A Man of Parts (56 page)

After two years of playful, sometimes decadent sex with little E, who made him demonstrate his whole repertoire of postures, but never wholly abandoned herself, the fierce passion Rebecca brought to the act of love was transporting, reminding him of the ecstasy he had enjoyed with Amber, and yet with a distinctly different quality. Amber he always thought of as an athlete of sex, a kind of Atalanta, clean-limbed, agile, pagan, whereas there was something feral about Rebecca when she was stripped and hungry for love. Her body was less classically beautiful than Amber’s, but it was sensual, with a full bust, small waist, broad hips and a generously curved bottom. She had a luxuriant bush of pubic hair. ‘I was ashamed of it when it first grew,’ she said. ‘I thought it looked like an animal’s fur.’ ‘That’s what’s so nice about it,’ he said. ‘There’s something animal about you that is very exciting. Something feline, a kind of contained energy that might show itself at any moment, like the leap of a panther in the jungle. I shall call you “Panther.”’ ‘And what shall I call you?’ ‘Call me “Jaguar”. We will be two big cats, mating in the jungle.’ This childish fantasy pleased them both, and became an essential element of their relationship.

He confessed to Jane that he was seeing Rebecca and discovered that, as usual, she had already guessed something of the kind was going on. ‘Elizabeth won’t stand it, if she finds out,’ she said.

‘You don’t think so?’ he said.

‘You know she won’t. Are you going to tell her when you go to Randogne?’ His visit to the Chalet Soleil was now imminent.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll see.’

He went to Switzerland in a state of indecision. He didn’t really want to break with Elizabeth if he could avoid it. Irritating as she had become of late, with her patronising little digs at Jane and himself, she was an ideal mistress: an interesting, intelligent companion, and a lover whose attitude to sex as a source of pleasure rather than an expression of deep emotional commitment was one he in principle approved. That she was well-off, and well-connected, and owned a fine house in his favourite part of Europe where he could stay for extended periods for both work and recreation, were also considerable assets which he would be sorry to sacrifice. On the other hand he was enraptured with young Rebecca: he had never met any woman who combined such exciting sensuality with the intelligence, eloquence and wit she possessed, both in speech and in writing. Elizabeth was an amusing conversationalist and a skilful writer, but within modest limits. She was basically an entertainer, skating elegantly on the surface of life, never plumbing the dark depths, never really challenging or disturbing her readers. Rebecca was only at the beginning of her career, but he was sure she would turn out to be the more considerable writer in the long run, and it would be rewarding to observe and guide her development. Must he choose between these two relationships? Or could he somehow contrive to enjoy both? Should he tell little E about Rebecca when he got to Randogne, and risk an irreversible break-up, or devote himself to smoothing over the bad feeling with which they had last parted, and continue to maintain the liaison with Rebecca in secrecy for as long as she was interested herself ?

Because he hadn’t made up his mind what to do before he arrived at the Chalet Soleil he succeeded in doing nothing satisfactorily. Elizabeth greeted him graciously but with something less than joy. He sensed she was expecting a humble apology for his behaviour when they were last together, but he felt he had already done that by letter, and that she had not reciprocated with any admission of being at fault herself. The first days passed quite agreeably in their accustomed way, both of them working in the mornings, he in the main house and she in the Little Chalet, then going for walks in the afternoon, followed by dinner and light reading in the evening with perhaps a little music from the piano, which Elizabeth played extremely well. But she did not come through the secret door between their rooms at night. He felt they were both performing parts, outwardly genial but inwardly watchful, circling each other mentally like wrestlers preparing to grapple but never actually doing so. He asked her what she was working on and she said, ‘a novel about adultery’. ‘The best sport in the world!’ he said, meaning to refer to their own civilised and light-hearted indulgence in it, but her answering smile was slightly forced, and he wondered whether she harboured suspicions that he had been unfaithful to her. She asked him if Rebecca West was still ‘pestering’ him, and he replied accurately but misleadingly that she was not. But when she made some slighting remarks about Rebecca’s contributions to the
New Freewoman
, he said that in his opinion, and that of several others, Fordie Hueffer and Violet for instance, she was the most brilliant young journalist in London. ‘Really?’ she said in a tone of bored scepticism, but she eyed him as if trying to assess the hidden significance of his words.

He had brought the proofs of
The World Set Free
to work on and one evening read some of it to her, but she didn’t care for it. ‘Why do you smash the world up like that?’ she asked. ‘To stop humanity from smashing it up in earnest,’ he said. ‘But there’s a kind of joy in destruction in your descriptions,’ she said, ‘like a naughty boy kicking over somebody else’s sand-castle, that they’ve spent hours building. How could you bring yourself to bomb Paris, beautiful Paris, to smithereens, even in imagination? After all, these bombs don’t actually exist, so nobody could really do it.’ ‘They will exist one day,’ he said. ‘So you say,’ she jeered. Again she did not come to his room that night – or the next. He sensed that she was waiting for him to beg her to do so, but he was not going to crawl to her. Why should he? It was a kind of silent duel between them – who was going to crack first? Who was going to provoke a confrontation and take responsibility for what followed?

In the end it was himself. After the sixth night spent lying fruitlessly awake in the dark, straining to hear the faint sound of the secret door being slid open, he had had enough, and told Elizabeth, when they stepped out on to the terrace after breakfast, that he would be leaving in the afternoon, two days earlier than planned. They were looking down the valley, which was covered at the bottom by a layer of early morning mist like cotton wool. ‘Why?’ she said, without taking her eyes off the view. ‘I don’t see that there’s any point in my staying any longer,’ he said. ‘Are you saying it’s all over between us?’ she said. ‘Every night since I arrived I have lain awake, waiting for you to come to my room,’ he said, ‘and you didn’t come. I take that to be a kind of statement.’ ‘I suppose it is,’ she said. ‘It’s because I’m common, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘No, it’s not,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘You
are
a little common in some ways, G, indeed it’s common just to say “
It’s because I’m common, isn’t it?
” But you’re also a genius, and one can forgive a genius for many imperfections. There’s someone else, though, isn’t there?’ ‘Suppose for the sake of argument there were,’ he said. ‘Why should that affect a relationship that has suited both of us very well for the last two years?’ ‘I know there is someone else,’ she said. ‘I feel it. I don’t like it. I won’t have it.’ ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and pack my bags.’

The Chalet Soleil was reached from Randogne by a little mountain railway that terminated a mile below the house. As he walked down the steep path that led to the station, preceded by a servant with a handcart containing his luggage, he felt sure that Elizabeth was watching him from a window, or the terrace, but he did not look back. The further he left the chalet behind him, the more his spirits rose, and they continued to rise as he travelled across Europe towards London, where Rebecca awaited him. If, as it had turned out, he could not have both women, he had no doubt that he had made the right choice between them. Little E had nothing new to give him. Rebecca was youth, life, and infinite potential.

As soon as he got back to Easton Glebe he told Jane what had happened: Elizabeth was history, Rebecca was the future. ‘As you wish, H.G.,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘But I don’t want to meet Rebecca again, and I certainly don’t want her staying here.’ He agreed without demur to these conditions, and thought he understood the feelings from which they arose. Jane wouldn’t be able to relate to Rebecca as she had to Elizabeth, a woman of her own age, or to Amber, a girl she had known from adolescence, who had been almost a surrogate daughter to her. Rebecca – not only young, but assertive and ambitious – would be more of a challenge, even a threat to Jane, if allowed into the ambit of their domestic and social life.

So he had to pursue his affair with Rebecca in a separate zone, and it remained clandestine. He did not meet her in St James’s Court any more – there was always the risk of the housekeeper noticing and gossiping, not to mention the embarrassing possibility of running into Elizabeth going in or out of the building when he had Rebecca on his arm. Rebecca had now moved out of her family home into a bed-sitting room in Maida Vale, but he could not visit her there with propriety. For a while they met regularly at the house of a married friend of Rebecca’s, Carrie Townshend, and he would take her off afterwards for a few hours to rooms he rented in Warwick Street, Pimlico, whose owner, Mrs Strange, was sympathetic to lovers. There they could act out their Panther–Jaguar fantasy without restraint. She would crouch on the bed, naked, like a panther couchant, with her head up, following him with her eyes as he, naked too, prowled round the room, emitting low-pitched growls, and then he would suddenly pounce, and locked together they would roll about on the bed, or on the floor, licking, biting and digging their claws into each other before he mated with her and they came to a noisy climax. Then she would purr in his arms until they both fell into a delicious sleep. He had never known such liberating sex, sex which acknowledged the animal nature of lust but turned it into a kind of erotic theatre. It provided a private language for their frequent exchange of love letters. ‘
There is NO Panfer but Panfer, and she is the Prophet of the most High Jaguar which is bliss and perfect being
,’ he wrote to her, and drew a picshua at the end of the two of them as big cats. He wrote of wanting to nuzzle her ‘
dear fur
’ and of coming up to Town for ‘
a snatch at your ears and a whisk of your tail
’. But he also wrote more seriously, ‘
I’ve been home two hours and twice I’ve turned round to say something to you – and you weren’t there. My dear Panther it’s like the feeling of suddenly missing a limb
.’ This was no
passade
: to his wonderment he was genuinely, helplessly in love – and for the first time in his life with a woman who if not yet his intellectual equal, might very well turn out to be. She did not flatter him or defer to him or abase herself before his genius, but challenged him and stimulated him by her shrewd insights into his work and that of others. And she could be very funny. She had been taken up lately by Fordie and Violet Hueffer, who were living together as man and wife in spite of rumours that he was not legally divorced, and Rebecca’s description of being kissed by Fordie, ‘like being the toast under a poached egg’, had kept him chuckling intermittently for a whole day. When a group of people were discussing Cecil Chesterton’s dirty-looking complexion and someone said it was natural, because she had seen him bathing in the sea at Le Touquet and he came out looking just the same as when he went in, Rebecca instantly asked, ‘But did you look at the Channel?’

The honeymoon phase of their affair came to an end early in January of 1914, when Rebecca told him she was probably pregnant. They met by previous arrangement at Mrs Strange’s house, and as soon as he saw her face he knew what she was going to say. Her period was long overdue, and she was experiencing some morning sickness. ‘What shall I do?’ she said, weeping. ‘You mean, what shall
we
do,’ he said, and she smiled gratefully through her tears. ‘The first thing,’ he said, ‘is to arrange for you to see a doctor and confirm it. But we should assume that you are pregnant, and I think I know how it happened.’ He reminded her of the occasion in the flat at St James’s Court when they had made love on the sofa in his drawing room. ‘It was my fault,’ he said. ‘No, it was mine for urging you on,’ she said. ‘Well, let’s not argue about that,’ he said. ‘What shall I do?’ she said again. ‘What you must do is have the baby,’ he said. ‘You’re not thinking of anything else, I hope?’ She shook her head, but without conviction. ‘Is there any other way?’ she said. ‘I’ve scarcely begun my career, and now it’s all ruined.’ ‘Nonsense,’ he said briskly. ‘And no, there isn’t any other way. Abortion is dangerous and a criminal offence. Don’t think of it. I’ll arrange a comfortable confinement for you in some quiet country place where I can visit, and you can get on with your writing until your time is due. Then you’ll have the baby and we will find some worthy couple to adopt it, and you’ll be free to resume your independent life again, with me as your lover. What do you say to that?’ ‘I say you’re a wonderful Jaguar,’ she said smiling and blinking away her tears. ‘But what will Jane say?’ ‘Jane will take it in her stride,’ he said. ‘It won’t be the first time, I’m afraid.’

In fact Jane came very near to losing her temper with him on this occasion. ‘For God’s sake, H.G.!’ she exclaimed when he broke the news. ‘Not again!’

‘It was unintentional, of course,’ he said. ‘My fault – I must take responsibility, and I do. You needn’t bother yourself about it. I will make all the arrangements.’

‘Well, you’ve had plenty of experience,’ Jane said tartly. ‘Don’t expect me to buy the layette this time.’

He was surprised how blithe he felt about the situation. But perhaps, he admitted to himself, he wasn’t sorry to have bound Rebecca to himself all the more securely by this accident, and he set about making arrangements for her confinement with careful deliberation. It was true, as Jane said, that he had his experience with Amber to draw on, but there was a big difference: in that case they had hoisted the flag of Free Love above the cottage in which she awaited the birth of her child, and paid the price for defying conventional morality. The resulting uproar had put him under intolerable strain, and nearly destroyed his career as a public man, but gradually the episode had faded from the collective memory, and he was now respected and – in most circles – accepted again. He did not want to jeopardise that recovery by another scandal of the same kind. He therefore looked for a location safely remote from London and its gossip-mongers, and, after doing a considerable amount of research, settled on the Welsh coastal resort of Llandudno. He invented a fictitious identity for himself as ‘Mr West’, and obtained details of houses and rooms to let there from local estate agents. At that point, however, he was obliged to leave the matter temporarily in Rebecca’s hands, while he made a three-week trip to St Petersburg with Maurice Baring that had been arranged before he learned she was pregnant.