For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  He put down the glass, his third, and he saw with surprise that she poured herself a fourth. All the same, there was no sign of its having affected her. The telephone rang, she answered it and said: “Nigel Fippenny is coming over in five minutes to have a cup of tea. This is Fleet Street time, that means an hour and a half.”

  “I’m blowing,” said Harry. “I have an idea he doesn’t like me.” He grinned slyly. Fippenny loved both Quicks and he suspected, with the penetration of jealousy, that the Quicks thought better of Girton’s brains than of his own; he lost no opening for his brash Irishman’s sallies and acid stories against Girton’s politics.

  “No, he doesn’t like you.”

  “He looks like one of your irritable Orangemen, I.R.A. or not,” said Girton pacifically.

  She poured out another glass of wine for them both. Girton, who had been about to go, watched her in surprise and said nothing. He guessed she had a secret to tell him, perhaps that she was in love with him. He knew, like all charming men, that women have no hesitation in saying when they love, and he smiled tenderly to bring out the mood that was most admirable to him in the sex, the gallant and frank mood, that is a proof of love.

  “Some more port?”

  “If you like!” He watched her intently and a velvety shadow moved round his sensual mouth. She knew what he expected of her, because he had said it two or three times. “In the Soviet Union, a girl who loved a man would tell him so,” but because he knew already, she would not say it. She did not care to talk about love at all, it was enough that there had been a covert declaration between them.

  Nigel Fippenny came earlier than he was expected, he came twenty-five minutes after he had telephoned, and at once flung himself down in the second arm-chair, throwing his black “revolutionary” hat, old-style, on the bed in the alcove. He stretched, got out a cigar, offered one to Harry Girton, who refused it, and made a cynical comment on the aid of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. This was a sore point with Nigel, since he had flourished his guerrilla campaigns against the British since 1916 and now could not give up the comforts of a Fleet Street salary, “thelegraphin’ thripe to the Colonies and Dominions”, to fight on the side of liberty. To excuse his sell-out, he invented a whole argument, heartily detested Harry Girton, an Englishman—therefore an “oppressor”—who nevertheless was going out to fight with the International Brigade. He opined that “Yu will never get out there and if yu dhu, yu will sit in a hotel in Madrid with all the other-r Mar-rxists and let me tell yu I can’t thole the arm-chair Mar-rxist, Len’n, that I knu in Moscow in 1921 was no ar-rm-chair-r Mar-rxist”, and so on. To this Harry Girton returned civil answers, or silence.

  The two men made up their minds to sit each other out. However, the untrimmed Nigel, who had sold out to the British Empire, became sharp about Mar-rxists who “sell out” to various entities, including the “par-rty”, and gave vent to a pious wish that Britain would fight with Hitler rather than with Stal’n, an ambitious bureaucrat, with whom Len’n would have nothing to do, so that Harry Girton got up, picked up his things and said he had to get on his way. He never argued foolishly.

  Teresa left the water on the gas-stove, saying to Nigel: “Your tea is nearly ready,” and accompanied Harry to the door, meanwhile laughing at Nigel’s parting shot, some insult to the Marxists. Then, asking Harry what he wanted to take away to Spain with him that she could give him next day, she went with him to the street door and into Crane Court. It was only three-thirty but night had fallen. The light dropped between the half-drawn curtains from the flat above and on to the asphalt, a yard or two beyond them. There were three steps down. She stood on the second step and held out her hand.

  “You’re going tomorrow,” she said in a muffled voice.

  “Yes.” He took her hand. She clasped it in both hers and looked down at him. He smiled faintly and stood still. After a moment, she said wildly: “Harry, I’ll go with you.”

  “Where?”

  “To Spain.”

  “Yes?” He waited, looking up at her and holding her hand still. When he withdrew his hand he still looked up, but gravely. She came down the steps, with her hand on his arm, and they turned down the court. At the mouth of the court, under the thick arch, she said: “Good-bye.”

  He bent down and kissed her, saying: “Good-bye.”

  “This isn’t Spain, is it?”

  He looked down silently. “I’ll come back,” he said at last. She was suffocated.

  “Wait for me till I come back,” he said.

  She came slowly up the court, scarcely able to walk. She thought: “If he comes back, I’ll never see him, there was never anything like this.” But when she got into the flat, she had a shining face, so that Nigel jealously noticed it.

  “Yu look all excited! How’s that?”

  “Excited? Why should I be?”

  “Maybe because James is coming back,” he said sarcastically. In the kitchen, as she made his “tay”, she began to sing the “Wedding March”.

  “Are yu going to get married?” he shouted.

  “Am I?”

  “Are yu singing for joy?”

  “Good Heavens!” She appeared holding the breakfast cup of tea. “For joy! No, Jimmy is not coming yet.” He took the cup and smiled under his lids as he blew at the steam. “A good cup of tay. I thought yu were singing for joy, maybe”, and he said no more.

  40

  “Today Put on Perfection”

  When James Quick came back from Antwerp she told him that “the boys” had been at the flat almost every day and that still she had finished the typing job. Quick inquired who they were and what they had said and seemed broken-hearted that Harry Girton had gone to Spain before he could say good-bye to him. “But you said good-bye to him?”

  “No. That is, hardly. I never have presence of mind.”

  She wanted now to go back to the office to help Quick as his secretary, but Quick had employed a young man secretary already, not to make Teresa anxious, as he said, smiling: “And Axelrode agrees with me, since the secretary is always the office wife, as you know, and cannot help being.” And he told Teresa she could employ herself at home.

  “I want to know that you are there waiting for me and that when I get home you will rush to the door as you do.”

  She was flattered, but she thought instantly: “It’s the surest way to lose me.” When Quick came home the same day she told him she could never live in a back street and wait for him—“What is every waiting wife but a back-street wife? No, I won’t be that. I’ll go and be someone else’s secretary, and then—you know, you said before—a kept woman, your kept woman, yours especially, I could not be.”

  “Why not mine especially?” he said.

  “Because I adore you.”

  He was radiant he but did not understand. He said: “Very well, but we must think out something for you to do. What would you like to do?” He was astonished that within three months this woman, whom he had pictured to himself as furiously passionate and to whom marriage would be heaven, should already be dull and discontented. As soon as she mentioned even the vaguest confusion in reasons for her discontent he became unhappy and said that he “had not satisfied her”, and he told her hundreds of queer stories, part of the legend of the male, both obscene and innocent, in which a woman satisfied, slept, became languid, lazy and fat. She remembered in literature, too, a dozen passages where “the satyrs ran off into the wood while the nymphs slept by the banks of the fountain”. For herself, she knew that the satisfaction of this great desire only made her more restless and energetic than before.

  Quick loved Teresa deeply; what was clumsy and harsh in her he put down to her hard life, to Jonathan Crow’s deceptions, and to her naïveté, when he felt irritated. If, sometimes, he wondered if he had not acted precipitately, in taking her to live with him at once before he had tested the strength of their union, at other times he found a great joy and glory in his absolute abandonment of which he
was so capable. It was because of this great self-abandonment that he did not understand her. It was not only her own training but her age, for she was young in experience, which made her different from him. The youthful give themselves up with difficulty. When a husband or wife is a little older a sort of reticence persists. They owe these elders more reverence and at the same time they feel that it is not wrong to conceal their feelings. How can the generations meet in youth, even in the same sex?

  Quick thought that her restlessness was something that would pass away when she had accustomed herself to married life, but he was not an obstinate, self-centred, or opinionated man. When he came back and saw by her silence that his wife’s friendship with Harry Girton, with all its peculiarities, had developed during his absence, he asked himself: “Have I merely got her on the rebound? Is she about to love truly another man? Am I, with my possessive passion, standing in the way of happiness? I would never do that, whatever the pain—well, we must see it through. If she loves Girton and not me, if her restlessness ceases through him, I must give her up; it is better to do it now than when we are better used to each other.” For restlessness in a woman, to him, by tradition, was wrong. He was very relieved to find that Girton had already gone abroad. This put off the question of their love till he returned and by then—it was far off.

  But the Monday after Quick’s return, about three in the afternoon, the door-bell rang and Girton appeared, to say good-bye to Quick. His departure had been delayed ten days. In the meantime he intended to go to the Midlands to see his family, from whom he had been separated many times in the past twenty-five years. He came in, sat down, and began to talk in an undertone, desultorily, to Teresa. That afternoon Quick came home early, at three-thirty, and so it was for five days, Girton each day putting off his visit to his home, and Quick each day coming home earlier. On the Friday he was at home again at eleven in the morning—there was nothing to do in the office, he said, and Axelrode off to Antwerp. During this week, when the men so mysteriously met each other, the desire for an hour alone became intense in the two lovers. They were only in love, perhaps, when Quick was there. Girton and Teresa, or so it seemed to them, only asked an hour in which to thrash out the whole matter. Nothing compared with the need to know, to hear the binding words; for the sexual act is also committed between strangers and people who hate each other, and it is the mystic words, “I love you, we love each other” which bind for life, and each waited for these words to drop. Quick, of course, plainly saw the tension between the two and could imagine only that they had a secret understanding. At last, on Friday, Girton said: “I must leave by tomorrow morning’s train to see my people in Birmingham. I keep putting it off—I leave at ten-thirty from Paddington”, and Teresa said: “That’s funny, my people, cousins and a great-aunt, live at Leamington, that’s on the same line, isn’t it? At least from Paddington, that’s where they told me to get the train——”

  Quick said hastily: “Yes, Tess, why don’t you go and see them for a day or two? It will change the scene for you before you start another job. You know, she wants to get a job, although I don’t want her to——”He said miserably: “I am not enough for her.”

  “Why not?” said Girton. “Teresa looks like work to me, she’d make a good commissar.”

  “For what?” said she, beaming.

  “For push-carts,” laughed Quick.

  “Not for care of the home,” said Girton lazily. Teresa frowned. Why this? Quick said: “Tess, why don’t you go up to see your Aunt Lobelia or what-is-it, for a day or two? Say I can’t go along but give her an account of your luxury flat, show my picture, all the rest, so that she’ll write home and say all is in order.”

  “No need for that.”

  “But still, Tess, go.”

  “If you insist, all right.”

  “And Harry here can go along with you, it’ll be company for you part of the way.”

  She said nothing.

  “Do you want to come, Tess?” asked Harry.

  “Well—but what for, after all?”

  “Yes, go, Tess,” insisted Quick. “You’ll go to Leamington, stay a day or two or three and come back to me, and see whether you like me better then.”

  “What?” cried Teresa, flushing. “Like you better? How could I like you better?” She frowned.

  The men began to talk of Spain and local fascists. She got out some sewing and, sitting on a hassock, bent her head over it. She raised her head once to see the blond young man who was stretched out at full length in the arm-chair, as usual, staring at her. She could scarcely believe it. She lowered her head again and paid no more attention to the conversation, but at the end, Quick said: “Well, Tess, are you going with Harry on Saturday?”

  She straightened up, put down her sewing. “Is it Saturday?”

  “Yes, in the morning,” said Harry.

  She looked with confusion from one to the other. “Do you think I ought to?”

  “Yes,” said Quick heartily. “Why not? You’ll get a chance to talk to Harry, he’s going away—perhaps you have some things to talk over with him. He can chaperon you to Leamington—or why not get off at Oxford and take a look around? Harry knows Oxford pretty well, don’t you?” and he laughed. He kept chattering gaily and questioning Girton who himself with warmth kept up the conversation. He told about what Oxford was like and the rest, occasionally turning to Teresa whose ears were burning. The meaning of this chatter was that the men were offering and counter-offering her love to each other, as a proof of their love for each other. She wanted to burst into tears and to go away and let them languish after her, “let them amuse each other”. In the end, she rather sulkily agreed to meet Harry in the morning and to go in the train with him as far as Leamington only. Meanwhile, Quick was all good nature, saying he would get the ticket, send a telegram to “the great-aunt Minnie, not Lobelia”, and of course, he knew she would have to traipse round the shops for half a day getting presents (for Teresa did not dare enter anywhere without propitiatory presents), and the like, and he sent Girton off with hearty handclasps, saying that he was going to get him several things before he went to Spain and that he was, or would ever be, the dearest and closest friend he ever had.

  On Saturday, a bright, windy day with a fixed cloudy sky above and earth-clouds sailing near, Quick got Teresa packed in a great hurry, took her to the station early, bought her a small hamper and something to drink in the train, counted her money several times and added to it each time with a few coins out of his pocket, took all her packages, including her gloves, so that she would have nothing to carry and gave her infinite instructions. The train time drew near and Quick gaily opined that Harry, who was always one hour and twenty minutes late, by the clock, would miss the train. However, Girton turned up ten minutes before, swinging his satchel into which, this time, he had packed a few things.

  His wife came with him, hanging on to his arm, and with her thick, pasty face quiet and cheerful. She seemed very surprised to see the Quicks and when she learned that the woman was was travelling alone, she turned ghastly pale and her face was convulsed.

  “Did you know you were going to meet?” she asked Teresa.

  Harry Girton made no sign, stood casually by; Quick coughed politely. Teresa, however, replied innocently: “Of course. I was going to see my great-aunt at Leamington and Jim thought I should go by the same train as Harry”, and she pointed at Girton. “You didn’t tell me,” said Manette, turning wildly to her husband. “It’s very funny, no doubt. Is it an escapade that you conceal it? What does her husband think of that?” and she turned furiously to Quick: “What do you think of that? Concealing it from me, I call it peculiar. I know what I call it. And do you allow that sort of thing?”

  “Why not?” asked Quick bluffly. “What crime is there in going to Leamington?”

  “It isn’t going to Leamington they have in mind,” she said bitterly, “but a week-end somewhere—where is it?” She turned to her husband. “Where are you going wit
h that woman?”

  Harry Girton looked calmly at Teresa all this time and he now made a gesture as if to ask would she get into the train.

  “Are you going?” howled Manette, in astonishment. Teresa looked curiously from her husband to Girton. Manette turned and flung herself upon Quick’s left arm, which he was holding across his waist, clutching the button of his raincoat. She looked up into his face, and the two onlookers, faintly disturbed but calm, because they had their train-tickets perhaps, noticed with surprise that there was a certain resemblance between the swarthy and shallow faces now staring at each other; there was the irregularly impasted flesh around high flat cheek-bones and long-shaped shadows in the cheeks, the deep lines, flesh round the mouth, short noses, long lips, and cleft chins. Apart, they were utterly unlike, except for the colouring; Quick was prognathous and Manette had wide, semi-circular, meeting jaws; Quick’s hair was smooth, short and receding, and Manette’s hair tendrilly, low-growing and stiff. Quick had the sad, friendly, round but soft eyes of a fine Chinese while Manette had the iron-bound brow and sullen sunken eyes of some ancient forest race, human but stupid and brooding, shaken by forgotten pangs. But the resemblance was there. Teresa without speaking turned to Harry Girton, who was observing her. Anyone would have had the same thought. Girton thought: “By what curiosity of fate—” She thought: “Really, I am a fatal woman, I travel thirteen thousand miles to meet the same mate that Girton picked up somewhere in the marshes of the Thames.” She said without thinking: “Where do you come from, Manette?”

  Manette drew back and stared at her. Her pleading with Quick, which she had carried on in her usual dramatic style, had not moved either of the two fair people looking at each other and she had heard the silence behind her. As for Quick, she saw that he was obedient to this woman and would bring her no aid. Her husband, whom she loved hopelessly, now said lightly: “Well, all aboard”, and saying “Bye-bye” to his wife, shaking Quick’s hand and pushing Teresa up before him, he sprang on the train. Manette was in despair. Was it inexorable that these two should travel together? She turned to Quick, to gabble at him the dozen infamies which were known about Harry to everyone (by her own mouth) when the train began to move. Quick paid no attention to her, except to say unconsciously: “Yes, Mrs Girton, yes, Mrs Girton”, but was running along the slowly moving car looking anxiously for his woman, his face shining bluish-white in the station light, his splendid large dark eyes wide open, in a circle of white, like two wood mushrooms turned upside down. Manette could look at these eyes, the colour of her own, but melting and handsomer, and see what they were; her defeat, her denial. She wrung her hands, seeing him running now after the running train and waving. When he came back towards her, his coat flying open, his handkerchief in his hand, a smile and tears on his face, she nearly collapsed.