“There are worse things than swearing,” he said, “and worse words than cuss words.”
Victorine said nothing.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” said Costello cruelly. He wanted to hurt her, he wanted to regain her attention, she had more and more withdrawn herself from him. She seemed to have forgotten their games, their funny confidences, their savage rough-housing.
Tears of protest came into her eyes and Costello became vicious. “It’s pretty good—you know what I mean—isn’t it?” he said. “Tell me, isn’t it?”
“Costello, I beg you.”
Costello felt a terrible longing for his sister that he could not help, that he did not even know was desire; taking a hold of one of her fingers, he bent it at the first knuckle hard and slow until his sister moaned in pain.
“Say uncle,” he whispered, and it was as if he had asked her to repeat a dirty word. He was pressing her thighs with his knees. His beauty was the beauty of a faun, his expression of lust suited him. “Say it,” he insisted.
“Oooh,” moaned Victorine, “please!”
“Say it, say it.” He pressed harder. His lips parted over even white teeth, a little silvery saliva formed at the side of his mouth.
Victorine sank to her knees; it was as if she were surrendering her virginity. “Uncle,” she said and her tone was caressing, sweet as honey, and the little conqueror felt as if he had possessed her. He let go and went off on his bike, the bell tingling, the dry leaves crackling.
The tempestuous son of Homer had won his point, his feelings left him, he was totally unprepared for the blonde woman who faced his father in the hall. He stepped back into the vestibule.
“I told you not to come here,” his father said coolly.
“She sent for me to take up her tweed skirt.”
“Mrs. L’Hommedieu?” (He was correcting her familiar use of the pronoun for his wife.)
“Yes, Mrs. L’Hommedieu.”
“You have received my cheques? You’re quite comfortable?”
“Yes, Homer, I’m quite comfortable.”
“You’re looking very well.”
“So are you, Homer.”
“I’ll have to insist that you do not come here again,” said Homer. “It’s hardly decent.”
“Perhaps you will come and see me,” said the blonde woman.
“Impossible.”
“You have forgotten everything, haven’t you . . .” She hesitated.
For a moment Homer saw a naked plump blonde girl lying on his bed, on the side table under the lamp a big box of chocolates, and himself awkwardly pulling on his trousers. “Aren’t you even going to say goodbye,” she had said, choosing a big nougat. Even now, after twenty years, a little of the pride, if none of the passion, returned, at his having so easily slept with the village queen. Twenty years had slimmed her down, her satiny allure was gone, but she still had, and would probably never lose, a frank licentiousness that she seemed almost to have been born with. Her lip curled at Homer’s bumptious vanity. As a good-looking boy, engaged to be married to a young woman in society, his quick and easy passion had given her a thrill, but now she felt it would disgust her and she sensed that he had not learned a thing and never would. It was true—what Homer knew about love would not even take a compound sentence in Ward’s Sentence and Theme.
Homer had seduced the prettiest girl in the village although she preferred Tony Hyde and was engaged to an electrician, and for ten years she had generously taken care of his, what are called, needs—it was only right and the gentlemanly thing to support her for the rest of her life although he no longer needed her, and of course keep the pain of the transaction from his wife.
“Well . . .” she said, and Homer’s youthful indiscretion picked up her little bag of pins and needles. Only Costello saw something else, something more than the “little seamstress” leave the house. In his imagination he undressed her and looked at her breasts and her thighs, her belly. She was woman. He had inherited his father’s tools and he wanted to use them. But suddenly some other blood stream warmed his heart and he adored her, his evil impulses melted away, he wanted only to be of service to her, run errands. As for his father, neither could Costello undress him and put him in bed with anyone, his interest was completely taken up with the blonde woman, he let his father pass, and it looked as if for the time being Victorine would be safe from his savagery, too.
Homer stood in the living-room and looked out of the bay window into the same violet haze that his little daughter had noted. Night was dropping down fast, as it does in November, and almost immediately it would be pitch black. Then the eyes would become accustomed to the suddenness of the absence of light and the big trees and certain great outlines and masses would take shape again, strange and eerie and marvellous. Even Homer felt a little uneasy and he switched on the lights. For a moment he looked back into the past. It was unlike him. Homer was one of those who believed that what was done was done and over with, and he had no patience with Allison when she regretted a purchase she felt she could not really afford or a hasty, thoughtless word to Elsie or Joe, “Forget it.” Homer was self-made and self-assured. It was for women to regret, it was womanish to be sorry, womanish to look back. It is not easy then to know for sure what went on in Homer’s head as he stood for that moment, an unlighted cigarette between his fingers, his legs slightly apart, his head thrust forward. The too sweet scent of the little seamstress stuck to the curtains like cigar smoke. He had come a long way since his terrible desire for her had compelled him to do a foolish thing. Engaged to Allison, Allison who was upstairs this minute wondering, putting on fresh lipstick, smoothing her eyebrows and wondering some more, no one knows why he couldn’t have waited three weeks, and been content with someone of his own class, as his father used to say, and not have “got in trouble” with the village queen. If it had not been for his overwhelming success with her, “Don’t be silly,” she had said, “no one will ever know,” he would have come to his wife three weeks later the virgin he swore to her he was because she liked it that way.
“Never anyone?” she had whispered, and her head fell sideways on his arm. At last the little fiancée who had always said, “No, wait, dear,” lay naked by his side, her eyes closed because she was shy but her whole lovely body tremulous and eager and swelling. For a moment the availability of the girl he most admired and came close to loving took away his desire, but only for a moment, “Never?” He saw the pulse beating fast in her neck and her flaming cheeks and the lie helped, and even as he did it he repeated as he struggled for his pleasure on her body, “Never . . . never . . . never,” and his brain made lightning-like comparisons—the bold, jutting and orange-coloured lips of the village queen and her almost grin of satisfaction, her clearly etched pale blue eyes looking right into his, and this girl’s look of a child gazing into space, her lips full and turned up at the corners, her skin moist and soft, her hair sticking to her temples, wet, like a drowned girl.
And after his pleasure, instead of feeling good, something new was added, something the big Homer, the grown Homer, had lost in his consciousness, lost and gone for ever, so that only a slight uneasiness had come over him a moment ago as he looked into the dark, remorse. So that for the last time in his life he said, “Allison, darling, I’m sorry.” “Sorry?” she had said, “Dearest, why?” and within a week he was back in Millie’s room where the completion of the act that made such regular demands on him did not make him feel bad afterwards. So for ten years, oddly enough, he had eased his conscience with Millie whom he disliked and Millie put up with what she called his elementary-school love-making because there was a practical wisdom in her, a shrewdness along with her glamour and her plump, nicely articulated body, and without demanding anything, or even actually asking, she got it, and soon it became a deal, and in writing, too! That was Homer’s youthful indiscretion.
Homer never, even when he was very young, looked into himself or asked questions about why things happened, there was not
hing profound about Homer. That he could enjoy himself with a woman he did not admire and go away whistling and relaxed, and after the selfsame enjoyment with a woman he did tremendously admire feel uneasy—it could no longer be called remorse, he had set his heel on that—did not make him wonder.
And it is not likely that during the short lapse as he stood immobile, the ashes on his cigarette lengthening, that he really recalled much of the above or any. His mind may simply have become that blank which he had cultivated. After all, Homer’s feelings were writ in water, he left no memoirs. Perhaps he was merely anticipating his bath.
He went over and put out his cigarette in an ash-tray.
“Allison?”
The woman that all of Homer’s business friends admired looked very pretty standing at the head of the stairs. She felt that she did, and she was glad to see Homer, she always was. She had lived with him for twenty years and didn’t know anything about him at all. She never questioned her love for him and did not, could not, doubt his for her—not with her brain. It was Allison’s intuition that gave her trouble. An intelligent woman, she wouldn’t go along with it, which may or may not have caused her frequent sore throats.
As he reached the step below her, she put out her arm and crooked it around his neck and pulled his head to her breast. She held on to his ear and, taller than he was, as they stood, she kissed his eyebrow, ran her lips along the arch of it and then quickly took the short hairs in her teeth, you could hear her funny caress. She let go of him but not before she had seen him, almost before he did it, turn his head away as if a fly were bothering him, a tiny irritation, which Allison, for her own sake, could not afford to note. He brushed her cheeks with his lips and looked at her, he must have really seen the woman he so much admired and to whom he was so devoted, but his smile and look seemed almost as if they were meant for someone behind her. On the landing he became suddenly four inches taller than she and she liked her feeling of littleness although she was tall for a woman. The feeling made her lift up her face and put her hand, she saw that it was long and smooth and pliable, on his lapel. “I will kiss you,” she said, “dip your head.” Homer looked at his watch. “There isn’t time before dinner,” he said, “afterwards.”
Well, Allison knew what he meant, after twenty years she should know, but she hadn’t exactly lost her identity and she still felt now and then the wish to express spontaneously an affection that had not, even at this late date, been completely snubbed, without taking off all her clothes, her pink and white candy-striped satin négligé, her best slip, her lace brassière, her silk panties, and locking the door against interruption, taking on Homer and letting him do what he did best; at least what he did in record time, even now—and still not get her kiss.
“The market?” she said, changing the subject. “Big doings?”
“The same.” He went into the bathroom and turned on the tub.
“Homer?”
But he couldn’t hear with the noise of both taps. He took off his clothes, he had completely forgotten she existed. Naked, he looked in the mirror over the basin and thrust out his chin, each side of his face, and ran his hand over his jowls. To shave or not to shave? Evidently no. He faced about, took a step and separated his legs. . . .
“Darling, I’ll close the door if you don’t mind.” She said it gently without a trace of irritation or sarcasm, and she pulled it ever so quietly shut. Homer had not answered, the door might have closed itself.
Allison curled herself on the pretty chaise-longue she liked so much, it was nearly always warm from her body, it scarcely cooled, and waited for Homer to finish his tub. Without closing her eyes she saw as clear as day a slim Indian boy with soft rounded features and long legs. Against his hard brown chest he cradled a young goat with pointed nose, the little goat’s legs were gathered together and hung down like stems of flowers. The boy stood squinting a little, his dark brows almost meeting, looking into the warm and enveloping sun of India, his white loin cloth was dazzling against his dark unblemished skin.
And Homer, soaking his head in the tub, must have been thinking of something, but no one will ever know what it was.
Chapter IV
Allison’s Intuition
Victorine’s mother, this Allison, who kept the pretty chintz-covered chaise-longue warm, was a woman of visions but, one might say, no vision. To reality she was blind. One day she would receive a shock, it was inevitable, it was building up like giant cumulus along the horizon, and when she was least aware, when she was fastest asleep, it would happen. It was as if unknown, nameless, headless forces were angry that a single woman, a very feminine woman, should have all by herself a will of iron, a will that enabled her to create, hour by hour and day by day, her own life and sustain her own beliefs and practise her own ethics, without, as it were, running afoul of the law, so to speak, the law of averages, the facts of life. I do not mean that she was stupid or headstrong. I do not mean that she was happy. It has been said that her brain and her intuition were at odds, as quite naturally two such opposing elements, as you might call them, would be, if she had both, and she did. Well, creative and wilful, to get to the point, she had, unconsciously, created Homer, as she saw him and loved him, and strength itself, she had sustained the image. No more than God, if he were disappointed in his creation, could say, “This is not man but beast,” neither could Allison. But just as she unconsciously created him, so did she unconsciously sustain him and it was no dream to her, it was true, it was real. I do not think she was mad, of that inventive madness that sits like a block of dry ice in the lobes of the brain of a paranoiac. That one, who, brilliant and single-minded, discovers the indiscoverable and spends the rest of his life begging for interviews with successful men, men he feels are satisfied with half truths, but men who are abler than he, men of action, all his energies dissipated on that ray of infinite light he has come upon, the Truth ray. No, I do not think so, Allison was simply fighting for her love life, a minor neurosis. The only comparison left with the mad inventor, the fact that, like him, her blindness was specific. In all else she was observing, even astute. Homer was her only blunder. How she loved him!
Of the many business friends and acquaintances he brought home to dinner, all those males in pin-striped suits, who, in a semicircle, admired Allison and envied Homer, not many escaped her divining eye, her lightning intuition, and if Homer asked her, she would happily tell.
“What did you think of March?”
“Did I like him or what did I think of him?”
“Both.”
“I did not like him, he is like so many of the others . . .” She hesitated.
“How?”
“You don’t mind?”
“Hell, no.”
She placed a finger to her temple. “Bullion,” she said, “solid bullion,” and then she touched her heart, “and muscle,” she said. “That’s all,” she said, “there isn’t any more.” She liked the game, she was good at it. “Who else?” she said.
“Jackson?” He really wanted to know, his firm was considering Jackson, and Allison had been so often right. It irritated him a little that she was, it nicked his omnipotence, but he trusted her judgment, never told her so.
“Weak,” she said seriously, “weak and vain and selfish.”
“Brains?”
“Oh yes, brains.”
“How weak, then?”
“Women,” she said, “but not wonderful women, not glamorous and clever women but . . .” She searched in her mind for a layout of what she meant. “I mean, well, just, he is so vain—little, poor—well, women who think he’s wonderful . . . like the little seamstress who did my tweed skirt. Yes!” she said, “like her.”
Any man but Homer would have blushed, but it is possible he made no mental comparison whatever between himself and first, March, and then, Jackson. She was looking at him lovingly and eagerly, she wanted to be praised for her ability that she felt he must recognize. Her love, and her belief in him was so true, her w
ill so strong, that in her presence it is possible he believed himself the man she thought he was. No look of his betrayed the possibility. His eye was candid and unwavering as he gazed at her, but he no longer saw her, he was thinking of textiles, and Jackson would do.
“But don’t let me influence you,” said Allison. “I could be wrong. He was the one with the little moustache, wasn’t he?”
“What,” said Homer and it wasn’t even a question.
“I don’t suppose,” said Allison reasonably, “that his personal life is anyone’s business and, as you said, he has brains and that’s what you’re looking for and that’s what he’s got and what possible difference could it make to the textile business . . . A man,” she finished, “can be absolutely honest in business and among men and with women a cheat and a liar and a bastard.” She blushed at her own enthusiasm and still found it fun to use a word like that on occasion.
Homer lifted his head; used to her soft but telling voice, something startled him from his reverie, but he was not sure what it was, he was that immersed; in what? Allison was never to know. He could have been planning to overthrow the Government by force.
That Allison had just described her own darling Homer to a T there was no indication that either of them, by the slightest tremor or evasion or sudden chill, knew.
“I’m cold,” said Allison, and she stooped and looked into the thermostatic thermometer on the wall, it was dusty and she wet her finger; it read an even 80. But Allison’s intuition didn’t have a chance. That it could easily be Homer, right this minute, over on Linden Street, straddling the second maid who wasn’t very pretty, in the few minutes he had before his wife came back from her shopping in town, she had no way of consciously knowing. The sudden shivering fit meant only another sore throat and as she searched for the thermometer in the bedside table drawer Jackson pulled on his pants and adjusted his tie in the mirror.
Allison, snug in her big four-poster bed with the fringe on top, settled down with The Heptaméron. The fever, the chilly sensations, the pain in her throat did not offend her, it wasn’t the sort of thing that could, and she built up no resistance consciously or unconsciously against an enemy as abstract as death. The real honest-to-goodness hangman who stood in the doorway masquerading as her darling Homer, would one day wring from her a cry that can only be sounded by a creature in anguish, and only be compared to an animal whose throat is cut by his master. But Allison’s twenty-four-hour security, as it might be called, was her own doing, her own thesis, her own brain child that she had tenderly raised from infancy.
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