A Man of Parts (55 page)

He slightly softened the harshness of this dismissal by adding a postscript to say that he would look out for her articles in magazines; and he fully expected to hear from her again, a humble, grovelling letter apologising for the hysteria of her previous missive and promising to behave more sensibly in future if he could bear to see her again, or at least write. But no such letter came. In July he read some things of hers in the
New Freewoman
, a successor to the
Freewoman
under the same editorship but with a more literary bias, which impressed him deeply. The first was an article about a singer called Nana she had heard in a cafe in Seville, whose sensuous voice and voluptuous figure had held the audience in a sympathetic trance and given Rebecca a kind of mystical insight:

I remembered how I once saw the sun beating on the great grey marbled loins and furrowed back of a grey Clydesdale and watched the backward thrust of its thigh twitch with power. I was then too interpenetrated with interests of the soul and the intellect to understand the message of that happy carcass: if my earliest childhood had realised that the mere framework of life is so imperishable and delicious that with all else lost it is worth living for, I had forgotten it. Now Nana’s dazzling body declared it lucidly: ‘Here am I, nothing but flesh and blood. When your toys of the mind and the spirit are all broken, come back to my refreshing flesh and blood
.’

This was remarkable writing for a twenty-year-old girl, even if it was obviously influenced by D.H. Lawrence, and it showed that Rebecca had not been so self-obsessed on her trip to Spain as to fail to profit from the experience. Another essay called ‘Trees of Gold’ was equally good. He could not resist sending her a note of congratulation, while making clear that he had not changed his mind since their last meeting. ‘
You are writing gorgeously again. Please resume being friends. You’ve had time to see just how entirely impossible it is for you to get that pure deep draught of excitement and complete living out of me and how amiable and self-denying it has been of me not to let you waste your flare-up – one only burns well once – on my cinders. Nana was tremendous
.’ She did not reply immediately, and then it was a very short message on a postcard, thanking him for his encouraging comments and saying that she was now literary editor of the
New Freewoman
, and exceedingly busy. In the meantime he had read another striking piece by her in the magazine
, a short story called ‘At Valladolid’, in which a young woman on holiday in Spain sought the help of a grumpy doctor to treat an infected bullet wound, sustained in England when she tried to kill herself after being spurned by a lover. He recognised himself in this latter figure with discomfort, but also admiration for the precision with which he was judged: ‘
Though my lover had left my body chaste he seduced my soul: he mingled himself with me till he was more myself than I am and then left me
.’

Over the same period that she was writing these literary pieces for the
New Freewoman
she was writing quite different but equally brilliant articles on current affairs for the
Clarion
, sparkling with mischievous wit and revealing increasing disillusionment with the militant suffragette movement – not on account of its confrontational tactics, but because its intolerant sexual politics were a mirror image of masculine prejudice. She even dared to ridicule a pamphlet by Mrs Pankhurst’s daughter Christabel that solemnly warned against ‘The Dangers of Marriage’. This turn in her thought delighted him because it accorded very much with his own views, as he told her in a letter congratulating her on this and other pieces in the same journal. Rebecca had hit her stride as a writer, and there was an excitement in following her rapid development almost week by week, preening himself on having recognised her potential in her very earliest work. On the other hand he was slightly piqued by her brief and restrained replies to his enthusiastic letters. He kept expecting she would ask to meet him again, but she didn’t, and he felt that he couldn’t propose it himself without sending misleading signals (and, to be honest, losing face).

The continual tension of frustrated expectations and conflicting impulses made him irritable and discontented. Supervision of urgent repairs and improvements at Easton Glebe was preoccupying Jane, making her a less attentive spouse than usual, and when he turned to Elizabeth to be comforted and spoiled he was disappointed. She had become increasingly critical of him of late, as if taking possession of ‘Chateau Soleil’ (as he sometimes ironically referred to it) had inflated her aristocratic pretensions, which after all amounted to nothing more than a fancy name acquired by marriage, and she was forever correcting his pronunciation or table manners and making little jokes about his humble social origins. Once at a London dinner party to which they were both invited, when he was describing a recent visit to Up Park (or Uppark, as it was known now, though he preferred the old spelling and pronunciation), which revived his early memories of the place, she enquired, ‘Did you go in by the front door or through the servants’ entrance?’ and an embarrassed silence fell on the company. ‘I was just curious to know,’ she said with a shrug, when he reproached her later. She also began to refer to Jane by slightly mocking nicknames, such as ‘Wifey’ and ‘the Keeper of the Scrolls’ (a reference to her typing his manuscripts), and to mimic Jane’s characteristic phrases and mannerisms. When he protested about this one day in her flat in St James’s Court it led to a blazing row in which she as good as said she thought he should divorce Jane and marry herself if their relationship was to have a future. He walked out in disgust, and discovered the next day that she had decamped to the Chalet Soleil. He dispatched a letter into the dust of her departure, apologising for losing his temper, and begging her not to destroy the very rewarding and civilised relationship they had enjoyed for the past two years. ‘
My wife has every virtue, every charm, only she’s as dead as a herring. You’re the eyes of the whole universe to me
,’ he wrote, laying it on thick, but her reply was long in coming and cool in tone. When he proposed visiting her soon, she suggested a date in November, several weeks away.

Early in October Rebecca West reviewed
The Passionate Friends
in the
New Freewoman
. Spotting the item in the journal’s list of contents, he felt a jolt of intense curiosity mixed with apprehension, and turned to it immediately. It was a long article that paired his novel, somewhat demeaningly, with the latest offering by the popular but worthless Hall Caine. He noted with satisfaction Rebecca’s comprehensive disparagement of
The Woman Thou Gavest Me
but skimmed through these pages, eager to discover what she had to say about himself. Would she have seized the opportunity to take revenge for his resistance to her appeals for love, by writing a review even more damaging than her first one of
Marriage
? Or would she try to melt his heart with a panegyric? In fact she had done neither. It was a judicious, well-written review which found things to praise generously in the early part of the novel (‘
The first chapter, with its brooding over a dear wilful child in gusts of naughtiness and sickness, is among the very greatest representations of childhood
’) but found fault with much of the rest: ‘
The skin of one’s brain is dappled with goose-flesh at the irritating surface of the style … Stratton marries a phantom doormat called Rachel who lives, to Mr Wells’ eternal shame in one sentence: “It sounds impudent, I know, for a girl to say so, but we’ve many interests in common
.”’ What most intrigued him, however, were Rebecca’s comments on the sexual and moral dilemma of the protagonists. If, as this pair seemed to assume, she wrote, men require for some great thing they have to do the inspiration of an achieved passion, this places an intolerable burden of responsibility on women. ‘
Surely the only way to medicine the ravages of this fever of life is to treat sex lightly, to recognise that in this as in philosophy the one is not more excellent than the many, to think no more hardly of two lovers who part soon than we do of spring for leaving the earth at the coming of June
.’ This was very much his own hedonistic attitude to sex, which he had always tried to practise with occasional lapses into jealous possessiveness, but never dared to articulate openly in his fiction. He was delighted to find Rebecca sharing it, and surprised too: he had assumed from her passionate declarations of love that she would not be satisfied with anything but total commitment by himself. Evidently that was not true. Was she, he wondered, sending him a message through this review that she was quite willing to figure in his life as a
passade
?

Not long afterwards he met Rebecca by chance one afternoon in Piccadilly. He was coming out of Hatchard’s as she was coming out of the Royal Academy and they saw each other at the same moment, as if some telepathic force had directed and focused their mutual gaze across the road, the cabs and vans and omnibuses passing between them like flickering shapes in the foreground of a cinematograph film. She stood still and waited as he weaved his way recklessly through the traffic to her side. ‘Rebecca!’ he said, grasping her hand and holding it. ‘You look wonderful.’ And she did – radiant, vital, beautiful. He had forgotten how lovely she was. ‘I’ve missed you. Why have you been avoiding me?’

‘I haven’t been,’ she said. ‘If you wanted to see me why didn’t you ask?’

‘Well, I’ve been very busy … but never mind. Let me give you tea somewhere – Fortnum’s – we’ve lots to talk about. Your review of
The Passionate Friends
was most interesting.’

‘You weren’t offended by it?’

‘Well, some comments stung, I admit, but I’m used to that by now. And you said some nice things. But look, will you have tea with me?’

‘I’d love to,’ she said, smiling.

He took her arm and steered her across the road and into Fortnum and Mason’s, where they had a sumptuous tea of crab and cucumber sandwiches, toasted teacakes with damson jam, and cream pastries, of which she partook with eager, healthy appetite. She told him about her work on the
New Freewoman
, writing and commissioning book reviews, and he told her about
The World Set Free
, his novel-in-progress about global war fought with atomic bombs. ‘Actually, you know, it was through talking to you about the arms race, that day you came to Easton, that I got the idea for this novel,’ he said, altering the actual sequence of events, and saw that she was flattered. ‘It’s one of several reasons why I’m very glad I thought of inviting you.’

‘Harold Rubinstein prophesied that you would,’ she said, biting into a cream puff.

‘Who is Harold Rubinstein?’ he asked, disconcerted by this information.

‘He’s a solicitor, a Young Fabian and a male feminist – he comes to the Freewoman Circle meetings.’

‘A friend of yours, obviously.’

‘Yes, we met at the Fabian Summer School. He takes me to concerts occasionally when I can find the time.’

‘And when did he prophesy that I would invite you to Easton Glebe?’

‘When he read my review of
Marriage
. He said you wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to meet me and put me in my place.’

‘Did he indeed?’ he said. He felt a familiar wave of unpleasant emotion pass through him like a spasm of nausea. It was jealousy: a sudden intuition that, if he should decide after all to respond to Rebecca’s desire, this uncannily percipient young man would turn out to be a rival, playing the same devious, disapproving role as Clifford Sharp and Rivers Blanco White in previous affairs. If ? There was no longer any ‘if’. The instant, visceral effect of this insight was a determination to cut out Mr Rubinstein by possessing Rebecca while he had the opportunity. He turned the conversation to her review of
The Passionate Friends
. ‘I was very interested in what you had to say about the necessity of treating sex lightly. It’s something I’ve always believed – not always practised, I admit.’

Rebecca grimaced. ‘I got into terrible trouble at home on account of that,’ she said. ‘Mama was very shocked. And Lettie said I was talking nonsense about something I knew nothing about.’

‘It’s not nonsense at all, but if you’re to extend your knowledge in that area, you will have to leave home.’

‘I long to. But I simply can’t afford it,’ she said.

The waitress came up with the bill, and when he had dealt with that he said, ‘My new flat is properly finished and furnished now. Would you like to see it?’ As she hesitated, he added: ‘I’m alone there at present.’

‘I’d love to,’ she said, and her eyes told him she knew exactly what he meant.

And so the affair began. On that first occasion Rebecca was ardent but submissive: she was overjoyed simply to have his arms round her, glad to know that he found her desirable, willing to do anything he wanted, not taking the initiative herself, following his movements like someone learning the steps of a new dance. But she learned quickly, and the intensity of her desire was thrilling. One day early in their affair when she came to St James’s Court there was a servant in the flat – a woman Jane had recently hired to clean and cook when either or both of them were in residence. He received Rebecca in the drawing room and apologised for the woman’s presence. ‘I didn’t know she was coming,’ he said, ‘I thought it was her half-day off. But come here and let me kiss you.’ They sat down together on the sofa and began to kiss and fondle each other, getting more and more excited. Soon he had her blouse undone and his lips on an exposed breast, while his hand was under her skirt and between her thighs. Rebecca began to moan and heave her pelvis against the pressure of his forefinger. ‘Take me, have me!’ she whimpered. ‘You mean now? Here?’ ‘Yes, yes!’ It was impossible to carry her off to his bedroom, where he kept a supply of French letters, without the risk of encountering the servant, but he was too aroused to want to stop, as much by Rebecca’s shameless urgency as his own desire, so he hastily unbuttoned and did as she asked. He considered himself a skilled exponent of coitus interruptus, but on this occasion, sprawled on top of Rebecca, with one foot on the floor, he slipped on a rug and the sudden change of position caused him to ejaculate before he could withdraw. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said afterwards, but she seemed to think he was apologising for the indecorum of their situation rather than the risk of pregnancy. ‘It was my fault for leading you on,’ she said. ‘Imagine if the woman had come in while we were …’ She giggled. ‘I should be ashamed of myself, but I’m not.’ He kissed her and suggested she would probably like to visit the bathroom. ‘You’ll find a bidet in there,’ he said. ‘I should make very thorough use of it.’ She caught his meaning and looked suddenly serious. ‘Oh. Yes, I will. Thank you.’ But she came back smiling from the bathroom, evidently placing great confidence in the efficacy of a douche, and he did not worry her with his own misgivings. After that he was scrupulous about using a sheath whenever they made love, until in due course she acquired one of the new female devices.