He noticed, as one detail in the drama, that his wife was listening attentively, in an extreme stillness, eyes half-close d’ head held back so that a shaft of light falling across it sharpened her nose to look more than ever like a small finely-arched beak.
After the service — it ended in a procession of the monks to the black Virgin in Her casket — they went back to the cardinal-bishop’s bedroom.
‘What did you think of it?’
‘I liked it,’ Beatrice said almost humbly.
‘You —?’
She seemed not to notice his amused astonishment. ‘There was a feeling of peace. Complete peace.’
‘My dear girl, did you look at anything?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And have you ever seen anything so vulgarly grotesque? I suppose that, catering for a million pilgrims a year — whatever the figure is — they have to combine the utmost sensationalism with the lowest common multiple of taste. It’s a business — the pilgrim business. The commercial profits must be enormous. Do they, I wonder, believe that that makes up for a total loss of religious profits?’
‘Is that really all you thought about in there, when they were singing?’
‘No one with any sensibility could think of anything else. Could you?’
His wife did not answer. Strange, she thought drily, that he has less idea than an animal of what the people closest to him feel. He writes exquisitely about feelings — and they are only his own…. Nothing in him reached across the gap, hell deep, that separates human beings living side by side…. If I were to thrust my — my happiness when I was in there under his nose, he would behave with the greatest delicacy and tact — and make a note of my absurd emotion for future use….
After an excellent dinner Gregory was alone in his room, watching the square. It was in darkness now except for a wide circle of coldly pale light near the steps, unreal, like nothing outside a theatre: there emerged into it, from the unseen street, the head of a thick dark stream of men and women, oozing up the steps, up the ramp. He called his wife to come and look. The stream flowed sluggishly on, endless. A file of priests, robed, and carrying large candles, came towards it from the church and stopped short at the upper flight of steps. Between them and the monastery was only blackness. After what seemed a long time a shadowy crowd — here and there a face, picked out by a candle, hung like a fish in the artificial current of a tank — had seeped, its edges lost in the surrounding darkness, on to the pavement before the church. The singing began, voices and candles flickering up with the same thin exhausted movement.
‘There you are,’ Gregory said, ’the chorus. It came here this morning in all those coaches, and has been hanging about in the wings ever since.’
‘Is that all you see in it?’ Beatrice asked in that one of her tones he disliked most: harsh, overbearing, sarcastic.
‘I see a very successful enterprise.’
‘Why shouldn’t they worship God in their way as you do in yours?’
‘Why not? I’m not sneering at them. I blame their spiritual directors.’
‘I suppose this is what you mean by trop de zèle?’
‘Not even that,’ he said. ‘Pure irreligious farce.’
Beatrice was silent. Then she said negligently, ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘Oughtn’t you to wait for the end of the act?’ he smiled.
‘No. Goodnight.’
The clatter of bells woke him, beating down relentlessly from all quarters of the sky. It was barely light — the greyness of before the light. He lay for some minutes, listening to the sound of feet striking the cobblestones. At last, driven by the sense that he was missing something he ought to see, he got up and went to the window. It was a little after four o’clock: a livid sky imprisoned the monastery, the black weight of firs on the hill, the square, the slow-moving file of pilgrims. This time no one met them; they went straight into the black cave of the church. He watched the last in, and was turning to go back to bed when he caught sight of something shapeless moving in the vast empty space, a grey-veined desert, of the square. A dog?
After a moment he saw that it was a man in a dark macintosh, moving on his knees; he moved at the pace of a crawling infant across the cobbles, up the first flight of steps, the ramp, the second flight. By now, Gregory thought, his knees must be raw. As well as he could see, the man was neither young nor old. About my age, he thought: and he is playing his last card…. He had a curious seized feeling — a hand gripping him for an instant. He shook it off.
Chapter Nine
Never had October and November in London been milder. The windows facing the Park framed a weft of threadbare sienna-reds and yellows, through which the blue of the sky showed like a cotton lining. All the less reason for Beatrice Mott’s sciatica to return to pinch her, as it did, cruelly, for weeks. It loosened its grip slowly.
The day before Christmas Eve she felt well enough to leave her bed for the sofa in her room; she could indeed have got as far as the drawing-room, but her bedroom gave her a sense of security she felt nowhere else in the house. Almost everything in it, the Victorian bed, the damask curtains, the chairs and sofa covered in a rose-and-tulip-patterned chintz, the small tables supporting a weight of photographs, enamelled Battersea boxes, papier mâché trays, had come to her from her mother’s bedroom in the great house in Wiltshire; where she had had to replace, she had sought the country for replicas. The only objects in the room which belonged to her and not to her mother were four magnificent bouquets of Victorian wax flowers under glass. Before their marriage she had told Gregory that she wanted some, and he ransacked London for fine specimens. They were the reliquaries of his brief passion for her; no other trace existed.
She lay looking through the windows at a smoothly grey sky and a vapour of leafless branches and black trunks covered by a yellowish lichen: beyond them, profiled on the mist south of the Park, a fantastic engraving of towers and domes. During the last few minutes the pain in her body had withdrawn and she felt as though she were dissolving into the warmth and silence that surrounded her. It was an extraordinary sensation — absolute relief, absolute peace. It reminded her of a few moments in the monastery-church in Einsiedeln, in so much as she had done nothing, then or now, to deserve it. Ah, she thought, if only I could turn my back on the world, never meet people, never have to put on for them my face of a shrewd sharp-tongued occasionally affable woman, I should escape the remorse I feel for my continual failures to be either charitable or submissive…. She drifted into a consoling dream that she had entered a convent. Silence, the duties and discipline of a Mother Superior…. Derisively she reflected that she had seen herself as a Superior, not simply as a nun. Have I become wholly false and dishonest? she wondered harshly. No charity, no humility? God help me.
She felt a twinge of sciatica.
The door opened and her husband came in. ‘I’ve brought Lambert with me from the office. He has your Christmas flowers with him.’
‘Mimosa?’ She had once told him casually that she liked it, and since then he had brought it every year on this day.
‘Yes, of course. Will you see him?’
‘What time is it?’
‘Four o’clock. Do you feel well enough to see him?’
‘No. Yes. Oh, bring him up.’
Lambert Corry was one of the people to whom she never gave a thought: she liked him when she saw him — and that was all. Now as he came in, his arms full of mimosa, turning his nose from side to side as though looking for something to pry open with it, she felt a movement of genuine affection.
‘You’re snug and warm in here,’ he said. ‘I hope your flowers haven’t got nipped. There’s an icy wind.’
‘They’re lovely. Ring, will you? I must have them put into water.’
He rang and came back to her. ‘How are you, my dear?’ he asked, smiling. ‘You look very well.’
She was spared answering this nonsense by Mrs. Bedford coming in to take the flowers. ‘Handle them
carefully, Bedford,’ she said, with a pretence of caring. ‘Take them…. How is your wife, Lambert? Are you at home for Christmas? Yes, of course, you have a boy. How old is he now? Six?’
‘Nine.’ Lambert’s face became pitiably foolish. ‘Nine and a half.’
Anything to wipe out that infatuated grimace, she said to herself. ‘Do you mind pulling the curtain immediately behind me? No, no, not the others. Only that one. There’s a draught.’
He stood for a moment at one of the other windows. ‘My God, what a view you have here.’
Gregory came across the room to glance at it. ‘Look over there,’ he said with a smile. ‘D’you remember watching a man and a woman walk along that path in summer? They’re there again now — or two like them. But now it’s quite a different poem.’ He dropped his voice to its deepest most disquieting note, disquieting in a way his wife found horrible and unforgiveable. ‘Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé, Deux formes ont tout à l’heure passé… How does it go on?… Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé, Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé… Ton cœur bat-il toujours à mon seul nom? Toujours vois-tu mon âme en rêve? — Non… Look — two ghosts, two dwarfs, their eyes reflecting blackened trees and the verdigris of the grass, their hearts as cold and lifeless as the asphalt path.’
Beatrice felt a wholly useless rage and grief, and said, ‘I recall various scenes in your novel of the loftiest, most high-principled adultery, but not one of them takes place in a park. Why not? It would be no more ridiculous there than anywhere else and you could tell as many, even more, lies about it.’
‘So that,’ he said, with unmoved good-humour, ‘is what you think about my novels? I’m very mortified.’
‘I wonder what would mortify you?’ she mocked. ‘To do something extraordinarily silly, in public. No, not silly — vulgar.’ The old-servant’s derisive malice in Lambert Corry’s glance pulled her up. ‘What are you busy with at the Institute?’ she said to him. ‘I always forget to ask Gregory.’
‘What do you think, my dear Beatrice? Only the Conference. Money for it is rolling in. I never believed we’d get it, but by golly I believe we’ll get it twice.’
‘What did I tell you?’ Gregory said, smiling. ‘You don’t know how to talk to these chaps. I do.’
‘They’re not all chaps,’ Lambert said slyly. ‘Emily Grosmont sent us a thousand pounds. Think of it! One thousand jimmy o’ goblins.’
‘Blood from a stone,’ said Beatrice. ‘She’ll skimp worse than ever on food. The last time I dined with her I was given a bone to gnaw.’
‘Oh, your husband could charm a man-eating tigress. Anyone who can persuade the grandest of our grand old men to open the show for us….’ With the friendliest malice he went on, ‘By the way, Gregory, have you found the letter the old boy wrote you?’
Gregory gave him a vexed glance. ‘No.’
‘Pity. We have the official acceptance, of course. But that personal letter was an heirloom.’
‘There’s no heir,’ Beatrice said.
‘Quite possibly it was stolen,’ said Gregory, stiffly. ‘Very likely in France. I had it in Albi. It wasn’t until we got home that I realised it was missing, case and all.’
‘Most likely stolen for the case,’ said Lambert.
‘It serves him right,’ Beatrice said, ‘for carrying it about with him. He couldn’t have handled it more reverently if it had been a royal relic’
‘Ah,’ Lambert said, with a grin, ’if you hadn’t been jaunting in France while I was chained to a desk in the office, writing letters to all the brutes who are going to speak and imploring them to answer, you wouldn’t have lost it.’
‘I don’t care deeply,’ Gregory said. ‘It annoys me to be robbed, that’s all.’
His wife made an effort not to mock him. It had become a habit, and not a pleasant one: it gave her the same comfort as scratching a scar. ‘What nonsense. Of course he cares. But what he really dislikes is to be reminded that he was idiotic enough to take it away with him.’
Gregory was silent.
He turned back to the window. It was dark outside now, a grey darkness webbed with lights, orange, white, blue, the fixed lights of the street-lamps encircling the Park between the dead cliffs of buildings and the dead trees, the lights flashing on and off in a window decorated for Christmas at the top of Park Lane, the headlights of invisible cars, two double lines, going and coming inside and outside the Park in a movement too smooth to be that of powerful animals, yet curiously menacing.
He looked at his watch and said, ‘I’m afraid I must go, I have an appointment. No, don’t move, my dear fellow. Stay and amuse my wife.’
‘Yes, stay,’ Beatrice said.
Chapter Ten
He‘s gone to see one of his Egerias,’ Beatrice said in a light voice, ‘perhaps the oldest of them — I suppose Emily Grosmont is well over seventy. Or Harriet Ellis, poor creature.’
If ever a man licked his spiritual chops, Lambert Corry did now. In the ten years he had known her she had never spoken about her husband in this indiscreet way. ‘Has he Egerias?’
‘Surely you know him as well as I do? If it weren’t for the poultice they keep clapped to his moral sensibility — or his vanity, is it? — how do you think he could go on living with my tongue? He needs them. But don’t make a mistake, my dear boy, they’re nothing now but Egerias. Not that I don’t find his, what would you call them?, his spiritual adulteries as irritating as the other sort. Quite as irritating. Even worse, since, really, you know, the poor things are making themselves ridiculous. Could you imagine anything more humiliating than wearing yourself out to flatter a man whose appetite for flattery — oh, only the most delicate — is insatiable? And getting nothing in return. Unless you count suitably inscribed copies of his books a fair return?’
‘Is that all they get?’ asked Lambert, grinning.
‘Do they, do you suppose, suffer from his… would you call it virtue? Scruples? Laziness? Not that he would notice it if they do. I think Harriet suffers. And dear Emily Grosmont no doubt did when she was of an age to hope for something a little more violent than spiritual exercises.’
It amused her to watch Lambert’s long nose probing to find a way of reaching what he imagined must be her feelings. As if she would expose them to a creature she made use of as she might have used a sort of eunuch-nanny-secretary. But why am I talking to him about it? she asked herself, surprised and annoyed. The truth about dear Lambert, she thought — no, no, a truth — is that he enjoys nothing so much as a slightly prurient confidence. He would listen to mine, with that slack body of his quivering a little, and offer me the noblest advice on how to handle an indifferent husband. He enjoys garbage and he enjoys giving spiritual guidance. And he’s a decent creature, too….
‘Has he always been like this?’ Lambert asked gently.
‘Always. And don’t, my dear, get it into your head that I dislike his habit of going elsewhere for his higher needs. I don’t, I assure you.’
‘Ah, he’s a lucky fellow.’
‘D’you mind fetching my heavy shawl from that cupboard. The third shelf. Thanks. No, no, my feet. Wrap my feet in it.’
Lambert did this service with nimble assiduity, delighted that she was treating him with this familiarity. Leaning across the head of the sofa he adjusted the scarf she was wearing round her shoulders. Fine shoulders she still has, he thought, fine white arms. Is the rest of her as white? So far I haven’t troubled to go and look….
‘You know, my dear Beatrice, you’re the most generous woman I know. Have you never felt jealous?’
‘Do you want me to make myself more ridiculous than any of the Egerias? Gregory wouldn’t even notice that I was jealous.’ From his furtive glance of sympathy she knew that she had spoken too sincerely. She laughed. ‘My good Lambert,’ she said affectionately, ‘I talk to you freely because you know how to hold your tongue.’
He looked at her with something between conceit and hand-licking devotion.
For all his shrewdness he had not caught in her voice the condescension that was the least presentable side of her fondness for him. ‘Ah, that’s true, my dear. You can chat to me as you would to yourself. I’m a sensible sort of fellow, and I’m very fond of you, you know.’
Of all forms of vanity, she thought, his — to be regarded (by the right people) as a lay priest — is surely almost innocent. More innocent than Gregory’s infinitely subtler form: the arrogance and self-love he hides — even from himself — under his famous sensitivity. And what is my pet vanity?… Another and more probing stab of sciatica made her shift uneasily and lose what she was thinking.
‘You said —’ Lambert leaned towards her, smiling — ‘all Egerias now. Do you mean…?’
His curiosity is quite childishly indecent, she thought: I could make him abominably happy by giving poor Harriet to him to mouth over. She said with contempt,
‘You don’t imagine I married a virgin of thirty-five, do you?’
‘I married at twenty-one,’ Lambert said. He contorted his bony face into a look of naïve buffoonery. ‘That’s nearly thirty years, and I’ve been a faithful husband ever since.’
‘Very creditable.’
‘Not at all. Women don’t fall for me as they do for our Gregory. And the devil of it is he doesn’t make any effort. He’s scarcely interested. Y’know, I’ll tell you something. One reason I stuck to him as I did, at school, was his — I can’t think of another word — his purity. Not that it’s a word I would have used then. He was absolutely uninterested in the grubby indecencies of boys who were going through the torments of puberty. My own torments, y’know, were sharpened for me by my fear of hell. Laughable, eh? Nothing to laugh at then, I can tell you, my dear. My parents were Primitive Methodists——’
The Road from the Monument Page 14
