A Man of Parts (54 page)

‘Just the once,’ he said. ‘She has absurdly exaggerated its significance.’

‘I should be very wary of her if I were you, H.G. A girl who calls herself Rebecca West might do anything.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Have you ever seen
Rosmersholm
?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Neither have I, but I’ve read it – just the other day, actually. Ibsen’s Rebecca West is a very devious character.’

‘I thought she was the heroine.’

‘Well she is in a way, but a very flawed one. It’s revealed in the course of the play that she wormed her way into Rosmer’s house by befriending his barren wife, and then drove the poor woman to suicide by pretending that Rosmer had made her pregnant, so she could have him to herself, and when this comes out they both commit suicide at the end by jumping into the millrace, just as the wife did.’

‘Good Lord!’ he exclaimed, genuinely astonished.

‘It’s an odd kind of girl who would rename herself “Rebecca West”, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Well, it wasn’t a carefully thought out decision,’ he said. ‘She chose it on the spur of the moment, to conceal from her mother that she was writing for the
Freewoman
.’

‘Even so … I would cut the connection with her if I were you. Don’t answer any more letters. Go away. You’re going to Switzerland soon anyway, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s very convenient,’ Jane said. ‘Elizabeth will look after you, H.G.’

Chalet Soleil had not been completed, as promised, for Christmas, but it was ready for occupation in the spring. It rose from a steep hillside, three storeys high, vast, many-windowed and balconied under its pitched roof, with a small satellite building beside it called the Little Chalet, which was Elizabeth’s workplace and had inscribed over its door the words: ‘I HATE THE COMMON HERD AND KEEP THEM OUT.’ She was not shy of playing the aristocratic lady, or of covering her buildings with assertive sentiments. Over the porch of the main house was written ‘ON THE HEIGHTS LOVE LIVES WITH JOY MAGNIFICENT AND GAY’, and above the front door ‘ONLY HAPPINESS HERE’ – which, so early in its occupation, seemed a little hubristic. The interior of the house smelled pleasantly of the wood of which it was constructed, like a huge cigar box, and was comfortably furnished and equipped for the entertainment of guests. His own bedroom was next door to little E’s, and had a special feature which she gleefully demonstrated by suddenly jumping out of a cupboard at him when he was unpacking his valise. She had ordered a secret sliding door to be constructed between the two rooms, mounted on silent castors and concealed behind two cupboards, so that she could visit him at night without any risk of being observed by other occupants of the house.

‘Was this done especially for me?’ he asked, when he had recovered from the surprise.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any other lovers. I trust you don’t either, G.’ In response to his familiar name for her, or in retaliation for it, she had taken to calling him ironically ‘Great Man’, now contracted to ‘G’.

‘Well, there is a young woman pursuing me in London at the moment,’ he said lightly, and told her about Rebecca West.

Elizabeth saw the
Freewoman
occasionally, and the name was familiar to her. ‘A clever writer, but there’s something rather wild and irresponsible about her articles,’ she said with a slight frown. ‘I should keep well clear of her.’

‘That’s what Jane says.’ The frown did not disappear. He had noticed before that little E never liked to be reminded of Jane’s existence, even though their relationship enjoyed her tolerance. A tiny seed of doubt was germinating in his consciousness that Elizabeth had not been wholly sincere when she said that she had no wish to oust Jane from her place in his life, but for the time being he suppressed it.

The novelty of waiting for Elizabeth to come through the secret door at night was erotically exciting at first, but it imposed on him a more passive role than he was used to. The door could be opened only from her side, and if she chose not to come through it after he had been lying expectantly awake for some time he was left feeling slightly snubbed, and not a little irritated. It was a quite different matter from his old practice, when they were sleeping in the same building, of slipping out into the corridor at night and trying the handle of her room. Whether the door yielded or not on those occasions he was the one taking the initiative, whereas little E’s sliding door seemed designed to give her control over their lovemaking. He did not complain, however, and when they went for one of their hikes in the foothills he would sometimes reassert his prerogative as lover by initiating intercourse al fresco. On one occasion this indirectly involved Rebecca West.

Rebecca was now writing regularly for a socialist weekly called the
Clarion
and in an issue that caught up with him in Switzerland he had read a forceful article by her entitled ‘The Sex War: Disjointed Thoughts on Men’. ‘
We have asked men for votes, they have given us advice
,’ it began. ‘
At present they are also giving us abuse. I am tired of this running comment on the war-like conduct of my sex, delivered with such insolent assurance and such self-satisfaction. So I am going to do it too
.’ The main targets of her eloquent scorn were journalists and politicians and other public figures who had recently denounced suffragette militancy in fatuous and intolerant terms, but she broadened out her polemic to attack the male sex at large, with effective use of a kind of refrain that punctuated her article in an ascending scale of contempt: ‘
Men are poor stuff … Men are very poor stuff … Oh, men are miserably poor stuff
.’ He had little doubt that through this article she was discharging the anger she felt towards him for his silence, but being well out of her reach he was able to appreciate her polemical wit.

Oh, men are very poor stuff indeed. And I begin to doubt whether they are ever reasonably efficient in the sphere in which they have specialised. They do not claim to be good. Collectively they do not claim to be beautiful, though private enterprise in this direction is brisk. But they certainly claim to be clever. And looking round at that confusion of undertakings which we call the City one begins to doubt. One doubts it still more if one ponders on the law, which men have had to themselves since the beginning. It is preposterously expensive. One could have four operations for appendicitis as cheaply as one can get rid of one adulterous husband
…

When he read this out admiringly to Elizabeth she was unsmiling and unimpressed. She regarded herself as a feminist, but of a more subtle and ingratiating kind than Rebecca West. ‘Her sentiments may be feminist,’ she said, ‘but that kind of exaggerated satire will just reinforce male prejudice against women. It’s the journalistic equivalent of the vandalism committed by Mrs Pankhurst’s suffragettes.’

He couldn’t help feeling that there was some jealousy behind her response, and this became obvious the next day when they went for a long walk in the foothills, taking with them a picnic as usual, and a two-day-old copy of the London
Times
, which was delivered to the Chalet Soleil just as they set out. On a grassy knoll with a fine view of the summit of Mont Blanc they had their picnic lunch and afterwards divided the newspaper between them, describing interesting items to each other. It so happened that his portion contained a letter from Mrs Humphry Ward denouncing the moral tone of the younger generation, and citing the articles of Rebecca West in evidence. He read it out, snorting with derision. ‘This is obviously long-meditated revenge for “The Gospel According to Mrs Humphry Ward” in the
Freewoman
,’ he said. ‘Did you read that, E?’ ‘I can’t remember,’ she said. ‘Oh you couldn’t forget it – it was absolutely brilliant,’ he said. ‘It was the first thing of hers that impressed me.’ ‘Really? And what was the second thing,’ Elizabeth said: ‘her face or her figure?’ And before long they were engaged in a silly squabble, he accusing her of unfounded jealousy which she was allowing to distort her critical judgment, and she accusing him of lavishing far more praise on the slight productions of a glib young novice than he had ever accorded her own substantial body of work. ‘This is absurd, E,’ he said, after several sarcastic exchanges of fire. ‘Let us drop the subject.’ ‘You raised it, so I will allow you the privilege,’ she said, and resumed reading the financial pages of the
Times
with an air of intense concentration. He did not relish passing the rest of the afternoon in sulky silence, so after a few minutes had passed, he said: ‘Let’s make love, E.’

‘Certainly not,’ she said, without looking up.

‘It’s the only way to forget this silly quarrel,’ he said, and with sudden inspiration continued: ‘We’ll strip off and make love on the newspaper, all over Mrs Humphry Ward’s letter about Rebecca West, and then we’ll burn it, and our negative feelings will go up in smoke and disappear into the crystal air of these mountains.’

She looked up at him and burst out laughing. ‘You’re such a rogue, G! Such an artful rogue. It is impossible to be cross with you for long.’

‘You’re game, then?’

‘Of course I’m game.’

So they stood up and faced each other as they shed their garments one by one until they stood naked under the eye of heaven, and he spread the
Times
on the turf with the Correspondence page uppermost and they lay down and made love with Elizabeth’s bottom carefully positioned on Mrs Humphry Ward’s letter. Afterwards he set fire to the creased and smudged paper with a match, and squatting side by side on their haunches, like a pair of savages, they watched it flare at the edges, and then blacken and disintegrate and blow away in the breeze in glowing fragments, leaving just a little grey ash on the grass.

‘There goes our anger,’ he said, and kissed her. They returned home to the Chalet Soleil in excellent spirits.

Rebecca’s anger was not so easily dealt with. When he returned to England he found a series of letters from her urgently requesting a meeting. He invited her to tea at the new flat he had just leased in St James’s Court, Westminster, as a London base in place of Hampstead – at Elizabeth’s suggestion, since she had a flat in the same block and it would be, as she said, ‘convenient’. The flat smelled of fresh paint, and had not yet acquired a comfortable lived-in look. It was short of furniture, the windows lacked curtains, and the floors were bare of rugs and carpets. He had hoped the inhospitable ambience would inhibit Rebecca from any untoward display of emotion, but she seemed to take little notice of her surroundings. Her dark eyes were fixed on him as she followed him about the flat from drawing room to kitchen and back to the drawing room again (there were no servants in place so he had to make the tea himself), and he glimpsed in their depths a turmoil of emotions – longing, frustration, anger, despair – as he tried to keep the conversation on light or neutral topics. He asked her what she had been doing while he had been away and she said she had been to Spain with her mother. Where? To Valladolid, Madrid and Seville. And had that been enjoyable? No it had not, she had been suicidally depressed most of the time. He pretended not to have heard her, so she repeated the information in a different form: only the fact that she was travelling with her mother had prevented her from taking her own life. And why would she do a silly thing like that, he asked. ‘Because you rejected me,’ she said. ‘You made me love you, and then you dropped me, as a child drops a toy in which he has lost interest. I don’t understand you. Why did you kiss me if you didn’t want to be my lover?’

He sighed, and shook his head, and made the speech he had prepared.

‘My dear Rebecca, you are very young. And being young – and passionate, and beautiful, and dimly aware when you look at yourself in the mirror of the pleasure your body might give and receive in the embrace of another body – you naturally want to experience that pleasure. But it’s not necessary to have a great love affair to do that – the great love affair can wait, and I certainly cannot give it to you. What you really want is some decent fun with a nice young man who is at the same stage of exploration and experimentation as yourself, or perhaps a little ahead of you, and who is responsible about birth control. You have been indoctrinated to think that without the emotions of a grand romance sex is an ugly thing. It’s not at all ugly – it is beautiful, and one day—’ But at that point in his homily the congregation stood up, gathered her belongings, and walked out of the flat without a word.

Soon afterwards she wrote him a long and extraordinary letter. It began:

Dear H.G
.,

During the next few days I shall either put a bullet through my head or commit something more shattering to myself than death. At any rate I shall be quite a different person. I refuse to be cheated out of my deathbed scene. I don’t understand why you wanted me three months ago and don’t want me now. I wish I knew why that were so. It’s something I can’t understand, something I despise. And the worst of it is that if I despise you I rage because you stand between me and peace
.

And it ended:

You once found my willingness to love you a beautiful and courageous thing. I still think it was. Your spinsterishness makes you feel that a woman desperately and hopelessly in love with a man is an indecent spectacle and a reversal of the natural order of things. But you should have been too fine to feel like that
.

I would give my whole life to feel your arms round me again
.

I wish you had loved me. I wish you liked me
.

Yours, Rebecca

There was a postscript:

Don’t leave me utterly alone. If I live write to me now and then. You like me enough for that. At least I pretend to myself you do
.

He read this letter with alarm at first, then with anger, and finally with relief. It was sheer emotional blackmail. If the stupid girl were really to kill herself, leaving a compromising letter, it would destroy him: reputation, marriage, career, the liaison with little E, all smashed irretrievably, as she well knew. But the final lines, and above all the postscript, gave away the hollowness of her histrionic rhetoric. The melodramatic ‘
If I live
’ – a phrase one of Ibsen’s heroines might have flung across the stage – followed by a bathetic plea for more letters. This girl was not going to kill herself, she was just trying to frighten him into making love to her, and she would not succeed. He wrote a curt reply to her letter: ‘
How can I be your friend to this accompaniment? I don’t see that I can be of any use or help to you at all. You have my entire sympathy – but until we can meet on a reasonable basis – goodbye
.’