Most Loving Mere Folly

by Edith Pargeter

  Sometimes, after these evenings, he could not sleep. It was hateful that he had to share a room with Harold, so that not even the nights could give him privacy in that house. If he turned on his pillow, half-awake, and uttered so much as a name, Harold would stir in his light sleep, and hear it, and the family would have it next day, he could be sure of that. They were already altogether too curious about how he spent his time. He had to lie still, while his mind in the heat of imagination ran away from him into feverish fantasies, and his body ached with a desperate excitement which he could neither control nor understand. Was it even true that Suspiria had singled him out? It was Theo who had first invited him there, but she had seconded the invitation at once, and Suspiria didn’t do things like that out of politeness, or out of kindness, either. She had wanted him to come. Was she secretly thinking him an unsophisticated fool for his trouble? He lay curled upon himself in the rumpled bed many a night, rubbing his hot cheeks into the pillow, and breathing deeply to exorcise her name, which came so easily now to his lips that he might utter it aloud, and never know. He was full of a hungry and burning pain which was somehow pleasurable, too. When her hands closed over his, in that impatient gesture to set him right, he felt his heart molten and hollow with desire.

  Sometimes he came to himself, in the hard grey half-light of morning, with the shivering revulsion of someone who has just jumped back from the edge of a precipice in the dark, and began in a fury of waking common sense, inexpressibly dreary and depressing, to demand of himself where he was going, and what he hoped to gain by continuing on the same road. But with the first burning recollection of Suspiria everything else would be forgotten, and the end, even if it amounted to no more than access to her presence, seemed to him more than he could ever hope to gain by another route. And by the time his hand was next at the latch of Little Worth he was sure that there was more for him, he could almost feel it already in his grasp.

  There was no light in the living-room, this night in December. He left the motor-cycle in the shed, and let himself in without knocking, because whoever was at home must be working, and would never hear him if he did knock. If you were a friend, you could walk in, and go and look for them; the door was never locked. He lifted the latch and went in. A low fire burned on the brick hearth, and cast gleams of light over a few glossy surfaces, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. The matt red arm of a chair, a curved gloss of bowl above a flat glimmering of polished wood, a pale comb of piano keys; these were all he could see. There was no one there.

  Because he always thought of Suspiria, it was always on Theo he called, standing in the dark doorway, and shouting towards the studio: ‘Hullo, there! It’s me, Dennis!’

  Suspiria answered him from the workshop, her voice sounding very small and far away, even in a shout. ‘Hullo, come on through!’

  He shed his gloves and coat and helmet, dropping them in the nearest chair, and went to find her. He knew his way to the workshop now without a light, as if he had really belonged to the house; down the vast, cave-like corridor, and out by the back door, and there were the never-cleaned grey windows on his left, seven or eight yards of them, the whole of one side of the long, narrow shed. There was a strong smell of paraffin as he opened the door, for she had lit her oil-stove to warm the air enough for handling brushes, but even so it was cold in there. He trod through the usual deadening layer of clay-dust, silently along the narrow gangway between benches and racks, past the big wooden block on which she kneaded her clay, and the shelves of bins and tins, most of them discarded from the household, in which she kept her materials. The amount of her paraphernalia still daunted him, just as its nondescript nature still affronted him. She was a brilliant artist, she ought to behave like one, surround herself with order, precision and elegance, instead of operating in this hybrid of a back-kitchen and a junk-yard, where half of her tools were concocted on the spur of the moment out of bits of accidental rubbish thrown away by somebody of ordinary stature.

  The hanging screens rattled in the subsiding draught. Through the racks of her drying work he saw her bending over the bench beside the kiln, where she painted, and mixed pigments and slips. She raised her head, looking for him, and he delayed for the pleasure of seeing the quick, waiting gleam of anticipation in her face. She was glad to see him, she wanted him. She never conjured up that expression for anyone unless she meant it. A curved feather of her hair lay across her forehead, her lips were parted, waiting to smile at him. She loved him! She must love him! Why else do you reach out your hand and draw someone to you? Why else do you select so carefully someone who has nothing to offer you, unless he has this? In her world it was nothing out of the way. She was an artist. They looked at these things differently. When you are invited into someone else’s kind of world, you live by its rules, surely – it’s a part of the invitation.

  He came round the racks of drying pots very quietly, rather slowly, looking at her from under his level brows with an uneasy gleam of shining grey eyes. He was flushed and pinched with the cold, his lips looked stiff from the frosty wind, and his light brown hair was untidy because of the way he had dragged off his helmet. A very attractive child, she thought, the veritable smile breaking; especially now that he had given up looking so guarded and afraid. In some ways, of course, a demure little prig, but that was the result of his upbringing, and the veneer was already beginning to crack. And even of demure little prigs one can become curiously fond, once having taken a degree of responsibility for them.

  ‘Hullo!’ she said, turning to look at him more attentively. ‘What are you looking so mischievous about?’

  ‘I didn’t know I was. Am I in the way tonight? You seem to be doing some serious work, and Theo isn’t in the studio.’

  ‘He’s in London – won’t be back until tomorrow, maybe not then if he meets too many of the old crowd. He took some small stuff down for me, too, so I can’t complain if he makes it an occasion for going on the tiles. But no, of course you’re not in the way. Wait until I finish here, and we’ll go inside, where it’s warmer.’

  He came close to her, looking down with an almost strained attention at the array of green and biscuited pots she had spread before her on the bench, and the saucers and small bowls of pigments, which she kept with a care she gave to little else, except her brushes. ‘It’s not so cold in here. I don’t want to stop you working.’ But he was shivering. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You’ve never tried your hand at brushwork yet. Do you want to? Or there’s some slip you can play with.’ She turned her shoulder on him, and went back to what she was doing, reaching for a brush and loading it fully with a dull blue pigment from one of her saucers. She expected him to sit down carefully and quietly beside her on the stool, or stand like a docile pupil at her elbow, and watch while she performed. She expected it, but he could no longer be sure of what she wanted.

  ‘I’m only good for play, of course,’ he said in a level voice, not yet even ill-humoured, and watching the wet brush flicker in long, swooping flights across the curve of the beaker. The line thickened and thinned again with the inclination of her hand. She held the pot well away from her, and the brush almost disinterestedly far from the point, and painted from the elbow rather than the wrist, with a beautiful, devoted ferocity. Drifts of dull blue foliage, branches blown in the wind, floating leaves followed her touch round the curve of the beaker.

  ‘You can turn the bases of those two bowls, if you like,’ she said, not even bothering to raise her head and look at him. ‘You know how to do it – I won’t interfere.’

  ‘I might spoil them for you.’

  ‘I know you might. I said you can try.’

  But that was not what he wanted; not even to be trusted with what he knew to be special orders. He didn’t know what he wanted. Certainly to remain near her, watching her, not to be sent away into the corner of the workshop, to bend obediently over her hand-wheel.

  ‘Sit down, then, and be quiet! Not too quiet! Talk to me
! If you want to sulk about something, do it out loud.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he protested warmly. ‘Not unless it’s about not being able to run before I can walk.’ He sat down on the corner of the bench, as close to her as he could without impeding her movements as she changed from brush to brush, and moved beaker after beaker with its autumnal branches across to the group at her left hand.

  ‘What colour will it be when it’s glazed and fired?’ He was already used to the idea that the raw colours could give little visible indication of their final glory.

  ‘Greener than this – a deep, greenish blue. It ought to be pretty effective on this light salmon-coloured body. They’re a set I’ve had ordered for some time, and never managed to finish.’

  ‘What kind of glaze will you use over them?’

  ‘A clear, straw-coloured one. There, that’s the last of those. I shan’t get round to glazing them tonight, I’m only decorating.’ She had still two flat dishes to treat, and a round-bellied vase, not yet fired, and four little hand-moulded ashtrays shaped like leaves. She pushed the trays towards him, with a preoccupied but placatory gesture, and a handful of graving tools after them. ‘You see what they have to be. Give them ribs, and then paint them. Here’s green, brown – the blue, if you like. You can do whatever you fancy with them.’

  She went back to her vase, and carrying it briskly away from the bench, set it up with anchoring wads of clay upon the hand-wheel she used for turning and banding, and without looking at him again, she began to score its plump shoulder with a little roller of biscuited clay, spinning the wheel occasionally with her left hand. And that was all she did with him, stroke him now and again left-handed into the motion she required of him, her eyes all the time upon her real objective.

  He flung away from the bench after her, and took her roughly by both wrists and pulled her round to face him; but so carefully still that the vase span undamaged with the slowing wheel, only the slightly deeper score of her astonished start marking its full and placid beauty. Her long eyes flared at him, greenish in the dimming shadow. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, with a sharp and wary quietness.

  ‘What’s the matter! Nothing, nothing at all! Only that you don’t even know I’m here. You don’t even bother to look at me. Go and play with those, and don’t worry me, I’ve got something important to do! Why do you let me come here, if that’s all? Why do you! Why did you ask me here in the first place?’ He shook her by the wrists, miserably conscious even now that he had not the courage to compel any answer. She looked up at him calmly under the soft, stirring plumes of her hair, and was not even angry. Her voice had a certain severity, but that was all.

  ‘Dennis, let go!’ It was a perfectly placid, if testy, order; he obeyed it slowly and sullenly. ‘I’m sorry, I told you we’d go into the house when I’d finished here. So we will. If you want attention, you’ll have to wait till then, or go and look for it somewhere else. I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me to go? I asked you if I was in the way.’

  He sounded, even to himself, like a querulous child, and yet she stood looking at him with that glimmering quietness and gravity, not at all as if she thought of him in that way. ‘You’re not in my way. At least, you haven’t been, up to now. You know we like to have you here, as often as you care to come. But my work doesn’t go into fixed hours, I can’t always leave it behind at six.’

  ‘You don’t really want me here,’ he said bitterly. ‘I suppose I must have been quite amusing for a time, but you’re getting a bit bored with the joke now, aren’t you?’

  ‘I could be feeling a good many things,’ she said, looking at him with a quickening annoyance, ‘but boredom isn’t one of them. What’s the matter with you? What are you accusing us of?’

  ‘As if you didn’t know! You took me up for a bit of fun – a novelty. Now my welcome’s wearing pretty thin, I see. These proletarian types are only entertaining for just so long – only they never know when to stop, do they? I must have been quite a problem to you sometimes – I’m sorry!’

  ‘You have,’ said Suspiria, darkly flushing, ‘a quite remarkable gift for vulgarity when you try, I can see that. But don’t be so modest about it, that’s no gift of your class, that’s all your own. Why, you little idiot, what do you suppose this silly talk of proletarian types means to me? Are you trying to fit me in somewhere to suit yourself? You’ll have hard work! My father was a pawnbroker in Hackney, and my mother was a farm-labourer’s daughter, and I’m a human being. Where does that get you? If you’re coming here trying to make yourself important to me because you feel inferior, or because you feel superior, or because for either reason you want a little more fuss made of you, I can tell you, you’re wasting your time. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a human being, too. You haven’t got any privileges or any handicaps but those you’ve given yourself.’

  She was flinging away from him, back to her work in anger and disgust, when she turned as abruptly to look at him again. The taut misery of his face seemed to her altogether too tragic for so small, mistaken and unworthy a squabble. It was not so easy for him, after all; he was dangerously young, he had no idea yet of what he was, or of how he could ever discover it. It was not for her to lock a door against him, even if his fumbling attempts to open it irritated her beyond endurance.

  ‘Dennis! I’m sorry, too! I don’t like it when you make yourself smaller than you are.’ She let her hand rest for an instant against his cheek, the roller on its twisted wire handle swung free from her wrist, touched him once, heavily, and was gone. ‘Give me just ten minutes more, to clean up, and I’ll come.’

  It was the unexpected caress that set light to all the lingering resentment in his heart, all the tormented self-doubt and self-love which had become molten into the deepest texture of his longing for her. She might have patted a puppy like that, as gently and as carelessly, and expected it to wag its tail and be playfully grateful for the favour. Her touch went into his cheek like acid, with a sharp and bitter pain, because he knew that if she had looked for a more adult understanding from him she had looked in vain, and now with ready kindness had given up the expectation, and accepted him as he was, a poor little pathetic hanger-on, wrapped up in his conventions and inhibitions, incapable of disentangling himself in time to meet her on any ground which would ever be common to two creatures so dissimilar. If he acquiesced now in her resigned acceptance of his inescapable limitations, her almost audible sigh of: ‘Ah, well, never mind!’ he would have to keep that rôle for ever. And it was not what she had wanted! ‘I don’t like it,’ she said, ‘when you make yourself smaller than you are.’ But after tonight, if he was silent now, it would be too late to grow.

  She had left the vase standing on the wheel, and gone back to her bench, and was beginning to clear away the little pots of colour, to cover them from the dust, and stand them on the shelves of the locker where she kept them. When he came after her closely and quietly, she did not hear him until his left arm encircled her shoulders and pulled her round to him, imprisoning both her arms tightly, and sending the bowl of blue pigment out of her hand, to shatter against the wall and spill its colour in a great stain down to the bench, spattering them both coldly. Wrenched hard against his body, she gave no cry, but her head went back violently against his shoulder, and her hands groped ineffectively for a purchase against his chest, to prise herself away from him. One of the little ashtrays was swept from the bench, and ground to powder under their straining feet. Then he got his other arm under her thighs, and lifted her, and carried her easily towards the door.

  She was so light and thin and small in his grasp that his heart felt bursting with frantic tenderness; and she did not struggle, but lay against his breast quite still and quiet now, and he felt her breath upon his cheek. Since he had shut his arm round her he was not aware of having seen her face at all, but he was sure that it held no anger, and no fear.

  He carried her along the corridor into the living-ro
om, and in the warm darkness laid her softly upon the long settee, and with his own weight held her there. His mouth felt its way, half-kissing, half-stroking, along her cheek and chin, and whispered through the ruffled silk of her hair, brokenly, breathlessly: ‘Oh, darling! – Oh, darling—’ over and over. His hands were shaking so that he was afraid to relax them, for fear she would dissolve through them and be lost, though she lay so still now that he was sure of her in every way but this, that he might awake in his unprofitable bed at home, sick with loss, and her accomplishment be only a piece of a broken dream. ‘Oh, darling! – Oh, darling—’ His hand crept downward, clumsy with longing and triumph and haste, down the slight, sweet, quiet warmth of her body.

  Suspiria flashed upward with one hand, set the heel of it under his chin, and springing suddenly into whalebone under him, hoisted a knee into his stomach, and threw him off from her sprawling upon the rug. Before he could recover she was over the back of the settee, the width of the room and a dozen minor hazards between them, and he could hear her laughing, a harsh, angry sound out of the darkness. Grovelling on the rug, winded, shamed, horribly ridiculous, spattered with the bubble of his triumph, he heard her laughing, heard her fingers feeling for the switch of the lamp; and then inexplicably she was still.