Question 7, page 3
Rebecca West was nineteen.
22
For his part Bertie Wells had long ago ceased being Bertie and was now not even a name but merely two initials, the same initials that adorned his book jackets and spines and introduced his surname: H. G.—the very same H. G. Wells, one of the most famous writers in the Empire, of whose latest novel only a week before Rebecca West had written a scathing review in the radical feminist magazine The Freewoman, to which Wells was also an occasional contributor.
‘Mr Wells’s mannerisms are more infuriating than ever in Marriage,’ the review began, words that Rebecca West was to discover could serve as a personal as well as a literary judgement.
For Wells was at once as notoriously devoted to his domestic life with his second wife Jane as he was to his affairs—most scandalously with twenty-one-year-old Amber Reeves, daughter of prominent Fabians, with whom he had a daughter; most recently with Elizabeth von Arnim, the celebrated Australian-born author and wife of a German aristocrat who had become famous for her books about her travails on her Pomeranian estate and her seeking to become part of the Junker aristocracy. The people’s prophet of change was in his private life master of only a curious stasis.
H. G. Wells was forty-six.
23
If not a vertiginous low, Wells’s career had hit a complacent lull. After the late Victorian sensations of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr Moreau, he had turned away from his scientific romances, as they were called, to more conventional storytelling and written a series of books that had not always been so well received. For every Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr Polly—both popular successes, if not of the same order as the earlier books—there was an Ann Veronica, deemed so scandalous that Wells had to find a new publisher after his own turned it down, and The New Machiavelli. Both acquired their notoriety as fictionalised versions of Wells’s affair with Amber Reeves.
In both books Wells had coupled a denunciation of Victorian morality to a spirited defence of sexual freedom. And yet because he kept up a conventional bourgeois life with his wife and two sons he was at once identified enough with the old order to be worth Rebecca West taking down, and sufficiently of the new to offer salacious material to help her do so.
‘Of course,’ she continued needling, ‘he is the old maid among novelists; even his sex-obsession that lay clotted over Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli like cold white sauce was merely an old maid’s mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships.’
And there it was for the world to see—all pure energy she; all putrid entropy he. Cold white sauce indeed. In his most vivid passages Wells had imagined a future world in which a dimming, exhausted sun feebly illuminated a few remnant monsters as energy came to its end: it was his recurrent nightmare and not only of the world. A dimming star himself, how could he not be intrigued by the possibility of a new energy source, be it Soddy’s radium or the young woman in the fetching skirt?
Wells didn’t know whether he was offended or intrigued or both when he read her savaging of his work. But he had read enough and heard enough to want to meet her. And so he invited Rebecca West to lunch.
24
On the day, Rebecca West chose to wear a blue silk hobble skirt she had borrowed from a friend several months before and was yet to return. Perhaps, she thought, she never would return the skirt. She liked it, she liked the way it clutched her thighs, liked how it made her feel and the attention it drew, and she liked how it simultaneously attracted and confused men who expected her to turn up in pantaloons or some such suffragette nonsense. She thought of it as her Rebecca West skirt. Only now, as she stepped out of the hansom cab she couldn’t afford but had felt obliged to arrive in, did she see that the hem was slightly frayed. Perhaps she would return it.
She reached inside her handbag and, not without difficulty given the skirt’s constricting cut, squatted down and snipped the offending threads back to a temporary straight line with a pair of nail scissors. Focusing on the cutting, she noticed her fingernails were dirty. She ran them under her teeth, spat on the pavement, and opened the gate to H. G. Wells’s home.
The housekeeper who ushered the exotic, wild, shabby and sharp young woman inside to meet the Wellses later told the butler that she felt like she was serving a lamb roast to a wolf, except for once it wasn’t entirely clear who was the lamb.
Rebecca West followed the housekeeper to a sitting room where she was met by an attractive middle-aged woman who turned out to be Wells’s wife, who introduced herself in the informal modern fashion as Jane. It was irritating. In the library to which she was next led was Wells himself, and as he rose from his chair to meet her, it was, Rebecca West had to admit, a shock. For having eviscerated Wells’s writings with words, Rebecca West was unprepared in every way for what she met in the flesh that day.
The man described as a giant turned out to be very short. For someone about whom words such as the future and energy were routinely used he appeared to be ageing badly, and dumpy with it. He exuded an earthy odour when he spoke. His eyes, so often pronounced as belonging to a visionary, seemed to her colourless, watery things housed beneath hapless drooping eyelids that suggested some rare breed of poultry. He was, quite simply, one of the ugliest men she had ever met.
25
Thankfully he began talking. He was a torrent of words—the woman question? Suffrage? Anarchosyndicalism in the Rhonda? Her exact thoughts on Mrs Humphry Ward? The Pankhursts? Dora Marsden? The rapidly changing nature of women’s fashions and the gender confusions of some new styles on both men’s and women’s parts—and all larded with low gossip, high science and startling opinions.
Charming as Jane Wells was, she soon withdrew—she seemed a little effaced, Rebecca West felt, sensing a small victory—leaving the two writers alone to talk. And for the best part of the next five hours, they did just that. If there was something abject about him physically, something absurd about a voice so comically thin and high-pitched it put her in mind of a drowning tin whistle, Wells still seemed to take her seriously, more seriously than any man ever had. Listening to his relentless flow of incoming ideas, questions to which she had no immediate answers, she felt like a telephone switchboard operator taking a barrage of calls without switching plugs. Still, that did not concern her. For if H. G. liked to explain, Rebecca liked to argue. She found herself beginning to warm to him. He was fascinating—and equally, she sensed, he was growing fascinated. It was not exactly conversation but something she felt was better. Women may be idiots, she thought, but men are lunatics. Intersecting monologues, that was the art and pleasure of being with him.
And so as their monologues began duelling, dancing, fighting and playing together, tumbling like dangerous kittens, she began enjoying herself. He would later call her Jaguar and she would call him Panther. While she could see he pretended to be a feminist but wasn’t, she was still beguiled by his intellect, his world, his glittering life. She was falling and he with her, tumbling and falling, and a waltz as if played on a watery tin whistle was playing in her head faster and faster as everything began to swirl around them.
Within half an hour she knew there wasn’t a man in all of England, in Europe even! who could compare. Not even the Belvedere Apollo could hold a candle to H. G., she thought, and she laughed at him and that funny little mouth with its crooked teeth grinned back.
For his part, Wells had never met anyone like Rebecca West and he very much doubted if there ever was anything like Rebecca West before. Many years later he would recall that she was mixed race, her mother hailing from the West Indies. This would seem without foundation but evoked the exoticism he found so attractive in her. She struck him as at once chappish and womanly. She talked like no one else, slowly weaving slightly grubby fingernails around her tales and ragged skirt as if she were an Andalusian dancer. She did these and other things in a fashion that Wells found vivacious and exciting all at once, using words as if they were fruit she had just picked straight from the tree, taken one bite from and then tossed over her shoulder.
She floated from the slave morality of Christianity to her family who, she said, were vampiring her; her father was glorious, she said, she had no father at all, she laughed; Mark Twain she adored and of Tolstoy she could not speak but only yawn except for the anti-sex thing which wasn’t enough to justify risking asphyxiation reading Anna Karenina. The suffragettes she admired enormously, but their business about venereal diseases which were supposed to be around every corner, all up, seemed to her, though she wasn’t in a position to judge, just a little silly.
The more he returned serve the more she came back with another ace. Wicked and wickedly clever, she had the qualities he lacked and feared the most and desired above everything else. He, the apostle of a free life, had been accused by Amber Reeves of somehow never living. But here, in this vivacious, wild-haired woman, was the very stuff of life.
A few weeks later they met again. Did the youthful Rebecca, not far distant from her acting days, searching towards her new role, now re-enact the part of the heroine of Wells’s Ann Veronica, the novel she had so recently rubbished? Did she tell Wells in Wells’s own words, as he had Ann Veronica tell an older married man, that she wanted him to be her lover? Or was it Wells who pleaded with her?
All that is known is this: in front of his bookcase, while talking about matters of literary style, they kissed.
26
That kiss would, in time, beget death which would, in turn, beget me and the circumstances of my life that lead to the book you now hold, a chain reaction which began over a century ago, and all of which will lead to the unlikely figure of my father, unlikely in that he is to appear in a story with, among others unknown to him, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West.
In front of the bookcase they now pause and stare for a moment at each other, they smell each other, he of walnuts, she of lavender, both scents that she would come to associate with an inexorable longing and an incommunicable anger.
Their later accounts of this seminal event confused much but were certain on one thing: it was mutual. They both took what they wanted. Perhaps it was her. Perhaps it was him. Perhaps it is what remains when memory and obliteration collide: imagination. Perhaps it just was: inexplicable to both. Perhaps it was question 7.
Two
1
It was clear to me even when I was very young that my father was different, that he had passed through something, but what that something was wasn’t ever really talked about. A quiet and reserved man who neither disciplined me nor encouraged me nor damned me nor praised me, he was for the most part vaporous, there and not there, substance and non-substance.
He saw the world aslant. It was for him a great tragicomedy in which the comedy was made poignant by the tragedy and the tragedy rendered bearable by the comedy. When the subject was sad or serious, he would smile wanly, his face turning inside out, a concertina of wrinkles compressing his eyes into wry sunken currants, and from him would flow a riversong of stories.
Even when I was young he already seemed impossibly old, so much older than other kids’ fathers, and his mouth would form that slight smile and he would tell an anecdote about someone or other in Cleveland, the tiny Georgian coaching hamlet set in some raggedy woodland in the Tasmanian Midlands, where he had been born the month Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, and you would see the event, the tragedy, in some larger human light.
There was Doughy Bonner who boasted he could outrun the train, stripped off and running through the bush in his long underwear alongside the express to Hobart, only to lose, his figure forever flickering through the framing of skinny-trunked willow leaf eucalypts like a Mack Sennett silent comedy of the era. Mrs Barker, so poor, who had never seen ice-cream and with the last of her pennies bought seven ice-cream cones while visiting Launceston, one for each of her children, put them in her handbag and did it up, before catching the train back to Cleveland.
But of Rightio Burton who fell in the shit trough in Hintok and, too weak to escape, drowned, and of his dear mate Micky Hallam, dragged out of the camp hospital and beaten to death for no particular reason by the Japanese as the rest of the POWs were made to stand and watch, he could find few words nor even his customary wan smile. That’s life.
2
One of the first things my father did when he made it home after the war ended was to take a train trip around all of Tasmania that he could visit. Perhaps he wanted to see people and places he had thought he would never see again. Perhaps it was an immeasurable comfort to him to be allowed to sit in their homes, their kitchens, their lounges, their backyards and say little or nothing, warmed by the human goodness of others, to be astonished by the small everyday acts of kindness too easily dismissed as everyday. He went to the rainforest, he went to the beaches. He went alone, touching his earth once more as if it were some sacrament necessary to live. None of these places had any value to the larger world, deemed without worth to commerce or justification by European art. But in the scrag ends of an island at the end of the world, in its unhonoured and unknown wonder, broken men rediscovered how to live.
To live, Gordon A—, neither a friend of my father nor a man for sentiment but another ex-POW, once told me how on returning he went up the remote Gordon and Franklin rivers and stayed put there amidst rainforest trees older than the great religions, working as a Huon pine sawyer, because, he said, he was sick and the rainforest rivers of the southwest were healing country.
To live, Clyde Mc—, an ex-POW mate, took a job skippering the May Queen, an old ketch that dated back to convict times, sailing it into the immense skies and aching serenity of Storm Bay, past the giant waves of Shipstern Bluff and the soaring cliffs of Cape Raoul, bringing and taking goods and supplies from the little towns that had grown out of the abandoned penal settlements along the way at Premaydena, Taranna, Nubeena and Carnarvon, listening to the scud and thump of the wooden bow rising and dropping through the indifferent ocean, the sound of dolphin trains broaching and rippling; laughing at the leaping jackknives of blue-fin tuna dappling the sky here! there! everywhere! as if crazily bouncing off some subterranean trampoline.
To live, Boy M— returned to trapping in the snow country where he was consoled by the cry of the currawong echoing through the ruby gold heathlands and snow drifts, eerie, ancient, defiant, the jo witties calling him home, h-o-o-o-o—ome! In their different ways, they all returned to the land and sea of their island home. To the healing country. To be healed.
To live.
3
There is a photo of my father taken before the war, aged twenty-four, with his father, mother and brother Tom. They look, as they were, irredeemably poor, his mother already wasted from the consumption that will shortly carry her away. He, however, taller, moody, handsome, looks dapper in a pair of Oxford bags and jacket. He doesn’t belong and he seems to know it.
In his nineties, hospitalised after a heart attack, he told me how back then he had been ashamed of his family and their poverty. And now he, in turn, was ashamed of having had such thoughts. He loved them. His tragedy, he told me another time, was to leave the working class but never arrive in the middle class. His triumph, I see now, was to survive.
Shame lay like crusted blood over the island: when he returned from playing football in Hobart, the island’s capital, to Launceston, its second and far richer city, through which the sheep money flowed and which identified much more with Victoria than Tasmania, he went into a drapery and asked for a shirt with a certain sort of lapel that he had seen in a Hobart shop window only to be told there was no such shirt. When my father insisted there was because he had seen it himself in Hobart, the shop assistant leant over the counter, repeated his claim that no such shirt ever existed, adding, ‘Listen, sonny, we’re not a convict town like Hobart, we are part of Victoria, and I’m telling you—that shirt doesn’t exist.’
Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.
4
He was a sick man and an enigmatic man all through my childhood. An alone man. He suffered a range of non-specific health problems which were known in the family as Dad’s ulcer. Dad’s ulcer meant that unlike so many of his army mates he drank almost nothing in the way of alcohol, taking a bottle of milk rather than beer with him when he went to visit. He drank milk of magnesia for his ulcer, a compound that left glasses streaked with a chalky residue, which as a child I feared, as if it might carry the strange illness that left my father so thin and distant.
There is a photo of him that was taken when he finally left Longford, the town where I was born and where he was much loved. It ran on the front of the local paper. He stands, a tall, striking man neither young nor old, neither alone nor befriended, while a host of schoolchildren sit around him. It is a strange photo. He looks like a celebrity or movie star rather than a country schoolteacher. He rises out of the children like an edifice, not human and human at the same time. Warm and distant. Loved and alone. He smiles characteristically. Which is to say quizzically.
He once told me he’d had a dream in which he had died, and he is in his coffin being wheeled through Longford’s streets and the whole town is out watching him as the coffin passes. And it was then, he said, that he knew he had to leave. He was admired. He lived, I sometimes think, looking at that photo, in an autumnal solitude. At the heart of his gentleness was the feeling that without kindness we are nothing. Kindness and courage: with him the two seemed synonyms. Perhaps it had been that way about him all his life.
5
One of the few times I saw him get angry as a child was when the American movie King Rat was to be shown on tv over the summer holidays and we wanted to watch it. My father refused to let us. I saw it later at a friend’s home. Based on a highly successful American novel, King Rat tells of how an American POW prospers in the Changi POW camp by stealing from other POWs and running rackets and, as a successful criminal, becomes the de facto head of the camp.
