The Road from the Monument

by Storm Jameson

  ‘Nonsense. I don’t need it.’

  ‘Wait a moment.’

  He waited impatiently for the old man to shuffle to the top of the house and come back with an overcoat and his hat. Helping him on with the coat, William asked, ‘Shall you be late in?’

  ‘I don’t know. Go to bed.’

  An evening in late April, with floating threads of cold and a tepid warmth. On one side of him, as he crossed the road towards the dark mass of the Park, the double yellow serpent of lights coiling and uncoiling into the distance; on the other the smooth merry-go-round of cars and buses circling the Arch, a fluid pattern of noise and lights, of the acid green of young leaves where the sodium-light corroded them, of faces drained by it of all semblance of life, detached arms and legs, torn newspaper, thin gusts of petrol, grit, smoke, the face of the young negress.

  Inside the Park, as soon as he left the road and began stumbling across rough grass, he was in darkness. The smell of damp earth, and another that might be the sour breath of the streets, met him.

  He thought with something between pity and indifference of his wife’s outburst…. Does she really see me as a humbug? Not that what she sees or thinks matters. Am I bogus — an elaborate construction labelled Gregory Mott? When did I begin on it? As a child?… Not clearly, in an exhausted half-light, he saw the child stooping over a book held in the circle of weak light thrown by an oil-lamp set on the table covered by its fringed cloth of worn red plush: behind him, dozing in his leather chair, the old captain, long bony fingers doubled over his vile-smelling pipe, at nine o’clock rousing himself to knock it out over the smouldering cinders in the grate and say, ‘Time now, boy.’ There was no gas in the house: he lit two candles and, in silence, the tall shambling old man first, followed closely by his delicate-seeming son, they climbed the steep narrow stairs to the two box-like rooms under the slope of the roof…. In those days I loved him without knowing it, he thought. The thought had a bitter after-taste: he spat it out without identifying it and went on to think indulgently of the nearly penniless undergraduate, taking a dandified care of his one suit of clothes. Was it he who began to invent Gregory Mott? Or was it the night-school teacher, grateful for the warmth of Mrs. Benham-Smith’s thickly upholstered drawing-room and its mixed odours of brandy and scent, the half-sweet half-musty smell of the plants in the enormous conservatory? Or the young man in love with Harriet Ellis and already critical of her half-elegance, of dilapidated antique furniture inherited from a father who was a country priest, overloaded bookcases, writing-table spattered with ink, dust…? Dear Harriet, he thought briefly.

  Suppose it were true: suppose he had deliberately made himself over — into a man as little like the old captain’s son as possible? Why not? What was wrong with it? Surely he had every right to do it, and every right to the world he stepped into with his first invitation from Emily Grosmont? He liked men and women who were elegant, polished, cultivated, and had good manners; he liked delicate food and wines: he had never been in any doubt that money is a good half of happiness in life. He had fitted himself for this world and he moved in it easily and naturally. Mine by right of preparing myself for it, he thought. Does that make me a humbug? Why? Why shouldn’t the child sharing a little mean shabby house with the old captain use everything he found in his hand, brains, gifts, charm, to shape the man he now was — bogus or not bogus?

  He stood still. A rusty glow spread through the sky behind the trees: the silence surrounding him was not silence but a succession of dulled noises, drone of traffic, an aeroplane, far-off voices like the note given out by a single-stringed violin, running ceaselessly against the wall of trees and buildings.

  My books at any rate are not bogus, he thought…. A confused satisfaction filled him. They remained. He had put the best of himself into them. They gave his life its meaning. Justified him.

  Did you ever do a spontaneous thing in your whole life? His mouth twitched in self-mockery. He thought derisively: What happened in Nice was spontaneous enough. And fatuous and inexplicable. The girl meant nothing to him, then or now. Nothing at all. Then why…? It was as if his life, revolting against him in an instant of anger or resentment or blind energy, had made a single gesture that threatened the whole careful elaborate construction with ruin….

  He turned to go home. In the street he had to wait at the edge of the pavement for the traffic to slow down enough to let him cross. He had stopped near the young negress: after a moment she spoke to him. ‘Don’t you want to take me home?’

  He shook his head. ‘Thanks, no.’

  ‘Not far.’

  For the first time he glanced at her. Seen close to, in the virulent light, her skin was a coarse blackish roan, like darkly polished wood. Her face was startlingly narrow, running down to a fine point as if the sides of the jaw had been forced together in infancy to crush out the chin; yet the neck supporting this no-chin was strong and very broad. When she moved, an acrid scent reached him from her clothes. The sheer silliness of having anything to do with her drew him like a thought of suicide. She must know everything I have forgotten, he thought. The spontaneous knowledge of an animal. Her life — its total insecurity, its perpetual risking of herself — was a jeering comment on his.

  What does she think about, he wondered, if she thinks at all? ‘Where do you live?’

  She jerked the yellow parasol vaguely left. ‘That way.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Five, two, twelve minutes.’

  Is she an imbecile? ‘Near enough to walk there?’

  ‘Walk? Yes. I walk.’

  He hesitated. ‘I should like to see where you live.’

  She had been scrutinising him, her eyes, balls of thick lightless flesh, moving from his face over his clothes and back again to his face. ‘You pay five pounds?’

  The figure was obviously too high — more than she expected to get. He agreed at once. ‘Very well.’

  ‘Five.’ She spread her hand, small and curiously wrinkled, its palm lighter than the rest, like the inside of a soft fruit.

  ‘Yes, yes, five.’

  ‘We cross.’ She stepped into the road. A car swerved to miss her and the one immediately behind it braked. The traffic going the other way was held up by the lights. She reached the pavement and waited for him to follow her, then turned west. He avoided the glances, some brief, some prolonged and insolent, turned on him; he could not avoid the stretched mouths and jeers of two youths: the contempt he felt was for himself, for his embarrassment. The young woman walked as though on grass, with a soft step, humming gently under her breath, her strange dark muzzle lifted to the lamplight: she moved shoulders and thin haunches together, easily, the parasol, folded now, swinging from a wrist. When, taking a turn to the right, she led him into darker streets, he asked her again,

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘A minute.’

  ‘Only a minute?’

  She smiled. ‘You want, eh?’

  He realised that she had only these few words she could use, the vocabulary of a three-year-old child. It was at least ten minutes before she stopped at a tall cankered house in a dark street, pushed open an unlocked door, and took him up a staircase where he tried not to touch the walls, and tried not to smell, into a room at the top of the house.

  It was the barest, the most poverty-stricken room he had ever seen: the bed, a single electric bulb, a thin curtain stretched across a corner; hanging crookedly from a nail a small looking-glass and below it a narrow shelf which held jars and an opened box of face-powder. Nothing else, not a chair. A suitcase of some flimsy material. He had never in his life stood in a room so stripped of the smallest decencies of living. He had a feeling of insecurity that was almost physical. Is this all she has — has she even a name? he thought.

  ‘What are you called?’

  She had begun humming again as she closed the door. She stopped and stared at him. ‘Called?’

  ‘Your name — what is your name?’

  ‘Oh.�
� She hesitated, and he had the impression that she did not want to tell him. Had she, like a child, the child she seemed mentally to be, an instinctive reluctance to give him anything so much part of her hidden life as her name? ‘Estella. Estella Baron. You like it?’

  ‘Is this—’ he moved his hand stiffly — ’this is the only room you have?’

  ‘Ye-es.’ She gave the word a pleased upward inflection. ’ My room.’

  He was baffled by the contrast between her self-assurance and the poverty of her words. She can tell me nothing, he thought, nothing…. It was as difficult as questioning a child, the same sense of dislocation, of asking on one level questions understood — if at all — on quite another. It was ridiculous to come, he thought, raging. He mocked himself: Another bogus gesture.

  In the meantime she had taken off coat and dress and kicked off her shoes, and was walking about the room naked, leaning her parasol carefully against a wall, looking in the glass, humming. Her body was not good; it was bony, and her legs were short, with wide ugly feet. It repelled him — but not more, indeed less, than did the room, and her life itself, a life so stripped, so denuded, that it gave him a feeling of nausea, a violent contraction of his stomach as if he had lost his foothold and were falling from a cliff. He felt in his pocket for the money, put it down on the shelf between the jars, and said,

  ‘I don’t want anything — anything more.’

  She looked at him, lips pushed forward, with bewildered anger. ‘You don’t want?’

  ‘Thank you for bringing me here.’

  As he turned to go her face changed suddenly, from anger to a derisive merriment. She took up a grotesque pose, knees and elbows bent out, head back, and began laughing. ‘You look, eh? All you do — look.’ She laughed like an insane clown, her face all open mouth and dark quivering tongue, eyes half-shut, a torrent of deep rich demented sound pouring out, wave on clapping wave.

  Half-way down the stairs, he could hear it still going on.

  In the morning Beatrice came up to his room in her dressing-gown, and told him stiffly and lightly that she regretted she had behaved badly.

  ‘Nothing of the kind,’ he interrupted. ‘It was my fault, entirely mine.’

  ‘Kind — but not true.’

  ‘Everything,’ he said gently, ’that has gone wrong with our marriage is my fault. But I’m not going to ask you to forgive me — there really is no forgiveness — ’ he paused and smiled slightly — ‘for my egoism. My frightful egoism and vanity.’

  A look of humour, not very good humour, sharpened his wife’s face. At the door she said,

  ‘My dear, I should have known you would outbid me.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Blount did not turn up until late in the afternoon. Today he looked less like a statesman, and more the languid and worldly literato. He had been lunching, he said, at Clarence House, and had seized a chance given him to speak again about the cocktail party during the Conference. ‘I asked a question or two. “Have you any preferences, Ma’am? Would you, for instance, rather we didn’t present, shall I say an Eastern European delegate?” I fully expected her to say that she had no preferences, and in fact she did…. So — have you the full list of delegates?

  ‘I have a copy here.’

  Arthur Blount put his hand out, long white fingers forming the calyx of a flower supported on his fine wrist. ‘Thanks.’ He glanced briefly at the sheets, and folded them to fit into his notecase. ‘I’ll go through it at home, and let you have fifty names — with a few in reserve to replace anyone who doesn’t turn up. There are always last-minute casualties.’

  Gregory was taken aback. ‘Don’t you want me to go over them with you?’

  ‘Oh, no, I think not.’

  ‘Very well.’

  He felt a prick of annoyance, as well as surprise. This was perhaps not the first time that Arthur had taken on himself to dictate on a strictly social issue, but it was certainly the only time he had done so without first going through every polite hoop, to give the decent illusion that Gregory had been consulted. His tone now was light and friendly, but without a tinge of the deference due to the Director. He means to be helpful, Gregory said to himself. Breathing more calmly, he waited.

  Blount lowered heavy eyelids. ‘And, now, my dear fellow, this, ah, what shall I say, grotesque story of Mr. Corry’s.’

  Again for a moment Gregory felt the uncertainty and the sense of a constriction in his body that went with it, both now familiar. He ignored them, and spoke in the light negligent voice he had meant to use. As he spoke he saw the two figures of his little story, very distinctly, the diffident young woman, the great writer condescending — no, not so much condescending as treating her with that delicate kindness, amused, witty, aristocratic, he used in talking to women (to men, too, especially if they were younger and less well known than himself). The two figures walked along the Nice front, gaily, and vanished in a light cloud. ’… I can assure you, Arthur, that she told me nothing that was the least use to me — as a novelist. I got nothing for my… my imprudence.’ The thin lines at the ends of his mouth smiled. ‘A completely wasted evening.’

  His brother-in-law was looking down at his hands, his really extremely fine hands, with their long pale nails. He nodded.

  Gregory expected to be asked a question — How did she know who you were? Or: Have you heard from her since? He waited for a minute and said,

  ‘I’m a little at a loss. I don’t know quite what — to be kind as well as sensible — I ought to do.’

  For the first time since he began speaking, Blount looked at him, and said calmly,

  ‘It was, I feel, a mistake not to see her when she came to the house.’

  A fist driven through a paper hoop. Appearing suddenly in the delicate fabric of his story, his revised story, this one naked fact threw him clean off his balance. He had all but succeeded in forgetting that there was another story behind the one he was telling. Its emergence was a shock. With the same shock he realised that the story at which Arthur was looking was this other story: the whole of his carefully and wittily built façade collapsed behind his eyes, he felt choked by the dust, his lips attempted a little smile, and he said, stammering,

  ‘What am I to do? The whole thing was… nothing at all. I don’t know what happened after I left her… I should like to be generous — yes, generous. That’s all.’

  His brother-in-law did not so much as glance at the gap between his charming story and his ridiculous anxiety and distress. For anything that his face, long, pale, very slightly ovine, gave away, he had accepted the façade, completely.

  ‘My advice to you, my dear Gregory, is to have a reasonably frank talk with our friend, our good Deputy-Director. He is, I think, the first person you should, how shall I put it?, disarm, settle, secure. I am sure you can do this, without in any way compromising your dignity. And without —’ he moved his hands — ’ putting yourself too much in his debt. I always try not to be indebted to people, especially ambitious people. They have a tendency to present their little bills, and it’s not always convenient to meet them. I enjoy doing unexpected favours, but I don’t, I must admit, like being put in a position where I can be pressed.’

  Nothing could have been more friendly, more charming — a familiar off-hand charm — than his voice; yet it was edged with ice, the thinnest least perceptible ice.

  ‘Settle Lambert? Why? Why Lambert?’

  ‘Surely you realise that he is much better informed than you know?… Has, I should say, been informing himself…’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘My dear boy, how do I know? But — I do assure you — you should take the trouble to placate him.’ He smiled politely. ‘Placate is an extravagant word. Forgive me — you know how very anxious I am to give you the right advice. I may be too anxious.’

  Gregory had reached an agreement with himself not to raise his voice, not to make a single gesture. Laying his hands together on the edge of his desk, he said, ‘I’m ver
y much obliged to you. I don’t — at this moment — entirely understand you, but no doubt I’m being stupid and when I’ve thought about it I shall see what to do.’

  Blount nodded again. As though he had not finished a previous sentence, he went on,

  ‘As for the young woman — we must take care not to have even the appearance of scandal. Tedious, of course. But there are others to consider — Beatrice, yourself, your position, your reputation. Even your friends, my dear Gregory, would be… embarrassed, wounded, if this foolish story became attached to you, to your distinguished name.’ He yawned, ‘Idle tongues, you know. Who knows better than you the delight with which ninety-nine people out of a hundred — among them one’s friends — watch a great reputation being cracked? Why give them that satisfaction?’

  ‘I don’t think you have understood,’ Gregory said. ‘A scandal is not the worst thing— ‘The look of weary boredom on his brother-in-law’s face halted him, and he said quickly, ‘Surely it was not such a serious business, not — essentially — so unpleasant? I believe that if you— ‘He stopped again: he had been speaking calmly and easily, but he no longer knew what he was saying, except that he was trying to explain without explaining, to rub out whatever was in Blount’s subtle mind without forcing himself to look at it. Blount had listened in silence, with a distant air of politeness, scrutinising his nails again. He said lazily,

  ‘I’m afraid I must go. I’ll send your list of names to Rutley House — next week. And do, dear boy, be sensible. And tactful.’

  Gregory stood up. He drew a careful breath, and smiled. ‘Perhaps you’ll let me talk to you about it later. I could, I think, tell you—’

  Blount interrupted him. He had strolled over to a window. ‘Such a view,’ he said. ‘Marvellous. I envy you a little. You may, if you like, write me down an elderly fool, but I do find certain things — comfort, leisure, a civilised life — important. Worth trying to keep. Don’t you agree?… And now I simply must go.’