Doves of Venus

by Olivia Manning

  And she would die. There had been a time when she scarcely believed in death, but now she believed in it all right. Her desolation, her physical weariness, her indifference to life – all those were a part of death. It was as though death were getting on to terms with her, giving her a jog now and then, as though to say: ‘One day we’ll know one another better.’ At night, though she longed for sleep, she lay in a stupor of half-waking, conscious of the route to non-existence as of a tangible boredom, an eternity infinitely insipid, neither to be comprehended nor evaded. This, it seemed, was the meaning of existence. There was nothing more.

  When Arnold came in he gave her a glance and she saw pity in his eyes. He asked: ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘Why?’ She was indignant that he should pity her.

  ‘You have been crying.’

  ‘No. I was asleep.’

  ‘You need some fresh air. Let’s go out for supper.’

  ‘If you like.’ She took out her powder-case and looked into the glass. Before she could absorb the fact of her face swollen with sleep and tears, she slapped the puff over it. The powder accentuated the uneven contours of her cheeks and gave to their flush a tinge of violet. With a defensive stare she faced her own reflection, then closed the case angrily. Her growing age seemed to her a personal affront: she could not bear to seem pitiful.

  Arnold was putting on the kettle and getting out the teacups.

  She said: ‘And how was the hack-work today?’

  He answered mildly: ‘Coming to an end. When I’ve finished this, I’ll do something of my own. To write! – but what to write about?’

  ‘“Look in your heart”, as the reviewers say. Just write about life.’

  He answered as though unaware she was baiting him: ‘No, I couldn’t be bothered to write a novel. Novels are démodé. No important reviewer will notice them.’

  ‘A political piece, then. Surely that would be modish enough!’

  ‘No. Politics may be serious enough to destroy us, but not serious enough to be a subject for literature.’

  ‘Darling, how Wildean! Then, why not a biography?’

  ‘Yes, but whose? They’ve all been written.’

  ‘A new person, recently dead. Get in on him quickly.’

  ‘Someone else would get in more quickly. It’s quite indecent these days, the scramble for the body.’

  ‘Then why bother? It’s not as though the libraries are short of books.’

  Watching him closely, she saw his equanimity falter. Hide the fact as he might, he was fool enough to take himself seriously. She watched his movements with indifference. Already their relationship was like an exhausted marriage. They lived together with a contemptuous tolerance: they seemed to know one another through and through. She thought: ‘I must have been married to him in a past life: married in a dozen past lives: married and remarried until now I’m sick of it.’ Yet the relationship had its shabby comfort, fitting like an old shoe.

  When he had made the tea, he placed it on the table between them, sighed deeply and let his large, soft body relax into the largest chair. He had a natural elegance of pose. With his massive face and body above slender legs that ended in long, slender, delicately shod feet, he had a look of importance, even of grandeur. She felt it ridiculous that he should look like that.

  She said: ‘From your appearance one might think you were somebody. And what are you? A man of possibilities and no achievements.’ She thought of him as she had now seen him innumerable times, abandoned to sleep, snoring, the small mouth pocked open. She said: ‘A self-made nonentity.’

  As he lifted his sombre, defeated glance away from her, his annoyance flickered out.

  She said: ‘What does it matter? If we fail, we return again. Life is not inflicted upon us. We choose our own difficulties the way a rock-climber chooses a rock face. We’re not pressed for time.’

  ‘You mean we spend eternity fooling around here? You don’t expect me to believe that?’

  ‘Why not? One has such a great longing to escape the limitations of life – surely there must be somewhere to escape to!’

  He said: ‘I remember when I had a minor operation once, I was given pentathol. I did not feel the needle being drawn from my arm. When I woke up some hours later, I knew I had been nothing during that time. On other occasions, when I’d had cocaine or ether or one of the old anaesthetics, I’d wake up with a memory of dreams, but that time I knew oblivion. I realised then that death really was extinction. I would never know the origin or purpose of the universe. I would never know more than I do now.’

  She listened to what he said but let it pass over her mind. After a long pause, she said: ‘I must believe in something. What can we do? – saddled with our accursed mortality.’

  ‘There’s much to be said for it.’

  She dropped her head down on to her arms and saw against her eyelids Quintin’s face – a face that touched the imagination, made infinite promise, yet was the face of a man who left one empty-handed in the end. Probably other women had been caught by that amenable look. She wondered how many of them had discovered what she knew – that there was nothing to him at all.

  She began to smile, then she burst out laughing. As she turned to Arnold, her face was revivified. She said: ‘I remember . . .’ She paused and turned her face sideways to look into the fire. When she said nothing else, he asked patiently:

  ‘What, my dear? What do you remember?’

  She smiled for some minutes into herself, then she told him of the early days of her affair with Quintin when, soon after meeting him, she had gone to stay with Henry’s sister at Cheltenham. Quintin had followed her there. Indifferent to everything – her sister-in-law, Flora, the expected arrival of Henry, the scandalised attention of her sister-in-law’s friends – she had given all her time to Quintin: and when Henry arrived, she had simply disappeared. Quintin had hired a car and they had driven without direction about the winter countryside. Shut together in the car, the rain blinding the windscreen, their senses heightened by nearness and a constant consciousness of one another, one or the other would whisper: ‘What shall we do now?’ and the other reply: ‘Make love.’

  Then they would drive at maniac speed to the nearest hotel, and take a room, whatever time it might be. Sometimes they would lie in bed all day and drive all night, their headlamps flicking over bare avenues of trees that disappeared behind them, for ever, into darkness. They sped through villages that never had a name for her, past sleeping cottages, through towns as deserted as those waterless desert cities that stood for centuries unvisited. There was no traffic on these country roads at night. Sometimes a rabbit crossed in front of them, but they seldom saw any other life. The car was a large limousine, heated, silent, insulated from the outside world that seemed to have emptied itself in respect for their intimacy.

  Early one morning they had crossed the Welsh border and at daybreak reached the snow mountains. Quintin had stopped the car and they had stepped out into air that touched the skin with the fine iciness of crystal. At first they could not breathe for the cold, then, breathing, they felt a wild exhilaration at the perfect whiteness and silence about them. The mountains hung over them like giant icebergs. There was no sign of human life.

  Quintin said: ‘We are the only people left in the world.’

  She had laughed at him and flung her arms about him so that they fell together to embrace within the swans-down pillows of the snow.

  While she talked, Arnold kept his eyes on her face and said nothing. She felt so remote from him, and from the room in which they sat, that she stretched her arms above her head, possessed by the almost unendurable sweetness of life. It passed in a spasm through her body and she turned, as though in pain, and put out her hand, imagining she was being offered all she could wish. But the sensation passed and she closed her fingers on emptiness. She looked at the room about her and said: ‘I’ll end in the gutter.’

  Arnold made no comment. After a pause, he asked: ‘And
after this tour passionel – what happened then?’

  ‘I returned to Cheltenham. Quintin went to London. I suppose he imagined it was all over. I knew it was not. One night, when I could bear the separation no longer, I went to Quintin and said: “I’ve come to stay.”’

  ‘He was agreeable?’

  ‘Not at first. We argued all night. I knew I could not go back to Henry. If Quintin would not have me, then . . .’ she made a small movement with one hand.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, some way out. Sleeping-tablets, the river, or something. In the morning he said: “All right. Stay”.’

  Arnold nodded as though the whole situation had been perfectly revealed to him. He said with what seemed to her insulting complacency: ‘These furious affairs die quickly. We can’t expect them at our age. They’re a part of youth.’

  ‘That was not so long ago. I could still live like that – but not here, not with you.’

  He looked down, accepting this as he had accepted much more. He said: ‘Get your coat on. Let’s go.’ But she was not finished: she never could finish. Her mind crowded to the attack.

  ‘I’ve never been afraid of life. I’ve rushed forward to meet it. I have involved myself. I didn’t care what happened. But you – all your life you’ve avoided ties and responsibilities: you haven’t even married.’

  ‘And what have you to show for it all?’

  ‘I? I – I have a child, a daughter.’

  ‘Whom you see – how often?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. She’s mine.’ Petta jumped to her feet, given energy by anger that was like blood returning to a benumbed limb. Arnold eased himself from his chair. Collecting the tea-things, he limped over to the sink with them. His forbearance, his meekness, touched her. She knew that in all her life she had defeated herself with her own nature. She went into the bedroom. When she stood under the hard, central light and looked at herself wrapped in her rich coat of geranium-pink, she spat at herself with disgust: ‘You look like some old bag slipping out for a pint.’

  8

  The next morning, Petta wrote to Henry’s sister, Diana, and asked if she might see Flora. She was invited to take tea in Charles Street a few days later.

  Petta had seen Flora less than half-a-dozen times during the years following her separation from Henry. The last time, she had suffered an edgy hour at Gunter’s with a strange girl, no longer a child, whose shyness had seemed resentment. Petta had wanted no more of it. She told herself she had no aptitude for motherhood.

  Flora looked like Henry. She had Henry’s slow speech and manner. Petta remembered what a burden the child had seemed to her at Cheltenham when she was planning her escape with Quintin. Her feeling for Flora then had been nearer hatred than love – yet, when Henry’s divorce went through and the court deprived her of all rights in the child, Petta was suddenly inflicted with so profound a sense of loss that she had cried herself to sleep.

  As she journeyed towards Mayfair, she remembered that bout of remorseful longing for Flora, and wondered if the lost relationship might not be reclaimed. She suddenly saw for herself a renewal of life, and interest in life. Flora was growing up. Soon enough it would be for her to choose whether or not she saw her mother. And a beautiful, amusing, knowledgeable mother, a mother who knew her way around, had surely more to offer a girl than had Henry and that god-awful widowed sister of his, Diana.

  Petta felt a new vitality as she saw her life’s focus change. Now she saw the pleasure with which a mother could step back, giving the centre of the stage to the young beauty. As the taxi turned off Berkeley Square and came to a stop, she decided that, should Diana intrude on them, she would demand to see Flora alone. She would probe the girl’s heart.

  She arrived early. A maid asked her to wait in the drawing-room. Flora and her aunt were out shopping. Petta moved round the panelled, low-ceilinged room that had, despite its size, a dolls’-house air. It was an eighteenth-century house that some time before the first war had been refaced with ornamental terra-cotta and fitted with bow windows. The panelling was painted with a shade of green that Petta disliked. She found its vapidity vulgar. She saw vulgarity everywhere – in the new green silk brocade of the upholstery, the small walnut tables and cabinets, the silver card plates and cigarette boxes, the latest best seller marked with a Times Book Club marker. All over the place, in silver frames, stood, large misty portraits of Diana in her heyday. The placid ‘county’ face, wreathed in floating gauze, was pretty and dull as a shop carnation. There was one of the late husband – Arthur in major’s uniform: the straight, narrow features, the moustache, the heroic stare, the ideal ‘soldier daddy’, only he had never been a daddy and the only fighting he had done was a wrangle with the War Office over his establishment Cairo Headquarters.

  There were no up-to-date photographs; nothing of Flora. Probably they cost too much these days. Diana had always been given to economy.

  There was a window-seat in the fake Queen Anne bow of the window. Petta sat on the hard cushion and watched for Flora’s return. Most of the passers-by were women; rich women. Nothing the high-glossed perfection of hair, skin and dress, Petta realised she was neglecting herself. Her nails needed filing, her heels needed levelling, her suit needed pressing: she did not care. Her appearance had begun to bore her.

  Diana and Flora returned in Henry’s car. Petta did not recognise the car, a new one of enormous size, but the chauffeur was an old friend. She felt an odd, unexpected pang at the sight of him. She moved to where she could see without being seen. While Diana gave the man instructions, Flora stood on the pavement, smiling humbly – a short, stout girl dressed in a princess coat, holding her little handbag with both hands and turning her face from the passers-by as though it called for apology. Petta felt sorry for the girl’s youth and uncertainty in the world. She was prepared to receive Flora with tenderness.

  When Flora came into the room, there was nothing in her manner that should have discouraged Petta. The humility was still there. Her round, soft-featured face beamed on her mother with kindly compassion.

  Petta, about to reassure the girl, realised the girl was attempting to reassure her. Of course Diana, priding herself on some sort of ‘officer class’ loyalty, had represented Petta not as a rake, a runaway, an irresponsible baggage, but as an object of pity.

  Petta immediately reversed tactics. Showing no emotion, she kissed the girl, then gave her a little push towards a chair, discouraging her with a show of dignity. ‘Sit down, my dear.’

  The girl sat obediently, her confidence gone. After some enquiries about health, Petta asked if Flora had left school. Yes, at the end of last term. And what did she want to do now?

  Flora blushed, sitting forward in a round-shouldered, uncomfortable way. ‘Well . . .’ she gazed down at her hands, that were her chief beauty. ‘Aunt Diana wants me to “come out”, of course.’

  Of course; a new round of amusements for Aunt Diana.

  ‘But . . .’ Flora had a slight, hissing stammer that now overwhelmed her.

  So there was a ‘but’! Petta, like a polite stranger, murmured encouragement.

  Flora ended with a rush: ‘I want to study medicine.’

  ‘Medicine!’

  ‘Yes, and Daddy is backing me up.’

  Did Henry really imagine this girl had the intellect and staying-power to enter one of the learned professions? Petta was astounded. Then she was angry, certain that Henry was encouraging Flora into the fellowship of students so that her interests would place her beyond Petta’s reach. And the move would be effective. It would displace Petta altogether. She could no longer offer herself as guide and mentor to a novice of the social whirl. She would simply be a silly feather-head of an erring mother.

  Petta deprecated the idea: ‘It means years of study.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’

  ‘But would you like that? Did you take your School Certificate?’

  ‘Yes.’ Flora looked up, smiling with her same natural modesty but
with a new assurance: ‘I got four distinctions.’

  ‘Did you!’ Petta looked at her daughter as though she were a stranger. Henry had given no details of Flora’s school career, and Petta had asked for none. It had never entered her head that a child of hers would want to learn more than convention required. After a long pause, she could only think to say: ‘So you want to become a doctor?’

  ‘Yes, but not a general practitioner. I want to specialise.’

  ‘And your Aunt Diana disapproves?’

  ‘Yes.’ Flora laughed a little. ‘But Daddy and I can manage her. As a matter of fact, he’s already in touch with the Royal Free.’

  ‘What on earth is that?’

  ‘A hospital. The school’s the best for women doctors.’

  Petta noticed that Flora made no appeal for her backing. She was an outsider. She could influence no one, except, perhaps, Flora herself. Now that her first surprise had passed, she felt a sudden acute envy of the girl. It seemed that all she had been given herself – beauty, an unexpected fortune, the attention of countless men – was as nothing compared with the intelligence that would enable this plain girl to turn her back on a world where beauty and money held all the cards. She was simply sidestepping the whole damn-fool set-up.

  ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ said Petta.

  ‘But I do. I know I’m lucky to be able to afford to do what I want to do. Lots of girls can’t.’

  ‘That’s true. I grew up in poverty. (Perhaps you did not know that?) When my uncle in America died and left me the income from his capital, I too might have done something worth doing, but I had had no real education. It seemed too late to start. Besides, I thought my looks were enough. So they were, while they lasted. One day that income will be yours. I haven’t done much for you, but I can give you independence. Now I must be going.’

  ‘But you’re staying to tea. Aunt wants to see you.’

  As though at a signal, the door opened and round it came Diana’s withered carnation of a face. She switched on the lights. ‘May I come in? Tea’s ready.’ Behind her the maid wheeled a trolley.