‘How can I? How can I forgive something I don’t understand? You don’t help me, you know.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Explain to me that it wasn’t — wasn’t only — squalid and vulgar.’
‘I can’t, I’m afraid.’
She stared at him. ‘You think I’m making a great deal of fuss about it.’
‘I do rather,’ he said deliberately.
‘I’m sorry.’ She sat up as straight as a pole and leaned her head back to look at him down the blade of her nose. ‘I’m trying — as I was taught — to remember my manners. But I’m not easy-going enough — if you like, not unselfish enough — to forgive a gaffe of this sort. It’s not the kind of thing I want to forgive. You’re not the kind of man.’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘I made a mistake. It was a mistake to marry you. My fault.’
He understood at last, clearly, and without a trace of resentment against her, that neither her loyalty to him, nor her very real piety and integrity, were as strong as the loathing started in her by an affair that struck her as only squalid and socially clumsy: she was essentially a good woman; she was also essentially a selfish one, with a hard incurably narrow view of human nature, as hard in its way, but infinitely less subtle, than her brother’s. Everything she had admired in him, his gifts, his devotion (which she shared) to traditions and the Right wing in religion and politics, his liking for the things her own father had considered merely necessary, fine glass and linen, good wine, a well-kept house, all were cancelled by his lapse into what she saw now he had always been: a common fellow, for all his genius. And genius is no excuse for silliness and vulgarity…. Poor woman, he thought, with an amused kindness, what a blow for her.
‘What will you do?’ he asked. ‘A divorce?… I suggested that before.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ He knew why not: she thought of divorce as wrong, forbidden by her religion, and very distasteful.
‘If you insist on it,’ she said. ‘If you want to marry again. Not that I should consider you had married.’
Gregory smiled slightly. ‘If you don’t want to divorce me, then what? What do you want?’
She said calmly, ‘I’m ready to help you. I’ll come abroad with you — for the sake of appearances — for your sake. Once there, we can separate. You go your way and I’ll go mine. I shall probably come back to England, to Wiltshire. Few people will notice that we’re not still living together. Fewer of them will be certain — you might be abroad writing, I might be ill, visiting friends — anything. After all, you won’t be in the public eye then — not in the way you are now. A writer isn’t news unless he is notorious in some other way….’ She looked at him with a trace of anger. ‘What is there to smile at, my dear Gregory? I’m standing by you as far as I possibly can.’
‘Without affection.’
‘Why should you expect that?’
‘Why indeed?’ he said without irony.
‘I did love you,’ she said, flushing, ’but you’re no longer the man I loved. I should feel more indulgence for you now if I’d cared less for you.’
‘There are so many ways of loving,’ Gregory said.
A look of contempt made her eyes brighter. ‘Do you believe that what happened to you in Nice was a sort of love?’
‘No. But it began in a sort of kindness — and it was not the worst thing I ever did.’
‘I can’t see,’ she said very calmly, ’that any conceivable kindness excuses you for making an ass of yourself. Or, no — there are some ways of making an idiot of oneself which are at least forgivable. If you had taken to backing plays or racing or… my father’s horses cost him a lot of money.’
For the first time he realised that some forms of vulgarity go as deep as the bone — however well-bred the bone, or even (he thought of Arthur) however fine the intelligence flashing and crossing swords with a brilliance that blinds the onlookers’ eyes. Neither old Captain Mott, noisily drawing tea through his ragged tobacco-stained moustache, shunning baths, spitting into the fireplace — nor Lambert with his ferret eye to his profit — was capable of the bone-deep instinctive vulgarity she had just given away…. He felt a light useless pity. My poor Beatrice…
He thought coolly: The most extraordinary things jump out when some unexpected knock splits open the more or less reputable self we spin round ourselves in the ordinary course of living. How many of Arthur’s friends knew that his charm, his subtle intellect, his detached quiet wisdom, contained the coldest, most indifferent of men, with less warmth than a tortoise? And Lambert — he certainly hadn’t the slightest idea that he was capable of sacrificing a friend to his ambitions — with a bland self-righteousness he thought of as the purest common sense…. He saw himself with a lucid humility. Should I — but for this ’stupid unsavoury’ little incident — have known anything about myself?
He began to reflect aloud. ‘My poor Beatrice — ’ he looked at her, seeing her as older, drier, smaller, her face pinched, its aristocratic sharpness faded and blunted — ‘the failure we’ve made of things. I’m to blame. Since long before this happened.’
‘You made use of me,’ she said.
‘No. I didn’t intend that. Not knowingly.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It makes no difference. None of it matters now.’
He got up, and moved to the door.
‘Please ring,’ his wife said. ‘I want to tell Bedford to bring me a tray here. I shan’t come down to dinner.’
‘Would you like me to come up here afterwards?’
‘There’s no point.’
Walking up the stairs to his room he realised, with a wry self-mockery, that his only feeling was one of relief. Overwhelming relief. To have spent the rest of his life devoting himself to her — what a trial!
Chapter Six
The following Saturday was the second day of the heat wave that struck London in mid-June. In the late afternoon, when he left his taxi in Brixton Road and set out to walk to the street he thought he knew how to find, he felt that he was walking into an oven. The pavements were alive with men sweating in open shirts, and women, old as well as young, with shoulders, legs, arms and the upper halves of breasts bared to the sun. A light as irritating as sandpaper spread a greasy yellow film over them and over the line of stalls where vegetables and fruit seemed to be rotting in the heat coming from a nearly colourless sky and striking back hard from the pavement. He realised that he had missed his turning, and he went back. Rising through the smells of food, armpits, petrol, there was another, insistent and pervasive, which must, he thought, be the sour breath of the heat itself, filtered through all these stale bodies and walls and seeping in from narrow side-streets of scrofulous over-lived-in little houses like the one he came on at this moment. He walked along it, looking for number eight.
The door from the street was open, and a washed-out striped curtain had been hung across in its place. He pushed it gingerly aside and stepped into the dark passage, with its stained wallpaper and the stairs at the end. He stood there, uncertain whether to knock on the door at his right: slow heavy footsteps were approaching, it seemed from beyond the end of the passage; another door was pushed open and the young woman came through it. She stopped. Her hand went to her mouth and she stared at him, with a vacant face, like a child who doesn’t know what is about to be done to it, whether to be afraid or not. For a moment he did not recognise her. It came on him like a blow that this woman, her swollen body pushing against the cotton dress she was wearing, was the same young woman he had seen in Nice. Her lips were thrust forward, her skin a bad colour, drawn over the cheek-bones: only the flat-set eyes were unchanged, and the oval of the face.
With bitter contempt for himself he thought: So clever of me to have seen her as a Lucas Cranach. So cultivated…. The living reality burned him like an acid rubbed into his flesh.
‘I ought to have told you I was coming,’ he said. ‘Have I startled you? I’m sorry.’
A look of sullenness troubl
ed the blankness of her face. ‘What do you want?’
‘To talk to you.’
‘Go on, then. Talk.’
‘Must we talk here?’ The airlessness of the passage gave him a feeling of near-suffocation, like a nightmare.
She hesitated and muttered, ‘Oh, all right.’
Turning clumsily, she took him down the stairs to her room. It was far worse, far more airless: he looked round it with a disgust he tried to keep to himself, only asking,
‘Why did you come here?’
‘I had the address. The woman it belongs to used to live near us in Liverpool — years ago — when I was little.’
‘It’s not a good place.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s cheap. I didn’t know where to go. I thought I ought to save money. And then — ’ her voice sounded as though she were ashamed —’ it didn’t seem that it mattered about me.’
‘Need we stand?’ It had occurred to him that she ought to sit down: when she moved he took hurriedly one of the kitchen chairs, mistrusting the cleanliness of the basket-chair she offered him. She sat in it herself, pulling her dress over her knees: her body was in shadow, but a shaft of sunlight fell across her cheek-bones, giving her face the smooth flattened look that had first struck him in Nice. He decided to talk to her with the utmost directness and simplicity, as if she were his sister.
‘When will the child be born?’
‘In about ten days. On June the 25th, they told me.’
‘Where?’
‘In the hospital.’
He did not ask which hospital. He had no wish to know any details — the fewer the better. ‘It’s arranged for, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well… Please listen. I’ll explain as carefully as I can. I’ve been arranging some things myself. I’m giving you all the money I have — except a small sum I shall need to live on until I—’ he stopped: his plans, or lack of plans, were of no interest to her. ‘My wife has her own money, all she needs. You’ll be hearing from a Mr. Henderson. Tomorrow. Mr.
James Henderson. You needn’t be afraid of him. I chose him because he’s an elderly man, kind, really kind. I should think he likes people. He’ll take care of your money, and tell you how much you have to spend, and he’ll always advise you. You can trust him completely.’ He looked at her with a smile. ‘You’ll do that, won’t you?’
She was silent, then said, ‘Yes.’
He said very gently, ‘You shouldn’t bring a child here.’
She answered him with a trace of liveliness. ‘Oh, no — I won’t. I’ll find something better.’
‘At once?’
‘Yes, at once.’
‘Have you anyone to help you? Anyone of your own?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’ In a childishly simple voice, made oddly appealing by its thinness and flatness, she added, ‘I can’t say I ever had, you know. My sister — my half-sister— she has her own family to think of, and I’ve never been as you might say run after. Not that it worries me.’
He was moved. At the same time he knew that he did not care two pins for her. She was nothing to him, nothing at all. Below his pity, the nervous pity of an imaginative man, he was abysmally indifferent to her.
‘You’re not quite alone now,’ he said. ‘Mr. Henderson is going to be there to help you.’
With a timid effort, with something like anguish, she asked, ‘Shall I ever see you again?’
He was on the point of saying: No. A sudden obscure voice, obscure and urgent, warned him that this would push her under. He said gently,
‘I don’t know.’
Her fear of vexing him — fear, awkwardness, timidity — made her nearly inaudible. ‘Do you want me to write to you — afterwards?’
It was the last thing he wanted. He tried to find some not too unkind way to put her off. A desperate sense of shame filled him: he was angry with her, too; he had harmed her, and she spoke in this diffident voice — as though she thought he might be going to punish her. A shiver passed through him; not a shiver of grief, a shiver of jeering self-derision…. Were you hoping that she would make things easier for you by behaving grossly?… He had an instant of nearness to her, her human reality — something infinitely young and weak seeking affection.
‘I should be very glad if you would write,’ he said.
‘E-eh, thank you,’ she said in a young direct voice.
He must give her hope. How else could she live? ‘You’ve been very generous,’ he said. ‘You’re very brave. I — I wish you weren’t alone.’
She turned scarlet. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t make any plans,’ he said, ’except for the child.’
She said humbly, ‘No. I won’t. Only except for him.’
He felt a sudden stab, incredibly painful, over in an instant.
‘How abominably I’ve behaved to you,’ he said.
‘Oh no. You were meaning to be kind.’
She was thinking of Nice, only of Nice. He let it go at that. Why remind her that she had been turned out of his house, by his orders? That he had ignored her pitiful decent letter and left her to carry, alone, all this time, her burden of despair, anxiety, and fear of the future?… He had had as much as he could stand of this room with its smell of a mean poverty and old sour dust. His moment of grace, the moment when he had been given a word or two to say to her that might help, was over. Sickening, he thought: I must get out of here. The stench of dry gutters and heat came in from the grated area below the window, crossed now and then by another: exhaust fumes, sweat. His hands slipped on the edge of his chair.
‘I’m not going to be in London for some time — I don’t know how long. You can write to me through Mr. Henderson. I’ll always answer. And I’ll do anything I can, but don’t rely on me too much, I’m not — not charitable.’
She had been watching him with feverish attention. ‘You aren’t like what I thought,’ she said.
He smiled crookedly. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you’re — after all, you’re simple. See?’
He shook his head. ‘Would you like me to tell Mr. Henderson to find you two rooms in the country near London — until you have time to settle things yourself?’
‘Yes, I would that,’ she cried.
‘Right. I’ll do it at once.’ He stood up. She got up, too, clumsily and slowly. Something hung in the air between them for a moment, a feeling of kindness, regret, distance. He tried to think of something friendly to say to her. Nothing came, and he thought: She has as much courage as she needs…. Without meaning to, he noticed the swollen breasts under the dress strained across them, and remembered them, briefly, as small, round, and hard, very small, almost sexless.
‘I must go,’ he said gently. ‘Do all Mr. Henderson advises you.’
‘I promise like,’ she said. She watched him go.
Not even the lies, he thought, had been his sin. The lying was as trivial as the rest, another face of his vanity. His real sin was his lack of love: the indifference rooted in him — when? at his birth? With a self-contempt that was not self-hatred only because, in the last resort, he was indifferent to himself, too, he thought: You made use of the girl entirely for your own amusement; you enjoyed the pity you felt for her and her young clumsiness. Not for a moment in Nice did you see her as a human being; she was an excuse, a channel, for your cultivated subtleties of feeling and the rest.
He knew now that his inability to love had discoloured his whole life, from its beginning. He had charmed, used, and in the end patronised and forgotten old Gate; he had left his father to die alone in the house where, when he was a child, the old clumsy patient fingers stiffening in the darkness had nursed, fed, cared for him. For an instant he saw the old captain again, in his body as when he lived, slowly, carefully, darning a boy’s stocking, into which he had pushed a bottle to keep the shape.
He remembered the words of some saint or other (St. John of the Cross?): When the evening of this life comes,
you will be judged on love.
How can I expiate this sin? he thought drily. What can I do?
He thought very briefly of going to see Harriet. He rejected the idea at once. Not only did he not want to see another person he had failed, but — with more energy — he did not want the comfort she would undoubtedly give him, feeling her way about his mind until she stumbled there on the right thing to say. No, he thought, no, you poor fool…. Neither she nor the other person who had loved him, old Gate, could tell him what to do next — and he had no right to ask them. They were not his confessors. Nor at this moment did he want a confessor. What could he say?… My dearest Harriet, my dear old Gate, I regret that I didn’t love you a tithe as much as I loved myself. I regret…. I repent…. Fool, fool.
Chapter Seven
At this moment, Harriet Ellis was alone in her room, at her writing-table, that ink-stained table of unpolished wood which Gregory thought sluttish. A kitchen table, and not even clean. There was a looking-glass facing her, an old one, from her father’s library: it hung on the strip of wall between two windows, and she had a habit when she was writing of lifting her head to stare at her reflection, more often than not without seeing it: only occasionally, if she were very tired or very puzzled, she spoke to it.
She glanced up now, uncurling the fingers stiffened over her pen, trying to relax shoulders that had become a block of pain, and said in a jeering voice,
‘Here you sit, with your clown’s face, scribbling.’
Nothing easier than to accentuate the look on her face of comic sadness: she had only to pull down the ends of her long once sensual mouth, and stare with her pale prominent eyes. It was a heavy face and would become heavier with age, as the lines from nose to mouth bit deeper and the square jaw sagged.
‘Yes, a clown.’
The morning’s letter from Gregory, telling her that he was going to resign, and no longer had any say in appointments, was still lying on an edge of the table: after one reading of the fine sloping lines, stiffly regretful and kind — he had not really understood what the job meant to her — she had pushed it away from her. Like a child, like a coward, but the disappointment, the shock, were too great, and the familiar inescapable humiliation, spreading through her veins like a poison. Another failure. This time lethal.
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