by David Lodge
The book was widely reviewed and discussed, and it strengthened his position in the Fabian, especially among younger members who responded enthusiastically to the boldness of its vision. He expected more criticism from the Old Gang, since he was well aware that his elitist Utopia bore little resemblance to orthodox models of socialism, but their reaction was on the whole surprisingly favourable. In fact neither the Webbs nor the Blands were enthusiastic supporters of the democratic system as it currently existed, nor did they have much faith in extending more power to the uneducated masses. They saw themselves in an ideal world – the Webbs in particular saw themselves – very much as his Samurai, selflessly administering sweetness and light to the community by the practical application of their superior intelligence, without having to answer to anybody else. Only the sexual mores of his Utopia caused a slight raising of eyebrows and pursing of lips, an intimation of trouble to come.
In June of that year his mother died, after a fall on the stairs in her cottage. For some years she had been sinking into senility, and unable fully to comprehend the scale of her son’s rise in the world. There was a photograph taken by Jane of the two of them sitting together on the sunny terrace of Spade House just a year before she died which eloquently expressed their relationship and her state of mind. He was relaxed, dressed in a soft Jaeger woollen suit, with his legs crossed and a hand on one knee, but leaning sideways and forward in an effort to get her attention, while she, dressed in a full-skirted, all-enveloping black dress and cap, the image of the recently deceased Queen Victoria in her widowhood, was looking away from him with an expression of bewilderment and fear on her white, round face. She obviously could not believe that this splendid and luxurious new house could belong to her Bertie, or that he had come to possess it by honest means. Her own father had deceived her mother and her siblings about his financial status and died bequeathing them nothing but a mortgage and numerous other debts. She clearly expected the bailiffs to turn up at any moment and begin moving the furniture out of Spade House, and nothing he told her about the income he was earning from his books, or the exalted company he kept, would dispel her anxiety. His stories of meeting lords and ladies and cabinet ministers on equal terms were as fantastic and incomprehensible to her as his scientific romances had been when she was still able to read them. ‘Fancy,’ she would murmur incredulously at anything and everything he told her. ‘Fancy that.’
It grieved him when she died that she had never understood or really appreciated his success. It had been achieved by dint of a struggle of wills between them in which he had been victorious, and he would have been pleased if she had been able to acknowledge that he had been right, and herself wrong, and to take pleasure in the admission. Then they would have been finally reconciled. But it was not to be. When she was laid out for burial, swathed in a white lace shawl, he kissed her forehead, cold and hard as marble, and took several photographs of her before the lid was screwed down on the coffin. But these were not consoling mementoes: her lips were tightly set in what could only be described as an expression of comprehensive disappointment with what life had given her. Among her effects he found a diary going back to her youth which was a long litany of complaints, especially against her father, whose fecklessness had compelled her to go into service, and her husband, who had taken her away from the comfortable position she had attained in that occupation and condemned her to years of unpaid servitude as a housewife in a home only one notch better than a slum. The single joy in her life had been her daughter Frances, ‘Possy’, who died of appendicitis at the age of nine, and she decided that her third and last son had been sent to her to replace this saintly child, an expectation that he had signally failed to fulfil. As he read he was divided between pity for his mother’s unhappy life and dismay at what an ungenerous, self-centred, unctuously pious person it had made her.
He was upset by his mother’s death, but unwilling to share these thoughts with Jane, or anyone else. He was irritable and restless in the weeks that followed the funeral, unable to get on with a new book he had started called In the Days of the Comet. He bickered with Jane about household matters, and shouted angrily at his boys when they made too much noise in the garden outside his study window, making little Frank cry. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jane asked. ‘I need to get away,’ he said. ‘Where will you go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe to the Reform. I could work in the library there.’ He had been elected to this famous club, another feather in his cap, in March. He packed a few clothes and the manuscript of In the Days of the Comet in a valise and set off for London, but on the journey the idea of staying at the Reform in the middle of July, when everybody he knew among the members, like Arnold Bennett and Henry James, would be in the country or abroad, did not appeal. He needed company, sympathetic company. He thought of Edith Bland.
He didn’t wire in advance, but arrived uninvited and unannounced at Well Hall, carrying his valise, and said to Edith, when she came downstairs to see who had called, ‘Hallo, Ernest, I’ve come to stay for a few days.’ Her face lit up with a smile of pleasure. ‘What a lovely surprise!’ She took his hand and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You may be wondering why—’ he began, but she waved away his explanations. ‘We’re always delighted to see you, H.G. Stay as long as you like.’
That evening the family put on charades based on the titles of his books to amuse him and make him feel at home. Paul sat at a table reading textbooks and taking notes while young John, dressed as Cupid, mimed taking shots at him with a bow and arrow. He guessed ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’ immediately but pretended to be puzzled for a while to let the actors have their fun. An item performed by Edith and the housekeeper-nanny Alice Hoatson kept him guessing longer, till he exclaimed ‘Anticipations!’ Rosamund, now eighteen and a striking young woman, with a pretty face and a buxom figure, did ‘The Sea Lady’, miming the breaststroke while pursued around the room by Hubert Bland wielding a shrimping net. He couldn’t resist contributing to the entertainment with a couple of improvisations on Nesbit titles, which were warmly applauded. He hadn’t enjoyed anything so much for weeks, and retired to bed in good spirits. ‘You won’t mind if I’m not in evidence tomorrow until the afternoon,’ Edith said as she wished him a good night. ‘I work in the mornings.’ ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘That’s perfect then,’ she said.
He had been given two bedrooms: one on the first floor in which to sleep, and another on the second floor in which to write, with a desk at the window which looked towards the front gates and a cottage dignified with the name of ‘The Lodge’. But the weather was fine that week, and both he and Edith worked most days in shady nooks of the garden, well separated so as not to distract each other. If he took a stroll to stretch his legs and meditate the next sequence in his novel he would sometimes catch sight of her sitting in an arbour, her head bowed over a foolscap pad, driving her pen rapidly over the pages, stopping, crossing out, looking up into the sky for inspiration, and then writing again. Sometimes she would work on into the middle of the afternoon, before breaking off for tea and a game of badminton or a punt on the moat. She was under considerable pressure, writing two serials simultaneously and struggling to keep an episode or two ahead of her deadlines. The Railway Children had been running in the London Magazine every month since January and the book was due to be published in time for Christmas; The Amulet had been appearing in the Strand since May and would finish in the same month next year. It used the same kind of magical device as previous tales to transport its English children from modern London to distant times and places where they had perilous adventures.
‘The amulet is in fact your time machine,’ he observed slyly one afternoon when they were chatting about their work.
‘I admit the debt, H.G.,’ she said, ‘and I shall soon be incurring another. I’ve been re-reading A Modern Utopia, and like it much better than I did the first time. I’m planning a chapter in which my characters travel into the future, where children cry if they can’t go t
o school because it’s so nice.’
‘I look forward to that,’ he said, laughing.
They were sitting in the garden after tea in the shade of a chestnut’s thick foliage, eagerly listened to by Rosamund, who had ambitions to follow in her mother’s footsteps and was clearly enthralled by this dialogue between the two writers. The others who had taken tea had gone back into the house, leaving only the three of them at the wooden table, apart from the wasps that were feasting on the jam-smeared plates. Edith sucked on her cigarette holder and blew smoke at them.
‘I’m enjoying The Amulet enormously,’ he said, ‘especially when you bring the historical characters back into modern London. The Queen of Babylon trying to recover her jewels from a case in the British Museum … great fun! But you know, Ernest, I think The Railway Children is going to be your masterpiece.’
‘Oh, I agree!’ said Rosamund. ‘It’s so moving as well as funny. I’m always dying to read the next episode.’
‘That’s because it’s got a strong plot that runs through the whole story, Rosamund,’ he said. ‘What has happened to the Father? What has he done? Will he return to his family? We want to know.’ He glanced at Edith.
‘Well, don’t expect me to tell you,’ she said, smiling. ‘What about you, H.G.? What’s your new novel about?’
‘It’s set in the future and it’s called In the Days of the Comet. Did you know that Encke’s Comet is due to make a reappearance next year?’
‘Never heard of it, I’m afraid,’ said Edith, and Rosamund also shook her head.
‘But you’ve heard of Halley’s Comet – that’s due again in 1910. It was thinking about these comets that gave me the idea for this novel. Their shining tails contain a great deal of gas, and it’s been discovered lately that this gas may be stripped from the tail if the comet passes into the gravitational field of another astral body, like the earth. I imagine a huge comet that is getting closer and closer to the earth, and causing a great deal of alarm and panic – because if it collided with the earth the effect would be devastating, perhaps the end of the world – and it’s happening just as war has broken out between England and Germany. There’s also a love-story plot that’s driven by jealousy. What happens is that the comet doesn’t collide with the earth, it just brushes past it, enveloping the world in its gas, which has a strangely beneficial effect: it puts humanity into a deep sleep from which they awake born again, realising what fools they’ve been, and that there is no need for war and jealousy, and begin to rebuild the world accordingly.’
‘Another Utopia, then,’ Edith said.
‘Yes, but with a more exciting story than the last one.’
‘It sounds wonderful!’ Rosamund said, gazing at him wide-eyed.
Later that day, before dinner, he went for a stroll with Edith. They passed beyond the confines of the moat and wandered through the overgrown and largely untended grounds until they came to an old summerhouse, and sat down on an ancient wicker sofa, where a most interesting conversation took place.
‘Why didn’t you like A Modern Utopia the first time you read it?’ he asked her.
‘I didn’t like the idea that married men could have affairs but their wives couldn’t.’
‘You think married women should be able to have affairs too?’
‘No. I don’t think either of them should,’ she said. He was surprised by this answer, which did not accord with what he knew about the history of her marriage, but he could hardly say so. Noting his silence, she said: ‘I mean I know they do, the flesh is weak, the heart is susceptible … I won’t claim that Hubert and I have been entirely … But I don’t think it should be publicly approved, taken for granted, as it is in your Utopia. I think we must uphold the traditional principle that sexual intercourse should be restricted to married couples.’
‘Even though we know it isn’t?’
‘Yes. If you had daughters like Rosamund you would agree with me. Young girls like her know everything and fear nothing. They don’t believe in religion, they read any books they like, Darwin, Marx, French novels, Havelock Ellis I wouldn’t be surprised, because we’ve brought them up – I mean liberal progressive people like us have brought our children up – in complete intellectual freedom. It makes them terribly vulnerable. I don’t worry about Iris, even though she is at the Slade, where all kinds of things go on. She’s a level-headed girl, and she’s being courted by a very nice man in the civil service … But Rosamund …’
‘But you and Hubert are Roman Catholics, aren’t you? Hasn’t that …?’
He left the question unfinished, but she inferred it without difficulty: ‘We were received fairly recently. Hubert in 1900 and I two years later. It was much too late to affect Rosamund’s upbringing. She’s a terrible little pagan, I’m afraid.’
He was surprised by this reply, because Bland had given him the impression that he belonged to an old Catholic family in the north of England who had been deprived of their wealth and property by the Reformation. He did not probe into this discrepancy however, but risked a direct question on a matter which puzzled him more: ‘I don’t wish to be rude, Ernest, but why did you both join an institution that is adamantly opposed to almost every principle the Fabian stands for?’
Edith looked a little embarrassed. ‘Yes, our friends who knew were surprised, some disapproving. Hubert had always been attracted to the Roman Church in a rather romantic, literary way, but he didn’t do anything about it until Fabian died. You know about that?’
‘Yes, I was very sorry to hear about it.’
‘I had a baby born dead once – that was bad enough. And one is always terrified of illnesses in infancy. But to lose a son at the age of fifteen, with his whole life before him … and he was such a lovely boy, my darling, my favourite …’ To his dismay, she began to weep.
‘Ernest – Edith – I’m sorry. Forget my impertinent question,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk of something else.’
‘No, no, it’s good to talk about these things occasionally,’ she said, taking a hanky from her sleeve and wiping her tears away. ‘You see it was such a stupid, unnecessary death, that was what made it so unbearable. It was just a minor operation, carried out at home, so minor that we had forgotten all about the appointment and Fabian was digging in the garden when the surgeon and the anaesthetist arrived, and I had to send him to have a bath and get into pyjamas so the operation could take place. The doctors left him sleeping off the chloroform. There was a muddle. I thought Hubert was with him, he thought I was with him. When Hubert went into the bedroom poor Fabian was dead – he had choked and suffocated while still under the anaesthetic. The poor child died alone. You can imagine how Hubert and I felt. We were devastated to lose our darling boy, and it was all our own fault.’ She wept again.
‘You mustn’t think that, Edith,’ he said, and put his arm round her shoulders to comfort her. ‘It was just damned bad luck.’
‘I know,’ she said, sniffing and blowing her nose. ‘And it’s kind of you to say so. But that’s how we felt. Hubert took it very hard. I think he decided to become a Catholic because he wanted absolution – they have confession you know, the real thing, not like the pale imitation you get in the C of E. When you’re received you have to confess the sins of your entire life, and they are forgiven. It seemed to work. He was able to forgive himself. He recovered his old energy and spirit. So I decided to follow him into the Church.’
‘And did it work for you too?’ he said.
‘Up to a point,’ she said. ‘But not as well as it did for Hubert. To speak the truth, we’re not really very good Catholics, either of us. We don’t go to mass very often – hardly at all in fact. But it’s a comfort to belong. It’s nice to know the Church is there if you ever need it, in the great crises of life and death, when the Fabian, frankly, isn’t much help.’ She smiled sadly at him. ‘Dear H.G., how kind you are to listen patiently to all this. And what extraordinary eyes you have.’
They both became conscious at the same tim
e that his arm was still round her shoulder and their faces very close together. It seemed natural to seal the conversation with a kiss, and it was far from being a chastely decorous one. It was full on the lips and lasted some time, during which he put his other arm round her waist. When it ended Edith leaned her head on his shoulder and they were silent for some moments as he wondered, and presumed she was wondering, what to do next. Then Edith sighed, sat up, and separated herself from his supporting arm. ‘Perhaps we should go back to the house,’ she said.
He was fairly sure that if he had acted first he could have enjoyed more kisses, and who knew what might have followed? ‘The flesh is weak, the heart is susceptible …’ Edith was a passionate woman, and Bland was conveniently absent on business in the north of England connected with his journalism. But on reflection he was relieved that he had not taken the opportunity to initiate a passade with her. His reasons were ungallant. She was taller than him by several inches and when he clasped her briefly in his arms he had taken the measure of her body’s considerable bulk under her flowing robe. When he imagined making love to her naked on a bed the picture he summoned up was faintly ludicrous. So it was as well that nothing irrevocable had been said or done between them in the summerhouse, and he could maintain an innocently friendly relationship with her, rendered more intimate by their conversation, but with no emotional complications. When Bland came back from his trip to the north he was able to look his host in the eye without a qualm.
