A Man of Parts (52 page)

Mr Wells’ mannerisms are more infuriating than ever in
Marriage.
One knows at once that Marjorie is speaking in a crisis of wedded chastity when she says at regular intervals, ‘Oh, my dear! … Oh, my dear!’ or at moments of ecstasy
, ‘
Oh, my
dear!
Oh, my
dear!’
For Mr Wells’ heroines who are loving under legal difficulties say ‘My man!’ or ‘Master!’ Of course he is the old maid among novelists; even the sex-obsession that lay clotted on
Ann Veronica
and
The New Machiavelli
like cold white sauce was merely old maid’s mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids
.

Reading this he felt rather as he had imagined Mrs Humphry Ward must have felt, for he was not accustomed to being likened to a celibate spinster. It was a very long review, and a very thorough demolition of his novel. ‘
His first sin lies in pretending that Marjorie, that fair, fleshy being who at forty would look rather like a cow – and the resemblance would have a spiritual significance – is the normal woman; and the second lies in his remedy: “Suppose the community kept all its women, suppose all property in homes and furnishings and children was vested in them … Then every woman would be a princess to the man she loved.” The cheek of it! The mind reels at the thought of the community being taxed to allow Marjorie to perpetuate her cow-like kind
.’ The real answer, Rebecca West asserted, was to let women earn their own living.

He might have been more annoyed to receive such a dismissive review by a little-known critic in a journal that he regarded as being on the same side as himself if he hadn’t had such a unanimously good press for
Marriage
everywhere else. As it was, he could afford to be magnanimous and admit to Jane, who had read the review first, and passed it to him with the advice, ‘You’d better take a few deep breaths before you read this, H.G.’, that the woman had put her finger on some vulnerable points in his novel, and certainly knew how to write. This Rebecca West seemed to have an interesting mind and a great deal of self-confidence – wouldn’t it be amusing to ask her down to Easton Glebe for lunch one day, and see if she had the gumption to walk into the lion’s den and defend herself ?

‘It seems to me that it is you who will have to do the defending,’ Jane said drily. ‘But invite her if you like.’

Accordingly he wrote to Rebecca West, care of the
Freewoman
, to say that he had read her review with interest and invited her to lunch to discuss further the issues it raised, adding information about the most convenient trains from Liverpool Street, and how to request a stop at the Easton private station. She accepted by return of post for the earliest of the dates he had offered, the 27th of September. She arrived at one o’clock and they talked with hardly a pause until six-thirty, by which time it was too late for her to return to London, so they carried on talking and she stayed the night.

– And that was how it began …

– That was how it began.

– Again! Another young virgin, half your age, bright, impressionable, rebellious, eager for experience – just like Amber. You invite her into your life and of course she falls in love with you, the great writer, as you might have known …

– I didn’t know. I thought from her review that she regarded me as an old fogey.

– But that needled you, didn’t it? The ‘cold white sauce’ and the jeers at your heroine’s conversion to the Endowment of Motherhood, rankled and you wanted to teach this impertinent young bitch—

– I didn’t know she was young.

– You could guess that a contributor to the
Freewoman
nobody had ever heard of before was young. And you thought to yourself that you would invite her into your elegant country house, sit her down in your study surrounded by all the editions of your books and other insignia of your fame, and turn on her the full power of your personality, that combination of sparkling intelligence and seductive charm that you knew from experience was usually irresistible to women. The fact that she turned out to be extremely attractive herself made it very easy
.

– I had no intention of making her fall in love with me, and I resisted her advances for a long time.

– But eventually you succumbed
.

– Eventually I fell in love with her myself.

And made her pregnant, and plunged yourself back into all the complications and embarrassments and time-consuming responsibilities you had experienced with Amber
.

– Only this time they lasted longer. A lot longer.

– Would you never learn?

– Where women were concerned, it would seem not.

ONE OF THE
many intriguing things he discovered about Rebecca West on the first occasion they met was that it was not her real name. She had been born Cicily Fairfield, the youngest of three daughters of a Scottish mother and an Anglo-Irish father who mysteriously disappeared when she was thirteen and was never heard of until he died in poverty five years later. To her great credit Mrs Fairfield, with very limited means at her disposal, ensured that her three girls received an excellent education. Cicily’s two older sisters had both gone to university and one was already launched on a promising professional career in medicine, but she herself had opted to train as an actress – a mistake, she declared, because she discovered that she would never excel in that vocation and dropped out before completing the course. It seemed to him, however, that the training had given her the confidence to express her vivacious personality without inhibition. It had certainly not prevented her from reading a great deal, and she seemed to possess, like himself, the precious gift of remembering everything she read. Astonishingly, considering the wide range of literary and intellectual reference she displayed in conversation, she was not yet twenty years of age. She was, he thought, an exceptional young woman.

Given the way they had been treated by Mr Fairfield, it was not surprising that his wife and daughters were sympathetic to feminism, but Rebecca was evidently by far the most radical and committed member of the family in this respect. She told him she had been an active suffragette for a time, parading and demonstrating and getting roughly handled by policemen, and also joined the Young Fabians, after he had parted from the Society. But she had been dissatisfied with the narrow perspectives of both these groups, and found the circle who gathered around the
Freewoman
more sympathetic to her heterodox feminism. This journal was however regarded at home as having a dangerously immoral tendency and Mrs Fairfield actually forbade her to read it, so when she became a contributor she thought it prudent to use a pseudonym, choosing the name of the radical heroine of Ibsen’s tragedy
Rosmersholm
, one of the last parts she had played at the Academy of Dramatic Art, and in due course she adopted it as her own name for all purposes.

‘I never liked my real name anyway,’ she said as she stirred cream and sugar into her second cup of coffee. She had eaten lunch with himself, Jane and Fräulein Meyer, deftly contributing to the conversation over watercress soup and poached salmon, and afterwards he had suggested the two of them should adjourn to his study and have their coffee brought there.

‘No, I don’t see you as a Cicily,’ he said, ‘or a Fairfield for that matter.’ Rebecca was fairly small in stature, but solidly built, and had a head of rich dark brown hair with eyes to match, set off by very white skin. Her features were full of character, from the broad forehead to the determined chin, and she had a way of keeping her lips just parted while listening to him as if to inhale more deeply the oxygen of ideas. ‘“Cicily Fairfield” is a name I might have invented for a blonde, blue-eyed, English rose in a novel,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, ‘it would have done quite well for your Marjorie if she hadn’t had red hair. By the way, I want to apologise for the abrasive tone of my review. I read it through again on the train this morning, knowing that I would soon be meeting you, and it suddenly seemed unforgivably rude. I blushed so deeply that I believe the gentleman in the seat opposite thought I must be reading something very improper.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he said, waving his hand in a vague gesture of absolution. ‘It’s stimulating to have one’s ideas challenged so forcefully.’

They argued for a while about whether women could ever get the same satisfaction out of work as men. ‘It’s not that I believe them to be inferior – not at all,’ he said. ‘But a man can forget everything else to focus on his work, using sex merely for relaxation and refreshment. Whereas for a woman sex is of paramount importance because it’s bound up with reproduction. It’s a biological imperative: to find a mate and reproduce – she can’t get away from it. That’s why I believe in the Endowment of Motherhood.’

‘You sound like one of Shaw’s characters, Mr Wells,’ she said.

‘Well, Shaw does have some good ideas mixed up with the silly ones,’ he said. ‘Have you met him?’

‘Once – at a Fabian Summer School,’ she said. ‘He moved among us like a flirtatious Moses.’

‘Very good!’ he chuckled. ‘But look here, you say at the end of your review …’ He picked up the magazine from his desk and read out a passage which he had marked: ‘“
Supposing she had to work?
” – Marjorie, that is –
“How long could she stand it? The weaker sort of Marjorie would be sucked down to prostitution and death, the stronger sort of Marjorie would develop qualities of decency and courage and ferocity. It is worth trying
.”’ That’s a brutal piece of social Darwinism – you condemn half your sisterhood to disgrace and death by throwing them all into the job market and letting the fittest survive. As a man I’d be run out of town if I dared make such a suggestion.’

‘It needn’t be as brutal as that,’ she said. ‘If women were allowed to compete in the workplace on equal terms with men, and men did their share of housework and childrearing at home, all the Marjories might be fulfilled.’

He laughed. ‘And I thought
I
was a Utopian!’ he said. ‘But what sort of work do you have your sights set on, yourself ? Writing, I presume – but what kind? Criticism? Fiction?’

‘All kinds,’ she said. ‘And some that haven’t been discovered yet.’ He laughed again. He liked her self-confidence and her ambition.

They discussed modern literature, beginning with Henry James, on whom she had very decided views, adoring some of his works, especially the stories about writers, but condemning others, including the much-admired
Portrait of a Lady
, on the grounds that the heroine’s motive for marrying the odious Gilbert Osmond – that he would make better use of her fortune than she could – was totally unconvincing. ‘You’d think it would cross her mind from time to time that he would be a very cold fish in bed,’ she said, ‘but she never seems to think of him as a lover at all. She has no desire for him – how could a woman marry without desire?’

‘Many do, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘My own first wife, for one.’

‘Really?’ She looked intensely interested, and hopeful of further revelations. He inwardly cautioned himself against making intimate confidences to someone he had known for only a few hours, a journalist to boot, and quickly steered the conversation back to literature. ‘Writing honestly about sexual desire in novels is always difficult. I’m not very good at it myself, I admit, but then English novelists never have been, not since Fielding. After him prudery and hypocrisy got a grip on our society. You have to go to the French for the truthful depiction of sex in fiction.’

‘Have you read D.H. Lawrence?’ she said.

‘I’ve read his things in the
English Review
. In fact I was one of the first people in London to hear about him. I was dining with Ford Madox Hueffer at the Pall Mall restaurant, along with Chesterton and Belloc, and Fordie said to us he had just received some poems by someone called D.H. Lawrence which in his opinion were the work of a genius. I remember turning round to the neighbouring tables, full of writers as usual, and shouting out, “Hooray, Fordie’s discovered another literary genius! Called D.H. Lawrence!” We had all had a fair amount to drink by then.’

‘Well, I think he
is
a genius,’ Rebecca said, unimpressed, or at least undistracted, by this burst of name-dropping. ‘His new novel
The Trespasser
has some extraordinary rhapsodic passages about lovemaking.’

‘Ah, you’re ahead of me there. I haven’t read it,’ he said, wondering how much she knew about lovemaking from personal experience. Very little, he suspected, living at home with her mother and sisters – the unembarrassed familiarity with which she spoke of such matters would be largely derived from her reading.

He was surprised when Jane appeared at the door of his study to ask if they would like some tea. ‘Is it teatime already, dear? Could we have it in here?’ he asked. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘But don’t forget that Miss West has a train to catch.’ ‘No, I won’t – but anyway, if she misses it she can stay the night. You don’t have any engagements in London that would rule that out, do you?’ he said, turning to Rebecca, and she smiled and shook her head. ‘But I couldn’t possibly impose on you,’ she said unconvincingly.