The Chinese Room

by Vivian Connell

  Then a clanging awoke the house. It was the dressing gong. Anger jumped up in him. It was this bloody gong and all it symbolized that had ruined things. His life was just an empty gap between gong and gong. Whatever happened, one obeyed the gong.

  If he obeyed his impulse now and ran down and threw Muriel into the grass, in ten minutes Oxinham would be out on the steps looking for them in case the chicken got spoiled in the oven. He spat out of the window in anger. He was a millionaire, and, by Christ, he was earning his money. He was paying for it, and had paid for it, and would go on paying for it, with the whole of his life. He was Atlas, with the Bude Bank and Mrs. Brampton’s England on his back.

  TWENTY-ONE

  When Nicholas got up from the window and turned into the room, his case on the table reminded him of what he had managed to forget for the last hour or two. Now it immediately returned and occupied his mind. Once and for all, he felt, he must clear up the mystery of these letters on Monday morning. In some way, he knew, he would never get clear about the future until he got rid of this tiresome business. Now he was beginning to remember his hands again and he stuffed them into his pockets. Whoever was writing these letters was shrewd enough to know his obsession with his hands. He considered Saluby. This doctor was possibly clever enough to know that he was unsatisfied in his life and it might appeal to his macabre humor to forestall him by writing the letters himself. But how the devil could he get hold of that notepaper? So far as he knew, the only Elder Bank paper at Barrington was some in his own desk in the library, locked in the bottom drawer, which he had just kept as a curiosity. And Muriel? Why on earth should Muriel, assuming that she had got the key and taken the paper, write letters to him, even as a joke? And the wording did not seem to be the kind she would invent. Also it did not seem a joke. It worried him. He felt that somebody knew hidden destiny in his hands.

  Nicholas felt that even Elder’s curious question about the number of pages he had taken last night did not convict him. There was nobody else but Sidonie—unless, by an extraordinary fluke, the letters came from somewhere outside his circle. He had considered Sidonie, until his mind had gone round in a drunken spin. Sidonie could have got the notepaper in the bank. She had the use of his keys and enough authority to open the Records Safe herself. Yes, she could easily have got the paper. And, Nicholas shuddered a little, she had some reason to fear his hands. More than once, in a black frustration, he had squeezed them too tight on her, and once he had, when he had wrenched the rope of her hair in anger, pulled it in a kind of knot around her neck. He had been thoroughly frightened by these happenings, because his hands seemed to be acting by themselves, tormented by that terrible hunger for her that she would not satisfy. In the most violent embrace of passion, she never yielded anything but her body to him. Nicholas wiped a little sweat off his forehead. He was afraid of this business, and he did not seem to have any way of tracking it down to Sidonie, if it was she. Once he could find the sender, he knew, his fear would go.

  My God, he must have his bath and forget about it until dinner was over and he questioned Muriel in as casual a way as he could manage.

  Somehow he got it out of his mind while having his bath, and his thought returned to Muriel. When he had dried himself, he looked at himself in the long glass and thought that his body, once glossy and muscular, was now like a lump of white plasticine. There was not a gray hair on his head, and the dark shag all over his body still showed the strength and vigor which had stroked the eight home against Cambridge, and which, as Laura had said, turned the bed into a gymnasium of lust, but his muscles had gone into mere flesh, and he put his thought bluntly to himself: “By God, I’d want a month’s holiday and hard rowing before I could have anything to do with Muriel.” He realized that he had flushed in anger in the humiliation of knowing that his body had become too old for her. Like any man who has been an athlete, he had a strong physical common sense, and, once again, he remembered how old Jock would have put it: “A man who isn’t fit to go into a boat isn’t fit to go into bed!” His mind struck out at random in anger, and he blamed Muriel for the scowl on his face, and then he saw that this was a ridiculous attitude of mind and began to wonder if he could get away for a month, and then the gong went and he pulled on his clothes hastily and went down to dinner.

  All during dinner she disturbed him, and she glowed like an orchid at the end of the table. They made the usual small talk that seemed somehow nothing more than a keeping up of appearances before the servants, and he said nothing personal until they had got their coffee in the veranda room. Then he said: “You knocked over Charndale today.”

  “Oh—how?”

  “Well, I mean, the way you look.” He paused. “You look about nineteen this summer.”

  Somehow this acutely embarrassed him.

  “Oh, well, I’m getting a lot of sun.”

  “I wish I could get some.”

  “Why don’t you take a holiday, before the summer is gone?”

  “It’s not very easy now. I’m on a thing with old Dorman.”

  “Well, it’s up to yourself.”

  That seemed to mean a lot. Once again, they couldn’t seem to get anywhere. He had a very strong feeling that she was getting sex somewhere and didn’t care about him. It annoyed him, and he went over to his desk. After a moment he said: “By the way, you haven’t seen any of the Elder Bank notepaper about the house?”

  “Elder Bank paper? No. Why?”

  “Oh, I just wanted a few samples.”

  “I thought you had some. I remember you showed it to me.”

  “I don’t seem to be able to find any here. I thought you might have used it up.”

  “Good heavens, no. I’ve got our own paper. Why on earth should I use that?”

  He pretended to rummage in the drawer. “Oh, I’ve found it. I knew I had it somewhere.”

  Well, it certainly wasn’t Muriel.

  “By the way, are you still writing those letters to yourself?”

  That startled him. Was it a fluke?

  “Ahm, yes. Why did you ask that?”

  “Just curiosity.” She paused. “It seems a waste of stamps.”

  “Oh, it’s just a joke.”

  “Dr. Saluby thinks it’s a mistake.”

  “Saluby? It was he suggested it. Why?”

  “I don’t know. He thought they were beginning to worry you.”

  “What the devil made him think that?”

  “I don’t know. But I got that idea.”

  “Well, it’s nonsense. Saluby isn’t the Bible, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, have you seen him lately?”

  “I met him yesterday.”

  “I suppose Saluby hopes they are worrying me just to prove him right?”

  “Perhaps. But I didn’t get that impression when he told me you ought to stop writing them.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a silence after that, and then she got up. “Oh, are you going to bed?”

  “Yes, I’m sleepy. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He sat for ten minutes at his desk. The puzzle was worse than ever. What the devil did Saluby know? Why did she mention those letters? He breathed in the perfume she used. Everything else went out of his head. He would either have to go out for a walk or go upstairs and throw her on the bed.

  He opened the window and whistled for the dogs. My God, where the devil was he with the lot of them?

  TWENTY-TWO

  On the next Monday, as Muriel rested in her room before going over to lunch with Therese Waldenham, she felt somewhat relieved at being today her own worst enemy. In her heart she had never believed in Harley Street’s opinion that she was not meant to be a mother, and had safeguarded herself through Saluby, and therefore had been able to enjoy herself with MacGregor.

  She pictured him in his cottage by the loch
s in the Highlands. He did not have a pantechnicon of luggage rumbling at his heels, as she and Nicholas had. She had never got Nicholas away by himself from the bank and Barrington. Since their talk on the evening that Grierson had thrown the sailor out, she had guessed that Nicholas was tired of the heavy gold shackles that buckled him to old Dorman and the bank. But she wondered if he would, when they offered him a peerage, answer as old Jock had: “D’ye think I want to lift myself up by me golden bootstraps into the Lords!” Nicholas had annoyed her all the week. He was, she thought bluntly, getting old. He was letting himself get old. And he was dull. He had let himself grow dull. He seldom laughed, and laughed out of his belly only when he recalled a crusty saying of old Jocks. She felt that Nicholas was a good deal more intelligent than he knew himself and that banking was not enough to use up all his mind. And he was developing kinks. This business of writing himself letters, even as an idle experiment, was nonsensical for a grown man. She guessed that Nicholas wanted her now, but she could not give herself to him. It was his own fault. He had let his body go into putty. Soon he would have a pillion backside. The realism of sex was giving her thought a realism, and she no longer dodged away in her mind from physical considerations. When she thought about MacGregor she thought about the whole man. She was being sharpened into an impatience by the feeling that she had been tricked out of her youth. She had wanted a Byron and had been landed with a one-pip subaltern. She was now beginning to understand the implication of the way Mrs. Canjole used to say “one-pip” when she spoke of army youth.

  She looked at the clock. It was time to put on something to go and see Therese. In a few days’ time, she knew, she would have a fresh problem—to find a new lover. A lover who would somehow remind her of MacGregor or of Nick as he might have been. Her mouth hardened. It was a pity that Nicholas could not simplify his vague existence to one plain need like that. She snapped open her hygiene box. She was damned well sick of English sexual bumbledom. She nearly spoke her angry thought aloud: “What a bloody idiot I have been! My God, how Therese would laugh if she knew that I never had any real fun out of my body until I met MacGregor! What a fool I have been!”

  Therese, Muriel felt, was not quite happy as the chatelaine of Waldenham Court. This elegant Parisienne simply could not put on tweeds and become a country gentlewoman. And she did not try the impossible. She had dressed for lunch as she might in her London house, and one could know that her eye was pleased that Muriel had clad herself in such a way that she need not change for lunch in the Ritz. Muriel guessed that she was getting tired of buxom Englishwomen in brogues with a dog at their heels.

  They had gone into a small room for coffee, and Muriel noticed at once the special atmosphere of this room that was an angle of the house. One had the curious feeling of sitting outside in a green arbor, since half the floor made the lobby of the French window, and shadows of leaves seemed to rustle in the corners of the room. The books in the cabinet were dappled in gold light.

  “Oh, how lovely!” Muriel exclaimed. “You’d expect to find a bird singing in here!”

  Therese looked at her in a quick pleasure. “Oh, how funny you said that! This is called the Nightingale Room. Nobody knows why. Perhaps somebody used to sit in here and listen to the nightingale. At night you can turn off the lamp, and the room is full of stars. The birds often come in here.”

  Muriel knew that her spontaneous remark, which had jumped out of her mouth, had somehow made a friendship with Therese.

  Suddenly Therese said: “I think perhaps I can marry an Englishman, but I cannot marry his castle. So I live in this little room. You do know what I mean?”

  Muriel laughed. She knew very well. This Frenchwoman had quickly discovered that everything in England, this England of money and position, became a kind of castle in which one got lost. One was only a caretaker of a heritage, as Nicholas was a caretaker of Barrington and the bank. She rather wondered what George Waldenham was like. He must be fairly interesting to have gained a wife like Therese. Muriel was used to his photograph in the newspapers since he had got the Foreign Office post. She felt that perhaps Therese might have been happier if he had stayed at the embassy in Paris.

  Therese began to talk about herself. “London is so hot, and George becomes so tired, he thought it might be a good idea to live down here for a few months. He gets so tired with always the crisis in Europe, and he thinks also it is good for me to have a rest from London. And I am glad, because I think I am going to live with myself down here, and be alone to refresh myself with my books and my thoughts. But never am I alone. I discover the English neighbor. In London, in Paris, I do not know who lives next door, as you say. But down here the person at quinze kilo—at fifteen miles perhaps is a côte. I see all these empty fields and I think I have solitude. But no. Behind each group of trees there is a house, and in the house are people, and all these people think I wish to see them because I can see the smoke of their chimneys.” She sighed. “So I think now I cannot stand all this company in the English country, and I must go back to Grosvenor Square to find myself alone.” She made a face. “They come, the big clop-cloppety women, and they talk of nothing I can understand, and when it is time to make the excuse, they say they must go because I do not ask the dog in to call on George’s dog, and sometimes I wonder if they ever go unless the dog wait in the car. Am I being rude to your Englishwomen? I am sorry. But you are not the same. You like so much to be a woman. And they feel ashamed to be a woman, I think—I mean the women in the English country. Of course, in London, they are so different, in the superior houses of the arts and diplomacy, that I say to George I think these London women as much foreign as I am to the country England women.” Therese paused. “I suppose you live nearly all the time in London.”

  “I don’t. I live always in this country. But I do not see many neighbors.”

  “Oh, how do you manage?”

  “They got tired of me, and I got tired of them.”

  “Oh, so that is the way! And how long time does it need?”

  “Oh—years!”

  “That is what I have guessed. I feel I do not wait all that time. So I go back to London when the summer goes, pouf, in a rain shower...Oh, you think of going! Do not, please! I mean you to stay at least for tea!”

  “I’d love to stay.”

  “It is so pleasant to meet somebody...You understand...Oh...” In a calm dismay Therese watched the car coming up the avenue. Muriel knew that Therese was tempted to move out of the lobby window, but Muriel’s car waited outside, and, moreover, it was somehow ill-bred to avoid guests. Muriel thought it was a perfect Tatler picture as the car pulled up on the gravel. The woman who got out wore tweeds, of good cloth but Dorminster cut, a hat that looked as if it belonged to somebody else, and low-heeled brogue shoes. She was built like a heavyweight hunter—the kind of woman, as old Jock might have said, who could carry home the horse if he went lame. Muriel noticed for the first time that a woman of this kind did not stand on her feet, but sat on them. No other word could describe the way she was planked down on the earth. Now she was talking to the terrier in the car before she closed the window on him. Immediately she left he barked. She avoided looking toward the lobby window, but, Muriel knew, had remarked them before she got out of the car.

  “I suppose I must be at home, as you call it?” Therese said.

  “I think so. She saw us and h&s noticed my car.”

  “You can stay here. I will see her in the drawing room and come back.”

  “Yes, I think I’d like to be lazy.”

  The maid came in and said that Mrs. Henderly had called and was in the drawing room. Was madame at home?

  “Yes. I will come. If I ask for tea, bring two cups. Madame Bude remains here.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “If you want anything, please ring the bell,” said Therese to Muriel.

  When she had gone out, Muriel listened to the barking of the dog that somehow put her mind on edge. For two years, until sh
e realized that the wife of Nicholas Bude could be distant, or rude if necessary, Muriel had endured this dawdling social bumbledom of English country life. At that stage she discovered that she liked really fashionable clothes, and discarded Knightsbridge tailoring and parochial hunting society at the same time. But she was punctilious about medical and clerical society, and the doctor and the parson felt they could drop in at Barrington at any time or call upon the Bude money for anything charitable. The Saluby affair was unfortunate, but she was going to ask him to dinner in spite of that. But now, as the barking of the dog irked her ears, she wondered what on earth right this frumpish wife of some obscure country gentleman had to come in here and unload the clods in her mind onto the carpet of the Waldenham drawing room as a carter might unload turnips in the yard. This greenwood Frau was not doing it out of friendship or sincerity, but simply because she wanted to prove her social position by calling on Lady Waldenham. Looking out on the great sweep of lawn, Muriel began to feel that English social life was a Ruritanian show of which the libretto was the social page of The Times.

  Often, watching a play in London which showed this kind of life, she had a dreamlike feeling that she was looking at something as old and vanished as the court of Versailles. It was hard to believe that this was a contemporary world, and she had noticed that many petulant Chelsea young men wrote notices of plays and novels which showed this life, and referred to them as period pieces which portrayed a world that was as dead as Queen Anne. Sometimes Muriel wondered if these young men considered that their own parish of a few thousand people comprised contemporary England. Period piece or no, this was contemporary England nearly halfway through the twentieth century, and it did not seem to Muriel that it got one anywhere if you pretended it was not there. The young men might own Chelsea, but Mrs. Henderly owned England. The social page of The Times was Mrs. Henderly’s bible as it had been Mrs. Brampton’s. There it was, every day, as actual as this lawn in front of your eyes, and somewhere stuck away in a corner of that voluminous journal was an item about Chelsea, and somewhere else, nicely cleaned and polished up in tranquil prose, some news about those distant lands, India, and the slums, and tomorrow India and the slums would be gone out of the corners, but the social page would be there to chronicle inch by inch and name by name and lawn by lawn the history of England.