by David Lodge
In the ground floor cloakroom she examines her fifty-year-old face in the mirror for new wrinkles, and combs her greying hair. She refreshes her lipstick, powders her nose, and shapes her eyebrows with a licked finger, feeling a little foolish at this display of vanity – but one wants to look one’s best when meeting an old lover, even if he is sick and dying. She is amused to observe a notebook and pencil lying on top of a cabinet next to the W.C. – it was always H.G.’s habit to have notebooks scattered around whatever house he was occupying, in case some thought occurred to him which he could scribble down before he forgot it. She peeps inside the notebook, but the pages are blank.
The small sitting room to which she is summoned when H.G. is ready is cosier than the drawing room, but she finds him in low spirits, worried and depressed. He is slouched in an armchair beside a fire of smouldering slack, his neatly slippered, size five feet peeping from under the rug covering his legs. Anthony and Gip have told him that he has cancer, but not the prognosis. ‘I want to know how long I have left,’ he says plaintively, ‘but they won’t tell me. Even Horder won’t tell me.’
‘That’s because they don’t know. You could live for years, Jaguar.’ Long ago, when they were lovers, they called each other ‘Panther’ and ‘Jaguar’ in bed and correspondence, and she thinks the name will please him, but to her dismay it upsets him even more. A tear trickles from one eye down his cheek and loses itself in the roots of the moustache, now grey and rather straggling, with which in his prime he would tickle intimate parts of her anatomy.
‘I don’t want to die, Panther,’ he says.
‘Nobody wants to.’
‘I know – but we must. Of course one must. I’m ashamed of myself.’ He sits up in his chair, smiles, reaches over and squeezes her hand. ‘Thank you for coming to see me.’
‘I brought you some eggs from the farm.’
‘That was kind,’ he says. ‘And how are you? Are you writing?’
‘Only journalism. I can’t concentrate on anything more substantial with the war going on and on …’
‘You managed to finish Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in spite of the Blitz.’
‘I had to. But it totally exhausted me. And what about you, Jaguar?’
‘Oh, I shuffle pages about. I have a couple of things on the go, but I’m not sure I shall finish either of them. Nobody’s interested in me now, anyway.’
‘Nonsense,’ says Rebecca, dutifully.
H.G. asks after Henry. ‘He’s working very hard at the Ministry on plans for post-war reconstruction,’ says Rebecca. ‘I must say it’s very reassuring to see him with his gaze fixed so confidently on the future, while the rest of us are biting our nails about the present. And how is Moura?’
‘She’s in the country, staying with Tania.’
‘Has she been to see you, since … ?’
‘Since Horder pronounced the death sentence?’
‘Don’t, Jaguar!’
‘I told Gip Moura wasn’t to be put in the picture yet. She’s not been feeling too well herself lately, and went down to Tania’s to rest and recuperate. I don’t want to upset her unnecessarily.’
‘I see.’ Rebecca ponders this information, uncertain whether to feel flattered or used that she has been summoned to comfort the stricken H.G. in preference to his mistress – if that is what Moura still is. The exact nature of their relationship has always been an enigma – to H.G. as much as anyone, he claims.
‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘I was afraid that if she was told I’m dying she’d come over all Russian on me, like some Gorky character, get maudlin drunk on brandy, and make me even more depressed than I am already.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Rebecca says with a smile. Moura, Baroness Budberg, does seem like a character who has stepped from the pages of a Russian novel, trailing melodramatic, barely credible stories of love and adventure: that she walked across the ice between Russia and Estonia at the time of the Revolution to get to her first husband and their children; that he was murdered on his estate and she later married the Baron to obtain an Estonian passport, paying his gambling debts in return and divorcing him shortly afterwards; that she was the lover of the British secret agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, and was suspected with him of involvement in the 1918 plot to assassinate Lenin, but found protection as secretarial assistant to Maxim Gorky. Rebecca knows this last detail is true because H.G. stayed with Gorky on a visit to Russia in 1920, and his confession to her on his return that he had slept with Moura, who lived in the Petrograd apartment, provoked one of their most divisive rows. Years after their relationship had come to an end, and his wife Jane was dead, H.G. met Moura again, decided she was the love of his life, helped her to settle in England, and tried in vain to persuade her to marry him. Anthony, who likes Moura and approves of her relationship with H.G., nevertheless believes she is a Soviet spy, as do several other people. Rebecca is uncertain whether to believe this or not: although Moura might have been a Mata Hari once, it is difficult to see the matronly, slightly dowdy fifty-year-old woman of today in that role. But being herself an outspoken critic of Soviet Russia, she keeps a wary distance from Moura.
These thoughts and memories slide across Rebecca’s mind as she chats to H.G. on light, neutral topics, until she notices his eyes are almost closed. ‘I don’t want to tire you,’ she says. ‘I’ll be on my way.’ She stands, stoops and kisses his cheek. It is no longer as smooth and plump as it once was, but his skin still smells faintly and pleasantly of walnuts, as it did when they first became lovers. Somerset Maugham asked her once, with a smile that was half a sneer, what had been the secret of H.G.’s sexual attraction, a man twice her age, not especially good-looking, only five foot five in height, and tending to corpulence, and she answered: ‘He smelled of walnuts, and he frisked like a nice animal.’
As she is leaving the house, smiling at the recollection of this remark, she meets Gip in the front hall, coming in from outside, and her smile fades. She berates him and Anthony for upsetting their father by telling him he is dying.
‘He kept asking questions,’ says Gip. ‘I don’t like lying to H.G. He brought us up, Frank and me, to tell the truth. It’s the basis of good science.’ Gip is Reader in Marine Biology at University College London.
They glare at each other with mutual dislike. It makes Rebecca feel almost physically sick to look at him, he so resembles his mother, the petite, dainty, self-effacing Jane, who clung on to her husband in spite of his many infidelities, and inspired in him an unshakeable loyalty. Hard as she tried, she could never persuade H.G. to divorce Jane. Of course it suited him very well to have a wife who looked after his every comfort and entertained his friends and typed his manuscripts and kept his accounts in order while he went off whenever he felt the urge and bedded whoever took his fancy, but no self-respecting woman would have tolerated the situation. Rebecca never doubted that if Jane had told H.G. he must choose between the two of them, he would have divorced Jane and married herself. She would have been a fit consort for him, his intellectual equal, and a great deal of emotional misery would have been avoided, not least for Anthony.
‘Anthony agreed that we should tell H.G.,’ says Gip.
‘I know,’ says Rebecca. ‘But I think he regrets doing so. He sounds overwrought when I speak to him on the phone.’
‘Well of course he’s upset,’ says Gip. ‘Anthony is very devoted to H.G.’
‘Anthony has a reverse Oedipus complex,’ Rebecca bursts out. ‘He has wanted to kill his mother and marry his father ever since he found out who his father was. Because I had to bring him up, I was the one he blamed for being sent to boarding school, and being bullied and teased and miserable, while H.G. was always the godlike Uncle-figure who descended from time to time in his motor car distributing presents and whisking him off to theatres and restaurants.’
‘Yes, well …’ Gip says. ‘It must have been difficult for Anthony.’
‘It was difficult for me!’ Rebecca almost shouts.
> Left alone in the small sitting room, H.G. stares into the fire, wondering what the world will say about him when he dies. The obituaries, of course, have already been written. Given his age and distinction, they will have been on file in the newspaper offices for years, revised and brought up to date periodically, ready for publication when the time comes. The time has come rather sooner than he expected when he wrote a humorous ‘auto-obituary’ for a BBC radio series in 1935. It was published in the Listener and reprinted in newspapers around the world. ‘The name of H.G. Wells, who died yesterday afternoon of heart failure in the Paddington Infirmary, at the age of 97, will have few associations for the younger generation,’ it began. ‘But those whose adult memories stretch back to the opening decades of the present century and who shared the miscellaneous reading of the period may recall a number of titles of the books he wrote and may even find in some odd attic an actual volume or so of his works. He was indeed one of the most prolific of the “literary hacks” of that time …’ He pictured himself in the early 1960s as a ‘bent, shabby, slovenly and latterly somewhat obese figure’ hobbling round the gardens of Regent’s Park with the aid of a stick, talking to himself. ‘“Some day,” he would be heard to say, “I shall write a book, a real book.”’ This piece was intended, and generally received, as a jeu d’esprit, a disarming exercise in self-mockery, but it doesn’t seem so absurdly wide of the mark now.
Of course the real obituaries, when they appear in due course, will be long, and respectful, paying tribute to his many achievements, his hundred-odd books, his thousands of articles, the originality of his early scientific romances like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, the controversial impact of his treatment of sexual relations in novels like Ann Veronica (the irregularity of his own sexual life would be discreetly veiled), the warm Dickensian humour of novels like Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, the remarkable accuracy of many of his predictions (the inaccuracy of many others would be tactfully passed over), the global success of the Outline of History, his morale-boosting journalism in two world wars, his hobnobbing with leading statesmen, his presidency of the international PEN association, his tireless campaigning for science, for education, for the abolition of poverty, for peace, for human rights, for world government … Yes, there is plenty for them to write about. But there will be an inevitable dying fall to the tributes, a sense of anticlimax, a perceptibly bored perfunctoriness in the record of the last twenty-five years, and an implication that he published too many books in that period, of diminishing quality. All the emphasis will be on the first half of his life – up to, say, 1920. That was the terminal date of his influence according to George Orwell, in his Horizon article a few years ago: ‘Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation … I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much.’ He recalls the words without difficulty, having returned so often to the article, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, fingering it like an old wound that still aches.
– But that’s a pretty impressive achievement, isn’t it? To have created a whole generation of thinking people … ?
He has heard this voice frequently of late, but when he looks round there is nobody else in the room, so it must be in his head. Sometimes the voice is friendly, sometimes challenging, sometimes neutrally enquiring. It articulates things he had forgotten or suppressed, things he is glad to remember and things he would rather not be reminded of, things he knows others say about him behind his back, and things people will probably say about him in the future after he is dead, in biographies and memoirs and perhaps even novels.
– Something to be proud of surely?
– Not the way Orwell served it up. He said that what made me seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, makes me a shallow, inadequate thinker now. He said that since 1920 I have squandered my talents slaying paper dragons.
– He did add, if I remember rightly, ‘But how much it is, after all, to have talents to squander.’
– That was just a sop, to try and draw the sting at the end. He probably added it in proof, because he’d just remembered that Sonia had invited Inez and me to dinner.
He had first met Orwell through the novelist Inez Holden, who was renting Mr Mumford’s at the time, 1941, and a few days before the dinner party she had given him the latest issue of Horizon with the essay about himself in it, saying, ‘I think you’d better read this before next Saturday, H.G., because George will assume you’ve seen it. Don’t take it too hard – he does admire you really.’ The article had upset him. It started by attacking his early journalism about the war, and admittedly he had been rash in affirming that the German army was a spent force just before it began to rampage through Russia, but what really stung was the assertion that ‘much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes are all there.’
– Well, they are, aren’t they?
– Yes, but with an entirely different intention behind them. It’s a travesty of what I have advocated and worked to bring about – as I told him at that dinner party.
He had taken Horizon with him to dispute the article, and saw immediately that Orwell had his own copy to hand, evidently prepared for a duel. They sat face to face at the table and he took Orwell through the text paragraph by paragraph, while Inez and Sonia listened nervously and the remaining guest, William Empson, got increasingly drunk. Honours were about equal by the end of the evening, but shortly afterwards Orwell gave a radio talk in which he said that H.G. Wells supposed that science would save the world, when it was far more likely to destroy it. Enraged by this second assault he fired off a note to Orwell care of the BBC: ‘I don’t say that at all, you shit. Read my early work.’
– Such as?
– Such as The Island of Dr Moreau. Such as The Sleeper Awakes. Such as The War of the Worlds. It’s not science that saves Earth from the Martians. It’s the accident that they lack immunity to earthly bacterial infection.
– But in other books you claim that the application of science can save the world.
– The application, yes. Progress all depends on a benign application of science. But our literary intellectuals have never had any faith in that possibility. Eliot, for instance, who’s at the opposite pole to Orwell in every other way, agrees with him about that.
– T.S. Eliot said some complimentary things about you in that article in the New English Review.
– But the tone of the whole piece was patronising, and at the end he said, ‘Mr Wells, putting all his money on the near future, is walking very near the edge of despair.’ Christians like Eliot have never expected anything better from humanity than blitzkriegs and concentration camps, because they believe in original sin. So they can calmly contemplate the end of civilisation, put their feet up, and wait for the Second Coming.
– Why do these fellows bother you so much?
He stares into the heart of the fire, glowing dully under a coat of grey-white ash.
– Because I’m afraid they may be right. I am very near despair.
‘The old man is muttering to himself again,’ the day nurse says to the night nurse, as they change over that evening.
‘What about?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ says the day nurse. ‘I can only make out the odd word. “Obituary” is a favourite.’
– Still brooding about your obituaries?
– I think atheists suffering from a terminal disease should be allowed to read their obituaries. In confidence, of course, and with no right of reply – except perhaps to correct matters of fact.
– Why only atheists?
– Well, if you believe in an afterlife, one of the things to look forward to must be finding out what your contemporaries really thought of you, eavesdropping on conversations as a ghost, reading the obituari
es over people’s shoulders … Unless they get all the newspapers delivered daily in heaven. Or the other place. Whereas we shall never find out. It’s frustrating.
– What d’you want to find out? Whether you are considered a great writer?
– Lord no, I gave up that ambition long ago – left it to Henry James and his ilk. I demolished the whole idea of literary greatness in Boon, remember? ‘Decline in the output of Greatness, due to the excessive number of new writers and the enlargement of the reading public, to be arrested by establishing a peerage of hereditary Novelists, Poets and Philosophers … The Nobel Prize to be awarded to them in order of seniority …’
– So … what then? A great thinker? A great visionary? A great man?
– Not a great anything. The whole idea of greatness is a nineteenth-century romantic deathtrap. It leads to the rise of tyrants like Hitler. We have to value the collective over the individual, serve the Mind of the Human Race, not try to impose our personal will on it. I’ve been saying that for the last thirty years, but no one has paid any serious attention. If they had, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now, with Europe being rapidly reduced to rubble.
– Something good may come out of the war. This idea of setting up a United Nations organisation, for instance – the obituaries should give you some credit for your contribution to that.
– It would be nice to think so. But it’s a long way from World Government. Without a change in the collective mindset it will be as useless as the League of Nations was.
