A Man of Parts

by David Lodge

  Unfortunately she began to pester him with love letters and urgent requests to meet him again, some of which he weakly indulged, and once she tricked him into an assignation by telling him she was staying near Easton with a married couple who were great admirers of his work and would be thrilled to meet him. When he responded to this bait by driving over to the house, Hedwig Verena opened the front door, dressed in a filmy tea gown and little else, and led him immediately upstairs to a bedroom, explaining that her married friends were away and had left her to look after the house. He felt increasingly uneasy about continuing the affair, if one could call it that, but unable to bring it discreetly to an end, until to his relief she finally went back to Austria.

  He was unpleasantly surprised to receive a telephone call from her on an exceedingly hot day in June of the following year, when he was on his own at Whitehall Court. ‘I’m back, H.G.,’ she said. ‘When can I see you?’ ‘You can’t, Hedwig,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m much too busy, and will be for the foreseeable future.’ Undeterred she came to the flat soon afterwards, pretended to the maid who answered the doorbell that she had an appointment, and was shown into his study. When she tried to embrace him he backed off and held up his hand. ‘No, Hedwig.’ ‘But I love you!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘ I do not love you. I never loved you, and I never said I loved you. We had an enjoyable passade last year, but that was all it was.’ Upon which she sat down, uninvited, and said sulkily, ‘You are very cruel, H.G. You are very cold. It is because of Rebecca West, is it not?’ ‘What do you know of Rebecca West?’ he said angrily. ‘What everybody in London knows, that you are her lover,’ she said, smiling maliciously. It seemed to him that her withered hand now gave her a sinister, witch-like appearance. She added: ‘Perhaps I will tell her that you were my lover last year.’ ‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’ he said, standing over her threateningly, now really angry. ‘No, no, of course I would not, I am joking you,’ she said, making a rare idiomatic error. ‘But I would love to meet her and talk to her about books and ideas. Perhaps I could interview her. Give me a letter of introduction to her, and I promise not to mention that we had what you call a passade.‘

  In the end it seemed the only way to get rid of her, so he scribbled a brief note of introduction to Rebecca and sent Hedwig round to Queen’s Gate, instructing the housemaid not to admit her if she returned. He learned later that Rebecca received the visitor with much puzzlement, and that her maid was so concerned by the latter’s appearance and manner that she went out into the street to check that a constable was on point duty at the corner in case he should be needed. Hedwig chattered away in a bizarre fashion, praising Rebecca’s work extravagantly, inviting her to borrow her flat in Vienna, describing in detail an unhappy affair she had had with an English diplomat there, and gesturing so wildly that she sent a sewing-box flying to the floor and broke it. But she kept her promise not to reveal her intimacy with himself, and Rebecca, after suffering a fervent embrace, eventually managed to ease her out of the flat.

  That evening he was in his dressing room, changing for a dinner with Lord Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, and wondering how he would bear a starched shirt and dinner jacket for a whole evening in the stifling temperature, when he heard the sounds of someone being admitted to his study. It was Hedwig. Unfortunately the maid had gone off duty without passing on his instruction to her substitute, and Hedwig had talked her way into the flat. When he entered the study she was standing in the centre of the room facing the door, wearing a waterproof raincoat, and he just had time to reflect that this was a strange garment for such a hot day before she threw it open to reveal that she was naked except for stockings, a suspender belt and high-heeled shoes. ‘You must love me!’ she cried, ‘or I will kill myself. I have poison. I have a razor.’ He instantly grasped the urgency of getting not only help but also witnesses to the madness of her behaviour. He went to the door and called down the passageway to the maid to summon the hall-porter of the building, but when he turned round Hedwig had already thrown off the waterproof and slashed her wrists and armpits with a cut-throat razor.

  Fortunately she had not severed an artery, but she was bleeding profusely when he took the razor from her, propped her up in an armchair and covered her with the waterproof, having checked that there was no vial of poison in its pockets. ‘Let me die, let me die,’ she declaimed, and as others arrived, ‘I love him, I love him.’ The hall-porter, an ex-army sergeant-major, proved to be a model of calm efficiency in summoning the police and the ambulance service, and Hedwig was whisked off to the Westminster Infirmary, from which he received in due course a telephone message that she was not in danger. This was an immense relief: if she had succeeded in committing suicide he would have been finished. There would have been an inquest and a public scandal that would have made the Amber Reeves affair look petty in comparison. Even so he was well aware that the press could make something very damaging out of the incident if they wished, and his solicitor Hayes, whom he contacted by telephone, agreed. ‘We must try and persuade your friends in the Newspaper Owners’ Association to suppress the story as far as possible,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid there’s bound to be something in the papers tomorrow.’

  And indeed there was. The police and the ambulance men had seemed sympathetic and discreet, but a reporter on the Star, a popular evening paper, got wind of the story the next morning, perhaps from the hospital, and having ascertained from Hedwig Verena’s landlady that she had visited Rebecca West earlier, went round to Queen’s Gate with a photographer in tow and asked her for a comment and a photo of herself with Anthony. She shut the door on them and phoned him in a panic asking him what had happened. When he explained she said, ‘Oh my God! What shall I say to them?’ ‘Nothing – send them round to me,’ he told her, knowing they would not be satisfied until they got something to print, and gave a short dignified statement when they arrived. ‘It is true that a young woman entered my flat uninvited and threatened to commit suicide, and actually attempted to do so while I was seeking assistance. Fortunately she did not succeed, and she is being treated in hospital for minor injuries. I do not wish the matter to be talked about, and I do not intend to add to the snowball of rumour.’

  He telephoned Rebecca and arranged to meet her in Kensington Gardens that afternoon to discuss the situation. She was not as angry with him for sending Frau Gatternigg to her as he had feared – but then she had no idea of his previous relationship with the woman; as far as she knew, Hedwig’s invasion of his flat and demented behaviour was totally unexpected. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into it, Panther,’ he said. ‘There will be a report of some kind in the Star this evening. Hayes says the best thing we can do is to dine out conspicuously and go on to a theatre, behaving as if nothing serious has happened and we are not in the least disturbed.’ They carried off this performance – rather well, he thought – at the Ivy that evening, and later at Wyndham’s Theatre, knowing that the Late Evening edition of the Star was on the streets outside, with a long and fairly accurate account of the incident under the headline, ‘WOMAN ATTEMPTS SUICIDE IN FLAT OF H.G. WELLS’. It mentioned that this person had ‘visited the home of a well-known woman novelist in Kensington and acted in a strange manner’ on the same day.

  A few other papers repeated the story the following morning, but with no more details, and mercifully there were no journalistic sequels. He blessed his good relations with Beaverbrook and Rothermere, both of whom promised to help when he appealed to them, and instructed their editors that ‘H.G. Wells is not news for the next two weeks.’ Hedwig, having been advised that she would be liable to prosecution for attempted suicide, returned to Austria as soon as she was able. Before the end of Beaverbrook’s and Rothmere’s helpful embargoes, the story was, in journalistic terms, dead.

  – You were very lucky.

  – I was. Mind you, Hedwig had no real intention of committing suicide. She’d had some practice in cutting herself witho
ut doing serious damage. I discovered later that she’d used the same trick before, in Austria, when she was spurned by some lover.

  – Your account of that episode in the Postscript to the autobiography is very misleading as regards Rebecca’s part in it. You say there that you discovered, when you met her in Kensington Gardens, that Hedwig ‘in the rôle of a literary admirer and possible interviewer, had visited Rebecca the previous day – I suppose with the idea of staging a triangular situation’, as if you yourself had nothing to do with it.

  – I didn’t feel it was relevant.

  – It was very relevant! Rebecca’s involvement was what made the story potentially so sensational. It wasn’t just a matter of a famous writer and a deranged fan – as you say, it became a triangle: the famous writer, his mistress and a jealous rival of the mistress. And it was all your fault.

  – Yes, quite true.

  – Why on earth did you send the woman round to Queen’s Gate? Anything might have happened. She might have attacked Rebecca.

  – I honestly don’t know. I was desperate to get rid of her, and it was fearfully hot that day in London – ninety-two degrees. I sometimes think the heat made me almost as deranged as Hedwig. Of course, I didn’t yet know how dangerous she was, but it was certainly an irrational thing to do, sending her to Rebecca. When I came to write up the whole episode I really couldn’t explain it, so I left it out.

  – In other words, you were too embarrassed to admit your folly even in these allegedly candid confessions?

  – I suppose so, yes.

  – She told people later that it was the Hedwig episode which finally convinced her that you were completely selfish and didn’t really love her, and that she would have to break with you.

  – Not true, actually – or only half true. I was selfish, but I did love her. And anyway, she didn’t break with me immediately.

  – No, she went for a cure to Marienbad with a friend, and you followed her there and made a nuisance of yourself as usual.

  – I did. The rope that held us together was fraying, but it wasn’t quite severed. After that we had a short holiday in Swanage with Anthony, for the boy’s sake, and were quite happy together for a few days, until she raised once again the question of my divorcing Jane and I refused, so we went back to bickering about the terms of my support for her. She wanted me to settle £3,000 a year on her. I gave her a large lump sum instead and said I would look after Anthony’s school fees. She was thinking of making a life for herself and Anthony in America, where she had good contacts in journalism, and went off for a long lecture tour there in the autumn of ’23 to assess the opportunities. She stayed until the following spring and decided in the end that she didn’t want to emigrate, but it was clear from the sparseness and the tone of her letters that when she came back to England, she wasn’t coming back to me. And yet …

  – And yet?

  – It wasn’t easy for either of us to write Finis under our story. The world was full of men she couldn’t talk to as she talked to me, and of women I had only a brief and simple use for. I went to Lisbon where the Galsworthys were wintering and paired up with a very pleasant red-haired young widow who was as much in need of consolation as myself, but it was only a passade. Rebecca, I gathered later, had experiences of a similar kind in America, all of them ephemeral and some alarming and upsetting. When we returned to London in the spring we were both very much aware of each other’s presence, and occasionally we met – once by chance in the theatre, and a couple of times by arrangement – and actually made love again, but it was different, we couldn’t revive the old Panther–Jaguar intimacy, we had hurt each other too much. In September Rebecca went off to Austria with Anthony and some friends, and I decided I would make a journey round the world, a project I had often planned and never followed through, but first I had to go to Geneva to address the League of Nations Assembly.

  – Where Odette Keun turned up.

  – She’d heard somehow that Rebecca and I had parted and she’d read in a newspaper that I was going to be in Geneva, so she hastened there from Grasse where she was living at the time, and called me up and invited me to meet her at her hotel that evening.

  – And instructed the reception desk to send you up to her room, where she had turned out all the lights and was waiting for you behind the door, doused in jasmine perfume and wearing only a negligee, and led you like a blind man straight to the bed.

  – It was clever of her, because her face was not conventionally pretty, as I discovered next morning: she had a prominent nose and a rather long chin. But she had a supple, slender body and she was like a monkey on heat as a lover. She’d been converted to Catholicism as a young girl and spent three years in a Belgian convent preparing to become a nun before she was dismissed for allegedly tempting a priest to kiss her, after which she made up for lost time by acquiring sexual experience from some fairly louche characters in Marseilles and Paris. I discovered that she wasn’t French, but the daughter of a Dutch father and an Italian mother, brought up in Constantinople. She was a fizzing cocktail of mixed genes and cultures, but intelligent and articulate and she had read nearly every book I had written.

  – So when she said she adored you and wanted to devote her whole life to serving you on any terms you prescribed, you succumbed, and went to Provence with her after your speech to the League of Nations, and rented a mas called Lou Bastidon in the hills outside Grasse, looking down over orchards and olive groves towards the Mediterranean, and you liked the situation and the climate so much that for the next nine years you divided your time between France and England, most of them in a mas you had built to your own design called Lou Pidou, which had a plaque over the fireplace, ‘Two lovers built this house.’

  – Odette’s idea, which I indulged, but we had such fierce and frequent rows that I kept calling in the stonemason to remove it, and then requesting him to put it back again when we were reconciled, until he got fed up and refused to do it any more. But I really don’t want to talk about Odette.

  – Why not?

  – Of all the women I’ve known well – and known in the biblical sense – she’s the only one whom I remember without any affection at all. With amusement at times, at the outrageousness of her behaviour, and bitterness often, but not affection. There were other women I parted from unhappily, but who subsequently became friends again – Isabel, Rebecca, and little E, for instance; even Hedwig, who recovered from her madness and sent me a nice letter of apology. I met her years later with her husband and advised her about getting a novel published. But Odette nearly drove me mad with her moods and her jealousies and her demented behaviour, which became worse and worse as time went on. I made a treaty with her at the beginning of our relationship, that she would be my companion in France but not invade my life in England, and was free to do what she liked while I was away from her. To make her independent I gave her a regular income, and the usufruct of Lou Pidou. For a few years she kept to the agreement, and wrote obsequious letters to Jane assuring her that she was looking after my health and general welfare. Jane was quite happy with the arrangement, since it meant she could go off to Switzerland for her holidays while I was in the south of France, winter sports and mountain walks now being too strenuous for me, and she considered Odette much less of a threat to her own status than Rebecca had been. She even gave us a nice picture by Nevinson for Lou Pidou. But after Jane died, in ’27, Odette became discontented. She wanted to be openly recognised as my companion, in England as well as France.

  – She probably hoped you would marry her.

  – And perhaps I would have done – God help me – if she’d played her cards right and been sweet and tender to me in my grief, but she couldn’t control her egotism, her competitiveness, and her temper. She badgered me and teased me, she showed off to my friends when we entertained them at Lou Pidou, and delighted in shocking them by using four-letter words which she falsely claimed I had taught her, and by making embarrassing allusions to our sexual h
abits. She complained that I spent too much time away from her and that she was lonely in Grasse, so I acquired a flat for her in Paris, where I could visit her more easily for short periods. Still she wasn’t satisfied, and broke the terms of the treaty by following me to England. I threatened to leave her, but she didn’t believe that I would sacrifice Lou Pidou, and persisted. In the end I did give up Lou Pidou – with great regret, for I loved the place – because I couldn’t stand the relationship any longer. It was as if the monkey had climbed on to my back, and was digging her claws into me all the time. I had to be free of her. But still she tormented me – she settled in London and spread malicious gossip about me, and about Moura, who I had linked up with again. She went to Amber Reeves’s house one day and proposed that, as two women who had been wronged by me, they should go round to my flat and shoot me in revenge: she actually had a small revolver, which Amber relieved her of and handed in to Hampstead police station later, pretending she had found it on the Heath. Odette published a book called I Discover the English in which she said Englishmen were unimaginative lovers who made the sexual act as boring as cold suet pudding, knowing that readers privy to our relationship would take the remark as a reflection on me, and she threatened to sell my erotic letters to her, a piece of blackmail I defied her to carry out, for I was not ashamed of them and they would have demonstrated conclusively that our sexual antics, so far from being like cold suet pudding, would have made Etruscan vase-painters blush.