by David Lodge
He could have wished the crisis in his marriage had occurred at a different season, for the approach of Christmas and its associated rituals and festivities seemed like a mocking, ironic commentary on their domestic misery. ‘Do we have to have a Christmas dinner?’ he said, appalled to see a turkey being prepared in the kitchen on Christmas Eve. ‘We’ve got to have something,’ Isabel said with a shrug, ‘so it might as well be a turkey. Mother is very fond of a turkey, she looks forward to it every year.’ ‘As long as we’re not going to pull crackers and wear paper hats,’ he said, and immediately regretted his sarcasm as Isabel flashed him a look which said very clearly, ‘And whose fault is it that we’re having a horrible Christmas?’ The three of them, Isabel, Aunt Mary and himself, ate the roast fowl and its usual accompaniments almost in silence, with his trunk packed and waiting in the hall for his departure next day. He was very nearly sick after the meal.
He crept out of the house early in the morning while Isabel was still asleep – or if not asleep, in bed. He couldn’t face saying goodbye to her in person, and instead left her a note, as tender as he could make it without seeming hypocritical. He pushed his trunk to the station in a wheelbarrow, and gave a porter a shilling to return it to the house. At the ticket office he asked out of habit for a ‘return to Charing Cross’ and quickly amended the request to a single fare. Once he was seated in the train, and it began to move, his spirits lifted. A new life lay ahead, full of risk, uncertainty – but also freedom! And a new female body, slim, pliant, nubile, to hold in his arms and introduce to the pleasures of physical love.
Catherine arrived in the early afternoon in a hansom cab with two valises. She looked pale and anxious, threw herself into his arms as soon as they were alone together, and clung to him as if to a mast in a storm at sea. Minutes passed before she spoke.
‘I had to tell Mother,’ she said at last. ‘I couldn’t just leave her a letter. It seemed cowardly.’
‘How did she take it?’ he asked.
‘How do you think? She sobbed and she wept and she went down on her knees and begged me not to go to you. It was terrible.’
‘My poor darling,’ he said. ‘But you came. My brave girl!’
‘She only stopped the hysterics when my cab arrived and I said I would go and get the lady next door to look after her – then she suddenly pulled herself together. It was the thought of having to explain everything to a neighbour …’
‘Better than smelling salts,’ he said with a smile, and then corrected his expression in case it seemed too flippant a remark.
‘I left her prostrate on the sofa, with a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne pressed to her forehead. Fortunately cousin Jemima and her husband are visiting for tea today, so she will have some support.’
‘Tea!’ he said. ‘What a good idea. I will ask our landlady to make us some. Tea and muffins.’
The landlady, who was German, seemed to have guessed that he and Catherine were very recently married, if married at all, and it probably took no great discernment on her part to draw this inference from their self-conscious behaviour. She was however well disposed towards them – almost too well, in fact, serving the tea and muffins, and later their supper, with many significant smirks and nods and gestures. She had a way of looking gloatingly at them and rubbing her hands together that was almost indecent, and he could see Catherine shrinking uneasily from her attention. He had a sense that if Mrs Scholtze could have infiltrated their bedroom unobserved she would have sprinkled rose petals on their mattress.
He had in fact already decided that he would not attempt to consummate their union that first night. Catherine had suffered enough stress that day, and he wanted to avoid a repetition of the debacle of his wedding night with Isabel. Besides, his need was not so urgent as it had been on that occasion when he released the pent-up desire of years. After Mrs Scholtze had carried away the supper trays, bidding them an almost visibly salivating goodnight, he turned the key in the door, and Catherine, hearing the click of the lock, looked at him with a kind of tense solemnity, as if steeling herself for an ordeal. He embraced her and said, ‘I think, dearest girl, we should not become lovers in the fullest sense tonight. Let us wait until you are more rested and relaxed. Tonight, let us just sleep in each other’s arms. Would you like that?’
‘Oh yes!’ she said instantly, relief flooding her face.
Their accommodation was the original dining room of the house, divided by folding doors left permanently closed to create a living room in the front half and a bedroom in the back. He allowed her to undress and get into bed before he joined her. A single candle on the chest of drawers dimly lit the room. Catherine, her hair down and spread out over the pillow, wearing a nightdress buttoned up to the neck, smiled timidly at him, and then turned her head to stare modestly at the wall when he began to undress. He pulled on his nightshirt before he removed his trousers and drawers, blew out the candle and got into bed beside her. When he drew her into his arms she snuggled up to him with a contented sigh and if she felt his erection through their nightwear she did not shrink away from it. Perhaps she didn’t know what it was. Only when he began to stroke her back through the thin fabric of her nightdress, and allowed his hand to slide down and cup her buttock did she stiffen as if startled. But nobody, he reflected, had touched her there since she was a baby. He removed his hand and placed it in a more decorous position and, obviously exhausted by the emotions and exertions of the day, she soon fell asleep, leaving him to plot the manner in which he would, in due course, possess her. A pleasure postponed was a pleasure enhanced.
In the event it was postponed longer than he anticipated. The next day Catherine could not resist going to the Camden Town post office to see if her mother had already sent a message to her there. Indeed she had, but as Catherine turned away from the counter with the envelope in her hand she saw cousin Jemima’s husband, Reginald, watching her with a triumphant expression. She had been ambushed. She hurried from the post office, but he caught up with her outside and demanded to be taken to their lodgings to confront ‘the bounder who has seduced you’. ‘He didn’t seduce me. I went to him of my own free will,’ she said. ‘If there was any seducing it was mine,’ she added boldly. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ Reginald said. ‘Your mother is beside herself, she can’t stop weeping. We are seriously concerned for her sanity – read for yourself.’ He pointed to the letter in her hand. ‘I will read it in my own good time,’ she said. ‘Now kindly leave me alone, or I will call a constable.’ She turned her back on him and walked swiftly away, and he did not attempt to detain her. All this she told her ‘seducer’ on her return to the house in Mornington Place, laughing and crying as she did so.
He praised her courage and called her his ‘heroine’. He proposed they should go to bed immediately and make love. But she said she was too upset by the incident, and her perturbation was increased by reading the tear-stained letter from her mother.
‘She says she will kill herself.’
‘Nonsense. Just emotional blackmail,’ he said.
‘I know, but I must see for myself,’ she said.
Catherine went immediately to Putney, and sent a telegram later that day: ‘MOTHER POORLY STOP AM STAYING WITH HER FOR ONE OR TWO DAYS STOP TRUST ME STOP ALL LOVE CATHERINE.’
In spite of the concluding words of the message he was apprehensive that once she was back in the family home pressure would be put on her to stay there and give him up, especially if her relatives discovered she was still virgo intacta. He began to regret that he had been so chivalrously considerate of her maiden sensibility, for he would look, and certainly feel, very silly indeed if he found himself all alone in a shabby London lodging house, having deserted his wife without securing his mistress. These misgivings turned to alarm the next day when Reginald and his brother Sidney called on him, having somehow obtained the Mornington Place address. They were rather large and intimidating men, dressed like undertakers in top hats and black overcoats with
black kid gloves, and they issued vague threats of legal action against him for abduction or enticement if he did not sign a document promising not to contact Catherine again. He laughed in their faces and told them, with more confidence than he felt, that nothing could keep himself and Catherine apart. It was a relief when she returned next day and learned with indignation of her relatives’ intervention, of which she knew nothing. ‘It’s outrageous,’ she said. ‘They had no right to interfere.’ ‘They didn’t get this address from you then?’ he asked. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Uncle Reginald must have followed me here from the Camden Town post office that day. Did you think I would tell them?’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘not willingly, but I thought they might have bullied you.’ ‘I wouldn’t have told them if they had used thumbscrews,’ she said, and she looked at that moment like some virgin martyr in an old painting calmly defying her tormentors. He was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for her steadfastness and with relief that she had returned to him and he folded her in his arms. ‘Tonight we will be lovers,’ he whispered, and she murmured her assent.
– But it wasn’t the rapturous shared experience you had hoped for, was it?
– I didn’t really expect it would be. I said to her ‘The first time it may hurt, but after that you will feel pleasure. More and more pleasure as time goes on.’
– But she didn’t.
– No. She tried, for my sake – that night and the nights that followed. She tried harder than Isabel. She took off her nightdress to please me. She let me have a lit candle on the chest of drawers when we made love. But it was like teaching someone to swim when they’re terrified of the water – she lay beneath me with every muscle in her body tensed, her arms round my neck, holding on for dear life, like someone afraid of drowning. As time went on she became a little more pliant, a little more responsive, but not much. When we went abroad for the first time, in ’98, to Italy, I picked up a copy of Aretino’s Postures in a bookshop in Florence, but she wouldn’t look at them, let alone try them.
– Did she ever have orgasms?
– I don’t think so, no. Sometimes, later on in our marriage, after we made love she claimed she had enjoyed it, but I was never convinced. Basically, she lacked lust. Whereas for me sex is the joyful relief of lust. It’s an animal thing. I like to be like an animal in bed with a woman, to bite and lick and wrestle before I take her. Jane hated that, she couldn’t join in the animal game. She was too fragile, too delicate, too fastidious.
– But you knew what kind of a girl she was before you eloped with her. ‘Catherine’ wasn’t the sensual type.
– I suppose I thought I would awaken her sexually. And when I failed at first, I presumed it was just the effect of her upbringing, which was repressed, prudish, fanatically ‘respectable’, in an English middle-class Low Church suburban way. She’d rebelled against that intellectually with all her New Woman stuff, but not with her body. And then it wasn’t the most auspicious setting for a sexual initiation, that pair of rooms in Mornington Place, with no bathroom in the house, and a landlady who acted like a procuress … We got out of there pretty smartly. Jane found us lodgings in Mornington Street, just round the corner, with a nicer landlady, but the rooms were almost identical and there was still no bathroom. We had a tin tub just big enough to stand up in. I used to tease Jane by peeping at her though a crack in the folding doors while she was having a strip-wash, and offering to come in and scrub her back. We were like a couple of kids, really, playing at ‘mothers and fathers’. We were full of our own audacity in defying the world. Living together without being married made even the most decorous lovemaking seem daring. We were acting out a sort of Shelleyan rebellion against a hypocritical, repressive social order – we gloried in our freedom from property, duties, responsibilities. Not that we were idle, far from it. Our landlady provided us with our meals on a tray, so we were free to read and write all day if we wanted to. Jane helped me research my journalistic articles, wrote them out in a fair hand, and posted them to my cousin to be typed.
– She didn’t go on with her studies. She didn’t get her degree.
– She couldn’t. It would have caused a scandal at the College. She took typing lessons instead, so she could type up my manuscripts and save us money. And she wrote a few little things herself which got published after I polished them a bit. We were a team. We got a thrill out of waiting for the post, wondering whether there would be an acceptance in one of the envelopes – or a cheque! We desperately needed money, and journalism seemed the best way to make it, until The Time Machine was published and my boom began. We moved out of lodgings to our first proper home, in Woking, and then to Worcester Park – quite a substantial house that was, with a name, ‘Heatherlea’, not just a number, and a half-acre of ‘grounds’ rather than a garden. We sniffed victory then – I mean victory over the people who had disapproved of our elopement and tried to keep us apart. Jane’s mother, who had sold her own house, helped with the expenses and moved with us into Worcester Park for a time. She was finally reconciled to our union when Isabel and I got divorced and I married Jane as soon as the decree came through. We both agreed there was no point in continuing to live in sin for the sake of a principle – fighting prejudice on that particular issue just consumed too much time and energy.
– It didn’t worry you that for the second time you were getting married to a woman who couldn’t satisfy you sexually?
– I think I hadn’t yet come to that conclusion about Jane. Or perhaps I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Everything else in our partnership was going so swimmingly, I didn’t want to bring that problem into the open, and neither did Jane. We conspired together to ignore it for some years. We developed a childish private language, and a sort of mythology, to avoid confronting the true nature of our marital relations. It involved pet names and amusing burlesques on our domestic life, in doggerel verse or in my little comic ‘pichuas’. She was ‘Bits’ or ‘Miss Bits’, an imperious and practical-minded female, and I was ‘Bins’ or ‘Mr Bins’, a weaker character who was usually in the wrong and rather afraid of her. It started when we were living together and continued into our marriage. I still remember some of the ‘pomes’:
Our God is an Amoosing God. It is His Mercy that This Bins who formerly was Ill is now quite well and Fat And isn’t going bald no more nor toofaking and such For all of which this Bins who writes congratulates him much.
That one ended:
I sits and sings to Lordy God with all my little wits. (But all the same I don’t love ’Im not near what I love Bits.)
We had a lot of fun with this kind of thing. We were substituting fun for the lust that was missing from our marriage.
– So you looked for lust elsewhere. When did that start?
– I think it was when we were living at Woking, through my old friend from Bromley days, Sidney Bowkett. I hadn’t been in touch with him since we left school, but one day I read a report in the newspaper about a playwright of that name who was the defendant in a case of plagiarism. I knew it must be him because it’s an unusual name and as a boy he was always dreaming of going on the stage. He’d been touring a play in the provinces allegedly based on George du Maurier’s Trilby, which of course was already a tremendous hit as a play in London, with Beerbohm Tree. I can’t remember what happened in the case – I think he lost – but I wrote to him and he turned up one day at our house in Woking, surprised to find that his old school chum was the rising young novelist H.G. Wells. He had married a very attractive blue-eyed Jewess, an actress called Nell de Boer, and they were living in a cottage at Thames Ditton, not far from us, so I began to see quite a lot of him. We went for cycle rides through the Surrey lanes, talking about life and art and women, especially women. Bowkett was a great one for the ladies, or so he would have me believe, and regaled me with very vivid accounts of his conquests. Frank Harris was another acquaintance in those days who liked to boast in the same way. It was very coarse talk, but inflaming. I began to hanke
r after something a bit gamier in that line than I was getting at home, and before long I obtained it – with Nell Bowkett, in fact, when I called at their cottage one day and found Sidney was in Town on theatrical business. Or maybe it wasn’t business – Nell had no illusions about his faithfulness and was disposed to get her own back, and I was very ready to oblige, on more than one occasion. I put the two of them into Kipps, years later, as the Chitterlows, suitably cleaned up to make a couple of Dickensian comic characters, though by that time they were separated. Nell Bowkett was the first of my adventures in adultery – I mean as regards Jane. I hadn’t been faithful to Isabel either, of course. There was Ethel Kingsmill, and some other casual encounters after her. I was faithful to Jane until Bowkett turned up in Woking and started putting ideas into my head.
– But that wasn’t for very long, was it? Less than two years after you eloped with her?
– True. But it wasn’t until some time later that I took every opportunity to ‘get’ women.
It was some time before he overcame the diffidence ingrained in him by his humble background, his small stature, his chronic ailments, and the squeaky voice from which he could never entirely eradicate a trace of the ‘common’, and realised that his increasing success and fame as a writer made him attractive to women. It was not until he and Jane had settled in Sandgate, and started to build Spade House, that he began to appreciate this fact, and by that time his increasing prosperity had made good his physical deficiencies to a considerable extent. He would never be tall or handsome, but there was now a spring in the step of his small, well-shod feet, there was a smooth sheen to his skin, and strong muscle beneath it, firmed by regular exercise. Even his moustache had grown less straggling, more glossy and dense. He was told by several women that the gaze of his slightly hooded blue-grey eyes was peculiarly penetrating and had an almost hypnotic power over the subject on which it was turned. And it gave him confidence in the game of seduction that when their clothes were off he could rely on his membrum virile (‘the Honourable Member for Sandgate’ as he sometimes personified it in amorous badinage) to rise impressively to the occasion. But it was the glamour of his literary reputation above all, and the possibility of intimate access to the man behind the books, that attracted susceptible women to him like the action of a magnet on iron filings. In most cases he found he only had to ask in order to receive, and sometimes they asked first. For example, that Australian woman – he couldn’t remember her name, only her golden curls, above and below, and the way her body was marked out like a map in sharply defined areas of pale and suntanned skin – who was visiting London and wrote to him care of his publishers to say how much she had enjoyed reading Kipps. She also invited him to call at her lodgings and spend some hours with her which she hoped would be mutually enjoyable – after reading Kipps of all novels, with one of the most sexually innocent heroes in contemporary fiction! And it was a very enjoyable afternoon.