I went to the side of the river and dropped cotton wool and tick into it. When I came back the dog was in the boy’s arms again and the boy was staring at me half in alarm, half in acceptance.
‘Take your dog along to a chemist and buy some antiseptic. Sponge this place two or three times and then he will be all right. Have you money?’
A terrible thing and a lovely thing. Why had one to destroy one woman in order to enjoy another? Self, Self. One claimed pleasure for oneself above all else—was that it? Would a better man go back to Harriet and leave Alexandra alone? Or a worse one try to keep, and deceive, both of them?
‘Money,’ I said. ‘Have you any?’
He shook his head.
‘Take this.’ I gave him five francs.
‘Thank, you, monsieur. Thank you.’ He still did not stir.
Some aeroplanes flew low overhead. I looked at my watch. Three o’clock. Five hours until I met Alexandra. Five hours and then I should be talking to her again, watching the movement of her lips, listening to her voice, meeting her eyes. And then dinner, and then a return to Neuilly.
The small boy, unnoticed by me, had gone. I looked round but could not even see his disappearing figure. It was as if he had never been, an imaginary counterpoint to these other thoughts. I began to walk along the river bank.
It is next to impossible to describe a love affair except in terms of monumental triteness, even though in the experience there is no triteness, no longueurs, no sense of flatness or repetition. Human experience can sometimes only be judged subjectively—otherwise one dissects the moth. In a mixture of emotions that summer I knew only one thing for certain, that I had not ever been in love this way before.
I flew back on the Friday in time for Harriet’s dinner party. To my annoyance she had told Ralph the story of Marie Paladini, and he was at dinner to question me about it. False details came easily, but it was irritating to have to produce them. I thought once or twice Tim Dickinson’s eyes rested on me thoughtfully. Tim worked a good deal in the courts, and this, plus his psychological training, no doubt gave him a nose for the witness whose replies came too glibly.
At the dinner also were Isabel Chokra and her smiling Thai husband, both of whom I was fond of, but for some reason Harriet had also invited the Maxwell-Smiths, the dreary people at whose house we had spent a recent weekend, and in the middle of dinner I had the excruciating experience of having my play analysed and discussed by two of the most ponderous minds in Great Britain.
Presently Ralph interrupted to say that someone else—Paul Vigox, the dramatic critic, whom I had met recently and had had a long talk with—had been to see my play a second time and he had said to Ralph afterwards that it was startling to compare the play and the man who wrote it.
‘Startling?’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Well, he said he thought you surprisingly—what was the word he used—surprisingly conformable to have written such a play. He’d expected someone, he said, with prominent teeth, and a long top lip and an interest in sodomy.’
Mrs. Maxwell-Smith gave a high startled laugh.
I said: ‘ I’m glad he’s reassured about the prominent teeth anyway.’
Ralph said: ‘I told him he was making a mistake if he took apparent simplicity for lack of depth.’
‘Oh, Morris’s far from uncomplex,’ said Harriet, ‘even though it doesn’t run to Mr. Vigox’s specifications.’
Ralph said: ‘I told him very much that sort of thing, and then he rather changed his front and said it wasn’t just an appearance of conformity that he saw—which, anyway, he said, might be in appearance only—so much as something he felt in Morris’s approach to life as a man that was at odds with his approach to life on the stage.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Tim Dickinson, ‘but it’s Vigox’s mistake, the public’s mistake, not Morris’s; that’s what I’ve said all along. The dichotomy is in the observer, not in the observed.’
‘Well, thanks most frightfully,’ I said. ‘It’s nice of you all to discuss me. Now how about putting Humpty Dumpty back on the wall? More brandy, Ralph?’
‘No, just a minute,’ said Harriet. ‘ Tell us what you mean, Tim.’
Tim eyed me doubtfully over his coffee cup. I had a curious feeling that Harriet had a better idea than the rest of us what Tim was driving at because she had heard it from him before; but that she wanted it to be made plain to the rest.
Tim said: ‘ I hope I don’t tread on any pet corns, Morris, but it’s something I’ve felt for a long time. Fundamentally you’re the serious type—over-serious maybe; you take things too much to heart. But, because of some curious quirk in your nature, what you put down on paper has a wry, off-beat twist to it, so that people look on it as the most advanced satire. In fact—seven times out of ten—you mean what you say literally, to be taken seriously. But because of the way you say it, it’s taken for the opposite. I’ll swear that some of the most delighted laughs you get in your play are, in your heart, about things you don’t really want to laugh at at all.’
‘Oh, come,’ said Ralph. ‘My dear Tim, you’re crazy. What is this?’
‘He’s crazy,’ I said, ‘ but he’s right in one respect. I’m not such a moron as to guy what I don’t intend to guy; but there’s some truth in what he says about my not wanting to laugh at things. Sometimes I hate having to. I hate the humiliation of our condition on earth. I hate the festering struggle for bare sustenance that most people go through even in the Western world. I hate the squalor and disease in which we all die. I don’t want to laugh at these things; but, short of insanity or an overdose of Nembutal, what else is there left but laughter?’
Talk broke up for a while then. But presently Mrs. Maxwell-Smith said: ‘Is it true, Mr. Scott, that you qualified as a doctor before becoming a playwright?’
‘Yes, a bad one, I’m afraid.’
Tim Dickinson said: ‘ He graduated to barbs from barbiturates.’
‘He was a bad one,’ Harriet said, ‘and you’ve just heard the reason. He feels too intensely. He took all his patients’ complaints home with him, worried about them; he couldn’t laugh them off. When you’re in as close contact with people as a doctor is you’ve got to grow a defensive hide, otherwise you’re heading for the bin.’
‘So I detached myself,’ I said lightly, ‘and came to see people as puppets on a stage.’
The whole conversation annoyed me. Tim Dickinson, whose own career, heaven knows, had been pretty chequered, specialised too much in wisecracks and in pseudo-smart character analysis. What perhaps was more irritating was the suspicion that Harriet had heard it all before and agreed with it. I resented the thought that I was being discussed behind my back by my wife and her best friend.
Anyway, I was entitled to say what I liked about my own abilities as a doctor—I took a pretty poor view of them—but that didn’t entitle others to continue the disparagement for me, especially in front of comparative strangers.
It was late when Tim Dickinson, the last to go, was edged out through our Georgian front door. I walked back to the living room and found Harriet trying to unflip the top of the whisky bottle.’
‘Oh, no you don’t!’ I said angrily.
She let me take it from her without protest. ‘It would do you good sometimes, Morris, to be able to let your hair down. You’re too tight, too self-restrained, cautious. What harm is there in relaxing?’
‘Come along,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
‘What time is it? My watch has stopped.’
‘Quarter-past one. Why don’t you scrap that thing and let me buy you another?’
She peered frustratedly at the little oval wrist-watch I had bought her for about eight pounds in Lucerne on our first holiday abroad.
‘It always goes. Never stops. Never stops. You know. Must have forgotten to wind it.’
‘Well, it’s not much to look at.’
‘I’m sentimental about it. You don’t realise, Morris, I’m sentimental. I’m rea
lly a rather sentimental person.’
‘No, I don’t realise,’ I said peaceably.
‘D’you also realise,’ she said as I took her arm and led her out of the room, ‘that you’ve not given me a proper kiss since you came home?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘You’re cold, buttoned up, inhibited.… It’s queer … you’ve all this feeling, this sensitive perception of the plight of mankind—and you can express it in a brilliant play—yet at times, personally, you’re completely and utterly cold.’
‘Not really. You only think I am.’
We got into the bedroom. ‘Well, how long is it since you slept with me? I’ll tell you; it was the thirty-first of May. It’s now the sixteenth of July. How long is that? ‘‘ Thirty days hath September …’’ ’
‘Perhaps it’s too long. But I’ve been up to my eyes in work. And you’ve not been well.…’
‘Maybe not. Maybe I’ve not been well. But I’m well tonight.’
‘Not tonight.’
‘Why not tonight? Have you some little fancy girl in Paris?’
Of course this was the ideal time to say yes. To say yes, Harriet. But not a fancy girl, a girl that I truly and dearly love; one who has taken possession of my mind and senses so that nothing else in the world is so important as being with her and having her for my own.
But in another way it was the worst time. It was not information to be blurted out in the irritation of the moment, nor was it something I could face her with when she was excited and slightly high. The thing had got to be confessed in the cold light of day. Sometime tomorrow, when she was more capable of facing it.
Chapter Six
In the morning, to my surprise, she apologised for talking about me so freely in front of the Maxwell-Smiths, and blamed the two drinks she had had. It was no good, she said, even sherry no longer suited her. It had to be the wagon from now on.
She looked tired today, but smiling and affectionate. She tried the painting I had brought her here and there on the walls, asking my advice and wanting to move all the other pictures round. It was a familiar exercise in which I often found as much fun as she did. But I could not today. Sometime today, I thought. Probably this evening. I really had to rehearse what was to be said so that it could be put in a way that conveyed what I felt and yet hurt her self-esteem the least. Unfortunately one could only half prepare for her response: anger, incredulity, pain, which would be foremost?
Did I over-estimate the strength of the tie? I hoped so. I hoped so. When I met her she had had lots of friends, but in the centre of them had remained a curiously lonely young woman. She gave acquaintanceship to anyone but her confidence practically to no one. Now after seven years her life was bound up completely in me and in my work. To cut this away would leave her without roots and without purpose.
Tim Dickinson might be a help and a support to her then, yet his job was ordinary and lacked the creative fascination for her that mine had. Himself divorced four years ago, there was no doubt that he was interested in Harriet; but Harriet only occasionally showed more than an old friend’s interest in him.
I could not settle to work, so told Harriet I would walk to my club—the literary and social club to which I had been elected five years ago at Harriet’s instigation and insistence—and lunch there. When I got into the gloomy eighteenth-century building I found few members about and realised too late that it was Saturday. However, I had a drink and took it to a desk and began a letter to Alexandra.
It was strangely hard to write to her. The moment I put the first words on the paper I went back into a day-dream. Two nights ago only I had been lying beside her in blissful lassitude in the companionable dark, and we had talked and talked right through the night until dawn was breaking and I had to go. What was there that could possibly be put on paper that had not already been said mouth to mouth in love, or in this drowsy confidential aftermath?
‘Darling,’ I had put, ‘darling, I’m writing this—’ and got no further. A hand tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Morris. Just the man I wanted to see. Come and have a drink. I see you’ve got one. What was it? I’ll top it up.’
Cecil Mallory. He had published a half-dozen medical books and was a member of the club on the strength of these. It was through our friendship here that Harriet had first gone to him.
Reluctantly I got up and followed him to the bar, screwing up my letter and dropping it into a waste-paper basket.
At the bar Mallory began to ask me about the play and to give his views on the capabilities of the cast. An opinionated man, like so many experts on subjects they do not understand, while being modest enough on those they do.
Presently he said: ‘I saw Harriet on Tuesday.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. Has she mentioned it?’
‘She says you gave her some pills the size of space capsules.’
He laughed. ‘They’re a new thing we’re trying. I’ve told her to report back if there are any side effects.’
‘Does she need to try new things?’
He got our drinks and paid for them. ‘That’s what I wanted to see you about. I was a little disappointed by the look of her, the changes since I saw her two years ago.’
‘What in—her back?’ All my senses were now alert.
‘Yes. I took pictures, of course, but these only confirmed what I suspected by manual examination—there’s been a good bit of deterioration, chiefly in the sacro-iliac joints, but here and there in the dorsal vertebrae too. Did you notice she was developing Heberden’s nodes?’
I searched my brain for almost forgotten knowledge. ‘You mean—her fingers?’
‘Yes. Perhaps it’s not surprising you missed them; they’re not prominent yet. But it all points to a disappointing change in two years. Two years ago she was complaining of pain and we were only speculating as to its cause.’
I took a gulp at my drink. ‘She’s not forty yet. Can we stop it?’
‘We can treat it. Gentle remedial exercises. As I say, we’re always trying new drugs. But I was asking her on Tuesday: did you know her grandfather was crippled at an early age?’
‘No … At least … she may have mentioned it.’
‘Obviously we don’t want to be alarmist. Treatment has improved quite a little in fifty years.… But I thought you ought to know.’
‘Does she know?’
‘She knows of the danger. I didn’t feel entitled to keep that from her. Anyway, we must have the co-operation of the patient. I didn’t want to alarm her, but I had to impress on her the necessity for care and treatment. She was too inclined to make light of it all.’
I thought of her apparent high spirits last night. ‘Now she does not.’
‘I hope not. It’s simply a question of seeing the situation in its true light, neither too black nor too white.’
‘She’s likely to have a good deal of pain, I suppose.’
‘Well she has had over these last weeks, she tells me. But it will vary. With luck she might get rid of it for long periods. Anyway there’s no reason why treatment shouldn’t relieve and improve it. One thing, Morris …’
‘Yes?’
‘She insisted I shouldn’t tell you anything of this. She said you’d worry too much—and anyway she didn’t want your pleasure over a successful play spoiled by anxiety for her. But I really felt bound to tell you. It wouldn’t be fair to you not to know what the position is. Particularly as you are a doctor. But of course don’t tell her that I’ve told you.’
‘Naturally not,’ I said.
I went home after lunch and in the evening took Harriet to a new revue that had just opened. She enjoyed it, and when we got home said she thought I could write a revue if I tried, with that off-beat, tongue-in-the-cheek sincerity that had come off so magnificently in Widow’s Peak. I said she was a great one for boosting my ego—I hadn’t a hope in hell of ever putting together that sort of a show, but thank you all the same.
We hadn’t eaten be
fore the show, so we cut sandwiches and drank coffee and ate sticks of celery in the kitchen. Then when we went to bed I made love to her.
To some men, making love to two different women in the same week presents no problem. Monogamy is an imposed sanction not a natural way of life. But to the over-civilised such as myself, the inhibitions of custom and loyalty and self-respect are difficult to break.
It’s not easy to explain why I broke them now. Probably some pity, a degree of guilt, even a sense of obligation, sublimated themselves—if this is not inverting the meaning of the word—into a sensation that passed for desire. It was strange, bizarre, to possess her again, long, rather bony, fine skinned, small breasted, expert within narrow limits, intellectually rather than emotionally sexual, yet pleasing and giving pleasure; contrasted with the pure youthful beauty and untutored love-making of Alexandra.
When we were lying smoking together after it, she said: ‘I think you’ve been unfaithful to me.’
I laughed sarcastically.
‘Oh, I know you haven’t really, in fact. But something is happening. I told you last night that it ought to, so perhaps you’re taking my advice to heart. Or perhaps it’s just success, the atmosphere, the relaxation of good living, London among the stars, Paris … all these things acting as a sort of catharsis. It’s time you grew into your own, into your new status. You’ve been too slow. It’s all part of an artistic realisation, a fulfilment.…’
I wrote to Alexandra the following day, telling her that Harriet was ill and that for the moment I could not bring myself to face her with the new situation. What I did not say was that the illness, if that was what it was to become, could be a chronic one. It was not pretty writing to Alexandra in such a way as to be misunderstood, yet the brief delay could hardly be vital. I could not tell Harriet now, immediately after my perversely inspired half-atone-for love-making, immediately after learning that she had osteoarthritis of the spine. I had some faith in Mallory; with treatment she would improve; there had to be a moment at which it would be possible to tell her everything.
After the Act Page 6
