Mr. Porter and the Brothers Jones

by Reinhold, Margaret;

  “Will you? Do you really mean it? That would be very kind, Lilac.”

  In fact, Lilac did manage to track down a woman who made tapestry, to Mr Porter’s surprise, and a design was commissioned.

  Sometimes they talked of Jerome. One day, Lilac confided that she had got to the point when she couldn’t stand Jerome.

  “What! Why?” Mr Porter was shocked.

  “I can’t bear him to touch me! He seems to have come too close to me—it’s as if he knows me too well—my body—”

  Mr Porter could understand. He, too, dreaded excessive familiarity, could sympathise with Lilac for shrinking from looks and gestures that implied a horrifying intimacy.

  “I can’t bear,” said Lilac, “to have people invade me. I suppose that’s why I married Joshua. He’s very detached. He doesn’t overwhelm me.”

  Mr Porter considered her cynically. He wanted to say, “Isn’t sexual intercourse rather close?” But he guessed that Lilac was anaesthetised against that penetration. Dr Katzenheimer had warned him. “Lilac is probably frigid,” she’d said, adding sombrely, “I don’t think that Lilac really likes men.”

  No one who saw her would have guessed it. Curled up in Mr Porter’s own armchair, she purred at him like a creamy cat. “Why did you never marry, Mr Porter?”

  Mr Porter frowned. Her question disturbed him. He couldn’t think of a suitable answer before she quickly chattered on. “Too busy? Too shy?”

  “Both, I suppose,” he gloomily replied, at which she gave her little formal laugh.

  “I bet there were a lot of women after you,” she said, and seemed to mean it.

  When Lilac left him, Mr Porter gathered together the remains of the scones and the cake and put them in a polythene wrapper for his morning woman, “although she has taken to refusing everything except bananas,” he told Dr Katzenheimer sadly, pained by this rejection.

  “It is not personally meant, dear Mr Porter,” Dr Katzenheimer assured him. “How are you getting on with Lilac, do you think?”

  “I am in love with her,” said Mr Porter solemnly, “utterly, totally, idiotically in love …”

  There was a long pause, then: “Nothing so alluring, so irresistible as self-destruction,” observed Dr Katzenheimer. “After all, we are born to die. The whole universe moves relentlessly towards disintegration.”

  “You think I have a death wish?” asked Mr Porter sarcastically.

  “Not so much a wish, more a hypnotised drift. Death beckons, like a bright light attracting fish, for some of us …”

  Mr Porter pondered this. “I shall think about it,” he said as he rose to go.

  Walking the grey streets, he wondered if he was really in love with Lilac. He was obsessed with her, or with the idea of her. Each waking hour and in his sleep she skirted around the fringes of his consciousness and his dreams. She had merged indissolubly with the figure of his suffering mother, his sister Vera, the girl on the train. The phantom Lilac was more pale, more transparent than the real Lilac, who was quite robust. The phantom endured an animal suffering, passively and with resignation, eyes dark in a white face.

  He recognised that he was not aware of a physical desire for Lilac’s body. He persuaded himself to imagine her body and himself in possession of it, the warm softness of her breasts beneath his clamoring hand, the slippery wet warmth of sex. But he was unmoved, even a little repulsed by this image. His love for her was a kind of abstraction. He longed for her. To be with her was exquisite. He remembered hearing on the radio the translation of a Russian poem. When he was with Lilac, he experienced, as the poem said, “the warm night, the smell of roses under the balcony, the scent of hay, the great summer of a vast continent …” His being expanded. He relaxed. Warm blood, previously held back by the constriction of arteries, surged into the surfaces and recesses of his body. He felt alive at last—but not lustful.

  Dr Katzenheimer murmured doubtfully on the subject of his physical indifference to Lilac—and perhaps she was right.

  As he was crossing Manchester Street, he saw a man and a woman, arm in arm, foreigners, he took them to be, oblivious to the world, their faces bemused with physical attraction for one another. Mr Porter felt a spasm of fury—the woman leaned on the man’s arm, her face soft and loose, her body limp as if she were just on the point of orgasm. The man clutched her fiercely, possessing her even as they swayed and staggered on the pedestrian crossing.

  So angry was Mr Porter that he had to enquire of himself what had provoked him. He came to the conclusion that he was probably deceiving himself about his lack of sexual desire for Lilac. Nevertheless, what deterred him, he believed, was the premonition that Lilac was doomed. Even at that very moment he heard a cry—a cry of terror—and the cry was Lilac’s.

  Eight

  In the evenings, Mr Porter sometimes met Jerome. Sometimes, Jerome visited him at his flat and sometimes they went out—to a pub for a drink or to a restaurant for dinner. These meetings with Jerome quite changed the routine of Mr Porter’s life. He had to have come to terms with his bowels by the time the meetings took place. This was not always easy. Dr Katzenheimer’s advice was to try to go through with the arrangements with Jerome whether he felt his body was cleansed or not. This might, she thought, create a new habit to replace the old. Mr Porter attempted to follow her advice, but everything depended on his mood. If he was deep in a black depression—usually because of goings on at the office—he had to cancel Jerome and fight with his bowels. But if—as was not uncommon lately—he felt reasonably cheerful he was glad of a chat with Jerome. The young man was looking rather wan these days. Lilac was acting in a very unpredictable way—sometimes rejecting him, sometimes full of warmth and affection—but most of the time she’d hardly allow him to touch her.

  Jerome found great comfort in Mr Porter, but he had difficulty convincing Beatrice that his evenings out were of a professional nature. Always suspicious, she was becoming convinced that he was having an affair.

  “Tell her about me,” advised Mr Porter. “Say you visit me.”

  “Who shall I say you are?”

  “A friend!”

  But this made Beatrice even more suspicious. “Who is he?”

  “Just a friend.”

  “Where did you meet him? How long have you known him?”

  Jerome hesitated. “I first met him long ago at some party, I think. Then we bumped into one another in the street not long ago.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Wimpole Street.”

  “Is he gay?”

  Jerome laughed. “Do you think I’m having an affair with him? Don’t be silly, Beatrice.”

  “You could be.”

  She sounded harsh and angry. “What number in Wimpole Street?”

  Jerome told her.

  So it was that one evening on his return home Mr Porter found a long envelope addressed to him in a large, firm, hand and inside a note from Beatrice. She’d appreciate it very much if he’d let her visit him briefly—she knew her husband was a friend of his. She enclosed a stamped addressed envelope and a chart which Mr Porter was supposed to tick which let her know which, out of several options, was a time that suited him.

  Mr Porter studied the note and wondered whether he could bear to see Beatrice—also, what the consequences might be and how Lilac would react. In the end, he decided it would be in the best interests of everybody if he were to agree to see Beatrice. He ticked an appropriate time and, punctually on the appointed day, Beatrice turned up at his flat.

  She introduced herself briskly.

  “I hope you don’t mind my coming here,” she said on the threshold of the front door. “I just had to see you. Jerome seems to visit you so often. To be honest, I wanted to make sure you existed.”

  He admired this directness. “You thought he was making me up?” Mr Porter smiled slightly at the notion of his unreality.

  “Well—you never know. I believe he is having an affair with someone.”

  “Wh
at makes you think that?”

  “Oh, just a feeling.”

  By now they had entered the sitting room.

  “Good God!”

  Beatrice looked about her in undisguised astonishment. “What d’you do with all this stuff? How can you live like this? Doesn’t it drive you mad?”

  Her strong Australian accent and her loud voice were definitely jarring—but, once again, Mr Porter liked her directness.

  “Yes,” he said, “it does. But there’s not a lot I can do about it.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “You’ve just got to allow yourself to throw things out,” she said. “It needs a lot of throwing out. You should give it a day at a time, every now and then …”

  “Easier said than done. I can’t throw the papers away in case I miss something. When I do try, I begin to read. Then I get absorbed and by the time I’ve finished reading, I’m exhausted. No more energy to do anything.”

  “Quite mad,” Beatrice said to herself and aloud, “I’ll give you a hand some time if you like. I’m quite good at tidying and organising—and throwing things out.”

  “I’m sure you are,” said Mr Porter, still polite, but becoming restive. His voice quavered a little. “I’ll get round to it myself one of these days.” He glared at her with twitching nose.

  “Quite nuts.” Beatrice’s silent appraisal was clearly visible in her expression.

  Mr Porter shifted impatiently in his chair.

  “May I look?”

  “By all means.”

  She began a little pilgrimage around the large room and, while she inspected his possessions, Mr Porter inspected her.

  She was tall and slender with long well-shaped legs. The latter were very noticeable as her skirt was extremely short. She had dark, well-cut hair and her face, he thought, could be plain or pretty according to her mood or her hormones or whatever caused intermittent changes in the faces of women. Her expression was challenging and slightly aggressive, he had noticed earlier. Now he saw only her back as she moved slowly from object to object. Her movements were free and lithe, but there was something about that back that told him she was an unhappy woman—and indeed, when she finally turned around her face was stormy and full of pain.

  “Has Lilac been here?” she asked unexpectedly.

  He didn’t answer at once. He said, carefully, casually, “What’s that? Did you notice that Florentine cushion on the chaise longue? I seem to remember Jerome told me you were interested in tapestry. It’s an unusual pattern.”

  Distracted, she turned to look. “Yes. It’s pretty. Where did it come from?”

  “My sister made it.”

  He basked in the warmth of Vera’s beneficence. “She gets the patterns from a shop in Oxford.”

  “Oh? What shop?” Beatrice was listlessly polite.

  “There’s a fellow—Austrian refugee originally, who’s worked out old Florentine patterns—keeps a needlework shop. I’ll let you have the address some time if you’re interested.”

  “Thank you.”

  She looked sulky, however, perhaps aware that he had deliberately fobbed off her question. She did not ask it again, to his relief.

  “I must find out more about her,” he said to himself. “What is she? Why did Jerome marry her? What attracted him?” For the life of him he couldn’t understand. Beatrice seemed to him an angry, athletic girl from down under, too strong and tough—but perhaps that was it.

  And what had made her love him, that rather ordinary Englishman? What had made Beatrice wish to escape from other tough, strong, angry Australians?

  “Beatrice is always on about how shitty men are and how her Pa messed around with other women and her poor mom suffered so much!” Lilac, in a malicious mood, had giggled nervously.

  They sat in his room, a tête-à-tête, on one of the many occasions they took afternoon tea together.

  Lilac went on: “Your poor mom! Why did she stick around? I ask her.”

  “For us! cries Beatrice, looking all noble and martyred. “For the children! Men will always let you down, Beatrice says. She is always afraid Jerome will let her down …”

  “So you managed to make her fears come true?” Mr Porter spoke quite mildly, but he fixed Lilac with a glittering eye.

  Lilac blushed—if so faint a staining of her pale skin could be called a blush. She looked confused.

  “I suppose so,” she stammered a little. “But I don’t think—what happened—means Jerome has let her down. He’s responsible—and—devoted.”

  Mr Porter changed the subject. “No point in pursuing it,” he said to himself. “None of them really know what they are doing.”

  Later, months later, Beatrice said to him, “I know I should try to forgive Jerome, and I should try to forgive Lilac—in my mind—but it’s hard—it’s really hard.”

  The Australian hard “a” and the way she drawled it out irritated Mr Porter beyond belief. “You’re very sorry for yourself, aren’t you?” he snapped, “When you organised the whole thing yourself, you and Joshua …”

  “What d’you mean?” She turned towards him angrily. “How can you say that? It’s something I dreaded more than anything else, I was always terrified that Jerome‘d be unfaithful. I’ve been through too much of that with my mother. You don’t know what it was like!”

  Her voice soared into a kind of shout, a desperate cry which she should have given years ago, he thought, as a small child in Melbourne or Sydney or the outback or wherever she had been brought up. Instead, she’d planned with patient, scrupulous care, that she too would suffer her mother’s awful destiny. She, too, would be satisfactorily betrayed so that she could feel badly done by for the rest of her days.

  He couldn’t resist saying, “Why did you send them off together?”

  Her eyes widened in huge indignation. “If one can’t trust one’s husband with one’s sister-in-law …!”

  “You were asking for it,” said Mr Porter evenly—“No, I should say arranging it, cleverly arranging for Jerome to be unfaithful to you—pushing him into it …”

  “Ooh!” Beatrice gave a grunt of disgust and disbelief and turned away.

  Mr Porter shook his head at her.

  Reporting to Dr Katzenheimer, he said: “Such stupidity! But what could one expect? People in the Antipodes have probably never heard of Freud or Jung …”

  “Aren’t you being a little arrogant?” she murmured. “There are people even in this great country who …” She drifted into silence.

  But on this first occasion of Mr Porter’s meeting Beatrice neither of them talked of Lilac again until Beatrice was about to leave. Then she said “You didn’t answer when I asked if Lilac has ever visited you.”

  Mr Porter surveyed her with hackles rising. “Is that what you came here to ask?”

  “No,” said Beatrice looking searchingly into Mr Porter’s face. “I came here to see if you existed. Now that I see you, I wonder what is it that draws Jerome to you? What is it you share with him?”

  And although she did not voice the question, Mr Porter could see her formulating it: “Is it Lilac?”

  Nine

  One morning in late January, Mr Porter woke exceptionally early to find his head buzzing and his legs tingling. A nervous excitement possessed him. He sprang restlessly from his bed and went at once to his larder where he seized and ate a whole bunch of grapes. He hardly paused to savour each one—which was his normal frugal custom—but thrust them hurriedly into his mouth and swallowed them almost without tasting them. He was only vaguely aware of the cool smooth texture of the skin and he swallowed also the pips, which might later play havoc with his bowels. His legs continued to tingle, tinkle, twinkle, he told himself roguishly, since he could almost hear and see the sparks of electricity that coursed swiftly through him. Having finished the grapes, he turned carelessly to see what else he might devour. His mood was pleasantly cheerful, although he felt distinctly tense. He began to think of the day without noticing that he had forgotten t
o attend to his bowels. All sorts of agreeable ideas flowed easily into mind.

  “It’s a day for spending money,” he thought, having exhausted trivia. “Think big!” he instructed himself jovially. He began to consider paintings, caravans, boats …

  He went to the telephone, forgetting it was 5.30 a.m. Half an hour later, having failed to rouse Harrod’s, Jack Barclay and several of the larger art galleries, he managed to wake Jerome.

  “Who is it?” asked a sleepy and resentful Beatrice. Jerome shook his head and tried to interrupt Mr Porter, who had launched smoothly into an unstoppable monologue.

  “So I wondered if you had any ideas on the matter, although no doubt you are not a sailing man or perhaps you are or have been.”

  Jerome began to shout: “Sorry, can’t talk now, perhaps we could, later.”

  Mr Porter had put the receiver down without listening to Jerome and went off to see if yachts were mentioned in the Times Shopping Guide. While rummaging through the piles of ancient newspapers, Mr Porter came across an article on collecting old fencing weapons which he began to read and forgot about the yacht.

  Passing not long afterwards in another foray to the kitchen, Mr Porter noticed his telephone was off its hook and replaced it tenderly. By this time London had begun to move. Cars started up under the window, revved and roared and sped away. Harrod’s would soon be open. He would do his shopping, visit his analyst, and take the day off.

  “Ever thought of growing your own?” Morris the greengrocer was carefully wrapping Mr Porter’s lavish purchase of grapes in layers of tissue paper. Mr Porter looked at him sharply. Suspecting mockery, he glanced right and left, implying that there were plenty of other grocers in West One, before replying.

  “Why? Are you tired of supplying me?”

  “God forbid!” said Morris fervently. Mr Porter bribed his way heavily towards the acquisition of perfect fruits—although on occasions, even the benefits seemed hardly to outweigh the disadvantages of Mr Porter’s custom.

  “No! No!” said Morris heartily. “It’s just that people do; thought it would make a nice interest for you. Got a bit of patio, have you? Or a basement area? You see nice healthy vines in basements sometimes. Haven’t you noticed?”