A Man of Parts (48 page)

– It was strangely appropriate that Amber gave birth on the day you finally had to give her up, the last day of the year – the last day of the
decade
indeed – marking the end of a chapter in your life
.

– And it also marked the end of my association with the Fabian.

– Though you’d already resigned, in 1908
.

– I resigned over policy issues. But what you might call sexual politics continued to be a cause of contention between me and the Old Gang, apart from Shaw. My affair with Amber, following on from the one with Rosamund, brought their disapproval to the boil. When it became public they turned their backs on me completely. There was no further possibility of my collaborating with them to convert Britain to socialism.

– Was it ever likely in the long run?

– Probably not, in hindsight. But we might have come to that conclusion in an amicable, reasonable manner, and without wasting so much time and energy on futile intriguing and backbiting.

– In
Experiment in Autobiography
you take some of the blame for that. ‘
No part of my career rankles quite so acutely in my memory with the conviction of bad judgment, gusty impulse and real inexcusable vanity, as that storm in the Fabian teacup
.’

– It
was
partly my fault. But it was because I believed in the sexual liberation of women, and acted on that belief, that we fell out. I didn’t seek scandal, I didn’t boast about my relationships with women to whom I wasn’t married, but if these affairs became public knowledge through no fault of mine, I refused to deny or apologise for them. It was my openness, or brazenness as they saw it, and the fact that Jane supported me, that shocked and frightened people like Pease and the Blands and the Webbs. But of course I couldn’t write openly about that in the
Autobiography
.

– Granted that you were trying honestly to live out your belief in Free Love, wasn’t it rather tactless to do so with the virgin daughters of prominent Fabians?

– I didn’t pursue them: they went after me. And I could never refuse an overture from a woman – it just isn’t in my nature.

– You weren’t getting your own back on your opponents in the Fabian by deflowering their daughters?

– There might have been a bit of that in the affair with Rosamund, I suppose. It started just after Pease and Bland and Sidney Webb began to block my attempts to reform the Society. I can’t say I was irresistibly attracted to her, and there was a kind of satisfaction in undertaking the sexual education of this girl under her hypocrite father’s nose. But Amber was a genuine love affair. I missed her horribly after we had to part.

– These were both very young women, half your age. Looking at the matter from the point of view of those who disapproved, your affairs put them under tremendous emotional pressure, alienated them from their parents for long periods, thrust them into the complexities of adult relationships before they were fully mature, and made them objects of wounding gossip and scandal. Was this fair on them?

– Well, all I can say is that neither of them bore me any resentment. I had a letter from Amber to that effect just before the war which pleased me greatly.

He looks in a filing cabinet where he keeps especially valued private correspondence and soon finds the letter, filed under ‘Blanco White, Amber’ and dated August 25th 1939. She had written to thank him for a copy of
The Fate of Homo Sapiens
, just published.

Dearest HG, We got back last night from Wales to find your book – it will be something to occupy our thoughts, a god-send. At a time like this, when life as we know it seems to be ending for all of us, one’s thoughts go back, and even if there were not the book to thank you for I think I should have written to thank you – What you gave me all those years ago – a hope that seemed perfect to me, the influence of your mind, and Anna Jane – have stood by me ever since. I have never for a moment felt that they were not worth the price
.

– Generous words
.

– Amber is a very generous person.

– You don’t think she might have had a more distinguished career if she hadn’t been led or pushed by you into adultery, motherhood, and marriage before she was twenty-four?

– She’s had a fulfilling life since then.

– But she was one of the brightest students of her generation. She might have had a brilliant academic career without the distractions of her involvement with you
.

– I know that’s what they said at Cambridge, and probably still say, but Cambridge always thinks it is the hub of the intellectual world. It isn’t. Amber has had a very creditable career. She found her métier as a lecturer in philosophy and psychology at Morley College, teaching adults, ordinary men and women – especially women – who were excluded from conventional university courses but hungry for knowledge.

– A worthy achievement, but not really a fulfilment of her promise
.

– I don’t think Amber was ever going to develop into a really original philosopher or sociologist – she’s one of those people who reach their peak as students, who are quick to take hints and tips from others and synthesise them into something that looks bright and new, but she lacked the persistence and self-belief necessary to produce the real thing. She did good work for me in her contributions to
Work, Wealth and Happiness
, but it was essentially a deft digest of secondary sources.

– What about her novels? She published several after you split up
.

– They were perfectly competent, and one of them,
A Lady and Her Husband
, which came out in 1914, was really good – about the cosseted middle-aged wife of a successful businessman who suddenly wakes up to the wage-slavery on which her quality of life is based. But the others were rather formulaic. In the end she lacked the courage to confront and explore her own personal experience in fiction.

– Perhaps she didn’t want to embarrass Blanco White
.

– Perhaps. But if you want to be a true novelist you can’t afford scruples of that kind. I’ve embarrassed a few people in my time.

– Indeed. Including Amber
.

– She forgave me for Ann Veronica. But I don’t suppose Blanco White would have forgiven her for portraying him in a novel. In the end a woman writer has to choose between putting her marriage or her vocation first, especially if there are children – and Amber chose her marriage.

– Considering its inauspicious beginnings, it has lasted remarkably well
.

– It certainly has. Ironic that Blanco White was made a Divorce Commissioner when the Divorce Law was liberalised. He’s Recorder of Croydon now, I believe. Not a glorious legal career, but a solid one. He’s an honest fellow.

– Did
he
forgive you?

– I don’t think so, not really, but he finally agreed to shake hands and put his feet under my table at a rather sticky lunch party at Easton Glebe in the twenties, and after Jane died it became easier to meet him and Amber socially.

– You didn’t meet Rosamund socially
.

– No.

– She had a rather unhappy life after her affair with you
.

– Don’t blame me – blame her parents for pushing her into marriage with Clifford Sharp. He became an alcoholic – lost his job as editor of the
New Statesman
, and was never able to hold down another one. Rosamund remembered that I had warned her against marrying him.

The few letters he possesses from Rosamund are filed under ‘Bland’, conveniently next to ‘Blanco White’. He takes out one dated 29th January. There is no year on it, but it must have been about 1929. She was writing to ask permission to use his portrait on a cigarette card. Sharp was in New York, looking for a job, and she was at home, desperately hard up and staving off creditors, working part-time in an advertising agency. ‘
Strangely enough I remember I gave you a promise on the seashore at Dymchurch twenty-two years ago that I would tell you if ever I was stranded. You told me then that Clifford would be no good to me. How horribly terribly right you were! Of course a promise like that doesn’t mean anything on either side, except that I remembered it & you probably didn’t
.’

– I did, of course.

– You gave her the permission?

– And a cheque, though she hadn’t asked for any money. Neither did Amber, after we parted, not for Anna Jane nor herself – though I wish she had, because I discovered later that she’d been terribly poor early in the first war. They were both very straight, honourable young women, who truly loved me and didn’t want to sully their affection with any mercenary obligation.

There is another letter from Rosamund in the file, sent years earlier, prompted by seeing a portrait drawing of him by William Orpen. ‘
Clifford came home the other night & thrust a page of “The Tatler” under my nose, saying, “There’s H.G. for you”. And it really was. Orpen is awfully clever. He had put down all that is essentially you & nobody did that before. This is the real H.G. who writes unforgettable and darling things, the H.G. one loves & always loved and couldn’t misunderstand. This was once my H.G. & I think in one deep place in me is still my H.G. Now that I have put that it seems rather cheek because it is really the other way round. Last winter I made a discovery. I was ill in bed for five months, fairly sure I wasn’t going to recover and during the better times I re-read your earlier books – all that I read at nineteen or twenty. I found that what I thought of as “Rosamund” was simply something made up of H.G. Wells. It was a shock to find that there was no “I” at all, that thoughts and feelings I had supposed my own were all to be found in you
.’

– It was sweet of her to say so, but I was sorry she had such a weak sense of her own identity. She became a disciple of that charlatan Ouspensky at some point.

– Didn’t she write a novel too?

– Yes. A very strange one.
The Man in the Stone House
. The heroine is a twelve-year-old girl who falls innocently in love with a writer of detective stories. He hates women because one betrayed him in the past, but finds himself reciprocating the girl’s love. In the denouement another little girl is murdered by a child molester, and the writer murders
him
and goes off round the world planning to return when the heroine will have grown up. It begins like one of Edith’s stories for children and then turns into something adult and dark. Rosamund actually called herself “Rosamund E. Nesbit Bland” on the title page.

– Hoping her mother’s name would help sales no doubt
.

– Well it didn’t, I’m afraid.

– And she didn’t write any more novels?

– No. A pity, because
The Man in the Stone House
is well written in parts.

– It’s a rather sad story, her life
.

– The whole family’s history was sad, after Edith’s boom came to an end. They’d squandered all the money on lavish entertaining, so when her sales declined they became hard up and had to sell the Other House. Edith became obsessed with the theory that Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon and frittered away a lot of time on that, and Bland was going blind, so his earnings fell off too. He was totally blind when he died in 1914.

– D’you think it was syphilis?

– It crossed my mind, given the kind of life he led.

– The existence of syphilis is perhaps the most cogent argument against Free Love
.

– It needn’t be if precautions are taken. I always used sheaths when prudence dictated it. But Bland probably didn’t because it was against his absurd religion.

– Did you see Edith after he died?

– She wrote out of the blue a year later, in the middle of the war, and told me that she was selling vegetables at the gates of Well Hall to make ends meet. It was the first contact I’d had with her since my affair with Rosamund. I’ve lost the letter, but I remember she said, ‘
Don’t you think there ought to be a time limit for quarrels?
’ I think she was hoping I would visit her.

– And did you?

– No. I couldn’t forget or forgive her vicious letters to Jane after the Paddington station episode. I replied politely, with belated condolences for Hubert’s death, but didn’t propose a meeting. I heard she married again a few years later.

– A sailor, wasn’t he?

– A sort of sailor. Tommy Tucker. He was a marine engineer in charge of the Woolwich Ferry and known as ‘Skipper’. The children thought he was a bit déclassé, I believe, but he looked after her till she died in 1924. They had to sell Well Hall after the war and lived in a couple of converted air force huts on the Romney Marshes near Dymchurch, which they called the ‘Long Boat’ and the ‘Jolly Boat’.

Berta Ruck told him the story after Edith died – Berta who had been a frequent guest at Well Hall in the glory days, and whom Edith had helped with her early attempts at writing romantic fiction. They quarrelled about something, as one did with Edith, and had no communication for fifteen years, until one day Berta got a letter from Iris Bland to say Edith was seriously ill, and went down to visit her. Skipper said ‘Welcome aboard!’ when he opened the door of the Long Boat, or perhaps it was the Jolly Boat. Berta said it was as if Edith had passed into one of her own stories, living in picturesque genteel poverty, but there was no happy ending up the author’s sleeve. She was dying of lung cancer. She was very pleased to see Berta, and be friends again, and Berta visited her several times before she died, and read to her. The first time, Berta said, it was from
Jane Eyre
, and the second time Edith asked for a chapter from
Kipps
. He was touched by that, and regretted that he hadn’t taken the opportunity to be reconciled with her when she wrote to him about having a time limit for quarrels.