31st Of February

by Julian Symons

  “Good night.”

  The door closed and he sat still for a moment in the armchair, staring straight ahead of him. Then, as his eyes slowly focused to take in the furnishings of the room, the modernist grey carpet with its jagged pattern of blue and orange picking up the same colours in the curtains, the chromium standard lamp, the Lalique glass on the mantelpiece, the chromium electric fire, the white ghastly light from the fluorescent strips on the ceiling, as he, took in the whole brassy brightness of the place he thought: I must get away from here; this is nothing to do with me. For if the choice of neighbourhood was Anderson’s, reluctantly agreed to by Valerie because it was almost impossible to find a place to live in, the flat itself was Valerie’s, just as Elaine Fletchley was Valerie’s friend. There was one incongruous element, however, which stood out as an oddity in that room of chromium furniture and tubular lighting; a Georgian writing desk which stood between the electric fire and an angular wall lamp. This writing desk had belonged to Anderson’s parents, and his father had given it to him when he moved from home. He walked over to the desk now and opened a drawer below the main body of the desk with a small key. He felt at the back of this drawer, pressed a small protrusion, and another small hidden drawer was revealed, just large enough to contain a book with a cover of black leather and stiff marbled corners. Anderson took this book in both hands, holding it carefully as if it were a fragile object. Then he sat down at the desk, staring at the black cover. Anderson had first written in this book a week ago, and had sat up four nights in succession, writing each night for several hours. Every night since then he had felt compelled to read the story put down between the black leather covers with marbled corners. He had written the story himself, and yet he felt so remote from it that a sensation of utter strangeness overcame him while he read, so that he seemed to be reading of somebody else’s life and not his own. And now the craving to read what was written in the book had become so strong that it was the first thing he turned to when he came back from work.

  Tonight he had gone to the cinema, but in front of the Hollywood faces he saw quite distinctly the shapes and appearance of the book. Now he sat looking at the cover, holding the book in both hands. I can do whatever I wish, he thought. A movement of the hand and this book returns to the drawer, another movement and the drawer is closed. A movement of the hand: and the hand is controlled by the brain. But if a person dissociated from the figure Anderson recognised as himself – the slick executive, in line for a directorship – if somebody else had put down what was in this book, could not a similarly dissociated figure put back the book in the drawer, with a movement of which Anderson himself had no awareness? Was it possible to experiment, he wondered, to make one’s mind a conscious blank? And while he thought this, his grip upon the book must have relaxed, for it dropped to the floor, landing with a soft plop upon the carpet. Anderson picked up the book, opened it, and began to read:

  Now it is all over. The funeral is over, the inquest is over, the verdict has been given. Two people who had very little in common have ceased to live together. One has fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her neck; the other continues an existence in which he regards his own ridiculous occupation with extraordinary gravity. Is there anything more to be said?

  Yes, there is a great deal more to be said. A casual death like this one makes one question the whole of existence. Why should Valerie and I have lived together for years? What possible meaning can one attach to our life together, how can one understand it? And if such a ridiculous end to a shared life is possible, doesn’t this illuminate the absolute absurdity of existence itself? Now that Valerie is dead, I see quite certainly that I didn’t love her. I am absolutely unable to understand why I married her. I can’t see why I didn’t push her down the stairs long ago. Wyvern, at the office, has a phrase which he uses every now and again when things are going wrong: “Why don’t we all get in one great bed and – one another?”

  Well, why don’t we?

  But of course that kind of thing won’t do – that pure abandonment to the idea that life is nonsense. There must be somewhere an explanation of human activity which isn’t purely biological, which interprets life in terms of some kind of meaning. It’s to try to get some idea of what it all means that I’m putting down this individual case history of my life with Val.

  I met Val first at a party given by Elaine Fletchley. At least it was given by Woman Beautiful, the high-class fashion magazine she works for, and Elaine was a hostess. They asked somebody from all the bright advertising agencies, and I went from Vincent’s. It was a very dull party. I had a bit of chat with other advertising figures and was just working my way over to say good-bye to Elaine when I bumped into a girl and upset her drink. “Oh dear,” she said. “Oh dear, my poor frock.” She stared at me with wide-apart eyes of a curious hazel colour. Then she said: “But I want another drinky.” There was just the faintest suggestion of a lisp in the ‘way she rolled her r’s. So I got her a drink and we talked, and it turned out that she worked for Woman Beautiful, too, as an assistant fashion editor. I told her that I was a copywriter and she said: “Oh, but you must be awfully clever.” She was so short that she had to look up at me, and she did so with a kind of starry gaze. I can remember wondering what I was doing talking to her. She was just the kind of girl, I can remember thinking, for whom I had no use at all. How is it possible, then, to account for my next action? I leaned over (I can see myself doing it quite clearly) and said: “Let’s get out of this din and go somewhere else?” And what did she say? She giggled and answered with quite a definite lisp. “I say you awe a quick worthker.” We left the party, had some drinks – she soaked up the drink like a sponge – and she stayed at the flat I lived in then, in Kensington. When she left in the morning we arranged to meet that evening. We did. And the next and the next. In six months we were married.

  So there it is, or there’s the beginning of it. During the whole of that six months if I’d ever asked myself whether I liked Val, the answer would have been an unhesitating No.

  I dislike girls who lisp, girls who are kittenish, girls who drink too much. Valerie did all of those things. Why did I marry her, then? Partly I’d got into the habit of seeing her – but what made me start the habit? Partly no doubt I was the victim of that feeling war and bombing gave you, that no relationship you formed mattered much, or was likely to be permanent – and how damned mistaken that feeling was. Partly she was good in bed, and although I was over thirty when I met her I hadn’t much experience of that sort of thing. Although Val was nearly ten years younger than I was, I gathered she’d had plenty. But although I enjoyed our times in bed, I wasn’t all that interested. That certainly won’t do for a main motive.

  And why did Valerie marry me? If I can’t explain my own motives, I certainly can’t understand hers. I think she found me attractive – although few women have done so. I believe she liked men older than herself. And – although I may be quite wrong – I believe she regarded me as a very different person from the man I am. Subconsciously I assumed that we should stop drinking and going to parties after we got married. But Val assumed that we should go on drinking, and go to more parties than ever.

  So we started off wrong. And then there was trouble about this house. Val was essentially what I think of as an Earl’s Court girl – nice gay parties with people in the rag trade as she called it, a few commercial artists, some fifth-rate actors. Well, you can get all that in our bit of Pimlico if you want it, but in rather too sordid a way for Val. She liked a bit of glamour spread over it – not too much, just a thin layer. She was horrified when she first saw the house and even more so when I told her I liked it. “But how can you like it? It’s so vulgar. That woman Flossie Williams – she’s just a tawt.” And what are your friends, do you think? I asked her. And what are you? Didn’t you sleep with me the first time you met me? The only difference was that she got marriage instead of a spot cash settlement. At that she burst into tears, and it’s true I w
as unfair, because Val was a one-man woman. I say I think she found me attractive, but I’m doing myself an injustice. The fact is that she never looked at anybody else at all. She told Elaine Fletchley so, and Elaine told me. And how can one explain that? That’s as nonsensical as the rest of it.

  So Val burst into tears. She was always bursting into tears; it was one of the most irritating things about her. Then she asked me again why I liked living here, but I couldn’t answer that, because I didn’t know. There was just something about the streets and the people and the atmosphere, that’s all.

  But if Valerie couldn’t get her own way about the house, at least she made it look the way she wanted. It’s all round me now, as it’s been round me for years – the glaring colours, the fumed oak paradise in the bedroom. “It’s so bright and gay and new,” she’d say – but with the lisp, of course. “I hate old stuff. I’d like life to start again every morning. New people, new job, new places, new everything. Wouldn’t you like that?” And when I said truthfully that I’d like nothing less, she’d be upset. And she not only had her way about the look of the place; she got Elaine to live in it as well. First she said the house was too big for just the two of us. Maybe there’ll be three one day, I said, but she didn’t want children. Then she wanted Elaine to come and live here with us. I didn’t want it; I wanted to be alone. But she had it her way. We turned the place into two self-contained flats and we had the ground floor and the Fletchleys had the first. We shared the cellar, where we both kept a small stock of drink. Elaine is a neat, tarty little piece, slick and smart and hard. What did she see in Fletchley to marry him? That’s another problem, but I can’t go into it now.

  Val had kept her job on Woman Beautiful, so when Elaine came the girls would talk office gossip all evening long. Fletchley never seemed to mind, just as he never seemed to mind Elaine going out with other men. “She always comes back,” he used to say to me. “She always comes back to old Fletch.” But at this time, when they first came here, Elaine didn’t go out much. She would talk office gossip with Val in the evening until I was nearly crazy. Occasionally I thought she was intending to make a pass at me, but Fletchley never seemed to notice, so perhaps I was wrong. I got so crazy with their talk that I suggested in desperation to Val that we should go out and drink. Six months ago she’d have leaped at the suggestion, but now she didn’t much want to do anything but drink a pint or two of black-market whisky by her own comfortable electric fireside while she chattered to Elaine. And when we did go out it wasn’t any good, because I didn’t really care for drinking and I could hardly even be polite to Val. “You’re never nice to me, Andy, the way you used to be,” she’d say tearfully, and look at me with her head slightly on one side Was it true? Had I ever been nice to her? I can’t believe that I ever was. She’d invented my niceness in the past to contrast with my howwidness in the present. We can’t recreate the past, but we can always soothe sorrow and vanity by inventing it.

  So drinking was no good, and after a couple of years there was another thing that was no good, too. I couldn’t work up the least flicker of interest in Val while I was with her. When I was away from her – in the office writing copy, interviewing a client, sitting round a conference table – then very often I would positively shiver with desire for her. The most powerful and violent sexual images came to my mind, and they were not merely vague images – they had a positive association with Val. As soon as I saw her, though – as soon, even, as I knew I would see her within half an hour – they vanished altogether. It would all have been comic if it had not been deeply humiliating.

  All this sounds like a good case for divorce, or at any rate separation. But strangely enough, Val never wanted a separation – throughout the whole of our life together she was absolutely devoted to me. And why did I stay with Val? I find the question absolutely unanswerable. It would have been difficult, I suppose, to arrange a separation. She would have wanted to go on living with Elaine. I should have had to get out of Joseph Street, and I didn’t want to get out. Then again I should have been lonely. She had become a habit, and we live by our habits. But there was something outside all that, something that held me to her. It was, it seems to me, precisely because I disliked her, because she filled our home with hideous furniture and empty chatter, that I wanted to live with her. The things that I most detested were the things I most desired! Shall I put down the image that came to me most often when I saw Val, tearstained and reproachful, or limply acquiescent in my unkindness? It was of my mother, and the ghastly house we lived in so many years ago – and of holding my mother’s hand as she lay, a pitiful and repulsive skeleton, upon her deathbed.

  But now I come to the real reason for writing in this book – the effect Val’s death has had on me. We lived together for several detestable years. For the whole of that time I had seen with irritation the grease on her face at night, and her intolerable cheerfulness in the morning. I’d listened all that time to her inanities about clothes and film stars. Unconsciously, I must dozens of times have wished her dead. But now that she is dead, and the bathroom is free when I want to use it and I no longer find hairpins in the bed, I am oppressed by an extraordinary sense of loss. Not loss of Val exactly – that seems not to enter into it. Rather, part of myself seems to have disappeared. I feel like one of those insects – that goes on living even after being cut in half.

  On Monday, February 4th, we went to work as usual. Val sang “Berkeley Square,” out of her repertory of out-of-date songs, in her bath. I had a worrying day at the office.

  There the writing ended. Anderson’s perfect absorption in the black book had been such that he had forgotten to turn on the electric fire, and he now became conscious that he was cold. He was sitting also in an uncomfortable position, so that something in his pocket pressed sharply into his side. He put his hand in his pocket, drew out the pot of Preparation Number 1, and placed it upon a red-topped table with chromium legs. He flicked a switch, and the firebar glowed. But there was some other cause for disturbance – what was it? Sickly-sweet chimes sounded in the room. Of course! Val’s musical doorbell. Anderson put the book back in the small secret drawer, and closed and locked the desk. Then he went to the front door, and opened it to reveal a burly figure. The street lamp cast the shadow of this patiently waiting figure into Anderson’s hall. The face was left dark, but Anderson recognized Inspector Cresse by his bowler hat.

  “Come in,” Anderson said with self-mocking gaiety. “Come in, Inspector.” With a catlike, almost mincing step, he led the way into the room he had just left. The Inspector followed more deliberately. Under the tubular lighting his face showed large, blue-white, slightly dented, with two strongly marked lines running from nose to mouth. The whole face was flattish, the nose a large, blunt wedge, the mouth broad and shapeless, but turned down slightly at the corners in an expression both clownish and severe. But the balance of these heavy features was changed altogether when the Inspector took off his bowler hat, revealing a great white head that was completely bald. What had been menacing now appeared ludicrous; and such sudden changes of appearance and gesture appeared to be part of the Inspector’s stock-in-trade. He had presented, Anderson thought, a quite farcical figure at the inquest; and yet at odd moments there was something in the firm fit of his clothes and his blank forward-looking stare that gave an impression of intellectual strength, though not of subtlety. Behind the figure of farce lay the man of power, behind the man of power lurked the irrepressibly clownish comedian. The comedian was uppermost when the Inspector took off his hat, and placed it, with a wonderfully whimsical gesture, upon the red table by the pot of cream.

  “A drink?” Anderson almost danced round the thickset figure. “A cigarette? Sit down. It’s rather cold in here, I’m afraid.” He shivered in an exaggerated manner.

  The Inspector sat in one of the chromium-armed chairs, his hard bulk filling it without overflowing. His voice was rich and thick, and at times he did not articulate with absolute distinctness. “I�
�ll take just a little whisky. Thank you, Mr Anderson. Nothing in it.” He held the amber liquid in one large blunt paw. “I called earlier this evening.”

  “Fletchley told me. You wanted to know the width of his pyjama stripes. You Gallup Poll policeman!” Soda water sizzled in Anderson’s glass. He almost giggled.

  “We had a little chat,” the Inspector said vaguely. “He’s a man with a sense of humour, which is something I always enjoy.” On another chromium chair, bent deferentially a little forward, Anderson smiled agreement, rocked by an obscure secret merriment. “A nice idea of his, to write those cards for birthdays and Christmas. Ingenious, too.”

  “A nice sentiment.” Anderson rocked again.

  “That’s right. Or don’t you think so?” A vacant orb, emptied of expression, the Inspector’s eye rolled.

  “I’m not called upon to express an opinion.” Anderson spoke a little huffily.

  “But I’m interested” – the Inspector’s great head nodded in puzzlement – “to know what you think. An intellectual man like yourself; you’d call yourself an intellectual now, wouldn’t you?”

  “An advertising man merely.”

  “Those verses he writes – you couldn’t call them great art now?” Anderson shook his bead. “But they help to increase friendliness between human beings, don’t they? Isn’t that a good thing?”

  With complete self-possession Anderson smiled at the heavy face opposite him. “The verses Fletchley writes are in every way contemptible. They pander deliberately to the vulgarian who lives in all of us. They exploit the lowest depth of public taste. That’s what is wrong with Fletchley’s rhymes.”

  With clownish pleasure the inspector said: “I do admire the way you talk, now. But tell me – as a plain man now – if there’s a demand for something, can it be wrong to supply it?” The vacant eye rolled round the room. “You don’t have a woman in,” he added. Anderson was taken aback.