‘Very well.’
He waited, standing in his room and trying to reason himself into a decent temper. To his relief, after less than ten minutes she came in, a handkerchief wet with eau-de-Cologne held to her cheek, and said,
‘No, I can’t come, it’s too hot, I’m too tired.’
‘Go and lie down, my dear,’ he said. ‘I’ll go alone.’
She gave him one of her sharp mocking glances. ‘You’d much rather. All right, go.’
Downstairs, he asked the way of a clerk and set off, so happy to have got off alone that he walked rapidly, almost without noticing the heat, until he reached the Aliscamps. It was horrible. The double line of tombs foundering in the thick dust of the road, the blistering yellow light which pressed him down as he walked, so that he had the greatest difficulty in remaining upright and could not look to either side without having to make an effort to move his eyeballs — all horrible. At the end there was a very small church, into which he went, and came out again at once: it was empty except for a few dilapidated tombs, with a crypt which exhaled a frightful sour breath of decay and futility, a sickening futility; he had the impression that everything here was corruption, the stones, the torrid air, the dust, a corruption that was at work in him, too. This was death, not as an idea, not as anything it was permissible to turn into words: a hiccup, a viscosity, an absence more nauseating than any imaginable touch….
During the quarter of an hour it took him to get back to the hotel, he was able to push the impression to the back of his mind. Beatrice wanted, of course, to be told about the Aliscamps. ‘It’s been overrated,’ he said easily. ‘The tombs are defaced and unimpressive, not worth the cost of dragging oneself there in this heat.’ As he said it, he had a mocking and uneasy sense that he had said something… unlucky. He chased it away, mortified to catch himself behaving like an old woman.
He had another atrocious night.
The next day should have been their last on the road — their rooms at the hotel on the coast were reserved from that evening. At midday they were in Aix. After the interminable quiver of heat on the road from Aries, starting a few feet ahead of the car and stretching to the horizon, the sight of the Cours Mirabeau, its fountains, its great trees arching overhead to turn the whole wide avenue into a green tunnel, decided them to eat lunch there. Gregory chose a small restaurant, shabby, friendly, but not cool. The noise from the avenue was head-splitting. Afterwards, Beatrice insisted on walking about the streets behind the Cours, through handsome decaying little squares, each with its shabby fountain, its black spiral of flies and smell of drains. Before long her head was aching, she felt faint, and at last, red in the face as a cock, said,
‘We’d do better to spend tonight here. You’re tired.’
‘Not too tired to drive on,’ he said.
She looked at him with an exasperated smile. ‘Can’t you see that I’m making excuses for myself?’
He helped her back to the car, and drove to a hotel on the edge of Aix. It turned out to be uncommonly pleasant. Beatrice went at once to lie down in a shuttered room, and he, if he had had any sense, would have done the same: instead, with half a day before him, he got the manuscript of his novel out of the book-box in the back of the car, and began to read the chapters he had already written. As he read he told himself: This is no good. His fingers itched to tear it up. The itch spread to the whole of his body, until he was shaking with impatience and irritability. He jumped up and walked about the room, came back to the manuscript, crossed out a page, then another, and another. He was behaving, he knew it, like a fool. He could no longer see to read the lines. A muscle twitching in his eyelids worried him, and he thought that in spite of the murderous heat he would be better off outside. He went out, and for two or three hours walked about the streets in a state as near frenzy as anyone can be in and remain sane. There are fountains everywhere in Aix, old, dilapidated, charming, and that day they were throwing out a poison as corrosive as the heat and dust. He felt trapped. He had a horrible feeling of impotence, the walls of the trap were suffocatingly close, yet out of reach. It had nothing to do with Aix, nothing, even, to do with his wretched book, though that too pressed on his mind as one more symptom of failure. I’m being sucked dry, he thought, by this mania for turning everything into words; my life has been drier and poorer than that of any of these men sitting at café tables, men with sallow skins and black lively greedy eyes, who get more pleasure out of making a little money, cheating each other, drinking, sleeping with a woman, even, I daresay, out of dying at the end of a life which has given them at least the sensual satisfactions they wanted, than I do out of so cleverly and endlessly and drily verbalising my life…. A furious impatience boiled in the pit of his stomach. Too late, he thought, it is too late.
Towards six o’clock, he found himself again in the Cours Mirabeau. He stumbled with fatigue. The fear of falling, or the inquisitive glances of two women who had been watching him walk towards them, gave him back his legs. Almost lucidly he thought: What’s going on, what’s happening to me? Obviously I’m ill, or I’m going to be ill…. But in fact what he felt was less weakness, bodily weakness, than a strange feeling of — he groped for the word — disintegration. Uncertainty. A sense of his control going, of something in his body unwinding, more and more feverishly.
He forced himself to think slowly and clearly. Tomorrow, in the hotel, I’ll take my temperature and if, as it must be, it’s up, I’ll see a doctor — there must be an English doctor in Nice — and let him tell me what kind of fever I have.
To his intense annoyance he found Beatrice sitting in his room. She had wakened, dressed herself for dinner, and knocked on his door. Getting no answer she thought he had fallen asleep, and came in to warn him of the time. He had to tell himself to thank her for this kindness. Hoping she would go back to her room, he shut himself in the bathroom. She waited. Her sleep had refreshed her and she wanted to talk. She talked — almost gaily. Her voice scraped backwards and forwards across the inside of his skull like a fingernail — the same cool high-pitched voice which had intoxicated him by its worldly inflections the first time he heard it, in Emily Grosmont’s drawing-room. It had summed up for him the assurance, the certainties of her world, as did her dress, her manner, the fineness of her bones and her skin. Looking at her now, he felt a distaste that was almost repulsion for this same skin, covered with the mauve powder she used to hide a crop of fine veins like threads of bluish-red silk. But this very repulsion made him ashamed. She has done so much for me: even now, he thought drily, there is nothing she would refuse to do: if I asked her to pay my debts — supposing I ever ran into debt — or give up the London house and live poorly somewhere, she would do it without any feeling that she was making a sacrifice.
With one of his flashes of self-mockery, he thought: And I shouldn’t feel that she was making one, either.
‘How is your headache?’ he asked.
‘Gone.’ She gave him a sharp glance. ‘You look as though your own head were aching. Is it?’
‘No.’
‘Your eyes are very inflamed. Look at them.’
It embarrassed him to examine himself in the glass while she watched him from behind. Her head appeared for a moment above his shoulder, poked forward, thin beak ready to strike. As he stared at his eyes, an incongruous thought jumped into his mind: Am I really finished? Is my life, my life as a sensuous human being, over already? At fifty?… As often, his wife was able to read half of what he was thinking: she saw a certain way below the surface, she knew when he was lying to her, or exasperated by her, or indifferent: what she seldom detected was the reason, the — let’s say the truth.
‘My poor Gregory,’ she said thinly, ‘how sad for you to be married to a tired old woman. Why did you do it?’
He turned, driving out of sight the impatience he felt at having to deal — now — with her mockery. He knew that it was not entirely mockery. It no less bored him.
‘Since we are the same
age,’ he said, smiling.
‘That’s not even true. I’m three years older in fact, and twenty in health, energy, mind. You must often wish I would die of one of my diseases.’
‘Don’t be foolish,’ he said gently. ‘You know I need you. Which may be a selfish way to put it, but it happens to be true.’
‘You need someone to run your house, see that your guests are fed, and that the servants do their work without disturbing you.’ She smiled, turning down the corners of her mouth. ‘Anyone could do it. Harriet Ellis.’
‘Must you talk nonsense, my dear girl?’
‘No, you wouldn’t marry Harriet. She wouldn’t devote herself. You need devotion. A woman who was deaf and blind, but able to look after you competently would do. You provide your own… interests.’
He laughed. His hands were shaking, with irritation or fever, or both. Following her down the stairs, he kept them in his pocket. A really good claret, he thought; and as much cognac afterwards as I can take. Better she should think I’m a little drunk.
The night, in his comfortable bedroom, was the worst he had ever spent. He had opened the shutters, but the only air that came in was warm and brought with it a smell he couldn’t identify but it was unpleasant and acrid. His dreams, at first vaguely to do with the Aliscamps — he was lying face downwards in the dust, stifled by its foul smell — became lascivious, but horribly, without pleasure, an exhausting nightmare from which he woke covered with sweat, with a dry mouth, and eyeballs that moved only with pain.
He thought: I can’t go on.
But once on the road beyond Aix he felt an access of energy. For one thing it was a little cooler, with a light, very light current of air from the distant Alps: now and then a whiff of resin or thyme from the naked corroded country to the left of the road. For the first time, too, he noticed the olives, trees it is impossible to look at without feeling, at least for the moment, tranquil and full of good-will.
The hotel, when they reached it in the evening, was all he had expected. They were given a suite on the first floor at the front, facing the sea, two immense bedrooms separated by an equally large bathroom and an inner corridor: the floor and walls of the bathroom were greyish marble, and each bedroom had its own wide enclosed balcony, with an awning. In the relief of arriving, anything would have contented him. But after he had sat in a chair for an hour, half dozing, conscious the whole time of a light breeze, of the sea below the balcony, moving very gently, so that scales of light slid over and under each other like the breathing skin of a fish, he became enough himself to wish he were here alone. Not, he knew, that Beatrice would disturb him when he was working — she never did that. But Beatrice in London, with her charities, her dressmaker, her Anglo-Catholic Fathers, the women friends she abused and needed, was one thing, and a Beatrice with nothing to do except probe his mind for the unkind disloyal thoughts she imagined — with a little reason sometimes — to be there, or cauterise his vanity, or take him down a peg, was quite another…. But is there anyone I want here in her place? he thought. No one. Not a soul…. He got up and went out on to the balcony, feeling weak and heavy, with less strength in his limbs than a starved dog. I am a long way from starving, he thought, with a smile of self-derision. For all his fatigue, his feverish weakness and uncertainty, he had eaten during the journey more than usual. Drunk more, too.
In the morning he woke from a long dreamless sleep, completely recovered. He was cool, he had no fever. He ordered his coffee brought to him in his room, and took it to the balcony. A little wind lifted the awning and a ray of sunlight struck across it from the side. In this early sun the wide stretch of water gave him a sense of release, satisfying and exciting. He had never felt happier. He heard his wife’s breakfast being taken to her along the inner corridor, and after a minute went in and asked her if she had slept.
She told him, ‘No. Scarcely at all. I never sleep the first night, it takes me time to get used to the noise the sea makes.’
‘Does it?’ he said, surprised.
‘Of course. At night. Don’t you hear it?’
‘Yes. But you forget — I lived with it for more than twenty years.’
‘Are you going to like it here?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Work. I’ve had a table carried on to the balcony. It may be too hot later to write outside, but I’ll give it a chance.’
‘I see.’
He turned to go away. ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’
‘Oh—’ her voice came out at its most piercing and un-amiable — ‘I shan’t ask you to give me any of your time. I’m not dear Harriet, I can’t flatter you or talk to you about your work.’
He felt able to deal with her tongue. ‘Why should you?’ he said easily. ‘That kind of thing is no help.’
‘What does help you?’ she asked.
He caught an inflection of grief, and said, ‘To be alone here with you — and working.’
She was silent for a moment. ‘Yes. Yes. All right — go.’
In his room, he thought: Extraordinary how well I feel. I must have had a touch of the sun. Probably the day we were driving to Albi…. He felt pleased that he had not given in to his weakness, but had fought and beaten it. He saw the old man, his father, and thought: We’re a tough family.
Settling himself on the balcony in the filtered light and warmth, he took his manuscript out of its leather folder and began reading. Almost at once he saw what had been going wrong, and how to put it easily right. He smiled. Already he felt the days unrolling in him, each with its early sun, its first cup of coffee, its inviolability, and its moment when, his brain lucid and alert, he wrote the first words on the empty whiteness of a sheet of the thick smooth paper he liked to use.
Chapter Seven
One day during the second week Beatrice asked him if he would drive her into Nice the next morning: the hotel in Einsiedeln to which his secretary had written to reserve rooms had not answered when they left England, and she wanted a travel agent in Nice to telephone and make certain they were expected. It was a stupid fuss and he knew better than to argue with her. But in the morning she was suffering from what, with her habit of attributing to every organ of her body a unique weakness, she spoke of simply as ‘my stomach.’ Something she had eaten had irritated it, and she was sick. She stayed in her room, trying to subdue the sickness by bad temper, but after an hour gave in and went back to bed.
Gregory had an involuntary loathing of illness. It was an ordeal for him to go into a sickroom: he took credit to himself for the fact that she was not conscious of the effort it cost him to sponge her face and hands after she had vomited, fetch her eau-de-Cologne and a glass of water, and straighten the sheets, bending over her to do it. And yet he was genuinely sorry for her. He did as much for her, and gently, as would a mother for a sick child. At one moment he had a hazy memory of his father stooping over him in the narrow brass bedstead he slept in from his first year; the brown corded fingers were doing something to his chest, something that comforted him….
‘Give me my glass,’ Beatrice said. She looked at herself for a minute, and said drily, ‘How yellow I am. Hideous… You’re a good kind nurse, Gregory. I’m tempted to be sick oftener.’
She was, yes, looking ugly, her long neck, the skin roughened like the neck of a plucked chicken, unprotected by her nightgown, her face seeming longer, the lips dry, thin, colourless. He had an impulse of pity. ‘You’ll be quite well tomorrow — and able to go into Nice.’
‘No. You must go this afternoon as we arranged.’
‘Why? There’s no hurry.’
She looked at him. ‘I’d rather you went. You’ve had enough of a sick wife for today. No point in your hanging about, not able to work because you feel you should keep an eye on me. You’ve been extremely kind. Now go and amuse yourself.’
‘In Nice?’
‘Why not? You want to go, don’t you?’
In fact he did. No
t for the sake of going to Nice, but to get away from her bedroom and the effort of talking to her without falling foul of her prejudices, or throwing poor Harriet to them. She was not, he knew, jealous of Harriet as a woman, but of Harriet as standing for everything in his life which she did not control. He asked,
‘Will you be comfortable?’
‘Yes. Tell them to bring some clear soup — no, no, when I want it I’ll ring. Before you go, look in the top drawer of the dressing-table and see whether I have my sleeping pills.’
‘Is this it?’
‘Yes. Thanks. Now be off.’
‘I may dine in Nice,’ he said.
‘Do. And on no account, when you come back, disturb me. I shall take two pills and make sure of a good night. You can tell me in the morning about Einsiedeln. Don’t leave that office until they have telephoned the hotel and got a promise of two rooms. We don’t want another Albi.’
‘Very well.’
Thankful to get away, he bent to kiss her. She drew back. ‘No. Not too near.’
Something, the pleasure of looking through his own eyes, of being able to walk at his own rapid pace, made Nice attractive, as a rather blowsy good-humoured pretty woman is, given her day. This for Nice was its day: a sky lively with white clouds, as he liked it to be; an almost gentle sunlight; and, out of sight behind much nearer hills but making themselves felt in a thinning and sharpening of the air the instant you turned into a street running more or less north-west, real mountains. He felt pleased with the town, and light-hearted.
The agency was willing enough to try to oblige an imbecile, but it took them nearly two hours to get through to the hotel in Einsiedeln and discover that rooms were booked in the name of Mott for the night of the 29th of September. It was now six o’clock. He chose a café facing the sea, with a terrace and a few tables, and ordered a drink.
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