The Road from the Monument

by Storm Jameson

  ‘Quite unnecessary.’ She glanced at him again and her voice changed. He could see her deciding to overlook his blunder, carelessly, as she would have overlooked the indiscreet familiarity of an old servant. ‘It’s been very kind of you to listen to my troubles,’ she said affably. ‘Very kind indeed. Perhaps you would like to think it over and then let me know just what you can do for us. For Gregory, that is.’

  The need to swallow his resentment almost suffocated Lambert. He said sulkily, ‘There has always been someone to look after Gregory.’

  It did not so much as brush Beatrice’s mind that she had wounded him: she put his sulkiness down to embarrassment, and tried, by speaking in a loud friendly casual voice to put him at his ease. ‘So good of you to help us.’

  He rose to go. ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said stiffly.

  She made a gesture as though she were going to pat his arm, but drew back and held her hand out, at arm’s length.

  ‘Goodbye, my friend. I rely entirely on your discretion and competence. I’m really most obliged to you. Goodbye.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Lambert was too, as he would say, churned up to go back to Rutley House immediately. To give himself time to calm down, he crossed the road to the Park and took a chair under the trees. Anger and humiliation were raging in him and he felt positively ill. After a time his anger moved aside to settle on Gregory — and harden him against the idea of letting his friend off scot free. Damn them, he thought, they can’t push me about. A worthless heartless lot — and he’s worse than any of them, with his duchesses and all that spiritual eye-wash and nobility and bogus eminence.

  A young woman in tight black trousers, so tight that her bottom bulged in them like a double cannon-ball, walked past him, dragging her child, a little boy, by the hand. At the nearest tree she stopped to encourage him to relieve himself like a dog. Lambert eyed them with disgust for today’s lack of manners…. Why doesn’t it strike her that people may not enjoy seeing her brat foul the grass?… He looked away. Something like a tiny bubble rose to the surface of his mind and there broke: he saw himself, at a moment in his fourth year, was it?, with a little girl of the same age; they had been left to play together, and curiosity had provoked them to undress and examine each other with the greatest interest and surprise. They were caught at it. What happened to the other child he never knew: he himself was whipped (’within an inch of your life’) by his father, and wept and prayed over by his mother for the better part of a week. Convinced by them of his black sinfulness, he yet had succeeded in forgetting the incident, until now.

  What nonsense, what nonsense, he thought. But for a minute the humiliation he had just endured ran into the shame of his childish guilt and filled him with hatred of himself and of the whole human race — which so meanly undervalued him.

  He shook himself and stood up. ‘We’ll see,’ he exclaimed. Annoyed to hear himself speaking aloud, he looked stealthily round. No one had heard him, and he hurried off, catching sight not far away of the man approaching to take money off him for the chair he had occupied for less than five minutes. This lucky turn put him in a better humour, his spirits rose and he began humming one of the few fragments of music he remembered from his schooldays: he had forgotten most of the words, but the tune persisted…. Glory, and bong to the men of old….

  Since his own secretary was away ill he had dictated the morning’s letters to Diana Yorke. She brought them to him in the Director’s room to sign, and seated herself near the desk, long slender legs crossed, uncovering both knees. As always, he was furtively conscious of them, and of the pair of fine breasts outlined by her cotton blouse. Unlike his own secretary, she did not wait until he spoke to her before speaking herself. She had even taken out a cigarette — Gregory spoils her, he thought, vexed — and as she put her lighter away asked,

  ‘Is it true that when Easterby goes, we’re to have Harriet Ellis — the writer?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I heard it.’

  She would never say that Gregory told her, he thought. ‘It’s not true. At any rate it’s not decided.’ He paused, and added, ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  He saw Diana look at him, one of those provokingly loose glances of hers, under lowered eyelids. Before she could answer, the door she had left ajar opened, and Bonnifet lounged into the room. Lambert looked round at him with a slightly sour grin.

  ‘You’ve decided to show up again, have you?’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ Bonnifet said negligently. ‘Have I been missed?’

  ‘You do happen to be on the staff of this Institute.’

  ‘I had the Director’s leave to take a week at home — to finish translating the Italian catalogue.’

  ‘You couldn’t do it here?’

  ‘Not so easily. In any case…’

  He left hanging in the air some such phrase as What business is it of yours? Lambert said drily, ‘In any case this place is run much too slackly. I don’t like it and I advise you to pull your socks up — in time.’

  ‘In time for what, sir?’

  Lambert intercepted the warning glance Diana sent the young man over his head. Smiling, he handed her the letters. ‘There you are, my dear Diana. And you — ’ he did not look at Bonnifet — ’ did you want anything in this room?’

  ‘I didn’t know that the Director wasn’t here.’

  ‘At the moment I’m directing,’ Lambert said genially, ’and I have no immediate use for you. You can run away.’

  During dinner Penny said, in an exaggeratedly indifferent voice, ‘Oh, what d’you think happened this afternoon—just a few minutes before you came in? Beatrice Mott rang up, and invited us both to dine with her next Monday. It’s the first time for years that she has taken the trouble to ask me. Why is she doing it, d’you suppose?’

  Lambert thought he knew. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told her no. I said you might be able to go, I didn’t know, but that I was engaged.’ She laughed shortly. ‘The sweet creature didn’t insist.’

  ‘Are you engaged then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why did you…?’

  ‘Oh, you know I can’t stand her dinner-parties — nor the people she invites. All that babble about nothing, or things of no importance, music or where to stay in Italy — even religion! No, my darling, life is too short to waste any of it on the Motts of this world.’

  Lambert said nothing. At this moment — for some reason he did not trouble to pin down — her feeling of unease and shortcoming in Beatrice’s house gave him only a sense of warmth and security. He felt thankful that they came from the same sort of home, had the same youthful memories and the same ambitions; thankful that he had not married a woman whose voice, high-pitched and very slightly hoarse, made something in him cringe whenever it reached a certain degree of insolence. He was thankful to be accepted as he was, wholly accepted, wholly approved of and backed up loyally in all his hopes and schemes. Not that Penny, even when he married her, had been any ordinary young woman of the lower middle-class: she had been, and she was, unusual — in her hunger to improve herself, in that ability of her mind to absorb knowledge almost from the covers of books and by listening, and in her fierce will to succeed. Whatever happens to us, he thought, she will be equal to it. And she’ll always think well of me.

  He leaned across the table towards her. ‘My pretty Penny.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Happy?’

  ‘Very. Because of you, my dear.’

  ‘Because of us,’ she corrected him. ‘You, me, Timothy — and this house and the Thursdays and your career. And we’re not at the end yet, not nearly. We’re going to go on… and on… life getting better and better and richer and more splendid. You’ll see.’

  After dinner he took his essay on Gregory from the drawer where it had been lying since he read it to Dinham and the others. As he read through it again he was surprised himself by its biting excellence. Some phrases struck him now as too
lenient: he took certain of these right out, others he barbed or made equivocal. At the end of an hour he felt he had said everything that needed saying about his friend’s virtues and failings as a novelist — the failings chiefly, since Gregory had been, after all, over-praised, spoiled by a too easy success and by excessive flattery and devotion. It will do him good to hear a few home truths, he thought coolly.

  All he had done was to correct a balance. Not only where it concerned the writer — there was an account to be settled between them as men, too. For these many years, since the two of them started out together, he had deferred to Gregory, made himself a doormat for Gregory’s feet, allowed Gregory to treat him with an arrogance all the more wounding that it was entirely unconscious. It was time he spoke for himself. And if, just possibly, he was being a little too outspoken, too severe, that, too, was — done at last — justice.

  Dinham, he knew, would be only too delighted to have the essay for the London Letter.

  He hesitated. Should he sign it? If he wanted applause, yes. There is always applause for the stoner of idols. No, if… He decided not to sign. Better — for many reasons — that he should not be known as the author of what had turned into almost an assault on that famous writer, Gregory Mott. A few people would know, or guess. The little group would know. But Gregory did not meet them. It was just as well—more comfortable, more prudent—that he should not be told the name of his candid critic.

  Part 4

  The End of The Run

  June 5–22, 1957

  Chapter One

  Gregory’s twelve days in Paris — arranged months ago, and the four lectures written and rehearsed — were to have given him time to reflect. Not on what he ought to do for the young woman — he knew that. But it was still, perhaps, not too late to repair the harm his cowardice and lethargy had done him. He had told himself that he was going — at last — to think over what he must do to be able to go on living with himself — with that eminent (highly-respected, noble-minded etc. etc.) writer Gregory mott. In the event He did nothing of the sort. he behaved as though to save himself were the last thing he wanted. He gave his lectures — they were brilliantly successful, performances of which he could be proud, if pride lives on the tears of ravishingly elegant women sitting in the front row of chairs and the half-acid half-moved congratulations of elderly academicians. He attended luncheons and receptions in his honour. When he had done everything he agreed to do, he invented new duties: he lectured, to their pleased surprise, to an obscure group of refugees, he visited museums and galleries, he walked, alone or with an admirer, about Paris in its lucid glory of late May and early June. And he decided nothing.

  He returned to London on the 5th of June, in the late evening. He had not been in the house ten minutes before Beatrice sent for him to come to her room. She was lying down. ‘My arthritis.’ She was yellow, her nose beakier than when she felt well, and he was reminded of the supposed Norman ancestry of her family. Not very engaging people, William’s Normans.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Is it very bad?’ he asked.

  ‘No. How was Paris? Your lectures?’

  ‘They went well. I think.’

  ‘Of course they went well. You’re a good actor, and you give value for money. Was she there — your little countess?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dressed by Givenchy, as usual?’

  He smiled. ‘I suppose so. I don’t know.’

  ‘Never mind…. I had Lambert to lunch.’

  ‘Yes?’

  She said drily, ‘He knows more than you told me. He was very like himself. Sensible, sly, pleased with Lambert Corry, as bland as a soft-boiled egg and full of good advice. I told him what to do.’

  Gregory had to swallow his repulsion. ‘Couldn’t the two of you let me manage my own affairs?’

  ‘Yes. If you had managed them — or even tried to.’

  ‘That’s true. I’ve been very… neglectful. Inattentive. The truth is…’ He had scarcely an idea what the truth was, nor the faintest wish to turn himself inside out for her to pick over his entrails. ‘What did you tell him to do?’

  ‘I told him to find a discreet not too well-known solicitor for us, and arrange with him to settle the thing decently, with proper safeguards.’

  He drove himself to be polite. She means well, he told himself. ‘And do you suppose you persuaded him?’

  ‘I didn’t try. I told him what I wanted.’

  Poor Lambert, he thought ironically. ‘You’ve been very good.’

  ‘Did you expect me to do as you’ve been doing yourself — sit with my hands folded, watching you drop to pieces?’

  ‘When I think how little liking you have for me…’

  She cut him short. ‘That has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘You don’t understand me,’ his wife said impatiently. She raised herself on an elbow: she was trembling a little, and her eyes glittered with pain and malice. ‘I’ve never asked myself if I liked you. I loved you, admired you. It would never have entered my head that — because you had lost interest in me as a woman — I was any less married to you — part of your life in a way none of your devoted female admirers could change.’ She had flushed. ‘But this… Frankly, my dear boy, it has made a difference. Not so much the thing itself as its squalor. The discovery that you are capable of — of a sordid lechery. And the thought that I — if it came out — would be tarred by it and made to look a fool.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ he said gently. ‘Well——’

  ‘Oh, I’m not going to do anything. Why should I? But it will take time for me to get used to it and put it in its place. That’s all.’

  ‘Yes. My poor Beatrice.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry for me,’ she said, with tart lightness. ‘That would be the last straw. The last degree of egoism.’

  He laughed. ‘Yes. Forgive me.’

  She lay back on her pillows. ‘And now do go away. I ought to rest.’

  ‘Is there anything you want?’

  ‘Only to be left alone.’

  It was nine o’clock. Behind a thin mist of cloud the sky was a bronze shield, not flat, not a surface, but depth on depth of an oblique heavy light, which appeared solid, and threw into violent relief the squared columns, patches of bone-white, at the Park gates, the swelling mass of trees, the sudden brutal strokes drawn on the asphalt by a woman’s red dress, and gave an astonishing precision, as in the background of a mediaeval painting, to the details of buildings as far off as the chimneys of the power-house on the north bank of the Thames with their massive grey-white pennants of smoke, and as near as the strong white stems of flagstaffs thrusting from the roofs of pent-houses in Park Lane. All these sharp outlines and splinters of colour were flung against the eye at once, a scattering of grains like the points of knives. There was a light wind.

  Something of this clarity and sharpness invaded his mind. He reflected, coldly, that what Beatrice called his sordid lechery was a relatively decent thing, whatever its impulse. The indecency came later, in his attempt to lie his way out, to evade a responsibility; in his refusal to know himself.

  And no doubt he was still sinning, at this moment, in not being able to feel even a trace of compassion for the girl. He must get money to her — of course. Through a lawyer? Through Lambert? He saw no need to have anything to do with her himself. Why should he?

  He thought for a moment of Paul Gate — only to reject at once the half-formed impulse to go and see him. It is always a mistake to try to creep back into a cast skin…. He did not want to see Danesacre again. Certain moments, certain fragments of the little town — the level rays of a setting sun embracing the old grave-stones, wrinkled by the sea wind and salt, their names obliterated, on the cliff-top; a summer evening, the air quiet and no wind, the sea very still, silence, silence, unbroken except by thin deliciously bad music floating up raggedly from the string band on the pier; the bare northward-curving cliffs of the coast — were caught in h
is mind like leaves frozen into the ice of a lake. They existed nowhere else now. If, hoping to find them there, he returned to Danesacre, the reality would efface a gleam, a salt air, a curve, all the fragments that he hoped, when his time came, to take with him into the dark.

  There were other reasons, vaguer, heavier, for not going back. Why stir the dust in empty rooms? Why disturb, in the obscure corner of his son’s mind to which he had been driven, the tall stooping sea-captain? And Gate himself — that simplicity of an old child, that innocence. Why pester the poor old boy, he thought sharply.

  He had a feeling of weakness — not physical, though it had sprung up in his body. There is no air in this room, he thought. He opened a window, and felt the wind on his hands, a dry London wind, heavy with dust and the stale breath of millions.

  A man may suddenly become aware that he is mortally ill, he has a cancer: in exactly the same way Gregory knew, in his body, in the cells of his brain, instantly, that his existence was a silly cheat. What use is it to say: I am alive, when in fact death is about to brush you away like a fly or a speck of dust? He felt cold to his heart and very giddy. The sense of pointlessness, of solitude, of sterility, was unbearable. Idiot — he had set up, between himself and the horror, the abyss, of knowing that he was an accident, a flicker in a total darkness, his fine dignified construction of my-belief-in-God, and shored it with tradition, order, the beauty of holiness, discipline and the rest. And it had collapsed as easily as a worm-eaten screen falling into dust.

  He thought lucidly: What I want is not tangible, not reasons, but to feel that God is. Nothing is any use except to be able to feel Him.

  But I am in hell, he thought with a sharp smile. Hell is this absence of all things, all people, all feeling, all movements of the heart. This spreading dryness.

  A branch knocking against the window. He turned quickly. The cord of the blind. Too late, he was too late. Before he could save himself, he was in the small airless attic bedroom, stooping over his father in the bed pushed under the slope of the ceiling. During his illness, his eyes had lost their tinge of blue and become bleached, so that looking into them was like looking through a crack into daylight: his shrivelled skin, hardened by the salt of voyages, was younger than his seventy-eight years, and the strength in his old body was dragging this illness out far past what should have been its time. His son did not believe he was dying.