The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(48)

But Wells scarcely had time to enjoy his achievements before the members of his tattered family discovered that little Bertie was on his way to becoming a man of means and entrusted him with the task of maintaining their fragile and threatened cohesion. Without taking the trouble to protest, Wells resigned himself to adopting the mantle of defender of the clan, knowing that none of its other members was up to the task. His father, having finally freed himself from the burden of the china shop, had moved to a cottage in Nyewood, a tiny village south of Rogate, where he had a view of Harting Down and the elms at Uppark, and life had gradually washed up the rest of the family in the tiny house. The first to arrive was Frank. He had left the bakery a few years earlier to become a traveling watch salesman, an occupation he had not been very successful in– a fact borne out by the two enormous trunks of unsold watches he brought with him, eating up even more space in the tiny dwelling in Nyewood.

The trunks gave off a loud, incessant whirring sound and rattled about like a colony of noisy mechanical spiders. Then came Fred, his trusting brother, who had been unceremoniously dismissed from the company where he worked as soon as the boss’s son was old enough to occupy the seat he had unknowingly been keeping warm for him. Finding themselves together again, and with a roof over their heads, his brothers devoted themselves to licking each others” wounds, and, infected by their father’s relaxed attitude to life, soon accepted this latest downturn with good cheer. The last to arrive was their mother, dismissed from her beloved paradise at Uppark because the sudden onset of deafness had rendered her useless and irritable. The only one who did not return to the fold was Frances, perhaps because she felt there would not be enough room for her little infant coffin. Even so, there were too many of them, and Wells had to make a superhuman effort to keep up his endless hours of teaching in order to protect that nest buzzing with the sound of Frank’s watches, that pesthouse of happy walking wounded reeking of snuff and stale beer, to the point where he ended up vomiting blood and collapsing on the steps of Charing Cross Station.

The diagnosis was clear: tuberculosis. And although he made a swift recovery, this attack was a warning to Wells to stop burning the midnight oil or the next onslaught would be more serious.

Wells accepted all this in a practical spirit. He knew that when the wind was favourable, he had plenty of ways to make a living, and so had no difficulty in drawing up a new life plan. He abandoned teaching and resolved to live solely from his writings. This would allow him to work at home, with no other timetables and pressures than those he chose to impose on himself. He would finally be able to live the peaceful life his fragile health required.

Thus he set about swamping the local newspapers with articles, penning the odd essay for the Fortnightly Review, and, after much persistence, managed to persuade the Pal Mal Gazette to offer him a column. Overjoyed by his success, and seeking out the fresh air indispensable to his sick lungs, the whole family moved to a country house in Sutton, near the North Downs, one of the few areas that had as yet escaped becoming a suburb of London.

For a while, Wells believed this quiet, secluded existence was to be his life, but once again he was mistaken, as this was an imaginary truce. Apparently chance considered him a most amusing toy, for it decided to change the course of his life again, although this time the new twist involved the pleasant, popular veneer of fated love.

In the classroom Wells had established friendly relations with a pupil of his, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he nicknamed Jane.

During the walk they happened to share to Charing Cross Station to catch their respective trains, Wells could not help mesmerizing the girl with his eloquent banter, which he indulged in with no other purpose than to allow himself to swell with pride at being able to impress such a beautiful, adorable girl with his words.

However, those friendly, innocent conversations ended up bearing unexpected fruit. His own wife, Isabel, alerted him to it on their return from a weekend in Putney, where they had been invited by Jane and her mother. It was she who assured him that whether or not he had intended it, the girl had fallen head over heels in love with him. Wells could only raise an eyebrow when his wife demanded he stop seeing his ex-pupil if he wanted their marriage to survive. The choice between the woman who refused his caresses and the cheerful and apparently uninhibited Jane was not difficult. And so Wells packed up his books, his furniture, and the wicker basket, and moved into a miserable hovel in Mornington Place in a run-down area of north London between Euston and Camden Town. He wished he could have abandoned the marital home spurred on by a violent passion, but he had to leave that to Jane. His real reasons for leaving were the playful curiosity he felt when he glimpsed her little body beneath her dress, and above all the chance to escape monotony and discover a new life, given that he could predict how the old one would turn out.

However, his first impression was that love had caused him to make a serious mistake: not only had he moved to the worst possible place for his tormented lungs—a neighborhood where the air was polluted by soot borne on the wind, fatally mixed with smoke from the locomotives passing through on their way north—but Jane’s mother, convinced her poor daughter had fallen into the clutches of a degenerate because Wells was still married to Isabel, had moved in with the couple. She seemed determined to undermine their patience with her endless, vociferous reproaches.

These unforeseen events, together with the additional worrying certainty that it would be impossible for him to run no less than three homes on the proceeds of his articles, compelled Wells to take the basket ,and shut himself in one of the cupboards in the house, the only place safe from Mrs. Robbins’s intrusive presence.