by David Lodge
It was full of drama, and emotional twists and turns that would have strained the credence of a novel reader. The self-possessed manner with which she parted from him at Boulogne had been, as he suspected, a pretence. Inwardly she had been depressed and despondent, a mood that deepened into despair as the packet churned its way towards England. What was she doing, going to marry a man she didn’t love, with another man’s child in her womb? Was it fair to Rivers, never mind herself ? She felt she had messed up her life irretrievably, and a lot of other people’s lives as well. She was seriously tempted to throw herself into the sea and end it all. ‘I actually tried to climb the ship’s rail to see if I could bring myself to do it, but my skirt was too tight. I was saved from suicide by my vanity,’ she said with a wry smile. A steward spotted her struggling with her skirt with one foot on the lower rail, and escorted her away from danger. He locked her in a cabin, came back shortly with a cup of tea, and chatted to her until the boat docked. ‘I would like to thank that man,’ he said. ‘I would like to give him a reward. What was his name?’ ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘But he was very nice. He didn’t tell me off. He just said, “Nothing’s really as bad as it seems when you’re down, Miss,” and then chatted about his family.’
As she lined up on the deck to disembark she wondered if perhaps Blanco White had had second thoughts too, and would not be waiting to meet her – but he was there, reliable as always, at the end of the customs shed, in a dark suit and a bowler hat, with a furled umbrella in his hand, as if he had just stepped out from Lincoln’s Inn. He greeted her shyly, kissed her on the cheek, and asked how the crossing had been. She didn’t tell him that she had nearly thrown herself into the sea halfway through the voyage. As they walked to the boat train preceded by her porter he told her that he had made an appointment for them to be married in the Kensington register office at eleven o’clock the next morning, and had booked her into a nearby hotel for the night. She was taken aback by the short notice and asked if it had to be so soon. ‘There’s no point in delaying,’ he said. ‘I know your parents will be delighted when we tell them we are married, but if we tell them in advance they’ll want to be involved, and they would expect you to live with them in the meantime. Do you want that?’ ‘No,’ she said, emphatically. ‘Let it be tomorrow, then.’ ‘We will have to postpone a proper honeymoon, I’m afraid,’ he said with a nervous smile. ‘But I’ve got tomorrow – Friday – off, so we’ll have a long weekend at least. I’ve booked us into a hotel on the Thames, near Henley. Then one of the QCs in my chambers has very generously offered us the use of his pied-à-terre in Bloomsbury until we’ve found somewhere ourselves.’
There were other passengers in their compartment whose presence inhibited further conversation on any but the most banal subject, and in fact they passed the journey mostly in silence. Rivers was plainly pleased with himself for the efficiency of his arrangements, but Amber was appalled as the full consequences of her decision became real to her for the first time. The word ‘honeymoon’ had sent a shaft of apprehension through her. It wasn’t that she found the idea of sex with Rivers repulsive, but it was bound to be extremely embarrassing, both of them being conscious that she had been until yesterday another man’s mistress, and was probably pregnant by him. She had a shrewd suspicion that Rivers was not sexually experienced, and might very well be a virgin – so how would they manage the wedding night? Should she help him and risk shocking him by her immodesty, or leave him to humiliate himself by his own clumsy efforts? It didn’t bear thinking about, but she could think of little else until they got to the hotel in Kensington, by which point she had made up her mind what to do.
He had booked for her a small suite with a separate sitting room, so she ordered tea to be served there, and told him to stay while she changed from her travelling costume. Then over tea and scones she made a frank declaration: she would marry him next day, but on one condition, that until her child was born it would be – she was about to say ‘un mariage blanc’, but just stopped herself from making the dreadful pun – an unconsummated marriage. Anything else, she said, would be indelicate, indecent, it would make her feel like a harlot being passed from one man to another. But after nine months or so of chaste companionship, after her child was born, and adopted by him as he had generously offered, she thought they could begin to have a real marriage. She fully expected him to reject this condition, and half hoped that he would, but to her surprise he welcomed it with visible relief. It seemed that similar thoughts had been exercising him, and he agreed with everything she had said. He cancelled the honeymoon weekend and they moved directly into the borrowed flat. ‘But the chaste companionship didn’t really work,’ she said. ‘It didn’t last two weeks.’
Amber was happy with the arrangement, but Rivers increasingly was not, for reasons he could empathise with. To live in close proximity to that delightful creature, to share a small flat with her, to glimpse her dressing and undressing, however discreet she tried to be, and not to be able to make love to her, must have been an intolerable strain. At first Rivers negotiated permission for certain modest embraces and caresses, but when he showed signs of wanting to go further she resisted and accused him of breaking their contract. Rivers said he found the situation intolerable, and she said in that case they should live apart until the baby was born. He was reluctant to accept this solution, but while he was brooding on it she wrote to her friend in Hertfordshire and secured an invitation to stay with her. The loan of the flat was due to terminate soon and fortunately they had not yet committed themselves to other accommodation, so she packed her valises and told Rivers she was leaving. And that was her story to date.
‘Where is Rivers?’ he asked.
‘He’s gone back to his bachelor rooms at the Inns of Court,’ she said. ‘He visited me here last week. He’s been to see Father and Mother, and told them that we are married but living apart by mutual agreement until the baby is born.’ She stroked her stomach, not yet visibly altered, in a tender, automatic gesture as she pronounced this last phrase. ‘They were pleased he’s made an honest woman of me of course, but a bit concerned about how I’m going to manage on my own while we are separated.’
‘And how are you going to manage, Dusa?’ he said.
It soon became clear that she had invited him to Hertfordshire to get his advice and assistance on this point. She could not stay with her friend’s family much longer without imposing on them. She had very little money, not enough to find decent accommodation for herself in which to prepare for the birth of their child, and she couldn’t ask her father to increase the modest allowance he made her without putting herself back under his authority – or risking his cutting it off altogether. Rivers had offered to find her rooms in London somewhere, but she feared that this might prove the thin edge of a wedge of renewed intimacy and corresponding tension.
‘You can stay with us as long as you like,’ he said.
‘Thank you, but that wouldn’t be a good idea,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘If it got back to Rivers, and my parents – and it would be bound to – there would be terrible ructions. Rivers would say you’d gone back on your word, and with reason. What I’d really like is a place of my own in the country – somewhere like this village, I love it here. Somewhere Rivers could visit me, but not too often.’
‘Leave it to me,’ he said.
There were times in the next few weeks when he felt more like an estate agent than a writer. He was selling his own house, and arranging to buy another in Hampstead, as well as looking for a country cottage for Amber, all at the same time. ‘It eats up time and brains,’ he wrote to a new friend, Elizabeth Robins, asking for her help in the third of these tasks. She was a distinguished actress, and a friend of Henry James, in whose first play she had starred, but she was better known these days as a feminist novelist and playwright. He had met her recently at a dinner party and on discovering that she had some property in the country near London he sought her help in finding a suitable
cottage for Amber. When in the course of their correspondence Miss Robins learned the facts of his relationship to the young woman on whose behalf he was acting, she delivered some sharply disapproving remarks about Free Love and recommended him to be quit of the entanglement. He replied angrily: ‘Have you ever in your life known what it was to have a community of flesh & blood & pain & understanding with another human being? You can’t get quit.’ In spite, or possibly because, of this outburst, Elizabeth Robins shortly afterwards offered for rental a cottage belonging to herself at Blythe, a hamlet outside the village of Woldingham, in a lush bit of Surrey near Caterham. He went to see it, and it was perfect – a thatched cottage with leaded casement windows and a walled garden with fruit trees. He wrote to Elizabeth Robins: ‘I wrote you a cross rude letter & I bow beneath your feet. (But you were wrong about me.) I’m putting Amber into Blythe.’ By early July Amber was installed there. He paid for a six-month lease, renewable – the baby was due early in the New Year – and undertook if necessary to subsidise Pember Reeves’s allowance to cover her living expenses.
‘What exactly are you trying to achieve?’ Jane asked him one day, watching him frowning over the lease. ‘To help the young couple, of course,’ he said. ‘To bring some stability into a very volatile situation.’ Which was true up to a point, but it was also true that by taking the initiative in the matter of the cottage he had found a loophole in the terms of his surrender of Amber to Blanco White, who was resentful of his intervention, but lacked the means to offer Amber an acceptable alternative. The marriage had not been consummated, and Amber was living apart from her husband to bring his child into the world. This surely gave him a moral right to continue to see her. And who could say what might happen in the future? Divorce would be easy if Dusa and Blanco White both desired it. And if she liked the country life as much as she claimed, perhaps the idea of being his mistress, with a home of her own, might not seem so alien to her as before. He wrote jauntily to Arnold Bennett at the end of July, congratulating him on a new play which had just opened in London, ‘and bye the bye, it may interest you to know that that affair of philoprogenitive passion isn’t over. The two principals appear to have underestimated the web of affections and memories that held them together. The husband, a perfectly admirable man, being married attempted to play a husband’s part. Violent emotional storms ensued and I think it will be necessary out of common fairness to give him grounds and have a divorce – and run a country cottage in the sight of all mankind. I tell you these things to strain your continence, knowing you will tell no one.’ But in August he wrote to reassure Miss Robins that ‘There will not be a divorce – a quite satisfactory treaty has been made about that. I shall be about at Blythe a good deal and Blanco White will come down for weekends. Everybody is going to be ostentatiously friendly with everybody & honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense. Amber seems likely to be very happy in Blythe.’ He took care to add: ‘At present she has two puppies & my two little boys to satisfy her abounding maternity – while we move to Hampstead.’
To send Gip and Frank, accompanied by Miss Meyer, to stay with Amber for two weeks while he and Jane attended to the move from Sandgate was not only very convenient – it was the best possible advertisement for their enlightened attitude to sexual relations. If people who regarded such arrangements as depraved could read Amber’s letter to Jane as the boys’ visit approached its end, and note the complete absence from its language of any hint of tension, animosity or jealousy – on the contrary the sustained tone of relaxed affection between the two women – they might be forced to revise their opinions. Jane had passed it to him at breakfast. ‘Dearest Jane, Many thanks for your sons. They have been perfectly delightful and I’m awfully sorry they are going … I tried to wring from the boys some admission that perhaps they would like to come again … You’ll come yourself as soon as you really get over the house, won’t you? … Did you know that one rub of Wood Milne shoeshine keeps boots bright for days? I see from a bill head on my desk that it does. Thought you might find the hint useful … Dear Jane what ought one per week prepare ahead for four people? Rivers and H.G. and visitors.’ He sometimes thought that if he could publish the complete correspondence of Amber and Jane in the Times the controversy about Free Love and their own practice of it would subside like a punctured balloon, but since that was impossible he did his best by soliciting the support of respected and influential people such as Elizabeth Robins. There was no way to stop the circulation of rumours and reports of his elopement to France with Amber, her pregnancy, the hasty marriage to Blanco White, and its sequel, especially in Fabian circles, so he wrote to as many potential sympathisers as he could think of, putting his side of the story in a favourable light.
The Reeveses’ relief at the marriage of their daughter quickly evaporated when they learned that her seducer was still seeing her and paying the rent for her cottage, and there was a good deal of sympathy for them among the Fabians. The Old Gang obviously regretted that they couldn’t expel him from the Society because he was no longer a member, but Pease wrote frostily to Jane requesting that she resign her position on the Executive in view of circumstances well known to her, which threatened to bring the Society into disrepute. The Webbs were particularly appalled by these circumstances and began to interfere. Sidney, using Shaw as an intermediary because he was too angry to write himself, deplored his inflammatory self-justifying letters, and declared that the honourable thing for him to do would be to find an excuse to go abroad for a year. But Shaw passed on the message in a tone of urbane detachment that would have displeased its originator. ‘Webb is pretty savage with you for writing to keep up the agitation. He wants you to go away to the East for a year, and write a book about oriental marriage customs, to keep you from making mischief with occidental ones,’ he wrote, and took a surprisingly sympathetic line about his continuing involvement with Amber and Blanco White: ‘It is entirely proper that the young couple should have the friendship of such a distinguished man if they are lucky enough to get it. And A. is such an ungovernable young devil that nothing short of a liberal allowance of interesting society will ever keep her from the wildest adventures. So if you will follow the negative part of Webb’s program (no more letters) and omit the Asiatic part, matters will proceed very properly, gossip or no gossip.’ He was delighted to receive this letter, so different in tone from the lecture Shaw had given him about the Rosamund affair, and replied at once: ‘My Dear Shaw, occasionally you don’t simply rise to a difficult occasion, but soar above it & I withdraw anything you would like withdrawn from our correspondence of the last two years or so … Matters are very much as you surmise. Amber has got a little cottage in Blythe, Woldingham. B.W. works in London, & goes down in his leisure time. I like him and am unblushingly fond of her & go down there quite often. The Reeves don’t know how often & the heavens will fall if Reeves finds out.’ Pember Reeves was more incensed than ever with ‘the blackguard Wells and his paramour’, as he apparently referred to them in conversation with his friends, and it was in fact hard not to feel some compassion for him. Disappointed in his hopes of returning to political life in New Zealand, he had resigned as High Commissioner earlier that year to accept an appointment as Director of the London School of Economics, only to find at the outset of his first academic year in post that the whole institution was buzzing with the scandal surrounding its most celebrated postgraduate student, his daughter.
It was reassuring to have Shaw on his side at this time, especially when Beatrice Webb began to get involved, writing peremptorily to Amber early in September, ‘You will have to choose – and that shortly – between a happy marriage and continuing your friendship with H.G. Wells.’ Astonishingly, she seemed to have only recently heard of the whole history of their affair – Sidney must have shielded her from the gossip as long as he could. She declared that the Webbs’ friendship with himself was at an end, and commenced a vicious defamatory campaign against him, as he discovered one day when he was staying with Sydney Ol
ivier, home on leave from Jamaica. Olivier, opening his mail at breakfast, gave a chuckle as he was perusing a letter, and passed it to him: ‘Here’s something that will make you laugh, Wells.’ It did not. It was a circular letter signed by both the Webbs but obviously written by Beatrice, to ‘all our friends who have daughters between the ages of fifteen and twenty’, warning them of the predatory sexual habits of H.G. Wells where innocent young girls were concerned. He immediately fired off a brace of furious letters to Sidney, threatening a libel action, which according to Shaw frightened him into making Beatrice desist from her poisonous letters – but not from involvement in the affair.
When he arrived at the Blythe cottage one day towards the end of September Amber greeted him with the announcement, ‘Beatrice Webb was here yesterday.’
‘Really? What did she say?’
‘She said I should break off all relations with you and live either with Rivers as his wife, or if I don’t want to do that, live with my family, and that if I go on seeing you in this irregular way I will eventually be cast out of decent society, and probably end up as fallen women usually end up in novels. Well, she didn’t say that in so many words, but that was the gist of it.’
‘Beatrice Webb is an interfering bitch with the soul of an old maid, married to another old maid,’ he said angrily. ‘She looks at you, radiant with the expectation of motherhood, and feels only envy and spite. What business has she coming down here?’
