by David Lodge
‘Anyway, I daresay it will take me some time to find the right place,’ he said.
4
‘THIS is a little démodé “crescent” hanging over a green green garden that hangs over a blue blue sea. Over all hangs my balcony – and over my balcony hangs a beautiful striped awning. No sound but the waves licking the honey-coloured sand.’ So he wrote to Anne Thackeray Ritchie, sitting on his balcony at the Osborne Hotel, describing the scene before him like an artist painting a landscape en plein air. It was the quiet, somnolent hour after luncheon; at another time of day he might have been obliged to add a few more sounds to the gentle lapping of the waves – the faint cries of children on the beach, the muffled shrieks of bathers plunging into the sea from their wheeled cubicles. But, although it was August, and Torquay was full of visitors, the beach at Meadfoot Sands was never crowded or noisy. It was perhaps too long and strenuous a walk from the centre of the town for ordinary holidaymakers; and in any case most of them seemed to prefer the diversions and amenities of the harbour, the Royal Terrace Gardens, and the promenade that stretched westwards towards Torre Abbey. As for the Osborne itself, like most superior hotels in Torquay it had its high season in the winter, when the rich and leisured were drawn to the resort by its famously mild climate. At this time of the year it was half-empty and surprisingly cheap, a blessedly peaceful retreat for an author still convalescing from a grievous blow to his self-esteem.
He had stayed here briefly the previous summer, at the suggestion of William Norris, and liked the place enormously. Démodé it might be, but it was comfortable and, in its idiosyncratic way, elegant: a perfect Georgian crescent of white stucco terraced houses such as one would not be surprised to find in Bath or Cheltenham, but here standing strikingly alone in its own grounds. It was as if a street of townhouses had taken flight like a flock of birds, soared over Vane Hill, and alighted in a graceful arc on the grassy brink of the sea. Originally it had been an exclusive residential development, but a number of the units had later been joined together to make a hotel, named somewhat opportunistically after the Queen’s summer residence on the Isle of Wight. The crescent was screened and sheltered at the rear by trees, mostly Scotch firs, though palm trees and other exotic flora also flourished in this warm humid nook of south Devon; and further back steep, densely green hills rose up to meet the sky, with red-roofed villas and curving carriageways fleetingly visible between their leafage. Perhaps the setting pleased him so much because it reminded him of the hills around Florence. He occupied a very pleasant suite of south-facing rooms, with an uninterrupted view of the sea, for the road that ran along the back of the sands was sunk out of sight beneath the lip of the Osborne’s gently sloping lawn. A giantess of a chambermaid, at least six feet tall (she might have sat for one of Du Maurier’s duchesses), kept the rooms in excellent order, and ran his bath for him in the mornings. The food was decently adequate – one could expect no more from an English hotel.
It had been a happy last-minute thought to settle here for the summer after weeks of vacillation. He had decided against going to Italy – he had no wish to reawaken painful memories of Fenimore or be jostled by the vulgar tourist hordes, and in any case he could hardly justify the expense of such a trip given the present state of his affairs. So he had dallied in London through May and June, distracted by the usual packed calendar of the Season, and by some particular social responsibilities of his own. Daudet came over from Paris for an extended visit at the beginning of May and he had felt obliged to put himself out for this venerable cher collègue. He escorted him down to Dorking to meet George Meredith, and the two old men embraced movingly on the station platform, though both were so enfeebled that he feared they would topple over, locked in each other’s arms, and roll under the wheels of the train. Later he gave a dinner in Daudet’s honour at the Reform, attended by Du Maurier and every other distinguished French-speaking guest he could scratch together in London. It went off well, though a certain anxiety attended the event because Daudet’s control of his bladder was unreliable (the consequence no doubt of libertinage earlier in life) and he required some means of relieving himself at frequent intervals throughout the meal that would not entail a long walk to the lavatory under the main staircase. He was accommodated by the provision of a chamber pot behind an arrangement of screens at one end of the private dining room, and any embarrassment was spared by the rest of the party talking together with particular loudness and animation whenever the guest of honour had abruptly to retire behind them.
The weeks passed, June turned into July, London grew increasingly airless, smelly and dusty, and still he had made no plans for getting away. It had to be a place where he would have some company – otherwise he would become lonely and depressed – but also be independent and have time and space in which to work. If the Du Mauriers had been going to Whitby he might have braved the rigours of its climate again, but even Kiki and Emma were shirking it for once, having both been quite ill there the previous summer. They were talking of Folkestone, which did not entice him. He thought of going back to the Tregenna Castle Hotel at St Ives, where he had stayed comfortably the previous summer as a kind of satellite guest of Leslie and Julia Stephen in their damp and draughty seaside house, but Julia’s lamentable recent death ruled that out. Even if the family went to Cornwall as usual this year, he didn’t know them well enough to intrude on their grief, and in any case the idea of having to keep the lugubrious and taciturn Leslie Stephen company without the presence of the enchanting Julia, and with those unnervingly clever long-nosed young girls, Vanessa and Virginia, closely observing him in order (he suspected) to make fun of him behind his back, was not to be contemplated. But by association St Ives and the Stephens made him think of Norris and Torquay, for it was Stephen, when he was editor of the Cornhill, who had first encouraged Norris to write fiction, and it was on his way to St Ives the previous summer that he had broken his journey to stay in Torquay. On receiving this inspiration he had immediately wired the Osborne with a request for accommodation and conveyed his intentions to Norris, who declared himself delighted at the prospect of seeing him for an extended period. He had taken the rooms for the remainder of July and the whole of August, and he thought he might well decide to stay longer – perhaps even look for a house of his own in the vicinity. Meanwhile he was growing more at peace with himself and the world by the day.
These days had a regular and soothing rhythm. The morning was dedicated to work, namely, the one-act play commissioned by Ellen Terry. He felt a little foolish at breaking so soon his vow to forswear the theatre, but in the end the temptation had proved irresistible, and it was easier to make an accommodation with his conscience in Torquay than it would have been in London. He told himself that, after all, only a short play was required and it would not occupy him for very long; that he would be dealing directly and confidentially with an actress who possessed a formidable power of patronage; and that if the piece did not please her he could easily turn it into a short story and nobody would be the wiser. Having convinced himself with these arguments he suspended work on ‘The House Beautiful’ (which was, in truth, proving more difficult than anticipated) and began to write a comedy provisionally entitled Mrs Gracedew. The eponymous heroine – the role designed for Ellen Terry – was a rich and handsome American widow with an enthusiasm for historic English country houses such as ‘Summersoft’ (a kind of Osterley) where the play was set. In the course of a single afternoon she was to rescue the house from the philistine to whom it was mortgaged, restore it to its rightful owner, and agree to marry him, while at the same time sorting out the matrimonial future of the philistine’s daughter. Her benign intrigue required her at one point to pretend to be a guide ‘showing’ the house to a group of gawping tourists, a comic set piece which he could imagine Ellen Terry carrying off brilliantly. Altogether he was very pleased with the rapid progress he was making with the play.
The afternoons were for catching up on correspondence, reading, and
taking lessons in riding a bicycle. He had purchased a machine from a shop in the town, and a young man called John Plater came out to give him instruction for an hour each day. Hilly Torquay was not an ideal place for a beginner, but the Meadfoot Road that ran along behind the beach for nearly a mile was flat and straight and seldom busy. He was now able to ride up and down its whole length without falling off, and his purple bruises were beginning to turn yellow. His waistline, he was pleased to note, had already been reduced by this regular exercise. After it, if he was very heated, he sometimes took a second bath; then between five and six he would walk up the hill to Norris’s villa, ‘Underbank’, and take tea with him.
This was really the only time of day when they could conveniently meet, since Norris played golf every morning and wrote his novels between the hours of two and five every afternoon, but it was opportunity enough. They usually ran out of things to say to each other after ten or fifteen minutes, and sat very contentedly in long contemplative silences after that. If Norris’s daughter Effie were present she would fill up their intermissions by talking about horses and hunting, the only subjects which appeared to interest her. She was a big, blonde, red-cheeked young woman of twenty-three, the very epitome of the healthy, hearty English maiden, as instinctive and unreflective as a fine animal – as, indeed, a horse. He found it useful to think of her when evoking the character of Mona Brigstock, the energetic but aesthetically insensitive rival of the heroine in ‘The House Beautiful’. Effie was Norris’s only child and only companion, her mother having died some fifteen years earlier in circumstances on which Norris did not elaborate, and into which Henry did not enquire.
Norris was the son of a colonial Chief Justice, and had been educated at Eton and the Inner Temple. He had been called to the Bar, but had no inclination to practise law. Instead, he chose to live the life of a country gentleman, and since the mid-’eighties had taken up, rather as if it were an enjoyable and modestly lucrative hobby, the writing of novels about English gentlefolk – mainly their courtships, marriages, and wills. Norris turned out these books at the rate of one or sometimes even two a year, three-deckers with not very many words to the page, perfectly adjusted to the circulating library system which was his principal market. They were things to marvel at, these novels, for totally lacking any distinctive flavour. Henry compared them in his mind to cups of tea brewed in a pot from which the tea leaves had been accidentally omitted in the process of preparation, and served to people who were either too polite to comment or didn’t actually like tea. The pot, and the cups, were of unexceptionable design, the water was of exactly the right temperature, and flowed freely from the teapot’s spout, but the beverage was completely transparent and tasted of nothing. They were novels for people who liked to have a novel always to hand, but did not much care for the reading process itself. You could put them down as easily as you picked them up, and five minutes after you finished one you wouldn’t remember a single word of it. Naturally he had never conveyed this opinion to Norris himself. Their friendship depended on a tacit agreement not to discuss each other’s work. Norris was the perfect English gentleman – it was what made his company so restful – and a disapprobation of anything that might resemble ‘talking shop’ was entirely consistent with his character. Norris’s private word to him before lunch, on the morrow of the first night of Guy Domville, had been the only occasion on which he had explicitly complimented Henry on his writing, which was why he had been genuinely moved by it.
After he had spent his hour with the Norrises he would leave them to change for dinner – a ritual they observed religiously even in the summer months – and return to the Osborne to dine contentedly alone, with a book propped up on his table. Once he accepted an invitation to dinner at Underbank, but found the meal overtaxed their collective ability to maintain a three-cornered conversation, and pleaded the pressure of work to excuse himself thereafter. And indeed he did sometimes put in another hour after dinner, going over what he had written in the morning and revising it, before retiring and falling asleep lulled by the faint whisper of waves breaking on the shore. His residence at the Osborne was proving, as he wrote to Anne Ritchie, both productive and restorative.
He owed her a letter, but what had prompted him to write was the association in his mind of Norris with Leslie Stephen, whose sister-in-law she was by his first marriage. He concluded the letter, signed and sealed it, and took it to the hotel’s reception desk to be posted. A message for him had just arrived from John Plater, his bicycling instructor, apologetically cancelling the afternoon’s lesson. He was downcast for a moment, then reflected: why should he not take a spin on his own along the sea-road? He had managed well enough on his last outing. Accordingly he changed into plus-fours and Norfolk jacket, put on a soft cap, and fetched his bike from the stables at the back of the hotel where it was kept. Rather than entertain other guests by attempting to mount the machine on the carriage drive in full view of their windows and balconies, he wheeled it out of the hotel grounds and on to the Meadfoot Road. After one false start and a few alarming wobbles, he got the bike under way and pedalled stoutly.
It was a pleasant, sunny afternoon, with a light breeze from the south that, augmented by his movement through the air, stirred his beard and cooled his cheeks agreeably. As always he felt exhilarated by the surge of speed compared with mere walking. In a few minutes he had travelled half a mile. What a wonderful invention it was! So simple, and so ingenious. Why had it taken mankind so long to realise that, given a certain momentum, a human being could balance indefinitely on two wheels? The combination of Momentum and Balance was the secret – and one might draw an analogy here with the art of fiction: momentum was the onward drive of narrative, the raising of questions to which the audience desired to know the answers, and balance was the symmetry of structure, the elimination of the irrelevant, the repetition of motifs and symbols, the elegant variation of—
At this point in his reverie a very small perambulator suddenly rolled out of a side alley in front of him, pursued by a young woman and a little girl. He braked hard, his front wheel locked and skidded in some loose gravel on the road, the bicycle overturned and he tumbled to the ground. The woman – she appeared to be a nursemaid – helped him rise to his feet. The little girl, aged about five, looked on from the side of the road with round eyes and a pale face.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ the woman asked anxiously.
‘I think so,’ he said, feeling himself, and flexing his limbs. He had grazed his hand – the left one fortunately, not his writing hand – and he would have a fresh bruise tomorrow on his shin, but otherwise he seemed to be all right. He picked up his bicycle. The handlebar was twisted slightly on its axis, but the machine did not appear to be seriously damaged.
‘That was very careless of you, Miss Agatha, letting go of your pram,’ the maid scolded the little girl. ‘You might have killed the gentleman.’
‘I hardly think so,’ he said, smiling to reassure Agatha, whose lower lip was trembling. ‘It was partly my own fault. I omitted to apply the back brake before putting on the front one.’ It was a lesson Plater had often impressed upon him. ‘But Dolly may have suffered worse injury, I fear,’ he added. The perambulator had overturned in the road and the doll was sprawled face down, like the victim of a crime.
‘Oh, don’t mind that, sir,’ said the maid, picking up the doll and righting the perambulator. ‘As long as you’re all right.’
‘Quite all right, thank you,’ he said. ‘Good day to you.’ Plater always insisted that he got back on the bike immediately after a fall (‘Else you’ll lose your nerve, Mr James’), so he valiantly remounted and pedalled away.
He interpreted this mishap as a warning against hubris – not only with respect to bicycling, but also (to extend the analogy which he had been developing when it happened) with respect to the literary life. He was very pleased with his new play, now called Summersoft, but reminded himself, when he dispatched it to Ellen Terry in the mid
dle of August, of how many unforeseen obstacles and unexpected resistances might prevail against it. The wisdom of adopting this philosophic attitude was quickly confirmed. Ellen Terry wrote back after a few days to say that she liked the play, but would not be able to perform it in America as the programme for the tour was already decided and her departure imminent. She wished, however, to acquire the rights for a production next year.
He decided to go up to London at the end of the month to ascertain in person and in more detail her opinion of the play and its prospects, and to stay on for a week or so to take care of other business and social obligations. He had agreed to meet the Benedicts, mother and daughter, who were returning to America from England, and help them on their way (he did so purely out of piety to Fenimore’s memory, not to say as a penance, for he found their company tedious). He had a longstanding invitation, which could not politely be deferred for much longer, to visit the Humphry Wards at their grand new country house in Hertfordshire. He also intended to call on the Du Mauriers at their new address in Oxford Square, but on the very day of his departure from Torquay he received a letter from Folkestone, where they had finally decided to take a holiday of some weeks’ duration, expressing a hope that they might see him there. Du Maurier didn’t seem to be enjoying himself very much: his health was indifferent, his nerves irritable, and he was fretting about Tree’s forthcoming production of Trilby. Henry dashed off a hurried reply, promising to pay ‘Carino Kikaccio mio’ a brief visit before he returned to ‘this sweet and soothing spot for which I have a really you-and-Whitby-like tenderness’. He added: ‘I am very sorry indeed to hear that you have been nervous and unwell but we will change all that; just wait till I get hold of you. I’ve wondered about your theatricals and you must tell me all.’
