by David Lodge
This news spoiled a lunch he had been looking forward to, and he was unable to appreciate – indeed he scarcely attended to – Olivier’s exposition of the social, political and economic problems of Jamaica. As soon as he could politely do so, he parted from him and hastened to the British Museum hoping to find Amber there. He had to renew his reader’s ticket, which had expired, before he could enter the Reading Room and look for her. The light was fading outside the high windows. It was a foggy day and some of the fog had seeped into the great domed space, increasing the gloom, so that the desk lamps seemed like so many street lamps in a miniature city of crescents and circuses as he prowled in search of Amber. He found her at last, staring vacantly into space, chewing on a pencil, with a thick volume open before her. She started when he touched her shoulder, and her face lit up when she recognised him, then paled as she registered his frown. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘We must talk,’ he whispered, conscious of disapproving looks from the neighbouring readers, and waited as she gathered her books together and took them to the desk where they would be reserved for her for the next day.
To obtain some privacy he led her out of the building to one end of the great pillared portico, deserted on this damp, dispiriting afternoon apart from a few sooty-winged pigeons strutting about, sat her down on a bench, and reproached her for her indiscretion.
‘I only told a few of my closest friends … and a couple of the dons,’ she protested, ‘and I swore them all to secrecy.’
‘Oh yes, and of course they swore their friends to secrecy when they told them, and so on,’ he said. ‘You must know by now that gossip spreads like wildfire in Cambridge. I don’t know why you still spend so much time there.’
‘Because I’m lonely in London,’ she said. ‘I know we can only meet occasionally, and I put up with that, but I must talk to somebody the rest of the time and most of my friends are in Cambridge.’
He was conscious that they seemed to be drifting towards their first lovers’ tiff, but he couldn’t stop himself from pressing on: ‘All right. But why talk to them about us?’
‘Because it’s the thing in my life I care most about,’ she said frankly, with her big dark eyes fixed on his; and immediately his heart melted and he took her in his arms and kissed her.
After a little love talk, and another kiss, he said, ‘I’m sorry that you feel lonely at times, Dusa. Don’t you have any friends in London?’
‘Only Rivers,’ she said. ‘If you mean a friend I can really talk to.’
‘Rivers?’
‘Rivers Blanco White.’
‘Oh, him!’ He knew this young Fabian, a nice enough fellow who had been at Cambridge and was currently at one of the Inns of Court, eating his dinners and preparing to be a barrister, but in putting his question he had been thinking of female friends. ‘You know him well?’
‘Very well,’ Amber said. ‘He wanted to marry me when I was in my second year at Cambridge.’
‘What ? You never mentioned that before.’
Amber shrugged. ‘I didn’t see any reason to. It seems a long time ago – I was a different person then.’
‘But you turned him down?’
‘Not exactly. We talked it over, and decided it was not a good idea – which it wasn’t. We were both far too young and immature – I certainly was. Rivers is a few years older than me. He’d already graduated, and was studying law before going to Lincoln’s Inn. But he was in love with me and afraid that he would lose me if we didn’t get engaged before he went down.’
‘Were you in love with him?’
‘Well, I thought I was, but really I think I just wanted to sleep with him. Which would of course have been the sensible thing for us to do,’ she said, smiling reminiscently at some memory, ‘but I knew he would be shocked if I suggested it and Rivers was far too conventional and chivalrous to suggest it himself. He even felt guilty about kissing me when we weren’t engaged.’
What kind of kisses? he wanted to ask – passionate kisses, open mouth kisses, tongues squirming, bodies pressed together, limbs intertwined … ? He was suddenly swamped by a wave of jealousy which he was ashamed to reveal, and asked a trivial question instead. ‘Where did he get that ridiculously tautologous name, as a matter of interest?’
‘There was an ancestor, an Irishman called White, who emigrated to Spain in the eighteenth century and changed his name to Blanco, but Rivers’s great-grandfather, Joseph Blanco, left Spain around 1810 to settle in England and called himself Blanco White.’
‘It sounds like a schoolboy’s nickname,’ he sneered. ‘“Rivers” is pretty odd too, for that matter.’
‘It’s an old family name, his second given name. He was actually christened “George”.’
‘Do you still see him?’
‘Oh yes, quite often. We take the Tube sometimes to the end of the line and go for walks in the country.’
He stared. ‘Why did you never mention this to me before?’
Dusa gave him a sly, feline glance from under her long lashes. ‘I thought you might be jealous,’ she said.
‘Hmmph!’ He looked away, across the courtyard now lit by gaslamps, each with a halo of irradiated fog. Visitors and scholars leaving the Museum as closing time approached were descending the broad steps and making their way towards the Great Russell Street gate, the scholars distinguishable by their briefcases. ‘Should I be?’ he asked.
‘Of course not! I’m in love with you. Rivers knows that.’
‘You told him?’ He swivelled round to face her accusingly. ‘You told him about us too?’
Amber looked defensive again. ‘I had to,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘To stop him from trying to make love to me again.’
‘So he is still in love with you, then?’
‘Well, he thinks he is. But our friendship is purely platonic.’
‘As far as you’re concerned, perhaps. But what about him? What does he think of your relationship with me?’
‘He disapproves of course, but—’
‘Disapproves! I wager he does! In his position I’d like to kill me!’
Amber laughed. ‘You needn’t be afraid of that! He’s a lawyer.’
‘It’s not funny, Dusa,’ he said, severely. ‘He may not literally try to murder me, but he could do a lot of damage. Suppose he tells your father?’
‘He won’t. I swore him to secrecy before I told him – and unlike my Cambridge friends he takes an oath seriously.’
‘Hmmph!’ he grunted again.
‘Are you cross with me, Master?’ she said in a small voice.
‘Well, yes, I am,’ he said. ‘With all these people knowing about us … sooner or later there’s going to be trouble.’
‘I’m sorry, Master. But I love you – that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’
After which there was nothing to do but take Dusa to Eccleston Square in a brougham and quell his jealousy and his doubts by possessing her with as much violent passion as she could bear. In the cab he whispered into her ear exactly what he intended to do, and felt her trembling with a mixture of excitement and fear. She fought him with spirit, and afterwards they kissed each other’s scratches and bite marks tenderly, and cuddled like babes. She was a girl in a thousand.
He had little doubt that the rumour-mills of London were now busy linking his name with Amber’s, but no gossip came directly to his ears, partly because he kept clear of the metropolis over Christmas and into the New Year. The holiday was enlivened by a new kind of war game he had invented for toy soldiers, of which the boys now had a fine collection – whole uniformed armies, or at least battalions, of cavalry and infantry. The recent invention of a breech-loading toy cannon, obtainable from Hamley’s, which when carefully aimed could actually knock down several soldiers at a time with a small projectile at a range of up to twelve feet, had enormously expanded the possibilities of this kind of play. He had devised a game, based on timed turn-taking for manoeuvring and firing, which could t
ake several hours to complete, and absorbed adults as thoroughly as it did Gip and Frank – in fact rather more so, as Jane was wont to observe when she went looking for her husband and his male guests and found them lying on the floor of the attic playroom, pushing toy soldiers around a miniature landscape constructed of wooden bricks, cardboard, and evergreen twigs, with a river marked on the lino in blue chalk, arguing vociferously about the rules, with Gip and Frank reduced to mere spectators.
Masterman, who came down with Lucy to stay in the village in January, was thoroughly taken with the game, and contributed a few refinements to the rules. He had come to Sandgate to start a new book called The Condition of England, and had been reading the serialisation of Tono-Bungay in the English Review with great excitement. ‘It’s exactly a fictional equivalent of the book I want to write,’ he said. ‘I intend to quote copiously from it if I may.’ He gave Masterman an advance copy on his departure and soon received a gratifying response, ‘I read it on the train back to London, and I could scarcely refrain from shouting out and brandishing it in the faces of the bewildered passengers, as I realised I had got hold of a masterpiece.’ Beatrice Webb was less enthusiastic in acknowledging her copy, and said she had preferred The War in the Air¸ a perverse judgment which provoked him into a dismissive response to the reciprocal gift of the first volume of the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission on which she and Sidney had been labouring for several years. ‘You don’t by any means make the quality of your differences from the Majority Report plain, and your case in the slightest degree convincing. Perhaps I have been led to expect too much, but at any rate, I am left wondering what it is you think you are up to,’ he wrote, to which she responded ironically: ‘What an interesting letter – I enshrine it with due honour in my diary.’ Somewhat chastened he replied, ‘Perhaps my letter was a little ungenerous but the provocation to hurt your good piece of work as you treated mine and to be just wilfully unsympathetic was too great,’ and was relieved when she wrote back apologising for her remarks about Tono-Bungay and even inviting a renewal of contact between them. He had no intention of getting involved with the Webbs again, but the rapprochement was welcome inasmuch as it implied that if they had heard about his relationship with Amber they were not going to make a fuss about it.
The early reviews of Tono-Bungay when it was finally published in February were mixed. The one that gave him most pleasure was surprisingly in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Unless we are greatly mistaken,’ the anonymous reviewer wrote, ‘Tono-Bungay is one of the most significant novels of modern times, one of the sincerest and most unflinching analyses of the dangers and perils of our own contemporary life that any writer has had the courage to submit to his own generation.’ Bennett was similarly laudatory in New Age, but then he would be. The Spectator, given its record of hostility to himself and his work, was better than he had anticipated: while deploring his ‘dreary or lurid harping on the sex problem’, it praised ‘the passages in which Mr Wells is stirred to eloquence by the contemplation of the grandeur or the squalor of London, and by the magic of its ancient river. The romantic side of the mad game of modern commercial and journalistic adventure; the dodges of forcing worthless wares on a gullible public and getting rich quick, – all this is described with the utmost verve.’ When he saw the name of Hubert Bland over the review in the Daily Chronicle, he braced himself for a verbal thrashing, but Bland was too experienced a journalist to betray any personal animus, and was aware that a tone of bored disappointment by a former admirer would be more wounding. Bland found the novel ‘rather incoherent, not to say rather chaotic … Mr Wells’s habit of letting his pen wander at large is growing upon him. Presently the artist who gave us Love and Mr Lewisham will be no more. We shall have only a greatly inferior Sterne.’
After all the effort, hope and anxiety expended on and generated by this novel, its publication was anticlimactic. It was not unanimously acclaimed as a masterpiece, but not universally damned either. His faith in the novel was unshaken by the criticisms, but it would have to make its mark gradually, over time. Meanwhile he got on with the revision of Ann Veronica. Among other things he added an epilogue in which Ann Veronica and Capes were shown four years after their elopement, back in London, married (Capes’s wife having agreed to a divorce) and affluent (he has had a success as a playwright), giving dinner to Mr Stanley and his sister, reconciled at last with Ann Veronica – who is expecting a baby. It was a fairly contrived happy ending, designed to appease any apprehensions Fisher Unwin might have about the reception of the book by the circulating libraries, and he was not particularly proud of it, but he salved his conscience by giving Ann Veronica a long speech on the last page in which she felt a kind of dread of the life she saw before her of respectability and riches, and appealed to her husband: ‘Even when we are old, when we are rich as we may be, we won’t forget the time when we cared for nothing, for anything but the joy of one another, when we risked everything for one another, when all the wrappings and coverings seemed to have fallen from life and left it light and fire. Stark and stark! Do you remember it all? … Say you will never forget!’
During these early weeks of the New Year he continued to see Amber in London, and as an occasional guest at Spade House, without any ripples of comment or condemnation reaching him. He began to feel that he had overreacted to the discovery of her indiscretions in December, until, at the end of February, there was a sudden alarming development. He got a wire one evening sent from a post office in Kensington saying ‘FATHER KNOWS. I MUST SEE YOU. DUSA.’ He wired back ‘ECCLESTON SQUARE TOMORROW ELEVEN AM’, and slept badly that night.
Amber had a latchkey to the flat and was waiting for him when he arrived, huddled by the gas fire. It was a cold, overcast day outside the grimy windows, and the familiar room looked shabby and cheerless without the promise of sexual release which usually brought him there. They embraced, and she clung to him as if reluctant to let go, but eventually they sat down and she told him what had happened.
‘Rivers went to Father and told him we were lovers.’
‘What? But you swore him to secrecy!’
‘I know.’
‘The little shit!’ The expletive burst out before he could suppress it. ‘Excuse my language, Dusa, but really that was very dishonourable. He swore an oath.’
‘Well, it wasn’t exactly an oath,’ she said sheepishly. ‘More like a promise, and he warned me yesterday he was going to break it. Of course I begged him not to, but he said he couldn’t stand by and see me “ruined” and do nothing to stop it. He said he was going to tell Father that he was still in love with me and wanted to marry me if I would give you up. He seemed to think that made it all right to break his word. I said I wouldn’t dream of marrying him under any circumstances, but it made no difference. He went straight round to Father’s office and told him. And then of course there was a terrible scene at home. He ordered Beryl and Fabian to go to their rooms, got Mother and me into his study, locked the door and raged at both of us for an hour. Poor Mother was in tears. He said I had disgraced the family, that Mother had connived at my dishonour and deceived him, and we had both dragged the reputation of New Zealand womanhood through the mud. I won’t tell you what he said about you …’
‘I can imagine,’ he said grimly. ‘What did you say?’
‘Well, of course, I defended you. I said I loved you, and it was mutual. That Jane knows and is happy about it. That we have a very special relationship between the three of us which we believed could be a model for future generations. And that I was twenty-one and free to make my own decisions about how I lived.’
‘And what did he say to that?’
‘He threatened to turn me out of the house, and cut me out of his will, like a character in a Victorian melodrama, and Mother said if he wanted to create a scandal that was the best thing he could possibly do, and he backed down a bit, and blamed her for encouraging me to go to Cambridge, which he said was the start of my moral decline. Then he began t
o sing the praises of Rivers, and said he was a very fine young man, and that I was very fortunate that he was still willing to marry me in spite of my being “damaged goods” as he charmingly put it, and that if I had the slightest remnant of a conscience, and the smallest consideration for myself and the family, I would accept Rivers’s proposal immediately, in which case a scandal might be averted, and he would be prepared to forgive me.’
‘And what did you say to that?’
‘I said I wouldn’t marry Rivers if he was the last man on earth. Which isn’t true actually, because I’m fond of him and I know he is doing what he thinks is right, according to his lights, but I wanted to make it clear that nothing could come between you and me.’
‘And it won’t, Dusa,’ he said, stretching out and covering her hand with his. ‘I won’t let it.’
They made love that morning after all, not with their usual joyous abandon, but simply, almost sadly, as a pledge of their determination not to be parted. In the ensuing days and weeks, however, he began to feel less confident of the outcome. Pember Reeves was no more capable of keeping his outrage to himself than Amber had been capable of keeping her love story to herself. He heard from several sources that Reeves was telling his friends that ‘the blackguard Wells’ had seduced his daughter, and vowing revenge. The High Commissioner was said to have obtained a gun with the intention of shooting him, and according to one lurid version of the tale sat every lunch hour in the bow window at the front of the Savile Club, to which they both belonged (Pember Reeves had in fact proposed him there), waiting with a loaded revolver for the blackguard to turn up, and so alarming the members that they begged him to resign. This was all palpable nonsense, since he himself had prudently resigned from the Savile the previous summer. But there was certainly some substance to the rumours, and for Amber the situation was deeply stressful. The poor girl was under intense pressure from her father either to marry Blanco White or to insist that he must marry her himself after divorcing Jane. ‘Otherwise,’ he thundered at her, ‘there will be no place for you in decent society.’ Maud, who had been shaken by the public exposure of the affair, and had a guilty conscience about her own part in it, suspended her feminist principles and sided with her husband, urging the merits of Blanco White, though she conceded that Amber might yet save herself from social disgrace if she only cut off all relations with himself immediately. ‘But I can’t give you up, and I don’t want you to divorce Jane – I couldn’t contemplate that for a moment,’ Amber wailed in one of their many conversations on the subject. ‘So what can I do?’ He suggested she should leave home and live independently in a flat which he would pay for, but the persona this proposal summoned up was obviously too close to the stereotype of the kept mistress for her to be comfortable with it.
