‘Please don’t. Please not that.’
‘Well, my God, what else? Stark, then. These stark embraces and the painfulness of it all. For myself, I think I deserve better than that . . .’
‘Where will you go? When?’ he asked, relinquishing her hand, almost as if he relinquished her.
Indeed, that was a different matter. She no longer had a man to make all the arrangements of changing house for her, had not the remotest idea of dealing with that dull world of leases or deeds, of agents and commissions. Between herself and her noble intentions these difficulties stood formidably.
Since she did not answer him, Robert glanced at his watch and said, as he seemed always to be saying to her: ‘I shall simply have to go.’
When she was alone she stood at the window looking out to sea and wondered how she had become the sort of person she now was. Deeply as she felt she loved Robert, she thought that the answer must be only in herself and looked for it back through her married life to girlhood; childhood, even; saw herself, at six years, standing between her mother and her governess, head bowed, in some sort of disgrace, so that she remembered of that scene only their long skirts and their shoes, and above her the voice of the governess saying: ‘She is a lovable child, but such a butterfly.’ Shame and elation, then: for, though ‘butterfly’ was a delightful image to her, the thin voice suggested another interpretation. Shame, yet elation. Did it all begin there, back in those shadows which were only broken into now by these disquieting and isolated memories? A girl at school, in trouble always – the day when she cut off her hair, the punishments devised to humiliate her, but which she turned into public triumphs in order to hide her secret shame: and all the time, Beth so doggedly loyal, helping her to cheat with her lessons, saving her trouble, shocked as (poor dull soul) she sometimes was, shocked as she continued to be by the letters in violet ink on scalloped paper to Sir John Martin-Harvey, Sir Gerald du Maurier; Beth having to engage authority in conversation while Tory, on the off-side of the crocodile, slipped these notes into the letter-box: Beth, later, safely married, trying to steady Tory into some sort of betrothal with one or other of the young men who seemed all exactly the same – except that Teddy Foyle was not so impoverished as the rest.
‘I didn’t exactly marry for money,’ Tory now explained to herself. ‘But neither did I marry for love. It is all very well to say one should wait for it, but the waiting might be for ever, and there’s no denying that it is pleasanter not to be on one’s own. Far pleasanter. In the end, all I ever asked from life was pleasure. And perhaps those artful people in the Bible are right, and the only way to get happiness is not to think about it, or to think of other people having it instead, and so, fooling it, catch it at last in the nets of one’s own indifference. “Father Christmas will not come if you stay awake for him.” Indeed, he cannot: so there is truth and commonsense in it, and all that I have netted in (with my disregard for cautionary tales) is this empty house, the frightening future, this stark present, and a cupboard full of hats without an occasion to wear any of them.’
To attract the attention of Bertram, passing by with a large parcel under his arm, she tapped her knuckles on the window-pane. He looked up and smiled, hesitating, and then came back towards the house as she ran to open the door.
‘If I were tied to the mast I should bring the mast with me,’ he began, wiping his shoes on the mat, ‘. . . so impossible would it be to resist . . .’ he placed the parcel on the hall-table ‘. . . your spell,’ dusting his hands with his beautiful handkerchief and following her into the sitting-room.
‘A drink against the long evening,’ she said, kneeling before a cupboard full of bottles.
‘There need be no long evenings if you would only marry me,’ he told her, walking about the room, his hands clasped behind his back.
‘Are you a great evening-shortener, then?’ she laughed, bringing out a bottle of gin and holding up the vermouth against the light to see how much was left and then, her more generous impulses deserting her, returning it quickly to the cupboard.
‘We should go to bed earlier,’ he said with tremendous -confidence.
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Late nights never suit me. I like to be up early in the -morning.’
‘Well, I don’t.’
‘We shall find a way of agreeing about it, no doubt.’
‘I am sorry I have nothing to drink with the gin,’ she said blandly, handing him the glass. ‘But it doesn’t mean we can drink more just because we have nothing to go with it.’
‘You make me feel really welcome. Women always stint their friends in these trivial ways. How silly this little drop looks at the bottom of the glass. However, to your beauty!’
‘These first evenings after Edward goes away are like the beginning of the war and my husband going back from leave. A curious emptiness. Once, in desperation, I packed up and went with him, but regimental life was intolerable. The wives are thrown so much together and scheme and intrigue without pause, or, at best, endlessly discuss domestic affairs, their children, their furnished flats, shopping.’
‘This was the Army?’ he asked condescendingly.
‘Yes. It was in the Army that Teddy met his downfall – if we may be allowed to call her that. I packed up and went home a little too soon. In a fit of pique at his nagging after I had rebuked his C.O. He simply couldn’t see that I was not in the Army, too.’
‘Wives are a damned nuisance, anyhow,’ Bertram said, -feeling sympathy for Teddy. ‘What had the C.O. done to deserve your rebuke?’
‘Oh, I thought he dealt too harshly with one of the men.’
‘It appears that you were the one who forgot you were not in the Army.’
‘It isn’t pleasant to see a man letting loose all his repressed aggressiveness just because he is temporarily in authority.’
‘Repressed aggressiveness!’ Bertram repeated scornfully, draining his glass, staring into it, putting it at last sadly upon the table.
‘You wouldn’t know. At heart you are gentle. The quality I admire above all. You would not willingly hurt anyone.’
‘To avoid hurting people needs constant vigilance. As one grows older one is less and less equal to the task. There are so many cruelties of omission.’ He thought at once of Lily Wilson, of how in the beginning he had implied perhaps that he would do much for her. And had done nothing. (He did not know that he had done worse than nothing.)
Lily Wilson got through the evening in one way and another, writing a letter to her brother in Canada, doing a little knitting, making herself a cup of cocoa. At nine she went to bed, lying down with a sense of achievement that another day was gone, that there was one day less to be lived through. She lay there a long time without moving; but she could not sleep.
On his way out Bertram took up the parcel from the hall-table and tucked it under his arm. ‘Canvas!’ he said casually. ‘I’m going to begin working in oils.’
Tory thought he was like a little boy, so transparent, and she smiled in the indulgent way her son found so irritating.
When Bertram entered the pub it was quite full. Eddie was leaning over the bar talking to Iris. Bertram, hailed at once by the old cronies, the local characters, made his way through the blue smoke to buy beer for them.
‘How’s Maisie?’ Eddie was asking Iris.
‘She’s all right. Nothing to stop you finding out for yourself, though.’
‘Nothing at all, bar the fact that I said I’d never enter the place again.’
‘That’s childish. You know what Mother is . . .’
‘I do. And I also know what I am not, and that’s something on a chessboard your mother or anyone else can move where they like. I manage my own life. Things don’t change me, I change them. Like anyone with any sense, any guts.’
‘I’m so glad. What’s that got to do with Maisie, though?’
‘She’s got no guts. I liked her, but I’ve got my own life to lead. I’m not one of those to go on wanting wha
t’s hopeless. What I can’t get, I cut out for good and turn my attention to other matters.’
‘We’re hearing a nice lot this evening about what you do and what you don’t do.’
As she spoke, she was drawing beer for Bertram, her breast moving slowly as she bent her arm.
‘What about the pictures to-morrow afternoon?’ Eddie asked, watching her.
‘No, thanks.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m going to wash my hair. What’s on, anyhow?’
‘James Mason.’ He cast the line and waited. Saw her indecision, but realised that it was over a film actor, not himself.
‘No, thanks,’ she said finally. ‘I shall have to wash my hair.’ She knew he was watching her intently and lifted her glass of beer and took a long, steady drink. Her creamy throat moved beautifully as she drank.
Mrs Bracey was sure that Lily Wilson had escaped her. She had watched the street but no one came or went. The old Librarian took his evening stroll along the front. Just as Eddie had come to symbolise death to her, so this old man symbolised culture, the dusty novels, the little dead worlds of other people’s make-believe, the antithesis of life – that real magic which only Bertram seemed to bring to her.
She leant back on her pillows and closed her eyes. Pain froze her chest and shoulders. Her throat ached. Maisie would only say it was the draught from the window and try to move her. For once in her life she decided not to complain. But in a few minutes she was banging with her stick upon the floor for Maisie to come up and tell her what she had been doing downstairs.
Robert followed Beth when she went to the kitchen to make coffee, leaving Prudence and Geoffrey in the midst of an uneasy silence.
‘Beth, dear!’
‘Yes, Robert?’
He paused awkwardly and she glanced up.
‘What is it?’
‘I hardly know how to say . . . I am sure you don’t realise, but all this conversation about books leaves Prudence out; I think she feels at a loss . . .’ Nothing but his love for his daughter could have made him stumble for words in this way.
Beth was not in the least annoyed, only surprised.
‘I was just talking to cover up the silence. I had a feeling that they had quarrelled. Prue was glum before we began, and I thought it all seemed so very awkward.’
‘You know how it is with young people. We were the same before we were married – at your parents’ house and mine.’
This reference to their first true love embarrassed them both. Beth blushed and measured the coffee in silence.
‘I believe that cat is pregnant,’ Robert said suddenly to change the subject. Yvette gave him a wounded look and turned her head.
‘It would be great fun if she were,’ Beth said. ‘Prudence might begin to make some money after all.’
‘How nice to retire – just sit back and let the cats do the work.’
‘I have a good idea, Robert. Let us drink our coffee here by ourselves.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous, dear. There is no need to lose your head because of what I said.’
‘Women are so coarse-fibred, so tough, so lacking in sensibility,’ he thought. This was constantly borne in upon him. ‘If they talk like this to men, God knows what they say to one another when they really throw back their veils. Even Beth,’ he decided, ‘shows an astonishing lack of delicacy sometimes . . . And as for Tory . . .’ But he had so much delicacy himself that he did not formulate his feelings about her in his thoughts, even.
‘Prudence,’ Geoffrey murmured quietly, as soon as they were alone, ‘I should very much like to talk to you some time. When can I?’
‘Why not now?’ she asked.
‘I mean – when we are alone.’
‘We are alone now,’ she pointed out.
He was afraid that someone would interrupt them, and therefore did not waste time trying to break down her hostility. ‘To-morrow evening I’ll be in the churchyard at nine. Will you meet me there?’
‘The churchyard!’ she said incredulously.
‘Yes, I like it there now the trees are in flower. That pink may by the gate. There’s a seat there and I take a book and read sometimes.’ He also wrote poetry on the backs of envelopes, but he did not tell her this, feeling, quite correctly, that she would not have been interested.
‘Will you come?’
‘I don’t know. I might.’
With all this so swiftly planned, there was nothing more to say. Her parents were out of the room longer than either had expected. She sat and twisted her handkerchief. There was silence and a sense of anti-climax between them, until they heard cups rocking on a tray and Beth’s unnaturally bright voice saying: ‘Here we are, then,’ or some nonsense of that kind.
‘Only the creative artist is ever really happy,’ Bertram thought, as he unwrapped his canvas up in his little bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed and imagined the picture he was going to paint – the harbour buildings seen across the harbour water, the crumbling texture of plastered walls, the roofs of purple, of grey-blue, the grey church on the shoulders of the other buildings, the green weed on steps and the sides of the harbour wall, silk-fine and damp like the hair of the newly-born – all the different surfaces and substances, the true being of it coming luminously through, the essence of such a scene, and he the focal point, painting from the end of the harbour wall, ‘or perhaps,’ he -suddenly thought as light outside thrust across the darkness, ‘perhaps they would allow me to make sketches from the lighthouse, up in the lamp-room itself.’
He smoothed the creased quilt and folded it back neatly and began to undress. Soon he began to think of Tory and his conversation with her in the early part of the evening. Had he begun to discover, as her husband must have discovered, that warmth and wit and loveliness are not enough? Not enough to compensate for the selfishness, the cussedness of her.
This evening, for the first time with him, her desirability admitted doubts. ‘Perhaps it is as well,’ he decided, thinking also of the passion which was eating her away, conceal it cunningly as she might. ‘I, who see to the core of things, of people, as a painter must, see her pinned down by misery, in a way I am incapable of being pinned down myself, with my genius for always making off when I feel another personality throwing its shadow too close to mine.’
He feared the unhappy, the possessive, the single-minded, the intense, and was gallant, rather than tender; flirtatious, but not loving. He was also rather a coward and, because he thought he saw Tory drowning, felt it safer not to notice, lest, forced to go to her rescue, he might be involved in her struggles and dragged down to depths he had no wish to visit.
14
‘Are you tearing pieces about yourself out of the newspaper?’ Stevie asked reprovingly.
‘Pieces about my book,’ Beth corrected her; for there was a world of difference between the two, it seemed to her.
‘Will you keep that paper?’
‘I daresay I shall, dear; for a time, at least. Why not?’ Beth leant over the kitchen table, reading.
‘It has those little round things all over it, like Tory’s party frock.’
‘Fish’s scales,’ Beth said, brushing her hand over the paper; then looking up at her daughter with new interest: ‘Sequins, you mean. Yes, they are like sequins.’ She folded the paper and went at once to her desk in the morning-room. When she had noted down Stevie’s simile, she said to Robert, who sat by the window reading The Lancet: ‘I found a review of my book wrapped round the cod.’
‘That was nice for you, my dear.’
‘Robert.’ She said his name and waited, as if to imply that she would not go on until she had his attention. Annoyingly, he put his forefinger upon a word and looked up. ‘Robert, I shouldn’t say my books were gloomy, would you?’
‘I shouldn’t say they were hell of a gay, either,’ he said, waiting, still looking up.
‘Listen to this!’ Beth’s amazement seemed to increase. ‘ “Macabre,” ’ she read
. ‘ “Funereal!” What do they mean?’
‘Well, I suppose “funereal” means “to do with funerals”, and that’s what your books mainly are.’
‘How worrying!’ Beth went on. ‘I only put the funerals in so that they shall not be too frivolous, the novels, I mean.’
Robert’s eyes dropped to the printed page again, and then he lifted his head and sniffed. ‘What an appalling smell of fish!’
‘It’s this piece of newspaper.’
‘Well, for God’s sake! Must we have it in here?’
‘No, dear. I will put it on the kitchen fire,’ Beth said gently, almost tiptoeing away, as if his irritability were a serious illness.
‘Are you famous?’ Stevie asked her, waiting for her in the kitchen.
‘Famous! Good gracious, no!’ Beth said, quite startled.
‘Will you ever be?’
She considered this and then said quietly: ‘No, I never shall be.’
‘How do you know?’
‘How do I know?’ Beth wondered. She watched the flames reaching up and over the crumpled newspaper and shook her head, smiling. But to herself, she said: ‘I can never know because all behind me there lies a great darkness and over all that I have written. I can see nothing of it. Only what I am going to write to-morrow is clear.’
‘Where is Prudence?’ she asked, unwilling to be catechised any further.
‘She is making herself a dress.’
‘A dress?’
‘Yes. She told me to go away. She is up in her room sewing hard. She has made the two sleeves already.’
Fearing a crisis, Beth ran up the stairs at once and tapped on her daughter’s bedroom door. Prudence sat near the window in her petticoat, one arm covered with a tacked-together sleeve of sage-green. Her lap was full of the material and her golden hair swung forward over her bare shoulders. Light rained down from the ceiling, reflected from the wideness of sea and sky, and there was no need to go to the windows or to listen for the cries of gulls and water lapping to know that it was a seaside room.
A View of the Harbour Page 20