Most Loving Mere Folly

by Ellis Peters

  2

  The spring came early and radiant; the last frosts wept away into a quick, bright thaw, the hanging woods behind the house budded into delicate green, softer and vaguer than the down of young birds, and all the carefully tended gardens of Great Leddington burst into a passion of flowers yellow as sunlight; but still they watched each other silently and compassionately through the dark mist of their memories of Theo, waiting for a word which was never said, a movement which was never made.

  On the eve of May Day she fired her kiln early. She had been experimenting with a new glaze, of which she said restlessly that she had great hopes; but she knew that it was a lie, even as she said it. She had no great hopes at all, of anything she did. The gift was gone out of her fingers. How they had suddenly torn that one great, delicate bowl out of the clay, after so many months without reward, she could not understand. Now it stood invisible, rose-red in the cooling kiln, waiting for the evening again, with all that was left of her spirit burning within it.

  Her mind had made this a final test; it had the full organic beauty of form which had eluded her for a year, and if she had brought the glaze to as high a perfection, then she was still alive, and an artist. If she had failed with it, after the wild encouragement of a first success, she was finished, and the spark had flowed out of her fingers only to mark the final death of the fire within. All day long she prowled in and out of the workshop, unable to work or rest, making excuses to remain beside the kiln, and yet the more deeply disquieted while she remained there.

  ‘You’re making too much of it,’ said Dennis. ‘If it came out a failure it would still be only a failure like any other – you’re trying to make an oracle out of it. If you go on making crisis after crisis of every piece you throw, how can you expect to get back into form? You’re ill, you ought to throw up the whole idea of work for a bit, and let it come back naturally.’

  She looked up at him across the kiln, her thin shoulders arched cat-like to fend him off, as if he had threatened her last stake. He saw again, with a slow contraction of his heart into pain, how her eyes had burned up half her face, and her cheeks had sunk into gaunt hollows under the gleaming bones. He should have known better than to argue with her, everything he did was suspect now; he could not warn her against anything, even her own frenzy, without warning her against him.

  ‘I know you don’t believe in it,’ she said, ‘you don’t have to tell me that. You’d like to be the breadwinner, wouldn’t you? It would give you your bearings again.’

  He made no answer. Unless she found some way of goading him off his balance against his will, he seldom quarrelled with her now. He would stand there staring steadily at her with his blank, compassionate eyes, while her blows bruised him and recoiled unacknowledged. For whole days she would be aware of those eyes upon her, smoothed clear of any betraying light or feeling, offering her no fuel for her angers or her despairs, and no unwary tenderness, but only a distant and detached pity, against which no weapon of hers could produce a wound.

  ‘In any case you can’t do anything until it’s cooled off,’ he said patiently. ‘Why don’t you come out into the garden, while the sun’s out? It’s nice if you keep out of the wind. It won’t cool any the quicker for you standing and watching it.’

  She felt how carefully, how arduously, he nursed her aside from her obsession, how even his voice had assumed the same opaque quality as his eyes. It was necessary to tread thus gently, because they had learned from scarifying experience that the slightest incautious step might hurl them into the screaming dark. Sometimes she could not bear the labouring calm, she wanted to end it at all costs, and longed for the very violence they went so wincingly to avoid. Sometimes she cast about her for a means of drawing blood from him, and forcing him to strike back at her, but it was not so easy as it had been. He kept his veiled quiet, his eyes continued their watch upon her without rest. Then, recoiling, she would think wildly: ‘Poor Dennis! What hell for him! If he were free of me he could still be happy – he’s only young, he has time!’

  She went out with him into the garden; he had been busy all the Saturday afternoon breaking up the neglected butts of ground within the rear fence, under the shade of the woods, which were foaming into a bright and tender green of full leaf. He was flushed from digging, and his forehead smudged with earth from his hands, and sun and exercise had moved him to strip off his collar and tie, and unbutton his shirt. ‘He looks,’ she thought, ‘like my son.’ And her body ached with her love and hate for him.

  She stayed with him a little while as he worked, and he was comforted, and bent his back to his digging again with all his attention; but when he relaxed for a moment, and turned to reassure himself that she was still there, he had already lost her. She had gone back silently to her vigil by the kiln. It was no use pursuing her and bringing her back again. Her mind was there, she could not help going back to it. And was it possible that he felt easier when she was gone? The lift of his heart, the deep sigh, could not be mistaken for anything but relief. Did he wish himself rid of her? Not often had he gone so far as to contemplate that question; the mere uneasy foreboding that he was approaching it set him baulking like a driven horse, and swerving from the line of thought which must bring him hard against it at last if he persisted.

  He loved her as terribly as ever, more terribly, he could no more give her up than he could give up his own heart from his body. As long as they both lived, they could not live without each other, and yet they could not live with each other, either. It was not all their fault, events had made their task impossible from the start. In the end they would destroy each other. He knew in his heart that he was afraid, that the despairing patience and gentleness with which he watched her acquired its calm from the very force of the fear he felt within. If a way of escape from her offered, would he take it? Could he? He did not know, he dared not wonder.

  He put away his tools and went and made the tea himself; she would have no awareness of time or hunger now, except as they touched her obsession. When he was drying his hands, he found that he had broken a nail in his wrestlings with some of the overgrown bushes in the garden. Suspiria’s handbag was lying in one of the chairs in the living-room, and somewhere in its habitual chaos she carried a nail-file, so he opened the bag gingerly, and began to search through the accumulation of letters, cosmetics and keys for what he wanted. He did not find it, but he found something else.

  There was a little phial of tablets with a chemist’s label, and Suspiria’s name upon it; small white tablets, with a very slightly translucent texture, and a mica-like gleam about them. He sat staring at the little bottle as it lay in the palm of his hand; and at first he thought he would simply put it back where he had found it, and ask nothing, as she had volunteered nothing. That ready, watchful fear in him stirred quickly, burning up newly-coloured, like salty flames. Yes, he knew he was afraid. He liked his life, he wanted it; it could be hell upon earth, but still he wanted it. Then he thought: ‘No! I will tell her I’ve seen them.’ There were too many things hidden and unsaid, he was not sure that the silent places of their minds could hold any more, or how much more his self-respect could bear.

  When she came in reluctantly in answer to his call that tea was ready, he opened his hand beneath her eyes, and showed her the phial. She looked from it to his face, and her eyes were sombre and ready to be angry, though the emaciated lines of her face remained severe and still. ‘Well?’

  ‘You never told me you’d been to a doctor. I asked you to – remember? Several times!’

  ‘I had to sleep,’ she said. ‘When it got too bad, I went to him, that’s all. There’s nothing else the matter with me.’

  ‘I should have thought he could have done something better for you than just give you dope. What are they?’ he asked, steadily watching her.

  ‘I don’t know. Chloral hydrate, most likely. Something better than a bromide, anyhow.’ She reached out her hand for them, and the authority of the gesture could not be den
ied. ‘What were you doing in my bag?’

  He told her; her lips curved upward into a cold and famished smile, but she believed him. She shrugged it off indifferently, and sat down to pour out tea, slipping the phial into the deep pocket in the skirt of her dress. He watched it out of sight, noticing how her fingers folded it tightly and thrust it down to the bottom, and how she instantly lifted her hollow, intent eyes to encounter his again, as if she waited for him to challenge her further.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d been to him?’

  ‘What difference does it make? Either they’re effective or they’re not, your blessing isn’t going to make them work any better. Besides, I’m not proud of needing a doctor. You’re more interested than I expected,’ she said in a curiously flat voice.

  ‘I don’t much like such things as sleeping drugs, that’s all. They’re only a way of patching at it, instead of finding out what’s really wrong. You’ll be careful with them, won’t you?’

  ‘I’m not likely to make any mistakes,’ she said.

  Across the table they watched each other steadily, wearily, aware of every movement. For a long time their life together had been like that, a contest of watchfulness, a match of eyes. He had not often ventured to question what he expected to see, nor why his life should seem to hang so heavily upon his senses; but he knew they were killing each other, and which of them was to die of it first, and by how rapid or how slow a pain, was something he found himself wondering now without disguise. What was the use of pretending that such things did not happen? Theo was dead. Such things had happened.

  In a little while Suspiria got up and left him, and he heard the back door shut after her. She was going back to the kiln, because she could not keep away. He went into the garden again, and kept watch upon her movements unobtrusively through the windows, as often as he could make an excuse to pass that way. Inside the workshop, she was as assiduously inventing occupations for her hands, which flew from tool to tool with distrait fury, beginning and abandoning. He would have liked to avoid the moment of crisis when it came with the sunset, but he dared not leave her to face it alone, she had hung too much upon the issue. So when the full light began to fail, he put his tools away, and went to wash his hands at her sink, making that his excuse for entering the workshop. She had the first bricks off already, and went on lifting and stacking them, without paying any attention to him. Through the widening gap a column of hot air quivered fiercely, and the feathers of her disordered hair shook in it, and erected themselves, groping uncertainly upward like living things. Her face flushed vividly in the heat as she leaned over to stare into the interior. Beads of perspiration broke upon her forehead, and the softest tendrils of hair darkened and lay limply against her damp temples. He held his breath because she stared so long and so intently, shielding her eyes with the fingers of one hand.

  He approached quietly, looking where she looked. The contents of the kiln stood intact, the bowl in the centre, large, eager and shapely, surely as fine as she could wish. It shaded upward from cream into a soft, dull gold, and at the rim into a deep chocolate-brown as furry in texture as the face of a Siamese cat. What more could she want? She prowled round it, circling, angling for every conceivable view of the thing. When she dared, she began to lift out some of the smaller pieces from round it, to have a clearer view; one of the small pots cracked as she closed the tongs on it. She drew back quickly, and waited again, never sparing another glance for the nondescript little thing she had broken, but taking to heart the warning for the single piece which mattered to her.

  ‘It’s all right, you see,’ said Dennis, carefully unemphatic in her ear. Her movements, the way she quested about distractedly and longed and feared to touch, hurt him abominably. But she only gave him a dark look, almost of derision, and turned her eyes fiercely back to the kiln.

  She had made too much of it; if a miracle came out, after this anguish of waiting, it could not satisfy her. He saw that clearly now. She had lost sight of truth and balance, everything went into the distorting mirror of her despair, and flashed back into her eyes grotesquely changed, a caricature of itself. He felt a terrible adoring pity gather hotly about his heart, filling him with pain. He remembered her as he had first seen her in this house, sweeping aside the curtain from between them with a gesture of her arm, and holding her grey and glistening hands before her while she stared at him imperiously from under her arched brows, angrily repulsing the invaders of her dedicated peace. A slut, he had called her, with shocking clothes and a dirty face; but all the time he had recognised and feared the magnificence of her absorption into something larger than anything he possessed in his limited life, and envied her the superb conviction with which she strode through the complexities of her daunting world, creating with assurance and joy things which were their own justification. The flowers of clay that came out of her hands rose and stood erect, knowing themselves to be works of art; they reared themselves up like man coming to his full height in the intoxication of knowing that he could go on two feet; they thrust with their ardent curves against the sustaining air, making a place for themselves as of right. Now she threshed uneasily about the still quivering heat of her kiln, waiting for one bowl, only one, to come forth uncrippled, and encourage her to go on believing that she was still an artist.

  The disintegration terrified him, because he knew that it was his work. He had not meant it, but that did not absolve him. For a long time he had tried to comfort himself with the belief that this was only the aftermath of emotional disturbance, and would pass in time, and she would regain that unifying peace of the mind which makes creation possible. So she might have done, if the causes of her disruption could pass. But there was always, at the heart of everything they did or said or thought, the question without an answer, the question which would never be anwered. There was Theo, there would always be Theo. ‘How she must long to get rid of him,’ thought Dennis, watching her insatiably, ‘even at the cost of getting rid of me! If she could break loose from us both she might amount to something yet.’

  The heat subsided slowly. She pushed back her hair from her damp forehead, and stripped away more of the smaller pots which obscured the great one, until finally she could lift it out. She set it down without damage on the edge of the kiln, and stood back to consider it more critically.

  A fine, full, vegetable shape, thrusting roundly outward, energetically making room for itself, as positive and confident as a great flower, and with something of a flower’s texture. It was fluted with the marks of her fingers, it stood poised as accurately and proudly on its narrow base as a tulip on its stem. She had seen a world of hope in the form, what was she seeing now in the finished bowl? What did she make of the glaze, that she stared at it still with unmoving face and fixed eyes?

  She had taught him, perhaps too well. He found himself examining his own reactions rather than hers. He liked the glowing yellow at first sight, with its furry chocolate lip and its creamy-white base. The gold was rich and soft as she had meant it to be. But had it, perhaps, a slight heaviness, a thought too much positive colour for the beautiful waxen shape, smoothed like flesh beneath her palms? It was not the singing gold of tulips, but a less live, less vernal yellow; it turned the vivid, responsive flesh back to clay. And the slight metallic tint in the brown of the rim gathered to a bluish-grey bloom where the light rested, defacing the furry, warm softness which was the unique quality of the glaze as she had intended it to be. The clay, where it showed like light beneath a curtain at the base, no more than a hair-thin line, had fired to a reddish russet; he was more aware of it than he liked, and it did not please him. And yet the thing came so near to being wonderful! But he knew it was a failure. The yellow was a surface yellow, no internal light came up through it, it was laid on from without, adroit, accomplished, unsatisfying.

  Was it possible that she had so lost her orientation that she did not know? She went all round it, looked at it from every side, and then at him across it, her hungry eye
s still dark with anxiety. ‘Well? What do you think of it?’

  ‘I like it!’ The lie came out almost without his knowledge. Anything, anything, to see that look of intolerable tension soften and ebb from her face; and if she did not know, what harm could it do? It was hardly a lie for any other creature but their two selves. The thing would pass with half the critics for a minor masterpiece, so subtle were the things that were wrong with it. ‘Can’t you see for yourself that it’s a success? What more do you want?’

  ‘You really think it succeeds?’ she asked, the green glitter waking in the depths of her eyes; and she looked down again at the bowl, and the first spasmodic tremor of a smile began to shake the corners of her lips. ‘The glaze, too? Do you think the glaze came out right? Could you fault it at all?’ Her voice was quiet, and yet breathless. She watched his face, hanging upon his answer.

  He looked back at her gently, and said: ‘No, I couldn’t. I can’t see anything I’d want altered. It’s perfect!’

  She stood looking at him for a moment with her lower lip caught between her teeth, and then she began to laugh. There was nothing hysterical about it, it came up out of the deep recesses of her throat with an aching bitterness of amusement; and in the middle of it she suddenly put out her hand, and flattened it against the hot golden side of the bowl, and thrust it into the kiln. It fell with a shattering noise, and burst into a shower of fluted petals, breaking a dozen things besides in its fall. He had opened his mouth to cry out, and then made no more than a faint, guilty gasp like a sob, and was speechless before her.

  ‘Liar!’ she said, dragging herself back out of her laughter into a blaze of anger. ‘Damned liar! You know as well as I do the thing’s bad. If you don’t know it, what use are you to me?’ She stood there looking down into the kiln at the fragments of her last hope. ‘It’s no good! I’m finished! And all for you,’ she said, incredulous between grief and laughter, ‘all for you!’