A Man of Parts Read Online Free

forward to must be finding out what your contemporaries really thought of you, eavesdropping on conversations as a ghost, reading the obituaries over people’s shoulders … Unless they get all the newspapers delivered daily in heaven. Or the other place. Whereas we shall never find out. It’s frustrating.
    – What d’you want to find out? Whether you are considered a great writer?
    – Lord no, I gave up that ambition long ago – left it to Henry James and his ilk. I demolished the whole idea of literary greatness in Boon , remember? ‘ Decline in the output of Greatness, due to the excessive number of new writers and the enlargement of the reading public, to be arrested by establishing a peerage of hereditary Novelists, Poets and Philosophers … The Nobel Prize to be awarded to them in order of seniority …’
    – So … what then? A great thinker? A great visionary? A great man?
    – Not a great anything. The whole idea of greatness is a nineteenth-century romantic deathtrap. It leads to the rise of tyrants like Hitler. We have to value the collective over the individual, serve the Mind of the Human Race, not try to impose our personal will on it. I’ve been saying that for the last thirty years, but no one has paid any serious attention. If they had, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now, with Europe being rapidly reduced to rubble.
    – Something good may come out of the war. This idea of setting up a United Nations organisation, for instance – the obituaries should give you some credit for your contribution to that .
    – It would be nice to think so. But it’s a long way from World Government. Without a change in the collective mindset it will be as useless as the League of Nations was.
    Shortly after her visit to H.G., Rebecca invites Anthony to meet her for tea at her London club, the Lansdowne. They have not met for some time and she is struck unfavourably by his appearance. At thirty he is still handsome in a bulky, fleshy sort of way, but today his cheeks seem unnaturally fat, almost swollen, and his hair needs washing and cutting, falling lankly forward over his forehead. His clothes look crumpled and grubby, no doubt because he is living away from home and Kitty’s housewifely care so much of the time. When they get on to the subject of H.G., and whether it was right to tell him he has an incurable cancer, his speech seems to her theatrical, inauthentic. He makes offensive remarks in a manner designed to make them seem compassionate, taking her hand and saying, ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Rac, I would rather do anything than that, but you shouldn’t involve yourself in H.G.’s welfare. The truth is, it’s a long time since you were the centre of his life.’ ‘I know that perfectly well,’ she says indignantly. ‘I took steps to remove myself from the centre of his life twenty-one years ago. Why are you putting on this show?’ ‘I just mean that H.G. is much closer to Gip and Marjorie than to you,’ he says. ‘They must make the necessary decisions.’ ‘I don’t have to pretend to agree with them,’ she says. When she asks after Kitty and the children Anthony looks slightly shifty as if he is concealing something. She will soon discover what it is.
    In the middle of May, Rebecca receives a brief note from Kitty saying that Anthony has asked her for a divorce. ‘ It was quite out of the blue. He said after supper last Sunday, when the children were asleep, that he had met someone at the BBC and wanted to marry her. I said, “That’s a pity my love, as you are married to me.” I thought he was joking. But he’s not .’
    Rebecca is outraged and dismayed. She likes and admires Kitty, a gifted painter and a beautiful woman, whom Anthony wooed and won in the most romantic fashion in 1936, proposing on the second occasion they met, and persisting on subsequent occasions until she capitulated. It seemed to Rebecca at the time a typically impulsive, quixotic move on Anthony’s