by David Lodge
Bland was in excellent spirits, for reasons that became evident when they went, at his suggestion, for a ‘breather’ after a late dinner delayed for his return. It was dark, but a full moon allowed them to follow the footpaths without the aid of a lamp. The moon cast sharp shadows of trees on the lawns, and prompted the thought that if a comet were as bright in the night sky every object would have two shadows, angled in different directions: he made a mental note to work that into his novel. Bland led him to a corner of the moat-enclosed garden that was screened from the house by trees and bushes, stopped beside a heap of compost and unbuttoned his fly. ‘I always like to piss in the open air, when I have the opportunity, don’t you?’ Bland said.
‘Well, there are some things I enjoy doing more in the open air,’ he said, as he followed suit. It was not his natural style of humour, but whenever he was with men like Bland – Frank Harris or Sidney Bowkett, for instance – he found himself drawn into it, while rather despising himself for competing on this low level.
Bland gave a knowing laugh. ‘And you don’t mean badminton!’ He spread his legs, leaned back slightly, and released an arc of urine which glittered in the moonlight and fell with a soft hiss on the compacted mound of leaves and grass cuttings. ‘Personally I prefer a nice big bed, with firm springs,’ he said. ‘Speaking of which … I made good use of such a bed last night, belonging to a young lady of my acquaintance in Manchester. I took her to heaven three times in as many hours.’ He finished his lengthy micturition with a grunt of relief, shook his penis, stowed it away in his trousers, and began to button himself up. ‘Not bad for a man of my age, eh, Wells?’
‘Not bad at all, Bland,’ he said, having already finished and adjusted his dress.
‘What’s the most times you’ve done it in one night?’ Bland asked, as they walked on.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I lose count after it gets into double figures.’
Bland roared with laughter and clapped him on the back. ‘You rogue! But if you prefer it al fresco you should try Blackheath one warm night, near the gates to Greenwich Park. All kinds of interesting ladies are to be met there.’
He couldn’t resist asking Bland how he reconciled these adventures with the teaching of his adopted religion. ‘Isn’t it a sin according to your faith, Bland?’
‘Of course it is. It’s very wicked,’ he said. ‘But it’s knowing that it’s a sin that makes it meaningful. For you fellows who don’t believe, it’s no more significant than a sneeze. For us it means risking our immortal souls. Fortunately there’s always confession.’
He wondered if Bland were joking, but it appeared that he was entirely serious. He couldn’t help reflecting that if Bland was saving up his sins for a deathbed confession, it would take a perilously long time to get through all of them, but managed to keep the thought to himself.
*
He stayed at Well Hall for a week, and made excellent progress with In the Days of the Comet. In the late twentieth century the elderly narrator, Willie Leadford, was recalling his life before the great Change which was brought about by the comet. Willie was a character much like himself when he was a young man, intelligent but hampered in his ambitions by the disadvantages of his humble background, and sexually frustrated. He set these early chapters in the Potteries, risking an accusation of poaching on Arnold Bennett’s territory, because he associated that place with one of the lowest points in his own life. But Willie’s home was closely based on Atlas House in Bromley:
A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as ours, a damp, unsavoury, mainly subterranean region behind the dark living-room kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty in our case by the fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness, opened and diffused small, crunchable particles about the uneven brick floor. It was the region of ‘washing-up’, that greasy damp function that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape pipe, and rags of a quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called ‘dish-clouts,’ rise in my memory at the name.
Recalling his mother’s life of drudgery and self-denial in this squalid environment, he worked through the complex emotions stirred up by her death and resolved them into a poignant portrait of a woman who was a victim of her society. ‘She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time had been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existing order dominated her into a worship of abject observances. It had bent her, aged her, robbed her of eyesight so that at fifty-five she peered through cheap spectacles at my face and saw it only dimly, and filled her with anxiety …’ In Willie’s furiously jealous pursuit of his former sweetheart Nettie, and her new love, the upper-class Verrall, he explored his feelings for Isabel after their divorce and at the time of her remarriage. As always, writing these things as fiction, with the freedom to change, enhance, and with hindsight interpret one’s own experience, was cathartic.
As he was strolling in the garden before lunch on his last day he met Rosamund, and had a strong feeling it was not by accident. He was walking under the shade of a pergola when she appeared at the other end and came smiling up to him, like a pretty wench who had stepped out of some pastoral idyll, her bare feet shod in sandals, wearing a straw hat and a loose blue muslin dress with a neckline that showed her remarkable bosom to advantage.
‘Finished work for the day, Mr Wells?’ she said.
‘Yes, I’ve come to the end of a chapter, and I’m not ready to start the next one. I’ll leave it till I get home tomorrow.’
‘I just heard you were leaving us. What a shame, it’s been lovely having you here. You’ve become one of the family.’
‘It’s been lovely for me,’ he said. ‘But I have a family of my own – I really must get back to them. Shall we …?’ He gestured to a bench seat, and they sat down. ‘Well Hall is a perfect haven for a writer,’ he said.
‘Well, it may be for you …’ she said, with a faintly sulky set of her lips and jaw. Like her mother she had a sensuously fleshy chin reminiscent of Rossetti’s beauties, though not their hairstyle: hers was short and fair and gently waved.
‘I believe you have literary aspirations yourself, Rosamund.’
‘Yes. Well, actually I have published a couple of little children’s books.’
‘Really? I didn’t know. Congratulations.’
‘Oh, they’re nothing – I don’t boast about them. Little books for little children. One is called Cat Tales and one is called Moo-Cow Tales. Just hackwork, really – Edith got me the commissions. It was useful pocket money, but that’s all. I want to write something more grown-up, more original, but it’s hard when you’ve got two famous and successful writers like Edith and Hubert for parents, looking over your shoulder. And then they fuss so if I want to go out on my own anywhere. How am I ever going to be a writer if I don’t get some experience?’
‘It will come. You have your whole life before you,’ he said benignly. ‘Meanwhile your home should give you plenty of ideas.’
‘What do you mean?’ For a moment he saw a look of surprise, almost alarm, in her brown eyes.
‘It’s such a romantic place. Steeped in history. Thomas More’s head buried somewhere in the grounds, for instance, nobody knows where. That should be good for a story. I’m surprised Edith hasn’t written it.’
‘Oh that…’
‘Why don’t you have a try yourself?’
She looked at him with a cheeky smile. ‘If I did, would you read it and give me an opinion.’
‘Certainly.’
‘Then I will!’ she said, clapping her hands. ‘Thank you. I’ll have to read up about Thomas More.’
‘Be sure to read his Utopia,’ he said.
‘Isn’t it rather boring?’
‘Not at all. The chapter on marriage is particularl
y interesting.’
‘Why?’
‘Read it and you’ll find out.’
‘I will,’ she said.
A voice, probably Alice’s, calling ‘Ros-a-mund’ was heard, coming from the direction of the house.
‘Bother,’ said Rosamund, ‘I expect she wants help with lunch. Excuse me.’
‘Of course,’ he said, and watched her walk down the tunnellike pergola. At the end she stopped, turned and waved, reminding him of something, or somebody.
He returned to Spade House in excellent spirits and immediately wrote Edith a ‘roofer’ as, for reasons obscure, a letter of thanks was called in the Bland family’s argot. It began: ‘Dear Lady, A roofer! The thing cannot be written! Jane I think must take on the task of describing the departure of a yellow, embittered and thoroughly damned man on one Thursday and his return on the next, pink – partly his own, and partly reflected’, and it ended: ‘Fine impalpable threads of agreeable association trail from Lodge to stairway, hold me to your upstairs and downstairs bedrooms, take me under the trees of your lawn, and to your garden paths … It was a bright dear time. Yours ever, H.G. Wells’
That visit marked a new phase of intimacy in the relations between the Wellses and the Blands, who, flush with Edith’s royalties, had acquired a bigger summer home in Dymchurch: a red-brick Georgian house with Dutch gables called Sycamore House, though with characteristic insouciance the Bland family always referred to it as ‘the Other House’ to distinguish it from the cottage it replaced. They were frequently in residence there in August and September, and numerous visits were made and returned between the two families. There was badminton at Spade House, and French cricket on the flat hard sand of the Dymchurch beach when the tide was out; there were cycle rides through the lanes of the Romney Marshes and pot luck meals and hilarious charades. He dispensed literary advice to Rosamund in confidential chats, enjoying her lavish praise of his own work. She never managed to get the story about Thomas More’s head into a shape she was willing to show him, but she did read the chapter on marriage in Utopia. ‘And what did you think of couples who are contemplating marriage being allowed to see each other naked before they commit themselves?’ he asked her. ‘I thought it was a jolly good idea,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t mind at all, if it were done decently, as in the book, with chaperones. What do you think, Mr Wells?’ ‘I think there would be many fewer unhappy marriages if it was a custom in our society,’ he said, ‘but the English are so prudish about nakedness.’ ‘Yes, I asked Iris if she wouldn’t like to see her Austin naked before she got engaged to him and she told me not to be disgusting. And she’s drawing naked models all the time at the Slade! Well, not quite naked.’ She giggled. ‘Apparently the men wear little pouches.’ ‘And what about the rest of More’s Utopia?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t find it very interesting, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I much prefer yours. The ending, when they come back to sordid London is so wonderful.’
‘I hope you will be sensible with that young girl,’ Jane said, as they were coming home from the Other House that day, having observed him and Rosamund deep in conversation in the garden. ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ he said. ‘She’s a nice girl, but I‘m not in love with her.’ ‘It’s her falling in love with you I’m worried about,’ Jane said. ‘It would be a shame if anything upset the nice relationship we have with the Blands.’ ‘Have no fear, I agree entirely,’ he said. And he did agree. There seemed to be a symbiosis between the two families that was helpful to the writers at the heart of each. In October Jane accompanied him to Well Hall for the first time, and they stayed for a weekend which went very well, Edith writing afterwards: ‘Oh my dears – oh my dearie dears! Virtue must have gone out of you both during this good weekend, for quite unexpectedly, and with a most thrilling suddenness I find that I have finished The Railway Children which have sat on my bent and aged shoulders for nearly a year!!!!!! Thank you so much. This, as you perceive, is a roofer!’
In December Edith sent him an advance copy of The Railway Children and he sat down in his study and read it in a single sitting, quickly at first, reminding himself of the early chapters he had already read in serial form, then more slowly and appreciatively. His provisional judgment had been correct: it was Edith’s masterpiece, with a depth and a unity that none of her previous books, for all their merits, possessed, and in his opinion was destined to become a classic.
Three children were abruptly uprooted from their comfortable London home because of the unexplained disappearance of their father, and obliged to live in near-poverty with their mother in a country cottage. The nearby railway line was their main source of amusement – waving to the passing trains, and making friends with the staff of the local station. Three-quarters of the way through the story the eldest, Bobbie, discovered from an old newspaper that her father was in prison; wrongfully, her mother assured her, but she had to conceal this knowledge from her siblings. As so often in the author’s work, a good deed by the children brought into the story a benevolent old gentleman who steered it towards a happy ending by organising an appeal against the father’s conviction, but never before had Edith played so skilfully with the reader’s desires, expectations and emotions at the climax.
There comes a day when the three children go down the fields to wave at the 9.15 train as usual and are astonished when all the passengers smile and wave back at them with their newspapers. Unable to concentrate on her mother’s lessons later that morning, Bobbie goes down to the station to ask after the signalman’s sick little boy. On the way everyone she meets smiles knowingly at her but says nothing, conspiring with the author to keep Bobbie unaware of what is about to happen. Daringly, the author addresses the reader: ‘Of course you know already exactly what was going to happen. Bobbie was not so clever. She had the vague, confused, expectant feeling that comes to one’s heart in dreams. What her heart expected I can’t tell – perhaps the very thing you and I know was going to happen – but her mind expected nothing.’ Thus did the writer simultaneously admit the convention-bound nature of fiction and at the same time claim a superior truthfulness for her own story, thus did she exquisitely delay the climactic discharge of emotion when Bobbie, sitting on the station platform, idly watching the passengers alight from the 11.54 suddenly sees –
‘Oh! my Daddy, my Daddy!’
That scream went like a knife into the heart of everyone in the train, and people put their heads out of the windows to see a tall pale man with lips set in a thin close line, and a little girl clinging to him with arms and legs, while his arms went tightly round her.
The story ended on the next page, for Edith did not make the mistake of trying to describe the heroine’s relief and happiness or how it was shared with the rest of the family.
Bobbie goes into the house, trying to keep her eyes from speaking before her lips have found the right words to ‘tell Mother quite quietly’ that the sorrow and the struggle and the parting are over and done, and that Father has come home.
There were a few more lines, but he read them with difficulty, tears streaming down his face.
Jane came into his study at that moment and looked at him in astonishment. ‘Good heavens, H.G., whatever is the matter?’ she cried.
‘Nothing,’ he said, wiping his eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief. ‘I feel such an ass, blubbing over a children’s book. But I couldn’t stop myself.’ He held up the copy of The Railway Children. ‘That woman plucks at your heartstrings like a harpist.’
Jane laughed. ‘Well, it’s certainly an achievement to make you cry over a book for children.’
‘Wait till you read the last chapter – I bet you’ll do the same,’ he said. He brooded for a moment over the way the trick was done. That switch of perspective from Bobbie to the passengers on the train, for instance, when she screams and embraces her father with her legs as well as her arms and you are reminded that she is, for all her emotional maturity, a child – brilliant! But it wasn’t simply a matter of technique. ‘Tell me,’ he
said, ‘did anything I’ve written ever make you cry?’
Jane thought for some moments, her eyes unfocused as she cast her mind back over the years and the titles of his novels and stories. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said at last, and seeing that he looked glum, added comfortingly. ‘It’s not your forte, H.G.’
THE PERSONAL AND social entailments of belonging to the Fabian were much more interesting and rewarding than its official activities, which consisted mainly of rather boring meetings at which senior members gave papers and aired views which were already well known to the audience, who debated them along predictable lines. There seemed to be little will to rethink the function and strategy of the Society radically, and he began to wonder if he had made a mistake in joining it. A familiar fugitive impulse gripped him, and in the spring of 1904 he thought he saw in the current controversy over tariff reform an opportunity to escape with honour. The charismatic Conservative politician Joseph Chamberlain was campaigning effectively for a protectionist British Empire, an idea which the Fabian Executive pragmatically decided not to condemn, but which his friend Graham Wallas, as a faithful Liberal, opposed on principle. When Wallas resigned from the Society over this issue, he seized the opportunity to tender his own resignation on the same grounds. Shaw, however, persuaded him to withdraw it in a letter which artfully combined sarcasm with flattery, declining to believe that he cared a fig about tariff reform, but urging him to persevere with the Society because they needed him. He accordingly wrote to the Secretary Pease withdrawing his resignation while making it clear that he disapproved of the Society in its present form and was staying on only in order to turn it upside down.