She pushed it into my hands. I unwrapped it. In the middle of the plate there was a naïvely drawn Chinaman and his wife; two children between them. A remote echo; peasants traveling steerage, the swell, the night wind.
“Supposing I break it.”
“I think you should get used to handling fragile objects.”
She made the double-meaning very plain. I looked down at the plate again, the small inky-blue figures.
“That’s really why I asked to meet you.”
Our eyes met; she gently mocked by embarrassment.
“Shall we go and have our tea?”
“Well,” she said, “why you really asked to meet me.”
We had found a table in the corner.
“Alison.”
The waitress brought the tea things. Those teas at Bourani; I wonder if she had chosen that on purpose as well.
“I told you.” Her eyes rose to meet mine. “It depends on her.”
“And on you.”
“No. Not in the least on me.”
“Is she in London?”
“I have promised her not to tell you where she is.”
“Look, Mrs. Seitas, I think—” but I swallowed what I was going to say. I watched her pour the tea; not otherwise helping me. “What the hell does she want? What am I supposed to do?”
“Is that too strong?” I shook my head impatiently at the cup she passed.
Her eyes weighed mine. She seemed to decide to say nothing; then changed her mind. “My dear, I never take anger at its face value.”
I wanted to shrug off that “my dear” as I had wanted to shake off her hands the week before; but she placed it with a faultless precision of tone. It was condescending, but its condescension was justified, a statement of the difference between our two experiences of life; and there was something discreetly maternal in it, a reminder to me that if I rebelled against her judgment, I rebelled against my own immaturity; if against her urbanity, against my own lack of it.
I looked down.
“I’m not prepared to wait much longer.”
“Then she will be well rid of you.”
I drank some of the tea. She began calmly to spread honey over her toast.
I said, “My name is Nicholas.” Her hands were arrested, her eyes probed mine. I went on, “Is that the right votive offering?”
“If it is made sincerely.”
“As sincerely as your offer of help was the other day.”
She went on with her toast. “Did you go to Somerset House?”
“Yes.”
She put down her knife.
“Wait as long as Alison makes you wait. I do not think it will be very long. But I can’t do anything to bring her to you. Now it is simply between you and her. I hope, I hope very much that she will forgive you. But I shouldn’t be too sure that she will. You still have to gain her back.”
“There’s gaining back to be done on both sides.”
“Perhaps. That is for the two of you to settle.” She stared a moment longer at me, then looked down with a smile. “The god-game is ended.”
“The what?”
“The god-game.” Her eyes were on mine again; at their gentlest.
“The god-game.”
“Because there are no gods. And it is not a game.”
She began to eat her toast, as if to bring us back to normal. I looked past her at the busy, banal tearoom. The discreet chink of cutlery on china; sounds as commonplace as sparrows’ voices.
“Is that what you call it?”
She said, “I’m not going to talk about it, but yes… that is, well, a kind of nickname we use.”
She went on demurely eating.
I said, “If I had any self-respect left, I’d get up and walk out.”
Her eyes crinkled. “Please don’t. I’m counting on you to get me a taxi in a minute. We’ve been doing Benjie’s school shopping today.”
“I can’t see Demeter in a department store.”
“No? I think she would have liked them. Even the gaberdine mackintoshes and gym shoes.”
“And does she like questions? About the past?”
“That depends on the questions.”
“The things Maurice told me—the First World War, the count with the château, Norway—were they in any way true?”
“What is truth?”
“Did they happen?”
“Does it matter if they did not?”
“Yes. To me.”
“Then it would be unkind of me to tell you.”
She looked down at her hands, aware of my impatience. “Maurice once said to me—when I had just asked him a question rather like yours—he said, An answer is always a form of death.”
There was something in her face. It was not implacable; but in some way impermeable.
“I think questions are a form of life.”
“You’ve heard of John Leverrier?”
I said cautiously, “Yes. Of course.”
“I think he must know far more about Maurice than you do. Do you know why?” I shook my head. “Because he never tried to know more.”
I traced patterns with the cake fork on the tablecloth; determined to seem guarded, unconvinced.
“What happened to you that first year?”
“The desire to help him through following years.” She was smiling again, but she went on. “I will tell you that it all began one weekend, not even that, one long night of talking… perhaps it was no more than that we were bored. I think historically bored—as one was in the entre-deux-guerres. Certain leaps were taken. Certain gaps bridged. I imagine—don’t you?—all new discoveries happen like that. Very suddenly. And then you spend years trying to work them out to their limits.”
For a time we sat in silence. Then she spoke again.
“For us, Nicholas, our success is never certain. You have entered our secret. And now you are a radioactive substance. We hope to keep you stable. But we are not sure.” She smiled. “Someone… rather in your position… once said to me that I was like a pool. He wanted to throw a stone into me. But I am not so calm in these situations as I may look.”
“I think you handle them very intelligently.”
“Touché.” She bowed her head. Then she said, “Next week I’m going away—as I do every autumn when the children are off my hands. I shan’t be hiding, but just doing what I do every September.”
“You’ll be with Maurice?”
“Yes.”
Something curiously like an apology lingered in the air; as if she knew the strange twinge of jealousy I felt and could not pretend that it was not justified; that whatever richness of relationship and shared experience I suspected, existed.
She looked at her watch. “Oh dear. I’m so sorry. But Gunnel and Benjie will be waiting for me at King’s Cross. Those lovely cakes…”
They lay in their repulsive polychrome splendor, untouched.
“I think one pays for the pleasure of not eating them.”
She grimaced agreement, and I beckoned to the waitress for the bill. While we were waiting she said, “One thing I wanted to tell you is that in the last three years Maurice has had two serious heart attacks. So there may not even be… a next year.”
“Yes. He told me.”
“And you did not believe him?”
“No.”
“Do you believe me?”
I answered obliquely. “Nothing you said could make me believe that if he died there would not be another year.”
She took her gloves. “Why do you say that?”
I smiled at her; her own smile. No other answer.
She nearly spoke, then chose silence. I remembered that phrase I had had to use of Lily: out of role. Her mother’s eyes, and Lily’s through them; the labyrinth; privileges bestowed and privileges rejected; a truce.
* * *
A minute later we were going down the corridor towards the entrance. Two men came down it towards us. They were about to pass when the one on the left ga
ve a kind of gasp. Lily de Seitas stopped and threw her arms back; she too was caught completely by surprise. He was in a dark-blue suit with a bow tie, a mane of prematurely white hair, a voluble, fleshy mouth in a florid face. She turned quickly.
“Nicholas—would you excuse me—and get me that taxi?”
He had the face of a man, a distinguished man, suddenly become a boy again, rather comically melted by this evidently unexpected meeting into a green remembering. I made a convenient show of excessive politeness to some other people heading for the tearoom, which allowed me to hang back a moment to hear what the two might say. Lily de Seitas said nothing, but he spoke.
“My dear Lily… my dearest girl…” and he couldn’t say any more. He was holding both her hands, drawing her aside, and she was smiling, that strange smile of hers, like Ceres returned to the barren land. I had to go on, but I turned again at the end of the corridor. The man he was with, a department curator or something, had walked on and was waiting by the tearoom door. The two of them stood there. I could see the tender creases round his eyes; and still she smiled, accepting homage.
There were no taxis about and I waited by the curb. I wondered if it had been the “someone quite famous” in the sedan; but I did not recognize him. Or some last trick, a professional adoration. His eyes had been for her only, as if the business he had been on shriveled into nothingness at the sight of that face.
She came out hurriedly a minute or two later.
“Can I give you a lift?”
She was not going to make any comment. Either it was arranged, or it had been by chance but was now being used by her, as her daughters used clouds that crossed the sun and casual strollers down a road; and something about her hermetic expression made it, yet once again, infuriatingly, seem vulgar to be curious. She was not good-mannered, but expert with good manners; used them like an engineer, to shift the coarse bulk of me where she wanted.
“No thanks, I’m going to Chelsea.” I wasn’t; but I wanted to be free of her.
I watched her covertly for a moment, then I said, “I used to think of a story with your daughter, and I think of it even more with you.” She smiled, a little uncertainly. “It’s probably not true, but it’s about Marie Antoinette and a butcher. The butcher led a mob into the palace at Versailles. He had a cleaver in his hand and he was shouting that he was going to cut Marie Antoinette’s throat. The mob killed the guards and the butcher forced the door of the royal apartments. At last he rushed into her bedroom. She was alone. Standing by a window. There was no one else there. The butcher with a cleaver in his hand and the queen.”
“What happened?”
I caught sight of a taxi going in the wrong direction and waved to the driver to turn.
“He fell on his knees and burst into tears.”
She was silent a moment.
“Poor butcher.”
“I believe that’s exactly what Marie Antoinette said.”
She watched the taxi turn.
“Doesn’t everything depend on the tone of voice? And who was the butcher crying for?”
I looked away from her intelligent eyes. “No. I don’t think so.”
The taxi drew up beside the curb. She hesitated as I opened the door.
“Are you sure?”
“I was born on the butcher’s side.”
She watched me for a moment, then gave up, or remembered.
“Your plate.” She handed it to me from her basket.
“I’ll try not to break it.”
“It carries my good wishes.”
“Thank you for both.” We sounded formal; she had set herself on the queen’s side; or perhaps, truer to her role, and sunt lacrimae rerum, on no side.
“And remember. Alison is not a present. She has to be paid for. And convinced that you have the money to pay.”
I acquiesced, to make her go. She took my hand, but kept it and made me lean forward, first to my surprise to kiss me on the cheek, then to whisper something in my ear. I saw a passing workman look disapprovingly at us: the bloody enemy, striking our effete poses inside the Petit Trianon of the English class system. She stood back a moment, pressed my arm as if to drive home what she had whispered, then stepped quickly inside the taxi. She gave me one look through the window, still the look of the whispered words. Our eyes met through the glass. The taxi moved, the head receded.
I gazed after it until it disappeared out of sight past Brompton Oratory; without tears, but just, I imagined, as that poor devil of a butcher must have stared down at the Aubusson carpet.
76
And so I waited.
It seemed sadistic, this last wasteland of days. It was as if Conchis, with Alison’s connivance, proceeded by some outmoded Victorian dietetic morality—one couldn’t have more jam, the sweetness of events, until one ate a lot more bread, the dry stodge of time. But I was long past philosophizing. The next weeks consisted of a long struggle between my growing—not diminishing—impatience and the manner of life I took up to dull it. Almost every night I contrived to pass through Russell Square, rather in the way, I suppose, that the sailors’ wives and black-eyed Susans would, more out of boredom than hope, haunt the quays in sailing days. But my ship never showed a light. Two or three times I went out to Much Hadham, at night, but the darkness of Dinsford House was as complete as the darkness in Russell Square. For the rest, I spent hours in cinemas, hours reading books, mainly rubbish, because all I required of a book during that period was that it kept my mind drugged. I used to drive all through the night to places I did not want to go to—to Oxford, to Brighton, to Bath. These long drives calmed me, as if I was doing something constructive by racing hard through the night; scorching through sleeping towns, always turning back in the small hours and driving exhausted into London in the dawn; then sleeping till four or five in the afternoon.
It was not only my boredom that needed calming; well before my meetings with Lily de Seitas I had had another problem.
I spent many of my waking hours in Soho or Chelsea; and they are not the areas where the chaste fiancé goes—unless he is burning to test his chastity. There were dragons enough in the forest, from the larded old bags in the doorways of Creek Street to the equally pickupable but more appetizing “models” and demi-debs of the King’s Road. Every so often I would see a girl who would excite me sexually. I began by repressing the very idea; then frankly admitted it. If I resolutely backed out of, or looked away from, promising situations, it was for a variety of reasons; and reasons generally more selfish than noble. I wanted to show them—if they had eyes present to be shown, and I could never be sure that they hadn’t—that I could live without affaires; and less consciously I wanted to show myself the same thing. I also wanted to be able to face Alison with the knowledge that I had been faithful to her, though I partly wanted this knowledge as a weapon, an added lash to the cat—if the cat had to be used.
The truth was that the recurrent new feeling I had for Alison had nothing to do with sex. Perhaps it had something to do with my alienation from England and the English, my specieslessness, my sense of exile; but it seemed to me that I could have slept with a different girl every night, and still have gone on wanting to see Alison just as much. I wanted something else from her now—and what it was only she could give me. That was the distinction. Anyone could give me sex. But only she could give me this other situation.
I couldn’t call it love, because I saw it as something experimental, depending, even before the experiment proper began, on factors like the degree of her contrition, the fullness of her confession, the extent to which she could convince me that she still loved me; that her love had caused her betrayal. And then I felt towards the experiment proper some of the mixed fascination and repulsion one feels for an intelligent religion; I knew there “must be something” in it, but I as surely knew that I was not the religious type. Besides, the logical conclusion of this more clearly seen distinction between love and sex was certainly not an invitation to enter a world o
f fidelity; and in one sense Mrs. de Seitas had been preaching to the converted in all that she had said—about a clean surgical abscission of what went on in the loins from what went on in the heart.
Yet something very deep in me revolted. I could swallow her theory, but it lay queasily on my stomach. It flouted something deeper than convention and received ideas.
It flouted an innate sense that I ought to find all I needed in Alison and that if I failed to do so, then something more than morality or sensuality was involved; something I couldn’t define, but which was both biological and metaphysical; to do with evolution and with death. Perhaps Lily de Seitas looked forward to a sexual morality for the twenty-first century; but something was missing, some vital safeguard; and I suspected I saw to the twenty-second.
Easy to think such things; but harder to live them, in the meanwhile still twentieth century. Our instincts emerge so much more nakedly, our emotions and wills veer so much more quickly, than ever before. A young Victorian of my age would have thought nothing of waiting fifty months, let alone fifty days, for his beloved; and of never permitting a single unchaste thought to sully his mind, let alone an act his body. I could get up in a young Victorian mood; but by midday, with a pretty girl standing beside me in a bookshop, I might easily find myself praying to the God I did not believe in that she wouldn’t turn and smile at me.
Then one evening in Bayswater a girl did smile; she didn’t have to turn. It was in an espresso bar, and I had spent most of my meal watching her talking opposite with a friend; her bare arms, her promising breasts. She looked Italian; black-haired, doe-eyed. Her friend went off, and the girl sat back and gave me a very direct, though perfectly nice, smile. She wasn’t a tart; she was just saying, If you want to start talking, come on.
I got clumsily to my feet, and spent an embarrassing minute waiting at the entrance for the waitress to come and take my money. My shameful retreat was partly inspired by paranoia. The girl and her friend had come in after me, and had sat at a table where I couldn’t help watching them. It was absurd. I began to feel that every girl who crossed my path was hired to torment and test me; I started checking through the window before I went in to coffee bars and restaurants, to see if I could get a corner free of sight and sound of the dreadful creatures. My behavior became increasingly clownish; and I grew angrier and angrier with the circumstances that made it so. Then Jojo came.
The Magus Page 65
