A Man of Parts (39 page)

‘Why should you want to stop it? She’s a lovely girl. You like her. She worships you. She wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. She understands completely that this doesn’t affect our marriage.’

‘Maud’s letter makes me feel we have betrayed their trust.’

‘Nonsense! You mean the good fairy letter?’ Maud had sent a gushing letter of thanks after Amber returned home from Sandgate: ‘
Thank you so much for your goodness to Amber. I think she is much better. She adores you both and talked of nothing else when she came back. She has gone to Cambridge full of spirits and confidence. I hope she will realise all her desires, dear soul. You are good fairies to all those young people
.’

‘Yes, that letter.’

‘We didn’t invite Amber down here so that I could seduce her. Maud asked if she could come – no doubt prompted by Amber. Amber has behaved exactly as you did in ’93, my dear, when you invited Isabel and me to Putney for the weekend. She fell in love and went after the man in question.’

‘Not exactly,’ said Jane. ‘Isabel wasn’t prepared to share you with me. Nor was I, for that matter.’

‘And that was why there was so much pain,’ he said. ‘We’ve matured since then. We’ve conquered jealousy.’

Jane thought for a moment, and then gave a shrug of acquiescence. ‘Well … Just be careful, H.G. Promise me you’ll be very, very careful.’

‘I promise,’ he said, and gave her a hug and a kiss. ‘You and I and Amber are exceptional people. We can make this work.’

He woke early the next morning and went out in the summer dawn to his garden shelter to write. He was finishing off
First and Last Things
with a chapter on sex and marriage. He wrote:

The ordinary civilised woman and the ordinary civilised man are alike obsessed with the idea of meeting and possessing one peculiar intimate person, one special exclusive lover who is their very own, and a third person of either sex cannot be associated with that couple without an intolerable sense of privacy and confidence and possession destroyed. But that does not abolish the possibility that there are exceptional people somewhere capable of, to coin a phrase, triangular mutuality, and I do not see why we should either forbid or treat with bitterness or hostility a grouping we may consider so inadvisable or so unworkable as never to be adopted, if three people of their own free will desire it
.

Amber’s ruse worked, as she said, ‘like a dream’. A fictitious cottage in Epping Forest was fictitiously rented for a week, shared with a fictitious fellow student, while they occupied rooms he found in Southend-on-Sea, a cheerful cockney resort on the Thames estuary where the landladies were broad-minded. They both worked in the mornings, sworn to silence. In the afternoons if the weather was fine they took books down to the beach and bathed and talked about the ground-breaking thesis she was going to write at the L.S.E. In the early evening they worked again for a few hours until it was time to sup in a nearby cafe or restaurant, and so to bed. They made love every night of their stay, and on the last morning, when it was time to leave, and their luggage had been taken down to the cab which had arrived earlier than appointed, they hesitated on the landing, looked at each other with the gleam of the same lascivious thought in their eyes, and went back into the room for a last quick coupling.

There was a chaste interval while Amber went back to Cambridge to sit her examinations, and then she was free to return to London occasionally while she waited for her results. He rented a bed-sitting room in Eccleston Square, Pimlico, a more salubrious venue than Soho, and they met there every week or so for a day of sensual indulgence, and sometimes a night too if she could contrive an alibi for her parents. She was a partner after his own heart, who frankly enjoyed the physical release of sex, liked to give vocal expression to her pleasure, and brought a surprising degree of athleticism to her embraces, which she attributed to the classes in jiu-jutsu that she had enrolled in, along with other emancipated young Cambridge women, under a Japanese instructor. She could effortlessly cross her ankles behind his neck when lying underneath him, and with her feet planted on a firm mattress arch her back like a drawn bow, strongly enough to lift his weight. When they went for walks in the country, he discovered with delight that she shared his penchant for spontaneous copulation in the open air, in copses, under haystacks, in churchyards – once even in the bell tower of a church itself – the risk of discovery giving an extra spice to what he referred to familiarly as their ‘sinning’.

If it was a sin it seemed immune from divine punishment, for Amber was awarded a Double First in July, and showered with congratulations from the great and the good of Cambridge and further afield. Towards the end of that month she came to stay at Spade House, a time chosen to coincide with the fruition of a long-mooted plan to entertain William James, who was visiting his brother in Rye with his daughter Peggy. Henry was always rather possessive of his relatives when he had them to stay, perhaps disliking to mix them up promiscuously with his literary friends for fear they would transmit family secrets, but he had agreed to release his brother and niece for a couple of days. ‘
There is staying with us a Miss Reeves who is just your daughter’s age
,’ he wrote in a letter to William James confirming the arrangements. ‘
She has recently achieved a transient notoriety by getting a First in Part II of the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge, and is so accomplished she can speak Hegelian
.’ On the appointed day he took Amber with him in a hired car to pick up William and his daughter. When they arrived at Lamb House, they found themselves in the middle of a farcical altercation between the two brothers, Henry red with indignation and William defensive but unrepentant. William had discovered that G.K. Chesterton, whose writings he admired, was staying in the house next door, and unable to restrain his curiosity had put a ladder against the wall, and peeped over into the neighbour’s garden in the hope of seeing the author of
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
and
The Man Who Was Thursday
taking the air. Henry had just caught him red-handed in this shocking breach of etiquette, and ordered the gardener to take down the ladder at once. ‘It is not done – tell him, please, Wells, that it is simply not done in England to spy on one’s neighbours.’

‘I was not obviously spying, Henry,’ William said mildly. ‘I was pretending to be trimming the vine which grows along the wall – I had provided myself with a pair of secateurs for that purpose.’

‘But you are not a gardener, William. You are my brother and my guest, and it is not appropriate – I would go so far as to say it is absolutely unacceptable – at least in this country – for a gentleman to ah, ah – impersonate a gardener in order to – to – to …’ (Henry James groped for
le mot juste
) ‘to
violate
the privacy of his neighbours. Is that not so, Wells?’

‘Some people might think it was a little eccentric, but perhaps not Chesterton, who has a few eccentricities himself,’ he said diplomatically. ‘Why don’t you just invite G.K. to call?’

‘Because I don’t know him!’ was the answer. ‘We haven’t been introduced.’

There was no more meticulous guardian of traditional English manners than this American expatriate. But after further huffing and puffing, Henry James calmed down sufficiently to release William and Peggy into his care, and they set off in the hired car, only to see approaching them on the coastal road outside Rye the unmistakeable figure of Gilbert Chesterton, tall, corpulent and untidily dressed, with coat flapping open and greasy curls protruding from under a panama hat, out for a walk with his wife. He stopped the car, made introductions, and a convivial conversation took place at the end of which Chesterton invited William to call on him one evening – ‘and do bring your brother’. They resumed their journey with William delighted to have made his acquaintance in a way to which Henry could take no exception.

Amber maintained an admirable poise in the midst of all these excitements but she was thrilled to have met so many distinguished authors all in one day. William was kind to her, congratulating her on her Double First, questioning her about her postgraduate research topic, and drawing her out on the merits and limitations of F.C.S. Schiller. Poor Peggy James was somewhat eclipsed by Amber’s brilliance, and the two young women managed only a polite pretence of friendship during the visit. Peggy was quite personable in a shrinking sort of way, and intelligent enough, but diffident and reserved. He gathered from William that she had recently had some kind of nervous illness, taking after her Aunt Alice, the James brothers’ neurasthenic sister who had died some fifteen years ago, and although she was now recovered she lacked vitality. She didn’t swim or play tennis and her attempt at badminton was embarrassing. She watched Amber and the boys playing floor games with interest, but did not take part. She was really a bundle of negatives, poor girl, with the words ‘old maid’ written all over her in prediction of her future fate, and it seemed almost cruel to put her in proximity to Amber, bursting with health and confidence and appetite for life.

Amber seemed to him a golden girl that summer and autumn, an almost mythical creature, such as the gods of classical Greece coveted and descended from the heights of Olympus to ravish in human disguise or in the form of some animal or bird. Every week or so she gave herself willingly to be ravished, in the Eccleston Square love nest or wherever else opportunity afforded, and he worked all the better in the intervals with the memory or anticipation of these passionate assignations at the back of his mind. It was not just his lust that she excited, but also his creative and intellectual ambition. She called him ‘Master’, but he looked forward to the day when she would be not just his pupil but his collaborator. She would give his non-fictional work the philosophical rigour it often wanted, and do the kind of sociological research for which he lacked time and patience. And she wrote a short story that summer, about a young wife dismayed to discover how much independence she had forfeited by getting married, which showed distinct promise in that kind of writing, even though his efforts to get it published failed. They were to do great things together. It seemed to him that he had finally achieved a kind of equilibrium in his life: work, love and domesticity balanced in perfect harmony between himself, Amber and Jane. The key of course was the absence of jealousy between the two women, who got on wonderfully well together. There was a tacit understanding that he did not make love to Amber at Spade House when Jane was there, while Amber for her part never challenged Jane’s sovereignty over the household, but made herself useful in unobtrusive ways.

Once when he and Amber were lying together in bed at Eccleston Square after a very satisfactory ravishment, and congratulating themselves on their happiness, he asked what had brought her to the point of confessing that she was in love with him, and her answer was interesting. ‘It was because Jane was away, and we had to look after Gip and Frank. I found myself in Jane’s place for a day, keeping you company, telling the servants what to do, putting the boys to bed, and so on … I suddenly felt on my pulses what it would be like to be married to you, to belong to you, to be part of your everyday life … And I knew that the next day Jane was coming back, and the day after that I had to go home and give up all hope of ever having you. Because it never occurred to me that both of us could have you in different ways. So I fell into a terrible despair, and when you started on about Winston Churchill in the garden I just couldn’t bear it and blurted out that I was in love with you. Which I thought would be the end.’ ‘Instead of which it was only the beginning,’ he said, and kissed her.

He put quite a lot of Amber into the heroine of his new novel. The young Catherine Robbins was also a source, and there was a little of Rosamund in the portrait, but Amber was present to his imagination as he wrote, like an artist’s model.

Ann Veronica Stanley was twenty-one and a half years old. She had black hair, fine eyebrows, and a clear complexion; and the forces that had modelled her features had loved and lingered at their work and made them subtle and fine. She was slender, and sometimes she seemed tall, and walked and carried herself lightly and joyfully as one who commonly and habitually feels well, and sometimes she stooped a little and was preoccupied. Her lips came together with an expression between contentment and the faintest shadow of a smile, her manner was one of quiet reserve, and behind this mask she was wildly discontented and eager for freedom and life
.

He made Ann Veronica’s struggle for personal liberation more difficult than it had been for Amber Reeves. Amber had taken advantage of her father’s absorption in his official duties and her mother’s enlightened feminist principles to obtain a considerable degree of independence for herself even before she went up to Newnham, and once there she made the most of her distance from home to increase it. Veronica was less fortunate. She was a dependant of a deeply conventional widower father, and lived at home under the watchful eye of his spinster sister, both of whom obstructed her attempts to explore the world and relationships with the opposite sex. Only rebellion could release her from a life of stifling conformity to their bourgeois prejudices and prudery. Early in the story Ann Veronica, denied permission to attend a fancy dress ball of which her father disapproved on moral grounds, ran away from her suburban home, took a room in central London, and enrolled to study biology at the Imperial College of Science in South Kensington. There she met and fell in love with her biology lecturer, a man called Capes, who reciprocated her feelings, but hesitated to respond because he was estranged from a wife who would not divorce him, even though he had been unfaithful to her. Meanwhile she was courted by and rejected an effete poetaster called Mr Manning whom her father favoured, and resisted seduction by a plausible libertine called Mr Rammage, who artfully compromised her by lending her money to subsidise her studies.