by David Lodge
‘Did you get away from Well Hall without any problems?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely … nobody suspected anything. And your instructions were so good! I had a little trouble getting a cab at Cannon Street …’ She was in the middle of telling him the details of her journey when the door of the compartment was suddenly opened from outside and Clifford Sharp appeared, looking up at them from the platform. They sprang apart and jumped to their feet. Rosamund spoke first: ‘Clifford! What on earth …?’ Sharp regarded them for a moment with a smirk of satisfaction, then turning his head called out, ‘Here they are!’
What followed resembled not a scene from one of Violet Hunt’s novels, but the melodramatic climax of some shilling shocker from the railway bookstall: villain foiled in the nick of time by outraged father and chivalrous admirer in dastardly attempt to abduct innocent maiden. All it lacked was a horsewhip in Hubert Bland’s hand when he appeared at the open door, glaring through his monocle like Polyphemus, his black moustache bristling, his face puce with anger under the thatch of white hair. ‘Out you get, young lady!’ he snapped.
Rosamund shrank back into the corner seat furthest from the door, and shook her head. ‘No, I won’t,’ she said tremulously.
Bland clambered into the compartment as if intending to drag her bodily from the train, and he placed himself protectively in front of her. ‘Get out of my way, Wells,’ Bland said menacingly, ‘I’ll deal with you later.’
‘Rosamund is an adult,’ he said, ‘capable of making her own decisions about where she travels and with whom. You have no right to treat her as if she is your chattel.’
‘And you have no right to seduce an innocent young girl – a married man old enough to be her father,’ Bland retorted. ‘Thank God I was able to prevent you – for the second time! Get out of my way.’
‘Rosamund and I became lovers last summer,’ he said, ‘by her own wish and consent – ask her.’
Bland was momentarily silenced, glowering, breathing heavily, his bulky shoulders heaving under his tight frock coat, like a bull preparing to charge. Clifford Sharp remained standing guard at the open carriage door, through which late-arriving passengers, sensing that some drama was in progress, shot curious glances as they passed.
‘It’s true, Father,’ Rosamund said from behind his back.
‘Then you should be ashamed of yourself,’ Bland snapped. ‘I never thought a daughter of mine would surrender her honour to a cad like this … cad.’ His journalistic gift for elegant variation had temporarily deserted him.
‘Of course you’ve always set her a shining example of chaste behaviour yourself, haven’t you, Bland?’ he said – rashly, because the man responded by grasping the lapels of his jacket and throwing him on to the seat, pushing past to seize Rosamund by the hand.
‘Don’t, Father! You’re hurting me!’ she exclaimed as she was pulled to the door. When he tried to impede them Bland punched him in the chest making him stagger and sprawl back on the seat. ‘Oh, don’t hit him!’ Rosamund wailed as she was dragged off the train, and she burst into tears.
‘Get her valise,’ Bland ordered Sharp, who obeyed smartly. ‘You’ll hear more of this, Wells,’ he snarled, before whisking the weeping Rosamund out of his sight.
Winded, he got slowly to his feet. Whistles blew and he heard the sound of carriage doors slamming shut. He managed to lift his own valise off the rack and alight from the train moments before it pulled out of the station, sending gouts of smoke and steam into the curved vault. Further down the platform Rosamund was being escorted – almost frogmarched – towards the exit by the two men. She turned her head and threw a helpless pitiful glance over her shoulder before she was jerked forward into a throng of people and disappeared from his view. Poor Rosamund. What a cruel awakening from her dream. He sat down on a bench to recover his composure and to consider how he was going to make a clean breast of this absurd and humiliating episode to Jane.
Jane was as quietly critical and stoically forgiving as she usually was when he made a fool of himself, though she had an additional provocation to feel resentful when Edith Bland, no doubt egged on by Hubert, wrote a very offensive letter holding her responsible for his debauching of their daughter. ‘Whether you knew of it or not, (and I find it difficult to believe you had no suspicions) you must be aware of his habitual philandering, and your toleration amounts to encouragement,’ she wrote. He wanted Jane to fire back a reply citing examples of Hubert’s habitual philandering, some of which were certainly known to and tolerated by Edith, but Jane maintained, rightly as it turned out, that a dignified silence was the best response. In spite of Hubert’s parting threat on the Paddington platform, it seemed that the Blands had decided not to make a public fuss about the episode, no doubt because they wanted to protect Rosamund’s reputation and because Hubert was conscious of his vulnerability to counter-attack. He and Jane braced themselves for a storm of public scandal which did not materialise.
The humiliation of the incident continued to rankle, however, and he couldn’t help wondering how their plan had been discovered. He had his suspicions, which he was unable to discuss with Rosamund because all social contact between the two families was at an end, and even at Fabian gatherings she was always watchfully guarded by Sharp or her parents. The Blands however still spent a good deal of time at the Other House that summer, and he received a letter from Rosamund asking him to meet her in Dymchurch on a day when she knew Edith, Hubert and Alice would be out on an excursion to Hastings. He cycled over and they met by arrangement beside an abandoned fisherman’s hut known to them both, at the back of the beach some distance out of the village. Rosamund looked a little thinner than usual, but still healthy and rosy-cheeked. They embraced tenderly, but not passionately, and he sensed with some relief that she accepted that their affair was over.
It was a dull overcast afternoon, and chilly for the time of year, so there were few holidaymakers about. He leaned his bike against the wooden wall of the hut and they walked westward together along the beach on the hard sand left by the low tide and talked. Rosamund said that life had been pretty hellish at Well Hall immediately after Bland had marched her back there to be arraigned by himself and Edith, but that gradually things had quietened down. ‘Daddy still hates you, I’m afraid, more than ever,’ she said. ‘When he was criticising my morals I said it was the pot calling the kettle black, and he’s convinced you’ve been feeding me with slander against him.’
‘Slander is lies,’ he said, recalling his conversation with Pease. ‘I’ve told you only the truth, and only half of what I know.’
‘And most of that I knew already,’ Rosamund said, with a wry smile. It puzzled him that she didn’t seem to bear any deep grudge against her father either for his hypocrisy or for the violent way he had treated her – or for that matter for the assault on himself. ‘I do hope Daddy didn’t hurt you,’ she said, adding as if to excuse him, ‘I’m afraid he doesn’t know his own strength.’
‘I had a bit of bruise for a while,’ he said.
‘Oh dear. I thought you were awfully brave, to stand up to him,’ she said, and he felt better.
‘How did he find out about our excursion to Paris?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t say.’
‘I suspect Sharp,’ he said. ‘Why else was he with Hubert that day?’
‘Daddy says he asked Clifford to go with him, to make sure he didn’t do something he might regret.’
‘Like pushing me under a train?’
Rosamund laughed. ‘Something like that.’
‘I think Sharp must have steamed open my last letter to you when it was delivered at the Fabian offices, and found out the details of our arrangement, and told your father.’
‘You could be right,’ Rosamund said. She looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Clifford of course has always been very keen on me, and very protective. He never approved of our friendship.’
‘No, I was aware of that.’
‘I ex
pect I’ll end up marrying him,’ she said.
‘Really? Why?’ He was shocked, for he had never liked Sharp. There was something too calculating about the way he had set about making a career for himself in the Fabian, taking charge of the Nursery and appearing to support change while retaining the trust and respect of the Old Guard. He did not seem to be a happy person or capable of making a woman happy.
‘Well he’s clever, and we share the same ideas, and he loves me – or he says he does,’ Rosamund said. ‘Daddy and Edith think I should marry him. So does Alice.’
‘You surprise me. She told me once she thought you shouldn’t be rushed into marriage. I agreed with her.’
‘Yes, well, Daddy was terribly cross with her for encouraging me to be friends with you, and blames her for what happened between us, so Alice is in disgrace and has to go along with what they say. They think Clifford is being rather fine in still being willing to have me, in spite of knowing we were lovers, and that I ought to be grateful and marry him.’
‘That’s old-fashioned nonsense!’ he said. ‘Don’t do it.’
‘Well, I shan’t be in a hurry to, anyway.’
‘Make sure you see each other naked first,’ he said.
Rosamund laughed. ‘Clifford would have kittens at the very idea!’
‘Then he will be no good to you,’ he said.
At that moment the clouds parted briefly and a bright sunbeam streamed down through the gap like a searchlight and cast its reflection on the calm sea. They stopped and admired the effect. ‘I think I’d better get back before they return from Hastings,’ Rosamund said.
They walked back to the fisherman’s hut mainly in silence, each lost in their own thoughts of what they had shared together. They embraced again on parting, and she wept a little. ‘Thank you, for everything,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I got you into trouble.’
‘Others would say I got you into trouble,’ he said.
‘I know. It’s not fair. I hope you don’t blame me too much.’
‘I don’t blame you at all. Rosamund – promise me something.’
‘What?’
‘That, if you’re ever stranded, if you’re ever in need – you’ll tell me.’
‘All right, H.G., I promise.’ She hugged him once more, turned on her heel and trudged away through the soft dry sand at the top of the beach. Cycling back to Sandgate along the coastal road, into the darkling east, he wondered why Rosamund, with all her radical views, her belief in Free Love and women’s rights, didn’t just walk out of her oppressive home. Perhaps she would when she was twenty-one, but somehow he doubted it. She just wasn’t brave enough, or clever enough, to break free from the strange sinister spell the Blands had cast over Well Hall, where nothing was as it seemed and distinctions between fact and fiction, truth and lies, were blurred and confused. She was still locked into a childish relationship to Hubert and Edith, idolising him and feeling rejected by her. As he pedalled, musing on Rosamund’s plight he thought it might be interesting to write a novel one day about a young woman who did act out her radical principles and assert her independence in defiance of parental authority and social disapproval, especially in the matter of choosing a mate for herself, and when he got home he made a few notes.
Charlotte Shaw wrote to invite them to share a house in Llanbedr in Snowdonia where the Fabian Nursery were holding a Summer School – their latest experimental initiative. He declined, since Rosamund and Sharp were likely to be there, but he was glad to receive the invitation, whose genial tone implied that no rumour of the Paddington melodrama had reached the Shaws’ ears. This impression was confirmed when Shaw wrote him an immensely long letter a few weeks later wholly devoted to the story of how, bathing with his friend Robert Loraine off a Welsh beach, they had been buffeted by strong waves and swept out to sea, unable to swim back to shore, and the thoughts that went through his head when he believed he would drown. It was like a good short story – vivid, gripping, and highly amusing. He wrote back: ‘Wasted chances! You shouldn’t have come out. There you were – lacking nothing but a little decent resolution to make a distinguished end. You should have swum to Loraine, embraced him & gone to the bottom – a noble life wasted in an insane attempt to rescue an actor-manager. I could have sailed in with one or two first class obituary articles and put you right with America and Germany …’
The summer passed at Sandgate in the way he liked, working hard on weekdays, and entertaining a jolly group of guests most weekends, with tennis now available as an additional diversion to badminton and bathing, and charades and improvised theatricals indoors when the weather was inclement. If it was a large party, guests were found lodgings in the village. An up-and-coming Liberal politician called Charles Masterman and his charming wife Lucy were accommodated in this way. Masterman had published a rather good study of urban poverty called The Abyss, based on the experience of actually living in a slum tenement for a period, was an admirer of his work, and had written an enthusiastic review of Kipps in the Daily News, ‘in spite of having my name taken in vain in that novel’ as he remarked, referring to a rather unsavoury character called Masterman. ‘Yes, I apologise for that,’ he said. ‘Actually he was a much nicer character in the original plan of the book – he was to convert Kipps to socialism. But my idea of the ending changed.’ ‘I really don’t mind,’ Masterman said tolerantly. ‘What are you writing at the moment?’ When he described Tono-Bungay Masterman showed keen interest and he promised to give him a copy as soon as it was available.
The Reeveses came down to Sandgate with the delightful Amber and her younger sister and brother, and also stayed in the village. Their presence was another reassuring sign that they had no knowledge of the Paddington episode, as was their agreement that Amber could stay on at Spade House on her own for several days, at the special request of Gip and Frank, who were enchanted by her. She spent hours with them playing the floor games with bricks and soldiers he had invented, as totally committed to this activity as when arguing points in philosophy with himself. Amber was in the best of spirits, having obtained the desired First in Part One of her Tripos. Her father now preened himself on her academic achievements, and carried about in his notecase a letter from the great Gilbert Murray, who had read a paper on Ideals which Amber delivered to the Newnham Society, sent to him by her classics tutor, Jane Harrison. ‘Listen to what Murray said,’ Reeves bade him, unfolding the letter with a flourish.
‘“It seems to me quite the best college paper on the subject I have ever read – I mean as treated by a young person and from a non-metaphysical point of view. She seems to start where our generation left off – just the thing that new generations ought to do and mostly don’t. I have no doubt that you are proud of her.” And we are!’ Reeves added, as he stowed the letter away. He seemed to have conveniently forgotten his former reluctance to send Amber to Cambridge.
Violet Hunt was an occasional visitor that summer, and they carried on risky games of hastily snatched kisses and intimate touching, concealed from other guests by the shrubbery or in his garden shelter. Dorothy, rather to his surprise, invited herself one weekend in August when Violet happened to be there, and Violet complained that she was in constant terror of seeing her sharp little eyes peering at them through the leaves of a laurel bush or the skylight of the shelter. ‘You don’t know what a jealous woman is capable of,’ she said, when he laughed at her. ‘Dorothy may disapprove of you, Violet, but she has no reason to be jealous,’ he said. ‘It is all over between us in that line. We are just friends now.’
Dorothy in fact had finally resolved the problem of her sexual identity and stressful relationships with Veronica and Benjamin Grad in the most Dorothy-like way, as she told him when he was able to give her a private audience in the garden shelter. It appeared that very recently Veronica’s fiancé, Philip, a man considerably older than herself, had died suddenly of a heart attack. Dorothy, herself barely recovered from her miscarriage, had nursed the grief-stricken Veronica through
this tragedy, and in the process she had a sudden, almost miraculous inspiration. ‘I knew that both Veronica and Benjamin wanted to possess me completely, but Veronica had also wanted a male lover in Philip, and Benjamin wanted to possess me only if we were married, while I didn’t want to be married or possessed by anybody. That was why we were locked in this exhausting three-cornered struggle for fulfilment. But now that Philip was dead I suddenly saw the solution: Veronica must marry Benjamin!’ She beamed at him triumphantly as she said this. ‘Really?’ he said, suppressing a temptation to smile. ‘Yes! That way Veronica and Benjamin can possess me spiritually in possessing each other physically – it will be a mystical marriage of three.’ ‘Like the Trinity?’ he risked saying. But she saw nothing amusing in the analogy. ‘Exactly.’ ‘And what do they both think of this idea?’ he asked. ‘They think it’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘In fact they are already engaged.’ ‘And will you live with them in a platonic ménage à trois?’ She shook her head. ‘No. I’ve found a place to live cheaply in Sussex, with some awfully nice people who look after me tenderly. I’m going to live there very frugally and quietly and write.’ She told him she was going to write a novel which would be a faithful record of the consciousness of a young woman like herself. ‘The psychological novel has been dominated by male authors,’ she declared. ‘Even the best of them, James, Conrad – none of them really gets us, women I mean. There is always the male idea of order imposed on the stream of thought, the final clinching main clause, the stamp of the full stop at the end of the periodic sentence. I want to do something much more flowing and organic, the way a woman thinks and feels.’ ‘Well, I wish you luck, Dorothy,’ he said sincerely. It didn’t sound very promising.
