A Man of Parts (41 page)

Instead the main focus of interest in her life was their affair, and she couldn’t keep the secret to herself. He understood her desire to confide in her mother and agreed that she should do so, trusting that Maud’s theoretical belief in female autonomy would extend to her own daughter, who was now twenty-one and legally as well as morally a free agent. According to Amber, Maud was shaken by the revelation, and fearful of the possible consequences, but reluctantly accepted their relationship as a
fait accompli
and helped to conceal it from Pember Reeves, hoping no doubt that it would eventually end without his ever knowing anything about it. In truth, it would have been difficult to avoid arousing Reeves’s suspicions without Maud’s co-operation in covering Amber’s tracks, though she was unwilling to admit that she knew anything about the matter. On the rare occasions when they were in the same company Maud was politely friendly to him but carefully avoided any opportunity for private confidences, and Jane had the same experience. ‘Not that I was seeking a tête-à-tête,’ Jane said to him as they came away from such a party. ‘In fact I was rather afraid that she would cut me – as most mothers would in the circumstances. But she just smiled vaguely and chattered aimlessly until someone else came up.’ He had a theory that Maud was treating her daughter’s affair and its ramifications rather as Christian Scientists treated illness and its symptoms, as unreal illusions which would go away if you ignored them.

His first intimation that Amber had taken others into her confidence came from Sydney Olivier, who was home from Jamaica on leave in December. They met for lunch at the Reform, and Sydney startled him by asking him quite early in their conversation, in a casual familiar tone, ‘And how is Amber?’

‘Amber Reeves? She’s well, I believe,’ he faltered. ‘Why do you ask?’

Olivier smiled sardonically above his bowl of oxtail soup. ‘I understand you are very close to her at present.’

‘Who told you that?’ he said, busying himself with his potted shrimps.

‘My daughter Marjery, who was told by Amber herself.’

‘Ah,’ he said, concealing his dismay as best he could. ‘That was very indiscreet of Amber. I trust Marjery has respected her confidence.’

‘It’s a bit late for that, I’m afraid, Wells,’ Olivier said. ‘Marjery is not the only one Amber has confided in. Even the dons know. The whole college is agog with speculation about your affair.’

‘Damn!’ he said quietly, and glanced at the neighbouring tables to see if anyone had overheard Sydney’s remarks. He had been aware that Amber was making trips to see her old friends at Cambridge from time to time between their trysts in Eccleston Square, and evidently she had been unable to resist boasting to them about her thrilling affair.

Olivier finished his soup and wiped his neatly trimmed beard and moustache with a napkin. ‘I thought something might be up when I saw you walk into Ben Keeling’s rooms with Amber last May, looking like the cat that has eaten the cream,’ he said. ‘As the father of four daughters I should deeply disapprove – and I do! But my baser self feels a certain admiration for your success with beautiful and gifted young women half your age. How do you do it?’

‘I’d like you to know, Olivier,’ he said earnestly, ‘that this is no casual seduction. We are deeply in love. Jane knows all about it—’

Olivier’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Jane knows? And she doesn’t mind?’

‘She and Amber get on famously together. We are acting out in personal relations what other so-called “advanced” people profess to believe in but are too timid to practise.’

Olivier shook his head. ‘Well I wish you luck, Wells. But I don’t think you can start a sexual revolution single-handed.’ He paused before adding drily, ‘If “hand” is the applicable word in this context.’

This news spoiled a lunch he had been looking forward to, and he was unable to appreciate – indeed he scarcely attended to – Olivier’s exposition of the social, political and economic problems of Jamaica. As soon as he could politely do so, he parted from him and hastened to the British Museum hoping to find Amber there. He had to renew his reader’s ticket, which had expired, before he could enter the Reading Room and look for her. The light was fading outside the high windows. It was a foggy day and some of the fog had seeped into the great domed space, increasing the gloom, so that the desk lamps seemed like so many street lamps in a miniature city of crescents and circuses as he prowled in search of Amber. He found her at last, staring vacantly into space, chewing on a pencil, with a thick volume open before her. She started when he touched her shoulder, and her face lit up when she recognised him, then paled as she registered his frown. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘We must talk,’ he whispered, conscious of disapproving looks from the neighbouring readers, and waited as she gathered her books together and took them to the desk where they would be reserved for her for the next day.

To obtain some privacy he led her out of the building to one end of the great pillared portico, deserted on this damp, dispiriting afternoon apart from a few sooty-winged pigeons strutting about, sat her down on a bench, and reproached her for her indiscretion.

‘I only told a few of my closest friends … and a couple of the dons,’ she protested, ‘and I swore them all to secrecy.’

‘Oh yes, and of course
they
swore
their
friends to secrecy when they told them, and so on,’ he said. ‘You must know by now that gossip spreads like wildfire in Cambridge. I don’t know why you still spend so much time there.’

‘Because I’m lonely in London,’ she said. ‘I know we can only meet occasionally, and I put up with that, but I must talk to
somebody
the rest of the time and most of my friends are in Cambridge.’

He was conscious that they seemed to be drifting towards their first lovers’ tiff, but he couldn’t stop himself from pressing on: ‘All right. But why talk to them about
us
?’

‘Because it’s the thing in my life I care most about,’ she said frankly, with her big dark eyes fixed on his; and immediately his heart melted and he took her in his arms and kissed her.

After a little love talk, and another kiss, he said, ‘I’m sorry that you feel lonely at times, Dusa. Don’t you have any friends in London?’

‘Only Rivers,’ she said. ‘If you mean a friend I can really talk to.’

‘Rivers?’

‘Rivers Blanco White.’

‘Oh, him!’ He knew this young Fabian, a nice enough fellow who had been at Cambridge and was currently at one of the Inns of Court, eating his dinners and preparing to be a barrister, but in putting his question he had been thinking of female friends. ‘You know him well?’

‘Very well,’ Amber said. ‘He wanted to marry me when I was in my second year at Cambridge.’

‘
What
? You never mentioned that before.’

Amber shrugged. ‘I didn’t see any reason to. It seems a long time ago – I was a different person then.’

‘But you turned him down?’

‘Not exactly. We talked it over, and decided it was not a good idea – which it wasn’t. We were both far too young and immature – I certainly was. Rivers is a few years older than me. He’d already graduated, and was studying law before going to Lincoln’s Inn. But he was in love with me and afraid that he would lose me if we didn’t get engaged before he went down.’

‘Were you in love with him?’

‘Well, I thought I was, but really I think I just wanted to sleep with him. Which would of course have been the sensible thing for us to do,’ she said, smiling reminiscently at some memory, ‘but I knew he would be shocked if I suggested it and Rivers was far too conventional and chivalrous to suggest it himself. He even felt guilty about kissing me when we weren’t engaged.’

What kind of kisses? he wanted to ask – passionate kisses, open mouth kisses, tongues squirming, bodies pressed together, limbs intertwined … ? He was suddenly swamped by a wave of jealousy which he was ashamed to reveal, and asked a trivial question instead. ‘Where did he get that ridiculously tautologous name, as a matter of interest?’

‘There was an ancestor, an Irishman called White, who emigrated to Spain in the eighteenth century and changed his name to Blanco, but Rivers’s great-grandfather, Joseph Blanco, left Spain around 1810 to settle in England and called himself Blanco White.’

‘It sounds like a schoolboy’s nickname,’ he sneered. ‘“Rivers” is pretty odd too, for that matter.’

‘It’s an old family name, his second given name. He was actually christened “George”.’

‘Do you still see him?’

‘Oh yes, quite often. We take the Tube sometimes to the end of the line and go for walks in the country.’

He stared. ‘Why did you never mention this to me before?’

Dusa gave him a sly, feline glance from under her long lashes. ‘I thought you might be jealous,’ she said.

‘Hmmph!’ He looked away, across the courtyard now lit by gaslamps, each with a halo of irradiated fog. Visitors and scholars leaving the Museum as closing time approached were descending the broad steps and making their way towards the Great Russell Street gate, the scholars distinguishable by their briefcases. ‘Should I be?’ he asked.

‘Of course not! I’m in love with
you
. Rivers knows that.’

‘You told him?’ He swivelled round to face her accusingly. ‘You told him about us too?’

Amber looked defensive again. ‘I had to,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘To stop him from trying to make love to me again.’

‘So he is still in love with you, then?’

‘Well, he thinks he is. But our friendship is purely platonic.’

‘As far as you’re concerned, perhaps. But what about him? What does he think of your relationship with me?’

‘He disapproves of course, but—’

‘Disapproves! I wager he does! In his position I’d like to kill me!’

Amber laughed. ‘You needn’t be afraid of that! He’s a lawyer.’

‘It’s not funny, Dusa,’ he said, severely. ‘He may not literally
try to murder me, but he could do a lot of damage. Suppose he tells your father?’

‘He won’t. I swore him to secrecy before I told him – and unlike my Cambridge friends he takes an oath seriously.’

‘Hmmph!’ he grunted again.

‘Are you cross with me, Master?’ she said in a small voice.

‘Well, yes, I am,’ he said. ‘With all these people knowing about us … sooner or later there’s going to be trouble.’

‘I’m sorry, Master. But I love you – that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’

After which there was nothing to do but take Dusa to Eccleston Square in a brougham and quell his jealousy and his doubts by possessing her with as much violent passion as she could bear. In the cab he whispered into her ear exactly what he intended to do, and felt her trembling with a mixture of excitement and fear. She fought him with spirit, and afterwards they kissed each other’s scratches and bite marks tenderly, and cuddled like babes. She was a girl in a thousand.

He had little doubt that the rumour-mills of London were now busy linking his name with Amber’s, but no gossip came directly to his ears, partly because he kept clear of the metropolis over Christmas and into the New Year. The holiday was enlivened by a new kind of war game he had invented for toy soldiers, of which the boys now had a fine collection – whole uniformed armies, or at least battalions, of cavalry and infantry. The recent invention of a breech-loading toy cannon, obtainable from Hamley’s, which when carefully aimed could actually knock down several soldiers at a time with a small projectile at a range of up to twelve feet, had enormously expanded the possibilities of this kind of play. He had devised a game, based on timed turn-taking for manoeuvring and firing, which could take several hours to complete, and absorbed adults as thoroughly as it did Gip and Frank – in fact rather more so, as Jane was wont to observe when she went looking for her husband and his male guests and found them lying on the floor of the attic playroom, pushing toy soldiers around a miniature landscape constructed of wooden bricks, cardboard, and evergreen twigs, with a river marked on the lino in blue chalk, arguing vociferously about the rules, with Gip and Frank reduced to mere spectators.

Masterman, who came down with Lucy to stay in the village in January, was thoroughly taken with the game, and contributed a few refinements to the rules. He had come to Sandgate to start a new book called
The Condition of England
, and had been reading the serialisation of
Tono-Bungay
in the
English Review
with great excitement. ‘It’s exactly a fictional equivalent of the book I want to write,’ he said. ‘I intend to quote copiously from it if I may.’ He gave Masterman an advance copy on his departure and soon received a gratifying response, ‘
I read it on the train back to London, and I could scarcely refrain from shouting out and brandishing it in the faces of the bewildered passengers, as I realised I had got hold of a masterpiece
.’ Beatrice Webb was less enthusiastic in acknowledging her copy, and said she had preferred
The War in the Air¸
a perverse judgment which provoked him into a dismissive response to the reciprocal gift of the first volume of the
Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission
on which she and Sidney had been labouring for several years. ‘
You don’t by any means make the quality of your differences from the Majority Report plain, and your case in the slightest degree convincing. Perhaps I have been led to expect too much, but at any rate, I am left wondering what it is you think you are up to
,’ he wrote, to which she responded ironically: ‘
What an interesting letter – I enshrine it with due honour in my diary
.’ Somewhat chastened he replied, ‘
Perhaps my letter was a little ungenerous but the provocation to hurt your good piece of work as you treated mine and to be just wilfully unsympathetic was too great
,’ and was relieved when she wrote back apologising for her remarks about
Tono-Bungay
and even inviting a renewal of contact between them
. He had no intention of getting involved with the Webbs again, but the rapprochement was welcome inasmuch as it implied that if they had heard about his relationship with Amber they were not going to make a fuss about it.