‘The mind is a time machine that travels backwards in memory and forwards in prophecy, but he has done with prophecy now …’
Sequestered in his blitz-battered Regent’s Park house in 1944, the ailing Herbert George Wells, ‘H.G.’ to his family and friends, looks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. Has it been a success or a failure? Once he was the most famous writer in the world, ‘the man who invented tomorrow’; now he feels like yesterday’s man, deserted by readers and depressed by the collapse of his utopian dreams.
He recalls his unpromising start, and early struggles to acquire an education and make a living as a teacher; his rapid rise to fame as a writer with a prophetic imagination and a comic common touch which brought him into contact with most of the important literary, intellectual, and political figures of his time; his plunge into socialist politics; his belief in free love, and energetic practice of it. Arguing with himself about his conduct, he relives his relationships with two wives and many mistresses, especially the brilliant student Amber Reeves and the gifted writer Rebecca West, both of whom bore him children, with dramatic and long-lasting consequences.
Unfolding this astonishing story, David Lodge depicts a man as contradictory as he was talented: a socialist who enjoyed his affluence, an acclaimed novelist who turned against the literary novel; a feminist womaniser, sensual yet incurably romantic, irresistible and exasperating by turns, but always vitally human.
David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Thinks..., Author, Author and, most recently, Deaf Sentence. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.
A Novel
by
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also By David Lodge
Title Page
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Five
Acknowledgements
Copyright
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
He could imagine as existing, as waiting for him, he knew not where, a completeness of understanding, a perfection of response, that would reach all the gamut of his feelings and sensations from the most poetical to the most entirely physical, a beauty of relationship so transfiguring that not only would she – it went without saying that this completion was a woman – be perfectly beautiful in its light but, what was manifestly more incredible, that he too would be perfectly beautiful and quite at his ease … In her presence there could be no self-reproaches, no lapses, no limitations, nothing but happiness and the happiest activities … To such a persuasion half the imaginative people in the world succumb as readily as ducklings take to water. They do not doubt its truth any more than a thirsty camel doubts that presently it will come to a spring.
This persuasion is as foolish as though a camel hoped that some day it would drink from such a spring that it would never thirst again.
A young mind is like a green field and full of possibilities, but an old mind becomes more and more like a cemetery crowded up with memories.
Nearly everything that happens in this narrative is based on factual sources – ‘based on’ in the elastic sense that includes ‘inferable from’ and ‘consistent with’. All the characters are portrayals of real people, and the relationships between them were as described in these pages. Quotations from their books and other publications, speeches, and (with very few exceptions) letters, are their own words. But I have used a novelist’s licence in representing what they thought, felt and said to each other, and I have imagined many circumstantial details which history omitted to record.
D.L.
IN THE SPRING of 1944 Hanover Terrace, a handsome row of Nash town houses on the western perimeter of Regent’s Park, is looking distinctly war-worn. Its cream stucco façade, untended since 1939, is soiled, cracked and peeling; many windows, shattered by bomb blast or shock waves from the anti-aircraft guns on Primrose Hill, are boarded up; a house towards the end of the terrace, hit by an incendiary bomb, is a gutted shell, stained with smoke. The elegant arcade running the length of the building, which serves as a communal porch for the front doors of the houses, is chipped and flaking, as are the massive Doric columns supporting the building’s central feature – a pediment framing statuary of classical figures engaged in various useful and artistic pursuits, two of whom have lost their heads and one an arm. The goddess who formerly stood on the apex of the pediment, clasping an orb, has been removed as a potential danger to people below if she should be suddenly toppled by an explosion; and the cast-iron railings that, smartly painted in black and gold, used to divide the service road and its shrubbery from the park’s Outer Circle, were long ago cut down and taken away to make munitions.
Only one house, number 13, has been permanently occupied throughout the war by its owner, Mr H.G. Wells. During the London Blitz of 1940–41 he was frequently teased with the suggestion that this might prove an unlucky number, to which he responded, consistent with a lifetime’s contempt for superstition, by having a bigger ‘13’ painted on the wall beside his front door. He stubbornly refused to move to the country, saying ‘Hitler (or in male company, “that shit Hitler”) is not going to get me on the run’, and stayed put in Hanover Terrace as, one by one, his neighbours slunk off to safe rural havens and their houses were occupied by sub-tenants or left empty.
As long as he was physically able to do so H.G. put on a tin hat and took his turn at fire-watching from the roof of Hanover Terrace, partly from a sense of patriotic duty and partly from a personal solicitude for the Aubusson carpet in his drawing room. It also gave him a gloomy satisfaction to observe from, as it were, a grandstand seat, the fulfilment of his prophecy as far back as 1908, in his novel The War in the Air, that future wars would be dominated by air power and involve the destruction of cities and civilian populations by indiscriminate bombing. Admittedly he had been mistaken in assuming that this strategy would be carried out mainly by enormous airships, big as ocean liners, rather than aeroplanes, but given the state of aeronautical engineering in 1908 that was not such a wild guess, and certainly didn’t seem so a few years later when German Zeppelins appeared in the night sky over England. Penguin Books considered The War in the Air still sufficiently relevant to the current war to reissue it in 1941, with a brief new Preface by himself that concluded with an epitaph he wished to have inscribed on his tombstone: ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’
Fire-watching is beyond him now, but there is little need for it. In the spring of 1944, the sirens seldom sound. The unexpected resumption of German night raids at the beginning of the year turned out to be just a token retaliation for the carpet-bombing of German cities by the British and American air forces and soon petered out. Now there is only the occasional hit-and-run daylight raid by some fast low-flying fighter-bomber that slips under the radar shield, and these rarely get as far as central London. Nazi Germany has more important things on its military mind: grimly resisting the advance of the Russian armies in the east, and preparing to repulse the invasion of occupied France which everybody knows is imminent. London is safe again, and one by one the leaseholders of Hanover Terrace are creeping back to reclaim their property, viewed with some contempt by H.G. who has been here for the duration, keeping to his routine, writing his books, answering letters, going for a daily constitutional – across the road and into the park, to the Zoo or the Rose Garden, or down Baker Street to the Savile Club in Brook Street, pausing for a browse in Smith’s bookshop on the way.
Lately he has had to give up these excursions – even the Rose Garden is too far. He is not well. He has no strength. He has no appetite. He rises late and sits in an armchair in the small sitting room, or in the sun lounge, a glassed-in balcony at the back of the house, with a rug over his knees, reading and dozing intermittently, woken with a start by the sound of his book sliding to the floor, or by his daughter-in-law Marjorie, who has acted as his secretary ever since his wife died, coming in with some letters that need answering or just to check that he is comfortable. In the evenings he is visited by his elder son Gip, Marjorie’s husband, or by Anthony, his natural son by Rebecca West, born on the first day of the First World War. He is conscious of these three people going in and out, scrutinising him with worried frowns. For some time he has had a nurse in the house at nights; now his physician Lord Horder has recommended that they employ a day nurse as well. He wonders if he is dying.
One evening in April, Anthony West rings up his mother. She receives the call at her home, Ibstone House, the surviving wing of a Regency period mansion, with its own farm attached, in the country near High Wycombe, where she lives with her husband Henry Andrews, a banker and economist now working at the Ministry of Economic Warfare.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,’ Anthony says. ‘Horder says H.G. has cancer of the liver.’
‘Oh God!’ says Rebecca. ‘How awful. Does he know?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You’re not going to tell him, I hope?’
‘Well, I’ve been talking it over with Gip. We think we should.’
‘But why?’
‘H.G. has always believed in facing facts. He’s not afraid of death. He’s said so on many occasions.’
‘It’s one thing to say it …’
‘I don’t think we should discuss this over the phone, Rac,’ Anthony says, using the nickname she acquired when she married Henry and they began calling themselves Ric and Rac after two French cartoon dogs. ‘I wish I could have come over and told you in person.’
‘Because you’re feeling dreadful?’
‘Because I thought you would feel dreadful.’
‘Well, of course I do,’ says Rebecca, bridling slightly. Their conversations tend to be barbed with little implied or inferred accusations and rebuttals, which often turn into bigger ones.
‘I can’t get over to Ibstone at the moment,’ Anthony says. ‘We’re short-staffed in Far East and I’m very busy.’ He is currently working as a sub-editor in the Far Eastern Department of the BBC’s Overseas Service.
Anthony summarises Horder’s prognosis: H.G. might experience some remission, but he probably has only a year to live, at the most. They argue again about whether he should be told, until Rebecca irritably terminates the call. She goes to her study and records it in her diary, concluding: ‘My chief anxiety is that Anthony should not be hit too hard by this news. I have made my peace with H.G. I have not forgotten the cruel things he did to me, but our affection is real and living.’ Her diary is written with one eye on her future biographers, who will quote from it.
Anthony rings up Jean, a pretty young brunette with superb breasts who works as a secretary at Bush House, with whom he is having a passionate affair, and tells her the news about his father. She is sympathetic, but unable to enter fully into his emotions because she has never met H.G., and she cannot be introduced to him or to the rest of the family because Anthony is married to Kitty, who is running their farm and looking after their two children while he works at the BBC, and Kitty is at present unaware of Jean’s existence. Meanwhile Anthony when he is working in London lives in the mews flat at the end of the rear garden of number 13 Hanover Terrace, known in the family as ‘Mr Mumford’s’ after some former tenant long gone and probably dead.
‘Have you told your wife about us yet?’ Jean asks Anthony, lowering her voice so her flatmate Phyllis won’t hear. Their affair is consummated mainly in this flat, situated conveniently near Bush House, in daytime hours snatched when they are free and Phyllis is at work.
‘Not yet.’
‘When will you?’
‘I have to wait for the right moment.’
‘There’ll never be a right moment. You just have to do it.’
‘I can’t while we’re all absorbing this news about H.G.’
‘Well …’
‘I love you, Jean.’
‘Love you too. But I hate this hole and corner thing.’
‘I know, but be patient, darling,’ he says.
Some days later Rebecca receives a phone call from Marjorie, asking her to come and see H.G. ‘Would he welcome that?’ Rebecca asks. The wounds of their parting in 1923 or ’24 (it was never clear to either of them exactly when it became final) after a stormy and passionate relationship that had stretched over a decade, have healed, and they have been on friendly terms in recent years, but knowing that he has a life-threatening illness makes a visit potentially stressful. ‘He said he would like to see you,’ says Marjorie. ‘Then I’ll come,’ says Rebecca. ‘Does he know about his … ?’ ‘Yes,’ says Marjorie.
Rebecca takes with her a basket containing eggs and butter and cheese from the Ibstone House farm, precious largesse which the housekeeper receives gratefully. ‘Mr Wells can’t stomach the dried eggs any more whatever I do with them,’ she says. ‘A nice fresh egg soft-boiled might tempt him.’ H.G. has had a bad night and is not quite ready to see Rebecca when she arrives, so she is shown into the long drawing room on the first floor to wait. She has never liked the house: it is grand but cold and rather gloomy, with dark polished parquet floors and beige walls, furnished with impersonal good taste, like an expensive hotel. There is an Aubusson carpet in the drawing room and a Tang terracotta horse on the mantelpiece but they express the owner’s wealth, not his personality. H.G. never did have much visual taste, she reflects. He was obsessed with functionality in domestic architecture, but indifferent to décor, a fanatic for plumbing, but a poor judge of pictures. The house lacks a woman’s touch – Moura Budberg, his mistress when he bought the lease in 1935, wisely refused either to marry or to cohabit with him, and she has had no successor. Even his study, which Rebecca peeps into on her way to visit the lavatory, with its mahogany desk bearing a green-shaded reading lamp on a heavy ziggurat base, a matching inkstand and a leather-bound blotting pad, might be the office of the chairman of a bank – except that on the polished surface of the desk there are two foolscap manila folders, creased and dog-eared from use, one to each side of the blotter, which look as if they contain manuscripts rather than accounts.
In the ground floor cloakroom she examines her fifty-year-old face in the mirror for new wrinkles, and combs her greying hair. She refreshes her lipstick, powders her nose, and shapes her eyebrows with a licked finger, feeling a little foolish at this display of vanity – but one wants to look one’s best when meeting an old lover, even if he is sick and dying. She is amused to observe a notebook and pencil lying on top of a cabinet next to the W.C. – it was always H.G.’s habit to have notebooks scattered around whatever house he was occupying, in case some thought occurred to him which he could scribble down before he forgot it. She peeps inside the notebook, but the pages are blank.
The small sitting room to which she is summoned when H.G. is ready is cosier than the drawing room, but she finds him in low spirits, worried and depressed. He is slouched in an armchair beside a fire of smouldering slack, his neatly slippered, size five feet peeping from under the rug covering his legs. Anthony and Gip have told him that he has cancer, but not the prognosis. ‘I want to know how long I have left,’ he says plaintively, ‘but they won’t tell me. Even Horder won’t tell me.’
‘That’s because they don’t know. You could live for years, Jaguar.’ Long ago, when they were lovers, they called each other ‘Panther’ and ‘Jaguar’ in bed and correspondence, and she thinks the name will please him, but to her dismay it upsets him even more. A tear trickles from one eye down his cheek and loses itself in the roots of the moustache, now grey and rather straggling, with which in his prime he would tickle intimate parts of her anatomy.
‘I don’t want to die, Panther,’ he says.
‘Nobody wants to.’
‘I know – but we must. Of course one must. I’m ashamed of myself.’ He sits up in his chair, smiles, reaches over and squeezes her hand. ‘Thank you for coming to see me.’
‘I brought you some eggs from the farm.’
‘That was kind,’ he says. ‘And how are you? Are you writing?’
‘Only journalism. I can’t concentrate on anything more substantial with the war going on and on …’
‘You managed to finish Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in spite of the Blitz.’
‘I had to. But it totally exhausted me. And what about you, Jaguar?’
‘Oh, I shuffle pages about. I have a couple of things on the go, but I’m not sure I shall finish either of them. Nobody’s interested in me now, anyway.’
‘Nonsense,’ says Rebecca, dutifully.
H.G. asks after Henry. ‘He’s working very hard at the Ministry on plans for post-war reconstruction,’ says Rebecca. ‘I must say it’s very reassuring to see him with his gaze fixed so confidently on the future, while the rest of us are biting our nails about the present. And how is Moura?’
‘She’s in the country, staying with Tania.’
‘Has she been to see you, since … ?’
‘Since Horder pronounced the death sentence?’
‘Don’t, Jaguar!’
‘I told Gip Moura wasn’t to be put in the picture yet. She’s not been feeling too well herself lately, and went down to Tania’s to rest and recuperate. I don’t want to upset her unnecessarily.’
‘I see.’ Rebecca ponders this information, uncertain whether to feel flattered or used that she has been summoned to comfort the stricken H.G. in preference to his mistress – if that is what Moura still is. The exact nature of their relationship has always been an enigma – to H.G. as much as anyone, he claims.
‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘I was afraid that if she was told I’m dying she’d come over all Russian on me, like some Gorky character, get maudlin drunk on brandy, and make me even more depressed than I am already.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Rebecca says with a smile. Moura, Baroness Budberg, does seem like a character who has stepped from the pages of a Russian novel, trailing melodramatic, barely credible stories of love and adventure: that she walked across the ice between Russia and Estonia at the time of the Revolution to get to her first husband and their children; that he was murdered on his estate and she later married the Baron to obtain an Estonian passport, paying his gambling debts in return and divorcing him shortly afterwards; that she was the lover of the British secret agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, and was suspected with him of involvement in the 1918 plot to assassinate Lenin, but found protection as secretarial assistant to Maxim Gorky. Rebecca knows this last detail is true because H.G. stayed with Gorky on a visit to Russia in 1920, and his confession to her on his return that he had slept with Moura, who lived in the Petrograd apartment, provoked one of their most divisive rows. Years after their relationship had come to an end, and his wife Jane was dead, H.G. met Moura again, decided she was the love of his life, helped her to settle in England, and tried in vain to persuade her to marry him. Anthony, who likes Moura and approves of her relationship with H.G., nevertheless believes she is a Soviet spy, as do several other people. Rebecca is uncertain whether to believe this or not: although Moura might have been a Mata Hari once, it is difficult to see the matronly, slightly dowdy fifty-year-old woman of today in that role. But being herself an outspoken critic of Soviet Russia, she keeps a wary distance from Moura.
These thoughts and memories slide across Rebecca’s mind as she chats to H.G. on light, neutral topics, until she notices his eyes are almost closed. ‘I don’t want to tire you,’ she says. ‘I’ll be on my way.’ She stands, stoops and kisses his cheek. It is no longer as smooth and plump as it once was, but his skin still smells faintly and pleasantly of walnuts, as it did when they first became lovers. Somerset Maugham asked her once, with a smile that was half a sneer, what had been the secret of H.G.’s sexual attraction, a man twice her age, not especially good-looking, only five foot five in height, and tending to corpulence, and she answered: ‘He smelled of walnuts, and he frisked like a nice animal.’
As she is leaving the house, smiling at the recollection of this remark, she meets Gip in the front hall, coming in from outside, and her smile fades. She berates him and Anthony for upsetting their father by telling him he is dying.
‘He kept asking questions,’ says Gip. ‘I don’t like lying to H.G. He brought us up, Frank and me, to tell the truth. It’s the basis of good science.’ Gip is Reader in Marine Biology at University College London.
They glare at each other with mutual dislike. It makes Rebecca feel almost physically sick to look at him, he so resembles his mother, the petite, dainty, self-effacing Jane, who clung on to her husband in spite of his many infidelities, and inspired in him an unshakeable loyalty. Hard as she tried, she could never persuade H.G. to divorce Jane. Of course it suited him very well to have a wife who looked after his every comfort and entertained his friends and typed his manuscripts and kept his accounts in order while he went off whenever he felt the urge and bedded whoever took his fancy, but no self-respecting woman would have tolerated the situation. Rebecca never doubted that if Jane had told H.G. he must choose between the two of them, he would have divorced Jane and married herself. She would have been a fit consort for him, his intellectual equal, and a great deal of emotional misery would have been avoided, not least for Anthony.
‘Anthony agreed that we should tell H.G.,’ says Gip.
‘I know,’ says Rebecca. ‘But I think he regrets doing so. He sounds overwrought when I speak to him on the phone.’
‘Well of course he’s upset,’ says Gip. ‘Anthony is very devoted to H.G.’
‘Anthony has a reverse Oedipus complex,’ Rebecca bursts out. ‘He has wanted to kill his mother and marry his father ever since he found out who his father was. Because I had to bring him up, I was the one he blamed for being sent to boarding school, and being bullied and teased and miserable, while H.G. was always the godlike Uncle-figure who descended from time to time in his motor car distributing presents and whisking him off to theatres and restaurants.’
‘Yes, well …’ Gip says. ‘It must have been difficult for Anthony.’
‘It was difficult for me!’ Rebecca almost shouts.
Left alone in the small sitting room, H.G. stares into the fire, wondering what the world will say about him when he dies. The obituaries, of course, have already been written. Given his age and distinction, they will have been on file in the newspaper offices for years, revised and brought up to date periodically, ready for publication when the time comes. The time has come rather sooner than he expected when he wrote a humorous ‘auto-obituary’ for a BBC radio series in 1935. It was published in the Listener and reprinted in newspapers around the world. ‘The name of H.G. Wells, who died yesterday afternoon of heart failure in the Paddington Infirmary, at the age of 97, will have few associations for the younger generation,’ it began. ‘But those whose adult memories stretch back to the opening decades of the present century and who shared the miscellaneous reading of the period may recall a number of titles of the books he wrote and may even find in some odd attic an actual volume or so of his works. He was indeed one of the most prolific of the “literary hacks” of that time …’ He pictured himself in the early 1960s as a ‘bent, shabby, slovenly and latterly somewhat obese figure’ hobbling round the gardens of Regent’s Park with the aid of a stick, talking to himself. ‘“Some day,” he would be heard to say, “I shall write a book, a real book.”’ This piece was intended, and generally received, as a jeu d’esprit, a disarming exercise in self-mockery, but it doesn’t seem so absurdly wide of the mark now.
Of course the real obituaries, when they appear in due course, will be long, and respectful, paying tribute to his many achievements, his hundred-odd books, his thousands of articles, the originality of his early scientific romances like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, the controversial impact of his treatment of sexual relations in novels like Ann Veronica (the irregularity of his own sexual life would be discreetly veiled), the warm Dickensian humour of novels like Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, the remarkable accuracy of many of his predictions (the inaccuracy of many others would be tactfully passed over), the global success of the Outline of History, his morale-boosting journalism in two world wars, his hobnobbing with leading statesmen, his presidency of the international PEN association, his tireless campaigning for science, for education, for the abolition of poverty, for peace, for human rights, for world government … Yes, there is plenty for them to write about. But there will be an inevitable dying fall to the tributes, a sense of anticlimax, a perceptibly bored perfunctoriness in the record of the last twenty-five years, and an implication that he published too many books in that period, of diminishing quality. All the emphasis will be on the first half of his life – up to, say, 1920. That was the terminal date of his influence according to George Orwell, in his Horizon article a few years ago: ‘Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation … I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much.’ He recalls the words without difficulty, having returned so often to the article, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, fingering it like an old wound that still aches.
– But that’s a pretty impressive achievement, isn’t it? To have created a whole generation of thinking people … ?
He has heard this voice frequently of late, but when he looks round there is nobody else in the room, so it must be in his head. Sometimes the voice is friendly, sometimes challenging, sometimes neutrally enquiring. It articulates things he had forgotten or suppressed, things he is glad to remember and things he would rather not be reminded of, things he knows others say about him behind his back, and things people will probably say about him in the future after he is dead, in biographies and memoirs and perhaps even novels.
– Something to be proud of surely?
– Not the way Orwell served it up. He said that what made me seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, makes me a shallow, inadequate thinker now. He said that since 1920 I have squandered my talents slaying paper dragons.
– He did add, if I remember rightly, ‘But how much it is, after all, to have talents to squander.’
– That was just a sop, to try and draw the sting at the end. He probably added it in proof, because he’d just remembered that Sonia had invited Inez and me to dinner.
He had first met Orwell through the novelist Inez Holden, who was renting Mr Mumford’s at the time, 1941, and a few days before the dinner party she had given him the latest issue of Horizon with the essay about himself in it, saying, ‘I think you’d better read this before next Saturday, H.G., because George will assume you’ve seen it. Don’t take it too hard – he does admire you really.’ The article had upset him. It started by attacking his early journalism about the war, and admittedly he had been rash in affirming that the German army was a spent force just before it began to rampage through Russia, but what really stung was the assertion that ‘much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes are all there.’
– Well, they are, aren’t they?
– Yes, but with an entirely different intention behind them. It’s a travesty of what I have advocated and worked to bring about – as I told him at that dinner party.
He had taken Horizon with him to dispute the article, and saw immediately that Orwell had his own copy to hand, evidently prepared for a duel. They sat face to face at the table and he took Orwell through the text paragraph by paragraph, while Inez and Sonia listened nervously and the remaining guest, William Empson, got increasingly drunk. Honours were about equal by the end of the evening, but shortly afterwards Orwell gave a radio talk in which he said that H.G. Wells supposed that science would save the world, when it was far more likely to destroy it. Enraged by this second assault he fired off a note to Orwell care of the BBC: ‘I don’t say that at all, you shit. Read my early work.’
– Such as?
– Such as The Island of Dr Moreau. Such as The Sleeper Awakes. Such as The War of the Worlds. It’s not science that saves Earth from the Martians. It’s the accident that they lack immunity to earthly bacterial infection.
– But in other books you claim that the application of science can save the world.
– The application, yes. Progress all depends on a benign application of science. But our literary intellectuals have never had any faith in that possibility. Eliot, for instance, who’s at the opposite pole to Orwell in every other way, agrees with him about that.
– T.S. Eliot said some complimentary things about you in that article in the New English Review.
– But the tone of the whole piece was patronising, and at the end he said, ‘Mr Wells, putting all his money on the near future, is walking very near the edge of despair.’ Christians like Eliot have never expected anything better from humanity than blitzkriegs and concentration camps, because they believe in original sin. So they can calmly contemplate the end of civilisation, put their feet up, and wait for the Second Coming.
– Why do these fellows bother you so much?
He stares into the heart of the fire, glowing dully under a coat of grey-white ash.
– Because I’m afraid they may be right. I am very near despair.
‘The old man is muttering to himself again,’ the day nurse says to the night nurse, as they change over that evening.
‘What about?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ says the day nurse. ‘I can only make out the odd word. “Obituary” is a favourite.’
– Still brooding about your obituaries?
– I think atheists suffering from a terminal disease should be allowed to read their obituaries. In confidence, of course, and with no right of reply – except perhaps to correct matters of fact.
– Why only atheists?
– Well, if you believe in an afterlife, one of the things to look forward to must be finding out what your contemporaries really thought of you, eavesdropping on conversations as a ghost, reading the obituaries over people’s shoulders … Unless they get all the newspapers delivered daily in heaven. Or the other place. Whereas we shall never find out. It’s frustrating.
– What d’you want to find out? Whether you are considered a great writer?
– Lord no, I gave up that ambition long ago – left it to Henry James and his ilk. I demolished the whole idea of literary greatness in Boon, remember? ‘Decline in the output of Greatness, due to the excessive number of new writers and the enlargement of the reading public, to be arrested by establishing a peerage of hereditary Novelists, Poets and Philosophers … The Nobel Prize to be awarded to them in order of seniority …’
– So … what then? A great thinker? A great visionary? A great man?
– Not a great anything. The whole idea of greatness is a nineteenth-century romantic deathtrap. It leads to the rise of tyrants like Hitler. We have to value the collective over the individual, serve the Mind of the Human Race, not try to impose our personal will on it. I’ve been saying that for the last thirty years, but no one has paid any serious attention. If they had, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now, with Europe being rapidly reduced to rubble.
– Something good may come out of the war. This idea of setting up a United Nations organisation, for instance – the obituaries should give you some credit for your contribution to that.
– It would be nice to think so. But it’s a long way from World Government. Without a change in the collective mindset it will be as useless as the League of Nations was.
Shortly after her visit to H.G., Rebecca invites Anthony to meet her for tea at her London club, the Lansdowne. They have not met for some time and she is struck unfavourably by his appearance. At thirty he is still handsome in a bulky, fleshy sort of way, but today his cheeks seem unnaturally fat, almost swollen, and his hair needs washing and cutting, falling lankly forward over his forehead. His clothes look crumpled and grubby, no doubt because he is living away from home and Kitty’s housewifely care so much of the time. When they get on to the subject of H.G., and whether it was right to tell him he has an incurable cancer, his speech seems to her theatrical, inauthentic. He makes offensive remarks in a manner designed to make them seem compassionate, taking her hand and saying, ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Rac, I would rather do anything than that, but you shouldn’t involve yourself in H.G.’s welfare. The truth is, it’s a long time since you were the centre of his life.’ ‘I know that perfectly well,’ she says indignantly. ‘I took steps to remove myself from the centre of his life twenty-one years ago. Why are you putting on this show?’ ‘I just mean that H.G. is much closer to Gip and Marjorie than to you,’ he says. ‘They must make the necessary decisions.’ ‘I don’t have to pretend to agree with them,’ she says. When she asks after Kitty and the children Anthony looks slightly shifty as if he is concealing something. She will soon discover what it is.
In the middle of May, Rebecca receives a brief note from Kitty saying that Anthony has asked her for a divorce. ‘It was quite out of the blue. He said after supper last Sunday, when the children were asleep, that he had met someone at the BBC and wanted to marry her. I said, “That’s a pity my love, as you are married to me.” I thought he was joking. But he’s not.’
Rebecca is outraged and dismayed. She likes and admires Kitty, a gifted painter and a beautiful woman, whom Anthony wooed and won in the most romantic fashion in 1936, proposing on the second occasion they met, and persisting on subsequent occasions until she capitulated. It seemed to Rebecca at the time a typically impulsive, quixotic move on Anthony’s part, but for once it turned out well. Kitty, older and considerably more mature than Anthony, convinced him to give up his ambitions to be a painter because he would never be really good at it, and to become a writer instead, like his parents, and although he has yet to produce anything of consequence he has shown some flair in reviewing novels for the New Statesman. They have seemed happy together, especially after Anthony resolved his feelings about the war, which were divided between his pacifist principles and a reluctance to seem to shirk patriotic duty, by becoming a dairy farmer, a reserved occupation. He has taken to farming surprisingly well, as has Kitty, but about a year ago he accepted the offer of a part-time job with the BBC which seemed to him a more dignified contribution to the war effort, and now it has led to this silly infatuation. ‘Who is she?’ Rebecca demands of Anthony on the telephone, but he refuses to tell her. ‘I want to meet her,’ says Rebecca. ‘Well, you can’t,’ he says. ‘This is nothing to do with you, Rac. It’s between Kitty and me.’ ‘How can you think of deserting those two adorable children?’ Rebecca says, referring to Caroline aged two and a half and Edmund aged one, on whom she dotes. ‘Well, you wanted H.G. to desert his children,’ Anthony replies. Rebecca slams down the phone in a fury, and then regrets doing so, as she has more questions she wanted to ask. For instance, does H.G. know about this latest folly of his natural son?
H.G. does indeed know, because Anthony tells him, and receives a tongue-lashing on the evils of divorce that takes him by surprise. ‘But you divorced your first wife,’ he points out, ‘and were very happy with your second, I believe.’ ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ says his father, his voice rising to a high-pitched squeak, as it always does when he is agitated. ‘Isabel and I had no children.’ ‘Kitty and I will share time with the children,’ says Anthony. ‘Kitty is not vindictive. She’s really been very reasonable about this.’ ‘It’s more than you deserve,’ says H.G. ‘You’re a fool. I don’t understand you. I never have.’ ‘I’m in love,’ Anthony says. H.G. gives a snort of derision. ‘I should have thought you of all men would have understood that,’ Anthony says.
H.G. is silent, and glancing at him Anthony sees that his eyes are closed. Whether he is asleep or feigning sleep there is no way of knowing, but he does not stir when Anthony adjusts the rug over his feet and miserably leaves the room. He finds the night nurse in the kitchen, chatting to the housekeeper, and tells her that he is going back to Mr Mumford’s.
– I suppose he has a point.
– What?
– You’ve had more than your fair share of love affairs in your lifetime.
– I had a lot of affairs. Love didn’t come into most of them. As far as I was concerned – and for most of the women too – it was just a mutual giving and receiving of pleasure. The idea that you have to pretend to be in love with a woman in order to have sex with her – which we owe to Christianity and romantic fiction – is absurd. It has caused nothing but physical frustration and emotional misery. The desire for sex is constant in a healthy man or woman and needs to be constantly satisfied. Love, real love, is rare. As I said in Experiment in Autobiography, I’ve only loved three women in my life: Isabel, Jane and Moura.
– Didn’t you love Rebecca?
– I was in love with her. And before her with Amber. But that’s a different matter. The most dangerous of all.
– Why dangerous?
– You think you’ve found the perfect partner at last – soulmate and bedmate …
– What you call the ‘Lover-Shadow’ in that secret Postscript you’ve written to your autobiography.
– Exactly.
– You’d been reading Jung.
– Yes, but it’s not quite the same as his Shadow. It’s a person, someone who embodies everything lacking in your persona, with whom you could achieve the perfect fulfilment which you have always dreamed of. But when you think you’ve found her, common sense goes out of the window. It’s as if you’ve taken a potion, or are under a spell – like the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a kind of madness. If that’s what’s happened to Anthony there’ll be a smash.
Anthony lets himself out of the back door of the blacked-out house and makes his way down the path with the aid of his shaded torch, inhaling the scents of hyacinth and lily of the valley invisibly in blossom, until he reaches the wall at the end of the garden. In defiance of blackout regulations he elevates the beam of his torch and plays it over the frieze drawn on the wall in lines of black paint by H.G. in his cartoon-like ‘picshua’ style, depicting the rise and fall of the Lords of Creation, a line of figures in profile beginning with prehistoric monsters and ending with men in top hats. Underneath is written ‘Time to go.’
There is a door in the wall which reminds Anthony of one of H.G.’s short stories, about a man who in childhood came upon a door in the wall of an anonymous London street opening on to a paradisal garden, full of sunshine and flowers and pleasant companions, which he longed fruitlessly to revisit for the rest of his days. There is no paradise behind this door – only Mr Mumford’s, a rather poky flat, in need of redecoration, furnished with odds and ends that Anthony remembers from Easton Glebe, H.G.’s country house in Essex, which he used to visit in the 1920s in his school holidays: a faded sofa with a tear in the upholstery, a gate-leg table, a revolving bookcase, and – whimsically mounted on the wall, like a trophy – a battered hockey stick, memento of many riotous games organised by H.G. in his prime for his weekend house-party guests. Banal, shabby objects, but the visits to Easton Glebe which they evoke had seemed like glimpses of paradise to the unhappy schoolboy.
He rings Jean, but the number is engaged, probably by Jean’s flatmate Phyllis who has interminable conversations with her mother most evenings. He sits down on the faded sofa and, to pass the time, takes from the revolving bookcase a thick omnibus edition of H.G.’s short stories, and turns to ‘The Door in the Wall’.
It begins: ‘One confidential evening not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story.’ Lionel Wallace was a successful forty-year-old politician who at the age of five or six escaped from his home and got lost in the streets of West Kensington. He came across a green door in a high white wall covered with Virginia creeper, a door that, once opened, led him into an enchanted garden. ‘There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave one a sense of lightness and good happening and well-being; there was something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad … everything was beautiful there …’ Two friendly panthers approach the little boy and one rubs its ear against his hand, purring like a cat. A tall fair girl picks him up and kisses him, and leads him down a shady avenue to a palace with fountains and all kinds of beautiful things and playmates with whom he plays delightful games, though he can never remember later what they were. Of course his story is not believed and he is punished for lying and running off from home on his own. For the rest of his life he yearns to return to the garden, but when he searches for the door in the wall he cannot find it, and when, on several occasions, he passes it by chance he does not stop to go through it because he is bound on some urgent worldly business – a scholarship exam at Oxford, an assignation with a woman that involves his honour, a crucial division in Parliament. These opportunities have become more frequent of late. ‘Three times in one year the door has been offered me – the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it.’
As Anthony reaches this point in his reading, the telephone rings. It is Jean. He is annoyed to be interrupted just a page or two short of the story’s ending, which he has forgotten, and fails to put the usual note of tenderness into his voice in their exchange of greetings.
‘Is something the matter, darling?’ Jean asks.
‘No. I was just deep in one of H.G.’s stories.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to intrude,’ she says ironically. ‘Shall I ring back later?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ he says. ‘I’m a bit upset, to tell you the truth. I’ve just had a rather painful telling-off from the old man.’ He gives her a brief précis of his conversation with H.G.
‘He’s got a bit of a nerve, hasn’t he?’ says Jean. ‘He wasn’t exactly a model of matrimonial fidelity himself, from what you’ve told me.’
Anthony gives a dry chuckle. ‘No indeed. But he didn’t like it when I sort of reminded him of that.’
‘Perhaps I should meet him,’ Jean says. ‘If he’s so susceptible, perhaps I could win him over.’
‘Not now, darling,’ Anthony says hastily. ‘Not yet.’
When the telephone call is over, he returns immediately to the story to find out what happens to Wallace. Oh yes, it comes back to him. He is found at the bottom of a deep shaft under construction for an extension to the London Underground, having gone through a door, carelessly left unlocked, in the temporary hoarding enclosing the building site, and fallen to his death – either accidentally or, more probably, deliberately. ‘We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security, into darkness, danger, death. But did he see like that?’
Meanwhile, in the small sitting room of the main house, the interlocutor has turned interrogator.
– You only loved three women in your life: Isabel, Jane and Moura?
– Yes.
– Two wives and one mistress.
– I wanted to marry Moura after Jane died.
– But she refused.
– Yes.
– Perhaps she was afraid you wouldn’t want to have sex with her any more if you were married.
– What do you mean by that?
– Well, both your marriages were sexual failures, weren’t they?
– I would say disappointments rather than failures.
– Isabel disappointed you in bed?
– I was starving for sex when we married, but she couldn’t respond. I was an inexperienced lover, and she was a deeply conventional young woman.
– So fairly soon you sought more exciting sex with other women? Like that little assistant of hers?
– I didn’t seek out Ethel Kingsmill, she took the initiative. But yes, she showed me that there were women in the world who had the same appetites as I had.
– And a year or so later you left Isabel for your student, Amy Catherine Robbins – ‘Jane’ as you curiously renamed her.
– I didn’t like the name Catherine, which she used because she didn’t like ‘Amy’, so I chose a new name for her.
– Not a very romantic one though, was it? No erotic associations. ‘Plain Jane’ … Jane Austen …
– What about Jane Eyre? She was passionate enough.
– Do you like that novel?
– No, since you ask. But—
– You left Isabel for Jane, and eventually married her, but as you say in your Autobiography she turned out to be just as disappointing in bed as Isabel. Isn’t it rather puzzling that you exchanged one sexually inhibited spouse for another? As Oscar might have said, ‘once is unfortunate, twice looks like carelessness’.
– What are you getting at?
.