by David Lodge
‘But what about Willie and the lovers?’ Rosamund asked.
‘He meets them of course, and all his jealousy has vanished. They immediately become firm friends, all three. But there is a snag: Willie and Verrall like each other – but they love Nettie. They have a man to man talk, and they agree that one of them must give up his claim to her, and obviously Willie’s is the weaker. But then Nettie says, “Why must it be one or the other? I love you both, for different reasons. Why does love have to be so exclusive, one woman owned by one man. Why can’t we be a unit of three equals” – or words to that effect.’
Rosamund was clearly excited by this turn in the story. ‘You mean, she offers to belong to them both – in every way?’ she said, wide-eyed.
‘Yes – she hints as much. But the men can’t contemplate the possibility. The old male possessiveness is too deeply ingrained in them. So Willie sadly goes on his way, and dedicates himself to assisting with the great task of remaking human civilisation, razing the filthy old cities and building light, clean new ones.’
‘Oh,’ said Rosamund. ‘What a shame. Poor Willie.’ She unclasped her hands and let them fall to her lap.
‘But he meets a nice woman called Annie, and marries her and has children by her, and they join Nettie and Verrall and live happily ever after as a kind of extended family.’
‘Oh, well, that’s not so bad then,’ Rosamund said, smiling.
He did not tell her, since he had not yet decided how to write it, that in the epilogue he was going to make it clear that Willie and Nettie finally became lovers, but not exclusively so, the two couples amicably cohabiting in a world that had come to accept Free Love as the norm.
‘Perhaps we should rejoin the party,’ he said. ‘People will be wondering what we are up to.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Mr Wells,’ she said flirtatiously.
‘I think it’s high time you stopped calling me Mr Wells, Rosamund,’ he said. ‘My friends call me H.G.’
Another blush of pleasure flooded her cheeks. ‘Thank you, H.G.!’
It crossed his mind that seducing Rosamund would be as easy as plucking a ripe peach from the tree.
But he did not act on this intuition immediately; never, in fact, for you could hardly call what happened a seduction, unless he himself was the object of it. Rosamund sent clear signals in further encounters between them that she was eager to know sexual love, and would like nothing more than to be initiated by a mature, experienced lover whose discretion could be relied upon and whose intellect she revered. He hesitated to respond, conscious of the dangers inherent in his relationship with the Blands. She was a good-looking young woman in a plump, wholesome, nubile way, but he did not feel an irresistible desire for her, and as if perceiving this she set about making herself interesting to him by some astonishing revelations about her parentage.
These were triggered by a casual remark he made about her eyes one evening at Spade House. She had brought young John Bland from Dymchurch to play with Gip and Frank, and they were staying overnight. While the boys were put to bed and dinner was prepared under Jane’s supervision, he poured himself and Rosamund schooners of Madeira and suggested that they take their drinks out on to the terrace. But there was a chilly east wind blowing, so they moved to the garden shelter (as he now called his shed-cum-study) and sat looking out through the open door as the sun declined towards the sea in the west. She raised her glass to the light and commented on the beautiful colour of the wine: ‘It’s the colour of your eyes, Rosamund,’ he said. ‘And your mother’s.’
‘You mean Edith?’ she said. ‘Edith is not my mother.’
He gaped at her. ‘Edith is not your mother?’ he repeated. ‘Then who is?’
She looked at him over her glass, as if both pleased and scared by the effect of her words. ‘If I tell you, you must keep it as a secretest secret.’
‘All right.’
‘Alice,’ she said.
‘Miss Hoatson?’ He was astounded. But … you don’t look like her. You look much more like Edith.’
‘I know,’ said Rosamund. ‘It was very convenient when I was adopted – the same colour eyes and everything.’
‘And who is your father?’ he asked.
‘Daddy, of course,’ she said.
‘Hubert! Good Lord … How long have you known?’
‘He told me when I was eighteen. And afterwards Alice filled in a lot of the details.’
Then, having sworn him again to secrecy, she unfolded a story so extraordinary that for a while he wondered if she was making it up, but he was soon convinced of its truth.
‘Alice was a friend of Edith’s in the early eighties,’ Rosamund began. ‘She worked for a pittance on a women’s magazine Edith used to write for. Edith became pregnant soon after Fabian was born – too soon – and Alice moved in with her and Daddy to take some of the domestic strain off Edith as her time approached. Sadly the baby was born dead. Edith was terribly upset – Alice told me Daddy had to practically tear the poor little corpse from her arms to see to the burial – and Alice stayed on in the house, not Well Hall of course, a much smaller one in Lewisham, or perhaps it was Lee, they were always moving house in those days … anyway Alice was a huge support to Edith in this crisis. But she soon had a crisis of her own to cope with: she was with child herself – me. She didn’t tell Edith who the father was – just that it was someone she couldn’t possibly marry – so Edith suggested she should move in with them permanently as a kind of housekeeper, have the baby under their roof, and she and Hubert would adopt it and bring it up as their own child. So that’s what they did. It seemed like the perfect solution. Daddy was very glad to go along with it.’
‘As well he might be,’ he could not resist interpolating, as Rosamund took a sip of her Madeira. ‘It got him out of a very sticky situation, I’d say. When did Edith discover the truth?’
‘I think when I was about six months. Apparently there was a terrible row, but she had become too attached to little me by then to reject me – at least that’s her story. Daddy told me she threatened to have me adopted by somebody else, and he said that if I went he would go too. But Alice thinks Edith suspected all along he was the father. She knew Daddy’s naughty ways with women and she made no attempt to discourage his attentions to Alice – rather the contrary, because Alice had an admirer whom Edith didn’t like, so she encouraged Daddy to see him off. She’s not very consistent, you know, Edith.’
‘Neither is your father, Rosamund, I’m bound to say,’ he remarked. ‘I’ve heard him singing the praises of monogamy more than once.’
‘No, you’re right …’ she said. ‘They’re both full of contradictions. I suppose that’s why they still love each other, in spite of everything. Because they do, you know, in their odd way. But whenever there was tension between them, I think the fact that I was Alice’s daughter, not Edith’s, would open up like an old wound, and add to the bitterness. My childhood memories are full of rows between them, with Edith suddenly bursting into tears, usually at the dinner table, and flouncing out of the room and going to her bedroom, and Daddy groaning, ‘Oh God!’ and going upstairs to pacify her.’
‘But you never guessed the truth when you were a child?’
‘No. Not even when Fabian died – I was thirteen – and I overheard Edith having hysterics and screaming, “Why did it have to be Fabian? Why couldn’t it have been Rosamund?”’
‘She said that? How terrible for you,’ he said, genuinely shocked.
‘It was terrible. But I never suspected the reason until Daddy told me.’
‘And then?’
‘Then, in a way, it was a relief to understand what I had always felt intuitively, that I was Daddy’s favourite child, but Edith’s least favourite. It was inevitable – how could she feel for me as she felt for her own children? If I outshone Paul and Iris in any way, she would naturally resent it. Oddly enough she was never the same about John, I suppose because he came so long after.’
‘Yes, John is Alice’s child too,’ Rosamund said calmly.
‘By Hubert?’ Rosamund nodded. ‘Good God,’ he murmured.
‘We’re quite an unusual family, you see,’ Rosamund said.
A phrase he had heard frequently on his travels in America, ‘You can say that again’, came to mind, but he did not utter it. Instead he put his free hand on hers and squeezed it. ‘You poor girl,’ he murmured.
They sat in silence for a while, looking out at a spectacular scene: dark purplish clouds edged with gold barred the setting sun, whose broken rays were reflected in the foam-flecked sea. Then the sound of a dinner gong which someone, probably Jane, was holding at an open window, carried to their ears on the east wind.
‘We’d better go in,’ he said.
As they stood up he saw that her eyes were wet. ‘My poor girl,’ he said again, and opened his arms to give her a comforting hug. She fell into them instantly, and he felt the soft, warm pressure of her breasts through his thin summer jacket as she clung to him. The only way he could think of to bring the embrace to a conclusion was to kiss her on the cheek, but she turned her head and pressed her lips warmly to his.
‘Dear H.G.,’ she said. ‘It’s such a relief to talk about these things to someone you can trust.’
He didn’t consider that his vow of secrecy applied to Jane, and as soon as Rosamund had returned to Dymchurch he told her everything that he had learned from his conversation in the garden shelter, omitting only the embrace which concluded it. Slightly to his surprise, Jane was disposed to be sympathetic to Edith’s part in the saga. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘it was generous of her to agree to bring up Alice’s child as her own … and the second one too. You could see that ménage as being based on a kind of Free Love – like your characters at the end of In the Days of the Comet.’ She had just read the epilogue he had written to this novel.
‘But that presupposes a completely transformed society,’ he said, ‘when Free Love is universally accepted, and everything between men and women is open and above board. The Bland household is the reverse of that. Well Hall turns out to be a house of lies – of concealment and hypocrisy.’
He felt that very strongly when he next returned there, not long afterwards. The Blands were hosting a big summer party to celebrate the engagement of their daughter Iris to her civil servant. The Wellses had been invited to stay for the weekend and had accepted, both parties tacitly agreeing to conceal the tensions that now existed between them. On the surface it was a gay occasion. The sun shone down on the ivy-covered walls of the old house and its gardens in the late afternoon, and as dusk fell light poured from the open windows and Chinese lanterns hanging from the trees were reflected in the moat. There was a splendid cold buffet laid out between silver candlesticks in the big hall, prepared by two Swiss male cooks whom the Blands now rather grandly employed, and the drawing room was cleared for dancing to piano and violin. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ Maud Reeves cried enthusiastically as she greeted him, throwing out her arm to embrace the whole occasion, and of course he agreed. But in truth Well Hall no longer seemed the idyllic demi-paradise it had been for him a year before. Rosamund’s revelations had cast a retrospective shadow over his previous perceptions of the place and its inhabitants, making the latter seem no longer charmingly eccentric, but devious and dangerously irresponsible. The death of the adolescent Fabian, for instance, when you thought about it, was not a tragic accident, but the consequence of culpable carelessness. Imagine forgetting that your son was booked to have a surgical operation, however minor! Fabian would have eaten breakfast that day – why would he not? – contrary to standard procedure before an operation. He probably choked on his own vomit while coming round from the chloroform, alone and unattended, while Edith was no doubt scribbling away in her room, lost in the dreamworld of one of her stories, and Hubert was, what, probably rogering Alice Hoatson …
At this point in his thoughts Alice herself came up to him, where he stood alone on the terrace overlooking the moat, and asked him if he didn’t want to go into the house and partake of the buffet. He said he would when the crowd around the table had diminished. She seemed disposed to linger and talk – rather to his surprise, for in all the time he had known the Blands he had seldom exchanged more than a few words with her. She was appropriately nicknamed ‘Mouse’, for she was small in stature (and seemed especially so when standing beside the Blands) and quiet and self-effacing in manner. He had never known anyone who made so faint an impression on one’s senses, like a figure slightly out of focus at the edge of a family snapshot. Now that he knew something of her personal history she had become an object of great interest to him, but it was difficult to connect the melodramatic story Rosamund had related with this diminutive, grey-haired, softly spoken woman of utterly unremarkable looks.
They chatted for a while on trivial topics, and then she startled him by saying: ‘I’ve been pleased to see that Rosamund and you are becoming great friends.’
‘Well, I er, I do my best to help her with her writing, you know,’ he stammered, though in truth she had still not shown him any work in progress, and he had been too busy with his own to urge her to do so.
‘Yes, that’s very kind of you. I’m not sure she has real talent in that direction, but we shall see. Apart from that, it’s good for her to have a mature man like you to confide in.’
‘Is it?’ he responded lamely, quite confounded by the tone and drift of her conversation.
‘Yes. She’s a very pretty and popular girl, and the young men flock round her, but she’s not ready to commit herself, quite rightly. I’m afraid that Edith and Hubert will try to marry her off as soon as they can, to make her safe, like Iris.’
‘Safe?’
‘You know what I mean: respectable. In spite of their own free and easy ways, they like to keep up appearances. They will encourage some young man to court her. Clifford Sharp, for instance – he’s keen on her.’
‘Is he?’ He felt a little stab of jealousy at this information. He had had a few conversations with Sharp and found him a dour character, ambitious to make his mark on the Fabian, but lacking originality and charm.
‘She needs time to discover herself, to become a woman without becoming the property of some man.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ he said, sincerely.
‘So that’s why it’s good that she has a friend like you to counsel her, tell her about life. The only mature man she is close to is Hubert. And Hubert …’ She sighed. ‘Well, Hubert is Hubert.’
There was a wealth of implication in this cryptic utterance, but he didn’t have the nerve to try and draw it out. The tenor of her remarks about Rosamund betrayed at every point a mother’s concern in a way he had never detected in her speech previously. It seemed certain that Rosamund had told her that she had revealed their secret relationship to him, but he dared not ask in case he was wrong.
‘Yes, Hubert is Hubert,’ he said with an air of profound and sympathetic understanding.
They heard the sound of Edith’s voice through an open window calling inside the house: ‘Mouse! Mouse! Has anyone seen Alice?’
‘I must go, Mr Wells,’ she said, and flitted away in the dusk like a shadow.
Later that evening he danced with Rosamund – having first, for form’s sake, waltzed with Jane and Edith. To Rosamund as they parted he murmured, ‘I’m going to take a breather on that seat in the pergola,’ where ten minutes later she joined him, approaching hesitantly until he called her name. There was barely enough light to see by from the hazy half-moon, filtered through the bramble roses that covered the pergola.
‘Golly, it’s dark under here, H.G.,’ she said, sitting down beside him.
‘Your eyes will accommodate soon,’ he said. ‘I wanted some privacy.’
‘Is that so you can kiss me again?’ she said archly.
‘No,’ he said, ‘so we won’t be overheard. I had a rather ext
raordinary conversation with Alice, earlier this evening. Or rather, she had it with me. She seemed to assume that I know – know she’s your real mother.’
‘Yes, I told her I had spoken to you, in confidence of course,’ Rosamund said.
‘Ah, I thought so … She seemed to approve.’
‘Yes, she does,’ Rosamund said. ‘She thinks you’re a counterbalance to Daddy.’
‘A counterbalance?’ For the second time that evening he felt the conversational ground shifting under his feet. As she didn’t answer, he said: ‘She did say something cryptic about your father.’
‘What’s “cryptic” mean?’
‘Difficult to interpret. She said, “Hubert is Hubert.”’
‘Yes, Hubert is Hubert,’ Rosamund said, nodding. She kicked off her shoes and wriggled her feet. ‘Gosh my feet hurt. New shoes.’
‘Rosamund,’ he said gently, ‘I must know what you are talking about.’
After a long pause she said: ‘It’s just that lately he’s been very affectionate towards me in a way that I feel is … more than fatherly. I don’t mean that he’s done anything rude, but … it’s just, when he kisses me, or gives me a hug, which he’s always done a lot, ever since I was a little girl, well he squeezes just a little too hard, or he goes on just a little too long, especially if we’re on our own. It makes me feel uncomfortable, but I don’t know how to stop it. I know that if I said the slightest thing about it to Daddy he would get into the most frightful paddy and accuse me of having a depraved imagination … And maybe it is my imagination …’