A Man of Parts Read Online Free Page B
Author: David Lodge
your persona, with whom you could achieve the perfect fulfilment which you have always dreamed of. But when you think you’ve found her, common sense goes out of the window. It’s as if you’ve taken a potion, or are under a spell – like the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream . It’s a kind of madness. If that’s what’s happened to Anthony there’ll be a smash.
Anthony lets himself out of the back door of the blacked-out house and makes his way down the path with the aid of his shaded torch, inhaling the scents of hyacinth and lily of the valley invisibly in blossom, until he reaches the wall at the end of the garden. In defiance of blackout regulations he elevates the beam of his torch and plays it over the frieze drawn on the wall in lines of black paint by H.G. in his cartoon-like ‘picshua’ style, depicting the rise and fall of the Lords of Creation, a line of figures in profile beginning with prehistoric monsters and ending with men in top hats. Underneath is written ‘ Time to go .’
There is a door in the wall which reminds Anthony of one of H.G.’s short stories, about a man who in childhood came upon a door in the wall of an anonymous London street opening on to a paradisal garden, full of sunshine and flowers and pleasant companions, which he longed fruitlessly to revisit for the rest of his days. There is no paradise behind this door – only Mr Mumford’s, a rather poky flat, in need of redecoration, furnished with odds and ends that Anthony remembers from Easton Glebe, H.G.’s country house in Essex, which he used to visit in the 1920s in his school holidays: a faded sofa with a tear in the upholstery, a gate-leg table, a revolving bookcase, and – whimsically mounted on the wall, like a trophy – a battered hockey stick, memento of many riotous games organised by H.G. in his prime for his weekend house-party guests. Banal, shabby objects, but the visits to Easton Glebe which they evoke had seemed like glimpses of paradise to the unhappy schoolboy.
He rings Jean, but the number is engaged, probably by Jean’s flatmate Phyllis who has interminable conversations with her mother most evenings. He sits down on the faded sofa and, to pass the time, takes from the revolving bookcase a thick omnibus edition of H.G.’s short stories, and turns to ‘The Door in the Wall’.
It begins: ‘ One confidential evening not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story .’ Lionel Wallace was a successful forty-year-old politician who at the age of five or six escaped from his home and got lost in the streets of West Kensington. He came across a green door in a high white wall covered with Virginia creeper, a door that, once opened, led him into an enchanted garden. ‘ There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave one a sense of lightness and good happening and well-being; there was something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad … everything was beautiful there …’ Two friendly panthers approach the little boy and one rubs its ear against his hand, purring like a cat. A tall fair girl picks him up and kisses him, and leads him down a shady avenue to a palace with fountains and all kinds of beautiful things and playmates with whom he plays delightful games, though he can never remember later what they were. Of course his story is not believed and he is punished for lying and running off from home on his own. For the rest of his life he yearns to return to the garden, but when he searches for the door in the wall he cannot find it, and when, on several occasions, he passes it by chance he does not stop to go through it because he is bound on some urgent worldly business – a scholarship exam at Oxford, an assignation with a woman that involves his honour, a crucial division in Parliament. These opportunities have become more frequent of late. ‘ Three times in
Anthony lets himself out of the back door of the blacked-out house and makes his way down the path with the aid of his shaded torch, inhaling the scents of hyacinth and lily of the valley invisibly in blossom, until he reaches the wall at the end of the garden. In defiance of blackout regulations he elevates the beam of his torch and plays it over the frieze drawn on the wall in lines of black paint by H.G. in his cartoon-like ‘picshua’ style, depicting the rise and fall of the Lords of Creation, a line of figures in profile beginning with prehistoric monsters and ending with men in top hats. Underneath is written ‘ Time to go .’
There is a door in the wall which reminds Anthony of one of H.G.’s short stories, about a man who in childhood came upon a door in the wall of an anonymous London street opening on to a paradisal garden, full of sunshine and flowers and pleasant companions, which he longed fruitlessly to revisit for the rest of his days. There is no paradise behind this door – only Mr Mumford’s, a rather poky flat, in need of redecoration, furnished with odds and ends that Anthony remembers from Easton Glebe, H.G.’s country house in Essex, which he used to visit in the 1920s in his school holidays: a faded sofa with a tear in the upholstery, a gate-leg table, a revolving bookcase, and – whimsically mounted on the wall, like a trophy – a battered hockey stick, memento of many riotous games organised by H.G. in his prime for his weekend house-party guests. Banal, shabby objects, but the visits to Easton Glebe which they evoke had seemed like glimpses of paradise to the unhappy schoolboy.
He rings Jean, but the number is engaged, probably by Jean’s flatmate Phyllis who has interminable conversations with her mother most evenings. He sits down on the faded sofa and, to pass the time, takes from the revolving bookcase a thick omnibus edition of H.G.’s short stories, and turns to ‘The Door in the Wall’.
It begins: ‘ One confidential evening not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story .’ Lionel Wallace was a successful forty-year-old politician who at the age of five or six escaped from his home and got lost in the streets of West Kensington. He came across a green door in a high white wall covered with Virginia creeper, a door that, once opened, led him into an enchanted garden. ‘ There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave one a sense of lightness and good happening and well-being; there was something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad … everything was beautiful there …’ Two friendly panthers approach the little boy and one rubs its ear against his hand, purring like a cat. A tall fair girl picks him up and kisses him, and leads him down a shady avenue to a palace with fountains and all kinds of beautiful things and playmates with whom he plays delightful games, though he can never remember later what they were. Of course his story is not believed and he is punished for lying and running off from home on his own. For the rest of his life he yearns to return to the garden, but when he searches for the door in the wall he cannot find it, and when, on several occasions, he passes it by chance he does not stop to go through it because he is bound on some urgent worldly business – a scholarship exam at Oxford, an assignation with a woman that involves his honour, a crucial division in Parliament. These opportunities have become more frequent of late. ‘ Three times in
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