by David Lodge
In June the war takes a dramatic turn, on the home front as well as abroad. On June 6th the long-awaited Allied invasion of France takes place – not, as was expected, at Pas-de-Calais but on the beaches of Normandy. The nation is gripped by excitement and suspense, eagerly consuming every morsel of strictly controlled news about the event. After a few days it seems that the operation has been successful, the Allied forces have obtained a secure foothold, and reinforcements and supplies are pouring in via the ingenious prefabricated Mulberry harbour. This surely is the beginning of the end of the war, long though the wait has been since Churchill famously described the battle of El Alamein as the end of the beginning. But then, just as people are starting to relax and celebrate, the bogeyman Hitler, like some demon king in a pantomime, produces a new weapon from his arsenal to show he is not done for yet: the V1, so-called by Goebbels, the first of two Vergeltungswaffen, ‘retaliation weapons’ designed to exact retribution for the Allied bombing of German cities. (No one knows yet what the V2 will turn out to be.) The V1s are small pilotless aircraft, painted an ominous black, with a bomb-shaped fuselage carrying a ton of high explosive and short stubby wings. They are propelled by a jet engine, mounted above the fuselage like the handle on a flatiron, which makes a distinctive droning sound, causing them to be nicknamed ‘buzz-bombs’ or ‘doodlebugs’ by the British public. When their fuel is consumed the noise stops, and the weapon falls to the ground. The heart-stopping seconds of silent suspense between the cutting out of the engine and the noise of an explosion as the missile hits its random target is a new source of stress for long-suffering Londoners.
This is a development in aerial warfare that H.G. has not foreseen. The V1s fly fast and low at all hours of the day and night, when they reveal their presence by a tongue of fire spurting from the jet engine. Anti-aircraft guns are of little use against them, and only the latest Spitfires and Typhoons can match their speed and shoot them down or tip their wings to send them spinning into the sea or open country (a difficult manoeuvre, but to shoot is to risk being blown up oneself). The V1 offensive began on the 13th of June, and by the end of the month two and a half thousand have been launched, of which about a third came down or were brought down in the Channel, a third in south-east England, and a third reached London. The numbers increase in July. It seems as if a new Blitz is beginning. Plans are made to evacuate women and children from the capital. The leaseholders of Hanover Terrace slope off back to their rural bolt-holes. Various friends and acquaintances urge H.G. to move to a safer location, but he dismisses these suggestions with scorn. The V1 offensive seems to have a tonic effect on his health. His appetite improves. He becomes more mobile, walking around the house and even, in fine weather, having short outings in the Park.
Moura visits him one day without notice, letting herself into the house with her latchkey, so it is a surprise, and a pleasant one, though she herself looks flustered. She travelled up to London that morning from her daughter’s home near Oxford to find her own flat with its windows blown out by blast from a V1. It was a shock, she says, and she asks for a brandy to calm herself. ‘Leave the bottle,’ she instructs the housekeeper when the drink is brought, and winks at H.G. Her capacity for brandy is legendary. When she pronounces ‘Hanover Terrace’ in her unique Anglo-Russian accent it sounds like ‘Hangover Terrace’, but he has never known her to be hung over – only the men who tried to keep up with her drinking the night before. ‘Why don’t you move in here till your flat is made habitable?’ he suggests, but she shakes her head, and pours herself another brandy. ‘No, I will go back to Tania’s.’ He does not suspect her of running away from the V1s. If only half of the lethal dangers she claims to have encountered and survived in her lifetime are to be believed – well, on reflection, probably half is about the right proportion, so say a quarter – if only a quarter of the perils she claims to have lived through are to be believed, there could be no question of her courage and nerve. ‘You could have the guest bedroom as long as you like,’ he says. She wags her finger at him. ‘Aigee! You are trying to break our agreement.’
Normally he was the one who dictated the terms of ‘treaties’, as he called them, with his women, but not with Moura. This one went back to the mid-1930s. She was willing to be his mistress, and to appear at his side in society, but she would not marry him and she would not live with him. When, after one of their many arguments, he said sulkily that in that case he wanted his latchkey back, she handed it to him on the spot. Subsequently she borrowed it for some particular reason and he did not ask her to return it, so she retained her freedom to come and go as she pleased. If they made love in Hanover Terrace after spending the evening together, she would leave him afterwards and go home by taxi. How often he had watched her from the bed as he telephoned for one and she put on her clothes by the dim light of a shaded table lamp – all except her stays, which she rolled up and put into a paper bag before leaving, because she couldn’t be bothered to struggle into them for the taxi ride.
‘Did you ever leave your stays in the taxi?’ he asks her on a sudden impulse.
‘What are you talking about?’ she says.
‘When you went home after we made love here, you didn’t put your stays on, you used to put them in a paper bag. I wondered whether you ever left them on the back seat of the taxi, and what the driver would have made of them if he found them.’ He smiles, but Moura doesn’t seem to be amused. Perhaps she doesn’t care to be reminded of her need for corsetry. She was a slim, lissome young woman when he first met her, but has an ample, slackly curved body in middle age.
‘What nonsense you talk, Aigee!’ she says. ‘Be serious. How are you – really?’
‘I’m feeling much better,’ he replies, ‘and all the better for seeing you.’ He does not see the need to tell her of Horder’s diagnosis, which he is beginning to distrust.
‘And the flying bombs? They don’t frighten you?’
‘Not a bit.’
‘But you must have your windows covered. Promise me.’ He agrees, reluctantly because it will make the house so dark, but there is always the glazed sun lounge, which cannot practicably be protected from blast.
All through July he writes regularly to Moura to assure her that he is surviving the V1 bombardment in good heart: ‘Sweet little Moura, everything you told me to do I am doing. Everything you told me not to do I do not do. And so I am still alive although there was one doodlebug this afternoon which fell apparently on the edge of the world because I heard no more of it … All my heart & love, Aigee … Dear little Moura, we had a near one last night but all your injunctions are scrupulously obeyed & we are now living in a boarded up and windowless home. Physically I get stronger and stronger every hour. All of my warmest love to you, your devoted Aigee … Sweet my Moura, the robot bombs come in increased quantities but thanks to my punctilious observance of your instructions no harm has come to me (or to anyone else in the house) … I go on working & I grow more & more self reliant every day … I love you my dear & am as ever your Aigee.’ The repeated references to Moura’s instructions about boarding up the windows are designed to bestow on her a kind of wifely status in his domestic arrangements. He has always been haunted by the fear of loneliness, of being without a woman companion devoted to his welfare, and he hasn’t entirely abandoned hope of persuading Moura one day to move into Hanover Terrace.
Sometimes he sits at the desk in his study, opens one of the two manila folders placed on its surface, and turns a few pages of the typescript it contains, making an occasional note or emendation with a fountain pen. These two works in progress, which he has been composing in tandem for some months, reflect his fluctuating moods as he turns from one to the other. One is a short text entitled The Happy Turning. It begins ‘I am dreaming far more than I did before this chaotic war invaded my waking hours’, and goes on to describe a recurring dream based on the daily constitutional he used to take in the Park when he was well.
I dream I am at my front door start
ing out for the accustomed round. I go out and suddenly realise there is a possible turning I have overlooked. Odd I have never taken it, but there it is! And in a trice I am walking more briskly than I ever walked before, up hill and down dale, in scenes of happiness such as I never hoped to see again.
It is a slight, sunny prose fantasia, a carnivalesque reworking of his story ‘The Door in the Wall’. It owes something to the idea of ‘dreaming true’ in George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson, and even more to Henry James’s tale ‘The Great Good Place’. They are all secular myths of transcendence, of paradise regained. ‘Nobody is dead in this world of release, and I hate nobody.’ He meets and chats companionably with Jesus, whose ‘scorn and contempt for Christianity go beyond my extremest vocabulary’, and who asserts that his greatest mistake was having disciples. ‘“I picked my dozen almost haphazard. What a crew they were! I am told that even those Gospels you talk about, are unflattering in their account of them.”’ Sometimes he dreams of ‘a purely architectural world. I apprehend gigantic facades, vast stretches of magnificently schemed landscape, moving roads that will take you wherever you want to go instead of your taking them …’ But unlike the futuristic cityscapes of his utopian fictions, which people seemed to find so cold and inhuman, especially as visualised in Korda’s film Things to Come, in his dream ‘endless lovely new things are achieved, but nothing a human heart has loved will be lost’. He ends up in the Elysian Fields, discussing ‘the Beautiful, the Good, and the True’ with a group of poets, painters and artists, but this episode, probably to be the conclusion of the book, is still incomplete.
The tone of the other text is very different. It is entitled Mind at the End of its Tether.
The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that his world is at the end of its tether … The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded. He is telling you the conclusions to which reality has driven his own mind, and he thinks you may be interested enough to consider them … Foremost in this scrutiny is the abrupt revelation of a hitherto unsuspected upward limit to quantitative material adjustability … The writer is convinced that there is no way out or round or through that impasse. It is the End … The limit to the orderly secular development of life had seemed to be a definitely fixed one, so that it was possible to sketch out the pattern of things to come. But that limit was reached and passed into an incredible chaos … Events now follow one another in an entirely untrustworthy sequence. No one knows what tomorrow will bring forth, but no one but a modern scientific philosopher can accept this untrustworthiness fully. Even in his case it plays no part in his everyday behaviour. There he is at one with the normal multitude. The only difference is that he carries about with him this harsh conviction of the near conclusive end of all life … It does not prevent his having his everyday affections and interests, indignations and so forth … Mind may be near the end of its tether, and yet that everyday drama will go on because it is the normal make-up of life and there is nothing else to replace it.
Nothing could illustrate this paradox more vividly than Anthony’s marital crisis and its repercussions. While the fate of Europe hangs in the balance in Normandy, where the Allied forces are bogged down and unable to advance, hampered by bad weather, which has broken up the Mulberry harbour, grounded air support for the invasion force, and turned the deep lanes of the Normandy bocage into mud, while V1s dart noisily across the skies of south-east England in ever-increasing numbers, to expire lethally like heavy birds stricken with heart attacks above the roofs of London – while these events, which are signs and portents to the scientific philosopher, are in progress – what most exercises the minds of Anthony and Rebecca and Kitty and their close relations, and what they talk and telephone and write letters about obsessively, is this drama in their personal lives. Whose fault is it? Anthony’s or Kitty’s? Or the Other Woman’s? What is to be done? How will it all end?
Rebecca arranges a meeting between Anthony and Henry, hopeful that her husband’s calm counsel will be more effective than her own in bringing Anthony to see sense. Anthony agrees but then cancels the appointment. Rebecca criticises this evasive behaviour and points out that there are financial aspects to Anthony’s proposed divorce on which Henry’s advice would be useful. ‘Then let Henry speak to Kitty,’ Anthony says, and arranges for them to meet for lunch one day early in July at the Carlton Grill. Although she has not been invited, Rebecca insists on accompanying Henry, and he is too apprehensive of her temper, when crossed, to resist. Kitty, already tired of the stream of letters Rebecca has been sending her, comprehensively condemning Anthony and promoting herself as Kitty’s chief ally and protector, resents her unexpected appearance in the Carlton Grill bar and retaliates by taking Anthony’s side in the discussion that follows. Four years older than Anthony, but secure in her blonde good looks, Kitty refuses to play the role of the injured spouse, and adopts a philosophical view of the situation, saying ‘such things do happen – men fall in love’. ‘But Anthony is not acting normally,’ Rebecca retorts. ‘I can tell when I speak to him on the phone that he is not in his right mind.’ ‘That’s funny, that’s exactly what Anthony says about you,’ says Kitty tartly. ‘And I wish you wouldn’t get at Anthony about Caroline and Edmund,’ she adds. ‘Surely,’ Rebecca asks, ‘I have a right to tell him I think he will regret leaving his children?’ ‘No,’ says Kitty. ‘That’s a matter between Anthony and me.’ ‘Mayn’t I even offer an opinion?’ says Rebecca. ‘No,’ says Kitty, ‘that’s my business, not yours. You shouldn’t interfere.’
Henry coughs and says he will see if their table is ready. But there is no table to be had – it seems there was some misunderstanding between Henry and Anthony about reserving it – so they get a taxi to the Ritz. On the way Kitty goads Rebecca further, remarking that Anthony shows signs of maturing at last, and she is hopeful that he will grow out of his current infatuation. Rebecca says she is a fool – Anthony is utterly irresponsible and mentally unstable. Over lunch, of which not much is eaten, the more Kitty defends Anthony the more hysterical Rebecca grows in her denunciation of her son. He is evil and vile and brings nothing but suffering on everyone he is involved with. There is something fundamentally base about him. She wishes she had never brought him into the world. She wishes he were dead. Gradually the diners at the tables around them fall silent, awed and fascinated by this torrent of eloquent vituperation. Eventually Henry beckons to the head waiter and together they escort Rebecca from the dining room and put her into a taxi to Marylebone station, Henry returning to apologise to Kitty and finish his lunch. ‘I’m afraid Rebecca is under considerable strain,’ he says.
When Kitty describes this episode to Anthony by telephone that evening he rocks himself in his chair, groaning and laughing with his eyes squeezed shut, visualising the scene, half appalled and half elated at having his prejudices against his mother so thoroughly vindicated. Relaying the story immediately to Jean he embroiders it, as a novelist might, to heighten the effect, so that in his version Rebecca is lifted from her chair by Henry and the head waiter and carried bodily from the dining room with her legs kicking in the air, still shrieking anathemas against Anthony, until the swing doors close on her, a detail he likes so much that he believes it actually happened. Jean however seems to find the story more alarming than amusing. ‘I don’t think I could ever face meeting your mother,’ she says down the line. ‘It would be like going into a house where you know there’s an unexploded bomb, waiting to go off.’ ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Anthony says. ‘She’ll calm down eventually.’ And indeed by the time Henry gets back to Ibstone that evening he finds Rebecca in a comparatively submissive mood. He reproaches her for her behaviour in the Ritz dining room and accuses her of making an unprovoked attack on Kitty. ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper,’ Rebecca says, ‘but in fact she provoked me a great deal. I don’t think you can have heard everything she said – you know you’re getting deaf, Ric.’ This she has found is a sovereign way to silence Hen
ry since he cannot deny that his hearing is deteriorating and therefore cannot be sure that he hasn’t missed some vital bit of information.
