For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  After lounging round the flat for two hours and perhaps only making querulous remarks, he would put on his greasy and torn raincoat and go out into the dirty fog, and dirty streets, to an ill-kept suburban home; all the same, he left his casual sorcery behind him and in a short time, they both, Teresa and Quick, drew rapidly near to him, as driftwood is sucked in by waters rushing downwards round a hidden reef. His easily delighted spirit he allowed freedom in this fumy den of the world, by bursts of irresponsibility. He had loved much, and he always loved; he knew now that the beginning of every love affair had the same heat and hope, whatever the end, and that no one can tell what is in a love affair until he is well tangled in it, so he gave himself without any forethought to any woman that give him pleasure.

  The second time he was at the Quicks’, when Quick went to the telephone, he leaned across the table and said in a hasty, low voice: “I never had any luck, I should have waited—” and he looked at her as if he had known her a long time, as if they were old friends. At once the young woman felt this too. Quick came back from the telephone and no more was said; there was only a pleasant and easy smile. Harry was over six feet, broad, and with shapely limbs. Now he began to glow with the soft, intermittent and still veiled fire which was the beginning of an affair to him, and when he stood in the doorway once more, in his sooty and greasy coat, smiling down at them and left them, striding away with his tired, languorous vigour, he left his presence with them, they were impregnated with him, and it seemed to both of them that he was their closest friend, one so constituted that everything was understood by all three of them without any words at all. When he spoke, his words rang true; if he lied, it was no lie, it was a convention; if he was trite, it was no triteness, but whimsy, and so forth. He bred love upon them, they came closer to the burning heart of life. They both loved him. Quick said when he left the second time: “Girton is like someone we know very well,” and when she next looked in the mirror, she called out in surprise: “Like me!” and she, thinking it over, declared: “You and Girton are blood-brothers in the mind!” and he said: “No doubt of it, I always feel it.”

  Girton’s hurried and subdued remarks, the receptive and happy mood she was in and the mysterious resemblance swept her into a whirlwind of that confused joy which any man might cause and which precedes, but is not love. She had felt in her heart for some time, emptied of the old need and ambition, an unemployment and dryness which startled her. It was her secret. “This is not right, life is love,” she said to herself. She thought this might be marriage, and if so, marriage itself was arid, for this end of all striving and even lusting in love was wrong and not the part of any mature, joyful, human being. It was no good struggling for mere tranquillity and the death of the heart. Thus she reasoned with herself, as in a delicate, irresistible way the image and ways of Girton began to lure her, growing on her in her sleep. She dreamed of him, and presently day-dreamed of him, and, differently from any other man till then, it was of his body that she dreamed; its secret nakedness become robed in incomparable, ever-flowing, ever-born, shadowy loves and nameless pleasures, as yet without form, but not without scent and touching the secret knowledge of the body.

  He looked at her and a storm of the uplands blew round her ears, she reeled and felt half-mad with love, and kept thinking to herself: “It comes again, it does not die with marriage, it is not over once for all.” All the time she loved Quick, and the three were closely knit all the time. Now she really felt a woman. Girton smiled long at her with his splendid oval blue eyes, lying back in his chair, and letting the fertility of his mind and flesh flow towards them. He was keen, and each knew what process was going on.

  She now knew a bounding ecstatic gaiety she had not felt since her early girlhood, in the stern pride of sixteen. The golden young man called up in her mind, when she was thinking of him, an endless succession of light images, golden days, golden globes within which she lived in the murk of London. There were flashes of light, a day which was always dawning, and her feet lightly touched on the shores of a smooth sea, and such feelings of childhood, these visions which come to a child lying on its back under the sun in the grass, and blazing pictures of long half-wooded slopes down which they ran, and the running down, the slipping away of cool winds on a naked shoulder, the full glassy tide spilling over a swimmer sweetly writhing through it, all the exquisite sensations of healthy youth came to her mind when she thought of Harry; through him she began to live the sunburnt, wind-blown, nonchalant days of singing in the grass which had never yet been; she felt her flesh running into his and clinging to him, as if they had never been sundered and as if this and all life would go on in this glory for ever, as if no years would ever pass over their heads and as if, at the same time, children were springing endlessly from his and her loins. There was honey in his thighs and new-pressed unfermented wine in all of him; and, mad with love, she sucked them both into her eyes, only then understanding love of man. For the long and bitter time, the time of her imprisonment, she had steeled herself too much against misfortune; she had never dared to hope or be glad, in fear of failure; and it was only now that she was able slowly to relinquish her fierce grip on life, to relish the abandon of the senses.

  It was a long time before he came to see them again. He came with Manette, who was always known as his wife, the swarthy woman who hated them all, an ugly savage woman of fire. This woman, coming in at the door, stopped, turned to wood, when she saw Teresa, and then sullenly she slouched in without a word, threw off her outdoor clothes and said nothing for an hour, and nothing during the whole afternoon except what was biting. It was she, clairvoyant, too experienced, who left them, Harry and Teresa, with the feeling that day, that a love affair between them was at hand. Neither sought it, all waited for it, tremulously, as for the buds on the earliest tree when the air begins to swim.

  Manette was a volcanic, savage, cold and melancholy woman who could have been satisfied by no civilized or metropolitan man. She had dashed herself from affair to affair in a brutal Bohemia and at the age of thirty-eight had drifted into a permanent house-holding with an easy-going fellow, who never intended to marry because of the “covetousness of marriage”. He had stuck to her because of her primitive force. She could always force him, in the last resort, by her deep, broken, anguished voice, her yells and the horrors of her soul which she put into words, to quell and terrify him. How many times had she threatened to commit suicide, and to murder, with such wild looks, with staring eyes, loosened hair, glabrous cheek, black shouting mouth and the stormy throwing about of her thickset powerful body; he had never the heart to oppose her. Fiercely brooding, she walked down the streets, hideous, swart, untamed, insulting; she did her shopping, with a few gleams of unctuous friendship between her week-long glooms, she did the work asked of her in her office; and with torrents of recrimination, scandal, hatred and self-pity she won herself friends against Harry. A partner has only to be betrayed once in order to understand for ever which way his mate’s fancies are turning. Thus Mrs Girton, at the first glance, saw the secret, animal understanding between them, of which they were as yet scarcely conscious. She saw, when she spent an hour with them, the flashed smiles, glances, silences between the two, heard the accord in the sentiments that they uttered separately. She had no interest in life now (she was forty-eight) but to keep her husband by this detection.

  No sooner had the door closed upon Manette and Harry Girton, than Manette fearlessly threw herself upon him. In a squalling voice, she accused him of new philandering and threatened to write at once to his office, and to James Quick to lay bare their intrigue. It was so convenient, said she, so near to the centre of London, and James Quick was away all day while Teresa was at home, typing out manuscripts at so much a page and without any time-limit—it was even likely that Teresa had chosen that address in order to be near the route of Harry Girton’s pursuits. He had had a mistress in the Temple and one in Covent Garden! All this was not by accident.

  Harry
Girton at once answered in the casual, offended tone which she knew meant innocence and threatened to leave her if she harried him. This reduced her. She wept aloud in the street and when she got to their home, she threw herself on the sofa in a fit of the sullens which lasted till midnight. At midnight, the man could stand this horror no longer and, getting on his knees beside her, told her he had never betrayed her, that she imagined all her miseries and that they could be happy if she only would. “But you need these fits of passion in order to love me, to feel you have snatched me back from the world, isn’t it so?” She admitted that it was; but in the next breath asked how often he had seen Teresa Quick and how often alone. To this he replied: “Never alone, and only twice before, when not a word was exchanged.” They were reconciled, but these reconciliations no longer quieted Manette nor were anything but a dull miserableness for Harry. The next day she began to pester him again. He trusted her instinct. He knew that she would not be so jealous of a woman unless she scented a real pleasure for him there. His expectancy, therefore, turned towards Quick’s young woman, but in an unenterprising, debonair way, for he intended to give no sign if she gave none. She wanted him and would tell him when she was ready, he thought. As time went on (the time was short) she seemed to him more timid and less experienced. One day she gave him a book of poems to read with one page marked; it was about a love affair in the violent noonday heat. It was a tour de force which brought up the feelings of a maddening heat and dizzied the senses. He kept this book for some time.

  From time to time, he came to see the husband, discussed things with him, the Spanish Civil War and the feeble efforts, or none, being made by governments of democratic countries to help the struggling Spanish government. Everyone stood aside, or covertly helped the aggressor exactly as England had done in the American Civil War. On the other hand, the true working classes in most countries sympathized with the democratic government then endangered and later unseated by force of arms.

  Sympathizers of various countries were then fighting in Spain, while the only armed forces that had been sent officially were sent by the fascist governments to help the rebels. Girton and others were going round from door to door explaining the real meaning of the word “Loyalist”, for this had been wantonly misinterpreted by the British Tory press. Harry Girton had intended before this to strike out along a new route into Inner Mongolia, but he now wished as soon as possible to go into Spain and fight with the International Brigade. He had duties at home, but in a week or two he would be able to get his passport and start abroad. In these anxious days, for him, he had often to be in the City and called almost every afternoon at No. 10 Crane Court, to speak to Quick, for whom he had formed a moderate but sincere affection; and there to meet, occasionally, men of his views as well as Fleet Street journalists of all kinds, to discuss the news with Quick and perhaps to write a book with him, for Quick always had ideas and Harry always needed money. He ate poorly because his wages were poor, but he liked good eating, he liked the old-fashioned fare of England which is still found in some counties, the rich pies and pasties, the great cuts of meat and smoking gravies, the roasts, baked fish and large puddings. It was convenient, when he was worn out and weak, to drop in there for a meal and rest there an hour or two in one of their deep armchairs. He would sit there, his long legs stretched across the little carpet, his eyes shaded, his pale yellowish flesh, which should have been fair and ruddy, drooping.

  The first time that he found her alone, the young woman was nervous and defiant. Sitting facing her, petulant, uneasy, at the moment when he roused himself and began to speak, she received a violent impression of his virility and physical beauty. The perception of beauty is always a shock, the rest of the visible world fades for a fraction of a minute and the beautiful thing stands there alone in space, in more than lively contours; this was the way she saw Harry Girton that day. She saw then that she was falling in love with him. Adultery! Ugly word—but his beauty carried her off into love’s Age of Fable: where no such words have ever been heard. His languorous movements and gentle voice, the way his voice twitched into another register, thin and irritable, the change of accents, began to float in the air round her ears; she heard, felt and saw him, smelled him. He had at all times odours coming either from his plump blond flesh or from his greasy coat and old books, or from his thick hair.

  Several times after that she went out when he came. Returning too early after a third evasion, she saw him blocking the end of the passage, and his half-smile. This completed the work of weeks. However, she could not help remembering—the words clanged in her ears—the words that James Quick had often repeated since they had lived together and more often said in the rhapsodies of their first days together: “We are united by love only, you are not mine, though I am yours, and if you want another lover, you shall have him as well as me.” How had she advanced in a few months from the idea that no one would love her to the assurance that she could control two men? She thought this, she moved slowly towards it, yet, at the same time, she had not even exchanged a significant word with Girton and fled from the notion of hurting Quick.

  One day, about three months after what Quick called their marriage, Quick was obliged to make one of his trips to Antwerp and to leave Teresa at home. At once, a new sort of friends swarmed into the small flat, to air their opinions in a new way. In closely knit circles, the friends are jealous of each other and watch each other closely. But a pack instinct made them all turn to attack Girton whenever he was not there. Hot, filthy words flew from side to side about him. “He is unreliable! He lies! He swills all night! He lives in grease and likes to eat it! They never clean the bath! All day they lie in dirty bedclothes and fornicate and make an unholy row! How he slouches and slobbers! His pants are torn, he never has a collar clean! He has had a hundred flames and though she yells, she’s justified! He goes down on his knees and cleans the floor of the house, but the house always reeks of filth and I have seen cockroaches there, where the crumbs fall on the bedroom floor!” What extraordinary tales the jealous, bitter and gay fantasies of these friends of Girton flung out. Eagerly Teresa listened, saying not a word, until before her silence they became silent; and when they were silent, she was disappointed, hungry for more words about the living, maddening, fertile man who excited them all to this wild frenzy. The wilder their insults, the happier she was; she enjoyed the hot unexpressed anger they gave her, and she enjoyed Girton in all these scenes of licence, in all this low rake’s progress which was his life.

  He stayed away. They went on backbiting. Once she saw him striding wearily up St James’s Street. He was all about town, wearing the trench-coat that the poor Londoner wears summer and winter, a discoloured drab felt hat which he crushed under his arm, a dirty muffler and brown boots. Five days after Quick left, he turned up at the flat, and found her alone. She was dressed all in black linen. “I was just going out.”

  “Well, I won’t come in,” he murmured.

  “Oh, I want you to come in.”

  “I’ll sit down for ten minutes, I’ve been walking all the morning.”

  “Do you like port? I have some. It looks black as tar, too, look at it.”

  “I like port, all right,” he said humorously, setting down his things neatly, and flinging himself in the same deep chair. She brought the bottle and two glasses. “I didn’t have time to read the poems, just one or two,” he said. “I’ve got five or six books promised to publishers and not one written. That’s how I live, on advances.” He laughed sadly. They drank two glasses of port each before he said reluctantly: “Well, I must be getting on. I’m getting off to France tomorrow.”

  “Ah?” she said guardedly. “You’ve got a lot to do then? Well, go then—but have another glass.” He smiled and took it reluctantly. “I never drink in the middle of the day.”

  “Well, after this go and have some lunch.” He said nothing, raising the glass and looking at its mantle. She explained that they got it from across the street. Since they wer
e just inside Temple Bar, the vintners had special regulations, that is, that applied to the City, and also had cheaper and better port and sherry than elsewhere in London. They sold from the barrel, so that the wineries resembled somewhat the wineshops in Spain. In the back room, all the young lawyers and well-known Fleet Street men met at about four or five in the afternoon. Also in the street were famous taverns with a few specialities, pasties, old ale and the like, with benches arranged round the room, or in pews; and each corner, each seat in fact, was ornamented with the names of the dead. Above the pews in the “Cock” were several men in wigs and robes who resembled Harry Girton, they equally, though better developed, having his puffy drooping cheeks and the pear-shaped paunch, which he, poor man, would never be able to mature. He did his best with a little round corporation based on occasional advances from publishers and which slowly disappeared as these were expended. Harry and Manette both worked, their rent was low and neither was charitable; but the cost of living and of going on low binges with Harry’s friends ate into their small cash. They had no large debts and got nothing on “easy payments”, but a trip to the dentist, a doctor’s bill, set them back for a six-month. They were, simply, very poor. Teresa would have liked to have gone out to eat with Harry at one of the taverns which she and Quick frequented and she knew that Harry would let her pay for him. They sat there, thinking of food. He was hungry. She thought: “If I were a man I would be as seedy and hungry as he, that’s honesty.”