The Chinese Room

by Vivian Connell

  Nicholas moved his chair into the lobby window of his bedroom and lit a pipe. He was trying to see himself in his background, and it was plain that he did not like or believe in this background, or in the social structure of England. Not only did he not like it; he did not belong to it. Barrington belonged to him, not he to Barrington. Did Barrington even belong to him? Surely old Forsyte in his gardens and orchards, Cantlebye in his woodlands, had a sense of proprietorship in Barrington that he had not. His grandfather, who had once worked here as a plowman, must have had a better sense of owning the fields. If he were away for a year, Barrington would go on just the same. He was the most dispensable person in the whole place. But the bank would not go on the same without him. Therefore, his whole life was in the bank. He did not own the bank. The bank owned him. In what had he a proprietorship, if not in himself? Not in the bank, not in Barrington, not in Muriel, not in Sidonie. He was a millionaire who owned nothing.

  He did not believe in this English scheme of things. Old Charndale was not the same. Give him a rod, a saddle, a gun, and he was a rich man. He was the old Englishman, the soldier or the hunter, to whom India was a tiger shoot, England a hunting field, and Europe, when he got bored, a dueling ground on a grand scale. A war was coming along, so he’d polish up his buttons and fight for his tiger shoot and his hunting field. That was what old Jock Bude would say to a Charndale, when he came to him for money to buy guns. Old Jock was never fooled by the parade of glory. He used to put on his topper for Ascot and call it his clown’s hat. Nicholas had often wondered if his father had put him in the golden cage of Bude’s Bank to see if he had the guts to break out of it. But it was not easy to get out of the money cage of England, or out of the social cage. Old Jock used to say that it was harder to get out of the Royal Enclosure than to get in, so many people were pushing outside at the gate. Mrs. Brampton had got in through the gates of Bude’s Bank. Fortunately, it had all been too much for Muriel’s mother, and she had burst a blood vessel and had, as it were, bled to death for the pomp and snobdom of England.

  Nicholas knew that it was no good. He would never believe in all this antique pageantry, this business of looking through a St. Paul’s window over the slums. Worse, he did not care a damn about the slums. Hang a ribbon or bunting over them, and the fools there thought they lived in a palace. Old Charndale had once sharply told a conscientious young Member of Parliament that a charwoman would rather see the changing of the guard on an empty belly than keep her own cakeshop and not have the time to go. That was Charndale’s idea, and nothing in the history of England for hundreds of years made him a liar. Oxinham would rather be a butler to a lord than the owner of his own farm. Indeed, Nicholas well knew, he would not stay at Barrington, only that he knew his master was sure to go into the Lords. Oxinham was a snob and a bully and would not be seen dead in the village pub. So what the hell was the good, as Charndale had said to the young Member, of going about with a suffering Calvary look on your face, trying to help people who did not want to be helped. The people of England knew what they wanted. And they wanted greyhound racing and football pools and test matches and cheap beer and a dartboard, and if they went to a political meeting and a dogfight started in five minutes, one dog would be Australia and the other dog England, and somebody in the crowd would be laying the odds on the Kerry blue. So Charndale had advised the young Member to go to Newmarket Sales and buy himself a Derby winner if he wanted to make himself a national figure, and that he would get more votes for that than he would for a social-reform plan. It all sounded, Nicholas thought, a very old story, but now, as the century closed up to 1939, there did not seem to be any reason why it shouldn’t go on forever. It had survived the last war, and would survive the next, and he did not see one single way in which he could do one damn thing about it, so it could go to hell.

  The only way in which it troubled him was that it had ruined his marriage. The social juggernaut had rolled over their nuptial bed, and Mrs. Brampton stood with a leg in each corner of the bedroom like a sacred cow. They went to bed with all the ceremonial livery on and never got into their own skins. Whatever had been pristine and healthy in their love had been wearied down to a nervous longing while they had waited in social probation. If he had taken Muriel out behind the garden fence on that first night and thrown her down into the dew, nothing would have gone wrong. “Love,” old Jock had said, “is war and bloody murder, and a long sleep afterwards.” Nicholas had overheard him saying that to a crony one day when he was on holiday from Harrow, and it had shocked him. “Here in England,” declaimed old Jock, “it’s a kind of social polygamy, and by the time you get down to your muttons, you’re so fed up that you might as well have one sheep as another. What with all this dressing up and wedding bells and what not, marriage will soon be as important in England as the mating of a Derby to an Oaks winner. They call it Who’s Who, but I call it Weatherby’s. Now when I was out in...” It was at that point that Nicholas, the perfect Harrovian, removed his ear from the keyhole, because old Jock had married his Deborah in a different fashion. “The parson’s cob was lame, but there was nothing wrong with our legs, so we didn’t wait for him, as we knew the old cob would be sound again in a couple of weeks.” This was all very shocking to a young Harrovian.

  As he lost confidence in his sexual power with Muriel, he had felt his whole morale going to pieces, and his nerves were in a bad way when some five months after his wedding he and Muriel went to stay at Haylton Place in a house party. There he got the further shock of knowing that Muriel was a social failure in the kind of society to which Laura Haylton and her guests belonged. Although she now had unlimited money she could not get used to the idea of spending forty guineas on a frock, and she dressed in a superior Knightsbridge fashion. And she could not get used to the difference between salted society conversation and the tedious gossip of Poona. Nicholas wondered crossly if she had ever read Shakespeare, who knew that it was a case of “the nearer the king, the nearer the knuckle” in conversation, or had studied the satirical Maugham. She was inclined to sicken on the bitter almonds that society relished on the tongue, and she had a habit of tautening her mouth as if she wanted to say “prudes and prigs.” She was an emotional tight-purse, as Laura had described somebody else, adding bluntly: “She’s so bloody mean with herself because she’s got nothing to give.” It was at this point that Laura changed the subject when she saw Adele Copland looking at Muriel with her sharp eyes, and realized that she was by accident describing a guest.

  It was here that Nicholas became aware of the habit of hoarding the emotions which is the hallmark of the English middle class but by which society is not so much handicapped. Old Jock, he knew, would agree with Laura on why they had to live within their biological incomes. “You can’t spend what you haven’t got,” Old Jock would have said. “The English are just sexual bankrupts.” And Nicholas now began to wonder if not only had he married a sexual bankrupt, but if he were one himself. It might be simply that he had nothing to which Muriel could respond. Surely if either of them had what each had felt in that first night they had met, it would have found itself by now. But Strangbow, an author in the house party, had said at dinner: “Marriage is like a novel. If it starts wrong you ran never get it right. If I start a book wrong, I can patch it somehow, and probably can fool my readers, but I will never fool myself or the characters in it. It’s the same with marriage. If it begins wrong, you can patch it up maybe, and fool your friends, but you will never fool yourself.” That comment had haunted Nicholas, and he had begun to accept it as a hopeless truth for himself and Muriel. He was glad when the house party was over, and when he got back to Barrington he knew that he had given up his marriage as a washout.

  It was a fortnight later that he had met Laura in London, and she had told him to take her to lunch at the Ritz. When the coffee arrived, she looked at him and spoke out:

  “Well, it’s just one hell of a mess with Muriel and you?”

  There was no use in ly
ing to Laura. “It’s not going very well.”

  “Gone wrong in the bedroom, as usual?” He would not say anything. “I know.” She paused. “Muriel would be all right if she said ‘bloody’ now and again and learned to spit.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Why the hell don’t you go away from each other for a while?”

  “Well, I’m going to Edinburgh for a fortnight on Monday, anyway.”

  “Oh, how odd. I’m going up there too, on Saturday.” She paused. “Where are you staying?”

  “The Glenbyne. Its near our bank there.”

  “Well, I’ll ring you up when you get there.” Nicholas knew that one could not be certain of anything, but he had a curious feeling that Laura had not had the least intention of going to Edinburgh until he had said he was going. Behind the cloud of cigarette smoke her eyes were heavy black grapes, her mouth was a slice of moist red flesh, and her sooty black hair tangled up his thought in her body. Her mother was a Hungarian of Magyar blood, and now a silence enfolded Laura like a gypsy dusk. She would not talk any more, and got up in a moment, and said good-by until Edinburgh.

  Nicholas was only an hour in Edinburgh when she called him up at his hotel and told him to take her out to dinner. They went out and dined and danced.

  She had taken a flat, and when they got back to her place she said: “Have you guessed yet why I am in Edinburgh?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are not going to play hell with everything in the usual way of an Englishman?”

  “I’m going to play hell with you in a moment. That’s all.”

  For a fortnight they got drunk on each other and stayed drunk. On the last day she said: “It’s incredible, to think this is the first time you’ve really had an affair. Do you know that every woman in my house party wanted to sleep with you?”

  “Good God!”

  “Is it any wonder!” She paused. “It’s going to take some time for me to get you out of my blood.”

  “Why get me out? I’ll get a divorce.”

  “No. I’m not made to be a wife. I’m a mistress. And I’m more moral that way, queer as it may sound.” She paused again. “Now go back to Muriel when you’re finished with the bank here, and forget about me. If there’s anything wrong with your marriage, it’s not you anyway. At least you know that.”

  “Did you do this out of charity?”

  “Don’t be a damn fool. I did it because I wanted you like hell. But all the same I’m glad you know.” For a week after she left he went around Edinburgh trying to sober up from Laura. He had done almost nothing at the bank while she had been there. They had made love at all hours of the day and night. She had, as old Jock might have put it, roasted him alive on the bed. Now he knew what the whole thing could mean. The casual episodes he had experienced had only disgusted him, and Muriel had been no improvement. But this salting of flesh and scalding of oil had actualized love as something more vital than anything in the world. This was what he had wanted from Muriel and had not got. And why the devil hadn’t he got it? All his instincts had told him the first night he met her that she had as much of it as anybody. But now his courage stimulated by Laura, his body cognizant, he began to feel confident that he could do things right with Muriel. On the night before he left Edinburgh he suddenly laughed aloud in his bedroom as he remembered old Jock’s phrase—“rip-rarin’ for a woman.”

  Now he understood the spirit and gusto of that, and, by the Lord, when he got back to Barrington, Muriel was going to understand it.

  When he got home there was a certain excitement at their meeting, and Muriel looked less constrained as she poured him tea. They talked easily by the fire, but, Nicholas felt, they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. The next thing he heard was the dressing gong for dinner, and then he knew the evening had settled down into social habit. When they had dined, they talked until eleven o’clock. By this time he felt things had gone to pieces, and, when they went up, he felt his nerves stick out all over him like pinfeathers. When he got into his pajamas and dressing gown, he knocked on her door, and when he got in, she pulled her dressing gown around her. Then he found her mouth cold after Laura’s, and he was glad when she turned out the light, lest she saw his dismay on his face. Anyway, he felt that he now knew how to make love and tried to make her body more confidential to him and to make her happy. Once he passed, and looked at her in the glow of the shaded bedside lamp, but nothing came into her eyes. It was then he realized they were not alone in the room. Mrs. Brampton was there, and with her the four hundred guests at the wedding, and they were all looking on. This was their marriage, and they had followed Muriel and him into the bedroom, and it was impossible to be natural under their eyes. They had never got away from them and, by God, they never would. Nicholas resumed his love-making, and, in the end, his frustration escaped on his tongue: “Damn it, you do nothing!”

  He felt her shrink up in the corner of the social cage, and then she made some bitter reply about him wearing gloves, that he did not understand, and he knew it was hopeless with her. During the four months’ engagement she had had time to remember all the social rules that govern English drawing rooms and then go upstairs and govern English bedrooms. When he got back into his own bedroom, he stood by the window and exclaimed aloud to himself:

  “By God, it’s as frightful as going to bed with my own sister! I suppose that’s what they call being respectable!”

  They avoided each other for four months after that, and since then it had got worse and worse. When he realized that they were not going to have any children, he felt the whole inside of his life was empty. She had gone to Harley Street, and Harley Street had said there was no physical reason, except that one of them must be barren. But always he felt that old Jock would have said: “To hell with Harley Street! There’s nothing wrong except they put no heart into it!”

  For almost five years after that, he had gone sour on women. He avoided social life almost completely, worked so hard that he used himself up that way, and had written love off his books. And then Sidonie came to the bank.

  When Miss Olden gave a month’s notice before her marriage, he had tried to get Mr. Strood’s secretary, as he felt he ought to promote somebody in the bank, but he knew, and Miss Olden confirmed it with her opinion, that Strood’s girl was hopeless as personal secretary to him. Then he had advertised, and when he got Miss Coleman’s application, that settled the matter as far as qualifications went. It astounded him that a girl with a string of Oxford scholarships and brilliant mathematical honors, holding a good job in the Foreign Office, should want the post at all. And he was still more astounded when she walked in for her interview and he found that she was a beautiful girl. But he was not Jock Bude’s son for nothing, and he went straight to the point.

  “Miss Coleman, I want a secretary I can keep. How long do you think I can keep a girl like you.”

  She said nothing that an ordinary girl would say and understood him at once. “I am not going to get married. I think that is what you mean.”

  He could not help a smile. “Why are you leaving the Foreign Office?”

  “Because I’m stuck in a pigeonhole. You know what Whitehall is.”

  “I do.” He paused. “You can work for a week with Miss Olden?”

  “Yes. I have given notice anyway.”

  “Very well. I am quite sure you will do.”

  After five days Miss Olden reported to him that in her opinion Miss Coleman could run Bude’s Bank herself, and, after a month of Miss Coleman, Nicholas had come to that conclusion himself. At first he had thought her cold and detached, but however distant she was in herself, she functioned as a part of Bude’s, and her work was as polished and immaculate as the marble stairway that curved up from the well of the bank. Sometimes he began to wonder if she were as cold and inhuman as that pale and shining marble. He had an odd feeling that when she came into the room, the air about her became chilled like the air one felt around a statue. It was not so
much, he felt, the classical beauty of her face that made him feel that, as the calm, Euclidean order in her mind. And she had a faculty of keeping things up to a pitch, and Nicholas soon began to guess that the staff feared her more than him if a mistake happened. It was nothing she might say, for she never lost her temper, but her silence isolated one as in an arctic solitude. Her black clothes were plain and elegant, her cool hands manicured, her golden hair was chaste and neat in a coil on her nape.

  Once, when she had gone out of the room to lunch, Nicholas had exclaimed to himself: “She’s so bloody perfect, something must be wrong.” He almost doubled her salary, and she thanked him in a formal way, and handled the minor matters he now began to leave to her without consulting him. Not only did she halve his work, but in some way she halved her own. He took her with him one day to a meeting with old Dorman, and that important man astounded Nicholas by sending her a basket of flowers, presenting his compliments to the most perfect secretary in London. She was a complete mystery to Nicholas, and he knew her value once and for all when she was away a week ill, and the whole damned bottom seemed to drop out of the bank. And, although she seemed so cold and passionless, Nicholas was surprised to feel all that week that he was sitting in a room where the fire had gone out. It was at this point that he noticed that, although he never saw her outside the bank, nor knew her except as an employee, she had made women dispensable to him, and he cared less and less whether he slept with Muriel or not. That gave him a shock, and he knew that he was aware of her as a woman.

  She had been almost a year with him, when, spending a week in London while Muriel was away with her family, he met Miss Coleman in the park. There was a greenish light in the sky, and although it was evening, the air had a morning freshness, for the spring rain had fallen, and the grass and the daffodils glistened with drops. She was standing by the lake, in a long green cloak, and, with her golden hair, somehow stood out of the landscape like a golden daffodil on its green stem.