The World in the Evening

by Christopher Isherwood

  ‘He could tell you you ought to be lying down,’ I said coldly. ‘If you’re sick.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Elizabeth submissively. ‘You’re quite right. I will.’

  ‘And you really want me to cancel this trip? They’ll think it awfully rude—at the last moment, like this.’

  ‘You did say it was a standing invitation. So I thought—’

  ‘Of course I won’t go,’ I said harshly, ‘if you’re really sick. But you said yourself it wasn’t serious?’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t.’ Elizabeth sighed faintly. ‘It isn’t really important. I’m sorry I spoke about it. I thought this trip didn’t matter to you particularly, either way. Otherwise, I’d never have suggested—’

  ‘I haven’t said it mattered to me, have I? I only think it’s rude to change one’s plans, for no particular reason.’

  ‘You’re perfectly right, darling. It is. Of course it is—’

  ‘But if you insist—’

  ‘Oh, Stephen,’ Elizabeth cried, with a kind of despair, ‘you know I don’t insist! When have you ever known me to insist on anything?’ She forced a smile, and reached out to touch my hand. But even this didn’t soften me.

  ‘Just tell me,’ I pursued, like an inquisitor in a torture-chamber who was hungry, and eager to get the signed statement before his supper, ‘do you want me to stay, or don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, go—go! Please go! Never mind what I said. I’m sorry I was so silly—’ Elizabeth turned her head quickly away and I knew, with shame and annoyance, that she was hiding tears. ‘I’d hate it—if you didn’t go, after this. I shall be all right.’

  ‘Very well, then. Then that’s settled.’ I gave her a quick formal kiss on the side of her averted face: a model patient husband with a petulant wife. ‘Au revoir, darling.’ I walked toward the door.

  But, just as I reached it, Elizabeth exclaimed with a gasp: ‘Stephen, wait—’

  She turned her face to me, now; and it shocked me—or came as near to shocking me as anything could, in my stupefied state of unfeeling. It was naked with fear. She reached out her hand. I gave her mine unwillingly, and she squeezed it with a sudden nervous spasm. ‘Promise me—’

  ‘What?’ I asked, suspicious again.

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Tomorrow, before lunch. The train gets in here about eleven fifty I think.’

  ‘And you won’t miss it, will you?’

  ‘Of course I won’t. Why should I?’

  ‘You will come back?’ Elizabeth had dropped all pretence, now. But I couldn’t possibly admit that I knew what she meant. A certain softening of kindness must have come into my face, however, for I saw it eagerly caught and reflected in her eyes.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ I assured her. ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘Shall you miss me?’ I asked Jane, next morning, as we lay in bed in our room at the Marseille hotel.

  ‘Oh, Steve! What a corny question!’

  ‘You mean, you won’t?’

  ‘Sure, I will. But you don’t have to make it into a big drama, for either of us. I’ll probably meet a boy in the States and marry him. And then I’ll have to forget about you, and the others, and be a prominent young society matron.’

  ‘You really want to get married?’

  ‘Not particularly. But I guess I will, sooner or later. What else is there?’

  ‘I can’t see you married, somehow.’

  ‘Can’t you? Well, I expect your friends couldn’t see you married, either. But you got.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Why is it different?’

  ‘It just is.’

  There was a silence. Jane must have sensed that she had better not ask me any more questions. As for me, it was as if I’d been suddenly startled awake and made aware of the insanity of this situation. I saw myself—as if in one of those mirrors that are hung over the beds in whorehouses—lying naked with this girl who now meant nothing to me; sprawling on the crumpled sheets, with the smell of her flesh all over my body. It was a picture that all my self-love, all my faculty for self-deception couldn’t make flattering. I had to shut the eyes of my mind tightly, not to see it. And I succeeded. I didn’t immediately jump out of bed; though I knew that I had to leave as soon as possible. Our Goodbyes to each other were of the most casual kind. And the parting kiss I gave her was as full of relief as any kiss given by any weary husband to a wife he’s grown tired of.

  I don’t think I travelled back to St Luc with any actual foreboding. What I felt was more like the sudden anxiety of a child on finding that it has wandered a long way from home. I made the ten-minute walk from the station to our villa into a five-minute run.

  Virginie met me at the door. She cried out on seeing me. Thank God that Monsieur had returned. Several times, they had feared that it was all over. Madame had seemed to be no longer breathing. The doctor had almost despaired—

  I pushed past her and ran into the bedroom. I found Elizabeth lying in bed, propped on some pillows, smiling at me.

  I’d been prepared for something near to a corpse; and the shock made me exclaim, with an almost indignant relief: ‘My God! But I thought you were—’

  ‘I know, darling. I heard Virginie telling you. I tried to call out and stop her from frightening you so, but my voice wasn’t strong enough.’

  It was only then that I realized how deathly pale she was looking. ‘But, Elizabeth, it’s true, isn’t it? You’ve had one of your attacks?’

  ‘Well—yes.’

  ‘A bad one?’

  Elizabeth looked at me gently, as if deciding how much to tell me. Then she said: ‘Quite a bad one.’

  ‘And I wasn’t with you!’

  ‘Oh, please don’t feel badly about that, Stephen! Why, it might just as easily have happened when you’d only gone out for five minutes, to buy a newspaper.’

  ‘But Virginie was here?’

  ‘No—and that was because of my own silliness. You see, she offered to stay with me, when she heard that you were going to be away for the night. And, like a goose, I said it wasn’t necessary. That was very unfair to you—I see that now. I’ve made you feel somehow guilty and responsible, all through my own thoughtlessness.’

  ‘But I still don’t understand—how did you get help?’

  ‘Well, you see, as it got later in the evening, I changed my mind. I suddenly felt I didn’t want to be alone, after all. There you have the typical spoiled female, I’m afraid; and if you have any responsibility whatever for this, darling, it’s only that it was you who did the spoiling … I decided to walk round to Virginie’s house and ask her to come back with me.’

  ‘You walked—all that way! Couldn’t you have found someone to send?’

  ‘Yes, it was silly of me, I know. But I thought it would be all right if I took it very slowly. Well, that’s where I was wrong—’

  ‘My God—you mean you had the attack right in the street?’

  ‘It was really rather a good place for it, as it turned out. I didn’t fall, or bump my head, or anything. I just sank down gracefully on to a doorstep. At least, I hope I was graceful. Pavlova would have done it exquisitely … And then that nice boy who’s the nephew of our butcher happened to be passing, and he took charge of everything—got help, fetched Virginie and the doctor, and brought me back here … You know, I think he’d appreciate it very much if you were to go round to the shop and thank him personally. You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you?’

  ‘Mind? I wish I could give him a medal!’ I kissed Elizabeth. Then I drew a long breath and said: ‘There’s something I want to tell you. I’ll never go away again. Not even for a single night.’

  ‘Darling,’ Elizabeth smiled at me, ‘please don’t let’s have any more promises.’

  ‘This isn’t a promise, exactly. It’s just something I know for certain. Something I want you to believe and be sure of.’

  ‘Very well, Stephen.’ Elizabeth’s tone was soothing, as though it were
I who had to be reassured.

  ‘That’s all over,’ I said; knowing that, now, we needn’t pretend any more not to understand each other. ‘Listen, Elizabeth: this time, I’m not going to say I’m sorry, like a naughty little boy running to his mother. I’ve behaved like a child, but I’m not one; and that’s not good enough. I know I hurt you terribly; and I know you’ve forgiven me. But the point is, now, what am I going to do about it? You say you don’t want any more promises. No wonder you don’t. You needn’t remind me what I promised in Orotava—that this wouldn’t happen again. I said that then and meant it, because I didn’t know I could go completely crazy, the way I have been, these last weeks. I’m almost glad I did, though—in spite of it hurting you—because now I’ve got it out of my system. I know that. But I don’t ask you to believe it now. I’m going to prove it to you.’

  ‘Oh, Stephen darling,’ said Elizabeth, ‘you don’t know how happy that makes me—for both of us! Only, don’t let’s talk about it any more. Not now. Not for a long, long time.’

  *

  The doctor told me that Elizabeth’s attack had been very serious. He refused to make any predictions: there might be more attacks soon, and, again, there might not. He urged me to get a night-nurse, but I knew already that Elizabeth would never agree to this; we had discussed it several times.

  Yet, even now, I somehow wasn’t really alarmed. This was partly due to the awful scare I had had, all those years ago in Athens, at the time of Elizabeth’s miscarriage. She had come through that, and I had an illogical faith that she would be all right now, too. Even less logical, and indeed purely superstitious, was my feeling that I’d paid for Elizabeth’s recovery by giving up Jane, and any intention of looking for another Jane, in the future. As long as there was never another Jane, Elizabeth would be all right: that was what I wanted to believe.

  The weather, those next few days, was beautiful. We sat out on the terrace, talking, or reading aloud to each other. I felt pleasantly tired and relaxed. It was as if I, not Elizabeth, were convalescent. After the strain of the past weeks, I was glad to be resting. Virginie waited on us both.

  After supper, on the fourth evening, I read to her from Turgenev’s First Love. It moved both of us, very much. ‘That’s how I’ve always wanted to write,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Like water running. I wonder if I ever could? One day, perhaps, if—Oh, Stephen, isn’t it absurd? I’m so full of plans and hopes, as if life were just beginning—’

  ‘What’s absurd about that?’ I asked—and immediately wished that I hadn’t. Elizabeth didn’t answer. It was obvious what she’d meant. But that was only a momentary shadow on our evening. Presently she began to talk, with increasing animation.

  ‘You know, darling, I sometimes feel such a longing to go back to the States. Perhaps we really ought to. After all, it is your real home, isn’t it—even though you know it as little as I do.’

  ‘Where would you like to go?’

  ‘Oh, certainly not New York or Hollywood. Not to any of those places we actually visited. That’s the odd thing about it, I’m homesick for somewhere I’ve never seen—unless it was in a photograph or a painting … There’s an old white wooden ranch-house under two cottonwood trees. Big crimson rocks behind it, shaped like clenched fists. And a long sloping view down to an almost dry river, with more trees, some of them green and some of them that marvellous flaring yellow. And, in the distance, great quiet snow-mountains … Do you suppose there’s a place like that?’

  ‘Hundreds of them, probably.’

  ‘And we could actually find one of them, and buy it, and live there. How extraordinary that seems!’

  ‘What’s extraordinary about it?’

  ‘That life has such millions of alternatives. And yet one so seldom seems to make any conscious choice. One just lets oneself be pushed this way and that. I’d like to have made my life so much more, well, intentional.’

  ‘But, Elizabeth, you have, surely? What about your writing?’

  ‘That’s just the trouble. I feel as if I’d put all my will into deciding what to call a character, or whether to use a semicolon instead of a comma. In life itself, I’ve drifted. And I’ve dragged you along with me. I’ve been terribly selfish, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What nonsense! Even if I have drifted with you, I’ve certainly wanted to. It isn’t your fault.’

  ‘Oh, Stephen, what a very strange thing a marriage is!’

  ‘I suppose they all are—the ones that last.’

  ‘Has it been at all like you expected, being married to me?’

  ‘I forget what I expected.’

  Elizabeth laughed: ‘You know, I used to keep dreading the most awful difficulties?’

  ‘What kind of difficulties?’

  ‘Well—I suppose, really, about our ages.’

  ‘Oh, Elizabeth! That might have mattered at the beginning. It doesn’t now. You know that. Why, very often, I feel—’ I hesitated for an instant, because I’d been about to say ‘quite middle-aged, myself,’ and then substituted ‘a lot older than you are’. But this didn’t sound right, either; so I added: ‘In fact, I never think about it.’

  Elizabeth nodded, thoughtfully: ‘And how that teaches one, doesn’t it, that there’s really nothing in the world to be afraid of?’

  ‘I don’t see how one can help being afraid, sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, no, Stephen!’ She spoke as if this were something for which she could answer without hesitation; and her face was quite radiant. ‘I’ve been afraid, darling—terribly afraid—and I can promise you, it isn’t necessary. We only get afraid because we cling to things in the past or the future. If you stay in the present moment, you’re never afraid, and you’re safe—because that’s always.’

  ‘I don’t trust that kind of mysticism,’ I said, rather impatiently. ‘It seems to me awfully over-simplified.’ I didn’t like the turn our conversation was taking. I didn’t like Elizabeth’s tone. It was beginning to make me feel uneasy about her.

  ‘It may be simple, darling. But it’s true. One day, you’ll know—’ Then, as if she realized that I didn’t want to hear her talk like this, she went on: ‘Speaking of the present moment, did I ever tell you about that weird young Welsh poet I used to know, in the early twenties? He believed that art could only be truly enjoyed, at moments of crisis. He’d made that discovery during the War, in the trenches. And, to prove it to us, he insisted on reading sonnets aloud while we were riding the switchback at the Wembley Exhibition. We were supposed to concentrate on them, and ignore the dips.’

  ‘And could you?’

  ‘Well, not altogether. But I think he proved his point, in a way. It really was an astonishing sensation. That feeling of apprehension, as we were climbing to the top of the track, did give a kind of new, quite unintended meaning to lines like “… in mounting higher, the angels would press on us”; and then, when we started to plunge downhill, the young man had to shout, of course, at the top of his voice—I can hear him now, yelling “I shall never look upon thee more,” and then losing his breath, so that the recitation died away with a gasp in the tunnel … The rest of us laughed so much that we nearly fell out of the car. And of course the other passengers simply thought we were insane—’

  ‘Who else was with you?’

  ‘Oh, Ethel, and Clive and his wife, and that woman who ran the bookshop in Buckingham Street—what was her name? Don’t you remember? She always wore that hair-ornament which looked like some kind of device for detecting enemy aircraft—’

  We talked like that for nearly an hour, recalling all sorts of people and situations. And then Elizabeth went into the house, still laughing, to get ready for bed.

  I stayed out on the terrace for a while, smoking and looking at the stars, and feeling a sort of calm thankfulness. Yes, I had gotten away with murder; but I wasn’t going to be like the other husbands who did that. I was going to take it as a warning and second chance. No Jane in the world was worth one instant of my incredible good luck in having
Elizabeth; and I would never forget that again. I would be quite different to her, from now on. I’d make her see that I’d changed and matured, and was fit to be her companion.

  I wanted to tell her about my new resolutions at once. But when I came into the bedroom, she was already asleep, and resting so quietly and deeply that there was no question of disturbing her. I undressed and got into my own bed and fell asleep almost instantly, like a child, with a complete childlike confidence that everything was going to be all right from now on, for ever and ever.

  That was the night Elizabeth died—at about three o’clock, the doctor said. She died only a few feet away from me, and I never woke; so she couldn’t have cried out, or made any loud noise. The doctor thought that she’d felt nothing whatsoever. At any rate, there was no trace of pain on the smooth waxen face of the thing she had left.

  8

  ONE MORNING, WHEN I had been at Tawelfan about a month, Gerda came into my room after breakfast with an air of teasing excitement.

  ‘Today,’ she said, ‘I bring you a big surprise. Something you never had before.’

  ‘Something to eat?’

  ‘Oh, no! Much more surprising! Your first letter—’

  Gerda handed it to me; she had been hiding it behind her back. ‘I am so glad for you,’ she added. ‘I begin to think none of your friends know how to write.’

  I looked at the letter. It was from Mr Frosch, the Los Angeles lawyer. As soon as I began to open it, Gerda discreetly left the room.

  ‘Dear Mr Monk,

  ‘I carried out the instructions contained in your last letter with regard to Mrs Monk, and since then I have remained in touch with her. It now appears that Mrs Monk is anxious to obtain a divorce from you as soon as possible. According to the laws of this State, a year would have to elapse before the divorce became final, and it would therefore be better if the suit was filed in Reno, since, as you probably know, the laws of the State of Nevada are considerably more expeditious. Desertion and mental cruelty would be the grounds urged, I imagine.