When he could not stand to watch through the little window in the door, or linger in the ward where Emma Chasubel kept a tender eye on him, he wandered the corridors of the hospital. Most of the patients were asleep—blissfully so, given their injuries and agony—but enough were awake that he was able to stop here and there and buck one or two of them up. Meeting the famous H. G. Wells was an exciting event, and he signed several plaster casts with a flourish. In the sunroom, dimly lit and lashed by gusts of wind, he found a young soldier with a missing right hand, struggling to write a letter with his left. The man laughed at the scribbles he’d left on the page.
“I never was very good with words,” the soldier confessed, “but not so bad as this.”
Wells, impressed as always with the resilience of these damaged young men, conceded that hieroglyphs might be more easily decipherable. “Would you like me to serve as your scribe?” he said, taking up the pen and paper.
“H. G. Wells, writing my letter?”
“The sentiments I will leave to you. I’ll just handle the penmanship.” And he did. Though reticent at first, the young soldier—a proud recruit of the First Edinburgh City Battalion—soon warmed to the endeavor, and before long he was rattling away to his family at such a clip that Wells had to ask him to slow down. When they were done, the soldier asked if Wells would include a postscript, saying who had actually written down the words. Adding a few lines of his own, praising them for having raised such a courageous and patriotic young man, Wells signed the letter, sealed it in its envelope, and blessed the boy with a hand on his head. It reminded him of his time in the subterranean lair of the so-called ghouls, when they had come to him with their own stories, as if in a confessional, and he had given them absolution simply by listening, without judgment.
By dawn, the rain had begun to let up, and Wells, who had drifted to sleep in a chair, was awakened by a gentle hand on his shoulder. He looked up, blearily, to see Emma holding a cup of tea, and he was instantly afraid of what she might tell him had happened while he’d slept. He pushed himself up in the chair, bracing himself, but she quickly put his fear to rest by smiling and saying, “The fever’s broken.”
He could hardly believe his ears.
“Mind you, she’s not out of the woods yet,” she said, placing the hot tea on the table at his side, “but I think she will come out all right.”
He sat up even straighter, fully awake now, and said, “Thank you, Emma, thank you for letting me know. The antidotes are working, then?”
“Maybe so,” she said. “Something is.”
“Something?”
“She’s got a spirit in her.”
“That she does. No one more so.”
“And something, or somebody, watching over her. A guardian angel, I’d say.”
He knew that she was not referring to him. Indeed, he knew precisely what—and to whom—she was referring. Wells had returned Friedrich to her, and now the ghost was repaying the favor by returning Rebecca to Wells.
He went back to the quarantine area, put on the protective garb, and then watched through the little window as Dr. Phipps removed a cold compress from Rebecca’s forehead, then took her pulse. She was lying still, but breathing steadily, her features for once untroubled. When the doctor saw Wells looking in, he nodded calmly, and though his face was concealed by the mask, the optimistic message was clear.
Wells turned away, bone-weary, and under his breath said, “Thank you, Friedrich.” Then he set off for his flat on St. James’s Court and the prospect of a hot bath, a boiled egg, and, at last, a soft bed for the night.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Having sat up most of the night, Jane heard the taxi pull up outside the flat, and went quickly to the window. The morning sun beat down on the street, still glistening from last night’s rain. Holding the curtain back, she saw the driver coming round to the back seat to help his passenger out. It was H. G., but looking as weak and fatigued as she had ever seen him. A few words were exchanged at the curb, the driver guffawed, and Wells, clutching the railing, mounted the steps slowly. By the time he’d entered the building, Jane was already waiting in the open door to the flat.
At the sight of her, his face lit up.
“Of all the surprises I might have wished for . . .” he said, moving to embrace her.
He felt frail in her arms, and his color was not good. Once inside, she was tempted to ask where he had been all night, but wasn’t sure she would welcome the answer. To preempt it, she said, “I just couldn’t stay at the rectory another minute. It was too sad there.”
“I quite understand.”
“And on top of that, Maude Grover has fired me as deputy watch commander.”
“Now there’s a blow,” Wells said, and they shared a laugh. “Did you have to relinquish all the rights and privileges of that high office?”
“Right down to the crown and scepter.”
Wells kissed her again, warmly, on the cheek, and collapsed into an armchair by the hearth. “I’ve been at the hospital all night,” he said, addressing the question hovering in the air. “Guy’s.”
“Are you ill?” Jane asked urgently.
“No, but I’m afraid that Rebecca has been.”
So, Jane thought, her guess wasn’t entirely far off. She suspected that he might have been with Rebecca somewhere, though the hospital was not where she had imagined.
“It’s a long story, which I am too exhausted to recount in detail, but she was infected with a deadly bacteria and she is being kept under close supervision and quarantine.”
“And the prognosis?”
“This morning, the fever broke, and she appears to be on the mend. It’s still a bit touch and go, but she will come through all right. I’m quite confident of that.”
“Oh, what a relief.” And, oddly enough, she meant every word. Her husband’s passades had grown so old hat, they were hardly worth belaboring. And although she had known from the start that this Rebecca was something more serious than that, she had never doubted H. G.’s love and devotion to her, his loyal and cherished wife. Their marriage rested on some other, higher, and more durable ground . . . and always would.
“I need a blazing hot bath to get this hospital stink off of me,” Wells said, and Jane replied, “I’ll get it running while you undress.”
“And would it be too much to hope that there is an egg or two in the house?”
“I brought a half dozen up from Easton with me.”
“A hot bath, fresh eggs—perhaps a basket of scones, unless I miss my guess—”
“Don’t forget the rasher of bacon.”
“I’m not sure if I tell you this often enough,” he said, laying a palm gently against her cheek, “but on the chance that I’ve been remiss, I love you, my dear, more than I can ever express. Words are supposed to be my stock in trade, but my life would utterly fall to pieces without you. I’d be Humpty-Dumpty.”
But Jane already knew all that. “Go and get ready,” she said. “Leave everything to me.”
Muttering “all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men,” he shuffled off down the hall, unbuttoning his coat, and disappeared into the bedroom. Upon her own arrival, Jane had scoured that room for any sign of a visitor, and been relieved to find none. Though Wells had always been open with her, he also exercised discretion.
When he came to the breakfast table, thoroughly scrubbed, his thinning brown hair slick on his head, he was wearing the silk dressing gown she had bought him for their previous anniversary. And although there were a thousand things warranting discussion, neither one of them did much talking. Wells seemed too drained, and she knew enough not to press him. He asked of course about their boys, but she assured him they were quite safe and doing well at school. He asked about the repercussions in Easton from the tragedy with Kurt, but she said everyone, apart from Slattery and Maude Grover, was behaving in a perfectly respectful manner. They then relapsed into eating their breakfast and reading the morning newspa
per in a companionable hush, as they did most mornings at the rectory. For all his volubility in public, Wells could be quite subdued at home, comfortably quiet and relaxed. Jane liked these times with him best of all.
When he had finished mopping up the egg yolk from his plate, and turned over the last page of the newspaper, he said that he was due back at Winston’s office that afternoon, “to go over this whole St. Paul’s affair.”
“Why you?” she asked, before tumbling to the next question. “You weren’t there, were you?”
“I was,” he admitted. “But that must go no further.”
The look in his eye reinforced his admonition.
Jane nodded—Lord knows, she had kept a hundred other secrets for him—but wondered just exactly what part he had played. The newspaper accounts had been fairly mysterious—leading her to suspect the heavy hand of the military censors—but that there had been a major explosion in the main rotunda was undeniable. All access to St. Paul’s Cathedral was forbidden until further notice, something that had never happened in London since the cathedral’s construction hundreds of years before. Much as she loved him, Wells would always remain to some extent a man of mystery—to her, as much as to the rest of the world.
“But first I am going to need a nice long nap in a big soft bed,” he said, laying a hand on top of her own and giving it a gentle squeeze. “I wonder if you might not need some rest, too?”
Jane, who had barely slept a wink the night before, could think of nothing more appealing. “Let me just clear up the table first,” she said, but Wells shook his head.
“That can wait.” Rising from his chair with her hand still in his, he led her down the hall, his slippers scuffling on the floor, and once in the bedroom, they lowered the blackout shades to keep out the morning sun.
EPILOGUE
December 12, 1940
The master of ceremonies, Sir Somebody-or-Other, had been droning on for so long, Wells could barely keep his eyes open. It didn’t help that the dinner had been a heavy one—roast beef and potatoes—or that he’d drunk too much claret. Diabetic now, he knew that he should limit his drinking and watch his diet more carefully, but at seventy-four—with one world war behind him, and another one now well underway—he had adopted a far more cavalier attitude toward transitory pleasures.
“And then there are of course the famous scientific romances, as our honored guest has called them, with which he first made his name.” Sir Somebody, not content to simply name a few, was listing them, and giving a précis of each plot, some of which even Wells had forgotten in all but their broadest outlines. Why, he wondered again, had he even accepted this honor from the Albion Society? Was it because one of his personal heroes, the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, a man whose epic defeats were more inspiring than other men’s victories, had accepted the same prize years before? It wasn’t as if the study of his new flat on Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park, lacked for awards. The walls were already overloaded with plaques and medals and ribbons. The only one he’d missed, though nominated for it four times, was the Nobel Prize in Literature. It would have been nice to add it to his collection, but no matter. His career had been a long and celebrated one, and he couldn’t complain.
Looking out from the dais and toward the long, narrow windows that lined the dining hall, he saw the night sky illuminated by the crisscrossing of the searchlights, constantly on the alert for signs of another bombing raid by Hitler’s vaunted Luftwaffe; he was reminded of the attacks, well over twenty years ago now, of the zeppelins. How deadly and menacing they had been at the time—the “baby-killers,” as they’d been called—but how primitive and inefficient they seemed today by the standards of the Blitz. Of course, he’d foreseen it all in his work; his novel The Shape of Things to Come, written in 1933, had even predicted a second world war erupting in this very year, and had described in brutal detail the aerial bombardment of cities and civilian populations. It gave him no pleasure to have been proven right on so many sad scores.
By the time the speaker finally gave way at the lectern, Wells feared that the audience, enjoying their after-dinner liqueurs, would be half in their cups, or fast asleep, but there before him, at the front tables, awake and smiling up at him, were some old friends, among them an alarmingly decrepit Arthur Machen and a still comely Rebecca West. Jane, poor thing, had been lost to cancer thirteen years before, and Winston, of course, was too overburdened as prime minister to find time for a literary occasion like this. Wells took his prepared remarks from the inside pocket of his jacket, but he hardly needed to do so. He had attended so many of these events, and given similar addresses so many times, that he could speak extemporaneously and from the heart.
After a few casual remarks by way of thanks, Wells said, “I only wish that the grim forecasts in my books had remained there, unfulfilled. But instead, I have only to glance out these windows to see their realization. That I once believed mankind would come to its senses—after the slaughter at the Somme, after Verdun, after Ypres and Passchendaele and Belleau Wood, after an entire generation was offered up on the bloodiest altar ever erected—now strikes me as hopelessly naive. A war to end all wars? Like a hanging to put a stop to gallows. Can’t be done.”
Rebecca’s rich dark hair was threaded with silver now, and her figure had grown stout. But she remained the one woman for whom he had felt not precisely the deepest devotion—that honor still fell to Jane—but the greatest and most enduring passion. Although their lives had taken many turns—they had even had a son together, and she was now married to a man he much respected—it was to Rebecca that his thoughts most often turned when he wished to bask in some pleasant reverie during these difficult days.
“In my books, I predicted many things that came to pass, such as armored tanks and aerial combat and a wider freedom for the female sex, along with some things that I fear may yet occur—I refer to the atomic bomb, whose potential for destruction is so great its creation could alter life, or end it, on this planet forever.” The Germans had already mastered a bomb that could explode not on contact, but only after burrowing into the earth, where its targets might be taking refuge, in vain. “There is no doubt in my mind that such an atomic weapon is being feverishly sought in our adversaries’ secret laboratories even now.”
When alone in his study at night, his eyes too weary to read anymore and his hand too unsteady to write, he would recall happier times. The first time Rebecca had kissed him, for instance, the night before his fateful journey to the Front . . . the first time they had gone to bed, when he had dubbed her Panther and she had called him Jaguar . . . the fertile exchange of political opinions and literary critiques, and the amusing little doodles—the “picshuas”—that he had drawn for her whenever they were apart.
“The one thing that I missed was the submarine,” he confessed. “I could never imagine an underwater vessel not foundering or suffocating its crew, but there I was wrong. Not a day goes by that we do not read in the papers another story of the U-boats making one more deadly attack on our navy.”
Though it was hard to do otherwise these days, he was painting, he recognized, a very gloomy picture for the assembled guests, there simply to honor a literary lion in the winter of his career. But before he could change course, and as if to underscore the point, his pause was suddenly filled by the distant wail of an air-raid siren. It was a sound that began low but swiftly rose to a harrowing pitch that, like the ululations of the Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds, encompassed all of London.
No one leapt from a seat, but everyone promptly put down their cups or glasses, and took their coats from the back of their chairs. There was no point in going on with his speech. Wells quickly thanked them all for coming, “but more pressing matters are now before us.” Sir Somebody stuck a plaque into his hand and advised everyone to take shelter in the tube station just around the corner.
After Wells stepped down from the dais, Rebecca helped him on with his coat and hat, and
tucked his scarf tightly around his throat. Machen, bent over, a few scraps of white hair clinging to his scalp, took a moment to shake his hand, and praise a piece Wells had written for the Times that day. “I think your point about a world body that could adjudicate future issues was especially well conceived,” he said, and would have gone on had Rebecca not interceded.
“Arthur, now is not the time. Let’s make for the door.”
Most of the others in the audience had already exited, and by the time the trio had emerged onto the blacked-out street, people were streaming toward the Underground station. But Wells resisted, turning instead in the other direction.
“H. G., where in the world do you think you are going?” Rebecca asked.
“Home.” He was not about to let the Nazis win by keeping him from his own home.
“Are you mad?”
“The place hasn’t been hit yet.”
“The windows have been shattered, twice, and the door has been blown off.”
“It was replaced, just last month, with a much sturdier one.”
But Rebecca put a firm arm through his, and put an end to the debate by guiding him toward the station. He knew she was right—navigating the rubble-strewn streets in the dark would be impossible. But all the same, he felt a visceral reluctance.
At the entrance to the station, an air-raid warden was waving an electric torch back and forth, encouraging everyone to keep calm and proceed in an orderly fashion, but before Wells entered, he took one last look over his shoulder, scanning the night sky for any sign of the enemy bombers. But all he could see, in the direction of St. Paul’s, was a squadron of British Spitfires heading off to encounter them. The bravest of boys, those pilots; Wells had met many of them after an address he’d given at the RAF air base in Croydon, and it grieved him now that for some, flying overhead at this very moment, this might well prove to be their last mission.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 34