Doves of Venus

by Olivia Manning

  ‘No.’ He stared irritably at her as though she were trying to deprive him of something desirable: ‘The party hasn’t begun yet. I don’t want to go.’

  ‘I’m very sleepy.’

  ‘You can lie down on the divan and go to sleep.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m not drunk.’ In her present mood, the suggestion seemed to her an insult. She shuffled to the edge of the divan and sat there, about to leave and yet not leaving.

  Someone was putting records on the gramophone. The young people were dancing, not as Petta had danced when young, but fiercely, as though the intention was to rid themselves of an incubus of energy. Some of the girls had thrown off their shoes and were dancing in bare feet. They moved wildly, turning their feet in and out, flinging their thighs to one side and the other, clutching at their partners as in an orgasm.

  This was a party, but it seemed to Petta no one was dressed for a party. The girls, who wore wide skirts, made great play with them, but several did not even wear skirts: they were dressed in jeans and jerseys. Petta followed with her eyes one youth who, having the imbecile look of a drug-taker, danced as though he had lost awareness of everything, even the insanely jerking automaton that was his body.

  She edged still further off the divan and managed to get to her feet. Why should she stay here to watch the appalling good fortune of the young?

  She said to Arnold: ‘If you won’t come, I’ll go alone.’

  This threat usually brought him to his feet. Now he simply lifted his glass and said: ‘Just as you like. I won’t be late.’

  She pulled her coat round her, saying nothing. He added in a gentler tone: ‘You don’t mind, do you, dear? I’ll drink this and be back in half-an-hour.’

  For the first time since their relationship had started, she went home without him. Feeling her way through the unlit passages, she stumbled and grazed her shin on the stair. The street, when she reached it, was full of a shrill and foggy damp. Damp glistened on the pavements. It filmed over the ironwork of street-lamps and railings. The fog drifted like smoke across the road.

  The cold, the pain in her leg, the bleak emptiness of the street, filled her with a sense of injury. Why had Arnold chosen this night of all nights to treat her with such callousness? It seemed to her that all her suffering came from the fact that her youth was passing and her beauty fading. She felt martyred, as though age were some horrible and incurable sickness imposed on her and on no one else.

  She thought of a young man she had known years ago in Ireland, the first to love her. He had said: ‘You seem to have a light about you.’ She wondered where he was now. Young no longer, she supposed, but perhaps he still imagined her as she had been, young, and so beautiful it seemed she had a light about her.

  In those days she had thought her beauty must bring her everything – yet what had it brought? That plain, pale girl, Ellie – she might, in the end, be given more than herself had ever been given.

  As she remembered Arnold’s hand stroking the girl’s hair, tears came into Petta’s eyes. It seemed to her she had no one. All her life she had most feared the moment when she would be thrown dependent on herself. How had she failed? Had she possessed some talent and kept it hidden? Some creative power that, aborted, had destroyed her?

  Well, if she had, she had lost it. She could do nothing now.

  In Fulham Road she stopped a taxi. The cold had wakened her. She was afraid she would not sleep. It was in her mind now to leave Redcliffe Gardens. She could keep the taxi waiting while she packed. When Arnold returned, he would find her gone. ‘That will give him a jolt,’ she thought. Then she decided she would not take her luggage: only a few things in a make-up box. Arnold would not know what had become of her. She might be dead.

  For a short time this intention enlivened her. She thought with contempt of Arnold: ‘That withered wind-fall,’ she said to herself. He had stayed at the party imagining himself young because he had never matured! Well, he’d come back to an empty flat! But by the time she reached the house her intention had weakened. As she left the taxi, she looked about the empty street. What place was there for her in this homeless night? She paid off the taxi, knowing the move was beyond her.

  If only Quintin were in England! She imagined herself flying to him, throwing herself into his arms . . .

  Someone came in at the front door. She looked down to the hall, imagining it would be Arnold. Had it been he, she would have run to him, remorseful, weeping – but it was not. It was the man on the ground floor, the disgusting mouse-killer.

  She went upstairs in an agony of resentment that Arnold had not come at the moment she needed him. She ran into the flat, possessed by a desperate and bitter purpose. Acting quickly, expecting him to come at any moment, she wrote:

  ‘Sorry Arnold, but I’m tired of everything. This is not the world I want, but I have not the means to change it. Forgive me. I really long to die. Please ring my husband’s solicitor (number below) and ask him to tell Q. what has happened. Petta.’

  She rummaged wildly through her papers, seeking the solicitor’s telephone number, found it at last and added it to the note, which she pinned to Arnold’s pillow.

  She filled her hot-water bottle. When she had undressed, she propped herself up on pillows and placed the hot bottle on her belly. She had lit the reading-lamps on either side of the bed. In the drawer of the table beside her she had a dozen or so boxes of sleeping-tablets. She looked them over and took out a box of a hundred she had bought a couple of years before in Paris. With these in her hand, she looked round the room, seeing it a place she was leaving for ever.

  The fog-coloured wall-paper was peeling off at the corners near the ceiling. The ceiling had been white once but now it was darker than the paper. There were no pictures: pictures meant nothing to Arnold. The fireplace and shelf above it were heaped with books. So were the pieces of late Victorian mahogany furniture on either side. Books were stacked against the walls, on chairs, on the window ledge, all spine-broken, torn, faded to an even greyness. Every day she had been there, Arnold had come in with more books, picked up for a few pence ‘for reference’. He never opened one of them.

  The room smelt of books. This concourse of books produced no show of culture, only a desolate squalor. And here, she thought, is where I am to die – ‘the worst inn’s worst room’.

  She took three sleeping-tablets and washed them down with water: she took three more. Then, in a sudden fear that death would miscarry again, she emptied the box into her hand and began cramming the pills into her mouth, taking gulps of water to clear away the acid powder. When she had swallowed all but a few that fell on the floor, she flung the box across the room.

  She lay down among the pillows, waiting for the first premonitions of sleep. Nothing now could keep her from unconsciousness of life. She pressed her face away from the light and felt, sensuously, through all her nerves, the heaviness of her body relaxed against the bed.

  She had imagined the tablets would act at once, but she remained awake. Bored with waiting, she stretched her arm down among the books beside the bed, lifted one and knocked off the dust. It fell open and she read:

  ‘. . . we carry within us the wonders we seek without us: There is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.’

  Her eyes, blurring, passed several times over this passage, then remained on the lines: ‘. . . we carry within us the wonders we seek without us: There is all Africa and her prodigies in us,’ until a fog of sleep came between her and the page. The book fell from her hand. If she had made a discovery, she had made it too late.

  It was as though her own weight was carrying her down through folds of darkness, each more compacted, till the last was dense enough to hold her. There, in the darkest recess, was to be found velvet oblivion.

  At the last moment of consciousness, she stirred, stretching her finge
rs, as she felt the voluptuous sweetness of life where it bordered dissolution. She sighed, the moment passed: she slept, certain she would not wake again.

  She returned to consciousness some time after nine in the morning. She opened her eyes to the delicate topaz light of the winter sun. The light crashed at her like a blow. She closed her eyes: her mouth fell open in pain and nausea. She must have a hang-over. As she tried to move, an excruciating sickness was set in motion. She lay still, but let her eyelids part again. She had not drawn the curtains: a reading-lamp was switched on. The whole room was a shifting dazzle of light. She could make nothing of this awakening. No hang-over could be as bad as this.

  She waited for the nausea to pass off. There was a sour smell in the air, like vomit. She imagined it came through the window. She turned her head distastefully and felt something wet and cold on her cheek. When she was still, the pain was no more than a twitch in her brain. After a while she managed to lift her hands and press them to her head. This darkened her consciousness, but the twitch remained. Worse than that, the sickness was becoming active, flooding up through her blackly until, at the last moment, she flung herself from the bed, reached the window and pulled up the lower frame. As she knelt, vomiting upon the weed beds below, she felt the luxury of relief. She closed her eyes and lay with her head on the window-sill until the cold saturated her and she began to shiver. Her head throbbed, but now, at least, she was capable of movement.

  In the pit of her body the waves of sickness were moving again. She wrapped herself in a dressing-gown and went down to the bathroom. She moved carefully, holding her head as though to hold it together, and reached the bathroom with a sense of gratitude for its existence. She had scarcely bolted the door when the walls began to jerk and spin about her. The air turned yellow. She could not stand. She slid down beside the water-closet, that had a sickly urine smell, and, propping herself against the seat, she let her mouth hang open and waited.

  12

  Some time after nine o’clock the dozen or so persons who had spent the night in Simon Lessing’s studio began gathering themselves up from the floor, from chairs, from the divan beds, to follow Simon and Ellie out to the car.

  Simon was carrying the suitcases. Each of the others, in imitation, picked up some object as they passed. Arnold Valance, the only one among them who was no longer young, cradled in his arms a plaster bust of Venus.

  The car doors were held open. Ellie and Simon were solicitously packed into the front seat. The luggage was placed in the back and on top of it were piled a washjug, a T-square, the top of the stove, several cushions and picture-frames, and two plaster cones.

  Arnold, swaying and smiling on the pavement, held to the bust as though it were part of himself.

  ‘Take them all back,’ said Simon, and the company, in a state of obedient torpor, a step beyond drunkenness, repossessed themselves of all but the plaster cones. These, rolling unseen into a corner, were carried down to Eastsea.

  The car started off. Arnold, with a vague and sleepy smile of good-will, waved until it was out of sight, then, with the bust in his arms, set out in a dream state to walk to Redcliffe Gardens.

  The car passed from London into the clear sunlight of the countryside. It was Christmas Eve. Ellie had not written to her mother to tell of her engagement. She had half expected Mrs Parsons would write inviting her home for Christmas – but Mrs Parsons did not forgive so easily.

  Now Ellie went home with confidence, taking with her, as she did, that most desirable of peace offerings – a future husband.

  The car could not travel at speed. They stopped at Tunbridge Wells for luncheon and reached Mrs Parsons’s restaurant as the sun was setting. The lights were coming on along the Eastsea promenade in a sad, wintry sunset. Ellie looked indifferently at it all. Nothing could touch her now.

  As the door-bell pinged, Mrs Parsons came out through the bead-curtains that hid the kitchen. At the sight of Ellie, her eyes narrowed, with resentment, yet with gratification. They moved to the male figure behind. She did not smile or speak. She awaited explanation.

  Ellie smiled. With as much triumph as pleasure, she said: ‘This is Simon Lessing. We’re engaged. We thought, if you approved, we’d get a special licence and be married down here.’

  Mrs Parsons raised her eyes again to Simon’s face, which, with its look of transparent simplicity and goodwill, smiled over Ellie’s shoulder, then her lips shook, her face crumpled and tears welled into her eyes.

  Ellie put her arms about her mother. Embracing her daughter, Mrs Parsons choked back her sobs to say: ‘Both my girls married before they’re twenty. I never dared hope for such happiness.’

  13

  Tom Claypole died in the new year, during a period of unusual cold.

  When Ellie left the Underground station, snow hung like swansdown in the air. It did no more than drift on the air’s currents, yet the roofs were already white and cars were cutting tracks in the lace-film on the road.

  As, directed by the ticket collector, she found her way from the station to the crematorium, the distances disappeared in a fog of gun-metal grey. The light was without shadow.

  This was Golders Green, the place she had once imagined to be in the depths of the country. Remembering Rhoda’s lily-pond and lawns and vine, she saw them now reduced to the stature of this red-brick suburbia where there was no brilliancy but the snow.

  A great many things had been reduced in her mind since her first days in London. Many mosaics of shadow and unsubstantial wonders had hardened now into fact.

  She thought: ‘I am growing old. A friend has died.’ This death seemed to her a step towards maturity, bringing her own death nearer and into perspective. That, she supposed, was how people came to accept death. Friends died and their presence there made a home for one in the grave.

  The softly tangling powder grains of snow were growing into flakes. A silver iridescence filled the air. Dazzled within this glass snow world, she remained on these new terms with death until she reached the crematorium church, then death took on a leaden look. The church was cold; its light livid from the snow. How desolate to be old and dead instead of young and married!

  The service had already started; a secular service. Verses and songs – agnostic but hopeful – had been chosen by Tom’s solicitor. Ellie tip-toed down the aisle to where Nancy sat.

  Nancy moved the black-gloved hand that shaded her face and whispered: ‘She hasn’t got a thing.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Maxine.’

  ‘Not anything?’

  ‘Not a bean. He’s paid off her overdraft, but who the hell wants money already spent?’

  The elderly gentleman beside Nancy shuffled in his seat. Silenced, she gave Ellie a grin of triumph. They bowed their heads.

  The coffin, hidden beneath chrysanthemums, began to slide out of sight. Did the flowers die in the flames? Ellie imagined Tom’s dark, folded face within the box. Because he had believed himself mortal, she felt him the more dead. He was shut in, immobilised by his belief in his mortality, a figure of clay. The coffin had gone. The doors closed on it. She pictured its journey into the furnace. When she supposed the clay body must be consumed, Tom seemed to her more dead than were the buried. Such non-existence did not leave space even for compassion.

  Someone was reading verses in a flat, dispirited voice. Ellie had never attended a funeral before, but she had once heard on a gramophone record the Russian Kontakion for the dead. She had come prepared for grandeur, supposing they would be caught up from their thoughts of past and present in the brilliance of a moment and a triumph of sound. Apparently that was not to happen.

  She whispered to Nancy: ‘Did he leave you anything?’

  ‘Only my allowance: that goes on.’

  Nothing for Ellie, of course. She had expected nothing. The service came to an end.

  When she turned to face the people who were filing out of the pews, she saw, for the first time since they parted that summer evening, Quin
tin Bellot. She came to a stop, growing faint.

  Nancy pushed her on: ‘Hurry. Get out before Maxine.’

  Partridge, who had sat at the back of the church, was standing beside Tom’s car.

  ‘Come on.’ Nancy caught Ellie’s elbow and rushed her to the car door. Partridge saluted and opened it. They took their places on the back seat. Through the rear window they could see Maxine, black-clad, with the air of a widow, talking to one person and another, making a leisurely exit from the chapel.

  Nancy said: ‘You can drive on, Partridge.’

  He looked uneasy: ‘Miss Maxine said . . .’

  ‘That is all right.’ Nancy spoke with authority: Partridge obeyed.

  As they started off, they watched, until they passed beyond her sight, Maxine’s furious awareness of their departure.

  ‘Does she know?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘Not yet. The solicitor rang me because I’m the only relative. He thought he ought to soften the blow. I was so damned glad she hadn’t got it, I didn’t care who had. At least, not much.’

  ‘And who has got it?’

  ‘An heir. His wife’s nephew. Perhaps he intended that all along.’

  ‘And you don’t mind?’

  ‘Well, Tom believed in the male heir.’ Nancy looked a little smug, as though, against all reason, she felt something glorious in the belief.

  ‘What was Mr Bellot doing there?’

  ‘Bellot? The heir? How do you know him?’

  ‘He used to come to Primrose’s. He’s a friend of Mrs P.’

  Nancy found this coincidence remarkable and, talking about it at length, she permitted Ellie to remain silent.

  Ellie watched the heath running whitely away into the violet snow mist that filled the bowl of grass. In the distance the roofs and spires of Highgate rose above fallen cloud. ‘I must come here with Simon,’ she thought.

  Suddenly she asked: ‘Will Mr Bellot be at the house for sherry?’

  ‘Of course. He’s been especially asked to come because he’s the heir.’