by David Lodge
They both believed in Free Love, but Violet’s experience had begun earlier and she had been tutored by one lover in particular, a man called Crawfurd, one-time diplomat and minor man of letters, who was a dedicated libertine. He was also, by her account, an unmitigated cad, who used her as his mistress for many years because he was married, and when his wife died promptly married another woman with money instead of Violet. Some years had passed since this happened, but the pain of rejection and betrayal obviously still hurt. At the time they lunched together at Torino’s she was grieving for her first lover, the painter George Henry Boughton, another married man with whom she had fallen desperately in love at the age of seventeen and pursued until he yielded to her importunate devotion. He eventually ended the affair in order to save his marriage, leaving her heartbroken, but his recent death had revived all her old tender feelings for him, and made her yearn for the comfort of someone else’s arms.
Violet had been a New Woman before the phrase was ever coined, fearlessly seeking her own erotic fulfilment from an early age, and prepared to pay the price that a hypocritical society exacted. Her novels dealt with the experience of similar young women, similarly placed, but the code of sexual reticence she was obliged to follow drew much of the potential sting from those he had sampled, sentimental stories of amorous intrigue redeemed by a cynical epigrammatic wit reminiscent of the plays of Oscar Wilde. She claimed Wilde had been an admirer in her youth and was once on the brink of proposing to her. Henry James, rather surprisingly, was a friend of her maturity, and entertained her occasionally at Lamb House. ‘I stimulate his imagination,’ she explained. ‘He knows what a depraved life I lead and milks me for lubricious stories of London Society, which he is too frightened to investigate for himself.’ She quoted a characteristic letter from the Master declining an invitation to visit her in London: ‘You are Society, and I am more and more contemplative detachment – hanging on to the world after the fashion of a very obese spider by a thin thread of my own independent weaving.’ They laughed together over this wonderfully vivid simile. ‘It deserves to be illustrated by Max Beerbohm, don’t you think?’ said Violet. ‘H.J. calls me the Great Devourer because of my appetite for social life, and the Purple Patch because of a purple overcoat I wore once, but also as a sly hit at my prose, I don’t doubt.’ It was true that Violet sometimes let her verbal facility run away with her in her novels, and that nearly all of them were a little too long for what she had to say, but there was no doubt about her fertility of invention within a fairly narrow compass.
At forty-five she had already lost the beauty for which she had been admired in her younger years, and painted heavily to disguise a poor complexion, but her body was still slim and limber, able to adopt any attitude in bed he suggested, and to demonstrate a few that were new to him. Her years with Crawfurd had made her shamelessly versatile in the art of love, and she did not hesitate to use her mouth and tongue to arouse him for an encore when they had time to indulge in one. ‘Now I know the real reason why Henry James calls you the Great Devourer,’ he said, watching her complacently as she performed this service, and causing her to choke with laughter. He liked a woman who laughed in bed. Violet was the ideal partner for a passade. Unlike Dorothy Richardson.
He continued to see Dorothy at infrequent intervals for rather perfunctory sex followed by long discussions of her emotional, psychological and philosophical problems. She was still locked in the curious triangular relationship with her celibate lover Grad and her ardent bi-sexual flatmate Veronica, and no nearer to resolving the question of her own sexuality. He wished he had never got involved with Dorothy, and blamed himself for doing so. He had undertaken a kind of therapeutic responsibility for her without having the necessary time and patience to exercise it, distracted as he was by his clandestine affair with Rosamund and his disputes with the Fabian Old Gang, not to mention the books he was trying to write at the same time. Sex for him was ideally a form of recreation, like tennis or badminton, something you did when you had completed a satisfactory bit of work, to let off steam and exercise the body instead of the mind for a while, but that was not what Dorothy needed, or at least wanted, from their assignations. He decided to put this to her one afternoon when they met at the hotel near South Kensington Underground station usefully recommended by Violet Hunt. When booking the room he had ordered a bottle of hock to be placed there in an ice bucket. Instead of getting into shirtsleeves and taking off his bow tie as soon as they were in the room, as he usually did, he remained fully dressed, gestured her to sit down in one of the two armchairs, and uncorked the bottle of wine. She looked at him with a wry, knowing, humourless smile.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she said.
‘What is that?’ he replied, filling the two glasses and giving her one.
‘You’re going to say we should put a stop to this.’
‘Well, it’s not making you happy, Dorothy, so it doesn’t make me happy either,’ he said, sitting down in the other chair facing her. ‘Of course we can go on being friends – you and I and Jane. But let’s face the facts. Sex between us has been a failure. I don’t know whether it’s my fault, or …’
‘Whether I’m a lesbian?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think you are not really interested in sex at all, per se.’
‘Sometimes I think that myself,’ she said.
‘There you are, then. Wouldn’t it be best to stop seeing each other – like this, I mean? Go back to our old open friendly relationship. Forget we ever tried to be lovers.’
‘That may be difficult,’ she said. ‘You see, I think I’m pregnant.’
‘What ?’ He sat up abruptly, spilling wine on his trouser leg. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, I haven’t been to a doctor yet. But it’s two months now since my last … you know. I’m fairly sure.’
His brain whirred, considering the implications and options at lightning speed. Was it his child? Almost certainly, and he couldn’t risk mortally offending her by asking. When had it happened – and how? He didn’t recall any mishap with a split French letter or a mismanaged withdrawal. Of course no method was one hundred per cent reliable … But suppose it was a hysterical pregnancy, that she was imagining the whole thing? He went across to her, perched on the arm of her chair, put his arm round her shoulder and kissed her forehead. ‘My dear Dorothy,’ he said. ‘How wonderful.’
‘Wonderful?’ She sounded surprised.
‘Wonderful that you and I should bring a new life into the world. He will be very clever.’
‘He?’
‘Or she. Of course, I will give you all the support you need.’
‘You will endow my motherhood?’ she asked ironically.
‘Exactly. I can’t make an honest woman of you, in that revolting phrase … but I will give you everything you need to bring up the child.’
She blinked at him as if she was about to cry. ‘I didn’t think you would be so nice about it,’ she said. ‘Thank you, but I will manage on my own.’
‘Why should you? You’re not well off, and I am.’
‘I prefer to be independent,’ she said.
‘Well, we won’t argue about it now. Have another glass of hock.’ He refilled her glass. ‘Here’s to the new life.’
‘You are an extraordinary man,’ she said.
‘And you are an extraordinary woman, my dear,’ he said. ‘How are your friends? Mr Grad and Veronica – do they know?’
‘No, of course not, nobody knows, except you – now. Benjamin will be shocked – he probably won’t speak to me again. Veronica will probably be delighted and want to adopt the child when she and Philip marry.’
‘And would you wish that?’
‘No. I would like to have a child of my own.’
‘Splendid!’ he said.
‘It’s not at all splendid,’ she said. ‘It’s a mess. What will Jane say?’
‘Jane will take it in her stride,’ he said. ‘Nothing to do with m
e surprises her any more.’
Nevertheless he did not put this presumption immediately to the test by speaking to Jane – wisely, as it turned out. Some time later he received a brief note from Dorothy to say that she had had a miscarriage. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ she wrote. ‘But I have been very ill, and feel wretched. I have been off work for weeks and would like to give up Harley Street completely. I would like to live in the country and write.’ He sent her a sympathetic letter and a cheque, and offered to give her proofreading work which she could do at home. He said that he hoped they would continue to be friends and that she would always be a welcome guest at Spade House. Whether she had really had a miscarriage, or in fact had not been pregnant, he would never know, but he was simply relieved that their unsatisfactory affair had finally come to an end by mutual consent, and that scandal had been avoided. As far as he was aware, nobody except Jane had known it was going on. The relief he felt at this turn of events was, however, soon overtaken by a new cause of scandal – or rather, the revival of an old one – which upset his tentative rapprochement with the Fabian.
He and Jane were both elected to the Executive at the end of March. He came fourth in the ballot, rather to his surprise, close behind Sidney Webb, Pease and Shaw, which showed that he still had considerable support among the membership in spite of his defeat at the December meetings. The new Executive agreed to set up a small subcommittee consisting of himself, Shaw and Webb to tackle once again the task of revising the Basis. He dashed off a draft and sent it to his two colleagues, but predictably they quibbled with him and between themselves about his formulations and he resigned himself to a long and probably inconclusive process. He converted his draft into a proposed Fabian Manifesto and circulated it to seventy-two senior members, but only twenty-six of them responded positively. His strongest supporters in the Society were the young. Amber Reeves, down from Cambridge for the Easter vacation, was telling everyone about how brilliant his talk of February had been, and asked him if he would give some public lectures under the auspices of the CFS in the autumn. Her opportunity to make this request, to which he agreed, was a meeting of the Fabian Arts Society at which Rosamund was also present, and in retrospect he wondered whether she had observed how very much at ease Amber was in his company and felt a pang of jealousy. The young women were equal in their admiration for his ideas, but Amber was able to discuss them more articulately, with a confident range of intellectual reference, and Rosamund, who had never been encouraged to think of going to a university, must have enviously registered this difference.
Up till then, Rosamund had been very sensible about keeping her distance from him to allow the gossip about them to subside, contenting herself with the occasional knowing smile when their eyes met across a crowded room, or a covert squeeze of his hand when she had occasion to shake it. She seemed to accept that their relationship was indefinitely suspended, if not, as he rather hoped, concluded. Occasionally the memory of their last private conversation, in the archway to Clement’s Inn, returned to worry him with the thought that his final words on that occasion had been imprudent, but it was not until after the meeting of the Fabian Arts Society and Amber’s return to Cambridge that he received a letter from Rosamund reminding him of his ‘promise’ to take her to Paris, and asking when the trip was to take place. He arranged to meet her in the Constable room of the National Gallery, where they could pretend if necessary that they had bumped into each other by chance. He could see that she enjoyed the little charade this plan entailed, their greeting each other with pleased surprise and sitting down on a bench under the bored supervision of a uniformed member of the gallery staff. But when he told her that he hadn’t realised she had taken the Paris idea so seriously she looked stricken. ‘You didn’t mean it, then?’ she said.
‘Well, I meant it at the time. But it was more of a wish than a promise. Something that would be fun, but … I mean, can you really see us doing it?’
‘Yes, I can,’ she said. ‘I think of it constantly.’ She spoke emphatically, and the attendant showed signs of interest in their conversation. He raised his finger to his lips and she continued in a lower tone. ‘It’s the last thing I think of before I fall asleep and the first thing when I wake up. I remember exactly what you said we would have – a hotel room in Paris with a huge four-poster bed with Egyptian cotton sheets, and a marble bathroom, and piped heating.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long pause while she looked at him yearningly. ‘Then we’d better do it,’ he said, and the way her face lit up was, for a moment, sufficient reward for his reckless commitment.
Why on earth, he wondered later, had he made it? Gallantry? Honour? Pity? Probably vanity, when you came down to it. He knew Rosamund would despise him for the rest of her life if he backed out of his pledge, and though he had no desire to continue their romance, he did not relish living with that knowledge. The whole justification for their affair in his own conscience was that he, the older, experienced man, would initiate her into the ways of love, and then gracefully retire at the appropriate moment, to allow her to explore relationships with people of her own age. There would be sadness at parting, but no bitterness and resentment. The only way he could think of achieving such a conclusion now was to make the Paris excursion the occasion of it. He would say to her something like: ‘We will have one weekend of ecstatic love, in exotic, luxurious surroundings, and then, for both our sakes, part for ever as lovers, contenting ourselves with the memory of that last, perfect time together.’ It sounded terribly like a line of dialogue from one of Violet’s novels, but it would almost certainly work.
Accordingly he started to make plans, and after a while he began genuinely to look forward to the adventure and to derive some satisfaction from his own finesse in planning it. He decided they would travel to Paris not by the usual route from Charing Cross or Victoria, crossing the Channel via Dover or Folkestone to Calais, but from Plymouth, where the transatlantic liners stopped to disembark passengers before proceeding to Cherbourg. They would be far less likely to run into anyone they knew, and although the journey would be longer, it would be more comfortable and give Rosamund the extra treat of a few hours in the first-class dining room and saloon of a Cunarder. He booked a passage for two on the Luciana under the names of Mr & Mrs Herbert, and tickets for the boat train from Paddington. As an extra precaution he counselled Rosamund to disguise her appearance by wearing a hat with a veil, while he himself planned to wear a scarf which he could wrap around his lower face if necessary. Having decided to spare no expense to make the trip a memorable one, he booked a suite at the Ritz in Paris. He corresponded with Rosamund via the Fabian Nursery office in Clement’s Inn, and she sent her replies to his club. They agreed on a weekend and constructed their alibis. Rosamund arranged a fictitious visit to a sympathetic ex-school friend; he told Jane that he was popping over to Paris to do some research for The War in the Air, which wasn’t entirely untrue – he was thinking of destroying the centre of Paris by aerial bombing at some point in the story and it would be easier to imagine on the spot how the Eiffel Tower might most spectacularly topple to the ground when its massive feet were blasted away.
To avoid meeting Rosamund publicly on the station’s concourse, he directed that they should rendezvous on the train, sending her a first-class ticket and seat reservation, and money for a cab. He arrived at Paddington early, feeling tense, wondering whether she would turn up or lose courage at the last moment, and slipped into the buffet to down a calming brandy at the bar. As soon as the Plymouth train drew in he took his seat, getting up from time to time to put his head out of the window and look down the platform towards the ticket barrier. There were not many people coming through, and he was hopeful that they would have the compartment, a smart new one with opulently stuffed and buttoned leather seating, to themselves. At last he saw Rosamund approaching in the distance, in a wide-brimmed hat with veil and a light-coloured travelling cost
ume, preceded by a porter carrying her valise, and he ducked back into the compartment, sat down and pretended to be deeply engaged in reading the Times. A few moments later he heard the porter say, ‘’Ere we are, Miss. Sure you wouldn’t prefer a Ladies Only compartment? I can find you a seat in one of them, easy.’ ‘No thank you, this will do perfectly well,’ Rosamund said, sounding remarkably assured. The porter opened the door, entered the compartment with a ‘’Scuse me, sir,’ and lifted Rosamund’s valise on to the luggage rack. He heard the man thank her as she tipped him on the platform, and lowered his newspaper. Only then did he see her, framed in the open door. She laughed as he grasped her hand and helped her up the step into the compartment. ‘Why are you wearing that thick muffler on such a lovely day?’ she said. ‘It was supposed to be a disguise,’ he said, pulling it off. ‘But you look wonderful, my dear.’ And she did, radiant and rosy-cheeked as she threw up her veil. He was no longer acting a part – he felt a surge of desire for her, and a triumphant pride in having organised this amorous escapade so successfully. He closed the door, hoisted up the window, and pulled down all the blinds on the platform side. Then he took her in his arms and kissed her warmly, and she responded with equal ardour. They sank down on to the leather upholstery with their arms round each other. ‘I was beginning to fear that you had changed your mind,’ he said. ‘Never!’ she said. ‘I’ve been dreaming of this for months, and now it’s actually happening, I can hardly believe it. Just think, tonight I will be in Paris with you.’ ‘In a four-poster bed,’ he said, and kissed her again as she blushed delightfully. He had a vivid mental image of them romping together amid the goosedown pillows, like lovers in the antique erotic prints you could buy on the Left Bank. What naughty fun they would have!