by David Lodge
Some hours later, when he was fairly sure everyone in the apartment, including Gip in the bed beside his, was asleep, he left his room and felt his way barefoot through the dark corridors to Moura’s. He had a story ready if he should be intercepted, that he had lost his way looking for the WC, but even so his heart beat fast, for he would hardly be believed, and the consequences would be deeply embarrassing. The risk he was taking, however, enhanced the ecstasy with which it was rewarded when he reached the safety of Moura’s room. She had the softest skin he had ever encountered. She murmured incomprehensible but exciting Russian words and phrases as she reached her climax and he released the pent seed of three weeks’ abstinence into a sheath he had prudently brought with him from England.
He did not feel guilty about being unfaithful to Rebecca. In his mind and in his memory, as he travelled back to England, that act of love in Moura’s dark bedroom (he had not seen more than dimly what she was like, naked) in the heart of dark, ruined Petrograd, did not belong to the familiar world of ordinary adultery, of hotel bedrooms and cabinets particuliers with pink lampshades and plush upholstery, but to a realm that was exotic, adventurous, almost imaginary, where the constraints of domestic ties and loyalties were suspended. It was perhaps for this reason that when he saw Rebecca shortly after his return, at the flat in Queen’s Gate, Kensington to which she had moved after the war, and gave her an account of his trip, he rashly did not conceal or minimise the part Moura had played as his interpreter and guide, but on the contrary described her talents with such enthusiasm, and showed such knowledge of her remarkable life, that Rebecca’s suspicions were aroused, and she suddenly said: ‘Did you sleep with her?’ Some foolish impulse of honesty made him answer, ‘Yes.’ As he saw her face go white, and then red, with shock and anger, he said, ‘Just once,’ and added foolishly, ‘On my last night.’
There followed floods of tears and a tremendous row, which ended with her declaring that she intended to take a handsome young lover herself at the first opportunity. ‘And I won’t have any difficulty finding one.’ ‘Don’t say that, Panther,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’ ‘Why shouldn’t I? It’s tit for tat.’ ‘It’s much worse for a man,’ he said. ‘Ha!’ she cried, addressing the ceiling. ‘Is this the great critic of the double standard speaking?’ And then, looking at him with fierce hatred, ‘Why don’t you go home to your frigid wife, and tell her all about Moura. She won’t mind.’ Rebecca retreated to her bedroom, locking its door and leaving him to let himself out of the flat.
He went home and immediately wrote a letter, begging her not to carry out her threat: ‘I love you and want to keep you anyhow, but I know that in spite of myself I shan’t be able to endure your unfaithfulness. I am horribly afraid now of losing you. It will be a disaster for both of us. It will cut the heart out of my life. I don’t think it will leave much in yours.’ When she didn’t immediately respond he sent more letters, decorated with drawings of heartbroken Jaguars gazing mournfully at the turned backs of unforgiving Panthers. ‘I am almost unendurably lonely and miserable,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve done no end of work and good work. The Outline of History is going to change History. It doesn’t matter a damn so far as my wretchedness is concerned. Righteous self applause is not happiness. Russia excited me and kept me going. Now I’m down. I’m alone. I’m tired. I want a breast and a kind boddy. I want love. I want love that I can touch and feel. And I don’t deserve love. I’ve nagged at and bullied you. I’ve not kept faith. You are probably the only person who can really give me love and make me love back. I don’t believe I’ll find you next April. If I don’t find you then I hope I’ll find Death.’ This last sentiment was overstated, but he was due to make an extended lecture tour in America in the New Year and Rebecca was about to visit a friend on Capri, so he was frantic to be reconciled before their long separation commenced. Rebecca eventually surrendered to his epistolary siege, and peace was made between them, sealed in the usual way.
Rebecca went off to Capri in November, leaving Anthony in the care of a boarding school, but he became ill himself and had to cancel his American tour. Then Rebecca’s friend on Capri also fell ill, and Rebecca was obliged to stay on, for weeks that extended into months, to look after her – or so she claimed in her letter. The worm of jealousy had entered their relationship with her threat to retaliate for his infidelity, and he wondered whether the young novelist Compton Mackenzie, who was living on Capri and whom she mentioned as having been kind to her, was part of the island’s attraction. He therefore proposed to join her in Italy at the end of January, which would be good for his health, and they could both get on with their writing under the mild winter sun. They met in Amalfi and occupied adjoining rooms at the Hotel Cappucini, ‘Miss West’ posing as his secretary and companion; and all was well until a retired English major among the guests recognised him and made an unpleasant scene in his cups one evening, complaining of ‘adulterous couples’ polluting the moral tone of the establishment. Another English acquaintance turned up at the hotel not long afterwards, and soon every guest in the place was aware of their identities. The sense of being the object of their prurient curiosity made him irritable and prone to make scenes himself, as Rebecca bitterly complained. ‘Even when people are nice to us, you snub them and make me feel awful,’ she said after he had behaved badly to a harmless brother and sister from Croydon who accompanied them on an excursion to Paestum. They left Amalfi after a month and moved on to Rome and Florence, still bickering between bouts of lovemaking, and making critical remarks when, as was their custom, they showed their work-in-progress to each other
Rebecca had had a deserved success in 1918 with her first novel The Return of the Soldier, a short, exquisitely written tale of a soldier who lost his memory as a result of a battle wound and recovered the happiness of his first love in consequence, only to forfeit it when, through the intervention of his embittered wife, he recovered his memory and was sent back to the Front to a probable death. It was a timely book which was highly praised and sold well, but Rebecca was struggling with her second novel, a dark, complex work called The Judge, while he himself was writing a riskily confessional novel called The Secret Places of the Heart. The hero, Sir Richmond Hardy, a world expert on fuel, was having a nervous breakdown due to overwork and the frustration of his efforts to establish international control of the earth’s resources of oil and coal, and sought help from a psychiatrist, who agreed to conduct the therapy while accompanying him on a motor tour of the West Country of England. Hardy’s sexual history was not unlike his own, a mixture of casual promiscuity and an unsatisfied longing for the perfect mate, and he currently had a mistress called Martin Leeds who annoyingly fell just short of this ideal. In the course of the motor tour Hardy met and fell in love with an enchanting young American woman and had many profound conversations with her about the meaning of life and his mission to save the world by the sensible management of fuel. In the last part of the novel they would be tempted to have an affair but abstain for the highest motives, and Hardy would die shortly afterwards leaving Martin to make a very late appearance in the book, regretting that she hadn’t fully appreciated his merits when he was alive.
There was an autobiographical source for the American girl: Margaret Sanger, the controversial leader of the birth control movement in America. He had signed a petition long ago protesting against her persecution under American law for distributing information about contraception, corresponded with her subsequently, and finally met her in the summer of 1920 when she was visiting England. He found her extremely attractive, and sensed that he could easily have initiated an affair with her, but constraints of time and circumstance as well as conscience prevented him from acting on the intuition. Rebecca had not met Margaret Sanger, but had corresponded with her at his suggestion to obtain advice on the latest methods of female contraception, and was aware of his admiration for the American woman. He knew that Rebecca would read this personal history into the parts of the novel he showed her,
and hoped that she would infer, and give him credit for, a wholly chaste friendship with Margaret. She did not however appreciate her own part in the story, which was mostly off-stage. She declared that ‘Martin Leeds’ was the most improbable name for a female character in the history of fiction, and tactlessly laughed aloud while reading chapters into which he could not recall putting any jokes. He retaliated by criticising the structure of The Judge, which started with a fine dramatic situation – a judge picks up a prostitute whose husband he sentenced to death ten years earlier and the woman plans to murder him in revenge – and then worked further and further backwards into the past. ‘The writing is all very fine, Panther – lots of vivid local colour – but you are keeping us waiting impatiently to rejoin the opening scene, to discover what happens next. What does happen?’ ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ Rebecca said sulkily. ‘That’s why you keep going backwards,’ he said.
After they returned to England, conscious that he had not been the easiest of travelling companions he wrote a letter thanking her for ‘two and half months of almost unbroken happiness’, to which she replied tartly that she wished he had expressed this gratitude at the time, since it had not been evident from his behaviour.
*
– There was a pattern here, wasn’t there? You were always trying to persuade her to extricate herself from domestic and family ties, to go away with you on your own, but whenever she actually managed it you behaved deplorably. The same thing happened a year later – only you were even worse. You went to America to report on the Washington Peace Conference, had a fling with Margaret Sanger, went about the country being lionised, and sailed back to meet Rebecca in Gibraltar for a holiday in Spain. But you made the holiday sheer hell for her. As soon as you transferred to the Maria Cristina in Algeciras, you started throwing your weight about, to her acute embarrassment.
– I wasn’t well. I was exhausted from all the travelling, and I had a sore throat.
– You ordered the manager of the hotel to phone the Admiral of the Fleet at Gibraltar Harbour for a naval doctor to attend to it. ‘Just tell him it’s H.G. Wells who is ill,’ you said. ‘He’ll send someone immediately.’
– That was a little presumptuous, I admit. But the retired English doctor they dug out from the foothills behind Algeciras was a hopeless quack – he could only prescribe a gargle for my sore throat.
– Perhaps a gargle was all that was required. When you moved on to Seville you treated Rebecca so rudely in public that the English chaplain there took her aside and offered to wire her parents to come and fetch her. In Granada you walked out halfway through a party with dancers and poets given in your honour by Manuel de Falla. When you got to Paris on the way home you refused to take Rebecca with you to visit Anatole France because, you said, she was not good-looking enough.
– So she claimed. I may have said she didn’t look smart enough. We’d just arrived in Paris – her clothes were creased and her hair needed doing.
– That was still insulting.
– She could be just as personal. She said I was getting a paunch.
– And so you were! You can’t deny you behaved abominably on that trip.
– I was in a strange state in those years. I was having a kind of extended nervous breakdown, like Sir Richmond Hardy. I was outwardly successful – ‘the most famous writer in the world’ – but inwardly dissatisfied. The praise I got was not the kind I wanted or from the people I wanted to get it from. It made me arrogant and irritable – I was aware of that, but I couldn’t control myself at times.
– Why on earth did Rebecca put up with you? Again and again you had tremendous rows, again and again she would say she’d had enough, and again and again you would wheedle your way back into her favour and her bed.
– I wasn’t always as difficult as that time in Spain, and even then we had happy interludes, days when we got on very well together and enjoyed ourselves. We were both exceptional people and we knew it. We were interested in the same things, we stimulated each other intellectually and creatively as well as erotically – it seemed destiny that we should be lovers. But yes, in retrospect it was surprising how long we stayed together, because we were temperamentally incompatible. Rebecca’s sensibility was essentially tragic. Jane was right – it wasn’t accidental that she took her assumed name from Ibsen. All her life she liked to act out the part of the tragic heroine, with tears, hysterics, melodramatic gestures … I hated her when she was like that. My temperament is essentially comic – I want life to be enjoyable, I like festive occasions and happy endings, I like sex and games, and when things go seriously wrong in my life – I don’t mean things like a sore throat, but a real disaster – I try not to let it show to other people.
– So why did the relationship last as long as it did?
– Basically because Rebecca went on hoping that I would divorce Jane and marry her. That’s why she would put up with my moods, and make up after our quarrels. And it wasn’t a one-way process. More than once I wrote her a letter saying I thought we should probably part for the sake of both our sanities, but she never wrote back saying unequivocally, ‘Yes, I agree, let’s do it.’
– Perhaps that was because those letters of yours were never unequivocal. They were full of fond nostalgic memories of your happy times together, and admissions of your sins against her, and expressions of your undying admiration for her. They were more like love letters than end-of-the-affair letters. No wonder she hesitated, when you proposed separation, to take you up on it.
– She hesitated because she still hoped to marry me. She didn’t really believe that I would never divorce Jane. To my mind, we had a potentially perfect relationship when it started: Jane to look after my creature comforts and organise my professional life and be the perfect hostess for the entertaining that we both enjoyed; Rebecca to be my lover, fellow artist and soulmate. But she wasn’t satisfied with that role alone – she wanted both, and Anthony gave her a kind of right to both, she thought. He was the incarnation of her claim on me, and he was a constant bone of contention between us even after we split up: arguments about how much I should contribute to his education, whether I could adopt him, and – when she blocked that – what access I could have to him. I’m afraid he had a pretty difficult childhood, Anthony. When he was very young he thought his mother was his aunt and I was his uncle, and then Rebecca told him she was his mother but he should still go on calling her ‘Auntie’, and then years later she told him his uncle was really his father.
– It sounds like a Freudian nightmare. You and Rebecca could hardly have done more to make him neurotic in later life if you had tried.
– I admit some responsibility for his later fecklessness. But he rarely reproached me. He always idolised me and blamed his mother for his upbringing, which was unfair on her, and embittered her towards me for a long time. It was all a mess and a muddle, that triangular relationship, an unholy family. It would have been better for Anthony if he had been adopted by a nice couple of caring responsible parents as I had intended, or if Rebecca and I had parted much sooner.
And the parting itself was never a clean, decisive break. It was impossible to put one’s finger on a particular letter or remember a particular conversation of which one could say, ‘That was it. That was the irrevocable statement of intent to separate.’ Not even the Hedwig Verena Gatternigg affair had that effect.
This youngish Austrian woman – she was in her early thirties, and married to an officer on a Danube patrol boat in the shrunken post-war Austrian navy – came to London in the autumn of 1922 with an introduction from her mother, whom he knew slightly, and called at the flat in Whitehall Court which was his London base at that time, to propose translating one or more of his books into German. On that occasion Jane was with him and they gave tea to Frau Gatternigg. She was pretty, with long-lashed brown eyes under a lustrous head of hair, and an elegant figure – but also a withered hand which gave her a certain pathos and made him sympathetic to her reques
t. Her spoken English was excellent. As she was interested in education, he suggested she might translate The Great Schoolmaster, a book he was writing about Sanderson of Oundle, who had died suddenly and dramatically of a heart attack earlier that year while giving a public lecture at which he himself was presiding. He gave her a carbon copy of the chapters that Jane had already typed out, and she returned a few days later to ask some questions about the text. On the next occasion she called (this time without an appointment) Jane had returned to Easton, and Hedwig Verena made it very clear that she wanted more than German translation rights from him. ‘I want you,’ she said, showing she had read Ann Veronica attentively.
It was not in his nature to reject a frank advance from a woman, face to face. The propositions which he received occasionally by post from strangers were a different matter, and these days he seldom followed them up; only recently he had declined one from a writer called Odette Keun, whose book Sous Lénine, My Adventures in Bolshevik Russia, he had reviewed favourably when it was translated from the French and published in England. She had thanked him effusively for the review, and declared herself a devoted admirer of his work, who had dedicated an earlier book to him without his knowledge; she was at a loose end with nothing to live for, and asked him to come to Paris and give her two or three days to make him happy. Intriguing as the offer was, prudence counselled against accepting it for several reasons. He replied that he already had a lover to whom he could not be unfaithful, and she accepted this virtuous excuse with resignation. Frau Gatternigg, appealing to him in person, was a different proposition, and he thought that if he rejected her overture she would be bound to attribute it to revulsion from her withered limb and be deeply hurt, so he responded gallantly. In fact when she was naked in his bedroom he found her deformity invested her with a novel and slightly perverse fascination which made him particularly vigorous. She for her part was passionate and effusively grateful, and if he had never seen her again he would have had only agreeable memories of the occasion and almost counted it as a good deed.
