Doves of Venus

by Olivia Manning

  Feeling herself safe, she leant over a wash-hand basin and wept without restraint. She put her hands over her face and felt the tears roll, scalding, through her fingers. She was so obsessed by her own weeping, it seemed to her something set apart from its cause. Now she was scarcely aware she was weeping for Quintin dead. She wept in a region beyond hope. Could she go further than that, she too would be dead.

  Someone came into the cloak-room. Without looking round, fiercely resentful of the intruder, she flung herself into a water-closet and bolted the door. There she stood, swallowing her sobs, her palms pressed into her eyes, and waited for the girl to go. There was no noise from the cloak-room. She imagined the girl was silent, holding her breath even, in order to overhear her grief, but after a while she began to think the girl must have gone. She emerged from the water-closet – and there was the girl sitting on a chair reading a letter. She lifted her glance, as though casually, and gave Ellie a look of experienced awareness.

  Ellie wept the afternoon away in J50. No effort, no thought could stop her tears. She left her work exhausted, her face swollen, and had scarcely reached Oakley Street when calamity swept over her and her eyes swam again. It was then she saw Simon Lessing, the young man whom she had met in the public-house with Denis. He came straight towards her, smiling, imagining she would smile back at him.

  Unhappily, she looked at his face – not the right face – then looked away. Her tears flooded down. As he started to speak, she moved round him and took to her heels. He called after her. A concerned voice. She wanted only to get away. When she reached the safety of her room, she threw herself on her bed and wept until her pillow was soaked.

  The week dragged on. She was thankful now for the privacy of J50. She worked on the blotters and boxes, crying all the time. She lived on cups of tea. Not only was she nauseated by weeping, but she turned her back on food as though life had injured her and she repaid it by rejecting its sustenance. At night she slept heavily from exhaustion. Waking next morning, she remembered and wept again.

  By the end of the week she had no tears left. A cold tranquillity possessed her. Contemplating existence, she contemplated nothingness. Traffic moved about her without purpose. The human beings who passed her were unrelated to her. It was extraordinary to hear them laugh. Their speech was like the chatter of another species. Only when she passed someone maimed or wretched or very old, she would pause in her indifference to think bitterly: ‘He is alive, but Quintin is not alive.’ It seemed this bitterness was now the only emotion she could feel.

  On Saturday evening she sat for a long time in Cheyne Gardens. A large dog came and nuzzled into her hand. Looking into the liquid adoration of its eyes, she said to it: ‘You feel sorry for me,’ and she was flooded with pity for the dog. When its owner whistled it away, she looked down at some zinnias that grew beside her seat. As though she had some new power of sight, she saw them hard and bright and minutely detailed. It seemed to her, secure as she was from all distraction, that she could see and hear the process of their growth. She watched an ant climb the stalk of a flower and make its busy, complex journey about the petals. When it had moved out of sight, she continued to watch the petals without will to look elsewhere. She thought: ‘I could paint a zinnia,’ then she remembered the portfolio she had left with Quintin. Suddenly it seemed to her it had been part of Quintin, a part she could regain. She jumped to her feet and started out for Quintin’s flat. She felt a wild sort of happiness, as though out of the very heart of despair she had snatched hope.

  She reached the flat in the late blae twilight of midsummer. Somewhere from the gardens of Birdcage Walk a bonfire was sending into the air intimations of autumn. The whistles were blowing in the park. The heavy foliage was dark. Ellie, caught up in the purpose of her visit, cared for nothing. She went straight to the door and pressed Quintin’s bell.

  Klixon had said that Quintin’s wife, that cruel deserter, had answered the telephone to Mrs Primrose. She must be in the flat. Ellie pressed the bell again and again, but no one came to the door. While she stood there the twilight darkened: the street-lamps were lit. When it seemed there was nothing to do but go away, a woman came out into the area and lifted a dustbin lid. Ellie looked down. She calmly asked: ‘Do you know if there is anyone in Mr Bellot’s flat?’

  ‘What?’ The woman came up the steps to the area gate and peered suspiciously through the bars. ‘That flat’s unoccupied,’ she said. ‘They’re coming to take the furniture next week.’

  ‘But I left something there. A portfolio. Could you let me in to find it?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ The woman surveyed Ellie from foot to head and back again. With her eyes fixed on Ellie’s shoes, she said: ‘No one’s going up to that flat, not while I’m caretaker here. All his things are there, clothes and all.’

  Ellie’s heart jumped painfully at the thought and her calm was suddenly gone. The portfolio existed, but Quintin did not. Her voice shook as she asked: ‘What will they do with his things?’

  ‘How do I know! His solicitor’s coming and I’m responsible till he comes.’

  ‘But I must get my portfolio. I know it’s there.’ Ellie, in her agitation, was becoming a little shrill. The caretaker looked at her with an expression that said: ‘And what’s it doing there, I’d like to know.’

  Ellie said: ‘Mr Bellot promised to show it to someone who might give me a job.’

  ‘Um. Well, I haven’t seen no portfolio and I’ve been doing the place out.’

  ‘Could you ask Mrs Bellot to look?’

  ‘Her? She hasn’t been here since he left.’

  ‘But she was here on Monday. She answered the telephone. She told someone that Mr Bellot was dead.’

  ‘Dead? Him?’

  ‘Yes, he died on the day after he reached Switzerland.’

  ‘Nobody told me that. So that’s where he went off to with all that luggage. I saw him go with that party down the road.’

  ‘The party down the road?’

  ‘Yes, her that calls herself Lady Someone. She came here with her car and chauffeur. He looked lively enough then. Dead? Who’d’ve thought it!’ Enlivened by the mystery of life, the caretaker was becoming almost friendly. Ellie pressed for her portfolio:

  ‘Could I go in and look for it? The paintings are all I have. I’ll need them if I have to find a job.’

  The caretaker looked at Ellie and nodded her head: ‘You’re right. She was here on Monday. I smelt her scent. And I believe it was her burnt the stuff in the grate. You wait there.’ She went down the steps to the dustbin and came back holding the charred corners of Ellie’s portfolio and some pieces of drawing-paper that had fallen from the fire. ‘That anything to do with you?’

  It was now quite dark. Ellie took the cardboard and paper to the street-light. Her hands trembled. ‘They are mine,’ she said. ‘But – what happened?’

  ‘I don’t know nothing. I just found them.’

  ‘But who would burn them? Who would do it?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know. Look at the way I’ve been treated after all I’ve done for them, him as well as her. And then they clear off like that without a word! They’re a pair, I can tell you.’

  ‘Where does Mrs Bellot live?’

  ‘Live? How do I know? She lived here for months, him never speaking to her. I don’t know where she’s gone to. Well—’ the woman turned suddenly and decisively away – ‘I can’t stay talking all night.’

  Ellie wandered off with the pieces of paper still in her hand. Something at last had penetrated the fog of her misery. Klixon had called Quintin Mrs Primrose’s ‘boyfriend’, but because she knew Klixon’s idiom, she had discounted that at once. Yet, strangely, she had been stabbed by ‘that party down the road’. She longed for contradiction, for reassurance, and the only one who could give her that was dead. She stopped at a litter bin and put into it the burnt pieces of her portfolio and drawings. The last contact was gone.

  That night she dreamt of Quintin
and awoke in darkness imagining him in the air above her. She felt afraid and, turning from him, pulled the bedclothes up over her ears. Next morning she wanted to weep from remorse, but she could not. She felt indignant with herself, unwilling to recover so soon.

  3

  During Ellie’s second week in the basement, her mother wrote to say she and Emmy were coming to London by excursion train early on Saturday morning. They would spend the morning buying a bridal dress for Emmy, then Ellie must meet them for luncheon at the Marble Arch Corner House. They could have the rest of the day together.

  ‘This, on top of everything else,’ thought Ellie, and the more she reflected on the hours she must spend with her mother and Emmy, the less endurable they seemed to her. And how could she be sure she would not betray herself with tears?

  On Friday, when the meeting was almost upon her, she rebelled. She would not see them. To make sure they could not track her down, she would go away. She would go to Clopals.

  Tom had recently sent her a card from Menton. He said he was recovered, on the point of returning to England and looking forward to seeing her again. When she rang him, he had been back a week. Could she come and see him? He would like nothing better.

  His pleasure warmed her like a stimulant, bringing life into the nullity of her desolation. After all, she had to live. She could not mourn for ever. Yet, when she left London on Friday evening, the journey filled her with sadness. Although she had never visited the country with Quintin, the long falling sunlight on the fields, the fleeced sky, the windless evening that gave to the scene the quiet of a painted scene – all these things seemed now a part of Quintin, a tablature of loss.

  There was a go-slow strike on the line. The train crept, paused, shunted: and darkness fell. It was a chilly night. Ellie did not notice the cold or the delays. When she arrived at Clopals she looked pinched and pale. Partridge told Tom the train had been nearly an hour late.

  Tom said: ‘A lot of shirkers. Any excuse not to do a decent day’s work.’

  Ellie, too remote to restrain herself, said: ‘I think they’re right. They need more money. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor.’

  Tom, raising his brows, said unbelievingly: ‘And you do? Oh, well, it’s the poor that suffer. I never travel by train.’

  Ellie, scarcely able to listen for the distraction of her own unhappiness, stood forlornly, making no attempt to defend herself. Tom suddenly laughed at her.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘They say that to be a Tory before you’re forty shows want of heart: to be a Socialist after forty shows want of head. It is quite right for you to be a Socialist. Quite right. Now let us talk of other things.’

  He was looking well. Restored by idle weeks in the sun, he was eager to take up his English life again. He asked what she had been doing all these weeks. She tried to make a picture of her life without mentioning Quintin or the loss of Quintin. Tom asked, had she heard from Nancy? Yes, she had received a letter. Nancy’s mother was recovering and Nancy longed to return.

  ‘Wants to come back, does she?’ Tom gave his mouth a downward twist of distaste.

  Ellie said: ‘Of course she does. It means everything to her.’

  He laughed as though Nancy and Nancy’s longing for London were equally absurd to him.

  They were at the dinner table. When the butler served her, she noticed he was not Fitton. When he left the room, she said: ‘Have the Fittons gone?’

  ‘Yes. I gave them an hour in which to pack and get out.’

  ‘Goodness! Where did they go?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ Tom lifted his chin as though on the alert to take offence, supposing Ellie would defend the Fittons as she had defended the strikers. She asked: ‘What had they done wrong?’

  ‘She made some little remark that displeased me.’

  Ellie knew that closed the subject. She said: ‘Tell me about Menton.’

  Tom’s worn old face had been tanned to a leathery darkness. She could feel his pleasure at recovery, his satisfaction that he was well and home again. She knew he was unaware of anything but himself.

  ‘Menton,’ he said. ‘A nice, old-fashioned place; not at all flamboyant; no cinema stars, as they’re called; no millionaires; nothing of that sort. I’m very fond of Menton. A most remarkable cemetery up on a hill, surrounded by the sea: full of poor young people who went there to die of consumption. A long time ago, of course; a hundred years or more. I always visit their graves. Poor, poor young things – English, Russian, German, Scandinavian. So sad! Why, it’s years since I was last in Menton. I felt full of beans: took my daily constitutional, ate like a horse, sat in the sun and slept the clock round.’

  Ellie, her head bending, brooded on the young people who had gone to Menton to die, and thought of another death. Suddenly grief came freshly upon her. She let her head fall. Her tears splashed on to the table. She pressed a hand to her eyes, then she was seized in a ferocity of grief. She could make no effort to control herself. All she could do was hide her face and try to hold her body still within the earthquake of her sobbing.

  ‘My dear child!’ said Tom, shocked that his cheerful memories of Menton should produce this response.

  In shame, she wept with the abandonment of the lost. Tom was silent. Some minutes passed before he quietly asked: ‘What is the matter?’

  She managed to say at last: ‘It’s my job. I’m frightened. They’ve taken me out of the studio. I have to work by myself in the basement. I don’t know why. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost it.’

  ‘Good heavens above! Is that all? Why, I’ll find you another job. I’ll find you half-a-dozen jobs. Now, pull yourself together. Don’t spoil the party. There’s a good girl.’

  Ellie thought how little a thing, after all, would have been the loss of her job. How easily remedied! But there was no remedy for death. Quintin dead, was dead for ever. Never again could she come upon him on a summer evening as he leant to contemplate the river. Wherever she went, she would be looking for him, but she would never see him. He was nowhere in the world, nowhere to be found.

  She gave a gulp. Seeking to spare Tom, she blundered from her seat and found her way to the drawing-room. She threw herself into an arm-chair and, wrapping her arms about her head, shut herself within the space of her affliction. She shut out everything else.

  In some other dimension of existence, people entered the room, moved about: there was a murmur of voices. A smell of coffee came to her like something remembered from another life.

  Tom’s hand touched her hair: he spoke at her ear: ‘My dear, what is troubling you? Surely all this can’t be about your job?’ He sounded perplexed and concerned, yet a little impatient of such preposterous grief. He put his hand on her shoulder and she could withhold the truth no longer.

  ‘Someone has died.’

  ‘A relative?’

  She shook her head: ‘Someone I loved, terribly.’

  He took his hand from her shoulder. He went to his chair and occupied himself with cutting and lighting a cigar. At last, when she had no tears left, she scrubbed her face with her soaking handkerchief and looked across at him. He was watching her, his eye critical, slightly derisive, like the eye of a parrot. He said with a certain grudging sympathy:

  ‘I take it that such an upset could be caused only by a member of the opposite sex. Were you hoping to marry this young man?’

  She shook her head: ‘He was married. He didn’t live with his wife, but she wouldn’t divorce him.’

  ‘Dear me! that sad, old story!’ Tom gave a rueful grimace that at once dropped Ellie’s tragedy down to the plane of doubtful humour. Ellie could feel at once the change in his attitude towards her. It was slight, but unmistakable, like a drop in temperature. He was disappointed in her and his disappointment made his glance hard.

  He said: ‘I suppose young women have a great deal of freedom these days?’ When she did not reply, he added: ‘I can only hope they do not al
l use it so unwisely.’

  She knew he was seeking reassurance: she had none to give. When she still did not speak, he gave her a long, reflective stare, ironical and mortified. She read his thoughts. If he had been so mistaken in her, what of Maxine? She could not care enough to defend Maxine.

  Sitting up, swollen-eyed, she was exhausted of emotion. When she spoke, it was half humorously: ‘Tom, have you ever been as unhappy as this?’

  ‘I do not remember.’ He had no wish to discuss the matter. He said with cool compassion: ‘I am sorry for you, my dear, but I am afraid we must suffer these things alone. You probably need a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘I always sleep well.’

  ‘Then you are to be envied.’

  He rose. She knew herself dismissed. She went over to offer him her cheek, but he was looking intently at his cigar and did not notice. She mumbled ‘Good-night,’ and took herself upstairs.

  Next morning it was raining. Tom stayed in his room. Ellie found an old Burberry in the closet and walked down to the stream. The dahlias were in flower: the chrysanthemums were budding. Soon it would be autumn. Where had this summer gone? The dark, wind-stirred wood under the dark sky was heavy with the coming winter. She passed into the darkness where the pewter-coloured sheen on the tree-trunks stood out like phosphorus in the gloom. The trees were massive and apart. Moving alone among so many static forms, she felt the relief of isolation. Now reality had lost its hold on her. At any moment now, Quintin would appear among the trees. She hurried to meet him, she put out her hand, touched, or almost touched, his hand – and yet she remained alone.

  She came to a stop and stood motionless, as the tree-trunks were motionless, beneath the wildly rushing force that bent the branches. She stood for so long that her own stillness grew upon her. She had no will to move. If she stood there a little longer she would know the secret of being a tree – but the secret did not come. She was a human being. It was too cold to stand for long. She was forced to move on.