The Road from the Monument
Page 27
‘Don’t I give you enough credit? I’m sorry.’
Its look of relentless benevolence sharpened Lambert’s face. ‘I’ll tell you right away — I’ve come to a conclusion…. The fact is, old boy, you haven’t been frank with me — I’m certain of it. You did have something to do with the young woman — whether you’re responsible for her condition or not…. No, no, wait a minute. I want to help you. But you must be frank with me, you must give me the facts. How the devil, if I’m not told the whole story, can I do anything for you? Surely you can see that?’
Gregory looked at him with curiosity and a brief spasm of amusement. ‘Do you mind telling me how you came to your… your conclusion?’
Lambert did not hesitate. ‘I’ve been to see Miss Verity.’
‘You couldn’t, could you,’ Gregory said mildly, ’keep that nose of yours out of such a rich muck-heap? How you enjoy your friends’ vices! You’d make an unpleasant father confessor.’
Stung, Lambert said, ‘Be damned to that….’ He checked himself, grinned, and said in an affectionate voice, ‘I’m not asking you to do more than tell me the facts. Give me those, and I’ll do my damnedest for you.’
He came here, Gregory thought, meaning to be generous and sensible and (he would say) to stand by me…. He felt only distaste. Lambert’s itch for being confessed to was pathetic and ugly — and less innocent than his mania for giving advice. All he wanted, to become a flattered accomplice, was to be confided in and begged for help…. The idea was not less unpleasant than absurd. He said lightly,
‘You’re on the wrong tack.’
Lambert cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘Are you going to go on denying that you had the girl — at least once?’
‘No,’ Gregory said, smiling.
‘Ah — ’ a sharp breath — ’you admit it, then.’
Gregory had a feeling almost of affection. He is a buffoon, he thought, a shrewd well-meaning decent clown and dogsbody. There was more liking than malice in his answer.
‘To you — I don’t admit anything.’
‘You’re hardly treating me as a friend.’
‘But are you one?’ Gregory said, still smiling. ‘Is it out of friendship — only friendship — that you’re pushing your long nose into my affairs?’
‘My dear Gregory, I’m trying to save you from yourself.’
Gregory’s impulse to mock the astute prying fellow died. He felt only the pain of isolation. When we were young, I should have told him everything freely, he thought. Why not now?
‘Suppose all you believe about me is true. Do you think I ought to be crazily grateful to you for helping me to avoid a scandal?’ He hesitated. What he wanted to ask was simple — had become simple suddenly. Is the avoidance of a scandal really so important? More important than anything? Than the truth? Than finding out who I am? Whatever I have to pay for finding out. ‘Tell me — ’ he began.
‘I’m not asking you to be grateful,’ Lambert interrupted. His voice hardened into savage bitterness. ‘I’ve always helped you, fairly and loyally, done the dull part of your work for you — without asking for thanks, nor even ordinary recognition. You…’
He stopped and passed his hand over his face to remove the traces of an emotion that had taken him violently by surprise.
‘I had no idea you resented me,’ Gregory said slowly.
‘Resent? Nonsense, nonsense!’
‘Yes. What I was going to ask — it’s not of much interest, but — if I’m the liar and hypocrite you’d like to be sure I am — why help me to evade the truth?’ He hesitated. ‘So many evasions.’
Lambert had recovered his self-possession. Rolling a cheerfully crafty eye, he said, ‘I don’t follow you, my dear chap.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No, I’m damned if I do. Frankly, I can’t make up my mind whether you’re malicious or cracked. I came here with the most generous intentions, to ask you a simple question, and you can’t do anything more sensible than pull my leg. I’m bloody annoyed.’
Suddenly Gregory could not stand him any longer. Hiding his distaste under an air of mockery, he said,
‘Very well. Then why not mind your own business?’
The expression of outraged decency on his friend’s face was sincere enough. It overlaid a confused and oddly malignant satisfaction, almost joy. A patch of colour, as if he had been slapped, appeared in both sallow cheeks. ‘I came here——’
‘Yes, yes,’ Gregory mocked, ’with the most generous intentions. I know, I know. And they’ve been thrown back at you. Very sad, very very sad. But as you see, I don’t want generosity. Let’s agree that I don’t deserve any, and then you’ll feel… free.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you mean,’ Lambert said quietly. ‘You’ve had years of damned hard work out of me, and years of admiring you and standing out of the way so that you could take the applause while I cleaned up — years of belief in you as worth helping.’ His hands were shaking and he gripped his knees with them. ‘D’you suppose I’m enjoying myself?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’
Lambert lost his temper. He steadied his voice. ‘You bloody fraud,’ he said.
Gregory looked at him with attention, as he might have watched a cut opening in his own flesh. Did I ever know you? he thought…. The man, the Lambert Corry he knew — always, even when he was a schoolboy, as prudent as an old man, always sensible, honest, loyal, capable — must, during years and years of intimacy, have been very slowly supplanted — pushed out like a tooth in the way of a second one, he thought — by another, resentful, atrociously jealous. No, he thought calmly, that’s much too simple: the two were there always, not two but one; the goodness and good sense exists and always did exist in the same skin with the resentment and squalid bitterness…. He decided ironically that he preferred his first image, of the two Lamberts. Lambert and anti-Lambert. The chap I’m talking to now is the anti-Lambert, he thought. Without irony, but without any kindness, he thought: He’s not always going to feel pleased with himself…. In the same moment he felt (and mocked himself) cruelly humiliated. He had always — even for this man who was his oldest and closest friend — been the great writer who was also a man of the world, able to impose an image of himself as coolly self-possessed and scrupulous. He couldn’t do this any longer. Another of his skins had been ripped off: he felt ridiculous, defeated, small.
He got up, turning his back on Lambert, and went to lean at a window…. In the still bright light, a fan of many colours opened itself for him with the gentlest, the most voluptuous movement, green of young May leaves, suavely pink front of a Park Lane house, violent red of the buses, green, grey, yellow of waiting cars, and blue, dazzlingly blue sky, with rags of white cloud.
He spoke over his shoulder.
‘Does she need money?’
‘She…? No. Not immediately. She will. You admit responsibility?’
Gregory was silent — out of a weary loathing of his friend’s curiosity, with its lecherous undertones. The silence was so prolonged that he turned, and caught Lambert eyeing him with an extraordinary mixture of complacency and doubt.
‘Had you anything more you wanted to say?’
‘No,’ Lambert answered. He hesitated, smiled, and said genially, ‘But I give you fair warning, old boy. I may — since you refuse to be sensible — have to take steps of some sort.’
Gregory had the impulse of a schoolboy. He gave way to it. ‘Go away and take them,’ he said lightly.
Chapter Twenty-one
Since the evening when she lost her temper Beatrice had taken rather acid pains to behave as much like herself as possible, as though that discreditable scene had never happened. She gave a number of dinner-parties, and amused herself at them by teasing and deflating her husband as often as he gave her the chance. Gregory believed she was happy. He would have given a great deal not to have to destroy her peace of mind by telling her what hung over them. For almost the first time in their life together he thoug
ht about her, and not at all about the figure he was going to cut in her eyes.
He told her that evening, when they were alone. Less to spare himself than to avoid hurting her too deeply, he made the whole thing sound trivial and senseless. She listened with an air of stupefied disbelief, her blue very bright eyes staring fixedly, a flush spreading slowly across her cheeks, which became mottled and very ugly. She really was stupefied. Is this all it is? she thought. For nearly four weeks she had been preparing herself to be told that he was in love with one of his Egerias, with the young French countess who wrote to him once a week and sent him exquisitely bound copies of his books to sign for her, or even with Harriet Ellis. But this — this unspeakably silly and vulgar story — to which she could scarcely listen without the discomfort she would have felt if asked to sleep in dirty sheets, and couldn’t talk over even with her closest friend.
‘Why are you telling me?’ she asked coldly, when he stopped.
‘Because I’d rather you heard it from me than from… possibly Lambert. He’s quite capable of finding some sensible reason why you should be told — and telling you.’
‘He knows, does he?’
‘Yes.’
‘You told him?’
‘No,’ Gregory said. He smiled. ‘He managed to find out.’
‘And that’s why you’ve told me?’
He hesitated. ‘Partly why.’
She threw her head back and stared at him down her commanding nose. ‘I can’t imagine what other reason you could have for asking me to listen to a vilely silly story.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently.
She was silent. ‘What do you expect me to say?’
Her harsh voice, and the sight of her bony hands gripping each other in the folds of her dress, made him wretched. She was more hurt than he had thought she would be. He said simply, ‘I don’t expect anything, I only hope.’
‘You hope? What?’
‘That I haven’t entirely lost your… friendship.’
His wife burst out laughing, and he realised how completely he had misunderstood her. ‘My dear, your conceit is beyond all. I have never known anyone so utterly and ludicrously self-centred. Did you really expect me to sympathise with you? You are astonishing. And the affair is extremely unpleasant. Must we go on talking about it?’
‘No,’ he said, with relief. A derisive smile — self-derisive — twitched the ends of his mouth. ‘I was afraid I’d made you unhappy.’
‘There’s no need to talk about that, either,’ she said stiffly.
‘Do you feel you’d like to get rid of me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You could divorce me.’
‘My dear boy! In the first place I don’t approve of divorce. And in the second — what nonsense!’
He had an impulse to break through her ferocious self-possession to whatever human feeling, pleasant or unpleasant, lay behind it. ‘I wish you’d believe that I would give anything, anything at all, to cancel it.’
‘I’m sure of that,’ she said drily. ‘Your vanity alone…’
‘Yes,’ he said, ’my vanity.’
Suddenly her face was distorted by a frightful bitterness. ‘Why did you do it? Tell me. Explain it to me so that I understand. Make me understand why a man who is intelligent and fastidious can pick a young woman up in a café and go to bed with her. Were you trying to have a romantic passion before you’re too old for that sort of thing? How — how stupid, boring, ill-mannered.’
‘Yes, it was all that,’ he said.
She had controlled herself at once, to say in a mocking voice, ‘Well, it’s very annoying, and you couldn’t know that your little lapse would turn out so troublesome. You have all my sympathy, my poor friend.’
He felt that it was futile, even unkind, but he made another effort to reach her. ‘Except for the pain it would cause you, the idea of a scandal doesn’t — now — it did — worry me. I’m humiliated by what I’ve learned about myself — my cowardice — my indifference to the — the young woman’s misery. I don’t understand myself.’
‘That seems to me nonsense,’ she drawled.
‘Yes. Very sensible of you.’
He had not meant to annoy her, but she flushed and said tartly, ‘Diseased foolish ill-bred nonsense…. If you take my advice, you’ll pay the young woman off at once. You have no proof, have you — other than her word — that you’re responsible?’
‘No.’
‘Still — ’ her nostrils quivered, giving her a look of reluctant benevolence, as though she were stooping, with gloved hands, to pick up a dirty weeping child — ‘one must behave well. Better to be a fool than a knave, my father always told us. You mustn’t be recklessly generous. An adequate sum of money. You must go to a solicitor, of course. If you don’t mind, not Hamilton — he, and his father and grandfather, have handled everything for us for so many years; I shouldn’t like him to know about this. But find someone reputable and tell him to deal with the creature firmly.’
He saw the girl being frightened by a lawyer as she had been by the insolence of the French waiter. But it was the obvious thing to do. ‘Very well.’
‘As for Lambert, oh, leave our friend to me. I’ll see to it that he knows what to do — and what not to do. I shouldn’t like him to speak about it to that climbing wife of his…. How much does he know?’
‘Don’t,’ he said, almost with amusement, ’be too sure that you can put Lambert in his place. He has a formidable persistence — and he’s enjoying himself. There’s nothing he likes so much as the smell of an unsavoury story.’
His wife stared. ‘You’re very severe.’
‘I’ve no right to be. And no wish.’
Beatrice was silent. Her glance passed over his head to some remote and, it seemed, empty place. Her fine colourless lips trembled a little. He thought she was going to break down again, and say something recklessly disagreeable and sincere. He waited. Her face closed, and seemed to age.
‘For once, your high principles didn’t serve you,’ she said, smiling. She yawned. ‘I’m sleepy.’
‘I’ll leave you,’ he said. ‘Try to…’ He forgot what he had been going to say.
She smiled again. ‘Try to forgive you? How ridiculous. Good night. Sleep well, my dear boy.’
With an irony he was ashamed of, he thought: I’ve offended her sense of what is avowable, fit to be talked over in a drawing-room. Spiritually speaking, the story isn’t wearable.
He glanced at his watch. It was still a few minutes short of twelve. I could go and see Harriet, he thought quickly. He knew that she never went to bed before two or three in the morning. She would listen to his absurd story with the gentlest and most soothing attention and find something affectionate to say to him. Affectionate, and tactful. She had a fine tactful heart.
He got as far as the hall on his way out. There he stood for some minutes, staring without seeing it at the globe he was so fond of that he never passed it without running his finger along a river or the outline of a country. He forgot that he had been going to Harriet, and turned and went up to his room.
Everything, he thought indifferently, has dried up. A frightful aridity had invaded everything he had imagined he possessed, everything he valued: his pleasure in beautiful objects, in the society of people like his brother-in-law — all he had thought of as the supremely fine flower of a good life.
Opening the drawer in his writing-table he fingered the pages of his manuscript: his glance caught a sentence, some way back, about death being the other half of life, and words — because they pin down a moment of life — being the very image of death. He frowned, and thought: What the devil does that mean?
It was scarcely conceivable that he had ever thought of his books as giving meaning to his life. What crushing nonsense! They were as pointless, as arid, as without substance as everything else he had done — as everything he had believed. Their substance had been borrowed — from the meaning he had imagined behind them
. He thought coldly: From God. Exactly, he thought, as a smile draws its meaning from the love you feel behind it…. He saw a Face of terrifying blank idiocy: a smile, a completely meaningless grimace, wavered across it.
A feeling of astonishment seized him. All his good reasons for belief had… not so much disappeared as become trivial and entirely irrelevant, a pinch of dust in the corners of his mind: the doctrine, the tradition, the apologetics, the intellectual love of God and the rest of it, the wrongness of destroying simple people’s faith, the social need for religion. All true, and all, all meaningless.
He heard and for an instant saw that shabby old fellow, Gate. He saw the poor gesture of his hand and heard him, in his timid voice, with the certitude of an old child, say: They don’t tell us anything about Him; they are, you might say, good but not God; they don’t give Him to us, do they?
I haven’t the faintest idea what to do, he thought.
Chapter Twenty-two
Looked at sensibly, as a man like Lambert himself would look at it, the cost of saving himself any further trouble was so small that it was only ridiculous not to pay it. Even now, yes, even now, if he were to take Lambert slyly into his confidence, throw in a few sexual details and What would you advise, my dear fellow?… He could be sure of one thing — neither Beatrice nor his brother-in-law would remind him of his ’ little lapse.’ Lambert certainly would, in every cunning friendly way imaginable, and make use of it to turn a trick or two for his own hand. But I could, surely, he thought, live with that?
He felt an icy revulsion.
I’ll talk to him again, he thought quickly. Without giving himself time to weaken, he rang through to Diana and told her to send Lambert to him. After a moment she came in and said that Mr. Corry had just left the office.
‘Left? At four o’clock? Where has he gone?’
‘He didn’t tell anyone.’
Following his nose somewhere, Gregory thought drily. ‘All right, Diana.’