A Man of Parts (64 page)

He had spoken sincerely, but he did not unsettle her by pointing out that the Bolsheviks were severely handicapped in the monumental task of reconstruction by their doctrinal allegiance to Marx and Marxism. The Revolution that Marx had predicted should have begun in the industrialised countries of Western Europe, where there was an educated urban working class of the appropriate critical mass; instead it had actually happened first in Russia, whose population consisted mostly of an agrarian, superstitiously religious peasantry, neither able nor willing to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat. Uneasily aware of this anomaly, and of their isolated and vulnerable position on the political map of Europe, the Bolshevik leaders he met invariably asked him when the revolution was going to begin in Britain, and were disbelieving or despondent when he assured them that there wasn’t the slightest prospect of it happening.

Early in his visit Moura escorted him to a session of the Petrograd Soviet, which he had been invited to address. ‘Will you be translating my speech?’ he asked her the day before. ‘No, there is an official interpreter,’ she said. ‘How can I be sure that my words will be translated accurately?’ he said, remembering Bertrand Russell had complained that his speech to the same assembly was altered in translation to appear much more flattering about the state of Russia, and reported thus in the newspapers. ‘The best thing you can do is write your speech and I will translate it and give it to the interpreter to read out,’ she said, which she did, rather to the latter’s consternation. She was implicitly colluding with him to prevent any manipulation of his words, an action which required considerable courage given her situation, and the episode had the effect of reinforcing his growing attraction to her. In the course of their perambulations he learned something of her history, which was both sad and dramatic. Her husband was dead – murdered, she said, on their estate in Estonia after the Revolution by some peasant with a grudge – and her wedding ring had been sold for food long ago, with all her other jewellery. Her aristocratic family had lost all their wealth and property, and were dead, dispersed, or like herself had thrown in their lot with the Revolution to survive. He gathered that she had two children who were being looked after in Estonia, and whom she longed to see again, but it was impossible for her to leave Russia and an attempt to do so had led to her being jailed for a time, after which she had been in considerable jeopardy until taken under Gorky’s wing.

He made a short trip to Moscow with Gip, primarily to meet Lenin, who asked the usual question about the imminence of a revolution in Britain, but was too shrewd and sophisticated to show any surprise or disappointment at his answer. Lenin spoke excellent English and was altogether much more relaxed and less doctrinaire in conversation than he had expected from the pamphlets and speeches issued under his name. Nevertheless the interview was unsatisfactory. There was no meeting of minds: Lenin wanted to talk only about the electrification of the Soviet Union, his grandiose plan to modernise the vast territory of Soviet Russia by throwing a web of cables and pylons across it, a project ludicrously beyond the country’s industrial capacity for the foreseeable future, and was uninterested in his own belief in global collectivism and a massive programme of education that would move mankind forward on its evolutionary path towards that goal.

He was glad to go back to Petrograd for a few days before his planned return to England – to Petrograd and more particularly to Moura, whose company he had missed acutely. Her enigmatic smile, her dark lustrous eyes above the high Slavic cheekbones, and the soft curves of her body where the thin black dress clung to it, stirred in him a desire which he felt intuitively she reciprocated. The idea of parting from this bewitching woman without having made love to her, and in all probability never seeing her again, tormented him. What had so far restrained him from making the attempt was the thought that she might be Gorky’s mistress, but he had detected no sign of it in their behaviour when they were together, and Gorky’s common-law wife, the actress Maria Fyodorevna Andréeva, whose presence had caused all the trouble in America, was serenely in charge of the apartment in Petrograd. He decided that his scruple was unfounded and unnecessary.

On the last evening of his stay some bottles of wine and vodka were mustered to accompany a farewell feast consisting of five tins of sardines and three jars of stuffed peppers, obtained through some shady connection of Gorky’s. Afterwards, in the relaxed mood engendered by the food and drink, when Gorky and ‘Andereyevna’ had retired and Gip had gone to bed in the room they shared, he began to flirt discreetly with Moura on a sofa in a corner of the large living room, and then, encouraged by her response, less discreetly. The circumstances were propitious: the electricity supply had been shut down – a frequent occurrence in Petrograd – and the room was romantically lit by candles and firelight. The others still up were getting drunk on vodka, sitting in a circle round the fire, chatting and occasionally singing in Russian. ‘Do you sleep with Maxim, Moura?’ he asked. She opened her eyes wide and laughed. ‘Of course not, Aigee,’ she murmured. ‘He sleeps with Andereyevna, and I sleep on the ottoman in Molecule’s room.’ Molecule was the nickname of a young medical student whom Gorky had taken under his wing. ‘But Molecule is not here tonight,’ he pointed out. ‘No, She has gone to her friend Tatlin, the artist,’ Moura said. ‘So you will be able to sleep in a proper bed tonight,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you will be alone.’ ‘Yes,’ she said. She looked into his eyes and smiled. They understood each other.

Some hours later, when he was fairly sure everyone in the apartment, including Gip in the bed beside his, was asleep, he left his room and felt his way barefoot through the dark corridors to Moura’s. He had a story ready if he should be intercepted, that he had lost his way looking for the WC, but even so his heart beat fast, for he would hardly be believed, and the consequences would be deeply embarrassing. The risk he was taking, however, enhanced the ecstasy with which it was rewarded when he reached the safety of Moura’s room. She had the softest skin he had ever encountered. She murmured incomprehensible but exciting Russian words and phrases as she reached her climax and he released the pent seed of three weeks’ abstinence into a sheath he had prudently brought with him from England.

He did not feel guilty about being unfaithful to Rebecca. In his mind and in his memory, as he travelled back to England, that act of love in Moura’s dark bedroom (he had not seen more than dimly what she was like, naked) in the heart of dark, ruined Petrograd, did not belong to the familiar world of ordinary adultery, of hotel bedrooms and
cabinets particuliers
with pink lampshades and plush upholstery, but to a realm that was exotic, adventurous, almost imaginary, where the constraints of domestic ties and loyalties were suspended. It was perhaps for this reason that when he saw Rebecca shortly after his return, at the flat in Queen’s Gate, Kensington to which she had moved after the war, and gave her an account of his trip, he rashly did not conceal or minimise the part Moura had played as his interpreter and guide, but on the contrary described her talents with such enthusiasm, and showed such knowledge of her remarkable life, that Rebecca’s suspicions were aroused, and she suddenly said: ‘Did you sleep with her?’ Some foolish impulse of honesty made him answer, ‘Yes.’ As he saw her face go white, and then red, with shock and anger, he said, ‘Just once,’ and added foolishly, ‘On my last night.’

There followed floods of tears and a tremendous row, which ended with her declaring that she intended to take a handsome young lover herself at the first opportunity. ‘And I won’t have any difficulty finding one.’ ‘Don’t say that, Panther,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’ ‘Why shouldn’t I? It’s tit for tat.’ ‘It’s much worse for a man,’ he said. ‘Ha!’ she cried, addressing the ceiling. ‘Is this the great critic of the double standard speaking?’ And then, looking at him with fierce hatred, ‘Why don’t you go home to your frigid wife, and tell
her
all about Moura.
She
won’t mind.’ Rebecca retreated to her bedroom, locking its door and leaving him to let himself out of the flat.

He went home and immediately wrote a letter, begging her not to carry out her threat: ‘
I love you and want to keep you anyhow, but I know that in spite of myself I shan’t be able to endure your unfaithfulness. I am horribly afraid now of losing you. It will be a disaster for both of us. It will cut the heart out of my life. I don’t think it will leave much in yours
.’ When she didn’t immediately respond he sent more letters, decorated with drawings of heartbroken Jaguars gazing mournfully at the turned backs of unforgiving Panthers. ‘
I am almost unendurably lonely and miserable
,’ he wrote. ‘
I’ve done no end of work and good work. The Outline of History is going to change History. It doesn’t matter a damn so far as my wretchedness is concerned. Righteous self applause is not happiness. Russia excited me and kept me going. Now I’m down. I’m alone. I’m tired. I want a breast and a kind boddy. I want love. I want love that I can touch and feel. And I don’t deserve love. I’ve nagged at and bullied you. I’ve not kept faith. You are probably the only person who can really give me love and make me love back. I don’t believe I’ll find you next April. If I don’t find you then I hope I’ll find Death
.’ This last sentiment was overstated, but he was due to make an extended lecture tour in America in the New Year and Rebecca was about to visit a friend on Capri, so he was frantic to be reconciled before their long separation commenced. Rebecca eventually surrendered to his epistolary siege, and peace was made between them, sealed in the usual way.

Rebecca went off to Capri in November, leaving Anthony in the care of a boarding school, but he became ill himself and had to cancel his American tour. Then Rebecca’s friend on Capri also fell ill, and Rebecca was obliged to stay on, for weeks that extended into months, to look after her – or so she claimed in her letter. The worm of jealousy had entered their relationship with her threat to retaliate for his infidelity, and he wondered whether the young novelist Compton Mackenzie, who was living on Capri and whom she mentioned as having been kind to her, was part of the island’s attraction. He therefore proposed to join her in Italy at the end of January, which would be good for his health, and they could both get on with their writing under the mild winter sun. They met in Amalfi and occupied adjoining rooms at the Hotel Cappucini, ‘Miss West’ posing as his secretary and companion; and all was well until a retired English major among the guests recognised him and made an unpleasant scene in his cups one evening, complaining of ‘adulterous couples’ polluting the moral tone of the establishment. Another English acquaintance turned up at the hotel not long afterwards, and soon every guest in the place was aware of their identities. The sense of being the object of their prurient curiosity made him irritable and prone to make scenes himself, as Rebecca bitterly complained. ‘Even when people are nice to us, you snub them and make me feel awful,’ she said after he had behaved badly to a harmless brother and sister from Croydon who accompanied them on an excursion to Paestum. They left Amalfi after a month and moved on to Rome and Florence, still bickering between bouts of lovemaking, and making critical remarks when, as was their custom, they showed their work-in-progress to each other

Rebecca had had a deserved success in 1918 with her first novel
The Return of the Soldier
, a short, exquisitely written tale of a soldier who lost his memory as a result of a battle wound and recovered the happiness of his first love in consequence, only to forfeit it when, through the intervention of his embittered wife, he recovered his memory and was sent back to the Front to a probable death. It was a timely book which was highly praised and sold well, but Rebecca was struggling with her second novel, a dark, complex work called
The Judge
, while he himself was writing a riskily confessional novel called
The Secret Places of the Heart
. The hero, Sir Richmond Hardy, a world expert on fuel, was having a nervous breakdown due to overwork and the frustration of his efforts to establish international control of the earth’s resources of oil and coal, and sought help from a psychiatrist, who agreed to conduct the therapy while accompanying him on a motor tour of the West Country of England. Hardy’s sexual history was not unlike his own, a mixture of casual promiscuity and an unsatisfied longing for the perfect mate, and he currently had a mistress called Martin Leeds who annoyingly fell just short of this ideal. In the course of the motor tour Hardy met and fell in love with an enchanting young American woman and had many profound conversations with her about the meaning of life and his mission to save the world by the sensible management of fuel. In the last part of the novel they would be tempted to have an affair but abstain for the highest motives, and Hardy would die shortly afterwards leaving Martin to make a very late appearance in the book, regretting that she hadn’t fully appreciated his merits when he was alive.

There was an autobiographical source for the American girl: Margaret Sanger, the controversial leader of the birth control movement in America. He had signed a petition long ago protesting against her persecution under American law for distributing information about contraception, corresponded with her subsequently, and finally met her in the summer of 1920 when she was visiting England. He found her extremely attractive, and sensed that he could easily have initiated an affair with her, but constraints of time and circumstance as well as conscience prevented him from acting on the intuition. Rebecca had not met Margaret Sanger, but had corresponded with her at his suggestion to obtain advice on the latest methods of female contraception, and was aware of his admiration for the American woman. He knew that Rebecca would read this personal history into the parts of the novel he showed her, and hoped that she would infer, and give him credit for, a wholly chaste friendship with Margaret. She did not however appreciate her own part in the story, which was mostly off-stage. She declared that ‘Martin Leeds’ was the most improbable name for a female character in the history of fiction, and tactlessly laughed aloud while reading chapters into which he could not recall putting any jokes. He retaliated by criticising the structure of
The Judge
, which started with a fine dramatic situation – a judge picks up a prostitute whose husband he sentenced to death ten years earlier and the woman plans to murder him in revenge – and then worked further and further backwards into the past. ‘The writing is all very fine, Panther – lots of vivid local colour – but you are keeping us waiting impatiently to rejoin the opening scene, to discover what happens next. What does happen?’ ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ Rebecca said sulkily. ‘That’s why you keep going backwards,’ he said.