She returned to her room astounded, still hearing his distant, expressionless voice, the voice of someone to whom the matter was of no importance at all.
Towards evening the rain cleared. She set out in nervous triumph and walked the length of the King’s Road as though transported in a disembodied state from point to point. Yet it was dark when she arrived in Belgravia. The servant admitted her without a word. She entered the vast drawing-room, where the count sat alone at his desk. The desk-lamp was the only light in the room. Ellie crossed towards it. The count rose, a tall, pale man in a dark suit, and handed her an envelope.
‘The money is there,’ he said.
She said: ‘Thank you,’ and thought she should say more. She felt sorry for him because he was alone there in the dark room, a sad, solitary, unsmiling man, but he merely waited for her to go. She left without another word.
As soon as she entered her own house, she called to Mrs Mackie and gave her the eight pounds. She went to her room rejoicing – a girl who was defeating adversity, who knew that tomorrow or the next day her troubles would be at an end.
Another week passed, then Nancy telephoned her again. It was a Monday luncheon hour. Nancy had returned to the studio that morning, to find Ellie had been dismissed.
Ellie felt an anguished happiness that Nancy should have telephoned her at once. Her eyes filled with tears, her voice broke.
‘For goodness sake!’ said Nancy. ‘Come and meet me for coffee somewhere.’
Ellie left the house at once and ran all the way to their meeting place. Nancy was indignant enough when told of the moves by which Ellie had been expelled from the studio, but when she heard of the telephone conversation with Maxine, her indignation became wrath.
‘This,’ she said, ‘is the end. And, what’s more, I don’t believe he’s ill at all. Why haven’t I heard about it? He was perfectly well when I was there. She’s just taking possession. I suppose if I rang up she’d tell me I couldn’t speak to him. She must be staying there, going up on the businessman’s train and coming back at night. I know what I’d do if I were you – I’d go straight there and see him.’
‘But, Maxine . . .’
‘She can’t be there during the day. She must go to her job.’
Nancy took out a ten-shilling note for Ellie’s fare. ‘And get something to eat.’
Ellie was to visit Clopals as Nancy’s emissary and her own advocate.
10
Ellie reached the country station late in the afternoon. She waited an hour and a half for the bus that passed Clopals. The wintry twilight turned to darkness. Everything was shut. Neither girl had visualised this wait for the bus. They had somehow imagined buses came and went much as they did in London. Wandering about the village, Ellie wondered if Tom would ask her to stay to supper. Perhaps he would let her stay the night.
The bus appeared at last. She was put down in the dark country road a few yards from the house. The only light at Clopals was in the hall: not the rich glow of her first welcome there, but a single pale bulb. She was disturbed by the smell of the damp earth, the bitter scent of rotted leaves. She began to feel frightened.
The door was opened by the new housekeeper, who had barely time to speak before Maxine called down from the landing to ask who was there. When she saw Ellie she came downstairs. She dismissed the housekeeper, then faced Ellie as though dealing with an animal in which she was surprised to find fight. Ellie had become dumb at the sight of her.
‘Well?’ Maxine waited with the look of someone upraised above the vulgar emotions. She said nothing until Ellie found power to speak:
‘Can I see Tom?’
For reply Maxine ran back up the stairs and called in a high whisper: ‘Nurse Rogers.’ When the nurse appeared, Maxine said: ‘This young woman insists on seeing Mr Claypole. I have already told her he is too ill to see anyone. Apparently she is not willing to take my word for it. I think you had better deal with her.’
The nurse, authoritive and disapproving, came halfway down the stairs and looked sternly at Ellie. ‘Mr Claypole can have no visitors at all. Not even family.’ The matter dealt with, she returned to her patient.
Maxine began to move towards the door. Ellie looked vaguely about her, scarcely able to believe she must go so soon. It still seemed to her that somewhere in the house there must be help for her, but Maxine was opening the front door, inviting her departure. She caught the sharp scent of apples and now noticed some baskets of pippins on the floor. It was as much as she could do not to pick one up.
‘If you don’t hurry,’ said Maxine, ‘you may miss the last bus to the station.’
Ellie went. The door closed after her. It seemed she had not been inside a minute, and now she was outside again. When she stood at the bus stop in the lane, all the excitement of hope subsided, she felt the country silence, as deep as the country darkness. She waited for a long time, barely aware of the passing of time. In this darkness and silence, her own feet invisible to her, she felt disembodied, existing only in her own poignant sense of failure.
What would Nancy say? – her ten shillings lost. How could Ellie excuse the fact Maxine had overridden her so completely? She might say it had not been Maxine but the nurse, but it was Maxine who had defeated her – if anything so easily achieved could be called defeat. She leant against the bus-stop post, stupefied by her own helplessness and frustration.
The world, it seemed, was full of cunning. The experienced met intrigue with intrigue: the serpent respected the fox. She saw her own innocence as idiocy. No wonder Quintin, Mrs Primrose, Maxine and Countess Slanski treated her as a nonentity. How could anyone so foolish be thought to feel?
‘But I am learning. I shall not always be despised.’
Then she began to realise how long she had been standing by the bus stop. There was some frost in the air. The cold was growing. In all the black reaches of the countryside about her there was no hint of sound or movement. The last bus must have gone while she was in the house. She started to walk to the station.
The sky was covered with cloud. Unused to this darkness that seemed impenetrable to her unaccustomed sight, she stumbled into brambles and felt the verge’s chilly grass through her shoes. A wind had risen. The clouds began to pass over. She saw with relief the first stars appear beyond the cloud’s edge. Slowly the whole firmament was revealed, the stars not shrunken and befogged like London stars, but great crystals, flashing and trembling upon the blue-black night. The countryside took form beneath this clear and spacious sky.
Now she could see the road, she walked quickly for a mile or two, then paused to rest against a gate. She looked across the fur-thick darkness of the fields to where the sky began. Lifting her face, she found the Dog Star. As, years before, they had walked along the dark sea-front, her father had shown her Orion’s Belt, the Plough, the Bear, the Pleiades. Now she sought the great star Betelgeuse. She had no knowledge where it was, but, fixing upon the brightest in the sky, she pictured that vast, cold, silent world turning with weighty slowness just above her head.
During all the time of her grief for Quintin, during these last weeks when all her thoughts had been given to unemployment, hunger and halfpence, these frozen worlds had turned in silence as they had turned a million years.
As she considered the substance of a million years, the nerve-ridden chaos of her life shrank out of sight. It seemed to her that, passed beyond the bickering household of the world, she was defined in silence like a turning star.
The wind awakened her. It blew in coldly from the fields as from the sea. Shivering, she returned to the pathetic disorder of the world. A pity of it all possessed her. She pitied the wood beneath her hands.
‘Poor Tom,’ she thought and imagined that old and ugly face dark among the linen of his bed. He was indifferent to the windy brilliance of the night; indifferent to the universe. All he could know was an ignominious weakness, the smell of medicine, the narrow confines of suffering. He admitted only the material world,
believing his life shrank and ended like the spark that dies on burntout paper.
She walked on, too tired to keep account of distance, and came to the town. The clocks were striking eleven. A train stood at the platform.
She asked: ‘Does this go to London?’
‘The last train,’ shouted the ticket collector. She ran and was thrust by the guard into a moving carriage. At this final effort, her legs collapsed: she lay on a seat and slept until she reached St Pancras Station.
When she left the station, she was in unknown territory. As she walked down the steps she looked back at the hotel that seemed empty, unlived-in, its windows dark. Below the steps, the empty drive swept down to an empty street. The street lamps did no more than make islands in the dark. To the uneven buildings, patched with advertisements, they added a jaundiced dilapidation.
She started to walk to the left. She wanted to ask the way, but people were few and scattered. The faces that came towards her in that desolating light seemed inhuman. As she hesitated to speak, they passed indifferently. She came to a coffee stall and spoke to the owner. Where could she find a 19 bus? He thought it too late to find one anywhere. He recommended the Underground and pointed vaguely towards a muddle of neon and traffic lights somewhere in the distance. Her instinct was against it. She preferred the bus: it was a part of home. Well, then! He sent her back to St Pancras church. If she turned left there and walked ahead she might come on a 19 bus in time.
She rounded the formidable grandeur of St Pancras church. Movement now required no effort: it came from a habit of movement. Her legs, passing and repassing each other, felt limp, as though the bones might bend. Yet they kept going. They brought her into an area of vast and sombre buildings. One ran the length of the road, blank-faced, two lions at its door: another rose in the distance to a great height, narrowing as it went, an array of windows, and not a light in one of them. No one was in sight. The sky and its stars were hidden behind the city’s atmosphere. Ellie was shrunken again to the scope of her own anxieties.
She was lost. She could not find a bus stop. She walked a long way before she met an old woman coming up from a basement. The woman said in an Irish accent: ‘Come along with me: I’m going that way myself.’ She showed Ellie Bloomsbury Square and the direction from which the bus would come.
‘Do you think there will be one?’ Ellie asked.
The woman spoke comfortingly: ‘I think there will. I think there will,’ but her face had a worried look and she hurried away before Ellie could ask anything more.
Ellie, gazing down the deserted road, thought that no sight in the world could be so glorious as that of a 19 bus. But no bus came. She gazed for so long in the direction of Theobalds Road, she almost conjured one out of nothingness. Once or twice a human being passed on the horizon of her sight, then disappeared. Cars sped out of sight. In the end she seemed to be alone in a sleeping world. She knew she should start walking home, but she was uncertain of the direction. Worse than that, her feet, having come to a stop, would not start again. At last she slid down the bus post to the kerb, meaning to sit for five minutes before setting out, but as soon as she propped her head against the post, she fell asleep.
Some time in the middle of the night she was awakened by a policeman, who wanted to know what she was doing there. She said she was waiting for a bus. He looked at her without humour. ‘You move on,’ he said. ‘You know you can’t sleep here.’
She had never before met a policeman who had seemed to her anything but a friend. She went on with an acute fear, not that she had broken the law, for she was sure she had not, but that, by being moneyless, shabby and unemployed, she had dropped out of the protected regions of respectability into an underworld where human beings were open to insult. How appalled her mother would be to know it!
‘But she’ll never know,’ thought Ellie. ‘I’ll never go back.’
Though Mrs Parsons would welcome the return of the transgressor with righteous satisfaction, she would never let the fall be forgotten.
Walking westwards, Ellie came on Oxford Circus. Now she knew where she was. She turned down Regent Street. As she descended the steps to the Mall, she saw the east growing green behind the pallid, cardboard shapes of Westminster. Above the park the constellations were askew, not flashing and trembling now, but sinking back feebly, as though into a solid sky. The trees were taking shape from the shadows, the façade of the Palace grew white, beyond it the uncertainty of Pimlico was settling down into substance. Here and there tramps lay like bundles of rags.
For whole minutes she could grasp what she saw exactly, in detail, then, with a barely visible movement, it would shift into a region of unreality oddly connected with the pain in her head.
In Victoria Street she passed a number 11 bus because she had ceased to believe in buses: then she looked back. It was standing at a bus stop. She ran to it and asked: ‘Do you go down the King’s Road?’
Yes, it was a genuine number 11 bus that had started out with the dawn and would come eventually to the Chelsea Town Hall.
She sat on the front seat and watched the streets go by. She was in a physical stupor but her mind was awake. Indeed, as the light grew, things seemed too clear, too brilliant, as though they had turned to silver and crystal. Perhaps she would never sleep again.
When she left the bus at the Town Hall she saw Simon Lessing coming from a doorway among the shops and crossing the pavement to a dilapidated car. She knew at once that this was the one person in the world who could and would help her. He was about to pull out the brake when she reached him. In a moment he would have gone. The car was an open Ford. She leant over the side and looked at him with the calm seriousness of someone who has encountered tragedy. ‘Will you help me?’ she asked.
He answered in her own tone: ‘What do you want me to do?’
Her need, for all its simplicity, was suddenly too complex to explain. She did not know what to reply. As she tried to speak, her eyes swam with tears. She dropped her head to her arms and sobbed.
Simon was not disturbed by her tears. He left the car and led her back to the place from which he had come – a large studio, shabby, crowded and rather cold. He sat her on a sofa beside the stove.
‘Put your feet up,’ he said.
‘But you were going somewhere?’
‘Only meeting a man for breakfast. I’ll ring him later.’
Seeming to float a little above the confines of her body, she lay and watched him as he boiled water and made toast and coffee.
He said: ‘What’s the matter? Anyone would think, to look at you, you’d been wandering about all night.’
She smiled, too tired to answer, and thought of the dark, windy country through which she had walked. She could not believe it still existed. She could no longer believe in Betelgeuse and the silent movement of stars. It was as though she had taken a step from outer darkness and found herself at home. Simon Lessing looked as familiar as an old friend. She watched his movements as he poured boiling water on the coffee and she seemed to know all of them.
He set out a tray. When he brought it over, she asked: ‘What age are you?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Then you’re quite grown up.’ She roused herself to take the cup he was offering her. Her tiredness was gone in a moment: she became suddenly talkative. ‘What do you believe – about religion? about politics? Is the world overcrowded? Will people starve and gnaw one another’s thigh-bones? Is it all nonsense about love and God? Are we going to be destroyed? If not, what is going to happen to us all?’
‘I don’t know.’ He sat on the edge of the sofa. ‘Everything’s been proved and disproved, so now we only know that we don’t know.’
‘So you didn’t grow up believing in civilisation?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Other people did. I was afraid I’d overlooked something important. So we can’t be certain of anything?’
He took away her empty coffee cup. ‘If we could believe in
one another,’ he said, ‘we would have as much certainty as we have any right to expect.’
As he leant towards her, smiling, she stared up at his face and felt for him a sudden vivid tenderness. Knowing herself in love again, she raised her arms and placed them round his neck and said: ‘If only I could live for ever!’
11
Petta and Arnold were eating at ‘The Passport to Fortune’. This was a new restaurant, decorated with trophies of the bull-fight, and lit with pink and yellow lights. It offered little but an appearance of being more expensive than it really was.
Petta was in her sublimest mood. It had occurred to her that evening, not for the first time in her life, that the experience she sought still lay before her. Now, almost at any moment, she would find the ultimate response to her own exaltation. Love, she sometimes said, was a light that could not be held in the hand. It existed and burnt of itself and died when it could burn no longer. But, surely, in every life there was one love that did not die? Then there must be one still due to her.
To each glance that came her way she responded with brilliant, provocative eyes, elated by anticipation, knowing that at last her life was about to begin.
She looked at Arnold, who was eating gloomily. She wished he were not there. She feared loneliness, yet desired separateness. She needed Arnold, but resented his presence. He had little to say to her. His intellect had to be set in motion by the friction of other people’s talk.
An expression of desolate disgust came over his face. She said: ‘What’s the matter?’
‘This filthy food. Nothing tastes as it used to taste. Nothing means anything. What are we alive for?’
She leant back in her chair and stretched her shoulders deliciously. ‘Adapt yourself, darling,’ she said, her voice full of inner satisfaction. ‘Why come to a place like this? It’s nothing but a compromise. Stop thinking you’re something special and accept your new position as part of the crowd. Enjoy it. If you can’t afford good food, good wine, then change your tastes. Learn to like what you can afford.’
Doves of Venus Page 29