A Man of Parts Read Online Free PDF Page B

her own – admittedly with more generous financial support from his father, but H.G. kept his distance and his freedom – and now Anthony is planning to leave Kitty to bring up his children on her own. And what was the reward for the mothers whose lives were pinched and frustrated by the responsibility thrust upon them? They became the object of their children’s displaced resentment, that was their reward. She never gave up hope that her beloved Daddy would somehow return to the family with an honourable explanation for his absence, like the father in The Railway Children (how she had wept over the ending of that book!), until she was thirteen, when they heard that he had died. Later she learned from her mother that he had been an incorrigible philanderer, seducing their own housemaids and resorting to prostitutes. She recognises in retrospect that she was a difficult, disruptive child and adolescent, always quarrelling with her sisters and criticising her mother; Anthony was the same when he was growing up – hero-worshipping his absent father and blaming her for all the miserable experiences of his schooldays. She can so easily imagine little Caroline and Edmund in years to come repeating the same mistake, adoring Anthony and inflicting the same undeserved punishment on Kitty, as she struggles to bring them up, run the farm and, if she is lucky, find a little time for her art. The feminism Rebecca campaigned for all her adult life has liberated women sexually – the bolder spirits among them, anyway – but it has not redressed this fundamental imbalance in the relations of men and women: the female instinct to nurture their offspring and the male instinct to spend their seed promiscuously. H.G. is simply a more intelligent and more successful version of her father. Even Henry has disappointed her in this respect. Unfailingly kind and protective, admiring and supportive of her work (gamely escorting her round the wilds of Yugoslavia in dirty trains and flea-infested hotels when she was researching Black Lamb and Grey Falcon ), possessing impeccable manners, and enough money to allow her to live in some style, he is in every respect the perfect spouse, except that he is prone to infatuations with pretty young women, and he hasn’t made love to her since 1937. Lying beside him in bed one night she cried out in the dark: ‘Why don’t you make love to me any more?’ But he was asleep, or pretended to be, and said nothing. She has had other lovers herself, of course, since then, though none at present. She reflects despondently that her sexual life may have come to an end.
    In June the war takes a dramatic turn, on the home front as well as abroad. On June 6th the long-awaited Allied invasion of France takes place – not, as was expected, at Pas-de-Calais but on the beaches of Normandy. The nation is gripped by excitement and suspense, eagerly consuming every morsel of strictly controlled news about the event. After a few days it seems that the operation has been successful, the Allied forces have obtained a secure foothold, and reinforcements and supplies are pouring in via the ingenious prefabricated Mulberry harbour. This surely is the beginning of the end of the war, long though the wait has been since Churchill famously described the battle of El Alamein as the end of the beginning. But then, just as people are starting to relax and celebrate, the bogeyman Hitler, like some demon king in a pantomime, produces a new weapon from his arsenal to show he is not done for yet: the V1, so-called by Goebbels, the first of two Vergeltungswaffen , ‘retaliation weapons’ designed to exact retribution for the Allied bombing of German cities. (No one knows yet what the V2 will turn out to be.) The V1s are small pilotless aircraft, painted an ominous black, with a bomb-shaped fuselage carrying a ton of high explosive and short stubby wings. They are propelled by a jet engine, mounted above the fuselage like the handle on a