by David Lodge
Elizabeth saw the Freewoman occasionally, and the name was familiar to her. ‘A clever writer, but there’s something rather wild and irresponsible about her articles,’ she said with a slight frown. ‘I should keep well clear of her.’
‘That’s what Jane says.’ The frown did not disappear. He had noticed before that little E never liked to be reminded of Jane’s existence, even though their relationship enjoyed her tolerance. A tiny seed of doubt was germinating in his consciousness that Elizabeth had not been wholly sincere when she said that she had no wish to oust Jane from her place in his life, but for the time being he suppressed it.
The novelty of waiting for Elizabeth to come through the secret door at night was erotically exciting at first, but it imposed on him a more passive role than he was used to. The door could be opened only from her side, and if she chose not to come through it after he had been lying expectantly awake for some time he was left feeling slightly snubbed, and not a little irritated. It was a quite different matter from his old practice, when they were sleeping in the same building, of slipping out into the corridor at night and trying the handle of her room. Whether the door yielded or not on those occasions he was the one taking the initiative, whereas little E’s sliding door seemed designed to give her control over their lovemaking. He did not complain, however, and when they went for one of their hikes in the foothills he would sometimes reassert his prerogative as lover by initiating intercourse al fresco. On one occasion this indirectly involved Rebecca West.
Rebecca was now writing regularly for a socialist weekly called the Clarion and in an issue that caught up with him in Switzerland he had read a forceful article by her entitled ‘The Sex War: Disjointed Thoughts on Men’. ‘We have asked men for votes, they have given us advice,’ it began. ‘At present they are also giving us abuse. I am tired of this running comment on the war-like conduct of my sex, delivered with such insolent assurance and such self-satisfaction. So I am going to do it too.’ The main targets of her eloquent scorn were journalists and politicians and other public figures who had recently denounced suffragette militancy in fatuous and intolerant terms, but she broadened out her polemic to attack the male sex at large, with effective use of a kind of refrain that punctuated her article in an ascending scale of contempt: ‘Men are poor stuff … Men are very poor stuff … Oh, men are miserably poor stuff.’ He had little doubt that through this article she was discharging the anger she felt towards him for his silence, but being well out of her reach he was able to appreciate her polemical wit.
Oh, men are very poor stuff indeed. And I begin to doubt whether they are ever reasonably efficient in the sphere in which they have specialised. They do not claim to be good. Collectively they do not claim to be beautiful, though private enterprise in this direction is brisk. But they certainly claim to be clever. And looking round at that confusion of undertakings which we call the City one begins to doubt. One doubts it still more if one ponders on the law, which men have had to themselves since the beginning. It is preposterously expensive. One could have four operations for appendicitis as cheaply as one can get rid of one adulterous husband …
When he read this out admiringly to Elizabeth she was unsmiling and unimpressed. She regarded herself as a feminist, but of a more subtle and ingratiating kind than Rebecca West. ‘Her sentiments may be feminist,’ she said, ‘but that kind of exaggerated satire will just reinforce male prejudice against women. It’s the journalistic equivalent of the vandalism committed by Mrs Pankhurst’s suffragettes.’
He couldn’t help feeling that there was some jealousy behind her response, and this became obvious the next day when they went for a long walk in the foothills, taking with them a picnic as usual, and a two-day-old copy of the London Times, which was delivered to the Chalet Soleil just as they set out. On a grassy knoll with a fine view of the summit of Mont Blanc they had their picnic lunch and afterwards divided the newspaper between them, describing interesting items to each other. It so happened that his portion contained a letter from Mrs Humphry Ward denouncing the moral tone of the younger generation, and citing the articles of Rebecca West in evidence. He read it out, snorting with derision. ‘This is obviously long-meditated revenge for “The Gospel According to Mrs Humphry Ward” in the Freewoman,’ he said. ‘Did you read that, E?’ ‘I can’t remember,’ she said. ‘Oh you couldn’t forget it – it was absolutely brilliant,’ he said. ‘It was the first thing of hers that impressed me.’ ‘Really? And what was the second thing,’ Elizabeth said: ‘her face or her figure?’ And before long they were engaged in a silly squabble, he accusing her of unfounded jealousy which she was allowing to distort her critical judgment, and she accusing him of lavishing far more praise on the slight productions of a glib young novice than he had ever accorded her own substantial body of work. ‘This is absurd, E,’ he said, after several sarcastic exchanges of fire. ‘Let us drop the subject.’ ‘You raised it, so I will allow you the privilege,’ she said, and resumed reading the financial pages of the Times with an air of intense concentration. He did not relish passing the rest of the afternoon in sulky silence, so after a few minutes had passed, he said: ‘Let’s make love, E.’
‘Certainly not,’ she said, without looking up.
‘It’s the only way to forget this silly quarrel,’ he said, and with sudden inspiration continued: ‘We’ll strip off and make love on the newspaper, all over Mrs Humphry Ward’s letter about Rebecca West, and then we’ll burn it, and our negative feelings will go up in smoke and disappear into the crystal air of these mountains.’
She looked up at him and burst out laughing. ‘You’re such a rogue, G! Such an artful rogue. It is impossible to be cross with you for long.’
‘You’re game, then?’
‘Of course I’m game.’
So they stood up and faced each other as they shed their garments one by one until they stood naked under the eye of heaven, and he spread the Times on the turf with the Correspondence page uppermost and they lay down and made love with Elizabeth’s bottom carefully positioned on Mrs Humphry Ward’s letter. Afterwards he set fire to the creased and smudged paper with a match, and squatting side by side on their haunches, like a pair of savages, they watched it flare at the edges, and then blacken and disintegrate and blow away in the breeze in glowing fragments, leaving just a little grey ash on the grass.
‘There goes our anger,’ he said, and kissed her. They returned home to the Chalet Soleil in excellent spirits.
Rebecca’s anger was not so easily dealt with. When he returned to England he found a series of letters from her urgently requesting a meeting. He invited her to tea at the new flat he had just leased in St James’s Court, Westminster, as a London base in place of Hampstead – at Elizabeth’s suggestion, since she had a flat in the same block and it would be, as she said, ‘convenient’. The flat smelled of fresh paint, and had not yet acquired a comfortable lived-in look. It was short of furniture, the windows lacked curtains, and the floors were bare of rugs and carpets. He had hoped the inhospitable ambience would inhibit Rebecca from any untoward display of emotion, but she seemed to take little notice of her surroundings. Her dark eyes were fixed on him as she followed him about the flat from drawing room to kitchen and back to the drawing room again (there were no servants in place so he had to make the tea himself), and he glimpsed in their depths a turmoil of emotions – longing, frustration, anger, despair – as he tried to keep the conversation on light or neutral topics. He asked her what she had been doing while he had been away and she said she had been to Spain with her mother. Where? To Valladolid, Madrid and Seville. And had that been enjoyable? No it had not, she had been suicidally depressed most of the time. He pretended not to have heard her, so she repeated the information in a different form: only the fact that she was travelling with her mother had prevented her from taking her own life. And why would she do a silly thing like that, he asked. ‘Because you rejected me,’ she said. ‘You made me love you, and then you dropped me, as
a child drops a toy in which he has lost interest. I don’t understand you. Why did you kiss me if you didn’t want to be my lover?’
He sighed, and shook his head, and made the speech he had prepared.
‘My dear Rebecca, you are very young. And being young – and passionate, and beautiful, and dimly aware when you look at yourself in the mirror of the pleasure your body might give and receive in the embrace of another body – you naturally want to experience that pleasure. But it’s not necessary to have a great love affair to do that – the great love affair can wait, and I certainly cannot give it to you. What you really want is some decent fun with a nice young man who is at the same stage of exploration and experimentation as yourself, or perhaps a little ahead of you, and who is responsible about birth control. You have been indoctrinated to think that without the emotions of a grand romance sex is an ugly thing. It’s not at all ugly – it is beautiful, and one day—’ But at that point in his homily the congregation stood up, gathered her belongings, and walked out of the flat without a word.
Soon afterwards she wrote him a long and extraordinary letter. It began:
Dear H.G.,
During the next few days I shall either put a bullet through my head or commit something more shattering to myself than death. At any rate I shall be quite a different person. I refuse to be cheated out of my deathbed scene. I don’t understand why you wanted me three months ago and don’t want me now. I wish I knew why that were so. It’s something I can’t understand, something I despise. And the worst of it is that if I despise you I rage because you stand between me and peace.
And it ended:
You once found my willingness to love you a beautiful and courageous thing. I still think it was. Your spinsterishness makes you feel that a woman desperately and hopelessly in love with a man is an indecent spectacle and a reversal of the natural order of things. But you should have been too fine to feel like that.
I would give my whole life to feel your arms round me again.
I wish you had loved me. I wish you liked me.
Yours, Rebecca
There was a postscript:
Don’t leave me utterly alone. If I live write to me now and then. You like me enough for that. At least I pretend to myself you do.
He read this letter with alarm at first, then with anger, and finally with relief. It was sheer emotional blackmail. If the stupid girl were really to kill herself, leaving a compromising letter, it would destroy him: reputation, marriage, career, the liaison with little E, all smashed irretrievably, as she well knew. But the final lines, and above all the postscript, gave away the hollowness of her histrionic rhetoric. The melodramatic ‘If I live’ – a phrase one of Ibsen’s heroines might have flung across the stage – followed by a bathetic plea for more letters. This girl was not going to kill herself, she was just trying to frighten him into making love to her, and she would not succeed. He wrote a curt reply to her letter: ‘How can I be your friend to this accompaniment? I don’t see that I can be of any use or help to you at all. You have my entire sympathy – but until we can meet on a reasonable basis – goodbye.’
He slightly softened the harshness of this dismissal by adding a postscript to say that he would look out for her articles in magazines; and he fully expected to hear from her again, a humble, grovelling letter apologising for the hysteria of her previous missive and promising to behave more sensibly in future if he could bear to see her again, or at least write. But no such letter came. In July he read some things of hers in the New Freewoman, a successor to the Freewoman under the same editorship but with a more literary bias, which impressed him deeply. The first was an article about a singer called Nana she had heard in a cafe in Seville, whose sensuous voice and voluptuous figure had held the audience in a sympathetic trance and given Rebecca a kind of mystical insight:
I remembered how I once saw the sun beating on the great grey marbled loins and furrowed back of a grey Clydesdale and watched the backward thrust of its thigh twitch with power. I was then too interpenetrated with interests of the soul and the intellect to understand the message of that happy carcass: if my earliest childhood had realised that the mere framework of life is so imperishable and delicious that with all else lost it is worth living for, I had forgotten it. Now Nana’s dazzling body declared it lucidly: ‘Here am I, nothing but flesh and blood. When your toys of the mind and the spirit are all broken, come back to my refreshing flesh and blood.’
This was remarkable writing for a twenty-year-old girl, even if it was obviously influenced by D.H. Lawrence, and it showed that Rebecca had not been so self-obsessed on her trip to Spain as to fail to profit from the experience. Another essay called ‘Trees of Gold’ was equally good. He could not resist sending her a note of congratulation, while making clear that he had not changed his mind since their last meeting. ‘You are writing gorgeously again. Please resume being friends. You’ve had time to see just how entirely impossible it is for you to get that pure deep draught of excitement and complete living out of me and how amiable and self-denying it has been of me not to let you waste your flare-up – one only burns well once – on my cinders. Nana was tremendous.’ She did not reply immediately, and then it was a very short message on a postcard, thanking him for his encouraging comments and saying that she was now literary editor of the New Freewoman, and exceedingly busy. In the meantime he had read another striking piece by her in the magazine, a short story called ‘At Valladolid’, in which a young woman on holiday in Spain sought the help of a grumpy doctor to treat an infected bullet wound, sustained in England when she tried to kill herself after being spurned by a lover. He recognised himself in this latter figure with discomfort, but also admiration for the precision with which he was judged: ‘Though my lover had left my body chaste he seduced my soul: he mingled himself with me till he was more myself than I am and then left me.’
Over the same period that she was writing these literary pieces for the New Freewoman she was writing quite different but equally brilliant articles on current affairs for the Clarion, sparkling with mischievous wit and revealing increasing disillusionment with the militant suffragette movement – not on account of its confrontational tactics, but because its intolerant sexual politics were a mirror image of masculine prejudice. She even dared to ridicule a pamphlet by Mrs Pankhurst’s daughter Christabel that solemnly warned against ‘The Dangers of Marriage’. This turn in her thought delighted him because it accorded very much with his own views, as he told her in a letter congratulating her on this and other pieces in the same journal. Rebecca had hit her stride as a writer, and there was an excitement in following her rapid development almost week by week, preening himself on having recognised her potential in her very earliest work. On the other hand he was slightly piqued by her brief and restrained replies to his enthusiastic letters. He kept expecting she would ask to meet him again, but she didn’t, and he felt that he couldn’t propose it himself without sending misleading signals (and, to be honest, losing face).
The continual tension of frustrated expectations and conflicting impulses made him irritable and discontented. Supervision of urgent repairs and improvements at Easton Glebe was preoccupying Jane, making her a less attentive spouse than usual, and when he turned to Elizabeth to be comforted and spoiled he was disappointed. She had become increasingly critical of him of late, as if taking possession of ‘Chateau Soleil’ (as he sometimes ironically referred to it) had inflated her aristocratic pretensions, which after all amounted to nothing more than a fancy name acquired by marriage, and she was forever correcting his pronunciation or table manners and making little jokes about his humble social origins. Once at a London dinner party to which they were both invited, when he was describing a recent visit to Up Park (or Uppark, as it was known now, though he preferred the old spelling and pronunciation), which revived his early memories of the place, she enquired, ‘Did you go in by the front door or through the servants’ entrance?’ and an embarrassed silence fell on the co
mpany. ‘I was just curious to know,’ she said with a shrug, when he reproached her later. She also began to refer to Jane by slightly mocking nicknames, such as ‘Wifey’ and ‘the Keeper of the Scrolls’ (a reference to her typing his manuscripts), and to mimic Jane’s characteristic phrases and mannerisms. When he protested about this one day in her flat in St James’s Court it led to a blazing row in which she as good as said she thought he should divorce Jane and marry herself if their relationship was to have a future. He walked out in disgust, and discovered the next day that she had decamped to the Chalet Soleil. He dispatched a letter into the dust of her departure, apologising for losing his temper, and begging her not to destroy the very rewarding and civilised relationship they had enjoyed for the past two years. ‘My wife has every virtue, every charm, only she’s as dead as a herring. You’re the eyes of the whole universe to me,’ he wrote, laying it on thick, but her reply was long in coming and cool in tone. When he proposed visiting her soon, she suggested a date in November, several weeks away.
Early in October Rebecca West reviewed The Passionate Friends in the New Freewoman. Spotting the item in the journal’s list of contents, he felt a jolt of intense curiosity mixed with apprehension, and turned to it immediately. It was a long article that paired his novel, somewhat demeaningly, with the latest offering by the popular but worthless Hall Caine. He noted with satisfaction Rebecca’s comprehensive disparagement of The Woman Thou Gavest Me but skimmed through these pages, eager to discover what she had to say about himself. Would she have seized the opportunity to take revenge for his resistance to her appeals for love, by writing a review even more damaging than her first one of Marriage? Or would she try to melt his heart with a panegyric? In fact she had done neither. It was a judicious, well-written review which found things to praise generously in the early part of the novel (‘The first chapter, with its brooding over a dear wilful child in gusts of naughtiness and sickness, is among the very greatest representations of childhood’) but found fault with much of the rest: ‘The skin of one’s brain is dappled with goose-flesh at the irritating surface of the style … Stratton marries a phantom doormat called Rachel who lives, to Mr Wells’ eternal shame in one sentence: “It sounds impudent, I know, for a girl to say so, but we’ve many interests in common.”’ What most intrigued him, however, were Rebecca’s comments on the sexual and moral dilemma of the protagonists. If, as this pair seemed to assume, she wrote, men require for some great thing they have to do the inspiration of an achieved passion, this places an intolerable burden of responsibility on women. ‘Surely the only way to medicine the ravages of this fever of life is to treat sex lightly, to recognise that in this as in philosophy the one is not more excellent than the many, to think no more hardly of two lovers who part soon than we do of spring for leaving the earth at the coming of June.’ This was very much his own hedonistic attitude to sex, which he had always tried to practise with occasional lapses into jealous possessiveness, but never dared to articulate openly in his fiction. He was delighted to find Rebecca sharing it, and surprised too: he had assumed from her passionate declarations of love that she would not be satisfied with anything but total commitment by himself. Evidently that was not true. Was she, he wondered, sending him a message through this review that she was quite willing to figure in his life as a passade?
