A Man of Parts

by David Lodge

  ‘Not like his brother, who uses difficult language to make ordinary concepts unintelligible,’ Amber said.

  He laughed. ‘Very good! Arnold Bennett would agree with you. Have you read a lot of James – Henry, I mean?’

  ‘Not much, I have to admit,’ she said. ‘I loved “Daisy Miller” when I was a girl, and some of his other stories, but I tried The Wings of the Dove and gave up halfway.’

  ‘A pity – the last section is the best. The book has its longueurs, admittedly.’

  ‘It seemed like one long longueur to me,’ she said. ‘I much prefer your novels. Once you start reading them, you don’t want to stop.’

  ‘Well thank you, Amber,’ he said. ‘But as I said to Arnold, there are things in The Wings of the Dove that I couldn’t do, and he couldn’t do.’

  ‘The question is, are they worth doing?’

  ‘Well, of course, that’s always the question. Which only posterity can definitively answer. But about Pragmatism …’

  She listened attentively as he outlined James’s distinction between two basic types of mental make-up. The Tender-minded was rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, monistic, dogmatic. The Tough-minded was empiricist, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, pluralistic, sceptical. Idealist philosophers and Christian apologists were typically tender-minded. Scientists and engineers were tough-minded. ‘You might find you can classify people in the social services that way,’ he concluded.

  ‘Yes, I can see that might work,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Thank you. But which type are you?’

  ‘Well, basically tough-minded. Most people who’ve had a scientific education are. But the point is that both are unsatisfactory on their own. As James says, quite rightly, the tender-minded are on the back foot these days, mainly because of Darwinism and advances in the physical sciences. But tough-mindedness alone leads eventually to pure materialism, which doesn’t satisfy the human spirit, because it leads only to death – death of the individual and in the long run the death of the planet. So no hope. The tender-minded offer transcendence in one form or another – God, the Absolute Mind, personal immortality …’

  ‘But those ideas have no logical foundations,’ Amber objected.

  ‘Exactly. But we can’t just dismiss them. There must be some non-materialistic principle to make life meaningful, purposeful, hopeful. Pragmatism, James says, values an idea not in the abstract but for what its practical consequences are. For instance, does it or does it not contribute to the betterment of human life? Socialism triumphantly passes the pragmatic test.’

  ‘It’s both tough-minded and tender-minded?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That’s all extremely interesting. I must obviously read Pragmatism as soon as possible,’ said Amber.

  ‘I expect Wallas would look after you at the L.S.E,’ he said.

  ‘I did speak to him about my thesis idea – at a party at Christmas – but he thought it was a rather ambitious project for a young girl like me. I need to get a First to really impress him.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell him how impressed I am, already,’ he said.

  She blushed, and dropped her eyes, and there was silence between them, suddenly charged with sexual feeling. He broke it by saying that he knew an officer of health called McCleary who would be a good source of information and that he could put her in touch with him when the time came. ‘Thank you, H.G.!’ she said, raising her big dark eyes to him again, and smiling, her composure regained. ‘You’re so kind.’

  He mused on that moment of charged silence as he travelled back to London in the evening, staring through the blurred reflection of his face in the train window at the dimly visible flat fields of Cambridgeshire. There was no doubt that the girl was in love with him; the question was whether he was falling in love with her. His sexual life was dormant at present – surprisingly so, because when he finished a big project like Tono-Bungay he normally let off steam in that fashion. But his affair with Violet Hunt was over. She had begun one with Hueffer, a really serious relationship by all accounts, and ironically enough he had been responsible in a way. She had shown him some short stories which he thought were rather good, more honest and less prolix than her novels, and he had suggested that she offer them to Hueffer, for the English Review. Hueffer liked the stories, they met, and now they were apparently besotted with each other and wanted to marry. It was a pity that Fordie already had a wife from whom he was estranged, but no doubt they would work something out in due course. He wished them well, and had no jealousy or regrets in relation to Violet, for their affair had run its natural course. So he was at a loose end as regards female company. He encountered opportunities for new passades, but somehow he didn’t have the urge to follow them up. Whenever his thoughts wandered in that direction, the image of Amber would pop into his head, laughing, arguing, and gesticulating with her friends, kneeling on the floor of the playroom in Spade House, building a fort for toy soldiers with the boys, or silently absorbed in a book, unaware she was observed. And now there would be another image: Amber squatting by the fire with a toasting fork in her hand, talking philosophy. If he wasn’t already in love with Amber Reeves, he was certainly dangerously near the brink.

  She wrote very shortly after his return home to say how much she had enjoyed their talk in her rooms, and how greatly she appreciated his support and encouragement. He was virtuously restrained in his reply and subsequent correspondence, keeping to a tone of avuncular-tutorial concern for her welfare, and he resisted the temptation to find new reasons to go to Cambridge. Instead he threw himself back briefly into Fabian politics. He and Jane were both re-elected to the Executive in March, rather to his surprise, because he had attended hardly any meetings in the past year. But the ordinary members didn’t know that, and a significant number obviously still regarded him as their spokesman. He felt an obligation to their loyalty, and picked up once again the much-chewed but currently dry bone of the Basis. Apart from the addition of the clause about equal citizenship for women which had been approved last September, thanks mainly to Maud Reeves’s efforts, the Basis remained unchanged from its original form, and the small committee of himself, Shaw and Webb, charged a year ago with the task of revising it, had achieved nothing. Accordingly he got out the papers and wrote yet another draft, with which he was rather pleased, and sent it off to his two colleagues, only to get dismissive replies from both to say that they saw much in the document with which they disagreed but were too busy with other matters – Poor Law reform in Webb’s case – to respond fully. He fired off a furious missive to Webb saying ‘You two men are the most intolerable egotists, narrow, suspicious, obstructive, I’ve ever met’, which Webb evidently passed to Shaw who favoured him with one of his patronising, sarcastic homilies: ‘There is an art of public life which you have not mastered, expert as you are in the art of private life.’ The effect of this correspondence was to make him wish he had never allowed his name to go forward for re-election on to the Executive. He had really had enough, more than enough, of being treated by the Old Gang like some promising but disruptive young pupil at the back of the class. He made up his mind to resign from the Fabian, but he would choose his own moment, one that would not make him look as if he were merely sulking.

  Early in April Jane received a letter from Maud Reeves to say that she was worried about Amber, who was at home for the Easter vacation and showing signs of nervous tension about her forthcoming exams, not eating or sleeping well. ‘I feel I should be looking after her more, but the trouble is I have so many speaking engagements for the suffrage movement that I’m rushing up and down the country and often away for days at a time, and Will of course is always busy with his work. I know she loves staying with you and H.G. – she was in raptures about her visit after Christmas – and I wonder if you could bear to have her again for a few days. The sea air and your company I’m sure would do her the world of good.’

  ‘What shall I say?’ Jane asked him when she had shown him
this letter.

  ‘Invite her, of course,’ he said. ‘Let her stay as long as she likes. The boys will be delighted.’

  ‘And you, H.G.?’

  ‘Well of course, I’m always pleased to see Amber. You too, I think?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m very fond of Amber. If I had a daughter I would wish her to be like Amber.’

  ‘Well then! Let her come – and everybody will be happy.’

  *

  When Amber arrived she showed no signs of the nervous prostration her mother had indicated. She ate with appetite, slept soundly, and seemed to have her usual energy. She ‘revised’ in the mornings while he was working, and in the afternoons went for walks with him which she told Jane were as good as revision, if not better, because they talked about books and ideas. In fact their conversation became increasingly personal and intimate as the days passed. She told him about her childhood, how she had hated London after the open air life of New Zealand – ‘no freedom, no seashore, just streets and streets of sooty brick houses’ – and described a home life surprisingly lacking in warmth, both physically and emotionally. Physically because both Maud and Pember had been Christian Scientists in youth and had never quite renounced faith in the power of mind over matter, so they kept the windows in the house open all through the winter, even if members of the family had colds, and when the girls reached the menarche they were given no special concessions or cosseting when they had their periods but on the contrary were made to take especially long bracing walks, in all weathers. Amber mentioned this without embarrassment, glancing at him to see if he was shocked – which he was not, of course; but he was impressed by her candour and the trust in himself it implied.

  They were walking along the seashore, crunching the shingle under their feet, as Amber reminisced in this vein. Maud’s commitment to the cause of women’s rights had not apparently made her a compassionate mother. ‘Once when I complained that she didn’t really love me, she boxed my ears and said she had more important things to do than fuss over ungrateful children. And in spite of all her progressive ideas about women’s rights, she never helped me or Beryl much with the problems of growing up. She was too embarrassed to talk about sex to either of us – she thought it was enough that we had the run of Father’s library and could look up anything we wanted to know.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. But encyclopaedias and medical textbooks can only tell you so much.’

  She stopped and turned to look at a commotion of gulls soaring and swooping above something, a shoal of fish probably, in the sea.

  ‘They don’t tell you about love,’ she said. ‘They don’t tell you about desire.’

  ‘No, you have to go to novels for that,’ he said.

  ‘But novelists don’t tell you what you really want to know – they’re not allowed to.’

  ‘True,’ he said. ‘In the end you must find out for yourself.’

  ‘I want to,’ she said. ‘But it’s difficult.’

  Neither of them dared to look each other in the face as they spoke. Their relationship was like a bowl that had been slowly filling with unacknowledged feelings until now it was brim full – the surface tension was actually convex, and it only needed one more drop to set the whole thing overflowing unstoppably.

  The moment came two days later, when they were effectively alone together in Spade House. Mrs Robbins was unwell, and Jane had gone up to Putney to visit her, staying overnight and leaving the two boys in the charge of himself and Amber and the servants. Amber threw herself into the role of surrogate mother with enthusiasm and to the boys’ great delight. But when they had been played with, fed, bathed and put to bed, and she had read them a story and kissed them goodnight, and returned to the drawing room, she became more subdued and pensive. It was a mild spring evening and he suggested they go out into the garden before they had their own supper. They strolled up and down the lawn, and then sat down on the garden bench outside his shelter, looking out over a sea wrinkled by dwarf waves and stained by the orange glow of the declining sun. He made conversation on the topic of the Altrincham by-election, which he had been thinking about that morning. Winston Churchill, required by parliamentary rules to stand for re-election because of his recent appointment as Liberal President of the Board of Trade, was opposed by his own adversary of the previous year, the Conservative Joynson-Hicks, and by a socialist candidate called Irving sponsored by the Social Democratic Party, an extremist faction in the Labour movement. Irving had no hope of being elected, but would split the progressive vote. He was minded to write an open letter to the electorate of Altrincham urging socialists to vote for Churchill as the best way of furthering the cause of socialism in the long run, and he wanted Amber’s opinion on this project, which was likely to arouse controversy among the Fabians, because it was the Society’s official policy to support all socialist candidates in parliamentary elections. It was the kind of issue which would normally engage her eager interest, but her responses to his exposition were listless, abstracted, almost bored. ‘What’s the matter, Amber?’ he said. ‘You don’t seem yourself this evening.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ she said.

  ‘No. Is it because you’ve got to go home soon?’

  ‘No, not exactly,’ she said.

  ‘Is it because you’re worried about those exams? You really don’t need to be.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t care less about the beastly exams!’

  He knew intuitively where the conversation was leading, but forced an uncomprehending laugh. ‘Well, this is a change! What is it then?’

  After a long pause, she said, in a small voice, without looking at him: ‘I’m in love, if you really want to know.’

  ‘I see.’ After an even longer pause, he said: ‘And who are you in love with?’

  ‘You of course! You!’ She turned and threw her arms round his neck, and sank sobbing on to his breast.

  He cradled her in his arms, pressing her body against his for the first time, feeling its heat under her thin dress. ‘Why are you crying, Amber?’

  ‘Because I love you, and you don’t love me.’ She spoke indistinctly, her face still buried in his shirt-front.

  ‘But I do love you, Amber,’ he said.

  ‘You mean, like a father …’ she mumbled.

  ‘No, like a lover.’

  She sat up and stared at him. ‘Do you really?’

  For answer he kissed her.

  ‘Am I dreaming?’ she said when she opened her eyes.

  ‘No,’ he said, and kissed her again.

  ‘But what about Jane?’ she said. ‘You love Jane.’

  ‘Yes I love Jane, and Jane loves me, but there are many kinds of love, Amber. You’ve read A Modern Utopia, you’ve read In the Days of the Comet, you know my views on free, healthy, life-enhancing sexual relationships. Jane shares them.’

  ‘You mean … she wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘She won’t mind,’ he said.

  Nevertheless he had a scruple about consummating their new relationship in Jane’s absence and without her knowledge, in her own home. Instead he proposed to Amber that they lay naked in bed together that night, without making love, as a kind of rite of betrothal. ‘And if you decide afterwards that you don’t after all want to go any further, then you must say so, and I will understand,’ he said. ‘Oh, I won’t,’ she said. ‘But I think it’s a wonderful idea. It’s so … so … fine!’

  He came to her room when the one housemaid who lived in had gone to bed and was sure to be soundly asleep. Amber was waiting in the pitch dark, wide awake and naked under the sheets. They embraced and lay in each other’s arms, exploring and gently stroking each other’s bodies like blind people. It was an intensely erotic experience. ‘Is that your … ?’ Amber whispered. ‘That is my erect penis,’ he said, ‘a column of blood, one of the marvels of nature, a miracle of hydraulic engineering.’ ‘It’s enormous,’ she said. ‘Will it hurt me when you … ?’ ‘It may hurt a little the
first time,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind anyway,’ she said. ‘I want it inside me. I want you inside me.’ In his younger days he would have found it difficult to restrain himself from satisfying her wish instantly, if only to avoid an embarrassing ejaculation, but at the age of forty-one he had attained a measure of control over his sexual reflexes. ‘And I want that too, my darling,’ he said, ‘but if we wait, it will be all the sweeter when it happens.’

  It happened one afternoon some days later in a rented room in Soho, on a bed that creaked and twanged under their every movement, but the seedy setting didn’t matter. Amber was wonderful. In the daylight that filtered through the thin curtains her body was as delectable as it had promised to be under his blind touch in Spade House, shapely but lithe, with a delta of dense black pubic hair that set off her milk-white skin. She gave a cry that mingled pain and pleasure as he penetrated her, and when he had spent she wanted immediately to do it again. He smiled at her ignorance of male physiology. ‘I’m afraid at my age – at any age, actually – an interval is required,’ he said. ‘Let us sleep now.’ When they woke they made love in a more leisurely way, and she had a rapturous orgasm. ‘You have a natural aptitude for love, Amber,’ he told her, without flattery, as they lay side by side, sated and happy.

  ‘Call me Dusa,’ she said. ‘My intimate friends call me Dusa.’

  ‘All right – Dusa. I love your Medusa hair – in both places.’ He stroked her pubes and she giggled. ‘But what will you call me? “H.G.” sounds a bit formal in bed.’

  ‘I’ll call you “Master”,’ she said. ‘Like the young Samurai to their teacher. Would you like that, Master?’

  For an answer he turned and kissed her. Would he like it! The word on her lips was enough to stir his limp penis into life again.

  In the remainder of her Easter vacation they snatched every opportunity to meet in the Soho lodging house for joyous copulation, and when she returned to Cambridge for the summer term good fortune provided a perfect excuse for meeting her there. Ben Keeling was giving an informal dinner party in honour of Sir Sydney Olivier (as he now was, following his appointment as Governor of Jamaica) accompanied by his wife and his two elder daughters, one of whom, Marjery, was at Newnham and a friend of Amber’s. He and Amber were both invited to this event and he arranged to escort her to it. He arrived at Newnham in time for tea and took advantage of his trusted status at the College to possess his young mistress in her bedroom in Clough Hall, covering her mouth with his hand to stifle the sounds of her ecstasy lest they reach the ears of the virgins and spinsters passing on the staircase or in the gardens below the open window. ‘Bite on my hand, bite me,’ he hissed, and she did; the indentations were still discernible on the cushion of his thumb hours later, if anybody at the party for the Oliviers had looked closely. They arrived late, with the meal already in progress, and were greeted with a cheer, but he was ragged a little for his open letter to the Altrincham voters, recently published, and had to defend himself, sitting beside Amber on a window ledge with their plates on their knees because all the seats at the table were taken. This company was used to his presence in Cambridge by now and their arrival together raised no eyebrows. Only Olivier met his glance with a quizzical and faintly admonitory regard.