She felt an immense cool exhilaration. I should be safe then, she thought.
Before he came she had rehearsed a dozen times the words she would use. He came in — and scattered them to right and left simply by walking across the room to the chair he always took, and dropping into it with an air of relief and weariness. Harriet looked at him. As always, he was beautifully turned-out.
‘Are you tired? Will you have tea or sherry?’
‘Sherry. Thanks. You’re the only woman I know who really likes the driest dry sherry.’
Flattered, she said, ‘What has tired you?’
‘Oh, I’ve been talking all day to the chaps I want to raise money for me for the Conference. Rather like swimming in warm oil.’
She laughed and said with the recklessness that had done her so much harm in her life, ‘I disapprove of your schemes.’
Gregory raised his eyebrows. ‘Why?’
‘This terrible idea of an immense monstrous über-alles council of artists and writers and the rest. Why must we be regimented and paraded in committees? I detest it. It’s part of the illness of our time. We can’t leave the individual alone. Sit here, go there, take this purse and go to Rome, to Portugal, give us your opinion on life, on death, on freedom. The committee, the State, is damnably everything and the single human being nothing. As if people can be numbered into happiness, as if happiness were anything more than a mind and senses able to feel, or than a fine day, or a friend coming in — like this. As if you can ever make people happy except by leaving them alone.’
Gregory decided to smile. ‘For an intelligent woman you’re quite the most naive person I know. The fact is, Harriet, you’re an anarchist. I have the greatest respect for your judgement on books and none at all for your politics. Which are silly, and would be dangerous if you did anything about it. Fortunately, you don’t.’
She was afraid — as always — to persist. I do the same idiotic thing over and over again, she thought with despair. In a burst of imprudence I tell the truth; it gives horrible offence; I can’t unsay it, I can only realise, once more, that I’m unfit for company.
In a kind voice Gregory said, ‘How is your new book going? I saw that it had been published.’
‘Last week. I sent you a copy. Don’t talk about it. I know you don’t read novels.’ In any event, not mine.
‘I began yours…. You know, my dear girl, your books lack — what is it? — warmth. No, no, I don’t mean that you write with a knife — though you do. I mean that you give the impression of being sorry for people without liking them. And that’s fatal.’
‘Did you get all that out of the first two pages?’ Harriet said, smiling.
It was a familiar pain, this contemptuous dismissal by him of — the mental jeer was familiar, too — of her latest masterly failure. He had no wish to be contemptuous, no slightest inkling that he was. And she would have let herself bleed to death rather than give away how much his indifference, his complete and completely unconscious egoism, hurt her.
‘Ten. I read ten.’
‘Oh.’ She refilled his glass and her own. ‘Tell me about your own book. The one you work on when you’re not planning your colossal Conference. You said — did you mean it? — that it was about death. Really about death?’
‘Why not? I’m fifty.’
‘My age. Need we think about death — yet?’
Gregory looked at her. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Life is absurdly too short. I should like to have lived in every country in the world, and — if it weren’t ridiculous to make a fuss — be buried in warm dry thymy soil in France. I remember hearing — in New York of all places — a story about a priest — or was it a monk? — who was promised as a reward for his saintly life that he could take one memory with him when he died. He spent days and nights sorting through them, and discovered that none, neither the most joyful nor the most trivial, can be torn out of the life that bred it — and life is that which dies. So all is vowed to oblivion. All. That’s why death is the theme, and why the great books are all of them monuments to death — Proust, War and Peace. Like all art. Each time you squeeze a moment of existence into words, it dies — words are the very symbol of death. They bring life face to face with death, they bring the taste of death into life, the reality of death into the mind, thus proving — among other things — that life is incomplete without death.’
As always when he was trying out on her, in his deep voice — staccato, and by turns cutting or warm — a paragraph he had just been writing, she was torn between admiration and a furious inner mockery of his eloquence. The woman she had become distrusted eloquence. Reality, she thought, is too sharp, too hard, too complex, too inconceivably slippery and delicate to be paid off with splendid words. He dupes himself with words…. In a quiet moved voice she said aloud,
‘It will be a superb book.’
‘I hope I can do it,’ he said simply.
One of the sentences she had rehearsed — Gregory, if at any time you need at Rutley House someone who can write grammatically on a given subject, I wish you’d employ me — leaped to the front of her mind. She felt herself grow hot. Was this the moment? Why the devil, she asked herself bitterly, did I make fun of his scheme? My damned tongue…. She sidestepped quickly.
‘Tell me, why didn’t you take a knighthood? Yes, yes, I know, you said these things are irrelevant, but you must have had a stronger reason than that.’
He hesitated, smiled. ‘Yes. I can tell you, Harriet. You’re the only person in the world I can tell. I didn’t think it was enough.’
‘Oh. What would you——?’
He said calmly, ‘I’d like the O.M. Failing that, a barony. There are precedents. Tennyson…’
She was startled almost out of her fear of offending him. Almost. Not quite. She had never dared offend his vanity. The instant it showed itself — behind his kindness, his enjoyment of sensual beauty, his formidable imagination — she rushed to flatter it. Like a silly woman in love, she thought. No, like a lackey…. Why? Only God knew why she did it. There was something, to her, horrible, like a face flayed of its skin, in the spectacle of a vanity in action. She was forced to bend her spine before it — in order not to see it.
‘Yes, of course you’re right,’ she said. ‘And you’ll certainly get it.’
‘It’s anything but certain.’
‘The O.M. is certain.’
‘I’d much rather have that than a title.’
Is that true? she wondered…. Again she tried to scrape up courage to speak her piece about a job. She hesitated; held back by shame, by the fear of boring him. Before she had brushed past these, Gregory had begun speaking again, with a half-smiling air of conspiracy.
‘I’m going to tell you a secret, Harriet. I’m telling you because I want someone to know. Someone else, I mean, than the chaps concerned — who won’t tell. Ten years ago — in 1946 — I was asked if I’d like to go as our Ambassador to… no, I won’t tell you where, but it was important. I refused.’
‘Gregory, why?’
‘Oh, various reasons. The decisive one — I couldn’t take it, or any honour, from a socialist government.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I should have had to give up the Institute, too. Another good reason.’
Was either of them, she wondered swiftly, his real reason for refusing? Or — this was something she understood from the inside — had he secretly been relieved to be able to make a superb gesture of abnegation and integrity which let him off a test? A really frightful test, one that he might, for all his talents, have bungled.
‘Who went in your place?’
‘I forget. A chap — I’d never heard of him in my life — from one of the universities.’
‘You must be the only writer who ever refused such an honour.’
‘No.’ He looked at her with the gleam of self-mockery which sprang in him often enough to take the grosser edge off his vanity. ‘Chateaubriand did.’
&
nbsp; ‘Have you ever regretted it?’
‘Not for a single moment.’
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said gravely, ‘for trusting me with the secret.’
He gave her a sweet smile. ‘My dear Harriet, you and Lambert Corry are my oldest closest friends. I trust both of you — completely.’
‘You can trust me—’ she began. How far? To like, admire, respect, flatter, fear — and forgive your arrogance, indifference to me, vainglory…. She felt ashamed of herself. He was so naively incapable of guessing that the impression he made on her was never quite the one he believed he was making. Let’s hope, my dearest, she thought, that your other close friend is less… treacherous.
Gregory stood up. ‘I must go. You know we’re leaving on Thursday? I’ve wrung some extra currency — or, rather, my banker has — out of whoever the chaps are who hold the end of our leash, and we shall be away for four or five weeks. We’re going to drive down through France, to a hotel on the coast — splendidly isolated. Not very far from Nice. I shall be able to work all day and every day — no Institute, no friends, nothing. And Beatrice can bathe. It’s said to do her arthritis good.’
‘Arthritis? I thought she had sciatica?’
‘The sciatica is a temporary indulgence, the arthritis is permanent,’ he said lightly. ‘We’ll come back through Switzerland. I don’t care for Switzerland — too neat — but Beatrice insists on dragging me there to look at Einsiedeln.’
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What is it?’
‘A Benedictine monastery, with a Gothic Virgin. Black and famous.’
Harriet felt bitter envy. ‘The only thing in the world I want is to travel.’
‘Why don’t you?’ he asked.
She did not answer. He hasn’t always been rich, she thought: if it doesn’t occur to him that any travelling I do costs me as much in anxiety — dare I spend the money? — as it gives me pleasure, I can’t tell him. Gregory was fumbling in a pocket for something. Is he, she thought wildly, going to offer me the price of a ticket? Pulling out a thin very new crocodile-skin case he opened it and showed her that all it held was a letter.
‘Look at that, Harriet.’
She looked. Three or four hand-written lines on a sheet of notably good writing-paper. A signature more famous than that of royalty. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.
‘I wrote asking him to open the Conference. I didn’t expect to get an answer, the most I hoped for was an official acceptance, or refusal, but he wrote this in his own hand. Agreeing, too.’
‘Why are you carrying it about?’
‘Because I’m nearly as pleased with it as if I’d been given the O.M.’ He smiled at himself with only the lightest most kindly irony.
Harriet was not wanting in reverence: she had to keep back tears before any village war memorial, with its banal line of verse and its few but too many names, each hiding the ghost of a young man who if he had lived would never have been heard of. But this handling as if it were a sacred relic of a commonplace letter from a great man struck her as silly to the last degree of fatuity. Trusting that he would take the quiver of laughter in her voice for another emotion she said,
‘It’s a marvellous thing to possess. What are you going to do with it?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said briefly.
Does he regret not having a child? she wondered. Probably not. Or only as he would regret a crack in one of his precious vases.
‘Give Beatrice my love,’ she said awkwardly. The awkwardness, the note of falsity, sprang in her conviction that Gregory’s wife knew all about the shifts she was put to to live…. Which does she despise more, my broken finger-nails or what she calls my feeble irreligion? Which is nothing but a total inability to believe in what I can’t see or feel.
Gregory put both hands on her shoulders and kissed her gently. ‘Take care of yourself, my dear child.’
For a minute after he had gone, she stood like a child in front of a fire, pleased and consoled by the warmth. He’s really fond of me, she thought, with an absurd happiness.
Her happiness faded quickly, nipped by a familiar habit of looking at herself, coldly, from the outside…. How did I behave? Obviously, like a buffoon, with the utmost imprudence. Imagine, she said to herself, you want him to give you a job, and so you mock the Conference on which at the moment he is pinning his hopes of glory. Was there ever such a fool!… She felt something between amusement and despair. There is something exhilarating in ruining one’s chances with a single indiscreet speech.
Chapter Six
For many years now Gregory Mott’s journeys abroad had followed a pattern which had obliterated completely his first, as a moneyless young man, when France, her often shabby villages, her tall flat shuttered houses, her cafés du Centre and du Commerce with their faded awnings and rust-speckled tables had been less places than moods, his own, of excitement, curiosity, pleasure. Now he and his wife chose a hotel which provided two things, the most delicate comfort and a fine view: they reached it by a train de luxe, and Gregory, a table set in front of the view, wrote. He wrote all day. Why take the trouble to go to France? Because as well as a comfortable cell (with a view) he got sun, clear hot skies, and the illusion of living in a foreign country: he never questioned his need to travel luxuriously, any more than he questioned his need to drink wine, buy all the books he coveted, and be on good (reverent, intelligent) terms with God (or ‘the spiritual principle in the universe’)…. The pattern had been changed this year for the sole reason that he needed to look at two places he had never seen: one of them was Aries — he meant to make use of the Aliscamps and its tombs in his novel: they were the right thing for a book with death as its theme.
He tried hard to persuade Beatrice to travel by train. It was waste of breath — she insisted on coming with him. Vexed, he hid his boredom from her, and arranged the journey in short easy stages, for her sake.
The day they landed in France was warm, with the bright sun and thick shadows he loved: during the following days, as they drove south, this soothing tranquil warmth turned into a heat fiercer and more oppressive than he had ever known in France in September. It advanced on them like a wild beast. At night, lying naked, he slept badly. Beatrice, who had a capacity for stillness which continually surprised him in her, endured the days better than he did. In any case, she was not driving, and could close her eyes against a glare that worked its way under his eyelids like thorns. It was impossible to keep tolerably cool in the car. On the fourth day, when they were driving to Albi, he had to stop every twenty or thirty miles because the blood pounding in his temples made him giddy. He began to wonder a little whether he were ill. To the north of Albi, the bare flatly sculptured hills gave him a brief illusion of coolness, ivory, grey-green, white, the brown of certain fungi, pale bone-yellow, with farmhouses of pinkish brick or sun-yellowed plaster separated from one another by miles of dry soil, a skin stretched across delicate bones. But it was only illusion. In the early evening when they reached Albi, he was exhausted.
The hotel could give them only one bedroom. They took it with reluctance — it was many years since they had shared a room — because to look farther in this heat seemed impossible. Beatrice lay down on one of its two vast lumpy beds, to wait for dinner. Too restless to stay with her, Gregory went out, and walked through airless streets to the cathedral. It confronted him suddenly, an immense fortress-church of rose-red brick, threatening, pierced by loop-holes: inside, where he expected coolness and austerity, it was hot with colour, blue, gold, and a red more violent than either. One of the saints in the famous ambulatory reminded him sharply of Harriet — the same air of withdrawn sensuality contradicted by the candour of a young child in the glance under lowered eyelids…. Still in search of coolness, he left and went into the archbishop’s palace, another red-walled fortress, used as a museum and filled with paintings by Lautrec: he got nothing whatever from them, beyond an impression of feverish un-happiness, and he was coming away when, at a great height on the s
taircase, he stopped to glance through a slit of window and saw, with the shock of a vision, an Albi of jostling roofs and bridges, faded a dull crimson by the sun, and cut through by a dark clay-red river, the colour of blood. It was hallucinating. As though the blood of all the thousands of heretics done violently to death here in the thirteenth century were running again from the severed veins, discolouring the water, and seeping into roofs and walls.
When he was taking his jacket off in the bedroom it fell on the floor, and the leather case in which he kept Churchill’s letter dropped out. Vexed, he picked it up. ‘I didn’t know I’d brought that away with me.’
Beatrice laughed. ‘Didn’t you mean to bring it?’
‘No. I meant to lock it away in my desk.’
‘Why not keep it in the bank?’ she said drily.
He disliked being caught by her behaving in a sentimental way. He said irritably, ‘I like to have it.’
‘How childish. Do you keep locks of hair, too? Let me put it in the flap of my dressing-case.’ She stretched her hand out.
‘No,’ he said, smiling. ‘I don’t trust anyone with it but myself.’
The heat next day was extraordinary. There was no direct sun: a sky the colour of white spongy flesh gave off a stifling warmth from all over. Gregory drove with sweat running into his eyes and across his hands on the wheel. His wife complained a good deal, but he had begun to find this heat — not pleasant, certainly — rather curiously exciting. His eyes ached and a ball of blood pressed against the back of his head, but his body felt light, detached from him, as though he were experiencing it, and the wave of fever rising and dropping again in it, from the outside. They reached Aries late in the afternoon, and Beatrice said,
‘Wait ten minutes, long enough for me to bathe my eyes, and I’ll come with you to look at the Aliscamps. It’s the only thing on our way I must see.’
A shock of anger passed through him, entirely unreasonable: the last thing he wanted was to support a tired complaining woman through this heat to look at something he had counted on seeing alone.
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