A Man of Parts (50 page)

Elizabeth found one quite soon. That summer she brought her children to England for an original kind of touring holiday through the south-eastern counties in hired horse-drawn gypsy caravans, with the intention of making a book out of it. The holiday was cursed by the wettest summer in living memory, and while the party was taking shelter from the bad weather at Leeds Castle they motored over to Spade House for lunch, after which the von Arnim children played floor games with Gip and Frank while the adults chatted, Jane and Elizabeth getting on very well together. The weather which had inconvenienced the von Arnims became a source of incidental comedy in the novel based on the holiday, called
The Caravaners
, which was received with acclaim when it was published a year or so later and created an imitative cult of such holidays among literary folk.

He heard no more from or about the little Countess until 1910, when he learned indirectly that her husband had died, and that she had moved to England with her children to pursue her literary career. She demonstrated her versatility that same year by writing a play of feminist sentiment called
Priscilla Runs Away
which had a triumphant first night and a long run at the Haymarket Theatre. He knew from his own limited experience of the theatre, and vicariously through Arnold’s more numerous ventures in that medium, that this was a remarkable achievement, and he couldn’t help admiring the Countess’s consistent ability to tickle the public taste without pandering to it. Elizabeth meanwhile was reading
The New Machiavelli
with unrestrained admiration as it was published in instalments in the
English Review. ‘You must forgive me for bothering you with my extreme joy over your wonderful
Machiavelli
,’ she wrote in November, when the serialisation came to its end. ‘
Never did a man understand things as you do – the others are all guess and theorise
–
you
know – & the poetry of it, and the aching, desolating truth – what one longs to read, written by you, is the story of the afterwards – what happened as the dreadful ordinary years passed
.’ She concluded by expressing a hope of seeing him again. He wrote a note to thank her for her generous praise of his book, and added a PS that if she happened to be free one day in the coming week he would be glad to give her lunch and take her for a walk on the Heath, since Jane would be away visiting an old friend in Devon and he would be in need of company. She replied by return of post that she would call the following Tuesday unless she heard from him to the contrary, and was as good as her word.

He took her to lunch at an inn in the Village and afterwards, the weather being fair, for a long walk on the Heath. He learned a good deal about her that afternoon, for she spoke with remarkable candour about her life. She had been born in Australia as Mary Beauchamp, the daughter of a prosperous shipping merchant, a first-generation immigrant who brought his family back to England when she was only three. She and her siblings had a good education in England and for a time in Switzerland, but as a young woman her ambitions and expectations had been very conventional, untouched by feminism and focused on making a good marriage. To this end her father took her on a tour of the Continent where they met and were impressed by Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, whose maternal grandfather was a nephew of Frederick the Great, and who, having recently lost his wife, was looking for a new one.

‘It was a terrible mistake, and all my own fault,’ she said, as they stood on Parliament Hill, looking down on the London plain, veiled by coal smoke like a vast fireplace smouldering under a layer of slack. ‘Well it was partly Daddy’s for not seeing through Henning’s aristocratic façade, but I was in a silly panic about being left on the shelf because my sister and my adopted cousin were already married and it seemed a rather glamorous match at the time. To be fair to Henning, he had his doubts and dragged his feet – I actually more or less seduced him so he would have to marry me. We didn’t realise that he was practically broke, and I certainly didn’t know what was expected of a German
Hausfrau
or the dreariness of her life. Well, you know something about that from
Elizabeth and her German Garden
. But it was actually much worse – Henning made me cut a lot out of the book before he would let me publish it.’

‘How did you seduce him – if I may be so bold?’ he asked.

‘Henning was in England for a while, dithering about whether to marry me, and I let him know I would be staying one weekend at a hotel in Goring-on-Thames with just a nominal chaperone, and he rose to the bait. I lost my virginity to the sound of the river lapping below my window. It was the only romantic element in the experience.’

‘But you went ahead and married him.’

‘I had to. I suppose I thought the physical side of marriage would be bound to improve – but it didn’t. It was a few minutes’ pleasure for him and nine months of pregnancy for me. He kept making me pregnant because he desperately wanted a son. I took up residence in Nassenheide – that’s the estate in the book – to get some respite from perpetual child-bearing, because he didn’t really like the place, and preferred to stay in our Berlin apartment. Then he took a mistress.’

‘And you found consolation in your garden.’

‘More in writing about it. The garden in the book is mostly fantasy, really – people who read about it were very disappointed when they saw the real thing. I had resigned myself to living without knowing real love, and like many another woman before me, I sought fulfilment in literary creation.’

‘But now you are free to find real love,’ he said, smiling, and turning upon her the blue-grey eyes whose gaze he had been told was so hypnotic.

She met it with cool composure, and an enigmatic smile. ‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ she said. ‘If I can find the right man.’

He escorted her to the Hampstead Tube station, and held on to her hand for some time when he took it in his to say goodbye. ‘We must meet again,’ he said.

‘I would like to,’ she said. ‘I’m living with my sister in Haslemere at present, but I’m looking for a flat in London.’

‘Haslemere!’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s a farm near there with a guesthouse where I sometimes go to work. I was thinking of going there again.’ This thought had in fact occurred a fraction of a second before he uttered it.

‘Well, if you do … be sure to let me know.’

‘I will.’ He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. ‘
Au revoir
, then.’

‘
Au revoir
.’ She smiled, and walked away towards the turnstiles, her neat rounded rear swaying under her tailored coat.

The next morning he scribbled a letter to Jane: ‘
Work and the gravity of life much alleviated yesterday by the sudden eruption of the bright little Countess von Arnim at 1 with a cheerful proposal to lunch with me & go for a walk. She talks very well, she knows
The New Machiavelli
by heart, & I think she’s a nice little friend to have
.’ He thought it prudent to add: ‘
Her conversation is free but her morals are strict (sad experience has taught her that if she so much as
thinks
of anything she has a baby
).’ After he had posted it he reflected that the afterthought had probably not been at all prudent, and that Jane would immediately guess what was in his mind.

They had not been long in residence at 17 Church Row before he realised that its purchase had been a mistake. The house was too small for their purposes, and he found it a noisy, restless environment for work. The servants went up and down on the stairs all day, and if anyone came into the drawing room, he heard them in his study through the folding partition. There were other disadvantages. The garden was a high-walled yard too small for badminton, and nothing that Jane planted there flourished. The proximity of the picturesque old church and churchyard had seemed an enhancement of the property when they bought it, but on weekdays there were frequently funeral carriages, elaborately decked out with the black trappings of mourning, waiting outside their frontage while services and interments took place, casting an air of melancholy over the street. His main complaint, however, was the lack of a quiet, secluded place to work. He had accordingly taken a small flat in Candover Street, in the nondescript area east of Great Portland Street, with a perfunctory ‘kitchenette’, as the agent called it, which he rarely used, a tiny bathroom, and a living room just big enough to contain a desk, an easy chair and a divan bed. The bed was officially for him to take a nap when he needed, or sleep in if he missed the last Tube train to Hampstead after an evening engagement, but it also served for dalliance with various ladies who solaced him for the loss of Amber. These were old flames to whom he sent signals of distress, or new acquaintances he picked up at parties or cafes and restaurants frequented by literary and artistic folk, and they slept with him out of sympathy, or for old times’ sake, or because they admired his books, or simply in return for a nice lunch. He did not think his treaty with Jane required him to report these casual couplings to her, but she must suspect that his hours at Candover Street were not dedicated exclusively to work, and it disturbed him somewhat that he was not being open with her. In Elizabeth he thought he saw the possibility of a liaison which he would not be embarrassed to own to Jane and she would be happy to accept. He was in little doubt, from their conversation on Hampstead Heath, that Elizabeth herself was looking for a lover, and had fixed her sights on him as a suitable candidate: a mature man whose intellect she admired and whose amorous appetite was legendary, but who would not wish to make her pregnant.

Accordingly he booked himself into the guest suite at Crotchet Farm near Haslemere for two weeks, to work ‘without distraction’, as he told Jane, on a new novel. It was another story of a man and a woman each struggling to find personal fulfilment against all the obstacles that a hidebound and materialistic society set in their way, but this time they would not find it necessary to commit adultery in the process because they would get married quite early in the narrative, and find redemption eventually within their marriage.

The novel was indeed to be entitled
Marriage
, and it was designed in part to persuade the British reading public that he was not hell-bent on destroying that revered institution, and to dissipate the aura of scandal that had attached itself to his name in recent years. In the first part of the story, already written, the heroine Marjorie married the hero, a scientist called Trafford, for love in preference to more eligible suitors, but she would fail to identify with his disinterested pursuit of knowledge. To keep her happy, and satisfy her conventional desires, he would give up research and make a fortune from the manufacture of synthetic rubber, but would eventually feel his life had become meaningless and resolve to go and live like Thoreau in the wastes of Labrador to save his soul, Marjorie to his surprise insisting on accompanying him. There they would have an adventurous near-death experience from which they would emerge strengthened and reunited in spirit, and return to England to collaborate on some kind of progressive intellectual enterprise. He had no personal knowledge of Labrador but then neither would 99.9 per cent of his readers, and he was confident he could mug up enough from books to convince them.

He combined work on this uplifting story in his mornings with the conduct of an affair with Elizabeth von Arnim in the afternoons. He called on her at her sister’s home, which was only a mile or so distant from the farm, he took her out for walks and excursions in the Surrey hills, and as the early winter darkness fell he smuggled her into his bedroom at the farm guesthouse, and demonstrated to her very satisfactorily how much sensual pleasure she had been denied as the spouse of the late Count. ‘I never felt such sensations before,’ she sighed after a gratifying orgasm. ‘And I never realised a man could go on for so long.’ She was frank and very amusing about her late husband’s deficiencies as a lover. ‘He never removed his nightshirt, and he didn’t require me to be naked either – he yanked up my nightdress like a shopkeeper raising the shutters on his premises, pushed my legs apart and got down to business immediately.’

‘Which didn’t last very long.’

‘No, but that was rather a relief, because he didn’t smell quite right.’

‘And do I smell right?’

‘You smell delicious,’ she said. ‘You smell of honey. I’d like to lick you.’

‘Please do,’ he said. ‘Anywhere that takes your fancy.’ And she did.

Although they had spoken on Hampstead Heath of her being free to find ‘real love’ the words were understood by both of them as code for ‘good sex’, so it was not necessary to pretend to be possessed by romantic passion to justify their enjoyment of each other’s bodies, or to make declarations of undying devotion when his fortnight’s residence came to an end. They parted cheerfully, agreeing to meet again when the opportunity arose, but without making any specific plans.

In fact there was a considerable hiatus in this promising relationship. Christmas and its festivities intervened, and then in the New Year he took the whole family, including Fräulein Meyer, to Wergen in the Bernese Oberland for a winter sports holiday. It was the boys’ first experience of skiing and they loved it, until, alas, there was an outbreak of influenza in the hotel which laid them all low, and they spent most of their second week in bed, and more weeks at home recuperating. Meanwhile the Countess had returned to Germany to tie up matters concerning her husband’s estate. So he got on with
Marriage
in Candover Street, diverted from his labours by occasional female visitors; among them, most unexpectedly, Amber.

It was entirely her initiative. She wrote asking if they could meet privately somewhere, and although he thought she was taking a fearful risk, he could not deny her. The risk to himself was negligible: if he broke the agreement he had signed there was no sanction Blanco White could invoke except the original threat to sue him for libel over
Ann Veronica
, and it was now too late for that. But she would be putting her marriage in jeopardy by seeing him, and he wondered if it was already in trouble. This surmise proved to be quite wrong.