‘She said that? How terrible for you,’ he said, genuinely shocked.

‘It
was
terrible. But I never suspected the reason until Daddy told me.’

‘And then?’

‘Then, in a way, it was a relief to understand what I had always felt intuitively, that I was Daddy’s favourite child, but Edith’s least favourite. It was inevitable – how could she feel for me as she felt for her own children? If I outshone Paul and Iris in any way, she would naturally resent it. Oddly enough she was never the same about John, I suppose because he came so long after.’

‘John?’ he said, bewildered.

‘Yes, John is Alice’s child too,’ Rosamund said calmly.

‘By Hubert?’ Rosamund nodded. ‘Good God,’ he murmured.

‘We’re quite an unusual family, you see,’ Rosamund said.

A phrase he had heard frequently on his travels in America, ‘
You can say that again
’, came to mind, but he did not utter it. Instead he put his free hand on hers and squeezed it. ‘You poor girl,’ he murmured.

They sat in silence for a while, looking out at a spectacular scene: dark purplish clouds edged with gold barred the setting sun, whose broken rays were reflected in the foam-flecked sea. Then the sound of a dinner gong which someone, probably Jane, was holding at an open window, carried to their ears on the east wind.

‘We’d better go in,’ he said.

As they stood up he saw that her eyes were wet. ‘My poor girl,’ he said again, and opened his arms to give her a comforting hug. She fell into them instantly, and he felt the soft, warm pressure of her breasts through his thin summer jacket as she clung to him. The only way he could think of to bring the embrace to a conclusion was to kiss her on the cheek, but she turned her head and pressed her lips warmly to his.

‘Dear H.G.,’ she said. ‘It’s such a relief to talk about these things to someone you can trust.’

He didn’t consider that his vow of secrecy applied to Jane, and as soon as Rosamund had returned to Dymchurch he told her everything that he had learned from his conversation in the garden shelter, omitting only the embrace which concluded it. Slightly to his surprise, Jane was disposed to be sympathetic to Edith’s part in the saga. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘it was generous of her to agree to bring up Alice’s child as her own … and the second one too. You could see that ménage as being based on a kind of Free Love – like your characters at the end of
In the Days of the Comet
.’ She had just read the epilogue he had written to this novel.